PARTISAN REVIEW
industrial wall against which there are always a few men relieving
themselves. Behind are the usual unfinished public works and miles
away, far upland, is the intricate earthen blue of the Sierra which
sends down the trickle of the Manzanares, more like the idea than
the actuality of a river.
It
appears to
be
the idea, the
hope
of a river
that attracts the gigantic crowd from the desert African dryness of the
slums. The boys leap high into the air, as if the water were measured
in
feet, not inches, and the dust clings to their legs when they clamber
up the bank. The river runs in a dirty green vein from shallow to
shallow; gangs run yelling up and down the sand islands of its bed.
A man leads his infant daughter, hardly old enough to walk, down to
the water. She has soiled herself, and he washes her with a certain
embittered tenderness while she clings screaming to his lanky, hairy legs.
Among the trees, surrounding the kiosks that sell wine and beer,
the huge multitude is dancing, jogging up and down. Three young
boys, self-contained, professional, indifferent to the dancers, play saxa–
phone, guitar, and drum, imitating the downtown version of American
chic. Two drunken men are blowing the
gaita,
the hairy Galician bag–
pipes, for a group of drunken-looking friends. Madrid is said to be
overrun with Gallegos; Franco himself is Galician and, in the old–
fashioned Spanish belief
in
provincial loyalties, they come to the city
by the thousands for jobs.
The soldiers in the crowd look thickset and short in their coarse
jackets, gaiters, and big boots. They bump against the wheeling pairs
of girls and
try
to force them apart. This is done seriously; there is
little friskiness or gaiety, and you see few smiles. The dancers tramp
and shufHe but, though excited and sweating, keep a straight-browed,
straight-lipped formality of expression and hold themselves apart with
rigid heads and shoulders.
The kiosks and the cafes do not sell food. The people bring their
own bread and chick-peas. You can buy a meal at middle-class
pri~es
in the bowery beer gardens set apart behind lattice walls and bushes
growing in tubs. In one of these places where I stop for a bottle of
beer, there is a huge, time-eaten barrel organ that produces martial–
sounding dances with missing notes, clanging bells, and queer, mechanical
birdcalls. The man who winds it has the pride-bitten look of someone
who has come down in the world and gives me a glance of "too good for
my destiny and every bit as good as you are." His wife sits beside him,
evidently to give him support in his humiliation, for she does not spell
him
at the organ. The brass drum inside catches the late sun on its
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