Birth of Our Power by Victor Serge Richard Greeman Read Free Book Online

under helmets scarcely different, dented by the same explosions, protecting the same gray cells of the human animal at bay … Sentries, brother sentries, stalking each other, stalked by Death, standing watch night and day on the boundaries of life itself, and here
I
was, strolling in comfortable sandals under the palms of the plaza, my eyes dazzled by the festive Mediterranean sunlight; I, climbing the paths of Montjuich; I, pausing before the goldsmiths’ windows of the
calle
Fernando, flooded by light in the evening as if by a motionless fountain of huge diamonds; I, following the Miramar path cut into the rock above the sea; I, living as that city lived, without fear, invincible, sure of not having my flesh ripped open tomorrow.
I
possessed these streets—these
ramblas
—loaded to excess with flowers, birds, women, and warm masculine voices.
I
had my books;
I
had my comrades. How was this possible? Wasn’t this somehow horribly unjust, incredibly absurd?
    It was mostly after nightfall, when the city abandoned herself to the pleasures of life—her cafés crowded, certain of her narrow streets transformed into rivers of light, streets where men and women pair off, leading each other on endlessly, couple after couple so closely intertwined that their walk seems an impudent, delicious prelude to clinches in stuffy rooms along streets haunted by sighs until dawn; when we strolled up and down the
ramblas
in groups, our heads held high, filled with the music of ideas—it was then that I was tortured by the remorse of not being a sentry myself, of being, in spite of myself, so careful of my own blood, of taking no part in the immeasurable suffering of the masses driven to the slaughter … a feeling sharpened by a revulsion against the blithe felicity of this city.

    We suffocated, about thirty of us, from seven in the morning to six-thirty at night, in the Gaubert y Pia print shop. Skinny kids, naked under their loose smocks, went back and forth across the shop carrying heavy frames, their thin brown arms standing out like cables of flesh. At the back of the shop, the women were folding away—sweating, lips moist, looking at you with dark-eyed glances that seemed almost to caress youas you passed by—repeating the same motions seven thousand times a day to the rumbling of the machines. The movement of the machines was absorbed in their very muscles. I set up type on the composing stick, fatigue mounting in my body, overpowering from three o’clock on, in the hottest time of the day. Toward four o’clock, mechanical concentration falters, and like one in prison, I am assailed by fantasies originating from the secret folds of the brain. To no avail, I cross the shop floor to get a drink of water from the
canti
—the leather flask you hold in both hands above the head, so that a hard stream squirts into your mouth like a fountain. The corrugated iron roof gives us little protection from the implacable sun.
    It was at those times of day, when the boss, el Señor Gaubert, had turned to face a visitor in his glass-enclosed office, that my neighbor Porfirio would tap me on the shoulder with a finger hard as a stick:
    â€œHé, Ruso!”
(Russian)
    Tall, brittle, with nothing on under his blue overalls, Porfirio had the broad, dark, pock-marked face, the face of an intelligent ape. His black mouth was lined by horrible yellow teeth that seem broken, but his grimacing smile, spreading from ear to ear, was fraternal. In actual fact, he wasn’t really a comrade, not even a union member (only two of us were union men out of thirty printers and typographers at Gaubert y Pia’s, but the others had as much solidarity as we did—we knew it as well as they); bull-fighting was his only interest. His eyes were black as charcoal.
    â€œHé!
Ruso! Que dices de la revolución?”
(“What have you to say about the revolution?”)
    The dispatches from the newspapers