Birth of Our Power Read online

  He made his living selling phony jewelry over in the Paralelo. With a friendly touch and an insinuating laugh, he’d fasten the huge silver loops on the ears of girls from the neighboring towns, sending shivers down their spines as if he had just kissed them on the neck. They all knew him well: from a crowd they would look at him with long, smoldering stares, from beneath lowered eyelids.

  Zilz, a French deserter, pretended to be Swiss: Heinrich Zilz, citizen of the canton of Neuchâtel, who taught languages—los idiomas— with childlike earnestness, lived on oatmeal, noodles, and fruit, spoke little but well, dressed carefully, went to bed every night at ten-thirty, went to bed once a week with a five-peseta girl (a good price), and held people in quiet contempt. “It will take centuries to reform them, and life is short. I have enough of a problem with myself, trying to live a little better than an animal, and that’s plenty for me.”

  Jurien and Couet (the one blond, the other chestnut-haired, but whom you would have taken for brothers from their identical Parisian speech, their little toothbrush mustaches, their jaunty walk), had both fled the war, one from the trenches of Le Mort Homme,2 the other from the Vosges, by way of the Pyrenees. Now they both worked in factories for the benefit of those who still persisted in getting killed, Jurien nailing boots and Couet loading grenades for export to France. They lived happily, from day to day, in the satisfaction of being spared from the fiery hell.

  Oskar Lange, a slender muscular lad with reddish hair, bloodshot eyes, thought to be a deserter from a German submarine, was their closest companion. They made him read Kropotkin and Stirner, in that order. And the sailor who had thought only of escaping the fate of rotting in a steel coffin discovered a new source of strength and pride in what he had thought to be his cowardice—thanks to them. We smiled to hear him pronounce the word “Comrade”—somewhat awkwardly—for the first time.

  There was also an athletic and intelligent Russian, Lejeune, elegant, handsome, graying at the temples, who had been known for a long time in his youth as Levieux. He lived with Maud, worn-out yet ageless, who had the body of a nervous gamin, a Gothic profile, brown curls, and sudden, catlike movements. And Tibio—el cartero, the postman—with his broad Roman countenance, wide forehead, and noble carriage, who studied the art of living and wrote commentaries on Nietzsche after systematically distributing letters to offices in the business district. Then there were Mathieu the Belgian, Ricotti the Italian, the photographer Daniel, and the Spaniards Dario, Bregat, Andrés, José Miro, Eusebio, Portez, Ribas, Santiago …

  There were at least forty or fifty of us, coming from every corner of the world—even a Japanese, the wealthiest of us all, a student at the university—and a few thousand in the factories and shops of that city: comrades, that is to say, more than brothers by blood or law, brothers by a common bond of thought, habit, language, and mutual help. No profession was foreign to us. We came from every conceivable background. Among us, we knew practically every country in the world, beginning with the capitals of hard work and hunger, and with the prisons. There were among us those who no longer believed in anything but themselves. The majority were moved by ardent faith; some were rotten—but intelligent enough not to break the law of solidarity too openly. We could recognize each other by the way we pronounced certain words, and by the way we had of tossing the ringing coin of ideas into any conversation. Without any written law, we comrades owed each other (even the most recent newcomer) a meal, a place to sleep, a hideout, the peseta that will save you in a dark hour, the douro (a hundred sous) when you’re broke (but after that, it’s your own lookout!). No organization held us together, but none has ever had as much real and authentic solidarity as our fraternity of fighters without leaders, without rules, and without ties.

  1 Probably a reference to Francisco Ferrer, a libertarian-educator executed at Montjuich in 1909. See note, page 47. —Tr.

  2 Le Mort Homme, or Hill 295, one of the Verdun defenses, captured by the Germans in 1916 and retaken by the French 1917.

  TWO

  Sentry Thoughts

  I HAD LEARNED IN THAT CITY THAT IT IS NOT ENOUGH TO FILL YOUR LIFE with the certainty of not being killed by the end of the day—a prospect dreamed of in those days as the supreme happiness by thirty million men on the soil of Europe. It often happened, during my strolls on the Montjuich rock, that I had the sensation of being at one of the earth’s extremities, which resulted in a strange despondency. There, facing the horizon, or during night walks through the happy city, this feeling—usually indistinct within me, attained a somber clarity. The peace we were enjoying was unique, and that city, despite the struggles, the pain, the filth hidden away in her hunger-ridden slums and her indescribably squalid callejitas, was more than happy just to be alive. We were, nonetheless, only a hundred miles from the Pyrenees: on the other side, the other universe, ruled over by the cannon. Not a single young man in the villages. On every train, you encountered the leathery faces of soldiers on leave looking out from under their helmets with probing, weary glances. And the farther north you went, the more the face of the countryside—aggrieved, impoverished, anguished—changed. The feverish but static image of Paris: brilliant lights extinguished in the evening, dark streets in the outlying districts where the garbage piled up, lines of women waiting in front of the local town halls, dense crowds on the streets where countless uniforms mingled, less diverse, no doubt, than the hands and faces of the Canadians, Australians, Serbs, Belgians, Russians, New Zealanders, Hindus, Senegalese … In war the blood of all men is brewed together in the trenches. The same desire to live and to possess a woman made soldiers on furlough of every race, marked for every conceivable kind of death, wander the streets. The maimed and the gassed, green-faced, encounter those as yet vigorous and whole, bronze skinned, the maimed and the gassed of tomorrow. Some of tomorrow’s corpses were laughing raucously. Paris in darkness, the drawn faces of women in the poorer quarters during the bitter February cold, the feverish exhaustion of streets endlessly bearing the burden of an immense disbanded army, the sickly intimacy of certain homes where the war entered with the air you breathed, like a slow asphyxiating gas—remained implanted in my very nerves. And, still farther north—I knew then, Jurien, only a little farther—those trenches of Le Mort Homme which you described to me under the palms of the Plaza de Cataluña on those evenings, cooled by the sea breeze, so magical that the joy of living quickened every light, every silhouette, the hoarse breathing of the vagabond who slept, every muscle deliciously relaxed, on the next bench—those trenches you described, with their odor of putrefaction and excrement. A shellburst knocked you flat, bitter sentry, into a ditch. You saw, your blood (your last, you thought) run into the filth.

  (“And I didn’t give a shit, you understand? I didn’t give a shit,” you said. “To die here or elsewhere, like this or in any other way—it was all the same to me. All equally stupid … But that stench was choking me.”)

  Then the ruined villages, the demolished towns, the leveled forests—hazy memories of news photos. And more corrosive, more intoxicating than anything—gnawing, abrasive—the language of the maps. Since childhood, maps had given me a kind of vertigo. I used to study them. I learned them by heart at the age of twelve, with a desperate and obstinate desire to know every country, every ocean, every jungle, every city. Desperate because I knew in the back of my mind that I would never go to Ceylon, never go up the Orinoco in a dugout canoe, or the Mekong in a gunboat: this desire filled me with a dull ache. Now the serene voices of the maps spoke a terrifying language. Artillery barrages on the Yser and on the Vardar, on the Piave and on the Euphrates; Zeppelins over London, Gothas over Venice. Blood on the Carpathians and blood on the Vosges. The defense of Verdun, that incredible mass grave, the crushing of Rumania, the battle of the Falkland Islands, the Cameroon campaign. Every ocean—where the child’s hand had traced the shipping lanes—was a watery grave.

  How then to live in this city, stretched out along the gulf, adorned in the evening
with a million lights, like an odalisque asleep on the beach; how to live here with the acute awareness of the absurd torture Europe was undergoing? I don’t know why, perhaps because of Jurien (who no longer thought of it himself), I was obsessed by thoughts of the sentries in the trenches, of silent soldiers dug into their holes—taking up as little room in the earth as the dead—with only their eyes alive, watching a mournful horizon of mud and barbwire (and, of course, a fleshless, rotting hand sticking out of the ground) in that narrow band of earth that belongs to no one, except to Death: no man’s land. Identical in their silence, on both sides of the trenches, under helmets scarcely different, dented by the same explosions, protecting the same gray cells of the human animal at bay … Sentries, brother sentries, stalking each other, stalked by Death, standing watch night and day on the boundaries of life itself, and here I was, strolling in comfortable sandals under the palms of the plaza, my eyes dazzled by the festive Mediterranean sunlight; I, climbing the paths of Montjuich; I, pausing before the goldsmiths’ windows of the calle Fernando, flooded by light in the evening as if by a motionless fountain of huge diamonds; I, following the Miramar path cut into the rock above the sea; I, living as that city lived, without fear, invincible, sure of not having my flesh ripped open tomorrow. I possessed these streets—these ramblas—loaded to excess with flowers, birds, women, and warm masculine voices. I had my books; I had my comrades. How was this possible? Wasn’t this somehow horribly unjust, incredibly absurd?

  It was mostly after nightfall, when the city abandoned herself to the pleasures of life—her cafés crowded, certain of her narrow streets transformed into rivers of light, streets where men and women pair off, leading each other on endlessly, couple after couple so closely intertwined that their walk seems an impudent, delicious prelude to clinches in stuffy rooms along streets haunted by sighs until dawn; when we strolled up and down the ramblas in groups, our heads held high, filled with the music of ideas—it was then that I was tortured by the remorse of not being a sentry myself, of being, in spite of myself, so careful of my own blood, of taking no part in the immeasurable suffering of the masses driven to the slaughter … a feeling sharpened by a revulsion against the blithe felicity of this city.

  We suffocated, about thirty of us, from seven in the morning to six-thirty at night, in the Gaubert y Pia print shop. Skinny kids, naked under their loose smocks, went back and forth across the shop carrying heavy frames, their thin brown arms standing out like cables of flesh. At the back of the shop, the women were folding away—sweating, lips moist, looking at you with dark-eyed glances that seemed almost to caress you as you passed by—repeating the same motions seven thousand times a day to the rumbling of the machines. The movement of the machines was absorbed in their very muscles. I set up type on the composing stick, fatigue mounting in my body, overpowering from three o’clock on, in the hottest time of the day. Toward four o’clock, mechanical concentration falters, and like one in prison, I am assailed by fantasies originating from the secret folds of the brain. To no avail, I cross the shop floor to get a drink of water from the canti—the leather flask you hold in both hands above the head, so that a hard stream squirts into your mouth like a fountain. The corrugated iron roof gives us little protection from the implacable sun.

  It was at those times of day, when the boss, el Señor Gaubert, had turned to face a visitor in his glass-enclosed office, that my neighbor Porfirio would tap me on the shoulder with a finger hard as a stick:

  “Hé, Ruso!” (Russian)

  Tall, brittle, with nothing on under his blue overalls, Porfirio had the broad, dark, pock-marked face, the face of an intelligent ape. His black mouth was lined by horrible yellow teeth that seem broken, but his grimacing smile, spreading from ear to ear, was fraternal. In actual fact, he wasn’t really a comrade, not even a union member (only two of us were union men out of thirty printers and typographers at Gaubert y Pia’s, but the others had as much solidarity as we did—we knew it as well as they); bull-fighting was his only interest. His eyes were black as charcoal.

  “Hé! Ruso! Que dices de la revolución?” (“What have you to say about the revolution?”)

  The dispatches from the newspapers came one after another, offering a welter of surprising details about the great Petrograd days. I can still see Porfirio, intoxicated as if by drink, with the Vanguardia spread out in front of him tinder a lamppost, rereading aloud in a delirious voice an article relating how, at the call of a non-com named Astakhov (almost completely unknown in Russia) the first regiment went over to the insurgent masses in a Petrograd street … “Magnificent!” said Porfirio in a voice made hoarse by emotion; and with a gesture he called our shop mates together as they emerged from the factory. The folders Trini, Quima, Mercédès, Ursula joined our group, their shoulders suddenly thrown back, their faces suddenly serious as if stiffened by a chill, bracing wind.

  Through him I learned what inordinate hopes were rising in the poor neighborhoods of the city. It was during the noon break at work. I was walking along a deserted street without a patch of shade and thinking vaguely how life could be as searing, as naked and as empty: Sahara. Porfirio caught up with me. I could tell immediately from the bounce in his step, the lively animation of his features, that he had something extraordinary to tell me.

  “D’you know?” he said. “The strikers in Sabadell have won their fight.”

  He turned on his heels, stopped short, and faced me, his hard hands on my shoulders.

  “You know, Ruso, it’s our turn next! We’re going to win too—in another battle. You’ll see, amigo mio, you’ll see!”

  He wouldn’t say more: probably because he didn’t know any more. It was then nothing but a confused rumor, a vague readiness in the factories and shops. Roughly, Porfirio yanked a hunk of bread out of his pocket and took a hefty bite out of it with the side of his mouth. He was too poor to eat in restaurants, but would grab a few bites in the street before taking a refreshing twenty-minute nap on a bench in a nearby park.

  I continued along my way with a quickened step, my heart pounding. I entered the little Ventura restaurant (where a few of us ate under the sharp, cordial eye of the fat patrón, an old anarchist, who had once “done” five years in the presidio) with a burdensome guilt lifted from my shoulders: I too awakened to high hopes. Sentries! Sentries! In this city we will accomplish our mission, a better one than yours!

  THREE

  Lejeune

  FROM THEN ON WE LOOKED AT THE CITY THROUGH NEW EYES.

  Nothing was changed in appearance; but the workers’ power surged through the city like new blood injected into the arteries of an old organism. Only those in the know could detect the feeling of excitement in the faces, movements, voices, pace of the city. Voices strayed from their normal patterns: sudden outbursts would follow murmurings among the groups seated at the Café Español. This enormous room was extended indefinitely by mirrors framed in heavy gilt and by terraces animated with voices crackling like the wind over dry grass: it opened onto a street flood-lit by little theaters, night clubs, dance halls, and big working class bars. Some side streets, covered with a reddish dust, wind their way up toward the citadel; others, uniformly gray, cool and dank with the eerie dankness of disease, bathed in the light of naked bulbs at the end of dark corridors—where tired women and avid males copulated endlessly and at random year in and year out.

  The café, crowded at every hour of the day, has tables which are—in a manner of speaking—reserved. The anarchists occupy one section of the terrace and a double row of tables inside, under the dazzling mirrors. The police informers, recognizable by their phony veneer of workers or clerks with time to kill; by their leaden, indolent, shifty hands made for playing dominoes, fastening handcuffs, or noiselessly wielding a blackjack; the police informers, with straining ears and prying eyes, form a familiar circle—not far off—at a round table. (We have an old trick we play every few weeks—of all pretending to sit down for a long evening together, and then having t
he waiter, a comrade, serve them burning hot coffee. As soon as the steaming cups of coffee are placed before them, we gulp down our drinks and hotfoot it out of there. Only El Chorro remains, laughing silently at the spectacle of the crestfallen faces of those “sons of bitches” who are forced to choose between losing the coffee they’ve paid for, or losing their “clients.”) The “ego-anarchist” corner is full of foreigners. If an overly elegant bull-necked gentleman, one of those habitués of swank bars who traffic in white slavery, happen to find his way into our group, the unlikely attention of the police informers and the forbidding indifference of the workers scare him off immediately. He recovers his aplomb on the terrace, at the sight of some French girls sipping orangeade through long straws. A calliope fills the hall with arias from operas and love songs. Through the din of the mechanical brass band, we are able to discuss things among ourselves without worrying too much about being overheard by the informers.

  Five of us were there, late one afternoon. Eusebio, a plasterer with the handsome, regular features of a Roman legionary, a bristling mustache, large, soft, brown eyes—luminous, primeval, accustomed to bright colors (but not nuances). Andrés, an editor of the Confederation paper, a thin, swarthy Argentinean with sharp, squarish features, a pointed chin, and a querulous look, held a pointed cigarette between purple lips. Lolita, Eusebio’s “wife” (and someone else’s), a pale, skinny factory girl with hair so dark it seems blue-tinted, sunken eyes concealing a lusterless gaze (like an indifferent caress), pale nostrils, a double fold of pursed lips as red as the inside of a pomegranate. Heinrich Zilz, his necktie carefully knotted, his face slightly flushed (for he has a yen for Lolita) was smoking with a smile on his face.