SPANISH LETTER
of the capitals, there are no dollars and the black market thrives. The
police do not interfere with it. Peddlers go among the tables offering
pens and cigarettes. Some of these, especially the pens, are obvious
counterfeits; the Lucky Strike packages are beautifully done; the blue
tax-stamps are perfect; the cigarettes are filled with dung and crumbled
straw. A boy comes with a huge gold ring
to
sell. He gives you glimpses
of it in his cupped hands with exaggerated furtiveness, his face franti–
cally thievish. It was a heavy, ugly, squarish ring, and you wonder who
would ever buy it. He whispers, "It's stolen," and offers it for two
hundred
pesetas,
one hundred, fifty, and then he gives you up with
3:
sad, bored look and tries another table. Women flap their lottery tickets
and
beg
tenaciously. Some of them carry blind or crippled infants and
exhibit their maimed or withered legs. One, with a practiced movement,
turns the child and shows me a face covered with sores and a pair of
purulent eyes. Juanita, my Basque landlady at the pension, tells me that
most of these children are hired out by the day to the professional
beggars. It's all business, she contemptuously says.
In the dining room of the pension, the conversation is mainly about
movie-stars. The commandante's wife is equally attracted
to
James
Stewart and Clark Gable. The Sanchez sisters who were born in Hong
Kong and speak English well are for Brian Aherne and Herbert Mar–
shall, British types. Even the commandante has his favorites and adds
his dry, nervous, harsh voice to the rattle of the women. The com–
mandante is lean, correct, compressed, and rancorous and
has
a pock–
marked face, a shallow pompadour, black eyes. He and the senora do
not eat our ordinary bread. A black-market white loaf is delivered to
them daily, and at noon he carries it under his arm like a swagger stick.
There is a little military
rush
when they enter, she with small, pouncing
steps, wagging her fan, he blind to us all but inclining his head. Even
on the hottest days his tunic is buttoned
to
the throat. I offend him by
coming to the dining room in a T-shirt and slippers. He sits down
grimly to his meal, taking the senora's fan to cool his soup. His is the
dignidad
of gnawing hauteur and dislike, the hateful kind.
There is an important person in the pension, an admiral stationed
at the ministry who never eats in the dining room and who often, in
the afternoon, blunders through the dark, curtained rooms in his pa–
jamas. Juanita enters his apartment without knocking and they are
obviously on terms of intimacy. The Sanchez girls explain in an em–
barrassed way that the admiral is under a great obligation to Juanita
who, during the civil war, concealed and nursed his sick son, or perhaps
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