Iberia (102 page)

 

‘Were the priests who rioted also free of politics?’

 

‘Quite. If you read the stories carefully you saw that the reason
the priests marched in defiance of police orders was to show their
support for us students. That’s all it was. On the other hand, the
police had begun to resent the freedom with which young priests
were speaking out on social problems, so I suppose you’d call that
politics. When the government gave the word “Beat up those
damned priests,” the police did it with real brutality. I was there,
marching behind the priests, and it would have been just as easy
for the police to beat us up but they were gunning for the priests
and they waded in dreadfully. It was very bad to see. A priest
would fall down and the police would jump on him and club him.
It was the natural hatred for the priest in black showing itself in
a new form.’

 

‘How do the students feel about the Church?’

 

On that one Pau Lluis bit his cheeks for a long time. ‘We were
pleased that the priests marched in our defense. It was a ray of
hope. Maybe the Church is going to abandon the big families and
the army and finally help the people. Certainly the young priests
know that this is what it should do.’

 

‘The Church as a whole?’

 

‘I know only Cataluña. Here there’s a possibility, but I suppose
you know that once again, when our bishopric became vacant,
they refused to appoint a Catalan and brought in some fellow
from Astorga. I think the Madrid government fears the Catalan
church as much as it does the Catalan university.’

 

In the days when I knew Pau Lluis there was great agitation in
the Church. Seminarians marched out on strike, something
unheard of before. Junior priests signed manifestoes which they
carried in person to newspaper offices, so that even though we
were unable to find out what was being protested, we know that
protests of a vital nature were being made. Other priests of high
rank circulated petitions demanding that the precepts of Pope
John XXIII be followed in reforming the Spanish clergy. And in
a small city not far from Barcelona, one priest who was out-spoken
in his demand for a general reform of the Church was arrested
and publicly charged with having had immoral relations with a
female parishioner in the back seat of an automobile. No one I
met could recall ever before having heard of a public charge of
this nature. It seemed to a group of Americans, some of them
Catholic, who followed the turmoil, as if ‘the young priests had
matriculated at Berkeley.’

 

Pau Lluis was an unusual student in that he spoke no foreign
language; we conducted our conversations in Spanish, and when
we encountered a subject for which my Spanish did not suffice
we sought out translators, and one Saturday afternoon while
traveling out into the countryside to visit the lodgings of the
student from England, I became involved in an experience which
quite startled me. We were riding in one of Spain’s good trains
and the coach was crowded with a group of schoolgirls heading
for a weekend camping trip, accompanied by four young,
attractive nuns. After a preliminary half-hour of squealing as we
pulled out of Barcelona, the girls subsided into informal group
singing. ‘My Bonnie Lies Over the Ocean’ and ‘Old Black Joe’
they dedicated to me. I think they next sang ‘Cielito Lindo,’ which
made their first three songs English, American and Mexican,
which was properly international for a group of Catalans. Then
they began a soft folk song, one of the best ever written; I have
often wondered why it has not been introduced to the United
States, for it seems to me to have everything a song of this type
requires. I could not believe that the girls of this Catholic school
were singing it, so I asked one of the nuns, ‘What’s the song?’

 

‘“Stinki Rass,”’ she said.

 

They were even singing it under its own name; in the United
States some school-board member would have insisted that new
words be substituted, for this was one of the great revolutionary
songs. ‘What do the words mean?’ I asked.

 

‘It’s a song of freedom,’ the nun said. ‘Stinki Rass was a man
who loved freedom.’

 

The girls were singing a Catalan version of ‘Stenka Razin,’ the
Volga folk song that speaks of the famous revolutionary who
defied the tsar and surrendered his head on the public chopping
block sometime around 1700. It was an unlikely song for Spain,
the apotheosis of revolt against tyranny, and I was not satisfied
that the girls knew what they were singing, so I made further
inquiry, and the same nun said, ‘Stinki Rass fought against the
tsar and was beheaded.’ When I asked why he was fighting, she
said, ‘For freedom.’

 

It was not the first time I had been perplexed by the
contradictions of Spanish censorship. A man was arrested for
spiriting Protestant Bibles into the country, but this Catholic
school was honoring Stenka Razin as freedom’s hero. In a Spanish
cinema house I saw an Italian motion picture about Benvenuto
Cellini in which Pope Paul IV was shown defending the Catholic
Church against the infamous troops of Spain, and periodically
one character or another reviled Spain and Carlos V; they were
the villains and were so specified, but the censor had not objected,
yet not long ago an American was thrown in jail for having spoken
disrespectfully of Spain.

 

I remember when I was visited in my hotel room in a northern
city by a newspaperman. He wanted to talk with someone from
the outside world and spent several hours telling me how
censorship operated in his field. ‘I have a friend in the French city
of Hendaye, and each month he crosses the bridge into Irún and
mails me the liberal journals from France.’ From a briefcase he
produced four or five magazines which were obviously more
valuable to him than food. ‘I know what’s going on in the world.
I’m at least as good a writer as you are. I’m a professional, and I
could write brilliant articles on what’s going to happen in the next
ten years, where the government’s making mistakes. Michener,
I know.’ He was close to having tears in his eyes as he translated
from the clandestine magazine a series of titles which had attracted
him: ‘De Gaulle and the Gold Standard.’‘Harold Wilson’s Four
Major Problems.’‘The Failure of Johnson’s Viet Nam Policy.’ He
tapped the magazines and said, ‘That’s what a man writes. What
do they make me write?’

 

He handed me a piece of paper on which, having anticipated
meeting with me, he had typed out the titles of his last three
articles: ‘?Existe el hombre abominable de las nieves?’ (Does the
Abominable Snowman Exist?), ‘El crimen en Chicago’ (Crime in
Chicago), and ‘?Es verdad que los ingleses aman Isabel Segunda?’
(Is It True That the English Love Elizabeth II?) He said that more
intellectual ability was being wasted in Spain than in any other
nation he knew, and he could foresee no end to it.

 

Pau Lluis and I debarked at a seaside resort well south of
Barcelona and walked over sand to a beach house where a group
of students waited to pepper me with questions. Like the
newspaperman of the north, they were as intelligent as those of
similar age in America. For a long time they spoke of nothing but
my country, and their knowledge of it was astonishing. They
wanted to know what role McNamara was playing in the
government and whether Bobby Kennedy would run for President
in 1968. They were, like all Europeans, especially interested in the
Report of the Warren Commission
and were unprepared to accept
it, but their rejection was not based on personal prejudice; they
had read of certain books contesting the
Report
and had been
influenced by them.

 

Finally my turn to ask questions came. I wanted to explore the
problem of how far politics intruded into the student riots, and
as soon as the subject was broached I found a willingness to talk
which quite surprised me. If students in Stalin’s Russia, Hitler’s
Germany or Mussolini’s Italy had spoken so openly of their
grievances, they would probably have been shot; I suppose that
in Franco’s Spain if I were to betray the individuals who talked
with me, they would also be in some kind of trouble, but of a
much lesser degree, because these students showed no hesitancy,
which they would have had to do with a stranger if their lives were
endangered.

 

‘Pau Lluis is right. This is not a political movement, essentially.
It’s an attempt to force choices now, before the big changes come
at Franco’s death.’ The speaker was a girl who looked as
un-revolutionary as a student could. She was quiet and obviously
middle-class, with an interest in social problems. It was her
opinion that the students and the young priests were trying to
impress the government with the fact that they must be taken
into account when the new Spain was formed. ‘We can’t have the
old sloppy university teaching. We won’t tolerate it.’ To hear her
and Pau Lluis one would have thought that Spain’s major problem
was improvement of the university.

 

A more radical young man, a would-be engineer, for the
students I met were enrolled in practical courses, with no poets
or philosophers intermixed, had a different opinion: ‘Politics has
had no part in launching these student riots. We’ve spent little
time discussing specific steps to be taken when the change comes.
I have no interest in politics, but of late I’ve seen that in the end
we shall have to become involved. We will want certain things,
just as the young priests do, and in the end the police will bang
us over the head, and we’ll be in politics.’

 

I asked what form this participation would take, and he said,
‘The students, the young priests, the young businessmen will say,
“The New Spain must have this kind of freedom,” and the Old
Spain will say, “Now you be still and we’ll make the decisions,”
and somebody will have to get banged on the head. It’ll be us,
and in the end we’ll have to align with labor and I suppose they’ll
have to send the army against us, and there we are!’

 

We pursued this for some minutes and there were those who
agreed, up to the point of army intervention. ‘There will be no
civil war,’ students like Pau Lluis believed. The engineer asked,
‘But if we are pushed too far?’ The students refused to say, ‘Then
there will be war.’ Instead they said, ‘No one wants a return of
1936.’

 

There was agreement, however, that I would see a good deal
more student agitation within the next year, and even before I
had reached home it had erupted in both Madrid and Barcelona.
The students also warned me that labor, having taken heart from
the example of the students, would begin to strike, and this too
happened as they had predicted. They also said that the
government, aware of these pressures, would liberalize the
constitution; they had seen reports of this in the
New York Times
but not in their local newspapers, and again they were right, for
shortly after, Generalísimo Franco announced a liberalization of
the form of government, although not much relaxation in actual
operation. In other words, the students understood rather well
what was happening.

 

There was heated discussion of a point on which I was
uninformed and whose intricacies I could not follow: the
government in Madrid had promulgated a fake student
organization with appointed representatives, ‘no better than the
labor syndicates,’ one of the engineers said, and the students were
determined to by-pass it and elect their own representatives.
Whereas politics in the abstract did not arouse them, this matter
of a union did, and I could anticipate the pragmatic steps whereby
they would escalate from university problems to national ones,
and I suppose that this was why the Madrid government had
cracked down so hard.

 

At the conclusion of the meeting Pau Lluis surprised me by
inviting me to his home, a comfortable apartment in the western
end of Barcelona, where his small, attractive mother and
businessman father were pleased to entertain me. They were
perplexed, as all parents are, at having bred a son who had strong
opinions, but they were proud that other young people sought
him out as if his opinions were important. ‘What should Pau Lluis
do about his education?’ his mother asked. She seemed no older
than forty and must have married young. ‘It’s disreputable for a
boy his age not to be attending classes.’ Her husband turned out
to be an aficionado of the zarzuela and had a large collection of
records; he was relieved when I turned the conversation away
from his son, who was in trouble no matter how well behaved he
might appear, and spoke of
La revoltosa
and
Gigantes y cabezudos
.
The Fregs served a formal tea, much as I might have got in London
except that the cakes were sweeter and the tea weaker. Señora
Freg came back to her son’s education: ‘From what you hear, is
there any chance that the university will reopen soon?’ I told her
that in American circles it was believed that classes must reopen
soon; it was only logical not to penalize an entire student body.
‘But this is Spain,’ she said reflectively, as if here it was not illogical
to stamp out intelligence that seemed to be developing a mind of
its own. Her husband remarked wryly that it was good to know
that in California, too, people had trouble with their universities.
‘It’s not localized.’ The Fregs were proud of their studious son
and dreadfully apprehensive. They showed this by their reaction
to me; Pau Lluis had shown them a clipping about my lecture
and they realized that he would not have taken the trouble to
make my acquaintance if he were not an exceptional boy, but
they also knew that he would not have done so unless he had a
kind of radical approach which must ultimately place him in
conflict with the police. I wanted to tell them that Pau Lluis was
as stable a young fellow as one could expect to meet under the
current circumstances, but I lacked the Spanish. However, I
mumbled something to that effect and I believe they got the drift.