The Spanish Bow Read Online Free Page A

little interest in the Catholic festivals that clogged our village streets. But he had loved when the traveling musicians came, with their gourds and broomsticks strung as homemade mandolins, guitars, and violins. I'd begged my father to buy me instruments like those. That had been close to two years ago, when Papá had last visited home.
    "The stick!" I called out suddenly. "Is that what he wanted for me to have?"
    "
Bow,
Feliu. It's an unfinished bow, without the hair."
    "I knew it!" I retrieved the stick from the box and began to saw at an imaginary instrument across my chest.
    After a moment I stopped to ask, "What kind of bow?"
    The question gave her pause. "It doesn't matter," she said, and part of me knew that she wasn't telling the truth. "One bow is the same as any other."
    I danced in circles as my mother spoke with the wagoner and watched his assistant load the box onto the wagon bed. Then I remembered my unanswered question: "Is that what Papá wanted me to have?"
    The wagon jerked forward, steered by an impatient driver and eager horses.
    "Up, Feliu," she gestured, her arms beckoning me toward the seat. "Your brothers and sister are waiting for us. Father Basilio is expecting a coffin. You made your choice. Now come."

    Back home, Enrique stole glances at my strange wooden stick, which made me hold it closer, working it under one armpit and finally down into one leg of my pants. But any incipient jealousy was dampened when he realized it was a musical object. "A bow?" he snorted, slapping my back. "I thought it was a musket plunger."
    Enrique, age thirteen, was our little soldier; he claimed the compass, a handy instrument for making sorties beyond the olive- and grapevine-covered hills. Percival—at sixteen, an adult in our eyes—stayed above the fray, accepting the blank diary. In the years to come, he'd never write a word in it, only numbers: gambling odds, winnings, and debts. Luisa, age eleven, wrapped her chubby fingers around the jungle cat, refusing to let go until Mamá offered to fill the blue glass bottle with perfume, if Luisa would give the cat to two-year-old Carlito. When the divisions were made and all brows smoothed, Mamá exhaled deeply, saying nothing more about my father's undisclosed intentions.
    Many years later, it would become an insomniac's preoccupation for me: What if Enrique had taken the bow? He 'd been in Papá's choir, and had demonstrated greater musical aptitude than any of us, even if guns amused him more. If he 'd walked with Mamá to the train and back, with more time to consider, would he still be alive? Would the compass have helped Percival or Luisa to better find their ways? And Carlito: Well, there was no saving him. He would die of diphtheria seven years later, to be buried alongside our two siblings who had perished as infants. At the funeral, Percival would lean into me, whispering, "We beat the odds—that's all it is."

    There's a saying in our corner of northeastern Spain: "Pinch a Spaniard—if he sings out, he's a Catalan." We considered ourselves a musical region, and yet even here, among troubadours, my father had stood out. In his spare time, he had been the director for our local men's choir, a group that took its cue from the workingmen's choirs of Barcelona—proud men, singing our native regional language at a time when Catalan poetry and song were briefly blossoming.
    In 1898, the year my father and several other prominent local men died abroad, the group disbanded, replaced by a choir led by Father Basilio, who had come to us from Rome. This later choir was never as popular. Following the priest's lead, it sang in Italian—a disappointment to nearly everyone, even my Cuban-raised mother, who had never felt entirely comfortable with the Catalan language. The secular Italian choir folded a few years later, leaving only a few hard-core devotees, the poorest singers of the lot, to sing in Latin during Masses. Our town, once a multilingual bastion of song,