The Forging of a Rebel E-Book

Arturo Barea

• Herausgeber: Pushkin Press
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2018

Seitenzahl: 1783

Beschreibung

An astonishing trilogy of books, collected in one volume, documenting the tumultuous first half of the twentieth century in Spain'One of the great autobiographies of the twentieth century' New Republic'Moving and dramatic' New York Review of BooksThe Forging of a Rebel is an unsurpassed account of Spanish history and society from early in the twentieth century through the cataclysmic events of the Spanish Civil War.Arturo Barea's masterpiece charts the author's coming-of-age in a bruised and starkly unequal Spain. These three volumes recount in lively detail Barea's daily experience of his country as it pitched towards disaster: we are taken from his youthful play and rebellion on the streets of Madrid, to his apprenticeship in the business world and to the horrors he witnessed as part of the Spanish army in Morocco during the Rif War. The trilogy culminates in an indelible portrait of the Republican fight against Fascist forces, in which the Madrid of Barea's childhood becomes a shell and bullet-strewn warzone.Combining historical sweep and authority with poignant characterization and novelistic detail, The Forging of a Rebel is a towering literary and historical achievement.Arturo Barea (1897–1957) was born in Badajoz and raised and educated in Madrid. For most of the Spanish Civil War, he acted as head of the Foreign Press and Censorship Bureau of the Republican Government in Madrid and was also the radio broadcaster who spoke as the 'Unknown Voice of Madrid'. Eventually forced out of Spain, he sought temporary asylum in France before crossing to England just before the outbreak of World War II. He and his wife Ilsa settled in Eaton Hastings near Faringdon in Berkshire. From 1940 until 1957 he transmitted a weekly broadcast for Spanish Radio to South America known as Juan de Castilla. He published novels and short stories as well as books of criticism, including Lorca, the Poet (1944) and Unamuno (1952), and his great autobiographical trilogy The Forging of a Rebel first appeared in English between 1941 and 1946.

Leseprobe

ARTURO BAREA

THE FORGING OF A REBEL

The Forge, The Track, The Clash

Translated by Ilsa Barea

PUSHKIN PRESS

CONTENTS

Title PageIntroductionTHE FORGEPART IPART IITHE TRACKPART IPART IITHE CLASHPART IPART IIAbout the AuthorsCopyright

INTRODUCTION

Few books on the Spanish Civil War of 1936–39 and its origins have been as acclaimed as The Forging of a Rebel by Arturo Barea. The first volume of this autobiographical trilogy, The Forge, published in June 1941, was lauded by Stephen Spender for its “great artistic merits” and “rare poetic feeling”, while The Times declared that “it is doubtful if there has yet appeared a more convincing picture of the anvil on which a rebel was forged”. The second book, The Track, which appeared in July 1943, was eulogized for its “great beauty and vivid detail”. Cyril Connolly singled out the author for being “something rarely found these days”, as he “thinks and feels clearly and honestly”. Published in February 1946, the third tome, The Clash, was declared by George Orwell “an exceptional book” of “considerable historical interest”. Altogether, as one critic summed up, the trilogy was “as essential to an understanding of twentieth-century Spain as the reading of Tolstoy is indispensable to the comprehension of nineteenth-century Russia”.

Such success notwithstanding, Arturo Barea had come late to writing. The Forge, his first novel, was published when he was forty-three years of age, The Clash at forty-eight. Indeed, had it not been for the Civil War, Barea would probably not have become a writer at all. However, this was not due to a lack of motivation. During his early life he was torn between his artistic aspirations and the exigencies of earning a living. He was born on 20 September 1897 into a lower-class family in the Extremaduran town of Badajoz, near the Portuguese border. The sudden death of his father, an army recruiting agent, caused the family to move to Madrid just two months later. There, his mother worked as a maid in her brother’s household and as a washerwoman on the banks of the river Manzanares. Unlike his two brothers and sister, Arturo lived with his well-to-do uncle and aunt. At the weekend, he would rejoin the family in the working-class district of El Avapiés. Thus the young Barea was caught between two worlds: an unresolved tension that would contribute to his sense of being an outsider and ultimately shape his work as a writer.

Following the sudden death of his uncle, Arturo had to start work at the age of thirteen. He undertook a succession of poorly paid jobs before making some money as a commercial traveller for a diamond dealer during the First World War—the outbreak of which marks the end of The Forge. By this stage, he had become afflicted, he recounts in his autobiographical notes, by “the literary microbe”, attending literary peñas, or discussion groups, at the cafés in the centre of Madrid. More time, he discovered to his horror, had to be dedicated to “praising and ‘sucking up’ to the chosen master” than to writing. This “vileness and endless mental torture” might lead to the publication of an unremunerated article, but the process would then continue for months and even years until one managed to join a newspaper on a mere pittance. Such a drawn-out and humiliating route to literary success clashed violently with Barea’s prickly pride. He thereupon abandoned the literary scene, his ambitions buried. In short, he could not earn a living as a writer, especially as he was determined to support his mother, to whom he was devoted. This contradiction is manifest in The Forging of a Rebel, but is crystallized in the short story “The Centre of the Ring”, which takes place between 1914 and 1920, the period which falls between the first and second volumes of the trilogy.

In 1920, Barea, now fully grown, of a lithe, tallish build, was called up for military service in Spanish Morocco, the country’s one remaining colony, an experience that constitutes the core of The Track. Here, he was a witness to the ubiquitous cupidity and incompetence of the Spanish army, of the wretchedness of the rank-and-file, and of the degradations of the Moroccan population. He also came to know personally many of the generals who later headed the insurgency of July 1936 against the democratic Republic. While in Morocco, Barea did not entirely abandon his literary aspirations. He wrote some poetry along with the occasional short story, though only a single story, “La Medalla” (“The Medal”) of 1922, has come to light. Nonetheless, on leaving the army in 1923, Barea did not attempt to pursue a career as a writer. On the contrary, he followed a highly conventional path: he married, became a father, and secured a steady job in the patents business. By the end of the 1920s, he had become the technical director of a leading firm, thereby allowing him to provide for both his immediate family and his mother, now in old age. The marriage to Aurelia Grimaldos, however, was, in his own words, a “depressing failure” that led him to take ever greater refuge in his work.

The eruption of mass politics with the establishment in 1931 of Spain’s first democratic regime, the Second Republic, partly assuaged Barea’s restless spirit. He became involved, as in the 1910s, with the Socialist trade union movement. Still, his union activities represented, he later noted, “a constant and bitter contradiction” in relation to his work at the Patent Office, where he dealt on a quotidian basis with big businesses.

By the outbreak of the Civil War in July 1936, Barea had published nothing except a little poetry, a few short stories, and the occasional political piece. The war—the cornerstone of The Clash—was to change all that. First, having joined the Office of Foreign Press Censorship at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in August 1936, he came into contact with journalists and writers, including figures such as Ernest Hemingway and John Dos Passos—both of whom would strongly shape Barea’s later literary work. He was also influenced by a short, plump Austrian with a mass of curly hair by the name of Ilsa Kulcsar. She, like many other foreigners, had gone to Spain to defend the Republican cause, having been an activist in the Austrian Social Democratic Party. Appointed as Barea’s assistant, when, upon the departure of the government for Valencia in November 1936, he had been made head of the censorship office, she was not only of inestimable help to him in his work as a censor—she spoke five languages extraordinarily well, albeit with a Viennese accent—but also encouraged him to write. Within weeks, moreover, they had become lovers. The fact that for much of 1937 Barea, as the “Unknown Voice of Madrid”, had to give daily radio talks of a literary and propagandistic nature was a further stimulus. The catalyst, however, was the nervous breakdown which he suffered in the summer of 1937. This was a result of the sixteen-hour days, the unremitting bombardments, the collapse of his marriage, and the increasingly ugly battle with the Communist-dominated bureaucracy in Valencia. Barea strove to transcend this all-enveloping crisis through writing. On 17 August 1937, he published a story in the Daily Express under the headline “This was written under shell fire”—a curious coincidence given that the great bulk of what he produced thereafter, as a republican exile in England, would appear first in English. In 1938, he published his first book, a collection of slight, propagandistic short stories—many of which drew on his radio talks and which concerned the everyday struggle of the common people against “fascism”—entitled Valor y Miedo (Courage and Fear). According to Barea, it was the last tome to be printed in Barcelona before Franco’s troops entered the Catalan capital.

By the end of 1937, the Communists had effectively forced Barea to abandon not only the censorship office and his radio work, but, worse still, in February 1938, Spain itself. Once in Paris, he started work on the first draft of The Forge in an effort to alleviate the hunger, the dire living conditions, and the pain of the Republic’s protracted defeat. Shocked by France’s “inner decay” and convinced of the “coming catastrophe”, Arturo and Ilsa—who had married just a week before leaving Spain—fled to England. They reached their destination the month that the Republic fell to the Nationalists: March 1939. The Civil War had transformed Arturo Barea’s life: he had left his wife for another woman, gone into exile, and finally committed himself to writing.

“More than I expected”, Arturo underlines in the autobiographical notes, “and more than seemed likely in a Spaniard, I took to English life at once, and fell in love with the English countryside”. Thus it was in “the peace of the country” that he achieved his first literary triumph in England—the short story “A Spaniard in Hertfordshire”, which appeared in the Spectator in June 1939. The following year, he began work for the Latin American section of the BBC’s World Service. He wrote and presented a fifteen-minute talk on an aspect of British life, under the pseudonym of “Juan de Castilla”, virtually every week up until his death; that is to say, over 850 programmes. These reflective monologues proved extremely popular, “Juan de Castilla” coming top of the listeners’ annual poll on numerous occasions, and became his principal source of income. Accordingly, Arturo Barea’s work at the BBC not only provided him with a certain measure of material security but also added to his renown as a writer—albeit in countries other than his own.

In 1941, Barea enjoyed his first critical success with the essay “Not Spain but Hemingway”, a searing indictment of the American novelist’s For Whom the Bell Tolls. The same year, he published Struggle for the Spanish Soul, a dissection of the ideas and forces that underpinned the Franco dictatorship, which appeared alongside George Orwell’s The Lion and the Unicorn in the “Searchlight” series at Secker & Warburg. Editor Tosco Fyvel assured Barea in a letter that the book would make him “a famous man”. Arturo, he predicted, would be known as “the Spanish writer in the country before the end of the summer”.

Barea did indeed become famous in 1941, but not as a result of Struggle for the Spanish Soul. That year, The Forge was published. Edited by T.S. Eliot at Faber & Faber, the book was translated by Sir Peter Chalmers-Mitchell, the former British consul in Malaga and a republican sympathizer, who had helped get the novel published. His rendering of The Forge, as Stephen Spender discreetly put it, was “not all that could be desired”. As a result, the next two volumes, The Track and The Clash, made available in 1943 and 1946 respectively, were translated by Ilsa. “Any English writer,” author Gerald Brenan observed in a letter to Arturo, “would be pleased to write as well”, while The Times commented approvingly that The Track “is so well translated that it reads as though it had been written in English and were in fact the product of an English mind”. Not surprisingly, Ilsa also produced a new version of The Forge, in 1946. That same year the three novels went on sale in the USA in a one-volume edition entitled The Forging of a Rebel. Acclaimed as a “masterpiece” and as “an invaluable contribution to our knowledge of modern Spain, as well as a work of high literary distinction”, the trilogy, Bertram Wolfe pronounced ringingly, was “one of the great autobiographies of the twentieth century”. The book sold 4,000 copies in the first month.

Barea had two, interrelated aims in writing The Forging of a Rebel. First, he endeavoured to expose, as he explains in the English introduction to The Track, “the dark psychological and social undercurrents of the Spanish War”. Second, he sought to do so by giving “voice” to the “common people”, having been “one of them”. He therefore rejected the first draft of the book as too abstract and ideologically led, preferring instead to focus on the concrete lives of individual people. “I can talk of what I’ve seen, of what I’ve lived”, as he put it in a letter. “Living beings”, he emphasised, “interest me much more than theory and analysis”. Characterized by its spare style, the photographic quality of its descriptions, its close attention to local detail and the corresponding colloquialism of the language, and by its uncompromising emotional honesty as well as by a remarkable absence of bitterness, The Forging of a Rebel is, as the Guardian observed, “a Spanish masterpiece which illuminates an entire historical epoch”.

The first Spanish edition was published in 1951 by Losada of Buenos Aires. Since Arturo had lost most, if not all, of the original manuscript, he and Ilsa had to re-translate the English version back into Spanish. This was evidently done with a certain haste as the text is plagued by grammatical errors and anglicisms. In Spain itself, Barea’s republican past, his self-proclaimed socialism, and The Forging of a Rebel’s unflinching critique of the ancien régime ensured that only clandestine copies circulated under the Franco regime. Once the transition to democracy got under way, the trilogy was at last published in Spain in 1978; that is to say, thirty-seven years after The Forge first appeared. Although new editions were brought out in 1980 and 1985–86, it was not until the Debate edition of 2000 that the Losada text was finally corrected.

Arguably, The Forging of a Rebel’s English version, despite being produced by a non-native speaker, is more polished and fluent than the re-translated Spanish one. What is more, this was the basis for the trilogy’s translation, as Ilsa explains in a letter, into “nearly all” other languages as “virtually no translator” was familiar enough with Arturo’s “very un-academic, direct and colloquial vocabulary”. Altogether, the book has been published in ten languages. For the translation, as for so much else, Arturo had Ilsa to thank. She was, as Arturo recognized, “my collaborator in everything… my companion in the most ample sense of the word”.

Recognition of Barea’s worth as a writer was reflected in the tour which he undertook of Denmark in 1946. The following year, he was put forward for the Nobel prize, and, according to Ilsa, was shortlisted for the award. In 1952, he was invited to lecture at the State University of Pennsylvania on nineteenth- and twentieth-century Spanish literature—quite an achievement for an autodidact. Moreover, such was the popularity of the BBC talks that the Corporation sent him in 1956 on a 48-day tour of Argentina, Chile and Uruguay, where he gave numerous lectures and interviews and attended a host of banquets and multitudinous book signings. He was feted not just for his broadcasting work but also because of The Forging of a Rebel. The Losada edition, for example, had sold 10,000 copies in a matter of months. Despite the malevolent efforts of the Francoist embassies to smear him as “Arturo Beria”—a reference to Stalin’s brutal security chief which hinted at Arturo’s allegedly Communist past—the tour was an unqualified triumph.

Barea’s interest as a writer is far from restricted to the trilogy alone. Often portrayed as a down-to-earth, working-class writer without literary or intellectual pretensions, his work as a critic has been unjustly neglected. In 1944, he published Lorca, the Poet and His People, a path-breaking analysis of the Andalusian poet that is still of value today. Admittedly, the later study of Miguel de Unamuno, the irascible Basque polymath—undertaken in collaboration with Ilsa—is of much less interest. Nonetheless, Arturo wrote some extremely stimulating literary criticism, characterized by its accessibility, by the sheer soundness of its judgement, and by a determination to place the novels within their social and historical context. In short, Barea was an independently minded and thought-provoking critic.

Only one novel was completed by Arturo following The Forging of a Rebel. Published in English in 1951 and in Spanish four years later, the revealingly titled The Broken Root can be regarded as a sequel to the trilogy insofar as it concerns a Spaniard, who, like Barea, is exiled in England, but who, unlike Barea, returns home; in other words, the book concerns the aftermath of the Civil War. While replicating many of the virtues of The Forging of a Rebel, the novel lacks the structural coherence and narrative impact of the trilogy’s first-hand testimony. In the meantime, Arturo continued to write short stories right up until his death. A posthumous collection, El Centro de la Pista (The Centre of the Ring), was published in Spain in 1960, but it was not until 2001 that the Cuentos Completos (Complete Short Stories), finally appeared. Many of the stories complement The Forging of a Rebel. Virtually all, moreover, concern Spain, despite the fact that the author spent the last half of his adult life in England. Yet this is true of all Arturo Barea’s work—the literary criticism, the historical accounts, the political commentaries, the novels, and the short stories—with the exception of his journalistic assignments.

The pain of exile, for a writer whose work was centred almost exclusively on his home country, is more than evident in The Broken Root. Yet it was in England, and in the company of Ilsa, that Arturo Barea encountered the peace and stability necessary to become a writer. Furthermore, he wrote, “I do not intend ever to return permanently to Spain, even after the overthrow of the Fascist regime, but hope to live ‘somewhere in England’”. He died during the night of 24 December 1957 from a heart attack. He left behind an unfinished novel, His Brother’s Keeper, which, like all his previous novels, was set in Spain.

Undoubtedly, the variety and quality of Arturo Barea’s output as a writer, ranging from his literary criticism and political analyses to his short stories and journalism, has not been fully appreciated. Still, his greatest work remains The Forging of a Rebel. In part, this is because the trilogy tackles the origins and course of the conflict of 1936–39. What distinguishes The Forging of a Rebel, however, is its first-hand testimony, its emotional integrity, and its effort to relate the untold story of the mass of ordinary Spaniards. If, to this, one adds the graphic descriptions, the penetrating observations, and the compelling narrative, it is evident why The Forging of a Rebel remains one of the greatest accounts of twentieth-century Spain’s greatest tragedy: the Civil War.

NIGEL TOWNSON

THE FORGE

To Two Women my mother, the Señora Leonor and my wife, Ilsa

What the hammer? What the chain?

In what furnace was thy brain?

What the anvil?

WILLIAM BLAKE

PART I

1. RIVER AND ATTIC

THE WIND BLEW into the two hundred pairs of breeches and filled them. To me they looked like fat men without a head, swinging from the clothes-lines of the drying-yard. We boys ran along the rows of white trousers and slapped their bulging seats. Señora Encarna was furious. She chased us with the wooden beater she used to pound the dirty grease out of her washing. We took refuge in the maze of streets and squares formed by four hundred damp sheets. Sometimes she caught one of us; then the others would begin to throw mud pellets at the breeches. They left stains as though somebody had dirtied his pants, and we imagined the thrashing some people would get for behaving like pigs.

In the evening, when the breeches had dried, we helped to count them in tens. All the children of the washerwomen went with Señora Encarna up to the top story of the washhouse. It was a big loft with a roof like a V turned upside down. Señora Encarna could stand upright in the middle, but her top-knot nearly touched the big beam. We would stand at the sides and bang our heads against the sloping roof.

Señora Encarna had in front of her the heaps of breeches, sheets, pants, and shirts. The pillow-cases were apart. Everything had its number. Señora Encarna sang it out and threw the piece to the boy in charge of the set of ten to which it belonged. Each of us looked after two or three groups, the “twenties,” or the “thirties,” or the “sixties,” and had to drop each piece on the right heap. Last of all we stuffed into each pillow-case, as into a sack, one pair of breeches, two sheets, one pair of pants, and one shirt, all marked with the same number. Every Thursday, a big cart drawn by four horses came down to the river to fetch the two hundred bundles of clean linen and leave another two hundred of dirty washing behind.

It was the linen of the men of the Royal Horse Guards, the only soldiers who had sheets to sleep in.

Every morning, soldiers of the Guards rode over the King’s Bridge escorting an open carriage in which the Prince of Asturias used to sit, or sometimes the Queen. But first a rider would come out of the tunnel which led to the Royal Palace, to warn the guards on the bridge. They would chase away the people, and the carriage with its escort would pass when the bridge was empty. As we were children and so could not be Anarchists, the police let us stay while they went by. We were not afraid of the Horse Guards, because we knew their breeches too well.

The Prince was a fair-haired boy with blue eyes, who looked at us and laughed like a ninny. People said he was dumb and had to go for a walk in the Casa de Campo every day, between a priest and a General with white mustaches. It would have been better for him to come and play with us by the river. And then we would have seen him with nothing on when we were bathing, and would have known what a prince looks like inside. But apparently they did not want him to come. Once we discussed it with Uncle Granizo, the owner of the washhouse, because he was friends with the head keeper of the Casa de Campo, who sometimes spoke to the Prince. Uncle Granizo promised to see to it, but later he told us that the General would not give his permission.

Those military were all alike. A General who had been in the Philippines often came to visit my Uncle José. He had brought back with him an old Chinese who was very fond of me, a pink wooden walking-stick, which he said had been the spine of a fish called the manatee and was the death of anyone who got a whack with it, and a cross which was not a real cross but a green star with many rays, which he wore everywhere, embroidered on his vest and shirt and as an enamel button in his coat-lapel.

Every time this General came to visit my uncle, he grunted, cleared his throat and asked me whether I was already a little man. He would at once begin to scold me: “Keep quiet, boy, a little man mustn’t do that… Leave that cat alone, boy, you’re a little man now.” I used to sit down on the floor between my uncle’s legs while they talked about politics and the war of the Russians and Japanese. The war had finished long before, but the General liked to speak of it because he had been in China and Japan himself. When they talked about that, I used to listen, and every time I heard how the Japanese had beaten up the Russians I was glad. I could not stand the Russians. They had a very nasty king who was the Tsar and a police chief called Petroff, Captain Petroff, who was a brute and lashed people with his whip. My uncle bought me a new number of the Adventures of Captain Petroff every Sunday. They threw a lot of bombs at him, but he never got killed.

When they stopped speaking of the war they bored me and I went to play on the dining-room carpet.

That other General who was with the Prince must have been just the same. He had to teach the Prince how to make wars when he became king, because all kings must know how to make wars, and the priest taught him how to speak. I didn’t understand that. How could he speak if he was dumb? Perhaps he could, because he was a prince; but the dumb people I knew could only talk by signs. And it was not for lack of priests.

It was a nuisance that no ball came floating down, when we needed one to play with that evening.

It was quite easy to fish a ball. There was a small wooden bridge in front of Uncle Granizo’s house. It was made of two old rails with planks on top and a railing, all painted green. Underneath flowed a black stream which came out of a tunnel; and that tunnel and that stream were the big sewer of Madrid. All the balls which the children of Madrid dropped into the gutters came floating down there, and we fished for them from our bridge with a net made of a stick and the wire guard of a brazier. Once I caught one made of rubber; it was painted red. Next day at school, Cerdeño took it away from me and I had to keep my mouth shut because he was bigger than I was. But I made him pay for it. In the corrala, the square in front of the school where we used to play, I threw a stone at his head from the top of the railing, so that he went about with a bandage for two days and they had to sew up his brain with stitches. Of course, he did not know who had done it. But I carried a sharp stone in my pocket after that, just in case, and if he had tried to beat me, they would have had to sew him up a second time.

Antonio, the one who limped, once fell from the bridge and nearly drowned. Señor Manuel, the handyman, pulled him out and squeezed his tummy with both hands until Antonio began to spit up dirty water. Afterwards they gave him tea and brandy to drink. Señor Manuel, who was a tippler, took a good swill out of the bottle because his trousers were all wet and he said he was cold.

Nothing doing, no ball came down. I went to dinner, my mother was calling me. That day we had our meal in the sun, sitting on the grass. I liked it better than the cold days with no sun, when we had to eat at Uncle Granizo’s. His house was a tavern with a tin-covered bar and some round tables which were all wobbly. The soup would spill over and the brazier stank. It was not really a brazier, but a big portable stove, with an open fire in the middle and all the stewing-pots of the washerwomen placed round it. My mother’s was small, because there were only the two of us, but Señora Encarna’s pot was as big as a wine-jar. There were nine of them, and they ate out of a washbowl instead of a plate. All nine sat on the grass round their bowl and dipped in their spoons in turn. When it rained and they had to eat indoors, they sat at two tables and divided their stew between the washbowl and a very big earthenware casserole which Uncle Granizo used for stewing snails on Sundays. For on Sundays the washhouse was shut and Uncle Granizo cooked snails. In the evening, men and women came down to the river and they danced, ate snails and drank wine. Once Uncle Granizo invited my mother and me, and I stuffed myself. The snails were caught in the grass round there, especially after the rain, when they came out to sun themselves. We boys collected them, painted their houses in many colors and let them run races.

The cocido tasted better here than at home.

First you cut bread into very thin bits and poured over them the soup of the stew, yellow with saffron. Then you ate the chick-peas, and after them the meat together with fresh tomatoes cut in half and sprinkled with plenty of salt. For dessert we had salad, juicy green lettuce with tender hearts such as you could not have got anywhere in town. Uncle Granizo grew the lettuces on the banks of the sewer, because he said that they grew better on sewage water. And it was true. It sounded nasty. But people spread dung on the corn-fields and chickens eat muck, and in spite of all that, bread and chickens are very good.

The chickens and ducks knew our meal-time. They arrived as soon as my mother turned over her washing-board. A big, fat earthworm had been underneath and now it wriggled. One of the ducks saw it at once. He ate the worm just as I used to eat thick noodles: he dangled it in his bill, sucked—plff—and down it went. Then he plucked at the feathers of his neck, as if some crumbs had fallen there, and waited for me to throw him my piece of bread. I would not give it him in my fingers because he was a brute and pinched. He had a very hard bill and it hurt.

With the washing-board for a table we ate, my mother and I, sitting on the grass.

My mother’s hands were very small. As she had been washing since sunrise, her fingers were covered with little wrinkles like an old woman’s skin, but her nails were bright and shining. Sometimes the lye would burn right through her skin and make pin-prick holes all over her fingertips. In the winter her hands used to get cut open; as soon as she took them out of the water into the cold air, they were covered with sharp little ice crystals. The blood would spurt as though a cat had scratched her. She used to put on glycerine, and her hands healed at once.

After the meal we boys went to play at Paris-Madrid Motor Races with the wheelbarrows used for the washing. We had stolen four of them from Señor Manuel, without his noticing, and kept them hidden in the meadow. He did not like us playing with them, because they were heavy and he said one of us would have his leg broken one day. But they were great fun. Each barrow had an iron wheel in front which screeched as it rolled. One boy would get into a wheelbarrow and another would push it at top speed until he had enough of it. Then he would suddenly tip up the barrow, and the passenger would topple out. One day we played at train-crashes, and lame Antonio squashed his finger. He was always unlucky. He was lame because of a thrashing his father had given him. He fell into the sewer, too. As he wore out one of his shoes more quickly than the other, his mother made him wear both shoes of a pair on both feet, changing them each day, so that he used up the two equally quickly. When he wore his left shoe on his right foot, which was the sound one, he limped with both legs and it was very funny to see him hopping on his crutches.

I had seen the real Paris-Madrid races in the Calle del Arenal, at the corner of the street where my uncle lived. There were many policemen lined up so that people should not get run over. The cars were not allowed to finish in the Puerta del Sol as they had wanted to, and the goal was at the Puente de los Franceses. Three or four cars crashed there. I had never seen a racing-car before. All the cars in Madrid looked like carriages without their horses, but those racing-cars were different. They were long and low and the driver crouched right down in them so that you saw nothing but his head—a fur cap and goggles with big glasses like a diver’s. The cars had thick pipes which let off explosions like cannon-shots and puffs of smoke with a horrid smell. The papers said they could go up to fifty-five miles an hour. The train to Méntrida, which is thirty-five miles from Madrid, took from six in the morning till eleven, so that it was not surprising if some of those racing men smashed themselves up on the road.

But I liked driving very fast. In our quarter we boys had a car of our own. It was a packing-case on four wheels, and you could steer the front wheels with a rope. We used to race it down the long slope of the Calle de Lepanto. At the bottom we went so fast that we kept on rolling along the asphalt of the Plaza de Oriente. The only danger was a lamp-post at the corner there. Manolo, the son of the pub-keeper, ran into it one day and broke his arm. He yelled, but it was not really bad; they put his arm in plaster and he went on driving with us as before. Only then he was afraid. When he got to the bottom of the slope he always braked with his foot against the curb.

The meadow where we had our races that day was called the “Park of Our Lady of the Port.” The grass was thick, and many poplars and horse-chestnut trees grew in it. We used to peel the bark off the poplars; it left a clear green patch which seemed to sweat. The chestnut trees grew prickly balls with a chestnut inside which you could not eat, because it gave you a tummy-ache. When we found any of those balls we hid them in our pockets. Then, when one of the boys stooped, the rest of us would throw chestnuts at his behind, and the prickles would prick him, and he would jump. Once we split one of the green balls open, took out the chestnut and stuck the shell under the tail of a donkey grazing in the meadow. The donkey went crazy, rushed all over the place, kicked, and would not even let his master come near him.

I never knew why the meadow was named after Our Lady of the Port.

There was a Holy Virgin in a little chapel; a fat priest lived there who used to take his walks in the meadow and sit down under the poplars. A very pretty girl lived with him. The washerwomen said she was his daughter, but he said she was his niece. One day I asked him why the place was called “Our Lady of the Port,” and he told me that she was the patroness of the fishermen. When they were shipwrecked they prayed to her and she saved them. If they drowned, they went to Heaven. But I could not understand why they kept this Holy Virgin in Madrid instead of taking her to San Sebastian, where there was the sea and fishermen. I had seen them myself two years before, when my uncle took me along in the summer. But here in the Manzanares were no boats and no fishermen, and nobody could have drowned there, because the water reached just to one’s waist in the deepest spot.

It seemed that the Virgin was there because of all the men from Galicia who lived in Madrid. Every August, all Gallegos and Asturians went to this meadow; they sang and danced to their bagpipes, ate, and got drunk. Then they carried the Virgin round the meadow in a procession, and all the bagpipes went along. The boys from the orphanage came down too and played in the procession. They were children without father or mother who lived there in the Home and had to learn music. If one of them played his trumpet badly, the teacher would knock it up with his fist and break the boy’s teeth. I had seen a boy who had no teeth left, but he blew the trumpet beautifully. He could even play the couplets of the jota all by himself. The others would stop playing, and he would blow the copla on his trumpet. The people clapped and he bowed. Then the women and some of the men gave him a few centimos, but secretly, so that the Director should not see it and take them away. For the orphans were paid for playing in the procession, but the teacher took the money and the boys got nothing but the garlic soup in the Home. They all had lice and an eye-sickness called trachoma, which looked as though their eyelids had been smeared with sausage meat. And the heads of some of them were bald from mange.

Many of them had been dumped in the foundlings’ home by the mothers when they were still infants-in-arms. That was one of the reasons why I loved my mother very much. When my father died, there were four of us children, and I was four months old. People wanted to make my mother put us into the foundlings’ home—so I was told—because she would never be able to keep all of us alive. My mother went down to the river as a washerwoman. I was taken in by my Uncle José and Aunt Baldomera. On the days when my mother was not washing she worked as their servant; she cooked for them, did all the housework, and at night she went back to the attic where she lived with Concha, my sister. José, my eldest brother, at first got his meals in the Escuela Pía. When he was eleven, my mother’s eldest brother took him into his shop in Cordova. Concha got her meals at the nuns’ school. My second brother, Rafael, was a boarder at the college of San Ildefonso, which is an institution for orphan boys born in Madrid.

Twice a week I slept in the attic, because my Uncle José said I was to be the same as my brothers and sister and should not think myself the young gentleman of the family. I did not mind, I enjoyed myself better there than in my uncle’s flat. Uncle José was very good, but my aunt was a grumpy old bigot and would not leave me alone. Every evening I had to go with her to Rosary in the Church of Santiago; and that was too much praying. I believed in God and the Holy Virgin. But that did not mean that I wanted to spend the day at prayer or in church. Every day at seven in the morning—Mass at school. Before lessons began—prayers. Then the lesson in religion. In the afternoons, before and after school—prayers. And then, when I was quite happy playing in the street, my aunt would call me to go to Rosary, and on top of it she made me pray before I went to sleep and before I got up. When I was in the attic, I did not go to Rosary, and I did not pray either in the evening or in the morning.

As it was summer then, there was no school. Every Monday and Tuesday I went to the attic; those were the days when my mother went down to the river to wash, and I went with her to play in the fields. When my mother had finished packing up her washing, we went home uphill, up the Cuesta de la Vega. I liked that road because it passed under the viaduct, a high iron bridge which spanned the Calle Segovia. It was from the top of this viaduct that people threw themselves down if they wanted to take their own lives. I knew a stone slab in the pavement of the Calle Segovia which had cracks because a man had smashed his head on it. His head was squashed like a pie, and the stone broke into four pieces. A little cross was engraved on the slab, so that people should know and remember. Each time I passed under the viaduct, I looked up to see if someone was not just about to jump down. It would have been no joke if anyone had squashed my mother or me. If he had fallen on the sack of washing which Señor Manuel carried home for my mother, it would have hurt no-one. The sack was huge, bigger than a man.

I knew exactly what was in it, because I had helped my mother to count the linen: twenty sheets, six tablecloths, fifteen shirts, twelve nightshirts, ten pairs of pants—a great many things. Poor Señor Manuel had to stoop under it when he wanted to get through the door of our attic. He let the sack slide down gently so that it should not burst, and leaned against the wall, breathing very fast, with sweat running down his face. My mother always gave him a very full glass of wine and asked him to sit down. If he had drunk water he would have died, for it would have stopped him sweating.

He would drink his wine, and then draw a handful of stubs and big coarse cigarette papers out of his blouse, and roll himself a fat, untidy cigar out of the stubs. One day I stole one of Uncle José’s good cigars with a gold band and gave it to Señor Manuel. He told my mother, and she scolded me and told my uncle about it. He scolded me too, but then he gave me a kiss and took me to the pictures, because he said my heart was in the right place. After that I did not know whether it had been right or wrong to give Señor Manuel a cigar. I thought it was right, though, because he had been very happy. He smoked it after his meal and kept the stump which he cut up to roll a special cigarette from it. Afterwards my uncle gave me a cigar for Señor Manuel from time to time, and he had never done that before.

The viaduct was all of iron, like the Eiffel Tower in Paris, only not so high. The Eiffel Tower was a huge iron tower built by a French engineer in Paris for an exhibition, in the year in which I was born. I knew that story very well, because my uncle had the old numbers of La Illustración with photographs of the tower and the engineer, a gentleman with a long beard like all Frenchmen. Apparently they never managed to take the tower to pieces after the exhibition was over, so they left it standing so that it should fall down by itself. For one day it would fall into the Seine, the river which flows through Paris, and destroy many houses. They said people in Paris were very much afraid of it; a lot of those who lived in the neighborhood had moved away so as not to get crushed.

It was just the same with our viaduct: it was sure to fall one fine day. When soldiers had to ride over it, they went very slowly, and even so the whole bridge trembled. If you stood in the middle, you could feel it swaying up and down, like in an earthquake. My uncle said the bridge would crack if it vibrated less; but naturally it would have to break if it vibrated too much, and that was what would happen one day. I thought I would not like to be standing underneath just then, but that it would be interesting to look on. The year before, on Inocentes Day, the A.B.C., which always had very good pictures, published a photograph of the viaduct in ruins. It was an All Fools’ joke that time, but many people went to look with their own eyes, because they thought it had to be true when there was a picture of it. Afterwards they were angry with the paper; but I thought it was the same with them as with me: they were angry because it was not true.

At each end of the viaduct was a policeman on patrol, to keep people from throwing themselves over. If anyone wanted to do it he had to wait until late at night, when the guards were asleep. Then he could jump. The poor men must have got terribly bored, wandering round the streets until they could kill themselves. And then they still had to climb over the railing. The viaduct was no good for old people because they could not climb. They had to hang themselves or jump into the big lake in the Retiro Park, but someone nearly always pulled them out from there and massaged their stomach, like lame Antonio’s, until they spat out the water and did not die.

My mother said they wanted to kill themselves because they had not enough money to buy food, but I would not have killed myself for that. I would have stolen some bread and run away. They could not have put me in prison as I was a child. But if people did not want to do that, why didn’t they work? My mother who was a woman worked. Señor Manuel worked too, and he was a very old man. He carried the heavy sacks with the washing, although he had a rupture through which his bowels stuck out. Once he carried a big bundle of linen up to the attic and when he got upstairs he felt very ill. My mother put him on the bed and pulled down his trousers. She had a great fright and called for Señora Pascuala, the concierge, and both together quickly pulled off his trousers and pants. He had a swarthy belly full of hairs which were nearly all white, and a bulgy lump rather like a bullock’s was hanging down from his parts. My mother and Señora Pascuala pushed this lump back into his belly with their fists and fastened his truss over it, a kind of belt which had a pad over the hole where his bowels slipped out. Then Señor Manuel dressed and drank a cup of tea and a glass of brandy. Señora Pascuala boxed my ears because I had been watching, and said children should never see such things. But I was glad because now I would know how to push Señor Manuel’s bowels back again if ever they slipped out while I was alone with him. The worst would be if it happened in the street and his bowels fell right out, for then he would have to die.

Now, Señor Manuel, who had a ruptured belly and smoked nothing but fag-ends, had no wish to kill himself. He was always cheerful and played with me. He used to let me ride on his shoulders and tell me that he had grandchildren like myself in Galicia. He smoked stubs so that he could visit them every year. My uncle used to get him what they called a charity ticket, and he traveled almost for nothing. When he came back he always brought butter in a round pig’s bladder for my uncle. It was sweet, fresh butter which I liked to spread on my bread and sprinkle with sugar. Once I asked him why he did not commit suicide, and he said he wanted to die at home in Galicia. I wondered whether he would kill himself there one summer, but then I thought he probably would not. Besides, he said that people who commit suicide go to hell, and everybody else told me the same.

Our attic was in a large house in the Calle de las Urosas. The ground floor was all stables, with more than a hundred fine carriages and their horses. The boss of the stables was an old man with a queer, flattened-out nose. My mother said he had picked it like I did, and because his nails were dirty, the tip of his nose started rotting one day. They had to cut it off and take a piece off his behind to sew on it instead. Once I wanted to make him angry and asked if he really had a piece of his behind sewn on to his nose, and he threw a scotch at me: one of those heavy wooden wedges which keep the wheels from running backwards on a slope. It missed me and struck the printing-shop opposite. There it hit a rack on which they kept their little boxes with letters and knocked one of them over. The A’s and T’s got mixed up, and all the boys of our street sat and sorted them out into little heaps.

The gateway of our house was so big that we could play with tops, and at hopscotch and ball there, when Señora Pascuala was not about. Her lodge was very small, squeezed in under the staircase, and the stairs were as big as the gateway; they had a hundred and one steps. When I went down, I jumped them three at a time. Sometimes I used to slide down the banisters; but once I lost my seat and was left dangling outside the railing over the second floor. Nobody saw it, but it gave me a fright so that I thought my heart would burst, and my legs trembled. If I had fallen then, the same would have happened to me as to our water jar. There was no running water in our attic and we had to fetch it from the stables. My mother had bought a very big jar, and even when I went down with it, it was heavy; but when I carried it upstairs filled with water, I had to rest at every landing. And once I dropped it from the second floor and it exploded like a bomb down there. It was from the same spot that I nearly fell myself. When I passed it afterwards, I always kept away from the banisters.

Upstairs there was a large round window with small panes, like some church windows. When the powder-magazine at Carabanchel exploded, the glass broke and was strewn all over the stairs. I was very small then, but I remember how my mother carried me down and into the street in her arms. She ran, because she did not know what had happened. People were very frightened at that time, because so many things had occurred one after the other: a few years earlier a huge meteor had come down in Madrid. Then Mount Vesuvius, the big volcano in Italy, had an outburst, and afterwards came Halley’s Comet. There was also an earthquake in San Francisco, a city much bigger than Madrid, and another one in Messina. Many people believed that the end of the world would come after the end of the nineteenth century. I saw the Halley Comet myself, but I was not frightened. It was beautiful. My uncle and I watched it from the Plaza de Palacio. It was a ball of fire with a tail of sparks, rushing along the sky. My aunt had not come out with us because she was too much afraid. She kept all the candles burning before a Virgin we had at home and prayed there the whole night. When we went to bed she closed the wooden shutters very tight, and my uncle asked her if she was afraid of the comet entering our balcony. At that time, a ship with dynamite, the Machichaco, had exploded in Santander and blown up half the town. An iron girder had pierced two houses before it stuck fast. Sucesos printed a picture in colors, which showed chunks of the ship and arms and legs flying in the air.

Opposite the round window began the passage which led to all the attic flats. The first belonged to Señora Pascuala, it was the biggest and had seven rooms; then came Señora Paca with her four rooms, and across the passage Señora Francisca who had only one room, like all the rest.

Paca and Francisca are the same name, but Señora Paca was one thing and Señora Francisca another. Señora Francisca was an old lady who had been a widow for many years. As she had no money she sold things for children on the Plaza del Progreso, a whole lot of things for two coppers, such as monkey-nuts, hazel-nuts, jacks-in-the-box, and bengal lights. But she was a lady. The other was a big fat woman who walked about in a dressing jacket so thin that you could see her breasts with very black nipples through it. One day I saw a few black hairs sticking through the stuff of her jacket and afterwards I always had to think of her when I saw bristles on a bacon-rind. It did not matter, because I did not like bacon. Señora Paca always went round shouting and screaming; once Señora Pascuala, who had quite a good voice herself, told her that she would get herself chucked out.

Señora Paca was a washerwoman too, but she did not wash at Uncle Granizo’s place—only at a laundry in the Ronda de Atocha, where there is no river and they had to do their washing in basins filled with water from a tap. I had been there once. I did not like it. It looked like a factory, with rows of basins full of wash, steam hanging in the air over them, and the women jostling each other alongside and screaming like mad. There was no sun and no grass and the linen stank. The drying-yard with the clothes-lines was a bit of waste ground at the back. Tramps used to climb over the hoardings and steal the washing. Of course they sometimes tried to do the same down by the river, but they were less cheeky there because it was open ground, where the women could run and throw stones after them, and they always got caught. In fact, the decent washerwomen were at the river, opposite the Casa de Campo; but from the Toledo Bridge downstream and in the laundries of the Rondas there were only slatterns.

Our passage made a bend, and then came a straight bit, thirty-seven meters long; I had measured it myself, meter by meter, with my mother’s tape-measure. There was a small window in the corner which let the sun through, and a large window in the middle of the ceiling, where the water came in when it rained. It came through the small window too, whenever a strong wind was blowing from the front. That made two puddles in the passage. When a tile was missing on the roof, the rain trickled through into the attic, and you put a pan underneath where it dripped. The passage and the attics were floored with bricks, or rather with tiles of burnt clay which looked like bricks. They were very cold in winter time, but our attic had a rush-mat with straw underneath and so we could play on the floor.

Our attic was Number 9 in the passage. Next door was the attic of the powder-woman who made up rockets and squibs for children. The neighbors said she could make bombs and was an Anarchist. She had a lot of books and was very kind. One night the police came. They went away without arresting her, but they woke up all the rest of us, because they turned her room upside down and threw things about.

In the attic next to hers lived Señora Rosa and her husband. He was a harness-maker and she was shortsighted; she could not have seen seven-on-a-donkey. They were tiny and very thin and loved each other very much. They always spoke in a low, soft voice and you hardly noticed them. They would have liked to have a child, and their room was a refuge for us when we were afraid of a beating. Then Señora Rosa would stand in front of her door and not let anyone in, nor us out, until they promised her not to touch us. She had a very small, very white face, and very light blue eyes with lashes so fair that you scarcely saw them. She wore spectacles with thick glasses and my mother said she could see well in the dark. When she looked at you, her eyes were like a bird’s.

Then there was still another attic, the smallest of all. An old woman lived there, called Antonia, and nobody knew anything about her because nobody wanted to have anything to do with her. She went begging in the streets and came home at eleven at night, just before the front door was locked. She would come up muttering to herself, drunk with gin. Upstairs she would bolt her door and start talking to her cat. Once she was sick on the stairs and Señora Pascuala made her scrub the staircase from top to bottom.

At the end of the passage lived the cigarette-maker. She and her daughter worked together making cigarettes for the Queen. They were very long cigarettes on to which they stuck cardboard holders with a fine brush dipped into a dusty little pot of gum. And that was what the Queen put in her mouth. The little pot was of thick green glass, and as they used to wipe their brush on its rim, it always had some hardened drops of gum sticking to its outside, like the wax drops on church candles. When they ran short of gum, Señora Maria scraped off the dried blobs, put them into the pot and poured some hot water over them. Once, she had no hot water ready and used stock from her stewing-pot; and her cigarettes got spotted with grease.

In a corner of the passage was the lavatory. At night I was afraid of going there, for a lot of fat cockroaches came crawling out and ran about in the passage to feed on the garbage cans which all the neighbors put in front of their attic doors. In summer, when you had to leave the door open, you heard them running about in the passage outside, making a small noise like crackling paper. They did not get into our room because my mother had nailed a strip of linoleum along the bottom of the door, the kind of linoleum rich people had in their houses. But lots of them got into the room of Señora Antonia, the drunkard, because it was next door to the lavatory and had no linoleum. Her cat ate them, and it made you feel sick, because when she crunched them they sounded like monkey-nuts.

Big rats from the stables used to get into the house and sometimes came up to the attics. In the stables they had many rat-traps and dogs of the ratter kind. In the mornings, the traps were taken out into the street, often with four or five live rats in them. Sometimes the neighbors and all the children of our street would make a circle, and they would open the traps and let loose the dogs to chase and kill the rats. At other times they poured paraffin over the rats and burnt them inside the wire traps, but only rarely because it made the whole street smell of burnt hair and roasted flesh. Once a rat bit a dog in the muzzle and got away. A piece was missing out of the dog’s nose after that. He belonged to Señor Paco, the one who had his behind stitched on to his nose. So the two of them looked alike, and the men at the printers’ called them the “pugs.”

We had arrived home, and my mother was very tired. Downstairs the milkman lent her a can to carry her milk, so that we had not to go up and down again for it, and she began at once to cook our supper. We were having fried potatoes with fresh sardines and an egg, and afterwards a little coffee, I with milk, my mother black and boiling hot. I never understood how she could stand it like that. While she was cooking, I sat down to read In Search of the Castaways by Jules Verne. From time to time, I stole one of the potato slices just out of the frying-pan. Then she fried the sardines. They smelled good. But my mother would not let me steal one of them, because they were few.

2. CAFÉ ESPAÑOL

BY THE TIME