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.

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.”

Al-Cerraz exhaled ruefully. “Is that how long it’s been? He may die with the Republic, if what we hear in Málaga is true.”

The most recent elections, in February, had transferred power yet again, from the right-wing parties that had held it during the two-year Bienio Negro back to the left, which finally and belatedly had managed to assemble a Popular Front. Even its superior resources, which funded an immense propaganda campaign—ten thousand campaign posters and fifty million leaflets—had not allowed the right to retain its grip. In my own party, however, we knew better than to celebrate a lopsided victory too freely. In the parlance of el toreo, we knew that a wounded bull is more savage than ever, and that a matador is most likely to be gored when his back is turned. That is why I had come to speak with Al-Cerraz.

I smoothed a hand through the thin hairs blowing up from my mostly bald pate, and launched into my speech. “Catching the eye and the ear of the people—that is the key to everything, these days. We need every artist, every writer, every musician who has ever spent time in the public eye—”

“But Feliu,” he said, leaning his forearms on the fence, “the left is going to lose.”

“We won in February,” I said. As if he couldn’t see through me; as if he didn’t understand what I, what everyone, feared. Parliamentary democracy was in its last throes; talk of revolution and counterrevolution occupied all sides. Military zealots clamored for martial law. The fascist Falange was more powerful than ever.

“It’s a dangerous game,” Al-Cerraz started to say, and for a moment I thought he was talking politics. But he was staring at the bull again. “You see those caramel-colored horns? They’re deadly sharp at the tip. Not filed. They say bulls use their horns like a cat uses its whiskers, to estimate the width of something, to know where they’re aiming. If the bull thinks his horns end there, and the owner files them to here”—he narrowed the span of his upraised hands—“then the bull aims wrong. But that’s cheating.”

I mumbled an assent, then tried to steer the conversation around to politics again. “The Republicans aren’t stupid. They sacked Franco as chief of staff and sent him off to the Canary Islands. And the other generals, too—Goded, Mola—they’re scattered to the four corners. Their most devout army followers are in Morocco, too far away to do harm.”

“Morocco,” he sighed. “You know, when they have sandstorms in Africa, we wake up to yellow grit in our sheets. It’s not that far, really.”

I tilted my face toward the sun and closed my eyes. “Justo, please listen to what I’m saying. We’d like your help.”

He watched the bull in silence for a while. Then he said, “I’m glad you came. And I’m glad you asked. Doña de Larrocha and I get along because she needs me. That is a condition I understand and cultivate.

“Sin embargo,” he paused dramatically, “I visited Barcelona last year. In the streets—well, I’m sure you’ve seen them—they were selling these sheets of Republican ballads. Sorry, not Republican—more anarchist, I suppose, glory of the worker and that sort of thing. I bought one to look at. I studied it for ten minutes, but I couldn’t understand it. I went up to a shoeshine boy whose box was painted black and red. ‘Qué quieres tú?’ he says, looking at my suit. ‘Tú,’ he says, not ‘Usted.’ ‘What’s up?’ he says to me, not ‘Buenos días,’ even though he can tell from my clothes I could give him a tip bigger than what he earns all day—if tipping were still legal.

“And I know I’m asking the right boy. I show him the lyric sheet and I ask him how the tune goes, since there aren’t any notes printed. ‘Any way you like,’ he says. I figure he is being sassy, but we talk for a while, and I realize he means it. He can sing the song a dozen ways. They sell these lyric sheets all over, different songs every block, so that all the leftists can lift their botas and belt it out together. The music doesn’t matter, just the foolish, sentimental words.

“Feliu,” he said. “We’re living in a time of messages, not art.”

“I suppose.”

He continued, “I have tried, these last years, to stay out of the public eye. I am not a great communicator—sometimes my right hand doesn’t talk to my left—”

“Coming from a pianist, that’s ridiculous.”

He continued, “That beast over there doesn’t know what’s coming. But we do. I recommend the middle road.”

“But you’re not middle—middle is moderate, loyalist, pro-democracy . . .”

“No. The other middle.”

“Which is?”

“Survival.”

 

Our plan for the next day was to watch the encierro, during which Doña de Larrocha’s bull and five others destined for the ring would be set loose to run through streets at one end of Málaga, chasing any youths who chose to risk their lives on the wrong side of the barricades. We would convene again several hours later at the plaza de toros, where the six dazed and furious bulls would be waiting in dark pens for the main event. Doña de Larrocha’s “Flor” would be second.

At the last minute, though, the encierro was called off. No one seemed to know why. Al-Cerraz and I circled the neighborhood where it was supposed to have been held. Walking down a narrow street between two high walls strung with clotheslines, we found ourselves surrounded by men in dark pants, collarless open-necked shirts, dark caps. Al-Cerraz, always a fastidious dresser, had become even more formal with age. A short man with curly red hair grabbed his tie and yanked it. Another man jabbed at his fine hands and polished nails. “My girlfriend doesn’t have hands this pretty,” the stranger simpered in falsetto.

It was like a scene from a schoolyard; I found myself stifling nervous laughter. I told myself these men were only confused, bored like us, frustrated by the cancellation of the encierro. But the way they studied Al-Cerraz and me—our clothes, our hands, our nails—told me differently. I noticed the bulge of a pistol tucked inside one man’s waistline, and a bandanna held taut between another man’s purpled fists.

“Work,” the redhead said. “What kind of work do you do?”

Al-Cerraz didn’t answer.

The pistolero grabbed at his waist and I saw, to my great relief, that it wasn’t a pistol he was harboring after all, it was a hammer. But my relief ebbed when the stranger grabbed Al-Cerraz’s wrist with one hand and brandished the hammer in the other, snarling, “Why do you need hands this pretty?”

Al-Cerraz didn’t move, his hand still extended, like a sleepwalker, even when the man let go of his wrist and grabbed for mine.

“How about you?” the redhead demanded, yanking my right hand.

“Olives,” I said.

He laughed. “With these hands?”

I yanked my right hand away and gave him my other, palm up. “I’m left-handed.”

“Look at this,” he said, admiring the calloused pads on my fingertips.

“Granada?” he said.

“Campo Seco. Near Barcelona.”

At the end of the street, another man whistled. The redhead dropped my hand and, without another word, the thugs moved on, leaving Al-Cerraz and me under the clothesline’s sheets and bloomers, sweating.

“Are you thirsty?” Al-Cerraz asked.

“Terribly.”

 

Continuing toward the bullring, we found refuge in a café, where we tried to make light of the confrontation, toasting ourselves for not having wet our pants in the face of danger. Still, the incident hung over us.

After the first round Al-Cerraz grew quieter still, and I thought he was brooding on the thugs again. But when he spoke he said, “Changing times have hurt la Doña, too. She still provides me with an allowance of sorts, but it isn’t enough.”

I nodded sympathetically. “Do you want me to buy the next round?”

“Gracias. Muy amable.”

We enjoyed a second. Without apology, he stuck me with the bill for a third. I refused his direct request for a fourth. At that point, Al-Cerraz rose unsteadily and told me to hold our table while he stepped outside. From my seat, I watched as he unfolded a piece of heavily marked paper from his pocket and waved it in front of passersby.

The crowd heading west, toward the plaza de toros, was growing heavier by the minute. Al-Cerraz darted from one pedestrian to the next, talking, gesturing, bowing, apologizing, tapping a shoulder here, pointing to a pocket there, pressing his lips together to hum. I tried to call him back to our table inside the café, but he gestured defiantly—stay there. I pointed to my watch. He squinted toward the end of the block and flapped his hands. Just wait.

My curiosity was unbearable. “Está bien—” I said finally, joining him on the sidewalk, where a young man in canvas trousers was inspecting the sheet. “What is this about?”

“I was closing a sale.”

“What?”

“In order to buy the next round.”

“You’ve had enough. And we’re out of time.”

“I insist on paying you back for the last two, then. I need some money in my pocket, in any case.” He turned back to resume his pitch.

“Give me that,” I said. “Whatever it is, I’ll buy it.”

The young man had been ready to walk away, but my sudden interest gave him pause. “Hum it again,” he said.

Al-Cerraz held the paper in his left hand and conducted with his right, while he hummed the first few bars of an unfamiliar melody.

“I don’t know,” the young man said.

“Give it to your girl. Tell her it was written in her honor. There’s no two like it.”

“You don’t have other copies?”

“Other melodies, yes. But no other copies of this melody. I write down something once, and then it lives its own life—”

I interrupted. “You’re selling one of your compositions on the street? And you don’t have another copy of it?”

“Trying to . . .” Al-Cerraz grumbled.

“Let me see another,” the young man said.

Al-Cerraz fished another folded paper from his pocket. Facing me, he said, “Those lyric sheets in Barcelona gave me the idea. Why not?”

But without a familiar melody, and without lyrics, the young man wasn’t interested. When he walked away, I said to Al-Cerraz, “You have a pocketful of these? That’s quite a development.”

He shrugged. “Yes, just a few years ago, I would have thought so, too. Once I stopped trying to write my masterpiece, my obra maestra, an endless number of obras mínimas spilled out. Like the little black notebooks I used to keep when we toured—full of overheard sounds and mental clutter.” He waved his hand over them. “But they’re worthless, of course—as are any unconnected fragments. Like your political parties on the left . . .”

I ignored the jab. “That’s what you’ve been working on, then?”

“Yes.”

“Since . . . ?”

“After Burgos. After I threw away everything.”

“You shouldn’t give up. Brahms spent fourteen years writing his first symphony.”

“I’m not Brahms.”

I tried again. “Don’t give up is all I meant.”

“Don’t worry about that,” he said, forcing a note of cheer into his voice. “I don’t give up any of my bad habits.”

 

At the plaza de toros, we found our seats in the shade. Doña de Larrocha called out to Al-Cerraz from amidst a gaggle of her friends, pursing her dazzling red lips to blow him a kiss. I’d stayed in her home once, years ago, and performed for her friends, but she barely acknowledged me now. Al-Cerraz asked if she knew why the encierro had been canceled, and I strained to hear her answer. Evidently, there had been some threats that someone would try to sabotage the street event.

“Escandaloso,” murmured the woman behind her.

“Qué lástima,” from the one to her left.

“Qué vergüenza!” This from her right.

Across the ring from us, the sun seats were empty of all but a dozen spectators, and they filed out after the first matador had killed his bull. On our side of the ring, the crowd cheered wildly, tossing botas and flinging handkerchiefs.

I studied the empty seats opposite, ear tilted toward a growing rumble that originated from somewhere beyond the arena, accompanied by a heavy knocking sound far below our seats. I turned to question Al-Cerraz, but he and the rest of the party were cheering even louder as the matador circled the ring grandly, followed by his team, who with the aid of horses were dragging the dead bull. The two men who were reapplying the white powder line around the sullied ring heard what I was hearing, though. I saw them lift their heads in the direction of the noise—the rumble again, and the heavy knocking, as if the Doña’s bull, due next to fight, was thrusting its unfiled horns into the wood of the paddock door.

Just as the matador finished his celebratory perambulation, the paddock door flew open. Doña de Larrocha’s bull staggered forward a few steps, head low, and collapsed. There was a long silence as the bull’s blood seeped into the sand. The matador had stopped and turned, weaponless hands flexing nervously, as if fearing that his own vanquished bull had risen from the dead. Then the crowd let out a collective gasp. Doña de Larrocha’s bull was sliding backward, into the dark paddock, centimeter by centimeter. Someone on my left pointed at a rope cinched around one of its back legs. We watched until the rope slackened. Another pause. And then—finally—the surge. Men began to spill out of the shadows, from behind barriers and stalls. One of them ran to the bull’s neck, and in a flash of silver slashed it—rather humanely, I couldn’t help thinking.

Doña de Larrocha shrieked. I pressed my back as flat against my seat as I could while Al-Cerraz and two other men pushed past to get to her. My view thus blocked, I didn’t see the next minute or so, as the forty-odd peasants below succeeded in pulling the bull back into its paddock and out a back door, to the growing cheers of hundreds more hungry braceros and workers in the streets outside. Near us, a white-haired man in the regalia of a retired general brandished a pistol and shot it wildly, managing only to graze one of the picadores’ horses below.

By the time my view was clear, Doña de Larrocha had shifted from despair to anger, and was screaming at the top of her lungs, “Cobardes!”—Cowards!—to the matador’s cuadrillas below, who, though armed with lances, had stepped aside once the peasants broke into the ring.

Al-Cerraz tried to comfort her, first with tenderness—“Yes, sweetness; a shame, unspeakable . . .” Finally he lost his grip and shouted, “The damn bull was going to die in ten minutes anyway!”

His flood of immediate apologies did nothing to assuage her, and as she attacked him with her fan, she shouted, “They have no respect for ritual!”

But she was wrong. The peasants who dragged the dead bull away were traditionalists, too. Even with the Civil Guard due to arrive at any moment, they took time to sever the bull’s ears and toss them into the ring.

 

Al-Cerraz did not forgive the peasants for what they’d done, upsetting his lady friend, ruining the day, making a mess of one of the few pleasures that remained in Málaga for a person of moderate means. He was not a political man. He drew his conclusions about world events based on personal experiences, personal affinities, the way others’ needs intersected with his own—as we all do, though I wouldn’t have admitted it at the time. I cut my visit to Málaga short. I knew I’d lost him to my cause: the Republic’s cause.

For some people, the civil war had started more than a year earlier, when the Asturian miners’ revolt was viciously suppressed by rightist military forces, under the leadership of then—Chief of Staff Franco, before he’d lost that post. I’ve said that the civil war started for me that day in the bullring. But it wasn’t at the moment when Doña de Larrocha’s bull was killed; it wasn’t while she was screeching, weeping, shouting the beast’s name. It was minutes later, as we prepared to leave the arena. She drew herself up, tall and suddenly stoic, and turned to the cluster around her—me, Justo, the lady who had been sitting behind her, the white-haired general with the bad aim. She said, “But it won’t be a long wait, will it?”

They all shook their heads in unison: No, it won’t. Not long.

“Let Flor be remembered,” she said, “as the first who spilled his blood for a good cause. There will be others.”

Cierto. Certainly. Yes, there will.

 

And maybe people were always saying these things—claiming special knowledge, forecasting doom or victory and the settling of scores, threatening revenge. In fact, that was just the problem in Spain—the long accumulation of such prophecies and grudges. I knew I had my own. In any decade it could have happened. But in July, a month after Doña de Larrocha’s bull died ten minutes prematurely, it did happen. One spark leaped into a century’s accumulated kindling.

What happened then surprised everyone. We expected a brief uprising, or alzamiento, leading to a swift change in power; instead we got a prolonged civil war. Franco was not the mastermind, nor a likely figurehead. He was not Spain’s Hitler, but only a general who emerged, quickly and stealthily, into a position of power. At moments, he seemed to be unexceptional—“Miss Canary Islands 1936,” the other anti-Republican generals had nicknamed him ironically just weeks earlier, expressing their bemused disdain for his timidity—his timidity!—while he stewed in the tropical Isla Tenerife heat, waiting for orders, ready to support any number of causes. But he wasn’t timid at all—just opportunistic and cold-blooded.

Also, lucky. Destined, many would later claim. The Moors, and men like my brother, who served alongside Franco during the Africa campaigns, had called his invincibility baraka. It explained why he had survived numerous near-death experiences, why he could advance on a white steed through whirlwinds of sand and clouds of smoke, not only undamaged but strengthened, as if his success fed upon others’ tragedies.

If the military commander for the island of Gran Canaria hadn’t died on a shooting range on July 16, conveniently and mysteriously, Franco wouldn’t have received military clearance to attend the funeral, traveling unsuspected from nearby Tenerife the next day. That evening, Spanish garrisons in the Moroccan cities of Melilla, Tetuan, and Ceuta rose against the Republic. The next morning, July 18, Franco and another general, Orgaz, took over Las Palmas, on Gran Canaria.

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.

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.