César Aira - The Musical Brain - And Other Stories

Time went by, but brought no changes. That winter there were a number of notable opportunities. A bar with a bad reputation took him on for a week to provide some late-night variety (he was to start at two a.m.). The bad reputation was due to the dealing done in the back room. The owner, who was also the dealer, was Irish; he went to see Cecil personally and explained what he wanted: real, innovative music, not just wallpaper. Cecil asked if he’d heard about his playing. He didn’t quite dare ask if he’d actually heard him play. The Irishman nodded without elaborating and offered him twenty dollars a night.

The place was seedy. The clientele was made up of black drug addicts, and a significant number of old ladies with resigned expressions, waiting in the corners. Two cobwebby pianos were standing guard at the back of the room. No one was paying any attention to the banjo trio and its messy chords. Paradoxically, there was a good ambience, a certain excitement in the air, almost like a prior music.

He sat down at one of the pianos. . He wasn’t sure which one, he wasn’t there long enough be sure, because he’d only played a pair of chords or bursts of notes when the owner of the bar tapped him on the shoulder and, with a worried look on his face, told him to wrap it up. Cecil took his hands off the keys and the downward pressure on his shoulder became an upward-pulling grip that lifted him to his feet. One of the old black ladies had appeared on the other side of him, and, as if she’d been waiting for a sign, slid into his place on the stool and began to play “Body and Soul.”

The Irishman showed him the way out, still looking worried. The speechless pianist was wondering what there could possibly be in his music to worry a man who dealt every day with the dangerous suppliers and buyers of hard drugs. The dealer held out a ten-dollar bill but, just as Cecil was about to take it, pulled his hand away.

“You weren’t playing some kind of joke, were you?”

There was a menacing gleam in his squinty eyes. Cecil wondered whether there had really been two pianos. That character had been dealing in danger so long, he had absorbed it and become danger in person. He would have weighed two hundred pounds, more than twice as much as the pianist, who didn’t wait around for further denigration.

Cecil was a kind of sprite, always stylish in spite of his limited means, wearing velvet and white leather, and pointed shoes that complemented his compact, muscular physique. He didn’t exercise, but the way he played the piano engaged every movable molecule in his body. Sweating had become second nature to him. He could lose as much as ten pounds in an afternoon of improvising at his old piano. Extraordinarily absentminded, whimsical, and volatile, when he sat down and crossed his legs (in his loose pants, immaculate shirt, and knitted waistcoat) he was as ornamental as a bibelot. His continual changes of address protected him; they were the little genie’s suspended dwellings, and there he slept on a bed of chrysanthemums, under the shade of a droplet-laden spiderweb.

That night he walked the deep streets of the island’s south, thinking. There was something odd: the attitude of the voluminous Irish heroin dealer was not substantially different from that of the lady who lived on Fifth Avenue, except that she didn’t seem worried, though perhaps she was just hiding it. And yet the two individuals were not at all alike. Except in that one respect. Could it be that the propensity to interrupt him was the common denominator of the human race? And he discovered something more in the Irishman’s final words, something he began to reconstruct from the memories of all his ill-fated performances. People always asked him if he was doing it as a joke. Some people, of course, the rich lady for example, didn’t deign to ask, but their behavior presupposed the question. And he wondered why the question applied to him, but not to others. For example, he would never have asked the lady, or the Irishman, if they did what they did (whatever it was) seriously or as a joke. There was something inherent in his work that raised the question.

Another rich lady, Mrs. Vanderbilt, figured in a famous anecdote, mentioned in virtually all the psychology books written around that time. She once decided to liven up a dinner party with some violin music. She asked who the best violinist in the world was. Why would she settle for second best? Fritz Kreisler, she was told. She called him on the telephone. I don’t give private concerts, he said: my fee is too high. That’s not a problem, replied Mrs. Vanderbilt: How much? Ten thousand dollars. All right. I’ll expect you tonight. But there is just one thing, Mr. Kreisler: you will dine in the kitchen with the servants, and you must not mix with my guests. In that case, he said, I’ll have to alter my fee. That’s not a problem, how much? Two thousand dollars, replied the violinist.

The behaviorists loved that story, and they would go on loving it all their lives, telling it to one another tirelessly and transcribing it in their books and articles. But what about his anecdote, the one about Cecil Taylor? Would anyone love that? Would anyone tell it? Anecdotes had to succeed too — didn’t they? — for someone to repeat them.

That summer, along with a horde of other musicians, he was invited to participate in the Newport festival, at which a couple of afternoons would be given over to the presentation of new artists. Cecil thought about it: his music, which was essentially new, would be a challenge to that festive, seaside atmosphere. All the same, it was a change from the smoke and chatter of bars: he’d be performing for jazz fans, who’d paid for their tickets and come to listen and judge. And yet, although he prepared for the event with his customary dedication, when the day came, his performance was an absolute fiasco. No one interrupted him this time, but the listening was interrupted: the audience walked out, which didn’t stop the critics and journalists among them having an opinion. Not even an opinion about him; they used it as a pretext to settle scores with the organizers, who were so lacking in judgment that they’d invited people who didn’t even play jazz, or any kind of music. The closest thing to criticism came from the Down Beat journalist. Without mentioning Cecil by name, and adopting an ironic tone, he trotted out a version of the Cretan liar paradox: If someone were to hammer a piano with his fists and say, “I am making music. .” Music, thought Cecil as he read, can’t be paradoxical, because of its nonlinguistic nature, and yet what is happening to me is a paradox. How can that be?

He couldn’t come up with an answer, then or ever. Over the following months he performed in half a dozen bars, always a different place because the result was always the same, and he received two invitations, which reopened the wound of anticipation, one from a university and the other from the organizers of a series of avant-garde events at the Cooper Union. He took up the first with some hope, which turned out to be misplaced (within a few minutes, the room was empty; the professor who had issued the invitation came up with complicated excuses and hated him ever after), but at least it served to provoke a reflection, which might have been misplaced as well, not that Cecil cared anymore: an educated audience was equivalent in every respect to an uneducated one. They were the same, in fact, except that they were looking in opposite directions, facing away from each other. The pivot on which their seats turned was the hoary old tale of the emperor’s new clothes. For one group the obscene and shameful thing was nakedness; for the other, it was clothes.

His experience at the Cooper Union was even less gratifying. They used a blackout as a pretext to stop him halfway through; there was vigorous booing, and from what he heard later, his performance left the audience wondering about the limits of music, and whether he had meant it as a joke.