Tomb in Seville (6 page)

W
E FOUND FELIPE AT
his desk in the basement of his tall, grey, narrow hotel, and decided that Salvador had by no means exaggerated his description of it as being working-class. It contained a large number of clean, severely-furnished rooms which were available at the equivalent of roughly one shilling and six pence per person a night. Notices admonished guests to observe rigid moral standards. Anyone, said a large placard, failing to observe the rules of education and punctilious manners would be expelled instantly, whatever the hour of day or night. ‘There is no restaurant,’ Felipe said, ‘but you may bring down your tray for morning coffee, midday and evening meals, and then return with it to your room.’ A mole twitched continually on his left cheek as he spoke, and his expression in between sentences was victimised by an unfocused smile.

‘Salvador spoke about the roof terrace,’ I said.

‘He’s right,’ Felipe agreed. ‘Your room will be on the top floor. It will be easy for you to reach the roof, but equally easy for someone you may not wish to see to enter your room. Remember that we have a secret police.’

What we hadn’t realised at first was that Felipe’s hotel was just inside the frontier of the working-class district of Atocha. We took a short exploratory walk, although in the wrong direction. By turning left we should have reached in about five minutes an area of palm-shaded avenues and small, respectable parks. As it was we turned right into what remained of the unimproved Madrid. At this particular moment it had become one of the principal foci of the class struggle, and a few hundred yards across the Atocha frontier trams, although empty of passengers, carried four soldiers on the front platform and four more at the rear.

Fear held Atocha in its grip. There was an occasional ping of a sniper’s rifle followed by a wild fusillade as the police let go at suspicious objects. The newly-created Assault Guards had been brought in to take on the revolutionaries. Most of them were in their early twenties, and I had read in a newspaper that many had been chosen not for their military bearing but their good looks. Here under the sniper fire in Atocha they seemed to be terror-stricken, blazing away with their German sub-machine-guns at windows and rooftops. One who had been wounded in the arm was crying like a child.

Setting out from the hotel, we were anxious not to surrender to an overdramatisation of the events, covering the first few hundred yards as if enjoying a leisurely morning stroll. We were converted by the sight of a well-dressed citizen lying in the gutter with something like red jelly spread over his chest at the opening of his shirt. Turning a corner moments later, we faced a machine-gun pointing vaguely at our stomachs and were halted by the threatening yell of the gunner. With that we came into line with the Madrileños, our hands went up, and we turned back.

We stopped for a drink at the Bar Atocha. I could not get over my amazement that whatever the danger and drama out in the streets, places like this not only stayed open but attracted business. To lessen the possibility of being robbed by death of his clientele the owner had cut off the main part of his café with a barricade of chairs and tables. There was a line of bullet holes across the window from one end of the café to the other. Even the bar itself was chipped and splintered by ricocheting bullets and a blood splash on the floor had not been wholly scrubbed out.

The owner was a Cuban from Havana who spoke American English which he kept trim, he said, by a daily visit to a cinema specialising in American films. This was his sixth revolution, but his first experience of the Spanish version, where, he explained with approval, they made a point of doing their best not to shoot a man in the cobblers. ‘The smart thing they do here when a man goes looking for a battle is to have a broad carry the gun. The one thing you have to hand to these guys is they never search the women.’

The day before had been a bad one. As he had left the café to go home he had been arrested and hauled off to the police station where they pushed him around a bit but then let him go.

‘What about today?’ I asked him. ‘What’s the programme for the day?’

‘Oh, I guess it’s safe enough in the morning,’ he said. ‘Put it this way, people need a break to do their shopping.’

‘How about the afternoon?’

‘Well, I guess that’s different. Maybe you heard. The Red Army has to come out some time before tonight.’

‘And will it?’

‘Christ only knows. Maybe it will, maybe it won’t. The guys at the top have to get together and stop the arguments. All depends on what comes through from Barcelona and the North.’

‘So what’s happening up there?’

‘They declared a separate state, but it’s supposed to have fizzled out already. News is that Asturias has gone Red. General López Ochoa was sent up there but they say the Reds derailed the train and cut his head off.’

‘What about the Reds in this city? Are they well armed?’

‘The usual thing. Machine-guns and hand grenades. We shan’t know much about it until later in the day. Right now they’re knocking out police stations and barracks. If they go down, the churches will go up.’

‘Why should that be?’ Eugene asked.

‘Because these guys hate the work of the Almighty Lord.’

‘That’s bad,’ Eugene told him. ‘But why?’

‘Because that’s the way they are.’

‘From what you say we ought to be moving on and looking for a quieter place.’

‘No hurry, it’s not much past ten now. You’ve got until at least two before the trouble starts. That’s when I’m shutting up. Hop into the nearest shop if anything starts. You don’t have to worry about the Assault Guards so much, unless they get really sore. It’s the untrained soldiers who can’t shoot straight that bother me. If you’re caught in some bad shooting don’t try to run for it. Just lie down in the street wherever you happen to be, and wait till it stops. Better if you can eat in a place where the waiter puts on a uniform, and when you need to shop choose one with an elevator. Best shopping as you probably know is round the Mediodía Station. You can always pop in and study the timetables if the shooting starts.’

And this, without warning, it did, and too late the shopkeepers struggled to get their shutters down as bullets demolished their windows and glass showered on the pavements. Machine-guns stamped an orderly pattern across the anarchic clamour of pistol and rifle reports. People were collapsing as they ran, doubling up and sprawling in the roadway, having fainted, stopped a bullet or collapsed from sheer terror. With tyres squealing a car lurched out of a side street. The inside back wheel bumped heavily on the kerb, and we sensed rather than saw that a machine-gun was being fired from it. An elderly man running towards us stopped suddenly, as if he had forgotten something, before turning to bolt into a shop doorway where he fell on his knees. Somehow we were able to extricate ourselves and reach the shelter of the hotel. The hubbub spreading up the side streets from the Puerta del Sol was close on our heels.

Back at the hotel we found the residents grouped on the stairs. This, through long experience, was deemed to be the safest place in such an emergency. We pushed past them and went up to our top room on the corner. From there we had an unobstructed view in three directions. At this height the racket was even more appalling; the individual reports produced by a variety of firearms amalgamated in a vast blur of sound. Assault Guards were advancing up the side streets, hugging the walls and exchanging fire with unseen adversaries on the roofs. Directly below on the opposite side of the road was a pork butcher’s shop whose owner had been too late to get the shutters up. While we looked on from our balcony the windows collapsed under a machine-gun volley. We were later to discover it had inflicted posthumous lesions on the porkers still suspended on their hooks.

Once or twice a distant scream asserted itself above the clamour. In a brief interlude of silence we heard the tapping of a blind beggar’s stick in the street below. He was lurching wildly and appeared to be hit. Two workers rushed out and took him by the arms, disappearing round one corner as an Assault Guard came into sight round the other. He pointed his rifle at our window. We slammed the shutters and stood back against the wall. No shot was fired, and as soon as it seemed safe to change our position we got out of the room and went downstairs.

A great assortment of ordinary people caught up in the street battle had taken refuge in the hotel. Left-wing strikers from the factories who had thrown their guns away when things got bad and made a dash for the nearest open door mixed with peasants who had come up, as they frankly admitted, to see the fun. The restaurant had opened at the usual evening hour but served nothing but coffee, and a doctor attended to the wounds of a guest stretched out on a table, whose screams, since no anaesthetics were available, added to the pandemonium.

Two communists introduced themselves politely and sat down at our table. They announced their political views with the pride with which in medieval days a man might have claimed membership of some knightly order. ‘Good evening, I am Manuel Maltés. This is my friend, Estebán Iriarte.’ Manuel was a mountainous Andalusian, a lawyer who had renounced collar, tie and razor as a tribute to his political views. Estebán, a cadaverous-faced Madrileño with melancholy eyes, a nostalgic expression and a gentle voice, appeared to be the intellectual disciple of the first.

The memory of that great propagandist of the English Bible, George Borrow, was still green in Spain. At this time I was the brief possessor of a beard, and the word had gone round among our Spanish acquaintances that we were engaged in the sale of bibles. These two militant atheists had apparently thought that it would be amusing to draw us into taking up the cudgels for Christ. With this misapprehension out of the way, Manuel recited poetry of the elemental kind, talking of such fundamental things as birth, life and the earth. Estebán hung on his words with the tears rolling down his face.

The varying thicknesses of wall separating us from the street had partially blanketed out the sounds of the battle. Only the constant crash of grenades exploding close to the hotel shattered the moments of silence, jarred the crockery and set the pans jangling in the kitchen. In the intervals a loudspeaker somewhere in the street brayed out messages of comfort and reassurance. ‘We are happy to be able to announce to our listeners that complete tranquillity has been restored throughout Spain.’

‘Turn it off,’ yelled a voice.

‘No, leave it alone,’ said another, ‘it won’t be long before our fellows take over the station.’

Among the more disturbing reports was one saying that the communists would that night use a plane to bomb the Gobernación—the Ministry of the Interior—which was located in an immense complex of buildings two streets away. The difficulty with this project, according to a comrade who had served in the Air Force, was that the lack of practice at such a nocturnal assault would expose a large part of the area to considerable risk.

Another factor bothering our new acquaintances was that a resident might be tempted to strike a blow for Socialism by sniping from the hotel, thus producing police reprisals of a vigorous and undiscriminating kind. While this was under discussion a man in his working clothes came in and sat down at the next table. He had been wounded in the neck, which was wrapped with a blood-soaked scarf. A basin of soup was produced in his honour, and this he drank with some difficulty and much coughing. The soup finished, he called over a woman and emptied two pocketfuls of bullets into her lap. This was done without attempt at concealment.

A few minutes later there was a loud report seeming to come from the direction of the skylight, which was repeated at intervals. This attracted the notice of two Assault Guards outside in a car. They shone a searchlight at the door but, possibly believing themselves to be outnumbered, drove off.

Next morning we got up and went down to the Puerta del Sol for breakfast. It was served, revolution or not, with the speed and good humour of any normal day. Everywhere the walls were flecked with bullet marks. Every shop window in sight had been punctured or devastated by direct hits or flying fragments. The Gobernación remained inviolate. It was surrounded by a large force of Assault Guards brought there in vehicles like old-fashioned brakes, with open sides and therefore offering no protection for the guards perched in rows on unprotected benches. Three trams had been derailed, but the revolutionaries had now been replaced by sightseers, and a group of Guards were no more than entertained by a lunatic who threatened them with a child’s toy gun.

A
T DAWN THE NEXT
day, all was quiet. Soon after daybreak we were called to the window by the sounds of jingling harnesses and plopping hooves. A squad of steel-helmeted cavalry was defiling down the street towards the centre of town. I decided that the Spanish army was yet another military machine that hoped to acquire martial virtue by moulding itself externally on the pattern of the Reichswehr. There was even something Germanic about the shrieked word of command.

We got up and again went down to the Puerta del Sol for breakfast. Much as on the previous day, the morning vitality of Madrid had been in no way damaged by the night alarms. There were new bullet marks on the walls. Every other shop window had been punctured by direct hits or devastated by flying fragments. The Gobernación remained inviolate and was still surrounded by a large force of Assault Guards.

Outside the Gobernación a queue had been formed to buy
El Debate,
the clerical newspaper, which, being unpopular among the working population, was being sold under police protection. We stood in the queue until the supply was exhausted, and then wandered away.

In the Calle Alcalá an ordinary newspaper-seller was doing a brisk trade with the
ABC.
This was a notable and somewhat reactionary daily. Just as we came up he stuffed the remaining copies under his coat and walked away quickly. We went after him and offered him ten times the usual price for a copy. He rejected our offer, telling us that he had just been warned on pain of death to stop selling.