‘Oh! are you Pestana?’ asked Sinházinha Mota1, holding up her hands in admiration. And then, correcting herself, in a less familiar tone: ‘Excuse my manners, but … are you really he?’
Embarrassed and annoyed, Pestana answered yes, it was he. He’d just got up from the piano, and was mopping his brow with a handkerchief as he went over to the window, when the girl made him stop. It wasn’t a ball; just an intimate soirée, not many people, twenty in all, who’d come to dine with the widow Camargo, on the Rua do Areal – this was on her birthday, 5 November 1875 … What a cheery person she was, the good widow! She enjoyed fun and games, in spite of her sixty years, and it was the last time she enjoyed them, for she died in early 1876. What a cheery person! With what loving care she set up some dancing, right after dinner, asking Pestana to play a quadrille! She didn’t have to finish her request; Pestana bowed graciously, and hastened to the piano. When the quadrille was over, they’d hardly had ten minutes’ rest when the widow rushed over to Pestana again to ask a very particular favour.
‘Just say, madam.’
‘It’s for you to play that polka of yours, “Don’t Meddle with Me, Young Sir”.’
Pestana made a face, but soon disguised it, inclined silently, ungraciously, and went unenthusiastically to the piano. As soon as the first measures sounded, a new, different happiness spread through the room, the gentlemen hurried over to the ladies, and they began to shake their hips in time to the latest polka. The latest: it had been published three weeks ago, and there was no corner of the city where it was unknown. It had reached the point where it was being whistled and hummed in the streets at night.
Sinhazinha Mota had been far from surmising that the same Pestana she’d seen at the dining table and later at the piano, in his snuff-coloured frock-coat, with long curly black hair, cautious eyes and shaven chin, was really Pestana the composer; it was a friend who’d told her as she saw him leaving the piano when the polka was done. Hence the admiring question. We’ve seen his answer was embarrassed and annoyed. Even so, the two girls spared him no flatteries; such they were, and so many, that the most modest of vanities would have been pleased to hear them. He greeted them with growing irritation, until, pleading a headache, he asked to be excused. Nobody, neither the girls nor the lady of the house, could detain him. They offered him home remedies, or a little rest; he accepted nothing, insisted on leaving and left.
In the street he walked fast, fearful they might still call after him; he only slowed down after he’d turned the corner of the Rua Formosa. But even there his famous festive polka lay in wait. From a modest house on the right, a few yards away, came the notes of the latest tune, played on a clarinet. There was dancing. Pestana stopped for a few moments, thought of retracing his steps, but pressed on, quickened his step, crossed the street, and went by on the opposite side from the house with the dancing. Gradually the notes faded away, far off, and our friend went into the Rua do Aterrado, where he lived. When he was getting close to home, he saw two men approaching; one of them, passing right close to Pestana, began to whistle the same polka, vigorously, con brio; the other picked up on the tempo, and off down the street went the two of them, noisy and happy, while the tune’s author, in desperation, ran to take shelter at home.
At home, he breathed easier. It was an old house, with an old staircase, and an old black servant, who came to ask if he wanted to have dinner.
‘I don’t want a thing,’ Pestana shouted; ‘make me some coffee and go to bed.’
He got undressed, put a nightgown on, and went to the back room. When the servant lit the gas, Pestana smiled and, in his heart, greeted some ten portraits hanging on the wall. Only one was in oils, of a priest who had educated him, taught him Latin and music, and who, according to idle tongues, was Pestana’s father. He certainly had left him the old house, with the old furniture, dating from the time of Pedro I.2 This priest had composed some motets, was mad about music, sacred or profane, and instilled the taste for it in the boy – unless he’d also transmitted it in his blood, that’s if the gossips were right. But this is something my story is not concerned with, as you’ll see.
The other portraits were of classical composers, Cimarosa, Mozart, Beethoven, Gluck, Bach, Schumann and some three more. Some were engravings, others lithographs, all of them badly framed and of different sizes, but put there like saints in a church. The piano was the altar; the gospel for the night was open: it was a Beethoven sonata.
The coffee came; Pestana swallowed the first cup, and sat down at the piano. He looked at Beethoven’s portrait, and began to play the sonata, oblivious to himself, absorbed, as if in a delirium, but with the greatest perfection. He repeated the piece; then stopped for some moments, got up and went to one of the windows. He went back to the piano; it was Mozart’s turn – he picked on a passage and played it in the same way, with his soul in another place. Haydn took him up to midnight and the second cup of coffee.
Between midnight and one o’clock, Pestana did little more than stand at the window and stare at the stars, then go back into the room and look at the portraits. From time to time he went to the piano, and, without sitting down, played some disconnected notes, as if searching for some idea; but the idea didn’t come and he went back to lean at the window. The stars looked like musical notes fixed in the sky waiting for someone to loosen them; the time would come when the heavens would be empty, but then the earth would be a constellation of musical scores. No image, reverie or reflection had any echo of Sinhazinha Mota, who, however, at this moment was thinking about him as she went to sleep, he, the famous author of so many beloved polkas. Maybe some idea of marriage prevented her sleeping for a little while. What’s so surprising? She was nearly twenty, he nearly thirty, a good age. The girl slept to the sound of the polka, which she knew by heart, while the author of the said polka wasn’t thinking about it or her, but the old classical works, scanning the night and the heavens, begging the angels, in a last resort the devil himself. Why couldn’t he write even one of those immortal pages?
At times, it seemed as if the dawn of an idea was going to arise from the depths of his unconscious; he ran to the piano to try it out entire, to translate it into sounds, but in vain; the idea vanished. At other moments, sitting at the piano, he let his fingers run over the keys, at random, to see if fantasias sprung from them, as they did from Mozart’s; but nothing, nothing, inspiration didn’t come and his imagination still lay sleeping. If by chance an idea appeared, well-defined and beautiful, it was just the echo of someone else’s music, repeated from memory, and that he’d thought he was inventing. Then, irritated, he got up, swore he would give up art and go and plant coffee or push a cart round the streets; but ten minutes later, there he was, with his eyes on Mozart and imitating him at the piano.
Two, three, four o’clock. After four he went to bed; he was tired, despondent, dead with fatigue; he had to give lessons the next day. He didn’t sleep much; at seven he was awake. He got up and had breakfast.
‘Master, do you want your stick or your umbrella?’ asked the servant, following orders, for his master was frequently distrait.
‘The stick.’
‘But it seems it’s going to rain today.’
‘Rain,’ Pestana repeated mechanically.
‘It seems so, sir, the sky’s getting darker.’
Pestana stared vacantly at the servant, his mind preoccupied. Suddenly:
He ran to the room with the portraits, opened the piano, sat down and spread his hands over the keyboard. He began to play something of his own, with real, immediate inspiration, a polka, a spirited polka as the advertisements say. There was no reluctance on the part of the composer; his fingers drew the notes out, linking them, shaking them about; you’d have said that the muse was composing and dancing at the same time. Pestana had forgotten his pupils, he’d forgotten the servant, who was waiting there with his stick and umbrella; he’d even forgotten the portraits, hanging there on the wall with their serious faces. He was simply composing, at the keyboard or on paper, without yesterday’s vain struggle, without the frustration, asking nothing of the heavens, no longer scrutinising Mozart’s eyes. No ennui – life, charm and novelty flowed out of his soul as if from a perennial fountain.
In a short time the polka was written. He corrected a few notes when he came back for supper; but he was already humming it as he walked along, out in the street. He liked it; the blood of his paternity and his vocation flowed freely in this recent, unpublished work. Two days later, he went to take it to the publisher of other polkas of his; there must have been about thirty already. The publisher thought it was lovely.
‘It’ll be a hit.’
The question of the title arose. Pestana, when he’d composed his first polka, in 1871, wanted to give it a poetic title, and chose this: ‘Sun-Drops’. The publisher shook his head, and said that the titles ought themselves to appeal to the popular mind, either by alluding to some event of the day – or by the charm of the words themselves. He suggested two: ‘The Law of 28 September’3 or ‘You’ll Not Get Your Way with Me.’
‘But what’s the point of “You’ll Not Get Your Way with Me”?’
‘There isn’t one, but it’ll spread like wildfire.’
Pestana, a still-unpublished youth, refused either of the titles and kept his polka; but it was no time till he’d composed another, and the itch for publicity made him print the two with whatever titles the publisher thought attractive or appropriate. And that was how he kept on doing things over the years.
Now, when Pestana handed over his new polka and they came to the title, the publisher said that for the last few days he’d had one in his head for the first work that came along, a really terrific title, long and with a swing to it. Here it was: ‘Hey Lady, Hang on to That Basket.’
‘And for the next time,’ he added, ‘I’ve got another in mind.’
The first edition sold out as soon as it was put on display. The composer’s fame was enough to make people buy; but the work itself was in keeping with the genre, original, made you want to dance and could be quickly committed to memory. In a week, it was famous. For the first few days, Pestana was truly in love with the composition, liked to hum it under his breath, stopped in the street to hear it being played in some house or other, and got annoyed when it was badly executed. From the start, the orchestras played it in the theatres, and he went to one to hear it. He got some pleasure from hearing it whistled, one night, by a figure going down the Rua do Aterrado.
The moon hadn’t had time to wax and wane before the honeymoon was over. As at other times, and sooner still than before, the old masters in the portraits made him bleed with remorse. Irritated and fed up, Pestana took it out on the muse that had come so often to console him, the one with the roguish eyes and seductive gestures, lively and graceful. Then his self-aversion came back, his hatred of anyone who asked him to play the latest polka, and together with it the effort to compose something in classical taste, one page would do, but one that could be printed and bound to stand between Bach and Schumann. But all study was useless, all struggle vain. He plunged into the Jordan, but came back out unbaptised. Night after night he spent in this manner, confident, stubborn, sure that will-power was enough, and that once he gave up the easy music …
‘The polkas can go to hell for the devil to dance to,’ he said to himself one day, at dawn, on his way to bed.
But the polkas didn’t want to go that far down. They came to Pestana’s house, right into the room with the portraits, and burst in so readily that he barely had the time to compose them, have them printed, enjoy them for a few days, get fed up with them, and go back to the old wellsprings, from whence nothing flowed. He lived this way, between these two options, until he married, and even after.
‘Marry who?’ asked Sinhazinha Mota of her uncle, a notary, who’d given her this news.
‘He’s going to marry a widow.’
‘Old, is she?’
‘Twenty-seven.’
‘Pretty?’
‘No. She’s not ugly either – so-so. I’ve heard he fell in love with her because he heard her sing in the last festival at St Francis de Paul. But I’ve also heard she’s got another quality, not uncommon, but less attractive: she’s consumptive.’
Notaries shouldn’t be so witty – or, at any rate, so unkind with it. His niece felt a final drop of balm, which cured the slight sting of envy. It was all true. A few days later, Pestana married a twenty-seven-year-old widow, a good singer and a consumptive. He received her as the spiritual bride of his genius. Doubtless celibacy was the cause of his sterility and his straying from the straight and narrow, he said to himself; artistically, he thought of himself as a late-night reveller – the polkas were the affairs of a habitual roué. Now, however, he would father a family of serious, profound, inspired and polished works.
This hope came to bud in the first hours of their love, and burgeoned in the first dawn of their marriage. ‘Maria,’ stammered his soul, ‘give me what I’ve not found in nights of solitude, or in the tumult of my days.’
Right at the beginning, to celebrate the marriage, he had the idea of composing a nocturne. He would call it ‘Ave, Maria’. Happiness, it seemed, brought him the beginnings of inspiration; not wanting to say anything to his wife before it was ready, he worked in secret. This was difficult, for Maria, who loved music as much as he did, came to play with him, or just to listen to him, hour after hour, in the portrait room. They even put on some weekly concerts, with three artists, friends of Pestana’s. One Sunday, however, he could no longer contain himself, and called his wife to play her a part of the nocturne; he didn’t tell her what it was nor whom it was by. Suddenly, stopping, he looked at her questioningly.
‘Go on,’ said Maria; ‘isn’t it Chopin?’
Pestana went pale, stared into space, repeated one or two passages and got up. Maria sat down at the piano, and after a small effort of memory played the Chopin piece. The idea and the motif were the same; Pestana had found it down some alleyway of his memory, an ancient city full of treacherous turnings. Unhappy, desperate, he left the house, and went towards the bridge on the way to São Cristóvão.
‘Why fight it?’ he said. ‘Let’s go with the polkas … Hurrah for the polka!’
Men who passed by and heard his words stopped to look, as if he was a madman. He went on his way, delirious, tormented, an eternal shuttlecock between his ambition and his vocation … He went past the old slaughterhouse; when he got to the railway crossing gate, he had the notion to walk up the line and wait for the first train to come and crush him. The guard made him turn back. He came to his senses and went home.
A few days later – a clear and fresh morning in May 1876 – it was six o’clock, and Pestana felt in his fingers a peculiar, well-known tremor. He got up slowly, so as not to wake Maria, who had coughed all night and was now in a deep sleep. He went into the portrait room, opened the piano and, as quietly as possible, brought out a polka. He had it published with a pseudonym; in the next two months he composed and published two more. Maria knew nothing of it; she went on coughing and dying, till, one night, she expired in the arms of her terrified and desperate husband.
It was Christmas Night. Pestana’s grief was made worse by a dance in the neighbourhood where several of his best polkas were being played. The dance was bad enough; his compositions gave it an ironic, perverse air. He heard the steps, imagined the movements, maybe provocative, which some of his compositions led to; all this right next to the pallid corpse, a bag of bones laid out on the bed … Every hour of the night went by like this, slow or fast, wet with tears or sweat, with cheap scent or cologne, ceaselessly frolicking and cavorting, as if to the sound of a polka by a great invisible Pestana.
Once his wife was buried, the widower had a single aim: he would abandon music after composing a requiem, which he’d have played on the first anniversary of Maria’s death. He’d choose another occupation, clerk, postman, peddler, anything to make him forget art, murderous and deaf to his pleas.
He began the work; he employed every trick, boldness, patience, meditation, even the caprices of chance, as he’d done in the old days, when he’d imitated Mozart. He reread and studied the composer’s Requiem. Weeks and months went by. The work, which first of all went quickly, began to slow its pace. Pestana had ups and downs. He thought it was missing something, that it had no religious feeling, no ideas, no inspiration or method; later, his heart would lift once more and he’d be hard at work. Eight months, nine, ten, eleven, and the requiem wasn’t finished. He redoubled his efforts; forgot his teaching and his friends. He’d reworked the piece many times; but now he wanted to finish it, one way or another. Two weeks, one week, five days … The dawn of the anniversary found him still at work.
He contented himself with a simple spoken Mass, for himself alone. It’s impossible to say if all the tears that came furtively to his eyes belonged to the husband, or if some were the composer’s. What’s certain is that he never went back to the requiem.
‘What for?’ he said to himself.
Yet another year went by. At the beginning of 1878, the publisher came by.
‘It’s been two years since you’ve given us one of those tunes of yours,’ he said. ‘Everyone’s asking if you’ve lost your gift. What have you been doing?’
‘Nothing.’
‘I know you’ve had a severe blow; but it was two years since. I’ve come to propose a new contract: twenty polkas in twelve months; the old price, and a bigger percentage on the sales. Then, when the year’s up, we can renew it.’
Pestana made a gesture of assent. He didn’t have many pupils, he’d sold the house to pay off debts, and his basic needs were eating up what was left, which wasn’t very much. He accepted the contract.
‘But the first polka must come straight away,’ the publisher explained. ‘It’s urgent. Have you seen the Emperor’s letter to Caxias?4 The liberals have been called on to form a government; they’re going to undertake electoral reform. The polka will be called “Hurrah for Direct Elections!” It’s not a political statement; just a good topical title.’
Pestana composed the first work for the contract. In spite of the long silence, he hadn’t lost his originality or his inspiration. He still had the same touch of genius. The other polkas came, in regular succession. He’d kept the portraits and their works; but he avoided spending every night at the piano, so as not to get caught up in more failed attempts. Now he asked for a free ticket whenever there was a good opera or solo concert; he went and sat in a corner, enjoying all these things which would never sprout from his brain. Once or twice, when he came back home, his head full of music, the unpublished maestro woke again; then, he’d sit down at the piano, and, with no real aim, play a few passages until he went to bed twenty or thirty minutes later.
So the years went by, until 1885. Pestana’s fame had given him the undisputed first place among polka composers; but the chief place in the village wasn’t enough for this Caesar, who would still have preferred not the second, but the hundredth place in Rome. He still had the mood swings he’d had before about his compositions; the difference was they were less violent now. There was no enthusiasm in the first hours following a new composition, nor was there the horror after the first week; a bit of pleasure and a certain ennui were all.
That year, he picked up a slight fever, which worsened in a few days, and became pernicious. He was already in danger when the publisher appeared; he knew nothing of the illness, and was coming to give him the news of the conservatives’ return to power, and to ask him for a topical polka. The nurse, an impoverished clarinet player in a theatre band, told him of Pestana’s state, so the publisher thought it better to remain silent. It was the sick man who insisted he should tell him what he’d come for; the publisher obeyed.
‘But only when you’re completely better,’ he concluded.
‘As soon as the fever’s gone down a bit,’ said Pestana.
There was a pause for a few seconds. The clarinettist went on tiptoe to prepare his medicine; the publisher got up and took his leave.
‘Look,’ said Pestana, ‘as it’s probable I’ll be dying in the next few days, I’ll do you two polkas; the other’ll serve when the liberals come back again.’
It was the only joke he’d ever cracked in his life, and it was just in time, because he died early the next morning, at five past four, at peace with his fellow men and at war with himself.