The Spanish Bow (10 page)

"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."

"No,
hijo,
she sold her hair to a wigmaker. And that was only for the first rental payment. She starts a new job tomorrow to pay for the rest." He pushed me toward the cello. "Go. Pick it up."

"She looks terrible." My voice was unsteady.

"Hair grows."

"How fast?"

"Your first cello!"

"Tell me—when will her hair be long again?"

"I don't know. A centimeter a month. Two years, maybe, and it will be well past her shoulders."

"Then that's how long I'm studying with you."

"You're in no position—"

"After that, I will audition for Don José, and I will be accepted into his school. Mamá will look decent enough to be seen again."

"She can be seen now."

"By people who matter," I spat out the words, and then wiped my nose on my sleeve. "By family, I mean. By friends."

"So you're just as eager to send her back home, whether or not it's a good idea."

It bothered me that my mother already felt close enough to Alberto to confide our personal problems, including, evidently, the real reason we'd fled Campo Seco.

"Two years," I repeated, hoping for my sake I'd have at least that much time.

"
Está bien,
" Alberto replied. "Then we have no time to waste."

After the cello came, my world both shrank and brightened, like a piece of wood burning down into red-hot coal. I woke, for the first time in my entire life, knowing exactly what I needed to do. Never mind the unexplored city all around me. Home became that circle of space around my chair, its radius defined by the movement of my bowing arm. By midday, the nerves in my tailbone tingled. After five to seven hours of sitting at the edge of the chair, it hurt to stand up, but the electric jolts down my spine told me I had done my best and could forgive myself for not being able to do more.

Once, on the Ramblas, in a vendor's trunk, I saw a sepia-toned picture showing three men smoking opium, each of them lost in his own dreamy cloud. That's how I must have looked during my first days with the cello. I was no more eager to leave Alberto's parlor than those smokers were to leave their Chinese den. No one needed to urge me to practice, then or at any later point in my life.

Alberto seemed equally enlivened to find himself teaching again. The music seemed to draw him from wherever he was in the apartment. He would enter the living room to shower me with directions, then exit the room backward, watching me until the last possible moment. Minutes later, he 'd reappear with bread crumbs on his unshaved jaw and a knife in one hand, talking with his mouth full, delivering the correction that could not wait. He would stand to one side, retracting from my view, before pouncing on me again, his outstretched hands so close to the cello's neck that I thought he was going to pull it away and begin playing it himself. But he never did. Nodding and clapping and waving his arms, he orbited around me. Was it my fault that I began to feel like the center of the universe?

It was a good thing for both of us that my energy always outlasted his. Near the end of each morning session, when the sun's rays illumined our slot-canyon street for a precious hour or so, I would spot him lounging on the balcony at the parlor's far end, a book on his chest, stubbled cheeks glinting. He left the double doors open, so that the sounds of people and horses passing, bottles clanking, and wagon tailgates slamming blended with my études. Once I was immersed in a challenging piece of music, I didn't hear them at all.

I couldn't have played well in the beginning. I'm equally sure that it didn't matter. Every virginal sensation was sublime: the friction of the minutely ridged strings against my fingers, the silkiness of the black fingerboard beneath, the first catch of the well-rosined bow against the string, the vibration of the instrument between my knees. My senses were so overloaded that I couldn't objectively hear myself play. I just knew how it felt every time a well-pitched note resonated through the cello's body and into mine: like an itch being scratched. Except the itch never went away. Every day, in fact, it grew stronger. Sometimes, I couldn't get to sleep at night because I couldn't silence the music in my head. Lavender bruises stippled my inner knees, where I'd clenched the cello too tightly. My right shoulder throbbed and the fingers on my left hand twitched. But I invited these insomniac spells. I knew my mind and body were making up for lost time.

Señor Rivera, my violin teacher, had emphasized mastery of the first position, each finger corresponding to a single note, with slight shifts forward and back for sharps and flats. Once I had my own cello,

Alberto dispensed with the corks and had me playing all over the fingerboard. It was his feeling that young players became fearful of the cello's highest notes and advanced positions, closer to the bridge, only because they typically learn those perilous notes last. The same note could be played with any finger, depending on where the hand was positioned; the same note could also be played on many places all over the cello, always with a slightly different tone. "It's a problem to solve," he'd say. "Your problem. Doesn't that feel wonderful? Isn't it amazing how simple wood and wire and hair can produce better riddles than an Egyptian sphinx?"

I had my own less-philosophical questions. I tried asking him, "Am I any good?"

He wouldn't answer me directly, even when I baited him with self-deprecating remarks: "Maybe I'm terrible, Alberto. Maybe I can't play at all."

He 'd reply, "Does it sound terrible? Do you feel terrible when you play? No audience is going to answer that question for you, past the novice stage."

I heard his remark as a tentative compliment—evidently, I was no longer a novice. What I did not hear was what Alberto truly meant: that I had to trust myself, had to know myself. An artist was destined to judge himself the most harshly. An artist could easily end up alone.

If my shoulders or left hand tightened up, he ordered me to stop playing, drape my arms over the fingerboard down the face of the cello, toward the bridge, and simply cradle the instrument. "See? You can reach every part. These distances that feel so vast when we 're nervous aren't large distances at all. Don't look—just feel your way and listen. It's easier to play the cello than to scratch your own back. If it doesn't feel easy, you're doing something wrong."

He encouraged me to use loose fingers, to reach forward or back with a relaxed left hand. But his unorthodoxy had its limits. Mixed into his liberated style were traces of the stiffer nineteenth-century techniques he himself had been taught. "Get that elbow down," he said whenever my bowing arm floated too far away from my side. "Stop stabbing at the air."

I listened to him as best I could, not because I feared him, but just the opposite—because I trusted him. Unlike Señor Rivera, he wanted nothing from me and did not goad me with any kind of future visions, glorious or doomed. But it was difficult. Sometimes, I slipped away and did not hear him until his soft voice had escalated to a grumble. Out of the corner of one eye, I would see his hand go up, gesturing me to stop playing mid-measure; but I could not stop, not until I'd finished the musical phrase. And even then, I would have preferred to finish the entire piece. As the months wore on, I grew accustomed to ignoring him, to indulging my own desire to enter that tunnel of light that appeared when the music was going well. I could fall into that light and block out everything.

Once I looked around mid-lesson and could not find Alberto at all. I remembered that he had been waving at me, calling out to me about dynamics, but now I could not find him. The balcony was empty. I hadn't heard the front door close. Yet it had—with a slam, he told me later. In a pique, he had left for the café.

Years later, critics would underestimate the influence of my Barcelona years. They would refer to me as essentially "self-taught," and I would not correct them. I prided myself on having learned so much under Alberto's light hand, forgetting that his leniency was a liberating gift that lesser men, like the Rivera brothers, did not know how to give. Alberto was not without opinions or methodology; he spent hours guiding me through scales and positions and teaching me how to hear. But when my eyes glazed over, when I started to withdraw into a dazed cloud of sound, he recognized the signs and understood the limits, both his and mine. In my lifetime, I would meet priests who had never learned to turn the other cheek, communists who had no interest in sharing so much as a cigarette, fascists who extolled order but couldn't walk a straight line. Alberto believed and lived a single idea. He was his own man. He struggled to let me become mine.

My mother usually woke three hours before I did, in order to make the long commute into the industrial neighborhood called the Eixample, where she had found work at a calico-weaving factory. She stood for fourteen-hour days in front of a loom, alongside hundreds of other women, in a giant industrial shed that was hot in summer, freezing cold in winter, and painfully noisy year-round.

Alberto's and my mother's schedules were so different, I assumed my tutor and mother rarely saw each other. But one morning when it was still dark I woke and went to use the bathroom down the hall. Passing the unlit hall that led to the kitchen, I heard voices, hers soft and high, his gentle and low, both of them surprisingly relaxed and informal—like old friends who had grown used to having coffee together. No wonder Alberto had trouble waking up in time for our morning sessions lately, I thought, and felt my chest grow heavy with the weight of an unfamiliar emotion.

Alberto spent less time worrying aloud about my future career than about my mother's immediate employment. "It's a bad time all around," he told me later that autumn, over our bachelors' dinner of sardines and bread. "The cost of food, the strikes. They've talked about closing your mother's factory. With no colonies to export to, it's hard to sell calico now. Still, it's hard work for a woman her age. She's lost weight since coming here."

Lost weight? How closely was he scrutinizing her shape? Yet even I had noticed how small she looked beneath the grayish white sheet, without the crinoline and corset and heavy skirts.

"You make it sound like it's my fault," I said.

"You could help her—earn some money, so she can work less. There is a café nearby looking to hire musicians."

"You asked my mother about it?"

"I did. She doesn't like the idea."

"She doesn't believe I can make money playing. She doesn't believe playing music is real work."

"Oh, I don't know."

"She doesn't believe in
me,
Alberto."

His heavy-lidded eyes met mine; his lips formed a patiently condescending half-smile.

"Maybe
you
aren't the thing she doubts."

I didn't understand.

"Music isn't everything, Feliu."

So it was not only my ability and fortitude that were suspect, but music itself? But of course, I'd always known it.

My irritation made me less shy. "Why don't you play the cello anymore, Alberto?"

"I have not played my own instrument for years. Teaching doesn't require it."

"Don't you miss it?"

"A little, yes."

He 'd said this before, and I'd never pursued the question any further. But I wasn't going to let it go this time. Something in my expression must have told him so.

"I was employed by an opera company and later, by a symphony. I toured all of Europe, of course—"

"Europe!"

Alberto shook his head, cautioning me not to interrupt again. "And at least I had the sense to save some of those earnings. But I missed many years in my daughter's life. Now she has moved away. She doesn't write. I played through my wife's illness, and she died. And I played through my own illness, wishing to die."

I looked down at my hands, folded in my lap.

"But that wish was not granted," he continued. "I got better. I dedicated myself to one instrument for two-thirds of my life, but I never found an answer to one question:
Why?
"

"Why play?"

"Yes—what point does it serve? What is music
for
?"

"Why does it have to be for anything?"

"I played for powerful men and saw them, a day after crying to my cello, govern without mercy. I played for workers and saw them no better able to feed their families. I asked myself—"

"You must not have loved it then," I interrupted. "If you loved it, you would play music for its own sake."

"What in this world exists for its own sake? Food nourishes. Water quenches. Women bear children."

"Beauty—" I started to say.

"A flower is beautiful, Feliu. But a flower's beauty and scent have one purpose: to attract a bee. To allow pollination to take place. To allow life to continue."