CHAPTER

2

“I’m going to the train station,” my mother announced on a cold morning, nearly six years after my birth. “Your father has arrived.”

I’d had a nightmare and woken from it breathing hard, just as the women in the house were stirring and whispering. Now, as I struggled to lace my boots, Tía mumbled over my shoulder, “Go back to bed with your brothers and sister. You’ll only delay your mother.”

Ignoring my aunt’s reproachful expression, I stepped out into the dark street with Mamá.

“Your nightmare wasn’t about a box, was it?” she asked as we hurried along.

No, I told her. It was about a wintry, unfamiliar beach of cold, dark, wet sand, and what lived in the holes.

“Good. Never mind.”

We continued in silence, holding hands; past connected, multistory stone houses like ours, and shuttered stores. As we zigzagged down the oddly angled streets I struggled to keep up, a jerking tail behind Mamá’s purposeful kite. The sidewalk was barely wide enough for one person, made of a smooth and slippery stone so burnished by decades of passing feet that it glinted silver. I skidded along its surface while my mother stumbled over the cobblestone road, yanking me each time her ankle turned, both of us struggling downhill toward the station in the dark. When I slipped and fell, skinning one knee, Mamá said nothing, only pulled me up by one arm and kept going.

A barnlike oak door creaked open, and a woman’s craggy face emerged, illuminated by a candle lantern.

“Buenos días, Doña. Meeting the train?”

“Meeting my husband,” Mamá answered.

“Madre de Dios,” the crone grunted, crossing herself before she withdrew into the shadows. The door’s ring-shaped knocker clapped hard as the door slammed shut.

Black sky lightened to deep navy as we cut across the town plaza. At the church, I ran one hand along the old building’s pockmarked walls, remembering my brother Enrique’s words (Yes, they’re bullet holes; even the priest says so. He has a jar full of the slugs . . . ) until my mother glanced over her shoulder and jerked me out of my reverie.

“Filth!” she yelled. “Look at your hand!”

“What? I can’t see it.”

“I don’t have time for this, Feliu!”

We veered into the alley behind the fish market, hopping the channel of wastewater spilling from the market’s open back door. In the golden, lamplit interior, I could see men heaving crates and shoveling chipped ice. Fish scales sparkled between the alley’s wet cobblestones like trapped stars.

Deep navy yielded to peach-tinged blue by the time we reached the station, where the train waited, warm and rumbling, still dribbling steam. Mamá freed herself from my sweating hand and marched onto the platform, where several men gathered around her. Within moments she was seated at a bench against the station wall, pulling coarse twine from the lid of a large box the men had placed at her feet. It was about as wide as my mother’s outstretched arms, made of an unfamiliar reddish-brown wood. There was a single small clasp on the fitted lid. Instead of a lock, there was only a twist of heavy wire attached to a yellow card bearing official-looking stamps and our address.

“Perhaps you should wait,” the stationmaster was saying. “Who knows what’s in it? Take it to the church. I’ll have a wagon brought around for you.”

But my mother blotted her face dry. “I’ve waited months,” she said, and glared until the stationmaster patted his vest pocket and strode away.

As Mamá untwisted the wire, she whispered, “You’ve seen bones, haven’t you, Feliu? It is probably mostly ashes, but there may be bones.” She worked her fingertips under the lid. “Don’t be afraid.”

I held my breath and stared. But when my mother pried the lid free with a dull pop, she was the one who gasped. Inside, there were no bodily remains.

“Presents!” I cried out. “From Papá!”

Mamá studied the straw-padded contents, fingering each object in turn: a compass, a blue bottle, a glossy brown stick, a jungle cat carved from dark wood, a cigar box with a small blank diary inside. At the bottom of the box lay an old suit jacket, neatly folded, which she took out and held to her face, inhaling. Reluctantly, she lifted out two notes—one printed on a card, a few sentences surrounded by blank space; the other larger and rough-edged and handwritten. She read the first quickly and let it drop onto the sticky station floor, shaking her head when I leaned over to retrieve it. A breeze flipped the card over twice, then sent it toward the tracks. The second note she read slowly, silently, smoothing it against her lap. When she finished, she folded it carefully, tucked it away in a pocket, and sighed.

“They’ve broken their promise. Whatever remains they retrieved after the rebellion were buried in Cuba. The American victory changed their priorities. Now they’re too busy getting out the living to worry about the dead.”

The details meant little to me. Two months earlier, my mother had perched my siblings and me in a row of five dining-room chairs—even Carlito, who kept squirming off his seat—to tell us what had happened. Rebels fighting for independence from Spain had triggered an explosion in the harbor. The building where my father worked had caught fire, killing Papá and nine other men. Now America—a place that meant nothing to me, beyond the fact that Spanish ships had discovered it—appeared ready to enter the fray.

Mamá cupped my chin in her hand. “Your Papá should have lived three centuries ago, when the world was getting bigger. Now it’s getting only smaller and more loud.”

As if to prove her point, the train departed at that moment, wheezing and clanging, south toward Tarragona.

When it was out of view, she said, “Papá meant to deliver these gifts with his own hands. They’re from his travels. He had his own intentions, but I’ll leave the choice to you.”

I picked up the compass first, watching the little copper-colored needle spin and bounce. Then the blue bottle. Then the jungle cat. They were enticing, but I did not choose them. Maybe I felt contrary on this rare morning alone with Mamá, away from the superior airs of my elder siblings; maybe I felt the need to reject the gifts that had the most clearly childish appeal. I picked up the one object that made no immediate sense: the glossy brown stick. At one end it had a rectangular black handle dotted with one small circle of mother-of-pearl. At the other end it had a fancy little curve, like the upswept prow of an ancient ship.

I lifted it out of the box. It was longer than my arm, a bit thicker than my finger, and polished smooth. I held it out in front me, like a sword. Then upright, like a baton.

“It’s pernambuco—a very good South American wood,” Mamá said, her eyebrows raised.

The anticipation on her face made my throat tighten. I returned the stick hastily to the box.

“Tell me,” I said. “I don’t want to choose wrong.”

I expected her to reassure me. Instead she said, “You will be wrong sometimes, Feliu.”

Her lecturing tone reminded me of the times she had helped tie my shoes, tugging the laces hard enough to upset my balance. I couldn’t know that those days of playful rough-handling were numbered, to be replaced by a grief-filled overprotectiveness.

When I still hadn’t chosen, Mamá asked, “Do you remember your Papá?”

“Yes,” I answered automatically.

“You can still see him in your mind? As clearly as you can see me?”

This time, when I didn’t answer, she said, “Always tell me the truth. Maybe other people need to invent drama. Not us. Not here.”

I’d heard her say this earlier that year, as the survivors of the Desastre of ’98 had straggled into town, living ghosts from failed faraway colonial battles. The Americans had invaded Cuba, Puerto Rico, and the Philippines, Spanish colonies already struggling for independence. The last vestiges of the Spanish Empire were collapsing around us while another empire rose to take its place. Now the soldiers and bureaucrats and merchants were returning—limbs missing, heads and torsos wrapped in stained bandages. Many who passed through Campo Seco seemed lost—they weren’t our missing men, we had nothing for them, so why had they stepped off the train here? We rented our cellar to one of them, moving all the casks and wax-sealed bottles aside, furnishing the dark, cool room with a cot, one chair, and an old cracked mirror. The man paid in advance for a week’s stay but left after three days, without explanation, prompting Tía to castigate Mamá, “I told you not to put the mirror down there. A man like that doesn’t want to see his face.”

I closed my own eyes and tried to see Papá. He was a blur, except for his dark mustache, thick under his nose, curled and twisted at the tips; and the wide bottom cuff of his pin-striped suit pants. I had clung to those pants while he directed the secular village choir. And I had perched high on his shoulders, smelling his hair tonic while we watched local processions. Papá had little interest in the Catholic festivals that clogged our village streets. But he had loved when the traveling musicians came, with their gourds and broomsticks strung as homemade mandolins, guitars, and violins. I’d begged my father to buy me instruments like those. That had been close to two years ago, when Papá had last visited home.

“The stick!” I called out suddenly. “Is that what he wanted for me to have?”

“Bow, Feliu. It’s an unfinished bow, without the hair.”

“I knew it!” I retrieved the stick from the box and began to saw at an imaginary instrument across my chest.

After a moment I stopped to ask, “What kind of bow?”

The question gave her pause. “It doesn’t matter,” she said, and part of me knew that she wasn’t telling the truth. “One bow is the same as any other.”

I danced in circles as my mother spoke with the wagoner and watched his assistant load the box onto the wagon bed. Then I remembered my unanswered question: “Is that what Papá wanted me to have?”

The wagon jerked forward, steered by an impatient driver and eager horses.

“Up, Feliu,” she gestured, her arms beckoning me toward the seat. “Your brothers and sister are waiting for us. Father Basilio is expecting a coffin. You made your choice. Now come.”

 

Back home, Enrique stole glances at my strange wooden stick, which made me hold it closer, working it under one armpit and finally down into one leg of my pants. But any incipient jealousy was dampened when he realized it was a musical object. “A bow?” he snorted, slapping my back. “I thought it was a musket plunger.”

Enrique, age thirteen, was our little soldier; he claimed the compass, a handy instrument for making sorties beyond the olive- and grapevine-covered hills. Percival—at sixteen, an adult in our eyes—stayed above the fray, accepting the blank diary. In the years to come, he’d never write a word in it, only numbers: gambling odds, winnings, and debts. Luisa, age eleven, wrapped her chubby fingers around the jungle cat, refusing to let go until Mamá offered to fill the blue glass bottle with perfume, if Luisa would give the cat to two-year-old Carlito. When the divisions were made and all brows smoothed, Mamá exhaled deeply, saying nothing more about my father’s undisclosed intentions.

Many years later, it would become an insomniac’s preoccupation for me: What if Enrique had taken the bow? He’d been in Papá’s choir, and had demonstrated greater musical aptitude than any of us, even if guns amused him more. If he’d walked with Mamá to the train and back, with more time to consider, would he still be alive? Would the compass have helped Percival or Luisa to better find their ways? And Carlito: Well, there was no saving him. He would die of diphtheria seven years later, to be buried alongside our two siblings who had perished as infants. At the funeral, Percival would lean into me, whispering, “We beat the odds—that’s all it is.”

 

There’s a saying in our corner of northeastern Spain: “Pinch a Spaniard—if he sings out, he’s a Catalan.” We considered ourselves a musical region, and yet even here, among troubadours, my father had stood out. In his spare time, he had been the director for our local men’s choir, a group that took its cue from the workingmen’s choirs of Barcelona—proud men, singing our native regional language at a time when Catalan poetry and song were briefly blossoming.

In 1898, the year my father and several other prominent local men died abroad, the group disbanded, replaced by a choir led by Father Basilio, who had come to us from Rome. This later choir was never as popular. Following the priest’s lead, it sang in Italian—a disappointment to nearly everyone, even my Cuban-raised mother, who had never felt entirely comfortable with the Catalan language. The secular Italian choir folded a few years later, leaving only a few hard-core devotees, the poorest singers of the lot, to sing in Latin during Masses. Our town, once a multilingual bastion of song, had grown unexpectedly silent and dour.

My mother had met my father at an arts festival in Barcelona, where they discovered that they shared similar backgrounds, as well as a love of music. Both of them had been born in Spain and had spent their childhoods in colonial Cuba, returning with their optimistic parents to Spain in time for the short-lived First Republic, in 1873. My mother had been renowned for her voice, though she claimed later she’d never had any professional ambitions. By 1898, she didn’t sing at all—not even the simple rounds and folk songs she had once sung for her children.

Lying together in the bed we shared, Enrique would sometimes sing to me a remembered line or two, very quietly in the dark, as if it were a secret no one should hear. When I asked him to sing more, he would tease me: “You know that song. Come on. . . .” I had a good memory for most things, so the complete unfamiliarity of what he sang drove me to distraction. I’d beg him again, and he’d tease me more, until I felt panicky. Only when I was on the verge of tears would Enrique relent and finish the song, sedating me with belated satisfaction. It occurs to me now that Enrique was old enough to be embarrassed by those lullabies, but he didn’t want to forget them, either. He wasn’t trying to torture me so much as give himself permission to remember.

In the years before he accepted his post overseas, Papá had been our town’s music teacher, keeping a piano for that purpose in a room between the church and the school. Following his death, my father’s best piano student, Eduardo Rivera, approached Mamá to offer condolences. A month later, he came to ask her to sing to his piano accompaniment. We didn’t own a piano anymore, she told him. She had given Papá’s piano to the priest, Father Basilio, to compensate him for the memorial service—or at least, that’s what we were told.

Eduardo reassured Mamá that he had his own piano, of course. She could come to his house and sing. Mamá changed the subject immediately, pretending not even to hear the request. But to make up for the rudeness, she did let him stay for lunch. He came uninvited a second time, and a third, and perhaps because he was my father’s student—or perhaps because my mother was still stunned with grief—she didn’t turn him away. Finally, he figured out the surest way to win her favor was through an intermediary. Eduardo stopped petitioning for my mother’s accompaniment and offered to give me music lessons, instead.

For as long as I could remember, local children had called my new teacher “Señor Riera.” The nickname was our local word for the town dry wash that flooded seasonally, just like Eduardo’s own drooping, allergy-prone eyes and nose. Eduardo had a thin version of my father’s mustache, but his was always damp. Because of his clogged sinuses, he’d developed the habit of leaving his lips slightly parted. His upper lip was hidden, but his fleshy lower lip protruded clearly, like some exotic pouch-shaped orchid hanging from the scruffy bark of a jungle tree.

Señor Rivera, as I learned to call him more carefully now, owned a piano and a violin. I chose to learn the violin because I wanted to use the bow that my mother had sent away to Barcelona to have finished for me, with horsehair and new silver wire. She used government money to pay for it, saying it was better that my father’s final pay be used for something we could keep and cherish, not just coal or bread.

Each day, Percival and Enrique stayed after school to earn a few coins doing the schoolmaster’s chores. My mother and Tía were busy tending Carlito and Luisa, and happy to have me out of the house each afternoon. Señor Rivera kept the violin at his home, where I practiced, but I carried my bow with me to lessons and back, in a leather-covered tube from my father’s custom files that had once held harbor maps from North Africa and the Caribbean. Every time I held it to my face, I inhaled a dizzying smell of sea salt and ink and sweat—the smell of foreign shores, and also of my father’s arms, which were harder to recall with every passing day.

I loved carrying that indestructible tube and hitting rocks with it as I walked. Once, when I’d made the mistake of dallying too long in the dry wash under the bridge, I attracted the attention of two older boys the same age as Enrique. They teased me, calling me Cerillito, or “Little Matchstick”; the dislocated hip had never healed properly following my birth, leaving my left leg thinner and slightly shorter than my right. The nickname didn’t bother me. I’d heard the same and worse already from my own brothers. But when they started insulting my father, I hit one of them with the tube end, splitting the boy’s lip before I managed to run away, incredulous at my small victory.

When Mamá found out about the fight, she punished me for it, but she did not take the tube away. I think she sensed I needed some protection. My teacher thought the tube was ridiculous, though, and the bow itself strange—“too thick, too heavy, probably not made for a violin. Anyway, it’s too big for you.”

“So is the violin,” I retorted. Señor Rivera pinched my arm hard enough to leave a mark, but I didn’t care. He’d cuffed me several times when I talked back or disobeyed him. At the time, I assumed he wanted my prize objects for himself. Now I realize he considered the bow an irritating reminder of my father.

Señor Rivera was half my mother’s age. It seemed ridiculous that he kept coming to our house every Sunday afternoon, bringing Mamá and Tía stale cookies that were never sweet enough for two women who had been raised on plentiful Caribbean sugar. My mother was beautiful, with shining chestnut hair and a strong jawline that might have appeared masculine were it not tempered by full lips. Many men sought her, even while an equal number criticized her for what they perceived as haughtiness and disrespect. In a town where many women were merely “Señora,” she was “Doña,” in deference to her noble bearing and education. Even in the loose-waisted, soot black dresses she’d worn since my father’s death, she could not fade into safe obscurity, though she tried.

It didn’t surprise my mother that playing the violin came easily to me. Everyone in our family was musically inclined. “Don’t be vain about your gifts,” she said. “Music is everywhere, and there is no one alive who can’t appreciate it. To love music is easy. To play it well is no different from knowing how to make shoes or build bridges.”

She did not teach me, did not directly encourage me, but she couldn’t help asking questions that reflected her own musical past. When I returned from lessons, she would say, “Were you relaxed? Did you play naturally?” They were unusual questions for such corseted, high-collared times; they were the same questions I would ask myself ten and fifteen years later, as I strove to develop my own relaxed bowing style.

I learned scales and etudes and easy salon pieces. I liked the violin, but I wasn’t passionate about its shape or sound, which in my unskilled hands came out as a tinny screech. The adult-sized violin that Señor Rivera let me use was so heavy that I could barely manage to hold it upright, my left wrist throbbing so fiercely I barely noticed what my right hand was doing. Besides, I hated standing to play. My matchstick leg didn’t hurt in those days, but because the knob of the thighbone didn’t fit the socket properly, I had trouble mimicking Señor Rivera’s stance. Occasionally the entire leg would start to tremble, and I’d have to shake out the spasm to regain my balance.

“Feliu, pay attention,” Señor Rivera said one afternoon, assuming I was falling asleep on my feet. “This is what you may someday hope to do.” He tossed his head, drawing attention to his fashionable shoulder-length hair and the glistening Cupid’s bow visible through his thin, damp mustache. Then he launched into a piece by Pablo Sarasate—our Spanish Paganini. He winced when he missed a note, but he recovered quickly, fingers slamming like pistons up and down the black fingerboard, the dynamics as dismayingly even as the tempo was not. I hated his theatrics. Quick fingers did not impress me. Long hair did not impress me.

Please, God, I thought, don’t let Señor Rivera move into our house.

“Someday, Feliu,” he said, and I gulped before I realized he was referring only to my own future chances with the Sarasate theme. “Now, hold that violin straight—straighter!”

 

Redemption came, as all things great and sorrowful did, by train.

The train meant everything to our village, which modern times might have forgotten if not for those parallel steel bars pointed south toward Tarragona, the town of Roman ruins and busy plazas, and north toward Barcelona, the city of commerce, art, and anarchy. Our narrow, twisting streets were lined with three-story stone and plaster buildings that cast the streets in shadow for all but a few midday hours. When the rains came, they resculpted the sinuous, gravel-lined gully that ran through the center of town. But the train tracks ran straight and hard through gusting winds and bright sun, exposed to anything the future might bring. The station itself was an oracle, bearing posters and flyers about upcoming events. I read my first words not in school, but on tiptoe outside the brick-walled station, puzzling out a three-colored flyer headlined “Los Gatos,” The Cats. A musical quartet, Enrique explained.

“Will they be playing here?”

He squinted at a dense block of smaller type. “Barcelona—Sitges—Lleida. No, they’re not stopping here.”

“Where is Sitges?” I asked him. When he didn’t answer, I tried again: “Where is Lleida?”

“Mamá is waiting at the footbridge. We’re already late.”

“You don’t know where Lleida is?” I asked, dismayed by his ignorance.

I kept pestering and he kept changing the subject, our voices rising. By the time we reached the bridge where my mother stood with Carlito on one hip and Luisa collapsed at her feet, I was crying, my skinny arm blazed with a red mark left by Enrique’s final twist, and Enrique himself was stuttering a dozen excuses. My mother only sighed.

For the next couple of years, I read those flyers as The Cats—as well as many Donkeys, Bulls, and Bandits—bypassed our village. But the sting of those anonymous rejections resolved into a sense of destiny the day I spotted a flyer headlined in big, blocky type, “El Nene—The Spanish Mozart.” By now I could decode the small print without help: “And His Classical Trio.” No animals this time; no gourds or broomstick mandolins. And yes, they were stopping at Campo Seco, as well as a dozen other small towns up and down the coast.

El Nene was our country’s best-known pianist, a prodigy who had toured the world since the age of three. His nickname hinted at his dual reputation. El nene means “baby boy,” but it can also mean “villain.” The pianist wasn’t a true traidor or malvado—not yet, anyway—but he did have a reputation for mischief. At this point, he was a precocious adolescent in a hefty man’s body, constrained by a toddler’s nickname, and performing with men many years his senior.

Dust hung in the hot air that day, obscuring the view of yellow-leafed vineyards on the hills beyond town. The town leaders had planned a parade, and the town ladies spent all morning pouring buckets of water on the main road, just to keep down the dust. We were a little embarrassed not to have wide boulevards to show off, or intricately tiled, fountain-filled plazas.

Señor Rivera was smitten. “I may ask him to hear me play, after the crowds have gone,” he bragged during our midday meal, to which he had sweet-talked yet another invitation. “Do you think that would be unbecoming?”

Mamá, who dealt increasingly with annoyances by simply enduring them, shrugged.

He persevered, “I’ve heard he asks ladies to sign his touring book. Would you like me to ask him on your behalf?”

“Carlito!” Mamá wailed, as my little brother tipped his soup bowl into his lap.

“I could ask El Nene to listen to Feliu play the violin,” Señor Rivera continued more loudly, competing with Carlito’s shrieks of pain as the hot soup drained into his best sailor suit. “I’m sure he must suffer excited parents in every village, but I did help to arrange the concert venue.”

I stared into my soup and felt my face getting hotter. So this was how Señor Rivera hoped to profit from the trio’s visit—by showing me off and increasing my mother’s sense of obligation.

With Carlito wriggling and wailing under her arm, my mother raised her voice above the squall. “I am not so impressed by this Nene—this performing monkey—forced to tour the world before he was old enough to stop sucking his thumb. His parents should be ashamed.”

Luisa, who’d shown no interest in El Nene’s visit, perked up. “He’s a monkey?”

Mamá exited with her thrashing wet bundle. Señor Rivera’s eyes darted around the room, his hopes and expectations unspent. He looked like a swimmer desperate for air, but still three hard strokes short of the surface.

“You,” he said, fixing on me, as if my elderly aunt and three other siblings weren’t there at all. “You will play for El Nene and his trio. You will demonstrate how much I have done for you.”

“Yes, sir.”

“And I warn you, enanito . . .”

“Feliu is a dwarf?” Luisa cried out gleefully.

“Dwarves make great entertainers,” Percival said. “The royal family keeps them around for fun.”

“He is a dwarf,” Enrique said, without lifting his gaze from his soup bowl. “But he’s our dwarf.”

“I warn you,” Rivera continued, oblivious to the interruptions, staring me into submission. “Do not humiliate me.”

 

Everyone came, wearing their finest. Matronly ladies decorated their upswept hair with large combs and lace mantillas unearthed from ancient trunks. Younger women wore fashionable gowns with puffed sleeves that tapered at the elbows into tight cuffs. Boys squirmed in black suits with short breeches. Veterans tottered under the weight of brass buttons. Our three Civil Guard members strutted between the church and the train station, their shiny black finned hats flashing in the sun.

And yet none of us could compare with El Nene.

“Look at his hands,” Percival whispered to me when we lined up alongside the train that afternoon, watching the performer disembark. “Each finger is wider than a piano key. He’s too fat to play.”

I started to object, but Percival didn’t wait to hear. He pushed his hands into his pockets, looking for the little diary in which he recorded every wager. “Do you want to bet?”

 

The concert was held in the school, a low stone building attached to the larger and more ornate church. An overflow crowd filled the plaza in front of the buildings, and the school doors were propped open so that everyone would have a chance to hear. Apartment dwellers opposite had decorated the railings of their balconies with satin bows and dragged chairs outside, to listen from their high, private perches like royalty at an opera house.

Mamá gave up on restraining Luisa and Carlos, and set them loose to gallop and charm their way among neighbors, accepting sugared orange peels and fingerfuls of quince. I skipped the treats and the preconcert parade in favor of getting a front-row seat inside the school itself, well before the concert started. My older brothers came with me. Percival didn’t care much about the music, but he couldn’t wait to settle our bet about El Nene. Enrique came simply because he was Enrique; the first to punish or tease, but also the first to guide and protect.

Inside, the crowds were flushed, buzzing with questions about this famous man we’d seen only in black-and-white newspaper photographs.

“No one knows where you were born,” a man called to the impromptu stage. “What are you, El Nene?”

When the pianist smiled, the long waxed tips of his mustache rubbed against the red apples of his cheeks. “Spanish, ciento por ciento,” he said. One hundred percent. “But surely the ladies here won’t fault me for having a little Moorish and gypsy blood.”

Satisfied titters ran through the crowd.

A woman yelled, “How old are you?”

“How old are you?” he shot back.

“Olé!” someone shouted.

An unseen voice: “Is it true you stowed away to Brazil when you were seven years old?”

He stroked his beard. “My music has allowed me to travel far and wide.”

And another, from a sultry-voiced woman in the rear: “When are you going to stop being called Baby? You look like a big boy to me.”

El Nene made a show of lifting a piece of sheet music and fanning himself with it. “Dear lady, if your impure thoughts have become too much to bear, there’s a confessional right next door.”

El Nene nodded across the room to the partners he’d failed to introduce, flipped his coattails out of the way, slid onto the piano bench and launched solo into an opening chord struck so ferociously that a girl in the audience cried out. Embarrassed laughter followed, but the pianist only smiled slightly and kept playing, as if the girl’s reaction and anything else our unsophisticated audience might produce—whispers, gasps, applause at inappropriate moments—were to be both expected and forgiven.

As the audience settled and quieted, El Nene began traversing the keyboard—octave by octave, at high speed, in showy hand-over-hand displays. He spread his arms wide and brought them together again, and I half-expected the keys to hop off the keyboard and pile with a clatter between his hands, like dominoes gathered at the end of a game.

Some of the assembled farmers and vintners, fishermen and bakers had been dragged to the concert by their wives; they had taken their chairs wearily and had endured El Nene’s preconcert banter with haughty expressions. But as he played, their faces softened and grew attentive. They leaned forward in their seats, hands on their knees or their chins, recognizing the athleticism of his attack and marveling at sounds and feelings they could not name.

As for dynamics, they were limited: loud, louder, and loudest. But to this crowd, it didn’t matter. Later, I would recognize this as El Nene’s trademark: his chameleonlike ability to judge a crowd, and to play to it. Among kings and queens, he played with lighter strokes and more ritardes. In Britain, he tried to sound more southern; in Italy, more northern. The crowds adored him, but the critics abroad sniped too frequently: not Spanish enough. It infuriated him, how little they knew about Spain, and how even though he knew so much more, he couldn’t please them all.

Except on an evening like this, in a small town, without music critics. Perhaps that’s why he’d come. For the duration of the piece, the audience remained silent. The only stray noise I heard, in the quiet interval before applause erupted, was a quiet, disappointed groan from Percival, who had lost his latest bet.

If the concert had ended there, it would have stayed in my memory forever. But something more astounding happened when the violinist and the cellist joined the pianist. I looked to the violin first, because it was familiar; I knew I’d learn something by watching, and was hoping to see El Nene’s violinist put my own teacher to shame. The cello, played by a man named Emil Duarte, didn’t interest me because it seemed like nothing more than an oversized violin. But then Duarte pulled his bow against the larger instrument’s strings, and my face turned to follow the sound. I was thankful that El Nene had played solo first, because once the cello started up, I never looked at the violin or piano again.

Duarte’s cello was a glossy caramel color, and the sound it produced was as warm and rich as the instrument looked. It sounded like a human voice. Not the high warble of an opera singer or anyone else singing for the stage, but rather the soothing voice of a fisherman singing as he mended his nets, or of a mother singing lullabies to her sleepy children.

When the cellist reached a crescendo on one of the lower strings, I felt a strange sensation, both pleasurable and disturbing. It reminded me of holding a cat, feeling its purrs resonate with me. Listening, I felt the sensation strengthen, as if the cello’s quivering vibrato were actually boring into me, opening a small hole in my chest, creating a physical pain as real as any wound. I was afraid of what might fall out of that hole, and yet I didn’t want it to close, either.

As Duarte climbed to higher notes, I followed him. I watched the way he bent over his instrument to reach the most precarious pitches, like a seated potter wrapping his arms around unshaped clay, stripping away its first layers, revealing rather than creating. El Nene had seemed like an actor, a showman—and a talented one at that, able to accept a role and play to his audience’s expectations. But Duarte seemed like a craftsman—the kind of craftsman I had been raised to respect.

As I listened, my nose began to itch, a warning sign that tears were imminent. Horrified that Enrique would see me cry, I blinked hard, without luck. I wrapped my fingers around the edge of my chair’s wooden seat, hoping to inflict myself with splinters that would require sudden, pained attention. When that didn’t work, I played a mental game, trying to taste Duarte’s strings as he played them. The lowest and fattest string, C: bitter chocolate. The G, next to it: something animal. Warm goat cheese. The D: ripe tomato. The high, thin A: tart lemon, to be handled with care. The highest notes, played near the bridge, could sting, but Duarte tempered that sting with a sweet vibrato.

The cello contained everything I knew—a natural world of tastes and sensations—and much more that I did not. After watching El Nene, I wanted to see him play again. But after watching Duarte, I wanted to be him.

When the trio had finished, my mother sent my brothers and sisters outside and guided me backstage, where I treaded for an eternity in a sea of wide-legged trousers and puffy skirt flounces. While I waited, I mentally replayed the cello parts I had heard, desperately trying to commit them to memory. I felt ill and giddy—drunk, just like the time my brothers had dared me to sip from one of Papá’s cellared bottles of liqueur.

My mother’s hand pushed from behind me, willing me forward with the crowd. Finally, the autograph seekers and civic well-wishers parted, I inhaled fresh air, and I heard Señor Rivera introduce me to El Nene, Emil Duarte, and their French violinist, Julien Trudeau. They stood just feet from where they had played, gods transformed back into men. There was the black piano bench and El Nene standing next to it, with a cigar in his mouth and a glass in his hand. There was Duarte’s glossy cello, recovering from its amazing performance—and looking for all the world like a curvaceous woman reclining on the beach, one arm flung over her head, trim waist and wide hips accentuated.

Señor Rivera was still talking—I saw his lips moving, and heard the rumble of the three musicians chuckling politely in response. I heard my mother’s higher, strained voice behind me. Someone pushed a violin into my left hand, where it hung, lifeless and unforgiving. My mother handed me my bow. More hands pushed me forward. Waves crashed in my ears.

I walked forward three steps and half-collapsed into the nearest chair.

“Feliu?” I heard my mother say. “Feliu?”

I started playing, in a daze. First slowly, then with gusto. Yes: It was easier this way. I could even wiggle my left fingers a little, to bring out that honeyed vibrato. My body swayed slightly as I played. All that longing I had felt during the concert was propelling my bowing hand, helping it flow expertly across the strings.

But the men were laughing again—uncontrollable bellows, instead of the polite chuckles of a moment earlier. Out of the corner of my eye I saw El Nene’s head tip back, so that his open mouth was facing the ceiling and his drink spilled onto the floor. Still I didn’t stop until I felt the sting of a hard slap against my face. My eyes followed the invading hand up a dark sleeve and into the face of Señor Eduardo Rivera. My cheek flamed. My stupor dissolved. It came to my attention, with the same sticky realization that one has upon waking just as one is wetting the bed, that I had been playing the violin as a cello. I had perched it on the seat between my legs. Duarte’s playing had affected me that much—I could imagine no other way to play a stringed instrument! Perhaps, in my dream state, I was only seeing the future.

The musicians were laughing too loudly for me to gauge whether they’d heard much of my minuet. Even played in the wrong position, it hadn’t sounded half bad to me. But perhaps because I did not look contrite, only groggy, Rivera lifted his hand again, to deliver a second slap.

In those days, when schoolteachers swatted students and shopkeepers chased away delinquents with brooms, Rivera would have been forgiven for the first slap. But not—in our family—for the second. My mother had been holding my leather bow tube for the duration of my short recital, and now she raised it to one shoulder. El Nene and his trio stopped laughing. My mother squeezed her eyes shut, cocked her right elbow and swung. With a muffled crack, the leather tube made contact with Eduardo’s infamous beak, and the flood-prone “Riera” flowed once more, this time in red.

 

That night we hurried home and packed our bags for an impromptu holiday on the coast, at a family friend’s summer cottage.

“But when are we coming back, Mamá?” Luisa asked as we tossed clothes into our bags.

“About three weeks, I think. By then, Señor Rivera’s nose will have healed.”

“Are the violin lessons done?” I asked. “Will he come to our house anymore?”

“Yes, querido. And no,” she said. Then she laughed as she hadn’t laughed in years—an explosive laugh, unexpected, brief and wild. It reminded me of a rising flock of startled birds, sending hope scattering in directions too varied for my mind to follow.

We had just gathered with our suitcases in the foyer when a knock came at the door. My siblings and I all looked to Mamá, who stiffened, and then to the line of dancing light under the heavy wooden door’s warped bottom, where we could see the shadows cast by an impatient set of small, shifting feet. A messenger boy’s grubby fingers pushed an envelope through the wide crack.

Evidently, El Nene had sympathy for my inauspicious debut. He’d taken the time to pen a handwritten letter of introduction recommending me for an audition with a real cello teacher, in Barcelona. It was signed with the pianist’s full name, Justo Al-Cerraz ( I hadn’t realized he was called anything except El Nene) and decorated with a peseta-sized, humorous self-portrait.

My mother smiled at the letter but frowned at the caricature. Then she folded the letter and instructed us to wait as she went to put it away in the family Bible, with the last letter from my father. “Barcelona,” she said, “is far away.”

Despite the sober silence that followed, I could still feel the warm glow of my mother’s earlier laughter. The future was uncertain, but at least it was exposed and alive. No matter where my father’s unreturned bones lay, turning to dust in a land Spain no longer possessed, the rest of us could be flesh again.