The Spanish Bow Read Online Free PDF Page B

your behalf?"
    "Carlito!" Mamá wailed, as my little brother tipped his soup bowl into his lap.
    "I could ask El Nene to listen to Feliu play the violin," Señor Rivera continued more loudly, competing with Carlito's shrieks of pain as the hot soup drained into his best sailor suit. "I'm sure he must suffer excited parents in every village, but I did help to arrange the concert venue."
    I stared into my soup and felt my face getting hotter. So this was how Señor Rivera hoped to profit from the trio's visit—by showing me off and increasing my mother's sense of obligation.
    With Carlito wriggling and wailing under her arm, my mother raised her voice above the squall. "I am not so impressed by this Nene—this performing monkey—forced to tour the world before he was old enough to stop sucking his thumb. His parents should be ashamed."
    Luisa, who'd shown no interest in El Nene's visit, perked up. "He's a monkey?"
    Mamá exited with her thrashing wet bundle. Señor Rivera's eyes darted around the room, his hopes and expectations unspent. He looked like a swimmer desperate for air, but still three hard strokes short of the surface.
    "You," he said, fixing on me, as if my elderly aunt and three other siblings weren't there at all. "You will play for El Nene and his trio. You will demonstrate how much I have done for you."
    "Yes, sir."
    "And I warn you,
enanito
..."
    "Feliu is a dwarf?" Luisa cried out gleefully.
    "Dwarves make great entertainers," Percival said. "The royal family keeps them around for fun."
    "He
is
a dwarf," Enrique said, without lifting his gaze from his soup bowl. "But he's
our
dwarf."
    "I warn you," Rivera continued, oblivious to the interruptions, staring me into submission. "Do not humiliate me."

    Everyone came, wearing their finest. Matronly ladies decorated their upswept hair with large combs and lace mantillas unearthed from ancient trunks. Younger women wore fashionable gowns with puffed sleeves that tapered at the elbows into tight cuffs. Boys squirmed in black suits with short breeches. Veterans tottered under the weight of brass buttons. Our three Civil Guard members strutted between the church and the train station, their shiny black finned hats flashing in the sun.
    And yet none of us could compare with El Nene.
    "Look at his hands," Percival whispered to me when we lined up alongside the train that afternoon, watching the performer disembark. "Each finger is wider than a piano key. He's too fat to play."
    I started to object, but Percival didn't wait to hear. He pushed his hands into his pockets, looking for the little diary in which he recorded every wager. "Do you want to bet?"

    The concert was held in the school, a low stone building attached to the larger and more ornate church. An overflow crowd filled the plaza in front of the buildings, and the school doors were propped open so that everyone would have a chance to hear. Apartment dwellers opposite had decorated the railings of their balconies with satin bows and dragged chairs outside, to listen from their high, private perches like royalty at an opera house.
    Mamá gave up on restraining Luisa and Carlos, and set them loose to gallop and charm their way among neighbors, accepting sugared orange peels and fingerfuls of quince. I skipped the treats and the preconcert parade in favor of getting a front-row seat inside the school itself, well before the concert started. My older brothers came with me. Percival didn't care much about the music, but he couldn't wait to settle our bet about El Nene. Enrique came simply because he was Enrique; the first to punish or tease, but also the first to guide and protect.
    Inside, the crowds were flushed, buzzing with questions about this famous man we'd seen only in black-and-white newspaper photographs.
    "No one knows where
you
were born," a man called to the impromptu stage. "What are you, El Nene?"
    When the pianist smiled, the long waxed tips of his mustache rubbed against the red apples of his