"An artist recognizes a setting, a moment," he was lecturing the lady, who had introduced herself as Señorita Silva. "An artist of life does the same thing—we are here, the weather is fine, why should this seem like an inconvenience?"
The lady glanced over her shoulder. "But I was concerned about how abruptly we stopped."
The conductor and a man in greasy overalls were walking down the tracks, in the direction we had been traveling. A group of male passengers watched them go, then formed a tighter circle near the locomotive, scratching their heads and wiping their brows as they talked amongst themselves.
Al-Cerraz reached out and tugged me down by the trouser leg. "Are you traveling with any friends?" he asked Señorita Silva. "Perhaps someone who would enjoy meeting my shy, impolite friend here?"
She answered distractedly. "With my sister. But look where those men are heading. On the tracks—does that look like a log to you? There aren't many trees about. I suppose they used the brakes just in time."
Al-Cerraz shook his head forlornly. He refused to look in the direction she was gesturing. "We have food, a blanket, shade if shade is needed, sun if sun is preferred. .. "
Gauthier offered tentatively, "I'll go see what it's about, if it will make everyone feel better."
Al-Cerraz slapped his leg with satisfaction. "There—our expert. An engineer at heart."
When Gauthier was out of earshot, I reached for a sandwich and took a bite, chewing moodily. I said to Al-Cerraz, "When I wanted to help talk to that foreign man on the train, you didn't volunteer my time—or your own."
"I fathomed," the pianist enunciated slowly, trying to impress this latest lady with his diction, "that you were going to get embroiled in some sort of political discussion with the train staff. Not a technical one."
Señorita Silva tilted her head toward me, fingering a pendant around her neck. "Are you very political?"
"He is a cellist," Al-Cerraz said.
She narrowed her eyes playfully. "Is that like a communist?"
Al-Cerraz reached out to extract a burr from the knotted laces of the lady's boot, allowing his wrist to graze the knob of her stockinged ankle. "I put these well-trained hands at your service."
"Are you a doctor?"
He laughed. "A doctor! Doctors are butchers. They lay their hands on living things and prod them toward death. I touch things that are long dead and bring them to life."
She pursed her lips together, suppressing a smile. "A riddle."
He plucked another burr from the underside of her hem. "These little devils have a way of crawling into dangerous places. I promise only to feel for them, not look..."
Her face registered no shock, though I'm sure mine did. He was seducing her as swiftly as he had attempted to seduce Felipa. If she walked away, there would be others. If I walked away, he wouldn't notice. Even with onlookers mere meters to either side, he would move his hands under her skirts, just because he enjoyed a challenge; it distracted him from his troubles nearly as well as playing the piano.
"There now," he said.
"A little higher," he said.
"Now, if you'll close your eyes," he said.
And his last rambling words: "My belief is that people simply choose to be unhappy..."—before the startling explosion which brought the impromptu picnic to an abrupt end.
"As soon as we reach a station, I will contact his sisters," I told Al-Cerraz later, as we contemplated the four bodies amid the wreckage of wood and burnt fuses and wire. Two hundred yards away, where the undamaged train awaited, there was no sign of the disaster, except for the fluttering tatters of singed cloth. A woman was crying, back near the train, but her sobs were indistinct hiccups swallowed by the warm wind.
Gauthier's family would want to know what happened. How would I explain?
"Anarchists," a man next to me muttered. "People who want our entire country to fall on its knees."
A younger man next to him reacted with offense: "You don't know that. It could have been our own Civil Guard."
"Wrecking a train?"
"Wrecking reputations, more like."
I didn't care, then or later, who'd done it. I just wanted to know how one could explain to nine sisters how their brother, who had avoided nearly every malady of those times—including both war and influenza—could suddenly and unthinkably have perished.
I turned to Al-Cerraz. "Do you know all of the sisters' names?"
"It is possible that he is only unconscious."
"That isn't possible, Justo. There's nothing you can do. Let me take you back."
But he was gripping the shoulder of another train passenger, a man in a dark suit who had brought blankets to cover the bodies. He was telling the stranger, "When we bothered him too much, he'd lay an arm over his head, just like that..."
I pulled on his sleeve.
"...he'd pretend to sleep..."
I pulled harder, but he wouldn't leave until he'd finished explaining.
"...I think he pretended not to mind things, when really he did." And from the measured insistence with which Al-Cerraz spoke, I realized—finally—that he was talking about himself.
CHAPTER 14
We escorted the violinist's crated remains to the French border. The box would make a slow and circuitous route to Paris, a lower priority than the soldiers and matériel making its way to and from the western front. We also sent his two trunks and his violin, but not before lifting the neck out of the case and looking into the rosin box beneath, to see how much Gauthier had managed to save over the years toward his Polynesian retirement. We hoped it would be enough for the funeral, with perhaps some additional assistance that his sisters would appreciate. But when we lifted the rosin and the tiny polish cloth beneath, we found only three crumpled bills, barely enough to buy a new set of strings.
I watched as Al-Cerraz opened his own billfold and emptied it, then retrieved a small cigar box from his largest trunk and emptied that.
"Is that everything?" I asked as I watched him roll the bills, fit them carefully around the violin, and push hard to close the case.
"Everything and nothing," he said.
"I have a little more." I reached into my own jacket, but he waved me off.
"We 'll need it."
At San Sebastián we inquired about escorting the crate and trunks on into France, but the stationmaster said, "There's no point in it. At Paris they'll just ask if you're 'essential.' First, you're Spanish."
"I maintained an address in France for years," said Al-Cerraz.
"And second, what did you say were your professions?"
"We 're musicians, sir," Al-Cerraz fumed.
The stationmaster returned his ticket pad to his pocket.
For three weeks we holed up in a hotel room in Bilbao. The staff was deferential, but only until word got around that the IOUs we had scattered around town weren't being paid. Then we were back where we started; worse, actually, with the money from Brenan having dried up.
I asked Al-Cerraz, "Don't you have savings somewhere, from all that earlier touring and recording?"
His chin sagged toward his chest.
I remembered the Stanley Steamer franchise and all the other passing infatuations. "Investments?"
He sighed.
"Dare I ask if your mother is doing any better these days?"
He mumbled, "No better than yours, I'm sure."
"Would Biber give us a loan?"
Al-Cerraz covered his face with his hands. "Gauthier was always the one who wrote to him. Gauthier did everything."
"I don't mind taking on additional duties."
"I don't want to think of duties. I don't want to think of anything. Please stop. I can't think."
Our best option was to tour again, but we had no trio now. We did not even have a duet.
I played a solo recital in the hotel restaurant to earn some kitchen credit and a few more nights in the hotel manager's good graces. That night I placed my cello near Al-Cerraz's bed, where he
had reclined through the dinner hour, and played a new score I had purchased in the city. It was a furious, yearning piece—insistent, emotional, difficult to ignore. I sight-read it for forty minutes, beginning to end, with only the briefest pauses.
The next morning I returned to the third movement—the Andante—and repeated it several times as Al-Cerraz washed lethargically and picked up the hotel phone to order a small lunch of patatas bravas and meat-stuffed cabbage. When the food came, he picked at it, then crawled back into bed, with the blanket up and around his ears. But later he asked, "Who was that by?"
"Rachmaninov."
The name stirred him. "Rachmaninov."
The next day, he asked me, "Arranged for cello?"
"Composed originally for the cello. Cello and piano."
When he didn't respond, I added, "G Minor, from 1901."
"It's vaguely familiar."
The third and final day, when I played it again, he said, "I didn't recognize the first two movements the other day. They sound so bare without the piano."
"Of course. It's Rachmaninov. He composed it for a friend, a cellist named Anatoly Brandukov. But he couldn't help giving the piano the best part."
"You have it? The complete score?"
"I do."
And we were performing again; slowly at first, in the north of Spain, as Al-Cerraz allowed his spirit to be revived by the work of rehearsing new compositions and arranging old ones, filling in the missing violin parts with more challenging cello accompaniments. The absence of our partner cast a shadow over our first performances. But at the same time, it forced a clean break with old habits. We could not play by rote, nor we could we mimic other trios' arrangements.
We had to innovate, and as the months passed, our sound matured—though, in respect for Gauthier's passing, we steered clear of self-congratulation. Instead, we protested more than was necessary about the difficulties of coordinating train schedules and counting luggage. One day, just after exiting a train, Al-Cerraz discovered he had lost an entire trunk carrying some of his childhood memorabilia, including early copies of a march he had written when he was six years old, as well as a postcard photo of his mother which he'd never let me see. Tallying the losses, he dropped to his knees, and began to gasp and cough into his hands while other passengers hurried around us. I didn't know what to do, how to help—other than to stand by as Al-Cerraz grieved the disappearance of these talismans, proofs of his mother's youthful beauty and his own precocity. But there was a benefit to the mishap. Al-Cerraz had been groping for evidence that, logistically, we could not manage as well without Gauthier. This dramatic demonstration allowed him to rage a final time about our violinist's death, an emotional purging that made room for a deeper artistic truth: that we played far better without him.
We didn't intend to remain a duet, but it proved hard to find a compatible substitute violinist. The first we fired after a month, when he refused to play the flyspeck villages that Al-Cerraz and I continued to visit when we could, between more profitable city engagements. Next came a slew of hardworking violinists with insufficient talent or talented violinists with insufficient stamina. Biber wrote, beseeching us to choose someone young, attractive, or recently "discovered" in order to boost ticket sales, especially in the larger cities. But we weren't interested in gimmicks. We accepted our musical marriage, "For better or for worse," as they say.
And there were many "betters": ovations, attention from the press, letters of interest from recording companies. Financially, we regained a modest footing, able to get by comfortably as long as we continued to perform—which Al-Cerraz would have done even if no one paid him, once he'd shaken off his deepest gloom. He returned to sending his mother a little money each month, even without Brenan's further assistance.
But those are financial details. What I remember best from those times is the music itself. When it succeeded, we took hold of the audience's attention, working it from a distracted, unshaped mass into spun beauty, passing the fine strands back and forth until we wove together something grander, not only music but memory, too—the particulars of past and present, stretched taut across a loom of timeless ideals. Harmony. Symmetry. Order.
The strength of that weave is what anchored me, while Al-Cerraz took a greater pride and fancy in how our sounds evoked the tapestry's edges: the soft fringes of the natural world just beyond our playing. A current of warm air, scented with orange blossoms. Blue shadows, lightening with the rising moon. Or rather, the imagined beauty of those things. Poets claim the moonlight is warm, but that warmth is only in the mind's eye.
Our styles were different. Our aims were different. During our best times, it didn't matter. We had become, finally, more than the former prodigy Al-Cerraz, with accompaniment. We had become a true con-junto musical: unified, complete, and whole.
Revived as he was, Al-Cerraz remained a more sober man overall. I know he was fretting about the Don Quixote commission. He still hadn't managed to compose anything of value, whether for a patron or for his own satisfaction. Even the November 1918 armistice did not overjoy him. To him it meant that the rest of Europe was awaiting his return, unless they had forgotten him. Either possibility seemed to fill him with anxiety.
By December we were traveling a northern route between Spanish cities, picking up telegrams at every stop, turning down offers to play in the south because Al-Cerraz wanted to remain ready for the slightest flurry of interest from north of the Pyrenees.
Finally, word from Biber came: "Cancel Burgos and head east. Biarritz en route, then Toulouse. Three concerts booked, more planned."
"East?" Al-Cerraz took the telegram from my hands. "He means northeast! He means France!" He kissed the telegram, then kneeled down and attempted to put his lips to the sidewalk, or as close as he could get before his waist refused to bend any farther.
I reached for his elbow. "That's what you do when you get to a place, not when you leave one."
"Toulouse!" he shouted, taking my arm and struggling to his feet. "Now the war is over! He wrapped both his arms around me and squeezed. "Perhaps Marseilles after that. Then Paris." He dropped his arms and his voice. "Mon Dieu, I need new shoes. Oh," and he splayed his fingers and regarded the nails with disgust. He twisted to look over one shoulder, trying to gain a view of the back of his frayed suit jacket. He kept turning, like a dog trying to bite its own tail.
"Come on, Cinderella," I urged him. "We need to check the train schedule. There will be a dozen better places across the border where you can shop and get a manicure."
He looked horrified. "You do not arrive and then dress. You dress and then arrive. What if someone hears I'm en route and comes to meet me on the platform?" Then he switched to French, slipping into it as easily as he'd slipped into the Retiro pond that day, and leaving me nearly as stranded. English was my second strongest tongue; German after that, owing to my fondness for biographies of Bach. Still I caught the gist, as he gushed through pursed lips about certain theaters, the parties of Madame Lafitte, a restaurant in Bayonne.
"Five years," he told me, as we waited at a café across from the train station, an hour before we were due to depart. A mostly uneaten croissant rested on the plate in front of him. He'd pinched at it repeatedly, blanketing the table with buttery flakes. "Nearly an eighth of my life.
And this," and pushed the plate away, but only by a few centimeters. "I can't eat it. Too rich." A server began to approach, but at the bovine swing of Al-Cerraz's head over the plate backed away.
"I'm sure everything has changed," he said.
"I'm sure it has."
"Who will remember me?"
"They asked for you. Biber got the bookings. Tout le monde is waiting for you, waiting for everything to be back to normal."
"Tout le monde," he repeated, and began to push fingerfuls of croissant into his mouth, covering his beard and thick mustache with crumbs.
That night, despite the train's soporific rocking, Al-Cerraz didn't sleep well.
"W
hat did I say about Rite of Spring?" he whispered, then barreled out of the bottom bunk to stand next to me, his mouth level with my head. I rolled away from him and told him to ask me in the morning.
"When I came to see you in Madrid, and found you in the bar," he persevered. "We went to the park. I told you about Stravinsky. About the premiere, and the riot it caused. I agreed with the detractors. Do you remember?"
I rolled back and felt his steamy breath on my face—no smell of liquor, only the sweet staleness of long, dark hours. "We talked about a lot of things that day."
"I wasn't fair. I was narrow-minded."
I thought for a moment. "You told me how you'd heard jazz, that same month in Paris, and loved it. See? You weren't narrow-minded. Go to sleep."
Silence. But I knew he was still there. His fingers, resting on the edges of the bunk, pulled it downward. Rolling slightly toward him, I could feel the pressure of the guardrail against my leg. After several minutes, I must have fallen asleep again. His next words interrupted a dream.
"I can still hear..." he whispered.
"Hmmm?"
"The catcalls. Debussy—he was there, pleading with the audience, telling them to calm down and listen. The dancers couldn't hear the orchestra. Ravel was in the audience, screaming Genius! Genius!' at the top of his lungs while a veritable brawl broke out. Those two men recognized what they were hearing. They weren't threatened by it."
"Next time, listen to men like Debussy and Ravel."
"You know why I didn't?"
When I didn't respond, he answered the question for me. "Because of Ravel's Rapsodie Espagnole—1908. And Debussy's Iberia—191o. I heard them both. I saw them performed. I bought the scores. I was a Spaniard in Paris, and every French composer was writing Spanish music—my music!—what I should have written, if I had been more focused, more forward-thinking, more willing to abstain from the instant gratuitous pleasures of performing, of being admired..."
The Spanish Bow Page 26