Authors: Andromeda Romano-Lax
As it turned out, the first bomb was a dud. But the second one sailed into the air like one of Galileo's apocryphal cannonballs falling from the Tower of Pisa. It landed in the orchestra pit, where it exploded with a flash. There were screams and a little smoke; away from the mayhem, some of the private box—holders' first thoughts were what a shame it was, that this four-thousand-seat theater, gutted by fire just a generation earlier and rebuilt at extravagant cost, would go down in flames again. They couldn't see the human wreckage below, how much blood was obscured by the theater's trademark red velvet seats. Rossini's opera was cut short. Men and women fled, tripping over the women's long trains and grabbing, in their desperation, the flowing black tails of strangers' coats.
The final toll: twenty-two dead, fifty wounded—among them, many of the musicians, who did not earn in an entire year what Doña Clementina had paid for her apricot-sized pearl.
"Apricot-sized—that's certainly a large pearl," I said when Holland's story was finished.
He looked incredulous. "That's all you have to say?"
"Well, it's a terrible story."
"If you don't believe me, go to the Liceo yourself."
"Why? Do they have a plaque there explaining everything you just told me?"
"No." He screwed up his face. "They'd rather pretend it never happened."
I pursed my lips, a little smug. "No record of this infamous disaster? No effigy of the criminal?"
Rolland frowned. "Effigy? Yes, come to think of it. Not at the Liceo. It's at the wax museum. That's where they display all the anarchists who lost their heads to the guillotine. And I think, on the wall, there are framed drawings from the trial."
At the mention of the wax museum, my smile faded.
"The trial?"
"There was a rumor that the musicians, including some of the worst injured, had been part of the plot. They helped Salvador sneak into the Liceo early. They showed him where to aim if he wanted to hit the fanciest private box, the one next to the stage. I guess he was not a very good shot."
I felt my chest tighten, a creeping acidity in my throat. "The musicians? They went to the guillotine, too?"
"Not a one. Their injuries saved them, I think—burned hands in bandages and that sort of thing. No one believed they would make themselves a target. Why would a musician risk losing his hands?"
The shock lasted several hours past Rolland's telling; it helped me sneak into the Liceo that evening. I didn't look nervous or shifty, only vaguely nauseous. That discomfited look was a badge of the privileged; I saw it flash across many of the theater patrons' faces as they pushed through the crowd in the foyer or signaled for attention from the cloakroom attendant.
The opera had working-class seats, too, I later discovered. These were in the "chicken roost," as it was called—fifth-tier seats above the top of the stage curtain, from which one couldn't see the opera at all, only hear it. To reach these seats as well as the poor ones on the fourth floor, one used a separate, less opulent entrance, on the side street. If I'd known, that's where I would have entered. But I didn't know. I didn't have any plan at all.
I still had my cello with me. I had worn my best pants that day, but the pants were tight, and my thick knee socks itched. I looked like an uncomfortable boy. Pushing through the foyer with my cello against my hip, I attracted the attention of a stage manager, a thin man with a pince-nez.
"Is Don Verdaguer waiting for that?" He gestured frantically at my cello before I could answer. "Curtain is in twenty minutes!"
He led me down a curving hallway, leaning as he pumped his long legs, like a racehorse on a track. Carrying the cello, I could barely keep up. I was out of breath by the time we found ourselves on the wings of the darkened stage, near the stairs leading down to the rapidly filling orchestra pit. He ordered me to leave the cello to one side, against a wall. Then he vanished. I stood there a minute, breathing heavily. I pushed the cello a little farther into the shadows, reasoning with myself that no one had asked for this cello, so no one would notice it. And then, with guilt pinging in my chest, I left my instrument there, bringing my bow—as always—with me.
I was well inside the theater now, but still without a ticket. I made my way up and down the second-floor hallways just outside the auditorium, crowded with gowned women and stiff-suited gentlemen, all heading for their seats. I went with the traffic as far as I could, then turned and walked against it.
A woman in a pale green gown was watching me. Her blond hair was coiled in a half-dozen ropes, pinned to her head and strung with thin ribbons and gems as small as seeds. When she tilted her head up to whisper into a man's ear, I turned away, but a second later I felt a lady's gloved hand on my shoulder.
"Are you looking for your parents?" she asked.
"Yes," I answered without thinking, and my eyes must have glistened authentically.
"Where did you see them last?"
Praying to have the skill of Holland's quick tongue, I blurted that they'd gone to meet some friends elsewhere in the theater, and we'd become separated. Her face lit up. "I know just where to look."
Turning a corner, she gestured me toward a vast and rapidly emptying room.
"The Hall of Mirrors," she explained, as I tipped my head back and gaped. "This is a place friends often meet. Do you see them anywhere?"
Straining to appear sincere, I studied the room until my eyes fixed upon a long line of words stenciled around the high ceiling's edge.
Music is the only sensual pleasure upon which vice can not impose.
I thought about that and read the phrase twice, three times more, willing it into memory as I had willed the music scores at the Casa Beethoven.
Then I read the second—shorter, simpler:
Art does not have a fatherland.
The green-gowned lady followed my gaze. "They're beautiful sentiments, aren't they?"
I nodded, and kept looking.
"You're sure you don't see your parents?"
I kept staring, not out toward the mirrors and the dwindling reflections of the last exiting patrons, but up, up, to the inspiring statements that had guided years of Alberto's life. For this, I now knew, was where he had played, as well as where he had stopped playing. He had been one of the collaborators who helped Salvador. That bloody day had ended his music career.
"Perhaps your father is in the gentleman's club?" the lady fretted.
I was tempted to tell her I didn't have a father, didn't have much of anyone, even a tutor I could entirely trust, and that was why it mattered to be here, to contemplate these words that might give me a sense of direction and purpose.
"...but I can't go there," she was saying. "We're out of time. You poor boy."
She pulled me away back toward the auditorium. Ushers chimed the final warnings. Closing doors huffed their final rebukes. She left me standing against a wall as she talked with a uniformed man; then she blew me a kiss and disappeared.
The usher took me up yet another marble staircase and found me an empty seat on the third floor. He warned me sternly that I'd better stay put until intermission and turned to go. It didn't seem to occur to anyone that a boy would have sneaked into an opera house; if anything, they all seemed worried that I'd sneak out.
The opera was about to begin. I did not even know what the day's production would be. "Wait," I called, and I was surprised when he turned lightly on his heel, his face suddenly placid. He thought I wanted to give him a tip.
"I'm just a little scared," I whispered as I fumbled in my pocket. "Being without my parents, I mean. Is it true someone threw a bomb here once, and killed a lot of people?"
The usher smirked. "Of course it's true. Nasty business. But that was years before you were born."
Not so many years, I thought to myself. But of course he probably took me for a child. I pushed a coin into his hand.
"You're not going to die here today." He winked. "You'll only wish you had." Then at my puzzled expression, he gestured toward the stage, where the curtain was rising. "It's all in German."
I never did go to the wax museum. There was no more I wished—or needed—to know. Besides, I had a natural dislike for the dissonance of complicated truths. I preferred to hold in my mind's eye the words I had read at the Liceo, in that vast, light-filled Hall of Mirrors:
Art has no fatherland.
Art could, I felt sure, rise above everything.
My partnership with Holland ended as quickly as it had begun. It was the first truly beautiful day of spring, sun shining down through the Ramblas's greening trees, waiters strutting importantly as their tables filled, vendors complaining—ah, to complain!—that an unexpected deluge of customers had bought the last good cigar, the last newspaper-wrapped cone of almonds, the last untorn gossip magazine from Madrid.
Rolland had taken a break from playing and was removing his jacket; it was hot now, even in the dappled shade. I wiped my palms against my brow and dried them on my pants, then started tightening my bow, preparing to begin. Two men in berets approached to watch; two ladies behind them strolled arm in arm.
Rolland turned to me and said, "It's easy to be friends in winter, but not so easy in spring."
"Is that a Basque proverb?"
"No. It's my way of explaining"—and here he paused, tapping his fingers against his fingerboard—"It was nice having company when the crowds were thin, but now I've got to earn a living." I stood for a while, dumbfounded. Finally I loosened my bowhairs and packed up.
I supposed I could have wandered a block in either direction, struck up a conversation with a contortionist or a silhouette artist and offered to pay them a share of my earnings if they would move over just a bit. The contortionist, especially, didn't need much room to earn her coin. But my heart wasn't in it. I had lost my place on the boulevard. I had lost my first real friend.
Wandering up the Ramblas toward home, I saw the Casa Beethoven owner running toward me. I stopped in my tracks and cowered, squinting to see if he was followed by his wife. But he was alone. When he reached me, he grabbed me by one elbow.
"There you are! I have been waiting for you to come back to my shop."
"Come back?"
He rubbed his chin. "I was worried I wouldn't find you again." He handed me a thin brown-wrapped parcel. "Go ahead, open it." Inside was a German edition. The green-bordered cover said
Bach SoIo-Suiten.
"Six suites," he said. "All for solo cello."
"I haven't played this. I haven't even heard it played," I said.
"Nor have I. But I was impressed by your desire, that day in my shop. Bach can be a little cold. Maybe your passion will warm it up."
He wouldn't take any money. It was rude of me to start reading the score before I had thanked him, but I couldn't help it. Each of the suites was divided into a half-dozen or so dance-inspired movements—allemandes and courantes and gigues and sarabandes.
"Incredible," I said. "It looks like a lot of work."
"A lifetime's work," he said. "Don't let my wife know I gave it away."
We parted before it occurred to me to ask his name.
In my first Barcelona months, my world had been compact and circumscribed—no bigger than the space of my cello, my chair, a radius defined by my bowing arm. Now it was large, larger even than the Ramblas itself, that flow of people and sounds, colors and ideals. Music, once my intense and solitary child's game, had become a world. There was room in it for more things, good and bad.
I took my time walking home. I knew where I would find Alberto: on his balcony, soaking up the ephemeral midday sun. He asked me if I had found what I needed and was ready to be his student again. I said I had, and I was.
The calico factory laid Mamá off that spring. She was upset by the news; we were relieved. Alberto and I admitted that I had earned money from months of busking without her knowledge. It meant her debt to Alberto was a fraction of what she'd assumed, but she did not look pleased to hear it. I expected her to ask me more about what I'd experienced—or to lecture me about how I had overtaxed myself, dragging a cello up and down staircases and across cobblestone streets. But Mamá's anxiety faced forward, never back. She had other worries to occupy her, including the need to pay for military exemptions. Percival would make an unlikely and uncooperative soldier; I was underage and physically unfit for conscription, but as Mamá reminded me, standards often changed as a war progressed.
Everyone seemed to be talking about exemptions, with glances east to the waterfront, where every day new soldiers boarded ships bound across the Mediterranean, to Morocco. In the cafés, old men hunched low to the tables, muttering about Rif tribes, iron-mining interests, protecting Spanish capital, sacrificing sons—and refusing to. I kept my ears closed as best I could, feeling even then, in 1909, that this was an old and broken record, this talk of colonies and bloodshed.
While Mamá recuperated from her long spell of overwork, Alberto entered one of his more energetic stages. Perhaps it was the season, the burst of red flowers on the balcony and the sounds of spring parades in the streets. Perhaps it was Mamá's presence, or the long break he 'd had from me. He was less reclusive and more eager to play the active tutor again. He left the apartment more frequently, and invited me to go with him. I accepted his lessons, but I declined his company. Not only did I wish to avoid his pontifications on current political troubles, but I feared overhearing any references to the past that would force me to evaluate my feelings about him.
Alberto had his secrets, and so did I. The prodigy book had been one. The Bach suites became the other. All spring and early summer I chose not to mention the gift given me by the music shopkeeper. The Six Unaccompanied Suites for Cello were deceptively easy to begin playing. The cover of my edition said they were simple studies that any intermediate cello student might attempt. But that was and was not true. Any cellist could play the basic notes, rigorously and mathematically sequenced on the page. It took a master, however, to make those long trains of ascending and descending notes sound like music, to find the dynamics and articulations and phrasings that turned a scalelike passage into a melody—uplifting, heartbreaking, human. I played them only when Alberto was out of the apartment, struggling with them, savoring them.