photo and poem by Isabel del Rio
Synopsis
Everyone talks about fascism in our present day, but what was it like to live in an actual fascist society? This is a narrative poem about a love story during Franco’s fascist dictatorship in Spain: the devastation of a society, the daily struggles, the scarcity of everything, the tragic memories of a civil war, and the entrenched and pernicious social customs that devastated lives. And worst of all: the incessant discord between those who used to be friends, with the worst foes still thriving.
Here is Hans,
Obergruppenführer,
sitting at the smartest cafeteria in the Gran Vía and reminiscing about his feats in broken Spanish:
Imperio... Europa... Enemigo... to two señoritas from the fifties in their twenties
(as single women waiting to marry, and soon,
used to be called). This could be Exhibit A.
The three of them laugh much and squint a lot
under the May sun. Hans has not been caught and never will,
and five years later he will leave to an undisclosed destination
across the Atlantic Ocean where his knowledge of Spanish will improve so much
that on his death bed his last words will be: Ay, si hubiéramos ganado la guerra
(if only we had won the war), his use of the subjunctive in perfect order.
On the next table, let’s call it Exhibit B,
Mother and Father are whispering and exchanging
niceties; no bodily fluids yet, that will happen once rings are
placed on fingers. Except, of course, for the exchange of air exhaled out of lungs that agonised during the many episodes of the war: the bombing, the shelling, the barraging.
He wants her, oh how he wants her, but she is not so sure
about wanting him. There are hardly any men left after the conflict, she keeps
reminding herself, and to make matters worse we fought on
opposite sides; me, the republican; and he, on the wrong side, for he is the enemy,
one of the rebels and insurgents and mutineers.
Oh, but there are many ways to talk about the rebellion,
he claims, because in his case he had no choice, he keeps
telling her, too young, caught on the
wrong side of the tracks, may I remind you that I never killed anyone knowingly, if anything
I only ever took prisoners. And in any case, I
would have been shot if I had behaved according to my conscience.
Conscience is a word far-removed from a country torn apart, frayed. It is considered
too radical to have a conscience, awareness perhaps
and observation maybe. But not conscience, please.
Your conscience, she has asked him so many times, where is it now?
She is wearing a navy-blue dress with a large white bow covering her bosom. The previous month she wore it without the bow and with a red belt. She is thinking that in a couple of weeks she will add some frills to the skirt, make it a little longer and prettier. Her dress is unrecognizable from one month to the next, cleverly transmuting into a new outfit each time. Me and my single blue dress, she thinks.
His red hair is unusual, with twists and curls and waves. His looks are decidedly foreign, as if from a country yet to be discovered. She suspects that there is no part in his body not covered by freckles, and smiles to herself. But he will do, because she is about to be thirty and counting. No woman is complete without marriage; she will have failed; will not be taken seriously; her destiny unfulfilled; her life wholly pointless. Conventions are as entrenched as the enemy, traditions are as deadly as firepower. Oh, but had it been otherwise, with all that social and familial pressure removed, she would have had a shining future in the world of business or the Arts. Anything other than being cooped up at home, transferring my reading of Philosophy to the reading of Gastronomy.
But in his eyes, it is not about convenience and customs,
but about poetry, and ultimately love.
For she has the arms that the Venus of Milo would have possessed. Marble-like, sleek, smooth, slight,
elusive. He wants to forget that hunger created those arms.
They are the fruit of potato peels, tossed in a little fat and fried, for the three long
consecutive years of the war.
Father and Mother have known each other for only a few weeks, meeting when learning the English language in some major foreign institution (not that the regime has allowed too many of those to flourish in the country). He says that progress is in language, freedom is very much in words.
And as he utters such things, which she may or may not
agree with, he dares to stretch his right hand in her direction,
slowly moving across the table with the two coffees and
this small pastry, the name of which he has forgotten because he has not tasted one since
before the war, and which she is eating
in tiny morsels, for her stomach is not yet used to good things after all those years
of deprivation, famine, the stench of death and the taste of gunpowder.
And his hand, moving as slowly as he would move with his bayonet on the ground
in order to catch the enemy unawares back then in Teruel,
eventually lands on her arm, sculpted by a Greek, lean, delicate, glowing,
formed like a column in a temple raised to a goddess
in charge of versifying or making love or both.
Possibly Grace, possibly Abundance, possibly Discretion.
And so, he tells her, yes, he tells her all those things, he has
the courage (how can he not have the courage after a three-year-old conflict where brothers
killed each other, all young men still in their teens). But
she, the daughter of a railwayman who lost his
mind-blowing fortune when business went sour and war turned out to be a way
of life, is not used to such niceties, because after the war came t
he consequences of the war, in so many ways so much worse.
It is all about forgetting. Hunger has made her forget
about soft puff pastries; and cruel war dispatches have made her forget
about the existence of dreamy words. She still cannot understand why
someone should be admiring her skinny arms, so pale from
malnutrition. For she, at almost 30, can only think
in practical terms. Marriage, children, even if it costs me my prized job as executive secretary to the director general of one of the largest companies in the city, because yesterday’s big companies are today’s big companies, such enterprises always impervious to the changes on the political arena, however bloodthirsty.
And as things are, a woman who decides to get married will lose her job, just like that, for it is assumed that a marriage and a profession are incompatible. The company will pay a dowry, much like a possessive father would, and the girl will leave her job. Let’s call this Exhibit C.
Oh, the rhetoric of men and women being different, this
two-pronged view of life, this irreconcilable dichotomy, this Hegelian contradiction (for she will also have to abandon her Philosophy studies upon marriage).
She is unhappy with the whole interactive play of suggestive
words, but there is no alternative, at least for now, no future for me without all this spectacle.
And so there, in that open-air cafeteria,
under the May sun and the greenery, the breeze,
the gentle swaying of all things, the waiter in
his bleached and starched jacket, the frayed bits cleverly concealed
with a touch of his wife’s nail varnish, comes over to their table and, looking at Father’s fingers
most gently touching Mother’s sculpted arm,tells them, in no uncertain terms, to leave.
What do you mean? Father asks with his eyes.
The waiter looks in the direction of the fingers barely reaching the bare arm
of a woman, and there is no need to reply to the question.
Father turns as red as his hair, pays with a large note.
Mother looks down and silently weeps.
You are holding hands in a public place, sir, the waiter says as if
the prompt reaction and payment by Father now required a verbal explanation. But his words
are not an accurate description, because the misdemeanour is more about
an arm admired than about a hand touched.
And the waiter gives Father the change to his note and
Father leaves him a tip, smaller than he would normally give,
understandably, but a tip nevertheless. Everything seems to be a matter
of honour for him. Tipping included.
The waiter is growing impatient. It is his job to make sure that people vacate their table quickly when they are told off, especially now that there is a long queue of Sunday sightseers waiting in the heat. Yes, all this while the sun is shining brightly over a city ever so darkly torn apart.
In any case, it is the norm to queue: from queueing for a table at a cafeteria, where you can barely pay with a quarter of your monthly salary, to queueing for your daily subsistence and allocated rations.
And Mother and Father get up and begin to walk away without looking back, despite everyone there observing them that Sunday
afternoon: the old couple, the family of four children drinking hot
chocolate even in May, a group of fascists in blue shirts, the
priest and three of his closest female parishioners, the coronel
and the young lieutenant eating ice-cream away from prying eyes. The all
look at Mother and Father as they leave the place, their stares gliding as if on a smooth surface.
For Mother and Father have been shamed.
Humiliated is perhaps an accurate word but more so is forlorn. Head bowed down, that’s Mother;
and he, Father, looking to one side and thinking that
this was definitely not a good start to the budding relationship.
He would have liked to go back and explain:
But waiter, this will not be such a big thing in a few years, it will be of no
consequence whatsoever!
He always knew that he was ahead of his time in everything he did.
If he had asked Mother, she would have added that there is nothing permanent, especially when it comes to practices, tastes, social conventions, and it is best not get stuck in the
rut of traditions that will, sooner or later, change
beyond recognition. But the present and overpowering
mindset about marriage is so much more devastating than
any intellectual notions she may have about how to live.
Had Father and Mother gone back to the cafeteria they would
have seen the Obergruppenführer try to entice
his two female companions by describing in his broken
Spanish what happens when people are caught doing
what they should not,
for he swears that he knows best regarding what is right and what is wrong.
He fought for it, he says, he disciplined others for it, he contributed to a whole historical era of
misunderstood and vanished greatness with his actions and ideals. And no passive bystander was he.
And this time he resorts to German in order to make it
very clear to the two señoritas, who look up to the skies for linguistic
inspiration in order to decipher his words, but none comes.
In view of this, he finally expresses something in a language that those two girls will understand.
Expulsados del paraíso, expelled from Paradise, he manages to say
but his heavy accent makes it almost impossible to identify the words.
And the two women, out of politeness, look towards the now fading figures of
Mother and Father who are crossing the road to get
to the other side and never return.
Paradise
is not on their route, and with this early warning in their relationship
they probably suspect that they will never find it anywhere at all, whatever
path they take. And we can call this Exhibit D.
©isabeldelrio2025
*From Isabel del Rio’s poetry collection ‘Madrid, Madrid, Madrid’.
painting: A plate of Hunger by Hani Dallas
مطرودون من الجنّة
لوحة صحن الجوع، هاني دلة
كلمات: إيزابيل دَلْ رِيو من كتابها “مدريد مدريد مدريد”
ترجمة: ميّ العيسى
توطئة:
يتحدَّث الجميع عن الفاشية هذه الأيام ولكن كيف كانت طبيعة الحياة في ظلّ المجتمع الفاشيّ في إسبانيا حينئذٍ؟
تحكي القصيدة السردية هذه عن قصة حبٍّ في عهد فرانكو،عن المعاناة اليوميّة، عن نقص المؤن بل التقشف في كلّ شيء، عن دمار المجتمع ومآسي الحرب الأهلية، وعن المواقف المعادية- تلك المترسِّخة في عادات المجتمع والتي دمّرت حياة الأبرياء. والاسوأ من هذا وذاك الخلاف اللا منتهي بين أولئك الذين كانوا أصدقاء وبين الأعداء المزدهرين.
مختارات
لا شئ يستمر، لا التقاليد ولا الأذواق ولا الأعراف.
دعونا لا نتشبث ب”شبق” تلكُمُ العادات،
ستتغير عاجلاً أم آجلاً ودون أن نشعر
***
هو النسيان.
الجوع جعلها تنسى
تنسى المعجَّنات الطَّريَّة
برقيَّات الحرب القاسية جعلتها تنسى
تنسى وجود كلماتِ حُلمٍ عطرة
***
الضمير كلمة مُحيت من دولة ممزّقةٍ متهالكة
غاية في التطرّف بأن يكون لديها ضمير
ربّما بعض الوعي
شئٌ من الملاحظة… ربَّما
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