He returned to the Workers’ Cooperative, and the sentry at the door told him Negrín had just left but had gone to a place nearby, the Socialist commissary on Calle Gravina. Negrín was loading cardboard boxes filled with foodstuffs and beverages into his car, wiping away sweat with a handkerchief, which he then stuffed into the breast pocket of his jacket.
“Help me, Abel, don’t just stand there,” he said with a peremptory gesture, not surprised to see him.
The two of them filled the trunk with canned food, sausages, sacks of potatoes. On the back seat were cases of beer and demijohns of wine wrapped in blankets.
“Don’t think badly of me, Ignacio. I’m not seizing all this food, and I won’t pay the comrades in the commissary with IOUs, like our heroic revolutionary patrols.”
The manager handed Negrín a long bill, and Negrín went over it with the point of a tiny pencil held between his large fingers. From a wallet held together by a rubber band he took out a handful of banknotes and paid the manager. He was already in the car and had started the motor when he told Ignacio Abel to get in and said goodbye to the commissary manager by holding his arm out the window with his fist clenched, in the same efficient way he’d extend it to signal a turn.
“Do you want me to drop you somewhere, Abel? I’m off to the Sierra to bring some food to the boys in the regiment my son Rómulo enlisted in. It’s a disgrace — there are no regular supplies of anything. They send those brave kids to the front and then don’t remember to bring them ammunition or food or blankets. If they don’t have enough trucks for food and ammunition, how come they’re still parading them through Madrid?” Boxed into a space that was too small, Negrín gestured over the wheel as he drove with abrupt accelerations and stops on the narrow streets, carried along by a mixture of indignation and enthusiasm. “So instead of despairing and wasting time by calling and asking the authorities to do something, I decided to take drastic action and do it myself. It’s not much, but it’s better than nothing, and besides, it keeps me busy. Come to think of it, how about helping me with your car?”
“It was requisitioned, Don Juan. I left it at the mechanic’s a few days before all this began and haven’t seen it since.”
“You’ve used precisely the right phrase: ‘all this.’ What are we living through? A war, a revolution, sheer absurdity, a variation on traditional Spanish summer fiestas? ‘All this.’ We don’t even know what name to give it. Did you hear what Juan Ramón Jiménez called it? When he was safe and sound in America, of course. A ‘mad tragic fiesta,’ that’s what Juan Ramón called it. The people’s great triumph. But he and Zenobia, just in case, rushed to put some distance between themselves and ‘all this.’ Do you know they were about to take him for a ride, as we say now? It’s a shame how things like this enter our vocabulary.”
“They were going to kill Juan Ramón Jiménez? What could they have suspected him of?”
“Suspected? Nothing. He had the same name as somebody else they were looking for, or he resembled him. His good teeth saved him.”
“So he bit his way out of it? He’s quick-tempered.”
“It’s no joke. The militiamen were sure of only one detail about the man they were looking for: he had false teeth. When Juan Ramón insisted they had the wrong man, they began to have their doubts. One of them figured they could just pull on his teeth and find out. Now you know that Juan Ramón has the best teeth in all of Madrid. A patrol almost arrested Don Antonio Machado because they thought he looked like a priest. But tell me, how long ago did they arrest your friend? It would be an international disgrace for us if anything happened to him. Yet another one.”
“I don’t know where to begin looking for him.”
“You don’t and neither does anybody else. It seemed we were going to abolish the bourgeois state, and now each party and union has its own jail and police force in addition to its own militias. What a great step forward. I suppose our enemies are delighted with us. In the Anarchist militias they vote on whether it’s a good idea to attack the enemy, in ours they shoot the few military commanders we have left for sabotage if an offensive fails. The miracle is that in the Sierra we’ve been able to contain the insurgents, and from the south they haven’t reached Madrid yet. And what about the Aragón front? If the brave columns of Catalán Anarchists keep breaking through and crushing the enemy’s defenses, how come they never reach Zaragoza? And if every day we’re about to take the Alcázar de Toledo, why haven’t we taken it yet? From what you tell me, I assume the people who picked up your friend were Communists. They wouldn’t have killed him right away, they would’ve wanted to interrogate him. Didn’t he live for a time in the Soviet Union? Go talk to Bergamín, at the Alliance of Anti-Fascist Intellectuals. You know that one way or another he’s connected to everybody. Leave me a message at home if you find out anything. As soon as I get back from the Sierra tonight, I’ll look with you.”
“And where’s this Alliance?”
Negrín burst into laughter and made a sharp turn at the corner of the Plaza de Santa Bárbara to head west along the avenues.
“For God’s sake, Abel, you don’t know anything! The cream of the anti-Fascist intelligentsia has installed itself in the palace of the marquises of Heredia Spinola, one of the best in Madrid. They make war by editing a little newspaper with revolutionary poems, and to rest from their labors they give masquerade balls using the wardrobe of the marquises, who may have fled or died, I don’t know which… Forgive me for not taking you there, but I’m pulled in the opposite direction, and I would like to reach the Sierra in time for supper.”