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2

Chinatown

Antonio was excited. His head bobbed from side to side as he pointed out landmarks, naming streets and squares and distant hills in a cascade of information that made Theo’s head spin. His weariness of the previous weekend had been replaced by a frenetic vivacity, reflecting a determination to experience to the full every moment of his day’s leave from his hated barracks.

They crossed a great square populated with baroque statues and fountains and walked down a long, wide road that Antonio said was called the Paral?lel because it ran parallel to the equator. He was the guide again just as he had been in the village two summers before, although it was not long before Theo began to realize that his friend’s knowledge of the real Barcelona, as he called it, was a thin veneer, concealing the ignorance of a dyed-in-the-wool country boy.

It was Theo who was at home in this urban world. He had grown up in it. The Paral?lel was a larger version of Fourteenth Street, where he had spent his childhood. There was the same spillage of shops and cafés out onto the sidewalks and the same crazy traffic—overcrowded trams with riders on the running boards hanging on for dear life and immobilized automobile drivers incessantly blowing their horns in a vain effort to get around carts laden with vegetables or coal.

In the middle of this chaos, a policeman in a fancy blue uniform stood on a box, making elaborate signals with his white-gloved hands that everyone ignored. He was like a conductor of an orchestra that had gone rogue, and Theo was reminded in a flash of the similarly ineffectual traffic cop he’d passed on that long-gone day when his grandfather had taken him through the New York streets to meet his bubbe .

He remembered her so clearly even though he’d met her only once: her wide-open green eyes and her foreign voice searching for the English words; the feel of her hands on his head, pressing. Leah Stern, who was dead now, gone beyond his reach.

Theo felt that same stab of loss and missed opportunity that he always felt when he remembered his grandparents, but then it was gone in a moment, swallowed up in a more general nostalgia for his hometown. Someone had painted Broadway De Barcelona in big white letters on a wall, and the sign made sense. It was as if the Paral?lel was consciously aping Manhattan. The cinemas were showing American films—Clark Gable and Bette Davis stared down from gigantic posters, and jazz was playing in all the cafés. Amid all the cacophony, Theo thought for a moment that he could hear Louis Armstrong singing “St. James Infirmary Blues,” but when he stopped to listen, the song was gone.

This was a different world to the Ramblas. There was no grandeur or pretension or luxury—no flower or bird markets, no hats on the women made of exotic plumage. The cafés were lit by naked bulbs, not chandeliers, and everyone wore black and white and talked in those terms. The medieval church towers rising above the Ramblas were replaced here with the roofs of smoke-belching factories. Over on the right, toward Montju?c, the three tall chimneys of the Canadenca power station were the cathedral spires of working-class Barcelona. Coal dust settled on surfaces like a thin gray dew.

At Café Chicago, the Paral?lel opened up to the north in the La Bretxa de Sant Pau, and Antonio turned left toward the Ramblas, plunging almost immediately into a warren of narrow side streets, lined on either side with tenement buildings whose height and proximity to each other prevented the angled sunlight from ever reaching the ground. The contrast to the wide, open Paral?lel was extraordinary and induced in Theo a sudden cramping claustrophobia that he had to struggle to overcome.

Some of the buildings were doss-houses with signs outside offering beds by the hour or even something called las cuerdas , which allowed those who couldn’t afford a bed to sleep the night hanging on to ropes. Others were brothels. Theo and Antonio stopped outside one window, looking in on a scene that left nothing to the imagination. Semiclad girls in slips and petticoats sat in a line on a wooden bench, while an old woman waited behind a glass-fronted cash desk by the door with a pile of metal disks beside her. On the back wall, a calendar from the year before hung slightly askew, and farther along, a staircase rose up into gloom.

Elsewhere, women too old to find work in the brothels called out to Theo and Antonio and cursed them as they hurried past, their harsh, angry voices echoing back off the lanes’ narrow walls. They frightened Theo with their lurid faces caked with rouge and their eyes heavy with mascara. The languid kimono-clad girls on Rivington Street who had adopted him as their mascot had no relationship to these desperate women struggling against the odds to keep their deaths at bay.

“What is this place?” he asked, turning to Antonio.

“The Fifth District, but everyone calls it Chinatown. Isn’t it terrible?” Antonio sounded strangely satisfied, as if he had succeeded in proving a point, although what that point was Theo had no idea.

“It’s worse than terrible. It’s hell on earth,” he replied. “Why’s it called Chinatown? I haven’t seen any Chinese.”

“Because it’s like the Chinatowns in America—foul and full of lowlifes,” said Antonio. “That’s the idea.”

Was that why Antonio was pleased? Theo wondered. Because it showed where America and capitalism got you? Was that the idea? No wonder the Anarchists were strong in this town, he thought. Even the most patient would end up throwing bombs if they had to endure this life.

Everywhere there was the sound of coughing. Not just from people they could see but from hordes of invisible others, filling the stale, malodorous air with a miasma of germs. Theo pulled his shirt collar over his mouth and nose while keeping his eyes fixed on the ground to stop himself from walking in the filthy open drains that overflowed out onto the cobblestones.

The main source of the poisoned air was the factories that stood side by side with the tenements, spewing smoke and toxic vapors out through vents and chimneys into the rooms where families ate and slept.

Theo and Antonio looked in through the sealed window of a workshop. As far as they could see in all directions, big mechanical looms and spinning frames were being operated by lines of textile workers. Their bodies moved like the pistons of the machines, as if both were being remotely controlled by some invisible brain.

The light from the naked bulbs hanging down from the smoke-blackened ceiling was poor and the window through which they were looking was grimy, but Theo’s eyes adjusted and he began to pick out small shapes moving about on the floor on their hands and knees. He pushed his face up against the glass and saw that the shapes were children sweeping out handfuls of dust and dirt and fallen cotton fiber from under the machines to stop them from becoming clogged. It was obvious that they risked being decapitated or crushed if they raised their heads or their backs too high.

“Look!” he said, taking hold of Antonio’s arm and pointing at the children. “That can’t be legal.”

But before Antonio could reply, a red-faced man with a big stomach held in by a dirty singlet noticed their faces at the window and started toward them, waving his arms.

Now, it was Antonio’s turn to pull at Theo. “Come on,” he said. “That’s the foreman. Let’s get out of here.”

“No,” said Theo, holding back. “It’s wrong. We need to say something.”

“It won’t do any good and you know it,” said Antonio harshly. “Please don’t get us in a fight. Trouble is the last thing I need.”

A few yards away, a door opened and the clattering, thumping noise of the machines was suddenly deafening in Theo’s ears. He could smell the hot, humid air thick with fiber, and he wanted to gag. The man was coming out. He was huge and his fists were clenched. Theo hesitated and then, at the last moment, just as the man was reaching toward him, he turned and ran after Antonio, sprinting down the lanes until they had left the factory and the sound of pursuing footsteps far behind.

Antonio stopped and pushed Theo hard on the shoulders, causing him to stagger back. “You’re so stupid,” he said. “I should never have brought you here.”

“So why did you then?” asked Theo angrily.

“Because I thought you should see it. So you wouldn’t think that fancy hotels and nights at the opera are what this town is really about. Just like I showed you what was real in the mountains. Remember?”

Theo nodded, understanding now.

“And because you want to find my sister,” Antonio added. “Just like I do. And this is where she is. I’m sure of it.”

Theo shuffled his feet uncomfortably and then looked at Antonio and held up his hands. “You’re right she’s here,” he said. “She told me they were going to Barcelona just before she left. I should have said so before. I’m sorry.”

“So why didn’t you?” asked Antonio, sounding angry again.

“I didn’t want you to think I had something to do with the murder.”

“Did you?”

“No, of course not!”

“What about Maria?”

“I don’t know. She was happy Primitivo killed him. I could see that.”

“Yes, the bastard won her with his knife because he couldn’t with his words. And now she’s thrown in her lot with him, it’s like she’s crossed over to the other side. Gone where I can’t follow. Sometimes I feel like I’ll never see her again.” Antonio bit his lip, trying to swallow his pain.

“You will. Of course you will,” said Theo passionately, not because he believed it, but because he couldn’t bear for it to be true. Not just for Antonio but for himself too.

“She was my younger sister and I let her down. I should have stood up for her to my father over Pedrito like you said. Not gone away and left her with nobody except Primitivo to turn to. But it’s too late now,” said Antonio despairingly.

“No, it’s not. She’s done nothing wrong. She doesn’t have to be with Primitivo. She can come back,” said Theo furiously, fighting his friend’s defeatism. Maria wasn’t gone. He wouldn’t let her be gone. “We have to try and find her,” he said. “You said it yourself just a minute ago.”

“I know I did,” said Antonio, bowing his head. “And I’ve tried, and I’ll carry on trying, but that doesn’t mean I think we’ll succeed. There are thousands of people here. It’s like looking for a needle in a haystack. And if we do find her, I don’t think she’s going to listen. That’s all.”

Up and down the streets and in the tiny, dirty cafés, they asked for Maria, but at best they drew a blank and at worst were met with open hostility. People who came asking questions in Chinatown were police or connected to police, and the cops were the common enemy. Finally, in one dingy bar, a man took out a pistol and spun it on his table meaningfully, and they ran. Without hesitation this time, turning this way and that as they searched for the light, until they burst out into the Paral?lel again, a block away from the Café Chicago, where they had started, and stood gasping for breath and laughing for no reason except relief.

“Enough for one day,” said Antonio. “It’s time to be happy.” And Theo agreed wholeheartedly.

They sat at a café, eating fish with bulging eyes and mussels and scallops with the smell of the sea still inside their shells, and drinking Andalusian wine that tasted just like it had on that first evening they had spent together in the village, when Spain was an adventure Theo was waiting to begin. Before everything became so complicated and hard to unravel.

Looking at his friend across the table, drinking hard to forget, Theo wished he could go back to that night when everything had been magical and the square had been transformed into Dracula’s castle just by pulling a sheet across the trees.

Afterward, they crossed the Paral?lel to the Moulin Rouge: a squat building with an illuminated windmill with rotating red sails superimposed on its facade above the portico. They bought tickets and coffee with rum in paper cups that they had to hold on to with both hands to stop them from spilling over as they pushed inside with the crowd. Soon all the seats were taken, rising in a steep semicircle up from the curtained stage. Everyone was squashed in together, shouting and laughing and smoking, utterly alive and, like Antonio, determined to enjoy to the full every moment of escape from the drudgery of their days.

Theo thought of the Liceu and wondered at the extreme contrast between the two theaters. Only a few streets separated them, but they belonged to different worlds. Plush carpet and sawdust, evening dress and overalls, the ostentation of great wealth and the degradation of terrible poverty. Could they continue to exist so close together and yet so far apart? Or was conflict between them inevitable as each fought for its own survival?

Suddenly there was a hush as the curtain rose and Conchita stepped out. Theo knew that was her name because it said so on the blackboard that was carried across the stage before each act. Dressed in a chemise and black trunks from which rolls of fat bulged out, and an oversize cross that glittered between her almost-exposed breasts, she sang bawdy songs while making eyes at and presenting her gyrating hips to the men in the front row. They reached toward her with their hands, from which she withdrew with a look of mock outrage, only to advance again. Her voice was terrible, but that was part of the joke, and the audience roared their appreciation when she came back for an encore.

“They put her in jail in 1932 when her negligee fell off,” Antonio shouted in Theo’s ear, but he couldn’t hear Antonio’s reply when he asked him how he knew, because everyone was singing along to a popular song called “La Vaselina” about a newlywed wife displaying incredible naivete on her wedding night.

The laughter was infectious. Through the acts—a kaleidoscope of sequins and corsets and glitter, of double entendre and innuendo—hysteria grew like a wind rushing this way and that through the audience, creating a violent happiness that possessed Theo like a demon.

There was a fantastic irreverence at work. In the best-received skit of the evening, the stage was turned into a confessional in which a libidinous priest even fatter than Don Vincente and wearing similar silver-buckled shoes took advantage of a beautiful female parishioner who turned out, after the slow removal of her garments, to be a man! Theo laughed so hard that it hurt and wondered afterward at his savage glee. It was as if he hated the Church now as much as the Anarchists around him, but not just for their reasons—the hypocrisy, the lies, the investment in ignorance; it was more because religion separated him from his mother, creating a gulf between them that he could not bridge.

The Moulin saved its best for last. A Romany woman in a long green dress with an elongated face and features, as if lifted from a Gauguin painting of Tahiti, walked out onto the stage, accompanied by a guitar player with a wide-brimmed black sombrero pulled low over his forehead. He sat on a stool and began to play, picking out slow notes, while she looked on immobile and impassive, gazing into a space that only she could see.

The audience fell completely quiet. No one spoke, no one moved. The sudden switch from tumult to silence astonished Theo. It was like a conjurer’s trick.

A minute passed and she remained still as a statue. Until the guitar all at once accelerated and she burst into life, jumping, twisting, contorted in a feverish swirl of cloth and castanets clicking in her upturned hands. All while singing with a voice that was like a nasal howl, descending through scales that made no sense to Theo to reach a lyrical beauty that she threw away as if it was nothing a moment later.

He couldn’t make sense of the words. They were distorted by the strange rhythms of flamenco, but he understood the passion. The song and the dance and the music were an expression of ecstasy and agony. Life lived on the outer rim of possibility. Carmen stabbed, bombs thrown, fire in the night. An art that this audience could embrace deep in their souls.

She stopped as suddenly as she had begun and stood looking at the audience for a moment, accepting their applause, before walking off the stage. The show was over. The lights came up and Theo and Antonio shuffled out with the crowd into the night.

They walked slowly up the wide avenue without speaking, even when they had left the reveling crowds behind.

The song had awakened a sense of foreboding in Theo that he had been holding suppressed ever since Pedrito’s murder. It was dread without the knowledge of what he was dreading. A growing pressure that felt like the hour before a storm that would not break. He tried hard, but without success, to push the anxiety back into the chamber of his unconscious mind where he usually kept it contained, and the effort constrained him, so that he could not think of what to say to Antonio, with whom conversation always came so easily. It didn’t help that Antonio was silent, too, lost in his own thoughts.

As they entered the street leading to the barracks, Theo forced himself to speak: “It was a good day, even if we didn’t find Maria,” he said. “Thank you for showing me ...” He stopped, unable to think of the right word to describe all that they had seen.

“It’s an honor to guide you,” said Antonio with a trace of his old smile as he repeated the words he’d spoken to Theo when they first met two years before in his father’s office. “I hope I can get away again next Saturday afternoon and we can look for her again. Will you still be here?”

“I don’t know. I hope so. If I am, I’ll come like today,” said Theo, stumbling over his words as he felt their inadequacy to match what he was feeling.

They were in sight of the barracks now: high and gray and imposing in the moonlight.

“Do you ever feel like something is coming?” he burst out. “Something bad which we can’t stop?”

“All the time,” said Antonio. “And I can’t see past it. I try to but I can’t. It’s like a bull running. It’s too big.”

His voice was very quiet, and Theo knew that he was thinking about the day of the storm, when they had taken shelter in the lonely cottage at the top of the village and the old woman had refused to say what she had seen in his palm. A black fate written in the lines from which there was no escape.

“It’ll be okay,” said Theo, even though he didn’t believe it. His feeling of separation from his friend was even stronger now, but he forced himself against its weight and reached out his arms to hug Antonio, who felt limp in his embrace.

He looked at Theo and nodded, as if communicating his understanding of what Theo was trying to do, and then turned and passed through the gate and was swallowed up in the darkness.