Learning to Lose

by David Trueba

  She chose her dress, his clothes, even the tie. After her nap, it seemed that the usually quiet house was filled with furious activity. Lorenzo would arrive at six-thirty to help them with everything. Did you call the taxi? Yes, yes, it’ll be here at seven.

  In front of the Auditorio, people were already gathering half an hour before the concert. Leandro holds the tickets. When they open the doors, he pushes the chair until he finds an usher. I’m sorry, but when I bought the tickets my wife wasn’t yet handicapped. Don’t worry, we’ll try to work it out. The employee checks with a coworker and returns to seat them on one side. Will you be okay here? Leandro looks up at the stage. Would it be possible to be on the other side? Of course. Because of the pianist’s hands, you know? The usher nods and crosses in front of the first row to the opposite end. When Leandro sits down, he turns his head toward Aurora and asks, okay? She reassures him with a nod.

  In recent years, since Leandro retired, they’d gone to more concerts and they had seen the seats filled with a wider range of people than in years past. There are so many young people studying music these days, she said happily. Leandro reserved his opinion. Music had become an almost ubiquitous student hobby. But there was a huge leap from hobby to studying music in a disciplined way toward a future. Sometimes he joked in conversations with friends, music is like the gym or judo, that’s all, but when a kid shows real aptitude they discourage him, they don’t want to ruin his future as an engineer or a businessman.

  He greets a few familiar faces, then he prepares his concentration for the recital. Aurora turns around to look behind her every once in a while, happy to find herself out in public after so many weeks of immobility. Leandro was worried. Would she feel okay? In the last week, she had occasionally asked him for some painkillers, but she wasn’t able to explain where the pains were. He had been afraid to leave her alone for the first time. At night he slept more lightly, in case she called him from the room. The doctor had visited, put on a patient expression, and recommended they keep up the massages, they’re always enjoyable, right?

  Leandro had still not gotten over his surprise at hearing the madam at the chalet tell him, with an almost offensive sarcasm, Valentina doesn’t work here anymore. It had taken him a few minutes to react. The woman offered him a drink, but he didn’t want anything. Well, you already know the other girls, none of them will disappoint you. Or do you only like chocolate? Leandro wasn’t ready for her jokes. He scratched his head for a second and dared to ask, is something wrong with Valentina? What happened?

  She wasn’t right here, black girls don’t know how to be in places like this. I’m not saying it to be racist, it’s just the plain truth.

  After several questions that only got half answered, Leandro managed to find out what happened. It seems that the day before, it must have been five in the morning, one of her last clients of the night had gotten into bed with Osembe. When the guy left, he couldn’t find his car. A Mercedes, to top it all off, said Mari Luz. It wasn’t parked where he left it and when he stuck his hand in his pocket he couldn’t find the keys, either, so it wasn’t too hard to connect the dots. He came back to the chalet, and made quite a scene, that the black girl must have taken his keys, and I don’t know what else. We had to get serious with him. Leandro thought it was her way of saying they called in the guy who watched over the place, the same one he had seen that afternoon at the garage gate.

  Of course Valentina had already disappeared. I’m sure she took advantage of the guy being distracted and threw someone the keys through the window, down to the street, piece of cake. The madam continued explaining undramatically. The man got aggressive and I had to tell him, come on, if you want to go to the police, go ahead and quit bluffing. The only good thing about this business is that nobody wants to get the police involved. We all have too much to hide, right? What was that about the stone? Let he who is without sin throw the first one, right? So the man left, I felt bad for him, really, because I know the black girl robbed him, with some accomplice, who knows. The thing is she won’t be back here, and it’s for the best because that’s one less problem for you. A thief around here is the worst thing you could have.

  Leandro tried to get Mari Luz to give him a contact number, an address, something to find Osembe. Even if I had some phone number, I wouldn’t give it to you, she told him. Take my advice, don’t go looking for trouble, you’ve got plenty as it is. If you want to have some fun, you got plenty to choose from here, there are new girls you haven’t even met. Sit down, have a drink. Why get obsessed with one when the world is full of pretty girls?

  When Leandro began to insist, you must have something, a phone number, a last name, I don’t think it’s so hard, the madam ended his visit. Look, forget about it, that girl’s no good, getting rid of her was the best thing that could have happened to us. And as she spoke she pushed him toward the door, as if Leandro were an annoying Sunday visitor. On the street, a woman passed by, staring at him. Leandro thought he could see her wagging her head, as if she were judging him.

  Why did he want to see Osembe again? What was it about her? Was there something about her he hadn’t yet got his fill of? He knew very little about her. He remembered that she had once mentioned she lived in Móstoles, near Coimbra Park, but to Leandro that sounded like a foreign land, a new city.

  On a long walk with his friend Almendros, he dared to ask, don’t you have a son in Móstoles? No, in Leganés, he said, but it’s pretty much the same thing, why? It’s my son, lied Leandro, he’s thinking about selling his apartment and moving someplace cheaper. He should think about it, he should really think about it. Yeah, I’ll tell him.

  The loudspeaker announces that the concert is about to begin and Leandro looks at the program in his hand. Two parts divided into a first half of pieces by Granados, his waltzes, and a second with Schumann’s “Kreisleriana” and Schubert’s “Musical Moments.” Joaquín hadn’t played for more than a year because of chronic tendinitis in his left wrist. It had been almost ten years since they’d seen him in person. The last time was after a performance of the symphonic orchestra where Joaquín played as the soloist in Mozart’s Concerto no. 25. Leandro had envied his naturalness, the polish of his execution, although he had thought, I prefer Brendel. Then he felt somewhat ashamed of his judgment. They invited him to the cocktail party afterward and Joaquín was friendly with him, as always. He asked for Leandro’s phone number again, as he had done the last four times they saw each other, but he never called. He played in Madrid on two more occasions, but Leandro didn’t go to the concerts.

  Joaquín comes out on stage and applause accompanies his smiling wave and vigorous walk toward the instrument. He pushes back the tails of his coat and sits in front of the keyboard. There is the deepest silence, which he allows to build, broken only by the crunch of the wood or a woman’s cough. Aurora looks at Leandro and smiles to see him concentrating. He plays the armrest of the chair and brushes Aurora’s hand through her shawl. Joaquín places his fingers on the keys and the music rises up from his delicate left hand. He has his back to them, but Leandro can make out his profile. His hair is white and thick as ever. His straight back is a powerful presence that extends in perfect continuation of the piano. His feet are together, leaning forward on the tips of shiny shoes with gray heels.

  When the music envelops the blond wood auditorium, Aurora closes her eyes. Leandro remembers the teenage friend he shared his life with on the streets, in their open houses. He doesn’t really know why he remembers the afternoon when they shut themselves in, sitting beside his father’s radio to listen to Horowitz play the “Funérailles” by Liszt and then trying to imitate the octaves with great swings of their arms. And on that same program “Patética” by Tchaikovsky was played. They turned up the volume the way they always did when they were alone in the house. The music echoed loudly and could be heard from the street. By then they had both decided to become professional musicians and at barely fifteen they devoted themselves to it with
enthusiasm and snobbery. Joaquín’s eyes that afternoon were flooded with tears. It is God playing, he said grandiloquently.

  That could be where the great distance between them lay. Leandro was incapable of such emotional exhibitionism. His friend spoke without fear in the midst of some sort of torrent, he let himself get carried away by what he was listening to, what he was playing. He had no problem with shouting, no, no, when a performer played a piece differently than how he felt it should be approached. Years before, their teacher, Don Alonso, would repeat to them, afternoon after afternoon, the same correction, no, no, emotion is not enough, intensity isn’t enough, it has to go hand in hand with precision, precision. Forget about poetry, this is sweat and science. And yet when he noticed an excessively cold and technical way of playing he would repeat to them in German the now classic quote by Beethoven that introduces “Missa Solemnis.” Von Herzen, möge es wieder zu Herzen gehen, let that which flows from the heart reach your soul.

  Joaquín’s mistakes were huge mistakes, but hopeful ones. That was how the teacher defined them when someone asked. Leandro began to feel that a breach was opening up between them, the same abyss between someone who plays like the angels and someone who correctly interprets a score. The professors they studied with in the conservatory barely corrected Leandro. But they gave Joaquín torrential explanations to win him over with their critiques. They knew it was a challenge to guide such spectacular, extraordinary talent. Many times Leandro surprised himself by thinking, how unfair, I’m the one who struggled to play, the underdog, the one who fought not to give it up, and the success will go to him, as if it broke with some poetic sense of justice. For Joaquín life was easy, satisfying, comfortable. Soon Leandro got a job as a copyist and handed over his meager wages to his mother. Joaquín wasn’t forced to do that.

  He invited Leandro over to listen to Bach records, paid his way into concerts, bought him drinks in bars, included him in plans and outings that Leandro couldn’t afford himself. Joaquín was the only one who allowed himself the brashness of getting up in the middle of a concert and walking out along the row of seated audience members as he muttered, I can stand it, but Beethoven can’t. Then came Paris and the distance. Aurora’s appearance that filled his orphaned free time. The slow shift of his friend becoming someone foreign. I’m more French now than the French, Joaquín would say to him when he returned to Madrid and mocked the pious provincialism of his hometown. I chose Paris, those born there don’t have to work at it, but I do, I want to stop being what I was before I went there.

  When his parents died, Joaquín’s visits became more infrequent. He would ask Aurora, behind Leandro’s back, if they needed anything, once his international success was already confirmed. In Austria they gave him the Hans von Bülow medal in the mid-sixties. Leandro never felt jealous, he was pleased to have shared in the rise of someone gifted, he was pleased by Joaquín’s success, and he never thought it took anything away from him. Leandro defended Joaquín if in a conversation among musicians someone committed the typical injustice of discounting him, usually for being local. But he stopped writing him, stopped keeping him up-to-date on his life, and even though the countless ties that bound them wouldn’t fade until many years later, in the sixties the gulf between them was so great that Leandro began to hide the fact that he knew him when his name came up. Often, like now, if he went to one of Joaquín’s concerts it was at Aurora’s insistence. He didn’t have time to call you, you have to be the one to make the first step, don’t mistake his lack of contact for a lack of affection. But the day came when Leandro realized he was just another audience member watching that man up on stage.

  At one time, their hands had been placed together on the old Pleyel piano. The same piano Leandro bought from Joaquín’s father to bring home when no one played it anymore. It pleases me for you to inherit it, the old man had told him. Joaquín’s hands were still capable of moving through a score and extracting its pleasure for an auditorium full of people, they still had the constitution and the strength, the fingertips reinforced with glue and Band-Aids. Leandro’s hands had grown tame, in order to be the correct working instrument for an academy teacher. For years Leandro thought his friend believed he’d been wounded by the sting of failure, by the unfairness of art, and he struggled to show him that wasn’t the case. Until one day he discovered his friend wasn’t thinking about him, wasn’t noticing him, wasn’t suffering over him. What’s more, he might have even forgotten that Leandro was a pianist, too. He didn’t grasp, of course, that they shared the same profession.

  At the intermission, Aurora wants a drink of water and Leandro goes toward the bar with her. The usher asks if everything is okay and in the vestibule a boy comes out to greet them. It is Luis, his former student. His last student. Hello. The boy greets them both, not letting his gaze linger on Aurora’s chair. Leandro had always been irritated by Luis’s perfect image. He dressed tastefully, his manners were always correct, and he had a deliberate way of speaking. A couple of times, Leandro had warned him that music had to be accepted as something superior, not like an escort, but more like a goddess to be worshipped. But the boy always took refuge in his confessed lack of ambition. I already know I won’t go far, but I want to play as well as I can. He was an applied student who progressed at his own pace. Leandro knew he wanted to finish college and not to make music his profession, so he wasn’t surprised when he dropped the classes. Are you enjoying the concert? the young man asks. Yes, yes, of course, replies Leandro. Very much, says Aurora. Okay, I’ll see you later, says Luis before heading off.

  Leandro hands Aurora the water and he quickly drinks a glass of wine. The sharp taste does him good, perks him up. The tone of surrounding conversations had risen, bit by bit, and now echoes in the hallway. Leandro wonders if Joaquín still has the peculiar habit of washing his hands with warm water during the intermission and lying down with his shoes off on the hard floor with his legs up on the seat of a chair at a perfect right angle. His wife would fix him a tea, which he would drink barely two sips of before returning to the stage. Aurora holds out the almost empty glass. Do you want more? No, no. Leandro quickly finishes the wine.

  When both of their heads are at the same height, back in their places again, Aurora asks him, do you like Schumann, too? Who doesn’t? What he is about to play now is masterful, but Schumann suffered a lot, from a very young age, a tortured soul as they’d say now. She nods as if she wished the class would never end. Do you remember when we were dating, we saw that German movie about his life, Träumerei?

  The second half of the concert is fast, goes by quickly. Joaquín plays the “Kreisleriana” barely using the pedal, combining the most unbridled, violent movements with odd ones, which he plays excruciatingly slowly. If someone coughs during one of them, they get a recriminating look. Soon drops of sweat start to slide down his forehead. For the first time, he uses a nearby towel. When he finishes, the audience, on their feet, demand another piece and he sits and plays solemnly, letting himself get tangled in the more disturbing harmonies of Fantasy and Fugue for Organ in G minor. The audience really gets into the somber atmosphere, letting themselves be transported. Serious things are always more valued, thinks Leandro, who finds the approach predictable. Yet everyone smiles as if it were a nod to levity when Joaquín chooses to close the performance with a Jerome Kern song whose swing borders on jazzy improvisation. The shift in mood leads to a boisterous send-off in which Joaquín offers several versions of the grateful nod of the head. Their applause has a metallic resonance. Leandro looks at Aurora, who also smiles as she claps with barely any strength.

  When the audience begins to file out, Leandro lifts the brake on Aurora’s chair. Are you going to say anything to him? she asks. No, no, Lorenzo is waiting for us at home. He doesn’t care either way, let’s go, you can’t leave without going backstage and just saying hi. Leandro changes his expression and, somewhat nervous, looks around. When he finds the usher he asks, is this the way backstage? I don�
�t know if you can, go over to that door. She points to an entrance flanked by two or three employees. Leandro doesn’t feel like going through the filter, giving explanations. Luis comes over to them when the seats are almost empty. I wanted to ask you something, it seems like this semester isn’t going to be too difficult and I’m thinking about taking lessons again and I don’t know if you …

  Leandro looks at the boy, who stops in the middle of his explanation. I don’t know if I … Luis lifts his hands in a gesture similar to pleading, it could be whenever it’s convenient for you, I don’t want to do that many hours, I’d rather finish my degree … Leandro looks at the boy. There is a blond girl waiting for him. She is pretty, she belongs to a new generation of girls, like his granddaughter, who have nothing in common with the serene women of his adolescent years, the silent land of bowed heads. The girl, as she waits, runs a finger over the fabric on the back of a seat. Okay, call me and we’ll see. The boy beams and before leaving he bends over Aurora’s chair to say warmly, a pleasure to see you again. Leandro watches him go back over to the girl and put his arm around her hips. Aurora always knew how to win over Leandro’s few students who came to the house. She’d open the door for them, lead them to the room, offer them something to drink, and, often, before saying good-bye again at the door, once class was over, she would say confidentially, he’s not as much of an ogre as he seems. The money would come in handy, was the only thing Leandro said to Aurora as he watched them head off.

  The woman guarding the entrance to the dressing rooms asks for his name when Leandro requests permission to say hi to Joaquín. She is a little while in returning and when she does she gestures for him to enter. Leandro goes to push the wheelchair, but the woman says, the chair, too? There are stairs … You go ahead, says Aurora quickly. Leandro wants to protest, but Aurora insists. I can wait here, right? she asks the woman. If he isn’t too long …