improbable and intriguing. I was, at twenty-five, as fascinated by him as I had been by my mysterious ancestor when I was ten.
Both were men who had refused to submit to their lot but dared to follow a dream. So unlike the timorous, tedious men I had grown up with, uncles, cousins, schoolmates—even my beloved father—tied, all of them, to a job or a place even when they were made miserable by it.
Abel had all their qualities, besides his exotic charm, dazzling talents and the ability to turn everyday life into a disinterested adventure.
Our backgrounds and interests were so far apart that Abel and I had almost nothing to talk about. But he was the partner who could turn me into a good dancer. We danced . . . we danced.
Abel was a doer, not a talker. Had always been, he said. “In school, I covered the blackboard with drawings: raging dragons, charging soldiers, erupting volcanoes . . . whatever came to my mind. Stopped the snickering my speech defect caused among my schoolmates.”
Abel’s love letters, slipped under my door almost daily, consisted of spirited sketches and cartoons and sparse, tender, witty comments. The quasi-mute messages filled me with wonder, delight, and pride.
I didn’t have much in common with his friends. They were the Bohemians, poor and free. I was the bourgeois holding a job and studying semantics. My seven-year-old pupils saved me by turning out Chagalls, Monets, and Picassos that the Parisian artists snatched away. Some were avid collectors of children’s paintings.
I easily abandoned the group of tormented young poets I had joined for the uninhibited artists. Forgotten, the endless discussions that had led nowhere and the wistful hours spent listening to the ancient paragon Alcanter de Brahms reading his well-constructed alexandrines out of a book bound in red Moroccan leather.
“Write a sonnet!” he had admonished when I had presented my best “poeme en prose.”
In March, Hitler, undisturbed, occupied the Rhineland.
“When are they going to stop him?” Abel asked.
But “they,” England and France, quarreled, did nothing. Most of us were relieved at that. Then April came. Braziers and glass windbreakers disappeared from café terraces, pyramids of apples surged onto the vendors’ carts. In the Luxembourg Gardens, horse chestnuts lighted up a thousand candelabras of flowers. Time had come to plan the summer vacations.
“We could crisscross Spain on horseback,” Abel said.
Of course we could. We started to study Spanish.
. . .
On the thirteenth of July, a Friday, Abel departed. He would buy the horses; I would join him when school was over at the beginning of August. Artists and models gave Abel a great send-off banquet complete with speeches and admonitions. At 11 P.M., we put him on the train at the Gare d’Orsay.
Our boisterous group walked back to Montparnasse. We passed Pont Alexandre. An exalted painter climbed one of the ornamented lampposts. “Abel’s spirits have remained among us,” he proclaimed as he came down. He then climbed the facade of apartment buildings on Boulevard Saint Germain and finally came crashing down with the neon lighting of our favorite nightclub. He disappeared into the police station between two officers only to walk out one hour later, all smiles. “A votre age, Monsieur” (“At your age, sir”), the police chief had said a bit sadly as he released him.
Ah, the Paris policemen of the ’30s! They monitored traffic to let the artists’ horrendous parades proceed through the whole city. They watched with us when we burned the giant papier-mâché effigy of a bad professor on Place de la Sorbonne. And the day a dozen of us student girls, decided that the waist had to go back to its rightful place and marched down Boulevard Saint Michel, our waists cinched by wide black patent-leather belts, the policemen stopped cars and trolleys.
When did those amiable policemen, together with the good days, depart?
Less than a week after Abel’s departure, the Spanish Civil War exploded, and even if, at first, everyone I knew refused to take it seriously, I was in shock. I went through the last days of school like a sleepwalker. Then one cheerful letter from Abel arrived, dated July 15, confirming our date on August 4 at 10 A.M. in front of the post office in Vigo, Spain. Against all logic—the letter had been written before the troubles had begun—I regained confidence.
Abel in Paris, 1928
Spanish consulates and banks closed, the peseta lost all value, train tickets for Spain were no longer sold.
“Vigo is a harbor. Why don’t you take a boat?” a friend said.
Why not, indeed? I spent one whole Thursday rushing from one maritime company to another. Against all expectations, I found a British ocean liner bound for Buenos Aires scheduled to make a stop in Vigo on August 4. Such an incredible stroke of luck! Refused a ticket for Vigo, I bought one for Lisbon, the next port of call, imagining myself getting off in Vigo and staying there. . . . Surely Abel would approve of my adventurous spirit.
Abel, 1935
I have forgotten the name of the ocean liner I embarked on that beautiful August 1, 1936.
I was taking with me little more than an overnight bag and traveling third class—rough wooden bunk beds in tiny doorless cabins, straw sacks for mattresses, no sheets, just one gray blanket. In the narrow, dark eating area, one long wooden table and two benches were bolted to the floor. The passengers ate out of tin plates with tin forks and spoons, a food that I have mercifully forgotten.
But then, in third class there were mostly lively French, Portuguese, and German students who quickly befriended me.
There was a fourth class on the British boat, a small triangular deck at the stern where several Polish families bound for South America camped in the open. At mealtimes, the women got busy cooking food on little charcoal stoves. The rest of the time, men, women, and children huddled in one big heap and sometimes sang low, sad songs.
Second-class-passenger ladies—long dresses of pale blues and yellows and voluminous hats—often stood on their balcony-like deck looking at the third- and fourth-class decks beneath them.
First class was way up out of sight. I ascended to it, in the company of a student girl who spoke English, to consult the captain about a rumor that an ongoing battle in Vigo would prevent our boat from stopping there as scheduled.
We saw chandeliers and Oriental rugs in first class. The captain was young, and his manners were refined. On his orders, coffee was served to us, poured out of a silver vessel into cups of fine china. Alas, the captain confirmed the rumors.
But on the third day at sea, the victorious Franco commandant telegraphed our British captain that he had won the battle and pacified the city, and that British visitors were welcomed.
I was standing on deck after supper when I heard the good news and jumped for joy. My foot hit the moving deck and began to swell alarmingly. The unsmiling gray-haired nurse on board—there was no doctor—tightly bandaged my foot and leg up to my knee. “No walking,” she shouted. I could understand that much. When a passenger I had befriended explained to the nurse
