Operation Garbo (3 page)

The man’s name was Adolf Hitler; his doctrine,
Mein Kampf.
Hitler hated both the political parties of the Left, as well as those which supported the Hapsburgs. His greatest spite, though, he reserved for the Jewish people, whom he managed to nearly exterminate by the most perverse, malignant and evil means ever witnessed in history. Many millions were his victims and their deaths were upon his conscience. Mankind would not tolerate such satanic splendour. Nor would I. That was why I fought against injustice and iniquity with the only weapons at my disposal.

‘O
n reading a biography, bear in mind that the truth can never be published.’ I do not accept this dictum of George Bernard Shaw’s, but would rather claim that there is an exception to every rule. I intend in these pages to refute the famous Irish writer’s comment by directing every effort toward exploring all that I can unearth about the double identity that became
ARABEL–GARBO
.

When I look back at the past, I seem to be watching a documentary which, despite the whirlwind of time, has not become blurred. After four years at Valldèmia, I returned to Barcelona to attend a primary school less than half a block away from home, run by the De La Salle Brothers. The four of us also received private French lessons three days a week from a teacher from Marseilles, for French in those days was what English is today, the universal language of tourism, diplomacy and business. But what I remember most when I feel nostalgic is my beloved father, my friend and mentor. I remember the smell of his stinking, black tobacco, for which he had a passion. He particularly liked long, thin cigars, similar to those blended in Tuscany, which we in Catalonia call
caliquenyes
; in no time at all a room would reek so foully from the stench that we would all be forced to leave, so he usually did his best to smoke them out of doors where he would not inconvenience those around him. He frequently tried to give them up, but never succeeded.
He was eventually so poisoned by them that they contributed in no small way to his death.

I remember too his love of cards, a distraction which he particularly enjoyed on Sunday afternoons. His favourite game was Manilla, for which four people were needed. The group usually consisted of my father; a family friend; the headmaster of the local secondary school, who was a priest called Mossen Josep; and myself. Eventually, my father decided that my brother and I should attend Mossen Josep’s school. But if the truth be told, I soon found both the school and its headmaster extremely tedious. The lessons seemed endless and dull and I attended them most unwillingly. After three years there I had become a hefty fellow of fifteen, with an incipient beard. Soon I was shaving and thought myself every inch a man. Going out with girls accounted for a fair bit of my time and the rest I devoted to sports, gymnastics and hiking.

One day I had a row with one of my teachers: he had it in for me and I didn’t think much of him. I came home and told my father that I did not want to stay at school any longer. He took my decision calmly and replied that if I was not going to study anymore, I must get a job. I accepted the challenge and went to work in a hardware shop in the old Carrer Comte d’el Asalto, in the old quarter of Barcelona near the famous promenade or
Rambla
.

As an apprentice, I had to keep the shop clean, run errands and return to their rightful places all those tools which the shop assistants left out on the counters after they had shown them to prospective clients. Gradually, the dreariness of the routine and the hard work involved in having to sweep out such huge premises every day undermined my show of bravado. I gave up my job.

I decided I wanted to read for an arts degree and began to spend hours in my father’s library. In particular, I was fascinated by the origins of words and spent my days perusing book after book. It was during this period that my appendix burst and I
was rushed into the hospital, as I have already explained. When I had recovered from the operation, I decided not to read for an arts degree after all, but to become a chicken farmer. I made up my mind to enter the Royal Poultry School at Arenys de Mar as soon as I was well enough.

It was 1931, General Primo de Rivera’s long dictatorship had ended and a new government had been sworn in under General Berenguer, who had promised democracy and
municipal
elections.

Most of the large cities voted Republican, but in the
country
people voted overwhelmingly in favour of the Monarchist Party. Despite being in the minority, the Republicans claimed a victory because they had gained the cities and the
provincial
capitals. To avoid bloodshed, King Alfonso XIII left the country, but without formally abdicating. Power was then
transferred
into the hands of the centrist leader of the Republic, Niceto Alcalá Zamora.

All I could make out from the tangled web of
proclamations
, announcements and acclamations that followed was that Spain’s stability was swiftly coming to an end. It seemed to me that those who had endured a dictatorship backed by the king were now in revolt against the prevailing judicial and national unity. My father had a premonition that hard days were looming over the horizon for his countrymen, which worried him greatly. However, as fate would have it, he never knew what followed, for he died a few months after the birth of the Second Republic in 1931.

His death left a great vacuum in the family, and the flight of his soul from the world left me oppressed and overwhelmed, my heart gripped by deep sorrow. I had lost the one I loved most, for ever. His coffin was borne on the shoulders of his factory workers and accompanied by some of the patients from the Saint John of God Hospital for Sick Children, to which he had been a great benefactor. Many other mourners also followed this kind and generous man to his body’s last resting place. Fifty
years after his death, I feel that providence had been right to remove him from the scene before he could see the tribulation and suffering which his beloved country was to suffer.

After I had finished training to be a poultry farmer, it was time for me to report to barracks for compulsory military service. In those days it was possible for a conscript to buy himself out after serving for six months. This scheme, known as the Fee-Paying Military Service Scheme, had the additional advantage that those who joined it could spend their nights at home. Moreover, if a recruit took all the necessary military training courses and studied hard during those six months, he was allowed to graduate with a star as a second lieutenant.

I decided to join the scheme and so avoid some of the more onerous chores of military life. I was drafted into the Seventh Regiment of Light Artillery, which had its barracks near Barcelona’s harbour, in the
drassanes
or old dockyard area. Unfortunately, it turned out to be a cavalry regiment so I had to learn to ride. The captain who taught us was extremely harsh, so that I returned to barracks more than once with my buttocks on fire. The accepted cure for this was to apply a cloth to the raw part that had been soaked in vinegar and sprinkled with salt; when I did this, it made me see all the stars in the
firmament
. Such tough training left me with little love for the cavalry by the time I had won my spurs. I ended my military service without any enthusiasm whatsoever for my companions or my mount; I lacked those essential qualities of loyalty, generosity and honour that the cavalryman is meant to possess; I had no desire to stay in the army.

I was lucky not to have been called upon to quell any civil disturbances while doing my national service. In January 1933 anarchists took over the village of Casas Viejas near Cádiz and were ruthlessly put down by the security forces at the
instigation
of Manuel Azaña Diaz’s left-wing government: fourteen prisoners were shot. All our leave was cancelled, but thankfully it was too far away from Catalonia for us to be sent there.

In October 1934 there was a revolt in Asturias, which was put down by the then centre-right government. After that,
transitions
from one government to another were swift. Bad news travelled around the country even faster. Every day
newspapers
reported more violent deaths. Passions were unleashed in bloody fashion. Debates in Parliament degenerated into insults and diatribes; politicians quarrelled endlessly among
themselves
. One day a right-wing faction sitting outside a
coffee-bar
would be machine-gunned; the next day it was the turn of the Left. Shots were exchanged daily. To make matters worse, governments took part in reprisals, lashed their opponents and claimed powers never granted them by the constitution. The police force, swamped by endless acts of private retaliation, ended up contravening the laws themselves. Finally, there came a black day in the annals of the country, 18 July 1936, an
ill-fated
date that changed the course of Spanish history, for it saw the beginning of a bloody civil war.

I
have stumbled across dictatorships all too often during my life, albeit with different characteristics and aims; it almost seems as though they were following me around. Perhaps in trying to avoid them I have inevitably strayed into their orbits. Fortunately, I have never had any personal misadventures with such regimes because I have been careful never to give cause for anyone to take action against me. Let me emphasise, once again, my apolitical stance. This does not mean that I have no interest in politics, which are inevitably all around us; indeed, politics are so much part of our everyday life that they even turn up in our soup, as we say in Spain. When I say I am
apolitical
I mean, if I may make myself absolutely clear, that I have never belonged to any political party, nor have I ever given a penny to further the cause of any of them. I have never held a party membership card, nor do I feel strongly about any specific faction or group.

If one looks at two or three recent dictatorships, one sees that they have certain facets in common. Franco’s
dictatorship
, for example, was a direct result of blindness, disunity and disagreement among all the political parties before his rise to power. These parties were all too ready to talk about their own freedom while oppressing that of their neighbours. They were willing to defend their doctrinaire and absolutist ideas by fire and the sword, but they were not open to rational argument, nor did they show any tolerance for the opposition. When the
Right was in power it took advantage; when the Left dominated it would trample autocratically over its opponents. As a result, a third force emerged which overcame both the Left and the Right with its motto ‘Order, peace and respect’. Salazar’s
dictatorship
in Portugal occurred for the same reasons, as did Marcos Pérez Jiménez’s coup d’état in Venezuela, where endless battles between the Adecos and Copeyanos, the nation’s two most prominent political parties, brought about such a confused state of affairs that Jiménez had to intervene to restore order.

Those who impose a totalitarian regime argue in the same breath about their love for their country, their faith in its destiny and their hope for ‘peace, progress and bread’. But they hate an adversary who gets in their way, who detracts from their own glory. Authoritarian by nature, they detest opposition and will not accept censure or criticism. They are all for efficiency and obedience: crime has to be punished unceremoniously and at once. Unfortunately, this is a relief to many people, who then support the dictator, for the great majority crave law and order, which can be harder to achieve in a democracy – where
punishment
is tempered with justice – than under a dictatorship.

The Count of Maistre once said, ‘Every nation has the government that it deserves,’ which is a profound truth. But if only the politicians who governed us would concentrate more on their democratic role, not just with honeyed words but with specific deeds, then we would not have to deplore the way they curtail our freedom. Philosophers and writers such as Seneca, Goethe and Cervantes, to name but a few, clearly define the guilt incurred by any free man who unwittingly crushes
freedom
. Once a man has lost his freedom through incompetence, dogmatism, sectarianism or lack of appreciation, he will mourn that loss like Abderramán, the last Moorish king on Spanish soil, ‘who cried like a child over what he did not know how to defend as a man’.

There are various ways of fighting absolute rulers: man to man, by clandestine methods, in dumb silence and finally
through retreat. But dying in battle does not bring down
tyrannies
. The efforts of those who give their lives to regain lost freedom is never enough. Violence breeds further violence. Those who have sacrificed their lives are followed by others who are tortured and persecuted.

Despite all this fighting and dying, it is my firm belief that no liberating changes occur until and unless men use their brains, teach, argue and produce practical solutions for
regaining
the freedom that has been lost. Pio Baroja once said: ‘The sublime moment, the heroic act is more of an exaltation of the intellect than of the will.’

Balzac wrote a brief note, which he put under a picture of Napoleon, which read: ‘What he was unable to secure by the sword, I will attain by the pen.’ Such an outlook has greatly influenced mankind. For it is not enough to fight with weapons of destruction and annihilation; it is essential to fight with ideas: powerful arguments can destroy whole empires, dominions and tyrannies. History is full of examples showing that the pen is indeed mightier than the sword. I too believe this sincerely and absolutely. I have devoted the greater part of my life to this ideal, using all my talents, all my convictions, all possible schemes, machinations and stratagems. The Second World War was a decisive moment in the human epic: it gave birth to the story of
GARBO
, the central character in this book.

I can assert with pride and a clear conscience that I have never fired a rifle, nor any other gun for that matter, with an enemy in front of me. My feelings, my scruples, even my morals would not allow me to take the sublime gift of life away from my neighbour.

In 1936 I was managing a poultry farm twenty miles north of Barcelona, at Llinars del Vallès. On that ill-fated day, Sunday 18 July, I had arranged to go on an excursion to Mont Montseny with some friends of mine from the Catholic Club in Plaça Trilla, but all my plans kept collapsing like a house of cards.
Early in the morning I learned from my radio that there had been an attempted military coup. I rang my friends and
relations
to try to find out what was happening. ‘People are fighting and killing each other in the streets,’ said one. ‘They are putting up barricades of paving stones in the main square and in the avenues,’ said another. News spread like wildfire. Many, who were frightened, did not dare come out onto the streets. Others hung white sheets over their balconies, ostensibly to show their neutrality. Most of us stayed glued to our radios, which were transmitting messages and speeches from both sides, from the Nationalist rebels and from the Republicans.

I plucked up courage and decided to walk to my girlfriend’s house in Carrer Girona. I spent the whole of that Sunday with her and her family, listening intently to the radio and hoping that order would soon be restored. However, the situation grew worse as the hours went by; it was clearly no ordinary military coup d’état, but nobody had yet realised that it was the
beginning
of three long years of civil war.

The days that followed were filled with fear. Columns of smoke rose everywhere: convents, churches and local party political headquarters were being set on fire all over Barcelona. No one reported for work as all the unions had decreed an indefinite general strike. We were afraid to walk down the streets as armed militia were shooting at random at anything that moved. Food soon became scarce; people were forced to go out to augment their rapidly dwindling larders. They would creep to the nearest shop after careful reconnoitring only to find that many shopkeepers had put up their shutters; others only opened to those they knew. If a car loaded with militia happened to be passing just as the owner opened the door, the soldiers would dash in, ransack the shop and then drag off the shopkeeper, charging him with strike breaking.

Utter confusion reigned. Neighbour denounced neighbour, paying off old scores. Some accusations were made in order to earn the ‘right’ to become a revolutionary, others to obtain
a union card or in order to be thought a political radical. In this suspicious atmosphere everyone mistrusted everyone else: threats bred bewilderment and insecurity.

Catalans had backed the dictator General Primo de Rivera until he had tried to curtail Catalonia’s desire for autonomy; after that they had tried to undermine his rule. Now, six years later, the people were tired of dictatorships and coup d’états; they longed for stability and, with this in mind, had backed the Republicans. At first it looked as if the Republicans would easily retain control, for they seemed to have kept a grip on the
situation
in Barcelona and to have retaken those barracks where the soldiers were in revolt. But just as they appeared to be about to gain a crushing victory, they made an unforgivable political error: they gave orders for all the public prisons in the city to be opened up and for all those awaiting trial, be they political
prisoners
, convicted criminals or thieves, to be let out. This soulless, callous mob joined up with the paramilitary militias and roamed the city intent on plunder. The majority of these malcontents had no particular political convictions; all they wanted to do was steal. They burst into people’s houses pretending to search for hidden reactionaries and counter-reactionaries. Terror spread throughout the city and thousands died.

The Nationalist rebels now declared that a fifth column or secret group of Franco sympathisers was hiding in the city, which brought about an even bloodier series of
reprisals
. This time the victims were not just the comfortably off but those who, while not going the whole hog in support of Republican doctrines, were too frightened to join the
opposition
. Such middle-of-the-roaders were known as Radishes, red (or Republican) on the outside but white on the inside. Many Radishes were Catholics who had seen their churches and cathedrals sacked and burnt, their priests and nuns mocked and ridiculed before being murdered. Now their only hope was to go into hiding. The violence and the lawlessness destroyed people’s morale; it was no longer a matter of defending a cause
or fighting for a belief, it was just a matter of defending oneself and one’s family against extremists.

My younger sister Elena had been engaged to be married but, during one of the house searches, her fiancé was carted off in the name of the Republic by a self-appointed policing unit. No doubt he was charged with presumed membership of the fifth column. Later, Elena and my mother were themselves arrested as counter-revolutionaries, but thanks to a relative in the anarcho-syndicalist trade union, the CNT or Confederación Nacional del Trabajo, they were snatched from certain death and eventually released. When they were arrested it wasn’t just they who felt fear: the whole family trembled.

The Republicans, who considered themselves to be the legitimate government, now called up all officers in the reserves in order to replace those soldiers who had joined the rebels. It was therefore my duty to report to my regiment, but I was loath to take sides in such a fratricidal fight; I had no desire to participate in a struggle whose passions and hatred were so far removed from my own ideals. But by not reporting, I became a deserter, absent without leave. I had to hide.

Hopes that hostilities would soon end faded by Christmas. I therefore decided to stay permanently with my girlfriend. I had always felt close to her mother and father, who were old friends of my own parents, our two families being bound together by ties of affection and friendship.

One evening, just before Christmas, I was making such a noise in their kitchen, cracking hazelnuts and walnuts with a hammer, that I failed to hear a knock at the door and so did not realise that a police patrol had arrived to inspect the premises. (Evidently, we had been reported by one of those many ‘friends’ one couldn’t trust, though we never found out who it was.) The police made straight for the threshold of one of the doors and started levering up the wood with a chisel. They seemed to know the exact place where my girlfriend’s father and brother had gouged out a secret hole for hiding jewellery
and gold coins. The father was an agent for a large textile firm in Torrassa and had many contacts, so that as well as his own valuables, he had also hidden other people’s. As a result, both father and son were arrested and so was I. For the police had continued searching the flat and had entered the kitchen only to find me with a raised hammer, my ear glued to the door leading to the dining room, trying to find out what was going on.

We were taken by car to the Metropolitan Police Station in Via Laietana, a great stroke of luck because it meant that we had fallen into the hands of one of the more popular militias, or I am sure I would not now be telling this tale.

I was kept in prison for a week, despite repeatedly
protesting
my innocence. I kept assuring the police that I had only been in the house because I was engaged to the eldest daughter, but they continued to question me remorselessly, for as far as they were concerned I was a deserter. I was petrified, fearing that I might have to pay with my life. ‘Going for a walk’ was a common experience in those days.

Meanwhile, my girlfriend had got in touch with one of the units of
Socorro Blanco
, a secret organisation which endeavoured to assist those who were being persecuted for idealistic or
religious
reasons. One of their girl helpers posed as a
revolutionary
and arranged for me to be let out of the prison at dead of night. Free, I joined the ever-growing number of those leading a clandestine existence. I went into hiding again.

Remembering my position then makes my hair stand on end. The only way I can view it calmly is if I look upon it as an old bill I discounted forty-five years ago. But at the time I was all too aware that I had, unwillingly and unwittingly, become a criminal. I had no papers and would be in even worse trouble if the police caught me again.

I spent the next year in one of those sordid, narrow streets in the sleazy working-class area of Barcelona down by the harbour. The rented flat I was hiding in belonged to a taxi driver who lived there with his wife and son, a shrewd boy of
about nine. The taxi driver was away most of the time, ferrying recruits to the Aragon front. He told me that the shortage of arms was so great that newcomers had to get their guns from those who’d been killed or wounded. Men complained bitterly that everyone had a gun at the rear but up at the front line they were expected to fight for democracy without them.