Authors: Andromeda Romano-Lax
"Which one?" I interrupted.
Gauthier laughed. "You mean the one who is dead, the one he wishes were dead, the one who is a saint, the one who was a courtesan, or the one who takes half of whatever money he's got left at the end of each month?"
"Who is she, really?"
"I don't know. All I know is that he has dined out on anecdotes about her—and about everything else—for his entire life. Perhaps he'll never compose anything but stories." And with that he closed his eyes.
Gauthier had other ambitions. His fantasy was to retire early to a French Polynesian island and to spend the last third of his life in a hammock, undisturbed. I could imagine his balding, age-spotted pate growing ever browner, like a coconut, and his wispy blond mustache shifting like a grass skirt in the South Pacific breeze. To that end, Gauthier aimed only to save a little money every few weeks, tucking it into his carefully guarded violin case. He was already in his late forties, and did not expect any more fame or attention than the modest quantity he 'd already attained.
Gauthier and I rehearsed daily in our train car. Without a piano, Al-Cerraz could not join us, but that suited his natural inclination, which was to save his energies for his audiences. As the violinist and I played, Al-Cerraz would listen, rocking lightly back and forth, just an arm's length from my moving bow. Sometimes he'd appear on the verge of falling asleep, but suddenly, his eyes would fly open: "There! Can you try...?" In his own mind, he could hear himself playing with perfect clarity, fused with our parts; Gauthier and I had the disadvantage, since we couldn't hear or imagine him as well. But it was impossible to worry, when Al-Cerraz did not. And at each performance, we found our harmonies, adapted our dynamics, and made impromptu bowing changes.
I had not yet recorded, of course, and Al-Cerraz had made only a few records by this time. But that was not how most villagers knew him. They had committed his trademark performance pieces to memory, preserved with great mental discipline since the time of his most recent visit.
As we pulled into each town, a self-selected music enthusiast—an
alcalde,
or the wife of some eminent merchant—would ambush Al-Cerraz as he stepped off the train. In a fishing village on the Cantabrian coast, it was a heavyset woman draped in a stiff and intricately patterned brocade gown one size too small. Thus confined, she nonetheless managed to sing wordlessly for close to a minute in a loud and passionate voice that made the carriage horse awaiting us take a few uncertain steps backward, ears flicking. I didn't recognize the song until Al-Cerraz announced, "Yes, Schubert! How long has it been, Señora—?"
"Rubielos," she said, bowing low. She remained there for a moment, catching her breath until she could answer, "It has been six years."
As we stepped into the carriage, an elaborate antique resurrected from a local museum or someone's barn, Al-Cerraz whispered, "There is always a Señora Rubielos."
Sometimes this archetypal aficionada hummed Chopin, or whistled Liszt. Sometimes she had waited four years, or eight. Her rendition might be a faithful mimicry, in a town where at least one person knew how to play the piano well, or had managed to lay hands on a score. More often, it would be mangled and fragmented, blended with some other work. But invariably the enthusiasts were earnest, delivering Al-Cerraz's notes back to him as if to prove his listeners' loyalty during the maestro's absence. They were like the New World natives we were told about as children, who upon hearing the word of Christ from a shipwrecked priest, chanted it into an amalgam, scarcely recognizable and yet still sacred to the Conquistadores arriving years later.
Al-Cerraz explained it to me this way: "In the deserts of the south there is a plant that requires rain only every few decades. Some say it will live without water for a century. But when the rain comes, it blooms. Feliu, we are the rain that comes to these towns."
In return, villagers opened their hearts and doors to us. As part of his onstage patter, just prior to his final encore, Al-Cerraz would describe the homesickness that plagued his heart, the great longing he had for a simple home-cooked Spanish meal. Hand signals would fly between mothers and sons; young boys would dash for the exits. Through open doors, as Al-Cerraz's encore relaxed into its final diminuendo, I was certain I could hear the protesting squawk of chickens pressed to the slaughter block.
Ideally, we would arrive at a small town at midday, proceed directly to an afternoon or early-evening performance, then repair to a bar for an hour until the locally chosen Doña had our dinner ready. Between courses, Al-Cerraz would regale his hostess and her guests with stories. After dinner, if she had a piano, he would play more encores, no matter how poorly tuned or ill-repaired the instrument. If keys were missing, it only increased the suspense as Al-Cerraz improvised around them, aping consternation, his black shock of hair more unruly with each passing hour.
He seemed to enjoy playing at a village hall more than at a city music palace, and he relished playing in a private house crowded with steaming bodies most of all. If a villager appeared with a guitar, Al-Cerraz would compete with it, mimicking the sounds of strummed chords by playing his own broken chords on the piano. If a boy produced some sort of shepherd's pipe or whistle, Al-Cerraz would accompany it, making it sound like the foundation for some elaborate concerto. If a woman commandeered the attention, stamping out some complicated Andalucían rhythm with her feet, Al-Cerraz would pause, listen, and finally join in, mimicking the rhythm. Then he would back just one step away from it, so that they continued to play together—hands and feet—in a tricky syncopation of escalating speed and intensity until one of them surrendered, sweating and laughing uncontrollably while the whole room erupted with earsplitting applause.
He had said we were the rain, as if these villages were bone-dry, without music or culture save what we delivered. It seemed to me that we were simply the spark, in places already rich with kindling. In such places lived the Señoras who revered foreign composers like Chopin (as Chopin's own Polish countryfolk had not revered him), and there were villagers who celebrated—and played—their own native folk music. And there was a sense, which my own town had lost sometime between my father's generation and mine, that Spain could have both: be European and Iberian, look back and look forward, preserve and innovate.
"It's remarkable," I told him once as we took the air outside a rustic house one evening, moments after he 'd accompanied a trio of farmers with their handmade instruments.
"What is?"
"The way you perform with them."
He finished swabbing his face with a handkerchief, then looked at me curiously. "I wouldn't call it performing. I'm just being a good guest. They say 'How do you do?' and I answer, 'How do you do?'" He didn't recognize the value of his talent, which allowed him to listen and mimic, distinguish and hybridize, changing accents and rhythms as we traveled from north to south, east to west. He thought it was a liability.
"They're just parlor tricks, refined from the accidents of birth," he said. "I have a sensitive ear. It not only detects, it collects, traps, and clogs. If the nation of Spain ever falls silent, I'm sure some doctor will take a scalpel to my inner ear—or better yet my brain—split it open, and perish as an avalanche of sounds burst forth."
He smiled mournfully, then clapped me on the shoulder with abrupt, effortful heartiness. "I know just what you need!"
Back inside the main
sala,
Al-Cerraz slid onto the piano bench and pounded out several introductory chords to get everyone's attention. Then he stopped and called out, "Men, find a partner!"
I pressed my back against the wall.
"You as well, Feliu!"
Suddenly there was a slim, feminine hand in mine. Al-Cerraz launched into an Aragonese
jota.
Men unbuttoned their collars. Women grabbed thick handfuls of skirt with one hand. Bodies began to hop around me. I don't think anyone except the puzzled lady with whom I'd been paired would have noticed my inactivity if only Al-Cerraz would have kept playing. Instead he stopped mid-measure, laughing, and announced to the crowd: "Forgive my partner! He makes a formidable obstacle on any dance floor."
All heads turned toward me.
My eyes must have flashed, because Al-Cerraz said quickly: "Forgive
me,
I should say. I am a man whose heart beats in rapid triple-time. Whereas my cellist"—and here Al-Cerraz began to play a simpler, slower melody—"lives to a statelier beat."
Later that evening, he gestured across the room to the woman with whom I had danced. "I've already told her that you need some air. And that you have a fascination with aqueducts."
"Aqueducts?"
"Medieval bell towers. Ancient granaries. Every town has some architectural feature on the outskirts, something they like to show off."
"But shouldn't we—"
"You'll notice"—Al-Cerraz breathed heavily into my ear—"Gauthier hasn't been seen in an hour. I myself have an interest in choir stalls. This lady"—he angled his head toward another young woman leaning against the piano—"has offered to take me to see the local cathedral by moonlight."
"I'm not very fond of strolling," I said. "I'd prefer to find a quiet place to sit."
He whispered into my ear, "Stroll only as far as necessary, then."
"I wouldn't know what to say to one of these girls."
"The less the better."
"But I'm not sure—"
"Listen," he interrupted, backing away to lock eyes. "If there is any reward to be gained from a lady in this room, it won't be gained by what you say. She's already heard you perform. That's the only reason she is interested in you now.
"These," he continued with emphasis, "are the perfumed hours. The music lasts a little while, the roses in their hair a few hours beyond that. And then..." he made a fluttering motion with the fingers of both hands, tracing the invisible lines of some dissipating magic.
"I thought you were interested only in what lasts," I mocked.
He looked at his hands, still floating in the air, as if they were unfamiliar objects. "The eternal." He studied his left hand. "And the ephemeral." He studied his right. "Yes, you're correct. It is a contradiction. Unless it isn't. Unless I find some way to contain these intangible, sublime moments within something that will outlast everything—even you and me."
He held himself like that for a moment, and then he exploded with self-mocking guffaws. "Such lofty ideals! All that the great philosophers ever wanted was beauty, and we have a dozen examples of it in this room."
"And truth..." I said, but he was already walking toward the woman leaning on the piano, leaving me standing opposite my former dance partner.
She wore a sleeveless gown, one size too large—perhaps a cousin's, pulled from a dusty wardrobe earlier that day; perhaps a sister's, traded in exchange for a week's worth of chores. I could see the pin at each side, under her bare arms, where she had pulled in and secured the fabric, and closer to her hip, through a small tear, a hint of some lace undergarment—perhaps borrowed as well. She saw me staring and stood straighter, raising both arms over her head to rearrange an ebony comb in the back of her wavy chestnut hair.
Just before I went to take her hand I said again, to no one but myself, "They wanted beauty—and truth."
But there weren't always young pretty women in abundance during those early years; or lavish parties, or even chickens. Sometimes the audience—small or large, finely dressed or plain—was missing altogether.
We arrived one night in our second year at a manor house in the far south. We had been picked up at the train station by a taciturn man with a wagon, the least-enthusiastic welcoming committee we'd had in some time. At the house, there were a dozen people, rather than the sixty or eighty we expected. The mood was peculiarly tense. I asked the wagon driver if a harvest was underway. The man, whose eyes were hidden under a sweat-stained fedora, fumbled nervously with the handkerchief tied around his neck. A better-dressed gentleman at the front of the room spoke up. "No harvest. We didn't plant this season."
Following the performance, there were no encores, and no postconcert festivities. The wagon driver gave us a ride back to the town center. Iron gates covered the shoe-repair shop and one of the town's two bakeries. The pharmacy was boarded over. We ate sandwiches at the train station, where we finally learned from the stationmaster what had happened to the townsfolk. With seed prices high and crop prices low, word had spread that most laborers would lose their jobs. Fearing reprisals, landowners and the local civil guard had trucked two loads of farmworkers away from the town—carted them three hundred kilometers west and left them there.
"What, like unwanted kittens in a burlap sack?" Gauthier said.
"I won't have this!" Al-Cerraz said sharply, and I turned to him with interest. Despite his fame in Spain—his access to reporters and high society ladies and artistic opinion-makers—I had never known him to attach his name to any cause. Perhaps he simply hadn't been incensed enough.
"I won't have this," he repeated—but he was not referring to the laborers. "I won't have my time and energy wasted." He turned to the railway table, and then to Gauthier. "Is there an earlier train out of here?"
That second year of touring, a reviewer in one of the larger cities made first mention of my contributions to the trio. By the end of the next year, a good quarter of the reviews praised my playing first; a smaller number offered first attentions to Gauthier, which still left the majority to fawn on Al-Cerraz.
By 1917, Gauthier was rarely mentioned at all. "It's only because you're French," I tried to console him, though he refused to act as if he needed any consolation. "The war, you understand. Everyone defending their own."
"If anything, my nationality should gain me sympathy," he said. "Don't your countrymen appreciate that we 're fighting in your stead?"
But that wasn't how Spaniards saw it. We endeavored to remain neutral in the war. As Al-Cerraz had predicted, that neutrality offered benefits, and a prestige Spain hadn't enjoyed in our lifetimes. New diplomatic and business offices opened in Madrid, Barcelona, Bilbao, and elsewhere. Coal mining and steel production surged. Industrialists profited from the opportunity to supply what the rest of war-torn Europe could not.