The Spanish Bow (8 page)

"Good, Feliu," Tía whispered hoarsely. "You bring him the key. It's the black one in the top drawer, in the kitchen."

"I'm not bringing him the key," I whispered back.

But I had stood up. Why? I bit my lip and said, "I'm going to help her."

Don Miguel was pounding on the bedroom door.

"Yes," Luisa said. "Please, Feliu. Hurry."

"You can't help her," Tía whispered.

"We can throw him out," I said.

"He's an important man in town...."

"We'll leave," Luisa said. "We'll move to another town!"

"Every town is like this town," Tía said, no longer caustic, suddenly and unnervingly calm. "This was meant to happen. You'll see. It's better this way."

She limped toward the kitchen and returned with the black skeleton key clutched in her bony fist. Luisa called out to her a final time but she continued slowly up the steps. I hadn't given up—I was thinking hard, trying to sort things out, wishing that Enrique were home. But I did not come to any decision. I did not act. I did not follow my heart. Perhaps I lost a piece of it then and there.

We heard Mamá shout through the closed door above us, "
No pasará!
" Which meant, in that economical way that has no English equivalent, both
He won't come in,
and
It won't happen.
Again and again she shouted the phrase, imprinting it in my mind. Decades later, I'd hear nearly the same words, said to a slightly different purpose:
No pasarán—They will not pass.
They were futile words, on both occasions. Don Miguel did enter, and they did pass, the fascist Nationalists who would end up ruling Spain. The worst part for Mamá, I imagine, was that her own loved ones were accomplices.

We heard the door swing open, and once more my mother shouted "
No pasará!
" Then all was quiet.

Tía reappeared, dug her fingers into my shoulder, and said, "Play now and play loud. For your sister."

For a moment I did not understand, until the sounds started above us, worse sounds than the shouting. Then I did understand, and I began to play, hating the fact that music couldn't stop what was happening upstairs, only drown it out.

I couldn't sleep that night. My mother hadn't come out of the room since Don Miguel had left; only Tía had seen her. Every time the wind blew against the house or the floor creaked, I thought it was Don Miguel coming back. I kept thinking of the sounds I'd heard from upstairs and the songs I'd pounded out on the piano, to cover the other sounds.

An hour before dawn, I sneaked into the bedroom Mamá and Tía shared, slid the Bible out of my mother's nightstand drawer, pulled out the letters inside, and tiptoed downstairs to the kitchen, to examine them by candlelight. The letters were both dog-eared and smudged, which surprised me. I could imagine my mother reading and rereading the first one from my father, which bore the stamp of the customs service, and the 1898 date. But I was surprised to see she had equally worn the second. Dark stains tattooed its yellowed, softened surface. Opening it, I nearly ripped the letter in three parts at the crease lines, where it had been folded and unfolded countless times. Wax had dripped onto the paper near Al-Cerraz's self-caricature.

How could it be that my mother had worn this letter to its present state, without ever letting me know that she had taken its brief message and its grand possibilities into serious consideration? Evidently she had deliberated for years, paralyzed by anxiety and pessimism. Worse than disregarding the letter, she had worried it nearly to shreds, unable to make any decision at all. We were not so different, she and I.

I heard a whisper at my shoulder: "Careful, Feliu. Don't tear it. We're going to need that letter now."

I jumped, nearly knocking over the candlestick. Turning, I saw her face, half-illuminated, half in shadow. I was afraid to look, but when I did, I found with great relief that there were no bruises or physical marks. It helped me to pretend that everything was going to be better, that we weren't simply running away from Campo Seco, but running toward a future that had awaited me all along.

"And how many years has he played?" Don José asked my mother after we had presented Al-Cerraz's letter at the Barcelona Conservatory.

"Violin, two years—a fast learner, even without a good teacher. Piano, about the same. His father—"

The professor interrupted. "No, Señora, how long has he played the violoncello?"

"He has not, sir, but he has great desire to learn."

Don José muttered under his breath.

"It's a rare instrument," my mother said. "He hasn't had the opportunity...."

"Rare? If only," he said, glancing toward the half-circle of students assembled before him. One boy, about my age, tapped his bow against his knee. A girl yawned.

"I don't accept beginners," Don José said. Then, noting my mother's crestfallen expression, "But you've come a long way. I can provide the name of a tutor who can give your son private lessons."

He took a pencil from the music stand nearest him and withdrew a slip of paper from his jacket pocket.

"But where would Feliu live? We have no family here in the city. We were looking for a full-time school, perhaps a stipend—"

"Your son has demonstrated no ability. If I may be frank, he is too old to begin a new instrument."

"Too old? He's only fourteen."

"I have more skilled student cellists than the entire world can employ. Perhaps you can find some trade for him before he is a burden to you and your husband."

"My husband is deceased."

"My condolences," Don José said, pausing to write quickly on the slip of paper and hand it my mother. "Students await me."

My mother shuffled despondently along the Ramblas, Barcelona's broad main boulevard. I should have been dejected, too. But the city radiated energy and promise. More was happening here between two divided lanes of traffic than in our entire village. A policeman haggled with two wide-hipped women who gripped their burgundy-colored skirts in defiance, baring their ankles as they sashayed toward the waterfront. Knots of people clogged the walkways—here, a group of older men spilling out of a narrow bar, enveloped in cigarette smoke; there, a flock of younger men competing for a pretty flower-seller's attention. A boy plucked an orange from the bottom of a fruit pyramid and ran shrieking from the avalanche. In Campo Seco, the vendor would have known the boy's name, perhaps would have chased him down the street. But here, with a half dozen customers waiting, the vendor simply gestured for his younger assistant to chase the rolling oranges while he reached out a hand to steady the swinging scale.

Light filtered through the plane trees overhead, and beneath the green canopy, stacks of golden cages lined the walkway, forming a sundappled tunnel that blocked the views of carriage traffic left and right. Within those cages, a hundred yellow birds sang.

"They love music here, I know it!" I shouted to my mother, but my words were swallowed by the raucous birdsong.

Past the cages, we found ourselves funneled between rows of finished paintings. Mamá apologized every few steps, as if trespassing through someone's private studio; but there was no other way to pass. We threaded our way through mazes of café tables, and I ducked just in time to avoid colliding with a tray billowing with garlic-scented steam. Rubbery pink tentacles overflowed the sides of diners' plates. I tugged on my mother's arm. "
Calamar!
" she explained over her shoulder, barely sidestepping a second waiter approaching from the side. She started to apologize, then stopped at the sight of him. From the waist up, he was dashing: white ruffled shirt, black bow tie, tray balanced on one upturned hand. From the waist down, he was dressed as a horse, a costume complete with head and bushy tail swinging loosely from threadbare suspenders.

"
Paella?
" he droned, citing the day's specials. "
Gambas al ajillo? Biftec?
"

I thought his appearance was spectacular, but Mamá recoiled, saying "No, no," as she quickened her step.

We were carrying everything we 'd packed hastily that morning in Campo Seco. The air under the plane trees smelled sweet and green, but the humid press of bodies all around us was harder to bear than Campo Seco's dry heat. The Ramblas was like a river, its current at midday in full force. Newspaper stands and café tables were like boulders in the stream, serving only to quicken the flow of people trying to get past them. Mamá's bag crashed into a pram, provoking a litany of insults. I paused to set down the suitcases, and a man bumped into me from behind. I was still muttering apologies when a woman's swinging arm clipped my shoulder. Leaning over to reshoulder a bag, my mother tripped over her own dragging skirt hem. Tearing it, she cried out, "Is there nowhere to sit?"

"Of course there is," a man said from behind us, and shoveled my mother into a chair mere steps away from the pedestrian flow. He set before her a goblet as big as a fishbowl, filled with ruby-colored liquid and bobbing fruit peels of yellow, orange, and green.

Mamá glanced around, pulling her bags closer to her feet as I slipped into the chair next to her. "We don't want to eat," she said.

"No menu?" the man said. "That's fine. I'll be back."

"
Muy amable,
" she whispered as he walked away, setting her lips into an approximation of confidence.

"What is that?" I asked, pointing to the goblet.

"I'm not sure. Don't touch it."

Mamá had just opened her fan when the man appeared again, slid a slip of paper under the goblet's stem, and disappeared. Mamá pulled it out and studied it. "But I didn't ask for this!" A second waiter appeared, his hand extended. To her explanation of the misunderstanding and her protest that she hadn't taken a single sip, he merely retied his apron strings and stared into the distance, signaling over his head with one finger. From across the Ramblas, the same policeman we'd seen earlier nodded briskly and stepped toward the street, pausing for a horse-drawn cab to pass.

My mother slammed down her fan, upsetting the glass, and sending a spray of red liquid across her torn dress. We both jumped up. "Fine—take it!" Mamá yelled and fumbled in her handbag for three coins that she pushed into the bored waiter's hand.

We were a block east, swept by the Ramblas's ceaseless current, before she turned to me. "Two days' grocery money—gone. And you know the worst of it, Feliu? I'm even thirstier than before." Under her breath she added, "It's the thing I hate most about cities."

"What?"

"The way they make you want what you didn't even know you should want. The way they make you crave what you can't have."

But I haven't explained about our abrupt departure that morning from Campo Seco, or how it came to be that our world was split in two, with Mamá and me on one side, Luisa and Tía on the other. Tía had expected the previous day's nightmare to yield an honor-salvaging wedding to Don Miguel. Even as we'd kissed her dry cheeks and promised to write soon, she'd refused to acknowledge that we were leaving. Luisa understood that someone had to stay with Tía, and the big city was no place for a girl—especially when we had no idea where we'd sleep. But she seemed to believe Mamá when she said she'd be back soon, even as Mamá packed up her silver candlesticks, two lace-edged tablecloths, and a rolled tapestry inherited from her parents.

In our town, Mamá had seemed eminently worldly, but here in Barcelona, no one would call Mamá "Doña." Though she had visited this city in her youth, and traveled to other places besides—Cuba, Cádiz, Madrid—the passage of years had diminished her confidence. In Barcelona, Mamá did not know where to rest, how to demand good service, or how to interpret the directions given us by lethargic cigarette-sellers and apathetic street-sweepers. As we wandered the boulevards and alleys looking for the address of the tutor Don José had recommended, strangers jostled her and cast disparaging glances at her country clothes. Every time she paused at an intersection, lost and weary, she seemed a little smaller, her head no higher than the spoked wooden wheels of the endless wagons and carriages groaning along the narrow, traffic-choked streets.

We finally found the home of the tutor along a side street that reeked of rotting shrimp, urine, and other alley smells against which Mamá and I stiffened our faces, each hoping to disguise our repulsion from the other. The ground-floor tenant, an old woman with rounded shoulders and a crooked spine, heard us slapping our hands against the locked wrought-iron gate.

"Alberto Mendizábal?" she mumbled, indicating the stairs. "He doesn't get many visitors."

The marble steps leading up the cool, unlit stairs hinted at elegance, but each slippery step had been rounded by the passage of countless feet, and unswept dirt and debris darkened the corners of the landings.

In response to several uncertain bouts of knocking, Mendizábal opened his own door, wearing a baggy cardigan so loosely woven I could make out his grayish white shirt between the gaping holes. He was unshaven, the silver stubble at his jaw a shade lighter than his close-cropped gray hair. Below his eyes sagged pillows of yellow-speckled skin. When he smiled, his heavily lidded eyes closed entirely.

"Call me Alberto," he said, neglecting to take my offered hand. "I have no use for titles."

Alberto listened to our story about visiting the conservatory and squinted at Al-Cerraz's introductory letter. "You think this city should welcome you just because of your name?"

I stared at him blankly. By now I knew the story of my birth and misnaming, but I couldn't see what it had to do with my present circumstance.

"Aníbal," said the tutor emphatically. "The great man who led his army of elephants against the Romans. His father was Hamilcar Barca, the founder of Barcelona. Doesn't anyone read history anymore?"

I summoned my confidence and said, "I don't know about conquering, but I know that with a bow in my hand, I don't fear anything."

"A fighter—good. In this town, an artist has to fight, just to be heard above the explosions."