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Title: Pagan Spain
Author: Wright, Richard [Richard Nathaniel] (1908-1960)
Date of first publication: 1957
Edition used as base for this ebook:
   New York: Harper & Brothers, 1957
   [first edition]
Date first posted: 12 December 2020
Date last updated: 12 December 2020
Project Gutenberg Canada ebook #1665

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Italics in the original printed edition are indicated _thus_.

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PAGAN SPAIN

by Richard Wright




    For my friends

    ALVA AND GUNNAR MYRDAL

    who suggested this book and whose
    compassionate hearts have long
    brooded upon the degradation of
    human life in Spain.




    How poor indeed is man...

    --NIETZSCHE




    I tell you the past is a bucket of ashes.
    I tell you yesterday is a wind gone down,
        a sun dropped in the west.
    
    --CARL SANDBURG





LIFE AFTER DEATH




CHAPTER 1


In torrid August, 1954, I was under the blue skies of the Midi, just a
few hours from the Spanish frontier. To my right stretched the flat,
green fields of southern France; to my left lay a sweep of sand beyond
which the Mediterranean heaved and sparkled. I was alone. I had no
commitments. Seated in my car, I held the steering wheel in my hands. I
wanted to go to Spain, but something was holding me back. The only thing
that stood between me and a Spain that beckoned as much as it repelled
was a state of mind. God knows, totalitarian governments and ways of
life were no mysteries to me. I had been born under an absolutistic
racist regime in Mississippi; I had lived and worked for twelve years
under the political dictatorship of the Communist party of the United
States; and I had spent a year of my life under the police terror of
Pern in Buenos Aires. So why avoid the reality of life under Franco?
What was I scared of?

For almost a decade I had ignored the admonitions of my friends to visit
Spain--the one country of the Western world about which, as though
shunning the memory of a bad love affair, I did not want to exercise my
mind. I had even resisted the solemn preachments of Gertrude Stein who,
racked with pain and with only a few days to live, had counseled me
(while nervously tugging with the fingers of her right hand at a tuft of
hair on her forehead):

"Dick, you ought to go to Spain."

"Why?" I had asked her.

"You'll see the past there. You'll see what the Western world is made
of. Spain is primitive, but lovely. And the people! There are no people
such as the Spanish anywhere. I've spent days in Spain that I'll never
forget. See those bullfights, see that wonderful landscape...."

And still I had not gone. During the Spanish Civil War I had published,
in no less than the New York _Daily Worker_, some harsh judgments
concerning Franco; and the dive bombers and tanks of Hitler and
Mussolini had brutally justified those judgments. The fate of Spain had
hurt me, had haunted me; I had never been able to stifle a hunger to
understand what had happened there and why. Yet I had no wish to
resuscitate mocking recollections while roaming a land whose free men
had been shut in concentration camps, or exiled, or slain. An uneasy
question kept floating in my mind: How did one live after the death of
the hope for freedom?

Suddenly resolved, I swung my car southward, toward those humped and
ragged peaks of the Pyrenees which, some authorities claim, mark the
termination of Europe and the beginning of Africa. The look of the world
darkened; a certain starkness of mood hovered over the landscape.
Gray-green masses of bald rock reared toward a distant and indifferent
sky. I edged my car along in the wake of the car ahead, circling round
the snaky curves of the tilting mountain slopes, glancing now and then
from the narrow road to plunging precipices that yawned but a yard from
my elbow.

Toward evening, under a remote and paling sky, I crossed the frontier
and entered my first Spanish town--a too quiet, dreary conglomeration of
squat, pastel-tinted houses: Le Perthus. Ringed by a horizon of
blue-green, naked mountains whose somber hues altered with the passing
hours, this border town, after the tension and rush of life in Nice,
Cannes, and Paris, seemed alien of aspect, torpid, forgotten, marooned
in the past. Being a national whose country had air bases on Spanish
soil, the customs and immigration requirements were but a formality, yet
I had to wait, and wait. Fatigued, I garaged my car and decided to spend
the night in Le Perthus and take the coastal road for Barcelona the next
morning. My hotel room, with bath, cost one dollar and a quarter, as
against twelve dollars that a dingier room, without bath, would have
fetched on the Cte d'Azur. My seven-course dinner, with wine, penalized
me one dollar and a half, but when I learned that the waiter serving me
had a salary of only one hundred pesetas (plus tips) a month, I began to
understand. (A peseta has roughly the value of a large Irish potato and
it would take about forty-five of such potatoes to buy the equivalent of
a dollar's worth of anything.) My shower had no curtain; when I used it,
water flooded the floor. There were no ashtrays; one dropped ashes upon
the beautiful Moorish tiles and smothered burning butts with one's heel.
The furnishings were shiny, rickety; the table sagged threateningly when
I placed my typewriter upon it. My elbow collided accidentally with the
thin headboard of my bed and I was startled by a deep, vibrating boom,
as though a huge drum had been struck. Several times an hour the
electric bulb dimmed momentarily.

Awakened by the melancholy tolling of churchbells and the strident,
reedy crowing of cocks, I rose and found the morning air bracingly cool,
the sky lowering and gray. The wall of mountains enclosing the town was
dim and shadowy, half drowned in an ocean of mist. I pulled into a gas
station and tanked up, for I'd been warned that gas was scarce. As I
released my car brake and clutched to leave, a Civil Guard officer
wearing a dark green uniform, a gleaming black patent-leather hat and
nonchalantly dangling a machine gun at his side, confronted me, clapped
his hand upon my right shoulder, and sadly blabbered something in
Spanish. I blinked, understanding nothing; I was in a police state and I
thought: _This is it_.... I extended my passport, but he waved that
aside, shaking his head. The gas station attendant spoke French and told
me that I was not being arrested, that the man merely wished a lift. The
officer was clad most imposingly and I could not believe that one of his
rank did not have a car at his disposal. I consented and he climbed in,
machine gun and all.

Having no language in common, we both were prey to a curious and uneasy
compulsion to talk, not to communicate but to try to let each other know
that we were civilized and of good will. We chatted at random, keeping
fixed smiles on our faces, furtively glancing at each other out of the
corners of our eyes, and then laughing unnaturally loud and long at our
inability to understand what the other was saying. I divined that he was
asking me if I were an American Negro, if I liked Spain, and I also
guessed that he was trying to tell me something about his family....
Then suddenly he touched my arm and made motions with his right foot,
pumping jerkily and vigorously downward. Thinking that he was signaling
for speed, I pressed the accelerator and the car shot forward. He hugged
his machine gun, looked at his wrist watch, doubled his fists and again
motioned with his foot for me to press down. I jammed the accelerator to
the floor, feeling that if I were hailed for speeding I had an officer
of the law at my side as my alibi. Finally, he grew desperate and,
walling his eyes, he shook his head. I got the point: he had been urging
me to step on the brake. I drew to a side of the road and offered to
drive him back over the distance that I had overshot his destination,
but, thanking me profusely, he would have none of it. We parted, shaking
hands, waving frantically and nervously at each other, laughing
uproariously, trying to fill the void that gaped between us. Head down,
he lumbered off, his machine gun cradled in his arm.




CHAPTER 2


Over reddish, undulating country the road advanced tortuously up into
dark and jagged mountains whose scarred peaks soared till they blended
with gray-blue mist. The day grew gradually brighter, revealing a bleak,
seemingly diseased and inhospitable landscape that grudged the few
patches of scrubby vegetation showing against vast humped mounds of
leprous-looking rubble. Later, dainty groves of stunted, dark green
olive trees clung precariously to the slanting mountainsides, their
filagreed leaves glowing like silver in the deepening morning's light.
The mountain road was rough and steeply inclined and the hairpin curves
came sharp and unexpected and my body could feel the heavy tug of
gravity as I twisted the steering wheel. Against a background of stacks
of cone-shaped, yellow-brown hay, I saw a stout peasant woman dressed in
bright red; she was trudging laboriously, her face downcast, her head
balancing a huge earthen jug of water. Farther, I passed another
peasant; he was perched atop his creaking, manure-filled cart; in his
right fist he clutched a gaudy, rolled-up, frayed comic book, his dull
eyes staring vacantly out across the splayed ears of his fuzzy-dirty
donkey that ambled along with the slow movements of an equine
sleepwalker.

Ahead, spanning the road, was a beautifully arched white stone bridge at
each end of which stood a Civil Guard in gleaming black patent-leather
hats and dark green uniforms, each with a machine gun nestling in the
crook of his right arm. Respect for the show of power made me brake my
car, anticipating my being stopped and challenged. They stared at me and
I at them, but they made no sign. I drove over the bridge and rolled on,
uncertain, feeling a naked vulnerability creeping down the skin of my
back. I was not accustomed to armed strangers of unknown motives
standing in my rear and I waited to hear _raatatatatatat_ and feel hot
slugs of steel crashing into my car and into my flesh. But nothing
happened. I increased my speed, thankful for the distance between me and
the black muzzles of those machine guns. Why were the bridges under
guard? Under this calm, dreary landscape there seemed to lurk coiled
tensions, fears.

Five kilometers farther I approached another bridge and, again, two
Civil Guards with machine guns on their forearms stood on duty. I slowed
to pass them and their black, staring eyes met mine for a split second
and then they were behind me. I studied their reflection in my rear
mirror, bothered, frowning, feeling exposed to danger. Another five
kilometers brought me abreast of yet another bridge with its now
inevitable two Civil Guards and their ready machine guns. Once more
instinct prompted me to slacken the speed of my car; then suddenly an
idea, or rather an impulse, came to my aid. Timidly, I lifted my right
hand in a greeting, a shy, friendly salute. And the two soldiers came to
attention, smiled, and waved their hands at me in return. I sighed,
relieved. It had been simply a gesture, human in intent, to determine if
those men who held those murderous weapons knew or understood the
meaning of fraternity, if they shared my kind of humanity, if they had
reactions that coincided with my own. My tension ebbed a bit.




CHAPTER 3


Coming round a mountain, my first Spanish village arrived in a pall of
heat and dust. Scrawny black goats nibbled at starved grass; stunted,
barefoot boys minded dreamy sheep. A swarthy young woman at an outdoor
hydrant registered bewilderment upon seeing my face; then she stared,
breaking into a knowing smile. What was she thinking? Did I remind her
of Moors? The irregular paving stones made my car do a nervous dance.
The walls of the whitewashed houses held lurid bullfight posters. This
village was conspicuous for the prevalence of dogs in it; they mingled
with the inhabitants on a plane of equality, sleeping in doorways, in
the middle of the streets. And every dog in Spain seemed in heat; canine
copulation was everywhere. Overtaking a truck in a narrow street, I
started violently: a huge dog, four feet from my windshield, his great
paws balancing him on top of the truck, spewed at me a torrent of
ear-splitting barks, his long white fangs showing, his gleaming red
tongue hanging out, flecks of foam flying from his gaping mouth. (Almost
all trucks on Spanish highways carry dogs to guard the merchandise.)

The road twisted and climbed into the magnificently craggy mountains of
the Costa Brava, and a blue-green sea, shimmering in a noon sun, lay on
my left far below. Hours later I entered the bleak suburbs of Barcelona,
then penetrated into the center of that garishly modern city, cruising
along its tiny, dirty streets, its noisy, ornate boulevards, studying
the neighborhoods.

At Plaza de Catalua I located a bank whose spacious doorway was blocked
by a soldier with that ever-present machine gun. I found more armed
guards standing about in the dim and mute interior. I exhibited my
passport and a plump woman made me sign five different documents, gave
me a tiny metal disk bearing a number, and bade me wait. I watched her
staple my traveler's checks to the documents, stamp them, present them
to an elderly man who leaned back in a swivel chair and studied them
minutely. He signed and stamped them. The woman now took them to yet
another executive who, too, lingeringly, hesitantly, signed and stamped
them. Clutching the bundle of paper, the woman vanished for a quarter of
an hour; she was taking the documents, no doubt, to an even higher
official. Returning, she shoved the papers through a barred window to a
teller who tossed them casually upon a pile. Half an hour later my
number was called. Once more I signed my name, this time as proof of
having changed dollars, then threaded my way past the muzzles of machine
guns to the sun-drenched streets.

I was tired and my thoughts drifted toward shelter for the night. Should
I put up at a modern hotel frequented by tourists, or ought I seek some
small place patronized mostly by Spaniards? I was inclined toward the
latter. While strolling and glancing into bars and shops, I saw two
shirt-sleeved youths chatting upon a street corner. In appearance they
seemed lower middle class and had the air of students.

"_Parlez-vous franais?_" I asked them.

"_Oui, Monsieur. Je parle un peu de franais_," the taller, thinner boy
answered proudly.

Yes, they knew of a clean and cheap pension operated by a friend and
they would be glad to take me there. I sized them up; maybe they were
sharpies? About the neck of the shorter and younger boy hung a silver
medallion of the Virgin and I decided to take a chance. I invited them
into my car and they pointed the way with shy but elaborate gestures.
Five minutes later they directed me to stop before a huge cathedral;
they got out and I followed.

"It's our cathedral," the taller boy told me in French.

I nodded, smiled, but I was puzzled. Maybe they had not understood me?

"But where is the pension?"

"This way," the taller boy said, taking firm hold of my arm.

They led me toward a vast, delicately wrought mass of Gothic splendor
that lifted gracefully toward a hot blue sky. Where were they taking me?

"But the pension," I insisted softly.

"Yes. Later. Later," they spoke together.

Well, if they were crooks, they certainly would not be taking me into a
church! I studied them; they seemed simple, honest, forthright..... We
entered the shadowed interior and I breathed the faint fragrance of
incense and caught wafted echoes of a singing choir. High overhead
floated a vault wrought of fragile stonework encasing countless panes of
stained glass through which soft beams of rose and blue light
fell--diaphanous rays that melted into an ocean of dimness. But why had
they brought me here? I walked forward between them and we came to a
wall that held a jutting, hollowed-out lip of faded marble containing
water. The taller boy dipped the fingers of his right hand into the
basin, crossed himself, moving his lips soundlessly, then he touched his
still wet fingers to the right hand of his friend who, in turn, crossed
himself. Next he touched his damp fingers to my right hand. I stared,
speechless. Both boys now crossed themselves anew and turned toward the
interior of the church, kneeling and crossing themselves once again as
they faced the Holy of Holies.

"You are not Catholic?" the taller boy asked me in a low tone of wonder.

"No," I whispered in reply.

I was deeply moved and, at that moment, a little ashamed of not being
Catholic. I felt that I had somehow hurt those two boys by declaring
myself outside the pale, for I could tell from the expressions on their
faces that they could not conceive of anyone ever being anything other
than Catholic. I began to understand now why they had brought me to the
church; I was a stranger and they were taking me into their Christian
fellowship even before they knew my name, their solicitude cutting
across class and racial lines. And there had been no hint of conscious
propaganda in them. To these boys it was unthinkable that there was no
God and that we were not all His sons.

Brooding, I trailed slowly after them down a shadowed aisle whose
stillness evoked in me a mood of awe; I could feel that I was feeling
it; in short, I was self-conscious. Beyond iron grilles of various
shrines loomed statues of saints clad in velvet and brocade, golden
haloes circling their heads. The trembling glow of many candles
illuminated men, women, and children kneeling, praying, crossing
themselves, their lips moving silently, their sense of worshipful
surrender deep beyond doubting. One shrine was dedicated to plumbers,
another to electricians, another to children, and yet another to
expectant mothers--no section of the population being slighted. A
barefoot girl in a ragged black dress knelt at the side of a
fashionably-dressed woman whose lips were rouged, whose neck was roped
with pearls, and whose fingers sparkled with diamonds.

We paused before a vast basin of white marble.

"That is where the first Indians that Columbus brought from America were
baptized," the taller boy informed me.

It was beginning to make sense; I was a heathen and these devout boys
were graciously coming to my rescue. In their spontaneous embrace of me
they were acting out a role that had been implanted in them since
childhood. I was not only a stranger, but a "lost" one in dire need of
being saved. Yet there was no condescension in their manner; they acted
with the quiet assurance of men who knew that they had the only truth in
existence and they were offering it to me.

I was then escorted through a chapel in which a life-sized statue of
Crucified Jesus, carved from blackened wood, hung from a cross.
Suspended from His hips was a silken skirt held in place by a cord from
which dangled red tassels.

"_Santo Cristo de Sepanto_," the taller boy whispered. "He has given
Spain many victories in war."

A humble woman in black rose from her knees and went forward and kissed
the gnarled, wooden toes of the carved figure, planting her lips in a
spot that had been worn to a much lighter shade by hundreds of
thousands of people.... They led me through the chapel and into a small
enclosure in which five or six men and women were kneeling in silent
prayer with glazed, half-opened eyes. The taller boy took my arm and
pointed to an oblong, transparent box toward which all eyes in the room
were gazing. The light was so dim that I could not at first determine
what the object was. "What is it?" I asked.

"It's the body of one of our great bishops," I was told. "He has made
many miracles."

Then I understood: in a glass coffin lay the mummified remains of a
human body. I saw sunken eye sockets, yellow, protruding teeth, and a
mass of sagging, gray flesh falling away from the cranial structure of
the head. The main portions of the body were mercifully hidden by a
silken robe, though the forearms and hands, like white, running dough,
were visible, and on the shrunken fingers were diamond rings. The boys
crossed themselves and we went out, wordlessly. When we were in the car,
I suggested politely:

"_Maintenant, la pension?_"

"_Oui, Monsieur_," they chorused.

The pension was on the seventh floor of a building in the center of the
city and the manager spoke French. Yes, he had a room.

"But you must take full pension," he warned me. "And you must be in at
ten o'clock each night. And you are not allowed to bring any women up
here."

"What does full pension cost?" I asked him.

"Sixty a day," he said stonily.

Sixty pesetas made a dollar and a half for a room and three meals.

"I'll take it," I said.

"But you must obey the rules," he warned me again. "That's life in
Spain."

I promised to obey. After my two young Spanish friends had helped with
my luggage, I shoved some packages of American cigarettes into their
hands and invited them to a bar for beer.

Both boys were swarthy, black-haired, proud in bearing, too eager in
manner, pliable, and seemingly devoid of the capacity for reflection.
The taller, Andr, was twenty-one; the other, Miguel, was twenty-six.
Andr was a student of maritime science and was on vacation. Miguel, who
carried his arm in a sling (he had fallen from his motorcycle six weeks
before and had broken a bone in his hand), was a skilled woodworker and
earned three hundred pesetas or about seven dollars a week. Andr's and
Miguel's fathers had been childhood friends, and the boys were proud to
celebrate their father's friendship by being friends themselves. Miguel
had a brother, mother and father. Andr's family numbered eight and he
invited me to have dinner with them Sunday.

Both were shy about women. Andr had a fiance, but Miguel would not
commit himself. To their minds, the feminine half of mankind was divided
into two groups: "good" women and "bad" women. "Good" women were women
like their mothers, sisters, and sweethearts; "bad" women were the women
who could be bought, or who could be slept with for nothing. Since they
had to have women and could not have the "good" ones, they frequented
the "bad" ones. And since going to bed with either a "good" or a "bad"
woman was a sin, it was necessary to be forgiven. Both boys went to
confession regularly.

"And every time you go with a 'bad' woman, you confess it?" I asked
Andr.

"Of course," he said.

"And how do you know when a woman is a 'bad' woman?" I asked him.

"Oh, we know where to find them," Andr said, laughing, misunderstanding
my question. "And we'll show you, if you want to know."

I told them that I wrote books, but they could not quite grasp it. My
butane gas lighter astonished them; they had heard vaguely of such
contraptions, but had never seen one; they fondled it, repeatedly
igniting the gas, asking questions for half an hour, exclaiming in a
manner that indicated that Spanish youth was cut off from the multitude
of tiny daily influences of the modern Western world. They had no racial
consciousness whatsoever.

"Who is the head of your government?" I asked them suddenly in French.

"Seor Franco," Andr answered.

"He is like your President," Miguel said sweetly.

I squelched my desire to pry further into politics and ordered more
beer, studying the boys. If Andr's and Miguel's reactions were genuine
examples of Spanish feeling, then Spain possessed a shy sweetness, an
open-handed hospitality that no other people on earth could match.

But why was Spain a dictatorship? I had long believed that where you
found tyranny, such as exists in Russia, you would also find a
confounding freedom secreted somewhere; that where you had a stifling
bureaucracy, such as in France, there was a redeeming element of
personal liberty; that where you had a police state, such as was in
Argentina, you had under it, disguised, a warm comradeship; and that
where you had a restrained and reserved attitude, such as is in England,
you had, somewhere nearby, equalizing it, a licentious impulse to
expression. _Did that principle hold true in Spain?_




CHAPTER 4


If Spain is a police state, then it's a sloppy one; after having had my
passport examined and stamped at the border, no one has asked to see it
since. Though Spanish police regulations require that all private homes,
hotels, or pensions report at once the presence of a stranger on their
premises, no one has as yet done so in my case, for no one has bothered
to find out who I am. I could be any kind of an agent, for or against
them, and how would they know? Soldiers, police, and no doubt
plain-clothes men are everywhere, but they do not seem to be molesting
the public. Of course, I may be dead wrong about this; perhaps they have
snoopers far slicker than I suspect.

My pension was a citadel of bad faith and was populated mostly by lower
middle-class men and women lost in anonymity--single girls traveling in
groups for mutual protection, and sad, white-collar young men, who
mainly for economic reasons, were without families or attachments. The
entire clientele was a damp, quiet, nervous lot whose lives were empty,
who never raised their voices, were retiringly polite, and who seemed
joined in a conspiracy never to mention their debased condition. My
dinner was dull, top-heavy with grease and fried food.

Later that evening I went into the corridor and found a girl sitting
behind the pension desk reading a thin green book. She glanced up,
smiled.

"Good evening, sir." She spoke in English.

"Good evening," I said. "Please, where is the Ramblas?"

"Just three blocks left of here," she said.

"Thank you." I glanced at the title of her book: _Formacin Politica:
Lecciones para las Flechas_.

"If I'm not indiscreet, what kind of book is that?"

"It's my political book."

"Are you interested in politics?" I ventured.

"Well, not particularly," she said in a drawling voice. "I'm studying
this for my social service."

"What kind of social service is that?"

Her face grew serious and she was silent. She rose and came from behind
the desk, pushing her tiny hands deep into the pockets of her dress.

"That's difficult to explain," she began. "Are you American?"

"Yes; I'm a writer," I said.

I picked up her book and rapidly leafed through the pages, seeking
clues; I saw the volume dealt with the aims and principles of the Franco
regime and was in the simple form of questions and answers--a political
catechism for the Spanish masses. Suddenly, desperately, I wanted that
book.

"Where can I buy this book?" I asked her.

"You can't buy it," she said. "They gave it to me at school--"

"You go to school?"

"Five nights a week," she said.

"Wonderful! You're studying English?"

"We don't study English there; it's not an ordinary school," she
explained. "It's a political school...."

"Could you get me a copy of this book?"

She stared at me silently, then sat again behind her desk.

"What do you want with it?" she asked with feigned off-handedness.

"I'm interested in politics."

She thought a bit, then asked: "Were you ever in Spain before?"

"No. This is my first trip," I told her. (It was not until later that I
understood the crucial import of her question: she was trying to
determine, in self-defense, if I had fought on either the Fascist or
Loyalist side during the Spanish Civil War. In other words, if I had
fought with the Loyalists, her association with me might seriously
compromise her.)

"Are you Catholic?" she next asked me.

"I have no religious affiliations," I said.

Her lips parted; she blinked and stared at me, then she hung her head.
Had I offended her? I did not wish to presume any longer; the situation
was delicate. I laid her book back upon her desk. She felt my concern
and she spoke in a whisper, casting a worried glance over her shoulder:
"I can't talk to you _here_. But I'm free; I've no classes...."

"Let's have a drink together in a bar when you get off. There are a lot
of things I'd like to ask you."

"That's difficult," she murmured.

"You can trust me," I urged her.

"It's not _that_.... The problem is _where_."

"I'll pick you up here--"

"No, no," she said, fear showing in her eyes. "You don't understand."

"Then where can I meet you?"

"The lobby of the Majestic Hotel," she said. "At ten."

A door opened and a bevy of girls came into the corridor.

"You'll find the Ramblas just three blocks to the left," she said
loudly.

I understood.

"Thank you," I said and hurried out. I felt strongly that that girl
wanted to talk about her life.

Broad and tree-lined, the Ramblas began at Plaza de Catalua and
terminated at Puerta de la Paz, and it had an atmosphere as cosmopolitan
as that of Paris, London, or New York. Flanking its wide expanse were
cafs, bars, restaurants, movies, night clubs, hotels, and travel
agencies. One could sit at tables under the sky in the balmy night and
watch perfumed and rouged girls strolling arm in arm, and black-haired
young men, walking four and five abreast, marching to and fro--the girls
weighing the blades with coy glances and the young men appraising the
female bodies with hot eyes. The air felt like rain and the smell of the
Mediterranean evoked nostalgia. Overhead tree leaves rustled
whisperingly and when I looked up I saw the light of the moon glistening
like water on the dark green foliage.

I counted no fewer than three policemen to the city block and no doubt
there were secret police mingling with the carefree crowds. So many
soldiers jammed the cheaper bars, loitered on street corners, or
sauntered in groups that one had the impression that Spain was mobilized
for war, had assumed a stance of military alertness to defend itself
against the attack of an enemy. But, no; these troops lived in the midst
of the enemy--the people of Spain. I took a seat next to a bunch of them
and dawdled with a _caf con leche_. Most of them were unshaven, their
uniforms baggy and crinkled and of a sleazy material resembling mattress
ticking, their shoes unshined, their posture slouched and bent, and
their gait loose and uncontrolled, like that of a peasant lumbering over
a plowed field. Were there ever worse troops? These soldiers were a
caricature of a modern army.

At ten o'clock I made my way through a light rain to the Majestic Hotel
and found the girl clerk of my pension waiting in the lobby with the
green book under her arm.

"I'm Carmen," she said, smiling and extending her hand. "I had to phone
my mother...."

She was uneasy and I felt that she was, for her protection, surrounding
herself with the absent members of her family. We went into the bar and
sat at a table and I ordered drinks.

"And she said that you could come?" I asked.

"Since you are an _American_, yes."

"Had I been a Spaniard, you would not have come?"

"I _couldn't_ have come. It's only in an American hotel that I could
meet you without a scandal. You don't know what it means to be a girl in
Spain."

"And what _does_ it mean?"

"I'm supposed to stay home and have babies," she said, grimacing.

"Who says you must do that?"

"Tradition," she said. "I wish I were a man; they are so much nicer--"

"Why?"

"They can do as they like. They are strong. We women are nothing."

"You really feel that way?"

"After your mother, father, and the priest get through with you, you
can't feel anything else," she said bitterly. "Look, I'm twenty-five, I
earn my own living. Yet I can't go out at night. Here--" she gestured to
the Americans seated about us--"it doesn't matter."

Carmen was a short, dark girl with large, shining eyes and an expressive
mouth. When she spoke her words were charged with tense emotion.

"But doesn't your boy friend ever take you to the movies?"

"Yes, and my family raises a storm."

"So what do you do?"

"I go out anyway," she said, laughing. "And that's what is keeping my
home in an uproar."

"Have you ever gone into a bar like this alone?"

"God, no! That would be the _end_.... Every Spaniard who saw me would
insult me, publicly. They'd think that I was looking for men. No 'good'
woman walks the streets alone. Only 'bad' women do that.... A woman
alone is lost in Spain."

"How do you account for Spain being like this?"

"We're Catholic," she said, sighing. "My father's Catholic. All of my
life I've heard that we were the most Catholic country in the world.
What else could we be but Catholic? We've never had a choice to be
anything else. I often wonder how it would have felt to have been born
in England or America or some other country...." She paused, staring at
me. "You told me a joke tonight, when I asked you about your religion."

"I have no religion in the formal sense of the word," I told her. "I
have no race except that which is forced upon me. I have no country
except that to which I'm obliged to belong. I have no traditions. I'm
free. I have only the future."

She sucked in her breath, sighed, and eased her glass down upon the
table.

"I wish I could say that," she murmured. "Just to hear anyone say
anything like that makes me tremble."

"Please, Carmen, let me see that famous green book," I said, laughing to
make her forget her tension and distress.

"You're not subtle," she laughed, her mood lightening; she handed over
the volume. "You're like my brother--direct."

"Neither is this book subtle," I said. "I adore catechisms."

The book was the real thing; it had been designed to inculcate the
principles of Fascism in young girls ranging in age from nine upward. My
Spanish was vague, but I gaped at the sentiments I saw there in cold
type.

"Why are _you_ studying this?" I asked her. "You can be frank with me."

"If I were not going to be frank, I wouldn't have come here tonight,"
she said. She drew in her breath and leaned back in her chair. "It's not
voluntary," she said proudly, defensively. "It's a long story."

"I'm patient," I said.

"Well, it all begins with one fact: I wish to leave Spain more than
anything--"

"Can't you just leave?"

"No. There are governmental difficulties. You see, I know four
languages: Spanish, English, German, and French. I studied them in
school; I can write and speak them. I can get work abroad; I've had
offers.... But, if you're a woman, unmarried, and not a domestic worker,
you must put in six months of social service to the state to prove your
right to leave Spain."

"What's this social work? You mentioned it before."

"This book," she said. "I must memorize this book, line by line, the
_whole_ of it. I must be able to answer every question in it, just as
they are written. It's one hundred and seventy-six pages of small type."

"Why?"

"I don't know," she said, gripping the edge of the table with the tips
of her painted fingernails.

"Is this to make sure that, when you leave Spain, you'll remain faithful
to Franco?"

"No. I'm sure that they are not that stupid," she said. "They just order
you to memorize it, that's all. Oh, I've fought with my parents about
this. They say that this book contains useful knowledge. But what on
earth is useful in my knowing how long were the sleeves of the shirt of
Jos Antonio? The color of his necktie?"

"I must have this book," I said.

"It's yours," she said. "People ought to know how we live." Her eyes
suddenly widened. "But make sure that you blot out my name; it's written
in it."

"I'll do that. But can you get another one?"

"Easily. I'll say that I lost mine." She leaned forward with purpose.
"Now, I must ask you a favor."

"Of course."

"I have a brother, Carlos.... I told him about you over the phone. He
wishes to see you. It's important. Are you free tomorrow?"

"Yes. What does he want to see me about?"

"He'll tell you that himself. He'll be at the pension in the morning at
ten. Is that all right?"

"I'll be glad to meet him at ten," I told her.

I took Carmen home in a taxi through the hot, rainy night.




CHAPTER 5


I returned in the taxi to the Ramblas, got my own car and set out to
meet Andr and Miguel, who had solemnly promised to show me some "bad"
women. They were waiting for me in a garishly-lighted caf that had
sawdust on the floor and dark-visaged waiters who wore aprons spotted
with dirt. My two young friends, dressed in dark suits and striving to
look blas, greeted me warmly and seemed as eager and hospitable tonight
as they had been this morning when they had steered me into the
cathedral.

"Where are we going?" I inquired of them.

"We know," Andr said, nodding mysteriously.

We drank _caf con leche_ and the liquid looked green under the neon
lights. We then set out down a narrow, smelly alleyway; from opened
windows above my head poured harsh sounds of flamenco music,
handclapping, stomping, and the wild, melancholy twanging of guitars.

"Just how well do you know these 'bad' women?" I asked Andr, trying to
keep a note of irony out of my voice.

"_Assez bien_," he replied shyly.

The rain had stopped and the hot air was moist, motionless, heavy.

"_Ici_," Andr said.

We pushed through a rattling curtain made of long strings of black
beads, flinging aside the strips and hearing them clack and settle into
place behind us; we entered an oblong dive whose background was lost in
smoke. An unshaven, Greekish face, with an unlighted cigarette stub in
its partly-open lips, eyed us coldly from behind a cash register as we
moved forward through fumes of tobacco smoke that stung the throat.
Strips of bamboo covered the walls; I suppose that that tropical
ornamentation was to make sailors feel that they were in an emotionally
abandoned atmosphere. Some thirty women of all ages and descriptions and
sizes sat at tables and at the long bar, their shiny black purses--the
international trademark of their profession--blatantly in evidence. They
weighed us with restless, surfeited eyes.

"_Nous voici_," said Andr, grinning.

"_Prenons une table_," I suggested.

"_D'accord_," Andr agreed.

We sat. Miguel was staring straight ahead of him.

"Does Miguel like this sort of thing?" I asked Andr.

"He hasn't been here as often as I have," Andr said, clapping his pal
on the back.

One needed no intiative in sewers like this. At least a dozen pair of
dark, feminine eyes were staring at us and then a few girls began to
edge forward. I ordered cognac and, as it was being poured, a tall,
angular, not pretty, not ugly girl came mincing to the table; she wore
the golden medallion of the Virgin between her enormous breasts. She
wanted a cigarette; I passed her one and lit it. She puffed, waiting for
a signal. I saw Andr's and Miguel's eyes darting from the girl to me;
than Miguel's foot kicked my leg under the table, telling me to lay
off....

"Drinkie _para m_?" the girl asked in a husky tone, speaking pidgin
Spanish.

I waved for her to sit. Miguel shrugged. The girl smiled, showing
strong, white even teeth, then she spoke to Andr in Spanish.

"She wants to know if she's met you before," Andr told me.

"Not a chance," I told her through Andr.

"You no man from sheep?" she asked, thinking that I was a sailor.

Her name was Pilly and she had learned a few words of English from
soldiers and sailors.

"No possibility fuckie?" she asked me with the brutal directness of a
professional.

"Not tonight, Miss Pilly," I told her.

Another girl, older and harder than Pilly, came slowly toward the
table, moving her hips exaggeratedly in her tight green gingham dress. I
waved for her to sit and offered her a cigarette.

"Drinkie?" she asked.

I ordered her a beer. Through Andr I learned that her name was Isabel,
that she had traveled in France and Germany. She did not smile and her
eyes were like green agates.

"_Pesetas para los nios_," she begged me. "Money for my children."

I gave her five pesetas. She wore a silver medallion of the Virgin.

"Catholic?" I asked her.

"I no Catholic," she growled.

"_Por qu a?_" I asked, mixing languages and pointing to the medallion.
"Why that?"

She shrugged. Andr and Miguel were furious; their faces darkened with
displeasure.

"_Vilaine fille!_" Andr spat. "_Sale fille! Va-t-en!_"

Isabel understood and tried desperately to hang on to me.

"You _m_ telephone, _s_?" she suggested.

I extended my notebook and indicated that she should write down her name
and telephone number.

"Me no write," she said, looking at me as though I had accused her of a
crime.

Pilly, who had been hovering in the background and overhearing what had
been said, now came forward and exhibited her golden medallion of the
Virgin.

"_Mi Catlica_," she said proudly.

"_Bon_," Andr approved.

Pilly and Isabel glared at each other; then Andr, over my protests,
waved Isabel away from the table. Both boys shook their heads,
indicating that they would not tolerate Isabel's anti-Catholic attitude.
To be a prostitute was bad, but to be a prostitute who was not Catholic
was worse....

The atmosphere was getting more and more strained. Andr and Miguel were
feeling that the tables had been turned; in one half hour I had plunged
my hands into Spanish life and had brought up poverty, fear,
prostitution, illiteracy--and all of this was but half a mile from the
bishop's rotting body in the glass coffin, the white marble basin in
which Columbus's Indians had been baptized. This morning I had been the
lost heathen standing in the need of being civilized and saved; now it
was I who was feeling the tissue and texture of their lives and they
were ashamed and angry.

I drove slowly toward my pension. Poor, "bad," illiterate girls.... I
glanced at the tall, dark middle-class apartment buildings and hotels
that loomed to left and right of me; they were filled with respectable
Catholic families in which all the women were "good." The sailors,
soldiers, the men who were married to "good" women and the young sons in
"good" families became the clientele of "bad" girls....

I undressed, washed, and stretched out to sleep. Carmen's green book! I
bounded out of bed and got it and opened it to page one and began to
read slowly:


_First Lesson_

SPAIN

     WHAT IS SPAIN?

     _Spain is a historical unit with a specific role to play in the
     world._

     WHAT DOES THIS MEAN?

     _That destiny has constituted all the people of Spain, varied as
     they may be, for all time into a unit in the natural order of
     things._

     WHAT IS A UNIT?

     _The union in one body of a number of distinct parts._

     WHAT DOES DESTINY MEAN?

     _The purpose assigned to everyone in life._

     WHAT IS MEANT BY THE NATURAL ORDER OF THINGS?

     _Something which concerns not only the Spanish but all nations._

     WHAT THEN IS MEANT BY SAYING THAT SPAIN HAS BEEN FORMED BY DESTINY
     INTO A UNIT IN THE NATURAL ORDER OF THINGS?

     _Because it is a whole constituted from the various peoples who are
     united by the common destiny they have to fulfill in the world._

     IS SPAIN OUR MOTHERLAND?

     _Yes._

     AND IS IT OUR MOTHERLAND BECAUSE WE WERE BORN IN IT, OR BECAUSE WE
     FEEL OURSELVES INCORPORATED IN ITS DESTINY IN THE WORLD?

     _It is our Motherland because we feel ourselves incorporated in its
     destiny in the world._

     ARE THERE THEN PEOPLE WHO WITHOUT BEING BORN IN SPAIN ARE
     SPANIARDS?

     _Yes; all who feel themselves to be incorporated in the destiny of
     Spain._

     AND CAN THERE BE PEOPLE BORN IN SPAIN WHO ARE NOT SPANIARDS?

     _Yes; children of foreigners and those who disassociate themselves
     from the destiny of the Motherland._

     THEN, DO YOU SEE CLEARLY THAT FOR US THE MOTHERLAND IS NOT THE LAND
     IN WHICH WE ARE BORN BUT THE FEELING OF FORMING PART OF THE DESTINY
     OR AIMS WHICH THE MOTHERLAND MUST FULFILL IN THE WORLD?

     _Yes._

     WHAT IS THIS DESTINY?

     _To include all men in a common movement for salvation._

     WHAT DOES THIS MEAN?

     _Ensure that all men place spiritual values before material._

     WHAT ARE SPIRITUAL VALUES?

     _Firstly, religious values derived from our Catholic religion._

     AND WHAT ELSE?

     _Those which concern human dignity, honor, service, culture, etc._

     AND MATERIAL VALUES, WHAT ARE THEY?

     _Those which refer to economic advantage, money and other things._

     HOW WILL SPAIN ACHIEVE ITS DESTINY?

     _By the influence it exercises over other nations and also by
     conquest._

     WHAT DO YOU MEAN BY INFLUENCE?

     _Making others do something because they see us doing it._

     WHAT DO YOU MEAN BY CONQUEST?

     _To take possession by force of arms._

     SINCE WHEN HAVE WE KNOWN THAT SPAIN HAS A DESTINY TO FULFILL?

     _Since the most remote ages of its history._

     GIVE SOME EXAMPLES.

     _When the Roman emperors such as Trajan, Theodosius and Hadrian
     were Spanish._

     _When Roman philosophers were also Spaniards, like Seneca._

     _When Spaniards led by Don Pelayo, began to clear the Moors from
     Spain._

     _When the Catalans carried their conquest as far as Greece._

     _When the University of Salamanca was the most important in the
     world._

     _When the Catholic sovereigns succeeded in ejecting the Moors by
     the conquest of Granada, and later discovered America._

     _When the sovereigns Isabel and Ferdinand began, through the
     Universities and the Spanish missionaries they sent there, to
     civilize the whole of America._

     AND FURTHER?

     _By the conquest made by Charles I in Europe and Africa to defend
     Christianity._

     _By the struggle carried on by Philip II against the Protestants of
     all Europe and Spanish participation at the Council of Trent._

     _When Don Juan of Austria, sent by Philip II, defeated the Turks at
     Lepanto._

     _When the troops of Philip II conquered Portugal._

I was staring at the mouth, at the veritable fount of Western history. I
was tired. I went to sleep thinking of poor Carmen's tense and
rebellious face....

The aspect of early-morning Barcelona that impressed me most next day
was the strident quality of its noise, lifting that city into a class of
the noisiest cities on earth. Huge trucks careened through the
thoroughfares, causing the pavements to tremble; streetcars, their steel
wheels grinding loudly upon steel tracks, crashed past, their bells
clanging deafeningly; the bellowing shouts of children shattered the
air; motorcycles roared thunderingly down the streets; shrill auto horns
sounded insistently; and over and above it all was an indefinable din
that created a mood of unrest.

Remembering that I had urgent letters to post, I inquired in my clumsy
Spanish the way to the main post office. I entered and found the window
at which I could dispatch airmail. The black-haired woman clerk behind
the counter was busy, bent over with her head down; her fingers,
sparkling and glittering with two diamond rings, shuttled with the dizzy
speed of a machine as she counted peseta notes. Patiently, I watched her
finish, clip the bills together into a pack, and toss the pack into a
drawer. Then she looked up and saw my face; her lips parted, her
expression became blank, and she quickly crossed herself. I handed her
my letters and she nervously occupied herself with them. But why had she
seemed so shocked to see me? Had it been that the sight of my heathen
face, which she could tell at a glance was most probably not a Catholic
one, had made her cross herself?

Heading toward my pension, I reached a street corner and found my path
blocked: a vast flock of sheep was ambling down the broad, modern
avenue. I stared, doubting my eyes. Yet, there they were, mincing along
slowly in the center of the city, occasionally bleating. A boy with a
long staff was leading them. I watched them until they were out of
sight, then I became aware of the pavement vibrating under my feet from
the rushing force of a subway train. Barcelona was so sophisticated that
one was likely to see anything.

At the pension Carmen introduced me to her brother, Carlos. He was
taller than Carmen, but he had her driving intensity. His face was
florid, his mouth thin and determined. He was high-strung, restless, and
had a habit of pacing the floor as he talked.

"Let's talk in your room," he suggested abruptly.

I led him inside my room and he closed the door and looked around; he
had the air of a disturbed man, a hunted man, a man who had the habit of
regarding his environment warily.

"My sister told me that you're a writer and that you're looking at
Spanish life," he said.

"That's right.... Say, your English is fluent. Where did you learn it?"
I asked.

"At school," he said, sitting. "I've traveled in England, France, and
Germany."

"What do you do?"

"I'm a horticulturist.... I was almost a priest once," he told me with a
wry smile. "I attended a Jesuit school in Paris."

"What a background. Just what do you grow or cultivate?"

"Orange trees," he said.

"Spanish oranges are good," I said.

"Nothing's good in Spain," he said emphatically.

If Carmen was rebellious, Carlos was bitter.

"Are you free now?" he asked.

"Yes."

"Then we're going to Valencia. I want to show you something."

"Fine. My car's downstairs."

"No. Your car's French. We'll go in mine. The French are not popular
here. And we must not be too conspicuous," he said.

We went down and I got into his car. We rolled in silence through the
suburbs of Barcelona.

"Why are the French disliked here?" I asked him.

"There are many reasons.... There was Napoleon; then there was the Civil
War; the Spanish believe that the French are immoral; and, too, there is
a conflict of French and Spanish interests in North Africa." He switched
quickly back to his main concern. "I've a large orange-tree nursery.
I've one hundred and forty thousand orange trees. Everything I have in
the world is tied up in them. But I can't sell them."

"Why?"

"The government prohibits it," he explained.

"Why is the government pursuing such a policy?"

"It's to protect the exporter's trust," he told me, screwing up his
eyes. "Not only do they stop my selling my trees, but there are
regulations against the planting and exporting of orange trees. The rich
men who control the exporting of oranges make the political and social
policies of the country. They have the approval and support of the
Church. The orange industry is controlled by the state in the interests
of the rich, who, in turn, are backed by the Church. That's the gist of
it."

"When was this law--against the selling, planting, and exporting of
orange trees--passed?" I asked.

"Passed?" he scoffed. "Laws are not _passed_ here. The government issues
decrees. This particular decree was issued on June 26, 1953, and it was
retroactive, covering orange trees already planted and growing in the
nurseries. That's what caught me. And no indemnification was given to
those whose sole means were tied up in such trees."

"Have you protested this? Are you allowed to?"

"No effective protest is permitted," he told me. "Sure. I protested, but
it was no use. I got nowhere. All of my letters and petitions went
unanswered. And they talk of the evils of Communism! _This is
Communism!_ I live in a religious Communist state!"

We were speeding past groves of olives and oranges.

"How does the government enforce this law?"

"They have their spies.... If you plant an orange tree without
authorization, you're liable to a fine ranging from one thousand to
fifty thousand pesetas, depending upon how much they dislike you. And
the government confiscates all of your trees.

"Now, a worker earns about twenty pesetas a day. Oranges cost from three
to four pesetas a kilo. Poor people can't buy them. Yet the government
says there are too many orange trees in Spain. What they mean is that if
more orange trees were planted, the price of oranges in the world market
goes down and the men who control the orange export industry would make
less money."

"Why don't you publicize your problem?" I asked.

"Who would dare publish this in Spain?" he demanded. "The first
newspaper telling the truth about this would be forced out of business
and the editor would be jailed. An explanation of the most innocent
economic processes, publicly printed, is a criminal offense. If I wrote
a letter to a newspaper about this, the paper would turn my letter over
to the police and the next day I'd be arrested."

When we entered Valencia, he said tersely: "We're going through without
stopping." He glanced at me and grinned. "You're highly visible, you
know. If you are seen with me, and if you wrote something about this,
they can easily put two and two together and know who told--"

"Is it that bad?" I asked.

"It's bad. I've a brother in exile. He's a Freemason. I'd like to get
out of Spain, go to America, perhaps. But how can I?"

"So Franco is not only against Communists?"

"You don't know! This government is against Communists, Radicals,
Socialists, Anarchists, Protestants, Liberals, Freemasons, Atheists,
Agnostics, Existentialists, Surrealists, Vegetarians--"

"You're joking! Why Vegetarians?"

"Because many Anarchists are Vegetarians," he explained. "Only recently
they closed down a Vegetarian restaurant in Barcelona. Anarchists are
mystics and many of them won't eat meat. So, if you shut down a
Vegetarian restaurant, you defeat Anarchism. Simple."

As Carlos sat hunched tensely over the steering wheel of his car, I
studied his reddish, strained face and a fear for him entered me. This
man would blow up someday and they would kill him.

"Try and get out of Spain," I murmured.

"I'm trapped!" he cried, his eyes hard upon the road ahead.

I saw his jaws swell as he clamped his teeth together. We entered the
countryside of Valencia and came to the grounds of his nursery.

"Do you own this land?"

"No. I rent. Look, one hectare of rich Andalusian land, well irrigated,
costs eighty thousand pesetas. Planted with orange trees, it costs four
hundred thousand pesetas. That same hectare here in the vicinity of
Valencia would cost more than a million pesetas. How can I get hold of
such sums?" he poured it out bitterly.

We stopped amidst a sea of dark green trees about two and three feet
high. We got out of the car.

"There they are!" he shouted, waving his arms wide. "What can I do with
them? They are worthless! Men take the place of God and condemn me! They
ask me nothing! They just tell me one morning: 'You have nothing!'"

His lips were open and he breathed heavily. He grew conscious of my
presence and controlled himself. He reached down and tenderly plucked a
leaf from a young orange tree and crushed it in his palm and smelt it,
then tossed it away with a gesture of disgust. I did the same and the
pungent odor made me look wonderingly at the dark fecund earth from
which the plant had sprung, at the high blue sky overhead that had
watered and warmed the plant, and then at the tight, bitter, baffled
face of Carlos--a man alienated from his dark rich earth, from his sea
of green, prolific plants, from his deep blue sky, yet silhouetted
against the darkness and the greenness and blueness that he so obviously
loved.

"Why didn't you become a priest?" I asked him impulsively.

My question startled him. He looked at me, smiled, then slowly shook his
head.

"The roads to salvation are many," he murmured.

I felt something incongruous in him. This man was a kind of scientist,
using empirical methods to control the causes and effects of the
external world. Yet in his life he was vainly trying to function in an
impossible situation. I was curious to know why his hot bitterness had
stopped at a certain point.

"What methods are you using to produce these orange trees?" I asked him.

"The most modern," he answered readily. "I'm in touch with the most
advanced farming methods used in American and England."

"I saw the dead, rotting body of a bishop in the Barcelona cathedral--"

"Oh, that," he murmured.

"Do you believe in that?" I asked him directly.

He smiled sadly, compassionately at me; he advanced and placed his hand
in a brotherly manner upon my shoulder.

"I told you I once studied to be a priest," he said. "Well, I'm not
going to discuss religion with you. You're intelligent and I like you.
And there's no point in arguing. There's only one thing: _You must
believe_. If you believe, the rest is simple. _I believe._ That's all."

"But all this poverty, this cheating, this prostitution, this
ignorance--"

"That has nothing to do with it," he spoke vehemently. "You MUST
BELIEVE! That's all."

"I think I understand you," I sighed.

As we drove back to Barcelona, he told me of his life. With the
exception of a few foreigners, he had no friends or contacts. He had
seen the world and he knew what was wrong in Spain and he had not been
afraid to speak out. He was, therefore, shunned, regarded as a dangerous
man.

Back in Barcelona, he suggested that we stop for a cup of coffee. I was
glad, for I wanted to talk to him some more.

"Carlos, why didn't you become a priest?" I asked him softly. "You
haven't answered me yet."

He was stirring his cup and he glanced up and grinned for the first
time.

"It was hard. To be shut away from life.... Brother, I couldn't keep
women out of my mind. I was going crazy," he said ruefully.

"And you gave it up for that?"

"Yes. My body was stronger than my will."

I told him of the "bad" women I had met last night and he said promptly:
"They're hungry. It's economic."

"Then you don't believe in sin?"

"Not that kind of sin, no."

"Why not?"

"Sex is no sin," he said. "That's why I couldn't be a priest."

"Brother, you're remarkable," I said. "You get out of Spain."

"How? Tell me how!" He began to seethe again.

I let him cool off; I knew that as long as he felt his own plight, he
could talk of nothing else. Then, when he had burnt out, I asked him:
"How are the general economic conditions?"

"There are but a few real figures," he sighed. "We Spaniards don't
believe in statistics. Figures hurt our pride."

"Yes. But just a few simple, obvious facts. You're a horticulturist.
What is produced here?" I asked.

"Not too much. Cereals, fruits, and garden produce; add oranges, grapes
and olives and you've almost covered the agricultural side. Otherwise,
we have a little coal, iron, and steel. But, you see, our whole economic
structure is lopsided. Our agriculture is still mainly primitive. We
have but little power and less transport," he recited. "No matter what
they tell you in Madrid, our production is below that of 1935."

"Your facts tally with what I heard from United Nations people in
Geneva," I told him. "What has been the effect of Franco's freezing of
wages?"

"It has worsened matters," he argued. "Wages are stationary, but prices
rise. Our population is slowly increasing, but production lags. Our
people do not have enough to eat. Over half of the active people in
Spain are either farmers or farmhands, and we have over two million and
a half surplus agricultural laborers. You can guess what that spells in
terms of economic misery."

"Carlos, en route here from France, I was amazed at the aridity of the
Spanish landscape--"

"Not enough water," Carlos summed it up. "Irrigation is one of our
biggest problems. Officially it is known that there are large areas in
Spain where crops are perishing and there is plenty of water at a depth
of three meters. It's maddening. We don't have enough water; we don't
have enough fertilizers. Just say we _lack_, _lack_, and _lack_...."

"Carlos, you have to do with the soil. What is this chronic agrarian
ulcer in Spain that no government seems able to cure?"

He took a deep breath, laughed, shook his head, and said:

"We've got twenty-eight million people living on one hundred twenty-five
million acres of land. Now, we are cultivating between fifty and sixty
million acres; another fifty or sixty million acres are allotted to
pasture and woodland. There are fifteen million acres that are more or
less barren. Now, that does not seem to be so bad a picture until you
begin to examine what happens. First, two-thirds of all the land in
Spain needs water; the need is worse in some sections than in others. At
this point, social conditions--the class structure, the attitude of the
Church, and tradition--complicate matters.

"For example, in Extremadura, Andalusia, and La Mancha about seven
thousand absentee landlords irrigate their land and operate farm
factories and keep wages down to starvation levels. Take the province of
Cordova: about half of it is owned by big operators. The same is true of
the province of Seville. In the province of Cdiz, big estates dominate
more than half of the economy, in some instances accounting for ninety
per cent of the land, the best land. Now, when you realize that the
landless population in these areas make up three-fourths of the
population, you can see what we are up against. There are more than a
million people in Spain who earn less than ten pesetas a day.

"Now, I'll divide this problem up into two sections. In the center and
the north of Spain the land holdings are too small to support the people
who cultivate them. In the south, the holdings are too big.

"The problem is: How to take the surplus population out of the south and
west and north and colonize them upon newly irrigated land. Well, the
government has some lovely plans. I won't go into them. All I'll tell
you is that, between 1936 and 1948, only a quarter of a million or so
acres of land were brought under irrigation. The people who live on that
productive land amount to one-fifth of the increase in the rural
population. You see, they are pecking away lazily at the problem and it
will never be solved like that."

"But aren't they worried about it?" I asked. "This is what made for the
Civil War."

"Yes; they worry in a lazy sort of way," Carlos said, laughing
cynically. "But they are depending more on the Civil Guard and the Army
to keep down trouble than upon any scientific plans. We don't believe in
science or plans down here."

"But, Carlos, hasn't the government timed or scheduled their
colonization program?"

"No," he said. "We live under the eye of eternity. They are more
concerned about the restoration of the King than about irrigation."

"But didn't the Republic rectify this problem of land distribution?" I
asked.

"Yes; but Franco and the Falange reversed all the work of the Republic."

"So those dead died in vain?" I asked.

Carlos shrugged.

"How much foreign exchange has Spain?"

"Not too much and official stealing cheats the nation out of most of
what little we do have," Carlos was relentless. "Take my oranges. When I
sell them abroad, the government fixes the price of the dollar I am to
receive. But they have their own personal, private price for the dollar
which is higher than the price they give me. I'm paid in pesetas. I
never see a dollar.

"Take another example; it's claimed that in 1952 we had a tourist trade
of forty million dollars. One and one-half million tourists spent that
amount here. If we attracted that many tourists, we should have had more
than a measly forty million dollars. But Spanish official fingers are
very sticky. There's corruption at the very top."

"Then your civil service is no good," I said.

"Civil service?" Carlos exclaimed, laughing scornfully. "That phrase
describes the opposite of the Spanish character. Our corruption is the
only really human quality we have left."

"You sound hopeless," I said.

"I'm just realistic," he maintained. "Listen," he said, changing his
tone. "Carmen and I have been discussing your accommodations. That
pension is no good for you. I know of a Spanish home; they have a room
free. They speak both French and English."

"I'd welcome a change," I said. "When can I see it?"

"I'll take you by tomorrow afternoon," he said.




CHAPTER 6


Next morning I was blasted out of my dreams by a sound so gratingly
brutal that I emotionally took it to be the trumpet of Gabriel blowing
for the last judgment. I lay still and listened, calling upon my memory
to help me to identify it. It continued and I could tell that it was not
human, but I'd never heard a beast give forth such a discordant bellow.
Maybe it was a bull on the loose? Or maybe it was a fire engine with a
newfangled siren...? I rolled from bed, opened the window and the sound
now smote my ears so directly that I winced. I looked down. It was a
donkey, seven flights below, and he was braying his damned head off, not
stopping, it seemed, even to catch his breath. I sighed, looking
wistfully and unbelievingly at the tall, clean skyscrapers gracing the
Plaza de Catalua, then turned to wash and dress with mechanical
movements, mulling over this strange Spain.

While drinking my _caf con leche_, a dirty, frightened-looking urchin
with blinking eyes entered the pension dining room and shuffled to my
table and, with downcast head, began a long, low, complaining mumbling
that I could not make head nor tail of. Finally, the manager rescued me;
the boy merely wished to wash my car, which was parked down in the
street below. Having debated and decided the price, I told him to go
ahead. He ducked out to do the job.

I felt listless and, when back in my room, I picked up Carmen's green
book and pored over the Spanish view of the world, reading:


_Lesson II_

LA FALANGE (THE PHALANX)

     WHAT IS FALANGE?

     _A political movement set up by Jos Antonio to save Spain._

     WHY HAD SPAIN TO BE SAVED?

     _Because Spaniards had lost the consciousness of their historic
     destiny._

     WHAT IS MEANT BY LOSING THE CONSCIOUSNESS OF THEIR HISTORIC
     DESTINY?

     _Forgetting that Spain had something very important to accomplish
     in the world._

     AND WHY HAD THEY FORGOTTEN IT?

     _Because Spain, between 1648 when it lost Holland and 1898 when it
     lost Cuba and the Philippines, was successively defeated by
     stronger nations so that Spaniards believed their mission had come
     to an end._

     WHAT CONSEQUENCES DID THIS HAVE?

     _The loss of the Spanish Empire._

     WHAT ELSE?

     _The breaking up of the territorial unity of Spain through the
     Catalan and Basque separatist movements._

     WHY DID THIS OCCUR?

     _Because, as Spaniards from the various regions lost the
     consciousness of their common destiny, they had no reason to remain
     united._

     WHAT THEN IS IT THAT UNITES THE DIFFERENT PARTS OF SPAIN:
     GEOGRAPHICAL BORDERS, LANGUAGE, CHARACTER OR DESTINY?

     _Destiny._

     WHY?

     _Because the Basques do not talk like the Catalans, nor the
     Catalans like the people of Castile; Andalusia is not Galicia;
     nevertheless all are united by a common destiny._

     WHAT OTHER CONSEQUENCE HAD DEFEAT FOR US?

     _Economic misery for most Spaniards._

     WHAT THEN IS THE FUNDAMENTAL MISSION OF THE FALANGE?

     _To give Spaniards back their faith in themselves and in the
     destiny of the Motherland and ensure through the revolution that
     all live better._

     HOW SHALL THIS BE DONE?

     _By teaching Spaniards a doctrine which will make them live always
     up to certain ideals._

     WHAT IS MEANT BY ALWAYS LIVING UP TO CERTAIN IDEALS?

     _Making our conduct conform to certain principles which will make
     us better._

     WHEN WAS THE FALANGE FOUNDED?

     _On October 29, 1933, in the Comedia de Madrid Theater, with the
     title Falange Espaola (the Spanish Phalanx)._

     WHO FOUNDED IT?

     _Jos Antonio._

     WHAT GROUP JOINED IT LATER?

     _The J.O.N.S., founded in 1931 by Ramiro Ledesma Ramos._

     WHAT DOES J.O.N.S. MEAN?

     _Juntas de Ofensive Nacional Sindicalistas (National Syndicalist
     Commando Groups)._

     WHO ALSO FORMED PART OF THE MOVEMENT?

     _The Juntas Castellanas de Actuacin Hispnica (Castillian Spanish
     Action Groups), set up by Onsima Redondo, and the forces which
     were united in the Conquista del Estado (Conquest of the State)
     also founded by Ramiro Ledesma Ramos._

     WHAT WAS "LA CONQUISTA DEL ESTADO"?

     _A review founded by Ramiro, where the first signs of the rebellion
     of Spanish youth against the degenerate country in which we were
     living appeared, and about which was formed the first group which
     later became the J.O.N.S._

     WHY DID THE J.O.N.S. JOIN UP WITH THE FALANGE?

     _Because they and the Falange desired the same things for Spain._

     WHEN WAS THE UNION?

     _February, 1934._

     WHAT WAS THE FALANGE CALLED FROM THEN ON?

     _Falange Espaola de las J.O.N.S._

     WHO WAS ITS CHIEF?

     _Jos Antonio._

     WHAT IS IT NOW CALLED?

     _Falange Espaola Tradicionalista y de las J.O.N.S._

     WHY?

     _Because on April 19, 1937 it joined up with the Comunin
     Tradicionalista (Traditionalist Confederation)._

     WHAT WAS THE "COMUNIN TRADICIONALISTA"?

     _A political and military organization which had fought for a
     century against the liberal monarchy._

     WHO IS HEAD OF IT?

     _Since Jos Antonio, Franco._

I started violently. There had come a hard, urgent knock upon my door. I
leaped up.

"Who is it?" I called out, wondering if the door was locked.

"It's the police!" It was Carmen's voice calling.

With a reflex gesture I tossed the green book under the covers of the
unmade bed. I opened the door, glancing to make sure the green book was
out of sight.

Three police officials in dark blue uniforms confronted me.

"_S, Seor_," I said.

I stood blocking my doorway so that they could not enter unless they
asked or pushed me aside. But they seemed to have no wish to enter.
Behind the three officers I could see Carmen's tense face. The officers
had papers and pencils in their hands.

"Ask them what they want, will you, Carmen?" I asked her.

She spoke to them, then relayed their question to me:

"Is your car numbered 8323-BL-75?"

"Yes. It's downstairs. What's wrong?"

"They want to know if you are French. Show them your passport," Carmen
instructed me.

"_Je suis Americain_," I told them exhibiting the document. I realized
that I should have spoken in English, but it was too late.

They were taken aback when they saw the passport; I watched them leaf
slowly through it.

"They thought you were French," Carmen whispered.

The officials consulted among themselves, then spoke to Carmen who told
me: "They want you to come downstairs."

"Okay."

The policemen stepped aside and let me lead the way. Carmen followed
close.

"They're treating you with dignity," she whispered.

"Why?"

"You're American. When they knew that you were American, I thought that
they'd let you off. But they've gone too far now to drop it."

"What am I guilty of?"

"I don't know," she said. "They never tell you that until they are
ready."

All of us rode silently down in the elevator, crossed the narrow lobby,
and went out upon the sidewalk. Two more policemen stood guarding my car
and a small crowd had collected. The ragged boy who had been washing my
car stood, wet rag in hand, beside a zinc pail, and he looked
alternately at me and at the pavement, his face full of apprehension.
The police spoke to him and he replied with alacrity, pointing to me and
saying:

"_Seor!_"

Do they think that my car is a stolen vehicle? I wondered.

"Carmen, ask them what's wrong?"

She did and they replied by demanding my _carte grise_ (official
certificate of ownership), my driver's license, and the _carnet de
passage_ (the right to take the car across national boundaries). I
surrendered the documents, begging Carmen: "Ask them what I'm guilty
of?"

When she asked this time, the answer came: "You have committed a public
nuisance."

I blinked. Was it illegal to leave my car parked upon the street? Or had
I forgotten to conform to some regulation?

"What nuisance?" I asked.

"You are bathing your car in public," I was told.

"But I'm not bathing my car, as you call it," I defended myself. "_He's_
washing it." I pointed to the boy who shrank back from me.

"Bathing and washing are the same thing," they said.

"But a car's not a person," I argued. "And the boy was washing it--"

"No matter. You violated the law."

"I was ignorant of the law. I'm a tourist."

"Ignorance is no excuse."

"That boy should have known better than ask to wash the car in a public
street," I contended.

A long confab took place between the assembled policemen and Carmen
conveyed me their decision: "They said that you asked him to bathe it."

"No! He asked me to let him wash it," I told them.

"But the car is yours; you are responsible," it was pointed out to me.

It was a vicious circle. All right; I'm guilty. And I thought of all
those desperate prostitutes who were permitted to ply their trades, of
the flocks of sheep who dropped their excrement upon the asphalt of the
ornate boulevards, and of the donkeys who were allowed to bray when and
where they damn pleased....

"What's the fine?" I asked with a sigh.

Carmen spoke to them at length and I could tell from the sense of her
words that she was making a plea for me on the grounds that I was a
writer, a visitor, a guest. But it was no use. I was guilty. I was fined
fifty pesetas. I nodded. Sure, I'll pay. I fished in my pockets for
money but was told that I'd have to pay the fine in the traffic court.

"They get a percentage of all fines that they impose," Carmen whispered
to me.

"Oh," I breathed, understanding it all.

I looked at the boy, whose guilty eyes avoided mine, and the whole game
became clear. That boy was working with the police, finding victims for
them. The boy was now glaring at me with defiant eyes, and I knew that
he knew that I knew. I was handed a summons; I tossed the boy a few
centavos and he vanished, rag, pail, and fearful face. The police walked
away and the crowd began to disperse. I gave my poor French car a
pitying look and rode up in the elevator with Carmen.

"You got off easy," she said. "Had you been French, they would have
fined you more and made you pay on the spot."

"Why were they light on me?"

"You're American," she said, smiling ironically. "You're our friend and
ally."

"The hell you say," I said.

Carmen bent double with laughter.




CHAPTER 7


Returning to my room, I pored over my notes, projecting an itinerary for
the hinterland. Through the partly-opened window and the cracks in the
door there seeped the scent of frying, rancid olive oil and I knew that
I would not eat in the pension at lunchtime; my stomach was in rebellion
against the food. Toward mid-afternoon hunger decided me to grab a quick
lunch somewhere and return in time to meet Carlos. But when I entered a
restaurant I found, to my despair, that the lunch hour had passed and
almost every dish I asked for could not be had.

"_Donnez-moi une paella_," I ordered.

No; it was too late to cook rice.

"Then give me anything you've got; I'm hungry," I said.

There was only one other customer in the restaurant; he turned from his
plate and stared at me. He was short, swarthy, Spanish-looking. He rose,
came to me, and asked: "Would you mind sharing my _paella_? There's
enough here for two and I can't eat half of this."

"Well, to tell the truth, I'd love it," I said. "But let me pay for half
of it."

"If you like," he said. "Would you join me, or shall I join you?"

"It's more convenient for me to join you," I said, rising and sitting at
his table.

"My name is Pardo L.," he said.

I identified myself and we shook hands. He seemed a man of great reserve
and dignity. He was graying a bit at the temples and had an almost
sardonic manner. He hesitated before speaking, as though searching for
the right word, and his eyes would widen and light up with what he was
about to say.

"American?" I asked.

"Yes. You?"

"Yes."

"Do you like Spain?" I asked.

"I'm enjoying it immensely," he said slowly. "My parents were Spanish,
you know. One of the ambitions of my life has been to visit the
birthplace of my parents. I came here with them on a visit when I was
six years old and it is strange how unchanged everything is--"

"You remember it?"

"Clearly."

"By the way, are you with the government?" I asked.

"No," he drawled, a smile hovering about his lips.

"I don't mean to be indiscreet," I murmured.

"Not at all," he assured me. He frowned while still smiling, then said
in a manner that gave full value to his words: "Not civil government, at
least. I work for a religious government."

I stared at him.

"What do you mean? A religious government?"

"I work for the Vatican," he said after a pause.

"My Lord," I said. "Oh, excuse me. I didn't mean to be profane."

"That's all right," he said, laughing.

"Here on religious business?"

"No. Just a tourist," he said.

"You're stationed in Rome."

"Naturally."

"Has your service there been of a long duration?"

"Since 1946," he said.

We were silent. Just how did one talk to a man who worked for the
Vatican? God's representative on earth was there; yet this man seemed
mundane, blas even. None of the transcendental qualities that were
supposed to be in evidence in the Vatican had rubbed off on him; at
least I couldn't detect any.

"What do you do there, if I may ask?"

"I'm an official translator."

"You must see some interesting documents," I commented.

"No. It's the most prosaic work imaginable." He spoke in measured,
deliberate tones.

"Just how aware are those in the Vatican of what is happening in the
world today?" I asked.

"The Vatican is not very much aware of anything," he told me. "Tradition
rules in the Vatican. I wished I could say otherwise."

I was overwhelmed by the quality of his frankness.

"How did you get the position?"

"They just asked me if I wanted to work, and I said I did," he told me,
shrugging.

"They didn't investigate you?"

"No, thank God," he said.

There was so much that I wanted to ask him that I didn't know where to
start.

"Have you visited any of the religious shrines here?" I asked.

"A few. But I intend to see many of them."

"I want to see the Black Virgin of Montserrat," I told him. "It's
reputed to be the most famous of all the religious shrines in Spain."

"I was told to see that too," he said. He paused, then added in an odd
tone of voice: "Spain bothers me."

"In what way?"

"I'm Catholic, but...."

His voice trailed off. He chewed his food. He had given me an opening,
but I wanted to proceed with caution. He was expressing himself about
vital matters with more frankness than I had thought possible, and I did
not want to make him defensive.

"My approach to religion--by the way, this doesn't bore you, does it?"

"Not at all. I'm passionately interested."

"--my approach is more spiritual than what I've seen here so far," he
said cautiously.

"Did you see the bishop's body in the glass coffin in the cathedral
here?" I asked.

"Yes." He laid aside his knife and fork and I saw a shudder pass through
him. "That offends me," he said flatly.

"An offense, a stumbling block, eh?" I asked gaily.

He laughed and stared at me.

"You know your Bible," he said.

"I was weaned on it," I told him.

"By the way, are you going to see the Black Virgin?" he asked.

"Yes; I intend to."

"Then, let's see it together," he suggested.

"I'll have to move today, maybe. It'll have to be tomorrow--"

"Tomorrow morning?"

"Good."

"How shall we go?"

"Let's take one of the tours. In that way, we can see how the tourists
react."

"That's an idea," he said, accepting. "All right; we will each buy our
ticket and we'll meet on the bus. There's a ten o'clock tour given by
the big agency on the Ramblas."

"Fine."

Later we shook hands and parted. That ought to be something, I told
myself as I hurried to my pension to meet Carlos.

And Carlos was there, nervous, his thin lips pursed determinedly,
striding up and down in front of the street door of my pension.

"I'm sorry if I kept you waiting," I told him.

"It's not me that matters," he muttered, taking my arm and guiding me
toward his car. "It's Dolores.... She's the youngest daughter in the
family and she works. She's taken time off to pass on you as a
prospective guest."

"Let's roll then," I said.

Carlos was silent as the car moved through heavy traffic. The sky
darkened and fine slanting strings of rain washed the air of dust,
bringing a smell as of wet clay. Flecks of water peppered the car
windows; the windshield wipers wobbled to and fro. The car stopped in
front of a tall apartment building.

"It's on the sixth floor," Carlos said, "and sometimes the elevator
doesn't work. Not enough electric power. That's one drawback."

"If the room pleases me, I won't mind," I said.

"They're good people," Carlos muttered. "They've been put through the
mill."

"You mean the Civil War?"

"Yes."

"What does the father do?"

"There's no father. He was killed--"

"By Franco or the Loyalists?"

Carlos pulled down a corner of his mouth.

"All of the supporters of Franco who were killed were killed by
Communists; and all of the supporters of the Loyalists who were killed
were killed by Fascists," he explained in a jeering tone.

"And who killed the father?"

"The Communists, they say."

"Oh, so these people are supporters of Franco?" I asked.

"It's better to say that they're traditional Spanish Catholics," Carlos
suggested.

"And how many are in the family?"

"There's a mother; then there's Dolores who works and supports the
family; and there's another daughter. Nice people," his voice trailed
off.

We crossed a spacious lobby and when Carlos pushed the elevator button,
he exploded: "Damn! The elevator's not working; it had to be now--"

"Let's walk up," I said. "Tell me more about this family."

"What do you want to know?"

"What are they like?"

Carlos was so long in answering that I thought that he had not heard;
when I looked at him he was frowning and I sensed that something was
bothering him. He mounted a full flight of steps before replying.

"The older daughter..." he began and broke off. He paused and looked at
me meaningfully and put the forefinger of his right hand to his temple
and twisted it round. "Understand?"

"You mean she's off?" I asked.

"Somewhat."

"Why don't they institutionalize her? They keep her at home?"

"Yes. But she's harmless. She bothers nobody."

"Yeah," I breathed softly.

Carlos was puffing heavily from his climbing and his face was so red
that it had a tinge of blue.

"There's a maid," he said. He stopped and smiled bitterly at me. "And a
dog.... That's all."

It was the kind of apartment building that the Americans had hurriedly
and cheaply thrown up during the false prosperity of the twenties: thin
walls, commodious hallways, faades of make-believe luxury, tiny panes
of stained glass, and large zigzagging cracks gaping in the concrete.

Reaching the sixth floor, Carlos pushed a bell whose metallic trilling
seemed a signal, for the strident barking of a dog burst forth from
somewhere deep within the apartment and advanced, rising in volume as it
neared the door.

"The dog," I said.

"Oh, you'll learn about him," Carlos said significantly.

"Is he dangerous?" I asked.

"Noooo; I don't think so," Carlos drawled.

I heard the dog's paws scampering over the wooden floor inside and then
I heard the impact of his body smashing against the door facing us,
making it rattle on its hinges, and from a rasping throat came an awful
growling and snarling.

"How _big_ is that dog?" I asked.

"He's just a little dog," Carlos said.

"Yeah, but he's got a hell of a lot of spirit," I said.

A woman's cajoling voice sounded behind the door and the furious barking
ceased. Silence. Sounds of retreating footsteps. Silence again. Then
echoes of approaching footsteps. The door opened and a stout woman of
middle age stood facing us, grinning. The mother, I thought. The first
thing that I noticed about her was that she was so horribly
self-conscious that she made me feel somewhat the same. She greeted us
in Spanish and I vaguely remembered that a dog had been barking savagely
and had stopped abruptly, but he was not now in sight. Carlos and the
woman exchanged a few words in Spanish and finally the woman turned to
me, extending a pudgy hand, laughing and turning her head away in
embarrassment. I shook her hand, saying in French and English that I was
glad to meet her, then followed her and Carlos into a large, neat living
room. I saw at once a photo of the dead father of the family: a dark,
angular face staring from a huge frame bordered in black atop the
piano--the kind of face that looked out upon the world with such
deliberate self-consciousness that I knew that only a man with an
old-fashioned and sentimental conception of life would have dared have a
photo of himself taken in so obviously unnatural a pose.

Carlos and I sat. The mother smiled sweetly at us and left.

"She's calling Dolores," Carlos said.

"Where's that dog?" I asked Carlos.

"Are you scared of a dog?" he asked me with a hard stare.

"No."

"Then forget him," he said.

About ten minutes later a small, dark, tense girl who looked about
twenty-six years of age came into the room. Her crown of wavy hair, her
long and arching brows, her large and luminous eyes, and her severe but
stylish skirt were all dead black; her smooth skin, her nylon blouse,
and her even teeth were startlingly white. She smiled, stood a bit aloof
from us and spoke in flawless English, all the while radiating a kind of
defiant virginity. She always looked straight in your eyes as she
talked, but gave the impression that she was thinking of another
subject, a subject which, had it been broached, would have made her
recoil in shame and moral loathing.

Yes; there was a room available; yes, I could see it; she was sorry that
she had read none of my books, but, as she worked, she had very little
time for reading; her dear, dead father had been a great and avid
reader.... They were not in the habit of letting rooms to anybody, but,
for a friend of Carmen and Carlos, they would be glad to do so. She was,
she told me, rarely ever home during the day and her sister "was not
well," but her mother (who now hovered grinning in the background) and
the maid, Rosario, would look after me. Yes; it would be all right to
move in that evening; the maid would help me to bring my things up. She
was very sorry, but she could not do any better about the price; after
all, it was a home atmosphere; I would be like one of the family.... She
asked to be excused now, as she had to rush back to her job. We shook
hands all round and we all walked down the stairs together, silently;
when we reached the street, Carlos offered to drive her to her job, but
she exclaimed:

"No. It's not far. I'll walk." And, unsmilingly, she strode briskly off,
her head erect.

En route to the pension, Carlos said: "She's a plucky girl. She's the
man in the family. She carries the load."

"What did the father do?"

"He represented a British telegraphic agency here."

"Why did the Communists kill him? Was he mixed up in intelligence?"

"Who knows?" Carlos said.

"Well, that family can feel that it made a sacrifice for this new
order," I observed.

"What new order?" Carlos asked bitterly. He changed the subject. "You
think you'll be all right there?"

"Sure. Why not?" I said, masking my emotions.

"I hope so," he said.

I thanked him warmly for his help and went to my room and lay upon the
bed. I picked up Carmen's political catechism and began to pore over it.
Lesson five read:


_Symbols Representing Spain and the Falange_

     WHAT ARE SYMBOLS?

     _Visible or palpable representations of things we cannot see._

     SUCH AS?

     _Religion, the Motherland, and political ideas, chiefly._

     SO WE DON'T SEE ANY OF THESE THINGS?

     _No. Our understanding of them comes through reason._

     BUT DON'T WE SEE THE MOTHERLAND IN WHICH WE LIVE?

     _We see it graphically in maps and physically with our senses, but
     we perceive its mission, the goal it has to reach, only through
     symbols._

     SO, WHY DO WE NEED SYMBOLS TO STAND FOR THESE THINGS?

     _Because when we perceive them with our senses we can render them
     the homage they deserve._

     WHAT IS THE SYMBOL OF RELIGION?

     _The Holy Cross._

     WHAT ARE THE SYMBOLS OF THE MOTHERLAND?

     _The Flag, the Arms, and the National Anthem._

     OF OUR POLITICAL IDEAS?

     _Banners, the Yoke and Arrows, and the song "Face to the Sun."_

     ARE THESE SYMBOLS ALWAYS VISIBLE?

     _No. They are sometimes visible like the Banners and Arms,
     sometimes heard like the Anthems._

     WHAT DO THE BANNERS AND ARMS REPRESENT?

     _The history of the country, with its victories and losses._

     AND WHAT DO ANTHEMS RECALL?

     _The poetic feeling which is always present at great historical
     occasion._

Just what kind of attitude did these lessons seek, I asked myself, to
instill in children? Frowning, I turned the pages; I came to lesson
nine, which read:


_The Yoke and Arrows--Origin and Significance_

     WHY DID THE FALANGE CHOOSE THE YOKE AND ARROWS AS AN EMBLEM?

     _Because they link our task today with the most glorious years in
     our history._

     WHO USED THE YOKE AND ARROWS BEFORE THE FALANGE?

     _The Catholic Kings._

     WHY DID THEY CHOOSE THEM?

     _Because of gallantry, and perhaps for their symbolic value._

     WHAT DO YOU MEAN?

     _Because when each sought a personal emblem, the King sought one
     with Y in homage to the Queen, and the Queen one with F in honor of
     the King._

     WHO WERE THE CATHOLIC KINGS?

     _Isabel I of Castile and Ferdinand V of Aragon._

     WHAT OTHER SYMBOLIC VALUE MAY THE YOKE AND ARROWS HAVE?

     _The bond between hard and disciplined daily toil, as represented
     by the yoke, and the capacity to undertake ambitious and worldwide
     enterprises, as represented by the Arrows._

     ANYTHING ELSE?

     _Perhaps the final union of the kingdoms of Spain (the sheaf of
     Arrows) joined by the bond (the Yoke or knot)._

     WHAT IS THE SIGNIFICANCE OF THE FALANGE'S CHOICE OF THIS PARTICULAR
     EMBLEM?

     _Because of the last centuries of our failure, we want to bind our
     times with those of the Catholic Kings._

     WHY?

     _Because we want Spain to achieve a glory similar to that which she
     achieved during their reign._

     WILL THIS BE POSSIBLE?

     _Yes, with adaptations to the era in which we live, of course._

     WAS THE EMBLEM OF THE CATHOLIC KINGS LIKE OURS?

     _No. They had the Yoke and Arrows separated; with us they are
     joined. Moreover with them the number of arrows varied; with us
     there are always five._

     WHAT ELSE?

     _Theirs did not have a definite color and ours is red._

     HOW ARE THE FALANGISTS TO USE THE YOKE AND ARROWS?

     _On a blue shirt, as a distinguishing mark, and embodying it in all
     that they do of importance in life._

     WHAT ELSE?

     _On our Flag, as already said, and on our whatever it may be, to
     show our Falangist faith._

     HOW WOULD YOU LIKE TO SEE OUR EMBLEM?

     _Cut in stone as a symbol of our age._

     WHY?

     _It would manifest proof of our intention to endure._

     WHAT DOES "ENDURE" MEAN?

     _Survive this age._

     WHAT DOES "SURVIVE" MEAN?

     _That our ideas and deeds should outlast our own lives._

I sighed and closed the book. As yet I had not encountered a single
practical idea. One thing was certain: something was bothering these
Spanish.... If Spain wanted to be great again, what I had read so far
was the best guarantee that it would never happen.

Later I packed, settled my bill, bade Carmen good-by, and set off in my
car. I was about to enter a strange home. I could feel it.

When I rang the bell, I did not hear the dog's greeting. The maid
admitted me, deferentially, with lowered eyes and a downcast mien.

"_Yo_," she said, pointing to herself, "_yo, Rosario_."

"_S, s_," I said.

She was silent, with a full, broad, flat face that had high cheekbones.
Her hair was profuse and jet black; her skin was a very pale copper and
she had a body that resembled a Sherman tank. Peremptorily, she forced
my heavy bags out of my hands and walked blithely with them down the
hallway, as though she were sauntering to a picnic. I followed her,
conscious that there was no sign or sound of the dog. Ten minutes later
I was installed in a neat, cool room that had two large windows
overlooking an imposing sweep of the rooftops of Barcelona.

Toward six o'clock I was seated at a table, writing, when I felt the
need of turning on the light. I rose, then whirled, sensing a presence
near me. A woman of about forty stood with a twisted smile on her face
in my partly opened doorway. She was hatless, had on a street coat, but
a long, dirty, crumpled nightgown hung from under it. She wore tattered
house shoes and her blond, touseled hair crawled over her head in all
directions. Peeping out from behind the woman's billowing street coat
was the dog, whose nose and eyes only were visible. His shaggy tail
waved indecisively now and then. Had she opened my door or had I left
it open...?

"Hello," I said.

"Good evening," she said, speaking perfect English. "I hope I'm not
disturbing you."

"No. Not at all," I managed to say, wondering if I should invite her in
or call her mother. I knew now, without doubt, that this was the older
sister, the crazy one. Not knowing what to do, I did nothing; I stood
there and studied her.

Neither did she move; she stood there tugging aimlessly at the lapels of
her coat. The dog now advanced timidly into my room, poking his nose at
my suitcases; then, sniffing my shoes, he began to wag his tail in
earnest. He seemed friendly enough and had none of that air of
viciousness that I had heard in his barking earlier that afternoon.

"My name is Lola," she said. "And that--" she pointed to the dog--"is
Ronnie, my little dog." She had the manners of a well-brought-up child
of six.

"Hello, Ronnie!" I called cheerfully.

Ronnie was a mongrel, covered with white, brown, and black spots; he now
rose on his hind legs and waved his front paws at me. Hesitantly, I took
hold of one and he nestled a cold wet nose into my palm.

"He's such a sweet darling," the woman singsonged. "Really, he is. He
never bothers anybody." She frowned suddenly and narrowed her eyes at
me. "The maids used to beat him. That's why he misbehaves sometimes. He
doesn't know _who's_ his friend." She advanced into my room and,
stooping, swept the dog up into her arms, folding him to her breasts,
closing her eyes and nuzzling her face into his shaggy hair. I was
standing next to her now and I noted her appearance: her neck was ringed
with dirt; her mouth was large and her gums were blackened with stumps
of rotted teeth. She had put on so much powder, rouge, and lipstick that
she seemed to be wearing a mask; her deep-set eyes, a clear brown in
color, were shadowed with long eyelashes drenched in mascara. She was
kissing the dog, mussing his hair, and he responded with strange,
subdued growls, but made no attempt to bite her.

She impressed me as having had a genteel background and education and
she bore the faded manners of one who had moved in an international
milieu. Intuitively I felt that, to escape scenes of unforgettable
terror, she had fled her life and was wandering disconsolately in the
dark bogs of her childhood memories.

"Do you love music?" she asked me suddenly.

"Oh, yes," I said.

"Oh, I'm so glad," she crooned, smiling toothlessly, her eyes shining.
"I have a piano and I love to play. It's therapeutic for me, you know.
When I get nervous, I play and it helps me. But Mama was afraid that I'd
disturb you with my music--"

"No; no; you must play just as you always did," I told her.

"Oh, thank you." She sighed like a child being reprieved, still fondling
and caressing the dog. "Isn't he wonderful?"

"He's a wonderful dog," I agreed.

"You see," she began in plaintive, honeyed, but doleful tones, "he
_knows_ that we won't go home till father returns. He _knows_ I'm
waiting." She spoke directly of herself now. "And I won't leave till he
comes back...."

Nonplussed, I managed to smile and murmur: "Yes, I see; I understand."

"We'll stay right here, won't we, Ronnie?" she asked the dog as he
licked her neck and chin.

"Your father?" I sounded a tentative question.

"_They_ took him," she told me readily, her eyes showing astonishment
and indignation. Her eyes widened and she glared at me silently for a
moment. "_You_, you are not a Communist, are you?"

"Oh, no!" I said and took a step back. The dog let out a growl that
trailed off.

"They took him and I refuse to go back home until he comes," she said
emphatically. She looked longingly and soulfully at the dog. "We won't,
will we, Ronnie?"

Ronnie trembled in her arms; his mouth opened and he stared at the
girl's face, then barked anxiously. The rest of the apartment was
quiet. I wanted to talk to her, but feared posing questions that might
touch off reactions leading to violence.

"I don't understand about your father. What happened?"

"But don't you _know_? Didn't I _tell_ you?" she asked with incredulous
eyes.

"No," I answered.

"But didn't I show you the photos of our house by the sea?" she asked,
her lips hanging open.

"No; no. I'd like to see them," I said.

"Wait. I'll get them!" she cried. She dropped the dog and ran out of the
room. The dog rushed after her.

She returned with Ronnie switching at her heels. Her street coat had
worked loose and her bosom was partially bare. Her hands were full of
photos.

"See," she said, pointing. "That's our home...." She put the photos in
my hands.

I saw a lovely little bungalow set amidst sand dunes.

"Isn't it beautiful?" she asked, smiling. "I was happy there and he was
there with us and--"

"Your father?"

"Of course," she said. "But we can't live like that now. Life was
wonderful then. But it wouldn't be right for us to go back there without
him, would it?" Without waiting for an answer, she went to my window and
stared wistfully out. "But he'll come back. They'll find out that he's a
good man and they'll let him go--"

"The Communists?" I asked.

"Yes; _they_ have _got_ him," she explained. "I'm waiting for
father...." She turned to me with fearfully large and luminous eyes. "I
won't go back until he comes back. I swore that and I'll keep my
promise." She waxed suddenly tearful. "I hope that you won't be like all
the others who come to live here. They go away. Always, they go away."
She grew aggressive. "I don't like that. Why do people always leave?"
She beamed a sudden smile upon Ronnie, who sat watching her face. "We
don't like that, do we, Ronnie?" she asked. Then she lifted appealing
eyes to me. "But you'll stay, won't you?"

"Oh, I'll stay," I said heartily, at last sensing a vague drift to the
woman's concerns.

"_You must stay_," she said, her voice desperate. Then brightly to the
dog: "Ronnie would like that. Wouldn't you, darling?" She was suddenly
worried for Ronnie. "Ronnie, come here?" The dog ran and leaped into her
waiting arms, giving a little bark of anxiousness. "We'll stay, won't
we, darling?" She sighed, looking at me. "They say you write books. Do
you have a book you've written that you could show me?"

"Yes; I think I have," I said. "There ought to be one in my suitcase."

Until that moment I had moved but a few inches. I turned and started
toward my suitcase and Ronnie erupted a bark and shot like a bullet from
the girl's arms and came at me, snapping, snarling. I turned and faced
him. He was crouched low on the floor, his teeth bared, his growl a low,
vicious snarl, his body tense and ready to leap.

"What's the matter with 'im?" I asked her.

"Ronnie!" she was screaming. "Ronnie!"

The dog snapped at me and I lifted my shoe to ward off his attack. The
dog continued to growl.

"Ronnie, no!" she screamed.

She got to her knees and grabbed the dog, gathering him to her bosom. He
quieted suddenly, but still glared at me.

"He thought you were _leaving_," she explained. She looked at Ronnie
reprovingly. "He's not _going_. See?" Then she smiled at me. "He's a
good dog, really."

"Yes, I see," I agreed, edging to my chair to sit down, wanting to let
Ronnie know that I was harmless, would remain, was not leaving the
apartment, and was no Communist....

"He's staying, Ronnie," she cooed to the dog, who still watched me,
growling occasionally.

I heard the front door opening. Ronnie sprang from her arms and tore
down the hallway, barking.

"Excuse me," she said.

She rushed from the room and I stood listening. It was the mother and
the maid, Rosario. They had evidently been out shopping together. I
closed my door softly and sat on the edge of my bed. The Spanish Civil
War had been over for eighteen years, yet its black shadow still lay
upon the minds and feelings of the people. For Lola there had been no
peace, no armistice. The bullets had long since stopped whining, and the
bombs were bursting no more, but memories of violence and horror lived
on and kindled mental and emotional pain. A timid knock came at my door.

"Come in," I called.

The door opened and the mother peered in, grinning, her eyes avoiding
mine.

"Are you all right?" she asked me.

"I'm fine," I said in a voice that was strange even to my own ears.

She laughed and then said, apropos of nothing that I could determine:
"Dolores will be home soon."

"Thank you," I murmured, not knowing what I was being grateful for.

She lingered on in my doorway, then she advanced into my room.

"You have enough cover? Is there anything you need?"

"No; everything's all right," I said.

She impulsively caught hold of the jamb of the door, as though for
support; then she was serious, unsmiling.

"I'm sorry Lola bothered you," she said, shaking her head. "You must
have a lot of work to do.... You see, sir, she has been through a lot;
she has seen terrible things...." She came close to me, clasping her
hands, and she half whispered: "She saw them kill her father. _She saw
it happen!_ That's why she's like that."

"She was a witness?" I asked.

"They killed him right in front of her eyes," she explained. "It was
night. They took the both of them from the house and out into the
countryside. They told her: 'We are taking your father. We'll bring him
back soon.' And they took him off a few feet and shot him. She saw
that, but she does not wish to believe it. She says that they'll bring
him back. That explains why she is like that."

"That's horrible," I breathed, understanding it all now.

"_C'est la vie_," she smiled bitterly.

"Life in Spain!" I exclaimed softly.

I saw her jerk a bit; her eyes roved restlessly about my room.

"It's life everywhere," she said. "It's the same everywhere. Father
Rubio was telling us that only last week. It's the same all over the
world...."

I understood. To negate this horror, the Church had had to make it the
normal lot of men. If this horror were the heritage of all men, then
rebellion was senseless, was sinful.

I lit a cigarette and sat down. A few moments later another knock came
at my door. It was Dolores. Her pale face was tense and serious.

"Pardon me," she said. "But do you plan to go out tonight?"

"Well, I'm going out to eat dinner," I told her. "Why?"

"Then, listen," she said and paused. Her eyes were defiant. "When you
are ready to go out, you'd better call the maid and ask her to lock up
the dog."

"What?" I knew what she was hinting at, but I wanted her to spell it
out; I wanted to understand it.

"When you leave the apartment, the dog must be locked up. Or he'll
attack you, seriously," she told me.

"Why? Have I made him afraid--?"

"No," she said and sighed. "Ronnie's just that way; that's all."

"He seems friendly enough," I said, wishing she would be still more
explicit.

"No. He's friendly only when someone _comes_ to the apartment," she
explained. (Her eyes were tortured and suffering.) "But when someone
tries to _leave_, he becomes dangerous."

"Why?"

"He just acts like that," she said vaguely. "He doesn't want anybody to
leave the apartment. When you are ready to leave, just open your door
and yell: 'Ronnie, _por favor_!' You understand?" She stared at me,
wondering if I caught it all. "And Rosario will lock Ronnie up. Then you
can leave."

"Has he really attacked people leaving the apartment?" I asked.

"He has ripped people's legs open," she told me.

"All right," I agreed. "I'll call out whenever I wish to leave.... But
is someone always there?"

"My mother or the maid will always be there," she said.

"Good."

"I'm sorry," she said, smiling bitterly.

"Not at all."

"Thank you."

"Good night."

"Good night."

Well, Ronnie or no Ronnie, I was hungry and I was going out to eat. I
got ready and went to my cracked door.

"Rosario!" I yelled.

"_S, Seor!_" her voice came distantly from deep within the apartment.

"Ronnie, _por favor_!"

A wild barking sounded. Running footsteps. A door opened and slammed
roughly. More running footsteps. Another slamming of a door and Ronnie's
savage barking was now faint. Rosario came rushing with a sheepish grin
on her broad, bland face, and said breathlessly:

"_S, Seor!_" She spread her arms wide to let me know that the coast
was clear.

"_Muchas gracias_," I murmured, walking nervously into the hallway.

Lola was standing in the door of her room and her large eyes were stony
with apprehension as she watched me pass.

"_Buenas noches_," I said.

She did not answer. Her dazed expression hit me harder than a blow or a
scream. I increased my pace and when I reached the front door, I was
almost running. I opened the door and ducked out, then pulled it shut
behind me. I waited. There came a furious rushing of paws over a wooden
floor and a cataract of barking spilled forth; then I heard Ronnie's
body landing against the door, shaking it violently. It seemed that he
could tell that I was still there and he whined and barked and leaped,
ramming his body against the door again and again.

"My God," I breathed.




CHAPTER 8


Returning after dinner, I let myself into the apartment and Ronnie ran
in circles of gladness, walking on his hind legs and waving his paws at
me in gestures of greeting. Lola was playing the piano in the living
room. Hearing my footsteps, she stopped and stood in the doorway,
smiling her welcome. Dolores sat sewing at the dining-room table, her
legs crossed, her bent head framed in a cone of yellow light cast by a
floor lamp; she glanced up, smiled and nodded. The mother went rushing
grinningly ahead of me and offered her services by opening the door of
my room. Rosario hovered nearby, dumpy, cold-eyed, placid, observing
with a detached and ironic air, then went off to the kitchen, lifting
her voice in a raucous flamenco ditty.

Before going to bed, I dipped again into the Falangist catechism,
reading lesson ten:


_The Blue Shirt--Origin. The Red Cap_

     WHAT DO THE FALANGISTS WEAR TO DISTINGUISH THEM FROM OTHERS?

     _A uniform._

     WHAT IS A UNIFORM?

     _That which equalizes and distinguishes all those who belong to a
     group or organization._

     GIVE SOME EXAMPLES.

     _The uniforms of various schools, military uniforms, and, in
     another sense, the religious habit._

     WHAT IS THE FALANGIST UNIFORM?

     _The blue shirt with the Yoke and Arrows embroidered on the left
     pocket._

     WHY IS THIS OUR UNIFORM?

     _Because Jos Antonio decreed it at the first National Falangist
     Council in Madrid, October, 1934._

     WHAT WERE HIS MOTIVES IN CHOOSING IT SO?

     _He wanted a uniform that showed the Falangists as militant,
     resolved to bring about the social revolution which was represented
     by the blue of our shirt--a proletarian color._

     WHAT DOES THAT MEAN?

     _It is the color workmen wear for their hard labors._

     WHY HAS THE SHIRT ALSO GOT THE YOKE AND ARROWS?

     _Because, besides the social revolution, the Falange wants to
     emphasize the national character of our movement._

     HOW IS IT TO BE WORN?

     _Without a coat and with rolled-up sleeves._

     WHAT ELSE IS THERE IN THE UNIFORM?

     _A black tie, since the death of Jos Antonio._

     WHAT ELSE?

     _A red cap, since the Unification of April 19, 1937._

     WHAT IS THE ORIGIN OF THE RED CAP?

     _The Carlist wars. It was the distinguishing sign of those who
     fought against the liberals, and remained forever the true sons of
     Spain._

     IS THERE ANYTHING ELSE THAT IS NECESSARY FOR THE UNIFORM?

     _No. I have described the uniform proper. Other parts are according
     to circumstance._

     WHAT IS THE WOMAN'S BRANCH UNIFORM?

     _The same, but without a tie._

     WHAT UNIFORM DOES THE YOUTH ORGANIZATION HAVE?

     _A similar one, but without the blue shirt or red arrows, as they
     are not yet militant members of the movement._

     WHAT MUST A YOUNG FALANGIST MAIDEN DESIRE ABOVE ALL?

     _To wear one day the Falangist uniform and serve Spain with her
     comrades._

     TO WHAT DOES THE UNIFORM OBLIGE US?

     _To behave so that we set an example to all._

     WHAT ELSE?

     _To remember always that Falangists are "half monks, half soldiers"
     and so their life must be courageous, austere and ordered._

Next morning I hurried to the tourist agency on the Ramblas, bought my
ticket, climbed aboard the waiting bus, and walked down the aisle,
looking for Pardo.

"Here," he signaled me, half rising. "I thought you weren't coming."

"I barely made it," I said.

The bus pulled away and we were Montserrat bound. The tourist passengers
were in a quietly gay mood, chatting and commenting upon the landscape
of bald mountains that loomed hazily through blue mist ahead.

"Well, what do you know about this Virgin we are going to see?" I asked
Pardo.

He shaped his words slowly, as though seeing the pages of history that
documented what he wished to say.

"It is claimed that St. Luke carved this statue from his memory of the
Virgin Mother of Jesus. It is further claimed that it was brought to
Spain by St. Peter himself in A.D. 30. In 717, to save it from the
Moors, it was brought to Montserrat and hidden in a cave. It was
discovered in 880...."

"And since then?"

"It has become famous because of the adoration showered upon it by the
Catholics of Europe and the world. Hermn Corts came here to ask
blessings from the Black Virgin. Even Columbus made a pilgrimage here,"
he said in a slow, soft voice.

"And what do _you_ think?" I asked.

His eyes looked out of the bus window to the lifting, scarred walls of
rock.

"I don't _think_," he said, laughing.

The ascent to Montserrat was breath-taking. We climbed, spinning and
circling slowly round the naked mountain peaks on tiny roads that
skirted the sheer edges of cloud-filled chasms whose depths made the
head swim. There was scarcely a moment when we were not tilting
downward, upward, leftward, or rightward while pulling round hairpin
curves. The air grew thin, its pressure lessening so much that one had
to swallow repeatedly to clear one's ears. And the higher we went the
bleaker was the look of the world.

We were now traversing veritable kingdoms of desolation, vast continents
of perpendicular columns--immense in their dimensions--of clustered,
grayish rock, seemingly numberless in extent and imposing in their
grandeur, all standing delicately balanced on their ends, side by side,
adhering one to the other as though glued together by some miraculous
substance, many of them rearing up and into the white clouds. The sense
of the defiance of gravity of these forests of upthrusting series of
columns evoked a hint of the mystical, of the impossible, and one
understood why this locality had lent itself so readily to the
establishment of a religious shrine.

The tourist passengers grew silent as we slowly but continually lifted
ever upward, rounding mountain bends. More and more nations of seriated
granite phalluses, tumefied and turgid, heaved into sight, each rocky
republic of erections rising higher than its predecessor, the whole
stone empire of them frozen into stances of eternal distensions, until
at last they became a kind of universe haunted by phallic images--images
that were massive, scornful, shameless, confoundingly bristling,
precariously floating in air, obscenely bare and devoid of all
vegetation, filling the vision with vistas of a non-or superhuman order
of reality.

"What on earth could have prompted the first man to climb up here?"
Pardo asked in a tone of wonder.

We were now all of some three thousand feet in the air, and the city of
Barcelona and its vast configuration of dwellings could not be seen.
Geology had it that at some remote period in the history of the earth a
volcanic upheaval had tossed up these gigantic masses of round, oblong
rock out of their ancient ocean beds, had stood them on their ends, and
that some odd chemical reaction of the rocks, sea slime, and atmosphere
had enabled them to cling uprightly together during eons of time in so
astonishing a manner.

Veiled by haze, the numerous buildings, the chapel, and the monastery of
Montserrat rose ahead of us. The bus slowed and stopped and I saw candy
bars, cigarettes, postcards, pennants, banners, clay replicas of the
Black Virgin, brochures, rows of bottles of cognac and Coca-Cola arrayed
for sale. At a sidewalk caf coffee and ice cream and sandwiches were
selling briskly. The guide now took over with rough authority and
shepherded us onto a funicular railroad which lowered us far down into a
deep ravine out of which we could see the tips of looming mountain
peaks. Many tourists took out their cameras and began snapping pictures.

After being dragged for what seemed an eternity over stony acres to look
at sundry marvels, we were at last informed that we could see the
Virgin; we queued up and began filing toward the chapel.

It was a small chapel, but one of the most beautiful, simple, and
tastefully decorated I had ever seen. Narrowly rectangular in shape and
with a remote and quietly luminous vault, it was filled with a soft,
almost golden light that floated down from high windows. A choir of
young boys clad in black and white chanted in piping, virginal tones.
Pardo genuflected before the Holy of Holies, then crossed himself. I
stood discreetly in the background. Inch by inch the queue moved forward
and we mounted steps of white marble flanked by walls of glowing
alabaster. I looked at those in the queue around me and saw the features
of many racial stocks: Chinese, Japanese, Hindus, Negroes, Frenchmen,
Germans, etc.--all of them awestruck by the nearness of the Virgin. We
rounded a bend of steps and there it was.... Bathed in an effulgence of
indirect golden light was a wooden image of a woman seated upon a throne
of gold. The right and left sides of the statue were bounded by two
phallic-looking uprights with oblong, smooth, extended heads. The statue
was about three feet high, gracefully carved, black of face, and held
within its plastic ensemble a kind of quiet, expectant tension. The
facial features seemed a blend of the Roman and the Oriental; the nose
was aquiline. Seated upon the woman's lap, and seeming to gaze in the
same direction that the woman was gazing, was a baby whose features
resembled those of the woman. The infant possessed that same attitude of
quiet, tense expectancy.

From under the woman's queer headpiece--it was a cap or a hat or a
crown--fell a shawl-like garment whose ripples flowed down well past her
shoulders. The robe, regal and simple in design, draped her body in a
modestly clinging fashion, descending in soft folds down to her feet,
which rested upon something resembling a cushion. The child, a
scaled-down duplicate of the mother, was garbed in a like manner. In the
woman's right hand--her hands were strangely large and strong, as though
she had not been unacquainted with rough or heavy labor--was a ball or
globe, which, perhaps, symbolized the world--no one knew exactly. The
child's left hand held something that looked like a pine cone, the
significance of which was never alluded to in the literature that I
consulted. Surrounding the statue were walls of gold and silver partly
covered with priceless religious paintings.

The queue moved on and we found ourselves in a dim corridor lined with
long glass cases filled with masses of jewels: watches, rings,
necklaces, brooches, bracelets, earrings, clips, pendants, diamonds,
pearls, etc., gifts donated to the Black Virgin by those who had
received aid from her in the crisis periods of their lives.

We emerged by another stairway into the chapel and the majority of the
tourists knelt at benches, crossed themselves and began to worship.
Pardo and I wandered to the rear of the chapel.

"I need a drink," Pardo said. "You want a cognac?"

"Sure. Let's go. We'll cut this tour."

We summoned a waiter and ordered brochures explaining the genesis and
history of the Black Virgin. We settled down to read. (I found later
that the apologists at Montserrat were far more modest than the
_Encyclopedia Britannica_ in accounting for the history and reality of
the statue.)

The few ascertainable facts were about as follows: In 880 a group of
boys, wandering and playing amidst the ravines and rocky columns of
Montserrat, were astonished by hearing strains of wonderful music
coming from a cave. Approaching to investigate, they saw flickering
lights as from many candles and smelled sweet odors. They grew afraid
and retreated; later they reported their findings to the proper
authorities, among whom was Gondemar, Bishop of Vich. The bishop,
accompanied by others, was determined to have a look at the cave and he
discovered exactly what the boys had reported: unearthly strains of
music, beguiling scents, and the glimmering lights of innumerable
candles. Taking courage, reports the legend, the bishop ordered the cave
to be entered. The statue of the Black Virgin holding the Baby on her
lap was found.

The bishop directed that the image be brought forth and a group entered
the cave and came out with it. At that juncture strange things began to
happen. The men carrying the statue suddenly found that it had grown so
heavy that they were obliged to stop; they were anchored down; they
could not move forward, backward, or sideways. This immobility that
gripped the men was interpreted as being a sign indicating that a chapel
should be erected on the spot.

That was the gist of the story. In comparison with the famous miracles
claimed by the partisans of the Black Virgin, it was not much.

Pardo and I continued to drink our coffee and sip our cognac.

"Would you deprive people of that statue?" he asked me suddenly.

"No," I assured him. "If people feel that they _need_ it, then, by all
means, let them _have_ it."

We pored over postcards showing the Black Virgin in color, depicting the
many odd aspects of the shrine.

"Forget I'm Catholic. What do you really think of this?"

"Pardo, my attitude is complicated," I began slowly. "I'll tell you my
objections to this statue, but you'll see that my objections won't mean
much. In the first place, Jesus and His Mother were Jews. Now that
statue does not seem to me to be Jewish either in features or dress. I
definitely do not accept the vague statements about its origin.

"I'm convinced that that statue is either Roman or Oriental. My guess is
that it represents a mixture of both influences.

"The concept of the Virgin Mother antedates Christianity by some two
thousand years. Maya, the mother of Buddha, was supposed to have been a
virgin. Chinese temples have long had their images of the Holy Mother
sitting with the Child on her lap. The Egyptians worshiped Isis, mother
of Horus, as a virgin, and she was called Our Lady, the Queen of Heaven,
Mother of God.

"I'd say that that statue had once been used in pagan religious
ceremonies, either by Romans or Eastern colonial subjects residing in
Rome long before the time of Christ.

"We know that the black color of the statue does not come from paint.
Neither is its blackness racially representative. It is highly likely
that that statue turned black from the smoke of incense that pagans
burnt before it.

"Now, to brand the Black Virgin a pagan relic plays right into the hands
of the Church. Indeed, the apologists of the Church have long contended
that pagan practices are _proof_ of Christianity! As you know, Pardo,
the Church's theory is that the pagans, without the aid of revelation,
blindly groped their way toward a confused idea of Christianity long
before Christianity came upon the scene. So the Black Virgin stands,
from the point of view of the Church, no matter how she came to
Spain--whether she came from some Eastern religion or was transported by
St. Peter.

"Though but little of an objective nature can be proved about the Black
Virgin, the existence of that statue proves a lot about man. Some men
need that statue and others like it. The image of the Virgin symbolizes
how man likes to feel about how he came into this world. That statue is
one of the ways in which the Church can accept sex, the most prevalent,
powerful, emotional, and factual experience in human life. Man senses
that if there is anything at all really divine or superhuman in us, it
is linked to, allied with, and comes through sex, and is inescapably
bound up with sex. In worshiping the Black Virgin, men and women are
worshiping the female principle in life, just as they have always done.

"Now, Pardo, don't you see at Montserrat the complementing male
principle of life?"

"What do you mean?" he asked me, frowning.

"The male principle is represented here too," I told him. "In fact, the
presence of that male principle is why they built a shrine here around
the Black Virgin."

He stared at me and blinked.

"I can't say that I follow you," he said.

"Come here," I called to him, rising and going to the door. He followed
and stood at my side. I pointed to the round, erectile, swollen clusters
of stone lifting their bare heads defiantly skyward. "Pardo, don't you
see that conglomeration of erect stone penises? Open your eyes, man. You
can't miss. I'm not preaching the doctrines of Freud. Let the facts you
see speak to you--"

Pardo leaped back from me and his face registered a strange combination
of mirth and shock.

"_You are terrible!_" he said.




CHAPTER 9


In my room I sat and pondered upon the mystery of the two Spains I had
so far seen: the official Spain and the human Spain. How far they were
apart! The sheer distance between them spelled danger. This nation had
been brutally and bloodily wrenched from the slender democratic moorings
it had had during the days of the Republic and had been set upon another
course. But what was that course and where was it leading? Because what
I had seen so far had failed to provide a satisfactory answer, I applied
myself once again to the Falangist political catechism, turning to
lesson fourteen, reading:


_Juvenile Heroism--Jess Hernndez--The Young Falangists of the
Baleares_

     WHAT IS HEROISM?

     _A noble impulse which makes us perform outstanding deeds._

     ARE CHILDREN CAPABLE OF SUCH DEEDS?

     _Yes, just like adults and with even more disinterest._

     WHY?

     _Because they cannot set a false value on life._

     ONLY FOR THIS REASON?

     _And because in their tender years they have a greater capacity for
     admiration of heroic deeds and greater generosity for giving
     themselves._

     DO YOU KNOW OF ANY CHILDREN WHO GAVE THEIR LIVES FOR SOME GREAT
     CAUSE?

     _Yes, religious martyrs._

     DO YOU KNOW THEIR NAMES?

     _Yes, some. St. Tarcisius, St. Pancras, St. Just, St. Pastor, St.
     Pelayo, St. Ivez, St. Eulalia, and many more._

     MUST CHILDREN ALWAYS DIE TO BE A HERO?

     _No. There are children who are heroes without giving up their
     lives._

     DO YOU KNOW OF ANY?

     _The drummer boy Bruch._

     WHAT DID THIS YOUNG CATALAN DO?

     _By beating his drum, he made a whole regiment of Frenchmen flee
     from Montserrat._

     ARE THERE SUCH CHILDREN NOWADAYS?

     _Yes, the young Falangist Jess Hernndez, for example._

     WHO WAS HE?

     _A boy of fifteen who wanted to fight in the Falange like the
     grownups, though, on account of his age, they would not let him._

     WHAT HAPPENED TO HIM?

     _He died from a wound in the back on March 27, 1934, when he was
     doing liaison work for the Falange._

     DO YOU KNOW OF ANY MORE?

     _Yes. That of the young Falangists on the cruiser_ Baleares.

     WHAT DID THEY DO?

     _Nine of them embarked to help the crew and when the ship sank they
     went down stoically, singing "Face to the Sun."_

     WHAT DOES "STOICALLY" MEAN?

     _Without moving, without fear, despite their years._




DEATH AND EXALTATION




CHAPTER 10


It was one of those unsolicited and dubious letters of introduction
pressed upon me by friends in Paris that provided the chance for me to
meet a Spanish nobleman, the Duke of A.--I shan't identify him more
precisely. His name, though illustrious, is not important. It was the
Duke's attitude, gracious but brutally disconcerting, that held my
attention.

One morning, accompanied by the Duke, I visited one of the city's
exclusive clubs. Ensconced in comfortable leather chairs in a quiet
corner, we nursed tall, sweating glasses of Scotch and soda. Heralding
each of the Duke's sententious utterances were prolonged, noisy
clearings of his throat, then, with an arrogant tilting back of his
white head--he was over sixty years of age--would come a squinting of
his gray-blue eyes at the ceiling as he let go a smooth, nasal stream of
Oxford-accented English:

"Harrrrumph.... I don't wish to shock you, but I must tell you exactly
how I feel. I'm sick and tired of this survival of the unfit. And that's
all that our modern life means today--coddling the unfit....
Harrrrumph.... None of these modern ideas for me. Maybe I sound hard on
the individual, but it is the race that I'm thinking of. The hell with
plumbing, sanitation, and modern medicine! I say, the hell with it all!
These damned antibiotics, what have they brought us? Nothing but the
survival of millions who ought not exist. Now you may think Spain is
backward. Years ago we had hardly any sewerage system in this city.
Today, we have one. They call it hygiene. When we had no sewerage
system many people died, but the strong survived. You had to develop
resistance in those days. Harrrrumph.... Now the weak are saved. I don't
like it.

"The ruling classes of the world today are decadent; they have grown too
soft. In the past the nobility created the Church, the State, the social
classes--all the values of life. But they have let things slip out of
their hands."

"But isn't Franco trying to restore all of that for you?" I asked.

"Franco?" he snorted. "That man.... Harrrrumph.... He's nothing. He's
not nearly hard enough. He lets himself be pushed this way and that. We
need a few excellent people, not millions of the botched, the unfit--"

"But how do you define 'fitness'?" I asked him.

"The ability to survive without help," he answered. "Harrrrumph.... Go
and look out of that window. See those people.... What do they mean?
Nothing. They have no right to this earth. In the old days we gave them
their duties; their lives had a meaning and they were happy. Now they
suffer and plot revenge against their betters.

"Ah, the old days.... Harrrrumph.... Ha, ha! Diseases carried them off
like flies. We didn't have to worry about them then. Nature settled the
score. And those who survived were _good_ and _strong_.... This has
nothing to do with democracy. We accepted men coming far down, but they
had to be endowed by nature with the will to live and rule....

"Harrrrumph.... This cutting of man off from nature has made all the
mischief. We've got to reverse it. And where do you find these denatured
men? In these terrible cities. Do you know I hate cities? I only come
into town when I have to, and then I scoot back to my place in the
country as soon as I can. Harrrrumph.... Ah, I see that I shock you,
don't I? Ha, ha!"

I did not try to answer the Duke's arguments; I was sure that no words
of mine could have ever reached him. And thereafter, wherever I went in
Spain, I saw either the consequences of the Duke's attitude or heard
echoes of his words; for most of the life that I saw in Spain was a
distorted protest against the Duke's philosophy. The Duke and his class
had instilled in the hearts of the Spanish masses an instinct for
revenge, an impulse toward hot rebellion, a tortured desire to have done
with the Duke and his class. But these insurgent instincts were feeble,
afraid, and ashamed of themselves; they were laden with guilt and sought
to hide, and whenever they did emerge into the light of day, they were
disguised, deflected, shrinking from frontal attack. I was not long in
learning to detect, under a thousand varied masks, the all-pervading,
substitutive, and symbolic nature of most Spanish reactions--reactions
that ranged all the way from the offering of the mass to bullfighting.




CHAPTER 11


One sweltering afternoon, upon leaving the American Express, I saw one
of those faces that tease the memory: I knew that I'd met the young
woman who was coming smilingly toward me, but, no matter how frantically
I tried, I could not recall when, or under what conditions I'd last seen
her.

"Hi," she greeted me familiarly, extending her hand. "What on earth are
_you_ doing in Spain?"

"Hello," I hailed her, shaking her hand, searching desperately for a
clue. "I'm just nosing around. What're _you_ doing here?"

"Writing articles," she answered. "And studying dancing." She smiled.
"Look," she chided me with a touch of superior aggressiveness, "I hate
seeing you trying to hide that baffled expression in your eyes. You
don't really remember me, do you?"

"Frankly, no," I replied, laughing.

"I'll make it easy for you," she said. "We met casually about a year ago
in G----'s bookshop in Paris. The name's V.L."

She was a woman of about thirty, a native-born American. Self-possessed,
intelligent, she was dressed in a stylishly Continental manner and wore
some becoming jewelry. We continued standing and confronting each other.
She spoke first, and I'd known that she would, for she had been
studying me with a peculiarly speculative air.

"What are you doing at the moment?" she asked me suddenly.

"Nothing. Why?"

"Let's have a _caf con leche_," she suggested.

"Sure."

Ten minutes later we were seated in a caf over steaming cups of coffee.
After a few moments of small talk, she leaned forward and said: "I want
to ask a favor of you."

I raised my brows and looked at her.

"I'm listening. I'll do what I can," I said.

"If you don't want to do it, or if you don't have the time, then just
say so." She spoke hesitantly.

"What is it?"

"Would you mind coming with me to my pension?" she asked. "Just for half
an hour--"

"Hunh?" I blinked and laughed. "Is this a gag?"

"I'm truly serious," she told me. "I'm scared."

She was suddenly mute, tense. Was she playing a game? But she sat there,
an image of just what she said she was, that is, scared. Her eyes showed
it.

"What are you scared of?"

"That _man_," she whispered, her eyes squinting at me. "My landlord... I
want to move from my pension and I'm scared stiff."

"What are you so frightened about? Do you owe him any money?"

"No. I--I can't explain it. Look, I'm not a nervous person.... I walked
the streets for two hours today, looking for somebody who would come
with me while I packed my things. I'm terrified--"

"Have you had anything to do with this man? I'm no moralist; you can be
frank with me."

"No, no," she said, shaking her head. "It's nothing like that."

"Then what's _wrong_?"

She stared at me and sighed.

"How long have you been in Spain?" she asked.

"Just a few days."

"Then you don't know what it means to be a woman alone in Spain," she
said.

Holy Moses. Here it was again. I remembered the terror that had come
over Carmen's face when I had suggested that she meet me in a bar. She
had reacted as though I had proposed a trip to perdition.

"But you are an American," I told V.

"It doesn't matter. I'm a woman and I'm alone...."

"Why did you choose this particular pension?" I asked.

"It's cheap; I can't afford a big hotel," she explained.

She covered her face with her hands and shuddered. Was she overdoing it?

"Is it that bad?" I asked.

"You have to see it to believe it," she sighed.

"All right. I'll come with you. I want to see this," I said. "Now, just
what do you want me to do?"

"Nothing. You just stand there. If a man is there, he'll act
differently."

There was no doubt in my mind now of her terror. But how could such a
thing be? Who had the right to throw gratuitous terror into lonely
women? We finished our coffee and headed toward her pension. It was on
the seventh floor of a fairly new and modern building. The elevator
worked. The whole atmosphere smacked of cleanliness, respect, of quiet,
secure living. She opened the pension door with her key and we went down
the hallway to her room. As she unlocked her door, I asked her:

"Will they object to my coming into your room?"

She turned a pair of hopeless eyes upon me.

"It doesn't matter now; I'm leaving." As we entered she said: "Oh, they
think I'm a whore, all right. All women alone are whores. I'm worse;
I've no official card."

"What do you think makes them act like that?"

"They're just Spanish," she said, summing it up. "Now, just stand by
while I pack," she said, rushing breathlessly to her wardrobe and
pulling out clothes by the armfuls. She worked feverishly, opening
suitcases and dumping clothing into them, stuffing papers and books into
cartons.

"Take your time; I'm here," I said. I sat on the edge of her bed and lit
a cigarette.

In half an hour she had packed her belongings and arranged them in a
group along a wall. She stood looking appealingly at me.

"Would _you_ tell him that I'm leaving and ask for the bill?"

"Sure. But my Spanish doesn't exist."

"He speaks French."

"Where is he?"

"Back there in his office," she said, pointing.

"Okay, sister," I said, rising. "Stay here."

I went out and down the hall and rapped upon the door of the office,
opened it and went in. Behind a small desk sat a large man, pale copper
in color, with a shining bald dome of a head. He had a wide mouth with
full, determined lips.

"_Buenos das, Seor_," I said.

"_Buenos das_," he sang, smiling whitely.

"The American lady is my friend," I explained softly in French. "She's
checking out. Would you please prepare her bill?"

He stared at me a moment, then winked knowingly, smiling.

"Of course. When, _Seor_?"

"Right now," I said.

"_S, Seor._"

"_Gracias_," I murmured, gritting my teeth.

"_Nada_," he sang softly.

I went back to V.'s room.

"It's all right," I told her.

"What'd he say?"

"Nothing," I said. I didn't want to mention his lascivious wink. "He'll
bring the bill in a moment."

We were silent. She moved nervously about, touching this item and that
one. Finally a knock came at the door.

"_Entrez!_" I called.

The landlord entered with the bill in his hand. He poked it at V. with a
sardonic air, then stepped dramatically back and waited, his lips
pursed. As V. studied the figures, her eyes widened.

"He's charging me for three months of baths," she told me. "I didn't
take them."

"She's objecting to the charge about the baths," I told him.

Then it came. He leaped into the center of the room and towered over
her, bellowing like an enraged bull.

"_Monsieur!_" I chided him sharply. "_Vous n'tes pas correct!_ That's
no way to speak to a woman!"

He checked himself, turned to me, smiling an apology, sighing.

"It was understood that she was to pay ten pesetas a day for baths--" he
began.

"But I didn't take them!" V. blazed. "And you know it! The water was
never hot. Ask the maid."

He insisted that she pay; she insisted that she was not going to pay for
what she had not gotten. She argued that she had not asked for the baths
and, therefore, was not liable for them. He stood over her, lifted his
clenched fists, and screamed.

"_Monsieur!_" I called to him.

He ignored me and began jumping up and down, stomping both feet on the
floor. I rose.

"_Vous m'tonnez beaucoup!_" I said. "You shock me!" I appealed to him,
spreading my palms. "You cannot reasonably expect her to pay for what
she didn't get."

He sighed again and fronted me, spreading his hands in a gesture of
helplessness. He smiled and explained in a sort of murmur that we were
men, that men were not, perhaps, superior to women, but they were
certainly more intelligent. His air was one of cynicism and his manner
asked me to join him in his masculine game of domination.

"She says she didn't take those baths, didn't ask for them, and she's
not going to pay," I explained.

"She said she wanted a bath every day," he sneered.

"I asked if I could _take_ a bath every day," she corrected him.

"Look, knock off the bath charges," I asked him softly.

He sighed and spread his hands again; I felt that he would have loved to
wrap them around my neck.

"_No, Seor_," he was adamant.

"But she didn't ask for them; the water was not heated for her--"

"She _asked_ for them when she came here," he insisted.

"Let her pay for the baths she took, for those for which water was
heated," I insisted.

He stared at me for a long time, then breathed despairingly: "_S,
Seor._"

We had won. I told V. to pay for the baths she had taken. I watched her
figure it out with him; she paid. He turned wordlessly to the door, and,
as he left, he slammed it so hard that the room shook.

"You see?" V. said, her eyes round with shock.

"He's crazy," I said.

"Now, watch," she warned me. "He's going to cut the lights, cut the
water, and lock the bathroom door--"

"No!" I laughed.

No sooner were the words out of my mouth than the lights winked out,
plunging the room, which faced a dim court, into semidarkness.

V. was so angry that her lips were rigid. I understood her now. She had
never in her life endured such treatment and she could not imagine
taking it without some form of retaliation.

I rose and tried the water faucets in her sink; a trickle of water came
through, then there was a sucking of air through empty pipes.

"You see?" she asked, driving her point home. "You have to _see_ it to
believe it. He wanted that bill paid just as he had drawn it. They
simply can't resist humiliating a woman who's alone."

"How do you stand it?"

"On the street it's not so bad," she said resignedly. "They insult you
as you pass. But the public protects you from their going too far. But
when they get you alone in front of them, they let you have it."

"Are you ready? Let's get out of here."

"I'll call the maid," she said. "She'll help with the luggage." She went
out and came rushing back, her face scarlet. "He won't let the maid
help. He says she's busy!"

"I'll take 'em down," I said.

We struggled down with the luggage, placing it upon the sidewalk.

"Wait, I'll get my car--"

"No! You've done your share. I'll get a taxi," she insisted.

She hailed a taxi and we loaded the luggage. She climbed in and slumped
back against the seat and burst into tears.

"I could kill him! I could kill him!" she cried in a nervous rage. Her
humiliation was complete.

"Take it easy," I said. "You're out of there now."

"I could rip his windpipe out with my hands!" she shouted, clenching her
fists and grinding her teeth.

I took hold of her shoulder and shook her roughly.

"Stop it! You're getting hysterical!" I yelled at her.

The taxi driver was staring at us incredulously. I nodded to him and
said: "_Un momento, Seor._"

"_Muy bien_," he said in a worried tone.

"Can I _help_ it if I'm a woman? Why _do_ they act like that? It makes
me mad clear through!" she spoke in fury.

I looked at her wavy locks of hair, at her white skin, her brown eyes.

"You are acting like a Negro," I told her.

That shocked her.

"What do you mean?" she asked wonderingly.

"Raging and wailing and crying won't help you," I argued. "Negroes do
that when they are persecuted because of their accident of color. The
accident of sex is just as bad. And crying is senseless."

"But they _treat_ me senselessly," she contended.

"And crying _compounds_ the senselessness," I said.

She dried her eyes. She straightened up suddenly, then looked at me with
a demanding stare.

"You must write about this. People ought to know."

"No. This is your story," I said. "It happened to you."

"No. Nobody'd believe it," she said. "A woman's word would be doubted."

"Okay," I said. "I'll tell your story. Now, calm down. And tell this man
where we're going."

She gave directions to the driver and the taxi moved off. It stopped
before a big hotel.

"It looks civilized," I commented.

"That's why I took a big one," she said. "For my own protection, I want
to be where other Americans are."

The luggage was unloaded and porters were taking it inside. I stood
watching her.

"You'll be all right?"

"Sure." She smiled. "Maybe I can do as much for you someday."

"So long and take it easy," I said.

I walked away. Yes, you had to see it to believe it.

I went back to Carmen's Falangist political catechism with renewed
interest. Somewhere there was a clue to all this. Maybe this funny book
of questions and answers could tell me. I turned to lesson sixteen and
read:


_Feminine Heroism_

     DO WOMEN ALSO HAVE OPPORTUNITIES FOR HEROISM?

     _Yes, though for them heroism consists more in doing well what they
     have to do every day than in dying heroically._

     WHY?

     _Because women haven't so much occasion to risk their lives._

     ONLY FOR THIS?

     _No, also because their temperament tends more to constant
     abnegation than to heroic deeds._

     BUT ARE THERE SOME WHO HAVE GIVEN THEIR LIVES FOR THEIR COUNTRY?

     _Yes, because women do not shun their daily tasks even if they cost
     them their lives._

     WHAT DOES "SHUN" MEAN?

     _Flee, abandon one's obligations._

     CAN YOU QUOTE SOME CASES?

     _For example, Mara Paz Uncita, the Chabas sisters, Sagrario del
     Amo, Mara Luisa Terry and many others._

     BUT WHAT WAS THE DUTY THEY WOULD NOT LEAVE?

     _Helping prisoners and in various front-line hospitals and wash
     houses._

     DID THEY KNOW THAT THEY MIGHT BE KILLED?

     _Yes._

     AND YET THEY DID IT?

     _Yes, for this was what Spain at war demanded of them._

     HOW DID THEY DIE?

     _Mara Paz Uncita and the Chabas sisters were murdered by the Reds;
     Sagrario del Amo and Mara Luisa Terry while helping wounded
     soldiers at the front._

     ARE THERE CASES OF WOMEN DYING WHILE FIGHTING LIKE MEN?

     _Yes, in the War of Independence against France, but it is
     unusual._

     SO WHAT IS THE REAL HEROISM OF WOMEN?

     _Giving up the pleasures of life when we feel we have to do a duty
     over and above them._

     WHAT DO "PLEASURES OF LIFE" MEAN?

     _All that is pleasant in life, beginning with life itself._

     AND WE CAN DO ALL THESE THINGS?

     _Yes, for they were done before by creatures of flesh and blood
     like ourselves._




CHAPTER 12


My fairly woolly hair had made me hesitant for a long time about testing
the racial reactions of Spaniards in terms of their giving or
withholding tonsorial services. Finally, overcoming my qualms, I entered
a small barbershop and asked for a haircut, making elaborate signals
with my hands to indicate what I wanted. A thin, dark-complexioned
little barber in a soiled white coat waved me readily to a chair. It was
directly after lunch and I was his only customer. He spoke a little
French.

"You are American, are you not?" he asked me as he gently tucked a white
cloth into the collar of my shirt.

"Yes, I am," I answered. "But I live in Paris."

He wanted to know how life was in France, if this was my first trip into
Spain, by what route I had entered the country, what my profession was,
had I found a hotel, and what did I think of Spanish food.

"Do you like Spain?" he continued, arching his brows.

"I love the people," I said diplomatically.

"We are poor," he sighed. He picked up his comb and scissors and paused,
staring off. "We were a great nation once. Now we are something like
Roumania or those Balkan countries. I know; I know...." He nodded and
pursed his lips. "Most Spaniards won't admit it, but it's true. One time
we were the foremost nation of the world, but now we are nothing."

"Nations rise and fall," I said philosophically. "The thing that worries
me about Spain is the suffering--"

"Ah, you have _eyes_! You can _see_," he congratulated me. "Most
tourists come here because it's cheap, no? But they do not see; they do
not care to see." He breathed asthmatically and began snipping the
blades of his scissors as he clipped my hair.

"I hesitated about coming into your shop," I confessed to him.

He stood off from me and gaped in astonishment.

"Why?"

"Well, you know..." I began slowly, "some people have very strong racial
feelings."

He lifted both of his hands and looked at the ceiling; one of his hands
held the comb and the other the scissors.

"But that's insane!" he exclaimed. "You are a man, a human being. Why
should I refuse to cut your hair? The cutting of hair is my profession.
I've heard that in some countries such things happen.... Look, sir, the
sun made your hair crinkly; the cold made mine straight. All right. Why
should that make such a difference?"

"It shouldn't," I said. "But it all too often does."

"I don't think it does very much with the Spanish," he said. "You
know," he smiled knowingly, "Spanish blood is all over the world. We
don't shrink from dark skins. We created new races in South America; you
know that, eh?"

"Yes, I know it," I said.

"Racial feelings are insane," he said with final judgment.

"Maybe the Spanish mixed _too_ much?" I suggested, smiling.

"What do you mean?" he wanted to know.

"Well, they married everybody they came in contact with, but they didn't
do much developing--"

"They took the gold, didn't they?" he asked me.

"Yes."

"_Muy bien_," he said, accepting my judgment with such aplomb that I was
suspicious. He paused and confronted me, his small eyes fanatic and
unblinking. "I'm _not_ Spanish," he said. "Yes, I live in Spain. I was
born in Spain. I speak Spanish. I speak a little French too. But I'm
_not_ Spanish." He put the backs of his hands on his hips. "_Monsieur_,
I'm Catalan. We are Catalans here; understand?"

"Yes."

"We are an occupied people; understand?"

"Yes," I said. He was preaching Catalonian nationalism.

"We Catalans didn't colonize very much," he explained. "We were not
allowed to. We have been oppressed for centuries. Not many of our people
were in South or North America. That was the way they oppressed us, by
keeping us out--"

"Why did they oppress you?" I asked.

"Because we are better men and they know it," he said stoutly. "The men
in Madrid forbid our language. They won't let us hold high offices. They
ram their orders down our throats. Understand?

"_Monsieur_, Catalans would not have behaved as the Spanish did in those
colonies," he told me. "We have certain types of personalities in this
country who feel that they must have something for nothing. They feel
that they are agents of God. _They_ were the people who colonized and
who have oppressed us. We Catalans have a language, a literature, a
culture. But, now, we are buried."

This man felt that to live in Spain under what he called the "men in
Madrid" was an insult to his humanity, yet, since there was nothing
concrete that he could do about it, since he could not alter matters or
redress his grievances, he had embraced the dream of nationalism. That
part of him that had been unfulfilled had been projected out in a hunger
for an independent national existence, and someday he hoped that he
could fight for it. He could not have been more than twenty-five; he
owned his little shop, was married and had two children.

"Your parents?" I asked him.

"Dead," he said. "My father died in the war. My mother died soon after."

"If I'm not indiscreet, what side did your father fight on?"

He looked at me in astonishment.

"For the Republic, of course," he told me proudly.

"Are you bothered or hounded because of what your father did?" I wanted
to know.

"That _could_ happen," he said slowly, "but it hasn't."

"How are conditions around here?"

"Not so bad," he said. "But you know we are overrun with the unemployed
from other areas. That is what causes our poverty. In Andalusia and
Extremadura there is much, much misery. And those poor people come
here.... _Les gens l-bas ont faim, Monsieur._ The men in those areas
are hungry."

"What can be done?" I asked him.

He was silent for a long time. His scissors went _clip-clip-clip_....

"Someday we'll heave them off of us," he predicted finally. "This
_can't_ last. It's not in the human heart to support things like this--"

"Does the Church play a strong role in this?" I asked, trying to push
him into other areas.

"Listen, it's all _one_ thing: the State. The Church is only a facet of
it; that's all," he analyzed it. "Those men in Madrid go too far, too
_far_! There'll be an evening of the scores one day; understand?"

"Why do you say that Catalonia is different from Spain?"

"We Catalans work hard. Look at Catalonia and you'll find it different.
See our farms. Our factories. We are an industrious people. We are not
like the Spanish, who are lazy, arrogant, and always wanting someone to
work for them while they rule. Understand?"

"But the central government is powerful," I reminded him.

He lathered my temples with a big white warm brush of soft bristles and
began lining the razor down the side of my head.

"Ah, _Monsieur_, we are patient," he said with a knowing smile. "We have
a saying in Spain. I don't know if I can translate it into French. But
it means that, though hungry, I am my own master, my own dictator. It
means that I do with my life what I want.... _En mi hambre mando yo._"

"I don't understand," I said.

In a variety of ways he explained what he meant; it boiled down to this:
I AM THE MASTER OF MY HUNGER. It was a bitter way of taking life. It was
a flight into a fierce and burning pride.

"_Nous ne bougerons pas, Monsieur_," he told me, his voice quivering
with fervor. "We won't move. We stay put. We stay put till death." He
looked at me and smiled. "And _he_ knows it."

"Who?"

He turned and pointed his lather-stained razor to the faded image of
Franco's face on the wall.

He finished shaving my neck and asked me: "You've seen the soldiers and
the machine guns?"

"Yes."

"They are not there for nothing," he observed.

"You mean that _he_ needs them?"

"He couldn't rule without them," he said.

"Naked force?"

"_Oui, Monsieur._"

He gave me a tiny mirror in which to look at myself, then smiled
proudly. I paid him and then shook his hand warmly.

"_Bonne chance, mon frre_," I told him.

I left, marveling. He was by far the most anti-Spanish Spaniard I had
yet met. But I could not escape the impression that he was still
basically Spanish, for he had denounced Spain in terms that were so
emotionally Spanish! He had boasted that he was the master of his hunger
and his misery, and that nothing could alter his attitude of insurgency.
He was the emperor of a bleak empire indeed. He would refuse to repress
his instinct for freedom even if faced with starvation. In fact, he
would take starvation and death and make of them a kind of victory.
Somehow, in his outlook, he had substituted the objective for the
subjective and was clinging to it with all the passion of his heart.
Proud, sensitive, knowing no practical way out of the morass of his
shame and degradation, he had made a monument out of his black defeat.




CHAPTER 13


My first Sunday afternoon in Barcelona was spent in Andr's home with
his family. He lived on the lower and more commercial end of the Ramblas
in a vast, dreary tenement that looked much better from the outside than
it did on the inside. Armed with a bouquet of red roses for his mother,
I trudged up four flights of winding, dirty, dark stairs and saw Andr,
a murky shadow in the watery beams of a distant skylight, framed in the
doorway of his apartment. As I approached him, I was aware of whitish
blobs of faces, members of his family, no doubt, floating behind him in
the background.

I was kindly, even elaborately welcomed and I was sure that Andr must
have coached them not to be too demonstrative or forward in their
reactions, for they stood about in attitudes of silent expectancy,
waiting. One by one they shook my hand, allowing me to advance into the
living room. Andr held my left forearm in a firm but brotherly grip,
guiding me gently but surely, signifying that he was my sponsor and
protector here. He translated and interpreted for me, an act which gave
me time to hover and observe.

They were all got up in their Sunday best and their awkwardness and
embarrassment were touching. The woman I intuitively knew to be Andr's
mother waddled forward; she was swarthy, short, fat, with jet-black hair
streaked with gray. Toil had aged her prematurely. After she had shaken
my hand, I presented her with the bouquet of roses. For a moment she was
taken aback, gaping at me as though she was sure that I had made a
mistake; her bewildered eyes circled the family group, then she grabbed
me and kissed me on the cheek. She gazed wistfully down at the flowers
and began a soft, silent weeping. Andr patted her shoulder and gave me
a wink that begged my indulgence for his mother who, his expression
implied, was a weak and irrational creature. Slowly the woman detached a
rose from the bunch and tucked it into her hair; there were exclamations
of "Ah!" and "Oh!" as all the women in the room followed suit, and they
looked uncommonly pretty with the red roses glowing darkly against their
somber tresses. It was amazing (and it was not to be the last time that
I was to notice this) how simply and cheaply a Spanish woman could
effectively decorate herself.

Andr's father was a squat, bald, hefty man and, when he crushed my hand
in his, I found the calluses of his palm as hard as stone. He looked at
me directly with lips that were always partly opened; I had the feeling
that he was waiting for me to issue him some command which he would
instantly execute, and it was impossible for me to glance at him without
his giving a slight, vibrant, nervous start in response. He worked in
the shipyards and had a blunt, honest face and a pair of dark, deep-set
eyes that stared out at the world with a certain degree of mild
self-distrust. A big black cigar holding an inch of ash was in his left
hand and he puffed at it now and then. With a slow gesture he pulled
another from his vest pocket and tendered it to me. I was about to
refuse, but felt the pressure of Andr's hand, indicating that I should
take it. I did, slipping it into my inner coat pocket.

"_Gracias, Seor_," I said.

"_Nada_," he murmured, smiling.

Andr's sister, a little mousy, self-effacing, black-haired girl, was
presented to me next; she shook my hand, bowing with ceremony, her eyes
fastened in fascination upon my face, my hands: my color seemed to
hypnotize her. At her side, clinging shyly to her skirt, was her tiny,
three-year-old daughter, at whom I smiled brightly and paid compliments.
The mother prodded the child to offer me her hand and I bent and shook
the sticky little fingers, wondering at the dirt that smeared her
features so much that she resembled a rag doll that had been left too
long out in the rain. Andr's mother swooped across the room and swept
up the tot and whisked her away amidst the general laughter of the
family.

"_La petite est sale_," Andr explained, guffawing.

Andr now led me up to his brother-in-law, who was the tallest of the
family. He seemed somewhat sophisticated, urbanized even; he worked in
an office. At once he offered me another long black cigar that went into
my inner coat pocket.

As though in response to some signal, or maybe from custom, all the
women gravitated toward the other women and edged slowly from the room,
leaving the men alone. I noticed that there was always an attempt to
herd the men with the men and the women with the women; it was as though
they wanted to protect the men from the women and the women from the
men, even in public, and it made one conscious of sexual differences
when normally such notions would have been far from one's mind.

An awkward silence prevailed, during which Andr pulled me to the
balcony from which I could see a plunging perspective of the crowded and
noisy Ramblas. The doorbell pealed and there was a scurrying of
footsteps, then exclamations of greetings. A tall, well-made girl swept
into the room and paused; she was sensual, olive-skinned, and had the
kind of personality that made you watch her and wonder what she would do
next. She had presence. Andr rushed forward and kissed her chastely on
both cheeks, standing a little off from her while doing so. Behind the
girl, smiling and shrinking, stood a woman whom I took to be her
mother--a morbidly timid creature who was not presented to me.

"_Ma fiance_," Andr said.

I shook her warm, pliant hand and bowed and smiled. She had large, dark,
shining eyes and she gazed at me with so mute, melting, and stricken an
expression that I had the feeling that, if I had said: "All right, now,
pull off your clothes and lie there on that couch!" she would have been
momentarily shocked, but would have obeyed at once. The girl was the
living personification of sexual consciousness; one could have scraped
sex off her with a knife. She whispered something to Andr, who turned
to me and, laughingly, asked:

"She wants to know if you are married?"

"_S, Seorita_," I said.

She sighed. Her full, moist lips were rouged; her eyes were dewy with a
dim, smoldering sparkle. Unconsciously her left hand rose slowly and
tenderly cupped her left breast as she backed away from me till she was
safe in a corner of the room. But she kept her eyes riveted upon my face
and her lips hung open.

"She's a virgin," Andr whispered proudly to me.

"Oh!" I said. Andr was clearly waiting for me to make some kind of
response to this announcement, but I was at a loss as to what to do or
say. Instinct urged me to reach out my right hand. He had been waiting
for it and shook it solemnly.

"_You are lucky_," I told him, nodding my head gravely.

"Yes, yes," he agreed readily.

By sheer accident my reaction had been the right one and I could feel
myself rising in Andr's estimation.

"When are you getting married?" I asked him. He shrugged and pulled down
the corners of his mouth while he rubbed the fingers of his right hand
together.

"I've no money," he said. "Maybe Papa'll help me as soon as I'm out of
school."

"What does your fiance do?" I asked him.

Dumbfounded, he stared at me.

"She's a virgin," he repeated.

"Oh, yes, I understand," I said, nodding my head still more gravely.

Being a virgin, evidently, was a kind of profession in itself. It seemed
that she stayed home with her mother and was never allowed out except in
the company of the immediate members of the family, a situation that
constituted proof of her virginity. I understood now why she had been
so wonder-struck by me; she had not had an opportunity to meet many men,
and I was, moreover, a different sort of man: brown.... Her being a
virgin was all in the world she knew, felt, and thought about. Hence,
each man that she saw she regarded as a possible agent of defloration,
an agent which, no doubt, she longed to meet and embrace. Her living the
role of a virgin had steeped her personality with an aura of sex and she
unconsciously attracted men to her body with more definiteness than even
a professional prostitute. Her entire outlook was one of waiting to be
despoiled, longing for the day when she could shed her burdensome and
useless role, when she could live a free and normal life like the older
women about her.

Suddenly something became terribly clear to me: Andr was aware that he
was sacredly pledged to marry this girl whose sole value was centered in
her virginity. When in her presence he could not help but be conscious
of her longing to be deflowered, and he responded emotionally and
psychologically to this ardent wish of hers, but he could do nothing
about it. He had to worship her from afar and wait until he had money
enough to marry her with the ceremonial blessings of the Church. And
that was why he had to go so often to seek the "bad" women in the dark
and fetid alleyways, and it was why, in his confused and embattled
heart, he hated those women and yet had to be with them. Those
prostitutes were the iron-clad guarantee that his fiance was and would
remain a virgin until marriage. But it was a torturous emotional and
psychological price that Andr had to pay for so dubious a value.

The apartment was bare, poverty-stricken. There were not even carpets on
the floor; it was not, I think, that they could not afford them; I
doubted if they had ever thought of putting any down. In fact, the home
was shabby and dirty. One wall of the living room boasted a loud and
vulgar print of the Last Supper; another wall was claimed by a huge
calendar showing a laughing, pretty girl, her head flung wantonly back,
her merry eyes contented and mischievous and watching you as you moved
about the room--and all the while she was about to take a sip from a
cold, sweating bottle of Coca-Cola. There was not a book or a magazine
in sight; there was no attempt at all toward aesthetic embellishment.

There was something missing here. There was not enough psychological
food in this home to sustain a genuinely human life. What was there that
linked this family with the modern world? Nothing that I could see. Was
it possible that they were that much cut off from life? No! Ah, I had
it. _They had the Church!_ The Church alone was their link with the
world, with other men; and they felt no need for other links--no books,
no magazines, no love of art beyond the traditional ecclesiastical. I
recalled that magnificent cathedral and realized how weighty and
meaningful a role it played in the emotions of people living so naked
and bare a life. Indeed, the cathedral was the only bright and colorful
thing on their whole horizon; without it their existence would have been
senseless. If the Church were taken away from them, the displacement
left would have plunged them mentally and emotionally into a void.

But even the decisive value that I assigned to the Church in their lives
did not completely satisfy me. I felt that there was still another
element lacking here, another dimension unaccounted for. But, for the
moment, I could not place my finger upon it. (I was far closer to
discovering what that element was than I imagined.)

The women now came into the living room to set the table for lunch.
Andr and his brother-in-law crowded about me as though to shield me
from the women, or to distract me from their presence.

"Do you like bullfighting?" Andr asked me.

"Oh, yes," I said.

"Have you seen many?" the brother-in-law asked me.

"A few.... But that was years ago in Mexico," I told them.

"There's a bullfight this afternoon," Andr informed me.

"Then you and your brother-in-law will come as my guests," I invited
them.

"But we have no tickets," Andr moaned.

"Can't we get some?" I asked.

"Sure. But they are expensive," Andr said.

"What do they cost?"

Andr shook his head hopelessly, gloomily.

"Sixty, seventy, and up to one and two hundred pesetas."

I pulled a thousand-peseta note from my billfold.

"This ought to take us with something to spare," I said.

Andr was undecided. I could see from his eyes that he wished hotly to
go. But would it be right...? Andr and his brother-in-law consulted
together, then stared at the note and shook their heads. Andr's father
came forward and spoke disapprovingly in a low voice, his eyes looking
at the note in awe. I guessed that he was telling Andr that it was not
correct for me to spend so much money to take them to a bullfight.

"It's nothing," I assured them. "It's a pleasure for me."

The old man slowly nodded his consent. Andr was wild with excitement.
He took the note and handed it to his brother-in-law, who rushed out of
the apartment to buy tickets. Andr could not contain himself; he danced
for joy, literally. He ran to the balcony and I followed him; we watched
his brother-in-law disappear toward a bullfight ticket office. Ten
minutes later the brother-in-law returned, panting and sweating, holding
three bright-red tickets in his hand. It seemed that the father had
instructed them to buy two cheap tickets for themselves and a ticket of
one hundred and sixty pesetas for me.

"You won't mind sitting alone, will you?" Andr asked me. "We couldn't
pay that much of your money for seats for us. It wouldn't be right; Papa
said so."

"Who's fighting today?" I asked.

"CHAMACO!" they all chorused gleefully.

"Who's he?"

"You'll see," Andr promised me.

He snatched the freshly ironed tablecloth from his mother's hands and
got in the center of the room. He held his feet close together, his
chest out, his buttocks in, his head tilted at an arrogant angle. His
right arm extended and dangled the tablecloth. His eyes were fastened
with contempt upon the horns of an imaginary bull. He twisted his wrist,
making the tablecloth tremble ever so slightly.

"Ha!" he shouted, shaking his body, trying to cite the bull of his
fancy.

"Andr," his mother pleaded, laughing.

Andr's eyes widened to indicate that the bull was charging; he swept
his arm gracefully upward, lifting the cloth with a flowing sweep, his
eyes glowing like coals and his voice, hoarse and filled with a tremor
of danger, sang out: "_Ole!_"

Every voice in the room echoed him: "_Ole!_"

When the room was quiet, I asked Andr: "Do you know the meaning of the
word, '_Ole_'?"

"It's just an expression," he said.

"It's a Moorish word," I told him.

"Really?"

He informed his family of the origin of the word.

"What does it mean?" they wanted to know.

"It means 'For God's sake!'"[A] I told them.

They all stood frozen and stared at me with open mouths. They had been
uttering the pagan religious phrases of the Moors and had never known
it!




CHAPTER 14


The talk of bulls and bullfighters swamped a long, heavy luncheon that
swam in olive oil. The afternoon was torrid and, though we were in our
shirt sleeves, I sweated as I ate. Spain being a man's world, we men
were served first by Andr's mother; the women had to wait meekly for
their turn. No nonsense here about the priority of women, of the mothers
of the race, not even if they were certified virgins. The women ate
silently with one eye cocked in the direction of their men, ready at a
moment's notice to drop their knives and forks and refill the half-empty
masculine plates.

We began with _paella_, then moved on to fried fish, followed by steak,
after which came salad; the dessert was canned peaches, a universal
favorite with the Spanish. I gave up after the _paella_ and begged for
mercy, much to the astonishment of Andr's mother, who promptly
predicted that I would collapse upon the streets if I didn't eat more.

With his napkin tucked efficiently into his shirt collar, and speaking
while masticating mouthfuls of food, Andr's father held forth about
famous bullfighters--Belmonte, Manolete, Joselito. Under the impact of
potent red wine and excited talk of bulls, the men's faces reddened,
grew mobile, inspired almost. Everybody ate a dreadful lot, including
the yearning virgin, who loaded her fork, packed the food into her
sensual mouth, and wolfed it down with open relish. She would take a
long swig of red wine, swish it about her gums for a moment to clean up,
and would swallow while her eyes roved the table, appraising the men.
Perhaps she was storing away a reserve of food for the children she
hoped someday to have. Anyway, she was not troubled with delicacy; maybe
she was resigned, knowing that she was undoubtedly destined for fatness,
and fairly soon.

After lunch we men sat, grunted, sighed, stretched out our legs while
the womenfolk cleared the table. I put one of Andr's father's big black
cigars in my mouth and let the old man have the pleasure of lighting it.

"_Muchas gracias, Seor_," I murmured, pretending to smoke.

"_Nada_," he sang, grinning with delight.

He patted Andr on the back and nodded approvingly toward me and said:
"_Simptico_."

Andr and the son-in-law chuckled in agreement.

A few moments later the old man's eyelids began to droop, then his chin
sagged slowly to his chest. Andr urged his father to take a siesta.
Laughing sheepishly, the old man rose, shook my hand, excused himself,
and lumbered off to bed. I relaxed and let my cigar go out....

No one felt like talking; in fact, there was nothing to talk about.
Andr kept glancing at the clock on the mantle and the long, dull
afternoon wore on. The voices of the women wafted musically from some
rear room. I was bored. At four o'clock Andr leaped to his feet and
announced with a whoop:

"_C'est l'heure! Partons!_"

"_Ole!_" I cried.

"_Ole!_" they chimed in.

We came to life, bade the women a lingering good-by, thundered down the
dark, smelly stairs, and went out upon the street to my car. Andr and
his brother-in-law were so excited that they were speechless; they sat
silent, hunched tensely forward, their eyes wide and unblinking. The
traffic was heavy; everybody was bull-bound. We came in sight of the
arena and even I began to succumb to the contagion of bull fever.

One glance at the straggling throngs converging upon the circular
stadium was sufficient to disclose that all social, class, and political
lines were melted here; but, wherever I looked, I saw armed members of
the Civil Guard, their machine guns ready.

"_Por qu a?_" I asked Andr, mixing languages and pointing to the
machine guns. "Why that?"

"_Nada, nada_," he mumbled, frowning.

Flocks of girls and boys scurried about with earthen water jugs; they
had tiny spouts from which water would jut into your mouth if you held
them up and out at arm's length and aimed the thin stream of water
accurately; they threaded their way through the throngs, calling:

"Water, fifty centavos!"

I parked my car. Andr and his brother-in-law went off to find their
seats. I saw upon the faade of a massive brick building fronting the
stadium a gigantic emblem of the Falange: a batch of red arrows held
together by a red horizontal bar, the symbol of the Yoke and Arrows
dating from the time of Ferdinand and Isabel.

The yokels from the hinterland, wearing dull brogans and sleazy,
crumpled trousers, mingled with the sleek members of the nobility, and
one could see the absoluteness that cleaved Spanish society, the working
class and the nobility, in twain. I was quickly hemmed in by men wishing
to sell booklets in English describing bullfighting, photos of
matadors, and brochures detailing their exploits. Others peddled combs,
cigarettes, canaries in cages, paper hats of many colors to shade the
head from the sun, pocketknives, wristwatch bands, dolls, rings, and a
sprawling welter of other cheap and flimsy trinkets. Beggars were
universal, eagerly exhibiting the stumps of arms and legs, their
outstretched palms beseeching centavos; they would follow you for
minutes, jabbering plaintively, their eyes humble and desperate.

Hawk-faced gypsy women offered bits of colored paper upon which your
fortune was printed; others, a little better dressed, had elaborate
astrological charts showing loops and whorls that traced the influence
of the stars upon your life. Excited, black-eyed teenage girls passed
arm in arm, their painted lips spewing out words so rapidly that their
voices sounded like the spluttering ends of dangling electric wires
emitting blue sparks.

Suppressed emotion filled the air; all about me eyes glittered with the
expectation of seeing something loved and believed in. Several
working-class women carried tiny babies in their arms; in a quiet,
shaded nook of the stadium wall one young woman was giving the swollen,
veined teat of her breast to her infant and crumbly milk drooled from
the tiny mouth as it suckled, and the mother, her eyes dreamy and
vacant, stood oblivious of passers-by. To me she was a spectacle far
more moving and beautiful than the ancient, wooden Black Virgin seated
among the rearing stones of Montserrat....

I surrendered my ticket and followed the stream inside, renting a tiny
pillow that was thrust upon me, the significance of which I did not
appreciate until I saw the bare slab of concrete that was to be my seat
for more than two hours. Up a short flight of steps and some thirty
thousand people magically appeared in a vast sun-drenched circle, the
tiers of faces rising like a wall toward the hot blue sky. The scene
leaped with color and noise. The heat was like steam and there was
scarcely room to move. I was jostled in front, in back, and from both
sides by pushing, sweating, panting people. An usher grabbed the stub of
my ticket and beckoned me to follow him; he pointed to a seat in the
shade at the barrier, with no one directly blocking my view of the wide
circle of red sand that formed the bullring. But, when the usher
indicated a span of bleak concrete ten inches wide and jammed in between
two other people, I thought that surely a mistake had been made. But,
no, that was my seat. In order to possess it, I had to straddle my legs
so that my kneecaps, when I eased down into a sitting position, touched
both of the hips of a fat woman sitting directly ahead of me on a lower
tier; and I could feel the fleshy legs of a woman behind me cushioning
my back. I smiled bitterly. The fantastically elaborate pains to which
Spaniards went to segregate the sexes were annulled here in a manner
that more than wiped out all of their other moral efforts. I could not
crook my elbow or reach for my pack of cigarettes without colliding
intimately with female anatomy.

The women were dressed to the hilt and everybody was edgy, nervous; some
were biting their fingernails and others were pulling absent-mindedly at
the lobes of their ears. Friend greeted friend and the ushers shoved
rudely, seating people, their faces bathed in sweat. Uniformed men sold
beer, Coca-Cola, candy bars, advertising their wares in singsongy wails.
The Civil Guards were stationed at intervals of about ten feet and they
had their machine guns handy. Though there was a bubbling din of voices,
I had the impression that the vast crowd was very quiet.

Suddenly I was aware of whispers and snickers coming from the people
around me; my ears caught the word: "_Americano_...." I grew
self-conscious, feeling that someone was commenting upon my national
identity. I looked cautiously at the faces near me, but they were
staring off intently in another direction. Then I spotted the object of
their bemused curiosity: I saw that it was a Protestant clergyman
looking awfully out of place in this splendid pagan setting and a long
way from his home and his ideas. He was aware, I felt sure, that he was
a minor sensation and now and then he ran the forefinger of his right
hand deep in and around his white turned-about collar. He kept his eyes
dead ahead and he held a fixed smile that did not look genuine.

Momently the crowd thickened. The bullfighters and their assistants
began to make their appearance in the space, about a yard wide, between
the barrier and the bullring. The matadors were dressed in flashy,
tight-fitting costumes that were known as "suits of lights"; their aids
were less gaudily clad. Reporters and photographers began to circulate
among the bullfighters, who went about arranging their capes and swords
and other paraphernalia in a tight-lipped, matter-of-fact manner. Their
faces were drawn, their eyes holding dull glints of apprehension.

A band began to play on the far side of the arena and a roar of voices
filled my ears. The spectators about me began moving with nervous
starts, their lips hanging open. I noticed that the pressmen and the
photographers behind the space of the first barrier kept looking up at
the tiers of human bodies in such a queer and self-conscious fashion
that I felt compelled to turn my head and seek out what was interesting
them so intensely. I discovered that they had an amazingly graphic view
of many women who, enthralled and excited, had allowed their legs to
spread, offering froglike visions of white flesh. The men would march to
and fro, with nervous expressions on their faces, then they would pause
and glance up, their eyes stony with lust. Now and then they would form
a knot, jab one another in the ribs, whispering, laughing with taut
lips, then resume their pacing and looking furtively upward. One
enterprising photographer attached a telephoto lens to his camera and,
with his comrades crowding about him so as to screen his actions,
pointed his camera upward and began snapping photos....




CHAPTER 15


The tempo of events quickened. As with one prompting, everybody now
turned toward the ornately decorated box where sat the president of the
bullring and official referee. His signal for the commencement of the
drama came when his fluttering white handkerchief showed over the top
railing of his box, and a highly synchronized, dazzling, and bloody game
got under way, at first slowly and with touches of studied ceremony, but
later becoming more desperate, fatalistic, and beautifully horrendous
as the grappling with danger grew more and more intimate and mounted to
a determined and inevitable climax of life or death for man or
beast--but surely _death_ for something or somebody.

A bugle sang a clear, golden note and the band began to play the
dolorously lively bullfighter's _pasodoble_. From out of a wide opening
on the far side of the blindingly bright red ring a score or more of
brilliantly costumed men, led by a lone black figure astride a
gracefully prancing horse, fanned out slowly and evenly over the scarlet
sand and advanced with solemn steps toward the presidential box, looking
like glowing pawns as they moved in the sunlight. They halted, facing
the presidential box, and lifted their dark eyes grimly upward. The
lone, mounted black figure now doffed his hat to the president; the
others--the matadors, banderilleros, and picadors--following tradition,
pressed their black hats firmly upon their heads, waiting. The president
now rose and tossed a key that traced a swift downward arc and fell into
the hat of the black, horse-mounted figure who, whirling his horse,
galloped across the ring of sand and handed the key to the doorkeeper of
the bull pen. Meanwhile, the matadors and their entourage were bowing to
the president, then, with hurried, tense steps they scampered behind
wooden, protective barriers at three points in the circumference of the
ring.

Again came the sound of a bugle, higher, clearer. A huge gate was thrown
open by a man who fled to safety. A gaping black hole yawned and all
eyes peered expectantly into it. Then out thundered a wild, black,
horned beast, his eyes ablaze, his nostrils quivering, his mouth open
and flinging foam, his throat emitting a bellow. He halted for a second,
amazed, it seemed, at the spectacle confronting him, then he settled
squarely and fearlessly on his four hoofs, ready to lower his head and
charge at the least sign of movement, his sharp horns carrying the
threat of death, his furious tenacity swollen with a will that would
brook no turning aside until all movement about him had been struck
down, stilled, and he alone was left lord and master of the bloody
field.




CHAPTER 16


It took but thirty seconds of contemplation of that black bundle of
bounding fury for my feelings to declare in me the definite conviction
that, though that raging bull was indubitably and dangerously real, he
was, at the same time, a complement of a subjective part of almost
everybody in the stadium; he was, though an incontestable and charging
beast, a creature of our common fantasy, a projected puppet of our
collective hearts and brains, a savage proxy offered by us to ourselves
to appease the warring claims that our instincts were heir to. And all
the swift and decisive moves on the part of the matadors and their
assistants that I saw in the ring that hot August afternoon served but
to deepen and inform my original intuitive impression.

_There was no doubt but that this beast had to be killed!_ He could be
allowed to linger along; he could be played with, teased even, but he
had to go, for there was no possibility of coming to terms with him. One
could not live with him, yet one could not run away, could not leave him
alone. This beast had not only to be slain, but _ceremoniously_
slain--slain in a manner that would be unforgettable. And when one faced
his wild and wayward presence, one knew that one's every act had to be
suffused with the implacable resolve to put him out of life, or he would
put one out of life.

From behind the three wooden, protective barriers of the ring the
bullfighters now ventured cautiously out into the sandy arena, each
group converging from a different angle, waving their scarlet capes to
lure the bull into making repeated charges so that they might study his
modes of attack, his manner of hooking with his horns, his predilection
for tossing his head to left or right; in brief, in a frantically short
space of time they had to familiarize themselves with the aggressive
tendencies of that restless beast.

And that crashing hump of a black bull that they had sworn to kill was
deeply loved; no mistake must be made about that. The long, secluded,
and attentive rearing that had been lavished upon him to bring him into
this ring virginal and pure, in terms of his having had no previous
experience in fighting men afoot, had been much too expensive and
elaborate to fit merely into a design of assuaging the desire to kill
for the sake of killing. That bull had been so tended, fed, supervised
that he was beautifully, wonderfully, innocently, and miraculously bad,
evil, ungovernable--the hallucinatory image of the undistracted lust to
kill.

That starting black hair, that madly slashing tail, that bunched and
flexed mountain of neck and shoulder muscles, that almost hog-like
distension of the wet and inflated and dripping nostrils, that defiant
and careless lack of control of the anal passage, that continuous
throbbing of the thin, trembling flanks, that open-mouthed panting that
was so rapid that it resembled a prolonged shivering, that ever ready
eagerness to attack again and again that was evidenced by those fluid
shiftings of his massive and mobile weight from hoof to hoof, those
unreserved lunges that sometimes carried him far past the elusive capes
and sent him pitching and sprawling into the dirt until his flaring
nostrils scooped up sand, that single-mindedness of concentration that
would never allow his turning his head away from his enemy, that
instinctively imperious pride that told him that he and he alone was
right, that superb self-forgetfulness that made him make of his body an
expendable projectile to hurl at and annihilate his adversaries, that
unheard-of ability to fight on even when rigor mortis was slowly
engulfing the tottering limbs, that total and absolute dedication of
life to defend life at any cost--all of these qualities made of that
murderously leaping monster in that red ring a bull that was obviously
something more than a bull. He was a substitutive instinct, a careening
impulse, a superhuman image to contemplate for an awful hour in the hot
sun buttressed by the supporting presence of one's neighbors--something
to look at and then forget with a sigh, something to be pushed into the
underground of one's feelings till the overmastering need to experience
it again would arise. Yes, the mystery and the miracle were here: the
mystery resided in why the human heart hungered for this strange need;
and the miracle was in the heart's finding that a rampaging bull so
amply satisfied that need.

The matadors worked tensely with their capes. This beast had to be
known, tamed--that proud and insurgent head had to be lowered, that wild
lunging had to be calmed--in sum, this beast had to be educated quickly
so that he could serve human ends, human purposes. The bull's desire to
kill had to be harnessed so that those sharp horns could graze, when
guided by the skillfully held cape in the hands of a man who was master
of his fear, the chest with an inch to spare and death would not come!
_Death must serve as a secular baptism of emotion to wash the heart
clean of its illegal dirt...._ And the matador in his bright suit of
lights was a kind of lay priest offering up the mass for thirty thousand
guilty penitents. I sighed, realizing that, in Spain, all things were
Spanish.




CHAPTER 17


Exclamations of admiration for the bull now filled the stadium. It could
be seen at once that he was a fighting bull, the ever-charging kind, the
sort that moved as though he had rails under him to make him come at you
like a thundering train. Once again the bugle sounded through the hot,
golden afternoon sunshine. The bull had now been sufficiently observed
by the matador and his assistants and the moment had come to attack the
beast directly by planting barbed hooks of steel deep in the center of
the mound of knotted muscles on the hump of his monstrous neck, the
ultimate object being to wear him down, to tire him and make him lower
his defiant head so that, at the moment of killing, the matador could,
while luring the bull in one direction, move his body in another and
reach across those ever-moving horns and plunge the sword hilt-deep into
the vital area of his body.

Also the matador had to check the beast's leaping lunges, had to slow
down his unearthly pace so that he could be played with the muleta, the
small yard-wide, yard-long stretch of red cloth attached to a stick
which the matador would use in his final and finest stages of playing
the bull. The bull had to be so conditioned that, when he chased the
muleta guided by the supple wrist of the matador, his horns would sweep
past the back, the side, the stomach, or the chest of the matador with
but an inch or a fraction of an inch to spare, sometimes leaving smears
of blood from the bull's sticky mane on the matador's uniform. This was
the dreadfully delightful climax that could evoke the scent of death in
the nostrils, the taste of death on the tongue, and the feel of death in
the blood--which was a way of experiencing death vicariously.

The matador and his assistants now took up positions to be ready in case
they were needed to coax the bull with their capes into a stance where
the banderillero could make his approach and jab home the darts of
steel. The panting bull now stood alone, looking from man to man,
waiting for some move, not knowing from what direction action would come
first. Then, on the far side of the ring, from behind a protective
wooden barrier, a man stepped forth and stood erect, bold, holding a
stick about two feet long in each hand. The sticks were gaily decorated
with frizzily cut, colored paper and were made of slender rods of
hardwood tipped with sharp, short spears of steel barbed and forged like
fishhooks. Once sunk into the body, they could not be withdrawn without
shredding the flesh.

The bull and the man were now alone in the red ring. The stadium was
silent. The sun beat down pitilessly. The man now proudly lifted the
brightly-colored banderillas high above his head, straightened his
shoulders and stood poised, then began to ready himself by flexing his
muscles as he lifted his body first on his heels and then on his toes.
The bull watched, then slowly began to move closer to the man. Man and
bull were still far apart and the distance between them burned with
tension. Still lifting and lowering his body on his heels and toes, the
banderillero began brandishing the sticks at the bull, shouting hoarsely
with full lungs, his pelvis jutting forward, his chest reared back:

"Ha! Ha! Ha!"

The bull lowered his horns for attack. The banderillero began advancing,
step by step, teasingly twisting his body from side to side, all the
time nearing the bull. The bull advanced. The man advanced. Now both
quickened their pace. Then man and beast rushed headlong at each other,
both at a dead run. The bull had reached the speed of an express train,
his horns lowered and aimed at the man's stomach. The banderillero held
his barbed sticks high, slanting a bit downward, and his body was
leaning forward at an angle, the steel tips in his hands ready to fly
over the onrushing horns to the hump of neck of the black, hurtling
body. Then, at the point of what seemed an inevitably bloody juncture of
man and beast, the man swerved to one side and leaped into the air, and,
at the same time, plunged the steel darts home into the hot and
quivering flesh of the back of the bull's knotted neck, then skipped
aside, avoiding the seeking horns, leaving the sticks dangling and
flopping as the bull still moved. The man escaped free and the bull now
stopped in his tracks, searching for the missed target and feeling
searing fire blazing in his gashed flesh.

A quick sigh went up from the audience. There was some handclapping.
Then came cries of:

"_Muy bien! Muy bien!_"

"_Bravo hombre! Bravo hombre!_"

The bull galloped in circles, heaving his massive shoulders, trying to
dislodge the steel hooks that ripped him the more he moved. His target
had eluded him and now he sought it again, determined, undaunted. He
trotted this way and that, thrashing his gigantic body about to rid
himself of those hooks in his flesh, and the candy-looking sticks bobbed
and flapped like circus pennants waving in the wind, shaving the tissues
anew, causing tiny streaks of scarlet to ooze down his forelegs each
step he took.

As though crazed, the bull loped into the center of the ring, snorting,
flinging his body to toss away those splinters of steel that bit ever
deeper into his muscles and the red streaks of blood turned to broad,
gleaming patches of scarlet that matted the black, bristling hair of his
back.

Then, to his right, another man appeared. The bull turned to face his
adversary, settling solidly on his four hoofs, then advanced. The man
advanced, holding two more red and green and white sticks tipped with
steel. Pained, the bull pawed the sand, lowered his horns, sighting his
target, and moved forward with quicker momentum, and the two steel tips
tore and widened the gash in his neck. On he came and on came the man,
and, at the point of meeting, when the horns of the bull seemed about to
gore the intestines and you could hear the bull's vast lungs expelling a
mighty breath, the man rose into the air, shooting the steel-tipped
darts downward and into the gaping, bloody wound. The man was in the air
when the sticks left his hands, and, upon landing lightly upon the sand,
he leaped aside, veering from the searching horns, escaping to safety.

The bull now stood and lifted his head and bellowed, raging, looking
about for the vanished target, heaving his vast black shoulders and
feeling the steel slashing his flesh and the streaks of blood now turned
to rivulets. The peak of muscle back of his neck gushed blood. That was
the way it had been planned. The means were cruel; the ends were cruel;
the beast was cruel; and the men who authored the bloody drama were
cruel. The whirlpool of discordant instincts out of which this sodden
but dazzling drama had been projected hinted at terrible torments of the
heart. Anyway, the results were being attained; the bull was now forced
to hold his head a bit lower.

The goaded animal now careened into the middle of the sandy ring,
bellowing, whirling his head in agony, his glaring eyes seeking vainly
for a moving target. It appeared; the banderillero stood arrogantly some
distance from him, again waving two beautifully deadly bright sticks
capped with hooks of shining steel, making dainty, capering steps,
yelling disdainfully:

"Ha! Ha! Ha!"

The bull studied the target. The man advanced mincingly, edging closer.
Slowly, head down, horns ready, the bull came, shaking his body to loose
those four arrows of steel that had now built a roaring fire in the
muscles back of his neck; he came, dripping blood, his mouth shedding
viscous gobs of white foam and saliva, his anal passage emptying, his
urine spraying the red sand. The man stopped and motioned the two sticks
at the bull, then stepped forward again. Then they both rushed at each
other; the man again left the earth, his arms outstretched, his feet
close together, and then he flung his arms forward, the pointed steel
tips shooting downward and sinking into the shaking flesh as the horns
passed an inch away from the stomach and the man skipped off to safety.
Maddened, the bull charged about the ring at random, his eyes hunting
something to hurt, to kill, the sticks flinging limply about his bloody
shoulders. He lifted his head and bellowed to the hot and empty sides.

The bugle sounded yet again and the ritual marched relentlessly on. I
settled back to watch the work of the picadors. Two men were leading a
blindfolded and padded horse, atop which sat the picador, cautiously
alongside the wooden barrier when the bull, spotting them, tore snorting
across the ring to attack before the picador and his horse could get
set.

The matador and the banderilleros rushed out with capes flaring and
flapping, calling to the bull, trying to distract him. The uproar
checked the bull in his flight; he now stood, turning his head in a wide
semicircle, looking from the waving capes to the mounted man. A cape
fluttered high and the bull charged; another cape flashed and the bull
altered his charge, changed his direction and went for that last
beckoning cape, twisting his gigantic body in a swift arc almost in
midair, hooking and snorting as he followed the fleeing and weaving
cloth, yet, as always, missing his adversary. Yet another cape rippled
and taunted him and again he was off upon another charge, and, once
more, the goal that his horns sought evaporated.... When the bull now
came to a standstill, he was facing the picador, who had ranged his
horse lengthwise along the wooden barrier. The picador reined his
blindfolded and quilted horse tighter and made the horse prance as he
forced the blindfolded animal to sidle toward the bull, all the while
readying his pick, pointing it toward the bull's back. He motioned the
pick toward the bull, goading him with heavy, throated grunts:

"Huh! Huh!"

The bull, head down, shot forward, his two horns striking the horse's
padded belly frontally, and, in the same instant, the picador's
steel-tipped pick was rammed with brute force into the already mangled
mass of oozing blood and hair of the bull's neck. The picador bore down,
his face twisted with effort, and he screwed the pick in, piercing deep
and turning it viciously left and right, jabbing downward, leaning his
weight upon it. But the bull never wavered; he lifted both horse and man
into the air, toppling them to the red sand that was already stained
with redder splotches of blood.

A wild melee of men and beasts ensued. The bull was the center of the
affray, following the frantically kicking horse, seeking the inert
picador, butting ceaselessly, avid to sink his horns and kill. The
matador and the banderilleros now converged upon the bull, coming within
a yard of him, flapping their capes in his eyes. Momentarily blinded,
the bull halted and looked about. Then he rushed after the floating and
dissolving capes, snorting, hooking to left and right until he was in
the center of the ring.

The picador was on his feet and was pulling his horse up; a stain of
blood showed on the horse's belly. Quickly, the picador remounted,
grabbed the long pole whose steel tip now dripped drops of blood, and
ranged the horse's padded body parallel to and almost touching the
wooden barrier; the picador knew that he needed support for the bull's
next rush.

Once more the bull was seduced with trembling capes toward the picador
and the padded horse. The banderilleros and the matador now retired to a
distance and the bull, without hesitation and as though having suffered
no wounds, lowered his head and attacked the horse once again, sending
both man and horse slamming violently against the wooden barrier. But
the picador's steel pick had again invaded that inferno of churning
flesh and blood on the bull's humped back. The picador was off balance,
but he leaned and threw his weight behind the pole, grinding it into the
pulverized tendons; yet the bull rammed his head forward again and
again. The bull reared; for a split second the picador was lifted off
the horse, clinging to the pick like a pole vaulter, then he was pitched
far and wide.

The crowd began to howl, protesting, disapproving, fearing that the bull
was being punished too much, would be too weak to fight well. And, as
thousands rose to their feet, shouting, the bugle sounded, signaling the
end of the picador's work and the beginning of the artful drama of the
bull and the lonely matador.

The men began to lead the picador and his blindfolded and limping horse
away, but the bull was too roused to stand idle. He bellowed and went
for the picador, who was now afoot, and the horse. Again the swirling,
circling scarlet capes flapped in front of the bull, and the bull spun
round and round, going for first one cape and then the other. He finally
singled out a fleeing cape and chased the man who was manipulating it to
the wooden barrier which lay but three yards directly below me. The man
leaped the barrier to escape the bull, dropping the cape. The bull
hooked the cape, tossing it on his horns, snorting, then, when the cape
fell, he bent and sniffed it, then lifted his head. While the bull was
standing baffled for that moment, I could see a tiny fountain of blood
bubbling up out of the confusion of flesh of his humped neck--a tiny
geyser of red that jutted up two inches high while a sheet of scarlet
flooded down the bull's left side, coagulating in soft, tiny, irregular
lumps in the bright sunshine. The bull now reared, lifting his two front
legs, and tried to hurdle the barrier, his eyes glowing like the lights
of hell and his distended nostrils flaring like a scream too terrible to
be heard. The reporters and the photographers ducked for cover,
scurrying left and right, seeking exits. And the people around me rose,
screaming, shouting--already beginning to push and shove in panic. The
bull's front hoofs were now resting atop the railing of the wooden
barrier. The matador and his aids ran forward, yelling, shouting,
hurling their capes at the beast, trying to bait him into turning and
charging again.

I had stiffened when the bull had reared and placed his hoofs upon the
barrier's railing, but I could not have moved had I tried, for the fat
woman who sat directly in front of me and a few inches lower down had
twisted her body about in convulsive terror and had flung her hands to
her face, covering her eyes, and had pushed her face down into my lap,
shuddering in horror. Stupefied, I stared down at her tumbling,
glistening black locks and did not move.

A moment later she lifted her head and peeped out toward the ring,
seeing that the bull had been enticed back from the barrier. She
straightened, gave a little orgiastic moan, and turned her body toward
the ring again, not saying a word. I doubt if she really knew what she
had done. I sat awhile, filled with wonder. And then I felt as though I
needed to go to confession....




CHAPTER 18


The matador was Chamaco. The bull now stood in the center of the ring,
winded, his head down, his eyes balefully watching the vague movements
of the men at the barrier. Across the red sand came a slender figure
carrying a muleta and a sword under his left arm. The sun glinted softly
on his suit of lights and his step was solemn, slow. With his chin
almost on his chest, he walked toward the presidential box, stopped,
looked up, bowed, then, following tradition, tossed his black hat to the
red sand, and turned. He strode slowly along the barrier, his assistants
following at a respectful distance.

Many people stood to get a full view of him. There was some
handclapping. He gave a swift, enigmatic glance at the circular wall of
faces and I was stupefied to see how young he really was; the contours
of adolescence were still upon his dark, brooding face. Impulsively, I
turned to the man who sat on my left and asked him in French:

"_Quel ge a-t-il?_"

"_Dix-neuf_," he said.

"_C'est un enfant_," I said.

"_Oui. Mais il est brave_," the man said, smiling at me. "You are
American, yes?" he asked in English with a clumsy accent.

"Yes," I answered.

"I could tell by your clothes," he said. "America and Spain are friends,
yes?" He patted my forearm.

I looked out to the red ring, pretending that I did not understand or
hear him. Politics was the last thing on earth that I wanted to discuss
at the moment.

"Friendship is a great thing, no?" he said.

"Tell me: why are all those machine guns here?" I asked him.

He was startled by my question, then laughed.

"For protection," he said.

"Whose protection?" I asked.

He looked at me and winked, then we both laughed.

"That boy is too young to risk his life that way," I said, bringing
bullfighting to my rescue.

The man leaned toward me and said in a whisper: "Pain caused by a bull's
horn is far less awful than pain caused by hunger. Understand?"

"Yes; I understand."

"That boy comes from a poor section of Spain, a town called Huelva, in
Andalusia. He has a large family, many brothers and sisters. Two years
ago he was starving; now he is almost rich."

"Yes."

"_C'est la vie_," he summed up, laughing.

"_Peut-tre_," I murmured.

I resumed watching Chamaco, who was now strolling with downcast head
toward the bull. The bull turned and faced him, eyeing him, immobile. I
had seen that boy Chamaco rushing about the ring with the others; I had
even noticed that he wore a suit of lights, but I had refused to believe
that one so young was a full-fledged bullfighter. (In fact, technically
speaking, Chamaco was not a full-fledged bullfighter. He was what was
called a _novillero_, that is, a fighter of young bulls. But he had been
fighting full grown bulls for a long time now and he was slated to take
his _alternativa_, that is, his formal inauguration as a regular
bullfighter, in the ring in Madrid, perhaps in 1956.)

He strode across the bloody sand and stopped at a spot about ten yards
from the bull, who regarded him tensely, not moving. Then, without once
glancing at the bull, Chamaco unfolded his muleta and took out his
sword, as though he were at home pulling off his hat and coat to hang
them up. He put the end of the spread muleta between his thighs, like a
boy straddling a broomstick, making believe that it was a horse. The
other end of the muleta now extended out, about a yard from his knees,
the red folds dangling. His right hand held the sword, which he now
inserted under the cloth so that the tip of the sword terminated at the
point where the muleta ended and fell toward the sand. Until that moment
he had been facing the bull; now he turned his left side to the bull and
stared straight ahead, acting as though the bull did not exist.

The thousands of onlookers were profoundly quiet, watching. The bull
advanced a step, lifting his head imperceptibly, studying this new
phenomenon. Then, for the first time, Chamaco looked at the bull, his
chin still on his chest. The bull trotted closer, looking, watching for
movement. Chamaco's right hand now jiggled the sword ever so slightly
and the outer fringes of the muleta fluttered a bit. The bull's head
lifted sharply. He had seen that movement. Despite all the punishment he
had taken, he was still able to send his horns through a man's body with
a mere casual toss of his mammoth head; he could still kill.

The bull was at Chamaco's left. Chamaco was fronting the crowded stands,
his slight figure draped in an attitude of indifference. Once more he
twitched the far end of the muleta with the sword, making the folds in
the cloth tremble. Chamaco was citing the bull's left eye, and was so
gauging and calculating the bull's angle of attack that he knew exactly
where the bull's right horn would pass and how deadly close.

The bull flew forward full tilt, seemingly certain now that he had at
long last gotten his hated target on the beam. As he thundered forward,
Chamaco moved the far end of the muleta slowly, slightly, lifting it,
and the bull's right horn swept past, within inches of Chamaco's chest,
his body rearing, and, as the muleta continued to float upward into the
air, the bull finished his wild lunge with his head high, horns pointing
skyward, both of his front legs extended, slanting upward in midair, and
his entire mass was one vast ensemble of taut black muscle covered with
bristling hair. Other than lifting his arms to raise the muleta, Chamaco
had not moved.

As with one voice, thirty thousand throats sang out in a soft, slow
burst: "_Ole!_ (For God's sake!)"

It had been beautiful and awful and horrible and glorious, and ought to
have been forbidden, for there had been something undoubtedly criminal
about it. I shifted nervously on my slab of concrete to watch and wait
for what would come next. My mouth hung open; I was revolted, but hungry
for more. I was indignant, but bewitched, utterly.

The bull's wild leap ended and he settled to earth, turned; he now stood
on Chamaco's right. Chamaco, without moving from his tracks, held the
muleta in his right hand, waist high, about two feet from him, and the
bull, without ceasing to move, came in for another charge, his horns
this time sweeping past Chamaco's stomach, and, following the muleta,
the bull rose to the height of Chamaco's shoulder, the force of the
beast's effort making his forelegs shoot into the air while the muleta
floated above his head.

"_Ole!_" the crowd sang with bated breath.

Man and beast had now become fused into one plastic, slow-moving,
terrible, delicate waltz of death, the outcome of which hung upon the
breath of a split second. The bull, now to Chamaco's left again, was
turning, his tail swishing, readying himself to resume attack. Chamaco,
still rooted to the spot, lowered the muleta till it dragged in the
sand, the handle of the stick of the muleta being held close to his
thigh. He held the muleta this time in his right hand and, as the bull
came in, he swept it gently, slowly backward, round to his side. The
bull, head down, hypnotized by the cloth, followed, hooking his horns
past Chamaco's kneecaps. While the bull was in this low charge, Chamaco,
pivoting slowly, advancing his left foot and pulling back his right,
turned, still moving the muleta ahead of the bull's nose, luring the
beast around him so that, when he whipped the muleta out of range of the
bull's vision, the bull's horns were almost touching his knees, the
beast having made a full circle around the man.

"_Ole!_" the mass chanted with fearful glee.

There was a dramatic pause. Chamaco hid the muleta behind him; he was
now two feet from the bull, looking directly down at it, not moving, his
right hand lifted high into the air. The bull stared, outwitted,
baffled.

Chamaco now stepped aside, disclosing the muleta which he now held in
his left hand. The bull lowered his head, then looked at Chamaco, then
at the cloth, at Chamaco, then at the cloth.

The stadium filled with murmurs. Everyone knew that the bull was now
trying to choose between the man and the cloth. Had the beast learned
the difference so quickly? Then the bull hurled himself at the cloth and
a sigh went up. Chamaco swept the cloth gently around him until he was
facing the middle of the bull's body, while the bull rushed until his
horns were in back of the man. Chamaco shifted the cloth from his left
to his right hand, and the bull was bound to his waist, still whirling,
and at last his horns were almost scraping the back of Chamaco's calves.

"_Ole!_" the crowd sort of whispered its reaction, waiting.

Two feet out of line with the bull, Chamaco now stood with his back to
the bull's horns. The muleta was held in his right hand, about a foot
from his body. The bull moved. The cloth moved. Head and horns lifted
violently, viciously, sweeping under Chamaco's elbow and into the air.

"_Ole!_" rolled from the tiers of jammed seats.

Chamaco now draped the cloth over the bull's nose and lured the beast
toward his feet, then, as the bull, head down, followed, the cloth moved
to the side and then to the rear of Chamaco. Chamaco's left hand now
reached behind him, taking the cloth from his right hand, keeping it
moving all the while, and the bull circled him once more, his head and
horns at Chamaco's feet.

"_Ole!_" It was barely heard now.

With the muleta still in his left hand, Chamaco drew the bull round past
him, floating the cloth, his back leaning backward over the bull's back.
The bull's horns, ever seeking the cloth, now thrust past the retreating
cloth and into the blinding sun, rushing past Chamaco's chest and his
lifted arm, the beast's forelegs kicking skyward and his eyes round
pools of frustrated fury.

"_Ole!_" It came crisp now; the crowd was sure that the man had mastered
the bull.

Chamaco faced the bull, planted his feet in the sand, holding the muleta
at his left side. The bull brushed past his left hip, his lunging head
and horns lifting the muleta, his forelegs pawing the air.

"_Ole!_" the crowd sang.

The bull turned, always charging. Chamaco now extended his right arm
behind his body so that the muleta jutted out from his left side. The
bull leaped at it again, its horns grazing Chamaco's left side, rising
in the air past Chamaco's shoulder, and the man stood gazing calmly at
the madly lashing tail of the bull which was now directly under his
eyes.

"_Ole!_" The voices now sounded like a prolonged sob.

Man and beast confronted each other. Chamaco, holding the muleta in his
right hand, began a kind of slow, creeping movement with his feet,
standing upright all the while, one toe thrusting out before the other,
then the other. Standing still, the bull turned his head, his eyes
following the ever-elusive cloth. Chamaco, shuffling one foot ahead of
the other, completed half a circle about the bull, and his back was now
to the barrier. Had the bull charged, he would have been killed, for he
could not have escaped.

A sigh swept the stands. Men closed their eyes and moaned: "_Bravo
hombre...!_"

On and on Chamaco turned, shuffling his feet in the sand; and the bull's
eyes followed the cloth, his massive black and bleeding body turning.
Chamaco returned to the original spot from which he had begun his
creeping movement. The bull was mastered.

Soft handclapping swept the stands.

The bull now stood facing Chamaco, his eyes dazed, his four feet
directly in line with his vast, heaving body, his head down. Chamaco was
about six feet away. Suddenly you knew that the moment for the kill had
come. (They call it "the moment of truth.")

Chamaco's left hand now grasped the muleta firmly; he turned away from
the bull, looking at him sideways, letting the red cloth drop below his
left knee. He now lifted his gleaming sword chin high and sighted along
the length of it, pointing its sharp, steel tip at the tormented and
bloody mound of wounds on the bull's back. Chamaco's left hand twitched
the cloth, citing the bull. The bull saw it and charged. Chamaco
charged, meeting the bull. But, as he moved toward the bull, his left
hand swung the muleta farther leftward and his feet moved sharply to the
right. The bull's horns rushed past his stomach as Chamaco tiptoed,
leaning in and over the driving horns, and sent the sword to its hilt
into the correct spot in the bull's body. The bull halted, swayed.
Chamaco stood watching him, gazing gently, sadly it seemed, into the
bull's glazed and shocked eyes.

An uproar broke out in the stands. Almost everybody stood up, pulled out
white pocket handkerchiefs and waved them, making the looming, circular
stadium resemble a ripe cotton field being lashed by wind.

I watched the bull. He sagged, his eyes on his tormentor. He took an
uncertain, hesitant step forward, and then was still. Chamaco lifted his
right hand high above the bull's dying head; it was a gesture that had
in it a mixture of triumph and compassion. The bull now advanced a few
feet more on tottering legs, then his back legs folded and his hind part
sank to the sand, his forelegs bent at the knees. And you saw the split
second when death gripped him, for his head nodded violently and dropped
forward, still. A heave shook his body as he gave up his breath and his
eyes went blank. He slid slowly forward, resting on his stomach in the
sand, his legs stretching straight out. He rolled over on his back, his
four legs already stiffening in death, shot up into the air.

The man-made agony to assuage the emotional needs of men was over.




CHAPTER 19


The dead bull's mutilated carcass was being hauled away over the sand by
a team of galloping horses while thousands stood, applauding, marveling,
waving handkerchiefs. An avalanche of gifts--ladies' handbags, men's
hats, flowers, cigars, and packages of cigarettes--rained down into the
ring. Most of these were scooped up by Chamaco's aids and tossed
laughingly back to their owners, only the flowers being kept.

For the daring manner in which he had played the bull and in recognition
of the determination of his kill, Chamaco received an honorable award of
the tail and a hoof of the animal who had died so bravely. With the tail
in one hand and a hoof in the other, he trotted slowly around the ring
to acknowledge his homage, his adolescent face still solemn and his
black eyes holding a soft, inscrutable expression. I had the feeling
that the boy did not quite believe in the value of what he had done, or
maybe did not thoroughly understand it, and harbored some rejection or
doubt about the Niagara of applause that deafened his ears. Anyway, he
seemed detached from, and consciously outside, it all.

Contrary to popular belief, which has it that bullfighters are something
like ballet dancers, bullfighting does not demand much muscular
exertion, physical fitness, or strength, and its practice does not
develop the body as football, basketball, baseball, or cricket does.
Indeed, some of the most memorable bullfights ever witnessed in modern
times were executed by a man almost too ill and too weak to stand upon
his feet. That man was Juan Belmonte, perhaps the most intelligent,
courageous, and perceptive of all the men who ever entered a ring to
kill a bull. Belmonte has characterized bullfighting as being
"fundamentally a spiritual exercise and not merely a sport. Physical
strength is not enough."

But what is this mysterious "spiritual exercise" of which Belmonte
speaks? It there something hidden here? If there is something hidden,
why are bullfights enacted out in the open, before thousands of
spectators? The answer is not often recognized even when one is directly
confronted with it. It is the conquering of fear, the making of a
religion of the conquering of fear. Any man with enough courage to stand
perfectly still in front of a bull will not be attacked or killed by
that bull. It has been known for a man to sit in the bullring in a chair
reading a newspaper in front of the bull-pen gate. The gate was thrown
open; the bull thundered out, stopped, gazed at the seated man, and
trotted away. But to remain immobile when a beast of more than a
thousand pounds is hurtling toward you is usually beyond human capacity.

Back in my room I dutifully performed my daily stint of reading Carmen's
political catechism; I read lesson seventeen, for girls aged twelve to
fourteen.


_Jos Antonio_

     WHO WAS JOS ANTONIO?

     _The founder of the Falange._

     WHERE AND WHEN WAS HE BORN?

     _In Madrid, April 24, 1903._

     WHAT WAS HE IN THE FAMILY?

     _The eldest of six._

     MIGHT THE OTHERS HAVE BEEN INFLUENCED BY HIS CHARACTER?

     _Yes, perhaps, for due to his father's long absences, he was the
     leading light among his brothers._

     WHERE WAS HIS FATHER?

     _Fighting the Moors._

     WHAT WAS HE?

     _A soldier like his forebears._

     MIGHT JOS ANTONIO HAVE BEEN INFLUENCED BY HIS FAMILY'S MILITARY
     VOCATION AND THE HEROIC ATMOSPHERE THAT SURROUNDED HIS CHILDHOOD?

     _Perhaps, for he later considered life as warfare._

     BUT WAS HE A SOLDIER?

     _No; he chose an intellectual profession._

     WHICH?

     _That of Lawyer._

     WAS THIS IN KEEPING WITH HIS CHARACTER?

     _Yes, on account of the intellectual power required to ask all the
     questions, and also because if it were not he would not have chosen
     it._

     WHAT DOES THAT MEAN?

     _That he did not seek easy success, but the real heart of a
     matter._

     WAS HE ALSO ATTRACTED BY POLITICS?

     _No, his real vocation was for study._

     THEN WHY DID HE ENTER POLITICS?

     _Because circumstances obliged him to, though against his will._

     WHAT CIRCUMSTANCES?

     _The fall of his father's government and the profanation of his
     memory after his death._

     WHAT WAS HIS FATHER?

     _Head of the Dictator Government, 1923-30._

     SO HOW DID JOS ANTONIO'S POLITICAL LIFE BEGIN?

     _Asking for a seat in parliament to vindicate his father's memory._

     THEN WHAT HAPPENED?

     _Without realizing it, he found himself at the head of a group that
     followed him._

     DID HE THINK OF FOUNDING THE FALANGE THEN?

     _Perhaps. He thought of founding a political movement incorporating
     the youth to prevent the collapse of the country which was already
     speculating about the future._

     WHAT DOES "SPECULATING" MEAN?

     _To foretell, to foresee._

     AND WHY WAS THE COUNTRY DOING THIS?

     _Because, with the fall of the dictatorship, and the Monarchy, the
     collapse of the Republic which had, in a way, been every man's
     hope, there reigned in Spain only chaos and disorder._

     WHY DID THE REPUBLIC COLLAPSE?

     _Because, instead of doing constructive work, it confined itself to
     hurting people's feelings._

     EXPLAIN.

     _It scoffed at religion and this cut the Spaniards to the quick._

     SO WHEN CAN WE SAY THAT JOS ANTONIO FULLY ENTERED POLITICS?

     _A little before October 29, 1933, when, with a group of university
     men and some army men, he decided to found the Falange._

     AND WAS HE HAPPY IN HIS NEW LIFE?

     _Happy, no. He was being forced by circumstances as he inwardly
     thought._

     WHY?

     _Because, by inclination, he would have lived quietly far from the
     public eye._

     WHAT DOES THIS MEAN?

     _He would have liked, like all men, to love a woman as she should
     be loved and share a quiet, sweet, and Christian life with her._

     WHY DIDN'T HE?

     _Because, according to him, "We have been touched by the destiny of
     war into which we must throw ourselves heart and soul."_

     SO, WE CAN SAY THAT JOS ANTONIO WAS A HERO?

     _Yes, for he voluntarily abandoned all the pleasures of life to
     place that life in the service of a great cause._

     WAS HE BRAVE AND STEADFAST IN WHAT HE DID?

     _He was brave and calm, without boasting, as the leader of a
     spiritual movement should be._

     WHAT DOES "WITHOUT BOASTING" MEAN?

     _Without arrogance, presumption._

     WOULD THIS NOT HAVE COME FROM HIS MILITARY BACKGROUND?

     _Again, perhaps, for since his childhood he had learned to prize
     dignity and honor._

     WHEN DID HE DIE?

     _November 20, 1936, murdered by the Reds in the prison at
     Alicante._

     HOW DID HE DIE?

     _Preparing his soul to give God an account of his life, as a good
     Christian should, and with our cry, "Spain--arise!"_

     HOW OLD WAS HE WHEN HE FELL?

     _Thirty-three, and he died like so many other comrades to whom he
     had taught that death in the Falange was the only act of service._

     WHERE DOES HIS BODY REST?

     _In the monastery of the Escorial, harmonious and beautiful as the
     Spain he loved._




CHAPTER 20


Next morning at five o'clock, I paid my rent bill, shook hands with
Dolores, her mother, and Lola, and bade them good-by.

The sky was still black. I put my motor in gear and headed toward
Madrid. I found the streets on the outskirts of Barcelona bathed in
darkness and cluttered with a never-ending procession of rickety, wooden
carts drawn by donkeys. Perched atop or walking beside each cart were
long files of men, women, and children accompanied by dogs. The carts
were heaped high with vegetable produce that they were taking to market.

As darkness waned I climbed slowly into craggy hills that gave way to
mountains bathed in blue mist. The air grew so cold that I had to stop
my car and put on my topcoat. I ascended a high mountain peak and lo! it
was day, full and bright and streaming from behind a high, rocky
horizon. Light was pouring into the world like a flood of shining water,
but in the plunging valleys far below there were dark islands of mist
and cloud. I mounted dizzy peaks and had to slow down to thirty
kilometers an hour, for the road slanted and curved while skirting sheer
precipices. I passed leaning trucks stacked so high with bales of hay
that I thought that they would topple over onto my car.

A brutal sun burst forth from behind jagged, fantastically sculptured
rocks and painted the wildest and most savage landscape that I had ever
seen. Naked promontories of rubble jutted up into a pale, flat, blue sky
that refused to bend at the horizon. An uneasy loneliness settled upon
me, for I drove hour after hour and failed to see a single other car.
The highway was an empty path stretching through an empty world,
belonging only to me, the desolate peaks, the sun-filled sky, and the
whirling birds. There were no signs whatever of industrial or farm life
and when, later, I did see a rare smokestack, black or red, lost and
lonely in the scaly hills, it resembled an exclamation point,
emphasizing how far Spain had fallen to the rear of her sister European
nations.

I passed vast, high, flat, surrealistically shaped mounds of red
laterite whose ancient geological formation brought to mind images of
tidal waves, volcanic upheavals of the earth's crust, and the cosmic
force of tearing winds--for only actions of so superhuman a nature could
have carved out these gigantic sweeps of erosion. The scene was
magnificent, but for aesthetic enjoyment only; one could not conceive of
its sustaining human life.

Then came brown hills, red lands, russet-gray vineyards, dun-colored
olive groves with here and there a flick of green thrusting through.
Scrubby trees struggled to grow on gruesome mountain-tops. It was a
melancholy world with a spell of sadness haunting it.

Each little village of squat, clay-colored houses was different from the
last, yet somehow they were all alike, clinging precariously to the
slopes of bleak and crumbly mountains, each having the same general
coloring as the niche in which it nestled, partaking of the tint of soil
around it. Ofttimes I was almost upon a fairly large town or village and
could not see it until I could discern the outlines of its cathedral or
town hall, and then, like magic, a whole new world would miraculously
disclose itself.




CHAPTER 21


I entered the grim precincts of Guadalajara just as a blood-red sun was
setting. I rolled slowly through its narrow, mean streets, giving the
place a once-over, admiring the stalwart, scarlet hills, now turning
purple and black, that ringed the town like a fortress. It was
vulgar-looking and the adjective "beautiful" could never possibly be
applied to it. Even though it was nearing twilight and an awful pall of
heat hung in the air, the people looked so silent and subdued and the
streets were so quiet that you felt that something was wrong. I saw more
than what I felt was the usual number of Civil Guards hugging their
black machine guns and I had to admit that the Franco regime was not at
all shy in its dictatorship; it made no bones of the fact that its rule
was based on naked force.

I picked out a retiring, sedate, yet modern-looking hotel just off the
main thoroughfare and entered to register. But it took me more than an
hour to get my room, for I walked smack into the middle of one of the
most typical of Spanish dramas.

At the front desk in the hotel office stood some nine or ten people
engaged in a violent verbal battle, shouting, waving arms in passionate
gestures, and banging fists upon the top of the desk. Two of the
disputants were policemen with shining badges upon their chests. A
greasy-faced fat man with a vast, ballooning stomach and a dark, dour
pair of eyes was obviously the proprietor; and the woman standing
stoutly at his side, all fat bosom and neck and arms, with her palms
planted defiantly upon her hips, and with a flamingly indignant face,
was, no doubt, his wife. There was an obsequious, hawk-faced man in a
blue denim uniform whom I took to be the hotel porter, and the tall,
raw-boned woman with the defeated-looking eyes and the white dress was,
of course, the hotel maid. Two other men who might have been
plain-clothes policemen or guests stood watching grimly in the
background. That left a tall, blond young man who stood silently at the
side of an olive-skinned young woman who was now declaiming Spanish in a
loud and angry voice. Just what the fracas was about I could not tell;
but, when the girl had completed her shouted oration, there was an
explosion of vehement objections on the part of the proprietor and his
wife.

"_No, Seorita!_"

"_Jams aqu!_ Never here!"

"_Nunca!_ Never!"

"_Imposible!_ Impossible!"

The tall, blond young man detached himself from the group and walked
toward the doorway in which I stood, rubbing his hands over his face in
a nervous gesture and exclaiming in English: "Good Lord!"

"Are you American?" I asked him.

"No. English," he muttered.

"What's the trouble?"

"I really don't quite know," he sighed. "I don't speak Spanish. Do
you?"

"I have only a few words," I told him. "Does the young lady speak
English?"

"She's Spanish," he explained, "and she knows no English." He winked at
me. "We don't communicate on _that_ level," he said cynically. "You see,
we're not married and--"

At that moment the proprietor bellowed something about "Gibraltar...."

The young Englishman whirled, shouting: "Stop talking to me about
Gibraltar! I've nothing to do with Gibraltar! Take that up with my
government!"

I had thought that the discussion was about sex, and now it had veered
toward politics. The Englishman turned to me, explaining; "They're mad.
They're condemning me for keeping Gibraltar."

It was so funny that I laughed out loud, an act which at once drew
unfavorable attention to my presence.

A lynx-eyed officer stepped forward, confronted me, and demanded:
"_Pasaporte!_"

Since my country had nothing whatever to do with that huge pebble of
Gibraltar, I surrendered my passport with a light heart. He glanced
through it, then eyed me dirtily, ardently longing to find me guilty of
something. He rudely shoved my passport back into my hands and rejoined
the verbal war raging at the desk.

"I wouldn't make an issue of it," I advised the young man. "Moral
jitters of this sort have been known to happen in London, you know."

"Yes. But we don't insult girls there like they do here," he complained.

"Brother, this is the land of the Virgin," I informed him. "The law is
dead against sin here."

The two policemen now seized hold of both of the girl's arms and jerked
her violently toward the door. It was the first time I had seen the
girl's face; she was pretty in a rough, tartish way--slender, muscular,
with brown hair and flashing gray eyes. Her face was livid and she was
screaming. The Englishman gallantly stepped forward.

"_Por qu?_" he demanded, blocking the way with his long, outstretched
arms.

"_Contrabando!_" the policemen shouted in return, sweeping his arms
aside.

The girl was trying desperately to calm the Englishman, fearing that he
might get himself into serious trouble if he interfered with the
operations of Spanish law. She kept shaking her head at him and
repeating: "No, no... _Nada, nada_.... _Qudase tranquilo_.... _Un
momento_.... Nothing, nothing.... Stay quiet... a moment...."

"They are accusing her of black-market activities," I told the
Englishman.

"But that's crazy!" he shouted, beside himself. "She hasn't done
anything!"

"_Contrabando!_" the policeman shouted at the girl.

"No! No!" the girl screamed. She lurched out of their grasp and stood in
the center of the room. "_No contrabando!_" she shouted. She straddled
her legs and clapped her right hand hard upon her dress, seizing hold of
her vagina through the cloth. "_Contrabando? S, Seor! S, s, s_,"
she repeated harshly. "_Contrabando? S, s.... Nada ms!_ Nothing
more!"

She had been so brutally direct that she had made herself more naked
than if she had ripped off her clothes. The proprietor's wife paled with
anger, crossed herself and rolled her black, bulbous eyes toward Heaven.
Even the maid shook her head, shocked. The policemen stared in triumph
around the room, their facial expressions saying:

"See! What brazen a creature she is!"

The Englishman's face burned red. As the policeman dragged the shouting
girl away, I caught a glimpse of a golden medallion of the Virgin about
her throat.

"Er.... Just where did you meet that girl?" I asked him.

"I picked her up in San Sebastin," he confessed. "We've been traveling
together ever since. We've put up at one hotel after another. But this
is the first time we've had any trouble. I drove up in my car about
half an hour ago," he explained. "We registered and no one said
anything. We went to our room. Then we were summoned downstairs and
confronted with these policemen."

One of the policemen re-entered the room and jabbered to the porter, who
took down a key from a board and handed it over.

"They are opening the door of our room," the Englishman said, outraged.
"They are going to search our bags."

"Don't they need a warrant for that?" I asked.

"Evidently they don't, here in Spain," he said.

Yet, the religious assumptions here are correct and consistent; if sin
is suspected, you certainly have the moral right to seek it out; for how
can sin be punished unless it can be found?

"Do you have anything illegal in your bags?" I asked him.

"I've nothing illegal but the girl," he said.

He looked to be about twenty-six or-seven and perhaps this was the first
time in all of his short young life that he had ever had a whole, live
woman all to himself and he was in trouble about it. But he was manfully
standing his ground. I surmised that he had come hopefully from his
fogbound, puritanical England, carrying a headful of illusions about a
sunny, sensual, liberal, and forgiving Spain....

I approached the desk and at once the hotel owner began explaining his
side of the argument. I listened patiently, understanding but little of
the rigmarole. I glanced at Franco's photo on a wall above the desk and
I was surprised at the severity of the dictator's mien; if the
proprietor had selected this particularly icy version of his demigod's
face, then it showed that the poor English boy did not have a dog's
chance. I registered and the maid escorted me chastely to the door of my
room.

I had dinner in a little restaurant on the main street, then wandered
about a bit. It seemed that half of the local citizens were on parade,
marching slowly to and fro, arm in arm, reaching the end of the street
and then turning and retracing the distance that they had covered. They
moved quietly, talking in low voices, their eyes glancing at
random--men, women, and children. I recalled the brutal faces of those
policemen in the hotel office and I understood why these people walked
here so aimlessly, hour after hour. There was nothing else for them to
do!

I went to my room, took a stiff drink out of a bottle, and settled in
bed and began to read Carmen's political catechism, turning to lesson
five:


_For Girls Ten To Twelve Years of Age--The Concept of Tradition_

     WHAT DO WE UNDERSTAND BY TRADITION?

     _The knowledge we have of things past._

     WHAT IS ITS USE?

     _To know what our ancestors did._

     WHAT ELSE?

     _To know what we can do in the future, basing ourselves on what
     they did._

     SO PAST DEEDS CAN BE OF HELP TO US?

     _Yes, for they do not obey the laws of chance, but historical
     constants._

     WHAT DOES "HISTORICAL CONSTANTS" MEAN?

     _The permanent reasons a nation acts upon in the world._

     ARE ALL HISTORICAL CONSTANTS THE SAME FOR ALL NATIONS?

     _No, for some have to influence others and others to be
     influenced._

     HAS THIS ALWAYS BEEN SO?

     _Yes, because it depends on the character and way of life of each
     people, which is invariable._

     IN WHAT CATEGORY IS SPAIN?

     _Among those who influence others._

     HOW DO WE KNOW THIS?

     _Because history and tradition tell us so._

     SO OF WHAT USE IS TRADITION TO US?

     _It helps us to know that Spain has much to do in the world, since
     we know by history and tradition that it achieved much in other
     ages._

     WHEN WAS THAT?

     _At all times from when it provided Rome with writers and rulers,
     but especially in the age beginning with the Catholic Kings and
     ending with Philip II._

     WHAT DOES A NATION SEEK WHEN IT INFLUENCES OTHERS?

     _Its historical plenitude or empire._

     SO, IF SPAIN ONCE ACHIEVED IMPERIAL PLENITUDE, WILL SHE BE ABLE TO
     REGAIN IT?

     _Yes, if she can follow the rule of her historical constants._

     WHAT HAPPENS TO A COUNTRY THAT DOES NOT FOLLOW ITS HISTORICAL
     CONSTANTS?

     _It loses sight of its destiny and even of the possibility of
     existence._

     WHY?

     _Because it will be governed by other countries._

     SO WHAT MUST SPAIN DO TO FIND THE ROAD OF HISTORICAL DESTINY?

     _The same as those who succeeded in the age of Spain's historical
     plenitude._

     IN THE SAME WAY?

     _No, because times have changed._

     SO WHAT MUST BE DONE?

     _We must try to guess what our ancestors would do if they lived now
     and do it ourselves._

     WHY?

     _Because tradition, as Jos Antonio says: "...is not a state but a
     process, and for nations as for men it is difficult to walk
     backward and return to childhood."_

     WHAT DOES THAT MEAN?

     "_That we must look at tradition not to imitate it, but to guess
     what our great ancestors would have done, were they alive._"

     WHY?

     _Because there is no doubt that they found the way for Imperial
     Spain._

     BUT CAN WE TODAY USE THE SAME FORMULAE AS YESTERDAY?

     _The same formulae but not the same processes._

     HOW IS THIS?

     _Because formulae are the invariable in the characteristics of our
     country and the processes are what are required by each different
     age._




CHAPTER 22


Next morning, when I descended to the dining room for breakfast, I saw
the Englishman and his Spanish sweetheart seated peacefully at a table.

"May I join you?" I asked him, nodding to the young lady, who had large,
dark rings under her restless gray eyes.

"Please do," he said, motioning to a chair.

I sat and ordered coffee.

"Looks like things came out all right," I commented with a smile. "What
happened? Did they take her to jail?"

"No," he laughed. "They were suspicious about us and they were fishing.
Their denouncing us for sleeping together was a false alarm. They
thought that we were black marketeers. But they had no evidence and
could find none. You see, the laws here are tricky. I've found that
every law can be used for four or five different things. An accusation
here for any one thing can serve as a cloak for something else. They
wanted to look into our bags, but they began by accusing us of breaking
moral laws. When they saw that that wouldn't stick, they switched to the
real aim.... Oh, they went through our things, all right. God knows what
they were really looking for. Then they wanted to know if I had been in
Spain before, if I had taken part in the Civil War--"

"But you were too young for that," I said.

"Of course," he said. "They just wanted to look us over. We hadn't
violated any law; they got us before we had a chance to. We hadn't been
to bed. But they refused to let her sleep in my room. I had to engage a
separate room for her. So, this morning, about one or thereabouts, I
went to her room and spent the night. No one was looking or watching.
Now, everybody's happy."

"And you promised to return the Rock of Gibraltar?" I asked him,
laughing.

"Not so that you could notice it," he said.




CHAPTER 23


There was no vast, black, girting belt of tumbling industrial suburbs
circling Madrid that one had to traverse before entering the city
proper--sooty, smoky suburbs such as too often mar the approach to great
world capitals. From Guadalajara one streaked over a smooth macadam
highway past barren and dusty stretches of red and yellow clay and then
suddenly one saw tall apartment buildings of reinforced concrete, new,
glistening structures shaped modernistically, all angles and clean,
plunging lines, six and seven stories high, their faades tan, yellow,
blue--running the gamut of pastel shades.

The sun, a seething disk of brass, blazed brutally down from a sky shorn
of all clouds. It was the kind of sky that made one thoughtful; I had
never seen a sky whose infinite immensity so dominated the finiteness of
human dwellings. I cruised through magnificent, tree-guarded,
flower-bordered boulevards that were lined with roomy mansions whose
metal shutters were already closed--it was nearing noon--against the dry
and searing heat. The tires of my car made a soft, whirring hum that
seemed to blend with the air of an arrogantly restrained bourgeois
Madrid.

This city surpassed Barcelona in the sumptuousness and splendor of its
imposing ministries, its quiet, gleaming museums, its bubbling
fountains, and its proud, ornate monuments, but, as in Barcelona, I had
to exercise caution to keep from running down chickens, goats, and sheep
in the center of the city just a few blocks from some of the world's
most luxurious hotels. I passed four slovenly-dressed young men
sauntering abreast down the middle of one of the main, busy streets
caroling flamenco songs at the top of their tremulous voices to the
accompaniment of a twanging guitar, and I was surprised because no one
else was surprised.

Shoeshine boys, those inevitable heralds of endemic poverty, clogged the
sidewalks. I could see no sign whatever of factories, of mills, of
industrial activity. I discovered later that Madrid had no real _raison
d'tre_, that it had been designated as the capital centuries earlier
merely because of its central location. It was not really a city at all,
but an enforced conglomeration of bureaus of the Army, the Church, the
State, and the Falange--an administrative unit out from which the main
arteries of the nation fanned to distant hamlets, like the spokes of a
wheel radiating out from its hub.




CHAPTER 24


That evening I settled in a dingy pension and, next day, directly after
lunch, I waited in the British-American Club to keep an appointment with
a young American bullfighter, Harry Whitney, who had promised to allow
me to accompany a team of bullfighters scheduled to perform before an
audience of peasants in a village near Madrid.

Whitney was a singular man, a blue-eyed, blond, six-foot Texan of
twenty-eight years of age. He had a grave manner, a firm, almost tight
mouth, and a diffident air that concealed a volatile reserve of emotion.
In his dark suit, he looked more like a student of divinity than a
killer of bulls.

"You'll see the real thing this afternoon," he told me. "Let's get
rolling and pick up the others."

An opportunity to act as a chauffeur to bullfighters was more than I had
hoped for. Whitney directed me through narrow streets to an apartment
building on the outskirts of the city, where four Spaniards were waiting
upon the sidewalk beside huge, clumsy bundles of bullfighting gear.
Having two cars at our disposal, it was decided to pile the bullfighting
equipment into one car so that the bullfighters could ride with me.
Whitney introduced me to the men.

The team was composed of father and son, both well-known matadors. There
were two banderilleros. Whitney was going along to substitute for one
of the others should an accident occur. There was no picador; small
villages could not afford to engage them. They were an affable, polite
lot, deferential yet poised toward a visiting stranger. They were
dressed in casual sport clothes and each had a medallion of the Virgin
dangling in the V of his open shirt collar.

We rolled into parched and dusty country, our destination being Morata
de Tajua, a village some twenty-seven kilometers distant. Almost at
once we were in a range of bald mountains. There was not a single tree,
no colors except dull tones of brown, gray, white--even the scrubby
grass was a faded yellow. Buzzards circled slowly in the still, hot sky.
The air was so dry that it seared the mucous membrane of the nostrils.

"Do you mind talking about yourself?" I asked Whitney, who sat beside
me.

"Not at all," he said.

"You're a university man?" I asked him.

"Yes. I spent two years at Brown. I graduated from Syracuse in
journalism," he informed me.

"You're single?"

"Yes."

"War veteran?"

"Yes. I was a bomber pilot."

"Were you on many missions?"

"Yes. Mostly over Germany."

"Why did you come to Spain?"

"To learn bullfighting," he told me.

"Now, Whitney, just lean back and tell me why you fight bulls," I said.

It was an exacting demand, but I felt that Whitney was intelligent and
could take it. As we rolled slowly over the treacherous, twisting road,
I observed Whitney out of the corners of my eyes and could see him
reacting strongly. He brushed his right hand over his wavy, blond hair
and said in a low voice:

"Only a few people really understand bullfighting. Hemingway has
described the technical side of it, but not the emotional.... There's
one man who knows what it's all about. He's Juan Belmonte--"

"I've read him," I said. "You think he's right?"

"Definitely."

"What do you feel out there in the ring?" I asked him.

"When I'm out there facing a charging bull and hearing that crowd
yelling: '_Ol!_', I could stand still and let that bull gore me--"

"Stand still and _let_ it happen?"

"Yes," he said emphatically. "I become sort of drunk with it. I feel the
bull in my power. That's how many bullfighters get killed."

"Some people think that bullfighting is akin to ballet dancing," I told
him.

Whitney bent double with laughter, then stared off, amused.

"A ballet dancer would be killed in thirty seconds in a bullring," he
said. "I don't know why ballet dancers wear tight-fitting costumes, but
we bullfighters wear tight-fitting uniforms for protection. They are
made of tough silk. Now, silk won't keep a bull from goring you, but
many times the bull's horn will glance off and not penetrate.... Listen,
we bullfighters do not seek to move gracefully. Our movements in the
bullring are dictated by the bull and the bull only. The essence of the
bullfight is not in moving around, but in standing still. And that's a
hard thing to do. When you're holding that muleta and facing a bull,
your instinct prompts you to run. And if you do, you're dead, for the
bull can outrun you. You must plant your feet in the sand and face
death. The slow movements in the ring are designed _not_ to attract the
attention of the bull...."

"With whom does the spectator identify when he's watching a bullfight?"
I asked him.

"There are two sets of identifications," he told me. "One is with the
bull and the other is with the matador. It's only when the spectator can
make the two identifications at once that the bullfight is really
experienced--"

"You are acting _for_ the spectators?" I asked.

"In a way, yes."

"Has it ever occurred to you that your bullfight costume is very similar
to the vestments of a priest?" I asked him.

"You're getting close to it," he said, groping for words. "The bullfight
has the intensity of religious emotion. You offer your life to the bull.
Without that, there is no bullfight."

"Tell me a little about the world that produces bullfighters," I urged
him.

"You're getting at the heart of it," Whitney said. "If you think that
what goes on in the bullring is awful, then what happens before one gets
into the bullring is indescribable. Novels have romanticized the lives
of bullfighters. Their lives are sheer misery; most of those who want to
fight bulls never reach the bullring. They starve. They live from hand
to mouth. They are not supposed to touch women or liquor. This is not to
help you in fighting the bull; it is to keep you in condition to
recuperate when you are gored. And make no mistake, you will be gored. I
was gored soon after I started fighting and I'm glad it happened, for
now I know what it feels like."

"How many times have you fought bulls?"

"I've had sixteen fights; I've killed twenty-six bulls," he said. "I'm
beginning, you know."

"Do bulls dislike red?" I asked him.

"Bulls are color blind," he told me. "They'll charge the nearest moving
object."

"How many bullfighters are there in Spain?" I asked him. "What is the
setup?"

"There are about thirty-five hundred bullfights each year in Spain," he
related. "We have about nine hundred eighty bullfighters and we belong
to a bullfighters' union which has as its duty the protection of the
bullfighters' interests and the promotion of bullfighting.

"Now, here is what makes bullfighting hard as a profession. Of the nine
hundred eighty bullfighters, there are about sixty famous ones.
Naturally, the public wants to see these famous ones continuously in
action. But, if each of the nine hundred eighty bullfighters got their
fair share of the thirty-five hundred bullfights, they would fight about
three and a half times a year. But what really happens? The sixty famous
bullfighters fight eighteen hundred times, which leaves seventeen
hundred bullfights to be scattered among nine hundred twenty
bullfighters. A young man aspiring to be a bullfighter, no matter how
zealously he is trying to toss his life away, has almost got to starve
to do so."

"How did you, an American, become a bullfighter?" I asked him at last.

He looked at me and smiled bitterly.

"My life has been hard," he said. "I've had many disappointments. I
didn't care what happened to me. So I decided to fight bulls."

"Who is really the wild beast in the ring?" I asked him.

"It's the audience," he confessed. "Bulls don't kill bullfighters. It's
the public clamoring for danger. More and more, when you're in the ring,
you're not fighting the bull; you're trying to live up to the legend the
public has built up about you. They ask for risks and they boo you when
you refuse to take them. When the bullfighter believes in his legend and
tries to obey the crowd, he's on his way to the graveyard."

"Why does the public clamor for blood?" I asked him.

"I try not to think about that," he said softly.

"By the way, are you religious, Whitney?" I asked.

"No," he answered.

"What do your Spanish colleagues think of your lack of religion?"

"At first they couldn't believe it," he told me. "But when they found
that I'd share their lives, they accepted it. They think I'm a little
boy who'll finally grow up someday; and, of course, when I grow up, they
think I'll naturally be Catholic."

We came to a stop in the middle of a village square covered with yellow
sand. At once hundreds of astonished peasants poured, shouting and
screaming, out of their homes, cafs, and bars to stare at us. Amidst
these nave yokels I became something that I had never been before, an
object that was neither human nor animal, my dark skin and city clothes
attracting more attention than even the bullfighters. I was stared at
with a kind of fearful, blank, absorbed curiosity that one reserves for
the unheard-of, the unnatural, the fantastic. The squat, big-breasted,
broad-hipped young women seemed especially struck by me, gazing as
though hypnotized at my face, nudging their friends in the ribs with
their elbows.

The sandy village square had obviously been built some centuries before
with but one thought in mind: bulls. For that square was really only a
kind of crude, permanent bullring. Numerous thick, hand-hewn beams of
heavy hardwood had been driven like stakes down through the yellow sand
and into the clay, forming a rough blockade on the square's four sides,
obscuring the dingy faades of the meat markets, wine shops, grocery
stores, and even the delicate Gothic entrance of the local church. The
heavy beams had been spaced some eighteen inches or so apart so that the
body of a normal-sized man could easily squeeze through, but the spaces
were small enough to keep out the body of a bull.

In the afternoon heat, colored pennants hung limp from the faade of the
city hall and the fronts of stores and houses were decked out in gay
bunting. Flies as big as the thumb buzzed and sang everywhere, alighting
on the bloody bullfighting capes, trying to suck nourishment from the
dried blood clots. Franco's Civil Guards, now an organic part of the
Spanish landscape, were planted at intervals with their efficient
machine guns. As we unloaded the bullfighting equipment, barefooted boys
stood entranced, their mouths opened wide.

Almost everybody was wearing black or green or red paper hats. Little
girls stalked to and fro in their starched dresses, waving wooden
rattles that made a throbbing sound. Little boys blew whistles, setting
off a hurricane of noise. The older men sat on caf terraces playing
cards or dominoes or drinking beer. The women, dressed in black, sat in
seats high above the bullring, fanning themselves, waiting for the
commencement of the excitement of blood and death. Amidst all of this
strode the men of the Church, carrying their unquestioned authority and
power proudly, huge silver crosses bobbing on their black-robed chests.
And from a spot high on the front of the city hall a gigantic photo of
the ever-watching Franco, now somewhat benign of visage, surveyed his
quaint domain.

We entered a caf to wash the dust out of our throats; I drank beer, but
the bullfighters sipped only a little water, observing a tradition that
stipulated that they could not eat or drink until after they had killed
their bulls. The blaring music of a band made us rise and rush out.
Musicians clad in dark blue were marching into the bullring and children
followed them, clapping their hands, laughing, rolling their eyes, and
cutting capers with their naked feet in the sand.

The time had come for the bullfighters to don their complicated suits of
lights and I was honored by being invited to watch them. Whitney warned
me in a whisper: "This is a serious moment. Just sit, look, and say
nothing."

A "dressing room" had been set aside for them on the first floor of the
city hall. The suits of lights were elaborate, traditional affairs. Five
men were dressing and they had to pause frequently to help one another,
for it was almost impossible for them to dress alone, so heavy and
tight-fitting was the gear. They stripped down to their underwear and I
saw that their bodies were a mass of mangled tissue, scars and gashes
from previous gorings. First, they struggled into narrow-legged trousers
of raw silk brocaded with gold and adorned with tassels. Next they
buttoned pleated and ruffled white shirts and tied little black bowties.
Then came pink silk stockings, two pairs of them, one being put on over
the other in the hope that a bull's horn would glide harmlessly off the
leg....

"You'll notice," Harry whispered to me, "that we follow a strict routine
in dressing. We always put on our suits of clothes in the order that you
have observed."

"Why?"

"Custom," he said.

"What happens if a bullfighter is wounded?" I asked him. "You are laced
and strapped like a knight of the Middle Ages," I told him. "How on
earth could a doctor get at a wound with all that regalia strapped to
the body?"

"A doctor'd have to cut this stuff off of us if we were wounded," he
said. "If he tried to undress us, we would bleed to death before he
could get to the wound...."

It took them more than an hour to dress and, when they were finished,
they were forced to move about with stiff, almost slow movements, so
bound and buckled were they. Then, from out of a box, they took a flat
package done up in crumpled, brown wrapping paper; they untied it and
spread out a two-flapped photo which, when perched upon a table, proved
to be a colored image of the Virgin. One by one, they all, excepting
Whitney, went and knelt before it, closing their eyes and praying
silently. They crossed themselves, then rose. Without a word being
uttered, they gathered up their capes, muletas, and swords and marched
directly toward the bullring. I ran to the balcony to see them enter.

It was not an emotional bullfight, but some odd and revealing things did
occur. The bulls were not good and they had to be run and played long
and violently to get them to lower their heads, for there were no
picadors to punish the humps of muscle in the bulls' powerful necks.

The first bull bounded into the ring to wild cheers. He was an unruly
beast, often refusing to charge and, when he did charge, he did so at
the wrong time, hooking viciously. When the matador finally killed him,
hundreds of men and boys squeezed through the spaces in the stockade and
swarmed onto the sand of the ring and converged upon the dead bull's
carcass. Then something happened that made my lips part in total
astonishment. The crowd went straight to the dead bull's testicles and
began kicking them, stomping them, spitting at them, grinding them under
their heels, while their eyes held a glazed and excited look of sadism.
They mutilated the testicles of the dead bull for more than ten minutes,
until the dead bull's carcass was hauled away.

And the same strange, sadistic ceremony was inflicted by the excited
crowd upon the second dead bull's testicles--there were only three bulls
killed that afternoon--and they did not cease until the dead bull's
carcass had been taken from them. One would have to be psychologically
blind to miss the meaning of that. They went straight to the real object
on that dead bull's body that the bull had symbolized for them and
poured out the hate and frustration and bewilderment of their troubled
and confused consciousnesses.

I was later told that in some backward villages the men and the women
smeared their faces and bodies with the blood of the dead bull, hoping
thereby to gain potency or be cured of various diseases, particularly
tuberculosis. In many backward areas the meat of the ceremoniously slain
bull commanded a higher price than that of ordinary beef.

I went to my pension for a nap, but could not sleep. I lay in bed and
studied the Falangist political catechism, reading lesson ten for girls
between the ages of twelve and fourteen:


_The Moral Revolution_

     WHY MUST THERE BE A MORAL REVOLUTION?

     _Because political and economic revolution would be useless without
     it._

     WHY?

     _Because there can be no reform without man being reformed._

     HOW SO?

     _Because men make revolutions and no one can effectively serve what
     he neither knows nor loves._

     WHAT THEN DOES THE FALANGE UNDERSTAND BY MORAL REVOLUTION?

     _The new understanding man must be given so that he can serve
     efficiently and with discipline the cause of his country._

     HOW WILL THIS UNDERSTANDING BE GRASPED?

     _By knowing Falangist truths._

     ONCE THEY ARE KNOWN, HOW CAN THEY BE SERVED?

     _By voluntarily subjecting one's life to discipline and obedience._

     THEN WHAT WILL FOLLOW?

     _We shall reach the conviction that "in each of our acts, in the
     most familiar of our acts, in the most humble of our daily tasks,
     we are serving on a par with our own modest individual destiny, the
     destiny of Spain and Europe and the world, the total harmonious
     destiny of Creation."_

     WITHIN THIS MORAL REVOLUTION WILL NOT THERE BE SOME WHO GIVE
     THEMSELVES MORE COMPLETELY TO THE SERVICE OF THEIR COUNTRY?

     _Yes, the Falangists._

     WHO ARE THEY?

     _As has been said, those who voluntarily join the Falange and
     acquire a "way of life" for the rest of their lives._




THE UNDERGROUND CHRIST




CHAPTER 25


     Q. _Are these doctrines [Protestantism] not worse in a certain
     sense, than those of the pagans?_

     A. _You are right; many pagan doctrines are far less impious._

     Q. _Are the propagators of Protestantism trying to spread Socialism
     and Communism?_

     A. _That is the sole reason for all their painstaking efforts.
     Protestantism is nothing but a vague voice, a negation of the true
     religion; this is why it suits them best for the purpose of
     covering up their designs whose aim is nothing else but the
     destruction of society._

_Catechism on Protestantism_, by
Juan Perrone, S.J., Barcelona, 1950



The average Spaniard knows nothing of Protestantism; does not know what
a Protestant is; has never, to his knowledge, met one; and would stare
with more bewilderment than hostility if he heard someone declare that
he was Protestant. And even the Spanish intellectual feels confused and
uneasy when the subject of Protestantism is mentioned.

The official Spanish attitude toward Protestantism is, however, a
completely different matter. That attitude is reflected in the daily
practices and policies of the Church and State. The officials of the
Spanish Church and State know what Protestantism is; they have dealt
with Protestants; and they are intimately acquainted with the philosophy
and attitude toward life behind Protestantism. Protestantism, according
to the Catholic Church, is rank heresy, a mortal sin, and, since the
State of Spain is buttressed and supported by the Church, each
government official, being naturally a devout Catholic, feels that it is
his bounden duty to abhor, defeat, and banish Protestantism when and
wherever he meets it.

I was born a Protestant. I lived a Protestant childhood. But I feel more
or less toward that religion as Protestants in Spain feel toward
Catholicism. What I felt most keenly in Spain was the needless,
unnatural, and utterly barbarous nature of the psychological suffering
that the Spanish Protestant was doomed to undergo at the hands of the
Church and State officials and his Catholic neighbors. For that
exquisite suffering and emotional torture, I have a spontaneous and
profound sympathy.

I am an American Negro with a background of psychological suffering
stemming from my previous position as a member of a persecuted racial
minority. What drew my attention to the emotional plight of the
Protestants in Spain was the undeniable and uncanny psychological
affinities that they held in common with American Negroes, Jews, and
other oppressed minorities. It is another proof, if any is needed today,
that the main and decisive aspects of human reactions are conditioned
and are not inborn.

Indeed, the quickest and simplest way to introduce this subject to the
reader would be to tell him that I shall describe some of the facets of
psychological problems and the emotional sufferings of a group of _white
Negroes_ whom I met in Spain, the assumption being that Negroes are
Negroes because they are _treated_ as Negroes.

As dusk was falling one evening, friends of mine, L. and Z., directed me
to drive out along a road leading to a small town two hundred kilometers
distant from Madrid. We were going to meet a woman who had a story to
tell. Upon our arrival we stopped at a caf and Z. made a phone call and
it was decided that my woman informant would meet us in a small park
bordering a river. It was a hot night and the air was heavy. A wan moon
shone in a blue-black sky. We arrived before the mysterious woman and
had a dinner of sorts, sitting at tables under the trees eating
fried-fish sandwiches and olives out of paper bags and gurgling tepid,
foamy beer from bottles.

"Look," I said to Z., "our meeting this lady in an outdoor spot like
this--does that mean that she's afraid of being followed or something?"

"It's for her protection," Z. told me.

"Is she being watched all the time?" I asked.

"Why don't you determine that after you have heard her story?" Z.
suggested.

I smiled and fell silent. This rendezvous under the trees, far from
eavesdroppers and microphones, reminded me of accounts of Russian
revolutionaries I had read--revolutionaries who had plotted the downfall
of the Czar before the 1917 upheaval....

We finished our picnicking meal and waited. L. and Z. did not seem
inclined to talk and I felt that it was not prudent to press them.
Occasionally a dark shadow would glide past our table and I began to
play a game, wondering what shadow would finally come forward and
announce itself. Then, when my attention had wandered, I looked up and
saw a buxom, middle-aged woman with a strong and sensitive face standing
beside L. She must have passed us several times and then had come
forward silently, for I had not heard her approach. All three of us
stood. Z., L., and the woman spoke together in Spanish in low tones and
then the woman looked at me. Her large, dark eyes reflected fear and
apprehension. She sat, stared straight ahead, knotted the fingers of her
two hands together so tensely that her knuckles seemed to glow white in
the dim moonlight. She was hunched forward, her bodily posture
indicating anxiety.

The interview was cumbersome and must have lasted for more than two
hours. The woman would speak a few moments, then Z. and L. would
interrupt her and convey what she had said to me in English. In her
opening sentences she betrayed a terrible nervousness, her finger tips
flitting from her chin to her eyes and then to her lips. Midway during
her gloomy recital she became calmer and even once or twice managed a
wry smile as she related some outlandish incident, glancing at me.

"I'm going to tell you this," she said, "hoping that you can help. But I
don't see how you can. Maybe God will help you to help us.

"I come of an old and highly respected Spanish family. We have been
Protestants for generations. It's our way of serving God. Other than for
our religion, there have never been any stigmas against us in Spain. We
have always rendered our military service. We have paid our taxes. We
have obeyed the laws of our country. We have helped to enrich our
nation. My father was a well-known businessman.

"In my youth I had one great desire. I resolved to give my life to try
to redeem my country from Catholicism. I felt called by the Lord to do
this. I wanted to see each man and woman free to stand up and
acknowledge God for himself.

"In the beginning I used my father's business offices for a place in
which to conduct Bible classes for children. But, after a few years, I
could no longer use my father's business offices to shelter what I was
doing; his business had grown so large that he needed all of the space.

"I was determined that that would not stop me. It was then that I
conceived the idea of going into a small village and continuing my work.
I was nave enough to think that I could work in such surroundings
without fear of detection. I sought out the poorest families that I
could find and asked the parents of those families if I could teach the
Bible to their children. Many agreed. Little by little, and over a long
period of time, I gathered a class of fifty-eight children of both sexes
who came together once a week in a Protestant's home. I gave them
religious instructions; I made them learn many Bible verses by heart; I
taught them to sing evangelical hymns. Whenever it was possible, I gave
them warm food and clothing, for many were in dire need.

"Everything went along smoothly until the local authorities took notice
of my activities. One day the police came and told me that I had to
stop my classes. I told them that I was violating no law, that I was
doing no harm, that I was helping to keep the children off the streets,
and that I was training and guiding them so that they could lead morally
pure lives. They would not listen to my explanations; they told me that
they had received instructions to put a stop to what I was doing. When I
pressed them to tell me just who it was who wanted my classes stopped,
they would not do so.

"I decided to be careful. As much as I was loath to do so, I stopped my
Bible class in that village and moved to another one. I rented a small
room in a building owned by a Protestant couple and recommenced my
teaching of the Bible to children. Always I found that my neighbors were
more than glad to send their children to me. Surprisingly, things went
well for almost four years.

"Then one afternoon, about four o'clock, while a Bible class was in
session, two policemen descended upon us. They first dismissed the
children and sent them home. Next they arrested the wife of the man from
whom I rented the room. Then they arrested me.

"They had a paddy wagon--you know, one of those long, black cars with
windows in the sides and with the doors locked in the rear--backed up to
the door of the house and they made us get into it. The wagon was filled
with men and women, many of whom were crying and cursing. We stood
jammed between girls who were undoubtedly prostitutes. The men jostled
us and called us names. It was the first time in my life that I was so
close to such people. My religious beliefs had led me to strange places.

"At the station we demanded to see somebody in charge. Other prisoners
were able to talk to the officials, to ask for lawyers, but my friend
and I were not allowed to communicate with anybody. No doubt the
officials had been told to hold us and say nothing to us. What made
matters worse was that the other prisoners kept asking us what we had
done, and we knew that it was better to keep our mouths shut for the
time being.

"They put us into a dark cell that had only concrete benches for us to
sit and sleep on. The man who locked us in asked us what we had done,
and we said nothing. We were afraid to express ourselves. You see,
people _do_ and _will_ ask Protestants about their beliefs, but if and
when you try to explain, you can be accused of carrying on a fight
against Catholicism, which is our official religion, and you can be
punished for it; they call it sedition.

"That night we got on our knees and prayed out loud; we called on God to
witness that we had done nothing wrong; we asked God to forgive our
enemies. The guards came to the bars and listened and they were amazed.
They had never heard anything like it in all their lives.

"Later they took my friend from the cell and kept her for hours. Later
she told me that the police had questioned her relentlessly about me.
They asked her why she had rented the room to me. They wanted to know if
she knew what I was teaching the children. They demanded if she had ever
heard me say anything against the Virgin....

"She came back to the cell and we sat up the rest of the night, praying.
We could hear footsteps going to and fro in the darkness. When morning
came the guards began asking us all over again to tell them what we had
done. Many of the guards now crowded around to listen. This time I felt
that I should not refuse to talk. Slowly, I told them that we had been
teaching the Bible to children. That puzzled them, for they did not know
what the Bible was. I told them that the Bible was the sacred Scriptures
that God had given to man, and they were silent and stared at me. As
they left the bars of our cell, I heard one of them say:

"'Who's safe under Franco?'

"Next day we were taken from our cell and loaded again in the paddy
wagon and taken to a big prison. No one had asked me if I was guilty or
not. No record had been taken of our being arrested. No official had so
much as spoken to me. In this big prison we were taken far down into the
cellars where hundreds of women prisoners were kept.... Now, you are not
going to believe what I'm going to tell you, but it's true. Many of
those women prisoners had their tiny children with them. Some had as
many as three children with them there in prison. I asked why children
were in the prison and I was told that the mothers had had no one to
leave the children with. If I had not seen this with my own eyes, I
would not have thought it possible.

"Our cell was dark and unheated. The food was bad, but we did not mind
that. We prayed and sang hymns to keep up our spirits. The other
prisoners were terribly curious about us, but, as I told you, we had to
be very careful about what we said to them. It was always possible that
some of them were informers....

"Sunday morning came and a young, rosy-cheeked priest came in. He was
laughing and jolly and he called out loudly for everybody to come to
mass. My friend was worried and I had to comfort her. We both knew now
that we were dealing with the Catholic Church itself.

"All the cell doors were unlocked and everybody went out except my
friend and me. We knelt and began praying out loud, witnessing for our
faith. The young priest came to the bars and asked us what we were
doing. I stood up and told him that we were Protestants. He laughed and
said that that was all right, but that we would have to come to mass
anyway. We told him that we could not.

"The news spread. Something like seventeen prison officials now gathered
about our cell, asking all manner of questions. And when they heard that
we were Protestants, they were astonished, for they did not think that
people were being imprisoned for their religious beliefs. They began to
question us about our beliefs and we answered the best that we could.

"The young priest left. We were finally excused from going to mass. Our
cell door was locked and we knelt again and continued our prayers,
praying out loud. We asked God to give us strength to withstand our
punishment, begging divine aid.

"Everybody knew now that we were prisoners because of our religion. The
women, when they returned from mass, came and looked at us curiously.
They were not angry with us; they were just bewildered. It was something
completely new to them. They asked us what kind of religion we believed
in. We told them. What else could we do? We knew that we were risking
being called seditious by explaining our religion. We spoke to them
about the Gospels and Jesus Christ and they stood about and talked in
whispers, abashed. They had never heard of such things before; they had
never heard about Protestants. They became very sympathetic and offered
us some of their food....

"That evening the prison officials sent for my friend again. I thought
that now it would not be very long before they sent for me. But nothing
happened. I heard later, through one of the guards, that my friend had
been questioned, fined five hundred pesetas, and let go. But I still
remained in my cell.

"I demanded to be taken before my accusers, but the guards only laughed
and shook their heads.

"It was not until three days later that a guard came, unlocked my cell
door, and took me upstairs.

"I found myself facing a judge. The guard shut the door of the
courtroom. The judge and I were in there alone. There was no public to
witness what happened. I had no lawyer. There was no one to take notes
of what was said.

"I asked the judge if he had been appointed to try my case, but he would
not answer. He had before him a big pile of papers. And, from the
questions he asked me, it was evident that he knew of every religious
activity in which I had been engaged for years; he knew of every Bible
class I had ever taught.... Their system of spying was good and
complete.

"'How much money do you earn teaching the Bible?' he asked me.

"'I don't earn any money,' I told him.

"He was astonished.

"'You are rich then?' he asked me.

"'No,' I said.

"'Don't foreigners send you money?' he asked.

"'No,' I said.

"'Then how do you live?' he asked me.

"'We Protestants pay tithes,' I told him.

"'What's that?' he asked me.

"I explained to him that all of us gave one-tenth of what we earned to
the church to carry on our work. He shook his head and could not
understand it.

"'I never heard of such a thing,' he said.

"'It's true,' I said.

"'Don't you know that you are doing wrong?' he asked me.

"'I'm doing no wrong in trying to save the children of the streets for
God,' I said. 'The laws of Spain do not forbid worship.'

"His face grew red. I knew that he did not wish to discuss that with me.
He looked at me for a long time and then at his papers. Finally he said:
'You are a capable woman. I don't see why you are in this trouble.'

"'I did not ask to be brought to this prison,' I told him.

"Then came the strange part of the interview. The judge looked at me
sternly and asked: 'Do you teach children to hate the Virgin?'

"'No! No! Indeed, no!' I told him.

"'Are you sure?'

"'I am sure,' I said.

"'All right,' he said. 'I'll find out.' He stood and pointed his finger
at me. 'If you have not been telling me the truth, it will go hard for
you.'

"'With God's help, I speak the truth,' I told him.

"I was told to leave the chamber; and, as I was leaving, I met the
children to whom I'd taught the Bible entering the chamber. I stopped.
It was clear to me that the judge was going to question those children
about what I had taught them. I protested.

"'Children ought not be questioned unless their parents are present,' I
told him.

"'You shut up!' he shouted at me.

"A guard took me into another room. I could hear the judge's voice, but
I could not hear what he was saying. I sat and shut my eyes and prayed
that the children would remember well what I had taught them. (I learned
later that my little pupils stood by me. They recited their Bible
lessons well; they quoted chapter and verse!)

"When the children were released, the judge called me in again. I asked
him what had the children told him and he would not answer. It was plain
that he was distressed; he had been assigned to find me guilty, and, so
far, he had not found any grounds upon which to hold me.

"'You ought to respect the wishes of the community!' he told me sternly.

"'I owe a duty to God,' I told him.

"You must understand that I was never formally charged with anything. I
was never booked. I was never really tried. I was simply picked up,
lodged in prison and held to suit the convenience of the bishops and
priests.

"They finally let me go, warning me not to teach the Bible again. But my
case is not over. They told me to be in readiness to be called before
the judge again at any time. That, of course, was rank intimidation.
They wanted me to live in so much fear that I'd never teach the Bible
again. There will never be a formal charge against me; I'll never be
tried in public; no newspaper will ever be able to report what the judge
will say to me. And there will be no legal grounds for my next arrest,
if it ever comes. Yet I can be arrested at any moment and taken back to
jail and held there indefinitely."

The woman who told me that story was no violent person. As she finished
talking, her fingers were moving nervously, knotting and unknotting her
handkerchief. She was the kind of woman who walked the streets of
America and England every day, free and unafraid. Her only crime was
that she was a Protestant and that she lived in Spain.

That evening I picked up the Falangist catechism and read lesson eight
for girls between the ages of twelve and fourteen:


_The Falangist Concept of the State_

     WHAT IS THE FALANGIST CONCEPTION OF THE STATE?

     _As a totalitarian instrument in the service of the country's
     destiny._

     HOW WILL THE CONSTRUCTION OF THIS NEW STATE BE ACHIEVED?

     _Through political revolution._

     WHAT WILL THE POLITICAL REVOLUTION CONSIST OF?

     _In place of a liberal state following the doctrines of Rousseau,
     there will be a National-Syndicalist state following everlasting
     truths._

     WHO WAS ROUSSEAU AND WHAT DID HE DO?

     _He was a Genevan philosopher who affirmed in his philosophy that,
     among other things, truth did not exist._

     HOW COULD HE SAY THIS?

     _Because he believed that the body of men who formed a nation had a
     spirit superior to the individual spirit of each, a spirit capable
     of deciding at any given moment what was the truth._

     WHAT DOES THAT MEAN?

     _That, for Rousseau, truth was not a permanent category of reason,
     but, at every moment, a decision of the will._

     CAN YOU MAKE THAT CLEARER?

     _For example--that God existed not by being God, but only if there
     was a majority which said that He did exist. But, if the majority
     said that God did not exist, then life must be lived as if there
     were no God._

     WHAT WERE THE CONSEQUENCES OF THIS PHILOSOPHY?

     _The rise of liberal states and the appearance of universal
     suffrage as a means of finding the opinion of the majority._

     WHAT IS UNIVERSAL SUFFRAGE?

     _The opportunity given to men so that each may manifest his wish by
     placing a slip of paper, called a vote, in a special box._

     WHY IS THIS DONE?

     _To find out, as already said, if the majority, that is, the
     greatest number of people, want any one thing._

     WHAT WAS THE CONSEQUENCE OF UNIVERSAL SUFFRAGE?

     _The appearance of political parties._

     WHAT ARE THEY?

     _As all men did not want the same things, they gathered together in
     different groups, each group having the same opinions, and these
     groups were called parties._

     WHAT HARM DID THIS DO?

     _It created division among men and also struggles to see which
     party could obtain the most votes and so rule the others._

     BUT DID NOT THE LIBERAL STATE DIRECT AND MANAGE THE INTERPARTY
     STRUGGLES?

     _No. The liberal state, according to its doctrines, could not
     direct interparty strife nor even manage it in the service of the
     country._

     WHY?

     _Because, according to Rousseau, only what the majority decided by
     vote had any right over the state, the country, and even God._

     WHAT THEN DID THE STATE DO?

     _Stood by as a mere spectator, awaiting the outcome of the ballot,
     even if that were to be its own destruction and that of the
     country._

     DO YOU NOT NOW SEE THE FUNDAMENTAL FLAW IN THE LIBERAL STATE?

     _Yes; it does not serve anything, or believe in anything, and
     leaves everything to fortuitous voting._

     WHAT DOES "FORTUITOUS" MEAN?

     _Something that is not permanent, that is subject to change, that
     can be or not be._

     CAN A STATE SUBJECTED TO CHANGE GIVE US THE SECURITY THAT SPAIN
     WILL STRIVE FOR IN HER HISTORIC DESTINY, THE ONLY JUSTIFICATION OF
     HER EXISTENCE?

     _No, because such a state does not even believe in the existence of
     Spain._

     WHAT MUST THE FALANGE DO TO REMEDY THIS?

     _In place of the liberal state, it must have one that will serve
     the everlasting truths._

     WHAT ARE THE EVERLASTING TRUTHS?

     _Anything touching what cannot change, such as the existence of
     God, of the Motherland as an historical entity, justice, etc._

     WHAT WILL THE STATE CREATED BY THE FALANGE BE?

     _As we have said, a totalitarian state which does not put the
     everlasting truths under discussion, but believes in them and
     serves them._

     WHAT IS A TOTALITARIAN STATE IN PRINCIPLE?

     _One which does not admit the existence of universal suffrage, nor
     of political parties, one which seeks the justification of its
     existence in its own historical or vital theories and which
     orientates the whole machinery of the state toward serving these
     theories._

     ARE ALL TOTALITARIAN STATES GOOD?

     _No, only those that serve doctrines of eternal and universal
     truth._

     WHAT KIND OF STATE WILL THE FALANGE CREATE?

     _One which believes in everlasting truths, which orientates the
     machinery of state toward serving these truths, casting out as
     pernicious universal suffrage and political parties._

     WHY WILL OUR STATE BE CALLED TOTALITARIAN?

     _Because everything in it, man, the country, the economy, and the
     state itself will be in the service of the everlasting truths in
     which it believes._

     HOW WILL THIS BE DONE?

     _By co-ordinating each man's activities with the service each must
     give the country, given man as the bearer of eternal values._

     WHAT DOES THAT MEAN?

     _That the totalitarian Falangist State will not use man as if he
     were an indispensable part of the aggrandizement of the Motherland,
     glorious as that may be._

     WHY NOT?

     _Because it turns into a tyrannical state._

     WHAT IS A TYRANNICAL STATE?

     _One that sets no store by the ethical value of man, only by his
     contribution toward the ends of the State._

     HOW THEN WILL THE FALANGIST STATE USE MAN?

     _Taking into account, as we have just said, that he has a destiny
     to fulfill before God equal to that of the state._

     HOW CAN THEY BOTH BE BLENDED?

     _Starting with the natural units where man spends his life, such as
     the family, the municipality, and the syndicate [trade union] and
     blending his own duties with those he owes to the state._




SEX, FLAMENCO, AND PROSTITUTION




CHAPTER 26


In Spain sex has been converted into a medium of exchange for almost all
kinds of commodities and services to a degree that cannot be found in
any other European country.

Partly fortuitously and partly determinedly, an amazing concatenation of
fantastic circumstances--religious, social, economic, familial,
cultural--has fostered and abetted the creation of a well-functioning
system of prostitution of women on almost all levels of Spanish life.
Madrid alone, according to spokesmen of the Catholic hierarchy itself,
has more than one hundred thousand prostitutes, forty thousand of whom
are not registered with the police or health authorities. Barcelona and
Seville literally crawl with hungry women willing to grant access to
their bodies for bread or its equivalent.

These trapped and unfortunate women have been referred to as a "wall of
flesh" and that wall is everywhere: in bars, cafs, pensions, hotels,
sidewalks, churches, parks, etc. Almost all of these women are deeply
religious and almost all of them have children to feed. A large portion
of them are sunk in illiteracy. Some practice prostitution
professionally, some part time; some operate on their own, others have
pimps. White slavery between Spain and the bristling brothels of North
Africa is a wide-scale, well-organized, and genially conducted
business--prostitution being perhaps the biggest business in the
Mediterranean world. The unbelievably low wage rates for domestic
workers are enough to convince any girl with any capacity for reflection
that it is by far preferable to merchandise her body than to be an
ill-clad, half-starved slave to some spoiled, bourgeois Spanish wench.

The first and foremost factor in this set of circumstances is that
painful and muscular contraction in the empty belly known as hunger, a
hunger that is chronic throughout the nation. Spaniards simply do not
get enough to eat. (And those who do manage to eat do not know how to
eat; their diet is lopsided with starch and oil. Bicarbonate of soda
vies with salt and pepper on the restaurant tables of Spain.)
Undernourishment is universal, blazoning itself in the tense eyes of
children, announcing itself on the wan cheeks of young women--the
foundations of this hunger resting solidly upon a surplus of more than
two and one-half million farmhands, a scarcity of water almost
everywhere, a deficiency of fertilizers, a soil worn out by a system of
one-crop farming and ruined by erosion, primitive methods of
agriculture, a lack of power and transport, and a landscape of rock and
rubble.

Back of this indigenous poverty and supporting it is a navely pagan
attitude toward life that is the opposite of the practical: a love of
ritual and ceremony; a delight in color and movement and sound and
harmony; an extolling of sheer emotion as the veritable end of human
striving; a deification of tradition that lifts them out of the world
that is shared by most of Western mankind; a continuous lisping about
greatness, honor, glory, and bravery; a dull doting on the surface
aspect of things; an infantile insistence upon one's own feelings as the
only guide and rule of living; a training that has conditioned them to
expect to sustain their lives by being overlords to the "morally" less
pure, to the "spiritually" inferior; all of which finds its ultimate
sanction and justification in the practices and canons of Spanish
Catholicism.

Growing out of this curious intertwining of archaic cultural values and
endemic poverty is still another facet that anchors prostitution in the
social structure: a religion whose outlook upon the universe almost
legitimizes prostitution: the Spanish Catholic concept of sin. Sin
exists, so declares this concept. Prostitution is sin, and proof of sin.
So prostitution exists. To account for prostitution in economic or
political terms is to be guilty of more sin, that is, flirting with
liberal thought which, in itself, is a mortal sin. Therefore this
universal prostitution is not something to be grappled with in terms of
social or economic engineering; it is not something to be dismayed about
or even astonished at; it is not a blight to be eradicated; it is simply
an indication that the work of salvation is not yet complete, and that a
more strenuous effort must be made to call men to God (and women, too!).
And, of course, a prostitute can at any time enter a church and gain
absolution.

In the life of Spain as a whole there is a strange lack that contributes
to this: the concept of the citizen does not exist in the Spanish mind
and the reality of the citizen does not exist in Spanish life--that
free, sovereign, responsible, self-moving man or woman whose inspired
functions created the Western industrial world; that solitary,
individual impulse that built vast, powerful, lay, public-spirited
philanthropic enterprises which assume and play so dominant and
reformist a role in American life. He who falls by the wayside in Spain
is lost, is only an object of private or Church charity or compassion,
and highly placed intellectual Spaniards have been known to rationalize
this situation by boasting to strangers that, if Spanish streets swarm
with numerous beggars, it is but proof of the kindness of Spanish hearts
that overflow with almsgiving.

Shoring up and maintaining this situation is a most curious blending of
disparate traits in the personalities of Spanish men, a mixture of
cynicism and sentimentality toward women. It begins in childhood in the
Spanish family. No people on earth so pet and spoil their young as do
the Spanish. Hence, if a woman in later years sells her body to feed her
hungry children, that in itself is almost a justification of what she is
doing. _Para los nios_ (for the children) is a slogan among Spanish
prostitutes that is almost as prevalent as _Arriba Espaa!_
(Spain--Arise!), the slogan of totalitarian-minded Spanish men.

Perhaps their making a cult of the child stems from their feeling for
the Virgin and the Child; I don't know. In any case, all Spanish
children are, to their families as well as to outsiders, _guapos_, that
is, good-lookers. They are pinched, patted, tickled, indulged, stared
at, waited on, kissed, fondled, worshiped, dangled, crooned over, hugged
and generally made to feel that they are the rightful center of the
world. At an extremely early age Spanish children learn to preen, to
strut, to feel that they deserve attention, caresses, and admiration;
they give and receive drooling compliments at all hours of the day, and
the little boy as well as the little girl comes in for more than a
normal share of this morbid cuddling. They catch its spirit and, when
they grow up and establish families of their own, they pass this sticky
maudlinism on to their children in terms of social heredity.

Consequently, the girls quickly develop traits of wild jealousy; they
cultivate tantrums of protest, practice the imperious policy of being
the sole objects of amorous solicitation. They learn to bedeck
themselves with flowers, earrings (I've seen earrings six inches long!),
develop the arts of gesturing sensually with their arms, shoulders, and
fingers; they master the violent, sexual contortions of flamenco dancing
and singing; in short, being a woman in Spain means being mistress of
all the tricks of sexual seduction and almost nothing else.

Spanish women have evolved a manner of staring at men with long,
intense, bold looks. They expect to be publicly admired in a way that
would make an American woman uncomfortable. Yet they expect and demand
more gallant attention than would an American or French or English
woman, an expectation that has been drilled into them since infancy.

But if the Spanish woman stares at you, the Spanish man all but converts
the streets and cafs of Spanish cities and towns into bedrooms. The
Spanish male learns early to divide all women into two general
categories: one group of women are those with husbands, children, and a
home; or they are young women of good families, yes, young women whose
hymen rings are technically intact. These are the good women and you bow
low to them and tenderly kiss their hands, murmuring compliments the
while.

The other group of women has been placed on earth by God, just as He
placed rabbits, foxes, lions, etc., to be hunted and had.

Still another buttressing aspect of this sexual atmosphere must be
mentioned. I, for one, feel it nave in our Freudian, twentieth-century
world even to allude to the bruited sexual lives of priests and nuns. I
do not know nor am I interested in whether they have sexual lives or
not. I hope that they do, for their own sake; and I'm sure that God does
not mind. But while in Spain I found an amazing degree of preoccupation
on the part of the ordinary men and women with the legend of the
supposedly torrid sexual lives of the men of the Church. It was a kind
of sexual projection of the common populace upon the priesthood. I heard
whispers of priests keeping mistresses; in clubs and bars I was shown
many little wooden carvings of priests, carvings that displayed, under
the religious habit, the genitals, indicating that there existed a
tremendous sexual jealousy and tension on the part of the laymen for the
rumored sexual prerogatives of the men of the Church. It does not matter
whether these allegations about the priesthood are true or not; what
does matter is that the laymen are preoccupied with them. Their
reasoning seems to be: if they can do it and get away with it, so can I.




CHAPTER 27


One morning an English acquaintance phoned me at my pension and said:
"The Spanish government authorities know that you are here. You have
written against the present regime. You had better go over to the
Ministry of Information and talk to them, let them know what you are
doing here."

"You think it's important that I go?"

"Well, yes, your prior political background being what it is."

"I can't conceal my background; in fact, I don't wish to," I said.

"Good. Then just tell them that. The main thing is to let them know that
you are not sneaking in, that you are not trying to hide."

I was graciously received at the Ministry of Information by a tall,
swarthy gentleman who gratuitously accorded me the title of "doctor."

"We had heard that you were in Spain, Dr. Wright," he said in an
impeccable Oxford accent.

"I have long wanted to see Spain," I told him. "But, after all the war
bitterness, I had been a little hesitant about coming. I had not been
for Franco. And I'm not a Catholic. My purpose for being in Spain now is
not primarily political. I want to see how the people live from day to
day, what they're thinking and feeling."

"That's quite all right," he said, laughing easily. "We like people to
come forward and have their say, no matter what their ideas are. Now,
just what aspects of life in Spain are of interest to you?"

"At the moment I'd like to see some flamenco dancers and singers," I
said. "Also I'd like to see some gypsies."

"That's easily arranged," he said at once. "I'm going to give you a
letter to our tourist department; they'll take care of everything. And,
please, Dr. Wright, feel free to come and go in Spain as you like."

At the tourist department I learned that a room had been reserved for me
in the Parador (Wayside Inn) San Francisco in Granada for five days and
that I should leave the following day.

I had long heard of the engaging manner in which Spaniards fraternized
on trains and I decided to make the trip to Granada by rail. Next
afternoon I stood in a queue for two hours at the railroad station to
buy a second-class ticket. The stone floor was dirty; the people around
me were dour, drably dressed, silent, shifting uneasily from foot to
foot, their eyes avoiding the muzzles of the machine guns on the
forearms of the Civil Guards. One unshaven man tried to edge his way to
the top of the line and immediately a tirade of frenzied protest broke
out.

That night I rode south in a second-class compartment in which sat five
women, a baby, and, besides myself, two other men--the eight of us being
jammed into a space that the French railways would have reserved for
four people. Flies half dead from the night's cold crawled over the
dirty upholstery. The floor was soiled and gritty and the stink from the
lavatory drifted throughout the coach. The train labored through the
mountains, puffing as though each puff would be its last.

My traveling companions were a diversified lot: sitting next to the
window was a mustached, fastidious, elderly man who turned out later to
be a country doctor and who kept aloof from everybody; a husky young
man, evidently a manual worker, sat next to me. Among the women was a
pretty girl who rode with her coat draped over her knees, obviously to
protect her virginity. Another young woman, plain and slightly stupid,
was traveling with her mother. Then there was the young mother who held
her baby upon her lap--a pudgy monster that had just learned to say a
few words. The most interesting and intelligent of the women sat almost
opposite me; she was about forty, wore eyeglasses, and seemed to spend
her time studying the other occupants of the compartment, including me,
with an amused and ironic air, but with no trace of condescension;
indeed, she seemed to possess a capacity of entertaining herself with
what was at hand. I was no doubt a great oddity to her, for my eyes
caught her looking at me with great wonder more than once. Was she a
businesswoman, a professional woman, a housewife?

We men were polite and reserved toward one another, but the antics of
the baby provided a means for the women to unbend and talk.

"_Qu guapa!_" sounded endlessly as they touched, smiled and patted.

Fatigued, I settled into my seat, and dozed. Some time later I was
awakened by the train's jerking motion, the _clack-clack-clack_ of the
wheels over steel rails, the soft sound of rhythmic handclapping, and
the melancholy, quavering lilts of flamenco singing. I sat up and
stared. The lights had been dimmed. The baby was sleeping in its
mother's arms. The five women were singing and I felt enclosed in a
warm, cozy dream. Smiling, I leaned forward and nodded affirmatively to
show my appreciation. The two men slept or pretended to. The women saw
that I loved their singing and they smiled.

"_Le gusta  usted el flamenco?_" the woman who wore eyeglasses asked
me.

"_S, s, mucho, mucho_," I answered with such glee that they paused in
their singing and laughed.

When they had finished, I called feelingly: "_Ms flamenco!_"

"_Seor Flamenco!_" the woman wearing eyeglasses said.

"_Seora Flamenco_," I said, bowing.

The names stuck. The women howled with laughter, pointing to me and
saying: "_Seor Flamenco!_" and then to the woman with the eyeglasses,
saying: "_Seora Flamenco!_"

Through the black night the train rattled up and down the mountainsides
and the women sang, their trembling voices and quivering throats evoking
sad, accusative moods, celebrating death, lonely love, futile yearning.
Exhausted, they leaned back and stared with nostalgic eyes, resigned to
disappointment and sorrow.

"_Usted de Nueva York? Americano?_" Seora Flamenco asked me.

"_S, yo Americano. Casa en Paris_," I stammered.

"_Familia?_" she asked.

"_S, ma femme y dos nios_," I said, mixing languages. "_Dos
muchachas._"

"Oh! Ah!"

They exclaimed as though I was the first man they had ever met who had a
wife and two children.

"_Fotografas?_" they chorused.

I had no photos of my family with me and their faces fell.

"_Le gusta  usted Espaa?_" Seora Flamenco asked me.

"_S, Seora. Mucho_," I said.

"_Por qu?_" she asked me in a gently ironic tone.

There had been strange echoes behind her voice. I had to be careful; I
did not know who she was.

"_Mucho flamenco en Espaa_," I stammered.

That I had narrowed down my reactions to Spain to a love of their sad
songs struck them as extremely funny and they laughed.

"_La vida muy mala en Espaa_," they said.

Though we had practically no words in common, we had succeeded in
communicating.

Seora Flamenco rose and took down her suitcase from the rack above her
head and opened it; she found a little booklet and handed it to me. It
was a collection of flamenco songs in both English and Spanish.

"_Para Usted_," she said.

"No, no," I protested.

"_S, s_," she insisted.

"_Cunto?_" I asked.

"_Nada_," she said.

"_Muchas gracias_," I said.

I did not like the idea of accepting a book from her without some form
of restitution.

"_Usted, Seora...?_" I asked.

She opened her purse and handed me her card, then she burst into song. I
followed the words in the booklet:

    Tell the Lord Mayor,
    Tell the Magistrate,
    That due to Luis Candelas
    I am dying of love.
    Tell them he is a scoundrel,
    Tell them that he's a thief,
    And that I allowed him
    With pleasure to break my heart.
    I want this love song
    To pass from mouth to mouth
    Just as if I were crazy....

Later they sang:

    Follies and always follies,
    I must sing about follies
    Until with the help of follies
    I shall make you fall in love....

    After the wedding night
    A beautiful girl had a toothache
    And an old maid was saying:
    "If I could only suffer from that pain!"

Later the elderly doctor, who slept in a seat next to the window, roused
himself and began performing a strange ritual. He took a bottle of
alcohol and a wad of absorbent cotton from his little black medical bag
and, dampening the cotton, he began swabbing his hands carefully,
sterilizing himself. Afterward, he opened a paper bag containing
sandwiches and began munching. I looked at my watch; it was three
o'clock in the morning.

"_Agua.... Agua...._" The little baby had awakened and was demanding
attention.

The mother put a nippled bottle of water into the infant's spasmodic
mouth and it suckled greedily. The train jolted and shook, whistling
mournfully in the night. Everybody now unwrapped packages of food and
there unfolded one of the most moving ceremonies I had ever seen. No one
touched his food until all the varieties of sandwiches and fruit had
been spread upon their laps. Then they offered their food, their eyes
beseeching others to avail themselves of what was proffered. It was as
though they felt that to eat before someone else had partaken of their
food implied that they would never eat again. I stared at their wan
faces, their tired eyes, and I could feel that poverty, loneliness, and
despair had forged this compulsion to be mindful of others.

I started violently, feeling hot liquid splashing me. The baby across
the aisle had tilted back its little head and, from its tiny mouth, a
hot stream of sour vomit was gushing up, spattering my legs and shoes. I
leaped out of the way, my face registering horror. The mother stared at
me with stricken eyes. The women rushed forward with newspapers and
began mopping me clean of the baby's swill, then they carefully spread
newspapers over the pools of vomit on the floor.

"_Oh, perdone, Seor_," the young mother cried, leaning abjectly
forward, her wide-open, moist eyes pleading.

"_Nada_," I breathed, actually managing a smile.

I cleaned myself in the reeking lavatory and, when I returned, the women
had finished eating and had resumed their flamenco singing. The doctor
had completed his snack and was sterilizing himself again. He looked
disdainfully at my crumpled suit, as though saying:

"That's what you get for fraternizing with women."

The women slept, heads resting on others' hips, knees drawn up and
touching others' backs, arms flung out in unconscious abandon upon
others' laps, their bodies swaying as the train groaned through the
black Andalusian mountains. The pungent odor of vomit hung in the air;
all about me was a yeasty stickiness.

I took out my notebook and began to jot down my impressions; I had been
scribbling for some time when I glanced up. Seora Flamenco was staring
at me with an open mouth. I felt guilty, for I could see that she knew
that I was making notes of what I had observed. I braced myself for a
negative reaction. But, no. She smiled and nodded her head with an air
of understanding.

"_Es usted un hombre muy inteligente!_" she whispered. "_Escritor?_"

"Sh," I sounded, placing my finger over my lips and looking
significantly at her sleeping sisters. "_S._"

"_Comprendo_," she whispered. She touched my knee with her hand to show
that she approved.

"_La vida es muy mala._" She sighed and closed her eyes.

The doctor ran up the train curtains and daylight revealed scarred
mountains. The compartment awakened, yawned, stretched.

Seora Flamenco was holding a handkerchief to her eyes.

"_Dao a los ojos?_" I asked her.

She lowered the handkerchief and pointed to her eyes, from which a
yellowish matter oozed.

"_Mdico_," I said, motioning toward the doctor.

The doctor glared at me and shrugged. He was not interested in the
woman's ailment. I had a vial of eyewash in my briefcase--a solution of
parts of novocaine and adrenalin suspended in distilled water. I offered
it to Seora Flamenco, but she was too frightened to use it. She stared
questioningly at the doctor, wanting his approval. The doctor took the
vial from my fingers and examined the label.

"_Es usted mdico?_" he asked me abruptly.

"_No, Seor_," I said.

He returned the bottle and shrugged his shoulders.

I put two drops of the medicine in each of my eyes.

"_Bueno_," I told her.

"_S_," she said.

She threw back her head and I stood and doctored her eyes. They cleared
at once. The fumigated doctor gaped in amazement. Seora Flamenco
examined her eyes in her purse mirror.

"Dr. Flamenco!" she cried with joy.

Everybody in the compartment, including the disdainful doctor, burst
into a loud and long laugh.

When I was ready to get off the train in Granada, I felt that I had
known them all of my life.




CHAPTER 28


The Parador was one of a number of such establishments maintained by the
Spanish government for the convenience of tourists. Located in
picturesque settings, they were tastefully furnished, well-staffed, and
expertly run. The management was expecting me and, an hour later, I was
in bed. I was sleep starved.

That afternoon I ventured out. The sky was a high deep blue, the sun
blindingly bright. The horizon was a ring of purple mountains. Olive
groves, orange trees, hedges, flowers, and winding walks made a
landscape that was so beautiful as to have an air of the unreal. Peasant
women sat hunched in the sun making lace with their fingers; old men
stood at benches fabricating inlaid wooden boxes. It was a distinctly
feudal atmosphere better suited to the days of the Moorish kings who
once ruled here some five hundred years ago than to our nervous, atomic
twentieth century.

I wandered over the ruins of Alhambra and Generalife, which lay but a
block from the Parador, and walked through the palace, the fortress,
and the summer gardens, then among the vast brick battlements erected
centuries earlier by the Moors. Washington Irving had been charmed by
this monstrous pile of dead glory and had woven romantic tales about it.
These relics represented the terminal point of the influence of the East
and Africa in Europe. Since the vanquishing of the Moors by Ferdinand
and Isabel in 1492, the tide of history had reversed itself and Europe,
with a long and bloody explosion, had hurled itself upon the masses of
mankind in Asia and Africa and the then unknown Americas....

The crumbling Moorish monuments stretched over acres. What massive and
brutal simplicity, what long straight lines! The moldering clues left by
a race of an alien temperament tried vainly to speak, to explain.
Through the pathos of distance one felt that that vanished race must
have been of a titanically childlike disposition, for it had sought to
fill all space with a kind of visual dream that blotted out the real
reality of the world.

I entered gardens built and arranged so that, wherever the eye roved,
clusters of sparkling images caressed the senses. Bubbling fountains
filled the air with lisping waters; endless hedges of laurel exuded
subtle perfumes; the depths of sleeping pools were ravaged by clouds;
cascading waterfalls fell with such steadied and trickling momentum that
their musical cadences made you feel, through empathy, the aesthetic
moods of the men who had created them; groves of orange and lemon
gleamed darkly; and, beyond tall thickets of noble cypress, were banks
upon banks of brooding flowers, some stretching away toward verdant
valleys, others lifting skyward. It was a paradise, but a static one--a
paradise whose vitality was only skin-deep.

A Catholic cathedral, built by Charles V, was housed in the ruins of
this once pagan shrine, and it was odd to observe the successive layers
of civilization lapping one over the other; in Granada one could see
out-croppings of Gothic, Greek, Roman, Jewish, Moorish, and Christian
ruins. But the most engrossing sight was the architectural depiction of
the passive Moslem dream being shattered by the psychological dynamics
of death and resurrection of the Christian Cross. What vengeful methods
the old-time Catholics had! It was not reverence for the past that had
stayed their hands from destroying the pagan temples; they had erected
their Christian cathedrals on top of them, thereby symbolically
straddling the neck of the beaten enemy for as long as stone and marble
could endure, heralding and flaunting their victories down the
centuries.

I glanced at the shaded arbors, the sunlit patios, the sumptuous courts
and their proud sculptures, the fragile Moorish tilework of blue and
gold, then drifted off, surfeited. My twentieth-century hunger could not
be sated here. These moss-covered ruins were far less interesting to me
than those landscapes of subjective ruins that strew our world
today--ruins that were harder to detect and much more difficult to
appreciate.

I descended past the rotting piles of Alhambra and Generalife and
returned to the Parador. Tired, I stretched out on the bed and thumbed
through the Falange catechism, reading lesson six for girls between the
ages of twelve and fourteen:


_Historic Mission_

     WHAT IS THE POLITICAL SIGNIFICANCE OF THE FUNDAMENTAL CONCEPTS OF
     OUR DOCTRINE?

     _Spain's historic mission, orientated toward the universal._

     WHAT DOES THAT MEAN?

     _That a nation that feels it is the bearer of a special destiny in
     history can have no other end but the projection of its personality
     over the world._

     HOW CAN THIS BE ACHIEVED?

     _By implanting in all the population the political and social
     formulae that give reality to Falangist doctrine._

     HOW?

     _By means of the revolution._

     WHY IS REVOLUTION NECESSARY TO ACHIEVE INFLUENCE OVER THE WORLD?

     _Because an influence such as the Falange desires cannot be based
     on the unfairness of life among so many Spaniards._

     WHAT ELSE?

     _Because a state must be created which will serve the ends of the
     Motherland._

     AND FOR WHAT OTHER REASON?

     _Because men must have a system of ethics which will enable them to
     know and serve the ends of their Motherland._

     SO, WHAT WILL BE THE NATURE OF OUR REVOLUTION?

     _Political, economic, and moral._

     ONCE THE REVOLUTION IS PAST, WHAT WILL THEN BE SPAIN'S HISTORIC
     MISSION?

     _One of leadership among the nations of the world._

     HOW WILL THIS BE?

     _Because empires will then not be like the old ones, the
     predominance of one nation above all others._

     WHAT WILL IT BE?

     _The domination by one group of nations--united by ideological and
     historical ties--over another group of nations with different
     ideas._

     WHAT WILL OUR LEADERSHIP CONSIST OF?

     _Being the head or axis of the group of nations to which we
     belong._

     WHY US AND NOT ANOTHER NATION?

     _Because it falls to us historically, since our influence will be
     over Portugal and Latin America, which Spain civilized._

     WHY WILL IT BE THAT GROUP OF NATIONS?

     _Because these nations, on account of their Spanish origin, have
     been those nations in this world that have most strongly upheld the
     superiority of eternal values over the materialistic and liberal
     concept of life held by some nations grouped together on the
     opposite side._

     SO THIS HISTORIC MISSION IS IDEOLOGICAL AS WELL AS TERRITORIAL?

     _Yes, though to fulfill it we need certain territorial recoveries
     which hinder our power of rule._

     WHAT DOES THAT MEAN?

     _Recovery means demanding something that is justly and lawfully
     ours, that is, while we do not, for example, seek our geographical
     integration by seizing Gibraltar, this presumes that it is because
     the British are stronger than we are and, for the time being, exert
     considerable influence in the world._

     HAVE WE TO RECOVER ANY OTHER LANDS FOR SPAIN?

     _Yes, some possessions in North Africa which, by geographical
     position, assure our country's independence._

     SHALL WE THEN NEED ALL THE LANDS THAT WERE OURS AT THE TIME OF THE
     SPANISH EMPIRE?

     _No; territorially, we need only those necessary to maintain our
     independence and our strength._

     HOW WILL THE PEOPLES OF AMERICA JOIN IN THIS COMMON DESTINY?

     _As the independent nations they are, but united to us by religion,
     culture, blood--stronger claims than the soil._

     HOW THEN SHALL WE ACHIEVE THE NECESSARY RECOVERIES?

     _By treaties or by conquests, because, in principle, to gain an
     empire you have to conquer it._

     WHY?

     _Because that is a way of showing strength and there is the old
     motto of the J.O.N.S. which says: "Do not halt until you have
     conquered."_

     WHAT THEN WILL SPAIN NEED TO BE ABLE TO ATTAIN HER HISTORIC
     DESTINY?

     _Great inner strength, assured by economic independence, an
     increasing population, a high standard of education and a great
     Land, Sea, and Air Force._




CHAPTER 29


That evening I took a taxi and invaded the precincts of gypsy town.
Blocks before I arrived I could hear the stomping of heels on tile
floors, the thumping of guitars, the clicking of castanets, and the
high-pitched and quavering bellows of flamenco. The night was warm, the
sky filled with fiery stars. We climbed a steep mountain and the taxi
stopped amid a throng of gypsies.

Gypsy town was situated upon a mountainside and I passed rows of caves
dug out of hard rock. In these spacious cavities scores of gypsy
families had made their homes. Legend had it that these gypsies were the
most favored of all the gypsies in Spain, for it was reputed that their
ancestors had aided Ferdinand and Isabel to drive out the Moors. They
earned their living by giving singing and dancing exhibitions, among
other things, for tourists. The front rooms of their cave homes had been
converted into small dancehalls where a gypsy family or clan would, for
a price, assemble and entertain you an hour.

For the sake of prudence, I chose a cave having a number of European
clientele and went in. An exhibition was being organized, that is, a
levy was being collected from those who had entered. When the traffic
had been taken for all it would bear, an old, evil-looking woman began
clapping her hands, the diamonds on her withered fingers flashing. As
the audience, which sat in chairs along the wall, grew quiet, the old
woman assembled her brood.

Back of the woman and along the whitewashed walls were photographs of
gypsy ancestors and a few prints of Jesus preaching to multitudes. I was
informed later that they practiced a kind of ancestor-worship religion,
that they could not marry out of the tribe, and that you had better keep
your hand firmly upon your pocket-book while listening to or looking at
their "culture." These were tribal people living under urban conditions;
their religion had made them reject the people around them and those
people had, in turn, rejected them. They had thus been reduced to
beggary, singing and dancing in order to eat and have a cave roof over
their heads. If ever there had been anything romantic about these
gypsies, it had long since been swallowed up in commercialism.

Three young men entered in tight-fitting black trousers, black hats,
high-heeled shoes, with guitars slung under their arms. About
twenty-five females, ranging in ages from eight to fifty, stationed
themselves about the floor. Pink carnations were tucked into their
jet-black hair; from their ears dangled gold loops; and they wore cheap
cotton dresses that had loud, splashing patterns of color. Redlipped,
rouged, their faces were tired and damp in the night's heat; now and
then one of them yawned.

The old witch clapped her hands; the guitars strummed; and the girls
plunged into wild whirlings, their arms lifted and their castanets
clacking, their cotton dresses rising and floating out at the level of
their hips, their black hair flying about their faces, and the cave was
suddenly filled with the scent of unwashed bodies and cheap perfume.
Abruptly the dancers broke and crowded along the walls, leaving one lone
girl in the center of the floor. A young man laid aside his guitar and
joined her. Their dance was a wild sexuality lifted to the plane of
orgiastic intensity. The man approached and then veered from the
spinning girl, evading her while the girl, red lips pursed, her eyes
half closed, her arms flung above her head, stood still in the center of
the floor and stomped her heels madly, wringing and twisting her
buttocks as though she were in the grip of reflex muscular movements
only. Then she gritted her teeth in a grimace, clutched the hem of her
dress with both hands and put her fists upon her hips, disclosing her
thighs and legs. She advanced across the room, stomping and writhing to
the beat of the music, her face carrying an expression of one about to
fall in a swoon. She then threw back her head, placed her palms upon her
trembling buttocks and stomped back across the room to the pound of the
music. The man approached the girl and they danced around each other,
their heads tilted backward, their eyes looking into each other's.

The Germans, Swiss, Americans, Englishmen gazed open-mouthed at an
exhibition of sexual animality their world had taught them to repress.

With sweat streaming off their faces, the girl and the man concluded and
a child who looked to be about eight years old came into the center of
the room, her castanets clicking. She had a thin, haunting face and her
long, straight black hair fell down to her waist. The music and clapping
blared forth and the little tot whirled, twisted her tiny hips and
rolled her eyes sensually. She too induced on her lips that expression
of savage sexuality; she must have been copying it, for I was sure that
she could not really feel what she was portraying. She had a charm, a
grace, and freshness that the older women lacked, yet there was
something pathetic about a child expressing sexual emotion far beyond
its capacity to experience.

The pale white faces that looked on were shocked, but entranced.




CHAPTER 30


Granada's one hundred and fifty thousand inhabitants were so tourist
conscious that I was repelled. It was almost impossible to see the city
for the hordes of chiselers swarming in bars, cafs, and even
cathedrals. Accordingly, I hastened the time of my departure, booking
train reservations for Madrid, which meant that I had only forty-eight
hours more of time. I strolled through ancient monasteries, visited the
most arrogantly dreamlike cathedral I had ever seen and paid my respects
to the lead coffins of Ferdinand and Isabel, then tried to digest the
food in the city's restaurants.

Next evening I picked up the telephone in my room at the Parador and
asked the girl at the switchboard to dial the number that I had found on
Seora Flamenco's visiting card. I waited, hearing the phone ring.

"_Dgame_," came a woman's voice over the wire.

"_Yo, Seor Flamenco_," I said and paused.

There was silence, then a gale of laughter erupted at the other end of
the wire.

"_Un momento!_" a woman spoke urgently.

I knew no Spanish and she knew no French or English; I guessed that she
was trying to solve the problem of language when she told me to wait.

I caught echoes of excited feminine voices, doors slamming, and running
footsteps. I held the receiver for five minutes.

"Hello!" came a panting voice. "I speak Engleesh...."

"Oh, yes? This is the man who met Seora on the train--"

"Wait a meenute. I tell her," the voice said.

I heard giggling, then: "She wants you to come to dinner. She wants her
friends to meet you. I'll be there to help you talk."

"Sure. What time?"

"Is nine all right?"

"Yes."

A little before nine o'clock, I bought two bottles of red wine and a
bouquet of flowers and took a taxi to Seora Flamenco's home, which was
in a dark, narrow street just behind the city's main business section.
Seora Flamenco, flanked by two other women, stood smiling at the edge
of the sidewalk.

"Seor Flamenco!" the women chorused, laughing delightedly.

We shook hands all around and I extended to Seora Flamenco the bouquet
of flowers. Her face assumed an expression of mock anger and she shook
her forefinger in my face, scolding me roundly.

"She says that you must not do that," one girl said in English.

Chuckling, we entered a tenement doorway and mounted dark stairs. Seora
Flamenco's second-floor apartment was sparsely furnished, cramped, but
neat, every detail proclaiming pride and poverty. I was led into a
combination living-dining room that was so tiny that only one person
could pass between the table and the wall. On the ceiling a bare, weak
electric bulb glowed. The room's only window was open and the discordant
sounds of night traffic were wafted up to us.

Seora Flamenco's English-speaking friend, Marie, was shy, blonde; she
was a stenographer and she smiled nervously whenever I looked at her.
She seemed to be in her early twenties.

"_M, Lita_," Seora Flamenco told me.

"Ricardo," I said, pointing to myself.

Sharing Lita's apartment was a young girl who aspired to be a dancer,
Lucile; she was stately, tall, had an unearthly beautiful face,
coal-black hair and eyes. Lita's aged mother-in-law (who was ill and in
bed) occupied another room, which accounted for the apartment's three
bedrooms.

Marie's bookish English proved too elementary to permit of much
communication. Lita now related to her friends how she had met me on the
train, how she had caught me making notes about our traveling
companions.

"What are you?" she asked me through Marie.

"I'm a writer," I said.

"You are writing about Spain?"

"Yes."

Lita stood and stared, then solemnly lifted her joined palms toward the
ceiling.

"You love freedom?" she asked me.

"I do, with all of my heart," I told her.

"You will tell the people in America about us?"

"I'll try; I'll do my best."

"What will you tell them?" she wanted to know.

"I shall tell them that the people of Spain are suffering," I said.

When Marie had conveyed that information, there was a long silence. Lita
stared at me, then rose and walked seemingly aimlessly around the table;
suddenly she covered her face with her hands and hurried from the room,
weeping.

"She has suffered much," Marie said.

We were silent. Lita returned and began arranging the flowers in vases,
with stony eyes.

"Has Lita a husband?" I asked Marie.

"No. He's dead," she said.

Lita had understood my question; she turned and pointed a forefinger and
said: "Boom!"

"The Civil War?" I asked.

"Yes."

"He fought for the Republic?"

"Yes. Of course."

"You have no children?"

"No. But I support my dead husband's mother."

"How is life here?"

"Bad.... Hard, very hard. We eat, that's all. We eat a little."

Lita busied herself placing bread, butter, cold meat cuts, and bottles
of wine upon the table, her brooding black eyes filled, they seemed,
with far-off memories. Marie sat and stared at me. Lucile stood looking
out of the window into the black, noisy night. The heavy atmosphere that
hung in the room made me feel that perhaps it had been wrong of me to
come. Then a miracle happened. Lita turned to me and opened her mouth;
her eyes were blank, hollow; her throat quivered and I could see a
bluish vein throbbing in her throat; and out poured a stream of pure,
drenching, melancholy song. The others came to attention, looked at me
with moist eyes, and joined Lita's singing.

When the last tremor of song had died, we sat and joked about how to
make oneself understood without words. I pantomimed what I wanted to say
and they were willing to take time to imagine, to guess, and, in the
end, to understand; and they were patiently determined to make others
know and feel what they thought and felt. Around midnight, as we ate and
drank, we imitated the miaow of the cat, the hoot of the owl, the bark
of the dog, the whinny of the horse, the low of the cow, the crow of the
rooster, and the results made us laugh for long minutes.

Speaking through Marie, I asked Lucile: "What kind of dancing do you
do?"

"Flamenco," she answered. "_Le gusta a usted?_"

"_S, mucho_," I said encouragingly.

At Lita's urging, Lucile rose and found a bit of space at the far end of
the room and, as Lita and Marie sang and clapped their hands, the girl
began a sensual dance that made a kind of animal heat invade the room. I
watched her, enthralled. When she finished, I applauded. Lita, however,
was pointing an accusing finger at me and saying:

"_Lucile, hombre peligroso!_"

Marie and Lita spilled over with laughter and Lucile's virginal cheeks
reddened with shame. I covered my face with my hands to atone for the
light that had been in my eyes when I had watched her dance.

The doorbell rang.

"Roberto," Lita whispered.

A young man of about nineteen entered carrying a huge book that turned
out to be a Spanish-French dictionary. He was shabbily dressed, shy,
subdued, and again I marveled at how strong and self-possessed the women
of Spain were in comparison to their men. Roberto was a student and a
nephew of Lita. They told him that I loved flamenco and at once he sat
and broke into song while the others clapped their hands. He sang of the
death of a soldier and there was silence when he finished.

Lita rose suddenly and stood over me, her face a mask of brutal
hardness.

"Franco!" she croaked with fury. "_Comprende?_"

"_S, Seora_," I said.

"_Hombre malo_," she said.

She lifted her arms and her thin white hands made a fluttering movement
and her mouth imitated the roar of plane engines; through her rounded
lips came:

"BOOOOOM! BOOOOOOM!"

"_La guerre_," I said.

"_S, Seor_," she said. "_Libertad terminada.... La mitad de la gente
espaola no come_," she hissed. "Liberty is finished. Half of the people
of Spain are hungry."

I nodded, struck by the bitter intensity of her passion.

"We have no hope," she told me through Marie.

I sat and brooded. They sang again and baptized me in their sorrow. I
was glad that we could not talk freely, for words would have profaned
what they communicated to me of their hurt and dejection.

Lita set out a big bottle of liqueur and we began to sip it.

"Roberto, what do you wish to be?" I asked the boy, speaking through
Marie.

"_Mdico_," he said shyly.

"_Bueno_," I said, patting his shoulder.

He shook his head and smiled bitterly.

"No money," he said trying to use his school English. He pushed out his
feet and showed me his tattered shoes, then spread his hands in a
gesture of despair.

Poverty in Spain was self-effacing, ashamed of itself. Out of another
heavy, awkward silence, Lucile turned to me and asked: "_Le gusta los
toros?_"

"_Mucho_," I said, pantomiming my love of bullfighting by waving an
imaginary cape.

Lita clapped her hands and laughed. Lucile got to her feet and took a
lace shawl from her head and dangled it in front of me, imitating a
matador.

"Ha! Ha!" Lucile prompted me.

Amid screams of laughter, I got on all fours and glared at the shawl.
Lucile shook it; my head bobbed as my eyes followed the shawl's
movements.

"Ha! Ha!" Lucile prompted me again.

I lowered my head and charged and the shawl floated away.

"_Ole!_" they cried.

I was still on all fours, looking about for the shawl; I turned and
found it. Lucile, proud, disdainful, jiggled the cloth before me.

"Ha! Ha!" she said, her black eyes flashing contempt for danger.

I eyed the shawl and charged again, hooking my imaginary horns
viciously, trying to gore or snare the shawl, but it went away.

"_Ole!_" they sang.

Lucile now stood close to me, dangling the shawl near my eyes; rising
and falling on her heels and toes, grunting: "Ha! Ha!"

I saw the shawl, but I also saw Lucile's trembling blue dress.

"Ha! Ha!" Lucile goaded me again.

I charged, not for the shawl but at Lucile, my head gently colliding
with her pelvis. The girl's eyes registered shock; she dropped the shawl
and stepped backward. The room exploded with laughter. Pawing the floor
with my hind legs, I bellowed:

"RRRRROOOAAR!"

Lita screamed and fell out of her chair to the floor, where she lay
squirming in a spasm of laughter. Marie yelled and clapped her hands
over her gaping mouth, her eyes round with moral consternation. The
room was filled with yelling. Roberto leaned his head on the cluttered
top of the table and laughed so strenuously that spittle drooled from a
corner of his mouth. Lucile's black eyes were two pools of astonishment.

"_Usted nio!_," Lita yelled at me.

I rose and turned to Marie and said: "Tell Lucile that bulls gore
sometimes."

Marie transmitted this to the girl, who continued to gape at me with
incredulous eyes. I extended my hand compassionately to Lucile.

"_No fait mala?_" I asked her, mixing languages.

"No," she breathed, staring as though in a trance.

Poor virgin! Maybe she was thinking that I should marry her now? Lita
led the dazed girl from the room and we continued laughing. A few
moments later Lita returned with Lucile, who had now recovered from her
goring and gave me a ghost of a forgiving smile.

I glanced at my watch; it was six o'clock in the morning; the night had
fled. Gray dawn stood at the open window.

"I've got to catch a train at eight o'clock," I told them.

They were silent and sad. I prepared to leave. Lita spoke to Marie, who
told me: "We want to come to the train with you."

"Wonderful," I said.

We drank coffee, then went down into the quiet, empty streets, crowded
into a taxi, and, singing softly, rolled to the Parador, where I got my
bags. At the station we sat upon an outdoor bench. Lita closed her eyes
and began humming flamenco. Roberto and I walked to and fro, puffing
cigarettes. The sun was strong now and lines of weariness snowed on our
faces.

I returned to the bench and tried to talk to Lita, but she motioned me
to silence by placing her finger upon her lips. Again she closed her
eyes and lifted her voice in song. Lucile and Marie joined her. People
stared at us and smiled. In Spain song was a special language with
special privileges. I stood before the singing women, conquered by their
sorrow.

The train puffed up and stopped. I shook hands all around, then climbed
aboard. I opened a window and looked down into their naked, pleading
eyes and I knew that this love that they were demonstrating was not for
me alone; it was an appeal to that world that they had never seen and
whose reality they had almost grown to doubt. I represented that world
to them.... I took out my fountain pen and waved gently toward them.

"_Para usted_," I whispered to them. I put my hand upon my heart.

They nodded their understanding with charged and misty eyes. The train
bell tolled. The train moved and I waved my hand as long as I could see
them and, as the train picked up speed, they sang louder. Then they were
gone, both the sight and sound of them, and I could hear only the
melancholy grinding of steel upon steel. But they were in my heart,
standing there, pleading.... I turned wearily and heavily to my seat in
the coach.




CHAPTER 31


Being near North Africa, I decided to make a quick trip to Tangier to
take advantage of the free-money market, then visit Seville and return
to Madrid. I boarded a dirty, hot train that puffed and groaned toward
Algeciras. A milky-white and sometimes bluish haze obscured the
low-lying mountains. Irrigated terraces rose in tiers that held
vineyards and olive groves. The faraway mountain ridges resembled the
scaly backs of prehistoric dinosaurs basking in the sun.

Toward noon working-class Spaniards took out big, wicked-looking
pocketknives to eat their lunches. Opposite me sat an old, withered
woman with a toothless mouth. She opened her lunch, extracted a hunk of
bread, a slab of raw, smoked ham, then pulled from her purse a shiny
pocketknife which she opened by flicking a button. She sliced off a
piece of bread, which she carried to her mouth with the blade of the
knife, then chipped off bits of ham which she ate in the same fashion,
chewing slowly. I had the feeling that she was so old that she was
eating more from habit than hunger. She paused, took a swig from her
bottle of red wine, swished it about in her hollow cheeks, then
swallowed. Having eaten, she licked the knife blade clean and laid it
carefully beside her upon the seat, stored away the leftovers, stoppered
the wine bottle, and took out an apple. She peeled the fruit slowly with
the pocketknife and cast the peelings between my legs and under my seat
with a kind of sublime absent-mindedness, her eyes fastened unseeingly
upon the passing mountain landscape.

At Algeciras I boarded the ferry for Tangier, slept one night in a
Tangier hotel, and, next morning, attended to my money errand. That
afternoon when the ferry docked at Gibraltar, I taxied to the port to
make connections for Algeciras. It was then that I witnessed yet another
example of the hardy daring of the Spanish woman. Swarming under the
shed that served as a waiting room were some three hundred women who had
just completed their day's work for the British on Gibraltar; they were
now on their way home, that is, to Algeciras.

These women were dressed in a most remarkable fashion; though it was not
raining and the temperature stood somewhere in the nineties, most of
them wore glistening black rubber boots that came up to their knees.
They attracted my attention because they were engaged in a frantic
activity the nature of which I could not, at first, determine. I seated
myself on a bench among them and smoked a cigarette, trying to appear as
unconcerned as possible, yet letting my eyes stray over the unfolding of
a fantastic ritual. I seemed to be looking at a factory in full
operation as the women feverishly opened packages: soap, cigarettes,
perfume, cold cream, lengths of cloth, lotion, Kotex, fountain pens,
packets of pudding powder.... Ah, these women were smugglers!

Until now there had been a buzzing of conversation, then not a word was
heard. I saw them looking furtively at me, whispering among themselves.
A stout woman came to me and asked: "_Usted Americano?_"

"_S, Seora_," I said.

She thought a moment, then murmured: "_Bueno._"

She joined her sisters and spoke to them; what she told them released a
storm of activity. Of course, they were still on British soil and
British officials did not care; it was the duty of the Spanish customs
officials to catch these smugglers and it was the task of these
tough-looking working women to outwit them.

The picture before me now became quite clear. These women were working
against time to secrete these items about their persons. Right before my
eyes I saw a consumptive-looking woman grow into a fat Spanish matron as
she lifted her skirt shamelessly and stored merchandise into the nooks
and crannies of her body. Before she could hide an item, she had to take
off its Cellophane wrapper ever so carefully, fold it and put it into
her purse so that the article could be rewrapped once it was safe on
Spanish soil.

One young woman took a small article out of her purse; it flashed like a
piece of jewelry, gold or silver. She handed it to an old woman
accomplice who proceeded to take the chignon from the back of the young
woman's head. The old woman then tucked the bit of jewelry deep into the
tresses of the chignon and then pinned the chignon neatly back into
place on the mass of the young woman's rich, dark-brown head of hair.

"_Gracias_," said the young woman, patting her magnificent crown of
luxuriant locks.

"_Nada_," the old woman breathed.

Another woman was pulling a pair of rubber boots onto her naked feet and
legs; she opened a bag of coffee and poured the contents into the top of
the boot. I counted ten pounds of coffee sliding into each boot. (I
wondered just how much of the coffee drunk in Spain was flavored with
rubber and sweaty foot odors.)

In port at Algeciras about one woman out of every ten was stopped and
hauled away to be searched by women police matrons. Even so, it must
have been a highly lucrative business and was undoubtedly efficiently
organized and sponsored and protected from somewhere high above.




CHAPTER 32


Next morning I boarded a bus for Seville and arrived during the sultry
afternoon. I was in the capital of Andalusia, the city whose cathedral
held the body of Christopher Columbus. Though rich in oranges, sugar
beets, olives, wheat, rice, the impression of poverty was so
all-pervading, touching so many levels of life that, after an hour,
poverty seemed to be the normal lot of man; I had to make an effort to
remember that people lived better lives elsewhere.

On my own in this city of four hundred thousand people and being without
my car, I sank wearily into a chair in the shade of an outdoor caf
fronting the Alameda de Hercules, a bare, sandy park patronized mainly
by working-class people. Unemployment must have been right, for scores
of ragged men lounged against walls in the sun, staring bleakly.

Yet the physical appearance of the city resembled a garden; tall,
spreading trees shaded almost every front yard; the approach to homes
was frequently through vine-covered arches; most houses were painted in
pastel shades of tan, blue, yellow, and cream. The faades of many
buildings were done in brilliant mosaic tile designs deriving without
doubt from the influence of the Moors; beyond iron-grill fences were
artistically arranged patios that were Alhambra-like in their static but
lovely beauty.

A man with a shoeshine box approached me and, with elaborate gestures,
asked to clean my shoes. I let him.

"You speak English? French?" I asked him.

He pointed to his mouth and ears, implying that he was deaf and dumb.
When he had finished my shoes, he scribbled upon a bit of paper and
handed it to me.

"_Un momento, Seor_," it read.

"_S, s_," I nodded.

He scurried off and returned a quarter of an hour later with a young man
whose right arm was withered.

"I son," the young man said in an original brand of English. "He
father," he continued, pointing to the deaf and dumb man. "What you
wan'?"

"I'm looking for a pension. Can you help me?"

"_S, s._ You wait. I go. I come queek. No?"

"_S, s_," I said, settling back. An hour later he reappeared, his
withered right arm, which was shorter than his left, bouncing up and
down excitedly as he neared me.

"You find something?" I asked him.

"I t'eenk so," he said.

"How much a day?" I asked.

He took out a fifty peseta bill and said: "Feety."

He said it too pat; no doubt he was getting a rake-off, but I was
willing to settle for fifty if I liked the room.

"Okay, let's see this place," I said, rising.

"Yes, meester," he cried, happy, bobbing along at my side.

It was a private house facing a square in a working-class neighborhood
and that decided me to accept it. There were four women in the two-story
house: Seora F., a plump, tanned, raven-haired, bulbous-eyed woman of
about thirty; she had a restrained and studied manner, but was
thoughtful and kind. Her assistant, M., a young woman in her late
twenties, actually ran the establishment; she had a pale, ascetic face
and was very nervous. The third woman was Seora F.'s mother, a stout,
baffled, ailing woman who rose late in the day and went to bed early.
The fourth female was a tall, stupid scarecrow who thought that anyone
who did not understand or speak Spanish was deaf, and she always lifted
her voice when she spoke to me. She did the heavy work. The little
pension was quiet, clean, with many a crucifix in the hallways and one
over each bed.

Settled in my room, I became aware of a strange sound that I could not,
for the life of me, define. It was a quiet chorus of high-pitched
emissions of complaint, like the squeaky chirping of newly-hatched
birds: _peep-peep-peep_.... Vainly I searched my balcony for birds'
nests. The piping sounds continued. Yes, they were coming from behind a
locked door in my room that gave onto the dining room. Then, over and
above the soft squirts of whistling sound came the murmuring voices of
women speaking Spanish. The more I listened, the more intrigued I
became. Finally I decided to investigate on the pretext of asking where
I could post a letter.

Leaving my room, I walked down a corridor and entered the dining room
and stood still, my eyes riveted upon a strange scene. About twelve baby
chicks were on top of the dining-room table pecking away at pellets of
meal-like grain. About the table were grouped the four women of the
house, lisping endearments, doting, smiling. Seora F. saw me and
beckoned me closer.

"_Bonita!_" she crooned, picking up a chick and kissing it.

"_S_," I said, feeling that I should agree. She had spent some years in
Paris and I could speak to her in French. "_Mais, o habitent les petits
poussins?_"

"_Sur le toit_," she said. She snapped her fingers and made a clicking
sound with her tongue. "_Nous pouvons les manger  partir de six mois._"

A cup had been turned upside down in a saucer and from its edges the
tiny fluffy chicks were drinking, poking their sharp, pearly beaks into
the water and then lifting their bald heads and making mincing,
scissorlike chewings to swallow. Well, if chickens were allowed to eat
on the dining-room table, maybe pigs slept in the kitchen? What went on
in this pension? Ah, but I could not then even imagine what other fleshy
and sinister doings transpired in that house. I finally did discover
them, but by accident, so wonderfully well were they cloaked by sugary
words, crucifixes, pious miens, and signs of the cross....

After mailing my alibi letter, I wandered the sizzlingly hot night
streets. A tent of black sky sagged low over the city's rooftops and its
burden of burning stars gleamed like glowing holes. Tree leaves
glistened wetly, drooping and motionless in the still air. The scent of
burning olive oil stood in the streets like a solid wall. People had
come outdoors to escape the heat of their concrete houses and the narrow
streets were cluttered with chairs. Under the weak blobs of yellow
light shed by street lamps groups of scrawny children clapped their
hands in complicated rhythms that reminded me of the children's games I
had seen in the African jungle. So congested was the working-class
quarter that one had only to poke one's head out of one's window and one
was looking into the bedroom or kitchen of one's neighbor.

I paused in front of a kiosk, looking for English-language newspapers.

"Do you carry the Paris _Tribune_?" I asked an old lady inside the
kiosk.

Her eyes went blank; my English was Greek to her.

"You know damn well you can't find the _Tribune_ down here!" a voice
boomed behind me.

I whirled and saw a grinning white face.

"Hi," I said. "Are you American?"

"I sure am," he said. "You're at the bottom of nowhere, guy. Nobody
reads English here. Tourist?"

"Sort of," I said.

He was a tall, blond fellow with a hard, bullet-shaped head and face.
There was a hint of something evasive about him, yet his thin lips
seemed to hold about ten different kinds of smiles. I had the feeling
that he would have smiled even had he been angry or afraid.

"How did you get lost down here?" I asked him.

"Oh, I'm on business here," he said. "How long are you here for?"

"Just a day or so; that's all."

"Having a good time?"

"Can't say I am. I just got in."

"You can't miss a good time here," he informed me significantly.

"Yeah?"

"What are you looking for? What do you want to see?" he asked me.

"I got the flamenco bug," I confessed.

He leaned his back against a parked car and roared with laughter.

"That's about all that they've got here," he said. "Where're you
staying?"

"In a pension, a couple of blocks away."

"Meet me here at eleven o'clock and I'll show you enough flamenco to
last you a lifetime," he said.

"You know this place well, then?"

"I know it."

"Okay. It's a deal. Here at eleven tonight."

"Sure thing, boy," he said.

"Your name?"

"S. Yours?"

"Ricardo."

"So long."

"So long."

Well, I would see some flamenco.... He seemed to know his way around
Seville. Maybe a businessman? Yet he did not quite look like one.
Perhaps one of those GI's who had stayed behind in Europe after the war
and had drifted into Spain? Maybe. In fact, I could not, in terms of
profession, place the fellow.




CHAPTER 33


At eleven that evening I made my way to the kiosk where S. was waiting
in his shirt sleeves.

"Ready for flamenco?" he asked me teasingly.

"Guess so. Where do we go?"

"Not far; right down the street," he said, leading the way.

We entered a curtained door over which a neon sign proclaimed: EL CISNE.

"A friend of mine runs this," he said.

It was a tiny night club, and about thirty girls, all more or less
young, were doing a whirling dance to the music of a small orchestra. S.
went directly to a table and we sat and ordered a bottle of white wine.
I noticed that almost every girl dancing on the floor looked at S. and
nodded or smiled.

"You're sure popular," I told him.

"You said it," he said, grinning cryptically.

The dancing was beautiful; the girls wore brilliantly colored, heavily
starched cotton dresses whose hems had been threaded with ribbons of
various colors. As they whirled, their skirts flared straight out,
floating at the level of their hips, revealing their bare, shapely legs,
and, when they reversed their whirling, the dresses wrapped around their
bodies, clinging. The girls stomped their heels on the floor and tossed
their heads in wild disdain, their red lips sultry, their black eyes
somnolent, their nimble fingers tapping castanets, their shoulders
moving fetchingly, enticingly....

"What do these girls earn a night for dancing?" I asked S.

"About seventy cents," he said.

"Then they work on the side?"

"Yeah, sure. They sleep for a hundred pesetas a throw."

"I've never in my life seen so many young and pretty girls on the sexual
market at such cheap prices," I said.

"I'm trying to solve that," he said, grinning, his eyes narrowing.

"What do you mean?" I asked.

"Forget it," he said, laughing. His hand swept toward the dancing girls.
"This is only a fraction of the women available in Seville," he
explained with the air of a veteran dealer in women. "I have a list of
available women in this city and that list is over three yards long, and
covers every section of the city. And, boy, that list is _selective_."

I wanted to ask him how he had gotten that list together, but I
inhibited myself. We drank wine and watched the girls flinging their
arms and legs. The dance stopped and several girls came to our table. S.
spoke to them in Spanish, then he took out a notebook and began jotting
down information. What was this man doing? One of the girls spoke to me
in Spanish.

"_No comprendo_," I said. I asked S., "What did she say?"

"She wants to know if you are going to take her to North Africa," he
told me, laughing.

I laughed too, but I was puzzled.

"What does she mean?"

"She thinks that you are the boss," S. said.

He looked at me with a smiling, ironical expression. (I did not know
then that he was wondering how long it would take me to catch on to what
he was doing!)

Four girls were at our table now. The orchestra played and they wriggled
their shoulders, rolled their eyes, and snapped their fingers. Most of
them were in their twenties. And they kept looking expectantly at me.

"I you go Africa," a young girl said to me.

S. bent over with laughter, enjoying my bewilderment.

"But I'm not an African," I told S. "Tell her that I'm an American."

S. laughed the harder, slapping his thighs.

"This is rich!" he said.

"What's the joke?" I demanded, nettled.

"Brother, you would never have thought that this would happen to you,"
he told me.

"But what's happening to me?"

"Look, I'm organizing these girls to take them to Africa next week," he
explained. "They think that you are the boss. You see, you are _dark_."

Good God! I stared at him, and then at the doting girls.

"You are a big man," S. teased me.

"But--w-what are you going to do with the girls in Africa?" I asked him
stammeringly.

"What the hell do you think? I'm going to put them to work in houses,"
he snapped, still laughing.

It hit me like a ton of rock. _White slavery...!_ And S. must have
thought that my expression was the funniest he had ever seen on a human
face, for he roared.

"Jesus!" he yelled. "Boy, these girls'll do _anything_ on earth for you.
They think you're the _boss_ from Africa. Look, don't be upset. I knew
that they would fall for it, see? I knew that when I saw you tonight.
You don't look like a sailor. So I wanted to see how they would receive
you."

"They think I'm the one they would work for in Africa?" I asked.

"They think you own the cathouses in Casablanca," he guffawed.

I stared at the white slaver and, at the same time, tried to appreciate
his strange brand of humor.

"White slavery?" I asked him haltingly, leaning forward and speaking
into his ear.

He looked at me mockingly.

"No. Not white slavery," he chuckled. "Olive-skinned slavery."

I looked at the girls again. They were fresh, young, happy, pretty,
healthy....

"But...." I tried to speak.

"What's the matter with you?" he asked me, clapping me on the shoulder,
bending double with laughter.

"You mean that they _want_ to work in the _whorehouses_ in Africa?" I
asked.

"They are _dying_ to go," he told me. "I got the pick of thousands of
women to make up my quota. That's why they were eyeing you; they thought
that you were the black boss from Africa." He went off into another long
laugh.

I managed a sick smile.

"You smuggle them out of the country?"

"Hell, no! They travel on the train and ferry. I buy their tickets."

"No knockout drops in their drinks, hunh?"

"Listen, I can't sleep for the women in Seville begging me to take them
to Africa." He looked at me with a derisive smile. "Knockout drops?
Novelists write that shit."

I was glad that I had not told him that I was a novelist. I was doing a
quick laundering job on the moral notions in my brain and the moral
feelings of my body. This was white slavery, and how simple and open and
jolly it was! The women and girls were begging to go; they were hungry.

"Look, there are plenty of women in North Africa," I said. "Why do you
have to ship these there?"

"They are white," he said.

"They want _white_ women?"

"_That's_ it."

"Racial revenge in bed, hunh?" I asked him.

"They _pay_," he said.

That settled it.

"Do they make much money?" I asked him.

"Two years' work over there and a girl can buy a house in Seville," he
said.

"Is there any girl here who has been there?" I asked.

He looked around, then summoned a girl with that hissing sound that
Spaniards always use to call someone--a sound that I had grown to hate.
A girl, still seemingly in her twenties, came over. She was flashily
dressed and had several gold bracelets dangling on her arms.

"She's one of our graduates," he said, laughing.

I offered the girl a glass of wine and she smiled and murmured:
"_Gracias_."

She did not look any the worse for wear, but, of course, I could only
see her face.

The flamenco road led in many directions, and this was one of them.
Well, given the conditions, the moral attitude of the Church toward sex,
the poverty, the ignorance, this was bound to be. It was all socially
determined. The Church could call it sin, but it was something far more
awful than that. Crush, inhibit, deny the impulses of man, thwart his
instincts, and those instincts would find a devious way out, a way to
freedom, and the instincts of women too would find a way.

"How many of these girls can read and write?" I asked.

"Oh, about three out of ten," he said.

"Just how is business?" I asked him, grinning.

"It's good," he said soberly. "It's damn good."

Later we left El Cisne and paid a visit to another night club, the
Congo, then to still another, the Citron, and, in each place, S.
interviewed and signed up girls to work in the whorehouses of North
Africa.

At two o'clock in the morning I pleaded fatigue and went to my pension.
I was too tired to sleep. I lay in bed staring in the hot darkness, not
wanting to accept how men lived their lives on this earth. I tossed and
turned on the warm sheet. Suddenly I was alert. A car had stopped down
in the street in front of the house. I heard the front door of the house
open and close. Footsteps mounted the stairs and there was the soft buzz
of whispered voices. Then silence. Some roomer coming in late, as I did,
perhaps....

About twenty minutes later I heard another car stop in front of the
house; I listened to the front door opening and closing again, then once
more footsteps sounded on the stairs and more whispered conversations.
What's going on?

Half an hour later still another car came to the front door. This time I
bounded out of bed and went to the window and gently-opened the
shutters. Looking down, I saw a man pay off a taxi driver and vanish
with a girl into the front door of the building.

Was it possible? I did not want to presume. I waited; minutes passed.
Yes; there was another taxi. It slowed and stopped below me and a man
and a girl got out.

There was no doubt about it. It was not quite a whorehouse; it was a
house of assignation. I still stood at the window. I saw a man and a
girl leave. A moment later yet another taxi came.... Spain seemed one
vast brothel. And those four women were so quiet, charming, respectable.
I turned toward my bed and became aware of the crucifix on the wall and
I blinked. I lay down. Business was going on around, over, and under me.
I drifted into an uneasy sleep.




CHAPTER 34


Have I sounded harsh in my speaking of the women of Spain? It has not
been my intention to slur or slight them.

The Spanish women are undoubtedly the most electrically beautiful of all
the women in all the world. A Spanish woman is all solid woman and
nothing else. Stalwart, they bear the burdens of their poor nation and
with but few complaints. They bind up their men's wounds, cater night
and day to their childish passions and needs. Against impossible odds,
they administer the routine of millions of bleak, hungry, and ignorant
families; indeed, it is because of the dutiful presence of Spanish women
alone that the hovels that shelter those families can be called home.
In short, the women of Spain make her a nation.

The daily striving and suffering of Spanish women make what little
structure there is to Spanish society, knitting together in a web of
care and love what would otherwise be a landscape of senseless anarchy.
They are a proud women, a sweet women, a forgiving women, a
compassionate women, women of easy laughter and easy tears. The mighty
maternal instinct of the Spanish woman is the anchor of responsibility
that holds the ship of Spanish life steady while the Spanish man babbles
abstract nonsense in the countless smoky coffee houses.

They are a lithe-limbed women who whirl and clack their castanets and
stomp their heels and make of an otherwise dull nation an exciting and
human spectacle; women who plow the fields; who wash clothes in country
streams; who drive the oxen-drawn carts; who satisfy their men and nurse
their babies; and who, at the beginning and the end of the day, creep
forward and kneel humbly before the weeping and jeweled Virgins in the
dim and drafty cathedrals; long-suffering and enduring women who follow
their hot-eyed men into war and peace when they understand nothing of
the causes of war and peace; desperately practical women who sleep with
strange men for food while their babies coo or cry in nearby cribs;
undernourished, skinny women who flee the chill of their concrete houses
to sit on curbstones and mend tattered clothing in the sun's wan light;
despairing women who send lunch boxes to their daughters who work in the
whorehouses; old lonely women who weep at the memory of their sons and
daughters who have gone off to seek their destinies in the cold, strange
world; silly women who sleep half the day and pay their maids five
dollars a month and who primp themselves long and lovingly before their
mirrors so that they can walk arm in arm with five other women down the
Ramblas and not impair their respectability; Lesbian women living their
quiet, secluded lives within the shadows of cathedrals where they go to
confess and make their atonements; blind women who sit on street corners
in rain or sun and sell lottery tickets; bold-eyed women who begin
staring at you ten feet away and whose eyes hold yours until you are
abreast of them; women who ask men to their beds without a flicker of
shame; shy little women who swab the tile floors on their knees and
whose frightened eyes beseech you not to soil the floor that they have
so meticulously cleaned; beautiful, rouged, jeweled women drinking
cognac in bars who will tell you with a sweet, sad smile that they
cannot read or write; ugly women with black and blue marks on their arms
from the embrace of drunken sailors; hard-faced women who are willing to
escape loneliness by cooking, working, whoring, and dying for a man;
frail, dry little women who sell candies and sunflower seed and almonds
and who sometimes die while sitting in their little wooden stalls; fat
and frightened women who, when they see the black hearse drawn by two
magnificent black horses with purple plumes on their heads, cross
themselves and throw a kiss from their index fingers to the Virgin of
their devotion; tall, long-limbed women who stride down the street,
lifting up their big feet and planting them down with the assurance of
men; solemn, vindictive women who stand gossiping in the middle of the
street with elbows akimbo; young, devout women who have husbands who are
hopelessly ill and who stifle their deepest physical needs while their
hair whitens before they are thirty--yes, all of those and more are the
women of Spain, the heart of Spain. Spanish men have built a State, but
they have never built a society, and the only society that there is in
Spain is in the hearts and minds and habits and love and devotion of its
women....

       *       *       *       *       *

P.S.

Since the above observations were written, the following news item
appeared on March 12, 1956, in the European edition of the New York
_Herald Tribune_:


     SPANISH BROTHELS TO CLOSE

     Madrid, March 12 (A.P.).--The government has allowed brothel
     keepers three months to close, under threat of heavy fines and
     prison sentences. Prostitution has been "tolerated" in Spain, and
     known prostitutes were given special identity cards and forced to
     pass medical inspection every ten days. A decree published in
     yesterday's official bulletin also ordered the closing within three
     months of "houses of tolerance," even though they don't keep
     prostitutes on the premises and only rent rooms.

The above is typical of the moral approach induced by shame and
self-consciousness stemming from world opinion. The Spanish mentality,
branding prostitution as sin, is incapable of dealing with it as a
social problem--a social problem born of economic conditions buttressed
by a political system. Such an approach implies flirting with liberal
ideas, and liberal ideas are a mortal sin. Concepts of social causation
smack of "dangerous thoughts."

The closing of brothels will, of course, but scatter a vast horde of
hungry women through the population, making a desperate problem even
more desperate, and converting many respectable buildings into centers
of illicit sex trade.




THE WORLD OF PAGAN POWER




CHAPTER 35


I felt that I had bitten off a large enough chunk of Spanish reality to
engage my thoughts and reflections for the time being. Accordingly,
after a few days' rest in Madrid, I pointed the nose of my car northward
and rolled to Paris.

Before going into Spain my ideas about its problems had been mainly
political. I had had a vague notion that I was going to be deeply
concerned about comparing the economic conditions under Franco with
those that had prevailed before and under the Republic. But my journey
and the nature of the reality that I had seen had provoked other and
different questions in my mind, questions that went far beyond mere
economic and political considerations. No neat, simple dialectical
diagnosis of class relations could clarify the reality that had flooded
in upon me.

Frankly, I had not been prepared for what I had encountered. Yet I could
not feel that the fault was mine. I had diligently waded through scores
of volumes by eminent Spanish authorities and scholars to provide myself
with some background against which I could measure and inform the
reality that I would discover. But the more I had probed and looked and
listened, the more obvious it became to me that my trek to Barcelona,
Madrid, Granada, and Seville had not been a voyage that I could by any
means describe as having taken me through the precincts of the Western
world. Though Spain was geographically a part of Europe, it had had
just enough Western aspects of life to make me feel a little at home.
But it was not the West. Well, what then was it?

That was the question that plagued me and I grew slowly to feel than an
answer to that question was much more important than a long poring over
economic statistics or my trying to understand the diabolical gyrations
of the Falange, the State, the Army, and the Church, for it was now
clear that these Spanish organs of power had been shaped by, and were
drawing their vitality from, some deep irrational core that made up the
heart of Spanish reality.

To be a functioning and organic part of something is to be almost
unconscious of it. I was a part, intimate and inseparable, of the
Western world, but I seldom had had to account for my Westernness, had
rarely found myself in situations which had challenged me to do so.
(Even in Asia and Africa I had always known where my world ended and
where theirs began. But Spain was baffling; it looked and seemed
Western, but it did not act or feel Western.)

Since I now felt most strongly, in fact, _knew_ that Spain was not a
Western nation, what then did being Western mean? (And what about the
Republic? The Civil War? The Anarchists? To my mind those realities now
became deeply modified and less important by the non-Western character
of the country I had seen.) Was being Western something so absolutely
different from Spanish life and civilization as to be of another genus?
Or was that difference a mere nuance, an angle of vision, a point of
view? It was not my task to define the totality of the contents of
Western civilization; I was interested only in that aspect of it that
engaged my attention in relation to Spain. I was finally led to believe
that that difference lay in the area of the _secular_ that Western man,
through the centuries and at tragic cost, had won and wrung from his own
religious and irrational consciousness. In Spain there was no lay, no
secular life. Spain was a holy nation, a sacred state--a state as sacred
and as irrational as the sacred state of the Akan in the African jungle.
Even the prostitution, the corruption, the economics, the politics had
about them a sacred aura. _All was religion in Spain._

When I arrived at that conclusion, still another and bleaker conclusion
thrust itself upon me, became deductively mandatory. The traditions of
the Akan African were unwritten, were fragile, and had already been
mortally jolted by the brutal and thoughtless impact of the Western
world. The African, though thrashing about in a void, was free to create
a future, but the pagan traditions of Spain had sustained no such mortal
wound. Those traditions were intact today as never before. In fact, they
were officially revered and honored; they were the political aims of the
State. This was a fact that made me feel that the naked African in the
bush would make greater progress during the next fifty years than the
proud, tradition-bound Spaniard!

But even this was not the whole story. The nature of Spain's religious
area differed markedly from all other religious areas in Western Europe,
including Italy. Why? What had happened in Spain? It was too easy to say
that Spain had, somehow, missed, slept through a whole period of
historical development--a period in which science, art, politics, and
human personality had established their own autonomy and justification.
In a way that had happened. But that was only one way of describing the
real situation. The boundaries of Spanish religiosity went _beyond_ the
Church....

For a long time my own Westernness proved a veritable stumbling block to
my seeing the truth that stared me in the face. The cold fact was:
_Spain was not yet even Christian!_ It had never been converted, not to
Protestantism, not even to _Catholicism_ itself! Somehow the pagan
streams of influence flowing from the Goths, the Greeks, the Jews, the
Romans, the Iberians, and the Moors lingered strongly and vitally on,
flourishing under the draperies of the twentieth century. An early and
victorious Catholicism, itself burdened with deep traits of a paganism
that it had sought vainly to digest, had here in Spain been sucked into
the maw of a paganism buried deep in the hearts of the people. And the
nature and function of Catholicism had enabled that paganism to remain
intact. And today Spanish Catholicism boasted that it was the most
perfect and the purest Catholicism in all the world....

I had, of course, read Castro's _The Structure of Spanish History_ and
Madariaga's _Spain_, both of which, in different ways, were monuments of
scholarship and which now and then had hinted at the real underlying
truth. But even these recent and authoritative pronouncements did not
seem to me to go deeply and boldly enough into the real heart of the
question of the Spanish animal. They had, on the whole, both Castro and
Madariaga, refrained delicately from calling things by their right
names.

I protested to myself for wanting to dump the entire life of a European
nation into the lap of the irrational. It just could not be, I argued
with myself, that a nook of Europe had completely escaped the
secularizing processes that were now rampant even in Asia and Africa.
But, in the end, I had had no choice.... True, the West had its areas of
the irrational; Germany and Italy had only recently been rescued from a
bloody Sargasso of the irrational and were still in a period of
convalescence. But, in the West as a whole, a substantial margin of the
secular, strategically anchored in science, industry, and in daily lives
of hundreds of millions of citizens, had been won and it was safe to
assume that those margins would not only remain, but would be, and were
daily being, enlarged, extended. But whatever of the secular in Spain
had ever existed had been blotted out almost totally by the Civil War
and the decimation of its free men through death and exile. I did, here
and there, encounter a few timorous Spaniards whose outlook longed
toward the pragmatically rational and the secular, but they were as
chaff before the totalitarian whirlwind. (One of the most intelligent
men I talked to in Spain has since been cast into prison!)

I soon discovered, however, and to my own dismay, that calling things by
their right names in the area of Spanish reality, an area charged with
passion and abounding in the quicksands of subjectivity, was no easy
matter. To accept the idiotic assumptions of the Spanish Falange was, of
course, out of the question, that is, if one accepted living in an even
somewhat rational world. And if I had, which was impossible, embraced,
even as a value judgment, the metaphysical assumptions of the Catholic
Church in Spain, I would have been forced to endorse the surrealistic
nature of the reality of present-day Spain as the normal lot of man, and
that was inconceivable. And it would have been less than senseless for
me to have tried to judge Spanish reality in terms of Western,
twentieth-century concepts, for the historical soil out of which such
concepts grew was completely lacking in Spain. On the other hand, to
have attempted a psychological approach in a Freudian sense would have
implied a much more intimate acquaintance with the daily family lives of
the people than I had--an access to case histories and clinical material
even. Otherwise my facts would have been forever wide of the theories.
In the end I resolved to accept the brute facts and let the theories go.

Why, I finally asked myself, was I worrying about guides, precedents,
concepts? Why not take the reality of Spain just as it struck me? Yes,
why not? That was what I had begun to do, so why not just keep on doing
just that even when talking to Spanish intellectuals and looking at
cathedrals and ceremonies? I so decided.

The first thing, though, that I had to be clear about was my own deep
non-Catholicness, my undeniable and inescapable Protestant background
and conditioning, my irredeemably secular attitude, and, beyond all
that, my temperamental inability to accept childlike explanations of a
universe which, if it had any ultimate meaning, was surely not the kind
of universe that could be represented by pictorial images of a cosmic
family whose members were quarreling among themselves.

Yet Spanish religion was a reality. That religion had been called "an
opiate of the masses," but I felt that that definition was more negative
and tendentious than a true description. The Spanish religion and its
effects that I had observed were nobody's opiate. The Spaniards were
ruling in the name of their religion and they were capable of killing
you in the name of that religion and of writing a book to justify it.

Possessed by that religion, the Spaniards had despoiled entire
continents. Could I possibly, though, accept, for purposes of
description, what they had done and were still doing in terms of their
own actions and _still not accept it_? Could I handle their explanations
and at the same time stand outside of them? As difficult as that was, it
seemed to me to be the only honest recourse I had. It meant walking a
mental tightrope, yet it did not commit me to any creed, let alone
theirs, and it left me free, in a fashion, to depict what I saw.

That was my mood and intention when I headed back toward Spain in the
late spring of 1955. And it had been my mood all along.




CHAPTER 36


The moment I recrossed the Franco-Spanish frontier--this time at Hendaye
and in a pouring rain--I noticed and felt a sharp drop in the material
and psychological quality of living. No matter how lushly green the
valleys, the Spanish villages were grim and sorry. Along the wet
highways trudged peasants bent under heavy burdens: sacks of grain,
loads of hay, boxes, etc.; open trucks rattled along filled with men and
women standing packed like cattle, the rain lashing their faces. The
women's dresses clung to their misshapen bodies; the men's ragged shirts
bagged about their shoulders and hips. Then came that immemorial symbol
of Spain: an old woman whose head was covered with a dirty cloth hobbled
alongside her heaped and donkey-drawn cart....

Quitting San Sebastian, I followed a winding, treacherous mountain road
shrouded in fog and rain and ascended toward Azpeitia to see the
sanctuary and the birthplace of St. Ignacio de Loyola, the Soldier of
Christ and founder of the Society of Jesus. The shrine and retreat lay
some kilometers off the main highway amid mountains covered with scraggy
pines. At last I saw a soaring dome and I knew that I was on the spot
that housed the personal effects of the first man who had made
Christianity a militant and deliberate way of life.

It was a vast but compact establishment lifting some four stories into
the air. Of course, the actual edifice in which Loyola had first seen
the light of day was no longer intact, but a most skillful feat of
preserving what little remained of it had been done. Around the few
surviving beams, the faade, and a collection of many other minor
mementos, the brooding and thorough Jesuits had constructed a jewel of a
religious monument.

Owing to the water shortage, the electricity had been cut and a young
priest, the first well-nourished and healthy-looking man I had seen
since re-entering Spain, showed me the holy relics by the murky beams of
a flashlight. A profound calm possessed the shrine. The rooms and
hallways were spacious, ornate; most of the floors were of marble; many
famous paintings hung on the walls; and everywhere was the soft, cloying
scent of cedar. In the dimness I examined glass cases in which were
locked fragments of clothing once worn by Loyola, yellowed letters
written by him, a sword which he had once used, gilded boxes, etc.; and
I could not help but remember the fetish huts that I had seen in West
Africa, huts containing the hallowed objects of ancestors.

"These things were actually handled by Loyola himself?" I asked the
young priest.

"Yes. The saint touched them," he said in a voice of deep reverence.

These items, therefore, were regarded as holy. Inlaid marble, carved
ebony and walnut, silver, gold--in short, the most precious and lovely
of earthly materials had been lavished here to make this shrine
arresting and memorable, and the maintenance of it had taken precedence
over other and more practical projects. If one accepted the premise that
this was a gateway to eternal bliss, one had to endorse the manner in
which the rich beauty of this shrine contrasted with the squalor and
misery that lay about it.

As I wandered through the shadowed rooms I saw young men kneeling and
praying with joined hands before tiny chapels framed by flickering
candles. It was believed that a magical manna dwelt in the objects to
which their prayers appealed and they were therefore attempting to
establish a relationship with those objects in order to partake of their
blessedness. And these young men were all strappingly healthy. Just how
many physically robust and mentally alert young men and women in Spain
were huddled in these dim and remote sanctuaries tucked away in secluded
settings, sworn not to reproduce themselves, engaged in continual
penance, loathing the world, cultivating humility, giving themselves to
a Beyond? I asked the young priest how many were in the sanctuary, but
he looked off evasively and would not answer.

These suppliant young men were beseeching sanctions for action and
thought. The world in which they lived was dark and deceitful and no
action deriving from spontaneous impulse and no thought stemming from
egotistical interests were acceptable. Justification for action had to
bear the stamp of supernatural origin, and only those thoughts born in a
body chastened and contrite could be good thoughts.

It would have been stupid to have questioned the sincerity of those
young men; they were wholeheartedly, self-sacrificially earnest. Only
someone subjectively at war with the religion that those young men were
practicing could have doubted them; to the outsider their devotion
carried the stamp of the tragically genuine.

But what kind of thought and action could possibly be produced by such
distrust of self, such morbid pleading for impersonal justification? Any
attitude born of that seeking must perforce be imperiously arrogant and
confident, feeling itself allied with the secret and hidden energies of
the universe. And all of the world which, for whatever reason, failed to
coincide with that attitude's brutal and militant irrationality must
seem confessedly evil, an object to be exterminated, banished like the
rays of the sun scattering darkness. There was undoubtedly a brand of
demonism here, for these young men had become hopelessly entangled in
the turbulent and obscure complexes of their own personalities.

It was nearing night when I emerged. The solemn tolling of bells filled
the black wet sky. I drove to the nearest village and put up in a chilly
hotel room, and, unable to sleep, I wearily took out the Falange
catechism and turned to lesson fifteen, for girls between the ages of
twelve and fourteen, reading:


_The Organization of the Movement_

     WHY DOES THE MOVEMENT EXIST?

     _To give life to Falangist doctrine._

     HOW IS IT ORGANIZED?

     _Hierarchically and vertically._

     WHAT ARE ITS OFFICES?

     _By order of importance, first the National Leader, with two
     accessory bodies to help him in his office._

     WHAT ARE THESE BODIES?

     _The National Council and the Political Junta._

     WHAT IS THE NATIONAL COUNCIL?

     _A Council to which officers of the Falange belong and a number of
     members chosen by the National Leader to help him in his duties._

     WHAT IS THE POLITICAL JUNTA?

     _A small delegation from the National Council which aids the Leader
     in a more permanent and direct way._

     AFTER THE NATIONAL LEADER, WHO ARE THE MOST IMPORTANT OFFICERS OF
     THE FALANGE?

     _First, the President of the Political Junta and then the General
     Secretary._

     THEN WHO?

     _The General Assistant Secretary and the Departmental Assistant
     Secretaries._

     THEN?

     _The National Departmental Delegates and Secretaries; the most
     important are from the Youth Front, the Syndicates, and the
     Delegate of the Women's Branch._

     WHY ARE THEY THE MOST IMPORTANT?

     _Because they enroll and train the mass._

     WHO COMES NEXT IN THE HIERARCHIC ORDER?

     _The Provincial Leaders and Deputy Leaders, the Provincial
     Departmental Delegates and Secretaries, the Local Leaders, and the
     Local Departmental Delegates._

     HOW ARE ALL THESE OFFICES FILLED?

     _The lower ones are directly filled on recommendation from the
     immediately superior office._

     WHO CHOOSES THE NATIONAL LEADER?

     _He is unchangeable except in case of death or incapacity._

     HOW WOULD THAT BE DONE?

     _In principle the Political Junta he had chosen would appoint the
     new Leader from its members._

     WHO ELSE FORMS A PART OF THE MOVEMENT?

     _The members._

     HOW ARE THEY ENROLLED?

     _As adherents and militants, in their Local Branches._

     WHAT ARE THE ADVANTAGES OF THIS VERTICAL ORGANIZATION?

     _That of keeping direct control from the National Leader down to
     the last of the members._

When I finished reading that, I knew that Loyola had not lived in vain,
that his spirit went marching on.




CHAPTER 37


Until now I had more or less avoided the intellectuals of Spain, feeling
that I did not wish to talk with them until I had become more conversant
with some of the reality that made up their lives. The next few days
were spent in Madrid examining the emotional landscapes of intelligent
and perceptive Spaniards, hearing explanations and justifications of
their plight.

My first informant was a well-known journalist whom I met one sunny
afternoon in the penthouse of a friend of a friend. We sat upon a
terrace under a high blue sky, drinking wine. Seor G. was in his
sixties, portly, white-haired, swarthy-skinned, with a pair of dark,
tired, tolerant eyes. He had requested beforehand, through our mutual
friend, that his name be omitted in what I would write, and I had
promised. Though we had been sitting for more than half an hour, I had
not ventured to broach the subject of Spanish life, yet we all knew
that the question of "What is Spain?" lay at the background of our
minds. Seor G. was a jolly man with a mordant sense of humor; suddenly
he was serious; he rose, crossed to my chair and clapped me heartily on
the back and said in a laughing and yet somehow accusative tone:

"So you have come to see our poor Spain, hunh?"

"Well...." I hedged, wanting him to take the lead.

"We _are_ poor," he said, striding to and fro, his hands deep in his
trouser pockets. "I'm an old journalist; I used to go to poor countries
to look at the natives too." He laughed and waved his hand to stifle my
protest. He sat and looked at me and nodded his head affirmatively.
"I've been in the outside world: New York, London, Paris, Berlin. I know
what they think of us. But we Spanish _are_ different.

"Let me start by telling you something quite frankly." He spoke in an
accent tinged with a slight but agreeable burr. "Don't take us Spaniards
too seriously. We aren't worth it. We have created empires with a
sleight-of-hand, and then we frittered them away like smoking a
cigarette. All the wars we ever fought were fought for the wrong
reasons; we have never been able to tell what our real interests were.
Every time we have ever had a chance, we grabbed for the shadow and let
the substance go. We were great at a time when greatness was easy.

"Yes; everybody today wants to know what makes a Spaniard a Spaniard."
He laughed bitterly. "It starts at birth and it starts all wrong. We
Spaniards pamper ourselves. We don't really know anything and we are not
taught anything. We are just allowed to grow. Our children do not know
what real hard work in the schoolroom is. Our teachers are idiots. I'm
not exaggerating. Just go into one of our university class rooms and
listen. The wonder is that we are not worse off; there is something that
saves us from the sheer bottom of nothingness, and it is not our brains.

"The Spaniard is an animal that is spoiled from the cradle. We are made
to feel that we are something precious, something that needs no
improvement. We are not shy; we are not even self-conscious, and, God
knows, we could use a lot of that. We are never humble; we are never
curious. We trapped the truth with our guns centuries ago and we are
certain that we have still got the truth.

"The ignorance among us is appalling. Don't be nave enough to ask for
statistics of literacy or even of population here. Barcelona may be
bigger than Madrid, but pride won't ever let us admit it. Figures here
mean nothing. We break our figures down into statistics relating to
regions. The region that we don't like is the less literate one, less
literate than our own.

"We don't like external reality. Every time we speak we remake the world
over in the way it pleases and suits us. We murder our own language
even. Do you know that there are but few literate Spaniards who can
speak and write their language properly? They could, if they really
wanted to, but they don't feel any need to--"

"Just a moment," I interrupted him. "A few moments ago you mentioned
regions. What about this well-known question of nationalism in Spain?
The Basques? The Catalans?"

"Our country has different regions with different habits and different
traditions," he said. "But that exists in all countries. Your American
South is different from the North, but you don't make national issues
out of it. Catalonia is different from Andalusia; one is industrial, the
other agrarian. Look, forget this national issue in Spain," he said,
waving his hand and laughing. "It's a false issue; really, it is. Let me
tell you the secret of it. When Spain was a going concern, we were all
proud to be Spaniards. But when Spain began losing her empire, when the
belly got empty, many parts wanted to withdraw." He chuckled cynically.
"It's like a man wanting to leave a woman who is no good for him any
more. Every section of Spain tells you how different it is from other
sections, how much better it is. One of the deepest traits of Spain is
to be anti-Spanish. When all Spaniards shout that they are different
from the other Spaniards, that means that they are all alike.

"Most nations must strive and pile up great accomplishments in order to
feel as proud and good about themselves as we do. The mere fact that a
Spaniard is alive is enough to guarantee him his delusion of nobility."

"But did not sectional differences help to make for bitterness during
the Civil War?" I asked him.

He rose and paced the terrace, chuckling and shaking his head
negatively.

"There was never very much bitterness about the Civil War in the first
place," he said. "Many people were shocked about the ferocity we
displayed during the fighting.... Do you know that nobody has yet told
the real and simple truth about that war?"

"And what is that truth?" I asked, mentally preparing myself for some
political revelation.

"We butchered one another and we loved it," he declared. "The Spaniard
was at his best in that war. This is what every intelligent Spaniard
knows, but he won't admit it publicly. And we are waiting to start
another butchering at the first good opportunity. The Spaniards never
had a better time of it in their modern history than they had in that
war."

I was silent. I had not expected to hear so frank a reaction to Spain by
a Spaniard.

"What about Franco?" I asked.

"You know, he's a Jew," he said. "I'm not an anti-Semite, but knowing
that he's a Jew is the only way to explain his peculiar mentality. He is
a very brave man, personally. But he has no sense of what a nation is,
or what a state is, or what a society is. He sits there, playing the
Church against the Falange, and the Falange against the Army, and the
Army against the people. I don't think that there is anything vindictive
or cruel in him. He is more devout than the ordinary Catholic. The worst
that I can say about Franco is that he has lunch with the Holy Ghost
every day."

The group of us laughed.

"What about the prison population?" I asked. "I'm told that there are
fewer political prisoners now than during and right after the war?"

"Why worry about the prison population?" he asked me in a mocking tone.
"At least, they eat. The people who are on the outside of prisons don't
eat. I'm not trying to be funny. But there are worse things to worry
about in Spain than the people in prisons."

He sat and twisted nervously in his seat, smiling, looking off.

"Look, there is one thing that you must know about us, or you'll never
understand us. We are barbarians. And only those Spaniards who know that
we are barbarians are a bit civilized. The problem here is deep-seated.
We need to start all over again--"

"Because of the force of tradition?" I asked.

"Yes. In order to _overcome_ tradition."

"How will you do that?"

"Who knows?" he asked with a sigh. "I'm old. I'm out of politics and
I'll stay out of it all. But if you want my opinion, I'd say: Start at
the cradle and rear a new generation--"

"But will the Church let you do that?" I asked.

"No. And there's the problem," he said.

"What about increasing the rate of industrialization as a means of
creating an area of secular life, of neutrality?" I asked.

"The power of the Church is much, much greater than you think," he
declared. "They manage to suck all new enterprises into their orbit. For
example, the Germans will build a plant in Barcelona. Those Germans are
Protestants. The Catholic Church, through the government, does not want
those Germans to have a Protestant Church. After much bickering, the
government, acting for the Church, grants the request of the German
Protestants, but insists _that their chapel must be in the factory and
that no Spaniards can be present_....

"They manage to control _everything_," he went on, laughing. "You
Americans are trying to change us. Why, we will change _you_ before you
change _us_.

"Do you know that your GI's here can hold their Protestant services, but
_only_ for American Protestants? I don't suppose that the government or
the Church has anybody standing at the door to see that no Spaniard gets
in. But those were the orders that your GI's received from the Spanish
government and your people have not protested. You said: 'Yes.'

"We Spaniards are a cunning and stubborn people. You'll see. Have you
noticed that no Americans wearing the uniforms of the Air Force or the
American Army are seen on the streets of Spanish cities?"

"Yes, vaguely."

"Do you know why?" he asked me.

"No," I said.

"It has been written into the terms of the treaty we made with you," he
told me. "Your boys can only wear their uniforms when they are on their
installations, but not in public. Franco and the Falange and the Army
and the Church do not want your smartly clad troops mingling with the
Spanish people. You'd sow discontent. In France and Italy and England
your boys walk about chewing gum and carrying cameras. But our people
often never suspect that your boys are here.

"Our people are cowed and asleep. The government does not wish them to
be disturbed. The energies of your people go into production; our
energies go into watching one another."

"Do the Spanish people want democracy?" I asked him.

"Yes and no," he said. "Those who understand what democracy is want it.
But we know very little about democracy. The nature of our Church is
anti-democratic. The Falange scorns the ballot.

"In rural areas there is a kind of traditional democracy. But beyond
that our conception of democracy is elementary, still crude. We
establish equality by taking something away from somebody. For example,
if you have nothing and you think that your neighbor is rich, you ruin
him; you don't enrich yourself with his wealth; you just ruin him and
then both of you are poor and equal." He laughed. "That was part of the
impulse behind destroying the churches. They were too ornate, too
lavish, too beautiful; they made the poor people feel miserable....

"Of course, you can destroy something only when you believe in it," he
explained. "The Spaniard is a magic-minded person. He felt that he had
to kill the magic of the Church before he could practice his own--"

"Do Spaniards believe in ghosts?" I asked.

"No; strangely, we do not," he said, laughing. "I'm afraid that that's
an English vice."

"How do you account for that among the Spanish?" I asked.

"Well, we don't need ghosts," he said. "We've got 'em visibly
everywhere. Our Beyond is right there to the sight and touch, in the
cathedrals."

"Your outlook is black," I chided him.

"No, no," he protested laughingly. "I'm just not proud of being a
Spaniard, that's all. I'm an old man; I have no false pride. I live with
myself and want to be honest with myself."

That man had lived long years abroad; he had come back to his native
land and had made a bitter peace. He was out of the fight and felt that
his personal state of mind was more important to him that tilting with
the windmills of the Falange. And, yet, there was an element of
self-hate in his attitude; he was honest, but he had had to pay a price
that was akin to having a thorn sticking forever in his heart.




CHAPTER 38


Like the uprooted Asian or African, the intellectual Spaniard, I found,
felt self-conscious about how he differed from the other men of Western
Europe. Through an American newspaperman I met in the British-American
Club, I was introduced to a young Spaniard who, I had been promised,
would "talk."

He was about twenty-eight years of age, of average height, black-haired,
with a quick and nervous manner. He had an important position with a
large pharmaceutical establishment, had visited England and Germany and
had spent most of his youth--the years during World War II--at school in
Paris. His sojourn in France had put "ideas" into his head; when
drinking coffee with him in a cafe, I asked if Spain had many problems,
and he said:

"This place crawls with problems."

"The water shortage, the agrarian problem--?"

"More than that," he cut me off.

"What, in your opinion, is wrong?" I asked.

"Just about everything," he said, sweeping his hands in a wide arc. He
leaned forward tensely and spoke through clenched teeth, trying to
suppress his fury. "This place needs to be _civilized_! I'm a practicing
Catholic, but I don't like this Church in Spain. I'm anti-Church,
anti-Franco, anti-Russian, anti-American (I'm sorry, no personal offense
meant), anti-British, anti-imperialist, anti-racist, and I'm against
anti-Semitism."

I could not suppress an improperly loud laugh.

"Sh," he cautioned me. "Let's don't attract too much attention."

"French logic has bitten deeply into you," I said.

"Maybe," he admitted. "But, look, what Spain is now going through all of
Europe will suffer someday in the near future. We in Europe have lived
off the rest of mankind for five hundred years. Those people off whom we
lived are now awakened and they are tired of it.... We Spanish were the
first to lose our possessions and we have never gotten over it. That is
the heart of what is wrong here. These people have a morbid complex that
they are destined by God to save the human race. It's insane. It's Spain
that should be saved. But the Spaniard believes in his crazy mission; he
can't forget it.

"France and all the rest of the other European countries that have
colonies will be in our sad state soon," he predicted. "The West has
been spoiled. It is not a healthy thing to train populations for
generations in the foolish idea that they are destined only to rule, and
that they must do nothing but rule. There's more mental effort in Spain
today about how to rebuild the empire than there is about how to pave
our streets.

"We are bad losers. Maybe the other European nations, when they have
lost (and they will lose), will outdo us in their bitterness. I don't
know and can't say. But at the moment, ours is the worst case. I'm sick
of hearing: _Arriba Espaa! Gibraltar para Espaa! Todo para la patria!_
I don't like the British; I've been in England. But if they gave us
Gibraltar, we'd have to ask them to come and help us run it....

"You see, all of these issues are false. We are one hundred years behind
the other European nations. While they were working and building, we
were dreaming of a Golden Age. Listen, in 1920, my father represented
the Ford Motor Company here. When he drove the first Ford into
Extremadura, the peasants saw that throbbing, moving mass of steel and
became terrified, thinking that the Devil had come. They stoned that car
as long as they could see it.

"Go off the main highways and you'll find whole villages without even
outdoor toilets. They use the open fields when the urges of nature
overtake them.

"I have a girl friend. Do you know that in many rural areas and in some
cities and towns, when I walk the streets with her, I do not dare take
her arm? I'd be arrested, or there'd be outspoken comments against it.
The police would fine me twenty-five pesetas for that. There are
Spaniards who call the mere touching of a woman's arm a sin.

"My fiance and I speak French, and, to avoid being molested by the
Spanish when we wish to kiss in public, we speak French very loudly.
Since they think that we are French, and since they think that all the
French are immoral, they let us commit the immorality of kissing! I
swear it's true!"

"What makes for that?" I asked him.

"The Church. The Church in Spain is too oppressive. Day and night the
priests yell against sin, that is, sex. What happens? The people become
morbidly sex conscious. Our cities and villages have the highest rates
of prostitution of any cities and villages of any of the countries of
Europe.

"It's simple. Here's how it works. When a poor boy can't touch his girl,
dares not kiss her, can't look at her breasts even when they are
covered, what does he do? At the first opportunity, he takes her out
into a field and has sexual relations with her. The Church has pushed
sex so far down into secrecy that everything has become sexual. Go in
the spring and summer into Andalusia and look into the open fields and
you'll see the Spaniards fornicating like animals--and the Church has
made it like that.

"Spain? It's nothing. It's like Greece."

He was a passionately bitter young man.




CHAPTER 39


One afternoon, just after having lunched in one of Madrid's better-known
restaurants, luck tossed in my path a young American architect who was
engaged in drafting plans for the construction of the new air bases. He
had stopped at my table to have a cup of coffee with me. He was a New
Yorker, relaxed, poised, breezy, cocky, with a ready flow of words. He
was abreast of the latest in fashion and scientific improvements; he was
about five feet four inches tall and wore elevated shoes.

"Just how are the Americans and the Spaniards getting along in their
collaboration?" I asked. "How are things going in general?"

"We are getting along like two pieces of sandpaper rubbing together," he
said with a drawl.

"Is it serious?"

"Not _too_ serious," he said, pulling down the corners of his lips.
"There's nothing that can't be straightened out in time."

"I've been informed by people who ought to know that these Spaniards are
going to change _you_ before you change _them_. Is there any chance of
that prediction coming true?" I asked.

He sat up and glared at me.

"Nuts!" he said. "Who in hell's been talking to you?"

"Some fairly perceptive Spaniards," I answered.

"Look, these blokes over here are dense and stubborn," he admitted. "But
we can handle 'em. We'll change 'em. You watch."

"How _are_ you going to change them?" I asked. "Spain has baffled some
pretty astute scholars."

"I don't know what the eggheads are talking about." He snuffed out his
cigarette and chewed his gum for a bit. "Look, what these people need is
a middle class." He nodded philosophically. "A middle class...."

"But how are they going to get one?"

"We're going to _give_ them one before we get through," he averred.

"That's a tall order," I informed him. "Liberals in Spain have been
fighting for that for decades."

"There are many ways of doing that," he said. "These people cannot
resist the new stuff that we are bringing in. They try to, but they
can't.

"It's logical to do things the way they ought to be done. When we show
'em something new, they denounce it, shake their heads, but a few days
later they are doing it and they like it so much that they want to
pretend that they thought of how to do it all by themselves."

"But this church here.... It's deeply entrenched. That hierarchy sits
and watches you," I explained.

"We are not planning any frontal attack on any institutions here," he
said. "But we've got a way of working in...."

"Spill it, brother. I'm all ears."

"Lemme tell you something," he began. "When I was in Japan we had a
similar problem. These Spaniards have no more traditions than the Japs
had. The Japs were even more backward. But look at the job we did there.
When we entered Japan, there was a black market. We were supposed to
smash it. But what was that black market? Just a bunch of gooks who
wanted to make a dime, and they had never had anything in all of their
lives. We didn't smash that black market. We knew that it went on and we
wanted it to go on. We winked at it and let it ride. Why? We wanted more
dough to get into the hands of people who had never had any.

"Boy, a new class of Japs got rich and changed their minds about
everything. Give a man a full belly and he thinks differently. What's
wrong here is too much hunger."

"You can't give me any details of just how this will operate?" I asked.

"No, no; no details. But you just watch. I'll give you my word. We'll
shake 'em out of it," he swore.

I reflected a bit, recalling the passionate little barber in Barcelona
who had preached to me his gospel of being master of his hunger. He had
told me that he was the emperor of his misery and that he would not
change for anybody or anything.

"Okay, pal," I said. "I wish you luck."

"Just watch," he said. "We're gonna jolt 'em out of this nonsense."




CHAPTER 40


The next Spanish intellectual I met roused so many conflicts,
resistances, and confused emotions in me that I can only lay the matter
and its negative outcome, for whatever it is worth, before the reader.

He was a doctor, young, well traveled, and, by repute, one of the most
renowned physicians in all Spain. He spoke French, English, and German
fluently. He was well versed in the latest scientific discoveries of the
Western world, had read papers before the royal societies of England,
and there was not the slightest doubt of his prestige, probity, and
general learning. He had so warm and winning a personality that it was
difficult to refuse his requests. Having heard that I was looking at
Spanish life, he voluntarily offered to place his time, his car, and his
intelligence at my disposal.

"I want to show you Avila, the birthplace of Saint Teresa," he told me.

"Oh, I'd like that," I told him.

"Good. Especially I want to show you the river that Saint Teresa
crossed," he said.

"Yes?"

"It was one of her miracles," he explained. "It was a stormy night.
Saint Teresa had to go on an urgent errand. It was a life-and-death
matter. But the bridge had washed away. There she stood. The torrent
raged. It was dark. What was she to do? She had faith. She stepped in
and the waters parted. She walked across."

I stared. At first I thought that he was making a subtle joke; but, no;
he was absolutely solemn.

"Really?" I asked softly.

"Yes," he said stoutly. "I want to show you that river. Saint Teresa is
my patron saint."

I swallowed. Of course, I had read in the Bible of how Moses had smitten
the waters of the Red Sea and had, when the waters had receded, walked
across on dry land. Also I had read some of the writings of Saint
Teresa, but I had never heard of the waters of a river parting for her.
And right before me was a renowned doctor vouching for it.

"Er.... What is there at that river to show that she really crossed it
that way?" I finally managed to ask him. There was nothing else that I
could ask.

"Nothing," he said. "That's not important. But the waters parted and she
walked across. And I believe it." He did not bat an eye.




CHAPTER 41


Seora O., middle-aged, a Spanish citizen by marriage, was a woman of
wide experience, having lived in New York, London, Buenos Aires, Paris,
Berlin, Rome, etc. She held a well-paying commercial job and had many
Spanish connections. She professed to be a liberal. She spoke as
follows:

"A friend of mine had a husband who died only a week ago. Now, she lived
in one section of the city and her husband was being buried from the
church in that quarter. But, for sentimental reasons, the wife wanted
the body of her husband to be taken into another quarter of the city.

"Ah.... Trouble started. The Church authorities said that it would cost
her fifteen hundred pesetas for each quarter of the city through which
the body of her husband would pass....

"The Church here is an industry.

"It's a strange thing, but if the police in Paris saw what goes on in
cafs here in Madrid, they'd raid the places. And these people call the
French immoral. I wonder how that started? It couldn't have anything to
do with sexual facts. I'm sure of it.

"The Church here will tell you that the people here love God so much
that sex has been conquered. But all that you hear about here is sex.
When I first came here, I thought that the Spanish had just discovered
sex--they talked so much about it, and they still do. Sometimes they act
as if they invented sex.

"Even the children are sex conscious in a way that is not known in other
countries. If you don't believe it, then just ask a Spanish child of six
to talk about sex. They know _everything_. Don't ask me how and where
they learn it, but they know. A Spanish child of six could tell a man of
twenty-one in New York things that he does not know about sex.

"And night and day they speak about innocence, about the Virgin. I don't
understand it. Life is upside down here. You have to be here, live here
to get used to it."




CHAPTER 42


Tall, handsome, pleasant, he had the nervous and evasive manner of a man
not at peace with himself. You felt that in his past he had had to watch
his step and that his had been a life of quiet, bourgeois living mingled
with conditions under which he had had sometimes to reach for his gun.
Yet you knew that, despite his preference for peace and order, he was
brave and had inflexible convictions. As I faced him and listened to him
talk, I said to myself: "This man has had to make too many compromises."

He ranked high in the Spanish maritime world and could trace his
ancestry back to the exciting days of Corts. He was proud of Spain, but
hastily admitted: "We made a record that is called the Black Legend...."
He sighed. "We Spaniards are a strange people; we are problems to
ourselves. We mixed up things terribly in history. We could have been
the dominant people on earth today if we had had any sense.

"We had no color bar, really. We married the colored peoples. We gave
them our culture in a way that no other European nation ever did, and we
meant it. But we were greedy; we were after gold. And that ruined us.

"In South America we had a great man, Las Casas, who loved and defended
the Indians." He shook his head in wonder, his eyes baffled. "We are
still asking ourselves how and why we messed it all up. We needn't have,
you know.

"Yet, we were very brave. Who but Corts would have burned his ships
behind him when he did not know what he faced in Mexico?"

"What you say is true," I said. "But weren't those special conditions
when compared with those of today?"

He bowed his head and pondered awhile.

"Yes," he admitted. "They were. Spain is and was a Church-State. The
world was a Church-world then. The country that was foremost in that
world was Spain. We were at the center of the universe."

"And the people you conquered had religions too, didn't they?" I asked.

He blinked, unable to grasp the point of my question. Those people had
been "heathens." He did not say so, but he was convinced that they were
still "heathens" and that his religion was the only true one, that it
had been entrusted to him and his kind by God for safekeeping.

"Politically, what are you?" I asked him.

"I'm a civilized man," he said ruefully. "What _could_ my politics be
here? I fought for Franco. I'm not ashamed to admit it. I couldn't help
it at the time. But I call myself a liberal. I'm Catholic, but I'm
liberal. Of course, I can't tell my priest that. They are backward
here."

He was silent. He had had to assume a position of psychological
independence and it was bothering him. He longed for a Church that would
endorse his humanist leanings.

"I just _had_ to fight for Franco," he resumed. "I know my Spain. I
could not see the Communists' winning. Do you know what I mean? It's not
that I'm so much against Communism, but I just don't like _Communists_.
Not at all.... Let me tell you something....

"One Easter Sunday I saw a Communist leader marching in the religious
procession, carrying the Virgin on his shoulders. After the parade, I
asked him: 'How can you, a Communist, carry the Virgin?'

"He answered: 'But, sir, _this_ Virgin is from my own neighborhood!'

"I cannot support that kind of nonsense. That man had sworn that he did
not believe in God. Yet there he was carrying the Virgin. How can you
fight with men who twist and turn like that?"

"Do you regret your having supported Franco?" I asked.

"I helped Franco because I could not support something _crazy_," he said
in despair. "Something _worse_.... I had no choice."

He sat a long time hunched in dejection. Then he lifted his face to me
and smiled bitterly.

"Those people whom the Spanish conquered," I began, "they had virgins in
their religions too."

He stared at me with wide eyes.

"I'm only a layman," he said tiredly, sighing. "I only know what I'm
told about matters like that."

"Well, those savages had virgin goddesses that served them just as the
Virgin here serves you," I said.

He continued his blank stare. I decided to leave that subject. Then he
lifted his head.

"Let me tell you something," he began in a tone of hot anger. "I have a
son. Just six years old.... A few days ago he came home from his class
and asked me: 'Father, does God live always?'

"'Yes,' I said.

"'And does Franco live always?'"

He stared at me for several seconds.

"I'm a Spaniard, a liberal, a pro-Franco man who fought to save Spain
from Communism. But I turned pale when my son asked me _if Franco would
live always_. I bent down and asked him: 'Why do you ask me that, son?'

"'That's what my political teacher says, Father.'

"I didn't even know that he had a political teacher until then. I don't
want my son to be taught anything that even remotely mixes up Franco
with God!" His whole body was stiff with anger. "That is not what I
fought for and I don't like it. No matter what or how they teach, they
don't have to confuse children about Franco and God!"

He was a decent man outraged by the conditions of his life.




CHAPTER 43


The next subject to answer my question was a great professor of law, one
of the highest-ranking legal minds of Spain, an authority on the
political situation. He was a short man with a pleasant, schoolteacher's
manner. He was terse, objective, pruning his statements of all emotion
and committing himself only to that which could be objectively
ascertained by someone else.

"How much bitterness lingers on here as a result of the Civil War?" I
asked him.

"The Civil War is just about liquidated," he told me.

"What do you mean by that?"

"It's no longer an issue," he explained. "A new generation has grown up.
The old wounds are healed. Even families that were arrayed against one
another have made peace."

I believed him, yet I remembered Dolores, that tense and proud daughter
who carried the responsibility of her family on her shoulders; I
remembered that dog, Ronnie, and his neurotic fury in that Barcelona
apartment; and I knew that the shadow of that war still darkened the
memories of millions of Spaniards, and that only the death of the
participants could ever truly liquidate its horrors.

"What is the number of the political prisoners now being held under the
Franco regime?" I wanted to know.

"I can't give you an exact figure," he said. "But it is below the number
that obtained before the Civil War."

"And what was the number then?"

"About two hundred and forty thousand," he said.

"So the number of those now being held is less than that?"

"Yes."

"What happens to a freed political prisoner?"

"His plight is very bad," he admitted. "He has not had his civil rights
restored. He is discriminated against in job hunting."

"When will the freed political prisoner get his civil rights?" I asked.

"No one knows just when that will happen," he said.

"Sir, there is a lot of talk in France and elsewhere about concentration
camps in Spain. Do you know anything about that?"

"I know nothing of any concentration camps. And personally I don't think
that there are any. That phase is past," he said.

"What about Communism here?" I asked.

"It is roughly estimated that about five per cent of the population is
Communist," he said.

"Party members?" I asked, surprised.

"That's the government estimate," he said.

"How is Communism defined here?" I asked.

He smiled and shrugged. He was factual, but his facts felt like mercury
in my hands.

"Some social scientists and others have been urging the government to
sample public opinion to find out what people are really feeling and
thinking in this country," he explained with an apologetic smile.

"In short, the government here really doesn't know just how the people
feel?"

"I don't think it does," he said.

"What about the restoration of the monarchy? One reads a lot about this
in the press outside of Spain."

"That's a plan," he said cautiously. "I don't think that there will be
any restoration of the monarchy until after Franco is dead. The idea of
a monarchy serves to organize certain sections of public opinion."

"Sections of the Falange are opposed to a king; is that true?"

"Yes, that is true."

"Just how strong is the Falange?" I asked him.

"Not so very strong," he said. "In recent parades here in Madrid the
Falange did not make a good showing."

"Yet students are obliged to belong to it; are they not?"

"Yes," he said.

"I've plowed through one of the Falangist catechisms," I explained. "It
is taught, isn't it?"

"Yes," he said. "All university students must belong to the Falange."

"And how much of the Falangist doctrine do they believe, these
students?" I asked, feeling that reality was slipping away from me.

"That is what has to be determined," he said. "Sixty per cent of our
youth know nothing of the Civil War, so it's hard to say just what they
feel."

I sat pondering. Obviously, the government and the Falange were
depending upon the adherence of youth to their doctrines, but there was
no way to determine just how widespread the adherence was. I suspected
that they assumed that deep adherence was small and that was why such a
show of force had to be maintained.

"And the Anarchists? What about them?"

"Well, that is really a kind of lay religious category, you know," he
said. "They flourish in Catalonia and Andalusia; but they weave in and
out of society as a whole."

"How do the Spaniards regard this pact between America and Spain?"

"It is very popular, but each section of the population has its own
special reasons for liking it," he explained. "You might say that the
Spanish-American alliance is _dangerously_ popular." (His tone of voice
did not indicate if he approved or disapproved.)

"In what way?"

"Well, each section sees in it something for itself.... For instance,
the Falange has boasted far and wide that America, in making this pact,
has changed its mind, has admitted that she was wrong in the past and
that now she repents and wants to join hands with Spain in fighting
Russia.

"Some Socialists feel that there is hope for democracy in Spain because
of that pact--"

"On what do they base that hope?" I asked.

"On nothing in particular," he said.

"Have the Americans in any way given encouragement to such hopes?" I
wanted to know.

"None whatever," he answered. "The Americans have been most correct,
abjectly correct in abiding by the terms of the agreement."

"Those terms are severe," I stated.

"Do you think so?" he asked with a knowing smile.

He was hinting that he did not think much of America's knuckling under
to Franco.

"But there must be some critics of the pact, aren't there?" I asked.

"Yes," he said thoughtfully. "Some sections of the Church have voiced
strong objections."

"This fellow Segura, the Cardinal in Seville, for example?"

"Yes. He spearheaded the opposition," he said. "But he has been more or
less silenced. He is a donkey. He is not important now."

"And what other sections are hostile?"

"Not all Socialists like the pact," he informed me. "There are some
sections of the population that feel that their hope for freedom has
been betrayed by the pact."

"In short, they regard the pact as an endorsement of Franco?"

"Yes. And there is also a vague hope, born of that pact, that Franco
will be heaved out and another regime installed. But there is no basis
for such a hope."

"Is that hope irrational?" I asked.

"Yes."

"Perhaps that irrational hope indicates the depths of the despair here?"
I questioned him leadingly.

He smiled and would not commit himself.

"The pact has actually increased tensions here, then?" I asked in a tone
that was half declaration and half question.

"To some degree, yes."

"Would you agree with me if I said that the Spaniard was a deeply
emotional man, sir? I'm not speaking in a derogatory sense, I assure
you. I'd class myself as an emotional person--only I think I know that
I'm emotional."

"The Spaniard acts," he said.

"Yes, yes. We all act. But out of what does the Spaniard act? Look, what
I'm trying to get at is this. It's rather delicate. The question I want
to ask is: There is poverty here; there are grievances. There's a
dictatorship, open and blatant. Now, is there any fear of a serious
uprising here--"

"No, no," he said quickly. "Spaniards are a people with a military
personality. Remember that. We fought the Moors for seven hundred years.
We had no trained men; we just fought in mobs, in individual exploits,
each section of the country making its individual contribution.

"Then we had the Inquisition. Then we conquered the Americas. Those were
not organized ventures. Each man went out and did what he could, or did
what he wanted to. That heritage has come down to us today. But we want
no more war, no more fighting for a change. We are tired of that."

"What is the actual situation in relation to the Church and education?"
I asked.

"In the primary grades, forty per cent of the education is religious;
sixty per cent is in the hands of the State. In the secondary grades,
fifty per cent is State and fifty per cent is Church. Large numbers of
children of middle-class Catholic families insist upon sending their
children to expensive Church schools conducted by the orders. This is
the result of a class difference that splits Spanish society in two. The
working classes are thus compelled to send their children to State
schools."

"What is the national per capita income of a Spaniard?"

"About five thousand pesetas," he said sadly.

"Roughly a hundred dollars a year?"

"Yes."

"How does this compare with what they received in 1936?"

"Inflation has risen seven times since 1936 and has lowered the standard
of working-class living," he stated. "Wages today are lower than in
1936. Suffering is general. The worst section is Andalusia. Men work
from four to six months of the year. There's no diversification of
crops; the agrarian problem plagues us now as it has for centuries."

"Why can't some step be taken toward a solution?"

"Any radical attempt on the part of any government to solve that problem
rouses the anger and opposition of the big Andalusian landowners," he
stated. "The Republic expropriated many of those vast estates, but
Franco gave them back."

"How much industrialization is going on?"

"There is a lot of it," he said. "But it is under the umbrella of
monopoly capitalism. Foreign capital coming into the country is limited
by law to a twenty-five per cent participation in industrial
enterprises. There are some special cases of a fifty-fifty participation
of State and foreign money.

"But the simple truth is that most of the money in Spain is in the hands
of a few landowners and a few industrialists. The national income of
Spain does not permit of industrialization without foreign aid. We are
poor; we are in the situation of many colonies," he concluded.

My interview with the lawyer underscored the fact that "facts" in Spain
were elusive. Spain was officially Catholic; any dissent provoked
punitive measures. Therefore, on the surface, all was peaceful. But what
was beneath the surface? The heart of Spain was the Church; overlapping
with and fanning out from the Church were the Falange, the government,
the Civil Guard, the Army, etc. That all but twenty thousand Protestants
and two thousand and five hundred Jews belonged to the Church was taken
for granted. It was the kind of setup that would inevitably create an
underground. And I had no special talent for snooping into
undergrounds.... In the end, all I had before me was one fact:
totalitarianism. But I was never able to tell just how strong it really
was, and because no one knew its strength, I suspected that it was
actually very weak.




CHAPTER 44


Through the intercession of friends, I went one evening to interview a
young Spanish Jewish businessman. He had entered Spain some five years
previously, having come out of Russia by way of Poland by way of
Belgium. He had lost all of his family through pogroms and wars and
revolutions. He spoke Spanish fluently, without an accent; he was proud
of having blended, in terms of external appearance and manner, with the
reality of Spain. Tall, swarthy, with a smooth, gliding, almost courtly
manner, he looked and acted distinctly Spanish.

We sat together in a quiet corner of the lobby of one of Madrid's most
luxurious hotels. Drinks rested on a little table before us. From
somewhere in the vast spaciousness the lulling melody of a Viennese
waltz wafted to our ears. Jew and Negro, both from backgrounds of
persecution, we sat seemingly securely anchored in a twentieth-century
world of sanity and comfort.

"Is there any anti-Semitism in Spain?" I asked him.

He looked straight ahead and the fingers of his right hand wandered to
his neatly knotted tie, making sure that the folds were straight,
acceptable to the world.

"No," he said after a long hesitation.

Was he willing to talk or unable to? He had lived through bloody pogroms
and surely he knew what I was asking. Or did he feel that I, a Negro,
had no right to invade that dark domain of his heart? His evasiveness
nettled me and I opened up broadly.

"Maybe it was all solved back in 1492 when Ferdinand and Isabel drove
the Jews from Spain?"

"Yes," he breathed.

My irritation vanished. It was not that he did not wish to talk; it was
simply almost impossible for him to talk. All right. I would wait. He
cleared his throat.

"You see, there are only two thousand five hundred of us here in Spain,"
he said.

"And since there are practically no Jews in Spain, there can't be a
problem, can there?" I asked.

"That's right." He sounded as though he were forcing the words out of
his throat.

"Why did you come to Spain?" I asked.

"I like Spain," he said.

"There's France, England--"

"You see," he sighed, "my people lived here once."

"You mean--"

"My ancestors were here," he told me simply at last. "I speak Spanish
from them."

"Oh! After all those centuries?"

"Yes."

I looked at him again. So that was why he had come back! He was a
football of history....

"How old are you?" I asked.

"Twenty-nine."

"Can a Jew marry here?" I asked him.

He was silent again. Finally he leaned forward, stared at the figures in
the plush carpet and explained: "If a Jewish boy and girl wish to marry
here, they must first get a certificate from the priest in their area--a
certificate saying that they have never been baptized."

"Is it easy to prove that you were never baptized?" I asked.

"Well, you never can really prove it," he said with a wry smile. "You
just convince them."

"Then the Catholic Church has the _negative_ right to say if a Jew can
marry or not?"

He scratched his head and a hunted look came into his eyes.

"Yes. Without a certificate of nonbaptism, they cannot marry."

"Then, if you get a certificate of nonbaptism, a rabbi can marry you
after you have married under Civil Law?"

"Yes."

"But the rabbinical marriage in itself is not valid?"

"No."

"What effect has a certificate of nonbaptism upon a Jew who belongs to
the synagogue?" I posed yet another dilemma for him.

He glanced at me as though I were a policeman grilling him for a crime.
He sighed.

"It nullifies our religion and makes us confess the omnipotence of
Catholicism," he confessed.

"Suppose a Jew wished to marry a Catholic?" I asked.

"He would have to marry in the Catholic Church and pledge that any issue
from that marriage would be brought up in the Catholic faith," he
explained.

"But what if he insisted upon marrying outside of the Church?"

"A Jew could not marry a Catholic who would not want to be married in
the Church and who would not pledge to rear the children as Catholics,"
he said.

"Then that particular Jew cannot get married?"

"That's it."

"You can't marry as a Jew, and if you do marry, the children are not
yours?"

"That's about it."

"There's a lot of Jewish blood in Spain, isn't there?" I asked him.

"Yes," he explained. "We Spanish Jews have carried the Spanish tongue
all over the world. They drove us out and we were scattered, but we
still speak Spanish. Many Sephardic Jews still bear their Spanish
names." He was identifying himself now and his words flowed freely,
proudly. "Franco is partly or wholly Jewish. In fact, there is about
thirty or forty per cent of Jewish blood in the veins of the Spanish
people.

"You see, we Jews either had to leave, or turn Catholic, that is, become
_conversos_. I've come back to the country from which my ancestors were
driven centuries ago. _I feel that I am Spanish._"

"You _want to be_ Spanish," I said.

"I'M SPANISH!" he repeated. "Names like Perez, Franco, etc., are Jewish
names. Toledo is a Jewish word...."

A void hung between us.

"I must go," he said suddenly, rising. I longed to talk to him more, to
try to follow the logic of his feelings. I walked beside him through the
lobby to the sidewalk. We shook hands.

"Can I give you a lift?" he asked me brusquely.

"No, thank you," I said. "My car's over there."

Without another word he spun on his heels and got into a long, shining
Jaguar. One second later I heard the motor roar thunderously and he tore
away down the night street at a terrifying speed, swerving like a knife
blade through the traffic. I knew that he was seething with shame and
burning with fury. But shame for what? And fury against whom?




CHAPTER 45


I left Madrid early the following Sunday morning and traveled south
through a wall of rain so solid that I could scarcely see the road. I
feared plunging into a deep puddle of water and drowning my motor. Then,
ahead, I discerned vague outlines of cars stalled in currents that
eddied about their fenders. I about-faced and found an early-morning
caf where I drank coffee and waited for the storm to slacken.

Later the rain abated and I rolled again under a gray sky. The look and
feel of Spain assumed a drastically altered aspect after I quit Madrid.
The savage mountains grew tamer; the brooding, red hills shed their
desolate character and changed to gentle mounds of gray; indeed, with
the passing hours, the landscape turned a shy glad green.

The highway dipped, rose, and, like a writhing serpent, seemed at times
to coil back upon itself. Then, when I thought that I was free of
mountains, another range loomed. To my left a sky of purplish mist began
to wax bright. Gradually a red sheen glowed, banishing straggling veils
of clouds. I came out of the mountains and traversed yellow-green hills
whose contours waved in the deepening light. Moments later I was
climbing into more mountains and the east blazed, thrusting up delicate
ringers of pink and blue. I climbed a steep peak of mountain and,
_bang!_ The sun was there, a bare, unwinking eye of hard blue steel
which, as I followed the bending road, played a game of hide and seek
that nearly blinded me, making me put on my sunglasses.

I began a slow descent and the air, moistened by vegetation, lost its
sharp, dry quality and I looked at the first signs of intensive land
cultivation that I had seen so far in Spain. I was in the province of
Toledo and the dominant activity was agriculture. I rode into Ocaa, a
town composed of a decrepit conglomeration of dingy stone houses
sheltering some seven thousand people. Peasants filed heavily along
muddy, manure-strewn alleyways, going to mass.

I braked my car on slippery clay, got out in front of the Santo Domingo
Church, whose soaring yellow walls were scaly with peeling paint. I
entered and found mass in progress. Beyond the heads of kneeling
penitents was a gilded altar framed with glittering candles. There was
silence save for a softly chanting voice. High along both walls were
paintings of floating angels below which were rows of shrines, each with
its cluster of crouching communicants, their eyes glazed, their lips
moving in silent supplication, their rough fingers telling their beads,
and, again, I was moved by what was beyond doubt the deep and abject
piety of the Spaniards.

These people were not serving God, they were adoring Him, surrendering
themselves before what they felt to be the Supreme Consciousness of the
universe. To Catholics the hierarchy of Christianity was external,
unspeakably beautiful, powerful, and yet miraculously accessible through
the intercession of others, and it was inconceivable for them to think
of refusing the aid of intermediaries to enable them to receive balm or
blessings from that source.

To Protestants this whole process had been psychologically internalized,
made a part of their mental functioning. Protestants had to conjure up
out of their imagination, their longings, and fears, and with but few or
no visual representations, what they felt to be the Supreme
Consciousness of the universe for the balm and blessings they needed.
Protestants had to make severe demands upon themselves; Catholics
submitted to what had already been arranged.

The Protestant, therefore, could be dynamic, could project into his
environment his sense of his dignity, could create his sense of God out
of the worldliness of the world. Hence, the social systems of America,
England, Switzerland, and large parts of Protestant Scandinavia had been
transformed by Protestant pressure molding the environment; they had
higher standards of living, more health, more literacy, more
industry--all stemming from the Protestant's ability to handle the
materials of reality.

But the Spanish Catholic remained static, the victim of a spell cast by
the external configuration of fetish objects that coerced his
imagination and emotions to unchangeableness. He was doomed to apprehend
his environment through the fogged and sacred glass of the Church's
hierarchy. And the physical area of the Spaniard's life reflected this:
low standards of living, illiteracy, no control over material forces,
and a charged, confused consciousness that compelled him to seek release
from his frustrations in the projected shadows of his own personality. A
glance sufficed to reveal how little Spain had altered during the long
centuries....

Emerging from the church, I saw at once that that altar and those
shrines were the only beautiful images in that town. In Protestant
environments the churches were almost always plain and simple, while
living conditions carried the adornments; here, living conditions were
sodden, dilapidated, and the only beauty resided in the churches.

A bearded, wrinkled beggar wearing filthy rags blocked my path,
mumbling. I dropped a few centavos into his clawlike hand and his dull
eyes gleamed with a flicker of life and he breathed:

"_Gracias._"




CHAPTER 46


I drove under an El Greco sky through villages filled with Goya-faced
peasants. Signs painted on walls exhorted the population: _Viva Franco!
Arriba Espaa! Todo por la patria!_

I entered the flat plain of La Mancha, the domain of the fabled and
abortive doings of Don Quixote, and rolled toward Madridejos, where I
paused to examine a yellowed stone church over whose ancient doorway was
engraved: 1679. The interior was dim and drab; high up on the altar was
a life-sized statue of Crucified Christ against a red backdrop. His
nudity was draped by a red silk petticoat in the center of which, in the
direction of the genitals, was a cluster of silken embroidery. As I
left, swarms of boy beggars with feet shod in rotting canvas shoes
surrounded me.

"Ceegarettes! Ceegarettes!" they chanted.

In the next town, Puerto Lapice, I entered an ugly brick church whose
murky interior was lit by twinkling candles. A priest sat in the
confessional box hearing the whispered transgressions of a kneeling girl
of about ten years of age. After listening for a moment, he dismissed
the child's sins with a wave of his hand and strode to the altar and
began lighting candles. I lingered, looking at two powerful, realistic
Christ figures. In one Christ sagged from a cross, His eyes lit with
dull agony, His parted lips cracked, His tortured body girded by a red
silken sash. The other Christ, His face strained, was bent beneath the
weight of a gigantic cross. Sweat glistened on His contracted brow and
the effect of physical horror and suffering was almost hypnotic. The
veins were distended, the neck distorted. The arms, elbows, and knees
had been streaked with red paint to create the illusion of skinned and
torn flesh. The eyes were those of a dumb animal in the grip of
excruciating pain.

I reached Manzanares, a small town dominated by a hideous church that
faced the main square. I was besieged by ragged women, many of whom held
babies in their arms; they stretched out their dirty palms and chorused
a singsong of supplication. The square itself was thronged with
unshaven, shabby men, most of whom stared in sullen silence at every
move I made. These were the most dispirited Spaniards I had yet seen.
Did their unnatural silence mean that they were the masters of their
hunger? Or was Franco the master here?

A few kilometers farther I lunched in a charming Parador and my table
was adorned with vases of delicate roses. The splendor of this Parador
would have awed the peasants of Spain as much as the cathedrals in which
they worshiped. Spanish Catholicism was one of the odd fatalities of the
world.

In Valdepeas I found the town square packed with children in dirty
cotton rags and, as soon as I alighted, they began a whining begging.
One skinny little girl of about seven carried in her arms a child who
seemed to be her baby brother. Their faces were pocked with sores and
their eyes were large, moist, round, and bloodshot, perhaps from
weakness and hunger. Dirty little hands reached out, palms up.

"_Dame dinero, Seor_," they whispered.




CHAPTER 47


I now weighed my remaining excursions, pondering over Galicia, Asturias,
Santiago de Compostela where, legend had it, the body of St. James the
apostle was buried. And I recalled that, when I had passed through
Saragossa, I had not stopped to see the famed Virgin of the _Pilar_ who
reigned over the Cathedral of _Nuestra Seora del Pilar_ where,
according to religious tradition, the Virgin had made a miraculous
visitation and selected the spot for the erection of her shrine. Then
there were Ibiza, Mallorca, and Mlaga. I concluded that, of all these
beckoning place names, I would see the _Virgen del Pilar_ and the
_Semana Santa_ (Holy Week) of Seville. Treks to Galicia and Asturias,
and even Santiago de Compostela would be but more sorties into religion.

But, luckily, before I set off toward Saragossa and Seville, the magic
of Toledo and El Greco lured me irresistibly. And well it might, for
Toledo was a vast museum crammed with the past of Spain. Sheltered by a
high, luminous sky and situated amidst flashing rivers and somber
ravines, Toledo had narrow, cobblestoned streets that darted up and down
hillsides. Tourists swarmed everywhere. Most of the public buildings
were monuments of history: Roman, Jewish, Moorish, and the conquering
Catholic. The deserted synagogues, victims of the ingenious cruelty of
the Inquisition, were pathetic reminders that totalitarianism was no new
thing....

The Alcazar, that hoary Moorish castle-fortress in which Charles V had
once lived, was interesting not only because of its gloomy immensity,
but for the fetish value with which the Falangists had endowed it by
their fanatical militancy that branded every non-Falangist an enemy.

Huge sums of money had been appropriated to refurbish this mammoth
structure that sprawled over a vast area and lifted some five or six
stories into the air. Swarms of workmen were busy plastering the jagged
fissures that had been caused by the shells of the fated Republic. The
Alcazar was being converted into a shrine of the fallen Falangists, many
of whose bodies had been ceremoniously entombed in its massive ramparts.
I poked through its dark chambers and saw how the Falangists had fought
and died; their guns, their crude cooking utensils were still there.

On one scarred wall was a full-length painting of the commanding Colonel
Moscardo who, when his son had been held hostage by the Republicans, had
allowed that son to be slain rather than surrender. This display of
theatrical heroism was being underscored by harangues of tourist guides
who steered American, French, English, and German ladies through
monstrous heaps of rubble.

If the Alcazar was a monument to the Falange's psychopathic strivings
toward "Destiny in the Universal," then El Greco's "The Burial of Count
Orgaz" was a magnificent projection of the same theme in terms of poetic
vision purged of Falangist dross. That masterpiece in the St. Thomas
Church of Toledo depicted with truer persuasion man's longing for
immortality than all the tortured, blood-clotted Christs in the
cathedrals of Spain. Lacking any other account of how the men of the
Middle Ages felt about life, El Greco's harmony of evanescent images,
done in tones of gray, black, and carmine, could serve as a kind of
document detailing the nature of the hope that had once animated
medieval minds in their more humane aspects.

Swinging back to Madrid, I went to Saragossa, arriving at twilight. The
city was dry and dusty from silt blown from the surrounding red hills.
Next morning I toured the industrial section of that metropolis of some
350,000 people, then went to see the Virgin of the _Pilar_, a shrine to
which the Catholic faithful from the world over came to ask special
favors.

The cathedral was a choir of singing stone; rich, ornate, filled with
paintings by Goya and Bayeu, etc., it abounded in marble, bronze,
alabaster, silks, satins, silver, and gold. The _Virgen del Pilar_ was a
lavishly decorated statue, doll-like in size and appearance, and rested
atop the original column upon which, it was said, the Virgin had made
herself manifest. Before it knelt some hundred or more people, young and
old, men and women, rich and poor--all worshiping in perfect democracy,
the only equality that they would perhaps ever know--their eyes cloudy
with desperate hope. Points of candlelight fluttered amid the dim and
soaring columns. The falling lances of ghostly light, the faraway domes,
the silence, the odor of incense induced a mood of humility and
dependence.

On my right a white-jacketed altar boy carried a four-year-old child in
his arms toward the statue so that it could kiss the hem of the Virgin's
robe. I watched the child grasp a fold of the glittering robe with its
chubby fingers and dab it greedily against its mouth several times. Men
and women watched with tears in their eyes, crossing themselves. I was
informed afterward that only children under seven years of age were
allowed that precious privilege....

That night I put up at a hotel and resumed my study of Carmen's
political catechism, turning to lesson twelve for girls between the ages
of twelve and fourteen:


_The Poetic Imperative_

     WHAT DO WE MEAN BY POETIC IMPERATIVE?

     _An inward force that always leads us to prefer the beauty of
     things._

     AND BY THE MERE FACT OF CHOOSING THE BEAUTIFUL, THIS PREFERENCE
     WILL BE MANIFEST?

     _Yes, for all that is beautiful tends toward perfection and in
     choosing the beautiful we also choose what is perfect._

     BUT IS THE AIM PERFECTION?

     _Certainly, for what is perfect is just, what is just is good, and
     what is good is fit and proper._

     WHY MUST FALANGISTS OBEY THE POETIC IMPERATIVE TO BE REAL
     FALANGISTS?

     _Because the Falange is, in itself, a poetic movement._

     HOW SO?

     _Because poetry is what is continually creating perfection._

     WHAT HAS THAT GOT TO DO WITH THE FALANGE?

     _A great deal, given that the Falange is a movement tending toward
     perfection and, moreover, is substantially a poetic movement._

     WILL YOU EXPLAIN THIS FURTHER?

     _The Falange does not seek ornament in poetry, but seeks in poetry,
     or in superior creation, the solution of all its problems._

     HOW DO WE KNOW THIS?

     _Through all Jos Antonio told us, and through his life, which
     always obeyed a poetic imperative._

     WILL YOU EXPLAIN FURTHER?

     _For example, his stubborn insistence on fighting against the
     coarse, the facile, the vulgar; the rigor and precision of his
     literary style and of the style of his life; his political
     solutions for Spain's problems; everything in him obeyed a poetic
     imperative._

     CAN YOU GIVE SOME EXAMPLES?

     _When he said, "Alas for him who cannot be roused by the poetry
     that destroys the poetry that promises!"_

     CAN THERE BE DESTRUCTIVE POETRY?

     _Yes; apparently beautiful creations that travel on the wrong road,
     such as separatist movements._

     HOW CAN THIS BE, IF WE SAID EVERYTHING BEARS IN IT A POETIC
     SUBSTANCE TENDING TO PERFECTION?

     _Because it is the negative perfection that destroys the "strong
     and beautiful wholes."_

     WHAT THEN SHALL WE DO TO FIGHT POETICALLY AGAINST POETIC
     SEPARATISTS?

     _Offer as a solution the poetry which promises, a poetry superior
     to theirs, which does not ignore the poetic reasons that they too
     may have._

     ON WHAT OCCASIONS DID JOS ANTONIO SPEAK OF THE SUBSTANCE OF THE
     FALANGE?

     _When he said, "...that the nations have never been moved more than
     by poets"; when he stated, on founding the Falange, that, "...The
     flag is raised; we shall now defend it joyfully, poetically." When
     he told us: "The shortest way between two points is the one that
     goes through the stars."_




CHAPTER 48


Upon arriving in Seville for the second time, I could sense at once that
I was in for a frantic week. In almost all the shop windows of the city
I saw tiny robed figures with tall, pointed hoods that gave me a creepy
feeling, for these objects reminded me of the Ku Klux Klan of the Old
American South. It must have been from here that the Ku Klux Klan
regalia had been copied. Well, I would see to what use the Spaniards had
put this costume. Was pillage or penitency the object when one donned
such an outlandish dress?

Tourists had flooded the city and no hotel room was available. I went
back to my old pension and found the four sedate ladies willing to
accept me and still doing their day's work at night. Seville was like an
old friend and my first walk into Alameda de Hercules produced my
withered-armed scout who welcomed me and assured me that nothing had
changed and that the forthcoming week would be wonderful.

I went to the Cathedral Santa de la Sede and studied the stupendous
collection of religious relics, seeing, among other things, a thistle
that was said to have been taken from the crown of thorns that had been
so cruelly pressed by the infidel Romans upon the brow of Christ. I saw
also the ivory-carved crucifix that Hermn Corts had taken with him on
his daring expedition to conquer Mexico. Yellow with age, slender, the
cross was strangely modernistic in design and the elongated figure of
Christ, with contorted features and a look of agony in the dying eyes,
reminded me of those El Greco characters whose delicately pointed
fingers and long necks and heads were said to be an indication of a
straining and longing for Heaven. This was the symbol that the Christian
had raised at the head of his warlike hosts.

In 1455 the Pope had divided the world between the Spanish and the
Portuguese and those nations had had not only the right, but the moral
duty of enslaving those infidels who failed to kneel and kiss the cross
and accept Christ as their Redeemer. Yet how was it that four hundred
desperate, half-starved white men, with this cross, had conquered
millions? True, the white men had been brave and the minds of their
red-skinned adversaries had been ridden with superstition, but even that
did not explain how a mere handful could subdue millions.

That they had triumphed in the name of a dead God nailed to a cross was
undeniably true, but what had that cross meant to them? And what had it
meant to the millions whom they had subjugated? If anywhere in the
Western world there was an answer to that riddle, it was here in this
slow and sleepy city of Seville, here where tradition had remained
intact for four centuries, here in this pile of Gothic stone that soared
with such fragile majesty toward a blue sky, here in these narrow
medieval streets where each store window showed the images of penitents
in white, red, and blue robes.

The weather was sunny and bright. Seats along the routes of the
religious processions were in the hands of speculators and I had to pay
a premium for my chair. More than the usual number of candles were being
lighted in the dim and hushed cathedrals. Women were shopping for black
lace shawls. Newspapers were filled with photos of Tortured Christs and
Weeping Virgins.

While in the center of the city, I saw a fashionably dressed woman
walking along barefooted! I blinked, then looked to see if others saw
what I saw. No. People were passing her as if her attire, or lack of it,
were normal. Back in my pension, I asked Seora F. the meaning of it.

"She was doing penance. Many people pledge to their priest not to wear
shoes, or not to eat on certain days, or to walk a certain number of
kilometers. It's quite common."

At three o'clock in the afternoon a man clad in snow-white raiment
stepped from a gaping doorway. Children grouped about him and stared at
his hidden face, for this man was masked and hooded. A round white
peaked cap about two and a half feet tall surmounted his head and a
white mask covered his face and chest. Two holes, slitted into the
material, provided a manner for him to see. The Christian cross blazoned
in red on his chest. He adjusted his white hood carefully and rushed
off, the children trotting after him in awe and excitement.

Over all the city other robed and hooded men surged out of dingy
doorways; religious processions were beginning a ritual that would
eventually converge upon the cathedral. I pushed my way through vast
crowds to the place where I had bought a chair; en route I passed masses
of hooded figures and I had the feeling that a priest would have had but
to utter a single word and these disguised men would have leaped gladly
to obey that word. I sat down at Plaza San Francisco.

In the distance I heard the thunder of many drums being beaten in
unison: _drum-drum; drruuum-drruuum-drruuuum_.... And to the beat of the
drums thousands of feet trampled over cobblestones. Policemen dressed in
blue with red-striped pants, with red rims on their peaked caps, passed,
armed to the teeth. Why? Then came the dolorous music of what seemed
like a million trumpets. The drums and the trumpets made a message like
a death march. The procession arrived with floating banners.

First came a contingent of smartly dressed troops with tall, white
plumes dangling from their steel helmets and waving in front of their
eyes, giving an impression of lofty and disdainful military might. Their
chests were covered with loop upon loop of gold braid and yellow
tassels. Their faces were hard and stern. Glittering swords swung from
their hips. Their high black boots gleamed and they marched with a slow,
almost shuffling tread.

White-hooded and masked penitents, members of church organizations known
as brotherhoods, came, each carrying a huge candle that was at least
four inches in diameter and more than four feet long. The huge candles
rested upon the hips of the penitents and the flickering flames danced
above their heads, the molten wax streaming and sparkling in the bright
sun, spattering in translucent spots on the dark cobblestones--flying
white drops that were like semen spraying, jutting from the
penises of sexually aroused bulls. On and on the white-robed,
white-hooded penitents flowed past and the drums beat: _drum,
drum--drruuuum--drruuuum--drruuuum_.... Two white-robed, white-hooded
little boys were carrying incense vessels of delicately wrought silver
which they swung slowly, creating a thin cloud of purple smoke that rose
and scented the air with a sweetish smell as of burning sandalwood. In
the sunshine the smoke turned a misty blue. Children penitents were now
moving past, each holding a burning candle, and the liquid wax dripped
and flew like white tears.

A mammoth float bearing a sculptured Virgin heaved into view. Her head
was crowned with gold. Her fingers, lifted in mute supplication, were
crammed with rings in whose settings were diamonds and pearls. A
wilderness of smoking, burning candles surrounded the Virgin, lighting
her sorrowful face so that the glass tears pasted on her cheeks glinted
in the light of the dying sun. Soldiers marched on each side of the
Virgin, guarding her, protecting her; then behind the float came
soldiers of the regular Spanish Army, wearing dark brown steel helmets.
The rifles on their shoulders had steel bayonets that gleamed balefully.
The troops marched with slow and measured steps, their right legs
kicking up, their left legs kicking up--they were doing a modified
goosestep. The Church, then the armed State to protect the Church....

Still another float came. The figures were life-size. Christ, streaked
with blood, sagged from a huge cross. The drums beat: _drum,
drum--drruuuum-drruuuum-drruuuum_.... A bugle corps with dragging feet
followed and the air was rent with a melancholy refrain. In the wake of
the Dying Christ came thousands of closely arrayed troops and their
dully gleaming bayonets made a forest of steel. It was now twilight and
sweet-smelling incense fogged the air.

Tired, I went home. I sat on the edge of my bed and attempted to sort
out what I had seen. Those hooded penitents had been protecting the
Virgin, and in the Old American South hooded Ku Kluxers had been
protecting "the purity of white womanhood." Even if the white South in
America had copied their tactics and costumes from here, it did not
explain why men loved to march in defense of what they felt was female
purity. Some underlying reality more powerful than the glittering Virgin
or southern white women had gripped these undeniably primitive minds.
They were following some ancient pattern of behavior and were justifying
their actions in terms that had nothing whatever to do with that
pattern.

Next afternoon I went again to the Plaza San Francisco to watch the
processions stream past. The first contingent came silently, without
music or drums. Then came long lines of black-hooded, red-robed men,
penitents all. Some were barefooted; I could see the bruised and
bleeding flesh where the cobblestones had torn the skin of their feet.
Some had iron chains bound tightly about their insteps to make
themselves suffer as they felt that their God had suffered.

Then came another huge float showing a Dying God under the tender
ministrations of the Suffering Virgin. Banks of candles, hundreds of
them, flickered and lighted up the tableau of agony. Red carnations and
blue irises formed a halo about the float. Black-robed men with cords of
white silk tied about their hips followed. The amount of gold and silver
that I saw was stupendous.

At times the processions so choked the narrow street that the penitents
could not move. The float stopped and came to rest on the cobblestones
and I saw workmen dressed in blue denim pushing aside the heavy red
velvet cloth that draped the float to get air. Their faces looked bleak
and pinched and their heads were covered with pads to enable them to
support the float upon their skulls. I counted some forty-odd men under
the float. They were paid, I learned later, forty pesetas a day by the
Church for this work. One man took a piece of bread out of his pocket
and began nibbling it as his chest heaved from the strain of his toil.

There sounded a knocking, a signal that the men should place their heads
against the bottom of the float; another knocking signaled them to lift
their heads in unison; up went the float on the heads of the workmen;
the red velvet cloth was dropped; the bugles sounded; the drums beat;
and the float moved on.

Night fell. The endless processions marched. Float after float passed.
Dying Gods and Sorrowful Virgins replaced one another. Grim soldiers,
armed with weapons of death, guarded and defended their God and their
Virgin. They were symbols of the male and the female principles of life.
A God died that man might live again, and the Virgin stood eternally
ready to give birth to the God that was to die, that is, the Man-God....
The idea was how to die, the degree and readiness for death, the
emotional willingness to die for one's aim. This was a militant religion
of death and suffering, of death and resurrection, each death being
linked with a rising from the dead, and each rising from the dead being
enthroned in a new generation of men. This was the religion that had
enabled the Spaniards to conquer and despoil Mexico and Peru; these were
the roots of the Black Legend....

After a restless sleep, I went once again to the plaza to watch the
foreshortened rituals and ceremonies of one of the world's most powerful
religions pass before my eyes. A vast float showed Christ seated among
His twelve disciples; Christ's face was bleak with despair. His
disciples, all but Judas, were bowed over with sorrow. This was one of
the most powerful and realistic of the floats that had passed and the
crowd, with one movement, rose from its seat and crossed itself. Some
women threw repeated kisses from their index fingers to the figure of
the Doomed God. Next came a Virgin atop another float; she came slowly
amidst an army of tall, burning candles that illuminated the many
strings of pearls about her white and beautiful throat. Diamonds
gleamed on her outstretched fingers, fingers that seemed straining to
touch the Doomed God, to touch Him with compassion. Her eyes were cloudy
with sorrow; she trailed yard after yard of white embroidered silk. She
stood under a white canopy. Incense bearers swung with slow rhythm their
vessels of silver, veiling the air, and the multitude rose again,
crossed itself, tossing kisses of adoration.

"_Bonita!_" exclaimed a fat woman beside me as she crossed herself and
threw a kiss to the Virgin.

The float paused. From above my head a woman burst into song, caroling a
_saeta_, a lament for the Dying God and the Grieving Virgin. The singer
stood on an iron balcony; she was dressed in the uniform of a domestic
servant. She had heard the sound of drums and bugles and had rushed to
the balcony. She lifted her voice in a wild and tremulous hymn of
despair and bitter triumph. The crowd listened, moved; then it murmured
softly in admiration. On and on the woman wept in tones of melody. When
her voice died away to a whisper, there was quiet handclapping. The
bugles sounded. The drums beat. The float of the Virgin moved on toward
other sections of the city where more _saetas_ would be sung to her.

It was night again. There came a float showing Christ roped and tied in
front of a cruel-faced Roman soldier. Drums beat sad, martial music....

Day after day and night after night the processions flowed on. In the
narrow streets of Seville and over the airways of all Spain the _saetas_
announced the tidings of death and rebirth, the psychological law of the
Christian life. A feeling of helplessness, of desperation, of wild
sorrow, of a grief too deep to be appeased clogged the senses. _Tramp,
tramp, tramp_ went the feet of the marching troops. The cross was held
high and on it was the bloody, bruised figure of a Dying Man, nailed
there, crucified, his face sunk in the throes of agony and despair. But
behind the Dying Man was the Virgin ready to replenish the earth again
so that Life could go on.

And in Spain, where I now stood--indeed, here in this city of
Seville--Christianity, in order to survive, had had to institute with a
bloody war another form of collectivity. Beleaguered by modern ideas,
stormed by the forces of social and political progress, Spain had had to
withdraw, had had to go back into the past and find some acceptable form
of endurable life that could knit its poetic-minded people together
again. The anxious freedom of capitalistic, democratic Europe and
America could not be sustained by the Spaniard. He had rejected it as
being too painful, too inhuman to bear. The tense Western nomads, hungry
for personal destiny, and, above all, the murderous rationalism of
sacrificial Communism, had been scornfully rejected in favor of an
archaic collective consciousness based on family symbols: One Father,
One Mother, One Spirit.

Yet, all of it, Christianity and Communism, had come from one (and
perhaps) unrepeatable historical accident that had been compounded in
Rome from Greek science and love of the human personality, from Jewish
notions of a One and Indivisible God, from Roman conceptions of law and
order and property, and from a perhaps never-to-be-unraveled
amalgamation of Eastern and African religions with their endless gods
who were sacrificed and their virgins who gave birth perennially.

In 1492, in the name of God, the Son, and the Holy Ghost, the Catholic
king and queen, Ferdinand and Isabel, had driven the Moors from Spain,
had liquidated the Jew, and had scattered a handful of willful gypsies
(who were supposed to have forged the nails that went into the cross of
Christ!) to the winds. The Inquisition, that cold and calculating
instrument of God's terror, had whipped the Spaniards into a semblance
of outward conformity, yet keeping intact all the muddy residue of an
irrational paganism that lurked at the bottom of the Spanish heart, and
Spain had been ready with one Will, one Race, one God, and one Aim.

And Spain, despite all the heroic sacrifices of her liberals, of her
poets, of her lovers of liberty, had remained stuck right at that point.

Convinced beyond all counterpersuasion that he possesses a metaphysical
mandate to chastise all of those whom he considers the "morally
moribund," the "spiritually inept," the "biologically botched," the
Spaniard would scorn the rich infinities of possibility looming before
the eyes of men, he would stifle hearts responding to the call of a high
courage, and he would thwart the will's desire for a new wisdom.... He
would turn back the clock of history and play the role of God to man.

How poor indeed he is....




FOOTNOTES:

[A] See Amrico Castro's _The Structure of Spanish History_, Princeton
University Press, 1954, page 113.






[End of Pagan Spain, by Richard Wright]
