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back, so that his open mouth was facing the ceiling and his drink spilled onto the floor. Still I didn't stop until I felt the sting of a hard slap against my face. My eyes followed the invading hand up a dark sleeve and into the face of Señor Eduardo Rivera. My cheek flamed. My stupor dissolved. It came to my attention, with the same sticky realization that one has upon waking just as one is wetting the bed, that I had been playing the violin as a cello. I had perched it on the seat between my legs. Duarte's playing had affected me that much—I could imagine no other way to play a stringed instrument! Perhaps, in my dream state, I was only seeing the future.
    The musicians were laughing too loudly for me to gauge whether they'd heard much of my minuet. Even played in the wrong position, it hadn't sounded half bad to me. But perhaps because I did not look contrite, only groggy, Rivera lifted his hand again, to deliver a second slap.
    In those days, when schoolteachers swatted students and shopkeepers chased away delinquents with brooms, Rivera would have been forgiven for the first slap. But not—in our family—for the second. My mother had been holding my leather bow tube for the duration of my short recital, and now she raised it to one shoulder. El Nene and his trio stopped laughing. My mother squeezed her eyes shut, cocked her right elbow and swung. With a muffled crack, the leather tube made contact with Eduardo's infamous beak, and the flood-prone "Riera" flowed once more, this time in red.

    That night we hurried home and packed our bags for an impromptu holiday on the coast, at a family friend's summer cottage.
    "But when are we coming back, Mamá?" Luisa asked as we tossed clothes into our bags.
    "About three weeks, I think. By then, Señor Rivera's nose will have healed."
    "Are the violin lessons done?" I asked. "Will he come to our house anymore?"
    "Yes,
querido.
And no," she said. Then she laughed as she hadn't laughed in years—an explosive laugh, unexpected, brief and wild. It reminded me of a rising flock of startled birds, sending hope scattering in directions too varied for my mind to follow.
    We had just gathered with our suitcases in the foyer when a knock came at the door. My siblings and I all looked to Mamá, who stiffened, and then to the line of dancing light under the heavy wooden door's warped bottom, where we could see the shadows cast by an impatient set of small, shifting feet. A messenger boy's grubby fingers pushed an envelope through the wide crack.
    Evidently, El Nene had sympathy for my inauspicious debut. He'd taken the time to pen a handwritten letter of introduction recommending me for an audition with a
real
cello teacher, in Barcelona. It was signed with the pianist's full name, Justo Al-Cerraz ( I hadn't realized he was called anything except El Nene) and decorated with a
peseta
sized, humorous self-portrait.
    My mother smiled at the letter but frowned at the caricature. Then she folded the letter and instructed us to wait as she went to put it away in the family Bible, with the last letter from my father. "Barcelona," she said, "is far away."
    Despite the sober silence that followed, I could still feel the warm glow of my mother's earlier laughter. The future was uncertain, but at least it was exposed and alive. No matter where my father's unreturned bones lay, turning to dust in a land Spain no longer possessed, the rest of us could be flesh again.

CHAPTER 3
    After we returned home from our vacation of discretion, I was delighted not to be making music with Señor Rivera anymore. But the feeling faded by Christmas, when I longed to hold an instrument in my hand again.
    "When can I learn to play?" I badgered my mother.
    "There are no cellos here, Feliu."
    "Even a violin."
    "And who would teach you?"
    "Mamá, I'm getting old!" I was nine years old when I first said this, and Mamá laughed. But as the months passed, and I kept repeating it, she stopped tousling my hair or smiling in