César Aira - The Musical Brain - And Other Stories

A year earlier, Cecil had done some arrangements for the famous jazzman Johnny Hodges, who, in return, had offered him a contract for five nights at a hotel, playing piano in his band (which didn’t usually include a piano). The first four nights he didn’t even touch the instrument. The only one who noticed the silence was the trombone player, Lawrence Brown, who, before the start of the fifth performance, smiled at him and said: Hey, Cecil, I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but that piano has eighty-eight keys. How about you hit one?

The story came up late one night, at a table in the Five Spot, and though it wasn’t exactly proof of his credentials, and had to be explained, the upshot was an offer to play there one night during the week, as support for an avant-garde group. It was a heaven-sent opportunity, and he treated it as such. He gave up his job at the dry cleaner, bought a piano with a providential loan, and practiced almost nonstop, only breaking off to reply to his neighbors’ complaints with polite explanations. He had moved from the rundown tenement on the Lower East Side to a poky room on Bleecker Street.

The cream of the jazz world went to the Five Spot, so he would have an audience of connoisseurs. He convinced himself that the jolt of his playing could transform that audience and produce the applause that he had been denied until then. The theory of cumulative units that his ex-classmate had propounded was precisely that: a theory, an abstraction, nothing more. In reality, there was something magical about an audience, like a genie appearing from a lamp.

The night in question arrived; he climbed onto the stage, sat at the piano, and began. The amplifier died almost straightaway — a technical fault, supposedly. It didn’t matter to him. But his performance was cut short by condescending applause. When he looked up, disconcerted, he saw the avant-garde musicians coming forward with their instruments and their simian smiles. He went to sit at a table where there were some people he knew; they were talking about something else. One took hold of his elbow and, leaning toward him, slowly shook his head. Laughing cheerfully, another came out with a supposedly apt remark: “It’s okay, it’s over now.” And that was all; they stopped talking to listen to the next number.

Someone came up to him and said: “I’m a poor black autodidact, but I have a right to express my opinion, and in my opinion what you do isn’t music.” Cecil just nodded and shrugged, as if to say, What can you do? But the self-proclaimed autodidact wasn’t content to leave it at that. “Don’t you want to know the reasons for my opinion? Are you so vain, do you really think being an artist makes you so superior that you don’t care what a fellow human being thinks?” “I’m sorry, I didn’t ask because I didn’t realize there were any reasons, but if there are, I’d be interested to hear them.” A satisfied smile from the autodidact, as if he had scored a point. He explained: “It’s very simple: music is a whole made up of parts that are also musical. If the part isn’t musical, the whole isn’t either.”

The argument didn’t seem irrefutable, but it wasn’t the time or the place to go into it. And there was a more general problem too. Cecil kept thinking about this experience over the following days, as he went distractedly about his business; he replayed what had happened step by step and tried to find an explanation. He thought perhaps the explanation would occur to him once he’d forgotten what had happened, but in the meantime he couldn’t help remembering. He mentally reconstructed the club, the movements of his fingers on the keyboard, the words and reactions of the others. . and the reconstruction was accompanied by a slight sense of incredulity, the feeling inevitably provoked by whatever has, in fact, occurred.

Like a naughty child caught in the act, he confessed that he’d been hoping for a response from the musicians. The way he played might have sounded strange. Hyperharmonic piano percussion, spatial intentions translated into time, sound sculpture. . (there are always plenty of formulae to account for an extraordinary phenomenon), and someone who wasn’t working in the field could well have been disconcerted. But the professional musicians who went to the Five Spot to keep up-to-date were aware of Schoenberg and Varèse, and they used formulae themselves, all the time! The only explanation he could come up with, borrowing an argument from the crazy autodidact who had accosted him (maybe he wasn’t so crazy after all), was that “musicians are part of music”: because they couldn’t get outside it, they couldn’t offer any explicit recognition.

Actually, he wasn’t so sure that any of the musicians he thought he’d noticed had really been there, because he was very short-sighted and wore dark glasses, which, combined with the subdued lighting, made it just about impossible to see. He promised himself, as he usually did, to come back later and assess the situation more objectively. He usually failed to keep those promises, and this time, preoccupied by other things, he let several weeks go by. He took a job as a night watchman at a supermarket and then as a cleaner in a bank, and both changes obliged him to rearrange his routine and his habits. Finally he went back to the Five Spot, to hear a singer he passionately admired, and was surprised to find a job offer waiting for him.

It turned out that a rich lady who lived on Fifth Avenue was hiring pianists for her bohemian dinner parties, and recruiting them from the Five Spot, as a kind of guarantee of quality. He never found out if they did it on purpose, to him or to her. In any case, she was paying a hundred dollars, up front. Cecil prepared some lyrical improvisations (he recorded his ideas in a little notebook, using a personal system of dots). He walked in the park until the sun went down, in a state of mind hovering between “What do I care?” and a detached optimism. Squirrels were running about in the trees, as if the law of gravity had not yet come into effect. The sky suddenly turned an intense turquoise, the breeze died away, and there was a silence in which a plane could be heard flying over the city. He crossed the street and told the doorman who he was.

He entered the penthouse through the servants’ quarters, where he spent the best part of an hour drinking coffee with the staff. Finally, a valet dressed in black came to tell him it was time, then took him across the salon to the piano, a full-size grand, already open. He barely glanced at the guests, who were drinking and chatting, light years away from any conceivable music. He looked down at the keyboard and peered at the strings, shining like gold. It was a first-class piano, and seemed to be brand-new.

He played a note with his left hand, a deep B-flat, which reverberated with slow submarine convulsions. . And that was all, because the lady of the house was standing beside him, closing the lid over the keys with a movement so smooth and effective it seemed to have been rehearsed.

“We’ll do without your company for today,” she said, looking around the salon. There was applause and laughter, but only from the guests who happened to be nearby. The room was very large.

Cecil was still perplexed hours later, talking it over with his lover. How could a single note possibly have such an effect? But had it been just a single note? He honestly couldn’t remember. He could have sworn it had been just the one, but perhaps within the dream of that note, he had played one or several of his famous “tone clusters,” or launched into some scales, or put his hands into the entrails of the piano.

No matter what exactly had happened, he should have expected some such reaction, from snobs like that with no knowledge of music. But he might have expected the opposite too, because his music, unable to break through their shell of ignorance, could have spread over its surface like Vaseline and facilitated a superficial penetration.