Homage to a Born Insurgent

Book Cover: Homage to a Born Insurgent

Hospice

THE PRIESTS are right. The Favoured of God are the Fascists, the bastards, anyone can see it.
Barcelona is ruptured, we all have our problems in this city, but when the water fails it’s not the penthouse Donnas who go thirsty, it’s us in the tenements, dry as cockroaches.
Then come Saturdays, on the best seats at the corridas, see the perfumed lace, the mantillas, crucifixes, the medals of bravery, the noble sashes, all on the shaded side of the arena. Out there in the sun, it’s us, stinking like the horses. For the young ones things are no better. A young miss of high birth gets with child, they take the nino to a provincial estate where it grows up with a Name of Grace and chubby legs. If the man wants the child for an heir they make a marriage in the cathedral as quick as you like, no banns, nothing, and they pre-date the cheque. But a girl from my part of town, she heads for the hospice with her bundle. The place I’m speaking of is in the lane beside Santa Theresa’s, with a chute like a safe-deposit.
She tugs the bellpull, slides her babe inside, and the clang of the hatch must be to her as a gateway to hell. Shame like this is not born of the bed, it’s of the religion. What sort of Church does this to a girl? She hides her face and runs.
For our part, we keep the street lamp broken with stones.

Enric, the boy of To the Death, Amic works as a smuggler for The Organisation, the resistance movement in Barcelona. From France, over the high country, he brings in ammunition, leaflets. This time his job is to smuggle a young woman north, across the French border, over the Pyrenees.

Where the night air is so cold I tell you, I piss icicles.

An Old Lag’s Guide to Barcelona

This guide, the now older Enric, shows off the history of the Old City where his boyhood was spent during the Civil War, as the narrator Enric in the novel To the Death, Amic, (see The Novels).

Walk LaRamblas, everyone does. This is the promenade.
The centre concourse is a mall. Bulbs light the trees like stardust. Stalls stock newspapers in any language. Bird breeders sell pigeons and small parrots. Take a table and sip coffee, the finest from the New World.
Please keep a few banknotes in a ready pocket and do not use your wallet in public. I promise, you may not notice that it has gone for quite some time. I used to be in the business myself, as a lad. Best to stay on the main thoroughfare here. The alleys on either side are not for you, if you are well dressed. A few precautions and all is fine.

As a Bird, South

MOTHER was at the treadle. All I could see of her, by the sewing-bench lamp, were fingers as swift as shuttles, a scarf at her shoulders, and at the hollow of the throat her silver crucifix.

Mama, I said, I’m home. I was home from the prison, so expected a welcome. She snipped, tugged, her foot pumped the grate and the bobbin raced over the fields, along the ridges, the tucks and the folds, fleet and sure-footed, but also fugitive.
So I was wondering if she made this connection, hour after hour, saw this mimicry of the way her sons live now; as if watching, from her high vantage, the traverses and the mad spurts, cunning backtracking and frantic dead-ends, all the while smoothing as best she can some safer path ahead? In the language of omen, what means a snarled thread, a shattered needle? Does her heart catch? Mama, I said.

Home from his prison sentence, for smuggling an illegal over the north border, Enric is summoned by the Organisation, the resistance, south to Cartagena. His age, at twelve, makes him a favoured courier for the underground, since living around the streets has trained his cunning beyond his years.

Barcelona Honours the Prostitute Maria Lopes

General Francisco Franco is to pay Barcelona a State Visit.

The day chosen in secret for his reception here in Barcelona was no surprise to us, since the garrisons on the waterfront at Atarazanas and in the castle atop Montjuic were now crowded with the regiments of Navarre and with African Moors; the Guardia Civil enforced the nighttime curfew with companies on horseback, and factories were closed for three days so smoke would not entice rain.

Markswoman Jacinta Llano Moya, member of the anarchist cell named after the revolutionary prostitute Maria Lopez, prepares her welcome for the dictator.