The Spanish Bow by Andromeda Romano-Lax

could, not because I feared him, but just the opposite—because I trusted him. Unlike Señor Rivera, he wanted nothing from me and did not goad me with any kind of future visions, glorious or doomed. But it was difficult. Sometimes, I slipped away and did not hear him until his soft voice had escalated to a grumble. Out of the corner of one eye, I would see his hand go up, gesturing me to stop playing mid-measure; but I could not stop, not until I'd finished the musical phrase. And even then, I would have preferred to finish the entire piece. As the months wore on, I grew accustomed to ignoring him, to indulging my own desire to enter that tunnel of light that appeared when the music was going well. I could fall into that light and block out everything.
    Once I looked around mid-lesson and could not find Alberto at all. I remembered that he had been waving at me, calling out to me about dynamics, but now I could not find him. The balcony was empty. I hadn't heard the front door close. Yet it had—with a slam, he told me later. In a pique, he had left for the café.
    Years later, critics would underestimate the influence of my Barcelona years. They would refer to me as essentially "self-taught," and I would not correct them. I prided myself on having learned so much under Alberto's light hand, forgetting that his leniency was a liberating gift that lesser men, like the Rivera brothers, did not know how to give. Alberto was not without opinions or methodology; he spent hours guiding me through scales and positions and teaching me how to hear. But when my eyes glazed over, when I started to withdraw into a dazed cloud of sound, he recognized the signs and understood the limits, both his and mine. In my lifetime, I would meet priests who had never learned to turn the other cheek, communists who had no interest in sharing so much as a cigarette, fascists who extolled order but couldn't walk a straight line. Alberto believed and lived a single idea. He was his own man. He struggled to let me become mine.

    My mother usually woke three hours before I did, in order to make the long commute into the industrial neighborhood called the Eixample, where she had found work at a calico-weaving factory. She stood for fourteen-hour days in front of a loom, alongside hundreds of other women, in a giant industrial shed that was hot in summer, freezing cold in winter, and painfully noisy year-round.
    Alberto's and my mother's schedules were so different, I assumed my tutor and mother rarely saw each other. But one morning when it was still dark I woke and went to use the bathroom down the hall. Passing the unlit hall that led to the kitchen, I heard voices, hers soft and high, his gentle and low, both of them surprisingly relaxed and informal—like old friends who had grown used to having coffee together. No wonder Alberto had trouble waking up in time for our morning sessions lately, I thought, and felt my chest grow heavy with the weight of an unfamiliar emotion.
    Alberto spent less time worrying aloud about my future career than about my mother's immediate employment. "It's a bad time all around," he told me later that autumn, over our bachelors' dinner of sardines and bread. "The cost of food, the strikes. They've talked about closing your mother's factory. With no colonies to export to, it's hard to sell calico now. Still, it's hard work for a woman her age. She's lost weight since coming here."
    Lost weight? How closely was he scrutinizing her shape? Yet even I had noticed how small she looked beneath the grayish white sheet, without the crinoline and corset and heavy skirts.
    "You make it sound like it's my fault," I said.
    "You could help her—earn some money, so she can work less. There is a café nearby looking to hire musicians."
    "You asked my mother about it?"
    "I did. She doesn't like the idea."
    "She doesn't believe I can make money playing. She doesn't believe playing music is real work."
    "Oh, I don't know."
    "She doesn't