Savage Coast (29 page)

“What comes to replace the fear?” Helen asked him. She was following her own question.

“I don't know. I think a kind of resourcefulness must come. Power over it, mastery—I think continually about the Germans in concentration camps, the immense power they must be developing, the victory after fear.”

“They are in jail,” she answered.

The hall was almost empty. Behind the desk, the Service Committee man was trying to help the little Englishman from the train who was in Coffee-and-Tea.

“By George,” he was saying, “I simply must get to the British consulate—” ending in a string of explanation.

“Please repeat,” asked the official.

“By . . . George,” he repeated in a slow loud monotone, “I . . . simply . . . must . . . get . . . to . . .” Peter touched his shoulder.

“Hello, old man!” the Englishman shouted, “I didn't know you were here. Could you help me make this fellow understand that my office is probably going wild at home, that I've got to get to our representative or the consulate and find what dispatches are going out?”

Peter translated for him, and gave him a slip of paper with the address written out. The little man shook his head, thanked everyone mournfully, and left.

“What happened to the chorus?” Peter called after him, but he had gone.

Olive came down while Peter was being directed to the American consulate.

“It's straight up the Rambla,” Peter said. “Let's see what the consul has to say to us. He might be able to tell us when we can leave for Palma.”

The milk-wagon was making its rounds and swung into the plaza, avoiding two towing cars which were removing the burned and shattered chassis near the café and subway station.

The Rambla was quiet, and the promenade up the center empty. The lettered cars passed at intervals, blowing a triple signal, but they were growing used to that sound, and were scarcely conscious of their passing. It was still cool, the sun was not high, and the broad street was fresh and shady. At the second corner there was a café whose steel curtains were all down except one, rolled six feet up, and they went in.

M. Corniche, his secretary, and the guide were drinking wine in a corner. They nodded and sat down at a table beside the French.

“Will you sail when the French do?” M. Corniche asked Helen. “I imagine we will depart this afternoon.” His smile contradicted the meaning.

Peter cut her answer off. “We'll see what the American consul
ate says,” he told the delegate. “They've asked us at the Olympic to make other arrangements, if we can, because they expect more athletes in today.”

“Better not go to your consul if you don't want to be put on a boat immediately,” the guide said.

“We'll just give him the names of the Americans we've been with, here and on the train.”

Three girls came in, and M. Corniche beamed. It was part of the chorus.

“All friends,” he said, and stroked his beard. “How are you? Where is your hotel?”

“We had mattresses in the Olympic,” answered the platinum blonde. “How do you say breakfast in Spanish?”

“
Vino
,” said M. Corniche.

The chorus and the Americans drank
piña
and Vichy. M. Corniche waved a piece of sausage at them.

“
A votre santé
,” he said, courteously.

The chorus thought they would look for the British consul, but their manager was against getting in touch with anybody but the manager of the theater where they were booked. If a boat took them into France, they would be stranded without working papers. England would be awful and would mean that they'd be looking for a job again—he was all for staying.

“We'll ask the head of the English delegation to get in touch with you through the consul,” said Helen.

“Let's find him now,” said Peter.

On the Rambla again, he wondered if it was the intelligent thing to do. “I've never had anything to do with a consul,” he said dubiously.

A Red Cross car passed, full of nurses, and swung down a street marked with a tremendous hospital flag. The armed worker stood in the promenade, staring after the car. Peter stopped and saluted him. He had a brother in that Hospital. He knew, of course, where
the American consulate was—he was going in that direction and would walk along with them. He introduced himself: member of the citizens' militia established by a decree, published and broadcast yesterday by Lluís Companys; his brother, Coronel Tomás Temporal, had deserted to join the
Guardia Civil
.

They stopped at a kiosk to buy a newspaper. The
Día Gráfico
carried pictures—
Notas Gráficas de la Sublevación Fascista
⁹²
—with the strained shoulders of soldiers in uniform bent over machine guns in the defense of the
Telefonica
; street-fighting, the gunwagons rolling through, the man in overalls standing, gun up, his legs spread solid against a wide and monumental public square.

The soldier pointed at the picture. “That's the Plaza de Cataluña,” he said. “It's straight ahead of us. That's where your consul is. I turn off here. And the papers . . .” he said, slapping his with the back of his hand, “they only tell half. Now we're making order. The Fascists are beaten; we are cleaning the city, little groups are wiping out the Fascists who are left. Now we build revolutionary Catalonia.”

The Plaza de Cataluña opened before them. The great stone square, broken by formal lawns, walled-in short arcs of marble, punctuated by lavish heroic statuary, was covered with pigeons that, as they watched, rose in a volley of wings, wheeled, and settled again. The plaza was filling with morning crowds, men without coats, handsome and fineboned, dark, glowing women. They saw the American flag hung over a bank building.

“There it is,” said Olive. “Official, protective; will they believe that the Communists rescued us!”

The heavy glass plate behind the wrought iron door held a bullet hole like a jewel. The stone here and all around the plaza was pitted with war.

“Sorry, can't come in,” said the attendant. “Bank closed.”

“
Consulado Americano
,” Peter answered curtly.

On the second floor, the door held the big eagled seal. They
went in. Helen's leg was beginning to hurt. The first room held two tables of American magazines and a few straight chairs. In the second, three young men stood behind a long blotter at the L-shaped desk. One of them, a man of about thirty, with an adolescent face and a crew haircut, was trying to placate three dark Americans. Their backs looked familiar.

“Christ!” said Peter, “the Pullman!”

“You've got to get us out,” the largest man was demanding, “and we must get in touch with Hollywood. You can't conceive how important it is for us to get out of the country. The studio will arrange for everything, we can pay for whatever services we get. We'll get a car”—The adolescent shook his head, sorrowfully— “we'll charter a bus, we'll
buy
a bus, only we must get to the border.”

The adolescent sucked his teeth and drew a circle on his blotter.

The Hollywood man went on. His assistants nodded as he finished each sentence. “It's incredible, monstrous,” he said, “that this should be allowed to happen in a civilized country. You can't conceive—it's unbelievable, the guns that have been distributed to just anybody on the streets. Sixty thousand guns given away, to the scum of the earth, with orders to shoot fascists, and no questions asked. And a fascist is anybody who hasn't got dirty fingernails.”

The adolescent looked up sympathetically. “The consulate is aware—” he began.

“I don't like this,” said Peter.

“Wait a minute,” Helen said. She had been listening to a white-haired, florid man, with intricate purple veins in his cheeks, who was talking to someone with a Panama suit, a clipped mustache, a businessman's gestures. “I want to talk to that man.”

“We'll just file our names,” said Olive.

Another clerk, a towheaded young man with white eyelashes, asked what he could do for them. He wanted first to tell them that Lluís Companys, the president of Catalonia, had advised the American consul that he would not be in a position to guarantee
the lives of any foreigners. The consul was asking all Americans to leave as soon as possible, and would give them safe conduct to the border. Boats? No, no boats were sailing. No, he could not supply transportation to the border. And the safe conduct? Why, no, of course it meant something, it was a sort of—well, a sort of pledge—

“Oh, for Christ's sake,” said Olive, “let's go find the team, Peter.”

Their names? Well, of course, if they'd like to leave their names, the consulate could take them. And the consul was making arrangements with the British consulate and one of the banks to have the bank open for an hour later in the day to change foreign money and traveler's checks.

Peter listed the Americans who had come in: Olive, Helen, the bitches, himself, and the one left on the train—Peapack. The Hollywood people had proclaimed themselves.

In the other corner, the businesslike man was saying to the flabby one: “And you can tell your paper that I was in the Hotel Colón when it happened, early Sunday morning.” He looked over at Helen and Olive and said, vaguely, “that's where it all started, you know.” He went on, “I got up and they were shooting from the street, and their fire was returned from directly beneath me. I got dressed right away, and all the hotel guests were put in the dining room at the back of the hotel. But the bombing began—you could see the lamps shake—and they sent us all down into the American bar. That was probably as safe as an air-raid cellar, dug deep in, you know. You can imagine, though, how I felt when I got upstairs and found my bureau all shot to hell and my mattress up in front of the window. Fortification!—my mattress!”

He was working himself up to it. The florid flabby man had his notebook out now and scribbled fast.

“That's not the worst of it,” he said, his voice rising steeply. “The vandalism is what we must protest. They've destroyed works of art that whole civilizations cannot replace—on Sunday, they burned the Chapel of Santa Lucía, which dates from almost 1300—and
some decoration in other churches went back to the seventeenth century. All destroyed! And God only knows what's happening in Seville and Toledo. What haven't they razed to the ground? What's happened to the Escorial?” He was drawn up, his hands out, his shaking voice pitched high. “What is there in this city that isn't burned?”

Peter turned sharply to him. “The Cathedral of the Holy Family hasn't been touched.” The brick-red flush swept up his jaw and cheek. “And there's a guarantee that it won't be: it's people's property, and hasn't been standing on their necks since the seventh century, or the year 1300.”

The flabby man put up his hand pacifically. It was bloodless and blown up. The businessman was enraged. “The people!” he spat the sound. “A lot of trigger-loose savages riding wild through the streets, so you don't know whether you'll be killed by cars or bullets!”

“They returned the fire from the Hotel Colón, didn't they?” asked Peter. “Who held your mattress as a shield?”

Helen suddenly turned and left the room.

“Come on out,” Olive insisted, and put her hand on Peter's shoulder. “Helen has misery. She ought to do something about it.” They looked down at her. She sat next to the litter of magazines.

“I'm all right. I'm all right. I'm healthy,” she said. “It's those people. All the art of Europe—we care, too. Priests hid Fascists in the churches—they told me in Moncada. There's no sense arguing with them, Peter.”

“You let them go on and on,” he accused angrily. “I don't feel that way. I don't want to hear what they say.” He picked up a copy of the
Boston Chamber of Commerce Journal
and riffled the pages.

“It's what the papers will say—it's what all the New York headlines must be saying today.”

“And Mr. Rockefeller—”

“Yes,” said Olive. “Mr. Rockefeller will feel better about Rivera because a man in a Panama suit in a consulate in Barcelona thinks
the people here should let themselves be fired on from the churches without shooting back.”

They sat there for a minute. Helen wanted to lie down, and they asked for a couch. An attendant took them into an inner office full of files marked
TO BE DESTROYED
. “Nice secret agent situation,” Olive whispered. The office irritated them all very much; they went back to the waiting room. The florid man came through, smiling.

“You mustn't mind him,” he said. “He's just had a great disappointment.”

“Your friend, the businessman?”

“He's neither—he's an art professor here to do some work on Spanish architecture, and he's heartbroken. Most of his thesis has been shot away from in front of him, and I don't think he's got the nerve to go out and see whether the rest is still standing. What he cares about now is getting a news story out, and maybe a little publicity at home.” He winked.

“What paper are you?” asked Helen.

“Oh—sorry. I'm Spanner—Barcelona correspondent for the
Paris Herald-Trib
,” he said, “and this has been keeping me pretty lively. Where did you come from—been here long?”

“Just since last night,” answered Peter. “The Communists brought us in from Moncada—our train stopped there.”

“Hm. Well,” said Spanner. “The Communists! Is it true that the tracks have been ripped up between stations? How did they treat you?”

“They were fine to us,” said Helen. “There was a guard on the train, and the Olympic teams were fed by the town. We didn't see the tracks.”

“Are you with the Olympics?” Spanner asked. He looked at them narrowly.