After Ballad of the Civil Guard by Federico Garcia Lorca
An essay
I
Lorca’s guards
had skulls of lead and souls of patent leather
and they do not weep he said.
Every gypsy, criminal, peasant and anarchist
in Andalucia knew what he meant.
It’s easy to romanticise
los gitanos as free spirits
or the Guardia Civil as la benemérita – reputable men.
Reality is the grit in between.
On the rural highways
the knives of the gypsy banditos
were as sharp as any guard’s sword.
Both groups of men knew the feel of their blades
cutting into the other.
During the Guerra Civil las guardias
fought on both sides.
A century later
they still live in military barracks
and patrol in pairs.
I hope their bodies are by now
flesh and blood.
As for their souls –
is confession enough?
It’s thirty-six years since
the last attempted coup.
The highways are free of thieves
more or less. The petty crooks now nest
in the outer-urban high-rises,
beyond the ruling ambitions of those
who have sent the country broke.
II
All over the world
the border forces are recruiting
with million-dollar uniforms and guns
there’s always someone who needs a job.
Today they’re on strike for better pay –
what does it cost
to be a guard, police officer, soldier?
We so want them to be
the good guys – truly la benemérita –
who rescue us and keep the peace.
Sometimes they do.
Democracy, it is said,
is checks and balances
– the paperwork is as demanding as ever –
but the grit in between ideals and politics
scratches an open wound.
III
Bored conscripts
defend a Promised Land,
boast of their casual cruelties.
Why not force
three women on their way home
to walk in the heat to the top of the hill
and wait there for hours
just because you can?
Then there’s that special kind of pornographic thrill
in pointing a bayonet
at the pregnant belly of another
as she comes through the checkpoint.
The howls of Rosa de los Cambrios
have turned into bombs.
A 19-year-old conscript
raised on a diet of virtual morality
is given the job considered safer for female soldiers.
On the security screen
she picks out a farmer in the distance
working the little land he has left
– her boss decides he is a terrorist.
She presses a button,
the farmer falls down dead.
This remote-control killing
sends her psychotic. But does she weep?
IV
Guards come in the vulnerable dawn
knocking down doors,
kicking and beating, smashing and trashing
anything that looks self-affirming.
We gather with candles
to light up the dark and mourn
for these are terrible affairs of the state.
And the girls keep running as fast as they can,
into the roses of black gunpowder.
V
Sixty million people on the move
and not for the love of travel.
The guards guard the lies
of those media millionaires, corporations,
politicians and highly-paid technocrats
who belittle the critics
for calling the detention-centre electric fence, electric.
No, the immigration department head insists,
it’s a courtesy fence, an energised fence –
it’s her profession to strip words of their meaning.
It’s his profession
to strip an asylum seeker
lock him in a room for a month,
with the light on 24/7
because it was alleged
he had a cigarette lighter.
It’s their profession
to joke at the end of the day
about the written requests for toothpaste or sanitary pads,
then throw them in the bin –
the paperwork is as demanding as ever.
When they evacuate their colleagues
and abandon those they know by number
to the encroaching cyclone,
which nightmare takes its toll?
VI
Every day Franco sat diligently at his desk
signing execution papers
over his afternoon coffee.
A century later in Australia
the son of Chilean migrants
boasts of his job: compliance officer –
his thrill in forcing people to submit
chilling, unmistakeable.
He believes
that Pinochet was a good man.
Remarkably he looks like
the aggrieved Ramón Ruiz Alonso
who arrested Lorca.
VII
Sixty million people on the move
and not for the love of travel.
Fleeing from the latest wars
they keep moving
from one country to the next,
squeezing themselves onto trains, boats, trucks, buses
or into the cavities of cars.
The face of a child barely a year old
in the clutch of her father’s arms,
looks on with a steady gaze
at the crush of adults around her,
as if she has seen it all before.
They are building walls again.
Patrolling passports, visas and minds
colonised by fear
where young and naked
the imagination burns
and reality is the grit in between.
