Free Birth of Our Power by Victor Serge Richard Greeman Page A

transactions.

    The two visitors move off, out of place on that street lined with stately houses.
    â€œWill they go along with us?” José asks brusquely.
    The ex-stevedore shifts the invisible load on his shoulders.
    â€œThey need us.”
    â€œIf they do go along, Dario, so much the worse for them.”
    â€œDon’t say that, my boy. There are things that those foxes can overhear at a distance, through the thickest walls. Their ears are made that way.”
    And if they don’t go along,” José continues, “so much the worse for them!”
    â€œAnd so much the worse for us. [Dario whistles.] Eh,
Chico,
I think that this time we’re being tailed for real …”
    They are. Two gentlemen, wearing Panama hats and carrying canes, are walking resolutely down the street twenty paces behind them.
    Dario represses an uneasy feeling. How the streets seem to narrow at times like this! The Committee’s money weighs heavily in his jacket. Fortunately a car pulls up. He hops in. José Miro turns on his heels—hard and straight like a steel mannequin—at the curb.

    The plain-clothesmen, now uneasy themselves, approach him. They slow their pace. When they get to where Miro is standing, glaring hard at them, they begin talking loudly about a certain Conchita and look away. Miro follows them. The hunters feel hunted now. That very day an informer had been found, in the center of town, with a hole clean through his head. Icy shivers run up their spines as Miro’s measured step falls in with theirs. That night, Miro described that chase to us, laughing like a mischievous child.
    â€œIn the end I swear to you they were dying to take to their heels like rabbits. Every five yards they would turn around. I was making a horrible face, so as to keep from laughing, you see. One goes into a cigar store. The other stops outside the window. I do likewise. We peer at each other out of the corner of the eye. He gets brave: ‘Mister …’—‘What?’—‘Mister, you shouldn’t hold it against us …’ (Oh, that hangdog look on his paunchy face. It’s true, I didn’t hold it against him any more.) ‘Ours is a dirty job. But I have three children. Three daughters, mister: Maria, Concha, Luisa’ (He told me the names and I remember them, how do you like that?), ‘seven, eight, and nine years old. And a bullet in my leg,mister, brought back from the Riff. And no trade to work at. But I’m a sympathizer’ (he said ‘sympathizer!’) ‘believe me. And if your plans work out, remember my name. You have a friend in the 2d Brigade: Jacinto Palomas, Pa-lo-mas. Tell Señor Dario that we all admire him. He’s a re-mark-a-ble orator!’”

SIX
Dari
    DARIO ’ S DAYS BEGAN AT SIX IN THE MORNING, WITH THE EARLIEST STARTING factories. He swallowed his coffee in the open air at one of the street-corner stands where workers grab a bite on the run. At an hour when the police informers were still rubbing their eyes, he would burst into a little print shop with a freshly washed window, give a friendly tap on the behind to the apprentice who was sweeping up, and bend down between two piles of posters depicting blue-and-yellow acrobats swinging from white trapezes ( THE LAURENCE BROTHERS INIMITABLE ECCENTRIC in dazzling letters straddling the paper) and a huge woman’s face, half-yellow, half-purple: GRACIOSA LA MISTERIOSA. Farther down, Dario’s hand was attracted by stacks of little yellow papers covered with fine print, nesting between the posters. As he read, his head cocked to one side, his mischievous eye saw a host of things through that wretched yellow paper. “Soldiers! Brothers!” … How much art it had taken to draft this appeal in terms both moving and familiar, to put in the words that fire the imagination, “barricades,” and “to arms”; to mention the great man who was