Spain Invites the World’s Writers

Abstract

From the moment of our arrival in Spain, our congress was overshadowed by the wonderful country, the Spanish people and the civil war. Port Bou itself makes the strangest impression — a town in which the people are particularly friendly, in which a third of the population seems to be occupied in military training in the hills, a third bathing and sun-bathing in the harbour, while the rest sit at cafés or stand about, impressing us with that peculiar feeling of a war, that the people are not so much living in the town as haunting it; they are spirits obsessed by their idea, easily transferable to some other scene of war; and their relation to their homes, their material surroundings, is very slight. I have been at Port Bou three or four times during the past few months, so this was not new to me, but I was very conscious of its effect on the South American delegates. We were shown parts of the town which had been destroyed in the course of several unsuccessful attempts to bomb the station. The South Americans were upset, and their usual gaiety seemed rebuffed. They noticed with a certain anguish the thing that is surrealistically amusing about bombardments: the single piece of furniture left quite undisturbed at the edge of a room which has been cut down, as though by a knife.