The Spanish Bow Read Online Free PDF

Spanish Paganini. He winced when he missed a note, but he recovered quickly, fingers slamming like pistons up and down the black fingerboard, the dynamics as dismayingly even as the tempo was not. I hated his theatrics. Quick fingers did not impress me. Long hair did not impress me.
    Please, God, I thought, don't let Señor Rivera move into our house.
    "Someday, Feliu," he said, and I gulped before I realized he was referring only to my own future chances with the Sarasate theme. "Now, hold that violin straight—straighter!"

    Redemption came, as all things great and sorrowful did, by train.
    The train meant everything to our village, which modern times might have forgotten if not for those parallel steel bars pointed south toward Tarragona, the town of Roman ruins and busy plazas, and north toward Barcelona, the city of commerce, art, and anarchy. Our narrow, twisting streets were lined with three-story stone and plaster buildings that cast the streets in shadow for all but a few midday hours. When the rains came, they resculpted the sinuous, gravel-lined gully that ran through the center of town. But the train tracks ran straight and hard through gusting winds and bright sun, exposed to anything the future might bring. The station itself was an oracle, bearing posters and flyers about upcoming events. I read my first words not in school, but on tiptoe outside the brick-walled station, puzzling out a three-colored flyer headlined "Los Gatos," The Cats. A musical quartet, Enrique explained.
    "Will they be playing here?"
    He squinted at a dense block of smaller type. "Barcelona—Sitges—Lleida. No, they're not stopping here."
    "Where is Sitges?" I asked him. When he didn't answer, I tried again: "Where is Lleida?"
    "Mamá is waiting at the footbridge. We're already late."
    "You don't know where Lleida is?" I asked, dismayed by his ignorance.
    I kept pestering and he kept changing the subject, our voices rising. By the time we reached the bridge where my mother stood with Carlito on one hip and Luisa collapsed at her feet, I was crying, my skinny arm blazed with a red mark left by Enrique's final twist, and Enrique himself was stuttering a dozen excuses. My mother only sighed.
    For the next couple of years, I read those flyers as The Cats—as well as many Donkeys, Bulls, and Bandits—bypassed our village. But the sting of those anonymous rejections resolved into a sense of destiny the day I spotted a flyer headlined in big, blocky type, "El Nene—The Spanish Mozart." By now I could decode the small print without help: "And His Classical Trio." No animals this time; no gourds or broomstick mandolins. And yes, they were stopping at Campo Seco, as well as a dozen other small towns up and down the coast.
    El Nene was our country's best-known pianist, a prodigy who had toured the world since the age of three. His nickname hinted at his dual reputation.
El nene
means "baby boy," but it can also mean "villain." The pianist wasn't a true
traidor
or
malvado
—not yet, anyway—but he did have a reputation for mischief. At this point, he was a precocious adolescent in a hefty man's body, constrained by a toddler's nickname, and performing with men many years his senior.
    Dust hung in the hot air that day, obscuring the view of yellow-leafed vineyards on the hills beyond town. The town leaders had planned a parade, and the town ladies spent all morning pouring buckets of water on the main road, just to keep down the dust. We were a little embarrassed not to have wide boulevards to show off, or intricately tiled, fountain-filled plazas.
    Señor Rivera was smitten. "I may ask him to hear me play, after the crowds have gone," he bragged during our midday meal, to which he had sweet-talked yet another invitation. "Do you think that would be unbecoming?"
    Mamá, who dealt increasingly with annoyances by simply enduring them, shrugged.
    He persevered, "I've heard he asks ladies to sign his touring book. Would you like me to ask him on