The Spanish Bow

by Andromeda Romano-Lax

  In our town, Mamá had seemed eminently worldly, but here in Barcelona, no one would call Mamá "Doña." Though she had visited this city in her youth, and traveled to other places besides—Cuba, Cádiz, Madrid—the passage of years had diminished her confidence. In Barcelona, Mamá did not know where to rest, how to demand good service, or how to interpret the directions given us by lethargic cigarette-sellers and apathetic street-sweepers. As we wandered the boulevards and alleys looking for the address of the tutor Don José had recommended, strangers jostled her and cast disparaging glances at her country clothes. Every time she paused at an intersection, lost and weary, she seemed a little smaller, her head no higher than the spoked wooden wheels of the endless wagons and carriages groaning along the narrow, traffic-choked streets.

  We finally found the home of the tutor along a side street that reeked of rotting shrimp, urine, and other alley smells against which Mamá and I stiffened our faces, each hoping to disguise our repulsion from the other. The ground-floor tenant, an old woman with rounded shoulders and a crooked spine, heard us slapping our hands against the locked wrought-iron gate.

  "Alberto Mendizábal?" she mumbled, indicating the stairs. "He doesn't get many visitors."

  The marble steps leading up the cool, unlit stairs hinted at elegance, but each slippery step had been rounded by the passage of countless feet, and unswept dirt and debris darkened the corners of the landings.

  In response to several uncertain bouts of knocking, Mendizábal opened his own door, wearing a baggy cardigan so loosely woven I could make out his grayish white shirt between the gaping holes. He was unshaven, the silver stubble at his jaw a shade lighter than his close-cropped gray hair. Below his eyes sagged pillows of yellow-speckled skin. When he smiled, his heavily lidded eyes closed entirely.

  "Call me Alberto," he said, neglecting to take my offered hand. "I have no use for titles."

  Alberto listened to our story about visiting the conservatory and squinted at Al-Cerraz's introductory letter. "You think this city should welcome you just because of your name?"

  I stared at him blankly. By now I knew the story of my birth and misnaming, but I couldn't see what it had to do with my present circumstance.

  "Aníbal," said the tutor emphatically. "The great man who led his army of elephants against the Romans. His father was Hamilcar Barca, the founder of Barcelona. Doesn't anyone read history anymore?"

  I summoned my confidence and said, "I don't know about conquering, but I know that with a bow in my hand, I don't fear anything."

  "A fighter—good. In this town, an artist has to fight, just to be heard above the explosions."

  Noticing my raised eyebrows, he added, "City of Bombs—you know that's what they call Barcelona? At least once a year the Ramblas is filled with smoke. Between that and church burnings, the city is reborn. It isn't a bad thing, necessarily. There are some nice public plazas where cathedrals once stood."

  Mamá lifted her chin and let her eyes sweep around the apartment in a studied display of unconcern.

  "If city life frightens you, turn right back around," Alberto said. "Get on the train, while the tracks are still there."

  Alberto rocked back on his heels, considering us. Then, with a sigh, he relented. "Oh, it's not bad. Too quiet, actually. Come in; sit down. We have much to discuss."

  That afternoon, Alberto invited me to become his student. His wife had passed away some years before, and his daughter had married and moved to Valencia, so he offered to rent a room to us as well, the first payment deferred until Mamá found local employment. In bed that night, Mamá whispered, "He is an intellectual and an anarchist. But he is harmless enough. At least he is cheap."

  The next morning, Mamá and I woke early. We ate some rolls left from the previous day's train trip, and drank some stale water from our wicker-wrapped jug. My eyes flitted to the kettle, but Mamá said, "Wait until it's offered." Alberto was nowhere to be seen.

  We proceeded to the main parlor to wait for him. Several heavy, leather-upholstered armchairs lined one wall, but they were filled with books and clothes. Mamá's eyes lit up when she spotted missing buttons on two wadded shirts. She went to fetch her sewing bag, grateful for something to do, and a reason to move the shirts off the chair so she could sit. I, meanwhile, perused the titles on the bookshelves—Pío Baroja, Unamuno, the ubiquitous Cervantes, and many names I didn't recognize at all. Finally, I lifted the lid on the grand piano and pressed down on one of the white keys. To my astonishment, there was no sound. I tried a few more keys and then banged out a chord: nothing.

  "Broken," Alberto said as he entered the room, coughing. "And scavenged for parts. But for dinner parties, it seats six or more—with the lid closed, of course."

  He wore the same shirt and cardigan sweater as the day before, over baggy pajama bottoms that Mamá took pains not to notice.

  "This bow of yours, let me see it." I expected him to marvel at the fine wood, puzzle over the bow's origins, ask me more about my father.

  Instead he said simply, "It's picked up oil and dirt, as if it's been toyed with too often."

  Mamá looked at me. I looked down at my feet.

  "That's our first subject: respect for the tools of our trade," Alberto continued. "I know carpenters who take better care of their hammers than you've taken care of this bow. When do you plan to rehair it?"

  Mamá consulted with him about the bow as best she could while keeping her face tipped up, away from his improperly attired lower half. Then she slipped out the door with the bow, looking relieved to have an errand to do.

  I expected our lesson to start in earnest now, but it did not. Alberto went back to his bedroom. I was left with a mute piano and a wall full of Spanish literature. I read awhile, then penned a long and lonely letter to Enrique, the only person I trusted to interpret in a positive light everything that had happened so far.

  The second day, Alberto talked about proper left-hand position. He demonstrated how to place the fingers on a cello's neck, using a broomstick and corks wedged between my fingers. If a cork slipped as I moved my stiff hand up and down the stick, then I was not maintaining the proper finger intervals. But Alberto had not demonstrated anything on a real instrument. I hoped his cello hadn't suffered the same indignities as his piano.

  Later that morning, as my mother was slipping out the front door with her bag of silver and linen, en route to a pawnshop, he asked her, "When are you going to purchase an instrument for the boy?"

  "He can't share yours? At least in the beginning?"

  "Oh, no. Mine's in a sorry state."

  That night, as I lay on the floor next to my mother's narrow bed, I whispered, "Are we certain Alberto knows how to play the cello?"

  "Don José wouldn't have recommended him otherwise."

  "But what kind of musician doesn't play his instrument anymore?" My mother didn't answer, but I sensed her body go rigid beneath the stiff sheets.

  "If I don't hear or play a cello soon, I might as well be home in Campo Seco. At least there, I played the piano every day. Here I play only a broomstick."

  "Do you want to go back?"

  "Of course not," I said. "Do you?"

  "Maybe," she said quietly.

  "Even though it's not safe?"

  "It's my home." She started to sigh, then caught herself and modulated the exhalation into an exaggerated yawn. "We'll make the best of things, for now. Tomorrow I will talk to the man who rehaired your bow. He knows all the music shops nearby. Perhaps he can help us." She rolled away from me then, but I could still sense her alert wakefulness, even in the dark.

  The third day, Alberto went to the kitchen and returned with a grease-spotted corner of butcher's paper. On the back he scrawled a list and handed it to my mother. She hesitated before taking it, and I could see her making fretful mental calculations.

  "Pedagogical supplies," he explained to me after she left. Noting my blank expression, he added, "Beginners' music, scales and études—that sort of th
ing."

  Still wearing his pajama bottoms, he spent the morning lecturing me. After explaining how limited the cello repertoire was, compared to the piano or violin, he traced the incremental advances of the instrument from the baroque chamber sonata through eighteenth-century Italy, France, and Germany, pacing the room slowly. At Bach he stopped, his back to me. "Too much to say. We'll come back to him when you are ready."

  Beethoven came next, and here his step quickened. Then Brahms—did I know he'd played cello as a child? Lalo, Saint-Saëns, Chopin: "His final sonata, dedicated to a cellist! Let me hum it for you, if I can."

  And then, he said, consider Rachmaninov, who just six years ago had introduced a new sonata in which the cello really carried the melodies—"You haven't heard the scherzo? You haven't heard of Rachmaninov?" I couldn't tell him I hadn't heard of more than half the composers he'd named. Much as I feared that Alberto would turn out to be a fraud, I was even more afraid he'd discover my fraudulence. I knew nothing about the cello repertoire.

  But self-doubt didn't stifle my appetite. As Alberto talked and whistled and finally sang, my stomach grumbled with mounting insistence, until my new tutor finally paused to say absentmindedly, "Yes—we should eat something," as if he'd been waiting days for someone to help him reach that conclusion.

  Since we 'd moved in, Mamá had tackled the mess in Alberto's kitchen, clearing away stacks of dirty plates and black-bottomed cups. That morning, Señora Pacheco, the old lady from downstairs, had dropped off some meat and produce, which she purchased for him twice weekly, saving him the trouble of going out. Instead of cooking, though, Alberto shaved and changed into a fresh, collarless shirt and shapeless jacket, and stood by the door, his hand on the knob. He cleared his throat a few times, then finally said, "Well? Are you coming?"

  I did not know this was a momentous occasion for him. It seemed a momentous enough occasion for me. I hadn't left Alberto's building in three days. As it turned out, he hadn't left it in three weeks. He wasn't truly phobic of the outside world, only melancholic, we would have called it then.

  Alberto took me around the corner to a café. At a crowded table in the rear, surrounded by mirrors, five men in wool watch-caps and berets hailed my tutor and slapped me on the back and ordered me a shot of anisette in a frosted shot-glass that burned my fingers. Talk quickly turned to politics—"It usually does," Alberto said with a puffy-eyed wink. But when the conversation lagged, a burly, dark-skinned man named Cesar said, "We thought your maestro was rotting in a hospital room somewhere, or in some jail. It looks like you've resurrected him."

  I shrugged and smiled.

  "So you want to be like your teacher? Play where he played, that sort of thing?"

  I shrugged again. "I don't know where he played."

  "Doesn't know where he played!" howled a thin man named Ramón, whose too-short jacket exposed bony wrists and hands covered with shiny ribbonlike scars.

  "The perfect match," laughed Cesar. "A student who doesn't ask too many questions and a maestro who doesn't like to answer them."

  It hadn't occurred to me to ask any questions. A boy didn't ask a grown man for his credentials. I tried to look away, to avoid all the laughing men's stares, but with the mirrors all around us, I couldn't evade anyone's stare, even my own. Three versions of my own boyish face—round cheeks, high forehead—taunted me from all directions.

  "You were born when?" Ramón asked.

  "December 29."

  Ramón found this hilarious. Still laughing, he shoveled a handful of almonds into his mouth. When he chewed, I could see the bones moving at his temple and in the shadowy depression between his jaw and ear.

  "The year, boy," he said as he scooped another handful of nuts. "Ninety-four? Ninety-five?"

  "Eighteen ninety-two," I said.

  "He's not young, we're just old," Cesar said, in a voice that was friendlier than the others'. "We're still arguing about things that happened before he could walk."

  I looked to Alberto, but his face was placidly unrevealing, his eyes twinkling above their pouchy bags.

  We ordered bocadillos filled with potato omelet. Ramón bought me a second anisette. The thick sweet liquid went down easily, but within minutes my head was spinning. The mirrored reflections all around us—on the ceiling, behind our table and behind the bar—amplified my dizziness.

  Alberto must have noticed my expression. "Time to get this one home. Lessons in the morning," he said—though it was scarcely midday now.

  We 'd all been wedged around the back table, so our exit was cause for a deep chorus of shuffling, chair dragging and table bumping as we worked our way free. Ramón knocked his ebony-handled cane onto the floor, and when I bent to retrieve it, his face met mine.

  "If it's lessons you want, you should visit the wax museum three blocks from here. Plenty to learn about the world, there."

  Cesar laughed and added with a sneer, "The whole neighborhood will teach you a thing or two."

  On the way home I asked Alberto about Ramón's hands.

  "He was an oboist, before his hands were burned. They're so tight now, he can't flex the fingers properly."

  "That's terrible."

  Alberto stiffened at the note of sympathy in my voice. "Never mind—it's nothing he didn't deserve. It's nothing most of us don't deserve."

  I could tell from his tone that I shouldn't ask anything more. A block later, he patted me on the back once and spoke as if there'd been no interruption. "We all get inflexible with age. Not just our fingers, but our attitudes. Music is the easy part, Feliu. It's everything else that's hard."

  I didn't see much of my mother that first week. When she wasn't spending the last of our money on musical necessities, she was looking for work. Returning from either kind of task, her face was knit with worry. Everything cost so much here, and her original plan—to find some piecemeal commission, sewing at home—had yet to produce any income. Even on our first Sunday, when nearly everything was closed, she left the apartment early, directing me to go to church with Alberto while she vanished in the opposite direction.

  Alberto laughed when I suggested we go to Mass together. He said he was not a churchgoer, but he directed me toward the nearest house of worship and I walked there alone, obeying my mother almost without thinking. Still, I had no desire to go inside. I loitered around the edges, watching other unescorted children my age from the corner of my eye. One boy sang near the church entrance. I watched for an hour as his upturned cap filled with a dozen coins. After he left, I hurried to the same spot. I'd never sung at home, but a new city seemed to make new expressions of self possible, and now I began to belt out one of the Italian songs favored by Father Basilio's defunct choir. I had no cap, so I removed my shoes and set them in front of me. Mass ended, families flowed outward, and a few coins landed in one shoe. The thrill of my success ignited me, and I sang louder, calling up any of the fragments I could remember from Enrique's nighttime singing. With a satisfying tinkle, more coins landed on top of the first few.

  A number of younger children—some with ragged clothes and bare feet—loitered around the plaza, watching me. Feeling proud of my own rapidly developing street savvy, I emptied the filling shoe into my pocket, so that the layer of silver wouldn't attract too much attention. Then I placed the empty shoe back on the ground and began to sing again, thinking of how I'd spend my money. Perhaps I would go to the wax museum, as Alberto's friend had suggested. Perhaps I could take my mother out for an elegant lunch. Or better yet—to the opera. The sprawling Gran Teatro del Liceo was only blocks from Alberto's house, its glittering chandeliers and green-and-gold columns a beacon along one of the Ramblas's busiest intersections.

  Just as I was envisioning Mamá and me dressed for an evening out, strolling the boulevard arm in arm, a blur of motion caught my eye. One of the young waifs had darted forward, snagged both my shoes, and disappeared around the corner. I stood, dumbfounded, jangling the silver in my pocket as I realized he'd never wanted the coins aft
er all.

  When I got to the apartment, Alberto greeted me at the door. Behind him I could see Mamá, still wearing her coat and head scarf.

  Alberto hurried me inside. "Come see what your mother brought you."

  But Mamá's face fell when she saw my shoeless feet.

  "You lost them?"

  "They were stolen!"

  "Off your feet?"

  "Next to my feet."

  "But why weren't you wearing them?"

  "I was singing. For coins."

  "Begging?" It came out as a shriek.

  Alberto touched my mother's arm, but she pulled away sharply.

  "I earned a little money—"

  "Not enough to buy shoes, I'm sure. Feliu—we can't afford to buy you new shoes."

  "It's all right," Alberto tried to intervene.

  "I just spent the last of what I had," my mother wailed. Burying her forehead in her hands, she dislodged the scarf. It slid onto her shoulders, revealing a ragged bob that had been cut just below her ears.

  "Mamá, your hair!"

  "We shouldn't have come to Barcelona," she said under her breath. Alberto stepped between us expertly, mumbling into his chest, "If it's not the fashion yet, it will soon be." Then he turned and, with hands on my shoulders, guided me away. I heard my mother's feet on the stairs, the sound of fading sobs.

  Alberto marched me into the living room, where I expected him to lecture me. Instead, he spun me around three times playfully, and pointed. There, in the opposite corner, sat a cello. It was not caramel-colored like Emil Duarte's. This one had an olive cast, a few scratches near the bridge, a chip in the scroll-shaped head, and some dark putty near the retractable endpin, to keep it from falling out. It was beautiful.

  "This is what she spent her last money on?"

  "What did you think?"

  "I thought she spent it on that hairstyle."