A wave of relief washed over the room, followed by rising chatter and giddy laughter. A guard came to inspect my cello. He examined the popped string, then peered inside the F-shaped sound holes and lifted aside the lapels of my jacket. As the hubbub in the room increased, I saw Isabel slip away. The tip of her nose was red and her cheeks shone with frustrated tears. The duet—thank God—was over, and I did not have to endure any applause, or the lack of it.
"Modern, you say?" I heard the Queen Mother saying above the background clamor, her head still tilted at that undecided angle.
"In Paris, people would have demanded an encore," a rotund man responded. His face was turned away from me, so that I could only see his broad, jacketed back.
"This isn't Paris," the Queen Mother said drily.
"Thank goodness. Vive la différence. But if you'd like a third act instead of an encore, I am ready to begin."
"Yes." She reached out to pat his arm with a surprisingly familiar touch while she forced a weak laugh. "Thank you, Justo. I think that would restore order beautifully."
I suppose my life to this point had been oddly, if backhandedly, blessed. Bad things befell me regularly, but often they seemed to work in my favor. From my father's death, I had received a bow; from my mother's doomed pairing with Don Miguel, I was granted flight to Barcelona; in the midst of radical uprising, I was promoted to musical study in Madrid. Now, this failed concert—which should have sent me packing—had attracted the attention of Justo Al-Cerraz for the second time in my life. This time he mistook me for a fellow mischief-maker.
After playing to a charmed audience, he extracted me from the Queen Mother's party and pulled me by the hand down a dark hallway, back to the parade grounds.
"My cello—"
"The count will take care of it. He's the one I am trying to avoid—his daughter, too, actually, but you've assisted me there." He stopped at a bright red car parked alongside the two silver ones I'd seen earlier.
"But he was your teacher. Didn't you come to visit him?"
"I came because the Queen Mother invited me," he said, lumbering up over a dip in the side panel and onto the padded leather bench in front. "She and I have our own history. Will you give me a hand here?"
Could one have a history with a sovereign? A sovereign is history.
"She knew I was in Madrid," he continued after he'd squeezed behind the wheel, breathing hard. "I don't say no to royal invitations." He gestured for me to get in on the other side.
"Where are we going?"
"On my personal farewell tour. I don't plan to come this way again. This is my last evening in Madrid—maybe forever."
I hadn't brought an overcoat. The dress shoes I'd borrowed from the count pinched my feet. "How long will we—" I was halfway in, one leg dragging when the motorcar lurched forward.
"Get in!" Al-Cerraz shouted, laughing, and we were off. "This model set the record three years ago. Forty-six kilometers per hour!"
Two halberdiers leaped out of our way and a guard managed to open the main gate just in time for us to pass through without hitting it. On the flagstone parade grounds the motorcar had glided smoothly, but once we hit the road beyond the palace, it erupted into violent vibrations on the loaf-shaped cobblestones. Al-Cerraz gripped the wheel with wide white fingers and clenched his teeth, but nothing could stop his cheeks and belly from shaking.
I lobbed questions at him over the roar of the engine—how long I had wanted to ask a prominent musician so many things! Only every third word transmitted. It was like trying to converse in another language, without subtleties, but between swerves and rattles, the answers came back: "...two hundred seventy-five days ... that's touring ... the first manager I've ever trusted ... Debussy, yes, but ... Pedrell, the father of Spanish music.lower spine, if we're not careful ... the prize in Rome ... the problem with sausages ... and then again..." I nodded eagerly trying to organize his words in memory, like little boxes of printer's type, which later—I hoped—could be arranged into meaningful messages. I wasn't certain he was saying anything worth knowing, but I felt lucky all the same—the wind in my hair, horses whinnying as we passed, men and women crowding into doorways along the narrow streets and recoiling as we showered them with clouds of dust. I had envied this man, resented him, but how quickly resentment turned to pride, how easily dislike turned into worship when one felt included.
We turned a corner, the car bucked and slowed, and in the sudden engine-dead silence my voice, barely audible before, emerged as an earsplitting screech: "...she said it was the best way!"
The car rolled another few meters. Al-Cerraz tugged at a glossy black knob and set the brake. He reached into his pocket for a handkerchief and I saw that he was shaking with laughter. "By making love, you said?" He wiped his brow, then brayed a final time and blasted his nose into the handkerchief. "Black snot—that's what you get driving. A windshield would be nice, and a roof. Then again, that would feel like being in a carriage or a train, all hidden away. I still think that motorcars are the way of the future. It fascinates me. Is there any more important question, really, than what will last?"
He said this without a hint of irony, even though his own motorcar had just rolled to a broken halt. Then, returning to the subject that had bridged the car's last gasp, "What gave you the idea that duet partners need to be intimate? Music as lovemaking—what a cliché!" He laughed again, and I looked away, to hide my red face.
"It's not your fault," he continued. "Isabel's, right? And mine—I put that into her head. Of course I did." He laughed again.
Al-Cerraz reached over and ruffled my hair with his large hand. "That's what you need—the windswept look! I hope you don't mind what happened. But why should you? Days behind closed doors with Isabel! I'm sure they were fun while they lasted."
He patted his thighs. There was a long pause. Finally he said, "The count is a good teacher. Stick with him, a year or two at least. Hear him out. Though he, like Isabel, can get stuck on a single motif. Has he told you that you are a modernist with classical hands?"
"A classicist," I said, "with modern hands."
"So there's the difference between us," Al-Cerraz said. "And some warning associated with Goya and women," he remembered, smiling wistfully.
So I was not special; not with Isabel, or with the count. They were reliving with me what they had lived and said and done with Al-Cerraz. I seemed destined to follow in this pianist's footsteps.
Which made me promise myself, at that moment, to focus on being as different from him as possible. Already, I had adopted my own more sober style of playing. That had been instinct, not artifice, but now I vowed to distance myself further from his flamboyance and the antics of so many musicians like him. My face would reveal nothing. I would aim always to channel the music, attracting no attention to myself, focusing on the larger aim ... which was? I wished he or someone like him could tell me.
Al-Cerraz studied my face, his eyes twinkling as they watered from the wind and the dust.
"Are you all right? Fernán, was that your name?"
"Feliu."
"Feliu, we must get this motorcar a drink."
"Petrol?"
"Water. It's a Stanley Steamer," he said, peering over the hood to the parched road. "In England, there were creeks at every turn. Where there weren't creeks, there were puddles. But here..." He wiped his forehead again.
"Maybe it's not the best motorcar for these parts," I said.
He bellowed indignantly. "Mercy—I invested in a dealership! But as they explained to me, where there are no creeks, there are troughs, even in La Mancha."
He reached behind his seat, pulled out a rectangular screw-capped container that looked like an oversized flask, and pushed it toward me. "This is why I never drive without a companion. Back one block and turn right—I'm sure I saw a horse trough back there near the lamppost, where the cabs park. Don't worry about me. I'll guard the car."
Off I went, retracing our route, brooding over what Al-
Cerraz had said about Isabel and the count, trying to feel dislike for him, squirming at the recent memory of my pleasure at being asked to join him on this drive. Fernán—I said it out loud, bitterly. He didn't know my name. He just wanted a water carrier for his wretched steam machine. Horse troughs. I stubbed my toe on a cobblestone and felt a pain shoot into my hip. But someday, I thought, when motorcars take over the world, there won't be horse troughs every few blocks.
When things change, they don't change a little, they change a lot—so completely we can't even anticipate the reversals; what vanishes, what rises to take its place. What would last? Not Stanley Steamers. Not, I predicted, the music of Al-Cerraz.
"I remember a boy," he said to me two hours later, punctuating the statement with flatulence. We'd managed to get the Stanley Steamer restarted, and this was the third taverna we'd slumped into—"for a bite to eat," he'd said, though he'd accompanied every crust of bread and bit of greasy meat with at least two glasses of amber liquid.
I leaned as far away from him as my stool would allow. But as soon as I moved, he began to slide, and I had to lean back against his meaty shoulder to keep him upright. The bartender's eyes lifted at the sound of my grunt, which gave Al-Cerraz the opportunity to lift his finger for a refill.
"This boy," he said, "was everything that I am not. I have been trying to find him for years."
I held out my hand to stop the bartender from refilling my glass.
"Met him in a little town. All dust and mule dung and crones dragging their black skirts. You know the place?"
"Of course," I said. "It's called Spain."
"Right. I played there with a trio. He came onstage afterward, carrying the smallest cello I have ever seen."
I sat up straighter.
"His parents were there—pretty mother; greasy father, a show-off. The boy seemed to be in a trance. Stage fright. Boy's father probably beat him. I've seen it in every town. Prodigies..." He paused and stared into space.
"Yes?"
"The boy put this tiny cello between his legs and started to play. And the trance deepened into something I'd not seen before. He wasn't even with us on the stage. Carried away. Then—reason why, I can't re-call—the father slapped him."
I was sitting rigidly now, neck craning, trying to see into Al-Cerraz's watery eyes for any signs of mischief.
"You're sure it was a cello he held?"
He ignored the question. "Funny part came next. The mother—too good for her husband—was holding something. Walking stick, but thicker. Long and round. And she let loose—astonishing—crack!— right at her husband's nose. Terrible mess."
"Maybe it wasn't the lady's husband."
"The point, friend," he said pompously and then paused, his eyes flooding, followed by his nose. He coughed into his sleeve, leaving a trail of slime and boozy tears. I tried to push my handkerchief into his hand but he refused it. "She was beautiful! His protector—a Madonna!"
"And he...?"
"He was in his own world."
"It wasn't a cello," I said. "It was a violin."
"Waiter!" Al-Cerraz thundered.
"It was a violin being played as a cello," I tried to say again.
"You don't understand me," he growled, his strength returning. He grabbed fistfuls of my jacket and lifted me slightly off my stool. I heard the dry rip of bursting stitches.
"You have found that boy," I said, my voice trembling.
"I am trying to tell you a story," he said and shook me once. "He was an angel—an abstraction."
"He's real; he grew up!"
"If we could simply love our music, if we could be protected from everything else, we would be angels, too," Al-Cerraz said, his grip loosening. "I am still looking for that boy, within myself. I am searching for that moment when music is all that matters. There has never been a time when I don't see the audience out of one corner of my eye. Is that woman yawning? Did that man stand to leave? Even alone: Are my fingers moving more clumsily than before? Are my best years behind me? Who will remember?"
He paused. "I am lost everywhere—except where I want to be." He pushed just far away from the bar to spit between his legs. He missed; I could see a shiny patch on his shoe. He reached for his empty grease-smeared glass and held it up. "Here's to what endures____"
I reached out my own hand and caught the glass just as his fingers loosened.
"I am a fraud," he whispered.
"You are famous."
"Sometimes I think the key is to go back to the beginning. But maybe the key is to go to the end."
"You're being melodramatic."
"I don't want to die." He leaned so close to me that one stiff, kinked tip of his thick mustache brushed my cheek. "I just want to disappear. A friend would help me do that—if I had a friend."
He slumped against my shoulder, and I strained to bolster him, his heavy breath in my ear. The bartender, who had stepped closer when he saw me catch Al-Cerraz's glass, motioned with his fingers, rubbing them together.
"Now you must hear me," I struggled to say between grunts, as I pushed my hands into the tight folds of his pockets, searching for his money. "That boy you met, that village..."
But either I couldn't cram my hands in far enough to find anything or the pockets were empty. And the breath in my ear had become a snore.
"You will pay now?" the bartender said.
"He's famous," I said, uncrinkling bills from my own pocket.
"He's heavy," the bartender said, with a pallbearer's practicality. "I'll help you carry him out."
The next day, Al-Cerraz remembered none of it and revealed no trace of a hangover. If anything, he looked fresher than ever as he clasped both my hands in his and gestured to a low chair. He 'd sent me a message to bring my cello to the Stradivarius reception room, one of the eighteenth-century chambers on the Palace's northwest side, where prize instruments were kept—various guitars and harps; an odd pair of upright pianos shaped like bookshelves; Stradivarius violins, a viola, and a cello. Once the count had whisked me through this room, but I'd never been invited to linger. Al-Cerraz treated it like his personal salon, even while a guard stood at the door, eyes pinned on us both.
He must have sensed my discomfort, my awe at his ease. He leaned close and said, "The advantage of belonging nowhere is that you manage to feel comfortable anywhere."
"You make it sound easy."
"It is: Don't join anything, sign anything, accept anything—unless it's a kiss. Sometimes a kiss is worth it." He winked at me, then gestured to my cello and asked me to play.
"Better," he said, with a charitable smile. "It was hard to hear yesterday. But maybe I was distracted by all the glamour. Or maybe it was the King's snoring. And that broken string! I won't forget it."
He sat down at one of the uprights and began to play a Spanish piece—rambling tuneful chords, a folksy Aragonese dance. "Can you improvise? Just find the melody—easy, easy. Just play it, enjoy it. Don't think of your lessons."
Playing with him felt easy, nothing at all like playing with Isabel, though I could not tell if that was proof of our compatibility or of his unparalleled sensitivities. "Wonderful," he said at the end, and I found myself smiling back at the way the curling ends of his mustache brushed against his red cheeks. "Now, your choice. Play anything, and I'll follow."
At the end he said, "Good cellists are hard to find—unique cellists even harder. You are ... sixteen now?"
"Seventeen in December."
"When you have had enough of Madrid—four years, or five—come see me in Paris."
Four years? Long enough that he would forget my name again? He was still a young man himself; he knew that four years must seem impossibly far away. It would have been better if he'd slipped away from the palace, so that I could remember him as a babbling drunk with spit on his shoe who still owed me for the last round. Instead, he left me with the sound of his playing—the bronze bite of ringing bells, broken chords of falling water, a soft drumming tap like a mal
let against leather.
***
The botched duet with Isabel did not cost me my allowance from the Queen Mother, but I did lose most of her interest. Nor did the count seem to regard me as he had before. Perhaps Isabel had told him something, or he'd been harboring suspicions of his own. Perhaps he was simply angry that I'd caused him embarrassment. In any case, he seemed bent on punishing me.
This was not the kind of punishment I had craved from Alberto—the punishment of orderly discipline or its opposite, total freedom, either one of which might produce artistic benefit. This was the punishment of humiliation, of disintegration. The count seemed bent on separating me from my own musical style—in other words, from myself.
In the count's view, the Queen Mother's concert only proved what he had told Isabel and me all along; that what I really needed was remedial training, a back-to-basics approach. More scrubbing the raw flesh. He took me back to scales, simple studies—reasonable enough. But he also interrupted me constantly, usually mid-stroke, with an outstretched hand if necessary. My brain would go on singing the note I longed to finish as the count barked his instructions—to start the next bow higher on the string, lower, bow tipped up, bow tipped down. I'd begin to comply, and he'd bark again, finding a new failing. I felt like the subject of an experiment designed to create a stutterer, except it was my bow that began to stutter, instead of my tongue. My right hand began to spasm and twitch whenever I saw his hand reach toward me.
And then there was the left hand, which I preferred to allow to move freely up and down the cello's neck. The count advocated keeping the hand in a fixed location and using extensions whenever possible—reaching back with the first finger, forward with the pinkie—so that by day's end my hand, small to begin with, felt like it had been on a torturer's stretching rack. I thought of Schumann, with his finger brace, stretching his hands and destroying them in the process, ending his concert career.
The Spanish Bow Page 16