CHAPTER

14

We escorted the violinist’s crated remains to the French border. The box would make a slow and circuitous route to Paris, a lower priority than the soldiers and matériel making its way to and from the western front. We also sent his two trunks and his violin, but not before lifting the neck out of the case and looking into the rosin box beneath, to see how much Gauthier had managed to save over the years toward his Polynesian retirement. We hoped it would be enough for the funeral, with perhaps some additional assistance that his sisters would appreciate. But when we lifted the rosin and the tiny polish cloth beneath, we found only three crumpled bills, barely enough to buy a new set of strings.

I watched as Al-Cerraz opened his own billfold and emptied it, then retrieved a small cigar box from his largest trunk and emptied that.

“Is that everything?” I asked as I watched him roll the bills, fit them carefully around the violin, and push hard to close the case.

“Everything and nothing,” he said.

“I have a little more.” I reached into my own jacket, but he waved me off.

“We’ll need it.”

At San Sebastián we inquired about escorting the crate and trunks on into France, but the stationmaster said, “There’s no point in it. At Paris they’ll just ask if you’re ‘essential.’ First, you’re Spanish.”

“I maintained an address in France for years,” said Al-Cerraz.

“And second, what did you say were your professions?”

“We’re musicians, sir,” Al-Cerraz fumed.

The stationmaster returned his ticket pad to his pocket.

 

For three weeks we holed up in a hotel room in Bilbao. The staff was deferential, but only until word got around that the IOUs we had scattered around town weren’t being paid. Then we were back where we started; worse, actually, with the money from Brenan having dried up.

I asked Al-Cerraz, “Don’t you have savings somewhere, from all that earlier touring and recording?”

His chin sagged toward his chest.

I remembered the Stanley Steamer franchise and all the other passing infatuations. “Investments?”

He sighed.

“Dare I ask if your mother is doing any better these days?”

He mumbled, “No better than yours, I’m sure.”

“Would Biber give us a loan?”

Al-Cerraz covered his face with his hands. “Gauthier was always the one who wrote to him. Gauthier did everything.”

“I don’t mind taking on additional duties.”

“I don’t want to think of duties. I don’t want to think of anything. Please stop. I can’t think.”

Our best option was to tour again, but we had no trio now. We did not even have a duet.

I played a solo recital in the hotel restaurant to earn some kitchen credit and a few more nights in the hotel manager’s good graces. That night I placed my cello near Al-Cerraz’s bed, where he had reclined through the dinner hour, and played a new score I had purchased in the city. It was a furious, yearning piece—insistent, emotional, difficult to ignore. I sight-read it for forty minutes, beginning to end, with only the briefest pauses.

The next morning I returned to the third movement—the Andante—and repeated it several times as Al-Cerraz washed lethargically and picked up the hotel phone to order a small lunch of patatas bravas and meat-stuffed cabbage. When the food came, he picked at it, then crawled back into bed, with the blanket up and around his ears. But later he asked, “Who was that by?”

“Rachmaninov.”

The name stirred him. “Rachmaninov.”

The next day, he asked me, “Arranged for cello?”

“Composed originally for the cello. Cello and piano.”

When he didn’t respond, I added, “G Minor, from 1901.”

“It’s vaguely familiar.”

The third and final day, when I played it again, he said, “I didn’t recognize the first two movements the other day. They sound so bare without the piano.”

“Of course. It’s Rachmaninov. He composed it for a friend, a cellist named Anatoly Brandukov. But he couldn’t help giving the piano the best part.”

“You have it? The complete score?”

“I do.”

 

And we were performing again; slowly at first, in the north of Spain, as Al-Cerraz allowed his spirit to be revived by the work of rehearsing new compositions and arranging old ones, filling in the missing violin parts with more challenging cello accompaniments. The absence of our partner cast a shadow over our first performances. But at the same time, it forced a clean break with old habits. We could not play by rote, nor we could we mimic other trios’ arrangements.

We had to innovate, and as the months passed, our sound matured—though, in respect for Gauthier’s passing, we steered clear of self-congratulation. Instead, we protested more than was necessary about the difficulties of coordinating train schedules and counting luggage. One day, just after exiting a train, Al-Cerraz discovered he had lost an entire trunk carrying some of his childhood memorabilia, including early copies of a march he had written when he was six years old, as well as a postcard photo of his mother which he’d never let me see. Tallying the losses, he dropped to his knees, and began to gasp and cough into his hands while other passengers hurried around us. I didn’t know what to do, how to help—other than to stand by as Al-Cerraz grieved the disappearance of these talismans, proofs of his mother’s youthful beauty and his own precocity. But there was a benefit to the mishap. Al-Cerraz had been groping for evidence that, logistically, we could not manage as well without Gauthier. This dramatic demonstration allowed him to rage a final time about our violinist’s death, an emotional purging that made room for a deeper artistic truth: that we played far better without him.

We didn’t intend to remain a duet, but it proved hard to find a compatible substitute violinist. The first we fired after a month, when he refused to play the flyspeck villages that Al-Cerraz and I continued to visit when we could, between more profitable city engagements. Next came a slew of hardworking violinists with insufficient talent or talented violinists with insufficient stamina. Biber wrote, beseeching us to choose someone young, attractive, or recently “discovered” in order to boost ticket sales, especially in the larger cities. But we weren’t interested in gimmicks. We accepted our musical marriage, “For better or for worse,” as they say.

And there were many “betters”: ovations, attention from the press, letters of interest from recording companies. Financially, we regained a modest footing, able to get by comfortably as long as we continued to perform—which Al-Cerraz would have done even if no one paid him, once he’d shaken off his deepest gloom. He returned to sending his mother a little money each month, even without Brenan’s further assistance.

But those are financial details. What I remember best from those times is the music itself. When it succeeded, we took hold of the audience’s attention, working it from a distracted, unshaped mass into spun beauty, passing the fine strands back and forth until we wove together something grander, not only music but memory, too—the particulars of past and present, stretched taut across a loom of timeless ideals. Harmony. Symmetry. Order.

The strength of that weave is what anchored me, while Al-Cerraz took a greater pride and fancy in how our sounds evoked the tapestry’s edges: the soft fringes of the natural world just beyond our playing. A current of warm air, scented with orange blossoms. Blue shadows, lightening with the rising moon. Or rather, the imagined beauty of those things. Poets claim the moonlight is warm, but that warmth is only in the mind’s eye.

Our styles were different. Our aims were different. During our best times, it didn’t matter. We had become, finally, more than the former prodigy Al-Cerraz, with accompaniment. We had become a true conjunto musical: unified, complete, and whole.

 

Revived as he was, Al-Cerraz remained a more sober man overall. I know he was fretting about the Don Quixote commission. He still hadn’t managed to compose anything of value, whether for a patron or for his own satisfaction. Even the November 1918 armistice did not overjoy him. To him it meant that the rest of Europe was awaiting his return, unless they had forgotten him. Either possibility seemed to fill him with anxiety.

By December we were traveling a northern route between Spanish cities, picking up telegrams at every stop, turning down offers to play in the south because Al-Cerraz wanted to remain ready for the slightest flurry of interest from north of the Pyrenees.

Finally, word from Biber came: “Cancel Burgos and head east. Biarritz en route, then Toulouse. Three concerts booked, more planned.”

“East?” Al-Cerraz took the telegram from my hands. “He means northeast! He means France!” He kissed the telegram, then kneeled down and attempted to put his lips to the sidewalk, or as close as he could get before his waist refused to bend any farther.

I reached for his elbow. “That’s what you do when you get to a place, not when you leave one.”

“Toulouse!” he shouted, taking my arm and struggling to his feet. “Now the war is over! He wrapped both his arms around me and squeezed. “Perhaps Marseilles after that. Then Paris.” He dropped his arms and his voice. “Mon Dieu, I need new shoes. Oh,” and he splayed his fingers and regarded the nails with disgust. He twisted to look over one shoulder, trying to gain a view of the back of his frayed suit jacket. He kept turning, like a dog trying to bite its own tail.

“Come on, Cinderella,” I urged him. “We need to check the train schedule. There will be a dozen better places across the border where you can shop and get a manicure.”

He looked horrified. “You do not arrive and then dress. You dress and then arrive. What if someone hears I’m en route and comes to meet me on the platform?” Then he switched to French, slipping into it as easily as he’d slipped into the Retiro pond that day, and leaving me nearly as stranded. English was my second strongest tongue; German after that, owing to my fondness for biographies of Bach. Still I caught the gist, as he gushed through pursed lips about certain theaters, the parties of Madame Lafitte, a restaurant in Bayonne.

“Five years,” he told me, as we waited at a café across from the train station, an hour before we were due to depart. A mostly uneaten croissant rested on the plate in front of him. He’d pinched at it repeatedly, blanketing the table with buttery flakes. “Nearly an eighth of my life.

And this,” and pushed the plate away, but only by a few centimeters. “I can’t eat it. Too rich.” A server began to approach, but at the bovine swing of Al-Cerraz’s head over the plate backed away.

“I’m sure everything has changed,” he said.

“I’m sure it has.”

“Who will remember me?”

“They asked for you. Biber got the bookings. Tout le monde is waiting for you, waiting for everything to be back to normal.”

“Tout le monde,” he repeated, and began to push fingerfuls of croissant into his mouth, covering his beard and thick mustache with crumbs.

 

That night, despite the train’s soporific rocking, Al-Cerraz didn’t sleep well.

“What did I say about Rite of Spring?” he whispered, then barreled out of the bottom bunk to stand next to me, his mouth level with my head. I rolled away from him and told him to ask me in the morning.

“When I came to see you in Madrid, and found you in the bar,” he persevered. “We went to the park. I told you about Stravinsky. About the premiere, and the riot it caused. I agreed with the detractors. Do you remember?”

I rolled back and felt his steamy breath on my face—no smell of liquor, only the sweet staleness of long, dark hours. “We talked about a lot of things that day.”

“I wasn’t fair. I was narrow-minded.”

I thought for a moment. “You told me how you’d heard jazz, that same month in Paris, and loved it. See? You weren’t narrow-minded. Go to sleep.”

Silence. But I knew he was still there. His fingers, resting on the edges of the bunk, pulled it downward. Rolling slightly toward him, I could feel the pressure of the guardrail against my leg. After several minutes, I must have fallen asleep again. His next words interrupted a dream.

“I can still hear . . .” he whispered.

“Hmmm?”

“The catcalls. Debussy—he was there, pleading with the audience, telling them to calm down and listen. The dancers couldn’t hear the orchestra. Ravel was in the audience, screaming Genius! Genius!’ at the top of his lungs while a veritable brawl broke out. Those two men recognized what they were hearing. They weren’t threatened by it.”

“Next time, listen to men like Debussy and Ravel.”

“You know why I didn’t?”

When I didn’t respond, he answered the question for me. “Because of Ravel’s Rapsodie Espagnole—1908. And Debussy’s Iberia—1910. I heard them both. I saw them performed. I bought the scores. I was a Spaniard in Paris, and every French composer was writing Spanish music—my music!—what I should have written, if I had been more focused, more forward-thinking, more willing to abstain from the instant gratuitous pleasures of performing, of being admired . . .”

I was wide awake now. “The French are always writing picture-postcard music about Spain. Bizet started it, before you were born.”

“Yes. Precisely. Picture-postcard. But what beautiful postcards. And what Englishman doesn’t hope to meet some exotic Carmen dancing outside a cigarette factory when he vacations in Andalucía?”

I waited for more, but when he didn’t continue, I offered, “Rimsky-Korsakov. Capriccio Espagnol—what, 1887? 1888?”

“Must have been. I think I was five years old.”

“Just so you don’t blame the French.”

I stared into the darkness, listening to him breathe, until he said, “Perhaps the well is dry.”

I sat up on one elbow. “It’s just exoticism—writing about some faraway, folkloric land that’s easier to capture than your own. The way the Russians love to write about the Orient, for example.”

He wasn’t listening. “They have created a Spain more real than our Spain; their art has transcended our reality.”

“That’s a dangerous thing, transcending reality. Look at Don Quixote—he was beaten to a bloody pulp.”

Al-Cerraz groaned. “Please, not Don Quixote. If I were free of Don Quixote, I might dare try my hand at some other kind of composition.”

“But haven’t you tried?”

“Not really. Not in years.”

“But you do keep a notebook.”

“Yes, I scribble things in a notebook, when I can’t get a sound out of my head. It’s not to help me remember. Sometimes, it’s the only way I can manage to forget. But that doesn’t make me a composer. The difference between my notes and a finished opera is like the difference between a grocery list and a novel.”

He expelled the weariest of laughs. “I don’t think on large scales. What Spaniard does? We can’t even fathom true nationhood—‘I am a Galician, you are a Basque, he’s Catalan, she’s a gypsy.’ I mean, look—look at how we eat! We can’t hold a thought long enough to plan a dinner. Instead, it’s tapas—an olive here, a bite of fish there, now I’ll switch to meatballs.” He laughed again. “Feliu, are you awake?”

“Mmm.” I had closed my eyes again.

“Compare it to the Germans—everything to them is epic. Heroic. The strength, the character!”

“Too epic,” I mumbled.

“What?”

“They overreached. They lost the war. They’re finished. You’re always asking, ‘What will last?’ Not them.”

“I don’t know.” He sighed. “Sometimes I can’t even see the connections between one moment and the next. I don’t have any mythic stories to tell. I can barely understand the story of my own life. How did I get to this?”

“You were apologizing about Stravinsky.”

He snorted. “No. My life, I mean. How did I get to this?”

A pause again. The sounds of the train. The soprano of steel wheels gliding over a new pattern in the track, as we sped without stopping through a village station, the platform cloaked in darkness except for one mist-haloed station lamp—a low, flickering star, here and gone.

“I have sinned, Feliu. I have erred. I have been envious . . .”

“You still are.”

“I have been vain . . .”

“We will be playing tomorrow near a church. You’ll have no trouble finding a priest.”

“I don’t”—he stuttered—“I’m not—the kind of man to make confession.”

“You just did. Now, please. I was sleeping.”

I felt the weight of his fingers leave the mattress, then from beneath me came his voice one last time: “Thank you, Feliu.”

 

For me, those first European months provided an effortless introduction to some of the world’s greatest music halls, on the arm of a musician already beloved. The French, the Swiss, the Italians—they did remember him, and they were even more eager than he to forget the war years and to embrace art and entertainment anew. Long lines of automobiles queued up outside the halls and theaters we were playing. Ladies arrived in backless evening gowns and soft knee-skimming skirts. Headlines carried news of war reparations and hunger, but at the parties hosted for us after major city concerts, talk focused instead on movies, fashions, and America’s experiment with Prohibition.

“Will you play in America next?” a lady in Nice asked Al-Cerraz.

“I’m sure we shall!” He raised his glass to the room.

Yet whatever relief I had been able to provide to Al-Cerraz in our midnight conversation seemed to be dissipating. “In Spain, I was able to feel I was doing a service,” he confided to me when we reached Paris after a five-city tour. “Not here, where there is a concert every night of the week, and a play, and an art opening; and everyone has records, and radio. Well, it’s the modern age. It’s freeing, in a way. And did you know, Madame Lafitte has a mustache now? She wears that hobble skirt, the Poiret number, but I think it was lovelier when I couldn’t see her ankles so plainly. And the oysters at Bayonne—oof. Better in memory, perhaps, than reality.”

“Perhaps if you’d had merely a dozen, instead of four dozen.”

“I suppose it couldn’t last forever,” he sighed. “The Belle époque is over.”

The Belle époque was over, but in Paris, Les Années Folles—the Crazy Years—had just begun. A strong dollar drew American writers and artists to the Left Bank. Women bared their breasts at nightclubs. Men attended street parties in the spring without clothing, their bodies painted in gleaming colors. At night, jazz blared in the alleyways. During the day, on the streetcars, young girls rolled down their stockings, hiked up their skirts, and leaned out the windows, singing, “Oh, how I hate to get up in the morning!”

The world was new again, or seemed to be. In Paris, it had become fashionable to thumb one’s nose at anything conventional, to take nothing seriously, to parody everything that had gone before. The lingering trauma of the Great War had invited a regression into childishness, complete with Dada-ist baby babble—a prolonged metaphysical giggle.

But a giggle doesn’t satisfy, and even nude costume balls lose their novelty with surprising speed. Beneath the glamour, surrealism, and silliness, people hungered for eternal excellence. They clamored for Beethoven and Bach, for Paganini and Liszt. They clamored for Al-Cerraz and me.

The gossip columns reported our appearance at Gertrude Stein’s Sunday salon. We drew a crowd in the modest Salle Thérèse, its stained-glass windows still boarded up from German shelling. We sold out the larger, grander Théâtre des Champs-Elysées and elicited a massive standing ovation that continued to build even after Al-Cerraz re-entered the stage, peaking only after I reentered and stood at his side, bowing together.

He took my rising stature in stride. We toured fifteen more European cities, many more damaged than Paris had been; many waking only slowly to postwar life. But we always returned to Paris. In no time at all, we were the top classical billing there. We were asked to play on the first anniversary of the death of Claude Debussy, who had passed away during a week when the city was being bombarded, and whose casket was carried through deserted streets. Now, finally, Debussy could be properly honored. We performed a special arrangement of the French composer’s Claire de Lune, and then led a procession to the Cimetière de Passy, where Debussy’s grave sat under a bower of chestnut trees, with a view of the Eiffel Tower.

After the crowd dispersed, I suggested to Al-Cerraz that we cross the city and visit the grave of Gauthier, something we had not yet done. It was March, and the trees were in bud, but in the mist they still looked skeletal, their branches black with rain. We found the cemetery, the name of which I no longer recall. We found the groundskeeper, and with him spent a good hour looking for the grave, confounded by the sheer number of new plots, filled with victims of war, influenza, and starvation. By the time we found Gauthier’s rectangle of earth, it was nearly dark. There was no stone yet, no trees, not much of a view. At my feet lay an old bouquet of flowers wrapped in a disintegrating cone of tissue paper, the exposed rose petals blackened with age.

“Where are the other flowers?” Al-Cerraz demanded. “Where is the tombstone?”

When I didn’t answer, he asked more insistently, “Where are his sisters?”

I responded, “Where were we?”

We stood shivering in the rain next to his grave, quietly; neither one of us prayed.

Finally Al-Cerraz said, “Which shall it be?”

I thought he meant Right Bank or Left—we hadn’t yet decided where we’d go for dinner. Earlier, we had discussed heading to a café in Montmartre to watch a local pianist and composer named Erik Satie, who—dressed always in his gray velvet suit and bowler hat—entertained diners with his melancholic piano miniatures.

But Al-Cerraz wasn’t talking about Satie, about Left Bank or Right. He was talking about the two graves we’d visited that day, and how we imagined our own future resting places.

“Like Gauthier’s—bare and forgotten? Or like Debussy’s?”

“I don’t think it matters much to them,” I said.

“It matters,” he said, voice cracking, “to me.”

 

It is a testament to our friendship that Al-Cerraz stayed in Paris as long as he did. Our roles had reversed. He, the cosmopolitan who had endured Spain only because of the war, felt ready to return and commit himself again to the more serious, unprofitable work of composing a Spanish work—not only because Brenan still expected it of him, but because, in Al-Cerraz’s mind, destiny did.

I was the one who had grown accustomed to comfort, to Left Bank cafés and international salons, to my slowly rising reputation, without which—I assured myself—I couldn’t really help Spain, anyway. In 1920 he agreed to one more European tour with me, though it proved to be a nerve-racking season for him.

On a summer night in Lucerne, fifteen minutes before curtain, Al-Cerraz burst into our shared dressing room, looking pale and distraught: “He’s here—in the audience!”

“Who?”

Al-Cerraz groaned. “Thomas Brenan.”

I sat down and withdrew my bow and a polishing cloth from its case. “That’s fine. We should invite him out after the concert.”

“Invite him out? I can’t see him. I can’t go on.”

We argued until the stage manager knocked. I tried to calm him. “He’s not expecting you to hand over a finished Don Quixote score tonight. He just wants to hear you perform. He has a right, Justo. He has been very generous to you.”

“It doesn’t matter.” He removed his cuff links and dropped them into an empty coffee cup, then began to unbutton his dress shirt.

“Pretend he isn’t there.”

“I won’t be able to focus.”

“Justo, you owe him something—”

He stopped and turned to me. “Haven’t you ever resented a debt? What of that gemstone in your bow—have you produced anything worthy of that?”

I gripped the frog of my bow protectively, feeling my thumb pass over the sapphire.

“It wasn’t payment, it was a gift.”

Al-Cerraz continued, “What about the bow itself? When your father gave it to you, did you give anything in return?”

Under my breath I answered, “My father was already dead when I received it.”

“All the more reason.”

Through the thin dressing-room door, we could hear the shuffling of feet, the bouncy echo of moving seat-backs, the coughing, rustling, and shifting of an audience preparing for the concert ahead.

Al-Cerraz said, “In Madrid, you said you’d developed a ‘distaste for favors.’ Do you remember that? You should understand my situation better than anyone.” He leaned over the sink and started to dry-heave.

“You aren’t really sick.”

He paused for a breath and wiped his dry lips. “Explain to the audience. Tell the stage manager. And make no exceptions: I’ll see no one after the concert.”

I walked out to a packed house, twenty-four hundred seats in six golden tiers all facing me in a chandelier-lit horseshoe.

I stood next to my cello chair and announced Al-Cerraz’s cancellation stiffly, as if I were reading from a piece of paper, though I held nothing in my hand but my bow. The auditorium echoed with murmured disappointment and some seats bounced up as a few people squeezed out of their rows and up the aisles. I had expected worse.

The audience settled, waiting to see what I would do next. I could still cancel for myself as well; the contract said as much. I stood under the lights, enveloped by warmth and silence and the humidity of the gathered crowd, all those expectant breaths. If I decided to play, I would have to change the program. There weren’t many choices, without accompaniment of any kind. But while my head thrummed and stalled, my hands, or my heart, decided to go ahead. I sat down, pulled my bow across the string, and began to play the Prelude to the first Bach Cello Suite.

 

After the second ovation, I slammed the dressing door closed behind me. Al-Cerraz had heard the thunderous applause; he saw me grinning and hurrying to change from my sweat-stained dress shirt into a dry, clean one. He said, “There’s no point putting that on yet, when you’re so heated up.”

I tried to open a window at the room’s far end; it was painted shut.

“You can’t be finished, with that much applause still going.”

I found a towel and scrubbed my neck with it.

He tried again. “You certainly look better than you did an hour ago. I feel better myself.” He shook the brown vial the doctor had given him. “But only a little. Maybe I should have doubled the dose.” When I still didn’t respond, he teased, “So I’ve created a monster. Now you’ll want to be a soloist!”

I didn’t understand what I was feeling. I had enjoyed playing solo, even with the greater burden of carrying the show, even with the awareness of thousands of scrutinizing faces just beyond the lights. Even now, the energy of my performance coursed through me. I was terribly thirsty. Sweat continued to drip down my spine, dampening my new shirt, soaking my waistband, where my leather belt chafed. I didn’t want to sit down.

The theater manager brought me a bottle of champagne. I swigged at it, then passed it to my partner—leaving him to worry about how it might affect his sedative-addled mind. Another arrived, courtesy of a fan who had been waylaid by the determined stage manager, and we drank that, too. But still, the adrenaline didn’t settle; I felt ill with the weight and heat of it, as if there was some force building in me that could not be expressed.

 

The next night Al-Cerraz again refused to play, worried that Thomas Brenan might have returned. I went on alone.

In Amsterdam, too, Al-Cerraz refused to play. This time, we were able to give advance notice, and the concert was publicized as a solo performance. The first-night crowd filled the hall to an acceptable three-quarters, and the next night—after a laudatory review in the city’s major newspaper—the hall filled completely.

That second night on the Amsterdam stage, I forced myself to look out in the audience as the curtain rose. As I introduced myself and explained the music I would be performing, I stood with feet widely planted, my cello and bow well behind me, next to my chair. My stance looked like confidence. It began, in fact, to feel like confidence.

I drew another ovation that night. Among those standing was a figure in the royal box, a spotlight revealing an unremarkable-looking man with sideburns and a dark suit, bowing to me and then to the audience at large. All eyes turned toward him, and the applause continued, now directed in the gentleman’s direction as well. It was later explained to me that he was Prince Hendrik, husband to Queen Wilhelmina of the Netherlands. The audience had applauded us equally, a fact that inspired in me an unbecoming giddiness that lasted for hours. I remembered Count Guzmán saying that someday a cellist could be as powerful as a king. But, I hastened to remind myself, I was not powerful at all, only popular. They were not the same thing.

What had Alberto wished for me? Not only to be good, but to do good. Was I doing anything at all besides entertaining people, and perhaps also inhibiting my partner from the serious work he wished to do? I was less than powerful. In fact, I was becoming imprisoned by my own simple desires: to be liked, to be cheered, to be comfortable, to live in a city of lights that had no connection to any person or place from my past.

I had a dream that night of following a man down a hallway. It was Prince Hendrik, dressed more regally now, in a military uniform. He pushed open a door and entered; I followed at a discreet distance. He walked toward a woman sitting on a black bench, her back turned to me, and whispered in her ear. Then he disappeared. I advanced closer to the woman, certain now that she was waiting for me, that I had something to say which she must hear. But she wouldn’t turn around. I could not reach out and touch her. And though I called out, she wouldn’t respond to my voice.

 

We had one more Dutch performance, in Utrecht. Two hours before the curtain, Al-Cerraz received a telegram from Thomas Brenan, saying the patron was back in London now, and greatly distraught that he hadn’t been able to see Al-Cerraz play.

“Gracias a Dios!” Al-Cerraz shouted to the puzzled messenger who had delivered the telegram to our dressing room, and began to dress immediately. That night we played a concert that thrilled the audience and disappointed several reviewers who noted, as I did, that Al-Cerraz had played so loudly and demonically that the cello could barely be heard.

Only two concerts remained on our tour, and both were in London, a week and a half away. Al-Cerraz made no mystery of his plans. He would come to London, he said, just to make a good show of it. Knowing that Brenan might appear, he would wait until the last minute and play sick again.

From our Dutch hotel, I corresponded with Biber, who was growing testy about Al-Cerraz’s cancellations. After London, he couldn’t promise any more bookings until Al-Cerraz was certain he was well. Unless, Biber wrote, I wanted to go ahead and make a few solo bookings?

“You wouldn’t,” Al-Cerraz said, after I’d handed him the letter. “Would you?”

“I don’t think so,” I said.

 

In London, the theater manager made it clear that he was alert to Al-Cerraz’s habit of canceling, and he insisted on having a doctor visit the pianist at our hotel the day before the concert. Al-Cerraz, fond of the sedative he had received in Lucerne, expressed a complete willingness to cooperate. He asked me, “Will a psychiatrist be able to prescribe something for relaxation?”

“Claro.” I thought for a second. “They’re sending a psychiatrist this time? Not a physician?”

“What’s the difference, exactly?”

“I guess you’ll find out. If your career as a pianist falls apart, perhaps you’ll find work as an actor.”

“But I am sick,” he protested.

“Yes, yes, I know,” I said as the hotel door closed between us.

 

I had my own London plans. Sir Edward Elgar had heard about my solo concerts in Switzerland and the Netherlands. He asked me to visit him at a friend’s house in the city, and to bring my cello along.

The renowned British composer was in his early sixties—a dapper Edwardian with tidy white hair, sharp cheekbones, and a mustache that covered all but the bottom edge of his lower lip, so that it was hard to tell if he was smiling. I felt comfortable with him immediately. There was something in his accent and bearing that reminded me of Queen Ena—even more so as he conducted most of our conversation from a piano bench.

“The world in which I was raised doesn’t exist anymore,” he said at one point. The crow’s-feet around his eyes deepened as he attempted to smile. He added, “You’ve been to Berlin?”

“I have.”

“I had many German friends. People in our line usually do. Music doesn’t stay behind borders very well.”

I mustered the courage to ask, “Did you lose someone in particular?” I didn’t have to add, “In the war.”

He cleared his throat; I saw his heavy mustache twitch. “We all lost something, didn’t we? We lost two thousand years of civilization.”

I had heard from other colleagues in musical circles that Elgar, who had been so prolific in his earlier life, had spent most of the time between 1914 to 1918 in a depressed and unproductive state. He talked about his troubles with his health, and said how much he owed his wife, Alice, who made up composition paper for him, marking the ledger lines by hand, saving him hours of drudgery. He did not mention that she was seriously ill. In fact, she would be dead within a month, and he would never compose seriously again.

“But,” he added now, “I will share with you something I did manage to accomplish during the war—the one important thing.” He brought out the score for his Cello Concerto in E Minor, premiered by the London Symphony Orchestra just the year before.

I hadn’t yet heard the concerto myself, only heard of it. I knew the premiere had been a disaster. The cellist hadn’t had adequate rehearsal time, and the critics had panned the performance. Yet Elgar revealed no lack of confidence in his own work. He felt the concerto would be one of his most-remembered compositions, much finer than his patriotic works, truer to his own reflective and subdued nature, much truer to the state of the modern world.

“Play it for me, if you will,” he said.

I looked at the cello part of the score and read the opening measures, a somber solo passage highlighted with four difficult, dramatic chords. I bowed the passage then stopped, amateurishly. The opening had sounded like a desperate cry descending into a low-pitched, agitated sob; I felt I had played it poorly. “That sounds rough to start,” I apologized. “I suppose without hearing the orchestration before it . . .”

“No. There is no orchestration before it. That’s how it begins.”

Before I could go on, he said, “I chose the cello for a reason. Of all the instruments, it is the one that sounds most like a human voice. I would ask you to play humanly, that’s all.”

I did not need to ask him for more direction after that. I had never played a piece so fully imagined, in which the cello not only took the lead but competed with the orchestration at times, as if to shake the other musicians by the throats, to make them face injustice and despair. The concerto had lighter movements, too, just as my afternoon with Elgar had lighter moments. He had laughed, during a break from my cello playing, as he told me how he’d once worked as a bandmaster in a lunatic asylum. “I was only a little younger than you are now,” he’d said. “You may not feel you are young. Believe me, you are!”

Nevertheless, it was the concerto’s dark parts that stayed with me. And the Elgar I still see in my mind is pensive, nodding almost imperceptibly at my interpretation from the piano bench, a companion in sorrow and confusion. Except that he had found a way to give voice to his confusion.

Once my cello was put away and Elgar had set a tea tray between us, I found it harder to make conversation that afternoon. He described the single recording he had made of the concerto in 1919, and said that he wanted to try again soon, in the expectation that acoustic technology had improved. He hoped I would spend some more time in London after my tour was finished, and work with him to record the concerto again.

“I will consider it,” I told him.

He set a slightly shaky hand on my shoulder in response to my quick answer. “Will you?”

When I didn’t respond immediately, he leaned closer, studying me sympathetically. “When you were playing my concerto, something in your face changed. You went away. I interpreted it as a good sign. But when you finished playing, I did not see you come back. Where were you, Mr. Delargo?”

“In my own country,” I said honestly. “In Spain.”

Elgar did not ask me again that day about recording the concerto. I think he understood that much as I loved it and even though it had moved me—perhaps because it had moved me—I wouldn’t be in a position to record it that year.

Even in his grief, Elgar had seemed perfectly sure about three things, in descending order: the power of music, the voice of the cello, and me. I respected his creation without reservation. But I was not sure about any of those three things.

“You are a young man,” he told me when we parted. “For me, it’s all I can do to grieve for a bygone world. Your generation needs to help shape a new one.”

 

Back at the hotel, I expected to find Al-Cerraz fretting about the upcoming concert, or else reclining languorously, thanks to psychiatrictonics. Instead I found him ready to pounce on me as soon as I entered his room.

“I should have tried this ages ago,” he enthused.

The visit with Elgar had tired me, and I’d spent the long walk back thinking. I wasn’t in the mood for another of Al-Cerraz’s foolish enthusiasms. I reclined on his bed and watched him pace and gesture manically.

“Hypnosis,” he explained, before I could ask. “The composer’s cure!” He reminded me that hypnosis had allowed Rachmaninov to break through a dry spell and produce his second piano concerto. He beamed, “Dr. Key explained why I love to swim so much.”

Thinking of Freud and wanting to humor my friend, I said, “Because the ocean reminds you of your mother’s womb?”

That stopped Al-Cerraz in mid-stride, finger extended, considering. “Good thinking. But what he said was this: The ocean is silent.” He paused, with a smug expression on his face, like a doorman waiting for a tip.

“Yes?”

“So that’s it. I am seeking silence. I am trying to escape from music.”

“Trying to escape. That’s why you insist on touring about three hundred days a year.”

“Well,” Al-Cerraz paused, “I am like an addict, both attracted and repulsed.”

“I can see that. I’ve felt that way toward people.”

He didn’t catch my insinuation. “The doctor said I need to get it out. I need a cassis.”

“No, that’s a liqueur, from currants. He must have said ‘catharsis.’”

Eso es.

“But what kind of catharsis?”

“One of composition, my sublimated passion.”

Sublimated—that was not an Al-Cerraz word, either.

“I think when one sublimates,” I ventured, “one takes a coarse desire—for food or sex or something else biological—and redirects it toward something loftier. You’ve done the opposite. You’ve spent the last ten years channeling your artistic drive into coarseness.”

“Regardless,” he said, “Dr. Key said I should compose a great work.”

“That’s what you’ve been saying for years. So you finally get to work on the Don Quixote.”

Al-Cerraz evaded my glance. “Actually, we had a stimulating session. I began to tell him about how I missed Spain; he has never been, but he mentioned the Alhambra. Next thing, I am telling him that this is what I’ve always longed to write—a masterpiece about the great Moorish fortresses of Andalucía.”

“I hope you weren’t just trying to please him.”

“What do you mean?”

“By reflecting back his own interests—his own perceptions. It’s only a suggestion.”

“But why would I try to please him?”

“Because he was an audience.”

“Hardly—”

“An audience of one. It is sufficient.”

Al-Cerraz changed the subject. “Next—you will be proud of me—I met with my patron.”

“With Brenan? Already?”

“He came right here. You are sitting just where I told him.”

I looked around for signs of struggle: broken bottles, shredded letters, fistfuls of hair.

“I told him about my self-discovery. And he is also interested in a symphonic work about the Alhambra. He understands that I need to pursue my own inspirations, as soon as possible.”

“That’s wonderful, Justo. You are finally free.”

“Eso es.”

He had been pacing the entire time with such heavy footfalls that I expected a maid to come knocking on the door with a complaint from the room below. Finally, he took a seat next to me, on the bed.

“It certainly buys me time,” he said, looking suddenly winded. “That is the important thing.”

“How so?”

“The Alhambra work, due in two years. Quixote, two years after that—and I don’t even have to use Brenan’s libretto, if it doesn’t inspire me.” He looked away, saving me the trouble of hiding my incredulous expression. “It’s perfectly fair, considering the support he has given me.”

“So,” I said, choosing my words carefully, “now it’s double or nothing.”

He repeated the phrase aloud, and I winced to see it sink in. “Of course, you will come home with me,” he added.

I was touched that he’d called Spain “home.” If our needs hadn’t coincided, perhaps we would have parted ways then. And perhaps it would have worked out better that way, in the long run. But fate and friendship had run an intersecting course.

“After our London concerts,” I answered him. “Then we’ll go home, Justo. You’ll find your Alhambra. I hope we both will.”