The Spanish Bow (54 page)

As a sixteen-year-old boy, I had fled Barcelona's "Tragic Week" without understanding the most basic matters of who was fighting whom, and how, and why. I had not understood the twelve years of colonialist turmoil that had led up to the military disaster that claimed my brother's life at Anual. Now I resolved to understand the chaos that was unfolding around me, day after bloody day. I watched as the coup d'état was greeted with cheers in the Catholic strongholds—Burgos, Salamanca, Zamora, Segovia, Ávila. I read the gory details of the first leftist purges in those old central-plains towns. Within a week, all of northwest Spain, except for the northern coast near Bilboa, was a Nationalist zone, secured by General Mola.

On July 18 I took a train south from Salamanca, where I'd been meeting with the symphony, to Mérida, where I had a studio apartment. I recall transferring my return ticket from the right front pocket of my pants to the inside left pocket of my suit jacket for safekeeping. The return trip specified a date—July 22, I believe. But I was certain that in a week or two, when the government crisis was sorted out, whether it was suppressed, as I hoped, or solidified into a new rightist government, I would be allowed to use my rail ticket.

I never set foot in Salamanca again.

Franco's significance within the uprising grew every day. On July 20, Sanjurjo, one of the key plotters, died in a freak plane accident. Sanjurjo, it was later said, was one of the rightists who would have pushed for early negotiations, before a shaky coup degraded into all-out war. More fate, a companion force to Franco's
baraka.

Franco had flown from Gran Canaria to Morocco, where an anti-Republican army had assembled from the ranks of
Regulares
—Spanish troops—and mercenary Moors. These troops stood ready to surge across the Strait of Gibraltar, hampered only by lack of transportation. Republican warships controlled the strait. Franco needed planes. Mussolini refused to help at first, then surrendered a dozen Savoia-81 bombers in exchange for cash.

Like Italy, Germany was not eager to get involved, and Franco's initial appeals elicited little support. But Hitler was at Bayreuth's annual Wagner festival that week in July, indulging his taste for mythology-inspired operas about good and evil, morality and desire. Opera had been his passion since adolescence, when he'd first stumbled out of
Rienzi
rubbing his red-rimmed eyes, overcome with emotion. The music of Wagner was his religion, he said.

I had visited Bayreuth once myself, in the 1920s; nearly every music lover who passes through Bavaria did, before Wagnerism became synonymous with Nazism. I had experienced the excellent acoustics of the
Festspielhaus,
so enchantingly designed by Wagner that operagoers were said to wander the village in a daze for hours after a performance, barely able to distinguish fantasy from reality.

On the evening of July 25, when Franco's emissaries arrived in Bayreuth to petition for military assistance, Hitler had just returned from a performance of
Siegfried,
performed under the baton of his favorite conductor, Wilhelm Furtwüngler. Before the night was over, Hitler had crafted a bigger offensive than Franco had requested. He named it
Unternehmen Feuerzauber
—Operation Magic Fire, a name taken from one of Wagner's musical motifs. Another night, another place, a different set of musical motifs ringing in his ears—who knows, even a less skillful conductor—and perhaps things would have been different.

I heard that story, months after it occurred, from a fellow music-loving Republican (who nevertheless had a hard time giving up his Wagner records). Should I have been surprised? I was. Surprised and horrified. Music's potency was proven to me, yet again, just as music's impotency had been proven to me, an equal number of times. Where was the pattern? Did art succeed in furthering only bad causes, providing emotion and justification for the evil already nesting within men's hearts? Did it provide solace, but only to those who might have fared better in the harsh light of reality, unconsoled? Did artistic inspiration only reinforce what destiny had already decided?

If music had power, then I had power, more than I had responsibly applied so far. If other men had destinies, then so did I; the burden of that realization was as great as it had ever been. Greater. I had spent the last fifteen years building up my reputation to be ready for a day such as this. Now the day had come, but I still had no idea how playing a cello—or being known as someone who played the cello—could make a difference in the world.

Once I had believed art had no fatherland, that art was a thing upon which vice could not impose. Now I believed that art was political, had a purpose, could literally move men and send foreign bombers screaming toward southern Spain. That made it debased, but it also made it—and me—responsible, powerful, and potentially guilty.

There was so much to be done. Yet I was unable to find anything worthwhile to do, beyond attending meetings, writing letters, and attempting the occasional short speech prior to a concert—none of which convinced the British or American governments to assist us. Meanwhile, I played Bach daily, to remind myself that Germany and Hitler were not synonymous, and because I needed the sense of order and meaning implicit in Bach's musical structure.

Franco crossed the strait. Workers' militias fled from the slaughtering Moors they'd always feared. Sevilla and Córdoba fell. In Granada, Falangist squads rounded up thousands of leftists, brought them to the cemetery, and shot them. One of them was the poet Federico García Lorca.

Now there were Nationalists both north and south, planning to meet in the middle. Franco made an appointment with a foreign reporter to meet him at a certain table in a certain Madrid café; he was that sure he'd be taking the capital according to his own timetable.

I listened to the nightly radio "chats" of the rebel general Queipo de Llano, broadcast from the Sevilla region, detailing the advance of Nationalist troops through southern Spain. He singled out well-known Republicans by name, describing the treatment they'd receive when they were caught. It wasn't enough to say he 'd kill you. If you were a soccer star, he threatened to cut off your feet. If you were a musician or artist, he threatened to cut off your hands. For me, hands weren't enough—he said he'd take my arms, "to the elbows."

One night, I was just about to turn off the radio after one of these inflammatory chats when he announced that the record to follow would feature a work for piano, performed by the man whom Franco had just named honorary president of a newly created National Spanish Culture Institute. I waited, wondering who it could be. Manuel de Falla? He was a conservative clericalist, but as a friend of García Lorca, could he have accepted the post?

The next sound was not a name, but the dry hiss of the needle navigating the groove of the record itself, followed finally by the sound of a cello, and then a violin. It was the 1929 recording of the Dvořák Piano Trios that we had made with Aviva, the year we had met her. It was Al-Cerraz who had been named president of the fascist institute, one step away from a future cabinet post.

Once the initial shock had passed, I felt no lingering surprise. They had offered him acceptance and an audience, two of the things he cherished most. My apolitical partner had eclipsed me, stepping boldly into the most political—and least forgivable—role of his life.

What had happened, I found out later, was this: While other southern cities fell, Málaga managed to hold out, until February 1937, when the Nationalists swept through and the tables were turned. Outside the gates of the
plaza de toros
stood sticks festooned with twisted bits of what looked like fruit peel or salt cod, drying in the sun: leftists' ears. Local aristocrats like Doña de Larrocha claimed it must have been the Moorish mercenaries who did it—heads on pikes were one of those things you heard so much about in African countries. But everyone knew, Al-Cerraz later told me, that it was local Falangists, fighting for the Nationalists and exacting retribution for the bullring episode of eight months earlier.

The ears were too much. Al-Cerraz left Málaga then, and the Doña. But he had not left her political sphere. He accepted the position with the Spanish Culture Institute in hopes of composing official music for what he assumed would become the new government.

Unable to return to Mérida since the civil war broke out, I had been staying in a hotel in Torrepaulo, in a loyal part of the southwest. In early 1937 the war arrived there, too. I woke one morning to the sound of planes bombing the city and all the outlying roads, which was followed by the sound of strafing maneuvers as the planes punished the fleeing crowds. Dragging my cello, I joined the exodus, walking toward the part of the horizon that seemed least obscured by smoke.

I had given away my shoes and socks to a feeble older man who had run out of his apartment in nothing but underwear and a beret. Now my feet registered the incredible heat of the narrow route, which had been bombed so repeatedly that the rocky dirt smoldered like volcanic rubble. Some young men alongside the road were wrapping torn shirts around their feet, and I did likewise. Then, remembering the large cotton cloth I kept in my cello case for wiping away rosin dust, I fashioned a
serape
by tearing a slit in the cloth's middle and putting my head through it. It covered my shoulders, at least. But even through the rags on my feet, I continued to feel the heat rising and I smelled—or thought I could smell—my skin cooking. Eventually I left my cello by the roadside so that I might walk faster—though not my bow, which hung in its tube around my neck. Music could do nothing for me at that moment, but how desperately I wished for a pair of shoes.

I arrived that evening at the neighboring city of San Ramón, where I hoped to find an acquaintance who had retired from the Salamanca Symphony. I had trouble recognizing his house. The top floor had been blasted off, leaving the beams exposed. But while there was no plumbing and no heat, the ground floor and basement still provided shelter. My colleague offered me some bread and cold garlic soup, and after dabbing iodine on a few cuts and wrapping my ailing feet in gauze, I fell into the deepest sleep of my life. Hours later—it seemed like just a few minutes—I woke to the feeling of something jabbing my feet. In my dreams, it was the sharp rubble of the hot street again, poking into my soles. In real life, it was an old-fashioned bayonet.

The Nationalists rounded us up: me, the friend who had sheltered me, and thousands of others. While the streets were still dark, they marched us to the
plaza de toros
at the edge of town—the other bullring in my story. They searched my pockets and found the return ticket to Salamanca—Nationalist territory for a while now—and a card printed with my name. I was stood in a separate line outside the ring while many others, mostly men and a few women, were marched inside. I heard the machine gun shots, a lazy spray, repeated at regular intervals that rattled on for an eternity, even as the sky lightened to an ugly pale yellow. I don't know how one could sleep in that situation, but at some point, I did. I fell asleep on my feet. And opened my eyes to his face: the soulful brown eyes, the pudgy cheeks, the weak chin.

"It's true," he said. "We are precisely the same height. Perhaps I am a little taller. Then again, you're not wearing any shoes. Where are your shoes?"

These were the first words Paquito Franco said to me. I was too stunned to answer him.

"I owe you nothing. My debt was paid sixteen years ago. The other day, I chose not to intercede even on my cousin's behalf. Do you know that? Say it."

My mind was a blank.

"Say it," he repeated.

"Say what?"

"Say I owe you nothing."

"You owe me nothing."

"It's true," he said, morosely. Then: "I was shot in the stomach, you know. Years ago. But I lived. Perhaps you have a little
baraka,
too. Two of your brothers dead now—isn't that true?"

"Three."

"And your father."

"Yes." I was too tired to be afraid.

From his pocket he withdrew a familiar object. A compass, my father's gift to Enrique, which I might have chosen all those years ago, if things had worked out differently. He popped open the lid dramatically, pretended to study it, and clasped the lid closed. "Madrid, our next destination—northeast. Good. It still works. You see? I will never be lost. A real man knows without a doubt where he is going, what he is doing, and why."

He pushed me away from the wall against which I'd been leaning. Intuitively, I headed toward the plaza door through which I'd seen so many others march—what a sleepwalking victim I was, at that pale hour! But then he nudged me away, in the opposite direction. I walked, expecting to feel at any moment the shot in my back, pushing me off balance, just as I'd seen the woman fall in the plaza, months earlier.

Unlike Franco, I did not know where I was going, but the survivor's impulse had rekindled within me, and I knew to keep moving. In an hour, I was on the city's outskirts. Sometime later that day I was on a train east, skirting the southern edge of Nationalist territory, heading to one of the few remaining Republican enclaves, in Barcelona.

***

The city had a strange inside-out look. Here and there, in the middle of busy commercial streets, militiamen had set up wicker armchairs and wooden rockers behind walls of sandbags. Everywhere, people pried up cobblestones to build barricades.

As the war progressed, factions would turn against each other—the anarchists against the Stalinists against the Trotskyites; the uniformed soldiers and assault guards against the informal militias. Then the city truly fell apart—and that was before the fascists overtook it. But I saw it when it was only mildly disheveled, and still hopeful. Few Barcelona residents had seen what I had: the strafing planes, the bullrings transformed into killing fields. Later, those scenes would arrive here, too.

From Barcelona, I made my departure plans. But before enacting them, I hired a car to take me south, to Campo Seco. While the driver waited in the street, grumbling about the cost of petrol and how little I'd paid him for this errand, I climbed the stairs of my family's home. In the main parlor, I shared embraces with my sister and her son Enric, who had sprung into a tall, quiet man I didn't recognize, and my mother, who had developed a pronounced stoop in her shoulders. To look me in the eye, she had to cock her head to one side and roll her own eyes sharply upward, which gave her a distracted air.