At dawn, our boat entered the beautiful deep bay of Vigo. I watched from the porthole, which, I discovered, was located above a deck. There was a pile of cordage right under it. My luck! I squeezed through the porthole, tumbled down on the cordage. The deck was deserted except for one young man who was taking photographs. He helped me to my cabin. A few hours later, carried by two Spanish-speaking students who knew my story, I was on Spanish soil.
At 10:15 we stood in front of the post office. Abel did not show up.
We went to the military commandant, who received us as he was being shaved. The white towel tied around his neck could cover neither the array of medals and decorations adorning his broad chest nor the knives and guns strapped to his ample girth.
We inquired about a German artist who, the stamp on his letter attested, had been in Vigo two weeks before. “Is he a Russian?” the commandant asked.
“No, no, alemán, alemán.”
“We have only Russian spies here, and they are in jail,” the commandant declared with ferocious glee.
We were dismissed.
We wandered through dead streets. Restaurants and shops boarded up, piles of rubble, an old civilian or two, truckloads of stern young soldiers wearing blood-red berets. At a makeshift place we ate fresh sardines fried in smelly oil. Downtown we passed somber walls of medieval thickness pierced with tiny barred openings. “The jail!” my companions snickered.
It did not enter my mind that Abel could be there. But he was. Jailed as a Russian spy, I would learn weeks later when his letters caught up with me in Lisbon.
He spent two appalling weeks in the Vigo jail until the answer to a telegram of inquiry sent by the German consul confirmed that, indeed, his family resided in Germany and that he had been born there.
After appropriating all his money—for room and board—the commandant ordered Abel put on a German boat and delivered to the Gestapo in Hamburg. After three days in a German jail, he was permitted to contact an artist friend who had retired in Hamburg. The friend vouched for Abel, took him to his home, and promptly sent him back to Paris.
Penniless, a ghost of his old self, Abel sat at the terrace of the Dôme in the lonesome Paris of August.
A smiling waiter brought him a week-old newspaper that had already published Abel’s obituary. The manager offered congratulations and a drink. Then a young artist friend, on his way to a vacation at the seashore with his family, spotted him and took him along.
By the time I returned from Portugal in September, Abel had recovered his good looks, but he had not gotten over his Spanish ordeal. His brief talk with the military commandant, to whom he had freely presented himself, still tormented him.
“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
