B007RT1UH4 EBOK (49 page)

Paris of course was the roundabout I thought it might be, and took some eight days of hopping, losing telephone numbers, missing buses, shaking hands, —but as you can see I finally did escape the warm-house-with-oriental-retainer, and the dashing sports car (which I didn’t even take out of the garage while there). But now, no telephones, no gramaphones, no Citröen, no Rolls Royce . . . And the welcome back. People I hadn’t seen in almost two years, and almost all of them servants or bar tenders &c, but glowing welcome, [...] It is wonderful, and heart-breaking, this lavishness with nothing, and such friendship isolates me in embarrassment even more, somehow, than London’s civilised indulgence or Paris’s hard, dull, dreary, absurd, pretentious, stupid, tiresome, indifference. Oh yes and unalive, also. And again " Well.

I don’t know what it is Madrid has, to make it handsome to me. But it was the two days I stayed there on the way down. Brisk clear weather, and everything seemed white, like Cadiz, though I hadn’t thought of it as a white city before. But the Prado. And the Retiro Park on Sunday afternoon. And there is, as many enough have said before, this apparently innate quality of happiness in south-Europeans, which Paris, with all its glittering old junk, never manages. And again the contrast to England, which shows in favour of both countries, the means of externalizing everything immediately here, sense of style, place for everything.

And nothing has changed; except they’ve finished the bank they were building on one corner of the Plaza Nueva, and started another across the street. Still the barrel organs, which bring every sentimental bit of me crying out, and like Odysseus must be tied to the mast as we pass the rock where the sirens sing, or I should follow them. (I did once, in Palamos, did I tell you? follow one out of the town, up the hill toward the cemetery, it was drawn by a pony.) But I ask them to play La Tani, and it is gone, no longer ‘popular’ but always popular because I asked an old and blind accordianist to play it in a bar a couple of evenings ago (he was playing that old rag La Cumparsita), and soon enough five gypsy girls and women, handsome and dirty, oiled, seams split and heels run down, were clapping in the corner, which excites me as it did when I first heard it. (Now I have to avoid the blind accordianist because he breaks into La Tani when his assistant sees me and it costs a peseta. Got to watch these things.)

I’ve thought about you a great deal these last weeks; but nothing has brought Chantry Mill so abruptly to my mind as the food, which Isabelle serves me in the sort of dim light usually kept for deception. (Though that is the first thing one notes in Spain, right across the border, the dim lights everywhere.) (No Paris neon.) Wretched fish, done to death by fire; plate of beans-and-rice; oak-leaf proportioned slices of beef and potatoes, fried in oil. Oil. Cold potatoes, floating in oil. But there is wine.

(But there is yet faith But the faith and the love and the hope are all in the waiting.

I ’phoned Margaret from Madrid, a perfection connexion, which did much to enhance the sadness of the conversation, the apparent impossibility of ever managing anything, we; I don’t know, it’s still all the same, nothing has changed, and I upset her by calling, in high spirits because Madrid was so fine, and she was so splendid, and so unhappy. I don’t know; should I bother you with this? But it’s in my mind, a steady depressent.

Vamonos . . . it is not that I do not love you, but that your house is so far away.

Mujer.

Uno y uno, dos/ Dos y dos son tres . . . No sale la cuenta porque falta un chulumbes (that word is gypsy, I can’t spell it;)

I shall call you, as I said. It will take a little straightening up first. Fortunately I’ve along a good store of books, though they do, of course, present the temptation to read them. I liked the Argentine novel, and in spite of its shortness it stays with me. Thank you, thank you, unnumbered times, for everything. I shall try; it will take time.

I have a lot of messy notes, taken on the spot in Real Life, to go through before the ten-o’clock shout from Isabella, —Don Guillermo, a comer! heralds the evening oil treatment (how I shall always remember what came out of that roasted chicken.

love from the wounded surgeon,

W—

La Tani: or “Tani mi Tani,” a flamenco song about a young Gypsy bride. It was written ca. 1942 by Francisco Acosta (lyrics) and Gerardo Monreal (music), and is heard throughout
R
III.3.

La Cumparsita: “The Little Parade,” a tango composed by Uruguayan Geraldo Matos Rodríguez (1917).

But the faith [...] in the waiting: a line from part 3 of Eliot’s “East Coker.”

Uno y uno [...] chulumbes: lyrics from “La Tani”; as Sinisterra explains in
R,
“The bill [la cuenta] doesn’t come out right because there’s a kid missing. It [churumbel] means a kid” (813).

the wounded surgeon: from the first line of part 4 of “East Coker.”

To Edith Gaddis

Sevilla

12 Feb. 1951, Monday morning

dear Mother—

Things are certainly not as they were between Paris and New York. We are safely back to Spanish concepts of mail service and time. I had your card saying you were about to set off for Florida yesterday, and by now you must be almost back.

Did you have a letter from me giving this address (below) instead of consulate, and asking that you put the february money into N Y bank? I hope so, because I may have to cash it in Africa.

A telegram from Barney yesterday saying he and a man I met in London are setting off for a 4-week automobile trip through north Africa, to Tunis, and return—will pass through Sevilla, and could I join them. Of course one never knows how such projects as these work out—especially with Barney—but I telephoned him in London last night, and apparently they will be in Sevilla in about 10 days. I can’t really say whether I’ll go or not and probably won’t know until they appear here. And so if you’ll continue to write to this address until I tell you of something phantastically different. [...]

I had a letter from
Atlantic Monthly
, whom I’d written impatiently, saying that they planned to settle definitely on the piece on Friday (last), so I should know one way or the other fairly soon. If they
should
take it (oh lord, how that would save my life), I might have to ask you to look for a letter I wrote you some 3 months ago, mentioning parts of it that must be checked again.

Otherwise everything goes along quietly and cold here in Sevilla—and fairly wet these last few days. We were to go to a bullfight in a nearby town yesterday, but it rained all day, and still is this morning. This evening I am going to dinner with Eulalio at his house, since it is his saint’s day, celebrated here as we do birth days. But aside from that, there’s no big news from this place. [...]

I’m waiting now for Isabelle to bring a charcoal brazier in, so that I can warm my hands over it and get down to work. I’ll let you know about “Africa”—and I hope your Florida trip was a success. (Remarkable that Granga didn’t pile in?)

with love,

W.

To Edith Gaddis

Sevilla

17 feb 1951

dear Mother,

I just had your note re
Atlantic Monthly
, Player Pianos &c. I think that by now probably everybody’s had enough of the whole thing. And so I’m writing Morton that you’ll send along the excerpt (could you have it copied out?) and for him to either send payment to my account in NY or to you, that you could deposit it. I’m sorry it’s been such a chore all around. I must confess, this afternoon, to being somewhat disappointed in spite of myself, for I had let myself depend on a more favourable outcome, over all the time it’s taken. Well. Life is very long.

A wire from Barney this morning, saying he can’t make the African trip, but that the other fellow (David Tudor Pole) is leaving Monday, should be here toward the end of the week, and is depending on my going and being able to share the driving. The trip, I understand, will be from Tanger east to the frontier of Libya, and back. I see no reason now that I shall not go, if, that is (through three telegrams from London) I understand things fully. I should think, then, that we’ll leave here about the 23rd, though I’ll confirm by cable, that as I referred to in my last letter, simply the word SEND.

Hosts of unforeseen difficulties and disasters waiting, no doubt.

Love,

W.

David Tudor Pole: (1921–2000), son of British spiritualist Wellesley Tudor Pole (and father of musician/actor Edward Tudor-Pole), at that time employed in his father’s business of importing esparto grass from North Africa to Scottish paper mills.

To Edith Gaddis

Hotel Astoria

Murillo, 10

Tanger [Morocco]

25 feb. 1951

dear Mother,

Things are going quite quickly. We got over here last night and now have some visa difficulties about Spanish Morocco, but hope to be in Tripoli in 5 or 6 days. I trust you got my note asking that 100 dollars be cabled to NABIEF Algiers—address in Tripoli, for any mail—Uaddan Club, Tripoli (marked “hold until arrival”). This first part of the trip is quite rushed, but we plan to return with less haste, and within a few days I should be able to write you more at length. Many thanks in advance for cable.