Authors: Andromeda Romano-Lax
"But," I said, surprised by my own forwardness, "that also means one who plays an instrument. If you talk about seeking comfort from your
tocador,
someone might think you are talking about your private musician."
"I'd like having a private musician. I'd prefer that to hosting fancy concerts with lots of people and guards, where the poor King is reduced to snoring."
I'd never been religious beyond the most perfunctory observances, even in the days when I had spent so much time with Father Basilio. But I felt myself praying now, with surprising intensity: Please let me teach you, play for you, do anything for you.
What I said was, "
A sus órdenes,
" bowing low to the ground. "
Para servirle.
" I'd said these phrases before, without meaning anything—you heard them constantly, all over the palace. But now I felt for the first time what they meant: to be ready for someone's orders, ready to serve in any way a sovereign requested.
"Well, you
can
do something for me," she said in a low voice. "If you'll just fetch me an ashtray, over there. That thing. Yes, attached to the clock. Is there anything in this palace not attached to a clock?" In an even lower whisper, she said, "I don't really smoke anymore. The society ladies have enough already to prattle on about. Who was that American actress arrested for smoking in public? Ridiculous. Anyway..." she trailed off, looking pensive. "I said I'd quit. I just came here to smell it. I miss him, that's all."
The ornamental clock had a wide base, with the ashtray mounted permanently in one side, and porcelain flowers as big as teacups blooming along its base. I pulled at it, expecting to carry it swiftly toward her, but it weighed too much. I grunted with surprise.
"That's it, bring it here," she encouraged me.
I tried lifting the monstrosity again, but only managed to rock it toward me, a centimeter or so, before letting it fall back on its felt-bottomed base. Its ticking blended with the pounding of my own addled heart. Looking back toward the Queen, I saw the caterpillarlike ash of her cigarette trembling, ready to fall, just a step away. I lunged toward her with my right palm outstretched.
But I had not steadied the clock sufficiently. Just as I reached the cigarette, taking it from her fingers, I heard a crash and turned to see an exploded galaxy of porcelain shattered against the parquet floor—fragments of shiny red roses and fine white powder and shards of glass and one of the hands of the clock, a meaningless arrow now, pointing toward nothing.
At that moment, Walker cleared his throat from the doorway again, and the stubby cigarette burned to my fingers. I yelped and dropped it. Instantly I covered it with my shoe. Then I closed my eyes, steeling myself for the grip of halberdiers' rough fingers dragging me out of the room.
With my eyes still clenched, I heard Queen Ena's voice. "I don't think it can be saved. I'm so clumsy."
I forced myself to look. There were no guards in sight even now—just Walker with his back to me, his hands on his hips, surveying the mess.
"Perhaps they'll want some of the parts for restoring one of the other King Charles clocks," she said.
He muttered. "It isn't a King Charles. This is a Ferdinand VII, eighteen-twenty or thereabouts."
The Queen's eyelids fluttered. For a brief moment, I thought she might be on the verge of fainting. Then I realized she was only rolling her eyes.
"My God—do you hear that?"
"Yes, madam," Walker said without facing her.
"Silence." She did not bother to conceal her amusement. "A room without ticking!"
Walker left to summon help in cleaning up the mess. When the echo of his footsteps had faded sufficiently, Queen Ena said, "If you won't gossip about my smoking, I won't tell anyone you broke the clock."
I could barely speak, my throat was so tight with embarrassment. "I'm so sorry."
"Don't be," she said. "Charles and Ferdinand were obsessive collectors. There's no way to get rid of their clutter without the occasional accident. Would you be interested in touching anything else?"
I don't think I managed a coherent sentence after that—only a stuttering promise, as I bowed repeatedly and backed my way toward the doorway, to keep our secrets.
"I believe you. I really do." Then she dismissed me.
That's how it started: the first confidence, the first step along a long, discreet road to becoming the Queen's private
tocador.
I hoped she would send for me again right away, but as summer advanced, the heat soared, until even the birds seemed too tired to sing. The King returned and then left again, this time with the Queen and their three children. They had packed heavily, a chambermaid informed me, for an extended stay at San Sebastián. There, Queen Ena loved to swim out from the beach, far into the bracing Atlantic. Two armed and fully uniformed guards would follow her, treading laboriously as their black boots filled with salty water.
Back at the palace, I had my own treading to do—trying to stay dedicated to my lessons with Count Guzmán.
"Now we start again, we build," he announced one summer day as he began to teach me vibrato anew, using a metronome. It had not occurred to me to count the tremor of vibrato as one might count simple rhythms, to control with such precision what had once seemed spontaneous. With his arms he gestured to signify the vibrato's size; how far I should veer from the note being played—wider here, narrower there. "Here," he said. "Draw what I am showing you," and I took notes of his motions, creating a portrait of climbing and falling waves.
I spent weeks following the design of such sketches, and the tick of the metronome, and the arc of his finger in the air—slow at this passage, faster here. When my vibrato lost its rhythm, he signaled for me to stop—again and again. This, I thought, must be what it feels like to be a scientist, to dissect a bird. How could one ever think of it as a flash of feathers once one had seen it stiff on a table, opened up to reveal organs the size of olive pits, tiny bones and tinier veins?
The work was so detailed and so demanding that I paid little attention as July yielded to August, and the royal family returned, settling into their Madrid routines.
At some point late that summer I must have pleased even the unappeasable count, because he closed the metronome's wooden lid and said, "Good enough! You deserve a walk—it's a beautiful day. When is the last time you left the palace?"
He sent me on an errand to pick up some rosin and violin strings at a shop near the Plaza Mayor. I left the palace, still hearing the tick of the metronome in my head, pacing my steps to it, until I noticed what I was doing. If I was going to proceed through life in a march-step, I might as well have joined Enrique in Toledo. With disgust, I tried to vary my gait—a little faster, a casually arrhythmic lope. But being out of rhythm on purpose was harder than being in rhythm. And any kind of jarring gait made my weaker leg twinge. After a while, I gave up. I finished the errand, continued past the royal bakery, stared at the pastries in the window, turned back. I proceeded to a large square, sat on a bench, and watched children kick a ball around the dusty flagstones.
How was it vibrato had once sounded to me? Like honey. How did the cello once sound to me? The deeper notes like chocolate; the highest string like lemon. The resulting emotions: a pleasurable vibration, a painful tension, an opening. Never like a blueprint or mechanical drawing. Never like the tick of a machine.
Of course, there was a different kind of pleasure in understanding that all things could be designed, measured, and documented. An adult pleasure. But I don't think I ever regained my spontaneous approach to vibrato after that year, just as I'd never again have a relationship initiated as thoughtlessly as the one I'd had with Isabel.
Now, when the count and I began to study a new piece of music, we talked for hours before bow touched string, hashing out the details on paper like desert generals at a tent meeting. As we talked, questioned, compromised, I interpreted the count's heavy nodding as respect. One day, after I'd played my part of a new sonata, the Count said, "My daughter could learn something from you—your discipline, your self-control. And yet"—I braced myself—"this piece is still lacking something."
"Yes?"
"Expressiveness."
"Which part?" and I pushed the sheet music toward him, but he didn't reach his hand forward.
"All of it."
I thought he was joking. I laughed once and waited, a pencil in my open palm. It was as if the count expected me to throw the bird we had dissected so carefully back into the air—as if it would really fly, rather than fall back to earth, ruined.
"What would you like me to do, Maestro?"
"Perhaps you could use a break from your studies."
"But my studies are all I have."
"Then perhaps this is your problem. I've done my best to broaden your education, but you're still only seventeen years old. Much as you try to look and act like an old man."
Like an old man? But
he
had reinforced my sober attitude toward music.
He
had turned cold on me after I'd acted my age with his daughter.
"Live with the music for a while."
"What do you mean—
live
with it?"
His voice took a snappish turn. "You think you'll learn everything about the cello overnight? Without struggle? Without trial and error? Nothing is that way."
He lowered his voice. "Make it your own, is all I am saying. The King has requested my services in some official matters. I will let you know when I am available for private lessons again. In the meantime, I've set up a quartet with three of my other students—you'll meet with them each Tuesday and Thursday. I expect none of the trouble you had with my daughter."
I didn't want to part with the count so abruptly. I pushed him for details about his business with the King, but he shrugged off my questions. "You've never been interested in politics before, Feliu. It's nothing for you to trouble yourself about."
But hadn't he told me to take an interest in something other than my cello studies?
"Cultivate some interests," he reiterated. "But don't forget whom you serve. Cultivate innocent interests, I beg you."
I'd been apathetic about court politics. I knew that the Cortes and the King's cabinet changed frequently; I barely managed to memorize a new minister's name before a successor was named, every change alienating some people and enriching others. But I did not know if this was how things always had been and should be, what it said about the King or Spain's future.
Now, two developments fed my interest. One was the count's sudden unavailability and incommunicativeness, which catalyzed my own contrariness. The other was simple excess leisure, that classic fomenter of mischief. Without lessons, I lingered at mealtimes and straggled through the hallways, pausing at the thresholds where chambermaids and court apprentices gathered. I did not ask questions; I simply listened, benefiting from my reputation as a quiet young man whose tongue never wagged.
A cook told me about the King, "He's like a boy who rearranges his toy soldiers again and again, for lack of anything better to do."
"A meddler," agreed the man whose only job was to dust the hundreds of antique jars in the royal pharmacy.
Others used similar terms, criticizing King Alfonso for destabilizing the government every time he intervened in parliamentary matters. They said he was inconsistent and rash, concerned mainly with consolidating his own power. He had long been a fanatic supporter of the army, but his increasingly cozy relationship with the Church worried Madrileños. The Catholic Church had grown richer in recent years; it now owned one-third of Spain's wealth, with investments not only in plantations and railways, but in banks, shipping—even the cabaret business. It sided with employers over workers, and I'd felt its control over the schools even back home in Campo Seco.
"What kind of sin is liberalism?' our catechism teacher had grilled us.
"It is a most grievous sin against faith," we children had answered in one voice.
"Is it a sin for a Catholic to read a liberal newspaper?"
"He may read the
Stock Exchange News.
"
Now, liberals were mounting a campaign demanding that certain unregistered clerical orders begin to pay taxes. Would the King step forward and ask the wealthy Church to pay its share? After all, he had been willing to offend the Church at least once, by marrying Ena, a converted Protestant. If he didn't take a serious stance now—if he continued to treat politics as sport or seduction—then others would step forward to press for change. Anarchist unions were organizing into a powerful
Confederación Nacional de Trabajo.
At the same time, insurrections were brewing in distant provinces.
Palace dwellers noticed that the King vacationed less and inhabited the Palace's reception rooms and marble-floored galleries more. He changed clothes constantly—five times or more each day—so that each time he strode toward some important meeting, it was in a new suit. He enthusiastically attended the military parades that seemed to become more frequent with every passing month.
I had been introduced to him once, in a palace reception line.
"Musician? What section?" he'd asked.
"Strings. Cello, Your Majesty."
"How do you walk with that?"
"I don't, Your Majesty."
The King had a pronounced underbite, like all the Bourbons, and his jutting lower jaw tightened at my response. "Well, there must be a way," he said. "Use a little ingenuity, young man."
The other direct result of the King's new homeland preoccupation was that Rodrigo, my roommate, the architect-apprentice, no longer traveled constantly, to Paris and Lisbon and beyond. Now he was more often at the palace, earning his royal stipend by helping to realize the King's expressed desire to make Madrid more like his beloved Paris. He began to stagger home each night under armloads of blueprints labeled in French.
"Are we to get an Eiffel Tower?" I asked him.
"Who needs a tower? The King wants another
riz.
"