The Sunday Gentleman (66 page)

“You’ll see them, and if Franco’s police should catch you at it, meeting with those people, why, they could try you as an enemy of the state. But there’s one loophole. Get yourself a press card. The card will prove you are a foreign correspondent and will say that you are free to go anywhere in Spain and see anyone, if it’s related to your job. This permit isn’t meant to include talking to members of the underground, but if you are caught with the Communists it gives you an excuse. Of course, they’ll shoot your friends and boot you out of Spain, but it saves you from getting into more serious trouble. Look, those of us who stay on here keep our noses clean—we have to—and we have no problems. So you’d just better see Olascoaga and get that card.”

I said thanks. I thought about it in bed that night, in a half-conscious dream: myself, hair mussed, shirt ripped, a kind of Reed, trapped by those booted Franco police. The next morning, I phoned the American Embassy. The press attache, Ted Maffitt—a bright, crisp fellow who had made an impression on me the very first day by telling me he had been offered 510,000 by a Spaniard for his 1946 Packard—said surely I must get press credentials, and he would arrange an appointment for me to get them.

“But let me ask you just one thing—have you ever written anything against Franco?”

I said no. I had done the usual anti-Fascist pieces on Hitler and Mussolini for Ken magazine, and once, in the army, had managed to retain in a Signal Corps orientation film some footage of Franco and the Fuehrer shaking hands, but beyond such minor sins I had been well-behaved.

“Okay,” said Maffitt, “you’re in. They can only object on the basis of your magazines, and that’s not likely. They’ve been very friendly this past year. I’ll call Olascoaga and fix you up.”

The morning following, a Friday morning, after stopping at Cook’s on the Avenida José Antonio for my mail, I took a taxi to the Subsecretariat of Education. The entrance was through a patio, squeezed between stores. I went up the wooden stairs and presented my calling card to a bulky attendant behind a table who was dressed like a Santa Fe conductor. He limped away, then returned and signaled me to follow.

In a moment, we were in a small office, furnished with a green desk—barren except for a pile of foolscap—a swivel chair, a file cabinet, and a colored portrait of Francisco Franco on the wall.

“Señor de Olascoaga will meet you here,” the attendant said. He indicated a chair. “Please.”

I had been told that Señor de Olascoaga, a stumpy, twinkling man in his fifties, a laughing boy, would be cordial, not too inquisitive. I had only to exchange a few pleasantries with him, display my passport, my credentials from magazine editors, and then he would okay me and in a week I could pick up my press card in the Foreign Office across the city. I had sat alone for several minutes, staring up at the portrait of a flaccid Franco, when the door opposite suddenly opened. A tall, slender, well-dressed man stood in the doorway. He paused there a moment, looking at me. His hair was slicked flat, his eyes black and bright, his cheeks hollow, his thin line of mustache accenting his sensual lips. He smiled. It went on; it went off. He stepped across the room, hand out. “How do you do?”

“Señor de Olascoaga?” I asked, confused, rising and moving forward to meet him.

“No, I’m afraid not. I am the Marqués de Espinardo.” His voice was high, fragile, his English correct and very British. “No, our friend, Señor de Olascoaga, was called out on business. I have been delegated to talk with you and review your application. Do sit down.”

I made my way back to my chair, wondering, and he went on around the desk and settled his long frame into the swivel chair behind it. He put his bony fingers together, tilted the chair backward, and looked at me pleasantly. In Hollywood, I had once met a bogus and larcenous German count who was blond and said he was from Heidelberg, and who looked almost like this. The count got five years.

“I hope you have some time to talk,” said the Marqués de Espinardo.

I said I did.

“I like to talk with English writers,” he said easily. “I was educated at Sandhurst, you know, and I’ve read the works of a good many of you English writers.”

“I come from Kenosha, Wisconsin,” I said, “by way of Los Angeles, California, and my friends do not think I am an English writer—”

“An American, then. I was once in the United States, in New York, for two months. I wonder. Is New York the United States? Is it exactly like Kansas City? Or like Los Angeles? Could I write an authoritative book about America because I spent eight weeks talking to New Yorkers?”

“I’m not writing a book on Spain,” I said, controlled.

He smiled indulgently. “Oh now, now—I was not jibing at you personally—I am speaking generally, of American writers and correspondents. I do believe it is a mistake to think you can interview ten or one hundred—even two hundred—Spaniards, and pretend to know how we live and how we think. Believe me, we are all different. Especially in Spain we are all different. Take me. I am a northern Basque.”

I was surprised. I had been up in San Sebastian, among the Basques, and they are a very unsophisticated people. Except for a few eccentricities like believing their language was spoken by Adam and Eve and that they will win autonomy, they are a cheerful and uncomplicated race. Your average Basque is without tricks. I would have bet the Marqués was a Castilian, Madrid Spanish, bruising easily, humorless, indirect, unhealthy, ingrown, too old, too devious.

“We Basques are more serious, more profound, not so silly as the Castilians here in Madrid. Those are distinctions one must know.”

He was speaking more forcefully now, his tone of voice was flatter and of more substance, and his face was red. Suddenly he paused. He had been leaning against the desk. He let out his breath, and slowly lay back in the chair. He was thin again, devious, Castilian.

“I have read your American writers,” he said. “I have read Hemingway. I loathe him.”

I sat in silent wonder.

“Hemingway is a liar,” he said, less cautiously, deciding I wasn’t Hemingway’s friend or a member of his school. “He is a fraud, a sensationalist.
For Whom the Bell Tolls
was an obviously cheap appeal for easy money. His other book on Spain,
Death in the Afternoon
, it is really too filthy to be reprinted here. We love everything on bullfighting, but that book is too filthy. In it, he uses Spanish words that you Americans just don’t understand. But they are words even a respectable Spanish prostitute would not dare use.”

I was nettled by the pointless tirade. “I’m sorry you don’t like Mr. Hemingway. Each to his own literary tastes. But at least Mr. Hemingway is permitted, in America, to write as he pleases.”

The Marqués cocked his head and looked at me more carefully. I could feel his bewilderment. He had judged me after the first minute—silent and too assenting. Now he was bewildered and, as a matter of fact, much more interested.

“I admit we have censorship in Spain, I admit it,” he said slowly. “We do not ban all ideas and news, but we water them, certainly. And I will tell you why. In the old days, our press was yellow like yours. Everything ran to sensationalism. If there was a murder in Barcelona—”

In Madrid, all the murdering is done in Barcelona.

“—if a severed head were found under a streetcar seat, reporters and photographers would rush up there, and then splash front pages with the most gruesome stories about it for weeks. This provoked fantastic ideas in the minds of unbalanced readers and also provoked a whole wave of murders and suicides. I have read medical books, and I know that sensational journalism is provocative. Today, under Franco, we ban such irritants, and so we have an orderly, peaceful country.”

I made a wry face at this limping apology, and he became quite annoyed.

“But what I have said is true.”

This time, I nodded, as one agrees with a lying child who belongs to someone else. He stared across the desk at me.

“You have as much censorship in the United States as we have in Spain. Oh yes, you do. Your Hollywood movies are censored by an office that sees the law is always triumphant and crime the loser. Why such censorship? For the good of the state? Yes, and we censor for the very same reason. I have been in England and I know the English make movies in which women wear decollete gowns, exposing their naked breasts to the camera, but your prudish censors in America say these scenes might provoke American audiences. So you censor. Ours is no more restrictive than that.”

I toyed with the idea of repeating the story I had heard of how Generalissimo Franco, a great movie fan, is always annoyed by a certain female musical comedy star because she wears tights and is so leggy, and how he always has her films censored for the public. I decided the story would inspire a long aimless discussion of movies, and I shelved it. I determined to bring up the specific business of my credentials.

“About my credentials—” I began.

The Marqués was not listening. “I am disgusted with American writing. We in Spain regard America as the most superficial country on earth. Two of your ambassadors have concurred with me in that opinion. You Americans get all your distorted capsule knowledge from newspapers and magazines or from spoon-fed Book-of-the-Month Club selections. You do not read profoundly at all. Writers come here, without learning Spanish history, without cultural background, without a knowledge of economics, without understanding the causes for our present condition. The key to why we are as we are today rests in simple economics. Understand how Spain lives, that we are not self-sufficient and wealthy as you are, that we have not your material resources, understand where we get our clothes and metal and food, and you will understand present living conditions in Spain.”

“I can’t dispute that. Marqués,” I said, “because I’ve been here less than a week and I haven’t looked around yet—”

“How can you criticize us? I have heard about conditions in the United States. There are not enough shoes for people to wear. And the housing is terrible, terrible. I read a letter in
Life
magazine. An ex-serviceman says he cannot find meat to eat, clothes to wear, a home to live in. The only thing he finds everywhere is signs advising him to re-enlist in the army. He thinks it is a put-up job by your government. Why should you have a housing shortage? You have had no great destruction of your cities and villages as we have had. Why a shortage?”

I gave him some of the pat answers. And I added, “In a city like Los Angeles, people who came to go into the war industries now don’t want to go home—”

“Ah yes, yes, we have exactly the same, slums in all our cities, composed of villagers who should go home now. But no. Here, they have the cinema, and they want to stay. We should force them to return to the farms where they would live better. Perhaps Spain and America have much in common after all. Perhaps language is the greatest obstruction to friendly relations. Perhaps it is that too many Americans believe that, since their Republicans are conservative rightists, our Spanish Republicans are exactly the same. Tell them it is not so. Tell them our Republicans are Communists, murderers. Tell them that and we can be friends.”

He halted on a high, shrill note, and caught himself there and pulled himself down with embarrassment. He took out a handkerchief and touched his forehead daintily. I was glad to see the handkerchief was silk. He pulled himself together and sat straight in the chair for the first time.

“Now then, about your credentials. You are writing for
The Saturday Evening Post, Reader’s Digest, Collier’s
—”

He stopped on the
Collier’s
. It pushed a button in his memory. He dug his right hand into his coat pocket and extracted a folded piece of white paper. He half opened it, moving his lips as he read it to himself, and shoved it back into his pocket. “
Collier’s
?” he said. “Perhaps you have heard of a girl named Martha Gellhorn?”

I felt I might as well tie the whole interview together. “She was married to Hemingway,” I said.

“She writes worse trash for
Collier’s
than Hemingway, and they print it. Last year, I read an article by her, written from France about us, about Spanish refugee children in southern France. It was full of lies. It was worthy of a Communist. Is she a Communist? Why does she write that way?”

“We have a kind of press freedom in America,” I said, “and she writes what he pleases to write, what she sees and thinks, and American magazines publish it if they like it.”

The Marqués was not satisfied. “Your magazines are inaccurate about Spain. They publish biased stories. They always write against us.”

The ice was thin, but I was sick of the Marqués and the whole credential opera. “Look,” I said, “you just don’t understand the American press. You should study it more closely. Almost every major magazine in the United States is against Communism, baits Russia, yet these same magazines publish pro-Russian articles when they get hold of a good one. If they could ever, ever, get an article from Spain which proved that there was one decent thing to say in support of General Franco, about the Falange party, about what you people are doing to Spain, why, they would publish it. Until they get such an article, I am afraid the American press must continue to print what you call biased stories.”

I thought he might stand up there. He didn’t. He sat a moment, looking down at the desktop, and then lifted his head, dug into his pocket and offered me a Chesterfield. I refused it.

“Well,” he said, rising at last, “we have a long way to go to understand each other—our countries have, that is.”

I laid my passport and papers on the desk. “You want to see these for my credentials, don’t you?”

“Oh yes, certainly.” He unscrewed his pen, made a few sprawling notes on a sheet of foolscap, after glancing at my papers.

I gathered up my things. He put his pen away, and pushed out his long hand. “This was a pleasant and instructive hour. Perhaps you will call upon me again. Yes, you must. We will have a real talk about American writers. Not Hemingway, but others. You will do that?”