(for Pablo Insua)
I’ve always wanted to learn how to play the sax so I could go up on the roof of our building on summer nights, with the neon lights of Sweep’s in the background, and play Yardbird suite, while the French girl from the third floor, who’s lost both her arms, poor thing, observes my silhouette and wonders who’s the crazy guy with the sax. That’s why I signed up for private classes. When I explained my initial need (and my only commitment to my dreams) to Salva, my music teacher, he told me that no one learns how to play the sax for such an odd reason, “insolvent” was the word he used, and I reproached him, perhaps too vehemently, on whether those of us in wheelchairs, and I paused, don’t have the right to dream, to become Charlie Parker for a moment and play on the rooftops of the neighborhood so that women who look like the Venus de Milo can listen to us. Because my French girl, I continued explaining to Salva, looks like the Venus de Milo, with no arms and her hair petrified in a Greek bun that never gets disheveled. You could say that I know her body from memory, I explained, that I’ve caressed each of her curves, including her nubile breasts and that I’ve suffered from unjust provocation. Because since the French girl moved into the apartment across from me, I’ve been creating, with my hands, in her honor, replicas of the Venus de Milo. I’m not bad at plastic arts, so I make them out of plaster, bronze and marble. Sometimes I give them away or I destroy them or I sell them or I continue creating my own personal army of mutilated beauties.
- So why don’t you give them arms? – Salva asked, taking the instrument out of its case.
For a teacher, he didn’t seem to understand anything. I couldn’t expect him to just get it like that though, out of the blue, in the first class.
- If she had arms she wouldn’t be the Venus de Milo.
She would be something else, but not a Venus de Milo, I explained, besides, if she had arms, what position would they be in? as if she were posing for Vogue magazine? as if pretending to wait for the local train? as if thinking, what time do I have to go to the dentist tomorrow? No, I have my own theory about classic cruelty and there are tragedies that, inevitably, have to end badly and the Venus de Milo is beautiful, among other things, because she doesn’t have arms. Like my French girl. I understand that her creator, some Alexandros or Agesandros or something like that, thought of putting an apple in her hand, because the apple is the symbol of Milos, but later he must have changed his mind and threw that arm with the apple far from the river, so that nobody would ever find it near his Venus.
- And what does that have to do with the alto sax?
- Too much – I responded -. I don’t believe in metaphors, but I’ve resigned myself to believing they’re just a part of the nature of things and raw material for artists. As a musician, you should know that.
Salva looked at me distantly and merely charged me for the first class. He extended a receipt towards me and before giving me the paper, looking me in the eyes he said:
- You know?, there’s something about playing in that wheelchair. I’m not going to lie: when you play sitting down, your diaphragm’s obstructed and the notes come out sounding hollow. The truth is that, if you continue, it’ll be a big problem.
- More than a problem – I responded smiling – it’ll be an obligation.
He shrugged his shoulders and told me that classes were Tuesdays at 7, and that I should be punctual. We played in a basement on Ferrocarril Street, in a small, dark room with no ventilation that was far from the neighborhood rooftops I’d been dreaming of. There were no stars there, no moon, no antennas, no sheets in the breeze, no windows with lights, no cats annoyed that you’ve usurped their territory. The efflorescence of the walls and the posters of Miles Davis and Sonny Rollins (who, incidentally, was Salva’s favorite) made it sound sort of padded, like the sunken bells of a ghost town. The notes, to use the musical terminology, were born sick, covered in mold and upholstered with rust from the depths. I confess that, since the first class, I was impatiently waiting for the month of August to come so I could get out of my wheelchair and go up on the roof to play Yardbird suite, forgetting all about that dark practice room.
Yes, there was another student, his name was Mateo and he was an old man, skinny, a small thing, with grey hair and a very focused look. He was the oldest student there and had spent years learning scales, but whenever he got to the high “A” he turned red like a tomato and was out of breath. The worst, Salva told me, was that he suffered from shortness of breath and that over time, with each passing day, he was farther and farther from the possibility of successfully completing the scale.
- It doesn’t surrender itself to just anybody. Without pain, and Sonny knew that well – Salva said looking at the poster on the wall – no one can play the sax.
On the poster, the black man appeared in one of his shows in a dive in New York, with his wide-brimmed hat, sweaty, eyes closed, kissing the mouthpiece and caressing the perfect curves of the sax. He seemed to surrender himself entirely to every note. Salva had a theory. He thought that Saint Teresa of Ávila and Sonny Rollins, when they reached ecstasy, were not as different as people may think.
After practice, when I got home and closed the door, all the Venus de Milos were there to greet me in single file, identical, flogged by the intermittent neon light. Under their watch, attentive and military, I made dinner. Afterwards I told my small legion about how my day had gone, what progress we’d made and the little time left, not even six months, until that night in August. We worked on the details and they were proving to be efficient, strong and feminine.
I practiced a lot that winter and it cost me a pneumonia. When I pushed the footrests down on my wheelchair, my lungs whistled like Mateo’s when he finished his peculiar rehearsals of do-re-mi-fa-so-la… Sometimes I got tired and wanted to throw in the towel and Salva said to me:
- If you don’t have the need it means you don’t have the feeling. No self-respecting feeling can be controlled.
Salva was an intelligent guy, with a good ear and instinct, but he was too used to noise. Little by little we were building a common cause together. Tuesdays, at practice time (finally I could escape from my mass production Venus factory) we were able to get more out of the sax than any other therapy, more than any catechism class. Our convictions closed in on the frontiers of friendship.
By Christmas vacation I’d already begun basic scales and by February I was mastering the language. I learned quickly under the watchful eye of Mateo, who kept doing his own thing, without making any progress with the scale’s high notes, without dying of envy. In March, Salva told me I was ready to start with the first notes of Yardbird suite. It was the second happiest day of my life. To show him how happy I was, the following Tuesday, I gave him a Venus, a 1.2-meter-tall one, in stuccoed plaster. The texture of stucco is as close to the texture of real skin as I know. The skin of Salva’s Venus was velvety and smooth, not shiny. I remember that while we were practicing, the delivery guys knocked on the door and brought her down as if she were a gymnast on parallel bars. Salva signed the delivery slip and looked at me skeptically.
- I just wanted to thank you for the classes – I told him.
Mateo, in the frenzy of his scale, in a suicidal, terminal “A,” was out of breath. The deliverymen left her next to the poster of Sonny Rollins. Truth is they didn’t make a bad couple. She had traveled across the distance of centuries and he was playing for her in New York, leaning in, attentive, as if he’d finally found his muse.
Salva moved closer to her with curiosity and touched her shoulder, the left one, the one that was lower down. Then he slid his hand along the curve of her stomach, along her waist, along her plaster hips and along the folds covering her legs. Nobody touches a stone like that unless they desire it, I know from experience. And I felt jealous or something similar to jealousy. I guess that small infidelity served for Salva to understand a lot of things.
- And your French girl, is she this hot?
I didn’t answer him, I rotated my chair towards the corner, opened my leather case and putting the mouthpiece together, I began to practice.
* * *
I suppose it’s important to have a motive that dignifies the tenacity of a sacrifice. One day, already in the month of July, I ran into the French girl in the doorway of our building. She was getting back from grocery shopping, with a bag hanging from her left shoulder with a bunch of parsley and two loaves of bread sticking out. I had never spoken to her before. She was wearing blue jeans and a white cotton blouse, loose-fitting with red edges, no bra. We said good morning according to the languid protocol of good neighbors and, when the elevator arrived, she asked me to hold her shopping bag. She opened the door with her foot and leaning on her stomach, with the weight of her entire body, pushed my wheelchair forward. I could feel the closeness of her skin, the accidental graze of her chest and the mischievous brush of a hanging piece of her hair. Up close, the Venus de Milo smelled softly of violets, wild berries, something archaic and almost childlike. While she pushed my wheelchair to the elevator platform I could feel the heat from her abdomen, a kind of intense radiation. I’ve always thought that if one is close enough to a woman and breathes her in, her neck, her hair or her arms, even though it’s only a mere gesture of courtesy and she doesn’t even realize it, one captures something of her, an indivisible portion of her soul, breaking off a piece of her like a kiss or a caress, but much more intense, a fragment of her that leads, on its own, to an unstable labyrinth of memories. As a general rule, for a man in a wheelchair, this kind of pleasure, almost poetic, is the only gift reserved for us by desire.
Once we were inside the doors closed and there was a dense silence, indescribable, something completely empty that lasted until the third floor. In the mirror I could see her reading the elevator plaque, “450 kg., in case of emergency stay calm”… On her back, at the edge of her blouse strap, was a tattoo that looked like a robbin, or a baby snake, or something like the Norwegian coastline. She realized that I was studying her and turning around, she gave me a sad, impossible smile. The piece of hair that had escaped from her bun fell across her forehead like a spring. I would have liked to ask her if she liked music, if she knew who Charlie Parker was and if she had listened to his amazing sax in Yardbird suite, I would’ve liked to introduce her to her fan club, to her army of impersonators, but the elevator got to the third floor just in time, with an abrupt, muffled boom.
- Will you be ok alone?” – she asked me.
It took me a while to respond. When one disconnects from reality, the same as when one goes out into an outdoor space, one needs a phase of decompression, to reconnect with the world.
- Sure, sure.
And the doors of the guillotine closed, cutting her vertical image, transforming her into a reflective steel surface. Then, I looked away.
That afternoon, for the first time, after thinking about it a lot I dared to modify the resin molds. In two years I hadn’t changed them even by a millimeter. I took my chisel and on her back, between her shoulder blades, I drew a shadow, a snake or a robbin or a Norwegian fjord and when I finished I looked at it from a distance and thought yes, it looked like the French girl’s tattoo. I shaved a few millimeters off the curvature of her shoulders and on the tunic, near her groin, I smoothed over the plaster form with my fingers, over the impossible fissure of her stomach. I then took the rest of the Venus de Milos and, one by one, I destroyed them, breaking them into powder and rubble.
* * *
A stage manager always demands the best. He meticulously prepares each act, studying each and every move of his actors, utilizing the decorations and atmospheric conditions. Every gesture is important and nothing can be left to chance. That’s how I wanted it to be that night, calculated, predictable. When the heat came and with it the month of August, I had already learned how to play the sax and I easily managed the notes of Yardbird. Sometimes the same thing that happened to Mateo happened to me, my diaphragm closed and the notes wouldn’t come out no matter how much I wanted them to. Salva observed me from behind his score.
- Maybe you should wait until next year, I think you’re still a little weak.
But I knew it wasn’t true, that desire has its own laws, chemical laws, any moron knew that, and that chemistry and its molecular connections lose intensity over time and become unstable and I looked at the poster of Sonny (who was enjoying his eternal romantic relationship with the Venus right now) and imitated his gestures, his surrender, his body bent over and his soul escaping from the bell of his sax, wailing. His eyes were closed and the sounds emerged like the bellowing of a mammoth against the padded echo of the basement.
We’d spent the last two weeks in suffocating weather, around 40 degrees Celsius. On television, the weather reporter said that that night would not be cloudy, nor would the next and that, throughout the week, and she made a resigned pause, no changes were expected, that the sky would be clear and cloudless. I confirmed on the calendar that the moon was gaining its last quarter and that that night, it would be full or almost full. I’d calculated its trajectory against the black background of the night, I’d written down the lunar coordinates and I’d obtained the precise angle and position where I should sit so that the French girl, from the third floor, saw in me what I wanted to show her. Of course Charlie Parker would never have accepted playing in a wheelchair. The cats were in heat and they’d been restless for days, trying to catch the males’ attention with their purring. Some neighbors had gone to the beach and on the terraced rooftops, to confuse the thieves, sheets and shirts waved in the breeze for weeks. Most of the people who’d stayed slept with their windows open, letting the suffocating wind invade their bedrooms. Sometimes, in the middle of the night you could hear a piano. There was a man who, punctually, leaned out the window to smoke in a tank top. He spent the time looking at the stars or down to the end of the street and then he threw the butt and was lost in the darkness of the last-quarter-moon. Another lady sat in a rocking chair two floors below and read a thick novel for a while. She would fall asleep there, with the book on her chest.
Yes, that night would be perfect.
There was only one question, one small detail, that was beyond my control and that didn’t pertain to routines, or forecasts: the French girl had an air conditioner. I could see the machine hanging over the façade, dripping like a slug, with its fan whirring. That’s why she closed the windows and pulled the curtains shut. Sometimes, in the darkness, I could see her silhouette crossing behind the yellow curtains, in the direction of the bedroom. How could I be sure that she’d come to the window when she heard my sax that night on the rooftop. Yes, it was an eventuality that had to be considered. I thought all afternoon and only one plan occurred to me. Someone must be with her when I start to play and at the right moment, open the window, look up to the rooftop and say something like who’s that crazy guy with the sax, come here, look at that and point with their finger at my silhouette against the liquid moon…
- You’re crazy.
- No, no, it’s just that you’re the only one I can trust. Only you know what I stand to lose.
- I’m just your teacher.
- It’ll be really easy, you just have to pretend you’re a neighbor from the building and when she asks what you want, ask for a little salt or oil or improvise whatever you want, I don’t know. Meanwhile, Mateo and I will prepare everything up there, on the roof and when it’s the right time, you open the window and say…
If Salva accepted it’s just because there are men who move on the instinct of curiosity. We’d gone too far, he reminded me, and it wasn’t a good idea to let everything go to waste because of a mere question of qualms.
That night, before the designated time, I called them to my apartment. I spread out a plan of the neighborhood’s rooftops on the table and marked my position with a little red flag.
- Mateo, you’ll go over here, and you – I told Salva – in this area. At 12:20 you open the window and look up at the roof – I said pointing to the other point - Is that clear?
Mateo and Salva looked at each other. Then, like in an action movie, I told them we had to synchronize our watches, that everything had to turn out perfectly.
- What do you think we’re going to do rob a bank or something – Salva responded laughing.
I looked him in the eyes. I suppose there are silences as clear as any response. Mateo gave me his alto sax, a SELMER with the mother-of-pearl keys and wooden reed he had brought me. When I looked at him, he seemed emotional, as if he were handing over the keys to a destroyed city or as if that instrument were some kind of generational witness.
Since the extermination of my Venuses, only a few days earlier, I had made four new ones, all with that small robbin on their backs. I warmed up for a few minutes, while they positioned the Venuses facing towards the window, in the orchestra of the theater my apartment had become. Salva noticed the robbin detail and wanting to make a last joke asked me:
- What? A touch of modernity?
But I didn’t answer him. I don’t know if Salva ever understood. That night he left confused. Maybe that’s why he became a musician, because he felt uncomfortable when someone wasn’t making any noise. We heard him walk up and down the hallway and finally, disappear into the floors below. The elevator didn’t go up to the top floor, so I leaned on Mateo to go up to the roof terrace. When we went outside, absolute silence filled everything. The city was cut up in a chaos of plans and lines below an asphalt horizon.
- Come help me.
Leaning on Mateo I jumped over the small, brick overhang and dragged myself with my arms to the eaves. From where the French girl was she would only see me, waist up. I could still see Mateo for a few seconds, with bright, intense eyes. Later he turned around and disappeared on the roof terrace.
The city, seen from up there, was like a beast that offered the nape of its neck to be caressed. The disorderly chaos of the rooftops extended out to the soccer fields, in the outskirts of the city. It was really hot that night and it was hard to breathe. An ambulance passed with the siren on. The neon sign of Sweep’s, at my back, buzzed like a mosquito every time it changed from fuchsia to blue and from blue to fuchsia. I could see the patio and the lit-up window of the French girl. Once I got comfortable, I looked at my watch: 12:10. The time was drawing near. I thought for a few moments, privileged seconds, about those of us who prepare ourselves our entire lives for something. These seconds deserve extra consideration, a less insignificant measure, reducing their ephemeral condemnation. I took Mateo’s sax and put the mouthpiece together. The neon light, reflected on its metal body, produced a hypnotic effect, a curve of light. Far away, maybe on a television, I heard a fight between a man and a woman. I wiped my forehead with my sleeve and put my black felt hat on, like Parker’s, tilted towards the front.
12:20. I filled my lungs with air, positioned the sax further out, separated from my body and closed my eyes, concentrating on the keys. Then I let all the air out, a moderate, measured flow. But only a trumpeted nervous sound emerged in the middle of the night, a kind of metallic murmur similar to what Mateo did in practice. “The sax doesn’t surrender itself to just anybody” I reminded Salva. I looked towards the window but didn’t see anyone. Two cats, small bumps on the overhang, observed me lazily, licking their paws. If everything had gone right Salva should’ve already been in the window. I tried to blow again and this time the sound was like the fury of a prolonged Viking horn. The man in the tank top had come out on time and was looking at me from his window. The old lady in the rocking chair had just gotten up to close the window and her expression didn’t leave any room for doubt. And suddenly I saw it, a shadow coming closer to the window, a shadow with arms, I thought. At any moment, the curtain would be opened and I’d see my French girl. But the window didn’t open and Salva stayed there for a while. Past 12:20. The silhouette of the Venus came closer to Salva. Their shadows were almost superimposed. They were very close to each other. And then I understood and everything shifted, inside and out, as if my lungs, my ribs and my stomach were being emptied out, and their contents, guts and intestines, were replaced with an alkaline, bitter substance. I guess Sonny felt the same that night in the club in New York. The man in the tank top put out his cigarette against the geranium pots and closed the window and only then, without any audience, without any fear, I leaned over my sax and began to play. I looked at the curtain and saw their two shadows together, practically joined as one. That was the last lesson from Salva, without pain, he told me in the first class, nobody can play the sax and I filled my lungs as much as I could and blew with controlled force, exhaling my soul, selling myself without any conditions, holding onto the instrument with both hands, as if it were the waist of the Venus and I kissed her lips of metallic plaster and the first sounds emerged, hasty, distant, necessary and I think I smiled, I lifted the instrument up in front of me and let out the notes, one after the other, so that they’d spill out over the rooftops, so that they’d fall like liquid over the streets and dignify how fleeting those privileged seconds were. Yes, I let my soul become oxygen and let the oxygen fill my lungs and from my lungs emerged the heartbeats of Yardbird suite or my soul became Yardbird suite. Then I saw her, with no arms, with her petrified bun, in her window, watching closely. Two, maybe three seconds. Never again. I don’t know if you’ve ever hear Yardbird by Charlie Parker. It’s not a sad song, nor is it melancholy, but rather more like a windy Charleston, relatively happy and without too much conviction. When I looked back, the light in the room had been turned off and the air conditioner rumbled in the middle of the night.
