Last month, my wife and I were traveling in Tuscany. One night after dinner, in a small town called Certaldo, Patrizia (my wife) said she wanted to go back to the hotel. I walked her there, but then decided to go out for a stroll by myself. There were a lot of people sitting outside, at the main square. As I passed by a table, I heard something that made me stop cold. It lasted just a moment, no more than a few seconds, but it was unmistakable. Someone was whistling a ballad from the Brigade days. Impossible, I thought. I felt like someone was walking over my grave. I looked at the man and he immediately stopped whistling. He was more or less my age, wearing a long-sleeved shirt. He was alone. We recognized each other at once. I mean, he knew exactly what had made me stop and stare. It wasn’t the first time that I’d stumbled across an old comrade. I’m sure you’ve had the same experience, at some point. The guy probably hadn’t even realized what he’d been whistling. Reaching out my hand, I introduced myself and told him the name of my unit: Abraham Lewis, Lincoln Brigade. Without standing up, which surprised me a bit, he told me his name: Umberto Pietri.
So now you know why I’m writing you.
He didn’t mention the name of his unit, which would have been the normal thing to do, so I was forced to ask him. But even then he hesitated. Finally, out it came: the “Squadron of Death,” also known as the Malatesta Battalion; he kept his eyes on me, waiting for a reaction. Realizing I wasn’t going to say anything, he made clear that, strictly speaking, it couldn’t really be considered one of the International Brigades.
I don’t know what you know about Pietri’s unit. Maybe you don’t want to know. But I did a little research after that encounter. It was a very dark business. The Squadron of Death was the brainchild of Diego Abad de Santillán, the anarchist union leader, who proposed to the Generalitat the founding of a unit made up of Italian anarchists. I’ve seen photographs. Apparently, their uniforms were very flashy and when they marched through the streets of Barcelona it looked more like a circus than a military parade. They were quite ostentatious and became famous before going into combat. The funny bit is that after such macho displays they were crushed by the Falangists in their first battle. I apologize for going into excessive detail, but I think it’s pretty likely you haven’t kept up with things—and you need to know the details if you want to understand what happened.
As for himself, to make a long story short, Pietri explained to me that he was from Certaldo, and that after returning home from his time in the Brigades, he never left his village again—except during World War II, at which time, he said, without going into too much detail, he was in hiding. His voice was tense. It was clear he was in a hurry to tell me something in particular. He pulled out his wallet, opened it, took out a photograph, and set it on top of the table. When he did this, he winced as if in great pain. His eyes closed and his head fell forward. I stood up, worried that he was going to faint. But he immediately reopened his eyes and kept them on me, although he himself didn’t seem quite there. He made a gesture with his hand as if to assure me that he would recover momentarily; when he did, he explained to me that he was very ill, but he didn’t seem to think this worth dwelling on. As if what was happening to him was unimportant, he insisted I have a good look at the photograph, and so I did.
It was a very young militia woman, barely out of adolescence, with large eyes. Teresa Quintana, mi compañera, he said. His tone stuck with me; it was biting and sharp, not the least bit somber. He hadn’t told me what he wanted, yet, but he had my attention.
At twelve noon, a multitude of bells began to peal loudly (the Angelus, the woman at the reception desk told me when I asked her later what it meant), and I thought it would be a good time to call Lewis. I put the letter back in its envelope and went down to the third floor. The receptionist told me that the phone worked with tokens and handed me one. It was about the size and color of a peseta, but it was missing the image of the dictator and its surface was crossed by a pair of deep striations. The woman looked up the number of the Hotel Florida in a phone book that had no covers. I went up to the phone, put the token in the slot, and watched it slide down a thin, glass-covered chute till it hit bottom. When I said that I wanted to speak to Abraham Lewis, the operator didn’t understand my pronunciation, so I had to spell the name for him.
After a few seconds, I heard a deep voice with a strong Southern accent on the other end of the line.
That and the laugh that punctuated his words made me feel less removed from the world I had left behind fewer than twenty-four hours before. Lewis asked me to meet him at a bar that was right next to the Cibeles.
It’s called Cervecería de Correos, and it’s on the left hand side at the beginning of a street that rises uphill toward the Puerta de Alcalá. You won’t have any trouble finding it, Ackerman. From your hostel it’s a very pleasant walk if you don’t mind the cold. Is one thirty okay?
Yes, but how will we recognize each other?
I am fifty-four years old, with a buzz cut—I’m six-foot-three, have wide shoulders, and if there’s any doubt left, I’m black.
He let out a long laugh. Once more, his voice, the way he spoke and laughed, had a deep calming effect on me. Fifteen minutes later, I came out of the hostel and leaving behind the labyrinth of side streets that surrounded it arrived at the Paseo del Prado. On the other side of the boulevard there was a tall wrought-iron gate and beyond it a garden. I crossed toward it. The wind was freezing, but at least it wasn’t snowing. I walked very slowly, rather distracted, registering what I saw without realizing it, mixing the sensations of the present with very distant memories. Early that morning—it seemed now like all that had been the day before—I’d looked at the city without being contaminated by its reality, as if the taxi had been a sterile bubble that protected me from direct contact with things. Now, walking along with other people, putting one foot in front of the other on the pavement, breathing in the mixture of smells that floated in the air, everything was different. Madrid. The city was getting into me through my pores, my eyes, my nostrils. The photographs, the movies, and the documentaries that I had seen so many times in Ben’s Archive, the things my father had told me, it all seemed to belong to some other dimension. It was as if I had awakened from a very strange dream to discover that reality was stranger still.
If someone had pinched me and shown me that I was in fact strolling across the surface of the moon, and even told me that I’d been born there, it wouldn’t have been too much more disconcerting. A few hours before, as she handed back my passport after writing down my details in the registry book, the woman at the pension had exclaimed, But you’re from here! Who would have guessed with a name like that? Remembering those words, alone in my room, I’d opened the passport and read:
Place of Birth: Madrid, Spain.
Madrid. Spain. Each of those two words contained an entire world locked within it. The M, with its mountain-shape, was the sierra where Ben had fought; and then the S, the sibilant S that Spaniards find impossible to pronounce without putting an e before it, and whose sinuous contours refer to the labyrinth of the conflict itself. The shape of the two letters put together gave rise to echoes of countless stories. It took Ben fourteen years before he’d confessed it to me, but I was a Spaniard. Another fourteen years had passed, and for the first time since Ben had taken me to America, back when I was only a few weeks old, I was physically here, in the city where I was born.
My childhood was one long parade of ex-Brigade men marching through our house in Brooklyn. They always showed a special affection for me, because they knew I was actually from there—the only one, really, among all those people whose memories were so vividly stamped with the months or years that they had spent in my country. For them, Spain was a painful memory because of how the war had ended—but no amount of pain was enough to efface all the marvelous moments they’d lived through there despite all. Ben and Lucia never tired of repeating that it had been the most extraordinary experience of their lives. And I, with my dark skin and Mediterran
ean features, so different from the Ackermans, both of them unequivocally Anglos, I was the living proof that such tragedy (to employ the same word Lewis used in his letter) had not been a dream.
I took one last look behind the gate of the Botanical Gardens (I didn’t know what it was, at that point—all I saw was a mysterious park, overgrown and wild, but somehow outside of time, like so many corners of the Paseo). Snow covered the flower beds and pathways not yet trod upon, it stuck to the trees reproducing the contours of their trunks, the silhouettes of the bare bushes. I continued toward the Museo del Prado, imagining that on the other side of the walls marked with niches occupied by unknown goddesses, the halls would be empty, its usual visitors kept away by the cold. I knew many of the works there very well. Ben had a catalog published during the Republic days that he held in great esteem. When I was a child, he liked to show me the reproductions, accompanied by anecdotes and explanations that my childhood mind turned into fairy tales of sorts. Later, when I was a teenager, the explanations became more technical. Art history was one of my father’s frustrated passions. He had insisted so strongly that, if or when I ever went to Madrid, I had to go to that extraordinary place, now that I was just a few steps away from all those masterpieces in there, I felt a strange tension. I’ll go see them soon, I said aloud, as if Ben could hear me.
When I reached the corner by the Ritz Hotel, I paused to observe the plaza of Neptune, and a title came to mind. Piedra y cielo. Whose was it? One of the poets that Ben liked to read, probably. I decided to write a story using the same title. How many times I’ve started to write something without the slightest idea where my imagination would take me, guided exclusively by the particular resonance of a few little words . . .
A tug on my coat shook me from my reverie. In front of me, a child of about ten with a very serious expression offered me a newspaper without saying a word. I saw some enormous headlines and, to one side, in red ink, the name of the publication, Diario Pueblo. I gave the kid the first coin I found in my pocket, but I didn’t take the paper. The diminutive vendor shrugged and ran off.
A few steps beyond, I stopped to look upon a flame burning in front of a stone tomb at the foot of a monolith surrounded by an iron fence. I read the inscription, which referred to the heroes of the 2nd of May, and I remembered one of my favorite pages in Ben’s catalog, Goya’s firing-squad executions. A somewhat disquieting association. It made me feel like a participant in a history with which I refused to integrate. At the same time, I was impatient to finally hear what Abe Lewis had to tell me. I asked myself again why, after so many doubts, I had decided to meet with some stranger on the other side of the Atlantic, and, as always, the answer escaped me. You have to do it—not so much for us, for Lucia and me, but for you, Ben had repeated to me to the point of exhaustion. That wasn’t how I felt about it. I had lived twenty-eight years without knowing anything about the man they said was my father, and had felt no need, was not even curious, to know his story.
Ben again:
As much as you refuse to accept it, there’s an unresolved issue in your past. Only by going to Madrid will you be able to settle it. The only way you can say that your life belongs to you completely is if you do this. And the place is also important. Of course, you could always wait until Lewis comes back to the States, but it wouldn’t be the same. You have to return, set foot on the earth of Madrid, hear the language that Lucia and I made sure remained alive in you. But, most of all, be among your people, for in the end it’s as one of them that you came into this world.
After months of hesitation I made plans to travel to Spain, and the expression of relief on Ben’s face made it all worthwhile. But now that I was there, alone, there were many moments when the grand gesture I’d made seemed to me completely absurd.
When I reached the end of the boulevard I scrutinized the statue of Cibeles. Riding on a carriage pulled by lions, the goddess of Earth, mother of Neptune (suddenly I realized the connection between the two statues), looked off into the distance. In her wake, two granite children were at play turning over a pitcher from which poured a stream of water. Surrounding the fountain, palaces and gardens formed a circle that seemed designed to protect the stone image, magnificent in her solitude. I continued toward the Palacio de Comunicaciones and arrived at a wide street on a hill. Above, to my right, I saw the arches of the Puerta de Alcalá and, in front of me, on the other side of a crosswalk, the Cervecería de Correos.
The place was packed and smelled of sawdust. A crowd, three-rows deep, made it impossible to approach the bar. A waiter called out to me from afar, asking what I wanted, and in an instant I had before me a tin mug atop a thick cork coaster in a tiny space the waiter had miraculously found for me. I saw the man I’d come to meet before I had taken the first sip of my beer. He was seated at a marble table in the front room to the left. Although I hadn’t described myself to him on the phone, he too had recognized me. His head raised, he followed my every movement. Without taking his eyes off me, he stood up and made a sign for me to come to him. When I got to the table, he shook my hand firmly.
Finally, we meet in person, he said, scrutinizing my face with a strange urgency. How was your trip?
The truth is that I don’t know what the hell I’m doing here, I replied brusquely. I’m doing it for Ben. But I’ve spent all morning thinking that coming here was a huge mistake. I feel like I’m floating in space, not knowing where to plant in my feet.
That’s normal. Give it some time.
Time for what? It was hard for me to talk about it. What do I care about this guy Pietri? I managed to ask. I had never even heard about him until the day Ben gave me your letter to read. Once more, just like when I was fourteen, I have to change all the coordinates of my life? And you, throwing all of this in my face all of a sudden, who the fuck are you? Was it really necessary for you to write that letter? I had brought my hand out of the pocket of my jacket and was brandishing it. Why are you all so certain about what needs to be done, as you say?
Who are you referring to?
You Brigade people and your infallible sense of “what’s right” . . . Lewis endured my diatribe as if he had known beforehand that this was the way things were going to be. When I’d finished insulting him and had put his letter back in my pocket, he looked me in the eyes and pressed a firm hand into my shoulder.
Have you had anything to eat?
Eat? I asked, as if I didn’t know the meaning of the word.
I’ll get us something, he said, signaling for the waiter.
Although you may not like to hear it, he noted after the waiter had taken our order, Ben’s right. That’s why I took the liberty of pressing this point. He’s a very special person—you’re very fortunate.
What do you mean?
It’s just my impression. I only know him through a pair of letters. I’d like to know more about him.
Like what?
His story.
The waiter dropped off tapas at our table and left. Abe Lewis was laughing.
What? I asked him.
You cross the ocean because you think that I’ve got something life-or-death to tell you, and the first thing I do when I see you is ask you to tell me stories . . .
It’s fine. You’re right about Ben. He is very special. And I apologize about what I just said about the Brigades. I was out of place.
Lewis went on laughing.
Well, let’s eat something, see if we can cheer up.
At that moment, the front door of the bar opened and group of people came in cackling and yelling. Their coats and scarves were sprinkled with snow. A burst of frozen air snuck in with them and reached our table. The newcomers blended in with the other patrons around the bar, leaving the door open. We looked outside. It was snowing harder now—for a few seconds the white filled the frame of the door. We saw whirls of snow glowing under the streetlights, sucked down by the storm, till a burly man came in from the street and closed the door after him.
It’s too l
oud here, Lewis said. Why don’t we go next door? It’s a perfect place to chat.
I shrugged, which in the code that we had begun to develop meant, it’s fine.
The snow drove itself into the reddish marble façade. I raised my eyes, barely able to make out the gold letters that read Lion D’or. A double set of glass doors created a buffer space that prevented the warm air of the cafeteria from escaping. Inside, a thick cloud of acrid smoke lingered, making it difficult to breathe; it stuck to the walls and clouded the mirrors. The curtains and upholstery on the seats were red velvet, the tables marble topped with wrought-iron legs. The light from the lamps floated ghostlike in the haze.
We sat in a corner next to a window and remained silent for a long while, getting used to each other. A waiter with a reddish complexion, an enormous mustache, and slick hair, asked us in a smug tone if we wanted anything.
Watching it snow. Trapped in a strange web of geometric intersections. The lights of the cars going both ways on Alcalá projected cones of light that beveled the curtain of snow. Same with the edge of the table; or the plane of the sidewalk that met the floor of the café at an acute angle. The windowsill almost touched the ground.
What’s the origin of your last name Ackerman? Is it Jewish?
People always ask me that. Same thing with my first name, Gal. Neither of them are necessarily Jewish. Ackerman is a German surname. My great-grandfather’s family was from Alsace, although he was born in Brooklyn, in 1858. He ran a bakery in Bensonhurst. My grandfather, David Ackerman, worked all his life for the Brooklyn Eagle, a great newspaper, the best one ever published in Brooklyn. Walt Whitman was one of its most renowned contributors, but there were others. It shut down in 1955, after one hundred and twenty-three years. The death of a newspaper is a very sad thing, don’t you think? My grandfather started as an apprentice when he was seventeen and he ended as a head typesetter. He never went beyond that, but now and then they allowed him to write a few things, and finally, right before he was about to retire, he got his own column, which was published weekly.
Call Me Brooklyn Page 5
