To Serve

In Zaragoza, Spain there lived one Heriberto Blazquez who served with General Rafael Garcia Valino's forces at the Battle of the Ebro during that country's civil war in 1938. Blazquez was a Nationalist soldier or an insurgent, an anti-Bolshevist or a dirty Fascist, a defender of the Faith and the monarchy or a lackey of plutocratic robber barons. Perhaps he was none of the above. A description of who or what he was so often depended on one's view of the issues that were putting the flower of Spanish manhood (and much of the civilian populace) almost literally through a meat grinder whose cranking power was supplied by the maniacal hand of prehistoric hatreds of tribalism and class, as well as the rather new godless religions of socio-political ideology. At the start of this final year of peace throughout most of Europe, Heriberto was twenty three years old and had earned a fairly decent living working in his father Nestor's jewelry store as a watchmaker and repairer and helping to tend a quite small olive grove several kilometers outside of town with his cousin Jorge on weekends. The latest call to arms came early in the year when frosts were frequent but most everything else was smoldering or already in flames. Generalissimo Franco had exhorted those of his camp to redouble their efforts and expand the lists of volunteers. Heriberto was not a political animal, his psyche being something of an anomalous one in the universe and cultural temperament of his time and nation. Still, he had seen and heard much in the last nineteen months since the conflict began and his phlegmatic nature was slowly but surely being aroused. A local parish priest who was friendly with a visiting Italian pastor from Genoa who had assisted a mutual friend and photographer working for the Diocese of Madrid, had shared with Heriberto some of the gruesome photo albums on loan to him that were compiled in the early months of the war. Garroted or shot civilians, including clergymen and nuns, were all carefully chronicled with stark black i.d. tags with white lettering indicating registration numbers and dates of death that were hung about the necks of each victim. Included too were children, wizened laypersons of either sex as well as nondescript young and middle aged adults, more than a few of each group with shattered eye sockets or undamaged eyes, but with half-opened, unseeing orbs and the occasional dried streaks of blood etched vertically down each corner of the mouth like the telltale signs of the lifelessness and mockery of a ventriloquist's dummy. Heriberto had never seen a "raw" corpse before, only prepared and lovingly treated ones at funerals in church. Stories of defecations in churches or on the bodies of religious left him incredulous, then frightened and finally, angry. Until then, though the seeds of his hatred had already germinated (if only by degrees almost as imperceptible as those of his grandmother's favorite hot Portuguese peppers) he had not been in lockstep with the bugle blast of the national maelstrom. Now he was ready to heed the call.

His induction process was rather brief and within a fortnight he had already trained with live ammunition and the sounds of the battle were heard with increasing frequency, leaving little (or much) to the imagination of an untested youth. A mail call (his first) surprised him. That is, the celerity of the delivery caught him off guard. Yet the bigger shock was the envelope extended to him by his distracted and unpleasant sergeant. Its borders were black and a shiver went through him despite a self-assessment of placidity. Dreamlike, he poked a slender finger into the tiny space at one of its corners and ripped at the upper portion of the flap. It was from his mother. His brother Horacio, who lived and worked as an accountant in Barcelona was dead. "Shot through the heart at close range" read the local constabulary's report. Six of his co-workers met a similar fate on the same day. "They should have not worn their suits and ties in that neighborhood" his mother reported she had been informed. "My cousin Antonio lives in that city also", thought Heriberto. "He also does not dress in 'proletarian' clothing. He's a court clerk. Does mother know how he is?" he further pondered. Reflection and prayer were not, however, priorities of the army unless the former was the glint of the sun off the helmets and bayonets of Heriberto and his "camarades." The Falangist anthem "Cara al Sol" was no empty slogan and at the least, it allowed an opportunity of escape through "machismo" from the terror and loathing that war engendered in sane and introverted men like Heriberto. And events swiftly swept all, along this river of action and monolithic emotion and purpose: "Save Spain! Kill the Reds and their Sovietic minions!" Yes, Heriberto went to war and could not, for the moment, spare another conscious thought for his brother, his cousin or anyone else. Preparatory to, during, and after the successful crossing of a literal river, the snaking Ebro, Senor Blazquez had further continued to see and hear much. Attacks, counter-attacks, sieges and trench warfare not unlike the epic struggles in France barely twenty years earlier: the Zaragozan lived through these calamities with but one small sliver of shrapnel gouging his flesh above the right nipple and yet, so many invisible wounds accumulated, their rawness crowding his brain and stealing many an evening's rest with or without shelling and other bellicose disturbances. By the end of summer there now occurred enough of a lull in the fighting for him to realize how much he now longed, uselessly, to see his brother again and for the tedium of his little shop on Calle de la Corona de Aragon. Their superior artillery, their air forces nearly unopposed in the skies, better supplied and well fed: the morale of Heriberto and his friends was heightened particularly by the prospect of going home that such riches in materiel might allow rather than simply by his army's likelihood of assuming the role of vanquisher.

His near fluency in French and a rudimentary if halting facility in conversational English (early summers spent with cousins in the Pyrenees and a beloved school teacher uncle from Philadelphia ensconced for many summers with his family) made him a belatedly popular choice as acting interrogator (upon the death of his predecessor) on the rare occasions that foreign Republican troops were captured. His assignments to attend to the watches and other timepieces belonging to several colonels, including an assistant to General Valino, were cut short one day when a seeming "big fish", his beret festooned with revolutionary pins and hortatory slogans stitched along the sweatband, showed up between two hulking Morroccan guards, his ears bleeding, crazed eyes stabbing the ether with pain and defiance. "Nombre?" said Heriberto who now caught himself on this occasion of his first interview of a foreign prisoner: "Nom, name?" "Rango--rang, rank?" "Numero serial, serial number?" Sullen silence and a quick sizing up by the captive revolutionary of Heriberto's owlish visage and rimless spectacles brought the mute assessment: "foolishly decent shopkeeper type, a pantywaist and no soldier!" The captured man's right arm was raised, elbow locking rigidly as it formed an acute angle with his humerus and the ulnar/radius. The arm was held as high as the wounded man was able in the predictable clenched fist of international Marxism. Heriberto stared, as was his habit, no different than when examining a timepiece whose innards were not performing as desired. "Madre de mierda! Vaya con El Diablo!" croaked the Red soldier. Heriberto reached methodically, no rancor evinced, and brought down the taller man's arm and back to his side. A peculiar new kind of silence had all in the room alert and eyes focused solely on the man from Zaragoza. He coughed twice: first to hide a nervousness that he convinced himself only he perceived. The second was purposefully throat-clearing in a sincere wish to communicate clearly with the prisoner. A small fraction of a second after forming the thought "What is the position of your unit and its strength?" Heriberto realized the energy involved in fashioning a worthy translation and he then in another instant warmed to the fact of this man's hardly idiomatic Spanish and obvious "Norte Americano" accent that perhaps warranted another approach. But it was really impulse, uncharacteristically, that outraced what his training manual had dictated, and tumbling out of his mouth he heard himself utter in English: "Stranger, do you know of the Hall of the Independence in Philadelphia?" More weird silence. Heriberto's comrades were impressed though in the dark about what he was saying and why. Had he been a more whimsical man, Blazquez may have wondered too, at least why, he was posing this question. A mirthless smile began to curl the corners of the prisoner's mouth and he enunciated slowly and contemptuously: "Sergeant Rory Philmont, 45th International Division, 139th Brigade, formerly of the XV International Brigade, Abraham Lincoln Brigade, neither a slave to serial numbers nor to Fascism, SIR!" Philmont delighted in his non-linear, disobedient way of timing his answers and when Blazquez had at last formulated his translation and posed the question about troop strength and position, the prisoner eagerly bellowed "Nice guess, Four Eyes. The right state, but the wrong city. Pittsburgh.....makers of steel, men of steel, Pirates and bituminous coal. And you're gonna taste more black steel from Democracies' arsenals and our Soviet brothers' factories than you ever dreamed of, SIR!" Heriberto recognized the tone but not the meaning of the rapidly spat out English words. He had other matters to attend to and the American had an overblown estimation of his value to his enemy as opposed to the curiosity he engendered. Philmont's pride and loose tongue almost invited pity despite his imposing height. Motioning to a guard, Blazquez quietly said "Carcelero, por favor." Whisked away while humming the American folk song "Red River Valley", Heriberto knew that he had some time to pick Philmont's brain, but not much. He had fleetingly and childishly hoped for an animosity-free exchange about the history of Philadelphia and its famous Hall, but he remembered where he was and the sanguinary and heartless circumstances he had to operate in. Paperwork and an antique watch and fob belonging to Col. Lerida were still waiting on his desk. An hour and a half later he was permitted to sup: pigeon peas and brown bread with the rare luxury of a small slab of butter. "Una taza de cafe" and a quarter tablet of Mexican chocolate sated the weary young man. His moth eaten bedroll upon a very thin layer of straw in the corner of his tent seemed very inviting though he wished a flap could be cut through the moldy canvass wall adjacent to his sweaty balding head. He tried to sleep.
END OF PART 1