The Magic Strings of Frankie Presto

by Mitch Albom

  A boy with his guitar in a wagon stood in marked contrast to the war that was overtaking the country—­and the world. I was quite busy during those years collecting talent that was snuffed out before its time, left on battlefields, drowned in sunken ships, shot out of the sky. Such a waste. Why humans kill each other is beyond my comprehension, but I can testify that you have been doing it since your inception. Only the weapons change.

  The war affected everyone. Baffa began to have trouble at the sardine factory, because some of his workers were given blue uniforms and taken away to fight. Others argued over party allegiances. The government ordered Baffa to produce a certain amount of sardines to help the war efforts—­something, I gather, he did not wish to do. Baffa came home at night, dropped in his chair, and placed a wet towel across his forehead. The hairless dog crouched at his feet.

  “Go outside to practice,” Baffa would tell Frankie. The boy was sad to see his papa this way, and he made him cheese and mustard sandwiches before going to the garden with his guitar. He cut the nails on his left hand each day before playing, then practiced the arpeggios that El Maestro had taught him, breaking down each chord by notes and playing them in a different order. He practiced all his scales. He walked his fingers along the frets like a spider’s legs, fast and faster, but never crossing.

  “Have you ever seen a spider trip?” El Maestro had asked.

  “No, Maestro.”

  “No, you have not. And your fingers must not trip, either.”

  “Sí, Maestro.”

  “Say ‘Yes,’ boy.”

  “Yes.”

  “Speak English.”

  “The teachers say we must speak only Spanish.”

  “With them, you speak Spanish. With me, English. You don’t tell them about me or our lessons. You understand?”

  “Sí.”

  “Our secret.”

  “Sí.”

  “Say ‘Yes.’ ”

  “Yes.”

  “Keep practicing.”

  “Yes.”

  El Maestro had good reason to be secretive. Politics is not my concern, but the repression in Spain was widespread, and as the months passed, more and more ­people were arrested in Villareal for being antigovernment. Many of them were artists. A piano player I had gifted was pulled from his home in the middle of the day and thrown into a prison cell. So were two cellists, a flutist, and several singers. As I understood it, the reigning Spanish leader—­a balding man named Franco—­had created a tyrannical society in which any deviation was viewed as criminally disloyal. I have witnessed such governments before. Their citizens always look the same. Tired. Glancing back and forth. And battling a constant, choking fear.

  Art suffers under such conditions, and it suffered in Spain. ­People were afraid to express themselves. Afraid to write or to dance a certain way. Poets were jailed. Regional music was banned. The varied radio music programs were replaced with traditional Spanish fare.

  “This Franco,” El Maestro grumbled. “If he had his way, we would play only flamenco.”

  Still, sometimes good is found amid bad, just as major-­key notes can be played over minor chords. One day, as Frankie was pulling his wagon toward Crista Senegal Street, past a new sign that warned IF YOU ARE SPANISH, SPEAK SPANISH!, he saw a commotion in front of the city’s biggest store. Policemen in gray uniforms were pulling ­people out, and merchandise was being stacked in the street. Frankie moved through the crowd and heard whispered words he did not understand. He heard others cheering, “Franco! Franco! Franco!” As ­people began to push one another and the yelling increased, Frankie’s eyes fell on something amid the stacks of goods. A phonograph machine. He had seen one in the store window once, and Baffa explained that it played music on round discs. When Frankie asked if they could get one, Baffa said, “They are too expensive.”

  But now here was a phonograph just sitting on the curb, atop a stack of recordings—­music from America, England, France, and the outer regions of Spain. Frankie was too young to understand that under this government, such recordings were considered subversive. He figured if they were in the street, someone didn’t want them.

  So as gray-­clad police began clubbing ­people into submission, Frankie quickly loaded the phonograph and the records into his pale green wagon, covered them with a blanket, and pulled a big chunk of me away from the fighting.

  He had no idea he was being watched.

  10

  I SHOULD SPEAK FOR A MOMENT ABOUT FRANKIE’S ABSENT MOTHER, and the shadow she cast on his young life.

  Frankie, of course, remembered nothing of Carmencita, the prayerful woman with hair the color of dark grapes. And Baffa, who never knew her, could not tell Frankie the truth—­that he had been found in a river by a hairless dog—­because what child wants to think he was once thrown away?

  So a legend was constructed. It is how you humans remold your history. Baffa told Frankie that his mother was a saintly woman, Baffa’s one and only love, who died tragically on a trip they took shortly after Frankie was born. This, Baffa figured, would explain why they never visited her grave at the cemetery in Villareal.

  It was not a good lie. And unfortunately for Baffa, Frankie was nearly as curious as he was musical.

  “Where was the trip, Papa?”

  “America.”

  “Where is that?”

  “Far away.”

  “How did Mama die?”

  “A car crash.”

  “Was she driving?”

  “Of course not.”

  “You were driving?”

  “Yes.”

  “Were you hurt, Papa?”

  “No. Well. I was hurt, but not badly.”

  “Did you try to save Mama?”

  “Of course.”

  “Did you try really hard?”

  Baffa sighed. You should never construct a lie based on a child’s questions. It is like writing music based on cymbal crashes.

  “Yes. I tried everything.”

  “Where was I?”

  “You were here.”

  “By myself?”

  “With a friend.”

  “Which friend?”

  “You don’t know him.”

  “How come?”

  “He died.”

  “How?”

  “A car crash.”

  “Was he driving?”

  Baffa rubbed his head. He was a practical man, with a good heart. But I am rather certain when he came into this world, his little fists did not grab the talent for storytelling.

  “I don’t remember, Francisco. It was a long time ago.”

  “What happened to Mama?”

  “When?”

  “After she died?”

  “She was buried.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “When you die, you are put in the ground.”

  “Then how can she live with God?”

  “After you are buried, then you live with God.”

  “Where is Mama buried?”

  “In a cemetery.”

  “Where?”

  “In America.”

  “Where?”

  Baffa barely knew America. His sister, Danza, had moved to Mexico years ago, and had married an American man from Detroit.

  “Detroit.”

  “What is that?”

  “A city.”

  “Where?”

  “In America.”

  “And you went there?”

  “Yes.”

  “Why did you go there?”

  “To get a car.”

  “Our car?”

  “A different car.”

  “The one that crashed?”

  “That is the one.”

  “Was Mama pretty?”

  “Very pretty.
”

  “Did she love me?”

  “Very much.”

  On this, Baffa told the truth, even if he didn’t realize it. And then, with his head pounding, he shut down the tale.

  “No more questions, Francisco.”

  “What did she look like?”

  “Please.”

  “Is this her?”

  Frankie held out a photograph. In it, a younger Baffa had his arm around Danza, his sister, a plump woman with light hair and dark lipstick. The picture was from years ago, the last time he had seen her, before she left for Mexico.

  “Where did you find that?”

  “In the closet.”

  “Why were you in the closet?”

  “Is this Mama?”

  Baffa sighed. “Yes. That is her. No more questions, all right?”

  Frankie gazed at the photo. So the plump woman hugging his father was his mother, the saint, who had died in a car crash in a faraway country and was buried in the ground so she could live with God.

  He had his story. Years later, inspired by this tale, he would write his first guitar composition, which he called “Lágrimas por Mi Madre.”

  “Tears for My Mother.”

  Truth is light. Lies are shadows. Music is both.

  11

  SPEAKING OF ME, YOU HAVE MANY WORDS FOR HOW I SHOULD BE PLAYED. In classical music, most of them are in Italian. Adagio. Moderato. This goes back to what you called the Renaissance, when Italy was at the center of creativity and musicians who went there invented hundreds of phrases for my tempos. Vivace. Andantino. Prestissimo. So far in Frankie’s story, we have been going largo, slowly, or at least larghissimo, as slow as it makes sense. But with the looming funeral ser­vice, we must employ accelerando, going faster, perhaps reach adagietto or allegro.

  The next three years of Frankie’s life—­from the day he stole the phonograph to the day he left Spain in the bottom of a ship—­contained the following developments: he grew nine inches, lost six baby teeth, got in four fights at school, took his first Holy Communion, mastered a soccer kick, put pomade in his hair, had a girl plant a kiss on his ear (and run away laughing), learned to ride a bicycle, pray in Latin, and make bocadillos with sausage and olive oil. He wore his first bathing suit, saw his first tank, asked Baffa, constantly, to point out America on a globe, and slept with that photograph of the light-­haired woman under his pillow every night, the one he believed to be his mother.

  He also practiced his guitar at least three hours a day in the garden, learning more than a hundred songs and serenading the hairless dog with arpeggios and finger drills.

  Of his lessons with El Maestro, I can attest that he made extraordinary progress, measured by the fact that his blind teacher actually smiled sometimes when Frankie played. El Maestro even gave up smoking cigarettes, although this may have been due to the time when Frankie, using the lighter, accidentally set fire to a tablecloth, then doused it with wine before his teacher could warn him that alcohol might set the whole place ablaze. (It did not. But such a scare can break a habit.)

  Frankie spent more and more time in that flat above the laundry on Crista Senegal Street, learning the proper classical techniques, turning the guitar neck away from his left shoulder, tilting it upward, putting his foot on a stool. El Maestro made him hold an orange in his right hand for hours to simulate the proper setup position for plucking the strings, and he constantly grabbed the boy’s fingers to show him the fleshy part of the thumb and the angle of the nails that would bring out the purest sound. He taught him every inch of the guitar, the piercing high sounds of playing up on the neck, the volume and tone relative to the sound hole, how each string vibrated and could be picked, tapped, plucked, fingered, or strummed.

  Frankie also learned to work the phonograph he had stolen from the curb. El Maestro, at first, was furious. He insisted they throw the machine away. (“If the policía shut down the store, what do you think they would do to me, stupid boy?”) But when Frankie put the needle on a recording of Duke Ellington’s orchestra doing “Don’t Get Around Much Anymore,” El Maestro slumped in his chair with his mouth open and made the boy put the needle back thirteen straight times.

  Eventually, he and Frankie listened to every disc that was in that pile, many times over. El Maestro’s favorite was a shellac recording of a gypsy guitar player named Django Reinhardt, whom the teacher labeled “not of this earth.” Frankie was partial to Louis Armstrong and the song “Bill Bailey, Won’t You Please Come Home?” the lyrics of which he memorized. One day, as El Maestro ate one of Frankie’s sausage bocadillos, the boy sang it for his teacher in perfect imitation.

  “Won’t you come home, Bill Bailey?

  Won’t you come home?”

  She moans the whole day long.

  “I’ll do the cookin’ honey; I’ll pay the rent.

  I know I’ve done you wrong . . .”

  When Frankie stopped, the blind man finished chewing, then rubbed his chin with two fingers.

  “Francisco, you are going to have a problem.”

  “What problem?”

  “You sing well.”

  “Thank you, Maestro.”

  “Too well. You must decide what you are going to be—­a great singer or a great guitar player.”

  “Can I be both?”

  El Maestro sighed. “Being both means being neither.”

  Frankie looked at his teacher, the dark glasses, the unshaven whiskers. He didn’t mean to let him down by singing.

  “I am sorry, Maestro.”

  The blind man smacked his teeth.

  “And stop trying to sound like Louis Armstrong. You are going to hurt your throat.”

  12

  I HAVE PROMISED SPEEDY MOVEMENT THROUGH THESE REMAINING SPANISH YEARS. So let me focus on two days only: the day Frankie fell in love, and the day he left.

  The first took place in the early autumn of 1944, on a cloudless afternoon when Baffa drove Frankie to the sardine factory near La Vilavella. Not long after arriving, Baffa was drawn into another argument between laborers, and he told Frankie to take the hairless dog for a walk. Frankie understood this to mean his papa did not want him hearing what was being said, and that was fine, since he wanted to finish learning the latest song El Maestro had taught him.

  With the guitar slung over his back, he led the hairless dog down the long path out of town. He whistled as he walked, and he sang a tune to himself and threw a stick, which the hairless dog retrieved.

  Before long he had wandered far from any houses and deep into a thicket of woods. Figuring he could lean against a tree stump to practice, he meandered until he found a good spot. He sat down, adjusted his guitar, held his left hand out (as El Maestro had taught), and began to play his scales.

  “Shhhhh!”

  He looked up.

  “Shhhhh!”

  Frankie could not see who was shushing him. His eyes worked their way through the woods until he spotted a figure in a tree, straddling a huge branch. It was a boy, about his size, in brown pants, a yellow shirt, and a cap pulled down tightly over his forehead.

  “Quién anda ahí?” Frankie said.

  “I don’t speak Spanish. Be quiet!”

  “I can speak English,” Frankie said.

  The child squinted.

  “Do you want to see dead bodies?”

  Frankie gripped his guitar neck.

  “I have to practice.”

  “Are you scared?”

  “No.”

  “It’s all right. Most ­people aren’t as brave as me.”

  The boy’s English sounded strange. (It was Frankie’s first British accent.)

  “I’m not afraid.”

  “Prove it.”

  “How do I prove it?”

  “Climb up.”

  Part of Frankie wanted to run. He had
no desire to see dead bodies. But he had never encountered an English-­speaking child before. And he didn’t have many friends, since most of the schoolkids still teased him for rubbing his eyes. He wondered if this boy knew any songs.

  “All right,” Frankie said. “I’ll come up.”

  He wrapped his arms around the trunk and tried to climb. He got a few feet before falling awkwardly.

  “That was stupid,” the boy said, laughing.

  Frankie wiped the dirt off his shorts. The hairless dog licked his bare legs.

  “Here. Catch.”

  The boy dropped a rope that was tied around the branch. Gripping it and jumping, Frankie pushed his feet against the tree and began walking up the trunk. When he reached the branch, he collapsed.

  “Hmmph,” the boy said.

  Only then, breathing hard, did Frankie realize that this was not a boy at all, but a girl with blond hair tucked under a cap. Her teeth formed a perfect little curve beneath her lips, and her skin was whiter and her cheeks pinker than any Frankie had ever seen. Her eyes were the shade of pool water, which made her seem a bit dreamy, even when she was looking straight at him.

  “You have proven you are brave,” she said matter-­of-­factly. “So you can be my friend.”

  Something warm spread inside Frankie. He felt as brave as she suggested.

  “Help me pull the rope up,” she said.

  “Why are you in this tree?”

  “I’m spying.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “You don’t know what spying means?”

  Frankie shrugged.

  “I’m seeing secret things that no one is supposed to see.”

  “Why?”

  “So I can tell my daddy. He is very important, you know.”

  Frankie shrugged again.

  “Only brave ­people can be spies. Like my daddy.”

  “Where is he?”

  “I don’t know. He’s on a secret mission. But when he comes back, I shall tell him what I saw.”

  “What did you see?”

  “The dead bodies. Look.”

  Frankie had almost forgotten about this part. He looked to where she was pointing and saw a large clearing in the woods, where the dirt appeared different from the dirt surrounding it. It had been dug up, churned, and replaced, as if covering something. Nearby was a deep, empty hole beside another mound of dirt.