Interesting Times - Eric Hobsbawm [198]
At all events in 1951 I had my first experience of a Barcelona still filled with ‘the field-grey teams of the armed police, with rifles and sub-machine guns sticking out like bristles, every hundred-odd yards in the town-centre, and by the factory gates’ and guarding the characteristically palatial banks, symbol of the downtown street scene of Franco Spain, like fortresses of the rulers who dominated a hungry people. After a few days in Barcelona I made my way by a mixture of trains and hitchhiking down the coast to Valencia, then to Murcia, Madrid, Guadalajara, Zaragoza and back to Barcelona.
Spain was poor and hungry in the early 1950s, perhaps hungrier than at any time in living memory. People seemed to live on potatoes, cauliflower and oranges. Had Tarragona ever been so badly off in its entire history, I asked myself as I looked at that wonderful gold-blond cathedral among the ruins of the Roman Empire. Spain had no public voices. The news from Barcelona reached the rest of Spain through rumour, travellers such as myself, hawkers, truck-drivers, occasional listeners to foreign radio. There were only obscure allusions in the press. Intellectually, the country, most of its talent in emigration, seemed strangled (‘few Spanish works in the ‘‘serious’’ bookshop’ – translations and even Spanish classics mainly in Latin American editions).
Spain was unhappy. Time and again, in cafés, in the cabs of trucks, or on the unspeakably awful correos, the slow but cheap trains stopping at all stations, people would say things like: ‘This is the worst country in the world’ or ‘People in this country are poorer than anywhere else.’ ‘Everything in this country has gone to pot since Primo de Rivera [1923–30],’ said the matriarch of a family of cheapjack traders from Madrid who took me under their wing. Spain had not forgotten the Civil War and the vanquished, though powerless and hopeless, had not changed their mind about it. And yet, time and again, when the subject came up, someone would say: ‘Civil War – nothing is worse. Father against son, brother against brother.’ Franco Spain in the early 1950s was a regime sustained by the argument of Thomas Hobbes that any effective political order is better than no order. The regime survived, in spite of its perceived injustice and massive unpopularity – at all events in the eastern parts of the country, where I travelled – not so much because of its power and readiness to terrorize, but because nobody wanted another Civil War. Perhaps Franco might not have survived if, at the end of the Second World War, the Americans and British had decided that he should not, and allowed the armed resistance units from southern France, largely composed of Spanish Republicans, to invade the country. But they did not.
Above all, Spain was isolated. Its blood-soaked regime was still enclosed in the carapace of anti-modernity, traditionalist Catholicism and self-contained autarchy. The extraordinary industrialization of the country, which was to make it unrecognizable, and even to change the very physical appearance of Spaniards in the next thirty or forty years, had hardly begun. Where else in Europe, except the equally self-sealed Portugal, could one still have found a place like Murcia, indistinguishable from a Habsburg provincial city before 1914: nannies in black-and-white uniforms by the dozen supervising their children along the river promenade, eyed by soldiers from the local barracks; middle-class young women with chaperones; farmers and pig-dealers settling bargains in market cafés? Tourists were counted in hundreds, not in tens of millions. The Mediterranean coasts were still empty. When I recall the costas of Andalusia in the early 1950s, what comes into my mind is a dusty, white-hot, empty road between stones and sea with a view of vultures descending from all parts of the sky to join the mob already eviscerating the cadaver of a mule or donkey.