THE TAGUS (El tajo)
by Francisco Ayala, 1949

The title of "The Tagus" ("El tajo"), one of four novellas by Francisco Ayala included in the original edition of The Lamb's Head (La cabeza del cordero; 1949) , involves a play on the several meanings of the word tajo. First, it is the name of the Tagus River, which winds around three sides of Toledo, where a decisive incident occurs. The word also means a violent cut or a slice, which is both literally and figuratively relevant: a cut in the earth—the Tagus Gorge and also the valley separating the entrenched armies—and the cutting off of a life, as the Furies cut the threads of mortal existence. Finally, the Spanish Civil War, which terminated the republic, constituted a tajo in the nation's life.

The narratives of The Lamb's Head, written during Ayala's exile in Argentina, treat aspects of the Spanish Civil War and its aftermath, but only "The Tagus" presents the war directly. As a disciple of Ortega y Gasset, an intellectual architect of the republic, Ayala served in diplomatic capacities and would have been executed if he had been caught by the rebels, who did shoot his father and brother. His treatment of the war—impartial, objective, and dispassionate—disconcerts readers aware of Ayala's background. He does not even name the war or the opposing factions and even denied in interviews and his prologue that the conflict portrayed was related to the Spanish Civil War. He probably hoped to have the work published in Spain, but it was prohibited until 1972. Many of Ayala prologues are apocryphal or ironic, and this one is no exception.

The Spanish Civil War has generated more fiction than any event in history—one bibliography lists more than 8, 000 novels—and despite Ayala's allegorical and symbolic presentation, The Lamb's Head cannot be read adequately while assuming that the conflict described is abstract or imaginary. If the censors were not fooled, some critics were, believing that nothing in the story suggests the author's preference for either side. The war is paradigmatically reduced to a single encounter between two combatants representing the opposing sides, a cultured bourgeois officer and an unschooled working-class militiaman. This itself is a sufficiently skewed choice of generic antagonists to contradict assertions of impartiality.

During 1938 the opposing armies dug into positions in their respective mountain ranges and faced each other across a noman's-land along the Ebro front in Aragón. There they waited for months without firing a shot. Republican resistance was crumbling, and desertions were mounting. Only months later, no obstacles to Franco's advance remained. This is the setting of the symbolic encounter emblematic of the war, a strategically insignificant occurrence on a sweltering August afternoon. During the lethargy of the siesta, Lieutenant Pedro Santolalla alleviates his boredom by strolling to the valley's vineyards, where he is startled to observe an enemy soldier picking grapes. The man's back is turned, and his rifle is on the ground, but Santolalla kills him, taking the victim's wallet and rifle as evidence of his "heroism." Santolalla becomes the butt of jokes by comrades who realize that taking the victim prisoner would have meant no risk. As the body of Anastasio López Rubielos rots, the stench blows into Santolalla's camp, and his companions wax sarcastic.

Ayala traces the ethical evolution of Santolalla's conscience from self-satisfaction to an uneasy realization that the killing was unnecessary and a progressively more guilty conscience and an unacknowledged remorse. López Rubielos's identity card becomes a symbol of Santolalla's guilt, and his attempts to rid himself of the card by giving it away fail. This occurs most resoundingly when, after the war, he seeks out the victim's impoverished family in Toledo, pretending to be a wartime buddy wanting to return the documents.

Although Ayala uses none of the terms normally denoting the contending factions (on the one side Loyalists, International Brigades, or Republicans; on the other Falangists, Nationalists, Fascists, or Francoists), subtle clues leave no doubt as to which side each antagonist represents. No militia supported the Franco side, while López Rubielos is a militiaman, and Santolalla, the narrative consciousness, calls the enemy "Reds," the Franco regime's term for communists, fellow travelers, and all those who supported the republic. The victim's documents identify him as a member of the Workers' Socialist Party and unobtrusively supply the information that he is barely 18 years old. Conversely, given his position and advantages after the war, Santolalla is clearly on the winning Falangist side.

While subtle, Ayala's message is far from unintelligible or unbiased. The implicit ethical question concerns just how Santolalla's act differs from war crimes. Killing an enemy in battle may be heroic, but the same act in peacetime is criminal. The differentiating legal element is circumstantial—a state of war existed—but the moral difference is blurred. Ayala portrays a peaceful interlude, a quiet front—almost an unofficial cease-fire—and a confrontation without danger. Had the war already ended, Santolalla's act would have been gratuitous homicide.

When the antagonists are Falangists and Republicans, the implications are unmistakable. Franco and the Falangists revolted against Spain's legal government. Had they lost, they would have been charged with insurrection and crimes against the republic. Allied with the German and Italian Fascists, they received the latest military technology and help from Hitler and Mussolini, while poorly armed Republican militia fought with their forefathers' antiquated hunting rifles, pitchforks, or whatever was at hand. That Santolalla kills an unarmed enemy is thus not fortuitous.

Ayala's narrative economy is exemplary, for there are no superfluous words or details. Irony abounds, however, and his works are seldom simply what they seem. Extratextual data illuminate his stories, which, like many written under censorship, are often allusive or elliptical, requiring readers to figure out a picture that closer examination shows to be a puzzle.

—Janet Pérez