The Cain in Spai

FANDANGO ROCK (371 pp.)--John Masters--Harper ($4.50).

To the list of American girls who have spread commotion merely by traveling abroad--from Pocahontas to Henry James's Daisy Miller--must now be added the name of Catherine Fremantle. Strong-souled and sturdily uppered, she is the daughter and soul support of the suet-brained information officer at a U.S. Air Force base in Spain. The trouble is that Catherine's old man has messed things up. To the natives, if a .fish floats dead in the river, it is because the yanquis have irradiated the water supply. If a badly timed flight of B-525 interrupts a bullfight with a moment of swoosh, then the U.S. is plotting to kill the corrida.

When Catherine is invited to spend a few weeks with a Spanish family, she sees a chance to repair all kinds of relations. Vitamin-packed but starved for iniquity --as far as Air Force gallants go, the Cain in Spain is mainly on the wane--Catherine sets the Spaniards to smoldering. Before long she is exchanging sweet nadas with the very Iberian who has been spreading all the calumnies--a handsome, aristocratic, intelligent, artistic, musically talented blackguard of a bullfighter. He hates the U.S. because it is burying his country's fine old traditions under a mulch of Coca-Cola and $10 bills.

Wrathfully, Catherine lectures her bullfighter: "You said the scum of Europe came to us, and perhaps they did, but the strong ones came first . . . well, there's a poem on the Statue of Liberty . . ." And sure enough, she quotes Emma Lazarus ("Give me your tired, your poor'') for five lines. Repentantly the torero discovers the real America: accepting the yanqui dollar, the moral seems to be, does not mean wearing the yanqui collar.

Storyteller Masters, Calcutta-born Englishman-turned-American, whose tales of India (Nightrunners of Bengal, Coroman-del!) are full of a mysterious yeast, explains how he hit on Fandango Rock as a title. "Once, in a narrow street in Zaragoza, late at night, there were two radios" --one playing "the subtle, introspective, and uncompromising rhythms of a fandango," the other whanging out "a rock-and-roll, simple, outgoing--and uncompromising." Masters hits his moment of truth with this gone lyric:

Ready, set, go man go!

I got a girl that I love so.

I'm ready, ready, ready, ready, ready ...

To rock an' roll.

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