J.S.U. members who fell during the siege of the cathedral of Sigüenza in October 1936, and Francisco Gonzalo, alias “El carterillo,” a socialist and president of the Casa del Pueblo in Sigüenza, murdered by the fascists on the eve of the Civil War 1. April 1931 On a day like today sixty years ago, my beloved and ever-missed Inés Valiente passed away in my arms. Barely three months had passed since the military uprising that degenerated into the long and fratricidal Civil War that brought a bloody end to the Second Spanish Republic. In 1931, Inés and I were two naive, illiterate teenage villagers, children of a poor village with just over a hundred families. Inés had begun attending literacy classes because she knew that learning to read and write would make her feel more dignified and respected. I, on the other hand, was content with my daily routine of taking the family flock to graze on the nearby hills, and I had no interest in learning to read and write. Today I recall with immense pain and sadness that it was Inés who overcame my stubbornness by teaching me to read and write herself, and today I have decided to show her my posthumous gratitude by writing this book with my memories of a Republican spring and a Fascist fall, during which her short and unhappy life unfolded. A flower broken just as the bees were sipping its nectar; just as spring gave way to summer and the new swallows fluttered their tender wings; just as the morning dew soon turned into scorching heat—that is, in the prime of her life. My memories go back to the first days of April 1931, when “with the first leaves of the poplars and the last blossoms of the almond trees,” as our immortal Antonio Machado sang, Inés would walk up the path to the village as usual while I tried to tend a couple of dozen stubborn sheep and an unmanageable goat. She came along playing with her writing notebook, scribbled over in every available space, and would toss it into the air as if it were a kite, catching it again as if it were trained. When she reached my side, she laughed—perhaps at my stubbornness as an illiterate teenager—while looking at me provocatively, rehearsing those feminine arts that arise naturally in all teenage girls without anyone teaching them. As she drew closer, it seemed as if the wind were blowing stronger, the rough rockroses seemed to bloom as if they were honeysuckles, and the song of the monotonous chichipanes sounded like goldfinches or nightingales. When she was close, she would blush—or pretend to blush—because Inés was never ashamed of me, which made me lose my composure, as if she were twenty years older than me and knew everything there was to know about life, whereas I, a strapping fifteen-year-old—almost sixteen—barely knew where babies came from, because I’d seen sheep give birth, though not without some embarrassment, since the placenta and the slimy texture of the newborn lamb repulsed me. Nearby now, on the hillside, a little way up from where I stood, Inés was adjusting her coarse dress, tugging at it here and there, straightening her shoulder pads, and tightening her apron, as if she were getting ready for a performance: “Come on, Andrés, don’t stare at me so much—you’re going to wear me out!” She said this knowing that I was watching her out of the corner of my eye, even though I appeared to be paying attention to several lambs climbing the hillside in search of fresh grass—but I wasn’t even looking at them. “Can’t you see that the goat’s running wild?” It was true—that damned goat, proving that not all creatures must be from God, was always running off into the mountains, and there was nothing to be done about it. For the scant quarter of a liter of milk it gave us each day, the trouble of keeping it with the sheep just wasn’t worth it, but my father insisted on keeping it, more out of nostalgia than practicality. Ever since my poor mother died, we’d had that wayward, unruly goat as if it were her soul lingering in the world—and the only one she respected. She bought it herself at the Sigüenza livestock market in the fall of ’27, because she wanted to make sure I had enough milk—even if it was goat’s milk. “If you want to be a decent man—and you will be, even if I have to beat you senseless—you have to drink plenty of goat’s milk.” She said it as if that milk were the anointing oil used by the bishop at Confirmation. “You’re a foolish shepherd who doesn’t even know how to keep an old goat in line!” Inés would scold me. But I knew that ever since my mother died, Inés had felt affection for me—not just out of feminine compassion, but for other reasons I’d rather not mention just yet. Yet she took pleasure in tormenting me, as if she believed it were her duty to do so. It was as if she wanted to take my late mother’s place and had set herself the mission of straightening me out and turning me into a “decent” man through scoldings and reproaches, just as my poor mother had said. She would stop, tuck her notebook into the roomy pocket of her apron, and then scold me again. “Can’t you see that the goat is running off into the hills?” I’d whistle for her, shout at her, throw a pebble at her, and try in vain to get her to return to the flock, because I didn’t want to go out looking for her and leave Inés behind. She was my only joy in the world, and I’d wait for that moment—when she came home from school—just as one waits for the sun after a cold, frosty night. Everything around me was silence and desolation. My father never smiled again after my mother’s death; my aunts seemed to be waiting for the moment to enter our bleak and cold house so they could wipe any sign of joy from their faces, and they seemed to feel obligated to pity me at every turn. “Poor son of mine! Without a mother to care for him, how will he ever become a man of worth?” To everyone, I was “poor little Andresito,” the motherless child, almost an orphan, because my father already seemed like a corpse. The other children in town—cruel and ruthless like all children—showed me everything that only a mother can provide, like their well-patched shirts and pants and their hearty snacks, and they’d smile maliciously at me when their mothers called them home at dusk. “Well, I’m leaving because my mother’s calling me. Sure, since you don’t have one, you can stay as long as you want. What luck!” Their cruelty was as immense as their ignorance. “I’m sick of that goat, so sick of her that one day… well, I don’t know what I’ll do to her!” “Don’t even think about it, Andrés! Your mother bought that goat, and you have to respect her!” Like everyone else, when my mother was mentioned, Inés, too, felt obliged to take pity on me, but she barely let a moment of melancholy show before her face immediately lit up again, her cheeks flushed, and her lips curved into a smile, as if she were trying to ward off any sad thoughts—she seemed to have been born to spread joy. Moreover, I accepted my mother’s death with the same naturalness as a priest administering last rites to a dying person, because I believe that whoever loves life also loves death, just as whoever volunteers to be a martyr can end up becoming an executioner. I did what she expected me to do: I rounded up the flock, reined in the revolutionary aspirations of that damned goat, and once everything was in order, I returned and sat down beside her, like a child waiting for his mother’s kiss for good behavior. But she continued with her methodical way of provoking my pride. “I’d never marry such a silly shepherd; in fact, I won’t even marry a shepherd at all, so get a grip!” “Don’t talk nonsense, Inés—talking about marriage already!” “When I grow up, I’ll be just like those young ladies on vacation in Sigüenza. I’ll wear pretty organdy dresses with a nice neckline to make the boys go wild. Because I’m not going to marry just anyone. That’s why I’m going to school—I can’t even afford shoe soles!” When she mentioned school, her expression grew solemn; her gaze drifted off somewhere into the valley, and she remained for a few moments in the most absolute silence—a rarity for her—as if she understood that only through the four scribbles beginning to emerge from her lined notebook could her dignity as a person rise to the level of her dreams. Then she’d become even more aggressive, pulling her worn notebook out of her apron pocket, opening it to any page to show me rows of repeated phrases—more or less aligned with the lines—and, almost arrogantly, she’d reproach me: “How can an ignorant shepherd who can’t even write an ‘o’ with a stick possibly understand how important it is to go to school?” “A young lady needs to know how to read and write, because…”—and she would stop suddenly, as if she knew that those letters scribbled in a charity notebook weren’t enough to make her a young lady. Yet those symbols intimidated me, because, in fact, I hadn’t had the chance to learn to read and write, and she seemed to me like an important person with a promising future. I had the feeling that they held meanings that were denied to me because of my ignorance. Perhaps they told stories, spoke of life, of nature, of everything one needed to know to understand all the mysteries the world holds. Just looking at those symbols, which hid their true meaning from me, filled me with anxiety—for whatever reason! Well, I’ve said enough nonsense already! She almost always ended her musings in that baffling way, but almost immediately regained her cheerfulness. It was as if she were returning from an imaginary journey through her future, after having strolled down the tree-lined avenue showing off her coveted dresses, teasing the boys with her daring neckline, and yet not having found the satisfaction she’d hoped for. And so she returned to the village—to the dusty path leading to school; to the bank of the stream covered in reeds where the frogs croaked; to the distant sound of the church bell, the bleating of the sheep, and the whistling of the larks among the fields. As if, in reality, that dream of hers of being a city lady weren’t truly her own, but rather something those poorly written scribbles in her tattered notebook had tried to instill in her. Suddenly, Inés would become maternal again, losing her appeal as a young woman of marriageable age, and she would rebuke me harshly: “Why don’t you go to school, too?” “Me, go to school? And who would do all the work around my house!” “What will become of you if you’re illiterate? Don’t you see that a man has no future if he doesn’t know how to read and write and the four rules of arithmetic?” “With land and sheep, why do I need to know how to do the books?” “But what if you lose them—if there’s a bad year or the sheep get sick and die? What will you do then?” “I’ll never be short on work as long as I have two arms.” “As a farmhand in the fields, dying of poverty?” “Whatever it takes, woman!” Outraged by my stubbornness, she’d get up in a rage and shove her worn notebook in my face, as if trying to force the letters into my head by hitting me with them. “If you don’t learn to read and write, I won’t love you as a husband, even if you asked me on your knees! Just so you know!” She believed that was the best way to shake me out of my recklessness and small-town stubbornness, because for Inés, life boiled down to living happily until the inevitable day she’d have to get married. Then life would cease to be a game and become something serious—a kind of natural mission every woman is bound to fulfill, such as taking care of a husband, running a household, and raising children. Therefore, everything I did before this momentous task was nothing but a trivial game, one that I had to make the most of. “I’m no good at writing things like that!” I protested, but deep down I knew that wasn’t true; in fact, I thought I understood them even without knowing what they meant. “You’re no good as a shepherd either, and I don’t want you to be one!” I want you to be someone important, because I’ll only marry someone who’s important—like those gentlemen who drive up from Madrid to spend the summer in Sigüenza. “But what kind of silly ideas are getting into your head? What’s wrong with our town, huh? Besides, where do you get these ideas from, you little brat who’s only been going to school for less than half a year?” What do you think—that just because you can read and write and do basic arithmetic, you can already aspire to all that nonsense about summer visitors? Come on, get down from the fig tree already, Inés—things aren’t the way you dream they are! We’re nothing more than two peasants, just like all the other peasants. You’ll be just like your mother: they’ll marry you off to a man from the village, you’ll tend sheep, weed the chives, dig up the beans, fatten a pig for the San Martín slaughter, reap and thresh the harvest every summer—and God willing, you’ll have at least four or five children whom you can raise in good health so they can take care of you in your old age. What’s all this nonsense about lords and ladies? You’d be better off not going to school at all! It was as if I’d slapped her. Pressing her lips together tightly, she stood up angrily, fixed me with a glare—one that, had it been a sword, would have pierced my heart—and, planting her hands on her hips, she told me everything I undoubtedly deserved but, thanks to her good nature, kept to herself: —See? You’re nothing but an illiterate fool who knows nothing about life! Just so you know, at school they don’t just teach us to read and write and the four basic arithmetic operations, but also how to be people… Well, I’m not saying it’s bad to be a farmer, but we have to aspire to be something more than illiterate people starving and living in misery. You think this is good because you don’t know anything else. Why? What can you learn about life if you spend all day in the mountains, or herding a mule in the fields, or digging in the garden? Do you think that’s all there is to life? That we poor people don’t have the right to eat anything fancier than rancid bacon, or chorizo and blood sausage? It’s not that I don’t like them, but there are other things: pastries, sweets, and drinks other than just water and wine. Do you think we don’t have the right to wear anything other than these patched-up rags? Look at your pants—they’re more patched up than the roof of my house! Why do you think the stores are full of pretty things? Just for decoration, huh, you fool? And how are we supposed to buy those things if we only see money when there’s a baptism and they throw us a few pennies as a bonus! I stayed quiet because I didn’t quite understand what he was trying to tell me. As far as I was concerned, life was fine just the way it was. I liked the intense scent of thyme, lavender, rosemary, sage, or marjoram—even the tang of broom flowers; I breathed in that clean mountain air with satisfaction; I enjoyed watching the hares scamper through the fields or the procession of baby pigeons following their mother; I liked to imitate the song of the skittish cuckoo, its silhouette silhouetted in the distance against the canopy of the holm oaks. I was happy watching the sun set at twilight, when the clouds blazed vermilion, as if they were on fire. All of that held for me the solemnity of the divine, and I wouldn’t know how to live without it. Suddenly Inés began to cry, and I knew it because two thick tears welled up from her large, green eyes, sliding down her flushed cheeks. “And now, what’s wrong with you?” “I don’t know, I just feel like crying—that’s all!” “Well, just like that!” “Yes, just like that! We women cry for no reason at all—just like that!” “Well, that’s nonsense!”—she always spoke of herself as a woman, even though she wasn’t yet fourteen “I’m crying because something—I don’t know what it is—is squeezing my chest, and if I don’t cry, I’ll burst!” “But does it have to have an explanation?” “Of course it has an explanation!” Is it not enough of an explanation that we’re poor, living here in this half-ruined village, forsaken by God, without even a single light bulb in the town square, lighting our way with oil lamps? Is it not enough of an explanation that your mother was taken by the flu—which doctors now know how to cure with just four pills? —Leave my mother alone; she rests in peace, and if she’s gone, God knows why! —“That’s it, always the same; good or bad, God wants it all! Well, what kind of God is yours who can’t tell the difference between what’s just and what isn’t? Come on, may God forgive me if He exists, but there’s no justice in the world, and He must know why—but I don’t!” —“Don’t blaspheme, Inés, or God will punish you with some misfortune!” “Leave me alone! No, you’re going to be a priest—and if not, time will see to it!” And she stormed off, angrily tucking her notebook into her apron, until she disappeared behind the wayside shrine, without even turning back to see the stupid look on my face as she left me. That was a premonition, because Inés knew my character better than I did myself. I felt it as a curse from heaven rather than a blessing. Becoming a priest meant turning away from her, giving her up, even though we somehow lived with the naive conviction that we were made for each other—but that it was only a matter of letting time smooth out our differences. This would happen as soon as I stopped being a teenager and became a man, but I didn’t know when or how I would know that I was one yet. I was only sure that I wasn’t one yet. She, however, had long since been a woman; she thought like a woman and behaved like a woman. She even cried like a woman! That latest argument didn’t cool our friendship—and I’d even go so far as to say it didn’t dampen our mutual affection, which might already be love. On the contrary, when I returned from the fields, I found her sitting by the fountain, with a pitcher that had been overflowing for quite some time—because she was undoubtedly waiting for me. I walked past her, feeling confused and afraid that, after our argument, she might never speak to me again, and I gave a harsh blow with my staff to a poor sheep that had stopped to nibble on some grass growing next to the stone basin, right where she was sitting. The frightened animal reared up on its hind legs and would have crashed into the fountain’s stone if she hadn’t stopped it. “Do you want to kill that poor animal? You’re such a beast, Andrés!” Inés scolded me. I didn’t say anything, but I felt remorseful. I grabbed the poor sheep by its shearing collar and tried to calm it down, as if to apologize for my bad behavior, but the animal wanted nothing more than to get away from me. Inés picked up the pitcher, slung it over her hip, and walked silently beside me. “What I said about you becoming a priest—I didn’t really mean it…” she said after we’d walked together for a while, just a few meters from her house. “I don’t want you to be a priest… Priests aren’t real men; they don’t know anything about life because they don’t get married”—she suddenly stopped, shifted the heavy pitcher to her other hip, and, laughing, shouted at me—“But if you become a priest, I’ll become a nun!” Once again, I was left confused and bewildered, because something inside me told me that I could never enjoy the love of that girl, who, nevertheless, already saw herself as a woman. Election Fever Election Fever It was a week before the 1931 municipal elections, and the town had turned into a circus. Strangers we’d never seen around there before were showing up on foot or on horseback. Some even arrived in cars emblazoned with large white initials representing the political parties they supported, and these cars could barely make it up the hillside, especially since the morning dew had made the road slippery. Signs with political slogans also appeared, painted rather clumsily and even with the occasional spelling mistake, on every wall—especially on the plastered wall of the fronton. “Farmer, remember your crops; don’t let them go to the lord again. Vote for your PSOE candidate, the party of the farmers.” But in our village, the elections didn’t seem to have any significance beyond re-electing the mayor, Don Mariano. He was the village’s sole landowner, with more than five hundred head of cattle and the best stretch of valley for grain, in addition to other uncultivated lands—good for wild boars and roe deer—where people from Madrid, and even from Aragon and Catalonia, came to hunt. The hunting reserve was well protected from poachers by a pair of sworn gamekeepers—father and son—who didn’t ask questions before shooting anyone who prowled around it. Don Mariano had been handpicked during Primo de Rivera’s dictatorship. The opposing candidate was Genaro Martínez, nicknamed “El Tejero” because he worked as a foreman at the village tile factory—a miserable, dilapidated enterprise owned by someone from Guadalajara whom almost none of us knew and whom we’d only ever seen around town during roe deer hunting season, at festivals, or on the occasion of some local celebration. There was yet another candidate from a Republican party, but he withdrew at the last minute to support the Socialist. It wasn’t that the town was particularly important, but for the parties in the left-wing and Republican coalition, every mayor or council member they could secure mattered. The Conservatives, on the other hand, seemed to take the election for granted, because they barely made a move. The discussions in the tavern were heated, and everyone in town seemed to know about politics without even being able to read the names of the leaders who appeared in the newspapers, which published articles supporting their parties’ candidates. “This is that Gil Robles. As far as I’m concerned, he’s a truly educated person, and besides, he’s the most qualified, because he comes from a good family, unlike us,” people would say. “Come on! All politicians are the same. Now they’re remembering us so we’ll vote for them, but I’m abstaining—or whatever you call it. I don’t like either one; one’s too greedy and the other’s too know-it-all. Nah, I’m not voting, and that’s that!” “Well, I’m definitely going to vote, just in case my apathy lets the Reds take the mayor’s office—with the Socialists, this town would be a total mess.” “I’m telling you, it’s all rigged! In the end, they’ll get as many votes as they want; even the dead will rise for the elections. I treat my ballot the same way I treat the rocks when I take a dump in the fields.” “Don’t be an idiot—these elections are serious! Things are already heated enough after what happened in Morocco, and this Admiral Aznar isn’t even fit to run a convent of nuns. Without a firm hand and someone from a good family to lead and keep this country in check, it’ll fall apart in two days.” “Well, Romanones doesn’t hunt as much around here anymore as he did back when Primo de Rivera was around—they must all be so high and mighty that their collars don’t even reach their shirts.” At dusk, groups of young people would arrive on horseback from Guadalajara, Madrid, and even Zaragoza. Sometimes they came to announce a rally in Sigüenza; other times, accompanied by their candidate, they would improvise one right there in the town square—which almost always ended in heated arguments, if not a brawl. The Socialists, the most active among them, would read a proclamation by Lenin and then comment on it, ostensibly toning down their demands and making no mention of private property. “The fruits of labor cannot be handed over to the capitalist; rather, they must be distributed fairly among all workers.” To which some peasant would respond by waving his walking stick in the air. “Go on, take your stories somewhere else! We don’t know anything here about capitalism or productism; we’re all honest people, and no one’s going to take away what we’ve earned with the sweat of our brow—least of all that Leni, or whatever his name is!” “But don’t you understand?” the impromptu orator pressed. “We’re all equal because we were all born of a woman, so we all have the right to a dignified life free from hardship. Large-scale landownership and the poor exploitation of the land are the causes of poverty in the Spanish countryside. We need a modern agricultural policy. We need to carry out a thorough agrarian reform that better distributes the fruits of the farmer’s labor and makes their work more profitable.” But the peasant insisted, all the while brandishing his club menacingly: “Everyone gets what they deserve, because there are lazybones and hard workers—we’re just like swallows: some are smart and some are dumb. It’s only right that the smart ones own property, and the dumb ones are good for nothing but being day laborers. What the hell is all this nonsense about us all being equal?” To which another farmer retorted: “Look who’s talking about cleverness—everything you have, you inherited; and as for work—real work—you never get tired, no, because your laborers do it, the ones you keep half-starved and in misery. We all know here what you pay them…” Then a brawl was inevitable. —“And you, you starving wretch, who’s given you a say in this funeral? Inherited and with honor, and I won’t let anyone come at me with that nonsense about how we’re all equal. The first one to cross my field will get a taste of this—and some of you here already know how it stings your kidneys!” Finally, a chaotic clamor broke out, with everyone shouting their opinions: “There can be no justice without a firm hand!” “Human beings are beyond redemption!” “Without a proper revolution, there can be no solidarity or justice!” Don Mariano delivered a conciliatory speech to please the Sigüenza faction, but due to his poor oratory skills, it was a resounding failure and almost a mockery, offset only by the bitterness of his fellow party members: —I don’t like to go around preaching; to be mayor, all you need is good judgment and common sense. I don’t know a thing about politics, nor do I care, because for a town like this, the less politics, the better. As long as I’m mayor, we’ll have peace and quiet, which is what matters most. What good is all that “progress” from the city if it comes laced with wickedness and corruption? What matters is peace and quiet and good health—which we have in spades, and we don’t lack for that here. But his fellow party members from Sigüenza weren’t satisfied with the simplicity of those small-town arguments, and they hurled their malicious jabs at the Socialist candidate. “The Socialists and Communists want to take your land away, burn down the church, and declare free love, so that everyone can sleep with your wives. Is that what you want your children to learn?” Despite the provocation, the retorts were lighthearted. “Go on, get back to your own town, little marquis—we don’t want snobs here!” “This is my town too, because this is Spain, and Spain is the holiest of all! The Reds are controlled by Moscow, and if they win the election here, the Russians will be in charge, not the Spaniards!” But the peasants were just as suspicious of the conservative politicians as they were of the socialists. “Russia’s way too far away for them to come and rule us! I don’t think they’d bother coming all that way to govern us just for the four bushels of wheat we harvest a year, half a dozen lambs, and a few horses that are falling apart from old age.” “But, you fool! What about universal values, the homeland, religion, God, and everything sacred in our land? Are we going to let those Reds desecrate them?” “Don’t insult me, crazy guy—that’s what school is for!” As for me, the only thing that’s sacred is a well-cured ham and red wine from Aragón, and I don’t think we’d be short on those, even if the Russians came! The laughter was unanimous, and the conservatives finally realized that their doomsday arguments weren’t impressing anyone. For me, the whole election business was nothing more than an opportunity to break out of my routine. The town had never been so lively, nor had so many outsiders ever come through. The tavern was always packed with regulars, and the only topic of discussion was politics. My fellow townspeople seemed to have regained their hope for the future. It was inspiring to see people in the tavern discussing social issues, such as work, education, the right to free speech, and the right to criticize politicians or the monarchy. The educated read the political pamphlets between sips of wine, while the illiterate nibbled on cigars that had been hastily rolled so they wouldn’t miss a single detail of what was being read. From time to time, if they didn’t understand something, they would scratch their shaggy hair, momentarily pushing back their caps to reveal their whitish bald spots. —“April 12 will be the spring of Spain, because the workers will vote en masse for the Republic,” read the enlightened peasant. “The workers’ vote will put an end to the historic suffering endured by the working class of this country under the oppression of the oligarchy—composed of military officers, debased nobles, and unscrupulous financiers—and will give way to an honest government, of the people and for the people. A new democratic government, honest and committed to the well-being of the people, and not merely to the defense of the privileges of a few.” Inés’s brothers—Juan, Damián, and Benjamín Valiente—were the most attentive and didn’t hesitate to interrupt the reading if they didn’t understand something. They seemed eager for knowledge and were visibly distressed by their ignorance. —“What does pri… pri… mean?” —“Privileges? Well, what else could it mean? That a few people take everything that should be shared among everyone…” —“Go on, go on, I get it now!” —“In this historic election, workers can have no doubts when it comes time to vote, because the coalition of the left and the Republicans is the only one that defends their interests…” . .. .