“What are you doing here?” the commandant had suddenly thundered.
“Tourist.”
“No más?”
“No más!”
“You are a Russian spy!”
A joke, surely, Abel had laughed.
“Alemán, alemán,” he had said pointing at the passport he had just handed to the commandant.
“German passport made in Paris . . . ah, ah . . . false passport! Paris . . . communist!”
The commandant had whistled. Two soldiers had appeared, frisked Abel brutally. Minutes later, his arms up in the air, bayonets in his back, he had been marched across town in the noonday sun and thrown into the dismal, overcrowded jail. On July 21, his birthday.
This photograph was the parting gift from Abel’s co-prisoner who was led out to be shot (Vigo, Spain, July 1936)
The inmates, all political prisoners, slept on the vermin-infested stone floor, got two sardines a day for food. The jailer was an old one-eyed murderer. Abel made his portrait—a profile in pencil on a piece of brown paper—and got in payment one glass of red wine and one cigarette a day.
Twice a week, at midnight, by the light of a kerosene lantern, a low-ranking officer read the names of a dozen prisoners designated to be led out and shot.
Abel had brought back two souvenirs: the snapshot of a tall young man and an empty matchbox, each given to him one midnight, and with their last embraces, by two fellow prisoners who were being led out.
V
“But we are in Paris now, safe,” I said. “Nothing has changed in our own lives. Nothing.”
I taught as before but took only one course at the university. Abel worked for long hours on large, tragic canvases that people looked away from. One of these, a prison yard, I remember well. In the foreground, crouching on bare ground, a young man in a gray-blue tunic—a quasi-medieval figure—turned unseeing white eyes toward an invisible sky. In the background—memory, nightmare, or actual scene—three men squatting on straw under a dead tree mourned the naked cadaver stretched at their feet. Right behind, dangling from a makeshift gallows, two bare bodies—one did not seem quite lifeless. Beyond it all, a sunny high wall, and peeping over it a pink rooftop.
We made a brave attempt at resuming normal life. We met our friends in the cafés, went to parties, gave parties. We did not dare to say it aloud, but yes, we knew a blight had attacked the mood of our city that neither laughter nor wine could chase away. A sure sign of it was our policemen, posted at every street corner, becoming forever suspicious. Their dark glares followed us as we walked our beloved streets, sat at the terraces of our favored cafés and under the trees of our beautiful parks. As if the madness of the Spanish Civil War had spilled over our borders.
Memories of the Spanish Civil War, 1936 (oil)
One April afternoon, the historic Basque town of Guérnica, so close to our border, was reduced to rubble by German planes. Could this be true? Newspapers had often lied. Weeks later, eyewitnesses confirmed the bombing, but by then we had already pushed the news away as if it had been only a nightmare. By summer, when Picasso’s Guérnica appeared, we debated fiercely over the artistic merits of the painting. Only the painting.
One day a letter came from a friend of Abel’s who had, a few years before, emigrated to Argentina to join an uncle who owned a factory there.
“Europe is heading for trouble,” the friend wrote. “I urge you to follow in my footsteps.” And he had enclosed with his letter a one-way boat ticket for Buenos Aires.
We had been sunning ourselves on the terrace of our hotel when Abel opened the letter. We did not speak for a long time.
One ticket, I was thinking, only one ticket. I would have gone to Buenos Aires with Abel. I would have gone to the end of the world with him.
“Which language do they speak in Argentina?” Abel suddenly asked.
“Spanish.”
“I am not going to a Spanish-speaking country.”
He held up the ticket.
“We are going to drink it,” he said.
He sold the ticket. We invited friends. Our spirits were restored. “Let’s go to Greece,” I said.
At the beginning of August, with five other artists, we boarded old Andros in Marseille. We slept on deck, we lived on deck. The Mediterranean sky was sending down dozens of shooting stars that summer, and one night, sailing through the Straits of Messina, we saw Mount Etna sending back up big, fiery bunches of them.
In Athens, after our group dispersed, Abel and I decided to cross the Peloponnese on foot. For days we walked through a nearly treeless landscape, under a cloudless sky, at the pace our donkey dictated, led by a guide who spoke classical Greek and knew where the gods had concealed rare trickles of clear, cold water.
At the Dôme, Paris, ca. 1935
Night after night, we slept under a sumptuous, infinite sky. We dreamed of walking around the world together and came to believe we could. Eastward. We would go eastward, Marco Polo’s route.
Back in Athens, we made inquiries about visas at the Turkish consulate. A French passport and a German passport? Dark glares and shaking heads. We shrugged; ah, these ever-friendly Turks! Never mind, we needed more time anyway. We went on with our great voyage, sailing from one quiet, white island to another on shabby, romantic Greek vessels. We slept, sometimes on the sands of deserted beaches, close to blue waters as quiet as a lake’s, and sometimes under the broken marble columns and altars in the temples of long-abandoned gods. Travelers were sacred in ancient Greece. This did not seemed to have changed at all; we encountered only quiet courtesy everywhere. There were perhaps only half-a-dozen French painters visiting Greece in the summer of 1937. We did not meet any other foreigners.
During the trip back, the Andros—an ancient British passenger boat sailing under the Greek flag—got tossed badly in a sudden, violent squall that sent cooking pots and deck chairs flying overboard. We held on to the mast, scared, soaked, delighted like children by that moment of danger.
VI
We returned to a Paris where gloom had tarnished the gold of autumn leaves. Our cafés were nearly deserted; most foreign artists were absent, and many French artists, donning ties and coats, had wandered to bourgeois cafés. Policemen were unfriendly, people moody. Everybody blamed the Spaniards still at war, the new suave prime minister and the one who had just fallen, the dictators strutting at our borders, and, of course, “les Anglais.”
I went back to teaching and began cross-country running in the woods—a new addiction. Abel went back to painting and making advertising posters. We moved to a new artist’s studio we loved, which was within walking distance of the Dôme, our favorite café. We gave a party. Did our best to forget the world.
For Christmas, we would go skiing in Germany. It happened that one of Abel’s brothers-in-law had come upon a beautiful, unspoiled, easily accessible place. He would secure room and board for us.
On our way, we stayed overnight in stately Stuttgart, beautiful under the snow. Christmas trees, songs—well sung—delicious pastries, good German wines—a surprise—stylish traffic policemen surrounded