A ghastly turbulence started up in his chest as he got into the car, but it passed as he drove back home with the windows down. He walked to the British Institute and sat at the back of the class and half listened through a session of conditionals. I would be feeling better now if I had been to the shrink. I’d be singing my madness out on the couch if I hadn’t lost my nerve. It would help if I could talk to someone.
He looked around the students in the class. Pedro. Juan. Sergio. Lola. Sergio? His thoughts grew strange and large in his head. Sergio. We might as well call this madman Sergio. He can talk. He sees things clearly. He gets inside and turns things over. He’d talked to Eloisa, given her hope and taken her hopeless life from her. Why don’t I talk to him? He’s telling me his story, why don’t I tell him mine? Let him wrench these horrible creatures from my brain.
‘Javier?’ said the teacher.
‘I’d like to apologize if I’ve been talking out loud.’
Falcon laughed to himself, grinned at the way the larger world outside had been diminished by the high-vaulted gothics of his own mind. He could live in here for years and, as soon as he’d thought it, he threw himself out, like a heretic from a cathedral. He delved into the machinery of language. It was so easy to fit words together, so relaxing. It was only the meaning that bled into the spaces around them that troubled.
He attached himself to some other students and went for a drink. They walked to the Bar Barbiana in the Calle Albareda. They drank beer, ate tapas — atun encebollado, tortillitas de camarones. The students didn’t belong with the clientele of this bar who were, as they were saying, muy pijo — upper class — probably with fincas in the country, until Lola looked embarrassed and they changed the subject because they thought Falcon was muy pija in his suit and tie.
They split up before Javier was ready to go home. Was he ever ready to go home these days? His house was a prison, his room a cell, the bed a rack on which he was stretched out every night. He walked around town, stood close to groups in well-lit bars, put his beer down amongst theirs, until they noticed him and sealed him off.
He ended the night under the high palms and the deeper darkness of the massive rubber trees in the Plaza del Museo de las Bellas Artes. The botellon was in full swing, the air full of hashish, clinking glass and the low roar of humans at their leisure.
Extracts from the Journals of Francisco Falcon
30th June 1941, Ceuta
Pablito came into my room this afternoon, lay down on my bed, rolled a cigarette on his chest and lit it. He has something to tell me. I know this but I always ignore him. I was drawing a Berber woman I’d seen in the market that morning. Pablito’s nonchalance bristled on the bed. He smoked like a cow would, always chewing.
‘We’re going to Russia,’ he said. ‘To hit the Reds. Kick them up the ass on their own soil.’
I put down my pencil and turned to him.
‘General Orgaz volunteered us. Colonel Esperanza has been asked to form a regiment. A battalion is going to be made up out of the Legion, the Regulares and the Flechas, here in Ceuta.’
That’s how I remember Pablito’s little announcement. Banal. I’m so bored I’m going along with it. So little has happened in the last few years I forgot I had this journal. My diary is in my drawings. I’m unused to writing. Four pages cover two years. Isn’t this the rhythm of life? Periods of change, followed by long periods of getting used to the change until you feel compelled to change again. Boredom is my only motive. It’s probably Pablito’s, too, but he dresses it up in anti-communist rhetoric. He doesn’t know the first thing about communism.
8th July 1941, Ceuta
There was a good turnout in the port to see us off. General Orgaz stirred us all up. If we didn’t suspect it before, we know it now — we’re a political device. (Am I sounding like Oscar now?) The uniform says something about what’s going on in Madrid: we’re wearing the red berets of the Carlists, the blue shirts of the Falange and the khaki trousers of the Legion. Royalists, fascists and military all satisfied and implicated.
The Germans have been at the Pyrenees for months. Rumour had it that they were going to send a strike force to take Gibraltar, which sounded too much like invasion. We’re being sent to Russia to make the Germans feel better about Spain, to make it look as if we’re on their side. The newspaper tells us that Stalin is the real enemy, but no mention of us entering the war. Games are being played and we are in the middle. I have a feeling of doom about this whole expedition, but beyond the harbour walls we pick up a school of dolphin, who escort us most of the way to Algeciras, which I take to be a good omen.
10th July 1941, Seville
We’ve been put in the Pineda barracks at the southern end of the city. We had a night on the town. We didn’t pay for a single drink. The last time some of our number were here they were hacking men to death on the streets of Triana. Now we’re the heroes, sent to keep communism at bay. Five years is an eon in human relations.
Despite the brutal heat, I like Seville. The dark, cool bars. The people with short memories and a need to express joy. I think this is a place to live in.
18th July 1941, Grafenwohr, Germany
We changed trains at Hendaye in southern France. The French shook their fists and hurled rocks at the carriages as we passed through. At our first stop in Germany, Karlsruhe station was full of people cheering and singing ‘Deutschland, Deutschland uber alles’. They covered the train in flowers. Now we’re somewhere northeast of Nurnberg. Weather grey. New recruits and most of the guripas already depressed, missing home. Us veterans depressed because we’ve just been told that the Division Azul, as we ‘re called, is not going to be motorized but horsedrawn.
8th August 1941, Grafenwohr
Pablito has a black eye and a cut lip. He doesn’t like the Germans any more than the communists he hasn’t yet met. The men, the guripas, like wearing their blue shirts and red berets instead of the regulation German uniform. A fight broke out in the Rathskeller in town. ‘They tell us we don’t know how to take care of our weapons,’ says Pablito. ‘But the real reason is that we’re fucking all their women and the girls have never had it so good.’ I don’t know if we’ll ever fit in with our new allies. The food stinks worse than the latrines, their tobacco smokes like hay and there is no wine. While Colonel Esperanza has taken delivery of a Studebaker President, we have been supplied with 6,000 horses from Serbia. It should take us two months just to get the animals trained, but we ‘re moving up to the front at the end of the month. Pablito’s heard that we ‘re going to march on Moscow, but I see the way the Germans look at us. They put a high value on discipline, obedience, command and neatness. Our secret weapon is our passion. But it is too secret for them to see. Only in battle will they understand the flame that burns inside every guripa. One shout of ‘A mi la legion!’ and the whole floor will rise up and ram the Russians back to Siberia.
27th August 1941,
