Birth of Our Power (9 page)

Just then, as if that were the magic word, a door opens noiselessly between the two portraits and His Honor, the Señor Deputy Domenico y Masses (a fine name—with a hexameter resonance) appears, both hands outstretched, a smile beaming from his eyes, his sensual mouth, his well-tailored frock coat and even, it seems, from his glistening patent leather shoes. The two visitors might have thought they were his intimate friends, he seems so overjoyed by their presence. In his study, bathed in the green light of a rose-studded garden, a pink marble Aphrodite with raised arms stands over the desk. There is also the portrait of a young boy, like one of Van Dyck's little English princes. From the depths of a red leather armchair a bald man, freshly shaven, rather stout with bushy white eyebrows, half rises and bows ceremoniously to the visitors. A double chain of gold is strung across his white polka-dotted vest. José Miro smiles, imagining himself as amiable, but only succeeds in uncovering a set of teeth that makes him look like a young wolf.

“Here is the government of tomorrow,” Señor Domenico is saying, his palms outstretched, “or most of it.”

They talk, for an hour, resorting at times to euphemisms and circumlocutions, interrupting themselves at just the right moment to light a cigar (Señor Domenico surprised them by opening a little safe hidden
behind a tapestry, and, smiling resplendently, bringing out his most precious Havanas). A map is spread out at Aphrodite's feet; the ex-stevedore outlines a wide semicircle around the city with his thumb. A heavy envelope with a number in four figures in the corner is swallowed in the pocket of the gray-jacketed visitor. Dates are worked out.

Señor Domenico personally shows his guests to the door. The other man had hardly budged from his armchair. At the age of fifty-six Don Ramon Valls would say, not with out pride: “I got my start at the age of twenty-three with two hundred thousand pesetas; I'm worth a couple of million today. O.K.! By the time I'm sixty, I'll have doubled my capital.” He exports oil from Tortosa, wood from Galicia, ore from the Asturias, books from Madrid. His character combines a certain American touch with the good-natured simplicity of a former ship owner who has no objections to mixing business with pleasure so long as he is able, as the evening wears on and the air grows thick with off-color stories, to innocently strike the most telling and treacherous blows against his antagonist with admirably feigned cordiality. This “old hog,” as he was cruelly nicknamed by some young businessmen (whom he cheated while leaving them the satisfaction of thinking they were much smarter than he) was able to pick up 30 per cent of his seemingly reasonable profits off the carpets of drawing rooms and private studies. His forte was his ability to judge men, and to bring off a big copper deal, paying less attention to the probable fluctuations of the market than to the temperament of the prospective buyer.

Now, left alone, he raises his eyebrows (with him a sign of the greatest perplexity), and his eyes, the eyes of a great, melancholy dog. Dealing with men unlike any he had ever known has left him angry with himself. “Smalltime hoodlums,” he thinks. On the other hand, that self-assurance, that clearheadedness, that grip on something bigger—bigger, actually, than any juicy deal in the millions … As the deputy returns, the exporter grumbles:

“Formidable allies. Are you sure we're not better off with our enemies?”

“Don Ramon, it's people like that who make revolutions. The riffraff begin the job, the parliaments finish it.”

“… by finishing off the riffraff,” said Don Ramon in that toneless voice he uses for dubious transactions.

The two visitors move off, out of place on that street lined with stately houses.

“Will they go along with us?” José asks brusquely.

The ex-stevedore shifts the invisible load on his shoulders.

“They need us.”

“If they do go along, Dario, so much the worse for them.”

“Don't say that, my boy. There are things that those foxes can overhear at a distance, through the thickest walls. Their ears are made that way.”

And if they don't go along,” José continues, “so much the worse for them!”

“And so much the worse for us. [Dario whistles.] Eh,
Chico,
I think that this time we're being tailed for real …”

They are. Two gentlemen, wearing Panama hats and carrying canes, are walking resolutely down the street twenty paces behind them.

Dario represses an uneasy feeling. How the streets seem to narrow at times like this! The Committee's money weighs heavily in his jacket. Fortunately a car pulls up. He hops in. José Miro turns on his heels—hard and straight like a steel mannequin—at the curb.

The plain-clothesmen, now uneasy themselves, approach him. They slow their pace. When they get to where Miro is standing, glaring hard at them, they begin talking loudly about a certain Conchita and look away. Miro follows them. The hunters feel hunted now. That very day an informer had been found, in the center of town, with a hole clean through his head. Icy shivers run up their spines as Miro's measured step falls in with theirs. That night, Miro described that chase to us, laughing like a mischievous child.

“In the end I swear to you they were dying to take to their heels like rabbits. Every five yards they would turn around. I was making a horrible face, so as to keep from laughing, you see. One goes into a cigar store. The other stops outside the window. I do likewise. We peer at each other out of the corner of the eye. He gets brave: ‘Mister …'—‘What?'—‘Mister, you shouldn't hold it against us …' (Oh, that hangdog look on his paunchy face. It's true, I didn't hold it against him any more.) ‘Ours is a dirty job. But I have three children. Three daughters, mister: Maria, Concha, Luisa' (He told me the names and I remember them, how do you like that?), ‘seven, eight, and nine years old. And a bullet in my leg,
mister, brought back from the Riff. And no trade to work at. But I'm a sympathizer' (he said ‘sympathizer!') ‘believe me. And if your plans work out, remember my name. You have a friend in the 2d Brigade: Jacinto Palomas, Pa-lo-mas. Tell Señor Dario that we all admire him. He's a re-mark-a-ble orator!'”

DARIO
'
S DAYS BEGAN AT SIX IN THE MORNING, WITH THE EARLIEST STARTING
factories. He swallowed his coffee in the open air at one of the street-corner stands where workers grab a bite on the run. At an hour when the police informers were still rubbing their eyes, he would burst into a little print shop with a freshly washed window, give a friendly tap on the behind to the apprentice who was sweeping up, and bend down between two piles of posters depicting blue-and-yellow acrobats swinging from white trapezes (
THE LAURENCE BROTHERS INIMITABLE ECCENTRIC
in dazzling letters straddling the paper) and a huge woman's face, half-yellow, half-purple:
GRACIOSA LA MISTERIOSA.
Farther down, Dario's hand was attracted by stacks of little yellow papers covered with fine print, nesting between the posters. As he read, his head cocked to one side, his mischievous eye saw a host of things through that wretched yellow paper. “Soldiers! Brothers!” … How much art it had taken to draft this appeal in terms both moving and familiar, to put in the words that fire the imagination, “barricades,” and “to arms”; to mention the great man who was shot in 1909,
⁵
to recall the Moroccan campaign; and all of this without inflaming the cautious bourgeois of the Regionalist League, all without displeasing the comrades of the Confederation, without incurring the anarchists' veto. “Sons of the people, be with the people! For justice and for liberty! For the bread of the workers!” Everybody would find whatever he was looking for in one or another of these ambiguous words.

Noon. A strident whistle blast suddenly called forth a crowd in blue coveralls, near a factory in Sans, a neighborhood of cheap working-class
hash houses. Dario, perched on top of a chair, smiled as he watched a terrified policeman being chased by some kids throwing stones on the other side of the square. “Run, you old beggar, run; you'll have to do lots more running!” And so Dario began his speech in the midst of sidesplitting laughter, power and confidence already awakened among the three hundred men crowding around him, surrounding him with an odor of male perspiration, machine oil, metal dust, and tar. Dario found the right words to reach these men. An open mouth, a damp forehead, a flushed glance revealed to him that his words had struck home, his efforts were rewarded. The Moroccan dead, the war dead, the bombed-out cities, the fortunes made “in blood, in excrement, and in mud,” the red flags flying over Russia, the famine invading Europe, the Jesuits, the degenerate King—
“el rey cretino
with his slack mouth like a slit in a piggy bank and his chin all unscrewed” (laughter almost broke out, relaxing the tension in the crowd; but the orator's voice climbed up an octave and—like an athlete who recovers his balance on the bar—recovered possession of three hundred souls suspended on the brink of laughter and brought them all violently under the spell of his awesome words), “the miserable King who shot our great Ferrer …”

Then, to temper the heat of that just hatred, Dario threw out some facts and figures with cold precision: Eight hours of work. Minimum wage. Fifteen per cent increase. Moratorium on rents. Lower rents. Repeal of administrative sanctions … Each listener, brought back to reality, measured the calculated realism of these demands against his daily pain and poverty. It was now time for the final appeal, spewed out in symbolic words, vague and boundless, carrying everything with it: solidarity, justice, the republic, labor, the future … Dario plunged into the crowd which surged around him, hugging, kissing, questioning, and arguing with him. A bare-chested giant whispered in his ear, in a cloud of garlic and wine: “We're twenty Brownings short.” Warm voices vibrated through the air. Comrades surrounded Dario all the way to a courtyard with two exits where he jumped onto his bike and rushed off to carry the word to a place twenty minutes away, just a few moments before the whistle blast which called the men back to work. The echo of his words continued to electrify their minds long afterward. And, sensing this wake of energy trailing behind him, he shrugged his burden of fatigue higher up on his shoulders and slept, exhausted, for two hours on a friend's cot (near the window a young woman was noiselessly doing her wash, immersed in a soft bluish halo against the
white wall: the orator's eyes closed over that calm and serene image. He awoke to the refreshing sight of children's clothing decked out like flags across the room). Around four o'clock he entered the
Comité Obrero
without knocking.

This was perhaps the most tiring hour of the day. For here he would find Porter, the cement worker, ceaselessly demanding explanations, setting limits, criticizing errors, warning of dangers, stuffing his speeches full of complex allusions with triple meanings—incomprehensible at first—or declaring brutally, both fists square on the table, hair in angry disarray: “Any comrades who see themselves as future ministers … any dictators-in-embryo, whatever service they may have performed, will have to be crushed!” And he would look straight in front of him into the emptiness of a dirty mirror. If there were any angry outbursts, he would say dryly: “I'm not pointing at any individuals. History is there, comrades, to show us the danger.” He listened to Dario with a sort of ostentatious deference. And his question fell, like a stone in deep water, radiating countless ripples:

“Will we take power, yes or no?”

Dario was forced to explain himself: We are not power seekers. We are libertarians. But we have to take practical necessities into account. We will accept full responsibility for the consequences of our acts. The Committee would be a temporary revolutionary organ expressing the will of the Confederation, and not a government.” Dario was well aware that he was becoming entangled, that he was playing with words, not daring to come to the point or to call things by their right name. A dull desire fermented within him to smash his fist down on the table, releasing all his pent-up brutality, and to cry out: “We'll do whatever must be done,
Madre de Dios de Madre de Dios!
and our sacrosanct principles won't be any the worse for it!” But that would have been a victory for calm, collected Portez, who would immediately have quoted Kropotkin, the bylaws of the Confederation, its conventions, Spartacus, Baboeuf, Anselmo Lorenzo, and carried the majority on a vote of no confidence. At moments like this, Dario became ugly, his large body slackened, his relatively small head hung awkwardly on a wrinkled, vaguely grayish neck, his eyes turned colorless. His words and gestures—evasively acquiescent—were delivered with half-hearted cunning. Portez pushed home his advantage by proposing the creation of a Control Commission authorized to relieve members of the Committee of their authority if they overstepped their mandates … Dario voted “for” with indifference.