Bunuel_Luis_My_Last_Breath

Acin, who financed Las Hurdes, told me about the time a Communistdelegation went to see the head of the strike committee."There are three police stoolies in your ranks," they told him,naming names."So what?" the anarchist retorted. "We know all about it, butwe like stoolies better than Communists."Despite my ideological sympathies with the anarchists, I couldn'tstand their unpredictable and fanatical behavior. Sometimes, it wassufficient merely to be an engineer or to have a university degree tobe taken away to Casa Carnpo. When the Republican governmentmoved its headquarters from Madrid to Barcelona because of theFascist advance, the anarchists threw up a barricade near Cuenca onthe only road that hadn't been cut. In Barcelona itself, they liquidatedthe director and the engineers in a metallurgy factory in order toprove that the factory could function perfectly well when run by theworkers. Then they built a tank and proudly showed it to a Sovietdelegate. (When he asked for a parabellurn and fired at it, it fellapart - )Despite all the other theories, a great many people thought thatthe anarchists were responsible for the death of Durruti, who wasshot while getting out of his car on the Calle de la Princesa, on hisway to try to ease the situation at the university, which was undersiege. They were the kind of fanatics who named their daughtersAcracia (Absence of Power) or Fourteenth September, and couldn'tforgive Durutti the discipline he'd imposed on his troops.We also feared the arbitrary actions of the POUM (Partido Obrerode Unificacion Marxists), which was theoretically a Trotskyite group.Members of this movement, along with anarchists from the FAI,built barricades in May 1937 in the streets of Barcelona against theRepublican army, which then had to fight its own allies in order toget through.My friend Claudio de la Torre lived in an isolated house outsideof Madrid. His grandfather had been a freemason, the quintessentialabomination in the eyes of the Fascists. In fact, they despised free-