Antonio Molina - In the Night of Time

I see the address on a map and walk up a narrow street behind Cibeles, Marqués de Duero, until I find number 7: a gate, a brick building with a Mudéjar-style roof, an iron-and-glass marquee over the entrance stairway, where Ignacio Abel walked in and saw, in the midst of a throng of busy people loading bundles of newspapers onto a truck, a fair-haired, smiling man with a fleshy face that looked familiar, though he couldn’t quite identify it, perhaps because he was dressed as a militiaman, in a spotless blue coverall and gleaming leather straps, a camera hanging from his shoulder instead of a rifle. When he got closer he realized it was the poet Alberti, whose eyes rested for a moment on him, alternately acute and absent, perhaps because Alberti knew vaguely who he was but didn’t consider it essential to greet him. He asked for Bergamín, saying he’d come on behalf of Bergamín’s brother the architect, and a short female secretary wearing a belt with a pistol in a leather holster led him to an office. Bergamín did remember him: in recent years he’d published some of Ignacio Abel’s articles in Cruz y Raya. I can almost see him, as if I myself had sat down in front of him and cleared my throat and swallowed before I stated, assessing the right tone, the reason for my visit: the methodical men who took away Professor Rossman after searching his room. Bergamín is thinner, more emaciated than ever, his nose more pointed, the tip damp and red from a cold that forced him to blow it from time to time, his eyes smaller beneath thick eyebrows, his voice weak, nasal, his black hair straight, parted down the middle.

“… the cut, of necessity, has to be bloody,” he says and inhales, “but what counts is not the spilled blood in and of itself but the smoothness of the operation. There is always more than enough blood, as our enemies take care to remind us, and they have no misgivings about spilling it. You’ve heard about the rivers of blood flowing where they’ve won — in Sevilla, in Granada, in Badajoz. The moral scruples that paralyze us don’t exist for them. So what should concern us at this glorious and tragic moment is not the volume of blood being spilled on account of the revolution but its success, and on this point it definitely is possible to have doubts. The Spanish people are behaving with an instinct for justice appropriate to the spirit of the race, but also with an anarchy that is equally atavistic and can turn against itself if we don’t channel it. What a talent for improvisation, a superior instinct, even in the language. Suddenly there are new words and expressions that seem to have always been there. What genius of farce thought up that verbal marvel of ‘taking for a ride’? Or ‘to lance someone’—the bottomless quarry of bullfighting speech that’s at the very heart of what is irreducibly Spanish. Don’t make a face. I lament the excesses as much as you do, but how trivial they are compared to the great good sense of the people’s instinctive heroism, and in any case we weren’t the ones who started this war, it’s just that the weight of the blood falls on the accomplices of those who provoked it. Don’t be shocked at the blood or the flames. It was necessary. Obligatory. Defense, not injury, on our part. I remember the article in which you celebrated the marvelous capacity of popular Spanish architecture to adapt. Isn’t the same thing happening now? The Spanish people, accustomed to scarcity, make do with what’s at hand. The disloyal army rebels? The people rise up in militias and guerrilla groups, just as they did in 1808 against the French, with the same instinct that had been dormant for more than a century, and they take what they find at hand, make the most ordinary thing epic, the proletarian blue coverall transformed into a new uniform, one without the negative connotation of a military uniform. That’s why I wanted to name our magazine The Blue Coverall. Isn’t that better than the name Neruda gave his, Green Horse ? A green horse, if you stop to think about it, is foolishness. The blue coverall is serious. It would be a good idea, come to think of it, if you’d write something for us. It isn’t a good idea to go around asking about a suspect when you’re not adding anything to the cause, you know, when it isn’t obvious you’re as committed to the struggle. The time of pure intellectuals has passed, if in fact it ever existed. Look at the public shame of Ortega, of Marañón, of Baroja, of the miserable felon that Don Miguel de Unamuno turned out to be. I suppose you’ve heard what they did to poor Lorca in Granada.”

“I heard but couldn’t believe it. You hear so many things that sound true and then turn out to be rumors.”

“I see you still have doubts. You suspect our propaganda is overdone and our enemies not as savage as we claim. You retain the humanist scruple about not drawing a definitive line between them and us. You don’t accept that we’re right and all the savagery is theirs. The man who seemed to be above it all howls in Salamanca against the Republic as he licks the spurs of the military and the rings of the bishops, who for him are now the defenders of Christian civilization. Look at what they do when they enter towns in Extremadura, how they behave. The servants of the nation hunt down their compatriots the way the Italians hunted down Negroes in Abyssinia. They’re not after military victory but extermination. And we’re to be remorseful because the people, in their own defense, take justice into their own hands?”

“My friend hasn’t done anything. They took him away because they can take anybody away. I don’t think that’s justice.”

“If he’s innocent, and for me your word is guarantee, you can be sure they’ll release him.”

“Do you know where I can find him?”

Bergamín remained pensive, his elbows on the large mahogany desk, his eyes half closed.

“Are you absolutely sure your friend hasn’t called attention to himself in any way? Is it possible he had contact with the German embassy?”

“He had to leave the country when Hitler came to power. If they didn’t put him in prison, it was because he had earned the Iron Cross in the war.”

“He was a man of clear anti-Fascist sympathies?”

“Why do you say ‘was’?”

“A manner of speaking. Anything specific about the car they took him away in?”

“Nothing. They didn’t show his daughter any credentials, either.”

“In these times, who thinks about credentials? You don’t realize the urgency of the struggle. We can’t allow our enemies to escape us in the name of some outdated legality.”

“Professor Rossman isn’t an enemy.”

“If he isn’t, why have they detained him?”

Ignacio Abel swallowed, shifted uncomfortably in the chair with its faux-medieval filigree, in the office of noble woods and weapons displays that would have impressed his father-in-law.

“Because they detain anybody. They go around in requisitioned cars, imagining they’re gangsters in a movie, and the names they’ve given themselves — Eagles of the Republic, Dawn Patrol, Red Justice. Don’t tell me that’s any way to do things, Bergamín. No police, no Assault Guards? They stop you on the street, they put a rifle to your chest, and sometimes they can’t even read the name on the card.”

“Do you consider yourself superior to a soldier of the people because you had the privilege of being taught to read and write? It’s the people who impose their law now, and we, people like you and me, have the option of joining them or disappearing along with the class into which we were born. The people are so generous in their victory that they are giving us a possibility of redemption as radical as the one Jesus Christ brought in his day.”

“What victory? Each day that passes, the enemy is closer to Madrid.”