The Spanish Bow

by Andromeda Romano-Lax

  Waking late each morning, grudgingly, slowly, I would swing my legs off my thin mattress, cough for several minutes, push myself to standing, and make my way across the room to dress. On the way, I never failed to glance at the cello, to peer at the bowl and refill it when necessary, as one refills a water bowl for a cat. The bow, I should add, stayed even closer to me; in its case, under my bed—protected from nocturnal thieves, I told myself.

  Quitting something that one has done all one's life is like quitting any addiction. The first days may be easy, sometimes alarmingly so. But then there are the deep pangs, the cumulative sense of unwellness, the dangers of relapse. I missed the feeling of my body wrapped around those curves of wood. I missed the gliding bow strokes. I missed the feel of the strings against my calloused fingertips, the oscillations of the vibrato, the pressure and release and speed and surrender; my entire body had become attuned to the cello over all those years, and without its mediation nothing made sense anymore, not weight or gravity or the rhythm inherent in anything—my breath, my heartbeat. The water tap developed a drip, and that drip drove me to distraction. Deprived of music, my ear went searching crazily for sound, like a stray dog wandering the alleyways, and wherever it found it, seized and shook it, wouldn't let go. I wrapped a washcloth around the spigot, but there were other sounds—people's footsteps over me, squeaking beds, the wheezing rattle in my chest as I succumbed to winter bronchitis.

  The only place where my body felt at peace, and where my mind could freely enjoy some remembered melody, was in sleep. I slept twelve hours at a stretch and still felt tired enough afternoons to nap two hours more. On hot days I sat in my worn trousers and damp undershirt. On cold days I kept my tattered blankets wrapped around me at all times, dragging them back and forth across the room, polishing one narrow path on an otherwise-dusty wooden floor.

  Visitors knocked at the door. Sometimes I answered, and many more times I did not. Envelopes were pushed through the crack and piled up on the floor. Every few days, obligation would force me to open them, to search for some sign that my hundreds of earlier letters—to government officials, to major philanthropists abroad—had finally brought some significant and heartfelt response. But mostly they were letters of mild concern, from people who had appreciated my playing in the past and wanted to know I was all right, or small offerings of charity folded between pages of embossed stationery. When relapse threatened, and my hand trembled and longed to touch my bow again, I punished it by inflicting it with a marathon session of letter writing, indignant new attempts to reach out to the world that lasted four hours, or five, until exhaustion drove me back to bed again.

  And I dreamed, how I dreamed. Not about the sandy holes—that image had been put to rest by my mother's passing. Not about the world's real nightmares: continued repression in Spain; Kristallnacht and the extermination of Jews in Germany; the advance of fascism and Nazism everywhere. Instead, I dreamed memories, starting with the recent past and moving back year by year, like a movie shown in reverse. I dreamed of Aviva prying notes from her violin, thin arms heaving and feet spread wide. I dreamed of the trains rocking and clanging and singing, and the rhythm of oars on the Retiro pond. I dreamed of the back of the Queen's head, nodding slightly, and the soft, wet heat of Isabel. I dreamed of the jostling of the Ramblas, and the light flashing down through the leaves of the plane trees, and the dazzling reflections of light in the Liceo's Hall of Mirrors. Back and back, night after night, filled with all the things that day deprived me. No wonder I couldn't wait to be under the covers again. And beneath it all, the sense that something was feeding the dreams, keeping them alive. Something as close, perhaps, as the tube under my bed, the bow that had chosen me or asked me to choose it or simply fallen into my hands as the result of that early waking. Something as close as my fear: of ceasing to matter, of returning to the place that had almost taken me at the moment of my complicated birth, the place of deepest silence that waits to take us all.

  CHAPTER 23

  By 1940 I was forty-eight years old, but I felt ancient, worn, frail—older then, in fact, than I do now as I tell this story, three and a half decades later. Who knows how much longer those dreams might have sustained my hibernation, if the knocking at my door had not suddenly grown insistent. Three times on one June day I ignored it and even pulled my window closed despite the sticky heat, to block out the shouts of an unfamiliar, self-important voice from the landing below my window. The shouting went away, but a fly stayed to torment me, beating and buzzing against the window. It so wore down my resistance that when the knocking started again, I rushed to the door and flung it open, only to find this time an altogether-different pest.

  Al-Cerraz came in, swinging in each hand a glass gallon jug filled with cider-colored liquid. He didn't offer me either of them, but only set them down, tested the mattress with one balled fist, and made himself comfortable on my bed.

  "You've missed me?"

  "I haven't." I was puzzled to realize that in all my dreams, he'd never appeared. I stifled a laugh. "My mind seems to dwell on everyone and everything, except you."

  He wiped his brow. "There's only one explanation. You're mooning over your undistinguished past. I'm in your future." He went to the window, looked out, and sat again. Then he explained all the knockings and callings I'd heard. Handbills were being posted throughout the city, and at least a few colleagues had tried to notify me, knowing I'd become a shut-in.

  "Not a shut-in," I objected. "I go out to shop every few days, to take care of my own business..."

  Al-Cerraz ignored me and pulled a paper from his back pocket, unfolding it so I could read the words: Citoyens! Aux Armes!

  He translated: "Citizens! To arms!"

  "Yes, I know," I said, exasperated. They were taken from the lyrics of "La Marseillaise,"the French anthem. But after a moment I had to ask, "What does it mean, exactly?"

  "It means the Germans are maybe a week away. Maybe only a few days, depending on their appetite for Paris luxuries. The French army has failed. Officially, it means Parisian citizens are preparing to fight—quartier by quartier, they say."

  He advised me to leave the city. When I said I wouldn't, that I didn't care, he said, "Come out for lunch, at least."

  "I have lunch here."

  "Do you?" He went toward the small cupboard behind the table that doubled as desk and dining table. He flung it open, nodded at the pitiful contents, then returned to the bed again, where he sat down heavily, testing the springs. I winced at the squeaking, the grinding of metal against metal, the knock of metal against wood...

  "Stop—my bow!"

  Al-Cerraz stood reluctantly and with one large hand gripped the white porcelain rail of the bed, lifted the whole thing as if it were nothing more than a suitcase, and moved it aside. Underneath was my bow tube, still sound, nestled like an egg atop a nest of thousands of papers and envelopes, stacked nearly as high as the bed frame itself.

  "Dear, dear," he murmured. "Do you have a match?"

  ***

  I agreed then to leave the apartment with him before he talked himself into building a bonfire and burning down the entire building with it. Outside, we walked, pausing to look into windows and to watch people. At the café where we stopped for lunch, it was as hard as ever to get a table. Ladies were dressed in their floral best, men in suits despite the heat, raising their glasses to toast with that season's most popular phrase: Chantons quand même!Let's sing nevertheless!

  Along one of the boulevards, we watched gardeners digging out withered flowers from an embankment and replacing them with fresh geraniums offloaded from the back of a truck.

  "Clearly they don't think the tanks are coming," I noted.

  "No, but they do." Al-Cerraz pointed down the boulevard to a squat, stone-faced government building, along which more trucks were lined up. Men in crisp work shirts, sleeves rolled up, came out pushing one dolly after another, loading with fat, uneven stacks of paper barely secured with twine.

&n
bsp; "See? They're doing what you won't—destroying the papers that the Germans shouldn't see."

  "Or moving it."

  "Yes. Probably." He laughed noncommittally. "Citizens to arms—guard our rears while we retreat."

  "If they think it's too dangerous to stay, shouldn't everyone leave?"

  "The train stations are jammed. I went there this morning, just to see. Ten people for every one seat. Children separated from their parents. It looked like a refugee camp. Already, people have been trampled."

  "And yet..." I paused, glancing back at the gardeners.

  "'Chantons quand même!' " he said. "In our land it was 'No pasarán— but it happened all the same. Let them pass, and make music anyway." He lifted his chin and said more loudly, "Make music. Make gardens. Make love. Admirable, in some ways. But I won't hang around to see how it ends—not past Monday."

  We stood a while longer, watching the gardeners in one direction and the government office workers in another. Al-Cerraz added, "For anyone with initiative, it's still relatively easy to leave now. In a few days, it won't be."

  "Why are you doing this?" I asked him.

  "Doing what?"

  "Why are you trying to help me?"

  He adopted an incredulous expression. "Come now. We've always had our differences. But we 've made music together. And I trust you. You've seen the worst of me—and here we are, still talking."

  Looking back on that day now, I wish I could say he'd already seen the worst of me.

  Later, he asked a favor: Would I keep his cider bottles for him until he left? His latest accommodation was in the home of a lover, a married woman whose husband was at the front. She let him sleep there, but she wouldn't let him store his belongings, for fear her mother-in-law would spot them during one of her frequent unannounced visits. It seemed a small thing to ask.

  "Tonight I'll come by with a few more, if that's all right. And then a few more again in the morning, if I'm lucky."

  "It's a bit late to be starting a cellar."

  "No." He ran a hand through his thick hair distractedly. "It's not too late at all."

  By morning, we all knew the handbills had been a political mistake. Even as they were being printed, even as some citizens boasted the Germans would never succeed in taking Paris, the government had already decided. No one planned to fight after all—not soldiers or citizens. Paris was declared an open city. Two of the city's five million residents had left or were preparing to leave; some quickly and some slowly; some bitter, some relieved, most fixated on this newest reality of getting out before Nazi flags were raised over every government office, every hotel, every historic landmark.

  In Spain, I had seen great masses of mostly poor people fleeing cities. But here the poor and the rich fled together, and no one had it easy. Near my apartment, there was a veterinary office, and the next morning as I returned from a shopping trip I saw a long line of women and a few men outside the lobby, all holding their cats and Pomeranians and poodles, trying to keep them from leaping free and igniting their own Gallic wars. It might have been funny, except that after a couple of inquiries I discovered the reason these elegant people were queuing up in such numbers. They were putting their pets to sleep, knowing how difficult it would be to carry animals while fleeing the rapidly approaching German front.

  That day, as planned, Al-Cerraz came with a fifth jug and a sixth. One last time, he tried to convince me to join him.

  "They know your opinions about everything," he said, looking around my apartment at the stacks of unsent letters. "They'll arrest you."

  "It doesn't worry me."

  "You were lucky in Spain."

  "Lucky?"

  He threw his hands into the air. "I still need rope and a few small things. I'll come back in an hour. Then I'm leaving Paris, with my jugs. I can't force you to see reason."

  After he left, I sat near the window, my coat-covered cello visible out of the corner of one eye. The day's heat was building. I opened the window to a day that seemed the more awful for its heartless sunshine. Outside, I heard a man calling, "Bicycle for sale!" I imagined the traffic that must be choking the city's gateways, as every kind of car and tractor and pushcart and bicycle joined the exodus. I heard an explosive pop—too light for a gun—and I thought of champagne, and that infernal toast: Chantons quand même!

  I couldn't decide which scenario seemed worse: to be trampled by refugees or maddened by naïve collaborators, the kind who thought, "It's better this way" or "It's easier," or who proclaimed "a return to traditional values," meaning fascism of the kind I'd already experienced in Spain. There were plenty of Parisians who not only tolerated the Germans but welcomed them, admiring their goose-stepping efficiency, their espousal of fatherland and family, their good public manners. And in any crowd, loyal or disloyal, there would be men as foolish as Al-Cerraz, storing up his cider or Chablis or whatever it was, as if elegant refreshment mattered at a time like this.

  But what could one do? The train stations were mayhem. Al-Cerraz seemed to have a different plan for traveling, but I hadn't asked what it was, hadn't even wanted to know. Wiping my face, I went to the sink and turned the tap. Nothing happened. It did not surprise me that someone had tampered with the pipes on this day of flight, and I acknowledged that perhaps Al-Cerraz hadn't been entirely silly to stockpile beverages. Shrugging, I lifted one of his jugs, felt the saliva dampening my mouth, and twisted the cap. I had the jug close to my lips when the fumes flooded my nose. I recoiled, barely stifling a sneeze. Then I drew close and sniffed again. Petrol.

  Had I said he was foolish? He was a genius.

  When Al-Cerraz returned, he burst through the door ready to argue his final case. "Forget what I said before. The truth is the Germans adore you, and that adoration will be worse than torture. The Nazis love classical music—didn't I once read that Hitler owns your recording of the Bach cello suites? They won't leave you alone a single day unless you perform for them."

  "You're right."

  "And you won't get away with saying you don't play anymore, that you've taken some kind of principled stand..." He paused, belatedly absorbing the fact that I had agreed with him.

  "You're right. I'm ready." I gestured to the bed, where one small valise lay waiting, my bow tube across it. He hesitated. I said again, "I'm ready. Show me to your car."

  Then the spell was broken. He laughed. "My car? I don't have a car."

  And I realized that nothing in wartime could be easy, but I had followed his lead for years and I felt willing, against my better judgment, to follow him again.

  Al-Cerraz's experience years earlier, crossing an arid land in a Stanley Steamer, had taught him that vehicles don't matter if you can't find fuel. We followed the long lines of traffic out of the city, hitchhiking easily at first when people recognized us by the cello Al-Cerraz had demanded I carry along, lashed to my back with rope, and walking when we couldn't get a ride, Al-Cerraz struggling under the weight of the tethered jugs. The exodus was chaotic and slow, with vehicles of every kind backed up by roadblocks. Some citizens, more optimistic or at least militaristic than France's own generals, had towed boulders and other obstructions into the center of roads, to slow down the advance of the German tanks. But in the east, where it mattered, the tanks had no trouble getting through; they'd simply gone around the roadblocks, across fields now greening with spring wheat. Within days, Paris was buzzing with German motorcades and Hitler was having his photo taken in front of the Eiffel Tower, and the boulders blocked only the exodus of refugees.

  As drivers' tanks began to run dry, as hearts hardened and faces grew frantic, we bargained for rides with Al-Cerraz's petrol. It gained in value the farther we traveled from the capital. Occasionally we came across rural stations where we could refill a jug or two, but the stations were spaced widely, and demand far exceeded supply. Nearly every station was noisy with altercations, as station owners claimed their tanks had run dry and desperate drivers accused them of lying and price gouging. />
  Kilometer after kilometer, Al-Cerraz strategized. He refused to help drivers of cars broken down along the road, insisting that we couldn't hitch our destinies to lost causes—a few more gallons of petrol wouldn't get an empty car to Marseilles. Better, he explained, to wave down a moving car and contribute only as the needle dipped low, giving drivers the insurance they needed to make it to the next rural station. In this way we traveled south on fumes, on others' hopes, on Al-Cerraz's unwavering resolve.

  We did not rest until we smelled the ocean again—not the untainted shore of my youth, but the briny, diesel-perfumed air of a major port: Marseilles. France's southeastern corner had become a mecca for fleeing artists and intellectuals. It was the part of France that everyone hoped might stay free—and it did, in principle, as part of Vichy France, once the Germans drew their occupation line in a zigzag south of Dijon and Tours, dipping low to the west, south of Bordeaux.

  But Al-Cerraz and I had barely found a flophouse before the Nazis arrived in Marseilles, too, assisting the collaborationist Vichy to route out critics of Hitler and other enemies of the state. According to the armistice, the French agreed to surrender on demand any German nationals within Vichy France, including citizens of the many countries Germany had overrun. Considering Hitler's expanding reach across Europe, we knew that eventually no one would be beyond the Nazis' reach. Exit visas were restricted, locking within France's borders thousands of persons anxious to emigrate. Germans in dark green uniforms strolled the streets of Marseilles with an air of luxury and leisure, taking their time in arresting the wanted men and women they knew to be holed up in various houses and hotels, sweating out their last days of relative safety.