Sometimes his arguments took on a curious note of pleading, as if he believed that these people, with their genteel pretensions, their gritty urban poverty that showed itself in their clothes, their bad-tasting cigarettes, their obvious avoidance of such luxuries as baths and haircuts, should understand him best. “Am I rich?” he would ask. “Did I make black-market money? Do I have a big house, or an American car? I don’t love myself, I love Spain. I’ve sacrificed everything for Spain. I was wounded at seventeen. Seventeen! And I was a volunteer. No one recruited me.”
Hearing this declaration for the twentieth time, the tenants in the dining hall would stare, polite. It was all undoubtedly interesting, their faces suggested; it was even important, perhaps, that Señor Pinedo, who had not made a dishonest céntimo, sat among them. In another year, at another period of life, they might have been willing to reply; however, at the moment, although their opinions were not dead, they had faded, like the sepia etching of the Chief of State that had hung in the entrance hall for more than thirteen years and now blended quietly with the wallpaper.
In Señor Pinedo’s room, between the portraits of film stars tacked up by his wife, hung another likeness, this one of José Antonio Primo de Rivera, the founder of the Falange, who was shot by the Republicans during the Civil War.
“He was murdered,” Señor Pinedo said to me one day when I was visiting the Pinedos in their room. “Murdered by the Reds.” He looked at the dead leader’s face, at the pose, with its defiant swagger, the arms folded over the famous blue shirt. “Was there ever a man like that in your country?” Under the picture, on a shelf, he kept an old, poorly printed edition of José Antonio’s speeches and a framed copy of the Call to Arms, issued on the greatest day of Señor Pinedo’s life. Both these precious things he gave me to read, handling the book with care and reverence. “Everything is here,” he assured me. “When you have read these, you will understand the true meaning of the movement, not just foreign lies and propaganda.”
Everything was there, and I read the brave phrases of revolution that had appealed to Señor Pinedo at seventeen. I read of a New Spain, mighty, Spartan, and feared abroad. I read of the need for austerity and sacrifice. I read the promise of land reform, the denunciation of capitalism, and, finally, the Call to Arms. It promised “one great nation for all, and not for a group of privileged.”
I returned the book and the framed declaration to Señor Pinedo, who said mysteriously, “Now you know,” as if we shared a great secret.
That spring, there was an unseasonable heat wave in Madrid; by the time Easter approached, it was as warm as a northern June. The week before Palm Sunday, the plane trees along the Calle de Alcalá were in delicate leaf, and on the watered lawns of the Ministry of War roses drooped on thin tall stalks, like the flowers in Persian art. Outside the ministry gates, sentries paced and wheeled, sweating heroically in their winter greatcoats.
The table in the entrance hall of the pension was heaped with palms, some of them as tall as little trees. Señorita Elvira planned to have the entire lot blessed and then affixed to the balconies on both sides of the house; she believed them effective against a number of dangers, including lightning. The Chief of State, dusted and refreshed after a spring-cleaning, hung over the palms, gazing directly at a plaster Santa Rita, who was making a parochial visit. She stood in a small house that looked like a sentry box, to which was tacked a note explaining that her visit brought good fortune to all and that a minimum fee of two pesetas was required in exchange. It seemed little enough in return for good fortune, but Señor Pinedo, who sometimes affected a kind of petulant anticlericalism, would have no part of the pink-faced little doll, and said that he was not planning to go to church on Palm Sunday — an announcement that appeared to shock no one at all.
On Saturday night, four of us accidentally came home at the same time and were let into the building and then into the pension by the night porter. Señor Pinedo had been to the cinema. The stills outside the theater had promised a rich glimpse of American living, but in line with some imbecility of plot (the hero was unable to love a girl with money) all the characters had to pretend to be poor until the last reel. They wore shabby clothes, andwalked instead of riding in cars. Describing the movie, Señor Pinedo sounded angry and depressed. He smelled faintly of the disinfectant with which Madrid cinemas are sprayed.
“If I belonged to the Office of Censorship,” he said, “I would have had the film banned.” Catching sight of Santa Rita, he added, “And no one can make me go to church.”
Later, from my side of the partition, I heard him describing the film, scene by scene, to his wife, who said, “Si, claro” sleepily, but with interest, from time to time. Then they said their prayers. The last voice in the room that night came from the radio. “Viva Franco!” it said, signing off. “Arriba España!”
It seemed to me not long afterward that I heard the baby crying. It was an unusual cry — he sounded frightened — and, dragged abruptly awake, I sat up and saw that it was daylight. If it was José María, he was outside. That was where the cry had come from. Señor Pinedo was out of bed. I heard him mutter angrily as he scraped a chair aside and went out to the balcony. It wasn’t the baby, after all, for Señora Pinedo was talking to him indoors, saying, “It’s nothing, only noise.” There was a rush of voices from the courtyard and, in our own flat, the sound of people running in the corridor and calling excitedly. I pulled on a dressing gown and went outside.
Señor Pinedo, wearing a raincoat, was leaning over the edge of the balcony. In the well of the court, a little boy lay on his back, surrounded by so many people that one could not see the cobblestones. The spectators seemed to have arrived, as they do at Madrid street accidents, from nowhere, panting from running, pale with the fear that something had been missed. On the wall at right angles to ours there was a mark that, for a moment, I thought was paint. Then I realized that it must be blood.
“It was the elevator,” Señor Pinedo said to me, waving his hand toward the big iron block that now hung, motionless, just below the level of the second-floor balconies. “I knew someone would be hurt,” he said with a kind of gloomy triumph. “The boys never left it alone.”
The little boy, whose name was Jaime Gámez, and who lived in the apartment directly across from our windows, had been sitting astride the block, grasping the cable, and when the elevator moved, he had been caught between the block and the wall.
“One arm and one leg absolutely crushed,” someone announced from the courtyard, calling the message around importantly. The boy’s father arrived. He had to fight through the crowd in the court. Taking off his coat, he wrapped Jaime in it, lifted him up, and carried him away. Jaime’s face looked white and frightened. Apparently he had not yet begun to experience the pain of his injuries, and was simply stunned and shocked.
By now, heads had appeared at the windows on all sides of the court, and the balconies were filled with people dressed for church or still in dressing gowns. The courtyard suddenly resembled the arena of a bullring. There was the same harsh division of light and shadow, as if a line had been drawn, high on the opposite wall. The faces within the area of sun were white and expressionless, with that curious Oriental blankness that sometimes envelops the whole arena during moments of greatest emotion.
Some of the crowd of strangers down below sauntered away. The elevator began to function again, and the huge weight creaked slowly up the side of the house. Across the court, Jaime’s family could be heard crying and calling inside their flat. After a few moments, the boy’s mother, as if she were too distracted to stay indoors, or as if she had to divert her attention to inconsequential things, rushed out on her balcony and called to someone in the apartment above ours. On a chair in the sun was Jaime’s white sailor suit, which he was to have worn to church. It had long trousers and a navy-blue collar. It had been washed and ironed, and left to dry out thoroughly in the sun. On a stool beside it was his hat, a round sailor hat with “España” in letters of gold on the blue band.