Authors: Andromeda Romano-Lax
"Don't you stand when a lady enters the room?" she asked. I stumbled to my feet and waited for some acknowledgment. She prolonged my discomfort by studying me from head to foot.
"You looked much taller sitting down," she said.
"Isabel," her mother chided, and nodded at me to return to my seat. "Come hear this funny story." And I had to repeat it all over again: my insipid conversation with royalty, and my tactless mention of family sorrows, which had ended miraculously with the offer of a cello.
Count Gunmán's daughter feigned huffiness. "We've had family tragedies, haven't we? If I'd known it was so easy to get a royal instrument, I would have cried to the Queen Mother myself."
The count humored his daughter with a smile, the dark skin around his sunken eyes crinkling. Except for his impairment, he was a handsome man, clean-shaven, with a sharp jaw and a fine wardrobe that his wife and daughter fussed over, just as they took turns satisfying all his needs.
"I've played for the royal family at least two hundred times. Haven't I, Papá? I mean, really..."
The count wiped his mouth with his napkin and then set it aside, raising his palm, commanding full attention before he spoke. Isabel stopped talking. The condesa set down her fork. I had just loaded a toolarge bite into my mouth and it took me a while to finish chewing, which evidently he could hear. Giving up, I swallowed hard, and winced at the knot of food caught in my throat.
"Now seriously, Feliu," he said. "About the Queen Mother. You were lucky today. But be careful. In this palace, she is the one to impress. She loves music, and she loves her musicians, and she loves her private chamber-music parties. But don't make any mistakes."
I nodded and swallowed again, my throat still aching slightly.
"If she asks you your favorite cellist, the answer is Boccherini. He was court composer a century ago, but she acts as if it were yesterday. If she asks you what foreign language you are learning, the answer is French."
"That's true," I started to say, my mouth empty at last. "French and English, and a little German—"
"The answer is French," he repeated. "Now, what else?" He tilted his face towards the condesa's. She didn't answer, but he nodded tersely as if she had.
"If she asks you about the weather outside, fine," he continued. "But if she asks you about the temperature inside, play dumb. Every winter, there is some disagreement about whether the palace is too cold."
"Every winter for the last three years," Isabel interjected.
"What happened three years ago?" I asked. The count, the condesa, and their daughter all stared at me.
Of course. The royal wedding.
"All the members of the royal family have their own apartments, obviously," the count continued, and I nodded again, because I had heard it was so, and I had puzzled over the idea of a young man sleeping in a bedroom far from his young wife.
"And likewise," he said, "each has his own friends. And the friends of one are not necessarily the friends of the others, if you understand me. So be careful what you say, and to whom; or better yet, say nothing at all."
The condesa smiled heartily and lifted her glass for a toast. "Here's to the luck of being a musician—someone who does not need to speak, and so may live a long and happy life!"
Isabel lifted her goblet in front of her nose, so that her face was mostly hidden. But from the side, I saw her clowning, her lips puckered and her nostrils flared. She noticed me noticing, and made a show of becoming sober again, as if she'd only been fighting a sneeze.
Setting my glass back down I asked, "But why do I need to impress the Queen Mother most? Doesn't the King care about music?"
At this, Isabel guffawed, a spray of wine leaked from the condesa's mouth, and even the count chuckled tenderly, reaching out with fumbling hands to offer his own napkin.
"The King cares about polo," Isabel said.
"He doesn't go to the opera?"
"He goes, but not for the music. The problem is that he doesn't always come back."
The count's fond smile faded again. "You see why my not-so-young daughter hasn't married yet? She always takes things just one step too far."
Isabel looked down at her lap. I persevered: "And the Queen?"
This time, Isabel knew better than to speak. Finally the condesa, her chin wiped and her calm restored, answered me. "She
does
love music, actually. She hosted her own private concerts before Alfonsito, Jaime, and Beatriz were born. But three children in three years—I suppose she's tired. And even so, she hasn't done what they brought her from England to do."
The count cleared his throat, and for a second time conversation stopped. When it resumed, the subjects were dull and safe: "How are your accommodations? Have you written a letter to your mother yet?"—leaving my mind to continue mulling what had been left unsaid.
I was not too provincial and slow-witted to know what the condesa had meant, about the unfinished duties of Queen Victoria Eugenia—Ena for short. Her firstborn, Alfonsito, was a hemophiliac who had nearly died at his own circumcision. No one was supposed to talk about it, but it was hard to ignore the fact that he lived in his own corner of the palace, tended by nurses and doctors, rarely seen. Something also seemed wrong with one-year-old Jaime, who did not babble or turn his head at the sound of a clap. At least the infant Beatriz seemed healthy enough.
As for Queen Ena herself, she was said to carry herself as gloomily as had her grandmother and namesake. Though only twenty-one, she had a heavy weight on her shoulders. Bourbon heirs had always been scarce—King Alfonso himself had been born just months after his father had died—and the quest for healthy male children had become a national preoccupation.
Toward the meal's end, a footman came to the door and the count excused himself. Changing the subject, the condesa asked, "Your roommate, Rodrigo—is he a good match for you?"
"He says he spends most of his time traveling between Madrid, Lisbon and Paris. I suppose that means I'll have more privacy for practicing."
"How convenient."
I nodded, but I was still thinking about the royal family. "May I ask you one more question?"
The condesa leaned forward, eager to indulge in gossip before her husband returned.
"Do you like Queen Ena?"
"It's not our place to like or dislike," Isabel recited.
The condesa smiled at her daughter gently, then turned back to me. "Even if it were our place, and she were not our Royal Majesty, and she spoke our Castilian tongue with greater ease, I'd have to say ... we simply don't know her. That's the problem. No one does."
Pescado frito,
Isabel mouthed silently to me, forcing me to focus on her lips.
Taking my leave of them both after dinner, I waited until the condesa had turned away. I took Isabel's hand, shook it awkwardly, and said under my breath: "The Queen likes fried fish?"
"Frío.
The Queen is a
cold
fish, you imbecile." But she winked at me before closing the door.
My new cello was lustrously varnished, the color of amber. Its sound, however, was somewhat thin and brittle. "It must warm up," the luthier explained. "Every time you play it, you'll be vibrating the wood, changing its sound, helping it to mature like a fine wine." All the same, I was glad to have one familiar and constant thing: my bow.
I had lessons every day with the count in both cello and piano, as well as music theory. Unlike Alberto, a seasoned cellist who rarely played, Count Guzmán was a well-rounded dabbler who could pick up any instrument and play it competently, if not expertly. He had no stifled ambitions or regrets. Even his near-blindness, which had developed slowly over the last decade, didn't seem to dampen his spirits. He could still make out the occasional note or key signature on a page by holding it a centimeter in front of his brown eyes and moving it around slightly. On rare occasions, I saw him study a person or a painting in the same way, putting his face directly up to it and moving back and forth in small, irregular circles, like an insect pollinating a flower.
Most of the time, however, the count relied on his memory and his ears. That was his one regret, he told me cheerfully: that his sense of hearing hadn't become more acute as his vision failed. Wasn't that the expected compensation?
But no, he hurried to reassure me, not wanting me to think him morose. The true compensation was his family. Isabel and the condesa doted on him more every year, just as he needed them more every year. In a royal setting, this kind of intimate servitude was nothing strange—anyone of any rank had someone following after him, refilling his glass or pressing napkins into his lap, or bowing to his commands. "And if you think a blind man—or a king—is the only person who needs a retinue," the count told me pointedly, reading my thoughts, "then you are only beginning to understand the musician's life. A musician relies on people of all kinds: patrons, publishers, the audience. If you've brought any notions from Catalonia about the artist being an independent soul, leave them at the gate—they're rubbish."
Count Guzmán toyed with composition, but most of all he loved to teach. He had tutored many court musicians and even King Alfonso XIII, from the time the boy King was old enough to sit at a piano bench. The scores the count had used with royals and court prodigies were still marked from those long-ago lessons.
"That's where His Majesty would always stumble; counting was not his strength," the count would say nostalgically, listening to me play. "He couldn't wait to quit lessons." Or, "The Queen Mother let me help her with this piece. The
fortes
and
pianos
are all circled to remind her; she had a way of making every measure sound the same."
Had he ever taught the young Queen? Did she play? The count shook his head once, without clarification. Given the little that anyone would tell me, I imagined that if she did play piano, she would play quietly, timidly, without passion. On her wedding day three years earlier, a dramatic attempt had been made on her life. Everyone had marveled that the new Queen had shown no emotion at all, but continued to wave to the frenzied crowds from the palace balcony, her pale blue eyes blank as cornflowers. If she had sobbed, the gossips said, the people would have loved her more. But what did they know? Volume wasn't everything. Barcelona's streets had taught me that.
"Here is something different," the count interrupted my thoughts, extracting a worn sheet of piano music and running his fingers over its wrinkles. "Don't tell me—I recognize the paper. This is the Liszt piano concerto I kept from my last lesson with one of my best students. It was—what? Seven years ago. He never stayed anywhere for long. Anyway, this piece opens with some grueling hand positions. It's not for you, not this one."
"Why is it so ... creased?"
"That's where he stomped on it."
"Because he couldn't play it?"
I enjoyed the idea that even the count's best student couldn't play everything.
But he corrected me. "Oh no, he could play it. I think he was upset that he hadn't thought to write it."
Youthful brilliance didn't intimidate the count; nothing did. Unlike Alberto, he had a method for everything—unwavering steps he expected students to follow. He didn't spend much time marveling at my lack of formal training. In his experience, most students arrived in poor shape, their training often worse than no music education at all. He set about scrubbing me blank in order to begin our relationship fresh. It was invigorating at first, as any good scrubbing can be, until the flesh becomes raw.
Isabel frequently observed our lessons, as ready as her father to point out my failings.
"Solo, he plays like an angel," she announced one day after I'd played, with the count accompanying on piano. We were in the music room attached to the count's palace apartment, the tall doors drawn closed, the warm air thick with the smell of cut flowers.
"But in duet, or ensemble"—she turned her head dramatically—"it's not his fault, I know. Somehow he is...
stunted
is the word that comes to mind."
I sat up straighter in my chair and tried to look unconcerned.
"Isabel is right," the count said. "You're talented. But you have played alone for too long. Inconsistent tempi, unpredictable dynamic shifts, insufficient communication. They all point to the same thing. You have not learned to adjust to other musicians playing with you."
He rubbed his hand back and forth along his cheeks, his fingertips absentmindedly massaging the barest shadow of new stubble. "What I should do, really, is take him back to the beginning; just the cello, to start—there are problems even there. Best to delay any kind of ensemble work."
Isabel's mouth dropped. "That's the opposite of what I meant! We 're playing together in less than two weeks, in the royal salon. He needs
more
duet practice, not less. I'm not an accompanist for hire; he'd best learn to play as equals, and soon."
A maid entered to serve us hot chocolate. I welcomed the interruption and I knew the count would, too; he loved sweets almost as much as he disliked seeing his grown daughter upset. But Isabel continued her protest over the maid's beating of the whisk within the spouted silver pot. There was something artificial in her tirade, but I didn't yet recognize it for what it was: the invented drama of a palace-dwelling courtier's life, neither personal nor truly passionate. And yet my own passions felt inflamed, in response. I would have listened to hours of abuse, if only to watch her chest heave and her fists curl.
Finally the count stepped in. "She is trying to say that a duet is like dancing. You can't step on each other's toes.
De acuerdo?
" He paused for his daughter's agreement. She shrugged, then opened her mouth, ready to lecture me again.
But he preempted her. "Feliu, have you ever ridden a horse?"
"A mule," I said quickly. "I've ridden a mule."
Isabel groaned.
"A mule," the count repeated thoughtfully. "No, I don't think a mule moves as gracefully with its rider. That won't help here."