IMAGINE, MY DEAR READER, that it is 1813, and you are sitting in the Carmo Church, along with all the other women, and watching and listening to one of those wonderful old pageants that were all there was back then in terms of public entertainment and musical talent. You know what a sung mass is, so you can imagine what a sung mass would have been like in those distant days. I won’t call your attention to the priests or sacristans, nor to the sermon, nor to the eyes of the young carioca ladies, which were pretty even then, nor to the black lace mantillas of the somber matrons, the breeches, the wigs, the dusty drapes, the candles, or the incense, none of that. I won’t even speak of the orchestra, which is excellent; I will limit myself to showing you one white head, the head of that old man conducting the orchestra with such soulful devotion.
His name is Romão Pires; he can’t be a day under sixty, and he was born in Valongo, or thereabouts. He is a good musician and a good man; all the musicians like him. He was known familiarly as Maestro Romão, and, in those days, “familiarly” and “publicly” amounted to much the same thing. “Maestro Romão is conducting the mass” was the equivalent of that other form of announcement many years later: “The actor Jõao Caetano plays the part of . . .” or even: “The actor Martinho will sing one of his best arias.” It was just the thing to whet the audience’s appetite. Maestro Romão is conducting the mass! Surely everyone knew Maestro Romão, with his circumspect air, his downcast eyes, his sad smile, and his faltering step? All of this vanished when he stood in front of the orchestra; life would then pour from every part of his body and from every gesture; his eyes would light up, his smile would beam forth: he was utterly transformed. Not that the mass was his own composition; for example, the one he is conducting now is by José Maurício; but he conducts it as lovingly as if it were his own.
The pageant has ended, and it’s as if a great blaze had been extinguished, leaving his face lit only by ordinary candlelight. See him coming down from the choir, leaning on his stick; he’s going to the sacristy to kiss the priests’ hands and accept their invitation to join them for lunch. All without saying a word, entirely indifferent. He has lunch, leaves the church, and walks toward the Rua da Mãe dos Homens, where he lives with an old black slave called Papa José, who is his true mother and who, at this very moment, is talking to the woman next door.
“Here comes Maestro Romão, Papa José,” said the neighbor.
“I’d best be going. See you later, sinhá.”
Papa José hurried into the house and waited for his master, who entered with his usual downcast air. The house, of course, was neither rich nor particularly welcoming. It bore not a trace of a woman’s presence, either old or young; there were no songbirds, no flowers, no lively, cheerful colors. It was a somber, barren place. The most joyful thing was the harpsichord, which Maestro Romão sometimes played when practicing. On a chair beside it lay some sheets of music, none composed by him.
Ah! If Maestro Romão had had the necessary talent, he would have been a great composer! It seems there are two sorts of vocation: those that can speak and those that cannot. The former find fulfillment; the latter are nothing but a continual, sterile struggle between one’s internal impulse and one’s inability to communicate with the outside world. Romão’s vocation belonged in that second category. He had a profound vocation for music; he carried within him many operas and masses, a whole world of new and original harmonies that he could neither express nor put down on paper. This was the sole cause of Maestro Romão’s sadness. Naturally, the hoi polloi did not realize this; some said one thing, others said another: illness, a lack of money, some lingering regret, but the truth is this: the cause of Maestro Romão’s melancholy was that inability to compose and translate his feelings into music. Not that he hadn’t scribbled many a bar and stave and sat staring at the harpsichord for hours on end, but everything emerged unformed and shapeless, with neither idea nor harmony. Latterly, he had even begun to feel embarrassed lest his neighbors should hear him, and so he had stopped trying altogether.
And yet, if he could, he wanted at least to finish one particular piece, a nuptial song started three days after he got married in 1779. His wife, who was then twenty-one and who had died at age twenty-three, was not pretty in the least, but she was extremely kind and loved him as much as he loved her. Three days after their wedding, Maestro Romão felt the stirrings of something akin to inspiration. He conceived the idea of writing a nuptial song and set about composing it, but the inspiration remained locked inside. Like a bird that has just been captured and tries to escape through the bars of the cage, flitting up and down, impatient and terrified—that was our musician’s inspiration, imprisoned within him, unable to escape, unable to find a door or a way out. A few notes managed to come together; he wrote them down, just a single sheet of paper, nothing more. He tried again the following day, then ten days later, and at least twenty times more during their marriage. When his wife died, he reread those first few conjugal notes and it made him even sadder, because he had failed to set down on paper that feeling of happiness now extinct.
“Papa José,” he said as he came in, “I’m feeling rather under the weather today.”
“Sinhô ate something that make him sick?”
“No, even this morning I wasn’t feeling well. Go to the apothecary’s, will you, and fetch me . . .”
The apothecary sent him some remedy or other, which he took that night; the following day, though, he still didn’t feel any better. I should mention here that he had a bad heart—a grave, chronic condition. Papa José was so dismayed when he saw that neither rest nor medicine yielded any results that he wanted to call the doctor.
“What for?” asked the maestro. “It will pass.”
Things were no worse by the end of the day, and the maestro got through the night unscathed, unlike his slave, who barely managed two hours’ sleep. When they heard about the illness, the neighbors could speak of nothing else; those who were on friendly terms with the maestro went to visit him, telling him it was nothing to worry about and that it was probably just a bug that was going around; someone added jokingly that it was simply a trick on his part to avoid being beaten at backgammon by the apothecary; someone else chipped in that he must be lovesick. Maestro Romão smiled, but said to himself that the end was nigh.
“It’s all over,” he said.
One morning, five days after the church pageant, the doctor found him to be really ill, and despite the doctor’s soothing words, the maestro could read this in the doctor’s face:
“Oh, it’s nothing to worry about; you must stop thinking about songs all the time . . .”
Songs! It was precisely this word spoken by the doctor that gave the maestro an idea. As soon as he was alone with the slave, he opened the drawer where he kept the nuptial song he had begun in 1779. He reread those notes wrung from himself with such difficulty and still left unfinished. And then he had a remarkable idea: he would finish it off now, come what may. Anything would do, as long as he left something of his soul on Earth.
“Who knows? Perhaps, in 1880, someone will play this, and say that it was written by a certain Maestro Romão . . .”
The beginning of the song ended in la; this la, which did not sound quite right, was the very last note he had written. Maestro Romão gave orders for the harpsichord to be moved to the rear parlor, which faced onto the yard: he needed air. Through the window, he could see two newlyweds—they had only been married a week—leaning out the window of a neighboring house, each with an arm about the other’s shoulder, their two free hands clasped. Maestro Romão smiled sadly.
“They’re arriving and I’m leaving,” he said to himself. “I’ll compose this one song for them to play . . .”
He sat down at the harpsichord, replayed the notes, and came to the la . . .
“La . . . la . . . la . . .”
Nothing. He was completely stuck. And yet he knew music like no one else.
“La, doh . . . la, mi . . . la, si, doh, re . . . re . . . re . . .”
Impossible! No inspiration whatsoever. He wasn’t asking for a profoundly original piece, but just something that was his and in keeping with his original idea. He went back to the beginning, repeating the notes and trying to retrieve a remnant of his extinguished feelings, remembering his wife and their first days together. To complete the illusion, he looked out the window in the direction of the newlyweds. They were still there, hands clasped, each with an arm draped over the other’s shoulder; the difference was that they were now gazing at each other, instead of down into the yard. Breathless with illness and impatience, Maestro Romão returned to the harpsichord; but the sight of the young couple had given him no inspiration, and the notes that should have followed would still not come.
“La . . . la . . . la . . .”
In despair, he got up from the harpsichord, took the sheet of music, and tore it into pieces. At that moment, the young woman, entranced by her husband’s gaze, began to hum randomly, unconsciously, something never before sung or even imagined, in which a certain la gave way to a beautiful musical phrase, precisely the one Maestro Romão had been seeking for so many years and had never found. The maestro listened to it sadly, shook his head, and, that night, he passed away.