Authors: Andromeda Romano-Lax
He did not bother to ask if I'd stolen them from other boys, which must have seemed unlikely, given my unimpressive physique. Nor did he ask if I disliked chocolate, since Mamá had assured him it was my favorite treat. Finally he tilted his head and tried, "Are you saving it for the poor?"
I'd never given the poor a thought. I'd been too busy over the last five and a half weeks enjoying the sparkly lightness in my head, the way hunger extended the church bells' dull metal echo, the feeling of defiant strength in my heart—as compared to the weakness in my hip and leg—when I walked into school unfed, feeling proud of myself for doing without.
"Yes, Father—for the poor," I lied.
"Remarkable," he said, and let me go home.
The next Sunday after Mass, Father Basilio invited me to his private study, a dark, airless room with heavy wine-colored drapes. He asked, "Have you thought of the priesthood, Feliu?"
"Is being a priest work?"
"The hardest work."
Thinking of my mother, I asked, "Is it
dignified
work?"
He laughed. "Dignified—of course it is! There is nothing more dignified."
Father Basilio directed me to various Bible readings, which I promised to contemplate and sometimes did. He helped me with my introductory Latin and taught me a few words of modern Italian, explaining they would come in helpful if I visited Rome someday. These same Italian words, he added, were used by musicians and composers across Europe. At this, I sat up and paid attention, learning how to pronounce and spell
adagio, allegro, andante, presto, maestoso.
Father Basilio's hopes for my clerical future lasted about six months. By this point, I hadn't played the violin for over two years, but I knew that in preparation for a future cello, I should stay physically ready to play. Alarmed that the calluses I'd developed on my left hand had faded, I discovered a way not only to renew but to increase them—by rubbing my fingertips against stone, at least twenty minutes a day. I always walked on the left-hand side of the street so I could drag my fingers against the rough stone as I walked. In bed at night, in the dark, I rubbed one finger at a time against the wall next to my bed. With time, my fingertips became stiff and waxy, capped with impressively thick, light-yellow pads, the fingerprint lines nearly invisible.
One day at church, as we were leaving Mass, Father Basilio wished me well and took my left hand in his—a spontaneous, collegial gesture. I watched as he squeezed harder, flattening his fingers against my own, feeling them. His face fell.
In confession the following Sunday, he asked, "How old are you now, my son?"
"Eleven years old, Father."
I heard him sigh. "And already committing the sins of adulthood."
I waited, confused.
"Feliu, you must resist your desire."
The desire to play cello?
"Our Lord knows what you have been doing."
I swallowed hard. "I'm not doing anything, Father."
He sighed again. I heard the wood settling under his bench as he shifted.
"Have you been helping your brothers with any olive trimming?"
"Only once last year. I fell off the ladder. Sometimes I visit Percival and he tells me to lie on my back on the ground and look up, to tell him where I can't see blue sky, so he knows where to trim more."
The priest grunted. After a while, he asked, "What hand do you write with, Feliu?"
"My right hand."
He paused again.
"I believe you have promise; I hope to help you find a meaningful vocation. But first, you must stop what you are doing."
"What am I doing?"
"
God
knows."
"But
I
don't know, Father."
"The thing you keep doing every day, over and over. The thing that is making those hard spots on your fingers."
"Oh," I said, relieved—but only for a moment, until I realized where his request was leading. I said more quietly, "But I need to do it. And I like to do it. I can't stop now."
Father Basilio's normally melodic voice lowered into a growl. "Of
course
you like doing it—that is the problem. I understand your father is dead, but hasn't your mother taught you anything?"
I leaped to her defense. "She has, Father."
I recalled what I knew about Father Basilio: that he had dissolved the Catalan-language community choir in favor of an Italian one. Perhaps he wasn't in favor of Catalan music—or musicians—at all. Why else would he discourage me?
Father Basilio gave me the cold shoulder for several weeks. Then he approached me one day and again clasped my hand. It was as calloused as ever. Feeling its hard patches and raised ridges, he released it and spat, "Considering the defilement this hand has suffered, I shouldn't even touch it!"
When I told Mamá that Father Basilio had decided to stop touching me, she turned to me, her eyes wide. "Touching you? Feliu—don't be alone with that man. Don't spend any more time in that church than you have to."
Sorry that I had alarmed her, I said, "All right, Mamá." I knew, though, that I'd miss the singing at Mass, however halting and off-key; and the church's inviting coolness; and the feeling, brief as it was, that one adult seemed to believe I had some kind of calling.
***
Eduardo Rivera continued to avoid our family, but he had an older and more powerful brother—
Don
Miguel Rivera, as my Tía reminded us to call him—who was not so easily rebuffed. Instead of being repelled by my mother's unladylike show of force the day of El Nene's concert, Don Miguel was intrigued by it. At any public gathering, he made sure to approach and greet my mother, and to ask after Tía's health—though he could have asked Tía herself just as easily, since he saw my aunt every week in church.
Don Miguel had inherited his father's job of managing the vineyards and olive groves owned by his patron, the Duke of Oviedo. As Don Miguel gained power and prestige, we saw him more around town. Even in scorching summer, he wore a vest and double-breasted suit jacket, bunched over his paunchy middle. Wandering away from Campo Seco's twisting streets toward its cracking, yellow-soiled fields, he looked like a crow, black coattails flapping in the heat.
Despite his increasing wealth, Don Miguel was struck by the same tragedy that befell so many of the villagers, when his thin, meek wife, Doña Clara, died giving birth to their long-awaited first child. He grieved intensely for one month, and then let it be known, with the frankness of a man shopping for a particular breed of horse, that he intended to marry again, as soon as possible. This time, he would seek out a stronger, sturdier woman. Women of unproven fertility need not apply.
If many widows expressed interest in Don Miguel's matrimonial quest, our family didn't hear about it. We had our own death to mourn. One month shy of his ninth birthday, my brother Carlito contracted diphtheria. What seemed at first like little more than a sore throat advanced to swollen lymph nodes and painful breathing. The inside of Carlito's throat darkened from inflamed red to a leathery gray. Within a few days, several more local children had caught the disease, and there was talk of quarantining Carlito and the others. A doctor from Barcelona was hailed, but before the man arrived, Carlito passed away.
Don Miguel was among the first to visit our house that week in 1905, when others were still deterred by the worry that fatal spores lurked in our hallways. He arrived flanked by two quieter men, who removed their hats while Don Miguel kept his own head covered. Tía brought them all glasses of sherry. Despite what they had in common—not least, the recent death of loved ones—my mother couldn't seem to find any words to share with her guest. She paced silently the entire time he sat drinking, his eyes hidden under the shadow of his hat brim as Tía refilled his glass again and again.
Finally Don Miguel explained why he'd come: not only to pay respects, but to offer to help carry Carlito's coffin. Mamá insisted that the task was well within the abilities of our two neighbors, Percival, and a visiting uncle. Then she resumed pacing between the table and the doorway, willing her guest and his silent cohorts to leave.
But Don Miguel wasn't to be so easily dismissed. He returned with a freshly plucked chicken and said that he hadn't had a good meal since his wife had died. Mamá had no choice but to invite him to stay and dine with us. Once again, the hat and jacket stayed on. The chicken was stringy and tough. It was the quickest midday meal we ever ate; ten minutes after she'd set the plates in front of us, Mamá swept them away, impervious to Don Miguel's quizzical expression and Tía's disapproving stare.
A few weeks later, Don Miguel delivered a letter informing us that Enrique had been accepted at the military academy in Toledo, near Madrid. Enrique had sat for the examinations several months earlier, and had been waiting in anguish to hear. We couldn't understand how Don Miguel had received the news first. "Perhaps it helped that I put in a good word when I visited the capital," he told my mother, but later, she took pains to tell Luisa and me that she was certain Enrique had passed the exams all by himself.
Don Miguel remained eager to impress, and a couple of months later he returned to our house with another scheme. He'd heard I was still pining to play music. Why not let me use my father's old teaching piano, which remained in the room between the church and the school?
"I understand it's a little far for the boy to walk each day," Don Miguel said, lowering his eyes to me with exaggerated sympathy. "But move it to the house and your problem is solved."
My mother reminded him, "It's Father Basilio's piano now, not ours. I gave it to him to settle a debt."
Don Miguel shrugged. "The priest doesn't mind. He has his own debts to settle. Tell him I asked, and he'll assure you—he doesn't mind at all."
Mamá said, "Besides, Feliu wants to play cello. He has no interest in piano."
"You played once yourself," he said to my mother. "You could teach the boy."
"
No tengo ganas,
" she said, and I knew it was true. She no longer had the desire to have anything to do with the piano.
"It's true you don't want to play piano?"
I was staring at Don Miguel's hat, wondering why he wouldn't remove it. I didn't think he was bald. I could see oily tendrils curling in front of his ears and along his neck. If anything, he seemed unusually hairy.
My mother touched my arm. "Feliu, he's talking to you."
I startled out of my daze. "Piano? Yes—any instrument, at this point." My mother's eyes widened. She twitched her head to one side, as if she were shaking a fly away from her ear. But I had already missed the cue.
"Good. It's settled," he said, scraping the chair legs against the floor. My mother pushed herself up slowly. He took her hand and mashed his lips and nose into it. After the front door closed, she collapsed into a chair and whispered, "We'll never be rid of him now."
The next evening, as Campo Seco awoke from its late-afternoon slumber, curious onlookers flocked to our street. Men headed downhill toward the church in twos and threes, dabbing their necks with white handkerchiefs, as if just the thought of moving a piano was sufficient to make a man sweat. At the threshold of the church's side door, volunteers had coiled ropes and heaped up pulleys, creating such a profusion of snakelike piles that one might have thought our church was engaged in an exorcism.
A dozen men had rolled up their sleeves in eager sympathy, but only four men would do the bulk of the work: Don Miguel, two of his taciturn associates, and the sniffling, sensitive, thin-armed Eduardo. I'd already begun to feel compassion for my former teacher, but today, seeing Eduardo's bullied expression, I felt doubly sorry for him. He removed his dress collar, unfastened the shirt's top button, stretched his arms out, rebuttoned his shirt, and would have repeated the process again if his two fellow movers hadn't yanked him into the church.
A half hour later, just as observers were getting restless, the brown lid of the piano appeared in the doorway, then withdrew. We onlookers could hear the sound of muffled voices and a dull thud. The piano top appeared again, protruding a few inches farther this time, before a second retreat. The piano was stuck, unable to move around a tight corner. We heard a curse and a clank. Then a shiny object sailed through the doorway, landing at our feet. It was one of the silver candelabras, now bent, that had been screwed to the piano's face, above the keyboard. The men hadn't thought to remove it first.
Eduardo squeezed through the doorway, past the stuck piano. He crouched into midwife position on a lower step with his hands and one cheek pressed hard against the piano, waddling backward, trying to maintain his footing and resist the brunt of the piano's weight, while inside, Don Miguel pushed and pulled and turned, trying every angle. A leather strap around the piano's top alternately slackened and tightened, reining the piano upright when it leaned too far down the outside stairs.
For several minutes, progress continued. The counterbalance worked. Then, just at the most delicate stage in the birthing process, as the piano passed more than halfway through the church door, its lidded top began to tip earthward. Eduardo squatted more deeply, his knees turning out in a
grand plié.
But the tipping continued; the piano seemed determined to end up in his lap. At the last moment, just as three hundred kilos of wood, wire, and ivory seemed poised to pin him to the ground, he leaped sideways, sending the piano, honking like a strangled goose, down the steps and into the street.
My mother buried her eyes in her hands while Luisa patted her hip consolingly, whispering, "It only fell a little bit, Mamá." The men in the crowd looked down at the ground or up at the sky, embarrassed to have been caught witnessing such a botched moving job.
Without meeting any of our glances, Eduardo reshouldered his load and the second half of the piano slipped out effortlessly. The instrument was set down, and we all leaned forward to get the first glimpse of Don Miguel's face as he turned toward his brother, red cheeks quivering between labored puffs.