The Flame of Life

CHAPTER TEN

The steamship trunk was a jig-saw of hotel and liner labels, some faded, others half torn off and in part scuffed through. Shelley had used the trunk, a log book of his meanderings over the world. The fat-faced surly man at the weighbase stuck on one more ticket — Port Bou and Paris Nord — and she opened her purse for the money. With its rusty lock it had been all winter in her mother’s damp house, a cloth spread over it like a table. Her brother’s record player blared out jazz on the frozen bulk of Shelley’s profoundest thoughts.

Back from prison she found that the music had not been hot enough to hold back rust and decay. Catalonian rain had tainted its corners — though an early spring had dried them and left mapstains as part of the fading labels.

Dawley’s letter held an open ticket to England. He seemed unwilling to give long explanations, only mentioning the community in which he lived, and asking her to bring the trunk which Shelley had talked about in Algeria.

To queue for and cajole a passport was a blight on her anarchist soul. Begging for the right to leave your country, and permission to enter another, was a bleak tyranny. She was twenty-eight, and during the last ten years had been twice out of Spain with false papers — once on foot over the snow into France. She was followed, and would be pulled back into prison at the first move. The Fascists treated you like a cripple. She filled in dozens of forms so as to take up domestic work in England, with the family of a famous painter whose triplicate letter in Spanish and English was shown at all the offices she waited in.

The passport was her book of servitude. On the train back from Barcelona to her home village, huddled in a corner of the shaking carriage like an animal that did not know which lair to flee to after the tight-lock of prison had been opened, she had been tempted to throw it into the heavily racing river below. The idea was overwhelming, but she pressed teeth and lips so hard that an elderly woman sitting opposite thought she was a mad person just out of the manicomio. The effort brought her close to fainting, in the smoke and steam heat, with rain-water sliding zigzag down the glass. Oak groves riding up the valley pinned her into herself.

The sky was churning with rain and more rain, the train shaking as if it would throw her into it. Two years of prison would take much time going from her spirit, and the passport was necessary if she were to survive and get to England. She gripped it tight, for fear it would fly of its own will on to the stony soil, and wear away under mouldering rain.

She loved Shelley as if he were alive and was to meet her next week in Sitges — as he’d done in former days. No love was ever lost. It buried itself into you, and could not disappear so that you didn’t feel it any more. He was that rare person who’d been able to love her as much as he was capable of loving himself, so she lived now with the smarting memory of his tenderness. They had regarded each other as equals, and the feeling that linked them was like that of brother and sister, but without the built-in destructiveness of sibling rivalry.

The simplicities and complexities had been there from the beginning. Perhaps belonging to different countries meant something after all. She did know why, but ease with him had become such a stable fact that she felt all people could learn to treat each other in the same way, so that the world might gradually save itself by creating its own utopia. Only the patience and the will were lacking. From childhood she had grown with the principles of mutual self-help, had been taught to work for universal sisterhood and brotherhood — equality, labour, abundance, and happiness. Her father had died in one of Franco’s prisons when she was six.

But the reality of society kicked such beliefs out of you, or eroded them by the fact of its monolithic presence. Or it turned its back on them. It did not matter. Civilisation — if that was the name for it — could be swept away in ten minutes, and if you were destroyed with it, you had no more problems. But if you survived, and others with you, perhaps only then could you build the new society in which you had always believed.

But society was stronger than you thought. Its nihilist underworld could never be contained or tamed. Society was modelled on its meanest jungle, and turned a blind eye to it. The cheeks and balances knitted themselves together, forming a locked mass of great strength, that could hardly be ripped apart.

She had walked up the Rambla and into the Plaza de Cataluña wondering: ‘How can I change it?’ It had been tried so many times. The foreign tourists came and went. It was a new thing. They also would try to stop you, no doubt, because they wanted the old Spain, the old world. They loved the butchery and torment of bullfights, these pink-faced unthinking tourists.

You had to try. She had thought so a long time before meeting Shelley, and believed more strongly after being in prison. But nothing was simple any more. Shelley had attempted it, and been killed. It was her belief that he’d never wanted to go into Algeria and fight for the FLN. His attachment to violence, though sincere, was sentimental. He had his weaknesses. His principles and inclinations were never finally formulated. His philosophy was ruptured at the base of the tree. In the beginning was the Word, and in the end was Action, he used to say. He had talked about destroying the property of the oppressors, whereas other left-wing parties wanted to preserve the buildings of their oppressors so that they could inherit them for their own ends — in the name of the people, of course. A genuine revolutionary party would not only open the gaols, but would blow them up and build no more.

He talked, he argued, he intrigued, but never shot or bombed directly. If others did it, in order to bring about a society based on equality and justice, he was always willing to help as a line-of-communications or logistics man. The possibilities of giving actual assistance to revolution or civil war were not numerous, so he had run guns from Tangier over the Atlas Mountains to the edge of the Sahara desert. On one such delivery he had Frank Dawley as his co-driver. Shelley had not come back, but had done something entirely out of character by continuing into Algeria and fighting for the National Liberation Front.

Their affection for each other enabled her to form correct conclusions. If Shelley had been the typical man who made love regardless and then vanished into the safety of himself or joined his male friends at the nearest bar or café, and if her feelings had been those of a woman who accepted this with inner resentment but without complaint, then her senses may not have led her to such plain truth. She may not have cared that he was dead, not gone on feeling an unrelenting sexual want for him month after month, which concealed what was truly happening, and only slowly drew her numbed brain towards the final, bitter fact of their parting.

Dawley, with the same ideas, forced him into Algeria at gunpoint. There was no other explanation. There were many such hardliners who talked about equality of people and the redistribution of the earth’s necessities — but they were monsters who did not believe in real freedom, in real love, in real women. Locked in the prison of their deprived hearts, they could not even know how much they fought against themselves. They believed in the power of the gun over the individual, till finally it was the gun that wielded them. Power did not corrupt such people, but reduced them utterly to an inhuman bit of steel called a trigger. It did this as surely as if they allowed tradition and society to crush them into a man with nothing more to his emotional credit than a stick of bone and gristle called a penis. It defiled them. They enjoyed it.

Dawley was as responsible for Shelley’s death as if he had murdered him deliberately for his own twisted purpose. He had accepted the way of violence, and let go the reins of humanity. She had often talked it over with Shelley, and though her arguments had had sufficient effect on his reason, they had never got through to his dreams.

All she had to do was confront Dawley and, if he were as guilty as she knew him to be, indulge for the first time in the violence she had always tried to talk Shelley out of. There were some people in the world who killed in the name of innocence and purity, and they called it love of humanity or Revolution. Their feelings of innocence increased the more they were taken up by the force of their own unquestioning violence, and those whom they couldn’t kill they corrupted instead. They had to be killed, therefore, so as to save the innocent they came daily into contact with. Such people had nothing to do with socialism.

Dawley was this sort of person, and his innocence was a menace to the good people of the world. Her own life’s love had been destroyed because of it, and so it would be the most perfect justice to kill him.

The choice was not easy, and she didn’t know where it would lead, or even whether she could do it, but as the train stopped at the frontier station and she stepped down from the high carriage, she knew that her made-up mind ought not to be altered. It was a new way of making a decision, with her heart instead of her head, and though this method was too much of a novelty for her to feel easy about it, she nevertheless sensed it to be a sort of letting go because it was something that she wanted with all her soul to happen.

She moved as if in a dream, as people do when they believe their minds are made up. That was the only way to act if the dream were to come true. She waited in the large hall for her trunk and other luggage to be brought to the customs counter by a porter. To anyone but herself and, for various reasons, to Mr Handley and Dawley, the trunk was valueless, but through its formidable presence Shelley seemed to be telling her that she had made the right decision. She was happy at the moment to stay in her dream, to take refuge in it. No one knew of the dream that was in her except herself and therein, she thought, lay its strength.

It was difficult to get a trunk and suitcase such a distance through Europe, travelling at full speed towards Paris. The trunk contained Shelley’s belongings: a lightweight suit and a few shirts, several pipes and an unopened tin of Raleigh tobacco. But the few dozen notebooks, which she had been too locked in her grief to read, took up most space, and formed the deadly leaden weight that porters shied from — showing great regard for their limbs and sinews till she offered them fifty pesetas to take it out of train or taxi and hump it bodily through its next stage.

She had registered its contents, as careful and anxious as if Shelley’s actual body were inside that she was for some weird reason taking to England. His soul was in those notebooks that he had pleasurably and laboriously written in during the years they had known each other. She did not know where his actual flesh and blood body was, though hoped that Dawley, his fellow-revolutionary and travelling companion, would tell her when she met him in England, describe the place and put it on the map in such detail that one day she would set off for Algeria, to find it and bury him properly, when Dawley was dead.