Bunuel_Luis_My_Last_Breath

The Civil War (1936-1939)I55The Republican camp was riddled with dissension. The maingoal of both Communists and Socialists was to win the war, whilethe anarchists, on the other hand, considered the war already wonand had begun to organize their ideal society."We've started a commune at Torrelodones," Gil Bel, the editorof the labor journal El Sindicalista, told me one day at the CafeCastilla. "We already have twenty houses, all occupied. You oughtto take one. "I was beside myself with rage and surprise. Those houses belongedto people who'd fled or been executed. And as if that weren'tenough, Torrelodones stood at the foot of the Sierra de Guadarrama,only a few kilometers from the Fascist front lines. Within shootingdistance of Franco's army, the anarchists were calmly laying out theirutopia.On another occasion, I was having lunch in a restaurant withthe musician Remacha, one of the directors of the Filmofon0Studios where I'd once worked. The son of the restaurant ownerhad been seriously wounded fighting the Falangists in the Sierrade Guadarrama. Suddenly, several armed anarchists burst into therestaurant yelling, "Sahd compatieros!" and shouting for wine.Furious, I told them they should be in the mountains fightinginstead of emptying the wine cellar of a good man whose sonwas fighting for his life in a hospital. They sobered up quicklyand left, taking the bottles with them, of course.Every evening, whole brigades of anarchists came down out ofthe hills to loot the hotel wine cellars. Their behavior pushed manyof us into the arms of the Communists. Few in number at thebeginning of the war, they were nonetheless growing stronger witheach passing day. Organized and disciplined, focused on the waritself, they seemed to me then, as they do now, irreproachable. Itwas sad but true that the anarchists hated them more than they hatedthe Fascists. This animosity had begun several years before the warwhen, in 1935, the Federadon Anarquista Iberica (FAI) announceda general strike among construction workers. The anarchist Ramon