PARTISAN REVIEW
pose a subject closer to my interests. He was a small, nervously mobile,
brown man with measuring, aggressive, melancholy eyes. He wore a
gloomy brown gabardine suit, shiny with dirt, and shoes that were laced
through only half the eyelets. Already we were climbing through the
thickening darkness; farms appeared below, remote in the steep, green
valleys. "You are on a holiday?" he said. "You will see many beautiful
things." He enumerated them: the Escorial, the Prado, the Alhambra,
Sevilla, Cadiz,
la taza de plata.
He had seen them all; he had been
everywhere; he had fought everywhere. "In Spain?" I asked. In Spain,
of course, and in Russia and Poland as a member of the Blue Division
against the Reds. Essentially he was a soldier; he came of a military
family; his father was a high-ranking officer, a colonel in the air-force.
He threw his hand open to me, displaying a white scar in the palm–
his souvenir of Albacete. Just then a young Guardia, lanky and sun–
burned, began to roll back the refractory door, and he sprang from his
place, seized the handle and held it. He spoke a few rapid words in an
undertone to the Guardia and rattled the door shut. Someone, certainly
not one of the Spaniards in the compartment, said,
rcHay sitio."
There
was :room enough for two more passengers. But the colonel's son kept
his own cqmsel and, stepping over legs to his own seat, he resumed
his conversation-with me alone this time, confidentially; and for a
while something of the expression with which he had dismissed the
Guardia lingered on his face, the roused power of his office. Yes, he
belonged to the police and made three trips a week between lrun and
Madrid. He liked the job. Being an old campaigner, he did not mind
the jolting or the noise-there was singing accompanied by rhythmical
clapping and stamping in the next compartment; in his own time, he
put a stop to that. The pay was not enough for his style of life, but
he was expecting a good
enchufe,
or sinecure, to which he felt himself
entitled. Fortunately he could add to his income ·by writing. He wrote
fiction and at present he was busy with a long historical novel in verse.
His eyes grew hot and visionary as he began to talk of the poets he
admired and to quote, somber and reverent. I reflected that it was
probably appropriate, since so many European writers were ambitious
to become policemen, that the police should aspire to become writers.
Meanwhile the sky had grown dark and the train threaded its
weak light among the trees and rocks or stopped briefly at stations as
weakly lighted as itself. Crowds waited in thy mist and the passage
was filling. No one made a persistent effort to get into the compartment;
everyone was turned away by the colonel's son. We, the Americans,
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