I closed my eyes.
"You're different, Feliu. You have principles. And you don't push."
"Promise me you and Justo aren't lovers."
She wrested her hands away from mine. "That's all you care about?"
"At this moment, yes."
She reached a hand up to smooth her hair. "Fine. I promise."
My head sank to my chest. I felt as if I'd just played a double concert, the worst of my life.
I stayed in Berlin through the summer. Within days, a letter arrived from Al-Cerraz, postmarked from Málaga. He asked me to assure Aviva that he wasn't angry, only worried. He looked forward to our tour the following summer. I replied immediately, reassuring him that nothing had changed with the trio, that we'd all be together again as planned. As long as he stayed away, I reasoned, whatever had passed between them could be forgotten.
In the meanwhile, I told him, I was enjoying an impromptu vacation. I planned to visit several museums, analyze some historical scores, improve my German—all things I did intend to do, as I wrote them. What I ultimately desired I wouldn't have been able to explain, to him or to myself.
What another man might have accomplished with overt action, I tried to accomplish with the same dogged determination that had allowed me to master the cello. I relied on long hours and repetitive motions. I refrained from making physical advances upon Aviva, even when opportunities presented themselves, reasoning that I had earned her trust so far by leaving her alone. I waited and followed. I listened. And over the next month, Aviva told me her story. After rehearsals, we met at bars, and later, in my hotel room, where she would relax, sometimes in a chair in the corner, hands wrapped around a glass, head nodding as I played the Bach suites for her.
I stopped once, just as her glass was tipping into her lap. I reached forward to catch it, set it aside, and said, "Justo always hated when I practiced these on the train."
She shook her head and wiped her chin, pretending to be wide awake. "He was envious."
"Of what?"
"Of your single-minded devotion."
Al-Cerraz's letters continued to arrive frequently. How is Aviva?
She is fine, I wrote back.
How are you both?
She and I are fine, I wrote, and in later letters, more forcefully, We are fine. I did not mention her drinking, which seemed if anything to increase, here in the land that reminded her daily of her unfinished task. I was haunted by the thought that Al-Cerraz would have handled all this better—would have handled her better. I thought of my mother pressuring me to choose among my father's gifts. "I don't want to get it wrong," I'd told her. "You will be wrong, sometimes," she had said—and she was right. I had been wrong many times, always when it mattered most.
And yet I could not seem to change course. If anything, I became a caricature of myself, even to myself: cautious, stern, dogmatic, ascetic.
When Aviva drank, refilling her glass even before it was empty, I switched to water. When she came out of my bathroom wrapped in a towel, wet hair streaming down her pale back, I turned away and busied myself in a corner, sorting through letters. When she decided to talk, I listened, hands in my lap, face impassive. She did not want sympathy, I told myself. She did not want physical love.
I did not touch her even when she fell asleep on my bed, head on my lap, whispering in German to herself as she nodded off: "Es macht nichts." It does not matter.
In the mornings when we left together, the guesthouse matron would turn a blind eye. We'd go to a café on the corner where I'd order her Katerfrühstück, a "hangover breakfast" of sausage and herring. But she rarely touched it, and I gained a few kilos before I learned to order only enough for one.
I heard most of Aviva's stories not during the evenings, when she turned silently inward, but during these headache-plagued mornings-after, when she became more verbose and acidic, angry at herself and therefore willing to invite discovery. Repeatedly, she asked me not to judge her. But why did she tell her stories to me instead of Justo, except that she did want to be judged?
Judaism, Aviva told me, was not what set her apart at the convent near the Austrian border where her violin teacher had dumped her unceremoniously. Where she was raised, Jews and Catholics intermarried occasionally. In the convent, the sisters treated her with compassion and did not try to convert her.
As she soon discovered, pregnancy did not make her different, either. First she was shown to her shared room in the attic, where she set down her valise and the battered violin case that held her first instrument (vastly inferior to the borrowed Magione). Next she was taken to the main hall, where the other girls sat at long benches that paralleled even longer tables, doing piecework sewing. Sister Luigia clapped for the girls' attention. In a disorderly wave, the girls pushed themselves up, some supporting themselves with hands on the table or hands on their lower backs, and Aviva saw that every last one of them was carrying a shameful burden, just like her. Only a few bothered to smile.
Sister Luigia was a music lover. After dinner, she asked Aviva to perform something on the violin for the other girls. Nausea had plagued Aviva for her first trimester and was only barely beginning to recede now. Smells still bothered her, and the convent was infused with them: mold, though the nuns and girls spent part of each day scrubbing the floors; garlic, which she had once loved, and sour, overcooked squash, which she did not; iodine and peroxide wafting in from the overcrowded infirmary. Aviva told the nun she felt too ill to play.
Many of the girls had come from well-off families in the south, but class meant less here than practical knowledge. The girls at the top of the pecking order were invariably among those farthest along in their pregnancies. They regaled and taunted the others after bedtime, as they lay in darkened attic rows, with the knowledge gained by their greater experience: how it felt to be so far along that the baby kicked your liver and forced the air from your lungs; how one could distinguish false contractions from real. A select few served as helpers in the infirmary. They alone knew what happened during labor and in the first few days following childbirth. Aviva didn't want to hear about it or think about it.
Sister Luigia again asked her to play the violin, a week later. And again a week after that. "I see," the nun said, in a quiet moment alone. "Humility is a virtue."
"I'm not humble, Sister," Aviva said.
"Then play for us."
"I can't."
"You mean, you won't."
"No, Sister. That's not what I mean."
A month had passed since she'd last played—the longest she'd gone without playing since she'd first picked up the instrument. By now everything about her felt different. Her hair was thicker, dryer and less curly, her fingers too fat to wear the simple ring her mother had left her. Veins sprang up on the back of her calves. The hair on her forearms darkened, but not nearly so much as the alarming stripe of dark skin that extended from her navel toward her pelvis, like an arrow from God, pointing to the place where all the trouble had begun. While some of the girls whispered clandestinely about their changing bodies, Aviva was sure that none of them had a stripe like hers; perhaps it was Paganini's mark on her. Each night, she faced the wall while undressing, to conceal it. It was easy to believe she would never be herself again. Nothing felt right, nothing mattered.
She wasn't depressed to the point of complete inaction. She ate a fair amount: pasta and soup and root vegetables, as mindless as a grazing cow. At the nuns' request, she sewed and washed floors; cleaned, dried, and ground herbs; scrubbed potatoes. She rarely talked, because there was nothing to talk about. One night, the girl who slept in the bed next to her asked in a whisper after lights out what Aviva would name her baby, but Aviva could hardly think what to say. The nuns would decide the babies' names, just as they would arrange the adoptions. She pretended to be asleep.
Each day, the nuns granted the girls free time to read magazines, stroll the vegetable garden, pray, or nap. Aviva didn't care what she did, as long as she could do it
alone. All the other girls who were at her stage—five or more months along—had been talking about the first quickening they'd felt. One girl likened it to bubbles popping just under the skin's surface. Another said it felt longer and more continuous, like a slithering snake. Aviva hadn't felt anything. The other girls knew, she was certain; it gave her an aura of contagious bad luck. Even though no girl would be allowed to keep her baby, none of them wanted to lose it to death—not at this advanced stage, anyway.
Two more weeks passed. A nun examined her without comment. Now she was entering her third trimester, still growing, but without any sign of movement inside. Perhaps her baby was dead. The nausea had long since passed, but a sourness remained, the metallic taste of sorrow. Two new girls, each in their first trimester, came to the home, and Aviva joined them in scrambling up the convent wall to view the hills beyond—a tricky task, with bellies pressing against the stone wall. They returned with scratched legs and arms, blackened elbows and knees, and Sister Luigia punished them each with a day's solitary confinement. What had they been thinking? Did they realize what might have happened if they had fallen?
As new girls entered, others graduated. A bossy redhead from Firenze had spent her last month reveling in her superior girth and know-it-all status, until the evening her contractions started. They began at lunch, continued through free time and afternoon chores and vespers. Even from the chapel, all the girls could hear her moaning in the infirmary next door. The nuns attempted to keep straight faces, but all the girls' eyes were wide, listening to the moans escalate into screams—even profane curses—to which some responded by crossing themselves and others by covering their mouths, to stifle panicky giggles.
Aviva didn't feel so well herself. Listening to the screaming, her pulse beat faster, and a deep pain rippled across her abdomen. During free time she began to think it was her time, too, even if the nuns had said it wouldn't happen for two months more. She rocked back and forth with the pain until she couldn't ignore it anymore. Then she walked toward the screams and moans to the infirmary. Rounding the corner, she saw red and purple, two nuns holding down the girl's arms, her open legs, silver bowls glinting everywhere like some awful blood sacrifice.
Despite the pain, she managed to climb the stairs to the attic bedroom faster than she 'd ever climbed them before. In the room, she took out her violin without thinking, an automatic motion practiced thousands of times. In the infirmary, her ears had flooded with white static, and she fingered several measures without hearing the sour din she was producing. Suddenly the white curtain of noise parted and she realized she hadn't tuned the neglected thing; it sounded wretched. She twisted a tuning peg, heard the wood of the neck groan in protest, and then the pop of the A string. She fumbled through the case and realized she'd brought no extra strings. Useless. Then she would play without the A string. The second string went the way of the first. She laughed out loud for the first time in recent memory, and mouthed a message to Paganini himself: I know this is the trick you loved best. But I can't play an entire piece on one string. Leave me two at least. The last two held: E and G.
Her violin teacher had encouraged her to stand with heels touching and toes apart, like a ballerina in first position, but she ignored that now and spread her swollen feet shoulder-wide, planted at an ungainly right angle. She rocked side to side as she played, feeling the weight of the baby nestling deep down into her pelvic bones. Her violin wasn't louder than the screams still issuing from the infirmary below, but it was a welcome distraction, a point of focus. At some point, the girl downstairs stopped, but Aviva kept playing—even an hour later, when the nun's handbell rang, calling all the girls together to share with them the bad news. The girl from Firenze was well enough, but her baby had died, and though no one had wanted it, every girl felt death's hand brushing too close for comfort.
Aviva felt no guilt in not rushing to join them then, or at the ensuing chapel service; there would always be bad news, there was no hurry. For now, she felt stuck to the floor—not glued but pierced—as if an iron shaft had descended through her pelvic bone, numbing the pain there and anchoring her to the floor, easing her need to rock. During a Vivaldi sonata, when she had played for perhaps two continuous hours, she felt the first stirrings of the baby inside her. Not deep in her pelvic bones, but higher up, just under her right ribs. Looking down, she saw the fabric of her jumper move, an elbow or knee pushing against the surface, followed by a deeper, indefinable gaseous shift, smooth and yet unexpected, like an ice cube rolling in a glass. "Vivaldi woke you up, not Paganini," she whispered. "I'm glad."
From that moment forth, she played every day. One girl complained that Aviva's use of the attic during free time infringed on others' rights to nap, but several other girls stepped forward to say they liked the music, and Sister Luigia allowed it to continue, even climbing the stairs to listen on occasion. Another nun brought her new strings after a trip to town. The strings were appreciated, but the praise meant nothing to Aviva; she would have preferred to play alone. Or not really alone, because she knew now for whom she was playing. Her baby never failed to move when she played—a percussive pummel, a sudden stretch that took her breath away, a slippery shift that gave it back.
One night two weeks before Aviva was due, the girl in the next bed whispered to her again. "I'm going to name mine," she said. "I will insist on it."
"Against the rules," Aviva yawned.
"I have a boy's name chosen and a girl's name, though I'm sure it's a girl. I won't push unless they say they'll agree to use it on the forms. The sisters will agree."
"Won't push?" Aviva laughed into her pillow. "You'll be dying to push. It's like going to the bathroom; that's what Elena said."
"That's disgusting," said the girl, and rolled away.
But she did not sleep, and neither did Aviva. A shutter was drawn over the attic's only window, but she could see the bright glow of a moon beyond the slats, until the moon had moved and the slats gradually darkened. Aviva whispered across the room, "Why do you want to name it? You'll never see it again."
"Maybe in a few years, maybe later, when I'm married and have a family, and I'll be shopping for a hat somewhere, and a beautiful young girl will enter the shop with her nanny..."
Unlikely, Aviva thought, but she had asked.
"...and I'll recognize the shape of her eyes, or her nose," the girl continued. "I'll pretend not to know her but I'll ask her to tell me her name. They'll place her only among good people—that's what the sisters have promised. And if I get along with her mother, I might ask her to tea."
From across the darkened aisle, a voice shushed them both.
"But what if the new mother decides to change her name? Parents can do that."
The girl pulled her sheets to her chin and answered with exasperation, "I'll choose a good name. It will fit her, and they won't change it."
"But how do you know it will fit your baby if you've never seen her?"
More shushing, aggrieved now.
The girl's insistence dismayed Aviva; it made her feel as if she'd spent no time considering the future. Certainly, she'd felt she had no future just a few months ago; but now that she was nearing pregnancy's end, the baby felt disturbingly real. When it nestled its hard round head against her abdomen, she could place a hand there, and it was almost the same as rubbing a fully developed baby's head; she could almost feel the fine hair, the soft skin, almost smell it. She longed to watch her baby's eyes open. She longed to see the small clenched fists that had been playing dotted rhythms against her lungs.
The nuns didn't allow the girls to nurse their babies. Following birth, mother and child were separated. Some preselected babies were delivered directly to wet nurses hired by prospective parents, upper-class couples who concealed all signs that the babies had not been born to them. Other babies were moved to a second home, where they were raised through early infancy and adopted out in less-predictable fashion. All the girls had agreed, upon entering the convent, not to
attempt any contact with their children.
But how not to forget, how to forge a bond, leaving open the possibility of later breaking that agreement—that was the question. A name was nothing, the first thing another person could take away. She would have to give her baby something more lasting.
Aviva's family had changed its surname once, attempting to assimilate into the region where her parents had settled. She had been told her great-grandmother's maiden name, but couldn't recall it. She had never asked her great-grandfather's trade. The nuns' rules aside, her sense of family was foggy, eroded by her parents' early deaths, dislocation, simple forgetting.
And yet consider how lovingly her music teacher, scoundrel that he was, had tended Paganini's grave. Consider what she herself knew of Vivaldi, eight generations removed from her own life. Aviva's memory of her own mother was a still portrait—the shape of a woman standing, hands on hips, in an open doorway. But Vivaldi was a living presence to her, a life that continued past that door, with whom she could spend a day, a season, a year. Playing the violin part of Le Quattro Stagioni, Aviva could sit on a rain-drenched hillside next to him, or walk in the paths of goatherds and laugh upon finding them asleep beneath a massive tree, their light snores accompanied by the buzz of sun-drunk flies. Those who loved his music need never be alone. And so she played the same measures again and again for her unborn child in those final two weeks, standing for hours until she thought her pelvic bones would split under the deepening weight.
The baby was taken away, but not adopted out immediately. Three months later, when Aviva moved away from the convent, she knew only that it had been a boy, and that the nuns had listed his religion on the form. She hadn't thought they'd do that; surely it lowered his chances of being placed into a good home.
She tried to put the idea of him behind her. She moved south to Bologna and spent two years studying violin and piano with a Madame Borghese, who also arranged a place for Aviva with a local family, in exchange for occasional help with their four children.
The Spanish Bow Page 37