Third movement. I look at the orchestra and I look at my violinists. Anna and I understand each other perfectly. I know that Teresa had that with my father. He always kept his distance except where music was concerned. I think that, for him, each concert or opera was like a love affair with his soloist or star singer. He enjoyed working with women, it was curious how he always managed to get everything to sound better when he worked with women.
Sometimes I wonder if he ever touched Maria, I mean if he tried to get involved with her. I don’t think my father was like that, and now it’s impossible to imagine, with him dead and her so old that I’m not even sure she’ll survive the trip back home alone, because she insisted on traveling by herself. It seems she has family here, even though she hasn’t introduced them to us. She must be embarrassed, thinking we’d have nothing in common.
Maria and my father spent many years alone together in that house, until I showed up. Maybe there was something between them, I don’t know. Either way, when I arrived in Barcelona, luckily I had Maria to help me with the day-to-day stuff, because my father always had his head in the clouds and if I had to rely on him I would have run into problems everywhere. That strange, cosmopolitan city was filled with danger for a man like me who was used to a routine that included the security and tranquility of knowing that everything was in order. Because that’s how it was on the other side of the wall: You didn’t have to worry about a thing, there were no complicated or different situations, everything was always the same, it was like a tout compris trip; I always had food and clothes to wear. If I wanted to choose what I ate or wore, then things got more complicated. One of my mother’s cousins, who lived in West Berlin, would sometimes manage to bring us some of the clothes we saw on TV. I didn’t care how I dressed, but it made my mother happy. And there was also the color television that same cousin brought for Christmas one of my last years there. Our neighbors were shocked and dying of envy.
It’s odd because now I’m in Berlin, and yet when I think of the city I grew up in, I think of a different city, when really it’s right here, on the other side of a wall that no longer exists. I’ve played concerts in the Staatsoper that is now being renovated, and I remember the front rows filled with military men. But this place isn’t the one I remember, not by a long shot.
Where are you going with that, Mr. Mark? Maria would scold, because I carried around a radio cassette player: Don’t you see they’ll steal it, you’ll be mugged in some of the rougher neighborhoods? I was surprised, and she rushed to give me a bag to keep it in. And when the bus didn’t come, I didn’t know what to do, and I would be late for rehearsal, because in the East, when the bus didn’t come, everybody was just late for wherever they were going, but in Barcelona, when I explained that I was late because of the bus, they said I should have taken a taxi, and I would say that the idea hadn’t occurred to me. One day I was mugged, and another time my pocket was picked on the Ramblas while I watched some jugglers. You are a bit naïve, Maria would laugh, fresh off the boat, like a kid with no sense of direction, Mr. Mark.
Please, don’t call me Mr. Mark, I begged her for the millionth time. Oh, yeah, she said, tapping her head, forgive me, Mark, force of habit. Then, when she would do it again, I answered yes, Miss Maria, and that would make her realize she’d slipped the Mr. in again.
Maria managed to keep the house neat and in order, always to her taste, of course, because as far as domestic subjects were concerned, it was as if my father didn’t exist. But Maria was something more, I don’t know what; she had a special touch that I could never put my finger on exactly. It must be that same sensitivity that has her sitting out there now, watching the musicians with an almost sacred concentration. Maria is a special woman.