The Spanish Bow Read online

  "The boy is confused," the notary said. "The baby's name was Feliu, " he said, stabbing a finger at the certificates in Tía's hands.

  She squinted as she read. "I'd be very upset to find out you copied the name wrong."

  "Like the saint. It means 'prosperous,' I believe."

  Tía muttered, "Not very prosperous to be born dead."

  Enrique tried again. "But the baby—he's in the cellar. You can see."

  "It's the midwife I need. Here and here—she will need to put her mark," the notary said, accenting the last word acidly just as the woman's heavy descent sounded on the staircase.

  The midwife acknowledged the adults with a weary nod, made an X just above the notary's ink-stained fingertip, then turned to Tía. "She seems comfortable now. Make sure she doesn't use the stairs for a week. Even then, if the bleeding increases..." She paused, hoping the notary would excuse himself so she could deliver more intimate instructions. When he made no effort to leave, she changed the subject. "I can speak to the carpenter for you, about a coffin. But he'll want measurements, so as not to waste wood. If you'll bring me the body, I have a piece of string left, to measure it."

  Tía stood erect with indignation. "You mean to say you didn't get a good enough look when it came out?"

  "I ran to get help. I didn't see it at all. It isn't in the bedroom."

  "It's in the cellar," Enrique said, and then louder, fists curled with frustration, "Feliz is in the cellar!"

  "Stop this nonsense!" Tía scowled. "Felix, maybe, or Feliciano, or Feliu—but what is this Feliz?

  "I imagine," she continued, facing the midwife, "that you expect full payment, even though you managed to miss the birth."

  No one noticed my mother descending the stairs, one painful step at a time, pale hand gripping the banister. She sat down on the bottom step. Her nightdress billowed around her bare feet. Her damp, dark hair flowed over her pale shoulders.

  "I just wanted my baby to be happy," she said. And then louder, so that the notary, the midwife, Tía and Enrique all turned, "Not prosperous, not successful. Just happy."

  "See?" Enrique said.

  The midwife opened her mouth to reprimand my mother for getting out of bed, the notary pursed his lips in preparation for defending the spelling on his certificates, and Tía ground her jaw, gathering the residue of her complaints. But before any of them could speak again, a piercing squall came from the cellar's open trapdoor, in the far corner of the foyer. Luisa's head followed it, then her shoulders, over which I was still crudely positioned.

  "Happy?" Luisa called out, over the sound of my furious mewling. "He can't be, with this black, tarry stuff coming out. He started crying when I tried to wipe it, and now he's turning purple."

  The adults gasped as they saw her head and shoulders sway unsteadily, one hand over my furiously shuddering body, the other gripping the ladder rungs. Tía, the midwife, and the notary remained frozen. My mother lifted her arms, but she was too dizzy to rise. Only Enrique bolted into action, pulling me away from my sister's unsteady shoulder so that she could haul herself the rest of the way out of the cellar. In the ensuing confusion, no one mentioned the certificates again.

  My mother laughed through her exhausted tears as Enrique brought me to her: "Call him anything, I don't care." And from that moment, she didn't. She had traded her initial, plain hope for an even more basic one: that I would simply survive.

  Tía and the midwife broke free from their paralysis and gathered around my mother. They grasped her elbows in order to coax her back up the stairs, and reached forward to take me out of her arms, muttering cooing sounds to stop my crying.

  "Leave us be, and let him cry," Mamá said, refusing to let go as she unbuttoned the top of her nightdress, preparing to nurse me on the stairs. "Es la música más linda del mundo."

  It's the most beautiful music in the world.

  Now, all of this story I'm telling you so far, I wrote down quickly, one night in October 1940. I began it at another man's request, but did not deliver it to him.

  You're not asking me why. I'd like to attribute your reticence to shyness. But your trade requires the opposite; requires, perhaps, the impatience I see when I look in your eyes, where I'd like to find—what? Forgiveness?

  Perhaps simply: Understanding.

  Writing these memories pained me. Less so the earliest childhood parts, which is why I started with them; certainly the later parts, as I was forced to review the course of my life, the development of my ideas and stances, which were to prove inadequate to the complexity of those times. But the discomfort of recollection was only a shadow of what was to come, when I would lose nearly all that was dear to me.

  For the last year, the curators of the new museum of music in Spain have been hounding me with letters and telegrams, asking for my bow. The museum people have no idea that I wrote my memoirs thirty-odd years ago, and that I have them in my possession still. I bring you here not to discuss the bow—which I shall donate as promised—or to thrust into your more capable hands all my papers, which I can share only in my own way, in my own time. To understand and appreciate what they contain, you must go slowly with me; you must indulge my interpretation. You must be a better man than I was—more sympathetic, at the very least.

  I realize the later parts of my story are the ones you most want to hear. You would have me begin with Aviva, all the better to have a living picture of her in your mind. Or at least with Al-Cerraz. You have asked already about the final 1940 concert, and I throw up my hands—I can no more start with that than I can play the Bach suites backward, from the last note to the first. I have never been that sort of a trick-performing prodigy. I have always been methodical, essentially conservative, by which—I see your smile—I don't mean politics. You will forgive me for being a classicist always, insistent on symmetry and proportion. You will allow me, at my advanced age, this last kindness—truly an indulgence, considering my lack of cooperation with your past journalistic efforts. In return, I will be honest.

  Wilhelm, I have done a terrible thing.

  Yes, please—a glass of water.

  But I have left you with the impression of a baby, barely alive and mistakenly named. Please, if you will let me introduce you to the boy, just beginning to understand the beauty and difficulty of life in that time, in that place.

  CHAPTER 2

  "I'm going to the train station," my mother announced on a cold morning, nearly six years after my birth. "Your father has arrived."

  I'd had a nightmare and woken from it breathing hard, just as the women in the house were stirring and whispering. Now, as I struggled to lace my boots, Tía mumbled over my shoulder, "Go back to bed with your brothers and sister. You'll only delay your mother."

  Ignoring my aunt's reproachful expression, I stepped out into the dark street with Mamá.

  "Your nightmare wasn't about a box, was it?" she asked as we hurried along.

  No, I told her. It was about a wintry, unfamiliar beach of cold, dark, wet sand, and what lived in the holes.

  "Good. Never mind."

  We continued in silence, holding hands; past connected, multistory stone houses like ours, and shuttered stores. As we zigzagged down the oddly angled streets I struggled to keep up, a jerking tail behind Mamá's purposeful kite. The sidewalk was barely wide enough for one person, made of a smooth and slippery stone so burnished by decades of passing feet that it glinted silver. I skidded along its surface while my mother stumbled over the cobblestone road, yanking me each time her ankle turned, both of us struggling downhill toward the station in the dark. When I slipped and fell, skinning one knee, Mamá said nothing, only pulled me up by one arm and kept going.

  A barnlike oak door creaked open, and a woman's craggy face emerged, illuminated by a candle lantern.

  "Buenos días, Doña. Meeting the train?"

  "Meeting my husband," Mamá answered.

  "Madre de Dios," the crone grunted, crossing herself before she withdrew into the shadows.
The door's ring-shaped knocker clapped hard as the door slammed shut.

  Black sky lightened to deep navy as we cut across the town plaza. At the church, I ran one hand along the old building's pockmarked walls, remembering my brother Enrique's words (Yes, they're bullet holes; even the priest says so. He has a jar full of the slugs...) until my mother glanced over her shoulder and jerked me out of my reverie.

  "Filth!" she yelled. "Look at your hand!"

  "What? I can't see it."

  "I don't have time for this, Feliu!"

  We veered into the alley behind the fish market, hopping the channel of wastewater spilling from the market's open back door. In the golden, lamplit interior, I could see men heaving crates and shoveling chipped ice. Fish scales sparkled between the alley's wet cobblestones like trapped stars.

  Deep navy yielded to peach-tinged blue by the time we reached the station, where the train waited, warm and rumbling, still dribbling steam. Mamá freed herself from my sweating hand and marched onto the platform, where several men gathered around her. Within moments she was seated at a bench against the station wall, pulling coarse twine from the lid of a large box the men had placed at her feet. It was about as wide as my mother's outstretched arms, made of an unfamiliar reddish-brown wood. There was a single small clasp on the fitted lid. Instead of a lock, there was only a twist of heavy wire attached to a yellow card bearing official-looking stamps and our address.

  "Perhaps you should wait," the stationmaster was saying. "Who knows what's in it? Take it to the church. I'll have a wagon brought around for you."

  But my mother blotted her face dry. "I've waited months," she said, and glared until the stationmaster patted his vest pocket and strode away.

  As Mamá untwisted the wire, she whispered, "You've seen bones, haven't you, Feliu? It is probably mostly ashes, but there may be bones." She worked her fingertips under the lid. "Don't be afraid."

  I held my breath and stared. But when my mother pried the lid free with a dull pop, she was the one who gasped. Inside, there were no bodily remains.

  "Presents!" I cried out. "From Papá!"

  Mamá studied the straw-padded contents, fingering each object in turn: a compass, a blue bottle, a glossy brown stick, a jungle cat carved from dark wood, a cigar box with a small blank diary inside. At the bottom of the box lay an old suit jacket, neatly folded, which she took out and held to her face, inhaling. Reluctantly, she lifted out two notes—one printed on a card, a few sentences surrounded by blank space; the other larger and rough-edged and handwritten. She read the first quickly and let it drop onto the sticky station floor, shaking her head when I leaned over to retrieve it. A breeze flipped the card over twice, then sent it toward the tracks. The second note she read slowly, silently, smoothing it against her lap. When she finished, she folded it carefully, tucked it away in a pocket, and sighed.

  "They've broken their promise. Whatever remains they retrieved after the rebellion were buried in Cuba. The American victory changed their priorities. Now they're too busy getting out the living to worry about the dead."

  The details meant little to me. Two months earlier, my mother had perched my siblings and me in a row of five dining-room chairs—even Carlito, who kept squirming off his seat—to tell us what had happened. Rebels fighting for independence from Spain had triggered an explosion in the harbor. The building where my father worked had caught fire, killing Papá and nine other men. Now America—a place that meant nothing to me, beyond the fact that Spanish ships had discovered it—appeared ready to enter the fray.

  Mamá cupped my chin in her hand. "Your Papá should have lived three centuries ago, when the world was getting bigger. Now it's getting only smaller and more loud."

  As if to prove her point, the train departed at that moment, wheezing and clanging, south toward Tarragona.

  When it was out of view, she said, "Papá meant to deliver these gifts with his own hands. They're from his travels. He had his own intentions, but I'll leave the choice to you."

  I picked up the compass first, watching the little copper-colored needle spin and bounce. Then the blue bottle. Then the jungle cat. They were enticing, but I did not choose them. Maybe I felt contrary on this rare morning alone with Mamá, away from the superior airs of my elder siblings; maybe I felt the need to reject the gifts that had the most clearly childish appeal. I picked up the one object that made no immediate sense: the glossy brown stick. At one end it had a rectangular black handle dotted with one small circle of mother-of-pearl. At the other end it had a fancy little curve, like the upswept prow of an ancient ship.

  I lifted it out of the box. It was longer than my arm, a bit thicker than my finger, and polished smooth. I held it out in front me, like a sword. Then upright, like a baton.

  "It's pernambuco—a very good South American wood," Mamá said, her eyebrows raised.

  The anticipation on her face made my throat tighten. I returned the stick hastily to the box.

  "Tell me," I said. "I don't want to choose wrong."

  I expected her to reassure me. Instead she said, "You will be wrong sometimes, Feliu."

  Her lecturing tone reminded me of the times she had helped tie my shoes, tugging the laces hard enough to upset my balance. I couldn't know that those days of playful rough-handling were numbered, to be replaced by a grief-filled overprotectiveness.

  When I still hadn't chosen, Mamá asked, "Do you remember your Papá?"

  "Yes," I answered automatically.

  "You can still see him in your mind? As clearly as you can see me?"

  This time, when I didn't answer, she said, "Always tell me the truth. Maybe other people need to invent drama. Not us. Not here."

  I'd heard her say this earlier that year, as the survivors of the Desastre of '98 had straggled into town, living ghosts from failed faraway colonial battles. The Americans had invaded Cuba, Puerto Rico, and the Philippines, Spanish colonies already struggling for independence. The last vestiges of the Spanish Empire were collapsing around us while another empire rose to take its place. Now the soldiers and bureaucrats and merchants were returning—limbs missing, heads and torsos wrapped in stained bandages. Many who passed through Campo Seco seemed lost—they weren't our missing men, we had nothing for them, so why had they stepped off the train here? We rented our cellar to one of them, moving all the casks and wax-sealed bottles aside, furnishing the dark, cool room with a cot, one chair, and an old cracked mirror. The man paid in advance for a week's stay but left after three days, without explanation, prompting Tía to castigate Mamá, "I told you not to put the mirror down there. A man like that doesn't want to see his face."

  I closed my own eyes and tried to see Papá. He was a blur, except for his dark mustache, thick under his nose, curled and twisted at the tips; and the wide bottom cuff of his pin-striped suit pants. I had clung to those pants while he directed the secular village choir. And I had perched high on his shoulders, smelling his hair tonic while we watched local processions. Papá had little interest in the Catholic festivals that clogged our village streets. But he had loved when the traveling musicians came, with their gourds and broomsticks strung as homemade mandolins, guitars, and violins. I'd begged my father to buy me instruments like those. That had been close to two years ago, when Papá had last visited home.

  "The stick!" I called out suddenly. "Is that what he wanted for me to have?"

  "Bow, Feliu. It's an unfinished bow, without the hair."

  "I knew it!" I retrieved the stick from the box and began to saw at an imaginary instrument across my chest.

  After a moment I stopped to ask, "What kind of bow?"

  The question gave her pause. "It doesn't matter," she said, and part of me knew that she wasn't telling the truth. "One bow is the same as any other."

  I danced in circles as my mother spoke with the wagoner and watched his assistant load the box onto the wagon bed. Then I remembered my unanswered question: "Is that what Papá wanted me to have?"

  The wagon je
rked forward, steered by an impatient driver and eager horses.

  "Up, Feliu," she gestured, her arms beckoning me toward the seat. "Your brothers and sister are waiting for us. Father Basilio is expecting a coffin. You made your choice. Now come."

  Back home, Enrique stole glances at my strange wooden stick, which made me hold it closer, working it under one armpit and finally down into one leg of my pants. But any incipient jealousy was dampened when he realized it was a musical object. "A bow?" he snorted, slapping my back. "I thought it was a musket plunger."

  Enrique, age thirteen, was our little soldier; he claimed the compass, a handy instrument for making sorties beyond the olive- and grapevine-covered hills. Percival—at sixteen, an adult in our eyes—stayed above the fray, accepting the blank diary. In the years to come, he'd never write a word in it, only numbers: gambling odds, winnings, and debts. Luisa, age eleven, wrapped her chubby fingers around the jungle cat, refusing to let go until Mamá offered to fill the blue glass bottle with perfume, if Luisa would give the cat to two-year-old Carlito. When the divisions were made and all brows smoothed, Mamá exhaled deeply, saying nothing more about my father's undisclosed intentions.

  Many years later, it would become an insomniac's preoccupation for me: What if Enrique had taken the bow? He 'd been in Papá's choir, and had demonstrated greater musical aptitude than any of us, even if guns amused him more. If he 'd walked with Mamá to the train and back, with more time to consider, would he still be alive? Would the compass have helped Percival or Luisa to better find their ways? And Carlito: Well, there was no saving him. He would die of diphtheria seven years later, to be buried alongside our two siblings who had perished as infants. At the funeral, Percival would lean into me, whispering, "We beat the odds—that's all it is."

  There's a saying in our corner of northeastern Spain: "Pinch a Spaniard—if he sings out, he's a Catalan." We considered ourselves a musical region, and yet even here, among troubadours, my father had stood out. In his spare time, he had been the director for our local men's choir, a group that took its cue from the workingmen's choirs of Barcelona—proud men, singing our native regional language at a time when Catalan poetry and song were briefly blossoming.