The Spanish Bow (21 page)

"I remember a boy," he said to me two hours later, punctuating the statement with flatulence. We'd managed to get the Stanley Steamer restarted, and this was the third
taverna
we'd slumped into—"for a bite to eat," he'd said, though he'd accompanied every crust of bread and bit of greasy meat with at least two glasses of amber liquid.

I leaned as far away from him as my stool would allow. But as soon as I moved, he began to slide, and I had to lean back against his meaty shoulder to keep him upright. The bartender's eyes lifted at the sound of my grunt, which gave Al-Cerraz the opportunity to lift his finger for a refill.

"This boy," he said, "was everything that I am not. I have been trying to find him for years."

I held out my hand to stop the bartender from refilling my glass.

"Met him in a little town. All dust and mule dung and crones dragging their black skirts. You know the place?"

"Of course," I said. "It's called Spain."

"Right. I played there with a trio. He came onstage afterward, carrying the smallest cello I have ever seen."

I sat up straighter.

"His parents were there—pretty mother; greasy father, a show-off. The boy seemed to be in a trance. Stage fright. Boy's father probably beat him. I've seen it in every town. Prodigies..." He paused and stared into space.

"Yes?"

"The boy put this tiny cello between his legs and started to play. And the trance deepened into something I'd
not
seen before. He wasn't even with us on the stage. Carried away. Then—reason why, I can't re-call—the father slapped him."

I was sitting rigidly now, neck craning, trying to see into Al-Cerraz's watery eyes for any signs of mischief.

"You're sure it was a cello he held?"

He ignored the question. "Funny part came next. The mother—too good for her husband—was holding something. Walking stick, but thicker. Long and round. And she let loose—astonishing—
crack!—
right at her husband's nose. Terrible mess."

"Maybe it wasn't the lady's husband."

"The point, friend," he said pompously and then paused, his eyes flooding, followed by his nose. He coughed into his sleeve, leaving a trail of slime and boozy tears. I tried to push my handkerchief into his hand but he refused it. "She was beautiful! His protector—a Madonna!"

"And he...?"

"He was in his own world."

"It wasn't a cello," I said. "It was a violin."

"Waiter!" Al-Cerraz thundered.

"It was a violin being played as a cello," I tried to say again.

"You don't understand me," he growled, his strength returning. He grabbed fistfuls of my jacket and lifted me slightly off my stool. I heard the dry rip of bursting stitches.

"You have found that boy," I said, my voice trembling.

"I am trying to tell you a story," he said and shook me once. "He was an angel—an abstraction."

"He's real; he grew up!"

"If we could simply love our music, if we could be protected from everything else, we would be angels, too," Al-Cerraz said, his grip loosening. "I am still looking for that boy, within myself. I am searching for that moment when music is all that matters. There has never been a time when I don't see the audience out of one corner of my eye. Is that woman yawning? Did that man stand to leave? Even alone: Are my fingers moving more clumsily than before? Are my best years behind me? Who will remember?"

He paused. "I am lost everywhere—except where I want to be." He pushed just far away from the bar to spit between his legs. He missed; I could see a shiny patch on his shoe. He reached for his empty grease-smeared glass and held it up. "Here's to what endures____"

I reached out my own hand and caught the glass just as his fingers loosened.

"I am a fraud," he whispered.

"You are famous."

"Sometimes I think the key is to go back to the beginning. But maybe the key is to go to the end."

"You're being melodramatic."

"I don't want to die." He leaned so close to me that one stiff, kinked tip of his thick mustache brushed my cheek. "I just want to disappear. A friend would help me do that—if I had a friend."

He slumped against my shoulder, and I strained to bolster him, his heavy breath in my ear. The bartender, who had stepped closer when he saw me catch Al-Cerraz's glass, motioned with his fingers, rubbing them together.

"Now you must hear me," I struggled to say between grunts, as I pushed my hands into the tight folds of his pockets, searching for his money. "That boy you met, that village..."

But either I couldn't cram my hands in far enough to find anything or the pockets were empty. And the breath in my ear had become a snore.

"You will pay now?" the bartender said.

"He's famous," I said, uncrinkling bills from my own pocket.

"He's heavy," the bartender said, with a pallbearer's practicality. "I'll help you carry him out."

The next day, Al-Cerraz remembered none of it and revealed no trace of a hangover. If anything, he looked fresher than ever as he clasped both my hands in his and gestured to a low chair. He 'd sent me a message to bring my cello to the Stradivarius reception room, one of the eighteenth-century chambers on the Palace's northwest side, where prize instruments were kept—various guitars and harps; an odd pair of upright pianos shaped like bookshelves; Stradivarius violins, a viola, and a cello. Once the count had whisked me through this room, but I'd never been invited to linger. Al-Cerraz treated it like his personal salon, even while a guard stood at the door, eyes pinned on us both.

He must have sensed my discomfort, my awe at his ease. He leaned close and said, "The advantage of belonging nowhere is that you manage to feel comfortable anywhere."

"You make it sound easy."

"It is: Don't join anything, sign anything, accept anything—unless it's a kiss. Sometimes a kiss is worth it." He winked at me, then gestured to my cello and asked me to play.

"Better," he said, with a charitable smile. "It was hard to hear yesterday. But maybe I was distracted by all the glamour. Or maybe it was the King's snoring. And that broken string! I won't forget it."

He sat down at one of the uprights and began to play a Spanish piece—rambling tuneful chords, a folksy Aragonese dance. "Can you improvise? Just find the melody—easy, easy. Just play it, enjoy it. Don't think of your lessons."

Playing with him felt easy, nothing at all like playing with Isabel, though I could not tell if that was proof of our compatibility or of his unparalleled sensitivities. "Wonderful," he said at the end, and I found myself smiling back at the way the curling ends of his mustache brushed against his red cheeks. "Now, your choice. Play anything, and I'll follow."

At the end he said, "Good cellists are hard to find—unique cellists even harder. You are ... sixteen now?"

"Seventeen in December."

"When you have had enough of Madrid—four years, or five—come see me in Paris."

Four years? Long enough that he would forget my name again? He was still a young man himself; he knew that four years must seem impossibly far away. It would have been better if he'd slipped away from the palace, so that I could remember him as a babbling drunk with spit on his shoe who still owed me for the last round. Instead, he left me with the sound of his playing—the bronze bite of ringing bells, broken chords of falling water, a soft drumming tap like a mallet against leather.

***

The botched duet with Isabel did not cost me my allowance from the Queen Mother, but I did lose most of her interest. Nor did the count seem to regard me as he had before. Perhaps Isabel had told him something, or he'd been harboring suspicions of his own. Perhaps he was simply angry that I'd caused him embarrassment. In any case, he seemed bent on punishing me.

This was not the kind of punishment I had craved from Alberto—the punishment of orderly discipline or its opposite, total freedom, either one of which might produce artistic benefit. This was the punishment of humiliation, of disintegration. The count seemed bent on separating me from my own musical style—in other words, from myself.

In the count's view, the Queen Mother's concert only proved what he had told Isabel and me all along; that what I really needed was remedial training, a back-to-basics approach. More scrubbing the raw flesh. He took me back to scales, simple studies—reasonable enough. But he also interrupted me constantly, usually mid-stroke, with an outstretched hand if necessary. My brain would go on singing the note I longed to finish as the count barked his instructions—to start the next bow higher on the string, lower, bow tipped up, bow tipped down. I'd begin to comply, and he'd bark again, finding a new failing. I felt like the subject of an experiment designed to create a stutterer, except it was my bow that began to stutter, instead of my tongue. My right hand began to spasm and twitch whenever I saw his hand reach toward me.

And then there was the left hand, which I preferred to allow to move freely up and down the cello's neck. The count advocated keeping the hand in a fixed location and using extensions whenever possible—reaching back with the first finger, forward with the pinkie—so that by day's end my hand, small to begin with, felt like it had been on a torturer's stretching rack. I thought of Schumann, with his finger brace, stretching his hands and destroying them in the process, ending his concert career.

When the count was particularly irritated with how I was playing, he tried his best to look at me, pushing his face up against my fingers, lowering himself into a crouch so that he could bring his nearly useless eyes level with my left thumb, studying me in his near-blindness, hovering over me like some hunched-over warlock. This was worse than when he pawed at me. It made me feel like he was trying to see something inside of me that no one else could see—some source of my ineptitude and my discontent, some basic character flaw. I would sit still as he ran his weak eyes over me, wanting him to see something good and promising in me, wanting to earn back his favor.

This continued all autumn, leaching away my joy. But my discontent was nothing special; I dared not mention it, or act out on account of it, or in any way publicize my displeasure, when more serious grief was brewing. The entire palace was hushed, contaminated with a melancholia that grew as our Queen Ena's belly grew. The gossip was that she felt worse than ever, had difficulty eating, should not have conceived again so soon.

And then the winter: I'd never been so cold! The wind gusted across the plains of La Mancha, down through the narrow river valley, up the little bluff that led to the palace and around the palace's corners. At night when the wind blew, I could hear a vibrating hum, like a stick rubbed fast against a washboard. It was the wind rasping against the palace's facade, grinding Spanish sand against those countless ribbed Greco-Roman columns. Such ostentation; so little comfort.

One day I caught sight of the Queen, being guided by the elbows along the marble hallway of the main gallery, between her quarters and the King's. She was trembling. Her little paunch, not quite disguised by a flowing gown, was trembling, too. Her pale blue eyes looked like ice that day, and her face looked like cold wax. Her ladies nodded at me as they passed, but the Queen herself showed no recognition of my presence.

Soon after that, workmen flooded the palace, hammering during my cello lessons (more interruptions and distractions; my tic increased). "
Calor,
" the servants whispered. Central heat. The Queen had put her foot down. She who had been raised in gloomy England refused to freeze to death in so-called sunny Spain.

But heat—and spring—were not enough to stem her woes. Her uncle, King Edward VII of England, caught a cold following a wet weekend and, a few days later, died of pneumonia. Only nine years had passed since his mother, the Empress Victoria, had died. The old guard was passing, and their children and grandchildren were taking over. Baby-faced men seemed to run the world. Would they know not to make a mess of things?

Heads of state flocked to England for the funeral from all over Europe, with their medals, sabers, embroidered cuffs, and shiny knee-high boots: King Haakon VII of Norway, Ferdinand of Bulgaria, Manuel II of Portugal, Kaiser Wilhelm II of Germany, Gustav V of Sweden, Albert of Belgium, Frederick VII of Denmark. The newspapers published the royal funeral portrait: Spain's King Alfonso sat in the front row, next to the new English monarch, King George V. King George asked after his cousin, and Alfonso said she was well enough, and sorry she couldn't have come. But it wasn't entirely true. She had wanted to come, but she wasn't at all well. The baby hardly moved.

The weather, too, was strange. People blamed Halley's comet, that streamer in the night sky; another omen. Later, as his power weakened and his paranoia intensified, Alfonso would claim that May itself was to blame. Wasn't that the month when he and his bride had nearly been assassinated? ("But also the month we were wed," Ena tried to remind him.) And wasn't it the month that Alfonsito, their firstborn, had nearly bled to death at his circumcision? ("But also the month that he was born. And he did live," she tried to say, correcting him privately as she never dared correct him in public.)

On some unknown date that month, the royal baby died inside of Ena. The royal doctors refused to operate on the Queen for fear of damaging her reproductive faculties and thus the very future of the monarchy. She had to wait, silent and uncomplaining, for the dead child to be born naturally. The entire palace held its breath. Music lessons and tutorials were canceled for a week. I passed Isabel as she exited the chapel off the main gallery, near the Queen Mother's quarters, and she rested her hand on my shoulder. I was forgiven by her, or at least forgotten, in this sad event that gave her and all the other bored courtiers something to dwell on.
Isn't it terrible?
she mouthed to me, then floated by, down the hall. All of us waited. All of us prayed.

It came out on May 20, stillborn. A boy.

"No vibrato," the count told me.

Through force of will, he had already changed the position of my left hand, and had brought all my bowing experimentation to a standstill. The worst thing was that he was sometimes right. Obeying him, I had improved my intonation, it was true. I had gained a better sense of where my bow rested—its precise orientation in regard to the bridge, its angle as it crossed the string. He noticed things that Alberto had not noticed—the position of my thumb, for example, anchored behind the neck of the cello. He was not correct all the time. But he was correct too often to legitimize a mutiny. And yet I wasn't sure he had my best interests at heart. Isabel seemed to have forgiven me, but he had not. Would my punishment ever be over?