"Children are brutal," I said, laughing.
"They're less corrupted and more honest," she corrected me, without any trace of a smile.
But these talks were brief, and once I started playing, she always looked away, rotating every week farther round, so that before long she was sitting with her back to me. Even when I'd finished, the silence filling the room between us, she avoided turning toward me. My dismissal was always the same: a wave of her hand. It was the one imperious gesture that reminded me we were sovereign and servant, not intimates.
***
Growing up in Catalonia, where bullfighting was not a tradition, I had no inbred fondness for red capes and gore. In that way I and many of my provincial neighbors were, like the Queen herself, insufficiently Spanish. Madrileños, by comparison, loved the spectacle of the corrida. I had heard that the Queen had nearly fainted at her first bullfight, but she attended regularly now, to please her husband, and even more, to please her people.
One Sunday I borrowed my roommate's boxy binoculars and purchased a cheap seat in the sun, one level higher than I would have liked, facing the royal box. I kept my binoculars targeted so resolutely on the Queen that after the first hour my arms ached from the effort, and there were circles of sweat from where I'd pushed the eyepieces against my face.
What I saw confused me. For someone who had winced through her first bullfights, the Queen seemed a rabid fan now. Not a tense or violent moment passed without her lifting her own binoculars, a lighter pair, with brass fittings that flashed in the sun. Other ladies waved squares of lace; men stood to toss their hats and leather botas into the ring, hoping the matador would honor them by taking a drink while assistants behind him combed the bloodied sand clean. When the dead bull was at last dragged away, some fans turned to talk to their neighbors, but not the Queen. Even this last bit of business interested her, evidently.
Then the next round began—a fresh bull, a more experienced matador. Dancing and sparring in his traje de luces—his tight-fitting, spangled "suit of lights"—he quickly brought the bull to its knees, then stood, spun haughtily, faced the crowd, and just missed being gored as his antagonist struggled to stand again and make a final charge. At this close brush with death, the King himself leaped to his feet. I could not hear his voice amidst the crowd's, but I could see his mouth moving, shaping the joyful cheers as the matador turned just in time to save himself and deliver a final fatal thrust into the bull's wobbling, stained cranium. And still, the Queen stayed glued to her field glasses.
"You must be a true scholar of la corrida," said a paunchy man next to me, his eyes reddened from hours of staring into the bright sun.
"Yes? What?" I moved the binoculars just barely, in order to acknowledge him, then set them back against my eyes.
"Those things. For hours, you haven't taken them down."
He wanted to borrow them for the next bullfight, I thought; that's why he was flattering me. But then it sank in. The stranger couldn't tell what I was doing. I wasn't even looking at the bull, but he couldn't see that. I could close my eyes, and he wouldn't even know. I focused on the Queen again—her slim white arms visible beneath lace-edged sleeves, her small oval face hidden beneath the propped lenses. And at last I realized that she was not using the binoculars to watch the bullfight. She was using them to avoid seeing it at all.
The next time the Queen dismissed me after I had played for her, I lingered in the hallway. Ignoring the guard, I pressed my ear against the door.
CHAPTER 11
"Two minutes," the guard yawned.
"What?"
"It's like the sand spilling out of an hourglass."
"Does she do it often?"
"The same every time. Then suddenly, she's done."
I had made of show of refastening my cello case, fussing with the latches in mock frustration, while my eyes grew round at the strange sounds coming from the other side of the closed door.
I peered at the guard, to look for alarm in his face, but the muffled, hiccupy sounds had no effect on him. He leaned his ax-topped halberd against the wall and slid a broken matchstick under his nails, cleaning them.
My pretense of latch trouble was wearing thin. I asked, "Do you think she's all right?"
"She comes out, pushing the pins back into her hair, and asks for Walker to bring her tea in the next room. She likes her privacy. You'd better be moving on."
Grabbing my case, I shuffled down the hall as quickly as my hip would allow.
I felt responsible. But was that responsibility a dull ache, or a warm glow? I toyed with the feeling, pressing on it like a bruise. Did it hurt? Did it feel good? It felt—that was the main thing. After months of inertia and isolation, my music had done something real; it had been received. Now it had a life of its own, and I wasn't sure if that meant I should run away from it or run after it, to make sure it did not make trouble.
I gathered my courage. The next time Queen Ena signaled to dismiss me, I hesitated. From her seat at the piano bench, she gestured again—one flick of her hand, as if she were trying to shake off water. I set aside my bow but stayed seated, resisting the urge to bolt.
Again the gesture, dismissing me.
"Please," I said. "It doesn't seem right to leave you alone."
She turned at last, annoyance flaring, even while the thin skin underneath her eyes grew pink and patchy. "Don't be ridiculous."
I stammered something meant to sound consoling.
"No, don't," she said. "You can stay if you don't talk. It ruins everything."
She turned her back to me again, but she didn't make me leave, that time or the many that followed. It became part of the routine: I would sit quietly, waiting with a thrumming heart and a composed public face that attempted to defy an oddly intimate situation, feeling closer to her at this remove than I'd ever felt with Isabel.
The Queen did not respond equally to everything I played. She was on her guard against the obviously sentimental, and she refused to be swayed so commonly. Saint-Saëns's "The Swan," with its romantic, long-necked slides between notes, did little for her, nor did anything that exploded too early into a theme of menace or melancholy. Once I launched into a Tchaikovsky nocturne and saw her back go rigid. She hated to be told how to feel. She wanted to be reminded of how life itself had already felt, with all its variations and complications.
What moved her most were the pieces that expressed more than one side of an emotion—triumph paired with dark foreshadowing, anger paired with tender acceptance. The first time I came across Respighi's Adagio con Variazioni, I knew it was for her. Its strong, slow, royal bowings reminded me of how she walked; its gentle diminuendos reminded me of her subtle humor; its faster, rising sections seemed to apologize instead of boast; its most poignant sections were tinged with a regret that somehow contained both anger and comfort. The adagio seemed familiar the first time one heard it; with its undulating variations, it seemed not like a memory, but like memory itself—haunting phrases repeated, rewoven, braided with an aching inevitability. The most virtuosic sections came at the end, invariably pulling me back into myself. When I surfaced from the fast, difficult bowing sections, breathless, I saw—from the trembling of the Queen's shoulders—that her breathing had changed, too.
She did not wait for the end of Respighi's Adagio to put her face in her hands. As she sobbed, her narrow shoulder blades moved beneath the thin fabric of her dress. The movement made me think of a letter opener sliding beneath the flap of a white envelope—efficient but tense, carrying the possibility of injury. But who would be injured, I wondered: her or me?
I expected the worst when the Queen called for me one day in late autumn. She greeted me with a small, tight smile that seemed to confirm my fears. She had exposed herself to me. She could not afford to have the court know too much about her vulnerabilities. It happened that I was planning to visit home that very week. She could easily use my departure as an opportunity to dismiss me permanently.
Instead,
as the door closed behind me, she beckoned me toward her. I came forward with one hand around my cello's neck, the other around my bow, ready to begin playing.
"Put that down. All of it," she said, taking my hands in hers. The small, thin fingers were surprisingly strong and warm. "I have a gift for you."
Still trying to ward off the bad news I thought was coming, I said, "Shouldn't I play first? I'm leaving tomorrow for Campo Seco. I'll be gone nearly two weeks. We'll miss our next meeting."
"I know. This is the perfect time. I have been waiting to do this." She pushed back a lock of hair and shook her wrist, jingling a bracelet she wore there. "You have made me happy," she said.
I noted her use of the past tense.
"You don't believe me," she said. "But you know, it's like when your foot falls asleep, and it gets pins and needles. It hurts so badly and you want to make it worse, pound it out, just to make it go away faster. The last several months have been the pins and needles. Your music helped me get through that."
My brain was having trouble keeping pace with her words, so different from anything I had heard before.
"And something else," she said, straightening her back, releasing my hands for a moment to put a finger to her lips.
"Do you hear?"
I shook my head.
"The clocks—there is no ticking in this room either. No ticking anywhere. In light of the accident last June, our porcelain curator has decided to round up every last King Charles and King Ferdinand object in the palace and perform a massive inventory and cleaning project. It will take several weeks at the very least.
"In other words," she added, smiling, "you have given me both music and silence. I don't know which to thank you for the most."
"You don't have to thank me for either."
"No, I do," she said, growing serious again. "I trust you. In this room, when you are playing, I have felt safe."
"Safe?" I asked. "Are your enemies really a threat, even here?"
"I'm more worried about my friends." She tried to make it sound like a joke. "No, Feliu. Things will be fine."
She gestured toward a nearby chair, motioning for me to move it closer to her and take a seat.
"There are new problems, of course," she said, her voice becoming more businesslike. "The men in the Cortes who resist the King's vision, who would rather have dissension when our country is fragile. It's always fragile, they say. Well, yes, it's true! But whose fault is that?"
She continued, "The society churchwomen who refuse to accept me. The fuss they've made about a cross—the Protestant cross—being hung in the city. As if that is my doing, when I renounced my own faith. They'd prefer we remain in the Middle Ages, with no tolerance at all.
"I'm tempted to ask your opinion about that, coming from a small village. But I won't. What you have given me, Feliu"—she took my hands again, so tightly I could see the white tendons raised over her knuckles—"is refuge from all that. Relief from all that."
She twisted my hands in her hands again, and the heavy bracelet shifted, bouncing light off its multicolored gems: rubies, emeralds, and sapphires in antique settings; a row of large oblong stones dotted with smaller round gems. It was a gaudy piece, nothing at all like the icy diamonds and tiny pearls she usually wore.
"I don't wear it often," she said, noticing my glance. "Never in public. But it has meaning for me. Old things give me comfort. This is a very old bracelet." She held her arm out toward me, displaying it. "How old, do you think?"
I imagined King Alfonso strolling through the streets of Paris or Vienna during one of his trips abroad, a black jewelry box in his hand. "Four years old?"
"Four years?" she laughed. "Closer to four hundred. It belonged to Queen Isabella. Do you know what the history books say, about how she financed Columbus's discovery?"
I shook my head.
"By pawning her jewels. She didn't want to borrow from the Jews."
"This was found in a pawnshop?"
"No," Ena chuckled softly. "This was the bracelet she hid away. The colors reminded her of stained-glass cathedral windows. It was a piece of her that had nothing to do with her sovereign duties. She never wore it in public. I admire that she refused to part with it. A collector would misunderstand this bracelet—he would see it as a symbol of the Spanish conquest. I see it as the opposite. I see it as the symbol of a woman refusing to be conquered."
This was a speech she'd practiced, for which I made an insignificant audience. But I did understand. The bracelet was a testament to purity, integrity, and independence. She was nothing like the King, with his revolving-door ministers and complicated intrigues.
She gestured for me to touch it. "Have you ever touched something so old?"
There was an olive tree, just beyond our Campo Seco house, that my mother said was five hundred years old. I'd hung from its branches and rested beneath it, listening to its dry branches creak in the hot wind. But I didn't say that, of course. Tentatively I reached out a finger and traced the gleaming metal surrounding the stones.
She sighed. "I'm not as devout as Isabella. I have never heard God's direct voice. But your music spoke to me. It helped me remember one part of myself, a part of me that existed before I came to Spain or married a king. I want to honor that. Choose one, Feliu."
She wasn't giving me the whole bracelet, just one stone, a small one that wouldn't be missed. She 'd have the empty setting and adjacent links removed; it would fit her narrow wrist better that way.
"The mother-of-pearl on your bow gave me the idea," she said. "I thought you could replace it with something more valuable. To remember our time together."
I had no trouble choosing. I looked into her pale eyes and found my voice. I said, "The smallest blue sapphire."
***
On the train ride home, I snatched only the shortest naps, with the bow tube in my arms, my cheek pressed against the leather. I could imagine the sapphire glowing inside. At one point I had a nightmare that I opened the tube only to see water spill out, as if the sapphire had been a chip of ice and had melted in my feverish embrace.
When another passenger entered my compartment during one of those brief naps and tapped me on the shoulder, my arm flung itself at him like a sprung lever. I awoke to the sound of him grunting, trying to catch his breath. My fist had caught him in the stomach. The edge of a red-roofed building was visible outside the window; beyond that, gaunt cypress trees that looked like tall, thin men until I rubbed the sleep from my eyes.
The train had stopped, which only confirmed my sense that a robbery was underway. "Jamón," the stranger wheezed, lowering himself into the padded seat opposite me. "Sandwiches—they're selling them on the platform. I thought you should know."
He was a gray-haired farmhand, wearing wide-bottomed trousers and unlaced work shoes with flapping tongues. I apologized to him, wiping a slick of drool and sweat from my jaw. By the time I shook myself fully awake, the train was moving again. My stomach was growling, but I'd missed the chance to buy food. He saw the disappointed look on my face and held out a handful of almonds, drawn from his pocket. I ate them without picking away the bits of hair and lint, not wanting to offend him.
"What's in there, anyway?" he asked.
"Surveyor's equipment." I said without thinking. "Railroad detail." I tossed more almonds into my mouth, to stifle my own impulse to keep embellishing.
I told myself I was concerned about thieves. But if so, why was I already planning, on the second train south from Barcelona, not to show my gem-studded bow to my own family? At least, not right away.
I didn't expect them to covet my treasure. Shouldn't I exhibit this proof of royal favor? Didn't I owe it to my mother? Wouldn't it explain who I'd become to Percival and Luisa, whom I hadn't seen once since leaving Campo Seco? Of course I would show them the bow and its new gemstone.
Enrique was the only sibling from whom I hadn't grown apart; we 'd continued to exchange at least one letter a month since I'd moved to Madrid. Unfortuna
tely, he wouldn't be in Campo Seco. He'd been posted to El Ferrol, a tiny garrison village in the far north, on the coast. It was an unglamorous posting—the uniforms plainer than the ones he 'd worn in military school, the pay entirely inadequate for someone his age, trying to woo a wife. But he was still fond of the military life, and he had close friends—among them Paquito, who'd been assigned the same posting and whose parents happened to live close by.
The swaying train allowed me hours both to worry and to daydream. I recalled the luthier's astonished face when I brought the stone to him, directly after leaving the Queen. His eyebrows had lifted when he heard it was a gift from her, and had lifted even higher when I told him I wanted the sapphire placed on the inside of the frog, facing me, rather than on the outside, where it would be seen most easily by an audience.
Before I'd left the palace for Campo Seco, a messenger had delivered a final note from the Queen. I imagined she had changed her mind and wanted the gem back, but she was writing only to request that I return within ten days. King Alfonso wished me to perform at a public event—he would explain more upon my return. Para servirle, I'd responded. What else?
The train arrived in Campo Seco several hours late, at the hottest part of the day. I was the only passenger to disembark. The town was asleep and no one was waiting for me. I was glad, even if it meant limping uphill with my bags. I'd been away three years. I'd earned money, had a lover, befriended a queen. I'd met—a second time, though he claimed it was the first—the nation's most famous pianist. I'd learned to play the cello. How did everything feel now? Disappointingly familiar: bleached, shrunken, and inadequate.
The glinting foot-worn sidewalks of Campo Seco were even narrower than I remembered, barely a ledge flanked by the town's long rows of connected stone buildings. After a block of rubbing my battered suitcase against walls, I gave up and walked up the middle of the cobblestone street instead. Legs tiring, I found myself looking around for an electric tram, only to laugh out loud—Campo Seco had no electric tramlines or even "blood trams," pulled by horses. It was a town for walkers, for shepherds, for bored farmhands tapping the street ahead of them with olive-felling sticks.
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