CHAPTER

3

After we returned home from our vacation of discretion, I was delighted not to be making music with Señor Rivera anymore. But the feeling faded by Christmas, when I longed to hold an instrument in my hand again.

“When can I learn to play?” I badgered my mother.

“There are no cellos here, Feliu.”

“Even a violin.”

“And who would teach you?”

“Mamá, I’m getting old!” I was nine years old when I first said this, and Mamá laughed. But as the months passed, and I kept repeating it, she stopped tousling my hair or smiling in response to my plea.

The new century pulsed with a mania for novelty and precocity. Young performers from England, Austria, and Russia visited Spain. A girl from America, younger than me, was performing virtuosic works on the cello—my cello, I couldn’t help thinking. None of these performers came to our village. I read about them in the newspapers and at the train station, where the posters announced Madrid—Sevilla—Granada—Córdoba—Valencia—Barcelona. Never Campo Seco.

Whenever I passed Eduardo Rivera, he crossed to the other side of the street or lifted his chin away from me. I recognized the terrible loneliness in his droopy expression. I wanted to shout, “I feel it, too!”

“Barcelona is far?” I’d pester my mother.

“Too far.”

She said the same thing about the beach that we no longer visited together. “I can’t carry you if you get tired on the way back,” she told me. “You’re too big for that now.”

“I won’t get tired. I promise.” I tried not to notice her eyes dropping to my left leg.

“Don’t make promises you can’t keep.”

“But I do promise.” Frustration burned in my stomach. I knew my older brothers and sister would get to go. I wanted to run with them, even fall or tire, without consequence, and without worrying that I had gravely inconvenienced or saddened my mother.

“Here’s a better idea,” she said. “Let’s rest at home today. When Carlito naps, I’ll read to you from Don Quixote.”

And maybe because that book’s adventures came to seem like a pale substitute for the physical adventures I wanted to have, I never cared for Cervantes. She read me those stories, I began to suspect, not as an inspiration to dream, but as a caution against dreaming. “How silly—and how terrible,” she’d say about the deranged protagonist, whose self-delusion earned him every kind of sadistic torment, reminding me that beneath a veneer of humor, the world was actually cruel.

 

I asked Mamá one day, “My bow—it really is a cello bow, isn’t it?”

She was seated at the dining table sewing a dress for Luisa, her hands struggling to align two pieces of cloth, her mouth clamped over a threaded needle. Tía, a more expert seamstress, watched from a corner, shaking her head at Mamá’s mistakes.

“How did Papá know I’d like the cello more than the violin?”

My mother mumbled something, her mouth still full of thread, but I couldn’t make it out. I tried again, and this time she didn’t answer at all.

But Tía had no stomach for a child’s insolent questions. She lashed out, saying what my mother had never considered, or never wanted to admit: “Your father knew about your lame leg, entiendes? He figured you could sit and play for your dinner, at the very least. Even a beggar needs a gimmick.”

My mother separated the pieces of cloth in her hands and removed the needle from her mouth. She seemed to be choosing her words carefully, but I was faster: “I don’t care. Even if I had good legs—”

She interrupted me. “You’ll never be a beggar—don’t worry about that. We’ll find you something to do for work.”

“I don’t care about a job,” I started to say, but my mother’s soft look hardened, stopping me.

“No person can have dignity without work. I’ve told you before. Music is fine, but it’s not work.”

“You said it was no different than making shoes or building bridges. So it is work.”

“Things change, Feliu. Everything changes. When things are good, there is time and money for music. When things are not good—hostia!” She threw down the dress she had been sewing, wagging the finger she had pricked, and continued to swear, using words I’d never heard come from her mouth. Her face reddened as she held her breath, desperately trying to restrain herself, but a few more words leaked out. “Damn you” were two of them. The third wasn’t so easy to hear.

As Mamá rested in her dark bedroom with a headache, I’d thought about what she’d cursed—from the Communion wafer to a dozen other holy objects we weren’t supposed to mention in anger. But of people, she had named only one: Reynaldo. It was Papá’s name, seldom uttered. She was cursing him not only for failing to return, not only for leaving her with five children and a difficult sister-in-law, but for delivering into my hands a hope that she couldn’t fulfill.

 

Around this time, Father Basilio decided that I might have the makings of a priest—a solution to one of my problems, if not both. It had started with the chocolate. From the time I was old enough to attend school, Percival, Enrique and I had set out together from home with our breakfast in our pockets: hard, dark, dusty chocolate squares, speckled with bits of dried fruit and nuts. We were forbidden to eat them on the way to the Mass we were made to attend before school, because Communion required a pure, empty stomach. After Mass ended, we and our young neighbors filed out of the church to the plaza, where—with Father Basilio’s words about kindness and brotherly love still fresh in our ears—we raced and taunted and pushed each other in hopes of grabbing a seat on the nearest outdoor benches. There we could sit and eat the treats in our pockets. Ten minutes later, a bell rang to call us into school next door.

Percival, who was in his last year of school, invariably ate his chocolate square on the way to Mass, daring us to tell on him—which we never did. Enrique respected the prohibition and adhered to it. But he wanted the chocolate so badly that his fingers crept into his pockets and nestled there, melting the treat into a lumpy puddle. Once, just before placing the Communion wafer on his tongue, Father Basilio paused and asked Enrique to hold out his hands. When my brother presented his sticky brown, trembling fingers, the priest assumed he’d been nibbling in the back of the church all through the service. Enrique was sent away without the wafer and given a paddling later that day at school. But the very next day, his fingers wandered into his pockets again.

I, too, loved chocolate and I, too, felt tempted. But I did not let my fingers touch the chocolate, or even the edges of my pockets. As I experimented with delaying gratification, I found a savory quality to self-denial that was even more powerful than the satisfaction of sugar. At some point my mother discovered my secret and had a meeting with the priest. He was the one to ask me, on a Monday afternoon after school, why I had accumulated twenty-seven squares of untouched chocolate in a box under my bed.

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.

“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.

“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.