Authors: Andromeda Romano-Lax
"That you'll perform to our standards."
"Who says I'll perform at all?"
"Biber asked what you'd want in terms of fees. I told him you'd understand what the life is really like—steady work, few vacations. I told him you'd be fair."
"Fair." I closed my eyes. "As fair as not answering the letters I wrote you?"
"Yes, yes—about coming to Paris."
"So you
did
read them."
"And look—I was right! It's no place for a musician. Not now."
"But you didn't explain that. I couldn't have known you were ignoring me for my own good."
When he failed to answer, I closed my eyes. He discarded his jacket and his shirt and rowed in his undershirt, making lazy circles in the sun. I heard the snap of the oarlocks. "Feliu, I went to your apartment first, before I found you at the café. I saw how you're living."
"I'm not interested," I said.
"You were seeking opportunity; now you're rejecting it. You don't consider this a good offer?"
"Too good, and too sudden. Over the years, I've developed a taste for independence—and a distaste for favors."
"'Over the years!'" he snorted and stood up. The rowboat lurched. I leaned forward and put my arms over the gunwales, trying to steady the boat while he balanced on one beefy leg, tugging at his shoelaces. "You're rather young for that sort of talk!"
My face over my knees, I willed the boat to stop rocking. I could hear more than see: the snap of a knee garter; the clatter of a dropped shoe. One black sock landed in my lap.
"Say no more," he said. "Disagreement is bad for digestion. And indigestion is bad for swimming."
The boat leaned hard and then righted itself so violently that I gasped. He splashed and was gone, under the surface. I heard a few protesting quacks when he came up for breath, several meters away.
"Come in!" he called.
When I didn't answer right away, he called back, "Never mind. It's wonderful. Don't do yourself any favors."
I watched him float on his back, his belly rising as a smooth white island above the surface. His undershirt was taut and nearly translucent against his chest, whorls of black hair visible beneath it. His large pink toes flexed above the opaque surface of the water.
"There are only two places in the world where I feel weightless and at peace," he called to me cheerfully, his irritation already purged. "This is the second one."
He took his time returning to the rowboat. Pulling himself back aboard, he glistened like an otter, diamond-bright drops of water nesting on his matted mustache, beard, and gleaming black hair. Water streamed from his rolled pant-legs while he lit a damp cigar, its leafy smolder doubling as the breeze shifted in my direction.
"I'm feeling a little sick, actually," I said.
"I told you a swim would make you feel better."
"I'm not a strong swimmer. I like the water, but..."
"Too much sun." He puffed away. "You never asked me what the first was—the first place I feel at peace."
"Maybe we could switch sides," I said, wanting to get away from the smoke. "I'll row us back."
"Not at the piano, if that's what you're thinking."
I wasn't. I still remembered him confessing years earlier his unease at playing, his self-consciousness on the stage—if that had all been true, rather than an exaggerated, wine-soaked lament.
"Aboard trains. That's what I meant."
"I see," I told him, but I was more focused on our balance in the boat. Holding each other by the forearms, we tried to execute a shuffling dance, working our way around each other while the boat lurched.
We had nearly stepped around each other when Al-Cerraz started to speak; then he shouted suddenly: "
Huy!
" The cigar had slipped out of his mouth. It was floating, like some chamber-pot detritus, in the tea-colored pond water. He leaned over, as if to retrieve it. I began to yell. Then my own mouth was full, and I was sinking, weighted down by all my clothes, darkness all around me. I kicked hard and came above the surface, gasping.
I could hear him laughing from the boat.
"Cálmate!
It's not that deep—just over your head!"
I went down again, felt the springy surface of weeds under my feet, kicked up, and breathed.
"Use your arms!"
Down again, another light bounce, and the agonizing tickle of inhaled water.
"Fool! Swim!"
Every time I came up to the dazzling surface, I saw the shadowy underside of the rocking boat, but nothing else—no sign of an outstretched hand. He was too busy trying to fish his cigar out of the water.
"Stop flailing!" he shouted again, barely bothering to look my way.
"I have a bad..." I started to say, sucking in water. I sputtered, "...leg—hip, really."
"What's a hip got to do with swimming? Look at me—I could swim to Africa!"
For a second, my fury overwhelmed my fear; somehow, that helped. Finally, I controlled my breathing and started pushing the water away from my face and kicking more evenly. A slippery piece of grass brushed my cheek, but I kept the rhythm. In just three or four more strokes, I was at the boat, reaching for the gunwale.
"See?" He hauled me in. "Not so bad, was it? I knew you couldn't have grown up near the Mediterranean and not be able to swim." A pause. Then: "You owe me a cigar, you know."
I spit, coughed, and finally retched until I managed to vomit over the side. Al-Cerraz turned away.
"Look what you've done," I said afterward, gasping, as I sprawled in the boat. "Imagine the filth I've swallowed."
"Oh—certainly. It was the pond water that did it—"
And the cigar smoke, I was thinking.
"—not the half-bottle of swill you'd drunk before two o'clock today. Or the hundreds of bottles before that."
"I'm not a drunk," I snapped.
"Good. I'm glad we got that question out of the way. Are you suicidal?"
"Why would you say that?"
"Your landlady said you spend a lot of time sitting on the suicides' bridge."
"That's rubbish."
"I'm glad to hear it."
Several glum minutes passed.
Finally he said, "You can see I don't put others first—there's no worry about that. So here's how it is. It's no favor to you. It's a favor to me. We have a dozen concerts already booked, and our French cellist ran off to Belgium, to sacrifice himself for
la guerre.
Fine, if that's what he wants."
He added, "You're not the first cellist I asked. You're the third. That's not because I don't think you're immensely talented. It's only because you're inexperienced and unknown. In semiretirement at—what—twenty-one?"
I glared at him.
"Be offended, if it will help you feel better about it. This isn't a great deal for either of us, but I'm too broke to live without touring. I've been paid to compose an opera based on
Don Quixote,
but it's gone nowhere. I can't remember the last time I had a good night's sleep." He perked up. "But the trains will help that. They're the perfect cure for insomnia."
I was too tired to speak. Sourness burned in my throat.
"You're afraid of getting wrapped up in something," he continued. "Makes no sense at all. You've got nothing to lose. But put it this way: If you had only a month to live, would you try touring with us?"
"Possibly."
"Well, then—" He pointed to a sign on the shore:
NO SWIMMING IN THE ESTANQUE-RISK OF CHOLERA-BUREAU OF PUBLIC HEALTH.
"As for me," Al-Cerraz said, "I never catch anything. A terrible scarlet rash whenever I eat shrimp, but besides that,
nada.
"
Within a week, I was preparing to board a train and say good-bye to the capital that had been my home for five years. Al-Cerraz was correct. I had nothing to lose. Despite my skepticism about the pianist, despite my initial pretenses of aloofness, I couldn't fight the tingle that mounted as the train approached, vibrating the platform. As jaded as I'd become in Madrid, I still believed it was possible to climb aboard a train as one person, and step off it as another.
I encountered our French violinist for the first time on the platform, crowded with people and suitcases. He swept by me, glancing around and through my legs, muttering into his thin blond mustache. I reached out a hand: "Feliu Delargo." But he circled me and walked back the other way, past Al-Cerraz and his five massive trunks.
"To him, you are not a person," Al-Cerraz explained. "You are someone with luggage—fortunately, not too much of it, since we are traveling heavy already."
Al-Cerraz nodded at the porter who, with the violinist's help, was directing the flow of our baggage into the train.
"He can be excessive with
ritardes,
and he once lost all memory of a Franck sonata we had performed a hundred times. But he has never lost a piece of our luggage. I introduce you to our violinist and chief transportation coordinator, Louis Gauthier."
Gauthier did not look up at the sound of his name. He was still immersed in discussion with the porter as the stationmaster walked by, ringing a handbell.
"Come on. He will be the last to board," Al-Cerraz continued. "And then he'll spend the next hour studying the railway timetable. And he will get off first at every stop, to calm our fans."
"Fans? Are you serious?"
"I think he must have played with trains as a boy," Al-Cerraz continued. "When he is very good, we let him ride in the locomotive."
In our compartment, Al-Cerraz put one arm around me. "I know this country better than anyone else alive. Bottom bunk all right?"
"That's fine." I'd never traveled first class. Captivated, I studied the small sitting room that would transform, at the turn of the porter's key, into a bedroom: the red carpet, the round table tucked between two chairs, the diminutive washbasin in one corner. It was immaculate and elegant, for the moment; less so as Al-Cerraz hung a sausage from the tasseled curtain rod over the picture window and set a woven garland of garlic in the marble washbasin.
"Since I was a very small boy, traveling from town to town, three hundred days a year, I learned to love this life," he continued. "The cradlelike rock and sway of the train, the hospitality of our countrymen, the gentle hearts of our countrywomen." He winked. "You will find that, as long as you keep moving, there is no end to the delights awaiting you. But you must keep moving, Feliu. Even when the heart skips; even when the view blurs."
I had seen so little of Spain, apart from my home coast and the capital, that for the first months of our 1914 tour, the place names alone were a new kind of music. Segovia. Burgos. Valladolid. And between those fabled places, hundreds of smaller hamlets, places that appeared on few maps and didn't need to. Each village had its own source of pride as the birthplace of a saint or Renaissance poet, or as the place with the sweetest grapes, the best-trained horses, the most talented leatherworkers.
The train rattled along its narrow tracks and the last few years fell away, shrugged off like a heavy cape. My health and color improved. My mood lightened. To make up for the reclusive gloominess of my recent past, I felt that I now deserved some pleasure. And who better to find it with than Al-Cerraz, who attracted the best and choicest and prettiest of everything, and who enjoyed life with such appetite, and no guilt?
Our trio had a natural chemistry. Gauthier was a tall, lean, light-haired serious man who cloaked his feelings beneath a wispy mustache and a smirk, providing a contrast to Al-Cerraz's clownishness. On the train, he most often took a horizontal position, reclining in his bunk as he wrote to each of his nine sisters, who were scattered between Paris and Alsace. As the eldest, and the only boy, he 'd had many responsibilities, he told me in our first days together. He'd grown more committed to his violin when he realized that his parents would never interrupt him to carry wood or dress a toddler as long as he was practicing. In the moments when he'd stopped playing and not yet been redirected toward a chore, he 'd learned to embrace ephemeral leisure without delay. I'd never seen a man more eager to sleep—or more able to leap from a state of sleep into instant readiness, as soon as duty called. No wonder Al-Cerraz had come to rely on him to keep track of luggage, schedules, and communications with the manager, Monsieur Biber.
It was Gauthier who first explained to me how little money touring actually made. For large city engagements, we sometimes were paid in advance. But small towns were a gamble. Whoever had arranged the show—a cultural league, a women's group, a music-loving town leader—assisted with promotion through the local posting of flyers, and paid us only after we played, based on their generosity or their success at fund-raising. When our income far exceeded our expenses, we paid ourselves and took an extended weekend—even the occasional week—off near the tour route. We never took off enough time to go "home," which satisfied me; I had no desire to return to Campo Seco or anywhere else I'd lived, and at least while the Great War raged, Gauthier and Al-Cerraz felt the same way. When our income dipped, we had to do without, living simply until the next, more profitable run of shows. As our audiences found it harder and harder to pay, Al-Cerraz began to subsidize our concertizing for weeks at a time.
"But why would he do that?" I asked Gauthier once, when Al-Cerraz was off by himself in the smoking car.
"He tours to feed himself." Gauthier reclined on his bunk with a folded newspaper on his lap.
"But when we're losing money, how can he feed himself?"
"Not with food," he said, pulling thoughtfully on his blond mustache. "He feeds his ego—and, I hope, his imagination."
Gauthier saw my baffled expression. "He can only afford to subsidize us because he gets money from Brenan." That was Thomas Brenan, the patron who had commissioned Al-Cerraz's
Don Quixote.
"I don't think he wrote a single note while he was in Paris. I'm sure he thinks time in Spain will enhance his creativity."
"Do you think he'll really compose anything?"
"He's always talked about it. First, his father was to blame for getting in the way. Then his mother—"