The Gate of the Sun

As the hatred, unrecognized, fed upon itself. Ana noticed changes in her appearance. Her hair, pinned back with tortoiseshell combs, still shone with brushing, the olive skin of her face was still unlined and her body was still young, but there was a fierce quality in her expression that was beyond her years. She attributed this to the inadequacies of her husband.

Not that he was indolent or drunken or wayward. He cooked and scavenged and cleaned and Rosana and Pablo, who was one year old, loved him. But he cared only to exist, not to advance. Why did he not write his sonnets in blood and tears instead of pale ink? wondered Ana who, since the heady days of courtship and consummation, had begun to ask many questions. It was she who had found the shanty in Tetuan, it was she who had found him a job paying five pesetas a week more than the National Archaeological Museum. But his bean soup was still the finest in Madrid.

When the left wing, the Popular Front, once again dispatched the Old Guard five months before the Civil War, Ana understood perfectly why strikes and blood-letting swept the country. The prisoners released from jail wanted revenge; the peasants wanted land; the people wanted schools; the great congregation of Spain wanted God but not his priests. What she did not understand were the divisions within the Cause and, although she reacted indignantly as blue-shirted youths of the Falange, the Fascists, terrorized the streets of the capital, she still didn’t acknowledge the hatred that was reaching maturity within herself.

On May Day, when a general strike had been called, she left the children with her grandmother and, with Jesús, who accompanied her dutifully but unenthusiastically, and her younger brother, Antonio, marched down the broad paseo that bisects Madrid, in a procession rippling with a confusion of banners. One caught her eye: ANTI-FASCIST MILITIA: WORKING WOMEN AND PEASANT WOMEN – red on white – and the procession was heady with the chant of the Popular Front: ‘Proletarian Brothers Unite’. In the side streets armed police waited with horses and armoured cars.

Musicians strummed the Internationale on mandolins. Street vendors sold prints of Marx and Lenin, red stars and copies of a new anti-Fascist magazine dedicated to women. And indeed women marched tall as the widows of the miners from Asturias advanced down the promenade. The colours of the banners and costumes were confusing – blue and red seemed to adapt to any policy – and occasionally, among the clenched fists, a brave arm rose in the Fascist salute.

After the parade the hordes swarmed across Madrid, through the West Park and over the capital’s modest river, the Manzanares, to the Casa de Campo, a rolling pasture of rough grass before the countryside proper begins. There they planted themselves on the ground, boundaries defined by ropes or withering glances, released the whooping children and foraging babies, tore the newspapers from baskets of bread and ham and chorizo, passed the wine and bared their souls to the freedom that was soon to be theirs.

Ana pitched camp between a pine and a clump of yellow broom where you could see the ramparts of the city, the palace and the river below, and, to the north, the crumpled, snow-capped peaks of the Sierra de Guadarrama.

Her happiness as she relaxed among her people, her Madrileños, who were soon to have so much, was dispatched by her brother after his third draught of wine from the bota. As the jet, pink in the sunshine, died, he wiped his mouth with the back of his hand and said, ‘I have something to tell you both. A secret,’ although she knew from the pitch of his voice that its unveiling would not be an occasion for rejoicing.

Antonio, one year her junior, had always been her favourite brother. And he had remained so, even when he married above himself, got a job, thanks to his French father-in-law in the Credit Lyonnais where, with the help of the bank’s telephones, he also traded in perfume, and mixed with a bourgeois crowd. He was tall, with tight-curled, black hair, a sensuous mouth and a nimble brain; his cheeks often smelled of the cologne in which he traded.

‘I have joined the Falange,’ he said.

It was a bad joke; Ana didn’t even bother to smile. Jesus took the bota and directed a jet of wine down his throat.

‘I mean it,’ Antonio said.

‘I knew this wine was too strong; it has lent wings to your brains,’ Ana said.

‘I mean it, I tell you.’ His voice was rough with pride and shame.

There was silence beneath the pine tree. A diamond-shaped kite flew high in the blue sky and a bird of prey from the Sierra glided, wings flattened, above it.

Ana said, ‘These are your wife’s words. And her father’s.’

‘It is I who am talking,’ said Antonio.

‘You, a Fascist?’ Ana laughed.

‘You think that is funny? In six months time you will be weeping.’

‘When you are taken out and shot. Yes, then I will weep.’ She turned to Jesús but he had settled comfortably with his head on a clump of grass and was staring at the kite which dived and soared in the warm currents of air.

Antonio leaned forward, hands clenched round his knees; he had taken off his stylish jacket and she could see a pulse throbbing in his neck. She remembered him playing marbles in the baked mud outside their home and throwing a tantrum when he lost.

He said, ‘Please listen to me. It is for your sake that I am telling you this.’

‘Tell it to your wife.’

‘Listen, woman! This is a farce, can’t you see that? The Popular Front came to power because enemies joined forces. But they are already at blows. How can an Anarchist who believes that “every man should be his own government” collaborate with a Communist who wants a bureaucratic government? As soon as the war comes the Russians, the Communists, will start to take over. Do you want that?’

‘Who said anything about a war?’

‘There is no doubt about it,’ Antonio said lighting a cigarette. ‘Within months we will be at war with each other.’

‘Who will I fight against? A few empty-headed Fascists in blue shirts?’

‘Listen, my sister. We cannot sit back and watch Spain bleed to death. The strikes, the burnings, the murders, the rule of the mob.’ He stared at the black tobacco smouldering in his cigarette. ‘We have the army, we have the Church, we have the money, we have the friends …’

‘Friends?’

‘I hear things,’ said Antonio who had always been a conspirator. ‘And I tell you this: the days of the Republic are numbered.’

Jesús, eyes half closed, said, ‘I am sure everything will sort itself out.’ He had taken a notebook from his pocket and was writing in it with an indelible pencil.

‘You were a Socialist once,’ Ana said to Antonio.

‘And I was poor. If I had stayed a Socialist or a Communist or an Anarchist I would have stayed poor. How many uprisings have there been in the past 50 years? What we need is stability through strength!’

‘And who will give that to us?’ She took the bota from her husband, poured inspiration down her throat. Her brother a Fascist? What about their brother, the sight knocked out of one eye by a police truncheon? What about their father, sacked by a priest with a trough of gold beneath his church? What about the miners, with their homemade bombs, gunned down by the military? What about the peasant paid with the chaff of the landowners’ corn?

‘There are many good men waiting to take command.’

‘Of what?’

‘I have said enough,’ Antonio said.

Jesús, licking the pencil point, said, ‘Good sense will prevail. Spain has seen too much violence.’

‘Spain was fashioned by violence,’ Antonio said. ‘But now a time for peace is upon us. After the battle ahead,’ he said. ‘Join us. The fighting will be brief but while it rages you can take the children into the country.’

She stared at him in astonishment. ‘Have you truly lost your senses?’

‘Life will be hard for those who oppose us.’

‘Threats already? A time for peace is upon us?’

Jesús said, ‘The milk of mother Spain is blood.’ He wrote rapidly in his notebook.

Antonio poured more wine down his throat and stood up, hands on hips. ‘I have tried,’ he said. ‘For the sake of you and your husband and your children. If you change your mind let me know.’

‘Why ask me? Why not ask my husband?’

Antonio didn’t reply. He began to walk down the slope towards the Manzanares dividing the parkland from the heights of the city.

When he was 50 metres away from her she called to him. The diamond-shaped kite dived and struck the ground; the bird of prey turned and flapped its leisurely way towards the mountains.

‘What is it?’

He stood there, suspended between distant childhood, and adulthood.

She raised her arm, bunched her fist and shouted, ‘No pasarán!’

The militiamen came for the priest at dawn, a dangerous time in the lawless streets of Madrid in the summer of 1936. Failing to find him, they turned on his church.

The studded doors gave before the fourth assault with a sawn-off telegraph pole. Christ on his altar went next, battered from the cross with the butt of an ancient rifle. They tore a saint and a madonna from two side chapels and trampled on them; they dragged curtains and pews into the street outside and made a pyre of them; they smashed the stained-glass window which had shed liquid colours on the altar as Ana and Jesus stood before the plump priest at their wedding. They were at war, these militiamen in blue overalls, some stripped to the waist, and a terrible exaltation was upon them.

Ana, who knew where the priest was, watched from the gaping doors and could not find it in herself to blame the wild men who were discharging the accumulated hatred of decades. Since the Fascist rising on July 17 the ‘Irresponsibles’ in the Republican ranks had butchered thousands and invariably it was the clergy who were dispatched first. Ana had heard terrible tales; of a priest who had been scourged and crowned with thorns, given vinegar to drink and then shot; of the exhumed bodies of nuns exhibited in Barcelona; of the severed ear of a cleric tossed to a crowd after he had been gored to death in a bullring.

But although she understood – the flowers that her father had taken from the graves of the privileged had been almost dead – such happenings sickened her and she could not allow them to happen to the priest hiding in the vault of the church with the gold and silver plate.

The leader of the gang, the Red Tigers, shouted, ‘If we cannot find the priest then we shall burn the house of his boss.’ He had the starved features of a fanatic; his eyes were bloodshot and his breath smelled of altar wine.

Ana, to whom blasphemy did not come easily, said, ‘What good will that do, burro, burning God’s house?’

‘He has many houses,’ the leader said. ‘Like all Fascists.’ He thrust a can of gasoline into the hand of a bare-chested militiaman who began to splash it on the walls. ‘What has God ever done for us?’

‘He did you no harm, Federico. You have not done so badly with your olive oil. How much was it per litre before the uprising?’

He advanced upon her angrily but spoke quietly so that no one else could hear him. ‘Shut your mouth, woman. Do you want that scribbling husband of yours shot for collaborating with the Fascists?’

‘As if he would collaborate with anyone. No one would believe you. They would think you were trying to take his place in my bed.’

‘The olive oil,’ the leader said more loudly, ‘is 30 centimos a litre. Who can say fairer than that?’

‘I asked what it was.’

‘So you know where the priest is?’ he shouted as though she had confessed and the militiamen paused in their pillaging and looked at her curiously.

She stared into the nave of the church where, with her parents and her brothers, she had prayed for a decent world and a reprieve for a stray alley cat and for her grandfather whose lungs played music when he breathed. She remembered the boredom of devotion and the giggles that sometimes squeezed past her lips and the decency of it all. She stepped back so that she could see the blue dome. A militiaman attacking a confessional with an axe shouted. ‘Do you know where the priest is, Ana Gomez?’

And it was then that Ana Gomez was visited by a vision of herself: one fist clenched, head held high, the fierceness that had been in gestation delivered. She told Federico to drag a pew from the pile in the street and when, grumbling, he obeyed, she stood on it.

She said, ‘Yes, I do know where the priest is,’ and before they could protest she held up one hand. ‘Hear me, then do what you will.’

As they fell silent she pointed at one young man with the tanned skin and hard muscles of a building labourer: ‘You, Nacho, were married in this church, were you not?’ And, when he nodded, ‘Then your children are the children of God and this is their house. Can you stand back and see it burned?’ He unclenched one big fist and stared at the palm in case it contained an answer.

‘And you,’ to a white-fleshed man whose belly sagged over his belt, ‘should be ashamed. Wasn’t your mother buried in the graveyard behind the church barely two weeks ago? Do you want her soul to go up in flames?’

‘And you,’ to a youth who had filled his pockets with candles, ‘put those back. Don’t you know they are prayers?’ She paused, waited while he took back the candles which cost ten centimos each.

When he returned she raised both hands. ‘Our fight is not against God: it is against those who have prostituted his love. If you take up arms against God you are destroying yourselves because you came into this world with his blessing.’

‘So the priest who grew fat while we starved should not be punished?’ Federico demanded.

They looked at her, these vandals, and there was a collective pleading in their gaze.

Again she waited. Raised one arm, clenched her fist.

‘Of course he must be punished. So must all the other black crows who betrayed the Church. Beat him, spit on him’ – they wouldn’t settle for less – ‘but don’t degrade yourselves. Why stain your hands with the blood of one fat hypocrite?’

They cheered and she watched the muscles move on their lean ribs, and she saw the light in their eyes.

‘Where is he?’ demanded Nacho.

Another pause. Then, ‘Beneath your feet.’ They stared at the baked mud. ‘In the vaults. With the gold and silver.’

‘Who has the key?’

‘The fat priest. Who else?’ She placed her hands on her hips. ‘Don’t worry. I’ll get him.’

She went into the church. Long before the priest had started to squirrel the altar plate in the vaults he had given her father a key; she had it in her hand now as she made her way through the vestry to the door. The key turned easily; in the thin light filtering through a barred window she saw a kneeling figure.

The priest said, ‘So it has come to this,’ and she thought, ‘Please God don’t let him plead.’ ‘Here, take this.’ He handed her a gold chalice. ‘And help me.’

She distanced herself from him and said, ‘This is what you must do. When you emerge in the sunlight they’ll beat you and scream at you and spit on you. Run as if the wrath of God is behind you’ – which it must be, she thought – ‘and make your way to the old house where I used to live.’

‘They’ll kill me,’ the priest said. As her eyesight became accustomed to the gloom she saw that his plump cheeks had sagged into pouches. ‘And make me dig my own grave.’

She wanted to say, ‘My father could do it for you if you hadn’t sacked him,’ but instead she said, ‘Give them the gold and silver, that will speed you on your way.’

‘It’s a trap,’ the priest said. He bowed his head and gabbled prayers. ‘How can they hate me like this? I have been a good priest to them.’

‘That is for God to decide.’

‘You are a good woman,’ the priest said, standing up.

She handed him back the chalice. ‘Take this and the other ornaments and follow me.’

He said, ‘I wish I were brave,’ and she wished he hadn’t said that because it made her think of her husband.

‘If you believe,’ she said, ‘if you truly believe then you need not fear.’

‘Do you believe, Ana Gomez?’

‘In a fable? A black book full of stories? Angels with wings and a devil who lives in a dark and deep place? Yes, I believe,’ she said and led the way out of the vaults.

In the vestry she ripped up a surplice, wrapped it round the leg of a shattered chair, dipped it in gasoline and lit it with a match. She picked up a green and gold vestment, soaked that in gasoline and, torch carried high in one hand, vestment in the other, emerged into the sunlight.

The mob stared at her, confused. She threw the vestment on the pyre; the gold thread glittered in the sunlight. She applied the torch to it. Flames leaped across the cloth, swarmed over the gasoline-soaked fixtures of the church. Thick smoke rose and sparks danced in it.

She turned and signalled to the priest lurking in the church. He had removed his clerical collar and he was wearing a grey jacket and trousers and big black boots, and was more clown than cleric. His eyes narrowed in the sunlight, his dewlap quivered.

He threw the altar plate at the foot of the flames and began to run. She spat at him, threw the torch on the pyre and ran towards the gold and silver.

The crowd hesitated; then those at the front made a dash for the booty. Federico, the leader, held aloft a gold salver. ‘And we had to count our centimos,’ he shouted.

Then they were after the priest as, weaving and stumbling, he reached the edge of the poor square. Some made a gauntlet in front of him; rifle butts and axe handles smote him on the shoulders. He tried to protect his face with his plump hands but he uttered no sound. Ana reached him and spat again and hissed to him to run down an alley to his left.

She blocked the alley. ‘To think we obeyed such a donkey,’ she cried and indeed he looked too absurd to pursue.

She listened to the receding clatter of his boots on the cobblestones. The pursuers hesitated and, frowning, looked to each other for guidance.

Federico pushed his way through them. ‘Out of the way, woman,’ he said. ‘We must have the priest.’

‘You will have to move me first.’ She folded her arms across her breast and stared at him.

He advanced upon her but as he reached her a burning pew slipped from the pyre belching flames like cannon fire, and smoke heavy with ash billowed across the square.

Ana raised her arms above her head. ‘It is God’s word.’

As they dispersed she returned to the church, locked the door and made her way down rutted lanes to the house where the priest was waiting for her.

She had listened to La Pasionaria broadcasting on Radio Madrid. ‘The whole country throbs with rage in defiance … It is better to die on your feet than to live on your knees.’

And on 20 July she had stood ready to die in the Plaza de España, where Don Quixote’s lance pointed towards the Montana Barracks in which Fascist troops were beleaguered – Fascists later pointed out that Quixote’s outstretched arm closely resembled a Fascist salute – and she had moved inexorably forward with the mob as they stormed the garrison.

She had watched the troops being butchered, although many, it was learned later, had been loyal to the Republicans, and she had watched a marksman drop officers from a gallery high in the red and grey barracks on to the ground.

She had heard about the Republican execution squads, the bodies piled up in execution pits at the university and behind the Prado – more than 10,000 in one month, it was rumoured – and she had wondered if her brother, Antonio, had been among them because although the bourgeoisie and the priests were fair game there was no more highly prized victim than a Falangist.

And she had heard about the inexorable progress of the Fascists in the south, under the command of General Francisco Franco with his Army of Africa – crack Spanish troops in the Foreign Legion whose battle cry was ‘Long live death’ and Moors who raped when they weren’t killing – and General Emilio Mola’s four columns in the north.

To Mola fell some of the responsibility for the killings in Madrid. Hadn’t he boasted, ‘In Madrid I have a Fifth Column: men now in hiding who will rise and support us the moment we march,’ thus inciting the gunmen, many of them criminals released from jail in an earlier amnesty, to further blood-letting? He had also boasted to a newspaper correspondent that he would drink coffee with him in the Puerta del Sol, so every day coffee was poured for him at the Molinero café.

She had doled out bread to refugees roaming the capital, in the sweating alleys of its old town, on the broad avenues of its heartland, and when the first aircraft, three Ju-52s, had bombed the city on 27 August she had organized air-raid precautions for the barrio – shatter-proofing windows with brown paper, painting street lamps blue, making cellars habitable.

So what am I doing drinking coffee in my old home with the enemy, a priest?

Her brother, a street cleaner whose eye had been knocked out long ago by the police, railed. ‘What is this fat crow doing here? He should have been crucified like all the other sons of whores.’

Salvador harboured a bitterness that was difficult for anyone with two eyes to understand, Ana thought. The patch over the socket stared at her blackly. Salvador hosed down streets at dawn but often his aim was bad.

She said quietly, ‘He baptized you and he married me and he listened to our sins.’

‘Did he ever listen to his own? Did he ever do penance?’

The priest, cheeks trembling as he spoke, said, ‘I did my best for all of you. For all of my flock.’

‘For my eye?’

‘That was none of my doing.’

‘Did you pray for the miners in Asturias?’

‘I pray for Mankind,’ the priest said.

‘Ah, the Kingdom of God. We have to pay high rents to occupy it, father.’

‘Jesus was the son of a carpenter. A poor man.’

‘But, unlike us, he could work miracles. Why did you only educate the rich, father?’

‘We have made mistakes,’ the priest admitted.

This took Salvador by surprise. He adjusted his black patch, good eye staring at Ana accusingly. The three of them, and her father who was dying on the other side of the thin wall, were the only people in the house. The house was a hovel but that had never occurred to her when they had been a family. The patterned tiles on the floor were worn; the whitewashed walls had been moulded with the palms of plasterers’ hands and, since her mother’s death, dust had collected in the hollows.

Salvador lit a cigarette and puffed fiercely. ‘I shall have to report his presence to the authorities,’ he said.

‘Which authorities?’

This bothered him too, as Ana had known it would. Before July he had supported the Socialist Trade Union. But now he suspected that Communists were infiltrating it – Russians who had forged tyranny instead of liberty from their Revolution. And they in their turn were at odds with the anti-Stalin Communists.

So Salvador was beginning to move towards the Anarchists, who believed in freedom through force, and didn’t give a damn about political power.

Already families were divided between the Fascists and the Republicans. Please God, Ana prayed while the priest shakily sipped his coffee, do not let the Cause divide us too.

‘The police,’ Salvador said lamely.

‘Which police? There are many of those, too.’

‘Stop trying to confuse me,’ Salvador said. ‘Get rid of him,’ he said pointing at the priest.

‘Kill him?’

‘Just get rid of him. I don’t want to see his face round here.’

‘Since when was it your home?’

‘You think our father would want a priest, that priest, here?’

‘I don’t know what our father would want,’ Ana said.

‘You realize,’ he said, touching his black patch, ‘that we are now the revolutionaries?’