Savage Coast (42 page)

I say “we,” but I had been sent down from London by myself. It was the hot, beautiful summer of 1936, my first time out of America, with all the smiting days and nights of the month in England.

I was working for the people who had brought me over with them, and I had driven across to London from the landing in Liverpool on the first morning. Then the first tastes: many people who came to my friends' flat, people who afterward would be the Labour government, and the people I saw, poets and refugees and the League of Nations correspondent for the
Manchester Guardian
. A brilliant performance of
The Seagull
, and the Russian Ballet, and a
tithe-marchers' day, all silent, with the signs reading
WE WILL NOT BE DRUV
. The feeling of Hitler in the sky, very highly regarded by many, the feeling of Mussolini. Adventures in meaning, too; curiosity about the cooperatives, for my friends were working on a book about co-ops in England and Scandinavia as well as in the U.S.; curiosity about Russia; all-absorbing delight and storm about people, for me, and my own wish not to be “druv,” for I was driven.

When the editor of an English magazine said, “Will you go to Barcelona for me?” I put away a chance to go to Finland and Russia with my friends. The Olympic Games were to be held in Hitler's Berlin early in August, and there were going to be Games in Barcelona as a peaceful assertion and a protest. France had asked for more money for these Games than the sum allotted to the big Olympics, and the United States and many other countries were going to send teams. The wedding of the other editor of the magazine, a woman I had never met, came at that moment too—and my editor would have to go to the wedding. I told my editor I would go. He came to the station with me, and gave me a handy black and orange book, a
Guide to 25 Languages of Europe.

Now that book was being passed among us on the train.

On the way south, there was a tantalizing hour in Paris, glimpses of avenues and buildings seen in movies and paintings and dreams, and kiosks with posters advertising gas masks for children. A change of trains, and the night, and the Spanish frontier at Port Bou, and then this train, going slowly, with a flash of the Mediterranean, and shoulders of olive hills, and a Catalan family in the wooden compartment with me. Slowly, and the olive, yellow-strapped uniform of the Civil Guard; the grins over English cigarettes and the Olympic teams, whom everybody had noticed at the frontier because one or two had some difficulty about the collective passports under which they traveled.

The train had gone more and more slowly, and then stopped here, Moncada. A small station after Gerona, a clearly unimportant
town. The Spaniards begin to talk to the Hungarian athletes, partly in French, partly in a mixture of sign language and
25 Languages
. But the phrase-book language, “One o'clock exactly. Thank you very much,” would not carry the questions about the Olympics, or politics. The Spaniards said, “The Army. Some on one side, some on the other. Not good to talk.” These are not Spaniards; they are Catalans. Their own nation, their own language (not in the orange and black book), and they have been preparing for these Games, these
Jocs
, for a long time. People are hurrying to Barcelona from Paris, from Switzerland, from America, from all over France, from England, whose unions have sent a tennis team and some track people.

The train does not go. On the station platform, there are armed civilians patrolling, and now the small boys are climbing the little blossoming trees. Rumors begin to go through the train, and the Catalan family sitting with me begins to make a plan. The heavyset fine father talks to his mother, who agrees; he pats his young olive-colored son on the head. The boy is eleven; he looks at me with iodine-color eyes as his father invites me to come into the town with them. His father says, “It is General Strike.”

At that moment two Americans come through the train. They have heard that an American woman is here. The lady from Peapack, New Jersey, had shared my compartment on the French train; she is up front, and is concerned about me. I decided for the train, and told the Catalan family I would find them later.

We went through the train, talking; really we were collectors of rumor. The engineer was in charge of us now, and the stationmaster spoke for the town. No, he could not say how long the strike would last. But the shooting had begun at the barracks in Barcelona that morning. It had something to do with the Games, they said; or something to do with the moment of the Games, at which several thousand foreigners were expected in the city. Some of the soldiers, at the appeal of the crowd before them, had refused to fire and had
turned against their officers, to immense cheers. There was something about generals, a general flying in from the Islands.

The tourists, frightened and inconvenienced, murmur, make a kind of flutter and try to plan.

Who is on this train? Conspicuously, Catalan families on their way from town to town or back to Barcelona, and the two teams, the Hungarian water-polo team from Paris and the Swiss team. The Catalans leave the train, almost without exception, and find quarters in the town.

There is a German who has come to run in the Games, on his own, from France where he has been working as a cabinetmaker. Bavarian, with a broad strong face like a man in a Brueghel picture—or a Käthe Kollwitz—his cheekbones stand out. He smiles, a very dark brown flashing. He had been a
Rotfrontkämpfer
who left Germany soon after Hitler came to power.

In first class, there are Italian businessmen, and a German family with two children who are hitting each other; a very beautiful woman from South America; the French deputy, M. de Paiche, who has come officially to the Games, and his male secretary; two rather attractive English couples on their way to Mallorca on holiday, from a bank and from
The New Statesman
, and others in the two cars who are not at once identifiable. In the one Pullman, there are Hollywood people, a director and two cameramen.

A Spanish doctor emerges from the Pullman and tells us about the Hollywood men; he has offered to hire a car, and to go with them to the city. But they do not want that. They want to go back to the frontier.

The mayor of the town appears on the platform; very grave, wearing in his lapel a black ribbon of mourning. There have been deaths of men from this town today.

A tall man, distinguished face, thin, with fine movements, climbs down the steps of the train. We see him speaking for a while to the mayor, as the long evening closes down. The birds begin;
the boys whistle from the trees. Word comes back: the tall man is a professor of philosophy from the University of Madrid. He will act as go-between for the train.

FIRST OF ALL
, household arrangements. The two English couples bring basins of water and the little cakes of soap they carry with them, for the use of the train.

“But we can wash on the train!” says the lady from Peapack. She has five white rawhide valises, I admired them in the compartment, one is a hatbox.

No, we can't wash on the train; that water was used up hours ago.

We sleep on the train. As we choose places—we have all moved to first class—the two teams are playing soccer outside. There is a rattle of guns from the olive grove on the hill. A dark figure moves to the steps where the professor of philosophy has stood. After about an hour, he comes out again; his face cannot be seen, but his shoulders are in grief.

The station is dark, except for three or four lights and the slight movement of mimosa flowers, shadow and yellow in a slight breeze coming down cool from the Pyrenees.

Night. Two families, the father wounded, walk in from Barcelona with news of a tremendous battle. The radio goes on at half-hour intervals: Beethoven's
Fifth
, government bulletins, tangos,
You're Driving Me Crazy
, sardanas, Catalan songs. As long as the radio goes, the government is in control. And now, over that booming, scratching sound, a tired voice. The general who had tried to take Catalonia. There are four of them: Goded, Mola, Sanjurjo, Franco. Sanjurjo has been killed; this is Goded. He sounds to me like the businessmen during the Crash, an endless tiredness in his defeated voice. He is telling his followers to lay down their arms. There has been enough bloodshed, he says.

We write a letter on the train—to the town—and take up a
collection for the wounded. We each give a little, the athletes do, too. No, not the German family, not the Italian businessmen, not the Cockney shoe salesman; not the six platinum blondes, the Rodney Hudson Young Ladies, who were supposed to open tonight in Barcelona. The passenger whose help counts most turns out to be a League of Nations observer from Switzerland. He revises our letter to the town, putting it in perfectly acceptable diplomatic language.

We take it into Moncada, to the next street over from the station, past the finer houses belonging to people who live in the capital and come there for weekends sometimes. In the next street, the Committee is in session at the mayor's office. The mayor accepts the money with a speech of thanks, and turns the letter over to the Committee—formed of members of the two unions, and the Anarchists. Catalonia is Anarchist country, the first I have ever seen. They say there has been fighting for a hundred years, but never like this.

One of us begins to speak in sympathy for the town, but the mayor puts his hand up, stopping him flat. “No,” he says. “No foreign nationals can intrude in revolutionary situations.”

The passengers' committee and the Committee shake hands, and we go back to the train.

The roosters crowed all night, after the radio shut down. At four-forty-five the train shook, and the branches of the trees. A spire of black smoke could be seen off to the side; the church had been bombed.

NOW WE BEGIN
to hear the story. The dark figure who had come to the train last night had been the priest, come to ask the professor to hide him. For an hour, the professor had considered, and had finally given his answer: this was an international place, the church had been storing ammunition for the officers' revolt, and he could not. Years later, in America, I heard Spaniards debating this incident. The professor had become an ambassador by then;
but this incident had become one of the most well-known and a node of argument of the war, with the death of Lorca. The train had become famous for the story of the priest and the professor of philosophy.

Five officers had been shot that morning in Moncada, we heard, and before their deaths, one had said, “Do what you want with me. I've killed two or three hundred of your men already.”

Gun cars begin to appear, with U.G.T. and C.N.T. painted on their sides—the initials of the united trade-union groups. The guns bristle, pointing at us as we walk in the town. The Committee has suspended the strike for an hour, to allow buying of food. Ernie and Rose, the American couple, face guns. He is a labor lawyer from New York, and he is comforting her. She is terrified of the guns this morning. I see her again at four in the afternoon, as the gun cars come through again. She is standing with her back to them, eating chocolate. The fear is absorbed very quickly.

The teams are doing exercises on the station platform. A member of the Committee comes to ask us not to come out of the train anymore. I am in third class when the word of the change of control in Moncada comes through. A Catalan woman has made a fire here, and is cooking soup. The Member of the Committee will speak for the town from now on, and Otto, the German, is speaking for the train.

The town has given the engineer permission to drive the train a hundred feet down the track, toward Barcelona. Damn fool passengers have been using the toilets; they must stop, and something must be done. The English couples have done all they can to get people to use the lavatories in the station but some few people are not listening, and
PASSENGERS WILL PLEASE REFRAIN
is not widely known. The town has two wells, and is giving us one of them. It also is giving us the use of the schoolhouse, the most modern building in Moncada. We can sleep on the tables. The two teams move to the schoolhouse at once; they have a playing field,
too, even though they are warned not to go out for more than two hours, now. Officers and rebel men are escaping northward from Barcelona, and running battles are expected.

There is a sound of cannon from Barcelona.

One of the Englishmen comes back as the stores close, with a supply of gunnysacks to sleep on. “So cheap—really such a bargain,” he commends them to us. “They're really clean.”

The people on the train are becoming very jumpy. Now we all go to the schoolhouse, for trucks have been promised to take the two teams into Barcelona; but they do not come.

Otto and I begin to talk in the late afternoon, in a complex immediate closeness. He does not speak English, and my freshman German is very bad, clumsy, full of mistakes. I have never wanted language so much. We try, and laugh, and hand the orange and black book back and forth. We try the pale yellow section, English, Spanish, French, the Romance tongues; we can both speak French of a sort. Then the pale blue: German, Dutch, the Scandinavians, and English. Then the buff: Russian, Polish, Czech, Serbo-Croatian, Bulgarian, always English. And the green, that the Hungarians have been using (but Ernie speaks Hungarian, with the languages that most of us speak), with Finnish, Estonian, that group. And the orange, Greek, Turkish, Albanian, Arabic, Esperanto. English always. Never Catalan.

With our language of many colors, we make a beginning.

The French newspapers lie on the floor of the train aisle. A tiny paragraph can be read if you pick up the paper. It says that shooting broke out yesterday in Spanish Morocco. But you don't have to pick the paper up to see the big picture of the feature story. It is Nijinsky in his Swiss sanatorium, against the background of black cloth unrolled in the shape of a cross, dancing his black dance of the world.