‘Ave, Ave, Ave Maria,
Ave, Ave, Ave Maria …’
until all marchers took up the chant and Badajoz echoed with praises of the Virgin.
Through the darkness we approached a tall building some seven or eight stories high which was used as a girls’ school; it was dark and silent, but as the priests at the head of our column reached its doors, suddenly from the roof several hundred girls in white lit their candles and began chanting, ‘Ave, Ave, Ave Maria.’ The effect was stunning. The marchers stopped. The priest with the bullhorn sang no more, but the girls’ voices, drifting through the night, lent the procession a religious quality that was profoundly moving. Quietly word passed along the column, ‘Proceed,’ and in silence we left the school, from which the echoes of chanting could long be heard.
Now we were in the country, toward two o’clock in the morning, and a three-quarter moon lit our way, so that we could see the trees and the towers of some building about a mile distant. The priest with the bullhorn resumed his chant and finally we came to a halt before a building, which I never did identify. Its front contained many balconies which were jammed with monks and nuns, and everyone bared his head as the priests who had led us from the cathedral began a service in praise of Our Lady of Fátima. It was a solemn, deeply moving moment, and many kneeled.
In the days that followed I was reminded again of the first essential for anyone who wishes to understand Spain: in every manifestation of life Spain is a Catholic country, and if citizens are willing to march several miles at midnight to honor the Virgin, they are equally willing to abide her surveillance in daily life. Down the street from the Casino de Badajoz stands an old palace at present converted into the offices of the diocese, from which the schools of Badajoz are supervised. The walls contain graduation pictures from the College of Our Lady of Carmen, in which, by Spanish tradition, the boys are dressed as admirals of the fleet and the girls as queens with tiaras, except that the boy who gained top grades is dressed as a fifteenth-century grandee with lace ruffs. There is no education not under the control of the Church and its orientation is to the past.
On the door of the parish church nearby hangs a poster classifying the motion pictures to be shown in Badajoz this week:
The National Catholic Confederation of Heads of Families.
Remember these classifications:
Class 1. For everyone, including children
Class 2. For those fourteen and above
Class 3. For those eighteen and above
Class 3-R. For those eighteen and above, but watch out
Class 4. Gravely perilous to morals
These restrictions apply to all dioceses and cannot be changed by any officials in those dioceses.
Of the forthcoming pictures only one was in Class 1, The Sound of Music, called in Spanish Smiles and Tears. Return from the Ashes, with Samantha Eggar and Maximilian Schell, was condemned for stressing ‘lust, adultery, illicit relations, crime and sadism.’ On one church door I saw this condemnation of an especially bad show: ‘This should be seen only by those ninety-four and above.’
One experience especially demonstrated the force of Catholicism in Spain. I had taken a long walk out into the country on a narrow road that led to Olivenza, and on the way back I stopped to inspect a group of clean, good-looking buildings called the Maternity Hospital of the Virgin of Solitude, and as I stood at the gate a man came out whose wife had just been admitted and we spoke of the good work such hospitals did.
‘Who runs them?’ I asked.
‘The Church. Who else?’
‘Are there any public hospitals?’
‘I don’t know what you mean. The Church gives us our hospitals and schools. Don’t they give you hospitals and schools in your country?’
‘We provide such things with taxation.’
He pondered this for some moments, then asked, ‘You mean the government taxes you for what the Church gives us? You have to pay for them out of your own pocket?’
I tried to explain that in many countries, England and Germany for instance, taxes provided schools, but he interrupted, grabbing me by the arm. “Tell me, would sensible men trust politicians to run a hospital? The Church you can trust.’ He was unable to imagine a society which operated on a system of taxation, and his final question was, ‘You mean to say you allow politicians to teach your children? The Church you can trust, but not those others.’
In Badajoz I also learned something about the government of Spain. At the post office I purchased ten air-letter forms and paid six pesetas (ten cents) each for them. I went back to the cathedral plaza and spent most of one morning writing ten letters, a job I find difficult, for words do not come easily to me. The next day I took the ten letters to the post office to mail, but a clerk refused them, saying, ‘The price of air-letter forms went up this morning from six pesetas to ten.’
‘All right. Give me ten four-peseta stamps and I’ll stick them on the letters.’
‘We can’t do that, sir, because it states very clearly on the form that if anything whatever is enclosed in the form or added to it, it will be sent by regular post.’
‘Then let me give you the difference, and you stamp them as having ten pesetas.’
‘There’s no provision for that, sir.’
‘Then what can I do? Mail them as they are and let them go regular mail?’
‘No, because they’re no longer legal. They’ve been declassified.’
‘It took me a long time to write these letters. How can I mail them?’
‘Take each one. Place it inside an airmail envelope. Readdress the envelope and place twelve pesetas’ worth of stamps in the corner and mail it as a regular air-mail letter.’
This I did, and the letters were delivered in various countries, but I was so astounded by the procedure that I called upon a high government official to ask how such things could happen. His answer was revealing. ‘The clerk did right. The forms you bought were valid yesterday. Today they’re not. Each form states clearly that nothing may be added, so there was no way to mail the old forms.’
I pointed out that in half a dozen different countries, including my own, I’d faced this problem and it had always been a simple matter to paste on the additional postage, at which he said, ‘In other countries, yes. But no nation in the world is so difficult to govern as Spain. No people are so fundamentally anarchistic as the Spanish. Therefore, when we say that nothing may be stuck on the envelope we have got to mean it. If we fluctuated on this point, we might be driven to fluctuate on others. The Spaniard understands when the clerk stands fast. If the clerk once wavered, he might be dead the next day.’
‘But it’s so unfair! You sell the forms one day and cancel them the next, with no redress.’
‘My friend. The whole affair cost you what? Ten times six pesetas. About one dollar American. That’s money lost, and it’s too bad. But you will talk about this everywhere in Spain and word will filter out to many people. And they’ll say, “See! Our government means just what it says, even with foreigners.” Your loss will do much good, my friend. Because we Spaniards are devils to govern.’
That is why, throughout Spain one sees so many members of the Guardia Civil, always in pairs, as I had seen them in Teruel. No truth in Spain is more difficult for the traveler to ascertain than that regarding these men, who are in effect the masters of rural Spain and men of tremendous power in all society. I shall recite seven stories for which I can personally vouch, having either witnessed the incident or known the persons involved.
As a beautiful young girl this woman was, of course, kept behind iron bars to protect her from young men.
An American couple working at a United States Navy base could not find quarters on the base but did find a comfortable house in a nearby town. They had a thirteen-year-old daughter who went to the local school. One Thursday the parents arranged for her to be picked up by friends at the base and to stay with them overnight. At five o’clock that afternoon two offic
ers of the Guardia Civil appeared, saying, ‘Señora, your daughter has not passed our headquarters this day. Is there trouble?’ It is said that every human being who lives in the Spanish countryside must be personally known to the guardia, who are able to report on that person’s movements, ideas and behavior.
An Englishman driving a small car of British make had a breakdown on a lonely road out of Salamanca. A pair of guardia walked by, ascertained his trouble, walked on to a telephone, called their headquarters twenty miles away, directed the guardia there to find at some garage a part for the British car, then walked back to the Englishman and stayed with him until a passing truck driver dropped off the part.
An Englishwoman staggered into an Extremaduran town with a terrifying tale. She had been in a little village where a gang of gypsies had molested her, trying to steal her purse. Two officers came on the scene and began to rough the gypsies up, whereupon the latter, fed up with previous pressure from the Guardia Civil, cut their throats to the neckbone. Someone from the village ran to report the murders to a neighboring Guardia station, whereupon four pairs of guardia climbed into a truck, drove to the scene of the murder, threw a cordon around the gypsy encampment and proceeded to machine-gun every human being therein.
The weekly bullfight at Sevilla was going badly and a riot started. The local police who attend all bullfights tried to control things, but the crowd laughed at them. The riot looked as if it were going to get out of hand, so the squad of guardia who are kept in reserve at all such functions started quietly down from their seats high in the rafters. As they descended men began to whisper, ‘The Guardia Civil.’ Slowly the guardia moved into the arena, taking up positions facing the unruly mob. They drew their revolvers and quietly looked at the rioters. There was not a man in the mob who doubted that within the next minute the guardia would begin to fire, and the riot collapsed.
An American working in a bar along the Mediterranean coast got drunk and slugged a guardia. He was hauled off to a military jail, where he was held incommunicado for six weeks, for the guardia are under military rule and offenses against them are judged by court-martial. Efforts of a most extraordinary kind were made to gain the young man’s release, but to no avail. ‘We can’t allow anyone to strike a member of the Guardia Civil,’ his friends were told. ‘No one.’ Finally he was brought to secret trial and sentenced to seven years in military prison. That was four years ago. The night before I wrote this paragraph I was advised by an American who knew the young man that word had been quietly passed that he could have his freedom if he could scrape together a fine of $7,000. Word of this affair traveled widely among the hordes of young Europeans and Americans barging into Spain in the summer: ‘No matter what you do, no matter what happens, never touch a guardia.’
A New York woman, lost in the outskirts of Madrid at midnight, was escorted to her hotel by two members of the Guardia. When we asked her why she was in the Madrid countryside at midnight, she explained, ‘In New York or Chicago or San Francisco, I would be mortally afraid to go out alone after dark. A woman simply isn’t safe in the United States after dark. But in Spain, with the Guardia Civil on the job, I am safe to go anywhere. No one is going to abuse me. So when I come to Spain the thing I like to do most is to walk at night. Tonight I got lost.’
An intelligence officer of the United States Navy told me, ‘We had this incident in which one of our kids in uniform committed a major crime. No question about it. But we didn’t know whether he’d had accomplices or not, so we put our best brains on the job, and when we were through we checked with the Guardia Civil and they’d done the same thing we were doing, but they had a dossier on this kid that was unbelievable. They knew everything he’d done for months past, who all his gang were, who was involved. In the States I’ve cooperated with our F.B.I. on similar cases, but in thoroughness they don’t compare with the Guardia.’
About such an organization opinions can vary. Conservatives believe the Guardia to be the agency which permits Spain to exist and that without these pairs of police Spain would fall apart in anarchy. Liberals recall García Lorca’s harsh phrase, ‘those patent-leather men with their patent-leather souls.’ At the outbreak of Civil War in 1936 one of the first things that happened in small villages across Spain was the slaughter of the Guardia Civil, so in the ensuing war they fought on the side of General Franco, revenging themselves for the outrages committed against their brothers. I have heard many foreign travelers arguing that the Guardia Civil was an invention of the Franco regime; actually they are well over a century old, having been created in 1844 to replace the militia, which had proved to be politically unreliable, and since then, no matter what form of government has ruled Spain, the guardia have been needed to keep order. In recent years the Franco government, in an effort to popularize the Guardia, has encouraged the press always to refer to them as La Benemérita (the well-deserving) in much the same way that Manhattan police are called ‘New York’s finest,’ and it is common to see stories in which the brave Benemérita captured a bandit or the compassionate Benemérita helped a widow. A Spaniard told me, ‘We Spaniards are really bastards to govern. If we didn’t have the Guardia we’d have no country. And remember this. If the Communists had won in 1939, every guardia you see today would still be a guardia. Only he’d be a Communist guardia. For to rule Spain without them would be impossible.’ He then used a phrase I had not heard before: ‘We have the old spirit of Viva yo. In Spain you must always take into account Viva yo.’
I must explain Viva yo because the phrase is essential, but before I get to it I would like to introduce a few other words which I shall be using frequently. When I was in college I mowed the lawn of Professor J. Russell Smith, a Quaker geographer who wrote a series of books about foreign lands. During the academic year Professor Smith was usually absent, for he taught at Columbia University, but in the summers he often spoke to me, and one evening he mentioned some of the principles which governed his work. I forget all of them but one: ‘James, if thee ever has cause to write about a foreign land, remember this. Don’t pepper the page with foreign words printed in italic. That’s pedantry and accomplishes little. But when thee has compiled a list of foreign words which thee thinks necessary, identify those which thee will be using at least three times in the chapter at hand or a dozen times in the book as a whole. These are the words thee really needs. Use them. But define them very carefully when thee first introduces them. Then define them by allusion on second use.’ The significance of this advice was somewhat lost on me at the moment because of the extraordinary thing he said next: ‘I discovered this principle by necessity. I was trying to teach graduate students about strange lands and I could see they were being drowned in words. So I asked myself, “What is the most successful expository material available today?” And I read the Bible to see how St. Paul expounded his ideas and I read the Tarzan books to find out why people who knew nothing of Africa were finding them so easy. I studied other works as well, but those were the two that taught me how to write.’
In dealing with Spain one is especially tempted to scatter italics. Spanish words are easy to pronounce, are often self-explanatory and do have an attractive power of suggesting to the reader that he is listening to castanets. I have never considered this an honorable way of writing and have followed Dr. Smith’s advice, but in writing of Spain certain words are inescapable. Without them I do not see how one can come even close to explaining this country or his reactions to it. Herewith, then, the words which I intend to use throughout this book, for they relate to the soul of Spain and are indeed of its essence.
Duende. In my recent visits to Spain I have heard no other word so frequently used to express important ideas, whereas years ago I did not hear it at all. In fact, my rather large Spanish-English dictionary, compiled originally in 1852, does not even contain the word, and one issued as late as 1959 offers several irrelevant meanings like elf, ghost, hobgoblin, hypochondriac, the restless one, glazed silk, small copper coin, but no conn
otation resembling the one which now dominates Spanish conversation. I find myself unable to define duende, yet it seems to have become the sine qua non of Spanish existence. Without duende one might as well quit the game, and I mean this seriously. To say that a friend or performer has duende is the highest praise one can bestow, and an experience which I prized came one night in Badajoz when we had been drinking late in the public square before the ugly cathedral and I made a painstaking observation in garbled English-Spanish, at the conclusion of which a student said solemnly, ‘Sir, you may be a norteamericano but you have duende.’ What was it I had? Let me refer to Japan in an attempt to explain. The Japanese have a word which summarizes all the best in Japanese life, yet it has no explanation and cannot be translated. It is the word shibui, and the best approximation to its meaning is ‘acerb good taste.’ For example, a bright yellow could never be shibui but a dusty purple might be. A kimono decorated with golden dragons would not have the slightest chance of being shibui, but a gray-black one with single silver crest the size of a half-dollar might have. Architecture, landscaping, theater art forms, total personal appearance, conduct—all can be shibui if they are properly acerbic, restrained and in the great tradition of Japan, but what the word finally means no one can say, for it relates to the soul of Japan, which is itself undefinable. Duende is a, word like that, but since Spain is not a country given to acerb restraint, the connotation is different. The dictionary of the Real Academia de la Lengua (language) defines it as ‘mysterious and ineffable charm.’ A night club has duende if all things are in proportion, all properly Spanish, and if a sense of lovely, swinging motion pervades. A singer possesses duende if suddenly she can tilt her voice in such a way that everyone automatically cries ‘¡Ole!’ (Bravo!) A bullfighter has duende when he displays not bravery but unmistakable class. The essence of the word lies in its peculiar usage, as in the sentence I heard not long ago describing a dancer, ‘My God! He has duende upon him.’ I judge from that that duende is something that no man can will upon himself, but occasionally, when he is one with the spirit of a place or with the inherent quality of Spain, it rises from some deep reserve within him. I am aware of its presence when I see it, and I would suppose that the indulgent scholar at Badajoz was wrong when he conferred duende upon me. I know of no foreigner in Spain who has ever shown me duende except that extraordinary American John Fulton Short, whom we shall meet later. In areas where he yearned for duende, I suspect he did not achieve it, but one night during the fair in Sevilla, in a high attic where some dancers, guitarists and singers had gathered, Short danced in such a way that duende shone upon him. It was something to see. I’m sure that when Hemingway was young and in the first blush of his exploration of Pamplona he had duende. In his last crumbling years when he was trying to retrace his steps he wasn’t even close. García Lorca compiled a considerable essay on duende in which he suggested that the best definition was one given accidentally by Goethe when speaking of other matters: ‘Paganini had that mysterious power which all sense but no one can explain.’ Lorca cites other quotations which indicate an understanding of the word. Of Manuel de Falla’s music: ‘Whenever it is composed of black sounds it has duende.’ And of a flamenco singer: ‘You have the voice, you have the style, but you will never triumph because you have no duende.’ Duende, then, is the essence that makes something Spanish.