Uncertain Glory

by Joan Sales

  What I was attempting wasn’t at all easy as I didn’t know the exact position of the front lines. Nor was I sure what I really wanted to achieve: either go over to the other side or reach the frontier with France by walking at night and hiding by day; perhaps I’d reach the Pyrenees over four days’ hard slog. The truth was that I was lost and had surrendered myself to chance or Providence; all I knew for certain was that a never-ending sadness had taken possession of me and was gradually eating me alive. Soleràs had left the brigade and Lluís was probably dead. Who could assure me that Picó, the commander and Dr Puig weren’t dead as well? Who could assure me that anything was left of our battalion, our brigade, our whole division? If not, why wasn’t there a trace of them to be found?

  When night finally fell I started walking again, guided by the constellations. Above all, I wanted to know where the others were and get some idea of the situation in general. All I knew was that the others were to my west. So I walked towards Sagittarius which, at that time of year, appeared on the horizon above the spot where the sun had just gone down. When Sagittarius set in turn, the Milky Way served to guide me, and how it sparkled in the heart of that steppe, in that dry, transparent air, in that pitch-black sky! It’s the most vivid memory I have of those strange nights: it was like a whirlwind of diamond specks and I would stop to look at it through my telescope; at other times I’d suddenly feel my solitude was a claw strangling me. How I would have cried, crybaby that I am, how I would have cried like a lost child without those stars for company! And the bitter scent of thyme, with the spindly juniper, the only vegetation on those deserted wastes – a bitter scent of thyme the icy wind swirled into my face . . . ! I walked so instinctively, training my eyes on the Milky Way, that I sometimes suspected I must be suffering a fresh attack of sleepwalking: today, all these years later, I wish I had been, that my conscious, responsible will had played no part; now I feel I was deserting, something I never felt then, but I wasn’t sleepwalking. Such attacks leave no memories: I’d never have known I’d had any if other people hadn’t told me. I should be under no illusion: I was fully aware that I was trying to desert.

  The following night I heard voices in the distance, the first I’d heard in three days. And once more I hesitated and couldn’t decide; I realised it would be almost impossible to reach the Pyrenees. Go back? Why should I if Lluís and Soleràs were no longer in the brigade and perhaps Picó, the commander and the doctor dead or taken prisoner? I was about to take one of the most serious steps in my life: I was about to choose my enemy. Up to that point I’d found myself on one side not through any choice of my own, it was the situation that chose me – not because I’d ever taken a decision that way, and I’d never thought the others were my enemies: they were simply the others. I’d never thought of them as my enemies! Not even when I’d fired bullets or hurled grenades at them: that had been a bout of bloodlust that left me feeling deeply ashamed when it faded. Instinct had taken hold of me and made me act not like myself, but like someone else: the same thing would have happened if I’d been on the other side, that seemed self-evident. I hadn’t shot at them in that surge of madness because they were enemies, but for reasons I couldn’t explain. And it had been like this from the moment I hadn’t chosen my side; I’d simply stayed where the war had taken me by surprise. That was how it had been so far. Now I was going to decide; from now on, as a result of a choice made by my own free will, my friends would become my enemies and vice versa.

  The voices were right there, in the end, some thirty metres away.

  My mind was such a haze I never registered that I couldn’t understand a word they were saying. It was a long time before I took any real notice: their strange gabble contained not a single intelligible word.

  They’re Moors, I thought, and curled up silently between two junipers, the branches of which were shaped into a kind of grotto. The guttural, nasal noises became clearer as they drew near; I cowered and shrank like a cornered animal. Moors had never remotely entered my head until I heard those shrill nasal sounds, but when I listened carefully they didn’t in fact seem at all shrill or nasal, simply incomprehensible. Could they be Basques?

  I knew that the last remnants of the Basque army, survivors of a desperate struggle, had reached the coast of Gascony to join up with Catalan troops via France. Blessed Providence has taken me by the hand, I thought suddenly. Better to go over to the Basques than the Moors.

  Their voices came and went, as if they belonged to a patrol searching those woods. Despite the cold, I was sweating; I could feel beads of sweat on my lips, and one slipped down my spine like quicksilver.

  That very second I glimpsed a campfire through the junipers a hundred metres from my den. They’d just lit the dry gorse and the flames spat like firecrackers. I crossed myself before crawling out: I just had to find out who they were. I’d stopped sweating and felt unusually lucid; a branch of thorns scratched my cheek like a paw with nails of steel. I managed to draw close to their fire without alerting them, close enough to see their faces lit up in the darkness by the flickering flames as in a chiaroscuro.

  What horrific faces! My God! Their faces were so horrific!

  I straightened my back ready to run for it. It was an idiotic thing to do.

  Bullets buzzed round me like a swarm of hungry mosquitoes. I had one wish: to fly. And I flew. Not through the air, but downwards. Until my flight came to a sudden halt and I felt stunned, like a bird felled by a bullet.

  I tried to move my legs but they wouldn’t respond, as if they belonged to someone else; they felt alien to me whenever I touched them. I could make out the penetrating voices of the Moors as they came and went: then the noise gave way to a strange silence.

  Why couldn’t I see any stars up above? It had been a peaceful night, at least until I fell. But where had I fallen? It was so silent, so cold, so pitch black, and I couldn’t move my legs . . . If only day would break! Though they’d find me with the first light of day . . . In that stillness the damp cold penetrated to the marrow of my bones; then the voices came closer . . . My God, may night be eternal!

  It was a miracle: I could hear them now and understood everything the Moors were saying! I relaxed, my legs responded again; I saw the starry sky, the Milky Way with its trail of diamond dust, and started sobbing.

  The tears streamed down and I could do nothing to stop them: they were speaking Catalan. I’d have liked to cry out for help, but I lost consciousness.

  “What a fucking mess” were the first words I heard when I came round. And when I opened my eyes I saw a face I wasn’t expecting to see at all, the cross-eyed look of Commander Rosich’s aide-de-camp. “What a fucking mess. What the hell are you doing at the bottom of this millpond? Lucky it’s empty!”

  And still on a high from the latest battle, Cross-eyes started to tell me about recent encounters: we’d fought off the Moors, those shit-bags; there are piles of corpses everywhere, piles of wounded, fucking awful, but the rout’s over, we’ve stopped running like rabbits.”

  “So where’s the commander?”

  “He’s very near here. The Moors almost ambushed us. Did you know we finally found Lluís? He was discovered by chance in a field hospital a long way from here; he’s very badly wounded. A nasty wound! He was picked up by stretcher bearers from an anarchist division – they took him to Almirete and never bothered to inform us. Each brigade and division looks after itself, do you know? Do you also know that an anarchist division opened fire on a communist division? What a fucking mess . . .”

  •

  However, it was futile trying to convince Auntie that not all battalions and brigades were the same, that the air on our side was fresh and healthy and not like the rotten stench in the rearguard. In her eyes it was all very simple: there were two fields, one wheat, the other wild oats, separated by barbed wire fences. I’d have preferred not to set foot in her place to avoid all these annoying arguments – she was still living in her mansion in Sarrià – but I was forced t
o by a ridiculous piece of bad luck.

  I took a tram as soon as I got off the train, because there were hardly any taxis. People piled in at each stop: we were bunched together on the platform like grapes waiting to be pressed. Then I suddenly felt a warm, sinuous body lean hard into mine so I could feel its heart beating; tresses of red hair were tickling me around the mouth and her scent was making me feel dizzy. All at once two yellow eyes stared shamelessly into mine; could eyes possibly be that yellow? It was a quiet, cynical stare the like of which I’d never seen before, and I felt her shifting, as if she were trying to stand on tiptoe to press even harder into me, perhaps so her mouth could reach mine. I did my best to elbow my way through the crowd to jump off the moving tram. My God, I thought, that’s because I’m wearing a military uniform; a surplice earned the respect of the most vulgar women.

  I put my hand instinctively into the hellhole of my pocket: my wallet had walked.

  What could I do now? That panther, I thought, prompted by her yellow eyes, that underwater panther must have got off at the next stop and disappeared among the thousands of anonymous faces; it would be like looking for a needle in a haystack. Strange to say, I felt a degree of warmth towards the woman and could only admire the skill with which she’d relieved me of my wallet. That panther, I kept repeating to myself, that underwater panther . . . Why underwater? An underwater panther floating in the warm waters of the feminine Ocean: Soleràs’ peculiar outpourings had come to mind.

  I put my hand on my chest – where the absence of my wallet created a depressing emptiness – and tried like a fool to remember if I’d ever seen a girl with yellow eyes before the war, and this worried me more than my missing wallet. Then I realised I couldn’t have lunch and would have to sleep on a street bench, unless I went to Military Headquarters, but how could I do that now the papers justifying my presence in Barcelona had vanished with my wallet? They’d clap me straight into a cell as a deserter until they could investigate my case!

  I had no choice but to head up to Sarrià and ask Auntie for a handout.

  After the inevitable emotional outpourings – after all, we remain nephew and aunt – the conversation became as absurd as I’d anticipated: “Why do you side with those ragamuffins?”

  “But, Auntie, if you could only see the others! They’re more ragamuffin than we are, I assure you; think for a minute how the whole of the textile industry is in republican territory.”

  “Have you forgotten that your people have murdered relatives of ours?”

  “So what do you expect me to do, Auntie? Go over to the other side? Every day somebody or other changes trench; you have to understand that it’s a two-way flow. And people desert from each side for the same reason: they’re all disgusted by the horrors being perpetrated by their respective rearguards. Soleràs – someone who has disappeared ‘without leaving a forwarding address’ as postmen say – often said the most outlandish things, but he was right. He once told me that if the war lasted long enough we’d find that all the republican soldiers had gone over to the fascists and vice versa.”

  Auntie wouldn’t listen to reason; in her eyes the others were knights of the Holy Grail, tall, slim, fair, clean-shaven and clad in spotless ironed uniforms – grasping a sword, a noble sword, a sword like a lily, like an Easter candle . . .

  But let’s get back to why I was in Barcelona in December 1937. It was all down to those letters that I’d read surreptitiously; for as long as I can remember I’ve suffered from this shameful weakness: I’d stand behind the door and listen to the long half-whispered conversations between Auntie and Monsenyor, or would read, when she wasn’t looking, a letter that happened to linger on her table, or even glance at a letter being read by an unknown woman who’d happened to sit beside me in a tram. I’m not the sensual kind, but I am a nosey parker. It’s as if the attraction others feel for those of their own flesh, I feel for their own lives – something that’s equally shameful, if not more so.

  It was all down to those letters that Lluís kept well hidden in his haversack.

  Once the front had been re-established after a series of routs, it was decided that our brigade should be sent to a “dead front” to re-form. A deserted valley lay between our positions and the enemy’s, within which lay five or six hamlets that had been abandoned by the local country people because they’d been shelled so often. Seven or eight kilometres as the crow flies lay between our trenches and the enemy: we were out of range of their infantry fire and supporting weaponry. Moreover, there’d been heavy snowfall and so long as three feet of snow covered the mountains, new operations would be impossible on that front: all was quiet! That’s why we’d been sent there. We’d suffered heavy casualties in recent battles, a lot of dead, a lot of badly wounded men and, above all, lots of men who’d disappeared, as was usual after a rout. The brigade had to recover, look after its wounded and, if possible, trace those who’d disappeared. We needed time to receive new supplies of arms to replace those lost or destroyed, and new recruits to fill the gaping holes.

  Our battalion occupied two villages on that dead front, Santa Espina del Purroy and Villar del Purroy. The Purroy is a river that flows between the two: the road, a mere cart track, follows the course of the river. It was ten kilometres from Villar to Santa Espina.

  Both villages were uninhabited at the time and were falling into ruin. They’d been taken, evacuated and retaken at the beginning of the year, burned by anarchists and fascists and finally bombed out during recent battles. The battalion headquarters and medical section were in Villar, closer to the rearguard, and the company of machine gunners in Santa Espina, closer to the trenches. The four artillery companies, or more precisely the little that was left of them, occupied trenches along the ridge, facing the deserted valley, quite a way from either village.

  Local game had multiplied magnificently in those mountains and woods that had been more or less completely abandoned by their inhabitants for eighteen months; our men hunted rabbit, hare and partridge, more than we could ever eat as it was child’s play following their tracks in the snow. We found olive oil and wine, almonds, walnuts and coal in the cellars of the ruined houses, everything the unfortunate country people had been forced to abandon in their rush to escape. Then there were villages in the valley where the most unexpected things were to be found: for example, a hurdy-gurdy the machine gunners hoisted triumphantly on the back of one of their mules and brought back. Our men sometimes met up with soldiers from the opposite lines and like good brothers shared out whatever they found. Why should they have felt like killing each other in this lull between operations?

  I lived in Villar with my superior, medical lieutenant Dr Puig, and often went to Santa Espina to see my machine gunner friends. Captain Picó had established himself in the only house still standing that had belonged to the biggest landowner, Don Andalecio, murdered by the anarchists in the first days of the war. They’d also set fire to his house, but the enormously thick walls had resisted. There were good size sitting rooms and bedrooms, because it was a huge house even though the walls and ceilings had been blackened by smoke from the blaze and there was no furniture at all. The dining room occupied a large part of the ground floor; the chimney hood was ample enough to accommodate three large, high-backed benches that Picó had requisitioned from another house: he’d put one on each side and one across, so the three made a kind of small, cosy compartment around the fire. I remember them well because we spent our evenings on those three seats over the nights I spent in Santa Espina, those endless autumnal and winter evenings, before and after the ladies came.

  Picó had big fires lit using whole beams retrieved from the house rubble. On rainy nights we’d hear the sound of walls collapsing here and there in the village: a dismal rumble of stones toppling that made you feel sad when you thought of the humble family that wasn’t going to find hearth and home when they returned to their birthplace after the war.

  When Lluís left the field hospital in Almirete he was sent
to join the machine gunners because nothing remained of his old artillery company; initially he’d been sent to the Weapons Support section, but their 0.70 cannons and 0.85 mortars only existed in the imagination or on paper. The hospital in Almirete was clearly a waste of time, though luckily Lluís wasn’t there long, just the time it took to extract the Mauser bullet from his left forearm and for the wound to heal. The first rumours had grossly exaggerated his wound – soldiers often magnified injuries – but Lluís was behaving strangely. We assumed he was in a bad temper because Soleràs had disappeared; they were close friends and had been inseparable from secondary school.

  We celebrated Lluís’ return with a dinner in Santa Espina given by the machine gunners’ captain. The commander, Dr Puig and I drove from Villar in the usual Ford, the survivor of so many battles and routs. “More loyal to the army of Catalonia,” the commander would say, “than many political commissars.” At the time we were bereft of political commissars, and that was how we and the commander wanted it; the commander, who couldn’t stand the sight of them, said “they’ve all made a run for it” in the recent battles, which wasn’t true – or at least not in every case – though it was true enough that we didn’t miss them.

  “Now,” said Commander Rosich, “we’ve supplied our soldiers with hurdy-gurdies rather than commissars; they may not be as educational, but they’re a sight more entertaining.”

  In the course of that dinner in Lluís’ honour Picó announced his latest find in no man’s land, that is, the deserted valley: he claimed it was a gilded silver cup “undoubtedly from the time of the Moors”. He had his cook fill it with mellow wine to drink to our health.

  “Captain!” I shouted.

  “What’s wrong?”

  “Where did you find that cup? It’s a chalice!”

  The commander gave a start: “Picó, did you find it in a church? Have you never heard of the blood of God?”