The Spanish Bow by Andromeda Romano-Lax Page A

father.
    Instead he said simply, "It's picked up oil and dirt, as if it's been toyed with too often."
    Mamá looked at me. I looked down at my feet.
    "That's our first subject: respect for the tools of our trade," Alberto continued. "I know carpenters who take better care of their hammers than you've taken care of this bow. When do you plan to rehair it?"
    Mamá consulted with him about the bow as best she could while keeping her face tipped up, away from his improperly attired lower half. Then she slipped out the door with the bow, looking relieved to have an errand to do.
    I expected our lesson to start in earnest now, but it did not. Alberto went back to his bedroom. I was left with a mute piano and a wall full of Spanish literature. I read awhile, then penned a long and lonely letter to Enrique, the only person I trusted to interpret in a positive light everything that had happened so far.

    The second day, Alberto talked about proper left-hand position. He demonstrated how to place the fingers on a cello's neck, using a broomstick and corks wedged between my fingers. If a cork slipped as I moved my stiff hand up and down the stick, then I was not maintaining the proper finger intervals. But Alberto had not demonstrated anything on a real instrument. I hoped his cello hadn't suffered the same indignities as his piano.
    Later that morning, as my mother was slipping out the front door with her bag of silver and linen, en route to a pawnshop, he asked her, "When are you going to purchase an instrument for the boy?"
    "He can't share yours? At least in the beginning?"
    "Oh, no. Mine's in a sorry state."
    That night, as I lay on the floor next to my mother's narrow bed, I whispered, "Are we certain Alberto knows how to play the cello?"
    "Don José wouldn't have recommended him otherwise."
    "But what kind of musician doesn't play his instrument anymore?" My mother didn't answer, but I sensed her body go rigid beneath the stiff sheets.
    "If I don't hear or play a cello soon, I might as well be home in Campo Seco. At least there, I played the piano every day. Here I play only a broomstick."
    "Do you want to go back?"
    "Of course not," I said. "Do you?"
    "Maybe," she said quietly.
    "Even though it's not safe?"
    "It's my home." She started to sigh, then caught herself and modulated the exhalation into an exaggerated yawn. "We'll make the best of things, for now. Tomorrow I will talk to the man who rehaired your bow. He knows all the music shops nearby. Perhaps he can help us." She rolled away from me then, but I could still sense her alert wakefulness, even in the dark.
    The third day, Alberto went to the kitchen and returned with a grease-spotted corner of butcher's paper. On the back he scrawled a list and handed it to my mother. She hesitated before taking it, and I could see her making fretful mental calculations.
    "Pedagogical supplies," he explained to me after she left. Noting my blank expression, he added, "Beginners' music, scales and études—that sort of thing."
    Still wearing his pajama bottoms, he spent the morning lecturing me. After explaining how limited the cello repertoire was, compared to the piano or violin, he traced the incremental advances of the instrument from the baroque chamber sonata through eighteenth-century Italy, France, and Germany, pacing the room slowly. At Bach he stopped, his back to me. "Too much to say. We'll come back to him when you are ready."
    Beethoven came next, and here his step quickened. Then Brahms—did I know he'd played cello as a child? Lalo, Saint-Saëns, Chopin: "His final sonata, dedicated to a cellist! Let me hum it for you, if I can."
    And then, he said, consider
Rachmaninov
, who just six years ago had introduced a new sonata in which the cello really carried the melodies—"You haven't heard the scherzo? You haven't heard of
Rachmaninov?"
I couldn't tell him I hadn't heard of more than half the composers he'd named. Much as I feared that Alberto would turn out to be a