Algren at Sea (20 page)

Nor has the work in the bullring at Badajoz by Franco's “Blond Moors” lent wisdom to the democracies twenty-three years after. Precisely as the democrats of Spain asked Western help, Portuguese democrats are asking it today—and are denied as was Spain. And again the Eastern bloc offers the arms needed by antifascists.

Spain today is not the work of a piece of activated pork in a tasseled hat named Francisco Franco. It is our Spain.

Yet now in the bright enormous morning twenty-three years after the fall of the city (making Barcelona forever new) I remain curiously proud of belonging to the curious, tragic, preposterous people once called “The Americans.”

You may remember: we began by saying “We are bound where no mariner has yet dared to sail. We risk the ship, ourselves and all,” and then we got rich. And wound up saying You can't be too careful. You remember.

You remember we began by saying No man is an island, but thought better of that toward the end; so changed it to I'm getting mine. You remember. We began in the search for the great white whale, yet dragged up nothing but Norman Manlifellow; that had to be tossed back for being under six inches.

We occupied a continent to the west and for a while there were quite a few of us. You remember.

You remember we began asking Are those really Congressmen? Are those the great Judges? Is that the President? Then I will sleep awhile yet. For I see that these States sleep.

I decided that fifty pesetas to the chambermaid, fifty to the kid who takes the bags down to the desk, and a hundred to the
concierja
would get me out of the Hotel El Kosmo. It meant walking downstairs to slip by The-Porter-Who'll-Never-Make-It.

The first part of THE PLAN worked fine. He was looking out the front door, his back turned, while I paid off at the desk. I got by him, with both bags, onto the street just as the cab pulled to the curb.
Now
who has it made? was my thought.

There was a rush behind me and a tug at my collar—he had hold of the piece of cloth that flops out of my jacket. I had to stand helplessly in the street while he tucked it in and brushed me down. He could have measured me for a new suit for the time he took.

All right, I was caught, and all I had was a hundred-peseta note and a half a pack of cigarettes. I broke down and handed him both.

He took one cigarette and handed me back the pack. With the hundred pesetas.

And stepped back with his hands in his pockets.

 

Farewell, lovely Barcelona, city of contrasts, where the old contrasts with the new. Farewell, quaint city of Old Iberia where the healthy contrasts with the sick and the rich contrasts with the poor and the poor contrasts with the very poor. Farewell, striving metropolis, city of flowers and Portuguese automobiles. Farewell, Rambla de Las Floras, where the dark-eyed señorita smiles at her faithful caballero after being out all night with an American marine. Farewell, busy capital where the tourists gets to be the manager of the restaurant—
Adieu! Adieu! Adieu!

When I saw that little two-motored orphan waiting for me out there on the windless Spanish grass, it looked like a plane without a mother. As I had not brought my own mother along, I felt sympathetic.

Once inside it I felt pure pity for the little brute. A plane without a stewardess doesn't care whether it
ever
gets off the ground.

The only other passenger was an American Air Force fellow in civvies who told me he makes the run to Almería twice a week, but I couldn't imagine why. My own reason was so preposterous as not to bear admission. I simply clicked the shutter of my camera once or twice to show I had film and didn't care how fast I used it, and let it go at that.

“Where's the runway?” I wanted to know, glancing out the window, “Where do they take off from?”

“Right here off the grass, Dad. There ain't no runway.”

“They'll have to warm this thing up half an hour to do
that.”

“They don't warm nothing up in this country. They just take off, Dad.”

“I think I'll just watch from the ground,” I decided.

“Sit down, Unk,” he urged me, “Ozark has a very good safety record.”

“OZARK?
Ozark?
Are they going to try to bring this mousetrap into
St. Louis?
For God's sake, we'll never make Cincinnati. Let me get out of this here.”

“We just call it Ozark because it barely clears those big hills, Dad”—pointing to the majestic heights of the Sierra Nevadas. A gesture that surprised me as the Sierra Nevadas are in another part of the country altogether.

The two-motored orphan began bumping about like a baby buffalo snouting for corn, got its wheels off the grass, ran into a storm a hundred feet off the ground though there wasn't a breath of wind inside or outside
the plane, and finally got a tentative sort of grip on the air. By the time I had regained my composure I was in a damp sweat. I am never a man to be easily frightened by danger. But imminent peril really gets me.

All the way to Almería the pilot killed time by banking into a climb just to see what was going on up there, then shutting off the motors to slip into a plummeting glide. I'd never seen anything like it.

“Exactly what do you think he has in mind,” I couldn't help wondering. “Is he trying to discover something?”

“Saving gas,” Air Force Jack informed me.

Recalling an occasion when a Spanish pilot took it upon himself to discover Seville while I was in the plane, I steeled myself against the moment when this one, upon some wild surmise, would discover Almería. Ever since Columbus had his little success, the Spanish pilot has an
idée fixe
about getting to places before anyone else. Though it will take him the better part of a morning to fix you up with a cup of coffee, the reason is that he is bemused by the marvels of space travel in the kitchen. That's how it
is
in Spain, Man, that's what it's actually
like.

The people below looked like ants. As we came down and raced toward the airport I looked out and saw they really
were
ants. There was nobody else around the airport at all.

“How much gas do you figure we saved
that
trip?” I asked Air Force Jack, who handed me a pack of Air Force cigarettes for reply. This kid must be loaded.

I offered to buy a drink provided it was on the ground, and he accepted at the little airport bar. He really seemed a deserving sort, so I regaled him with an account of the crossing of the Remagen Bridgehead.

I've told the story of how we crossed at Remagen so often and so well that if I ever run into somebody who actually crossed it I can only hope he'll have the simple decency to doubt himself so I don't have to bother. I have come to embrace this fantasy so wholeheartedly, in fact, that I can now recall quite clearly how I tricked two SS officers into chasing me until one dropped dead and the other died laughing; but before I reached this climax I looked up to see that Air Force Jack had gone.

Gone with Goth and Byzantine; gone with Scythian and Moor. Gone, like the Brooklyn Robins, taking his PX cigarettes.

The reason I had come to Almería was to photograph
The People from God Knows Where,
the cave-dwelling race who live in the immemorial
rocks in the heights above the city. The title, inclusive of italics, was my own device, as one most likely to captivate the editor of any magazine that can afford to buy photographic plates.

Almería is a provincial town of streets as narrow as its people, a kind of Indianapolis without smoke. Having seen Indianapolis, I didn't bother with the town. The townspeople will tell you there is nobody living up there, because the idea of Spanish people living in caves touches their pride. But I knew better. I took a cab to the end of town and told the driver to wait as I was coming down on the other side. As that is a sheer drop of five hundred feet he said he would be pleased to catch me. I told him I'd take my own chances.

The road keeps going up into a toyless sun until there is no road, but merely loose gravel, and I went slip-sliding on all fours, camera dangling, from rock to rock wondering how Herman Wouk got
his
start. It occurred to me that the Abominable Snowman might turn out to be no more than another American trying to get pictures of people nobody had taken before. Frankly I don't even know how the Abominable Snowman got
his
start.

Nobody knows where these people came from, though there is conjecture that they might have come from caves along the Red Sea, a conjecture I made just this minute. At any rate, whoever they were, they found the rock of Greece too hard to carve. Why they didn't want to live in houses I have no idea. But in southern Italy they found rock soft enough to carve, and in Africa northeast of Ksar-es-Souk, they dug into the ground, where whole towns, large enough to hold ten thousand people, thrive today. I saw two blond, stocky little blue-eyed fellows perched on a rock, and they didn't run and hide when I came up, as the Bedouins northeast of Ksar-es-Souk do. They run and hide in Ksar-es-Souk. I never chased one into Ksar-es-Souk myself. but if I had a Diners' Club card I'd go in and bring one back. It might turn out to be Martin Bormann. Well, how would
you
feel if
you
were Bobby Breen when Tony Curtis came along?

I was pleased the kids didn't run from me and even more pleased they didn't start posturing when they saw the camera in hope of pay—asking
“Foto gitano? Foto gitano?”
even though they weren't gypsies. They had a ten-foot bamboo pole lying between them, across their knees. It looked suspiciously like a fishing pole, but I didn't want to ask them if they'd caught anything, not being in a hurry to make a fool of myself.

Other than their bamboo pole, there is no sign of a plaything in these toyless heights. No doll, ball, or bicycle. Just the beating heat on the gravel and the shade of the silence-colored rock. It's too hot for dogs; goats can't make it. Only men, women, and children, the hardiest brute that still roams free, can survive. If you ask me what they live on, I'll tell you that they must work as servants in the town below. That's only a guess, but it's as good as yours.

Some of the caves are natural wonders; others have been dug out and a window carved in one side, toward the morning sun, and the front whitewashed. One had palms across its doorway to remember the coming of Christ to Jerusalem. I
told
you they've been here a long time.

I stopped before one labyrinth that looked as if it had been old when the moon was new. A man's turtle-neck sweatshirt was hanging on a line to dry beside the opening, so I looked in thinking I might find James Jones at work. Nobody was in, so I judged he was downtown taking notes. A heavy-set young woman came along carrying a bucket of water in either hand. I stepped aside to let her by, but she didn't wish me good day. I waited to give her time to set the table for lunch, then put my head in and asked her if I could come inside.

She didn't say I couldn't, so I did. Some fellow who looked like he might be boarding with her sat in a corner, but I couldn't see him clearly because there wasn't enough light. But he didn't have anything to say either. Well, if the Troglodytes aren't a race of grouches, at least I'd found two who were.

He took a cigarette from me, sparing the pack, and when I offered her one she didn't know what to do. He said it was alright, take one, so she did and handed it to him. If he had handed it back to me I would have figured they were both in need of analysis, but they weren't. They just wanted to know what the hell I wanted. They were sure they hadn't sent for me.

I told them I had a hard time understanding Spanish, so they both began talking so loud, both at once, with gestures, that I realized they had misunderstood me—they thought I was hard of hearing. I put my fingers in my ears and shook my head, to show there was no need of hollering.

Finally I understood that not being able to understand Spanish words well meant I did not understand any words well. They could not conceive of another language because they had never been faced with the concept
of another country. “Spain” and “world” meant the same thing. A Spaniard was a man and a man was a Spaniard. If a man did not understand Spanish it was because his hearing was bad.

I did not tell them there were other countries. Had one of the pair found out, he could have told the other. But as nobody has told either and both were now past middle age, neither would be able to believe it anyhow. Yet both man and wife were in good shape physically.

When I came back into the sun, toyless boys with bamboo poles were perched on a rock with their lines out over a sheer drop of rock. They were fishing for birds. A starling dived at the bait of bread, got hooked, and was hauled in. One of the bird-fishers had half a dozen birds beside him and the other had two. Wait till the sailors searching for sailfish off Palm Beach hear of
this!

I asked where I could find the gypsies and they pointed downhill and up again, to see the
gitanos.

The road up was solid and easy, so I made it upright. At the top of the road a mob of them were waiting, for they had spotted the camera. Five-year-olds to ancestral hags in bandanas, all crowding, hollering, and posturing,
“Foto gitano? Foto gitano?”
I didn't see one good-looking girl in the crowd.

This race, if it is a race and not a roadshow, has but one cultural distinction—that of holding out the hand for you to put something in. If you do there is, immediately, a whole host of cousins, brothers, sisters, babies, youths, grandparents, all hollering
“Foto gitano!” “Foto gitano!”