Oscar

by Mauricio Segura

  To his already very busy schedule, he added courses with a prestigious teacher of classical music, a student of a student of Liszt, a man so thin that he seemed always to be in profile. While Oscar played, the teacher placed glasses of water on the backs of his hands to train him in maintaining good posture, to the point where, his pants as drenched as if he had spilled his soup, O.P. invariably caught cold after his lessons. Meanwhile, he continued to work on his orchestral piano style, raising his virtuosity to levels never before seen, in the opinion of the city’s cranky critic. What was his problem with the bebop pianists? he asked him in an interview. Ignoring the left hand, and dabbling in a music that marginalized jazz and that would sooner or later entail its death.

  In those years, as 78 rpm gave way to 45, the music industry thrived, placing itself in the foreground of the arts and entertainment world. The public’s appetite seemed insatiable, the clubs and cabarets were never empty, and radio, according to some, was experiencing its golden age. How could one foresee that a few years later, the advent of television would put an end to radio’s dominance? Many businessmen, seeing a good deal in the offing, threw themselves headfirst into the adventure of opening a local branch for a record company based usually in the United States.

  Oscar’s reputation was such that he was not surprised to receive a phone call at home from a local producer who wanted to record his music. As he later told the story, the man was a potbellied individual of few words, wracked by nervous tics, who constantly spilled coffee onto his pants and shirt, but who seemed not to think anything of it. O.P. was so delighted at the idea of making a recording that with doglike docility he agreed to all the producer’s conditions for fear that this strange man might change his mind. After a few meetings, the fidgety producer held out the record jacket for a disc where you could read “Oscar P.” in big letters and, on the other side, the list of pieces that had been picked out for him. Oscar was speechless, and the deal was done.

  The disc was a commercial success of sorts, despite the lamentable quality of the recording—it sounded like Oscar was playing at the other end of the room from the microphones—and despite the producer’s serious inability to boost sales. One day, when the producer got up to serve himself yet another cup of coffee, Oscar couldn’t help reading, upside down, a letter sitting on his desk. A representative of the mother company was expressing his puzzlement at the tic-riddled producer’s refusal to cede the recording’s rights to Oscar so that it could be distributed in the United States. O.P. left the office, never to return. Inquiring as to the producer’s reputation among more experienced musicians, he learned that the man had behaved the same way with others, because he himself hoped to distribute their records worldwide, even if he did almost nothing to realize this ambition. When she told the story to whoever paused in front of her house to chat a little, old Jackson would end it thus: Our O.P. soon got the message that a goat with no cunning won’t fatten up.

  One bitterly cold night, as he was finishing up his last show at the Twilight Station, he thought he spotted out of the corner of his eye a certain Dizzy G., a crony of Charlie P. and a trumpet player of note, who was listening with a thoughtful air, seated at a table where there were half a dozen musicians. According to what Oscar later said, when the show was over Dizzy got up to congratulate him and invited him for a drink. After two beers, he asked him if he could speak frankly and suggested that he drop his boogie-woogie repertoire, that it was an outdated style that constricted him. Keep to swing, to ballads, that’s what shows off your talent, bredda. From one glass to the next, without knowing quite how, they found themselves upstairs engaged in a lively conversation with some scantily clad girls, and each of them ended up in a different room with one of the ladies. As the girl was unbuttoning her blouse, stretched out before him like a warm sand beach, Oscar kept thinking about Dizzy’s advice; if he’d understood rightly, he’d go nowhere if he didn’t sign with an American record company.

  Oscar and Dizzy left the bar at the break of day, laughing arm in arm, not so much because of the alcohol, but because of the ice that had turned the sidewalk into a skating rink. Dizzy, who’d lost track of his musician friends, was hoping to sleep for a few hours before catching the train that would bring him back to New York. He readily accepted Oscar’s invitation to stay with him. It’s said that on the doorstep in her dressing gown, Beverly, who hadn’t slept all night, when she saw that he’d been drinking and that he wasn’t alone, glared at Oscar through swollen eyes as if to wipe him off the face of the earth. She was busy sniffing his breath when she noticed the lipstick smudge on his shirt collar. It’s not what you think, mumbled Oscar, while, with his hand flat against the wall, Dizzy was trying hard not to laugh. Beverly’s eyes went moist and filled with tears, triggering a gale of laughter from Dizzy. Oscar then did something that was unlike him, and he did it for that very reason: imitating Dizzy, he too doubled up laughing. Beverly returned to her room, and that morning the men went to sleep at a hotel.

  Every time Oscar ran into his old neighbourhood friends, someone asked him for money, and every time, he searched his pockets and held out a coin or a bank note, knowing that he’d never be reimbursed. Why did he keep doling out money? Was he a prisoner of his fine-fellow image? It was perhaps then, for the first time, that he had the seductive idea of leaving the neighbourhood. One morning, a childhood friend of whom he’d lost track, a little man who was having a hard time making ends meet as a saxophonist, in part because he was doing heroin in the Twilight Station toilets, perhaps to emulate his bopper idols—he’d called O.P.’s music old-fashioned—had the nerve to appear on Oscar’s doorstep with his wife and children. It’s to feed my family, O.P., come on, he implored in a broken voice. Looking down from his bouncer’s height, Oscar glared at him as if he wanted to run him through with his gaze’s invisible lance, and then slammed the door in his face.

  One Saturday afternoon, as the sun was ending its job of transforming the snow banks into runnels, Josué and Oscar went down towards the port, zigzagging through the maze of narrow streets. Earlier that day, if you can believe his sisters, when his father suggested taking a walk, Oscar began to worry: his father, when he wasn’t onboard a train, spent most of his time with his nose buried in an astronomy manual or sitting in the living room listening to his favourite records, and in truth, he almost never went walking. A boat was at anchor in the port, full of immigrants waving to the crowd with their handkerchiefs. It had apparently crossed the ocean in five weeks after having braved the fury of a dozen storms. His father leaned on the railing, breathed in the air, and contemplated the awestruck faces of the new arrivals with his customary impassivity. After they’d installed the gangplank, the immigrants filed down, their weighty bags on their backs, two or three suitcases in their hands, inadequately dressed, their children hanging onto the women’s long skirts. When the boat was finally emptied, Josué pulled out his notebook to scribble a message that he held out to his son: I’m up to my neck in unpaid bills. He fixed the horizon with his emotionless eyes before writing another note: I’m tearing my hair out. Oscar placed a hand on his father’s shoulder: Don’t worry, I’ll take care of everything. Josué warmly thanked his son, promised to pay the money back as soon as possible, and shared this thought with him: The bird of paradise sets down only on generous hands.

  Every other Friday night, Oscar’s brothers and sisters, along with their little families, came to eat at their parents’. They all gathered in the cramped kitchen where the steam from Davina’s cooking pots clouded the windows, while the children, swift as eels, dodged between them, playing hide-and-seek. The men, sitting around the table, one hand on a thigh, the other holding a cold beer, chewed away at bread that they dipped in an outlandishly spicy sauce; the women talked standing up near the counter and then burst out laughing, frantically waving their hands as if they were suffering from third degree burns. Those who unwisely tried to offer Davina some help found themselves summa
rily rebuffed, set back on their heels by her no-nonsense dismissals. When there were not enough chairs, the men surrendered their places to the ladies and ate standing up at the counter, which exasperated Davina. Josué, who disapproved of her larger-than-life reactions, got up to write and pass notes to his wife, who, without even reading them, tossed them to the floor while raising her eyes to heaven, after which the brothers and sisters, together, burst out laughing.

  That was when Chester, it seems, shifted the conversation to the bosses and the deep contempt they inspired in him, keeping things playful, usually, and addressing his companion, a different woman from one Friday to the next. He described in detail their unbelievable self-importance, their arrogant indifference, their limitless egoism, and their inherent avarice. As no one took seriously his concept of a “society of pimps,” he patiently expounded, brooking few interruptions, a schematic class theory which, according to him, harmonized well with the principles of roulette, dooming the most destitute to lose and lose again, while fattening the bourgeois. He paused to catch his breath and take a mouthful of beer, after which he began to rail against those who turned their backs on the unions. The others exchanged uneasy glances and didn’t say a word, for fear of incurring his wrath. Gesticulating aggressively, he then addressed himself to Oscar, asking him if the musicians had finally united so as not to be conned by the bosses, and when his brother didn’t reply, he reminded him of his disastrous experience with the producer, an episode that was off limits for the family.

  Despite the rich establishments he frequented and the generous girth that had him resembling his bosses, Oscar was just a servant, and he’d better not forget it. The proof was that the salary he received was a thousand times smaller than that of the producers, promoters, and club owners. Indirectly, Oscar was complicit, because his shows helped drive the mad machine that bled the workers. Chester raised himself up briefly, as if to give himself courage, took a good swig of beer, and was off again: yes, because of his inaction and his wilful blindness, he was complicit in the crimes committed in the name of capital. Then one night, according to his sisters, Oscar had had enough, and he reminded Chester that he had always, in his own way and with his certainly modest means, helped out all those who were in need, perfectly aware that life was not rosy for most people. How can you attack me like that? Me, your brother? As Chester went on blaming him for the fate of thousands of individuals, Oscar cut him short: Who did Papa go to when he was in need? Do you know? It’s strange, he didn’t go to you, the great champion of the workers, but to me, the accomplice in capitalism’s crimes. Isn’t that bizarre? And then, as everyone—including Davina—wanted to know what exactly he was talking about, Oscar described in detail the afternoon he spent in his father’s company at the port, under the neutral gaze of the man in question and while Chester was accusing him of creating a cowardly diversion.

  Back home, Beverly put the two children to bed—a second had just been born. She stretched out under the blankets and called Oscar, who had stayed behind in the living room, listening to the radio. It’s said that he was beside himself, hurt by the words of Chester, who, to his mind, couldn’t tolerate his success. A thought went through his mind that the old proverb took on all its meaning when its terms were reversed: the happiness of one makes for the unhappiness of others. He wanted to take the air, he told his wife, who got up to ask him anxiously where he intended to go at that late hour. As he remained silent, she said, in a more conciliatory tone: What’s happening with you, O.P.? She was getting all worked up over nothing, she was dramatizing a situation that had nothing dramatic about it. She went silent in her turn before lashing out, You want to become a druggie, a degenerate like your musician friends, is that it? You’re saying whatever comes into your head; you ought to shut up instead of insulting people better than you. Her face froze, she turned away. Do you take me for an idiot, or what? You think I don’t know you’re going to see that woman who gets her rouge on your shirt? He stared at her for a long time; what was he thinking? Was he asking himself how the refined and dignified woman who had stolen his heart had in such a short time turned into a shrew? Yes, he replied, in a voice that was almost gentle, I’d rather spend the night with a whore than with you. At least there, things are clear, I pay and they give me what I want. He slammed the door behind him; once outside, he pulled up his coat collar. He went to the Twilight Station, less to listen to the music than to spend the night in the arms of the lady of the night in question, to whom he’d given no thought whatsoever before his wife brought her into the conversation. In the morning, when he awoke, he was no doubt surprised that he felt not an ounce of remorse; decidedly, his strength of character impressed him.

  One morning, when he was visiting his parents, he had a coffee with his father, who considered him with his affectless eyes before moving into the living room. Oscar followed, and when he saw on the piece of furniture where the radio was enthroned the record cover where he was smiling broadly in a three-quarters portrait, he began strutting, puffing himself up like a peacock. His father scribbled a few words in his notebook: Do you enjoy betraying me, or what? Oscar forced himself to plant a smile on his face: I don’t know what you’re talking about, Fadda. But his father, who wasn’t done, ripped several more pages out of his notebook. He reminded him that he had asked him specifically not to say anything about the loan. Did he know that Davina had kept him up all night, questioning him about this business? Did he not yet know that one’s word was sacred? Oscar swallowed his saliva.

  Thinking that the conversation was almost over, and wanting to avoid its becoming even more acrimonious, Oscar went looking for the raincoat he’d left in the kitchen, but on his return to the living room, Josué had settled into his armchair to listen to a record he’d just placed on the turntable. When a piano riff began, Oscar went quiet, his hands in the pockets of his coat, his brand new fedora on his head, all ears. The melody, like a player piano veering out of control, took off in a dramatic headlong dash, as if the opening were an irritant to the pianist. After a series of strange chords, wilfully dissonant, which brought to mind someone’s struggling to maintain his balance, the left hand launched into a blistering, even frenetic rhythm. Oscar, who’d never heard such music, such a sound, such rhythmic complexity at the piano, said to himself—at least that’s what his sisters later claimed—that it had to be two pianists, since more than four melodic lines were interacting, coming together, moving in concert for a while only to separate, distance themselves, advance at different tempos. The melodies undeniably constituted a whole, a world both coherent and unsettling. Soon the music mutated into an infectious carnival, but darkly hued, intensely fraught, as if the pianist were playing with a gun to his head. Later, it suggested a shower of meteorites that set everything ablaze, fields of grain, pine forests cast into a deceptive tranquillity, a northern town shuddering under the assaults of a polar freeze.

  The piece having ended, Josué let the needle bump up over and over against the label at the centre of the record. Before Oscar had time to ask all the questions boiling up within him, Josué wrote: You’re wrong, it’s only one pianist. It’s said that at that instant, Oscar felt the ground giving way beneath his feet, whereupon Josué stunned him with another revelation: And he’s blind. What was Oscar thinking at that moment? It’s not easy to know, but we can assume that the damage he inwardly sustained changed his view of the world forever, veiling it with a grey film that from then on would cast a pall over all people and all things. Oscar had enough strength to totter to the phonograph and lean down; the pianist had a strange name, Art T. He dragged himself to the door and left without saying goodbye to his father.

  That day, all his listeners learned that Oscar had been replaced as his program’s host. The telephone rang off the hook at his home, but not even Beverly knew where he was. A few witnesses claimed to have seen him meandering through the centre of town. Apparently, as he was paying no attention to where he was going, he b
umped into several passersby, who, furious, turned to insult him. According to one of the neighbours who crossed his path, you would have said that the commotion inside his head was blinding him to the people around him. Some claimed that he abruptly turned into a record store. Before the morning was out, he’d listened to all the Art T. recordings that he’d been able to find. His face, it was said, fell a bit more with each piece, as if Art’s superhuman and unreal performances were snuffing out one by one his artistic ambitions and his claim to be one of the elect. He apparently threw a few bills onto the counter and left the store, leaving the records behind.

  No one knew where he spent the night, but over the course of the week a number of people saw him wandering like a lost soul near the train station and sitting on the parks’ yellow lawns under this spring’s lowering skies. He advanced, dragging his feet. He occasionally raised his eyes to follow, irate, other pedestrians, or, when he crossed paths with a sandwich-man, he wrinkled his nose as if filled with disgust. It’s said that, at the end of the day, he went home. But after having criss-crossed the city’s streets, he couldn’t close his eyes, and he got up to drift from one room to another while his children slept and while his wife, pretending to snore peacefully, observed him with one eye open. In the living room he sat in front of the piano, arms crossed, glaring at it intently, until the anger that filled him became unbearable. He felt betrayed—but by whom?—and even that he’d fallen into a trap—but set by whom? He ended up pulling his clothes back on to rove around in the middle of the night, while scrupulously avoiding the jazz bars. What was running through his mind? Marguerite, with her face as perfect as the Virgin Mary’s? Or her long white fingers, which, it appeared, he wanted so much to caress? Was he dying to ask her advice, she who was so clairvoyant?