by Joan Sales
“The electricity had gone. From the fuss they were making we gathered the neighbours were on their way down to the shelter. I opened the window shutters to take a look out: the bright moon lit up the whole bedroom. We could hear distant gunfire as if from out to sea and that made us think the navy was bombing us, not the usual aeroplanes. The boy was sleeping soundly.”
Maria Engràcia was referring to her six-year-old brother.
“ ‘Mother, why don’t you take him to the shelter?’ I asked.
“ ‘Are you serious?’
“Recently we’ve stopped going: laziness, indifference, fatalism, whatever. Mother lay back on her bed and we listened to distant gunfire, a soothing rat-a-tat-tat compared to the din the bombs had been making. So we both went back to bed. I heard her mutter: ‘I feel really relaxed. I think it’s over.’
“It was then, when I was back in bed and asleep, that I suddenly found myself in the next-door flat. According to Mother and the neighbours a bomb had dropped; they’d heard it but I hadn’t. If it weren’t for them, I’d have thought I’d flown out of my bed through the door to the floor of the neighbouring flat by magic. Thanks to God we were both safe and sound.
“ ‘It was like the end of the world,’ they said. Out of the window we could see a thick haze over terraces and roofs down to the port. It was whitish, gradually turning black, and in the meantime we could hear the ambulance bells tinkling and the strident sirens of the fire brigade.
“It would soon be daybreak and I wanted to go out and see what had happened. I was already dressed and combing my hair in front of the bathroom mirror. Mother was saying: ‘We’ll have to find a workman to repair that wall.’
“I hadn’t noticed the big hole. I was still making myself up in the bathroom when we heard the crackle of anti-aircraft artillery from Montjuïc. The puffs of smoke from the explosions were hardly visible over our heads in a sky that was beginning to clear. Suddenly, every now and then, ten or twelve little snow-white clouds blossomed among the few stars still twinkling and that made me think of the blue fleur-de-lis flag Jeanne d’Arc grasped in her fist in the French chapel where I went as a child. Those puffs of smoke that silently erupted – the buzz didn’t reach us for some time after – made me feel safe, protected and almost happy: our anti-aircraft artillery was looking after us! I forgot that if they were shooting it was because enemy aircraft were back circling above us.
“The second time I did hear it. A massive explosion shook the whole house; I felt the floor rock under my feet as if I were travelling in a boat. I thought the ground was going to open and swallow us up. Strangely, the bathroom mirror was still up and I could see the stupidly calm expression on my face. A tremendous blast of air filled the whole flat with dust that made us cough; it was so thick in the street we could see nothing. There was a big brass coffee pot on my bed I recognised immediately: it was the one from the El Dàtil bar opposite our house. The smoke and dust didn’t disperse. We could see nothing but heard screams and cries.
“Then we heard the tinkling bells and sirens again, now on our street. I was in the middle of the road among the many onlookers. I saw a man – or was it a woman? – get to his feet among the rubble from the two houses that had collapsed; he was completely white, as though his clothes, hands and face had been coated in lime or chalk. Others were struggling to stand, yet others tried to and couldn’t, and more were completely still: they were all eerily coated in white. Blood on that white looked so shockingly red that a thought struck me: I’d never have believed blood could be such a deep scarlet.
“A military ambulance the size of a lorry drove up and army nurses began picking up the injured: one was a four- or five-year-old who was shouting: ‘Mummy is there!’ pointing to a pile of rubble. The firemen were working hard but it was obvious they’d take hours to extract the buried. Half the body of an elderly man was pinned under a huge beam which had to be lifted. Four of the brawniest firemen could barely budge it. They got the local carpenter to saw through it. ‘Give it your best!’ shouted a neighbour to encourage him. They finally dragged the old man out; he’d lost a leg. In the meantime other firemen were putting out fires with water hoses. We could see several bodies among the flames, some still moving. It was impossible to advance towards them until the firemen had the fires under control. They pulled them out as they proceeded: some were dressed and others were stark naked, some were white with dust and others completely black. The latter, I soon realised, had been incinerated. Sometimes, when two soldiers tried to lift one, the body would come apart in their hands. In the midst of all this a gentleman, naked except for his hat, was shouting down from a sixth-floor balcony that had only preserved its façade. He’d been thrown there from the bar counter in El Dàtil, where he’d been drinking his breakfast cup of malt when the expansion wave from the bomb stripped him of everything except his hat. The soldiers told him to be patient, the firemen were busy for the moment.
“After that,” concludes Maria Engràcia, “it didn’t take us long to decide to go to this farm that belongs to one of Mother’s cousins. May God reward their hospitality.”
All this my friend describes. What can I add? That I feel genuine remorse because I live in a quiet district like Pedralbes where we only hear the distant thunder of bombing – apart from the very few occasions when the bombs drop much nearer?
It’s surprising to think many people still live in those districts around the port as if nothing were amiss. One day, when I’d been to see my parents, I went for a walk around the streets and back alleys that had been so punished by the bombing: there were the usual shopkeepers, many of whom had been around when I was a child. I talked to some. They were flummoxed at my being surprised. Why should they leave their neighbour-hood? Where would they go?
“And what about the soldiers?” one asked.
Another told me she ate her meals in a collective dining room. There are a lot of these now and this one is on passeig de Colom, right by the port. They serve a single course. “If I’m lucky and there’s a bombing raid at dinnertime, I eat mine and the dinners left by the people running to the shelter as well.”
To return to that beadle in the science faculty who’s now a captain in your brigade, I’ve just remembered that once, when the Physics professor was away at a congress in Koenigsberg, Maria Engràcia Bosch taught us a class – she was more advanced in her studies than me and preparing her doctoral thesis. This beadle would sit in on our classes whenever his duties allowed. He’d stand by the door, cap in hand, listening to the discussions and observing the experiments that seemed to enthral him.
On that occasion Maria Engràcia Bosch was talking specifically about freezing points and boiling points and lo and behold the beadle interrupted her very respectfully.
“With your permission, senyoreta teacher,” he said, “I’d like to say something. You say that distilled water under normal pressure freezes at zero degrees, and if I understood you rightly you call zero degrees the temperature at which distilled water freezes under normal pressure. I would be very upset if whatever I say might be interpreted as showing a lack of respect for science and culture, but I would call this a vicious circle.”
People burst out laughing and I laughed as much as anyone; Maria Engràcia laughed on her professorial podium as did the beadle in the doorway, very pleased to have triggered such good cheer. Yet why were we laughing? We were laughing because it was a beadle who had said this; we were laughing like the fools we were. Years later, when I found the same statement, almost word for word, in one of Einstein’s youthful works, I was left feeling deeply perplexed; I certainly didn’t want to burst out laughing.
30 AUGUST
You talk about childhood memories and ask me if my grandmother’s death hasn’t brought lots to the surface. Yes, but never relating to her – I only remember her stuck in her armchair – and never rose-tinted. I don’t think any childhood has ever been rose-tinted; old age, possibly. I think I’ve already told you as much pr
eviously; innocence is really very difficult, and in any case we can reach that state only after a whole lifetime of struggle. To succeed in attaining innocence! That may be our spirit’s utmost aspiration . . .
But can childhood be innocent? My mother made me wear much shorter skirts than the other children: it formed part of her advanced ideas, which were more set in concrete than ever after “she’d been to Paris and Rome”. The worst of it was the other girls making fun of me; that really depressed me. One day a new girl came wearing a skirt even shorter than mine! A circle immediately formed around her and everyone tried to find the cruellest, most hurtful barb and I was the one who found the most cutting remark. Pleased to be a victim no longer and to have been promoted to the rank of executioner!
As you’ve asked me, what childhood memories do I have? I’ll tell you, those Sundays when Father took us to the woods in Les Planes. We would sit under a pine tree and eat chufa nuts and peanuts: each pine tree had its requisite proletarian or artisan father eating peanuts and chufa nuts surrounded by children like us. Ours told us stories and we listened, mouths agape; they were educational rather than entertaining although my father, like the good schoolmaster he was, tried to combine the two: he mixed in a lot of geography and notions of physics, botany and homespun medicine, lots of secular ethics and references to the progress of humanity and the emancipation of the proletarian classes. These were my fairy tales, the spiritual nourishment of my early childhood. It was all I had and I really loved them! I preferred them when they were only slightly educational, when Father emphasised his pedagogic role less and let himself be driven by his imagination. We so need imagination when we are children, when we are new to this world; we need to transform this world where we’ve ended up – we’re not sure why or how – with touches of fantasy and mystery! That’s not all: there is more to it than this intense need children feel for fantasy and mystery – children are afraid. All children are full of fears: of the dark, of strangers – whether animals or people – of being lost, of going astray, of the unknown. Like all unbelievers, my parents denied that this was something innate and attributed it, on the contrary, to the vice – as they put it – of telling children about things that provoke fear, like death and the devil, ghosts, wolves and witches. But nobody had told me of such things and I can remember my fears as if it were yesterday, terrible fears to which I woke in the middle of the night, shapeless, endless fears that floated threateningly in the darkness of my bedroom. One day, when I was older, I met a girl at school who told me that when she was afraid at night she prayed to her guardian angel. She said:
Guardian angel,
every day and night,
be at my side
to guide and light.
I learned these lines without saying a word to my parents and from then on, whenever I awoke, I’d recite them aloud. Mother heard me once and scolded me severely; on the other hand, when Father found out, he simply shrugged his shoulders and looked at me as if intrigued, in fact rather tenderly.
I believe that if we so need poetry and faith to spare us from feeling unhappy about the fact of our existence, it is because poetry and faith are existence and life: without them this whole world would collapse into nothingness like an empty, hollow phantasmagoria. If you could only see Ramonet’s big eyes when he is listening to stories; I mean, you know what he’s like, you’ve told him so many. And how he likes to know that the guardian angel, the Infant Jesus and the Virgin Mary are watching over him – he finds that comforting! We would feel so forsaken in this world if there wasn’t another invisible one sustaining us. What does it matter if our sustaining fantasies are childish? The fact is we are poor forsaken children – can we ever aspire to being anything else? Is there so much difference between what we understand at the age of three and what we understand in our twenties? How can we ever imagine the Deity in a way that isn’t childish?
One Sunday, in Les Planes, it suddenly started to rain cats and dogs. Father sheltered Llibert and me under the skirts of his raincoat, a very loose raincoat that I can see even now, extremely worn and shabby, a proper schoolmaster’s raincoat! And I still have warm memories of the feeling of protection and security that spread through me the moment I buried my head under that raincoat like a little chick under the wings of a mother hen. It’s one of my earliest memories; I must have been three at the time. Another very distant recollection, perhaps from the same era, was one Sunday morning when we went to the port rather than to Les Planes. We did that sometimes: we went on a pleasure boat round the port and it was so exciting. But it’s not the boat that has stuck in my memory, it’s the legs of passers-by on the Rambla. We walked from our street to the port and that stretch of the Rambla, between carrer de l’Hospital and Porta de la Pau, was always packed with people on a Sunday morning. As I was so little, I could only see legs and more legs, a forest of legs on the move: those men’s and women’s legs used to make me so sad! Why do I bother telling you? Well, you asked for some of my childhood memories and there you have one . . . though that’s enough: I find them depressing! That gloomy forest of legs was only interrupted by a side street I had to cross. In those days there was a red-capped street porter by each gas-light waiting for his next customer and a woman selling balloons – we called them “bombs”. On the corner of each side street the bright red of the porter’s cap and the lurid colours of the “bombs” made me so happy, though it was short-lived: after crossing the street I was plunged back into that ocean of legs and more legs . . .
How odd now to think we called those coloured balloons bombs when we were children . . . and what if I said those waxen faces come back to me now when I tell you about all this nonsense from my childhood that is hardly riveting. Some nights when I wake up and try to get back to sleep I see them in the dark with their open, unseeing eyes – can God ever forgive us? My brother has turned them into huge posters with incomprehensible faces you find stuck on walls everywhere in Barcelona – the faces of children who have never thought bombs were coloured balloons. Yes, the brilliant Llibert has turned our balloons into propaganda – it’s sick-making! I know the things our side is keeping quiet about and I know because a middle-aged man told me – he happened to be in Melilla on business when the colonial troops rebelled. His wife and children were in Barcelona so he wanted to get back right away, however difficult it was to escape from the Spanish protectorate. He managed to travel in secret to Casablanca and then embark on a steamer en route to Marseille. I met him in our local air-raid shelter, where I always go with Ramonet and the maid when the bombs start raining, though he only goes when it’s fiercer than normal. So thanks to this gentleman, whom I hardly know, I discovered our people were the ones who started that kind of thing. He says that a week after the insurrection of the Foreign Legion and the Moorish troops the warship Jaime I bombed Melilla; it was three o’clock on Sunday afternoon and the Europeans were napping. As it was so hot they’d undressed for the purpose, so that men, women and children were fleeing half naked from their bombed houses. The shells from the Jaime I fell over the whole city, but mostly in the European quarter. When they exploded on a block of flats, the top ones flew into the air “as if made of paper”, says this gentleman who saw it all. The buildings disappeared in smoke and when it lifted only piles of rubble were visible. It was 26 July, the war had begun the previous week and the Europeans, unlike the Moors, were almost all republicans! If it hadn’t been for this trader from Melilla, who is quite old – he must be over forty – I’d never have known about this: the Lliberts of this world have been careful to conceal such actions and made us think that only fascists bomb cities. The details he explains are very similar to those in Maria Engràcia’s letter that I copied to you the other day: both sides are equally savage, however saddening it may be to acknowledge this. And don’t think that our conversations in the shelter always centre on the same topics; a great variety of people go there and you’d be amazed how frivolous and superficial most are, especially the ladies. One i
s made up like a parrot and carries a Pomeranian in her arms: you’d say her head was full of wind. She’s always laughing and speaking silly nonsense; and, strangest of all, if the other people’s conversation takes a political turn, she comments sententiously: “It’s what I always say: it’s all down to bad management.” By the way, before I met this gentleman from Melilla, I felt relaxed on nights when it was the navy and not aircraft bombing us, but now I realise that shells from the sea can be as big, or almost, as bombs from the air – and are better aimed: he says they blew up whole buildings in the European quarter of Melilla. And don’t imagine that this gentleman isn’t republican – he is as much as we are. I asked him how he could remain one after living through horrors like that and he replied with a sigh – “What choice do we have?”
And, you see, that’s why I feel nauseous when I see those photos pinned on the walls of buildings, the faces of children that shrapnel has transformed into visages of the dead. They were children from Madrid who had come to Barcelona as refugees from the bombing there; I have no idea why, but we thought they’d never bomb Barcelona. They’d been housed in the monastery of the Oratory Order, next to the church of Sant Felip Neri; now the monastery has caved in and the entire stone façade is pockmarked as if it had had smallpox. I sometimes walk by and stand and stare at it in the square for a moment.
I take one look at what’s left of that monastery and think of the Holy Innocents, not the ones in the Gospel but all the innocents who’ve been sacrificed in atrocities committed by adults since the world has existed.
Why do you want us to find escape in childhood memories, Juli? Wouldn’t that be selfish and frivolous given that as children we saw none of the delights which we – and I mean all of us – offer children today? I went to look for the first time soon after the bombing raid and the dailies were full of photos of children who’d been blown to bits. I then walked to the cathedral just round the corner and sat down on one of those big stone benches on either side of the monument to the martyrs of the wars against the French, in front of the entrance to the cathedral, where I’d not sat since the November evening when we were there together. Of course, you don’t remember but I can never forget that night. It was when we went on those endless walks in the old city with the unsellable La barrinada under our arms. We were tired and sat on those benches.