Looking to the Future, Ethical Responsibility: Return to Sender

Although both these books were written in exile neither refers significantly to the negotiation of their exilic condition. De la Mora was separated from her husband and daughter; however, the autobiographical voice is only that of a positive, unified subject whose personal exilic experience is of secondary importance to securing aid.35 Her true experience of exile is reduced to a repressed ghost-like entity, hidden behind a rigid mask placed by the hand of the scribe, in the endeavour to produce a finely tuned example of propaganda. Reference to exile is completely absent from Constancia’s autobiography, and in I Must Have Liberty onlythe final chapter is dedicated to Isabel’s exilic situation in Mexico City. Depite having arrived with nothing, optimism

characterizes Isabel’s description of the new house:

The first morning I opened my eyes in our new home I did not see the bare floors and walls nor the empty rooms. I saw only the Mexican sky lit up by the rising sun and being turned into a gem of many colors. [...] I have had this same sensation every day since. It has never failed me nor have I grown weary of it. I expect it never shall. [IL: 466-467]

Any negativity is shrouded in order to express publicly her gratitude to Mexico for its commendable humanitarian gesture to Republican Spain. In the closing paragraphs of her first autobiographical volume, Isabel issues her final propagandistic response to the

34 Lejeune delineates the pact as a legalistic contract between the narrator, reader and publisher in which the formal mark of commitment is that the identity of the author, narrator and protagonist share the same name (1975).

35 _{Mangini draws a parallel between In Place of Splendor and Dolores Ibárruri’s They Shall Not Pass: The} Autobiography of La Pasionaria: ‘[g]iven their role as public and political women [they] tend to mitigate the dramatic nature of their testimonies’ (1995: 61).

call of the foreign addressee, endorsing Mexico’s exemplary actions in the hope that the United States follow suit:

War is destructive in many ways: disillusion is one of them and our young people had every reason to have lost their faith in the virtue of civilization and progress — they had served to destroy our Spain. Besides their attitude after the war was over was another disappointment. With the exception of Mexico no country in the world had respected international law in the Spanish question. [IL: 469]

The true experience of exile is obscured because In Place of Splendor and I Must Have Liberty are not primarily personal autobiographical projects.36 The selfless

autobiographical identity does not seek the addressee’s compassion for their personal exilic condition but seeks to generate a credible patriotic project. In war and exile both women accept being separated from their husbands, putting the needs of the Republic before their own family’s unity. Curiously, both women make reference to Dolores Ibárruri’s speech on this very subject [IL: 235 and PS: 272]. Constancia even entitles her fourth chapter ‘Widows of Heroes Rather Than Wives of Cowards’ after a famous excerpt of Ibárruri’s speech (Fox: 34). Ultimately conditioned by their specific

addressee, at the culmination of their autobiographical trajectory, both autobiographical subjects issue a propagandistic patriotic plea from exile as eligible spokespersons for the legitimate Republic who put the nation before their own personal negotiation of exile in autobiography.

Throughout their texts both de la Mora and Oyarzábal de Palencia assiduously seek the political and moral complicity of the addressee in order to maximise the effectiveness of the overarching propagandistic patriotic project. This is a dual process. As discussed in section 1.2, both authors select appropriate autobiographical strategies and models to ensure that their autobiographical identity is seamlessly constant, even at the expense of tensions and omissions. The second aspect is to appease any doubts the foreign audience may have had concerning the rumours fascist propaganda had

disseminated in the international press, such as branding the ‘Republic’ as being synonymous to ‘Reds’ and ‘Communists’ as well as smear campaigns involving accusations of violent anti-clericalism. To alleviate suspicions of a Communist agenda in the Republican government, both authors provide the addressee with a full English

36

As Martínez affirms in reference to Oyarzábal de Palencia’s text ‘[e]s parte de su proyecto patriótico’ (2006: 810).

translation of Los Trece Puntos del Gobierno de Negrín.37 Negrín was the then Premier of the Spanish Cabinet and the thirteen points articulated are the official programme of the Republic. They are described by Constancia as ‘full, complete, and truthful’ [PS: 361]. Having successfully concealed her own Communist allegiance, she explicitly assuages doubts the foreign addressee may have by citing Negrín: ‘Here was our answer to the liars in London who called us “Communists”’ [PS: 361]. She introduces the thirteen points by stating: ‘[t]his is for what we fought and for what we still fight’ [PS: 362]. In Smouldering Freedom, in addition to Negrín’s Thirteen Points [SF: 30], Isabel

refers to the pronouncement made at the last session of the Cortes held in Spain on 1 February 1939. She provides the addressee with direct quotations of Negrín’s speech and gives a critical synopsis of its main points. She compels the foreign addressee to reconsider the defective binary of “Communism vs. Nationalism”, and then quotes Negrín directly to urge the reader to consider a more pertinent binary: ‘“the hegemony of a totalitarian, brutal, despotic imperialism on the one hand, and the survival of the democratic countries on the other. This is a dispute between two civilizations”’ [SF: 33]. Isabel warns that this threat is not limited to Spain. A subsequent chapter, ‘The Struggle for Spain’, forewarns of the consequences of any appeasement policy towards Franco, one example being the potential dissemination of Nazism to Ibero-America [SF: 166].

Moreover, both authors pointedly counteract Nationalist smear propaganda concerning the burning of churches in order to reassure the foreign addressee that the accusations of violent anti-clericalism were false. Constancia assures:

There were instances of churches being burned, yes — but only those where stores of machine guns and rifles were found. The people felt that an altar behind which bullets were hidden to kill the people of Madrid was no longer sacred. [PS: 245]

In addition, as a practicing Catholic, Isabel highlights her perplexity regarding the actions of the Spanish Church hierarchy. She includes a reminder of the Vatican’s position, citing the Sovereign Pontiff who had forbidden ‘Catholics to join the

movement against the government [as] no Catholic had a right to rise against a legally constituted authority’ [IL: 216].

Having mitigated the addressee’s potential reservations regarding the Republic, in a patriotic project above and beyond a personal quest, not only do both

autobiographical subjects display a coherent, unified identity, they are also rounded, eligible spokespersons of a fair legitimate government. Having sought the moral and political complicity of the American reader, in terms of their ultimate quest of obtaining aid, both authors have maximised the viability of their propagandistic, ethical gesture. The ethical dimension of autobiography does not terminate when the addressee closes the final page:

By signing an autobiographical text, an author performs a very complex

operation which appears, and in most cases pretends, to be cognitive but that in reality is an ethicopolitical gesture that entails a double responsibility: in the first place, by signing, the self is responding for itself before the other; and in the second not only the signature responds to the other’s injunction to speak, but that same logic of alterity implies that the signed text is also a legacy to an other that not simply receives it but has to cosign it and thus take responsibility for it. Autobiography comes from the other and is for the other. (Loureiro 2000: 24). A comparative study of the English and Spanish versions of de la Mora’s autobiography illuminates certain underlying tensions. There is no doubt that In Place of Splendor is not completely truthful yet this is irrelevant as the ethical framework of autobiography considers the originary dimension of the self being provoked by the call of the

addressee. The concealed elements are not relevant to Constancia’s rallying cry for aid. In terms of returning definitive responsibility to the American addressee she has

crucially achieved maximum efficiency in her propagandistic response, whereupon she issues a convincing rallying cry to the assuaged American audience:

And now, more than ever, I know that Spanish democracy is not dead — but still lives — and will always live. Franco had executed thousands. Even as I write these words, the firing squads are still shooting men and women who believe in democracy, at the rate of one every nine minutes, for twenty-four hours of the day. Thousands more still live in French concentration camps, hungry, suffering in forced idleness and misery. [...] The fascists cannot make Spain fascist. We are a democratic people. We shall always be a democratic people. I know that Spain will soon again be free. Nothing can prevent it — for the united people of Spain will make a democracy with their blood and their courage. Viva la

República! [PS: 426-427]

As previously mentioned, Isabel’s propagandistic response in I Must Have Liberty commendsMexico’sexemplary actions. The second instalment of her

complementary autobiographical volumes is Smouldering Freedom: The Story of the Spanish Republicans in Exile and this propagandistic text injects renewed vigour into her patriotic autobiographical project.38 Published in 1945 in New York and 1946 in London, given the chronological distance from the publication of her first

autobiographical text, there is an evolution in the aid sought for Republican Spain. She now seeks that democratic nations renounce their tacit acceptance of Franco’s regime. In order to maximise her potential Anglophone audience the text commences with a concise prologue entitled ‘A Summary of the War’, reinforced with evidence taken from American and British sources such as the Duchess of Atholl’s text Searchlight on Spain

(Stewart-Murray 1938). Isabel’s purposeful consideration of American and British texts regarding the question of Republican Spain displays a careful engagement with her addressee. Simultaneously, this provides the bibliographical details of the texts at the addressee’s disposal should he or she choose to take the responsibility implied in the ethical framework. The subsequent text is divided into twenty-one succinct chapters each of which analyses an aspect of the outcome of the Civil War. These include an examination of the extreme situation of Republicans in fascist Spain, in prison, and the abhorrent treatment of exiles in France and French concentration camps. Others address the activity of Spanish maquis, guerrilleros, extradition, and exiles in other countries. The ex-diplomat’s narrative is at times not dissimilar to a political document. The recourse to statistics, facts and figures obliges the foreign addressee to receive the propagandistic message packaged in a number of striking vignettes. In the sixth chapter, ‘Life in a French Concentration Camp’, she poignantly includes statistics such as death rates, describing the conditions in Argèles-sur-Mer as so atrocious that ‘thirty-five infants died in one single day’ [SF: 67]. The chapter ends recounting how a young boy was tortured (by sleep deprivation) for humming the Internationale. In his delirious state he was shot by a Senegalese guard for walking too near the camp’s wire boundary. Oyarzábal de Palencia describes his body which lay at rest under the searchlight ‘bathed [...] in a white ethereal refulgence [...] on the French soil he had thought, when he left Spain, was going to be a “land of liberation”’ [SF: 74]. Pointedly seeking their

complicity, Isabel grants the foreign addressee privileged access to information omitted from the American and British press regarding the painful consequences of Non-

Intervention. In the closing paragraphs she issues the foreign addressee the final explicit

38

Mangini states its ‘exclusive purpose was to inform people abroad [...] of the situation in Spain’ (1995: 167).

propagandistic instruction: urging the American and British public to lobby their governments to sever relations with Franco’s illegitimate fascist regime. She states:

I am often asked what Spain would like other countries to do in her favour. In some sectors of opinion it is feared that the Republicans want foreign armed intervention on their behalf, but they are very much mistaken. [...] What is demanded is the minimum to which we have a right — what nobody with an elementary sense of justice can deny. Simply this. That those countries that call themselves democratic do not maintain relations, diplomatic or commercial and economic, with an openly declared enemy of democracy, and that a well-

deserved recognition be granted to the legal constitutional representatives of Republican Spain. Nothing more. [SF: 187. Emphasis in the original]

All three texts analysed constitute an ethical gesture in which both the textual proclamation of identity, and the propagandistic message is directed to the future. Having appropriately framed their response and maximised its potential impact on the American public, in the closing lines their finely tuned propagandistic message is issued and handed to the addressee who must now, as implied in the ethical framework,

ultimately take responsibility for the subsequent outcome of their respective patriotic propagandistic ventures.