Authors: Andromeda Romano-Lax
That sense of impending flight mirrored the hesitation she'd displayed on the steamer. Always, there was the sense that she was saving herself for something—or someone; that any given concert, no matter how dutifully performed, was merely a way station. And yet she never said so. Like most prodigies, she was still eager to please—if not the audience, whom she barely noticed, then at least Al-Cerraz and me.
Most of the violinists I'd known saved their virtuosic displays, their enthusiasm and energy and most focused vibrato for the thin, high strings—the high register where the violin soars and sings, beyond the easy pitch range of viola or cello. Aviva tended to play high notes starkly—brushed pewter instead of silver, a beautiful effect. But she saved her best artistic effects for the low register. Plunging in, she planted her feet, bowed her head, closed her eyes, executed her widest vibrato, her most expressive bowing. Her facial features and thin arms radiated fragility, but her posture and her sound could only make one think of hard physical labor. Once, watching her play out of the corner of my eye, I was struck by the image of someone sinking into deep gray-green water, not thrashing but pushing forcefully and purposefully against the water's weight, motion slowed by the chill. In that cold darkness she seemed most focused and at peace.
Violin concertos would have been a perfect vehicle for her, if she'd ever wanted to solo with an orchestra instead of playing in a trio. But as much as she enjoyed hearing other solo violinists perform, she claimed to have no interest in that sort of debut.
Once in Toledo, during our first winter's tour, I invited Aviva to a Sibelius concert.
"Is Justo coming along?"
"I couldn't get more than two seats together." I was a terrible liar.
She looked concerned, on the verge of refusing.
"You know how he is," I added quickly. "It's a concerto with orchestra. No starring role for a pianist. Besides, how could he sit still when he isn't the one playing?"
Aviva sat during the Sibelius concert with her eyes closed, her hands folded in her lap, while the soloist on stage played high, flutelike passages so soft one could just barely hear them above the orchestration. The effect produced was one of Scandinavian mist, weaving a spell of mass hypnosis.
I took the opportunity to study her profile from the corner of my eye, daring myself to move my arm closer to hers, to let our shoulders touch, to reach out for her hand—adolescent challenges, at which I failed completely.
During the intermission, a man behind us complained that the solo violinist was too weak to play with a full orchestra. "It's nothing like the record," he complained to the lady on his arm. "It's as if the sound was turned off. At the end, the bow was still on the string but I couldn't hear anything."
He carried on about the acoustics, the ticket prices, and the stature of the soloist until Aviva finally turned and said, "Perhaps he didn't care if you could hear every measure. Perhaps he was playing those last few notes just for himself."
"That's ridiculous," the man scowled. "It wasn't played correctly at all. I've got the record at home—"
"Then go home and listen to it," Aviva said, leading me away to the bar, where she paid for two vodka shots with her own money, and handed one to me. When the end-of-intermission bell rang and I hadn't so much as sipped mine, Aviva lifted it lightly out of my fingers and downed it herself, in one easy swallow.
"Sorry," I said. "I was thinking about something."
"Not about that amateur critic, I hope. We can change seats, if we need to."
But no, I'd been thinking about what she had said about the Sibelius soloist—that he might have been playing for himself. Aviva herself often seemed to play that way. And yet her playing did not seem to fulfill or energize her—if anything, she looked more drained as the music proceeded. At the beginning of a concert, Al-Cerraz was tense and desperate for silence; at the end he was gregarious and hardly willing to leave the stage. Aviva was the opposite. She began each concert relaxed and ready and ended limp, vanishing from the stage before I had stepped out from behind my cello. Her rapid exit did not seem calculated, but it did have a predictable effect: The audience cheered even more loudly, insistent on encores, refusing to let her disappear.
Aside from our musical performances, I remember that first tour as a series of images: Al-Cerraz down on his knees on a black stage floor, behind the curtain, not scrubbing Aviva's elbows this time, not proposing to her (as I'd thought at first, with my heart in my throat), but retrieving a lost earring. I nearly collided with him as he knelt there, the glittering rhinestone stud cradled within the thick crease of his palm. I was used to seeing him stand next to women on tiptoe, all the better to peer down their décolletage. I'd never seen him on his knees before a woman, and certainly not twice in a span of six months.
It wasn't that he treated Aviva as a special object of romantic esteem. He continued to treat all women with equal gallantry, opening cab doors and surrendering preferred café tables from one city to the next. But only Aviva merited his tender, quieter gestures. The way he pushed her hair out of the way, off her forehead. The time, standing on a train platform together, that he reached a thumb behind her ear to rub away a smudge while Aviva stared off into the distance, unbothered by his familiarity. Perhaps all I was seeing in him was the development of a brotherly demeanor, after a lifetime of acting like a spoiled only child. Or perhaps that was wishful thinking. Nothing had happened between them, but that didn't mean it would never happen. Perhaps I was living on borrowed time.
Sometimes I played worse when I played with Aviva, distracted by thoughts of what we'd all do after the concert, or the next day. Perhaps we would rent a car and tour the countryside. Perhaps we had planned dinner at an elegant restaurant, where I hoped through some alchemy of the soul that I would find a way to become more noticeable than Al-
Cerraz, more gay, taller in my chair, more comfortable in my clothes, in my own skin. But usually, when the time came, the alchemy failed. Listening to Al-Cerraz charming Aviva across the table—charming everyone in the room, even the waiter bringing us champagne courtesy of some music fan several tables away—I would slip my hands into my jacket pockets and remember one of my earliest selves: the boy who had chocolate at his fingertips but refused to eat it, refused even to touch it.
Didn't it make sense to wait, to be restrained? Hadn't Aviva herself said she needed to address her past first—perhaps immediately, perhaps within a year—to make things right? I had known other women like her—women like my mother and like the Queen, who had been pushed hard by men, or by circumstance. The more I thought of her that way, the farther I nudged her out of my own grasp, on a pedestal raised so high that even a taller man would have had trouble reaching her.
And if I occasionally played worse because of Aviva, many more times I played better. Once I stepped onto a stage to play Saint-Saëns's "The Swan," and Al-Cerraz, catching my jaded expression at the prospect of playing that romantic, shopworn piece yet again, mouthed, "Think of her." I did. I pictured Aviva as she was at that moment, waiting for her entrance backstage, pinning up her hair as a stagehand finished buttoning up the back of her new custom-made gown. (At Al-Cerraz's insistence, she had advanced finally beyond cheap ready-made dresses.) I let my bow trace that image of her, imagining her long waist, the tiny white cloth-covered buttons between her shoulder blades, the line of her collar, her bare neck. I took my time with the duet's sliding notes, my wrist flexing to connect them smoothly, to blend up-bow into down-bow. Gradually I let my vibrato widen, until I sketched the thin final note and let it fade, as gracefully as a swan's silver wake. Applause rolled across the room in undulating waves; tremendous applause. It was accompanied by that rarer thing, a quick approving nod of Al-Cerraz's head from behind the grand piano's open lid. Afterward, he whispered to me, "I
knew
you'd learn to play that piece, sometime or other."
By the spring of 1930, Biber was forwarding various new requests for our busy trio: the chance to perform on radio with the BBC Symphony Orchestra; a fall music festival in Paris. Aviva reminded us that she'd be returning to Germany for the school year. As a trio, we had to decline any appearance that couldn't wait until the following summer. Our lack of availability fanned the flames of interest. How could we decline all performances in fall and winter, the height of the music season?
A Madrid magazine featured Aviva, alone, on the cover:
La Mujer Misteriosa.
The mysterious woman. The article inside speculated about Aviva's sudden emergence in the world of classical music. An enterprising reporter had tracked her earliest recital notices in some smalltown Italian newspapers and found glowing descriptions of her in a Munich society column. It was hinted that she had performed privately for a prominent fascist.
Al-Cerraz had picked up a copy of the magazine at a train station, and now he passed it to me in the parlor car. "I bought it without even looking! If I'd noticed, I would have taken several copies."
I held it out to Aviva, but she lit a cigarette and looked away.
"Our talented girl, playing for Hitler," Al-Cerraz fawned, but Aviva did not laugh. Instead she said stiffly, "Nowhere does it mention Hitler."
"She's right," I said. "I hear Mussolini loves the violin."
This time Aviva said nothing.
"I'm only joking, Aviva."
Al-Cerraz persevered: "Mussolini?"
Still she didn't answer.
"Then it's true! Was this with an orchestra?" Al-Cerraz asked.
"Nothing so formal."
"Oh, come now—
please!
"
"I was eighteen," she relented. "It was an audition—something a friend had arranged, which I couldn't cancel without offense. One half hour."
We questioned her more closely on the timing, trying to stitch together what little we understood about the year before we'd met her, when we knew she had moved from Italy to Germany.
"He has the most amazing head—like one of those enormous Toltec stone heads they find in the Mayan jungle," Al-Cerraz said. "That left hand he keeps on his hip must be some kind of structural support, to keep his top half from tipping."
"Tell us about the music," I said.
She sighed through a cloud of smoke. "I was on my own for the first time, after leaving the convent. He was looking for a nanny. A nanny with musical talent. His little boy, Romano—just a baby, then, very sweet—showed a fascination with music, especially piano music. But you know, that was just a pretext. Il Duce wanted a private violin teacher in the house, for his own pleasure, someone on call."
"So then he does play the violin?"
"Absolutely. He's known for it, just as he's known for reading a canto of Dante every morning—a champion of Italian culture. With the violin, it's fifteen to twenty minutes, every day, or—" She paused.
"Or...?"
"Well, all right. I'll tell you one small thing, then we change the subject. Do you promise?"
Al-Cerraz wouldn't promise. I glowered at him threateningly.
Finally she relaxed long enough to sketch the scene for us: the official residence of Villa Torlonia, the music room with its gramophone and stacks of Verdi and Puccini records. Mussolini closed the curtains and locked the door whenever he practiced, and made it clear that no one was allowed to disturb him for that sacred twenty minutes when he relinquished the nation's helm and lost himself to music.
"But how did he play?" Al-Cerraz demanded.
"I don't know," she said.
"What do you mean, you don't know?"
"He put on a record—a record of a solo violin, playing études. He held the violin to his chin for a moment or two—"
"That chin! I'm surprised he didn't crush the violin!" Al-Cerraz interjected. I shushed him.
"—as if he were producing the sound on the record," she continued, undaunted. "But then he set it down. And began flirting."
"Aha!" Al-Cerraz laughed. "So it's a ploy. He doesn't play."
"No—he does. My friend who arranged the meeting, another violinist, once played a duet with him. Mussolini plays when he likes. But he also has an insistent wife, many children and counselors and, more to the point, a long line of mistresses coming and going to that music room all the time, and it seems that twenty uninterrupted minutes is just the requisite interval."
Al-Cerraz was delighted.
"Anyway," she continued, "I'd had enough life experience by that point to communicate my ... lack of interest. I did play the violin for a few minutes, at the end, but I had decided already I wasn't interested in the position. There was no need to make use of the defensive weapons I'd brought for the occasion."
"Weapons?" I asked.
"Stiletto heels. You know I don't like to wear anything but flat shoes, but this was a special occasion."
"
Brava!
" Al-Cerraz said.
But I was bothered. "You didn't mind performing for a dictator?"
"I wasn't interested in the position."
"But even in that half hour; you weren't sickened to face that man?"
"Friends," Al-Cerraz interrupted. "Please."
"He is the leader of Italy. Anyone with that kind of power has some skeletons, I'm sure. But I'm sorry—Il Duce has been Il Duce for all of my adult life."
"This is a man who murdered people from the very beginning—his socialist opponent in 1924, just for starters."
"I was fourteen years old in 1924," Aviva said. "It wasn't a good year for me either, you know."
"Skeletons don't begin to describe what are in that man's closet—fresh corpses, more like." My voice sharpened. "Every time that man makes a political decision, someone dies."
"I think
I
would have preferred to die that year, myself."
"Friends," Al-Cerraz interrupted, "what are you talking about? Can't you hear yourselves? You're talking right past each other."
I persevered, "You're aware of these things, Aviva. How could you not be, when you plan to go to Germany and perform with Kurt Weill and Bertolt Brecht? They're just the sort of musicians the Nazis hate."