Читать книгу The Angel Of History - Bruno Arpaia - Страница 9

Chapter Two

What’s that, my son? Still going on about your German, your philosopher? His name was Benjamin, wasn’t it now? He must have really been someone – a very important person if you came all the way to Mexico from Italy, all those thousands of miles, just to talk to a poor old man like me.Yes, I’m very old. Do you know that this October 26, I’ll turn seventy-eight? Have I already told you that? You’ll have to forgive me. Andrés, my grandson, the boy who let you in, he’s always making fun of me because I can’t keep things straight. I never remember what happened yesterday or the day before. He says that I have diseased arteries and that I’m incurable. What can I do about it? I’m certainly not going to let it bother me. Let him talk. If I were really sick, people wouldn’t joke about it. Instead you’d all treat me with those pious little smiles that people reserve for jackasses. It’s better to play along.You want to know what I really suffer from? The affliction of time. Just like my grandfather, may he rest in peace. After a certain point, he’d answer questions that you’d asked him three days earlier. He’d mix up the before and after. But I remember things from fifty years ago as if they were happening now. That’s why I remember your philosopher perfectly.As I said, it must have been autumn 1940. I found myself at the top of the Pyrenees in the middle of the night, standing on the French–Spanish border on the Lister Trail.What was I doing up there? Well, that’s another story.You should know that I was born in Spain, in Asturias. I wasn’t born here in Mexico. But I’ve been living here for the last fifty years. I came here back in 1941 to save my skin and I stayed, because I couldn’t ever go back. At sixteen, in October 1934, I was in the middle of the Asturias revolution. I hardly need to explain that we were fighting for a lost cause. Two thousand dead, fifteen thousand prisoners tortured. There were the legionnaires, the Moors of the African army raping women and burning down houses. My mother died then, struck down by a bomb. It fell on us by accident. Maybe they just dropped it so that they wouldn’t have to carry it back to their base, which would make them look bad. It was rotten luck. I didn’t have a great time of it either. I spent a month in jail, being beaten and tortured like so many others, and then I made it out. I don’t even know how. I managed to escape to France in the hold of a ship carrying cider to La Rochelle. I stayed there for a year, living in squalid flea-traps, or in fields where we’d built barracks for ourselves, running from the cold. We went from Orléans to Dieppe and then to Saint Nazaire. In 1936, when we won the elections, I went home. We didn’t even have time to celebrate, not to mention catch our breath, and there I was with a rifle in my hands. I must have been almost eighteen when those bastards rose up again in July of ’36.War. That was the only life I knew. It was my trade. I didn’t like it but what could I do about it? There wasn’t any choice, we had to defend ourselves, fight back. I knew those men well. Giving up would have been the same as committing suicide. So I slung my rifle over my shoulder and set off again.

I fought in Gijón, my city, and I then joined the offensive against Oviedo in February ’37. In July Colonel Aranda claimed he was with us, but he led the rebellion against us – the traitor. He laid siege to the city and wasn’t budging. More than thirty thousand of us mounted a counter–attack but those sons of bitches had cannons and fought us off. We lost. I don’t know how many men died. It was a disaster. In the meantime, General Mola launched an attack against the Basques and we had to go help them. In May I was made a sergeant and they sent me to Bilbao to protect the city in the cinturón de hierro against the raids by German Condor Legion and the Navarre and Italian armies with their carts and cannons. I thought I would never see anything more horrifying in my life. But there’s no end, my son, to the very worst.

I was a socialist, even if my company was made up of anarchists. I’d fought with them – the CNT, the anarchists’ trade union – years before and I have to say that I was happy with them. They were good people; those guys had balls. And we were united by the fact that for both of us, getting along with the communists, well, let’s say it was never wine and roses. My lieutenant was also my friend, Mariano Peña. I’ve already told you about him. We grew up together, were toddlers together, went to school together, went snail hunting in the marsh along the banks of the Piles river. We started chasing the girls who went parading along the calle Corrida or out on the boardwalk. Then, little by little, we started going to party meetings; there were strikes, weapons, the elections, and then there we were, part of the revolution. I mean the 1934 revolution. I like to think we were well behaved, even if our combined age didn’t top forty. If you had seen him, standing on the Gijón barricades directing the men and the battle! How he did it. He seemed born to it; born to give orders. That’s why they made him a lieutenant in two years, even though he was so young. And even though he was shit as a person. He was a nun-chaser, a snake and a hothead. You could tell right away when he got agitated because he’d start twisting his curls with his fingers and look you right in the eyes. He had an icy stare. Lucky for me we were friends.

All that aside, if it weren’t for him I don’t think I would have survived Bilbao. They came from the sky, fifty fighter planes, seventy three-motors, massacring us with machine guns and bombs. On the ground they deployed three brigades armed with heavy artillery. You didn’t shoot back, you hoped they didn’t hit you . . . hoped you’d be luckier than the guy next to you. The Basques prayed, but we didn’t even do that, because we were all atheists and had to make do with hand-gestures to ward off the bad luck. It was one o’clock on the eleventh of June – I remember it as if it were yesterday. The nationalists broke through our front, but it took them another week to occupy the entire city, and another two months before we got to Santander. Our men crumpled before those brutal cowards – some more, some less – we just let them come at us without realising that what we needed to do was buy some time. But Mariano knew that and he deployed our company the right way; they only got a few of us, who they could, and we’d stand, doing what we could to hold up another line of combat. It went on like that until September. Months of eating badly, sleeping with our eyes open, staring at the sky, ears perked up and our hearts in our throats.We were almost happy when the order came down to retreat back to Asturias – even if we knew that it had gone badly. Back to face our destiny, the cursed destiny of Asturias. Surrounded just like we were three years earlier, barely protected by the remnants of an army that had already lost Bilbao and Santander. We hardly had any provisions and only about twenty planes. Then it was October again. What a coincidence. The German planes came through Infiesto and Arriondas and left maybe four houses standing. Troops in Solchaga, our lines crushed in Ibarrola, and in the meantime the Italians were attacking Avilés. I asked Mariano, ‘Why do we keep going? It’s over. Shouldn’t we just try to save our asses before those bastards sink the only ships we have left?’

We were standing on the front looking out towards Villaviciosa. There were twenty men and two machine guns guarding the bridge. It was drizzling that night but we hardly noticed. Mariano and I were going from one command station to another trying to get ammo.We only had a couple of boxes; just enough for half an hour of steady fire and that wasn’t enough. But no matter who we asked, no one wanted to give us supplies. That’s why I’d started talking like that . . . and because my stomach was howling for food . . . and because I could see that it was getting harder and harder for us to keep soldiers on the line. So many ran, they went home or went looking for a ship, even a fishing boat, to escape on.

‘I’m serious, Mariano,’ I said. ‘What are we fighting for now?’

I knew he’d start twisting his hair, but I’d never imagined he’d get so pissed.

‘Bastard,’ he said, ‘cowardly bastard.’ And then he pointed his rifle at my chest and clenched his teeth. Then he calmed down. He wasn’t blind and he knew I wasn’t wrong. He just didn’t want to admit it.