Authors: Andromeda Romano-Lax
But we didn't know all the ways truth would be warped in the weeks to come—only that something terrible and new had happened. Civilians had been targeted directly. Nearly all of Guernica had been razed, and fleeing residents had been picked off by low-flying planes. It was the first time in modern warfare that such an outrageous, unilateral strike, with no clear military target, had taken place. Later, it would be called the rehearsal for Dresden, London, Hiroshima. That day, it was simply unthinkable.
I needed something to do, something much more than playing a brittle cello with gloved hands. I walked to the embassy twice a day, though usually there was no one available to talk to me. I wrote dozens of letters at a time, until my right hand cramped. I received many responses, all of them unsatisfactory. I wrote to statesmen about arms and aid and the need to pressure Italy and Germany. They wrote back about Beethoven and Fauré, how they'd enjoyed some performance of mine, how I was welcome to visit their country and play again. I couldn't help turning each letter over, looking for some other message on the back perhaps, to explain the disconnect between what I had writ-ten—what I had begged—and what they had written in response.
Spring's warmth had not penetrated the dark corners of my tenement lodgings. The kitchen pipes had burst from the cold, and I kept a block of ice in a large ceramic bowl, chipping off chunks to heat on the tiny two-burner stove when I needed water.
One day I was chipping ice while I listened to the news on a little radio I had bought, which was prone to tempestuous bursts of static. The newsman was echoing Franco's claim that it wasn't the Nazis who had bombed Guernica, it was the Basques themselves who had lit their own city on fire with gas cans, just to make fascist Spain and Nazi Germany look bad. I talked back at the newsman—What of the eyewitness reports? What of the bodies in the streets? What of the bomb craters? What of the shells?—until the static roared, like a door slammed in my face. It astonished me, the way everything could be turned upside down—innocents into enemies, guilt into blamelessness. It rattled my senses, even more so when I looked down and realized I had chipped through the ice to the bowl's bottom, and beyond. Shards of ceramic lay on the counter in front of me. Rivulets of water ran down my leg. A neighbor girl was knocking on the door: "Monsieur Delargo, are you all right in there?"
Inspired by the bombing of Guernica, Picasso finished his mural a month later. It was a marvel: horses, bulls, bare cellars and bare light-bulbs, women with dying children in their arms—an abstract portrait of horror that filled an entire wall with its terrible shades of gray.
I visited the mural at the World's Fair, and stared as long as I could, the shapes melting as my eyes filled. But not everyone was equally moved, or satisfied. A few viewers took exception to the painting's political content. Many more, including some of the Spanish Republican officials who had pushed for its completion, were disappointed that it wasn't more explicitly political. Where was the clear message, the assignation of blame? Was that bull in the corner Franco, or was it all of suffering Spain? Which figure was the aggressor, which the victim? What did the wounded horse mean? What should anyone do?
After the Spanish Pavilion closed,
Guernica
toured the United States, where it succeeded in raising only seven hundred dollars. Later, the painting would be recognized as Picasso's most lasting masterpiece. But not while the Spanish Civil War still raged; not when it mattered most.
Visual art, I realized then, was a dull blade with which to fight a war. But it could provoke. I observed that firsthand while doing my small part, performing solo on a side stage at the pavilion. By the time fair-goers arrived there, they had already taken in nearly everything: the mercury fountain, the photomurals, and certainly
Guernica.
They came and went as I played, chattering about what they'd seen.
I recall two Americans, an older woman and a younger, who dropped thankfully into the half-circle of seats that had been arranged next to my small stage, talking loudly about their sore feet, the size of the fair, the size of Picasso's horrid painting, "So
awful.
" Did he have to paint it that way? Could things really be that bad?
"Yes—and worse," I wanted to say, but I was busy with the final repeat of a Bach sarabande.
"That's better," I heard the younger woman say, nodding in time to the melody.
"Now, that's really lovely," the older woman said. And when I had finished, "Are you the same Señor Delargo who played on the BBC two years ago? Would you sign this for us? It would make such a fabulous end to our day."
And I knew the women would forget what they had seen of
Guernica,
that I had helped them to forget it. A painting was a dull sword with which to fight a war, and a painter himself could be a hypocrite. But music was a numbing, soothing poison, which—dripped into the general water supply—contaminated everyone.
And so I came to my decision. It seemed the only thing left to do was to stop playing altogether. Now, I realize that to someone who has followed my life story, it may seem as if I'd made such a choice before. But that is only hindsight and compression at work. To me, the choice I made in 1937 was not the same choice I had made in 1921. After Anual, grief and horror had struck me dumb, as if my music were too pure to associate with evil. This time music itself struck me as evil. Not directly evil, perhaps, but passively so, like Roosevelt's neglecting to aid the Spanish Republic, like Chamberlain's appeasing Hitler, like all the Allies who refused to recognize what was happening to Jews and gypsies and Spaniards—yes, Spaniards, too—in the concentration camps. The power that brings no true peace and offers no solution—that only obscures—is itself a negative force. That is what I believed.
It did not help that each passing month showed we were right, and they had all been wrong. As we loyalists had claimed, the fall of the Spanish Republic paved the way for totalitarianism elsewhere. The forces that had stood against Spain, the forces that had lent fascists their guns and planes and men, now turned those well-practiced troops and fine-tuned weapons against the rest of democratic Europe. We had begged, pleaded, screamed, painted, played. What else was there to do?
And if I should not play, then no one should. Perhaps then, people would pay attention. If they had no music, no theater, no entertainment, then perhaps they could not continue to ignore fascism's march across the globe. Manuel Rocamura, a young cellist whom I had trained through master classes in 1934 and 1935, was scheduled to tour America. When a reporter asked what I thought of Rocamura, I said I thought he should be home fighting—or at least resisting, as were many of Spain's finest—not entertaining the nations that were refusing to aid Spain. My name carried weight; my comments were widely disseminated. Rocamura's indignant response, also widely reported, inflamed the controversy. And soon, I heard, Rocamura's recording label had pulled out. His American tour was canceled. He was only twenty-eight years old at the time. Even after World War II, I never saw his name in the newspapers again, though I looked.
Perhaps my logic was wrong. Perhaps my emotions were overwrought. But consider what we would learn later, of the Jewish musicians who continued to play in Nazi-sanctioned organizations—organizations they believed would save them. By continuing to perform, by refusing to flee, by entertaining their fellow Jews and distracting them from the dangerous deterioration of their situation, the musicians hastened their own demise, and perhaps even aided the Nazis in their terrible task. One might argue that even until the last days in the camps, the Jewish musicians were shoring up spirits, aiding survival. But the facts suggested differently. In the camps, the Jewish musicians did not have stronger spirits, were not buoyed by their dedication to art. In fact, they committed suicide at higher rates than their comrades did. They were tormented by guilt—the guilt of playing in pathetic ensemble as the Nazis paraded victims to the gas showers. There was no nobility in these final serenades; this was not the heroic quartet clinging to their instruments as the
Titanic
sank. This was doing the devil's own bidding.
I did make one last public effort. All summer, I kept to myself, but in the fall, Aub came to my door and talked me into making a trip with him to the south of France, where most of the Spanish refugees were living in camps surrounded by barbed wire. We spent a week talking up our trip and gathering donations—packets of powdered milk and boxes packed with needles and gauze. We traveled by car, with a lady photographer who documented the lines of seated men who looked like children, eating their chunks of bread off the yellowing grass while officials walked between them to make sure no one stole or moved in hopes of being served twice. The real children had dirt-stained faces and bowl-shaped haircuts. The women wore shapeless dresses and hugged themselves against the autumn cold, studying us distrustfully as we carried our meager charity boxes across the compounds.
Some of the refugees slept in huts, but there weren't enough huts for all, and some of them slept like animals, in holes dug out of the sandy soil. The photographer made me stand next to these burrows with hands clasped in front and hands clasped in back and hands clasped in front again and then crouching farther down with my forearms on my thighs so that she could photograph the burrow hole more clearly and then in profile, with a look of concern—No, please, directly into the hole, not at me—until I finally let myself look, really look, and I saw two things at once while the photographer stayed hidden behind her camera. One: I saw a dark shadow resolve into a hank of dark hair and a lump, which proved to be a dark brown dress. An old woman was still in one of the burrows, though it was midday, and she seemed to be motionless. Two: I recognized why the whole scene was familiar—the gray watercolor sky, the stiff clumps of grass, the sandy holes. My chest tightened with the sudden, flooding memory of it, a memory that left me with no doubt at all, and little breath.
I had glimpsed the scene before, in a nightmare. It was the dream that had awakened me, when I was nearly six years old; the dream that had caused me to rise early and go with my mother to the train station. In her anxiety over the arrival of a coffin, she had asked me if I'd dreamed about a box. She had been reassured when I told her it was not a box, just sandy holes. These holes. And the sense of something terrible inside.
Some camp orderlies came and dragged the woman, blue-faced and stiff, from her burrow, murmuring regretfully that she 'd had no relatives at the camp, and no one to notice when she hadn't shown up for morning call or last night's dinner. I told Aub I had to leave then—not tomorrow, not the next day—because I knew something had happened to my own mother. I could not cross back into Spain but I could return to Paris, where I was sure the news awaited me. And I was right. The telegram I found under my door told me my mother had died four days earlier, in Barcelona.
And so I realized, all these years later, that what my mother had thought was a dream of my father's death had really been a dream of my mother's. All along, I had felt unable to impress her, unable to fulfill whatever hopes she had for me, or to make her lack of hope more bearable. Now that she was dead, that potential was finally revoked. The person we are by the time our parents have died is the person we shall always be; any aspirations to further development are delusional. We have had our turn, and now we stand just one generational step away from our own deaths, every year passing more quickly than the last.
I proceeded to sleep away most of the next three years. In Paris, rationing tightened. Three days a week were so-called meatless days; three days a week, hard liquor couldn't be served in restaurants; three days, there were no pastries. It mattered little to me. I could subsist on beans, bread, water. I bought the occasional chunk of hard cheese and left it wrapped on the counter for days, untouched, like my little squares of childhood chocolate. I had always taken pride in my asceticism, my ability to do without.
Likewise, my cello sat, untouched and unplayed, in the far corner of my room. Once, Max Aub called on me. He had heard about my determination not to play. He assumed that meant public performance only, and he was taken aback to see my instrument in its corner, with a long coat thrown over it. I did not tell him that I had placed a bowl of water under that coat, and the coat itself was not a mark of dishonor, but a drape intended to maintain some humidity close to the instrument's brittle wood. I bore the cello no grudges. What I did not respect was this age, this world, this life.
Waking late each morning, grudgingly, slowly, I would swing my legs off my thin mattress, cough for several minutes, push myself to standing, and make my way across the room to dress. On the way, I never failed to glance at the cello, to peer at the bowl and refill it when necessary, as one refills a water bowl for a cat. The bow, I should add, stayed even closer to me; in its case, under my bed—protected from nocturnal thieves, I told myself.
Quitting something that one has done all one's life is like quitting any addiction. The first days may be easy, sometimes alarmingly so. But then there are the deep pangs, the cumulative sense of unwellness, the dangers of relapse. I missed the feeling of my body wrapped around those curves of wood. I missed the gliding bow strokes. I missed the feel of the strings against my calloused fingertips, the oscillations of the vibrato, the pressure and release and speed and surrender; my entire body had become attuned to the cello over all those years, and without its mediation nothing made sense anymore, not weight or gravity or the rhythm inherent in anything—my breath, my heartbeat. The water tap developed a drip, and that drip drove me to distraction. Deprived of music, my ear went searching crazily for sound, like a stray dog wandering the alleyways, and wherever it found it, seized and shook it, wouldn't let go. I wrapped a washcloth around the spigot, but there were other sounds—people's footsteps over me, squeaking beds, the wheezing rattle in my chest as I succumbed to winter bronchitis.