I remembered that Tupra had also said: 'The truth is that, initially, everything tends to be believed. It's very odd, but that's how it is,' I remembered his words while I continued to read snippets from one book and from another: to crown all these mad calumnies, a book was published in 1938 by a certain Max Rieger (surely a pseudonym, possibly of Wenceslao Roces, whose name I knew because, later on, he translated Hegel's Phenomenology of Mind), supposedly a Spanish version based on the French translation by Lucienne and Arturo Perucho (the latter was the editor of the Catalan Communist organ, Treball), and with a 'Preface' by the famous, more-or-less Catholic and more-or-less Communist writer José Bergamín – oh dear, these mixtures – which, under the title Espionage in Spain, collated all the tall tales, falsehoods and accusations hurled at Nin and at the POUM, presenting them as true and bona fide, sanctioning them, repeating them, elaborating on them, documenting them with fabricated proofs, embellishing them, adding to them and exaggerating them. I remembered once hearing my father talk about this prologue by Bergamín as an act of rank indecency, justifying as it did the persecution and slaughter of people from the POUM and denying its leaders the right to any defence (Bergamín was pushing at an open door there: for this had already been denied to quite a few people, tortured and imprisoned or executed without trial), one of many acts of indecency committed by various Spanish intellectuals and writers from both sides during the War, and even more afterwards by those on the winning side. I read one dishonest, incompetent commentator – it may have been Tello-Trapp, but it could have been someone else, I had begun rather randomly taking notes on bits of paper, poor Peter's study was rapidly becoming a complete tip – who tried to excuse Bergamín, because he had known him in person ('a charming, fascinating man', 'a worthy Don Quixote, a lover of truth') and because he loved his poetry, 'profound, pure and romantic' and 'the lamp-light glow of his voice' – I gulped down another chocolate and a truffle and some wine to recover, I wondered how he could possibly come out with such schmaltz and still go on writing – but the preface in question, which I found widely quoted elsewhere, left no room for its author's salvation: the POUM was 'a small treacherous party', which had not even turned out to be 'a party, but an organisation for spying and collaborating with the enemy; that is, not an organisation merely conniving with the enemy, but the enemy itself, part of the international fascist organisation in Spain… The Spanish Civil War revealed international Trotskyism at the service of Franco in its true colours as a Trojan horse…' The duplicitous commentator could only regret and condemn this prologue, but 'we do not know', he said, if its author 'wrote it while in the sway of the Communist Party, or in good faith', when the most likely and obvious answer is that he wrote it perfectly freely and in the worst possible faith; as the almost always considered and objective Hugh Thomas remarked: 'He could not possibly have believed what he wrote.' The text of that 'lover of the truth' makes a good pairing with the poster or vignette which, according to Orwell and others, circulated widely in Madrid and Barcelona in the spring of 1937, and which showed the POUM taking off a mask bearing the hammer and sickle to reveal a face stamped with a swastika. My father was not exaggerating when he spoke of rank indecency.