TOPICS: George and Spain

WHEN I knew George during the summer the rich people had all left Madrid for the beaches so his little illegal business in land speculation was sucked dry. He was eating on the cuff and his duena was dunning him for the rent, but he would terrorize her with his deep voice and dark skin. He had only been in Spain two months and his Spanish wasn't up to quarrelling.

George once had a house in Ethiopia and has eaten lobster steaks from the Red Sea. He is very black, though his features are Caucasian. He is quite fat because he is always eating; he says he can never get enough to eat. As he is in some measure resigned to his corpulence he walks stiff-legged and pigeon-toed, which makes his belly and breats jiggle with every step.

After George left this country, which was twenty years ago after being called a Communist and finding that the smart New York musical circles might tolerate a Jew but not a Negro, he came to Europe to conduct the great symphonies and operas. He studied under von Karajan then and now the foremost conductor in Germany, who wrote that George is hochbegabt, highly gifted, very fine praise indeed. I have seen this letter and one from Richter, the pianist, saying how much he enjoyed performing with George. Once the Emperor of Ethiopia come to Berlin and admired Geogre's work and invited him to Africa to organize a symphony orchestra there. George went and has pictures to show he did.

There are several much older pictures, now warped and cracking, in which George looks much thinner. These early pictures are of him conducting choruses of white ones and black ones, as he says. That was in Harlem, where he lived for a time after coming from North Carolina.

George is priapistic. He can be very charming about it walking down the Gran Via, carelessly rolling his large head at one woman then another. He wants you to think that one day he made a list of all the vices and then chewed a pencil and circled all those he would practice and those he wouldn't. But heis very, very serious about women. The only ugly things in my life have to do with America and women, he said to me one time. What is a little surprising is that he likes black women too. Many American Negroes in Europe will not touch a black women, even though there are girls from Africa who are greatly desired by the whites. They, the expatriate Negroes, have managed an awesome act of reduction by which they may avenge themselves and their race on the Western world. George dismembered history too, but in a way of his own devising.

His proposition was this. All the evil in the world, the race hate and his own decline was caused by the devil and the CIA. It was the same shop-worn devil but now, in this century, no longer served by solitary, gutted souls but by an institution. There is so little poetry in the CIA, so much that is pedestrian and mean that no one but George could dare to attribute cosmic force to it. He carried it off though. He always had a cigarette in his mouth when he said it and tilted his head back waiting for the smoke to curl up over his face and the light to shine on the moistening high forehead. George was very conscious of the shameless theatricality of the pose. He practiced it, just as he practiced a Hemmingwayesque clumsiness in his speech, the careful inclusion of certain words, as though he had learned English as a foreign language.

George was as terrified by his monstrous abstraction. He has seen forces rampant on the earth.

In his North Carolina the forces burned and suffocated him at the same time like a poisonous gas. He was in Dusseldorf after the war when you could stand at the train station and look ten miles in any direction and in Africa to see tribalism, nationalism, them, us slither into the fetid soil. Then his career in music was wrecked, and he watched that too, proud of his talent, his mission to music but still shy and afraid to stand too close to a white man.

I don't know how his career went wrong and I don't think he does either. He truly does suspect the CIA of insinuating against him. He claims, and I more than half believe him, that he refused to spy for them when he performed in East Germany; when they sent some woman agent to coax him he got furious and said wouldn't you like to go to hell and tell some of his friends. He thinks that they hate him because the woman was arrested a few months later and they think he was responsible, even though the woman always went about in purple and orange clothes and wore a wig and was known to be a spy.

I don't think it matters, though deprived of specific knowledge, the dates of decisions and actions, his decline becomes less formally tragic. I must apologize for this. His moral and geographic position in life hint at great tragedy and I could not resist suggesting a fury, an activity, a motion that does not exist. Anyway he was half waiting for them to come from America to seize him, to break him dead or force him back to America. Sometimes he said he was a citizen of the world, free, not speaking English. But he was waiting for them all the same. Whatever happens George is over now, for all he wants is to marry a pretty girl and move to the South of Spain where he can run a small hotel and let the CIA conduct the symphonies of the world.