The Spanish Bow (37 page)

Al-Cerraz perched on the edge of his chair. "Three hours? That's his work routine?"

"That's his toilette," she sniffed, and then vanished back into the house.

After a few minutes Falla returned, still squeezing the dumbbells. The sun was shining fiercely into the courtyard and he had put on little round glasses with bright blue lenses.

Al-Cerraz broke the silence. "I'm afraid we've somehow offended your maid."

"That wasn't my maid."

"Forgive me," Al-Cerraz said. His face never flushed, but two spots on his neck, just below his beard, darkened with embarrassment.

"Sister Maria," Falla said, fixing us both with that opaque, blue-lensed stare.

"Does she come from the convent each day, or live with you all the time?"

"Not
a
sister,
my
sister. Maria del Carmen."

Al-Cerraz patted his lap. "Well. I suppose I should explain that I'm a pianist."

"Of course. I know your work, I've seen you play—three times," Falla said, the corners of his large mouth twitching. He ticked them off on his fingers: "Cádiz. Madrid. Paris."

Al-Cerraz smiled at me and settled more deeply into his chair. "I am interested in composing—not suddenly, not impulsively. Really, it's been my aim for years," he continued, and I let my attention wander around the courtyard until, several minutes, later, the words "Don Quixote" brought me back into focus. Al-Cerraz was laughing, while Falla sat motionless.

"It's just ridiculous, what others want us to do—repetition, imitation. There is no interest in originality. If there were, we 'd let these old themes rest in peace." The pianist shook his head, rattled his glass, and raised it to his mouth.

Falla picked at his pant leg. "I, too, am composing a work based on
Don Quixote.
"

Al-Cerraz froze, holding his glass in front of his face for a prolonged moment to shield his unsettled expression.

"It takes the form of a puppet play," Falla said.

Al-Cerraz's discomfort exploded into laughter. "Puppets!" He looked to me. "A puppet play, did you hear? The maestro is pulling our leg."

Falla didn't laugh.

Al-Cerraz cleared his throat. "It's going well, then?"

"It's nearly complete."

The sister entered the courtyard with a fresh pitcher in her hand. She refilled our glasses dutifully, without making eye contact, as if she were watering plants. My bladder was full, but I busied myself emptying a second tall glass.

Falla rose and exited the courtyard again, without explanation, squeezing a dumbbell in his hand as he walked. Al-Cerraz reached inside his vest pocket, pulled out a flask, and poured a healthy slug into his lemonade, nearly overflowing the glass. Just as he replaced it Falla reappeared and took his seat.

"Of course, there's also something to be said for timeless themes and timeless places," Al-Cerraz ventured. "I mean, consider Andalucía itself—the history here! The deep feeling! Anyone who listens to
Nights in the Gardens of Spain
can feel it, hear it, smell it." He was warming to the task. "The perfumed opening—I can see the moon shining against the stone walls. The first broken piano chords—I can hear the water running, that great Moorish irrigation, bringing the jasmine-scented gardens to life! The tense violins—"

Falla uncrossed and recrossed his legs, shifting away from us. "My intention was never to be quite that pictorially descriptive, in the limited sense."

"Of course not," Al-Cerraz said.

The composer muttered inaudibly.

"
Perdóname?
" Al-Cerraz asked.

"On the rue de Richelieu," Falla repeated. "In Paris. I picked up a booklet, just a little thing, with some pictures. About the Alhambra."

"And it led you here, to do your research?"

De Falla paused; I could hear the dumbbells squeaking, like little trapped mice.

"I moved here after writing
Nights,
" he said finally. "I did not need to see the Alhambra in order to conceive that work."

Al-Cerraz and I stood outside Falla's house, surveying the cobblestone road that led steeply upward, and the vines on the walls flanking the road. The plants seemed to have grown thicker and greener in the last hour, encouraged by the day's deepening humidity.

"Does this mean you don't want to see it now?"

Al-Cerraz sighed.

"I don't see why you're upset. He is a Romantic, like you. 'Imagination as the supreme faculty'; didn't you praise a philosopher who said that? So Falla relied on his imagination of the Alhambra."

Al-Cerraz ran a hand through his hair. It was damp from perspiration, and the result of his distracted raking was a crazed, spiky look. "Feel, and dream, but first—observe. Whether it's poetry or painting or music, there has to be truth. The Impressionists didn't invent the idea of light—they observed it."

I rubbed my neck and felt coils of sweaty dirt forming. I wanted to say, "The Alhambra was just an idea. Music's real truth isn't in its story or imagery. Music's real truth is in its deeper structure—balance, control, proportion, all those elements that nineteenth-century pianists started tampering with when they disrupted meter and harmony in favor of extreme expression."

But it was too hot, so instead I said, "Come on."

"I don't feel well," Al-Cerraz said.

"You want to find something to eat?"

"No."

This wasn't Al-Cerraz at all.

"Go on," I said. "Let me hear it."

"What should I say?"

"I don't know. Say he's no different from Debussy. Say we might as well just give it all away." I raised my voice: "Let the French tell us about sunny Spain—let the vendors of the rue de Richelieu sell us their little pictures of the Alhambra!"

"Is that how you think I'd react?"

"Isn't it?"

When I realized he had no more to say, I reached for his arm. Much as I longed to head back downhill to the hotel in time for a siesta, I found myself pulling Al-Cerraz uphill instead. After a few feet he held up a finger, patted at his jacket, found the flask, and offered me a sip.

"
Seguro,
in a moment," I said, and stepped closer to the wall to relieve myself.

Al-Cerraz shrieked, "You're urinating against the maestro's house?"

I waved a hand at him. "This isn't his house—it's the city wall. What's got into you?"

Al-Cerraz watched the yellow trickle run downhill, along the shingle-lined ditch. Then he nodded with disgust, took another swig from his flask, and started walking uphill. "Come on," he called back to me, "the day's already a lost cause. I will bring my mother something from the Alhambra—that will make her pleased to see me, for a little while at least."

At the first switchback, we paused. Al-Cerraz's face blazed red. My shirt clung to my back.

"You know," I said, "in all these years, I don't think you've ever mentioned your mother's name."

Al-Cerraz paused for a moment, then, too tired to obfuscate, he replied, "Her name is Carolina Otero."

"La Belle Otero? The dancer?"

"Dancer, cabaret artist, courtesan—and worse."

"You shouldn't say that."

"She wouldn't deny it. Vanderbilt, the American—that was her first big catch. Then the Kaiser, our randy little Alfonso, the Shah of Persia, a Japanese emperor..." he paused, breathless. After a minute he added, "She might have kept it up a little longer, if not for her illness."

Something in my expression must have indicated distaste. I was imagining what kinds of diseases a courtesan would have.

"Gambling," he explained. "That was her illness.

"She had a house in Nice, once," he continued. "Now she lives at a hotel. In her prime, she lost millions. She got sloppy. She'd take any lover who would pay her debts. Once she became common, shahs and emperors had no use for her."

I whistled through my teeth. "I've seen her picture, the one where she is wearing that tall headdress and the costume..." I stopped. "Well, she must have been much younger then."

At the next switchback, Al-Cerraz leaned over, his hands on his knees, face blanched. "My heart's beating too fast. I need water."

A boy was passing, heading downhill. "The Alhambra," I called out to him. "Are we almost there?"

He nodded and kept going.

We continued, and a tall red wall rose on our left, then two towers, but no gate. "I'm sure we'll come to an opening soon."

Al-Cerraz stopped again, and leaned heavily on his uphill leg. He let out a desperate laugh. "Maybe I should have stuck with a French postcard."

At last we came to a gate and passed through it, onto more level ground. That seemed to give him renewed energy. "I'm going to pick a rose for my mother when we get to the gardens. It will cheer her. There's the palace. I think I see a way in."

A man approached us and offered to be our guide. Al-Cerraz handed him a coin and told him to go away. We entered the Nasrid palace together, walking from one silent, cool, unlit room to the next, under arched doorways, admiring the mosaic-tiled walls, the slim pillars framing hallways, the elaborately carved ceilings, the wooden grilles as finely cut as lace.

We came to a long rectangular courtyard with overgrown hedges on either side and a shallow reflecting pool in the middle. "There's your water," I laughed. It was dark green, opaque with algae.

After a while, I said, "Why isn't your last name Otero?"

"She wouldn't let me use it."

"Wouldn't let you?"

"She'd already left us by the time I started touring. My father and his second wife raised me. My father, the cuckold, would have gladly had me use her last name, despite the sordid implications, but she wouldn't agree to it. She didn't want anyone knowing she'd had a child."

"I'd think she'd be proud."

He stared at me blankly. "Exclusivity, competition, independence—first lessons in being a courtesan. So, I went nameless for a while."

"As El Nene..."

"Until I wasn't a nene anymore, and I had to choose a real name. My earliest memories of my mother—my only childhood memories of her—are of her telling me stories that took place in the desert. Full of oases and harems." He paused. "She had presented herself as An-dalucían, the daughter of a gypsy. My father said she was really from the north—the daughter of an umbrella salesman. Which story would
you
choose to believe?"

"You could have used your father's last name."

"Not exotic enough. I'd learned something from my mother's success. Do what is necessary. Between umbrellas and mystery, choose mystery."

This was different from his typical stories. It had no punch line or happy ending, and it added no luster to his persona. But for all it lacked, it rang truer than anything he 'd ever told me.

I followed him through a doorway into another dark room with an ornate, horseshoe-shaped window. From a distance, it looked all gold, but that was only the late-day sun coming through the opening, setting the carved wood aglow.

"The name Al-Cerraz was my idea. It sounded right to me. I believed in my heart that I had Moorish roots." He stared into the distance, a green sea of cypresses. "I always believed in some kind of ancestral memory. I believed that this place would feel like home."

"Does it?"

He didn't answer.

I busied myself studying the tiles on the wall, arranged in endless repeating eight-sided stars. I reached out to rub a hand over them. When I turned back, Al-Cerraz was gone.

I found him later, at the top of the Alcazaba, after I'd spent a good hour following an endless progression of stone steps that circled a decaying core. Al-Cerraz was at the citadel's highest, farthest corner, sitting on a crumbling rectangle of stone, surrounded by the weathered rocks that had once been walls, benches, and the floors of cell-like rooms in which long-ago soldiers had slept, close to a signal tower. I saw the flash of metal—the flask being lifted a final time, backlit by the setting sun. In the city below us, white buildings glowed, separated by the spiky tops of palm trees.

"A drink for my troubles?" I said when I reached his side.

"Last one," he said, and handed it to me.

"I'm sure it's against the rules," I said after I'd barely managed to wet my lips. "Drinking amidst Muslim ruins."

"Rules—that's what we need." He sounded tipsy. "
Por ejemplo:
children should be named after their parents. And people shouldn't try to be what they are not."

We watched the sun set. I tried to imagine the Moorish battles of five centuries ago. I conjured up the clash of soldiers and the shouted orders of the Nasrid rulers, guarding their final Iberian stronghold. I imagined horses and banners and harem girls with kohl-lined eyes.

After a while, I asked, "Did you get the rose for your mother?"

He laid an arm across my shoulder. "Did you know? They didn't plant roses in the Nasrid times. That's what a lady told me, in the garden. There's roses now, a few of them, nothing to write home about. And mossy fountains. But it's all fake, really. I can't see the point in it. This whole place," and he lifted his other arm to encompass the breathtaking view of red-rock ruins. "All fake. It does not move me one bit."

"It isn't fake, Justo. I think you're angry at your mother. Or else Falla's story confused you. His representation of it may be imaginary, but this is real. Just look around you."

"No one lived here. No one loved here. If they did"—his voice broke a little—"I would feel it."

I said, "You'll find your inspiration."

The sky lost its bronze warmth, lightened to a pale yellow, and then slipped toward gray; the red walls darkened. I stood up, ready to go, when Al-Cerraz tugged at my arm.

"Falla got the little book on the rue de Richelieu, but that's not how he came up with the opening theme. He said it came from some out-of-tune notes he kept hearing a blind violinist play outside his window when he was renting a house in Madrid, of all places." He forced a little laugh. "Isn't that funny?"

"I don't get the joke."

"I didn't tell you the second part. There was another musician sharing the house. Amadeo Vives. You know Vives? He put the notes in his piece, too—a
zarzuela
number he was working on. They realized it only later. One old busker, inspiring two maestros!" This time he laughed uncontrollably. Then he wiped his eyes and shook his head. "Falla said the world is full of music already. He said:
'Listen'"