She sat for a while, contemplating the page she finished typing. Engrossed in it, unaware of its content but conscious of the porosity of the paper, the impression each character had left. Black ink. Alongside the typewriter, there was a stack of handwritten pages with green blotting paper between them. Gerta twisted the roller, removed the sheet, and began reading it closely: “In the face of Nazism spreading itself throughout Europe, we are left with only one solution: uniting Communists, Socialists, Republicans, and other Leftist parties, into one anti-Fascist coalition that will facilitate the formation of wide-ranging political groupings (…). The alliance of all democratic forces into one Popular Front.”
“What do you think, Captain Flint?” she said, looking up at the shelf where they set up the trapeze for the bird to do its stunts. Since André had left for Spain, she found herself talking more to the parrot. Another of her tactics for combating loneliness. Just like her return to being her old militant self. She felt the urgent need to help, be useful, serve a purpose. But in what? Not a clue. She tried to find out by going back to the gatherings at Chez Capoulade, which had only grown more popular with time. Woman-echo, Woman-reflection, Woman-mirror. Inside, there was always too much cigarette smoke. Too much noise. Gerta grabbed her glass of vodka, still half-full, and went outside to sit on the edge of the sidewalk and smoke a cigarette. She sat there, hugging her knees, looking up at the patchy sky, a star here, another there, between eave and eave, with a faint orange glow toward the west. She felt good like this, breathing in the aroma of lime trees during spring’s recent debut. The silence of that city appealed to her, with its labyrinth of stoned promenades creeping down to the river. That calm brought her peace. It allowed her to organize her thoughts. She remained like this awhile, until someone placed their hand on her shoulder. It was Erwin Ackerknecht, her old friend from Leipzig.
“We need someone to type the text to the manifesto in French, English, and German,” he said, taking a seat next to her on the pavement. “The more intellectuals we can gather the better. We have to make this congress a success.” He was referring to the International Congress of Writers for the Defense of Culture, which was to be held in Paris in the early fall. Erwin took his time rolling a cigarette between his fingers, then wetting the paper with his lips to seal it. “Aldous Huxley and Forster have already confirmed their attendance,” he added, “as well as Isaac Babel and Boris Pasternak from the USSR. Representing us will be Bertolt Brecht, Heinrich Mann, and Robert Musil, from Austria. The Americans still haven’t confirmed … It’s important that this document reaches everyone, Gerta, each one of them, in their own language. Can we count on you for this?”
“Of course,” she said. She took a sip of her vodka drink, allowing the alcohol to find its way into her veins, passing through her heart and up to her brain. She found it tasted harsh, mixed with the tobacco. Brushing a patch of hair off her forehead, she looked out into the sky. Like just another sentry in the night, Saint-Germaindes-Prés’ thousand-year-old abbey and its Romanesque bell tower stood tall, framed in black.
In recent weeks, the surrealists’ controversies had shifted away from poetic boundaries to concentrate instead on the reality that was being reported in the media. Their desires grew dim, and the small group from the Left Bank temporarily abandoned the astral heights of Mount Olympus and muses with green-colored eyes, so they could take part in the world’s grand whirlwind. While they awaited further news, a latent conflict persisted between those who accepted the revolutionary party’s plans and those who still aspired to unite the revolution with poetry. It was not a trifling matter. Walking down the boulevard one afternoon, André Breton, on his way to buy tobacco at the shop next to Dôme, bumped into the Russian Stalinist Ilya Ehrenburg, just as the latter was leaving. Neither chose their words carefully. The poet took a deep breath and, on the same impulse, punched Ehrenburg in the nose with a crack that sounded as if a chair had broken. It wasn’t a premeditated act. It simply happened. Caught by surprise, the Russian didn’t have time to react. Weakened by the blow, he fell to his knees, dripping a scandalously red-colored blood over the gray pavement. Afterward, as if they were all possessed, it turned into a messy battle with everyone against everyone. There were insults; some people got up to help the wounded man, while others tried to calm the poet’s fury. They tried to lift the Russian, get him out of there, until someone shouted something about calling the police, and in that moment they all decided to walk away from the boxing match between mastiffs until the next time. A few days later, René Crevel, the poet in charge of trying to make peace between the surrealists and the Communists, committed suicide in his kitchen by opening the gas valve.
“It’s always necessary to say good-bye,” he wrote, having lost hope. “Tomorrow, you will return to the fog of your origins. To a city, red and gray, your colorless room, its silver walls, and with windows that open directly onto the clouds to which you are sister. To search for the shadow of your face throughout the sky, the gestures of your fingers…”
That was the state of things when Gerta found herself obliged to choose between two options she didn’t like. It was no secret how dissidents in the Soviet Union were repressed, but in that small Montparnasse community, the sacred dwelling of the gods, many were unsure whether to denounce Stalin’s abuses or keep them quiet in order to preserve the unified band of anti-Fascists.
She thought for a while, as if floating over an abyss, with the manifesto in one hand and a cigarette in the other. She wasn’t reading the words, just smoking and looking at the white fabric covering the sofa, and the shelf with the clay figurines that Ruth bought from a peddler. Despite all their efforts to convert that place into a home, it never stopped being a temporary camp: the taped-up glass on the kitchen doors, a map of Europe in the living room, the hallways lined with stacks of books on the floor, a small bottle with lilacs in the window, random photographs tacked onto the wall … André, with the sleeves of his blazer rolled up, waving good-bye from the Gare de l’Est. She missed him, of course she did. But it wasn’t something irreparable; more like a gentle sensation untangling itself imperceptibly. Without a loud roar, but with a kind of familiarity. Nothing serious. She had opened up the window and propped her elbows on the windowsill when a breeze came her way, refreshing her skin and memory: mornings spent running around the neighborhood with the Leica; André’s teachings, his way of installing himself in time without ever looking at a watch, as if it was up to everyone else to adapt to his rhythm; the day he arrived with Captain Flint on his shoulder; the false negligence with which he kept his developing liquids on the top shelf of the bathroom; his way of always showing up at the last minute with a bottle of wine under his coat and a basket of trout, fresh off the boat; the way he laughed while turning on the kitchen stove, while Chim spread out the tablecloth and Ruth removed the plates and glasses from the cupboard and arranged the silverware on the table in pure gala style. The quick carelessness in all his gestures. His arrogance at times, fused with a peculiar aptitude to be what he didn’t seem to be and to appear as he wasn’t. Behind which mask was he hiding? Which was he? The happy bohemian and seducer or the lonely man who could sometimes fall into silence on the other side of a collapsing bridge? “I’m nothing, nothing.” Gerta remembered how he told her this near the edge of the Seine. He used his fragility to hide his pride. Perhaps all his charm was rooted in his ability to pretend: in the shyness he instinctively hid his courage within, his way of smiling, or shrugging his shoulders, as if nothing was wrong, when in reality he was furious. So many contradictions: his blazer hanging open, those strong hands, his worldly air, and that rare ingenuity of an obedient child when he allowed someone to counsel him on his wardrobe. But that costume game brought results. If it wasn’t for that respectable new image that wearing a jacket and tie gave him, Berliner Illustrierte Zeitung magazine would never have given him that assignment he was now on in Spain. At first he was hesitant about accepting the offer, because the magazine, like all German publications, found itself part of Goebbels’s iron-fisted propaganda machine. But he wasn’t exactly in a position to be able to choose or reject his projects. All he was asked to do was interview the Basque boxer Paulino Uzcudun, scheduled to fight the German heavyweight champion Max Schmeling in an upcoming match in Berlin.
André’s fascination with Spain was instantaneous. There were days when he returned to his pensión, and as big as he was, he’d throw himself on the bed listening to La Niña de Marchena or to Pepita Ramos, and it reminded him of home. The country reminded him a great deal of Hungary, those rowdy streets, the tavern scene with its strings of garlic hanging from the ceilings, wineskins filled with red wine, stages for flamenco … The Gypsy within him did not hold back. He joined right in, taking portraits of those around him with such a penetrating intensity it was as if he were trying to rob them of their souls. When he was finished with his sports assignment in San Sebastián, he continued onto Madrid to cover the huge protest on April 14, the fourth anniversary of the Republic’s proclamation. There was a charge in the air, and André could feel the tension in the streets. How they hated the Confederación Española de Derechas Autónomas (CEDA), the right-wing coalition that, less than a year ago, government-led, had launched an attack on the miners rebellion in Asturias. The wounds were still fresh, but the political issue did not stop the Spaniards from celebrating their holidays and religious festivals as they wished. Sevilla’s Holy Week, for instance, where André had arrived by train, along with a thousand other visitors, to soak up the imagery: women with mantillas and pinned carnations cheering on the passage of Jesús del Gran Poder, singing songs of devotion to all the passing brotherhoods, the Nazarenos dressed as Ku Klux Klan, zigzagging through the narrow streets and the firecracker smoke until dawn. He had never imagined a festival where the sacred and the profane were so intertwined. Observing it all objectively, with a look that still hadn’t been fully adjusted, still a bit raw and superficial but forming a new layer of skin to it all: dancers in frilly dresses stomping furiously in the April wind, young men on horseback, Premier Alejandro Lerroux touring the city in a carriage whose horses were adorned à la Andalucia, fun-loving drunks, tourists, cats perched on undulating tin-plated rooftops. An old man in his doorway sharpening a knife, next to him a small bundle covered in cloth with an opening on one side revealing the dark-skinned little face of a sleeping Gypsy girl. The war was about to begin.
“You have to experience this country,” he wrote Gerta in a letter, not knowing that in a short while she’d be traveling through it, under fire from antiaircraft weaponry, still alive within the dead lights of the cities. How strange life can be. But André couldn’t have known this as he described his impressions of the trip in an awkward German, from the American Bar at the Hotel Cristina, with a three-day-old beard, shirtless, and moneyless, after having spent the entire night drinking. “Sometimes I wish you were here” was how he finished the letter.
That he tempted everyone around him was part of his charm, as was his lack of discipline, his way of appearing self-centered and slightly conceited. A touch of womanizer in him. This, Gerta could not ignore.
Sometimes … she repeated to herself, rereading the letter. What an imbecile.