Читать книгу The Revolutionaries Try Again - Mauro Javier Cardenas - Страница 11
ОглавлениеEveryone thinks they’re the chosen ones, Masha wrote on Antonio’s manuscript. See About Schmidt with Jack Nicholson. Then she quoted from Hope Against Hope by Nadezhda Mandelstam, because she was sure Antonio hadn’t read her yet: Can a man really be held accountable for his own actions? His behavior, even his character, is always in the merciless grip of the age, which squeezes out of him the drop of good or evil that it needs from him. In San Francisco, besides the accumulation of wealth, what does the age ask of your so called protagonist? No wonder he never returns to Ecuador.
Why had her comments in Antonio’s manuscripts been so mean spirited? She’d been transferring the contents of her closet to boxes that will be transported to her new apartment in New York soon and she’d come across Antonio’s manuscripts inside a hatbox, where she’d also come across the compendium of contemporary classical music he had recorded for her, which she was listening to as she read his manuscripts again. She hadn’t seen Antonio or thought about him in at least twelve months, since around the time of his farewell party, and because she doesn’t remember marking his manuscripts with such virulence, reading them now was akin to discovering that while she was asleep or away someone who turns out to be her had defaced an entrusted room with a red pen. Had she somehow subscribed back then to the asinine notion that one couldn’t just barge into art, as Antonio had been desperately trying to do, without a lineage that justified one’s so called artistic inclination? Her father was a physicist and her mother had been a violinist and unlike Antonio she grew up alongside the Western Canon but she hadn’t become a great painter.
—
D Sharp Minor Etude, No. 12, Opus 8 by Alexander Scriabin: Horowitz wrong noted the D sharp etude in Moscow, Antonio said to Masha, listen, toward the end, Vladimir must have been nervous, or overwhelmed, or trying to both perform and watch himself perform because he’s eighty three years old and hasn’t been to Russia in sixty one years, and yet what’s amazing, or perhaps not so amazing, I know you’ll grumble if you don’t think it’s at least mildly amazing that, if you put on your headphones and scan every second of that recording of Horowitz in Moscow, you have to conclude that he’s not crying, unless he’s a silent weeper, now listen to this Valentin Silvestrov piece called Postludium, Antonio said — I absolutely agree with you, Masha, Silvestrov’s concept of the postlude, of a nostalgia for tonality expressed as a dissipation of tonality, sounds more interesting than his music — now listen to this piece by Arvo Pärt called Tabula Rasa, Antonio said, recounting for her what he knew about this music with so much glee that she began to think he couldn’t even believe he knew so much about a repertoire that just a few years ago had been foreign to him. She might have found his glee appealing then, or maybe she hadn’t, but since she had been new to San Francisco and hadn’t known anybody yet she had allowed herself to find his glee appealing (his glee and his excessive focus on researching the music, as if to atone for the deficiencies in his musical training he was trying to become a librarian of sounds — did you know that Messiaen composed his Quartet for the End of Time in a German war camp? — I don’t care I still don’t like his monotheistic bird music, Antonio —), but now she chooses to dismiss his glee and his librarianism as a noxious attempt to differentiate himself from others, no different than a dentist sporting heavy metal tank tops emblazoned with creatures that could extirpate Messiaen’s birds on earth, although the need to differentiate themselves had been what brought Masha and Antonio together: their contempt for those who stopple their lives for the promise of stocks, for instance, their unstated belief that what really matters exists in a parallel San Francisco of performances and paintings and poetry readings and yet unlike Antonio she detested poetry readings: why undermine your quiet text with your loud, needsome voice? At Antonio’s farewell party the loud voices of the women there had confused her. Were these not the same philistines they had targeted with what they liked to call, in homage to Nabokov, their plumed opprobrium?
All the guests at Antonio’s farewell party had been women. A blond American had opened Antonio’s door. She seemed to know that she needed to pull the door extra hard against the bristly carpet, although she looked confused about why her pull also spilled her drink, and either because she was drunk or because Masha refused to smile at the girl’s performance of cute bewilderment, the girl interrupted the welcoming skit that she’d seemed ready to enact for Masha, and yet as the girl in the tight jeans and pink pumps retreated down the hall, holding her Styrofoam cup as if it were a pet soaked in pee, and as the teleological dance beats coming from the living room concluded in a collective singalong — we want your soul! — Masha didn’t keep Antonio’s manuscripts rolled in her hand but returned them to her messenger bag, stashing them among his copy of A Werewolf Problem in Central Russia and her new palette knives and what was left of a bottle of corner store Pinot, the same brand that Antonio had offered her on the night they first met. She shouldn’t have come unannounced. That she’d felt entitled to because she wanted to know if the fictions Antonio had given her were true seemed ridiculous to her now. That she’d been trying to make herself believe that was the real reason she’d come was even more ridiculous. She knew then as she knows now, as she listens to Scriabin’s D Sharp Minor Etude from Antonio’s compendium, that her five or six months with Antonio entitled her to nothing. She also knew, because he’d told her, that not only were all of his friends in San Francisco women, but all of his relationships with them lasted less than six months. Why return to these moments at his farewell party then? Just toss his manuscripts and his tiresome compendium. Does she find solace in reminding herself that the moment’s over and she’s become the only spectator of that embarrassing moment, Masha in her black turtleneck by Antonio’s front door, trying to decide whether to leave what turned out to be Antonio’s farewell party, or wade into the party and confront him with absolutely nothing? On the other side of his living room Antonio was dancing in the exuberant way he probably thought American women expected from him, just like his exuberant clothes were probably what Antonio thought American women expected from him, a South American in San Francisco, although his clothes were so outlandish that they looked more like a parody of what Antonio thought American women expected from him, or perhaps his clothes were a rebuff for expecting him to dress like this, or perhaps the extra slim white bell bottoms with the crimson flowers printed on them and his extra tight white linen shirt abloom with ruffles were simply a ploy to make American women think that he wasn’t vain; that he favored the absurd not the vainglorious; that his clothes just happened to be tailored to accentuate his body and just happened to be expensive and that, unlike most Russian immigrants she didn’t associate with, he wasn’t brandishing these clothes as proof of European membership. On the other hand the more obvious possibility: Antonio had been having fun. Don’t you wish Antonio would have taken you to at least one of those all night dance parties, Masha? Yes. Maybe I would have tolerated the dumb trochaic rhythms of his electronic dance music just to watch him twirl in his slim flower pants inside a warehouse in the South of Market, no, I wouldn’t have tolerated it. I would have countermanded the excesses of the evening, which is probably why he never invited me. Or I would have drunk too much to thwart my tirades about his absurd costumes and a generation of young men hexed by, oh, enough, Mashinka. Enough.
—
I wanted to become a Jesuit priest, Antonio wrote, hoping his impulse to become a Jesuit priest when he was fifteen or sixteen and still living in Guayaquil could sustain a novella or at least a short fiction about youth and god and so on, the kind of fiction that would rhapsodize his volunteer work with Leopoldo at the hospice Luis Plaza Dañín and would exalt their roles as catechists to the poor in Mapasingue, and yet a week or two after writing down that first sentence about wanting to become a Jesuit priest, a week like every other week for him in San Francisco (happy hour at 111 Minna on Wednesdays, a launch party for a new technology startup on Thursdays, an all night warehouse dance party on Fridays, and because he lived right behind Davies Symphony Hall and the War Memorial Opera House, and because he wanted to see and hear everything in the world — to become an expert on the unconscious one needs to know everything, Carl Jung said, and Antonio liked to believe that applied to becoming a writer, too — a symphony or an opera on Saturdays), Antonio concluded that although he wanted to write about his impulse to become a Jesuit priest when he was fifteen or sixteen, he wasn’t interested in dramatizing his impulse to become a Jesuit priest through scenes and reversals and recognitions from the time of Aristotle, yes, let us please not follow the pious Ecuadorian boy who, after a series of intense religious experiences, including the apparition of La Virgen del Cajas, which Antonio was absolutely not going to write about for anyone in the United States (Leopoldo had been there, too), loses his faith as everyone eventually does, no, dramatizing his impulse to become a Jesuit priest with scenes and reversals and recognitions seemed to him contrary to everything he valued about fiction (his first adult encounter with fiction had been Borges, and it was only after he enrolled in an introductory fiction class at the Berkeley Extension that he was shown the flat world of Best American Realism — I discovered Borges because of Michaela from Sweden, Antonio would have liked to tell Leopoldo over the phone, a fellow economics student from Sweden who allowed me to stay with her during the winter break of my senior year at Stanford because I didn’t have any money to fly anywhere that resembled home — listen to this, Leopoldo, a Mexican grad student who also had a crush on Michaela had handwritten a dedication on Borges’s Ficciones that read Dear Michaela, after reading this book, you’ll finally understand me — how does anyone understand anyone via Borges, Leo? — fiction that unfolds solely in Judas’s head was how Antonio liked to think of Borges’s fictions), so Antonio discarded his first sentence about wanting to become a Jesuit priest when he was fifteen or sixteen just as he had discarded his first sentence about wanting to become the president of Ecuador or at least the minister of finance and coming to the United States to prepare himself to return and run for office with Leopoldo because what he had come to understand was that he didn’t know how to write the kind of fiction he wanted to write, didn’t think he had another option but to continue to work as a database analyst during the day and read as much as he could during the night until one day maybe he would come to know how to write the kind of fiction he wanted to write (to manufacture a sense of daily anticipation during his workweek at the check cashing technology startup where he ran database queries he would order novels without tracking numbers from different websites and wait for them to arrive before lunch so he could read them during his two hourlong lunches outside South Park Café), and then one day Leopoldo called him and said come back to Ecuador, Drool, and despite Antonio’s copious explanations to himself about why he was no longer interested in returning to Ecuador to run for office (if the goal of running for office was simply to increase people’s income — people we don’t even know, Microphone — then he wasn’t interested because playing the piano or writing fiction was more challenging and for him more personally rewarding — dilly dally all you want, Leopoldo would have countered, have your fun, we’ll wait —), he didn’t tell Leopoldo he wasn’t interested in returning to Ecuador anymore, didn’t explain anything to Leopoldo but instead said let me think it through — what exactly do you have to think through, Leopoldo would have countered if the phone lines had been less crossed — and the week or weeks after Leopoldo called him Antonio was surprised and not surprised that he’d been expecting Leopoldo’s call even though he hadn’t talked to Leopoldo in years (even on his deathbed he would still be expecting Leopoldo’s call — out of bed, old man, the time to revolt is now — I do receive discounts on air travel now that I’m old and decrepit, Microphone —), even on his deathbed he would remember wanting to become a Jesuit priest when he was fifteen or sixteen because the logic of his impulse to become a Jesuit priest had been inarguable to him: if god was the pinnacle of life, one should dedicate one’s life to god, but that hadn’t been the last time he was inarguably certain about what to do with his life: the impulse to come to the United States and study at a school like Stanford to prepare himself to return to Ecuador and run for office had been as inarguable a plan as wanting to become a Jesuit priest, and what he told himself to explain the evaporation of his impulse to return to Ecuador to run for office included the discovery of Borges and Scriabin, Merce Cunningham and Virginia Woolf (Antonio liked to tell his American acquaintances that if he hadn’t come to the United States he would have never discovered Pina Bausch and Stanley Elkin, for instance — quit it with your Elkin and your Pina Bausch, Drool, what really changed your life plan was that you underperformed in your macroeconomics class at Stanford and discovered women, or rather you discovered that, unlike in Guayaquil, here women actually pay attention to you, the exotic Ecuadorian), Cortázar and António Lobo Antunes, Claude Simon and Leonid Tsypkin, discovering the possibility of an alternative life in which he did not have to submit to embarrassing myths about himself — everyone thinks they’re the chosen ones, Drool — although he had approached fiction and piano playing the same way, thinking of them not simply as activities to pass the time before he died but as transcendental callings, which was an exhausting way to live: but what I really wanted to tell you is that I loved Annie, Leopoldo, loved driving up to the Berkeley Hills to take piano lessons with this stern, elderly French lady named Annie, loved her two grand Steinway pianos and her tall bookcase with shelves like mail slots for sheet music only, her high heels clacking on the floorboards between her piano and her front door, loved how I tried to please her every week by switching on her metronome and showing her how much faster my fingers had become and at the same time displease her by picking piano pieces I wasn’t ready to play, her husband, Bruce, a composer who praised my imprecise yet according to him tempestuous rendition of Scriabin’s D Sharp Minor Etude and allowed me to practice in his piano shop by the Gilman Street freeway exit, loved hearing about Annie & Bruce’s Evening Games in which she would play different records of the same piece for him, Chopin’s Ballade No. 1, for instance, and then her husband had to guess who was the pianist, and one night, at the annual Halloween recital she organizes for her students, I showed up shirtless, wearing shiny red leotard pants and a boa around my neck, ready to perform Brahms’s Ballade No. 1, and afterward one of her students, an Austrian psychotherapist who favored Maurice Ravel, said to me I couldn’t concentrate on your Brahms because I kept imagining you in my bed, Antonio, to which neither I nor her husband had anything witty to add, and just as Antonio had intermixed two of Borges’s fictions to come to think of Borges’s fiction as fiction that unfolds solely in Judas’s head, he’d also intermixed Annie with his impulse to return to Ecuador, Annie frowning at him like she always did after he attempted to play Scriabin’s D Sharp Minor Etude and scolding him and saying you are a foolish one, Antonio José, for what made you think you were going to be allowed to stay in San Francisco and not return to Ecuador?
—
After a twenty one year absence my father returned to the church. The pious boy I was back then had convinced him to attend Christmas Mass, and, according to my grandmother, his return that night was what led to the baby christ’s tears. Most in my family readily adopted my grandmother’s version, as I was to do in the years that followed, sharing it with my American friends as another example of the quaint superstitions of my Third World country, which would often prompt in them comparisons to eyewitness news reports of Virgin Mary sightings on trunks of trees or mortadella sandwiches. Of course I suspected my grandmother’s version was far too simple, but nothing ever compelled me to elaborate on it by implicating others or by including events that began long before that night.
Masha had forgotten to ask him about his grandmother’s baby christ, just as she’d forgotten to hand him his manuscripts at his farewell party despite the inordinate amount of time she spent reddening them with recommended readings, allusions, panels of question marks, imagining a late night at Antonio’s in which she was to hold forth, by Socratic questioning, like Akhmatova must have done with Osip — Akhmatova never piled obloquies on Osip, Masha — on the defects of his work. Did Antonio really witness a baby christ cry? Did his classmates at Stanford really mistake him for the son of the dictator of Ecuador? How could anyone expect her to have been the one to convince him to stay if he didn’t even share anything about his life in Ecuador?
—
I enrolled in piano lessons soon after graduating from Stanford and accepting a lukewarm job at an economic consultant firm with absolutely no ties to Latin American development, Antonio wrote, hoping that by writing about the life he had chosen in San Francisco he could counter his impulse to return to Ecuador, an impulse that he knew was imprudent to pursue outside of his imagination and that was extensively documented in literature as a terrible idea — just because I was born in a poor country doesn’t mean I’m obligated to return, right? I can become something else: why not a pianist? — so Antonio tried to write about his attempt to become a pianist after graduating from Stanford, beginning with his first piano lesson, Annie guiding his index finger to middle C, for instance, Annie tapping his knuckles with a number two pencil, him fumbling through his first le petit pieces to the delight of the Japanese premed students who happened to be studying in the common area where he’d found an upright piano and who happened to interrupt his clunkers with their variant of American snark, which of course drove him to practice longer and louder, and then he tried to write about how after just a year of practicing three hours a day he was able to play challenging pieces like Scriabin’s D Sharp Minor Etude, and then he tried to write about how exhilarating it had been to discover Olivier Messiaen, who used to voyage to canyons and forests around the world to transcribe birdsongs, some of which can even mimic the city sounds around them, a French composer called Olivier Messiaen, who meticulously inked all of his birds, which he called, without irony, little servants of immaterial joy, into an opera about San Francis of Assisi: at the North American premiere of San Francis of Assisi, from the balcony section of the War Memorial Opera House, I watched San Francis praying about what he calls the perfect joy, Leopoldo, in other words about the acceptance of suffering, which the orchestra and the ondes Martenots and the xylophones granted to him by performing an insistent, nervewrecking squawk of every single birdsong Messiaen had ever transcribed — can you imagine what Father Villalba would have said about calling such racket the Sermon of the Birds? — in unison all instruments mimicking a different birdsong, instruments with names as thrilling as the names of Messiaen’s composition methods: nonretrogradable rhythms, limited modes of transposition — why shouldn’t I be able to compose fiction or music or anything with names like that, Leopoldo? — and then a Russian painter called Masha said I can’t take this racket anymore, Antonio, and Antonio said to hell with these birds, let’s get out of here, standing up, the disapproval of the audience around him enlivening him so he laughed and tarried on purpose, pantomiming a clumsy, sluggish retreat along the row of wincing footwear, and then back at his apartment, emboldened by the champagne he’d ordered for them at Absinthe, Masha surprised him by taking off all her clothes except for her underwear, ambling toward him with her arms crossed to cover her chest, purposefully exaggerating her shyness so as to conceal her shyness, both of them outstretched on his sofa, the lights off in his apartment but on outside his windows, hearing the drunk tenors stumbling back to their station wagons because the night had been surprisingly warm so the living room windows were open, or perhaps he has ascribed the drunk tenors to that moment in retrospect because the San Francisco Opera’s parking lot happened to be in front of his apartment building on Fulton Street and late at night he could often hear the drunk tenors stumbling back to their station wagons, wailing their arias in self mockery, and as Antonio tried to write about his attempt to become a pianist he came to realize that just as he used to think of himself as the boy who taught catechism to the poor and vowed to return to rescue them (he still thinks of himself as the boy who teaches catechism to the poor and vows to return to rescue them), he now also thinks of himself as the Ecuadorian who listens to extravagant classical music, and isn’t it wonderfully freeing that no one here expects an Ecuadorian to know anything about Silvestrov’s postludes or Messiaen’s birdsongs?
—
I drink so I can bear talking to people, Antonio wrote. I acknowledge my conversational alcoholism. The more people converse with me, the more alcohol I am bound to imbibe. My liver, that most handsome of organs, was heard gossiping to my other organs about the absurdity of my social neurosis. Thank god my kidneys stood up for me and said shut up liver, you’re drunk again. So your narrator drinks at parties, Masha wrote along the margins, then what? Yet another tale about the agonies of partying in the USA? Why not include some of your actual travails?
One morning she’d commented on the expensive red leather pants strewn on his bedroom floor and he’d whispered to her, as if they could hear them, they’re uninvited guests, Mashinka, crashing for the night. Can you believe I allowed my cheap Acura Integra to be repossessed not only because I didn’t need it anymore but because I wanted to use the monthly payment to buy more clothes? Can you believe I was fired from my first job at an economic consulting firm for falsifying receipts for meals I did and didn’t have? Antonio behaved as if he’d come from money but that morning he told her his only income was his junior database analyst salary. He also told her that after all the startups in the South of Market ran out of cash and were forced to shutter their businesses, including the startup where he collected his paycheck, the only company hiring in San Francisco had been Bank of America. I interviewed for yet another database analyst position at Bank of America last week, Masha. A former marine who’s now in charge of managing twelve million checking accounts asked me about challenges I’ve faced. Weaknesses? Where do you see yourself in five years? Sir, to tell you the truth, sir, this job would be temporary: I’m going to become the liberator of the Americas so I can only stay twenty to forty years tops.
Months later, at his farewell party, she enticed him away from the other women by telling him she had carefully read his manuscripts, avoiding at first any references to the actual travails he’d shared with her. So what do you think, Mashinka? Any hope for me as a writer? Wait, let’s have another round of shots first. Antonio finished his shot and hers. She had forgotten that, although she didn’t hand him his manuscripts with her comments, she did tell him what she thought of them, paraphrasing most of the red comments she has been rereading while listening to Tabula Rasa. You claim to despise so called conventional fiction, she said to him, you mock me for listening to Bach instead of John Cage, and then you write this extremely conventional fiction about a miraculous baby christ who cries because of the corruption of the narrator’s father. She looked away while she said this, although she knows she’s softening her defiance so she can feel better about herself. She knew Antonio had been writing for less than two years. Would he have stayed in San Francisco if she had lied and told him his fictions showed promise? Hints of brilliance? You seem to purposely exclude any clues as to why you’re throwing all these words at us, Masha said. How can we distinguish the important and serious from the less important? Neither the festive atmosphere nor the shots lessened the impact of the harsh words she was foisting on him. Had she expected him to banter about her critiques? To refute her comments amusingly? He didn’t. He looked embarrassed that he’d disappointed her. I’m sorry, Antonio. I wish I would have told you back then to wait, keep going, no one can write decent fiction in less than two years. The other day the televisions at my gym were showing a special about astronauts, Antonio said. Did you know my neon gym is my one link to American pop culture? I was on the Treadmaster watching all those silent televisions, and in spite of their muteness I could easily tell what the shows and the commercials were all about because they had cued up all their moments for me. Here’s the moment of truth. Here’s the moment of cereal. Plus some of the televisions had subtitles. What does it mean, Masha? When all our narratives have been cued up for us? Here’s a moment for you: There was a radical old priest at my Jesuit high school and we were all in awe of him and for years I used to think of him as my mentor but I only spoke to him once, maybe twice. By the time I arrived at San Javier he had abdicated his role as a spiritual counselor because he thought my classmates and I were the problem. I wasn’t the exception, but for years I imagined he’d been my spiritual sensei, my Narcissus, my Mister Miyagi. But it doesn’t really matter, right? Our faux narratives affect us just the same. Here’s a narrative for you: one time I stayed on the Treadmaster for more than two hours because the music channel was showing a documentary about a former member of Menudo, a Latin American boy band that was popular when I was in middle school. This represents at least a hundred words I was not counting on. Come, Antonio said, pulling her to his bedroom, I want you to meet Alvin Lucier.
—
Not yet asleep on her living room sofa, as she listens to Tabula Rasa amid boxes she still needs to retape and ship to her new life at NYU’s film program, boxes where she may or may not toss in Antonio’s reddened manuscripts, she wonders if years from now she will only remember Antonio because of Tabula Rasa, the only piece out of all the contemporary pieces he’d included in his compendium that turned into a favorite (in a few days she will move away from San Francisco like everyone else, leaving behind friends who were really acquaintances who paired up with her simply to avoid going out at night by themselves and who will not remember her just as Antonio won’t remember them and she won’t remember him — every moment is an ending, Arvo Pärt said, every five minutes there’s an ending do you understand? — no, I don’t —), and perhaps all that will remain of San Francisco for her will be Tabula Rasa and the vague contours of Antonio at his farewell party (why hadn’t she interrupted his drunk ramblings with questions or asides or by shouting at him why are you leaving? — you didn’t want him to think you cared? — I did and didn’t, do you understand? — on the one hand everything will pass and on the other nothing will pass and I miss Antonio’s dumb sprint toward everything in the world —), and perhaps she will also remember that first night with Antonio at Bistro Stelline, and afterwards how surprised she’d been at how much he’d revealed about himself and how quickly she’d accepted his invitation to come to his apartment, although he didn’t phrase it as an invitation but simply slipped his hand on hers and said come, Masha, no, Antonio, she didn’t say, I just met you, no, Masha thinks as she listens to Tabula Rasa, she will toss Antonio’s ersatz fiction in her recycling bin along with her unused canvases and be done with a life in San Francisco she will not remember once she settles in New York.
—
I’d never listened to classical music before, Antonio wrote, at home in Guayaquil no one unwrapped the classical cassette collection compiled by the Encyclopedia Salvat because on the one hand my mother favored the melodrama of José José, not melodrama, no, let’s call it pickled fatalism, while on the other hand I favored the pickled nihilism of Guns N’ Roses: to me symphonic music as elemental as Tchaikovsky’s Pathétique sounded like sap from soundtracks, so to train my ear I started listening to easy Satie piano pieces, then I moved on to Mozart sonatas, a movement at a time, which Annie was glad to supply for me, sharing her recordings of the complete Beethoven sonatas by Richard Goode, of Schumann’s Symphonic Etudes by Alfred Brendel, everything by Sviatoslav Richter and nothing by Glenn Gould, and after I exhausted Annie’s music stash I ventured out on my own, driving to the shopping outlets in Sonoma or Saint Helena and listening to Scriabin’s sonatas or Prokofiev’s piano concertos or whatever I’d purchased at random from the classical music section at Tower Records that same afternoon, no, not at random, those listening / driving sessions were life projects to me so the recordings had to be of (a) longer piano pieces and of (b) composers I didn’t yet know, and perhaps because I didn’t yet know too many classical pieces besides the ones that Annie was introducing me to through analog recordings of Sviatoslav Richter and tapes of master classes she’d attended at Berkeley, which I was borrowing from her because I’d refused to play the little Bach pieces she’d assigned to me from the Notebook for Anna Magdalena Bach and therefore needed to know what else was out there, purchasing a recording before setting out to Sonoma or Saint Helena still felt like a chance activity, and although Annie had cautioned me against listening to piano music while driving because the onrush of road underneath obfuscates the nuances that I should be listening for, especially when the markings of a phrase demanded pianissimo, I did it anyway, purchasing Prokofiev’s piano concertos because Annie frowned upon Prokofiev — if you would have lived in San Francisco with me I would have immediately shared with you that as a young student at the St. Petersburg Conservatory Prokofiev would sneak into the concert hall before a performance to pencil wrong notes into the scores, Leopoldo — and then one night at Annie’s house, after she examined the cover of my sheet music binder that read Antonio’s Piano Career, and after she laughed at it as one laughs at the silly refrains of children, I parked outside Gordo’s Taquería on Solano Street and cloistered myself inside my car, forcing myself to listen to the first movement of Tchaikovsky’s Pathétique until it made sense to me, which must have been a long while because the burrito folk started eyeing me suspiciously: by the time I was done training my ear, I had to accept that it was too late; that there was more to playing the piano than pressing the right notes; that I would never achieve a competitive level of pianism and would never become a pianist: well, why not a writer?
—
I Am Sitting in a Room by Alvin Lucier: I am sitting in a room, Alvin Lucier said, different from the one you are in now. I am recording the sound of my speaking voice, and I am going to play it back into the room, again and again, until the resonant frequencies of the room reinforce themselves. Was this Antonio’s idea of a prank? Or was his insistence to have her listen to this piece just a pretext to seclude himself with her by his bed? Antonio wasn’t laughing, and the door to his bedroom wasn’t locked, but neither was sufficient evidence to refute her hypotheses. So that any semblance of my speech, Lucier said, with perhaps the exception of rhythm, is destroyed. What you will hear, then, if you ignore the reverb and the space sounds of the electronic dance music coming from his living room, where his farewell party wasn’t ebbing yet — can you believe it? Antonio’s going back to do the Peace Corps in his own country! — are the natural resonant frequencies of the room, articulated by speech. What you won’t hear is Antonio relaying his unspoken expectation of her to her: concentrate, Masha, music isn’t just counterpoint and variations. But I regard this activity, Lucier said, not so much as a demonstration of a physical fact, but more as a way to smooth out any irregularities my speech might have. I am sitting in a room, different from the one you are in now. After the seventh or eighth iteration she stopped listening in for surprises. Lucier was simply shearing his voice and what remained was metallic noise. His fingers surprised her by grazing her lips. She didn’t smile so he did it again, this time acting as if he was clearing bread crumbs, stepping back, drunk like the rest of them — all of my friends here are party friends, Mashinka — turning his left hand into a bird, fingers like antlers, as he had done the night they stormed out of the premiere of Messiaen’s San Francis de Assisi. Whatever he saw in her face saddened him but he was a quick one, raising his index finger in mockery, as if he had just remembered something important: aha, yes, he had to stop his double decker and tap the other portable player to check that it was still running. Are you recording this, Antonio? He nodded, motioning with his hand to please recite something for him. Sure, why not? She could recite something he wasn’t likely to know: here is my gift, she could recite, not roses on your grave, not sticks of burning incense: alone you let the terrible stranger in, she could recite, and stayed with her alone: only my voice, like a flute, she could recite, will mourn at your dumb funeral feast: but she didn’t feel like giving him that satisfaction. Later that night, at her apartment, she was to recite those lines out loud to herself. They’re opening a new crêpe place on Gough, she said. I’m sorry I didn’t call you about the party, Masha. I figured you would hate it anyway. Or that you would expect to find painters like you, pianists and poets, a salon. All last minute anyway. I’m leaving. I was going to call you and tell you. To Ecuador? Where else, Masha? Berlin, Barcelona, New York? Guayaquil has one performance arts center named after one of our presidents who was praised by Reagan for his strong armed tactics. The shows mostly comedies there? Antonio laughed. Then he sat down on the bench by his bed and cried. Was this another ploy of his to embarrass her? To expose her callousness? To repulse her with his self pity? No. He probably would have cried even if she wasn’t there. Or wouldn’t have cried if she was there but hadn’t dismissed his manuscripts. Or if she would have asked him to tell her more about Alvin Lucier. How easy it is to discourage aspiring writers. Because of his flower pants and his ruffled shirt she still expected him to turn his crying into a joke. He didn’t. She didn’t know then that this would be the last time she would see him. That her last gestures toward him would be nongestures: no sitting next to him on his bench, arms around his shoulders, trying to convince him to stay. Imagine a different life in Berlin or New York, where you could walk out of operas like Messiaen’s every week. Goodbye, Antonio.
