Authors: Andromeda Romano-Lax
"It's just..." Eduardo stammered. "If we had ... but here, if I..."
Don Miguel resettled his skewed hat and pulled the brim forward, obscuring his eyes. Then he spit into his hands, rubbed them, and grunted, "Grab the ropes."
Now that the piano had cleared the narrow doorway, the four men strapped it to a wide stretcherlike board. They counted to three before lifting, and in that long second before the piano defied gravity, I saw Eduardo Rivera's eyes survey the course ahead of them: the long and painful trek down the cobblestoned street, potholed and steep, to be followed by the even more perilous lifting of the piano, via block and tackle, over our second-story balcony. He was not the right man for the task; even the youngest boys gathered knew it. And there were a dozen heartier men eager to take his place—men who had spent countless festivals practicing for just this sort of processionary task, carrying plaster Virgins and enormous papier-mâché heads through slippery, candle-wax-spattered streets. Why couldn't Eduardo simply refuse?
As if in response to my silent thoughts, Don Miguel cleared his throat and announced, "At some point, we must all make amends. By the time this job is done, the Delargos and Riveras will be one family." I'm not sure who looked more ill at this comment: Eduardo or my mother.
During the hours ahead, the piano would be dropped several more times. It would crush two toes, dig a deep gouge into a neighbor's arched wooden door and, while rising to our balcony, chip several century-old stones off our house's street-facing wall. When it was finally in place, a man came to tune it, thanks again to Don Miguel's charitable assistance.
My mother had no interest in teaching me, so I taught myself, tackling easier pieces by Bach and Schubert and Brahms. Don Miguel invited himself over every few months, and each time I was trotted out in front of him and made to play. Everyone marveled at how quickly I had learned, how well I played. But it was like the violin—far better than nothing, but not quite right. Playing the piano was like filling up on bread and water while the smell of a neighbor's roast wafted in through the windows. It helped me to know that somewhere a cello was waiting for me; the bow, my father's gift, was proof. I took it out once each month, wiped the wooden stick with an oiled cloth, twisted the pearl-dotted adjuster that tightened the bow's horsehairs, and loosened them again before replacing the bow in its sturdy leather tube.
Over the next two years, Don Miguel attempted to court my mother. With his younger brother, Mamá had maintained a stance of polite indifference. With Don Miguel, she expressed her disdain openly. It made little difference to him. Their tepid courtship proceeded slowly, interrupted by Don Miguel's journeys to manage distant olive groves and to conduct business in Madrid. My mother breathed more freely every time he went away. "Another city, another farm—he'll turn some girl's eye," she said once.
"You're wrong," responded Tía. "He likes a challenge. You've made it clear you think you're better than him—that was your mistake."
One morning Don Miguel stopped by to let us know he was back from Madrid and to invite himself to dinner. Enrique had just begun his second year at the academy, and Percival now lived with his employer, at the olive press where he was apprenticing. For Luisa, who was nineteen, Don Miguel brought a hand mirror, its silver handle patterned with bas-relief roses.
For me, Don Miguel brought a magazine called
ABC.
The issue celebrated the anniversary of King Alfonso's marriage to Queen Victoria Eugenia, informally known as Ena. Though our King, now twenty-one years old, had wed Queen Ena a year earlier, the Spanish public was taking some time to accept Alfonso's blond bride. The granddaughter of Britain's Queen Victoria, Queen Ena had converted from her Protestant faith to Catholicism two days before the royal wedding, but that renunciation hadn't changed her reputation as a rather frosty, distinctly non-Iberian foreigner.
Luisa, Mamá, and Tía took turns passing around the magazine. Even my mother couldn't resist poring over the glossy pictures and gossipy captions, but when she flipped past them, she saw why Don Miguel had brought me the magazine and handed it back. The next piece was a profile of El Nene, who had finally shed that nickname and was now called Justo Al-Cerraz. The pianist insisted on the hyphenated version of his last name, drawing conspicuous attention to the Islamic prefix, which was part of his new mystique. His mother was said to be Moorish. Or gypsy. Or both: a distant descendant of some Moor pretending to be a gypsy following the seventeenth-century expulsion of the Moors from Spain. Though Christian, Al-Cerraz claimed he could orient himself toward Mecca even blindfolded, unless there was a piano nearby. (Wasn't there always some piano nearby?) Any stringed instrument, he said, disturbed his "magnetic energies."
In the six years since I'd heard him play, Al-Cerraz had toured briefly with a
zarzuela
company, spent a few months in the royal court of Madrid, then rededicated himself to his own musical education by briefly joining the composer Richard Strauss in Germany. The last episode had not gone well, as evidenced by Al-Cerraz's willingness to poke fun at his short-lived mentor. At the time of Al-Cerraz's visit, Strauss was still basking in the success of his
Don Quixote: Fantastic Variations on a Theme of Knightly Character
—a dissonant production full of bleating trumpets meant to sound like sheep, wind machines, and other noisy post-Wagnerian inventions. When the
ABC
reporter asked what Al-Cerraz thought of Strauss's "variations," the pianist sniped, "They are certainly fantastic. I had no idea that any musical production could have quite so many sheep. I thought I was right back in the Spanish countryside. I forgot I was listening to music at all."
Undoubtedly he was still bristling at Strauss's claim that "A Spaniard will not be the one to write great works about Spain. You are a nation of bullfighters, not composers." For as the article made clear, playing music—even playing for royalty—was no longer enough for Al-Cerraz. He wanted to compose, too.
Reading the article, I didn't sympathize with Al-Cerraz. I had my own miseries to contemplate. I was young, yes, but not so young in a country where the King himself was still learning to shave. At twenty-five, Al-Cerraz was older than our monarch, but look how much he had done! Here he was, embarking on a second career. I hadn't even started my first.
This notion of a profession was no small thing, as my mother's repeated comments had made clear. My leg was as weak as ever. I'd never be able to follow Enrique's footsteps into the army, or Percival's path into the laborious agricultural trades. Recently, setting her sights lower, Mamá had tried apprenticing me to a shoemaker, but even he had deemed me unworthy. My fingers were too clumsy, the shoemaker said, adding, "A good thing you have taught him numbers and history so well, Doña. Perhaps he will serve as his father did, as an inspector or diplomat. But as for a real trade, he is hopeless."
At my age, Al-Cerraz had been in demand all over the world. I was not in demand anywhere, except perhaps at home, where I was expected to empty chamber-pots and help pull my aunt out of bed when her joints stiffened.
Lost in melancholy, I continued to stare at Al-Cerraz's photograph. I didn't notice Luisa sneaking up behind my chair until she pawed the magazine out of my hands. I grabbed at it, and the pages tore. A shredded slip of paper—showing Al-Cerraz's wide fingers clutching a cigar—fluttered down upon the ripped face of Queen Ena, her pale, sorrowful eyes separated from her thin and colorless Victorian lips. Furious, I jumped up and retrieved Luisa's new silver mirror from the dining-room table. I held it over my head, tossing it lightly from hand to hand.
"Give it back!" my sister howled, as I made the mirror sail in widening daredevil arcs.
"Look at you," she laughed, changing tactics. "You're such a child. You're probably afraid to look into that mirror. You know you'd break it."
I tilted my face toward the ceiling, closed my eyes, and kept tossing.
"Really, Feliu. Just look. You look like Papá." She feigned tenderness.
I sneaked a glance at her through slitted eyes, and saw her own eyes narrowing, while her lips curled into a smirk. "Except that you're shorter. And skinnier. And by the time he 'd lost his hair, he had a mustache."
I stopped, mirror gripped in one fist. Luisa had found my sore spot. I'd been born with a high forehead and a receding hairline; when I was worried, or concentrating, with my eyes slitted and lips pursed, my mother said my face looked like the bottom of an orange.
I heard Mamá and Tía on the stairs, ushering Don Miguel up the narrow staircase from the street. Frantic to pick up the shredded magazine before Don Miguel saw it, I rushed to the table and slammed the mirror down, cracking it. Luisa burst into tears just as Don Miguel appeared, cradling a white box in his arms.
Mamá didn't even notice the mirror. She was arguing with Don Miguel about the box. "Just open it," he said, and Tía echoed him, pushing it in front of Mamá's face. Mamá relented and unfolded a pale yellow dress, which she lifted halfheartedly to her shoulders.
"
Qué guapa!
" Tía crooned.
"Put it on," Don Miguel said. My mother hadn't worn anything but black since the day at the train station—the day my father's remains did not arrive, the day of the bow. Now she hung her head as Don Miguel persisted, his voice rising. When Mamá looked up, finally, I could see her dark brown eyes swimming behind barely contained tears.
Tía, uncharacteristically animated, took control of the room. She hobbled between Don Miguel, my mother and me, in a triangular trajectory that was both determined and unsteady, like that of a ship captain crossing a deck in a storm. While Luisa settled to sulk in a corner of the room, Tía poured a grass-colored liqueur for Don Miguel and pressed it into his hands. She flapped her arms toward the staircase, gesturing to the bedrooms above, where my mother was again commanded to change into the new dress. Ignoring the broken mirror, she pushed me toward the piano. "Play! Play!" she croaked, and then more softly, "It will bring peace." My mother disappeared up the steps, each footfall slower than the last. All of us strained to hear her reach the landing and close the bedroom door behind her.
Don Miguel gulped the liqueur with one swift tilt of his head. Tía, who had reentered the room with a tray of salt-encrusted sardines and bread, wheeled back toward the kitchen and returned with the liqueur bottle to refill his glass. He tossed back the second glass. Tía looked relieved when he reached out and took the whole bottle, saving her from the task of anticipating his desires. He drained his third glass of liqueur, and set both glass and bottle down. Then he reached to remove his hat.
Performed by any other man, it would have been an empty gesture. But for Don Miguel, it was a ritual. He fingered the hat brim, all the way around. With the other hand, he batted at the small table next to his chair, whisking away any invisible dust. Then he lifted his hat off and set it aside. That was it—no surprises beneath it after all, just thick dark hair, slightly flattened—and yet the gesture and what it might herald made my stomach knot.
Swinging around, I started to play. But above my leaden fingerings, I could hear Don Miguel shift restlessly.
"Is she coming?" he called out to Tía.
"
Cierto, cierto,
" she called back from the kitchen.
I reached the end of the piece and started the repeat.
"Why isn't she down here?" he called again, louder.
Tía reentered the room. "She must be doing her hair." She managed a dry laugh that sounded like a cough. "It's never good to rush a lady, you know."
I played a second minuet—"Such happy music! Don Miguel, doesn't Feliu play wonderfully now?"—and a third, and still Mamá had not returned to join us in her new yellow dress. Her new yellow
betrothal
dress, I thought, my mind fixing on the word that had appeared a dozen times in the gossipy captions of
ABC Magazine.
At least I had an excuse to turn away. Luisa watched the bottle gradually empty, and Don Miguel's face redden, his voice slurring with increasing fury. "Why isn't she coming?"
Tía flattered and cajoled, pressing more food into his hands to counter the alcohol's effects.
"That day with my brother, she showed her true colors," Don Miguel said. "She has no respect for this community."
"She's had difficulties," Tía countered.
"She shouldn't have hit a man in public. Do you know how that looks? Six years, and my brother still hasn't married. What woman would respect him now?"
"It's a shame,
sí, sí,
" Tía said. But her airy ramblings didn't soothe him.
"Someone should teach her a lesson."
I had been playing softly, all the better to eavesdrop, but now I pounded on the keys. I did not want to hear more. I wanted to vanish inside the music, to lose myself the way I'd lost myself listening to El Nene's cellist. But the piano was not my instrument. Playing it, I could hide, but I could not disappear.
The song ended; as I racked my mind for another, I heard Don Miguel's chair move. I exhaled with relief, thinking he was rising to leave. He headed toward the staircase, and I waited to hear his footsteps descend. Instead, he climbed—toward the third floor, toward my mother.
"Don Miguel, I'll go with you," Tía said.
He grunted one word: "Stay."
Luisa whispered, "Feliu, what is he doing?"
Outside of marriage, men and women didn't visit in bedrooms or within sight of any bed. For this reason, we wouldn't have professional nurses in Spain for another decade, not counting a few poorly trained nuns. Death, it seemed, was preferable to dishonor.
I heard Don Miguel rap three times on the door over our heads, echoed by Tía's distressed hobble. I heard my mother shout through the door: "I don't want to see you!"
"This door is locked," Don Miguel called down to us. "Someone bring the key."
No one moved. Don Miguel repeated his demand. I started to stand, pushing myself up from the piano bench.