Birth of Our Power (11 page)

Dario, who was also hiding behind curtains, watched us pass, measuring our spirit in his mind and reflecting that Juan Bregat's blood (poor lad!) had at last solidified the workers' strength. No one knew that Dario was standing at that window, indistinguishable from all the others. No one, except Señor Felipe Sarria (the only one who shouldn't have known it) and who, knowing just about everything, was by now almost unable to do anything.

That afternoon had been cool; the evening was sweltering. Heavy clouds carried by hot winds came toward the city from the sunbaked plateaus of Castille and probably from even farther off, from the African desert. The crowds on the boulevards strolled more slowly than usual. Their bodies were damp, the lights were glaring, the shadows opaque. And
suddenly a current began to pass from person to person, keying up the nerves of all those people who, a moment before, had been walking nonchalantly under heavy, overhanging trees. Those who were walking up toward the heights turned around, as if hypnotized, and descended toward the harbor. Human rivulets flowed from all sides toward the dense and murmuring crowd which had gathered suddenly near a café where huge perpendicular letters of fire burned out: BRAZIL. A gleaming automobile, like an extraordinary dark beetle, greenly iridescent, stopped there; white sheets of paper were being tossed out in sprays around it, and snapped up by hands and eyes more eagerly than flowers during the Festival of Flowers. And when two men appeared, standing up on the seat, erect above the dark and moving crowd, sharply illuminated by the fiery letters (BRAZIL), the murmur of the human tide changed into a crackling of hands, a long ovation, then a clamorous outcry. The acclamation, dying off and rising up anew, was mingled with distant rolls of thunder. Señor Domenico y Massés greeted the crowd with bows and more bows, from his handsome beard, his outstretched hands, and the smile of his gleaming teeth. He begged for silence so that the leader of the Regionalist League, more massive and rude, with the square face of a Flemish squire, might speak … The latter's peremptory voice snapped like a flag in the wind.

The comrades stood out in that perfumed crowd whose exhilaration they did not share. If Señor Domenico had felt the weight of their defiant looks on him, his triumphant smile would certainly have faded like the light of a candle, a candle which makes huge shadows dance in the night but which vanishes under the clear light of day …
“Salut,
Lejeune!”—“
Salut!”
—“They say that the infantry
juntas
…”—“Yes.”—“And informer was killed this morning, at San Andrés …”—“So you're still going along with those jokers?”—“Come and drink an orangeade.”

At the same time as on the previous evening, the same call on the telephone obliged Don Felipe to put down his cigarette in the nickel ashtray. This time a queer, hollow voice was trembling at the other end of the wire. Don Felipe was obliged to catch it on the wing to hold it. “Hello, hello! Yes, of course … I can't hear you … What do you say? Killed? Where? At home? Perez Vidal? …” (“Already!” thought Don Felipe. In fact, the stabbing came at a convenient time. A considerable sum of money had been saved: once Perez Vidal had been “uncovered,” it would
have been necessary to pay his way to Buenos Aires.) “You think you've been spotted? Of course … Count on me. But if you're not completely sure of it, try to wait it out a few days. Come now, you are probably under considerable emotional strain because of this unfortunate incident …” The hollow voice on the other end of the line thrashed about like a fish in a creel: Let me have some money: some money and then the fastest train to Madrid! Wait it out? … The man who was speaking felt a vague nervous ache at the point on his chest where Perez Vidal had had his flesh pierced by a thin,
triangular
blade. “Count on me!” repeated Don Felipe, but he reflected that in three or four days the men in file #A-2 might perhaps save him some more money.

Nonetheless he sighed at the thought of that big hairy devil now doubtless stretched out on the black marble table of the morgue. (The larynx distends the skin around their throats in a strange manner, as if a knot had been tied underneath; their toes, rimmed with shapeless toenails, look miserable and tragic.) A good spy, Perez Vidal. Better than this one … Not as cowardly. He dared to write. Imprudent. Not a liar, though, nor a scatterbrain … Too bad. Don Felipe turned the switch. A white light rippled across the room. The light made him feel better. Between the safe and the strongbox containing the secret agents' dossiers (“the stoolies' box”) the King's feeble smile stood out against its purple background reflecting the heavy gilt of the frame. The King, all decked out, gave the impression of emerging from some place of ill repute, his flesh emptied, his jaw elongated by a flabby complacency. Don Felipe took a few steps. Walking on a thick carpet always gave him a feeling of security. A strong odor of jasmine penetrated through the Gothic arch of the window. The thin trickle of a fountain was hissing out there on the tiny patio. Don Felipe turned his ear to that soft sound whose wordless melody turned the night from black to blue and peopled the growing silence with reassuring voices. But now the noisy shouting of a crowd, slow and powerful like the tide, came from the patio through the window frame, filled the brightly lit room and broke in an inexorable wave around the happy King. The clamor died and built up again, a little closer, a little louder.

Don Felipe moved back into the interior of the room. The King seemed to be smiling into space at the thought of some low pleasures he had just left behind the purple hangings in the background. For the first time in his life, Don Felipe looked at the august portrait with a kind of hatred which even he was surprised to feel. A poor portrait. A
stupid smile. (He shrugged his shoulders …) “It is true, he does look as if he's thinking dirty thoughts.” The thunder was still rolling along the boulevards. Don Felipe caught himself saying out loud:

“As for me, Your Majesty, I'm heading over the Pyrenees!”

And, as in former times back in school when, as soon as the teacher turned his back, little Felipe would stick out his tongue in a complicated grimace which was his greatest secret and his most powerful weapon, now the Deputy Commissioner of the Security Police, fifty years old, balding and overweight, stuck out his tongue at the King.

NIGHTS. OUR FOOTSTEPS IN THE NIGHT. OUR VOICES, THOSE MEDITERRANEAN
voices ringing like cymbals … “This is the land of lotteries,” cried Eusebio. “Who wouldn't play his life on the lottery of the barricades? Double or nothing!” We were certainly neither Germanophiles nor Alliadophiles (another term coined by the newspapers). But with each faraway upheaval of the shell-torn soil on the Somme, the Artois, Champagne, or the Meuse, we were better able to hear the foundations of the world cracking. “What a great Paris Commune there will be after the defeat!” Deserters embroidered on the stories of the April mutinies among the immensely weary horizon-blue armies. “There will be a German revolution,” asserted others, who seemed more daring. Germany and Austria were subsisting on chemically prepared foodstuffs, the newspapers proclaimed daily. A French Commune, a German Commune—after the Russian Commune—we could already make out the red flags waving proudly through the haze of the future. They were necessary to reason, to that vague confidence in the universe without which life becomes unthinkable to anyone with his eyes open. And what if the circle of absurdity were not broken? If, after this war, these millions of dead, this disemboweled Europe, we were to know once again the peace of times past with the old, multicolored flags flying over the bone heaps? This city, this country condemned the war from the depths of its soul. The newspapers kept it quiet, for they all lied (and the propaganda bureaus of the belligerents gave them new reasons for lying on the first of every month), but everyone said it. We lived in expectation of a catastrophe which would be at the same time a retribution and a renascence, a rehabilitation of human energies and a new reason for believing in men. The Russian Revolution, the first sign, had revived that universal expectation.

Couet sometimes wore a pair of heavy infantryman's boots which marked him out on the streetcars as a deserter. People would stare
at him. Once someone asked him: “Deserter? …” He nodded yes, out of defiance. “Ali, you are quite right, young man,” said a well-dressed old man, putting his arm around his shoulder. Another smiled his approval … When, in order to avoid an unnecessary conversation I gave the same answer (falsely, as it happened) to the butcher while he was cutting meat, he immediately wiped his hand clean and held it out to me, cordially … In the factories, the workers were willing to work short weeks in order to keep management from laying off the deserters: those fugitives who, by withdrawing their own lives from the tempest of the Front, seemed to be defending life itself.

And this city, this country, peaceful, vigorous, happy, voluptuous, laid out along the edge of the brilliant blue sea, listened to the dulled echoes of the artillery barrages, listened to the beating of the exhausted heart of a wounded Europe, and lived on spilled blood—a profitable pasture! We were all working for the war. We were, in the factories, all of us more or less war workers. Clothes, hides, shoes, canned goods, grenades, machine parts, everything, even fruit—the sweet-smelling Valencia oranges—everything that our hands made, worked, manipulated, embellished” was drained off by the war. The faraway war caused factories to be built in this peaceful country, and filled them with workers who often came from the burning fields of Andalusia, the mountains of Galicia, the barren plains of Castille. The war raised salaries. The war unloosed that fever to live and laugh, to maul women on shabby back-room couches, to see the
bailarínas
flitting about, with their naked breasts, in the cabarets; for after the pressure of work it was necessary, in that constant fever of death and madness,
to feel yourself living.
The avidity of men in shirt sleeves turned loose by the factories in the evening, miserable but muscular, without a place to stay Worth sitting under a lamp in, but with a peseta in their pocket to buy an evening of painted pleasure—without confidence in the future, or rather with no other hope than that of their simmering revolt.

Every city contains many cities. This was ours. We did not penetrate into the others. There was the city of the calculating businessmen who gorged themselves in the best restaurants and who spent their nights undressing the expensive creatures whom we glimpsed passing in limousines. There was the city of the priests, the monks, the Jesuits in their monasteries surrounded by vast gardens like fortified cities. The city of power—held in contempt—with its decorated generals, its policemen bought for a
douro,
its jailers, its informers. The city of writers,
professors, journalists—a city of paid phrases, of poisoned words and ideas, of lucrative alchemies. The city of spies, labyrinth of mines and countermines, of secret rendezvous, of multiple treacheries like equations with several unknowns: military intelligence, consulates, Herr Werner, financial dealings through Amsterdam, Mata Hari carrying an address in her handbag (another equation—the exact equivalent of that last bullet, the
coup de grâce,
that would crash through her skull within a few months at the foot of the stake in Vincennes).

Prowling spies sometimes crossed our paths, ready to strip our power bare like the vermin who strip corpses on the battlefields. They offered their money and they asked for nothing in return: the last word in subtlety! The careers of secret agents would be made or broken by the general strike, the possible ruin of the industries working for the Entente. A whole stinking underground mob, drooling over the limbs of a proletarian giant ready to leap forward, imagined they were making it move at their will, like a puppet. That made us laugh. “What a rude awakening they'll have, those s.o.b.s, if things work out! …” In those cities the blood of Europe and the labor of three hundred thousand workers had brought forth a strange spring of wealth, spurting into a network of golden rivulets. And we knew it. It was in the order of things! Dario would explain:
“They
can no longer put up with the rule of the bureaucrats in Madrid and the political bosses in the provinces. Neither their wealth nor their businesses will be safe as long as the old court camarillas and their personnel of pious, lazy, corrupt scribblers whose bribes start at twenty-five centimes are in power. They are choking, and money is suffocating them.” Dario laughed. “And they need us to pull their chestnuts out of the fire. We need them to shake up the old edifice. Afterwards, we'll see …” Yes, we'll see. We know the old story. With the monarchists overthrown and the Jesuits in flight, three to six months later, the republics establish order by machine-gunning the workers. An old tradition. Whoever lives will see. We won't always be the weaker. With what is brewing on the other side of the Pyrenees …” We'll twist the neck of tradition, right?”—“We're the power, the only power.”—“In '73 Alcoy and Cartagena held out for months. We have our Communes, which will be remembered. Wait a bit.
Hombre!
this will be something beautiful!”