ice bucket with the bottle of Dom Perignon leaning at a jaunty angle and a note card propped against the side.
Dear R: Bienvenidos a Madrid. We are honored that you can leave your busy schedule to join us. Your presence here will help make this a great and historically ACCURATE film. I’ve always said we couldn’t do it without you.
Abrazos, TJ
P.S. Take the day off. Drink champagne. Get some rest. Enjoy!! See you Jarama tomorrow! No pasaran!
I start to crumple the note, then think better of it. Here’s a possible piece of documentation for the new book.
The telephone buzzes as I am about to get into the shower. It’s too early for local friends and too late for California, so it must be the production office in search of their daily bit of historical data. That’s one of my jobs. Historical Consultant. I wrote the book, I must know all the facts. Or so the producers think. Early on I tried to respond honestly to their questions. When asked how many Americans were in the trenches of Jarama on February 22, 1937, I played the good academic and said: Nobody really knows. The records aren’t complete. This wasn’t a regular army. Lots of paperwork never got done, lots of stuff was lost in the great retreats, or shipped to the Soviet Union. Some who claim to have been at Jarama were still back at the training camp in Tarazona. Some guys got to the front lines without being listed. The best I can do is put the figure at somewhere between 375 and 425.
Not good enough, shouts Rick Toomey, the line producer. I can’t work with approximate. You’re the goddamn historian. Give me facts. Isn’t history facts?
No, not exactly. But neither he nor you really want to hear a lecture on the epistemology of historical knowledge. Surely you don’t want me to go on about how facts are, as we say, constituted by the discourse—or to make it simpler, by the way we write the past (discourse being one of those scholarly words that nobody inside the academy can give up and nobody outside it wants to hear). It’s simpler than it sounds. There are all these traces of stuff that happened in the past, documents, letters, newspapers, artifacts, but nothing becomes a fact, a useful piece of data, until we use in a story that involves connecting it to other facts and claiming we understand how these facts affect each other.
End of lecture.
Soon enough I dropped the academic approach and adapted to the historical logic of production, one based on a different kind of fact: how many extras must be hired for a particular sequence? Now it was easy to be precise. When we shoot the February 27 sequence, 413 extras will storm up the slopes of Mount Pingarron.
I pick up the phone.
Professor Benjamin.
Yes.
Good morning. Eduardo Gonzalo Hernandez here, from the American Embassy. Assistant Secretary to the Secretary to the Assistant Vice Consul for Cultural Affairs.
Good morning.
Welcome back to Spain, Professor Benjamin. We at the Embassy know and admire your work.
Thank you.
We want to consult with you about the . . . the project that brings you here. The film of your book, Crusade in Spain.
Fine with me.
The Embassy car will pick you up in forty five minutes.
Not right now. I’m exhausted. I just got off a flight from the States.
Sorry, but we really need you right away. We understand that you must be tired and we won’t keep you more than a few minutes. But it’s very important. Your government needs you.
I say okay before he begins to sing the Star Spangled Banner. I suppose it’s my government even at nine in the morning. Even if I haven’t cared much for the people running it for the last few decades.
Embassies give me the creeps. At the entrance, the usual tall unsmiling marines with slit eyes, wearing blue pants with red stripes at the seams, khaki shirts and neckties, white peaked caps and white gloves. A sergeant behind bullet proof glass checks my passport against a computer screen. Next to him, a sweaty looking civilian with a huge, plastic ID card hanging from the pocket of his jacket, smiles and waves. This assistant to an assistant something leads me down long hallways, past offices that contain more computer screens than people, up in an elevator, and along more corridors. He is not Gonzalo Hernandez. I never do meet Gonzalo Hernandez. In an office with low, modern furniture, I am greeted by Manolo Rodriguez and Alten Pryce-Wilson, veritable stereotypes in their dark suits, striped neckties, highly polished black wingtip shoes. In the Sixties we used to say that only FBI men wore such shoes.
Each hands me a card with the title Program Officer. Rodriguez says Call me Manny. He speaks what my father would have called the King’s English, assuming the king were from the south side of Chicago. Pryce-Wilson’s voice is full of the tones of Back Bay and Harvard Yard. We drink lukewarm coffee and nibble on stale churros during what must be the requisite minutes of flattery for any guest. Like two men with a football, they begin to toss my career back and forth, mentioning things I have forgotten and others I prefer not to remember. Praise for my books, my Guggenheim, my NEH fellowship, and my Fulbright. Pryce-Wilson clucks over my stint at Oxford, saying Magdalene College just the way you are supposed to: Maudlin. Then it’s my military service—are they digging!—as a tank commander, with no wry comment that it was only in a training company. I brace myself, but they never do get around to the three volumes in the Michigan Series on Modern History that I stole from the Fort Knox library and smuggled home in the bottom of my duffle bag. I never actually read them, but they are still on the shelf in my office.
Pryce-Wilson clears his throat. From this point, he does all the talking, Rodriguez all the smiling.
We are at a delicate moment in relations between our two countries. We don’t want to threaten what we have achieved by so much effort over the years. Anything foolish could upset the apple cart. You as an eminent historian can understand that.
So could a high school cheerleader. I keep the thought to myself.
Spain is a democracy. Free press, free speech, free elections, a member of the European Community. The king is a democrat. The king’s mother’s a democrat. Even the fascists are democrats.
He and Rodriguez begin to laugh together. They sound like a sitcom soundtrack, distant, tinny and fake. I lean forward, pick up the coffee cup, and ask what Spanish politics has to do with me. Pryce-Wilson explains that there are terrorist elements in Spain. The Basques. Their radical organization, ETA, kills policemen and politicians. They have moved out of Bilbao, spread across the country, made contact with others here who would like to destroy democracy. Lots of people in Spain dislike having U.S. air and naval bases on Spanish soil. Some of them are on the far right, some on the far left, some are regionalists. History is important here. Everyone looks to precedents for what they are doing or want to do. It’s a dangerous moment.
Intense words about the importance of history can only be cheery for someone who has spent so many years in the profession. Save for teachers, editorial page writers, and politicians on ceremonial occasions, everybody else finds academic history far too boring to read or quote. Film is a different story. Let Oliver Stone make a movie about a President or a Vietnam vet, and half the people in the country become passionate historical critics. But the interest doesn’t last. When you meet an attractive woman at a party a few weeks later and mention your occupation, she doesn’t want to talk about Vietnam or Nixon, but says History was my least favorite subject at school and stalks off to refresh her drink.
Pryce-Wilson
