'Oh, I remember the Cafe Roma,' I said, 'it was still there during my first year at university.’
'Possibly,' he replied, not wanting to pause. I felt that it was best not to interrupt him again, he had embarked on a story that was very hard for him to tell, and it was best not to give him time to have second thoughts or doubts, as he had with my mother, when he returned home after hearing the story and decided to keep it to himself. 'As soon as we went in, some friends or acquaintances of his called him over to their table and asked us to join them. I don't know if they knew who I was, I mean, if my name meant anything to them when I was introduced, but I certainly knew who two of them were, although not the other two. One was the writer I've told you about, and who, at the time, was still a shiny new Falangist, and the other I was a monarchist, of the kind with infinite patience and in no particular hurry, that is, a Francoist through and through. Both were already safely ensconced in their respective cushy jobs. The writer was really only beginning to be talked about as such: he had published a volume, or possibly two volumes, of rather old-fashioned verse, much praised for obvious reasons; later on, he abandoned poetry and devoted himself to the novel, which is where he made his name; he also wrote a few dull plays and the odd dull essay as well. These two men appeared not to have seen the others for a very long time, and people then were still in the habit of recounting to each other what had happened to them during the War, what they'd suffered or made other people suffer. And this was the case with them. They were swapping experiences, stories, the occasional exploit, the occasional hardship, the occasional atrocity. Gomez-Antiguedad contributed a little, I not at all. And in the middle of all this, the writer mentioned a name which I knew and admired, that of a former university friend. We hadn't been close friends, he was a year below me, but I'd enjoyed talking to him from time to time, and he was just a very nice man: Emilio Mares, an Andalusian, very friendly and bright, he was rather vain, but in a funny, self-consciously frivolous way, he made out he was an anarchist, but there was nothing solemn about him at all; even when he got on his high horse about something, he did so with a degree of self-mockery, and he always looked immaculate, impeccably dressed, certainly not the kind of anarchist you read about in novels; a really lovely man, always in a good mood. He was in Andalusia when the War broke out; by 18 July a lot of students who weren't from Madrid had gone back home to spend the summer with their families, and he was from a village near Malaga or Granada, I'm not quite sure where, but his father was, I think, the socialist mayor, in Grazalema or Casares off Manilva, somewhere round there. We had heard, when the War was already in full swing, that he'd been killed in Malaga by the Nationalists, and we assumed that he'd been killed there in February 1937 when the Italian blackshirts moved in, more than ten thousand of them. We imagined that he would have been summarily shot. The repression or, rather, revenge was particularly ferocious there, because the city had resisted for seven months and the people of Malaga had committed a lot of barbarous acts themselves, random shootings, indiscriminate looting, the burning of churches, the settling of personal accounts, just as happened at the beginning of the War here. It was said that when the Nationalists took the city, under the Duque de Sevilla, they corrected the imbalance and went still further, and that in the first week alone about four thousand people were shot. It may have been fewer than that, but it doesn't matter, they certainly served up plenty of coffee, because that, as you know, was the euphemism used by Franco and his cohorts for ordering executions,
"Dadles cafe" – "Give them some coffee" – they would say, and the prisoners would be put up against the wall and shot. In Malaga, a lot of them were taken to the beach to be shot. The Italians protested at such brutality, they felt splattered by all that spilled blood, so much so that the ambassador, Cantalupo, spoke to Franco about it and went there himself to stem the violence. I read somewhere that he was stunned at the furious cruelty that had been unleashed, and how even wealthy matrons, all of them good Catholics, were busily desecrating Republican graves.' My father stopped and drew one hand across his forehead or, rather, almost squeezed it with his four fingers, as if he were trying to remove something, images perhaps, perhaps stories. He was then in his eighties. But it was a very brief pause and he immediately resumed his account: 'I can't remember exactly how the episode came up in the conversation, in the old Cafe Roma, but what was said about Mares is engraved on my memory. I think one of them remarked in offended tones that many Republicans, when they surrendered or were detained, 'got very hoity-toity", he said, or something along those lines. And it was more or less then, spurred on by the mention of such arrogance, that the writer decided to describe the lesson they had taught just one such Republican. He told how once, in Ronda (Ronda had fallen long before Malaga, in September or October of 1936), they took three prisoners out at dawn to shoot them, and how, as was the custom, they ordered them to dig their own grave (it was the custom on both sides, and I fear it may still be so in any war). One of them, "a dandified little fellow called Emilio Mares", those were his words, "the son of a Commie mayor from some village around there" refused and said to his executioners: "You can and will kill me, I know that, but I'm not a bull to be baited." He wasn't prepared to do their work for them, let's say. The comment was just what I would have expected from the man I had known, who had, on that I particular day, unsurprisingly lost his usual good humour: a final impudent remark, he obviously didn't want to spend his last moments digging and sweating and getting himself dirty. "The fellow got really uppity," the writer went on, "as if he was in a position to impose conditions. However much of a red he claimed to be, you could see, straight off, that he was just a little rich kid, done up to the nines, quite the young master. And he even urged his two companions to refuse as well. Luckily for them, though, they were too frightened, and kept on digging. He must have assumed we would just shoot all three of them afterwards beside the open grave. One man in our group, a local chap who clearly had it in for him from the start, struck him in the face with a rifle butt, knocking him to the ground, and told; him again to start digging. But the fellow still refused, and repeated that we could kill him if we wanted to, beat him to; death if we liked, but that he wasn't going to be our plaything,; a bull to be baited 'as sure as my name is Emilio Mares', he said. That's how he put it, with his name and everything -jumped up little man. Well, all I can say is that it was a most unfortunate turn of phrase to choose because, do you know what we did?” And the writer waited a moment, as if for dramatic effect, to arouse our expectations, as if he really needed us to say "No, what did you do?", although he didn't, in fact, wait that long, because it was a purely rhetorical question, pure theatre Then he brought his index finger down through the air, stopping just short of the table, as if he were pointing something out or underlining it, as if he were proud of the answer, and at the same time as he made this gesture, he gave the answer, gave us the answer: "We baited him," he said smugly, pleased with the lesson they had taught the man. I remember that this was followed by a shocked, uncomprehending silence. I don't think any of us could grasp what he meant, because up until then it had been clear that the man had been speaking figuratively, and, of course, the whole thing was utterly inconceivable. Surprised and slightly apprehensive, Antiguedad was the one to ask him: "What do you mean?" "Precisely what I said, we took him at his word and we baited him like a bull. We played matador to his bull," replied the writer. "It was the chap from Malaga 's idea, the one who'd had it in for him from the start. 'Oh, so you're not a bull to be baited, eh?' he said to him. 'I don't think you've quite got the measure of us.' And he climbed into the van and drove into town and in less than half an hour, he was back with all the stuff. We stuck banderillas in him, stood on the roof of the van and drove very slowly past him, jabbing at him like picadors, and then the malagueno delivered the coup de grace with the sword. He was a nasty piece of work, a real bastard, but he obviously knew what he was doing, and he went in for the kill with genuine style, straight in, through the heart. I only stuck a couple of short banderillas in him, round the neck and shoulders. Oh, Emilio Mares got the measure of us all right. The other two men were our audience and we forced them to cheer and clap. We didn't shoot them until the show was over, as a reward for having dug their own graves. That way they could see what they had escaped. The malagueno insisted on cutting off one ear as a prize. That was perhaps going a bit too fir, but we weren't going to stop him." And that was the story that the famous, celebrated writer told over drinks,' added my rather, and as soon as he stopped speaking, his voice sounded suddenly weary, 'although he never told it again later on, when he was really famous. A solemn funeral mass was held when he died. I think one very democratic minister even helped carry his coffin.’