Around that time, I left on a mission to Stockholm, where I read in a newspaper that a bomb had leveled a small apartment building near the Etoile that had been the headquarters of a labor union. I remember the article saying quite precisely that the bomb was so powerful the building had simply crumbled to dust, and that two agents had died in the blast. It was obvious which terrorist had done the job.
Again, nothing happened. The man continued to pursue his activities, protected by the careful indifference of the French police, who seemed to support whomever had the upper hand. At the end of the war, the actor, a member of the Fifth Column, was decorated for his services by Franco.
While my terrorist was cheerfully going about his dirty work in Paris, I was being violently attacked by the French right wing, who—believe it or not—had not forgotten L’Age d’or. They wrote about my taste for profanity and my “anal complex,” and the newspaper Gringoire (or was it Candide?) reminded its readers that I’d come to Paris several years before in an effort to “corrupt French youth.”
One day, Breton came to see me at the embassy.
“Mon cher ami,” he began, “there seem to be some disagreeable rumors about the Republicans’ executing Péret because he belonged to POUM.”
POUM had inspired some adherence among the surrealists. In fact, Benjamin Péret had left for Barcelona, where he could be seen every day on the Plaza Cataluña surrounded by people from POUM. On Breton’s request, I asked some questions and learned that Péret had gone to the Aragón front in Huesca; apparently, he’d also criticized the behavior of certain POUM members so openly and vociferously that many had announced their firm intention of shooting him. I guaranteed Breton that Péret hadn’t been executed by the Republicans, however, and he returned to France soon afterward, safe and sound.
From time to time, I met Dali for lunch at the Rôtisserie Périgourdine on the place St.-Michel. One day, he made me a bizarre offer.
“I can introduce you to an enormously rich Englishman,” he said. “He’s on your side, and he wants to give you a bomber!”
The Englishman, Edward James, had just bought all of Dali’s 1938 output, and did indeed want to give the Republicans an ultramodern bomber which was then hidden in a Czechoslovakian airport. Knowing that the Republic was dramatically short of air strength, he was making us this handsome present—in exchange for a few masterpieces from the Prado. He wanted to set up an exhibition in Paris, as well as in other cities in France; the paintings would be placed under the warranty of the International Tribunal at The Hague, and after the war there would be two options: If the Republicans won, the paintings would be returned to the Prado, but if Franco was victorious, they’d remain the property of the Republican government in exile.
I conveyed this unusual proposition to Alvarez del Vayo, who admitted that a bomber would be very welcome, but that wild horses couldn’t make him take paintings out of the Prado. “What would they say about us?” he demanded. “What would the press make of this? That we traded our patrimony for arms? No, no, it’s impossible. Let’s have no further talk about it.”
(Edward James is still alive and is the owner of several châteaus, not to mention a large ranch in Mexico.)
My secretary was the daughter of the treasurer of the French Communist party. He’d belonged to the infamous Bande à Bonnot, and his daughter remembers taking walks as a child on the arm of the notorious Raymond-la-Science. I myself knew two old-timers from the band—Rirette Maîtrejean and the gentleman who did cabaret numbers and called himself the “innocent convict.” One day, a communiqué arrived asking for information about a shipment of potassium from Italy to a Spanish port then in the hands of the Fascists. My secretary called her father.
“Let’s go for a little drive,” he said to me two days later, when he arrived in my office. “I want you to meet someone.”
We stopped in a café outside of Paris, and there he introduced me to a somber but elegantly dressed American, who seemed to be in his late thirties and who spoke French with a strong accent.
“I hear you want to know about some potassium,” he inquired mildly.
“Yes,” I replied.
“Well, I think I just might have some information for you about the boat.”
He did indeed give me very precise information about both cargo and itinerary, which I immediately telephoned to Negrín. Several years later, I met the man again at a cocktail party at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. We looked at each other across the room, but never exchanged a word. Later still, after the Second World War, I saw him at La Coupole with his wife. This time, we had a chat, during which he told me that he used to run a factory in the outskirts of Paris and had supported the Republican cause in various ways, which is how my secretary’s father knew him.
During this time I was living in the suburb of Meudon. When I got home at night, I’d always stop, one hand on my gun, and check to make sure I hadn’t been followed. We lived in a climate of fear and secrets and unknown forces, and as we continued to receive hourly bulletins on the progress of the war, we watched our hopes slowly dwindle and die.
It’s not surprising that Republicans like myself didn’t oppose the Nazi-Soviet pact. We’d been so disappointed by the Western democracies, who still treated the Soviet Union with contempt and refused all meaningful contact with its leaders, that we saw Stalin’s gesture as a way of gaining time, of strengthening our forces, which, no matter what happened in Spain, were sure to be thrown into World War II. Most of the French Communist party also approved of the pact; Aragon made that clear more than once. One of the rare voices raised in protest within the party was that of the brilliant Marxist intellectual Paul Nizan. Yet we all knew that the pact wouldn’t last, that, like everything else, it too would fall apart.
I remained sympathetic to the Communist party until the end of the 1950s, when I finally had to confront my revulsion. Fanaticism of any kind has always repelled me, and Marxism was no exception; it was like any other religion that claims to have found the truth. In the 1930s, for instance, Marxist doctrine permitted no mention of the unconscious mind or of the numerous and profound psychological forces in the individual. Everything could be explained, they said, by socioeconomic mechanisms, a notion that seemed perfectly derisory to me. A doctrine like that leaves out at least half of the human being.
I know I’m digressing; but, as with all Spanish picaresques, digression seems to be my natural way of telling a story. Now that I’m old and my memory is weaker, I have to be very careful, but I can’t seem to resist beginning a story, then abandoning it suddenly for a seductive parenthesis, and by the time I finish, I’ve forgotten where I began. I’m always asking my friends: “Why am I telling you this?” And now I’m afraid I’ll have to give in to one last digression.
There were all kinds of missions I had to carry out, one being that of Negrín’s bodyguard from time to time. Armed to the teeth and backed up by the Socialist painter Quintanilla, I used to watch over Negrín at the Gare d’Orsay without his being aware of it. I also often slipped across the border into Spain, carrying “special” documents. It was on one of those occasions that I took a plane for the first time in my life, along with Juanito Negrín, the prime minister’s son. We’d just flown over the Pyrenees when we saw a Fascist fighter plane heading toward us from the direction of Majorca. We were terrified, until it veered off suddenly and turned around, dissuaded perhaps by the DC-8 from Barcelona.
During a trip to Valencia, I went to see the head of agitprop to show him some papers that had come to us in Paris and which we thought might be useful to him. The following morning, he picked me up and drove me to a villa a few kilometers outside the city, where he introduced me to a Russian, who examined my documents and claimed to recognize them. Like the Falangists and the Germans, the Republicans and the Russians had dozens of contacts like this—the secret services were doing their apprenticeships everywhere. When a Republican brigade found itself besieged from the other side of the
Gavarnie, French sympathizers smuggled arms to them across the mountains. In fact, throughout the war, smugglers in the Pyrenees transported both men and propaganda. In the area of St.-Jean-de-Luz, a brigadier in the French gendarmerie gave the smugglers no trouble if they were crossing the border with Republican tracts. I wish there’d been a more official way to show my gratitude, but I did give him a superb sword I’d bought near the place de la République, on which I’d had engraved: “For Services Rendered to the Spanish Republic.”
Our relationship with the Fascists was exceedingly complex, as the García incident illustrates so well. García was an out-and-out crook who claimed to be a Socialist. During the early months of the war, he set up his racket in Madrid under the sinister name of the Brigada del Amanecer—the Sunrise Brigade. Early in the morning, he’d break into the houses of the well-to-do, “take the men for a walk,” rape the women, and steal whatever he and his band could get their hands on. I was in Paris when a French union man who was working in a hotel came to tell me that a Spaniard was getting ready to take a ship for South America and that he was carrying a suitcase full of stolen jewels. It seemed that García had made his fortune, left Spain, and was skipping the continent altogether under an assumed name.
García was a terrible embarrassment to the Republic, but the Fascists were also desperate to catch him. The boat was scheduled for a stopover at Santa Cruz de Tenerife, which at that time was occupied by Franco. I passed my information along to the ambassador, and without a moment’s hesitation he relayed it to the Fascists via a neutral embassy. When García arrived in Santa Cruz, he was picked up and hanged.
One of the strangest stories to emerge from the war was the Calanda pact. When the agitation began, the civil guard was ordered to leave Calanda and concentrate at Saragossa. Before leaving, however, the officers gave the job of maintaining order in the town to a sort of council made up of leading citizens, whose first venture was to arrest several notorious activists, including a well-known anarchist, a few Socialist peasants, and the only Communist. When the anarchist forces from Barcelona reached the outskirts of town at the beginning of the war, these notable citizens decided to pay a visit to the prison.
“We’ve got a proposition for you,” they told the prisoners. “We’re at war, and heaven only knows who’s going to win. We’re all Calandians, so we’ll let you out on the condition that, whatever happens, all of us promise not to engage in any acts of violence whatsoever.”
The prisoners agreed, of course, and were immediately released; a few days later, when the anarchists entered Calanda, their first act was to execute eighty-two people. Among the victims were nine Dominicans, most of the leading citizens on the council, some doctors and landowners, and even a few poor people whose only crime was a reputation for piety.
The deal had been made in the hope of keeping Calanda free from the violence that was tearing the rest of the country apart, to make the town a kind of no man’s land; but neutrality was a mirage. It was fatal to believe that anyone could escape time or history.
Another extraordinary event that occurred in Calanda, and probably in many other villages as well, began with the anarchist order to go to the main square, where the town crier blew his trumpet and announced: “From today on, it is decreed that there will be free love in Calanda.” As you can imagine, the declaration was received with utter stupefaction, and the only consequence was that a few women were harassed in the streets. No one seemed to know what free love meant, and when the women refused to comply with the decree, the hecklers let them go on their way with no complaints. To jump from the perfect rigidity of Catholicism to something called free love was no easy feat; the entire town was in a state of total confusion. In order to restore order, in people’s minds more than anywhere else, Mantecon, the governor of Aragón, made an extemporaneous speech one day from the balcony of our house in which he declared that free love was an absurdity and that we had other, more serious things to think about, like a civil war.
By the time Franco’s troops neared Calanda, the Republican sympathizers in the town had long since fled. Those who stayed to greet the Falangists had nothing to worry about. Yet if I can believe a Lazarist father who came to see me in New York, about a hundred people in Calanda were executed, so fierce was the Fascists’ desire to remove any possible Republican contamination.
My sister Conchita was arrested in Saragossa after Republican planes had bombed the city (in fact, a bomb fell on the roof of the basilica without exploding, which gave the church an unparalleled opportunity to talk about miracles), and my brother-in-law, an army officer, was accused of having been involved in the incident. Ironically, he was in a Republican jail at that very moment. Conchita was finally released, but not before a very close brush with execution.
(The Lazarist father who came to New York brought me the portrait Dali had painted of me during our years at the Residencia. After he told me what had happened in Calanda, he said to me earnestly, “Whatever you do, don’t go back there!” I had no desire whatsoever to go back, and many years were to pass before I did in fact return.)
In 1936, the voices of the Spanish people were heard for the first time in their history; and, instinctively, the first thing they attacked was the Church, followed by the great landowners—their two ancient enemies. As they burned churches and convents and massacred priests, any doubts anyone may have had about hereditary enemies vanished completely.
I’ve always been impressed by the famous photograph of those ecclesiastical dignitaries standing in front of the Cathedral of Santiago de Compostela in full sacerdotal garb, their arms raised in the Fascist salute toward some officers standing nearby. God and Country are an unbeatable team; they break all records for oppression and bloodshed.
I’ve never been one of Franco’s fanatical adversaries. As far as I’m concerned, he wasn’t the Devil personified. I’m even ready to believe that he kept our exhausted country from being invaded by the Nazis. Yes, even in Franco’s case there’s room for some ambiguity. And in the cocoon of my timid nihilism, I tell myself that all the wealth and culture on the Falangist side ought to have limited the horror. Yet the worst excesses came from them; which is why, alone with my dry martini, I have my doubts about the benefits of money and culture.
15
Still an Atheist …
Thank God!
CHANCE governs all things; necessity, which is far from having the same purity, comes only later. If I have a soft spot for any one of my movies, it would be for The Phantom of Liberty, because it tries to work out just this theme.
I’ve often fantasized my ideal scenario, which would begin at a perfectly banal moment—for example, a beggar crossing a street. He sees a hand emerge from the open door of a luxurious car and toss a half-smoked Havana into the street. The beggar stops short to pick up the cigar, another car strikes him, and he dies instantly. From this one accident comes an infinite series of questions: What was the beggar doing in the street at that hour? Why did the man smoking the cigar throw it away at that precise moment? The answers to questions like these provoke other questions, just as we so often find ourselves at complicated crossroads which lead to other crossroads, to ever more fantastic labyrinths. Somehow we must choose a path. In other words, by tracing apparent causes (which are really no more than accidents), we can travel dizzily back in time, back through history—all the way back, in fact, to the original protozoa. (We can also follow the scenario in the opposite direction and see that the act of throwing a cigar out the window, which leads to a beggar’s death, can change the course of history and lead to the end of the world.)
The perfect example of this historical accident is Roger Caillois’s Ponce Pilate, a gorgeous book which is really the quintessence of a certain kind of French culture. In it, Pilate has every reason in the world to wash his hands and let Christ be crucified. That’s the opinion of his political adviser, who’s worried about trouble in Judea. It’s also what Judas wants, so that God’s intentions can
be realized. Even Marduk, the Chaldean prophet who knows what’s going to happen after the Messiah’s death, wants Pilate to leave Christ where he is. But Pilate is honest and committed to justice, and so after a sleepless night he rejects all this advice and decides to give Christ his freedom. His disciples embrace him joyfully, Christ continues his teaching, and he dies at a ripe old age, in everyone’s opinion a saintly man. For a couple of centuries, pilgrims visit his tomb, but then he’s forgotten. Had this happened, just think how different the history of the world would have been.
This book fueled my fantasies for a very long time; and despite what people say about historical determinism and about the will of an omnipotent God who wanted Pilate to wash his hands, I still feel he might not have done so. By refusing the basin and water, he would have changed the world; it was pure chance that he accepted them.
Of course, this is risky reasoning. If our birth is totally a matter of chance, the accidental meeting of an egg and a sperm (but why, in fact, that particular egg and sperm among all the millions of possibilities?), chance nonetheless disappears when societies are formed, when the fetus—and then the child—finds himself subjected to its laws. And yet these laws and customs, these historical and social conditions at any given period—all these things, in other words, that claim to contribute to the forward march of the civilization to which we belong by the good or bad luck of our birth—appear as so many attempts to master fate. The only trouble is that fate is full of surprises, because it never stops trying to adapt itself to social necessity.