How does it fare with Felipe?

IT WAS THE feast of the Virgin of Carmen, patroness of fishermen, and the town of Comillas, like most sea-faring villages on the Iberian Peninsula, celebrated the occasion with a public dance in the square and special religious observances, here a week-long rosary that culminated in an evening Mass.

The church was packed, in part because only for his solemn and joyful least does the town's extraordinary choir of men's and boy's voices ring out with the thrilling "Hymn to Crist," a Baroque musical gem of unknown provenance. All the township had gathered, rich, poor, pious folk, miscreants, wife-beaters, drunkards, and--yes, this is Spain--atheists. Among the last, late in arriving and making his way desperately through the dense jam at the rear of the church, tall, balding, yet still Gary Cooper-like handsome, came Pepe Luis, struggling to reach the choir, of which he is a member. Pepe Luis is not only an atheist, he is a leading member of the local Communist Party. His mother-in-law, who runs a grocery store in the main square, is its doyenne. A week earlier he had won el gordo (the "fat," i.e., big, prize of the national lottery); his one-tenth of the ticket, which had cost him 250 pesetas ($1.68), paid off ten thousand times--2.5 million pesetas, or $16,800. Even in these days of drastically eroded value, that ain't hay. But not because he had been suddenly transformed into a capitalist was he struggling now to take his place in time; he simply would not have missed pitching his voice--until it seemed his lungs must burst and his very heart explode--in praise of the Christ he loves and officially rejects.

As far as I know, Manuel Fraga Iribarne, the brilliant, politically doomed leader of the futureless right-wing opposition, has only a single funny story in his repertoire. It's a goodie. An earnest young Protestant missionary is evangelizing on the stony soil of the dour Castilian province of Guadalajara, where tall, gaunt peasant women dressed in the solid black of King Philip II receive his words in silence. Finally, one of them akes pity. "Young man," she says, "why continue to waste your time? We don't even believe in the True Faith."

Not much has changed under the Socialists, who have been in power a year now. Inflation, while moderating, rages still at 15 per cent and more. The peseta continues its precipitate fall against the dollar, worth less than two-thirds its value of a year ago. The 800,000 new jobs for the chronically unemployed (22 per cent of the work force) that were promised during the election campaign did not materialize. Far from it. The jobless figure rose by another two hundred thousand.

Plus ca change, plus c'est la meme mess, because Felipe Gonzales (leader of the Partido Socialista Obrero Espanol--the PSOE--and prime minister of Spain) has committed the error of perpetuating, in the main, the sloshy socialist mistakes of his liberal-democratic predecessors. Spanish political humor, however, has happily revived. Quips and anecdotes abound, almost all scurrilous, many obscene, the palest of which only may I repeat here: "In what does Felipe resemble the Pope?" "Why, in two million who have repented." (Roughly the margin of the Socialists' victory.) For this quickening of the mordant Spanish wit, if not much else, the Socialists must be thanked.

The Spanish flag is publicly burned by idiotic Catalan and Basque ultranationalists, to the indignation of the overwhelming majority of Spaniards (there is, I think, a happy revival of patriotism, too), and, though apparently slowing down, the terrorist killings carried out by the Basque Marxist ETA extremists (the equivalent of the Provisional IRA in Northern Ireland) continue, orchestrated by the morbid Hispanic fascination with violent death. The newspapers smack their lips over bodies with bulging bellies punctured by bullet holes. A news pix that took the, uh, yuk, cake for me (I was having breakfast) was that of the remains of an ETA fanatic whose two kilos of plastique blew up in untimely fashion: There in the street lay half a human trunk, from about belly button up, with a single arm, the hand missing, still adhering to what was left of a shoulder, head and face a bloody gruel on the pavement. Goya woulda loved it.

Scandals, one financial (the Rumasa bankruptcy), the second social, continue their reign in the press. I must admit that the murder of the Marquises of Urquijo, which took place in Puerta de Hierro, a rich and exclusive suburb of Madrid, is a gorgeous mystery. Who pulled the trigger is not at issue. In the blackest early hours of the morning of July 31, 1980, Rafael Escobeda Alday, the deadbeat, alcoholic, drug-addicted, and (they say) estranged husband of the Marquises' only daughter, broke into the house by the kitchen wing, snuck along the corridors, and shot Manuel de la Sierra Torres and Maria Lourdes de Urquijo to death, in the head, in their beds, in their separate bedrooms. (He died in his sleep; she apparently half awoke before being blasted into eternity.) But what was the motive? And was Escobeda--this is universally doubted--acting alone? He was finally sentenced to thirty years' imprisonment. But during the 24-month interval between his arraignment, first trial, and final sentencing, the police mysteriously lost such vital evidence as his recorded confession (made on the very day of the double murder, and subsequently recanted) and the cartridge cases of the mortal slugs.

This is scandal of the first social and financial water, reducing to small pertaters our own Claus von Bulow case. Sordid sham revelations about the family life of the Urquijos, containing whatever grains of truth, continue to thrill Spain even now, exciting unabating prurience. These include accounts of an (alleged) shabby love affair of the daughter with an (allegedly) crooked American promoter, of the son's (the only son's) hostile relations with his father, and on and on. Nobody's reputation has escaped. This is an Agatha Christie serial spiced up by Penthouse. Quickie books with the latest authoritative hypothese pour off the presses, and moviemakers fight for the rights.

Riveting as the Urquijo case is, the public is even more concerned with the ongoing Arab Reconquest. The last of the Moors were finally booted out of Spain by Fernando and Isabela, as you may remember, in 1492, after almost eight centuries of struggle, and in the Friday prayers of every good Muslim the world over squats the plea that one day the garden of Granada, that mythic symbol, be returned to Mohammed's faithful. What importunities to Allah have not availed, OPEC is making possible. The sheiks, mostly Saudi Arabians, have hit upon the expedient of buying Spain back meter by meter, creeping up the coast from their base, south of Malaga, toward the hills of Alhambra. The Sheiks at Home

ALI BABA-SIZED fortunes have been made by crooked intermediaries, Moor and Christian, who do the actual business for their principals, robbing them outrageously. The oil sheiks don't seem to mind. They prefer being cheated to soiling their hands with the details of commerce. They want the best and most beautiful property available, with the most splendid views, on which they proceed to build the most ostentatious and luxurious housing possible. Here they install their tubby wives and musky concubines, dozens of children, and countless servants and retainers, and here they regularly hold their garish carousals, where the finest wines and most exquisite whiskies are swallowed (pace the Prophet) to the beat and clash of cymbals, and for which planeloads of English prostitutes are flown over in private Boeing 747s.

The extent of the peculation on the part of the Arabs' hirelings can be reckoned by this: One supplier I know well told me that he billed a certain sheik a little more than 100 pesetas each for bolts or nuts, or whatever, which sum he personally caught the intermediary falsifying on his charge sheet as 360 pesetas. The point is that the desert princes know they are being scarrewed bling by the predators they hire to deal for them, but they don't give a date plum, they're so unbelievably rich. A friend who in the early 1960s bought a tract of about forty acres near Estepona, outside Marbella, for fifty grand, on which he built a large and gracious house for, oh, say, another sixty grand, two summers ago sold house and property to a desert chieftain for $10 million. Uh-huh, ten million bucks. Percentage-wise, this is a bonanza not quite so good as Pepe Luis's, but OK. The buyer at once razed the house, becuase what he wanted the land for was to garage his personal collection of two hundred automobiles.

Now, the Spaniards have not completely ceded their Sun Coast to the Arabs. There is a mil maravillas development called Puerto Banus, which is an entire ersatz Spanish fishing village raised up from bare sand and seashells by one of Spain's most imaginative real-estate tycoons, with moorings for multimillion-dollar pleasure boats and a waterfront that is a cross between Worth Avenue and a casbah, where the innocent can be legally fleeced by rapacious restaurateurs and boutique keepers in less time than it takes to sheer the wool off a newborn lamb. When the first stage of the mammoth project was nearly completed, the story goes, Banus went on an inspection tour . . . and threw up his hands in horror. He had hired master masons and master carpenters, and what had they done? Why, they had built everything perfectly! The beams of the rooftops were all as straight as arrows, the doors and windows were in perfect plumb. It was awful. It did not look like an Andalusian fishing village one bit. Banus, at a cost of millions, had everything torn down and begun anew, until he was satisfied that the spines of the rooftops sagged in pictureque imitation, and that shutters and doors hung lopsidedly from their obliquely set frames, as they should.

A Golden Epoch

AH, THE days of glory, the golden era of Franco prosperity. Gone. Long gone. Gone, mayhap, forever; to be recalled in some future century with that ohter golden epoch of the Conquistadors. Spain, under her first socialist government since 1936, continues on the slope of decline that has characterized her economic and social history since the Caudillo's demise. On the economic waterfront there is total stagnation, widespread personal bankruptcy, collective catastrophic mendicancy, together with a crushing national debt and a debased currency. And the political horizon, although ti-died by the national elections of November 1982, deepens, if anything, in the bleakness of its potents.

And that is the best news about Spain during this winter of its discontent. The ineffective, bumbling, amateur-directed socialist government of Felipe Gonzalez is the best government Spanish democracy has brought forth; because the two administrations preceding, those of the Duke of Suarez and of Leopoldo Calvo Sotelo, his successor, were no governments at all, their preoccupations being solely political.

Under Franco, whose phalangist base--never forget--was "national socialist," and who himself was a soldier with heliocentric instincts coupled to a Christian Democratic sentimentality (the Caudillo loved nothing better than, for instance, to double the wages of all masons and hold carriers as a New Year's gift--which had you can imagine what catastrophic effects on projects midway through construction), Spain underwent a continuation of the centralism and collectivism that have immemorially characterized her governments under crown, dictatorship, or (short-lived) republic. This explains how the prudish old codger, with his pot belly and high, thin, monotonous voice, managed to stay in power so many years, and by authoritarian standards with a minimum of suppression: because he was truly within the Spanish tradition.

Spain stagnated, as she had stagnated since the Treaty of Utrecht in 1713, until he advent of the Opus Dei technocrats under the brilliant finance minister Jose Maria Ullastres, who, with his Erhardian liberal economics, ushered in the Franco properity--rather frightening the old fellow himself, who never quite understood how it all came about. But the slashing of red tape, the welcome given to foreign capital, and the boom in tourism (imagine 260 million people visiting the States every year; that's the proportionate impact on Spain), all occurring at once, transformed a nation of possessionless pedestrians into crazy mad drivers of little SEAT (Fiat) 600 runabouts, who owned television sets, who were buying their wee flats in Madrid and Seville and Barcelona on thirty-year state-subsidized credit terms, and who might evenbe dickering for a Eurohotel summer villa in Alicante or Torremolinos.

The handful of major banks, through the early 1960s, retained the vast majority of heavy industry in their caterlist hands; but by the middle of the decade, the new fortunes, coined from tourism adn from hundreds of diversified industries, expressed themselves in a proliferation of new financial institutions. Competition--not, often, as we know it, but fierce by Spanish standards--grew and thrived, and everybody benefited.

Right along, however, the government was spending--and, to keep a restive people pacified, all the more so when Franco lapsed into his long senility. The deficits piled up, the trade balances turned negative. Came the first OPEC crunch in 1973. Spain had to spend precious hard-currency reserves on energy, and, at the same time, the worldwide recession of 1973-75 diminished the horde that regularly spilled over the Pyrenees to refill Spanish coffers. Debt was monetized; and by the time the Claudillo was cooling in his tomb (1975) inflation was in double digits. The caretaker governments of the post-Franco vacuum hadn't the stomach for the necessary severe measures. Worse yet, there was an almost total absence of ideas. Not until November 1982 was a government elected with a mandate actually to govern, and that responsibility fell on the Socialist.

Young, vigorous, immensely popular, Felipe Gonzalez can afford tobe tough; and to a degree he has demonstrated that he is willing to incur the displeasure of the ideologues within the PSOE as well as that of his bases of support. The state-owned steel industry, for example, is hemorrhaging; Gonzalez shut down inefficient mills last spring despite protests from the workers and howls from such as Alfonso Guerra, his doctrinaire rival. He plans to dismiss thousands more in the steel industry and in the equally inefficient railroads--again, despite shrieks of pain. In the works is a reform of social security that would provide minimum support only, leaving anything beyond the subsistence level to private insurance and pensions plans. Gonzalez has cracked down on moonlighting by absentee state emplooyees; he has devalued the peseta once, and may soon again, and he has hiked the price of gasoline, which hike was very unpopular.

A Doubting Marxist

IN SHORT, there is a gritty streak of realism in Felipe. He is not a Mitterand. One gleans the impression that he is a socialist in the same way that my friend Pepe Luis is an atheist. He has dared whre his predecessors wouldnot, and sometimes in the right direction.

He cannot, however, turn his back completely on the ideology of his party and on the powerful labor unions, to which he owes his election. And though he may not even believe in the True Faith according to Marx, he is not likely togo on to civilized conversion. His pragmatism will be as effective as the correctness of its direction, and that will not always be liberalizing. His 1984 budget comprehends a 17 per cent increase in public spending and higher taxes. That is the wrong direction. But what should shame his predecessors on the Right is that he has had the courage to act, whereas they, poltroons preoccupied with personal power, simply stood by and watched their country go to pieces.