We already knew what they were like. After the Republic came to power in 1931, they opposed coeducation; when lay education was established they sent their children to school with crucifixes on their breasts, they were the false piety of long skirts and smelly armpits, they were the Goths, enemies of Arabic cleanliness and Jewish thrift; bathing was proof of the Moorish taint, usury was a Hebrew sin. They were the corruptors of language, Laura, you would have to hear them to believe it; they spoke without shame of the values they were defending-the ardent breath of God, the noble home of the nation, the chaste and worthy woman, the fertile furrow of wheat against Republican eunuchs and Jewish Masons, Marxist sirens who introduce exotic ideas into Spain, sowing discord in the field of the robust Spanish Catholic faith; rootless cosmopolites, renegades, mobs thirsty for Spanish and Christian blood, red scum!, and for that reason Alberti’s costume balls on the roof of a theater illuminated by bombs were like a challenge from the other Spain, the one that always saves itself from oppression thanks to its imagination.
It was there I met two fellows, two Americans, from the International Brigades, which the Italian Communist Palmiro Togliatti and the French Communist André Marty were put in charge of organizing. Beginning in July 1936, about ten thousand foreign volunteers crossed the Pyrenees and by early November there were about three thousand in Madrid. The phrase of the moment was ¡No pasarán!, “They Shall Not Pass.” The fascists will not pass, but the brigade members will, received with open arms. The cafés filled with foreign soldiers and journalists. The people shouted to all of them, “Long live the Russians!” Among the others was a German Communist, an aristocrat with a fabulous name I’ll never forget: Arnold Friedrich Wieth von Golsenau. He approached me as if he recognized me, saying “Maura” and all my other last names, as if to assimilate the two of us, inducting me at his side into that species of impregnable superiority that is being both an aristocrat and a Communist. He noted my reticence and smiled. “People can trust us, Maura. We have nothing to gain. There can be no doubt about our honesty. A revolution should only be carried out by rich aristocrats, people without inferiority complexes or economic needs. Then there would be no corruption. It’s corruption that ruins revolutions and makes people think that if the old regime was detestable the new one is even more so because while the conservatives offered no hope, the left simply betrayed it.” “Things like that happen,” I answered in a conciliatory way, “because aristocrats and workers always lose revolutions while the bourgeoisie wins them.” “You’re right,” he conceded, “they always have something to win.” “And we,” I reminded him, “always have something to lose.” He laughed hard at that. I didn’t share the cynicism of Golsenau, who was known in the Brigades by his nom de guerre, “Renn.” There were two levels in this war, the level of those who talked war, theorized about it, thought about it, and invented strategies, and the level of the vast majority of the common people, who were everything but common. They were extraordinary and every day demonstrated their limitless bravery. You know, Laura, the first line of fire in all the great battles-Madrid and the Jarama, Brunete and Teruel, the defeat of Mussolini at Guadalajara-was never unmanned. The Republicans, the people, fought to be the first to die. Boys with their fists raised high, men with no shoes, women with the last family loaf of bread between their breasts, militiamen waving their rusty rifles-all fighting in the trenches, the streets, the fields. No one hesitated, no one ran. No one ever saw anything like it before. I was at the Jarama when the fighting intensified, with a thousand African troops arriving under the command of General Orgaz, protected by tanks and by the planes of the Nazi Condor Legion. The Russian tanks on the Republican side held back the fascist advance, and the front moved back and forth between the two, filling the hospitals with wounded and also with the sick, who caught the malaria brought by the Africans. There was some black humor in the situation, up to a point. Moors expelled from Spain by Ferdinand and Isabella in the name of blood purity were fighting on the side of the German racists against a republican and democratic people supported by the tanks of another totalitarian despot, Joseph Stalin. Almost instinctively, out of liberal sympathy, and because of antipathy to Renn and Togliatti, I became friends with Americans in the Brigade. Their names were Jim and Harry. Harry was a New Yorker, a Jew, motivated by two simple things: hatred of anti-Semitism and faith in Communism. Jim was more complicated. He was the son of a famous journalist and writer from New York and had come to Spain, even though he was very young-he must have been twenty-five then-with press credentials and the support of two famous correspondents, Vincent Sheean and Ernest Hemingway. Those two were competing to see which would have the honor of dying on the Spanish front. I don’t know why you’re going to Spain, Hemingway said to Sheean, when the only article you’ll produce is your own obituary, which won’t do you any good, because I’ll be the one to write it. Sheean, a brilliant and good-looking man, quickly shot back: The story of your death will be even more famous, and I’ll write it. Behind them came the tall, awkward, nearsighted one, Jim, and behind him came the little Jew in a jacket and tie, Harry. Sheean and Hemingway went on to be war correspondents, but Jim and Harry stayed to fight. The Jewish boy made up for his physical weakness with the energy of a fighting cock. The tall New Yorker, as a matter of principle, immediately lost his glasses and laughed about it, saying it was better to fight without seeing the enemy you were going to kill. Both of them had that New York sense of humor: sentimental, cynical, and, above all, self-mocking. “I want to impress my friends,” Jim would say. “I need to create a CV that will make up for my social complexes,” Harry would say. “I want to know fear,” Jim said. “I want to save my soul,” said Harry. And the two of them: “So long to ties.” Bearded, in sandals, their uniforms more ragged every day, singing songs from The Mikado (!) at the top of their lungs, the Americans were really the wit of our company. Not only did they lose their ties and eyeglasses, they even lost their socks, but they won the goodwill of all, Spaniards and Brigade members. That a nearsighted man like Jim could ask to be allowed to lead a squad on a night scouting mission proves the heroic madness of our war. Harry was more cautious: “We’ve got to go on living in order to go on fighting tomorrow.”
At the Jarama, notwithstanding the German planes, the Russian tanks, and the International Brigades, it was we, the Spaniards, who fought. Harry admitted it, but he pointed out, They are Spanish Communists. He was right. At the beginning of 1937, the Communist Party had grown from twenty thousand to two hundred thousand members, and by summer it had a million. The defense of Madrid gave them those numbers and that prestige. Stalin’s policies would erase them both. Socialism never had a worse enemy than Stalin. But last year Harry could see only the victory of the proletariat and its Communist vanguard. He would argue all day, he had read the entire corpus of Marxist literature, and he’d repeat it as if it were a Bible and end his speeches saying, “We’ll see tomorrow.” It was his Dominus vobiscum. For Harry, the trial and execution of a Communist as honorable as Bukharin was an accident on the road toward a glorious future. Harry Jaffe was a small, nervous man, intellectually strong, physically weak, and morally indecisive because he would not recognize the weakness of a political conviction that had not been subjected to criticism. In every detail, he contrasted with the lanky giant Jim, for whom theory was of no importance. “A man knows when he’s right,” he’d say. “So you’ve got to fight for what’s right. It’s simple. Here and now, the Republic is right and the fascists wrong. You’ve got to be with the Republic, and that’s that.” They were like Don Quixote and Sancho Panza, except that their La Mancha was called Brooklyn and Queens. Well, actually they were more like Mutt and Jeff, except they were young and serious. I remember Harry and I would smoke and argue, leaning against bridge railings, on the theory that fascists never attacked communication routes. Jim, on the other hand, was always looking for the fighting, requesting the riskiest positions, always in the most advanced line, “looking for my lost glasses,” he would joke. He was a tall, smiling, incredibly courteous man, very delicate in his way of speaking. (“I leave all bad words to my father. I’ve heard him say them so many times that they’ve lost their impact. In New York, there’s the public language of journalism, crime, rude competition, and another, secret language of sensibility, refined regard, and happy solitude. I want to go back and write in that second language, George old boy, but in fact my father and I complement each other. He thanks me for my language, and I thank him for his: What the fuck!” laughed the clumsy, brave giant.) I climbed trees with him to get a view of the Castilian countryside. Despite the wounds that war leaves on the body of the earth, we managed to make out flocks, windmills, carnation-colored afternoons, rose dawns, the girls’ solid legs, the furrows waiting for the trenches to close like scars; this is the land of Cervantes and Goya, I’d say to him, no one can kill it. It’s also the new land of Homer, he’d say back, a land that is born at the same time as the rosy-fingered dawn and the fatal, ruined wrath of men. One day, Jim didn’t come back. Harry and I waited for him all night, at first exchanging glances wordlessly, then joking, whiskey might kill that gringo but gunpowder never will. He never did come back. We all knew he was dead, because in a front like the Jarama anyone who didn’t come back after two days was considered dead. The hospitals never took longer than forty-eight hours to report on the wounded. To keep track of the dead took longer, and at the front the daily casualties added up to hundreds of men. But in Jim’s case, everybody went on asking about him as if he were only lost or absent. Harry and I realized then how all the other soldiers in the Brigade and the Republican army loved him. He’d made himself loved for a thousand reasons, we told each other in that retrospective act which allows us to see and say in death what we never knew how to see or say in life. We’re always blind to what we see and see only what we’ve lost forever. Laura, I somehow convinced myself that only I knew Jim was dead, and that I was keeping him alive so as not to depress Harry and the other comrades who loved the big, well-spoken American. But then I realized we all knew he was dead, and we were all agreeing to lie and say our comrade was still alive.