The Spanish Bow Read online

  In confession the following Sunday, he asked, "How old are you now, my son?"

  "Eleven years old, Father."

  I heard him sigh. "And already committing the sins of adulthood."

  I waited, confused.

  "Feliu, you must resist your desire."

  The desire to play cello?

  "Our Lord knows what you have been doing."

  I swallowed hard. "I'm not doing anything, Father."

  He sighed again. I heard the wood settling under his bench as he shifted.

  "Have you been helping your brothers with any olive trimming?"

  "Only once last year. I fell off the ladder. Sometimes I visit Percival and he tells me to lie on my back on the ground and look up, to tell him where I can't see blue sky, so he knows where to trim more."

  The priest grunted. After a while, he asked, "What hand do you write with, Feliu?"

  "My right hand."

  He paused again.

  "I believe you have promise; I hope to help you find a meaningful vocation. But first, you must stop what you are doing."

  "What am I doing?"

  "God knows."

  "But I don't know, Father."

  "The thing you keep doing every day, over and over. The thing that is making those hard spots on your fingers."

  "Oh," I said, relieved—but only for a moment, until I realized where his request was leading. I said more quietly, "But I need to do it. And I like to do it. I can't stop now."

  Father Basilio's normally melodic voice lowered into a growl. "Of course you like doing it—that is the problem. I understand your father is dead, but hasn't your mother taught you anything?"

  I leaped to her defense. "She has, Father."

  I recalled what I knew about Father Basilio: that he had dissolved the Catalan-language community choir in favor of an Italian one. Perhaps he wasn't in favor of Catalan music—or musicians—at all. Why else would he discourage me?

  Father Basilio gave me the cold shoulder for several weeks. Then he approached me one day and again clasped my hand. It was as calloused as ever. Feeling its hard patches and raised ridges, he released it and spat, "Considering the defilement this hand has suffered, I shouldn't even touch it!"

  When I told Mamá that Father Basilio had decided to stop touching me, she turned to me, her eyes wide. "Touching you? Feliu—don't be alone with that man. Don't spend any more time in that church than you have to."

  Sorry that I had alarmed her, I said, "All right, Mamá." I knew, though, that I'd miss the singing at Mass, however halting and off-key; and the church's inviting coolness; and the feeling, brief as it was, that one adult seemed to believe I had some kind of calling.

  ***

  Eduardo Rivera continued to avoid our family, but he had an older and more powerful brother—Don Miguel Rivera, as my Tía reminded us to call him—who was not so easily rebuffed. Instead of being repelled by my mother's unladylike show of force the day of El Nene's concert, Don Miguel was intrigued by it. At any public gathering, he made sure to approach and greet my mother, and to ask after Tía's health—though he could have asked Tía herself just as easily, since he saw my aunt every week in church.

  Don Miguel had inherited his father's job of managing the vineyards and olive groves owned by his patron, the Duke of Oviedo. As Don Miguel gained power and prestige, we saw him more around town. Even in scorching summer, he wore a vest and double-breasted suit jacket, bunched over his paunchy middle. Wandering away from Campo Seco's twisting streets toward its cracking, yellow-soiled fields, he looked like a crow, black coattails flapping in the heat.

  Despite his increasing wealth, Don Miguel was struck by the same tragedy that befell so many of the villagers, when his thin, meek wife, Doña Clara, died giving birth to their long-awaited first child. He grieved intensely for one month, and then let it be known, with the frankness of a man shopping for a particular breed of horse, that he intended to marry again, as soon as possible. This time, he would seek out a stronger, sturdier woman. Women of unproven fertility need not apply.

  If many widows expressed interest in Don Miguel's matrimonial quest, our family didn't hear about it. We had our own death to mourn. One month shy of his ninth birthday, my brother Carlito contracted diphtheria. What seemed at first like little more than a sore throat advanced to swollen lymph nodes and painful breathing. The inside of Carlito's throat darkened from inflamed red to a leathery gray. Within a few days, several more local children had caught the disease, and there was talk of quarantining Carlito and the others. A doctor from Barcelona was hailed, but before the man arrived, Carlito passed away.

  Don Miguel was among the first to visit our house that week in 1905, when others were still deterred by the worry that fatal spores lurked in our hallways. He arrived flanked by two quieter men, who removed their hats while Don Miguel kept his own head covered. Tía brought them all glasses of sherry. Despite what they had in common—not least, the recent death of loved ones—my mother couldn't seem to find any words to share with her guest. She paced silently the entire time he sat drinking, his eyes hidden under the shadow of his hat brim as Tía refilled his glass again and again.

  Finally Don Miguel explained why he'd come: not only to pay respects, but to offer to help carry Carlito's coffin. Mamá insisted that the task was well within the abilities of our two neighbors, Percival, and a visiting uncle. Then she resumed pacing between the table and the doorway, willing her guest and his silent cohorts to leave.

  But Don Miguel wasn't to be so easily dismissed. He returned with a freshly plucked chicken and said that he hadn't had a good meal since his wife had died. Mamá had no choice but to invite him to stay and dine with us. Once again, the hat and jacket stayed on. The chicken was stringy and tough. It was the quickest midday meal we ever ate; ten minutes after she'd set the plates in front of us, Mamá swept them away, impervious to Don Miguel's quizzical expression and Tía's disapproving stare.

  A few weeks later, Don Miguel delivered a letter informing us that Enrique had been accepted at the military academy in Toledo, near Madrid. Enrique had sat for the examinations several months earlier, and had been waiting in anguish to hear. We couldn't understand how Don Miguel had received the news first. "Perhaps it helped that I put in a good word when I visited the capital," he told my mother, but later, she took pains to tell Luisa and me that she was certain Enrique had passed the exams all by himself.

  Don Miguel remained eager to impress, and a couple of months later he returned to our house with another scheme. He'd heard I was still pining to play music. Why not let me use my father's old teaching piano, which remained in the room between the church and the school?

  "I understand it's a little far for the boy to walk each day," Don Miguel said, lowering his eyes to me with exaggerated sympathy. "But move it to the house and your problem is solved."

  My mother reminded him, "It's Father Basilio's piano now, not ours. I gave it to him to settle a debt."

  Don Miguel shrugged. "The priest doesn't mind. He has his own debts to settle. Tell him I asked, and he'll assure you—he doesn't mind at all."

  Mamá said, "Besides, Feliu wants to play cello. He has no interest in piano."

  "You played once yourself," he said to my mother. "You could teach the boy."

  "No tengo ganas," she said, and I knew it was true. She no longer had the desire to have anything to do with the piano.

  "It's true you don't want to play piano?"

  I was staring at Don Miguel's hat, wondering why he wouldn't remove it. I didn't think he was bald. I could see oily tendrils curling in front of his ears and along his neck. If anything, he seemed unusually hairy.

  My mother touched my arm. "Feliu, he's talking to you."

  I startled out of my daze. "Piano? Yes—any instrument, at this point." My mother's eyes widened. She twitched her head to one side, as if she were shaking a fly away from her ear. But I had already missed the cue.

  "Good. It's settled," he said, s
craping the chair legs against the floor. My mother pushed herself up slowly. He took her hand and mashed his lips and nose into it. After the front door closed, she collapsed into a chair and whispered, "We'll never be rid of him now."

  The next evening, as Campo Seco awoke from its late-afternoon slumber, curious onlookers flocked to our street. Men headed downhill toward the church in twos and threes, dabbing their necks with white handkerchiefs, as if just the thought of moving a piano was sufficient to make a man sweat. At the threshold of the church's side door, volunteers had coiled ropes and heaped up pulleys, creating such a profusion of snakelike piles that one might have thought our church was engaged in an exorcism.

  A dozen men had rolled up their sleeves in eager sympathy, but only four men would do the bulk of the work: Don Miguel, two of his taciturn associates, and the sniffling, sensitive, thin-armed Eduardo. I'd already begun to feel compassion for my former teacher, but today, seeing Eduardo's bullied expression, I felt doubly sorry for him. He removed his dress collar, unfastened the shirt's top button, stretched his arms out, rebuttoned his shirt, and would have repeated the process again if his two fellow movers hadn't yanked him into the church.

  A half hour later, just as observers were getting restless, the brown lid of the piano appeared in the doorway, then withdrew. We onlookers could hear the sound of muffled voices and a dull thud. The piano top appeared again, protruding a few inches farther this time, before a second retreat. The piano was stuck, unable to move around a tight corner. We heard a curse and a clank. Then a shiny object sailed through the doorway, landing at our feet. It was one of the silver candelabras, now bent, that had been screwed to the piano's face, above the keyboard. The men hadn't thought to remove it first.

  Eduardo squeezed through the doorway, past the stuck piano. He crouched into midwife position on a lower step with his hands and one cheek pressed hard against the piano, waddling backward, trying to maintain his footing and resist the brunt of the piano's weight, while inside, Don Miguel pushed and pulled and turned, trying every angle. A leather strap around the piano's top alternately slackened and tightened, reining the piano upright when it leaned too far down the outside stairs.

  For several minutes, progress continued. The counterbalance worked. Then, just at the most delicate stage in the birthing process, as the piano passed more than halfway through the church door, its lidded top began to tip earthward. Eduardo squatted more deeply, his knees turning out in a grand plié. But the tipping continued; the piano seemed determined to end up in his lap. At the last moment, just as three hundred kilos of wood, wire, and ivory seemed poised to pin him to the ground, he leaped sideways, sending the piano, honking like a strangled goose, down the steps and into the street.

  My mother buried her eyes in her hands while Luisa patted her hip consolingly, whispering, "It only fell a little bit, Mamá." The men in the crowd looked down at the ground or up at the sky, embarrassed to have been caught witnessing such a botched moving job.

  Without meeting any of our glances, Eduardo reshouldered his load and the second half of the piano slipped out effortlessly. The instrument was set down, and we all leaned forward to get the first glimpse of Don Miguel's face as he turned toward his brother, red cheeks quivering between labored puffs.

  "It's just..." Eduardo stammered. "If we had ... but here, if I..."

  Don Miguel resettled his skewed hat and pulled the brim forward, obscuring his eyes. Then he spit into his hands, rubbed them, and grunted, "Grab the ropes."

  Now that the piano had cleared the narrow doorway, the four men strapped it to a wide stretcherlike board. They counted to three before lifting, and in that long second before the piano defied gravity, I saw Eduardo Rivera's eyes survey the course ahead of them: the long and painful trek down the cobblestoned street, potholed and steep, to be followed by the even more perilous lifting of the piano, via block and tackle, over our second-story balcony. He was not the right man for the task; even the youngest boys gathered knew it. And there were a dozen heartier men eager to take his place—men who had spent countless festivals practicing for just this sort of processionary task, carrying plaster Virgins and enormous papier-mâché heads through slippery, candle-wax-spattered streets. Why couldn't Eduardo simply refuse?

  As if in response to my silent thoughts, Don Miguel cleared his throat and announced, "At some point, we must all make amends. By the time this job is done, the Delargos and Riveras will be one family." I'm not sure who looked more ill at this comment: Eduardo or my mother.

  During the hours ahead, the piano would be dropped several more times. It would crush two toes, dig a deep gouge into a neighbor's arched wooden door and, while rising to our balcony, chip several century-old stones off our house's street-facing wall. When it was finally in place, a man came to tune it, thanks again to Don Miguel's charitable assistance.

  My mother had no interest in teaching me, so I taught myself, tackling easier pieces by Bach and Schubert and Brahms. Don Miguel invited himself over every few months, and each time I was trotted out in front of him and made to play. Everyone marveled at how quickly I had learned, how well I played. But it was like the violin—far better than nothing, but not quite right. Playing the piano was like filling up on bread and water while the smell of a neighbor's roast wafted in through the windows. It helped me to know that somewhere a cello was waiting for me; the bow, my father's gift, was proof. I took it out once each month, wiped the wooden stick with an oiled cloth, twisted the pearl-dotted adjuster that tightened the bow's horsehairs, and loosened them again before replacing the bow in its sturdy leather tube.

  Over the next two years, Don Miguel attempted to court my mother. With his younger brother, Mamá had maintained a stance of polite indifference. With Don Miguel, she expressed her disdain openly. It made little difference to him. Their tepid courtship proceeded slowly, interrupted by Don Miguel's journeys to manage distant olive groves and to conduct business in Madrid. My mother breathed more freely every time he went away. "Another city, another farm—he'll turn some girl's eye," she said once.

  "You're wrong," responded Tía. "He likes a challenge. You've made it clear you think you're better than him—that was your mistake."

  One morning Don Miguel stopped by to let us know he was back from Madrid and to invite himself to dinner. Enrique had just begun his second year at the academy, and Percival now lived with his employer, at the olive press where he was apprenticing. For Luisa, who was nineteen, Don Miguel brought a hand mirror, its silver handle patterned with bas-relief roses.

  For me, Don Miguel brought a magazine called ABC. The issue celebrated the anniversary of King Alfonso's marriage to Queen Victoria Eugenia, informally known as Ena. Though our King, now twenty-one years old, had wed Queen Ena a year earlier, the Spanish public was taking some time to accept Alfonso's blond bride. The granddaughter of Britain's Queen Victoria, Queen Ena had converted from her Protestant faith to Catholicism two days before the royal wedding, but that renunciation hadn't changed her reputation as a rather frosty, distinctly non-Iberian foreigner.

  Luisa, Mamá, and Tía took turns passing around the magazine. Even my mother couldn't resist poring over the glossy pictures and gossipy captions, but when she flipped past them, she saw why Don Miguel had brought me the magazine and handed it back. The next piece was a profile of El Nene, who had finally shed that nickname and was now called Justo Al-Cerraz. The pianist insisted on the hyphenated version of his last name, drawing conspicuous attention to the Islamic prefix, which was part of his new mystique. His mother was said to be Moorish. Or gypsy. Or both: a distant descendant of some Moor pretending to be a gypsy following the seventeenth-century expulsion of the Moors from Spain. Though Christian, Al-Cerraz claimed he could orient himself toward Mecca even blindfolded, unless there was a piano nearby. (Wasn't there always some piano nearby?) Any stringed instrument, he said, disturbed his "magnetic energies."

  In the six years since I'd heard him play, Al-Cerraz had toured briefl
y with a zarzuela company, spent a few months in the royal court of Madrid, then rededicated himself to his own musical education by briefly joining the composer Richard Strauss in Germany. The last episode had not gone well, as evidenced by Al-Cerraz's willingness to poke fun at his short-lived mentor. At the time of Al-Cerraz's visit, Strauss was still basking in the success of his Don Quixote: Fantastic Variations on a Theme of Knightly Character—a dissonant production full of bleating trumpets meant to sound like sheep, wind machines, and other noisy post-Wagnerian inventions. When the ABC reporter asked what Al-Cerraz thought of Strauss's "variations," the pianist sniped, "They are certainly fantastic. I had no idea that any musical production could have quite so many sheep. I thought I was right back in the Spanish countryside. I forgot I was listening to music at all."

  Undoubtedly he was still bristling at Strauss's claim that "A Spaniard will not be the one to write great works about Spain. You are a nation of bullfighters, not composers." For as the article made clear, playing music—even playing for royalty—was no longer enough for Al-Cerraz. He wanted to compose, too.

  Reading the article, I didn't sympathize with Al-Cerraz. I had my own miseries to contemplate. I was young, yes, but not so young in a country where the King himself was still learning to shave. At twenty-five, Al-Cerraz was older than our monarch, but look how much he had done! Here he was, embarking on a second career. I hadn't even started my first.

  This notion of a profession was no small thing, as my mother's repeated comments had made clear. My leg was as weak as ever. I'd never be able to follow Enrique's footsteps into the army, or Percival's path into the laborious agricultural trades. Recently, setting her sights lower, Mamá had tried apprenticing me to a shoemaker, but even he had deemed me unworthy. My fingers were too clumsy, the shoemaker said, adding, "A good thing you have taught him numbers and history so well, Doña. Perhaps he will serve as his father did, as an inspector or diplomat. But as for a real trade, he is hopeless."