Going Up (22 page)

Some Argentinian visitors in the
pensión
assured me that the purest Spanish was spoken in Buenos Aires. Lacking
porteños
to imitate, I worked at my grammar and eavesdropped wherever I could. Something inhibited me from trying to make conversation with strangers, male or female, whether in bars or in the Prado, where I tried to conjure some original response to Velazquez and Bosch and Murillo and El Greco. Goya’s Black Paintings were in the basement, quite as if they had been relegated to the chamber of horrors. What other court painter was ever so subversive? He had gone from nugatory pastoral to the savage heart of the matter.

I went out for a breather into the forecourt of the Prado. A young American couple, the tall slim man in a seersucker suit, his wife in loafers, sweater and skirt, were giving their small daughter an ice cream. I heard the man call out, ‘You all by yourself?’ He could say that again. ‘Had lunch? Care to join us?’ His name was Herb Oppenheim and this was Judy. Herb was thirty years old, with a fair complexion, short greyish hair and blue eyes. Judy had a pleasant smile, but she was no beauty. And this was Linda. She was three years old.

Herb had just graduated from Columbia’s school of architecture. Garlanded with a Guggenheim, they were driving through Europe with studious zeal. Loneliness made me talkative; my accent entertained them. Herb was impressed by my academic record (I did not mention that I had failed to get a First). They were planning on leaving for Toledo next afternoon and then driving on down into Andalucia. There was room for me if I cared to join them. I did not wonder why a strange couple should so generously take a stranger on board. I liked myself better when I had an audience.

We arrived in Illescas, just short of Toledo, in late afternoon. Herb was driving a small blue Simca car with a bench seat in the back and red international number plates. He had discovered from his guidebook that there were several El Grecos in the Santuario de Nuestra Señora de la Caridad, in the main square. The big wooden doors were padlocked. Herb was a rich man’s son. Persistence (and perhaps a suitable donation) procured the arrival of a very small, very old nun. She brought not only the key to the Sanctuary, but also an oil lamp by which we were able to inspect paintings in a suitably sepulchral light. Since she was so short, the light spilled upwards and darkened, in dramatic fashion, into jagged shadow.

As we drove on up to Toledo, the purple sky, fractured by lurid patches of brilliance, towered over the jagged city. I had not spent time with Americans since I left New York as a small boy. It was a deliverance to be in unsuspicious company. Herb was a Jew; Judy was not, nor did she come from a prosperous family. She told me that she had liked Herb, because he was gentle, before she realised, from the drawings in his thesis, how brilliant he was. She came from a Midwestern state where the word ‘measure’ was pronounced ‘mayzher’. It was easy to present them with an agreeable version of myself. Herb taught me to look up at old buildings in modernised streets in order to appreciate what they had looked like before the ground floor had been improved. He was quick to believe that I was going to be the writer I wanted to be. Beetle soon came into what I told him about myself.

We went to the Alcázar and read the words of the Franquist commander, El Coronel Moscardó, who allowed his own son to be shot by the Reds rather than surrender the citadel. He told the boy, over the field telephone, to recommend himself to God and cry
Viva España
. There was an old motorbicycle which, when jacked up by the besieged cadets, generated the only available electricity. It was difficult not to side with the beleaguered bad guys.

Herb led the way to the great church of Santa Maria, which had been the central synagogue before the
Reconquista
. When we visited El Greco’s house, I recalled Willie Maugham’s suggestion, in
Don Fernando
, that the Greek’s flamboyant superficiality was typical of, as they used to say, ‘queers’ (Herb’s term was ‘fruit’). I had no idea that Maugham was painting an incidental portrait of himself. Herb said he had never met anyone of my age so well read. Judy seemed happy that Herb had talkative company. She occupied herself with Linda, who had derived small pleasure (‘playzher’) from spending weeks in the little Simca, as they honoured Herb’s virtuous, demanding itinerary. He wore his father’s money modestly, but it dressed him with the presumption that he was entitled to the best. He had a three-dimensional camera, which he wielded assiduously. We broke our pot-holed ride south, through Aranjuez and along the wide, monotonous plain of La Mancha, by stopping overnight in Ubeda. The four-square, thick-walled Parador was an early Renaissance castle of unadorned brown stone.

The following morning, as Herb and I were loading the car while Judy was busy with Linda, we were approached by the son of the last private owner of the property. He had a round, heavy head, like a polished bean, and a front tooth missing. His suave English had the rueful cadences of those who had known cosmopolitan days. When Judy arrived, with the fractious Linda, he asked why they didn’t hire a
muchacha
to look after her. A local girl would work fifteen hours a day for between 150 and 300 pesetas (£2–£3) a month.

We had to stop at a level crossing on the Ubeda–Linares narrow-gauge
railway while a train shunted back and forth several times. A throng assembled around the alien Simca. They smiled at Linda and offered us cigarettes (
Celtas
were only a few pesetas for twenty). The ragged children were often misshapen: skin eruptions, oozing ears, gummy or already divergent eyes. Others might have been Murillo angels. Dark eyes stared, enviously but without malice, at the plump American kid.

Judy Birdwood had recommended the
Hotel de Cuatro Naciones
at Córdoba. Herb rated it ‘minimal’ but its blue tiled floors and white walls seemed quite elegant to me. The city was an impacted monument to the centuries of the
Convivencia
when, under a tolerant caliph, the dominant Muslims lived on easy terms, some of the time at least, with both Christians and Jews, who occupied powerful positions in the city. Monotheistic Judaism made better sense to the Muslims than the Christian Trinity. The magnificent
Mezquíta
and its fate stood in unique witness to the city’s history.

I wrote in my notebook:

Whatever the Reverend Harper Wood might have thought of my insolent sentiments, thanks to him I was seeing things in a way I never had before. Alone in my hotel bedroom, pen in hand, I was no one in particular, sure only that he was a writer.

In the starched streets of the ghetto, Maimonides’s house had been turned into a museum of tauromachy. The little synagogue where the great Rambam had prayed was clean and void of memories, a square, blanched, lifeless room; no black elders; no bewigged women looking down from the balcony; no light, no ark in the niche. The old guardian, who had but a single tooth, announced that it was a ‘
Monumento Nacional. Antigua sinagoga Ebraica
.’ He indicated where the Torah had been kept and how it was wrapped and I nodded as if to imply that what he was saying was familiar to me. Delusions of Sephardic origin prompted furtive aggression. I wrote in my notebook: ‘The Jews, we are still told, must learn to behave. Must they? How many people have
we
driven from their homes; burned, murdered, crucified? Before the walls of Jerusalem, Titus crucified seven thousand men who had defended their city.
Eso no es lo peor
, far from it.’ I cadged the phrase from the title of one of Goya’s
Desastres de la Guerra
.

Herb was a New York Democrat. He believed that the Rosenbergs were
innocent. Certainly they had not deserved the death penalty. Greenglass, the chief witness against them, had everything to gain by saying whatever the FBI wanted. Even so, he said only that he had heard of a man called Julius who was some kind of a ‘leader’; the name Rosenberg was not mentioned. Did I know that Klaus Fuchs’s middle name was Julius? Surely he was the ‘Julius’ who was alleged to have memorised and passed on information about the mathematical formulae necessary for making an atomic bomb. Rosenberg had failed every mathematical grade in school.

Einstein and another physicist, Harold Urey of the University of Chicago, had said that it was inconceivable that such a man could remember abstruse information. The Supreme Court said that if the defence had been properly conducted, the case could, at one stage, have been thrown out; had it not been, they would have had grounds for allowing the appeal, but only if appropriate objections had been voiced during the trial. Even so, three Supreme Court justices dissented from the judgment, all Liberals. Herb maintained that the Rosenbergs would never have been convicted, on the evidence, by an impartial jury. America was on the way to Fascism: you had only to compare Judge Medina’s attitude to the trial of Communists to his conduct in the federal anti-trust case over which he presided at the same time.

Herb was neither loud nor heated. He had no intention of living anywhere except in the US. He was a keen advocate of the international style, all glass, steel and concrete of the kind celebrated in Siegfried Giedion’s
Space, Time
and Architecture
, which I made a note to read; and in due time I did, all four volumes. The name of Alvar Aalto sticks adhesively in the mind, the man to be if you wanted to come top in any index. I also remember Baron Horta, whom Giedion accused of betraying the modern movement by deciding that there can be too much steel, glass and concrete.

I asked Herb what he thought about the Willie McGee case. McGee was a Mississippi black man, sentenced to death for rape in 1945 and eventually
electrocuted, after a series of appeals, in 1951. A number of famous people from William Faulkner to Albert Einstein pleaded with Harry Truman to reprieve or pardon him. Herb thought it likely that McGee was having an affair with the white woman, who accused him of rape, to avoid being called a nigger-lover, when rumours started to spread about them.

Linda cried and cried. We stopped for coffee on the way to Granada and ate the cakes we had bought in Sevilla. Herb crumpled the
pasteleria
’s cardboard box and left it on the table. As we were going, the waiter punched the box back into shape and took it into the café. By the time we reached the gardens of the Alhambra, all the rooms in the Parador San Francisco had been taken. A young American, in slick clothes, called Russell, advised that ‘the neatest of you’ go into the Alhambra Palace Hotel and have them recommend somewhere within our means. Russell told us that Granada was ‘wonderful’, quite as if we might not have heard. He was figuring to stay till at least – I expected him to say the following year – ‘
Monday
’. He wrote travel pieces for
Holiday
magazine. Herb said, later, that he was a ‘snide Ivy League snob’.

We found rooms at the Pensión America, a hundred yards up from the entrance to the Alhambra. My bedroom window looked across the deep, steep valley to the Sacro Monte, where the gypsies lived. Since I was down to my last few £5 traveller’s cheques, I went to the
Correos
and sent a telegram to St John’s College asking for another tranche of money to be sent to the Banco Central. The following evening, the son of the
padron
took us, in a party of tourists, to see and hear some flamenco. The ‘
Zambra
’ took place, under unshaded electric bulbs, in a large cave lined with wicker-seated chairs. We sat down, awkward, and looked at the few gypsies already there. Two guitarists strummed listlessly. Our lame guide whispered that the dancing would probably be bad. At the back of the deep, whitewashed cave, you could see an old iron bedstead with a red cover. A tired tiered dress hung on a wardrobe.

A fat-armed gypsy with an elusive brassiere came and sat down, yellow flowers absurd in her towered hair. Others, older, wrinkled, with rounded noses and thin reddened lips, wore similar flowers. Six elderly gypsies, in washed-out costumes, began to dance. The routine might have been the sad opening chorus of ‘Why go to Granada?’ You felt like a visitor to a brothel; wishing you weren’t with people you knew, insufficiently excited to forget your embarrassment.

A young gypsy girl sat beside me, mouth heavily rouged, and clapped with petulant servility as a solo dancer replaced the sad sextet. The newcomer whirled, and nearly fell, and clicked her castanets, brows contracted. More gypsies arrived and more chairs were brought, and more. A new young girl, fourteen or fifteen, very slim, no bosom, darker than most, luminous black, accusing eyes, pride in her shaken, lustreless hair, thin fingers with crescents of whitened nail, stared unblinkingly over our heads, serving a different god. She snapped her fingers and the clapping resumed.