Authors: Andromeda Romano-Lax
"You're not one of the investors affected, are you?"
"Every investor is affected. My broker didn't bother to return my call on Friday. It was easy to get a last-minute steamer ticket. There were plenty of cancellations."
A shroud of bad luck still seemed to hang over him, but he appeared to be taking the news astonishingly well. "What lasts?" he asked rhetorically, as he had so many times before. Then he laughed. "Good looks, rarely. Money—never."
"And friendship?" I asked cautiously.
He fingered his mustache. "Sometimes. I suppose I'd put it in the same category as love: flawed and messy, and of questionable duration, and yet somehow irresistible."
The concert, on Monday night, reminded me of a palace affair. Twelve rows of straight-backed chairs filled the generically elegant room. We offered a simple program: Massenet, the Franck we'd played all those years ago with Gauthier. Eight years hadn't diminished how well we played together. And it was so much easier to reconcile without speaking. I appreciated, as I hadn't appreciated in years, the power of music to transcend the mundane, to satisfy complicated emotions, to provide a shared language when words failed.
When we were finished, the assembled passengers called for an encore, which we supplied. Then they called for a second one. Al-Cerraz, who'd always favored small audiences such as this one, promised to play again, but first he launched into a speech about his love of ocean passages and his memory of his first one, when he stowed away to Brazil at the age of seven. I'd heard it before, never quite the same version twice. This anecdote opened the door to other recollections of a former prodigy: being pursued by the authorities through Caribbean isles, befriending a port-haunting woman of ill repute who helped him earn his passage back home. I was thirsty now, and ready for the performance to be over, gripping my bow tighter the longer he talked.
The audience's laughter punctuated something Al-Cerraz had just said—I'd stopped paying attention—and suddenly, he sat down and started to play again. It was Saint-Saëns's "The Swan," a piece that had never been one of my favorites, and I missed the opening cue. In rushing to catch up, I must have dug in hard, with my bow hand off balance. Suddenly—alarmingly—my hand was empty. And the bow, arrow-straight and sure, was flying through the air, sprung from the tension formed between my hand and the string. A gasp escaped the room. Al-Cerraz finished a measure and turned.
I waited for the laughter to come. These same rosy-cheeked passengers had proven capable of it; the men with their hands over their tight vests, and the women with their hands at their flushed necks. But then this awkward breach had opened, breaking the spell.
I knew I should say something. Al-Cerraz would have made the right quip, the right pun, and somehow even in the back row, where his voice wouldn't have carried, or even the middle, where his thick accent wouldn't be comprehended, still they would have laughed—or at least exhaled. But I couldn't find the words. And anyway, I was more worried about my bow. I couldn't begin to imagine what I'd do if the stick had snapped, or the sapphire had come unlodged and rolled under some matron's heel, camouflaged among the stray bits of send-off confetti that were never completely swept away from one sailing to the next.
I rose from my chair and pushed my way through the silence. I was halfway to the first row when a young woman stood and—leaning over a stooped gentleman seated in front of her—bent toward me.
She was pretty, with a light olive complexion and large dark eyes close-set on either side of a long, slim nose. She had dark hair, a lock of which had fallen loose from its comb. In a room of gowns, she wore a plain long-sleeved dress with a prim, scalloped collar, above which I could see her throat pulsing like a trapped sparrow.
That quiver betrayed her. If I hadn't seen it, I would have believed she was perfectly composed. Her right arm came forward and my eyes followed it, tracing the long, thin wrist. Just before I reached her, she nudged one finger into the crook of the ebony frog and let the bow swing a swift ninety degrees to nearly vertical—a surrendered pistol, a compass needle swinging to true. Then she lifted the bow slightly upward, toward me.
That's how I knew. Someone who had never touched a bow would have wrapped an awkward fist around it, spoiling the hair; or lifted it heavenward in two flat palms, like an exotic sacrifice.
I muttered my thanks. She leaned toward my ear and whispered, "Now"—and she paused and wetted her lips self-consciously—"Now you have their perfect attention."
Not
our
attention, but
their
attention. A small conspiratorial detail. Violinist was just a guess—the right one, as it turned out.
For perhaps the first time in his life, Al-Cerraz took the realistic, rational view. She was just another passenger—one among thousands. He accused me of hitting her with my bow on purpose. As if anyone, save Cupid, could have such perfect aim.
"You don't believe me?" I said to Al-Cerraz the next day on the second-class deck. "There she is. I'll prove it."
I approached the young woman and we exchanged introductions as if the evening before had never happened: What a shame to have gray days when sun on the open sea must be spectacular, and wasn't it surprising how far from land gulls will fly. Looking skyward, she confided she didn't care for the ocean, actually. She'd felt queasy the whole trip.
I asked her in English, "Did you bring it?"
"Bring what?"
"On this crossing—did you bring your instrument?"
"What instrument?" She tucked her slim fingers under her armpits, forearms flattening her already small, high breasts.
"Please," I said. "If I say 'violin' and it's viola, you'll never speak to me again—and vice versa. I don't understand the problem about violas, but I know not to make a joke of it. Make it easy for me. Tell me what you play."
She unlocked her arms and dropped her hands slowly. "I'm sorry if my English isn't good."
"It's perfect. Better than my—what is your native...?"
"I don't speak Spanish," she said, avoiding the question.
"Any French?" Al-Cerraz butted in.
"Only a little, sorry," she said. "German?"
"Whatever tongue, we'll make you answer," I said, and Al-Cerraz's eyes widened.
"We 're on our way home to Spain," Al-Cerraz interrupted, rescuing her from my inquiries. "And you?"
At this she hugged herself again, tucked her left cheek close to her shoulder, and stared at the rail. Then she spun on one low heel and walked away.
"Well done," I said.
He shook his hairy head and held up his palms.
"You
were the rude one."
It was the Beethoven ladies who were able to enlighten me, at least in part. I'd met the two elderly women on my rambles through second class, and we'd already had several discussions about "new music," as one of them called anything composed after her mother's birth year, 1820. The young lady was from northern Italy, they informed me. They stumbled over her last name ("About seventeen syllables long—no wonder she introduces herself by her given name") but her first name was Aviva. They knew for certain that she had had proper business in the United States, some kind of special visa, an invitation to play violin with the New York Philharmonic. Yet no sooner had she arrived in New York than she had turned around and booked a cabin to go back on the very same ship.
"Do you think it's stage fright?" said the darker-haired lady—the one who preferred Beethoven's early period.
I said, "I don't think that's it. If she had a foreign job offer, she must have had considerable experience performing back in Italy."
"Exactly," the other matron said. "I think it's a personal matter. Perhaps love."
"Yet the skin on her finger is evenly toned," the darker-haired matron interjected. Seeing my puzzled expression, she explained, "She has not recently discarded any ring."
The other lady countered, "Perhaps she never obtained one."
Al-Cerraz appeared a short while later, claiming he was already bored with his tablemates, who had spent all of luncheon discussing the latest vanished billions. "They're calling this 'Black Tuesday,'" he groaned. "First Black Thursday, now Black Tuesday. The entire week is a massive, ugly bruise."
"What do you think about a concert?"
"Another one?"
"A different one. A trio."
The captain was willing to close off a small parlor for us, long enough to allow us to audition Aviva. Though she showed up with her violin, she demonstrated no eagerness to remove the instrument from its case. Al-Cerraz tried to put her at ease, encouraging her just as he had encouraged me, the first time we'd played together at the palace in Madrid. He could be wonderful that way, when his mind wasn't preoccupied by appetite, ego, or thoughts of the distant future.
Still, our small talk lagged, and Aviva still seemed disinclined to play. With a pang of desperation, I said, "This is quite an opportunity for you, if you don't mind my saying so."
She cocked her head. "I'm perfectly aware of your reputation."
Al-Cerraz heard the stridency in her tone. "Don't mind him. Please—this crossing is dreadfully dull. Do it for me."
"I'll think about it," she said.
"No thinking," he said. "Just say you will."
I wanted her to perform, but not just because he'd beseeched her. "Take your time, Miss—"
"Just think about it," Al-Cerraz interrupted. "It isn't much to ask."
She nodded and gripped her violin case, eyes on her shoes. When she turned to go, Al-Cerraz winked at me, then started to shuffle through the sheet music he 'd spread out on the piano's lid.
He called to Aviva, "
Au revoir.
Perhaps we'll see you on deck later. Could you close the door after you?" Then to me, louder: "Actually Feliu, if you have just a moment." He stopped shuffling and pulled out a sheet, squinting at it. "I don't think I've found the pulse of this particular work."
In all our years together, Al-Cerraz had never petitioned me for any kind of interpretive advice. He didn't typically read from sheet music, either. He might study it away from the piano, but when he played, it was nearly always from memory. Now he had a seat on the bench and pulled up to the keyboard. "Just listen." His hands flew over the keyboard.
"I don't recognize it."
"Fauré, D Minor," he said, over his frenetic playing.
"You have my part?"
"On the piano."
"Why didn't you say so?"
As I went to retrieve it, Al-Cerraz shouted over his shoulder, "Shut it, please. I won't have the outside world hearing something I haven't yet perfected." I realized he was addressing Aviva, still lingering in the open doorway.
But of course he had perfected it. He had launched into Fauré's restless opening with complete confidence, his hands conjuring the sound of a rapidly tolling bell, hitched to some wave-tossed buoy, sending out warnings across a dark seascape. The agitated music begged for some-thing—but not for anything that Al-Cerraz or any pianist could provide. Music in hand, I took my seat and joined in: and there, ah, the relief provided by the cello—a slower, surer melody, like a ship cutting through those agitated waves, holding steady against the wind and the spray.
The two parts together were magical, but they required a third to complete Fauré's vision. I was so busy following my own music that I didn't see Aviva take a step back into the room and extract her violin from its case. She joined the trio just as the violin's melody twined with the cello's, then rose above it, cleaving the darkness. She had no trouble leading me, using the bold harmonizing strokes the piece required. But later in the movement, it was as if she suddenly realized how high she'd climbed; some vertigo set in and her energy waned a little. She continued to play masterfully, in a way no audience would have criticized; but she had succumbed to some self-imposed limit.
And yet she looked contented when we finished, all of us breathing heavily as the final notes echoed across the room, inhibitions erased by the sheer physical challenge of working through an unfamiliar piece so quickly. Aviva stood next to Al-Cerraz, laughing now. "Next time, you'll let me tune, I hope!"
"Next time," Al-Cerraz smiled. "Those are the words I like to hear. You've played it before, I take it?"
For the first time it registered with me that Aviva hadn't needed the sheet music.
"I performed it two years ago," she replied.
I said, "I'm not familiar with it. When was it composed?"
"In 1923," Al-Cerraz guffawed. "Feliu—you must keep up with things!" And then back to her: "But he's lost in the 1600s, half the time."
It didn't matter—not the teasing and one-upmanship that followed, not the trivial banter as the euphoria of a wonderfully executed movement faded. We had seen what Aviva could do, and perhaps a little of who she was.
I sought the captain's permission to give a concert the last night before reaching port. I explained that we knew it was strange, assembling an untried trio of musicians in such record time.
"Strange? Record time? Not at all. On this ship, I've married passengers who met just days before. Seems to be some people's notion of romance, to hurry things along. Besides, the passengers loved your first concert. Anything that will keep them out of my radio room is much appreciated."
Furthermore, the captain said, having a trio concert with Aviva would be a kindness to her.
"A kindness?"
"You do realize she doesn't have any money, don't you? A patron paid for her westbound ticket so that she could save what little she had to get herself set up in an apartment. But then she spent all of it coming back. Unlike most of the people on board, she was broke even before Black Tuesday."
"I didn't realize."
"Well, we've got some music fanciers on board. I'm sure we can arrange to do something for her. Nothing as crass as passing a collection plate, don't you worry."
When we told Aviva the news, she tried to dodge the concert one more time, halfheartedly. "I don't have anything to wear besides this," she said, lowering her eyes to the same prim, scalloped-neck dress she 'd worn the night Al-Cerraz and I had performed.