The Gate of the Sun. Derek Lambert
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Why did he not write his sonnets in blood and tears instead of pale ink? wondered Ana who, since the heady days of courtship and consummation, had begun to ask many questions. It was she who had found the shanty in Tetuan, it was she who had found him a job paying five pesetas a week more than the National Archaeological Museum. But his bean soup was still the finest in Madrid.
When the left wing, the Popular Front, once again dispatched the Old Guard five months before the Civil War, Ana understood perfectly why strikes and blood-letting swept the country. The prisoners released from jail wanted revenge; the peasants wanted land; the people wanted schools; the great congregation of Spain wanted God but not his priests. What she did not understand were the divisions within the Cause and, although she reacted indignantly as blue-shirted youths of the Falange, the Fascists, terrorized the streets of the capital, she still didn’t acknowledge the hatred that was reaching maturity within herself.
On May Day, when a general strike had been called, she left the children with her grandmother and, with Jesús, who accompanied her dutifully but unenthusiastically, and her younger brother, Antonio, marched down the broad paseo that bisects Madrid, in a procession rippling with a confusion of banners. One caught her eye: ANTI-FASCIST MILITIA: WORKING WOMEN AND PEASANT WOMEN – red on white – and the procession was heady with the chant of the Popular Front: ‘Proletarian Brothers Unite’. In the side streets armed police waited with horses and armoured cars.
Musicians strummed the Internationale on mandolins. Street vendors sold prints of Marx and Lenin, red stars and copies of a new anti-Fascist magazine dedicated to women. And indeed women marched tall as the widows of the miners from Asturias advanced down the promenade. The colours of the banners and costumes were confusing – blue and red seemed to adapt to any policy – and occasionally, among the clenched fists, a brave arm rose in the Fascist salute.
After the parade the hordes swarmed across Madrid, through the West Park and over the capital’s modest river, the Manzanares, to the Casa de Campo, a rolling pasture of rough grass before the countryside proper begins. There they planted themselves on the ground, boundaries defined by ropes or withering glances, released the whooping children and foraging babies, tore the newspapers from baskets of bread and ham and chorizo, passed the wine and bared their souls to the freedom that was soon to be theirs.
Ana pitched camp between a pine and a clump of yellow broom where you could see the ramparts of the city, the palace and the river below, and, to the north, the crumpled, snow-capped peaks of the Sierra de Guadarrama.
Her happiness as she relaxed among her people, her Madrileños, who were soon to have so much, was dispatched by her brother after his third draught of wine from the bota. As the jet, pink in the sunshine, died, he wiped his mouth with the back of his hand and said, ‘I have something to tell you both. A secret,’ although she knew from the pitch of his voice that its unveiling would not be an occasion for rejoicing.
Antonio, one year her junior, had always been her favourite brother. And he had remained so, even when he married above himself, got a job, thanks to his French father-in-law in the Credit Lyonnais where, with the help of the bank’s telephones, he also traded in perfume, and mixed with a bourgeois crowd. He was tall, with tight-curled, black hair, a sensuous mouth and a nimble brain; his cheeks often smelled of the cologne in which he traded.
‘I have joined the Falange,’ he said.
It was a bad joke; Ana didn’t even bother to smile. Jesus took the bota and directed a jet of wine down his throat.
‘I mean it,’ Antonio said.
‘I knew this wine was too strong; it has lent wings to your brains,’ Ana said.
‘I mean it, I tell you.’ His voice was rough with pride and shame.
There was silence beneath the pine tree. A diamond-shaped kite flew high in the blue sky and a bird of prey from the Sierra glided, wings flattened, above it.
Ana said, ‘These are your wife’s words. And her father’s.’
‘It is I who am talking,’ said Antonio.
‘You, a Fascist?’ Ana laughed.
‘You think that is funny? In six months time you will be weeping.’
‘When you are taken out and shot. Yes, then I will weep.’ She turned to Jesús but he had settled comfortably with his head on a clump of grass and was staring at the kite which dived and soared in the warm currents of air.
Antonio leaned forward, hands clenched round his knees; he had taken off his stylish jacket and she could see a pulse throbbing in his neck. She remembered him playing marbles in the baked mud outside their home and throwing a tantrum when he lost.
He said, ‘Please listen to me. It is for your sake that I am telling you this.’
‘Tell it to your wife.’
‘Listen, woman! This is a farce, can’t you see that? The Popular Front came to power because enemies joined forces. But they are already at blows. How can an Anarchist who believes that “every man should be his own government” collaborate with a Communist who wants a bureaucratic government? As soon as the war comes the Russians, the Communists, will start to take over. Do you want that?’
‘Who said anything about a war?’
‘There is no doubt about it,’ Antonio said lighting a cigarette. ‘Within months we will be at war with each other.’
‘Who will I fight against? A few empty-headed Fascists in blue shirts?’
‘Listen, my sister. We cannot sit back and watch Spain bleed to death. The strikes, the burnings, the murders, the rule of the mob.’ He stared at the black tobacco smouldering in his cigarette. ‘We have the army, we have the Church, we have the money, we have the friends …’
‘Friends?’
‘I hear things,’ said Antonio who had always been a conspirator. ‘And I tell you this: the days of the Republic are numbered.’
Jesús, eyes half closed, said, ‘I am sure everything will sort itself out.’ He had taken a notebook from his pocket and was writing in it with an indelible pencil.
‘You were a Socialist once,’ Ana said to Antonio.
‘And I was poor. If I had stayed a Socialist or a Communist or an Anarchist I would have stayed poor. How many uprisings have there been in the past 50 years? What we need is stability through strength!’
‘And who will give that to us?’ She took the bota from her husband, poured inspiration down her throat. Her brother a Fascist? What about their brother, the sight knocked out of one eye by a police truncheon? What about their father, sacked by a priest with a trough of gold beneath his church? What about the miners, with their homemade bombs, gunned down by the military? What about the peasant paid with the chaff of the landowners’ corn?
‘There are many good men waiting to take command.’
‘Of what?’
‘I have said enough,’ Antonio said.
Jesús, licking the pencil point, said, ‘Good sense will prevail. Spain has seen too much violence.’
‘Spain was fashioned by violence,’ Antonio said. ‘But now a time for peace is upon us. After the battle ahead,’ he said. ‘Join us. The fighting will be brief but while it rages you can take the children into the country.’
She stared at him in astonishment. ‘Have you truly lost your senses?’
‘Life will be hard for those who oppose us.’
‘Threats already? A time for peace is upon us?’
Jesús said, ‘The milk of mother Spain is blood.’ He wrote rapidly in his notebook.
Antonio poured more wine down his throat and stood up, hands on hips. ‘I have tried,’ he said. ‘For the sake of you and your husband and your children. If you