The Spanish Bow Read online

  In 1898, the year my father and several other prominent local men died abroad, the group disbanded, replaced by a choir led by Father Basilio, who had come to us from Rome. This later choir was never as popular. Following the priest's lead, it sang in Italian—a disappointment to nearly everyone, even my Cuban-raised mother, who had never felt entirely comfortable with the Catalan language. The secular Italian choir folded a few years later, leaving only a few hard-core devotees, the poorest singers of the lot, to sing in Latin during Masses. Our town, once a multilingual bastion of song, had grown unexpectedly silent and dour.

  My mother had met my father at an arts festival in Barcelona, where they discovered that they shared similar backgrounds, as well as a love of music. Both of them had been born in Spain and had spent their childhoods in colonial Cuba, returning with their optimistic parents to Spain in time for the short-lived First Republic, in 1873. My mother had been renowned for her voice, though she claimed later she'd never had any professional ambitions. By 1898, she didn't sing at all—not even the simple rounds and folk songs she had once sung for her children.

  Lying together in the bed we shared, Enrique would sometimes sing to me a remembered line or two, very quietly in the dark, as if it were a secret no one should hear. When I asked him to sing more, he would tease me: "You know that song. Come on...." I had a good memory for most things, so the complete unfamiliarity of what he sang drove me to distraction. I'd beg him again, and he'd tease me more, until I felt panicky. Only when I was on the verge of tears would Enrique relent and finish the song, sedating me with belated satisfaction. It occurs to me now that Enrique was old enough to be embarrassed by those lullabies, but he didn't want to forget them, either. He wasn't trying to torture me so much as give himself permission to remember.

  In the years before he accepted his post overseas, Papá had been our town's music teacher, keeping a piano for that purpose in a room between the church and the school. Following his death, my father's best piano student, Eduardo Rivera, approached Mamá to offer condolences. A month later, he came to ask her to sing to his piano accompaniment. We didn't own a piano anymore, she told him. She had given Papá's piano to the priest, Father Basilio, to compensate him for the memorial service—or at least, that's what we were told.

  Eduardo reassured Mamá that he had his own piano, of course. She could come to his house and sing. Mamá changed the subject immediately, pretending not even to hear the request. But to make up for the rudeness, she did let him stay for lunch. He came uninvited a second time, and a third, and perhaps because he was my father's student—or perhaps because my mother was still stunned with grief—she didn't turn him away. Finally, he figured out the surest way to win her favor was through an intermediary. Eduardo stopped petitioning for my mother's accompaniment and offered to give me music lessons, instead.

  For as long as I could remember, local children had called my new teacher "Señor Riera." The nickname was our local word for the town dry wash that flooded seasonally, just like Eduardo's own drooping, allergy-prone eyes and nose. Eduardo had a thin version of my father's mustache, but his was always damp. Because of his clogged sinuses, he 'd developed the habit of leaving his lips slightly parted. His upper lip was hidden, but his fleshy lower lip protruded clearly, like some exotic pouch-shaped orchid hanging from the scruffy bark of a jungle tree.

  Señor Rivera, as I learned to call him more carefully now, owned a piano and a violin. I chose to learn the violin because I wanted to use the bow that my mother had sent away to Barcelona to have finished for me, with horsehair and new silver wire. She used government money to pay for it, saying it was better that my father's final pay be used for something we could keep and cherish, not just coal or bread.

  Each day, Percival and Enrique stayed after school to earn a few coins doing the schoolmaster's chores. My mother and Tía were busy tending Carlito and Luisa, and happy to have me out of the house each afternoon. Señor Rivera kept the violin at his home, where I practiced, but I carried my bow with me to lessons and back, in a leather-covered tube from my father's custom files that had once held harbor maps from North Africa and the Caribbean. Every time I held it to my face, I inhaled a dizzying smell of sea salt and ink and sweat—the smell of foreign shores, and also of my father's arms, which were harder to recall with every passing day.

  I loved carrying that indestructible tube and hitting rocks with it as I walked. Once, when I'd made the mistake of dallying too long in the dry wash under the bridge, I attracted the attention of two older boys the same age as Enrique. They teased me, calling me Cerillito, or "Little Matchstick"; the dislocated hip had never healed properly following my birth, leaving my left leg thinner and slightly shorter than my right. The nickname didn't bother me. I'd heard the same and worse already from my own brothers. But when they started insulting my father, I hit one of them with the tube end, splitting the boy's lip before I managed to run away, incredulous at my small victory.

  When Mamá found out about the fight, she punished me for it, but she did not take the tube away. I think she sensed I needed some protection. My teacher thought the tube was ridiculous, though, and the bow itself strange—"too thick, too heavy, probably not made for a violin. Anyway, it's too big for you."

  "So is the violin," I retorted. Señor Rivera pinched my arm hard enough to leave a mark, but I didn't care. He'd cuffed me several times when I talked back or disobeyed him. At the time, I assumed he wanted my prize objects for himself. Now I realize he considered the bow an irritating reminder of my father.

  Señor Rivera was half my mother's age. It seemed ridiculous that he kept coming to our house every Sunday afternoon, bringing Mamá and Tía stale cookies that were never sweet enough for two women who had been raised on plentiful Caribbean sugar. My mother was beautiful, with shining chestnut hair and a strong jawline that might have appeared masculine were it not tempered by full lips. Many men sought her, even while an equal number criticized her for what they perceived as haughtiness and disrespect. In a town where many women were merely "Señora," she was "Doña," in deference to her noble bearing and education. Even in the loose-waisted, soot black dresses she'd worn since my father's death, she could not fade into safe obscurity, though she tried.

  It didn't surprise my mother that playing the violin came easily to me. Everyone in our family was musically inclined. "Don't be vain about your gifts," she said. "Music is everywhere, and there is no one alive who can't appreciate it. To love music is easy. To play it well is no different from knowing how to make shoes or build bridges."

  She did not teach me, did not directly encourage me, but she couldn't help asking questions that reflected her own musical past. When I returned from lessons, she would say, "Were you relaxed? Did you play naturally?" They were unusual questions for such corseted, high-collared times; they were the same questions I would ask myself ten and fifteen years later, as I strove to develop my own relaxed bowing style.

  I learned scales and etudes and easy salon pieces. I liked the violin, but I wasn't passionate about its shape or sound, which in my unskilled hands came out as a tinny screech. The adult-sized violin that Señor Rivera let me use was so heavy that I could barely manage to hold it upright, my left wrist throbbing so fiercely I barely noticed what my right hand was doing. Besides, I hated standing to play. My matchstick leg didn't hurt in those days, but because the knob of the thighbone didn't fit the socket properly, I had trouble mimicking Señor Rivera's stance. Occasionally the entire leg would start to tremble, and I'd have to shake out the spasm to regain my balance.

  "Feliu, pay attention," Señor Rivera said one afternoon, assuming I was falling asleep on my feet. "This is what you may someday hope to do." He tossed his head, drawing attention to his fashionable shoulder-length hair and the glistening Cupid's bow visible through his thin, damp mustache. Then he launched into a piece by Pablo Sarasate—our Spanish Paganini. He winced when he missed a note, but he recovered quickly, fingers slamming like pistons up an
d down the black fingerboard, the dynamics as dismayingly even as the tempo was not. I hated his theatrics. Quick fingers did not impress me. Long hair did not impress me.

  Please, God, I thought, don't let Señor Rivera move into our house.

  "Someday, Feliu," he said, and I gulped before I realized he was referring only to my own future chances with the Sarasate theme. "Now, hold that violin straight—straighter!"

  Redemption came, as all things great and sorrowful did, by train.

  The train meant everything to our village, which modern times might have forgotten if not for those parallel steel bars pointed south toward Tarragona, the town of Roman ruins and busy plazas, and north toward Barcelona, the city of commerce, art, and anarchy. Our narrow, twisting streets were lined with three-story stone and plaster buildings that cast the streets in shadow for all but a few midday hours. When the rains came, they resculpted the sinuous, gravel-lined gully that ran through the center of town. But the train tracks ran straight and hard through gusting winds and bright sun, exposed to anything the future might bring. The station itself was an oracle, bearing posters and flyers about upcoming events. I read my first words not in school, but on tiptoe outside the brick-walled station, puzzling out a three-colored flyer headlined "Los Gatos," The Cats. A musical quartet, Enrique explained.

  "Will they be playing here?"

  He squinted at a dense block of smaller type. "Barcelona—Sitges—Lleida. No, they're not stopping here."

  "Where is Sitges?" I asked him. When he didn't answer, I tried again: "Where is Lleida?"

  "Mamá is waiting at the footbridge. We're already late."

  "You don't know where Lleida is?" I asked, dismayed by his ignorance.

  I kept pestering and he kept changing the subject, our voices rising. By the time we reached the bridge where my mother stood with Carlito on one hip and Luisa collapsed at her feet, I was crying, my skinny arm blazed with a red mark left by Enrique's final twist, and Enrique himself was stuttering a dozen excuses. My mother only sighed.

  For the next couple of years, I read those flyers as The Cats—as well as many Donkeys, Bulls, and Bandits—bypassed our village. But the sting of those anonymous rejections resolved into a sense of destiny the day I spotted a flyer headlined in big, blocky type, "El Nene—The Spanish Mozart." By now I could decode the small print without help: "And His Classical Trio." No animals this time; no gourds or broomstick mandolins. And yes, they were stopping at Campo Seco, as well as a dozen other small towns up and down the coast.

  El Nene was our country's best-known pianist, a prodigy who had toured the world since the age of three. His nickname hinted at his dual reputation. El nene means "baby boy," but it can also mean "villain." The pianist wasn't a true traidor or malvado—not yet, anyway—but he did have a reputation for mischief. At this point, he was a precocious adolescent in a hefty man's body, constrained by a toddler's nickname, and performing with men many years his senior.

  Dust hung in the hot air that day, obscuring the view of yellow-leafed vineyards on the hills beyond town. The town leaders had planned a parade, and the town ladies spent all morning pouring buckets of water on the main road, just to keep down the dust. We were a little embarrassed not to have wide boulevards to show off, or intricately tiled, fountain-filled plazas.

  Señor Rivera was smitten. "I may ask him to hear me play, after the crowds have gone," he bragged during our midday meal, to which he had sweet-talked yet another invitation. "Do you think that would be unbecoming?"

  Mamá, who dealt increasingly with annoyances by simply enduring them, shrugged.

  He persevered, "I've heard he asks ladies to sign his touring book. Would you like me to ask him on your behalf?"

  "Carlito!" Mamá wailed, as my little brother tipped his soup bowl into his lap.

  "I could ask El Nene to listen to Feliu play the violin," Señor Rivera continued more loudly, competing with Carlito's shrieks of pain as the hot soup drained into his best sailor suit. "I'm sure he must suffer excited parents in every village, but I did help to arrange the concert venue."

  I stared into my soup and felt my face getting hotter. So this was how Señor Rivera hoped to profit from the trio's visit—by showing me off and increasing my mother's sense of obligation.

  With Carlito wriggling and wailing under her arm, my mother raised her voice above the squall. "I am not so impressed by this Nene—this performing monkey—forced to tour the world before he was old enough to stop sucking his thumb. His parents should be ashamed."

  Luisa, who'd shown no interest in El Nene's visit, perked up. "He's a monkey?"

  Mamá exited with her thrashing wet bundle. Señor Rivera's eyes darted around the room, his hopes and expectations unspent. He looked like a swimmer desperate for air, but still three hard strokes short of the surface.

  "You," he said, fixing on me, as if my elderly aunt and three other siblings weren't there at all. "You will play for El Nene and his trio. You will demonstrate how much I have done for you."

  "Yes, sir."

  "And I warn you, enanito..."

  "Feliu is a dwarf?" Luisa cried out gleefully.

  "Dwarves make great entertainers," Percival said. "The royal family keeps them around for fun."

  "He is a dwarf," Enrique said, without lifting his gaze from his soup bowl. "But he's our dwarf."

  "I warn you," Rivera continued, oblivious to the interruptions, staring me into submission. "Do not humiliate me."

  Everyone came, wearing their finest. Matronly ladies decorated their upswept hair with large combs and lace mantillas unearthed from ancient trunks. Younger women wore fashionable gowns with puffed sleeves that tapered at the elbows into tight cuffs. Boys squirmed in black suits with short breeches. Veterans tottered under the weight of brass buttons. Our three Civil Guard members strutted between the church and the train station, their shiny black finned hats flashing in the sun.

  And yet none of us could compare with El Nene.

  "Look at his hands," Percival whispered to me when we lined up alongside the train that afternoon, watching the performer disembark. "Each finger is wider than a piano key. He's too fat to play."

  I started to object, but Percival didn't wait to hear. He pushed his hands into his pockets, looking for the little diary in which he recorded every wager. "Do you want to bet?"

  The concert was held in the school, a low stone building attached to the larger and more ornate church. An overflow crowd filled the plaza in front of the buildings, and the school doors were propped open so that everyone would have a chance to hear. Apartment dwellers opposite had decorated the railings of their balconies with satin bows and dragged chairs outside, to listen from their high, private perches like royalty at an opera house.

  Mamá gave up on restraining Luisa and Carlos, and set them loose to gallop and charm their way among neighbors, accepting sugared orange peels and fingerfuls of quince. I skipped the treats and the preconcert parade in favor of getting a front-row seat inside the school itself, well before the concert started. My older brothers came with me. Percival didn't care much about the music, but he couldn't wait to settle our bet about El Nene. Enrique came simply because he was Enrique; the first to punish or tease, but also the first to guide and protect.

  Inside, the crowds were flushed, buzzing with questions about this famous man we'd seen only in black-and-white newspaper photographs.

  "No one knows where you were born," a man called to the impromptu stage. "What are you, El Nene?"

  When the pianist smiled, the long waxed tips of his mustache rubbed against the red apples of his cheeks. "Spanish, ciento por ciento," he said. One hundred percent. "But surely the ladies here won't fault me for having a little Moorish and gypsy blood."

  Satisfied titters ran through the crowd.

  A woman yelled, "How old are you?"

  "How old are you?" he shot back.

  "Olé!" someone shouted.

  An unseen voice: "Is it true you stowed away to Brazi
l when you were seven years old?"

  He stroked his beard. "My music has allowed me to travel far and wide."

  And another, from a sultry-voiced woman in the rear: "When are you going to stop being called Baby? You look like a big boy to me."

  El Nene made a show of lifting a piece of sheet music and fanning himself with it. "Dear lady, if your impure thoughts have become too much to bear, there's a confessional right next door."

  El Nene nodded across the room to the partners he'd failed to introduce, flipped his coattails out of the way, slid onto the piano bench and launched solo into an opening chord struck so ferociously that a girl in the audience cried out. Embarrassed laughter followed, but the pianist only smiled slightly and kept playing, as if the girl's reaction and anything else our unsophisticated audience might produce—whispers, gasps, applause at inappropriate moments—were to be both expected and forgiven.

  As the audience settled and quieted, El Nene began traversing the keyboard—octave by octave, at high speed, in showy hand-over-hand displays. He spread his arms wide and brought them together again, and I half-expected the keys to hop off the keyboard and pile with a clatter between his hands, like dominoes gathered at the end of a game.

  Some of the assembled farmers and vintners, fishermen and bakers had been dragged to the concert by their wives; they had taken their chairs wearily and had endured El Nene's preconcert banter with haughty expressions. But as he played, their faces softened and grew attentive. They leaned forward in their seats, hands on their knees or their chins, recognizing the athleticism of his attack and marveling at sounds and feelings they could not name.

  As for dynamics, they were limited: loud, louder, and loudest. But to this crowd, it didn't matter. Later, I would recognize this as El Nene's trademark: his chameleonlike ability to judge a crowd, and to play to it. Among kings and queens, he played with lighter strokes and more ritardes. In Britain, he tried to sound more southern; in Italy, more northern. The crowds adored him, but the critics abroad sniped too frequently: not Spanish enough. It infuriated him, how little they knew about Spain, and how even though he knew so much more, he couldn't please them all.