Birth of Our Power (12 page)

It is already something beautiful to be carrying that victory within us. I have doubts, but it is because I am a newcomer in this city: I cannot, as you do, Dario, feel the strength of this people mounting in my very
veins. In spite of myself, I often see you with the skeptical eyes of a foreigner: and I see your inexperience, your embryonic organization, your boldly delineated ideas, shedding great light here and there, but incapable of organizing themselves, of becoming precise, disciplined, implacable and self-critical in order to transform the world … Only a few thousand union members among three hundred thousand proletarians. Tiny unions that are in reality more or less anarchist discussion groups. Doctrines that border on dreams, burning dreams ready to become acts because men of energy live by them (and because at bottom they are no more than simple truths raised to the level of myths by minds too richly primitive to operate on theories). It is true that at the call of a union of about a hundred comrades, thousands, perhaps tens of thousands of workers would be there, in the street, at our side. It is true that, for more than ten years, the government has not succeeded in building a new prison in this city. The boys in the building trades don't go in for that kind of work. When the government tried to bring in workers from the provinces it only took a few explanations and a few bloody noses to inculcate the feeling of proletarian duty in them.

Dario, I don't know whether we will win. I don't know if we will do any better than they did at Cartagena or Alcoy. It is perfectly possible, Dario, that we will all be shot at the end of this business. I am uncertain of today and I am uncertain of ourselves. Only yesterday you were carrying loads in the harbor yourself. Bent under your burden, your elastic step carried you over the rickety planks laid out from the
quai
to the loading deck of a freighter. The dark oily waters sent you back the reflected image of a giant slave, hideous from the front, your face encrusted with bitter grime, bowed under an Atlas' burden. Your dripping body was ablaze in a flash of sunlight. I, myself, was wearing chains. A literary expression, Dario, for only numbers are worn nowadays, but they are just as heavy to bear. Our old Ribas from the Committee was selling detachable collars in Valencia. Portez spent his time grinding up stones in mechanical molds or drilling holes in steel cogwheels. Miro, with his feline agility and rippling muscles, what was he doing? Oiling machines in a cellar in Gracia. The truth is that we are slaves. Will we take this city? Just look at it, this splendid city, look at these lights, these flames, listen to these magnificent noises—automobiles, streetcars, music, voices, bird songs, and footsteps, footsteps and the indiscernible rustle of silks and satins—to take this city with these hands, our hands, is it possible?

You would certainly laugh, Dario, if I spoke to you aloud like this. I would read in your crafty eye an ironical thought which you would not voice. You distrust intellectuals, especially those who have tasted the poisons of Paris. And you are right to do so. You would say, opening your broad hairy-backed hands, so fraternal and steady: “As for me, I feel able to take everything. Everything.” Thus we feel we are immortal until the moment when we no longer feel anything. And life goes on after our little droplet has returned to the ocean. Here my confidence meets yours. Tomorrow is full of greatness. We will not have brought this victory to ripeness in vain. This city will be taken, if not by our hands, at least by others like ours, but stronger. Stronger perhaps for having been better hardened, thanks to our very weakness. If we are beaten, other men, infinitely different from us, infinitely like us, will walk, on a similar evening, in ten years, in twenty years (how long is really without importance) down this
rambla,
meditating on the same victory. Perhaps they will think about our blood. Even now I think I see them and I am thinking about their blood, which will flow too. But they will take the city.

“The citadel,” said Dario … “We will take the citadel from within.”

IT HAPPENED THAT AN APPARENTLY TRIFLING EVENT CROSSED OUR PATH AND
stirred up the human tide of the city in a very different manner. Fervent multitudes stood night and day in the boulevard in front of the windows of the hotel where Benito was staying. His appearances on the balcony were greeted with joyful ovations. His automobile was constantly blocked by a dense crowd that threw flowers and would have torn his clothes to pieces each time had he not been protected by some husky sports whose friendly shoves were like punches. “Benito,
Olé! Olé!”
Waves of shouting pursued the retreating red automobile from which a sharp, swarthy profile with a hawk nose and large white teeth was smiling beneath a broad felt hat, looking for all the world like an Indian warrior in a detachable collar. A precious Sunday was lost because Benito had to kill his bull that day. The thin sword in the hand of this excowherd from Andalusia seemed to by parrying the death blow aimed at the monarchy. Everything was forgotten; only the matador existed. “He kills like an angel,” wrote the newspapers. “Let's go watch Benito!” cried Eusebio, “we'll fight better afterwards!” When Benito entered the ring a hushed whisper went through the stands. Ten thousand pairs of eyes were riveted to this athlete in silk stockings—narrow in the hips, broad through the shoulders in his gold-embroidered maroon jerkin—as he saluted the other city with his sword: the
capitán general,
a fat old man with a chest full of ribbons; the governor (white sideburns, black paunch); the important citizens in their loge draped with garnet-colored velvet; the ladies, leaning out over floating, arabesque-covered tapestries resembling fantastic flowers from a distance, black lace mantillas over tall hairdos, the ivory of faces and bare arms, the play of fans. The bravos and the shrill applause came across to us from the enemy city which occupied the shady side of the arena. Next, more discreetly, with a slight bowing of his head and his sword, Benito greeted the people,
the masses of ardent faces on which the sun was burning harshly.
“Olé! Olé! Olé!”
Benito met this tumultuous outcry with a starry smile.

The bull charged, his gallop heavy and emphatic (but muffled like the beating of some great heart) toward this flamboyant man, admired by the multitude, on whom the living light of ten thousand pairs of eyes and the ill-contained passion of ten thousand men were concentrated, surrounding him with a sort of magnetic field in the sudden silence. The beast was a thoroughbred with such a powerful head that his legs seemed short by comparison. The yellow, green, and orange
banderillas
stuck into his neck lay flat over his back; his flanks were striped with thin streams of red. Dazzled and furious, made drunk by the noise, the sun, the colors, the warm blood, the beast had struggled alone, for ten eternal minutes, against glittering shadows. Every time he thought he had finally caught one of those agile phantoms on the end of his horn, his huge and baffled fury ended up in the tantalizing folds of a flashing cape. Blazing colors such as are never seen in the sierras or on the plains of Andalusia, or even in blood itself—the purples burning like black flames, the reds redder than blood, the blinding blues, the emerald greens at once liquid and hard—appeared like lightning flashes; and the man, the gilded shadow, appeared again farther off, elusive. The animal was gathering speed again, his muzzle flecked with foam, his back steaming—in his glassy, bloodshot eye there was a glow of intelligence, a tiny flame at the bottom of a well, struggling against bewilderment and rage in order to take aim at the new enemy who seemed to be waiting, without a cape, a huge grotesque insect with gilded wings. The
banderillero
twists his body deftly, escaping the black horn which would have torn his innards had his muscles slipped five or ten centimeters. He straightens up again, elegantly, on the toes of his dancing slippers, have planted another dart—carrying the royal colors—painful arrow of fire in the brute's neck. The beast turns and thrashes about on the golden sand in the middle of a circle like a living crater, tormented by man, multiple and false, agile, winged with purple, with blue, with motley laughter, man dancing around him in a cleverly cruel game. The beast turns about and the city turns around him, savage, with ten thousand fixed stares, all alike: those of the ragged beggars, the sweating proletarians, the well-dressed gentlemen, the charming señoras; of the elegant dandies, the officers in stiff corsets, the heavy businessmen, the overweight doctors; alike on the shady side and the sunny side—perfumes and perspiration, great furies simmering under momentary
forgetfulness and carelessness with pretty white teeth, soft sensual looks, leaders whose calculations are as precise as the mechanism of machine guns—all turns around under the implacable umbrella of a blue marble sky, around the maddened bull who wants to kill and who will be killed.

“Eusebio?”

“What?”

Heads, bodies, hands are growing all around us like tropical vegetation; a powerful odor of warm and vibrant flesh—the smell of masses of men and of sunlight—makes our nostrils throb. I also breathe in the acid smell of the oranges being eaten greedily by a young girl of whom I can see only a head of luxurious black hair (giving off a vague aroma of almonds) and the sunburned line of a neck which makes me think, for a fraction of a second, of enormous flower stems, of the thrust of tall palm trees, then of the whole outline of a sunburned body, terribly thin, hard, and hot.

“What will happen tomorrow, Eusebio?”

That square Roman legionary's brow, damp now, those pupils enlarged like cats' in the darkness, their flood of reflections, that grimace of a smile which looks sculpted into rough old wood by a barbarian hand: Eusebio, hardly glanced at me in reply.

For below in the pit the bull brandishes a horse and a man at the end of his wide horns, a gutted horse and a terrified man. A pinkish foam rings the horse's nostrils. We can hear his panting breath and it is horrible
that he cannot cry out,
that there is nothing but this breathing. The bull lashes his warm, entrails, brandishing the picador—a misplaced puppet with eyes searching wildly for a place to fall—three yards above the ground … Man and beast thrown down, greenish steaming intestines unwound like snakes on the sand—now everything is crumbling. Ah! you hold him at last, bull, your enemy; you conquer, you drive on, you live.

But no! The lure of a purple cape leads you on already, a victorious beast being toyed with, toward the killer.

(What fog is this blurring your eyes, Lolita, in their deep orbits? Thus a snowflake melts, all at once, in one's hand. That snow, your look, Lolita.)

Benito moves into the center of the ring with measured step. Eusebio's arm grips my shoulder, hard and knotty like an old vine. “Look! Look!” The killer and the beast observe each other. Benito, in the face of that driving violence gathering speed with each bound, presents
the calmest restraint, a few tight movements, a simple twist of the torso, which the red horns seem to graze, the leap of a dancer, motionless a moment later on his high heels; and his fingers gracefully touch the tip of the horn. Thus his skill mocks that huge black power … At last he presents himself to the danger, calm, powerful, cruel, the short brilliance of steel in his hand, his shrewd eye seeking out the vital point where the precise sword must strike. Man and beast turn slowly around each other—aiming, aimed at, clearheaded, maddened, coupled by the necessity of combat. Around them silence reigns. Expectation. I see Lolita hunched over from her heels to her narrow brows, her lips pressed together like a scar—and I seem to feel the being who is there within her, under that appearance of carnal immobility, like a bent bow whose string already quivers imperceptibly on the verge of shooting its arrow into the clouds, yes, into that abyss where vision fails.

A double climax, rapid to the point of imperceptibility, below; it takes a long fraction of a second for us to grasp that the sword has glittered, thrust by the killer with an almost rectilinear movement of his arm, at the precise moment—one thousandth of a second before the beast would have completed his final, deadly charge. The bull collapses with all his weight. His mouth is dripping bloody foam.

“
Olé! Olé!
”

The city is on its feet. The whole city. Ten thousand heads are lifted in joyful, riotous clamor, mingled with whistles, guttural cries and the rumble of stamping feet. Countless hands emerge over this human ocean, handkerchiefs waving like flowers of foam.
Olé! Olé!
The tide is mad, the whole city is shouting for joy, and the triumph carries everything along with it.—Triumph of man over beast, triumph of the beast over man?—Benito raises a proud forehead toward the reviewing stand, his short red cape over his arm, his thin, shining sword (a dress sword, senora) in his hand, saluting the ladies while treading on flowers … They throw everything at him, even jewels, watches, parasols. They yearn to throw down their half-parted lips, their half-closed eyes, and other eyes, as wide as the horizon, open hands that would fall like chrysanthemums, pearly breasts and even the warm secret treasures hidden in the sacred folds of their flesh. And that is the only thing of which he is aware in this moment: what marvelous booty.

“Tomorrow!” Eusebio shouts in my ear.

All doubts are swept away by this breath of conquering joy. Over the heads of the crowd, over the head of the victor, Eusebio's eyes seek out,
in the governor's loge, the heads that will have to be removed. (I can't hear what he is shouting at them, his clenched fist outstretched. His voice is lost in the torrent.) Those smiling faces contemplate at length the pit in which we are a boiling lava. “Tomorrow will bring us other feasts …” His Excellency the
Capitán general
is perhaps dreaming that a well-placed row of machine guns is—against the huge, ten-thousand-headed wild beast that we are—a weapon as sure as the matador's sword. Everything is in the precision of the aim. If this damned little Andalusian cowherd (to think that only three years ago he was looking after cows in the Sierra de Yeguas!) had made a half-inch's error in the marvelous intuitive calculation of his sword point, he would probably have been killed, certainly vanquished. Choose the right time, and strike home.