CHAPTER

13

“Are you permanently attached to that seat?” said a voice behind me.

I couldn’t make out the face, only a shock of thick dark hair in the rust-spotted reflection above the weathered headline—CATASTROPHE IN SARAJEVO—with a blurry, yellowing photo of the assassin, Gavrilo Princip, being dragged away by several policemen.

“How long have you been sitting there?” the stranger tried again.

“I’m still on my first.”

“I doubt that.”

He was even closer now, pressing against the back of my chair to let another man pass. When he reached over my shoulder to signal for a drink, I noted the sharp clean line of his shirt cuff and the heft of his arm. I could smell something on him—lavender, perhaps—that was aggressive in its floral prettiness.

I ignored him and lifted a finger toward the aproned barkeeper.

“I think you’ve been sitting several hours,” he persevered.

“Listen—”

“Maybe even years.”

“If you’re in a hurry—” I said, turning.

The words caught in my throat. He laughed and clapped me on the back and finally embraced me, squeezing my thin suit jacket. Even after he let go, I could feel the spot on each triceps where his wide fingertips had pressed.

“Dios santo,” I gasped, catching my breath, “I thought you were in Paris!”

“I was, until a week ago.”

“You promised you were never coming back to Madrid.”

“Did I? I wish I could keep that promise.”

Fine red capillaries snaked across his cheeks, but from a distance, they would only look like the hearty bloom of indefatigable youth. Everything about him, from his shoes to his wax-tipped mustache, shone.

He was studying me as closely as I was studying him. I opened my mouth and realized, after a hard swallow, that I had nothing to say.

The barkeeper set down my drink. Al-Cerraz reached over and grabbed it before I could, and gave it a sniff. “I forgot how cheap the liquor is here. I can’t let you drink this! We’ll find ourselves a better bottle somewhere.”

I reached out to rescue the drink but Al-Cerraz had already pushed it, along with a coin, into the barkeeper’s hand. “Coffee instead, please—two of them, cortados.”

I said, “You didn’t leave because of the fighting?”

“It wasn’t the war itself I couldn’t stand, it was the whole festive atmosphere—one big party, the whole city engaged in debauchery, and young boys running around with wine bottles, hanging on their sweethearts, telling them they’d be back in two weeks. Two weeks!”

“Well, maybe . . .”

“They’ll make beautiful targets in their bright uniforms. Here.” He gestured for me to join him at an emptying table on the other side of the café, closer to the entrance. “The worst of it was the music. Three days of it. Bands playing in the streets, people dancing and singing like wind-up toys. If there had been a moment of quiet, people might have had a chance to think.” The bartender came around and wiped the table for us. Al-Cerraz thanked him. “They say music is a dangerous aphrodisiac. It’s nothing compared to patriotism. Anyway—how long have you been trying to grow a beard?”

“What do you mean, trying?”

He wrapped a heavy arm around me again and squeezed. His fingernails were manicured, glossy, with shiny white half-moons rising from trimmed cuticles. Suddenly I was aware of how long it had been since I’d laundered my shirt.

“This wasn’t the first place I looked for you. I tried the music school, the theater. Then I thought, maybe some of the finer restaurants—they’re not too bad, if you don’t mind tinkling spoons. Personally, I refuse to compete with flan for attention.”

“I have a few private students.”

“Then I thought, maybe he’s gone to America! Carnegie Hall.”

“Not all of us are looking for fame and fortune.”

“I can see that.”

“Listen . . .”

“I’m listening, Feliu—tell me everything!”

“The letters,” I managed to say with effort. “Didn’t you get them?”

He made a few false starts, then smiled sheepishly. “I’m hopeless at writing. Ask anyone.”

“But seven times? Eight? I figured the address was bad, but I had nowhere else to write.”

“I’m here now. You can ask me—tell me—anything.” And he leaned forward, bearded chin resting in his fleshy palms.

“Forget it. If you’re here to find out about the latest intrigues, you’re talking to the wrong man. I’m not with the court anymore.” When he didn’t react, I added, “The Queen asks to see me every few months, though I no longer play for her. Any local dandy spends more time there than I do. If you’re setting up royal residence, you’ll have the entire spotlight to yourself. I never had much of it, anyway.”

“No, you just caught one bright spark.” He bumped the table slightly, chuckling. “I hear it left a shiny spot on the inside of your bow.”

A shaft of light had penetrated the bar’s entryway and was dancing on a mirrored pillar next to the table. “You know,” I said, squinting, “it’s good to see you. But I think I’ll go back to where I was sitting. Sun’s in my eyes. I feel a headache coming on.”

“The sun’s in your eyes?” He laughed again, jostling his full cup. The saucer beneath was close to overflowing.

“You don’t need the dark, you need something to eat. Away from here. I insist.”

I hedged, thrust my hand into my pocket, felt the last coin there, and thought of the empty apartment waiting me.

“Vale. But I’m not fetching any water for your car,” I cautioned.

“Water? There’s no need—but that gives me a marvelous idea.”

He didn’t mean the Stanley Steamer; he’d replaced that long ago, before souring altogether on automotive fads. By water, he meant the estanque, the nearby Retiro’s pond with its paddleboats and lawns for picnicking. This August day it was nearly deserted, the food stalls and little puppet theater shuttered against the midday sun while a few employees napped in the shadows, waiting for evening’s cool reprieve. The only other park stroller was a shifty-looking man in a threadbare cape—perhaps a failed courtier like me—tilting his ear toward the marble statue of the King’s father as if he were listening to the dead monarch’s secrets.

Al-Cerraz rattled the window to rouse the sleeping rowboat attendant and slipped a folded bill between the bars. Soon we were floating on the dazzling water, next to a line of ducks too hot to flee. I hadn’t thought I was hungry, but when I smelled the grease-spotted bags he’d loaded into the boat, filled with bread, sausage, cheese, and fruit he’d bought along the way, my appetite returned. I listened, sleepy and full for the first time in days, as the pianist expressed his distaste for Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring, his tentative interest in jazz, his catalog of every famous Spanish musician and artist living in Paris. “Anyone and everyone you can think of!” And then, catching himself and endeavoring to be more kind, “Well, not everyone. A lot of has-beens, come to think of it.”

He talked to me about music and life in England, Italy, San Francisco, and New Orleans—about everywhere, it seemed, but Spain. Perhaps I’d assumed wrong. Al-Cerraz wasn’t settling back into court life here, he was just passing through. Spain was the last place in the world that interested him, and he was a man who demanded to be interested, inspired, at the center of things, where everything was new. Yet he hated war—even the most remote hint of it, the sight of bandages, any hint of tinny bugling. And so, he assured me when I asked him directly, he was home to stay. Spain, he predicted, would stay neutral in the war, not upon any moral high ground, but to dig itself out of its economic slump. With the rest of Europe in ruins, its tottering industries might have a chance—as might its performers.

“We’ll take the trains,” he was saying. “Not with our own private car, not this time—anyway, traveling with a piano is overrated; why rehearse with a better instrument than you’ll get to play at the concerts themselves? But first class we’ll manage, traveling light. The cities, of course, but the smaller towns, too, on the way. You’ll have the energy for that. As my beautiful mother always said, hard work and a harder bed keep an artist young.”

I had nodded off, lulled by the gentle rocking of the boat. “Trains?” I rubbed my eyes, yellow spots dancing on my inner lids.

“You’re probably wondering about the violinist. He’s adequate. He’s had the same questions about you, of course—as did Monsieur Biber, but I’ve reassured him. The first week is always a trial, but after that—”

“Reassured him?”

“That you’ll perform to our standards.”

“Who says I’ll perform at all?”

“Biber asked what you’d want in terms of fees. I told him you’d understand what the life is really like—steady work, few vacations. I told him you’d be fair.”

“Fair.” I closed my eyes. “As fair as not answering the letters I wrote you?”

“Yes, yes—about coming to Paris.”

“So you did read them.”

“And look—I was right! It’s no place for a musician. Not now.”

“But you didn’t explain that. I couldn’t have known you were ignoring me for my own good.”

When he failed to answer, I closed my eyes. He discarded his jacket and his shirt and rowed in his undershirt, making lazy circles in the sun. I heard the snap of the oarlocks. “Feliu, I went to your apartment first, before I found you at the café. I saw how you’re living.”

“I’m not interested,” I said.

“You were seeking opportunity; now you’re rejecting it. You don’t consider this a good offer?”

“Too good, and too sudden. Over the years, I’ve developed a taste for independence—and a distaste for favors.”

“‘Over the years!’” he snorted and stood up. The rowboat lurched. I leaned forward and put my arms over the gunwales, trying to steady the boat while he balanced on one beefy leg, tugging at his shoelaces. “You’re rather young for that sort of talk!”

My face over my knees, I willed the boat to stop rocking. I could hear more than see: the snap of a knee garter; the clatter of a dropped shoe. One black sock landed in my lap.

“Say no more,” he said. “Disagreement is bad for digestion. And indigestion is bad for swimming.”

The boat leaned hard and then righted itself so violently that I gasped. He splashed and was gone, under the surface. I heard a few protesting quacks when he came up for breath, several meters away.

“Come in!” he called.

When I didn’t answer right away, he called back, “Never mind. It’s wonderful. Don’t do yourself any favors.”

I watched him float on his back, his belly rising as a smooth white island above the surface. His undershirt was taut and nearly translucent against his chest, whorls of black hair visible beneath it. His large pink toes flexed above the opaque surface of the water.

“There are only two places in the world where I feel weightless and at peace,” he called to me cheerfully, his irritation already purged. “This is the second one.”

He took his time returning to the rowboat. Pulling himself back aboard, he glistened like an otter, diamond-bright drops of water nesting on his matted mustache, beard, and gleaming black hair. Water streamed from his rolled pant-legs while he lit a damp cigar, its leafy smolder doubling as the breeze shifted in my direction.

“I’m feeling a little sick, actually,” I said.

“I told you a swim would make you feel better.”

“I’m not a strong swimmer. I like the water, but . . .”

“Too much sun.” He puffed away. “You never asked me what the first was—the first place I feel at peace.”

“Maybe we could switch sides,” I said, wanting to get away from the smoke. “I’ll row us back.”

“Not at the piano, if that’s what you’re thinking.”

I wasn’t. I still remembered him confessing years earlier his unease at playing, his self-consciousness on the stage—if that had all been true, rather than an exaggerated, wine-soaked lament.

“Aboard trains. That’s what I meant.”

“I see,” I told him, but I was more focused on our balance in the boat. Holding each other by the forearms, we tried to execute a shuffling dance, working our way around each other while the boat lurched.

We had nearly stepped around each other when Al-Cerraz started to speak; then he shouted suddenly: “Huy!” The cigar had slipped out of his mouth. It was floating, like some chamber-pot detritus, in the tea-colored pond water. He leaned over, as if to retrieve it. I began to yell. Then my own mouth was full, and I was sinking, weighted down by all my clothes, darkness all around me. I kicked hard and came above the surface, gasping.

I could hear him laughing from the boat. “Cálmate! It’s not that deep—just over your head!”

I went down again, felt the springy surface of weeds under my feet, kicked up, and breathed.

“Use your arms!”

Down again, another light bounce, and the agonizing tickle of inhaled water.

“Fool! Swim!”

Every time I came up to the dazzling surface, I saw the shadowy underside of the rocking boat, but nothing else—no sign of an outstretched hand. He was too busy trying to fish his cigar out of the water.

“Stop flailing!” he shouted again, barely bothering to look my way.

“I have a bad . . .” I started to say, sucking in water. I sputtered, “. . . leg—hip, really.”

“What’s a hip got to do with swimming? Look at me—I could swim to Africa!”

For a second, my fury overwhelmed my fear; somehow, that helped. Finally, I controlled my breathing and started pushing the water away from my face and kicking more evenly. A slippery piece of grass brushed my cheek, but I kept the rhythm. In just three or four more strokes, I was at the boat, reaching for the gunwale.

“See?” He hauled me in. “Not so bad, was it? I knew you couldn’t have grown up near the Mediterranean and not be able to swim.” A pause. Then: “You owe me a cigar, you know.”

I spit, coughed, and finally retched until I managed to vomit over the side. Al-Cerraz turned away.

“Look what you’ve done,” I said afterward, gasping, as I sprawled in the boat. “Imagine the filth I’ve swallowed.”

“Oh—certainly. It was the pond water that did it—”

And the cigar smoke, I was thinking.

“—not the half-bottle of swill you’d drunk before two o’clock today. Or the hundreds of bottles before that.”

“I’m not a drunk,” I snapped.

“Good. I’m glad we got that question out of the way. Are you suicidal?”

“Why would you say that?”

“Your landlady said you spend a lot of time sitting on the suicides’ bridge.”

“That’s rubbish.”

“I’m glad to hear it.”

Several glum minutes passed.

Finally he said, “You can see I don’t put others first—there’s no worry about that. So here’s how it is. It’s no favor to you. It’s a favor to me. We have a dozen concerts already booked, and our French cellist ran off to Belgium, to sacrifice himself for la guerre. Fine, if that’s what he wants.”

He added, “You’re not the first cellist I asked. You’re the third. That’s not because I don’t think you’re immensely talented. It’s only because you’re inexperienced and unknown. In semiretirement at—what—twenty-one?”

I glared at him.

“Be offended, if it will help you feel better about it. This isn’t a great deal for either of us, but I’m too broke to live without touring. I’ve been paid to compose an opera based on Don Quixote, but it’s gone nowhere. I can’t remember the last time I had a good night’s sleep.” He perked up. “But the trains will help that. They’re the perfect cure for insomnia.”

I was too tired to speak. Sourness burned in my throat.

“You’re afraid of getting wrapped up in something,” he continued. “Makes no sense at all. You’ve got nothing to lose. But put it this way: If you had only a month to live, would you try touring with us?”

“Possibly.”

“Well, then—” He pointed to a sign on the shore: NO SWIMMING IN THE ESTANQUE—RISK OF CHOLERA—BUREAU OF PUBLIC HEALTH.

“As for me,” Al-Cerraz said, “I never catch anything. A terrible scarlet rash whenever I eat shrimp, but besides that, nada.”

 

Within a week, I was preparing to board a train and say good-bye to the capital that had been my home for five years. Al-Cerraz was correct. I had nothing to lose. Despite my skepticism about the pianist, despite my initial pretenses of aloofness, I couldn’t fight the tingle that mounted as the train approached, vibrating the platform. As jaded as I’d become in Madrid, I still believed it was possible to climb aboard a train as one person, and step off it as another.

I encountered our French violinist for the first time on the platform, crowded with people and suitcases. He swept by me, glancing around and through my legs, muttering into his thin blond mustache. I reached out a hand: “Feliu Delargo.” But he circled me and walked back the other way, past Al-Cerraz and his five massive trunks.

“To him, you are not a person,” Al-Cerraz explained. “You are someone with luggage—fortunately, not too much of it, since we are traveling heavy already.”

Al-Cerraz nodded at the porter who, with the violinist’s help, was directing the flow of our baggage into the train.

“He can be excessive with ritardes, and he once lost all memory of a Franck sonata we had performed a hundred times. But he has never lost a piece of our luggage. I introduce you to our violinist and chief transportation coordinator, Louis Gauthier.”

Gauthier did not look up at the sound of his name. He was still immersed in discussion with the porter as the stationmaster walked by, ringing a handbell.

“Come on. He will be the last to board,” Al-Cerraz continued. “And then he’ll spend the next hour studying the railway timetable. And he will get off first at every stop, to calm our fans.”

“Fans? Are you serious?”

“I think he must have played with trains as a boy,” Al-Cerraz continued. “When he is very good, we let him ride in the locomotive.”

In our compartment, Al-Cerraz put one arm around me. “I know this country better than anyone else alive. Bottom bunk all right?”

“That’s fine.” I’d never traveled first class. Captivated, I studied the small sitting room that would transform, at the turn of the porter’s key, into a bedroom: the red carpet, the round table tucked between two chairs, the diminutive washbasin in one corner. It was immaculate and elegant, for the moment; less so as Al-Cerraz hung a sausage from the tasseled curtain rod over the picture window and set a woven garland of garlic in the marble washbasin.

“Since I was a very small boy, traveling from town to town, three hundred days a year, I learned to love this life,” he continued. “The cradlelike rock and sway of the train, the hospitality of our countrymen, the gentle hearts of our countrywomen.” He winked. “You will find that, as long as you keep moving, there is no end to the delights awaiting you. But you must keep moving, Feliu. Even when the heart skips; even when the view blurs.”

 

I had seen so little of Spain, apart from my home coast and the capital, that for the first months of our 1914 tour, the place names alone were a new kind of music. Segovia. Burgos. Valladolid. And between those fabled places, hundreds of smaller hamlets, places that appeared on few maps and didn’t need to. Each village had its own source of pride as the birthplace of a saint or Renaissance poet, or as the place with the sweetest grapes, the best-trained horses, the most talented leatherworkers.

The train rattled along its narrow tracks and the last few years fell away, shrugged off like a heavy cape. My health and color improved. My mood lightened. To make up for the reclusive gloominess of my recent past, I felt that I now deserved some pleasure. And who better to find it with than Al-Cerraz, who attracted the best and choicest and prettiest of everything, and who enjoyed life with such appetite, and no guilt?

Our trio had a natural chemistry. Gauthier was a tall, lean, light-haired serious man who cloaked his feelings beneath a wispy mustache and a smirk, providing a contrast to Al-Cerraz’s clownishness. On the train, he most often took a horizontal position, reclining in his bunk as he wrote to each of his nine sisters, who were scattered between Paris and Alsace. As the eldest, and the only boy, he’d had many responsibilities, he told me in our first days together. He’d grown more committed to his violin when he realized that his parents would never interrupt him to carry wood or dress a toddler as long as he was practicing. In the moments when he’d stopped playing and not yet been redirected toward a chore, he’d learned to embrace ephemeral leisure without delay. I’d never seen a man more eager to sleep—or more able to leap from a state of sleep into instant readiness, as soon as duty called. No wonder Al-Cerraz had come to rely on him to keep track of luggage, schedules, and communications with the manager, Monsieur Biber.

It was Gauthier who first explained to me how little money touring actually made. For large city engagements, we sometimes were paid in advance. But small towns were a gamble. Whoever had arranged the show—a cultural league, a women’s group, a music-loving town leader—assisted with promotion through the local posting of flyers, and paid us only after we played, based on their generosity or their success at fund-raising. When our income far exceeded our expenses, we paid ourselves and took an extended weekend—even the occasional week—off near the tour route. We never took off enough time to go “home,” which satisfied me; I had no desire to return to Campo Seco or anywhere else I’d lived, and at least while the Great War raged, Gauthier and Al-Cerraz felt the same way. When our income dipped, we had to do without, living simply until the next, more profitable run of shows. As our audiences found it harder and harder to pay, Al-Cerraz began to subsidize our concertizing for weeks at a time.

“But why would he do that?” I asked Gauthier once, when Al-Cerraz was off by himself in the smoking car.

“He tours to feed himself.” Gauthier reclined on his bunk with a folded newspaper on his lap.

“But when we’re losing money, how can he feed himself?”

“Not with food,” he said, pulling thoughtfully on his blond mustache. “He feeds his ego—and, I hope, his imagination.”

Gauthier saw my baffled expression. “He can only afford to subsidize us because he gets money from Brenan.” That was Thomas Brenan, the patron who had commissioned Al-Cerraz’s Don Quixote. “I don’t think he wrote a single note while he was in Paris. I’m sure he thinks time in Spain will enhance his creativity.”

“Do you think he’ll really compose anything?”

“He’s always talked about it. First, his father was to blame for getting in the way. Then his mother—”

“Which one?” I interrupted.

Gauthier laughed. “You mean the one who is dead, the one he wishes were dead, the one who is a saint, the one who was a courtesan, or the one who takes half of whatever money he’s got left at the end of each month?”

“Who is she, really?”

“I don’t know. All I know is that he has dined out on anecdotes about her—and about everything else—for his entire life. Perhaps he’ll never compose anything but stories.” And with that he closed his eyes.

Gauthier had other ambitions. His fantasy was to retire early to a French Polynesian island and to spend the last third of his life in a hammock, undisturbed. I could imagine his balding, age-spotted pate growing ever browner, like a coconut, and his wispy blond mustache shifting like a grass skirt in the South Pacific breeze. To that end, Gauthier aimed only to save a little money every few weeks, tucking it into his carefully guarded violin case. He was already in his late forties, and did not expect any more fame or attention than the modest quantity he’d already attained.

 

Gauthier and I rehearsed daily in our train car. Without a piano, Al-Cerraz could not join us, but that suited his natural inclination, which was to save his energies for his audiences. As the violinist and I played, Al-Cerraz would listen, rocking lightly back and forth, just an arm’s length from my moving bow. Sometimes he’d appear on the verge of falling asleep, but suddenly, his eyes would fly open: “There! Can you try . . . ?” In his own mind, he could hear himself playing with perfect clarity, fused with our parts; Gauthier and I had the disadvantage, since we couldn’t hear or imagine him as well. But it was impossible to worry, when Al-Cerraz did not. And at each performance, we found our harmonies, adapted our dynamics, and made impromptu bowing changes.

I had not yet recorded, of course, and Al-Cerraz had made only a few records by this time. But that was not how most villagers knew him. They had committed his trademark performance pieces to memory, preserved with great mental discipline since the time of his most recent visit.

As we pulled into each town, a self-selected music enthusiast—an alcalde, or the wife of some eminent merchant—would ambush Al-Cerraz as he stepped off the train. In a fishing village on the Cantabrian coast, it was a heavyset woman draped in a stiff and intricately patterned brocade gown one size too small. Thus confined, she nonetheless managed to sing wordlessly for close to a minute in a loud and passionate voice that made the carriage horse awaiting us take a few uncertain steps backward, ears flicking. I didn’t recognize the song until Al-Cerraz announced, “Yes, Schubert! How long has it been, Señora—?”

“Rubielos,” she said, bowing low. She remained there for a moment, catching her breath until she could answer, “It has been six years.”

As we stepped into the carriage, an elaborate antique resurrected from a local museum or someone’s barn, Al-Cerraz whispered, “There is always a Señora Rubielos.”

Sometimes this archetypal aficionada hummed Chopin, or whistled Liszt. Sometimes she had waited four years, or eight. Her rendition might be a faithful mimicry, in a town where at least one person knew how to play the piano well, or had managed to lay hands on a score. More often, it would be mangled and fragmented, blended with some other work. But invariably the enthusiasts were earnest, delivering Al-Cerraz’s notes back to him as if to prove his listeners’ loyalty during the maestro’s absence. They were like the New World natives we were told about as children, who upon hearing the word of Christ from a shipwrecked priest, chanted it into an amalgam, scarcely recognizable and yet still sacred to the Conquistadores arriving years later.

Al-Cerraz explained it to me this way: “In the deserts of the south there is a plant that requires rain only every few decades. Some say it will live without water for a century. But when the rain comes, it blooms. Feliu, we are the rain that comes to these towns.”

In return, villagers opened their hearts and doors to us. As part of his onstage patter, just prior to his final encore, Al-Cerraz would describe the homesickness that plagued his heart, the great longing he had for a simple home-cooked Spanish meal. Hand signals would fly between mothers and sons; young boys would dash for the exits. Through open doors, as Al-Cerraz’s encore relaxed into its final diminuendo, I was certain I could hear the protesting squawk of chickens pressed to the slaughter block.

Ideally, we would arrive at a small town at midday, proceed directly to an afternoon or early-evening performance, then repair to a bar for an hour until the locally chosen Doña had our dinner ready. Between courses, Al-Cerraz would regale his hostess and her guests with stories. After dinner, if she had a piano, he would play more encores, no matter how poorly tuned or ill-repaired the instrument. If keys were missing, it only increased the suspense as Al-Cerraz improvised around them, aping consternation, his black shock of hair more unruly with each passing hour.

He seemed to enjoy playing at a village hall more than at a city music palace, and he relished playing in a private house crowded with steaming bodies most of all. If a villager appeared with a guitar, Al-Cerraz would compete with it, mimicking the sounds of strummed chords by playing his own broken chords on the piano. If a boy produced some sort of shepherd’s pipe or whistle, Al-Cerraz would accompany it, making it sound like the foundation for some elaborate concerto. If a woman commandeered the attention, stamping out some complicated Andalucían rhythm with her feet, Al-Cerraz would pause, listen, and finally join in, mimicking the rhythm. Then he would back just one step away from it, so that they continued to play together—hands and feet—in a tricky syncopation of escalating speed and intensity until one of them surrendered, sweating and laughing uncontrollably while the whole room erupted with earsplitting applause.

He had said we were the rain, as if these villages were bone-dry, without music or culture save what we delivered. It seemed to me that we were simply the spark, in places already rich with kindling. In such places lived the Señoras who revered foreign composers like Chopin (as Chopin’s own Polish countryfolk had not revered him), and there were villagers who celebrated—and played—their own native folk music. And there was a sense, which my own town had lost sometime between my father’s generation and mine, that Spain could have both: be European and Iberian, look back and look forward, preserve and innovate.

“It’s remarkable,” I told him once as we took the air outside a rustic house one evening, moments after he’d accompanied a trio of farmers with their handmade instruments.

“What is?”

“The way you perform with them.”

He finished swabbing his face with a handkerchief, then looked at me curiously. “I wouldn’t call it performing. I’m just being a good guest. They say ‘How do you do?’ and I answer, ‘How do you do?’” He didn’t recognize the value of his talent, which allowed him to listen and mimic, distinguish and hybridize, changing accents and rhythms as we traveled from north to south, east to west. He thought it was a liability.

“They’re just parlor tricks, refined from the accidents of birth,” he said. “I have a sensitive ear. It not only detects, it collects, traps, and clogs. If the nation of Spain ever falls silent, I’m sure some doctor will take a scalpel to my inner ear—or better yet my brain—split it open, and perish as an avalanche of sounds burst forth.”

He smiled mournfully, then clapped me on the shoulder with abrupt, effortful heartiness. “I know just what you need!”

Back inside the main sala, Al-Cerraz slid onto the piano bench and pounded out several introductory chords to get everyone’s attention. Then he stopped and called out, “Men, find a partner!”

I pressed my back against the wall.

“You as well, Feliu!”

Suddenly there was a slim, feminine hand in mine. Al-Cerraz launched into an Aragonese jota. Men unbuttoned their collars. Women grabbed thick handfuls of skirt with one hand. Bodies began to hop around me. I don’t think anyone except the puzzled lady with whom I’d been paired would have noticed my inactivity if only Al-Cerraz would have kept playing. Instead he stopped mid-measure, laughing, and announced to the crowd: “Forgive my partner! He makes a formidable obstacle on any dance floor.”

All heads turned toward me.

My eyes must have flashed, because Al-Cerraz said quickly: “Forgive me, I should say. I am a man whose heart beats in rapid triple-time. Whereas my cellist”—and here Al-Cerraz began to play a simpler, slower melody—“lives to a statelier beat.”

 

Later that evening, he gestured across the room to the woman with whom I had danced. “I’ve already told her that you need some air. And that you have a fascination with aqueducts.”

“Aqueducts?”

“Medieval bell towers. Ancient granaries. Every town has some architectural feature on the outskirts, something they like to show off.”

“But shouldn’t we—”

“You’ll notice”—Al-Cerraz breathed heavily into my ear—“Gauthier hasn’t been seen in an hour. I myself have an interest in choir stalls. This lady”—he angled his head toward another young woman leaning against the piano—“has offered to take me to see the local cathedral by moonlight.”

“I’m not very fond of strolling,” I said. “I’d prefer to find a quiet place to sit.”

He whispered into my ear, “Stroll only as far as necessary, then.”

“I wouldn’t know what to say to one of these girls.”

“The less the better.”

“But I’m not sure—”

“Listen,” he interrupted, backing away to lock eyes. “If there is any reward to be gained from a lady in this room, it won’t be gained by what you say. She’s already heard you perform. That’s the only reason she is interested in you now.

“These,” he continued with emphasis, “are the perfumed hours. The music lasts a little while, the roses in their hair a few hours beyond that. And then . . .” he made a fluttering motion with the fingers of both hands, tracing the invisible lines of some dissipating magic.

“I thought you were interested only in what lasts,” I mocked.

He looked at his hands, still floating in the air, as if they were unfamiliar objects. “The eternal.” He studied his left hand. “And the ephemeral.” He studied his right. “Yes, you’re correct. It is a contradiction. Unless it isn’t. Unless I find some way to contain these intangible, sublime moments within something that will outlast everything—even you and me.”

He held himself like that for a moment, and then he exploded with self-mocking guffaws. “Such lofty ideals! All that the great philosophers ever wanted was beauty, and we have a dozen examples of it in this room.”

“And truth . . .” I said, but he was already walking toward the woman leaning on the piano, leaving me standing opposite my former dance partner.

She wore a sleeveless gown, one size too large—perhaps a cousin’s, pulled from a dusty wardrobe earlier that day; perhaps a sister’s, traded in exchange for a week’s worth of chores. I could see the pin at each side, under her bare arms, where she had pulled in and secured the fabric, and closer to her hip, through a small tear, a hint of some lace undergarment—perhaps borrowed as well. She saw me staring and stood straighter, raising both arms over her head to rearrange an ebony comb in the back of her wavy chestnut hair.

Just before I went to take her hand I said again, to no one but myself, “They wanted beauty—and truth.”

 

But there weren’t always young pretty women in abundance during those early years; or lavish parties, or even chickens. Sometimes the audience—small or large, finely dressed or plain—was missing altogether.

We arrived one night in our second year at a manor house in the far south. We had been picked up at the train station by a taciturn man with a wagon, the least-enthusiastic welcoming committee we’d had in some time. At the house, there were a dozen people, rather than the sixty or eighty we expected. The mood was peculiarly tense. I asked the wagon driver if a harvest was underway. The man, whose eyes were hidden under a sweat-stained fedora, fumbled nervously with the handkerchief tied around his neck. A better-dressed gentleman at the front of the room spoke up. “No harvest. We didn’t plant this season.”

Following the performance, there were no encores, and no postconcert festivities. The wagon driver gave us a ride back to the town center. Iron gates covered the shoe-repair shop and one of the town’s two bakeries. The pharmacy was boarded over. We ate sandwiches at the train station, where we finally learned from the stationmaster what had happened to the townsfolk. With seed prices high and crop prices low, word had spread that most laborers would lose their jobs. Fearing reprisals, landowners and the local civil guard had trucked two loads of farmworkers away from the town—carted them three hundred kilometers west and left them there.

“What, like unwanted kittens in a burlap sack?” Gauthier said.

“I won’t have this!” Al-Cerraz said sharply, and I turned to him with interest. Despite his fame in Spain—his access to reporters and high society ladies and artistic opinion-makers—I had never known him to attach his name to any cause. Perhaps he simply hadn’t been incensed enough.

“I won’t have this,” he repeated—but he was not referring to the laborers. “I won’t have my time and energy wasted.” He turned to the railway table, and then to Gauthier. “Is there an earlier train out of here?”

 

That second year of touring, a reviewer in one of the larger cities made first mention of my contributions to the trio. By the end of the next year, a good quarter of the reviews praised my playing first; a smaller number offered first attentions to Gauthier, which still left the majority to fawn on Al-Cerraz.

By 1917, Gauthier was rarely mentioned at all. “It’s only because you’re French,” I tried to console him, though he refused to act as if he needed any consolation. “The war, you understand. Everyone defending their own.”

“If anything, my nationality should gain me sympathy,” he said. “Don’t your countrymen appreciate that we’re fighting in your stead?”

But that wasn’t how Spaniards saw it. We endeavored to remain neutral in the war. As Al-Cerraz had predicted, that neutrality offered benefits, and a prestige Spain hadn’t enjoyed in our lifetimes. New diplomatic and business offices opened in Madrid, Barcelona, Bilbao, and elsewhere. Coal mining and steel production surged. Industrialists profited from the opportunity to supply what the rest of war-torn Europe could not.

And yet, though we had read and heard that these riches would eventually fill even poor men’s pockets, the reverse seemed to be true. Inflation drove prices up, while workers’ wages—and army officers’ fixed wages as well—remained stagnant. The Spanish-American War, in which my own father had died, had left the countryside impoverished. And now this “prosperous” peace somehow did the same.

Talk of economic policy rarely invaded the first-class parlor cars. But the proof of changing times hung just outside the train windows, providing glimpses for those who chose to see. The houses looked emptier, the horse-drawn wagons fewer and farther between. Some train stations looked abandoned. Others were curiously crowded, with people who seemed only to stand and stare; never departing, never arriving.

In the small towns where we performed, the “perfumed hours” lost their easygoing charm. An evening stroll with a young lady, whatever her station in life, often led to overeager conversations about the prospects for life in some other corner in Spain. I was asked frequently whether I intended to marry, and if so, where I would settle, and whether things were better off there? Kisses were offered with greater urgency; addresses were pressed into my hand more forcefully. Where my fellow musicians and I had once represented a romantic dalliance—a moment beyond time and reason—we now seemed to represent some greater reality: the chance to escape into a better situation.

“I know this country better than anyone else alive,” Al-Cerraz had said. But what did he know, if what he had nearly always seen were people in their weekend best, depleting their stores and their cellars? I felt like we were seeing not real places, but stage sets, constructed to last just until the train moved on, billows of locomotive steam curling the paper facades of pretend buildings, the blue boxboard sky propped overhead, everything ready to crash as soon as pulled out of view.

“Keep moving,” Al-Cerraz had advised, and we did. But as we left each village, we seemed barely to outpace the groping hands we left behind.

 

Our train rides between performances began to seem interminable, especially as we stopped playing some of the smaller venues, traveling farther between towns and cities that would pay us. On top of that, there were more delays, particularly in the south, where debris littered the track and uniformed men patrolled the stations, looking for signs of revolutionary activity.

Three men were one too many for a compartment as narrow as ours, even after the beds were folded away. I tired of Gauthier’s ceaseless smoking. Al-Cerraz was irritated by my morning routine of Bach, followed by an hour of scales. He could have gone to the dining car, but I think he liked to talk over my practicing, assuring himself a captive audience for his ritualistic morning laments, which were usually about the state of his mind, his heart, and his gastric system.

“You’ve heard of creative juices,” he said one day as I bowed a minor scale. “Mine are overproductive. With insufficient outlet, they are dissolving my organs from the inside out. It’s all from lack of artistic opportunity.” Anyone who lived with our pianist could see the cause of his periodic discomforts: rich foods, sausage, cigars, espresso, wine. Our compartment smelled like a delicatessen, with an entire leg of air-cured serrano ham hanging from the ceiling, stale loaves of bread tucked into the folded bed platform, liquor bottles and empty anchovy jars accumulating in the washbasin.

Afternoons, I read musical biographies in German, French, and English, to continue advancing my language skills. Gauthier buried himself in our business, organizing the receipts and records he would forward to Biber. Al-Cerraz stretched out on his bunk to compose, he said, though I suspected he was composing only obsequious letters to his patron. Eventually, the heaviness of Gauthier’s and Al-Cerraz’s sighs drove me out of the compartment and into the passageway, where I would stand alone, eyes fixed on the passing landscape of terraced hills and crumbling barns.

“Trouble finding your compartment?” conductors asked in train after train; or, “Dining car open for another few minutes, if you hurry.” Then they’d leave me to watch as the cars glided through these tranquil scenes, disturbing only the clouds of black birds that alighted, startled, from yellow fields. As we made our way south, gray slate roofs gave way to red; dark, water-stained walls to white. The sun shone, but from behind the glass, I could not feel it. We passed a grove of olive trees, and I remembered how the bark had felt against my fingertips, the cold ground against my back, the branches dividing blue sky overhead as Percival, doing the hard physical work that my own infirmity prevented me from doing, called down to me from his precarious perch, “More here? Feliu, pay attention—cut here?”

Some days it felt as if the world beyond the train windows were more real than the one within, that the acts of eating and talking and sleeping and playing in constant motion placed us outside of normalcy, saved us from reality—which made us doubly saved, since to live in neutral Spain during the War to End All Wars was in itself a form of salvation. But if we were saved, then why did the real world, even in its impoverished state, seem so much more enchanting than our private refuge?

 

Constant travel had made it more difficult to correspond with Enrique, but the occasional letter reached me. My brother was still living a bachelor soldier’s life, and he was beginning to feel not only underpaid but unappreciated—unable to settle down with any real comfort, respect, or purpose; unable to attract a wife or start a family. He’d come back to El Ferrol from a two-year tour in Morocco without much to show for it. His friend Paquito had suffered a near-fatal stomach wound during his own African tour, but this close brush with death had yielded considerable rewards. Paquito had been promoted to the rank of major and had earned renown as a fearless man of extraordinary good luck. Enrique’s friend was determined to go to Morocco again, and to return with either “la caja o la faja”—the coffin or the general’s sash.

A general’s sash didn’t seem to be in my brother’s future regardless of where he was posted. To cheer him up, I did my best to describe the itinerant musician’s life for him, exaggerating both our adventures and discomforts and poking fun at my musical partners and their quirks.

It was a few months before Enrique’s response reached me: You are right when you blame AlCezzar [his spelling] for not seeing the Poverty and Ruin around him.

Had I done such a thing?

 

You told me he only goes to the Parlorcar with the large picture windows at night and I can imagine why. Have you noticed when you ride in a Traincar during the day you can see out? But after sunset when it is brighter inside the car than outside the window becomes a Mirror? He prefers his own image to that of the world. That is how our current leaders are. They are just as self-centered as your Pianist.

 

It embarrassed me to read such unkind things written about Justo, whom my brother had never met. But it was my brother’s uncharacteristic bitterness that concerned me more. Perhaps he only needed someone to dislike or blame, as an outlet for his undeserved disappointment and frustration. And so I tolerated the barbs in one letter after another about this “piggish AlCezzar,” and even “this enemy Moor,” to which I felt duty bound to respond that Al-Cerraz’s ethnic identity relied upon a distant ancestral connection, perhaps a wishful fabrication at that.

 

Now you write to say that he is not a Moor. That makes him a Liar. It does not surprise me at all.

 

I wrote again, explaining that Al-Cerraz was more complex than I must have portrayed, and perhaps nobler as well—that his greatest passion was truly music, not himself. That he could be childish, but he could also show maturity. That he could be frivolous, but that he was faithful to his fellow musicians.

I was relieved when Enrique dropped the personal attacks in favor of larger topics. He wrote back:

 

You were surprised at the criticism I levied on the Government but make no mistake. Our Military while esteeming Authority Loyalty and Respect does not necessarily side with those currently in power. It is not a contradiction to say that we career soldiers are both the greatest standard-bearers of Tradition and also the only force for real change. What that change will be I cannot say.

When you and I were both enanitos together it impressed me that you knew your Destiny. That day you saw the cello played you said that was your instrument and we laughed at the seriousness in your little man’s voice. But what I didn’t tell you that day or any other was that I wished I had my own Star to follow, the way you had yours.

Some of us can be great and some of us can only recognize greatness. Some day a more worthy leader will rise up from our ranks and hopefully I will recognize him, perhaps I have already, just as you recognized your own passion.

Siempre,

Enrique

 

That letter awaited me in Córdoba, where we spent a long weekend, along with a second from Enrique, announcing that he had been promoted, at long last. Encouraged, he had decided to accept Paquito’s advice to seek another posting in Morocco, under his friend’s leadership.

 

Don’t worry for me. Paquito and I will look after each other.

 

Also waiting in Córdoba were a telegram and a package from Thomas Brenan. Al-Cerraz’s patron telegraphed every three months or so, requesting updates. Until now, Brenan had seemed perversely pleased by obstacles and delays, as if such inconveniences foretold an even more brilliant result. But the continuing European war was taking its toll on even the optimism of the rich. For the first time, Brenan warned Al-Cerraz that he couldn’t afford more advances without some evidence of progress. “Prove to me,” he wrote, “that in four years you have accomplished something.”

On the train later that afternoon, Al-Cerraz filled the stale air of our compartment with cigar smoke. His listlessness matched the stark, dry scenery around us as our train labored through a scrubby mountain pass, rocks bouncing from the rail bed. Addressing no one in particular, he said, “It’s ironic, really, that our own countrymen don’t respect us enough to support our art. And the man who does hasn’t visited Spain for twenty years. He doesn’t have to, does he? He has learned everything from Spanish literature. He wants his name immortalized as a patron of Spanish music. Your English is better than mine, Feliu. Read this.”

He leaned forward and handed me a manuscript that he’d extracted from Brenan’s package. The title page read, “Libretto for Don Quixote.”

“Your patron paid someone to write the libretto?”

“He wrote the libretto. Tell me how bad it is.”

I scanned for several minutes without getting past the first character’s recitation, a long-winded, rhythmically unvarying solo that read like something from a children’s book. “It does seem to rhyme.”

He thrust out a hand to take back the manuscript. “It rhymes. Vale. No problems there.”

Ignoring him, I flipped toward the middle and tried to read again.

Al-Cerraz grabbed for it more insistently. “It doesn’t matter what he’s written. It’s been done already, a hundred times.”

“A thousand times,” I corrected him distractedly, still reading. “But maybe if you took more time away from touring—more than just the odd week off now and again. You’d have time and quiet and a good piano—”

At that moment, the train shuddered. Gauthier fell toward Al-Cerraz’s lap, then regained his balance. We all looked at each other, surprised for a moment, but nothing more seemed to happen, and the train banked smoothly into a curve. Just as reassured smiles began to spread, a second jolt hit. Metal screeched against metal as the train braked to a halt. Gauthier lost his balance again and hit his head with a dull thud. But that didn’t stop him from being the first to run outside.

Five minutes later, he was back. “That first bump might have been some sort of failed explosive.”

Al-Cerraz said, “An exaggeration, don’t you think? I’d wager it was debris.”

“If so, debris artfully placed,” Gauthier replied.

Outside in the hallway, two men were arguing. We opened our door to find the conductor interrogating a man who didn’t have a ticket. The porter was suggesting they put him off the train immediately. The conductor wanted to confine him and turn him over to authorities at the next station. The man himself seemed confused; he continued to pat his pockets and search for words of explanation in broken Spanish.

I was considering intervening—it didn’t seem right to leave a man out here in the middle of nowhere, with nothing but rocks and bushes, not even a gnarled tree for shade—when Al-Cerraz stepped in front of me to flag down a passing serving girl carrying a tray of sandwiches.

“We’ll have some of those,” he said.

“I can’t,” the girl replied. “They’re someone else’s. But I can’t find the door.”

“What’s the number?” Gauthier asked.

She cocked her chin downward, indicating a ticket in the front pocket of her apron. “It isn’t a number, just a name. But I can’t make it out.”

Gauthier reached toward the apron. “I will try to read it for you,” he said, his French accent noticeably thicker.

She wrinkled her nose. “No, thank you. Are you movie stars?”

“Movie stars? What a treasure you are,” Al-Cerraz replied.

“I recognize you from your picture on a flyer at one of the stations.”

“How clever. And what is your name?” He was interrupted by a knock at the door. I opened it to find another serving girl, stockier than the first, but fair. She stepped over the threshold, attempted a quick smile, and then said to her friend in a low voice, “Felipa—you still haven’t found it?”

The girl shook her head.

“So—it’s Felipa,” Al-Cerraz said. “It gives a person nearly magical powers, to know another person’s true name, all the more so when it is hidden. I had my own name changed when I was scarcely twelve—”

“You changed your name?” Felipa interrupted. “That’s terribly glamorous. Dolores—they are movie stars!”

“I don’t believe it for a minute,” Dolores said, glancing around the compartment at the empty tins and bottles and the scraps of food.

Felipa, still holding the tray high, began to whine, “It comes out of our own pay if we can’t deliver it.”

“Someone will buy it,” Gauthier said.

“Not this much. Not if it goes stale.” Her lips turned down as she shaped the last word.

“Well let’s just eat it then—all of us,” Al-Cerraz said. “Don’t worry, we’ll pay for it. But only if you stay.”

“I’ve got to set this down,” Felipa said, arms starting to tremble under the weight of the tray.

Al-Cerraz ran a finger along the front of her apron, tickling her waist as he tucked some money into her pocket. “Do you promise . . . ?”

I’d watched Al-Cerraz flirt countless times but there was a manic, dogged quality to this flirtation that was all the more inappropriate given how many immediate problems begged our attention: the upsetting letter from Brenan; the train’s sudden, mysterious halt. I looked to Gauthier, thinking he would help me put an end to this impromptu party, but he was playing his customary role, following Al-Cerraz’s lead.

“I will be the gentleman,” Gauthier said to Felipa. But instead of taking her tray, he lifted only one sandwich. With pinkie finger extended, he took a bite from the middle, then tossed the rest out of the half-open train window.

Dolores spoke up: “I haven’t eaten all day! If you’re just going to waste them . . .”

“You’ll get these girls fired,” I said.

Al-Cerraz replied, “If they’re fired, they’ll live with us, in here. This compartment could use a woman’s touch. They can stay with us for a few weeks at least.”

“He’s joking,” I said. “We get off in just a few hours.” But Felipa gave me a sour look, as if she were angry with me for spoiling the fun. Then the train started to move again and she lost her footing, landing in Al-Cerraz’s lap. Her face registered surprise, uncertainty and, finally, resignation.

“If I’m too heavy, you’ll have to tell me,” she said, shifting into a more comfortable position on his knee.

“Heavy! I should think not,” he replied, and he settled his arm lightly around her waist, crooking one thick finger under her sash to loosen it.

Dolores leaned in closer to Gauthier. She said tenderly, “Do you realize your head is bleeding?”

The train moved only a few hundred yards before it stopped again. The corridor clattered with the sounds of many footsteps. The porter knocked at every door, calling out in an efficient, unworried voice, “Everyone out! Off the train!”

Felipa and Dolores exchanged glances. Al-Cerraz sighed, then gathered an armful of sandwiches and a small blanket from a pocket above one of the folded-up bunks.

Small clusters of passengers milled around the sandy wasteland just beyond the tracks. The foreign man who had been arguing with the conductor and porter had been reunited with his wife and two children; he kept a protective arm around the younger child’s shoulders, glaring at the train staff anytime they drew near.

Al-Cerraz spread the blanket over a steep and scrubby slope and anchored it with his rump, his back to the train. He gestured for Felipa and Dolores to sit, then called to an elegantly dressed lady picking her way across the rocky terrain with the help of a closed parasol. The serving girls exchanged nervous glances as the lady approached, unwilling to fraternize with well-heeled passengers so openly, where everyone could see.

“Please, stay,” Al-Cerraz lamented without rising, his arms outstretched, as Felipa and Dolores mumbled farewells. “Oh, come now, look at the view! Everyone together, looking out over the valley. And look, our new arrival has had the forethought to bring a parasol. This is like that beautiful painting—what is it called, Gauthier? A Sunday . . . ?”

“Un dimanche après-midi . . .” Gauthier said, still standing.

“At some island . . .”

“à l’Île de la Grande Jatte.”

“That’s it.”

The lady had reached the blanket in time to hear the last of this exchange. “Weren’t they gazing at water in that painting?” she said. “We have no water here. How do you do?”

Al-Cerraz smiled. “We have a blue horizon, though, if you look far enough and squint.” He patted the blanket. “Come, sit down. Make yourself at home.” He did not notice the departure of Dolores, who had made her way along the tracks to the back of the train, or Felipa, who was backing away slowly, confused by the mention of an island when there was no island in view, a painting she’d never heard about or seen. He was entertaining this new guest, swept along by the tide of good fortune that had brought her to his shores.

“An artist recognizes a setting, a moment,” he was lecturing the lady, who had introduced herself as Señorita Silva. “An artist of life does the same thing—we are here, the weather is fine, why should this seem like an inconvenience?”

The lady glanced over her shoulder. “But I was concerned about how abruptly we stopped.”

The conductor and a man in greasy overalls were walking down the tracks, in the direction we had been traveling. A group of male passengers watched them go, then formed a tighter circle near the locomotive, scratching their heads and wiping their brows as they talked amongst themselves.

Al-Cerraz reached out and tugged me down by the trouser leg. “Are you traveling with any friends?” he asked Señorita Silva. “Perhaps someone who would enjoy meeting my shy, impolite friend here?”

She answered distractedly. “With my sister. But look where those men are heading. On the tracks—does that look like a log to you? There aren’t many trees about. I suppose they used the brakes just in time.”

Al-Cerraz shook his head forlornly. He refused to look in the direction she was gesturing. “We have food, a blanket, shade if shade is needed, sun if sun is preferred . . .”

Gauthier offered tentatively, “I’ll go see what it’s about, if it will make everyone feel better.”

Al-Cerraz slapped his leg with satisfaction. “There—our expert. An engineer at heart.”

When Gauthier was out of earshot, I reached for a sandwich and took a bite, chewing moodily. I said to Al-Cerraz, “When I wanted to help talk to that foreign man on the train, you didn’t volunteer my time—or your own.”

“I fathomed,” the pianist enunciated slowly, trying to impress this latest lady with his diction, “that you were going to get embroiled in some sort of political discussion with the train staff. Not a technical one.”

Señorita Silva tilted her head toward me, fingering a pendant around her neck. “Are you very political?”

“He is a cellist,” Al-Cerraz said.

She narrowed her eyes playfully. “Is that like a communist?”

Al-Cerraz reached out to extract a burr from the knotted laces of the lady’s boot, allowing his wrist to graze the knob of her stockinged ankle. “I put these well-trained hands at your service.”

“Are you a doctor?”

He laughed. “A doctor! Doctors are butchers. They lay their hands on living things and prod them toward death. I touch things that are long dead and bring them to life.”

She pursed her lips together, suppressing a smile. “A riddle.”

He plucked another burr from the underside of her hem. “These little devils have a way of crawling into dangerous places. I promise only to feel for them, not look . . .”

Her face registered no shock, though I’m sure mine did. He was seducing her as swiftly as he had attempted to seduce Felipa. If she walked away, there would be others. If I walked away, he wouldn’t notice. Even with onlookers mere meters to either side, he would move his hands under her skirts, just because he enjoyed a challenge; it distracted him from his troubles nearly as well as playing the piano.

“There now,” he said.

“A little higher,” he said.

“Now, if you’ll close your eyes,” he said.

And his last rambling words: “My belief is that people simply choose to be unhappy . . .”—before the startling explosion which brought the impromptu picnic to an abrupt end.

 

“As soon as we reach a station, I will contact his sisters,” I told Al-Cerraz later, as we contemplated the four bodies amid the wreckage of wood and burnt fuses and wire. Two hundred yards away, where the undamaged train awaited, there was no sign of the disaster, except for the fluttering tatters of singed cloth. A woman was crying, back near the train, but her sobs were indistinct hiccups swallowed by the warm wind.

Gauthier’s family would want to know what happened. How would I explain?

“Anarchists,” a man next to me muttered. “People who want our entire country to fall on its knees.”

A younger man next to him reacted with offense: “You don’t know that. It could have been our own Civil Guard.”

“Wrecking a train?”

“Wrecking reputations, more like.”

I didn’t care, then or later, who’d done it. I just wanted to know how one could explain to nine sisters how their brother, who had avoided nearly every malady of those times—including both war and influenza—could suddenly and unthinkably have perished.

I turned to Al-Cerraz. “Do you know all of the sisters’ names?”

“It is possible that he is only unconscious.”

“That isn’t possible, Justo. There’s nothing you can do. Let me take you back.”

But he was gripping the shoulder of another train passenger, a man in a dark suit who had brought blankets to cover the bodies. He was telling the stranger, “When we bothered him too much, he’d lay an arm over his head, just like that . . .”

I pulled on his sleeve.

“. . . he’d pretend to sleep . . .”

I pulled harder, but he wouldn’t leave until he’d finished explaining.

“. . . I think he pretended not to mind things, when really he did.” And from the measured insistence with which Al-Cerraz spoke, I realized—finally—that he was talking about himself.