A distracted gesture in that direction: listen to the end of the story, cabrones.
‘Then they transferred me to Paris once and for all, to organise las Brigadas, the International Brigades. With Longo, that’s right. When I arrived in Spain, to defend the republic, there was such a mess I can’t even tell you. We worked day and night, it was all meetings, consulting files, greasing rifles, organising the brigades. And what a confusion of tongues! Fuck, the English understood one thing, the Russians another, the Hungarians understood A, the Yugoslavs B, then the Americans, the Germans, we Italians, the Irish, locos, loquisimos! puta vida, that’s why we lost the war! No one understood anyone else!’
From the other room, the inexhaustible flood of words, slow, cadenced, stressed the lawyer’s argument. Ah, but when you’ve got all those ideas in your head.
Father and son craned their necks to peer around the corner and see who that voice belonged to.
Get their attention back, straight away: ‘Then, after the defeat, Mexico took us in. No one wanted us. We even built a monument a los hermanos mexicanos! If it wasn’t for them. Ah, but I never went back to Russia, to freeze my arse off, no thank you very much. And so many things had changed. They’d got rid of everyone I had known in the twenties. Traidores, Stalin said. Fuck, you make the revolution, and they shoot you as an enemigo of the people. No thanks, give me Mexico any day. They asked me to help them kill Trotsky as well. I said no, you can do that without me, el compañero Mantovani is withdrawing from the fray. So they killed Trotsky with an ice-pick and I opened this cantina. Then one night they tried to snuff me as well. They waited for me in the street. There were three of them. Burying them in the field was a task and a half.’
The end.
The meeting in the next room, on the other hand, showed no signs of reaching a conclusion. León thought: if it goes as it usually does, this is going to be another late night.
So he made himself comfortable. Legs stretched out on the chair. ‘Now I want to retire. The city does nothing for me now. I want to retire to the sea, where it’s hot, and do nothing todo el dia. Por eso I’m selling the bar. And if you really are interested, I advise you to take advantage of the fact, because it’s a good price.’
The two listeners re-emerged from the story rubbing their eyelids.
The father was the first to speak. ‘Yes, it’s a good price sure enough. But we also need advice.’
At that moment the river of words coming from the other room became more intense, almost a roar.
The boy couldn’t help asking, ‘Who is that man talking in there?’
‘The lawyer. A great mind, and with two enormous great cojones. He’s an exile too, like all the rest of us.’
‘One hell of a harangue!’ commented the boy. ‘He’s been at it for two hours now!’
‘In his own country, that man there attacked an army barracks. A fine brain and balls de hierro, entiendes? except when he starts talking. ’ A shrug of the shoulders. ‘There are political refugees from all around the world here. If you stick around, you’ll hear some good ones. Take the lawyer, for example: he’s looking for decent people to train up some guerrillas. He wants to topple a dictator and free his island! Every now and again I tell him he’s mad. Like Don Quixote, you know. Then it occurs to me that I’ve spent my whole life with mad people and I’ve never regretted it.’
A strange light gleams in the eyes in the older of his two listeners. ‘Train up some guerrillas?’
Explain it to him: ‘This is Latin America, compadre. You should never be surprised about anything. Think of the most ridiculous thing you can imagine, and it’s perfectly normal here.’
At that moment the tall and corpulent figure of the lawyer approached the bar. Every now and again even his throat dried up.
‘Abogado, qué tal? Deje que le presente a mis amigos.’
He wore an elegant black suit, his hair was short and curly, slicked back with brilliantine, a jovial, slightly chubby face, with a thin moustache. He couldn’t have been more than thirty.
León Mantovani pointed to his guests: ‘Le presento a dos compañeros italianos. Piense que el padre luchó junto al comandante Tito contra la dominación nazifascista. Estuvo en las montañas con la guerrilla. ’
The man shook hands with the old partisan.
‘Muy honrado. abogado Castro Ruz.’
Then he did the same to the boy, and it was as though he had transmitted a strange sensation to him.
One that suggested that life, like history, would never be short of surprises.
End Titles
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These are really the thoughts of all men in all ages and lands, they are not original with me, If they are not yours as much as mine they are nothing, or next to nothing, If they are not the riddle and the untying of the riddle they are nothing, If they are not just as close as they are distant they are nothing.
This is the grass that grows wherever the land is and the water is, This the common air that bathes the globe.
Walt Whitman, ‘Song of Myself’, 17
On Cary Grant (1904–86)
Cary and Betsy separated in 1958 and divorced four years later. Cary married twice more. He retired from the cinema in 1966, after about seventy-two films. He became a director of the cosmetics multinational Fabergé. He died in 1986 and was cremated, and his ashes were scattered to the wind.
‘I used LSD about a hundred times before it became illegal.’ (C.G.) A subculture of Cary Grant fans lives and thrives on the web. The most complete site is: www.carygrant.net. You can also sign up to Warbrides, the email fan club: www.carygrant.net/warbrides.html Among the many biographies and critical works, we would be happy to recommend: McCann, G., Cary Grant: A Class Apart, Columbia University Press, 1997.
Imagine that Cary amused himself by putting hidden references to his Yugoslavian adventure into his subsequent films. Have fun spotting them!
On Frances Farmer (1914–70)
Hollywood tried to salve its guilty conscience by dedicating a film to her. Frances (1982) is sustained by a mesmeric performance from Jessica Lange, and describes very effectively the progressive slide into misery and the descent to hell, even if it is strained in places. For example, there is no proof that Frances underwent a transorbital lobotomy. The film simply skips the last twenty years of her life and ‘career’: two marriages, odd jobs, moving from Seattle to San Francisco before finally settling in Indianapolis, where she fronted a television show, before dying of cancer, having written an autobiography, Will There Really be a Morning?, published posthumously in 1972.
Frances was buried in Oaklawn Garden Memorial Cemetery in Indianapolis, Indiana.
Nirvana dedicated a song to her, ‘Frances Farmer Will Have Her Revenge on Seattle’, on the album In Utero, 1993.
The daughter of Kurt Cobain and Courtney Love is called Frances.
Dedicated sites:
www.geocities.com/the mistyone/index2.html
www.people.virginia.edu/pm9k/libsci/FF/francesF.html
On Lucky Luciano (1897–1962)