10 March
WE LEFT MÁLAGA YESTERDAY for Churriana. Antonio and Rosario had prepared for us the best bedroom in their cottage and given us their small sitting-room. Rosario’s excellent cooking – she has learned to temper the monotony of the Spanish cuisine by a few simple French recipes – makes a welcome change. We eat less, but better.
The talk of the province during the past week has been the prophecy of an old sabio or wise man of Alhaurín (the next village up the road) that it was going to rain. The prolonged drought has been causing great despondency everywhere and so his prophecy has been seized on and given headlines in the local papers. Now, the day after our arrival, the sky is overcast and a few heavy drops fall. Towards night it begins to rain in earnest and when we wake up the patio is full of water. All morning the heavy drench continues. Then, soon after three o’clock, there is a cloud-burst, with much thunder and lightning. The mountain above the house has a turban of mist and the whole vale bellies with dark purplish cloud. The villagers sit up all night in fear, muttering Ave Marías.
So the sabio has been right and the drought has broken. His photograph comes out in all the papers – a little dried-up old man with as many wrinkles on his face as there are gullies in the mountains. A man too who knows his own mind: when they wanted to photograph him in a collar and tie, he refused to put them on, saying that he had never worn such things and that they must take him as he was or not at all. The Civil Governor sent for him to thank him and give him a present, and everyone is as pleased and grateful as if he had made the rain himself. I learned from a woman who knows him that he is a shepherd and lives in a small casita some way outside the village. His wife is blind and, as he sleeps badly, he is in the habit of spending much of the night wandering about the fields: thus he gets to know the signs and portents. The rain, I am told, began on the day he had predicted and stopped just when he had said it would.
Everyone has longed for this rain, yet the immediate effect has been unemployment. No work can be done on the fields for four or five days, so wages have stopped coming in and the day labourers’ families – that is, more than half the population of the village – find themselves with nothing to eat. At once children and old people begin to appear at the door, asking for money for bread. What sort of an agriculture is this when a couple of days’ rain reduces every labourer’s family to such straits? Behind it lie centuries of bad organisation and heartlessness.
From the moment of our moving into Antonio’s cottage, we have been overwhelmed with visitors. Every hour or two some fresh person arrives. Among those who come expecting assistance, the most troublesome has been Frascillo. He is a man we used to know as the hanger-on of a friend of ours, Juan Navaja, village baker and political agent for the Catholic Conservative party, who was shot in the first weeks of the civil war. Feckless, restless, with neither parents nor wife, he has now degenerated into a complete drunkard. In his alcoholic mind I have become the successor of his former patron, and I am told that he used to boast in the village that he had had letters from me. My arrival was therefore a great event for him, to be celebrated dramatically. Coming up to me in the street, he threw his long, drooping arms about me and thrust his red, bloodshot eyes and two weeks’ growth of beard into my face. ‘Can it be true? Don Geraldo home again! My protector returned! Are these eyes of mine really seeing him in person?’
I gave him a few pesetas, which he hurried off to spend on wine, and after that set up a perpetual guard at the door of our house, seizing my hand when I went out and mumbling to himself and weeping when I did not appear. One night he spent in a drunken slumber on the doorstep. He supports himself on wine, and for food eats only a crust of bread a day: when offered more, he refuses it.
Another visitor is a beggar woman called Marta, aged about thirty, and simple. She lives in a rock shelter by the cemetery, sleeping on a heap of straw and rags with a blind man much older than herself who is said to beat her. In the spring and autumn they set out on long journeys, going as far as Seville and Cartagena. Marta is liked by everyone, for she has the goodness of very simple people, a gay disposition and quick tongue. The game is to tease her and ask smutty questions about what she does with her blind man: she makes a naïve or a witty answer and is given a piece of bread or a penny.
It is extraordinary how much this country resembles Russia before the Revolution. In a sense it is even more revolutionary in feeling than it was in 1936, because it is corrupt and rotten and conditions are so bad that everyone except for a few black marketeers wants a change. But no revolution can take place. The police and the army see and will continue to see to that: they are the one solid and dependable thing in this ramshackle regime, in which bureaucratic interference with legitimate business is combined in the worst possible way with the laissez-faire economy of the black market. And they get the moral support they need, in the dread which everyone who has anything to lose feels of another civil war.
I have been surprised to find how friendly the whole village (in England we should call it a small town) is to us. Smiles everywhere. This is because of the broadcasts I made against the regime during the war. But even the people who supported the military movement seem well disposed to me, partly for the reason that Antonio and Rosario have such a good reputation and partly because they are now thoroughly disillusioned. Even the leading Falangists, who by the way are excellent persons, send polite messages. One of these men is the brother-in-law of Juan Navaja, who, as I have said, was a great friend of mine. His mother, in her grief at his assassination, had blamed me for his death, because when he was on the run I refused to shelter him for more than a single night, knowing that if I did so the house would be searched and Don Carlos arrested. But I gave him advice which, if he had not been too besotted by fear to act on it, might have saved him.
One of my first acts, therefore, was to call on this brother-in-law. He received me well, though a little stiffly, and at once began to talk about the state of affairs.
‘Things are much worse today than before the civil war,’ he said. ‘The poverty is atrocious. Never has such poverty been known before. It is not safe to leave the main streets after dark, as hungry men will take any risk to get money. Yet Málaga is one of the richest towns in Spain.’
Then suddenly he dried up: the words had burst out because he could not keep them in, but it was not for him to talk politics to a man who had backed the other side. When I saw him again, he was polite but distant. But I must record the fact that, though exposed as a baker to the worst temptations of the black market, he had the reputation of being honest. So, I think, are many of the local Falangists: the corruption in which their leaders are involved has not touched them.
12 March
We set off today to visit our old friends, the Washbrooks, at Torremolinos. A beautiful walk, skirting the foot of the mountains: olive trees, carobs and a mile or two away the sea, throwing up its white arms against the long curved shore of the bay of Málaga. Clear air, the distant barking of dogs and silence.
Mr Washbrook is a New Englander, thin, grey-haired, angular, with a harsh creaking voice and, in moments of excitement, a slight stutter: his wife is a handsome and vigorous Madrileña. When the civil war broke out, they took the side of Franco and left the country, returning nine months later with the victorious armies. Anything tinged however lightly with Red was anathema to them and I was therefore especially curious to learn their opinion of the present state of affairs.
We had not been in their house five minutes before Mr Washbrook began to explode with indignation. The robbery going on on all sides, he declared, was incredible. People started with a handful of dollars and in a couple of years had made their fortunes: all they needed was a friend in the government and a lack of shame. Then the condition of the working classes was intolerable. Their wages were barely sufficient to keep them alive and the moment they lost their work, they starved. The folly of the government at allowing such a state of affairs was unbelievable. But then the government and the municipality scarcely existed. This was not a dictatorship, but a free-for-all regime in which no one thought of anything but feathering his own nest. People did as they pleased and no one could stop them. Not even Franco. If he tried to do so, they would shoot him. Look at the position here! Numbers of men had been thrown out of work because the landowners had turned their corn lands into sugar cane, which required very little labour. Although corn was short, the government did nothing to stop this.
Mrs Washbrook joined in in her vigorous way:
‘Give the people enough bread and olive oil and you would never hear a word of complaint. But they have neither bread nor oil, so naturally they are all Communists. If I were a working man, I would be one too.’
‘That’s it, that’s it,’ broke in her husband, stammering with excitement. ‘The people in power here seem to have no idea of what they are doing. We are living on a volcano. Everything is heading for a tremendous eruption.’
‘But unless the Russians come here,’ I said, ‘what eruption can there be?’
Mr Washbrook waved his arms.
‘No, no, I say. You can’t go on like this for ever. Something is bound to happen. And then we shall have to pack our bags and leave the country once more.’
They took us out to show us their little property of two or three acres. They grow their own corn, grind it in a hand-mill and bake it in an oven brought expressly from the United States.
‘The bread here is poison,’ Mr Washbrook declared. ‘There is no government inspection and the millers throw in any rubbish they like. If one wants wheat bread, one must buy on the black market.’
‘The bread in England is bad too,’ I said. ‘In fact I prefer Spanish ration bread.’
But he wouldn’t hear of this. The bread might be just eatable in some places, but wherever the miller was dishonest it was poison.
After tea we went out to look at the new villas that were springing up. Marbella, thirty miles to the west, has been turned into a fashionable plage and now this is happening in Torremolinos too. The new fortunes made since the civil war demand new outlets. There is a municipal building scheme and land values have soared.
‘Look at that house,’ our friend exclaimed, pointing to a very ordinary-looking villa. ‘It belongs to the director of a bank and cost 1,500,000 pesetas [i.e. £15,000], because it is built of steel and concrete, which can only be obtained at fantastic prices on the black market. Flats at controlled rents have been put up for the lower middle classes, but, would you believe me, not a single working-class house has been built either here or at Málaga. These people are living in a fool’s paradise.’
‘The other day,’ said Mrs Washbrook, ‘a man on the bus put the matter well. General Franco, he said, is a really great man. He is teaching Spaniards a wonderful thing – how to live without eating.’
Darkness fell before we reached Churriana. We quickened our steps, remembering how often we had been told not to be caught out of the village after nightfall: the footpads are more dangerous than the brigands, as well as ten times more numerous. As we hurried along, the mountains loomed high above us. The crickets sang loudly from the moist earth of the wheat fields, the goat bells tinkled, the frogs kept up their amazing croaking. And so we came at length to the village, where Rosario was waiting for us.
The housing problem is certainly acute. In Churriana twenty working-class families are living in a barn divided up by cane partitions: each family has an area of some ten feet by ten to live, sleep and cook in. The reason for this overcrowding is that, on their present wages, no working-class family can pay an economic rent, and the government and municipality make no grant. They have, it is true, put up blocks of flats at controlled rents, but these are for the lower middle classes, and their rents – 1,000 pesetas a month – far exceed the total earnings of a working family. The Falange may say what it will, but the people who govern Spain today could hardly do more than they are doing to show that the working classes are their enemies. The result is that no labourer does more work than he can help. As a man said to me, ‘It’s as though one planted potatoes and then refused to hoe or manure them. Naturally one gets a bad crop.’
One cannot be long in this country without realising that the sole thriving industry is the estraperlo or black market. Legitimate business is starved, throttled by forms and regulations, and frowned on by the Falange and the authorities, whereas the black market moves on oiled wheels with the secret help and connivance of everyone.
Take for example the building trade. Cement, iron and wood are all rigidly controlled and one has to get a permit to buy anything at an ironmonger’s. And these permits cost money. They are only granted on the payment of a substantial bribe and, if one refuses to pay this, one must buy on the black market. The controls originally had a sensible purpose – to reduce the consumption of goods that have to be imported – but their effective use today is simply to keep up black-market prices. Rightly or wrongly, it is widely believed that the ministers who impose the controls are in the pay of the racketeers.
‘How can one expect people to be honest,’ said the master builder who gave me this information, ‘when the men at the top are thieves? The flower of the country’s manhood is either overseas or dead.’
This man, who before the civil war had built up a position for himself by hard work and shrewdness, was a Monarchist and a great admirer of Primo de Rivera.
‘We need another dictatorship like his,’ he said. ‘A dictatorship of pan y palo – bread and the stick.’
Now the motto of Franco’s dictatorship is Pan y justicia, ‘Bread and justice’, and people say, ‘We have seen his justice and we don’t like it, but we haven’t seen his bread.’
One evening the bailiff of a large estate in the Hoya, whom I had known slightly in 1935, called in to see me. He was a strong, athletic man in the prime of life, with clear blue eyes and a face redder than one usually meets with in Andalusia. Like most of these bailiffs, he was hard-headed, capable and honest. I asked him how he was getting on.
‘We farmers,’ he said, ‘carry the burden of everything. First of all there’s the host of forms to be filled in: every year there are more of them. Then comes their presentation. Two or three times a week I go in to Málaga with a dispatch case full of them and dance attendance on the authorities. I stand in a queue at the various government and municipal offices, but they only open from eleven to one and then as likely as not the boss is out and my business cannot be attended to. For these officials can’t do anything on their own: they have no training or technical knowledge, but are just recomendados, people who have got their jobs through personal influence. You can’t believe their incompetence.’
‘But are they honest?’
‘Honest? Not likely. How can they be on the salaries they get? The other day I asked permission to buy Seville potatoes at so much the ton – the current price. They agreed. But when the forms came to be filled in I found that I must pay an extra ten per cent – as a tip, of course. This made the potatoes too dear and I had to look for others. And the hours wasted!’
‘Tell me how the black market works.’
‘Oh, in a thousand ways. A manufacturer of quince jelly writes to say that he has twenty tons of pulp. This entitles him to an equal weight of sugar. An inspector goes down, is feasted and wined and given a present: he enjoys himself so much that he fails to notice that there are really only ten tons of pulp, and the manufacturer is able to sell half the sugar he gets on the black market. He makes much more out of this than he does out of his quince jelly.’
‘And is it true that this is done by the authorities too?’
‘Of course. By them more than by anyone. Here’s a case. Not long ago a ship arrived with 50,000 tons of artificial manure. Headlines in all the papers, smiles on the farmers’ faces, for artificial manure is the new treasure of the Incas. I hurried down at once with particulars of my crop to claim my share. But this share turned out to be nothing – scarcely worth collecting. Then, hardly was I outside the office than I found I could buy all I wanted at double prices. The greater part of the cargo had been sold on the dock to the estraperlistas – sold, you understand, by the municipal authorities.’
‘That’s bad,’ I said. ‘I wonder you manage to survive.’
‘Oh, we manage that all right,’ he replied. ‘All we have to do is to turn the tables on them. They tell us, you know, what to plant, at what price we must sell, to whom, and so forth. On paper every detail is controlled. But we are on the spot and they are in their offices and so, without their being able to stop it, we contrive to place a good part of our crop on the black market. If we didn’t, we couldn’t live.’
‘Many people don’t live.’
‘That’s true. The land has never been so well cultivated before, yet half the population is starving. And if you put an end to the black market, then the middle classes would starve also.’
‘So what do you suggest?’
‘Oh, don’t ask me. I’m not a politician. But obviously the Falangist syndicates that work the controls will have to go and then a foreign loan will be needed to break the black market. It will have to be a large one.’
The black market has, however, its better side. Like the industrial movement in Victorian England, it offers facilities to hard-working and enterprising persons of all classes to rise in the social scale. Very large numbers of poor people are engaged in it in a small way and many of them have succeeded in bettering themselves. For example there is a woman we know who has risen from absolutely nothing to be the owner of a neat little shop in Málaga and of some landed property. I asked her how she had managed this: entirely, she said, by very hard work. Every morning over many years she has risen early to take the train or bus to some distant village to buy from the peasants. She has not got back till late that evening or early on the following day, after a night spent uncomfortably on a bench in the railway waiting-room. On every journey she has had to run the gauntlet of the police with her boxes and baskets and to risk a considerable fine if she was caught. But she was never caught: according to her brother, her air of quiet respectability disarmed the Civil Guards, who were not out to enforce the law but to keep up appearances. For everyone realises that without the black market life would simply come to an end.
The most risky type of estraperlo is selling coffee. In the buses and trains women place their bundle of coffee some way from where they sit and, if it is discovered, they do not claim it. It becomes the policeman’s perquisite. Barley coffee is also on the forbidden list. Those who deal in this get up at two or three in the morning to roast it, so that the smell may not give them away, and then hawk it around on hand-carts or bicycles. Another secret trade is the making of macaroni on a portable machine. The white rolls one buys are made at the ordinary bakeries, but their sale is the monopoly of certain nice-looking young girls, who no doubt have their own ways of placating the police. At all events they sell it under their eyes and are never arrested. In short the world of the estraperlo is vast and complicated and sometimes linked to other kinds of vice. To a novelist such as Balzac or Pérez Galdós its investigation would open up endless and fascinating possibilities.
The two forces in Spain that represent something more than the money interest are the Church and the Falange: they are naturally rivals and most people believe that the Church is today the more powerful. The struggle between them is especially acute in Málaga. This, I imagine, is because the bishop, Dr Angel Herrera, late editor of the great daily paper El Debate, is a man of exceptional ability and, what is more, has strong ideas on the part the Church ought to play in the social question. Last year he used his influence to get houses built for the fishermen of Palo and this year he has been canvassing a project for settling peasant families on the land. But the landowners have refused point-blank to have anything to do with it: in a recent meeting they denounced all such projects as Communism and had the audacity to request the bishop to stop preaching on land reform and to put his ideas to them in private.
Not to be outdone by the Church, the Civil Governor, who is of course a Falangist, has also had his idea. Last week he produced a scheme by which the landowners should hand over a tenth part of their estates on long leases to small proprietors. But this has had to be dropped too. The only real power in Spain today is the power of money, and neither landowners nor estraperlistas see why they should make sacrifices for the sake of warding off a revolution that, so long as army and police stand firm, can never come. And why give a tenth part when nothing less than three-quarters would meet the need? They probably have the sense to see that the Church and the Falange are merely nibbling at the problem.
A Spanish friend of mine, who has lived many years abroad, poured scorn on all these projects. The main effort of the Church, he said, was devoted to getting everyone to do the Exercises of St Ignatius. These were the panacea, and the Jesuits, who controlled Church policy, had little faith in land reform or in economic amelioration. The Catholic social organisation, too, was hopelessly weak: just because it was Spanish, it was half-hearted and lethargic and did not compare with the drive and efficiency of the Catholic institutions in the United States. However, he said, the seminaries were turning out a better and more idealistic type of priest and many women of the middle classes, appalled by the misery of the poor, were taking the veil in charitable orders. The worst symptom was that the young no longer had faith in anything – not even in common honesty.
One thing, however, may be said, and that is that, as the shadows deepen over the Spanish scene, such idealism and enthusiasm as are still to be found tend to take a religious form. The wealthy give their money to the Church and new convents and schools spring up. Now, under the instigation of Dr Herrera, a hundred acres of land has just been acquired by the Building Society of the Sacred Heart. On this a model village is to be built for working-class families, complete with church, dispensary, market, nursery and sports ground. If Dr Herrera’s influence were to spread – and it is said that he will be the next Primate – the Church will do something to regain its former position. But how many bishops are there of this type? The last bishop – he has now been promoted to the archiepiscopal see of Granada – was a very different sort of person. A characteristic story is told of his dealings with the fishermen of Palo. These men have a Virgin for whom they feel a great devotion because they depend on her to keep the sea calm when they go out. Every year they hold a fiesta in which they carry her from her sanctuary with rockets and frantic applause and dip her in the waves. The bishop forbade this. To dip the Blessed Virgin in the water! That was highly disrespectful, and even to carry her across the beach was insulting to her purity, because from this beach women were accustomed to bathe. If they wished to take her to the edge of the sea, they must choose a portion of the beach where during the past fifty years no woman had taken off her clothes.
Such is the old rigid type of bishop, brought into being by the liberals when they closed the chairs of theology in the universities. Educated in a narrow and poorly endowed seminary, nurtured on readings of the fathers and doctors of the Church, they know nothing of life or of the world. For them the whole duty of man may be summed up as death to the liberals, suppression of sex and frequent attendance at divine service. The great discovery of the Jesuits – how to relate means to ends – has made no impression on them.
As for the Falange, it is simply the party of the Spanish lower middle class. From 1840 to 1920 this was the vocally discontented class in Spain and under its radical programme it championed the politically uneducated working classes. But when these began to form trade unions and political parties of their own, the lower middle class became isolated. Liberalism had by this time died in the general stagnation of parliamentary politics, so that, when the threat of revolutionary socialism began to develop, the lower middle class adopted in a hurry a programme borrowed from Italy and Germany, whose chief merit was that it promised to give them power rapidly. But it is a gross over-simplification to say, as the Marxists do, that the Falange came into being to support the interests of the landowners and capitalists. On the contrary it is a genuinely revolutionary party, both anti-capitalist and anti-clerical. Its tragedy is that it has not been able to seize power. It finds itself a prisoner of the landowners, the army and the Church and so unable to carry out any of the reforms that it desires and to obtain which it has shed such rivers of blood. Thus it has become disillusioned and cynical, and its leaders, many of whom entered the party late and for purely personal reasons, have allowed themselves to join in the general wave of black marketeering and corruption which has been brought about by the inflation. Disgruntled, angry and suffering from a bad conscience, it is very much on the defensive today.
One of the pleasures of living in Spain is the enlarged sense one gets of the passage of time. In England the day is broken up by a thousand little fences and obstacles, which produce a feeling of frustration and worry. One passes from breakfast to supper with struggle and effort, and when night comes one feels one has not had a day at all. Nothing of interest has happened, no taste or colour has been left to mark out that day from all others. But in Spain time imitates the landscape. It is vast, untrammelled, featureless, and every day gives the sensation of a week.
I write this after seeing from my diary that I have spent nine days at Churriana. Already I feel rooted in this life and house again, almost as though, thirteen years ago, I had never left it. The fixed background, giving the mood and tone, has been the garden. Every day we pace round it a dozen times with Antonio or Rosario, touching, smelling, admiring, commenting: breathing in the calm and happiness that only southern gardens, bathed in perpetual sunlight, can give. The orange buds come out, the goldfinches chase one another among the branches, the flower of the avocado-pear tree gives off its summery smell, the datura its Cleopatra perfume. Then evening falls: every colour becomes transparent, every shadow filled with light, while in the sky above long pink and scarlet trails of cloud act the charade of another garden overhead.
Night too has its intoxication. One walks out and the smell of the warm, moist earth takes possession of one’s nostrils. The great lotus tree, Celtis australis, a cousin of the elms that has borrowed the smooth, soaring trunk of the beech, seems to be suspended downwards by its roots from the sky. So strong is the feeling that the fixed part of Nature lies above! Then one starts to grope forward between the shadows: here the canes give a faint rustle, there one sees or smells a white flower. At length, at the end of the box path, one climbs the platform built to give a view over the wall. Moon and the dark, towering mass of the sierra. Stars pulsating like organic bodies. Away across the valley are the lights of Málaga and its attendant villages and, more brilliant than these, the flares put up to guard the crops of the artichoke growers. Frogs raise their concert in the ditch, owls hoot and from every farmyard in the plain comes the sound of dogs barking. Slowly and in an altered mood we turn and go back to the friendly faces and the fire of olive twigs.
One of the most frequent visitors during the past ten days has been a young priest called Don José, who is the confessor of a new convent of nuns that has been recently established here. He is a curious and original character. Pale, slightly built, with clear-cut, feminine features, soft brown eyes which he scarcely ever raises from the floor, and long, tapering hands, he seems to ooze out refinement with every pore of his body. He speaks in a slow, careful voice, articulating every syllable, as though language were a kind of music that required precise execution, and in everything he says there is a mixture of what, if it did not almost ring true, one would call affectation.
He had come to visit us, he said, because he had heard from Rosario that we were interested in literature. Poetry in his opinion was, after religion, the highest activity possible to our weak human nature: indeed it was itself a form of religious practice, the expression of man’s adoration of the world in which he had so marvellously been placed. Did we, he wondered, like poetry? I assured him that we did and asked him with some curiosity what poets he liked best. Rubén Darío and Juan Ramón Jiménez, he answered – which for an English reader may be rendered as Swinburne, Verlaine and Yeats – and I replied that I admired them too and had recently been shown some letters written by Juan Ramón Jiménez from America.
‘Juan Ramón!’ he exclaimed, laying his long fingers on my sleeve and raising his eyes from the ground to give me one of his rare smiles. ‘But he is one of the most divine! And you do not have to tell me that his handwriting is as exquisite as his poetry. It must be so.’
‘Of course you write poetry yourself,’ I said.
‘I confess that sometimes in my clumsy way I practise the art. At present I am engaged in copying out a few of my little efforts in a fine calligraphy. I have no ambition to publish, but the album in which I am collecting my verses will be left on my death to a friend. I would like to feel that, when I pass from this world, I shall leave something behind me, even though it is too worthless to interest posterity.’
Don José has very delicate health. For this as well as for aesthetic reasons he is a vegetarian and a firm adherent of the naturist clinic in Málaga, with its theories of opposites and harmonies in foods. (Vegetarianism has been a semi-religious cult in Andalusia since the beginning of the century.) It is in fact on account of his health that he is here. A Granadino by birth, the Archbishop sent him to Málaga because its climate is so mild and secured his appointment to a post in which, after he has said Mass at eight o’clock, he has no further duties.
‘That is something,’ he said, ‘for which I cannot thank the Lord sufficiently. My spiritual health requires two things – complete leisure and the contemplation of beautiful landscapes. These are both things that I enjoy super-abundantly here.’
It seems however that the nuns of his convent think differently. They belong to an order which looks after the prisoners and the sick and they have many acres of land on which they try to grow the food they need. Although they give better wages than anyone round about, they understand nothing of estate management and so are imposed on and swindled by everyone who works for them. They therefore need a priest who can not only say Mass and give absolution, but act as their bailiff. This, of course, their poet confessor is unable to do.
Under his affected way of speaking Don José is a man of great simplicity. Rosario, a warm-hearted but worldly woman who never enters a church, treats him as a child. She makes him salads and lets him walk about the garden, listening to his Don Quixotesque speeches with a scarcely concealed smile. Antonio, her husband, is after all another simpleton, though of a more Sancho-esque sort.
I use the word Quixotesque deliberately, for this priest is really an example of the Don Quixote type of man, in that he has incorporated himself completely into his idealistic philosophy. Every word, every gesture expresses the way of thinking he has adopted and the person he would like to be. Listen to his conversation. He is a mystic and a nature mystic. He tells me in his slow, precise voice, with his eyes modestly lowered and his hands crossed in front of him, that he sees God in the plants and leaves and hills and butterflies. Yes, and in the beetles too. For Nature ought to be loved in many different ways and on several different levels. One should love it immediately with one’s eyes and ears and sense of taste and smell: then with one’s imagination as the material of poetry, and last of all mystically, as a means of raising one to God.
As a first step one should accustom oneself to seeing everything under the aspect of poetry. Thus there should be poetry in one’s eating, as when one sits down to a meal of fresh fruits of the earth. There should be poetry in the movements of one’s body and in one’s thoughts. Speaking of the country people, ‘They are virgin savages,’ he said. Uncultivated, but at bottom pure and good, like all human beings. Bondad, goodness, was the clay out of which God had made men, only with the process of time it had been corrupted. ‘But the world is created afresh,’ he said, ‘for every man who has a poet’s imagination.’
As we sat together on the platform of the wall, looking out over the green countryside, I thought how, on the surface at least, he resembled St John of the Cross. But one thing was lacking – the interior struggle. He wore his creed, not as an obsession that filled him and tormented him, but as a fine suit of clothes. This made him in the long run a bore.
18 March
Today we had intended to climb the mountain above the house, but instead had to endure a merciless afternoon of visits. An engineer from Málaga and his wife, drawn by the prospect of airing their views to an Englishman, were the first to arrive. He was a shrewd, clever little man, who as a ship’s engineer had travelled and seen the world, but he was an intolerable talker. He commenced his monologue by explaining to us at length what England and the English character were like – a common Spanish habit which my wife, who is American, tells me the English practise on her about her own country – and then in a rapid voice, hard as a machinegun’s rattle, he held forth about world politics. The Russians, the Americans, the Russians, the English . . . olé! what manoeuvrings for position in preparation for the world war that would shortly break out! Easy to see what they wanted Spain for! Then, lowering his voice to a loud whisper, he began to speak about the crimes of the Franco regime. I pretended to listen to the furious, sibilant sounds that issued from his mouth, but all the time I was watching the goldfinches in the orange trees and the solitary mountain with its three dark pines. What silence one would find there! But on he went and, when at last he got up to go, it was to make a Russian farewell.
This monkey type of man is a common Mediterranean species. Always too clever by half, they are sometimes good and sometimes bad, but invariably crude and superficial in their judgements. This one was better than most: his heavy eyelids and large, liquid eyes showed sensibility, his wrinkled forehead the chronic anxiety of the neurotic. He lived, like so many of his kind, the life of the addict, whose drug is not sex, or morphia, but politics. But isn’t that a poison naturally secreted by the Spanish scene, with all its outrageous examples of injustice and misgovernment? This man, I reminded myself, was a man of the Left, a Republican, living among people he could not confide in. If he was so boring, it was because he had spent months storing up what he had to say, and then suddenly found the chance of unloading it upon a person who came from an almost mythical world of sanity and reasonableness.
His wife was a very different sort of creature. A product of the Madrid suburbs, matter-of-fact, talkative, with no interests outside her neighbours and her furniture, she told Rosario that her husband was destroying himself with his political ideas.
‘The man’s no good in bed, no good whatever. His voice is loud and fierce, but when you see him stripped, his what-do-you-call-it is no larger than a pencil. I’ve got a child for husband.’
The papers announced today a 40 per cent rise in the pay of all army officers and NCOs. A bribe to keep the army faithful, a foreigner might remark. But in fact the rise is a just one, because for a long time now it has been almost impossible for a Spanish officer or NCO to live on his pay. As the hours in which they are employed are few, they nearly always take on other jobs in commerce or business, or supplement their earnings by selling army stores on the black market. This is not generally regarded as dishonest. The rations provided are deliberately far larger than can be consumed, and every officer and NCO has the privilege of selling his share of what is left. Yet over every army and police barracks are written the words Todo por la patria, ‘Everything for the fatherland’, and many feel intensely the humiliation of being obliged to live in this manner. I was told of one heroic lieutenant-colonel who refused to follow the usual practice and chose instead to exist in an undignified poverty.
How do the working classes, who cannot afford to live on the black market, manage to keep alive? One way is by having extra ration books. New births are registered that have not occurred, deaths are concealed, and so forth. There is even a trade in ration books and one wealthy man from the Limonar, who was heard saying that he could not understand why people complained of a shortage of food, had to admit that he had thirty-two. For this reason I cannot help being sceptical of the statement put out in official quarters that there has been a huge increase of the population. This statement is founded on the returns sent in by the various provinces of the rations that they require, and such returns cannot, I think, be taken very seriously.
I had been careful up to now to avoid making any contacts with the underground, or indeed seeking out anyone who might have left-wing opinions. If they came to me, I listened and that was all. However when I was offered an opportunity of meeting in Málaga a man who could tell me how the Reds of the sierra were organised, my curiosity was aroused and I accepted. My informant was an elderly man who, as a Socialist, had spent many years in prison and had come out maimed and scarred by the beatings he had received. His native village was in the Serranía de Ronda and he had left it because, as a man of the Left, he would be held responsible by the police for any subversive actions that took place in the vicinity. The Reds, he told me, were composed of Socialists and Communists under Communist direction. They were highly organised in regional commands and took their orders from coded messages given out by a foreign radio station. The effective unit was a group of from five to ten men living in the sierra, and linked to another group dispersed about the towns and villages whose task was to provide information. At present they were lying low and giving as little trouble as possible.
Until recently people suspected of underground activity had been arrested and court-martialled. But this had led to an agitation in the foreign press and to the intervention of ambassadors, so now a different procedure was adopted. Suspects were either kept in prison without trial or taken to some mountain district where police rule was absolute and there left dead by the roadside. When their bodies were discovered next morning, it was given out that they were Reds who had been shot while trying to escape. Since May 1947, when the Civil Guard were given full powers in certain areas, this has been the usual method for getting rid of unwanted people.
The enormous number of police of all kinds is, of course, one of the things that first strikes the foreigner. In certain districts, where the Reds are active, they give the impression of an army. But the Civil Guards, who form the flower of this force – if flower is the word to use in such a dismal connexion – are not what they used to be. The visitor to Andalusia before 1936 will recollect the traditional type – grave, stern and monkish, planted in a hostile village like Knights Templar among infidels and devoted to the tradition of their service and its code of honour. These men exist no longer: the Civil Guards of today are just civilians in uniform. Travelling about the country in buses, I have often been struck by their easygoing friendliness, without reflecting that this might imply a lack of discipline. In fact they are often corrupt and indolent, take their private toll off black marketeers and show little eagerness in risking their lives against the Reds. More serious than this is their tradition of brutality. Only two days ago some Civil Guards were passing down our street when they heard some young men laughing. Thinking quite wrongly that they were laughing at them, they went up to them and began beating them on the head. Apparently these sorts of incident happen frequently: a man of the working classes has no defence and no protection. And, of course, anyone taken to the police station as a political suspect receives a good beating, simply as a matter of routine.
20 March
The time had now come for us to leave Churriana. For the last time we walked round our garden, as Adam and Eve might have walked round theirs, before deserting it for the impersonal world, unwarmed by the friendly glow of ownership. The feeling of affection that can grow up for a house and its corner of land is surely one of the more valuable kinds of piety that civilisation has produced. When we pour scorn on the feudal spirit, we forget the frigid nomadism, the camping-ground in the desert of flats and villas, with which we are replacing it. How is it that every step we take in the intellectual mastery of Nature leaves the world more uncongenial and unassimilable to our other faculties?
In Málaga we went to say goodbye to Don Carlos. He was sitting hunched up with a red muffler round his neck, his bald head rising steeply above it and his eyes gleaming, as he listened with the excitement of a schoolboy to the radio report of a football match. Córdoba was playing La Coruña and to his delight was one goal ahead.
‘Viva Andalucía!’ he said. ‘We’ll show these Gallegos we can beat them.’
And we had to sit down and wait patiently for the end of the match.
Then his wife and daughters came in, some refreshments were produced and we drew up to the table to eat them.
‘You’re leaving us very soon,’ said Doña María Luisa. ‘Are you tired of Málaga already?’
I protested vehemently. Málaga, I said, was an earthly paradise.
‘Aha,’ said Don Carlos, laughing, ‘you know the saying Paraíso habitado por demonios, A paradise inhabited by devils. That describes us completely. When you’re with Malagueños, keep your eyes open.’
Before long the conversation drifted on to politics. Here Don Carlos had a very characteristic manner. He spoke as though I must agree entirely with his point of view, yet with a boastfulness and exaggeration that sought to beat down beforehand any opposition that I might be tempted to put up. He especially enjoyed saying things that would, he supposed, shock my liberal conscience. Yet, like almost everyone of his race, he was frank and truthful and said without reticence what he thought of the weaknesses of the regime.
His bête noire was the landowners, whom he accused of being cerrado, or stingy. They refused to raise wages, they kept alive the black market and cared nothing if the regime failed. Even an American loan wouldn’t make them disclose their hidden supplies. Here of course he was venting the Falangist opinion. But it is also the opinion of everyone else, and if the higher ranks of the Falange were not so corrupt and their system of control through the syndicates so rotten, they would be the strongest force in the country.
When we left, Don Carlos, Doña María Luisa, and their whole family accompanied us back to our hotel with true Spanish courtesy. Twenty years ago, they would have insisted on seeing us off at the railway station on the following day.
Going to the bank next morning to cash a cheque, I stood waiting, while the usual forms were being filled in, beside a nun of the order of St Philip Neri. She told me that she visited the banks twice a week to collect money for the orphans whom her convent feeds and educates; they gave her five pesetas (i.e. 1s.) at every bank and for that kept her waiting half an hour. ‘Beggars have to learn patience,’ she said. Her merry face and twinkling eyes pleased me so much that I offered her a coin, and she told me that I was doing something for my happiness in the future life.
‘If I thought that,’ I said, ‘I would give you all I had.’
‘Some people,’ she answered with a smile, ‘do.’