The Spanish Bow - Hardcover

Romano-Lax, Andromeda

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0151015422 ISBN 13: 9780151015429

Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2007

Synopsis

**DEBUT FICTION**
 
I was almost born Happy.
Literally, Feliz was the Spanish name my mother wanted for me. Not a family name, not a local name, just a hope, stated in the farthest-reaching language she knew―a language that once reached around the world, to the Netherlands, Africa, the Americas, the Philippines. Only music has reached farther and penetrated more deeply.

In a dusty, turn-of-the-century Catalan village, the bequest of a cello bow sets young Feliu Delargo on the unlikely path of becoming a musician. Anarchist Barcelona and the court of the embattled monarchy in Madrid teach him his first serious lessons in creativity, principle, and passion―and their consequences. When he meets up with the charming and eccentric piano prodigy Justo Al-Cerraz, their lifelong friendship and rivalry orchestrate a tumultuous course for them both. Over the span of half a century of creative struggle and international turmoil that sees them paying house calls on Picasso one year and being courted by dictators the next, they make glorious music together, and clash over virtually everything else: love, politics, and the purpose of art. When the tensions propelling a war-torn world toward catastrophe bring Aviva, an Italian violinist with a haunted past, into their lives, Feliu and Justo embark upon their final and most dangerous collaboration.

About this title

About the Author

ANDROMEDA ROMANO-LAX has been a journalist, a travel writer, and a serious amateur cellist. Her fiction includes The Spanish Bow, The Detour, and Behave. She lives in Anchorage, Alaska, with her family.

Reviews

In her impressive debut, Romano-Lax creates the epic story of Feliu Delargo, an underprivileged child prodigy whose musical ability brings him into contact with world leaders, first-class artists and a life filled with loss and triumph. Their father killed in Cuba just before the Spanish-American War, Feliu, his three brothers and one sister manage a meager life in Campo Seco, a small Catalan town, while their strong-willed mother fends off suitors. At 14, Feliu and his mother travel to Barcelona, where a cello tutor agrees to take on Feliu as a student. Over the years, as Feliu establishes himself, he crosses path with Justo Al-Cerra, an egotistical, manipulative pianist, and their touring leads to an intertwining of lives that becomes more complicated when they encounter Aviva, a violinist with her own emotional damage. As the trio tour and Europe careens toward WWII, Romano-Lax weaves into the narrative historical figures from Spanish royalty to Franco and Hitler, giving Feliu the opportunity to ponder the roles of morality in art and art in politics. Though the story has much heart and depth, Feliu's proximity to so many watershed moments of the 20th century can make him feel more like an instructive icon than a person. But for sheer scope and ambition, this is a tough debut to beat. (Sept.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Set against the tumultuous backdrop of turn-of-the-century Spain, this fusion of art and politics traces the professional and personal evolution of a world-class cellist. As Feliu Delargo moves from prodigy to major talent, he travels from anarchist Barcelona to royalist Madrid. The volatile relationship between the idealistic Delargo and the pragmatic pianist Justo Al-Cerraz mirrors all the passion and turmoil of a Spain on the brink of civil war. Colleagues, friends, and rivals, the two take radically divergent paths when Franco assumes power, but are reunited in Paris on the eve of the Nazi invasion. Joining forces, they prepare for one last fateful concert in order to save Aviva, the Jewish violinist they both love. This riveting historical page-turner moves inexorably toward a heartrending crescendo. Flanagan, Margaret

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Chapter

~ 1 ~

I was almost born Happy.
           Literally, Feliz was the Spanish name my mother wanted for me. Not a family name, not a local name, just a hope, stated in the farthest-reaching language she knew—a language that once reached around the world, to the Netherlands, Africa, the Americas, the Philippines. Only music has reached farther and penetrated more deeply.
           I say “almost born Feliz,” because the name that attached itself to me instead, thanks to a sloppy bureaucrat’s bias toward Catalan saints’ names, was Feliu. Just one letter changed on my death—yes, death—certificate.
           My father was overseas that year, working as a customs officer in colonial Cuba. The afternoon my mother’s labor pains started, my father’s elder sister changed into a better dress, for church. Mamá bent over a chair near the kitchen doorway, legs splayed, ankles turned inward, as the weight of my dropping body pulled her pelvis to the floor. While she begged Tía not to go, Mamá’s knuckles whitened against the chair’s straw-plaited back.
           “I will light candles for you,” Tía said.
           “I don’t need prayers. I need—” My mother moaned, angling her hips from side to side, trying to find a position where the pain eased. Cool water? A chamber pot? “. . . help,” was all she could say.
           “I’ll send Enrique to get the midwife.” Tía pushed the ebony combs into her thick masses of gray-streaked hair. “No, I’ll go myself, on the way. Where’s Percival?”
           My oldest brother had slipped outside minutes earlier, bound for the bridge and the dry wash beneath it, along which the local shepherds drove their flocks. He and his friends hid there frequently, playing cards amid orange peels and broken barrel staves that reeked of vinegar.
           Percival was old enough to remember the previous disasters in sharp detail, and he didn’t want to witness another. Mamá’s last baby had died within minutes of birth. The one before had survived only a few days, while my mother herself hovered near death, racked with infection-induced fever. In Campo Seco, she was not the only unlucky one.

           My mother blamed the midwife who had moved to the village four years earlier, accompanied by her husband, a butcher.
           “They don’t wash their hands,” Mamá panted. “Last time, I saw the forceps she used. Broken at the hinge. Flakes”—she squirmed and jammed the heel of her palm into her back—“flakes of rust.”
           “Ridiculous!” Tía drew the lace mantilla over her head. “You are worrying for nothing. You should pray, instead.”
           My two other siblings, Enrique and Luisa, remained stoic in the face of my mother’s barnyard moans, the slick of straw-colored amniotic fluid on the floor, which five-year-old Luisa wiped away; the bloody smears on the wet towels, which seven-year-old Enrique wrung and dipped in a wide porcelain bowl. By the third dip, the blue flowers on the bowl’s painted bottom disappeared, obscured beneath a smoky layer of pink water.
           Thirty minutes after Tía departed, the midwife arrived. Mamá panted and strained from her marriage bed, pushing with all her strength while she struggled to keep her eyes open. She scrutinized the dirt crescents beneath the midwife’s fingernails. She twisted her neck to follow every step the midwife took, to catch fleeting glimpses of the tools displayed on a square of calico covering the bedside table, and the coil of gray cotton string that brought to mind the butcher’s leaky, net-covered roasts. When the midwife’s hands came near, Mamá tried to close her knees, to shield me from ill fortune. But the urge to push could not be stopped. I was coming.
           And then—just as suddenly—I stopped coming. What had once moved too quickly stopped moving at all. Mamá’s belly rippled and bulged a final time, then hardened into one long, unceasing contraction. Her jaw went slack. A blue vein bulged at her temple. Enrique, lingering in the open doorway, tried not to look between her legs, where the combination of taut, pearly flesh and wet hair made him think of washed-up jellyfish, collapsed against the weedy shore. The midwife caught him looking and snapped the sheet back into place, over Mamá’s legs and high, round abdomen. That gesture hid one disturbing view, but it only drew more attention to what remained visible: my mother’s red face, beaded with sweat and contorted with pain.
           “Here,” Mamá would say later, in recounting the story of my birth, “is where you decided to rebel. Whenever someone pushes you too hard, you do the opposite.”
           Actually, I was stuck: feet twisted up toward my neck, rear facing the only exit. A living churro tied into a bow.
           The midwife grunted as her hands pushed, prodded, and massaged beneath the loosely tented sheet, a question darkening her face. Forgetting Enrique, she tore away the sheet and whimpered at the sight of a small purple scrotum appearing at the spot where a crowning head should have been. She watched that spot for ten minutes, twisting the cloth of her apron with red fingers. Then she panicked. Ignoring Enrique’s incredulous, upturned face and Luisa’s round eyes, she pushed past them both and down the stairs, missing the bottom step entirely.
           The midwife had left to fetch her husband, who was two blocks away, wiping his own stained hands. She could have sent my brother or called from the balcony to one of our neighbor’s fleet-footed children. But she wasn’t a bright woman. And she knew that a third infant death in one family would invite costly gossip. Already, she could envision the sea of dark shawls that would greet her from this day forward—the back of every neighbor woman’s averted head and rounded shoulders, snubbing her if I died, and my mother with me.
           Left unassisted, my mother summoned her resolve and tried to breathe more deeply. She felt safer with the midwife gone, ready to accept whatever happened. She asked Luisa to retrieve a bottle from the cellar and to hold it to her lips, though nausea allowed her to drink only a little. She called Enrique to come and take the forceps, to dip and scrub them in a bowl of the hottest water, to be ready.
           “They don’t open very well,” he said, struggling with the oval-shaped handles. They were fashioned from twisted iron and padded with small pieces of stitched dark leather that reminded Enrique of a sweat-stained horse saddle. “Are the pieces supposed to come apart?”
           “Forget it. Put them down. Use your hands.”
           He blanched.
           Mamá heard Luisa start to cry, and ordered her to sing—anything, a folk song, or “Vamos a la Mar,” a happy round they’d all chanted on picnic trips to the Mediterranean coast.
           “. . . to eat fish in a wooden dish . . .” Luisa sang, again and again, and then: “I see something! It’s a foot!”
           Another push. A narrow back. With Enrique’s help, a shoulder. My mother lost consciousness. I’ve been told I hung there for a while, the picture of blind indecision, with my head refusing to follow my pasty body. Until Enrique, decisive enough for us both, stepped forward and pushed a small hand into the dark, hooking a finger around my chin.
           Following my final, slippery emergence, he laid me on my mother’s belly, still attached by the cord to the afterbirth inside her. There was no spank; no bawling cries. Mamá briefly surfaced into consciousness once again with instructions for Enrique on how to tie the cord with the gray string in two places, and how to cut the flattened purple cable in between.
           He moved me onto my mother’s chest, but I didn’t root. One of my legs hung more limply than the other, the hip joint disturbingly flaccid. No one cleared the white residue plugging my tiny nostrils. Mamá’s arms lay at her sides, too tired to embrace me. There was little point. My eyelids did not twitch. My rib cage did not swell.
           “It’s cold,” Luisa said. “We should wrap it.”
           “He’s cold,” Enrique corrected.
           “A boy.” My mother sounded both pleased and resigned, her cheeks wet as she relived what had happened before and would happen again: the increasing pain as her adrenaline ebbed, the incapacitating fever, the deep plunge into confused sleep from which she might not return. “Tell the midwife it was not her fault. The notary will come to the door. There is a blank card with an envelope in the drawer, with the money. Write the name down for him, so there is no mistake: Feliz Aníbal Delargo Domenech.”
           She gritted her teeth, waited for a spasm to subside. “Is it cold in here, Luisa?”
           “It’s hot, Mamá.”
           “The notary will inform the priest”—she sucked in a mouthful of air, then bit down on her lower lip—“and the engraver.”
           “The engraver?” Luisa asked, but Mamá did not explain.
           “Enrique—you know how to spell Aníbal, like your great-uncle.”
           Enrique shook his head.
           “Like the conqueror from Carthage, the man with the elephants.”
           “I don’t know how,” my brother protested, more alarmed by the request to write my name than he’d been by the drama of pulling a reluctant baby from the womb.
           But the long list and the imagined tasks ahead—a letter to Papá, a visitation, a burial—had exhausted the last of Mamá’s stamina. She closed her eyes and swung her head from side to side, trying to catch an elusive breeze. She began, “A-N-I-B . . .” and then lost consciousness again.

Copyright © 2007 by Andromeda Romano-Lax
 
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Edition details

• Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
• Publication date: 2007
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0151015422
• ISBN 13: 9780151015429
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 560