TODAY IN BARCELONA
By LOUIS MACNEICE
IWAS in Barcelona from December 29th till January 9th. The most surprising things I saw were on January 9th— in Toulouse, where I landed by 'plane from Spain: food in the shops and on stalls in the streets, drink in the cafés, well-clad people, the street-lamps lit. It only takes one ten days to find these things surprising.
I had arrived in Barcelona after dark, the streets like limbo but crowded. A feeling of thousands of people cir- culating round one in the night. That is one thing there is plenty of here—human beings; two and a half millions now against one million before. These people's lives have become very much simplified and assimilated to one another; the topics of conversation are few and universal, money has lost its diversifying force, and everyone, one feels, is by necessity in the same boat. For this reason one feels very much at home in the dark streets of Barcelona. There may be bitter dissensions among the politicians, but the people in the streets, one feels, have become a family party—or, if you prefer it, are in on the same racket—united by material necessities, by hunger, by the fear of sudden death which enhances the values of life. I have never been anywhere where these values were so patent. It would be difficult to be a Hamlet in Barcelona.
The shops are ghosts of shops, only open in the morning, the counters and shelves bare, one object every two yards. The cafés are ghosts of cafés—no coffee, beer, spirits or wine, people making do with coloured water which is called lemonade or with terribly degraded vermouth (yet in one café there was a string quartet). They close at nine and the chairs are piled on the tables. But the people, though thin and often ill, are far from being ghosts of people. Facts in a city at war are necessarily uncertain; how can one know the truth about the Front or unravel the para- doxical knots of Spanish party politics or sort out truth from propaganda ? One fact, however, is as clear—and as refreshing—as daylight: the extraordinary morale of these people—their courage, good-humour and generosity.
Their strength, of course, can also be their weakness. Optimism on the Government side has already meant several gains for Franco. Again, while a people must obviously adapt themselves to war conditions, it does not seem altogether desirable that war should become quite so much a habit as it has in Barcelona; one feels the people have almost forgotten about peace and might not know what to do with it if it came. Yet without this confidence and this adaptation to circumstances, Barcelona no doubt would have already given way to Goliath. Her people are essen- tially non-defeatist; no one this New Year admitted for a moment that Franco's present offensive might succeed. I saw a new comedor for children in an industrial district, which is being converted from a theatre and adjacent cinema.
In this, once the great city of cafés and taxis, you now have to get about by walking. And instead of cocktails and seven-course meals there are food-queues, rationing of acorns, a ladleful of lentils for dinner. By ordinary people food cannot be bought though it can be obtained by barter: soap, flints and tobacco are among the best currencies. (I am told that Arabs come into the port and sell soap at 25o pesetas a kilo.) In my hotel (where the bombing commissions stay) we had a privileged access to food—at fancy prices : a dish of chickpeas at 3o to 4o pesetas, horse and chopped swedes at 45, fried sprats (a very rare delicacy) at 6o. (A superintendent of a comedor gets 40o pesetas a month salary.) People's rations at the moment (they are always decreasing) are as follows : —Bread : 15o grammes per day except on Sundays. Chickpeas (roogr.) and peas (5o) on one ticket, but you only get these once a week or maybe once a month. Oil: * litre, but they have had none now for three months and then it was like machine oil. They have had no fish on ration tickets for two months, no meat for one month. Those who, instead of having ration-cards go to the comedores, seem to me to be better off, because at any rate they know what they will get. And the children are considered first; for all that their diet is causing a vast increase in rickets and in skin diseases such as scabies. I should add that the people who work in the comedores seem invariably good humoured, kindly and strictly conscientious.
In these extremities statistics are more important than impressions, but here are some snippets from my visit. The crowing of cocks: most characteristic sound in Barcelona (as if you were to hear cocks in Piccadilly). Lots of people keep hens or rabbits on their window balconies. Lack of tobacco: to give a man a cigarette is to give him the King- dom of Heaven; I gave a Spaniard three cigarettes one night, and next day he sent me in return a hunk of dry bread wrapped in paper. Refugee colonies: often in con- verted convents, beds in the gloom under towering Gothic arches, old women with eye diseases making jokes about Mr. Chamberlain, the children doing eurhythmics. Schools: shortage of teachers, but the children clean (though washed in cold water) and happy, the walls often decorated with figures from Walt Disney—the Big Bad Wolf representing Fascism—or with Popeye the Sailor knocking Mussolini for a loop. All the children seem to be natural artists; in some schools they still print their own poems and lino-cuts. - Air raids: The siren is like the voice of a lost soul, but the anti-aircraft defence is beautiful both to hear and to see—balls of cottonwool floating high in the blue day, or white flashes at night. The searchlights also are beautiful, and the red tracer bullets floating in chains gently, almost ineptly, upwards like decorations at a fair. After the raid on the centre on New Year's Eve the streets were heaped with powdered glass, and crowds collected to look at a spatter of black blood-spots fifteen feet high on a wall. During an alarm in Tarragona four girls romped down the square with their arms round each other's necks. Ruins: near the cathedral a house six stories high, its face and floors torn away; on the top story a plate-rack fixed to the wall with all its plates unbroken and a shelf with two unbroken bottles. The district to the side of the port, Barceloneta, has been evacuated; all the streets are rubble, and all the houses like skulls. Irony: the Banco de Vizcaya still announces stock market prices for July 17th, 1936, and the chemists sell cures for obesity. Recreation: every Friday after- noon a crack orchestral concert, well attended, in the enormous Teatro di Liceo; the theatres and cinemas all running; a newsreel showing a fashionable dog show in Moscow. And people still playing pelota. But the Zoo is macabre—a polar bear 99 per cent. dead, a kangaroo eating dead leaves. In the Barcelona air-port I met an American seaman, an ex-member of the International Brigade, short, square and tough, with a face like a gangster. On his lapel he wore the insignia of all the Government parties—to create good feeling, he said. He expressed the greatest admiration for the Spaniards—even, in spite of what some people say, as soldiers. I shared his admiration and, as I flew down from the Pyrenees to a country where money still goes, I felt that my descent into this respectable landscape was not only a descent in metres but also a step down in the world.
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