PARTISAN REVIEW
of the journey and you cannot travel without a
triptico,
a safe-conduct.
No consulate or embassy is permitted to grant a visa without the police
salida.
The broad face of
Seguridad,
near the place where the first shots
were fired on Napoleon's troops, dominates the Puerta del Sol with
barred and darkened windows. The police license radios. The police
go through your suitcase in a provincial rooming-house. The woman
living in the cave, dug in the bluff near the Manzanares, is quick
to tell you, "We are here with the permission of the
polida."
Every–
where you hear that the jails are full. There is regular bus service for
visitors from Cibeles, at the center of town, to the Carabanchel prison.
On a trolley car near the Toledo Gate, I saw two arrestees, an old
man and a
boy
of about eighteen, being taken there. They were hand–
cuffed and in the custody of a pair of Guardia with the inevitable
machine guns. The boy, with thick hair that grew sturdily down his
neck and with prematurely deep creases beneath his eyes, had the
precarious nonchalance of deep misery and deep hatred. There was
a loaf of bread sticking out of his pocket. The old man was one-armed,
filthy, and scarred. His feet were coming through the rope-soled
alpar–
gatas.
He was nearly bald and the lines of a healed wound spread under
his thin gray
hair.
I looked at him and he gave me a gentle shrug of
surrender, not daring to speak, but when I got down in Mataderos,
among buildings demolished during the civil war, he ventured to lift
his hand and wave it as far as the steel cuff permitted.
These were probably common criminals, not
uRojos."
Hundreds
of the latter are arrested every month and the trials at Alcala de
Henares continue endlessly. Political prisoners released from the over–
flowing jails are on conditional liberty and show you the cards on
which they must have a current official stamp. Most of them are not
granted work-permits and live as they can in the streets, shining shoes,
opening
taxi
doors, peddling lottery tickets, and begging.
At the center of Madrid you occasionally notice shot-scarred
buildings, but on the whole there are few reminders of the civil war in
the better
barrios.
On Gran Via the shops are almost American in their
luxury, and the early evening cafe crowds that sit looking down the
broad curve of the street at the mass of banks, churches, and govern–
ment buildings resemble those in New York and Washington bars.
Hollywood pictures run in all the better theaters, and the craving for
American good things-Buicks, nylons, Parker 51 pens, and cigarettes–
is as powerful here as in the other capitals of the world and, as in most
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