and she’d pick up the thread.
“Pep Saval bought me a Chinese doll. I kept it for years until it disappeared during one of my moves.”
“He got it in China?”
“No, Casa Ribas, a very fine store in Sabadell. Her body was soft cotton and she was dressed in brocade with red-and-blue silk and golden threads woven throughout. Her head was made of porcelain—white as alabaster with all the details of her features rendered in the finest ink strokes. The delicate line of the eyebrows, the rosebud mouth, a perfect mole on her cheekbone. She had tiny pointy feet. Later I found out that the costume of the doll identified her as a prostitute. No, not as bad as that, a courtesan really, a concubine. Pep knew. It was like a statement from him.”
“A doll, for Pep’s little girl.”
“Pep Saval became my first manager—as well as my chaperone, school teacher, voice coach, protector.”
“How old did you say you were?”
“Eleven. It was all practically platonic. I was such a beautiful child that people couldn’t help touching me. They reached out constantly to stroke my hair, rub my back, pinch my cheeks. Neither men nor women could keep away from me. Pep Saval would step in and gently remove me from their grip. Then at night, because I was a child and children need to be held, he would take me into his bed and pull me close.
“His skin in the muggy summer night glistened like copper. His chest was strong and the hair on it was springy. He smelled of dark tobacco and brandy, and later of a gypsy dancer’s perfume. In the dark, when he smiled, two gold teeth gleamed. He would hold me until he thought I was asleep. Then he would slip out and spend the rest of the night with the dancer in the room next door. I could tell he was with her because I would hear his voice and her laugh and the jingle of bell bracelets. My hope was to make him feel as good lying with me. Then he wouldn’t need to change beds in the middle of the night.”
“You laugh, Señora?”
“Why are you surprised? I knew what to do for his good. The gypsy had left a husband and a child in Seville because her tips were better when she appeared to be available. I don’t understand much about money, but I understood this much. She would trade the company of her family for money—how could she be anything but a gold digger to Pep Saval?
“By then I had figured out a thing or two about men. They just want to be touched, you know. Men don’t want to do the work. At first, maybe, when they are young and a woman is new to them. But after a while, they want to lie back and be touched. I learned about touching men from Pep Saval. After a few nights, he stopped going to her.”
“How long?”
“Turn that thing off. There are things I will not have on tape. You’ll have to trust your memory.”
“It’s good material, Señora. You can edit afterward.”
“Darling . . . I never call anyone darling unless I am angry at them. So do be on guard, you and your tape machine. If I say to you, ‘That is enough for today, darling,’ or ‘Shut the machine off, darling, do it.’ ”
“Are we done, then?”
“No, but let’s change the subject. Anything except men.”
“Any fears, Señora?”
“To be old and weak and generally burdensome. To look like Jell-O with my clothes off. And like an overdressed blimp with them on. To have a brain that forgets and eyes that blur and a voice that cracks.”
“Aging is unavoidable.”
“I should have died years ago. At forty-seven, to be exact. I sang in Madama Butterfly, so petite, so happy-happy and sad-sad, so delicate and vulnerable and pitiful. I looked like Cio-Cio-San’s mother in a kimono the size of a circus tent. I died on stage. I died in the reviews. I should have died in my hotel room.”
“There were other more suitable parts where you triumphed still.”
“How old are you, Mr. Lockwood?”
“Forty.”
“Learn to sail. Read Don Quixote. Bathe in the Ganges. Finish this book. Live dangerously, but not past fifty-seven.”
“I’ll need years to accomplish those things.”
“They won’t get any easier. Finish up with your life before you go on too long, like me.”
“You don’t seem to be contemplating death. You are very much alive, Señora.”
“Well, I do have a book deal.”
“Yes, so do I. We should get back to work.”
FROM THE WONDER SINGER . . .
The Language of Hands
During those first years, I thought of Father every day. I searched for his face in the market crowds and in hostels, listening for his voice amid the lodgers bent over their cards. Along the road, I watched for the distinctive cadence of his walk, the rocking of his body, the puzzled frown of his expression as he ate, unable to enjoy the food until he had discerned its freshness and precise seasoning. I rehearsed what I would say to him: I would pummel his chest and kick his shins and demand to know why he had left me.
“Your father must be dead,” Pep Saval tried to persuade me. “When he stepped out of the inn that day, he left you in my care with every intention to return in the evening after his customer visits.”
“Don’t say that.”
“How else does someone disappear?” he said as if the answer were absurdly self-evident. “Señor Casals loved you and he wanted the best for you. That night, while on his way to see how our first lesson had gone, bandits came upon him on the road and killed him to steal the money he had collected from his sales.”
I stared at him boldly.
“It would do you good to cry for your father,” he said to me.
I remained sullen and dry-eyed, even after he scolded me for having a cold heart. He told me I would never become an artist if I was unable to shed tears.
We had been living in Vals, a town located along the fair circuit where Pep Saval found a ready harvest of easy winnings. We settled into two rooms in a dank, noisy building.
In the larger of the two rooms Pep Saval hung a sheet to divide the main brass bed where he slept from my narrow cot, on which rested a variety of dolls and plush animals. He had bought them for me as we went from town to town whenever I required quick relief from melancholy.
“We will respect each other’s privacy,” he declared. “This curtain is a sacred barrier. May I be damned to hell if I ever violate it.” He crossed himself when he said this, even though I had never known him to acknowledge the existence of God or Joseph, Mary, and Jesus or the Saints. Except for the occasional scatological blasphemy, Em cago en Déu, when things did not go as expected, Pep Saval was happily godless.
The other room contained Pep’s armchair, a table and two stools, a washbasin, a makeshift kitchen organized around a charcoal brazier where a pot of soup continually simmered. The Eternal Soup, Pep called it. I never saw him wash out the pot. When it ran low, he would add water, a couple of carrots, an onion, a potato. There was never meat or chicken in the soup because Pep claimed that animal fats coated the vocal cords and made the voice thick. With the soup there was always pa amb tomàquet made with stale rolls and soft ripe tomatoes.
I shuffled about the rooms in my stocking feet, shoulders slouched, eyes unfocused, red hair stringy and hanging over my face. Every morning while I stood at the small stove heating the milk for morning coffee, Pep Saval greeted me cheerfully: “Bon dia, Senyoreta Mercè.” Then he’d lead me through the basic exercises. I went along grudgingly.
There