Tapestry of Spies

had any good idea what that was. The POUMistas, nevertheless, had taken control of the Falcon, here on the Ramblas. What was more, they sponsored the largest of the militias, the Lenin Division, now entrenched outside of Huesca two hundred fifty miles to the east in the foothills of the Pyrenees, the closest authentic “war” to Barcelona.

But Florry, still sluggish after the business of the night, understood what she meant.

“Yes, it is odd,” he replied. There was something particular in the air, and to come to it, straight out from tidy England, was to feel its power in a particularly undiluted dosage. They’d heard the theories all these years, the fashionable arguments, the intellectual fancies spun in cigarette-smoke-filled rooms, the shouted dreams, the fevered visions. The optimism of it was like a virus, the hope like a fantasy. Yet here it was, or at least one early model, clearly clunky, a wheezing, puffing, whirling gizmo, but the thing itself: the classless society.

“It fills one with hope,” Sylvia said. “It’s how things could be; it’s how they should be.”

Florry nodded, unsure of the feelings in his own heart just then, but somehow in agreement with her. They sat in the sunlight at a table at the Cafe Moka, which occupied the ground-floor corner of the Hotel Falcon, surprised at the warmth and sunlight of January, which in its way was oddly appropriate. They sipped cafe con leche and watched the parade. For the revolution was a parade.

Down the Ramblas, a wide thoroughfare that ran a mile from the Plaza de Catalunya to the port, in never- ending columns, the revolutionary masses tramped. To watch it, one felt, was almost a privilege; it was quite a moment for the tired old world.

“God, look at them,” Sylvia said, her face flushed, her eyes vivid.

“It’s the biggest parade there ever was,” said Florry, speaking the truth, but leaving unsaid and unanswered the question of ultimate destinations.

And for this parade, Barcelona had tarted herself up in a new garb, as if part of the joy were in the costumes; the whole population had become workers, it seemed. It was, for the first time in the history of the world, fashionable to be a worker. Everybody wore the blue monos of the working class, or the khaki of the fighting militias. Even the prosaic public transportation contrivances wore costumes: the trams up and down the Ramblas moved like vast floats, pulling their cargo through the crowds; all wore a gaudy red-and- black scheme and all of them sported the giant initials of their particular political affiliations. At the same time the autos and trucks had been liberated to political purpose and they, too, wore their allegiances as proudly as old guardsman’s chevrons. It was a Mardi Gras of revolutions, a reveler’s revolution. The air was full of confetti and music and history. Festive banners flapped from the balconies of the buildings to the leafless trunks of the trees of the Ramblas or were strung in crudely painted, sagging, dripping majesty from balcony to lamp pole, offering a cheerful variety of exhortations to the duties that still lay ahead.

THEY SHALL NOT PASS

FASCISM WILL BE BURIED HERE

TO HUESCA! TO HUESCA!

UNITE, WORKERS

IN UNION, LIBERTY

DEATH TO THE BOURGEOISIE!

Huge portraits from the revolutionary pantheon hung everywhere, heroic, kind, knowing faces, the faces of saints. Florry knew the key figures: Marx and Lenin, the woman called La Passionaria, an intense intellectual fellow named Nin, head of POUM; and some other Spaniards whom he didn’t recognize. Only the Soviet Man of Steel, Stalin, was missing, unwelcome down here among the unruly libertarians; but he held great sway not half a mile away at the vast Plaza de Catalunya, where the PSUC, the Communist Party of Catalonia, under Russian guidance, had taken over the Hotel Colon and turned that ceremonial space into a small block of downtown Moscow.

There was noise, too, on the Ramblas, noise everywhere: a din of singing and gramophone recordings, the clash of a dozen different tongues, Spanish and Catalonian the most popular only by a narrow margin, the others being English, French, German, and Russian. The air had filled with sunlight and the dust and the noise and the smell of flowers and petrol and horses and sweets. Sensation piled atop sensation, sight atop sight.

“It’s like a new world,” Sylvia said. “It’s like a different world altogether. It’s like some year in the future.”

Florry didn’t know what to say. The extent of her passion somewhat astonished him. She had not referred to last night.

“I want to believe in it so much,” Sylvia said. “It explains so many things to me.”

She was quite right, of course. So pure was the sense of revolution, the ether of justice deferred for so long but arriving at last, that to breathe it was to endorse it: the joyous madness of Starting Over, of Doing Right, of the Just State. To be in the birthing room of history, as a new age attempted to wrench itself into life! Florry, sitting there, could feel the sentiment move through his bones.

Yet even now, in the blooming ardor, with the mood of purpose as heavy as perfume all about him, Florry could not prevent the coming of doubts. How much, one could ask, of all this was simple illusion. Parades, speeches, leaping peasants: the future?

Or was the future old Gruenwald removed by the police for reasons unknown? What about poor, drowned Witte, lost in the night, and the hundred unknown Arab crewmen sucked under the black water?

“Your face is so long, Robert.”

“I was thinking of Count Witte.”

“Dead and gone,” she said. “The poor man.”

“Yes.” He reached over and took her hand.

“I was also thinking of us, Sylvia. Not of history, not of progress or justice. No, us. Is that fair, Sylvia? Do I have that right?”

“I like it when you touch me,” she said. “I like it very much.”

“Here we sit, Sylvia, in the brave new world. And you tell me you like it when I touch you. Are you part of my illusion, Sylvia? Tell me, please. Am I misreading you? Am I weak and sentimental and seeing things that aren’t there?”

Her face clouded in the sunlight. There was a particular burst of music from somewhere, so loud it made him wince. A haunted look came to her face.

“I just wonder if there’s time for us,” she said. “In all this.”

A troop of khaki cavalry was moving down the Ramblas, the horses’ hooves clattering on the cobblestones. From this distance, they looked fierce and proud, a conceit of glory and destiny.

“I like you so very, very much. I just want time for this. Not the revolution really, but the experience of it. I’ve never been anyplace so exciting, I’ve never been so close to history. I never will again. I want some time to … to have my experiences. That is what I came for, for my experiences. Do you see what I’m saying?”

“Well, Sylvia, I suppose I do. Still, the truth is ? God help me for finding the courage to face it at last ? I suppose the truth is that I love you. Comical, isn’t it? Well, let’s do be grown up about the whole thing. Yes, let’s do be friends.”

“Last night was wonderful. Do you see? But there’s so much more to it than just the simple business of how we feel.”

“I suppose there is.”

“There’s so much to do still.”

Florry said nothing. Yes, he had things to do, too.

“Your friend Julian has joined up. I talked to some of the party members. He no longer represents his little magazine. Now he represents the People. With a capital P, one supposes. He’s joined the POUMista Lenin Division. He’s out in the trenches at Huesca. He’s in the war. God, Robert, now there’s a man.”

The admiration in her voice almost killed him.

“Well, Sylvia,” he heard himself saying, “well, then you may get your introduction to the great Julian after all. Because I shall be there, also.”

* * *