Authors: Andromeda Romano-Lax
The world was new again, or seemed to be. In Paris, it had become fashionable to thumb one's nose at anything conventional, to take nothing seriously, to parody everything that had gone before. The lingering trauma of the Great War had invited a regression into childishness, complete with Dada-ist baby babble—a prolonged metaphysical giggle.
But a giggle doesn't satisfy, and even nude costume balls lose their novelty with surprising speed. Beneath the glamour, surrealism, and silliness, people hungered for eternal excellence. They clamored for Beethoven and Bach, for Paganini and Liszt. They clamored for Al-Cerraz and me.
The gossip columns reported our appearance at Gertrude Stein's Sunday salon. We drew a crowd in the modest Salle Thérèse, its stained-glass windows still boarded up from German shelling. We sold out the larger, grander Théâtre des Champs-Elysées and elicited a massive standing ovation that continued to build even after Al-Cerraz re-entered the stage, peaking only after I reentered and stood at his side, bowing together.
He took my rising stature in stride. We toured fifteen more European cities, many more damaged than Paris had been; many waking only slowly to postwar life. But we always returned to Paris. In no time at all, we were the top classical billing there. We were asked to play on the first anniversary of the death of Claude Debussy, who had passed away during a week when the city was being bombarded, and whose casket was carried through deserted streets. Now, finally, Debussy could be properly honored. We performed a special arrangement of the French composer's
Claire de Lune,
and then led a procession to the Cimetière de Passy, where Debussy's grave sat under a bower of chestnut trees, with a view of the Eiffel Tower.
After the crowd dispersed, I suggested to Al-Cerraz that we cross the city and visit the grave of Gauthier, something we had not yet done. It was March, and the trees were in bud, but in the mist they still looked skeletal, their branches black with rain. We found the cemetery, the name of which I no longer recall. We found the groundskeeper, and with him spent a good hour looking for the grave, confounded by the sheer number of new plots, filled with victims of war, influenza, and starvation. By the time we found Gauthier's rectangle of earth, it was nearly dark. There was no stone yet, no trees, not much of a view. At my feet lay an old bouquet of flowers wrapped in a disintegrating cone of tissue paper, the exposed rose petals blackened with age.
"Where are the other flowers?" Al-Cerraz demanded. "Where is the tombstone?"
When I didn't answer, he asked more insistently, "Where are his sisters?"
I responded, "Where were
we
?"
We stood shivering in the rain next to his grave, quietly; neither one of us prayed.
Finally Al-Cerraz said, "Which shall it be?"
I thought he meant Right Bank or Left—we hadn't yet decided where we'd go for dinner. Earlier, we had discussed heading to a café in Montmartre to watch a local pianist and composer named Erik Satie, who—dressed always in his gray velvet suit and bowler hat—entertained diners with his melancholic piano miniatures.
But Al-Cerraz wasn't talking about Satie, about Left Bank or Right. He was talking about the two graves we'd visited that day, and how we imagined our own future resting places.
"Like Gauthier's—bare and forgotten? Or like Debussy's?"
"I don't think it matters much to them," I said.
"It matters," he said, voice cracking, "to me."
It is a testament to our friendship that Al-Cerraz stayed in Paris as long as he did. Our roles had reversed. He, the cosmopolitan who had endured Spain only because of the war, felt ready to return and commit himself again to the more serious, unprofitable work of composing a Spanish work—not only because Brenan still expected it of him, but because, in Al-Cerraz's mind, destiny did.
I was the one who had grown accustomed to comfort, to Left Bank cafés and international salons, to my slowly rising reputation, without which—I assured myself—I couldn't really help Spain, anyway. In 1920 he agreed to one more European tour with me, though it proved to be a nerve-racking season for him.
On a summer night in Lucerne, fifteen minutes before curtain, Al-Cerraz burst into our shared dressing room, looking pale and distraught: "He's here—in the audience!"
"Who?"
Al-Cerraz groaned. "Thomas Brenan."
I sat down and withdrew my bow and a polishing cloth from its case. "That's fine. We should invite him out after the concert."
"Invite him
out
? I can't see him. I can't go on."
We argued until the stage manager knocked. I tried to calm him. "He's not expecting you to hand over a finished
Don Quixote
score tonight. He just wants to hear you perform. He has a right, Justo. He has been very generous to you."
"It doesn't matter." He removed his cuff links and dropped them into an empty coffee cup, then began to unbutton his dress shirt.
"Pretend he isn't there."
"I won't be able to focus."
"Justo, you owe him something—"
He stopped and turned to me. "Haven't you ever resented a debt? What of that gemstone in your bow—have you produced anything worthy of that?"
I gripped the frog of my bow protectively, feeling my thumb pass over the sapphire.
"It wasn't payment, it was a gift."
Al-Cerraz continued, "What about the bow itself? When your father gave it to you, did you give anything in return?"
Under my breath I answered, "My father was already dead when I received it."
"All the more reason."
Through the thin dressing-room door, we could hear the shuffling of feet, the bouncy echo of moving seat-backs, the coughing, rustling, and shifting of an audience preparing for the concert ahead.
Al-Cerraz said, "In Madrid, you said you'd developed a 'distaste for favors.' Do you remember that? You should understand my situation better than anyone." He leaned over the sink and started to dry-heave.
"You aren't really sick."
He paused for a breath and wiped his dry lips. "Explain to the audience. Tell the stage manager. And make no exceptions: I'll see no one after the concert."
I walked out to a packed house, twenty-four hundred seats in six golden tiers all facing me in a chandelier-lit horseshoe.
I stood next to my cello chair and announced Al-Cerraz's cancellation stiffly, as if I were reading from a piece of paper, though I held nothing in my hand but my bow. The auditorium echoed with murmured disappointment and some seats bounced up as a few people squeezed out of their rows and up the aisles. I had expected worse.
The audience settled, waiting to see what I would do next. I could still cancel for myself as well; the contract said as much. I stood under the lights, enveloped by warmth and silence and the humidity of the gathered crowd, all those expectant breaths. If I decided to play, I would have to change the program. There weren't many choices, without accompaniment of any kind. But while my head thrummed and stalled, my hands, or my heart, decided to go ahead. I sat down, pulled my bow across the string, and began to play the Prelude to the first Bach Cello Suite.
After the second ovation, I slammed the dressing door closed behind me. Al-Cerraz had heard the thunderous applause; he saw me grinning and hurrying to change from my sweat-stained dress shirt into a dry, clean one. He said, "There's no point putting that on yet, when you're so heated up."
I tried to open a window at the room's far end; it was painted shut.
"You can't be finished, with that much applause still going."
I found a towel and scrubbed my neck with it.
He tried again. "You certainly look better than you did an hour ago. I feel better myself." He shook the brown vial the doctor had given him. "But only a little. Maybe I should have doubled the dose." When
I still didn't respond, he teased, "So I've created a monster. Now you'll want to be a soloist!"
I didn't understand what I was feeling. I had enjoyed playing solo, even with the greater burden of carrying the show, even with the awareness of thousands of scrutinizing faces just beyond the lights. Even now, the energy of my performance coursed through me. I was terribly thirsty. Sweat continued to drip down my spine, dampening my new shirt, soaking my waistband, where my leather belt chafed. I didn't want to sit down.
The theater manager brought me a bottle of champagne. I swigged at it, then passed it to my partner—leaving him to worry about how it might affect his sedative-addled mind. Another arrived, courtesy of a fan who had been waylaid by the determined stage manager, and we drank that, too. But still, the adrenaline didn't settle; I felt ill with the weight and heat of it, as if there was some force building in me that could not be expressed.
The next night Al-Cerraz again refused to play, worried that Thomas Brenan might have returned. I went on alone.
In Amsterdam, too, Al-Cerraz refused to play. This time, we were able to give advance notice, and the concert was publicized as a solo performance. The first-night crowd filled the hall to an acceptable three-quarters, and the next night—after a laudatory review in the city's major newspaper—the hall filled completely.
That second night on the Amsterdam stage, I forced myself to look out in the audience as the curtain rose. As I introduced myself and explained the music I would be performing, I stood with feet widely planted, my cello and bow well behind me, next to my chair. My stance looked like confidence. It began, in fact, to feel like confidence.
I drew another ovation that night. Among those standing was a figure in the royal box, a spotlight revealing an unremarkable-looking man with sideburns and a dark suit, bowing to me and then to the audience at large. All eyes turned toward him, and the applause continued, now directed in the gentleman's direction as well. It was later explained to me that he was Prince Hendrik, husband to Queen Wilhelmina of the Netherlands. The audience had applauded us equally, a fact that inspired in me an unbecoming giddiness that lasted for hours. I remembered Count Guzmán saying that someday a cellist could be as powerful as a king. But, I hastened to remind myself, I was not powerful at all, only popular. They were not the same thing.
What had Alberto wished for me? Not only to be good, but to
do
good. Was I doing anything at all besides entertaining people, and perhaps also inhibiting my partner from the serious work he wished to do? I was less than powerful. In fact, I was becoming imprisoned by my own simple desires: to be liked, to be cheered, to be comfortable, to live in a city of lights that had no connection to any person or place from my past.
I had a dream that night of following a man down a hallway. It was Prince Hendrik, dressed more regally now, in a military uniform. He pushed open a door and entered; I followed at a discreet distance. He walked toward a woman sitting on a black bench, her back turned to me, and whispered in her ear. Then he disappeared. I advanced closer to the woman, certain now that she was waiting for me, that I had something to say which she must hear. But she wouldn't turn around. I could not reach out and touch her. And though I called out, she wouldn't respond to my voice.
We had one more Dutch performance, in Utrecht. Two hours before the curtain, Al-Cerraz received a telegram from Thomas Brenan, saying the patron was back in London now, and greatly distraught that he hadn't been able to see Al-Cerraz play.
"
Gracias a Dios!
" Al-Cerraz shouted to the puzzled messenger who had delivered the telegram to our dressing room, and began to dress immediately. That night we played a concert that thrilled the audience and disappointed several reviewers who noted, as I did, that Al-Cerraz had played so loudly and demonically that the cello could barely be heard.
Only two concerts remained on our tour, and both were in London, a week and a half away. Al-Cerraz made no mystery of his plans. He would come to London, he said, just to make a good show of it. Knowing that Brenan might appear, he would wait until the last minute and play sick again.
From our Dutch hotel, I corresponded with Biber, who was growing testy about Al-Cerraz's cancellations. After London, he couldn't promise any more bookings until Al-Cerraz was certain he was well. Unless, Biber wrote, I wanted to go ahead and make a few solo bookings?
"You wouldn't," Al-Cerraz said, after I'd handed him the letter. "Would you?"
"I don't think so," I said.
In London, the theater manager made it clear that he was alert to Al-Cerraz's habit of canceling, and he insisted on having a doctor visit the pianist at our hotel the day before the concert. Al-Cerraz, fond of the sedative he had received in Lucerne, expressed a complete willingness to cooperate. He asked me, "Will a psychiatrist be able to prescribe something for relaxation?"
"
Claro.
" I thought for a second. "They're sending a psychiatrist this time? Not a physician?"
"What's the difference, exactly?"
"I guess you'll find out. If your career as a pianist falls apart, perhaps you'll find work as an actor."
"But I
am
sick," he protested.
"Yes, yes, I know," I said as the hotel door closed between us.
***
I had my own London plans. Sir Edward Elgar had heard about my solo concerts in Switzerland and the Netherlands. He asked me to visit him at a friend's house in the city, and to bring my cello along.
The renowned British composer was in his early sixties—a dapper Edwardian with tidy white hair, sharp cheekbones, and a mustache that covered all but the bottom edge of his lower lip, so that it was hard to tell if he was smiling. I felt comfortable with him immediately. There was something in his accent and bearing that reminded me of Queen Ena—even more so as he conducted most of our conversation from a piano bench.
"The world in which I was raised doesn't exist anymore," he said at one point. The crow's-feet around his eyes deepened as he attempted to smile. He added, "You've been to Berlin?"
"I have."
"I had many German friends. People in our line usually do. Music doesn't stay behind borders very well."