Algren at Sea (17 page)

The Spanish have had to go to the French to learn the proper attitudes of service. But your average Spaniard can't learn service. I understood this when I saw the waiter
serving
me a napkin. He brought it held high between two forks and deposited it with care before me, that I might see for myself that its spotless purity was unstained. I didn't mind that it had the remains of someone else's
gaspacho
from the night before on it. A lot of people like a cold soup before they turn in.

What gets me is that the hotel takes such precautions for me against the germs on the waiter's hands, but won't spare me a bar of soap. I'll take my chances on the waiter's germs if someone will put a bar of Lifebuoy in the bathroom.

The porter is beginning to look like a piggybank to me. What
is
this everlasting smile? Was the man raised in Los Angeles?

In front of a cave called Club Java I heard a woman singing:

Everyone in The Club Java looked like he was raised in East St. Louis, including the bartender, but the paper on the bar wasn't the
Globe-Democrat,
it was
Arriba. Arriba,
as in
Arriba España!
meaning “Property Owners of Spain, Arise!” On the cover is the customary photograph of El Porko saluting other investors.

I myself was one of that happy number of Americans who once hoped somebody would defeat the Italians and Germans. I know I was thinking along those lines because I joined the local chapter of Rear-Echelon Radicals Against Fascism. There were at that time many American writers,
mostly in New York City, whose politics were left wing because of a shortage of business opportunities in the right wing. None of these could go to Spain to do any actual fighting themselves because they had a magazine called
Partisan Review
which the editors decided was indispensable to culture, the thing the Spanish people were then fighting to preserve. I didn't go to Spain to fight either, but this was only because I didn't want to die young. A flimsy excuse. I didn't want to give up listening to Bessie Smith.

I saluted the photograph to amuse the bartender, but he wasn't about to be amused. He fought on the winning side in the Civil War but they didn't give him a prize. So he merely looked glum and pushed down one thumb.

He was a little late in turning down a thumb. While Americans who were turning down their thumbs on El Porko twenty-five years ago are now putting them up. Chiefly rear-echelon liberals against Fascism who may earnestly point out that the bartender of The Java isn't as badly off as he would have been under Hitler. I've never cared for this Reader's Digest type of Richard Rovere-ish product, however marketable. To bring the record up to date, I still don't.

In the women's prison at Alcalá de Henares there are ten Christian Democrats serving from ten to thirty years. One, who was a student of twenty when she was arrested in 1941, has contracted tuberculosis. Another, a woman of fifty-five who has now done eighteen years, is paralyzed. Two days after Eisenhower's visit to Madrid in 1959, seventeen Christian Democrat Catholics were put on trial for distributing leaflets at a football game. One received a sentence of eight years at hard labor. The other sixteen got terms of from six months to six years. Records on 1,900 political prisoners belie the insistence of El Porko that there are no political prisoners in Spain.

An American wearing a white pullover on which the name HANK had been sewn with red thread came into The Java and sat beside me. Hank was looking for someone to tell how hard it is to get ham and eggs in this country. He looked at me steadily but I wouldn't rap to him. Finally he asked me the time, so I had to give him an opening.

He told me he was from Milford Junction, Ohio, and had been walking
all over Barcelona. “I heerd there was hoo-ers in this town but I could of done better in Columbus. Ain't seen nare
one.
”

What country did HANK think
he
was in?

The bartender says when a country is at war everybody ought to go. But that if there
is
another in his own, he will give up his turn for once to somebody who has never had a chance to go before.

He doesn't believe that the Spanish people are going to war against each other in his lifetime.

So if you were the editor of a magazine the Spanish people were giving their lives to preserve in the mid-thirties but are now shopping around for a chance to dynamite an indispensable bridge across the Ebro twenty-six seconds ahead of the Italian cavalry so that you can crawl into a sleeping bag containing Ingrid Bergman with her head shaved, it looks like you'll have to shop around for somebody else's river and somebody else with her head shaved. In somebody else's sleeping bag. Personally, the one I liked best was the one about the great white shark, Over The River And Into The Ocean. Although I have never dynamited a bridge I'll call it off if the cavalry will give up their horses.

The Bartender-Who-Knows-the-Answer-to-Everything says Spain would be a happier nation if it only had a king. Those were good times, simpler times, he says, when Spain was a kingdom. Now what country does he think
he
is in?

I didn't trouble to tell him that what he is living in
is
a kingdom. But, so long as it is, perhaps they ought to go all the way and pick one and now is a good time because there are three candidates who have a legal claim: Don Jaime, Dona Beatriz, and Don Juan. The first is a deaf mute, Dona Beatriz is blind, and Don Juan is an idiot.
Arriba, España!

The bartender's wife asked me if I were English and I felt I was losing altitude. “
Americano,
” I told her. But when she answered that it came to the same thing because both peoples spoke the same language, I felt my seat belt snap. I informed her that what the woman on the juke was singing was
Americano
and if she wanted to hear
Inglés
she should catch Reinald Werrenrath doing
The Road to Mandalay.
So much for The Boxer Rebellion.

The Bartender-Who-Is-an-Authority-on-Everything taxied in with the news that the greatest American singer of all time was Johnny Ray and the greatest song ever sung was
The Little White Cloud That Cried.
As I
hadn't seen an American newspaper for a week this came as a complete surprise. “You don't hear so much about Johnny Ray since Sal Mineo came along,” I told him.

Another
Americano
wandered in. This one was wearing a coat so I couldn't tell what his name was. He sat beside me but I didn't ask him where he was from. Finally I got tired of that and told him the time without his having to ask it.

“They don't know how to make a hamburger in this country,” he replied immediately; “they don't know what butter is. I waited an hour and a half this morning to get two poached eggs!”

“You can get a
good
hamburger on the
Champs-Élysées
,” I told him. “Why don't you try there?” After a minute he left too. That left me the only American in Barcelona who liked The Club Java.

The reason there are so many crippled dogs along this street is because the new cars are so wide and come on so fast that the brutes don't have a chance to get out of the way. The biggest cars, the blackest, that make everything moving leap for the wall, are the ones with liveried chauffeurs.

I have a sightline from here on the ancient street fountain where women of the waterless tenements come, kettle and pitcher, pan and pot, for water for drinking and bathing and washing. Whether you live in village or city in Spain, it's an uphill grind and a downhill slide for water. In rooms of dreamers, city or town, sleepers go forever uphill then go forever down: winding up a stairwell's steep abyss or slowly down the spiraling cliff. Hope means hope for soap and water to last the day and saving the suds for tomorrow. Those big black cars that make you leap for the wall are Portuguese. The passenger in the back seat of one was a bishop.

Two Barcelona men are on trial here before a military court charged with “insults to the chief of state.” If Franco is going to try everyone who insults him here I'd like to have a peseta a head for turning people in. I'd come before El Porko wearing a black tricorn and a monkey suit, give him that nutty-looking salute and say respectfully, “El Caudillo, Spain insults you,” and he'd owe me thirty million pesetas. But I'd say it respectfully so
he wouldn't put me in jail too. They called it a Civil War, but if that one was civil I would as soon not be around when they lose their manners. The big problem to me is the Portuguese. If it's true that their power has declined, where do they get those cars? Is everyone in Portugal a bishop?

The bartender asked me if I'd like to taste a
carraquillo
and I said I'd bite anything that wouldn't bite me back. He said No, it was just a little drink that would warm me up. I said I wasn't cold just to see if he could think of another reason. I kept putting obstacles in his path like that. I didn't want to make things easy for someone who wanted a king. He insisted on making me warm enough even though I wasn't cold. By this time it was plain that what he had in mind was to knock me out and steal my camera. Well, I know a trick or two myself, one being to fall backward off a barstool and lie on the floor pretending I am unconscious. When he took down an unlabeled bottle, I demanded that he give me
only a small glass
, thus reducing his chances of knocking me out by 50 per cent.

He and his wife then began laughing at something together—a pair of operators if I ever saw a pair—they even contended a little over the bottle for the honor of being the one to pour the dirty drink. It must have been her turn, because she served me and stepped back, waiting. I drank it and looked around. They make coffee cups in Spain too small.

Actually, all you have to do is pour a spot of cognac into a cup of Spanish coffee to have the drink called
carraquillo.
Unless you prefer to do it with anise, in which case it is called Death in the Afternoon. In France they say red wine is the communion of the poor and in Ireland they say Guinness is the communion of the poor. But if they call cognac-coffee a hard drink, then in Spain the communion of the poor must be Communion.

The good wine is the
Bueno,
the cheap wine is the
Ordinario,
but there is no bad wine as there is no bad dancing; and the
Ordinario
is
bueno
enough for anybody.

Except, of course, for Portuguese bishops who live on wood alcohol strained through a bandanna.

Below the great gaiety of the Spanish heart is a stern, ancestral passion for control. To be
loosely
gay will not do. As one does not drink or dance or face the death on the horns of the bull loosely. Like the Irish, the Spanish are infatuated with death, but with an infatuation as different as midnight from noon. The Irishman goes by degrees, half willingly, into that good night. Goes too gently into that good night. The Spaniard stays
death's stern hand with his own. No man gives so little to death and no man dies so hard. As the Irishman leaves lightly, he drinks hard. As the Spaniard goes hard, he drinks lightly.

Penalties for public drunkenness here seem inordinately severe. An offense that would get an incorrigible lush thirty days on a state farm in the States will get him years at hard labor here. Dignity is more important to the Spaniard.

Man's first triumph, in the Spanish view, is over the great bull of passion within every man. The bull of lust and the bull of fear, that must be faced with no outward show. Personal dignity is the communion of the poor.

There is also big money to be made here in robbing the blind. My own personal control was remarkable, inasmuch as the bartender kept pouring the great bull of
carraquillo.
For I concealed my inner excitement that the stuff was being poured on the house, and he kept pouring it. He even poured one for himself. So I knew the man realized he wasn't dealing with some fool who would turn down a free drink just because it might zonk him onto his skull. He kept pouring.

My assumption that everything was free was gradually earning me his respect. My strategy was to keep him pouring out of respect until he would realize that it would be cheaper to quit pouring free cognac and offer me
keef.

I stood up and drew on a cigarette until my eyes crossed. Then I uncrossed them and looked at him inquiringly.
Keef
is a mild hypnotic combining the finest virtues of hashish and marijuana into a single noble blend. Humanitarian seamen bring it into Barcelona from Africa. I don't know what they call the name of the stuff from Greece. You might call
keef
the communion of the poor, too, because that is what the poor here really do call it, except that it costs more than the poor can afford.

The bartender shook his head. Either he didn't have any or he didn't trust me. All he did was turn Bessie Smith over.

Past times, simpler times, when we went to a bar to drink whiskey instead of staying home to smoke pot. Past days, gone days, when every
saloon had a print of Custer's Last Stand donated by the Budweiser Brewery. Old times, Budweiser times, when we called for a boilermaker when we wanted a shot and a beer. Gone times, Schlitz times, when a man would say “I'm taking a count” when he wanted to know how much money he had instead of “I'm reviewing my holdings.” Lost times when nothing was easier than to forget an army serial number. Times that had transpired upon some first-person person's planet before third-person times came along. Times when there had been nothing to get grim about except crapping out three rolls running or having to go to a war. How was it then that the campus fellows, arrived with their blueprints to which the arts must henceforward conform at peril of getting bad grades, felt grim about everything?