CHAPTER

20

Returning to Spain after so long away was like waking from a dream and realizing one has overslept disastrously. I spent the next month with an imaginary alarm ringing in my ears, alerting me to all that had happened in my absence, on both musical and political fronts.

Several renowned conductors requested my appearance as a soloist in the upcoming year, performing the Dvořák Cello Concerto in B Minor, Elgar’s Concerto in E Minor, and Glazunov’s Concerto Ballata in C Major. Just as many civic organizations—several of them without any connection to the musical world—asked me to speak to their members. Having traveled across Europe and America, didn’t I have a better view of how Spain stood in the world and how she should choose to stand in this era of rising nationalism?

Rita had decided to get married that year, and had resigned her position as my secretary. I could have found another, but I didn’t want the help or the company, preferring instead to busy myself in the comforting piles of unanswered mail and telegrams that had accumulated while I was away. I needed to immerse myself in my old life—the letters and awards and royalty statements and requests, antidotes to the powerlessness and invisibility I’d felt in Germany. I needed time to sort out what had happened—that last week, that last night with Aviva.

In Salamanca, I had requests, too, from other cellists—younger musicians wanting master classes, letters of introduction to conductors, or my approval for recordings they had made. I took this role seriously, enjoying the chance to help others and to establish high standards, not only for music, but for behavior. I kept a close eye on the rising stars of the day, and did not lend my name lightly to others’ pursuits. How good it felt to be in control again, to have my views sought, my advice heeded.

Of course, I continued to write to Aviva. I couldn’t have abandoned her completely as she was that last night, but I couldn’t have stayed. And yet, much as I tried to forget what had happened next, it kept coming back to me.

“I’ll do anything you want,” she had said, the towel loose around her chest, eyelids heavy. When I wrapped my arms around her, they found dead flesh. Sharp elbows collided with my chest; cold, damp hair flicked against my cheek. I opened my eyes in time to see her lean back into the bed, one tear running sideways, across the bridge of her nose, expression fixed halfway between submission and revulsion. Suddenly she sat upright, shouting. My palm stung, though I had no awareness of using it. But there was the proof, blooming across her reddening cheek, the sight of which only fueled my wrath.

They say that empathy and compassion are the first steps toward peace. But the empathy I felt in that moment brought no one peace. Because I did not come closer to understanding Aviva in that moment; I came closer to understanding Don Miguel Rivera. I felt the frustration he must have felt, the fury that comes when a person has not bent to your will, when a situation cannot be endured, when humiliation overwhelms your senses. I almost believed in that moment that I could make her obey me, and love me—then everything would be better. I did not do what Don Rivera did, or what Aviva’s own teacher had done, or what Franco and his men in Morocco had done and would do again—but I came close enough to taste what they had tasted. Sand and sweat, salt and blood—the taste of passion, pain, and justification.

I had never been so angry in my life, or so afraid. I walked out of that hotel room without speaking. I took the next train out of Germany, feeling that I had escaped just in time. From that moment, my life changed again. I gave up, finally, on personal satisfaction. I became more wholly dedicated to practical concerns, to fighting an enemy I finally understood.

 

Al-Cerraz was in Málaga, on the southern coast, when I returned to Spain.

We’d planned to join him in Barcelona in April, with ample time to discuss programs, to have some new photographs taken to keep Biber happy, and to sort through the recording offers he had forwarded, as well as to rehearse before we commenced our summer tour.

I knew I would have to tell Al-Cerraz what had happened in Germany—at least enough to explain Aviva’s changed appearance if she returned, or her absence if she did not. But there was no point in alarming him if there was still a chance that everything would soon be set right—or right enough. And so I delayed, hoping each day for a letter or a telegram from Aviva, something more than the short note she had sent me as soon as I’d arrived back in Spain, in which she had apologized for her behavior and forgiven me for mine. She had written:

 

I know that wasn’t the real you in that hotel room. It’s easy for me to believe, since I know that wasn’t the real me.

 

I had written back:

 

I’m sorry, too. Let’s not talk of it again. Just come and we will perform together, like old times.

 

But she sent no indication that she had decided one way or another.

If Al-Cerraz had any sense that our concert season faced disruptions, he would have been expecting public difficulties, not private ones. Across Spain, the political climate had been tense for several months. The dictator Primo de Rivera had lost the support of the army and stepped down, to be replaced by another bland dictator who didn’t last long enough to make an impression. Since then, the King had agreed to municipal elections. Posters, flyers and banners papered every lamppost. Early polls predicted an antimonarchical landslide, even with the rural vote controlled by the headstrong political bosses.

I met Al-Cerraz at his hotel on April 12, and we spent the day together going through the motions of preparing a tour. A photographer met us in the lobby to discuss his fees and schedule a session. Al-Cerraz showed the man what we already had: a horribly dated photo of him and me from ten years earlier and a beautiful shot of Aviva, problematic only because we weren’t in it with her. She’d had it taken months earlier in Berlin—face forward, slim nose, darkly shaded eyes; the top of her head covered by a fashionable, nearly brimless cloche, with brown curls on each side of her face. She looked so well, I couldn’t bear to tell him.

That following night we had dinner at an outside table on the Ram-bias. Al-Cerraz said, “Funny that she hasn’t telegraphed the hotel. Maybe they lost it. I suppose we should stop by the station tomorrow morning, in case she’s on the 11:15 coming south.”

A paperboy ran by, calling out the latest headlines.

I cleared my throat. “It might not be the best time for a tour.”

Al-Cerraz let his gaze wander to the boy, galloping away from us with a fat sheaf of papers under one arm. “The election? No matter who wins, someone will dispute it. It will drag on for months. It will be the same old mess it always is. You can wake me when it’s over.”

“Yes—I mean, no.” A waiter came to clear our dishes. “I meant the tour might not work without Aviva. I don’t think she’s coming.”

“That’s ridiculous. Have you heard from her?”

“Not recently . . .”

“There you have it. Of course she’s coming. We’ll go to the station tomorrow.”

“And if she’s not on the morning train?”

“Well, there are only two—the 11:15 or the 2:38. She knows we have a concert in one week. I wrote her a letter explaining everything we’d need to do first. She’ll be here tomorrow at the latest.”

“And if she isn’t?”

He didn’t respond.

I said, “You haven’t heard from her in weeks either, have you?”

The waiter brought us coffees that cooled, untouched, on the table.

“It’s my fault,” Al-Cerraz said finally. “That argument I had with her, back in the fall, the last time I saw her”—he mulled it over, struggling with his memories—“I thought we’d patched it up. But maybe not.”

“Well, she and I had arguments, too,” I said quickly—cringing as I said it, because as true and innocent as the words were, the intentions behind them were not. It would be so easy to let Al-Cerraz think he was to blame. “One really bad argument at the end,” I tried to say, more forcefully and honestly. “It wasn’t pretty. I have to say—she wasn’t well. Not at all . . .”

The catch in my voice caught me unaware. I tried to speak again and then gave up, and finally hailed the waiter angrily, to tell him that the coffees were cold.

Al-Cerraz studied me warily.

After a while, I said, “Maybe it’s impossible to rescue a person.”

“I don’t know. I’ve been rescued two or three times in a day—and that was before dinner.” He smiled and patted my shoulder. “I remember when I came to see you in Madrid. I had to throw you into a pond just to shake some sense into you. Some people would call that a rescue.”

It wasn’t a fair comparison. But all I said was, “What I did to her was worse.”

“I trust that it wasn’t.” He looked at me more sternly. “You know, losing hope is what gets people in the most trouble.”

“She’s in a fantasy world. Her problem isn’t losing hope, it’s about seeing clearly—”

“I wasn’t talking about Aviva,” he interrupted. “I was talking about you.”

 

The next day a telegram came at breakfast—not from Aviva but from Biber, explaining that our Madrid concert was being postponed, due to concern about the election and the mayhem that might ensue in the coming week if a new dictator arose.

“Well, let’s just cancel then,” Al-Cerraz said without looking up from the newspaper he had opened to the sport pages.

“Madrid?”

“All of it. The spring and summer tour.”

He wasn’t upset. “So we had another year together, because of her. We made one great record. I’m back on my feet; you’re busier than ever.”

“That’s it?”

“When she’s done with Weill and his projects, she’ll come back.” He closed his newspaper. “Find somewhere to spend your energies. Create something beautiful. Be the kind of person she’d want to come back to, if you’re still thinking along those lines.”

 

Later that day, in a cab bound for the train station, I asked him, “Where will you go?”

“Málaga.”

“Whenever you’re not touring—always Málaga.”

“It’s warm.”

“The entire south of Spain is warm this time of year.”

“No,” he laughed. “I mean it’s very warm.”

“Well, I suppose—” I stopped. “You don’t mean Doña de Larrocha?”

His mustache twitched. “She is recently widowed.”

“I’m sorry.”

“I’m not. Anyway, with liberalism running amok, the communists will be terrifying the latifundistas”—they were the owners of the immense southern farms. “She has Civil Guards to watch her fields, but at her manor house, Doña de Larrocha will want another man around, to look after things.”

“What will you do—guard the front door with a pitchfork?”

“I think she has one of those old blunderbusses in a back closet. Word is that once they get the eight-hour workday passed, the workers will have more leisure than they know what to do with. They say the braceros’ plan is to gather up all the wives and daughters, to create orgies of ‘obligatory free love.’ If I fail to stop that from happening, and the forces of free love break down our door, then I will enjoyably submit to the insurrection. If I manage to keep those scoundrels at bay, Doña de Larrocha will shower me with amorous gratitude. That is, more than she already has . . .”

I held up one hand. “Don’t feel you need to share the details.”

But he couldn’t contain himself. “I’m not talking about physical relations, Feliu. I’m talking about money. She has paid all my debts, every last one. Every last cent to Thomas Brenan. My future compositions are mine alone.”

He grew more serious. “I was still willing to tour, but the truth is I don’t have to anymore. I am free.”

I smiled. “Free from everyone except Doña de Larrocha.”

But he wouldn’t let me put a damper on his happiness. “Some of her wealthy neighbors are leaving for Sevilla or the south of France—or at least sending their money there. But she’s a tough lady.” He smiled, savoring the thought. “She’s like one of those prize bulls in their special pastures, glowering at the mischievous boys who stroll past, daring them to annoy her.”

 

Al-Cerraz got out at the train station. I stayed in the back of the cab, brooding, until the driver asked a second time, “Where to?”

“Anywhere.”

He dropped me on the Ramblas. I paid for one overpriced drink at a wobbly table in the flow of pedestrian traffic, remembering how my mother had grieved over her lost grocery money on our first day in Barcelona. With the midday sun beating down on my head, I left a tip that was more than the cost of the drink, went to another café table under an awning, and ordered a coffee I barely touched. The waiter picked up my cup and saucer, wiped the table, and set it down again, eyeing the line of waiting patrons, but I refused to be rushed. The air was warm, the boulevard’s graceful plane trees were green. Though I wasn’t hungry, I ordered a cold cod salad, just to be left in peace. Everyone seemed to be out on the boulevard today, waiting for something. A popping sound at another café several doors down caused dozens of heads to turn, but it wasn’t a pistol or explosive, just champagne.

Al-Cerraz had left me with the program materials we’d been assembling—worthless now. I thought about dropping the whole envelope into the nearest garbage bin, but then I remembered the publicity photos inside. I took out Aviva’s again and stared at it. The longer I looked, the more this perfect image crowded out the last real images I’d seen of her, coming out of the bathroom, sitting on the bed, looking at me as if I were her captor, or worse.

I was still studying that photo when the news came. I heard it from the waiter who brought my salad. He kept dashing between my table and the café kitchen, where the staff had their ears pressed to a radio: King Alfonso was leaving the country, bound for exile, possibly in Italy. I listened intently, ready to hear who the next dictator might be, and in what manner these latest pro-Republican elections would be suppressed. But there was no mention of a dictator, or of any sort of conservative backlash.

When the next announcement came, the café erupted, its patrons spilling into the street. One and then two waiters ran out and pulled off their aprons. A little boy shinnied up a lamppost and began to sing indecipherable words at the top of his lungs. A man who had just bought flowers began to hand them out, and then ran back for more, but the flower seller distrusted the gleam in his eye and waddled to the front of her kiosk to pull the metal shutters closed with a long hooked pole. Her reaction goaded him; he reached around her for the flowers while she brandished her pole at him, prepared to strike. Other sellers, equally wary of anarchy, began to close up their kiosks and follow the crowd up the street, to any café with standing room. An older man sitting in the sun next to me pushed away his plate, stood, and said to his wife calmly but knowledgeably, “They’ll let all the prisoners out—the innocent ones and the common criminals, too. Best to be getting home.”

Merriment, disbelief, joyful tears—all of it flooded the Ramblas that hour, that day, and into the raucous evening. There it was, that word, on everyone’s tongues: República. The Second Republic. The First Republic, in 1873, when my own parents were children, had lasted only eleven months—and yet they’d talked about it for years, a time when colors were brighter, food tasted better, and music was everywhere. Now people were saying that a general election was yet to be held, but procedural challenges aside, the unthinkable had happened already. The King had admitted defeat, and no one had rushed forward to usurp parliamentary leadership, no martial law had been imposed. Could this republic be permanent? Was democracy possible?

The dancing started. A group of older women set their handbags in the middle of a circle, joined hands, and began to perform the sardana, a Catalan dance that would one day symbolize political defiance, but on this day was simply a spontaneous expression of unity and joy. And from a fourth-floor window overlooking the street, a radio blared the triumphant strains of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony.

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.