Authors: Andromeda Romano-Lax
"Art exists for its own sake."
Alberto shook his head vigorously. "No, that's not true. Anyway, I loved it
too
much. Too much for it to be mere entertainment, for me or anyone else."
I did not like this side of Alberto. I did not understand how he could speak ill of something so obviously wonderful and pure. But I felt even more displeased by what he said next.
"Your mother understands this. I know she gave up her own music career. I know that after your father's death, she had to give up many things. Maybe that's why we understand each other." He sighed, "It's good to have a friend in times like these."
To hear either of them talk, the world wasn't nearing its end, it had already ended. Didn't they see how unfair it was to make a young man feel that he 'd been born too late, that he was lucky to have survived at all, that there was no point in believing in anything anymore?
One night at the café, Ramón, the scarred oboist, asked what concerts I had attended.
"None," I told him.
"Not even the Liceo?"
"He doesn't belong there," Alberto said quickly. I took this to mean I was too young, too low-class, ill-mannered and ill-attired. I wouldn't have denied any of it. Just passing the brightly lit, block-long building made my heart pound in my chest.
Ramón persevered. "How can a boy learn classical music without hearing it?"
I'd heard many musicians on the streets, I told him—Andalucían guitarists, strolling violinists, comical performers playing reedy Moorish flutes, even an African drummer.
Ramón cocked an eyebrow at Alberto. "Is that what you're preparing him for—to busk on the Ramblas?"
When Alberto didn't answer, Ramón continued, "Would you have been content with that kind of life? Do you think he should play it safe just because of y
our
mistakes?"
Alberto had been staring at his own crossed forearms, propped on the table. Now he peered up through his gray eyebrows. "Our mistakes, you mean."
The next day, Ramón showed up at our apartment door cradling a large box. "Your maestro loaned this to me three years ago. I am returning it."
It was the first phonograph I'd seen up close, a portable hand-cranked model set in a burgundy box, with a cone-shaped amplifier made of cardboard. I found it difficult to believe Alberto's explanation that he had given it away when his neighbors complained about the noise, since the sound of my cello playing was much louder. But I had to honor the restrictions he imposed as a condition of my keeping it.
"You can play it between five and seven in the evening, and no more," Alberto said. That, conveniently, was the time he went to the café, during his more energetic weeks. Other weeks, he had resumed his habit of not leaving at all.
"And only on the days you finish the schoolwork your mother sets out for you," he continued. Mamá had threatened to take away the cello if I didn't start spending at least part of each day reading the school-books and filling the math ledgers that had once belonged to Enrique, which she had brought all the way from Campo Seco. I hadn't believed her about the cello, but I believed Alberto about the phonograph.
"And if it breaks, I can't afford to fix it," Alberto said as I jumped up and down within a handbreadth of the cardboard cone.
Ramón also had brought a stack of thick shellac records. As we studied the labels, I tried to imitate the way he held them, the white patches of his scarred palms pressed gingerly against each disk's shiny black edges. He held up one, indicating the label with his chin. "Principal cellist—A. Mendizábal," it read, in tiny, curling script.
"I'll take that one," Alberto said. I never saw it again.
Enrique's letter came just in time, during a week when Alberto's moods were sliding downhill. I thought it was my fault, given our many arguments about my bowing arm. Alberto advised me to keep it pressed more closely to my body, while I was interested in experimenting with more varied positions, letting it move away from my body as I bowed. Exasperated, he tucked a thick book between my right elbow and rib cage, and ordered me to hold it there as I played. The result produced tension in my forearm, my shoulder and my wrist—I knew it couldn't be right, and I knew it contradicted everything he'd taught me in a more cheerful time. To spite him, I complied, but let the bow skate over the strings, filling the parlor with alley-cat screechings and yowlings that punished us both.
After the midday meal, Alberto retreated to his bedroom. I dragged a chair to the balcony, to read Enrique's letter.
Toledo, April 12, 1908
Dear Cerillito,
We wake every day to music here, or bugles at least. Do you think you could march with a cello? That would be a trick. If not, I guess you'll have to stay in Barcelona, eating pastries and watching girls.
How are your legs doing? I hope you don't sit the entire day playing your instrument, without exercising. Here, they make us march to the point of collapse. You would think all the men would befit, but that isn't the case. I thought of you the other day when I entered the mess tent and heard three men harassing a new cadet. I couldn't see his face at first, but I could hear his voice. It was high and whistly like a parakeet. Anyway, he is very thin and the men keep calling him Matchstick and it makes me think of you. Also he is your age and height almost exactly, unless you have grown a lot since I saw you last. I inquired about him and he was sent to Toledo by his mother, who probably doesn't realize her Paquito will become the butt of jokes here. The men hide his clothes and his books and torment him, but I can't say he complains. He keeps to himself mostly and does not seem to want or need a friend. But I will try to keep an eye out for him and I hope you have someone there who will keep an eye out for you.
They are recruiting many new cadets all the time. All talk is of Morocco.
Send my love to Mamá and I hope you have news of Luisa, Percival, and Tía, since I haven't heard much from them. Do you send them money, now that you are a famous musician? Or does that come later?
Con cariño,
Enrique
Alberto's moods continued to wax and wane. On the upswings, he brought out new pieces of music and lectured me about various composers and their styles and strategies, the particular problems they'd had to solve, and the times that had shaped them. On the downswings, he slept late and retired early, leaving me to practice old pieces to death, fussing with the bowings and trying to correct the tinny quality of my open strings or the woof of my high F. The more I played, the less happy I felt with my playing. My ear was improving faster than my hands, my expectations rising ahead of my abilities. It was not pleasant to spend so many hours alone.
In December of that year, I turned sixteen. I was no taller than I'd been at fifteen, but deeper voiced, and certainly more prone to dark moods of my own. The novelty of playing all day and doing little else was wearing thin. I listened to the phonograph more and more, but the recordings, primitively made as they were, only made me more morose. Symphonic music in particular brought me to tears—all those instruments playing together, so much richer and more complex than the simple études and salon pieces I played without accompaniment. Still, I cranked on, starting before five and continuing longer and longer past seven each evening. One night, at a quarter to nine, Alberto flung open his door, stomped into the parlor, and snatched the Beethoven record that had been playing. His hands shook as he turned left and right, looking for a place to crack it in two. Then his shoulders slumped. He turned away and set the record on a chair.
"Get out," he growled, pointing to the door. "I need quiet. Here." He thrust his hand into his pocket, then extended his fist to me. "A boy shouldn't be inside all these hours. Go find something to do. Go." He released the coins into my palm, and I saw that his hand was still shaking. "To the waterfront. To the wax museum. Waste some money. Waste some time! Get out of this building and act your age."
That was how I found the book. If the phonograph had wedged open a gap in my confidence, suggesting that perhaps my own music-making was nothing special, then the book split my confidence in two, exposing me as unexceptional, untalented, and—despite my own best efforts—woefully untrained.
I had walked toward the waterfront, as Alberto had suggested. Past the glittering lights of the Liceo opera house, past the vendors and cafés, toward the lower, seedier streets where prostitutes milled about, flaunting their cleavage beneath the city's gaslights. Two blocks short of the waterfront, where the statue of Columbus stands on a high pedestal with his back to the city, I turned left. A half-block more, and I arrived at the Museo de Cera.
Waiting behind a line of couples at the ticket window, I studied the museum posters under dirty glass. The main attraction seemed to be wax effigies of local criminals who had been put to death by the museum's founder, who was also Barcelona's executioner. Without a girl on my shoulder, feigning distress, I wasn't terribly interested, even though other people—first Ramón, later Alberto—seemed to think I should be.
Instead of buying a ticket, I wandered away and down the curb, where vendors offered eclectic wares. A postcard vendor displayed lurid images in a velvet-lined trunk: belly dancers whose bare breasts were plainly visible beneath sheer scarves, acrobats whose pear-shaped bottoms rested on trapeze bars. They were of a different caliber than the images sold higher up the Ramblas, better matched to the wax museum clientele, eager for lurid mementos.
"Look through here," the vendor said, holding up a black box, and when I peeked inside, I was confronted with the tableau of a naked woman recoiling dramatically as an ax fell toward her neck. I shrank back, then looked again.
"I have more, but it costs," he said. "Already you see two times for free." I shook my head and started to walk away.
My mother wouldn't want me to be here, I thought. But then I remembered Alberto's words: "Waste some money. Waste some time. Act your age."
"You like oddities?" the vendor tried, and pulled out an entire box stuffed with postcards, photos, pamphlets, and books. I glanced at the spines:
Slaves to Love. Oriental Secrets. The Marquis de Sade.
A sixteen-year-old boy should have been drawn to those books. But it was a thin gray volume with silver type that caught my eye, instead—
Tortured Genius: Two Centuries of Musical Prodigy.
"You don't want that one," the vendor said. "Not many pictures. Only little girls and boys." Then his eyes lit up. "Unless you
like
little girls and boys. In that case, I have better—no words, all pictures. Wait and see, I will get. Separate box."
But I was already digging in my pocket. He shrugged and took what I had. As he passed the book to me, the loose title page shifted and fell free from its broken binding. Our eyes locked; he could see I still wanted the volume, but he conceded the damage and left one coin in my palm, pitying my lack of perversity. He pointed me back toward the Ramblas. "You have enough left for an ice cream. Go."
And so it was that I read about the misery of genius, and other truths that had been withheld from me. I read about Franz Joséph Haydn being torn from his home, neglected, and caned after misbehaving at school; about Mozart being exhibited relentlessly by his domineering father; about the violinist Paganini being starved and locked in his room for endless practice sessions.
These names I knew. Others were unfamiliar, and they bothered me even more, because they made musical suffering and sadism seem banal and—here, the possibility that bothered me—perhaps essential. The father of a motherless German girl named Gertrude Mara tied her to a chair whenever he left for his work; yet she went on to become a skilled violinist, and later, singer. Crippled, yes, but skilled.
Across Europe, children were beaten, pushed off piano benches, deprived of food, stripped of their playthings, even the dolls or marbles brought to them by musical admirers. And the torture seemed to work. Children—at least the ones who were the focus of this slim gray volume—excelled and became famous. The bruises faded. The music lasted.
An entire chapter in the prodigy book was devoted to Justo Al-Cerraz and the many ways his father goaded him into early performance, following abandonment by his unnamed gypsy mother. When an early patron presented him with a large stuffed hobbyhorse, Al-Cerraz's father sawed off the horse's head and scooted its body closer to the piano, so the boy prodigy could keep playing as he rode. The text claimed the young pianist had burst into tears at seeing the patron's gift mutilated, but in the accompanying photograph he looked radiant atop the oddly beheaded horse. Perhaps that inner light came from the music itself. Or perhaps—my envy soared here at the thought—it came from the absolute knowledge of one's future path, and the sense that a parent, kind or cruel, wise or misguided, believed without a doubt that one was destined for artistic greatness.
Punishment aside, the book highlighted all the subjects these brilliant young musicians were learning before they outgrew their sailor suits and banana curls: music theory, composition, solfège. I'd assumed that learning to play an instrument was enough. What if it wasn't? And what was this French thing, solfège?
I had bought myself an ice cream, as the vendor had advised, and ate half of it in the brightly lit parlor, the book in my lap, the ice cream thick in my throat. Finally, I gave up, leaving a melted puddle of cream in the bowl.
"Not good enough for you?" the barman said as he watched me ease myself off the high stool, face pinched with nausea. And then, under his breath: "Spoiled kids."
It was true. I
was
spoiled. But was it my fault? I'd wanted to play the cello for years, but my mother had held me back. I would rather she had tied me to a practice chair than lured me back into bed on a Sunday afternoon with promises of
Don Quixote
and an extra chocolate square, if I lay particularly still. Most recently, my mother had brought me a manual for the repair of phonographs. Alberto's wasn't broken, but Mamá seemed intent on interpreting my love of the phonograph as a boyish fascination with machines, rather than a young man's dedication to serious art. She'd even hinted I might find a future career in a repair shop, if I took up mechanical tinkering. (And yet, she did not push this idea, either. Even her discouragement of my dreams had a passive, ambivalent quality.) As for Alberto, just when I wanted to study more and harder he slept half the day, unwashed shirts again collecting on armchairs and the sink filling with towers of dirty dishes—proof indeed of my spoiling, since no one demanded I wash them; proof of Mamá's overworked distractedness, since she did not even see them; and proof of Alberto's low expectations, since he seemed to think it normal for an apartment to reek of old rice and beans.