by Saul Bellow
In the dining room of the pension, the conversation is mainly about movie stars. The commandante’s wife is equally attracted to James Stewart and Clark Gable. The Sanchez sisters, who were born in Hong Kong and speak English well, are for Brian Aherne and Herbert Marshall, British types. Even the commandante has his favorites and adds his dry, nervous, harsh voice to the rattle of the women. The commandante is lean, correct, compressed, and rancorous and has a pockmarked face, a shallow pompadour, black eyes. He and the señora do not eat our ordinary bread. A black-market white loaf is delivered to them daily, and at noon he carries it under his arm like a swagger stick. There is a little military rush when they enter, she with small, pouncing steps, wagging her fan, he blind to us all but inclining his head. Even on the hottest days his tunic is buttoned to the throat. I offend him by coming to the dining room in a T-shirt and slippers. He sits down grimly to his meal, taking the señora’s fan to cool his soup. His is the dignidad of gnawing hauteur and dislike, the hateful kind.
There is an important person in the pension, an admiral stationed at the ministry, who never eats in the dining room and who often, in the afternoon, blunders through the dark, curtained rooms in his pajamas. Juanita enters his apartment without knocking, and they are obviously on terms of intimacy. The Sanchez girls explain in an embarrassed way that the admiral is under a great obligation to Juanita, who, during the civil war, concealed and nursed his sick son, or perhaps his nephew, and he swore to reward her. The Republic was unjust to the admiral. He taught at a very low salary in the naval academy. The commandante served under Franco in Morocco and is now head of a military school. He has the reputation of being a great disciplinarian, the sisters inform me rather proudly. They themselves were educated in a convent.
The rest are middle class, people who must be well connected to be able to afford a pension as good as this one, beneficiaries of enchufismo or civil service patronage—literally, the enchufe is an electric socket. An ordinary civil service job—and one must be, politically, as faultless as a sacrificial lamb to get it—carries a salary of five or six hundred pesetas a month, or roughly twenty dollars, and since desirable things are approximately American in price (higher, in many cases; a pound of black-market coffee costs two and a half dollars), a man needs enchufes to live comfortably. If, through family influence or friends high in the church or the army, he has several jobs, he makes the rounds of the ministries to sign in and sign out. Occasionally he may be required to do a little work, and he does it para cumplir, to acknowledge the obligation, but as hastily as possible. This is in part traditional. All Spanish regimes have used the same means to keep the educated classes from disaffection. “Modern” government programs receive great publicity. Recently a social security system modeled on the Beveridge plan was announced, and Sir William himself was invited for consultation. But the real purpose of these programs is to extend enchufismo, for the actual benefits to the sick or unemployed worker under this insurance scheme amount to about three pesetas a day, hardly enough for a loaf of bread. Franco has great-state ambitions, like Mussolini’s, but Spain is too poor; the cost of staying in power is too high for him to realize them. The buildings called the New Ministries, which were to have gone up monumentally at the foot of the Castellana, stand in scaffolding, uncompleted and apparently abandoned.
For middle-class families without enchufes, the difficulties are terrible. One must wear a European suit, a shirt that costs two hundred pesetas, a tie, and to appear in the rope alpargatas of the people is inconceivable. It is essential to have a maid. And then one’s wife has to be properly dressed, and the children clothed and educated. One must cling to one’s class. The fall into the one below is measureless. Its wretchedness is an ancient fact, stable, immemorial, and understood by everyone. The newer wretchedness, that of keeping one meager suit presentable, of making a place in the budget for movies in order to have something to contribute to polite conversation when The Song of Bernadette is discussed, of persisting to exhaustion among the stragglers in the chase after desirable things, the images of the earthly kingdom reflected in every casual American, is nevertheless not the wretchedness. That you see in the tenements and the inhabited ruins, old kilns and caves, the human swarms in the dry rot of Vallecas and Mataderos.
Summer is arid in Madrid, and cloudless. The sound of thunder is very rare. When it is heard, the maids cry out, “Una tormenta!” and dart through the pension, slamming the windows. Across the air shaft, the blond Bibi calls “A storm!” to me in her tense, warlike voice, wavers behind the smoky glass, and leaves the thick drapes trembling like the curtains of a stage on the last cry of a tragedy. Then the rain begins with a plunge, falling with the heaviness of drops of mercury.
In ten minutes it is over; ten minutes more, and it has dried. On the hottest days the streets and the locust trees are watered morning and evening. The parks are divided by irrigation ditches and are grassless. The only grass I saw in Madrid, that before the Prado, was kept alive by continual sprinkling. As one goes out from the center of the city the green becomes more and more thin until, from the blank, sun-hardened flats of the outlying districts, overlooking the trenches that have sunk and are grown over with brown weeds and brown wires, there is only the scattered green of gardens on the immense plain, each garden with the diagonal pole of a well sweep rising above the Indian corn.
The Manzanares River is almost empty, yet on Sunday, in the section called the Bombilla, where, in places, the water has collected to a depth of several inches, there are hundreds of bathers and picnickers in throngs at the working-class cafés for miles along the shores, the gente humilde, choking the streets and bridges and lying on blankets on the dusty banks under the scanty acacias. It is like a vision of the first moments of resurrection, seeing those families lying in the smothering dust and milling in the roads. On the city side there are homes in the ruins, fenced round with the wreckage of bombardments and rolls of barbed wire. A few gypsies live in the Bombilla, in wagons. They are not like the Andalusian gypsies; they have a citified, depressed air; the women, filthy and gaunt, sit by their iron pots; the children lie naked on sacking. Goats are tethered to the wheels and axles, and under one wagon I saw two apes crouching spiritlessly. A factory that makes concrete tubes rises on the other side—a long, proudly lettered, modern industrial wall against which there are always a few men relieving themselves. Behind are the usual unfinished public works, and miles away, far upland, is the intricate earthen blue of the Sierra, which sends down the trickle of the Manzanares, more like the idea than the actuality of a river. It appears to be the idea, the hope of a river that attracts the gigantic crowd from the desert African dryness of the slums. The boys leap high into the air, as if the water were measured in feet, not inches, and the dust clings to their legs when they clamber up the bank. The river flows in a dirty green vein from shallow to shallow; gangs run yelling up and down the sand islands of its bed. A man leads his infant daughter, hardly old enough to walk, down to the water. She has soiled herself, and he washes her with a certain embittered tenderness while she clings screaming to his lanky, hairy legs.
Among the trees, surrounding the kiosks that sell wine and beer, the huge multitude is dancing, jogging up and down. Three young boys, self-contained, professional, indifferent to the dancers, play saxophone, guitar, and drum, imitating the downtown version of American chic. Two drunken men are blowing the gaita, the hairy Galician bagpipes, for a group of drunken-looking friends. Madrid is said to be overrun with Gallegos; Franco himself is Galician, and in the old-fashioned Spanish belief in provincial loyalties, they come to the city by the thousands for jobs.
The soldiers in the crowd look thickset and short in their coarse jackets, gaiters, and big boots. They bump against the wheeling pairs of girls and try to force them apart. This is done seriously; there is little friskiness or gaiety, and you see few smiles. The dancers tramp and shuffle but, though excited and sweating, keep a straight-browed, straight-lipped formality
of expression and hold themselves apart with rigid heads and shoulders.
The kiosks and the cafés do not sell food. The people bring their own bread and chick peas. You can buy a meal at middle-class prices in the bowery beer gardens set apart behind lattice walls and bushes growing in tubs. In one of these places, where I stop for a bottle of beer, there is a huge, time-eaten barrel organ that produces martial-sounding dances with missing notes, clanging bells, and queer, mechanical birdcalls. The man who winds it has the pride-bitten look of someone who has come down in the world and gives me a glance of “too good for my destiny and every bit as good as you are.” His wife sits beside him, evidently to give him support in his humiliation, for she does not spell him at the organ. The brass drum inside catches the late sun on its short spines as it revolves. He is bald and small, and his cheeks are taut and hard as he faces me, his mouth is bitter. His wife is passive and sits with quietly folded hands.
People complain rather freely on very short acquaintance about the regime: the shortness of the rations, the inferior bread, the black market, the army, the police, the Falange, and the church. Madrileños speak of the recent referendum on the law of succession as el reverendum, a priests’ affair. It was conducted with the familiar, heavy-handed efficiency of fascist elections. Workers in the unreliable barrios of Mataderos, Vallecas, and Cuatro Caminos received ballots beforehand with a printed Sí. Ration books that were not stamped at the polling place to show that their holders had voted were invalid after election day. Nevertheless many people, monarchists as well as republicans, abstained, and even government figures acknowledged that a considerable number had voted no: 132,000 in Barcelona, 117,000 in Madrid, 36,000 in Seville. The socialists interpret the referendum as an attempt by the regime to convince the United States of its stability in order to obtain a loan. Franco has become very confident since the weeks after V-E Day, when it was thought that he had lost together with Hitler. The Germans did as they liked in Madrid during the war, and everyone was therefore greatly surprised that Franco was allowed to remain in power after their defeat. But Britain and the United States did not stop selling him the gasoline without which his army, estimated at seven hundred thousand men, would have been paralyzed. And now, with the air of future allies, Spanish fascists tell you that no other country on the continent is so safe and convenient a base for the coming war with Russia. France and Italy are, or soon will be, communist. Spain is a strategic center owing to Gibráltar, and Franco’s reliability as an old fighter against communism is appreciated by America. Besides, everybody knows what magnificent soldiers the Spanish are. It is curious how much national pride is mingled with the cynicism of the people who tell you this. Everyone, whether communist or socialist, has a touch of this pride, and fascists and socialists alike joke explosively about the Italian disaster at Guadalajara: “The order was ‘a la bayoneta,’ and they thought it was ‘a la camimeta’”—“To the trucks!” instead of “Bayonet charge!”
There is, judging from the number of political arrests and the frequency and violence of the attacks in the press on Prieto and other exiled leaders, a great deal of underground activity. Several republicans told me that between November 1946 and April 1947, ten thousand people were imprisoned. CNT, UGT, and communist newspapers circulate in Madrid and other large cities, but there is little organized resistance except in isolated mountain districts in the north and in Andalusia. From abroad, both the socialists and the communists claimed leadership in the short Asturian coal strike, which occurred in May 1947, but little is actually known about it. Many socialists and republicans admit that the communist underground is growing, mainly because the international situation favors it. Of the Western countries, only France has boycotted Franco, and it is believed that the border was closed by the French government as a concession to the communists. The victory of the Labour party did not change Britain’s policy, notwithstanding the pledges of support made by Attlee to the Loyalists when he visited Spain during the civil war as his party’s representative.
Alcalá de Henares, where I saw one of the political trials, is an ancient, decayed town, the birthplace of Cervantes and, in the fifteenth century, famous for its university. Ten men, tramway employees from Cuatro Caminos charged with distributing the communist paper Mundo Obren, were the defendants. I was told by the son of one of them that they had been arrested sixteen months before. Such trials are theoretically public, but they are never announced; embassies and the foreign press are notified by the underground or by relatives of the accused. I came with one of the embassy secretaries, in a resplendent green embassy car before which soldiers and Guardia Civil gave way in the antique streets. Diplomáticos, we went unchallenged past the sentries and under rifles up the staircase into the long hall of the courtroom. It was lined with guardias and their machine guns. We sat down at the rear among the families of the accused.
The court was a tribunal of officers, for members of illegal political parties are in the category of criminals endangering public safety and come under the army’s jurisdiction. Looking toward the narrow windows, we could see only dimly. The prisoners were on benches, with their backs turned to us. The members of the tribunal had the light behind them, and their faces, too, were obscure. In profile at either side of the room were the prosecutor and the officer appointed for the defense. Boots and scabbards shone under the tables.
A clerk hurriedly reads the depositions of the ten. On such and such a night, Fulano de Tal met another conspirator in such and such a place and received or handed over money, instructions, papers. One by one the accused, called on by court or prosecutor, rise and acknowledge the confessions. Only one balks at a detail. He does not recall it. He is ordered to look at the signature of the deposition. Is it his? It is, but he cannot remember making the statement in point. Again, more impatiently, does he recognize the signature as his own? He does. Obviously, then, the statement is his. He is ordered to sit, and he stiffly obeys. All the prisoners with the exception of two elderly men rise and stand with a military bearing, infected by the manner of the tribunal. To see them play the soldierly game and stand like hombres honrados to verify confessions extracted, everyone knows, in the cellars of the Seguridad affects me painfully, like the injection of a depressant that thickens the heartbeat. No doubt it is very castizo, purely and essentially Spanish, that the prisoners should conduct themselves like captives in an honorable war, and probably it also sustains them to stand at attention, but I have a horror of this game as I do of the commandante’s bouncing and pivoting game in the pension, his peevish chivalry.
Each of the prisoners answers questions. The defense does not cross-examine them, no evidence is introduced, and there are no witnesses. You become aware, when the prosecutor stands up, of his large hands and powerful body; they give an effect of incongruity to the meticulousness of his uniform. He makes a neat prosecutor’s packet of the depositions: “It is admitted … it is admitted … according to the statements of Fulano de Tal …” Not until he concludes does he become bullish and exhortatory. He puts forth his strong voice suddenly. In cold blood, lifting up his chest, he begins to thunder that crimes “in a foreign spirit” against a whole people cannot be pardoned, and he asks that the leader of the ten be given a twelve-year sentence and the rest four years each. W. whispers that this is relatively lenient. Then the defense lawyer reads a short statement to the effect that in the Christian democracy of the Caudillo’s government there is room for differences of opinion when the expression of those differences is temperate. These words cause a sighing stir in the gloomy end of the room where the families sit. The prosecutor speaks for another half hour in reply, his showmanship at times becoming perfunctory. This is a very minor trial. He towers before the window in the clear morning light of Castile and makes his last summation, reads from notes, and repeats his demand for twelve years and four. The time served awaiting trial does not count. The president of the tribunal now asks each of the prisoners in turn whether he has anything to sa
y before sentence is passed. Six do not. The seventh, however, the leader of the ten, starts to speak; the president says loudly, “Cállese!”—“Shut up!” The prisoner persisting, he rises and shouts, “Cállese!” startling everyone. “Nada de la política! Sit down!” He sits. “Stand up!” The prisonerrises. “You have been heard on the evidence. Nothing else is relevant. There will be no politics here. Be seated.” There is no other disturbance. The trial is over, and we file down under the guns with the silent relatives. I see the grieving face of a boy on the stairs, and I talk to him. His father is one of those who received four years. Will he be allowed to see him? He does not know; since the arrest he had not seen him till this morning. He is now the eldest at home. There was an older brother, but he disappeared in the last days of the war. He has another brother, eight years old, and two sisters. “How do you live?” I ask; he does not reply. Thin and tall, he stands pigeon-toed beside me on the street, drawing his long hands out of his pockets and thrusting them back. His face is narrow, and his soft eyes seem almost without whites: all center. I make a low-voiced comment on the barbarousness of the trial. W. has meanwhile taken down the names of the condemned for his report and wants to leave, so I say goodbye, and we get into the car.