20
DISASTROUS TWILIGHT
I
One of the sights of Madrid about which Lanny had been hearing since his youth was the great Museo del Prado. Here were some twenty-five hundred paintings assembled under one eighteenth-century roof by successive kings of Spain. It was not merely a Spanish but a European collection: Murillo, El Greco, and Velasquez, each with a Salon of his own; Goya with a Rotunda; van Dyck and Rubens with a Long Gallery; Raphael and Correggio, Titian and Tintoretto, each with his Cabinet.
One would not really know the vigor and fire of Velasquez until one came here; for this Salon and the entrance halls leading to it contained more than half the total of his works, beginning with his youth and ending with his death. Here were portraits, landscapes, and historical subjects, religious and mythological subjects—did he in his secret heart distinguish between these latter? Here was his Adoration of the Magi, a conventional religious scene; here also his Forge of Vulcan, in which a heavenly messenger comes to the ancient Greek smiths. It is supposed to be Apollo telling them about the infidelity of Aphrodite; but Lanny preferred to say that the god of light was asking them to cease from the forging of deadly weapons. Lanny himself would have been willing to take up the worship of the “Far-darter,” if only he would have promised such a consummation.
And then Los Borrachos, the peasants having a bacchic festival, worshiping a god whom Lanny had never favored. And the famous portrait of the royal princess with her ladies in waiting, and Velasquez himself visible in a mirror, painting the picture. Also The Surrender of Breda, historical painting of the end of a battle of which Lanny had never before heard. The names of the princes meant nothing to him, but he observed that they behaved to each other with a sort of courtesy which the world had forgotten. In those days fighting had been a game, and the victors thanked the vanquished for fine competition; but in these modern days it was carried on with deadly hatred amid poison-gas clouds of the mind.
Also, Goya, painter out of love with his time. He was represented here by many portraits, among them King Charles IV and His Family. An extraordinary thing was to see degeneracy of the human body, and realize how it was accompanied by degeneracy of the intellect. This royal family had been caricatured in the most cruel and bitter way—and yet they had paid for it and liked it! This one painting revealed more about Royal Spain than all the palaces which Lanny had visited.
And then the gentle Murillo, with his lovely dreams of heavenly beings. These were the images which the black-veiled women carried in their hearts on their way to the cathedral in Seville, the painter’s home; Lanny was content to forget for a while the degradation of religion and remember that a mother and child were not changed because a painter had put yellow circles over the tops of their heads. Nor did it trouble him that in so many cases the woman had been the painter’s mistress, for Lanny’s own mother had played that role with success during most of his childhood.
These hours in the Prado, among the most memorable of Lanny’s life, he passed in the company of tourists, a large proportion of them Americans, wandering through the long rooms and gazing in wonder real or simulated. For the most part they were silent, but two ladies with some sort of Middle Western accent brought a smile to the face of an expert, a smile which lasted him a long while. One had a catalogue in her hand and was studying it with a worried expression. “Where is the Oney?” she asked her companion. “Somebody told me to be sure and see an unfinished Virgin and Child by Oney, but I don’t find it in the catalogue.”
“Oney?” repeated the other. “Are you sure you’ve got the name right?”
“I wrote it down,” was the reply. “George O-n-e-y. How else could it be spelled?”
Lanny thought it the part of kindness to come to the rescue. “Pardon me, madam,” he said. “Giorgione is one name in Italian, and it is that way in the catalogue.”
“Oh, thank you, thank you!” stammered the lady, and moved on quickly to hide her confusion.
II
What Raoul desired to visit was the new and still unfinished University City—Ciudad Universitaria de Madrid. It stood at the northwestern approaches to the capital, a tract of a thousand acres on level or terraced land, with the blue Sierras for a background and the great Escorial as part of the landscape. Thus the pest and future of Spain confronted each other. The Escorial had been the religious center of the court, at once a church and a palace, built by the bigoted and cruel Philip II, and still the focal point of reaction; while the new university was rapidly making itself the center of scientific progress, and of free literature and the arts. Impossible to keep modern thought out of it; impossible to keep modern thought out of any part of the earth where there were telephones, printing-presses, radio, and other means of spreading knowledge to mankind.
Embarrassing to a Marxist to have to admit that this magnificent conception was attributable to the hated Alfonso XIII of the jimber-jaw and the odious way of life. But it was true that he had been its promoter, and had proceeded to raise the funds by an original and characteristic device—a national lottery. Every spring the people of Spain were invited to purchase fifty-five thousand tickets valued at one thousand pesetas each; they were sold in small fractions amid great excitement, and it was estimated that in the course of ten years the profits would provide the entire cost of the higher intellectual life of the Spanish people.
Lanny drove his friend out to the grounds. Eight or ten of the buildings had been completed; the most urgently needed, the centers of medicine and pharmacy, having been started first. No imitation Gothic, such as you would find too often in America, but modern structures adapted to the work of scientists. The building of the Faculty of Letters, recently finished, had cost three million dollars; it was built on three sides of a square, and attached to the rear facade was a circular auditorium. Raoul became enraptured over the interior of this structure. It was empty in summer, but his mind’s eye saw it packed with young men and women, absorbing sound knowledge and constructive ideals. The forces generated here would spread over the whole nation and scatter the night of superstition and reaction; the light of humanity and justice would penetrate to the darkest corners of old Spain. So Raoul dreamed, and Lanny proved once more that he possessed no clairvoyant gifts; he strolled through one fine structure after another and still heard no thunders of artillery, no crash of falling walls, no death-cries of young Socialists or Communists, democrats or liberals.
III
As when a summer thunderstorm is gathering, and black clouds form over the horizon, and rise higher, rolling like giant wheels in the sky, throwing out wisps and streamers and dropping long gray curtains of rain; gradually they spread, and the blue sky is blotted out, the rumble of the thunder grows louder and more menacing, and the lances of lightning stab into the earth; men cease their work and stand gazing upward with troubled thoughts, and the birds are hushed, thinking perhaps that night is coming, or perhaps the end of the bird-world: so it was in the capital city of Spain in that second week of July 1936.
One of the consequences of paying a hundred and fifty pesetas a day for your hotel suite was that you could have a radio for the asking. Lanny had one, and he and his friend would sit and listen to what the democratic government of Spain wished its people to know. There was a long building strike, and the government very much wished the strikers to return to work, because they were only playing into the hands of reactionaries who maintained that the people were incapable of self-government and self-restraint. There was another station belonging to the Marxist unions, and this advised the workers to stand firm, because it was the only way to compel the bourgeois government to act against the reactionaries. This conflct of opinion must have been confusing to the ordinary Madrileno.
There came the news that the Falangistos in Valencia had seized the radio station, having got their dates mixed. They proceeded to announce the counter-revolution ahead of time, and then, discovering their error, they were embarrassed, and retired. Raoul said: �
��Surely that will wake up the government!” But apparently it wasn’t going to.
Late one night, coming in from a concert, the travelers turned the dial and heard the news that Jose Castillo, commander of a group of police guards who had been selected for their reliability, had been murdered; he had gone for a stroll on the street with his wife, and the Fascist gangsters had shot him in the back. This crime was denounced over the radio, and both the hearers knew what fury it would awaken in the hearts of the workers. Once more Raoul said: “Now they must act!”
All. Madrid waited for them to act next day. The conspiracy had been proved many times over, and proved by deeds as well as by words. Everybody knew who had murdered Castillo—except those heads of the government who believed in democracy and peace, in civil liberties and freedom of speech, so ardently that they couldn’t make any move against the sworn enemies of these blessings.
Still graver news that night. Castillo’s guards had gone to the Fascist headquarters and carried away the Fascist leader in Madrid, Calvo Sotelo by name, and shot him to death. An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth is an old formula, known in Spain long before the Christian religion arrived there. Raoul said that it did not apply to the class struggle. “They have a right to kill us, but we have no right to kill them. You will see what a difference it makes.”
And it did, in very truth. Sotelo and others of his sort had shot hundreds of workers and peasants all over Spain, and that had not counted with bourgeois newspapers at home or abroad. But here was a man of prominence, a member of the ruling classes, the man who was to have been made Presidente when the coup d’etat succeeded; and so this was murder, “most foul, strange, and unnatural.” Next day in the Cortes the Fascist political leader, Gil Robles, arose and said: “His blood is on the heads of those people who support the Popular Front. The day is not far off when the violence you have unleashed will turn back on you.” After that it was in order for the counter-revolution to be launched.
IV
Lanny had made all his plans to leave Madrid the next morning. Picture deals have to be put through promptly, before one party or the other has a change of mind. He had several under way, with members of the wealthy classes who thought they could get their art works shipped out of Spain in spite of government decrees. The two travelers had their bags and bundles of linens stowed in the car, and set out on the road to Barcelona.
Stopping to see Alcala de Henares, the birthplace of Cervantes, who now had the honor of having the town’s best hotel named after him. Stopping at Guadalajara to look at the Palacio, now an orphanage. Another town where Lanny might have had clairvoyant shudders, but didn’t! Most of the time his thoughts were on the radio in his car; a delightful invention, whereby one could travel and still be at home, or wherever one wished to be. The Fascists in Madrid had announced a state funeral for their hero, but it had been forbidden. An outrageous violation of civil liberties, declared a gentleman in the little cafe where the travelers ate lunch.
Then a town called Calatayud, made all of brown clay from its crumbling hills, in which many of the people had dug themselves caves. Here the travelers turned off the highway, for in more distant hills lay that village where Raoul had been born and to which he had been promised a visit. He had written his older brother, saying that he was coming, and had received a badly spelled reply—for learning in the Palma family was not congenital, but had to be acquired, so Raoul said. The brother, back from the Argentine, called himself a sindicalisto, and was trying to organize a group of very poor peasants into a co-operative, so that they could dam a small stream, first for irrigation and then for power and light.
The car crept along on a road which was not much more than a muletrack. Lanny had seen much poverty here and elsewhere, but never more gaunt and haggard humans than he found in this lonely valley in the naked hills of Aragon, bitter cold in winter and blazing hot in summer. “Forgotten by the Holy Trinity and the Blessed Virgin and remembered only by the tax-collector,” said Esteban Palma; a sturdy fellow, swarthy as an Arab, and generously covered with curly black hair. He had let it grow on his face and had a magnificent bush; when his brother commented on it he sang an old Andalusian song about “whiskers such as have not been seen on earth since those of Jesus Christ.” No irreverence intended, it was Spanish naivete; they really believed in their many gods and all the gods’ physical details.
Esteban was a great person to these forgotten patanes; he had been a sailor and visited most of the ports of the world; whatever he told them was gospel. Now he had promised that an American millionaire straight out of the cinema was coming to visit them in a motor-car that went like the wind and was upholstered inside like a palacio real. The peasants had seen old Ford cars when they went to market, and few of them but had been to a cinema at least once. Now they gathered and stared as if it had been one of those chariots that used to come down from the skies with passengers robed in light. But at the same time they did not forget their dignity; they stood erect and seemed to be saying: “It is true that we are in rags but we are not to be mocked or humiliated.”
Raoul remembered some of them, the grown-up boys with whom he had played. They exchanged reminiscences, and the visitors strolled about looking at the sights. Later they went to the low dark hut without glass which Esteban called home, and ate dry hard bread, dried olives, cheese, and such herbs as had not been scratched up by a neighbor’s chickens. One of the improvements of which the co-operative mind was dreaming was an enclosure in which all the community chickens could scratch one another. Esteban had no delusions about the human chickens, he said; they would scratch one another, too—but they might be taught better, and now was the time, while Spain was on the move into the modern world.
He announced to the patanes the presence of a miracle. The Senor americano possessed one of those wonder-boxes whereby you could hear voices speaking in Madrid and even in Barcelona. The Senor would be graciously pleased to exhibit its powers; so all the children, and such men and women as were not at work in the fields, gathered round and listened to spot news from the gathering storm of civil war: a government spokesman announcing that the Cortes had been suspended and appealing to the populace to remain quiet and have confidence in the authorities. After the radio was turned off, Esteban made a speech, explaining why the landlords and money-lenders wanted to destroy the people’s government, and why the workers and peasants must be prepared to defend it with their lives. The determination of this audience was made manifest, but Lanny and Raoul could not see with what weapons these ill-nourished victims of land-erosion were going to meet planes and machine guns brought from Italy and Germany with the money of Juan March and the Duque de Alba.
V
Raoul had said: “Esteban will invite us to spend the night, but if you do you will be devoured by fleas.” So Lanny explained that he was pressed for time and traveled by night as well as by day. He presented to the hairy ex-sailor a couple of hundred-peseta notes to be used for the benefit of the cooperative, and the announcement of this brought the first enthusiasm upon the faces of these depressed countrymen. The pair departed in a blaze of glory, and Lanny felt that he had learned more about Spain in this village than in any of the great cities.
They started down the muletrack, with twilight falling and headlights causing ruts and gullies to stand out like black canyons across the road. They had to crawl along, and had not got very far when they heard loud shots and the pounding of hoofs behind them. Lanny had laid his Budd automatic on the seat between him and his fellow-passenger, and now as he stopped the car he put his hand upon it. But it was a quite harmless hold-up; a peasant fellow, a criado in worn and patched clothing, riding a tall and bony mule which evidently had been pushed hard, for it was white with lather and breathing like the bellows of a forge. “Detengarse Vd., Senores!” the man had been shouting, and now: “Perdone Vd.!”—for no matter how ragged, he would be polite.
He made a speech, and Lanny, who had been picking up words rapidly
, heard pintura several times, and also the name of mi amo, el Senor Don Pedro Ruiz Bustamente y Bastida, who lived somewhere in this neighborhood and who had learned that the gentilhombre americano was coming for a visit and had sent his servant to invite him to inspect the pintura which he, Don Pedro Ruiz Bustanmente y Bastida, possessed, and which the Senor americano might like to purchase and take away with him; pintura esplendida, declared the messenger, and explained that he had ridden to the village, and finding the Senores had already departed, had come as rapidly as a mulo perezoso could be driven.
All this Raoul translated; and Lanny said: “Ask him who painted the pintura.” But the criado, or man-servant, shook his head; not even the learned Don Pedro Ruiz Bustamente y Bastida knew that; but it was a pintura mucha magnifica, gran—the messenger stretched his arms wide. It was a portrait of Don Pedro’s ancestor, the great Comendador Humfredo Fernando Bustamente y Bastida.
Lanny asked of his friend: “What do you suppose are the chances of their having a worthwhile painting?”
“It might be anything,” Raoul replied. “These valleys were fertile once upon a time, and this is an old family which I knew about in childhood. Their mansion may be falling into ruins, but that wouldn’t hurt a painting.”
Wide Is the Gate (The Lanny Budd Novels) Page 48