The Spanish Bow

by Andromeda Romano-Lax

  Al-Cerraz had missed the festivities by mere hours. But the advice he'd given me rang even more true, given the news: Find somewhere to spend your energies. Create something beautiful.

  And wasn't this beautiful? Our Second Republic, born on that spring day, and like Aviva herself, best contemplated and most easily loved in idealized form, before complications could set in.

  In the weeks that followed, I began to see that image everywhere: full-color posters of "La Niña Bonita," the pretty girl. Instead of a cloche hat, she had a bejeweled helmet, and purple rays radiated from her light olive skin. That was simply how one poster artist had decided to portray our newly proclaimed republic. But to me, it was Aviva, and when later I heard the phrase "La Niña Bonita," I applied it not just to the Second Republic, but to that entire period, the years 1931 to 1933. It made me think of the "pretty girl" I had known, before obsession and addiction had tarnished her features.

  If I had been busy upon my return from Germany, I was twice as busy during the Republic's first years. I said yes to everything, sat through as many meetings as rehearsals, and accepted every title and honor the new Republic wanted to bestow upon me, as long as it would further peaceful causes.

  I attended one dinner after another, one discussion after another: Does art belong to the elite? Does art belong to the masses? Should intellectuals be involved in politics? How should one support and train poets and musicians if every untrained peasant or laborer is already a poet or musician at heart? In contrast with my years with Al-Cerraz, who had performed tirelessly but refused to engage in serious political discussions, I now shared meals and cabs and train cars with artists who excelled at political talk but balked at creating or performing. There would always be a better time, later. "The future is my muse," one socialist thespian told me when I came to inform him that my colleagues in the Ministry of Education couldn't continue to subsidize a playwright who never finished any of his plays. "Perfect," I told him. "Then come to us for money in the future. As for now, you might need to get a job."

  I traveled frequently between Salamanca, Madrid, Barcelona, Córdoba and Sevilla. I woke up thinking I smelled the sea, only to remember I'd gone to bed in an urban hotel on the central plains. I went to bed red-eyed and groggy, thinking I was staring out some guesthouse window at the twinkling lights of farmhouses, only to remember I was in a harbor town in the south, looking toward a line of boats.

  What did I do? Whatever was asked of me. I had been a conductor long enough to appreciate the role of the percussionist who waits three hours to clap the cymbals once. I was that percussionist. I traveled, I attended, I advised; I lent my name and appearance and reputation to the cause. And what was the cause? Not just artistic matters, but a fundamental reorganization of society. It's easy to laugh now at the era's lofty chatter, the programs that ran out of steam. But in the meanwhile, we succeeded in making fundamental changes. We gave women the vote. We eliminated titles of nobility. We secured basic rights for laborers. We stripped the Catholic Church of its monolithic power. We stayed too busy for heartache or regrets.

  Yes, I continued to write to Aviva. Yes, she continued to write to me. But how did she say it in German? Es macht nichts. It does not matter. Now we each had our own noble causes to pursue.

  Despite the great hopes of April 14—because of the great hopes—discontent brewed from the Republic's start. A threat of rebellion from clerical rightists was followed by a vengeful spate of church burning. Azaña, acting as Minister of War, made the decision not to send out the Civil Guard to stop it. "All the convents in Madrid are not worth the life of a single Republican," he proclaimed. His comment would dog him for eternity. Alfonso sympathizers and Church conservatives repeated it as often as possible, to reinforce the image of the Republic as disordered and dangerous. In the streets, rightist thugs provoked fights. It was in their interest to make the Republic seem untenable and frightening to the middle class.

  For those of us on the left and middle—a diverse group, to be sure—it was in our best interest to make the Republic appear vital. Crop prices were falling, the economy was out of our hands; but education and the arts were the areas we could attempt to control. We struggled to create a secular school system to replace the private Catholic schools—an impossible task, given the lack of money, buildings, and teachers. Perhaps President Alcalá-Zamora had expelled the Jesuits too soon; perhaps the anticlerical legislation was too strict.

  I did my part by creating a national music curriculum, patterned after the Orff method from Germany, which emphasized simple percussion instruments. It never went very far. Spanish children, armed with castanets and guitars, proved to be less malleable and mechanistic than their German counterparts. And when we allowed them to sing—How dare we print Castilian lyric sheets where Catalan was flourishing? And if we paid more to print the lyrics in Catalan, then what about Euskera?—all hell broke loose. It might have been funny, if we hadn't needed some semblance of national unity so desperately.

  Every political organization splintered into two or three factions; everywhere, people spoke as if in code: CEDA, CNT, FNTT, PCE, POUM, UGT, PSOE, FJS, JSU. If acronyms were chickens, we would have eaten well in those years!

  Perhaps it says something about the liability of abbreviations that the group that had none—the Spanish fascist party—dominated the country in the end. It was called simply the Falange—an Englishman would say "Phalanx," from the ancient Greek word for a united body of soldiers, moving as one, protected by their joined shields and lances. The opposite of division; the opposite of alphabetical obfuscation. Not the only reason they won, not even the main reason. But a name has power and direction; it creates its own momentum, like the wind formed by a wall of flame, born by fire and birthing fire, carrying embers downwind.

  And meanwhile, it was our job to pretend that things were still well. To admit that wealthy people were hoarding their hams and flour and olive oil, that southern farmworkers were forced to scour the countryside for rabbits and acorns, that anarchists were blowing up telephone exchanges, that it was unsafe on such-and-such dates to attempt a concert in Casa Viejas or Bajo Llobregat, was to play into enemy hands. If the nation was hungry or the streets were unsafe, then perhaps the new Republic wasn't working, perhaps democracy didn't have enough power to shake a chaotic society by its lapels, to make it behave. Regardless of how people had voted in 1931, the wealthy still controlled the land, and desperate people still reacted to hunger, evictions, and wage cuts with violence. They had expected the Second Republic to heal all, to provide everything, regardless of the worldwide economy, which was in ruins.

  Idealism: That was the problem on all sides. On both left and right, everyone had some shining image in mind, the ideal society, toward which they ran at such full tilt as to guarantee a bruising collision. Quixote and his windmills. Never forget that Cervantes's hero, while the victim of undeniable public cruelty, did the worst damage to his own hide, while fighting phantoms.

  The Catholic press applauded Germany's Nazis, with their emphasis on fatherland, authority, hierarchy. The word for that system was "fascism," and perhaps that was what we needed, they argued. Better than its alternative, communism. And what was communism? Now it was a label applied to anything the landowners did not like. For generations, townsfolk had been allowed to gather windfall crops, to scour the countryside for firewood, to water their beasts on the latifundios. But now those actions were considered threatening.

  I stayed in touch with Al-Cerraz, a man who'd never used acronyms in his life and who'd never belonged to any official party. But his leanings and sympathies—or lack of sympathies—were clear. He wrote to me once, in 1932:

  You have to understand. In Málaga, these people are kleptomaniacs. They'll steal anything that isn't nailed down—they think it belongs to them. And they don't look ahead. They'd eat all the seed in the storehouses if they could, and then there'd be no chance of planting next year, when things are better.

  On January
30, 1933, the Spanish newspapers paused in their coverage of local bombings in Barcelona and Sevilla long enough to report bad news from abroad. Hitler had been named German chancellor. Two months later, I received a letter from Aviva—short, confused, written in haste. Weill had been warned that the Nazis were coming to arrest him. He had left the country, bound for Paris. Brecht and hundreds of other intellectuals had left as well.

  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: PEASANT! THE REVOLUTION NEEDS YOUR EFFORT or Tú!—WHAT 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.

  PART VI

  Bull Season 1936

  CHAPTER 21

  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.<
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  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."