After several futile attempts, Josué finally managed to have a doctor visit the house. He, a man in his seventies who came walking along the park, his bag in hand, sporting a goatee and a monocle, confirmed what Davina had said: as the illness had severely damaged his respiratory system, Brad was dying. He was breathing so strenuously that he seemed to want to fill his lungs with all the air in the world. When the doctor told the family that this sickness was called the white plague, Josué didn’t contradict him, afraid that he would leave, but in his heart of hearts he knew that the disease had everything to do with cannibal stars and very little to do with the plague.
One night, with the moon as full as a light bulb, Brad, stretched out on his bed, his hands joined upon his breast, breathed his last. Josué opened his mouth to give voice to his pain, but his mute cry never passed his lips. He rushed to the bathroom; looking at his double in the mirror, he saw that not only had he lost his use of words, but that his face would from now on remain expressionless. He wept in silence, to all appearances uncaring. Why, he wondered every day for the rest of his life, did the Lord choose to take away the child of whom he was the most proud? Was it for that very reason, because he so openly preferred Brad to the others? It seemed to him then that God, like an underhanded boxer, took pleasure in delivering blows below the belt. Never again would he utter another word, and it was not his employers who were going to complain, because as one of them remarked in Josué’s very presence the following Monday, one perfectly muzzled employee was better than two who spoke.
Leaning over her dead son, Davina wiped the tears from her cheeks and went to her kitchen, where she began pacing up and down, mumbling words that only she could understand. She gesticulated in a way no one had ever seen, at times overcome by emotion, smiling as if she were recalling happy memories and even bursting into laughter as though someone had just told her a good joke. At dawn, after having confirmed Brad’s death, the doctor with the goatee, as a precaution, examined all the other members of the family. His face beset by nervous tics, he twitched his nose from bottom to top as he tapped Oscar’s chest and belly. After endless auscultations, he told his parents that he wanted to submit him to a battery of tests, and asked them to come to the hospital at the end of the day so that they might get a report on the state of his health.
Davina spent the day murmuring that even if God’s will was sometimes obscure, the suffering it generated elevated the soul of mortal man. It’s said that she made her way to church to seal a secret pact with Him. Back home, as soon as she stepped into the living room, she told the family members that, not being born yesterday, she knew perfectly well what to expect: Oscar would not be leaving the hospital for some time. Josué raised himself up in his chair and opened his mouth, not, however, to produce a sound. His wife’s cheeks were carved out with deep furrows. As he questioned her with his eyes, she replied that she’d had no choice, that if she’d not agreed to sacrifice ten years of her life, Oscar’s would not have been saved, it was as simple as that. Josué approached her to explore the accelerated inroads time had made. His eyes filled with tears that bathed his utterly stoic face, and it seems certain that from that moment on his love for his wife grew tenfold.
At day’s end, as twilight set fire to the sky, Oscar stood next to the doctor with the goatee, facing Davina and Josué in an office cluttered with plastic thoraxes of all different sizes. He said goodbye to his parents with a wave of his hand, since he was forbidden to embrace them—a moment of implacable cruelty that he would recall many years later. Was it then that there opened up, like a poinciana flower in spring, the wound that would lend him a more inward-looking temperament, essential to artistic creation? Josué contemplated him with his customary blank expression, while Davina, without interrupting the passionate exchange she pursued with her indwelling voices, waggled her fingers next to her ear like an eight-year-old girl before turning her back. His parents dwindled away behind the glass between the office and the corridor; drops of rain dotted the little window giving onto the hospital courtyard; Oscar thought of Brad and the way he could alter the weather with his music, and all at once he found himself wondering if up to then he’d not been taking his life too lightly.
2
Oscar was bound night and day to his hospital bed, as still as a coconut palm under a blazing sun, since he was forbidden any physical activity. It’s said that, bored to death, he lived in a world of disjointed dreams, imagined memories, and invented stories with himself as the hero. Over and over he saw himself racing through the neighbourhood streets once again, a kite string in his hand, while far off, beyond the factories’ foul exhalations and the rows of teetering houses, a train whistle signalled an end to his freedom. He wondered if he’d ever really walked those teeming avenues where the smell of jerk chicken was able to smother that of soot. He saw himself ambling along the one street that never slept, whose heart pulsed to the strum of a double bass and the blinking of neon signs, or creeping up to a jazz bar’s window to clear it of condensation and hearing in the background, like something out of a premonitory dream, Brad’s inimitable boogie-woogie, but he never saw Brad because either an ardent music lover leapt to his feet to applaud or a cigarette girl passed through, screening him from sight. When he opened his eyes, aghast at being back on reality’s solid ground, he saw his neighbours, dozens of children as sick as himself, all similarly plagued by this illness which, as his father had said, drew you down into a dark void. When one child coughed, he too was wracked by a furious coughing fit, certain each time that it would never stop. Draped in their black veils, the nuns, like crows, circled the room, and was it his imagination playing games, or did they only approach him after having dealt with all the other boys? Was he going mad, or did they all stare past him as if he were a ghost? Had he been swallowed up by his sickness’s black hole, bloodseed? When, years later, the details of his hospital stay became a subject of conversation, old Jackson couldn’t help having her say with her usual tact: Those lovers of little Jesus who don’t nurse a child for the reasons we know, I’d have given them a good kick in the rear!
After a few months, once he was feeling better, those same nuns began, in the late afternoon, to roll his bed to a games room where he was allowed to sit in a rocking chair, to push a wooden airplane, and to play checkers with a child who was in just as bad shape as he was. He kept nodding off, and then, with a thread of cool saliva snaking down his cheek, woke to a silence barely disturbed by the constant breath of an overhead fan, in a games room swathed in shadow. He pulled the curtain aside to gaze through the window at the soft moonlight, mirror of time, and the moths trying vainly to shorten their lives by throwing themselves at the streetlight near the entrance. It was then, thinking about the frightening number of his neighbours who vanished every week, that he saw, behind his eyes, advancing towards him, the sniggering skeleton with its enormous scythe, and he wondered, transfixed, what might await him in the realm of the dead. It appears that, rather than conjuring angels reclining at ease on helium-inflated clouds, he dreamt each night that he was clearing a path with a machete through a stifling jungle that swarmed with wild animals snarling and poised to attack and insects that left glistening trails in their wake. Was the All Powerful dooming him to conjure these hostile places because his faith was not sufficiently strong?
They say that one night he got out of bed, tottering, in the games room. Yawning, he turned on the light and stood in the middle of the room without knowing quite what to do, until his eyes came to rest on the drawers of a large wardrobe. He knelt down in front of the piece of furniture to rummage around inside and came across an object that was familiar to him but that at first he couldn’t identify. It was a rectangular box of worn mahogany with a latch that he lost no time in opening. What appeared was an organ that reminded him of the one his father had played in times past when he was a sailor, the same one on which Brad had learned his scales. Why did the instrument’s keys strike him so diff
erently? Why did they glow with such a seductive brightness? As he later recounted, he would spend the rest of his life asking himself these questions, pondering the troubling irony of having dedicated his entire life to music while remaining utterly oblivious to the deepest roots of his vocation. He tinkled a bit to acquaint himself with the instrument’s sound and played an exercise he found on its music stand, then a second, then began a piece for children. A nurse burst into the room, expertly slid the organ back into the wardrobe, and, without saying a word, rolled Oscar’s bed to his room. The next day he played the organ again, but for longer, and two days later he played for hours without anyone interrupting him. All of those who were present had the same impression: he seemed to apply himself to the organ not so much for the pleasure it provided, but because it enabled him to lose track of time, that joker who dragged his feet and filled his veins with the poison, boredom. When he performed in front of the other patients, neither the children’s nodding heads nor the crows’ black wings marking time on their thighs escaped him.
The doctors let him spend more time at the organ, as long as it didn’t slow his recuperation. No matter where you were, in the twilit coolness of the corridors, in the empty entry hall with its damp flagstones, in the cafeteria where the crows greedily downed their thin greenish soup, or in the little chapel where doctors, bags under their eyes down to their cheeks, came to perform their perfunctory genuflections, you heard his boogie-woogie airs echoing through the hospital like the promise of a distant future. People sat around him, a spark of hope lodged in their pupils. Was it true, then? Did music have occult powers, as his mother claimed? If not, how to explain that, invisible, he had suddenly become visible? He noted this change as much in the eyes of the staff as in those of his neighbours, even as they were lost in the haze of their own convalescence. These first reactions to his music, although he was still taking baby steps, imprinted themselves forever, it would appear, in his memory. Music did much more than soothe the soul, it enabled mortals, for the time of a performance, to cherish their life in all its twilit decline.
One night in the games room, while rain pounded down and Oscar was playing a ragtime tune he’d learned by ear, a nebulous shadow appeared at his side. Oscar kept on as if nothing had happened, and only turned his head towards the silhouette once he’d finished. It was a girl his age with coal-black hair and a face so milky-white that it seemed vampiric. She had to have been new, he’d never seen her before. When she said to him, in an astonishingly mature voice, You, you play to lose yourself, he didn’t know how to reply. Her eyes, shadowed as they were, still had something merry about them, as if her bursts of enthusiasm were tempered by a precocious fatalism. She’d spent a good part of the afternoon listening to him; his music had become her oxygen, and the better it became, the more it filled her lungs.
They began to meet every evening in the games room to share pieces of music that were to their taste. As if her bouts of sickness prevented her from playing to full capacity, she did timid interpretations of some of her favourite pieces, all classical airs. Oscar taught her blues scales and the few jazz turns he knew, while she taught him good posture, the right fingering, and arpeggios, those last reminding him, always, of a wave just on the point of breaking. Every Saturday night, in the games room, he would perform before an audience made up of young patients and the staff, who willingly pardoned him his hesitations and false notes.
Sometimes, as if to put to the test Marguerite’s pessimism, Oscar played tricks on her: he glued a pen onto a bench that served as her bedside table so that she damaged her fingernails trying to pick it up, or he cranked up her bed so that when she came back from the cafeteria she wasn’t able to hoist herself onto the mattress. You’re such a child, she said, not so much as a reproach, but as if she regarded his aggressions as signalling a kind of innocence. That night, as he stared at the cracks in the ceiling of his room and his neighbours’ coughing fits died away, Oscar wondered what it was, exactly, that he felt for Marguerite.
One evening, as he was waiting for her in the games room, he learned from a crow that Marguerite had changed wards. When he asked her the reason for the move, she warned him not to raise his voice. One day followed another, he lost his appetite, no longer bathed, and even stopped wanting to play the organ. Another night he was dozing in his room, his face turned towards the frenzied cloud of insects swarming the streetlight, when he heard piano music whose source he first thought was a dream wherein majestic beasts, hunched in the shadows, halted their hunt to lend their ears to a muted melody. Then he realized that the sound was wafting through the half-open window like a breeze, and he recognized the delicate touch of Marguerite. He went to the window and saw another window on the top floor of an adjacent pavilion, giving onto a lighted room where, once the piece ended, there appeared Marguerite’s silhouette. So began a musical dialogue at a distance, where they expressed their troubled feelings through their choice of music and the way they performed it.
It’s said that, during a sleepless night, he overheard the murmurings of two crows who had entered his room to snuff out the oil lamps. If he understood correctly, it was Marguerite’s parents who, having learned what company she was keeping, demanded that she be moved to another pavilion. It seems that his first reaction was to ask himself why, after which he became pensive, not moving a hair, feigning a composure he was far from feeling. What was in his thoughts? The unpitying cruelty of the world? Was he paralyzed with sadness, as his detractors claim? That’s doubtless an exaggeration, given O.P.’s combative personality, which he was just beginning to affirm. Was he, on the contrary, channelling his mounting anger into creative energy, as his admirers would insist? This idea, seductive as it is, leaves one perplexed: you don’t play an instrument because you’re aggrieved, rather you attack the keys because touching them gives you pleasure, that is the true incentive. What is certain is that he was already of an age to sense that the question of race was at the heart of the matter, and what must have come back to him now was surely his father’s dimmed eyes on those Friday evenings when he made his way home.
The day he left the hospital, neither his mother, always deep in conversation with her inner voices, nor Oscar, still in a state of shock in the wake of this episode, were brimming with joy, and they greeted each other as if they had just been together the day before. As they walked side by side through the summer air, choked by dust because they were repairing the road, his mother urged him to hurry: a few days a week she cleaned rich people’s houses, and she had to get back to her employer. As if it were the most normal thing in the world, she picked up where she’d left off just a few moments before, pursuing a passionate exchange with a neighbour only she could see, concerning something dreadful that had happened when she was still living on her native island.
That night, Josué and Davina organized a little party at their home. They invited members of the extended family and some friends. According to Oscar’s brothers and sisters, they crowded around to embrace him; the men threw their arms over his shoulders, the women cried out that he was a miracle boy and squeezed his hands. Despite her modest means, Davina had prepared a jerk chicken and a plate of rice and beans that drew accolades from the guests, as well as some fried plantains that she’d picked up at the West Indian grocer’s. Oscar was quizzed about his stay at the hospital, sometimes solemnly, sometimes teasingly, as if people wanted to read between the lines to find out if the personnel had treated him like a poor relative. After the meal, Oscar sat down at the piano and played his heart out while those present looked at each other, amazed. He performed a popular piece with an ease that surprised them all; the keyboard must have seemed enormous compared to the hospital’s little organ. After the applause, Prudence, his older sister, remarked that his interest in the piano was fortuitous, since the doctor had forbidden him from playing the trumpet for the time being. Josué went up to him and ruffled his hair before scribbling a phrase in the notebook that now neve
r left his side: Same pirate, same beard.
People took the opportunity to question him further, but with tact, so as not to offend him. What exactly had happened at the hospital? He shrugged his shoulders, and kept smiling. Come on, O.P., don’t be so coy! He looked about him while twisting his fingers, and as they all sat on the edges of their chairs, he explained that he’d been very bored at the hospital, but thanks to the experiences he’d had, he’d matured by at least ten years. In a joyous cacophony, they showered him with questions: What had he done with his days? Had he made friends with other children? Were there other children from the islands? And the nurses? The doctors? After a while, Oscar got up from his chair and asked Davina if he could excuse himself, he felt faint and wanted to lie down. Once her brother was gone, Prudence, wide-eyed, looked about her and whispered: Am I wrong, or have they sent us back an improved O.P.?
So as not to slip into a bog of indolence, Oscar had taken to reading the hospital’s newspapers every day, and he knew that prohibition in the United States had come to an end. Apparently, men of the cloth had been observed taking a drop. After years of imposed sobriety and parched throats, people had protested vehemently in front of the politicians’ offices, and they’d at last given in to the angry electorate so that alcohol could once again run free. While he expected to find fewer bars in the neighbourhood, he was astonished to discover that they had multiplied like cats in a cemetery. Cars as long as ocean liners, gleaming like porcelain dishware, glided slowly along the sidewalk; couples dressed to kill strolled arm in arm, stylish and blithe; the mood was electric, imparting the message that those who weren’t there were missing out on life.
Oscar Page 3
