Antonio Molina - Sepharad

SOMEONE IS WAITING NOW in the reception room, courteously asking permission to come into my office. I hide in the drawer the letter or book I was reading. Of all the names and faces from that time, one figure stands out, nameless now, and another I remember perfectly. Two images, like illustrations from two different stories, but both set in the same place and atmosphere, a gloomy waiting room where applicants wait hours or days. A man and then a woman, their accents not the same. I listen in a silence broken only by the keyboard. The woman has a child in her arms, no, seated on her knees, because he isn’t a baby but a child of two or three. “What luck,” she is saying, speaking with a Montevideo or Buenos Aires accent. “I’m so happy that he can’t remember.”

The man speaks a meticulous, slightly formal Spanish, which he learned in his own country, I can’t remember now whether it was Romania or Bulgaria, when he was a teenager and he thought of Spain not as a real country but a fabulous kingdom of literature and music, especially music, the pieces that he studied at the conservatory in his distant past as a child prodigy, when he astounded his professors by playing from memory difficult piano passages from Albéniz, de Falla, and Debussy, invocations of gardens in the moonlight and Muslim palaces with splendors of stonework and murmuring fountains. He read translations of Washington Irving and listened to and quickly learned Ravel’s Rhapsody Espagnole and Night in Grenada by Debussy, who had never seen the city when he wrote that music, the pianist told me, and who in fact never traveled to Spain, though it was not far away and he had written music indebted to it. The pianist told me that the first time he walked through the Alhambra, after escaping from his country, Debussy’s music played in his mind, and he seemed to recognize the things around him not from photographs or drawings but from the faint notes of a piano.

AT FIRST HE WAS an applicant like any other, although somewhat better dressed and with better manners, which were as correct as his use of the Spanish language. In the half light of the reception room, he leafed through a magazine on the low table as if he were in a doctor’s waiting room. He, too, had brought a dossier, his briefcase with clippings and photocopies, but his were better organized than usual, the pages protected in plastic sleeves, some with color photographs and programs of recitals in the cities of Central Europe, often with text in Cyrillic characters. On the cover of the album was a professional artist’s photograph, somewhat dated, a younger and more vigorous version of the man before me; the pose was that of an impetuous, romantic concert artist, long hair, closely fitted tuxedo, elbow propped on the lid of a grand piano, hand on cheek with the index finger touching his temple, a dreamer of consummate virtuosity. Or maybe I’m remembering the jacket of a recording of Spanish music published at the height of his career, which he insisted on giving me though earlier he told me that there were few copies left, because all his records and books, everything he owned — except his credentials as a musician — had been abandoned, left behind at the border that then divided Europe. “I didn’t desert, didn’t flee,” he said. “ Me fui, as you say in Spanish: I went away, because I didn’t want to spend the rest of my life toeing a line, afraid my neighbor or colleague was a spy or that there were hidden microphones in the dressing room.” It wasn’t political, he assured me, sitting there in my office while I was willing him to leave so I could be alone again and he was lingering in the hope that the manager would come that morning. “I couldn’t bear to live in my country any longer, because everything was always the same, the face of the head of government on all the posters and in all the newspapers and on television, and his voice on the radio, while things that for you in the West are normal, buying a bottle of shampoo or looking up a number in the telephone book, were difficult, often impossible. In my country there are no telephone books, and it is a major undertaking to get a permit for foreign travel. If you try to bring in a typewriter, they confiscate it at customs and put you on the list of suspicious persons. But what am I saying, my country? Now my country is Spain.”

He set his dossier to one side, first making sure the album was tightly closed so no photograph, program, or clipping could fall out, and felt for something inside his skimpy jacket — velvet, I remember now, with very wide lapels, a jacket more for an obsolete crooner than a piano player — and for a moment his expression turned to alarm as he patted all his pockets, looking at me with a smile of embarrassment and apology, as if I were a policeman who’d asked for identification. But then the anxious fingers touched what they were looking for, the flexible covers of a passport so tenderly handled that it looked new, just like the identification card the pianist now showed me, his color photograph sealed beneath the smooth plastic along with his strange Romanian or Slavic name, which I’ve forgotten.

His long, pale fingers stroked those documents with reverence, with amazement that they existed, with the anxiety that they could be lost. So many years living in a country he wanted to get out of to visit another that he knew only through books and music, through the sonorous names in the scores he learned so well at the conservatory, all that tension on the eve of the final decision, when he climbed out the washroom window of his dressing room on the tour through Spain to avoid being seen by the agents watching him and his companions, all the waiting, giving statements in police stations and presenting papers, living in Red Cross shelters or filthy boardinghouses, with the fear of being expelled or, worse, repatriated, what a horrible word, he told me, with no money, no identity, in a no-man’s-land between the life he’d left and the one he had yet to begin, divested of the security and privileges he had enjoyed as a renowned pianist in his country, uncertain about the chances of beginning a new career here, of being unknown.

The bewildered look of one who has nurtured a dream for years and actually accomplished it contrasted, on his face and in his eyes, with the melancholy of one who has gradually capitulated to reality. He had been a child prodigy in the conservatory at Bucharest or Sofia, and his collection of clippings and programs attested to a distinguished career in the concert halls of Eastern Europe. But now he was spending entire mornings in the reception room of my office, awaiting a decision on a contract that would guarantee him, at most, two or three performances in cultural centers on the outskirts of the city, in theaters with bad acoustics and mediocre, badly tuned pianos.

He wasn’t allowing himself to be discouraged, and if he came into my office and I told him that the manager wouldn’t be in that day or that we hadn’t even begun processing the forms for his contract, he would smile weakly, thank me, and bow as he left with a mixture of old-fashioned Central European courtesy and Communist stiffness: a timid deference toward any official that he would probably never lose. He was a young man, small: in my now-faded memory he looks something like Roman Polanski, a fleeting liveliness in the eyes and gestures that at a certain distance erases the signs of age.

He was giving private lessons, and he sought and accepted concerts anywhere, earning almost nothing, a fee sometimes so low that when he was going over the figures, he told himself, using one of those Spanish sayings he liked so much, “Minimum pay, food for the day.” He also told himself, “Better than stone soup,” and, “A bird in the hand is worth scores on the wing” in the painstaking Spanish so passionately learned in a capital with broken-down streetcars, long winters, and early nightfalls, practiced privately and with the dream of escape and rebellion, much as he learned to play the most difficult passages of Albéniz’s Iberia or Ravel’s Rhapsody Espagnole. Now, although the fruits of his dream were so meager, because in Spain his career as a piano virtuoso meant nothing and he had to perform in lamentable venues, wearing worn clothing and living under the constant strain of poverty, he refused to give in to depression and continued to show his gratitude and enthusiasm for his new country. It was a pathetic happiness, as of a man in love who knows he is scorned by his beloved but still gives her his boundless devotion.