The Spanish Bow Read online

  The Spanish Bow

  Andromeda Romano-Lax

  * * *

  Harcourt, Inc.

  ORLANDO AUSTIN NEW YORK SAN DIEGO LONDON

  * * *

  Copyright © 2007 by Andromeda Romano-Lax

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced

  or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical,

  including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and

  retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

  Requests for permission to make copies of any part of the work

  should be submitted online at www.harcourt.com/contact or mailed

  to the following address: Permissions Department, Harcourt, Inc.,

  6277 Sea Harbor Drive, Orlando, Florida 32887-6777.

  www.HarcourtBooks.com

  Lyrics from Mahler's Second Symphony are translated

  from the German by Steven Ledbetter. Used by permission.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Romano-Lax, Andromeda, 1970—

  The Spanish bow/Andromeda Romano-Lax.—1st ed.

  p. cm.

  1. Musicians—Fiction. 2. Madrid (Spain)—Fiction. I. Title.

  PS3618.O59S68 2007

  813'.6—dc22 2006100937

  ISBN 978-0-15-101542-9

  Text set in Fournier MT Tall Caps

  Designed by Liz Demeter

  Printed in the United States of America

  First edition

  A C E G I K J H F D B

  * * *

  A Brian Lax y Elizabeth Sheinkman,

  con respeto y gratitud.

  PART I

  Campo Seco, Spain 1892

  CHAPTER 1

  I was almost born Happy.

  Literally, Feliz was the Spanish name my mother wanted for me. Not a family name, not a local name, just a hope, stated in the farthest-reaching language she knew—a language that once reached around the world, to the Netherlands, Africa, the Americas, the Philippines. Only music has reached farther and penetrated more deeply.

  I say "almost born Feliz," because the name that attached itself to me instead, thanks to a sloppy bureaucrat's bias toward Catalan saints' names, was Feliu. Just one letter changed on my death—yes, death—certificate.

  My father was overseas that year, working as a customs officer in colonial Cuba. The afternoon my mother's labor pains started, my father's elder sister changed into a better dress, for church. Mamá bent over a chair near the kitchen doorway, legs splayed, ankles turned inward, as the weight of my dropping body pulled her pelvis to the floor. While she begged Tía not to go, Mamá's knuckles whitened against the chair's straw-plaited back.

  "I will light candles for you," Tía said.

  "I don't need prayers. I need—" My mother moaned, angling her hips from side to side, trying to find a position where the pain eased. Cool water? A chamber pot? "...help," was all she could say.

  "I'll send Enrique to get the midwife." Tía pushed the ebony combs into her thick masses of gray-streaked hair. "No, I'll go myself, on the way. Where's Percival?"

  My oldest brother had slipped outside minutes earlier, bound for the bridge and the dry wash beneath it, along which the local shepherds drove their flocks. He and his friends hid there frequently, playing cards amid orange peels and broken barrel staves that reeked of vinegar.

  Percival was old enough to remember the previous disasters in sharp detail, and he didn't want to witness another. Mamá's last baby had died within minutes of birth. The one before had survived only a few days, while my mother herself hovered near death, racked with infection-induced fever. In Campo Seco, she was not the only unlucky one.

  My mother blamed the midwife who had moved to the village four years earlier, accompanied by her husband, a butcher.

  "They don't wash their hands," Mamá panted. "Last time, I saw the forceps she used. Broken at the hinge. Flakes"—she squirmed and jammed the heel of her palm into her back—"flakes of rust."

  "Ridiculous!" Tía drew the lace mantilla over her head. "You are worrying for nothing. You should pray, instead."

  My two other siblings, Enrique and Luisa, remained stoic in the face of my mother's barnyard moans, the slick of straw-colored amniotic fluid on the floor, which five-year-old Luisa wiped away; the bloody smears on the wet towels, which seven-year-old Enrique wrung and dipped in a wide porcelain bowl. By the third dip, the blue flowers on the bowl's painted bottom disappeared, obscured beneath a smoky layer of pink water.

  Thirty minutes after Tía departed, the midwife arrived. Mamá panted and strained from her marriage bed, pushing with all her strength while she struggled to keep her eyes open. She scrutinized the dirt crescents beneath the midwife's fingernails. She twisted her neck to follow every step the midwife took, to catch fleeting glimpses of the tools displayed on a square of calico covering the bedside table, and the coil of gray cotton string that brought to mind the butcher's leaky, net-covered roasts. When the midwife's hands came near, Mamá tried to close her knees, to shield me from ill fortune. But the urge to push could not be stopped. I was coming.

  And then—just as suddenly—I stopped coming. What had once moved too quickly stopped moving at all. Mamá's belly rippled and bulged a final time, then hardened into one long, unceasing contraction. Her jaw went slack. A blue vein bulged at her temple. Enrique, lingering in the open doorway, tried not to look between her legs, where the combination of taut, pearly flesh and wet hair made him think of washed-up jellyfish, collapsed against the weedy shore. The midwife caught him looking and snapped the sheet back into place, over Mamá's legs and high, round abdomen. That gesture hid one disturbing view, but it only drew more attention to what remained visible: my mother's red face, beaded with sweat and contorted with pain.

  "Here," Mamá would say later, in recounting the story of my birth, "is where you decided to rebel. Whenever someone pushes you too hard, you do the opposite."

  Actually, I was stuck: feet twisted up toward my neck, rear facing the only exit. A living churro tied into a bow.

  The midwife grunted as her hands pushed, prodded, and massaged beneath the loosely tented sheet, a question darkening her face. Forgetting Enrique, she tore away the sheet and whimpered at the sight of a small purple scrotum appearing at the spot where a crowning head should have been. She watched that spot for ten minutes, twisting the cloth of her apron with red fingers. Then she panicked. Ignoring Enrique's incredulous, upturned face and Luisa's round eyes, she pushed past them both and down the stairs, missing the bottom step entirely.

  The midwife had left to fetch her husband, who was two blocks away, wiping his own stained hands. She could have sent my brother or called from the balcony to one of our neighbor's fleet-footed children. But she wasn't a bright woman. And she knew that a third infant death in one family would invite costly gossip. Already, she could envision the sea of dark shawls that would greet her from this day forward—the back of every neighbor woman's averted head and rounded shoulders, snubbing her if I died, and my mother with me.

  Left unassisted, my mother summoned her resolve and tried to breathe more deeply. She felt safer with the midwife gone, ready to accept whatever happened. She asked Luisa to retrieve a bottle from the cellar and to hold it to her lips, though nausea allowed her to drink only a little. She called Enrique to come and take the forceps, to dip and scrub them in a bowl of the hottest water, to be ready.

  "They don't open very well," he said, struggling with the oval-shaped handles. They were fashioned from twisted iron and padded with small pieces of stitched dark leather that reminded Enrique of a sweat-stained horse saddle. "Are the pieces supposed to come apart?"r />
  "Forget it. Put them down. Use your hands."

  He blanched.

  Mamá heard Luisa start to cry, and ordered her to sing—anything, a folk song, or "Vamos a la Mar," a happy round they'd all chanted on picnic trips to the Mediterranean coast.

  "...to eat fish in a wooden dish..." Luisa sang, again and again, and then: "I see something! It's a foot!"

  Another push. A narrow back. With Enrique's help, a shoulder. My mother lost consciousness. I've been told I hung there for a while, the picture of blind indecision, with my head refusing to follow my pasty body. Until Enrique, decisive enough for us both, stepped forward and pushed a small hand into the dark, hooking a finger around my chin.

  Following my final, slippery emergence, he laid me on my mother's belly, still attached by the cord to the afterbirth inside her. There was no spank; no bawling cries. Mamá briefly surfaced into consciousness once again with instructions for Enrique on how to tie the cord with the gray string in two places, and how to cut the flattened purple cable in between.

  He moved me onto my mother's chest, but I didn't root. One of my legs hung more limply than the other, the hip joint disturbingly flaccid. No one cleared the white residue plugging my tiny nostrils. Mamá's arms lay at her sides, too tired to embrace me. There was little point. My eyelids did not twitch. My rib cage did not swell.

  "It's cold," Luisa said. "We should wrap it."

  "He's cold," Enrique corrected.

  "A boy." My mother sounded both pleased and resigned, her cheeks wet as she relived what had happened before and would happen again: the increasing pain as her adrenaline ebbed, the incapacitating fever, the deep plunge into confused sleep from which she might not return. "Tell the midwife it was not her fault. The notary will come to the door. There is a blank card with an envelope in the drawer, with the money. Write the name down for him, so there is no mistake: Feliz Aníbal Delargo Domenech"

  She gritted her teeth, waited for a spasm to subside. "Is it cold in here, Luisa?"

  "It's hot, Mamá."

  "The notary will inform the priest"—she sucked in a mouthful of air, then bit down on her lower lip—"and the engraver."

  "The engraver?" Luisa asked, but Mamá did not explain.

  "Enrique—you know how to spell Aníbal, like your great-uncle."

  Enrique shook his head.

  "Like the conqueror from Carthage, the man with the elephants."

  "I don't know how," my brother protested, more alarmed by the request to write my name than he 'd been by the drama of pulling a reluctant baby from the womb.

  But the long list and the imagined tasks ahead—a letter to Papá, a visitation, a burial—had exhausted the last of Mamá's stamina. She closed her eyes and swung her head from side to side, trying to catch an elusive breeze. She began, "A-N-I-B..." and then lost consciousness again.

  Luisa and Enrique did not understand that Mamá considered me already dead. They wrapped me and took me down to the cool, earthen-floored cellar—a cellar that Papá excavated and enlarged on every visit home. He'd always dreamed of starting a fine liqueur-making and exporting business in the cavernous room beneath our three-level stone house. Other local families had succeeded at the same dream. At one time, fourteen different sweet liqueurs—colored grassy-green to honey-yellow, with aromas of herb and hazelnut—were made and shipped from Campo Seco and a cluster of neighboring villages. We had the grapes, we had the train, and we had the confidence: Catalans, like Basques and other ancient seafarers, had traded and prospered long before there was a unified nation called Spain.

  In the meanwhile, the cellar was simply an empty space, save for one rustic bench and one rough-hewn table, joined without screws or nails, suitably pitted and gouged, so that it looked like a place where Don Quixote might have dined three centuries earlier. On this table Luisa had placed a pot of cooling water dipped from the larger pot the midwife had prepared, and a hot chocolate serving set with delicate tulip-shaped cups, which she arranged while jostling me importantly over the shoulder. She'd already pushed one of her doll's bonnets over my sticky head. Now she worked a cocoa-soaked finger between my pale lips.

  Enrique had changed out of his stained shirt and slipped into the too-small military uniform he wore for costumed play, a gift from my father which gave him comfort. He picked up his homemade flute. Because the rustic instrument always set Mamá's teeth on edge, Enrique had grown used to playing here, below street level and away from open windows. Between the warm shaking, the bitter taste of Luisa's fingers and the shrill ancient music, I opened my ears, eyes and mouth for the first time. I prepared myself to live.

  Upstairs, the midwife had returned at last. Finding the baby gone and Mamá barely conscious, she sent her husband to notify the priest and began to massage my mother's distended belly, trying to stimulate contractions that would expel the afterbirth and stem the flow of blood. In the midwife's refocused mind, there was no time for gratitude—not to my siblings, for having removed the stark evidence of the day's tragedy, nor to God, for having spared one life when He easily could have taken two.

  From the cellar, Enrique heard Mamá scream with renewed vigor, and at the same time, a knock on the door. He climbed the ladder to the foyer and pulled the heavy front door open to find the notary waiting there, just as our mother had predicted.

  "The midwife, please," he said, just as Mamá howled again.

  "She's occupied. Wait, please."

  "The baby is with them?"

  "No. We already brought it to the cellar."

  The notary winced. "It can't stay there, you know. It will..." he paused.

  "Smell?" Enrique guessed.

  "Well, yes. But not for a little while."

  "No—it already does!"

  The notary shook his head.

  "A fait accompli," he said. "So, there is no blame."

  "Not the midwife's fault. That's what Mamá said. Wait—the envelope!"

  "And your Tía?" he inquired as my brother hurried away, to retrieve the money.

  "She's at the church," Enrique called over his shoulder. "Lighting candles."

  "I see."

  As the notary waited, he hunched his shoulders, looked back at the street, and then took a few steps forward, into the protection of the foyer. The men of the town paid him little mind, but the women had poured buckets of water on him from their balconies, to protest the food taxes levied on any item unloaded by train. At least it wasn't boiling water they poured or—God help him—oil. One particularly feisty grandmother had been fined for scalding his predecessor. It was a difficult freelance existence, checking stamps here, imposing duties there, notarizing official papers on the side, writing important letters for the more than half of the village population that was illiterate. And notice how they sought him out during land deals, or when someone needed to protest a notice of military conscription. No buckets of water then!

  Anyway, here came the boy—my brother, Enrique, out of breath from climbing and descending the two flights of wooden stairs to my mother's bedroom.

  Together they filled out the papers, stumbling over the questions my mother hadn't anticipated and my brother wasn't sure how to answer: maternal grandmother's last name? Paternal grandmother's? Parents' birthplaces? All the while Enrique worried distractedly about the four names he had managed to write in a shaky, left-leaning scrawl: my first name, quickly, my second name—the one that troubled him—less so.

  "A-n-í-b-a-l—can you read it?" he fretted.

  "Yes, that's fine."

  But neither noticed how the notary had botched my first name, misreading the z at the end as a long-tailed, sloppy u.

  "The money." Enrique presented his clenched fist.

  The notary tugged open my brother's fingers and counted the treasure inside. "It's not enough. I'll be writing two certificates."

  At that moment, my Tía rounded the doorway, her black skirt flapping at her ankles, stirring dust motes into the bright shaft of light penetrating the fo
yer.

  "What's this?" she said, pushing past the notary, who touched his hat in greeting. She moved Enrique aside and peered at the certificates in the notary's ink-stained hand. Reading the words, she crossed herself.

  "The boy paid me for the first one, but I need money also for the second."

  "Why two, if the infant was born dead?"

  "You can't have a death certificate without a birth certificate."

  "But why can't you put 'born dead' on the birth certificate, and leave it at that?"

  Out of habit, the notary retracted his head into his stiff, high collar.

  Tía barked, "Shame on you, arriving even before the priest."

  "I do a service, Señora. I am a—"

  "Vulture."

  "—a legitimate representative," he continued, "of the provincial authority."

  "I doubt you collected two certificates when Señor Petrillo's infant died. You know a shoemaker has little money, but you think we have more than our share. Bureaucracy—"

  The notary interrupted, gesturing toward the stairs. "Once these have been stamped, the service is fulfilled. Payment must be made."

  "—before spirituality, I was saying. That's where this country is going."

  "The boy's mother understands. Without these certificates, funerary benefits can't be paid to the father. The shoemaker does not work for the colonial government administration. He has no right to such benefits."

  As they argued, no one noticed Enrique hopping side to side, trying to interrupt. Tía stirred her fingers around the bottom of her leather pouch, still mumbling about the decline of piety and the problems of empire, while the notary wagged his head. Finally, after more coins and handwritten copies of both certificates had changed hands, Tía turned to my brother.

  "Out back," she ordered, irritated by his hopping. "Before you have an accident."

  "I don't have to go."

  "Well, what then?"

  "Feliz isn't dead."

  "Who?"

  "The baby, Feliz."