PARTISAN REVIEW
to speak; the president says loudly,
«Callese!"-"Shut
up!" The prisoner
persisting, he rises and shouts,
«CaJlese!"
startling everyone.
"Nada de
la pol£tica!
Sit down!" He sits. "Stand up!" The prisoner rises. "You
have been heard on the evidence. Nothing else is relevant. There will be
no politics here. Be seated." There is no other disturbance. The trial is
over and we file down under the guns with the silent relatives. I see
the grieving face of a boy on the stairs and I talk to him. His father is
one of those who received four years. Will he be allowed to see
him?
He does not know; since the arrest he had not seen him till this morn–
ing. He is now the eldest at home. There was aa older brother, but he
disappeared in the last days of the war. He has another brother of
eight and two sisters. "How do you live?" I ask; he does not reply.
Thin and tall, he stands pigeon-toed beside me on the street, drawing his
long hands out of his pocket and thrusting them back. His face is
narrow and his soft eyes seem almost without whites: all center. I make
a low voiced comment on the barbarousness of the trial. W. has mean- ·
while taken down the names of the condemned for his report and wants
to leave, so I say goodbye, and we get into the car.
The uselessness of it afflicts me. Poverty and the harshness of the
dictatorship make resistance inevitable, and the relations of powers out–
side the country make it vain, perfectly useless. The Spanish problem
will not be settled within Spain. Franco wants to bargain with America,
and the communist leaders, were they in power, would represent Russia.
But people continue to struggle in the political spirit of past times when
they were still free within national boundaries to make revolutions and
create governments. There is no such freedom now, as a growing number
of Europeans are aware. "We liberated ourselves from Napoleon in
1812," a Spanish acquaintance said to me, "and we manifested the
same spirit in 1937 when we fought Hitler. Against him, however, we
were powerless. And perhaps we might have been swallowed by Stalin
if we had succeeded in defeating him. I dread another civil war here,
for it would inevitably turn into the conflict of greater powers. The
doctrines of 1789 are for us like the morals of Christianity: pieties. We
are not strong enough to enjoy the Rights of Man.
If
Russia does not
dominate us, your country will. We must resign ourselves to remaining
subjects and withdraw our hopes of independence from the realm of
politics to another realm."
Nearly every conversation in Madrid eventually turns to the subject
of national character, and more than once I was referred by other
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