Dennis Hollingsworth

A Real Grimace

I met up with our old freind Craig last night, and he returned my favorite book, Dark and Bloody Ground. I found a description in a googled eBay page: Edited and with an introduction by Victor Guerrier. Though born in Spain, Perez Lopez was raised in France and thus became a member of the International Brigades serving as a guerrilla leader of the First Death Platoon under the name of "El Mexicano".

Here at the end of an early chapter titled "First Jobs", Lopez relates how in his mid teens, he worked in the circus as a clown:

I traveled in a beautiful trailer with three clowns who taught me the trade. We did not have to set up the tent. As soon as we arrived we practiced our roles. First, they taught me how to take slaps. Usually the slaps are for fun and you make the noise by clapping your hands together. But they dealt me real slaps and I made a funny grimace. That was just what they wanted: it was the only way to learn to make a real grimace. It was the same with falling off a bench. First they had me sit on a bench, then without warning, they shoved me off, hard. I hurt myself falling and got up bent double with pain. Again that was what the wanted: my contortions were natural. Then they taught me to fall, throwing my elbows out behind at just the right moment. Then it was falling on my head, covering it with my arms at the last moment to protect it. Finally, we rehearsed a number. Once we knew it well, always making the same gestures, the same grimaces and saying the same words, there was nothing to doing it before the public. I made people laugh and was a great success. The director was very pleased. We traveled around France for a month. But when the circus went to Marseille to embark for South America, I left it and went back home.

This adventure made me a celebrity in my friends' eyes. They were not the flower of the town. With them I had become a steady customer of the local whorehouses. I knew all the girls. Sometimes their pimps would ask me to place girls for them in N?mes, Arles, Aix or Marseille. The police started keeping an eye on me.

At the time the Spanish Republic was beginning its propaganda campaign to get young Spanairds in France to enlist in the army. I could see myself in helmet and bandolier. That didn't appeal to my grandmother. To change my mind, she decided that the whole family would leave for Algeria to visit my successful great-uncles there.