The Blind Man of Seville (23 page)

23rd March 1933, Dar Riffen

I have just completed my first major work, which is the entire company individually caricatured riding their own camel, which has taken on some of their characteristics. I mount them on boards and hang them in the barracks so that they all seem to be in a caravan heading for the Dar Riffen arch, which instead of the usual legionnaire’s motto reads:
legionarios a beber, legionarios a joder.
All the officers come in and ask to see it. Oscar tears down my cartoon arch,
saying: ‘You don’t want to be court-martialled and shot for a silly drawing.’ Now I am never short of cigarettes.

12th November 1934, Dar Riffen

We have just welcomed back Colonel Yagüe and the Legion, who have been in Asturias to put down the miners’ rebellion … Oscar is grim. There was no resistance and, having relieved Oviedo and Gijón, los brutos ‘demonstrated a lack of discipline and were not restrained by command’. This means that they killed, raped and mutilated without fear of punishment. Somehow in this conversation Oscar reveals that he is German and bores me by saying how German soldiers would never have behaved like this. His empty boots seem to be screaming in the corner of the room. ‘This is the beginning of a catastrophe,’ he says. I don’t see it like that and can only get excited by the gory stories told and retold. Apparently I still haven’t learnt how to think. I’ve noticed, in all the history I’ve read, under Oscar’s pointing finger, just how many times the thinkers are taken away and shot, hanged or beheaded.

17th April 1935, Dar Riffen

My second major work — Colonel Yagüe wants me to paint his portrait. Oscar gives me some advice: ‘Nobody likes the truth unless it happens to coincide with their own version of it.’ It’s only when I have Colónel Yagüe sitting in front of me that I realize the real nature of the task. He’s a bull of a man, with thick round spectacles, grey receding hair, heavy jowls and a half-smile that’s nearly friendly until you see the cruelty in it. I sit him so that none of the damaging profile is showing. I ask if he wants to retain the glasses and he tells me that if he doesn’t he will look like a newly born puppy. I see a coat on a chair with a fur collar. I ask him to wear it and tell him it will frame his face and give him an adventurous, heroic look. He puts it on. We are going to like each other.

1st May 1935, Dar Riffen, Morocco

The portrait is a triumph. There is a small private unveiling ceremony with a select band of officers. Colonel Yagüe is delighted by the reaction. The fur collar was inspired. I thinned his face down and gave him a jutting chin so that he looked defiant, resilient, dependable but bold and enterprising, too. In the background I have the massed ranks of legionnaires marching through the arch, which reads as it should:
Legionarios a luchar, legionarios a morir.
Oscar tells me: ‘I see we have had a convergence of delusion.’ Colonel Yagüe does not hang the painting. He could not be seen to be more grand or ambitious than his superiors.

14th July 1936, Dar Riffen

Summer manoeuvres finish with a parade taken by General Romerales and General Gómez Morato, our two most senior commanders of the Army of Africa. Oscar, who has a nose for these things, says that something is going to happen. His evidence is that during the banquet after the parade, even before the dessert course was served, there were shouts of ‘Café!’ which was clearly not a demand for coffee. It stands for
Camaradas! Arriba! Falange Española!
and is evidence of Colonel Yagüe at work. He’s a falangist, who Oscar believes loathes General Gómez Morato. I don’t know how he informs himself of this and he says that all I had to do was look at the officers who came to the private unveiling ceremony of my portrait of Colonel Yagüe.

We are locked away in our barracks with no knowledge of what is going on across the straits. Oscar finds a newspaper,
El Sol,
in which there’s an article about the shooting of an officer called Lt José Castillo outside his home in Madrid only a month after the man was married. ‘The Falange did that,’ says Oscar. I am puzzled. I don’t know where we stand. I ask Oscar who we should support and he tells me: ‘Our commanding officer, unless you want to get shot.’ At least
there are no difficult decisions to be made on that score, although Oscar alarms me by adding: ‘Whoever that might be.’

Later in the evening he calls me in. He’s very excited. He’s been listening to the radio. Spain is in a state of shock. Calvo Sotelo has been shot. I couldn’t care less, having never heard the name before. Oscar cuffs me round the head. Sotelo is the monarchist leader and a prominent figure on the right. His murder will have terrible consequences. I ask who killed him and Oscar bats an imaginary ball from hand to hand saying: ‘Tit-tat, tit-tat.

‘Except that the left have gone too far this time,’ he says. ‘This will not be seen as personal because of Calvo Sotelo’s position. This is a political killing and now, I can guarantee it, there will be civil war.’ I ask him where he stands in all of this and he holds out his hands, the palms criss-crossed with a thousand creases so that I think I must draw them. ‘Before you,’ he says and I leave him none the wiser.

19th July 1936, Ceuta

Colonel Yagüe marched us out of the barracks at 9 p.m. and by midnight we had control of the port of Ceuta. Not a shot was fired at us or by us. We were disappointed to meet no resistance as on the march we’d all been spoiling for a fight. By morning we were told that Melilla, Tetuán, Ceuta and Larache were all under military control and that General Franco was on his way to take over command.

We march back to the barracks at Dar Riffen in the early morning. General Franco arrives at the barracks in the afternoon and we are all on parade to meet him. We surprise ourselves by going mad without knowing why. Colonel Yagüe makes a speech which starts with the words: ‘Here they are, just as you left them … ‘ and we see that the general is very moved. We roar, ‘Franco! Franco!’ and he announces a pay rise of one peseta a day. We all erupt again.

6th August 1936, Seville

My first time on Spanish soil. We were one of the first detachments across the straits by boat and were disappointed not to be airlifted. They put us on trucks and we drove straight up the middle of completely empty roads to Seville. Our orders are to head north under Colonel Yagüe to Mérida. We’ve been told that anyone who resists us is a communist and, as such, against Spain, and that they are to be dealt with in the most severe manner and shown no mercy. The word is that the opposition is ‘shitting in its pants’ at the thought of the Army of Africa. Our reputation from the Asturias miners’ rising travels before us. The effect of these orders, shot through with their bloodthirsty emotion, is like electricity through our ranks. We were already fired up and now we are invincible and righteous, too.

10th August 1936, near Mérida

The advance has been relentless (300 km in four days) and we have quickly learnt that the news of the terror we inspire travels at the speed of sound. We call it
castigo,
punishment. When we have quelled any resistance, we move through the towns and villages with knives and machetes. It is the cold steel that terrifies. It is not impersonal like bullets.

At El Real de la Jara the people fled into the hills only to be rounded up by the Moors of the Regulares who did such terrible things to them that we met no resistance until we reached Almendralejo. There a madness seized us and we killed everybody left in the town. Hundreds of corpses, men and women, littered the streets. The stench in the heat was soon unbearable and we left the stunned houses, lifeless under a pall of smoke from the burning roofs. Oscar presses me ‘to write it all down’, but I am too exhausted for anything after the demands of the day.

11th August 1936, Mérida

Officers joke that they are giving the peasants ‘agrarian reform’.

One of the Moors from the Regulares shows us his flyblown and stinking collection of men’s testicles. They castrate victims as a rite of battle. This is too much for Oscar, who puts it in a report to our Captain and the practice is soon banned.

15th August 1936, Badajoz

The 4th Bandera stormed the Puerta Trinidad. They went in singing and took heavy machine-gun fire full in the face, which drove them back for a moment. They breached the gates at the second attempt and we went in after them, stumbling over their dead bodies. Once inside it was street-to-street fighting all the way to the centre. In the afternoon anybody suspected of resistance was herded into the bullring near the cathedral. There was a lot of weeping and wailing, but we were savage after our losses in the initial assault. Shots rang out until nightfall. The Regulares searched the town, house to house, looking for anybody with a weapon or even a recoil bruise on their shoulder. After the indiscipline of Asturias, Oscar is determined that we will not lose control and go on an orgy of looting and raping like the other companies in the
bandera
and the Regulares. The men are disgruntled until Oscar brings in some cases of drink, mixed bottles stolen from a bar. We pour aguardiente, anís and red wine into the same glass and this drink becomes known to us as the Earthquake.

22nd September 1936, Maqueda

I know now what it is to be battle-hardened. Before they were just words attached to veterans. Now I realize that it is a mental state which endures. It comes from making multiple decisions under extreme pressure, from the complete suppression of fear, from seeing men die around you daily, from the conquering of exhaustion, from the acceptance of the inevitability of battle.

29th September 1936, Toledo

The attack was launched at midday on 27th September. Before the assault we were marched past the mutilated corpses of two executed nationalists a couple of kilometres outside town. The order came down from the colonels: ‘You know what to do.’ The fighting was fierce and the Regulares took a beating in the initial storming of the town. Just as we were expecting to have to pull back and regroup the leftists gave up and ran for it. There was some street fighting. The Moors were particularly savage that afternoon, hacking away at prisoners with their machetes until the steep cobbled streets of the town were literally running with blood. Grenades were thrown into the San Juan Hospital and as the Regulares approached a seminary, in which a group of anarchists were holed up, it burst into flames.

30th September 1936, Toledo

Oscar has found out that the republicans left the El Grecos in the city and has arranged through our Captain for us to see them. In the end we see seven of the Apostle paintings but not the famous
Burial of Count Orgaz.
I am mesmerized and quite unable to unravel his technique, how he seems to achieve an inner light that shines through the flesh and blood, even the robes, of the apostles. After the roar of battle, the mutilations, the blood-spattered streets, we find peace in front of those paintings and I know now that I want to become an artist.

20th November 1936, Ciudad Universitaria de Madrid This war has reached a new level. We have been bombing our own capital with explosives and incendiaries for more than a week. We were camped out by the railway tracks on the west side of the River Manzanares, with our every attempt to get across being easily driven back. Then suddenly we were over it and running up to the university, unopposed and amazed. We couldn’t think what had happened — another loss of nerve at the vital moment or the usual republican fiasco of one unit retreating before the replacement had arrived. The fight that ensued indicated the latter. We’ve taken the School of Architecture but have been driven back from the hall of Philosophy and Letters. We are fighting International Brigades of German, French, Italians and Belgians. The buildings ring with German communist songs and the ‘Internationale’. Oscar says these brigades are all made up of writers, poets, composers and artists. They even name their battalions after literary martyrs. I ask him why artists exclusively support the left and he gives one of his usual enigmatic replies: ‘It’s in their nature.’ And I, as always, have to ask him what he means. Our pupil/teacher relationship has never changed.

‘They are creative,’ he says. ‘They want to change things. They don’t like the old order of monarchy, the church, the military and the landowners. They believe in the power of the common man and his right to be equal. To bring this about they have to destroy all the old institutions.’

‘And replace them with what?’ I ask.

‘Exactly,’ says Oscar. ‘They will replace them with a different order … one that they like with no kings or priests, no businessmen or farmers. You should think about that, Francisco, if you want to be an artist. Great art changes the way we look at things. Think of Impressionism. They laughed at Monet’s blurred vision. Think of Cubism. They assumed that after Braque was shot in the head and had to be trepanned, he lost his mind. Think of Picasso’s
Les Demoiselles d’Avignon —
call them women? And what do you think General Yagüe hangs on his wall? Or General Varela?’

‘You ‘re playing with me now,’ I say.

An attack starts and we crawl to the window and shoot down on the men running out of Philosophy and Letters (we’re in Agriculture). There’s a large explosion in the Clinical Hospital (we find out later that a bomb was sent up in the lift to the Regulares). We decide to retreat from Agriculture and go back to the French Institute’s Casa de Velázquez, which is full of the dead bodies of a company of Poles. As we zig-zag back, Oscar shouts to me that General Yagüe will probably go to his grave wrapped in the canvas of my heroic painting. Bullets rip across the wooden doors of the building and we change course and dive through the windows on to the soft landing of the dead Poles. We fire back through the windows until the attack loses heart.