Call Me Brooklyn Read online

  That was his way of trying to explain things. In that sense you could say I was luckier than you. Your grandfather never says anything; he lets people come to their own conclusions. But, that day, he was more loquacious than usual. He explained to me who Sacco and Vanzetti were, the case that had been mounted against them, the intricacies of the judicial system. Finally, he told me they’d been condemned to death a few days before. A wave of indignation has surged through the world, he said. Protests have been organized in countless cities trying to stop this travesty. I want you to come with me—you’re almost a man.

  We got out of the subway at Rector Street. Many of the side streets off Broadway were crowded with police troops, both on foot and mounted. The demonstrators had gathered at Bowling Green, near Wall Street. It was a cloudy day, and there was great tension in the air.

  We meandered through groups of policemen and eagerly joined the crowd. It was difficult to move amid so many people. Your grandfather told me to hold on tightly to his vest and not to let go under any circumstances.

  Suddenly, the crowd began to push toward Broadway. At first I heard some isolated screams, but after a few seconds your grandfather and I found ourselves engulfed by the deafening roar of the multitude. I could feel my temples pounding. The cops egged on their horses. They didn’t charge head-on right away, just passed us quickly, barely missing us, trying to disperse us. It was so terrifying that I can barely remember isolated scenes. At one point I saw clouds of rocks flying through the air and the horses stampeding from panic. At an officer’s command, the police charged, and the crowd scattered in all directions. I heard screams, loud thuds, horseshoes striking the cobblestones. There were people fallen on the ground, windows being shattered, cars turned over. Somewhere, flames rose up, further frightening the horses, which began to kick and rear, getting rid of their riders. People with bloodied faces, many of them women, kicked and punched the fallen policemen. After I’m not sure how long, we were running through the graves of the small cemetery at St. Paul’s. Your grandfather lifted me up and threw me over a hedge as if I were a bale of hay. We kept on running alongside other demonstrators, and didn’t stop till we left behind all signs of violence, well past the outskirts of Chinatown. It’s a miracle that nothing happened to us.

  There were demonstrations all over the world, not only in New York and other major cities in the United States, but that didn’t affect the course of things. We held out hope till the very last moment, but when the day arrived, May 17, 1927, the two anarchists were executed in spite of the fact that there had been no conclusive proof against them. A few days later, your grandfather David published an incendiary article in the Brooklyn Eagle. Many times over the years, I heard him say that it was the best thing he ever wrote. Maybe so; the fact is that the article made quite an impact, and some passages were quoted in other papers, including the New York Times. Numerous letters of support arrived at the Eagle’s offices. The execution was followed by more violence. And around that time, the police showed up at our house with an arrest warrant for David Ackerman, accusing him of inciting violence in his article—which, as you can imagine, was full of invective against the judicial system of this country. They put him through all types of interrogation and coercions, but after the seventy-two hours of the habeas corpus, not having enough proof to charge him and realizing they weren’t going to get anything out of him, they just let him go. He remained an anarchist until the end of his life, but, never losing sight of his own sense of repugnance at any sort of proselytizing, he never tried to inculcate anyone with his ideas.

  Maybe that was the reason, I went on, why Ben didn’t inherit his father’s ideology. He was a well-intentioned intellectual, a liberal, to be sure, but free of specific political affiliations. At most, you could say he was a sympathizer of the Communist Party, or, more accurately, a latter-day adherent of utopian socialism. As for me, despite my heritage, I’ve never cared for politics one bit.

  Lewis nodded:

  My kids neither. Each generation responds to the world according to unforeseen patterns.

  The protest at the southern tip of Manhattan and the meeting in Boerum Hill are connected in one important way: each event represented the moment at which David Ackerman felt that his son and his grandson had, respectively, become men. And, of course, the meeting I attended with my grandfather was in honor of the two anarchists who had been legally murdered twenty-five years before.

  Thinking about it, I realized that the event that David had made me attend in Boerum Hill had two consequences at a symbolic level: first, my grandfather had welcomed me into the world of adults, something that he’d managed to do before my father had even thought of it; second, and for me this was the most important one, because of David’s gesture, I was at last allowed into the Archive. It was a decisive moment for me: I was giving up one haven for another. I was leaving behind the paradise of my childhood, which I had not yet completely abandoned, to enter into one filled with books, which I would never leave again.

  Ben gave me free access to the Archive a couple of years later, in 1954. By then, however, I had begun to accumulate my own papers, dating them and documenting all my writing. The difference being that Ben never wrote anything, only collected it, while I felt the need to record everything I saw. On the other hand, I began to fathom the most profound side of my father’s character. The fifties, as I don’t have to remind someone like you, were a very difficult time for people like him. McCarthy was in his heyday, doing his thing, and ex-Brigade men had it tough. The worst part was that they had to hide their past. The noble ideal of which they felt legitimately proud and for which they had risked their lives had become something criminal and embarrassing. They had no other choice but to hide.

  The events of 1927—the demonstration in Bowling Green, the executions of Sacco and Vanzetti, the agony caused by the detention of my grandfather—were a revelation that left a seed planted in Ben’s conscience. For the moment, the floodwaters ebbed and he could lead a normal life like the rest of the kids his age. When he finished high school, he spent a summer working as a forest ranger in Vermont, and in the fall, he enrolled in the school of engineering at the University of Pittsburgh. He was always a good student. By the time the Spanish Civil War broke out, he had finished his sophomore year with excellent grades. The news of the fascist uprising surprised him in the middle of the summer, while he was working at the Brooklyn Navy Yard. What had happened in Spain—and this I don’t have to tell you either—caused quite a stir in liberal circles in the United States. There was an overwhelming show of support for the republican cause, both from conscientious workers and from the intellectual class. Ben didn’t have to think about it twice. He was twenty-three years old and had led a rather uneventful life. Up to that point, his studies had taken up most of his time and energy. Ben’s told me many times that what was going on in Spain was the catalyst that awoke his political conscience, which had been dormant for so long. During the first few months, he followed news of the war in the papers with great restlessness and anxiety. One year after the hostilities had erupted, things began to look bad for the Republicans. In October 1937, reading the Brooklyn Eagle, he saw the announcement for a meeting that was going to take place at a hotel in Manhattan, and he decided to attend. He had good reason to go: he had made his mind up to enlist in the International Brigades, and was going to do it without telling his family. The keynote speaker was the British novelist Ralph Bates—you know who he is, of course.

  Lewis slapped his thigh and let out a loud laugh:

  Do I know who Bates is? Who hasn’t heard of El Fantástico? A brilliant man.

  Then you’ll remember that the republican government had asked him to make a tour of North American cities to recruit volunteers and raise funds to fight the rebels. That was the meeting Ben went to. As far as my father was concerned, however, Bates was preaching to the converted. The idea of enlisting in the Brigades had been bouncing around in his head for a while, and he had
already made up his mind before hearing one word of the Englishman’s harangue.

  Funny the way people’s paths cross, Abe said. I met Ralph long after the end of the war, in 1951, during the yearly reunion of the International Brigades in their New York quarters, on Broadway. In the United States, Bates had been pretty well-known as a fiction writer before ’36. He had published a couple of novels and collections of stories dealing with Spain, although literature was only one of his many interests. Have you read him?

  I haven’t, but Ben likes his work very much. Some people say that his stuff about Spain is better than Malraux’s or Hemingway’s. There are a few of his books in the Archive: Sierra, Lean Men, The Olive Field . . . and some others I forget now. Have you read him?

  I don’t read fiction. I said the same thing to Bates when I was introduced to him, to justify my not really knowing his work. A few days later, I got a copy of The Dolphin in the Wood in the mail, signed and dedicated. It’s not fiction, the dedication said—and it wasn’t, as such. It was his autobiography. A beautiful gesture, and I have to say, I was impressed by the book. He’s had a fascinating life.

  What ever happened to him?

  He’s been forgotten. I think he spends half of the year in the island of Naxos with his wife and the rest of the time in Manhattan. Sort of like I do. As far as I know, he teaches at NYU, these days.

  Has he stopped writing?

  When I last saw him, he had long since decided not to publish ever again. He gave me a rather peculiar explanation: the more politically disenchanted he had become, the less he cared about literature. Before the war, he had been very prolific. After Franco’s victory, he went to Mexico as so many others had. He didn’t know that he was in for yet another terrible blow: the news of Stalin’s pact with Hitler. When he found out, he almost completely lost faith in his fellow man. He tore up his party card after having been a member for twenty-four years. But, in spite of everything, he had just enough faith left in him to finish The Fields of Paradise. That was in 1940, after that there was a ten-year silence. When we met at that reunion on Broadway, he told me that The Dolphin in the Wood was his farewell to writing. And the nail in the coffin was still to come: the McCarthy era. That’s where Ralph Bates’s public life comes to an end. There’s not a trace of him after the early fifties.

  It can’t be.

  It is. End of story. He became disenchanted with the world, with politics, with human beings, with literature, and disappeared from the face of the Earth. That’s how it turned out. That’s the simple truth. We’d know by now if he had any more to say for himself.

  It had stopped snowing and was getting dark. The Lion D’Or was still packed, a few of the groups who had been there when we arrived still chatting away. Before starting on another subject, let’s go somewhere else, Lewis said. I propose that we continue this conversation in a rather peculiar place—you’ll see what I mean when we get there. You probably don’t know who Chicote is, do you.

  No.

  You haven’t missed anything. A questionable character, a Francoist. But political differences aside, everyone knows that his bar serves the best cocktails in Madrid. It’s on the Gran Vía, a few steps from the Hotel Florida, where I want to go afterward. Of course, if you have a problem with that, we’ll go somewhere else.

  Anything’s fine with me.

  In that case, the best thing to do is knock back a carajillo. I can’t believe I didn’t think of it before. Do you know what that is?

  There was practically no one on Alcalá Street. It was no longer snowing, the air was crisp, and a sharp wind cut at the skin. Just as we reached Recoletos Avenue, the facade lights of the buildings around Cibeles went on. That morning, crossing the plaza by cab, I had seen the opposite: the streetlights had all turned off. With them on, the city looked different, more beautiful in a way. We were in front of a building crowned with a winged god; Ben told me the name, once, but I’d forgotten it. Alcalá Street meets the Gran Vía there, two bright avenues disappearing into the distance. Patches of clouds sped across the sky. The glow of some straggling lightning shimmered far away. We walked slowly, not saying a word, soaking in the mystery saturating the air of the city.

  At Chicote, the waiter brought two steaming cups and put them on the table, warning us not to touch them.

  Unless for some reason you feel like getting burned, he said, dead serious.

  Ben was in one of the first contingent of brigades that set sail from New York in ’37, I went on. From Albacete, they sent him to the Guadalajara front and he was wounded in one of his first confrontations. He was treated in a hospital in Madrid where he became friends with an American doctor named Bernard Maxwell. During his convalescence, he also met a fellow countrywoman spending a few days in Madrid: Lucia Hollander. Lucia spoke Catalan as well as Spanish, which is why they’d stationed her in Barcelona, where she worked for intelligence. She met my father at a party in the house of Mirko Stauer, a Montenegrin aristocrat who was active in the party. Ben and Lucia fell in love at first sight and got married then and there, in the middle of the war.

  In the same manner that I can only associate the word father with Ben Ackerman, for me there has been no maternal figure other than Lucia Hollander. And yet, from the first time my father told me about Teresa Quintana and showed me her picture when I was fourteen years old, there hasn’t been a day I haven’t thought about my biological mother. At first, when all my imagination had to go on was the young militiawoman in the picture, a thousand questions hammered the inside of my head. What was she like? How did her voice sound? Was anyone in her family still alive? What had her life been like in that little town in Valladolid, whose name Ben couldn’t even remember? And what was the young man standing beside her in that photo like? At night, before falling asleep, I repeated her name aloud, as if I could summon her ghost that way, or stir up some memory I didn’t have. Somehow, my sadness made its way to Lucia, who appeared in my room and sat at the edge of my bed, trying to console me. But it was only Ben who had met her in real life, and when we were alone in his studio, it was him that I implored to tell me again and again the tale of how they’d met. A thousand times I asked him to repeat it, and he always complied, although there wasn’t much to add to what he had told me the first time. When it comes down to it, Abe, I know very little about her, and I can sum it up in very few words.

  Ben and Teresa met each other in Madrid. Lucia, like I said, was stationed in Barcelona. She and Ben still hadn’t gotten married and communication between them was limited to the phone calls Ben was able to make from work, once a week if they were lucky. In spite of the war, daily life in the capital of Spain went on with tenacious vitality. Ben was always saying that Madrid is the most fun-loving city in the world. He was staying in a pensión near Cuatro Caminos. One morning, while he was having his coffee at the Aurora Roja, he saw a girl walk in. She caught his attention because of her pale skin and because of the mixture of sadness and determination that he saw in her face. The girl sat a few tables away and ordered a glass of milk and some cupcakes. Ben’s like that, sometimes he doesn’t notice the glaringly obvious, other times he zeroes in on the most trivial detail imaginable. That was it. After a while, the girl left, but for some reason, her image stayed with him. We always tend to think that we’ll never see people like that again, when we run into them by chance—I mean people we find attractive, not necessarily sexually, but who capture our attention. Ben must have assumed the same thing, which is why he was shocked when that same day, a few hours later, he saw her at the headquarters of the International Brigades. The girl was speaking to someone who had a British accent. She seemed very nervous and the Brigade man was trying to calm her down. The girl’s black eyes rested for a moment on Ben, not quite seeing him. Although he was at some distance, he caught bits of the conversation. The Englishman was telling the militiawoman that the unit her compañero was in had been wiped out near the hermitage of Santa Quiteria, and that there wasn’t news of any survivors. Y
ou know about that better than I do.

  The snippets of conversation Ben heard had intrigued him and when he called Lucia a few nights later, Ben told her about the militiawoman with the black eyes. He asked her if she’d heard about the Squadron of Death, and Lucia told him that it was a unit of Italian anarchists. She promised that she would make inquiries among her comrades in the intelligence services, and that she would have some answers the next time he called. When she did, she confirmed everything he had half-heard: the expedition had been a catastrophe, the members of the squadron had fallen like flies, exterminated near a hermitage in the mountains of Huesca and there was no word of survivors.

  For some reason, Ben was certain he’d see the girl again, and it wasn’t long before he was proved right. Some days later, she showed up again at the Aurora Roja. This time, as soon as she walked in, Ben realized she was pregnant. Her state was so evident that he didn’t understand how he hadn’t noticed it before. Teresa asked for a coffee with milk and sat down. Every so often, she glanced impatiently at the clock on the wall, as if she were waiting for someone who was late. After a bit, a man arrived and sat with her. This time, Ben didn’t have to make an effort to hear their conversation. The man was quite effeminate. The girl called him by his name several times: Alberto. Grabbing her by the hand, he told her that he was very sorry, but that he still had no news for her. The catastrophe of the Malatesta Battalion had given rise to anger and controversy in Republican circles. According to his sources, two things seemed clear: one, what had happened could only be explained by some type of betrayal; and two, there was now talk that some of them had survived. A name came up repeatedly: Umberto. That must have been the militiawoman’s companion, although the Italian never mentioned a last name. Alberto told her that there was no news, and insisted that the best thing was to try not to think about it until they had some reliable news. As for him, they had just told him he was being transferred to the Luigi Longo unit. When she heard this, the girl began to cry. The Italian tried to calm her down as best he could, and soon enough he succeeded. After about half an hour, he excused himself. They agreed to meet the following day. When he saw that she’d been left alone, Ben approached her table and asked for permission to join her. She gave him a desolate look but did not refuse his company, probably because—aside from the fact that she felt helpless—Ben was wearing his Brigade uniform and had a foreign accent.