If the money power in Spain decides it is essential to enter Europe, join the Common Market, the police state would be obligated to reform. People reassure each other earnestly, saying that Holland and Denmark will refuse to admit Spain if there are still political prisoners, torture, no elected parliament, no free trade unions. Holland and Denmark. Nobody in Spain who longs for our ordinary freedoms expects any support, moral or political, from the government of the United States. On the contrary. That's sad and shameful, but that's how it is.
The way news gets around in Spain is a mystery. You do not read it in the censored press, but everyone knew about the 26-year-old student in La Paz, a hospital the size of a small town, where Franco died. He was fighting for his life on the eighth floor while Franco was not allowed to die on the first floor. A Spanish journalist observed (not in print, of course) that they were both perfect victims of Franco's regime; the boy beaten nearly to death by the police. Franco's 30 doctors so afraid of future blame and punishment that they subjected him to “exquisite legal torture” to keep him alive. After the student spent three weeks in La Paz, hanging between life and death, the hospital announced that he would survive. Three days later, Franco finally released himself from torture by dying, like other Spaniards before him.
The boy was remarkably handsome though pale yellow in color and very weak. His right elbow was bandaged and through his open pajama jacket you could see a swelling like a huge tumor in the region of the liver. He replied instantly to my sympathetic muttering, “I am not the only one.” Which is the important point. On October 13, this boy went to the Students’ Room in the College of Engineering at the university to meet friends. He had a daytime job and studied at night. Three plain-clothes police (secret police, the dreaded Social-Political Brigade) seized him and hauled him away in a car.
At their headquarters, from eight that night until six the next morning, they beat the boy with iron bars and the special police truncheons, steel wands encased in heavy rubber and leather. “They laid me on a table, it was a regular office, and beat me. Or some of them held me up while others beat me or they pushed me around between them and took turns.” They questioned him about the keys in his pocket which he said belonged to business premises of his father. The police went on beating him “to make me say they were keys to a room full of propaganda or weapons or God knows what.” In the morning, the police checked and found that the keys fitted the address he had given.
He was left alone in a cell for eight days without medical attention. “I couldn't eat, I only vomited.” Then he was taken before a police judge who sent him to the prison hospital at Carabanchel. The prison doctor said they had no equipment to treat him and he would die. Three days later, now eleven days after the beating, he was taken to La Paz in a coma. The medical report at La Paz stated that he had “lesions” on eleven zones of his body: the left knee, the left testicle, the right elbow, the base of the spine, the lower stomach above the genitals, the backs of the thighs, the back from the waist down, the buttocks, the left side (that tumor swelling?), the mouth with the lips and tongue cut. His kidneys had been so damaged that they had ceased to function. In the raw meat on his back were marks of cigarette burns.
A judge of the Tribunal of Public Order declared that there was no accusation, the incident had been a mistake, and the boy was at liberty. The police, who make their own laws, fined him $4,000 for “agitation and propaganda.” He laughed, telling me that. “When would I have time, with a job and my studies and my wife and child?” The $4,000 was raised in one day at the university by the students and professors.
“They just picked me by chance. They don't need reasons. Three of them were about 30, the other was a man of 40. They wore sports clothes. They looked like anyone else, but they were not normal, they were sadists. When I was in the cell, I wanted to kill them, but afterwards I knew I could never do that.”
There is nothing unusual about this story except that the boy is in a civilian hospital and can be seen. And also, with the help of one of the heroic civil-rights lawyers, he means to prosecute the police, which has never been done. The day police torturers are sentenced for their crimes would be a day of national rejoicing, but it won't be soon.
The first official act of King Juan Carlos was the famous Pardon. The word in Spanish is indulto. Within hours the Pardon was called “indulto-insulto" and Juan Carlos was bitterly named Franco Junior. Poor Juan Carlos, king by the grace of Franco, not God. Franco left him, as a legacy, the entire structure of a police state and an immense military and civil bureaucracy firmly entrenched. Juan Carlos is a trapped king.
The Pardon infuriated the opposition. It commuted pending death sentences, but Juan Carlos got no credit for that; everyone agreed he had no choice, since Franco's September executions caused such an outcry around the world. Otherwise the Pardon released thousands of common criminals but was so restricted that at this time of writing, a mere 230 political prisoners had gone free. About an equal number were soon arrested, which doesn't necessarily mean prison terms but does mean police detention and intimidation. The cops’ conveyor belt operates without pause.
A protest was called, by mysterious underground means as if by invisible tom-toms. It was a cold clear day, nice weather for a demo. Some three thousand people, mainly young, gathered in silence outside the red brick walls and watch towers of Carabanchel, Spain's largest prison, built by the prisoners themselves after the Civil War. It was the first demonstration of its kind in 37 years. We stood as ordered, not stepping off the curb, one group opposite the gates and two groups lining the curved entry road to the gates. More and more police arrived, enough to control a violent crowd of 20,000. We simply stood.
Presently a cop with a bull horn said no one would be released this morning, so go home. A man shouted “Amnestia" and the crowd raggedly took up the word. At once, the mounted police started to move and the crowd broke up hurriedly, but still shouting. A middle-aged woman stepped into the roadway, raised her arms, and cried with great authority, “Silencio!" I asked a young colleague why, what was the point in being here and not shouting, “Because they don't want everyone to have their skulls fractured and get shoved into jail, that's why.’
Altogether, the young Reds in Spain are dazzling. Those I met were mainly the children of parents who could afford a university education, hence middle class. If they had been willing to conform, the Franco state offers plenty of perks and goodies to such as these. They looked tired, ill nourished, dressed in worn corduroys and jeans. One endearing bunch of law students in Barcelona described their fathers as “to the right of Franco,” "nouveau riche," “Fascist,” and took no money from them. Some had badly paid jobs to see them through; some, like the civil rights lawyers, live by chance—the clients pay what they can, if not, not. The girls, the young women, are equals and partners with the men. They do the same work, are committed together. And after all, the police make no distinction as to sex. They are Catholics, Communists, Basque and Catalan Nationalists, Socialists, humanists. The old Rojos of the Republic would be very proud of them.
I was ashamed to be so dejected in a few weeks by what the Opposition is still fighting after more than a generation. Especially when energy and guts are their only weapons against the entrenched power of the State. So I withdrew on a nostalgia trip, asking a grey-haired taxi driver to take me to the Retiro Park where the zoo used to be. We often walked there on quiet days to visit an old keeper who mourned the animals. The people had no food, the animals were shot to spare them starvation, but he had saved some birds. The driver stopped at gates I had forgotten, brick pillars with stone lions on top.
He said, “The animals are in the Casa de Campo now.”
“I know. Tell me, weren't there trolley cars on the Gran Via and going around the fountain by the Palace Hotel and Cibeles?”
“There were, long ago. How do you know that?”
“I was here in my youth.” Then suddenly I was sick of this Spain where the only “h
eroes” are Franco's Falange and the war monuments only commemorate Franco's dead. “I was here in Madrid on the side of the Republic.”
He turned with a big warm smile and shook hands. He had been here too. “Look, feel my head,” guiding my hand to a scar under the hairline on the side of his neck. “I got that at the Puente de los Franceses. You remember it? I was seventeen and in the Fifty-third Transport Brigade and I was driving an ammo truck to the Casa de Campo. I lost consciousness and the truck fell in the river, but I was rescued and cured.”
We had a good old-soldiers’ chat; I checked everything against his better memory. Cuatro Caminos and Arguelles are just city streets now but yes, they had been battlefields. And yes, Madrid was pounded all the time by the German artillery on Garabitas Hill. He remembered walking along the Gran Via when a shell hit a trolley car and he and a comrade pulled out a young girl, “a beautiful girl, about sixteen, and her whole breast was sliced off by a shell fragment. They took her in the ambulance to Atocha Hospital. I'll never forget it. . . .”
He spoke of the years of hunger after the war and how all the young soldiers of the Republic like him had been forced to do three years’ military service in Franco's army. “They looked at us with a funny eye and gave us the dirtiest jobs. Ah man, I tell my children these things and they believe me because I am their father and would not lie to them, but they cannot really believe, they cannot understand. Do you think Juan Carlos will be a king like they have in England? That's what we want, say, four political parties and everyone has the vote and a king like the English. Madre! No one wants another war. But you know, if the Germans and Italians hadn't helped him, Franco would never have won our war.”
I felt at home again, and after that I talked to all grey-haired taxi drivers and they had all been in the war and we were instant friends. A taxi is a safe place; they could talk about their thirteen-hour working day, the wife doing piecework on the sewing machine at home, the price of food is a disaster (not that farm laborers are wearing fur coats—we are rich compared to those sons of misery), and what a horrible state Franco had made where a man was afraid to speak his thoughts. “The newspapers are novels. The only true facts in them are about football.” “We are supposed to be grateful to him for peace. The way to keep peace in a country is to ring it round with bayonets and anyone who moves—hop! a Communist or ETA, shoot him.” “This country is the marvel of the world, didn't you know? Here we are all content. Or in jail.”
I wanted to see Garabitas before I left Madrid and took with me a young writer. From that hill, where I had never been before, you saw Madrid spread out below, street by street, with the tower of the Telefonica sticking up like a direction finder. They could aim their heavy guns as if they were rifles. The city was like a shooting gallery for them, with fixed and moving targets. Hundreds of thousands of shells, day and night, year after year, killing the small, brave, hungry people of Madrid, destroying their homes.
I was in a rage and close to tears, so suggested that we eat tremendously and get drunk and forget everything. We went to the oldest restaurant in Madrid and ate a superb expense-account lunch, the only good meal I had in the country and perhaps the only good meal he ever had on a monthly salary of $200. We drank pitchers of the local wine and felt like old, close, loving friends, perfectly united in our views, though we had met that day and with a slight time pinch I could be his grandmother.
He said, “There has to be something wonderful about my country because all of you loved it so much. I believe it's still alive, and no one is ever going to be able to kill it, despite everything.”
Yes, of course it's alive. If defeat in a long, appalling war and 36 years of Franco couldn't crush the spirit of Los Rojos, nothing can. When the losers are indomitable, someday, somehow they must win.
Christmas with the Outcast
THE OBSERVER, January 1977
The unemployed have become a hated statistic. A political face on TV announces: “We must expect increased unemployment next year.” As if talking about bad weather, not doomed people. The unemployed, one by one, are human beings in trouble we do not begin to know. They are doing their best to stay alive, for which they can scarcely be blamed; after all, they didn't invent this Depression. Christmas (the Great Spending Spree for others) is the hardest time; they were still gallantly doing their best.
A vicious campaign against the unemployed is growing by word of mouth and in the Press. We are led to believe the unemployed are scroungers, if not straight cheats, who'd rather live on State money than do an honest day's work. “You get the picture of layabouts, loafing in comfy homes on fat checks the State has gladly handed out. No one would dare spread such ugly lies if they knew the truth about the real lives of the unemployed. In fact, a vast, suspicious complex bureaucracy unwillingly doles out just enough money to keep people from starving in the streets.
Officialdom is hostile to inquiring outsiders. Charitable organizations misguidedly protect their clients from what they most need: publicity. A wall of silence is built around the unemployed, and they have no way to speak for themselves. For two weeks, night and day, I have been trying to break through that wall of silence, and simply see unemployed people in their homes. It was far easier to meet dissidents in Russia and the underground opposition to Franco. When finally I reached their homes, I found these hidden-away people likeable and admirable, eager to talk, welcoming a listener.
The bureaucracy gave me leaflets which explain the citizen's rights to State aid. These leaflets are a universal black joke; no one understands them, including me. Two friends, with first-class degrees from Oxford, were baffled. Another friend, faced with a bureaucratic form, said she would be happy to answer any questions but could not decipher the form. The brightest and bravest of the young unemployed have formed small groups called Claimants’ Unions. They print a guidebook, “Fight to Live,” to help the helpless through the dread maze of bureaucracy. It's fine if you can read, “You'd be surprised by how many people of all ages are illiterate in the Welfare State.
It is too complicated to describe here what the unemployed go through before receiving Giro checks, their poverty pay. Labor Exchanges and Social Security Offices; interviews and interrogation proving your absolute need; home visits from the Social Security to check on your life; weekly begging for essentials (the children must have shoes), weekly signing on at the Labor Exchange and searching there for a job opening. And all the time, as the unemployed say, you are treated as guilty until proved innocent.
Let's look at the money supposedly lavished on the unemployed. Everyone, except jobless school-leavers, has paid compulsory National Insurance throughout his or her working life. The more you earn, the higher your National Insurance contribution. Think of yourself: say you've earned £3,450 or above in the last tax year: you are then in the top class for unemployed benefits. For one year. And you will get weekly: £12.90 for a man, £8 for your wife, £4.05 for your first child, £2.55 each for other children. You will also get a top class bonus: £12.18 a week. A family of four will be rolling in riches on £39.68 a week. But only for six months. Then your high income bonus stops and you revert to the flat rate: £27.50 weekly for a family of four.
After a year of unemployment you drop down to Social Security—the Dole, which pays somewhat less and is trickily variable. And remember, all the unemployed on the Dole have also paid compulsory National Insurance whenever they had work. Does it sound like the lap of luxury?
I met nobody receiving the full, if puny, Dole assistance except for one, a determined father rearing four children alone. After paying rent, rates and heating on his flat, Mr. Hardy is left with £28.40 to keep himself and the children aged four to 11. But he had a small plastic Christmas tree and a present for each child and a bucket of fruit, which thrilled the children, and a medium turkey. “We'll be broke next week but we're going to have a good Christmas dinner.”
It was pouring icy rain; the Blackfriars Settlement, that haven of kindness, had giv
en Janice a big carton of tinned food and toys for her sons. She looked stylishly King's Road with her tight head scarf and large black-penciled eyes. Closer inspection showed that her much washed slacks were thin cotton and her poncho the same. On £19.90 a week to provide for herself and two small boys, the warm clothes are for them. Janice is a gentle soft-spoken girl whose husband vanished long ago. She has battled alone against the entire range of bureaucracy to keep a home for her boys. Janice is a squatter.
Her home is one room, about 10 ft. by 10 ft., because she has no furniture for the other room. Every day for a month, she has hauled a heavy coal sack to cook in the tiny fireplace. Her most desperate need is a second-hand cooker.
Her furniture is a prehistoric sofa, a padded bench and a few big square cushions, all of which serve as beds. With scraps of cloth and remnants of paint, Janice has made this room charming, interesting and warm, a place where children can feel happy.
Like two and a half million others in Britain, Janice receives her money from the Dole. The Dole also gives grants for a list of essentials if the S.S. home visitor agrees to the “need.” A cooker is on the Social Security list of “essentials.” Janice was stuck with the coal grate until a visitor arrived to make sure she wasn't lying about her “need.” Maybe he was in a bad temper that day or ill or disapproved of the charm of her home, concocted from nothing. Result: no cooker.
St. Agnes Place in Lambeth is a street of little broken-down houses, where 100 people, mostly squatters, mostly unemployed, live in friendship. It's a lovely neighborhood, whatever its looks.
The View from the Ground Page 36