By JEAN MARC VON DER WEID*
It is with great longing for this incredible character that I write these memories that, I hope, will be able to say something so that future generations will become aware and reflect on his life of tireless struggles.
I knew Apolônio de Carvalho by reputation, stories told by my brother-comrade Paulo Pinheiro, but I only saw him in the flesh for the first time in October 1972. I had come from a long period of intense travels through Europe and North America on campaigns to denounce the dictatorship since I left Chile at the beginning of March 1971 and decided to take a break.
I accepted an invitation from Paulo to go on vacation in a borrowed car, on a wide circuit that began when we met in Annemasse, on the border between France and Switzerland, going down the Rhône Valley to Marseille and following the Mediterranean coast to Andorra, entering Spain, Portugal and returning north to Paris. The program included a meeting with Apolônio de Carvalho in Marseille.
It was a beautiful autumn, the kind called Indian era or Indian summer, an extension of the hot days before a more brutal drop in the thermometers. Apolônio de Carvalho arrived in Marseille just one day before us and we met right away. He was delighted to have won a tough battle with the French government, which had refused to allow him to enter the country since his liberation in July 1970. He was held for a long time in Algeria, where the banished members of the group of forty were sent.
The Pompidou government was forced to give in under pressure from former anti-Nazi resistance movements who, regardless of their political views, came together to demand that the hero of the liberation of Marseille be allowed to return. The permission, in a petty way, restricted Apolônio de Carvalho's freedom of movement, limiting him to the city where he had led the resistance. But Apolônio was overjoyed and immediately offered to show us the Marseille of the resistance.
We spent a day and a half walking with Apolônio, telling the adventures since the first action carried out against German soldiers, using an old revolver that could not withstand fire, knives and clubs. They killed three soldiers and took the weapons with which they could carry out other operations with greater safety and thus they began arming the recruits chosen by the French Communist Party to join the FTP (French tireurs and partisans – guerrillas). He also told of his arrest and escape organized in conjunction with the English bombers who destroyed the prison where he was being held.
We noticed that the city's geography did not make it easy to surprise and escape during operations, as all the streets seemed to converge on the port. Apolônio de Carvalho laughed and said that the Germans were also intrigued until the end of the war. The Gestapo offered rewards to anyone who could show them escape routes, and tortured and killed anyone they managed to capture, but the secret was well kept.
Apolônio de Carvalho took us to the edge of the dock and said that the escape route was under the sea, from one end of the dock to the other. How? “In that restaurant on the right there is a wine cellar with an underground passage that crosses the cove and exits through a warehouse on the other side.” It was something little known, an old legacy of the religious wars of the 16th century, recovered by the guerrillas.
We walked to the restaurant and Apolônio de Carvalho said: “It looks exactly the same! I wonder if the owners are still alive?” and we went in to check. It was a lazy afternoon, and we were taking a nap in a hammock, and the restaurant was empty. Only a young woman of about 20 was sitting at the cash register reading a magazine. Apolônio asked about Monsieur Bernard (if I’m not mistaken) and the young woman replied that he was her grandfather, but he had died many years ago. Apolônio de Carvalho was saddened by the news, but asked about his wife and jumped for joy when he learned that Madame Machine (I don’t remember her name) was alive and well, although very old.
Her granddaughter went to get her while we sat fanning ourselves in the humid heat typical of Marseilles. Soon a lady in black slowly came down the back stairs of the restaurant and came over to us. Apolônio de Carvalho stood up and asked: “Madame Machine, do you remember me?” The old woman fixed her myopic eyes on our companion and put on a pair of bottle-bottom glasses to look again.Monsieur Martin! C'est bien vous?"And she began to cry when Apolônio hugged her. He was speechless, moved, and the two of us even more so, with the famous lump in our throats. Both of us regretted that their deceased husband was not there to see his companion in the clandestine struggles again.
And there was no way around it: the old lady took us to the kitchen and we watched the production of the best bouillabaisse that I have ever eaten. After a hearty lunch accompanied by a great sauvignon blanc very dry and cold, the lady told her granddaughter to take us to the cellar so that Apolônio de Carvalho could show us the underwater escape route of the French resistance in Marseille. Among many lying barrels of various sizes, the girl stopped in front of one of the largest and told us to knock on the wood. The sound was of a full barrel wherever we knocked, and the young woman opened a tap and poured wine into a mug.
She turned a device that opened the barrel like a door, revealing a dry space that led to an opening at the bottom of the barrel through the stone wall of the cellar. We entered the barrel and went down a staircase made of masonry that had been worn down by the passage of fugitives over many centuries. We walked about two hundred meters and felt the walls wet – we were under the sea. Soon we came across a thick grate that blocked our passage and they explained to us that the city council had closed the tunnel due to the risk of collapse.
Apolônio de Carvalho told us that the fighters passed through there after attacks against the German military and police of the collaborationist Vichy regime, sometimes waiting for hours while the enemy surrounded the port from all sides.
The history of Brazilian fighters in the French resistance was marked by the leadership roles of two of them. Apolônio de Carvalho was better known, as he was the commander of the entire southeast area of Provence. The other figure was another militant and leader of the PCB, Davi Capistrano, who commanded the resistance area in southwest Provence, based in Toulouse. Both followed the same route, arriving in Spain to fight on the Republican side in 1936, on the instructions of the party.
Apolônio de Carvalho told us an episode of the civil war, in the last days of the Catalan front in 1938. I was impressed by the wealth of detail in the description, both from a military and human point of view, and even the geography of the terrain through which the remains of the republican regiments were passing towards the border with France. He, promoted to captain of a machine gun company, covered the retreat of both the combatants and a group of civilians who were trying to escape Franco's troops, famous for the massacres committed after the fighting.
After holding off the enemy for a few hours, Apolônio de Carvalho retreated with his company, destroyed the guns and crossed the French border near Baniuls. At this point Apolônio consoled a Spanish lieutenant who was crying in helpless despair: “courage companion! In one year we will be in Madrid”. He laughed a lot about his optimism in the midst of the collapse of the republican cause and added: “34 years have passed and I’m still waiting…”. And he waited another six years until the Moncloa Pact brought a negotiated end to the sinister Francoist regime.
In 1977, I participated in an amnesty event in Lisbon, organized by CBA Portugal (Mink, Sirkis, Domingos, Almir and others) with the support of the MFA government. There were four of us invited from abroad: Artur Poerner came from Germany, José Barbosa (former president of the Metalworkers' Union of São Bernardo) from Switzerland, Apolônio de Carvalho and I from France. After a week of debates and events on various topics on the democratic agenda, we ended with a demonstration in a huge square with 10 Portuguese people in solidarity, mobilized by all the leftist groups in the country.
We decided that we would give speeches in order of political importance, starting with Poerner, followed by me and Zé, and, to top it off, Apolônio. We managed to make short and impactful speeches that warmed up the audience for Apolônio de Carvalho’s entrance. I will never forget the introduction by the master of ceremonies: “and now the lieutenant of the 1935 uprising in Brazil will speak, the captain of the Spanish Republican Army in 1937, the colonel of the French Resistance in 1944, Apolônio de Carvalho.” It was a climax. The “howling masses,” as Vladimir would say, roared “A-PO-LÔ-NIO, A-PO-LÔ-NIO,” nonstop for about five minutes. It was hair-raising.
We returned to Paris together on a plane that had to make a stopover in Porto, and I had the privilege of listening to Apolônio de Carvalho tell stories about his life for several hours, drinking more than one bottle of Douro wine. Impressed by the richness of his stories and the delicious way he told them, I insisted to René about the need to write the story of this exceptional character. René simply told me that if I wanted to, I could try, and I did.
It didn't work. As soon as I turned on a tape recorder in front of Apolônio de Carvalho, he took on the personality of a party leader and answered all my questions with political analyses, forgetting the episodes that I had heard on more than one occasion and that seemed more interesting to me than political abstractions. I gave up.
It took years for him to open up more and talk about his rich experiences, which resulted in two very interesting books of memoirs, but still far from what I had heard in informal conversations. I think that Apolônio had a bias towards humility common to the best of the old communists, which tended to erase the individual and his role in order to value that of the social forces and the party.
It is with great longing for this incredible character that I write these memories that, I hope, will be able to say something so that future generations will become aware of and reflect on his life of tireless struggles for socialism, here and in other arenas of contemporary history.
*Jean Marc von der Weid is a former president of the UNE (1969-71). Founder of the non-governmental organization Family Agriculture and Agroecology (ASTA).
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