She laughed again, then stopped herself, hand patting her neck as if she had swallowed a fishbone. But my expression must have looked even more pained. She reached a hand toward me: "Mr. Delargo, are you all right?"
The concert was a resounding success, followed all too quickly the next day by our arrival in port. Before we knew it, we were walking down the gangplank and into the darkened harbor on clumsy, sea-adapted legs. In a waterfront café we attempted to delay our final leavetaking. Al-Cerraz went in search of a long-distance telephone service. Dark fog blocked our view of the water. Aviva and I sat inhaling the damp air, which smelled of fish and fuel.
The night before, after the concert, some of the wealthier passengers had crowded around her, asking about her plans. The captain had hinted that she was bound for Germany, a report that she'd confirmed reluctantly. She'd barely gotten the words out before they pressed bills upon her, praising her performance and saying it was the least they could do to further her career.
Now, over coffee, I pushed her for details, which she provided just as reluctantly. "My contact is Herr Weill. He had offered a job before, and I realized, when I reached New York, that I should have taken it."
"That's something. Isn't it?"
"Yes, but it doesn't start for six months. It begins just ahead of the school year. I'll be touring from school to school with the national music-education program."
We sat for a while without speaking, until I finally said, "I still don't understand. You had a great job waiting for you in New York, starting immediately, and you'd already traveled all that way. Why change your mind?"
She rested her cheek in one hand. "That's a long story."
"I've got nothing to do until Justo gets back."
She bit her lip, considering. "May I ask you a question?"
"I'd be honored."
"It may be a question you hear all the time."
"I don't mind."
"Why the cello?"
I paused, rubbing my chin.
"You don't have a stock answer?"
"I suppose I do. If I were trying to gain your sympathy, I'd tell you I was weak as a boy and needed an instrument I could play sitting."
"That isn't true?"
"It is true, but it's a stock answer. If I were trying to be flirtatious—and I'm not—I'd say it's because the cello is shaped like a woman."
"But that's still a stock answer."
"Yes."
"It's all right if you don't want to tell me."
"I do want to tell you." I cleared my throat and pushed my coffee cup to one side. "I want to tell you that the cello has the most human voice of any instrument—Sir Edward Elgar once told me that. I want to tell you that it reminds me of my mother's singing before she stopped, and my father's humility—or what I remember of it. That when the playing goes well, I can't tell where I end and where the cello begins. But what I most want to tell you—"
A man squeezed past our chairs and Aviva tapped a spoon against the table nervously, waiting for the stranger to pass. Before I could continue, she said, "You're much more talkative when your partner isn't around."
"He has a way of talking for both of us. And he hasn't really been my partner for about eight years."
"He's very charming."
I tried to suppress a twinge of irritation. "What I most want to tell you," I continued, my voice lower, "is that I don't always know why I play the cello. I tell myself various reasons, but I don't know whether they're rational, or true. Sometimes I wonder whether we have feelings and then invent reasons to fit them—or have reasons, and then invent the feelings."
Aviva was staring into her cup determinedly. "But you're something of a statesman, aren't you? In public, you seem to know exactly why you do everything you do."
I pressed my fingers against my temples and chose my words carefully. "Yes, that's right. I've managed to give that impression." I tried to laugh. "But—do you know?—I've lost my train of thought. I was really trying to talk about you."
She shifted in her seat.
I persevered, "What I meant to say was—I was attracted to you when we met because you do seem to know why you play your instrument."
She bowed her head slightly at the compliment.
"I've seen ambition before, of course, and focus—but rarely have I seen perfect focus without professional ambition. Am I insulting you?"
"No."
"Did I answer your question?"
"A little."
"Will you answer mine?"
She looked up. "Which one—about why I play, or why I turned back from New York?"
"I thought I might get lucky," I said. "I thought one answer might lead to the other."
"I don't think it will. Not today." She squinted out into the fog, which obscured all but the fuzzy white lights of ships docked for the night. "Why is Justo taking so long?"
"Anytime someone recognizes him, he'll stop and chat. It can take him an entire evening to cross a town square, if he's in a good mood."
"Why should he be in a good mood? It seems he has lost his money, like all the Americans."
"He's in a good mood because we met you."
She looked away. "I'd like to say a proper good-bye to him. I'd like to say a proper thanks and good-bye to you both."
"But until then?"
She sighed deeply, set her cup aside, and put her hands in her lap. "I suppose it's easier to tell this kind of story to someone I'll never see again.... "
She was born in 1910, she said, to a musical family in an Italian mountain village near Bolzano, on the Adige River, closer to the birthplaces of Handel, Mozart, and Bach than to Rome. Innsbruck was a hundred kilometers away by train, Munich and Salzburg another hundred kilometers beyond to the north and northeast, though she never saw those places as a child. Her family was poor, and poorer yet after her parents died—her father in the war, her mother from tuberculosis a few years later. Unlike most of the other children she knew, she was an only child. She lived alone with her grandmother until the age of thirteen.
That's when the music teacher came—the one who first recognized her talent, and persuaded Nonna to let him show her off, in small recitals in Verona and Brescia and later Bergamo. Aviva wouldn't say his name even now, not because she'd hated him—quite the contrary. He loved music history, and he'd told her stories about all the Italian virtuosi; he took her for carriage rides even when they weren't touring. He backed her up against the wall of the little room in his house where she sometimes slept, when they'd gotten back into town late from a performance, and made charcoal marks on the wall to show how much she'd grown. He held out his hand and pressed it against hers, marveling as her slim fingertips grew beyond his, rising crescents that, with every new half-centimeter, might stretch to reach new positions without shifting. He did not make her feel guilty for growing up, as her griefstricken and ever-fearful Nonna did. He filled her with hope.
She was fourteen when he took her to Bologna, to perform for a family that was interested in sponsoring her. They left before dawn in a horse-drawn carriage, Aviva peppering him with questions as they bumped along in the dark.
"If they bought me a violin, would it really be mine, or theirs?"
"Theirs. But you'll be the one to play it. It doesn't matter."
"Remember Paganini? He borrowed that violin for a concert and loved it so much he refused to give it back."
"Paganini could get away with such things," he said, but without any severity. She knew he liked to hear her talk about the gaunt maestro, whose impossible-to-play caprices were among her teacher's favorites. And it wasn't just Paganini's music he worshipped, but the man himself. Her teacher had a hundred-year-old snuffbox from Vienna with Paganini's scowling, hollow-cheeked face on the lid, under a thick coat of lacquer.
"Will they send me to a conservatory?"
He squeezed her chin without answering, and it occurred to her that she shouldn't sound so cheerful about being sent away, beyond the reach of his tutelage.<
br />
"One more question?"
He yawned—effortfully, theatrically. In truth, he didn't look fatigued at all. One hand was cupped tensely over her knee. His own narrow legs were clenched together, kneecaps tight against the thin shiny cloth of his trousers.
"Go ahead."
"Will they mind that I'm not Christian?"
"We won't mention it."
"And if they find out later?"
But in the end, the question of religion never would even arise. She would play terribly that afternoon. Signor Magione would agree to lend her a slightly better violin and ask to see her again, to discuss her future education, when he visited Bolzano on business in six months' time. Perhaps, he said hopefully, she would have matured a little more by then.
As it turned out, in six months she would have matured too much, and she wouldn't be able to play for him at all.
But all that was still to come. First, her teacher had a stop to make, at a graveyard in Parma that he was raising funds to improve. She knew he was a member of various men's associations and active in all sorts of civic and Church-related causes, and she assumed that he had a personal connection, perhaps family buried there.
The morning still felt like night: A pale moon bulged low on the horizon, the unkempt grass was stiff with frost. The cemetery gate was locked but her teacher drew from his vest pocket his own key, a benefit of his philanthropy. They made their way between the stones. He didn't speak. She searched for his surname among the inscriptions, wanting to be helpful by spotting the correct section first. But he knew where he was going and didn't need her help.
They arrived at another small black picket gate—a separate key, drawn with great ceremony from a separate satin-trimmed pocket. Beyond the gate stood a large marble mausoleum. Four stone steps led to four columns, a pedestal, and the bust of a gaunt-cheeked man. Niccolò Paganini.
"The devil himself," she whispered under her breath, and stooped to read the inscriptions, wondering if it was her comment about the maestro and his violin that had put the idea of coming here in her teacher's head. She turned to thank him and to make her way back down the stairs, but he stood in her path.
"Don't you have family to attend to?" She gestured hopefully to the rows of humbler gravesites surrounding them.
"Only this"—and he forced a smile—"my spiritual family."
She put her hands behind her back and rocked on her heels, looking around the graveyard. She counted the seconds, watching out of the corner of one eye to see if he made a move to pray. But he continued to look straight at her, at the front of her overcoat where the buttons joined. Then he sat down on the topmost step and took a jackknife and an apple from his pocket. She watched as he began to peel it, in a long, unbroken strand.
She turned back to the pedestal. "Why doesn't it say he died in Italy?"
"Because he didn't. You saw more than one date, didn't you?"
She nodded.
"In Nice, as he was dying, he refused the final sacrament, so the Church wouldn't sanction his burial, nor would it allow the local church bells to be rung. So his body was kept unburied for five years. Does that bother you? Here, here." He handed her the peeled apple and put his arm around her shoulder. "Actually, can I tell you something? I've seen part of him, his unburied part, in a jar of formaldehyde. A man in Berlin has it. It's shriveled now, but then whose wouldn't be, after all that time? Given his reputation with the ladies, it's no indication..." And his voice lowered, as if he regretted the turn his story had taken. If his lecture had been designed to comfort or seduce, it was a failure.
Seduce. Yes, somehow she understood—even as her teacher finished describing the long-delayed burial, the subsequent disinterment and transfer of the remains, and the second, more elaborate burial he had subsidized, along with a group of others who worshipped the Faustian genius—that he had brought her here to seduce her.
The details didn't matter, and she had tried to forget them as best she could. The marble was slippery and cold. The stairs were narrow. Her head bumped against the pedestal seven or eight times, and she had a staggering headache by the time they reached Bologna. Back in the carriage, he had offered her his handkerchief, but she had looked at it blankly until he gestured to her skirt. Then he realized he had forgotten to lock the gate.
By the time he returned, she had her eyes shut, feigning sleep. She could feel his eyes on her as the sun rose, burning off the morning mist, but she didn't stir, even when her shoulder and neck screamed with stiffness, even when he eased her hand into his lap. Now the sickening effort of her charade was as hard to shake than the memory of what he had done at the cemetery.
He made no attempt to repeat the event. For the next few months he returned to his usual kind self, attentive during her lessons, encouraging despite her poor performance for the Magiones, ready to correct a tensed shoulder with a paternal hand or an awkward angle with a tap on the wrist. Then—overnight—he stopped touching her, stopped even looking at her. It took another month before Aviva grasped what had happened, and in another month Nonna understood, too.
The teacher took back the Magione violin.
Two weeks later, he returned, told her to pack, and took her away. He brought her to a convent even farther into the mountains, near the Austrian border. He explained that she would be allowed to live there, alongside some other unfortunate girls. When she started to cry, he reminded her that music thrived in surprising places—consider the Conservatorio della Pietà, the Venetian orphanage where Antonio Vivaldi, the red-haired priest-composer, had led an outstanding choir and orchestra of foundling girls.
"Does this place have an orchestra?" she said, looking up at the crumbling walls surrounding by treeless, boulder-dotted grounds.
"No."
Before he left, he whispered, "If it's a boy, name him Niccolò"—the only time he 'd acknowledged her condition.
She spat on the ground between them.
A foghorn blasted in the distance.
"Ever since, I've hated Paganini. Whenever I hear those arrogant caprices, I think of him trying to stick his inhuman fingers where they don't belong—if you'll forgive me for the image."
I swallowed the last sip of my cold coffee.
"Please," she said. "You're not saying anything."
"It 's a terrible story."
"You're shocked by it."
"I suppose I am."
"You don't believe in honesty?" She leaned back in her chair.
"No—I do." I paused and took a deep breath. "It reminds me of something that happened to someone very dear to me. Something I've never been able to put out of my mind."
She studied me, teetering between defensiveness and trust. "I'm not claiming it's an uncommon experience. I don't think about it most of the time. I wouldn't think of it all, except..."
She trailed off, looking over my shoulder. Al-Cerraz was standing at the far side of the café, waving to us from the counter.
"I suppose nothing can be done."
"In most cases, no. In mine—possibly."
She seemed to be waiting for me to say something, to ask something. Perhaps she was only deciding how much more to divulge.
"Is there some way I can help?"
"No," she said flatly. Without turning, I could sense Al-Cerraz's approach in her changed expression, her squared shoulders and forced smile. "It's something I need to take care of. Maybe immediately, maybe in a year. In any case, it is the reason I couldn't stay in America, after all. I'm sorry I haven't answered your questions very well."
And then he was with us: a hand on my shoulder, a puddle of coffee on the table as he bumped it, the strong smell of lavender, the booming voice that drowned out the last of Aviva's words.
"It's true!" he bellowed. "According to my broker, I don't have a cent!" He squeezed Aviva's arm. "At least you have the fifty dollars that matron on the steamer gave you."
Aviva nodded politely, switching from German to less-confident English. "It's better than nothin
g."
"That settles it, then," Al-Cerraz beamed. "We'll be poor together!"
I was not poor; I had more work than I could manage. Just before my American trip, my record label, Reixos, had asked me to do a fourth recording. They had suggested an accompanist for the project, but it wasn't anyone I admired. I didn't expect the record to sound half as good as some of my concerts—certainly not as good as the two concerts on the ship.
I said to Al-Cerraz, "An idea has just come to me. Would you consider recording?"
I would like to say, all these years later, that I was trying to help him financially, or that I was making amends for the Burgos concert. But I was only acting on impulse, moved by the memory of how we had sounded and the ease of our last week together. And there was another force acting upon me as well.
I added, "Aviva could record with us. At last we 'd have a trio."
"You can't just decide that, can you?" Aviva asked. "Doesn't your record company decide these things?"
"Reixos will be thrilled."
"Biber will be even more thrilled," Al-Cerraz interjected. "We'll have to let him know where we want to play after the recording comes out."
I stammered, "Yes, I suppose we will. But I do have my own manager now."
"I can't let mine go," Al-Cerraz explained to Aviva, ignoring me. "Lifetime contract."
"And I have a secretary," I said. "I should try to reach her."
"A secretary?" Al-Cerraz howled. "Don't answer all those letters—that's what I say. Let the manager handle the bookings and ignore the rest. Inaccessibility is one of the keys to long-lasting fame."
"You misunderstand me," I said. "I haven't tried to become more famous."
"Oh, of course not..."
Aviva glanced from one of us to the other, following our rising voices and sharpening tones. We were only warming up, but I suppose she'd never lived with other musicians. She'd simply have to adapt, I found myself thinking—and realized, in that thought, how quickly I was accepting this new arrangement, how easily I could envision the coming year: first a recording, and then a short tour in Spain, perhaps another across Europe.
The Spanish Bow Page 33