Algren at Sea Page 16

  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 wo
uld 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.

  The wind off the Sierra Nevadas that prevails against men as well as against trees.

  Seville is the place where the harsh Saturday-night clamor of old Barcelona, jesting cries of sellers and jesting answers of buyers, the big free laughter of fishermen, whores, and bartenders, flower women and lottery vendors, fades to a churchly Sunday-morning hymnal. It is always Sunday morning in churchly Sevilla, where well-behaved girls with self-important behinds and big feet leave their embroidering to hurry to Mass but take their time coming back to embroidering.

  It is a city of women watching the street from small barred windows, because the Moors not only built delicately, but strongly as well: it takes strong walls to keep women indoors, and the Moors never did devise a wall strong enough.

  Yet their strategy was an improvement over the Byzantine school, that bricked the girls in solid. As this hadn’t worked in Byzantium, the Moors let their women have windows—with bars if the windows were on the ground floor. When the window was too high to leap out of without breaking a leg, the Moors were progressive enough to leave the bars off. These left high arching apertures in which the great day, or the night thronged by stars, were framed.

  But by high window or low, the common lot of the woman of Spain south, yet today, is a life sentence of doing embroidery while watching a street owned by men.

  “Needle and thread for the woman, mule and lash for the man,” is the saying.

  Neither the good girl nor the bad frequents the streets of Seville except to go to church or on a shopping errand. A respectable woman doesn’t take a walk when she feels like taking a walk. She does her walking with her fingers, across a bit of fabric.

  The good girl embroiders for her hope chest and the brothel woman works for the Virgin of Macarena above her bed: to give thanks for last night’s favors and in hope of men who are young and rich in the night to come.

  Sons of officers and breeders of bulls who sit all day over long-stemmed glasses of manzanilla on the Calle de Sierpe speaking of bulls, horses, and women in one breath: of women of good family as of those protected by none but the Virgin. Young men who feel it is as right to be Spanish as confidently as the Englishman feels it is right to be English.

  It is therefore unnecessary for the Spaniard to identify himself as Spanish, in the Italian and American manner. “Me Italiano!” the man you meet for a moment assures you. Or, “Ah’m from Tayxus” another shouts across a dining room.

  Well, good, but why be so shaky about it, Dad? We aren’t going to throw you out of the old Union. We need your oil.

  At the Plaza de Toros of Seville we met Goytisolo and Andarra. Goytisolo had learned that his brother had been released in Barcelona, with no more reason given for releasing him than had been given for his arrest.

  We saw the first bull, The Foolish Bull of Seville, storm out into the arena in a smoking fury, and a strong yellow smell mixed of urine and rage blew off his furious hide. Ladies coughed into handkerchiefs and men stood up to get a better look at this passionate brute who didn’t know that, if he wanted to win, he was certainly going about matters the wrong way. Perhaps his wife had just told him she was leaving him—”Honey, you’ve supported me all these years; now go out and get a job for yourself.”

  The animal did have one good idea, and that was to wipe out the other side. He got one good horn under the horse, and horse goes upsy, rider and all, rider comes downsy, and Goytisolo began reciting “At Five in the Afternoon.” I stood up and hollered, “Finish them both off!”

  The bull didn’t hear me because he had so much stuff sticking in him he looked like a fruitcake and it hurt. He had had enough of the picador and the picador had had enough of him. The point I’m trying to make is that they had had enough of each other.

  The matador came out but he came out too soon, because the bull caught him with the flat of the horn, and up the matador went too. That was a great day for going up in Seville.

  Torero came down kneeling with the bull’s nose in his face; the preliminary boys ran out. Torero waved them away to indicate he now had the bull transfixed. I wondered what he was going to transfix him with, as his sword was yards away. His left pant leg had been ripped to the waist, and if it hadn’t been padded he’d be riding that horn yet. Yet he boldly turned his backside directly on the bull and recovered his sword—there was one moment of truth as he stooped to recover it, but the bull hadn’t read Death in the Afternoon.

  He was over at the fence, looking up at the judges, thinking he had won. The next move was to give him the matador’s ear and half his pants, was his thinking. This seemed to me to be the right moment for someone to mount the fence with a sledgehammer, finish the bull off and jump down, as the animal was streaming blood.

  Nobody had a sledgehammer in Seville, and with or without a hammer, nobody wanted to get that near to Toro. The thinking was that the longer everyone stayed out of his way, the better for everybody. So the preliminary boys merely trotted cautiously after Toro as he trotted till the very air stank of blood.

  By this time even Goytisolo no longer liked it. Andarra didn’t like it. I doubted even the bull enjoyed it. Personally I felt I could do without it. The whole team followed him till his legs gave way at last and one of the valiant clowns gave him the dagger. Arriba España!

  “I want Scotch,” Mme. de Beauvoir said.

  “I want wicky,” Andarra said.

  “Who’s going to wipe up the blood?” I inquired.

  The horns resounded and who should trot out but The Wise Bull of Seville looking for a friend. That The Wise Bull of Seville had been well brought up was immediately apparent, for he was a bull who remembered his promise to Mother. How she had planted her gentle hoof on the back of his neck and warned him, “Once you make a run at one of these fools, you’ve answered the first question, so you’ll have to answer all the rest and the horses will drag you off like they dragged off your poor daddy.”

  “Why did Daddy answer the fools, Mother?”

  “He was a proud bull, Son. Too proud to take the fifth.”

  The Wise Bull of Seville had been a mere calf when he’d promised his widowed mother to take the fifth. He had never had anything against people as such—some of his best friends had been people—but he had never seen so many at once as he saw now. Then he caught a whiff of Chanel that brought him to a dead stop nose up, for the woman who was giving off something that smelled like that must be a beauty. He saw her, down front, a red-haired Andalusian, and lowered his horns toward her by way of indicating that he was a gentleman who had no intention of goring anybody.

  Mother had been right, he saw then for sure. For out of the corner of his eye he saw people in yellow pants prancing and dancing toward him: they were surely up to something.

  The Wise Bull of Seville got the feeling he better get the hell out of there; so he nodded a “Pleased to have met you, Baby,” at the lovely redhead and trotted quietly away.

  After that it was touch and go, because some came running and some came sneaking, and one caught him a couple sharp shots with something in the back of his neck. He pretended not to notice. The Wise Bull didn’t even snort, not wishing to be held in contempt.

  They began to applaud his good manners—he would have been hurt had he understood they were clapping becaus
e he was boring everyone stiff.

  When he finally realized they were clapping out of displeasure, he thought it must be the people who kept chasing him on the horse who was wearing everyone down. He resented the fellow for being so imperceptive.

  Yet, he supposed, the fellow must be a steady employee with some seniority, while he himself was a newcomer; so he might as well be gracious about it, and trotted out through the same gate by which he came.

  Well, what would you have done if you had been Potash and Perlmutter when Morris Fishbein came along?

  And though he was proud of himself for having kept his word to Mother so well, at the same time he couldn’t help feeling sad, for in his heart he knew he could whip anyone of those little peoples in the fancy pants. As a matter of fact he wouldn’t mind taking a shot at that finky-looking horse.

  Next time he wouldn’t tell Mother—but oh, how proud she was going to be when she read in the papers that he had won!

  The penalty for engaging young bulls in mock bullfights while they are being raised for the arena is extremely severe, in order to discourage such sport among Spanish teenagers. The boys are fond of slipping over a fence after dark and teasing a young bull with a stick in lieu of a sword, and then hitting out for the fence when he charges. The peril is not to the boy, but to the matador the bull will one day meet, for Toro learns fast and remembers well. A year later, in the arena, assuming it is the bull’s first time out, a torero may pay with his life for not knowing it is the bull’s second time out.

  The bulls that followed were all foolish bulls. All answered the fifth and all wound up as bloody carcasses being dragged out by finky-looking horses.

  We went to a coffee joint on the Calle de Sierpe to have a final carraquillo with Andarra and Goytisolo, who were leaving that evening for Barcelona. I realized then that my antagonism toward Andarra was really only toward his camera. And as he was leaving the whole south of Spain to me to photograph, I relented long enough to shake his hand and tell him I was looking forward to seeing the pictures he had taken.