The Bell Tolls for Thee

Spain has long held a firm grip on man's imagination. It is the land of mystery, a Gothic tapestry sewn together from strands of brutal sunshine and lustful blood, of tart wine and even tarter women. It is the secret of thunderous clouds menacing El Greco's Toledo; the acrid fire consuming the bodies of heretics during the Inquisition; the melancholy strains of a guitar played after a day's labor in the fields; the gnarled branches of the olive trees that cluster throughout the sun-beaten hills. It is the legend of the independence of the leather-skinned Basque farmer, of the fiery spontaneity of the Andalusian anarchist, of the Catalonian workers who stopped work two hours one day to listen to Pablo Casals play the cello on the radio. It is a nation struggling to extricate itself from a destiny of solitude, to establish peace with itself and end its perpetual suffering.

My first encounter with the myth of Spain came, as I imagine it does with many Americans, through Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises. Jake, the narrator, is a sullen American expatriate who, frustrated in love, goes to Spain to carouse his solitude away at the Fiesta de San Fermin in Pamplona. Every July a good part of Spain converges on this northern city for a seven-day orgy of wine-drinking and bull-fighting. The bulls selected for each day's contest are run through the city's streets, on the heels of all those brave (and crazy) enough to risk their necks for the honor of being able to boast of "running the bulls" at Pamplona. After the day's fights the cafes are jammed as raised wineskins squirt forth their hurtling jet of cheap vino. The bands in the central square launch into native tunes that set the pace for the whirling dance of tottering celebrants, strangers momentarily united in their stupored carefreeness. Jake joins in with the native Spaniards, and, aided by the wine and the contagious exhilaration of those around him, almost forgets his loneliness.

Reading that years ago, I caught a glimpse of a world where the normal barriers of propriety, temperance, and privacy are transcended in a communal frenzy, where people aren't afraid to let their pants down. So, a few summers back, finding myself in Spain in July, I headed for Pamplona to pay my respects to San Fermin and his Dionysian worshippers. After a sleepless all-night train ride, crushed into a stuffy corridor crammed with Spaniards on their way to Pamplona, I arrived on the first day of the fiesta. The city was jammed and the wine had already begun to flow in the streets. I promptly bought myself a wineskin and some dirt-cheap red wine, and, with a little practice, I developed a proficiency in squirting the juice into my mouth so that it hit the back of my throat. The night came, the music eddied up toward the moon, and there was dancing in the streets, almost as Hemingway had described it. I was drunk, and winding through groups of elated Spaniards, I regretted that I couldn't speak their language.

Pamplona's hotels had been reserved far in advance, so that I had little choice but to join the crowd sleeping in the park located next to the bullring. I unrolled my sleeping bag and arranged my sweater into a makeshift pillow. I took off my pants, which contained my wallet, passport, traveller's checks, and train pass, and put them into my knapsack, which I placed a half-foot from my head. The wine had made my head heavy, and I was out like a light. Around 4:30 a.m. I awoke with a start and, after, shaking my head, I noticed with a shock that my knapsack was gone. I frantically began searching the area around me. Here I was in a totally strange country, without my wallet, my passport, my money--without even a pair of pants. And I didn't speak a word of Spanish.

It took me two and a half hours to get up enough nerve to wrap my sleeping bag around my thighs and venture into the city to look for a cop who might be able to help me. This was 7:00 a.m., the precise time the bulls are run through the streets, and everyone was gathered around the bullring in anticipation. I swallowed my embarrassment at my rather unflattering outfit and began asking policemen outside the arena if they understood English or French. They would just stare at me, point at my legs, and laugh, "Pantalones! Pantalones!" I was on the verge of breaking down and I soon began to make obscene gestures at the people laughing at me. Finally an usher at one of the entrances to the bullring took pity on me and went across the street to a firehouse, from which he graciously brought me an old, worn pair of uniform pants. They were about eight inches too big around the waist, and the zipper wouldn't work, but at least I now had some pantalones.

* * *

And so I joined the elite clan headed by Don Quixote, chasers of chimera on the horizon which turn out to be windmills turning vapidly in the air. But Spain, that nurturer of fantasies and distiller of dreams, has witnessed the loss of more serious things than one's pants. In this century its seared soil has sucked up the blood of endless thousands of men and women who had a vision and were willing to risk their lives to see it realized.

Few events in modern times have inspired men to as great heroics as did the Spanish Civil War, fought in 1936-9 between those loyal to the five-year old democratic government and the fascist forces of General Franco determined to turn Spain into a totalitarian state. Barely had the Popular Front government been elected, bringing to power a coalition of Communists, Socialists, and other elements of the Left, than Franco started an army revolt originating in northern Africa and quickly extended throughout Spain. While Franco's Nationalist troops were substantially reinforced by elite troops sent from Hitler's Germany and Mussolini's Italy, the Loyalists were isolated by the stubborn neutrality of the United States and the European democracies. Their only external aid was from those volunteers throughout the world who left their comfortable homes to defend the nascent republic against the encroaching wave of European fascism.

Spain attracted men like George Orwell. In Homage to Catalonia Orwell writes of his ecstasy on entering Barcelona in the early days of the war. The city was then controlled by the Anarchists, who set on instituting socialist revolution simultaneously with waging the war against Franco. Leaving behind the stultifying atmosphere of England's rigidly stratified society, Orwell exulted in the vitality of Barcelona's blossoming egalitarianism, in the salutations of "Comrade" to strangers and the notices in barber shops proclaiming that barbers were no longer "slaves." In one of his finest passages Orwell describes his flash encounter with a young, tough-faced Italian militiaman in the international troops' barracks. The gap of language, of nationality, of blood and class background that separates them vanishes when Orwell reads in his face that he would do anything--even commit murder--for a friend. "With his shabby uniform and fierce pathetic face," Orwell writes, "he typifies for me the special atmosphere of that time. He is bound up with all my memories of that period of the war--the red flags in Barcelona, the gaunt trains full of shabby soldiers creeping to the front, the gray war-stricken towns further up the line, the muddy, ice-cold trenches in the mountains."

Spain also attracted less political types, the Robert Jordans of Hemingway's For Whom the Bell Tolls. This is not the aimless, rootless Jake in Pamplona, but a committed American from Idaho who leaves his post as a schoolteacher to help the Spanish people defend their liberty. Jordan--laconic, straightforward, and uncomplicated--joins a group of Spanish peasants working behind the Nationalist lines and, while working with them to blow up an enemy supply bridge, comes to feel less of an alien among these backward people. In the three tense days of preparation he senses his impending death, almost kills the leader of the peasant band, and agonizes over the suffering his mission will surely bring them. But, underlying all, he feels a simple, common bond of humanity with the Spaniards that prevents him from ever questioning the necessity of what he has been instructed to do.

And of course the Loyalist cause attracted the millions of poor peasants and workers who, with the Popular Front government, for the first time felt themselves an integral part of the Spanish nation. It is only after watching documentary sequences from a movie such as To Die in Madrid that we can truly understand the tragedy of the destruction of the Spanish Republic. We see avid militiamen raising clenched fists out the windows of railroad cars headed for the front. We then see them scurrying like scared rabbits through the din and smoke of the battlefield, advancing in spite of their terror. We are witness to heaps of mutilated bodies lying in fields where, a year earlier, wheat was almost ready for harvest.

But, no matter how much we have seen and read and re-read about Franco's regime in Spain, it is shocking to realize that this squat, mustachioed little man we see parading on the screen before his elite troops is the selfsame man who for 35 years has ruled the Spanish people with an oppressive iron hand. Decades after the fall of Mussolini and the demise of Hitler, Franco maintains a reign of terror in Madrid and Barcelona, throughout Aragon and Castile, over the sons and daughters of the Loyalist soldiers who lay buried in unmarked graves in the Spanish countryside.

And now Franco is dying. Two weeks ago his condition had become serious enough to force him to formally transfer power to his designated successor, the nondescript Prince Juan Carlos de Borbon. As Franco's death seemed imminent, Spain was alive with rumors of the political and social transformations that would usher in the post-Franco era. Within a week, displaying the remarkable fortitude that has marked his entire career, Franco, according to government reports, had totally recovered, and had temporarily retired to his summer estate to rest. But authority remains with the prince, and it is clear that Franco's days are numbered.

For those of us on the outside, looking in at Spain, we can do like Hemingway and sit in a hotel room and bang away on a typewriter, constructing on paper a character who partakes in a struggle we ourselves are not part of. Or, naive college students, we can travel to Spain in an effort to take a draught of an elusive, transmogrifying elixir. In one case our hero is killed, in the other we lose our pants. Yet, in spite of ourselves, the dreams continue, and, as the end of the Franco era hastens, we catch the stronger strains of a guitar and glimpse smiles on the faces of the children who crowd the streets of Barcelona. Spanish history is stained with rivers of blood, remaining true to the vision of Goya's drawings of a haunted people. Yet still we wait, and hope against hope for the Spain of Orwell's Italian militiaman, of Hemingway's Idaho schoolteacher, of the Spanish workers raising their fists into the air as they travel to their death in defense of their freedom.