During times of universal deceit telling the truth becomes a revolutionary act.
—George Orwell
Cádiz, Spain. 1932.
For the next four years (from 1932 to 1936) they took refuge in the beauty of Cádiz, on Spain’s southwestern coast, between the Iberian border and British Gibraltar. Cicero was in his late twenties, a handsome man, with dark Slavic eyes, smooth skin, and a fine widow’s peak. His nose, like his name and his confident attitude, seemed to be Roman. He had grown to six foot three. He carried no excess fat, but was lean, and athletic. Despite all this, he was still a virgin, but quite unburdened by this.
His attentions had been diverted toward his sick pal. It seemed to him that his payment, his debt to Johan, would supersede anything he could ever feel for a girl. Subconsciously, he had accepted this in his youth, and nothing had happened so far to prompt him to consider an alternative. That remained so until, at an open-air circus on the beach during the throbbing annual carnival in Cádiz in the summer of 1932, he saw a young girl.
Twenty minutes or so into the event, a violent electric storm forced the audience, the crew, the animals, and the performers to move for cover, and hastily. Cicero stayed in his seat. He might well have been infected years earlier with Johan’s mistrust of the misanthropic umbrella, which in turn had given way to a sizzling affection for warm summer rain. Or perhaps his childhood illness had made such extravagances so much more fun to him, amusements that the fools running for cover could (sadly) never comprehend. Johan left his protégé there, announcing that his older bones were suspectible to a chill and that he was going to a favored restaurant in the back alleys of the old town to watch the flamenco girls. He would meet Cicero there.
Cicero then closed his eyes. This accentuated the feel and sound of the rain. His enjoyment was intense, but was magnified beyond his imagination when, five minutes later, he opened his eyes to see high above him a girl on the swinging trapeze, performing for him and only for him. She remained there for twenty, maybe thirty exquisite minutes, at high risk, both of falling without a safety net and from the lightning. She managed to perform without a partner, and it seemed that she did so to perfection, thoroughly reveling in the heightened peril, all glittering and inspiring. Her backdrop was dark, which only highlighted the twinkling stars on her costume and the trail of a supernova she left in her sublime arcs high above Cicero. If one stares hard enough into the night skies, the planets may change color; it seemed this girl also did this that night in Cádiz: electric blue, fire red, burnt orange, Aztec gold, and the brightest of whites, which one suspects is the very same white of the light that leads us into death. Cicero felt privileged.
Eventually she shimmied down, and Cicero was there to meet her at the bottom of the rope. She made it very easy for him to talk to her, encouraging his initial shy mutterings until his pulse had calmed, but only back to the level of someone who had just fallen in love, and for the first time.
“You looked so happy up there.”
“I might just be happier down here right now. My name is Veronica, though for their show the circus likes to call me Florita, the little flower.”
“Cicero. Emperor.”
“Emperor of where?”
“That is a secret. I might tell you one day, but I have to be on guard, you understand. There are treasonous plotters in our midst.” He wondered if he was being an idiot, but her giggles and her gentle sways in front of him suggested otherwise.
“I completely understand, Your Highness. But why did you not take cover from the rain? You will catch your death of cold.”
“It’s impossible to catch cold if one enjoys the rain. I have often suspected that this was a marvelous secret, too, but I just watched you up there, and I know that you also know this. Maybe we could keep this secret between ourselves, though?”
“I would like that. I would like that very much, Emperor Cicero.”
“Would you like to walk along the beach? We might then take a drink with a friend of mine, if you wish. He is waiting for me, and you might just like him. And he you.”
“I am all yours.”
And they walked along the beach, guided by the flickering gaslights. The rain hardened, and the swish of the tide caught their feet. Cicero told her that he had never had a girlfriend, for his hero was the Flying Dutchman, the mythical phantom sailor destined to sail his ghost ship on the high seas until he found his one true love, who would be willing to die for him. She suspected she might be dealing with a fine politician, and smiled.
Veronica pulled Cicero away from a collection of beach parasols bending threateningly in the persistent winds, and it was then that Cicero knew that Johan would simply adore her. They kissed.
When, soaked and smiling, they came into the restaurant where Johan was waiting, the aroma of apples came with them. Veronica needed not the artificial help of an eau de toilette, for her skin when mixed with the Cádiz air and the warm evening rain created something of true beauty. Johan nicknamed her Manzana.
* * *
The following night he took the couple to a picture house off the town square to see Freaks—the story of a circus of strongmen, midgets, characters with extreme deformities, and a radiant and beautiful trapeze artsist whose name was Cleopatra. They laughed throughout. The next afternoon, Veronica returned to see the film with her best friend, a bearded lady called Gertrude, but Emperor Cicero was there to meet his very own Cleopatra after the film, with an armful of tuberoses.
Veronica’s show that night made the audience gasp with delight, even more so than usual. Cicero was there, of course, and brought Johan along to witness the high pitch of her sublime art.
The next evening, Cicero asked her, “Would you, Veronica Florita Cleopatra Manzana, make the Emperor Cicero the happiest boy in Spain, and please marry him?”
She had more names than there had been days since they’d met.
“Only if you promise with all of your heart to tell me on our wedding night where you are emperor of. If you can do that . . .”
“I promise.”
“I do say yes.”
* * *
Veronica moved into the boys’ casita by the beach of La Caleta, and Johan rented a second room for himself. She continued to perform at the circus until the winter break. Cicero watched every performance from the same seat. They were married in September 1932, when Cicero stood by his promise and told his bride that he was the emperor of that place in the east to which he now pointed, that birthplace of all the Universe’s stardust and supernovas since the beginning of time. Of course, his finger was in the precise direction of Rome.
Johan’s best friend was happy, and in this, Johan knew he should take solace. He adored Veronica, for she laughed a lot and she in turn worshipped the ground Cicero seemed (in her eyes) to float above, as serenely as she did for real each evening.
Johan spent all his days in the same way by the beach between the two wonderful ancient castles of San Sebastian and Santa Catalina. Without the diversion of upheaval, movement, and war, and remaining in one place, weeks and months passed by quickly. He attempted to live vicariously, through Cicero.
Johan joined the local library under the cover of yet another false name; this time it was Pedro Alvarado. Pedro, from his friend in Portugal; Alvarado, from the label of a rather decent bottle of wine he had with him for company. He spent most of his days reading alone in a small café on the promenade by the beach. He would frequently drop what he was reading and tap out a few words on his typewriter, though he wrote no new novels during these months. Cicero did, however, mail several piles of bizarre short stories and a few clunky poems to London under the title of The Gospel According to Blanche de la Peña. Her name was such that these were published and sold well. It was around this time that Johan came upon the following in the Manchester Guardian, by the critic Archibald DeWitt-Vultura, which made him chortle and Cicero snort with delight and pride.
THEY SEEK HER HERE;
THEY SEEK HIM THERE
The mystery of the identity of Miss de la Peña has continued now for almost two decades. I suspect we shall all go to our graves unaware of her (or his) true identity. Last night, I heard chat at a dinner party that the Prime Minister is where some of the smart money may lie, violently afraid as he is since the Peking Summit to fully reveal his own born-again pacifism. Dorothy Parker’s fingerprints are suspected, too, as she is allegedly still shuddering from that emetic bloodlust in Spain. Mrs Christie? Lord Buchan? The Duke of Gloucester? Mr Compton? Mr Niven? Mr C. B. Fry?
Rumours, allegedly emanating from around the environs of Bloomsbury, of Our Blanche having revealed herself (though not in the biblical sense, sadly) in the latest adventure of Rex-Foyle are (I may confirm here in these editorial pages) wide of the mark, and likely to have been a cunning stunt of that wily old Ludgate Circus book lord, Mr Tobias Kilz. The claim that her self-portrait might be found in a mystery locker at St. Pancras station is piffle, for no such trail of clues in the text exists.
She may just as well be that fusty old gent with the twitch and the monocle opposite you on the Northern Line right now, or some dashing Brylcreemed wing-half making his debut for Charlton Athletic on Saturday. He may be the leading man (Mr Roger Livesey) or his counterpart (Miss Wendy Hiller) in Mr J. Arthur Rank’s upcoming moving picture of The White-Kilted Brigadier. Or he might not.
Surely someone reading this missive knows Miss de la Peña, either unwittingly or otherwise.
One thing that I may tell you for sure, however, is that the latest pulp instalment shall not disappoint. In fact, it could not be more exciting than if old Holmes himself had survived (or is he really keeping bees in Sussex?), returned to Blighty, and had, to an audience gasp as the credits played, revealed the grinning face of Jack the Ripper on the wireless.
Bravo, Blanche! Please just stay as unknown to us as you currently are, although you are most welcome to take high tea (or something ridiculously stronger) here at our offices on any day of any week. Your secret is safe with the Manchester Guardian, and there is no need to use the code word. Three simple winks and to whistle the first four bars of “The Colonel Bogey March” shall suffice, Prime Minister.
* * *
For companionship, Johan would engage in conversation with many of the tourists who stopped in for the café’s well-publicized and quite delicious orange ice cream. He himself preferred the café’s wine, and while he could be charming before the middle of the afternoon, he often became intrusive with his comments, which he alone seemed to find amusing, as the evenings approached. The old owner, Carlos-Ramón Kitríl, initially tolerated Johan, for he was his best customer. Latterly, Carlos-Ramón admired and possibly even loved him. He appreciated Johan’s air of eccentricity, as well as his erudition. Carlos-Ramón, in his youth, had started the superbly colorful and rich local custom of the chirigota, the bizarre, even surreal, satirical musical troupes which circulate the artistic haunts of the Old City to this day. Johan, too, was very fond of Carlos-Ramón: his ever-present generosity, his wise, creased face, and his superbly spiced Moorish pork.
The beaches, the labrynthine old town (which made Johan think of Bascarsija), and the promenades made Cádiz a quite beautiful place in the early thirties. Its bizarre geography offered a further soothing comfort to Johan, for the city lies on a narrow spit, hemmed in by the Atlantic waters as they approach the warmer, calmer Mediterranean at British Gibraltar. Cádiz displayed with chest-out civic pride the signs of her successful resistance of Napoleon, her flourishing history under Moorish and Roman occupation, and her naval traditions, for it was here where Sir Francis Drake famously singed the King of Spain’s beard.
Most evenings, Johan would dine with Veronica and Cicero, who would tell him of their days, her new routines on the trapeze, their adventures around the town or out on fishing boats. Johan was often quite tipsy at this point, and would soon be in his bed and unable to recall much detail. He was unable to recall anything of real note for Ernest until he told him that Veronica died swiftly in July 1936 after contracting typhoid.
Cicero buried her in a local cemetery. On her white limestone gravestone was engraved
VERONICA FLORITA CLEOPATRA MANZANA EMPRESS OF ROME
Cicero wept openly. Johan stared into space, but this did not mean he was not moved, for he was, and deeply so.
On the same day as her funeral, they learned that an errant right-wing general in the Spanish armed forces in Morocco, by the name of Francisco Franco, had declared a civil war. The renegades were marching up from the south and were taking all in their dusty-blood path as their own. The geography of Cádiz meant that Johan and Cicero had to move quickly. They backtracked eastward across Spain, staying in one-tavern towns. Cicero drove most of the way, with Johan stretched across the backseat, usually staring west, fully aware that the decay of his now beloved Portugal was all his fault.
Sadly, to Cicero, his logic did indeed seem to make sense.
* * *
“If I could not turn the clock back to Sarajevo in ’14, then I would return to those warm days and nights of Cádiz. The sun and the lights of the city, the shaded back alleys and the worn mosaic tiles that cooled us into a blissful serenity. I would spend a day at Carlos-Ramón’s with my friend, eating orange ice cream and drinking wine, waiting for Veronica and Cicero to appear at dusk.”
Johan picked up another letter, and passed it to Ernest.
New York City, July 6, 1936
My dearest J.,
I am returning to Europe with Carl. I have promised to show him Paris, Athens, and London. We will also be in Sarajevo. I have a pair of rooms reserved in a certain hotel near Bascarsija, where he wants to read The Arabian Nights. Oh my!
I would hate to impose, but we might even consider visiting Argona so that he may perhaps meet his grandparents.
Carl is on leave from the navy. A pair of skinny pink doughboys from Arkansas told him he has an older doppelgänger living by the last lighthouse in Europe, in Portugal. He has a crazy notion it’s you, and doggone, I think he has me convinced of it, too. Fascists be damned, we’re on your trail.
Your ever-determined Lorelei xxx