"How long have you been sitting there?" the stranger tried again.
"I'm still on my first."
"I doubt that."
He was even closer now, pressing against the back of my chair to let another man pass. When he reached over my shoulder to signal for a drink, I noted the sharp clean line of his shirt cuff and the heft of his arm. I could smell something on him—lavender, perhaps—that was aggressive in its floral prettiness.
I ignored him and lifted a finger toward the aproned barkeeper.
"I think you've been sitting several hours," he persevered.
"Listen—"
"Maybe even years."
"If you're in a hurry—" I said, turning.
The words caught in my throat. He laughed and clapped me on the back and finally embraced me, squeezing my thin suit jacket. Even after he let go, I could feel the spot on each triceps where his wide fingertips had pressed.
"Dios santo," I gasped, catching my breath, "I thought you were in Paris!"
"I was, until a week ago."
"You promised you were never coming back to Madrid."
"Did I? I wish I could keep that promise."
Fine red capillaries snaked across his cheeks, but from a distance, they would only look like the hearty bloom of indefatigable youth. Everything about him, from his shoes to his wax-tipped mustache, shone.
He was studying me as closely as I was studying him. I opened my mouth and realized, after a hard swallow, that I had nothing to say.
The barkeeper set down my drink. Al-Cerraz reached over and grabbed it before I could, and gave it a sniff. "I forgot how cheap the liquor is here. I can't let you drink this! We'll find ourselves a better bottle somewhere."
I reached out to rescue the drink but Al-Cerraz had already pushed it, along with a coin, into the barkeeper's hand. "Coffee instead, please—two of them, cortados."
I said, "You didn't leave because of the fighting?"
"It wasn't the war itself I couldn't stand, it was the whole festive atmosphere—one big party, the whole city engaged in debauchery, and young boys running around with wine bottles, hanging on their sweethearts, telling them they'd be back in two weeks. Two weeks!"
"Well, maybe..."
"They'll make beautiful targets in their bright uniforms. Here." He gestured for me to join him at an emptying table on the other side of the café, closer to the entrance. "The worst of it was the music. Three days of it. Bands playing in the streets, people dancing and singing like wind-up toys. If there had been a moment of quiet, people might have had a chance to think." The bartender came around and wiped the table for us. Al-Cerraz thanked him. "They say music is a dangerous aphrodisiac. It's nothing compared to patriotism. Anyway—how long have you been trying to grow a beard?"
"What do you mean, trying?"
He wrapped a heavy arm around me again and squeezed. His fingernails were manicured, glossy, with shiny white half-moons rising from trimmed cuticles. Suddenly I was aware of how long it had been since I'd laundered my shirt.
"This wasn't the first place I looked for you. I tried the music school, the theater. Then I thought, maybe some of the finer restaurants—they're not too bad, if you don't mind tinkling spoons. Personally, I refuse to compete with flan for attention."
"I have a few private students."
"Then I thought, maybe he's gone to America! Carnegie Hall."
"Not all of us are looking for fame and fortune."
"I can see that."
"Listen..."
"I'm listening, Feliu—tell me everything!"
"The letters," I managed to say with effort. "Didn't you get them?"
He made a few false starts, then smiled sheepishly. "I'm hopeless at writing. Ask anyone."
"But seven times? Eight? I figured the address was bad, but I had nowhere else to write."
"I'm here now. You can ask me—tell me—anything." And he leaned forward, bearded chin resting in his fleshy palms.
"Forget it. If you're here to find out about the latest intrigues, you're talking to the wrong man. I'm not with the court anymore." When he didn't react, I added, "The Queen asks to see me every few months, though I no longer play for her. Any local dandy spends more time there than I do. If you're setting up royal residence, you'll have the entire spotlight to yourself. I never had much of it, anyway."
"No, you just caught one bright spark." He bumped the table slightly, chuckling. "I hear it left a shiny spot on the inside of your bow."
A shaft of light had penetrated the bar's entryway and was dancing on a mirrored pillar next to the table. "You know," I said, squinting, "it's good to see you. But I think I'll go back to where I was sitting. Sun's in my eyes. I feel a headache coming on."
"The sun's in your eyes?" He laughed again, jostling his full cup. The saucer beneath was close to overflowing.
"You don't need the dark, you need something to eat. Away from here. I insist."
I hedged, thrust my hand into my pocket, felt the last coin there, and thought of the empty apartment waiting me.
"Vale. But I'm not fetching any water for your car," I cautioned.
"Water? There's no need—but that gives me a marvelous idea."
He didn't mean the Stanley Steamer; he'd replaced that long ago, before souring altogether on automotive fads. By water, he meant the estanque, the nearby Retiro's pond with its paddleboats and lawns for picnicking. This August day it was nearly deserted, the food stalls and little puppet theater shuttered against the midday sun while a few employees napped in the shadows, waiting for evening's cool reprieve. The only other park stroller was a shifty-looking man in a threadbare cape—perhaps a failed courtier like me—tilting his ear toward the marble statue of the King's father as if he were listening to the dead monarch's secrets.
Al-Cerraz rattled the window to rouse the sleeping rowboat attendant and slipped a folded bill between the bars. Soon we were floating on the dazzling water, next to a line of ducks too hot to flee. I hadn't thought I was hungry, but when I smelled the grease-spotted bags he'd loaded into the boat, filled with bread, sausage, cheese, and fruit he'd bought along the way, my appetite returned. I listened, sleepy and full for the first time in days, as the pianist expressed his distaste for Stravinsky's Rite of Spring, his tentative interest in jazz, his catalog of every famous Spanish musician and artist living in Paris. "Anyone and everyone you can think of!" And then, catching himself and endeavoring to be more kind, "Well, not everyone. A lot of has-beens, come to think of it."
He talked to me about music and life in England, Italy, San Francisco, and New Orleans—about everywhere, it seemed, but Spain. Perhaps I'd assumed wrong. Al-Cerraz wasn't settling back into court life here, he was just passing through. Spain was the last place in the world that interested him, and he was a man who demanded to be interested, inspired, at the center of things, where everything was new. Yet he hated war—even the most remote hint of it, the sight of bandages, any hint of tinny bugling. And so, he assured me when I asked him directly, he was home to stay. Spain, he predicted, would stay neutral in the war, not upon any moral high ground, but to dig itself out of its economic slump. With the rest of Europe in ruins, its tottering industries might have a chance—as might its performers.
"We 'll take the trains," he was saying. "Not with our own private car, not this time—anyway, traveling with a piano is overrated; why rehearse with a better instrument than you'll get to play at the concerts themselves? But first class we'll manage, traveling light. The cities, of course, but the smaller towns, too, on the way. You'll have the energy for that. As my beautiful mother always said, hard work and a harder bed keep an artist young."
I had nodded off, lulled by the gentle rocking of the boat. "Trains?" I rubbed my eyes, yellow spots dancing on my inner lids.
"You're probably wondering about the violinist. He's adequate. He's had the same questions about you, of course—as did Monsieur Biber, but I've reassured him. The first week is always a trial, but after
that—"
"Reassured him?"
"That you'll perform to our standards."
"Who says I'll perform at all?"
"Biber asked what you'd want in terms of fees. I told him you'd understand what the life is really like—steady work, few vacations. I told him you'd be fair."
"Fair." I closed my eyes. "As fair as not answering the letters I wrote you?"
"Yes, yes—about coming to Paris."
"So you did read them."
"And look—I was right! It's no place for a musician. Not now."
"But you didn't explain that. I couldn't have known you were ignoring me for my own good."
When he failed to answer, I closed my eyes. He discarded his jacket and his shirt and rowed in his undershirt, making lazy circles in the sun. I heard the snap of the oarlocks. "Feliu, I went to your apartment first, before I found you at the café. I saw how you're living."
"I'm not interested," I said.
"You were seeking opportunity; now you're rejecting it. You don't consider this a good offer?"
"Too good, and too sudden. Over the years, I've developed a taste for independence—and a distaste for favors."
"'Over the years!'" he snorted and stood up. The rowboat lurched. I leaned forward and put my arms over the gunwales, trying to steady the boat while he balanced on one beefy leg, tugging at his shoelaces. "You're rather young for that sort of talk!"
My face over my knees, I willed the boat to stop rocking. I could hear more than see: the snap of a knee garter; the clatter of a dropped shoe. One black sock landed in my lap.
"Say no more," he said. "Disagreement is bad for digestion. And indigestion is bad for swimming."
The boat leaned hard and then righted itself so violently that I gasped. He splashed and was gone, under the surface. I heard a few protesting quacks when he came up for breath, several meters away.
"Come in!" he called.
When I didn't answer right away, he called back, "Never mind. It's wonderful. Don't do yourself any favors."
I watched him float on his back, his belly rising as a smooth white island above the surface. His undershirt was taut and nearly translucent against his chest, whorls of black hair visible beneath it. His large pink toes flexed above the opaque surface of the water.
"There are only two places in the world where I feel weightless and at peace," he called to me cheerfully, his irritation already purged. "This is the second one."
He took his time returning to the rowboat. Pulling himself back aboard, he glistened like an otter, diamond-bright drops of water nesting on his matted mustache, beard, and gleaming black hair. Water streamed from his rolled pant-legs while he lit a damp cigar, its leafy smolder doubling as the breeze shifted in my direction.
"I'm feeling a little sick, actually," I said.
"I told you a swim would make you feel better."
"I'm not a strong swimmer. I like the water, but..."
"Too much sun." He puffed away. "You never asked me what the first was—the first place I feel at peace."
"Maybe we could switch sides," I said, wanting to get away from the smoke. "I'll row us back."
"Not at the piano, if that's what you're thinking."
I wasn't. I still remembered him confessing years earlier his unease at playing, his self-consciousness on the stage—if that had all been true, rather than an exaggerated, wine-soaked lament.
"Aboard trains. That's what I meant."
"I see," I told him, but I was more focused on our balance in the boat. Holding each other by the forearms, we tried to execute a shuffling dance, working our way around each other while the boat lurched.
We had nearly stepped around each other when Al-Cerraz started to speak; then he shouted suddenly: "Huy!" The cigar had slipped out of his mouth. It was floating, like some chamber-pot detritus, in the tea-colored pond water. He leaned over, as if to retrieve it. I began to yell. Then my own mouth was full, and I was sinking, weighted down by all my clothes, darkness all around me. I kicked hard and came above the surface, gasping.
I could hear him laughing from the boat. "Cálmate! It's not that deep—just over your head!"
I went down again, felt the springy surface of weeds under my feet, kicked up, and breathed.
"Use your arms!"
Down again, another light bounce, and the agonizing tickle of inhaled water.
"Fool! Swim!"
Every time I came up to the dazzling surface, I saw the shadowy underside of the rocking boat, but nothing else—no sign of an outstretched hand. He was too busy trying to fish his cigar out of the water.
"Stop flailing!" he shouted again, barely bothering to look my way.
"I have a bad..." I started to say, sucking in water. I sputtered, "...leg—hip, really."
"What's a hip got to do with swimming? Look at me—I could swim to Africa!"
For a second, my fury overwhelmed my fear; somehow, that helped. Finally, I controlled my breathing and started pushing the water away from my face and kicking more evenly. A slippery piece of grass brushed my cheek, but I kept the rhythm. In just three or four more strokes, I was at the boat, reaching for the gunwale.
"See?" He hauled me in. "Not so bad, was it? I knew you couldn't have grown up near the Mediterranean and not be able to swim." A pause. Then: "You owe me a cigar, you know."
I spit, coughed, and finally retched until I managed to vomit over the side. Al-Cerraz turned away.
"Look what you've done," I said afterward, gasping, as I sprawled in the boat. "Imagine the filth I've swallowed."
"Oh—certainly. It was the pond water that did it—"
And the cigar smoke, I was thinking.
"—not the half-bottle of swill you'd drunk before two o'clock today. Or the hundreds of bottles before that."
"I'm not a drunk," I snapped.
"Good. I'm glad we got that question out of the way. Are you suicidal?"
"Why would you say that?"
"Your landlady said you spend a lot of time sitting on the suicides' bridge."
"That's rubbish."
"I'm glad to hear it."
Several glum minutes passed.
Finally he said, "You can see I don't put others first—there's no worry about that. So here's how it is. It's no favor to you. It's a favor to me. We have a dozen concerts already booked, and our French cellist ran off to Belgium, to sacrifice himself for la guerre. Fine, if that's what he wants."
He added, "You're not the first cellist I asked. You're the third. That's not because I don't think you're immensely talented. It's only because you're inexperienced and unknown. In semiretirement at—what—twenty-one?"
I glared at him.
"Be offended, if it will help you feel better about it. This isn't a great deal for either of us, but I'm too broke to live without touring. I've been paid to compose an opera based on Don Quixote, but it's gone nowhere. I can't remember the last time I had a good night's sleep." He perked up. "But the trains will help that. They're the perfect cure for insomnia."
I was too tired to speak. Sourness burned in my throat.
"You're afraid of getting wrapped up in something," he continued. "Makes no sense at all. You've got nothing to lose. But put it this way: If you had only a month to live, would you try touring with us?"
"Possibly."
"Well, then—" He pointed to a sign on the shore: NO SWIMMING IN THE ESTANQUE-RISK OF CHOLERA-BUREAU OF PUBLIC HEALTH.
"As for me," Al-Cerraz said, "I never catch anything. A terrible scarlet rash whenever I eat shrimp, but besides that, nada."
Within a week, I was preparing to board a train and say good-bye to the capital that had been my home for five years. Al-Cerraz was correct. I had nothing to lose. Despite my skepticism about the pianist, despite my initial pretenses of aloofness, I couldn't fight the tingle that mounted as the train approached, vibrating the platform. As jaded as I'd become in Madrid, I still believed it was possible to climb aboard a train as one person, and step o
ff it as another.
I encountered our French violinist for the first time on the platform, crowded with people and suitcases. He swept by me, glancing around and through my legs, muttering into his thin blond mustache. I reached out a hand: "Feliu Delargo." But he circled me and walked back the other way, past Al-Cerraz and his five massive trunks.
"To him, you are not a person," Al-Cerraz explained. "You are someone with luggage—fortunately, not too much of it, since we are traveling heavy already."
Al-Cerraz nodded at the porter who, with the violinist's help, was directing the flow of our baggage into the train.
"He can be excessive with ritardes, and he once lost all memory of a Franck sonata we had performed a hundred times. But he has never lost a piece of our luggage. I introduce you to our violinist and chief transportation coordinator, Louis Gauthier."
Gauthier did not look up at the sound of his name. He was still immersed in discussion with the porter as the stationmaster walked by, ringing a handbell.
"Come on. He will be the last to board," Al-Cerraz continued. "And then he'll spend the next hour studying the railway timetable. And he will get off first at every stop, to calm our fans."
"Fans? Are you serious?"
"I think he must have played with trains as a boy," Al-Cerraz continued. "When he is very good, we let him ride in the locomotive."
In our compartment, Al-Cerraz put one arm around me. "I know this country better than anyone else alive. Bottom bunk all right?"
"That's fine." I'd never traveled first class. Captivated, I studied the small sitting room that would transform, at the turn of the porter's key, into a bedroom: the red carpet, the round table tucked between two chairs, the diminutive washbasin in one corner. It was immaculate and elegant, for the moment; less so as Al-Cerraz hung a sausage from the tasseled curtain rod over the picture window and set a woven garland of garlic in the marble washbasin.
"Since I was a very small boy, traveling from town to town, three hundred days a year, I learned to love this life," he continued. "The cradlelike rock and sway of the train, the hospitality of our countrymen, the gentle hearts of our countrywomen." He winked. "You will find that, as long as you keep moving, there is no end to the delights awaiting you. But you must keep moving, Feliu. Even when the heart skips; even when the view blurs."
The Spanish Bow Page 23