Falla rose and exited the courtyard again, without explanation, squeezing a dumbbell in his hand as he walked. Al-Cerraz reached inside his vest pocket, pulled out a flask, and poured a healthy slug into his lemonade, nearly overflowing the glass. Just as he replaced it Falla reappeared and took his seat.
"Of course, there's also something to be said for timeless themes and timeless places," Al-Cerraz ventured. "I mean, consider Andalucía itself—the history here! The deep feeling! Anyone who listens to Nights in the Gardens of Spain can feel it, hear it, smell it." He was warming to the task. "The perfumed opening—I can see the moon shining against the stone walls. The first broken piano chords—I can hear the water running, that great Moorish irrigation, bringing the jasmine-scented gardens to life! The tense violins—"
Falla uncrossed and recrossed his legs, shifting away from us. "My intention was never to be quite that pictorially descriptive, in the limited sense."
"Of course not," Al-Cerraz said.
The composer muttered inaudibly.
"Perdóname?" Al-Cerraz asked.
"On the rue de Richelieu," Falla repeated. "In Paris. I picked up a booklet, just a little thing, with some pictures. About the Alhambra."
"And it led you here, to do your research?"
De Falla paused; I could hear the dumbbells squeaking, like little trapped mice.
"I moved here after writing Nights," he said finally. "I did not need to see the Alhambra in order to conceive that work."
Al-Cerraz and I stood outside Falla's house, surveying the cobblestone road that led steeply upward, and the vines on the walls flanking the road. The plants seemed to have grown thicker and greener in the last hour, encouraged by the day's deepening humidity.
"Does this mean you don't want to see it now?"
Al-Cerraz sighed.
"I don't see why you're upset. He is a Romantic, like you. 'Imagination as the supreme faculty'; didn't you praise a philosopher who said that? So Falla relied on his imagination of the Alhambra."
Al-Cerraz ran a hand through his hair. It was damp from perspiration, and the result of his distracted raking was a crazed, spiky look. "Feel, and dream, but first—observe. Whether it's poetry or painting or music, there has to be truth. The Impressionists didn't invent the idea of light—they observed it."
I rubbed my neck and felt coils of sweaty dirt forming. I wanted to say, "The Alhambra was just an idea. Music's real truth isn't in its story or imagery. Music's real truth is in its deeper structure—balance, control, proportion, all those elements that nineteenth-century pianists started tampering with when they disrupted meter and harmony in favor of extreme expression."
But it was too hot, so instead I said, "Come on."
"I don't feel well," Al-Cerraz said.
"You want to find something to eat?"
"No."
This wasn't Al-Cerraz at all.
"Go on," I said. "Let me hear it."
"What should I say?"
"I don't know. Say he's no different from Debussy. Say we might as well just give it all away." I raised my voice: "Let the French tell us about sunny Spain—let the vendors of the rue de Richelieu sell us their little pictures of the Alhambra!"
"Is that how you think I'd react?"
"Isn't it?"
When I realized he had no more to say, I reached for his arm. Much as I longed to head back downhill to the hotel in time for a siesta, I found myself pulling Al-Cerraz uphill instead. After a few feet he held up a finger, patted at his jacket, found the flask, and offered me a sip.
"Seguro, in a moment," I said, and stepped closer to the wall to relieve myself.
Al-Cerraz shrieked, "You're urinating against the maestro's house?"
I waved a hand at him. "This isn't his house—it's the city wall. What's got into you?"
Al-Cerraz watched the yellow trickle run downhill, along the shingle-lined ditch. Then he nodded with disgust, took another swig from his flask, and started walking uphill. "Come on," he called back to me, "the day's already a lost cause. I will bring my mother something from the Alhambra—that will make her pleased to see me, for a little while at least."
At the first switchback, we paused. Al-Cerraz's face blazed red. My shirt clung to my back.
"You know," I said, "in all these years, I don't think you've ever mentioned your mother's name."
Al-Cerraz paused for a moment, then, too tired to obfuscate, he replied, "Her name is Carolina Otero."
"La Belle Otero? The dancer?"
"Dancer, cabaret artist, courtesan—and worse."
"You shouldn't say that."
"She wouldn't deny it. Vanderbilt, the American—that was her first big catch. Then the Kaiser, our randy little Alfonso, the Shah of Persia, a Japanese emperor..." he paused, breathless. After a minute he added, "She might have kept it up a little longer, if not for her illness."
Something in my expression must have indicated distaste. I was imagining what kinds of diseases a courtesan would have.
"Gambling," he explained. "That was her illness.
"She had a house in Nice, once," he continued. "Now she lives at a hotel. In her prime, she lost millions. She got sloppy. She'd take any lover who would pay her debts. Once she became common, shahs and emperors had no use for her."
I whistled through my teeth. "I've seen her picture, the one where she is wearing that tall headdress and the costume..." I stopped. "Well, she must have been much younger then."
At the next switchback, Al-Cerraz leaned over, his hands on his knees, face blanched. "My heart's beating too fast. I need water."
A boy was passing, heading downhill. "The Alhambra," I called out to him. "Are we almost there?"
He nodded and kept going.
We continued, and a tall red wall rose on our left, then two towers, but no gate. "I'm sure we'll come to an opening soon."
Al-Cerraz stopped again, and leaned heavily on his uphill leg. He let out a desperate laugh. "Maybe I should have stuck with a French postcard."
At last we came to a gate and passed through it, onto more level ground. That seemed to give him renewed energy. "I'm going to pick a rose for my mother when we get to the gardens. It will cheer her. There's the palace. I think I see a way in."
A man approached us and offered to be our guide. Al-Cerraz handed him a coin and told him to go away. We entered the Nasrid palace together, walking from one silent, cool, unlit room to the next, under arched doorways, admiring the mosaic-tiled walls, the slim pillars framing hallways, the elaborately carved ceilings, the wooden grilles as finely cut as lace.
We came to a long rectangular courtyard with overgrown hedges on either side and a shallow reflecting pool in the middle. "There's your water," I laughed. It was dark green, opaque with algae.
After a while, I said, "Why isn't your last name Otero?"
"She wouldn't let me use it."
"Wouldn't let you?"
"She'd already left us by the time I started touring. My father and his second wife raised me. My father, the cuckold, would have gladly had me use her last name, despite the sordid implications, but she wouldn't agree to it. She didn't want anyone knowing she'd had a child."
"I'd think she'd be proud."
He stared at me blankly. "Exclusivity, competition, independence—first lessons in being a courtesan. So, I went nameless for a while."
"As El Nene..."
"Until I wasn't a nene anymore, and I had to choose a real name. My earliest memories of my mother—my only childhood memories of her—are of her telling me stories that took place in the desert. Full of oases and harems." He paused. "She had presented herself as An-dalucían, the daughter of a gypsy. My father said she was really from the north—the daughter of an umbrella salesman. Which story would you choose to believe?"
"You could have used your father's last name."
"Not exotic enough. I'd learned something from my mother's success. Do what is necessary. Between umbrellas and mystery, choose mystery."
> This was different from his typical stories. It had no punch line or happy ending, and it added no luster to his persona. But for all it lacked, it rang truer than anything he 'd ever told me.
I followed him through a doorway into another dark room with an ornate, horseshoe-shaped window. From a distance, it looked all gold, but that was only the late-day sun coming through the opening, setting the carved wood aglow.
"The name Al-Cerraz was my idea. It sounded right to me. I believed in my heart that I had Moorish roots." He stared into the distance, a green sea of cypresses. "I always believed in some kind of ancestral memory. I believed that this place would feel like home."
"Does it?"
He didn't answer.
I busied myself studying the tiles on the wall, arranged in endless repeating eight-sided stars. I reached out to rub a hand over them. When I turned back, Al-Cerraz was gone.
I found him later, at the top of the Alcazaba, after I'd spent a good hour following an endless progression of stone steps that circled a decaying core. Al-Cerraz was at the citadel's highest, farthest corner, sitting on a crumbling rectangle of stone, surrounded by the weathered rocks that had once been walls, benches, and the floors of cell-like rooms in which long-ago soldiers had slept, close to a signal tower. I saw the flash of metal—the flask being lifted a final time, backlit by the setting sun. In the city below us, white buildings glowed, separated by the spiky tops of palm trees.
"A drink for my troubles?" I said when I reached his side.
"Last one," he said, and handed it to me.
"I'm sure it's against the rules," I said after I'd barely managed to wet my lips. "Drinking amidst Muslim ruins."
"Rules—that's what we need." He sounded tipsy. "Por ejemplo: children should be named after their parents. And people shouldn't try to be what they are not."
We watched the sun set. I tried to imagine the Moorish battles of five centuries ago. I conjured up the clash of soldiers and the shouted orders of the Nasrid rulers, guarding their final Iberian stronghold. I imagined horses and banners and harem girls with kohl-lined eyes.
After a while, I asked, "Did you get the rose for your mother?"
He laid an arm across my shoulder. "Did you know? They didn't plant roses in the Nasrid times. That's what a lady told me, in the garden. There's roses now, a few of them, nothing to write home about. And mossy fountains. But it's all fake, really. I can't see the point in it. This whole place," and he lifted his other arm to encompass the breathtaking view of red-rock ruins. "All fake. It does not move me one bit."
"It isn't fake, Justo. I think you're angry at your mother. Or else Falla's story confused you. His representation of it may be imaginary, but this is real. Just look around you."
"No one lived here. No one loved here. If they did"—his voice broke a little—"I would feel it."
I said, "You'll find your inspiration."
The sky lost its bronze warmth, lightened to a pale yellow, and then slipped toward gray; the red walls darkened. I stood up, ready to go, when Al-Cerraz tugged at my arm.
"Falla got the little book on the rue de Richelieu, but that's not how he came up with the opening theme. He said it came from some out-of-tune notes he kept hearing a blind violinist play outside his window when he was renting a house in Madrid, of all places." He forced a little laugh. "Isn't that funny?"
"I don't get the joke."
"I didn't tell you the second part. There was another musician sharing the house. Amadeo Vives. You know Vives? He put the notes in his piece, too—a zarzuela number he was working on. They realized it only later. One old busker, inspiring two maestros!" This time he laughed uncontrollably. Then he wiped his eyes and shook his head. "Falla said the world is full of music already. He said: 'Listen'"
"And?"
"And," Al-Cerraz said it louder, "listen! As if that's helpful advice."
"But Justo, you do listen. You have an amazing ear. You've said so yourself: Your brain is a huge repository of melodies and rhythms from all the places we 've traveled. Isn't that right?"
"Falla knew," Al-Cerraz whispered. "He knows my secret. That nothing in here is real." He banged a fist against his chest. "Nothing in here." He banged his fist against his temple and winced. The action drew my eye to the dark hair pasted against his head in that spot. I'd taken it for sweat. It was blood, from a nasty cut, the wet edge of which ran just inside his hairline.
"La osa!" I leaned toward him and held a hand out toward his face, but he leaned away from me. "What did you do?"
"Fell."
"Where?"
"On the steps."
"Don't you know to put your hands out when you fall?"
"My hands? Are you deranged?" He tucked his fists into his lap protectively and cocked his head. "How can anyone listen when there's not a quiet place in this whole goddamned world?" And he squinted his eyes and covered his ears, as if to block out the crash of cymbals.
I listened too, but could hear only the faintest rattle—a breeze far below us, rustling the blades of a palm tree. But then, there—where was it coming from? Behind us: notes as light as distant birdsong at first. Then louder. It was a boy singing, voice high, jumping an octave, falling back, nonsense words repeated. Then he switched to a whistle. It was birdsong—or rather an imitation of it. He was whistling a folk song about springtime that I remembered from my own youth. It brought a smile to my face.
"It's just a boy," I said, relieved, and reached up to pull Al-Cerraz's fingers away from his ears. "Justo, do you remember the time in Madrid, years ago, when you told me a story about a boy playing a violin placed between his legs—and you said you wanted to be like that boy, immersed in music? There are two things I've always meant to tell you. One: You are immersed. Your entire heart is in your music, all the more so when you're playing for a few people instead of in some stuffy concert hall."
He looked dubious. "And the second thing?"
"That boy was me."
"I don't believe it." But a small smile had formed on his lips.
I slapped my leg. "You knew it all along, didn't you?"
"Maybe yes, maybe no. I did know that we were destined to perform together." His smile faded; he grew serious again. "But I was destined for many things. That doesn't always make them happen."
The boy came up the stairs toward us slowly, alternately whistling and singing. As he approached, I saw that he was dragging one leg behind him with every step. I watched him advance toward us over the rooftop of broken stone, hopping up and over a low ruined wall with the alacrity of an injured pigeon that has adapted long ago to a broken wing and still manages to get its share of plaza crumbs. This was the same boy we'd seen on our way to the Alhambra gate, but I hadn't seen him before—hadn't noticed his leg; hadn't seen his face lit up with song. I couldn't stop staring at the boy's dust-covered shoe, split at the side where it dragged against the ground, and his open face, crowned with disheveled black hair, now directly before us.
"Father says you shouldn't be here now." The boy's chest puffed importantly. "Father says he is closing all the gates."
When we didn't respond immediately, the boy lost his brio and let his chest cave inward again. "You don't want to spend the night here," he said more quietly, directly to me, with real concern in his dark eyes. "There are ghosts."
"We don't mind apparitions," I said jovially, reaching out a friendly hand toward the boy's tousled hair. Al-Cerraz's booming voice stopped me.
"Don't tell me when to go," he threatened the boy. "If I'm not ready..."
He pushed himself to standing, legs spread shoulder-wide to support his bulk. But he wasn't fully upright before his legs wobbled and he reached for my shoulder.
"I'm ready now," he said. "Help me."
"Of course," I said. "Always."
CHAPTER 16
Something changed in me that evening, in that ancient place that had failed to move Al-Cerraz in the way he had expected. I tried to settle into that feeling, to prolong it, r
emembering above all the image of the boy, his song and his light step, the sense of hope and self-acceptance it had inspired.
Al-Cerraz visited his mother in Monte Carlo, before returning to his lady-friend's villa in Málaga. I accepted an interim post as a symphony conductor in Salamanca. Conducting was something I'd never even thought of doing, and now I found myself enjoying it, intellectually, physically, and emotionally. And what a relief to be in control, yet out of the spotlight, or at least sharing it with other fine musicians.
Somehow, this respite from my own ego dissolved barriers around me. Instead of staring at the country through a train window, I found myself walking daily around that ancient scholars' city. I attended lectures—on subjects other than music, no less. I had no idea where our country should go but I attempted to educate myself, remedially, on how we had arrived at our current situation: led by a weak king and an ineffectual parliament, pulled various directions by the army and the Church, which together threatened to have more power than any of our democratic institutions. When a group of university professors sponsored a two-day conference at which various liberal groups debated current events, I accepted their invitation to perform at the concluding dinner. It was the least I could do. Even though my reputation had grown considerably in the last decade, I still saw my role as a citizen first, a ceremonial figure second, perhaps a well-recognized advocate of certain reforms (none of them particularly radical and certainly not antimonarchical)—always off to one side.
I began to accept dinner invitations, allowing myself to be seated next to young, eligible women. Over Easter, I rented a cottage in the mountains and invited my family to visit; Mamá made excuses, saying Tía needed daily assistance and it was too hard to bring her. But Luisa came with Enric, and I reflected with satisfaction that I was beginning to have a normal life, as best I could imagine it.
Enrique wasn't there, of course. He had arrived in Morocco by way of ferry to Algeciras, handpicked by his friend Paquito—now known as Paco—to help lead Spain's new Tercio de Extranjeros. The Tercio was a mercenary legion, modeled after the French Foreign Legion. While Al-Cerraz was covering his ears, alarmed by the sound of a young boy singing, Enrique and Paco had been screaming at the top of their lungs into the hardened faces of two hundred recruits: common criminals, malcontent Great War veterans, dangerous thugs, pathetic misfits. They were telling these men that their lives had been worthless, but that they might have a new life, as long as they were willing to pay for it with the ultimate sacrifice. "Consider yourselves novios de la muerte—bridegrooms of death!"
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