With the passion of youth and the courage inspired by his ideals, Henry decides to leave England to fight for the Spanish Republic. So he travels to the turbulent Barcelona of early 1937 with his wife Emma. The couple settles in at the Continental hotel on Las Ramblas. When the husband is called to the front, the wife is left alone in an unknown, cold, collectivized city, devastated by famine and hunger, where spies swarm and people live under the uncertainty of a devastating and cruel war.
Aureli Vázquez travels with Emma through Barcelona in the winter of 1937 in The Militiaman’s Woman (Diëresis), a fascinating book that won the Vallirana Prize for Historical Novels. The author now returns to the setting of the story, where Emma lives a few adventures, in this interview with La Vanguardia.
How was collectivization applied in Barcelona and how did you live under that system?
In July 1936, the unions arrested the rebels in Para.lel. They thus gain strength that they did not have and become the new masters of the city to the point that political power is suspended. A climate of revolution then begins, because this worker conglomerate sees itself capable of applying communist and Marxist theses that until then were only coffee doctrine. All businesses, banks, hotels, the press, factories and also medium and small establishments are collectivized.
Was any improvement achieved for citizens with this collectivization?
It is difficult to say, because in a climate of war you cannot live better, but there was hope. There was a revolutionary atmosphere in which the idea that ‘finally we are going to be the masters of our destiny’ prevailed.
What happened to the bourgeoisie?
They went abroad, hid or joined the national side. In the novel, clothing has a lot of prominence, because espadrilles and gray or blue overalls were a working-class symbol. The bourgeoisie took off their hats, which were a class badge. Manuel, one of the protagonists of The Militiaman’s Wife, is a shoeshine boy and that is no coincidence, because that was one of the jobs of the emerging class that at that time was the working class.
But that didn’t take long to change…
In the spring of 1937, the city began to gentrify again. It is told by George Orwell – who appears in the novel along with his wife, Eileen, as a cameo – in his Homage to Catalonia. Orwell was seriously wounded in the neck and he returned to Barcelona where he was unpleasantly surprised by this gentrification, which he attributed to the great distance from the front. And also because there were other struggles in the city, power struggles.
What do you fight?
Clashes between the official communist power and the Generalitat against that other side, also republican, represented by the anarchists, the revolutionaries, the POUM, the CNT, the FAI…
That was one of the reasons that made the city a really dangerous place…
Yes. Eileen, Orwell’s wife, had a bad time and inspired me with the idea of ??writing this novel and inventing the character of Emma, ??who is left alone in a hostile city, in which there is an authentic socialist, Marxist, Trotskyist revolution. , that is, of all political signs. There were disorders, shortages, anarchy and the so-called militia terror.
What did this militia terror consist of?
In Barcelona everything was random. If an armed militiaman considered that a citizen was guilty of something, he could shoot him or take him to a summary trial, although he could also save himself with an intervention in his favor. It was that arbitrariness that made the situation so dangerous.
Emma is amazed when she finds out about the existence of the Czechs…
The Czechs were terrible, they were the ultimate demonstration of that militia terror. There were them on both sides. In the Francoist one, but also in the Republican one. The Czechs, the random patrols, the little parades that ended with a shot existed on both sides and I wanted to reflect it in the novel, show the grays of the Civil War, because they have told it to us as a Manichean story of good and bad, but it has many chiaroscuros.
There were barbarities and cruelty everywhere…
The Republican side had in its favor the legitimacy of defending the democracy that the military had violated, but there comes a time when that presumed legitimacy that is presupposed in any war disappears and arbitrariness, revenge, and personal quarrels begin…
Furthermore, Barcelona became a nest of spies of all tendencies, as the novel reflects…
Barcelona was one more square on the chess board, but an important square. On the national side, Germans and Italians deployed all their weapons in anticipation of what could be and then was World War II. Something similar happened on the Republican side with the Russians, who were not messing around. The POUM at some point became a Trotskyist party and the USSR declared it a party non grata. Many foreign soldiers had enlisted through the POUM to fight for a cause and suddenly realized that the war was not on the other side but on their own.
Another threat was the bombs. What was that first bombing in Barcelona like that came from the sea?
The first bombing in Barcelona came by sea and the city realized that it had to speed up the preparation of shelters because that was going to become a constant. There were already instructions on how to act. Posters had been printed recommending getting down on the ground, staying calm, turning off the lights, but after those first bombs it was clear that things were really serious.
The militiaman’s wife is also a literary tribute. What authors have inspired you?
There is a very obvious tribute to Carmen Laforet that readers will detect. One of the protagonists is a bookseller, because Barcelona and culture are two more protagonists of the novel. And Valle-Inclán is also very important, because he was the promoter of the grotesque and the Civil War seems grotesque to me.
