The Spanish Bow (24 page)

I didn't know what a
riz
was. I assumed it was short for
rizo
—a curl or loop—which could only mean, I guessed, some form of palace ornamentation. I couldn't imagine anything less interesting or necessary. It only confirmed for me that King Alfonso was a silly, superficial man and that Queen Ena deserved my most tender sympathies.

The first few times I played for the Queen were uneventful. I brought my cello. I expected her to sit in one of the large royal armchairs and listen to me play. Instead she sat on the nearby piano bench, one arm resting on the piano.

"Are you planning to accompany me?" I asked.

"No. I can enjoy listening more this way, at ease."

"Are you sure?"

She turned to face me. "It's something I haven't gotten used to in Spain—the way that even the humblest servant will talk back to a sovereign."

"Pardon me, Your Majesty."

There was a long pause, but when she spoke again her voice was less stern. "It looks better this way. As if I'm at the piano, taking a lesson. If someone enters."

When I'd arrived, Walker had been standing near the wall, with another guard near the door. But at some hand signal I'd overlooked, they had exited, leaving us alone, the door closed.

I wanted to say, "You are a queen. Can't you do anything you like?" But I remembered the smoking incident. I said, "Forgive my naïveté."

"Señor Delargo, if you were cunning, we couldn't be in this room together. Not alone, anyway."

She moved her hands to her lap and sat with her profile to me, her head slightly bowed. Our relative positions reminded me of being in a confessional, but I wasn't sure who was confessing to whom.

"Please go ahead," she said.

At first I watched her, but only until I lost myself in my own playing. When she lifted her hand, I missed the cue. She stood and repeated the gesture, still facing away from me. "You're dismissed."

I packed up slowly. "Was it satisfactory?"

"It was." But she seemed annoyed that I had asked.

Two days later she called on me again, and I thought,
There is my answer. Don't ask again, just flay.

Her demeanor inspired me. I resolved to be just as strong, to stop asking for approbation. Hadn't that been what I'd wanted from my mother, from Alberto, from the count, even from Rolland? Someone to tell me I played well. None of them had given it effusively, yet I'd kept craving it. Here, playing for the Queen, I finally understood: One must not ask for acceptance. One must assume it, and value actions over words. Did she enjoy my playing? She always asked me to return.

I played for her regularly, and sometimes—only before I played, never after—we talked. I mentioned that my father had died at the hand of insurgents, in colonial Cuba, before I was old enough to attend school. She said that her father, Prince Henry, had died when she was nine, in much the same way. He'd contracted a fever on a military mission to Africa's Gold Coast, and died on the homeward journey to England. He had written to her from Cádiz: "If you are good, you will come to this beautiful country. You will see for yourself how much you will like it and how happy you will be there."

Wasn't that extraordinary? Did I think, she asked, that a father could predestine his child's life in such a way?

I thought of my pernambuco bow stick, a gift from my father's grave, and said: "Absolutely."

She asked me about childhood pastimes in Campo Seco. I told her about the vine-covered hills and the dry wash where I'd been bullied and used my bow tube to fight back. She told me about a game she played with her siblings and cousins, in which the "martyr" endeavored not to cry or protest no matter how the other children beat her.

"Children are brutal," I said, laughing.

"They're less corrupted and more honest," she corrected me, without any trace of a smile.

But these talks were brief, and once I started playing, she always looked away, rotating every week farther round, so that before long she was sitting with her back to me. Even when I'd finished, the silence filling the room between us, she avoided turning toward me. My dismissal was always the same: a wave of her hand. It was the one imperious gesture that reminded me we were sovereign and servant, not intimates.

***

Growing up in Catalonia, where bullfighting was not a tradition, I had no inbred fondness for red capes and gore. In that way I and many of my provincial neighbors were, like the Queen herself, insufficiently Spanish. Madrileños, by comparison, loved the spectacle of the
corrida.
I had heard that the Queen had nearly fainted at her first bullfight, but she attended regularly now, to please her husband, and even more, to please her people.

One Sunday I borrowed my roommate's boxy binoculars and purchased a cheap seat in the sun, one level higher than I would have liked, facing the royal box. I kept my binoculars targeted so resolutely on the Queen that after the first hour my arms ached from the effort, and there were circles of sweat from where I'd pushed the eyepieces against my face.

What I saw confused me. For someone who had winced through her first bullfights, the Queen seemed a rabid fan now. Not a tense or violent moment passed without her lifting her own binoculars, a lighter pair, with brass fittings that flashed in the sun. Other ladies waved squares of lace; men stood to toss their hats and leather
botas
into the ring, hoping the matador would honor them by taking a drink while assistants behind him combed the bloodied sand clean. When the dead bull was at last dragged away, some fans turned to talk to their neighbors, but not the Queen. Even this last bit of business interested her, evidently.

Then the next round began—a fresh bull, a more experienced matador. Dancing and sparring in his
traje de luces
—his tight-fitting, spangled "suit of lights"—he quickly brought the bull to its knees, then stood, spun haughtily, faced the crowd, and just missed being gored as his antagonist struggled to stand again and make a final charge. At this close brush with death, the King himself leaped to his feet. I could not hear his voice amidst the crowd's, but I could see his mouth moving, shaping the joyful cheers as the matador turned just in time to save himself and deliver a final fatal thrust into the bull's wobbling, stained cranium. And still, the Queen stayed glued to her field glasses.

"You must be a true scholar of
la corrida,
" said a paunchy man next to me, his eyes reddened from hours of staring into the bright sun.

"Yes? What?" I moved the binoculars just barely, in order to acknowledge him, then set them back against my eyes.

"Those things. For hours, you haven't taken them down."

He wanted to borrow them for the next bullfight, I thought; that's why he was flattering me. But then it sank in. The stranger couldn't tell what I was doing. I wasn't even looking at the bull, but he couldn't see that. I could close my eyes, and he wouldn't even know. I focused on the Queen again—her slim white arms visible beneath lace-edged sleeves, her small oval face hidden beneath the propped lenses. And at last I realized that she was not using the binoculars to watch the bullfight. She was using them to avoid seeing it at all.

The next time the Queen dismissed me after I had played for her, I lingered in the hallway. Ignoring the guard, I pressed my ear against the door.

"Two minutes," the guard yawned.

"What?"

"It's like the sand spilling out of an hourglass."

"Does she do it often?"

"The same every time. Then suddenly, she's done."

I had made of show of refastening my cello case, fussing with the latches in mock frustration, while my eyes grew round at the strange sounds coming from the other side of the closed door.

I peered at the guard, to look for alarm in his face, but the muffled, hiccupy sounds had no effect on him. He leaned his ax-topped halberd against the wall and slid a broken matchstick under his nails, cleaning them.

My pretense of latch trouble was wearing thin. I asked, "Do you think she's all right?"

"She comes out, pushing the pins back into her hair, and asks for Walker to bring her tea in the next room. She likes her privacy. You'd better be moving on."

Grabbing my case, I shuffled down the hall as quickly as my hip would allow.

I felt responsible. But was that responsibility a dull ache, or a warm glow? I toyed with the feeling, pressing on it like a bruise. Did it hurt? Did it feel good? It
felt
—that was the main thing. After months of inertia and isolation, my music had done something real; it had been received. Now it had a life of its own, and I wasn't sure if that meant I should run away from it or run after it, to make sure it did not make trouble.

I gathered my courage. The next time Queen Ena signaled to dismiss me, I hesitated. From her seat at the piano bench, she gestured again—one flick of her hand, as if she were trying to shake off water. I set aside my bow but stayed seated, resisting the urge to bolt.

Again the gesture, dismissing me.

"Please," I said. "It doesn't seem right to leave you alone."

She turned at last, annoyance flaring, even while the thin skin underneath her eyes grew pink and patchy. "Don't be ridiculous."

I stammered something meant to sound consoling.

"No, don't," she said. "You can stay if you don't talk. It ruins everything."

She turned her back to me again, but she didn't make me leave, that time or the many that followed. It became part of the routine: I would sit quietly, waiting with a thrumming heart and a composed public face that attempted to defy an oddly intimate situation, feeling closer to her at this remove than I'd ever felt with Isabel.

The Queen did not respond equally to everything I played. She was on her guard against the obviously sentimental, and she refused to be swayed so commonly. Saint-Saëns's "The Swan," with its romantic, long-necked slides between notes, did little for her, nor did anything that exploded too early into a theme of menace or melancholy. Once I launched into a Tchaikovsky nocturne and saw her back go rigid. She hated to be told how to feel. She wanted to be reminded of how life itself had already felt, with all its variations and complications.

What moved her most were the pieces that expressed more than one side of an emotion—triumph paired with dark foreshadowing, anger paired with tender acceptance. The first time I came across Respighi's
Adagio con Variazioni,
I knew it was for her. Its strong, slow, royal bowings reminded me of how she walked; its gentle diminuendos reminded me of her subtle humor; its faster, rising sections seemed to apologize instead of boast; its most poignant sections were tinged with a regret that somehow contained both anger and comfort. The adagio seemed familiar the first time one heard it; with its undulating variations, it seemed not like
a
memory, but like memory itself—haunting phrases repeated, rewoven, braided with an aching inevitability. The most virtuosic sections came at the end, invariably pulling me back into myself. When I surfaced from the fast, difficult bowing sections, breathless, I saw—from the trembling of the Queen's shoulders—that her breathing had changed, too.

She did not wait for the end of Respighi's
Adagio
to put her face in her hands. As she sobbed, her narrow shoulder blades moved beneath the thin fabric of her dress. The movement made me think of a letter opener sliding beneath the flap of a white envelope—efficient but tense, carrying the possibility of injury. But who would be injured, I wondered: her or me?

I expected the worst when the Queen called for me one day in late autumn. She greeted me with a small, tight smile that seemed to confirm my fears. She had exposed herself to me. She could not afford to have the court know too much about her vulnerabilities. It happened that I was planning to visit home that very week. She could easily use my departure as an opportunity to dismiss me permanently.

Instead, as the door closed behind me, she beckoned me toward her. I came forward with one hand around my cello's neck, the other around my bow, ready to begin playing.

"Put that down. All of it," she said, taking my hands in hers. The small, thin fingers were surprisingly strong and warm. "I have a gift for you."

Still trying to ward off the bad news I thought was coming, I said, "Shouldn't I play first? I'm leaving tomorrow for Campo Seco. I'll be gone nearly two weeks. We'll miss our next meeting."

"I know. This is the perfect time. I have been waiting to do this." She pushed back a lock of hair and shook her wrist, jingling a bracelet she wore there. "You have made me happy," she said.

I noted her use of the past tense.

"You don't believe me," she said. "But you know, it's like when your foot falls asleep, and it gets pins and needles. It hurts so badly and you want to make it worse, pound it out, just to make it go away faster. The last several months have been the pins and needles. Your music helped me get through that."

My brain was having trouble keeping pace with her words, so different from anything I had heard before.

"And something else," she said, straightening her back, releasing my hands for a moment to put a finger to her lips.

"Do you hear?"

I shook my head.

"The clocks—there is no ticking in this room either. No ticking anywhere. In light of the accident last June, our porcelain curator has decided to round up every last King Charles and King Ferdinand object in the palace and perform a massive inventory and cleaning project. It will take several weeks at the very least.

"In other words," she added, smiling, "you have given me both music and silence. I don't know which to thank you for the most."

"You don't have to thank me for either."

"No, I do," she said, growing serious again. "I trust you. In this room, when you are playing, I have felt safe."

"Safe?" I asked. "Are your enemies really a threat, even here?"

"I'm more worried about my friends." She tried to make it sound like a joke. "No, Feliu. Things will be fine."