Authors: Andromeda Romano-Lax
"Perhaps you should wait," the stationmaster was saying. "Who knows what's in it? Take it to the church. I'll have a wagon brought around for you."
But my mother blotted her face dry. "I've waited months," she said, and glared until the stationmaster patted his vest pocket and strode away.
As Mamá untwisted the wire, she whispered, "You've seen bones, haven't you, Feliu? It is probably mostly ashes, but there may be bones." She worked her fingertips under the lid. "Don't be afraid."
I held my breath and stared. But when my mother pried the lid free with a dull pop,
she
was the one who gasped. Inside, there were no bodily remains.
"Presents!" I cried out. "From Papá!"
Mamá studied the straw-padded contents, fingering each object in turn: a compass, a blue bottle, a glossy brown stick, a jungle cat carved from dark wood, a cigar box with a small blank diary inside. At the bottom of the box lay an old suit jacket, neatly folded, which she took out and held to her face, inhaling. Reluctantly, she lifted out two notes—one printed on a card, a few sentences surrounded by blank space; the other larger and rough-edged and handwritten. She read the first quickly and let it drop onto the sticky station floor, shaking her head when I leaned over to retrieve it. A breeze flipped the card over twice, then sent it toward the tracks. The second note she read slowly, silently, smoothing it against her lap. When she finished, she folded it carefully, tucked it away in a pocket, and sighed.
"They've broken their promise. Whatever remains they retrieved after the rebellion were buried in Cuba. The American victory changed their priorities. Now they're too busy getting out the living to worry about the dead."
The details meant little to me. Two months earlier, my mother had perched my siblings and me in a row of five dining-room chairs—even Carlito, who kept squirming off his seat—to tell us what had happened. Rebels fighting for independence from Spain had triggered an explosion in the harbor. The building where my father worked had caught fire, killing Papá and nine other men. Now America—a place that meant nothing to me, beyond the fact that Spanish ships had discovered it—appeared ready to enter the fray.
Mamá cupped my chin in her hand. "Your Papá should have lived three centuries ago, when the world was getting bigger. Now it's getting only smaller and more loud."
As if to prove her point, the train departed at that moment, wheezing and clanging, south toward Tarragona.
When it was out of view, she said, "Papá meant to deliver these gifts with his own hands. They're from his travels. He had his own intentions, but I'll leave the choice to you."
I picked up the compass first, watching the little copper-colored needle spin and bounce. Then the blue bottle. Then the jungle cat. They were enticing, but I did not choose them. Maybe I felt contrary on this rare morning alone with Mamá, away from the superior airs of my elder siblings; maybe I felt the need to reject the gifts that had the most clearly childish appeal. I picked up the one object that made no immediate sense: the glossy brown stick. At one end it had a rectangular black handle dotted with one small circle of mother-of-pearl. At the other end it had a fancy little curve, like the upswept prow of an ancient ship.
I lifted it out of the box. It was longer than my arm, a bit thicker than my finger, and polished smooth. I held it out in front me, like a sword. Then upright, like a baton.
"It's pernambuco—a very good South American wood," Mamá said, her eyebrows raised.
The anticipation on her face made my throat tighten. I returned the stick hastily to the box.
"Tell me," I said. "I don't want to choose wrong."
I expected her to reassure me. Instead she said, "You
will
be wrong sometimes, Feliu."
Her lecturing tone reminded me of the times she had helped tie my shoes, tugging the laces hard enough to upset my balance. I couldn't know that those days of playful rough-handling were numbered, to be replaced by a grief-filled overprotectiveness.
When I still hadn't chosen, Mamá asked, "Do you remember your Papá?"
"Yes," I answered automatically.
"You can still see him in your mind? As clearly as you can see me?"
This time, when I didn't answer, she said, "Always tell me the truth. Maybe other people need to invent drama. Not us. Not here."
I'd heard her say this earlier that year, as the survivors of the
Desastre
of '98 had straggled into town, living ghosts from failed faraway colonial battles. The Americans had invaded Cuba, Puerto Rico, and the Philippines, Spanish colonies already struggling for independence. The last vestiges of the Spanish Empire were collapsing around us while another empire rose to take its place. Now the soldiers and bureaucrats and merchants were returning—limbs missing, heads and torsos wrapped in stained bandages. Many who passed through Campo Seco seemed lost—they weren't our missing men, we had nothing for them, so why had they stepped off the train here? We rented our cellar to one of them, moving all the casks and wax-sealed bottles aside, furnishing the dark, cool room with a cot, one chair, and an old cracked mirror. The man paid in advance for a week's stay but left after three days, without explanation, prompting Tía to castigate Mamá, "I told you not to put the mirror down there. A man like that doesn't want to see his face."
I closed my own eyes and tried to see Papá. He was a blur, except for his dark mustache, thick under his nose, curled and twisted at the tips; and the wide bottom cuff of his pin-striped suit pants. I had clung to those pants while he directed the secular village choir. And I had perched high on his shoulders, smelling his hair tonic while we watched local processions. Papá had little interest in the Catholic festivals that clogged our village streets. But he had loved when the traveling musicians came, with their gourds and broomsticks strung as homemade mandolins, guitars, and violins. I'd begged my father to buy me instruments like those. That had been close to two years ago, when Papá had last visited home.
"The stick!" I called out suddenly. "Is that what he wanted for me to have?"
"
Bow,
Feliu. It's an unfinished bow, without the hair."
"I knew it!" I retrieved the stick from the box and began to saw at an imaginary instrument across my chest.
After a moment I stopped to ask, "What kind of bow?"
The question gave her pause. "It doesn't matter," she said, and part of me knew that she wasn't telling the truth. "One bow is the same as any other."
I danced in circles as my mother spoke with the wagoner and watched his assistant load the box onto the wagon bed. Then I remembered my unanswered question: "Is that what Papá wanted me to have?"
The wagon jerked forward, steered by an impatient driver and eager horses.
"Up, Feliu," she gestured, her arms beckoning me toward the seat. "Your brothers and sister are waiting for us. Father Basilio is expecting a coffin. You made your choice. Now come."
Back home, Enrique stole glances at my strange wooden stick, which made me hold it closer, working it under one armpit and finally down into one leg of my pants. But any incipient jealousy was dampened when he realized it was a musical object. "A bow?" he snorted, slapping my back. "I thought it was a musket plunger."
Enrique, age thirteen, was our little soldier; he claimed the compass, a handy instrument for making sorties beyond the olive- and grapevine-covered hills. Percival—at sixteen, an adult in our eyes—stayed above the fray, accepting the blank diary. In the years to come, he'd never write a word in it, only numbers: gambling odds, winnings, and debts. Luisa, age eleven, wrapped her chubby fingers around the jungle cat, refusing to let go until Mamá offered to fill the blue glass bottle with perfume, if Luisa would give the cat to two-year-old Carlito. When the divisions were made and all brows smoothed, Mamá exhaled deeply, saying nothing more about my father's undisclosed intentions.
Many years later, it would become an insomniac's preoccupation for me: What if Enrique had taken the bow? He 'd been in Papá's choir, and had demonstrated greater musical aptitude than any of us, even if guns amused him more. If he 'd walked with Mamá to the train and back, with more time to consider, would he still be alive? Would the compass have helped Percival or Luisa to better find their ways? And Carlito: Well, there was no saving him. He would die of diphtheria seven years later, to be buried alongside our two siblings who had perished as infants. At the funeral, Percival would lean into me, whispering, "We beat the odds—that's all it is."
There's a saying in our corner of northeastern Spain: "Pinch a Spaniard—if he sings out, he's a Catalan." We considered ourselves a musical region, and yet even here, among troubadours, my father had stood out. In his spare time, he had been the director for our local men's choir, a group that took its cue from the workingmen's choirs of Barcelona—proud men, singing our native regional language at a time when Catalan poetry and song were briefly blossoming.
In 1898, the year my father and several other prominent local men died abroad, the group disbanded, replaced by a choir led by Father Basilio, who had come to us from Rome. This later choir was never as popular. Following the priest's lead, it sang in Italian—a disappointment to nearly everyone, even my Cuban-raised mother, who had never felt entirely comfortable with the Catalan language. The secular Italian choir folded a few years later, leaving only a few hard-core devotees, the poorest singers of the lot, to sing in Latin during Masses. Our town, once a multilingual bastion of song, had grown unexpectedly silent and dour.
My mother had met my father at an arts festival in Barcelona, where they discovered that they shared similar backgrounds, as well as a love of music. Both of them had been born in Spain and had spent their childhoods in colonial Cuba, returning with their optimistic parents to Spain in time for the short-lived First Republic, in 1873. My mother had been renowned for her voice, though she claimed later she'd never had any professional ambitions. By 1898, she didn't sing at all—not even the simple rounds and folk songs she had once sung for her children.
Lying together in the bed we shared, Enrique would sometimes sing to me a remembered line or two, very quietly in the dark, as if it were a secret no one should hear. When I asked him to sing more, he would tease me: "You know that song. Come on...." I had a good memory for most things, so the complete unfamiliarity of what he sang drove me to distraction. I'd beg him again, and he'd tease me more, until I felt panicky. Only when I was on the verge of tears would Enrique relent and finish the song, sedating me with belated satisfaction. It occurs to me now that Enrique was old enough to be embarrassed by those lullabies, but he didn't want to forget them, either. He wasn't trying to torture me so much as give himself permission to remember.
In the years before he accepted his post overseas, Papá had been our town's music teacher, keeping a piano for that purpose in a room between the church and the school. Following his death, my father's best piano student, Eduardo Rivera, approached Mamá to offer condolences. A month later, he came to ask her to sing to his piano accompaniment. We didn't own a piano anymore, she told him. She had given Papá's piano to the priest, Father Basilio, to compensate him for the memorial service—or at least, that's what we were told.
Eduardo reassured Mamá that he had his own piano, of course. She could come to his house and sing. Mamá changed the subject immediately, pretending not even to hear the request. But to make up for the rudeness, she did let him stay for lunch. He came uninvited a second time, and a third, and perhaps because he was my father's student—or perhaps because my mother was still stunned with grief—she didn't turn him away. Finally, he figured out the surest way to win her favor was through an intermediary. Eduardo stopped petitioning for my mother's accompaniment and offered to give me music lessons, instead.
For as long as I could remember, local children had called my new teacher "Señor Riera." The nickname was our local word for the town dry wash that flooded seasonally, just like Eduardo's own drooping, allergy-prone eyes and nose. Eduardo had a thin version of my father's mustache, but his was always damp. Because of his clogged sinuses, he 'd developed the habit of leaving his lips slightly parted. His upper lip was hidden, but his fleshy lower lip protruded clearly, like some exotic pouch-shaped orchid hanging from the scruffy bark of a jungle tree.
Señor Rivera, as I learned to call him more carefully now, owned a piano and a violin. I chose to learn the violin because I wanted to use the bow that my mother had sent away to Barcelona to have finished for me, with horsehair and new silver wire. She used government money to pay for it, saying it was better that my father's final pay be used for something we could keep and cherish, not just coal or bread.
Each day, Percival and Enrique stayed after school to earn a few coins doing the schoolmaster's chores. My mother and Tía were busy tending Carlito and Luisa, and happy to have me out of the house each afternoon. Señor Rivera kept the violin at his home, where I practiced, but I carried my bow with me to lessons and back, in a leather-covered tube from my father's custom files that had once held harbor maps from North Africa and the Caribbean. Every time I held it to my face, I inhaled a dizzying smell of sea salt and ink and sweat—the smell of foreign shores, and also of my father's arms, which were harder to recall with every passing day.
I loved carrying that indestructible tube and hitting rocks with it as I walked. Once, when I'd made the mistake of dallying too long in the dry wash under the bridge, I attracted the attention of two older boys the same age as Enrique. They teased me, calling me
Cerillito,
or "Little Matchstick"; the dislocated hip had never healed properly following my birth, leaving my left leg thinner and slightly shorter than my right. The nickname didn't bother me. I'd heard the same and worse already from my own brothers. But when they started insulting my father, I hit one of them with the tube end, splitting the boy's lip before I managed to run away, incredulous at my small victory.