SPANISH LETTER
foreigners to Unamuno's essay on Spanish envy and was quoted Que–
vedo's line, used as an epigraph by Unamuno: "Envy is lean; it bites
but cannot swallow." An Italian explained to me that the Spaniards
were half Moorish and that I would not understand them if I forgot it
for an instant, and according to a German lady who has lived in
Madrid for many years the great fault of the Spaniards was that they
had
no real feelings. After her brother's death, several
Madrileiio
friends
came to visit her. "They did not console me," she said. "They sat and
talked of their
marmotas
(maids) and their children. They knew I was
in mourning. They really are heartless." On the other hand Pio Baroja,
with whom I had a conversation, found the German character inex–
plicable. "At first I could not believe that they were burning their
captives in ovens. But then I met a young man who had lost his mother
and a sister in that way. And to tell the truth I found Germany a queer
place when I visited it in the twenties. In Hamburg a nudist family
got• on the streetcar: father, mother, and little ones all as naked as my
hand, a family of petit bourgeois .carrying bundles and packages like any
petit-bourgeois family that has been shopping. And the parents weren't
even handsome. The father had a huge
tripa,
like a barrel."
All these discussions of national character were occasions of re–
sentment, and the resentment was particularly strong when it was the
American character that was discussed. A traveling salesman said to
me, his eyes aswim with poetic heat behind thick lenses, "America is
still looking for a soul ; our soul is very old." Others spoke of "American
emptiness," "unhistorical Americans who live only in the future," etc.
But people, of course, feel the sway of American strength and
American goods and the loss of their own liberty and strength. Until
1898, Spain still considered itself an empire, and for a nation of tradi–
tionalists, 1898 is by no means the distant past. The emphasis on na–
tional character is an emphasis on value. Take away the ignorant non–
sense and there is still something left, namely, an assertion of worth
in a world in which worth is synonymous with power, and power has
passed to featureless mass societies for which the past has little mean–
ing, and machinery, wealth, aad organization topple the old dignity to
replace it with contempt and discontent.
Between Malaga and Granada, at the railroad junction of Boba–
dilla shivering under the heat that darkened the stone hills and olive
fields, I went into the station restaurant. It was a buffet, doing a feverish
business in bread, grapes, tortillas, ham, boiled eggs, jelly sausage and
blood sausage, salami, cheese, chicken, a huge abundance without boun-
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