Free The Spanish Bow by Andromeda Romano-Lax Page B

reshoulder a bag, my mother tripped over her own dragging skirt hem. Tearing it, she cried out, "Is there nowhere to sit?"
    "Of course there is," a man said from behind us, and shoveled my mother into a chair mere steps away from the pedestrian flow. He set before her a goblet as big as a fishbowl, filled with ruby-colored liquid and bobbing fruit peels of yellow, orange, and green.
    Mamá glanced around, pulling her bags closer to her feet as I slipped into the chair next to her. "We don't want to eat," she said.
    "No menu?" the man said. "That's fine. I'll be back."
    "
Muy amable,
" she whispered as he walked away, setting her lips into an approximation of confidence.
    "What is that?" I asked, pointing to the goblet.
    "I'm not sure. Don't touch it."
    Mamá had just opened her fan when the man appeared again, slid a slip of paper under the goblet's stem, and disappeared. Mamá pulled it out and studied it. "But I didn't ask for this!" A second waiter appeared, his hand extended. To her explanation of the misunderstanding and her protest that she hadn't taken a single sip, he merely retied his apron strings and stared into the distance, signaling over his head with one finger. From across the Ramblas, the same policeman we'd seen earlier nodded briskly and stepped toward the street, pausing for a horse-drawn cab to pass.
    My mother slammed down her fan, upsetting the glass, and sending a spray of red liquid across her torn dress. We both jumped up. "Fine—take it!" Mamá yelled and fumbled in her handbag for three coins that she pushed into the bored waiter's hand.
    We were a block east, swept by the Ramblas's ceaseless current, before she turned to me. "Two days' grocery money—gone. And you know the worst of it, Feliu? I'm even thirstier than before." Under her breath she added, "It's the thing I hate most about cities."
    "What?"
    "The way they make you want what you didn't even know you should want. The way they make you crave what you can't have."

    But I haven't explained about our abrupt departure that morning from Campo Seco, or how it came to be that our world was split in two, with Mamá and me on one side, Luisa and Tía on the other. Tía had expected the previous day's nightmare to yield an honor-salvaging wedding to Don Miguel. Even as we'd kissed her dry cheeks and promised to write soon, she'd refused to acknowledge that we were leaving. Luisa understood that someone had to stay with Tía, and the big city was no place for a girl—especially when we had no idea where we'd sleep. But she seemed to believe Mamá when she said she'd be back soon, even as Mamá packed up her silver candlesticks, two lace-edged tablecloths, and a rolled tapestry inherited from her parents.
    In our town, Mamá had seemed eminently worldly, but here in Barcelona, no one would call Mamá "Doña." Though she had visited this city in her youth, and traveled to other places besides—Cuba, Cádiz, Madrid—the passage of years had diminished her confidence. In Barcelona, Mamá did not know where to rest, how to demand good service, or how to interpret the directions given us by lethargic cigarette-sellers and apathetic street-sweepers. As we wandered the boulevards and alleys looking for the address of the tutor Don José had recommended, strangers jostled her and cast disparaging glances at her country clothes. Every time she paused at an intersection, lost and weary, she seemed a little smaller, her head no higher than the spoked wooden wheels of the endless wagons and carriages groaning along the narrow, traffic-choked streets.
    We finally found the home of the tutor along a side street that reeked of rotting shrimp, urine, and other alley smells against which Mamá and I stiffened our faces, each hoping to disguise our repulsion from the other. The ground-floor tenant, an old woman with rounded shoulders and a crooked spine, heard us slapping our hands against the locked wrought-iron gate.
    "Alberto Mendizábal?" she mumbled,