Chapter 4. 1936 - Civil War

Durruti's Column: The Dark Ones

Iniga was restless all the while she was in France and could hardly tolerate the rigors of the French education system. Marcel’s return to the Fournier estate added fuel to the fire that was ignited in her heart on that day in Asturias. She, at thirteen, dropped out of the Lycée and fled back to Barcelona and the excitement of the revolution that had started in Asturias. Iniga had a score to settle and, even at such an early age, was determined to avenge, not only her parent’s murder, but to castrate the rapists who’d taken her body and corrupted her spirit. She wasn’t motivated by, or cared at all for, revolutionary zeal.

The Popular Front led by Largo Caballero, a key player in the Asturias revolt, won the general elections of 1936; thus, returning the government of the Republic to liberals, the radical left Anarchists, and Marxists, with a two thirds majority over the conservative party, CEDA. Campesinos seized lands and evicted landowners throughout the province of Estremadura; Anarchists and Marxists rampaged through Madrid; workers took over factories in Barcelona, burning churches, killing priests, and purging the bourgeoisie. Like Iniga, their zeal was fired by vengeance more than the revolutionary fury of ideals. Generismo Franco left his nest in the Canary Islands, where he’d been sitting like a spider for such a calamity, to pool his Moroccan and Foreign Legions with Falangists of the Regular Army. The same officers that commanded the massacre in Asturias, General Varela and Colonel Yague, had advanced the Army of Africa in 1936 as close to Madrid as Toledo.

Fully recovered, Alesandro returned to Barcelona and Madrid two years before Iniga. Alesandro’s baptism of blood in Asturias, and its aftermath, caused a violent twisting of ideology turned inside out the way the steel of a samurai’s sword is hammered and folded and forged in fire. It couldn’t be defined in black and white but by the vivid colors of the fires inflamed and fed by the values of war. If it could be said that, as a tactician Alesandro was an artist, he would be a Dadaist in the Art of War with no allegiance to anyone but to his own heart. Sometimes, when he thought about it, he had to admit to his innermost-self that he was addicted to the adrenaline of combat and his hardest battles were fought in the interlude of the arena of peacetime where he’d find himself terribly alone and uncomfortable.

Alesandro knew that Iniga understood him too, for they were both children forged of the same flames. However, the difference was that he wasn’t motivated solely by vengeance. His campaign for a free Basque country, language and culture, superseded the distractions of vengeance or ideology. His will was turned toward service to that goal. His desire was for a free country where common people could prosper and live in peace. His experience, thus far with revolutionaries, acknowledged that a Marxist or Anarchist workers utopia would prove impossible without crushing the human spirit it was born of. Alesandro held to a practical faith in his fellows born in the landscape of his country.

Alesandro, regardless of his detachment, found himself called out of France by the CNT into the midst of the mix at first in Barcelona, then Madrid, and finally, Bilboa. The mix, for many like Alesandro, was in Barcelona. He was considered a veteran by then and joined in, training on-the-job for unconventional warfare with the infamous Galvan and his Los Oscuros (Dark Ones). There, his tactically astute leadership hadn’t gone unnoticed by his comrades.

He had, upon arriving in Barcelona, been appalled by the bureaucratic organization and the out-of-the-trenches gallant massacres against howitzer and machine gun. WWI battle strategies that were being employed by the Communist Party of Spain, the PCE, in Madrid were glorious but futile. Bile rose from his gut for the minions of Moscow, more concerned with purging the opposition than actual combat, who took credit for the urban warfare tactics of the bloody sweat of house-to-house fighting in the suburbs of Carabanchel led by the Anarchist CNT-FAI; i.e., Durruti’s Column.

 Assassination in Madrid:

It happened as Durruti was being driven to the front at the bridgehead on the Rio Manzanares. A group of militia were on the street leaving the front.

Durruti ordered the driver, “Deserters, pull over.”

A crew cut blond stood at the corner on the far side of the car as Durruti got out, raised his arms, and proceeded towards the men.

His last words would be, “Where are you going? Go back to the Manzanares!”

The militiamen stopped. Durruti returned towards his car. Shots rang out and Durruti dropped to the pavement. The driver scooped him up to rush him to the lobby of the Ritz Hotel that, like the other luxury hotels, had been commandeered and transformed into an emergency hospital. It was true that the bullet  had entered his chest from the front left side though it was said to have been fired from the Clinical Hospital held by the Nationalists. Regardless, it was determined by most to be an assassination ordered by the NKVD. No one on either side took credit for it. It was even proposed that it was a fellow militiaman’s machine pistol that accidently went off. Alesandro didn’t believe it would matter much either way.

The final outrage at the assassination of, Durruti, compelled Alesandro further to separate himself from the divisive purges of ideologies. He wrote Marcel of his disillusion in a letter posted from Barcelona; “I can spot a PCE column from a distance because Stalinists know how to march in unison with new, nicely creased, uniforms. If you happen to fall into the wrong trench you can tell it is of the P.S.U.C. militia (i.e., so called Communist Popular Army) by the clean uniforms and modern Soviet rifles. Other than that, though murderously efficient at taking orders from Moscow within the barricades against the anarchist militia of the P.O.U.M., they’re almost useless on the field of battle. Do you remember reading Bakunin’s critique of Marxism in his essay, Statism and Anarchism? I paraphrase: The Marxists insist that only a dictatorship can engender what the people want… to impose the will of the people. The way I recall the answer to that was; No dictatorship can have any other purpose than that of self-perpetuation, and it can only give birth to slavery in the people tolerating it. I remember best the slogan: freedom can be created only by freedom… a spontaneous and universal rebellion on the part of the people and, most importantly, free organization of the proletariat from the bottom up. If you do remember that you can precisely see the failure of socialism in those words.”

Though Anarchists and Communists marched together in the beginning, he had as much a natural repulsion against lock-step uniformity of Stalin’s minions as he did the militant anarchism of his comrades. He would have said, “The enemy of my enemy is a friend that can be trusted to carry a dagger for my back.”

Thus, Alesandro had successfully employed unorthodox field tactics of the anarchists in Barcelona. He realized that he was born a warrior and, though he had mastered the polemics of philosophy, a warrior doesn’t have time to debate high ideals and theories except when pausing to clean his weapon. Besides, the weapons or tactics, of both the Anarchist POUM and the Marxist PSE, were antique battle strategies coming from committees in Madrid. Alesandro’s primary weapon was his mind and his had to be as clean and clear in its precision as a soldier’s rifle. It couldn’t be clouded with purist social philosophies any more than it could with wine as he yielded to the awakening of spirit forged in battle.

The loyalty and common trust in the fellowship of others like him compelled Alesandro to hone his skills. Upon his arriving in Madrid in ’38, Iniga reunited with him. She was of greater value than the Lugar he wore under his coat. She had acquired for him a new Russian Mosin Nagant carbine that she commandeered from a sleeping PSE soldier in the lobby of the Hotel Florida. The hotel, that had been the hub of Madrid, where foreign journalists and Party elites once dined, had become a din of cries from the suffering and wounded on cots strewn throughout, attended by an overwhelmed staff of volunteers. Any good rifle was prone to theft… more valuable than gold and these, along with her cunning, got them through the last weeks in Madrid.

Iniga had little use for rifles and pistols; she possessed natural talent for the art of survival; for finding escape through pathways, alleys, or for seducing her way in and out of, and/or slipping past guarded PSE storerooms; lifting food, weapons and ammunition for her friends. Some she disarmed with a teenager’s girlish gift of a flirtatious impish wink and, if necessary, she dispatched by way of the garrote or knife. She was last sighted in Madrid with a Soviet Komissar at the bar of the Florida Hotel, drinking an expensive Polish Vodka (Baiala Dama). She couldn’t have been a day over sixteen and, diminutive in size, looked like she could have been as young as twelve when she played the coquette with the Komissar at the bar.

The Komissar was slightly disturbed by the unrecognized server at the bar, “Comrade, you are new here. Where is the usual bartender?”

Iniga interrupted before the server could answer, “Maybe he was needed elsewhere. I know this man.” She added, “Martin can be trusted. But, my General, I am here.”

She had a job to do and was honed in on it as she put a hand on the Komissar’s crotch.

“I’m impressed at how Russian men handle their drinking,” she cooed.

The Komissar’s face was red with lust. His passion for adolescent girls was well known among Iniga’s comrades. She wasn’t at all concerned with the Komissar’s devotion to Stalin or the Party, nor was she inspired by the passion of ideology. She was more than delighted to take on this commission as the rumors reached her ears of missing girls, of rape, and suspicion of murder. This man had no idea he was in the skillful hand of the most proficient asesino in Madrid. She was becoming known underground as Diana le Cazadora de Los Violadores but the Komissar’s mind had been sidetracked by lust and he would think of none of it until it was too late.

“You, my Kalinka, could have lacy negligée that you would look so good in... or maybe you’d rather have butter.” Then suspicion clouded his libido, “or maybe bullets? Whatever you want.”

Any new face entering the bar caught the Komissar’s attention and Iniga was swift to dump her chimney glass of un-iced vodka over the bar as, at each opportunity, Martin switched it for a drink of mostly water. Martin was sure to keep their glasses full, hers with water and the Komissar’s with vodka, she slurred her words nonetheless, “Ohhh, you have a suite here, Komissar?”

“Yes, my little one,” he was damned near slobbering drunk, “would you like to lay on my satin sheets?”

“I have a secret though, Komissar,” she prepared to throw gasoline on fire.

The Komissar leered, “Oh, dear one, secrets are my business.”

He was on fire and more than ready to rape her right there at the bar.

“You see, Komissar," she paused for dramatic effect, "I am a virgin.”

Swoosh, had there been flames in his groin they would've gone ceiling high. He gathered what little poise he possessed and exclaimed, loud enough for the bar to hear, “I’m delighted. I was afraid... well, you seem so much more experienced... you drink like a man.”

She was slipping off her stool and grabbed at him, “I’m so very drunk... I want you to teach me, my General... teach me las artes del amor.”

The two were seen staggering up the stairs to the Commissar’s suite on the first floor. They were hardly in the room before the Komissar made the mistake of stripping Iniga’s shirt revealing a dagger in its sheath. With a flick and a turn of the wrist she deftly put it to his neck, saying, “I have another secret, Komissar.”

He was so stunned and governed by lust that he could hardly believe she held cold steel to his jugular, “Don’t you know who I am?” he demanded.

“I know you rape children," and drawing the razor edge of the daggar across his neck she added, "Oh, yes, you had Durruti murdered.”

Taking care to move out of the way of the pulsating crimsom fountain spraying an arc from his neck she stepped aside. This was not her first kill, nor would it be her last.

She wrote in blood on the bureau mirror; El Asesino de los violadores, with the assassin A circled. As she wrote, in an innocent child’s voice, she softly sang the refrain: “Los politos decen los politos pío, pío, pío cuando tienen hambre tienen frío!”

Komissar’s body was found with his throat slit the next day. The writing on the mirror confirmed it had to be Iniga’s handy work for Alesandro.

Whether or not it was true that the Komissar was responsible for Durruti’s assassination didn’t matter to Iniga. That he was a rapist of young girls was enough for her to exact revenge.  In war, rape is all too common and Iniga would have her hands full if she were to go after every rapist. She especially concentrated her efforts to those who violated pre-adolescent girls... the innocents... the most vulnerable... and she played the part of the coquette to draw them in. She was forced to leave Madrid afterwards, and that was just as well, as the purges of 1938 had begun.