from Zoetrope
ICAN still hear the satisfaction in Roberto's voice: he’d talked Miguel into shepherding Rosario on her trip to the seashore. And the roguish-ness: “Everybody knows about Miguel.”
Not long after he began taking lessons from me, Roberto one day looked up from the keyboard and asked: “Do you like Rosario?”
“Rosario? What Rosario?”
He said her full name.
“She's a student of mine.”
“I’m going to marry her.”
At the period I remember best, Roberto and Rosario had a little girl, Lilí, and lived in an apartment looking out on the mountains. French windows opened onto a dramatic wrought-iron balcony, which Roberto had designed himself. The apartment smelled of geraniums. I always associated this with Rosario's sense of order. Everything in its place, immaculate.
Though I generally required my students to come to me I made an exception as often as possible for Rosario, since being away from Lilí impaired her concentration. She was preoccupied with every aspect of her daughters well-being. This concern extended to Roberto, even to myself. She always had waiting for me a draft of her “magic immunizer”—an orchard squeezed into one tall glass—and entreated me to drink every drop. Something majestically selfless lent a becoming gravity to her solicitude.
Late one sultry afternoon I arrived to find Roberto—lank, tan, with the nose of a Caesar—lounging in an armchair. At the piano, Rosario was helping Lilí, in her lap, pick out a tune. They all looked fresh and trim— congenitally undisheveled. Rosario put the child down: “If you’re quiet-quiet, you can stay.” With a smile to Roberto: “You, too.” Lilí pondered for a moment, chin in fist, then parked herself in a miniature chair. She sat through the entire hour without a peep. Rosario leapt up afterward and cuddled her. “You were so good! Let's play our game.” She pinched her ears, nuzzled her neck, pulled faces at her. To each sally Lilí responded in kind, with squeals.
Roberto leaned back and pronounced: “I feel envious of myself.”
Many of my students wanted to confide in me. I used this as an incentive to conscientious preparation: do your lesson well and afterward you can unburden yourself. One-way confessional; no penance, no absolution. The more they revealed, the better I could tailor their assignments. If they pressed me for a reply, I would point to the sounding board of the piano.
One of the stories that Roberto told me dealt with a younger friend of his named Miguel, also a pupil of mine. How they knew each other, I’m not sure; it may have been a professional connection, since Roberto was an engineer and Miguel, at the time I met him, had recently wound up his training as an architect.
“We went sailing together, and the wind quit on us. We’d brought a picnic hamper—it was so chock-full the top wouldn’t close. With nothing else to do, we cleaned it out. Then I dove into the water and began showing off my butterfly stroke. Miguel hollered at me to come back, or I’d get a cramp. I called him a sissy and kept on going, to tease him. A spasm jack-knifed me, crunched the air right out of me. I couldn’t stay afloat. Just as I was giving up—I remember thinking rather calmly of Rosario for the last time—an arm grappled my chest. Somehow Miguel tugged my deadweight to the boat. Hauling me over the gunwale was too much for him: he injured his spine. He still has to wear a brace.”
Other stories that he passed on to me, always in an affectionate tone, centered on Miguel's penchant for strapping youths, which Roberto took to be a commonly known fact since with him Miguel was impishly open about it. He was fascinated by his friend's descriptions of a spangled, promiscuous netherworld, and amused by his ardors. “In the street, Miguel will spot some foxy muchacho, and ayayay!—he trembles, he staggers, he has to cling to my arm, or Rosario’s.”
Both men had slender silhouettes. It would have been difficult to tell them apart at a distance, if not for Miguel's gait. Lumbar twinges caused him to stiffen his naturally balletic glide, like a dancer working on a treacherous floor. He had curly hair (Roberto's was bristly), and his face was longer than Roberto’s, with sharper features, nostrils that flared. Each man had a peculiar way of actuating his attention. When I put a problem to Roberto, he would flick the tip of his nose, as though rapping his intellect awake. Miguel would bite down on one side of his underlip, and slowly release it. Roberto used to scold Miguel for this habit, warning him that he’d get canker sores.
Of the three, Rosario had the most pianistic talent. With her octave-spanning fingers, autonomous left hand, knack for sight-reading, and affluent musi-cality, she could have surmounted the drawback of a delayed start and made a career for herself. (She had a lovely voice, too, and might have become a singer.) Scales, arpeggios, the “Gradus ad Parnassum” never wearied her. Exercises that Miguel and Roberto would have done with clenched teeth, such as practicing pieces a half tone higher or lower than written, she regarded as a lark. While the two men were still plunking away at “The Little Orphan,” she bounded through Anna Magdalena Bach and Tchaikovsky's Children's Album. Her great ambition was to graduate to Schubert's Impromptus and Chopin's Nocturnes. She achieved it with exhilarating dispatch. I had to dissuade her from tackling the Études: fragile wrists.
She had one odd weakness—rushing the final measure of a piece.
“Look, Rosario: there's a fermata at the end. The composer wants that note prolonged.”
She would blush.
“A work isn’t finished until the last resonance has faded.”
She assented. But as soon as she approached a double bar, she seemed to go blank.
“The piano gets snatched away from me.”
I’d been teaching Miguel for almost a year when he told me: “A lot of people think I’m homosexual. It's an act I put on, to lull husbands.”
He was no doubt capable of bringing it off, what with his fine-drawn lineaments, his wounded dancer's grace, his streak of flamboyance (which I had to curb repeatedly in his music-making).
“I only sleep with married women,” he went on. “Fewer complications that way. Except sometimes… There was an underage pantheress who used to prowl the nightclubs. Her husband—a bulldog, with a pencil mustache—came up to here on her” (he sketched her bust) “and liked to exhibit her, doing tangos. She always managed to brush me on the dance floor.
“I redecorated their apartment for them, as a favor. Nouveaux riches, unsure of their taste. We did a heap of shopping for furniture and fabrics. I flirted, ostentatiously, with the brawnier clerks.
“They had a country place. He said I must spend a weekend, go deer hunting. I recoiled—the poor helpless Bambis and so forth. He chuckled: ‘You can keep my wife company while I’m off in the woods. I don’t suppose you’ll object to a nice haunch of venison.’
“So I rode the train to a whistle-stop in the hills. He met me. ‘My bride is under the weather, unfortunately, and couldn’t make it out. Maybe tomorrow. There's someone here I think you’ll like, though.’ He drove me to their chalet, and did the honors. The walls were studded with antlers; each rack involved a saga. At last, he excused himself. After a few minutes, he reappeared—in a geisha wig and a kimono, mustache powdered over, rouge everywhere….”
The memory of it turned Miguel ashen.
Gazing into Rosario's naked eyes was like dropping your vision down a well. The first time I met her, all I saw was a pair of sapphires with a woman appended; they reduced the rest of her face to a mere perfect setting, a blur of high cheekbones framed by lustrous red hair. It helped that, during lessons, she put on glasses for her myopia.
In all but the coldest months, she went about in sleeveless blouses and short skirts. Her arms and legs were slim, sinuous. Matter-of-factly, she would say: “I enjoy looking at them.” It did not occur to her to begrudge others the same pleasure.
Her bearing—back perpendicular, hands folded, thighs together— turned any seat she occupied into a throne. She told me that once, due to some domestic emergency, she had arrived less than prepared for an oral exam at the university, where she was taking courses in pedagogy. “As luck would have it, the professor started ogling my legs. The first tough question he asked me, I put on a meek, respectful expression and opened my knees. He gaped. He stammered. Without realizing that I hadn’t answered, he moved on. The longer I sat like that, the more flustered he became. He had no idea what I was or wasn’t saying. Finally he spluttered, ‘Get out,’ and dismissed me—with the top grade!”
Periodically I invited my students to a class in harmony or analysis. It wasn’t unusual for a dozen or more of them to cram into my studio, pitching on every available chair and scrap of carpet. Prodigies gearing up for international careers, a radiologist mad for Debussy, an octogenarian widow who practiced four hours a day… I wished for them all to cohere, cross-pollinate—and to some extent they did. Their attitudes toward Rosario, however, exposed their frailties like a dye: the women acknowledged her with a sullenness that betrayed their envy, while the men fought shy of her, although they hobnobbed easily enough with Roberto and Miguel.
After concerts, there would be ad hoc suppers at cafés. Roberto, Rosario, and Miguel, who never missed a musical event of any importance, usually took part. It was on these occasions that I observed the mixture of humility and histrionics which Miguel displayed in public toward Rosario. He held her coat, repaired her mussed hair with a deft pat. Once, he sashayed into a ladies’ room with her to help mend a broken spaghetti strap. He used to lift her hands like chalices and venerate them with caresses. Installing himself across from her, he would stare moonily into her eyes: “Think of me as your adoring mirror. I swear I’ll die if you don’t let me have my fill.” One evening our party included another student of mine, an official at the foreign ministry, who witnessed Miguel's behavior with mounting indignation.
“You permit this?” he hissed at Roberto.
“I encourage it! It redounds to my glory.”
Roberto began to mention affairs he was having. He sought out different companions, he claimed, so as to slake his urges without overtaxing his wife. Under the guise of divulgence, he would fish for advice. Describing some demand his mistress was making of him, he might slip in, expectantly: “Have you ever had to cope with that sort of thing?”
I’d laugh: “You need more Schumann!”
Rosario was wise to what was going on and saw no reason to protest. For her, the essence of the marriage was maternity. “I’m a scatterbrain,” she would say, “but this I take seriously”—indicating the zone of her womb.
Roberto and Rosario were accustomed to spending a week or two at the beach every summer. This year, one of Roberto's partners had fallen ill, saddling him with an extra load at the office. Also, Roberto had just embarked on a liaison with a young ballerina. If he could persuade Rosario to go on vacation without him, he would provide himself an open field while affording her a rest. Sending her off unprotected would, for him, have been out of the question. He had thought of the ideal escort: Miguel, who combined the most expedient features of a bodyguard and a dame de compagnie. At first, Miguel balked. It required a lot of wheedling on Roberto's part to bring him around. He didn’t have an easy job with Rosario, either.
I listened to her deliberate: “Naturally, Lilí would come with me. But can I trust Roberto to eat properly? And Miguel has been overworked. Wouldn’t he be happier unwinding with his handsome friends than chaperoning me?”
They went. While they were away, I attended a recital by Claudio Arrau. During the intermission I noticed Roberto, at the rail of one of the boxes, deep in conversation with a wiry, chignoned gamine. After the last encore, filing out of the auditorium, we ran into each other. He hesitated for a moment, then introduced his chum, the dancer.
“What a terrific evening!” he said a bit too loudly.
I concurred.
“That Carnavalw as a real treat,” he rattled on. “Such a charming piece, isn’t it?”
At his next lesson he asked: “Why did you look at me that way when I said I liked his Carnaval?”
“Well, sure. Papillons and all that. You can’t deny it's pretty stuff.” “A cadaver comes up to you and wants to dance—you consider that charming?”
“What are you talking about?” “Listen to Carnaval.”
When Miguel returned from the vacation, his playing grew soberer, solider, focused. Some chronic misgiving seemed to have been resolved, some inner reorganization effected: the same chord, voiced more cogently. Yet he was also feverish, brooding; one day a confession, long pent up, gushed out of him:
“We took the train down to the coast. The motion of the carriage kept jogging our arms against each other—hers cool, mine hot. I was in a sweat. The craving in me! What I’d felt for the others was—froth. All that time longing for Rosario, courting her from behind my mask—and now to have this chance. It gave me qualms. And there was Lilí, curled up across our thighs, sucking her thumb.
“The train arrived late. The hotel clerk informed us that we’d forfeited our reservations: the only thing he had available was a room with a double bed and a cot for the little girl. Rosario winked at me: ‘I don’t think it would kill either of us to sleep together.’ Was it that I couldn’t bring myself to abuse her naïveté? Or pure cowardice? I slipped the clerk a thin wad. Adjacent rooms materialized. Rosario and Lilí, at least, got a good night's sleep.
“The next morning, early, I heard them stirring. I washed up and joined them for breakfast on Rosario's terrace. As soon as we’d finished, we grabbed our bathing gear and made for the beach. I hired a cabaña. While Rosario and Lilí changed, I scanned the panorama. The sand, the air, the sea—all sparkling. I felt sparkling myself. The cabaña's door opened, and Lilí flittered out. Then Rosario stepped onto the deck. She tossed her mane, loosening it to the breeze. I couldn’t swallow. I could hardly breathe. It hadn’t occurred to me to prepare for this sight—not that I could have. The swimsuit was a sleek one-piece, modest compared to the bikinis that many other women were sporting—but what it concealed, it revealed more than nudity itself, including the precise, sand-dollar forms of the nipples. It was her utter lack of self-consciousness, as much as anything, that undid me. I scuttled into the dressing room.
“When I emerged, Rosario was sitting on the sand, watching Lilí romp with some children in a tidal pool. I sank down beside her. She stretched her limbs and let out a groan of relaxation, as if only at that moment had she shed her burdens. ‘Would you rub some lotion on my back?’ she asked, not taking her attention off her daughter. The swimsuit was cut low in the rear, almost to the sacrum. The flesh was smooth as meerschaum, except for a tiny heart-shaped mole near the fifteenth vertebra (I counted them in an effort to calm myself). My hand was on fire. A crushing ache had me in torment. I tried to relieve this through speech, telling Rosario how voluptuous I found her. The liberties I allowed myself only inflamed me more. Of course, I was also testing the waters. ‘Oh, Miguel,’ she said, ‘you and your flattery!’
“Don’t do anything rash, I cautioned myself. Bide your time. Didn’t the sheer freedom to luxuriate in Rosario's presence amount to progress?
“We had lunch on the patio. Lilí was transfixed by the fan-pleated napkins, the staff's uniforms, the Noah's ark of new faces. A waiter brought her a cushion to perch on and helped her choose from the menu. He was lame. After he left, she said to us, quite stricken: ‘That poor man, he's like Esmeralda’—her doll, who had lost a foot. She laid out the seashells she’d collected, and aligned them by order of preciousness. When the waiter presented the check, she shyly pushed her three prize specimens in his direction.
“While Lilí had her nap, Rosario and I sat on the terrace. The canvas awning cast a shadow that stopped on her thighs just at the line where her skirts usually fall. The sun floodlit those legs of hers. I kept glancing at them, insatiable. She appeared to be drowsing. It sounds absurd, but I would swear her knees caught me spying. More than once I’ve been unnerved by the way that her gaze—which I live for—suddenly retracts. Well, now she locked her legs—rigid, canted off to one side—and her entire body seemed to retract. I actually shivered. Then they did something negligible, and momentous—to this day, I have the impression it was the legs alone, independent, that did it. They opened far enough for a fist to slide in between them, and the farther one slowly rose about an inch, as if to gauge my reaction. The movement was so—brazen.
“Somebody began to whisper with furious intensity, telling Rosario all my secrets. Only as the torrent subsided did I realize who was talking. Rosario jumped to her feet. Had I outraged her? Was she storming off to phone Roberto? A hoarse cry—‘Mommy!’—came from the room. Rosario must have picked up an earlier cry that I, in my agitation, had missed. For a second, she stared at me.”
The doorbell rang. Miguel, stranded on the sunstruck terrace, blinked.
“My next student.”
“Ah.”
“Roberto.”
I went and let him in. Seeing Miguel, he smiled.
“Did you mention my idea?” Roberto asked him.
“No… I wanted you to.”
“Miguel and I both need to work on mechanics, right? Why not coach each other, to accelerate the process? One week, say, Miguel practices leaps: I zero in on the problems. The next week he does the same for me. That way, we’ll get to the four-hand repertoire before we grow long beards! Maybe once a month, we could have a joint session with you, to make sure we’re not leading each other astray.”
“Bravo! How soon do you start?”
They set up an appointment on the spot.
The following time, Miguel did an impressive job with some exercises by Clementi. He was anxious to finish telling me his story:
“That afternoon, after my outburst, the world seemed to be holding its breath. Rosario behaved as though nothing had happened. On the beach, I sought refuge in Lilí—her uncomplicated light. Together we built a sand castle—a château, in fact, with all the fairy-tale trappings—and I spun tales in which she starred as its resident princess. We had supper around five, for her sake. Both Rosario and I spontaneously dressed up for the hotel's rather pretentious restaurant, and Lilí got to wear her ‘royal gown’ (a velvet frock). Rosario had somehow managed to manicure her nails. I refused to let myself believe she had done this for me. I half convinced myself that if I indulged such a presumptuous fantasy, those crimson rake-teeth would lash out and flay me. A tasty terror.
“Afterward I lay on my bed, clothed, letting myself be mesmerized by the revolutions of the ceiling fan. The dimness around me thickened. I was conscious only of a thudding right beneath my Adam's apple. Someone knocked. Rosario—in a silk nightgown that tied behind the neck.
Without a word, she floated past me and tiptoed to the door that communicated with her room, opened it a crack, listened. I began to say something. Her palm muzzled me, warmly. I kissed it. She stepped back. My hopes froze. She reached behind her neck and undid the bow.
“I’ve usually found in even the most alluring woman some falsity, some tinge of coarseness that diminishes my respect for her. It was just the opposite with Rosario. One detail made our intimacy especially poignant: she was both with me and with her sleeping child. An instinctive vigilance radiated from her—a wave of tenderness combined with a coiled readiness to spring, if necessary, to her daughter's defense. I sensed this as palpably as one feels the sun on one's skin.
“Then the idyll was over. Dismal! In the last eighty-one days, I’ve seen Rosario alone exactly four times. I mustn’t push for more. She's devoted to Lilí and Roberto.
“Every day I’m not with her weighs like jail. All I want to do is hibernate—but I can’t fall asleep, thinking about her. It's turning me into a zombie. I play a lot, to distract myself.” He paused. “Can I study that new piece you gave her?”
“Which one?”
“By Mompou.” He hummed the theme. “It won’t leave me alone.”
I produced a score for him. “Start by working out the fingerings.”
“What's the title?”
“Secreto.”
His teeth clamped down on his lip.
It was around then that I performed Prokofiev's Paysage for Miguel, to demonstrate what delights lay in store if he stuck at his drills. I finished, and he exclaimed, “You don’t mean to tell me that's how all women are!”
“Of course not.”
It puzzled him that Roberto disallowed this sort of comprehension: “We’ll hear a piece at a concert. His only comment is ‘I liked it’ or ‘I didn’t like it’—as if it were a flan. When I try to discuss what it's about, he gets sarcastic: ‘I don’t need to make up stories to go with the soundtrack.’”
Even with me, Roberto practically brandished this incapacity. (Or was it puerile resistance, a stance adopted in order to distinguish himself from his more aesthetic friend?) “I honestly can’t see anything more in music than a formally pleasing arrangement of melodies, harmonies, and rhythms.”
“Only that, Roberto?”
He would shrug.
One day, having played a piece by Schumann, he said: “This moves me.”
“Why?”
He flicked his nose. “I just feel an affinity….”
I launched into my own rendition, emphasizing certain of the ideas.
“Wait! Is it his family?”
“He and his wife and his children, all joined in some activity—that's his heaven. They’re a hearth that cheers him and drives off the world's chill….”
He became keen to learn the language of music, notwithstanding his limited aptitude. Every week he would turn up with some new revelation. Frequently he was guessing rather than hearing; nevertheless, he gained increasing trust in his own ear. “This passage demands a crescendo here,” I would tell him, demonstrating. He would acquiesce but venture: “Maybe a tad softer, eh?”
Rosario, for her part, had a vivid sympathy with the Romantic repertoire, so much so that she was often disturbed by the anguished passions it depicted. Like a child who cannot bear stories in which dumb beasts are threatened, she shied away from extreme emotions. If she was unsettled by one of Chopin's evocations of jealousy, say, she felt free to leaven it with some congenial sentiment of her own, or simply to use the music as a vehicle for her mood of the moment. Although this disqualified her as an interpreter, it need not have prevented her from developing into a competent instrumentalist. She could have cloaked her failing beneath the ensemble of a chamber group, or excelled as a soloist in those grandiloquent calliopes which are the warhorse piano concertos. Empty compositions would have come out sounding expressive with her.
As the summer receded, I had less time for my students beyond the ambit of their lessons. Miguel gradually resigned himself to scant, sporadic trysts. He and Roberto carried on their reciprocal coaching. Soon they were plodding through Schubert's Ländler, D. 814. I advised Roberto to prepare a similar piece with Rosario. He contended it was too difficult to coordinate their schedules. The flimsiness of the alibi made me suspect that what really thwarted him was the fear that playing side by side with her would show him to poor advantage.
He declared his intention to acquire a grand piano.
“What's the matter with your upright?” I asked him.
“I don’t do things by halves,” he retorted. “Besides, Rosario should have an instrument worthy of her talent.”
At his insistence, I referred him to el señor Alvear, proprietor of the Casa de Pianos. Soon afterward, I was hurrying along a street downtown when a tubby, florid figure up the block began bouncing toward me, waving: el señor Alvear. He had on a beret and a muffler (no overcoat), and as usual he toted a wicker basket filled with bonbons. “Catch, catch!” he cried in his flügelhorn voice, and lobbed foil-wrapped candies at me.
Flushed, beaming, he bussed me on the cheek. “You’ve sent me a tycoon! The man has to have a full-size grand, no less.”
“You didn’t sell him one….”
“Anything larger than three-quarters was excessive, I told him. That only made him want to buy a full-size more.”
“A baby grand will do him fine.”
He cocked his head. “A smaller piano means a smaller commission for you.”
“Así es.”
When I next stopped at Roberto's and Rosario’s, a Blüthner Aliquod baby grand loomed in the twilight of the living room. Rosario went to get me a glass of juice from the kitchen, where Lilí was being given dinner by the maid. Roberto was talking on the telephone in the study. An odd dissonance charged the atmosphere. I sat down at the piano to try it out. Feathery action, pedals that yielded without the slightest creak, ringing tones in every range.
Roberto sauntered in. “How do you like it?”
“How do you like it, is the question.”
“Not bad for its size, I suppose.”
“But it's magnificent!”
“He knows it's magnificent,” Rosario said, stepping into the room. “He's just grumpy because he won’t be playing it himself.”
“What do you mean?”
“Well, not for a while,” he conceded, chagrined. “My company bid for a job down south. It's so much bigger than anything we’ve done before, we didn’t think we’d win it. The word came yesterday. I’ve been put in command.”
“Everybody agrees that Roberto is the one best qualified,” said Rosario. “And it's such an opportunity. Still, what a wrench…”
“I’ll be marooned, away from my family.” Roberto made a gesture encompassing his wife, the Blüthner, me.
“You won’t quit practicing,” I growlingly admonished him.
“That I promise! Even if I have to use one of those mute keyboards.”
It was pouring outside. With his wet slicker and dripping curls, Miguel seemed to sweep the whole hectic vigor of the cloudburst into my apartment. From his sodden briefcase we extracted his music, damp at the edges. I brought him a towel, and he rubbed his crown into a spume of fluffy ringlets. “I have a message for you from Rosario,” he announced. “She's canceling her lesson tomorrow.”
Rosario had always notified me of such changes herself, and in good time. After weeks of specially assigned exercises, she had been eager to attack Scriabin's Prelude for the Left Hand.
“She's well?”
“Wonderful.” A manic treble suggested that he had shared a delicious secret with me. “She's gone to see Roberto,” he added, in the manner of one obliged to furnish a gross hint.
“Ah.”
“He's been away for over two months.” Then, as if discarding all restraint: “She needed to see him.”
“That's a long separation.”
Miguel couldn’t shake his itchiness. When he played, he hit many wrong notes. Suddenly he seized my arm: “She's pregnant!”
As soon as Rosario returned, I went to give her a lesson. She greeted me with news of her husband. An efficient housekeeper was fixing him wholesome meals. His project, though formidable, was advancing smoothly; if the weather continued mild, he would finish it on schedule. “And you’d be proud of him. He's rented a spinet: no matter how busy the day, he does scales for at least twenty minutes.”
I signed for her to sit down at the keyboard. She did, but remained motionless, looking straight ahead. Mainly to herself she said: “I missed Roberto. It was a mistake to sleep with him. Now he’ll inevitably presume… It will be that much harder to tell him. I’ll have to wait for the proper moment. Isn’t there some music about this?”
At the end of the session, I answered: “Transfigured Night. ” “That's it!” She brightened. “Schoenberg will be my patron saint.”
Rosario was one of those women who live on easy terms with pregnancy. Her condition remained almost imperceptible. A gossamer smile betokened the dreaminess that enveloped her and that seemed only to enrich her faculties. She devoured pieces as fast as I fed them to her, wanting to spend all her time at the piano when she was not with Lilí.
Once he had made his disclosure, Miguel kept his own counsel— except for issuing the occasional contented sigh, and offhandedly mentioning his conviction that Rosario was carrying a boy.
I was early. The maid let me in. Believing that Rosario was not yet home, and tempted by the Blüthner, I began to toil over the Liszt sonata. I don’t recall how far I got before I became conscious of her standing in a doorway. She wore a look of horrified rapture.
“Please, don’t stop.”
“It may not be healthy for you to hear this when you’re…”
“I’ve never been stronger. It's now that I can face such things.”
I glanced at my watch. “We’d better start your lesson.”
The next week she told me that she had been listening to recordings of the sonata.
“Horowitz's version is all about Horowitz. Arrau conveys perhaps half of what's there.”
“Even that much is a miracle.”
“Then how to describe what you convey?”
“He has a vast repertoire. I don’t.”
She began a campaign to get me to perform the entire piece for her. Soon Miguel took up the same refrain. She must have spoken to Roberto about it as well: he wrote me a postcard appealing for a future “Liszt recital.”
That sonata is an intelligent, seductive cobra.
Rosario's labor commenced on a frosty afternoon about seven months after her initial visit to Roberto. In order to spare him anxiety, she put off alerting him until the last possible moment. Within a couple of hours, she was able to report to him that it was a boy, astonishingly robust. Ecstatic, he flew back on the next plane. His first impression: “The spit and image of Rosario!” The engineering project was so close to completion that he was able to turn it over to a partner and stay home to be with his son.
Miguel had accompanied Rosario throughout her accouchement. Inspired by his friends devotion, Roberto insisted that the baby's name incorporate both of theirs: Guelberto. Following some discussion, this became Gilberto, which quickly, via Gilbertito, contracted to Tito.
A few weeks after the birth, Roberto and Rosario held an intimate soirée where Miguel and I were the only guests—if one could apply that term to Miguel, a virtual member of the family in his capacity of tireless volunteer sitter, burper, bather, and diaper-changer. No sooner was my coat off than the two men bustled me into the nursery to behold the gurgling scion. Roberto urged me to offer him a pinkie: “He has the grip of a rock climber.” Miguel fussed with Tito's bedding and got him to smile. I noticed that he was neglecting his pose. Over dinner, he slipped back into it to act out the befuddled reactions of various hospital personnel who, on the night of the delivery, had taken him for Rosario's spouse and were at a loss to fathom how “this hysterical peacock,” as he described himself, could have managed to sire an heir. His mimicry had Roberto in stitches.
Rosario gave a recital in Roberto's honor, surprising him with Scriabin's Prelude and Nocturne for the Left Hand, along with several études by Kessler. Roberto, a stranger to all of these pieces, sat beside Miguel on the sofa, with Lilí, in her nightgown, on his lap. His face assumed its satisfied cast. Miguel's was set in an identical expression.
Toward the tail of the evening, Rosario pulled me aside: “I don’t know how to laugh.”
“I’ve never seen you laugh. It's true.”
“Can’t you teach me?”
“Are you happy?”
“How could I not be!”
“Then you don’t need to laugh.”
At the time I accepted Rosario as a student, we settled on the fee for my services. Week after week elapsed without my receiving any payment. I had to tell her: “This cannot go on.”
“You mustn’t think I don’t value your…”
“It violates your orderliness, Rosario.”
“The one thing I haven’t ever been able to keep straight is my accounts,” she owned. “I stick my bills in an old hatbox. I always mean to get to them, but the pile just grows, and I can’t deal with it.”
“Before our next session, you’ll send me what you owe me. The rule will be: you pay me first thing.”
Rosario respected this disposition faithfully for as long as she remained my pupil. Otherwise, she did not mend her ways. Eventually Roberto took over the administration of her finances. “If she wasn’t so good-looking, she’d be in debtor's prison,” he joked.
Soon after the evening of my audience with Tito, Rosario asked to come to me for her lesson. She moved listlessly, seemed to peer out through an indigo haze. Having played a few notes, she thumped a sour chord and let her hands plummet to her lap. “Fool!” she muttered.
“What is it?”
“While Roberto was gone, I vowed that I would surprise him by keeping up with the bills. I did stay on top of the really dire ones, but most of them were still unopened when he got home. He didn’t rebuke me—just shook his head. The other night, he sat down to pay them. I was in bed. He stalked in, snapped on the light, flung one at me with ‘Third Notice’ stamped on it: ‘What's this?’ I supposed he was angry because we might be dunned. I apologized. ‘No, read it.’ It was for the pregnancy test I’d had a couple of weeks before my first trip to visit him. ‘What's the meaning of this!’ he shouted. For months I’d been considering how best to present the facts to him. I was positive I could make him understand. But I didn’t take enough time—I blurted out: ‘He's not yours.’ Roberto looked like he’d been stabbed.”
The next morning Miguel appeared at my door, though it wasn’t the day for his lesson. He begged me to spend a few minutes with him. Since I was just leaving, I suggested that he walk with me to an appointment I had. I set a brisk pace and he jounced along at my side, fitfully grasping me by the arm as he spoke.
“Rosario talked to you—I know. Listen, the last thing I wanted to do was to hurt Roberto. I never thought there’d be consequences. I never thought he’d find out. If it had been me Roberto confronted with that bill, I’d have invented a story. But Rosario did what she did—which upset everything. I couldn’t let Roberto simply hang like that, not knowing who the father was. I was sure I could break it to him in a way so he’d feel—not excluded. I had this idea I could tell him the truth as if I were lying….”
He stepped off the curb and I yanked him back as a bicycle whizzed by. He didn’t seem to notice.
“I reached him at the office: ‘Can you come over, it's urgent.’ Ten minutes later, we were both standing in my alcove. It just popped out of me. ‘I’m the father.’ He glared: ‘Ah, so Rosario told you. Who are you trying to cover for?’ He started getting all worked up: ‘Don’t hide this from me!’ ‘I am the father.’ ‘You’re mocking me!’—and he stomped out. I called Rosario to tell her what had happened. She was angry: ‘Why didn’t you speak to me first? There was no reason for him to know.’”
We were at my destination. I reached out and thrummed on his shoulder a theme from the rondo he was studying. “Tomorrow at five.”
It was seventeen after the hour when an elated Miguel sailed in. “I’ve just left Roberto. Do you know what he did? He hugged me—hugged me!— and asked me to forgive him. He said: ‘With Rosario so attractive… even for you, Miguel. You needed to have a son, man! Besides—aren’t two fathers better than one?’ What a friend! I would give my life for him!”
“Your life, Miguel?”
“Yes!”
I had to handle Miguel sternly for several weeks to get him back in harness. Rosario settled down of her own accord. Roberto did not alter his demeanor, except to introduce a shade of punctilio into our relations, a heightened sense of his own dignity. A different tone crept into his remarks about Rosario and Miguel: not so much paternal as paternalistic, a benevolent grandfather speaking of slightly errant grandchildren. He had lost ground pianistically while away, and drove himself to catch up with Miguel. They kept on meeting regularly to critique each other, and we had a joint lesson monthly.
One of these took place at Roberto’s. I was struck by his warmth as a host. In a hundred gracious ways he had insinuated Miguel as an orna- ment of the household. A favorite armchair was reserved for him. He was encouraged to regard the kitchen as his own, and sometimes on the maid's day off he cooked dinner. When I got there that evening, Lilí was bawling over some grievance. Roberto, who was building a fire in the grate, let Miguel assuage her. Rosario, placidly ensconced on the sofa, suckled Tito.
At random intervals, I would ask my students to play something they had not practiced for many months, to ascertain whether it had stayed in their fingers. During one of his private lessons, I said to Roberto: “Let's hear that Schumann piece you were affected by.”
“I’ve forgotten it,” he snapped.
“Go ahead, give it a try. You may be surprised how much of it comes back.”
Reluctantly, he complied. He acquitted himself so well, one would almost have sworn he had been reviewing the score.
“Excellent.”
He scowled. “Never again!”
“Roberto—”
“Schumann. Bah! If he had such a happy hearth, why was he obsessed with death? Those dancing skeletons in Car-naval? I see them every day around my house. Grimacing.” He mashed some keys cacophonously “Don’t mind me. I still haven’t recovered from the strain of that job.”
To disperse the gloom, I served tea with cakes and played him Mac-Dowell's Dance of the Gnomes.
“Ah,” said Roberto, “a piece with nothing but charm.”
It was as though I had unwittingly opened a drawer deep inside Roberto and glimpsed some venomous insect feeding on the darkness. Whatever that noxious energy may have been, he seemed to harbor it as a mortifying reminder of hazards to be shunned. He showed Miguel and Rosario the most exquisite consideration. They, in turn, deferred to him as the generous ruler of their garden.
Miguel was ambushed by the ferocity of his attachment to the baby. Tito's smiles and yawns, imperious appetites, budding quirks became his only topic. He buttonholed everyone he met to flaunt photos of his “godson.” To me, he chafed at the façade he had adopted: “Will I always have to talk to my boy through this mask?” When an earache set the child wailing in agony, Miguel couldn’t eat or sleep; he later confessed to me that the ordeal had brought him a guilty relief, since it supplied him a pretext to haunt the nursery at all hours, wring his hands, moan, and for once vent his feelings for Tito with fully licensed abandon.
I remember the coziness of the household throughout that wintry season: dense crystal vases spilled over with flowers that sunned in the blaze of the fireplace, and the vista of snowcapped peaks made the living room all the more snug. Rosario seemed burnished with well-being. Roberto, prospering in his business, bought for her any number of expensive outfits, which soon had their fronts stained with mothers milk. Rosario said that she was “addicted” to feeding the baby. One evening, as Tito gorged, Roberto poked Miguel in the ribs: “Don’t you wish you were him? When Rosario nursed Lilí, she was ravishing enough, but the boy stimulates a whole other set of glands in her. What a pity it would have been to miss this, eh? It sometimes seems to me that I was destined to have only a daughter, but that Fate had the good sense to change its mind.”
Rosario told me: “Before I married Roberto, I asked him: ‘What if I fall in love with someone else?’ He answered: ‘Just so you don’t stop loving me….’ ‘It's impossible for me to stop loving you,’ I said. And that's how it's turned out.
“There's something incestuous in me. Roberto excites me more as a brother. With Miguel, it's different. He's more of a son. What would it be like with a real son! That's what I’ve secretly dreamed of, ever since I began to desire men. Maybe that's why I had a boy.” She gave a quick smile: “It's not going to happen, though.” Suddenly earnest: “I’ll die soon.”
“Rosario!”
“Today I’m crazy.”
Weeks before Tito's first birthday, Roberto set about planning a party. He liked to ruminate the guest list out loud. A legion of relatives, colleagues, and neighbors had to be included, especially those with tots of their own. He petitioned Miguel for the names of his muchachos. “I’m in a bind,” Miguel told me. He managed to extricate himself by claiming that they were such a jealous bunch, to invite any of them would cause hostilities.
Roberto was determined that I too should attend. I had a conflicting engagement. “In that case,” he said, “you might help celebrate the occasion in another way. Would you, one evening, give us the Liszt sonata?”
Roberto and Miguel wore dinner jackets; Rosario, a hyacinth sheath. Candles shone; a tall vase on the Blüthner bristled with gladiolas. A few streamers, some stray specks of confetti, and a balloon lolling in an upper corner testified to the recent festivity.
As I entered, a small pink whirlwind darted at me and enfolded my legs.
“Lilí just wanted to welcome you,” Rosario explained.
“My mommy said I can’t stay.”
“Then we have to obey her.”
“But why can’t I hear the music?”
“Another time, I’m going to play something specially for you.”
“You are? What?”
“Wait and see.”
Lilí contemplated this briefly, then went to kiss Roberto and Miguel good night. Tripping back to me, she motioned me down and mouthed: “Don’t forget.” Rosario led her off.
“We missed you at the party,” said Roberto. “A resounding success, wouldn’t you say, Miguel?”
“Tito howled through most of it, that's for sure,” Miguel laughed. “What a pair of lungs that kid has!”
I offered my score to Roberto: “You might like to follow—though it may be awkward for the three of you together….”
“Not to worry.” With a flourish, he drew a tight new edition from a stack on the coffee table. I passed my wilted old folio to Miguel, who nestled into “his” armchair and leafed through the pages. Moving to the piano, I adjusted the bench and took some deep breaths. Rosario came back and sat down on the sofa beside Roberto. At that moment, I pounced.
The whole piece is daunting, but the first two notes are nearly insuperable: terminal heartbeats. How to play those? The keys have to be touched as if they were red-hot irons. I pinged off that opening salvo—vitality's parting shots—and plunged ahead, in a kind of conscious trance… until at last, in the closing measures, the dawn appeared and outfaced the destroyer. The final note whispered: Death, even you will die.
Miguel stood up and began to pace: “This never sank in before—yet I can’t say I didn’t know.”
Roberto, who had been lost in scrutiny of the ceiling, bent forward and addressed me: “Rosario was right. You really put it across. I almost wish you hadn’t….”
“The beauty transforms it into something tolerable,” said Miguel.
Borne on her own current, Rosario reflected: “People live such different lives. Why shouldn’t they experience death differently? For one it might be an eternal catastrophe…. For another, nothing at all.” She stood up; I thought she was going to leave. Instead, with a soft gesture she signaled for me to surrender the bench. She occupied my place with such a magisterial posture that an electric hush seemed to descend upon a crowded hall. “Number Five, from Schoenberg's Six Little Piano Pieces” she announced. “In celebration of our heartbeats.”
An hour before her next lesson, Rosario telephoned me, asking to have it at my house. She turned up well-groomed as always but had circles under her eyes. She was quiet, rather stiff. We worked on a Prelude and Fugue. At the end, I fetched her coat from the closet.
She wrapped it about her as if suddenly chilled, and sniffed sharply. “Roberto delivered an ultimatum: ‘If Miguel ever tries to see Tito again, I’ll kill him.’”
“Kill Miguel?”
“No, Tito.” She clawed her hair back. “All this time. Engineering it.”
The bell jangled. I opened the door: Miguel, unshaven, bedraggled. Rosario manifested no surprise at his apparition. He seemed on the verge of pleading for something. She laid her hand over his mouth.
The following day, I got in at four o’clock from doing errands. Two students of mine, teenage twin sisters, were waiting outside my apartment in their matched jumpers, stealing glances at Miguel, who leaned against a wall, weeping.
“Miguel, what is it?”
“How can he cut me off from my head? Never? I don’t want to live!” “Come in, why don’t you? I have to give these girls their lesson. Yours isn’t till five.”
The twins were unabashedly gawking. I shooed them in.
When I ushered them out, Miguel was standing in the same spot, more composed. I led him in to the piano. He said nothing—for fear, I guessed, of dissolving again. His hands shook so, he could scarcely play. Midway through the hour, he sprang up, embraced me, and bolted.
Roberto requested that I come to him for his lesson. It was dusk; he left the lamps unlit. No one else seemed to be around. The gladiolas, still in their tall vase, exhaled a sickly smell.
He worked attentively. At one moment he mumbled to no one in particular: “Even flirted with me.”
At the end, he pressed down middle C with his fifth finger and intoned, “Good-bye.” Was he saying this to me or to the piano?
As I walked home, I remembered that once, at a gathering, I had seen Miguel clasp Roberto around the waist, dance a few steps with him, and yell, “How hot this man is!” Roberto joined in the act, stroking Miguel's chin: “Look who's talking!” Everybody had laughed, except Rosario, who asked me, “Why are they laughing?”
I recalled one of Miguel's first lessons. A stifling summer day. He had on a fitted silk shirt, shorts, espadrilles. I got up to pour him some water. When I turned around, he had unbuttoned his shirt. He flashed me a broad grin.
“Is something funny?’
“Sorry.” He buttoned up.
Another time—I’d praised him for having performed a piece well—he took my index finger and put it to his lips.
“What are you doing?”
He held my finger there for a few more seconds and, with a subtle smile, answered: “Shushing my pride.”
I was expecting Rosario at three o’clock. Three thirty came, and no sign of her. I phoned. The maid answered: “Something terrible, Dios mío… Lilí fell off the balcony.”
“What?”
“Dead.”
The day after the funeral, Rosario arrived punctually for her lesson. She was dressed in a gray suit and had on dark glasses, which she did not remove.
“Just Bach,” she said.
Every so often, a shudder convulsed her and she had to stop. At one point she retired to the other room for a few minutes. She strode back in: “I need to play.”
Week by week, she made progress.
From her spring, she passed directly to her autumn. Her red foliage turned gray. She took to wearing a hat, and gray weeds. More stunning than ever. She reminded me of the elm in the field behind the house where I grew up. A squall of hailstones fractured its branches, yet the tree stood firm.
Roberto decided to relocate to another city. Rosario moved with him. At our last meeting, she clutched my hands. “You’ve taught me to take care with endings,” she said. “We’ll probably never see each other again. I am not an unfinished symphony. The double bar has come.”
The metronome tapped away, prestissimo. Six years? Seven?
One summer afternoon, the sun closed down like an iris, the sky let loose a barrage, and I, who had been trying to outrun the storm, found myself huddling beneath a leaky cornice. Each time the blast seemed to have reached its utmost vehemence it would swell anew. I was thinking of a three-legged mongrel I’d seen, hoping the poor cur hadn’t drowned, when suddenly a shape bodied forth out of the swirl. A bald shape, with an umbrella. It slowed, squinted through the murk, advanced, halted, pushed its nose almost up to mine.
“Roberto!”
He glowered, brought the drumming black canopy over my head. “Music!” His jaw quivered. “The best music is silence.” His incisors dug into his lower lip till it bled. He planted his umbrella in my hand with a solicitous squeeze, and tromped off into the deluge.
I tried to conjure up Rosario's two sapphires. In her presence I had always forbidden myself to blink, not wanting to lose sight of their dazzle even for an instant. Now, in order to recapture her eyes, I needed to press my own tight shut.