Spain (17 page)

It is the beginning of an era in Spain, but more pertinently, it is the end of another. Nobody knows whether democracy will last in Spain, but it is historically certain that the despotism that died with General Franco was not a Spanish aberration, but was the Spanish political norm. It was one of the classic eras of Spanish history, for better or for worse, in which a despot supported by Church and Army strengthened the unifying forces of Spain, and clamped the country in a vice of conformity. If it saved Spain from the ravages of the Second World War, for years it set her apart too from the hopes and achievements of the peace—rather as the despotism of Philip II, long before, made Spain the greatest of the Powers, but condemned her to self-illusion.

Like Philip's, Franco's autarchy was shrouded in religiosity—not Christianity alone, but also a sort of dim Wagnerian vision of hero-gods and Valhallas, a gloomy level of devotion on which paganism, Catholicism and the apotheosis of the State could conveniently be mingled. They may scoff at it now, but vast numbers of Spaniards, I do not doubt, would still respond to this heady stimulant, if they were given the chance again. They love to think of themselves as incorrigible individualists, and if you believed their more starry-eyed apologists you would think them constitutionally incapable of suffering despotism. Such is not the case. More than most people, they seem to need a strong leader, and more than most they vibrate to the mass emotion and the communal life. They are easy to bully, as any petty bureaucrat will demonstrate, as he harangues the submissive queue before his desk. They do not often defy the majority. Watch the Spaniards at a bull-fight, and you will see that when a matador succeeds, a frightening tide of hero-worship sweeps instantly
around the crowd, and that when one fails, then the catcalls and whistles echo across the city, the insults are chanted like incantations, and not a single dissenting tremor of sympathy breaks the unison—the women stare pitilessly at that handsome failure, and even the matador's own assistants, standing there all gaudy behind the barricades, avoid his eye as he leaps lithe but crestfallen out of the sand.

The Spaniards are negative individualists—there is nothing very constructive to their jealous egotism. Their social conscience is generally rudimentary, they are factional and often violent. They do have, to be sure, a healthy disbelief in the innate superiority of anybody to anybody else—‘as noble as the king, but not as rich', is the Castilian's traditional description of himself, and the Aragonese nobles used to swear loyalty to their king in the following stout formula: ‘We who are as good as you swear to you who are no better than we, to accept you as our sovereign lord, provided you observe all our statutes and laws:
si no, no
—if not, not.' Goya once threw a plaster cast at the Duke of Wellington, and the Kings of Spain themselves, perhaps conscious that their autocracy must be impersonal to succeed, never signed their names to a document, only the words ‘
Yo, el rey
—I, the King'.

But once disciplined by the will of the majority, or by the inflexible command of Government, the Spanish people seem almost ideal material for dictatorship—strong, diligent, courageous, proud, patriotic, obedient, unimaginative. Autocracy is an old habit in Spain, and in Franco's day most Spaniards fell easily enough into its rhythms; life in his republic often looked like a sequence from some totalitarian propaganda film, as the jolly workmen bounced gregariously to work in the backs of lorries, as the pretty girls in kerchiefs sang songs and waved in potato fields, as the sailors marched along the Majorca waterfront singing patriotic songs, and the schoolchildren sat attentive and respectful beneath the Generalissimo's paternal portrait. On the other hand democracy, when they tried it between the wars, was an unsuccessful innovation, so unpractised were the people in its techniques, and so violent were the passions that its milder authority released.

Will it work better this time? It is true that Spain always seems to be yearning for some moment of fulfilment, some chance to flower, that nowadays only democracy can allow: but though the Spaniards are eagerly seizing their new opportunities, and political liberty is all the rage, somehow democracy does not yet feel natural to the place. I hope it will change—I hope I am wrong —but so far Spain seems to me one country where autocracy represents the natural order of things—organic, hereditary, bred in the bones, as much a part of the Spanish climate as the dead heat of the Castilian summer, or that knife-edge wind beneath the ribs.

The Spanish language has two words for the verb ‘to be.' One is
estar
, which means to be in a particular condition, as a book is on a table, or your mother-in-law is ill. The other is
ser
, which means to be in a state of being, as grass is green and God's in his Heaven. The
estar
of Spain is shifting today, with its new veneer of modernism, but beneath it all the essential
ser
remains. Our graph ends with King Juan Carlos. We can be sure of nothing further. Perhaps ours is the last generation to glimpse Spain as the world has so long known her; or perhaps our children too, as they wander this enigmatic State, will recognize it still as Philip's disillusioned kingdom.

Some thirty miles north-west of Madrid a vast granite cross, the largest emblem of the Christian faith ever erected on earth, stands tremendously upon a ridge, visible almost from the capital itself, and surveying one of the most dismal battle-fields of the Civil War. General Franco put it there, and inside the hill on which it stands he has tunnelled a vast granite crypt, longer than the nave of St. Peter's in Rome, and sumptuously decorated with statuary, tapestries, and bronze. Ostensibly this mausoleum is a memorial to all those, from either side, who fell in the Civil War. Actually it is a monument to Spain herself, the ser of this country, the denuded soil and the empty plateau, the snow on the mountains, the heat and the cold and the poverty, the ever-present abstractions of God, death and Inquisition.

Seven hundred men worked every day for ten years to dig this
place, and many of them were political prisoners of the regime. Franco lies now in a tomb before the high altar, and all day long the monks, the nuns and the soldiers file through, the tourists whisper awestruck, and the elaborately uniformed attendants, like cinema ushers, stand with their white-gloved hands reverently behind their backs. Sometimes an organ thunders through the chapels in a constant fortissimo, playing pompous hymns and marches. A frightening air of tomb or prison haunts the vault, the music deadens the senses, and all seems swollen, tragic and endless.

A mile or two along the ridge stands the Escorial, and the Vale of the Fallen is another door to the
coro
of Spain. From the road that runs between them you may look out across the desolate expanse of the
meseta
, and see Spain lying there below—‘a cloud of dust, left in the air when a great people went galloping down the highroad of history'. There it all is, like a mirage in the morning: the space and the dust and the pride of it all, the chuffing steam trains on the high plateau, the tall golden towers beside the rivers of Spain, the storks, and the priests, and the policemen. It is the kind of high prospect that hermits look for, when they want to sit down with a skull on the table, and think about the future.