...Written on the Subway Walls

Years ago, Gen. William Westmoreland sued CBS after a "60 Minutes" piece charged that he had deliberately concealed the extreme improbability of a U.S. victory in Vietnam, Dan Rather defended his network with the classic maxim. "If it looks like a duck, and it walks like a duck. "You can't practically perform the genetic testing necessary to confirm that a duck is a duck. You've got to go on what you observe.

Likewise, when you see in a given city an abundance of fat, smiling babies and clean streets you assume that all is well within the municipal limits. On the other hand, you start to worry when you find signs of right-having nativism in subways, alleys, and mainstream stores. But when you discover the name signs in the midst of apparent sweetness and light--as I did in Madrid and Barcelons--no message becomes immediately apparent. The juxtaposition simultaneously frightens and puzzles.

When you look around Barcelno you first sense the pure giddiness of the city in its buildings. One facade of the Sagrada Familia church, the city's most famous landmark and the creation of iconoclastic architect Antonio Gaudf, shows a stylized crucifixion with a nude and faceless Modernista Jesus, while another side, constructed seemingly of marzipan, seems on the verge of melting.

Not just some architectural veneer, Barcelona's whimsy echoes in the Catalan spoken here as well. For instance, in this capital of Catalonia common words begin with X's, and it's somehow endearing that you can buy candy in a xocolateria on your way to a sparkling wine bar--a xampanyeria--called Xampau Xampany. Moreover, a government-printed language textbook eachews the dry repetitions of "amo amas amat" that filled my high-school Latin primer and replaces them with two unclothed cartoon Catalans locked in a torrid embrace.

Meanwhile, kiosks offering plants, parrots, puppies and Persian kittens occupy much of the sidewalk space on The Rambles, Barcelona's touristy retail boulevard. On Friday afternoons visitors and city residents alike mob the Passeig de Gracia because the weather's nice, they feel like it and they're happy.

At first glance there's little sign that anything unseemly could ever happen in this city. Little surprise, then, that a few years ago Spanish author Eduardo Mendoza called his novel about Barcelona "The City of Wonders." The city seems a more cheerful but more real version of Walt Disney World.

Funny, then, that I found myself standing in the expensive new shopping mall in EI Prat de Liobregat, Barcelona's international airport--fresh-faced for the 1992 Olympics--and staring at little figurines of a saluting Adolf Hitler in a toy store's display case. The absurdity of finding Nazism trwsalued in the mudst of stuffed ducks jarred me.

It didn't surprise me entirely though. In Madrid someone had taken the far-right Falangist party on dozens of building Graffiti's proclaiming "SKIN HEADS" and "KKK" occupied conspicuous places in subway stations. I'd seen racist rhetoric in the T and on down town buildings in Boston, but never to much as in Madrid.

Neo-Nazi spray paintings weren't the only sign of trouble in Spain, either. Just as the HIV test looks for antibodies to the AIDS virus rather than for the virus itself. I detected a subterranean ideological war in some Spaniards' perception that rightist musings must be responded to in kind.

To that end, one clever madrileno revised a "KKK" graffito by changing the first K to a Y and consequently rendering the Invisible Empire as YKK, the international zipper concern. The sole defacement of one spiffy Barcelona metro stop declares, "!NAZIS NO!" In the United States we face racial and ethnic problems of our own, but most Americans, I think, avoid responding to far-right sentiment not because they agree with it but because they consider it simply too marginal to merit any attention. Either politically mainstream Spaniards like to vandalize subways, or the sentiment they observe seems to them too virulent to be deemed marginal.

Those concerned about a nascent Hitler cult could easily find depictions of him throughout the city. A bare-assed rubber Hitler--smiling and saluting, of course--graced a few of the tacky souvenir shops along The Rambles, and the Nazi dictator's visage appeared in many other bodegas. Another store offered ID cards bearing the names of war criminals. No marginality here. The thought that some people have particularly sick senses of humor crossed my mind, but I found myself wondering. "Do people really think this shit is funny?" This is not the type of question, though, that you ask a passerby.

Spain's current slump might explain an outburst of race tensions, which tends to explode when economic conditions sour. Unemployment in Spain, according to The Economist, is the highest in Europe. Yet industrial production hasn't fallen as much as in other countries, wage growth is among the best anywhere, and to my eyes most of the stores seemed to be doing brisk business. Most Spaniards, undoubtedly, aren't bigots. Something more than economic frustration, some cultural hiccup, drives the apparent dismissal of the horrors of racism.

History provides no explanation, either. Francisco Franco, a rightist generalisimo who received aid from Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy in the early years of his four-decade-long dictatorship, tried to impose a rigid moralistic and nationalist ethos upon Spain. Liberal intellectuals and partisans of Basque, Galicia, and Catalonia culture bristled under Franco.

But Franco died 18 years ago, and I just didn't get the sense that anybody wanted him back. Spain's less numerous nationalities, Catalans included, enjoy the linguistic and political (albeit limited) autonomy for which they longed under Franco.

Moreover, censorship is long gone. Sex magazines of every ilk clutter the metropoles' numerous newsstands, and there's a new condom shop in Barcelona's Placa Sant Josep Oriol. Whatever one thinks of pornography and contraception, it's probably a positive development that every day Spanish vendors sell products that would have rendered the old man apoplectic. King Juan Carlos' de-Francoization is complete.

So the mystery remains. The unpalatable graffiti and tastless toys didn't wreck my vacation, but they did rein in my tendency to describe Barcelona as an urban Magic Kingdom with the Sagrada Familia as its bizarro Space Mountain. I couldn't conduct a poll of city residents and ask them whether they felt more whimsical than other Spaniards, but I'm convinced that Barcelona's smirky attitude is more than mere packaging. Yet it's mixed in with something ugly, and nothing! observed gave me any means of teasing the swagger apart from the dark cloud.