Authors: Andromeda Romano-Lax
She gestured toward a nearby chair, motioning for me to move it closer to her and take a seat.
"There are new problems, of course," she said, her voice becoming more businesslike. "The men in the Cortes who resist the King's vision, who would rather have dissension when our country is fragile. It's always fragile, they say. Well, yes, it's true! But whose fault is that?"
She continued, "The society churchwomen who refuse to accept me. The fuss they've made about a cross—the Protestant cross—being hung in the city. As if that is my doing, when I renounced my own faith. They'd prefer we remain in the Middle Ages, with no tolerance at all.
"I'm tempted to ask your opinion about that, coming from a small village. But I won't. What you have given me, Feliu"—she took my hands again, so tightly I could see the white tendons raised over her knuckles—"is refuge from all that. Relief from all that."
She twisted my hands in her hands again, and the heavy bracelet shifted, bouncing light off its multicolored gems: rubies, emeralds, and sapphires in antique settings; a row of large oblong stones dotted with smaller round gems. It was a gaudy piece, nothing at all like the icy diamonds and tiny pearls she usually wore.
"I don't wear it often," she said, noticing my glance. "Never in public. But it has meaning for me. Old things give me comfort. This is a very old bracelet." She held her arm out toward me, displaying it. "How old, do you think?"
I imagined King Alfonso strolling through the streets of Paris or Vienna during one of his trips abroad, a black jewelry box in his hand. "Four years old?"
"Four years?" she laughed. "Closer to four hundred. It belonged to Queen Isabella. Do you know what the history books say, about how she financed Columbus's discovery?"
I shook my head.
"By pawning her jewels. She didn't want to borrow from the Jews."
"This was found in a pawnshop?"
"No," Ena chuckled softly. "This was the bracelet she hid away. The colors reminded her of stained-glass cathedral windows. It was a piece of her that had nothing to do with her sovereign duties. She never wore it in public. I admire that she refused to part with it. A collector would misunderstand this bracelet—he would see it as a symbol of the Spanish conquest. I see it as the opposite. I see it as the symbol of a woman refusing to be conquered."
This was a speech she'd practiced, for which I made an insignificant audience. But I
did
understand. The bracelet was a testament to purity, integrity, and independence. She was nothing like the King, with his revolving-door ministers and complicated intrigues.
She gestured for me to touch it. "Have you ever touched something so old?"
There was an olive tree, just beyond our Campo Seco house, that my mother said was five hundred years old. I'd hung from its branches and rested beneath it, listening to its dry branches creak in the hot wind. But I didn't say that, of course. Tentatively I reached out a finger and traced the gleaming metal surrounding the stones.
She sighed. "I'm not as devout as Isabella. I have never heard God's direct voice. But your music spoke to me. It helped me remember one part of myself, a part of me that existed before I came to Spain or married a king. I want to honor that. Choose one, Feliu."
She wasn't giving me the whole bracelet, just one stone, a small one that wouldn't be missed. She 'd have the empty setting and adjacent links removed; it would fit her narrow wrist better that way.
"The mother-of-pearl on your bow gave me the idea," she said. "I thought you could replace it with something more valuable. To remember our time together."
I had no trouble choosing. I looked into her pale eyes and found my voice. I said, "The smallest blue sapphire."
***
On the train ride home, I snatched only the shortest naps, with the bow tube in my arms, my cheek pressed against the leather. I could imagine the sapphire glowing inside. At one point I had a nightmare that I opened the tube only to see water spill out, as if the sapphire had been a chip of ice and had melted in my feverish embrace.
When another passenger entered my compartment during one of those brief naps and tapped me on the shoulder, my arm flung itself at him like a sprung lever. I awoke to the sound of him grunting, trying to catch his breath. My fist had caught him in the stomach. The edge of a red-roofed building was visible outside the window; beyond that, gaunt cypress trees that looked like tall, thin men until I rubbed the sleep from my eyes.
The train had stopped, which only confirmed my sense that a robbery was underway. "
Jamón,
" the stranger wheezed, lowering himself into the padded seat opposite me. "Sandwiches—they're selling them on the platform. I thought you should know."
He was a gray-haired farmhand, wearing wide-bottomed trousers and unlaced work shoes with flapping tongues. I apologized to him, wiping a slick of drool and sweat from my jaw. By the time I shook myself fully awake, the train was moving again. My stomach was growling, but I'd missed the chance to buy food. He saw the disappointed look on my face and held out a handful of almonds, drawn from his pocket. I ate them without picking away the bits of hair and lint, not wanting to offend him.
"What's in there, anyway?" he asked.
"Surveyor's equipment." I said without thinking. "Railroad detail." I tossed more almonds into my mouth, to stifle my own impulse to keep embellishing.
I told myself I was concerned about thieves. But if so, why was I already planning, on the second train south from Barcelona, not to show my gem-studded bow to my own family? At least, not right away.
I didn't expect them to covet my treasure. Shouldn't I exhibit this proof of royal favor? Didn't I owe it to my mother? Wouldn't it explain who I'd become to Percival and Luisa, whom I hadn't seen once since leaving Campo Seco? Of course I would show them the bow and its new gemstone.
Enrique was the only sibling from whom I hadn't grown apart; we 'd continued to exchange at least one letter a month since I'd moved to Madrid. Unfortunately, he wouldn't be in Campo Seco. He'd been posted to El Ferrol, a tiny garrison village in the far north, on the coast. It was an unglamorous posting—the uniforms plainer than the ones he 'd worn in military school, the pay entirely inadequate for someone his age, trying to woo a wife. But he was still fond of the military life, and he had close friends—among them Paquito, who'd been assigned the same posting and whose parents happened to live close by.
The swaying train allowed me hours both to worry and to daydream. I recalled the luthier's astonished face when I brought the stone to him, directly after leaving the Queen. His eyebrows had lifted when he heard it was a gift from her, and had lifted even higher when I told him I wanted the sapphire placed on the inside of the frog, facing me, rather than on the outside, where it would be seen most easily by an audience.
Before I'd left the palace for Campo Seco, a messenger had delivered a final note from the Queen. I imagined she had changed her mind and wanted the gem back, but she was writing only to request that I return within ten days. King Alfonso wished me to perform at a public event—he would explain more upon my return.
Para servirle,
I'd responded. What else?
The train arrived in Campo Seco several hours late, at the hottest part of the day. I was the only passenger to disembark. The town was asleep and no one was waiting for me. I was glad, even if it meant limping uphill with my bags. I'd been away three years. I'd earned money, had a lover, befriended a queen. I'd met—a second time, though he claimed it was the first—the nation's most famous pianist. I'd learned to play the cello. How did everything feel now? Disappointingly familiar: bleached, shrunken, and inadequate.
The glinting foot-worn sidewalks of Campo Seco were even narrower than I remembered, barely a ledge flanked by the town's long rows of connected stone buildings. After a block of rubbing my battered suitcase against walls, I gave up and walked up the middle of the cobblestone street instead. Legs tiring, I found myself looking around for an electric tram, only to laugh out loud—Campo Seco had no electric tramlines or even "blood trams," pulled by horses. It was a town for walkers, for shepherds, for bored farmhands tapping the street ahead of them with olive-felling sticks.
I'd never noticed how plain it all was—no tile mosaics or exotic sculptural adornments, as in Barcelona; no columns or vast white flagstones, as in Madrid. Everything was dark yellow, or a cracked light red. The color of soil. The color of mud. As I passed, the houses' oak front doors—curved at the top, wide enough to fit a cart—looked more than ever like barn doors to me. Passing under a second-story balcony, I heard a softly explosive glottal noise; I thought of a rooting pig, then realized I was hearing snoring. Someone was taking his afternoon nap above me, with the doors thrown open.
My family's door was just as barnlike as the others. When Luisa opened it, she shrieked and buried me in kisses, then tried to race me up the stairs to the main floor, just as we'd done as children. But now she was too wide. I stepped back to let her climb ahead of me, and she bunched up her skirt and scaled the stairs with exaggerated steps, mocking my gentlemanly gesture. Walking behind her, I noticed the dirt on her bare feet, the thick yellow pad of her cracked, calloused heel and the width of her calf, flaring muscularly from her Achilles tendon.
Upstairs, I dug into one of my bags and pulled out the white gown I'd bought for my nephew Enric, finished at the bottom with a satin ribbon.
"
Lindo!
" Luisa called out with delight. Then taking it in her hands, "But it's so tiny!"
"The storekeeper said it would be just right for a baptism."
"For a one-week-old's baptism, but not for a one-year-old's."
She continued to hold it up, as if the fabric might widen if she stared at it long enough.
My mother came and put her arms around my waist. "That's what she gets for waiting."
"Mamá," Luisa protested—and I did not need to hear the rest, to know this argument had waxed and waned for a year, sustained by irregular letters from the baby's father, an atheist, serving in Morocco.
"Keep it for the next baby," came Tía's leathery voice from a dark corner—the most optimistic thing I'd ever heard the old lady say.
"Have you heard from him?" I asked Luisa, under my breath.
"Not lately."
There was an awkward pause, and then I was nearly knocked over by Percival, who had grabbed me from behind.
"You're skinny!" my eldest brother shouted, looming over me.
I struggled free. "You're blue." His loose white tunic was speckled with paint. There were smears even on his large ears, which protruded from his stubbly scalp, all close-shorn except for a large black forelock over his forehead. "Have you become an artist?"
"I have."
"I heard nothing about it!"
"My exhibition finishes tomorrow." His lips were twisted into a braggart's pout. My mother was smiling.
"Finishes? You mean closes? Where?"
"Here, in Campo Seco. I am the next Picasso."
"I had no idea. Mamá, Luisa—why didn't you mention it in your letters?"
Tía sat in the corner, fanning herself stiffly, scowling at all of us.
"All that music has left you blind, Feliu," Luisa laughed. "Look up!"
I did. The ceiling was the same color as the paint flecks—pale blue, except for the exposed dark-wood beams, just as it had always been, in this and every room. The sky-blue surface, freshly painted, should have looked familiar. I'd stared at it for years.
"Your old room is the only one that's still wet, and the smell is strong," my mother said, ladling the food onto dishes. "You'll have to sleep out here, on the floor."
"If you can sleep on a floor, given what you're used to," my brother added. "We hear the palace beds are so high off the ground, you get nosebleeds."
I was still catching my breath, still laughing, but there was something else in my voice; I heard it myself as it slipped out, an off-key note. "Percival—you're not a painter?"
He pushed my shoulder a little too hard to be friendly. And then, to make up for it, he pulled our father's old chair away from the table, gesturing for me to take the place of honor, though he was older. I stalled, unsure. Mamá and Luisa called out in unison, "
La comida está fría,
" and their combined voices woke the baby sleeping in the corner. I reached out a hand, waving to catch his attention, but his eyes were deep, wet wrinkles of fury. Luisa smiled apologetically and carried him to the table, where he bawled through the dinner blessings. Mamá tried to hurry the routine but Tía's mouth kept moving long after the rest of us had crossed ourselves.
I kept waiting to feel more comfortable in my home, more comfortable with my family, but the feeling never materialized. The low point came during the second course, as we worked our way through the gluey pink rice and rubbery shrimp. At a grunting, suckling noise, I looked up, thinking it was Tía extracting the last bits of meat from the tails. But it was Enric. Luisa was nursing her red-cheeked baby at the table. As he sucked, one tightly curled fist punched first at the air and then, with more satisfaction, at the soft white drum of her breast. She continued eating, lifting her fork each time over his flailing arm. A part of one dark nipple was visible, level with her plate.
I stopped eating.
"You said they starved you on the train," Mamá protested. "Where's your appetite?"
"It's good, Mamá. I'm tired."
"Tired? You need to eat. Have seconds. After all that travel."
"Travel is the problem," I said. "It unsettled my stomach."
"Percival, pass me his plate." She held out her hand.
"No, Mamá. I'll have some more wine. See? A half-glass more."
"You can drink, but you can't eat? Is that what court life has taught you?"
Luisa was still filling her cheeks with rice; the baby kept letting go of her nipple and then finding it again, pushing his face into her breast. Luisa sighed. "He can't latch on properly. He's all stuffed up with a cold. Do you think he'll be all right for the ceremony tomorrow?"