Mirrors (70 page)

General Franco insists that Guernica has been set aflame by Asturian dynamiters and Basque pyromaniacs from the ranks of the Communists.

Two years later in Madrid, Wolfram von Richthofen, commander of the German forces in Spain, sits beside Franco at the victory parade: killing Spaniards was Hitler’s rehearsal for his impending world war.

Many years later in New York, Colin Powell makes a speech at the United Nations to announce the imminent annihilation of Iraq.

While he speaks, the back of the room is hidden from view,
Guernica
is hidden from view. The reproduction of Picasso’s painting, which hangs there, is concealed behind an enormous blue cloth.

UN officials decided it was not the most appropriate backdrop for the proclamation of a new round of butchery.

THE COMMANDER WHO CAME FROM AFAR

Brunete, summer of 1937: in mid-battle Oliver Law takes a bullet in the breast.

Oliver is black and Red and a workingman. He left Chicago to fight for the Spanish Republic in the ranks of the Lincoln Brigade.

In the brigade, blacks do not form a separate regiment. For the first time in the history of the United States, whites and blacks mix. And for the first time in the history of the United States, white soldiers obey the orders of a black commanding officer.

An unusual commander: when Oliver Law gives the order to attack, he does not watch his men through binoculars. He is the first to join the fight.

But then all the volunteers in the international brigades are unusual. They do not fight to win medals or conquer land or capture oil wells.

Sometimes Oliver wonders:

“Since this is a war between whites, who for centuries have held us in slavery, why am I, a Negro, why am I here?”

And he answers:

“We came to wipe out the Fascists.”

And laughing he adds, as if it were a joke:

“Some of us must die doing that job.”

RAMÓN

Mediterranean Sea, fall of 1938: Ramón Franco explodes in the air.

In 1926 he had crossed the ocean from Huelva to Buenos Aires in an airplane named
Plus Ultra
. And while the world applauded his feat, he celebrated with nights of carousing, toasting his glory, singing the Marseillaise, and cursing kings and popes.

Not long after that, on a drunk, he flew his plane over the Royal Palace in Madrid and refrained from dropping the bombs only because children were playing in the gardens.

He put two and two together and on he went: he raised the Republican flag, took part in an anarchist uprising, was elected to Congress on the Catalan nationalist ticket, and was charged by a woman with bigamy, although in truth it was trigamy.

But when his brother Francisco rebelled against the Republic, Ramón Franco suffered a sudden attack of
familyitis
and joined the ranks of the Cross and the Sword.

After two years of fighting, the remains of a plane, his plane, disappear in the waters of the Mediterranean. Ramón, with a load of bombs, had been headed for Barcelona. He was going there to kill those who had been his comrades, as well as the lovely lunatic he himself had been.

MACHADO

The border, winter of 1939: the Spanish Republic is falling apart.

From Barcelona, from the exploding bombs, poet Antonio Machado manages to flee to France.

He is older than his years.

He coughs, walks with a cane.

He gazes at the sea.

On a scrap of paper he writes:

“This sun of childhood.”

It is the last thing he writes.

MATILDE

Palma de Mallorca jail, fall of 1942: the lost sheep.

Everything is ready. Standing in formation, the prisoners wait. The bishop and the civilian governor arrive. Today Matilde Landa, a Red and leader of other Reds, convicted and confessed atheist, will convert to the Catholic faith and will receive the holy sacrament of baptism. The repentant woman will rejoin the flock of the Lord and Satan will lose one of his own.

It grows late.

Matilde does not appear.

She is on the roof, no one sees her.

From way up there, she jumps.

Her body explodes like a bomb against the ground of the prison yard.

No one moves.

The ceremony is carried out as planned.

The bishop makes the sign of the cross, reads a page from the Gospels, exhorts Matilde to renounce evil, recites the Apostles’ Creed, and anoints her forehead with holy water.

CHEAPEST JAILS IN THE WORLD

Franco signed death sentences every morning while he had breakfast.

Those not put before a firing squad were locked up. Those who were shot, first dug their own graves. And those who were imprisoned, first built their own jails.

Labor costs were zilch. The Republican prisoners who built the infamous Carabanchel Prison in Madrid, as well as many others throughout Spain, never worked less than twelve hours a day and got a handful of coins, nearly all of them invisible, as payment. What’s more, they received other benefits: the satisfaction of contributing to their own political rehabilitation, and a reduced sentence on this earth since tuberculosis would take them sooner.

For years and years, thousands upon thousands of criminals guilty of resisting the military coup did more than construct prisons. They were also forced to rebuild destroyed towns and erect dams, irrigation canals, ports, airports, parks, bridges, highways. They laid new railroad lines and left their lungs in the coal, mercury, asbestos, and tin mines.

And, prompted by bayonet thrusts, they erected the massive Valley of the Fallen monument, in homage to their executioners.

RESURRECTION OF CARNIVAL

The sun shone at night,

the dead fled their graves,
every clown was king,
the insane wrote the laws,
the beggars were lords,
and the ladies gave off sparks.

And in the end, when Ash Wednesday arrived, people pulled off their masks, which did not lie, and put on their faces until next year.

In the sixteenth century, Emperor Charles in Madrid decreed the punishment for carnival and its wantonness: “If a lowly person, one hundred lashes in public; if a nobleman, six months in exile . . . ”

Four centuries later, one of Generalissimo Francisco Franco’s first decrees was to outlaw carnival.

Invincible pagan fiesta: the more they forbade it, the more eagerly it bounced back.

FORBIDDEN TO BE BLACK

Haiti and the Dominican Republic are two countries separated by a river called Massacre.

In 1937 it already had the name, which turned out to be prophetic: on the banks of that river thousands of black Haitians who had been cutting sugarcane on the Dominican side were chopped to bits with machetes. Generalissimo Rafael Leónidas Trujillo, mousey face, Napoleon hat, gave the order to exterminate them in order to whiten the race and exorcize his own impure blood.

Dominican dailies did not hear the news. Neither did Haiti’s papers. After three months of silence, something was published, a few lines, and Trujillo warned against exaggeration, for the dead numbered no more than eighteen thousand.

A long discussion ensued and in the end he paid twenty-nine dollars a head. In reparations.

INSOLENCE