The Spanish Bow (40 page)

"Not mad, just preoccupied. Maybe frustrated."

"Are all musicians that way?"

"Of course not, Rita. Look at me."

She had whistled and turned back toward her typewriter without comment, chin tipped up and eyebrows lifted, her forehead effortfully smooth.

I didn't even mind the way she left cheese rinds and apple cores on my desk. I caught myself smiling when I picked them up, and then I had to reprimand myself: When had I come to find sloth charming? There had been a time when sausage casings in sinks and orange peels on a compartment floor were enough to make me fume, but that was long ago. Maybe I found her charming
because
she reminded me of past irritations, in tolerable quantities.

"Any letters from old colleagues?" I asked her, as I did at least once a week.

"No. And no phone calls either."

"That's fine." I concentrated on my cuff links. "Next week, possibly."

One of the files Rita kept for me was full of clippings documenting Al-Cerraz's career since the Burgos concert. Six months later, he had managed to premiere his work at a smaller venue in Toledo, to a disappointing review from the one critic who attended. A year later, he'd tried again with another series of compositions, but although Rita had found a small preconcert announcement, she hadn't been able to locate any review at all. The next time he performed, it was at a concert honoring Liszt; and the time after that, at a concert featuring new Russian works. He was back to playing other men's music, no doubt a concession to financial realities.

My own financial situation was more comfortable than it had ever been. Between seasonal conducting, regular touring and sales of my first three records, I had earned more in 1929 than ever before. Besides my mother, to whom I dispatched a regular stipend, I had no one on whom to spend my earnings. If marriage and a normal life had seemed on the horizon eight years earlier, that horizon had grown less visible under the hazy storm-clouds of current events.

Following the 1921 Burgos concert, my acquaintances had divided into two camps: those inspired by my spontaneous protest and those enraged by it. I'd hoped the attention would blow over, but debate about the disaster at Anual only inflamed my minor role, giving the public something to glorify or ridicule while they waited for a more meaningful conclusion that was slow in coming. Two years would pass before the government's official investigation into the tragedy closed. In the meanwhile, every social occasion had seemed fraught with the threat of ambush. I'd dated one young woman only to find out that her father despised me for my Anual stance. I'd dated another whose entire family adored me, but more for my high political profile than for my status as an a artist, or as a man.

In 1923 a special commission was ready at last to present its investigative report to the Cortes, analyzing how our forces in Africa had been recklessly overextended, and by whom. Just before the report was due to be released, General Miguel Primo de Rivera staged an army uprising in support of King Alfonso, the man expected to bear substantial blame. Alfonso supported the uprising, allowing his supposed protector, Primo de Rivera, to assume the role of dictator. Our King had merely traded one kind of shame for another. Unwilling to take responsibility for Anual, he had rendered himself a ceremonial vestige—monarch still, but reduced to a shadow life while another man held the country's reins.

I imagine that Ena felt disgraced by Alfonso's surrender. She had contacted me once by letter, just after Anual, to ask me to return the gift she 'd given me. I wouldn't.

She had followed up a year later with another letter, no less aggrieved:

You've gained fame for your disruptive gimmick and your current public stance. I believe it's clear you are no longer a friend to the monarchy.

I wrote back:

There is a technical issue to consider. I am comfortable with my bow as it is, and I don't see any reason to take an artistic risk merely to satisfy your sensibilities. Besides, I refuse to be stripped of an honor bestowed upon me in less-troubled times.

But my formal tone was a bluff, meant to disguise the pain in my heart. I'd never found a better audience than the Queen, and I'd never found a substitute for her elegant and compassionate company. Years later, I would keep a newspaper photo of her from the day she fled the country. Alfonso was already abroad, leaving Ena to bring up the rear, with mobs not far behind. In the photograph she is seated on a roadside boulder, commonly dressed, looking forlorn but resigned, and openly smoking a cigarette—no longer beholden to public opinion.

One of the few people to emerge unscathed from the Anual
desastre
was that little soldier, my brother's friend, who returned from Morocco a national hero, having managed to spill Berber blood on a battlefield strewn with mostly Spanish corpses. Because of the Anual inquiries, he wasn't promoted immediately, but he was honored with military medals, feted at Automobile Club luncheons, and profiled endlessly in the newspapers—even newspapers that were hostile to the military as a whole. Franco represented the noble soldier untarnished by the ignobility of war itself—an emblem of order, loyalty, and survival. The adulation, he claimed, ran contrary to his greatest wish, to continue to serve his country yet "pass unnoticed."

Yet he had wanted me to notice, to know the precise details of what he 'd done, to approve. He had heard as much about me as I'd heard about him. He was aware that Enrique's lifelong kindness toward him had been a proxy for Enrique's love for me. He said as much and thanked me for it in the letter that came two months after the telegram telling me of Enrique's death.

The letter went on to detail what Franco had done in honor of my brother, whom we had both adored. Pursuing the Berber leader Abd-el-Krim, Franco and a handpicked band of Legionnaires had decided to wreak vengeance on Moroccan villages along the way. They set houses blazing and killed old men, women, and children—"baby Moors"—without mercy. There were many more details, in a neat, unvarying handwriting that never revealed emotion or even fatigue. What disturbed me most was how much they had enjoyed it, and how much Franco felt I needed to know and enjoy it alongside him. The job was "difficult but pretty," he wrote me. "Know that I did it in your brother's name, and in yours."

Coming on top of my grief for Enrique, that sickening letter wrecked my concentration and addled my brain. It wasn't that I had decided on principle not to perform, it was only that I couldn't. The staff lines blurred together. The notes danced on the page, and took wing like flies—the battlefield flies that gather in clouds where there are too many bodies to bury.

But when, after Anual, I canceled my early-autumn concerts, the reporters started phoning, and the photographers came to take my picture. No one listened when I said I had headaches and blurry vision; that I was canceling only for September, and planned to resume by October or November, at the latest. They wanted to believe I was protesting, still; that I had some plan; that alongside the governmental inquiries some drama might emerge to give the disaster satisfying closure.

I felt guilty when I played poorly, distractedly, my heart insisting that this was not a time for musical pleasures and escapism. I felt guilty when I didn't play and the reporters came, showering me with undeserved attention. I finally returned to a regular performance schedule, but the attention didn't diminish. Just as a poor reputation is hard to correct, so is a heroic one. The more humble and resisting I tried to be, the more my humility and resistance was praised. I despised Franco for benefiting from this mess, but my career was benefiting, too.

And truly, there was no small pleasure in being a successful soloist and conductor, in demand across Europe. Never before in the history of Spain, or perhaps of the world, had a cellist's name been known by the average man. Every year that decade, my fame increased. My mail swelled with honors, invitations, and requests. Young musicians beseeched me for favors. Political organizations requested my support. It was hard just to keep track of it all. Yet even as my fans multiplied, old friends slipped away. I had not heard from Alberto in years. It had been even longer since I'd heard any news of Count Guzmán and his family.

And, since the Burgos concert, I had not heard from Al-Cerraz. Given the fieriness of his exit, and the debacle of his later debut, I did not dare contact him. In my mind, it was clear he would have to make the first move. Surely he couldn't stay angry with me forever.

I was almost ready to go out the door when I heard Rita squeal and hop off the desk. "Here it is! I knew it would come someday. Maestro, come see!"

With great effort, I ignored the thick piece of stationery she held out to me until I finished tying one of my dress shoes. She saw my hesitation, came around the desk, and pressed the letter into my hands. "It's from America! An invitation to play at the White House!"

"Oh," I said; and then louder, for Rita's benefit and my own, "Oh my! That's wonderful. Of course it is."

"Well," she said, puzzled by the catch in my voice, "you deserve it."

"Of course. Yes. Write back directly. Tell them I accept, with pleasure."

I visited Washington, D.C., in late October of 1929, six months into President Hoover's first term. At the formal dinner that preceded my concert, I could not manage to eat more than a few bites, due to mild nervousness, but I performed to my and my hosts' satisfaction. I was looking forward to the postconcert reception, where I hoped to have a chance to ask the president his thoughts on how one should best help one's own floundering country. Hoover had a heroic reputation among Europeans for the relief work he had done privately during the Great War, particularly in Belgium.

But it was impossible to get a private word with the president that night. Everyone was too distracted by "Black Thursday" the day before, when the U.S. stock market had taken an alarming dive. Gentlemen hooked fingers under their cummerbunds or pulled at their bow ties, nodding morosely at talk of liquidations, speculation, overheated markets, and other terms wholly unfamiliar to me. The only mention of my home country came in a broader reference to Europe, when one of the Rockefeller ladies lamented the thousands of foreign investors who had abandoned Wall Street in favor of investing in their own recovering national markets.

The climate was no different on the steamer I boarded the day after the concert, eager to return to Spain, where I had a new recording contract waiting for me. At every meal, my fellow first-class passengers discussed the weekend financial reports, dreading the reopening of the stock markets on Monday. By Sunday evening, panic had engulfed the ship. At dinner, two older men started to argue about finance, until a white-haired woman between them stood up, twisting the double strand of pearls over her wide bosom as she called out, "Can't we find anything else to talk about? I don't believe I can stomach any more of this."

The man next to her reached for her hand, but she refused it. Another couple a few seats down started bickering about whose idea it had been to travel to Europe in the first place. Someone said that the ship should turn around. A fourth person blamed the coming crash on pessimists and naysayers—"people like yourselves, who can't sit tight and let the market adjust." The dinner ended without any exchange of physical aggression, but just barely. We heard that one of the men from the table had reported to the ship doctor with chest pains.

The ship's captain approached me later that night. "I hear you performed at the White House this week. What can I do to convince you to play a concert on board?"

Before I had time to answer, a junior officer tapped the captain's shoulder. A long line of guests was requesting use of the ship's radio, he said. Telegrams to and from brokers were overloading the ship's communications staff.

After his subordinate left, the captain turned to me again. "Tomorrow night, if you could. It will give the passengers something else to think about. I can't control an entire ship full of anxious Wall Street barons." He added, "Even without the crisis, it would be foolish of me not to take advantage of the musical talent on board. We always have a few actors, a few writers, but two celebrated musicians from the same country isn't so common."

"Two?" I said.

"Beg your pardon—not to put you both in the same category. Though I'm told the other fellow is quite famous, or used to be. He recognized your name immediately."

"It couldn't be Justo Al-Cerraz? The pianist?"

"That's him."

"But why haven't I seen him on board?"

The captain leaned closer, lowering his voice. "He's in second class. I said I'd give him a better cabin if he wouldn't mind playing a concert as well. He said I should ask you."

At that moment, another junior officer approached. While the two men conversed, I turned away, my throat tight with emotion.
Ask me?
I was surprised Al-Cerraz was willing to speak with me, much less perform with me.

"The Empress Lounge has an excellent grand piano," the captain resumed. "The last concert there was jazz, but I think you'll like the acoustics. Do you want to see it?"

I didn't hear the rest. I was still trying to imagine what I should say to Al-Cerraz, when we turned a corner into the lounge and saw him there, fingers hovering just above the keys.

Al-Cerraz swung around on the piano bench, clasped my hand, and held it for a moment. I had time to study him: jowls, a little heavier and redder, forcing his earlobes to jut at right angles away from his head; hair as thick as ever, but streaked with silver. His mouth widened into a smile, and I felt my body relax, from the shoulders downward, all except for one knot in my stomach. Could forgiveness really come so easily?

"What are the chances?" I managed to say.

He confessed, "I'd say the chances were good. I read about your White House appearance and knew you were traveling back to Europe on this ship."

I did not ask him why he'd never written or called; he avoided the same questions. Instead, he told me about some small concerts he had played in Philadelphia and Boston, and in South America before that. "I considered staying in New York another month, but my finances are a little rocky, let's say. So I figured, as long as I'm heading home..."