They couldn’t keep him away from the piano. Starting at the age of three, he would sneak into the music room and pound away for hours. At last the Count, who had fond memories of Laszlo’s mother, engaged a teacher for him, over the protests of the Countess. The boy progressed rapidly. It was not long before visitors to the estate began spreading tales about the gypsy servant lad, who had an elfin charm and played the piano like an angel.
The Count was pleased by Laszlo’s growing reputation. Not so the rest of the family. There was an ugly little incident at hog-butchering time when Laszlo was twelve, but he did manage to get his hand out of the meat grinder before any permanent damage was done—though not without severing his half-brother’s left thumb with a larding needle, an act that did not endear him to the Countess. His home life, in fact, grew so disagreeable as his playing continued to improve that at fifteen Laszlo ran away.
The records of the next five years are hazy, as Magyar roamed Central Europe with his mother’s tribe, and I skimmed quickly over the chapter. The only specific piece of information was a newspaper account of a Bösendorfer grand vanishing during shipment from Hamburg to Prague, a robbery that was never solved.
In 1868, Magyar’s single-thumbed half-brother, who had become an amateur scientist, died mysteriously while collecting botanical specimens in the Carpathians. A large boulder inexplicably dislodged itself from a rocky outcropping and mashed his head to jelly, just as he was bending over to pluck a specimen of Hyoscyamus Niger. No one could find Laszlo to tell him the news. He was also unavailable when the Countess met her untimely end in a freak accident a year later. For no apparent reason the docile old mare she was riding suddenly went berserk, catapulting her into the farmyard feeding trough, where she was battered to death by an enraged sow. Not until a year after that, in 1870, did Magyar return to his father’s estate.
It was fortunate that he showed up when he did, for shortly after his arrival the old Count began to fail, and it would have been tragic indeed if his only living relative had not been by his side to sweeten his last days with music. In his journal, the old man writes touchingly of his son’s spectacular playing, which usually went on all night in the room immediately adjoining his sickbed. “The music almost seems to weave a kind of spell,” he observed in one of the later entries, “saturating my spirit with a deep disorienting frenzy, releasing me from the bondage of such trivialities as food, water and sleep, all of which seem abhorrent to me now. Only the music matters. I will brook no more interference from those busybody physicians with their noxious potions, and have sent them all away.” He died a week later. Laszlo inherited everything.
Magyar’s first public performance in Prague the same year caused an immediate sensation. After that he wandered restlessly, impelled perhaps by his mother’s blood, performing in all the great cities and before all the crowned heads. He travelled by gypsy cart, taking his piano with him wherever he went, practicing even as they scaled mountain passes and jolted over rough forest tracks.
As relentless as his quest for technical perfection was his pursuit of romantic liaisons. Many a peasant maiden, catching sight of the wagon with its gaily painted arcane symbols and hearing the passionate music from within, would be compelled to follow along behind. Without stopping the music, Magyar had only to lift his left hand briefly from the keyboard to beckon her inside. Sometimes the girl would be discarded only a few miles down the road. In other cases, she would be kept on for a few weeks and dropped off wherever they happened to be at the moment Magyar became weary of her. Many of the younger ones never found their way home, stumbling instead into unsavory predicaments in the big cities.
Magyar did make several life-long attachments that transcended these ceaseless casual encounters. He was a frequent visitor at the castle of the Romanian Princess Marie-Therese, often leaving wild revels in the early hours of the morning to retire to her private suite in a tower overlooking a foaming gorge, where he would practice until dawn. There was also the poet Alphonse Thibauld, with whom Magyar haunted certain notorious dens near the wharves of Marseilles and Tangiers. Thibauld rhapsodized about their bizarre passion in several sonnets and an aubade, but his poetry was so cryptic that no one, save the author of this book, ever realized whom he was talking about. And of course, there was Mother St. Cyr, the Abbess of a remote convent in the Urals, who would shed her habit and vanish without explanation from her cell whenever Magyar was in the vicinity. It was whispered among the sisters that under Magyar’s influence she once led a Black Mass involving human sacrifice at an ancient basalt slab beside an eldritch tumulus on a mountain pass. But it was only a rumor.
Even the worshipful author of the book, who claimed to be a descendant of Magyar, couldn’t deny that his idol’s lifestyle was not altogether wholesome. Though it had no basis in fact, one can understand the pervasive rumor about the pact with the Devil, which Magyar never tried to dispel, but instead seemed to enjoy. And it was not only his inhumanly dazzling technique that caused people to wonder about Satanic powers. For though he indulged wantonly in every imaginable vice, Magyar never seemed to age. In 1900, when he was fifty, his body was still slender and lithe, his face fresh and unlined, his vigor, and his various appetites as powerful as they had been at twenty. How much longer would his youth have persisted? the author wondered. We will never know, for at the age of fifty-three Magyar tripped in front of a streetcar in a suburb of Düsseldorf. Not only was he neatly decapitated, but both his hands were also cleanly severed at the wrist. His head, according to the book, is still soaking in formaldehyde at that remote convent in the Urals. And his hands, inexplicably, vanished without a trace.
AT THE BACK of the book was an appendix, listing all of Magyar’s forty or so compositions, with a brief harmonic analysis of each. It was a little drier than the biographical part of the book, but very convenient for me. Most of the pieces were based on gypsy tunes, and the harmonic progressions, as Nitpikskaya, had said, really weren’t logical. Whatever effect the pieces had was due for the most part to Magyar’s smashing technique. I certainly couldn’t have picked a better composer for our project. He was exactly the kind of obnoxious person whose ghost, if you were idiotic enough to believe in such things, would be likely to come back and wreak havoc on the living. Better yet, as a composer he was a superficial slob, and therefore easier than most to copy. As we neared Milan, I was almost beginning to look forward to dashing off another one of his compositions.
It was just as well that my attitude was positive, because we didn’t have much time. Usually concert bookings were made far in advance. But the pianist who had been scheduled to appear in Milan had suddenly been taken ill, at the same time that Humphrey’s name had appeared in the papers. Since the people in Milan desperately needed someone to fill the empty spot in their series, and since no musician with a serious reputation would play at such short notice, they had asked Humphrey. The concert was in two days. Already it was time to repeat the procedure we had executed so awkwardly in Venice. This time, perhaps, we could manage to avoid some of the mistakes we had made before.
We weren’t rolling in wealth yet, and the hotel Humphrey’s agent had booked in Milan was just as cramped and dismal as the one in Venice had been. But there was a halfway decent desk in one of the rooms. I began working that very night.
I chose another American folk song for my theme, a tune called “Green Corn,” which was almost as simpleminded and repetitive as “Yeller Gal.” Still, it had a lot of bounce, and I was inspired by the wildness and total freedom of Magyar’s life. He was an independent guy, if nothing else, and so I tried to get an independent feeling into the music. It wasn’t too hard. I just blithely scribbled away, ignoring all the rules, tossing in totally unexpected harmonic changes and ghastly conjunctions of chords. This time, instead of jazz notes, I used jazz rhythms. It ended up even more outrageous than “Yeller Gal,” but I wasn’t worried. Now that I knew what an uncontrollable eccentric Magyar had been, I was confident that no one c
ould prove the music to be beyond his imagination. They might not agree about it, but the more controversy the merrier.
When I showed it to Luc the next day, he grunted and toyed with his slimy lips. Finally he said, “I don’t like this C sharp major chord. Better get rid of it.”
The C sharp major chord happened to be one of my favorite parts. It came right after a G major seventh, and I enjoyed the weirdness of the progression. “Oh, come on, Luc. Let me keep the C sharp major,” I said, “It’s no stranger than a lot of things Magyar did.”
He didn’t even have the courtesy to answer me. “Bridget,” he said, “I’ve asked Sam to get rid of this C sharp major, and he’s balking.”
Bridget looked up from her magazine. “Get rid of the C sharp major, Sam,” she said.
“But it’s a great chord there,” I protested.
“The C sharp major is out, Sam,” she said, with finality, and went back to her magazine.
So I acquiesced, carelessly blotting out the C sharp major and replacing it with a far more predictable chord. I had liked the chord, but big deal. Now that I was finished with the piece, I hardly cared about it at all. It was rubbish anyway.
The night before the concert, I was sent out to pick up food and bring it back to the privacy of our rooms. We had learned from the last experience. I bought sausage and bread and cheese and wine and Coke, and four cannoli for dessert. In my usual clumsy way, I kept fumbling with the packages as I walked, not really looking where I was going, and so I collided with someone as I was entering the hotel. I dropped the package of cannoli, upside down, and I was so busy picking it up that I didn’t even get a look at the person I bumped into, who rudely hurried away without a word. All I noticed was a peculiar medicinal smell that was faintly familiar.
Bridget ordered Humphrey to wash his hands, and so this time she had no trouble at all dissolving the pill in his preprandial Coke. We picnicked messily in Bridget and Luc’s crowded little room. I sawed off big hunks of salami and cheese with my Swiss pocket knife, and we tore the bread apart with our hands, paying no attention to crumbs. The cannoli were a little flattened, but still better than anything we had eaten in Venice. The cuisine here was reputed to be more interesting in general, and I looked forward to tomorrow night, when, if the concert was a success, we were planning to celebrate afterwards at a decent restaurant.
Then Humphrey and I settled down for a quiet evening in our room, I with Buddenbrooks, and Humphrey with a pile of horror comics. It didn’t matter that they were in Italian, since Humphrey only looked at the pictures anyway.
Humphrey began giggling about forty-five minutes after we had eaten. I did my best to ignore it. But Humphrey’s mirth only increased, and after five minutes of it I put down my book and said, “All right, Humphrey, what’s so hilarious? Maybe if you tell me about it, you’ll shut up.”
“Oh, but Sammy, it’s so funny, I just can’t help it,” he said, trying to choke back his laughter. “Here, you look at it.” We were lying on twin beds, which they had managed to cram into a room only big enough to be a single. Humphrey rolled over to hand the comic across to me, stretching out his arm to avoid the effort of sitting up. “This page right here.”
The drawings were sloppily printed in lurid reds and greens. A horde of witches, blood dripping from their mouths, were dismembering a helpless male, limb by limb. A figure in a red cloak, presumably the devil, directed them. As I read, Humphrey continued to chortle merrily at the mere thought of it.
“Humphrey, this isn’t funny, ifs disgusting,” I said as I tossed the comic back. I was actually a little unnerved by his ghoulish response. “What is there to laugh at?”
“Oh, it’s just …” Humphrey shook his head and wiped the tears out of his eyes. “Just … they think … the other one looks like that.” And he was off again.
“Stop it, Humphrey!” I said, sitting up and grabbing his foot and squeezing it hard. “Stop it this minutel You’re acting screwy.”
“Oh … I just,” said Humphrey, finally pulling himself together but still grinning sheepishly.
“But it’s not one bit funny. What do you mean by ‘the other one’ anyway?”
“But Sammy, you know as well as I do,” he said, sitting up earnestly. Then he swayed and closed his eyes. “Hey, what’s the matter?” he said. “How come I feel so dizzy?”
“Humphrey, what do you mean?” I persisted, standing up and looking down at him.
“Oh, you know,” he said, smiling again and rocking back and forth. “Feel so funny all of a sudden. Warm and cozy.”
I grabbed his hair and pulled his head back. “Tell me what you mean,” I snarled.
I wasn’t pulling gently, but he was anesthetized by the pill and just went right on smiling. “Oh, Sammy, don’t be silly. You know what I mean,” he said, “And it’s so pretty on the island, out in the sunlight, the water and sky so bright … so much space …”
I gave up. I wasn’t going to get anything sensible out of him. And if I didn’t hurry, I wasn’t even going to be able to get him out of bed and into position. Grunting, I pulled him to his feet and guided him over to the desk and into the chair. He obligingly slumped forward onto his arms, singing quietly, and in a moment was asleep.
I said nothing that night to Bridget and Luc about Humphrey’s odd response to the comic book. I’m not sure why. I just didn’t want to talk about it. I did my best not to think about it either. After we arranged the music and the pen under Humphrey’s arms, I retreated back into Buddenbrooks.
I didn’t sleep very well. I dreamed that the four of us were back on the train, squeezed into the tiny compartment with a huge Bösendorfer grand. Humphrey pounded on it furiously, but it produced no sound at all. An audience of witches from the comic book milled around in the corridor and outside the slowly moving train, hungry for our flesh. I knew that if Humphrey stopped playing, the train would stop too, and they would devour us:
When Humphrey awoke the next morning, he was not nearly as bewildered and confused as he had been the time before. The grogginess wore off quickly, and he was more impatient than ever to get over to the theater and learn the new piece for the concert that night. Bridget stayed in the hotel, but I had to go with Hamphrey and Luc in case they had trouble reading the notes.
I went reluctantly, already thoroughly sick of “Green Corn.” The scheme was beginning to make me anxious. I tried to tell myself it was foolish to brood about what that strange old man had said to me and to worry about Humphrey’s peculiar behavior. I was trapped in it, after all, however much I was beginning to dislike the plan. The only sensible thing to do was to try to make the best of it, since it was too late for me to get out of it now.
As before, Humphrey had a rough time learning the notes. But if I had made the harmony more conventional, and therefore easier to learn, or the rhythms less tricky, then the piece wouldn’t make the bizarre splash that was necessary to get the audience riled up. I did whisper to Luc, toward the end of the hot, grueling, tense afternoon, that next time, if there was a next time, we would do well to get Humphrey the music a couple of days in advance.
“Well, that’s your department, isn’t it, Sam,” he said with a mean little laugh. He was always a lot bossier when Bridget wasn’t around. “It’s your own fault you waited until Milan to start this piece. I’d suggest you start preparing another one right away.”
“In that case, you can finish teaching it to him,” I said. “I’m sick and tired of it.” I left the theater and gloomily wandered the streets for several hours.
But as the concert got closer, my mood began to change. It was impossible not to be excited and curious about how the audience was going to respond. There were no seats for us this time, since we had been called on such short notice and the series was already sold out, so we had to watch from backstage.
The theater manager and the concert organizers, who had made it clear that they had strong reservations about Humphrey, finally left for their box seats just
before eight o’clock A fat stagehand in an undershirt remained, occupying the only chair. The four of us stood in the small stage-right wing, squeezed together among curtains and ropes, waiting out the last few minutes.
As usual, Humphrey was overcome by stage fright. He paced, clutching a wad of toilet paper (graciously provided by the management) upon which he continually wiped his dripping hands. He nodded abstractedly at Luc’s final bits of advice, while his unhappy eyes darted around as if searching for some last minute reprieve that he knew wouldn’t be coming. And I realized for the first time that I was very glad not to be going out there. I even felt a pang of compassion for Humphrey.
Bridget had been checking on the house from the near edge of the curtain. “Okay, Humphrey, the time has come,” she said at last. “Good luck, darling.” She pecked him on the cheek.
“Already?” lamented Humphrey. “Can’t I just wait another—”
“Get out there and play,” she said.
Humphrey took a deep breath, clenched his fists and marched out. Luc only just managed to get the toilet paper out of his hands before he hit the stage.
It was a repeat performance of the concert in Venice—the same repertoire, the same technical prowess, the same obscene poverty of musical expression. It had been bad enough watching as an anonymous member of the audience. From backstage the debacle was even more embarrassing. The audience, observed from a distance, seemed less like a harmless, if restive, group of individuals and more like a hostile mob.
When Humphrey came barrelling toward us at the end of the scheduled program, there were actually a few jeers and catcalls over the heavy rush of the audience getting away. Perhaps the concert in Venice had been a fluke. Perhaps this group would laugh “Green Corn” off the stage, and I felt a desperate itch to destroy the manuscript before Humphrey exposed it to them.
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