The Spanish Bow (52 page)

And none too soon, it would seem, considering that Hitler's Nazi police commissioner, Heinrich Himmler, had arrested so many political opponents that he couldn't find room to imprison them all. According to newspaper reports, the Nazis were busy solving that problem by opening their first camps—concentration camps, they called them—in Bavaria near Dachau, with three more camps to open soon near Berlin.

Try as I might to read the news about Weill soberly and sympathetically, my stomach also registered light flutters of anticipation. If Weill's productions were blacklisted, then Aviva would be leaving Germany, too, wouldn't she? She'd be an outcast there, perhaps even an enemy of the state, based on her race and her affiliations. I read on, expecting a request for help from me and Al-Cerraz. Perhaps we could record again, or go on a tour. Perhaps I could find her a position within the Spanish school-music program.

I read on, to find that Aviva wrote only of her need to find another local musical position.

I wrote back to her, trying to drill sense into her, and to dangle before her opportunities that she could not resist. Perhaps—did I dare turn my back on my own Republican colleagues?—perhaps we could even leave Europe for a while, if that was her desire. We could go to England, or the Orient. An orchestra in Japan had asked me to guest-conduct a symphony by Mahler, of all things.

She wrote back with more descriptions of the changes in Berlin:

Jews everywhere, even the artists and musicians and theater people of all kinds, are being fired from their jobs. It is official policy. There is a
Staatskommissar
for the
Entjudung—
the De-Jewification—of cultural life.

Again, I read on with hope. She was coming, then.

She was not.

Thank goodness I am in Berlin, where the people are clever enough to craft a response to the problem. So many Jews were dismissed en masse that they have started a new association, the
Jüdischer Kulturbund.
It will operate a theater for Jews only, under the plan of Dr. Kurt Singer. So there will be jobs, after all. Always, there is a way to ride out these things.

Furthermore, she wrote, the Nazi leadership supported the
Kulturbund.
It could serve the artistic needs of one group, the propagandistic needs of another. It would give Hinkel, Himmler, Goebbels, and all the rest a chance to prove to the outside world that they didn't necessarily mistreat Jewish people. "Jewish artists working for Jews," Hinkel had said with pride. Aviva thought that Hinkel seemed to fancy himself a paternalistic protector.

The only problem she foresaw was that the Jewish theater planned to specialize in music and drama with which she wasn't familiar. Jewish audiences preferred what all Germans preferred: the latest plays and operas, or classic favorites such as Shakespeare. But the
Kulturbund
leaders and Hinkel wanted more distinctly ethnic content. Folk music. Yiddish culture. Plays about Palestine. Jewish opera—if there was such a thing as Jewish opera. Aviva wrote:

What do any of us know about that?

The last time I was in a synagogue I was a child, and it was a school field trip, for history class or some such thing. Most of these so-called Jews don't speak Yiddish and couldn't find Jerusalem on a map. We have a Wagner expert among us, a Beethoven expert, a Bruckner expert; but we're being asked to put on plays about golems and sing "Shalom Aleichem" to audiences that clamor for
A Midsummer Night's Dream.
We've had to recruit more culturally Jewish musicians from outside Germany to come and lead us. They are offering classes in Hebrew and Yiddish inflection so the German actors can play their parts more authentically. See why I tell you not to worry? You are reading in your newspapers about some Jews trying to leave Berlin, but what you are not reading is that Jews are moving from Denmark and Palestine and probably even Spain to Berlin, where
Yiddishkeit
and
Judenkultur
are booming.

Competition in the
Kulturbund
was so fierce, and loyalties so fragile, that she couldn't risk leaving the job, even temporarily. It might not be waiting for her when she came back. German mail censorship had begun in February, the same month the Nazis burned down their own Reichstag and arrested all of the legislature's communist members. Aviva might have sent other letters that month, but if so, they didn't arrive.

Have I mentioned that the Spanish posters had changed? The beautiful, lifelike images I'd first seen all over Barcelona in April 1931, "La
Niña Bonita,
" had undergone a transformation. She had lost her pink cheeks and soft brown eyes, the hopeful rays emanating from her cloche hat. She had become monotone, verdigris, thicker-lipped, with a harder jaw, the hint of an Adam's apple at her neck, and thick forearms—drawn in the same style as the workers and soldiers on all the communist-style posters that shouted: P
EASANT!
T
HE REVOLUTION NEEDS YOUR EFFORT
or T
ú!
—W
HAT HAVE YOU DONE FOR VICTORY?
A girl for one month only, she had become a statue, empty-eyed, as if to say there was no time for humanity now, no time for individuality; only time for symbols and causes.

In 1933 the
Bienio Negro
—the Two Black Years—began. An electoral landslide by the right wing allowed the Republic's enemies to reverse many of the reforms of the last two years. Yet even that wasn't enough. Everywhere there was talk of disorder, and the need for strength; conspiracies, and the need for iron will. Young Spaniards eyed news photos from Italy and Germany with envy; they who did not remember 1921, or 1914, nonetheless spoke as if with personal knowledge of 1898, that end of the era in which Spain had known true power and pride. In driving sleet, they lined up in columns, twenty thousand strong, wanting to shout
Führer!
or
Duce!
but having no such comparable Spanish word yet, and no single charismatic leader. They settled for calling out
Jefe! Jefe! Jefe!
—Chief! Chief! Chief!—relying on the wind to carry their incantation to any man who might step forward to guide them.

Picasso's Spain was the land of
matadors
and
picadors
and
banderilleros,
and so was Hemingway's; but not mine, not my Catalonia. But bullrings did figure vividly twice in my life, framing a year that proved to be bloodier than a
corrida.

My most striking memories from that year consist mostly of visual flashes: A naked baby held up toward a passing truck while a man pushes it away, mouthing "
lleno
"—full. Thin striped mattresses doubled up alongside the road, with feet sticking out from between the folds. And this: A woman dashing across a plaza at midday, in pumps and a party dress, pearls glowing at her earlobes, a spaniel nipping at her heels, when a sniper bullet catches her near the pelvis. She falls, clutching her purse against her hip, her face registering first embarrassment, as if she 'd only slipped; then, only slowly, the terror of dawning realization. She could not believe what had just happened. I couldn't believe it either, watching from across the square, as the next two shots stilled her thrashing and sent her dog into frantic confused circles, lapping at the ground.

More like that—dozens and hundreds of images like that, numbly rendered. All of them, notably, without sound.

***

But I have let my story fall out of sequence, which I promised not to do. It is the influence of the Civil War itself, a series of events that resists objective, accurate retelling. I will begin again with the bulls, because it is with bulls that the war started for me, and with bulls that it nearly ended for me.

Al-Cerraz had invited me to attend Málaga's spring
feria,
which would climax in a series of bullfights, including one that would feature Doña de Larrocha's prize
toro bravo.
This was June 1936, and the pianist and I had seen each other only a few times since April 1931, when we happened to be in the same city together. Now that he had stopped performing, he rarely left the south. Most of my duties lately had been in the capital and in the north.

But in the intervening years, we had also corresponded regularly, even more so after 1933, when we'd last heard from Aviva. Just as her first appearance in our lives had knit us closer together, her absence now kept us so. Together, in our frequent letters and rare visits, we suppressed our anxieties about her welfare. Together, we indulged the naïve hope that the state of affairs in Europe would improve someday soon, allowing things to continue as they had before.

I was keeping an apartment in Mérida at the time, and Mérida to Málaga was a long way to travel to see a bullfight. But there was a subject I wanted to broach with Al-Cerraz, on behalf of the party officials with whom I'd allied myself during those fragile, final Republic days.

"There," said Al-Cerraz on the afternoon I arrived, leaning his bulk against a fence rail. "The Doña hasn't visited her children in years, but she comes to look at that animal once a day."

We both admired the bull standing under the shade of the great oak tree, twitching its narrow rump and flicking its long tail.

Al-Cerraz whistled. "The sacrifices she has made to keep that bull alive!" The bull glanced our direction, and Al-Cerraz winced. The Doña tried to limit the bull's exposure to people, lest it grow complacent about attacking a matador in the ring. But even with her guards, Al-Cerraz told me, she'd had a hard time keeping people away.

"They want to fight it?"

"Fight it?" He laughed. "They want to eat it. You might see a dangerous beast under that tree, but the peasants see five hundred kilos of beef. Some of them haven't eaten meat in the five years since that bull was born."

I nodded appreciatively. "Five years. So this was a bull born during our first Republican spring."

Al-Cerraz exhaled ruefully. "Is that how long it's been? He may die with the Republic, if what we hear in Málaga is true."

The most recent elections, in February, had transferred power yet again, from the right-wing parties that had held it during the two-year Bienio Negro back to the left, which finally and belatedly had managed to assemble a Popular Front. Even its superior resources, which funded an immense propaganda campaign—ten thousand campaign posters and fifty million leaflets—had not allowed the right to retain its grip. In my own party, however, we knew better than to celebrate a lopsided victory too freely. In the parlance of
el toreo,
we knew that a wounded bull is more savage than ever, and that a matador is most likely to be gored when his back is turned. That is why I had come to speak with Al-Cerraz.

I smoothed a hand through the thin hairs blowing up from my mostly bald pate, and launched into my speech. "Catching the eye and the ear of the people—that is the key to everything, these days. We need every artist, every writer, every musician who has ever spent time in the public eye—"

"But Feliu," he said, leaning his forearms on the fence, "the left is going to lose."

"We won in February," I said. As if he couldn't see through me; as if he didn't understand what I, what everyone, feared. Parliamentary democracy was in its last throes; talk of revolution and counterrevolution occupied all sides. Military zealots clamored for martial law. The fascist Falange was more powerful than ever.

"It's a dangerous game," Al-Cerraz started to say, and for a moment I thought he was talking politics. But he was staring at the bull again. "You see those caramel-colored horns? They're deadly sharp at the tip. Not filed. They say bulls use their horns like a cat uses its whiskers, to estimate the width of something, to know where they're aiming. If the bull thinks his horns end there, and the owner files them to here"—he narrowed the span of his upraised hands—"then the bull aims wrong. But that's cheating."

I mumbled an assent, then tried to steer the conversation around to politics again. "The Republicans aren't stupid. They sacked Franco as chief of staff and sent him off to the Canary Islands. And the other generals, too—Goded, Mola—they're scattered to the four corners. Their most devout army followers are in Morocco, too far away to do harm."

"Morocco," he sighed. "You know, when they have sandstorms in Africa, we wake up to yellow grit in our sheets. It's not that far, really."

I tilted my face toward the sun and closed my eyes. "Justo, please listen to what I'm saying. We'd like your help."

He watched the bull in silence for a while. Then he said, "I'm glad you came. And I'm glad you asked. Doña de Larrocha and I get along because she needs me. That is a condition I understand and cultivate.

"
Sin embargo,
" he paused dramatically, "I visited Barcelona last year. In the streets—well, I'm sure you've seen them—they were selling these sheets of Republican ballads. Sorry, not Republican—more anarchist, I suppose, glory of the worker and that sort of thing. I bought one to look at. I studied it for ten minutes, but I couldn't understand it. I went up to a shoeshine boy whose box was painted black and red. '
Qué quieres tú?
' he says, looking at my suit. '
Tú
,' he says, not '
Usted.
' 'What's up?' he says to me, not '
Buenos días,
' even though he can tell from my clothes I could give him a tip bigger than what he earns all day—if tipping were still legal.

"And I know I'm asking the right boy. I show him the lyric sheet and I ask him how the tune goes, since there aren't any notes printed. 'Any way you like,' he says. I figure he is being sassy, but we talk for a while, and I realize he means it. He can sing the song a dozen ways. They sell these lyric sheets all over, different songs every block, so that all the leftists can lift their
botas
and belt it out together. The music doesn't matter, just the foolish, sentimental words.

"Feliu," he said. "We're living in a time of messages, not art."