CHAPTER

5

After the cello came, my world both shrank and brightened, like a piece of wood burning down into red-hot coal. I woke, for the first time in my entire life, knowing exactly what I needed to do. Never mind the unexplored city all around me. Home became that circle of space around my chair, its radius defined by the movement of my bowing arm. By midday, the nerves in my tailbone tingled. After five to seven hours of sitting at the edge of the chair, it hurt to stand up, but the electric jolts down my spine told me I had done my best and could forgive myself for not being able to do more.

Once, on the Ramblas, in a vendor’s trunk, I saw a sepia-toned picture showing three men smoking opium, each of them lost in his own dreamy cloud. That’s how I must have looked during my first days with the cello. I was no more eager to leave Alberto’s parlor than those smokers were to leave their Chinese den. No one needed to urge me to practice, then or at any later point in my life.

Alberto seemed equally enlivened to find himself teaching again. The music seemed to draw him from wherever he was in the apartment. He would enter the living room to shower me with directions, then exit the room backward, watching me until the last possible moment. Minutes later, he’d reappear with bread crumbs on his unshaved jaw and a knife in one hand, talking with his mouth full, delivering the correction that could not wait. He would stand to one side, retracting from my view, before pouncing on me again, his outstretched hands so close to the cello’s neck that I thought he was going to pull it away and begin playing it himself. But he never did. Nodding and clapping and waving his arms, he orbited around me. Was it my fault that I began to feel like the center of the universe?

It was a good thing for both of us that my energy always outlasted his. Near the end of each morning session, when the sun’s rays illumined our slot-canyon street for a precious hour or so, I would spot him lounging on the balcony at the parlor’s far end, a book on his chest, stubbled cheeks glinting. He left the double doors open, so that the sounds of people and horses passing, bottles clanking, and wagon tailgates slamming blended with my études. Once I was immersed in a challenging piece of music, I didn’t hear them at all.

I couldn’t have played well in the beginning. I’m equally sure that it didn’t matter. Every virginal sensation was sublime: the friction of the minutely ridged strings against my fingers, the silkiness of the black fingerboard beneath, the first catch of the well-rosined bow against the string, the vibration of the instrument between my knees. My senses were so overloaded that I couldn’t objectively hear myself play. I just knew how it felt every time a well-pitched note resonated through the cello’s body and into mine: like an itch being scratched. Except the itch never went away. Every day, in fact, it grew stronger. Sometimes, I couldn’t get to sleep at night because I couldn’t silence the music in my head. Lavender bruises stippled my inner knees, where I’d clenched the cello too tightly. My right shoulder throbbed and the fingers on my left hand twitched. But I invited these insomniac spells. I knew my mind and body were making up for lost time.

Señor Rivera, my violin teacher, had emphasized mastery of the first position, each finger corresponding to a single note, with slight shifts forward and back for sharps and flats. Once I had my own cello,

Alberto dispensed with the corks and had me playing all over the fingerboard. It was his feeling that young players became fearful of the cello’s highest notes and advanced positions, closer to the bridge, only because they typically learn those perilous notes last. The same note could be played with any finger, depending on where the hand was positioned; the same note could also be played on many places all over the cello, always with a slightly different tone. “It’s a problem to solve,” he’d say. “Your problem. Doesn’t that feel wonderful? Isn’t it amazing how simple wood and wire and hair can produce better riddles than an Egyptian sphinx?”

I had my own less-philosophical questions. I tried asking him, “Am I any good?”

He wouldn’t answer me directly, even when I baited him with self-deprecating remarks: “Maybe I’m terrible, Alberto. Maybe I can’t play at all.”

He’d reply, “Does it sound terrible? Do you feel terrible when you play? No audience is going to answer that question for you, past the novice stage.”

I heard his remark as a tentative compliment—evidently, I was no longer a novice. What I did not hear was what Alberto truly meant: that I had to trust myself, had to know myself. An artist was destined to judge himself the most harshly. An artist could easily end up alone.

If my shoulders or left hand tightened up, he ordered me to stop playing, drape my arms over the fingerboard down the face of the cello, toward the bridge, and simply cradle the instrument. “See? You can reach every part. These distances that feel so vast when we’re nervous aren’t large distances at all. Don’t look—just feel your way and listen. It’s easier to play the cello than to scratch your own back. If it doesn’t feel easy, you’re doing something wrong.”

He encouraged me to use loose fingers, to reach forward or back with a relaxed left hand. But his unorthodoxy had its limits. Mixed into his liberated style were traces of the stiffer nineteenth-century techniques he himself had been taught. “Get that elbow down,” he said whenever my bowing arm floated too far away from my side. “Stop stabbing at the air.”

I listened to him as best I could, not because I feared him, but just the opposite—because I trusted him. Unlike Señor Rivera, he wanted nothing from me and did not goad me with any kind of future visions, glorious or doomed. But it was difficult. Sometimes, I slipped away and did not hear him until his soft voice had escalated to a grumble. Out of the corner of one eye, I would see his hand go up, gesturing me to stop playing mid-measure; but I could not stop, not until I’d finished the musical phrase. And even then, I would have preferred to finish the entire piece. As the months wore on, I grew accustomed to ignoring him, to indulging my own desire to enter that tunnel of light that appeared when the music was going well. I could fall into that light and block out everything.

Once I looked around mid-lesson and could not find Alberto at all. I remembered that he had been waving at me, calling out to me about dynamics, but now I could not find him. The balcony was empty. I hadn’t heard the front door close. Yet it had—with a slam, he told me later. In a pique, he had left for the café.

Years later, critics would underestimate the influence of my Barcelona years. They would refer to me as essentially “self-taught,” and I would not correct them. I prided myself on having learned so much under Alberto’s light hand, forgetting that his leniency was a liberating gift that lesser men, like the Rivera brothers, did not know how to give. Alberto was not without opinions or methodology; he spent hours guiding me through scales and positions and teaching me how to hear. But when my eyes glazed over, when I started to withdraw into a dazed cloud of sound, he recognized the signs and understood the limits, both his and mine. In my lifetime, I would meet priests who had never learned to turn the other cheek, communists who had no interest in sharing so much as a cigarette, fascists who extolled order but couldn’t walk a straight line. Alberto believed and lived a single idea. He was his own man. He struggled to let me become mine.

 

My mother usually woke three hours before I did, in order to make the long commute into the industrial neighborhood called the Eixample, where she had found work at a calico-weaving factory. She stood for fourteen-hour days in front of a loom, alongside hundreds of other women, in a giant industrial shed that was hot in summer, freezing cold in winter, and painfully noisy year-round.

Alberto’s and my mother’s schedules were so different, I assumed my tutor and mother rarely saw each other. But one morning when it was still dark I woke and went to use the bathroom down the hall. Passing the unlit hall that led to the kitchen, I heard voices, hers soft and high, his gentle and low, both of them surprisingly relaxed and informal—like old friends who had grown used to having coffee together. No wonder Alberto had trouble waking up in time for our morning sessions lately, I thought, and felt my chest grow heavy with the weight of an unfamiliar emotion.

Alberto spent less time worrying aloud about my future career than about my mother’s immediate employment. “It’s a bad time all around,” he told me later that autumn, over our bachelors’ dinner of sardines and bread. “The cost of food, the strikes. They’ve talked about closing your mother’s factory. With no colonies to export to, it’s hard to sell calico now. Still, it’s hard work for a woman her age. She’s lost weight since coming here.”

Lost weight? How closely was he scrutinizing her shape? Yet even I had noticed how small she looked beneath the grayish white sheet, without the crinoline and corset and heavy skirts.

“You make it sound like it’s my fault,” I said.

“You could help her—earn some money, so she can work less. There is a café nearby looking to hire musicians.”

“You asked my mother about it?”

“I did. She doesn’t like the idea.”

“She doesn’t believe I can make money playing. She doesn’t believe playing music is real work.”

“Oh, I don’t know.”

“She doesn’t believe in me, Alberto.”

His heavy-lidded eyes met mine; his lips formed a patiently condescending half-smile.

“Maybe you aren’t the thing she doubts.”

I didn’t understand.

“Music isn’t everything, Feliu.”

So it was not only my ability and fortitude that were suspect, but music itself? But of course, I’d always known it.

My irritation made me less shy. “Why don’t you play the cello anymore, Alberto?”

“I have not played my own instrument for years. Teaching doesn’t require it.”

“Don’t you miss it?”

“A little, yes.”

He’d said this before, and I’d never pursued the question any further. But I wasn’t going to let it go this time. Something in my expression must have told him so.

“I was employed by an opera company and later, by a symphony. I toured all of Europe, of course—”

“Europe!”

Alberto shook his head, cautioning me not to interrupt again. “And at least I had the sense to save some of those earnings. But I missed many years in my daughter’s life. Now she has moved away. She doesn’t write. I played through my wife’s illness, and she died. And I played through my own illness, wishing to die.”

I looked down at my hands, folded in my lap.

“But that wish was not granted,” he continued. “I got better. I dedicated myself to one instrument for two-thirds of my life, but I never found an answer to one question: Why?”

“Why play?”

“Yes—what point does it serve? What is music for?”

“Why does it have to be for anything?”

“I played for powerful men and saw them, a day after crying to my cello, govern without mercy. I played for workers and saw them no better able to feed their families. I asked myself—”

“You must not have loved it then,” I interrupted. “If you loved it, you would play music for its own sake.”

“What in this world exists for its own sake? Food nourishes. Water quenches. Women bear children.”

“Beauty—” I started to say.

“A flower is beautiful, Feliu. But a flower’s beauty and scent have one purpose: to attract a bee. To allow pollination to take place. To allow life to continue.”

“Art exists for its own sake.”

Alberto shook his head vigorously. “No, that’s not true. Anyway, I loved it too much. Too much for it to be mere entertainment, for me or anyone else.”

I did not like this side of Alberto. I did not understand how he could speak ill of something so obviously wonderful and pure. But I felt even more displeased by what he said next.

“Your mother understands this. I know she gave up her own music career. I know that after your father’s death, she had to give up many things. Maybe that’s why we understand each other.” He sighed, “It’s good to have a friend in times like these.”

To hear either of them talk, the world wasn’t nearing its end, it had already ended. Didn’t they see how unfair it was to make a young man feel that he’d been born too late, that he was lucky to have survived at all, that there was no point in believing in anything anymore?

 

One night at the café, Ramón, the scarred oboist, asked what concerts I had attended.

“None,” I told him.

“Not even the Liceo?”

“He doesn’t belong there,” Alberto said quickly. I took this to mean I was too young, too low-class, ill-mannered and ill-attired. I wouldn’t have denied any of it. Just passing the brightly lit, block-long building made my heart pound in my chest.

Ramón persevered. “How can a boy learn classical music without hearing it?”

I’d heard many musicians on the streets, I told him—Andalucían guitarists, strolling violinists, comical performers playing reedy Moorish flutes, even an African drummer.

Ramón cocked an eyebrow at Alberto. “Is that what you’re preparing him for—to busk on the Ramblas?”

When Alberto didn’t answer, Ramón continued, “Would you have been content with that kind of life? Do you think he should play it safe just because of your mistakes?”

Alberto had been staring at his own crossed forearms, propped on the table. Now he peered up through his gray eyebrows. “Our mistakes, you mean.”

 

The next day, Ramón showed up at our apartment door cradling a large box. “Your maestro loaned this to me three years ago. I am returning it.”

It was the first phonograph I’d seen up close, a portable hand-cranked model set in a burgundy box, with a cone-shaped amplifier made of cardboard. I found it difficult to believe Alberto’s explanation that he had given it away when his neighbors complained about the noise, since the sound of my cello playing was much louder. But I had to honor the restrictions he imposed as a condition of my keeping it.

“You can play it between five and seven in the evening, and no more,” Alberto said. That, conveniently, was the time he went to the café, during his more energetic weeks. Other weeks, he had resumed his habit of not leaving at all.

“And only on the days you finish the schoolwork your mother sets out for you,” he continued. Mamá had threatened to take away the cello if I didn’t start spending at least part of each day reading the school-books and filling the math ledgers that had once belonged to Enrique, which she had brought all the way from Campo Seco. I hadn’t believed her about the cello, but I believed Alberto about the phonograph.

“And if it breaks, I can’t afford to fix it,” Alberto said as I jumped up and down within a handbreadth of the cardboard cone.

Ramón also had brought a stack of thick shellac records. As we studied the labels, I tried to imitate the way he held them, the white patches of his scarred palms pressed gingerly against each disk’s shiny black edges. He held up one, indicating the label with his chin. “Principal cellist—A. Mendizábal,” it read, in tiny, curling script.

“I’ll take that one,” Alberto said. I never saw it again.

 

Enrique’s letter came just in time, during a week when Alberto’s moods were sliding downhill. I thought it was my fault, given our many arguments about my bowing arm. Alberto advised me to keep it pressed more closely to my body, while I was interested in experimenting with more varied positions, letting it move away from my body as I bowed. Exasperated, he tucked a thick book between my right elbow and rib cage, and ordered me to hold it there as I played. The result produced tension in my forearm, my shoulder and my wrist—I knew it couldn’t be right, and I knew it contradicted everything he’d taught me in a more cheerful time. To spite him, I complied, but let the bow skate over the strings, filling the parlor with alley-cat screechings and yowlings that punished us both.

After the midday meal, Alberto retreated to his bedroom. I dragged a chair to the balcony, to read Enrique’s letter.

 

Toledo, April 12, 1908

Dear Cerillito,

We wake every day to music here, or bugles at least. Do you think you could march with a cello? That would be a trick. If not, I guess you’ll have to stay in Barcelona, eating pastries and watching girls.

How are your legs doing? I hope you don’t sit the entire day playing your instrument, without exercising. Here, they make us march to the point of collapse. You would think all the men would befit, but that isn’t the case. I thought of you the other day when I entered the mess tent and heard three men harassing a new cadet. I couldn’t see his face at first, but I could hear his voice. It was high and whistly like a parakeet. Anyway, he is very thin and the men keep calling him Matchstick and it makes me think of you. Also he is your age and height almost exactly, unless you have grown a lot since I saw you last. I inquired about him and he was sent to Toledo by his mother, who probably doesn’t realize her Paquito will become the butt of jokes here. The men hide his clothes and his books and torment him, but I can’t say he complains. He keeps to himself mostly and does not seem to want or need a friend. But I will try to keep an eye out for him and I hope you have someone there who will keep an eye out for you.

They are recruiting many new cadets all the time. All talk is of Morocco.

Send my love to Mamá and I hope you have news of Luisa, Percival, and Tía, since I haven’t heard much from them. Do you send them money, now that you are a famous musician? Or does that come later?

Con cariño,

Enrique

 

Alberto’s moods continued to wax and wane. On the upswings, he brought out new pieces of music and lectured me about various composers and their styles and strategies, the particular problems they’d had to solve, and the times that had shaped them. On the downswings, he slept late and retired early, leaving me to practice old pieces to death, fussing with the bowings and trying to correct the tinny quality of my open strings or the woof of my high F. The more I played, the less happy I felt with my playing. My ear was improving faster than my hands, my expectations rising ahead of my abilities. It was not pleasant to spend so many hours alone.

In December of that year, I turned sixteen. I was no taller than I’d been at fifteen, but deeper voiced, and certainly more prone to dark moods of my own. The novelty of playing all day and doing little else was wearing thin. I listened to the phonograph more and more, but the recordings, primitively made as they were, only made me more morose. Symphonic music in particular brought me to tears—all those instruments playing together, so much richer and more complex than the simple études and salon pieces I played without accompaniment. Still, I cranked on, starting before five and continuing longer and longer past seven each evening. One night, at a quarter to nine, Alberto flung open his door, stomped into the parlor, and snatched the Beethoven record that had been playing. His hands shook as he turned left and right, looking for a place to crack it in two. Then his shoulders slumped. He turned away and set the record on a chair.

“Get out,” he growled, pointing to the door. “I need quiet. Here.” He thrust his hand into his pocket, then extended his fist to me. “A boy shouldn’t be inside all these hours. Go find something to do. Go.” He released the coins into my palm, and I saw that his hand was still shaking. “To the waterfront. To the wax museum. Waste some money. Waste some time! Get out of this building and act your age.”

 

That was how I found the book. If the phonograph had wedged open a gap in my confidence, suggesting that perhaps my own music-making was nothing special, then the book split my confidence in two, exposing me as unexceptional, untalented, and—despite my own best efforts—woefully untrained.

I had walked toward the waterfront, as Alberto had suggested. Past the glittering lights of the Liceo opera house, past the vendors and cafés, toward the lower, seedier streets where prostitutes milled about, flaunting their cleavage beneath the city’s gaslights. Two blocks short of the waterfront, where the statue of Columbus stands on a high pedestal with his back to the city, I turned left. A half-block more, and I arrived at the Museo de Cera.

Waiting behind a line of couples at the ticket window, I studied the museum posters under dirty glass. The main attraction seemed to be wax effigies of local criminals who had been put to death by the museum’s founder, who was also Barcelona’s executioner. Without a girl on my shoulder, feigning distress, I wasn’t terribly interested, even though other people—first Ramón, later Alberto—seemed to think I should be.

Instead of buying a ticket, I wandered away and down the curb, where vendors offered eclectic wares. A postcard vendor displayed lurid images in a velvet-lined trunk: belly dancers whose bare breasts were plainly visible beneath sheer scarves, acrobats whose pear-shaped bottoms rested on trapeze bars. They were of a different caliber than the images sold higher up the Ramblas, better matched to the wax museum clientele, eager for lurid mementos.

“Look through here,” the vendor said, holding up a black box, and when I peeked inside, I was confronted with the tableau of a naked woman recoiling dramatically as an ax fell toward her neck. I shrank back, then looked again.

“I have more, but it costs,” he said. “Already you see two times for free.” I shook my head and started to walk away.

My mother wouldn’t want me to be here, I thought. But then I remembered Alberto’s words: “Waste some money. Waste some time. Act your age.”

“You like oddities?” the vendor tried, and pulled out an entire box stuffed with postcards, photos, pamphlets, and books. I glanced at the spines: Slaves to Love. Oriental Secrets. The Marquis de Sade. A sixteen-year-old boy should have been drawn to those books. But it was a thin gray volume with silver type that caught my eye, instead—Tortured Genius: Two Centuries of Musical Prodigy.

“You don’t want that one,” the vendor said. “Not many pictures. Only little girls and boys.” Then his eyes lit up. “Unless you like little girls and boys. In that case, I have better—no words, all pictures. Wait and see, I will get. Separate box.”

But I was already digging in my pocket. He shrugged and took what I had. As he passed the book to me, the loose title page shifted and fell free from its broken binding. Our eyes locked; he could see I still wanted the volume, but he conceded the damage and left one coin in my palm, pitying my lack of perversity. He pointed me back toward the Ramblas. “You have enough left for an ice cream. Go.”

And so it was that I read about the misery of genius, and other truths that had been withheld from me. I read about Franz Joséph Haydn being torn from his home, neglected, and caned after misbehaving at school; about Mozart being exhibited relentlessly by his domineering father; about the violinist Paganini being starved and locked in his room for endless practice sessions.

These names I knew. Others were unfamiliar, and they bothered me even more, because they made musical suffering and sadism seem banal and—here, the possibility that bothered me—perhaps essential. The father of a motherless German girl named Gertrude Mara tied her to a chair whenever he left for his work; yet she went on to become a skilled violinist, and later, singer. Crippled, yes, but skilled.

Across Europe, children were beaten, pushed off piano benches, deprived of food, stripped of their playthings, even the dolls or marbles brought to them by musical admirers. And the torture seemed to work. Children—at least the ones who were the focus of this slim gray volume—excelled and became famous. The bruises faded. The music lasted.

An entire chapter in the prodigy book was devoted to Justo Al-Cerraz and the many ways his father goaded him into early performance, following abandonment by his unnamed gypsy mother. When an early patron presented him with a large stuffed hobbyhorse, Al-Cerraz’s father sawed off the horse’s head and scooted its body closer to the piano, so the boy prodigy could keep playing as he rode. The text claimed the young pianist had burst into tears at seeing the patron’s gift mutilated, but in the accompanying photograph he looked radiant atop the oddly beheaded horse. Perhaps that inner light came from the music itself. Or perhaps—my envy soared here at the thought—it came from the absolute knowledge of one’s future path, and the sense that a parent, kind or cruel, wise or misguided, believed without a doubt that one was destined for artistic greatness.

Punishment aside, the book highlighted all the subjects these brilliant young musicians were learning before they outgrew their sailor suits and banana curls: music theory, composition, solfège. I’d assumed that learning to play an instrument was enough. What if it wasn’t? And what was this French thing, solfège?

I had bought myself an ice cream, as the vendor had advised, and ate half of it in the brightly lit parlor, the book in my lap, the ice cream thick in my throat. Finally, I gave up, leaving a melted puddle of cream in the bowl.

“Not good enough for you?” the barman said as he watched me ease myself off the high stool, face pinched with nausea. And then, under his breath: “Spoiled kids.”

It was true. I was spoiled. But was it my fault? I’d wanted to play the cello for years, but my mother had held me back. I would rather she had tied me to a practice chair than lured me back into bed on a Sunday afternoon with promises of Don Quixote and an extra chocolate square, if I lay particularly still. Most recently, my mother had brought me a manual for the repair of phonographs. Alberto’s wasn’t broken, but Mamá seemed intent on interpreting my love of the phonograph as a boyish fascination with machines, rather than a young man’s dedication to serious art. She’d even hinted I might find a future career in a repair shop, if I took up mechanical tinkering. (And yet, she did not push this idea, either. Even her discouragement of my dreams had a passive, ambivalent quality.) As for Alberto, just when I wanted to study more and harder he slept half the day, unwashed shirts again collecting on armchairs and the sink filling with towers of dirty dishes—proof indeed of my spoiling, since no one demanded I wash them; proof of Mamá’s overworked distractedness, since she did not even see them; and proof of Alberto’s low expectations, since he seemed to think it normal for an apartment to reek of old rice and beans.

I craved rigor and order, and instead I spent the day surrounded by entropy, while the streets outside offered more of the same: graffiti, peeling posters, slogans and mottoes protesting the government, denouncing the King, defying military conscription. How could someone learn amidst such chaos? Only by turning further inward, learning to block out everything but the clean and orderly perfection of music itself.

 

I hid the book in a drawer under my socks, like a pornographic postcard, and I didn’t mention it. But I continued to look for every indication that Mamá and Alberto had never taken me seriously or, worse yet, that I was truly soft inside. I received a letter from Enrique describing a three-day field exercise he’d suffered through, during which several men had fainted from heat exhaustion. Enrique had soldiered on, of course. Even the skinny-legged Matchstick had made it, Enrique troubled himself to write. I did not appreciate being constantly compared to that friendless waif. Was it Enrique’s way of saying that if I were a real man, I would have joined the military, too?

That week, I began practicing harder and longer. Instead of resting after lunch, I repeated my entire five-hour morning drill. For days, Alberto said nothing. Finally, on Friday evening, when he saw me struggling to stand up from my cello chair, he said, “There’s no need to injure yourself.”

I lashed out, cheeks flushed: “Paganini practiced ten hours a day!”

Alberto shrank back, pantomiming shock at my outburst. “Until he was twenty years old—then he never practiced again. Besides, he was sick all the time.”

“You haven’t taught me solfège,” I grumbled through gritted teeth.

Alberto made a quizzical sound, then nodded with understanding. He began to sing an ascending scale: “Do re mi fa so . . .” He paused. “You know that, don’t you? It’s just sight-reading those tones. I’ve heard you do it on your own.”

“That’s solfège?”

“That’s solfège.”

I rubbed the small of my back with one hand, reached forward to set my bow on the music stand, but a sudden pain shooting down my left leg made me drop it. I swore under my breath and bent to pick up the bow, hot tears pooling. Rising, I kicked over the music stand.

“You don’t seem happy, Feliu.” There was no humor in his voice now.

I shouted back, “I’m not supposed to be happy! If you knew anything about teaching, you would know that.”

“I see,” he tried to say lightly, but there was a catch in his voice. “It’s cruelty you want.”

I didn’t have the words to explain the frustration in the pit of my stomach. I sputtered and looked around. The music stand that I’d knocked down belonged to Alberto. It was one of the few musical objects he displayed with pride, fashioned from thick mahogany, shaped like a lyre with scrolled edges. I kicked it again and heard the wood splinter. Before I had time to exhale, Alberto was pulling me by the wrist into the kitchen, around the table, and toward the pantry closet. He nudged me inside and slammed the door. Suddenly, I was immersed in darkness, surrounded by the musty smell of mold and mouse droppings.

I waited a minute, unsure if Alberto was still on the other side.

“You’re supposed to lock me in here with my cello!” I called out.

I heard the groan of wood—Alberto leaning against the door. His muffled voice answered, “That closet’s too small. If you wanted to be locked away with an instrument, you should have stuck with the violin.”

Silence again.

“I’m not afraid of you,” I shouted.

“Of course not. You want a tyrant for a teacher. I refuse to be a tyrant. And I’m not starving you properly, either. If you feel around, you’ll find plenty to eat.”

“Then why I am in here?” I yelled, my eyes bulging, trying to see past the darkness.

I barely made out his soft reply: “You tell me.”

The darkness made five minutes feel like fifty. Groping above my head, I managed to knock over a bag of something soft. I felt a film of powder settle on my face, smeared a finger against my cheek, and tasted it. Flour. Reaching around, I knocked over another bag. Something grainy spilled out. I plunged a finger and then brought it to my lips. Sugar.

The door opened. Alberto was silent, but his shoulders were heaving. For a second, I thought he was sobbing. Then I saw he was laughing silently, tears streaming down his cheeks.

“You’re white as a ghost,” he said when he’d caught his breath. “You look more like Paganini already.”

I didn’t laugh.

“The other day, when I asked you to go to the wax museum, did you go?”

I wondered if he’d found my book. “I walked there, but I didn’t go inside.”

“I gave you the money. You should have gone inside. Do you see? Even when I try to guide you, you don’t listen.”

When I didn’t respond, he added, in a lower voice, “I never asked you to come to me. If your mother hadn’t been so desperate—and so kind—I would have turned you both away. I did try to turn you away. You should know more about the people you trust to teach you.”

He ran his hand through his short gray hair and nodded three times, like a railroad worker practice-swinging his mallet before raising it high, for the heavy blow. “If you’d gone to the wax museum, you’d understand something important about me. But never mind that. Today I learned something about you. For the time being, I am resigning as your teacher. If it’s cruelty you want, you’ll find it in the streets.”

Then Alberto told me the new rules: I was expected to contribute to room and board, which my mother had fallen behind in paying. I was expected to vacate the apartment every day after lunch and not return until dinner, honoring his new need for privacy. He didn’t want to hear the phonograph anymore. He didn’t want to hear my incessant cello playing. He didn’t even want to see the cello—I was to take it with me each day when I left.

“We don’t need to tell your mother,” he added. “It would only upset her.”

The small spark of fury I had been fanning leaped suddenly into a roaring flame. Heat smoldered in my chest; my tongue felt dry. I couldn’t speak. He was kicking me out—like Haydn! He was expecting me to earn my own money—like Mozart!

I’d never felt such righteous anger in my life.

I’d never felt so grateful.