The Owl & Other Stories by John Auerbach

From The Durutti Man

Among the Spaniards who frequented the Café Catalan in the old harbor of Marseilles, Jose Fernandez kept aloof. He was not justified in doing so by reasons of social standing, or by any special qualities of his character or personality; in fact, he was very much like all the others, handicapped, if anything, by his scarred face, in which only one eye shone.

But Fernandez was a Durutti man -- he had fought with the famous division and remained at heart a passionate and idealistic anarchist -- and this gave him a feeling of superiority over his companions in exile, none of whom could lay claim to such a glorious past. Of course, outside this little group hardly anyone remembered now what or who Durutti was; in the apocalyptic spectacle of the Second World War, the memory of a small local civil war fought on the Iberian Peninsula was blotted out completely, its hundreds of thousands of victims forgotten now as people shed fresh tears over tens of millions slaughtered in the great conflict; the dimensions of misery and suffering surpassed all imagination. And what, after all, were Guernica and Madrid in comparison with the ashes of the cities of Europe, which even now, in 1948, were still warm and smoking?

Fernandez was intelligent enough to understand this. He and his comrades bore their old grief and sorrow quietly and with dignity, they did not take part in the macabre discussions and quarrels which were so very much in vogue among certain people in these first after-war years, the subject being: who suffered most?

Still, sometimes he wondered how short human memory was, and how easily things were forgotten; for, after all, it was on the cities of his country, and nowhere else, that the planes were tested, those that would later reduce Europe to rubble.

Fernandez had only fought with Durutti for half a year, but he felt that those six months had contributed something permanent to the pattern of his behavior and thinking, something that had become an organic part of him and which, he felt, would stay with him until he died. He wore the memory of the Durutti days like others wear decorations and medals. But medals and distinctions were not known among the Durutti men, not even officers' badges.

Sometimes Fernandez calculated: there are hundreds of millions people in the world, but only three or four thousand were fortunate enough to have fought with Durutti. I am one of them. With that awareness, a proud glint would light up in his right eye, his only one. The other was glass. He had lost an eye, alas, not in the fight against the fascists, but on the barricades of Barcelona, in the dark days, when, within earshot of the Franco offensive, the defenders of the Republic fought each other; when the Durutti men were forced to resist the communist traitors, who, by orders from a foreign capital, wanted to disarm them.

Fernandez was evacuated from the hospital before his wounds had healed and followed the tragic track of thousands of refugees who would not accept fascist rule and preferred the bitter exile of France.

Once safe from fascist persecution and imprisoned by the friendly French in a concentration camp, Fernandez had the opportunity to examine his ruined face in a cracked mirror in the camp's lavatory. Initially, he was deeply shocked by what he saw: a very pale face, with two deep parallel scars running from the left cheekbone to the corner of the mouth, where the fragments of the bomb were clumsily extracted by the surgeon in Barcelona. But the worst was the place where his left eye had once been. In its place there was a half-healed cruel wound covered with moist, black, lashless eyelids. The scars and the closed eye gave his face a permanent sarcastic grin, though he felt far away from grinning.

In fact, he remained a somber man throughout the many years of misery that followed this first tragic confrontation with his face, and this permanent gloom, combined with a strange melancholic and bitter pride, became the most outstanding features of his personality. One would almost certainly use these adjectives, when asked at random to give one's first impression of Fernandez: gloomy, melancholic.

His compatriots reserved a certain special respect for this strong, grave, taciturn man; usually occupied by the hard struggle for daily bread, consumed by never-ending nostalgia, they had no time to make a thorough inquiry into each other's psychology. The Spaniards in Marseilles formed a very loose group; only memories linked them, and memories get worn out with time, like clothes. Occasionally they met, exchanging greetings and useful information: where and how one could earn a little money, or find a better living.

It was on one such occasion that Albino, the calderettero, told Fernandez to come on Monday evening to the Café Catalan, and to pass the word to the others he might encounter that there might be a well-paid job for quite a number of them, who, like Albino and Fernandez, were seamen by profession.

"What sort of job?" Fernandez asked.

But Albino could not tell him, and Fernandez thanked him for the information and said he would come, for certain.