Algren at Sea (21 page)

One entrepreneur, a boy of about fourteen, was working along different lines. He was standing in the shadow of a door and, as I passed, exposed himself.

My single hope was to get out of town with the camera. There was no use of trying to take a picture. Darryl Zanuck couldn't have afforded it.

From the barrooms of Barcelona to the gravel heights above Almería I saw a tough and vigorous race. A monarchy of hungry peasants controlled, yet scarcely governed, by a military establishment shot through with corruption and sustained by a contented American State Department. The stink in the herring begins in the head.

Should this writer's convictions trouble his reader, please bear in mind that the writer paid his own way. That he remains, today, not a bought journalist (although working in a corrupted estate) only by the chance
that there have been no offers, in no wise alters his honor. The virgin who retains her virginity by the happenstance of being overlooked is no less the virgin for that. The writer is therefore resolved to cherish his unstained condition so assiduously in the future as to provoke the passions of parties who might be interested in soiling it simply to amuse themselves.

The point here is not to gain riches, but only to be able to attend a writers' conference somewhere and not have to feel, when seated on a panel facing an audience, that he is different than the other members.

Show me a gypsy and I'll show you a nut.

Back at the airport I picked up a week-old
Herald Tribune,
Paris edition. Frank Lary of Detroit had beaten Pedro Ramos of the Senators in their second pitching duel within the week, retiring the last twelve men in order.

Another American wearing a pith helmet and Bermuda shorts was standing at the bar. I was going to ask him if he'd checked his Mannlicher, but it's best not to start anything with an American.

Yet I kept wondering what country
he
thought
he
was in.

The plane's enormous shadow keeps wandering above The Land of Visible Silence: to these vast rock-colored wastes no bird ever comes. No grass grows, no tree can flower. I'm the pilot's only passenger, and the cabin door is closed. If I open it and he isn't in there I'll have to learn to fly real fast.

A plane without a stewardess is home without a mother, and on Lineas Aéreas España it's home without a Spanish mother. If I could see somebody down there, just
anybody,
it would be less lonesome up here. Nothing could be more lonesome than the silence-colored wastes below.

Until a savannah green with hope takes the plane's shadow by surprise—here the Moors brought water long ago. Then the wastes once more. If the Catholic kings couldn't irrigate themselves, the least they could have done was not to bother the Moors when they were gardening.

Besides being great gardeners, the Moors took great strides toward going to seed themselves. Nobody in Spain would have had to bother getting decadent today had the Spaniards let them alone. The work would have all been done. This means that the modern Spaniard has lost the opportunity of becoming decadent through satiation. He has to find some other means. Such as hunger.

I'm told Spanish power is no longer what it was, and in that event I'm tickled that I wasn't around when it was really cranked up. Unless I could have been a Spaniard too. In which event I would have gone to Mexico and made life a living hell for Montezuma. Then I'd buy Goa with the profits and give it back to the Portuguese.

I found the copy of
The Ring
magazine with Carmen Basilio on the cover, and turned to. “Harry Greb King of the Alley Fighters.” I'll have to remember to ask the pilot what ever became of Paolino Uzcudun.

If I
have
a pilot. If he isn't in there I'll grab the most likely looking stick and taxi into Seville as gracefully as though I'd been expected. When the reporters start throwing questions at me I'll say, No, I've never flown before; it's just that an American adapts himself to danger by disposing of it. Yes, I'm single at the moment but if I'd stayed in Marseilles at the end of the war I would now be the father of six.

How I'd support a family like that on one PX card gave my sense of security such a jolt that I decided to settle every doubt I'd gathered since 1946 simply by knocking on the cabin door and shouting, “Are you
in
there, in there?” At that moment I knew there really was somebody in there, because he and I both spotted the city below at the same moment. I judged it to be Seville, but he thought he had discovered something, because he pointed the nose of the plane straight down and shut off both motors.

We didn't descend. Men, we
plummeted.

He straightened me out at the last possible second for the headlong race down the runaway with every loose rivet in the plane rattling barely loud enough to cover the rattling of my own; which aren't any too tight, anyhow.

That's how it is in Spain, men. That's how it
really
is. When you see something you never saw before, get there first.

You may have discovered something.

As the bulls were not being fought on the day of my arrival, several Europeans had driven to the airport in hope of seeing a plane come down in flames. Among these sophisticates I spotted a novelist, Juan Goytisolo, whose brother, Luis, was being held incommunicado by Franco in Barcelona; and Mme. Simone de Beauvoir, who is never incommunicado under any circumstances.

They put on a poorly rehearsed business about having come to meet me, but I was
on.
One brief nod covered both
voyeurs.

Between them stood a moustachioed brigand for whom they hastily invented the pseudonym of “Vicente Andarra” and introduced him as “our translator.”

Some translator. What was he doing with a German camera dangling from his neck and his pockets bulging, apparently with film? One photographer on this safari would serve our purposes, was
my
thinking. I pressed my own small Kodak to my side, for I felt her trembling under the Prussian aristocrat's arrogant glare.

“Nothing will come of the camera,” Mme. de Beauvoir, a French
philosopher, philosophized, to assure her Spanish companions that my Kodak was nothing more than a prop.

“Something
will
come of it,” I corrected her. We were off to a good start.

“Our translator” had maneuvered a small rented car to the airport upon the assumption that all Americans love to drive. He had never seen one who had never driven. I had to climb into the back seat to establish this move: this not only prevented a terrible crash on the highway, but, as it left no one but Andarra to handle the wheel, cast me as the expedition's official photographer; a post richly deserved.

“Now
let's see you take pictures,” I challenged him silently when he took the wheel.

“Nothing will come of
either
camera,” Goytisolo observed—the first occasion he had had to slander somebody in English. I was going to have trouble with him too. That was plain enough.

Out of the comer of my eye, on both sides of the road, I saw a crowd of dust-green dwarfs racing us to Seville; but when I turned my head they stiffened into attitudes of trees.

Like people, olive trees become stagestruck early and seldom recover, spending their whole lives twisting themselves into unnatural attitudes in trying to be something they are not. One old paunchy rogue was trying to give some dusky girl-trees the impression that he was Harry Belafonte by doing a calypso bit. Although they were laughing at him to themselves, he thought he was making it and making it big.

An austere, imperious sort, a very De Gaulle of olive trees, directed the entire grove, holding his branches like olive whips while reminding all of the ancestral grandeur of his grove; which, I had the impression, he had planted himself. He was telling them that he was different than most trees because he thought in terms of decades, and I guess he was right, because half of the grove kept marching the other way as if thinking in terms of what was going to happen tomorrow. Personally I felt they should all go home; including their commander.

Yet all—rogues, girls, reluctant conscripts—in whatever direction they strove, struggled hard against the Spanish wind.

The wind off the Sierra Nevadas of which peasants say, “It will not blow a candle out, but will kill a man in a night.”

One widowed olive, draped in a silvered shawl, her other arm shielding her eyes, was cradling a dead infant at her breast.

A grief wholly Spanish.

A contented-looking teen-age tree stood looking on, feeling cocky about being so much smarter than anybody else; but I think he gave himself too much credit. He reminded me, in fact, of myself on an occasion when I outsmarted both the owner of the corner poolroom and my mother in an early westside coup. The owner wouldn't let me shoot pool in short pants and my mother wouldn't let me put on long ones until I was fourteen.

I was the only sport on Kedzie Avenue still in short pants, and I had three months to go before I could shoot pool with my colleagues of the Kedzie Avenue Arrows. That was a lifetime to wait.

So I bought a pair with money I'd earned myself, and put them on in the poolroom washroom. At the clack of the cue ball breaking up the triangle, the fifteen ball raced to the corner pocket and dropped in. When I touched the tip of the cue to the wooden markers by which we kept score on the wire overhead, to rack up my first point, I had become a man at last.

I don't know how many points it
really
takes; but racking up the fifteen ball did it for
that
day.

“It's not as easy as you think, punk,” I told him as we passed.

One seed, one soil, and one wind had formed them all. Yet each felt certain he was unique.

“Olive trees act like people,” I therefore informed the French philosopher, confident that she would translate this nifty notion and in no time at all we'd all be laughing.

“People act more like olive trees,” was her fast rejoinder.

Next time I'd keep my mouth shut.

Goytisolo reported that he had not succeeded in seeing his brother, but had learned that Luis had been in solitary confinement forty-three days and was sick as a dog. No reason had been offered for his arrest.

At the time of his arrest, Señor Fernando Castiella, Minister of Foreign Affairs for Spain, was in the United States, having been invited by the Eisenhower Administration (presumably on the advice of the C.I.A.) to speak at Georgetown University. In this address Señor Castiella neglected to mention “the passionate permanent unity between Spanish Fascism and German Nazism” that he had declared in his own book; in which he asserts with pride that World War II was planned and rehearsed in the
Spanish Civil War. His invitation followed his private discussion with Eisenhower in London in 1959. Since that secret occasion, Señor Castiella has echoed Franco's declaration of solidarity with Portugal.

“I estimate we have killed 30,000 of these animals already,” a Portuguese major has informed a correspondent of
Time;
“there are perhaps 100,000 of them in revolt, and we intend to kill every one of them when the dry season starts late in May.”

Nobody in Spain knows when the dry season starts for the C.I.A.

Goytisolo was five when Mussolini and Hitler invaded Spain, and now lives in Paris because it's hard to get a lawyer when you're locked up in Barcelona. But being inordinately fond of Spanish dancing, Spanish food, Spanish wine, the Spanish guitar, Spanish girls, the Spanish language,
toros, fiestas, mantillas, gaspacho, carraquillo,
and all the rest of that crazy stuff they have over there, he ducks back to Barcelona now and again to see who else he knows is being held incommunicado.

The melancholy information that Luis Goytisolo was being held in solitary confinement was as close as Juan had been able to come to seeing his brother. The information had been conveyed to Juan through the good offices of the prison physician, who had let him have this news for a hundred dollars, as he was an idealist. Had he not been, the information would have cost less.

It isn't in despite of their Catholicism that these Catalans resist Franco, but because of it. These are the people whose priests were put to the wall by Franco's “blond Moors”—as he called his German brigades.

All Goytisolos, being Catalans, speak at once, and I doubt that any member of the family stops talking even in solitary. Mme. de Beauvoir speaks a broken English more fluently than I can speak it unbroken. This left me only my Kodak as a means of asserting my presence, so I kept aiming it at the olive groves and snapping the shutter whether I had film in it or not. This revealed me as an American tourist of the most unbearable variety; an identity I was trying to establish so that nobody could say I was going out of my way just to endear myself to everyone. Well, how would
you
feel if
you
had been Richard Widmark when Rip Torn came along?

Goytisolo and Andarra began brushing up on their English by asking me the English name of objects along the road. Goytisolo would point at a grove and I would explain: “Tree. Olive. Martini.” And Andarra would disagree—“No Martini. Wicky”—“wicky” being the closest people south
of Madrid can come to saying “whiskey.” They have as much difficulty with our “s” as we do with their double “r.”

The olive-tree people kept trailing us, some waving us on, some calling us back.

The last one I saw, as we rounded a curve into Seville, was a youthful relay runner straining toward some everlasting finishing line with a hard wind against him.