CHAPTER

10

That summer, a month after the baby was stillborn, Queen Ena sent for me. I assumed she was doing her mother-in-law a favor, dismissing me from royal service while the Queen Mother herself was away on holiday. Some nine months had passed since the disastrous concert; a year had passed since I’d moved to the palace. Besides composing a wedding song for one of Alfonso’s distant cousins, I had done little in my official capacities except to continue studying with the count.

Perhaps, I thought, as I stumbled through cursory greetings—A sus órdenes, para servirle—I could prove my talent to the Queen herself.

“If you could hear me play,” I began, stuttering through my self-defense as my eyes flitted between her face and the ubiquitous fresco on the vaulted ceiling overhead: classical figures in billowing powder-blue robes, tensed calf muscles and dark, gesturing hands. All that movement, all that drama, contrasting with the face of the woman to whom I spoke—a face of defiant stillness that revealed nothing.

“I have heard you play,” she said.

“The Queen Mother’s concert—”

“You don’t have to explain. I’ve heard you play since. Through doors and across courtyards, but I’ve heard you play.”

There was that twitch again, not a smile but a softening, though her erect posture and thin, unsteady fingers made her look like a deer ready to bolt.

“During my last pregnancy, I was advised to steer clear of music,” she said. “For health reasons. Nothing to quicken . . .” She paused, resting her hand on her chest.

“The heart?” I interjected, wincing inwardly as soon as I’d said it. One wasn’t supposed to interrupt a monarch, even one struggling to master a second language.

“The pulse, I was trying to say.” She signaled caution, both her lips and eyes narrowing. But there was friendliness in it. It was the kind of look a sister gives a younger brother. “The doctors said—but what do the doctors know? Mostly, they seemed determined to deprive me of pleasure. But the worst still happened. And once it does, no one has power over you anymore.”

I waited, listening, thinking of the guard standing at the door behind me, and the statuelike servant off to one side of the room. Walker was her favorite, the only English servant in the palace.

It was from the maids and kitchen staff and doorway guards that I’d gleaned most of what I knew about the royal family, especially the King, about whom many stories circulated. When he went to Paris, he checked into hotels under an assumed name: Monsieur Lamy. Everyone laughed about it. The chambermaids added their own discovery—that the King always traveled with his own sheets. It was said that he loved the look of black satin against his long, thin limbs and sallow skin.

“Next week,” the Queen took a deep breath, “we have two birthdays—Jaime and Beatriz, a day apart. And I am wondering: a party for a one-year-old and two-year-old, with a three-year-old attending—what on earth is one supposed to do? The King is in France. The Queen Mother is at San Sebastián.”

I said, “All the birthday games I know would make a baby cry.”

She looked puzzled.

“The loud noises.” I noticed how tired she looked, the faint lavender shadows around her eyes. “But how about something outside? Something quiet, perhaps with animals?”

“Animals?”

“Burros? Cart rides?”

“There’s an idea.” She looked away wistfully. “I had a pet donkey, growing up. On the Isle of Wight. He used to help us haul buckets from a deep well. It was two hundred feet deep—at least.” She paused. “Amazing how you forget things; how things come back to you.”

The conversation flagged, and in the silence I could hear a clock ticking insistently on the mantel behind the Queen’s head.

“As for the party,” she continued more stiffly. “You could play your cello, next to the cart?”

“Not easily. Maybe some flutists could follow along. The children might like that. What do you think of streamers? In several colors, fluttering from the cart . . .”

In the hallway, after I was dismissed, I realized I had squandered an opportunity courtiers were supposed to prize: to get close, to curry favor, to become a favorite of the royal children, to become essential. But I was too distracted to worry. As I walked away, I repeated to myself, again and again, the name of that exotic place as she had pronounced it in her native tongue: “Ay-íl ove Wa-ít; Ay-íl ove Wa-ít.” There was a melodiousness to the phrase, to everything she said in English, even when the words ended harshly, without vowels. How could one explain the way such short, sharp words could flow, could sound starkly beautiful? But that was Bach’s trick, too. His Germanic music, so measured and restrained, nonetheless held great emotions and vast mystery.

That day, listening to the Queen speak, I knew that she would like Bach; that she would like how I played it, not in the Spanish way, but in the universal way, without affectation.

 

In his letters, my brother Enrique regularly asked me, rather insistently, if I had gotten to know any girls. I hinted at the affair with Isabel, skipping the embarrassing parts. I tried to make it sound like a conquest. I wrote him about the Queen, too, in a kind of code. I described a palace girl I’d met—I called her Elena—a quiet girl, only a little pretty, not always liked. Trying to capture this half-real new friend on paper felt like tuning an instrument: a careful process of finding the right words, making small corrections, pairing observations into verbal chords, listening for reverberations.

Here was one chord: She looked young, smooth-faced, both full-cheeked and round-eyed, like a child caught just seconds after filling her mouth with stolen pastry. But she also looked old—the guarded expression, the set lips, so like her famous British grandmother’s. And here was another: She looked unhappy most of the time, everything about her flat and still and ponderous, but that heavy symmetry could give way in a moment. All she had to do was tilt her head slightly, or stand with one hip jutted from beneath an otherwise-plain ankle-length skirt, to communicate a flash of independent spirit—and in her, independence seemed synonymous with happiness, however fleeting.

But no matter how carefully those chords were struck, they didn’t sound properly. The real Queen Ena wasn’t oppressed or weak. In fact, she seemed to be the royal family’s strongest member and the one most committed to the monarchy. The more I watched her, the less I understood why the Spanish people distrusted her. She was guarding our heritage, cultivating stability, while the King flitted between hunting lodges and polo matches and distant capitals, silly and oversexed, an embarrassing dandy. Madrileños criticized her for being passionless, too tranquil—but her stillness was her power. She was the pole around which everything else spun: the bridge, the sounding post. Everything else could move, could vibrate, because she stayed in place.

 

The best thing about visiting the royal chapel was that, upon exiting it, one had reason to walk along the gallery fronting the King’s and Queen’s private rooms, en route to the main palace staircase. One day, I went to light a votive candle in each of my siblings’ names, and especially in the name of my new nephew, Enric, who had been born to my unmarried sister five months after I moved to Madrid.

As I headed back down the gallery, I heard my name called. I recognized the accent instantly, but I couldn’t quite accept its source. I stepped toward the voice, which was coming from the open door of the Japanese Smoking Room: a tiny, dazzling refuge that was not much bigger than a small bedroom, with a ceiling twice as high. The King’s father had ordered the walls covered with bamboo, panels of purple silk, and porcelain plaques depicting Asian fish, birds, and boats. Stepping into the room felt like wrapping oneself in a tight kimono.

Surrounded by all that color and shine, Queen Ena looked small and plain, garbed in a shapeless off-white dress. Her arms hung limply from the dark arms of a cane chair.

“I lost an opportunity, the last time we spoke,” she called to me as I loitered in the doorway, unsure of the protocol for entering and greeting her. She waved away my hesitation, gesturing for me to come closer. “You helped me plan the party, but I did not manage to talk you into performing.”

Through a side door I could see into the next small chamber—a billiards room, dark-paneled, the green baize of the table glowing under three low-hanging lanterns. I couldn’t see the King, but I assumed he must be near, given that these rooms were his. I thought I could smell him, or some man; the smell of tobacco and drink, anyway.

“The opportunity lost was mine,” I said. “I talked myself out of an honorable service.”

“Everyone makes mistakes,” she said.

I added, bowing, “Al mejor cazador se le escapa la liebre.”

She repeated the words slowly, translating them: “Even the best hunter lets a hare escape. I will try to remember that. Each time the King returns, I try to surprise him with some proof that I am mastering the language.”

“You speak it well already. So the King isn’t here now?”

“He is away. His work allows him so little leisure.”

She looked over my shoulder as if expecting to see someone there, but the hall behind us was empty. “We never have enough time, do we? Any of us, I mean. I suppose one must enjoy what one has. Do you have a good saying for that?”

I clasped my hands behind my back, thinking. “Aprovecha gaviota, que no hay otra.” Enjoy eating seagull, as long as there’s nothing else.

She screwed up her face. “It rhymes nicely, but I can’t imagine a worse meal than seagull. You sound like Cervantes’s little funny man—like Sancho Panza—spouting those funny dichos.”

“Do you have something prettier in English?”

“Goodness, I hope so,” she said, wrinkling her nose. “I must. Let me think. How about this?” She enunciated slowly, in her own native tongue: “Gather ye rosebuds while ye may.”

For a moment, the words hung in the room. I could picture them quite literally: rising, dispersing, like smoke.

“Please—say it again.”

She did. Then she translated it into Spanish with my help, stumbling in her search for capullo. But I preferred the English word anyway—rosebud. Already, I could imagine myself including it in a letter to Enrique, to describe the blush of her cheek, the purse of her lips. Rosebud. I felt a ticklish heat creep across my chest.

The ticklishness proceeded to my throat, and into my nose. It wasn’t just in the walls. And it wasn’t just poetry. There was real smoke in the room. At last I traced it to a thin gray column rising just behind the Queen’s chair, originating from her hanging hand, curled awkwardly under the chair’s polished arm. What piqued my interest wasn’t the thing she was hiding, but that she—the most powerful woman in the nation—felt the need to hide anything at all.

“But I’m wasting your talent,” she said. “You shouldn’t be giving anyone Spanish lessons. You should be giving music lessons.”

“Do you play?” I said, too eagerly.

“I don’t.”

She read my disappointment. “I used to. But I wasn’t very good. And where I grew up, silence was the rule, especially on rainy days, when we all crowded indoors. ‘Children should be seen, not heard’—perhaps you have heard that English expression.”

“You could learn now.”

She considered this. “The King’s mother—your patroness—is the musical one in this family. It’s better, I think, for each person to develop her own strengths.”

A man cleared his throat. It was the servant, Walker, behind me in the doorway. I noticed that the Queen’s hand curled even more tightly under the arm of her chair.

He said something in English; I caught the words tea and served.

“No,” she said, “the boudoir is fine. I’ll be there shortly.”

He left, and she turned to me again. “And speaking of language, there is a funny French word—boudoir. Do you know that it means ‘to sulk’? I hope men don’t really think we women sulk in our dressing rooms. Though sometimes I do, I guess.” She made a little noise in her throat, a whinnying approximation of a laugh. “Even Madrileños use the word. But I suppose I should set a good example and use the Spanish word, tocador.”

“But,” I said, surprised by my own forwardness, “that also means one who plays an instrument. If you talk about seeking comfort from your tocador, someone might think you are talking about your private musician.”

“I’d like having a private musician. I’d prefer that to hosting fancy concerts with lots of people and guards, where the poor King is reduced to snoring.”

I’d never been religious beyond the most perfunctory observances, even in the days when I had spent so much time with Father Basilio. But I felt myself praying now, with surprising intensity: Please let me teach you, play for you, do anything for you.

What I said was, “A sus órdenes,” bowing low to the ground. “Para servirle.” I’d said these phrases before, without meaning anything—you heard them constantly, all over the palace. But now I felt for the first time what they meant: to be ready for someone’s orders, ready to serve in any way a sovereign requested.

“Well, you can do something for me,” she said in a low voice. “If you’ll just fetch me an ashtray, over there. That thing. Yes, attached to the clock. Is there anything in this palace not attached to a clock?” In an even lower whisper, she said, “I don’t really smoke anymore. The society ladies have enough already to prattle on about. Who was that American actress arrested for smoking in public? Ridiculous. Anyway . . .” she trailed off, looking pensive. “I said I’d quit. I just came here to smell it. I miss him, that’s all.”

The ornamental clock had a wide base, with the ashtray mounted permanently in one side, and porcelain flowers as big as teacups blooming along its base. I pulled at it, expecting to carry it swiftly toward her, but it weighed too much. I grunted with surprise.

“That’s it, bring it here,” she encouraged me.

I tried lifting the monstrosity again, but only managed to rock it toward me, a centimeter or so, before letting it fall back on its felt-bottomed base. Its ticking blended with the pounding of my own addled heart. Looking back toward the Queen, I saw the caterpillarlike ash of her cigarette trembling, ready to fall, just a step away. I lunged toward her with my right palm outstretched.

But I had not steadied the clock sufficiently. Just as I reached the cigarette, taking it from her fingers, I heard a crash and turned to see an exploded galaxy of porcelain shattered against the parquet floor—fragments of shiny red roses and fine white powder and shards of glass and one of the hands of the clock, a meaningless arrow now, pointing toward nothing.

At that moment, Walker cleared his throat from the doorway again, and the stubby cigarette burned to my fingers. I yelped and dropped it. Instantly I covered it with my shoe. Then I closed my eyes, steeling myself for the grip of halberdiers’ rough fingers dragging me out of the room.

With my eyes still clenched, I heard Queen Ena’s voice. “I don’t think it can be saved. I’m so clumsy.”

I forced myself to look. There were no guards in sight even now—just Walker with his back to me, his hands on his hips, surveying the mess.

“Perhaps they’ll want some of the parts for restoring one of the other King Charles clocks,” she said.

He muttered. “It isn’t a King Charles. This is a Ferdinand VII, eighteen-twenty or thereabouts.”

The Queen’s eyelids fluttered. For a brief moment, I thought she might be on the verge of fainting. Then I realized she was only rolling her eyes.

“My God—do you hear that?”

“Yes, madam,” Walker said without facing her.

“Silence.” She did not bother to conceal her amusement. “A room without ticking!”

Walker left to summon help in cleaning up the mess. When the echo of his footsteps had faded sufficiently, Queen Ena said, “If you won’t gossip about my smoking, I won’t tell anyone you broke the clock.”

I could barely speak, my throat was so tight with embarrassment. “I’m so sorry.”

“Don’t be,” she said. “Charles and Ferdinand were obsessive collectors. There’s no way to get rid of their clutter without the occasional accident. Would you be interested in touching anything else?”

I don’t think I managed a coherent sentence after that—only a stuttering promise, as I bowed repeatedly and backed my way toward the doorway, to keep our secrets.

“I believe you. I really do.” Then she dismissed me.

 

That’s how it started: the first confidence, the first step along a long, discreet road to becoming the Queen’s private tocador. I hoped she would send for me again right away, but as summer advanced, the heat soared, until even the birds seemed too tired to sing. The King returned and then left again, this time with the Queen and their three children. They had packed heavily, a chambermaid informed me, for an extended stay at San Sebastián. There, Queen Ena loved to swim out from the beach, far into the bracing Atlantic. Two armed and fully uniformed guards would follow her, treading laboriously as their black boots filled with salty water.

Back at the palace, I had my own treading to do—trying to stay dedicated to my lessons with Count Guzmán.

“Now we start again, we build,” he announced one summer day as he began to teach me vibrato anew, using a metronome. It had not occurred to me to count the tremor of vibrato as one might count simple rhythms, to control with such precision what had once seemed spontaneous. With his arms he gestured to signify the vibrato’s size; how far I should veer from the note being played—wider here, narrower there. “Here,” he said. “Draw what I am showing you,” and I took notes of his motions, creating a portrait of climbing and falling waves.

I spent weeks following the design of such sketches, and the tick of the metronome, and the arc of his finger in the air—slow at this passage, faster here. When my vibrato lost its rhythm, he signaled for me to stop—again and again. This, I thought, must be what it feels like to be a scientist, to dissect a bird. How could one ever think of it as a flash of feathers once one had seen it stiff on a table, opened up to reveal organs the size of olive pits, tiny bones and tinier veins?

The work was so detailed and so demanding that I paid little attention as July yielded to August, and the royal family returned, settling into their Madrid routines.

At some point late that summer I must have pleased even the unappeasable count, because he closed the metronome’s wooden lid and said, “Good enough! You deserve a walk—it’s a beautiful day. When is the last time you left the palace?”

He sent me on an errand to pick up some rosin and violin strings at a shop near the Plaza Mayor. I left the palace, still hearing the tick of the metronome in my head, pacing my steps to it, until I noticed what I was doing. If I was going to proceed through life in a march-step, I might as well have joined Enrique in Toledo. With disgust, I tried to vary my gait—a little faster, a casually arrhythmic lope. But being out of rhythm on purpose was harder than being in rhythm. And any kind of jarring gait made my weaker leg twinge. After a while, I gave up. I finished the errand, continued past the royal bakery, stared at the pastries in the window, turned back. I proceeded to a large square, sat on a bench, and watched children kick a ball around the dusty flagstones.

How was it vibrato had once sounded to me? Like honey. How did the cello once sound to me? The deeper notes like chocolate; the highest string like lemon. The resulting emotions: a pleasurable vibration, a painful tension, an opening. Never like a blueprint or mechanical drawing. Never like the tick of a machine.

Of course, there was a different kind of pleasure in understanding that all things could be designed, measured, and documented. An adult pleasure. But I don’t think I ever regained my spontaneous approach to vibrato after that year, just as I’d never again have a relationship initiated as thoughtlessly as the one I’d had with Isabel.

Now, when the count and I began to study a new piece of music, we talked for hours before bow touched string, hashing out the details on paper like desert generals at a tent meeting. As we talked, questioned, compromised, I interpreted the count’s heavy nodding as respect. One day, after I’d played my part of a new sonata, the Count said, “My daughter could learn something from you—your discipline, your self-control. And yet”—I braced myself—“this piece is still lacking something.”

“Yes?”

“Expressiveness.”

“Which part?” and I pushed the sheet music toward him, but he didn’t reach his hand forward.

“All of it.”

I thought he was joking. I laughed once and waited, a pencil in my open palm. It was as if the count expected me to throw the bird we had dissected so carefully back into the air—as if it would really fly, rather than fall back to earth, ruined.

“What would you like me to do, Maestro?”

“Perhaps you could use a break from your studies.”

“But my studies are all I have.”

“Then perhaps this is your problem. I’ve done my best to broaden your education, but you’re still only seventeen years old. Much as you try to look and act like an old man.”

Like an old man? But he had reinforced my sober attitude toward music. He had turned cold on me after I’d acted my age with his daughter.

“Live with the music for a while.”

“What do you mean—live with it?”

His voice took a snappish turn. “You think you’ll learn everything about the cello overnight? Without struggle? Without trial and error? Nothing is that way.”

He lowered his voice. “Make it your own, is all I am saying. The King has requested my services in some official matters. I will let you know when I am available for private lessons again. In the meantime, I’ve set up a quartet with three of my other students—you’ll meet with them each Tuesday and Thursday. I expect none of the trouble you had with my daughter.”

I didn’t want to part with the count so abruptly. I pushed him for details about his business with the King, but he shrugged off my questions. “You’ve never been interested in politics before, Feliu. It’s nothing for you to trouble yourself about.”

But hadn’t he told me to take an interest in something other than my cello studies?

“Cultivate some interests,” he reiterated. “But don’t forget whom you serve. Cultivate innocent interests, I beg you.”

 

I’d been apathetic about court politics. I knew that the Cortes and the King’s cabinet changed frequently; I barely managed to memorize a new minister’s name before a successor was named, every change alienating some people and enriching others. But I did not know if this was how things always had been and should be, what it said about the King or Spain’s future.

Now, two developments fed my interest. One was the count’s sudden unavailability and incommunicativeness, which catalyzed my own contrariness. The other was simple excess leisure, that classic fomenter of mischief. Without lessons, I lingered at mealtimes and straggled through the hallways, pausing at the thresholds where chambermaids and court apprentices gathered. I did not ask questions; I simply listened, benefiting from my reputation as a quiet young man whose tongue never wagged.

A cook told me about the King, “He’s like a boy who rearranges his toy soldiers again and again, for lack of anything better to do.”

“A meddler,” agreed the man whose only job was to dust the hundreds of antique jars in the royal pharmacy.

Others used similar terms, criticizing King Alfonso for destabilizing the government every time he intervened in parliamentary matters. They said he was inconsistent and rash, concerned mainly with consolidating his own power. He had long been a fanatic supporter of the army, but his increasingly cozy relationship with the Church worried Madrileños. The Catholic Church had grown richer in recent years; it now owned one-third of Spain’s wealth, with investments not only in plantations and railways, but in banks, shipping—even the cabaret business. It sided with employers over workers, and I’d felt its control over the schools even back home in Campo Seco.

“What kind of sin is liberalism?” our catechism teacher had grilled us.

“It is a most grievous sin against faith,” we children had answered in one voice.

“Is it a sin for a Catholic to read a liberal newspaper?”

“He may read the Stock Exchange News.”

Now, liberals were mounting a campaign demanding that certain unregistered clerical orders begin to pay taxes. Would the King step forward and ask the wealthy Church to pay its share? After all, he had been willing to offend the Church at least once, by marrying Ena, a converted Protestant. If he didn’t take a serious stance now—if he continued to treat politics as sport or seduction—then others would step forward to press for change. Anarchist unions were organizing into a powerful Confederación Nacional de Trabajo. At the same time, insurrections were brewing in distant provinces.

Palace dwellers noticed that the King vacationed less and inhabited the Palace’s reception rooms and marble-floored galleries more. He changed clothes constantly—five times or more each day—so that each time he strode toward some important meeting, it was in a new suit. He enthusiastically attended the military parades that seemed to become more frequent with every passing month.

I had been introduced to him once, in a palace reception line.

“Musician? What section?” he’d asked.

“Strings. Cello, Your Majesty.”

“How do you walk with that?”

“I don’t, Your Majesty.”

The King had a pronounced underbite, like all the Bourbons, and his jutting lower jaw tightened at my response. “Well, there must be a way,” he said. “Use a little ingenuity, young man.”

The other direct result of the King’s new homeland preoccupation was that Rodrigo, my roommate, the architect-apprentice, no longer traveled constantly, to Paris and Lisbon and beyond. Now he was more often at the palace, earning his royal stipend by helping to realize the King’s expressed desire to make Madrid more like his beloved Paris. He began to stagger home each night under armloads of blueprints labeled in French.

“Are we to get an Eiffel Tower?” I asked him.

“Who needs a tower? The King wants another riz.”

I didn’t know what a riz was. I assumed it was short for rizo—a curl or loop—which could only mean, I guessed, some form of palace ornamentation. I couldn’t imagine anything less interesting or necessary. It only confirmed for me that King Alfonso was a silly, superficial man and that Queen Ena deserved my most tender sympathies.

 

The first few times I played for the Queen were uneventful. I brought my cello. I expected her to sit in one of the large royal armchairs and listen to me play. Instead she sat on the nearby piano bench, one arm resting on the piano.

“Are you planning to accompany me?” I asked.

“No. I can enjoy listening more this way, at ease.”

“Are you sure?”

She turned to face me. “It’s something I haven’t gotten used to in Spain—the way that even the humblest servant will talk back to a sovereign.”

“Pardon me, Your Majesty.”

There was a long pause, but when she spoke again her voice was less stern. “It looks better this way. As if I’m at the piano, taking a lesson. If someone enters.”

When I’d arrived, Walker had been standing near the wall, with another guard near the door. But at some hand signal I’d overlooked, they had exited, leaving us alone, the door closed.

I wanted to say, “You are a queen. Can’t you do anything you like?” But I remembered the smoking incident. I said, “Forgive my naïveté.”

“Señor Delargo, if you were cunning, we couldn’t be in this room together. Not alone, anyway.”

She moved her hands to her lap and sat with her profile to me, her head slightly bowed. Our relative positions reminded me of being in a confessional, but I wasn’t sure who was confessing to whom.

“Please go ahead,” she said.

At first I watched her, but only until I lost myself in my own playing. When she lifted her hand, I missed the cue. She stood and repeated the gesture, still facing away from me. “You’re dismissed.”

I packed up slowly. “Was it satisfactory?”

“It was.” But she seemed annoyed that I had asked.

Two days later she called on me again, and I thought, There is my answer. Don’t ask again, just flay.

Her demeanor inspired me. I resolved to be just as strong, to stop asking for approbation. Hadn’t that been what I’d wanted from my mother, from Alberto, from the count, even from Rolland? Someone to tell me I played well. None of them had given it effusively, yet I’d kept craving it. Here, playing for the Queen, I finally understood: One must not ask for acceptance. One must assume it, and value actions over words. Did she enjoy my playing? She always asked me to return.

I played for her regularly, and sometimes—only before I played, never after—we talked. I mentioned that my father had died at the hand of insurgents, in colonial Cuba, before I was old enough to attend school. She said that her father, Prince Henry, had died when she was nine, in much the same way. He’d contracted a fever on a military mission to Africa’s Gold Coast, and died on the homeward journey to England. He had written to her from Cádiz: “If you are good, you will come to this beautiful country. You will see for yourself how much you will like it and how happy you will be there.”

Wasn’t that extraordinary? Did I think, she asked, that a father could predestine his child’s life in such a way?

I thought of my pernambuco bow stick, a gift from my father’s grave, and said: “Absolutely.”

She asked me about childhood pastimes in Campo Seco. I told her about the vine-covered hills and the dry wash where I’d been bullied and used my bow tube to fight back. She told me about a game she played with her siblings and cousins, in which the “martyr” endeavored not to cry or protest no matter how the other children beat her.

“Children are brutal,” I said, laughing.

“They’re less corrupted and more honest,” she corrected me, without any trace of a smile.

But these talks were brief, and once I started playing, she always looked away, rotating every week farther round, so that before long she was sitting with her back to me. Even when I’d finished, the silence filling the room between us, she avoided turning toward me. My dismissal was always the same: a wave of her hand. It was the one imperious gesture that reminded me we were sovereign and servant, not intimates.

 

Growing up in Catalonia, where bullfighting was not a tradition, I had no inbred fondness for red capes and gore. In that way I and many of my provincial neighbors were, like the Queen herself, insufficiently Spanish. Madrileños, by comparison, loved the spectacle of the corrida. I had heard that the Queen had nearly fainted at her first bullfight, but she attended regularly now, to please her husband, and even more, to please her people.

One Sunday I borrowed my roommate’s boxy binoculars and purchased a cheap seat in the sun, one level higher than I would have liked, facing the royal box. I kept my binoculars targeted so resolutely on the Queen that after the first hour my arms ached from the effort, and there were circles of sweat from where I’d pushed the eyepieces against my face.

What I saw confused me. For someone who had winced through her first bullfights, the Queen seemed a rabid fan now. Not a tense or violent moment passed without her lifting her own binoculars, a lighter pair, with brass fittings that flashed in the sun. Other ladies waved squares of lace; men stood to toss their hats and leather botas into the ring, hoping the matador would honor them by taking a drink while assistants behind him combed the bloodied sand clean. When the dead bull was at last dragged away, some fans turned to talk to their neighbors, but not the Queen. Even this last bit of business interested her, evidently.

Then the next round began—a fresh bull, a more experienced matador. Dancing and sparring in his traje de luces—his tight-fitting, spangled “suit of lights”—he quickly brought the bull to its knees, then stood, spun haughtily, faced the crowd, and just missed being gored as his antagonist struggled to stand again and make a final charge. At this close brush with death, the King himself leaped to his feet. I could not hear his voice amidst the crowd’s, but I could see his mouth moving, shaping the joyful cheers as the matador turned just in time to save himself and deliver a final fatal thrust into the bull’s wobbling, stained cranium. And still, the Queen stayed glued to her field glasses.

“You must be a true scholar of la corrida,” said a paunchy man next to me, his eyes reddened from hours of staring into the bright sun.

“Yes? What?” I moved the binoculars just barely, in order to acknowledge him, then set them back against my eyes.

“Those things. For hours, you haven’t taken them down.”

He wanted to borrow them for the next bullfight, I thought; that’s why he was flattering me. But then it sank in. The stranger couldn’t tell what I was doing. I wasn’t even looking at the bull, but he couldn’t see that. I could close my eyes, and he wouldn’t even know. I focused on the Queen again—her slim white arms visible beneath lace-edged sleeves, her small oval face hidden beneath the propped lenses. And at last I realized that she was not using the binoculars to watch the bullfight. She was using them to avoid seeing it at all.

The next time the Queen dismissed me after I had played for her, I lingered in the hallway. Ignoring the guard, I pressed my ear against the door.