Category: ~ New Stories of Mexico and Elsewhere

The Nalgas We Sit On

Posted on by sterlingbennett

A friend showed me a clip on his iPhone. A young woman walking along what I thought was a tropical beach. Since I am in Mexico, I think of all beaches as being tropical. She is naked, it turns out, after squinting at first to make sure she isn’t wearing something skin color. Then you check the top. The back, her back—after all she’s not an object—is free of any ties. She is also barefoot, the sand is deep, so her feet swivel as she gains purchase, pushes off and moves forward.

The camera focuses on her nalgas – buttocks, which are a little exaggerated in proportion to the rest of her body. Once, she turns to smile, and you catch just a glimpse of her left breast. Then she swivels away again.

I ask my friend what his thoughts are. “I like it,” he says. I say I like it, too. But I am wondering if there isn’t more to say, if we’re not just content with the reptilian-visual part of our brain.

He says, “I like it.” And I admire the simplicity of his reaction. I have the same reaction, but I find myself thinking of another woman, fully clothed, sitting in front of a piano in Holland or Italy, in concert. The conductor has just started the orchestra on Mozart’s concerto in D minor. The piano player’s name is Maria João Pires. She sits in shock and agony because the concerto is not the one she had been prepared to play. No nalgas at work here, except the ones she’s sitting on. She is in a panic, a performer’s worst nightmare has unfolded. The conductor has changed the program on her—and she sits in horror.

She addresses the conductor, while he conducts. I don’t have the music. I didn’t prepare this one. We did not agree on this one. What am I to do? He replies, while he conducts. You know this one. You know it by heart. You can do it.

The moment draws closer where she is to place her hands on the keys. She seems despairing. Then—resigned—she adjusts her seat. You could say her nalgas—because she has them, too—and at precisely the right moment she begins to play.

You wonder whether she can remember. As spectator, all of your fears of performance are at the fore. But she continues—flawlessly—all the way through.

I am glad she also has nalgas. There is a music theory that says by rocking first onto one buttock while playing, then onto the other, the quality of the music goes way up. But if Maria João Pires began doing that, I could not see it, perhaps because it was too subtle. But as far as attraction goes, the complexity of that person, as well as having shared her panic, her vulnerability, all those things make her more attractive to me than Miss Nalgas on the Beach, who—poor lady—is in danger of presenting herself as little more than a visual stimulant of remote male (or female) sexual appetite.

Don’t get me wrong. Probably most of the babies born to this world can thank their existence to visual signals radiating from nalgas, broad shoulders, the color of eyes or any number of other body parts that both sexes (all sexes) find meaningful.

I would be the first to sing a paean to nalgas—my own included, since they are what we sit on and what may have attracted mates in the past. I have heard my current love of many, many years, even recently, call me Bubble-Butt. That is very kind of her, but with the years the bubble-butt has gone the way of all flesh—there is less of it until, in the end, the worms or the flames get what little is left.

Miss Nalgas, all of us Miss Nalgas, will go the same way. And when we go to the flames or the worms, the wonderful, simple reptilian part—that delight in nalgas (or some other part)—will go with us. For that reason, we must remember, at our last breath or two, to sing praise and thanks to all buttocks—to Ours, to Theirs and to All of Yours.

Forgery

Posted on by sterlingbennett

I hope I’m not misleading you on the subject of your research. You’re ready to record? All right—I’m trying to remember when it began. Probably with the usual things, like imitating my father’s voice and style with a note to the principal of the elementary school, excusing me from gym class, then from arithmetic because of my brain tumor, then from lunch period—so I could go out behind the baseball backstop and slip into the woods, where I smoked Philip Morris cigarettes and met with girls too brain impaired to attend school.

How did I get them to come there? By imitating the principal, with invitations to join a softball team that would consist equally of elementary school children—without concern for mental development.

Later, when I was in high school, I studied, then submitted—without return address—unknown works by Hemingway, Emily Dickinson and the Brontë sisters. I submitted them to publishers, claiming they had been discovered in this or that archive nook or rare book library.

At first, there were nothing but rejections. Then, gradually, experts began to pay attention. A letter here, a short story there, a poem, even a thin novel hitherto unknown. Literary and library journals could not resist the fact that priceless pieces had been discovered, and they began to publish them and attribute them to the Brontës, Emily Dickinson and Ernest Hemingway.

I studied other languages and with the years managed to place essays by Camus and Thomas Mann, in clotted Courier type. Once even a pornographic piece by Richard Wagner. The submissions were always anonymous, but written with such skill—on blank pages ripped from old books—that academic journals fought with each other over who presented the best argument for their authenticity. All the while, I worked as a quiet librarian in Orange, New Jersey.

In time, I grew bored with these shenanigans and began submitting work of my own—with the result, over and over, that I was accused of borrowing, i.e. stealing the style and vocabulary of known authors.

I had a few successes with small literary magazine, where the gatekeepers—usually severely male—were so schooled in mimicry and where so many of their submissions were youthfully imitative, that my own lingering trickery went undetected.

I married and had a daughter—a delightful child with equally generous measures of intelligence and heart. When she went away to camp, I wrote her news and stories I had not made up. By college, she began to complain to her mother—we were no longer together—that she no longer knew me and—more troubling—that there was something inauthentic about me.

When my ex-wife told me this, with an expression between gloating and reprimand, I spent the rest of the day and night drinking enough whisky to kill an elephant.

I didn’t know what to do. I went to a psychiatrist, who told me to explore my relationship with my parents, both of whom had had careers in persuading people to trust them. My father, a financial advisor, had been warned a few times by his firm, for irregularities. And my mother had been a painter of modest talents, who openly painted copies of Breughel, Rembrandt and the Impressionists for clients in Santa Monica, California with blue hair and rooms to decorate.

After some years of therapy, I joined an ashram to learn how to meditate and give up wants in the material world. I spent time with a number of the lovely apostles of the promised more spiritual life, practicing the arts of defense and rendition. While my daughter, though always polite, grew ever more remote from me.

When my granddaughter was born, my daughter softened and allowed me to play my role as grandfather. She even allowed me to tell the child bedtime stories. And over time, something happened whereby I began to tell stories that were different from my earlier ones and clung more to the questions my granddaughter asked me. About whether bears could talk with children, and had I ever talked with a bear or an elephant. I did not want to lie to her, so I said I hadn’t. She was three or four, and so she suggested we could go to the zoo and try to talk to a bear and maybe an elephant.

And so we went to the zoo. And then we went again. And then, again. We tried other animals as well. None of them actually talked to us, but we made up stories about what they said and laughed because some of the stories were funny. And besides, we were happy to be with each other.

I began to go back alone, and when other people weren’t around I talked to the animals by myself. And something changed, and I learned something that seems too trivial to say. But I will. That there is no reason to disguise who you are. My granddaughter and the elephants were who they were—and pretended nothing more.

My time to leave the earth has come now—as you can see for yourself. On her last visit, my lovely ex-wife held my hand and said it was too bad we had not spent more time together—in every aspect—over the last twenty or thirty years. My daughter weeps uncontrollably when she visits. And my granddaughter—now a wonderful writer at the age of twenty-five—sits beside my bed and tells me in many different ways which animals I should visit and what I should say to them when I go to join them.

That is my story about forgery. It may not have been what you wanted. But there it is.

Broccoli Bandits and Just Plain Bandits

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Cameras and Broccoli

After exactly one week, one of the local bandits walked through the unfinished building ten feet from us and, as predicted, stepped out onto a ledge and dropped a heavy rock on our neighbor’s replacement security camera—which had been placed by right below it.

I guess you could call it a war over the public space and how it should be used. The alleys are for whom? Arbitrary occupation and use by a few families, or for safe passage for everyone? It’s all more comprehensible if you think of bandit and non-bandit culture, for which there is a long history in Mexico. The bandit culture says, “I will take what I want and you can’t stop me—because I have rights, too.” Except that bandit or tribal rights exclude the rights of others. “There shall be no limits on my behavior,” says bandit culture.

So how do you resolve the issue, if you have to change culture in order to do it?

What about broccoli culture? It is entirely the opposite. We were returning from San Miguel the other afternoon. There was a big truck ahead of us, with high sides and back and an open top. It was loaded with broccoli, with a loose tarp over everything. At the smallest bump, the whole load jiggled like—well, broccoli.

I said to Dianne, “Bump the back of the truck (with our Honda CV-R), maybe some broccoli will fall off.” I was joking, of course. But then the truck came to a tope—a speed bump—a little too quickly. Three heads of broccoli fell off. I said, “Stop!” Dianne stopped, in the middle of traffic. I jumped out in bare feat. I picked up three heads of broccoli. Bandit work. After all, the truck had gone on. I offered one to a motorcyclist behind us. He shook his head grimly, as if the say, “Get out of my way, free the road.”

We drove on a bit. A man was returning to the sidewalk. He had two heads of broccoli. I whistled my loud whistle at him, motioned a throw, he prepared to catch, I tossed, he caught. Big smiles at each other. A moving broccoli pass-off.

Farther ahead, a young woman was picking up broccoli. I called, “Buen provecho!” Bon Appétit. Big conspiratorial smile. We crossed the railroad line. Farther along, a man had gotten out of his car to retrieve fallen broccoli. “That’s private property, you know,” I said. He didn’t know what to think. In a few seconds, he passed us on the inside and waved—smiling.

We stopped one more time. I got out and picked up a broccoli. A nice one. Then I saw that a woman had started across the road from a fruit stand. I walked to meet her. She came forward, we met in the middle of the highway. It was a sweet exchange. After all, we had all the broccoli we needed, and she had hoped for one.

What happened? you ask. I think we were performing bandit culture, but with a difference, in that we were sharing the public space—and the public booty.

Listening to a Story, Drifting Toward the End

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I received great compliment (not quite the right word) today when a friend told me she was reading my novel Playing for Pancho Villa aloud to a person who is struggling against a cluster of merciless winning debilities. The person could follow the story, see the images and listen for the next step in the unfolding. And found satisfaction, even distraction, as he listened. What better use of a story can there be? What could be more important to the storyteller?

This is My Land

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Interview with Alfredo Figueroa (Caborca, State of Sonora, Mexico), November 12, 2001:

~ When I was a small kid in 3rd grade we were starting geography. The teacher pointed to a map on the wall and said, “Now this is the United States that we all love so much.” I got up like an Indian and raised my hand and said, “Well I don’t love it too much.” She asked, “What do you mean? You don’t know what you’re talking about!” I said, “My father says they stole this land from us.” I wouldn’t change my mind, so they sent me home and told my mother I was unpatriotic. They kept me away for two weeks. They took me to the principal’s office, where he had a big old paddle they used to call the board of education. And they paddled and whipped me. They made a play named after Philip Nolan’s book, Man Without a Country, and showed it at school, just to intimidate the Mexicans. They named it Boy Without a Country. I was just telling them, “This is my land.” I was just a little kid. Can you imagine, 9 years old? Man! But that’s why they had the Americanization schools, to brainwash all those young Mexicans and Chimahuevos living in Blythe.
My mother always used to say that we were Chimahuevos and my father was Yaqui. We never did classify ourselves as American. Never! It was a battle everyday, and we knew who we were. My mother negotiated with the principal, and I had to write on the blackboard, “I love the United States” in front of all the kids a hundred times. And then I was accepted back as a student at Blythe grammar school. ~

Presumption of Innocence

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You should never go back to see the person that has inspired one of your stories. If you do, you should never mention it to anyone at that place.

Five years ago, in a bustling Mexican city, a waitress served me tea, which I had ordered, and two fluffy orange-flavored muffins, which I had not. She had struck me somehow—a unique face, dark, perhaps Indian, a pronounced jaw, an air of sadness. Dignity. Like the other waitresses, she wore a black dress with white trims, a short white apron tied around her waist.

Now, five years later, I asked the cashier about her.

I added that I had written a story about her—an imprecise and disastrous choice of prepositions. About her.

The cashier knew exactly whom I was talking about. She described a person that was slim, dark-skinned, and raised her hand palm down to indicate a certain height.

I said that might be her, but that I hadn’t seen her that morning.

“She works in the afternoon,” she said.

I thanked her and sat down again with my love. Then something occurred to me. I got up and approached the cashier again.

“I don’t know her,” I said. “Perhaps it would be better if you didn’t mention me. I don’t want to cause her embarrassment.”

I left out that would come back that afternoon.

My companion and I walked to a hill a mile or so west of the city center. I wanted to see the spot where a European monarch and his two loyal Mexican generals absorbed the bullets of a Mexican anti-French firing squad. The sun was lovely, the jacarandas billowing. A Soviet-style 43-foot statue of Juárez the Avenger loomed over us. I could not feel the executed monarch’s spirit.

Afternoon came, and my companion went on an errand.

I walked back to the café.

The woman behind the cashier’s booth looked down a little too quickly when I walked in. The coffee counter was topped by clean cappuccino glasses, white cups, and drifts of paper napkins—and just above those, the heads and shoulders of three afternoon waitresses whose eyes glistened with suspicion.

One of them came close to fitting the description of the woman I was looking for, except that she wasn’t as slim and pretty as the woman in my story—and no longer as young. While I, on the other hand, had remained roughly the same age as the narrator in the story.

I ordered a cappuccino. The woman in question turned her back to me.

“Chico o grande?” asked another, younger waitress asked.

The situation was out of control, and I didn’t know how long I would be staying.

Still, I said, “Grande.”

I sat down and took out my La Jornada, Mexico’s national left wing newspaper. The Legislature, it reported, was blocking any discussion of widening ownership of the airwaves—radio and television—beyond the monopolists Emilio Azcárraga and Carlos Slim, men of privilege.

I abandoned La Jornada and took out my notebook instead—to show I was a writer, not a pervert. It was part of a current manuscript, about a National Rural Policeman in the 1890’s who discovers the Yaqui Indians are human and deserve the rights guaranteed in the Mexican Constitution of 1857—my protagonist rural, a man who admired Sherlock Holmes.

But I decided he wouldn’t have known any better than I how to extract himself from the situation I was in.

I wrote for about an hour. I never looked at her. God knows what they were thinking. Eventually, M—I think that’s what the cashier said her name was—came out from behind the coffee counter and began waiting on people.

The city was filled with wedding parties. Twice, while I was writing, groups of young women, in their twenties and thirties, dressed expensively and to the nines, in heels too high and grooming too perfect, perhaps still unmarried, came through the door, and filled the room with an air of privilege and desperation.

When I got home, I wrote a letter to M—in Spanish—and sent it to my friend, who said he would print it out and hand deliver it.

~ Estimada Señora M, I began.

Please forgive me for the considerable discomfort I believe I caused you last Saturday. I am the gringo that entered the café and asked after you.

Five years ago, I sat down in your café and could not help but observe some of the people chatting there, drinking coffee, and giving you little orders as if you were there to serve them in all ways—not just in things they would eat and drink. I did not think they were aware of the assumptions of privilege behind their behavior—which may have been obvious to a person who was waiting on them.

Someone like you—a person of dignity, kindness, and beauty—also, humor. When I paid for my tea and the two orange–flavored muffins I had not ordered, I said, “They were a awful temptation, so I ate them.”

And you had said, with a smile, and without missing a beat, something like, “Yes, but the storm has passed now and life can go on.”

Then I went home and wrote a story about a person similar to you—but not you.

It was a love story. The narrator recognizes a woman in the Zócolo in Veracruz who works in the café where he has had breakfast. She is wearing a simple, lovely dress, red hibiscus against black, and high heels. It is an evening of danzón, and the plaza is filled with spectators seated in metal chairs watching the dancers.

The woman seems to be waiting for someone, who finally arrives. They dance together with much pleasure in each other. The man is tall, attractive, his clothes are still dusty from work. Although the dance form is formal, one can nevertheless see they adore each other. Still, something seems to be separating them, perhaps an unhappy marriage on his part.

There is a sad parting, with few words. He leaves on old black bicycle.

After he has left, she feels the narrator’s eyes on her, recognizes him, gets up and comes over to him, indicating that he shall dance with her.

He says he doesn’t know how. She insists, and teaches him the basic steps. After two or three dances, she says it’s time for her to go.

“It was a temptation,” she says.

“You’re not talking about the muffins,” says the narrator.

“No,” she says.

“And not about me,” he says, with a smile.

“Tampoco,” she says. “No.”

Then she leans over and gives him a peck on the cheek and walks away in the opposite direction from that taken by the man with the black bicycle whom she obviously loves.

This story came solely out of my imagination, but also—in a way—honors you.

I wrote the story in English, but if you find a way to forgive me and want to read it, I will translate it and send it to you— by the same courier friend that is bringing you this letter now.

My behavior last Saturday was clumsy and inexcusable and put you in an impossible situation.

I asked the cashier not to tell you I was coming to catch a glimpse of you again. I suppose I was also coming to see someone I had created in my story. I told her I did not know you and did not want to bother you or cause you embarrassment.

She, on the other hand, felt a warranted obligation to warn you that a stranger was asking about you—perhaps some sort of stalker or crazy person, or worse, a chupa-almas—someone that sucks on people’s souls for their stories.

I did not include this last phrase.

I knew as soon as I entered the café that the cat was out of the bag, and that you knew about me and that I was a suspect—that I was the observed one, instead of you.

I did not know what to do, and for that reason I began writing in my notebook—not about you, but about the situation.

You must have thought I was out again to steal one more part of your privacy, your dignity or your soul.

After paying my bill, I turned around and you were standing ten feet from me, looking at me, full on, with a face that was striking in the sense of being stricken—a dark brow full of anger, outrage, confusion or perhaps disappointment that I was not decent enough to speak to you directly.

I do not know what you were feeling. And I could not step out of being a writer to being a person and simply ask you.

Please forgive me. It was not my intention to cause you such unhappiness.

Nor to become just one more of your clients that shows a presumption of privilege—in my case, that I should presume to spy on one of my inspirations as if they were some sort of trinket of literature and not a person with feelings and rights.

Please forgive me.

Sincerely,

And then I wrote my signature and mailing address.

The Tenuous Connection

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We have finally received a letter from the office of Catastro Municipal, the registry of properties, on the second floor of the Presidencia. The vacant lot across from us, the letter pointed out—where mini gangbangers for years have been buying, selling and inhaling glue, Magic Marker, paint thinner and, for all we know, Comet powder—belongs to Señor Ricardo Valázquez—a dead man.

An official at the Presidencia, a young woman sitting at the front desk at the office of Catastro, handed me the letter. It was short, and so I read it in front of her. I asked her how the owner paid the taxes if he was dead. The young woman showed hesitation, perhaps surprise.

“Someone is paying the taxes for him,” she offered.

I mentioned that I didn’t understand how you could pay his taxes if he didn’t exist. She closed a folder lying in front of her.

“It’s in his name,” she said.

I thought about that, with my semi-wounded I don’t understand look.

“Why isn’t it in his wife’s name?” I asked.

The young woman nodded, approving of my question. “Well, she hasn’t gone through the steps to change the title.”

I mentioned then, a little timidly I confess, I was thinking of suing him for neglect of the property. I explained it was full of trash, it was a gathering place for glue sniffers intent on destroying their brains, its walls were covered inside and out with years of the world’s ugliest graffiti and, when the local delinquents fled the police and Army, they escaped through the lot.

The young woman said she didn’t think I could proceed in the manner I suggested. “That would be suing a dead man,” she said.

I nodded. I thought I detected an edge of impatience, perhaps a judgment that I hadn’t immersed myself deeply enough in Mexican culture. She smiled and said, “You can’t sue a dead man,” and then excused herself graciously, and walked out of the office.

I took a step further into the Office of Catastro, a word that comes from sixteenth century French.

A tall, serious man rose and came around in front of his desk. I showed him the letter and said I’d like to write the owner and make an offer on the land.

The tall man read the letter as if for the first time, although I had already noticed the name on his desk was the same as the signature at the bottom of the letter.

He looked up at me and said I needed to make the request in writing, just the way I had before in order to find out the property owner’s name.

“In letter form?” I asked. “For him directly?”

“No, for the office. We need a formal written request,” he explained.

I sympathize with providing work for people in a country that needs jobs. I asked him whether the office would pass the letter on to the owner. He looked down at the letter again, then up at me.

“I believe he’s dead,” he said.

I asked if that would be a problem, since someone was paying his taxes for him and could possibly therefore speak for him regarding his decision whether to sell or not.

“Perhaps it would be easier if you just gave me his address,” I said.

The man looked at me calmly.

“I don’t think he has an address any more—for the obvious reason,” he said.

I nodded. “Perhaps the address of his survivor then,” I said.

He looked down at the letter again. “That person hasn’t officially claimed the new ownership yet.”

I nodded. “But do you have that person’s address?”

He said they did not, and besides it would be an intrusion on that person’s privacy since they weren’t the new owner until they applied for the title.

I nodded. I thought for a moment, then asked him whether it would be illegal for me to enter the property, clean up the trash and weld the metal entrance door shut so delinquents couldn’t destroy their brains there with paint thinner and Comet powder.

“It’s private property,” he explained, patiently.

I nodded. I asked him if that fact held the same force when the property was a problem for the neighborhood and the owner was dead.

He said I needed to go to Desarrollo Urbano, Urban Development. They would give me a more definitive answer if I submitted the question in writing.

I did not want to insult him, given that the French had invaded Mexico in 1861, but I told him I was having trouble reconciling the concept of ownership and being dead. I mentioned I was reading the French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan who divided the structure of human identity into the Réel, Symbolique and Imaginaire—the so-called interlocking and inextricable pieces of the Noeud Borroméen, the Knot of Borromeo.

I used the French terms to show my openness about the matter, also suggesting that Lacan’s definitions might help in quantifying the dead man and his control over his property—so that we could all move forward.

To make my remarks more sympathetic, I mentioned that Jacques Lacan was also dead.

He smiled cordially. “You need to go to Desarrollo Urbano,” he said. “We only deal with the ownership of property.”

I held out my hand, and he shook it warmly. I thanked him and then turned away to leave.

An idea occurred to me as I left the Presidencia. I would follow the suggestion of a wise and trusted neighbor and paint in large black letters, on the graffitied walls of the vacant lot, “Se vende” (for sale). I still had the telephone number of the Catastro office and I would add that too, just below the dead man’s name, Ricardo Valázquez—on the theory that a man who owned the property was also capable of painting such a sign and that those who paid Ricardo’s taxes would appear soon enough, given that they, as far as I knew, were not dead. My only regret was that I had not thought of this solution on November 1 and 2 for the Día de Los Muertos (the Day of the Dead)—when the barrier between Ricardo and me might have been more tenuous and communication easier.

What Happened to the Spanish Civil War?

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When you walk through the Catalun Musë–the Catalonia Museum near the harbor in Gaudy’s Barcelona and get to the end of all the exhibits, it occurs to you that something is missing—like the Spanish Civil War.

And you wonder why.

The rest of the exhibits are comprehensive. The building is lovely, and you look can look out over the Mediterranean. We took an elevator to the top floor and began walking through endless display rooms. This was not as hard as you might think because the floor is always slightly sloped and, like the steps of a circular stairway, the rooms spiral down to the bottom of the museum—a brilliant idea for the museum-weary.

We learn about the earliest peoples who lived in the Barcelona area, spread across the two river systems Besòs and Llobregat. We re-lived the Stone Age, the Bronze Age, hunting, cultivation, Greek colonies, Roman rule, Roman vineyards, and the Goths. Somewhere along the way, Hannibal rides elephants toward Rome, and then there is the 700-year Arab and Moorish presence. Which made me wonder briefly about the likely longevity of the Anglo-etc. presence in the great Native American continent.
I found it fascinating that the idea of irrigation came from the Muslims. Or that they introduced (to what is now Spain) lettuce, cabbage, radishes, eggplant, carrots, pomegranates, melons, watermelons, red figs, grapes, oranges, lemons, cucumbers, garlic, rice, sugar cane, wheat, cotton, paper, the idea of universal education, libraries, lit streets, religious tolerance, banking, medicine, astrology, astronomy, pharmacology, psychology, physics, physiology, zoology, biology, botany, mineralogy, optics, chemistry, mathematics, algebra, geometry, trigonometry, music, meteorology, geography, mechanics, navigation, and history.

There were universities. We got the Arabic number system and the concept of zero from them. They gave us harmony, the keyboard, the guitar, and the flute (although I thought the Greek god Pan invented that.) Their concept of optics led to the application of idea of perspective in painting. Modern Spanish still uses many Arabic words. The new invaders–the Christians–translated all of this over time, and we got the Enlightenment.

All of this impressed me immensely. It is not quite the image we get of Muslims in my former place of residence, just north of the Mexican border.

Back in Spain, the Christians turned on the Muslims and Jews and either killed them or drove them into exile. There was no mention of the Inquisition. The monarchies send ship west and discovered peoples who had already discovered themselves, in the New World. Grammarians try to establish a “high” Spanish. The Catalonians (Barcelona) refined their own language. The monarchies eventually conquered the Catalonians, but not their language.

There were many different subcultures in Catalonia. They were people who dwelt in the nooks and crannies got tired of war, and drifted toward what is now Barcelona, joined in its commerce, trading, and shipping. A portion of the population gradually began to oppose the social, economic, and political structure presumed by the monarchists. The Eighteenth and Nineteenth Century are a bit of a blur: wars, wigs, and kings. An anarchist tradition appeared: worker organizations, socialism, communism, agitation to defend workers’ rights against abuse by the big industrialists, big landowners, and the Church. And the counter-reaction by the latter.

I see reference to First World War, the Weimar Republic, Picasso. We are almost on the ground floor of the museum. I know there was a Republican Democracy in Spain, but then also the rebellion by certain generals against the same democratic republic, followed by a brutal Civil War July 17, 1936 to April 1, 1939. But I’ve seen no mention of it.

The year I was born, German Stukas (Stuka from Sturzkampfflugzeug, dive bomber) dive bombed Guernica, and Picasso does his famous painting of it.

I wonder whether I should sneer a little at Hemingway for romanticizing of the Spanish Civil War, but then I read that the Franco-ists took him very seriously and tried to block the U.S. publication of his books and the filming of movies based on them.

Blood flows, executions abound on both sides. The generals are the victors, the losers– 465,000 of them, thirty-five percent of them from the Catalan provinces alone, including a mass exodus from Barcelona (we are walking through a Barcelona museum) flee through three or four gaps in the Pyrenees to France, to be un-welcomed by French economic hard times, xenophobia, and a fascist government. Those who didn’t make it across the border and were political leaders were in trouble.

But we are on the ground floor by now. I ask the front desk, in Mexican Spanish, with my apparently Guatemalan accent, “Isn’t there anything about the Civil War?”

We are directed to a very small room on that floor, where there are some photographs on a wall–perhaps ten of them. A video is running. We sit down to watch. We see men, women, and children, on foot, in trucks, on horses and mules. We see armored cars, regular and irregular soldiers with their shoulders slouched or thrown back trying to look proud, as they pass, as if in review, the lines of French gendarmes. As they pass, the Spanish fighters throw their weapons onto piles of other weapons. There is a place for ammunition and grenades alone, another just for pistols–and a last one for machine guns.

It is cold. Everyone is tightly wrapped, if they are lucky. It is gray and bleak. The faces show hope and relief. I knew from elsewhere they were then marched to camps in open fields with barbed wire and no shelter–with soldiers separated from their families. They suffered from malnutrition, bad water, dysentery, cholera and starvation. The film doesn’t show that.

France doesn’t want them. Mexico, Argentina, Chile, and Dominican Republic are the only countries that will accept them–but in small numbers. Plus, there is little money for transportation and settlement. In the end, only something like 30,000 make it to Americas.

Conditions are so bad in the camp, some 268,000 people return to Franco’s Spain. By the end of 1944, 162,000 are still in France. 47,000 appear to be unaccounted for–perhaps the victims of starvation and disease.

The men who stayed were offered no good choices. They could serve in various work, support, and fighting brigades–or be returned to Spain. Those who refused were treated like prisoners. Activists were treated like prisoners anyway. Later, after the fall of France at the beginning of WWII, some join the Marquis, the French underground, to fight the Germans in Vichy France. Spanish Civil War fighters and leaders captured by the Germans were sent directly to German death camps.

If you were a high school or college student and had no background, and watched the ten-minute video in the small room at the museum, you would not understand why these people were fleeing their country.

And so, the question arises: Why, at this museum, was so much left out? Is it a matter of whose history shall be the official history?

I walked into the gift shop. I approached an intelligent looking young man. I asked him the question. I asked him what it meant–this invisible portion of their history. He asked me whether I had seen the exhibit. He pointed to the little room. I said I had. I asked the question in different ways. A young woman, also a store employee, joined us and listened in. I ask them whether it meant there were conditions that discouraged a larger treatment of one of the most painful events in Spain’s past.

I could tell by the way they were looking at me that my status had changed from tourist to somebody knocking on the door of their history.

The young man gave me an ironic smile. And as if it all just happened, he said, “You know the victors write the history.”

I said I knew that. But wasn’t there something not from their side? They brought out books. The victors’ intellectuals had recently written a history from a conservative point of view. The losers’ intellectuals had recently answered with their own thick volume. I wanted to buy the latter, but it was too heavy and I didn’t want any more weight.

He handed me a paperback. “This a novel about a Franco-ist (victors, fascist, dictator) intellectual who escaped a Republican (losers, democratic, left) firing squad during the last days of the war. A soldier from a Republican search party finds the escapee half-hidden in mud and leaves, but instead of shooting him, turns and walks away.”

I said I didn’t want to read something from the fascist point of view. He said, “This is not from a this or a that point of view. It is the book you want to read.”

From the way he said it–with intelligence and focus, and something in his voice–and because it was light, I bought it.

It is the book I recommend you read before you walk into the little room on the ground floor at the magnificent Catalonia Museum–in Gaudy’s Barcelona. Soldiers of Salamis, by Javier Cercas, translated by Anne McLean, Bloombury Press, 2004.

In a review, Susan Sontag writes, “With irresistible directness and delicacy, Javier Cercas engages in a quick-witted, tender quest for truth and the possibility of reconciliation in history, in our everyday lives—which happens to be the theme of most great European fiction. He has a fascinating tale to tell, which happens (mostly) to be true. He has written a marvelous novel.”

In all fairness, there is another museum which treats this period of Spain’s history. I did not have time to visit it. The Museu Memorial de L’Exili is located near the border with France, at La Jonquera. It is very modern structure, well laid out and, I think, comprehensive–with unrestrained concern for examining and remembering the catastrophic exodus of 1939. I do not know whether its texts are only in Catalan, but if you know Spanish you will be able to figure it out.

One further point: there were deadly struggles within the Republican (democratic) ranks. Stalin sent GPU (secret police) and other forces to support the anti-fascists but at the same to murder non-Stalinists who were thought to be too revolutionary in the sense of pro-worker and for land reform. Also targets were internationals who associated with these activists, among whom was one George Orwell. To appease Hitler, Stalin secretly ordered the International Brigade out of Spain, thus sealing the fate of the Republic and its supporters, resulting in the fascist victory and the mass exodus. For more I recommend http://www.critiquejournal.net/spain32.pdf

I recommend William Herrick’s autobiography “Jumping the Line: The Adventures and Misadventures of an American Radical,” University of Wisconsin Press, for an understanding of the destructive role of Stalinist Communists in the Spanish Civil War. Very good reading

My Apology to France

Posted on by sterlingbennett

I take back—if I may—what I said about the TGV (le train à grande vitesse) being a metaphor for why France—where my great-great-grandfather was born—could not conquer Mexico between 1864–1867. For those of you who remember anything about your U.S. History, that was roughly the time of our Civil War. And maybe the only reason we didn’t intervene against both France and Mexico.

I know that’s a lot of information to take in. Especially the part about my great-great-grandfather, whose place in my family tree grants me one thirty-second French blood, and therefore clearly the right to pass judgment on things French.

You can read the whole truth about my great-great grandfather at http://www.sterlingbennett.com, under the title “French Blood,” where you will learn that he owned slaves, traded in the Caribbean with chartered schooners, shipwrecked off the coast of Florida, swam ashore, and was shot full of arrows by Seminole Indians who thought they were getting too many immigrants in their area.

The trolleys of Montpellier run on the same nuclear energy produced électricité that the TGV uses, but do not stop or slow down for bad weather. Why I don’t know. Perhaps it’s because they do not aspire to de la grande vitesse. In fact, they poke along, for the most part, until the drivers—both male and female, I point out—see an open stretch, and then open up the throttle to as much as forty miles an hour.

Maybe this lesser speed has something to do with their shape: they closely represent California’s banana slugs, but that is the extent of their throw-back character, and my thirty-two parts French blood is immensely proud of their technology.

Any great city of the world would be lucky to have them crawling over their streets. They ding their bells a lot but otherwise progress with space age avionics. The drivers sit enclosed in air-conditioned booths with switches and levers and blinking lights and various digital readouts. Cameras point rearward on both sides to alert the driver that a passenger has only managed to get half way in—or out. The drivers’ seats are cushy. The trolley’s progress is coordinated with all kinds of outside track signals that say proceed or slow or proceed with caution. This is to prevent various kinds of collisions with other wheeled but un-tracked vehicles. It doesn’t help at all with passengers that get out and then cross the track right in front of the tram just as it’s about to start; or against the unlit cyclist at night who performs a daring fly-by, in front of the moving trolley, ignoring its three warning dings.

Very much like mating banana slugs, as many as three cars cling to each other. But unlike slugs, you can walk from one car to the other—and bring bikes and animals inside.

So, all in all, France is doing very well, judging by the trolleys of Montpellier. Every city should have a rout of them (group name for snails). And for between cities, maybe a TGV or two. But the type that does not build up static electricity and cause delays and explosions and mysteries for its passengers—and eventually become a metaphor, justly or unjustly deserved, for the country it breaks down in.

So much for my apology. No doubt the country is heaving a sigh of relief, having been redeemed by this one thirty-second of a countryman.

Why the French Couldn’t Conquer Mexico

Posted on by sterlingbennett

Dark clouds formed on the horizon. We were whipping along, taking the first-world super train TGV from the Gare de Lyon, Paris, toward the south of France. Rain began to fall. The train slowed to a halt. The intercom announced, “We are stopping for your security.” Then there was a tremendous explosion from the front of the train. Crows in a tree way off to the right rose into the air frightened. The blast was sharp and loud. There had been no lightning. I thought, briefly: a terrorist attack. Or somehow we had built up static electricity and the train had stopped because it had reached dangerous levels. Then I thought the static electricity had somehow attracted lightning, a connection with ions already in the air from the storm. It began to rain hard. Finally the rain stopped, the sky lightened. The voice on the intercom announced there were experiencing electrical difficulties (!) and they were working on it. We heard people banging on things outside our super-modern car.

After fifteen minutes, the train began again. Ten minutes later, it stopped again. Same announcements, but no explosion. The intercom man said again it was a matter of regional electrical problems. Hard to believe. After fifteen minutes, we started again. I assumed they were talking by radio or cell phones with trains behind us—so we wouldn’t be rammed.

After fifteen or so minutes, we stopped again. In the end, we arrived fifty minutes late in Valence! (Largest barge harbor in Europe, where Napoleon imprisoned a Pope, refugee center for survivors of the 1.5 million genocide of the Armenians by the Turkish government in 1915) A read-out there said we had been late because of high winds. Hard to believe. We could have just slowed down.

Tomorrow, we continue on the TGV to Montpelier. We have to take a small train for five miles east from Valence to reach the high speed TGV line. We will get to our train on time, but we are not sure whether the super-modern TGV will be anywhere near on time. I do not know the explanation for the breakdowns. None of the explanations, theirs or mine, convince me. All I can think of is that Fate provided us with a metaphor for what is currently happening (economically) in “first world” France, as well as a clue as to why, ultimately, Maximilian (“The Last Prince of the Mexican Empire,” C.M. Mayo) and his troops could not prevail in their occupation of Mexico.