The Spanish Bow (53 page)

"I suppose."

He continued, "I have tried, these last years, to stay out of the public eye. I am not a great communicator—sometimes my right hand doesn't talk to my left—"

"Coming from a pianist, that's ridiculous."

He continued, "That beast over there doesn't know what's coming. But we do. I recommend the middle road."

"But you're not middle—middle is moderate, loyalist, pro-democracy..."

"No. The other middle."

"Which is?"

"Survival."

Our plan for the next day was to watch the
encierro,
during which Doña de Larrocha's bull and five others destined for the ring would be set loose to run through streets at one end of Málaga, chasing any youths who chose to risk their lives on the wrong side of the barricades. We would convene again several hours later at the
plaza de toros,
where the six dazed and furious bulls would be waiting in dark pens for the main event. Doña de Larrocha's "Flor" would be second.

At the last minute, though, the
encierro
was called off. No one seemed to know why. Al-Cerraz and I circled the neighborhood where it was supposed to have been held. Walking down a narrow street between two high walls strung with clotheslines, we found ourselves surrounded by men in dark pants, collarless open-necked shirts, dark caps. Al-Cerraz, always a fastidious dresser, had become even more formal with age. A short man with curly red hair grabbed his tie and yanked it. Another man jabbed at his fine hands and polished nails. "My girlfriend doesn't have hands this pretty," the stranger simpered in falsetto.

It was like a scene from a schoolyard; I found myself stifling nervous laughter. I told myself these men were only confused, bored like us, frustrated by the cancellation of the
encierro.
But the way they studied Al-Cerraz and me—our clothes, our hands, our nails—told me differently. I noticed the bulge of a pistol tucked inside one man's waistline, and a bandanna held taut between another man's purpled fists.

"Work," the redhead said. "What kind of work do you do?"

Al-Cerraz didn't answer.

The
pistolero
grabbed at his waist and I saw, to my great relief, that it wasn't a pistol he was harboring after all, it was a hammer. But my relief ebbed when the stranger grabbed Al-Cerraz's wrist with one hand and brandished the hammer in the other, snarling, "Why do you need hands this pretty?"

Al-Cerraz didn't move, his hand still extended, like a sleepwalker, even when the man let go of his wrist and grabbed for mine.

"How about you?" the redhead demanded, yanking my right hand.

"Olives," I said.

He laughed. "With these hands?"

I yanked my right hand away and gave him my other, palm up. "I'm left-handed."

"Look at this," he said, admiring the calloused pads on my fingertips.

"Granada?" he said.

"Campo Seco. Near Barcelona."

At the end of the street, another man whistled. The redhead dropped my hand and, without another word, the thugs moved on, leaving Al-Cerraz and me under the clothesline's sheets and bloomers, sweating.

"Are you thirsty?" Al-Cerraz asked.

"Terribly."

Continuing toward the bullring, we found refuge in a café, where we tried to make light of the confrontation, toasting ourselves for not having wet our pants in the face of danger. Still, the incident hung over us.

After the first round Al-Cerraz grew quieter still, and I thought he was brooding on the thugs again. But when he spoke he said, "Changing times have hurt la Doña, too. She still provides me with an allowance of sorts, but it isn't enough."

I nodded sympathetically. "Do you want me to buy the next round?"

"
Gracias. Muy amable.
"

We enjoyed a second. Without apology, he stuck me with the bill for a third. I refused his direct request for a fourth. At that point, Al-Cerraz rose unsteadily and told me to hold our table while he stepped outside. From my seat, I watched as he unfolded a piece of heavily marked paper from his pocket and waved it in front of passersby.

The crowd heading west, toward the
plaza de toros,
was growing heavier by the minute. Al-Cerraz darted from one pedestrian to the next, talking, gesturing, bowing, apologizing, tapping a shoulder here, pointing to a pocket there, pressing his lips together to hum. I tried to call him back to our table inside the café, but he gestured defiantly—
stay there.
I pointed to my watch. He squinted toward the end of the block and flapped his hands.
Just wait.

My curiosity was unbearable. "
Está bien
—" I said finally, joining him on the sidewalk, where a young man in canvas trousers was inspecting the sheet. "What is this about?"

"I was closing a sale."

"What?"

"In order to buy the next round."

"You've had enough. And we're out of time."

"I insist on paying you back for the last two, then. I need some money in my pocket, in any case." He turned back to resume his pitch.

"Give me that," I said. "Whatever it is, I'll buy it."

The young man had been ready to walk away, but my sudden interest gave him pause. "Hum it again," he said.

Al-Cerraz held the paper in his left hand and conducted with his right, while he hummed the first few bars of an unfamiliar melody.

"I don't know," the young man said.

"Give it to your girl. Tell her it was written in her honor. There's no two like it."

"You don't have other copies?"

"Other melodies, yes. But no other copies of
this
melody. I write down something once, and then it lives its own life—"

I interrupted. "You're selling one of your compositions on the street? And you don't have another copy of it?"

"Trying to..." Al-Cerraz grumbled.

"Let me see another," the young man said.

Al-Cerraz fished another folded paper from his pocket. Facing me, he said, "Those lyric sheets in Barcelona gave me the idea. Why not?"

But without a familiar melody, and without lyrics, the young man wasn't interested. When he walked away, I said to Al-Cerraz, "You have a pocketful of these? That's quite a development."

He shrugged. "Yes, just a few years ago, I would have thought so, too. Once I stopped trying to write my masterpiece, my
obra maestra,
an endless number of
obras mínimas
spilled out. Like the little black notebooks I used to keep when we toured—full of overheard sounds and mental clutter." He waved his hand over them. "But they're worthless, of course—as are any unconnected fragments. Like your political parties on the left..."

I ignored the jab. "That's what you've been working on, then?"

"Yes."

"Since...?"

"After Burgos. After I threw away everything."

"You shouldn't give up. Brahms spent fourteen years writing his first symphony."

"I'm not Brahms."

I tried again. "Don't give up is all I meant."

"Don't worry about that," he said, forcing a note of cheer into his voice. "I don't give up any of my bad habits."

At the
plaza de toros,
we found our seats in the shade. Doña de Larrocha called out to Al-Cerraz from amidst a gaggle of her friends, pursing her dazzling red lips to blow him a kiss. I'd stayed in her home once, years ago, and performed for her friends, but she barely acknowledged me now. Al-Cerraz asked if she knew why the
encierro
had been canceled, and I strained to hear her answer. Evidently, there had been some threats that someone would try to sabotage the street event.

"
Escandaloso,
" murmured the woman behind her.

"
Qué lástima,
" from the one to her left.

"
Qué vergüenza!
" This from her right.

Across the ring from us, the sun seats were empty of all but a dozen spectators, and they filed out after the first matador had killed his bull. On our side of the ring, the crowd cheered wildly, tossing
botas
and flinging handkerchiefs.

I studied the empty seats opposite, ear tilted toward a growing rumble that originated from somewhere beyond the arena, accompanied by a heavy knocking sound far below our seats. I turned to question Al-Cerraz, but he and the rest of the party were cheering even louder as the matador circled the ring grandly, followed by his team, who with the aid of horses were dragging the dead bull. The two men who were reapplying the white powder line around the sullied ring heard what I was hearing, though. I saw them lift their heads in the direction of the noise—the rumble again, and the heavy knocking, as if the Doña's bull, due next to fight, was thrusting its unfiled horns into the wood of the paddock door.

Just as the matador finished his celebratory perambulation, the paddock door flew open. Doña de Larrocha's bull staggered forward a few steps, head low, and collapsed. There was a long silence as the bull's blood seeped into the sand. The matador had stopped and turned, weaponless hands flexing nervously, as if fearing that his own vanquished bull had risen from the dead. Then the crowd let out a collective gasp. Doña de Larrocha's bull was sliding backward, into the dark paddock, centimeter by centimeter. Someone on my left pointed at a rope cinched around one of its back legs. We watched until the rope slackened. Another pause. And then—finally—the surge. Men began to spill out of the shadows, from behind barriers and stalls. One of them ran to the bull's neck, and in a flash of silver slashed it—rather humanely, I couldn't help thinking.

Doña de Larrocha shrieked. I pressed my back as flat against my seat as I could while Al-Cerraz and two other men pushed past to get to her. My view thus blocked, I didn't see the next minute or so, as the forty-odd peasants below succeeded in pulling the bull back into its paddock and out a back door, to the growing cheers of hundreds more hungry
braceros
and workers in the streets outside. Near us, a white-haired man in the regalia of a retired general brandished a pistol and shot it wildly, managing only to graze one of the
picadores'
horses below.

By the time my view was clear, Doña de Larrocha had shifted from despair to anger, and was screaming at the top of her lungs, "
Cobardes!
"—Cowards!—to the matador's
cuadrillas
below, who, though armed with lances, had stepped aside once the peasants broke into the ring.

Al-Cerraz tried to comfort her, first with tenderness—"Yes, sweetness; a shame, unspeakable..." Finally he lost his grip and shouted, "The damn bull was going to die in ten minutes anyway!"

His flood of immediate apologies did nothing to assuage her, and as she attacked him with her fan, she shouted, "They have no respect for ritual!"

But she was wrong. The peasants who dragged the dead bull away were traditionalists, too. Even with the Civil Guard due to arrive at any moment, they took time to sever the bull's ears and toss them into the ring.

Al-Cerraz did not forgive the peasants for what they'd done, upsetting his lady friend, ruining the day, making a mess of one of the few pleasures that remained in Málaga for a person of moderate means. He was not a political man. He drew his conclusions about world events based on personal experiences, personal affinities, the way others' needs intersected with his own—as we all do, though I wouldn't have admitted it at the time. I cut my visit to Málaga short. I knew I'd lost him to my cause: the Republic's cause.

For some people, the civil war had started more than a year earlier, when the Asturian miners' revolt was viciously suppressed by rightist military forces, under the leadership of then—Chief of Staff Franco, before he 'd lost that post. I've said that the civil war started for me that day in the bullring. But it wasn't at the moment when Doña de Larrocha's bull was killed; it wasn't while she was screeching, weeping, shouting the beast's name. It was minutes later, as we prepared to leave the arena. She drew herself up, tall and suddenly stoic, and turned to the cluster around her—me, Justo, the lady who had been sitting behind her, the white-haired general with the bad aim. She said, "But it won't be a long wait, will it?"

They all shook their heads in unison: No, it won't. Not long.

"Let Flor be remembered," she said, "as the first who spilled his blood for a good cause. There will be others."

Cierto.
Certainly. Yes, there will.

And maybe people were always saying these things—claiming special knowledge, forecasting doom or victory and the settling of scores, threatening revenge. In fact, that was just the problem in Spain—the long accumulation of such prophecies and grudges. I knew I had my own. In any decade it
could
have happened. But in July, a month after Doña de Larrocha's bull died ten minutes prematurely, it
did
happen. One spark leaped into a century's accumulated kindling.

What happened then surprised everyone. We expected a brief uprising, or
alzamiento,
leading to a swift change in power; instead we got a prolonged civil war. Franco was not the mastermind, nor a likely figurehead. He was not Spain's Hitler, but only a general who emerged, quickly and stealthily, into a position of power. At moments, he seemed to be unexceptional—"Miss Canary Islands 1936," the other anti-Republican generals had nicknamed him ironically just weeks earlier, expressing their bemused disdain for his timidity—his timidity!—while he stewed in the tropical Isla Tenerife heat, waiting for orders, ready to support any number of causes. But he wasn't timid at all—just opportunistic and cold-blooded.

Also, lucky. Destined, many would later claim. The Moors, and men like my brother, who served alongside Franco during the Africa campaigns, had called his invincibility
baraka.
It explained why he had survived numerous near-death experiences, why he could advance on a white steed through whirlwinds of sand and clouds of smoke, not only undamaged but strengthened, as if his success fed upon others' tragedies.

If the military commander for the island of Gran Canaria hadn't died on a shooting range on July 16, conveniently and mysteriously, Franco wouldn't have received military clearance to attend the funeral, traveling unsuspected from nearby Tenerife the next day. That evening, Spanish garrisons in the Moroccan cities of Melilla, Tetuan, and Ceuta rose against the Republic. The next morning, July 18, Franco and another general, Orgaz, took over Las Palmas, on Gran Canaria.