Birth of Our Power (10 page)

“Back to the agenda,” murmured old Ribas, the chairman, without raising his white head.

Now it was Dario's turn to take the offensive. He was never one for arguing on general principles … “The men at Granollérs haven't yet received any weapons. What's going on? … Sans is twenty Brownings short … Perez Vidal of the barbers' is an
agent provocateur:
this has been known for several days and he is still alive … Why has the Committee's envoy to Paris not left yet? … Things will never be ready for the nineteenth.”

Heated voices rose to answer him. The room was, filled with hubbub. A young woman wearing a gold-colored scarf on her head appeared in the doorway and whispered, smiling:

“Comrades, you can be heard outside in the courtyard!” That golden smile, that voice—like a fresh-water stream among their voices—calmed the men.

“Let's get back to the question of rents,” said Ribas.

I would meet Dario sometimes in the evenings, in a tiny lodging which was dark and cool. The air and the noise of the street wafted in through the balcony. On extremely hot days, the gray shadow of the high wall of a medieval convent lent shade to that house, our refuge in the evening. There was wine in big glasses on the unvarnished wooden table. Some tomatoes, red peppers, and onions lying nearby in a dish where everybody took what he wanted made it even more like a room in an inn. Dario would gulp down his wine. His narrow greenish eyes were now relaxed; the faint ugliness of his features seemed to disappear; he spoke about the coming insurrection with an infectious confidence. “Oh, sure, all those readers of
La Conquête du pain
don't really believe we can win. Hold out one week for history's sake, that's the main thing as far as they're concerned. Afterward—they all hope to escape to Argentina; for they have a vocation for collective martyrdom and an individual love of self-preservation. But it doesn't make any difference. The main thing is to begin. Action has its own laws. Once things get started, when it's no longer possible to turn back, they'll do—we'll all do—what must be done … What will it be? I haven't any idea, Comrade. But certainly a whole lot of things we don't even suspect …”

“You have to burn your boats. If Cortes hadn't burned his, his conquistadores would have re-embarked like cowards. Burn your boats …”

“In 1902 we held the city for seven days. In 1909 we held out for three days, without, moreover, finding anything better to do than burn a few churches. There were no leaders, no plans, no guiding ideas. Now, all we need are a couple of weeks to make us practically invincible.”

Indeed? Obviously Dario wasn't saying everything he was thinking. Had he really thought it out himself? He made us explain the Russian events to him while he wrinkled his brows like a schoolboy having trouble following the lesson. Then, suddenly erect, joyful:

“I've got a feeling we're going to catch up with the Russians! That would be beautiful, Europe burning at both ends!”

Dario often slept in that dwelling, after secret meetings that might last until the hour when the city of pleasure lighted its lamps: a fiery glow mounting above the gloomy convent from the brightly lit streets. Couples entwined along the street, standing motionless in front of the old doors with their wrought-iron knockers. From his balcony, Dario would lean out over them for a few moments, breathing in the throbbing freshness of the night, stretching his great arms (capable of carrying two-hundred-pound loads), mouthing a cry of power and fatigue which had to be repressed. He would totter back into the room where a shade-less oil lamp was burning on the table among the wine glasses and the remains of supper. With the indolent step of a tired cat he crossed through that feeble yellowish light and entered a sort of dark closet built under the stairway, where there was just enough room for a chair and a bedstead. It was there that he lay down, without a light, cramped as if in a dungeon, a Browning at his bedside.

But sometimes a mouse like noise made him stretch out his hand and draw open the bolt. Then Lolita would slip in next to him, naked under her red-and-blue striped Indian mantle (the colors invisible in the dark), svelte and cool, yet burning. She pressed herself close to him without speaking a word. He sought her face and found only her ardent lips. “Let me look at you,” he said. He struck a phosphorus match against the wall. A sputtering blue star, hissing and spidery, burst into flame at his fingertips: her delicate, soft-toned face—with its huge dark eyes, each now lighted by a spark, shining from out of their deep-set, dusky orbits—was nestled in the hollow of his arm, with a poor, gentle, worried smile. Dario gazed at it until the ephemeral light singeing his fingers went out. They made love in total darkness—in silence, for he was hurried and tired, and she always felt on the verge of losing him.

5
   Francisco Ferrer, executed October 13, 1909, at Montjuich. A libertarian teacher, he happened to be in Barcelona during the general strike which had forced the government to flee. Accused—without the slightest evidence—of fomenting the whole rebellion, his trial and execution sparked a worldwide protest movement similar to the Sacco-Vanzetti movement a generation later. —Tr.

AT THAT PRECISE MOMENT A TELEPHONE RANG IN THE LARGE, QUIET OFFICES
of the Deputy Commissioner of the Security Police, a stubborn old civil servant with the smooth, hairless face of an actor. Don Felipe Sarria put down his cigarette in a nickel ashtray. “Hello? Ah, it's you. Very good.” At the other end of the line, a constrained voice was battling against the fa-la-las of an orchestra. Hard little heels hammering rhythmically on the boards made a din like thick hail beating down on that prudent voice. The man was evidently calling from the wings of a dance hall. The Deputy Commissioner listened with great attention. “Himself! Well, well. At Lloria's?
Calle
Jeronima, number 26? Just a minute … On the second floor, you say? The room is on the right, under the stairs, at the end of the hall. The nearest window is on the courtyard? That's it?—Good-by.” The insidious voice fell silent over the receiver. The Deputy Commissioner turned a switch and the room was flooded with light. The full-dress portrait of the King appeared, set off by a massive gilt frame, between the safe and a strongbox containing the informers' dossiers: a feeble smile and a sidewise glance hanging in the air behind the policeman. Don Felipe looked through a big file:
“Lloria,
married to Sarda, Maria (Lolita), aged 27 …” From another file containing the plans of houses occupied by the activists (“extremely dangerous”) entered on list #A-2, Don Felipe withdrew a more interesting card: the doors, the heights of the windows, the turnings of the corridors, everything fell clearly into place before his eyes, and this perfect layout, carefully drawn up by a prize student of the School of Art and Design, became the blueprint for a trap … With the point of his pencil, Don Felipe, pensive, slowly traced a circle on the plan, in the room where Dario was sleeping. Then, still completely absorbed, he put in three little dots—the tiny, schematic representation of a face.

“Of course. Of course.”

The pencil point mechanically traced another circle, sketching another head, somewhat smaller, hugging the first one: a slightly heavier line representing the mouth. Only then did the policeman come out of his dream: Two men in the courtyard. Two men in the street. Three to make the arrest. No exit. A perfect trap. Very good. Don Felipe rubbed his hands together. He was about to ring, to close this trap with a mere push of the finger in the shadows. The King approved silently from his shining frame and purple velvet backdrop above. But, but …

But the anger of those thousands of workers, tomorrow, in the back streets, the cold fury of all those men in File #A (“dangerous”) would haunt the city, invisible, controlled, vehement yet ready to explode in an outcry or, worse still, in the dry crackle of pistol-shots. Two or three officers would be dead by nightfall, without any doubt. Don Felipe peered into the future. And after that?—After that was the great unknown of the masses' anger.

And then this man, asleep in the rectangle now marked by two circles … “Hmmm,” thought Don Felipe in spite of himself (one thought crossing another en route from the depths where the light never penetrates), “two heads, one against the other …” The Regionalist League feared him more than anybody. Arrest him? Enrage the workers, calm the regionalists. Self-interest added its ounce of gold to the dark nugget of fear on the invisible scales.

The next day we buried Juan Bregat. He killed himself accidentally while handling a Browning with a child's delight and clumsiness. Some comrades had left his body in an empty bystreet, and most people believed it had been a crime of the police. We knew better. The bullet made a hole in his forehead above the left eyebrow: and this hole, black at the edges, plugged with a cotton wad, gave him the look of a young victim of the firing squad. The totally tragic character of his death was apparent in the attenuated sharpness of his features, the greenish tint of his skin, the stale odor given off by that livid flesh—virile only yesterday—in the insistent buzzing of the flies over that darkened mouth; apparent, too, in a different manner—transformed into living, suffering flesh—in that dark form standing at the bedside, straight but broken, showing the pallor beneath the veil and two shriveled hands clasped one over the other (whose rigidity made me think of the frozen hands of the women in mourning one finds among the stone figures of cathedrals). Standing
around the dead man in the small, white hospital room, the comrades were saying, “The first blood.” They passed gravely by him, murmuring almost aloud, as if he could have heard them, “Adieu! Adieu!” They stood around the corridor and in the courtyard with its barred windows, discussing this perhaps senseless death on which their faith had now conferred a higher sense. For the light of humanity to be suddenly snuffed out within an ardent young brain, what absurdity!—no matter how it happens. But to die from a clumsy gesture while loading your weapon on the eve of the battle or to die from a stray bullet during the shooting, what difference is there? Somehow it seems even more absurd to be the first one killed in the insurrection or the last one killed in the mutiny, and yet it is the nature of things that we must cry for these two. Or to fall, judged and vanquished, after the combat, under twelve bullets from twelve miserable soldiers whom you hate with all your soul in that awful moment but whom you nonetheless forgive, shouting; “Brothers!” You don't choose your time. This first blood was the purest, the blood of a young worker with his vision firmly attached to life, loved by a wife and a child—and by us—spilled in vain (but again, can one ever know which is vain and which is fruitful? And wasn't it the fertility of your blood, poor Juan, that gave us that feeling of strength when, several thousand strong, we addressed you our soldiers' farewell?).

There was no singing, no music, no speeches. The coffin, nailed shut over that energetic brow, was lifted by anonymous hands, in a silence so profound I thought I could hear the beating of hearts. The coffin floated above our heads, carried, one might have said, on the wave of a blue tide, for practically all these men were dressed as usual in their blue overalls, sandals, and caps. Not many women had come, because of the vague apprehension that hovered over us. The workers' wives pressed close to their men. The red ribbons of the wreaths clung like glowing cinders to the bare, black hearse which bore no cross. The black horses cut through the crowd, their tall plumes bobbing. We were that crowd, first a few hundred, then a few thousand, then waves of people flooding the street … We who preceded, who surrounded, who followed that solemn rig, bathed in an extraordinary silence: the tramp of countless feet, the murmur of voices, and, set above it all, concentrated around that body with the hole in its brow, an oppressive expectation, unexpressed, inexpressible: as if a song were held suspended over all those silent lips, ready to fly up—a song or a shout—a shout
or a sob—a sob—no, no; a cry, an outburst … The estuaries of the streets opened to that procession like the future to deeds; and little by little our mass formed into a column, set off from the passive and ill-assorted people who watched us pass from the sidewalks, by its work clothes (punctuated by an occasional soldier's uniform) and by its air of tension. We followed the tall black plumes through a wealthy quarter. Our unexpressed outburst—the song on our silent lips—carried us along more than we carried it. There was defiance in our step, in our looks, in the stiffening of our necks, in the squaring of our shoulders. The opulent houses watched us parade by, silent too, like faces with closed eyes. Frightened faces, some with wide-open eyes, fixed us with dogged, fearful stares through half-parted curtains. We turned onto the bleak highways that lead out of town. Buildings became scarcer. No more crowds—only, at long intervals, some groups of people at doorsteps. Old women or little girls asked, “Who died?”—surprised to hear the name of an unknown man and to see thousands of men accompanying that unknown man to the cemetery, moving forward with firm steps as if marching to meeting the living. By that point we had formed a long column, almost uniformly blue and gray, moving rhythmically. As we approached, the police disappeared. The column was composed mainly of young men whose heavy weapons could be seen bulging under their light clothing and at times carried openly. Their eyes answered any persistent stare by suddenly unsheathing hard, sullen looks. We were no longer a dead man's companions, but a group of shock troops on the march with tense souls and ready hands.