PARTISAN REVIEW
daries, spread on thick paper and shining with fat. There were two
women and a man behind it. The man was middle-aged, gray-faced, and
he coughed continually. Three or four strands of hair were arranged
with elegant care over his bald head. He behaved toward me with iron
dignidad.
I was an American, therefore he refused to speak Spanish.
He addressed me in a kind of French acquired, probably, in a restau–
rant in Madrid or Barcelona or in a luxury hotel on the Mediterranean
and ripened during many isolated years in the desert wilderness of
Bobadilla.
"Les oeufs son' a cinq cad' un, m'sieu."
He kept coughing
softly and could not stop, obviously consumptive.
"Y que precio tienen
las uvas?" "Cuat' le demi-kilo, m'sieu."
Great politeness; fiery politeness.
Meanwhile he stared at me secretly with his rather vindictive eyes, the
coug'h blurting softly through his lips so that his cheeks shook. By my
accent, by the cut of my clothes, the pattern of my shoes and who knows
what unconscious attributes, he recognized me as an American, one of
the new lords of the earth, a new Roman, full of the pride of machines
and dollars, passing casually through the junction where it was his fate
to remain rotting to death. But he faced me at least with the proper
dignidad,
like the bitter organ-grinder in the Bombilla.
The commandante's dignity is something else again. The com–
mandante is, after all, the tyrant's friend and the tyrant too believes in
organization and is trying to trade his way into the new Imperium.
The senora wears nylon stockings, and the commandante owns a mar–
velous cigarette-lighter, and I am sure he has a large supply of Amer–
ican flints.
Saul Bellow
230
