IN BARCELONA
By S. F. A. COLES AYOUNG Austrian and his blue-eyed wife talked sadly of post-War Vienna at a table in the little pension off the Calle Blames. They were teaching German, quite glad to be in Spain. At the head of the table sat a Berlin professor who silently bullied the room with spectacled glares. A fair-haired Norwegian boy, just arrived from Oslo. stood the scrutiny well, taking his food in measured mouthfuls. He had been navvying in Montreal for two years and spoke Canadian- English ; had returned to Norway. where his father was member of Parliament. in the stokehold of' a Scandi- navian tramp steamer that had nearly foundered in an Atlantic storm ; was now looking for a ship to Japan where he spoke of settling in commerce. A number of Barcelona steamship and bank clerks kept-up a runnin! conversation in Catalan all meal times. Spain, they declared, was _played out : only Catalonia counted in the European concert. Their sympathieS were with Don Luis Companys and the Separatists. The pall-mine was tactful and discreet, bringing in extra portions for those who got worked up. " it is Strictly Forbidden to Talk Politics " he had written in SpaniSh on a card hung above the table. A young dangbter played the violin.
I liked to wander about the old Plaza del Rey where Columbus was received in state by Ferdinand and Isabella. This Plaza del. Rey and the adjacent Plaza de la Constitution arc from the old original Barcelona, the heart of that sturdy port founded on the original Cartha- ginian settlements, exploited by Greece and Rome, raised later by its wealthy counts to the maritime emin- ence of Venice and Genoa.
The office of the President of the Generality in the Cam de -la Diputacion was locked. Seitor Companvs was unveiling a memorial to Colonel Macia, said a porter attired in the strange Catalan uniform of which white plimsolls forms a part. He led the way into the hand- some Council Chamber of polished oak, into St. George's chapel, as ornate as its namesake at. Windsor but less than a tenth of the size. The Cappadocian knight is also the patron .saint of Catalonia and local legends say that the dragon was killed in mediaeval Barcelona.
From the balcony where the first Executive of the autonomous State of Catalonia had prematurely declarcmI .Catalonia a Republic before Madrid itself had dismissed Alfonso, to the frantic cheers of the .revolutionary mob below, the new flag of the Generality was flying. Now he rests from thirty years of political storm and struggle, and from his brief and exacting triumphs, under a stone slab bearing the one word Macia."
Santa Maria del Mar is the mariners' cathedral. • It is redolent of the sea, speaks of elemental things, of loneliness, hardship, death in strange. waters. It is weather-beaten, wrinkled its veins are blue with age. The style is transitional, a supremely-interesting example of the birth of Gothic. The nave is wide like the ocean ; a latticed gallery slants down upon the altar as the poop-castle of some galleon. Side-chapels are small as ships' galleys,. railed from intrusion. An unofficial guide halted near a marble tomb saying it was that of Columbus.
- From the great Plaza de Catalunya, the city's heart and centrum,- more spacious even than Salamanca's celebrated Plaza' Mayor, the Rambla runs down to a port 'crowded' with world shipping. Dense traffic passes in two streams on either side of the wide tree-bordered -Paseo murmurous each evening with-Barcelona's teeming population. Here stand the kiosks massed with blooms, canaries in high cages, the bookstalls with news-sheets from the other side of the Pyrenees pasted up for all the world to scan beside pages of the Madrid dailies, of the violent Catalan organs, of Communist, Anarchist periodicals. The literary taste of this Mediter- ranean race reaches all extremes. Here one is caught up in conflicts, crises. Life breaks over the pedestrian in breathless waves, in a hissing foam of hard and sharp monosyllables as the electric vitality of Castilla surges and splutters about him in the Puerta del Sol in Madrid.
The Rambla has fine shops, some hotels, bars, open restaurants where people sit on high stools eating wondrous fish collations and drinking high vases of iced beer ; theatres, churches, a few private homes, cinemas. The atmosphere is Roman. At the bottom of the great highway soars the Columbus monument, with its vivid bronze reliefs of scenes in the life of the great navigator, more memorable and artistic than those on the Madrid or Valladolid monuments. The illuminated statue at the summit is five times a man's height.
Beyond lie the wharfs of the great South American lines which carry the bulk of the European traffic between Spain and the New World.
In Sarria, in a villa below the high crown of Tibidabo, I lunched with a famous foreign correspondent who had been the friend of Dostoievsky, seen Tolstoy die, and whose life had once been endangered by Stalin when the Soviet Dictator was a bandit in the Caucasian moun- tains. We had Russian dishes and borch wine. My illustrious host took little. Age, illness and disillusion had crowned his brilliant life.
I took the funicular to Tibidabo. The view was wonderful, like a vast water-colour. The great city with its myriads of villas and houses, its colleges, churches, spires, intersected by streets and boulevards running in a thousand directions, unfolded from the very steps of the Look-Out on the highest point of the wild Sierra of Llobregat behind Barcelona. The azure immensity of the sea, bearing the smoke of cargo-laden ships and steamers, stretched away in a shimmering sheet of unbroken blue.
The Balearic Islands were not visible on this occasion because of the haze. Out of the enormous map below rose the spear-towers of the old cathedral, the exhibition lace-work of the new unfinished structure.
I returned into the city.
The cathedral was dark, spacious, dignified, imposing. In the long nave it was difficult to see passers-by. In the chapel of the Holy Christ of Lepanto was the blackened Image of the Virgin which, says a legend, bowed its head on the poop of Don Juan's flagship to escape the Moslem's bullets. . . .That Spaniards have not in the centuries that have ensued lost their capacity for instant action and sublimity of utterance is proved by General Batet's broadcast to his Catalonian country- men, after his loyal and resolute move against the rebel Ministers had saved the unity of Spain.
Candles were burning in a crypt before the shrine of Santa Eulalia. Folk stood at the bottom of a wide .
flight of steps with their noses glued to the cold railings. On chairs above the steps old men were nodding. The sunset streamed through glass rich and lovely here as at Chartres. Above the finely-modelled silleria were coats- of-arms of early members of the Order of the Golden Fleece, that Order whose insignia Philip wears in all the gloomy portraits of him in the Prado by Pantoja and Tiziano, with its pathetic dead-sheep ivory hanging against his black tunic. . . . A cathedral dark, solemn, soberly withdrawn into itself, but amply proportioned, nobly Gothic, where the world is kept out by a roseate whisper.
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