Authors: Andromeda Romano-Lax
"He'll be fine," Tía said, her mouth full of rice.
"Everyone has it," Mamá said. "And with the heat—what misery. The church will be cool, though. He'll sleep through most of it."
I cleared my throat. "Does she have to nurse the baby at the table?"
Luisa ignored the comment, but my mother's face darkened. Percival looked at our mother, then cast a sidelong glance toward me. I felt everyone's eyes on me, expecting an apology.
"Can't she go into another room?"
My mother set down her fork.
"It's not very discreet—that's all I'm saying. You asked me what happened to my appetite."
Mamá wiped her mouth with her napkin. She took a deep breath. "How—and where—does Queen Ena nurse her infants?"
"I haven't seen her do it," I stammered. "Maybe someone does it for her."
Percival snickered.
"She certainly has many babies," Mamá said. "Close together, and not very healthy, so we hear. If she isn't nursing them herself, perhaps that is the problem."
"Can't we talk about something else?"
"I nursed you at the table, Feliu," she said. "In the church, in the street, on the stair."
She was reminding me of my beginnings, putting me in my place.
"Please, Mamá—"
"I wouldn't look to royalty for lessons in how to live," she said. "I'm glad you're doing well in Madrid, but don't forget—it's not real life, living at court."
"Actually, I've received a surprising honor," I started to say, wondering how best to mention the sapphire without seeming to boast.
My mother seemed not to hear. "Watch and learn and prosper. But don't lose your head."
I persevered. "Not so much an honor, as a kind of reward..." But it was coming out all wrong. "I suppose," I tried again, smiling weakly, "you'd call it more of a gift."
My mother's stern eyes met mine. "In life, there are no gifts. Do you remember the free violin lessons?" Her voice wavered. "Do you remember the piano?" She tossed her napkin on the table and left the room.
Luisa broke the long silence that ensued. "
Have
you gotten to see much of the Queen?"
"The back of her head, mainly," I said.
Percival laughed. My self-deprecation had earned me brief entry back into the fold. But I knew I wouldn't tell them about the sapphire now.
***
Hours later, Percival shook me awake. I reached toward him in the dark, felt the thick coarse fabric of his sleeve and smelled something like turpentine. It turned out to be rank home-brewed liquor—stronger and less skillfully brewed than my father's regional liqueur.
"Get dressed."
"Why are you wearing a coat?"
I sat up and banged my head. I'd forgotten I'd gone to sleep under the dining-room table, feet splayed toward the open balcony doors. From the street, I heard a light whistle, followed by stifled mirth: Percival's friends, waiting for us.
Outside, I stood at a distance while Percival concluded, in muffled whispers, some long-simmering argument with one of the other men—was that little Jordi? And Remei's cousin, too? I heard my old nickname, Cerillito, and Percival saying that he'd hidden a wheelbarrow near the church, to aid our escape; if I couldn't run fast enough he'd push me in it. I didn't press for further details. I was more concerned with straining to hear what had been said about me, and finding satisfaction in Percival's insistence that I come.
Under the footbridge someone had stored three lanterns and a pile of fat sticks. When the first lantern was lit, I finally saw the faces. The flame leaped, the shadows settled, and where I expected to see full cheeks and tousled hair, I saw red eyes and trembling Adam's apples, protruding above the edges of tightly tied bandannas. These were not boys, they were men, and they did not look merely mischievous. Laughter had petered out into nervous chuckles, and then into anxious throat-clearings punctuated with barked commands, issued at half-volume. Jordi wrapped a rag around a stick while he told us that back home, his son was coughing flecks of blood and his wife was distraught; he couldn't stay away long. He drained the bottle Percival had brought and threw it hard against one of the bridge's wooden pilings, where it shattered. I was still thinking:
Little Jordi is married? He has a son?
"Percival—where are we going?"
"I told you," he said. "The church."
"What are we doing there?"
He turned his back to me. I heard Remei's cousin say Father Basilio's name. He accented the last symbol and lengthened it—Basili'oro, "Basil of the Gold."
"Father Basilio isn't rich," I said to the others' backs. "He doesn't even eat meat."
A man called Quim started lighting his rag torch and the others flapped their arms at him, telling him to save it until they were on the other side of town. He dropped the torch and stepped on it, struggling to suffocate the flame.
"I don't mean just on Fridays. I mean on all days."
Quim swore under his breath. A gurgle erupted from another man's throat—a forced, drowning laugh.
"He doesn't have a housekeeper," I continued—that was a polite word for a live-in girlfriend. Most of the priests had them.
No one heard me.
"We used to bring him—right, Percival?—we used to bring him tomatoes."
"We 'll give him tomatoes," one of the others muttered.
"Why waste tomatoes?" someone asked. "Use cobblestones."
I said, "If this is about money, you're going to the wrong place. You should see Father Basilio's socks!" But my attempt at humor came out as a squeak. In Madrid, I had grown used to turning heads as soon as I pulled my bow across a string. Here no one listened to me.
Only Percival cocked his head in my direction, granting me a profile backlit by the flicker of Quim's lantern. "The Church is sitting on a fortune," he said.
"But our church isn't
the
Church."
"They refuse to pay taxes, while our neighbors are losing their farms—except Oviedo, of course." That was the duke, the one Don Miguel Rivera worked for. "He's twice as rich as when you ran off to Barcelona." He said it as if the two things were connected: the rising power of the aristocracy and my pursuit of a musical career.
Percival turned back toward the others. The huddle tightened; I stood outside of it.
"Father Basilio will recognize you," I said, pulling on Percival's sleeve. "How can you do this the night before your nephew's baptism?"
Percival spun and hovered over me. He laid his hands across my shoulders, stooping so that his forehead touched mine. "Basilio will stay inside," he whispered. "He knows from the last time. These fellows won't hurt anyone. They're just sending a message."
"It's wrong," I said.
"You're just soft on the priest."
"Not him—it could be anyone. There are better ways to do things. There are better ways to send messages."
Percival said, "You'd like us to talk to someone in the Cortes? Someone handpicked by Oviedo? Someone the Rivera brothers do favors for?" He pushed away from me and forced a chuckle. "Or do you mean the King? Maybe you're right. Go talk to him. We'll wait here." When I didn't speak or move, he said, "What have you ever discussed with the King? Horseracing? Whores? Don't pretend you have his ear. Our kind of people never have his ear."
"Please, Percival." I said softly, ignoring the impatient glances of the others. "You don't have to be involved."
He shook his head slowly, grabbed my ears and made my head swivel in time with his. We were boys again, but only for a second.
"
Somos o no somos?
"
"
No somos.
We should stay out of this mess."
"Stay out? We 're in it."
"Not me."
"You want to see the bulls through the barrier, eh? No risk?"
"I don't want to see anything," I whispered. "I'm not going."
"They'll wonder about you.
I
wonder about you sometimes, brother. Which side are you on?"
"I'm not on any side. Percival—you shouldn't be doing this." I reached out to embrace him, but he stepped backward, into the darkness. The lanterns had been snuffed—Quim's torch, too. The smells lingered—oily, soaked rags, the acrid smell of Quim's burned shoe. The group was slumping away from me—uneven footsteps, clattering along the stony riverbed of the dry wash. Then they scaled the riverbank, cleared a small hill, and vanished.
I fought sleep the rest of the night, waiting for the sounds of Percival's return. An hour before dawn, I heard footsteps on the stairs, and surrendered to confusing, long-delayed dreams. In what felt like minutes, the house was bustling again. Luisa was kicking at my feet, extended beneath the table, and my mother was dragging the blanket from my bare legs and chastising me for sleeping too long on an important day.
The walk to church was agonizing. I held back, delaying everyone, while my mother clucked sympathetically about my legs, a ready-made excuse. Down every alley and around every turn, I looked for signs of the previous night's malice. The scorch mark I saw darkening a fine stone house was really just a long morning shadow. The windowpane on the school building had been cracked a week earlier, my mother informed me, by boys playing
pelota
in the plaza. I was imagining the horrible shouts of men with torches while Mamá mused, "It's funny to say, but it's almost pretty, the way the cracks catch the early light. It looks like a dew-covered spiderweb."
Coming around the last corner, with the church tower in view, I saw a pile of white robes, a collapsed figure in the street. I gasped and tripped into Mamá's side, steadying myself against her arm. But it was only a sheet blown off a balcony clothesline. A young girl waved down to us from the balcony and then appeared at street level a moment later, to retrieve her muddied linen while her unseen mother moaned above us, lamenting the wasted effort. The little scene made Luisa laugh; she had been walking just ahead of us, with baby Enric in her arms, both of them radiant, as if there 'd never been a more perfect morning.
Percival had taken another route. Avoiding me at the house that morning, he'd found an excuse to leave early by volunteering to stop at the bakery to pick up the special pastry that had been ordered for the occasion. Or so he said. I rehearsed what I would tell my mother if Percival never showed up—if he jumped on a train bound for Alicante or Cádiz, and was never seen again. As we crossed the plaza, I was still shaping the words in my head when I heard Luisa say, "There he is, coming with the pastry box. I want to get inside and settle the baby before the others arrive."
No graffiti, no broken glass—just the cool church, the smell of dusty darkness and the flicker of candles. Perhaps the boys—the men—had decided instead to hike into the hills, unearthing hidden bottles. Perhaps they had wobbled all the way to the shack of ill repute where Juanita, the aging orphan girl, lived.
My thoughts were interrupted by a tap on my arm: Father Basilio. From one side, his smile looked normal and welcoming. Then he turned. The left side of his face drooped. Swelling half-closed one purple eye. A vertical gash ran just in front of his ear.
"I must..." he said in a low whisper, his voice strained.
Mamá, standing next to me, turned and saw his face. "Father! What happened?"
"An accident. It's nothing."
Ignoring her alarm, intent on his message, he persevered, pinning me with one beetle-bright eye while the other remained an unfocused and watery slit.
"There is a name I need to tell you—"
Heart pounding, I steadied myself to hear the recriminations.
"Because you will understand the importance," the priest continued. "You have the position now; you will tell the court of Madrid."
He expected this to become a national matter? I looked around, panicky, for my brother. He was sitting to one side, relaxing in the church pew, demonstrating oblivion with a well-practiced poker face.
"That they should never forget"—and here Father Basilio gestured dramatically with his robed arms—"Scarlatti."
I froze, trapped between the priest's grand gesture and Mamá's confused stare.
"Domenico Scarlatti!" the priest said again, feigning offense at my flustered ignorance. He started to laugh, but the movement quickly became a grimace, sealing his swollen eye completely.
I explained to Mamá, "Scarlatti. He was the Italian composer who came to the Madrid court in the 1700s."
"Will you do that for me?" he asked. "Remind them. Just remind them." His eyes rolled slightly upward and refocused over our heads. At first I thought it was a reaction to pain in his face. But it was only a form of relaxation—a habitual escape from a deeper pain. He lifted a finger from beneath his robe and began to mark a silent, spry rhythm, as if he were imagining the harpsichord, actually hearing it, erasing his pain note by note, in soothing, measured echoes. He did not want Mamá to ask him about his face. He did not want to tell me who had hurt him. He wanted to think about his music, to imagine it in his mind 's ear, to let it rise and swell and keep him company in this town of disloyal parishioners. Surely he'd seen their faces the night before.
As suddenly as his finger had started marking time, it stopped. "Will you?" he said again.
"Of course."
"No one honors him anymore. In Spain, his works are being forgotten. Perhaps if they had a special royal concert, or named something after him. Perhaps a new building, or at least a statue ... We shall talk again," he continued. "I would love to hear you play, one of these days. You didn't bring your cello? What a shame. But now—here they come."
Father Basilio gestured toward the open church doors, where six elderly black-clad women filed into pews, fanning themselves all the while. Behind them came Don Miguel Rivera in black jacket and open-throated white shirt. He gestured grandly to an open seat, reserved for the short, stout second wife he had finally married, a year earlier.
"Don Rivera has made a special contribution in honor of your nephew's day of honor," Father Basilio said. "He is a pillar in this crumbling town. As you may one day be. God be with you, Feliu."
By the next day, I was feverish and congested. The strain of travel and three sleepless nights had weakened me, and accepting several kisses from bubbling, fussing Enric had sealed my fate. I spent the rest of my visit in bed, coughing, light-headed, miserable—and grateful, because this forced reclusion kept me from seeing any more of Campo Seco.