Birth of Our Power (15 page)

“
They
had at least one that I know of,” continues Miro, his eyes shining. “Angel never regained consciousness. I was at the hospital, at his bedside. His dying gasps drove into my head like nails. My head was full of burning nails when I walked out of there. I left …”

(… left.)

“… without knowing where I was going. At nine o'clock, imagine, with that headache, that gasp, those nails in my head, I leaned against a wall exhausted. I heard someone shouting at me: ‘Move on.' I roused myself: I was standing in front of the
guardia civil
barracks. The sentry was watching me; all I could see of him was a black shape. I went over to him, I said: ‘Do you know Angel? He was a little Andalusian with a beard.' He thought I was drunk and repeated: ‘Move on.' I fired through the pocket of my jacket: it's burned, look, in three places. He didn't fall right away; he stuck to the wall, then he slid along the wall sighing. I leaned over him; his eyes were still alive. I saw them glowing, the sky was reflected in them. I said to him:
‘Angel, you killed him
…' They must have fired at least twenty rifle shots from all sides into the night. I walked calmly away, my head as cool as if I had rinsed my brain in ice water. But you couldn't understand, no, you couldn't understand how good I feel this evening …”

RIBAS PACES, CAGED, IN A CELL OF THE MODEL PRISON. DARIO AND PORTEZ
are in hiding. Lejeune and Miro spend their days together, in a small boat off the coast, taking turns rowing, then resting while the gentle waves rock them. Lejeune smokes, dressed in a white piqué shirt. José, naked to the waist, hard and burned like a Malayan, sings at the top of his voice; sometimes revolutionary songs:

Pour leurs entrailles, ô grain de blé!

O grain de blé, fais-toi mitraille!

(For their entrails, o kernel of wheat!

O kernel of wheat, turn yourself into grapeshot!)

or ballads:

Ta candeur de visage

Ton coeur de gitane…

(The frankness of your face,

Your gypsy's heart … )

The blue waters mirror a pure sky in their shimmering silk folds. Invisible strings tremble on the burning air like the flight of bee swarms. The light hums. In the distance are white sails. Flights of seagulls describe curves of whiteness which fade like a light caress in the crystal blue air. The rocks of Montjuich are tinted with amber.

In the evening José speaks at meetings of metalworkers, construction workers, and men from the
Canadiense
works. Lejeune, on a back street where the rare passers-by avoid each other's glances, raises the knocker of a door with a barred peephole. An extremely old woman with gray lips leads him into the purple darkness of a corridor where the sound of feet is smothered by carpets. Three naked women lie on animal skins in a long, low room, waiting for the call of a stranger's
lust; reading over and over, in cards reeking of cosmetics, the fired mysteries of the Jack of Hearts and the letter that will come from across the sea (but a dark-haired woman is on his path … )—Inès, Viorica, Dolorès. One has a child—Marquita, who is growing up in a garden in Granada; another a lover—Evelio, who is in prison; the third has the clap, gray eyes with long ashy lashes, no eyebrows, a bony face as pale as alabaster which looks like the face of a dead woman when she closes her eyes, lips as red as a fresh wound. “Play dead!” the men say to her sometimes, and her head, thrown back on the black silk cushion, seems frozen; her eyelids narrow over the bluish globes of her eyes, and her breathless half-open mouth reveals the cold whiteness of her teeth, in a defenseless grin. Some gilded switches are standing in the comer, on a little black Moorish table with white filigree.

At the hour when Lejeune enters there, three other women, at the other end of the city, are getting ready to go to the Sans cemetery. Erect in her old widow's clothing, the mother, already joining her fleshless fingers in prayer, goes to the kitchen door and says, “It's time, Concepción.”—“Yes, Mother,” gently answers Concepción, whose soft face—still the face of a child—has just aged all at once, under the corrosive blast of an invisible furnace. Concepción throws a black shawl over her sloping shoulders; she takes Teresita by the hand, Teresita who is ten years old and carries flowers. They move in silence, hurried, black; the mother, the wife, the sister—she whose life is finished, she whose life is broken, she whose life is beginning. When the silence becomes too heavy for them, Concepción talks of the factory. “Mother, they say they're going to lay off some girls in the sorting department.” The mother doesn't answer; she has gray eyes, no eyebrows, a bony face as pale as alabaster which looks like the face of a dead woman without it being necessary for her to close her eyes. At the cemetery there is a fresh grave, without a cross, where flowers have been planted. The red ribbons on the metallic wreaths are fading in the grass. The mother would have preferred a cross, but Concepción had said no so firmly, her lips trembling (though she, too, would have preferred a cross, but Angel had exclaimed one day, laughing: “It's so stupid, all those crosses and monuments in cemeteries …”). The mother prays before that grave where even the consolation of a symbol is missing; but she had forgotten the words of the prayers so long ago that, trying to find them in the dark well of her memory, she becomes tired and forgets herself … “Angel,” murmurs Concepción. She would speak to him as if to a living person,
if she dared. She is still suffering from having annoyed him the other Sunday when he wanted her to wear her shawl with the big red flowers. “Is it possible, señor? Is it possible?” Teresita lays the flowers on the grave and murmurs, very low, fascinated by the comings and goings of the industrious ants from one grave to another, “This is for you, big brother. We haven't forgotten you, Angel. Uncle Tio came over to the house last night, the orange cat had four kittens, I'm keeping one, for you and me …” And Teresita, bending over the grave of her big brother, smiles about the orange cat who is giving milk to her kittens at home.

I have returned to my composing stick at the Gaubert y Pia print shop. We set up racing forms and religious works. The metallic clanging of the presses dissolves into a monotonous hum in the ears after a while. The hunchbacked boss looks down on us from his glass-walled office. Porfirio, my neighbor, is a wizard: the black type-characters with their long silver facets seem to leap by themselves into his hands which line them up tirelessly. It's the same in all the shops, in all the factories of the city. Yesterday we were three hundred thousand strong, flowing over the city like waves of lava, ready for anything with so much blood in our veins; today we are back in the shops, the yards, the factories. The machines are turning, twisting, screeching, sawing, crushing, pounding; tools in black hands bite into metal. In the evening we go out, three hundred thousand of us at once, our skulls, stomachs, and muscles empty. Nothing has happened. The city taunts us with its lights, its diamonds and jewels, the violins in its cafés, the displays along its boulevards, the lamentations of its beggars, the printed smiles of its dancing girls, the oily smells of its slums, the sleep of its vagabonds on the back street sidewalks …

Etchegoyen, of the carpenters, has run across the border with the union treasury, nine hundred pesetas. Good riddance, the bastard.

Gilles, my former cellmate, writes me from a detainees' labor squad, slaving away somewhere in the Massif Central that he spends stupefying days digging up shells, after target practice. “You are lucky not to be like each of us, a tiny cog in a huge munitions factory …” Gilles, old man, one should never deduce another's happiness from one's own misfortune … The communiqués lie and contradict each other day after day. The newspapers line up one after the other, on the Allied side or the side of the Central Powers. It is impossible to recognize the same
events in the labyrinth of lying phrases … Sentries, sentries, where are you now in all of this, dug into the earth stinking of corpses and excrement? Bombardment of Amiens, in the quiet sector of the Vosges. Life goes on like yesterday. Porfirio's intelligent simian eyes are sadder than usual. Twice a week he is absent from the shop in the afternoon in order to go to the San Luis Hospital to bring some oranges to, his little girl who is recovering from typhus. He probably doesn't eat every day. He pretends to be consulting me over the text in 8-point Roman on his composing stick (“… the blessèd childhood of St. Theresa …”):

“Things are going badly too, over there?”

Badly, yes. The papers are full of contradictory dispatches through which it is possible to discern a victory for the old order brought about by the Cossacks; Lenin and Trotsky in flight, arrested, shot, who knows? Bolshevism routed. The Kronstadt sailors are still holding out, it seems. While we were getting ready here, other crowds, over there, were lining up in massive columns behind red flags for an assault similar to ours. “During the entire day of the 17th, the Tauride Palace was besieged by crowds of workers and soldiers demanding the resignation of the ‘ten capitalist ministers.' The Social Revolutionary Party leader, Mr. Chernov, was almost slashed to pieces by some sailors.” Last night I was reading these prosaic lines from a newspaper correspondent's report and I thought I could hear, echoing our footsteps, the dull rumble of those multitudes on the march, on the march like us; only wearing gray uniforms; only carrying in their heads, their bellies, their fists that nameless anger brought back from the Lithuanian front, the Galician front, the Rumanian front, the Armenian front; only stronger than we for having undergone the ordeal of fire, the ordeal of blood, the ordeal of victory … (That evening when I had gone home giddy with joy, repeating the disconcerting words over and over again unable to realize their true meaning for want of precise images and because the news was so great that it was overpowering—newspaper headlines: R
EVOLUTION IN
P
ETROGRAD
. A
BDICATION OF THE
C
ZAR
. T
ROOPS GOING OVER TO THE PEOPLE
.) … stronger than we because they went forth preceded by those who were hanged, those who were shot down before the firing squad, those who were deported, those who were martyred throughout a half-century of tenacious struggle—and were guided by those who had escaped … According to the latest news, the treason of the Bolshevik leaders is a proven fact: German agents. We know what that means: formulas of this type are as necessary as ammunition for the
twelve rifles of the firing squad. If they did take money from Germany, well they were damn smart to do it, for they must have needed it, and the Germans are wasting their money. “Taking money,” says Dario, “being incorruptible … What is the point of being incorruptible if you don't take money?”

Ten hours of work in the shop are on our backs; it weighs you down. I have lifted eight thousand characters. Ten hours standing on our feet. At the age of forty, most typographers have varicose veins. El Capillo, that yellow-toothed swine, has put us on piecework, the dirtiest job imaginable. Now we are on our way downtown in the soft cool of the evening—the poets' “mauve hour.” What we would really like is to take a bath or to punch someone in the nose.

“You'll see,” says Porfirio suddenly, still thinking about the foreman, “if I don't smash in his old horse's teeth for him one of these days!”

It's very light out. A lulling transparency attenuates the shapes of things, even to the delicate outlines of the foliage. It is not yet dusk, but the full light of the day has already passed. The turquoise tint of the sky and the straight clear perspective of this avenue which reminds one of a garden call an image into my companion's mind: the image of a half-starved child being eaten up by bugs in the San Luis Hospital. I, too, am thinking of your Paquita. I know that you are going to talk about her. You say, without any transition, as if you knew that I am reading your mind (and perhaps you do):