Authors: Andromeda Romano-Lax
We had to innovate, and as the months passed, our sound matured—though, in respect for Gauthier's passing, we steered clear of self-congratulation. Instead, we protested more than was necessary about the difficulties of coordinating train schedules and counting luggage. One day, just after exiting a train, Al-Cerraz discovered he had lost an entire trunk carrying some of his childhood memorabilia, including early copies of a march he had written when he was six years old, as well as a postcard photo of his mother which he'd never let me see. Tallying the losses, he dropped to his knees, and began to gasp and cough into his hands while other passengers hurried around us. I didn't know what to do, how to help—other than to stand by as Al-Cerraz grieved the disappearance of these talismans, proofs of his mother's youthful beauty and his own precocity. But there was a benefit to the mishap. Al-Cerraz had been groping for evidence that, logistically, we could not manage as well without Gauthier. This dramatic demonstration allowed him to rage a final time about our violinist's death, an emotional purging that made room for a deeper artistic truth: that we played far better without him.
We didn't intend to remain a duet, but it proved hard to find a compatible substitute violinist. The first we fired after a month, when he refused to play the flyspeck villages that Al-Cerraz and I continued to visit when we could, between more profitable city engagements. Next came a slew of hardworking violinists with insufficient talent or talented violinists with insufficient stamina. Biber wrote, beseeching us to choose someone young, attractive, or recently "discovered" in order to boost ticket sales, especially in the larger cities. But we weren't interested in gimmicks. We accepted our musical marriage, "For better or for worse," as they say.
And there
were
many "betters": ovations, attention from the press, letters of interest from recording companies. Financially, we regained a modest footing, able to get by comfortably as long as we continued to perform—which Al-Cerraz would have done even if no one paid him, once he'd shaken off his deepest gloom. He returned to sending his mother a little money each month, even without Brenan's further assistance.
But those are financial details. What I remember best from those times is the music itself. When it succeeded, we took hold of the audience's attention, working it from a distracted, unshaped mass into spun beauty, passing the fine strands back and forth until we wove together something grander, not only music but memory, too—the particulars of past and present, stretched taut across a loom of timeless ideals. Harmony. Symmetry. Order.
The strength of that weave is what anchored me, while Al-Cerraz took a greater pride and fancy in how our sounds evoked the tapestry's edges: the soft fringes of the natural world just beyond our playing. A current of warm air, scented with orange blossoms. Blue shadows, lightening with the rising moon. Or rather, the imagined beauty of those things. Poets claim the moonlight is warm, but that warmth is only in the mind's eye.
Our styles were different. Our aims were different. During our best times, it didn't matter. We had become, finally, more than the former prodigy Al-Cerraz, with accompaniment. We had become a true
con-junto musical:
unified, complete, and whole.
Revived as he was, Al-Cerraz remained a more sober man overall. I know he was fretting about the
Don Quixote
commission. He still hadn't managed to compose anything of value, whether for a patron or for his own satisfaction. Even the November 1918 armistice did not overjoy him. To him it meant that the rest of Europe was awaiting his return, unless they had forgotten him. Either possibility seemed to fill him with anxiety.
By December we were traveling a northern route between Spanish cities, picking up telegrams at every stop, turning down offers to play in the south because Al-Cerraz wanted to remain ready for the slightest flurry of interest from north of the Pyrenees.
Finally, word from Biber came: "Cancel Burgos and head east. Biarritz en route, then Toulouse. Three concerts booked, more planned."
"East?" Al-Cerraz took the telegram from my hands. "He means northeast! He means France!" He kissed the telegram, then kneeled down and attempted to put his lips to the sidewalk, or as close as he could get before his waist refused to bend any farther.
I reached for his elbow. "That's what you do when you get to a place, not when you leave one."
"Toulouse!" he shouted, taking my arm and struggling to his feet. "
Now
the war is over! He wrapped both his arms around me and squeezed. "Perhaps Marseilles after that. Then Paris." He dropped his arms and his voice. "
Mon Dieu,
I need new shoes. Oh," and he splayed his fingers and regarded the nails with disgust. He twisted to look over one shoulder, trying to gain a view of the back of his frayed suit jacket. He kept turning, like a dog trying to bite its own tail.
"Come on, Cinderella," I urged him. "We need to check the train schedule. There will be a dozen better places across the border where you can shop and get a manicure."
He looked horrified. "You do not arrive and then
dress.
You dress and then
arrive.
What if someone hears I'm en route and comes to meet me on the platform?" Then he switched to French, slipping into it as easily as he'd slipped into the Retiro pond that day, and leaving me nearly as stranded. English was my second strongest tongue; German after that, owing to my fondness for biographies of Bach. Still I caught the gist, as he gushed through pursed lips about certain theaters, the parties of Madame Lafitte, a restaurant in Bayonne.
"Five years," he told me, as we waited at a café across from the train station, an hour before we were due to depart. A mostly uneaten croissant rested on the plate in front of him. He'd pinched at it repeatedly, blanketing the table with buttery flakes. "Nearly an eighth of my life.
And this," and pushed the plate away, but only by a few centimeters. "I can't eat it. Too rich." A server began to approach, but at the bovine swing of Al-Cerraz's head over the plate backed away.
"I'm sure everything has changed," he said.
"I'm sure it has."
"Who will remember me?"
"They asked for you. Biber got the bookings.
Tout le monde
is waiting for you, waiting for everything to be back to normal."
"
Tout le monde,
" he repeated, and began to push fingerfuls of croissant into his mouth, covering his beard and thick mustache with crumbs.
That night, despite the train's soporific rocking, Al-Cerraz didn't sleep well.
"What did I say about
Rite of Spring
?" he whispered, then barreled out of the bottom bunk to stand next to me, his mouth level with my head. I rolled away from him and told him to ask me in the morning.
"When I came to see you in Madrid, and found you in the bar," he persevered. "We went to the park. I told you about Stravinsky. About the premiere, and the riot it caused. I agreed with the detractors. Do you remember?"
I rolled back and felt his steamy breath on my face—no smell of liquor, only the sweet staleness of long, dark hours. "We talked about a lot of things that day."
"I wasn't fair. I was narrow-minded."
I thought for a moment. "You told me how you'd heard jazz, that same month in Paris, and loved it. See? You weren't narrow-minded. Go to sleep."
Silence. But I knew he was still there. His fingers, resting on the edges of the bunk, pulled it downward. Rolling slightly toward him, I could feel the pressure of the guardrail against my leg. After several minutes, I must have fallen asleep again. His next words interrupted a dream.
"I can still hear..." he whispered.
"
Hmmm?
"
"The catcalls. Debussy—he was there, pleading with the audience, telling them to calm down and listen. The dancers couldn't hear the orchestra. Ravel was in the audience, screaming
Genius! Genius!
' at the top of his lungs while a veritable brawl broke out. Those two men recognized what they were hearing. They weren't threatened by it."
"Next time, listen to men like Debussy and Ravel."
"You know why I didn't?"
When I didn't respond, he answered the question for me. "Because of Ravel's
Rapsodie Espagnole
—1908. And Debussy's
Iberia
—191o. I heard them both. I saw them performed. I bought the scores. I was a Spaniard in Paris, and every French composer was writing Spanish music—my music!—what I should have written, if I had been more focused, more forward-thinking, more willing to abstain from the instant gratuitous pleasures of performing, of being admired..."
I was wide awake now. "The French are always writing picture-postcard music about Spain. Bizet started it, before you were born."
"Yes. Precisely. Picture-postcard. But what beautiful postcards. And what Englishman doesn't hope to meet some exotic Carmen dancing outside a cigarette factory when he vacations in Andalucía?"
I waited for more, but when he didn't continue, I offered, "Rimsky-Korsakov.
Capriccio Espagnol
—what, 1887? 1888?"
"Must have been. I think I was five years old."
"Just so you don't blame the French."
I stared into the darkness, listening to him breathe, until he said, "Perhaps the well is dry."
I sat up on one elbow. "It's just exoticism—writing about some faraway, folkloric land that's easier to capture than your own. The way the Russians love to write about the Orient, for example."
He wasn't listening. "They have created a Spain more real than our Spain; their art has transcended our reality."
"That's a dangerous thing, transcending reality. Look at Don Quixote—he was beaten to a bloody pulp."
Al-Cerraz groaned. "Please, not Don Quixote. If I were free of Don Quixote, I might dare try my hand at some other kind of composition."
"But haven't you tried?"
"Not really. Not in years."
"But you
do
keep a notebook."
"Yes, I scribble things in a notebook, when I can't get a sound out of my head. It's not to help me remember. Sometimes, it's the only way I can manage to
forget.
But that doesn't make me a composer. The difference between my notes and a finished opera is like the difference between a grocery list and a novel."
He expelled the weariest of laughs. "I don't think on large scales. What Spaniard does? We can't even fathom true nationhood—'I am a Galician, you are a Basque, he's Catalan, she's a gypsy.' I mean, look—look at how we eat! We can't hold a thought long enough to plan a dinner. Instead, it's tapas—an olive here, a bite of fish there, now I'll switch to meatballs." He laughed again. "Feliu, are you awake?"
"
Mmm.
" I had closed my eyes again.
"Compare it to the Germans—everything to them is epic. Heroic. The strength, the character!"
"Too epic," I mumbled.
"What?"
"They overreached. They lost the war. They're finished. You're always asking, 'What will last?' Not them."
"I don't know." He sighed. "Sometimes I can't even see the connections between one moment and the next. I don't have any mythic stories to tell. I can barely understand the story of my own life. How did I get to this?"
"You were apologizing about Stravinsky."
He snorted. "No. My
life,
I mean. How did I get to
this
?"
A pause again. The sounds of the train. The soprano of steel wheels gliding over a new pattern in the track, as we sped without stopping through a village station, the platform cloaked in darkness except for one mist-haloed station lamp—a low, flickering star, here and gone.
"I have sinned, Feliu. I have erred. I have been envious..."
"You still are."
"I have been vain..."
"We will be playing tomorrow near a church. You'll have no trouble finding a priest."
"I don't"—he stuttered—"I'm not—the kind of man to make confession."
"You just did. Now, please. I was sleeping."
I felt the weight of his fingers leave the mattress, then from beneath me came his voice one last time: "Thank you, Feliu."
For me, those first European months provided an effortless introduction to some of the world's greatest music halls, on the arm of a musician already beloved. The French, the Swiss, the Italians—they did remember him, and they were even more eager than he to forget the war years and to embrace art and entertainment anew. Long lines of automobiles queued up outside the halls and theaters we were playing. Ladies arrived in backless evening gowns and soft knee-skimming skirts. Headlines carried news of war reparations and hunger, but at the parties hosted for us after major city concerts, talk focused instead on movies, fashions, and America's experiment with Prohibition.
"Will you play in America next?" a lady in Nice asked Al-Cerraz.
"I'm sure we shall!" He raised his glass to the room.
Yet whatever relief I had been able to provide to Al-Cerraz in our midnight conversation seemed to be dissipating. "In Spain, I was able to feel I was doing a service," he confided to me when we reached Paris after a five-city tour. "Not here, where there is a concert every night of the week, and a play, and an art opening; and everyone has records, and radio. Well, it's the modern age. It's freeing, in a way. And did you know, Madame Lafitte has a mustache now? She wears that hobble skirt, the Poiret number, but I think it was lovelier when I couldn't see her ankles so plainly. And the oysters at Bayonne—
oof.
Better in memory, perhaps, than reality."
"Perhaps if you'd had merely a dozen, instead of four dozen."
"I suppose it couldn't last forever," he sighed. "The Belle Époque is over."
The Belle Époque was over, but in Paris,
Les Années Folles
—the Crazy Years—had just begun. A strong dollar drew American writers and artists to the Left Bank. Women bared their breasts at nightclubs. Men attended street parties in the spring without clothing, their bodies painted in gleaming colors. At night, jazz blared in the alleyways. During the day, on the streetcars, young girls rolled down their stockings, hiked up their skirts, and leaned out the windows, singing, "Oh, how I hate to get up in the morning!"