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Jake

I wrote this for creative writing (school). About 60% of it is written under the influence of weed. It would have been better if was longer, but 10 pages was our limit. Took the name from a song by the Clash. I know it's generally longer than most things written here, so read a random chapter or something and add input on my general ability to get a point across or tell a story.

By Jake Landis

Chapter I

I woke up and didn’t know really how to go about the day. I reached a rational decision the night before that I would go fight Francisco Franco and or the communists, whichever came to violate my innocent town first. I don’t know how to go about this whole ordeal. Is there a proper way of leaving? How do you say see you later if in fact, there’s a chance you won’t be there later? If I die? What if I not only leave Andalusia, but the world forever?
I don’t really know who or what to say good-bye to. Last night was the first time I’ve thought about Gloria in months…it’s been months since I saw her last. I love my property more. I’d like to make Gloria my property. Is that what love is about? I guess that I’ll say good-bye to two things and two things only: My land and Gloria. God knows I love both of them.
How do I go about saying good-bye to Gloria? I haven’t seen her in a long time. We’re not lovers, we’re not even great friends. We seem just to be two separate souls on the save wavelength. We both openly admit to loving each other’s presence, but we don’t admit that we love each other. But on the other hand, what is love but loving someone’s presence? It’s more than loving her presence…it’s appreciating her existence for all it’s worth. I’m fine as long as we both exist on the same planet and we know of each other. I love her existence, not just her presence. Perhaps that’s why I didn’t miss her each day I didn’t talk to her this summer.
Ah, the summer of ’38. Everything is threatened. My land is threatened. My form of government is threatened. Even my own freedom is threatened. I seem apathetic about it, however. I should probably care a large bit more. I guess when you live in an anarchist town, you don’t tend to comprehend bad things. I need to realize that this violence effulging the country is real. Violence is real. All of these people dying are real. Francisco Franco is too goddamn real to ignore forever.
It’s real enough, no matter how unreal it seems, to put my life on the line. I love life too much to put my life on the life for anything. I had a chance to fight in the war to end all wars, but I passed up. Why should I die for a cause that wouldn’t even affect me? Why would I die if my land nor way of life were threatened? I don’t fight for the government; I fight for myself. Government thinks people are expendable. No way in hell they are. This time…for the first in my life, there is a war that is worth fighting for, worth dying for, and it’s only necessary to fight in it.
I’ll go say good-bye to Gloria now, before going to wherever I go to fight. I won’t leave until I kiss her, it could be my last kiss, you know. Of course, I should also kiss my land good-bye also, but I don’t really want dirt on my lips before I kiss her.
I should leave now, but like always, there is time for a cigarette before I leave. Tobacco is one of “God’s” greatest gifts to mankind. I really like the cigarette I’m smoking. Ah, another thing worth mentioning. Not much is machine produced here. I buy hand rolled cigarettes. I don’t like machines. In the Great War, there were giant new machines called tanks. Machines built to kill people. They’ll get bigger and “better”. Machines are supposed to make people’s lives easier. Not to kill people easier. Machines illustrate man’s genius; they are not supposed to illustrate all that is bad in man.
This cigarette will kill me in the future if the war doesn’t. I smoke very slowly, holding in the smoke and enjoying it. Still, smokers take five minutes every hour to organize our thoughts and understand our emotions. We get five minutes an hour to be in solitude. We listen to the match combusting, and then we listen to nothing else but our own thoughts. Non-smokers don’t. Winston Churchill did his deepest thinking over a cigar. Many great ideas came to men while pondering over a fag. The theory of relativity could have been thought of over a cigarette (though I hope the idea for war machines didn’t come from a cigarette…).
The cigarette is almost over, damn it to hell. I now know it’s time to say good-bye to everything I hold dear.

Chapter II

I walk very slowly across the four-mile trail to Gloria’s cottage. It’s such a small distance…I didn’t walk there even once this summer. Why? Well, she was away to see London and Paris for a good part. Her family is slightly aristocratic, but that’s a good thing, not a bad thing, provided that they actually earned the money rather than stealing from the people. I never really found out which side of aristocracy Gloria’s family fell on. It doesn’t matter, I guess, I love her, not her family.
When was the last time I saw her? Sometime in the winter. Those were the best days of our relationship. A lot of sex, I mean. Not much talking, but in the good way. We didn’t talk because we appreciated each other, not because we couldn’t communicate.
I’m about one mile away to her house. Suddenly I realize that when I go, I will say good-bye to my land and Gloria, but when I come back, I’ll be coming back for her. I don’t want to come back to her like how our relationship this summer has been. I want to come back to her as her husband, or future husband anyway. Am I really debating to propose? I think that I will, actually. It’ll be great to live with her everyday. To wake up next to her. To see her look like hell in the morning before she’s dressed and still know she’s beautiful.
I’m at her house now. I open the door. She looks pretty stunned to see me. Mouth open sort of thing. “Gloria!” I half shout, and she immediately jumps into my arms. This summer of not seeing each other hasn’t killed anything, obviously. “Eduardo…” she says, very shakily. I laugh, “you missed me that much?” I ask. “Yes” she says, “I only realized it just now.” “Gloria, I love you, did you know that?” I ask.
“Yes, and I love you, and I know that you know it.”
“Yes…I underestimated you, Gloria.”
“Eduardo…” she laughs, “what are you doing here anyway?”
“Only to ask you to not forget me, although we both know that this is impossible. But I’d also like to ask you your hand in marriage.”
“I’ll say yes, of course.”
“I know.” And I ginned sheepishly. This is what I’ve missed, I thought. Someone who I completely and totally understand. And someone who understands me. “But Eduardo, what did you mean when you told me never to forget you? You’re not leaving are you?”
“I am.”
“To go fight?”
“To go fight.”
“Of course you would, Eduardo.” And she grinned, in a very odd mix of pride in me and worry for me. “We only have about two hours before I leave to go find some sort of makeshift anarchist regiment to join,” I tell her.
“What should we do for two hours?”
“My lovely, let’s do what we always do and enjoy each other.”
We had a very nice time together, just like the days of old. We did talk quite a lot. We planned our wedding day, when and if I returned. Not much family members. It’s about us, not them. It’s nice that we’re both God-less; there will be no religious problems.
I leave. When we say good-bye, we have the greatest and most passionate kiss in our lives. Leaving and closing the door, all I want is to not leave. Oh, I hope I come back. I don’t even want to fight for my land and my freedom; I want to fight to see her again…

Chapter III

A small army of anarchists was not too many miles away. It was only a two-day walk through the country. You have to love this country; it’s so beautiful. Trees and the grass are green, spacious meadows are everywhere. Small towns are lazy but productive. The factories in the larger cities don’t collide with nature all too badly.
The small army is so great. The people who I’ll fight with are a lot like me. They are fighting for the same reasons that I am. They don’t talk about loving humanity or brotherhood. They don’t talk about working for the common good. Hell, if they did, we’d send them to go fight for the communists and take pleasure in killing them. Not much of this army has experience, but they’ll fight with heart. We talk a lot at night. The anarchists have appealed to many sorts of people. There are a lot of countrymen like me who are fighting only for our freedom and land. There are a lot of industrialists, fitting because they are capitalists. Freedom of economy fits in very well with absolute freedom, you see. There are also a lot of poets and artists. Many of them are very good. I hope that the war doesn’t claim their bodies, or worse, their writing abilities.
We’re going to meet up with many other small anarchist armies tomorrow and fight a communist army. The thrill of battle doesn’t exist for me, I think. All I can do is try to kill to the best of my ability. And hope that I am not killed. Just to fight for another day and take another chance of dying. And another and another. The odds of surviving this don’t seem too bright do they? Especially because if Franco’s armies get you, you don’t get sent to a POW prison, you get executed. In principle, living in a communist regime is worse than living in a military dictatorship that Franco will implement, but in war, Franco is viler.
Sleep. An important day tomorrow.
We wake up to the sound of trumpets. Our standard way of waking up every morning. There are thousands of more people around me. The other anarchist armies must have joined us during the night.
Not much is happening. People are not really talking this morning. These people don’t joke about death; they take the matter very seriously. Some people are writing in what could very well be their last battle. The soldiers who do talk only talk to one or more person. Their last conversations with others will not be with people they don’t give a damn about, I think.
After eating my food without any conversation save for may I sit here. Fitting, it seems to me, because I haven’t grown close with anybody here yet. There are a couple people whom I really like. A young poet whose surname is Lorca has really made an impression on me through his very beautiful yet unpolished words. He is very friendly, if not engaging. I haven’t seen him yet this morning. The only other person here that I respect more than the others is our commander. He was a very good soldier, I hear, in the Great War. His is simply known as Commander. He made quite an impression on me during the first day. He said simply “If you are fighting for us, it obviously shows that you want us to win enough to put your life at state. I am one and the same. If you do what I say, your desires will have a greater chance of being met. It is in your best interest to do as I say.” “Ah,” I thought, “he described to me the only humane way a man can take orders.”
However, he didn’t use his commanding ability to much use. The only main things that were asked of us was to be able to use a gun. There were many training devices and obstacle courses if we wished to become better soldiers before we fought. However, in his way of thinking, all of us will want to become better soldiers because winning is more important to us than life. Perhaps this is why every single man here has given countless hours to get stronger, faster, better.
I could be writing my last words to Gloria right now. However, nothing important has happened since I left. Nothing worth writing about.
The communist army we’re facing is much bigger than ours, most likely. Their principles attract the most pathetic souls in the country, but pathetic souls outnumber the heroic souls. We’ll have less people than them by two to one; ratios smaller than for our side are very uncommon. “Ah, it’s not too bad”, I think, “We seem to fight better than them.” We always have the odds against us, but not once have we fought a battle that was doomed from the start.

Chapter IV

After more than a few hours of waiting and getting instructions for the battle, we get the orders to walk a few miles. Damn, we all thought, we were hoping to fight in the morning, before the summer heat ruled the day. The men were a lot jollier than they were in the morning. These could be their last hours alive, it’s important to enjoy it.
I spoke to Lorca during the walk. He seemed very enthusiastic about the whole prospect of putting his life at risk. He went on and on about how inspiration this should be. He said that in a strange sense, death intrigues him. He wants to experience death just for the experience. He isn’t the type who would spend his last days lucid on morphine to dumb the pain. He wants to taste death. He wants to smell it, taste it, come to terms with it. He isn’t afraid of death, in this way. Odd, because he won’t be the type that will operate under the point of a gun.
The walk went by rather quickly. It was hard, wearing long sleeves in the heat with the addition of a gun on the shoulder. We knew our walk was over when we saw a group dressed in red on top of a hill.
The communists quickly ran down the side of the hill towards us and we took our positions. We all took a few shots at them before half of them stopped to shoot and half of them continued to charge us. Already, we were winning. Our first shots were all anonymous killings. If I had time to think, I would have thought about what it feels like to kill someone. There’s no way it should feel good at all.
Almost immediately after our initial advantage shots, the communists’ sheer numbers starting causing many of us to fall. But not me yet. But not me yet, I repeated to myself. I continued shooting shots at a general distance. A few times, the droppings of a red soldier was not anonymous, it was obviously of my doing. No time to take it in, to grasp it. Only time to keep shooting. The death of that red soldier is a good thing, I have to believe.
Quickly the battle turned from rifles to knives and machine guns. For me, unfortunately for my survival chances, I was to use a pistol and a knife and partake in the gruesome melee. Almost immediately after entering, blood is everywhere around you. Blood splatters turns you, in fact, into a red soldier yourself, with only the actual uniform of the reds giving them away. People are dead lying in the ground and many are screaming or bellowing. Running over bodies on the ground is necessary to get a closer shot at an opponent. I hope to God the people I’ve stepped on were all dead and not wounded.
We were losing and losing badly after only 45 minutes of fighting. I have two large wounds. One is on my left shoulder and one is on the right hip. It is getting very hard to walk, let alone run or chase. I can barely use my left arm. I am still killing communists and not dying, so I have to continue fighting. I enter the melee itself and slash my knife in the general direction of red soldiers, then quickly leave and take a few pistol shots. I did this many times.
Blood is soaking through my uniform, and it’s getting painfully obvious that it is my own blood. Once standing causes loud yelling, and I leave. I fall down after removing myself a few hundred yards. As I lie on the green grass, the three seconds spent awake are spent staring into the eyes of a dead anarchist. He was very young.

Chapter V

I woke up in the same place I fell down. The dead soldier was still there, deader than he was before. Not being able to move, all I could do was shift my eyes. I could hear anarchist voices. We were obviously losing when we fell, where did the communists go? Soon, a soldier gets to me, rolls the dead soldier on his face, and forces water down my throat. He calls other soldiers over, and I fall asleep again as I am carried away from the battlefield.
I wake up in a small, hastily made “hospital” bed. I have bandages all over, the big ones being on my left shoulder and right hip. “What happened to me?” I must have asked fifteen times before a nurse came in to tell me. She told me that I had been stabbed in the left shoulder and shot in the right upper leg, with an exit wound in the hip. Must have been shot by a red lying wounded on the ground. “Oh,” and the nurse adds, “go back to sleep. You’re still bleeding and we’re changing your large bandages every thirty minutes. I don’t know how you woke up.”
I do as she tells me, but only because my body is telling me too. In the morning, I awake and groggily holler for a nurse. I bitch at her about the intolerable pain, mostly, and ask how I am doing. She tells me that I stopped bleeding over the night, but the blood loss was terrible and I have a high chance of infection. “How many miles are we from Andalusia?” I ask. She tells me about 15 miles. And of course I’m not really allowed to go. I do go, however. It’s not like there are rules in an anarchist army. They are running a transportation carriage that’ll take me to any city within 30 miles.
I take the first carriage I can. I’m going to see Gloria before I possibly pass away. The carriage ride was hell. Every bump hurt some part of my body. I was feeling weaker and weaker.
Getting there was a horrible sight. Small trenches have been built and many dead young men are in them. Many buildings are burned. A work of Franco’s armies no doubt! The driver was very hesitant to let me off, and once he did, he left very quickly. I used crutches to take the walk to Gloria’s house. I don’t know how I did it. Her house was on the outskirts of the town and was untouched by the burnings, and hopefully, the prisoner taking.
I burst in the door and collapse on the floor. Gloria isn’t here…I quickly drift out of conscious, this one seeming more final than the others.
I wake up…I feel more than half dead. Gloria has me in her arms She looks very distressed, and I don’t understand why…perhaps…perhaps I can say one word. I quietly, slowly say “love” and my eyes close. If it were physically possible, my face would be in a grin. I got to see Gloria. At least I got to do that one last time before I taste, smell, and experience death…

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iloveunot

i read the whole thing and ive got to say youre a really good writer.
really lacking in historical acuracy though as lorca never fought in any battles or was a part of any army and was excecuted in 1936 (people think he was excecuted because he was a homosexual). the anarchists would have been fighting with the communists, both fought on the "republican" side against the "nationalist" franco.
also andalusia isnt a city, so someone couldnt say how far are we from andalusia, 15 miles... that would be like saying how far are we from texas? which you could say, but it doesnt really fit what youre trying to say.
but its not a history paper and its REALLY well written. since the title is spanish songs.... you should possibly add something about music into the story. maybe how eduardo and gloria enjoyed listening to and watching flamenco together or something...
i really liked it and i didnt even feel like i was reading something that was long, because i just wanted to keep reading. it really flows and you have a really good way with words

Jake

Than you for the historical info. I knew I had a lot of stuff wrong. I read the war's history on Wikipedia after writing it. Well, I was high and wanted to write, and wasn't caring about accuracy.