The Gate of the Sun. Derek Lambert
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of the Casa de Campo crossing the bridges of the Manzanares – what was left of it after the long hot summer – and scaling the heights beside the palace. Could an ill-equipped, ill-assorted ragbag of militia, sleepless and hungry, skulls echoing with explosions, some armed with canned fruit tins stuffed with dynamite, defend itself against 105 mm artillery and the German bombers of the Condor Legion?
Some thought it could.
Among them La Pasionaria who, dressed in black and fierce of face, preached courage to dazed fighters in blue overalls.
Among them a young sailor named Coll who tossed dynamite beneath Italian tanks rumbling towards the centre of the city, disabled them, proving that tanks weren’t invincible, and got himself killed.
Among them children digging trenches and old women boiling olive oil to pour on Fascist heads and younger women defending a bridge vulnerable to enemy attack and tram-drivers taking passengers to the battle front for five centimos.
And their belief given wings by the spectacle of Russian fighters, rats, shooting the bombers out of the cold skies and the soldiers, many wearing corduroys and blue berets, steel helmets on their belts, who materialized on the Sunday 8 November, singing the Internationale in a foreign tongue.
Russians, of course. Word spread through the bruised avenues and alleys: relief was at hand. Except that they weren’t Russians at all; they were 1,900 recruits of the 11th International Brigade, Germans, British, French, Belgians and Poles; Communists, crooks, intellectuals, poets and peasants.
But they armed the ragbag of defenders with hope.
The Ju-52 bomber looked innocent. It had split from its formation and, with the November-grey sky temporarily free of Russian fighters, it was looking for a target with grotesque nonchalance.
Ana noticed that it was heading in the general direction of her old home but only vaguely because at the time she was preoccupied with an argument with her husband.
Jesús was writing about the war for the Communist newspaper Mundo Obrero and providing captions for the fine, fierce posters the Republicans were producing.
She kicked off her rope-soled shoes and said, ‘So how was the housekeeping today?’ Rosana, who was eating sunflower seeds in the corner of the room, spitting the husks into a basket, turned her head; she was ten years old and sensitive to atmosphere.
‘I got some rice,’ he said. ‘A few weevils in it but we don’t get enough meat as it is.’
‘It’s a pity,’ she said, ‘that you have to write for a Communist newspaper.’
‘I write for the Cause. In any case, isn’t La Pasionaria a Communist?’
‘She is for the Cause,’ said Ana who knew she was a Communist too.
‘She is a great woman,’ Jesús agreed.
‘Fire in her belly,’ said Ana who had just taken food and brandy to the high positions overlooking the Casa de Campo where, on 1 May, her brother Antonio had announced his betrayal. She had also crossed the Manzanares to the suburb of Carabanchel, and taken rifles and ammunition from dead men in the trenches to give to the living and she had taken a dispatch through the centre of Madrid, through the Gran Via, Bomb Alley, where she had seen a small boy lying dead in a pool of his own blood, and the corpse of an old man with a pipe still stuck stiffly in his mouth.
‘But a Communist nonetheless,’ Jesús remarked.
‘So?’
‘It was you who were complaining that I write for a Communist newspaper. It would be a terrible thing, would it not, if we fell out within ourselves. Communists and Anarchists and Socialists …’
Ana said, ‘It is better to fight than to preach.’
Rosana spat the striped, black-and-white husk of a sunflower seed into the basket.
‘I am no fighter,’ Jesús said.
‘Are you proud of it?’
‘I am not proud of anything.’ He went to the charcoal stove to examine the black saucepan of rice from which steam was gently rising. The ancestors on the walls looked on.
‘Not even me?’
‘Of you I am proud. And Rosana.’ He smiled at their daughter.
Rosana said, ‘When is the war going to finish, papa?’ and Jesús told her, ‘Soon, when the bad men have been driven away from our town.’
‘By whom?’ Ana asked, feeling herself driven by a terrible perversity.
‘By our soldiers,’ Jesús said.
Rosana said, ‘Why don’t you fight, papa?’
‘Some people are born to be soldiers. Others …’
‘Housekeepers,’ Ana said.
‘Or poets,’ he said. ‘Or painters or mechanics. Mechanics have to repair the tanks and the guns; they cannot fight.’ He smiled but there was a sad curve to his lips.
Rosana cracked a husk between her front teeth and said, ‘The father of Marta Sanchez was wounded in the stomach. He can’t eat any more because there’s a big hole there.’
Her hair was curly like her father’s and her teeth were neat but already she is obstinate, like me, Ana thought. She wants many things and she uses guile to get them; she will be a handful, this one.
‘Why are Fascists different from us?’ Rosana asked and Jesús said, ‘I sometimes wonder if they are.’
The ground shook as bombs exploded. Yesterday Pablo had come back with a jagged sliver of shrapnel so hot that it had burned his hand.
Ana said, ‘Because they are greedy.’
‘And cruel?’ Rosana asked.
‘But they are Spaniards,’ Jesús said. ‘Born in different circumstances.’
‘You called them bad men just now,’ Rosana said.
‘Ah, you are truly your mother’s daughter.’ He stirred the rice adding fish broth.
And Ana thought: I should be doing that and he should be peering down the sights of a machine-gun, but since the war had begun the role of many women had changed, as though it had never been intended any other way, as though there had always been a resilience in those women that had never been recognized. And respect for women had been discovered to such an extent that, so it was said, men and women slept together at the front without sex.
She heard the sound of a plane strumming the sky; the Ju-52, perhaps, returning from its nonchalant mission. She hoped the Russian-built rats fell upon it before it landed. She wondered about the pilot and bomb-aimer, Germans presumably. She wondered about the pilots of the Capronis, Italians. Did any of them understand the war and had they even heard of the small towns they bombed? She thought the most ironic aspect of the war was the presence of the Moors: it had taken the Christians 700 years to get rid of them and here they were fighting for the Church.
Ana took the bota from beside the sink and poured resinous wine down her throat; it made a channel through her worries. Rosana picked up her skipping-rope and went into the yard.
Jesús settled his thin body in an upright chair beside Ana, took the bota, wetted his throat and said, ‘Why are brothers killing brothers, Ana. Can you tell me that?’
‘Because it has to be,’ she said. ‘Because they were bleeding us.’
‘Could we not have used words instead of bullets?’
‘Spaniards have always fought.’ Her voice lost some of its roughness and her words became smooth pebbles in her mouth. ‘But perhaps our time has come. Perhaps this war was born a long time ago and has to be settled. Perhaps we will not fight again,’ she said.
‘But we will always talk,’ he said, smiling at her