Like a Fading Shadow

by Antonio Munoz Molina

With meticulous patience, like a prisoner, I elaborated imaginary plans to change my life radically; meanwhile, in the real world, my wife’s voice on the phone announced we would be having another child. In my mind, I was the pianist in my novel, endowed with all the things I would have liked to have, some beyond my reach, like musical talent, and others I had not dared to claim: unfettered freedom; the ability to experience different countries and languages; the full and solitary dedication to one vocation.

  And yet, I also embodied, in a dark way, my narrator without a name, though not quite the neutral lens of my cinephilia, the one that observes but does not act, jealously following others’ passions, which for some unbeknown reason exclude him. Nobody is just a camera or a gaze. Equally incompetent at marriage and fleeting affairs; as ill-equipped for an administrative job and family life as I was for the methodical chaos of bar life, I kept on retreating into an intimate paralysis fed almost entirely by fictions: the ones I created and the ones I found in films, songs, and literature.

  * * *

  Alcohol was becoming an insidious and frequent ally. Drinking seemed like a requirement for literary life, a path to relief and enlightenment. Great writers drank until they collapsed. Movie heroes drank and smoked. Jazz musicians were addicted to heroin or alcohol, or both, like Charlie Parker. At the end of her life, Billie Holiday could barely stand when singing and her voice had an alcoholic drawl. Edgar Allan Poe, Charles Baudelaire, Paul Verlaine embalmed alive in absinthe, William Faulkner embalmed in bourbon, Malcolm Lowry surrendering to gin and mescal, Carson McCullers’s pale face and bloodshot eyes, Marguerite Duras swelling up from alcohol like a frog, Raymond Chandler, Ernest Hemingway, Dashiell Hammett, the best of the best, the aristocracy of literature and delirium tremens. In Granada, we had our own pantheon of legendary drunks, alcoholic oracles moving like shadows after midnight, known and unknown, distinguished professors, poets, wild bohemians from a previous era looking for old friends who could lend them some money or at least a cigarette. There was something sacred or frightening in those terminal drunks, an immolation, a radical renunciation of the status quo. In the bars, enclosed by a fog of smoke and voices, the literati held court and shook their glasses and cigarettes; as the night advanced, alcohol lavished them with a simulacra of friendship and extreme lucidity, aesthetic daring, and political vehemence. No one would achieve anything original or memorable without the willingness to pay the price, sacrifice one’s health and sanity in exchange for the divine fruits that sprout on the edge of madness or even suicide.

  After midnight, one had to become Lou Reed, Rimbaud, Jimi Hendrix, Antonin Artaud, Alejandra Pizarnik, Chet Baker, Scott Fitzgerald. Poets from Barcelona or Madrid passed through the city, leaving behind legends of their alcoholic and sexual exploits. I was impressed by Humphrey Bogart’s answer in Casablanca to a question about his nationality: “I’m a drunkard.” Sitting in the dark, Rick Blaine works through a bottle of bourbon. The bar is already closed and he is alone. Beside him: a glass, the bottle, a pack of cigarettes, and an ashtray. Suddenly, a door opens and in the light Ingrid Bergman’s tall silhouette appears like a mirage. Who wouldn’t want to live in that world, that unchanged kingdom.

  I had not tried bourbon, just as I had never been to Lisbon or lived in hotels, but that was the drink my characters could not get enough of. Up to that point, I drank sporadically and rather absently. But something changed. Gradually, I began to drink more, sometimes in the company of others, sometimes by myself as I got ready to write. Ingrid Bergman was a shadow on the silver screen, but cigarettes and liquor were within anyone’s reach. I would start drinking and soon I felt liberated, excited, hopeful. The bar was welcoming, improved by low light and smoke, the sound of people, music, conversations with friends, the beginnings of inebriation, beautiful women, some of them strangers, eyes meeting across the bar. Stepping out on the street, en route to the next bar, the night unfolding before us like a promise, an abyss, an enigma.

  In those days without cell phones, you could spend hours looking for someone and never find them, the more you looked the more you imagined seeing them from afar and the more your desire intensified; there were also unexpected encounters around a corner, sudden twists of fate.

  The future of the night and your whole life could depend on a street turn; whether you stayed at a bar after a few hours of waiting; whether you left a few minutes before the one you desired appeared behind the glass. The next bar, the next glass, the next cigarette, so brief one must take another one, the imminence, a little longer, just one more hour, as if the night could be prolonged and dawn delayed, the shame and penance of daylight.

  Sometimes I retired just in time, due to despair rather than good sense, convinced that I lacked the courage to truly let go and embrace the great madness of life, and that this would prevent me from ever knowing the secrets of love and writing. But other times I stayed and drank until I lost control of my steps and actions, as if a stranger that hides within came out to take over my will, dragging me from street to street, as I held on to whatever I could find to keep from falling.

  I would search for my apartment in that revolving city, my footsteps echoing like a stranger’s, someone whispering things in my ear. I would walk and walk and end up lost or sitting by a water fountain in some plaza, shivering in the piercing cold of night in Granada. Or I returned sunk in the backseat of a taxi, letting the cold air hit my face, watching the city go by, the city that only night owls get to see, the city of ghosts and the last drunks of the night, the one where the lights of early risers begin to dot the buildings, dark like blocks of shadow. And there were times when I woke up in bed or on the sofa, not knowing when or how I had arrived and whether someone had helped me. Alcohol corrodes entire memories. In the lost hours of the morning hangover, the remorse and fear, the shame at something I did not know, slowly thickened.

  * * *

  I recovered by taking refuge in my routine. The smell of alcohol made me nauseous, so strong in the urine of the morning after, in the sheets damp with perspiration. Writing had a healing power. I invented my story, or rather I watched it unfold in my imagination like images in a film. I did not elaborate an argument: images came in isolated flashes, like the posters that decorated movie theaters when I was a child, stills that made you want to watch the film or at least imagine it. I saw a man walking away in the wee hours of the morning. I saw a woman in sunglasses at a bar in San Sebastián’s promenade, sitting by a window overlooking the Bay of Biscay. I saw long airmail envelopes with their red-blue borders and exotic stamps. I saw two lovers meeting after many years of separation and not recognizing each other, now they’re only steps away, unaware that distance has already defeated them. I saw a coat pocket with a gun and a map of Lisbon marked with a cross. I saw a dear friend from those broke college years in Granada, now running a bar. The place was falling apart and he had no customers, but even in misfortune he still had that great smile of his, a glowing round face with an easy blush, more Irish or Nordic than Spanish, flashing blue eyes and curly blond hair.

  When we lived together, he would sometimes wear a cassock from his days in seminary, instead of a bathrobe. I did not try to hide his identity when I transformed him into one of my characters: the character sprang from him like a joyful outburst made of his presence and kindness, just like his fictional name, Floro Bloom. The bar where my friend lost his health for some time and the little savings he had, was as hospitable as a garage, with a loose South American theme, in an area of ugly apartment blocks close to the Camino de Ronda trail and mostly inhabited by students.

  Writing meant enveloping people and places in a cellophane of illusory beauty, exalting them in a fantastical geography. Granada was San Sebastián; a dark block of brutalist buildings became a promenade by the ocean; a depressing cafeteria was a jazz club with a neon sign, LADYBIRD. As soon as I started writing, names of characters and places would come to me, memories transmuted into movie scenes and song titles, some real, some made-up
. I wanted the story to unfold like a film in the reader’s imagination. I wanted it to sound like music, the same music that carried me and was in the flow and breathing of the words. Writing that is music and music that moves through a story like the soundtracks of those movies that for so many years had me spellbound at the Principe and Alhambra cinemas, a luminous alloy of images and words in foreign languages, Italian and Nino Rota’s music in Fellini, English and Ennio Morricone’s music in Once Upon a Time in America, French and English and Gato Barbieri’s band in Last Tango in Paris, English and the incredible soundtracks of Stanley Kubrick, French and Miles Davis in Louis Malle’s Elevator to the Gallows, Albéniz and the pasodoble “En er Mundo” in Víctor Erice’s El Sur; music and cinema and foreign languages and also desire, because we had to wait for many of those movies until the end of the dictatorship, and in them we saw for the first time on-screen the supreme and breathtaking beauty of the naked female body, Dominique Sanda in The Conformist and 1900, Eiko Matsuda in In the Realm of the Senses, the silver-haired woman walking under a blue light in A Clockwork Orange to an electronic version of Henry Purcell’s Music for the Funeral of Queen Mary, Marisa Berenson, languid and nude, staring into the distance as if she could hear the Handel suite or the Schubert piano trio that haunted Barry Lyndon, Fanny Ardant in Truffaut’s late films, Susan Sarandon massaging her breasts with lemon halves in Atlantic City to remove the fish smell, while Burt Lancaster spied on her through the window.

  * * *

  I wanted the writing to develop a sense of phrasing with the restlessness of jazz. Through a narrator that doesn’t know anything about music, I avoided all the technical details that would have been inevitable if the story had been told from the perspective of the pianist. To write fiction is to see the world through the eyes of another person, to hear it through somebody else’s ears. It is the audacity to believe you can know the secrets of another mind, no matter who it is—an assassin, a fugitive, a man leaning on a balcony at dusk, one or two minutes before a bullet shatters his jaw and pierces his spine, a musician who closes his eyes to play the piano.

  I loved jazz but I think I loved jazz musicians even more. I loved the music itself but also as an ethic and as an aesthetic model for literature, the combination of discipline and abandon, hard technical skill and absolute control but also improvisation and fits of passion, lightness and depth, slowness and speed. That’s how I wanted my writing to sound, how I wanted to write, with a powerful impulse and without knowing where it would take me, sometimes in a straight line and sometimes letting myself get lost in detours that would take me to unforeseen treasures.

  The outlines of a scene, a metaphor, a name. I was going to write the word brume and, without realizing it, typed burma instead. It suddenly hit me how beautiful a name Burma is. The word brume lingered in it along with a suggestion of journeys in the Far East, a magical sound. The strangest part of the story sprouted from that name, like an open sesame to a cave of treasures. Burma was handwritten on a map of Lisbon; it was a password for members of a secret organization; a name that glowed in red or blue neon letters on the door of what could be a brothel or the headquarters for a network of smugglers; the title of a song in which, after a very long solo, a trumpeter puts his instrument down and hoarsely whispers into the microphone, Burma, Burma, Burma, just like John Coltrane in the mantra A love supreme, a love supreme, a love supreme. In a jazz composition the theme is announced in the first measures and then seems to lag far behind, as if the musicians proceed so deep into the detours of improvisation that they forget it completely. Perhaps a few loose notes strike like a quick reminder, an intuition of the past in the midst of the present, vanishing as quickly as they come. But then the flood subsides, the music runs back to its course, and the original theme returns but not quite as repetition; it has been transformed by everything that just happened, like one who returns from travel forever changed, and sees all that was left behind in a new light.

  Jazz musicians interested me much more than writers or artists. They passed through my provincial eighties Granada like comets from another solar system. Thanks to my job back then, I was able to see many of the best and even meet a few. Writers, even second-rate ones, artists, aspiring local rock stars, tended to be arrogant and vain, wanted to be treated like geniuses. But jazz musicians simply did their job. They came from long tours looking tired but it only took a few minutes for the infallible power of music to take over. Once the concert ended, they put their instruments down and sighed with relief like someone completing a work shift.

  Back then I could not have known that I was one of the last witnesses of a golden era. I saw Dexter Gordon, thin and long like a figure from Picasso’s Blue Period; Chet Baker with the small, wrinkled face and slicked-back hair; Miles Davis in a yellow leather jacket, his face hidden behind the enormous sunglasses, arachnid fingers covered in rings moving up and down the golden valves of the trumpet; Art Blakey, his skin like old leather and tobacco, sweating profusely under the stage lights, a great reptilian tongue in his open mouth; Sonny Stitt, Carmen McRae, Phil Woods in an acoustic quintet, such relief after so many excessive amplifications; Johnny Griffin, small and daring; Tom Harrell in the depths of schizophrenia, quiet like a monk, head lowered, trumpet in hand waiting for his solo; I saw the drummer Billy Higgins playing effortlessly and with a wide, placid smile of happiness; I saw Woody Shaw, almost blind and barely able to move due to the diabetes that would soon kill him. Backstage, moments before the concert, his wife threaded his white curls tenderly with a plastic blue comb. I saw Paquito D’Rivera, who had recently fled Cuba, dressed in black leather and cowboy boots, entering the stage like a cyclone as he played “All the Things You Are.” I saw Tete Montoliu, one of my heroes, many times, wearing green or rose-colored frames, his blind-man smile; face slightly cocked back as if to better hear something far away; his white, fleshy hands, and the shining wedding band; the formal suits, like a bureaucrat or cloth merchant; the impression that he felt lost on that stage and in the labyrinths behind the curtain; the stiffness with which he stood by the piano to accept the applause, the tips of his fingers resting on the edge of the keys.

  Sometimes, after a concert, I went out to dinner with him and other musicians. He remained absent, often smiling the way he had onstage as he plunged through the twists and turns of improvisation. I noticed that his hands touched the world around him lightly, as if he were seeing through them, the silverware, the border of the plate, the edge of the glass. He smoothed the tablecloth, folded and flattened the napkins. The other musicians, relieved after so many hours of focus and exertion, enjoyed their beers and relaxed, leaning back on their chairs, sharing stories and laughing. Tete remained still in his gray suit and tie, hands on the table, a confused smile, submerged in the only world he knew, yet eccentric to it, separated by his blindness and Catalan seriousness, hiding the fury that would later be unleashed on a piano without hesitation, without any warning, all at once.

  * * *

  I saw Elvin Jones playing in a quartet with his wife, a Japanese woman whose petite figure accentuated his formidable size. The man was built like a tower or a tree. I will never forget it. Elvin Jones, thick-necked and head buzzed, entered the stage like a boxer enters a ring; he wore black trousers and a short silk robe with Japanese drawings of birds and bamboo stalks tied at the waist. Black high-tops, white socks. The robe opened at the chest. From the moment his hands fell on the skin of the drums and the metal brush touched the edge of the cymbals, silence gave way to the ancient and sacred sound of John Coltrane’s music. It was a feat of musical virtuosity that bordered on spiritualism; if you closed your eyes it was as if the dead had joined the living onstage. You could hear the dead in the jazz instruments singing like human voices: Coltrane’s saxophone, Eric Dolphy’s bass clarinet, Jim Garrison’s bass, all three taken from us too early, at the prime of their lives, each one unique and without equal, each one possessed by a different strain of that fever they shared, making mus
ic with an audacity jazz had never seen, the golden age, the early seventies, absolutely free yet deeply rooted in their origins—the blues, the spirituals, the work songs, the visionary sermons of Baptist preachers, aesthetic radicalism, political fury. The piano and the drums that night were like an opening into a world long gone, fragments of a time now preserved in records or in the memories of those who met them, in the New York clubs where John Coltrane and his band had played for hours without break, the Five Spot, the Village Gate, the Village Vanguard, remote, mythical spaces, cave-like basements at the end of a narrow staircase, catacombs.

  Slowly, the other musicians stayed behind and gave way to Elvin Jones’s solo. Under the blue and red lights, copious beads of sweat gathered on the shaved head. He smiled or grimaced with eyes closed as if in pain or exasperation, the large bright teeth shining in the dark. It put you in a state of heightened alert, dilated hearing, aware of every sound and melodic thread, every break in the rhythm, every harmonic connection. Elvin Jones continued his solo, guiding a powerful flow of music that transformed into unexpected rhythmic patterns, seismic trepidations that took over the drums for a few seconds, then gave way to subtle vibrations, like rain or rustling leaves, a polyphony of heartbeats, drumrolls, steps, train wheels, bongos palpitating around a fire. External time, the time of clocks and calendars, was canceled. The only time that existed was the one governed by the solemn religiosity and delirium of Elvin Jones’s drums, beating against the feverish expectancy of the audience like a heart in the concave darkness of the body.

  Surrounded by drums and cymbals, Elvin Jones kept descending into a whirlpool of his own making, seemingly lost for a few long minutes, then finding his way through a path insinuated just seconds before; eyes shut tight; the grin transformed into a great laugh; the vibrations of the metal, the stretched skin of the drums, the hollowed wood, the dried seeds in the maracas, bursting in a simultaneous deflagration; rain-whipped forests in which every leaf and every branch participate in a great collective percussion; euphoric calamities of crumbling glass walls and towers. Then, ever so slowly, as if emerging from under the earth, the austere pulse of the blues, which had never left, the impulse of the train, the primordial compass of the slap and pop. When he finished playing, Elvin Jones stood up to welcome the applause and stumbled across the stage, his robe like a second skin soaked in sweat.