The Spanish Bow Read online

  Except on an evening like this, in a small town, without music critics. Perhaps that's why he'd come. For the duration of the piece, the audience remained silent. The only stray noise I heard, in the quiet interval before applause erupted, was a quiet, disappointed groan from Percival, who had lost his latest bet.

  If the concert had ended there, it would have stayed in my memory forever. But something more astounding happened when the violinist and the cellist joined the pianist. I looked to the violin first, because it was familiar; I knew I'd learn something by watching, and was hoping to see El Nene's violinist put my own teacher to shame. The cello, played by a man named Emil Duarte, didn't interest me because it seemed like nothing more than an oversized violin. But then Duarte pulled his bow against the larger instrument's strings, and my face turned to follow the sound. I was thankful that El Nene had played solo first, because once the cello started up, I never looked at the violin or piano again.

  Duarte's cello was a glossy caramel color, and the sound it produced was as warm and rich as the instrument looked. It sounded like a human voice. Not the high warble of an opera singer or anyone else singing for the stage, but rather the soothing voice of a fisherman singing as he mended his nets, or of a mother singing lullabies to her sleepy children.

  When the cellist reached a crescendo on one of the lower strings, I felt a strange sensation, both pleasurable and disturbing. It reminded me of holding a cat, feeling its purrs resonate with me. Listening, I felt the sensation strengthen, as if the cello's quivering vibrato were actually boring into me, opening a small hole in my chest, creating a physical pain as real as any wound. I was afraid of what might fall out of that hole, and yet I didn't want it to close, either.

  As Duarte climbed to higher notes, I followed him. I watched the way he bent over his instrument to reach the most precarious pitches, like a seated potter wrapping his arms around unshaped clay, stripping away its first layers, revealing rather than creating. El Nene had seemed like an actor, a showman—and a talented one at that, able to accept a role and play to his audience's expectations. But Duarte seemed like a craftsman—the kind of craftsman I had been raised to respect.

  As I listened, my nose began to itch, a warning sign that tears were imminent. Horrified that Enrique would see me cry, I blinked hard, without luck. I wrapped my fingers around the edge of my chair's wooden seat, hoping to inflict myself with splinters that would require sudden, pained attention. When that didn't work, I played a mental game, trying to taste Duarte's strings as he played them. The lowest and fattest string, C: bitter chocolate. The G, next to it: something animal. Warm goat cheese. The D: ripe tomato. The high, thin A: tart lemon, to be handled with care. The highest notes, played near the bridge, could sting, but Duarte tempered that sting with a sweet vibrato.

  The cello contained everything I knew—a natural world of tastes and sensations—and much more that I did not. After watching El Nene, I wanted to see him play again. But after watching Duarte, I wanted to be him.

  When the trio had finished, my mother sent my brothers and sisters outside and guided me backstage, where I treaded for an eternity in a sea of wide-legged trousers and puffy skirt flounces. While I waited, I mentally replayed the cello parts I had heard, desperately trying to commit them to memory. I felt ill and giddy—drunk, just like the time my brothers had dared me to sip from one of Papá's cellared bottles of liqueur.

  My mother's hand pushed from behind me, willing me forward with the crowd. Finally, the autograph seekers and civic well-wishers parted, I inhaled fresh air, and I heard Señor Rivera introduce me to El Nene, Emil Duarte, and their French violinist, Julien Trudeau. They stood just feet from where they had played, gods transformed back into men. There was the black piano bench and El Nene standing next to it, with a cigar in his mouth and a glass in his hand. There was Duarte's glossy cello, recovering from its amazing performance—and looking for all the world like a curvaceous woman reclining on the beach, one arm flung over her head, trim waist and wide hips accentuated.

  Señor Rivera was still talking—I saw his lips moving, and heard the rumble of the three musicians chuckling politely in response. I heard my mother's higher, strained voice behind me. Someone pushed a violin into my left hand, where it hung, lifeless and unforgiving. My mother handed me my bow. More hands pushed me forward. Waves crashed in my ears.

  I walked forward three steps and half-collapsed into the nearest chair.

  "Feliu?" I heard my mother say. "Feliu?"

  I started playing, in a daze. First slowly, then with gusto. Yes: It was easier this way. I could even wiggle my left fingers a little, to bring out that honeyed vibrato. My body swayed slightly as I played. All that longing I had felt during the concert was propelling my bowing hand, helping it flow expertly across the strings.

  But the men were laughing again—uncontrollable bellows, instead of the polite chuckles of a moment earlier. Out of the corner of my eye I saw El Nene's head tip back, so that his open mouth was facing the ceiling and his drink spilled onto the floor. Still I didn't stop until I felt the sting of a hard slap against my face. My eyes followed the invading hand up a dark sleeve and into the face of Señor Eduardo Rivera. My cheek flamed. My stupor dissolved. It came to my attention, with the same sticky realization that one has upon waking just as one is wetting the bed, that I had been playing the violin as a cello. I had perched it on the seat between my legs. Duarte's playing had affected me that much—I could imagine no other way to play a stringed instrument! Perhaps, in my dream state, I was only seeing the future.

  The musicians were laughing too loudly for me to gauge whether they'd heard much of my minuet. Even played in the wrong position, it hadn't sounded half bad to me. But perhaps because I did not look contrite, only groggy, Rivera lifted his hand again, to deliver a second slap.

  In those days, when schoolteachers swatted students and shopkeepers chased away delinquents with brooms, Rivera would have been forgiven for the first slap. But not—in our family—for the second. My mother had been holding my leather bow tube for the duration of my short recital, and now she raised it to one shoulder. El Nene and his trio stopped laughing. My mother squeezed her eyes shut, cocked her right elbow and swung. With a muffled crack, the leather tube made contact with Eduardo's infamous beak, and the flood-prone "Riera" flowed once more, this time in red.

  That night we hurried home and packed our bags for an impromptu holiday on the coast, at a family friend's summer cottage.

  "But when are we coming back, Mamá?" Luisa asked as we tossed clothes into our bags.

  "About three weeks, I think. By then, Señor Rivera's nose will have healed."

  "Are the violin lessons done?" I asked. "Will he come to our house anymore?"

  "Yes, querido. And no," she said. Then she laughed as she hadn't laughed in years—an explosive laugh, unexpected, brief and wild. It reminded me of a rising flock of startled birds, sending hope scattering in directions too varied for my mind to follow.

  We had just gathered with our suitcases in the foyer when a knock came at the door. My siblings and I all looked to Mamá, who stiffened, and then to the line of dancing light under the heavy wooden door's warped bottom, where we could see the shadows cast by an impatient set of small, shifting feet. A messenger boy's grubby fingers pushed an envelope through the wide crack.

  Evidently, El Nene had sympathy for my inauspicious debut. He'd taken the time to pen a handwritten letter of introduction recommending me for an audition with a real cello teacher, in Barcelona. It was signed with the pianist's full name, Justo Al-Cerraz ( I hadn't realized he was called anything except El Nene) and decorated with a pesetasized, humorous self-portrait.

  My mother smiled at the letter but frowned at the caricature. Then she folded the letter and instructed us to wait as she went to put it away in the family Bible, with the last letter from my father. "Barcelona," she said, "is far away."

  Despite the sober silence that followed, I could still feel the w
arm glow of my mother's earlier laughter. The future was uncertain, but at least it was exposed and alive. No matter where my father's unreturned bones lay, turning to dust in a land Spain no longer possessed, the rest of us could be flesh again.

  CHAPTER 3

  After we returned home from our vacation of discretion, I was delighted not to be making music with Señor Rivera anymore. But the feeling faded by Christmas, when I longed to hold an instrument in my hand again.

  "When can I learn to play?" I badgered my mother.

  "There are no cellos here, Feliu."

  "Even a violin."

  "And who would teach you?"

  "Mamá, I'm getting old!" I was nine years old when I first said this, and Mamá laughed. But as the months passed, and I kept repeating it, she stopped tousling my hair or smiling in response to my plea.

  The new century pulsed with a mania for novelty and precocity. Young performers from England, Austria, and Russia visited Spain. A girl from America, younger than me, was performing virtuosic works on the cello—my cello, I couldn't help thinking. None of these performers came to our village. I read about them in the newspapers and at the train station, where the posters announced Madrid—Sevilla—Granada—Córdoba—Valencia—Barcelona. Never Campo Seco.

  Whenever I passed Eduardo Rivera, he crossed to the other side of the street or lifted his chin away from me. I recognized the terrible loneliness in his droopy expression. I wanted to shout, "I feel it, too!"

  "Barcelona is far?" I'd pester my mother.

  "Too far."

  She said the same thing about the beach that we no longer visited together. "I can't carry you if you get tired on the way back," she told me. "You're too big for that now."

  "I won't get tired. I promise." I tried not to notice her eyes dropping to my left leg.

  "Don't make promises you can't keep."

  "But I do promise." Frustration burned in my stomach. I knew my older brothers and sister would get to go. I wanted to run with them, even fall or tire, without consequence, and without worrying that I had gravely inconvenienced or saddened my mother.

  "Here's a better idea," she said. "Let's rest at home today. When Carlito naps, I'll read to you from Don Quixote."

  And maybe because that book's adventures came to seem like a pale substitute for the physical adventures I wanted to have, I never cared for Cervantes. She read me those stories, I began to suspect, not as an inspiration to dream, but as a caution against dreaming. "How silly—and how terrible," she'd say about the deranged protagonist, whose self-delusion earned him every kind of sadistic torment, reminding me that beneath a veneer of humor, the world was actually cruel.

  I asked Mamá one day, "My bow—it really is a cello bow, isn't it?"

  She was seated at the dining table sewing a dress for Luisa, her hands struggling to align two pieces of cloth, her mouth clamped over a threaded needle. Tía, a more expert seamstress, watched from a corner, shaking her head at Mamá's mistakes.

  "How did Papá know I'd like the cello more than the violin?"

  My mother mumbled something, her mouth still full of thread, but I couldn't make it out. I tried again, and this time she didn't answer at all.

  But Tía had no stomach for a child's insolent questions. She lashed out, saying what my mother had never considered, or never wanted to admit: "Your father knew about your lame leg, entiendes? He figured you could sit and play for your dinner, at the very least. Even a beggar needs a gimmick."

  My mother separated the pieces of cloth in her hands and removed the needle from her mouth. She seemed to be choosing her words carefully, but I was faster: "I don't care. Even if I had good legs—"

  She interrupted me. "You'll never be a beggar—don't worry about that. We'll find you something to do for work."

  "I don't care about a job," I started to say, but my mother's soft look hardened, stopping me.

  "No person can have dignity without work. I've told you before. Music is fine, but it's not work."

  "You said it was no different than making shoes or building bridges. So it is work."

  "Things change, Feliu. Everything changes. When things are good, there is time and money for music. When things are not good—hostia! " She threw down the dress she had been sewing, wagging the finger she had pricked, and continued to swear, using words I'd never heard come from her mouth. Her face reddened as she held her breath, desperately trying to restrain herself, but a few more words leaked out. "Damn you" were two of them. The third wasn't so easy to hear.

  As Mamá rested in her dark bedroom with a headache, I'd thought about what she'd cursed—from the Communion wafer to a dozen other holy objects we weren't supposed to mention in anger. But of people, she had named only one: Reynaldo. It was Papá's name, seldom uttered. She was cursing him not only for failing to return, not only for leaving her with five children and a difficult sister-in-law, but for delivering into my hands a hope that she couldn't fulfill.

  ***

  Around this time, Father Basilio decided that I might have the makings of a priest—a solution to one of my problems, if not both. It had started with the chocolate. From the time I was old enough to attend school, Percival, Enrique and I had set out together from home with our breakfast in our pockets: hard, dark, dusty chocolate squares, speckled with bits of dried fruit and nuts. We were forbidden to eat them on the way to the Mass we were made to attend before school, because Communion required a pure, empty stomach. After Mass ended, we and our young neighbors filed out of the church to the plaza, where—with Father Basilio's words about kindness and brotherly love still fresh in our ears—we raced and taunted and pushed each other in hopes of grabbing a seat on the nearest outdoor benches. There we could sit and eat the treats in our pockets. Ten minutes later, a bell rang to call us into school next door.

  Percival, who was in his last year of school, invariably ate his chocolate square on the way to Mass, daring us to tell on him—which we never did. Enrique respected the prohibition and adhered to it. But he wanted the chocolate so badly that his fingers crept into his pockets and nestled there, melting the treat into a lumpy puddle. Once, just before placing the Communion wafer on his tongue, Father Basilio paused and asked Enrique to hold out his hands. When my brother presented his sticky brown, trembling fingers, the priest assumed he'd been nibbling in the back of the church all through the service. Enrique was sent away without the wafer and given a paddling later that day at school. But the very next day, his fingers wandered into his pockets again.

  I, too, loved chocolate and I, too, felt tempted. But I did not let my fingers touch the chocolate, or even the edges of my pockets. As I experimented with delaying gratification, I found a savory quality to self-denial that was even more powerful than the satisfaction of sugar. At some point my mother discovered my secret and had a meeting with the priest. He was the one to ask me, on a Monday afternoon after school, why I had accumulated twenty-seven squares of untouched chocolate in a box under my bed.

  He did not bother to ask if I'd stolen them from other boys, which must have seemed unlikely, given my unimpressive physique. Nor did he ask if I disliked chocolate, since Mamá had assured him it was my favorite treat. Finally he tilted his head and tried, "Are you saving it for the poor?"

  I'd never given the poor a thought. I'd been too busy over the last five and a half weeks enjoying the sparkly lightness in my head, the way hunger extended the church bells' dull metal echo, the feeling of defiant strength in my heart—as compared to the weakness in my hip and leg—when I walked into school unfed, feeling proud of myself for doing without.

  "Yes, Father—for the poor," I lied.

  "Remarkable," he said, and let me go home.

  The next Sunday after Mass, Father Basilio invited me to his private study, a dark, airless room with heavy wine-colored drapes. He asked, "Have you thought of the priesthood, Feliu?"

  "Is being a priest work?"

  "The hardest work."

  Thinking of my mo
ther, I asked, "Is it dignified work?"

  He laughed. "Dignified—of course it is! There is nothing more dignified."

  Father Basilio directed me to various Bible readings, which I promised to contemplate and sometimes did. He helped me with my introductory Latin and taught me a few words of modern Italian, explaining they would come in helpful if I visited Rome someday. These same Italian words, he added, were used by musicians and composers across Europe. At this, I sat up and paid attention, learning how to pronounce and spell adagio, allegro, andante, presto, maestoso.

  Father Basilio's hopes for my clerical future lasted about six months. By this point, I hadn't played the violin for over two years, but I knew that in preparation for a future cello, I should stay physically ready to play. Alarmed that the calluses I'd developed on my left hand had faded, I discovered a way not only to renew but to increase them—by rubbing my fingertips against stone, at least twenty minutes a day. I always walked on the left-hand side of the street so I could drag my fingers against the rough stone as I walked. In bed at night, in the dark, I rubbed one finger at a time against the wall next to my bed. With time, my fingertips became stiff and waxy, capped with impressively thick, light-yellow pads, the fingerprint lines nearly invisible.

  One day at church, as we were leaving Mass, Father Basilio wished me well and took my left hand in his—a spontaneous, collegial gesture. I watched as he squeezed harder, flattening his fingers against my own, feeling them. His face fell.