Tomb in Seville Read Free Page A

carcass, waited until we were within fifteen yards before spreading its wings to take to the air. Where there are eagles, the driver said, men go short of bread.
    Behind this desolate beauty the outline of Pamplona raised itself cautiously from among low hills and I was at first delighted by the town’s mouldering ramparts but then almost immediately discouraged as an area of industrial development came into sight. What do they produce in the heart of this amphitheatre of nature, I asked, and the reply was bathroom fittings and sanitary appliances. While old Pamplona guarded its silences, the new town uttered a muffled roar of profitable activity. Understandably there were no tourists in sight, for Pamplona, we were to learn, possessed just one hotel. The Montaña charged eight pesetas fifty centimos a day—the equivalent of six shillings and nine pence for full board, and naturally enough, said the manageress, wine was included with both meals.
    We were already well aware of the fact that such cheap Spanish hotels, however little they charged, always did their best to give a lot for the money. Thus, instead of concentrating on simple two-course meals based on wholesome materials, they insisted on performing feats of camouflage with what was left over and bought at auctions in the markets at the end of the day’s business, and in serving it up in four or five often abominable courses.
    The Montaña offered the finest example of this competitive policy in action that one could hope to find; both ingenuity and imagination were employed in the processes of substitution and falsification of what was on offer. The tang of corruption was suppressed as far as possible by wholesale use of garlic. All cooking was done in the cheapest of rancid oil promoting odours that wandered through the building for an hour or so before and after each mealtime. This was to remind me that one of the charges on the indictment drawn up by the Inquisition leading to the expulsion of the Spanish Jews was that (to the offence of Christian nostrils) they cooked in oil.
    Falsifications generally employed in such low-cost establishments were common throughout Spain in those days. It seemed extraordinary that the counterfeiters of food went to the lengths they did. There were even occasions in restaurants when we were confronted with such wild impostures as a fish described as a salmon but possessing the three-cornered spine of a conger eel or a small shark.
    Among the small surprises of the Montaña Hotel was the news that its manageress was an ardent communist who organised the many political rallies taking place in the central square. Her husband, a mason, was employed at five pesetas (three shillings) a day on the building of a giant seminary just outside the town. He supplemented his wages, she told us with some pride, by producing busts of Lenin which commanded a good sale as household ornaments, replacing the biblical figures of old among the working class.
    Eugene produced his membership card and we were invited to a cell meeting at which the prospects for the success of the coming revolution were discussed. At this time the armed revolt by Asturian miners was in full swing, with even such government newspapers as the ABC reporting with misgivings the slaughter produced by the shock troops employed to quell the revolt. Pamplona’s communists had gone to the trouble of bringing down a miner to talk to them—a near dwarf whose ancestors had worked underground for generations. He convinced them with splendid oratory that the victory of socialism was at hand. Next day we were to discover that government censorship had suppressed all news from the north on the eve of a final battle in which tanks were in action against strikers armed with pickaxes, and a victory, never in doubt, was proclaimed.
    Our State of Alarm problem refused to go away. In Pamplona we faced increasing difficulties through the frequent changes in and misunderstandings of the