CHAPTER

18

“You don’t believe me?” I said to Al-Cerraz the next day on the second-class deck. “There she is. I’ll prove it.”

I approached the young woman and we exchanged introductions as if the evening before had never happened: What a shame to have gray days when sun on the open sea must be spectacular, and wasn’t it surprising how far from land gulls will fly. Looking skyward, she confided she didn’t care for the ocean, actually. She’d felt queasy the whole trip.

I asked her in English, “Did you bring it?”

“Bring what?”

“On this crossing—did you bring your instrument?”

“What instrument?” She tucked her slim fingers under her armpits, forearms flattening her already small, high breasts.

“Please,” I said. “If I say ‘violin’ and it’s viola, you’ll never speak to me again—and vice versa. I don’t understand the problem about violas, but I know not to make a joke of it. Make it easy for me. Tell me what you play.”

She unlocked her arms and dropped her hands slowly. “I’m sorry if my English isn’t good.”

“It’s perfect. Better than my—what is your native . . . ?”

“I don’t speak Spanish,” she said, avoiding the question.

“Any French?” Al-Cerraz butted in.

“Only a little, sorry,” she said. “German?”

“Whatever tongue, we’ll make you answer,” I said, and Al-Cerraz’s eyes widened.

“We’re on our way home to Spain,” Al-Cerraz interrupted, rescuing her from my inquiries. “And you?”

At this she hugged herself again, tucked her left cheek close to her shoulder, and stared at the rail. Then she spun on one low heel and walked away.

“Well done,” I said.

He shook his hairy head and held up his palms. “You were the rude one.”

 

It was the Beethoven ladies who were able to enlighten me, at least in part. I’d met the two elderly women on my rambles through second class, and we’d already had several discussions about “new music,” as one of them called anything composed after her mother’s birth year, 1820. The young lady was from northern Italy, they informed me. They stumbled over her last name (“About seventeen syllables long—no wonder she introduces herself by her given name”) but her first name was Aviva. They knew for certain that she had had proper business in the United States, some kind of special visa, an invitation to play violin with the New York Philharmonic. Yet no sooner had she arrived in New York than she had turned around and booked a cabin to go back on the very same ship.

“Do you think it’s stage fright?” said the darker-haired lady—the one who preferred Beethoven’s early period.

I said, “I don’t think that’s it. If she had a foreign job offer, she must have had considerable experience performing back in Italy.”

“Exactly,” the other matron said. “I think it’s a personal matter. Perhaps love.”

“Yet the skin on her finger is evenly toned,” the darker-haired matron interjected. Seeing my puzzled expression, she explained, “She has not recently discarded any ring.”

The other lady countered, “Perhaps she never obtained one.”

Al-Cerraz appeared a short while later, claiming he was already bored with his tablemates, who had spent all of luncheon discussing the latest vanished billions. “They’re calling this ‘Black Tuesday,’” he groaned. “First Black Thursday, now Black Tuesday. The entire week is a massive, ugly bruise.”

“What do you think about a concert?”

“Another one?”

“A different one. A trio.”

 

The captain was willing to close off a small parlor for us, long enough to allow us to audition Aviva. Though she showed up with her violin, she demonstrated no eagerness to remove the instrument from its case. Al-Cerraz tried to put her at ease, encouraging her just as he had encouraged me, the first time we’d played together at the palace in Madrid. He could be wonderful that way, when his mind wasn’t preoccupied by appetite, ego, or thoughts of the distant future.

Still, our small talk lagged, and Aviva still seemed disinclined to play. With a pang of desperation, I said, “This is quite an opportunity for you, if you don’t mind my saying so.”

She cocked her head. “I’m perfectly aware of your reputation.”

Al-Cerraz heard the stridency in her tone. “Don’t mind him. Please—this crossing is dreadfully dull. Do it for me.”

“I’ll think about it,” she said.

“No thinking,” he said. “Just say you will.”

I wanted her to perform, but not just because he’d beseeched her. “Take your time, Miss—”

“Just think about it,” Al-Cerraz interrupted. “It isn’t much to ask.”

She nodded and gripped her violin case, eyes on her shoes. When she turned to go, Al-Cerraz winked at me, then started to shuffle through the sheet music he’d spread out on the piano’s lid.

He called to Aviva, “Au revoir. Perhaps we’ll see you on deck later. Could you close the door after you?” Then to me, louder: “Actually Feliu, if you have just a moment.” He stopped shuffling and pulled out a sheet, squinting at it. “I don’t think I’ve found the pulse of this particular work.”

In all our years together, Al-Cerraz had never petitioned me for any kind of interpretive advice. He didn’t typically read from sheet music, either. He might study it away from the piano, but when he played, it was nearly always from memory. Now he had a seat on the bench and pulled up to the keyboard. “Just listen.” His hands flew over the keyboard.

“I don’t recognize it.”

“Fauré, D Minor,” he said, over his frenetic playing.

“You have my part?”

“On the piano.”

“Why didn’t you say so?”

As I went to retrieve it, Al-Cerraz shouted over his shoulder, “Shut it, please. I won’t have the outside world hearing something I haven’t yet perfected.” I realized he was addressing Aviva, still lingering in the open doorway.

But of course he had perfected it. He had launched into Fauré’s restless opening with complete confidence, his hands conjuring the sound of a rapidly tolling bell, hitched to some wave-tossed buoy, sending out warnings across a dark seascape. The agitated music begged for some-thing—but not for anything that Al-Cerraz or any pianist could provide. Music in hand, I took my seat and joined in: and there, ah, the relief provided by the cello—a slower, surer melody, like a ship cutting through those agitated waves, holding steady against the wind and the spray.

The two parts together were magical, but they required a third to complete Fauré’s vision. I was so busy following my own music that I didn’t see Aviva take a step back into the room and extract her violin from its case. She joined the trio just as the violin’s melody twined with the cello’s, then rose above it, cleaving the darkness. She had no trouble leading me, using the bold harmonizing strokes the piece required. But later in the movement, it was as if she suddenly realized how high she’d climbed; some vertigo set in and her energy waned a little. She continued to play masterfully, in a way no audience would have criticized; but she had succumbed to some self-imposed limit.

And yet she looked contented when we finished, all of us breathing heavily as the final notes echoed across the room, inhibitions erased by the sheer physical challenge of working through an unfamiliar piece so quickly. Aviva stood next to Al-Cerraz, laughing now. “Next time, you’ll let me tune, I hope!”

“Next time,” Al-Cerraz smiled. “Those are the words I like to hear. You’ve played it before, I take it?”

For the first time it registered with me that Aviva hadn’t needed the sheet music.

“I performed it two years ago,” she replied.

I said, “I’m not familiar with it. When was it composed?”

“In 1923,” Al-Cerraz guffawed. “Feliu—you must keep up with things!” And then back to her: “But he’s lost in the 1600s, half the time.”

It didn’t matter—not the teasing and one-upmanship that followed, not the trivial banter as the euphoria of a wonderfully executed movement faded. We had seen what Aviva could do, and perhaps a little of who she was.

 

I sought the captain’s permission to give a concert the last night before reaching port. I explained that we knew it was strange, assembling an untried trio of musicians in such record time.

“Strange? Record time? Not at all. On this ship, I’ve married passengers who met just days before. Seems to be some people’s notion of romance, to hurry things along. Besides, the passengers loved your first concert. Anything that will keep them out of my radio room is much appreciated.”

Furthermore, the captain said, having a trio concert with Aviva would be a kindness to her.

“A kindness?”

“You do realize she doesn’t have any money, don’t you? A patron paid for her westbound ticket so that she could save what little she had to get herself set up in an apartment. But then she spent all of it coming back. Unlike most of the people on board, she was broke even before Black Tuesday.”

“I didn’t realize.”

“Well, we’ve got some music fanciers on board. I’m sure we can arrange to do something for her. Nothing as crass as passing a collection plate, don’t you worry.”

When we told Aviva the news, she tried to dodge the concert one more time, halfheartedly. “I don’t have anything to wear besides this,” she said, lowering her eyes to the same prim, scalloped-neck dress she’d worn the night Al-Cerraz and I had performed.

I wanted to say that clothes didn’t matter, but Al-Cerraz was our showman. “We’ll find you something better,” he told her, pinching the sleeve of her dress.

It turned out that the Beethoven ladies’ young niece, who was traveling with them, had a green gown that she was willing to take in at the waist. Wielding a pincushion, the two of them crowded with Aviva into Al-Cerraz’s large cabin—he’d taken the captain up on the offered upgrade—while Al-Cerraz and I hovered near the doorway. One of the ladies held the sleeveless gown in front of Aviva’s torso. Aviva turned to look at me, lips parted, eyebrows tilted upward in an expression of confusion, nausea, or both.

Then the door closed.

“She was fine at rehearsal,” I said.

“I don’t think she’s nervous about playing, I think it’s just the attention. And maybe the dress. It’s somewhat revealing. One of the ladies told me she grew up in a convent.”

“Not fair, is it? You and I aren’t planning on wearing anything revealing.”

“Thank goodness,” he said. “People don’t want to see any more of me than they already do. As for you—you’re invisible. Don’t argue with me. When you’re playing, you hardly look up from the floor. There’s not much to see but the slump of your shoulders and the shine of your head. But they’ll be staring at her, one way or the other.” He added, “You stare at her, even when she’s not playing.”

After a few minutes, it dawned on me that we both looked like nervous bridegrooms, pacing outside the door. I, for one, chose to leave.

 

And regretted my decision deeply, when I returned an hour later.

Al-Cerraz’s cabin door was closed. I figured the volunteer seamstresses were gone by now and Aviva was finishing her toilette. I put my ear to the door. There was some knocking and bumping, and then Aviva’s voice, high and strained: “It hurts.”

“Hold still,” came Al-Cerraz’s voice, followed by a grunt. “I’m not going to tell you again.”

Perspiration sprang from my temples, chest, and armpits; even from the soles of my feet.

“It doesn’t feel good—please!” she said again.

“Maybe it has to hurt. That’s what my mother said.” His mother, the worn-out courtesan? Dios mío.

I started to knock, but then I heard Aviva say, “I want to put my clothes back on.”

My knuckles hovered against the door; my hand paused above the knob. Why couldn’t I act when it mattered most? But this was Al-Cerraz. Granted I’d witnessed many of his countless seductions, in small towns across Spain, but he’d never take a woman against her will. Or would he?

I heard him groan again. Please, I thought, just hit him. Kick. Scream. He’s hopeless, once he’s flat on the ground. Just push. But no sound from Aviva.

The back of my hand brushed the door, faltering. I cleared my throat loudly: no scuffling response inside. Then a sharp feminine yelp.

Without thinking, I grabbed the doorknob, turned, and fell forward. The door hadn’t been locked. Aviva was sitting awkwardly on the edge of a bed in the green gown, hunched forward, while Al-Cerraz knelt on the floor before her, grasping one of her slender arms. They turned to look at me, but only for a second. Then Al-Cerraz resumed what he was doing, grunting and pulling. And what was that in his hand?

“Aviva,” I said. She winced and looked toward me, but she didn’t spring to her feet or burst into grateful tears.

“Hold still,” Al-Cerraz said again. And gave the half-lemon another turn, grinding it onto her elbow.

He leaned back on his haunches. “Maybe milk would have worked better. I remember my mother using milk, too. At least I think I do. Haven’t you ever seen a lemon before, Feliu? And shut that door.”

“He won’t rest until he’s satisfied with my appearance.” Aviva extracted her arm from Al-Cerraz’s grasp. “Now look. The skin isn’t white—it’s all red.”

“Better than black.” He laughed. “Now we know why she didn’t want to wear a sleeveless gown. She has a tomboy’s arms, dark and rough as wood from all those years of climbing trees.”

“Walls. We’d climb the convent walls, I said.”

I closed the door and leaned against it, weak-kneed.

“He’s teasing me, Feliu.” She looked uncomfortable using my first name, but there—she had said it. “I hate my arms. They’re too hairy from the elbows down—like a little monkey, a teacher once told me. I can’t believe I’m talking about this. I’ve never gone without sleeves in my life.” Now she was laughing, holding her red elbow and laughing.

“And this,” she pointed to a little gold cross at her neck. The same niece who’d loaned her the gown had insisted on loaning her jewelry, too. “I didn’t want to offend her, but I can’t wear this. How did I get mixed up with you both?”

She laughed again, then stopped herself, hand patting her neck as if she had swallowed a fishbone. But my expression must have looked even more pained. She reached a hand toward me: “Mr. Delargo, are you all right?”

 

The concert was a resounding success, followed all too quickly the next day by our arrival in port. Before we knew it, we were walking down the gangplank and into the darkened harbor on clumsy, sea-adapted legs. In a waterfront café we attempted to delay our final leavetaking. Al-Cerraz went in search of a long-distance telephone service. Dark fog blocked our view of the water. Aviva and I sat inhaling the damp air, which smelled of fish and fuel.

The night before, after the concert, some of the wealthier passengers had crowded around her, asking about her plans. The captain had hinted that she was bound for Germany, a report that she’d confirmed reluctantly. She’d barely gotten the words out before they pressed bills upon her, praising her performance and saying it was the least they could do to further her career.

Now, over coffee, I pushed her for details, which she provided just as reluctantly. “My contact is Herr Weill. He had offered a job before, and I realized, when I reached New York, that I should have taken it.”

“That’s something. Isn’t it?”

“Yes, but it doesn’t start for six months. It begins just ahead of the school year. I’ll be touring from school to school with the national music-education program.”

We sat for a while without speaking, until I finally said, “I still don’t understand. You had a great job waiting for you in New York, starting immediately, and you’d already traveled all that way. Why change your mind?”

She rested her cheek in one hand. “That’s a long story.”

“I’ve got nothing to do until Justo gets back.”

She bit her lip, considering. “May I ask you a question?”

“I’d be honored.”

“It may be a question you hear all the time.”

“I don’t mind.”

“Why the cello?”

I paused, rubbing my chin.

“You don’t have a stock answer?”

“I suppose I do. If I were trying to gain your sympathy, I’d tell you I was weak as a boy and needed an instrument I could play sitting.”

“That isn’t true?”

“It is true, but it’s a stock answer. If I were trying to be flirtatious—and I’m not—I’d say it’s because the cello is shaped like a woman.”

“But that’s still a stock answer.”

“Yes.”

“It’s all right if you don’t want to tell me.”

“I do want to tell you.” I cleared my throat and pushed my coffee cup to one side. “I want to tell you that the cello has the most human voice of any instrument—Sir Edward Elgar once told me that. I want to tell you that it reminds me of my mother’s singing before she stopped, and my father’s humility—or what I remember of it. That when the playing goes well, I can’t tell where I end and where the cello begins. But what I most want to tell you—”

A man squeezed past our chairs and Aviva tapped a spoon against the table nervously, waiting for the stranger to pass. Before I could continue, she said, “You’re much more talkative when your partner isn’t around.”

“He has a way of talking for both of us. And he hasn’t really been my partner for about eight years.”

“He’s very charming.”

I tried to suppress a twinge of irritation. “What I most want to tell you,” I continued, my voice lower, “is that I don’t always know why I play the cello. I tell myself various reasons, but I don’t know whether they’re rational, or true. Sometimes I wonder whether we have feelings and then invent reasons to fit them—or have reasons, and then invent the feelings.”

Aviva was staring into her cup determinedly. “But you’re something of a statesman, aren’t you? In public, you seem to know exactly why you do everything you do.”

I pressed my fingers against my temples and chose my words carefully. “Yes, that’s right. I’ve managed to give that impression.” I tried to laugh. “But—do you know?—I’ve lost my train of thought. I was really trying to talk about you.”

She shifted in her seat.

I persevered, “What I meant to say was—I was attracted to you when we met because you do seem to know why you play your instrument.”

She bowed her head slightly at the compliment.

“I’ve seen ambition before, of course, and focus—but rarely have I seen perfect focus without professional ambition. Am I insulting you?”

“No.”

“Did I answer your question?”

“A little.”

“Will you answer mine?”

She looked up. “Which one—about why I play, or why I turned back from New York?”

“I thought I might get lucky,” I said. “I thought one answer might lead to the other.”

“I don’t think it will. Not today.” She squinted out into the fog, which obscured all but the fuzzy white lights of ships docked for the night. “Why is Justo taking so long?”

“Anytime someone recognizes him, he’ll stop and chat. It can take him an entire evening to cross a town square, if he’s in a good mood.”

“Why should he be in a good mood? It seems he has lost his money, like all the Americans.”

“He’s in a good mood because we met you.”

She looked away. “I’d like to say a proper good-bye to him. I’d like to say a proper thanks and good-bye to you both.”

“But until then?”

She sighed deeply, set her cup aside, and put her hands in her lap. “I suppose it’s easier to tell this kind of story to someone I’ll never see again. . . .”

 

She was born in 1910, she said, to a musical family in an Italian mountain village near Bolzano, on the Adige River, closer to the birthplaces of Handel, Mozart, and Bach than to Rome. Innsbruck was a hundred kilometers away by train, Munich and Salzburg another hundred kilometers beyond to the north and northeast, though she never saw those places as a child. Her family was poor, and poorer yet after her parents died—her father in the war, her mother from tuberculosis a few years later. Unlike most of the other children she knew, she was an only child. She lived alone with her grandmother until the age of thirteen.

That’s when the music teacher came—the one who first recognized her talent, and persuaded Nonna to let him show her off, in small recitals in Verona and Brescia and later Bergamo. Aviva wouldn’t say his name even now, not because she’d hated him—quite the contrary. He loved music history, and he’d told her stories about all the Italian virtuosi; he took her for carriage rides even when they weren’t touring. He backed her up against the wall of the little room in his house where she sometimes slept, when they’d gotten back into town late from a performance, and made charcoal marks on the wall to show how much she’d grown. He held out his hand and pressed it against hers, marveling as her slim fingertips grew beyond his, rising crescents that, with every new half-centimeter, might stretch to reach new positions without shifting. He did not make her feel guilty for growing up, as her griefstricken and ever-fearful Nonna did. He filled her with hope.

She was fourteen when he took her to Bologna, to perform for a family that was interested in sponsoring her. They left before dawn in a horse-drawn carriage, Aviva peppering him with questions as they bumped along in the dark.

“If they bought me a violin, would it really be mine, or theirs?”

“Theirs. But you’ll be the one to play it. It doesn’t matter.”

“Remember Paganini? He borrowed that violin for a concert and loved it so much he refused to give it back.”

“Paganini could get away with such things,” he said, but without any severity. She knew he liked to hear her talk about the gaunt maestro, whose impossible-to-play caprices were among her teacher’s favorites. And it wasn’t just Paganini’s music he worshipped, but the man himself. Her teacher had a hundred-year-old snuffbox from Vienna with Paganini’s scowling, hollow-cheeked face on the lid, under a thick coat of lacquer.

“Will they send me to a conservatory?”

He squeezed her chin without answering, and it occurred to her that she shouldn’t sound so cheerful about being sent away, beyond the reach of his tutelage.

“One more question?”

He yawned—effortfully, theatrically. In truth, he didn’t look fatigued at all. One hand was cupped tensely over her knee. His own narrow legs were clenched together, kneecaps tight against the thin shiny cloth of his trousers.

“Go ahead.”

“Will they mind that I’m not Christian?”

“We won’t mention it.”

“And if they find out later?”

But in the end, the question of religion never would even arise. She would play terribly that afternoon. Signor Magione would agree to lend her a slightly better violin and ask to see her again, to discuss her future education, when he visited Bolzano on business in six months’ time. Perhaps, he said hopefully, she would have matured a little more by then.

As it turned out, in six months she would have matured too much, and she wouldn’t be able to play for him at all.

But all that was still to come. First, her teacher had a stop to make, at a graveyard in Parma that he was raising funds to improve. She knew he was a member of various men’s associations and active in all sorts of civic and Church-related causes, and she assumed that he had a personal connection, perhaps family buried there.

The morning still felt like night: A pale moon bulged low on the horizon, the unkempt grass was stiff with frost. The cemetery gate was locked but her teacher drew from his vest pocket his own key, a benefit of his philanthropy. They made their way between the stones. He didn’t speak. She searched for his surname among the inscriptions, wanting to be helpful by spotting the correct section first. But he knew where he was going and didn’t need her help.

They arrived at another small black picket gate—a separate key, drawn with great ceremony from a separate satin-trimmed pocket. Beyond the gate stood a large marble mausoleum. Four stone steps led to four columns, a pedestal, and the bust of a gaunt-cheeked man. Niccolò Paganini.

“The devil himself,” she whispered under her breath, and stooped to read the inscriptions, wondering if it was her comment about the maestro and his violin that had put the idea of coming here in her teacher’s head. She turned to thank him and to make her way back down the stairs, but he stood in her path.

“Don’t you have family to attend to?” She gestured hopefully to the rows of humbler gravesites surrounding them.

“Only this”—and he forced a smile—“my spiritual family.”

She put her hands behind her back and rocked on her heels, looking around the graveyard. She counted the seconds, watching out of the corner of one eye to see if he made a move to pray. But he continued to look straight at her, at the front of her overcoat where the buttons joined. Then he sat down on the topmost step and took a jackknife and an apple from his pocket. She watched as he began to peel it, in a long, unbroken strand.

She turned back to the pedestal. “Why doesn’t it say he died in Italy?”

“Because he didn’t. You saw more than one date, didn’t you?”

She nodded.

“In Nice, as he was dying, he refused the final sacrament, so the Church wouldn’t sanction his burial, nor would it allow the local church bells to be rung. So his body was kept unburied for five years. Does that bother you? Here, here.” He handed her the peeled apple and put his arm around her shoulder. “Actually, can I tell you something? I’ve seen part of him, his unburied part, in a jar of formaldehyde. A man in Berlin has it. It’s shriveled now, but then whose wouldn’t be, after all that time? Given his reputation with the ladies, it’s no indication . . .” And his voice lowered, as if he regretted the turn his story had taken. If his lecture had been designed to comfort or seduce, it was a failure.

Seduce. Yes, somehow she understood—even as her teacher finished describing the long-delayed burial, the subsequent disinterment and transfer of the remains, and the second, more elaborate burial he had subsidized, along with a group of others who worshipped the Faustian genius—that he had brought her here to seduce her.

The details didn’t matter, and she had tried to forget them as best she could. The marble was slippery and cold. The stairs were narrow. Her head bumped against the pedestal seven or eight times, and she had a staggering headache by the time they reached Bologna. Back in the carriage, he had offered her his handkerchief, but she had looked at it blankly until he gestured to her skirt. Then he realized he had forgotten to lock the gate.

By the time he returned, she had her eyes shut, feigning sleep. She could feel his eyes on her as the sun rose, burning off the morning mist, but she didn’t stir, even when her shoulder and neck screamed with stiffness, even when he eased her hand into his lap. Now the sickening effort of her charade was as hard to shake than the memory of what he had done at the cemetery.

He made no attempt to repeat the event. For the next few months he returned to his usual kind self, attentive during her lessons, encouraging despite her poor performance for the Magiones, ready to correct a tensed shoulder with a paternal hand or an awkward angle with a tap on the wrist. Then—overnight—he stopped touching her, stopped even looking at her. It took another month before Aviva grasped what had happened, and in another month Nonna understood, too.

The teacher took back the Magione violin.

Two weeks later, he returned, told her to pack, and took her away. He brought her to a convent even farther into the mountains, near the Austrian border. He explained that she would be allowed to live there, alongside some other unfortunate girls. When she started to cry, he reminded her that music thrived in surprising places—consider the Conservatorio della Pietà, the Venetian orphanage where Antonio Vivaldi, the red-haired priest-composer, had led an outstanding choir and orchestra of foundling girls.

“Does this place have an orchestra?” she said, looking up at the crumbling walls surrounding by treeless, boulder-dotted grounds.

“No.”

Before he left, he whispered, “If it’s a boy, name him Niccolò”—the only time he’d acknowledged her condition.

She spat on the ground between them.

 

A foghorn blasted in the distance.

“Ever since, I’ve hated Paganini. Whenever I hear those arrogant caprices, I think of him trying to stick his inhuman fingers where they don’t belong—if you’ll forgive me for the image.”

I swallowed the last sip of my cold coffee.

“Please,” she said. “You’re not saying anything.”

“It’s a terrible story.”

“You’re shocked by it.”

“I suppose I am.”

“You don’t believe in honesty?” She leaned back in her chair.

“No—I do.” I paused and took a deep breath. “It reminds me of something that happened to someone very dear to me. Something I’ve never been able to put out of my mind.”

She studied me, teetering between defensiveness and trust. “I’m not claiming it’s an uncommon experience. I don’t think about it most of the time. I wouldn’t think of it all, except . . .”

She trailed off, looking over my shoulder. Al-Cerraz was standing at the far side of the café, waving to us from the counter.

“I suppose nothing can be done.”

“In most cases, no. In mine—possibly.”

She seemed to be waiting for me to say something, to ask something. Perhaps she was only deciding how much more to divulge.

“Is there some way I can help?”

“No,” she said flatly. Without turning, I could sense Al-Cerraz’s approach in her changed expression, her squared shoulders and forced smile. “It’s something I need to take care of. Maybe immediately, maybe in a year. In any case, it is the reason I couldn’t stay in America, after all. I’m sorry I haven’t answered your questions very well.”

And then he was with us: a hand on my shoulder, a puddle of coffee on the table as he bumped it, the strong smell of lavender, the booming voice that drowned out the last of Aviva’s words.

“It’s true!” he bellowed. “According to my broker, I don’t have a cent!” He squeezed Aviva’s arm. “At least you have the fifty dollars that matron on the steamer gave you.”

Aviva nodded politely, switching from German to less-confident English. “It’s better than nothing.”

“That settles it, then,” Al-Cerraz beamed. “We’ll be poor together!”

I was not poor; I had more work than I could manage. Just before my American trip, my record label, Reixos, had asked me to do a fourth recording. They had suggested an accompanist for the project, but it wasn’t anyone I admired. I didn’t expect the record to sound half as good as some of my concerts—certainly not as good as the two concerts on the ship.

I said to Al-Cerraz, “An idea has just come to me. Would you consider recording?”

I would like to say, all these years later, that I was trying to help him financially, or that I was making amends for the Burgos concert. But I was only acting on impulse, moved by the memory of how we had sounded and the ease of our last week together. And there was another force acting upon me as well.

I added, “Aviva could record with us. At last we’d have a trio.”

“You can’t just decide that, can you?” Aviva asked. “Doesn’t your record company decide these things?”

“Reixos will be thrilled.”

“Biber will be even more thrilled,” Al-Cerraz interjected. “We’ll have to let him know where we want to play after the recording comes out.”

I stammered, “Yes, I suppose we will. But I do have my own manager now.”

“I can’t let mine go,” Al-Cerraz explained to Aviva, ignoring me. “Lifetime contract.”

“And I have a secretary,” I said. “I should try to reach her.”

“A secretary?” Al-Cerraz howled. “Don’t answer all those letters—that’s what I say. Let the manager handle the bookings and ignore the rest. Inaccessibility is one of the keys to long-lasting fame.”

“You misunderstand me,” I said. “I haven’t tried to become more famous.”

“Oh, of course not . . .”

Aviva glanced from one of us to the other, following our rising voices and sharpening tones. We were only warming up, but I suppose she’d never lived with other musicians. She’d simply have to adapt, I found myself thinking—and realized, in that thought, how quickly I was accepting this new arrangement, how easily I could envision the coming year: first a recording, and then a short tour in Spain, perhaps another across Europe.

With far less certainty, Aviva stood, smiled, and began to thread her way between our piles of mismatched cases and trunks. “Let me think about this. While you’re both here to guard the castle, I’ll go clean myself.”

“Fort,” I corrected her automatically. “And ‘freshen up,’ in English. Never mind. Take your time.”

When she was out of earshot, Al-Cerraz eyed me gleefully. “Well, this is a big risk for you. Touring with someone new is one thing—but recording? Right away? You won’t shake her off too easily after that.”

“Since when do I shake people off?”

He cocked his head, studying me, then chose his words with uncharacteristic caution. “We don’t know much about her.”

I knew something about her, more than he did. But I knew I couldn’t share it, because it was the only advantage I held over him. If he knew what I knew, if he spoke better German or Italian, they would be inseparable within days—I was sure of it. With luck, I would always know her a little better. With luck, he would keep his hands to himself.

“I’ll say this politely,” he tried. “You realize there are far easier ways to get a date.”

“A date?” I laughed. “This isn’t about a date.”

“Then what is it about?”

“It’s about music, of course. We sounded brilliant together on the ship, all three of us. If you don’t agree one hundred percent, then say it—but I know you agree. I know you heard it. She’s everything we wanted in a trio partner ten years ago: fresh, energetic, appreciative, skilled but malleable—”

“You’re doing this for music,” he repeated, testing me. “When have you ever done anything just for the music?”

I might have argued with him then, but I saw a shadow pass over his face—emotion dangerously near the surface. I knew then that the Burgos concert was still with us, that he still held me responsible for damaging his composing career. He wanted to forgive, I believed he did. And even more, he wanted to move ahead, to perform and to be inspired.

 

“I left behind so much of my sheet music in Germany,” Aviva lamented one day later that autumn, at an outdoor café in Segovia.

The three of us had a day to spend in the city, before heading southeast to a recording studio in Madrid. My label had agreed we should record the Dvořák Piano Trios, which we’d been rehearsing for most of November. We’d already accepted some engagements following the recording sessions, but we knew we’d want a broader repertoire for those concerts.

“Eventually, we’ll all need more trio music,” Al-Cerraz told her. “I know the perfect place. But first”—he gestured across the street to a woman’s dress shop—“take as much of the day as you need. I don’t mind giving you a loan until Reixos pays us.”

I said, “He means that I don’t mind giving you a loan.”

Al-Cerraz continued, “Feliu and I will pick up some scores and meet you later, for lunch.”

She shot him a dark look.

He pressed some money into her hand, oblivious. “Don’t skimp.”

Al-Cerraz and I were finishing our second coffees with a city map laid out between us when Aviva emerged from the shop and crossed the street toward us, carrying two large bags.

“Done,” she said, collapsing into a chair. “Now, there’s a Brahms Trio in C Minor I haven’t performed; that should be easy to find.”

Al-Cerraz stared at her bags.

She tucked them farther under the table. “What about the León concert in December? Do we pair the ‘Dumky’ with another Dvořák piece, or do something entirely different?”

“Something different,” I started to say, then stopped, watching Al-Cerraz lower his head, with theatrical effort, under the table. Snagging the handles with his pinkies, he pulled the shopping bags back into view.

“Did you actually try them on, or just point to the window display?”

Aviva extracted a white box, opened it, lifted a red belted dress to her chest, and then stuffed it back into the bag. “Two others,” she said. “Same style, different colors.”

Al-Cerraz pinned me with an imploring stare. When I didn’t pick up the argument, he persevered solo. “No alterations required?”

“The belt has notches,” she said flatly.

“Length?”

“They don’t drag on the ground, if that’s what you mean.” Aviva turned the city map around so that she could study it. Al-Cerraz cleared his throat heavily, but she ignored him. Without looking up, she said, “Now where is that music shop?”

I knew there was no point in telling Al-Cerraz that Aviva wasn’t a female Gauthier. He could see for himself that she had no difficulty standing up to him.

At least he wasn’t a chauvinist. He had paid as much attention to his own appearance in the last few weeks as he paid to hers. Our very first week off the steamer from America, he had started dyeing his silver-streaked hair, so that now the dyed patches gleamed blue-black in the sun. The change was so transparent, it made me laugh. But I dared not tease him about it. Al-Cerraz did look younger, and in the months that followed, he seemed healthier as well. He ate better, complained less of his digestive problems, and retired early, with notebook in hand. Privately, discreetly, and without a patron dominating his efforts, he was composing again.

 

Onstage, Aviva had a contrary style that could not help but attract attention, even while her mannerisms defied charm. She was about ten centimeters taller than I was, and rarely wore high heels. Playing a duet with Al-Cerraz, she stood near the piano, in a surprisingly wide-footed position, as if she were preparing to push a heavy cart through a muddy, rutted field. In trio, she typically sat, but even sitting, she managed an athletic stance, with feet squarely planted, spine straight, and head forward, as if ready to leap off her chair at any moment.

That sense of impending flight mirrored the hesitation she’d displayed on the steamer. Always, there was the sense that she was saving herself for something—or someone; that any given concert, no matter how dutifully performed, was merely a way station. And yet she never said so. Like most prodigies, she was still eager to please—if not the audience, whom she barely noticed, then at least Al-Cerraz and me.

Most of the violinists I’d known saved their virtuosic displays, their enthusiasm and energy and most focused vibrato for the thin, high strings—the high register where the violin soars and sings, beyond the easy pitch range of viola or cello. Aviva tended to play high notes starkly—brushed pewter instead of silver, a beautiful effect. But she saved her best artistic effects for the low register. Plunging in, she planted her feet, bowed her head, closed her eyes, executed her widest vibrato, her most expressive bowing. Her facial features and thin arms radiated fragility, but her posture and her sound could only make one think of hard physical labor. Once, watching her play out of the corner of my eye, I was struck by the image of someone sinking into deep gray-green water, not thrashing but pushing forcefully and purposefully against the water’s weight, motion slowed by the chill. In that cold darkness she seemed most focused and at peace.

Violin concertos would have been a perfect vehicle for her, if she’d ever wanted to solo with an orchestra instead of playing in a trio. But as much as she enjoyed hearing other solo violinists perform, she claimed to have no interest in that sort of debut.

Once in Toledo, during our first winter’s tour, I invited Aviva to a Sibelius concert.

“Is Justo coming along?”

“I couldn’t get more than two seats together.” I was a terrible liar.

She looked concerned, on the verge of refusing.

“You know how he is,” I added quickly. “It’s a concerto with orchestra. No starring role for a pianist. Besides, how could he sit still when he isn’t the one playing?”

Aviva sat during the Sibelius concert with her eyes closed, her hands folded in her lap, while the soloist on stage played high, flutelike passages so soft one could just barely hear them above the orchestration. The effect produced was one of Scandinavian mist, weaving a spell of mass hypnosis.

I took the opportunity to study her profile from the corner of my eye, daring myself to move my arm closer to hers, to let our shoulders touch, to reach out for her hand—adolescent challenges, at which I failed completely.

During the intermission, a man behind us complained that the solo violinist was too weak to play with a full orchestra. “It’s nothing like the record,” he complained to the lady on his arm. “It’s as if the sound was turned off. At the end, the bow was still on the string but I couldn’t hear anything.”

He carried on about the acoustics, the ticket prices, and the stature of the soloist until Aviva finally turned and said, “Perhaps he didn’t care if you could hear every measure. Perhaps he was playing those last few notes just for himself.”

“That’s ridiculous,” the man scowled. “It wasn’t played correctly at all. I’ve got the record at home—”

“Then go home and listen to it,” Aviva said, leading me away to the bar, where she paid for two vodka shots with her own money, and handed one to me. When the end-of-intermission bell rang and I hadn’t so much as sipped mine, Aviva lifted it lightly out of my fingers and downed it herself, in one easy swallow.

“Sorry,” I said. “I was thinking about something.”

“Not about that amateur critic, I hope. We can change seats, if we need to.”

But no, I’d been thinking about what she had said about the Sibelius soloist—that he might have been playing for himself. Aviva herself often seemed to play that way. And yet her playing did not seem to fulfill or energize her—if anything, she looked more drained as the music proceeded. At the beginning of a concert, Al-Cerraz was tense and desperate for silence; at the end he was gregarious and hardly willing to leave the stage. Aviva was the opposite. She began each concert relaxed and ready and ended limp, vanishing from the stage before I had stepped out from behind my cello. Her rapid exit did not seem calculated, but it did have a predictable effect: The audience cheered even more loudly, insistent on encores, refusing to let her disappear.

 

Aside from our musical performances, I remember that first tour as a series of images: Al-Cerraz down on his knees on a black stage floor, behind the curtain, not scrubbing Aviva’s elbows this time, not proposing to her (as I’d thought at first, with my heart in my throat), but retrieving a lost earring. I nearly collided with him as he knelt there, the glittering rhinestone stud cradled within the thick crease of his palm. I was used to seeing him stand next to women on tiptoe, all the better to peer down their décolletage. I’d never seen him on his knees before a woman, and certainly not twice in a span of six months.

It wasn’t that he treated Aviva as a special object of romantic esteem. He continued to treat all women with equal gallantry, opening cab doors and surrendering preferred café tables from one city to the next. But only Aviva merited his tender, quieter gestures. The way he pushed her hair out of the way, off her forehead. The time, standing on a train platform together, that he reached a thumb behind her ear to rub away a smudge while Aviva stared off into the distance, unbothered by his familiarity. Perhaps all I was seeing in him was the development of a brotherly demeanor, after a lifetime of acting like a spoiled only child. Or perhaps that was wishful thinking. Nothing had happened between them, but that didn’t mean it would never happen. Perhaps I was living on borrowed time.

Sometimes I played worse when I played with Aviva, distracted by thoughts of what we’d all do after the concert, or the next day. Perhaps we would rent a car and tour the countryside. Perhaps we had planned dinner at an elegant restaurant, where I hoped through some alchemy of the soul that I would find a way to become more noticeable than Al-

Cerraz, more gay, taller in my chair, more comfortable in my clothes, in my own skin. But usually, when the time came, the alchemy failed. Listening to Al-Cerraz charming Aviva across the table—charming everyone in the room, even the waiter bringing us champagne courtesy of some music fan several tables away—I would slip my hands into my jacket pockets and remember one of my earliest selves: the boy who had chocolate at his fingertips but refused to eat it, refused even to touch it.

Didn’t it make sense to wait, to be restrained? Hadn’t Aviva herself said she needed to address her past first—perhaps immediately, perhaps within a year—to make things right? I had known other women like her—women like my mother and like the Queen, who had been pushed hard by men, or by circumstance. The more I thought of her that way, the farther I nudged her out of my own grasp, on a pedestal raised so high that even a taller man would have had trouble reaching her.

And if I occasionally played worse because of Aviva, many more times I played better. Once I stepped onto a stage to play Saint-Saëns’s “The Swan,” and Al-Cerraz, catching my jaded expression at the prospect of playing that romantic, shopworn piece yet again, mouthed, “Think of her.” I did. I pictured Aviva as she was at that moment, waiting for her entrance backstage, pinning up her hair as a stagehand finished buttoning up the back of her new custom-made gown. (At Al-Cerraz’s insistence, she had advanced finally beyond cheap ready-made dresses.) I let my bow trace that image of her, imagining her long waist, the tiny white cloth-covered buttons between her shoulder blades, the line of her collar, her bare neck. I took my time with the duet’s sliding notes, my wrist flexing to connect them smoothly, to blend up-bow into down-bow. Gradually I let my vibrato widen, until I sketched the thin final note and let it fade, as gracefully as a swan’s silver wake. Applause rolled across the room in undulating waves; tremendous applause. It was accompanied by that rarer thing, a quick approving nod of Al-Cerraz’s head from behind the grand piano’s open lid. Afterward, he whispered to me, “I knew you’d learn to play that piece, sometime or other.”

 

By the spring of 1930, Biber was forwarding various new requests for our busy trio: the chance to perform on radio with the BBC Symphony Orchestra; a fall music festival in Paris. Aviva reminded us that she’d be returning to Germany for the school year. As a trio, we had to decline any appearance that couldn’t wait until the following summer. Our lack of availability fanned the flames of interest. How could we decline all performances in fall and winter, the height of the music season?

A Madrid magazine featured Aviva, alone, on the cover: La Mujer Misteriosa. The mysterious woman. The article inside speculated about Aviva’s sudden emergence in the world of classical music. An enterprising reporter had tracked her earliest recital notices in some smalltown Italian newspapers and found glowing descriptions of her in a Munich society column. It was hinted that she had performed privately for a prominent fascist.

Al-Cerraz had picked up a copy of the magazine at a train station, and now he passed it to me in the parlor car. “I bought it without even looking! If I’d noticed, I would have taken several copies.”

I held it out to Aviva, but she lit a cigarette and looked away.

“Our talented girl, playing for Hitler,” Al-Cerraz fawned, but Aviva did not laugh. Instead she said stiffly, “Nowhere does it mention Hitler.”

“She’s right,” I said. “I hear Mussolini loves the violin.”

This time Aviva said nothing.

“I’m only joking, Aviva.”

Al-Cerraz persevered: “Mussolini?”

Still she didn’t answer.

“Then it’s true! Was this with an orchestra?” Al-Cerraz asked.

“Nothing so formal.”

“Oh, come now—please!”

“I was eighteen,” she relented. “It was an audition—something a friend had arranged, which I couldn’t cancel without offense. One half hour.”

We questioned her more closely on the timing, trying to stitch together what little we understood about the year before we’d met her, when we knew she had moved from Italy to Germany.

“He has the most amazing head—like one of those enormous Toltec stone heads they find in the Mayan jungle,” Al-Cerraz said. “That left hand he keeps on his hip must be some kind of structural support, to keep his top half from tipping.”

“Tell us about the music,” I said.

She sighed through a cloud of smoke. “I was on my own for the first time, after leaving the convent. He was looking for a nanny. A nanny with musical talent. His little boy, Romano—just a baby, then, very sweet—showed a fascination with music, especially piano music. But you know, that was just a pretext. Il Duce wanted a private violin teacher in the house, for his own pleasure, someone on call.”

“So then he does play the violin?”

“Absolutely. He’s known for it, just as he’s known for reading a canto of Dante every morning—a champion of Italian culture. With the violin, it’s fifteen to twenty minutes, every day, or—” She paused.

“Or . . . ?”

“Well, all right. I’ll tell you one small thing, then we change the subject. Do you promise?”

Al-Cerraz wouldn’t promise. I glowered at him threateningly.

Finally she relaxed long enough to sketch the scene for us: the official residence of Villa Torlonia, the music room with its gramophone and stacks of Verdi and Puccini records. Mussolini closed the curtains and locked the door whenever he practiced, and made it clear that no one was allowed to disturb him for that sacred twenty minutes when he relinquished the nation’s helm and lost himself to music.

“But how did he play?” Al-Cerraz demanded.

“I don’t know,” she said.

“What do you mean, you don’t know?”

“He put on a record—a record of a solo violin, playing études. He held the violin to his chin for a moment or two—”

“That chin! I’m surprised he didn’t crush the violin!” Al-Cerraz interjected. I shushed him.

“—as if he were producing the sound on the record,” she continued, undaunted. “But then he set it down. And began flirting.”

“Aha!” Al-Cerraz laughed. “So it’s a ploy. He doesn’t play.”

“No—he does. My friend who arranged the meeting, another violinist, once played a duet with him. Mussolini plays when he likes. But he also has an insistent wife, many children and counselors and, more to the point, a long line of mistresses coming and going to that music room all the time, and it seems that twenty uninterrupted minutes is just the requisite interval.”

Al-Cerraz was delighted.

“Anyway,” she continued, “I’d had enough life experience by that point to communicate my . . . lack of interest. I did play the violin for a few minutes, at the end, but I had decided already I wasn’t interested in the position. There was no need to make use of the defensive weapons I’d brought for the occasion.”

“Weapons?” I asked.

“Stiletto heels. You know I don’t like to wear anything but flat shoes, but this was a special occasion.”

“Brava!” Al-Cerraz said.

But I was bothered. “You didn’t mind performing for a dictator?”

“I wasn’t interested in the position.”

“But even in that half hour; you weren’t sickened to face that man?”

“Friends,” Al-Cerraz interrupted. “Please.”

“He is the leader of Italy. Anyone with that kind of power has some skeletons, I’m sure. But I’m sorry—Il Duce has been Il Duce for all of my adult life.”

“This is a man who murdered people from the very beginning—his socialist opponent in 1924, just for starters.”

“I was fourteen years old in 1924,” Aviva said. “It wasn’t a good year for me either, you know.”

“Skeletons don’t begin to describe what are in that man’s closet—fresh corpses, more like.” My voice sharpened. “Every time that man makes a political decision, someone dies.”

“I think I would have preferred to die that year, myself.”

“Friends,” Al-Cerraz interrupted, “what are you talking about? Can’t you hear yourselves? You’re talking right past each other.”

I persevered, “You’re aware of these things, Aviva. How could you not be, when you plan to go to Germany and perform with Kurt Weill and Bertolt Brecht? They’re just the sort of musicians the Nazis hate.”

“The Nazis interrupt theatrical performances. With noise, with threats, with stink bombs—even with chamber pots. If they actually want to attend our performances, I won’t deny them for a moment. It might do them some good.”

“You don’t draw a line about whom you would play for?”

“Anyone,” Aviva said. “Or no one—it’s all the same. It’s not any one particular audience I am trying to reach. I have my own reasons.”

Al-Cerraz gave up on stopping the conversation and tried to steer it away from my grasp instead. “I think,” he said, nodding genially, “that I would have to convince myself first that the person wasn’t a monster. I’d have to see his human side—everyone has a human side.”

“Nonsense,” I said, but already I felt terrible. I had not meant to start an argument with Aviva.

She stood. “Gentlemen, you’ve tired me, and the day has just begun. I’ll be resting in my berth.”

“If she only ate a little more,” Al-Cerraz mumbled after she left, nibbling the leftover crusts on her lunch plate. “What did she mean, about wanting to die in 1924?”

 

That week, after a concert in Lisbon, the three of us went to a nightclub. We were tired, and we had yet another train to catch the next day, but a local patron of the arts had invited us, and we felt it necessary to accept. To a fast-paced jazz band, Aviva danced with the patron, a Senhor Medina. Then she danced with Al-Cerraz, as Medina hovered nearby, ready to grab her hand again.

Instead, she took the seat next to me, her cheeks flushed, her collarbone shining. She shouted, “I suppose you hate this music.”

I shouted back, “No, I don’t hate it.”

“Well, then?”

I laughed. “You’re expecting me to dance? I’ve finally worked my way up to waltzes, but any faster and I’d never walk again.”

“What?”

“Never mind,” I shouted, smiling, indicating the music.

She moved closer, so that she could speak directly into my ear.

“Does it hurt?”

“What?” I said, though I had heard her.

She leaned closer. Her hair touched my cheek. “Your hip. Does it hurt?”

“Sometimes,” I said. From the first time we met, Aviva had been more sympathetic about my infirmity than Al-Cerraz had ever been. Since she had joined us, there had been no more mad dashes to concert halls, no bullying to walk farther or carry more, no forced swims. She had accommodated me without speaking, without even asking—until now.

“Have you seen a doctor?”

My forced laugh was swallowed by the roar of the nightclub. “It happened at birth. There’s no point.” I turned back, with my ear next to her lips, to hear her reply.

She cupped her hand against my cheek and leaned close. “Why are you punishing yourself?”

I did not move. I did not dare even turn, because then she might move away, or worse, I might see that what I had heard as tender sympathy was really only curiosity.

“You don’t have to live with pain.” Her hand was still against my face.

When she didn’t say anything else, I reached up and took her hand, holding it there as long as I dared.

She whispered something. It sounded like: “Come outside with me.” But I didn’t want to move, didn’t want to gamble this moment for another that was less certain. And all the while, my eyes tracked across the table, counting the emptied glasses, feeling my heart thud in my chest.

“I won’t ask again,” she said.

Just then, the song ended and Al-Cerraz collapsed back into his seat, with Medina not far behind. “Won’t ask what?” our Portuguese host asked, panting and smiling.

Aviva pulled her hand away from me and sat up straighter. “For another drink, of course.”

“Shame on you,” Al-Cerraz said, hitting my back. “Letting this gorgeous girl get thirsty while we were away.”

 

“Interesting,” Dr. Gindl said. “But not unusual.”

This was two weeks later, in Switzerland. I had laughed at Al-Cerraz for dyeing his hair to impress Aviva. But I was trying to impress her, too. I intended to follow her advice. And perhaps I had even higher aims. Perhaps I imagined that I might find a way to dance with her someday.

I told the doctor, “It doesn’t give me too much pain, except when—”

“It will,” he interrupted. “You’re thirty-seven, you said?”

“—an occasional twinge . . .”

“In the forties, the arthritis tends to accelerate. You bear weight on your left side, do you? The pain may become considerable. Later on, you’ll want a cane.”

Up until now, I had been smiling, attempting to mask the discomfort I felt as the doctor manipulated my leg.

“Dysplasia of the hip,” he said, lifting and rotating my thigh one last time, sending a hot ache into my groin. “The head of the thighbone doesn’t sit properly in the socket of the pelvis. Go ahead, you can sit up now.”

I did so, slowly.

“A difficult breech birth?” he asked. Then, seeing my incomprehension: “Rear end first?”

I nodded.

“Fairly common result. Caught just after birth, it could have been splinted.”

He kept a hand on my knee. “Anyone discuss childhood surgery with your parents?”

I shook my head.

“Well, that’s fairly recent. Special footwear is important—I’m sure you’ve experimented with that. Exercises are essential.”

“It does fatigue easily.”

“All muscles fatigue—and then they become stronger. You’re from the countryside? I trust your parents kept you busy as a youth—running, carrying, working that leg. There’s nothing to be gained from letting the muscles wither. A century ago, people were more ignorant. They would have kept you as inactive as possible—and made a weakling of you in the process.”

When I turned away from him, he said, “I do hope it hasn’t hindered you.”

My jacket was across the room. I climbed down from the examination table and walked toward it, as evenly as I could, ignoring the pain lingering from the manipulation. I was almost out the door when he said, “For the pain, you could try this.” He handed me a small brown vial from his bag.

I read the label. “Isn’t this very strong?”

“It does the job.”

“I don’t think I’d feel comfortable taking it. My hip isn’t that bad.”

“It lasts only four to six hours. Some patients require it to sleep. There’s nothing shameful in it.”

I was thinking of the people I admired who had accepted discomfort and surrender in their lives; but I was also thinking how their hopelessness had tainted my own life. I felt ready to move beyond those memories. Aviva had said pain wasn’t necessary. I wanted to believe her.

 

Aviva’s twentieth birthday, later that spring, coincided with a concert in Milan. We bought her a set of matching luggage, to replace the small wicker valise that Al-Cerraz had, at first glance, mistaken for a lunch box. At a restaurant following the performance, we toasted her health and Justo gave her a pair of fine leather gloves—a sneaky addendum to the gift we’d bought together, allowing me no time to match it.

Later that night, after Aviva and Al-Cerraz had returned to their own hotel rooms, I wandered off by myself and found my way to a bordello where, after the requisite services had been rendered, I spent some part of the predawn paying extra for my buxom, yawning bed-mate to keep me company. She darned socks while I rambled on about birthdays and age differences and the proper age for marrying.

“Twenty isn’t so young,” the not-so-young damsel informed me.

“Soon she’ll be gone. When I see her next, she’ll be twenty-one.” I couldn’t bear to say Aviva’s name aloud in this disreputable house.

“Let her out of your sight that long, and for certain she’ll be married when you see her again.”

“No. She’s a musician—an entertainer.”

“I’m an entertainer,” the woman said. “I’m married.”

I must have glanced nervously toward the door. She laughed. “You met him already when you came in. He took your money.”

“Besides,” I said, searching the rumpled bedclothes for my trousers, “she’s not likely to find a husband. There are complicating factors.”

“Previously married?”

“No.”

“Ruined reputation? Non-Catholic?”

I stared at her. “Both. How did you know?”

She laughed. “What other problems would a pretty young woman have in Spain?”

“She isn’t Spanish. She’ll be living in Germany soon.”

“Well, then.” She plumped the pillows behind her and resumed her darning.

“What does that mean?”

“In my better days, I spent a summer in Berlin. I worked in a variété—you know, a cabaret? We had every type there: unmarried mothers, gypsies, Jews, an American Negro—God he was beautiful, as shiny purple as an eggplant. It was a very open-minded place. More open-minded than here. I don’t know why I left.” She frowned at the door, then turned the same scowl on me. “She won’t be judged harshly, if that’s what you’re counting on.” Fool, she wanted to add—I’m sure of it.

She asked, “What line of work do you do, anyway?”

“What do you think I do?”

A tasseled red scarf covered the bedside lamp, infusing the room with a pink glow. She tugged it off suddenly, and blinding white, stomach-turning light flooded the room. From her regally supine position, she squinted at me, as if seeing me for the first time.

“Some kind of bureaucrat, I’d say. Or a plumber. Those little hard spots at the end of your fingertips remind me of the lines at the end of pipes—what are they called?”

“The threads.”

“Right. See?”

I didn’t tell her she was wrong. But the rest of what she’d said stayed with me. I hadn’t meant to rely on Aviva’s past or her identity to improve my own chances. I wasn’t counting on anything. One of the things that attracted me to her was her determination, her clear sense of purpose—a purpose that was leading her away from Al-Cerraz and me.

A few days later, we took her to the train station. Weill had asked Aviva to join the school-music program rehearsals for Der Jasager, a short children’s opera he’d written, beginning in May. She promised to return to Spain during the first long school break, the following summer.

As we stood on the platform, waiting for the train, Al-Cerraz asked her, “You’re not fond of this fellow, are you?” Damn Justo for his newfound paternalism; bless him for his inappropriate curiosity. It was, of course, what I wanted to know, too. Weill was formidable: only thirty, successful, evidently brilliant, and Jewish.

“Herr Weill?” She screwed up her face. “He’s married to Lotte Lenya, the beautiful actress! I love his violin concerto and all his theater pieces. But—with that cue-ball head? Those glasses? The way he sprays spittle when a musician misses the pickup? Sorry—no.”

Which meant that I still had a chance.

I felt less secure a moment later, when Al-Cerraz said, “But you know—I’d like to see this ‘school opera.’ Why not? I’ll come along for a few days, if it’s the same to you.”

I swiveled toward Aviva, studying her face for ambivalence, so that I’d have a reason to talk Al-Cerraz out of his plan. But she was digging in her handbag, seemingly unbothered by the notion of sudden company.

“We ‘ve been together for half a year,” I ventured. “A break might be good for all of us, artistically speaking. Absence makes the heart grow fonder, don’t you think?”

Al-Cerraz said, “No one’s making you come along.”

The train blew into the station, rattling our platform. Passengers crowded around the doors immediately, pushing past us with their bags.

“Our luggage is back at the hotel,” I reminded Al-Cerraz.

“You didn’t think I’d escort her at this very moment, did you?” But I could see him warming to the idea. He smiled. “Why not? I can buy a toothbrush anywhere. Maybe that composer friend of hers will lend me a nightshirt. If I walk around in his clothes, perhaps his success will rub off on me.”

Aviva was smiling, too, tickled by Al-Cerraz’s sudden eagerness, or perhaps by my discomfort. She shook my hand coolly, then said to Al-Cerraz, “I’ll wait for you onboard.”

He waved and started walking toward the ticket window, talking to me over his shoulder. “Just tell the hotel to hold my bags. Three or four days should do it. It’s a shame to come back at all—maybe you could have them forward the bags directly to Spain.”

“I’m not your luggage handler,” I said to his back, but he was busy talking with the ticket seller. “And I’m not your chaperon, either. I won’t feel pressured to come along, just to keep you out of trouble.”

He finished his business at the window, thanked the ticket seller grandly, and then turned around. “Keep me out of trouble? Why would I ever want you to do that?”