Under the Gypsy Moon: A Novel

by Lawrence Thornton

Overview

“Beautifully lyric . . . [Lawrence Thornton’s] prose is finely honed and his touch sure.”—Chicago Tribune

The year is 1936. The tide of fascism is overwhelming Europe. In Spain the Guardia Civil wages war on the citizens. Spanish-German novelist Joaquín Wolf leaves his adopted home in Paris for a short visit to Spain, where he will spend an evening that will change his life. For there he meets the great Spanish poet Federico García Lorca and in two brief hours they forge a close friendship. Within days Lorca is dead, executed by the civil guard, an event that sets Wolf on an irrevocable course as he joins the struggle against Franco.

Wounded, Wolf returns to France to find German fascism threatening the city he loves. Banding together with a fiercely political group of writers named the Lorca Club, he again becomes a soldier of the resistance—this time using his most potent ammunition: words.

Through the Lorca Club he meets Ursula Krieger, another exiled Berliner living in Paris, a survivor not only of war but of the bloodless horrors of postwar life. Though the scars of her past keep her from reaching out to him, Wolf’s quiet, steadfast love vanquishes shame and pain. And while Lorca taught Wolf what must be fought against, even to the death, it is Ursula who teaches him what is worth fighting—and living—for.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780307430380
Publisher:	Random House Publishing Group
Publication date:	11/23/2011
Sold by:	Random House
Format:	eBook
Pages:	284
File size:	2 MB

About the Author

Lawrence Thornton is an award-winning novelist best known for Imagining Argentina, his first novel, which received a number of literary prizes, including the Ernest Hemingway Foundation Award, the PEN American Center West Award for Best Novel of 1987, a nomination for the PEN/Faulkner Award, the Shirley Collier Award from UCLA, and the Silver Medal of the Commonwealth Club of California. He also received fellowships from the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts. Thornton was born and educated in California, where he lives with his wife.

Read an Excerpt

1 • Lisbon
HOTEL FERDINAND
NOVEMBER 23, 1942
 
1
 
Who knows where memory begins? Who can say where the vibrant voice becomes an echo, the face once so vividly intaglioed on the retina a fading copy in the mind?
 
Three weeks ago I had neither the desire nor the need to know.
 
Three weeks ago, when we left the Gare d’Austerlitz, and Paris slowly disappeared behind the snow, I had abandoned memory. I believed only in the future as Claude and Monika, Joaquín and I headed south to Lisbon, where a ship would take us away from the war to America. The jeopardy we’d endured was already blanketed by falling snow, silenced by whiteness that offered itself like a bright new page of life.
 
I have spent every day since our arrival watching ships leaving Lisbon’s harbor, trying to distract myself by attending to their shapes and sluggish movements, but it does no good. Everything I see is filmed by memory, which rises like Lazarus to mock me for my presumption. Though I accept this censure, I insist that I did not part lightly with the past. For many years my life was devoted to its twists and turns. I knew its hidden chambers with the certain knowledge of a connoisseur, and walked away only when it was safe to think that the four of us would soon stand together at the ship’s railing and watch Lisbon fall behind. It was neither shortsighted nor naive to believe I’d escaped. Everything had been planned, every contingency imagined. Without the benefit of the fortune-teller’s art, how could we have known that a horse and rider waited in the mountains we had to pass through on our way to freedom?
 
It would be easy to blame chance for Joaquín’s death, rather than the Guardia Civil. Easy to spend my days rocking back and forth in silence, an anguished woman clutching a photograph in my hands. Easy to wear grief like a black mantilla thrown across my shoulders.
 
But grief makes chance victorious, allows his great blank face to obscure Joaquín as surely as the moon’s shadow sometimes falls upon the sun. I refuse that eclipse, and that is why I have taken up this diary.
 
Until this morning, when I knew I had to write, I dreaded the crossing to America as a final sundering, a last, watery farewell.
 
No more. Now I see it as a time to purge grief’s bitterness with the pith and essence of Joaquín’s life.
 
So I return to memory, not as the slave I was, but as its mistress. The white page that so recently offered itself to me will hold a different, sadder story than the one I was ready to inscribe. But it will have its benefactions, and of these none will be greater than the picture of a man neither Nazis nor Guardia Civil could silence. Perhaps, in a humble way, my words may act as epilogue to Joaquín’s famous Letters to Lorca. Perhaps, by facing memory unafraid, I may find the way to look forward once again.
 
2
 
I have it on the harbor master’s authority that our ship will leave by the end of the week. Time enough to build a foundation to sustain me on the crossing. Time enough to explain why Joaquín went to Granada and sought out the place where Lorca died, and in doing so altered the direction of his life and mine as well.
 
His journey to the place the Spaniards call Fuente Grande began one spring morning in Paris in 1936, a little over six years ago. By then his reputation as a novelist had spread across Europe and brought a letter inviting him to read and comment on his work at a writer’s congress that summer in Madrid. The congress was a prestigious affair reserved for the best of the avant-garde, and the invitation, written by the president, a man named Carnero, was filled with pleasant flatteries.
 
It arrived on the heels of the publication of Morning, the second novel of a projected quartet devoted to the life of Paris. It should have been a happy time. The reviews were splendid, his publisher had fěted him, but depression set in even before the book’s release. At the time he thought it was because he’d reached an impasse. He had written a thousand pages tracing the city’s psyche through his narrator’s dispassionate Germanic precision. He had given Heinz a painter’s eye, a musician’s ear to record all he saw and heard, but he feared these were not enough to sustain the next two books, which had to rise above the others and comprehend the whole.
 
His old friend, Jacques St. Omer, the essayist, laughed when Joaquín confided his troubles to him.
 
“Postpartum blues, Wolf. Everyone feels the same when they’ve just finished something. Don’t be stupid. Get out of Paris for a while. Enjoy yourself. When you come back everything will look different.”
 
There was no one Joaquín respected more. He and St. Omer had met soon after he arrived in Paris and quickly established a deep friendship, seeing each other at least once a month at Jacques’s house where his wife stuffed them with food and the children took shameful advantage of his good nature. St. Omer was a French Algerian who emigrated to Europe when he was eighteen, working out his passage in the engine room of a filthy steamer. In Paris he survived by his wits, read voraciously, and finally became a respected journalist. It was St. Omer whom Joaquín turned to for advice when he began the quartet. They argued over his theories, shouted, insulted each other, but when Dawn was finished St. Omer took it to a well-known publisher and insisted that he read the first chapter as Jacques paced back and forth like an expectant father. Although the book needed no one’s intercession, Joaquín was grateful. Every year, on the anniversary of its publication, he sent St. Omer a bottle of fine champagne.
 
He knew that he should take his old friend’s advice, but Joaquín was dedicated to his work. Abandoning Paris, even for a few weeks, went against the grain until he realized that he could accomplish nothing in his present state of mind. Then he wrote to Carnero, accepting the offer, and sent a longer letter to his aunt María in Madrid, asking if he could spend a few weeks with her and his uncle Pedro. She responded immediately, saying he was welcome to stay as long as he wished.
 
Rather than going directly to Madrid he decided to spend a few days visiting his father in Berlin, whom he hadn’t seen since his mother’s funeral several years earlier. He had never been close to Heinrich. After Joaquín turned his back on the family’s bank, leaving Germany with the idea of becoming a writer, Heinrich refused to correspond with him for years, giving in only after Estrella fell ill and begged him to heal the rift. When Joaquín returned after her death he was shocked by the depth of his father’s grief. The old man had always been indifferent to Estrella, treating her with only slightly less disdain than he did the servants, but he seemed to have forgotten this as soon as Joaquín arrived. Heinrich depended on him for everything, begged him to make the funeral arrangements. That night he insisted on sitting up late as he recalled the high points of his married life and drank himself unconscious. The next morning the old man greeted Joaquín in the breakfast room with an icy stare, and he knew their rapprochement had ended.
 
“He has a place for everything in his life,” Joaquín told me once. “His mind is like an old-fashioned desk studded with drawers where his emotions are neatly stored—excitement, anger, desire, grief and the rest neatly labeled in Gothic script. Father is nothing if not systematic. After Mother died, he opened the grief drawer and emptied it of memories, tears, self-pity—everything he felt, or thought he should feel. I don’t know if he experienced any of those emotions, or simply put them on for the occasion. In any case, the morning after the funeral he looked in, found the drawers empty, and resumed his life as Heinrich Wolf, banker and financier.”
 
The city Joaquín abandoned, the city he remembered as it appeared six years earlier from a car in his mother’s funeral cortège and then the high windows of his family’s estate as he listened to Heinrich’s brooding recollections, had undergone a profoundly disturbing change. At that time he was still essentially innocent of politics, though a few years earlier he had been outraged by reports of the torchlight parade of students to the square on Unter den Linden opposite the university where thousands of books had been burned. He knew that Hitler was meticulously obliterating the past in other, equally repugnant ways, but he was not prepared for the transformation of the city into a Fascist nightmare when he arrived that hot and sultry afternoon.
 
He had decided to stay in a hotel so there would be a retreat in the event things went badly with his father. That spring Berlin had begun cleaning itself in preparation for the Olympic games, but only the city’s gardens and spacious avenues had been refurbished and neutralized. On the way in from the station he saw a few racist signs whose sickening impact did not strike with full force until after he unpacked and went out. He walked for block after block, passing grocery stores and butcher shops, bakeries and cafés, all shouting in German and Hebrew: JEWS NOT ADMITTED. JEWS ENTER THIS PLACE AT THEIR OWN RISK.
 
At a favorite coffee house he opened a newspaper to read while he ate a roll. The language of the signs seemed modest compared with the xenophobia of the official press. He put the paper down in disgust, listened to conversations that seemed drawn from what he’d read, picked the paper up again, unable to believe the hatred.