by Dennis Bock
Within days of occupying the abandoned consulate we opened our doors to the public. It was a remarkable turnout. I am obliged to report here that the Spanish put these Chinese peasants to shame in that regard. When I arrived in north China, little more than a year later, the locals were terrified by the very thought of a blood donation. In Madrid, though, young mothers, old ladies and even children formed a line that reached down the block, well past the cinema, at the time running an inspiring government propaganda film whose name has not stayed with me. The old Prussian’s liquor cabinets were now stocked with medical equipment and canned food stuffs. We produced our serums and improved our instruments in a small room where the diplomat had once kept his stiff shirts and top hats.
As I walked the journalist and this elegant associate of his through the rooms of the clinic, I explained the process of transfusing, storing and transporting blood. I showed them the stations where we worked and provided statistics, details and a few simple medical anecdotes he might find useful for his Daily Worker article. I introduced the staff, among them the Castilian doctor Antonio Calebras, a talented man, though consumed by an odd inferiority he overcompensated for through a haughty impatience with foreigners and their near-universal inability to master the language that came to him so effortlessly. It always seemed to me that he felt we were crashing his war. I attempted to avoid him most days, but often this proved impossible. We regarded one another with a fair bit of contempt, I should think. He offered the two visitors a limp hand, the very portrait of the noble Iberian. I believe Kajsa’s Spanish surprised him. The way it held his attention was unusual, though I suspect her beauty may have had something to do with that. He was a little man with black, slicked-back hair. In fact he looked a bit like photographs of the Andalusian poet García Lorca. Appearances being shallow, however, Dr. Calebras certainly did not possess the great artist’s sense of poetic fraternity and political idealism.
“Do you have an average travel time,” the woman asked, “based on your trips up to the Guadarrama Pass?” I now presumed your mother was another journalist, asking a question like that.
They called for a second interview the following morning, and after some persuading I agreed. It was mid-evening when I arrived at the Cervecería Alemana. It was my first break in eighteen hours. I could have worked another eighteen and still left things unfinished. Kajsa was standing at the bar with Pitcairn and leafing through a Spanish newspaper. She was more beautiful than she had seemed the day before. She wore the same jacket but different trousers, I think. She pushed her thick bangs back over the top of her head, folded her newspaper under her arm and greeted me with a handshake. Pitcairn slapped my back and thanked me for making time for him.
They began by having me describe my day, which had begun with a visit to half a dozen basement hospitals. Then came meetings with officials from the Ministry of War regarding supplies, I said, that were rarely available. I had performed three surgeries that day as well, and spent three hours on blood collection and storage.
When I finished speaking I turned to Kajsa. “You’re with the Daily Worker, I take it?”
“Oh, I tried my hand at writing when I was a student,” she said. “I’ve got more sense in my head now.”
“Good sense and ideals,” I said, “don’t often go hand in hand.”
She said she was with the Mujeres Libres, the Free Women of Spain. This was an organization of anarchist women that helped get prostitutes off the streets. They pulled them up from their misery and found them honourable work in the textile industry or in the city orphanages. The bombing raids made sure there were always lots of motherless children for the reformed ladies of the night to take care of. “From a life of hell to a life of helping,” she said. She’d been studying in London but left university when she saw how pointless it was when compared with the real issue. When I asked what she considered this to be, she said, without a pause, “Nihilism. A passion for destruction.”
“I see you have read Turgenev,” I said.
“Would you both please stop?” Pitcairn said. “We’re not dead yet. So let’s forget about gloom and doom and the class struggle, shall we? I’m a bit done with the revolution for tonight.”
Soon after exiting the café we found a long, narrow street lined with bars and anaemic plane trees that barely reached past the first balcony of the adjacent buildings. This was Huertas Street. I think your mother called it “charming,” or something along those lines, and it was. In a tavern called Casa Alberto I drank my first glass of absinthe. It was green and turned milky white when the water was added. I didn’t like it much. “Go on,” she said. Its taste and effects seemed terrifically overrated. I drank another, impatiently. Your mother, who wasn’t a drinker, told me to send it back when I said it tasted more like formaldehyde than liquor, but it wasn’t that bad and I drank it anyway.
All the bars were busy. It was close to midnight. I was feeling the alcohol by now. The street seemed to be moving in slow motion. Groups of people were singing, chanting in deep, low voices, marching up and down the street like lumbering elephants. It seemed an entire neighbourhood of drunkenness. The smell of black tobacco was on everyone’s clothing. I remember a blanket of smoke hanging over the street. Some of the bars were reserved for quiet old men who played dominoes and listened to radio reports of the war and watched the young people through the windows. Heads turned when we walked in. I was not as young as the rest of the crowd but not so old, either. No one said anything to us. I was used to that by then. In these bars nobody liked seeing a new face. It was understandable, your mother said, even healthy, to be suspicious of strangers in times like these.
*
This evening Ho passed before my door, propped open to permit the breeze, and stopped. He may have seen my foot protruding from behind this desk, hunched over as I was and thinking about where to go with this story. I rolled another sheet into the Remington. Off he walked to the sound of my clacking.
*
I remember rumours were an ongoing source of debate and discussion. They became something of a fascination and a pastime, I think. For some months it was said that the French would not buckle under British pressure to reverse their promise of military aid, and that the Americans would enter the war within six months. People spoke of Mussolini with ridicule and of Hitler with fear and of the devilish Moors with such a grinding racial hatred that I myself began to feel it. Up at the front, during the lulls in fighting, the urge to talk grew, and spies were a frequent topic. Emilio Mola, the Fascist general, spearheading four columns of soldiers at Madrid’s southeastern flank, had proclaimed that a fifth column of sympathizers was said to be waiting quietly, patiently, in the heart of the capital. Soon this was considered fact, though nothing was known for certain.
Entering the world of gossip and rumour was a common rite of passage that greatly relieved the tedium. At the front there was only waiting and fighting and talking. Women and prostitutes also figured in these conversations, until some remark unwittingly reminded the men of the rapes they’d seen or had themselves committed. Then the jocularity was sucked out of the air as if fire had suddenly stolen oxygen from their lungs, and they would return to their silent stares and memories as the war again became real. Most days, recollections of my own experiences many years before, in Belgium during the Great War, came to me. I never spoke of them, not to your mother and not to these young men. Stories of another war to end all wars would do no one any good. Your mother knew enough to guess what I’d seen before coming to Spain.
*
I have been thinking about the night your mother and I spent in a bomb shelter. It was our first night together, and a very strange night, indeed. I’m sure she would tell you the same. I can close my eyes and still smell the dankness in the air, and feel the closeness of those arched brick passageways we moved through under the city. Most of us spent a fair bit of time in cellars and basements in Madrid, but this night
was unusual and I think you should know about it.
Frank Pitcairn had led us into a bar called Los Gabrieles, where colourful mosaic advertisements for brandies and biscuits and sherries covered the walls. It was probably close to one o’clock in the morning when the loud, high whine of an air-raid siren came through the door and all conversations stopped. People made for the basement. Your mother seemed oddly calm, I thought. Could she be so used to this, already? I carried my drink outside and watched the streets being vacated as people ran for the safety of doorways. She followed casually behind. I did not hear the planes, but when the explosions began, the last of the drinkers and the staff quickly headed below for shelter. Your mother and I followed and walked through a long hallway, past the washrooms and down a narrow, dimly lit set of stairs. The air grew thin and dank as we descended the steps, and the thud of the exploding bombs grew muted.
Upon entering this basement I saw quickly enough that it was unlike any other shelter I had seen in Madrid, or anywhere else for that matter. It was a magnificent labyrinth, an intricate series of rooms linked by a main tunnel that branched off into smaller, darker tunnels that ran even farther beneath the city. Rooms waited at the end of four of the tunnels, each one representing, in miniature, a stage of a bullfight. Like the bar upstairs, they were decorated with ceramic tiles, depicting scenes that took up an entire wall. The mosaic of the first room we entered was that of a vestiary. On one wall the tile showed the bullfighter’s brightly decorated suit of lights, gold with red sequins along the arms and legs. The room was crowded with customers from upstairs, people still holding their drinks. We found the main tunnel again and walked through the dank air to the chapel, where the matador pauses for a word with his Maker before entering the ring. The scene was well lit by the open window portrayed in the mosaic, and visible in its frame was a bright day, with the Virgin Mary hovering in the centre. Radiance emanated from her outstretched hands. The ceramic also showed a desk, on which sat a Bible propped up against a stack of books, an unlit candle, notepaper and a fountain pen. This room, too, was full of people. We exited and continued down along the main tunnel.
We entered a circular room constructed to represent the main bullring, the plaza de toros. It was less than ten paces across and also near capacity. The tiles showed stands filled with people facing us, creating the perception that we ourselves were the main attraction and not some hapless bull and matador. The bombs falling outside, perhaps ten blocks away, sounded as dull thuds over our heads. The room shook with the force of the distant explosions. Tiles scattered on the dirt floor had been shaken loose by previous bombardments—or this one, it’s impossible to say.
Frank had found a seat and sat with his back to the wall, talking quietly with an old man. Your mother and I continued along the main tunnel to the fourth and last room.
She said, “This would be absurd if it wasn’t so terrifying.”
*
Absurd moments in Madrid, there are plenty of those to choose from, and I shouldn’t be so surprised. I suppose that is the nature of war. I remember my first encounter with the absurd very well. It was on my first morning in Madrid, in early November of 1936, a few months before I met your mother. I recall taking my breakfast at the hotel cafeteria on the Gran Vía, Madrid’s principal east-west thoroughfare, only a few doors up from a bar called the Museo Chicote. I knew very few people in the city at the time and had brought with me nothing but my few items of luggage, a small amount of cash in the form of American Express orders and safe-conduct papers issued to me by the Spanish Embassy in Paris. I had begun walking east along the Gran Vía when an annoying little creature approached from behind and grabbed me by the elbow. Of course, I had no idea what this man was trying to tell me. He spoke very fast and I didn’t understand any Spanish. I was just then indicating to him the impasse, shaking my head and gently but firmly pulling away, when his free hand casually slipped under his coat. He patted something there and raised an eye. It was a gesture he might have picked up at the movie house just down the road.
Having no option but to take his lead I followed him the few steps back to my hotel, where he rang the service bell and waited for the lady to appear at her desk. She was, I know now, a typical patrona of the type you find all over that country—efficient and powerful in the small world of her clean hallways and uncomfortable, tubular pillows, loud, talkative and helpful. She helped me understand the gist of the man’s complaint. It seemed he was connected in some form to the security apparatus of the Republican government, and that he’d heard me, while conversing with another hotel guest, say “Fascist.” He had not liked how I’d spoken the word. Perhaps had I spat it in disgust he might have waived his suspicions and bought me a brandy. It’s no secret, of course, that small men tend to puff themselves up, but I was to learn just how much they can do so when acting on behalf of powerful organizations and, moreover, carrying a sidearm. As I was thinking this, the other reasons for his stopping me came out, and at first I could only believe that the proprietress had translated incorrectly. He had not liked the fact that I was well dressed and wore a moustache. Fascists, I’ve since learned, wear Abercrombie & Fitch and sport trimmed facial hair, not Socialists or Communists or Marxists. This was beyond ludicrous, but, reading an unmistakable excitability in the man, I chose the cautious route. I had the lady explain that I had just arrived to the country, as my papers would indicate, supported the Republican cause, and would soon be donning the appropriate clothing. I did not, however, mention what I had planned for my moustache.
I watched his enthusiasm wane slightly when the landlady produced my passport from her desk drawer. With his permission I retrieved my safe-conduct papers from my breast pocket. He studied both documents, overly carefully, I thought, guessing that he was not much more than an illiterate thug looking for something to keep him occupied before lunch. He returned the documents, nodded slightly and, with a tinge of regret in his eyes, told the landlady I was free to go. I supposed that was the end of it. I took the lift to my room to splash some water on my face and shake off this ridiculous scare. It was an inconvenience more than anything else, but also a reminder that certain aspects of security were not to be taken for granted in a city ringed by Fascists and said to be brimming with spies.
Not five minutes later, as I was preparing to resume my day, a knock sounded at the door. Here stood another man, dressed in a black leather coat—very impressive and fit, quite handsome, and bearing a briefcase. With him were five guards, each armed with a carbine. This man, too, demanded to see my documents. Apparently his colleague had scampered down the road to get some help. One of the guards, instructed to descend for the passport, returned a moment later. The man in the leather coat sat down on the bed, briefcase on his lap, and began flipping through its pages. Two guards stood barring the door. I heard others in the hallway, their voices striking a chord of boredom, and the man on my bed looked up and shook his head, as if annoyed by their banal conversation. While a suspect, and perhaps a spy, I still might understand the superior regrets of an important man obliged to spend a whole war in the company of bumpkins. But this handsome, haughty police officer wasn’t having such a good day, either, and seemed just as let down as his predecessor had been. My status was unimpeachable. He stood up, organized his minions with a short bark, and finally I was left in peace. For a few minutes I watched from the window, hoping to see them leave, but saw nothing but a busy street teeming with mules and military vehicles and pedestrians.
Then another knock at the door. This time a friendly face greeted me. Henning Sorensen was a Canadian associate of mine with whom I would soon travel (I did not know this yet) up to Paris and London in search of a car and various instruments, gadgets and chemicals we would need to get our clinic up and running. He had been in Spain for a number of weeks, preparing the groundwork, and spoke a bit of Spanish. Shortly before departing for Europe I’d been entrusted with a letter from his sweetheart back in Mo
ntreal, and after explaining my ,encounter with the secret police, I retrieved it from my luggage and handed it to him. Just then the man with the briefcase swooped through the door, accompanied by his bored, grunting men. Greatly enjoying his line of work, he snatched the letter out of Sorensen’s hand while his guards aimed their rifles directly at us. Greedily, he ripped the letter open, clearly believing he’d smashed a ring of Fascist plotters until he read, “My dearest darling . . .” With that there was nothing left for him but a quiet retreat.
It was a ridiculous episode, but again, a reminder. Sorensen and I watched them leave the building, walk up Gran Vía and disappear into the crowd of vehicles and mules. We descended to the street not long after, looking to soothe our nerves with a drink at the Museo Chicote, though not before I changed my clothes and shaved off my moustache.
*
I remember the tunnel growing narrower and deeper. The things we remember! Your mother’s hand brushed against mine. I remember that so well. I felt like a schoolboy! What did I do? I pretended not to notice, of course. I did not move my hand but stretched my fingers out in case her touch might come again. A moment later we entered a small infirmary that was not as crowded as the other rooms had been, situated at the confused and narrow end of the tunnel. It was the end of our journey, and the bullfighter’s. The mosaic of this last room represented an operating theatre. Well, I said, at last something I understand. Perhaps the fallen bullfighter had already been gored and was now being carried down to the infirmary, for three doctors and a nurse stood at the ready, all looking very concerned, as well as a solemn-looking priest with long, thin El Greco hands and an old, grey face. The portraits were beautifully rendered and close to life-sized. The artist had required nine tiles to depict the surgeon’s rib-spreaders, laid out on the table beside a stethoscope and various cutting instruments. Their smocks were still shiny white.