Display, a certain extravagance of state, is—by the continual paradox of Spanish life—loved by this frugal and sober people. The question has been gone into thoroughly by Galdós, the Spanish Balzac, as he is called, and moralist historian of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. The moral basis of life in Madrid has been thoroughly described by this moralist who soaked himself in the life of all classes, and in spite of the social changes he is still a valuable guide. Societies do not change as fast as they like to think they do from generation to generation. Galdós went into the question of social state and display in his novel called La de Bringas and it is concerned with a family that spends everything on social position. In the golden age when the treasure was brought back from the Indies, in the time of Goya, when the maja and the majo wore their fantastic clothes, in the gorgeous uniforms of the various police forces which the Spaniard cannot do without, one can trace the phases of the Spanish extravagance.
In the past twenty-five years, and especially under the Franco régime, Madrid has gone in for architectural display. It now belongs to the exuberant group of southern cities, like Barcelona, Genoa, and Milan. The outburst has been stimulated by Fascist megalomania and bad taste, but it had started long before Franco. Like ambitious provincials, the Spaniards have gone in, architecturally, for the façade of modernity. Spain is a poor country which has been ruined by civil war and years of drought and famine. It has little industry, and in despair, after the Civil War, the peasants have left the land in tens of thousands to go into the cities. The population has enormously increased, which delights the chauvinists of the present régime, but the means of supporting this new huge population have not grown with it. (I saw this year a village in the south from which seven-eighths of the population had gone, and the roofs of its empty houses had fallen in, and outside all the big towns are slums of temporary shacks, built of flattened tins. The government does all it can to stop this swarming in, and sends the Civil Guards to burn down these horrible places, but they soon spring up again.) Wages are very low, food is still very dear, the working population is living on a much lower standard than existed twenty years ago. The ordinary labourers’ wages vary from twelve to seventeen pesetas a day and of this higher wage a car-park attendant said to me dryly: “It is a wage on which one cannot live, but one may die with dignity on it.” The aim of General Franco’s rebellion was to crush the revolutionary movement which had risen during the slump of the thirties among the Spanish poor, and to meet their demands, after disbanding their political and trade-union organizations, by the “vertical corporations” on the Italian Fascist model. Economic conditions have been so bad, owing to war and drought, that one cannot tell whether this system works as a system or has been broken into a possible way of living by Spanish character. But these corporations are so organized that on no level can the worker have an independent, not to mention a decisive or powerful, voice. The position of some workers has improved where they were unorganized before—domestic servants are better off—and there are social services, like free medical attention and insurance, which did not exist before. Madrid is cynical about all this. Everyone delights in pointing out the fatal Spanish capacity for producing the perfect blueprint, which is never put into operation. Again—“We obey but we do not fulfil.” The reform is not organic. It is imposed from above on the Spanish people. It is a form of display. Talk about it to any pragmatic Spanish workman. He answers in two dry sentences: “We are silenced. Look at my wages.” If a foreigner asks the question, he soon finds himself the embarrassed centre of a protest meeting. And the law prohibits political discussions.
The megalomaniac building has a bearing on this. It is the outlet of southern European régimes where the small middle class cannot face social problems. Certainly Franco has built workers’ colonies and flats, rebuilt villages destroyed in the war, and, since the Spaniards are excellent domestic builders, these have been admirably done. Spanish bad taste comes out in public buildings, where there is money to burn. Just outside Madrid there is a suburb which has been called New Moscow and looks like it. The display-building of dictatorship is in the huge, ugly public monuments, the skyscrapers, the pretentious squares and blocks of government offices—these are nearly all unfinished, and no work has been done on them for years, so that they have not the merit of providing employment any more. The money has run out and one dare not consider how much has gone down the drain of political and contractual rewards. With the sparkling cynicism of his city the Madrileño repeats the proverb: Las cosas de palacio van d’ espacio and enjoys the pun; palace affairs drag on.
As I have said, this architectural change has really been creeping on for a long time in Madrid. It began in what now (as one looks back upon it) must have been the peace and abundance of the first years of the century and in the time when Spain filled its pockets as a neutral in the First World War. Madrid first imitated Paris. Those dough-like balconies of the latest flats were copied from the Champ de Mars and Passy. The architectural beauty of Madrid lay in the seventeenth-century quarter, in the stately Plaza Mayor (now a semi-slum), in the beautiful, grave Ayuntamiento; after that in the sad, sedate, middle-class nineteenth-century air. The Spaniards had a certain grace in being out of date and behind the times. It was a sign of respectability, and this gave Madrid a firm Victorian charm which was in keeping with the easy, old-fashioned notions of its people. The chief cafés were comfortable and rather worn. The spittoon—the national grail of the period—was everywhere. One could walk down corridors of spittoons. The cafés were packed with men until three or four in the morning; respectable women did not often go to them, though here and there one might see a family. Even by the early thirties it was not common to see respectable women in cafés; foreign women were pitied for their social ignorance or “nervous” emancipation in going to them. In that old Madrid up to the thirties one was struck by the large number of priests in the middle of the city, huge amiable men in shabby hats, and smoking cigars as they strolled up and down—whereas now, no doubt because the Church is tactfully keeping their great number out of sight, there are very few. The cabinet minister used to walk with his court of secretaries and sycophants, the most favoured walking next to the great man, who was commonly very fat. Spanish writers used to attack their rulers for being so public and available and having no regard for the reserves of office. The great generals would have their court. They would sit in the cafés with the courtesan of the moment. One would admire the double chins of the rich or powerful and well-fed, the remarkable bellies of the sad gluttons carrying their burden before them with an air of martyrdom.
In this period Madrid produced—and it still produces—a large number of what can only be called single-purpose men and Oblomovs. A number of these might have the occupation of remaining in bed all day and would rise at six merely to fulfil the function of walking; others were devoted chiefty to sleep—I remember a pleasant Marquis, a very intelligent man, who must have been the aesthete of sleep, the Walter Pater of the long torpid moment. Another I remember was a gambler, another a pursuer of women; many were full-time talkers. Some sat alone. These were their occupations, their entire life. In one Andalusian town there was a man called “the night-husband,” an unhappy man who had two illegitimate families besides his own—an Andalusian habit that is a throwback to the harem system copied from the Moors—and who was therefore known “to be unable to be about in the daytime.” Others were journalists who went to an office to talk, but who never wrote; many were contact men, who walked the streets in order to scrape acquaintance and hope for a commission to turn up. A large number of civil servants notoriously appeared at their offices only on pay day. These single-purpose men were not necessarily rich. They had some small rent, perhaps, and, having the Spanish instinct for frugal living and for finding the basic minimum of human need and effort, could live on that or perhaps on the subvention of an unprotesting relative. In every family there seemed to be one phenomenal man whose single func
tion it unluckily was to work day and night, often at two or three different professions, so that he might be a solicitor for one part of the day, a civil servant at some other or an agent for a company, and in the evenings a journalist and a teacher. It was he who supported, without complaint, a large family of his own and a number of relations whose special gift happened to be the one of doing without regular employment. And even these workers had found a minimum; they had discovered quite naturally how to live on a minimum of pleasure.
Franco’s victory has given a longer lease to the single-purpose man, and in countries where the middle class is relatively small, it is hard and aggressive in self-defence. Still the outward changes in twenty-four years are enormous. That preposterous South American street still called the Gran Vía, though it has been renamed Avenida José Antonio after Primo de Rivera’s son, the Falangist leader who was shot in one of the earliest vengeances of the Civil War, has been extended and completed. Instead of the old Victorian cafés, new marbled bars of luxury and pretence have been built. The famous jam of yellow trams, moving at a quarter of a mile an hour and stuck fast between the Puerta del Sol and the Post Office, has gone. The trams are blue, the traffic moves fast. The super-cinema has arrived, with its huge melodramatic posters; the radios bawl out their flamenco songs; in the hot weather the canned voices from the screen of the open-air cinemas can be heard shouting two or three streets away, and since the cinemas go on till nearly two in the morning, no one who lives near can sleep.
Intellectual life is certainly in eclipse—and literary society is so alive with malicious rumour and scandal that one cannot do more than crudely suggest the obvious reasons: political and ecclesiastical censorship. The former is not considered as harmful as one would suppose, because Spain is politically tired out; the clerical censorship is another matter. It is intensely disliked, for it is as gross as the censorship in Eire. Writers have told me that the text of the classics and of recent writers like Galdós and Valle-Inclán has been tampered with. I do not know whether this is so, but it is hard to get necessary books in Spain. I know that the foreign interest in Galdós has taken booksellers by surprise: French tourists and students cleared his works from the bookshops in Barcelona. A young Spanish novelist—who was unable to publish his last book in Spain and lost his job in the Censor’s office—a favourite bread-and-butter occupation for writers—defined the intellectual’s case by raising his glass “To the Pope’s intentions.”
In one sense, the present intellectual sterility in Spain is due to the swing of the pendulum. Between 1898 and the 1930’s, Spanish literature was written by a brilliant school of inquirers and pessimists, two of whom—Unamuno and Ortega y Gasset—came to have European reputations. In education there was Giner de los Ríos, and Cossío, the authority on Greco; in science Cajal; in music Falla; in poetry the Machados and Lorca. Benavente, the dramatist, won the Nobel Prize; Baroja, Ayala, and several others were very good novelists. There was Azorín, the exquisite and learned essayist. To these must be added the political writers Araquistain, who became a Marxist, Maeztu—who was executed—who became fascist. In the twenties and thirties there was intellectual excitement in Madrid, and Spanish history might have turned out differently if Primo de Rivera (a benevolent and practical despot) had been able to obtain the support of the intellectual movement. He could not, because he was in the hands of the two forces the intellectuals always opposed: the Army and the Church. The renaissance simply exhausted itself. Its leaders are old or dead or in exile.
A very large number of the best liberal or independent minds were driven for a long time and even permanently out of Spain by the Civil War. The educated classes left because they hated the two main factions. General Franco has now left it open for his opponents to return without molestation, and some have done so; but most of them remain in France, England, and South America. These exiles are often embittered, for they have seen the work of a whole generation of educators, reformers, men of science, and artists destroyed first, and superseded. And, as always happens when exile is long enough, the Spanish exiles are either out of touch or they have struck roots elsewhere. Most of them are intellectuals, and are not rich; how would they live if they returned? Another party or another generation has stepped into their shoes. In politics, the exiled not only are out of touch with what is really going on inside Spain, but are incurably divided among themselves, quarrelling over the obvious cause of their defeat: the intolerance and fanatical quarrels of the Left-wing sects. In politics the exiles, generally, are more extreme and dated than people of the same complexion inside Spain. These wish to forget the Civil War and its appalling personal losses; the business of surviving the terrible time after the Civil War, of keeping their heads above water, of getting enough to eat, has bewildered and exhausted them, whereas the exiles are fixed in the past. Beyond the frontier is Spanish pride, inside the frontier is Spanish compliance and the dread of going through it all again. Scepticism has come in:
“I see no difference between Franco and communism,” says the Left-wing hotel proprietor—nothing more absurd than to imagine the Left or Reds consisted only of the poor and propertyless.
“I was jailed by Franco,” said a publisher, “and I hate the present régime, yet perhaps, after all, things have turned out better than we thought they would.”
“After Franco?”
“We have shown ourselves to be barbarians, fanatics, and extremists: we must dread the future.”
All they know is that the Civil War was a revolution that has made a complete break between the generations.
The Gran Vía and the Castellana (the wide avenue which runs from the ugly Post Office to the outskirts of the city, where the road to France begins) are lined with soldiers in khaki and German-style steel helmets They look as though they had slept all night in their rumpled uniforms, which were made in the cheap factories of Catalonia, and they stand slack, sunburned, apathetic, and with a kind of homely individual rebelliousness, the very opposite of a military machine.
“What a lot! The poor mugs,” mocks the taxi-driver, a man of an older generation, as one drives by. “Standing there like sticks. Do this! Do that! Doing what the officers tell them. We never took any notice of any officers in my time.” He goes on shouting with laughter all down the line as we drive by and ends up with some old soldier story about hiding a platoon in the cook-house. All this is the usual ridicule of Madrid, the old Sancho Panza coming out, the old hatred of discipline; all the same, the spirit of working-class Madrid is deeply anti-Franco. In the good regiments there is a better turn-out than this, in imitation of the Germans, but generally the Spanish Army looks baffled, hopeful rather than efficient. These soldiers must be very different from the former highly trained Spanish infantry of the time of Charles V, but we remember that the Republican Spaniards made short work of the Italians in the Civil War, which indicates what they can do when they are well led.
Since the Napoleonic Wars the Spaniards have become a nation of guerrilla fighters—they invented the word for this kind of fighting—and perhaps in this they reverted to the traditional methods of warfare which they had employed in the reconquest of Spain from the Moors. The fighting in the Civil War was sharp—though the casualties in the field were far lower than the loss of life by civilian massacre, execution, and murder—and when one considers that one side (the Franco side) had the enormous advantage of war material from Germany and Italy, the length of the war indicates the stubbornness of Spanish fighting even when it was ill-matched. It is true that the Republican side was stiffened by foreign battalions and Russian advisers and that the war was also prolonged by the incurable quarrels on the Republican side and the incompetence on the side of Franco; but the unyielding quality of the fighting is obvious in all accounts.
The taxi-driver belonged to the old Spanish Army, the poor, ill-fed, ill-armed hungry lot who were not so healthy-looking as these men are. He was not old enough to have belonged to the generation which had known the c
atastrophe of Annual in Morocco, when a whole army was wiped out in 1921 by the Moors of Abdel Krim. The Spanish commanding officer committed suicide in the field in that disaster, which was caused by the grossest corruption in the higher ranks of the Army. (Up to the time of the Republic there were nine hundred generals.) Alfonso XIII had been the driving force behind the Moroccan campaign, and he had always relied upon the Army because it was more stable than the civilian parties; he managed to stave off the consequences of Annual by putting in Primo de Rivera as a dictator, but by 1931 civilian Spain had had enough, and the King wisely went.
The troops line the Castellana and the Gran Via because General Franco is driving by. One sees the amiable little fat man standing up in his car, trim, dignified, and homely. The crowd is pretty considerable. It loves to see his Moorish cavalry, though there must be many who had other feelings about the Moors, especially in Madrid. The people are waving to the only surviving fascist dictator in western Europe, the one friend and ally of Hitler and Mussolini to survive in a world utterly hostile to him. He is the ghost of that old guilty fear of Hitler and Mussolini which paralysed French, English, American, and Russian politics in the thirties, for without the help of arms and technicians and men from the Axis powers Franco would not have won the Civil War. Indeed, after the first set-back before Madrid (indeed, long before that, when it was obvious that Spain was divided in two) he would have been the usual Spanish general who makes a coup d’état and fails. There would have been no mass massacres, no secret and murderous tribunals, no famine and destruction. Would there have been a Red revolution, as the propaganda of General Franco has always asserted? Who can tell? A counter coup d’état by a “liberal” general seems just as likely; the material aid of the Russians was small compared with what was at once received by the servant of Mussolini and Hitler—the bombing of Guernica, the bombardment of the refugees from Málaga to Almería, were German military exercises.
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