by Pablo Medina
Adalberto wanted to know more but he couldn’t well ask in front of the boy. The thought that Bob Rowe was dead passed quickly through his mind and he relished it.
That’s his son.
I can’t play anymore. Don’t have the lungs. All I do now is teach, barely keep food on the table, roof over my head. That was the short version of his life. The long version wasn’t worth telling.
Then you can make room for another student, China said.
Bring him around tomorrow afternoon. He turned to the boy and said, You hear that, chico? Tomorrow, four o’clock.
The light tone he used with the boy belied the misery he felt inside. That night he couldn’t stop thinking of that woman, who’d nearly cost him his life, and the youthful bravado that made him think he could show up the King of the Tenderloin. At three in the morning he got up and made himself a ham sandwich, took one bite, and put it down. He pulled the case out from under the bed, opened it, and brought the instrument to his lips. He licked the mouthpiece and played a few notes, then a soft bolero he’d learned in his early days in Havana to lull the girls. The heat of the music was gone but he could still turn the notes into words, the words into notes. China. She’d turned his life into a bolero. He lay on the bed with the cornet across his chest and slept soundly for the first time in months.
Adalberto had not the heart to tell the boy or his mother that he should take up another instrument, or better yet, another trade. Secret’s in the fingering, he said gently, but the boy’s fingers were clumsy and lacked the delicacy to coax the valves down. Feathers, Adalberto called them. Nurse the feathers.
The lessons went on for two months, not because there was any hope of the boy getting better—you either have talent or you don’t—but because the weekly visits allowed Adalberto to interact with China. He made an exception to his rule that parents should not be present during the lesson. It was too hot for her to walk back and forth, he insisted, and so she stayed, sitting in a corner of the living room while Adalberto tried his best to bring out the boy’s limited ability even if he sounded like a hoarse goose in the best of moments. Adalberto’s heart raced, his breath shortened, his concentration became a yellow butterfly flittering back and forth from the kitchen to the bedroom, from the bedroom to the living room. He made sure his pants were clean, his shirt pressed, and his shoes shined. Then he waited, sitting across from the window, where he could watch her come down the street and up the porch steps, pretty as ever, with that relaxed way of walking, her hips moving from side to side like a bell and black hair glistening in the hot sun. Seeing her brought back the wind he had lost, and his confidence, too, though that didn’t keep him from getting nervous.
At the end of the second month she showed up without the boy. Adalberto was surprised and pleased. This time she sat on the couch, and he sat next to her after bringing her a glass of water with lime. She liked it that way.
What do you think? she said matter-of-factly.
He might be better off with another instrument, he said. The horn requires delicacy of touch. That’s something you’re born with—that and a good ear.
He has none of those things, she said.
Adalberto didn’t contradict her. Instead he said, He’s a good boy, un buen muchacho, but music’s not his thing. I want to keep seeing you. He hesitated a moment, and then he added, forcing it like a bad note, I want to marry you.
China let out a loud laugh. My son’s father was a pimp. I was his whore. Once a whore, always a whore.
I don’t care about any of that.
You should. I’ve done things you don’t even want to think about. Don’t mess with me. There was no sadness or resignation in her voice, just a casual dismissal that unsettled Adalberto.
She left then, not letting him say another word. Adalberto spent the next three days sitting on the couch, getting up only to go to the bathroom. The whiskey bottle he’d relied on in times like these sat in the kitchen like a somber sentinel. There were knocks on the door. By then students knew to leave him alone if he didn’t answer. He had visions of his sister, who’d died of typhoid fever in Havana, dancing round him like a small jaundiced angel and of his mother, who used to beat him with a broom handle when he misbehaved, and of his best friend, Lolo, who became a thief and was shot in the face by a policeman. He thought of suicide, and he thought of moving away to a place he’d never been and where no one knew him, but he lacked the will.
On the fourth day, there was another knock that sounded forceful and insistent, and for reasons he never could explain to himself, he woke from his torpor and answered the door, expecting to find there, if not the devil himself, then one of his emissaries. It was Jelly Roll, someone worse than the devil. Adalberto stood at the door like a fool, waiting for the man to say something.
He was dressed in a perfectly pressed gray suit, white shirt, solid maroon tie with a diamond pin holding it down. He was at the height of his fame then and he gave off the sweet scent of expensive cologne, the scent of success.
I know who you are, Adalberto said stepping to the side. Adalberto pointed to the couch while he sat on the old straight-backed wooden chair where he had his students sit for posture.
I heard you play that Spanish music sometime back, Jelly Roll said.
Cuban music, you mean, Adalberto said. Don’t play anymore. My lungs no good.
Somebody told me about that. I first heard that music from you. I’ll make it worth your while.
My while’s come and gone. Lungs no good. Need a piano.
Piano I got, Jelly Roll said and insisted they go to the same club where he’d stood him up many years before.
It was the middle of the afternoon and the club was closed. Adalberto sat and played a few awkward chords. Piano was not his instrument. What he played was flat and uninspired, and Jelly Roll said to play again, up tempo, with brio. Adalberto let loose, not worrying about the mistakes he was making, and Jelly Roll poured him a tumbler of whiskey. Adalberto did his best and got out a few tunes. Jelly Roll took over and played a rag, slowing the tempo, then picking it up, moving up and down with the right while the left hand stayed in place, harmonizing with the melody, and going off on rhythmic riffs that were identical to what Adalberto used to play on his cornet, only nobody had paid attention because he was a nobody in a nobody’s land.
When the session was over, Jelly Roll pulled out a roll of bills and tried to give Adalberto a hundred dollars. Adalberto refused, not out of pride. One hundred dollars more or less wasn’t going to make a big difference in his life, and knowing that Jelly Roll had listened to him and learned from him and that some historian years hence would say he stole that Spanish tinge from Adalberto was satisfaction enough. He didn’t need money; he needed someone to notice what he’d done back in the day.
Keep your money, Mr. Jelly Roll. I got what I wanted.
Adalberto made it home just as the sun was setting, streaks of clouds moving westward colored a vibrant orange. He was exhilarated and jumpy again, just like he got before a gig, and he wanted more than anything to play a little music, get a little sex from a sweet and sassy woman like China. Whore or no whore, she was the woman for him. He knew that the first time he saw her.
That night he went in search of her, and over the next week he scoured the city—uptown, downtown, Storyville, French Quarter. He asked dozens of people. Some had never heard of her; some had and gave him a conspiratorial smile and shake of the head. None had seen her in years, not since her man was shot at a card game. She was nowhere. He was too old for despair, but after seven full days of looking he told himself, If I can’t have her, I won’t have any woman.
So he went home and resumed his teaching, this time in a more relaxed manner and without the mordant criticisms he’d dole out when one of his students missed a note or lost his posture or let the horn sag down from his lips like a flower witherin
g. Horn’s your dick. Keep it up! Finally he learned what all teachers learn: You don’t teach the students you want but the students you get, and he took on all comers.
Occasionally he’d go to a club, especially if one of his former students was playing—they were very insistent he go listen to them—but that club life had lost its luster, and weeks would pass without him leaving the house, except for groceries and liquor. It wasn’t a bad life. He was no longer in the thrall of desire, and he could look at a beautiful woman as at a statue, admiring the beauty from a distance as he walked past, and go on about his business. By 9 pm his eyelids grew heavy, and forty-five minutes later he was in bed, covers up to his chin, even in summer, sleeping deeply through until five when his bladder woke him. Mornings were his to do with as he wished. Most of his students were schoolboys and took their lessons in the afternoon and early evening. Sometimes he did a little cleaning; mostly he sat on the front porch and watched the birds on the yard chase after bread crumbs the old, deaf landlady fed them.
He avoided thinking about the past and for the most part he was successful. Whenever the memory of his knifing came up, he stood and walked around the block looking at garden fixtures, the clouds, the trees, anything to divert his mind. New Orleans was a nice town, slow and gentle on the nerves. The past was a gray indeterminate mass that had no surface because it had no bottom. If he was going to die anywhere it would be here, a place he liked better, or remembered better, than any other. Days came and days went, interrupted by students, shy younger ones accompanied by their mothers and cocky older ones on their own. Without knowing it, Adalberto had become a fixture like a church or a barbershop. El maestro. That pleased him most of all.
All ambition left him. He didn’t care if he was the best teacher in town or the worst, the richest or the poorest. Some men liked to collect women, and some men liked to eat and drink well, but he was not driven in those directions. People knew him, took him for granted even, and he didn’t mind that, nor did he mind that slowly, imperceptibly, those people died and younger ones took their place who didn’t recognize him on the street and therefore were not compelled to engage him in conversation, chat about the weather or the house falling down at the corner or the runaway dog that had bitten one of the children on the next block. Then one day when he was shaving, he looked at himself in the mirror and saw a man, older-looking than his years, but glowing with contentment, who went to bed at night and got up in the morning because he couldn’t imagine doing anything else. He had no wife to care for, no children to feed. His students’ faces, and those of their mothers, were as blank and indistinguishable as he was to them. El maestro. That he’d once had a past and that the future was coming at him faster than he could figure didn’t matter. At a moment’s notice he could be gone and forgotten, less than a blip in people’s memory, replaced by a younger, more dynamic teacher who would know the latest techniques, the newest sounds.
What’s the hottest music? one of his students repeated, incredulous, when Adalberto asked. Jazz, man, jazz.
Jazz, Adalberto said. That’s not new.
The way Jelly Roll plays it, nobody’s ever done before. The left hand does crazy things, improvises on the rhythm so the piano sounds like a drum.
As it should, Adalberto said. Piano’s a percussion instrument.
But the rhythm’s not regular. It varies and the melody moves off the rhythm.
The clave beat from the habanera. Cubans been doing that for a while, moving off the six/eight on the downbeat, then back again.
Jelly Roll calls it Spanish tinge.
My ass, Adalberto said with a smirk. It ain’t Spanish. It’s Cuban.
Spanish, Cuban, what’s the difference? the young man said. He was barely out of his teens, thought he was Columbus discovering the world.
Look at me, buster. You think they have people with my color skin in Spain?
You could be Creole, the young man said.
I am criollo, bobera. I got African blood and I got Spanish. I’m Cuban and so’s those rhythms. He heard them from me first. I was playing at the St. George with a band full of nobodies and Jelly Roll comes in a few times. Then he disappears. Goes up north to Chicago, L.A. Now’s he’s calling it the Spanish tinge and I’m still a nobody without lungs.
Adalberto sent the young musician away without a lesson and thought maybe he’d reached the end of his teaching. Jelly Roll was out there in the world making music, and a new generation was gaining on him strong. Music was changing and he didn’t know what it was changing into. He stepped out to the store to buy himself some cigarettes, mull the thing over. On his way he walked past a blooming magnolia under which lay an old bicycle. The bicycle, rusted and mangled, was covered with petals fallen from the tree. There now, that’s a good way to go, broken, covered with flowers. And this thought was followed almost immediately by the fact that he was only forty. Strange to think his life was over. There’s any number of things he could do. He could be a bartender or a club manager; he could open up a music store or become a housepainter. Lots of houses in New Orleans needed paint.
Involved in these thoughts, he opened the door to the store, and just as he entered a gust of wind hit him square on the face. It was a sweet-smelling kind of wind, perfumed with gardenias and moist, as if it had come off the ocean. It had none of that grocery-store smell—stale carton and pickles and salt bacon all mixed together. Jackson, the owner, sat behind the counter chewing on a toothpick and drinking out of a coffee cup. The store was as Adalberto had always known it—several rows of canned goods and, up along the far wall, sacks of rice and dry beans of various kinds. Something, though, was different, and not just the smell. He nodded to Jackson and Jackson nodded back and asked what he wanted. Adalberto didn’t answer.
Instead he walked the length of the establishment, looking down each row until he reached the last, which he followed to the end with the line of his sight. There she was, leaning over a sack, shoveling red beans into a paper bag. He had a strong desire to call her name, but every time he tried, no sound came out of his mouth. He felt nauseated and tasted the bitter bile from long ago in his mouth, the knife going into him, the pain, the deflation. There she was, China, and he couldn’t even say her name. He heard a voice urging him to go to her and another telling him to stay away. A powerful struggle went on inside him between what he’d wanted and what he’d lost, the forces of ambition and love and the forces of defeat. The store tilted and he almost fell over sideways to the wooden floor, but he grabbed hold of a post and leaned against it, taking deep breaths until the world was level again.
He made his decision, which was based neither on reason nor on passion but on a reluctance to give up any more of his life than he had. He retraced his steps back to the front of the store and slipped out the door. It was spring and the sun was out and trees were blooming all over the neighborhood. He walked home without the cigarettes, taking his time, past the broken bicycle and the magnolia tree, past the old houses and the ones just recently built. He didn’t know what year it was—1928, 1938? He sat on the porch a long while, not moving much. No one came in or out, not his fellow tenants or his landlady or the postman. The birds had flown away looking for food in another yard. He was stuck, somewhere between the living and the dead, the soft afternoon sun making everything creamy. It was a great day to be alive, someone might have said a block or two away. He sat until the shadows lengthened and the day turned to night and the night into an open space that could only be measured by the depth and breadth of all he was and ever would be.
STORYTELLER
I had just finished bathing Papa and was applying liniment on his chest when he said something very soft, which sounded like radio static. As I bent over and asked him to repeat it, he arched his back, let out a long moan, and didn’t take another breath. I sat on the bed, unsure what to do, call the police, an ambulance, a priest? What would they say about Mama, mumm
ified next to him? Why hadn’t I called after she died? There are laws, you know. What story could I possibly tell? She tried to kill me.
A flock of creatures swept through the bedroom window. They flew around me in tight swooping turns, grazing my face with their wings and pecking at my ears. At first I thought they were demons coming to fetch Papa’s soul. They were smaller than I imagined, and from them emanated a sweet odor of tenderness and severity, not the stench of sulfur. They weren’t demons but angels come to take him to a different place. The peace they had experienced through eternity made them impervious to any kind of human suffering. All I could feel was the relief of someone liberated at last from the chains of obligation. Everything’s a story, I tell you.
Angels on the dresser, cooing and pecking the warped wood; angels on the bed, ministering to Papa with divine ablutions, chanting in all the languages that have ever existed, as well as a few that had not yet been created. I stood away, arms over my head, until they were finished with their rites and had flown back to their perches. I made my way toward Papa and felt for his body, which had acquired the texture of melted cheese. It was too soon for decomposition and I couldn’t figure out what they had done to him, what interstellar acids they had bathed him in. I lowered my hand to his belly again, gathered some of the curdly substance, and brought it to my nose. It was like nothing I’d smelled before, seawater and milk and roasted poppy seeds and toilet-tank water. My mind went in circles around the smell, trying to identify it. I stuck out my tongue and tasted, and I knew it was bird shit Papa was covered in, not angelic fluids. I screamed at the angels; I swatted at them as they flew by inside the room, beating the air with their wings, cooing maniacally. They bounced against the walls and ceiling until they found the window and flew out flapping, leaving behind a faint avian scent and a rain of downy feathers that stuck to my head and arms and gathered on the floor.
I cried a long while. I’d never felt such desolation. I was smeared in shit and feathers. I was blind. I knew nothing of the world outside the door, how to make my way into it, how to survive within it, and I had no one to pity me but myself. Some liberation.
