Books: Landscape Without Toros

More cannot be said for a book about Spain than that it contains no description of a bullfight. Two new books with Spanish settings, though otherwise dissimilar, share this rare quality.

REAPERS OF THE STORM, by Elizabeth Lytfleton and Herbert Sturz (303 pp.; Crowell; $3.95), is almost worth buying for the dust jacket alone. Done up in sinister black, it bears a come-on as fetchingly phrased as the preambles of people who sell watches in bars: “Written secretly by two Americans visiting a small fishing village in Spain, Reapers of the Storm has had a perilous birth and an uneasy life. In the guise of writing a book in praise of the regime … these two authors studied and listened to the people among whom they lived. They became achingly aware of the desperate poverty, the cruel indignities, [the] corruption and inequality … Smuggled in small notebooks into Gibraltar, Reapers of the Storm is their novelized account of Spanish life . . .”

The authors, who now live in New Jersey but still profess to be wary of retribution by Spanish agents, have taken the undoubted truths that Franco’s regime is corrupt and oppressive, that the fishers and farmers are appallingly poor, and that the Spanish church is the most inflexible in Catholicism, and blurred them in something called a “documentary novel.” But, encysted in a perfunctorily told story in which each character is paraded merely as a type—the grasping peasant, the sadistic Falangist, the hardy old freedom fighter—facts quickly take on the smell of falsity. And ironically, although the authors speak in their introduction of enduring daily police questioning and of being “forced to resort to lies, to cultivate friendships among informers, torturers and murderers” in order to keep faith with friends, there is no evidence of respect for the Spanish people. Good and bad, the little wooden characters are manipulated with contempt.

TOMORROW Is MANAMA, by Shirley Deane (198 pp.; Morrow; $4), is an altogether different book about Spain—unassuming, observant and pretending to no deeper understanding than a year’s residence can give a foreign visitor. Australian Author Deane tells wittily and without prattling of the quiet adventures she had with her artist husband and two small sons during their stay in an Andalusian fishing village. Without caricature, describing people and not types, the author presents the villagers—the fishermen who starve with grace when rough weather keeps their motorless vessels ashore, the aging, middle-class virgins who embroider napkins by the gross while conducting decade-long engagements, the rich who choose not to be distressed by the poor.

The realities of Franco’s rule are presented: the steel-hard Guardia Civil, whose men garrison each small town; the squirmings of a dictator who is afraid to travel an announced route for fear of assassination; the indoctrination of the students. But for most of the villagers, gaiety and great pride overcome grimness. Author Deane is aware that there are lessons to be learned, as well as taught in Andalusia. One lesson well learned: the author’s three-year-old son can handle a one-glass-a-day wine ration handily, unless someone feeds him sugar cane. When someone does, the mixture “foments”—or so says an ancient barmaid—and he sings Old King Cole in a manner that sounds almost bawdy. But then, of course, the clan is Australian.