The Magic Strings of Frankie Presto

by Mitch Albom

  He wiped his eyes and walked his family to a nearby fountain. They sat down.

  And he told them everything about his papa.

  53

  HAD THEY ALL LEFT THAT DAY, OUR STORY WOULD BE DIFFERENT. But then, had many of you left places even one day earlier, the landscape of your lives would be rearranged. You cannot unplay your notes. Time, like music, is indelible that way.

  They were heading back to England, Frankie, Aurora, and Kai, to visit Aurora’s sister and then return to New Zealand. On their last night at the hotel, Frankie had a vivid dream. He dreamed about walking behind Baffa, up the stairs above a laundry. He saw Baffa wiping his brow, and urging young Frankie to sing. He saw a door opening, and got his first look at a tall, bearded figure with dark glasses.

  And then everyone was gone.

  The next morning, Aurora awoke to see Frankie sitting by the window.

  “What’s wrong?” she said.

  “There’s something I need to do here.”

  “So we’ll stay.”

  “I should do it myself.”

  She narrowed her gaze.

  “Everything’s all right,” Frankie assured her. “Go to your sister’s. You already have the tickets. I’ll be there in a few days.”

  “Promise?”

  “Promise.”

  He drove them to the airport, kissed them good-­bye, then drove back to Villareal.

  To search for El Maestro.

  Perhaps you are wondering why this did not happen sooner? A fair question, for Frankie had never stopped thinking about his teacher. He remembered every instruction, every scolding. Each time he lifted the guitar, he pictured El Maestro’s face, the tousled dark hair, the unkempt beard, the dark glasses. Was he still alive? What might he look like? How would he get around? A blind man in his seventies? Would he even remember the child he took in?

  And what would he think of Frankie’s career?

  It was this last question, in truth, that had kept the former student away this long. For all his successes, his gold records, his concerts, Frankie was sometimes ashamed of how he’d achieved them. El Maestro had lectured him on the purity of music, the dedication to playing the guitar and the dangers of silly distractions. Yet Frankie had become hugely popular (and wealthy) on relatively simple songs. The guitar hardly mattered. His voice and good looks were what sold him to the public. His dancing only added to his popularity. Some of what he’d done, Frankie feared, might actually disgust his mentor.

  “Why did you behave like a fool?” he could hear him say. No amount of fame or wealth diminished that. His time in El Maestro’s small flat above the laundry had been the closest Frankie ever came to my stark beauty, my melodic seduction. In drifting from that, he feared he’d drifted from El Maestro’s grace.

  This, I should note, is often the relationship between mentor and mentee. Witness my French composer Henri Duparc, who grabbed a considerable piece of me at his birth in the nineteenth century. He created some inspired works, beautiful blends of orchestra and voice. Yet he so revered his mentor, the German composer Richard Wagner, that in 1885, when Duparc was just thirty-­seven years old, he stopped composing altogether and eventually destroyed all his work, burning his transcriptions, certain they were not worthy of the man he looked up to.

  A teacher’s shadow can hover for life. Of course, Frankie could not know that this teacher was also his father. Nor could he know that, in searching for him now, he would not like what he found.

  Instead, he rose early, had an espresso in the hotel, and retraced a familiar course through the streets, a journey he had often made with a green wagon and an oversized guitar. How many times had he walked this route, wearing a cap and short pants, mumbling the information he was certain El Maestro would demand? “Which composer wrote that piece? . . . What is the rasgueado technique in flamenco?” Those memories flooded back now with each step Frankie took. He could feel his pulse quickening like the nervous student he once was.

  But when he turned the corner onto Crista Senegal Street, his body sagged. The laundry was gone, replaced by a square office building with a P sign for parking. No blue shutters. No steps to climb. Just a glass-­enclosed entrance and a yellow-­gated garage.

  It was as if someone had bulldozed his memory.

  Frankie sat on the curb. He felt the morning sun on his neck. He could not give up so quickly. Where else? he thought. Only that last day had they ventured far from this corner. He reconstructed, in his mind, their final stops, but he could not recall the location of the stores, the restaurant, or even the guitar maker who had handed El Maestro the instrument that Frankie still played today.

  But he remembered the taberna.

  He wondered if it was still there.

  “A blind man, you say?”

  “Yes. Tall. Dark hair.”

  “No, señor. I do not recall.”

  “It was a long time ago.”

  “My father was the owner then.”

  “Is he still alive?”

  “No, señor—­”

  “It’s important I find this man—­”

  “—­but you look familiar.”

  “That does not matter.”

  “Wait . . . You are the American. The actor!”

  “No—­”

  “The singer?”

  Frankie pursed his lips.

  “Ah! I am right? Yes?”

  “Yes.”

  “Your name is Presto.”

  “Yes.”

  “You are from here, señor?”

  “As a boy.”

  “Villareal?”

  “Yes.”

  “This I did not know.”

  “I had a different name.”

  “This is why you speak Spanish! Increíble!”

  The owner yelled to his bartender, who was setting out chairs. A dishwasher looked up as well. They nodded at the news.

  “ ‘I want to love you,’ ” the bartender bellowed. “ ‘I will be true . . .’ ”

  His accent sounded like a bad imitation. Frankie forced a smile.

  “Señor, please, would you honor us by playing on our stage?”

  “Playing?” Frankie said.

  “Tomorrow night. We have the large band on Fridays. They would be most happy to include you.”

  “I’m not here to play—­”

  “You will be our guest—­”

  “I only wanted to—­”

  “You were here as a boy—­”

  “Yes, but—­”

  “You return as a man! Is perfect, no?”

  Frankie exhaled. He looked around the taberna, just opening for business, the chairs being taken off the tables. The place was dimly lit and smelled of alcohol and bleach. Frankie did not mention that he had already played here once. Or that he remembered it vividly. He felt it every time he stepped on a stage. The cheers turning to boos. The banging glasses. The way El Maestro forced him to take a bow.

  Maybe he should play, he thought. There were demons in this place he had long sought to silence. He had made a certain peace with his papa’s memory. Was it time to do the same with that final night?

  “I’ll think about it,” he said.

  “Please do,” the owner replied. “We will make a special meal for you. Lovely food. Drink. Music.”

  “Is there anyone else who might know the man I’m looking for?”

  The owner scratched his chin. “Perhaps the musicians. Some of them are quite old. They work cheaper that way, eh?”

  He grinned and raised a glass of orange juice. “To your return, señor!”

  Frankie nodded and walked out the door.

  Later that day, Frankie went to the Villareal city hall, to see if there were any records of his teacher. He had to fill out a form and was told it would take several days fo
r a response. When Frankie mentioned El Maestro was a guitarist, he was directed to a round-­faced man named Jacinto, who served as a cultural delegate. Jacinto said he could not recall a blind guitar teacher, but offered to show Frankie a room honoring the beloved guitarist Francisco Tárrega. There were photos and letters and sheet music and the large plaster bust that was once carried through the streets of San Félix. There were also several of Tárrega’s beloved guitars in glass cases, including the first one he had made by the venerable Antonio de Torres Jurado, the famous nineteenth-­century luthier from whom most acoustic guitars today can trace their roots.

  Frankie noticed it was damaged, with breaks and stains that had not been repaired.

  “Do you know the story of this guitar?” Frankie asked Jacinto.

  “I do, señor,” the man said, straightening up as if making a presentation. “It was one of Tárrega’s favorites. He played it for twenty years. When he was forced to replace it from too much use, he sought out a man to restore it. After many attempts, the man succeeded.”

  “And?”

  “Tárrega and his guitar were reunited.”

  “So he left it behind when he died?”

  “Yes and no, señor. Tárrega left the guitar to his family, but in time, his brother Vincente sold it. He thought he was selling it to the famous musician Domingo Prat, a disciple of Tárrega’s who lived in Buenos Aires. So he put it on a ship and sent it to South America.

  “But when it got there, it did not go to the great Domingo Prat. Instead, it went to a ten-­year-­old girl. Over the years, it fell into disrepair.”

  “In South America?” Frankie said.

  “Yes.”

  “How did it get back here?”

  “A former student of Tárrega’s discovered it years later in Buenos Aires, in a house, lying on a couch. He helped arrange for its return to Spain.”

  Frankie gazed at the guitar, which had a break in the body near the neck, and was missing pieces of the rosette that framed the sound hole.

  “Why did he bother? It’s broken.”

  “Just the same, señor,” the man said. “It belongs back where it made its best music, does it not?”

  Frankie stared at the instrument. He wished El Maestro could have seen it or, even better, played it in its healthier days. Connected to the great Francisco Tárrega? How he would have loved that! Frankie thanked Jacinto and left the building. But for the rest of the day he thought about that guitar’s journey: made here, shipped on a boat, misdirected, knocked about, now returned to native soil.

  It belongs back where it made its best music.

  He decided he would play at the taberna. To honor his teacher.

  And, if possible, to summon him.

  Homecomings in music are never predictable. Some are raucously successful (the rock musician Bruce Springsteen playing in New Jersey), some are bittersweet (the Russian pianist Vladimir Horowitz returning to Moscow after sixty years of exile), and some are, frankly, less than they were hoped to be.

  Frankie’s homecoming was hastily arranged, so the crowd would be mostly regulars. Still, Frankie hoped the word might spread; if El Maestro was alive, perhaps he would hear that his student had returned. Villareal was still not that big, right?

  He arrived early with his guitar. There were men outside smoking by a row of motorcycles. Inside, he noticed the stage was wider than it had once been, and the house band, slowly arriving, was a nine-­piece ensemble, whose musicians ranged from middle-­aged to quite old. Frankie went over material with the bandleader, a thin-­armed piano player. Unlike forty years earlier, foreign songs were now commonly performed in Spain, and the man nodded with each of Frankie’s selections.

  Frankie chose a variety of material. Determined to erase the bad memories of this place, he selected a few of his own compositions, “I Want To Love You” and “Our Secret,” but also instrumentals like “St. Louis Blues,” “Tiger Rag,” and Django Reinhardt’s “Parfum,” along with any other song he could remember from El Maestro’s last performance on this stage.

  The crowd shuffled in. Seats were taken. Drinks ordered. The lights went down.

  Few ­people noticed a heavily clothed figure taking a chair in the back.

  The owner gave Frankie an ebullient introduction, to polite applause, but with each number, the ovations intensified, as Frankie grew more focused on the memory of that last night. He played Ellington, Schumann, and Tárrega as El Maestro had taught him, as if the next best thing to finding his old teacher would be to conjure up his spirit. He blazed through several flamenco numbers, pleasing the Spanish audience. When he sang his famous songs, the patrons cheered, delighted that the man who’d made these records was actually here in Villareal.

  Frankie took no breaks. He never left the stage. Drinks were replenished, more cigarettes smoked. For nearly two hours, the guitarist’s music grew ever more piercing. An old jota melody. A Muddy Waters blues.

  For his last number, he chose a very specific song: “Avalon.” It was the first thing he’d ever played for an audience, on this very stage in 1945, and the only piece he’d ever performed with his beloved teacher.

  As he started the first chords, beads of sweat trickled down his forehead. He pictured El Maestro sitting alongside him, whispering the old words, urging him on.

  “Sing the song.”

  “But I don’t want to.”

  “Why not?”

  “I’m scared.”

  “Yes. And you will be scared again. All your life. You must conquer this. Face them and pretend they aren’t there.”

  “Maestro—­”

  “You can do it. Always remember I said you can do it.”

  As the band fell in behind him, Frankie noticed the crowd’s bobbing heads and tapping fingers. The beat grew louder, and some patrons clapped along. Frankie sang:

  I found my love in Avalon

  Beside the bay,

  I left my love in Avalon

  And sailed away.

  He looked at the owner, who was clapping with the rest of them.

  I dream of her in Avalon

  from dusk till dawn

  So I guess I’ll travel on

  To Avalon.

  While part of him braced for history to repeat, there was no protest this time, only enthusiasm, and Frankie found himself looking left and right, in some deluded hope that he would see El Maestro at a table, smiling from behind his dark glasses, a cigarette dangling from his mouth. Deep down, this had been his wish for years, seeking what every student desperately seeks from a beloved teacher: final approval.

  It did not happen. Frankie completed his spirited solo and reached the last lyrics like a runner crossing the finish line. He hit three chords to end it, the last one ringing out to the crowd, and he bowed his head. The owner jumped to his feet and the others followed, standing in a noisy shower of appreciation.

  Frankie slowly rose and held up his guitar. He thought of Tárrega’s long-­lost instrument and was overwhelmed suddenly by the deepest longing he’d ever felt in his life: to see his old teacher one more time.

  Instead he got an ovation. He forced a smile. Homecomings are never predictable. And there are few things emptier than applause when you feel you don’t deserve it.

  A music arranger has a difficult task, coordinating instruments into a mellifluous blend. What happened next in Frankie’s story can best be told as a series of arranged sounds, coming together to reach a climactic finish.

  There was high applause, like soaring violins, when Frankie finished his show. Then bass lines of adult conversation as patrons discussed it on their way out. There were the percussive sounds of the band breaking down, packing up their horns and cymbals, and the soft scribbling of Frankie signing autographs for older fans who remembered his records.

  There was the enthused baritone of the owner,
asking Frankie to return anytime. There were soft vocals like tickled piano keys between Frankie and several musicians, and questions about a blind man that rose in hope and sank in disappointment, like a glissando on a flute.

  Later, with the place nearly empty, there was the sound of the back door creaking open as Frankie stepped into the alley where he’d once escaped in a car.

  And, finally, the sound of a match being lit.

  “I know you,” a voice said in Spanish.

  Frankie saw the orange glow of a cigarette tip.

  “How do you know me?”

  “That song. I have not heard it in many years. But I could never forget it. You are Francisco.”

  “And you are?”

  “Drunk.”

  “Your name, sir?”

  “You don’t know me? I was playing onstage with you all night. In the back.”

  An old man wobbled out from the shadows, clearly inebriated. His hair was sparse and curled white. His shoulders were stooped beneath a draping jacket.

  “The congas,” he said.

  Frankie tilted his head curiously. The old man placed two fingers around his lips.

  “Years ago, I wore a mustache. You see?”

  He lowered his hand.

  “I am Alberto.”

  Frankie’s eyes widened. “Alberto,” he whispered.

  “Yes.”

  “You drove with us that last night . . .”

  “I did.”

  Frankie felt his heart racing.

  “Alberto, please, I have been looking for El Maestro. My teacher—­your friend. He—­”

  “I know who he is.”

  “Do you know where he is?”

  Alberto scanned Frankie’s face.

  “Yes.”