Birth of Our Power (16 page)

“The nuns are badgering her because she doesn't want to say her prayers.”

Perhaps this is the very moment when the sister noiselessly approaches bed number 35, room IV. The little girl is lying down with her eyes closed pretending to be asleep, but she can hear the ineffable rustling of starched clothing, the slithering of gray heelless slippers along the floorboards. The little girl can feel the stern gaze of the old woman's dismal, petrified face falling on her blue-tinted eyelids.

“Paquita, I know you are not sleeping. Paquita, you are a wicked child. Say your prayers.”

This is the awful moment of the blue cold. The blue cold starts in Paquita's kidneys and climbs up, climbs up slowly, squeezing her in a vice, toward her heart, her throat, her brow; it presses in at her temples for an instant, like an icy halo, and vanishes: it's over; she can open her
eyes, she is no longer afraid … The old woman has gripped Paquita's hands with authority and forces her to join them—the blue cold comes from the touch of those bloodless old hands which would nonetheless like to be good. Paquita obeys, but her terror has already passed. Slowly, with a depthless obstinacy in her powerless glance, Paquita says “No” with her eyes. And the sister goes away, sad and severe.

In his cell at the Model Prison, old Ribas stops abruptly with his back against the door: from this point the whole length of a green branch may be seen in the narrow window, sometimes motionless, sometimes gently waving. Although he is nearsighted, Ribas has never worn glasses; that is the secret of the distant expression we have often noticed in him. He would really like to know what kind of leaves they are; it tortures him and makes him smile at the same time. He is alone, calm, weakened, without fear, confident. He knows that we will win in a month, three months, six months, twelve months. The length of time is of no importance. He knows that there is always the great expedient of dying like Ferrer, in order to live on usefully in the comrades' memories, leaving a kind of dignity to the children, and that it isn't even very difficult any more when you have a long, wearisome life behind you like a gray ribbon, grayer and grayer, almost black. “After all, at my age when one is not very intelligent, it's about the best thing that can happen to you.” The day, however, has been a bad one. No letters from home. It is ridiculous, of course, to be worried like this. But what if something had happened to little Tonio? And besides, he only left fifty pesetas in the house.

Dario is talking in the back room of a café on the Tibidabo road. You can hear cars going by, carrying people to supper at the all-night restaurants. He is surrounded by twelve heads, dramatically silhouetted in the reddish shadows. An oil lamp is placed in front of him. His blue pencil traces out straight lines and crosses on a sheet of paper in order that these men should understand exactly what must be done. The lamp sputters darkly.

HERE AND THERE ACROSS THE BLACK MASSES OF MONTJUICH, THE MOON
spreads patches of shiny blue, near-white, lacquer. The houses at the foot of the mountain are blue and black rectangles, stippled with gold dots along the line of the windows. Each of these perforations is a lamp lighting up a home. In each of these homes reigns the repose of the evening, the talk of the evening, the concerns of the evening; when that luminous pinpoint vanishes, the man and the woman will have gone to bed. And tomorrow the luminous dot will be lighted again, and thus each day … One is overcome at the thought of the relentless persistence of all these little destinies. In each one of these lighted compartments, men are sitting down at this moment across the table from their lives: lives that still wear the same face of an old, ageless serving-woman, resigned to her cloistered existence. There are some who are happy. The old serving-woman smiles on them; a few little joys, of which some are unclean, swarm over them in the impoverished air.

We are having a discussion on the balcony; behind us, in one of our rooms, there is a lamp burning which, seen from that house over there in the distance, is also nothing but a pinpoint or luminous perforation. The round tower of the fortress, on the summit of Montjuich, is in clear view.

We are at Santiago's house because he has not been under surveillance since he was let out of prison—last year—after that sabotage business in the streetcar yards. He pretends to be discouraged: we suspect a certain amount of sincerity in his role. We can hear him splashing about under the faucet in the kitchen. All the noises of this house come floating around us for a moment; they seem light and transparent to me in the moonlight. The baby, in his crib, is doing a kind of dance in the air with his little legs and purring: “m-mm-mm” or humming “a-aa-aa-aa” on a flat note. The mother is ironing linens on the plain
wooden table. We can hear the dull thud of the iron on the cloth. The mother is chatting quietly with a neighbor. The two voices are alike: one could be the slightly amplified echo of the other. Whole sentences mingle with our discussion.

“You're right,” says Dario, “that's the real revolution. The real revolution begins when millions of men begin to move, feeling inexorably that it no longer possible to turn back, that all the bridges have been burned behind them. It's a human avalanche rolling on.”

Miro and Jurien are smoking. Tibio is quietly plucking his mandolin, dropping chords into the night which glide down to the earth and are lost, amber disks, among the vacant lots.

“Our job is to give a good shove to that first big stone that will perhaps bring on the avalanche.”

Other voices, inside the house: “Six pesetas, the grocer; two, the baker; three, the sewing machine; eleven …”

A barking dog, a banging door drown out this accounting. Then:

“… how she loved him though, how she loved him! Do you know what she did … ?”

We will never know.

A short, dark-haired woman, annoyed by our vain chatter, has gone over to lean on the railing and looks out at the beautiful night horizon—the horizon of her poverty—almost without seeing it. Her sour voice, her tired glances darkened by some vague reproach, her blotchy skin are familiar to me. She is at the age when well-dressed women are still desirable, and the others are already finished. I know what she is thinking: “As if they wouldn't do better to try and earn a little more money.”—“It's all right,” she was saying a little while ago, “we land on our feet every month, then back into our misery like a cat that some nasty kid throws out the window at regular intervals. It's already something to be able to feed our faces almost every day.” Her husband had wanted to be a painter: he's a sign painter. They haven't loved each other for a long time. And why should they love each other, as dull as worn-out coins where the eyes on the effigy of some ideal republic have been rubbed away? Existence—it certainly can't be called life—is too hard.

Dario thinks the movement is soon going to start up again with a good chance of success. He talks about salaries, the employers' association, the artillery juntas that have just sent an insolent appeal to the governor; events and forces seem to take shape under his hands like pieces on a chessboard … I answer that the workers' force has not yet
become clearly conscious of itself. That there is no organization: sorry number of union members, amorphous groups. No clarity of ideas, no body of doctrine …

“Oh, doctrines!” says Dario with an evasive gesture of both open hands. “The fewer there are, the better it goes. A specialty of intellectuals. There will always be time to make theories afterward.”

“I mean no lucidity. Vague ideas—some only good for leading us to a dead end. No precedents. The habit of being defeated. We have never yet won. All the communes have been strangled. We are on the verge of discovering some great truth, of finding the key, of learning to win. But the old defeat is still within us.”

There comes a time when Dario stubbornly refuses to listen any more. He puts on his mask of weariness and repeats:

“That's all very possible. But if the employers association refuses to agree to the fifteen per cent—and they will refuse—the strike will become generalized; if there is a general strike, the troops won't march against us. If the troops don't march, we will be the masters of the situation …”

He shrugs off the invisible load that weighs endlessly on his shoulders and says, jovially:

“… and one bright morning we will wake up having found the key, as you say, but without having looked for it. While if we waste our time looking for it …”

Tibio says, while the fleeting chords escape from his fingers like amber disks:

“The rich lands have all been fertilized by the life and the death of countless organisms. You have to enrich the soil in order to harvest good crops. We will always have been good for something.”

I fall silent, finding argument useless since I know that at this moment Dario has nothing to answer me. He is the man of this hour, of this country, of this proletariat which he must lead toward uncertain lights: the future. Sometimes they call him “Comrade Future-minister,” and that makes him smile with a mischievous glow in his eyes which seems to say, “Well, why not?” and grudgingly shrug his shoulders. In fact he is much closer to the fortress dungeons or the little anonymous mounds of the cemetery … These men are the leaven of a people slow to awaken. Each does his job, performs his task, and passes. We no longer
even know the names of those who were tortured in Montjuich and in Alcalá Alcada del Valle, but without them several thousand proletarians of this city would not have this tempered courage, this burning hatred, this exaltation that makes fighters of them in the pain of their daily existence. “We will always have been good for something.” But I am unable to cry out to you that it is no longer enough, that it is imperative to turn that page; perhaps to go about it entirely differently.

The other city is stronger.

Stupid Sunday. Sunshine everywhere: yellow streetcars shuttle back and forth. The balconies of the wealthy houses slightly grotesque, are decked out with red cloth; some little stunted trees, raw green, are steaming in the sultry air. All this is raw and colorful; all stupid, stupid, stupid with the incredible satisfaction of being stupidly stupid in the sunshine. A procession is going by between two rows of bored-looking ninnies. And it's hot. Marching in a procession makes you sweat.

Hats off, they watch the procession go by as sluggish as a bored, broken-winded animal. It drags itself out for the length of the avenue, to strains of music which sound sleepy in spite of their din …

There's an old priest with the low forehead of a sly animal, mopping his brow with a pitiable air of weariness. “Oh Lord, what drudgery! What heat! And what an exasperating idiot, that fellow over there, carrying his candle at if it were an umbrella!” He is probably saying such things to himself, marching solemnly on the heels of a bald, sanctimonious gentleman with glasses, solemnly carrying a beautiful, brand-new checkered flag, stiff with ennui. Pompous gentlemen, dressed up in their Sunday-best solemnity, carry bulky smoking candles. The Municipal Guards—solemn in their black helmets trailing white plumes, blue shirt fronts, white gloves swinging sleepily back and forth—escort a perspiring group. A plaster Virgin, surrounded by candelabra, glass gewgaws, and artificial flowers, weighs down on the shoulders of eight obese bearers.

The other city is stronger. José's mouth narrows—the sign of something wrong; his face is hardened wax. We cross slowly over to the next street corner, for the crowd is kneeling in front of the Blessed Sacrament. The soldiers bend down on one knee, their rifles at the ready, their heads bowed. We are the only ones standing, held up by a kind of defiance. But their city is stronger, stronger …

Wearing a gilded cape, a little old man wrinkled like a mummy (but with big red hands folded over his (stomach) advances under a canopy.
Without those big peasant's hands you might think he had just stepped out of a reliquary, iced over in his golden embroideries. People hold open the folds of his train.