Ramón picked the revolver off the kitchen table and felt its weight in has hand. He broke it open, examining it in the candlelight. The six bullets were still there, as they were on the day he found it, discarded on the battlefield, abandoned by some Republican officer nearly 20 years ago. He'd kept that gun, kept it hidden, all those years - not even his mother nor his wife knew about it. It was a big revolver. A British-made Webley, firing big bullets. This gun was the final argument. With it in his hand, he had power of life or death.
Over another glass of red table wine, he contemplated what he'd do with it, as he'd contemplated so many times before. Yet now, there was even more reason to do so. His family were fast asleep in the back room - his wife and his two daughters. His mind wandered, oh, it wandered. So often if would wander, bidden or unbidden, to that summer afternoon in 1939, a few months after then end of the Civil War, to the town's dusty bullring. Ramón, then a young glazier's apprentice, had been working that day under a glaring sun up in the top tier of the bullring, replacing some stained glass windows that had been missing since the war passed briefly through the town two years earlier.
There was a clamour outside; the
puertas de los toriles were open and a large group of local Republican sympathisers were herded in by the
Guardia Civil at rifle point. Behind them trooped in a shabby brass band. A lorry drove in. Out jumped Capitán Jesús María Méndez y Castrejon, who Ramón had long known - the classmate of his oldest brother, Raúl. The
Guardia Civil captain was renowned in the district as a ruthless man of extreme cruelty, a man who Ramón's brother had hated since childhood. Captain Méndez stood amid the prisoners, haughty in his polished tricorn hat, a look of disdain on his face. He drew a pistol from his holster, and holding it high, started shouting angry commands at his men. The musicians, who had positioned themselves up in the grandstands, took up their instruments, and struck up a discordant version of the Falangist anthem,
Cara al sol.
As they did so, Captain Méndez aimed his pistol at a prisoner's head. And he pulled the trigger - a loud retort, the man toppled over into the sand. His gunshot was the signal to his men to open fire into the prisoners, seemingly at random; staccato rifle fire burst out all around, a dirty, untidy slaughter, a comedic massacre... Looking down, Ramón crossed himself instinctively. He watched men fall - men he knew - from school, from Saturday afternoons at the bullring, from the bar; he watched the blood pouring out onto the arena, like bulls' blood, yet not. Their piteous calls for mercy were met with jagged, halting laughter, foul curses and more gun fire. Rifles would jam, then the bullets began running out; many wounded men writhed around in the sand. Their piteous cries mingled with the ragged march of the brass band... "
Formaré junto a mis compañeros/ que hacen guardia sobre los luceros..."
Ramón looked around the arena for his middle brother, Rafael. He hoped that the one child who had defied their God-fearing mother and had committed to the Republican cause, had escaped the round-up. Down in the ring, Méndez gesticulated wildly, shouting angrily at his men to finish the job ; bayonets were fixed and half-heartedly plunged into fallen bodies. This obscene spectacle of inhuman butchery went on for maybe half an hour.
Ramón prayed for their souls. He prayed that God would receive them, even those who had desecrated the Cross and had supported anti-clericalism during the Republican period.
And so, over those bleak post-war years, that image of Captain Méndez, strutting around the blood-soaked bullring in his black tricorn hat, crouching down to put a bullet into a wounded men pleading for his life - would stay with him in his waking nightmares for the next two decades. They were local men, family men - how could he have done such a thing! That very same Captain Méndez, now a portly middle-aged man, would patrol their small Extremaduran town, strutting with that same arrogance; his haughty gaze demanding subservience from all but the mayor, the parish priest and the wealthiest of landowners.
Ramón had hated Captain Méndez for as long as he could remember. Rafael had managed to escaped to exile in France, but the fact that Ramón had a godless Republican brother abroad, remitting French francs to his family back home, marked him down for particular harassment from the authorities. His small glazing business would be subject to all sorts of controls and tax inspections.
But Ramón had a new reason for reaching for that revolver that autumn night in 1957, and imagining what it would do to the innards or brain of Captain Méndez; the vile man had taken a shine to his two teenage daughters. The filthy man would sit close to Ramón's family during Holy Mass, leering at the girls. What depraved thoughts were going through his head? The Captain would observe the girls walking up and down the main street, watching them... watching them... Ramón knocked back another glass of wine, chased back with a handful of olives, and, raising his revolver, considered his options.
As brass bands go - this was by far and away the swingiest I've ever come across in Poland! A repertoire that covered the Blues Brothers, Count Basie (Splanky - from the great Atomic Mr Basie album) and Glen Miller, played with great verve, superb arrangements, melodious solos - and the 28-piece band was as tight as the proverbial duck's behind.
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