Thoughts on the Spanish Civil War - 2
By Sandra Ramos Rossi
A couple of years later I fell in love with a Spaniard. We’re still together today. It takes a while to gain the trust of the family, especially if you’re a foreigner. You don’t get the whole family history at once, you piece it together bit by bit, and it was only when grandma died that I learnt about granddad. I never really spoke to grandma; she was eighty-five years old and senile when I first met her. She lived at home with her daughter until the day she died. When they told me about how her husband had been killed in the fighting at Toledo, at twenty-one years old, it made me stop and wonder at the stupid waste of it. She had never remarried, had brought up three children, on her own for sixty years. I like to imagine them both happily reunited in the afterworld.
He died at Toledo, and the siege of the Alcazar of Toledo was one of the bloodiest and stupidest episodes of the Spanish Civil War. At the beginning of the war the Republicans took control of the city. It was a major prize because the largest munitions factory in all Spain was located there. The only problem was that the military garrison of the town had blockaded itself in the old castle, or Alcazar, with their families, and had refused to surrender. For two years the Alcazar was bombarded until there was nothing left but rubble above ground, but the garrison continued to hold out in the cellars.
The Republicans captured the son of the General in charge of the garrison and threatened to execute him if his father did not surrender the Alcazar. There was telephone communication between the two sides, and the Republicans put the son on the line to his father, to plead for his life. They've rebuilt the castle today, and turned it into a museum. You can go there and listen to a tape recording of the conversation, where the General says "Well son, good luck. There’s nothing I can do for you." They play the tape over and over again as an example of heroic stubbornness. The son was executed shortly afterwards.
Towards the end of the war Toledo was taken by the Nationalist forces and the few surviving members of the garrison were liberated. It was a great propaganda coup for the Nationalists, and they also gained control of the munitions factory, which had not produced a single weapon the whole time it had been under Republican control.
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Around about the time that grandma died, we moved into a flat near the Gran Via, in the centre of town. The Gran Via is a wide commercial street, with large, impressive nineteenth century buildings, which climbs a hill up to the Plaza de Callao before heading back down to the Plaza de España and then west out towards the University.
At the bottom of the hill there is a famous cocktail bar called Chicote’s. It’s famous because it was one of the only bars that didn't shut during the two year siege of Madrid, because Chicote himself was a famous barman who invented some cocktails, and because Ernest Hemingway wrote various short stories about it while he was in Madrid as a war correspondent. They still do a great Mojito, my favourite cocktail.
Nowadays they do house music sessions here at the weekend, and it gets quite a trendy crowd, but if you go during the week it'll be quiet, and you'll get that 1930s atmosphere straight away. The décor hasn't changed, they still have the 1930s built-in green leather chairs, room for three people in each booth with a small table, and another two chairs pulled up alongside.
Whenever I visit Chicote's, I always think of one particular story of Hemingway's. Towards the end of the war the front line was just the other side of the University, and the Nationalists could lob shells onto the Gran Via from there. Hemingway used to shelter in Chicote's if there was shelling on the Gran Via and he couldn’t make his way up to his hotel in Callao, at the top of the hill. In the story I always think of, Chicote’s is crowded with people sheltering from the shells, and one man is shouting, causing a fuss, making everyone nervous. An argument starts, and escalates, until somebody pulls out a gun and shoots him dead, by the door.
Hemingway's writing is excellent, as you might expect, and it's very easy to conjure up the situation in your imagination. The nervous people, everybody carrying a gun, the disrespect for life that war inevitably engenders in the soldier, the trigger-happy atmosphere, you can picture it all. I can never go in there without imagining the cadaver of the poor guy on the floor, by the door. Like I said, it was a real shooting war, with real dead people.
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Three years later we bought a flat in one of the more popular barrios of Madrid, Lavapiés. I like to know the history of the area that I live in, so I did some research. I was especially interested in the ruins of a church, in the next street along.
It turns out that this barrio, being so 'popular' was home to the socialist headquarters before the start of the war. On the first day of the civil war, the evening the uprising of the rebel generals was announced, a large red beacon was set up on the roof of the headquarters, and soon a mob had gathered which crowded the streets. Soon the crowd turned violent, as they will do, and the target selected was the Jesuit church and college in C/ Mesón de Paredes. The Catholic Church had allied itself to the right-wing parties, and so had come to be seen as an enemy of the working classes.
That evening they set fire to the church and burnt it out. It spent the next seventy years as an empty shell. In 2005 it was reopened as a University library after two years of restoration.
Worse things happened in Madrid at that time, a mass of people charged the machine guns of the army barracks in Moncloa, and defeated them through the sheer press of bodies. Hundreds were killed. The whole city was in state of nervous paranoia, any accusation could lead to a neighbour or fellow worker being taken away for a paseo, for a euphemistic 'walk' that always ended with a bullet in the back of the head in a corner of the park.
Terrible times. It’s hard to imagine that happening here now. Of course, you don't have to look far to see the same events being repeated again, in Baghdad this time. The cycle repeats itself because we don’t explain to our children what war is like.
When my nephew asked me "So, was that a real shooting war, where people died?," I told him.
© Sonia Ramos Rossi 2007
