The typewriter that told the Civil War

“The bosses formed us and said: the war is over.” It was March 20, 1939, Francisco Buj noted in his memoirs. The Army of Extremadura began a slow and staggered descent to the Guadiana valley to surrender to the national troops. His brigade, the 109th, stationed since the summer in Talarrubias (Badajoz), had to do so a week later, at a ford in the river known as “la barca.” Very dense smoke covered the town square. The tired faces of the few officers in uniform were illuminated by the bonfires. They had to burn and render useless everything, including their two brand new Mercedes Prima typewriters. Before adding the second to the fire, they discovered that a boy was watching. They knew him, his family had treated them well, so they decided to give her to him. “Take it, for yourself, so that you can use it.” That boy, Octavio Gonzálvez Ruiz, just turned 100 years old. He smiles and proudly shows off his machine, while he recites to his daughter Inmaculada the scene that she has carried intact in her head all these years.

“The night before, the troops in the Civil Guard Barracks loaded their luggage and escaped urgently. That night and the following nights we couldn’t sleep.” Gonzálvez kept the machine, at his house they never said anything. He began studying, finished high school and law school many years later. In 1975 he used it to write his own memoirs. His daughter gave them to Fernando Barrero Arzac, who has spent decades documenting the history of all these families that he feels are his own. Andrés, the commissioner of Brigade 109, was his grandfather. He has now received the machine with the same task of keeping alive the memory of those defeated soldiers who, in the most difficult moment of their lives, bet on Gonzálvez’s innocence.

The end of the war remains an open question. The denunciations and accusations crossed during decades of exile reduced to pieces everything that happened afterwards. The intrahistory of that army, of hundreds of thousands of men who remained to face a more than uncertain future, is still unknown. The Republicans initiated the so-called Plan P, designed by Vicente Rojo, to attack and break the Francoist rearguard in two, but it was too late. Queipo de Llano, inactive since the beginning of the war, was deployed before the Almadén mines could be disabled, definitively cutting the border with Portugal and pocketing a huge enemy army intact. Among them were the members of the 109th battalion who delivered the machine to Gonzálvez before surrendering.

The members of the 109th brigade had spent almost the entire war together. On November 7, 1937, they were photographed at their command post. On the back of the photo, Sergeant Pedro Pérez Cano, standing with his tunic buttoned, wrote: “The war is in full swing. Here with my companions, in Malpartida de la Serena.” His son Luis, who keeps it as his most precious asset, has enlarged the negatives. The background image shows the quadrant of a monthly weapons magazine. They were at their best, organizationally and morally. He smiled, nothing made that sergeant from Cartagena think that he would end up in a concentration camp in Toledo. After several years of prison, he returned, like many of his companions, to the place where he had spent the war. They had forged a special bond with the people of the area. A union that remained alive long after, as Gonzálvez explains in his memoirs of Siberia in Extremadura.

In the image, Captain Amador Álvarez looks at the photographer while holding the phone. The war brought him on a train from far away, but he would live there until his death. Before him he had to go through the Castuera field and the Brunete penal detachment, “redeeming punishment.” Shortly before leaving, in 1944, he was able to send this photo among the censored correspondence. The prisoner’s suit barely projected his shadow on the desolate landscape of post-war Spain. The soldier who types the typewriter is Francisco Buj Pastor, the company’s clerk. He had arrived with other Aragonese in June 1937 and, on his first night on duty, he was greeted with a hail of shrapnel.

His son Paco guards a treasure, Memories of the Civil War (unpublished, 1980, Terrassa). In them she wanted his father to organize all his memories, starting at the end. They left their weapons before crossing the river and surrendered in columns. After a search in which they said goodbye to their few belongings, they were taken to a place they called the farmhouse or Casa de Zaldívar. He spent his captivity with his friend Pepe García, from Puerto de Sagunto, waiting for reports from his town that never came. Finally, thanks to the mayor’s daughter, “girlfriend of a soldier from Caspe”, they got him to personally endorse them.

Franco’s documentation offers a complete overview of the entire area. In that sector, the Southern Army took 3,000 prisoners in a single day. They took them on foot to the Casa de Zaldívar farmhouse, 15 kilometers from Puebla de Alcocer. A month later they were already guarding nearly 5,000 prisoners. The order arrived. On April 26 they were transferred to the Castuera concentration camp. Only a small group remained that had to be taken to another farmhouse, that of the Boticaria, “in fulfillment of missions that do not allow delay.” There were, along with those waiting there, about two hundred men from different brigades, classified and selected in advance. It was no use burning the documentation. On May 15, the sun was shining brightly when they finished digging their own grave. Their bodies lay in the olive grove, mixed with those of several residents of the area, until the spring of 1978. It was the first exhumation of the Civil War in Extremadura. The Mercedes Prima on 109 sounded again.