by Joan Sales
“I’m too old, my love. Snakes change their skins, men don’t. It turns leathery when you’re my age . . .”
He’s been telling me such a lot over these last few days and some of it strange stuff that was news to me. It turns out that he really likes our little mansion; unlike Mother, who finds it “so very sad” that we live in Pedralbes, “so far from the centre”, “in an isolated house with no neighbours”. Apparently Father has always preached that every working-class family should have a little house of its own with a small backyard and with that in mind has always argued for building co-operatives and proper credit-granting bodies, and he even tried to organise one of these co-operatives many years ago that unfortunately went bankrupt. I knew nothing of all this. I’m now finding out – to my amazement – that I knew next to nothing about my own father’s ideas, and what’s even more amazing is that some aren’t so crazy, like this one, for example: “Your house is obviously very bourgeois: it’s a rich man’s abode. The vast majority can never aspire to anything similar though the ideal would be for everyone who wanted one to have a little mansion with a garden like yours. Who knows? If progress were to go in this direction rather than the manufacture of increasingly deadly weapons . . . if everything the world wastes on arms and excesses – and I’m including those of the poor, the miserable excesses of poverty – and if all the effort expended on such dire things were spent to provide decent, comfortable housing . . . You know, your mother and I have never agreed on this issue, as on so many others: our arguments go back a long way. You were very small and won’t remember, but one Christmas we had a bit of luck on the lottery. It wasn’t that much, I’d only spent a peseta, but it was enough to buy a small detached house in Sant Andreu or the Poble Nou with a small yard to plant a couple of pine trees in. Lots of workers owned that kind of place at the time and it wasn’t in any way incompatible with proper anarchist ideas, in fact, quite the contrary.”
“What I’ve never understood, Father,” I told him one day, “are your pacifist ideas. If we must always be pacifist, in whatever situation, if we can never defend ourselves, come what may . . .”
“My love, if we don’t intend to be pacifists all the time, we might as well never be. In peacetime we should prepare ourselves for war: war is something you don’t do, or you do properly. What was the point of all the years of pacifist, anti-military propaganda if at the moment of truth we’ve allowed ourselves to be dragged into fighting a war? The only point in fact was to ensure that our poor soldiers at the front would fight in inferior conditions: everything has had to be improvised, even the idea of an army that so many years of anti-army misinformation had erased from Catalan consciousness. If we aren’t pacifist to the bitter end, accepting all the consequences, it is a crime to be pacifist: all we ever prepared was the bloody disasters that our fighters, whom nobody trained for war, are experiencing now – so don’t have too many high hopes! For years we’d been saying there’d never be another war . . .”
“So what are you saying? You’d have preferred there to be no resistance?”
“You’ll think it very odd, but that’s what I would have preferred. So the militarists and the Falange would have won straightaway? So what? It would have made more sense to let them win without offering resistance, and as they’re going to win anyway – let’s not fool ourselves – at least we’d have been spared the bloodshed, arson and looting that only bring dishonour upon us. Then the responsibility would have been entirely theirs. We should not have gone to war – we’d been preparing the people not to for years! Some folk realise they have backtracked and spin these slogans about ‘making war on war’, ‘defending pacifism with gunfire’ . . . pathetic sophisms that fix nothing. To make war on war, to defend pacifism with gunfire, we should have given ourselves time to prepare for the war. Since we weren’t prepared – quite the contrary – it would have been better not to fight . . . But let’s drop this discussion that could go on and on and get back to what I was telling you. The fact is your mother always disliked those little proletarian houses with a couple of pine trees in the backyard. She wanted us to throw all our money from the jackpot on a trip that, according to her, would be both fun and uplifting. ‘Travel broadens the mind,’ she insisted. To be frank, I didn’t understand what the hell you could see in Paris or Rome or Marseille that you couldn’t find without leaving Barcelona: for ‘Know your own town and see the whole world’. She went on and on about the education and culture that travel brings, and you know if people talk to me about education and culture I immediately give in, as it’s not for nothing that I am a schoolteacher. So we went to Rome and Paris. You and Llibert were still very little – you must have been one and a half or two at the time – and stayed with your grandmother, may the poor thing rest in peace. It was before my mother had the stroke that later confined her to a wheelchair. We went to Rome and Paris: it’s the one and only time I have left Barcelona. Our money melted like snow because your mother insisted we stay in the best hotels: ‘I want a bit of the bourgeois life,’ she said, ‘now we have the chance.’ So this was our educational travel – staying in lots of luxury hotels I found stifling! And once we’d spent our money, back to carrer de l’Hospital! Your mother is just like Llibert: if they hate the bourgeoisie, it’s because they long to do as they do. Which means spending like them, but not worrying like them about expanding factories and businesses: they don’t want to know about that side of our bourgeoisie and never will. Your mother and I have never really agreed about anything although we’ve both called ourselves anarchists, but then has anyone ever managed to understand me, besides poor Cosme – may he rest in peace – and even then not on every issue? If only a little of what I’ve written and preached over more than forty years had been understood, disseminated and put into practice, we wouldn’t have seen this suicidal way in which the collectivisation of industry has been carried out. They are killing the goose that lays the golden eggs! They think capital is something magical, that you only have to take possession of it for it to blossom miraculously! They haven’t a clue! They are killing off Catalan industry, the product of a hundred years of good common sense, hard graft and saving, Catalan industry that provided for us all . . . You can’t change a social set-up overnight. First the working class has to acquire a culture that will give it the necessary skills, then organise itself, and both these tasks take time. First it has to be organised in consumer co-operatives and these must learn to structure and manage themselves: only after years of practice can the workers make these consumer co-operatives they create – and the odd mixed enterprise – completely autonomous, like the house building one I described. Only then can the attempt be made to create producer cooperatives: up to now, we should never forget, they have always failed. When these co-operatives prosper rather than go under, we can think seriously about transforming all of industry, or at least the biggest concerns, into so many workers’ co-operatives. Anarchism is not something that can be improvised in a day or a year! Precisely because it is the most grandiose undertaking in the whole of mankind’s history, it requires many, many years, perhaps even centuries; it involves moving with feet of clay so as not to take a wrong step . . . Labour of this nature can never be a labour of hatred but a labour of love; love never rejects, it invites collaboration wherever it comes from, to help this world become a more beautiful, just, and comfortable place. What, my love, would a workers’ production co-operative do if it had a proper sense of responsibility and sincerely wanted its members – the workers – to be prosperous? Well, in most cases it would appoint the same manager who’s been managing for years, who is very often the owner, because who – with very few exceptions – can take charge of an industry better than the person who has already handled it efficiently for years and years? These morons only decided to murder the lot . . .”
I then told him about Uncle Eusebi who months ago had lived in the same bedroom where Father is now. I hadn’t mentioned him before but Father’s last comments made Uncle se
em very relevant to our conversation. He listened to me attentively, shaking his head: “From what you say, my love, he’s a fine person. You can be sure that the moment they got rid of him, the noodles from that factory started to stick . . . that’s if they made any. And by now this good bourgeois must be as horrified by the barbarians on his side as I am by those on ours.”
“His side? No, you’re wrong, Father. He’s not one of theirs at all. In his letter he told me in fact that he’s decided to go straight from Genoa to Santiago de Chile, he’s not in the mood to go over to the other side – ‘that is no more attractive than your lot,’ he writes, ‘they’re basically all the same.’ Then he adds: ‘Whoever comes out the winner, I will have lost.’ It’s something I’ve heard so many different people say – the poor marquis, for example. On 19 July Lluís’ uncle and the marquis – I know this because they told me – were more supportive of the autonomous government than the military insurgents, like everyone else in Barcelona, but how could they feel enthused the day after, when anarchist patrols began to roam the country spreading blood and fire? Uncle had always voted for Acció Catalana and was a subscriber to La Publicitat, as the marquis voted for the Lliga and read La Veu de Catalunya; what could they do or how could they react, caught between the military insurgents on the one hand and the rabid anarchists on the other? ‘Neither one side nor the other,’ said Uncle Eusebi; ‘neither the red nor the black,’ said the marquis. ‘Whoever wins in the end, I have lost,’ added both. Something has gone terribly wrong in this country, Father, everything we have lived through since 19 July 1936 is as chaotic as any nightmare; the day will come when nobody understands anyone. My God, in what way were Uncle Eusebi or the marquis fascists? But how could Lluís’ uncle, the owner of Ruscalleda’s Son, stay in Barcelona now they were searching for him just to kill him? He would have met the same end as the marquis. He will go from Genoa to South America, he writes, feeling deeply sad: life far from Catalonia makes no sense to him, is absurd. And he already thinks it is a huge admission of failure, but what can he do except leave his country? He will start life afresh in Santiago de Chile – from zero.”
Father continued to listen attentively, shaking his head: “People,” he said, “should be united by our feelings rather than our ideas. When I think how they are murdering half of Catalonia to defend the abolition of the death penalty . . . Did I have to wait to be sixty to see that ideas are bloody worthless?”
29 JUNE
Dear Juli, I received a letter from Lluís the day before yesterday after weeks without one. I was so pleased to hear you are both in the same brigade. I hadn’t heard from him for so long! The only news I had was the monthly postal order he sent me without fail.
I was really depressed; that’s why I’ve not written to you for so long after sending you those long epistles. I wasn’t in the mood to write and was reluctant to harp on at you about my personal hardships.
His is a very affectionate letter, and I put that down to you. You have such a big influence on him.
Next month it will be a year since he left home: a whole year since I’ve seen him . . .
Father has gone back to carrer de l’Hospital. They say the danger is over, that the government has finally reined in the gangs of murderers, but didn’t they say that before the May events? In any case, the irreparable damage has been done: it’s too late to put all that right. You at the front are lucky not to have experienced the hell Barcelona has been through over these past months.
I find it hard to believe that the murderers have truly been rendered powerless and I really suffer on Father’s behalf. He has resumed publication of La barrinada and rails even more violently against “the cannibals of the F.A.I.” – he now puts in the three letters – with more hyenas and panthers than ever and long articles framed in black to the memory of “true anarchist martyrs like Cosme Puigbò, immolated by executioners who have usurped the name of anarchism”. In his last editorial he risks saying that in the end one suspects this sect is driven not by an ideal that’s at all proletarian or acratic but by “the criminal desire to destroy the land that has so generously welcomed them and that doesn’t distinguish – and never has – between its own offspring and newcomers.” I’ve copied that word for word: I have the most recent issue on my table. Poor La barrinada and poor Father . . . he’s probably more clear-sighted than most, but so what, if nobody listens to him?
This war is setting in for an eternity and I’m a real coward. Yesterday the evening newspapers carried dramatic headlines: Big Battle on the River Parral! I can’t tell you how upset I was! Why did a big battle have to start there the second Lluís arrived? I was imagining the worst, him seriously wounded if not abandoned and bleeding to death in no man’s land . . . The happiness I felt when I knew he was in the same brigade as you quickly turned to despair! Why hadn’t he stayed where he was? It’s quiet there now after so many battles.
Today’s newspapers have published a correction: the battle isn’t on the Parral, but the Parval, a river a long way from yours. I’m ashamed to feel so happy! As if the dead and wounded don’t bother me as long as Lluís isn’t among them. Or you, naturally.
As for my beloved brother Llibert Milmany, will you believe me if I tell you that he has found a way to strengthen his position despite the loss of influence suffered by the anarchist extremists? He’s doing better than ever! If I make cutting remarks about the good life he’s leading, he retorts: “You know, sister, I don’t want my family to go without while we’re waiting for equality and anarchy to show up.” For the moment, his “family” is simply Llopis; and he says that with a wink, as if implying that he intends to sit comfortably while he waits for equality and anarchy.
25 AUGUST
Dear Juli, I’ve received another letter from Lluís, a letter that’s so bullet point it’s left me feeling quite depressed. I’m lucky I’ve got you to let off steam to; if not, I’d feel so alone. I’ve got my boy, of course, but how can you let off steam to one so young? He’s been in bed the last few days with indigestion. Children’s temperatures shoot up to thirty-nine for next to nothing. As he’s had his tonsils removed, he won’t be getting any more tonsillitis and that’s a relief. And I have food for him, which is another relief. What if told you that the doctor’s diagnosis of indigestion is a source of pride as far as I’m concerned? We’ve still not finished the first crate of El Pagès tinned milk and that leaves four to be opened. How beautiful they look stacked in the pantry! How I think of you when I see them!
As for Lluís, on the other hand . . . can you believe that in his letter he only writes about a former beadle in the science faculty whom he says he’s found in your brigade? Did he really have nothing more interesting to tell me?
It’s strange that you’ve never told me about the existence of this former beadle. In fact, I think I remember him, a beadle by the name of Picó, one of those handy men the physics or chemistry professors have recourse to when they are in the middle of an experiment and a piece of electrical apparatus breaks down or when water doesn’t flow from the tap. That Picó was a man who could fix anything: he could even stuff the rare animals that the natural sciences professor sometimes bought from hunters.
What a coincidence that this fellow should end up as captain of the machine gunners in your brigade, but Lluís could write about other things as well . . .
You keep asking me to write more about what’s happening in my life now – as if I didn’t go on far too much about it in the interminable letters I write to you! I’m really worried about my parents who stubbornly refuse to move from carrer de l’Hospital: he would rather “be shot” than live with Llibert and she’d rather “be strung up” than live with me. We should separate them, Father with me and Mother with Llibert, but who could ever split them up? They need each other though they only row and fall out; besides, they are so used to their flat where everything has kept them company for so many years: they’d feel at a loss without their Pi i Margall in his Phrygian cap, the
ir dining-room lamp and rows of chairs – elsewhere they’d wither away. But someday a bomb will blow them to smithereens along with all the neighbours on their landing. The fascist pilots obviously can’t get their aim right so when they bomb the port and train tracks they also scatter bombs over the old city. With each new raid, I suffer on their behalf; they are so used to it that when I mention a raid they look at me in astonishment as if to say: The things you come out with!
“You’ve always been funny about our flat,” Mother told me one day. “I think you’re ashamed you were born on carrer de l’Hospital. You’ve always thought our flat was seedy. Well, you know, my love, we’re proletarians and proud of it.”
As if that was what was at issue! The first sortie had a big impact on them, the second hardly at all, and by the third they felt completely indifferent: now they listen to bombs as if to the rain. They never go to the shelter.
Maria Engràcia Bosch, that friend of mine in the science faculty I mentioned, comes from a family that’s as “proletarian” – as Mother says – or more so than ours; just imagine, she lives with her mother, who is a widow, on one of those streets that go from carrer de Sant Pau to Barbarà. Carrer de l’Hospital seems quite “posh” in comparison, given that everything is relative in these matters. Well, you know, a few weeks ago they decided to go and live in a rural hamlet as they’ve had enough of bombs and sirens. I’ve just received a letter from her in which she tells me about the last bombing raid in her neighbourhood, and I’ll copy it here since you keep asking me about life in Barcelona. “The air-raid sirens woke me up,” Maria Engràcia Bosch writes, “and Mother, realising I was awake, opened the door between my bedroom and hers.
“ ‘It’s a bombing raid,’ I said.
“ ‘Yes, here we go again,’ she replied. ‘What a pain!’