Books: Illusions Worth Living For

SPANISH LEAVES by Honor Tracy. 189 pages. Random House. $3.95.

In Paris, Irish Novelist Honor Tracy’s favorite smell is the musty odor of the Metro on rainy days; in Spain, she prefers the fragrance of open sewers. “A vision comes,” she writes, “an enchanting still life of broken glass and pomegranate rinds with a dead rat floating in iridescent water, and beckons to me sweetly.”

Not sewers alone, but all the things that offend the typical tourist in Spain —stalled trains, unpredictable electricity, fire engines screaming like “Amazon howling monkeys”—delight Honor Tracy in this brief and lively travel book. She is entertained by what most tourists never even notice: “The men maintained their usual impassive demeanor” and, dressed in corduroy suits and broad black hats, looked “out from the dusty taverns hour after hour, silent, neither drinking nor playing cards, as if merely waiting for the end of the world.”

Does the postman deliver the mail a month late and not even look remorseful about it? Never mind, he kills snakes in Honor Tracy’s backyard, and once, when she was giving a party, he bicycled three miles to bring her ice. Are Spanish nightclub acts and zarzuelas sometimes performed by stuttering septuagenarians, Goyaesque dwarfs, and faded, toothless beauties? It doesn’t matter. It’s more fun to watch the audience, such as one old man who was ogling the girls and groaning “with delight as an old dog does when his ears are fondled.” Are Spain’s majestic cathedrals filled with “gabbling priests, rowdy acolytes, grubby vestments, candles drunkenly reeling and raining grease on all around, flowers faded or dead, statues thick with dust, sacristans spitting on the floor?” Neatness and decorum are snares and frills for those of feeble faith.

In one Andalusian town, a baker produces bread that is more like stone. But everybody eats it without complaint because the baker grandly signs his initials on each loaf. In Spain, illusions of grandeur are respected. “To us, illusion is a weakness to recognize and overcome,” writes Honor Tracy. “To a

Spaniard, his ilusión gives the world its glow and life its fragrance.”

Actually, Author Tracy concludes, the tourist should not worry too much about understanding Spain. Spaniards ask very little of him: “Foreigners in Spain should humbly recognize that their principal charm is their money, and their only virtue a readiness to part with it.”