Spain: Toward a Change

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death.* Since the second son in line, Don Jaime, was a deaf-mute and renounced the throne, the monarchic responsibility at last fell to Don Juan.

Don Juan was a cadet in the Spanish naval academy near Cadiz when the news came on April 14, 1931, that the republic had been declared, and the royal family was rushing off to exile in France. That very night a torpedo boat hustled Don Juan off to join his parents. Recalls Don Juan: "I stood looking at those shores, and I thought I might never go back again. It was frightfully sad. At the bottom of one's heart, one could not help feeling that it was not for the good of the country." Like the Wandering Jew. The royal exiles were warmly welcomed in republican France, but Don Juan still yearned for the sailor's life. His father wrote Britain's George V, asking that the lad be allowed to continue his training in the Royal Navy. Don Juan became a cadet at Dartmouth, went on to win his officer's stripes, put in two years and 89,000 miles of sea travel with the British fleet. His marriage to a distant cousin and childhood friend.

Dona Maria de las Mercedes de Borbon y Orleans, was Rome's biggest social event of 1935. After a honeymoon in the U.S.

and Canada, the couple took a house in Cannes. Within a year, civil war had broken out in Spain; abruptly Don Juan rushed off to join the nationalists' struggle against the republicans. But General Franco wanted no help from the monarchy, replied that Don Juan's life was "valuable and will be needed later." Until they chose a place to live at Estoril in 1946, Don Juan and his family roamed through Europe, as he puts it, "like the wandering Jew." The Reign in Spain. He is a handsome bull of a man, with no trace of the family's hereditary illness. But his younger daughter, Infanta Margarita, is blind. His older daughter, Infanta Pilar, 25, is now completing her nurse's training in Lisbon. Living in Lausanne, Switzerland, is Queen Victoria Eugenia, Alfonso XIII's English widow, 74, regal matriarch of the brood, and last surviving granddaughter of Britain's Queen Victoria.

This week the Pretender will get back to Estoril just in time to celebrate his 49th birthday. A few days later, there will come a flood of guests—friends, political supporters, monarchists of any ilk—for 31 the formal celebration of the feast day of his patron saint, San Juan Bautista. Every year the ritual is the same. As the visitors enter Villa Giralda's big, comfortable drawing room, they press toward Don Juan and his wife to bow or curtsy. They greet the man who may one day be their ruler as "El Rey, El Rey."

Some of the Pretender's backers want El Rey to get tough and exploit the ferment in Spain with a rousing declaration to speed Franco's end. Some Spaniards even say that he should go back and live on Spanish soil. Don Juan refuses. "Couldn't . . . It'd raise problems . . . I'd be accused of meddling in politics," he mutters. He can only steer the lonely and precarious course of not publicly antagonizing Franco and yet suggesting to the waiting Spanish people how he feels about the regime that in 1945 he called ''fundamentally inconsistent with conditions prevailing in the world."

If Don Juan were king, his reign would certainly be more liberal than