“I’ve never seen you laugh. It's true.”
“Can’t you teach me?”
“Are you happy?”
“How could I not be!”
“Then you don’t need to laugh.”
At the time I accepted Rosario as a student, we settled on the fee for my services. Week after week elapsed without my receiving any payment. I had to tell her: “This cannot go on.”
“You mustn’t think I don’t value your…”
“It violates your orderliness, Rosario.”
“The one thing I haven’t ever been able to keep straight is my accounts,” she owned. “I stick my bills in an old hatbox. I always mean to get to them, but the pile just grows, and I can’t deal with it.”
“Before our next session, you’ll send me what you owe me. The rule will be: you pay me first thing.”
Rosario respected this disposition faithfully for as long as she remained my pupil. Otherwise, she did not mend her ways. Eventually Roberto took over the administration of her finances. “If she wasn’t so good-looking, she’d be in debtor's prison,” he joked.
Soon after the evening of my audience with Tito, Rosario asked to come to me for her lesson. She moved listlessly, seemed to peer out through an indigo haze. Having played a few notes, she thumped a sour chord and let her hands plummet to her lap. “Fool!” she muttered.
“What is it?”
“While Roberto was gone, I vowed that I would surprise him by keeping up with the bills. I did stay on top of the really dire ones, but most of them were still unopened when he got home. He didn’t rebuke me-just shook his head. The other night, he sat down to pay them. I was in bed. He stalked in, snapped on the light, flung one at me with ‘Third Notice’ stamped on it: ‘What's this?’ I supposed he was angry because we might be dunned. I apologized. ‘No, read it.’ It was for the pregnancy test I’d had a couple of weeks before my first trip to visit him. ‘What's the meaning of this!’ he shouted. For months I’d been considering how best to present the facts to him. I was positive I could make him understand. But I didn’t take enough time-I blurted out:
The next morning Miguel appeared at my door, though it wasn’t the day for his lesson. He begged me to spend a few minutes with him. Since I was just leaving, I suggested that he walk with me to an appointment I had. I set a brisk pace and he jounced along at my side, fitfully grasping me by the arm as he spoke.
“Rosario talked to you-I know. Listen, the last thing I wanted to do was to hurt Roberto. I never thought there’d be consequences. I never thought he’d find out. If it had been me Roberto confronted with that bill, I’d have invented a story. But Rosario did what she did-which upset everything. I couldn’t let Roberto simply hang like that, not knowing who the father was. I was sure I could break it to him in a way so he’d feel-not excluded. I had this idea I could tell him the truth as if I were lying…”
He stepped off the curb and I yanked him back as a bicycle whizzed by. He didn’t seem to notice.
“I reached him at the office: ‘Can you come over, it's urgent.’ Ten minutes later, we were both standing in my alcove. It just popped out of me. ‘I’m the father.’ He glared: ‘Ah, so Rosario told you. Who are you trying to cover for?’ He started getting all worked up: ‘Don’t hide this from me!’ ‘I am the father.’ ‘You’re mocking me!’-and he stomped out. I called Rosario to tell her what had happened. She was angry: ‘Why didn’t you speak to me first? There was no reason for him to know.’”
We were at my destination. I reached out and thrummed on his shoulder a theme from the rondo he was studying. “Tomorrow at five.”
It was seventeen after the hour when an elated Miguel sailed in. “I’ve just left Roberto. Do you know what he did? He hugged me-hugged me!- and asked me to forgive him. He said: ‘With Rosario so attractive… even for you, Miguel. You needed to have a son, man! Besides-aren’t two fathers better than one?’ What a friend! I would give my life for him!”
“Your life, Miguel?”
“Yes!”
I had to handle Miguel sternly for several weeks to get him back in harness. Rosario settled down of her own accord. Roberto did not alter his demeanor, except to introduce a shade of punctilio into our relations, a heightened sense of his own dignity. A different tone crept into his remarks about Rosario and Miguel: not so much paternal as paternalistic, a benevolent grandfather speaking of slightly errant grandchildren. He had lost ground pianistically while away, and drove himself to catch up with Miguel. They kept on meeting regularly to critique each other, and we had a joint lesson monthly.
One of these took place at Roberto’s. I was struck by his warmth as a host. In a hundred gracious ways he had insinuated Miguel as an orna- ment of the household. A favorite armchair was reserved for him. He was encouraged to regard the kitchen as his own, and sometimes on the maid's day off he cooked dinner. When I got there that evening, Lili was bawling over some grievance. Roberto, who was building a fire in the grate, let Miguel assuage her. Rosario, placidly ensconced on the sofa, suckled Tito.
At random intervals, I would ask my students to play something they had not practiced for many months, to ascertain whether it had stayed in their fingers. During one of his private lessons, I said to Roberto: “Let's hear that Schumann piece you were affected by.”
“I’ve forgotten it,” he snapped.
“Go ahead, give it a try. You may be surprised how much of it comes back.”
Reluctantly, he complied. He acquitted himself so well, one would almost have sworn he had been reviewing the score.
“Excellent.”
He scowled. “Never again!”
“Roberto-”
“Schumann. Bah! If he had such a happy hearth, why was he obsessed with death? Those dancing skeletons in
To disperse the gloom, I served tea with cakes and played him Mac-Dowell's
“Ah,” said Roberto, “a piece with nothing but charm.”
It was as though I had unwittingly opened a drawer deep inside Roberto and glimpsed some venomous insect feeding on the darkness. Whatever that noxious energy may have been, he seemed to harbor it as a mortifying reminder of hazards to be shunned. He showed Miguel and Rosario the most exquisite consideration. They, in turn, deferred to him as the generous ruler of their garden.
Miguel was ambushed by the ferocity of his attachment to the baby. Tito's smiles and yawns, imperious appetites, budding quirks became his only topic. He buttonholed everyone he met to flaunt photos of his “godson.” To me, he chafed at the facade he had adopted: “Will I always have to talk to my boy through this mask?” When an earache set the child wailing in agony, Miguel couldn’t eat or sleep; he later confessed to me that the ordeal had brought him a guilty relief, since it supplied him a pretext to haunt the nursery at all hours, wring his hands, moan, and for once vent his feelings for Tito with fully licensed abandon.
I remember the coziness of the household throughout that wintry season: dense crystal vases spilled over with flowers that sunned in the blaze of the fireplace, and the vista of snowcapped peaks made the living room all the more snug. Rosario seemed burnished with well-being. Roberto, prospering in his business, bought for her any number of expensive outfits, which soon had their fronts stained with mothers milk. Rosario said that she was “addicted” to feeding the baby. One evening, as Tito gorged, Roberto poked Miguel in the ribs: “Don’t you wish you were him? When Rosario nursed Lili, she was ravishing enough, but the boy stimulates a whole other set of glands in her. What a pity it would have been to miss this, eh? It sometimes seems to me that I was destined to have only a daughter, but that Fate had the good sense to change its mind.”
Rosario told me: “Before I married Roberto, I asked him: ‘What if I fall in love with someone else?’ He answered: ‘Just so you don’t stop loving me…’ ‘It's impossible for me to stop loving you,’ I said. And that's how it's turned out.
“There's something incestuous in me. Roberto excites me more as a brother. With Miguel, it's different. He's more of a son. What would it be like with a real son! That's what I’ve secretly dreamed of, ever since I began to
