Trafika Europe 6 - Arabesque

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crossed the Spanish border in 1917 by way of a remote beach near Cerbère and then proceeded along the coast until they reached Puerto de la Selva on the bay’s innermost point, where they huddled together in the second of the watercolor s , a rather unf ini shed ver s ion of Bouteilles et fruit , until sometime in October 1919, at which point they headed back over the border in search of the originals. Meanwhile, the three paintings had been sent to Vollard, whereupon the ears set a course for the master’s studio in Aix, which they entered through the high crack in 1927, twenty years old, now with only Les Baigneuses intact. For some reason or another, which could as well be Spain’s hermetic road signs as inertia or the rotating ear th’s

centri fugal force, most Spanish ears headed south. Portugal, however, did not adopt Spain’s wait-and-see attitude to the war, but instead cast itself eagerly and superfluously into the fray. Mobilization was already creating strong unrest among that country’s ears, causing many to pull up and most to head for less agreeable, though safer pastures. Yet hardly had the cannon booms from the northern battlefields began to sound in Portuguese newspapers, which, in all haste, had to requisition larger fonts and drop the verb’s active tense from all headlines and captions, when hosts of terrified ears began to flee south toward less literate regions. Up until 1917 most ears stuck it out, holing up in ana l phabet i c f armer s ’ outhouses and hay barracks,

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