Birth of Our Power (5 page)

Let us hope that, after years of exile, Serge's works find the audience they deserve: those “other men, infinitely different from us, infinitely like us” who are carrying on the struggle today.

Richard Greeman

New York, 1966

A CRAGGY MASS OF SHEER ROCK
—
SHATTERING THE MOST BEAUTIFUL OF HORI
zons—towers over this city. Crowned by an eccentric star of jagged masonry cut centuries ago into the brown stone, it now conceals secret constructions under the innocence of grassy knolls. The secret citadel underneath lends an evil aspect to the rock, which, between the limpid blue of the sky, the deeper blue of the sea, the green meadows of the Llobregat and the city, resembles a strange primordial gem … Hard, powerful, upheaval arrested in stone, affirmed since the beginning of time … stubborn plants gripping, hugging the granite, and rooting into its crevices … trees whose obdurate roots have inexorably-cracked the stone and, having split it, now serve to bind it … sharp angles dominating the mountain, set in relief or faceted by the play of sunlight … We would have loved this rock—which seems at times to protect the city, rising up in the evening, a promontory over the sea (like an outpost of Europe stretching toward tropical lands bathed in oceans one imagines as implacably blue)—this rock from which one can see to infinity … We would have loved it had it not been for those hidden ramparts, those old cannons with their carriages trained low on the city, that mast with its mocking flag, those silent sentries with their olive-drab masks posted at every corner. The mountain was a prison—subjugating, intimidating the city, blocking off its horizon with its dark mass under the most beautiful of suns.

We often climbed the paths which led upward toward the fortress, leaving below the scorched boulevards, the old narrow streets gray and wrinkled like the faces of hags, the odor of dust, cooking oil, oranges, and of humanity in the slums. The horizon becomes visible little by little, with each step, spiraling upward around the rock. Suddenly the harbor appears around a bend: the clean, straight line of the jetty, the white flower of a yacht club, floating in the basin like an incredible giant
water lily. In the distance, heaps of oranges—like enormous sunflowers dropped on the border of a gray city—piled up on the docks … And the ships. Two large German vessels: immobile. Under quarantine for several years now, they catch the eye. A six-master, under full sail, glittering in the sun, sails slowly into the harbor from the ends of the sea. Her prow, fringed with dazzling foam, cuts serenely through the amazing blue of liquid silk. She opens horizons even more remote, horizons which I can suddenly see, and which by closing my eyes I see more perfectly: Egypt, the Azores, Brazil, Uruguay, Havana, Mexico, Florida … From what other corners of the earth did these golden sails come? Perhaps only from Majorca. The ship probably bears the name of an old galleon, the name of a woman or a virgin as sonorous as a line of poetry:
Santa Maria de Los Dolores …
Christopher Columbus on his column is now visible above the harbor. Looking out from the city over the sea, the bronze explorer welcomes the sailing ship as she moves in toward him from a past as moving, as mysterious, and as promising as the future.

The city is most attractive in the evening, when its avenues and its plaza light up: soft glowing coals, more brilliant than pearls, earthly stars shining more brightly than the stars of the heavens. By day, it looks too much like any European city: spires of cathedrals above the ancient streets, domes of academies and theaters, barracks, palaces, boxlike buildings pierced by countless windows—A compartmentalized ant heap where each existence has its own narrow cubicle of whitewashed or papered walls. From the very first, a city imparts a sense of poverty. One
sees,
in the sea of roofs compressed into motionless waves, how they shrivel up and crush numberless lives.

It is from the height that one discovers the splendors of the earth. The view plunges down to the left into the harbor, the gulf lined with beaches, the port, the city. And the blue-shadowed mountains, far from shutting off the distances, open them up. The vast sea laughs at our feet in foamy frills on the pebbles and sand. Plains, orchards, fields marked as sharply as on a surveyor's map, roads lined with small trees, a carpet of every shade of green stretches out to the right on the other side of the rock down to the gently sloping valley, which seems a garden from that height. Mountains on which, when the air is clear, pale snow crystals can be seen at the peak—where earth meets sky—extending our horizons toward eternity.

But our eyes, scanning the faraway snowcap at leisure, or following a sail on the surface of the sea, would always light on the muzzle of a
cannon, across the thicketed embankment. Our voices would suddenly drop off, when, at a bend in the path, the stark, grass-covered corner of the citadel's ramparts loomed up before us. The name of a man who had been shot was on all our lips.
¹
We used to stop at certain places from which we could see the narrow confines of the dungeons. Somewhere within these fortifications, men like us, with whom each of us at one time or another identified ourselves, men whose names we no longer remembered, had undergone torture not long ago. What kind of torture? We did not know precisely, and the very lack of exact pictures, the namelessness of the victims, the years (twenty) that had passed, stripped the memory bare: nothing remained but a searing, confused feeling for the indignities suffered in the cause of justice. I sometimes used to think that we remembered the pain those men suffered as one remembers something one has suffered oneself, after many years and after many experiences. And, from that notion, I had an even greater sense of the communion between their lives and ours.

Like them—and those ships we saw coming into the harbor—we came from every corner of the world. El Chorro, more yellow-skinned than a Chinese, but with straight eyes, flat temples, and fleshy lips, El Chorro, with his noiseless laugh, who was probably Mexican (if anything): at any rate he used to speak at times familiarly and with admiration of the legendary Emiliano Zapata, who founded a social republic in the Morelos mountains with his rebellious farmers—descendants of ancient bronze-skinned peoples.

“The first in modern times!” El Chorro would proclaim proudly, his hands outstretched. At which point you noticed that he was missing his thumb and index finger, sacrificed in some obscure battle for the first social republic of modern times.

“A little more,” he'd say, “and I would have lost my balls as well. A stinking half-breed from Chihuahua nearly snatched them from me with his teeth …”

“Si
hombre!”
he would add, breaking into loud and resonant laughter, for the joy of that victory still vibrated through his body.

He made his living selling phony jewelry over in the Paralelo. With a friendly touch and an insinuating laugh, he'd fasten the huge silver loops on the ears of girls from the neighboring towns, sending shivers
down their spines as if he had just kissed them on the neck. They all knew him well: from a crowd they would look at him with long, smoldering stares, from beneath lowered eyelids.

Zilz, a French deserter, pretended to be Swiss: Heinrich Zilz, citizen of the canton of Neuchâtel, who taught languages—
los idiomas—
with childlike earnestness, lived on oatmeal, noodles, and fruit, spoke little but well, dressed carefully, went to bed every night at ten-thirty, went to bed once a week with a five-peseta girl (a good price), and held people in quiet contempt. “It will take centuries to reform them, and life is short. I have enough of a problem with myself, trying to live a little better than an animal, and that's plenty for me.”

Jurien and Couet (the one blond, the other chestnut-haired, but whom you would have taken for brothers from their identical Parisian speech, their little toothbrush mustaches, their jaunty walk), had both fled the war, one from the trenches of Le Mort Homme,
²
the other from the Vosges, by way of the Pyrenees. Now they both worked in factories for the benefit of those who still persisted in getting killed, Jurien nailing boots and Couet loading grenades for export to France. They lived happily, from day to day, in the satisfaction of being spared from the fiery hell.

Oskar Lange, a slender muscular lad with reddish hair, bloodshot eyes, thought to be a deserter from a German submarine, was their closest companion. They made him read Kropotkin and Stirner, in that order. And the sailor who had thought only of escaping the fate of rotting in a steel coffin discovered a new source of strength and pride in what he had thought to be his cowardice—thanks to them. We smiled to hear him pronounce the word “Comrade”—somewhat awkwardly—for the first time.

There was also an athletic and intelligent Russian, Lejeune, elegant, handsome, graying at the temples, who had been known for a long time in his youth as Levieux. He lived with Maud, worn-out yet ageless, who had the body of a nervous gamin, a Gothic profile, brown curls, and sudden, catlike movements. And Tibio
—el cartero,
the postman—with his broad Roman countenance, wide forehead, and noble carriage, who studied the art of living and wrote commentaries on Nietzsche after systematically distributing letters to offices in the business district. Then
there were Mathieu the Belgian, Ricotti the Italian, the photographer Daniel, and the Spaniards Dario, Bregat, Andrés, José Miro, Eusebio, Portez, Ribas, Santiago …

There were at least forty or fifty of us, coming from every corner of the world—even a Japanese, the wealthiest of us all, a student at the university—and a few thousand in the factories and shops of that city: comrades, that is to say, more than brothers by blood or law, brothers by a common bond of thought, habit, language, and mutual help. No profession was foreign to us. We came from every conceivable background. Among us, we knew practically every country in the world, beginning with the capitals of hard work and hunger, and with the prisons. There were among us those who no longer believed in anything but themselves. The majority were moved by ardent faith; some were rotten—but intelligent enough not to break the law of solidarity too openly. We could recognize each other by the way we pronounced certain words, and by the way we had of tossing the ringing coin of ideas into any conversation. Without any written law, we comrades owed each other (even the most recent newcomer) a meal, a place to sleep, a hideout, the peseta that will save you in a dark hour, the
douro
(a hundred sous) when you're broke (but after that, it's your own lookout!). No organization held us together, but none has ever had as much real and authentic solidarity as our fraternity of fighters without leaders, without rules, and without ties.

1
   Probably a reference to Francisco Ferrer, a libertarian-educator executed at Montjuich in 1909. See note, page 47. —Tr.

2
   Le Mort Homme, or Hill 295, one of the Verdun defenses, captured by the Germans in 1916 and retaken by the French 1917.

I HAD LEARNED IN THAT CITY THAT IT IS NOT ENOUGH TO FILL YOUR LIFE
with the certainty of not being killed by the end of the day—a prospect dreamed of in those days as the supreme happiness by thirty million men on the soil of Europe. It often happened, during my strolls on the Montjuich rock, that I had the sensation of being at one of the earth's extremities, which resulted in a strange despondency. There, facing the horizon, or during night walks through the happy city, this feeling—usually indistinct within me, attained a somber clarity. The peace we were enjoying was unique, and that city, despite the struggles, the pain, the filth hidden away in her hunger-ridden slums and her indescribably squalid
callejitas,
was more than happy just to be alive. We were, nonetheless, only a hundred miles from the Pyrenees: on the other side, the other universe, ruled over by the cannon. Not a single young man in the villages. On every train, you encountered the leathery faces of soldiers on leave looking out from under their helmets with probing, weary glances. And the farther north you went, the more the face of the countryside—aggrieved, impoverished, anguished—changed. The feverish but static image of Paris: brilliant lights extinguished in the evening, dark streets in the outlying districts where the garbage piled up, lines of women waiting in front of the local town halls, dense crowds on the streets where countless uniforms mingled, less diverse, no doubt, than the hands and faces of the Canadians, Australians, Serbs, Belgians, Russians, New Zealanders, Hindus, Senegalese … In war the blood of all men is brewed together in the trenches. The same desire to live and to possess a woman made soldiers on furlough of every race, marked for every conceivable kind of death, wander the streets. The maimed and the gassed, green-faced, encounter those as yet vigorous and whole, bronze skinned, the maimed and the gassed of tomorrow. Some of tomorrow's corpses were laughing raucously. Paris in
darkness, the drawn faces of women in the poorer quarters during the bitter February cold, the feverish exhaustion of streets endlessly bearing the burden of an immense disbanded army, the sickly intimacy of certain homes where the war entered with the air you breathed, like a slow asphyxiating gas—remained implanted in my very nerves. And, still farther north—I knew then, Jurien, only a little farther—those trenches of Le Mort Homme which you described to me under the palms of the Plaza de Cataluña on those evenings, cooled by the sea breeze, so magical that the joy of living quickened every light, every silhouette, the hoarse breathing of the vagabond who slept, every muscle deliciously relaxed, on the next bench—those trenches you described, with their odor of putrefaction and excrement. A shellburst knocked you flat, bitter sentry, into a ditch. You saw, your blood (your last, you thought) run into the filth.