CHAPTER

7

My partnership with Holland ended as quickly as it had begun. It was the first truly beautiful day of spring, sun shining down through the Ramblas’s greening trees, waiters strutting importantly as their tables filled, vendors complaining—ah, to complain!—that an unexpected deluge of customers had bought the last good cigar, the last newspaper-wrapped cone of almonds, the last untorn gossip magazine from Madrid.

Rolland had taken a break from playing and was removing his jacket; it was hot now, even in the dappled shade. I wiped my palms against my brow and dried them on my pants, then started tightening my bow, preparing to begin. Two men in berets approached to watch; two ladies behind them strolled arm in arm.

Rolland turned to me and said, “It’s easy to be friends in winter, but not so easy in spring.”

“Is that a Basque proverb?”

“No. It’s my way of explaining”—and here he paused, tapping his fingers against his fingerboard—“It was nice having company when the crowds were thin, but now I’ve got to earn a living.” I stood for a while, dumbfounded. Finally I loosened my bowhairs and packed up.

I supposed I could have wandered a block in either direction, struck up a conversation with a contortionist or a silhouette artist and offered to pay them a share of my earnings if they would move over just a bit. The contortionist, especially, didn’t need much room to earn her coin. But my heart wasn’t in it. I had lost my place on the boulevard. I had lost my first real friend.

Wandering up the Ramblas toward home, I saw the Casa Beethoven owner running toward me. I stopped in my tracks and cowered, squinting to see if he was followed by his wife. But he was alone. When he reached me, he grabbed me by one elbow.

“There you are! I have been waiting for you to come back to my shop.”

“Come back?”

He rubbed his chin. “I was worried I wouldn’t find you again.” He handed me a thin brown-wrapped parcel. “Go ahead, open it.” Inside was a German edition. The green-bordered cover said Bach Solo-Suiten. “Six suites,” he said. “All for solo cello.”

“I haven’t played this. I haven’t even heard it played,” I said.

“Nor have I. But I was impressed by your desire, that day in my shop. Bach can be a little cold. Maybe your passion will warm it up.”

He wouldn’t take any money. It was rude of me to start reading the score before I had thanked him, but I couldn’t help it. Each of the suites was divided into a half-dozen or so dance-inspired movements—allemandes and courantes and gigues and sarabandes.

“Incredible,” I said. “It looks like a lot of work.”

“A lifetime’s work,” he said. “Don’t let my wife know I gave it away.”

We parted before it occurred to me to ask his name.

In my first Barcelona months, my world had been compact and circumscribed—no bigger than the space of my cello, my chair, a radius defined by my bowing arm. Now it was large, larger even than the Ramblas itself, that flow of people and sounds, colors and ideals. Music, once my intense and solitary child’s game, had become a world. There was room in it for more things, good and bad.

I took my time walking home. I knew where I would find Alberto: on his balcony, soaking up the ephemeral midday sun. He asked me if I had found what I needed and was ready to be his student again. I said I had, and I was.

 

The calico factory laid Mamá off that spring. She was upset by the news; we were relieved. Alberto and I admitted that I had earned money from months of busking without her knowledge. It meant her debt to Alberto was a fraction of what she’d assumed, but she did not look pleased to hear it. I expected her to ask me more about what I’d experienced—or to lecture me about how I had overtaxed myself, dragging a cello up and down staircases and across cobblestone streets. But Mamá’s anxiety faced forward, never back. She had other worries to occupy her, including the need to pay for military exemptions. Percival would make an unlikely and uncooperative soldier; I was underage and physically unfit for conscription, but as Mamá reminded me, standards often changed as a war progressed.

Everyone seemed to be talking about exemptions, with glances east to the waterfront, where every day new soldiers boarded ships bound across the Mediterranean, to Morocco. In the cafés, old men hunched low to the tables, muttering about Rif tribes, iron-mining interests, protecting Spanish capital, sacrificing sons—and refusing to. I kept my ears closed as best I could, feeling even then, in 1909, that this was an old and broken record, this talk of colonies and bloodshed.

While Mamá recuperated from her long spell of overwork, Alberto entered one of his more energetic stages. Perhaps it was the season, the burst of red flowers on the balcony and the sounds of spring parades in the streets. Perhaps it was Mamá’s presence, or the long break he’d had from me. He was less reclusive and more eager to play the active tutor again. He left the apartment more frequently, and invited me to go with him. I accepted his lessons, but I declined his company. Not only did I wish to avoid his pontifications on current political troubles, but I feared overhearing any references to the past that would force me to evaluate my feelings about him.

Alberto had his secrets, and so did I. The prodigy book had been one. The Bach suites became the other. All spring and early summer I chose not to mention the gift given me by the music shopkeeper. The Six Unaccompanied Suites for Cello were deceptively easy to begin playing. The cover of my edition said they were simple studies that any intermediate cello student might attempt. But that was and was not true. Any cellist could play the basic notes, rigorously and mathematically sequenced on the page. It took a master, however, to make those long trains of ascending and descending notes sound like music, to find the dynamics and articulations and phrasings that turned a scalelike passage into a melody—uplifting, heartbreaking, human. I played them only when Alberto was out of the apartment, struggling with them, savoring them.

Exposure was inevitable. As the days grew hotter and the air inside the apartment stuffier, I drew my chair closer and closer to the French doors that opened onto Alberto’s balcony. By June I was playing on the balcony itself, sweat running down my temples and into the neck of my shirt.

One day I had just finished the climactic, double-stop ending of the first suite when I heard a voice, three stories below.

“Eso es!” Alberto shouted up from the street. “That’s it! But three measures back, if you will start on an upbow . . .” He turned at the sound of a horse-drawn cart advancing on him. “Just wait—I’ll be right there!” And he bounded out of the way, through our building’s black gate, and up the stairs.

As I listened to his advancing steps—his boyish eagerness to reach me, the measured footfalls as the first burst of energy waned, the slowing pace as he neared the top, winded, doubled over, becoming old again—I nearly felt sympathy for him. But I fought it. I thought of the Liceo, the gleaming Hall of Mirrors, the words high on the wall that were like a hand on my shoulder, pushing me toward perfection and success. I steeled myself to be silent, undemonstrative. And yet Alberto was barely through the front door when I found my feet and my voice. I stood in the center of the room, shouting: “Why didn’t you tell me?”

Alberto lifted his head to me, laboring to form a puzzled smile as he caught his breath, hands on his knees. Then he stepped sideways and collapsed into a chair, still grinning.

“The Bach suites,” he panted. “You’ve discovered them.”

He gestured toward another chair. I stared at it for a few seconds; and then, relenting, backed into it, my arms crossed.

“You’re angry with me for not teaching them to you? Well—you weren’t ready, that’s all. And now you are!”

He flapped a hand toward the kitchen, gesturing for a glass of water. I did not rise. He accepted my rudeness—too easily, it occurred to me, even then. He dropped his hand into his lap. “There’s nothing wrong with waiting.”

I asked again, “Why didn’t you tell me?”

“A novice can’t see the patterns. It’s like a child who doesn’t understand life—who thinks everything is black and white. With Bach, you have to see between the notes. Some people call them études, and without insight, it’s true—they’re not much more than that. But you’re ready.” Alberto sat up straighter now, taking a full breath. At last, he met my eyes. His smile faded. “You have something to say to me. Not about Bach, am I right?”

I inhaled deeply. “Art has no fatherland.”

He waited.

I tried again. “Music is the only sensual pleasure—”

He completed the phrase: “—upon which vice cannot impose. Yes, I remember those words, too. But vice did impose, did it not?”

“Ramón’s hands . . .”

“And many other scars. Not all so visible. So you finally did go to the Liceo. And you know the whole story.”

“Not the whole story.”

Alberto gestured firmly for me to stay where I was, sitting in the main parlor. Then he disappeared into the kitchen. I heard a cupboard opening, a glass knocking against wood, a long silence as he drank and finished catching his breath—while I also caught my own, calming myself down, as was his plan.

He returned and took his seat. I waited for his nod before asking, “Did you help that man?”

“I never helped Salvador directly.”

“But you knew of his plan?”

“I’d heard whispers of it.”

He saw my scowl and countered it with his own raised voice. “Do you think it’s easy going to work thinking someone might bomb the place where you’re performing? It wasn’t the first time we’d heard something might happen. If we stayed home every time, or told every audience, there’d be no concerts or plays in Barcelona. Do you think that’s a better solution? There are threats every day here—it’s been that way as long as I can remember.”

I hadn’t thought of it that way. But I didn’t want to be convinced of his innocence.

Alberto continued, “If I’d told the Liceo’s management, they would have canceled that concert—and many others. At the time, I believed that fear was not a way to live, that life itself should go on.” A less charitable expression crept across his face. “I thought music was everything. Does that sound familiar?”

“You were a collaborator,” I tried again.

“You will find,” he said calmly, “that collaboration is an imprecise word. The longer you live, the more you know people from all walks of life—and sometimes their paths intersect yours in unexpected ways. Listen,” he added, “I would never hurt anyone on purpose.”

“But you do feel guilt. You stopped playing.”

“I didn’t stop because of the bombing, but because of what followed. The main tragedy of my life was personal, not political. All real sorrows are personal sorrows.”

He went on to explain how the trial had shamed his daughter, who was nineteen at the time, and ruined her chances of marrying her true love: a young man from an illustrious family of Catalan bankers who could trace their professional heritage back to medieval times. The boy bowed to family pressure and withdrew his marriage offer. In the end, Alberto’s daughter settled for a marriage of convenience arranged by second cousins, to an apothecary from Granada.

“She has not forgiven me.” Alberto shook his head. “I don’t believe that music can actually do bad, but neither am I sure that it can do any good. It didn’t prevent the horror of what happened that day. I haven’t seen it prevent any injustice since. I did not help Salvador. But I did begin to ask myself—what is the point? And without a point, I have not let myself play.

“But maybe you will find a way to do good with it, Feliu; just as you will find your own way to interpret Bach. Don’t you see? Maybe you’ll find a way not just to be good—the best—but to do good.”

That night, I had trouble sleeping, thinking of what Alberto had told me, and feeling the residual smolder of some dark emotion. Was I angry because he would not accept blame for his involvement? Did I dare admit to myself that his situation reminded me of my mother and Don Miguel; that even if he hadn’t helped Salvador, he hadn’t stopped him, either, and that was enough to make me feel sick inside?

Or did I feel resentment that he expected me to do what he could not—to not only be good, but to do good? Perhaps I simply felt fear: the fear that I might not be able to live up to his final wish for me, much as I wanted to.

I left the bedroom to use the bathroom at the end of the hall, and heard voices in the kitchen.

“A general strike—yes, all right,” Alberto was saying. “But it will be more than that. The radicals want one thing, the anarchists another, the Republicans a third. Even my old colleagues are angry with me, because I refuse to join them in taking advantage of the chaos.”

The conversation paused, and I started to creep back to the bedroom, trying to avoid the squeakiest floorboards, but then I heard Alberto say, “Alma.” I stopped. I’d never heard Alberto use my mother’s first name.

“You will have to leave,” he said, so softly I had to strain to listen. “Go home, now that you have that option.”

“Gracias a Dios,” she mumbled.

“There will be problems in the villages, too. But at least there, you’ll be among familiar faces.”

“Feliu won’t want to leave Barcelona.”

“But he’ll have to,” Alberto said. “It’s a good time for the audition. Regardless of the outcome, he will understand that we are done. If he passes, it will mean a different teacher, somewhere else. If he fails, he goes home—but at least he’ll be safe.”

“That’s all I’ve ever wanted for him.” Her voice dropped to a whisper.

“I know,” he said, and the chair scraped, as if he’d moved closer, to comfort her. “But what about you?”

“Me?”

“What will you be looking for, when this is over?”

I covered my ears, not wanting to hear my mother’s breathy voice and Alberto’s reassuring masculine grumble. But near my bedroom door, just as I put my hand on the knob, I uncovered them again.

“It’s just not the right time,” my mother said.

“Will it ever be the right time?”

“Maybe not.”

 

The next day, when we started our lesson, Alberto explained that he was thinking of contacting Don José.

“The sooner the better,” I said.

Alberto lifted an eyebrow but said nothing. Then he reached for my stack of scores and tablets, which now stood knee-high.

“You should prepare something. Perhaps a Sibelius theme? And he will want a sonata. I leave the choice to you, but what about Chopin’s Sonata in G Minor? The scherzo would demonstrate your bowing.”

“Not Chopin.”

“Lalo?”

“No.”

“Then what do you want to do?”

Finally I said, “Bach’s first cello suite. C Major.”

“What movement?”

“I’ll start at the beginning and play until he stops me.”

“You’re making this sound like a bullfight. The goal isn’t to last until he tosses you out of the ring. It’s to play well. Besides, the first suite is the simplest. It doesn’t sound like a performance piece.”

“It will when I play it.”

“Don José might be more impressed with something modern.”

“Then he should listen to jazz on a Victrola.”

Alberto raised his palms, indicating surrender.

I continued to sit with my cello between my legs, tapping restlessly at the fingerboard with my left hand, baiting him to rebuke me. But he simply waited, and then said, “It’s your choice, Feliu.”

His pacifism only raised my ire. “Would you like to remind me that your reputation depends on this as well?”

“No, I would not,” he said. “And it does not. My reputation depends on my own actions.”

“So you have no expectations for me.” My lower lip trembled.

“I have tremendous expectations. More than a man should have for a boy who is not his son. But only a few of them have to do with music.”

My head felt impossibly heavy, my fingers fat and dull. A moment earlier, I had been testy, but now I felt only depressed. I was too upset to play, and I could not even understand the source of my sudden balefulness.

It was almost a relief when Mamá burst into the room, panting, “The music-shop man has sent his brother to come and take Feliu’s cello! We were only a few days late, but he says he doesn’t want the weekly payment now, only the balance—or the instrument.”

Alberto stepped outside and returned a few minutes later, weary and resigned. “He’s closing his shop and leaving the city, because of the rumors. He’s collecting on debts and selling his instruments. Perhaps you could trade your bow, Feliu. It’s worth more than the cello.”

“Not my bow.”

“Está bien.” Alberto placidly removed the cello from between my legs and put it in its case. The dropping lid reminded me of a coffin. I was seeing my first cello for the last time.

At the school, we waited outside Don José’s classroom door, the three of us pressed together on a narrow bench. “They’re ending the term early this year,” Alberto whispered to my mother. “Vacations, they call it, but it’s a week early.”

To me he said, “Another few days, and you wouldn’t have gotten to play for Don José at all.”

Mamá was distracted. According to the newspapers, young men from across our region, men like Percival, might receive military notices any day. In addition, Mamá had received word that Luisa’s boyfriend had already sailed for Morocco. My sister was distraught.

A secretary appeared. She ushered us into the room next door where Don José sat, once again surrounded by a half-circle of cello students. Alberto and José embraced, and I heard a murmur of Mendizábal go around the room as the students recognized this name, which had meant nothing to me two years earlier.

“Don Mendizábal, honor us.” Don José held out his own bow.

Alberto clasped his hands together, studied his feet, and launched into an eloquent refusal. But Don José persevered. “I am doing you a favor today, is it not true? So first do us a favor. Play something. It has been too long.”

I did not expect my tutor to relent. I’d badgered him the entire time I had known him, yet he’d never played more than a few instructive measures at a time for me. But now he nodded deeply, pulled up an empty chair, accepted Don José’s cello, and sat down to play. No introduction, no apologies, not even the name of the composition. He simply pulled the bow across the strings, and we all leaned forward to listen.

Alberto’s playing mirrored his personality: It started slowly but built as he played, gained shape and discipline and volume, sounded noble and certain even when a note fell ever so slightly sharp, until the very end, when it became a whisper: a pianissimo ending that spoke of surrender. Mamá’s head bobbed along the entire time he played, as if to say, Yes, this explains everything. If I had not already recognized that she was in love, that day I could no longer have denied it.

The only technical surprise was Alberto’s pronounced breathing. He inhaled and exhaled audibly, filling his lungs at the more demanding moments, and I thought, Breathing, I’ve never even considered my breathing, and all the hubris of the last months drained out of me. I had underestimated him. I had thought he was a nobody, which made the mild praise and gentle direction he gave me worthless, and so I had underestimated myself. My egotism and insecurity and undeveloped sense of self were inseparable. I don’t castigate myself for it. I was young. I had done nothing and been nowhere. I was no prodigy—not a Mozart, not even an El Nene.

The moment the last note faded, Alberto stood and handed back the cello, without glancing at his audience. He had no interest in applause, only duty.

“And now, the student,” Don José announced. He gestured toward a lanky boy, who pushed his cello toward me with a dutiful nod. I was relieved the maestro had not asked me to explain my own lack of a cello.

“I did bring my own bow.” As I struggled to extract it, the students all stared at the velvet-lined tube with interest, though one boy snickered.

I sat down and began to play the first few notes of Bach’s first suite, as planned. But my right arm shook, and I could barely keep the bow perpendicular to the string.

“He needs rosin,” I heard Mamá say, and a flurry of student hands passed up their amber-colored chunks, which I applied to the bow hair with quivering fingers. I set the bow upon the string again, but anyone could see it was a hopeless gesture.

“The book,” Alberto stage-whispered—referring to the pedagogical restraint he had inflicted on me long ago. He meant it as a joke, but there was a commotion to one side of the room, and before I knew what was happening, a student had brought forth a hefty tome and wedged it under my right armpit.

“Do you see?” Don José replied. “I’m not the only teacher to inflict el libro on you.” He nodded at me. “Go ahead now. That will stop the trembling and keep your elbow where it belongs, too.” Across the room, Alberto flashed me an apologetic grin.

Clamping my arm to my side, I began to play again. Bach’s baroque braid of sixteenth notes climbed and fell, gently, evenly, rhythmically. Changing strings, I felt the book slip slightly, and I clamped my right arm more tightly. The spasms subsided; I began to feel my muscles warming and cooperating. I even dared to glance up: Don José was watching dutifully, the students’ faces were regarding me with mild approval, and my mother . . . was twirling a loose strand of shoulder-length hair.

A hearty shout echoed outside the classroom window—a rally down the street—and I cursed the cheerful disorder in the man’s voice. A bird flew by, nearly strafing the top of a clothesline where some protest banners had been hung, oddly placed between an assortment of chemises and socks. Several pairs of eyes followed the bird; a student noticed the undergarments for the first time and giggled.

I stumbled on my shift to the A string. Don José sighed deeply. Still I kept my composure, until my eye fell on my mother’s hand. I watched as it wandered from her neck, to her lap, to the head scarf sitting beside her. I had played for less than a minute; I was only one-quarter of the way through the first movement; the melody was only beginning to build. But already, the audition was over. She knew I had not played well. She was fingering the knot of the head scarf. She was preparing to leave.

I closed my eyes. I loosened my right hand, which had been wrapped, clawlike, around my bow frog. I pictured the water flowing alongside the seawall, glittering golden in the sunset, and the pillarlike statue of Columbus above it, seeing more than just an endless train of waves; seeing possibility; seeing beyond the curve of the earth.

I relaxed and divided the sixteenth notes slightly less mathematically, extending them subtly as the melody arced. I relaxed my right arm. The book fell to the floor with a resounding boom. I heard gasps, but I did not open my eyes. I kept playing, and my right elbow began to lift away from my body, feeling lighter with every measure now that the infernal book was out of the way, and my wrist could flex naturally as the bow traveled across the string. The bow changes were much easier now—like sewing deftly through felt with a thick needle.

Now the suite reached its tensest moment, when the notes cascade in a downward spiral. It would have been so easy to storm down them, to throw my head around like Eduardo Rivera, or even like Rolland. It would have been easy to make the vibrato tremble and sob. Instead I kept my eyes closed and the notes terse and quick, subtle pressure changes against the strings infusing them with color and variation. I was not playing for coins, or for fainting girls, or for anyone but myself—and the hope that I could transcend the frustrations and limitations of this particular place, this particular time.

After that: I do not recall. I know I made it through the dramatic broken chords that resolve and close the piece, played on all four strings. I did not so much play them as hear them played. Then I opened my eyes and set aside the cello. Returned my bow to its case. And left the room.

 

Alberto was laughing as we walked the seven blocks home. “He was furious with your mother—furioso! He said she should have brought you to Barcelona years earlier, when you first showed talent on the violin. He said she had almost—almost—obstructed God’s will!”

Mamá did not speak. She was not tickled about being rebuked by the same man who had refused her nearly two years earlier.

“It doesn’t matter, Alma,” Alberto continued. “He was angry at me, too. He said I was hiding talent. He said I should have spoken to him after Feliu had played for a few months. Not that he thought our boy’s playing was perfect, mind you. Would you like to know what he said about the Bach, Feliu?”

I toyed with the idea of not responding, but my curiosity was too great.

“He said it demonstrated excellent potential, but that it was ‘Too beautiful, too heroic.’ He said, ‘One should approach Bach more . . . objectively.’ He was particularly dubious of the bariolage at the end. He said it sounded as if you were playing two cellos, instead of one. Ha!”

Alberto ran forward a few steps and raised a fist to the sky, then turned and noticed my wounded pride. “You made him think! He didn’t even mention the book dropping, or the way your elbow kept stabbing at the air. I’m sure he would have loved to tie your bowing arm to the chair, but he was too busy hearing a new interpretation—hearing music. Music, Feliu!”

I took a deep breath. “I’m not sure I want to study with him.”

“I agree,” Mamá said quietly, astounding me.

“You’re both being irrational,” said Alberto. “No importa. Don José doesn’t want to teach Feliu, either.”

Now it was Mamá’s turn to be surprised.

“Feliu is already more skilled than his other students,” Alberto explained. “Don José will get no credit for having discovered him because I tutored him for two years.”

“But that isn’t fair!” Mamá cried.

“It’s for the best. It’s better than the best! Don José doesn’t want Feliu to study in Barcelona, where there will be too many comparisons to his own students. He is recommending that Feliu study with Count Guzmán. At the Palace. In Madrid. It is a giant leap forward.”

“Madrid?” I echoed, my voice cracking.

“Count Guzmán is the court composer. He taught Justo Al-Cerraz for a season, until Al-Cerraz’s father insisted the boy return to touring. Feliu, you will be walking in El Nene’s footsteps!”

“No,” my mother said firmly. “Those are the last footsteps I’d have him follow.”

“And he will be away from Catalonia. At least for a while.” Alberto paused, letting the idea sink in before he added with a smile, “Madrid is a safe place, Alma. It’s a place of royal balls, not rebellion—tedious as that sounds.”

That settled it.

 

I took the train, alone, to Madrid. It was nearly empty, though at every stop the platforms were crowded with families tearfully embracing their conscripted sons, who were boarding trains headed the opposite direction, toward Barcelona, for transport across the Mediterranean. Internal battles already raged. Workers called a general strike. In the days to come, martial law would interrupt train transport. Radical groups would dynamite several rail lines, and roads to and from Barcelona would be barricaded. What Alberto had predicted, what he and my mother had wanted to save me from, was happening: chaos and insurrection. People I met on the train heard I was from Catalonia and assaulted me with questions: “Is it just an antiwar movement? Or is it a Republican uprising? Have they really burned a hundred churches? Is it true the women are fighting next to the men, that even the prostitutes are armed?” I couldn’t answer their questions, except to say, “I think it was about Morocco, mainly.”

I hadn’t paid attention in the week before I left town. I didn’t even recognize the names of the various faction leaders. I had no opinion about the men who faced execution once the fighting ceased. Semana Trágica—The Tragic Week, it would be called later, a prelude to violence in the decades to come. I had been immersed in my own world, the world of the cello. I can’t say I regretted my ignorance—if anything, I took pride in it, the luxurious and self-deluding pride that only youth can afford.