I visited a royal palace which has been turned into a special and delightfully housed school for favoured pupils, the Pioneers, who have lovely grounds to wander in, and I was struck by the stern little boys who policed—it is the only word—the corridors of the school. Heels clicked. Salutes. The display of children’s work was quite good— with the startling exception of the drawing and painting. The imaginative painting of children which has been a revelation in the last thirty years in the West is quite unknown. The carving on the other hand was excellent: it is a Romanian skill. At their cinema, the children were looking at the usual war film about the Partisans. Apollo thought it all splendid. I’m afraid it was only the situation and the prettiness of the children that impressed me.
Now Romania has over seventeen million people. It is hard to know what progress they were making. They had a period of great prosperity between the wars which put them on their feet. Have they improved or gone back? There is little in the way of reliable information to guide one. The diplomatic gossip is that the régime is “losing its grip”—whatever that may mean. Western diplomats are so badly treated that they are subject to wishful dreams. At any rate, the Romanians were building fast; I saw no signs of shortages in basic things—the sort of food shortage you get in Poland. The head of the cultural organisation was bland. “We always produce an enormous number of poets,” he said, “but not exceptionally good ones.” They have one or two good novelists and here—this is exceptional in eastern Europe—one or two of the best ones firmly support the Party without arrière pensée.
A quick, sedate, acquisitive, rather pompous intelligence is noticeable everywhere, an open mistrust of Western foreigners, too. I heard an American lady explaining about her alimony to a young Romanian interpreter, a pleasant girl who might have come out of Radcliffe or Somerville. “We do not allow alimony here,” the girl said sternly. “Only an allowance for children. Women here prefer to work. There are no idle divorcees.”
The women are very conscious of being better to look at and better dressed than their Russian visitors. Apollo, continually hopping off to check up on something— perhaps report on me, more probably to see what new girls had turned up—with his eye on the future, his hopeful contacts, the cosy flat he had got from a friend, clearly kept in with the good things of life.
“Now,” he said to me in a bored, sarcastic voice as I got on the international plane, “now you will be able to read your Western papers.”
One more boring Western visitor was going. Dutiful to the end, he stayed and waved and waved. He even smiled. He had a blonde with him, a real beauty.
7
Madrid
Madrid is the invented capital. It is an idea in red brick, iron-grey stone, and flashing concrete, rising in the middle of the Castilian steppe. Until twenty-five years ago it was low and almost invisible from the plain; now it is ringed by high, up-ended white rectangular blocks and can at last be seen. In 1560 it was a scheme in the mind of Philip II, who turned a half-Arab village into a capital.
In the main street of the working-class quarter called Cuatro Caminos, on the northern outskirts of the city, there is a small shop with the name El Ciento Siete—one hundred and seven. On its door the proprietor, indignant with the local government officials, has put the true number in large figures: 109. Always growing, always anomalous, Madrid is never quite sure of its identity. For Spain is a collection of regions that are, by tradition, always trying to break away from the centre; every region has a capital which regards itself as the equal of any other, just as every Spaniard is the equal of every other Spaniard. Philip II, the subtle centraliser of the sixteenth century, determined to keep every detail of the management of the largest Empire since the Roman in his own hands, and so invented a small capital. He desired a small place where he could work without interruption, while the deeper solitude of the monastery of El Escorial, twenty-five miles away in the Guadarrama Mountains, was being prepared for him. The new capital recognized its artificiality. Madrid is rarely called the capital: even today it dislikes calling itself a city—the word is too commonplace and impersonal. It is known, with negligent family pretension, as the Villa or the Corte.
By the rest of Spain, Madrid is also called the parasite. Tourists who travel too fast and who look for the standard Spanish clichés think the city dull. Once they have seen the Prado, the Royal Palace, and the seventeenth-century Plaza Mayor and have looked for antiques in the Rastro, or flea market, they move quickly on. For them it is a comfortable centre from which to visit more interesting places. Yet Madrid is one of the most liveable cities in Europe for those who believe in the untroublesome pleasures of life. With its shaded boulevards, its Metro, it is something of an imitation Paris shut off from Western Europe by Spanish stubbornness, but it is not electric, it is not perfumed, it is not feminine, intellectual, or modish.
It is a male city, run for lazy men and the slack masculine kindness: even the women have something of the male in their harsh voices and their sharp looks. One would say that this is a place to which the men have brought all their relations to live and have then got out of their houses to avoid them. Hence, a glum and foot-loose air about the crowds; no one wants to go home—he knows what he’ll find there! There is no chic. The romantic Napoleonic Madrid of Goya, the Madrid of the majoy maja, of the picnics at San Isidro, of the yellow and gold silks and the shawls of Manila, went a long time ago and Madrid very much depended on such things. At a first night in the theatre, one sees occasionally an old gentleman wearing a black cloak with the crimson lining, muffling his face as he goes out into the cruel air of the Madrid winter. And women going to mass or confession, to a wedding or a funeral, will cobweb themselves in the black mantilla. These are survivals. The Madrid crowd of today, overwhelmingly lower middle class, has joined what the madrileños call the cheap-gabardine civilisation.
So one does not go to Madrid for the sights. The deep attraction of Madrid is in its people, their liveliness and manners. Yet, before we speak of them, let us mention the city’s most important physical distinction; it is pretty well the highest capital in Europe. It stands on the table-land over 2,000 feet above sea level, in air that is dry and fluttering. The Castilian wind is continuously flickering under the nostrils, a wind that is kind in spring and grateful in the summer, but deadly to the weak-chested on winter nights, when it is glacial and blows over the wet or the snowy stone. It is the proverbial wind that will not blow out a candle but will kill a man.
But against the wind we have to put the light. Outside Greece there is no light to compare with the Spanish, specially the light of Castile: Madrid is less the capital of Spain than the capital of the Castilian light. In the hot months it is pure fire, refined to the incandescence of a furnace, and it is like the gleam of armour in the cold winter. It is so limpid that you feel you have only to reach out to run your fingers over the peaks of the Sierra in the distance. At sunset, the buildings, the helmet spires of churches cut the hard green sky; it is the armed military moment of the Spanish cities. By day the light has the radiance of enamel. It is rare to see a cloud in the sky above Madrid after March and before November, and if one small puff of cloud does sail over, people stop in the street and look at it as if it were something lost.
The effect of such a light, without mists and without soft shadows, is to remove illusion; everything stares in its detail, as if every leaf or brick or rock were crowded with impersonal eyes. We see the same stare in the details of the clothes worn by Spanish kings in the pictures of Velazquez. In this light the painter learned his realism, as perhaps Goya learned his in the fire of the Madrid noon, and El Greco sought his colours in the hard, bruised dunes between Madrid and Toledo.
Twenty-five years ago the first sight one had of Madrid was the long white flush of the eighteenth-century Royal Palace on its cliff above the Manzanares, that poor dried-up river now turned into a concrete canal. The palace led one to expect a sumptuous city, but no other building in the capital
approached its magnificence. Madrid (the people said with affection) was no more than a pueblo, a town. It had one or two minor palaces, but they were dull. It had a population of 800,000.
The once horizontal city has become vertical; it sticks up into the light and the wind. Eighteen years after the Civil War, it has doubled its population; it will soon have 2,000,000. The place which once stopped dead in the ploughed land at the end of the Castellana—the little Champs-Elysees of Madrid—has spread chaotically into the sandy building lots and arterial roads of the steppe. The peasants from the poor southern provinces have left their villages en masse and have come to the capital. They are working for the builders who are responding to the dictator’s appetite for monuments, skyscrapers, colleges, convents, churches, and immense buildings for the new civil service of the syndicalist state. Madrid has lost its identity and has become foreign to its inhabitants. Some look at the new city with pride, some with mistrust—for how can a poor country afford it? All are dumbfounded. Suddenly and very late, Madrid has left the nineteenth century and joined the twentieth.
The fact is that the city has moved out of the economy of small commerce and into the modern world of finance-capitalism. It is being built and occupied by the tough corporations of the Basque bankers. It is even being industrialised. Sadly, people say, “Madrid is beginning to work.”
For centuries the city had produced nothing very much. That character remains in spirit, if it is changing in fact. From the time of the Empire, Madrid has lived for the ease of office, for pleasure, and for spoils. The houses were often austerely furnished. The family fortune in all classes was spent on public show, on social life or personal display in the streets.
A city of the servants of servants of servants, Madrid is now ruled, family fashion, by a general and his near relations, who manipulate the three powerful forces in the country: the Church, the Army, and the Falange or neo-Fascist party. One has the impression of stepping into family life. The madrileño is a man of attachments and friendships. His pleasures are small and are the things that give him no trouble: sitting, strolling, staring, sleeping, talking. He ignores the clock. Life in Madrid is not lived at a high, nervous pitch. People are themselves. More conventional than the Frenchman, less naive than the Italian, the madrileño is a natural observer, sceptical and realistic. But fundamentally he regards himself as “formal”, even Victorian; he admires the distinguished—the distinguido. He is quick to perceive and answer and anticipate. He is abstemious in drink, extravagant in opinion, violent when moved. If at first sight he appears glum, this is merely because he is waiting to be lit up and to crackle into life and frivolity. For his malicious wit he is famous. There is probably a larger daily output of political epigram in Madrid than in any other capital on earth. The habit of living under a dictatorship encourages cynicism. “To the Pope’s intentions”, says the young novelist in trouble with the ecclesiastical censorship, raising his glass.
The madrileño will sacrifice comfort, property, everything, to the public appearance. The sacred hour of the paseo at six in the evening, when the women come out and the crowd walks up and down the street, is the time of display. The cinema and the theatre crowds are elegant. The people do not slump into pleasure. Pleasure is an occasion. Nothing shocks the madrileño so much as the foreign tourists’ indifference to their appearance. Northerners to him are vulgar in dress and their activity. In his heart he agrees with the hungry poor Knight in the most famous of the picaresque novels, Lazarillo de Tormes, that it can be more important to appear to have eaten than to be able to eat.
There are three Madrids: the city of the dry, hard, splendacious twentieth century; the Villa or Corte of the nineteenth, the place of old boulevards, balconies, small, rattling elevators with gates that catch the knuckles, enormous brass-studded or carved doors, high unheated rooms and dark, windowless alcoves for bedrooms; and the old Madrid of convents, alleys, markets, and the outlying wagoners’ inns.
The twentieth-century city looks South American. It has not yet enough electricity to go round. In the last few years the sky signs of the Gran Via have gone out and the restaurants have been lit by pressure lamps until the current is switched on again. You can see the struggle between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries in the trams. The old grinding cars are being replaced by swift modern ones and by trolley buses. There are even a few old ill-treated London buses, painted blue. Madrid traffic, which used to be stuck fast for hours in the evening, now moves. But in the older parts of the city you can still see at night one of the red or blue trams waiting, say, at Santo Domingo, like a battered Chinese lantern.
Nineteenth-century Madrid has the shade of trees, the bourgeois decorum; also a narrow, genteel anxiety to conceal anxiety about money. A large number of middle-class men are feverishly looking for ways of picking up commission here and there. In a neighbourhood like the Puerta del Sol and the hilly streets around it, shabbiness has come in. The famous square where the populace comes out on New Year’s Eve, to eat twelve grapes as the clock strikes twelve, is going downhill. The old cafés are going. But there are still, on the first floors, the celebrated barber-shops which are the male gossip clubs. As one moves toward the Royal Palace into the formal garden of the Plaza de Oriente and the Plaza Isabel Segunda, there is quiet and there is propriety. From the Palace back to the Castellana, to the deep-shaded walks of the Retiro, at whose gates every Sunday the servant girls meet or exchange their young men as if it were an open-air marriage market; to the rose walls and cedar trees of the Prado—all this has the graciousness of an older age.
When the traveller visits the Royal Palace, he is taken round in a small party, perhaps of people from some provincial town, by one of the old long-coated servants who will speak of how they waited at King Alfonso’s table. There are Goyas mocking Carlos IV and Maria Luisa. There is the throne room with its golden chair, where General Franco receives ambassadors; the beautiful rooms done in the lovely porcelain of the Retiro factory which Napoleon destroyed. There is a firmament of chandeliers—and to the Spaniard, the chandelier is the symbol of success. “So-and-so has arrived,” they say. “He has got his chandelier.”
“It puzzles me that people go to the cinema,” the servant says disdainfully to the crowd, “when they could come here and see far greater luxury.”
“But we do not live in Madrid,” the provincial protests.
“A pity,” says the servant, and walks away to announce a new treasure. “Si, señor,” he says as an after thought. It has a formal ecclesiastical tone. He is saying “Amen”.
These heavy-coated servants of Madrid, tall and ambassadorial, guarding the great doors, reborn for the doors of apartment houses and cinema and night-club entrances, are a special race of men. They are as poor as they are magnificent; and if one of them gives a final spit from a doorway across the pavement into the street before he turns in at night, the act has all that is grand and ceremonious and familiar in the Spanish temper. They speak in proverbs. “It is a cold night,” you say as you go into the warm house. “But for those who have the peseta it is warm,” is the reply. “Si, señor.” Amen. So God intended it.
The madrileño makes all things familiar. The Palace yard with its fine view across the plain makes a sun-trap for the nurses, the mothers, the black-shawled women knitting and sewing on their stools while hundreds of children play around them. In sun or shade, according to the season, the families take over the doorsteps, the pavements, the spaces of the city.
Many of the great houses are now museums, but the Duke of Alba’s palace is still a private home. It was burnt to the ground in the civil war, and has now been rebuilt. Its library has almost gone, but most of the best pictures were saved, including a number of Goyas. Galdos and Goya still rule the older spirit of the city; and it was indeed in a spirit primitive and goyesque that the palace was burnt down in the civil war. Its gardens are still haunted by horrors. There was a giant, brutal man who appointed himself to take charge of the ruin befor
e the city fell and who used to go out at night sniping like a hunter, bringing back his victims slung on his shoulders, like shot rabbits. He buried them reverently in the palace gardens. That was, as the madrileño says, something muy español, inexplicable, savage: the mixture of the primitive and some obscure act of courtesy, like the last cigarette offered at an execution.
A milder example of the muy español is the curious home of the Marqués de Cerralbo. The Marques was an indiscriminate collector, and his house is an absurd jumble of nineteenth-century taste. The artist who painted the ceilings was sacked because he painted nymphs in the nude, for the Spanish taste has a marked puritan strain. This house is drenched in golden luxury, but it is all for display. There was something of the hermit in its owner. His bedroom is as bleak as a monk’s cell and hung with gloomy religious images. There is so often an ascetic and frugal core inside the Spanish voluptuary. In the great houses, with their tapestries, in the modern houses of the moderately well-off, we have the sensation that a people who are gay in public like to preserve the sense of life as a private sadness. The same people who shout in each other’s faces when roused go back to glum, uncomfortable, solitary meditation afterward.
There is also a tendency toward the life of single purpose. The madrileño who works half kills himself with two or three jobs. He is at the government office in the morning, at a business in the afternoon, and in the evening is a journalist, a telephone operator, or a teacher. Such men uncomplainingly support huge families of sick, idle, or unsuccessful relations who sit about talking, stand around in bars, stroll up and down alone, gamble, or even lie in bed. To be a little ill is a career in itself. There are the men who get up only at night. There are others who see how many meals they can do without. One of the most amusing madrileños I ever met told me that he never allowed anything to interfere with his “profession”, which was to be an observer of life and an avoider of effort. He was middle-aged and a qualified doctor. He was idle on principle. He lived on very little. His friends fed him. At a period of financial crisis he was nearly persuaded to take on the idlest of jobs with a famous foreign surgeon. He refused it when he discovered, just in time, that he would have to walk up and down three flights of stairs every day when he came to the surgeon’s flat. The only single-purpose man missing in Madrid is the student of nature. About plants, trees, birds, and animals the madrileño is incurious and indifferent: except for the bull, an animal is nothing to him. The lost dog starves and dies on the building site.
Foreign Faces Page 12