The Grace of God in Spain
Mayer, Milton
THE GRACE OF GOD IN SPAIN by MILTON MAYER Alicante, Spain If I was going to see Harry—and I was—I was going to have to see him in Spain. Harry cares not who makes a country's laws, let him...
...who cares (if I don't) whether I go to Spain...
...The solemn country is in- congruously full of jerry-built junk, like New Jersey or Phoenix, and incongru- ous fun-lovers from you-name-it...
...Harry doesn't worry about the Gaudillo, whose picture is on all the coins (the few that there are) with the superscription that the Caudillo is Caudillo "by the grace of God...
...A country of dreadfully poor people on whose backs the tourists ride cheap...
...It is only in domestic affairs that there is no liberty...
...The Caudillo...
...I suppose it meant something (at least to him) when Thomas Mann left Germany and said, "Where I am there is Germany," and when Pablo Casals left Spain and refused to go back...
...But I had to see Harry, so I had to go...
...But where is there then to go...
...My godsons don't understand sec- ondary boycotts, and they don't like walls...
...I have American friends who thought I shouldn't go to Ger- many after the war—but I had Ger- man friends in Germany, tottering out of the concentration camps and the prisons...
...THE GRACE OF GOD IN SPAIN by MILTON MAYER Alicante, Spain If I was going to see Harry—and I was—I was going to have to see him in Spain...
...The foreign papers are available...
...Their eastern anchor men, in Greece and Turkey, are of course anti-Communist despots too...
...Thirty-five years ago the people of Spain, or most of them, tried to save their poor republic from the Caudillo and his Nazi and Fascist patrons, choosing to die on their feet rather than live on their knees...
...Now they live on their knees, and after thirty-five years of it there is a new generation to whom Guernica is the name of a pro- vincial town up north somewhere...
...always Ger- mans...
...Since the Latin-American world is still legendarily Spain, the Caudillo and Fidel exchange embassies and en- gage in great trade...
...The constitutional rights, like Russia's, are a joke, and their "suspension" in times of emer- gency a bigger joke...
...He had twenty- four million other foreign visitors this summer (to a country of 35,000,000), and Spain is now the top tourist coun- try in Europe...
...It would be impossible with that many foreigners there...
...there are far fewer graffiti on the walls than anywhere in the West except Switzerland, where there is nothing to graff about...
...And a new gen- eration of French and British tourists —and British pensioners settled in the sun—people who (or whose fathers) once stormed the Quai d'Orsay and Whitehall shouting shame at the neu- trality policy that let the Nazis and the Fascists carry the Caudillo to Spain...
...But I had to see Harry, so I had to go- I suppose this kind of secondary, or •tertiary, boycott is ridiculous...
...And the Caudillo's is an old despotism now, and an easy one...
...MILTON MAYER, the Roving Editor of The Progressive, is currently in Europe, on leave from his post as professor of English at the University of Massa- chusetts...
...the water flows uphill," from the bar- ren fields of the Castilian peasants to the flower gardens of the rich up above...
...You don't even have to have forgiven it, only forgotten it...
...and there is no censorship of the mail...
...Spain is the only cheap country left in gung-ho Europe, and a European can be rich there (an American fabulous...
...I didn't want to go to Spain again, not as long as the Caudillo ruled by the grace of God...
...A Spanish friend of mine likes to go into the restaurants along the Costa This and the Costa That and say, "Do you serve Spaniards" or, "Do you speak Spanish...
...Now I have Czech godsons in Prague, and I'm on my way to see them again...
...By the grace of God—and of Truman, Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon, and before them of Hitler and Mussolini—you can live and laugh in Spain, providing you have forgiven and forgotten Guernica...
...Casals, living in American Puerto Rico, by that fact "supports" worse in Viet- nam than the Caudillo did in Spain...
...And how could I "teach the Germans a lesson" by not going to Germany to teach and to learn...
...A solemn, stony country, and a dry one...
...Harry cares not who makes a country's laws, let him but strum its guitar and sop up its sun and its sherry...
...At seventy-nine, the Caudillo, under the influence of the lay Catholic organiza- tion Opus Dei, represents autocratic moderation against the generals who mean to outlive him...
...After thirty-five years I was still shouting shame, now at the Nixon mob all but two of whose cabinet members have gone to pay their homage to the western anchor man of the sea in which they think they might fight it out with the Rus- sians some time...
...Germans, too, of course...
...This past summer the foreign tourists were pouring into Spain so fast that the border control police were waving them on with a get-the-hell-into-here gesture, without letting them stop to show their passports...
...A new generation, too, of American tourists, who never did much care who made a country's laws...
...But these were famous men, and it was their own, their native lands they were boy- cotting...
...the Spanish press is allowed to report objectively on for- eign affairs (and it does...
...When there is pro- test, it is violent...
...And neither do I. But Spain stuck in my craw...
Vol. 35 • September 1971 • No. 9
