Authors: Andromeda Romano-Lax
"This isn't a concert hall," he drawled. "If you need sheet music, you shouldn't play here."
"I'll decide that for myself," I said, swallowing hard.
The young violinist smirked and raked one hand against his forehead, pushing his hair from his eyes. "I was trying to be"—he searched for the word—"charitable. This is my spot. That is my box you're sitting on."
He was French Basque, he said; his hometown was to the northwest, across the border. The wooden purfling along his violin's edges was nearly worn away. One of his coat pockets was torn, attached at the bottom seam by just a few stitches. It flapped uneasily, like a piece of torn skin.
"You know how long it took me to get this spot? How much it cost me?" When I didn't answer, he proceeded to tell me the story of his mentor, a stiltwalker and juggler who had demanded that the violinist hand over half of his earnings to share the right to play under this tree.
"Until the day," he crowed, "that his stilt fell into that hole, just there." He pointed at a saucer-sized drainhole in the Ramblas paving. "His ankle turned 'round as easily as a balloon on a string. It looked like his foot had been put on backward. And the sound he made!"
"Didn't anyone help him?"
The violinist studied the back of his free hand, pretended to buff his black-edged nails. "He made it to the cabstand. Eventually." Seeing my disturbed expression, he added, "This was a man who could walk on his hands! He had lost only the use of one foot!
"Anyway," he continued, his voice a notch lower, "do you want to see something?" He propped his case on the ground, opened it, and pulled out a round object wrapped in a white handkerchief. He unwrapped it to show me the cast-iron drainhole cover. "Do you have any idea how much work it was to pry this loose without anyone noticing?"
He was a survivor, and I liked him. It had been months since I'd talked with anyone my age. I told him my name. He told me his—Rolland—and a dozen other things, perhaps half of them true. Even as he explained that I couldn't possibly share this spot, that I didn't deserve it and wasn't ready for it, I knew it was already partly mine. He needed company too badly to turn me away. He wanted a confessor and a protégé, someone to guard his cheap wooden box when he went to relieve himself or scrounge for restaurant leftovers. I wasn't going to have these honors for free; I'd have to pay a generous share to him, just as he 'd paid a share to the stiltwalker. "But that won't amount to much," he said. "Don't expect to get rich. And with that—what is it?"
"Cello," I said. "Short for violoncello."
"Of course," he said. "I couldn't remember the word. You can stroll with it sometimes?"
"No. I have to sit."
He made a sucking sound, his tongue pressed against his front teeth. "A disadvantage. You are an orphan?"
"No."
"You have a place to sleep?'
"Yes."
His eyebrows went up. "Is it a good place?"
I checked myself from answering, remembering all the warnings I'd ever heard about feeding stray cats.
"It 's crowded. I'm already sharing a small bed." I added quickly, "With a woman."
"With a woman?" He grinned and looked me over again, from top to bottom. "Perhaps you're not so helpless as you look. We make partners?"
For every twenty minutes he allowed me to play, Rolland would allow himself an hour. If four or five people started to gather around my cello, he ended my turn immediately and began to play himself, hoping for the coins to fall into his propped-open violin case. After all, I had a place to sleep.
But usually, crowds did not gather. Women pulled their shawls over their heads and men flipped up their collars, intent on continuing briskly to more sheltered destinations. The cafés had pulled in most of their tables, leaving only a few here and there for the hardiest outdoor patrons. An appreciative passing nod or a coin flipped from afar was the most reward we generally received.
As the winter wore on, stiff winds blew up the boulevard, rattling the sword-shaped palm leaves on the trees at the Ramblas's farthest seaward end and carrying the salty smell of the Mediterranean and the storms building offshore. Rain came suddenly, in driving sheets. We packed our instruments quickly and cowered in any storefront we could find; easy for Rolland to do but hard for me, with my bulky instrument earning the scowls of inconvenienced strollers as we all competed for the same cramped shelter. When the downpour stopped, we'd make our way back across rain-glazed cobbles to the wet box, and stand around rubbing our stiff fingers and waiting for our sleeves to stop dripping cold rain onto our wrists.
On our slowest days, we closed our cases and talked. Rolland told me fantastic stories about crossing the mountains, hiding in farm outbuildings, evading the angry fathers of the pretty maids he had kissed, stealing a sheep that he butchered with a dull knife. "But you know all about that kind of adventure," he said. "Here in Spain, every man is an El Cid, or a Don Quixote. True?"
It was just like a foreigner to mention Quixote. People who couldn't or didn't read seemed to think Quixote was an honorable, happy-go-lucky dreamer. They didn't realize how savage the tale was—full of violence, ridicule, and humiliation. Quixote's story didn't encourage romance or chivalry; it convinced the reader that Spain's chivalric age was over.
I couldn't explain all that, and I didn't want to offend Rolland. So I simply said, "I'm not sure a musician can be that kind of hero."
At this, Rolland looked more affronted than ever. He held up his violin and bowed a series of lightning-fast, off-pitch arpeggios. "/ am a hero," he said. "What are you waiting for—some queen to knight you?"
When I didn't answer, he said, "There will be no royalty at all, someday. We got rid of ours, and you'll be rid of yours soon, too. But there will always be Don Quixote. You are placing your bet on the wrong side."
I murmured assent, but it wasn't emphatic enough for Rolland.
"You want to be a hero, too," he continued. "Even beneath the blank face—beneath the mask of
humilité
—I can tell."
I laughed involuntarily. That only egged Rolland on.
"No? Well how is it that you don't play with an orchestra, or at least with a quartet? Nearly every music job in this city is an ensemble job. There are flyers advertising for musicians to play in the pit at the Palau de la Música Catalana." That was the elaborate new musical palace being built for workers and their liberal patrons, a palace that might someday rival the bourgeois Liceo.
"I haven't seen any flyers."
"Solo jobs are one in a hundred," Rolland continued. "You found two already, and now you're on your third."
His points rattled me; I couldn't deny them.
"You pretend to be shy, but you're a soloist, a principal." He laughed out loud, overjoyed at his own bull's-eye. "You are not Feliu Delargo. You are Feliu
del Arco.
"
He spun to face the hunched-over Ramblas walkers, shouting it into the wind at the top of his lungs: "
El Rey del Arco
—The King of the Bow!"
The worst of the winter storms had passed, and the weather had mellowed to a disagreeable coolness, when my busking partner informed me of the favor he 'd been doing me all along. To play in this spot on the popular boulevard, Rolland had the informal permission of the local musicians' associations, which regulated every possible aspect of public performances. He rattled off the acronyms of the various organizations, which all sounded as confusing and mind-numbing as the political factions Alberto so often talked about at the café with his
tertulia
friends. In Alberto's leftist world, there were the anarchists, the radicals, the syndicalists. In Rolland's world—and now, my own—there were the West Side Wind Regiment, the Juvenile Songsters of Our Lady, the Mechanics' Union Percussionists. Every group had its own arcane membership and performance rules. "It is like Barcelona—all very confusing. Don't even try to understand," Rolland laughed.
Within our own group of string classicalists, there were strict requirements about what music could be played at what spot along the Ramblas's length, to avoid repetition and competition, he said. "It only makes sense, or everyone would be playing the same minuet and none of us would make any money. The associations were not enforcing before, because Ramblas traffic was so light, but with winter ending soon, they must be strict again."
I nodded my understanding.
"It's divided by nationality," he said. "Unfortunately, I missed the last meeting, so German, Spanish, and French were already taken."
So, we...?
"Norwegian."
I still felt self-conscious about my limited musical knowledge. "Such as ... Grieg?"
Rolland rubbed his tongue against his front teeth. "Yes."
"Who else?"
"Any Norwegian."
"What Norwegian composers are there besides Grieg?"
"I am not sure. We stick with Grieg."
That afternoon, I headed to the Casa Beethoven, a tunnel of a music shop—two shoulder-widths wide and at least two rooms long, with racks of sheet music lining both sides and a dark curtain at the back. There I pawed through the scores, performing the most rapid memorization I could manage. The next day, I played a melody by Grieg. On Rolland's turn, he played something I didn't recognize—he claimed it was Grieg, too—and I learned to copy it, so that by day's end I had at least two acceptable tunes in my repertoire.
Hardly a week had gone by when Rolland mentioned that the assignments had changed again. Now we were to play Czech music, he said wearily.
"But that's great," I said.
"It is?"
"That's Antonín Dvo[[[rcaron.gif]]]ák—he wrote a famous concerto for cello."
"You know it?"
"I should."
That afternoon, I made a second trip to Casa Beethoven. The shop owner watched me curiously but his wife, straddling the threshold to the curtained back room, where she was sorting sheet music, called out, "This isn't a library!"
After Rolland had taken his cut, most of my money was going to Alberto; I couldn't afford the Dvo[[[rcaron.gif]]]ák score. I kept looking at it, scanning as fast as I could, until the shop owner's wife came toward me and ripped the score from my hands. "This is stealing," she yelled. "Forget what you were reading or I will call the police!"
"I'm going," I said, my chin tucked into my chest.
She held me by the sleeve. "Start humming."
"What do you mean?"
"Hum something—other than Dvo[[[rcaron.gif]]]ák."
I tried to pull away from her. Her grip tightened.
"Something Spanish," she insisted.
I glanced around wildly. "I can't think of anything."
"
Carmen
—the 'Toreador Song!'" she demanded.
"That's Bizet. It's French."
She lifted a thick music book in her other hand, preparing to swat me.
"If you insist," I said, and started humming, feeling the Dvorrak score slip painfully from my mind.
When I told Rolland the story, he listened intently, then burst out laughing.
"You win," he said.
"Win what?"
"The truth, for entertaining me so well." He stifled his mirth by rubbing his tongue against his front teeth. "There are no assignments."
"The street organizations don't care?"
"There are no street organizations."
We were sharing the box, crowded onto its narrow, pinching slats. I turned away from him.
After a minute, he nudged my shoulder with his. I nudged back.
"Why did you lie to me?" I asked.
"It was a gift. I am teaching you not to be so easy a fool."
I muttered under my breath.
"When you are famous—when you are a hero cellist—you will say I was one of your teachers." He added, "And you
will
be famous, Feliu. You are a quick learner, that is for sure."
"Hmmph.
"
"But you need to be stronger—not to believe so much in everyone and everything." He added, "Fool that you are, I am surprised you have not yet lost this woman you are sleeping with. Another man will steal her, if you are not more careful."
And so it was with skepticism that I listened, some weeks later, as Rolland told me another story. It was a dreary afternoon of few tourists and fewer coins, and we were preparing to quit for the day and go our separate ways. I confessed my great desire to see inside the Liceo. Rolland said it was no problem to sneak in, but I'd better dress well, to fool the doormen and the ushers. If I looked bohemian, they might do more than just toss me out.
"Fifteen years have passed," he said with a dramatic nod as we sat on the wooden box. "But they still remember."
"Remember what?"
"You don't know? It was the Ramblas's bloodiest day. That's saying a lot."
I steeled myself for another tall tale, listening with an impassive face.
It happened in November 1893, Rolland said. The opera was Rossini's
William Tell—
"I know how it starts," I interrupted. "It's played by the cellos. A beautiful passage. I read that Rossini studied the cello, in Bologna. I tried playing that passage once and Alberto went all white and didn't speak the rest of the day."
Rolland leaned forward to close his violin case. This story had nothing—but nothing—to do with cellos. If I planned to interrupt again, he needn't tell it to me at all.
This thing happened, he continued—trying to conjure again the gloomy aura that I had deflated—in the second act, when Arnold and Mathilde meet in a valley by a lake, to pledge their love. Whispers quieted as the audience turned their opera glasses from each other toward the stage. A mining developer from Bilboa wrinkled his nose and twitched his walrus mustache, trying to conceal the emotion threatening to take control of his face. A lady named Doña Clementina reached for her décolletage and found herself twiddling the glistening, apricot-sized pearl that rested in the soft hollow at her throat. And up in the gallery, a man named Santiago Salvador attempted to extract two heavy metal objects from his jacket pockets.
The objects were precisely the size of oranges, except that they had spikes, and gleamed silver under the house lights that were always on, so that the wealthy could see and be seen—which was one reason everyone went to the Liceo, and the same reason that Santiago Salvador hated the bourgeois palace, which represented everything that must die in order for Barcelona to be reborn. However, no one was looking at Salvador. The flashing of the orange-sized objects could not compete with the winking of the chandeliers overhead, or the gleam of gilt that framed the murals on the walls. He decided to wait a little while, to savor the moment that might be his last, enjoying the feel of the spiky little orbs, which had the satisfying heft of bocce balls.