CHAPTER

6

My mother hadn’t wanted me to perform publicly. Perhaps she was worried that I would fail. Or perhaps she was worried that some small taste of success would give me false hope and lead to some larger failure in the future. If she feared only that a busking or café career might inflate my vanity, it was a needless concern. Curious stares aside, I received little attention over the winter months that followed, regardless of how and where I played.

Barcelona itself was a spectacle. The young Picasso had shown his work at the Quatre Gats and then sailed off toward Paris on the winds of his rising fame. Gaudí, the architect, had designed an entire fairy-tale suburb of abstract pavilions and serpentine, mosaic-covered benches. Even the local fish market was a splashy affair, its main gate decorated with green, amber and deep blue circles of glass cut from bottle bottoms, no two of them identical. The thickness of the glass, the presence of waves or bubbles or cracks, the direction of the sunlight all added variety and texture, an infinite number of hues.

Whenever I walked past the gate, I thought of the way Alberto had explained the cello’s tone colors to me, the individuality and interpretive possibility inherent in a single note. The cellist’s left hand was a technician—to find a quarter note of B on the A string, it headed to the first fingering, in first position. The right hand, on the other hand, was an artist, whose palette included the weight of the bow, the speed of the bow, the proximity of the bow to the bridge, all of which colored and shaded that note an infinite number of ways. From the simplest materials, so much was possible in Barcelona—or felt possible, anyway, which was the first step toward innovation, as well as the first step toward disillusionment and rebellion.

Visitors came to see Barcelona’s color and strangeness. Residents took pride in its booming modernity. Street revelers shot off guns when they were joyful and dynamite when they were not. A distant explosion might be a religious festival; every third day, some saint was being heralded in some corner of the sprawling city. Or it might be a revolution. At the center of such a visual and auditory kaleidoscope, it was easy to go unseen and unheard.

While there was little glory or attention for a young unknown musician, there was ample opportunity. On my first attempt, I procured a job at the back of a café, replacing a violinist who had been jailed for punching a tax collector. The violinist returned after one week. But the next job came just as easily, when I wandered into a movie house. Barcelona had eighty of them at least, most of them small and shoddy and subject to frequent changes in ownership. Noticing my cello case, the theater owner pulled me aside and immediately offered me a position. His daytime pianist had disappeared, and the first round of replacements hadn’t been quick enough to master the scores that accompanied each new film. Meanwhile, the audience was getting restless. They had come to see silent films, but they didn’t expect silence. Nothing was more awkward than a “flicker” absent the musical cues that told the viewer when to laugh, cry, or close his eyes in fright.

I quickly extracted my cello from its case and played a sliding high note that sounded like a woman’s shriek. Then I played a rapid trill on the lowest string, to suggest the tremor of suspense. I asked to see the piano music. The manager handed me a sheet upside down; I don’t think he could read the alphabet, much less notes. Within minutes I had translated the first measures of a rather contrived piano score for two hands into a simpler one-line bass-clef melody, dressed up with the occasional double-stop chord.

“You’re hired,” the manager said, sweating as he watched the audience file toward their seats. “This one’s a train picture. There’s lots of ladies with their mouths open, fainting all over the place. Just do that screech and add the rest when you get it figured out.”

I lasted five weeks at that job, twelve-minute reel after twelve-minute reel, until the theater closed. “It wasn’t your fault,” the manager said kindly, surveying the empty theater with an unlit cigar in his mouth. “You play that big violin pretty good.”

The café was four blocks from Alberto’s building; the theater, five—all close enough, but not an easy trek with a cello case bumping against my bruised hip. The instrument that had been the easier choice when I played only at home was the least convenient now that I needed to pursue employment. Just descending the stairs from Alberto’s apartment, I’d strained my hip repeatedly and added a few scratches to the cello’s face besides. I considered a map of the tram routes, wondering how much farther I was willing to travel with an instrument both taller and wider than I was.

Of course, the perfect place to play was just around the corner. But the world-famous Ramblas intimidated me. Most of the audience at my first café job had been drunk; at my second job, in the theater, essentially blind, their eyes focused on a screen instead of on me. On the Ramblas, I would be under clear and sober scrutiny. To play in an open-air setting, on the boulevard that had bewitched me on my very first day in Barcelona, seemed a kind of graduation—a necessary one.

At least the season made it easier. In late winter, half the seasoned street entertainers headed to indoor jobs or warmer climes, reducing the competition among musicians. Fortunately, many of the tourists remained. Afternoons, when local residents had already returned home from their market shopping, Englishmen loitered around the news kiosks, a mob of white suits, straw boaters and two-tone shoes demanding their copies of the London papers. Pale ladies whispered and turned, tickling passing waiters with the wayward plumes of their enormous feather-decorated hats. Eastern European aristocrats inhabited the cabstands—a motley crowd of dark suits and drooping cravats, exchanging pleasantries in incomprehensible accents.

But there was another language on the Ramblas, and this one I could fully understand: the music of the boulevard itself. By mid-afternoon, commerce in all the adjacent markets and side alleys slowed, leaving only the main walkways faintly pulsing. Flower sellers swept up fallen petals and clipped stems. On the boulevard’s far side, where a perpendicular street opened into the Saint Joséph market, produce vendors piled up boxes of blemished, unsold fruit. For the rest of my life, whenever I would hear the first uncertain sounds of an orchestra tuning, it would remind me of the sleepy Ramblas on a winter afternoon: the tap of crates, the squeal of departing carts and creak of closing awnings—discordant, and yet full of promise.

This pause, which seemed a quiet lull to the tourists sipping their cooling coffees and their warming manzanillos, was electrifying to me. I knew what came next. Once the vendors had departed, the street entertainers could take up their stations, spaced more or less evenly along the Ramblas’s kilometer-plus length.

The day I found my courage was brisk and overcast, with mattress-thick clouds. I hadn’t brought a chair, but under a tree I spotted an overturned box made of thin wooden slats that sufficed as a low seat. I hadn’t brought a music stand either, and I struggled to arrange some sheet music around my feet, the papers’ edges held down by my open cello case. I’d just picked up my bow and was tightening the hairs when one of the sheets blew free. It fluttered toward a cabstand, where it stayed wrapped around a horse’s leg long enough for me to retrieve it, risking the cabdriver’s wrath and the fate of my unguarded cello. I was just loping back to my makeshift seat when I saw a second page of music flutter free, and then a third. I grabbed at the pages that remained, and was just tallying my losses—the second page of a Popper étude, the first and second pages of a Bach minuet—when a voice from behind my shoulder said, “You’re doing it all wrong.”

I twisted around, relieved to see a boy instead of a policeman. He was a year or two older, and taller, with a forelock of black hair that lay flat against a pimply forehead. A battered violin hung from the long, thin fingers of his left hand. A dark, oversized coat draped his bony shoulders.

“This isn’t a concert hall,” he drawled. “If you need sheet music, you shouldn’t play here.”

“I’ll decide that for myself,” I said, swallowing hard.

The young violinist smirked and raked one hand against his forehead, pushing his hair from his eyes. “I was trying to be”—he searched for the word—“charitable. This is my spot. That is my box you’re sitting on.”

He was French Basque, he said; his hometown was to the northwest, across the border. The wooden purfling along his violin’s edges was nearly worn away. One of his coat pockets was torn, attached at the bottom seam by just a few stitches. It flapped uneasily, like a piece of torn skin.

“You know how long it took me to get this spot? How much it cost me?” When I didn’t answer, he proceeded to tell me the story of his mentor, a stiltwalker and juggler who had demanded that the violinist hand over half of his earnings to share the right to play under this tree.

“Until the day,” he crowed, “that his stilt fell into that hole, just there.” He pointed at a saucer-sized drainhole in the Ramblas paving. “His ankle turned ’round as easily as a balloon on a string. It looked like his foot had been put on backward. And the sound he made!”

“Didn’t anyone help him?”

The violinist studied the back of his free hand, pretended to buff his black-edged nails. “He made it to the cabstand. Eventually.” Seeing my disturbed expression, he added, “This was a man who could walk on his hands! He had lost only the use of one foot!

“Anyway,” he continued, his voice a notch lower, “do you want to see something?” He propped his case on the ground, opened it, and pulled out a round object wrapped in a white handkerchief. He unwrapped it to show me the cast-iron drainhole cover. “Do you have any idea how much work it was to pry this loose without anyone noticing?”

He was a survivor, and I liked him. It had been months since I’d talked with anyone my age. I told him my name. He told me his—Rolland—and a dozen other things, perhaps half of them true. Even as he explained that I couldn’t possibly share this spot, that I didn’t deserve it and wasn’t ready for it, I knew it was already partly mine. He needed company too badly to turn me away. He wanted a confessor and a protégé, someone to guard his cheap wooden box when he went to relieve himself or scrounge for restaurant leftovers. I wasn’t going to have these honors for free; I’d have to pay a generous share to him, just as he’d paid a share to the stiltwalker. “But that won’t amount to much,” he said. “Don’t expect to get rich. And with that—what is it?”

“Cello,” I said. “Short for violoncello.”

“Of course,” he said. “I couldn’t remember the word. You can stroll with it sometimes?”

“No. I have to sit.”

He made a sucking sound, his tongue pressed against his front teeth. “A disadvantage. You are an orphan?”

“No.”

“You have a place to sleep?’

“Yes.”

His eyebrows went up. “Is it a good place?”

I checked myself from answering, remembering all the warnings I’d ever heard about feeding stray cats.

“It’s crowded. I’m already sharing a small bed.” I added quickly, “With a woman.”

“With a woman?” He grinned and looked me over again, from top to bottom. “Perhaps you’re not so helpless as you look. We make partners?”

 

For every twenty minutes he allowed me to play, Rolland would allow himself an hour. If four or five people started to gather around my cello, he ended my turn immediately and began to play himself, hoping for the coins to fall into his propped-open violin case. After all, I had a place to sleep.

But usually, crowds did not gather. Women pulled their shawls over their heads and men flipped up their collars, intent on continuing briskly to more sheltered destinations. The cafés had pulled in most of their tables, leaving only a few here and there for the hardiest outdoor patrons. An appreciative passing nod or a coin flipped from afar was the most reward we generally received.

As the winter wore on, stiff winds blew up the boulevard, rattling the sword-shaped palm leaves on the trees at the Ramblas’s farthest seaward end and carrying the salty smell of the Mediterranean and the storms building offshore. Rain came suddenly, in driving sheets. We packed our instruments quickly and cowered in any storefront we could find; easy for Rolland to do but hard for me, with my bulky instrument earning the scowls of inconvenienced strollers as we all competed for the same cramped shelter. When the downpour stopped, we’d make our way back across rain-glazed cobbles to the wet box, and stand around rubbing our stiff fingers and waiting for our sleeves to stop dripping cold rain onto our wrists.

On our slowest days, we closed our cases and talked. Rolland told me fantastic stories about crossing the mountains, hiding in farm outbuildings, evading the angry fathers of the pretty maids he had kissed, stealing a sheep that he butchered with a dull knife. “But you know all about that kind of adventure,” he said. “Here in Spain, every man is an El Cid, or a Don Quixote. True?”

It was just like a foreigner to mention Quixote. People who couldn’t or didn’t read seemed to think Quixote was an honorable, happy-go-lucky dreamer. They didn’t realize how savage the tale was—full of violence, ridicule, and humiliation. Quixote’s story didn’t encourage romance or chivalry; it convinced the reader that Spain’s chivalric age was over.

I couldn’t explain all that, and I didn’t want to offend Rolland. So I simply said, “I’m not sure a musician can be that kind of hero.”

At this, Rolland looked more affronted than ever. He held up his violin and bowed a series of lightning-fast, off-pitch arpeggios. “I am a hero,” he said. “What are you waiting for—some queen to knight you?”

When I didn’t answer, he said, “There will be no royalty at all, someday. We got rid of ours, and you’ll be rid of yours soon, too. But there will always be Don Quixote. You are placing your bet on the wrong side.”

I murmured assent, but it wasn’t emphatic enough for Rolland.

“You want to be a hero, too,” he continued. “Even beneath the blank face—beneath the mask of humilité—I can tell.”

I laughed involuntarily. That only egged Rolland on.

“No? Well how is it that you don’t play with an orchestra, or at least with a quartet? Nearly every music job in this city is an ensemble job. There are flyers advertising for musicians to play in the pit at the Palau de la Música Catalana.” That was the elaborate new musical palace being built for workers and their liberal patrons, a palace that might someday rival the bourgeois Liceo.

“I haven’t seen any flyers.”

“Solo jobs are one in a hundred,” Rolland continued. “You found two already, and now you’re on your third.”

His points rattled me; I couldn’t deny them.

“You pretend to be shy, but you’re a soloist, a principal.” He laughed out loud, overjoyed at his own bull’s-eye. “You are not Feliu Delargo. You are Feliu del Arco.”

He spun to face the hunched-over Ramblas walkers, shouting it into the wind at the top of his lungs: “El Rey del Arco—The King of the Bow!”

 

The worst of the winter storms had passed, and the weather had mellowed to a disagreeable coolness, when my busking partner informed me of the favor he’d been doing me all along. To play in this spot on the popular boulevard, Rolland had the informal permission of the local musicians’ associations, which regulated every possible aspect of public performances. He rattled off the acronyms of the various organizations, which all sounded as confusing and mind-numbing as the political factions Alberto so often talked about at the café with his tertulia friends. In Alberto’s leftist world, there were the anarchists, the radicals, the syndicalists. In Rolland’s world—and now, my own—there were the West Side Wind Regiment, the Juvenile Songsters of Our Lady, the Mechanics’ Union Percussionists. Every group had its own arcane membership and performance rules. “It is like Barcelona—all very confusing. Don’t even try to understand,” Rolland laughed.

Within our own group of string classicalists, there were strict requirements about what music could be played at what spot along the Ramblas’s length, to avoid repetition and competition, he said. “It only makes sense, or everyone would be playing the same minuet and none of us would make any money. The associations were not enforcing before, because Ramblas traffic was so light, but with winter ending soon, they must be strict again.”

I nodded my understanding.

“It’s divided by nationality,” he said. “Unfortunately, I missed the last meeting, so German, Spanish, and French were already taken.”

So, we . . . ?

“Norwegian.”

I still felt self-conscious about my limited musical knowledge. “Such as . . . Grieg?”

Rolland rubbed his tongue against his front teeth. “Yes.”

“Who else?”

“Any Norwegian.”

“What Norwegian composers are there besides Grieg?”

“I am not sure. We stick with Grieg.”

That afternoon, I headed to the Casa Beethoven, a tunnel of a music shop—two shoulder-widths wide and at least two rooms long, with racks of sheet music lining both sides and a dark curtain at the back. There I pawed through the scores, performing the most rapid memorization I could manage. The next day, I played a melody by Grieg. On Rolland’s turn, he played something I didn’t recognize—he claimed it was Grieg, too—and I learned to copy it, so that by day’s end I had at least two acceptable tunes in my repertoire.

Hardly a week had gone by when Rolland mentioned that the assignments had changed again. Now we were to play Czech music, he said wearily.

“But that’s great,” I said.

“It is?”

“That’s Antonín Dvořák—he wrote a famous concerto for cello.”

“You know it?”

“I should.”

That afternoon, I made a second trip to Casa Beethoven. The shop owner watched me curiously but his wife, straddling the threshold to the curtained back room, where she was sorting sheet music, called out, “This isn’t a library!”

After Rolland had taken his cut, most of my money was going to Alberto; I couldn’t afford the Dvořák score. I kept looking at it, scanning as fast as I could, until the shop owner’s wife came toward me and ripped the score from my hands. “This is stealing,” she yelled. “Forget what you were reading or I will call the police!”

“I’m going,” I said, my chin tucked into my chest.

She held me by the sleeve. “Start humming.”

“What do you mean?”

“Hum something—other than Dvořák.”

I tried to pull away from her. Her grip tightened.

“Something Spanish,” she insisted.

I glanced around wildly. “I can’t think of anything.”

“Carmen—the ‘Toreador Song!’” she demanded.

“That’s Bizet. It’s French.”

She lifted a thick music book in her other hand, preparing to swat me.

“If you insist,” I said, and started humming, feeling the Dvořák score slip painfully from my mind.

When I told Rolland the story, he listened intently, then burst out laughing.

“You win,” he said.

“Win what?”

“The truth, for entertaining me so well.” He stifled his mirth by rubbing his tongue against his front teeth. “There are no assignments.”

“The street organizations don’t care?”

“There are no street organizations.”

We were sharing the box, crowded onto its narrow, pinching slats. I turned away from him.

After a minute, he nudged my shoulder with his. I nudged back.

“Why did you lie to me?” I asked.

“It was a gift. I am teaching you not to be so easy a fool.”

I muttered under my breath.

“When you are famous—when you are a hero cellist—you will say I was one of your teachers.” He added, “And you will be famous, Feliu. You are a quick learner, that is for sure.”

“Hmmph.”

“But you need to be stronger—not to believe so much in everyone and everything.” He added, “Fool that you are, I am surprised you have not yet lost this woman you are sleeping with. Another man will steal her, if you are not more careful.”

 

And so it was with skepticism that I listened, some weeks later, as Rolland told me another story. It was a dreary afternoon of few tourists and fewer coins, and we were preparing to quit for the day and go our separate ways. I confessed my great desire to see inside the Liceo. Rolland said it was no problem to sneak in, but I’d better dress well, to fool the doormen and the ushers. If I looked bohemian, they might do more than just toss me out.

“Fifteen years have passed,” he said with a dramatic nod as we sat on the wooden box. “But they still remember.”

“Remember what?”

“You don’t know? It was the Ramblas’s bloodiest day. That’s saying a lot.”

I steeled myself for another tall tale, listening with an impassive face.

It happened in November 1893, Rolland said. The opera was Rossini’s William Tell—

“I know how it starts,” I interrupted. “It’s played by the cellos. A beautiful passage. I read that Rossini studied the cello, in Bologna. I tried playing that passage once and Alberto went all white and didn’t speak the rest of the day.”

Rolland leaned forward to close his violin case. This story had nothing—but nothing—to do with cellos. If I planned to interrupt again, he needn’t tell it to me at all.

This thing happened, he continued—trying to conjure again the gloomy aura that I had deflated—in the second act, when Arnold and Mathilde meet in a valley by a lake, to pledge their love. Whispers quieted as the audience turned their opera glasses from each other toward the stage. A mining developer from Bilboa wrinkled his nose and twitched his walrus mustache, trying to conceal the emotion threatening to take control of his face. A lady named Doña Clementina reached for her décolletage and found herself twiddling the glistening, apricot-sized pearl that rested in the soft hollow at her throat. And up in the gallery, a man named Santiago Salvador attempted to extract two heavy metal objects from his jacket pockets.

The objects were precisely the size of oranges, except that they had spikes, and gleamed silver under the house lights that were always on, so that the wealthy could see and be seen—which was one reason everyone went to the Liceo, and the same reason that Santiago Salvador hated the bourgeois palace, which represented everything that must die in order for Barcelona to be reborn. However, no one was looking at Salvador. The flashing of the orange-sized objects could not compete with the winking of the chandeliers overhead, or the gleam of gilt that framed the murals on the walls. He decided to wait a little while, to savor the moment that might be his last, enjoying the feel of the spiky little orbs, which had the satisfying heft of bocce balls.

As it turned out, the first bomb was a dud. But the second one sailed into the air like one of Galileo’s apocryphal cannonballs falling from the Tower of Pisa. It landed in the orchestra pit, where it exploded with a flash. There were screams and a little smoke; away from the mayhem, some of the private box—holders’ first thoughts were what a shame it was, that this four-thousand-seat theater, gutted by fire just a generation earlier and rebuilt at extravagant cost, would go down in flames again. They couldn’t see the human wreckage below, how much blood was obscured by the theater’s trademark red velvet seats. Rossini’s opera was cut short. Men and women fled, tripping over the women’s long trains and grabbing, in their desperation, the flowing black tails of strangers’ coats.

The final toll: twenty-two dead, fifty wounded—among them, many of the musicians, who did not earn in an entire year what Doña Clementina had paid for her apricot-sized pearl.

 

“Apricot-sized—that’s certainly a large pearl,” I said when Holland’s story was finished.

He looked incredulous. “That’s all you have to say?”

“Well, it’s a terrible story.”

“If you don’t believe me, go to the Liceo yourself.”

“Why? Do they have a plaque there explaining everything you just told me?”

“No.” He screwed up his face. “They’d rather pretend it never happened.”

I pursed my lips, a little smug. “No record of this infamous disaster? No effigy of the criminal?”

Rolland frowned. “Effigy? Yes, come to think of it. Not at the Liceo. It’s at the wax museum. That’s where they display all the anarchists who lost their heads to the guillotine. And I think, on the wall, there are framed drawings from the trial.”

At the mention of the wax museum, my smile faded.

“The trial?”

“There was a rumor that the musicians, including some of the worst injured, had been part of the plot. They helped Salvador sneak into the Liceo early. They showed him where to aim if he wanted to hit the fanciest private box, the one next to the stage. I guess he was not a very good shot.”

I felt my chest tighten, a creeping acidity in my throat. “The musicians? They went to the guillotine, too?”

“Not a one. Their injuries saved them, I think—burned hands in bandages and that sort of thing. No one believed they would make themselves a target. Why would a musician risk losing his hands?”

 

The shock lasted several hours past Rolland’s telling; it helped me sneak into the Liceo that evening. I didn’t look nervous or shifty, only vaguely nauseous. That discomfited look was a badge of the privileged; I saw it flash across many of the theater patrons’ faces as they pushed through the crowd in the foyer or signaled for attention from the cloakroom attendant.

The opera had working-class seats, too, I later discovered. These were in the “chicken roost,” as it was called—fifth-tier seats above the top of the stage curtain, from which one couldn’t see the opera at all, only hear it. To reach these seats as well as the poor ones on the fourth floor, one used a separate, less opulent entrance, on the side street. If I’d known, that’s where I would have entered. But I didn’t know. I didn’t have any plan at all.

I still had my cello with me. I had worn my best pants that day, but the pants were tight, and my thick knee socks itched. I looked like an uncomfortable boy. Pushing through the foyer with my cello against my hip, I attracted the attention of a stage manager, a thin man with a pince-nez.

“Is Don Verdaguer waiting for that?” He gestured frantically at my cello before I could answer. “Curtain is in twenty minutes!”

He led me down a curving hallway, leaning as he pumped his long legs, like a racehorse on a track. Carrying the cello, I could barely keep up. I was out of breath by the time we found ourselves on the wings of the darkened stage, near the stairs leading down to the rapidly filling orchestra pit. He ordered me to leave the cello to one side, against a wall. Then he vanished. I stood there a minute, breathing heavily. I pushed the cello a little farther into the shadows, reasoning with myself that no one had asked for this cello, so no one would notice it. And then, with guilt pinging in my chest, I left my instrument there, bringing my bow—as always—with me.

I was well inside the theater now, but still without a ticket. I made my way up and down the second-floor hallways just outside the auditorium, crowded with gowned women and stiff-suited gentlemen, all heading for their seats. I went with the traffic as far as I could, then turned and walked against it.

A woman in a pale green gown was watching me. Her blond hair was coiled in a half-dozen ropes, pinned to her head and strung with thin ribbons and gems as small as seeds. When she tilted her head up to whisper into a man’s ear, I turned away, but a second later I felt a lady’s gloved hand on my shoulder.

“Are you looking for your parents?” she asked.

“Yes,” I answered without thinking, and my eyes must have glistened authentically.

“Where did you see them last?”

Praying to have the skill of Holland’s quick tongue, I blurted that they’d gone to meet some friends elsewhere in the theater, and we’d become separated. Her face lit up. “I know just where to look.”

Turning a corner, she gestured me toward a vast and rapidly emptying room.

“The Hall of Mirrors,” she explained, as I tipped my head back and gaped. “This is a place friends often meet. Do you see them anywhere?”

Straining to appear sincere, I studied the room until my eyes fixed upon a long line of words stenciled around the high ceiling’s edge. Music is the only sensual pleasure upon which vice can not impose. I thought about that and read the phrase twice, three times more, willing it into memory as I had willed the music scores at the Casa Beethoven.

Then I read the second—shorter, simpler: Art does not have a fatherland.

The green-gowned lady followed my gaze. “They’re beautiful sentiments, aren’t they?”

I nodded, and kept looking.

“You’re sure you don’t see your parents?”

I kept staring, not out toward the mirrors and the dwindling reflections of the last exiting patrons, but up, up, to the inspiring statements that had guided years of Alberto’s life. For this, I now knew, was where he had played, as well as where he had stopped playing. He had been one of the collaborators who helped Salvador. That bloody day had ended his music career.

“Perhaps your father is in the gentleman’s club?” the lady fretted.

I was tempted to tell her I didn’t have a father, didn’t have much of anyone, even a tutor I could entirely trust, and that was why it mattered to be here, to contemplate these words that might give me a sense of direction and purpose.

“. . . but I can’t go there,” she was saying. “We’re out of time. You poor boy.”

She pulled me away back toward the auditorium. Ushers chimed the final warnings. Closing doors huffed their final rebukes. She left me standing against a wall as she talked with a uniformed man; then she blew me a kiss and disappeared.

The usher took me up yet another marble staircase and found me an empty seat on the third floor. He warned me sternly that I’d better stay put until intermission and turned to go. It didn’t seem to occur to anyone that a boy would have sneaked into an opera house; if anything, they all seemed worried that I’d sneak out.

The opera was about to begin. I did not even know what the day’s production would be. “Wait,” I called, and I was surprised when he turned lightly on his heel, his face suddenly placid. He thought I wanted to give him a tip.

“I’m just a little scared,” I whispered as I fumbled in my pocket. “Being without my parents, I mean. Is it true someone threw a bomb here once, and killed a lot of people?”

The usher smirked. “Of course it’s true. Nasty business. But that was years before you were born.”

Not so many years, I thought to myself. But of course he probably took me for a child. I pushed a coin into his hand.

“You’re not going to die here today.” He winked. “You’ll only wish you had.” Then at my puzzled expression, he gestured toward the stage, where the curtain was rising. “It’s all in German.”

 

I never did go to the wax museum. There was no more I wished—or needed—to know. Besides, I had a natural dislike for the dissonance of complicated truths. I preferred to hold in my mind’s eye the words I had read at the Liceo, in that vast, light-filled Hall of Mirrors: Art has no fatherland. Art could, I felt sure, rise above everything.