Alan Furst: The Foreign Correspondent

Sandoval turned off the engine, Weisz and McGrath got out and stood by the car. In the hard wind that blew down from the mountains, there was not a sound to be heard. McGrath took off her glasses and rubbed the lenses with her shirttail, squinting as she watched the column. “Dear God,” she said.

“You’ve seen it before,” Weisz said.

“Yes, I’ve seen it.”

Sandoval spread a map across the hood. “If we go back a few miles,” he said, “we can go around it.”

“Where does this road go?” McGrath said.

“To Barcelona,” Sandoval said. “To the coast.”

Weisz reached for a pad and pencil. By late morning, the sky had closed in, with low gray cloud above the high plain, and a ribbon of road that wound across it, wound east, toward Barcelona.

The censor, in Castelldans, didn’t like it. He was an army major, tall and thin, with the face of an ascetic. He sat at a table in the back of what had been the post office, not far from the wireless/telegraph equipment and the clerk who operated it. “Why do you do this?” he said. His English was precise, he had once been a teacher. “Can you not say, ‘moving to reposition’?”

“An army in retreat,” Weisz said, “is what I saw.”

“It does not help us.”

“I know,” Weisz said. “But it is so.”

The major read back through the story, a few pages covered in penciled block print. “Your English is very good,” he said.

“Thank you, sir.”

“Tell me, Senor Weisz, can you not simply write about our Italian volunteers, and the colonel? The column you describe has been replaced, the line is still being held at the Segre.”

“The column is part of the story, Major. It must be reported.”

The major handed it back, and nodded toward the waiting clerk. “You may send it as it is,” he said to Weisz. “And then you may deal with your conscience in whatever way suits you.”

26 December. Weisz sat back against the faded plush seat in a first-class compartment as the train chugged slowly past the outskirts of Barcelona. They would be at the border crossing in Port Bou in a few hours, then France. Weisz had the window seat, across from him a pensive child, next to his mother and father, a fastidious little man in a dark suit, with a gold watch chain looped across his vest. Next to Weisz, an older daughter, wearing a wedding ring, though no husband was to be seen, and a heavy woman with gray hair, perhaps an aunt. A silent family, pale, shaken, leaving home, likely forever.

This little man had apparently followed his principles, was either an ally of the Republican government or one of its minor officials. He had the look of a minor official. But now he had to get out while he could, the flight had begun, and what awaited him in France was, if he was unlucky, a refugee camp-barracks, barbed wire-or, if his luck held, penury. To avoid train sickness, the mother reached into a crumpled paper bag and, from time to time, dispensed a lemon drop to each member of the family; the small economies had begun.

Glancing at the compartment across the aisle, Weisz could see Boutillon, of the Communist daily L’Humanite, and Chisholm, of the Christian Science Monitor, sharing sandwiches and a bottle of red wine. Weisz turned to the window and stared out at the gray-green brush that grew at the edge of the track.

The Spanish major had been right about his English: it was good. After finishing secondary school at a private academy in Trieste, he’d gone off to the Scuola Normale -founded by Napoleon, in imitation of the Ecole Normale in Paris, and very much the cradle of prime ministers and philosophers-at the University of Pisa, probably the most prestigious university in Italy. Where he’d studied political economics. The Scuola Normale was not particularly his choice, but, rather, had been ordained at birth. By Herr Doktor Professor Helmut Weisz, the eminent ethnologist, and Weisz’s father, in that order. And then, according to plan, he’d entered Oxford University, again for economics, where he’d managed to stay for two years. At which time his tutor, an incredibly kind and gentle man, had suggested that his intellectual destiny lay elsewhere. It wasn’t that Weisz couldn’t do it-become a professor-it was that he didn’t want to do it, not really. At Oxford, not really was a variant spelling of doom. So, after one last night of drinking and singing, he left. But he left with very good English.

And this turned out, in the strange and wondrous way the world worked, to be his salvation. Back in Trieste, which in 1919 had passed from Austro-Hungarian to Italian nationality, he spent his days in the cafes with his hometown pals. Not a professorial crowd: scruffy, smart, rebellious-a would-be novelist, a would-be actor, two or three don’t know/don’t care/don’t bother-mes, a would-be prospector for gold in the Amazon, one Communist, one gigolo, and Weisz.

“You should be a journalist,” they told him. “See the world.”

He got a job with the newspaper in Trieste. Wrote obituaries, reported on an occasional crime, now and then interviewed a local official. At which point, his father, always cold, positively glittered with frost, pulled a string, and Weisz returned to Milan, to write for Italy’s leading newspaper, Corriere della Sera. More obituaries, at first, then an assignment in France, another in Germany. At these, now age twenty-five, he worked-worked harder than he ever had, for he had at last discovered life’s great motivation: fear of failure. Presto, the magic potion!

Too bad, really, because Mussolini’s reign had begun, with the March on Rome-Mussolini had gone by train-in 1922. Restrictive press laws soon followed and, by 1925, the ownership of the paper had passed to fascist sympathizers, and the editor had to resign. Senior editors went with him, a determined Weisz hung on for three months, then followed them out the door. He thought about emigrating, then returned to Trieste, conspired with his friends, tore a poster or two off a wall, but generally kept his head down. He’d seen people beaten up, he’d seen people with blood on their faces, sitting in the street. Not for Weisz.

Anyhow, Mussolini and his crowd would soon be gone, it was simply a question of waiting it out, the world had always righted itself, it would again. He took tepid assignments from the Trieste newspapers-a soccer match, a fire on a cargo ship in the port-tutored a few students in English, fell in and out of love, spent eighteen months writing for a commercial journal in Basel, another year at a shipping newspaper in Trieste, survived. Survived and survived. Forced by politics to the margins of professional existence, he watched as his life drifted away like sand.

Then, in 1935, with Mussolini’s ghastly war in Ethiopia, he could bear it no longer. Three years earlier, he’d joined the giellisti in Trieste-the would-be novelist was now locked up on the prison island of Lipari, the Communist had become a fascist, the gigolo had married a countess and both had boyfriends, and the would-be prospector had found gold and died rich; there was more than treasure to be found in the Amazon.

So Weisz went to Paris and took a room in a tiny hotel in the Belleville district and commenced to live on the diet imagined by every dreamer who went to Paris; bread and cheese and wine. But very good bread-its price controlled by the brutally sagacious French government-pretty good cheese, supplemented with olives and onions, and wretched Algerian wine. But it did the job. Women were a classic, and effective, addition to the diet: if you were thinking about women, you weren’t thinking about food. Politics was a tiresome addition to the diet, but it helped. It was easier, much easier, to suffer in company, and the company sometimes included dinner, and women. Then, after seven months of reading newspapers on cafe rollers, and looking for work, God sent him Delahanty. The Great Autodidact, Delahanty. Who had taught himself to read in French, to read in Spanish, to read-Lord have mercy! — in Greek, and to read, providentially, in Italian. Delahanty, the bureau chief of the Reuters wire service in Paris. Ecco, a job!