The Forging of a Rebel: The Forge, the Track and the Clash - Softcover

Barea, Arturo

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1782274944 ISBN 13: 9781782274940

Publisher: Pushkin Press, 2018

Synopsis

The Forging of a Rebel is an unsurpassed account of Spanish history and society from early in the twentieth century through the cataclysmic events of the Spanish Civil War. Arturo Barea's masterpiece charts the author's coming-of-age in a bruised and starkly unequal Spain. These three volumes recount in lively detail Barea's daily experience of his country as it pitched toward disaster: we are taken from his youthful play and rebellion on the streets of Madrid, to his apprenticeship in the business world and to the horrors he witnessed as part of the Spanish army in Morocco during the Rif War. The trilogy culminates in an indelible portrait of the Republican fight against Fascist forces in which the Madrid of Barea's childhood becomes a shell and bullet-strewn warzone. Combining historical sweep and authority with poignant characterization and novelistic detail, The Forging of a Rebel is a towering literary and historical achievement.

About this title

About the Author

Arturo Barea (1897-1957) was born in Badajoz and raised and educated in Madrid. For most of the Spanish Civil War, he acted as head of the Foreign Press and Censorship Bureau of the Republican Government in Madrid and was also the radio broadcaster who spoke as the 'Unknown Voice of Madrid'. Eventually forced out of Spain, he sought temporary asylum in France before crossing to England just before the outbreak of World War II. He and his wife Ilsa settled in Eaton Hastings near Faringdon in Berkshire. From 1940 until 1957 he transmitted a weekly broadcast for Spanish Radio to South America known as Juan de Castilla. He published novels and short stories as well as books of criticism, including Lorca, the Poet (1944) and Unamuno (1952), and his great autobiographical trilogy The Forging of a Rebel first appeared in English between 1941 and 1946.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

The Forging of a Rebel

The Track, The Clash, The Forge

By Arturo Barea, Ilsa Barea

Pushkin Press

Copyright © 2018 Pushkin Press
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-1-78227-494-0

Contents

Introduction, 7, 
THE FORGE, 15, 
THE TRACK, 243, 
THE CLASH, 443, 

CHAPTER 1

RIVER AND ATTIC

The wind blew into the two hundred pairs of breeches and filled them. To me they looked like fat men without a head, swinging from the clothes-lines of the drying-yard. We boys ran along the rows of white trousers and slapped their bulging seats. Señora Encarna was furious. She chased us with the wooden beater she used to pound the dirty grease out of her washing. We took refuge in the maze of streets and squares formed by four hundred damp sheets. Sometimes she caught one of us; then the others would begin to throw mud pellets at the breeches. They left stains as though somebody had dirtied his pants, and we imagined the thrashing some people would get for behaving like pigs.

In the evening, when the breeches had dried, we helped to count them in tens. All the children of the washerwomen went with Señora Encarna up to the top story of the washhouse. It was a big loft with a roof like a V turned upside down. Señora Encarna could stand upright in the middle, but her top-knot nearly touched the big beam. We would stand at the sides and bang our heads against the sloping roof.

Señora Encarna had in front of her the heaps of breeches, sheets, pants, and shirts. The pillow-cases were apart. Everything had its number. Señora Encarna sang it out and threw the piece to the boy in charge of the set of ten to which it belonged. Each of us looked after two or three groups, the "twenties," or the "thirties," or the "sixties," and had to drop each piece on the right heap. Last of all we stuffed into each pillow-case, as into a sack, one pair of breeches, two sheets, one pair of pants, and one shirt, all marked with the same number. Every Thursday, a big cart drawn by four horses came down to the river to fetch the two hundred bundles of clean linen and leave another two hundred of dirty washing behind.

It was the linen of the men of the Royal Horse Guards, the only soldiers who had sheets to sleep in.

Every morning, soldiers of the Guards rode over the King's Bridge escorting an open carriage in which the Prince of Asturias used to sit, or sometimes the Queen. But first a rider would come out of the tunnel which led to the Royal Palace, to warn the guards on the bridge. They would chase away the people, and the carriage with its escort would pass when the bridge was empty. As we were children and so could not be anarchists, the police let us stay while they went by. We were not afraid of the Horse Guards, because we knew their breeches too well.

The Prince was a fair-haired boy with blue eyes, who looked at us and laughed like a ninny. People said he was dumb and had to go for a walk in the Casa de Campo every day, between a priest and a general with white mustaches. It would have been better for him to come and play with us by the river. And then we would have seen him with nothing on when we were bathing, and would have known what a prince looks like inside. But apparently they did not want him to come. Once we discussed it with Uncle Granizo, the owner of the washhouse, because he was friends with the head keeper of the Casa de Campo, who sometimes spoke to the Prince. Uncle Granizo promised to see to it, but later he told us that the general would not give his permission.

Those military were all alike. A general who had been in the Philippines often came to visit my Uncle José. He had brought back with him an old Chinese who was very fond of me, a pink wooden walking-stick, which he said had been the spine of a fish called the manatee and was the death of anyone who got a whack with it, and a cross which was not a real cross but a green star with many rays, which he wore everywhere, embroidered on his vest and shirt and as an enamel button in his coat-lapel.

Every time this general came to visit my uncle, he grunted, cleared his throat and asked me whether I was already a little man. He would at once begin to scold me: "Keep quiet, boy, a little man mustn't do that ... Leave that cat alone, boy, you're a little man now." I used to sit down on the floor between my uncle's legs while they talked about politics and the war of the Russians and Japanese. The war had finished long before, but the general liked to speak of it because he had been in China and Japan himself. When they talked about that, I used to listen, and every time I heard how the Japanese had beaten up the Russians I was glad. I could not stand the Russians. They had a very nasty king who was the Tsar and a police chief called Petroff, Captain Petroff, who was a brute and lashed people with his whip. My uncle bought me a new number of the Adventures of Captain Petroff every Sunday. They threw a lot of bombs at him, but he never got killed.

When they stopped speaking of the war they bored me and I went to play on the dining-room carpet.

That other general who was with the Prince must have been just the same. He had to teach the Prince how to make wars when he became king, because all kings must know how to make wars, and the priest taught him how to speak. I didn't understand that. How could he speak if he was dumb? Perhaps he could, because he was a prince; but the dumb people I knew could only talk by signs. And it was not for lack of priests.

It was a nuisance that no ball came floating down, when we needed one to play with that evening.

It was quite easy to fish a ball. There was a small wooden bridge in front of Uncle Granizo's house. It was made of two old rails with planks on top and a railing, all painted green. Underneath flowed a black stream which came out of a tunnel; and that tunnel and that stream were the big sewer of Madrid. All the balls which the children of Madrid dropped into the gutters came floating down there, and we fished for them from our bridge with a net made of a stick and the wire guard of a brazier. Once I caught one made of rubber; it was painted red. Next day at school, Cerdeño took it away from me and I had to keep my mouth shut because he was bigger than I was. But I made him pay for it. In the Corrala, the square in front of the school where we used to play, I threw a stone at his head from the top of the railing, so that he went about with a bandage for two days and they had to sew up his brain with stitches. Of course, he did not know who had done it. But I carried a sharp stone in my pocket after that, just in case, and if he had tried to beat me, they would have had to sew him up a second time.

Antonio, the one who limped, once fell from the bridge and nearly drowned. Señor Manuel, the handyman, pulled him out and squeezed his tummy with both hands until Antonio began to spit up dirty water. Afterwards they gave him tea and brandy to drink. Señor Manuel, who was a tippler, took a good swill out of the bottle because his trousers were all wet and he said he was cold.

Nothing doing, no ball came down. I went to dinner, my mother was calling me. That day we had our meal in the sun, sitting on the grass. I liked it better than the cold days with no sun, when we had to eat at Uncle Granizo's. His house was a tavern with a tin-covered bar and some round tables which were all wobbly. The soup would spill over and the brazier stank. It was not really a brazier, but a big portable stove, with an open fire in the middle and all the stewing-pots of the washerwomen placed round it. My mother's was small, because there were only the two of us, but Señora Encarna's pot was as big as a wine-jar. There were nine of them, and they ate out of a washbowl instead of a plate. Allnine sat on the grass round their bowl and dipped in their spoons in turn. When it rained and they had to eat indoors, they sat at two tables and divided their stew between the washbowl and a very big earthenware casserole which Uncle Granizo used for stewing snails on Sundays. For on Sundays the washhouse was shut and Uncle Granizo cooked snails. In the evening, men and women came down to the river and they danced, ate snails and drank wine. Once Uncle Granizo invited my mother and me, and I stuffed. The snails were caught in the grass round there, especially after the rain, when they came out to sun themselves. We boys collected them, painted their houses in many colors and let them run races.

The cocido tasted better here than at home.

First you cut bread into very thin bits and poured over them the soup of the stew, yellow with saffron. Then you ate the chick-peas, and after them the meat together with fresh tomatoes cut in half and sprinkled with plenty of salt. For dessert we had salad, juicy green lettuce with tender hearts such as you could not have got anywhere in town. Uncle Granizo grew the lettuces on the banks of the sewer, because he said that they grew better on sewage water. And it was true. It sounded nasty. But people spread dung on the corn-fields and chickens eat muck, and in spite of all that, bread and chickens are very good.

The chickens and ducks knew our meal-time. They arrived as soon as my mother turned over her washing-board. A big, fat earthworm had been underneath and now it wriggled. One of the ducks saw it at once. He ate the worm just as I used to eat thick noodles: he dangled it in his bill, sucked — plff — and down it went. Then he plucked at the feathers of his neck, as if some crumbs had fallen there, and waited for me to throw him my piece of bread. I would not give it him in my fingers because he was a brute and pinched. He had a very hard bill and it hurt.

With the washing-board for a table we ate, my mother and I, sitting on the grass.

My mother's hands were very small. As she had been washing since sunrise, her fingers were covered with little wrinkles like an old woman's skin, but her nails were bright and shining. Sometimes the lye would burn right through her skin and make pin-prick holes all over her fingertips. In the winter her hands used to get cut open; as soon as she took them out of the water into the cold air, they were covered with sharp little ice crystals. The blood would spurt as though a cat had scratched her. She used to put on glycerine, and her hands healed at once.

After the meal we boys went to play at Paris-Madrid Motor Races with the wheelbarrows used for the washing. We had stolen four of them from Señor Manuel, without his noticing, and kept them hidden in the meadow. He did not like us playing with them, because they were heavy and he said one of us would have his leg broken one day. But they were great fun. Each barrow had an iron wheel in front which screeched as it rolled. One boy would get into a wheelbarrow and another would push it at top speed until he had enough of it. Then he would suddenly tip up the barrow, and the passenger would topple out. One day we played at train-crashes, and lame Antonio squashed his finger. He was always unlucky. He was lame because of a thrashing his father had given him. He fell into the sewer, too. As he wore out one of his shoes more quickly than the other, his mother made him wear both shoes of a pair on both feet, changing them each day, so that he used up the two equally quickly. When he wore his left shoe on his right foot, which was the sound one, he limped with both legs and it was very funny to see him hopping on his crutches.

I had seen the real Paris-Madrid races in the Calle del Arenal, at the corner of the street where my uncle lived. There were many policemen lined up so that people should not get run over. The cars were not allowed to finish in the Puerta del Sol as they had wanted to, and the goal was at the Puente de los Franceses. Three or four cars crashed there. I had never seen a racing-car before. All the cars in Madrid looked like carriages without their horses, but those racing-cars were different. They were long and low and the driver crouched right down in them so that you saw nothing but his head — a fur cap and goggles with big glasses like a diver's. The cars had thick pipes which let off explosions like cannon-shots and puffs of smoke with a horrid smell. The papers said they could go up to fifty-five miles an hour. The train to Méntrida, which is thirty-five miles from Madrid, took from six in the morning till eleven, so that it was not surprising if some of those racing men smashed themselves up on the road.

But I liked driving very fast. In our quarter we boys had a car of our own. It was a packing-case on four wheels, and you could steer the front wheels with a rope. We used to race it down the long slope of the Calle de Lepanto. At the bottom we went so fast that we kept on rolling along the asphalt of the Plaza de Oriente. The only danger was a lamp-post at the corner there. Manolo, the son of the pub-keeper, ran into it one day and broke his arm. He yelled, but it was not really bad; they put his arm in plaster and he went on driving with us as before. Only then he was afraid. When he got to the bottom of the slope he always braked with his foot against the curb.

The meadow where we had our races that day was called the "Park of Our Lady of the Port." The grass was thick, and many poplars and horse-chestnut trees grew in it. We used to peel the bark off the poplars; it left a clear green patch which seemed to sweat. The chestnut trees grew prickly balls with a chestnut inside which you could not eat, because it gave you a tummy-ache. When we found any of those balls we hid them in our pockets. Then, when one of the boys stooped, the rest of us would throw chestnuts at his behind, and the prickles would prick him, and he would jump. Once we split one of the green balls open, took out the chestnut and stuck the shell under the tail of a donkey grazing in the meadow. The donkey went crazy, rushed all over the place, kicked, and would not even let his master come near him.

I never knew why the meadow was named after Our Lady of the Port.

There was a Holy Virgin in a little chapel; a fat priest lived there who used to take his walks in the meadow and sit down under the poplars. A very pretty girl lived with him. The washerwomen said she was his daughter, but he said she was his niece. One day I asked him why the place was called "Our Lady of the Port," and he told me that she was the patroness of the fishermen. When they were shipwrecked they prayed to her and she saved them. If they drowned, they went to Heaven. But I could not understand why they kept this Holy Virgin in Madrid instead of taking her to San Sebastian, where there was the sea and fishermen. I had seen them myself two years before, when my uncle took me along in the summer. But here in the Manzanares were no boats and no fishermen, and nobody could have drowned there, because the water reached just to one's waist in the deepest spot.

It seemed that the Virgin was there because of all the men from Galicia who lived in Madrid. Every August, all Gallegos and Asturians went to this meadow; they sang and danced to their bagpipes, ate, and got drunk. Then they carried the Virgin round the meadow in a procession, and all the bagpipes went along. The boys from the Orphanage came down too and played in the procession. They were children without father or mother who lived there in the Home and had to learn music. If one of them played his trumpet badly, the teacher would knock it up with his fist and break the boy's teeth. I had seen a boy who had no teeth left, but he blew the trumpet beautifully. He could even play the couplets of the jota all by himself. The others would stop playing, and he would blow the copla on his trumpet. The people clapped and he bowed. Then the women and some of the men gave him a few centimos, but secretly, so that the Director should not see it and take them away. For the orphans were paid for playing in the procession, but the teacher took the money and the boys got nothing but the garlic soup in the Home. They all had lice and an eye-sickness called trachoma, which looked as though their eyelids had been smeared with sausage meat. And the heads of some of them were bald from mange.

Many of them had been dumped in the foundlings' home by the mothers when they were still infants-in-arms. That was one of the reasons why I loved my mother very much. When my father died, there were four of us children, and I was four months old. People wanted to make my mother put us into the foundlings' home — so I was told — because she would never be able to keep all of us alive. My mother went down to the river as a washerwoman. I was taken in by my Uncle José and Aunt Baldomera. On the days when my mother was not washing she worked as their servant; she cooked for them, did all the housework, and at night she went back to the attic where she lived with Concha, my sister. José, my eldest brother, at first got his meals in the Escuela Pía. When he was eleven, my mother's eldest brother took him into his shop in Cordova. Concha got her meals at the nuns' school. My second brother, Rafael, was a boarder at the College of San Ildefonso, which is an institution for orphan boys born in Madrid.

Twice a week I slept in the attic, because my Uncle José said I was to be the same as my brothers and sister and should not think myself the young gentleman of the family. I did not mind, I enjoyed myself better there than in my uncle's flat. Uncle José was very good, but my aunt was a grumpy old bigot and would not leave me alone. Every evening I had to go with her to Rosary in the Church of Santiago; and that was too much praying. I believed in God and the Holy Virgin. But that did not mean that I wanted to spend the day at prayer or in church. Every day at seven in the morning — Mass at school. Before lessons began — prayers. Then the lesson in religion. In the afternoons, before and after school — prayers. And then, when I was quite happy playing in the street, my aunt would call me to go to Rosary, and on top of it she made me pray before I went to sleep and before I got up. When I was in the attic, I did not go to Rosary, and I did not pray either in the evening or in the morning.

(Continues...)

Excerpted from The Forging of a Rebel by Arturo Barea, Ilsa Barea. Copyright © 2018 Pushkin Press. Excerpted by permission of Pushkin Press.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

Edition details

• Publisher: Pushkin Press
• Publication date: 2018
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1782274944
• ISBN 13: 9781782274940
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 768