“Maybe they bombed it by accident?” I suggested innocently.
“And was the National Library an accident also? Do you know what the rebel factions fear most about the Republic?”
I shook my head.
He continued, “What they fear most is culture, that people know things. Of course they know that people can read and write and do math. What I mean is, they’re afraid of people thinking for themselves. Though, to be frank, I’ve heard something similar is happening in Russia.”
His words took me by surprise. Until recent years he had been an ardent admirer of Lenin and always talked about how Spain needed a revolution like Russia’s of 1917. In a way, their revolution was the model that the left in Europe was following.
“The proletariat revolution is liberation,” I answered. It’s what I’d learned at school. Anywhere I looked I saw Soviet symbols, and people said that for the twentieth anniversary of the revolution a monument to Stalin would be erected in Puerta de Alcalá.
My father didn’t answer. He just took another bite and then a swallow of wine.
“What do you think of that painting?” he said, pointing to the wooden panels of the triptych.
“I don’t know. It’s weird,” I said. I knew he loved teaching me things and loved how I would eat up his lessons.
“It is a strange piece. One time the poet Rafael Alberti explained it to me.” I knew my father had been friends with the poet, though it had been some time since they’d seen each other. “He told me that Bosch, the Dutchman who painted the work, unlike most artists, tried to express what was inside a man’s heart, not what could be perceived with the human eye. This is how we really are: vengeful, prideful, insatiable.”
“So then what good is utopia?” I asked, somewhat fearful of his answer. I had heard him talk hundreds of times about the need to believe in and fight for utopia.
Dad was thoughtful, as if he had wondered the same and still had not settled the matter. “You ask hard questions. Your mother has always said your mind is an anomaly. But anyway, utopia is the perfect society: a just society, in peace, that strives for the common good—”
“But it doesn’t exist.”
“No, utopia is always our goal, our objective. And the closer we get to it, the further away it inevitably moves. That’s why we always have the sensation of dissatisfaction. We move a few steps forward, and utopia retreats as if hoping to escape our small, selfish desires. The moment we make utopia fit our plans and schemes, it disappears. It never serves individualistic interests because there’s always something to improve, something else to fight for.” His gaze now bore into mine as he spoke. His own eyes, worn-out and tired from so much pain and suffering, held melancholy.
“But if we can never reach it, what good does it do?”
“True, we’ll never reach it, but that’s exactly what it’s good for—to push us forward so we don’t lose hope.”
That I could not understand my father’s words was my only surety. After a few more minutes, we stood up and went to look at The Surrender of Breda.
“Look at the battle, all those spears, the governor handing the keys to the city over to the enemy army,” my father said. “Velázquez is trying to show us that war has a meaning, a point . . . that everything boils down to victory and defeat, but at the core that’s a big lie. So many times what we do doesn’t end up bringing us happiness. But the paradox is that if we sit here twiddling our thumbs, we’ll never reach the perfect world, that utopia, we long for. Each generation believes it’s destined to change the world. It’s fallen to our generation to keep fascism from subjugating us, but without even realizing it, we’ve turned into destroyers.”
I stared at him, hypnotized. He was giving me a lesson I would never forget, but I could barely understand it at the time. His words were seeds that would take years to bear fruit.
“I’ve learned a lot over the past few months,” he went on. “I’d been taught that individualism was a bourgeois principle, that a man is only truly human when he’s among the masses. I thought war was the end of loneliness, that by joining my comrades against a common enemy and with a single purpose all the loneliness would dissipate like fog. Instead, war has made me feel new depths of loneliness. The one thing I know for sure is that if I have to choose a side, I can’t be allied with those who write history from their offices or studying a map. My place is with those who suffer, who endure history. But sometimes your enemies are enduring and suffering as well. Everyone’s shouting for liberty now, but if there’s no justice, liberty has failed.”
“Who are our enemies? The fascists, then?” I asked, dizzy with confusion.
“When I was younger, I was told we would have to kill in order to create a world in which nobody would kill anybody else. It’s not true.” Tears formed in my father’s eyes as he spoke. “For every free man who dies in this war, five slaves will be born. The world will lose hope, lose its utopia.”
We trudged out of the building with low spirits. It was dusk, but the streetlamps were dark to make it harder for the fascist bomber planes to see their targets.
Then we heard the roar of the bombers. The alarm rang out, and we ran to the metro, though my father was apathetic about the whole thing, as if death were the only gift a desperate man could hope for. As we descended the stairs, surrounded by the crowd, the bombs began to whistle overhead. Then the explosions shook the ground, making us feel insignificant and small.
We stayed underground in the dark for almost an hour, listening to the cries and groans of the crowd that jostled and pressed in from all sides. The dust falling from the ceiling choked us as we struggled to breathe, but no one talked, until one girl began to sing:
Through Casa de Campo,
little mama,
and over the Manzanares River,
the Manzanares River,
the Moors want to pass,
little mama,
but they shall not pass,
but they shall not pass,
Madrid, how well you resist,
little mama,
the bombings,
the bombings!
The citizens of Madrid,
the citizens of Madrid,
little mama,
laugh in the face of the bombs.
The song had a calming effect on the crowd. When we returned up to street level, the courage the song had given us was enough to face the fires resulting from the bombing and the stench of death. My father and I had walked less than a mile when we passed my school. There were no classes at that hour, but a group of boys played ball and girls always skipped rope in the front yard. Smoke rose from inside the main building, and a few trees were burning like torches illuminating the dark city. We heard the strangled cries of women before we saw anything more. And as we drew close to the fence, what I saw reminded me of Bosch’s inferno: amputated limbs, destroyed bodies, mothers clinging to what remained of their children. My father ordered me to look away, but the images were seared into my soul forever.
“Dad!” I cried out, clutching his arm. It was all I could say. If I hadn’t joined him that afternoon on his watch in the museum, I would’ve been there, playing with my friends in the schoolyard.
He had no words either. We walked, downcast, back to our apartment—relieved and grateful to have survived, but also full of guilt. Nothing is more absurd than death or more terrible than war. From that day on, I understood that the most important thing we do every day is to fight to live, even though life may be unbearable.