The Spanish Bow by Andromeda Romano-Lax Read Free Book Online Page A

people, she had named only one: Reynaldo. It was Papá's name, seldom uttered. She was cursing him not only for failing to return, not only for leaving her with five children and a difficult sister-in-law, but for delivering into my hands a hope that she couldn't fulfill.
    ***
    Around this time, Father Basilio decided that I might have the makings of a priest—a solution to one of my problems, if not both. It had started with the chocolate. From the time I was old enough to attend school, Percival, Enrique and I had set out together from home with our breakfast in our pockets: hard, dark, dusty chocolate squares, speckled with bits of dried fruit and nuts. We were forbidden to eat them on the way to the Mass we were made to attend before school, because Communion required a pure, empty stomach. After Mass ended, we and our young neighbors filed out of the church to the plaza, where—with Father Basilio's words about kindness and brotherly love still fresh in our ears—we raced and taunted and pushed each other in hopes of grabbing a seat on the nearest outdoor benches. There we could sit and eat the treats in our pockets. Ten minutes later, a bell rang to call us into school next door.
    Percival, who was in his last year of school, invariably ate his chocolate square on the way to Mass, daring us to tell on him—which we never did. Enrique respected the prohibition and adhered to it. But he wanted the chocolate so badly that his fingers crept into his pockets and nestled there, melting the treat into a lumpy puddle. Once, just before placing the Communion wafer on his tongue, Father Basilio paused and asked Enrique to hold out his hands. When my brother presented his sticky brown, trembling fingers, the priest assumed he'd been nibbling in the back of the church all through the service. Enrique was sent away without the wafer and given a paddling later that day at school. But the very next day, his fingers wandered into his pockets again.
    I, too, loved chocolate and I, too, felt tempted. But I did not let my fingers touch the chocolate, or even the edges of my pockets. As I experimented with delaying gratification, I found a savory quality to self-denial that was even more powerful than the satisfaction of sugar. At some point my mother discovered my secret and had a meeting with the priest. He was the one to ask me, on a Monday afternoon after school, why I had accumulated twenty-seven squares of untouched chocolate in a box under my bed.
    He did not bother to ask if I'd stolen them from other boys, which must have seemed unlikely, given my unimpressive physique. Nor did he ask if I disliked chocolate, since Mamá had assured him it was my favorite treat. Finally he tilted his head and tried, "Are you saving it for the poor?"
    I'd never given the poor a thought. I'd been too busy over the last five and a half weeks enjoying the sparkly lightness in my head, the way hunger extended the church bells' dull metal echo, the feeling of defiant strength in my heart—as compared to the weakness in my hip and leg—when I walked into school unfed, feeling proud of myself for doing without.
    "Yes, Father—for the poor," I lied.
    "Remarkable," he said, and let me go home.
    The next Sunday after Mass, Father Basilio invited me to his private study, a dark, airless room with heavy wine-colored drapes. He asked, "Have you thought of the priesthood, Feliu?"
    "Is being a priest work?"
    "The hardest work."
    Thinking of my mother, I asked, "Is it
dignified
work?"
    He laughed. "Dignified—of course it is! There is nothing more dignified."
    Father Basilio directed me to various Bible readings, which I promised to contemplate and sometimes did. He helped me with my introductory Latin and taught me a few words of modern Italian, explaining they would come in helpful if I visited Rome someday. These same Italian words, he added, were used by musicians and composers across Europe. At this, I sat up and paid attention, learning how to