Birth of Our Power (14 page)

Now One-eye placards his copy of
Soli
on the wall with care. This improvised poster covers up another, a gray one faded by the rains, on which you can still read in large official lettering: S
USPENSION OF
C
ONSTITUTIONAL
G
UARANTEES.
We, by the Grace of God
…—The next
line cries out:
“WORKERS!”
… But what is this empty space forming around Sanche? No one on the right, no one on the left. Farther on, the two little girls have turned around, all white. Horses' nostrils breathe a warm dampness down his meek. Suddenly he sees the black capes, the tall tricornes, and an olive face, bearded and grimacing, a bare saber circling above him. He feels terribly alone, choked by wild anger, like that faraway time when, as a sixteen-year-old farm boy, his master threw him out, blinded in one eye, for a theft he hadn't committed: it had been necessary to put out his eye to make him bow before the injustice; as on that other time when his wife ran off with a policeman. The saber scrapes off the magic words. The street snickers, turns on its axis, and, fades away, knocked about from all sides by giant horsemen making frantic gestures on their rearing mounts.

The sky, washing away everything, suddenly spreads out its immense white coolness. Salt taste of blood in his mouth. Nothingness.

THE 19TH.
TODAY.
FOUR O'CLOCK. A SURPRISING CALM PREVAILS OVER THE
uproar. The heedless mutiny is dying out slowly in the back streets. What is it then? Brawls are joined and unjoined like human knots at the points where the lines of the soldiers and the waves of the crowd intersect. I ran into Eusebio, calm and tense, in an excited group. Eyes wide open, hands in his pockets, seemingly motionless in the middle of a sort of senseless circus, Eusebio let out a guttural laugh: “It's all over, over, ha! ha!” Some running men cut us off. They were carrying someone: we might have said something. A squad of cavalry charged, by in a whirlwind and vanished around a street corner where gilded letters danced out: C
ERVEZERIA
L
OPEZ
H
IJOS.
The moment was broken into two strangely juxtapositioned blocks: one of silence, here, in the sudden emptiness—the other of shouting and clashing, over there, behind the closed blinds of the
Cervecería.

The
guardia civil,
in closing off the boulevard, pushed us slowly backward. We were easily five or six times as numerous as that double line of spaced-out mannequins marching on us with lowered rifles and stiff, hardwood heads coifed with great black tricornes. Every step they took toward us was pushed on by fear, opening an enticing void before them. Between us and them there remained a moving space of about ten yards where some exasperated, clumsy fool was always hanging back, gesticulating absurdly.

A young man planted himself there, poised like a statue, a package wrapped in newspaper at the end of his arm. The two lines, theirs and ours, wavered without moving; then the void grew larger around the man who had appeared. He cried out:

“Gang of cowards! Dogs of the King!”

As fear lowered the rifles toward his chest, he raised up a round object wrapped in an illustrated page of the
A.B.C.
We crossed the intervening distance—springboard for death's leap—just in time, and dragged him off. His heart was beating so hard that its throbbing rhythm could be felt just by holding his arm. His muscles were hard with anger.

Flanked by a cavalry charge preceded by a band of fleeing men rolling the breath of panic before them, our group breaks up instantaneously, in the manner of unexpected events. A handful of us—men, women, a child, an agitated pregnant mother—are forced back into the blue-and-white stairway of a small hotel. A rifle under a tricorne cuts us off from the street. Trapped. The hands of the
guardia civils
are trembling—fear or fury. His eyes, black marbles, staring, search us out; and accompanying them, a third black spot, steadier, empty but with an incredibly deep darkness: the muzzle of the rifle. Whom to shoot, Virgin of Segovia? He makes his choice.

First movement: pull your head into your shoulders, pull in your shoulders, shrink up, flatten out, crouch down behind the people in front—your comrades, your brothers—make a shield of them, for you've got the good spot, way in the back, one of the last …

Second movement: Ah, no you don't, you filthy beast. A little dignity! Hold up your head, your body, stand up all the way, slowly, above the bent backs while fear turns into defiance, and cry out with your eyes to that swine: Shoot, go ahead and shoot, you murderous bastard—long live the revolution!

The explosion tears through the silence like the gale ripping a sail at sea, and throws us forward onto that murderous mannequin animated by a new panic fury. Bewildered flights and cores of resistance collide everywhere in the street. Some of the boys turn over a kiosk. Farther on a cart is burning under a column of black smoke. A tearful woman's voice is crying, “Angel, Angel.” An unhorsed
guardia civil
runs after his mount, hobbling. The even line of mannequins with tricornes reappears, inexorable …

We break out, all at once, into the Plaza Real as into an oasis of silence and peace. The gray arcades that surround the square are filled with a peaceful half-light. The warm shade of heavy palm trees, the benches dear to lovers in the evening and to vagabonds at night;
squatting Gypsies are waiting for our storm to pass in that refuge. Joaquin holds us back with an imperious gesture that makes us all smile, for at that moment we realize that he has only one sleeve left on his coat. As we emerge from the riot, we see two heads, close together, in the shadow of a pillar: of the man, the back of the neck and shoulders; of the woman, the face, upturned, eyes closed, radiating happiness, covered by his kisses … We check our steps, we hold back our voices. Our footsteps leave a red trail behind us on the flagstones.

The closest meeting room of the Committee was in a little café near the cathedral. A few old women were coming down from the porch; you could feel the calm weighing on the city. An ordinary street—and even the song of a guitar:

“… Monde, monde, vaste monde …”

Five o'clock. Only an hour has passed since we began to understand that today is a defeat. In the back room of the café, Ribas is presiding, as usual, without looking at anyone. His face, haloed by white hair, emanates serenity tinged with sadness. Dario seems crushed under the lash of Portez' sarcasm …

“Misled by the apostles of coalition with the bourgeoisie, yes. Betrayed, no. You had to be naive, like some people, to think that they would really go along …”

Under the crushing blow of defeat Dario had turned inward in meditation. Visual images troubled his train of thought: black automobiles carrying off irresolute parliamentarians through the police lines in front of the city hall; Señor Domenico bursting into the little notarial study hung in pearl-gray silk where Dario is waiting for him; shaking both his hands, reassuring, exalted, feverish: “Dear friend, you must understand. We have to make use of all the political possibilities. We are gaining two weeks of preparation, dear friend. Please tell that to the Committee. We will never retreat, never, never. You do understand, dear friend? Never!”—holding up his hand as if swearing an oath. Dario, overcome by a brutal desire to laugh, had replied in a hollow voice, “Too bad for you if we have to fight alone.”

Now the allusion to “some people who are too naive” fell on him like a whiplash; he made a disdainful face and threw his own barb out into the void, aiming at “the worst danger at this moment, the terroristic hysteria of those who take a setback for a defeat, a diversion for a
catastrophe, hesitations for a betrayal … that state of mind which the back rooms of certain espionage bureaus are perhaps trying to foster …”

“Nothing is lost,” said Ribas softly. “We can only be defeated today by discord. I'm moving on to the second point on the agenda.”

Around midnight, in a street which the moonlight divided into vast shadowy patches, half-blue, half-black, José Miro, who was wandering about, a cigarette in his lips, meets Lejeune, taciturn, his eyes lowered. They shake hands distractedly. “What's the news?” A hard smile lights up Miro's sharp features. He puts his arm affectionately around the shoulder of his companion: “You look out of sorts, old man, what's happened to you?”

They walk along for a moment without speaking. The shadow of an octagonal tower envelopes them. “Maud has left me,” Lejeune says finally, and his low voice reveals a great defeat.

(Maud: a nervous tomboy's worn-out body, an ageless, Gothic profile, brown curls, sudden catlike movements, faded gray eyes under lowered lids, mouth faded at the fold of the lips, but such a mobile face, such lively eyes, full of questioning mingled with worry, laughter, deceit, greed, sadness, and God knows what else … Maud: her narrow hips—Maud.

This gray-haired man was holding back the desire to cry like a baby. He had been walking for hours, an extinguished cigar between his fingers; repeating her name under his breath: Maud; having but one idea, which at times was only a word, in his devastated brain—“left me”—in his eyes only her Gothic profile, her gray eyes, her narrow hips, Maud.)

“You understand,” he says, “the ‘other man' is Paris … But you couldn't understand. You're too young.”

“Only a woman,” thinks Miro, who also has been walking for hours that evening, overcome by a feeling of terrible pain, a savage sorrow repressed by a feeling of powerful joy; consuming one cigarette after another, saddened to the point of tears one minute, humming along the next; filling the deserted streets with the sound of his springy step …

“Angel is dead,” he answers abruptly. “You know, little Angel of the machinists'. A bullet in his stomach. It took him two hours to die, from five to seven. We had three dead.”

“Yes, three dead,” Lejeune repeats mechanically. (Maud has left, left, left, left.)