Cry, Children, Cry

CHILD OF OUR TIME (281 pp.)--Michel del Castillo--Knopf ($3.75).

The 20th century has supped so full of horrors that it has all but digested its conscience. The age prattles of guilt, yet rarely feels it. Man's inhumanity to man has become not so much a cause for tears as merely another Cause. To get beneath this thick-skinned indifference, a book need not be a masterpiece, but it must speak the language of the heart so guilelessly as to make sophistication a mockery and callousness a crime. Such a book, and a small masterpiece, is Michel del Castillo's Child of Our Time.

Like The Diary of Anne Frank, this story takes its unproclaimed text from the New Testament: "But whoso shall offend one of these little ones ... it were better for him that a millstone were hanged about his neck, and that he were drowned in the depth of the sea." The offense against Author del Castillo (who calls himself Tanguy in this autobiographical novel) began with the Spanish Civil War. At the age of three he saw corpses in the streets of Madrid, an omen of the dread commonplaces that would haunt his boyhood. Though his mother was a militant left-wing journalist, the Communists shortly clapped her into jail. His father, a social-climbing Frenchman who detested his wife's politics, had left for France before the war. But when the Loyalists lost, mother and son threw themselves on his untender mercies. When they arrived in France, he met them in a crowd of other refugees. Ignoring the boy, the father took one look at his wife and snapped, "You turn up with all this riffraff Hate the World. Still, Tanguy was happy in the little house outside Vichy where they settled, and for a while he felt like "an ordinary boy again." But the parents quarreled, and his mother decided to move on. The police arrested the woman and child on vague political charges. "Who denounced us?" asked Tanguy. "Your father," was the reply. At that moment Tanguy hated the whole world, "his father and mother, the policemen ... all grownups, because they seemed to hate him, and he was only seven years old."

Tanguy and his mother spent 18 months in a concentration camp in South France before she arranged to escape via a kind of underground railway. "Please, please don't leave me behind, Mama," begged Tanguy, and as he watched her go, he felt that "an iron hand was squeezing him inside" and that he would die of misery. ("He had not yet learned that no one ever dies of misery.") The plan was for Tanguy to follow his mother a few days later, on his ninth birthday, but the Nazis closed the escape hatch.

Mistakes Will Happen. Tanguy was herded into a sealed cattle car with a group of Jewish children bound for a German concentration camp. For 3 1/2 days, under a broiling August sun. the railroad car remained unopened while the children wept, sickened, and gradually lost control of their natural functions. Tanguy kept up his courage by believing that it was all a "mistake," and that once the authorities found out that he was not Jewish they would send him back to his mother. The word "mistake" recurs through Del Castillo's book and picks up the same rhetorical power and irony that the words "honourable men" do in Mark Antony's funeral oration, rising at last to an almost cosmic indictment of a universe in which such monstrous "mistakes" can happen.

What happened to Tanguy at the Nazi camp adds little to the all too familiar living-death literature. What gives it a special horror in this book is that it all happens to a little boy. Tanguy would surely have died but for a German friend named Gunther who mothered him, fired his flagging will to live, and, before his own death, left the boy a matchless maxim: "Leave hate to those who are too weak to love."

Orphanage by Dickens. Peace brought no peace to Tanguy. He went back to Spain, but found no trace of his mother. He was sent to an orphans' and delinquents' home that might have been imagined by Dickens. It was run by sadistically inclined lay brothers. Tanguy took his beatings without a whimper: he "had exhausted his capacity for crying, just as he had drained away his reservoir of hope."

After jumping over the wall in the narrowest of escapes, Tanguy and his odyssey of torment moved from darkness into light. He was enrolled in a Jesuit school for the children of Andalusian peasants.

In the school's founder Tanguy found a substitute for the loving father he had never known: Father Pardo "was not a saint in the strict sense. But he was a real man, which is almost as rare."

What Now? At 19 Tanguy still cherished the image of a kind of prodigal son's return. But when he finally found his father in Paris, the boy was coldly rebuffed. Tanguy's mother, who also turned up in Paris, had equally little use for him. She was still a left-winger, lost in the intellectual Minotaur's cave of the '30s. At novel's end, with a wistful touch of Chaplinesque pathos, the 25-year-old Del Castillo, currently living in Paris, asks, "What is to become of Tanguy now?" and offers the shadow of a hope that he may "even come to find life the wonder and delight it should be; who knows?"

The artlessness with which Author del Castillo achieves a child's angle of vision makes his boy-hero Tanguy one of the most endearing and poignant figures in recent fiction. Child of Our Time is both a grim and a grand commentary on the human condition. The first response to this book is elemental--to weep. The second response is to marvel that Michel del Castillo endured what he did, and that, having endured, he could still forgive so much that is eternally unforgivable.

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