Iberia (116 page)

Sayonara
. All of
us at the seminary did. It’s about two soldiers and two Japanese
girls. Japan must be a wonderful country and I wouldn’t be
unhappy to be sent there when I’m graduated, but I suppose I’m
destined for Spain. This is a great country and there’s much work
to be done.’

When the seminarian left in Teruel, I was assaulted, there can
be no other word for it, by noise such as I had not heard for some
years. At first I couldn’t identify it or its direction, but as I drove
toward the center of the city I heard the rhythmic roar of motors
off to the west and decided that Teruel must be holding some
kind of auto race, and I set out to find it. I was wrong. It was a
motorcycle race around a circular course that ran through a
handsome new section of Teruel which had grown up in recent
years on the other side of the ravine down which the Saracen bulls
had charged the Christians in 1171. Before the war this area had
contained no houses or even any barns. I took my place behind
some bales of straw that marked a turn in the course and decided
simply to look at what was on display in this new Teruel. The
thirty or forty motorcycles which kept roaring past were the best
that Europe built, and each driver wore an expensive leather suit
with goggles to match. The competition was keen. Number 1, in
green, drove at a sensational speed and could not be overtaken,
but a real battle developed between 11 in red and 15 in the same
color. The latter tried to drive 11 into the wall at the turns, and
when 11 protested, rowdy 15 yelled the Spanish equivalent of ‘Up
your bucket.’ The noise was unbelievable, for not only did the
motorcycles thunder with their mufflers open, but as usual three
huge loudspeakers suspended from public buildings kept up a
constant chatter, while a Coca-Cola truck below played records
over its public address system. The streets along which the race
careened were wide, well paved and finely planted with trees. The
houses, all of recent construction, were about what one would
find in southern California, except that since Teruel has bitterly
cold winters, said to be the worst in Spain, its houses had more
provision for heating than California’s would have had.

It was the people, however, who were the most impressive. To
watch the race cost about twenty-five cents, but the course was
jammed, and I saw no one poorly dressed; their clothes would
have fitted in without comment in Chicago or Edinburgh. It was
a well-fed, well-groomed audience, and as the motorcycles roared
around the walls of the bullring for their dash right at the bales
of straw where I stood, I saw at least as many pretty girls wearing
make-up as I would have seen in a similar American city. Their
dresses were about as short, and if they were accompanied by
young men, they walked hand in hand as they would have in a
small English city. In fact, except for a rather heavy concentration
of men in clerical garb, I could see nothing that would indicate I
was in Spain.

In this cautious manner I checked each experience I was having
in Teruel and could find no evidence that this was the city on
which Franco’s forces had broken their teeth in the Civil War.
The visible scars were healed. If in the sieges of 1937-38 the city
had been mainly destroyed, it has now been well rebuilt. Not even
in the ancient Jewish quarter, with its crowded streets, were there
evidences of the war, but I did see set into the wall of a house built
in 1400 one sign which startled me: ‘This building is insured
against fire by the Great American Insurance Company of New
York.’ If the Franco government has rebuilt Teruel in a spirit of
forgiveness, no matter how grudging, then the outward bitterness
of the Civil War has subsided. In the new suburb where the
motorcycle race took place I saw much evidence of new
construction sponsored by the government: new schools, new
homes, even a new bullring, and a handsome new sports center
where for fifteen pesetas (about twenty-five cents) a month young
men can enjoy a swimming pool, a large gymnasium and a
basketball court as good as that in any American city of
comparable size. A sign said that the sports hall had been erected
with funds from the Youth Front, so I suppose that only those
boys whose families support the government can participate. I
saw the tennis courts on an emotional morning: the day before,
Manuel Santana had won the world’s tennis title at Wimbledon,
Spain’s first title of the kind in history, and Teruel was celebrating.

Today, even though the sore of Teruel has not healed in my
heart nor will it ever, I can accept most of the statement which
the Franco government has recently drafted in English for
inclusion in any tourist publication where reference to the war
cannot be avoided.

For a century and a half Spaniards had tried to live in peace
according to the formulas laid down by the French
Revolution—generally speaking under a Monarchy, though twice
under a Republic. It was impossible to implant a purely liberal
policy in a country without a middle class, and with an almost
feudal structure. And so we spent a century and a half hitting each
other over the head, familiarizing the world with the spectacle of
civil war, and introducing the word ‘

pronunciamiento
’ into most
languages. The nation was filled with hatreds, and those hatreds
provided a fruitful field of action for ideas and political groups
which ended up by dominating the rest—Anarchism and
Communism. And this was the outcome of a policy full of liberal
phrases!

One day, in 1936, those hatreds exploded. The world still
remembers that three-year war to which the Catholic Church gave
the name of Crusade. We don’t pretend that all the goodies were
on one side, and all the baddies on the other; for one thing,
goodness and badness are always mixed. But what we can and do
claim is that the war was won by that section of the people who
preferred a Spanish Spain to a Spain turned into a satellite of
Russia.

And then, when my opinion about modern Teruel had about
crystallized, I stumbled upon an extraordinary building, a modern
hospital built on the skyscraper design, with an elegant reception
floor topped by tiers of rooms bursting with every modern medical
device. I was shown around the building by the administrator,
Don José Callado Ruiz, who had been born in nearby Cuenca and
educated in Madrid. He was indistinguishable from hospital
administrators in England or Holland, efficient, knowledgeable
and proud of his institution. Where the ordinary hospital might
have one iron lung, his had two, and incubators for premature
babies, and gleaming trays of all the latest medical tools from
Solingen in Germany, and x-rays galore and a splendid medical
library. It was the kind of hospital that put the ones I knew in
America to shame.

It had one fault, however. It had almost no patients. There
were, I believe, four women on one floor awaiting childbirth; the
rest of the gleaming installation was unused and had never been
used. I tried to pierce the secret of this amazing building, for I
had recently been in a hospital in America, and judging by the
overcrowding there, this Teruel installation had space for about
four hundred patients, and certainly in the villages I had been
visiting there were candidates who could have profited from
admission. Then, as I waited in the foyer, I understood a little
better, for on the far wall, gazing balefully at whoever entered the
hospital, was the frightening portrait of a fleshy young man in an
open shirt. I had seen this hypnotic portrait before in many public
buildings, this all-seeing, all-knowing young god of modern Spain,
and his countenance was the only thing that had ever frightened
me in the country. He was José Antonio, son of the tough dictator
Miguel Primo de Rivera, Marqués de Estella. Born in 1903, José
Antonio had organized the Falange at the age of thirty and had
been the bullyboy of the street-rioting that had helped discredit
the Republic. His adherents roamed the street in trucks,
machine-gunning their opponents, and most Spaniards believe
that if José Antonio had lived he would have challenged Franco
for the leadership of Spain and might have become the country’s
Fascist dictator, but shortly before the outbreak of war he was
arrested by the Republicans and some months after the beginning
of hostilities was tried, condemned and shot. Alive, he was a
danger to Franco’s claim to leadership; dead, he became a patron
saint, and at the end of the war his body was carried on shoulders
from Alicante in the south to El Escorial, where he was temporarily
buried among the ancient rulers of Spain. Later his corpse was
translated to the newly built basilica of the Valley of the Fallen,
where it lies in enormous solemnity before the high altar. I say
that the visage of José Antonio is frightening because he looks
exactly like a younger Herman Goering, and had he lived and
triumphed he would each year have resembled Goering more.
He would now be only sixty-three and good for another fifteen
years’ rule, which is a frightening thought.

At any rate, the hospital he now supervised in absentia, the
finest I had visited in a dozen years, was reserved for those who,
like himself, were dedicated to a certain way of life. For members,
the rates of the hospital were low and the service provided by the
medical head, Dr. Antonio Moreno Monforte from the college
in Zaragoza, was, I am sure, excellent. In England such a hospital
would be crawling with patients and overworked nurses and
grumbling doctors, for members of the Labor and Conservative
parties alike would be eligible, and one had to sense the difference.

On the last day of my sentimental return to Teruel, Señor Cortel
Zuriaga, the man who had shown me the tomb of the Lovers,
took me to a high point overlooking the city, and with the
cemetery at our backs, explained how the fortunes of the great
battle for Teruel had fluctuated, and he spoke with decent respect
for each side: ‘If the Republicans were to win the war, they had
to capture this city. They did so, and then General Franco knew
that he must retake it. It was as simple as that.’ And he pointed
out the routes used by Franco’s rescue columns as they brought
pressure to bear on the city, then held by the Republicans. ‘For
anyone in Teruel it was a terrible war,’ he said. ‘It was a blessing
when it ended.’ Then he said something about the bull that stood
in the plaza, representing the city, and in these words summarized
the spiritual significance of Teruel: ‘We saw the other day that
the symbol of Teruel is a bull. But which particular bull? A Saracen
bull sent against the Christians as an enemy. It came to destroy
us, but we converted it. If the Spaniards in 1171 were able to
accept such a bull as the symbol of their city, then other Spaniards
in 1939 should have been able to accept their recent enemies.’
Apparently, after the first long year of revenge, that is what has
happened.

As I stood looking down upon the city that has meant so much
to me, I asked myself the question which perplexes many people
who wish to visit Spain: ‘If I was once so committed to a
Republican victory, how can I bear to visit Spain now?’ I have
often wondered, for after the destruction of the Republicans, I
went through a period of bitterness in which I did not care ever
again to see Spain, and I would schedule my trips through Europe
so as to avoid it. Then two things happened. One day, while
talking to a group of Spanish exiles in Mexico, I asked myself,
‘Why should I allow Franco to deprive me of a land which is
almost as much mine as his?’ More important, as I studied the
world I came to the conclusion that each nation, at the end of a
cycle of about twenty-five years, starts anew. What went before
is historically important and probably sets a limit to what the
newborn nation can become, but the fact is that the past is past
and a new nation is in being, with fresh possibilities for success
or failure. That is why General de Gaulle has been so right in
France; he is governing an entirely new country not bound by the
debacle of 1941. That is why the young Germans are so right in
disclaiming responsibility for 1935-1945; they’re a new moon,
and they are correct in insisting that they be so treated. It is
obviously true of China, though most of us have been reluctant
to admit it. And one of these days it will be true even of Russia,
and we had better be prepared to admit that, too.

It also applies to the United States, though we fight against it
and blind our eye and conscience to the fact. The median age of
our population is lower now. We are more overcrowded, more
urban, and whether we like it or not, a permanently mixed nation
racially. We are in the midst of swift change in education,
technology, labor relations and religion. We are evolving a new
morality, a new posture in world politics. Yet we refuse to
understand that the advent of such change signifies also the advent
of a new nation. The people of Spain seem more prepared to
accept their new nation than we are to accept ours, and it may be
this reluctance to accept the new that will destroy us.

As a matter of fact, I suspect that the rebirth of each nation
occurs about every seventeen or eighteen years, but only the rare
social scientist can recognize the change as it occurs. I usually
seem to be about seven years tardy. America’s present cycle will
end sometime around 1970, and if we try to govern our new
nation by 1920 policies we shall be truly doomed. Spain’s last
cycle ended about 1964, and it is the opportunity to watch a new
nation coming into being that makes a visit to Spain so instructive
and rewarding.