THIS week's cover story is about a present actuality and a future possibility. It thus involved covering Spain from the inside, and a man on the outside--the Pretender who may one day be King. The inside job is the work of Jeremy Main and Godfrey Blunden. Main, who was born in Argentina of British parents and speaks fluent Spanish, was once Madrid bureau chief for International News Service. Returning to Madrid, he interviewed Cabinet ministers, economists. Roman Catholic lay leaders and politicians from left to right, and reports. "Mostly I found sources far more willing to talk and even to be quoted than when I worked here six years ago."

Blunden made a null trip through the west and southwest of Spain, touching not only the tourist spots, but such forsaken and hostile places as the valley of Las Hurdes. He found that "people were speaking more freely and more openly than at any time since the Civil War. It is as if a statutory limit on the sense of guilt arising out of the Civil War--shared by both sides--had suddenly run out."

The agreeable job of interviewing the cover subject himself fell to Paris Bureau Chief Curtis Prendergast, who has spent grimmer days as a TIME correspondent covering the Korean war, the emerging and contentious continent of Africa, and of late, the France of De Gaulle and Algeria. Prendergast, who got to know Don Juan first in Portugal two years ago, had this time to find him first. The Pretender was somewhere in the Mediterranean aboard the yacht Saltillo. returning from the Athens wedding of his son Prince Juan Carlos to Princess Sophie of Greece. On a tip, Prendergast flew to the Spanish island of Majorca.

There a friend of Don Juan's got a cable from Messina, Sicily, signed "Con-de Barcelona" (one of his titles), saying he would be along four days hence. When he arrived, Prendergast found him wearing a sailor's blue dungarees, faded blue canvas sneakers and "for reasons I'll never know, only one sock. I like the man tremendously.

He couldn't say much--political pronouncements are touchy with him, particularly when he is on Spanish soil, as he was then. He roared with laughter when I tried to put a political question to him. He is an exhilarating talker in English, and probably in the five other languages he speaks as well." When Artist Henry Koerner painted Don Juan earlier in Portugal, he was dressed more formally in the uniform of the Maestranza de Ronda, an honorary Spanish military order which he has headed since he was a young man.

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