Read While England Sleeps Online
Authors: David Leavitt
In the event, I contacted Northrop hoping that he might help me to leave. He would not give me the chance, insisting rather that I must stay and that I would be grateful to him. But why must I give up my life for the victory of the Republic? In any case, I cannot go home, as the brigade has confiscated my passport, issuing a worthless brigade passport in its place.
I realize I left England rather suddenly, and in doing so no doubt caused you distress. Suffice it to say that I had the misfortune to come upon your journal and commit the unpardonable sin of reading it. No doubt by now you and Miss Archibald are engaged and I am the last thing on your mind. Nonetheless I am facing a difficult dilemma and know no one else who might be able to help me find a way out of it.
I should add that meeting the people of the Spanish culture has been a most edifying experience, bringing me into contact with things I never could have known in Upney.
In the event, any pity you might be able to muster for your old friend at this hour would be greatly appreciated. Again, let me apologize for the inconvenience I may be causing.
With very warmest regards, I remain yours sincerely,
Edward Joseph Phelan
I put the letter down. Nine o’clock in the morning, the old house quiet except for the sound of a maid polishing silver. Outside, boats on the water, sunlight filtering through clouds and spreading itself out over the river, and in my chest a wild trembling, half terror and half joy. The letter, having been sent to Earl’s Court, then forwarded, had taken several weeks to reach me. Yet I did not think: was Edward still alive? I thought: Two weeks ago he was alive, scarred but alive. He wrote this letter. Two weeks ago he still lived.
It is odd, given my earlier ambivalence, that I never doubted for a minute what I had to do.
I rang up Emma Leland. I rang up the chap from Dartmoor Walk. I rang up everyone I knew who might possibly be able to get me an address for John Northrop, until finally I was put in touch with a brigade organizer from Putney, a fellow named Chambers, who had an address where he thought Northrop could be reached. The telegram—sent that afternoon—informed him of my desire to come to Spain as quickly as possible. If he still wished me to write a pamphlet, I was at his disposal .
.
.
Chambers called that afternoon. Northrop had wired him from Altaguera, the brigade’s base, to tell him to thank me for the telegram and ask if I might consider going to Spain right away: apparently a position had been found. As for my request to join the Party, the pertinent card had been issued; I had only to sign the proper forms.
I assented immediately, having no idea that years later, in a different country, that letter—unearthed—would prove the undoing of my career.
Travel arrangements were finalized. Northrop, Chambers said, would meet me in Barcelona upon my arrival; at that point, having been briefed, I would be sent on to the town of —— to continue on my own. Couldn’t I go directly to Altaguera? I asked. What would be the point? Chambers said. Altaguera was the opposite direction. Oh, of course, I said, not wanting to reveal my real motive; once I arrived in Spain, I decided, I’d find a way to Altaguera, and Edward.
It was the winter of 1937, and I was twenty-three years old.
Barcelona. Mountain and water.
I took a room at a pension in the old part of the city, off the Ramblas. It contained a sagging bed with a threadbare white spread; a table with a short leg; a cold-water sink; a chair; a chicken-scratched armoire; and a calendar reproduction of Velazquez’s
Las Meninas
. The floor tiles were old, the same shade of gray as gray hair. My windows opened onto a street so narrow almost no light came through them. Only if I thrust my head out and looked up could I see a sliver of sky and make a guess as to what the weather would be like.
Barcelona’s geography is itself a metaphor; the poorest people live downtown, by the port. Then, as the long avenues steepen toward Mount Tibidabo, the apartments grow extra corridors and bathrooms, the shops fill with elegant clothes, the people’s faces take on that ruddy look faces have when people have always been well fed, warm and clean. Some streets are so steep, there are escalators on the pavements.
Downtown, by contrast, was a delirium. On the Ramblas, elderly whores, their cheeks and lips painted crudely as clowns’, offered sex for a few pesetas. A transvestite with huge false eyelashes winked at passersby and thrust out a breast as hard and spherical as a coconut. Another whore, in a tight red dress, flitted through a café, singing and periodically shoving her breasts (real) into the faces of gawking foreigners.
On the Ramblas, I passed booths where you could buy orchids, houseplants, chickens and parrots, dogs and cats and mice. There was a booth where a monkey wearing a bow tie picked envelopes that told your fortune out of a jar. There was a swallower of flaming swords and an elderly flamenco dancer and a contortionist who could tie himself into a bow.
Even though it was winter, the sun shone brazenly. It would never have dared shine that way in London, which went a long way toward explaining my own skin, ludicrously pallid in this land of dark vigor. Smoke hung heavy in the streets; everywhere there was the odor of potatoes, frying oil, horse manure.
I saw an old woman knitting a pink sweater as she walked down the street.
The first two days, I ate lunch in empty restaurants, wondering if their emptiness signaled that they were second-rate, until I caught on that no one here had lunch before three. This was then followed by siesta, two hours during which the city became a ghost town, every shop shuttered. Around dusk, things came alive again and didn’t stop. The Ramblas were up all night; you could buy a parrot that said “I love you” in four languages at three in the morning; everywhere there were soldiers, brigadiers, the color red. The Spanish call the mysterious hours between midnight and dawn
la madrugada;
if you stay awake through it, you are said to
madrugar,
and most people I met
madrugar
ed every night. But working hours were no different than anywhere else. When did they sleep? Did they hibernate in the winter, like bears?
Every couple of hours, news from the front shot through the city. Women thrust wirelesses out their windows and turned them up full blast; old men dragged blackboards to the streets, on which they scrawled hastily received dispatches. Usually these had to do with battles in Aragon. The actual facts—who had won, how many had died—got through only after several days’ worth of unsubstantiated and contradictory rumors. Then came funeral processions, huddled clusters of mourners bearing sepia-toned photographs of young soldiers wreathed in flowers. And the mothers wailed their grief, grief on a Mediterranean scale, showing none of the restraint for which the English are famous. They tore open their blouses until the buttons popped, they scratched at their chests; if they could have, they would have torn out their own hearts.
Word spread that there had been heavy brigade losses at Guadalajara. But when I visited the local Communist Party headquarters and asked for information about casualties, the depressed-looking lackey at the desk merely shook his head and said he was sorry but he had no news.
The grand dining room of the Ritz Hotel, meanwhile, had been converted by the hotel trade unions into a canteen; the Anarchist leader Federica Montseny, who wanted to outlaw marriage, was appointed minister of health; and on posters all over the city a bare-chested fellow appeared with whom I might easily have fallen in love. “The Spanish workers struggle for the liberty and the cultures of all countries!” he pleaded. “Solidarity with them!” Barcelona, it seemed, was revolution central, while down the coast in Málaga the Fascists ruled; vendors sold postcards on which Hitler, Franco and Mussolini shared equal billing, like a demented Three Stooges. (Hitler did look like Moe.) “Viva España!” the captions read. “Viva Italia! Heil Hitler!” And how long would it be, I wondered, before the Führer’s Mediterranean
confrères
emulated him further, dispensing with nationalism, demanding allegiance not to the mother country but to its holy generalissimo, its prodigal son?
Two days passed, and still I had received no word from Northrop.
Finally I decided to go myself to Altaguera.
I was in the middle of packing when the old woman who ran my pension rapped on the door. Northrop had sent a message to say he would be in Barcelona that evening. Could I meet him at ten o’clock at Bar Bristol on Plaza Madrid?
I got there half an hour early. Bar Bristol turned out to be a simple
bodega,
barnlike, with big communal tables and, instead of chairs, warped benches designed to hold ten people but squeezed, that night, with as many as twenty. (Once, one of the benches collapsed under the pressure, spilling its occupants onto the stone floor.) The owners, a young couple of weather-beaten beauty, appeared to speak the same four languages that the parrots on the Ramblas spoke, with only slightly more fluency.
I stood near the entrance. The bar was so crowded, people were literally bursting out the doors onto the streets. Music might have been playing, but you couldn’t hear it; it was completely drowned out by a huge human noise like a hive of bees, men and women shouting about politics, or demanding tables. While the husband balanced trays filled with wine and
cerveza, tapas
and
empanadas
and
bocadillos,
his wife simultaneously sliced ham, pulled a bottle from an ice chest and wrote up a bill. They had no employees; the two of them managed the unruly crowd by themselves. They seemed to be the sort of people who could do a dozen things at once, perfectly, without ever losing their otherworldly composure.
In a dozen different languages, the patrons at the bar were arguing—Communists with Anarchists, Catalans with Castilians—which went a long way toward explaining the divided condition of the left. Spaniards enjoy argument and practice it as a sport, something I witnessed frequently during my days there, restaurateurs duking it out with customers over the honor of an insulted salad. Even those who stood on the same side of the fence could work themselves into such a frenzy over fine points, they might come to blows.
Across the room some soldiers started singing a drinking song. With each verse they raised their glasses higher into the air, until, on the twelfth verse, one of them lifted his glass so high the beer splashed a bare light bulb on the ceiling, which fizzled out.
“Coño,”
the wife said, then went into the kitchen, emerging with a ladder and a new bulb, which she held between her teeth like a rose. She climbed the ladder and began removing the old bulb. The soldiers, still singing, surrounded her and lifted the ladder in the air, and taking the bulb out of her mouth, she told them to put her down, but they would not put her down; instead they started twirling the ladder as if it were a chair that carries the bride at a wedding. Then she smiled, she threw back her head so that her hair flew out in a fan, as the ladder swayed, and the crowd applauded, and she let herself be lost in the pleasure of motion.
I heard a voice, loud and distinctly English: “Excuse me, excuse me, passing through.” It was Northrop, looking quite hale in his brigade uniform. “Botsford,” he said, “how good to see you!”
He thrust out one of his huge hands to shake mine; the other, I noticed, was swathed in bandages. “Sorry about the delay,” he said. “We took a bit of a drubbing at Guadalajara. No one emerged unscathed, not even yours truly, though in the end I’m happy to say our side managed to prevail.”
“Were losses heavy?”
“Depends on your definition of ‘heavy’. Let’s get a table, shall we? Manu!”
The husband put down his tray and came over to greet Northrop. For some moments they conducted a gushing conversation in Spanish, the result of which was our being ferried immediately to two open places at a table, much to the chagrin of the people who had been waiting. Northrop, it appeared, had become a figure of importance.
Two
cervezas
arrived—pale and urine-colored, nothing like English beer. “Drink, drink,” Northrop said. “I know it looks pissy, but it’s the best you’ll find over here.” I drank. “Cheers, I forgot to say. Anyway, I was delighted to get your telegram, though I can’t say it surprised me. I knew you’d come around sooner or later.”
“Northrop, I must ask you about Edward,” I interrupted.
“Edward?”
“Edward Phelan. The fellow who shared my flat.”
“Ah, Phelan, yes.” He shook his head.
“Well—is he all right?”
“I wish I knew.”
“But I presumed—” My heart was racing. “Northrop, has something happened to Edward?”
“Easy, old boy! It’s just that he’s deserted.”
“Deserted!”
“Yes. It’s been almost a week now.”
So Edward wasn’t dead. I closed my eyes in a silent prayer of thanks.
“But we’ll find him,” Northrop went on. “Mark my words, we’ll find him. A thing like that can’t go unpunished. If men desert and get away with it—well, what then of the republic? What then of the cause?”
“But how? Why did he leave?”
Northrop shrugged. “I suppose he just didn’t like the fighting. Not that anyone does. Anyway, he came to me and asked to be relieved. I said no. The next morning”—he snapped his fingers—“gone.”