Oscar

by Mauricio Segura

  Meanwhile, Norman was hounding him to produce ever more, and Oscar was unable to protest, since, despite his suspicions, he had confidence in Norman’s management of his career. Besides, beset from the outset by the fear of running short of money, doubtless inherited from his begetter, and even though his bank account was being flooded with cash at the speed of a rising tide, he looked very kindly on the dizzying proliferation of records in his catalogue. That year he had to plan for the recording of six albums, the consequence being that on arriving home, his nerves strained to the limit, he barked at Marguerite if she made the slightest noise while he was rehearsing at the piano. Immediately afterwards he mumbled an apology, and she forgave him, but the harm was done, and the flickerings of fear deep in her eyes distressed him, so much so that when she took her turn at the piano, although he was terribly exasperated, her lack of talent being so plain to see, he tried to persuade himself that the melodies she played were supremely inventive.

  He determined to purchase a house where they would have more space, a decision she supported. After a few months, more to satisfy the demands of their respective parents than because they wanted to, they decided to get married. Almost none of their childhood friends were invited; they claimed they preferred a small wedding. It’s said that the left aisle of the church was occupied by Marguerite’s family, and that of the right by Oscar’s clan, and that this division, curiously, was maintained throughout the festivities, despite the couple’s best efforts. Ironically, in his interviews as well as in private, Oscar continued to speak out in favour of mixed origins, which he advocated in life as in music. Meanwhile, Davina’s response brought them some happy surprises: she never opposed his desire to divorce Beverly, and she never lectured him because he’d set his heart on a companion from another community. But as soon as the two families met, everyone froze as if a camera were being levelled at them, to the point where the exchanges could be counted on the fingers of one hand. One Friday night, as he was entering his parents’ front hall, he heard Chester declare that Marguerite’s family was as cold as a dog’s nose, a comment that drew approving murmurs.

  During this time, although in a very tentative fashion, Marguerite reproached him for his tendency to cultivate friendships only with people who might help promote his artistic career. If he understood rightly, he told his intimates, this was a veiled attack on the presumed narcissism he’d picked up from the celebrities he spent time with, a defect that in itself explained his total lack of interest in her. If he followed his wife’s tortured reasoning, television, even in its early stages, nurtured this vanity that was tightening its grip on him. The proof was that when complete unknowns approached him to ask for an autograph, he willingly scribbled his name on the scrap of paper held out to him, regardless of the occasion they were celebrating or the place where they found themselves. Aren’t you going too far? she sighed, knowing that she was making a mistake in speaking up, that he did not take well to criticism.

  He began drinking with his colleagues after concerts, a ritual he’d rarely allowed himself up to then because he feared like the plague the stereotype of the bohemian jazzman, all the more so when he was alcoholic or a drug addict. And he began opening up more and more to his companions: he would have never thought that the woman of his dreams would be so jealous. He was astonished, really. Was he saying that two pianists couldn’t live under the same roof? O.P. remained silent, staring into space, nodding his head as if seriously studying the question.

  Faced with adversity, Oscar threw himself into his music with renewed zeal, and in the company of his sidekicks, Ray and Herb, he produced some of his best interpretations ever of the standards. He tempered his passion and virtuosity with increased aplomb, he gave pride of place to gravitas and restraint, he achieved a refinement rarely equalled. He sought salvation in his work, then felt the need for a different kind of support. He was surprised more than anyone to find himself drawn to the serenity of churches, places he had not visited for years. Entering his neighbourhood parish one day on impulse, he happened on a young minister in the extension to the nave, someone he didn’t know from Adam but who agreed to talk with him. It seems that Oscar did not hold back, but launched into a lengthy monologue, as tangled as it was suffused with a desperate sincerity. Was he really surrounded by people who resented him? Was he possessed by spirits, or was his wife truly jealous? For some time he’d felt like an orphan, had had the sensation that he was abandoned by all, including the Good Lord. But what had he done to Him to be spurned like this? When the reverend suggested, with a sigh, that he return twice a week for religious instruction, Oscar almost choked on his laughter: did he have any idea who he was?

  It’s said that one morning the telephone rang, waking him, and pulling him out of bed. It was Norman, asking him in a merry voice if he’d seen the newspaper, before hanging up without saying goodbye, as was his custom. Oscar opened the front door to pick up the paper from the mat and leafed through it. In the cultural section there was a box announcing the death of Art T. At first, not outwardly shaken by the news, there was just one thing he wanted to know: What was the cause of that sudden death, a question not dealt with in the article. He cancelled the concert he was to give that night in a Washington bar, and he flew to Los Angeles. The funeral took place under a leaden sky, in a cemetery bordered by tall palm trees whose fronds had been trimmed militarily. As Oscar was climbing the stone path, Art’s widow spotted him, ran to him, and burst into tears in his arms. It appears that she was trembling uncontrollably and that she embraced him with a fervour that surprised him, as he hardly knew her. During the entire ceremony, wracked by sobs, she clung to him, dampened his shirt, blew her nose from time to time for the sake of appearances, all the while reeking of a perfume that made him feel queasy. Oscar kept silent, as was proper, but deep inside he was euphoric: now he had free rein, he was the world’s greatest jazz pianist!

  After the ceremony, she took him aside and told him that Art regarded him as his musical heir, if not his son, which left Oscar speechless. He was going to reply with a polite remark, but then an elderly man approached them to speak to the widow. After a moment, she explained to this retired painter that her husband’s death was due to his kidneys giving out. Ah yes? said the gentleman. She informed him, in a low voice, but loud enough for Oscar to hear, that someone, she didn’t know who, had recently been sending Art cases and cases of beer. Wasn’t it reckless to have done that to a man who—everyone knew—had always had problems with alcohol? The painter was appalled, while Oscar was near to collapse. Choosing not to attend the funeral feast, he returned to the hotel. Was it Norman who had sent those cases of beer to Art, he wondered, since he himself had never had the courage to do so? So said his admirers. Nonsense, because it really was him who had sent off the bottles, replied his detractors. Whatever the case, it seems that he had a nightmare that night in the course of which, unlike what usually occurred in his dreams, Art turned to him, begging him not to shoot, but the gun went off on its own and the bullet entered his heart, putting an end to the ogre.

  The next morning, while he was packing, he received a phone call from Prudence telling him Josué was dead. It’s said that he didn’t move for several seconds, during which there echoed in his head, amplified by the passing of time, a phrase that Norman G. particularly favoured: everything is atoned for, both good and evil sooner or later have their price. Was that his impresario’s way of making him pay for the mission he himself had undertaken in his place? Oscar would be there for his family, he’d be present at the funeral, he promised his sister. He went to the window, and as he looked down on the gaggle of rooftops, like staircases leading to paradise, he again saw his father, his face stricken but stoic, his porter’s uniform spattered with blood, as he passed unsteadily through the door into the family home. From now on that was the picture that would return to him most often when he thought about his progenitor, the iconic image of what he did not want to become.
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br />   On a cold night at the end of autumn, a taxi dropped him off at his parents’. In the house, people were stifling their tears, sighing often, loudly blowing their noses. When Davina came towards him it seems he thought that she’d shrunk and that someone had dusted her hair with gunpowder, so much had the terrible sorrow aged her all at once. She now had a little girl’s hands, slumping shoulders, and absent eyes. As he embraced her, and while his mother’s reassuring odour permeated his entire body, he repeated his promise to answer to her needs for as long as she would be in this world. Shortly afterwards, he sat down in his father’s chair for the first time. He let his eyes rest on all the furniture in the room, as if to fully embrace his begetter’s point of view. Soon, as he was suffocating, he went out for a walk without letting anyone know. The street of clubs was so becalmed that its erstwhile energy seemed to be a legendary lie.

  When he climbed the hill towards the north he didn’t see the crowd of people flowing past him, but, again according to his sisters, thought only of his father, sometimes propped up in the living-room chair, sometimes sitting on the stairs leading to the house, in each case wearing the same mask that doomed him to silence. He again saw in his mind’s eye, it’s said, the train that on Fridays tunnelled through the night with a great groundswell of urgent exhalations, while at the same time he heard a double bass laying down the rhythm for the piece he was composing as he walked. When he came to himself he was being jostled, but he resolved to follow the fitful movement of the crowd. Scalpers called to him, sometimes in one language, sometimes in the other, and held out tickets. He refused three or four offers and continued walking towards the turnstiles, finally grabbing a ticket offered by a young man in a checkered cap who looked tough but seemed to be doing this for the first time in his life.

  Oscar took his seat among the crowd, at first more drawn to the spectators than to the hockey players warming up on the ice. A few metres down, a young man was kissing his girlfriend on the mouth while pawing at one of her breasts. Lower still, two girls were blowing kisses at a Habs player with slicked-back hair every time he came along the boards. He noted to his right the staccato delivery of the beer vendor, like the cry of an owl. When a couple leaned towards him to ask for an autograph, he willingly played along, replying not without pleasure to their questions: yes, he’d shared the stage with such-and-such a legend, a certain musician was just as nice as he seemed to be on TV, he was indeed preparing a new album, and, the hint of a smile on his lips, he was in no position to say whether or not he was the fastest pianist in the world, but thanks for the compliment. Soon, a dozen people were lined up on the stairs leading to his seat, armed with pencil and paper.

  He didn’t at all seem to be a man in mourning, according to some witnesses. But what was he to do, burst into tears in public? replied his admirers. As soon as the match began the Habs went on the offence, and at each appearance of the Rocket on the ice the crowd lifted to cheer on his canny feints and his unpredictable passes. If he lost the puck the spectators immediately forgave his mistake, so clear was it that his commitment to the game was unconditional. As he followed with his eyes this player whose resolve he admired, Oscar heard, it seems, the central theme of the piece on which he was working, strummed by a dozen angels rocking their bodies like a church choir singing the gospel. There were a few piercing and repetitive chords, evoking the heft of that iron monster with his father on board, hurtling through the night in the midst of a snowstorm.

  By the end of the second period, the Habs were so dominant that he lost interest in the game. He got up and left. Outside, the fog had thickened and now assumed the form of a great cloud that lent itself well to nostalgia. He was looking forward to telling his sisters that he’d completed a series of chords for “Night Train,” when he saw, on the other side of the street, that unmistakable silhouette, elegant, topped as always with the perennial fedora masking his eyes, from which there trailed a coil of smoke. Bloodseed, how had he been able to find him? Had he passed by his parents’? The impresario crossed the street with a light step, ignoring the cars braking suddenly in his path, their horns blaring. It was a brilliant idea to go and see a hockey game after what had happened, he declared, before shaking Oscar’s hand. Brilliant. Was it then that Oscar asked himself for the first time if he would one day have the strength to break with this man? Or did he then accept, remembering his mother’s advice, that it was futile to want to free oneself from the devil’s clutches? What is certain is that they were seen that same night leaning on the Ritz-Carlton bar, absorbed in, to all appearances, a productive conversation, and that at dawn, on the sidewalk in front of the hotel, Oscar gave Norman a warm embrace, as if he really was sorry to leave him.

  6

  It’s said that, many years later, his hair turning grey, with a solemn air that matched his sagging features and a spasmodic grimace on his lips, Oscar was lying on a chaise longue in the garden of his house on a glorious summer afternoon, dressed in a flat beige cap, linen pants, and a Hawaiian shirt sporting artfully arched green palm trees. In front of him were his young wife, who bore no resemblance to Marguerite, and his daughter, the apple of his eye, who was slowly bouncing up and down in the swimming pool, throwing and catching a beach ball. Everything would suggest that for a second time, Oscar was questioning the very foundations on which he had grounded his life; for the second time he found himself face to face with the fugitive glimmerings of water, not now to ponder drowning himself in despair, but to decide if he would ever again play the piano, since for a year and a half he had performed no concerts. He kept asking himself by what strange detours his life had led him to where he now found himself. How had it managed to rob him of his desire to play?

  Wiggling his toes, he saw passing before his eyes, it’s said, the dregs of events, the dross of incidents, sometimes of great drama, sometimes of no import, in any case all swept away by the cyclone of time, which seemed to take a malicious pleasure in consuming everything in its path, leaving in its wake only fragments of conversations with no beginning or end, sensations as fleeting as fame, muted sorrows, and hysterical laughter. For several days he’d been setting himself the painful task of taking stock of his life, passing in swift review the houses he’d lived in, the hotel rooms where he’d slept, the women he’d embraced, the records he’d made, from the best to the most banal, the prizes he’d been awarded, the honorary degrees he’d received, the photos he’d allowed his fans, the autographs scribbled in haste, not forgetting the vicious attacks and the looks rife with envy from his fellow musicians.

  He remembered that, as his renown reached Himalayan heights, just as Davina had predicted, he swelled up like a pumpkin at the end of autumn, like those found in the lake-strewn region north of Toronto where his country house nestled at the bottom of a small valley. Even before reaching the crest of maturity, because of his precarious balance, he had to walk with a cane, one with a knob of gold that he’d chosen to blend practicality with pleasure. That amused him, because the object in question reminded him of his childhood, when the first ship’s captain to sail up the river to port at the end of winter received just such a gift from the authorities. He advanced slowly, as if floating in an aquarium, while his speech began to be punctuated with silences, marked by wisdom, claimed his admirers—tainted by insufferable vanity, replied his detractors.

  How many parties did he attend where he installed himself in an armchair and didn’t get up for the whole evening? He showed off his designer shirts, his expensive suits, bracelets, chains, and gold rings. When his acquaintances teased him about his taste for luxury, he argued that he had the money and asked, not as a jest, if it was a crime to enjoy what was beautiful. As if to excuse himself, he’d talk to anyone at all with the same naturalness as when he was a novice pianist taking pains to hide the holes in his pants and his threadbare jacket. He was always lavish with his compliments and avoided references to stars unless he was asked a question about one artist in particular
, and above all he was self-mocking to a fault, according to some of his detractors: he practised the piano less and less, talent was important but you had to give luck its due, and even if he gave his all every night, you never knew what might happen. If you got out on the wrong side of the bed you could botch everything just like that, he said, snapping his fingers—the spark of genius or run-of-the-mill adequacy, it all depended.

  During one of those evenings, Duke E., now a friend, gave him a warm ovation, as much to make a strong impression on the other guests as on Oscar, and remarked: You’re pretty as a picture, O.P.! I figure life’s treating you well. He looked him up and down from head to toe. Really, you’re the maharajah of the piano, my friend! Everyone present had a good laugh, but the nickname stuck like a birthmark, and far from being offended by it, O.P. was delighted.

  For his denigrators, he was no longer, in public, just the person he was in private, but also the fictional Oscar portrayed in newspaper profiles. One has to acknowledge that the half-truths, the factual errors, the approximations, and the virtues attributed to him added up to a personage as credible as it was seductive. No doubt he tried to distinguish the true from the false, but it would seem that he couldn’t always remember if he’d acquired a certain character trait before or after reading about it in the paper.

  If radio loved Oscar, television adored him, and now he was as ubiquitous as those secret agents who were to be found everywhere on his small screen, always in the right place at the right time. Television warmed immediately to his good-natured smiles, his anecdotes that paid homage to jazz legends while teasing them at the same time, his entertaining teaching sessions on the history of jazz piano, and of course his playing, which was never dark and not the least bit hermetic, as was the case with too many jazzmen, in the opinion of one celebrated host and ardent admirer, for whom O.P. was a veritable ray of sunshine beaming into the viewers’ living rooms.