The Music

by James Hamilton-Paterson

  ‘I’m so stiff,’ he mourned with pleasure. ‘Really rusty. It took ages to learn that and now see what’s happened in a few months. I was going to play to a professor in Zagreb but the war … Oh, it’s a sonata by Mauro Giuliani. He was a Bolognese but lived in Vienna. Something like that. My teacher says he was the greatest guitar virtuoso of his day. Even Beethoven admired him.’

  But in the silence which stretched on after these remarks a listlessness began to creep in such as to leave the music hanging in the air like a reproach. The ear went on hearing the final chords’ brightness but the echoes they had set up were more persistent and more dark. They hollowed out the kitchen until everything – the lamplight, the meal, the sense of rescue, even the music’s dazzling tinsel – were left afloat and tiny above gulfs of wastage and despair. It might all have been discharged by a sudden outburst of tears, a collapse into comfortings. But the boy’s refusal to break merely hardened the outlines of whatever had stalked in. Even the dog, which had slept throughout the music, groaned and raised its head towards the door. The malign intruder spoke out of the firelight and from among the echoes. It reminded that small tranquil moments, snatched pleasures, even affection itself, are always underlain by the iron indifference on whose surface they float as beatific scum.

  All too evidently Jaro also heard this voice. In Italian, one doesn’t sing for one’s supper, one merely earns it. He now said quietly, mockingly, still holding the guitar: ‘Well, did I earn my supper? Or don’t I stop there?’ The contemplative elder he might (if he survived) become had entirely vanished. Nothing now sat on the hearth but street trash wearing someone else’s clothes.

  Tiredness, of course, that would account for everything. The boy was stone weary. He stumbled upstairs into his room with a gas camping lamp, still clutching the guitar. The heavy door closed firmly like that of an abbot on a pastoral visit to a nunnery. Uneasy silence fell. The house tensed around his unseen presence as if expecting to hear, in the depths of the night, a muffled crying or the terrified howls of re-lived atrocity. But there was only, before sleep, a half-hearted attempt at the Beatles’ ‘Hey, Jude’. Sometimes when a cock has its throat cut and just before its last energy drains out it will try feebly to crow. This desolate sound is not a last attempt at defiance so much as the mere noise of the creature running down, its own programmed voice, as unvolitional as a rose’s scent as it lies on a bonfire. Such was Jaro’s ‘Hey, Jude’ behind his oak barrier in the darkness.

  *

  And now came brisk blue weather, a handful of days the colour of reprieve. He moved about in the sunlight carrying the guitar which had long since passed into his possession. The two were inseparable. ‘It got stolen, didn’t it?’ was his answer to the obvious question, since it had become impossible to imagine him fleeing a war without rescuing his own instrument. ‘The bastards just took it’: less actual people than agents of that perpetual corrosion which had seeped up from below and leached it away.

  The struggle within Jaro took on a stark clarity in the bright air of the terraces. The drifting orphan longing for a home was pitted against the survivor who knew it was fatal to risk the certainty of renewed loss. The nostalgias can’t have helped: the oil-lit farmhouse, the long rows of vines strung between posts stained blue-green with generations of copper solution. ‘Aren’t you going to prune the olives this year?’ he asked. ‘It’s nearly April.’ And for a moment a vaguely similar terrain hovered over Umbria, an Istria with its own olives and vines and bucolic rhythms. It had spoken for him unawares, and memory clouded his face while he attacked the guitar with a fearsome outburst of scales and arpeggios. In similar fashion he took care to avoid physical contact, except that now and then a betraying hand would reach out instinctively. These lapses were always well punished with aloof withdrawal to somewhere slightly conspicuous such as the rusty iron saddle of an abandoned Fiat tractor, an antique which it was easy to imagine hadn’t moved since the 1950s. He would sit perched up high, outlined as a lonely huddle with a guitar, ploughing off motionlessly through docks and nettles to nowhere imaginable.

  It couldn’t go on, of course. At some point charity has to shade into commitment or else turn away and reward other victims for their pitiability. And commitment means a life upheaved, griefs and horrors of every kind with no outcome guaranteed except, in the absence of the most rigorous undeception, a bog of conflicting longings and meshing disappointments. The confusion of someone else wearing Luca’s clothes and playing Luca’s guitar was already painful. ‘Don’t mother me!’ came Jaro’s voice from those clothes, sitting on the tractor or on a step among irises, always at a distance but never – never quite – out of sight. ‘That’s the trouble with you women. You never can let us be.’ And in between, snatches of Bach, fragments of Villa-Lobos, riffs of a demonic Jimi Hendrix; the outcries of a drowning talent all at sea among styles as among desires, among alternative futures wasting away beyond a succession of horizons.

  The agent of precipitation – and it might have been anything – was probably Francesco, calling on his way home with a bundle of mail which the postman couldn’t deliver since his moped was lying dead in a ditch. He arrived capless but in uniform in a car which, although it wasn’t actually marked Carabinieri, did bear a number plate prefixed by the military’s red letters ‘EI’. He was whistling as he got out, waved a hand and called ‘Buon giorno’ towards Jaro and his guitar before handing over the letters with his usual pleasantries and driving away again. Thought about retrospectively, Francesco’s very friendliness must have fed Jaro’s anxiety about betrayal. When viewed as a possible lover, what local cop mightn’t be curious about strangers on familiar premises? Or be slow to winkle out details about vagrants with stolen driving licences? (even though the licence, together with the trousers, had been burned the day after Jaro’s arrival).

  ‘Oh yes,’ said the boy sarcastically, ‘you told him I was a cousin from up north somewhere. A likely tale.’ And he remained quite unchastened when reminded that it was no more unlikely than his own tale of a cousin in Manciano. The Manciano relative had been a safety net whereas this was conspiracy. Reassurances were useless, as were remarks beginning ‘Sooner or later’ and dealing with coming in from the cold and resuming guitar lessons under whoever was the nearest thing to Segovia that Italy could currently offer. That night for the first time he drank quite a lot of wine and showed signs, before being headed off, of becoming ineptly amorous, though probably only to pay the policeman back. More suggested was the child who badgers to be allowed to make a chocolate cake, but who loses interest in the absurd gulf of time which separates his greed from the finished article and is reduced to licking the uncooked mixture off the bowl before wandering away.

  The next morning, without a sound from the dog, he had gone, taking a few more clothes and – of course – the one uncontaminated companion he could talk to, listen to and trust, who was attuned to his own perfect pitch. It seemed both officious and offensive to go driving around the lanes and highways looking for a youth with a guitar; only later would his departure take on aspects of deliverance. At first it left guilt and the rawness of pity, much intensified by the discovery that on his last night Jaro had wet the bed. Unaccustomed alcohol? The deep anaesthesia of misery? Meanwhile the dog roamed the rooms looking for whatever had been and then gone, leaving a house shaking with the echoes of illimitable damage and with the ghost of a guitar on one wall.

  Anxieties of Desire

  THAT A MUSICIAN should be haunted by sounds seems only proper; that they should have been the sounds peculiar to his exile is equally right. They come to me in my memory as frontier noises, for the outskirts of Algiers in the early 1930s formed a frontier between city and desert, modern and ancient. My nearest muezzin had perfect pitch: five times a day he began his melismas unfailingly on E♭, varying the chants with improvisatory flourishes of his own. At dawn the sound would rise, richly decorated and trembling against the eggshell sky like a single peacock feather. Soon af
terwards the copper beaters began work in the souk. At night, sounds of violence and travel. Every few weeks the police would round up the stray dogs which slunk in from the desert’s fringes, herd them into my alley and shoot them more or less accurately as a measure against rabies. The snarling and shrieking and gunshots were terrifying; and even though the corpses were immediately thrown into carts to be burned the alley was always black with vultures next morning, pecking at stains and gulping fragments. Most nights, though, long after the radio and flutes had stopped in the little café whose name I can’t now remember, that silence fell which is, as Mozart observed, the most beautiful thing in music. It was the voice of a wilderness which began only a couple of streets away. Sometimes in those still hours I would hear a caravan arrive as though on tiptoe, the velvet shuffle of camels and a tinkling like loose change.

  Had I not committed myself to strange territory? I was a thorough European on both parental sides, born in Antwerp, raised largely in Berlin and attending the Paris Conservatoire (Prix de Rome, 1922, for Les Jardins Mystérieux). What had such a man to do with deserts and muezzins? What had I known of Algiers, except that Saint-Saëns had died there of a fever? Well, it’s a shocking enough story for it shows that the muses, far from being the handmaidens of high art and encouragers of those prepared to sacrifice a life in their service, are in reality traitorous hags, as fickle as schoolgirls and of an equally brainless cunning.

  You too, perhaps, hypocrite reader? You who have just reached down your damned encyclopaedia and found – aha! – that in 1922 the Prix de Rome was not awarded. Oh yes it was; but it was taken away again from me by the vilest imaginable machinations. The spectacle of those academicians – whose vellum scalps sported withered laurel in place of hair – snarling like curs behind the iron gates of their own entrenched opinions was more than an artist could bear. Normally ponderous professors scuttered about, robes flapping, marshalling votes and writing malicious squibs to members of rival cliques. Never had the Académie so humiliated itself in disharmony. And why? Because my beautiful Jardins were too unfashionable for it, too mystérieux, too talented. I had failed to put into them enough evidence of the professors’ own teaching. These academics didn’t want strange scents and uncanny perspectives. They wanted heavy hints that behind the delicate colours was a technique like pumice, something grey and hard left over from the volcanoes of a former age. Not a set-piece canon, maybe, but at least some thoroughgoing counterpoint in the orchestra, a mock-learned and witty fugato (say) while the singers wailed earnestly on. Anyway, as all the world knows my piece became a cause célèbre. The jury of nine composers gave a six-to-three verdict in Jardins’ favour, those from the Institut being unanimous. Then, thanks to vicious lobbying on the part of my detractors – including, I later discovered, approaches to the illustrious J-J – the Académie vetoed it. So: no performance of the work that October; no four years’ government pension: no residence in the Villa Medici. Very well, then, so be it. None so deaf as those who will not hear! I turned my back on them all, the so-called musical establishment, those tight little circles of dullards and perverts who simply played each other’s works and sniffed each other’s farts and gave each other fawning reviews. In any case, who ever heard again of any winner of the Prix de Rome? Debussy, Massenet, Bizet, Gounod … Four real composers. That’s about it for a prize which has been awarded annually (or not) ever since 1803. René Martens, then, was a name destined to rise from ranks other than these.

  The wilderness: that’s where all true artists go to lick their wounds and recover their strength in order to return like lions. Even as I headed for it, not knowing where it was, I moved about Europe, a job here, a job there. If there is such a crime as puellicide I came close to committing it on many occasions as I sat listening to some hapless child with plaits and freckles massacring a Bach Two-Part Invention. But I learned to congeal. Coolly I told them I wasn’t paid to hear them practise but to hear them play. Like ice I took the envelope left for me on the brass salver in the hall. Slowly the lions’ breath entered me, undeniable, thrilling as strychnine. My paws itched. All this while I was working, studying, scribbling and tearing up, swallowing and swallowing pride and feeling it gradually turn to the breath of lions down among lights and bowels. René Martens was biding his time. I think now he was shucking off the Conservatoire and replacing it with more Teutonic influences from his Berlin adolescence. That tradition certainly supplied heartening examples of composers pacing themselves, making themselves prowl their cages. Bruckner was over forty before he began his list of great symphonies; Brahms didn’t complete his own First until he was forty-three. This was fit company for René Martens. The essence of desire is waiting.

  Yet just as it had taken Brahms so long to learn how to step from the dense shadow which Beethoven cast, so it took me most of my wandering thirties to overcome Paris’s pernicious hold. If I’d heard it once, I’d heard it a thousand times when I was a student: ‘But the symphony is dead, Monsieur Martens. It belongs to another age’ (the elegantly cocked eyebrow, the dismissive flutter of the hand). Oh how I wish I could have cast Messiaen in their teeth at the time. Young Olivier did the right thing, of course: all those first prizes at the Conservatoire in the late 1920s – harmony and counterpoint, fugue, improvisation and organ playing, composition … But we’re all different and we have to run our own courses. Mine turned me into the lone and humble student of my own academy. I hired and borrowed instruments, made myself passably competent on several. Never again would I write a non-existent note for a French horn – the occasion, I remember, for quite exaggerated scorn and calumny on the part of one of Jardins’ savagers. Hadn’t the young Schumann made just such an error in the very first bar of his very first symphony, The Spring? Genius goes where it has to and is sometimes careless of details in the overwhelming rush of inspiration.

  Slowly I fell away to the south. I ran my tongue around Vienna for left-over pockets of musical sweetness, sucked at Florence for its lingering taste of blood and brilliance, swept the streets of Rome for useful dust (such handsome little Fascists!). While there I would make a point of passing the Villa Medici at a mocking lope, regal with scorn and disdain, wondering what pampered and cosseted expatriate wunderkind was holed up behind the tall shutters, making a bid for Parnassus at French taxpayers’ expense. And I … I was free of such things! Thank God! And so at length I reached Algiers, having run innumerable gauntlets of whining creditors, prurient landladies and miffed policemen. I arrived with a growing bundle of score beneath my arm, needing only a neutral African sun to shine on the completion of that first, great symphony of mine.

  *

  So it was that the tawny breath of the Sahara scorched into me like big cats at my back as I sat in a whitewashed room and wrote while five times a day the muezzin shook his peacock feathers in the rectangle of sky. The café’s flutes and wailing radio, the metal beaters and even the shot dogs are there in the score for anyone to hear, while the slow movement’s tread is the velvety pad of camels bearing from unimaginable lands strange and disquieting bounty. It was, in fact, to this very movement that I was adding a late inspiration, an intermittent soft jingling like harness buffed by windblown sand, when I happened to catch sight of a copy of Le Mercure du Sud. Normally I barely glanced at the Arts page, at those syndicated reports of the distant, parochial goings-on in the world’s so-called artistic capital. If one deigned to notice them in all their lickspittle pretension it could only mean one felt excluded – and you surely know me well enough by now to realise the absurdity of that idea. I was all too happy to be working my work, free at last of a metropolis which, like a child, considered herself both the universe and its centre. Yet on this occasion glance I did. There beneath the headline ‘Début éclatant’ was an account of the dazzling première of René Martens’ First Symphony.

  My instant reaction was a thrill of joy. At last, you pigs! Now will you …? before thought overtook it like a javelin, piercing it through the heart
. Feverishly I read the piece, bewildered, aghast. René Martens had last Sunday himself conducted the first performance of his symphony. L’Orchestre de Paris had given a sumptuous account of a work which, from that moment, had become the talk of Europe. No lesser laureates than Poulenc and Milhaud had hailed it as the most original, most beautiful, most … Beyond the window the muezzin hit his usual smug E♭; I flung the paper from me, at him, at the world, at Allah. It fluttered through the aperture and vanished. A donkey added its tortured mockery from the alley below. There was another René Martens. I couldn’t believe it. I clung to the table. Once more, by some malignant joke which the muses must have hatched in helpless stitches, my success had been stolen from me. My very name had been stolen from me. I could have believed a jealous rival had crept in by night, taken my score off the table, had published it under his own name.

  That night the curs were culled again. I lay awake on my mat, staring at the flickering ceiling with a snarl so fixed it ached, hearing the bullets crash through skulls and brains, ribs and hearts, seeing the stranger who had stolen my life die a thousand times over. It was his body I heard tossed again and again into the cart until it rolled off the heap and had to be stuffed ignominiously behind the tailboard. Trundled to the edge of the desert, this huge stack of the fake René Martens was doused in waste oil and piled around with his spurious manuscript. A match flared, the orange flames leapt up and sent heavy, stinking smoke into the absolving African night. How his fat sputtered and melted, dripping blue flames into the sand! How his brains bubbled and seethed! How his internal gases expanded until slowly he raised himself to a sitting position, blackened arms seared into an imploring boxer’s defence, puny against an obliterating blow! And how, released by the cleansing flames, his crotchets and quavers and bar lines took grateful wing, fluttered upwards and were lost for ever. Oh, I lay awake that night; and never once did I take my eyes off the play of those distant orange flames on my chamber wall; and never once did my grin cease until wearily I sat up and kneaded my face back into an expression fit to meet dawn’s light and the world of human commerce.