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Wandlung
When the ground had been cleared, the surroundings
of Can Gorgs looked peaceful. From the gate to the
estate you could survey the whole zone, see who was
coming and going, you know, the sentry’s jobs. In front
of the house, the horizon; behind, we were protected
by a pinewood, one of the few that had not been
burned during that war. It all looked so far from the
world. Sheltering from the sun, he had drawn sentry
duty by the door of the house, protected by its long
shadow. He had been left there by his mates who were
travelling the area commandeering bell towers or
tearing the bells down from the chapels of abandoned
country houses and estates; they had been used to
call the faithful to private prayers or announce the
different moments of the daily work. They were people
from Sabadell and Terrassa, cities they had already
stripped of bells and almost of churches, doing the jobs
the union had charged them with, looking for the metal
needed to strengthen the war industry. Basically their
work consisted of transforming the use the old order
had allocated to bronze, iron and other metals. There
was no money and so their game needed no exchange.
They collected bells, candelabras, goblets, crucifixes,
walking sticks and rods for different ornaments, always
metal. Bells had become the material most in demand,
for that symbolic saying people recited in times of
peace: to melt down cannons to make bells. Now we
were turning it around. Those were other times, times
of revolution, but as far as we know, rather than cannons
it was lorries that emerged from the smelting of that
holy metal. Our committee acted throughout the Vallés
area. We had been in Viladecaballs, and in Matadepera,
Ullastrell and Castellbisbal, and now we were combing
the surroundings of Sabadell. All we did was to load
it all onto lorries that took it to a foundry in Vic.
Our friend, of whose name no record has remained,
was amusing himself by throwing dice against the wall.
The monotony of the scene was heightened by the
summer heat. Every time the dice rolled out of the shady
zone by the gateway they shone and, from far off,
they looked like signs that someone was betting
there. They were silver dice, he had torn them off a
crucifix abandoned in the Becket chapel in the group
of churches of Sant Pere in Terrassa, from where we
also dragged out a few bells. It was the day of the
visit by the French journalist Tristan Tzara when they
ordered us to leave the bell of Santa María, which was
left there to announce the opening and closing hours
of what the town had now turned into a museum. He
was holding the three dice now, playing at wasting
time. He had joined the militia recently – he was the
one who had found the bell on the road to Rellinars –
and he was not in the union, nor had he been a member
of the anarchist federation, so he found the exhortations
against rolling dice, playing cards or other pastimes
that provided a break from the daily grind weird, to say
the least. They were harangued by Comrade Espartacus
Puig. The printed leaflets left no room for doubt about
the Side’s intentions. The radio announcements were
clear enough too. Fortián Matabosch had had the
foundry on the Rambla de Egara closed for accepting
booty from orchards and mountain farmhouses. The
Terrassa Committee had argued for the abolition of
packs of cards and the Sabadell Young Communists
smashed any dice they confiscated to smithereens.
Even one of his companions, a communist from
Barcelona, had rebuked them – after losing all his
money, of course – accusing them of being capitalists,
he had even called them seditious. The name that
has come down to us is Carles Mas, who was leading
the squad when they took the set of dice. He was
one of Pedro Alcócer’s ‘Chiquillos’ and as he was
the best educated he acted as political boss and on
various occasions he had harangued them about the
precise use to be made of those dice. Union orders,
he said. No time wasting. No moments of leisure or
winnings stolen from the comrades in working hours.
Likewise, when they had to decide if it was this or some
other church to be assaulted or if that country house
was the one to take the bells down from, then the dice
were used. That was the libertarians, the people from
the Lino Patrol did the same, and they did not take
numbers to the game. Stories were told about how
they had decided more than one execution with the
dice, but he had never been a witness, could never
prove it. Joaquín, who had been with them since July
1936, had told him, ‘at least when they were priests
the dice were rolled.’ The story was frightening to hear,
like the origin of the dice themselves: they were on
the cross because they were used by the soldiers to
throw for the belongings of the gentleman they had
executed. You had to be careful with all the stories
that were told then; nothing seemed to be free of
propaganda. He could not shake off his anxiety and
that string of tales and inventions now served to load
his luck even more heavily on each roll of the dice.
That was why our hero was not only wasting time;
he knew what he was risking.
So far we have the reconstruction of the scene
according to the accounts of Miquel Mestres and
Joaquim Matarrodona, the chronology collected in
Terrassa 1936-1939. Tres anys difícils de guerra civil by
Baltasar Ragon, and the chronicles in the newspapers
El día and Vida Nueva, and the testimonies of Benjamín
Peret and Mary Low. There is also a series of films
produced by the anarchist trade union CNT between
1936 and 1939, especially Barcelona trabaja para
el frente by Mateo Santos and fragments of what could
be El acero libertario by Ramón de Baños, which
have helped to put this story together. The beginning
of this investigation was finding in the International
Social History Institute in Amsterdam the sequence of
photographs nos. 279 to 296 – currently stored in the
Fundación Anselmo Lorenzo in Madrid – perfectly
ordered in a logical sequence although of different
provenance, from the collecting of the bells to the
emergence of the new object from the factory. I was
not able to verify what it was for, if it was used in some
propaganda publication or exhibition. Having just
finished writing these lines, I was reminded of the book
Sobre el juego by Javier Echeverría, a pretext for which
this story could be merely an illustration. Kafka’s short
story The Refusal – a fable about power from a brief
description of a trial, always with a negative outcome,
which takes place in a remote village – is central when
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