Authors: Andromeda Romano-Lax
"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.