Authors: Andromeda Romano-Lax
Al-Cerraz sneered. "The Naysayer. The Yea-sayer."
I asked, "What does Weill say?"
"He says the music should stand on its own. There is no need for any supplemental texts."
Al-Cerraz raised his glass. "Hear, hear."
"Besides, the music itself is antiauthoritarian," Aviva said, raising her finger to the bartender as she spoke, evidently quoting from Weill again, if the false confidence in her tone was any indication. "A grim chorus; triumphant solo melodies. The audience should know to root for the individual."
Al-Cerraz raised his eyebrows. "Well, I wouldn't go that far. I wouldn't count on the audience knowing whom to cheer for, based on what I saw today."
I reached a hand toward Aviva's wrist. "Are you sure you want another?"
She squirmed away from me, smiling across the room at the waiter approaching us, a towel over his forearm, a stoppered bottle in his hands.
"
Mineralwasser, bitte,
" I suggested with a nod in all directions, but the suggestion made little impact; Aviva ordered her own glass of
likor
instead.
Al-Cerraz said, "Can you imagine Beethoven saying, 'Listen to this measure. This dotted rhythm here tells the workers they should meet at quarter-past nine to smash all the machines'? Nonsense.
Der Jasager, Der Neinsager
—it will not stand the test of time."
Aviva downed her freshened glass and set it down. "Anyway, I'm here. That's all that matters, really."
When the hotel bar closed, we hired a cab and escorted Aviva back to Frau Zemmler's house, then walked back to the guesthouse by ourselves. I asked Al-Cerraz, "Didn't you see, at the bar?"
"What?"
"She got teary about that line from the opera."
"Not our stoic girl." But then he reconsidered. "Something about dewdrops."
"
Eso es.
That's what the mother tells her son. She thinks about him every minute. That's how Aviva feels. She can't forget him."
"Who, Weill?"
"No."
"Brecht?"
"No!"
"Frau Zemmler? I've heard some strange things about these German women, I'll admit. They don't follow the rules our Spanish women follow. At some of these cabarets—"
I slapped him hard on the back, torn between aggravation and gratitude for his clowning.
"No. I am saying that Aviva misses her baby."
"Her baby," he repeated, stopping dead in his tracks, all playfulness extinguished. Without turning, I could feel the slump of his shoulders, his eyelids growing heavy with disappointment.
That night, I finally told him what I knew, what Aviva had told me at the harbor café, about her music teacher and Paganini's grave, and being left at the convent, pregnant. He was astounded by the story, but even more astounded that I hadn't revealed it to him earlier.
"The baby was born? It lived?"
"I assume so."
"Where is it, then?"
"I don't know."
"Does she?"
"The way she put it..."
"And then? And then?" he kept saying, incredulous that I hadn't pressed to know what happened later. "It couldn't be any more personal than what she'd already told you. Good Lord, Feliu—you're an ass."
"I was worried about her feelings," I said.
"You were worried about
your
feelings. You don't want any complications. You like playing the priestly role—Father Confessor— someone whispering into your prim, sexless ear, as long as what they say doesn't require you to take action."
"I'm hardly a religious man—"
"I'm not talking about religion, I'm talking about authority—the kind that likes to keep everything how it is and everyone in their place."
"That just isn't true."
"It's the last thing I'd expect from someone with your—leanings." He stopped and ran his hands through his hair. "Do you remember that 'Mysterious Woman' article? There will be more like that one. We'd better know more about Aviva than what some malicious journalist has to say."
The next morning, I knocked on Al-Cerraz's door and got no answer. I went to the rehearsal hall, but Aviva hadn't shown up for work. I sat in the back row of the hall, sweating in my overcoat as I listened to the young choristers' falsetto, more annoying with every refrain:
It is important to know when to be in agreement. Many say yes, and there is no agreement.
After an hour, Aviva hurried in, hair disheveled, a run up the back of one stocking. She winced as she passed quickly by me, face half-hidden in her coat collar, but I caught the mascara smears under her eyes. Weill's assistant approached, took Aviva's coat and led her backstage. When she emerged, her face was clean but redder, fiercely scrubbed.
For another hour I waited, my throat tight. When the rehearsal ended, Aviva took her time in apologizing to Weill, then made her way slowly to where I sat, in the shadowy rear.
"Justo spent the night," she said, refusing to look directly at me. My worst fears were confirmed. In one night of swift and decisive passion, Al-Cerraz had surmounted my months of hesitation. Seeing my expression, Aviva said, "It isn't what you think, Feliu. We argued." She began to sob, the tears dripping from her red nose into the fur of her coat collar. "Don't be angry with me, too."
I cleared my throat, struggling for composure. "Why was he angry?" To my own throbbing ears, my voice sounded aged and strained, as if I hadn't spoken for days, as if I'd lived alone for years.
"Because I wouldn't tell him," she said, and leaned into me, her wet cheek against my own, the tips of her collar soft against my eyes. The embrace provided the perfect blind for my sudden burst of relief.
"He already knows about your teacher, and the pregnancy. I told him."
"That became clear," she said sharply, then softened again. "But there is more, and it's not his business."
"Of course it isn't."
"He'll want to advise me, and I can't bear advice. I can't bear anyone's questions. I have one idea, but it's mine, and it's all I have. If he laughed it away, I think I'd fall apart."
"Of course."
She pushed away, rubbing her face with the back of one hand. "Justo thinks that one yes means a yes to everything."
I felt the tightness take hold again, the hollow ache of fading relief.
"He's used to getting everything he wants—you know that."
"Please," I said, taking her hands in mine and squeezing. I saw her eyes grow wide as she struggled against the pressure of my hands. "Don't tell me any more about what you and Justo did."
"Well, at first—"
"I don't want to hear this." I swallowed hard as a pain gripped my chest.
"You're overreacting. We didn't do anything. We talked
—he
talked. Into his own glass, by the end. Are you listening to me?" she said, noticing the fist clenched over my heart.
I closed my eyes.
"You're different, Feliu. You have principles. And you don't push."
"Promise me you and Justo aren't lovers."
She wrested her hands away from mine. "That's all you care about?"
"At this moment, yes."
She reached a hand up to smooth her hair. "Fine. I promise."
My head sank to my chest. I felt as if I'd just played a double concert, the worst of my life.
I stayed in Berlin through the summer. Within days, a letter arrived from Al-Cerraz, postmarked from Málaga. He asked me to assure Aviva that he wasn't angry, only worried. He looked forward to our tour the following summer. I replied immediately, reassuring him that nothing had changed with the trio, that we'd all be together again as planned. As long as he stayed away, I reasoned, whatever had passed between them could be forgotten.
In the meanwhile, I told him, I was enjoying an impromptu vacation. I planned to visit several museums, analyze some historical scores, improve my German—all things I
did
intend to do, as I wrote them. What I ultimately desired I wouldn't have been able to explain, to him or to myself.
What another man might have accomplished with overt action, I tried to accomplish with the same dogged determination that had allowed me to master the cello. I relied on long hours and repetitive motions. I refrained from making physical advances upon Aviva, even when opportunities presented themselves, reasoning that I had earned her trust so far by leaving her alone. I waited and followed. I listened. And over the next month, Aviva told me her story. After rehearsals, we met at bars, and later, in my hotel room, where she would relax, sometimes in a chair in the corner, hands wrapped around a glass, head nodding as I played the Bach suites for her.
I stopped once, just as her glass was tipping into her lap. I reached forward to catch it, set it aside, and said, "Justo always hated when I practiced these on the train."
She shook her head and wiped her chin, pretending to be wide awake. "He was envious."
"Of what?"
"Of your single-minded devotion."
Al-Cerraz's letters continued to arrive frequently.
How is Aviva?
She is fine,
I wrote back.
How are you both?
She and I are fine,
I wrote, and in later letters, more forcefully, We
are fine.
I did not mention her drinking, which seemed if anything to increase, here in the land that reminded her daily of her unfinished task. I was haunted by the thought that Al-Cerraz would have handled all this better—would have handled
her
better. I thought of my mother pressuring me to choose among my father's gifts. "I don't want to get it wrong," I'd told her. "You will be wrong, sometimes," she had said—and she was right. I had been wrong many times, always when it mattered most.
And yet I could not seem to change course. If anything, I became a caricature of myself, even
to
myself: cautious, stern, dogmatic, ascetic.
When Aviva drank, refilling her glass even before it was empty, I switched to water. When she came out of my bathroom wrapped in a towel, wet hair streaming down her pale back, I turned away and busied myself in a corner, sorting through letters. When she decided to talk, I listened, hands in my lap, face impassive. She did not want sympathy, I told myself. She did not want physical love.
I did not touch her even when she fell asleep on my bed, head on my lap, whispering in German to herself as she nodded off: "
Es macht nichts.
" It does not matter.
In the mornings when we left together, the guesthouse matron would turn a blind eye. We'd go to a café on the corner where I'd order her
Katerfrühstück,
a "hangover breakfast" of sausage and herring. But she rarely touched it, and I gained a few kilos before I learned to order only enough for one.
I heard most of Aviva's stories not during the evenings, when she turned silently inward, but during these headache-plagued mornings-after, when she became more verbose and acidic, angry at herself and therefore willing to invite discovery. Repeatedly, she asked me not to judge her. But why did she tell her stories to me instead of Justo, except that she did want to be judged?
Judaism, Aviva told me, was not what set her apart at the convent near the Austrian border where her violin teacher had dumped her unceremoniously. Where she was raised, Jews and Catholics intermarried occasionally. In the convent, the sisters treated her with compassion and did not try to convert her.
As she soon discovered, pregnancy did not make her different, either. First she was shown to her shared room in the attic, where she set down her valise and the battered violin case that held her first instrument (vastly inferior to the borrowed Magione). Next she was taken to the main hall, where the other girls sat at long benches that paralleled even longer tables, doing piecework sewing. Sister Luigia clapped for the girls' attention. In a disorderly wave, the girls pushed themselves up, some supporting themselves with hands on the table or hands on their lower backs, and Aviva saw that every last one of them was carrying a shameful burden, just like her. Only a few bothered to smile.
Sister Luigia was a music lover. After dinner, she asked Aviva to perform something on the violin for the other girls. Nausea had plagued Aviva for her first trimester and was only barely beginning to recede now. Smells still bothered her, and the convent was infused with them: mold, though the nuns and girls spent part of each day scrubbing the floors; garlic, which she had once loved, and sour, overcooked squash, which she did not; iodine and peroxide wafting in from the overcrowded infirmary. Aviva told the nun she felt too ill to play.
Many of the girls had come from well-off families in the south, but class meant less here than practical knowledge. The girls at the top of the pecking order were invariably among those farthest along in their pregnancies. They regaled and taunted the others after bedtime, as they lay in darkened attic rows, with the knowledge gained by their greater experience: how it felt to be so far along that the baby kicked your liver and forced the air from your lungs; how one could distinguish false contractions from real. A select few served as helpers in the infirmary. They alone knew what happened during labor and in the first few days following childbirth. Aviva didn't want to hear about it or think about it.
Sister Luigia again asked her to play the violin, a week later. And again a week after that. "I see," the nun said, in a quiet moment alone. "Humility is a virtue."
"I'm not humble, Sister," Aviva said.
"Then play for us."
"I can't."
"You mean, you won't."
"No, Sister. That's not what I mean."
A month had passed since she'd last played—the longest she'd gone without playing since she'd first picked up the instrument. By now everything about her felt different. Her hair was thicker, dryer and less curly, her fingers too fat to wear the simple ring her mother had left her. Veins sprang up on the back of her calves. The hair on her forearms darkened, but not nearly so much as the alarming stripe of dark skin that extended from her navel toward her pelvis, like an arrow from God, pointing to the place where all the trouble had begun. While some of the girls whispered clandestinely about their changing bodies, Aviva was sure that none of them had a stripe like hers; perhaps it was Paganini's mark on her. Each night, she faced the wall while undressing, to conceal it. It was easy to believe she would never be herself again. Nothing felt right, nothing mattered.