Authors: Andromeda Romano-Lax
"Oh, Mary won't be there." He studied his fingernails, then raised them to his teeth, and spoke into the anonymity of his cupped hands, whispering, "Only Hitler and Franco and a lot of newspapermen from both sides."
I didn't say anything. Aviva reached for my hand but I ignored her. She pushed a water glass across the table. When I ignored that, she dipped a napkin in the water and held it toward my brow.
"You can't say yes on my behalf," I said finally.
Al-Cerraz looked to Aviva, who looked away. Then he turned to me, wincing slightly. "I already did."
Al-Cerraz refused to take no for an answer. By the time I got back to the Villa Air-Bel, a messenger had already left a note for me. It said, "I'll never ask another favor. After this, you'll never see me again." I should be so lucky, I thought—but I did not believe him.
He must have met with Fry at the Hôtel Splendide, too, because Fry came to me later, and to my astonishment suggested that the plan was a good one. Bold, inventive, and sound, he said, except for one fact: "It certainly will destroy your reputation."
"I don't care about that."
"If that's true, then why aren't you willing?"
The question deprived me of sleep all the next night.
Fry came to me again the following day, to share what he'd learned from one of his best sources, a man who had worked for the British embassy.
Al-Cerraz had not been inventing stories or exaggerating the rank of our proposed audience. The concert would be the centerpiece of the welcoming festivities at the railroad station in Hendaye, France, just across the westernmost border of Spain, where Franco and Hitler planned to meet for the first time in both dictators' lives. Still, it didn't make sense to me. Given that Al-Cerraz and I were not Franco's favorites, why would Nazi authorities consider us the best musical accompaniment for a Spanish-German summit?
"Hitler and Franco will both be taking pains to annoy each other," Fry guessed. "Franco never managed to force you to perform for him or his government—I doubt he could have succeeded. But if the Nazis can, then it's Hitler's way of showing how much control of Spain he has already. It's all tied up with public image—cultural showmanship, philosophical innuendo. As a propaganda plan, it has Goebbels's fingerprints all over it."
"Wouldn't my appearance just make Franco angrier?"
"It might. But Hitler has tried friendship with Franco for years already. I think he's ready to settle for intimidation."
The day before our officially ticketed departure, I had one last visitor. Aviva arrived at the villa on a black bicycle she had borrowed from the madame of a brothel. We sat outside, next to the pear trees. A few of the unharvested pears had fallen from the trees and been left to bake and decay into pulpy splotches between clumps of unmowed grass. I hadn't noticed them before, but on this unseasonably warm autumn day, the wasps buzzed insistently between us and the sticky ground. We sat as still as possible, trying not to aggravate them.
"There are two things I need to tell you," Aviva said. "First, I understand why you won't play the concert." She swallowed hard. "Even when I wasn't well in Germany—wasn't in my right mind—I understood you. And I think, despite your concerns, that you understood me. I admire your principles, Feliu. I always have."
Little could she know that she was praising me for a firmness I did not feel. She continued, "If you tell them you won't be playing, it makes the whole thing suspect. So we want you to come with us on the train. They already believe that you have arthritis. Ride all the way to Hendaye and at the last minute say you can't perform—a medical excuse. Then Al-Cerraz and I play, and we leave the concert, and then. .. "
I sat quietly, considering both what to say and what to do: not just later in Hendaye, but there, at that very moment, in the villa's garden, while she sat just across from me—her hand within reach, her cheek only a bit farther, if I stood now and leaned across the table.
"That way," she added, "there is no harm to your reputation."
There was that word again. But in that moment, I did not care about my reputation. I did not want to be revered, I wanted to be loved.
"Wait," I said.
She looked at me quizzically, smiling. I'd been watching a wasp circling her head lazily for the last several minutes.
"There—in your hair."
She shook her head impatiently. "The second thing is harder to say. I don't know how you'll take it."
The wasp had landed on a dark brown curl behind her ear, trapping itself there as she shook her head from side to side. She looked more annoyed than fearful; it was taking all of her energy to find her words, and she didn't want to be interrupted.
"Justo and I—" she clapped her hand hard against her neck.
I reached toward her. "You'll just get it—"
"—are getting married."
"—angry..."
Our words had crossed, and I was only beginning to absorb what she had said.
She stiffened, closing her eyes. "Too late."
For a full minute I sat, silent and stunned, until she rose to her feet. Ignoring the reddening spot at her throat, she said, "I have to go. The madame warned me that she imposes strict overtime penalties on all her customers."
I watched her struggle to bunch her skirt between her knees and extend one leg over the crossbar. "Just remember," she said. "No one can make you do something you don't want to do. You've always been your own man."
Had I? She seemed as sure of it as Al-Cerraz had seemed sure I'd follow his lead. But why should this matter when I'd just lost Aviva?
Why should I care what she or anyone thought of me—what the entire world thought of me?
Precisely because now it was the only thing I had left.
I had written perhaps half of my life story so far, if the thin pile of hand-scrawled sheets I'd filled could be called a life story, and now this trip to Hendaye imposed a deadline. Fry had promised to smuggle my manuscript to a clandestine courier at the end of the week, while I was away.
Pushing Aviva as far as I could from my grieving mind, I continued to wonder about the choices I had made in my life, or failed to make; the lines I had drawn, not only for myself but for others as well. I had been fortunate in many regards, endowed with opportunities and gifts. But I needed think only of the gemstone in my bow to recall how many of those gifts had weighed upon me, upsetting my balance in more than one sense. With the same kind of fervor I'd once displayed in Alberto's apartment, bowing until my tailbone ached, I kept writing, remembering, and searching.
That afternoon, Fry came to the Villa Air-Bel, and I told him I had used up all the paper he had given me. "Both sides?" His question embarrassed me. I hadn't meant to be wasteful. I thanked him and returned to writing, filling the backs of all the completed pages, writing faster than ever—a
scherzo
of pen strokes.
One by one the house lights went out, the pure dark country night pressed down upon the house, and I continued to write in an insomniac trance. One might assume it was the events at Hendaye that were costing me sleep, but the truth is I didn't spend more than a minute imagining them. I worried about only one thing: Had I explained myself? Whether or not I performed, I knew the Hendaye concert would change the way the world thought about me. There was a chance that something might happen to me. The manuscript I was writing provided answers, a defense, an explanation for everything I had ever done, or failed to do. But rereading the parts I'd already written, I knew I hadn't explained anything well. Was it true I had lost contact with Alberto, distancing myself from him even after my own experiences at the palace had showed me that any musician can be ensnared by a situation beyond his control? After I—and everyone else—turned against the monarchy, why had I been unable and unwilling to return the Queen's gift? Had I really ruined the chances of that young cellist, Rocamura—and how many other musicians besides? What had I ever done for my family? What had I ever done for art? For love?
I did not want to be remembered for the life I had so far lived. In the dark of the night, as I sat shivering and hungry with a cramped writing hand, I felt consumed by incompleteness. In the emotionalism that sweeps over a person rubbed raw by exhaustion, I suddenly became teary, thinking of the chorus from Mahler's Second Symphony, which I had conducted once in Salamanca:
Prepare thyself to live!
I did not feel prepared to live, or to die.
I wiped my eyes and turned over a piece of paper, to use the other side—it was filled. All the pages were filled. But I had more to remember, more to say and explain. I paced the room and wandered the house and found myself suddenly outside Fry's door, and before I knew it I was banging on it, waking the poor overworked man.
"Paper," I said.
He rubbed his eyes. "Tomorrow."
"I leave tomorrow, very early. It's my last chance to finish what I'm writing."
"Go back to bed."
"I wasn't in bed. I need more paper."
"There is no more paper."
I shrieked inconsolably, "I need more paper!"
He turned slowly and disappeared into the darkness of his bedroom. I heard rustling, for two minutes, three. He shuffled back to the lighted doorway with a sheaf of manuscript pages in his hand. He thrust them toward me, eyes still squeezed into half-slits. "It's all I have. Keep them in order; you can write on the backs and someone can recopy them later. They're going with the same courier. Leave them with Imogene in the morning, before you leave."
He started to close the door, then reopened it a crack. "He called them 'everything I know.' Be careful with them."
Back in my room, I held the first page under the light of my gooseneck desk lamp. It was a music manuscript: short works for piano, by Justo Al-Cerraz. Some of the pages had dates ranging across many years. Unable to help Al-Cerraz leave France, Fry had apparently agreed to smuggle out page after page of his work.
I wiped at my burning eyes with a calloused fingertip and tried to focus on the first page. One brittle corner was marked with a wineglass stain so perfect and round and red it looked like a passport stamp. And a date: 1921. I held the blemished page to my nose, wondering if the smell of cheap Rioja would still be there, and with it perhaps other scents—rosemary from the Alhambra's red-soiled slopes, the iodine of Mediterranean shores—but the only thing I could smell was dampness. A purple constellation of mold stippled many of the papers' edges.
I read the first bars of the first page silently. The solo piano piece started with a percussive sequence: a sixteenth note followed by a dotted eighth. Again. Again. Again.
His heartbeat,
I thought.
I'm hearing his heartbeat...
"
Olvídalo!
" I cried, and jumped at the sound of my voice echoing in that dark, empty wood-floored room. Forget it. And all my curiosity, all my concern, vanished in a fiery halo of indignation.
I caught my breath, tried to read more, to translate the inky markings into mental music. But my anger would not allow it.
Every measure bore his trace. The music refused to stand alone. It was always about him, and he was inescapable. How many times had I lain awake in a sleeper train climbing into the Pyrenees, listening to his snores and his flatulence? In Italy, ten minutes before the conductor raised his baton—and years before we met Aviva—I had been forced to witness him seducing a young violist, grunting into her neck like a pig unearthing truffles. Every day for months at a time, over three decades, I could have told you what he ate, whether he 'd changed his shirt, how his intestines and feet were faring, if he 'd suffered nightmares or enjoyed erotic dreams. His bodily rhythms demanded more than their fair share of attention.
And yes, perhaps age had mellowed him, or at least made him more fit for mixed company. But look at the company he sought! He was a political opportunist of the worst kind. And finally—finally—when he had seen the error of his ways and shed his political opportunism, he had grasped an opportunity of a different kind. He and Aviva were leaving together, to be married; to disappear together. Where would they go after New York—Los Angeles? Mexico? Brazil? His disappearance might be an improvement. But hers—unacceptable; an unjust prerequisite for her survival.
He had called this suite of piano pieces "everything I know."
He
was everything he knew. Of course the rhythm of the very first page was his heartbeat.
I turned the page over, told myself it was just paper, and tried to return to my own task. I continued to fill pages with scenes, memories, justifications. As dawn broke, I heard Yehoshua outside, warming up the car to take me to the train station, as we had arranged. I piled the papers together, and I knew I could not leave them behind. My story wasn't over, I hadn't told anything correctly or well, and I did not know whether I would manage to return after Hendaye. I had no choice but to take the entire manuscript with me, with the work of two men—the interpretation of two lives—in my shaking hands.
"And then?" the journalist prompted after I'd refilled his glass. He'd asked for whiskey, but foreign brands were hard to procure in Cuba, at least for someone of my means. I'd given him rum instead.
I told him, "The train, the checkpoints, the heavily guarded station in Hendaye, our nerves, arriving to discover we'd brought inappropriate clothes, trying to find two tuxedos with the help of the Gestapo officer escorting us—terrifying a tailor in town when we all walked in, four of them and three of us, and the look on the face of the tailor's wife, poor woman! And then giving up—I was quite small, Al-Cerraz was quite large—having the suits we'd brought ironed for us—the Germans were always better pressed than the French.... Well, I had no time to write during all that. No time to write or think at all."
"You carried it with you, place to place."
"In the side pocket of my cello case. I didn't want Al-Cerraz to see it, to know I hadn't left it with Fry."