The Sunday Gentleman

by Irving Wallace

  “But let me ask you just one thing—have you ever written anything against Franco?”

  I said no. I had done the usual anti-Fascist pieces on Hitler and Mussolini for Ken magazine, and once, in the army, had managed to retain in a Signal Corps orientation film some footage of Franco and the Fuehrer shaking hands, but beyond such minor sins I had been well-behaved.

  “Okay,” said Maffitt, “you’re in. They can only object on the basis of your magazines, and that’s not likely. They’ve been very friendly this past year. I’ll call Olascoaga and fix you up.”

  The morning following, a Friday morning, after stopping at Cook’s on the Avenida José Antonio for my mail, I took a taxi to the Subsecretariat of Education. The entrance was through a patio, squeezed between stores. I went up the wooden stairs and presented my calling card to a bulky attendant behind a table who was dressed like a Santa Fe conductor. He limped away, then returned and signaled me to follow.

  In a moment, we were in a small office, furnished with a green desk—barren except for a pile of foolscap—a swivel chair, a file cabinet, and a colored portrait of Francisco Franco on the wall.

  “Señor de Olascoaga will meet you here,” the attendant said. He indicated a chair. “Please.”

  I had been told that Señor de Olascoaga, a stumpy, twinkling man in his fifties, a laughing boy, would be cordial, not too inquisitive. I had only to exchange a few pleasantries with him, display my passport, my credentials from magazine editors, and then he would okay me and in a week I could pick up my press card in the Foreign Office across the city. I had sat alone for several minutes, staring up at the portrait of a flaccid Franco, when the door opposite suddenly opened. A tall, slender, well-dressed man stood in the doorway. He paused there a moment, looking at me. His hair was slicked flat, his eyes black and bright, his cheeks hollow, his thin line of mustache accenting his sensual lips. He smiled. It went on; it went off. He stepped across the room, hand out. “How do you do?”

  “Señor de Olascoaga?” I asked, confused, rising and moving forward to meet him.

  “No, I’m afraid not. I am the Marqués de Espinardo.” His voice was high, fragile, his English correct and very British. “No, our friend, Señor de Olascoaga, was called out on business. I have been delegated to talk with you and review your application. Do sit down.”

  I made my way back to my chair, wondering, and he went on around the desk and settled his long frame into the swivel chair behind it. He put his bony fingers together, tilted the chair backward, and looked at me pleasantly. In Hollywood, I had once met a bogus and larcenous German count who was blond and said he was from Heidelberg, and who looked almost like this. The count got five years.

  “I hope you have some time to talk,” said the Marqués de Espinardo.

  I said I did.

  “I like to talk with English writers,” he said easily. “I was educated at Sandhurst, you know, and I’ve read the works of a good many of you English writers.”

  “I come from Kenosha, Wisconsin,” I said, “by way of Los Angeles, California, and my friends do not think I am an English writer—”

  “An American, then. I was once in the United States, in New York, for two months. I wonder. Is New York the United States? Is it exactly like Kansas City? Or like Los Angeles? Could I write an authoritative book about America because I spent eight weeks talking to New Yorkers?”

  “I’m not writing a book on Spain,” I said, controlled.

  He smiled indulgently. “Oh now, now—I was not jibing at you personally—I am speaking generally, of American writers and correspondents. I do believe it is a mistake to think you can interview ten or one hundred—even two hundred—Spaniards, and pretend to know how we live and how we think. Believe me, we are all different. Especially in Spain we are all different. Take me. I am a northern Basque.”

  I was surprised. I had been up in San Sebastian, among the Basques, and they are a very unsophisticated people. Except for a few eccentricities like believing their language was spoken by Adam and Eve and that they will win autonomy, they are a cheerful and uncomplicated race. Your average Basque is without tricks. I would have bet the Marqués was a Castilian, Madrid Spanish, bruising easily, humorless, indirect, unhealthy, ingrown, too old, too devious.

  “We Basques are more serious, more profound, not so silly as the Castilians here in Madrid. Those are distinctions one must know.”

  He was speaking more forcefully now, his tone of voice was flatter and of more substance, and his face was red. Suddenly he paused. He had been leaning against the desk. He let out his breath, and slowly lay back in the chair. He was thin again, devious, Castilian.

  “I have read your American writers,” he said. “I have read Hemingway. I loathe him.”

  I sat in silent wonder.

  “Hemingway is a liar,” he said, less cautiously, deciding I wasn’t Hemingway’s friend or a member of his school. “He is a fraud, a sensationalist. For Whom the Bell Tolls was an obviously cheap appeal for easy money. His other book on Spain, Death in the Afternoon, it is really too filthy to be reprinted here. We love everything on bullfighting, but that book is too filthy. In it, he uses Spanish words that you Americans just don’t understand. But they are words even a respectable Spanish prostitute would not dare use.”

  I was nettled by the pointless tirade. “I’m sorry you don’t like Mr. Hemingway. Each to his own literary tastes. But at least Mr. Hemingway is permitted, in America, to write as he pleases.”

  The Marqués cocked his head and looked at me more carefully. I could feel his bewilderment. He had judged me after the first minute—silent and too assenting. Now he was bewildered and, as a matter of fact, much more interested.

  “I admit we have censorship in Spain, I admit it,” he said slowly. “We do not ban all ideas and news, but we water them, certainly. And I will tell you why. In the old days, our press was yellow like yours. Everything ran to sensationalism. If there was a murder in Barcelona—”

  In Madrid, all the murdering is done in Barcelona.

  “—if a severed head were found under a streetcar seat, reporters and photographers would rush up there, and then splash front pages with the most gruesome stories about it for weeks. This provoked fantastic ideas in the minds of unbalanced readers and also provoked a whole wave of murders and suicides. I have read medical books, and I know that sensational journalism is provocative. Today, under Franco, we ban such irritants, and so we have an orderly, peaceful country.”

  I made a wry face at this limping apology, and he became quite annoyed.

  “But what I have said is true.”

  This time, I nodded, as one agrees with a lying child who belongs to someone else. He stared across the desk at me.

  “You have as much censorship in the United States as we have in Spain. Oh yes, you do. Your Hollywood movies are censored by an office that sees the law is always triumphant and crime the loser. Why such censorship? For the good of the state? Yes, and we censor for the very same reason. I have been in England and I know the English make movies in which women wear decollete gowns, exposing their naked breasts to the camera, but your prudish censors in America say these scenes might provoke American audiences. So you censor. Ours is no more restrictive than that.”

  I toyed with the idea of repeating the story I had heard of how Generalissimo Franco, a great movie fan, is always annoyed by a certain female musical comedy star because she wears tights and is so leggy, and how he always has her films censored for the public. I decided the story would inspire a long aimless discussion of movies, and I shelved it. I determined to bring up the specific business of my credentials.

  “About my credentials—” I began.

  The Marqués was not listening. “I am disgusted with American writing. We in Spain regard America as the most superficial country on earth. Two of your ambassadors have concurred with me in that opinion. You Americans get all your distorted capsule knowledge from newspapers and magazines or from spoon-fed Book-
of-the-Month Club selections. You do not read profoundly at all. Writers come here, without learning Spanish history, without cultural background, without a knowledge of economics, without understanding the causes for our present condition. The key to why we are as we are today rests in simple economics. Understand how Spain lives, that we are not self-sufficient and wealthy as you are, that we have not your material resources, understand where we get our clothes and metal and food, and you will understand present living conditions in Spain.”

  “I can’t dispute that. Marqués,” I said, “because I’ve been here less than a week and I haven’t looked around yet—”

  “How can you criticize us? I have heard about conditions in the United States. There are not enough shoes for people to wear. And the housing is terrible, terrible. I read a letter in Life magazine. An ex-serviceman says he cannot find meat to eat, clothes to wear, a home to live in. The only thing he finds everywhere is signs advising him to re-enlist in the army. He thinks it is a put-up job by your government. Why should you have a housing shortage? You have had no great destruction of your cities and villages as we have had. Why a shortage?”

  I gave him some of the pat answers. And I added, “In a city like Los Angeles, people who came to go into the war industries now don’t want to go home—”

  “Ah yes, yes, we have exactly the same, slums in all our cities, composed of villagers who should go home now. But no. Here, they have the cinema, and they want to stay. We should force them to return to the farms where they would live better. Perhaps Spain and America have much in common after all. Perhaps language is the greatest obstruction to friendly relations. Perhaps it is that too many Americans believe that, since their Republicans are conservative rightists, our Spanish Republicans are exactly the same. Tell them it is not so. Tell them our Republicans are Communists, murderers. Tell them that and we can be friends.”

  He halted on a high, shrill note, and caught himself there and pulled himself down with embarrassment. He took out a handkerchief and touched his forehead daintily. I was glad to see the handkerchief was silk. He pulled himself together and sat straight in the chair for the first time.

  “Now then, about your credentials. You are writing for The Saturday Evening Post, Reader’s Digest, Collier’s—”

  He stopped on the Collier’s. It pushed a button in his memory. He dug his right hand into his coat pocket and extracted a folded piece of white paper. He half opened it, moving his lips as he read it to himself, and shoved it back into his pocket. “Collier’s?” he said. “Perhaps you have heard of a girl named Martha Gellhorn?”

  I felt I might as well tie the whole interview together. “She was married to Hemingway,” I said.

  “She writes worse trash for Collier’s than Hemingway, and they print it. Last year, I read an article by her, written from France about us, about Spanish refugee children in southern France. It was full of lies. It was worthy of a Communist. Is she a Communist? Why does she write that way?”

  “We have a kind of press freedom in America,” I said, “and she writes what he pleases to write, what she sees and thinks, and American magazines publish it if they like it.”

  The Marqués was not satisfied. “Your magazines are inaccurate about Spain. They publish biased stories. They always write against us.”

  The ice was thin, but I was sick of the Marqués and the whole credential opera. “Look,” I said, “you just don’t understand the American press. You should study it more closely. Almost every major magazine in the United States is against Communism, baits Russia, yet these same magazines publish pro-Russian articles when they get hold of a good one. If they could ever, ever, get an article from Spain which proved that there was one decent thing to say in support of General Franco, about the Falange party, about what you people are doing to Spain, why, they would publish it. Until they get such an article, I am afraid the American press must continue to print what you call biased stories.”

  I thought he might stand up there. He didn’t. He sat a moment, looking down at the desktop, and then lifted his head, dug into his pocket and offered me a Chesterfield. I refused it.

  “Well,” he said, rising at last, “we have a long way to go to understand each other—our countries have, that is.”

  I laid my passport and papers on the desk. “You want to see these for my credentials, don’t you?”

  “Oh yes, certainly.” He unscrewed his pen, made a few sprawling notes on a sheet of foolscap, after glancing at my papers.

  I gathered up my things. He put his pen away, and pushed out his long hand. “This was a pleasant and instructive hour. Perhaps you will call upon me again. Yes, you must. We will have a real talk about American writers. Not Hemingway, but others. You will do that?”

  “I certainly shall. Good day.”

  That evening, at the British-American Club, beneath the three framed portraits of the King and Queen of England, the President of the United States, and Francisco Franco, I sat over bourbon-and-sodas with several resident American correspondents. Although they knew everyone in the government, especially in the press department of the Foreign Office, not one of them had ever seen or even heard of the Marqués de Espinardo.

  ‘Tall? Mustache? Sandhurst?” said the correspondent who had come into Madrid shortly after Franco. “Can’t say I’ve ever heard of him. He’s a new one. Most likely secret police. Oh, they still do that. As for press credentials, look, old man, you’ll do better without them.”

  He paused, reflected a moment. “Espinardo, eh? He sounds like an improvement. At least, he’s read Hemingway.”

  WHAT HAS HAPPENED SINCE…

  The preceding story was one result of my first visit to Spain. I had taken a train from Paris to the Spanish frontier in January of 1947, stayed in the Basque capital of San Sebastian briefly, then continued on by train to Madrid. A month later, in February, my wife and I agreed to depart from Spain by automobile, sharing the ride and the burden of driving with a pretty, young brunette, and free-lance American correspondent, named Rita Hume. We drove from Madrid to Zaragoza, and then on to Barcelona, and later, went on to La Junquera, crossing out of Spain to visit Montpellier, Marseille, Cannes, Rapallo, and finally Rome.

  The adventures on this ride eventually provided not me but my close friend, Zachary Gold, with the basis for a hilarious short story, his last before his untimely death in 1953. The innocent triangle of Rita, my wife Sylvia, and myself became Gold’s “A Lady in No Distress” in Woman’s Home Companion for September, 1952. However, there is a second sad postscript to the story: Rita Hume eventually married John Secondari, author of Three Coins in the Fountain and later, a television network commentator, but short years after their marriage, Rita was killed in a motorcar accident in Europe.

  During the time I spent in Spain, I wrote three magazine articles. One was about the independent, eccentric, and fascinating Basques of Spain. Another recounted my adventures in a small Spanish village south of Madrid, an impoverished village inhabited by brave but angry men who were anti-Franco. I had been taken there by Charles Gordian Troeller, publisher of Luxembourg’s L’Indépendent, and his friend, a sweet, gentle, chubby Barcelona member of the anarchist underground who looked like Robert Benchley and was equally loved wherever he went. I published this story in The Saturday Evening Post. Partially as a result of my story, but mainly because of further clandestine activities on their part, Troeller was eventually ousted from Spain, and the sweet anarchist gentleman was caught and executed. I was banned from Spain. However, apparently the passage of eighteen years has had its mellowing effect on the Falangist authorities, for now all of my books, fiction and nonfiction, have been or will be published in Spain, and several of my novels have achieved widespread popularity there.

  The third article I wrote in Spain was “The Man Who Hated Hemingway.” My journal reminds me that I met the Marqués de Espinardo on Friday, January 24, 1947, in Madrid. I was sufficiently impressed and irritated by the interview simply to sit down
and write the preceding impression, although I had no periodical in mind.

  Having always had affection for the story, I decided, to include it in this collection. In preparing to do so, I wondered what had happened in the many years since to the Marqués de Espinardo. I did not know where to inquire, and then I remembered one press-association friend—a Spaniard who had worked for an American newspaper syndicate in Madrid—and I wrote to him. Here is his reply verbatim:

  Dear Irving,

  Please excuse me for the delay in writing, but I was awaiting replies to my inquiries for particulars about the Marqués of Espinardo. For many days, I was trying to remember the family name of this Marqués, and I did not succeed. The only Espinardo I know is a little village in the Murcia Province. I contacted some friends for further information. They said the name was unknown down there. You know, the titles of nobility are common among Spanish officials these days, especially in the Foreign Ministry. But this one was a real mystery. One thing is certain: the Marqués was an official of the Spanish Foreign Ministry, since Olascoaga (who died several years ago) was not in the Ministry of Information and Tourism but in the Foreign Office itself.

  It was difficult to identify the man, despite the very good description you give in your story. One thing is clear to me: the Marqués must have been, may still be, a Foreign Ministry intelligence official, because Olascoaga was Vice-Chief of the Oficina de Información Diplomática, and the Marqués was certainly a substitute for him. I don’t think that the Marqués was an obvious secret policeman, as the correspondent in the British-American Club told you. Secret policemen are quite different in Spain, and they usually do not speak the fluent English your Hemingway-hater spoke. The Marqués was probably more important and less known to outsiders. I think you will not find out more about him.

  If the Marqués was still alive at the time, it is unlikely that he grieved at the news of Hemingway’s suicide in Idaho on that early July morning in 1961. But I suspect that today the Marqués enjoys little satisfaction from the disappearance of the corporeal Hemingway. For he must know that Hemingway, the artist, still lives.