War. What is it Good For?

War

I despise

It means destruction to innocent lives

War means tears

To thousands of mothers' eyes

When their sons go out to fight

And lose their lives

War, huh, yeah

What is it good for?

Nothing

~ Temptations, Edwin Starr

The old woman was sitting beside the door of her residence, which could best be termed a hut. She was hunched over a basket where she was shelling the kernels off of several corn cobs. In back of her, behind her other bent shoulder, was an unkempt, rather large, or orchard of apple and walnut trees. Unkempt didn’t mean nothing was produced in the orchard. Quite the contrary: the branches were laden with red fruit and nuts. The harvest would be abundant. A few pear trees and a chestnut or two would add to the abundance.

On the other side of the hut was a garden full of grelos, couve, potatoes, a few carrots, and half a dozen each of other plants. Curling alongside the patch were mint and pennyroyal. Surely there was mint growing beside the stream that gurgled on the back line of the property. Everything with a purpose.

"I remember," says the old woman, whose name was Fidelina, although it's not clear if anyone has asked her a question. Most people don't think she has many answers any more. That is unfair.

"I was seven," adds the old woman, as if she had been asked how old she had been when everything happened. When the world had exploded and left shards of people and their lives everywhere.

"My mother was pregnant with my sister when they came with their pistols on their hips, dragged my father away, and shot him where he would fall face down into the ditch beside the road. It was what they often did. The fascists would drag a suspicious person out of his home, calling him ‘red’, then pump bullets into him. It didn't only happen to my father, which helped a little, but not much."

Now there was no stopping the old woman from the telling of what she knew, and what she wanted us to know.

"I was seven, so I remember. My younger brother was four, and he doesn’t know if he remembers or not. That makes me really angry. My younger sister doesn’t recall a thing, but then she couldn't, since she was born three months after they took my father away. She never met him. She had a father, but he died before she was born. To this day, I know she wonders if it were her fault."

The elderly woman who, despite her years, still had not ceded all of the original color of her brown hair to age, seemed unable to stop. The memory door had been opened, and she was going to make use of it. Those whoi knew Fidelina could vouch for that.

"There are a lot of absurd ideas in my family," she mused. Her gaze looked as if it were beginning to wander. Maybe she would lose track of what she was saying. The poor woman was right on that point, however. For a child yet unborm to feel guilt regarding the death of her father makes no sense at all. What could she, as a six-month-old fetus, have done? Interposed herself between the pistol and her father? Poor child.

"Come to think of it, maybe my sister does remember, even if it seems impossible. After all, the family has taken pains to record important events in its oral memories album. Stories of things that took place during the Spanish Civil War, 1936-1939, are told and retold - as they should be - to the point where we sometimes think we remember what we've only heard." Fidelina was beginning to make more and more sense.

There are probably studies on the topic of how memory is constructed and maintained. We are sometimes convinced we remember something, but it turns out to be a fake memory, created by someone else who lived the experience. The memory may be helped along by an old photograph, with an accompanying story that leads us to believe we have had the moment in our heads since the moment it happened. Even if we were only eighteen months old. Even if we hadn't been born yet. Do we recall the photograph or do we recall the event? Does the photo become the event? For example, if you didn't have a yellowed, curled-up ohoto of the miniature ponies at the amusement park, would you know you had gone to ride them and had the time of your life?

"I was peering around a door when the pistol went off. I recall every second, and the moment only last two seconds. Two brief seconds during which a life was ended and a brain splattered all over the books in the library my father had created in his study. Blood all over the spines of a dozen volumes, white matter here and there. I was far too young to understand it all."

There are things we can never unsee, as people like to say nowadays. The problem is how to store those things away so they do not incapacitate us, or worse, repeat the lesson once we are grown up and can acquire things like pistols that kill. This story was unexpected. Maybe it was one of the things we invent. Except that no child would invent what Fidelina had seen.

"I saw my father's head blown apart in his study. He had done something very wrong, I guess. He was very smart, or so I was told. He had smart ideas. I was only seven, so I can't really say."

Silence. Nevertheless, the elderly woman wasn't finished remembering, and so she continued.

"My mother never spoke again, except to scream when she was in labor with my sister. I'm not sure if she stopped being my mother at that point, but I believe so. My little brother became something unmentionable and my baby sister, she never really had a chance. As a family, we didn't ever talk to each other much, and I think we wore black a lot. Lots of people wore black a lot. That was part of the war, but there was also after the war. That was bad, too."

In a way, we wish we hadn't met the old woman, or at least we wished she'd never started talking, but it was too late. All we'd been looking for was a pleasant chat beside an old rural dwelling, an orchard of apple and walnut trees, and a little garden. Just to pass the time of day in a lovely country setting. We didn't need to hear all her words, all of them rooted in a single shot to the head. We weren't prepared to think so hard.

"Lots of people disappeared, but most of them turned up soon after in the ditch alongside a road. The shooters didn't bother to conceal what they'd done. On the contrary: they wanted the shots to be loud, because that was the best way to keep everyone quiet. They did manage to silence our mouths, but our eyes and minds were not asleep. We knew they would help us."

That was indeed the Spanish Civil War, where the worst crimes imaginable were committed in the name of Fascism. It is really wrong the way 'Fascist' is thrown around nowadays, just because we don't like something about a person. No, this was brutal and very, very wrong. In Spain there was Fascism, and it worked in collaboration with Germany and Italy. Fascists built concentration camps and filled them, but not just with one group. Instead, they filled them with anybody who didn't agree or seemed not to agree, as wee as anybody who was different. They didn't despise just one group of people; they were after anybody who didn't look or act like they did.

History is actuallly quite ignorant about the whole matter, and some countries don't have a clue regarding how many bullets were put in the brains of people just because they didn't think Fascism was great. All the people with the same memories and history as the elderly woman sitting beside her house in the country, and nobody knows. 

How is that? Well, for one thing, because the leaders of some countries are also Fascist. Or if not Fascosts, they are capitalists. What does that mean? Probably something to do with power and profit. Sign a lucrative trade deal, ignore the way the country is run. Important stuff, even stuff that is manufactured in sweat shops. I mean, do you think relationships with other countries are determined by what they call 'respect for human rights'? Are you that ignorant?

I suspect some of you are.

The elderly woman whose father had his head blown off was not so unique. People, mostly men, were dragged off from whatever they did, from homes and work, and were terminated. Men and women wore pistols on their hips. Speak the wrong language and they assassinate you. Teach and they assassinate you. Live an alternative sexuality and they definitely assassinate you. Write or paint or act and you're at risk of assassination. That is Spain. 

Yet when push came to shove, Mr. Marshall with his phenomenal Plan for Europe was ready to dole out big bucks to countries, even though with Fascist leaders. Everything had to look hunky-dory, because trade was necessary, at any cost. Human rights be damned. Go see the 1950s movie about what happened to Spain as it groveled for big bucks and got a pittance. Hysterical.

"We had to study religion in school. Our mothers were supposed to have lots of children as part of their national duty. Of course that was difficult for the women who had been widowed by a pistol shot to the head of their spouses."

The elderly woman was right, of course. Still, she had a bit more to add.

"I don't know how I knew, but we learned to be stiff, rigid, unerring in what we said and did. My Uncle Xosé, who was a priest and a member of the community in the Mosteiro de Samos, the monastery at Samos, would call on us sometimes, and I swear he wasn't there to visit. He was there to spy on us, to see if anybody in the family had communist ideas. That was a joke. We knew better than to have any ideas. What was poured in our glasses and dumped on our plates was what we knew had to be consumed. There were no other choices."

"We sometimes had news from family members who had escaped. For example, one of my uncles made it out hidden in a haycart. He reached Portugal, then hightailed it to Latin America, Maxico, I think. Another uncle crossed the Pyrenees into France, got caught and put in a concentration camp, then escaped and got on a ship to Mexico as well. I heard of some who went to Cuba, Uruguay, Bolivia."

It's true: people and families were scattered everywhere. War is like a pandemic: nobody knows when the armed conflict will end, just as nobody knows when the infection will disappear. Some people lived on the edge, so much so that they always kept their watches set to the time in western Europe rather than the country to which they'd escaped. Usually that meant wearing a watch that was five or six hours off. Clocks on walls were set that way as well. Life continued in a new space, but time had not been cleaved. Hard to understand having your head in one place and your body in another. Some people died that way, their watches and clocks all marking a different time than the one where they lived.

The old woman is speaking again:

"We had no warning, or at least we children didn't. Suddenly we were all in a little cage and were only allowed one song. Culture stood still or twent back to the nineteenth century. We were a real mess, only we didn't know it. However, we did not stay a mess."

This does not sound convincing. The world after the Spanish Civil War had to be a disaster. Toughts had been assassinated or exiled. At best, they had been swallowed, never to see the light of day again. Community was forced into the strait-jacket of the Church, and cooperation on the level of farming, milk production, any sort of economic arrangement, had been quashed. It is hard to see that any sort of progress could grow back from Ground Zero.

Fidelina was murmuring something again.

"Oh yes. The world could not be the way the Fascists said it was, so we went around flipping through pages of books (very dangerous, not for the faint-of-heart), traveling (being careful to observe more than anything), lifting up rocks to see what was underneath."

It is doubtful whether there was much to be found underneath rocks that could be considered subversive or contrary to Fascist principles, but one never knows. An elderly woman in a rrural village might know, though. We might gain something from listening to her.

"We discovered lots of things we weren't supposed to know about. We were obstinate as hell, constructing our memories and leaving out the recently-imposed layer of ultra-conservative thinking. We didn't want their world of cabaleiros andantes (knights errant) and defending the Empire was never going to be in our repertoire."

And she went on to tell how learning happened when it was being stifled. She told how reading happened when so many books were forbidden, She told how religion only worked on the fearful, and that a lot of people were not afraid. After the initial fear, they had begun to set down roots in what they knew to be true: the fields and meadows, the sea and its inlets, the beehives cared for by the community, the traditions of living and dying in a place where pistols did not. exist and gay songs sung by everyone did.

The real world was a place brains were not splattered, where they were used to think of ways to improve life, not destroy it. Any Fidelina can tell you that.