Spain Remembered

THE FORGING OF A REBEL--An Autobiography (739 pp.)--Arturo Barea, translated by lisa Barea--Reynal & Hitchcock ($5).

Ten years ago this winter, the siege of Madrid by Franco's army foreshadowed the hell that all Europe was to suffer. Sooner or later, the rest of the world realized that Spain had been victimized, but it was slower in learning how Spain had got herself in for it. The purely Spanish background of the Civil War has never been aired enough, though Spanish historians like Salvador de Madariaga have insisted on its importance. One of the few books to put light on the background is this long autobiography by an exiled Spaniard. It is valuable because it reflects in great detail the peculiar corruption and puzzlement of Spanish life between the Cuban (Spanish-American) and the Civil Wars.

Neither a politician nor a professional man of letters, Arturo Barea has a kind of faith, which neither of those types is likely to have, that he can "get it all down." This miracle--though not prolonged--actually seems to occur when he describes his childhood in Madrid. The first section of his book (originally published in England in 1941 as The Forge) ranks with the most incandescent realism that ever came out of Spain.

Madrid from Below. Barea's evocation of Madrid in the first years of the century has the childhood magic of minute particulars. He communicates not only the look of the city but the feel and smell of it: of sun-warmed horses, of dampened streets, of clean linen spread on balconies, of old furniture sweating beeswax in the heat.

He did not see "poverty"; he saw rills of blood on his mother's hands after a day's work beating laundry in the icy Manzanares River in winter. He did not see "the clergy," but an old priest dozing in a wild garden with a lizard sunning on his knee, or young priests emptying the church's poor box and playing cards for the proceeds. The worn-out monarchy, for him, was a hemophilic prince grinning from a carriage.

The blind violinist in the corner cafe could see with his finger tips which of two identical bow ties Arturo was wearing--the red or the blue. The little boys from the orphanage "all had lice and an eye-sickness called trachoma, which looked as though their eyelids had been smeared with sausage meat." The winding alleys--Street of the Union, Street of the Clock-were lit at night, white and black, by the polished moon of Castile and by gas jets, weak flames shaped like slices of melon. In summer he saw the savage boredom of village life in Brunete on the baked plain, where young men crucified bats whose wings tore as easily as old rags. He saw a starved boy in the ragged tinsel of a matador waiting, with the face of a mystic, for a bull's charge in a drunkenly howling village square.

Retreat to Morocco. Young Barea got a job as one of 60 unsalaried "apprentices" in a great foreign bank, the Credit Etranger (250,000,000 francs capital). At the end of the year he was one of three apprentices taken on as paid employes. The rest were fired and new boys who would work for nothing took their places. The bank's business, he soon decided, was to control or ruin other businesses. After a few years he exchanged one hopelessness for another and took service in the army in Morocco, building a road into the hostile territory of Abd-el-Krim. From top officers down, the army was as sick with graft as many of its members were with malaria and syphilis.

Barea saw honorable and intelligent Spanish officers trying to conduct war against the Moors. He also saw the disaster of Melilla in 1921, brought on when King Alfonso ordered the commanding general to make an insane attack. In the relief of Melilla, Barea slaved in a nightmare of stinking, mutilated dead. The Spanish Foreign Legion saved Melilla. Then and later Barea heard legionaries speak with awe of the cold and murderous courage of an officer named Francisco Franco. He also learned of a cynical doctrine held by some military careerists: it would never do to relieve Spain--either by complete success or withdrawal--of the mess and waste of the Moroccan adventure.

Hamstrung Republic. In the '303, out of the army and a prosperous consultant on industrial patents, Barea observed from the inside how German interests, especially I. G. Farbenindustrie, had sunk their hooks deep into Spain's economy. Meanwhile, the parties of the Left--Socialists, Anarchists and Communists-- brawled among themselves. No republican government could get enough strength to put through reforms against the opposition of the caciques (bosses). Barea does a careful portrait of this ancient Spanish type in action--the landowner, moneylender and local boss who deliberately let the countryside starve to hamstring the republic.

The Popular Front victory in the 1936 elections was something neither the caciques nor the army--nor the new Fascist Falange--could stomach. An ominous summer of street fights and rumors ended with Francisco Franco's moment--the vast confusion and fury of the Rightist uprising. Then, in Madrid, Barea saw gangsters and whores put on the overalls of "Milicianos," saw Anarchists and Socialists murdering each other and supposed Rightists without trial. He joined tipsy mobs setting churches afire and saw streets ringing with snipers' shots. It was months before the Loyalist Government could control its defenders.

Barea's narrative of his first year in besieged Madrid mixes impressions of heroism with comedy, brutality with cowardice. He worked for the Loyalist Foreign Ministry, under shell fire in the Telephone Building, censoring the dispatches of foreign correspondents. He liked Herbert Matthews, Ernest Hemingway, and John Dos Passos. Others seemed hateful to him, treating as a football game what he felt to be a tragic .agony. He survived it with the help of an Austrian woman whom he later married.

But Barea's self-command, worn down by the daily bloody destruction of children and women in Madrid's streets, finally broke. A fistful of quivering brains, stuck to a plate-glass window after a shell burst (he was escorting the visiting Duchess of Atholl at the time), shocked and nauseated him. He could no longer deal coolly with the bureaucratic intrigues that entangled him. In early 1938, he got the Government's permission to leave Spain with his wife. They crossed the frontier from Barcelona to France, to live in poverty and write.

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