The Spanish Bow (55 page)

The four of us shared the latest news, as we'd heard it. I described the streets of Barcelona. They talked about food shortages and kept trying to peek behind my back, as if I might be hiding gifts. But I'd brought nothing except an invitation. I hoped the surviving members of my family would come with me to France. One might think it would be a conversation of the highest priority. But my nephew had something to attend to—he apologized and left the house. Luisa, patting smooth the first gray hairs in the part of her outdated bob, was concerned about the rice she'd left cooking in the kitchen. Mamá was intent on dragging a heavy armchair away from the balcony doors toward the dining table until I took over the task, arranging the chair alongside its mates for a dinner I wouldn't stay long enough to share.

She waited until we were finally seated together, alone, to rebuke me. "You didn't come to your Tía's funeral." My father's elder sister had finally passed away a year earlier.

"I couldn't. I was halfway across the country...."

But she wasn't interested in my excuse. She stood up and began to rearrange the chairs again, counting them with difficulty. Each time she 'd get to the fourth and then stop and look around for another.

"Mamá, leave the chairs. I can take care of them. It won't take more than a minute. What I was saying about France—"

She began counting again, under her breath.

"You don't need more chairs," I said. "There are only four of us: You, me, Luisa, Enric. Only four. And anyway, I won't need one. You may not need any of them. Please, will you pay attention?"

She wandered away, toward the kitchen. I followed her, grabbed a fifth chair that was next to the counter, and pulled it into the main
sala.
"Now will you listen to me?" I called back toward the kitchen. "Luisa, will you come here?"

"The rice will boil over," she called back.

"Fine. Mamá, let's go in the kitchen. I need to talk to you both—at the same time."

She patted me on the arm. "But we did talk all together, when you first arrived. And we have the chair now, from the kitchen. Let's talk at dinner."

"It can't wait. I have a driver outside. I'm not staying for dinner."

Below us, through the balcony doors, I heard the driver step out of his car and shut the door. I heard the dull pop of a hip leaning against already-dented metal, and then the strike of a match. I smelled the rising cigarette smoke—the scent of restlessness. I had told him we would be out within a half hour, with our bags. All four of us, with any luck.

"Mamá, you must understand what will happen once the Nationalists come to Barcelona."

"Yes, well," she said. "Barcelona."

"What does that mean?"

When she didn't answer me, I said more loudly, "What does that mean—'Yes, well, Barcelona'?"

She patted my arm again. "It wouldn't be the worst thing. Don't worry." Then she changed the subject. "I do wish you had married, Feliu."

Our conversation continued in this contrapuntal vein. She discussed the funeral I had missed and the wedding I'd never have, while I struggled to discuss the ferry from Barcelona and the living conditions in Paris, until my head felt ready to explode.

"Do you know," she said finally, her voice sharpening, "that in this day and age, in Catalonia, it's illegal to have a church wedding? The Republicans have gone too far."

I agreed that it was a little extreme. But everything was extreme. Aberrations and abuses were to be expected. Didn't she remember the First Republic of her youth, the one she had always talked about?

"It was nothing like this," she said bitterly. "It was beautiful."

Luisa had heard the change in my mother's tone, from peaceful confusion to rising stress. She came to the kitchen doorway, a spoon still in her hand. "Feliu," she said, "we're not leaving."

I kissed Mamá on the forehead, begging her not to rise. On my way out, Luisa embraced me, then disappeared into the house and reappeared holding a dusty bottle. The very last of my father's liqueur, she said.

In the car, I opened it and passed it to the driver, explaining it was the only tip I could afford. He flashed a gap-toothed smile, took one hand off the wheel, and accepted a swig, the grass-colored liquid dribbling from the side of his mouth. Then he leaned out the window and spat furiously. We 'd saved it for nothing, all these years. It had gone bad long ago.

I'd left a cello behind in San Ramón—it would be firewood by now; and another behind in Mérida. I still had my bow, but I didn't feel lucky at all.

Later, the Nationalist forces would bomb the Barcelona harbor, making it difficult for boats to come ferry away escaping citizens. Later, refugees by the thousands would be forced to cross the Pyrenees on foot. But I left early, and my April 1937 passage was easy—a swift and uneventful boat ride from Barcelona to Marseilles.

I continued to Paris by train and walked into the Spanish Republican embassy, to ask what I could do. Within a day they had set me up in a modest apartment on the rue des Grands-Augustins and advanced me a small loan. My label, Reixos, had offices in Belgium and owed me some royalties, though future profits would shrivel, with the Spanish market in chaos and economies across Europe struggling. Nationalist authorities had frozen my bank accounts in Salamanca and Mérida.

A day later, a woman in a head scarf appeared at my door with a cello.

"You will forgive the crack at the bottom," she said, her eyes downcast. "It was my brother's. I'm afraid we stored it in a closet after he passed away."

I replied, "I'm sure I can rent or purchase one somewhere." But in truth I wasn't sure I could afford anything more than bread, cheese, and a second set of clothes.

"The winters are dry. We should have kept it in a more humid place. But it's a good cello, I've been assured."

"Really, I can't—"

"The embassy told me you would need it."

An hour later, I reported to the embassy to complain. I had asked how I might help, and so far they had only helped
me,
twice. On the fifth such visit, a man with slicked-back hair and round, black-rimmed eyeglasses exited his office, spotted me in the waiting area, threw his arms around me and kissed both my cheeks. He introduced himself as Max Aub, the embassy's cultural delegate; he'd recognized me immediately from the photograph on my recordings. "Of course we have work for you." His eyes shone with emotion. "Do you mean to say you've been in Paris all this time without an assignment? I do hope you've been keeping your fingers nimble..."

"Nimble enough."

"The apartment isn't too chilly?"

I thought of the tea left at the bottom of a cup that froze into a light brown lozenge within hours, and the way my hands cramped from the cold even though I had cut the fingers from my only pair of gloves in order to practice. "It's fine," I said.

Over lunch, Aub explained that he and the Catalan architect Josép Lluís Sert had been frantic with preparations for the Spanish Pavilion at the upcoming World's Fair, to open soon at the base of the Eiffel Tower. That was the only reason he hadn't paid me a personal visit after hearing I had arrived safely from Marseilles. "Our budget is nothing compared to the other countries, yet we're in more need of publicity than anyone. The planners set Germany and the Soviet Union opposite each other. On purpose, of course. The Soviet Union has a three-story tower with menacing steel sculptures of giant workers. Germany's building is even bigger, with an eagle sneering down from the cornice."

"And ours?"

"Well," he paused. "Low, flat, simple. Directly under the German building's shadow."

A waiter delivered our cutlets. Aub raised his eyebrows at the thin yellow sauce, poked at the meat with the tines of his fork, tasted it finally, and nodded with satisfaction. "Not as good as the old days, but certainly better than what they're eating in Bilbao."

"What's that?"

"Cats, mostly."

He didn't notice when, after several bites, I pushed away my plate.

Aub and Sert couldn't get half the building materials they needed. "I can't push for money when militias in Barcelona and Madrid don't have proper guns." Aub shrugged. "But what we'll put inside the pavilion should count for something."

The fair's theme was technology, and its purpose was entertainment. But nearly everything displayed in the Spanish Pavilion, from photomurals to films by Buñuel, would focus instead on the horrors of war in Republican Spain. It was the only way to get a message out to a world that had showed little concern so far.

Aub said that he and Sert had visited Picasso, knowing that the painter still considered himself fiercely Spanish, although he had lived in Paris for thirty years by now. They had asked him to paint a new mural in time for the opening of the fair in May, but he'd been hesitant about accepting a commission for an overtly political work. "His heart is with us," said Aub, "no doubt about that. He promised to keep thinking about it. And we know that he has ordered an immense canvas, fitting the proportions of the pavilion. So even at the last minute, he may come around."

Picasso's studio was on the same street as the apartment the embassy had found for me. Like the proximity of the German and Soviet Union pavilions, it seemed a convenient coincidence, especially when Aub remarked, "We hoped you'd pay him a visit."

How could I tell him how strange I found it, that anyone believed me to be persuasive? I had never proved myself able to convince anyone of anything through words alone. In fact, my words often seemed to raise a wall between myself and others. Only by playing music had I ever been able to break down that barrier.

"I don't know him," I said, in lieu of explaining.

"Probably better that way. It means you won't have crossed him in the past. Anyway, I'm sure he knows of you." He moved a toothpick from one side of his mouth to the other. "The cello? It suffices?"

"Very kind. I forgot to ask for the woman's address, to send a note."

Aub shook his head and waved the concern away. "You want to write letters, I have a list a kilometer long. You were invited to perform at the White House once, were you not?"

"Correct. For President Hoover—"

But his mind was racing ahead of my answer. "Let's see: Roosevelt first, members of Congress, philanthropists—anyone who believes in this myth of nonintervention, who might be convinced by a reasonable letter or two or ten thousand to consider facts. In England, it would be ... well, come to my office next week and we will review the names together."

I begged Aub for something more to do, something more than the letters—perhaps a benefit concert abroad?—but I'd already learned from my efforts back in Spain that the idea was a tough sell. A London backer was willing to sponsor a typical concert, but not a pricey and controversial fund-raiser mentioning the Spanish Republican cause. Subtracting my travel expenses, the proceeds would be minimal. I could raise just as much by playing in the streets of Paris, with a hat overturned to catch the coins.

Aub checked his watch distractedly. "At the pavilion they're having trouble engineering the flow of liquid mercury through a modern sculpture we 'll have there, a sort of fountain." He rose, kissed me on both cheeks again, and said, "Without Picasso, the Spanish Pavilion doesn't have a chance." He hastened to add, "It has little chance without you, as well, of course—but we've always known where you stand. Visit me as soon as you have any news."

And so it was that I walked down rue des Grands-Augustins one morning shortly thereafter, with a sense of import, and trepidation. The feeling in my heart—as if I carried some essential portfolio or secret message—was not matched by the emptiness in my hands. Halfway to Picasso's address, I stopped to purchase an inexpensive bottle of Beaujolais. The wine meant I wouldn't have any money for dinner, but my appetite had waned in recent weeks.

The artist opened his door and simply stood there, hands on his hips and a lumpy brown cardigan tied over his sailor-stripe shirt. A few white strands of hair stood up on his otherwise bare, tanned pate, as if he 'd just rolled out of bed. I could hear another voice inside, a clatter of dishes, and a record player. I introduced myself. He prolonged the silence a moment more, then said, "Well, I can't turn away news from home, can I? Come in, come in," and took the bottle from my hands.

The studio was large, echoing, and only a little warmer than my apartment. Tilted against the wall was the canvas, three and a half meters tall and nearly eight meters long. A ladder leaned against one end. The canvas itself was perfectly blank, but everywhere around the room the painter had tacked studies, sketches, drawings, postcards, pictures ripped from magazines; and underneath various tables there were empty bottles, stacked framed pictures, masks, hats, volcanic glass, enormous round sponges, jars of colored pencils and tins stuffed with paintbrushes, some of them lashed to long sticks. To one side there was a sagging couch and standing mirror; to another, mismatched chairs, splattered with paint. It was such a clutter that my eyes could rest only by settling upon the canvas, but to stare at the blankness there seemed like an invasion of privacy, like staring at someone not yet dressed, or prying into someone's undecided mind.

He knew why I'd come.

I shared what I knew of the Nationalists' latest advances, and especially what I'd seen from loyal Barcelona, where Picasso's elderly mother still lived. All the while we talked, I heard the dishes clattering and cupboards closing from a room off to the side. I knew Picasso had a wife, Marie-Thérèse—or was it Dora Maar?—and assumed it was she, or perhaps some more recent substitute.

"I think that Señor Aub would sleep better if he knew..." I started to say. Suddenly I stopped, my eyes tracking to the kitchen doorway. There, where I expected to see some fashionable young waif or heartsick housewife, stood a familiar large figure, fists extended, fingers crooked around the stems of three glasses and the neck of a bottle different from the one I'd brought.

"So it
is
you!" Al-Cerraz exclaimed. "I figured it was just another Catalan official." He nodded at the bottle. "I came to toast the man who lent me his couch for three nights. Thank heaven you brought a bottle, too—this deserves more than one toast."