Birth of Our Power (17 page)

He moves on. The flabby paunches, the skimpy shoulders, the shapes, sharp or buried under layers of fat, all dressed in black, the faces rosy or blue-tinted, close-mouthed, the white-tonsured pates, crudely carved out of dirty wood—file by one after another. A fat sweaty gentleman wearing his high silk hat and carrying his candle stops for a moment and you can see that his fingernails are black. Little girls in white strew flowers in front of all this Sunday ugliness on parade, moving inexorably forward, following tall black horsemen … This city will march over our stomachs. First the gendarmerie and then the processions. These same little girls will throw flowers onto the pavement where our blood has been spilled.

But now José, disarmed, is smiling. Two brown-skinned kids are making pee pee under a tree. Huge smiles spread across their gritty faces; they're having a swell time pissing during the procession. “Except ye be converted, and become as little children …”

The four towers of the Holy Family, held aloft by intricate scaffolding, extend their apocalyptic ugliness into the blue. They look like monumental factory chimneys, only misshapen, crying out their uselessness. They also make you think of phallic symbols.

Under the watching stars, at the corner of two narrow, dark streets, the fiery furnace blasts forth. Circles of liquid fire flicker ceaselessly around the flamboyant letters, now red now yellow, announcing F
IFTY BAILARÍNAS.
On both sides of the entrance, repeated six times, Juana the Cuban (more svelte and more ardent on these posters than in real life, a Creole at thirty pesetas a trick)—a white shawl dotted with golden flowers, arms and legs darting like flames, long oblique eyes which seem to laugh out of their shadowed depths like flashing knives.

Poor devils, who can't even go inside—for lack of the price—devour her with their eyes. There are always three or four of them on the sidewalk, looking for an improbable windfall.

The hall is poor, almost bare, cruelly lighted by huge arc lamps. You sit at white marble tables. Drink. Look. Think of nothing. Your day is over. It's not time yet to go to sleep on your cot in your four-pesetas-a-week hole in the wall, where you can hear your neighbor coughing on one side and, on the other, through the paper-thin walls, a panting couple making love after a bitter whispered argument. Here is the fruit
of your labor, the climactic moment of your day. Feast your eyes on forms, on colors, on rhythms, on delirium, on laughter, on everything denied you in life. From dusk to dawn fifty women will act out, for you, all the joy they know. Some of them will talk to you without seeing you, the spangles about their waists tingling through your veins; their castanets and their heels will echo in your loins long after; you will drink greedily as soon as they have gone off into the wings, and, this night, for a long while, long before the deep, black sleep of the weary carries you off—you will see before you the white and red smile of their lips, the black and fire of their eyes.

Lucecita, a skinny girl sheathed in black, a purple knot around her hips, glides before your eyes, leaving behind a suggestion of despair: the image of an ash-gray mask, an overpainted mouth and a pointed chin, eyes like raindrops glistening out of shadows under black lines.

El Chorro's hairy fingers beat out the rhythm of the dance on the table. José is preoccupied by his idea: we must shake this city out of its torpor by acting with sudden and terrible boldness. A few men would be enough. He himself—afraid of nothing, no longer able to wait, consumed with a desire for action and sacrifice—would go first. He idolizes the memory of Angiollilo the typographer, gentle yet obstinate like a missionary, who, twenty years ago, followed Cánovas del Castillo (the butcher of Montjuich and Cuba!) patiently from town to town in order to strike him down one day in the name of that future anarchy where human life will be sacred. He refuses to get married: “That's like drowning. No thank you! A true revolutionary can't have a wife or kids. Above all don't imagine
you can live
—or you're good for nothing except wearing a collar.” I found him a while ago reading over the trial of Emile Henry.
⁶
There is a legend that says that Henry faltered at the last minute, three yards from the scaffold. “That's impossible,” José grumbled. “It's a filthy lie made up by the newspapers.” He was unwilling to understand how that final crisis might yet heighten the dauntlessness of the condemned, the fruit of a difficult victory won over himself. “I tell you he was all of one piece!”

“Benito will kill again on Sunday,” José murmurs.

“So?”

“The governor will certainly be in his box.”
At the next table the woolly-haired, low-browed stokers from an Argentinean freighter are laughing heartily because two women, Asunción the blonde, Pepita the brunette, with saffron scarves wrapped around their waists, are doing the dance of the breasts with convulsive smiles. One girl fair, the other dark; one cool, the other arid as the desert. The fruits of their flesh, set off by coral tips, quiver as they shimmy all over, standing in place. Guitars twang. The heat from their loins mounts to the brain, flushes their faces and clouds their eyes. José alone retains a glacial calm. He barely unclenches his teeth:

“Take a good look at these men, this room! Don't you see you have to shake them up, snap them out of it, out of this place, out of their stupor?”

I see that you are alone, José, with your exalted valor which intoxicates you like wine that is too heady; alone, ready for anything, absurd like heroes who come before their time. Lost. The other city is stronger …

On the way out of there, toward midnight, José spies a poor wretch with the look of a dead fish on the edge of the shadows, about to disappear into the night. José takes him by the arm:

“Come on, old fellow. I'll buy you supper. Don't laugh. I'm not drunk. I'm a man. Maybe you don't know what that is.”

6
   A young French anarchist, executed May 21, 1894, for having exploded a bomb at the Café Terminus in Paris. At the trial he took full responsibility for his act and practically demanded to be guillotined. —Tr.

THE MAJORITY OF THE FRENCHMEN AMONG US ARE OF ZILZ
'
S OPINION. THE
herd of humanity is not worth fighting for; revolutions won't change man's destiny in the least. Let's look out for ourselves. Derelicts marked for prison or death in the trenches, they create this escapee's philosophy for themselves, not unlike that of certain profiteers of the existing order. We were just talking about the Russian Revolution. Zilz struck each of us in turn with his triumphant question:

“Do you like coffee with cream … ?”

Next over to the Russian Consulate. A blond smooth-faced clerk had me sign some papers. All I really saw of him was a shirt cuff, some well-manicured pink fingers bearing a signet ring, and shiny hair slicked down over his skull with such perfect care and such heavily scented brilliantine that I was dying to muss it up. In a thin voice he insinuated to me that “today even our ministers don't know how to spell properly.” Thus a revolution is envisaged under carefully combed hair.

The
Arriviste
received me in the middle of a white and gold
moderne-style
room. At times he seemed to be gazing lovingly at his well-manicured fingernails; the white handkerchief in his breast pocket was puffed up like whipped cream; even the inflections of his voice were full of nuances and kind attentions; but his eyes, the eyes of a pretty boy accustomed to making a good impression, said—strangely—nothing. What color were they in fact? As with the faces of certain Greek statues the pupils are represented by shallow holes; any shadow, however light, emphasizes the absence of vision, that abstract depth. I understood in the very first minute that he was successful with women, that is to say, with ladies, published free verse in slim volumes with parchment covers, made an effort to read Bergson, add professed at once and the same time an energetic nationalism (“What we need is a Catalan Barrès”: that phrase of his was to become famous) and the eloquent republicanism
of “our great Pi y Margall …” I could see him as he will be in thirty years, a sure fate: heftier, pale-skinned, his eyelids heavier, decorated, no matter what the regime may be—for even the Republics of Labor will have to invent decorations for this kind of precious servant!—ten years from a peaceful death that will utterly obliterate him, all at once, like a newspaper, its charred headline an urgent cry, forgotten without having been heeded, licked by the flames in the hearth. His sympathies tend naturally toward the great cause of the Entente. Naturally because the contrary would have been just as natural. And how could I help but take his part with Letter of Transit #662–491 pressed tightly in my billfold! Already this ticket,
Good for one death like the others,
engulfs me in deceit and print's a hypocritical smile on my face. The
Arriviste
requested some correspondence from me about Russia for a newspaper:

“Via Stockholm (well, you like to travel). Our only rule is: Objectivity, local color.”

I know, I know, The little superior air of not taking sides: a maxim of
Realpolitik,
an allusion to sociology (modern journalism being scientific) a digression on the Slavic soul, and some picturesque, some human interest, some exotic words:
muzhik, izba, traktir, chinovnik …
This job is at bottom no worse than the other, which consists of spending ten hours a day setting up the names of the Duke of Medina-Coeli's horses in 6-point italic. The one ruins the lungs, the other deadens the brain: both stupefying in the long run.

“Bah, one can always take a pseudonym.”

An hour later the mendicants had reconciled me with the tragedy of life. The beggars of this city are magnificent. (Their misery is a slap in the face to wealth, smug self-satisfaction, the blue sky.) You can see them dragging themselves around on the porches of the churches, in the gilded dust of the boulevards, filthy, misshapen, pitiful, with their stumps of limbs and suppurating sores, stares tenacious as leeches from eyes ringed with tainted blood, maniac glances of eyes flecked with white. Detestable vermin multiply in their rags with joyful abandon. Horrible diseases: leprosy, lupus, psoriasis, erysipelas, pullulate in their open sores. They have local color. I know one who plays rasping music on the steps of the jetty. This flabby gray slug glues himself to the stern stone shaft which stands erect, cleaving the very gold, the very azure of the sea. And the shaft transports him. “Blind from birth”—a fake blind man, they say, a fake slug, that slug; but we, we are authentic. At the door of the cathedral a mummy's hand shoots out of a gray stone
nook toward a rather plump milky-skinned passer-by who is carrying roses and sweet Williams to her patron saint, doubtless a saint who watches over thrifty widows (H
ERBALIST
'
S
S
HOP
:
medicinal teas our specialty
… ) A cadaverous voice issues from behind that long-dried-out corpse's hand, as august as that of Ramses II:
“Carida por l'amor de Dios, Señora.”
(Charity for the love of God, Madam!) The passer-by has passed. Never will that hand fall into dust …

A Herculean torso, bearing a huge, ill-connected head, is dragging itself toward us on its belly and its leather-strapped wrists. With each lurch forward of this half-man, the head, jerked to one side by the shock, spits out a long guttural supplication; you would think it was spewing forth inexpiable curses at the world if you didn't hear the words
“Nuestro
Señor” falling heavily like drops of dark blood from those fleshy lips. Voices answer each other. Echo. In the silence of the cathedral, I can hear the same hill mouthed syllables repeated with fervor by a child's voice falling like drops of gold, heavy and brilliant: “a
Nuestro
Señor,
a Nuestro
Señor …”

“That man,” I say to El Chorro, “makes one think of an earthworm that has been cut in two by the blade of a shovel.”

El Chorro throws away his cigarette:

“Very apt! That's old Gusano: the Worm. The whole town calls him that … Hi! How are you, Feliz. Here's one of the boys from
Tierra.
What's new, you sanctimonious sans-culotte?”

The stump of a man laughs, exposing strong teeth, greenish at the gums. Ever since a fall of thirty yards from the scaffoldings of a new basilica for the Holy Family diminished him by one-half, Feliz, of the
Tierra y Libertad
(Land and Liberty) Party, has been up to his ears in land, and starving in liberty. Policemen turn away, when they hear him apostrophizing some respectable passer-by: “It was building your house that broke my back! Eh, landlord … !” He is still able to be of service. His straw mattress is the last place they would look for Cuban certificates of naturalization, fabricated by …