The Spanish Bow (2 page)

"The midwife, please," he said, just as Mamá howled again.

"She's occupied. Wait, please."

"The baby is with them?"

"No. We already brought it to the cellar."

The notary winced. "It can't stay there, you know. It will..." he paused.

"Smell?" Enrique guessed.

"Well, yes. But not for a little while."

"No—it already does!"

The notary shook his head.

"A fait accompli," he said. "So, there is no blame."

"Not the midwife's fault. That's what Mamá said. Wait—the envelope!"

"And your Tía?" he inquired as my brother hurried away, to retrieve the money.

"She's at the church," Enrique called over his shoulder. "Lighting candles."

"I see."

As the notary waited, he hunched his shoulders, looked back at the street, and then took a few steps forward, into the protection of the foyer. The men of the town paid him little mind, but the women had poured buckets of water on him from their balconies, to protest the food taxes levied on any item unloaded by train. At least it wasn't boiling water they poured or—God help him—oil. One particularly feisty grandmother had been fined for scalding his predecessor. It was a difficult freelance existence, checking stamps here, imposing duties there, notarizing official papers on the side, writing important letters for the more than half of the village population that was illiterate. And notice how they sought him out during land deals, or when someone needed to protest a notice of military conscription. No buckets of water then!

Anyway, here came the boy—my brother, Enrique, out of breath from climbing and descending the two flights of wooden stairs to my mother's bedroom.

Together they filled out the papers, stumbling over the questions my mother hadn't anticipated and my brother wasn't sure how to answer: maternal grandmother's last name? Paternal grandmother's? Parents' birthplaces? All the while Enrique worried distractedly about the four names he had managed to write in a shaky, left-leaning scrawl: my first name, quickly, my second name—the one that troubled him—less so.

"A-n-í-b-a-l—can you read it?" he fretted.

"Yes, that's fine."

But neither noticed how the notary had botched my first name, misreading the
z
at the end as a long-tailed, sloppy
u.

"The money." Enrique presented his clenched fist.

The notary tugged open my brother's fingers and counted the treasure inside. "It's not enough. I'll be writing two certificates."

At that moment, my Tía rounded the doorway, her black skirt flapping at her ankles, stirring dust motes into the bright shaft of light penetrating the foyer.

"What's this?" she said, pushing past the notary, who touched his hat in greeting. She moved Enrique aside and peered at the certificates in the notary's ink-stained hand. Reading the words, she crossed herself.

"The boy paid me for the first one, but I need money also for the second."

"Why two, if the infant was born dead?"

"You can't have a death certificate without a birth certificate."

"But why can't you put 'born dead' on the birth certificate, and leave it at that?"

Out of habit, the notary retracted his head into his stiff, high collar.

Tía barked, "Shame on you, arriving even before the priest."

"I do a service, Señora. I am a—"

"Vulture."

"—a legitimate representative," he continued, "of the provincial authority."

"I doubt you collected two certificates when Señor Petrillo's infant died. You know a shoemaker has little money, but you think we have more than our share. Bureaucracy—"

The notary interrupted, gesturing toward the stairs. "Once these have been stamped, the service is fulfilled. Payment must be made."

"—before spirituality, I was saying. That's where this country is going."

"The boy's mother understands. Without these certificates, funerary benefits can't be paid to the father. The shoemaker does not work for the colonial government administration. He has no right to such benefits."

As they argued, no one noticed Enrique hopping side to side, trying to interrupt. Tía stirred her fingers around the bottom of her leather pouch, still mumbling about the decline of piety and the problems of empire, while the notary wagged his head. Finally, after more coins and handwritten copies of both certificates had changed hands, Tía turned to my brother.

"Out back," she ordered, irritated by his hopping. "Before you have an accident."

"I don't have to go."

"Well, what then?"

"Feliz isn't dead."

"Who?"

"The baby, Feliz."

"The boy is confused," the notary said. "The baby's name was Fel
iu,
" he said, stabbing a finger at the certificates in Tía's hands.

She squinted as she read. "I'd be very upset to find out you copied the name wrong."

"Like the saint. It means 'prosperous,' I believe."

Tía muttered, "Not very prosperous to be born dead."

Enrique tried again. "But the baby—he's in the cellar. You can see."

"It's the midwife I need. Here and here—she will need to put her mark," the notary said, accenting the last word acidly just as the woman's heavy descent sounded on the staircase.

The midwife acknowledged the adults with a weary nod, made an X just above the notary's ink-stained fingertip, then turned to Tía. "She seems comfortable now. Make sure she doesn't use the stairs for a week. Even then, if the bleeding increases..." She paused, hoping the notary would excuse himself so she could deliver more intimate instructions. When he made no effort to leave, she changed the subject. "I can speak to the carpenter for you, about a coffin. But he'll want measurements, so as not to waste wood. If you'll bring me the body, I have a piece of string left, to measure it."

Tía stood erect with indignation. "You mean to say you didn't get a good enough look when it came out?"

"I ran to get help. I didn't see it at all. It isn't in the bedroom."

"It's in the cellar," Enrique said, and then louder, fists curled with frustration, "Feliz is in the cellar!"

"Stop this nonsense!" Tía scowled. "Felix, maybe, or Feliciano, or Feliu—but what is this Feliz?

"I imagine," she continued, facing the midwife, "that you expect full payment, even though you managed to miss the birth."

No one noticed my mother descending the stairs, one painful step at a time, pale hand gripping the banister. She sat down on the bottom step. Her nightdress billowed around her bare feet. Her damp, dark hair flowed over her pale shoulders.

"I just wanted my baby to be happy," she said. And then louder, so that the notary, the midwife, Tía and Enrique all turned, "Not prosperous, not successful. Just happy."

"See?" Enrique said.

The midwife opened her mouth to reprimand my mother for getting out of bed, the notary pursed his lips in preparation for defending the spelling on his certificates, and Tía ground her jaw, gathering the residue of her complaints. But before any of them could speak again, a piercing squall came from the cellar's open trapdoor, in the far corner of the foyer. Luisa's head followed it, then her shoulders, over which I was still crudely positioned.

"Happy?" Luisa called out, over the sound of my furious mewling. "He can't be, with this black, tarry stuff coming out. He started crying when I tried to wipe it, and now he's turning purple."

The adults gasped as they saw her head and shoulders sway unsteadily, one hand over my furiously shuddering body, the other gripping the ladder rungs. Tía, the midwife, and the notary remained frozen. My mother lifted her arms, but she was too dizzy to rise. Only Enrique bolted into action, pulling me away from my sister's unsteady shoulder so that she could haul herself the rest of the way out of the cellar. In the ensuing confusion, no one mentioned the certificates again.

My mother laughed through her exhausted tears as Enrique brought me to her: "Call him anything, I don't care." And from that moment, she didn't. She had traded her initial, plain hope for an even more basic one: that I would simply survive.

Tía and the midwife broke free from their paralysis and gathered around my mother. They grasped her elbows in order to coax her back up the stairs, and reached forward to take me out of her arms, muttering cooing sounds to stop my crying.

"Leave us be, and let him cry," Mamá said, refusing to let go as she unbuttoned the top of her nightdress, preparing to nurse me on the stairs. "
Es la música más linda del mundo.
"

It's the most beautiful music in the world.

Now, all of this story I'm telling you so far, I wrote down quickly, one night in October 1940. I began it at another man's request, but did not deliver it to him.

You're not asking me why. I'd like to attribute your reticence to shyness. But your trade requires the opposite; requires, perhaps, the impatience I see when I look in your eyes, where I'd like to find—what? Forgiveness?

Perhaps simply: Understanding.

Writing these memories pained me. Less so the earliest childhood parts, which is why I started with them; certainly the later parts, as I was forced to review the course of my life, the development of my ideas and stances, which were to prove inadequate to the complexity of those times. But the discomfort of recollection was only a shadow of what was to come, when I would lose nearly all that was dear to me.

For the last year, the curators of the new museum of music in Spain have been hounding me with letters and telegrams, asking for my bow. The museum people have no idea that I wrote my memoirs thirty-odd years ago, and that I have them in my possession still. I bring you here not to discuss the bow—which I shall donate as promised—or to thrust into your more capable hands all my papers, which I can share only in my own way, in my own time. To understand and appreciate what they contain, you must go slowly with me; you must indulge my interpretation. You must be a better man than I was—more sympathetic, at the very least.

I realize the later parts of my story are the ones you most want to hear. You would have me begin with Aviva, all the better to have a living picture of her in your mind. Or at least with Al-Cerraz. You have asked already about the final 1940 concert, and I throw up my hands—I can no more start with that than I can play the Bach suites backward, from the last note to the first. I have never been that sort of a trick-performing prodigy. I have always been methodical, essentially conservative, by which—I see your smile—I don't mean politics. You will forgive me for being a classicist always, insistent on symmetry and proportion. You will allow me, at my advanced age, this last kindness—truly an indulgence, considering my lack of cooperation with your past journalistic efforts. In return, I will be honest.

Wilhelm, I have done a terrible thing.

Yes, please—a glass of water.

But I have left you with the impression of a baby, barely alive and mistakenly named. Please, if you will let me introduce you to the boy, just beginning to understand the beauty and difficulty of life in that time, in that place.

"I'm going to the train station," my mother announced on a cold morning, nearly six years after my birth. "Your father has arrived."

I'd had a nightmare and woken from it breathing hard, just as the women in the house were stirring and whispering. Now, as I struggled to lace my boots, Tía mumbled over my shoulder, "Go back to bed with your brothers and sister. You'll only delay your mother."

Ignoring my aunt's reproachful expression, I stepped out into the dark street with Mamá.

"Your nightmare wasn't about a box, was it?" she asked as we hurried along.

No, I told her. It was about a wintry, unfamiliar beach of cold, dark, wet sand, and what lived in the holes.

"Good. Never mind."

We continued in silence, holding hands; past connected, multistory stone houses like ours, and shuttered stores. As we zigzagged down the oddly angled streets I struggled to keep up, a jerking tail behind Mamá's purposeful kite. The sidewalk was barely wide enough for one person, made of a smooth and slippery stone so burnished by decades of passing feet that it glinted silver. I skidded along its surface while my mother stumbled over the cobblestone road, yanking me each time her ankle turned, both of us struggling downhill toward the station in the dark. When I slipped and fell, skinning one knee, Mamá said nothing, only pulled me up by one arm and kept going.

A barnlike oak door creaked open, and a woman's craggy face emerged, illuminated by a candle lantern.

"
Buenos días, Doña.
Meeting the train?"

"Meeting my husband," Mamá answered.

"
Madre de Dios,
" the crone grunted, crossing herself before she withdrew into the shadows. The door's ring-shaped knocker clapped hard as the door slammed shut.

Black sky lightened to deep navy as we cut across the town plaza. At the church, I ran one hand along the old building's pockmarked walls, remembering my brother Enrique's words
(Yes, they're bullet holes; even the priest says so. He has a jar full of the slugs...)
until my mother glanced over her shoulder and jerked me out of my reverie.

"Filth!" she yelled. "Look at your hand!"

"What? I can't see it."

"I don't have time for this, Feliu!"

We veered into the alley behind the fish market, hopping the channel of wastewater spilling from the market's open back door. In the golden, lamplit interior, I could see men heaving crates and shoveling chipped ice. Fish scales sparkled between the alley's wet cobblestones like trapped stars.

Deep navy yielded to peach-tinged blue by the time we reached the station, where the train waited, warm and rumbling, still dribbling steam. Mamá freed herself from my sweating hand and marched onto the platform, where several men gathered around her. Within moments she was seated at a bench against the station wall, pulling coarse twine from the lid of a large box the men had placed at her feet. It was about as wide as my mother's outstretched arms, made of an unfamiliar reddish-brown wood. There was a single small clasp on the fitted lid. Instead of a lock, there was only a twist of heavy wire attached to a yellow card bearing official-looking stamps and our address.