Authors: Andromeda Romano-Lax
"You changed your name?" Felipa interrupted. "That's terribly glamorous. Dolores—they
are
movie stars!"
"I don't believe it for a minute," Dolores said, glancing around the compartment at the empty tins and bottles and the scraps of food.
Felipa, still holding the tray high, began to whine, "It comes out of our own pay if we can't deliver it."
"Someone will buy it," Gauthier said.
"Not this much. Not if it goes stale." Her lips turned down as she shaped the last word.
"Well let's just eat it then—all of us," Al-Cerraz said. "Don't worry, we'll pay for it. But only if you stay."
"I've got to set this down," Felipa said, arms starting to tremble under the weight of the tray.
Al-Cerraz ran a finger along the front of her apron, tickling her waist as he tucked some money into her pocket. "Do you promise...?"
I'd watched Al-Cerraz flirt countless times but there was a manic, dogged quality to this flirtation that was all the more inappropriate given how many immediate problems begged our attention: the upsetting letter from Brenan; the train's sudden, mysterious halt. I looked to Gauthier, thinking he would help me put an end to this impromptu party, but he was playing his customary role, following Al-Cerraz's lead.
"I will be the gentleman," Gauthier said to Felipa. But instead of taking her tray, he lifted only one sandwich. With pinkie finger extended, he took a bite from the middle, then tossed the rest out of the half-open train window.
Dolores spoke up: "I haven't eaten all day! If you're just going to waste them..."
"You'll get these girls fired," I said.
Al-Cerraz replied, "If they're fired, they'll live with us, in here. This compartment could use a woman's touch. They can stay with us for a few weeks at least."
"He's joking," I said. "We get off in just a few hours." But Felipa gave me a sour look, as if she were angry with me for spoiling the fun. Then the train started to move again and she lost her footing, landing in Al-Cerraz's lap. Her face registered surprise, uncertainty and, finally, resignation.
"If I'm too heavy, you'll have to tell me," she said, shifting into a more comfortable position on his knee.
"Heavy! I should think not," he replied, and he settled his arm lightly around her waist, crooking one thick finger under her sash to loosen it.
Dolores leaned in closer to Gauthier. She said tenderly, "Do you realize your head is bleeding?"
The train moved only a few hundred yards before it stopped again. The corridor clattered with the sounds of many footsteps. The porter knocked at every door, calling out in an efficient, unworried voice, "Everyone out! Off the train!"
Felipa and Dolores exchanged glances. Al-Cerraz sighed, then gathered an armful of sandwiches and a small blanket from a pocket above one of the folded-up bunks.
Small clusters of passengers milled around the sandy wasteland just beyond the tracks. The foreign man who had been arguing with the conductor and porter had been reunited with his wife and two children; he kept a protective arm around the younger child's shoulders, glaring at the train staff anytime they drew near.
Al-Cerraz spread the blanket over a steep and scrubby slope and anchored it with his rump, his back to the train. He gestured for Felipa and Dolores to sit, then called to an elegantly dressed lady picking her way across the rocky terrain with the help of a closed parasol. The serving girls exchanged nervous glances as the lady approached, unwilling to fraternize with well-heeled passengers so openly, where everyone could see.
"Please, stay," Al-Cerraz lamented without rising, his arms outstretched, as Felipa and Dolores mumbled farewells. "Oh, come now, look at the view! Everyone together, looking out over the valley. And look, our new arrival has had the forethought to bring a parasol. This is like that beautiful painting—what is it called, Gauthier?
A Sunday
...?"
"
Un dimanche après-midi...
" Gauthier said, still standing.
"At some island..."
"
à l'Île de la Grande Jatte.
"
"That's it."
The lady had reached the blanket in time to hear the last of this exchange. "Weren't they gazing at water in that painting?" she said. "We have no water here. How do you do?"
Al-Cerraz smiled. "We have a blue horizon, though, if you look far enough and squint." He patted the blanket. "Come, sit down. Make yourself at home." He did not notice the departure of Dolores, who had made her way along the tracks to the back of the train, or Felipa, who was backing away slowly, confused by the mention of an island when there was no island in view, a painting she 'd never heard about or seen. He was entertaining this new guest, swept along by the tide of good fortune that had brought her to his shores.
"An artist recognizes a setting, a moment," he was lecturing the lady, who had introduced herself as Señorita Silva. "An artist of
life
does the same thing—we are here, the weather is fine, why should this seem like an inconvenience?"
The lady glanced over her shoulder. "But I
was
concerned about how abruptly we stopped."
The conductor and a man in greasy overalls were walking down the tracks, in the direction we had been traveling. A group of male passengers watched them go, then formed a tighter circle near the locomotive, scratching their heads and wiping their brows as they talked amongst themselves.
Al-Cerraz reached out and tugged me down by the trouser leg. "Are you traveling with any friends?" he asked Señorita Silva. "Perhaps someone who would enjoy meeting my shy, impolite friend here?"
She answered distractedly. "With my sister. But look where those men are heading. On the tracks—does that look like a log to you? There aren't many trees about. I suppose they used the brakes just in time."
Al-Cerraz shook his head forlornly. He refused to look in the direction she was gesturing. "We have food, a blanket, shade if shade is needed, sun if sun is preferred. .. "
Gauthier offered tentatively, "I'll go see what it's about, if it will make everyone feel better."
Al-Cerraz slapped his leg with satisfaction. "There—our expert. An engineer at heart."
When Gauthier was out of earshot, I reached for a sandwich and took a bite, chewing moodily. I said to Al-Cerraz, "When I wanted to help talk to that foreign man on the train, you didn't volunteer my time—or your own."
"I fathomed," the pianist enunciated slowly, trying to impress this latest lady with his diction, "that you were going to get embroiled in some sort of political discussion with the train staff. Not a technical one."
Señorita Silva tilted her head toward me, fingering a pendant around her neck. "Are you very political?"
"He is a cellist," Al-Cerraz said.
She narrowed her eyes playfully. "Is that like a communist?"
Al-Cerraz reached out to extract a burr from the knotted laces of the lady's boot, allowing his wrist to graze the knob of her stockinged ankle. "I put these well-trained hands at your service."
"Are you a doctor?"
He laughed. "A doctor! Doctors are butchers. They lay their hands on living things and prod them toward death. I touch things that are long dead and bring them to life."
She pursed her lips together, suppressing a smile. "A riddle."
He plucked another burr from the underside of her hem. "These little devils have a way of crawling into dangerous places. I promise only to feel for them, not look..."
Her face registered no shock, though I'm sure mine did. He was seducing her as swiftly as he had attempted to seduce Felipa. If she walked away, there would be others. If I walked away, he wouldn't notice. Even with onlookers mere meters to either side, he would move his hands under her skirts, just because he enjoyed a challenge; it distracted him from his troubles nearly as well as playing the piano.
"There now," he said.
"A little higher," he said.
"Now, if you'll close
your
eyes," he said.
And his last rambling words: "My belief is that people simply choose to be unhappy..."—before the startling explosion which brought the impromptu picnic to an abrupt end.
"As soon as we reach a station, I will contact his sisters," I told Al-Cerraz later, as we contemplated the four bodies amid the wreckage of wood and burnt fuses and wire. Two hundred yards away, where the undamaged train awaited, there was no sign of the disaster, except for the fluttering tatters of singed cloth. A woman was crying, back near the train, but her sobs were indistinct hiccups swallowed by the warm wind.
Gauthier's family would want to know what happened. How would I explain?
"Anarchists," a man next to me muttered. "People who want our entire country to fall on its knees."
A younger man next to him reacted with offense: "You don't know that. It could have been our own Civil Guard."
"Wrecking a train?"
"Wrecking reputations, more like."
I didn't care, then or later, who'd done it. I just wanted to know how one could explain to nine sisters how their brother, who had avoided nearly every malady of those times—including both war and influenza—could suddenly and unthinkably have perished.
I turned to Al-Cerraz. "Do you know all of the sisters' names?"
"It is possible that he is only unconscious."
"That isn't possible, Justo. There's nothing you can do. Let me take you back."
But he was gripping the shoulder of another train passenger, a man in a dark suit who had brought blankets to cover the bodies. He was telling the stranger, "When we bothered him too much, he'd lay an arm over his head, just like that..."
I pulled on his sleeve.
"...he'd pretend to sleep..."
I pulled harder, but he wouldn't leave until he'd finished explaining.
"...I think he pretended not to mind things, when really he did." And from the measured insistence with which Al-Cerraz spoke, I realized—finally—that he was talking about himself.
We escorted the violinist's crated remains to the French border. The box would make a slow and circuitous route to Paris, a lower priority than the soldiers and matériel making its way to and from the western front. We also sent his two trunks and his violin, but not before lifting the neck out of the case and looking into the rosin box beneath, to see how much Gauthier had managed to save over the years toward his Polynesian retirement. We hoped it would be enough for the funeral, with perhaps some additional assistance that his sisters would appreciate. But when we lifted the rosin and the tiny polish cloth beneath, we found only three crumpled bills, barely enough to buy a new set of strings.
I watched as Al-Cerraz opened his own billfold and emptied it, then retrieved a small cigar box from his largest trunk and emptied that.
"Is that everything?" I asked as I watched him roll the bills, fit them carefully around the violin, and push hard to close the case.
"Everything and nothing," he said.
"I have a little more." I reached into my own jacket, but he waved me off.
"We 'll need it."
At San Sebastián we inquired about escorting the crate and trunks on into France, but the stationmaster said, "There's no point in it. At Paris they'll just ask if you're 'essential.' First, you're Spanish."
"I maintained an address in France for years," said Al-Cerraz.
"And second, what did you say were your professions?"
"We 're musicians, sir," Al-Cerraz fumed.
The stationmaster returned his ticket pad to his pocket.
For three weeks we holed up in a hotel room in Bilbao. The staff was deferential, but only until word got around that the IOUs we had scattered around town weren't being paid. Then we were back where we started; worse, actually, with the money from Brenan having dried up.
I asked Al-Cerraz, "Don't you have savings somewhere, from all that earlier touring and recording?"
His chin sagged toward his chest.
I remembered the Stanley Steamer franchise and all the other passing infatuations. "Investments?"
He sighed.
"Dare I ask if your mother is doing any better these days?"
He mumbled, "No better than yours, I'm sure."
"Would Biber give us a loan?"
Al-Cerraz covered his face with his hands. "Gauthier was always the one who wrote to him. Gauthier did everything."
"I don't mind taking on additional duties."
"I don't want to think of duties. I don't want to think of anything. Please stop. I can't think."
Our best option was to tour again, but we had no trio now. We did not even have a duet.
I played a solo recital in the hotel restaurant to earn some kitchen credit and a few more nights in the hotel manager's good graces. That night I placed my cello near Al-Cerraz's bed, where he had reclined through the dinner hour, and played a new score I had purchased in the city. It was a furious, yearning piece—insistent, emotional, difficult to ignore. I sight-read it for forty minutes, beginning to end, with only the briefest pauses.
The next morning I returned to the third movement—the Andante—and repeated it several times as Al-Cerraz washed lethargically and picked up the hotel phone to order a small lunch of
patatas bravas
and meat-stuffed cabbage. When the food came, he picked at it, then crawled back into bed, with the blanket up and around his ears. But later he asked, "Who was that by?"
"Rachmaninov."
The name stirred him. "Rachmaninov."
The next day, he asked me, "Arranged for cello?"
"Composed originally for the cello. Cello and piano."
When he didn't respond, I added, "G Minor, from 1901."
"It's vaguely familiar."
The third and final day, when I played it again, he said, "I didn't recognize the first two movements the other day. They sound so bare without the piano."
"Of course. It's Rachmaninov. He composed it for a friend, a cellist named Anatoly Brandukov. But he couldn't help giving the piano the best part."
"You have it? The complete score?"
"I do."
And we were performing again; slowly at first, in the north of Spain, as Al-Cerraz allowed his spirit to be revived by the work of rehearsing new compositions and arranging old ones, filling in the missing violin parts with more challenging cello accompaniments. The absence of our partner cast a shadow over our first performances. But at the same time, it forced a clean break with old habits. We could not play by rote, nor we could we mimic other trios' arrangements.