Authors: Andromeda Romano-Lax
Then one of the men said, "Just pretend it's a woman." It seemed a vulgar thing to say to a boy, though it made all four of them burst out in guffaws. The tall boy held his hand to his stomach as he doubled over, laughing; then he used the same hand to slick back his hair. The gesture drew my attention to his eyes, which were large and dark, accentuated by olive-tinted eyelids and above that, a deeply creased forehead.
Walking past the strange youth on my way to the main palace door, I felt the weight of dozens of eyes—the cigar-smoking men, the chauffeurs, guards in three different uniforms. At the door itself, the halberdiers rapped their long ax-topped pikes on the ground. The double-tap startled me, and I passed inside quickly and hobbled toward the main staircase, hoping the guards hadn't noticed me flinch.
I had reason to be nervous this day. Isabel had refused to rehearse with me after our last "lesson." Practicing my part alone, I'd told myself that I would muddle through just fine. I hadn't given any formal recitals; but neither had I learned to fear them. Back in Barcelona, I had made it through my audition with Don José. I'd simply pretend I was playing on the Ramblas.
We were to be the party's second act. The Queen Mother herself would go first, playing a short duet with the count. It had been arranged that the count would present this as a spontaneous idea, bowing low to the ground to beseech her to play, as if he had not been tutoring her for weeks. It was this duty—a diplomatic challenge as well as an artistic one—that had kept him from noticing the discord between me and his recalcitrant daughter.
All went well with the Queen Mother's duet. The applause of three dozen close friends put her into such a buoyant mood that, I dared to hope, even our inadequately rehearsed duet could scarcely threaten it.
The count stood between Isabel and me as we were introduced to the party guests, who were seated in a casual horseshoe of upholstered chairs. I tried to catch Isabel's eye, but she kept her head tilted resolutely away from me.
In the beginning, Isabel pretended she was playing solo and so did I, so that our rhythms and accents were merely out of step. But as the standoff heated up, Isabel decided to play over me, both faster and louder. The composition gave her an edge, because Schumann had loaded it with pianistic hyperbole. Isabel rocked her head and stamped her feet with so much force that she seemed on the verge of falling off the bench. Behind us, a woman gasped. Somewhere nearby, I heard a man with a low, reassuring voice respond, "Very fine—very modern."
I played as ferociously as I could in the shadow of Isabel's angry pounding, trying to subdue her. I brought my bow close to the bridge, working a deep growl from the strings, and I leaned into every stroke, letting my weight help me. At the most frenetic moment in the piece, I couldn't hear Isabel at all. For a fraction of a second I thought she had stopped playing, but when I glanced up, I saw her shoulders still heaving. Continuing to bow thunderously, I scanned to the right, and my eyes fell upon the Queen Mother. Her head was tilted slightly to one side, and her eyes were narrowed in an undecided expression, verging on annoyance.
Next to her, I was surprised to notice, was the tall boy. Now he was suited in formal clothes, although his thin calves were encased in riding boots that looked wrong for a music salon. His jaw was slack, his olive-lidded eyes nearly closed. He looked not just older now, but geriatric. Our sovereign. He may have been an uninspiring young man, but
I
was the fool who had failed to recognize a king.
Though I'd missed a short run of sixteenth notes and Isabel and I were more out of step than ever, I continued to look. Next to the King sat a woman with an oval face, perfectly white, her dark blond hair piled atop her head and her eyes as pale and distant as a cloud reflected in water. I'd never seen the Queen in person until that moment, but I had been told that her eyes hinted at some vacancy within. I didn't believe it. I'd spent enough hours staring at whole notes to know that what looked empty could often hold more than something that looked full.
Just when the music sounded its cacophonous worst, I thought I saw a twitch of amusement on the young Queen's thin lips. But then it was gone, and her face looked milky and dour again. I was still trying to figure out if I'd imagined the smile or really seen it when I came to the end of a rapid descending flurry of notes and dug into my lowest string.
A that moment, a shot rang out. The room erupted in screams and blurry motions. The King threw himself toward the Queen Mother's lap; whether to protect her or to take refuge in her, no one could say. Isabel made one last lurch to the side, slid off the piano bench, and collapsed on the floor. Someone yanked open the salon door, allowing two startled halberdiers to peer into the room.
The Queen herself was still sitting perfectly upright, as if she were being held erect by puppet strings. One finger of her gloved white hand seemed to levitate in the air, pointing at—we all craned our necks to follow the trajectory of her gesture—pointing at
me.
Or my cello, anyway. I twisted right and left, pulled the neck of my cello forward, and realized that the G string had snapped. No gun or bomb, just a popped string.
A wave of relief washed over the room, followed by rising chatter and giddy laughter. A guard came to inspect my cello. He examined the popped string, then peered inside the F-shaped sound holes and lifted aside the lapels of my jacket. As the hubbub in the room increased, I saw Isabel slip away. The tip of her nose was red and her cheeks shone with frustrated tears. The duet—thank God—was over, and I did not have to endure any applause, or the lack of it.
"Modern, you say?" I heard the Queen Mother saying above the background clamor, her head still tilted at that undecided angle.
"In Paris, people would have demanded an encore," a rotund man responded. His face was turned away from me, so that I could only see his broad, jacketed back.
"This isn't Paris," the Queen Mother said drily.
"Thank goodness.
Vive la différence.
But if you'd like a third act instead of an encore, I am ready to begin."
"Yes." She reached out to pat his arm with a surprisingly familiar touch while she forced a weak laugh. "Thank you, Justo. I think that would restore order beautifully."
I suppose my life to this point had been oddly, if backhandedly, blessed. Bad things befell me regularly, but often they seemed to work in my favor. From my father's death, I had received a bow; from my mother's doomed pairing with Don Miguel, I was granted flight to Barcelona; in the midst of radical uprising, I was promoted to musical study in Madrid. Now, this failed concert—which should have sent me packing—had attracted the attention of Justo Al-Cerraz for the second time in my life. This time he mistook me for a fellow mischief-maker.
After playing to a charmed audience, he extracted me from the Queen Mother's party and pulled me by the hand down a dark hallway, back to the parade grounds.
"My cello—"
"The count will take care of it. He's the one I am trying to avoid—his daughter, too, actually, but you've assisted me there." He stopped at a bright red car parked alongside the two silver ones I'd seen earlier.
"But he was your teacher. Didn't you come to visit him?"
"I came because the Queen Mother invited me," he said, lumbering up over a dip in the side panel and onto the padded leather bench in front. "She and I have our own history. Will you give me a hand here?"
Could one have a history with a sovereign? A sovereign
is
history.
"She knew I was in Madrid," he continued after he'd squeezed behind the wheel, breathing hard. "I don't say no to royal invitations." He gestured for me to get in on the other side.
"Where are we going?"
"On my personal farewell tour. I don't plan to come this way again. This is my last evening in Madrid—maybe forever."
I hadn't brought an overcoat. The dress shoes I'd borrowed from the count pinched my feet. "How long will we—" I was halfway in, one leg dragging when the motorcar lurched forward.
"Get in!" Al-Cerraz shouted, laughing, and we were off. "This model set the record three years ago. Forty-six kilometers per hour!"
Two halberdiers leaped out of our way and a guard managed to open the main gate just in time for us to pass through without hitting it. On the flagstone parade grounds the motorcar had glided smoothly, but once we hit the road beyond the palace, it erupted into violent vibrations on the loaf-shaped cobblestones. Al-Cerraz gripped the wheel with wide white fingers and clenched his teeth, but nothing could stop his cheeks and belly from shaking.
I lobbed questions at him over the roar of the engine—how long I had wanted to ask a prominent musician so many things! Only every third word transmitted. It was like trying to converse in another language, without subtleties, but between swerves and rattles, the answers came back: "...two hundred seventy-five days ... that's touring ... the first manager I've ever trusted ... Debussy, yes, but ... Pedrell, the father of Spanish music.lower spine, if we're not careful ... the prize in Rome ... the problem with sausages ... and then again..." I nodded eagerly trying to organize his words in memory, like little boxes of printer's type, which later—I hoped—could be arranged into meaningful messages. I wasn't certain he was saying anything worth knowing, but I felt lucky all the same—the wind in my hair, horses whinnying as we passed, men and women crowding into doorways along the narrow streets and recoiling as we showered them with clouds of dust. I had envied this man, resented him, but how quickly resentment turned to pride, how easily dislike turned into worship when one felt included.
We turned a corner, the car bucked and slowed, and in the sudden engine-dead silence my voice, barely audible before, emerged as an earsplitting screech: "...she said it was the best way!"
The car rolled another few meters. Al-Cerraz tugged at a glossy black knob and set the brake. He reached into his pocket for a handkerchief and I saw that he was shaking with laughter. "By making love, you said?" He wiped his brow, then brayed a final time and blasted his nose into the handkerchief. "Black snot—that's what you get driving. A windshield would be nice, and a roof. Then again, that would feel like being in a carriage or a train, all hidden away. I still think that motorcars are the way of the future. It fascinates me. Is there any more important question, really, than what will last?"
He said this without a hint of irony, even though his own motorcar had just rolled to a broken halt. Then, returning to the subject that had bridged the car's last gasp, "What gave you the idea that duet partners need to be intimate? Music as lovemaking—what a cliché!" He laughed again, and I looked away, to hide my red face.
"It's not your fault," he continued. "Isabel's, right? And mine—I put that into her head. Of course I did." He laughed again.
Al-Cerraz reached over and ruffled my hair with his large hand. "That's what you need—the windswept look! I hope you don't mind what happened. But why should you? Days behind closed doors with Isabel! I'm sure they were fun while they lasted."
He patted his thighs. There was a long pause. Finally he said, "The count is a good teacher. Stick with him, a year or two at least. Hear him out. Though he, like Isabel, can get stuck on a single motif. Has he told you that you are a modernist with classical hands?"
"A classicist," I said, "with modern hands."
"So there's the difference between us," Al-Cerraz said. "And some warning associated with Goya and women," he remembered, smiling wistfully.
So I was not special; not with Isabel, or with the count. They were reliving with me what they had lived and said and done with Al-Cerraz. I seemed destined to follow in this pianist's footsteps.
Which made me promise myself, at that moment, to focus on being as different from him as possible. Already, I had adopted my own more sober style of playing. That had been instinct, not artifice, but now I vowed to distance myself further from his flamboyance and the antics of so many musicians like him. My face would reveal nothing. I would aim always to channel the music, attracting no attention to myself, focusing on the larger aim ... which was? I wished he or someone like him could tell me.
Al-Cerraz studied my face, his eyes twinkling as they watered from the wind and the dust.
"Are you all right? Fernán, was that your name?"
"Feliu."
"Feliu, we must get this motorcar a drink."
"Petrol?"
"Water. It's a Stanley Steamer," he said, peering over the hood to the parched road. "In England, there were creeks at every turn. Where there weren't creeks, there were puddles. But here..." He wiped his forehead again.
"Maybe it's not the best motorcar for these parts," I said.
He bellowed indignantly. "Mercy—I invested in a dealership! But as they explained to me, where there are no creeks, there are troughs, even in La Mancha."
He reached behind his seat, pulled out a rectangular screw-capped container that looked like an oversized flask, and pushed it toward me. "This is why I never drive without a companion. Back one block and turn right—I'm sure I saw a horse trough back there near the lamppost, where the cabs park. Don't worry about me. I'll guard the car."
Off I went, retracing our route, brooding over what Al-Cerraz had said about Isabel and the count, trying to feel dislike for him, squirming at the recent memory of my pleasure at being asked to join him on this drive.
Fernán
—I said it out loud, bitterly. He didn't know my name. He just wanted a water carrier for his wretched steam machine.
Horse troughs.
I stubbed my toe on a cobblestone and felt a pain shoot into my hip. But someday, I thought, when motorcars take over the world, there won't be horse troughs every few blocks.
When things change, they don't change a little, they change a lot—so completely we can't even anticipate the reversals; what vanishes, what rises to take its place. What would last? Not Stanley Steamers. Not, I predicted, the music of Al-Cerraz.