Authors: Andromeda Romano-Lax
I craved rigor and order, and instead I spent the day surrounded by entropy, while the streets outside offered more of the same: graffiti, peeling posters, slogans and mottoes protesting the government, denouncing the King, defying military conscription. How could someone learn amidst such chaos? Only by turning further inward, learning to block out everything but the clean and orderly perfection of music itself.
***
I hid the book in a drawer under my socks, like a pornographic postcard, and I didn't mention it. But I continued to look for every indication that Mamá and Alberto had never taken me seriously or, worse yet, that I was truly soft inside. I received a letter from Enrique describing a three-day field exercise he'd suffered through, during which several men had fainted from heat exhaustion. Enrique had soldiered on, of course. Even the skinny-legged Matchstick had made it, Enrique troubled himself to write. I did not appreciate being constantly compared to that friendless waif. Was it Enrique's way of saying that if I were a real man, I would have joined the military, too?
That week, I began practicing harder and longer. Instead of resting after lunch, I repeated my entire five-hour morning drill. For days, Alberto said nothing. Finally, on Friday evening, when he saw me struggling to stand up from my cello chair, he said, "There's no need to injure yourself."
I lashed out, cheeks flushed: "Paganini practiced ten hours a day!"
Alberto shrank back, pantomiming shock at my outburst. "Until he was twenty years old—then he never practiced again. Besides, he was sick all the time."
"You haven't taught me solfège," I grumbled through gritted teeth.
Alberto made a quizzical sound, then nodded with understanding. He began to sing an ascending scale: "
Do re mi fa so...
" He paused. "You know that, don't you? It's just sight-reading those tones. I've heard you do it on your own."
"That's solfège?"
"That's solfège."
I rubbed the small of my back with one hand, reached forward to set my bow on the music stand, but a sudden pain shooting down my left leg made me drop it. I swore under my breath and bent to pick up the bow, hot tears pooling. Rising, I kicked over the music stand.
"You don't seem happy, Feliu." There was no humor in his voice now.
I shouted back, "I'm not supposed to be happy! If you knew anything about teaching, you would know that."
"I see," he tried to say lightly, but there was a catch in his voice. "It's cruelty you want."
I didn't have the words to explain the frustration in the pit of my stomach. I sputtered and looked around. The music stand that I'd knocked down belonged to Alberto. It was one of the few musical objects he displayed with pride, fashioned from thick mahogany, shaped like a lyre with scrolled edges. I kicked it again and heard the wood splinter. Before I had time to exhale, Alberto was pulling me by the wrist into the kitchen, around the table, and toward the pantry closet. He nudged me inside and slammed the door. Suddenly, I was immersed in darkness, surrounded by the musty smell of mold and mouse droppings.
I waited a minute, unsure if Alberto was still on the other side.
"You're supposed to lock me in here with my cello!" I called out.
I heard the groan of wood—Alberto leaning against the door. His muffled voice answered, "That closet's too small. If you wanted to be locked away with an instrument, you should have stuck with the violin."
Silence again.
"I'm not afraid of you," I shouted.
"Of course not. You want a tyrant for a teacher. I refuse to be a tyrant. And I'm not starving you properly, either. If you feel around, you'll find plenty to eat."
"Then why I am in here?" I yelled, my eyes bulging, trying to see past the darkness.
I barely made out his soft reply: "You tell me."
The darkness made five minutes feel like fifty. Groping above my head, I managed to knock over a bag of something soft. I felt a film of powder settle on my face, smeared a finger against my cheek, and tasted it. Flour. Reaching around, I knocked over another bag. Something grainy spilled out. I plunged a finger and then brought it to my lips. Sugar.
The door opened. Alberto was silent, but his shoulders were heaving. For a second, I thought he was sobbing. Then I saw he was laughing silently, tears streaming down his cheeks.
"You're white as a ghost," he said when he'd caught his breath. "You look more like Paganini already."
I didn't laugh.
"The other day, when I asked you to go to the wax museum, did you go?"
I wondered if he 'd found my book. "I walked there, but I didn't go inside."
"I gave you the money. You should have gone inside. Do you see? Even when I try to guide you, you don't listen."
When I didn't respond, he added, in a lower voice, "I never asked you to come to me. If your mother hadn't been so desperate—and so kind—I would have turned you both away. I did
try
to turn you away. You should know more about the people you trust to teach you."
He ran his hand through his short gray hair and nodded three times, like a railroad worker practice-swinging his mallet before raising it high, for the heavy blow. "If you'd gone to the wax museum, you'd understand something important about me. But never mind that. Today I learned something about you. For the time being, I am resigning as your teacher. If it's cruelty you want, you'll find it in the streets."
Then Alberto told me the new rules: I was expected to contribute to room and board, which my mother had fallen behind in paying. I was expected to vacate the apartment every day after lunch and not return until dinner, honoring his new need for privacy. He didn't want to hear the phonograph anymore. He didn't want to hear my incessant cello playing. He didn't even want to see the cello—I was to take it with me each day when I left.
"We don't need to tell your mother," he added. "It would only upset her."
The small spark of fury I had been fanning leaped suddenly into a roaring flame. Heat smoldered in my chest; my tongue felt dry. I couldn't speak. He was kicking me out—like Haydn! He was expecting me to earn my own money—like Mozart!
I'd never felt such righteous anger in my life.
I'd never felt so grateful.
My mother hadn't wanted me to perform publicly. Perhaps she was worried that I would fail. Or perhaps she was worried that some small taste of success would give me false hope and lead to some larger failure in the future. If she feared only that a busking or café career might inflate my vanity, it was a needless concern. Curious stares aside, I received little attention over the winter months that followed, regardless of how and where I played.
Barcelona itself was a spectacle. The young Picasso had shown his work at the Quatre Gats and then sailed off toward Paris on the winds of his rising fame. Gaudí, the architect, had designed an entire fairy-tale suburb of abstract pavilions and serpentine, mosaic-covered benches. Even the local fish market was a splashy affair, its main gate decorated with green, amber and deep blue circles of glass cut from bottle bottoms, no two of them identical. The thickness of the glass, the presence of waves or bubbles or cracks, the direction of the sunlight all added variety and texture, an infinite number of hues.
Whenever I walked past the gate, I thought of the way Alberto had explained the cello's tone colors to me, the individuality and interpretive possibility inherent in a single note. The cellist's left hand was a technician—to find a quarter note of B on the A string, it headed to the first fingering, in first position. The right hand, on the other hand, was an artist, whose palette included the weight of the bow, the speed of the bow, the proximity of the bow to the bridge, all of which colored and shaded that note an infinite number of ways. From the simplest materials, so much was possible in Barcelona—or felt possible, anyway, which was the first step toward innovation, as well as the first step toward disillusionment and rebellion.
Visitors came to see Barcelona's color and strangeness. Residents took pride in its booming modernity. Street revelers shot off guns when they were joyful and dynamite when they were not. A distant explosion might be a religious festival; every third day, some saint was being heralded in some corner of the sprawling city. Or it might be a revolution. At the center of such a visual and auditory kaleidoscope, it was easy to go unseen and unheard.
While there was little glory or attention for a young unknown musician, there was ample opportunity. On my first attempt, I procured a job at the back of a café, replacing a violinist who had been jailed for punching a tax collector. The violinist returned after one week. But the next job came just as easily, when I wandered into a movie house. Barcelona had eighty of them at least, most of them small and shoddy and subject to frequent changes in ownership. Noticing my cello case, the theater owner pulled me aside and immediately offered me a position. His daytime pianist had disappeared, and the first round of replacements hadn't been quick enough to master the scores that accompanied each new film. Meanwhile, the audience was getting restless. They had come to see silent films, but they didn't expect
silence.
Nothing was more awkward than a "flicker" absent the musical cues that told the viewer when to laugh, cry, or close his eyes in fright.
I quickly extracted my cello from its case and played a sliding high note that sounded like a woman's shriek. Then I played a rapid trill on the lowest string, to suggest the tremor of suspense. I asked to see the piano music. The manager handed me a sheet upside down; I don't think he could read the alphabet, much less notes. Within minutes I had translated the first measures of a rather contrived piano score for two hands into a simpler one-line bass-clef melody, dressed up with the occasional double-stop chord.
"You're hired," the manager said, sweating as he watched the audience file toward their seats. "This one's a train picture. There's lots of ladies with their mouths open, fainting all over the place. Just do that screech and add the rest when you get it figured out."
I lasted five weeks at that job, twelve-minute reel after twelve-minute reel, until the theater closed. "It wasn't your fault," the manager said kindly, surveying the empty theater with an unlit cigar in his mouth. "You play that big violin pretty good."
The café was four blocks from Alberto's building; the theater, five—all close enough, but not an easy trek with a cello case bumping against my bruised hip. The instrument that had been the easier choice when I played only at home was the least convenient now that I needed to pursue employment. Just descending the stairs from Alberto's apartment, I'd strained my hip repeatedly and added a few scratches to the cello's face besides. I considered a map of the tram routes, wondering how much farther I was willing to travel with an instrument both taller and wider than I was.
Of course, the perfect place to play was just around the corner. But the world-famous Ramblas intimidated me. Most of the audience at my first café job had been drunk; at my second job, in the theater, essentially blind, their eyes focused on a screen instead of on me. On the Ramblas, I would be under clear and sober scrutiny. To play in an open-air setting, on the boulevard that had bewitched me on my very first day in Barcelona, seemed a kind of graduation—a necessary one.
At least the season made it easier. In late winter, half the seasoned street entertainers headed to indoor jobs or warmer climes, reducing the competition among musicians. Fortunately, many of the tourists remained. Afternoons, when local residents had already returned home from their market shopping, Englishmen loitered around the news kiosks, a mob of white suits, straw boaters and two-tone shoes demanding their copies of the London papers. Pale ladies whispered and turned, tickling passing waiters with the wayward plumes of their enormous feather-decorated hats. Eastern European aristocrats inhabited the cabstands—a motley crowd of dark suits and drooping cravats, exchanging pleasantries in incomprehensible accents.
But there was another language on the Ramblas, and this one I could fully understand: the music of the boulevard itself. By mid-afternoon, commerce in all the adjacent markets and side alleys slowed, leaving only the main walkways faintly pulsing. Flower sellers swept up fallen petals and clipped stems. On the boulevard's far side, where a perpendicular street opened into the Saint Joséph market, produce vendors piled up boxes of blemished, unsold fruit. For the rest of my life, whenever I would hear the first uncertain sounds of an orchestra tuning, it would remind me of the sleepy Ramblas on a winter afternoon: the tap of crates, the squeal of departing carts and creak of closing awnings—discordant, and yet full of promise.
This pause, which seemed a quiet lull to the tourists sipping their cooling coffees and their warming
manzanillos,
was electrifying to me. I knew what came next. Once the vendors had departed, the street entertainers could take up their stations, spaced more or less evenly along the Ramblas's kilometer-plus length.
The day I found my courage was brisk and overcast, with mattress-thick clouds. I hadn't brought a chair, but under a tree I spotted an overturned box made of thin wooden slats that sufficed as a low seat. I hadn't brought a music stand either, and I struggled to arrange some sheet music around my feet, the papers' edges held down by my open cello case. I'd just picked up my bow and was tightening the hairs when one of the sheets blew free. It fluttered toward a cabstand, where it stayed wrapped around a horse's leg long enough for me to retrieve it, risking the cabdriver's wrath and the fate of my unguarded cello. I was just loping back to my makeshift seat when I saw a second page of music flutter free, and then a third. I grabbed at the pages that remained, and was just tallying my losses—the second page of a Popper étude, the first and second pages of a Bach minuet—when a voice from behind my shoulder said, "You're doing it all wrong."
I twisted around, relieved to see a boy instead of a policeman. He was a year or two older, and taller, with a forelock of black hair that lay flat against a pimply forehead. A battered violin hung from the long, thin fingers of his left hand. A dark, oversized coat draped his bony shoulders.