Laura Furman - The O Henry Prize Stories 2005

“Bravo! How soon do you start?”

They set up an appointment on the spot.

The following time, Miguel did an impressive job with some exercises by Clementi. He was anxious to finish telling me his story:

“That afternoon, after my outburst, the world seemed to be holding its breath. Rosario behaved as though nothing had happened. On the beach, I sought refuge in Lilí-her uncomplicated light. Together we built a sand castle-a château, in fact, with all the fairy-tale trappings-and I spun tales in which she starred as its resident princess. We had supper around five, for her sake. Both Rosario and I spontaneously dressed up for the hotel's rather pretentious restaurant, and Lilí got to wear her ‘royal gown’ (a velvet frock). Rosario had somehow managed to manicure her nails. I refused to let myself believe she had done this for me. I half convinced myself that if I indulged such a presumptuous fantasy, those crimson rake-teeth would lash out and flay me. A tasty terror.

“Afterward I lay on my bed, clothed, letting myself be mesmerized by the revolutions of the ceiling fan. The dimness around me thickened. I was conscious only of a thudding right beneath my Adam's apple. Someone knocked. Rosario-in a silk nightgown that tied behind the neck.

Without a word, she floated past me and tiptoed to the door that communicated with her room, opened it a crack, listened. I began to say something. Her palm muzzled me, warmly. I kissed it. She stepped back. My hopes froze. She reached behind her neck and undid the bow.

“I’ve usually found in even the most alluring woman some falsity, some tinge of coarseness that diminishes my respect for her. It was just the opposite with Rosario. One detail made our intimacy especially poignant: she was both with me and with her sleeping child. An instinctive vigilance radiated from her-a wave of tenderness combined with a coiled readiness to spring, if necessary, to her daughter's defense. I sensed this as palpably as one feels the sun on one's skin.

“Then the idyll was over. Dismal! In the last eighty-one days, I’ve seen Rosario alone exactly four times. I mustn’t push for more. She's devoted to Lilí and Roberto.

“Every day I’m not with her weighs like jail. All I want to do is hibernate-but I can’t fall asleep, thinking about her. It's turning me into a zombie. I play a lot, to distract myself.” He paused. “Can I study that new piece you gave her?”

“Which one?”

“By Mompou.” He hummed the theme. “It won’t leave me alone.”

I produced a score for him. “Start by working out the fingerings.”

“What's the title?”

“Secreto.”

His teeth clamped down on his lip.

It was around then that I performed Prokofiev's Paysage for Miguel, to demonstrate what delights lay in store if he stuck at his drills. I finished, and he exclaimed, “You don’t mean to tell me that's how all women are!”

“Of course not.”

It puzzled him that Roberto disallowed this sort of comprehension: “We’ll hear a piece at a concert. His only comment is ‘I liked it’ or ‘I didn’t like it’-as if it were a flan. When I try to discuss what it's about, he gets sarcastic: ‘I don’t need to make up stories to go with the soundtrack.’”

Even with me, Roberto practically brandished this incapacity. (Or was it puerile resistance, a stance adopted in order to distinguish himself from his more aesthetic friend?) “I honestly can’t see anything more in music than a formally pleasing arrangement of melodies, harmonies, and rhythms.”

“Only that, Roberto?”

He would shrug.

One day, having played a piece by Schumann, he said: “This moves me.”

“Why?”

He flicked his nose. “I just feel an affinity…”

I launched into my own rendition, emphasizing certain of the ideas.

“Wait! Is it his family?”

“He and his wife and his children, all joined in some activity-that's his heaven. They’re a hearth that cheers him and drives off the world's chill…”

He became keen to learn the language of music, notwithstanding his limited aptitude. Every week he would turn up with some new revelation. Frequently he was guessing rather than hearing; nevertheless, he gained increasing trust in his own ear. “This passage demands a crescendo here,” I would tell him, demonstrating. He would acquiesce but venture: “Maybe a tad softer, eh?”

Rosario, for her part, had a vivid sympathy with the Romantic repertoire, so much so that she was often disturbed by the anguished passions it depicted. Like a child who cannot bear stories in which dumb beasts are threatened, she shied away from extreme emotions. If she was unsettled by one of Chopin's evocations of jealousy, say, she felt free to leaven it with some congenial sentiment of her own, or simply to use the music as a vehicle for her mood of the moment. Although this disqualified her as an interpreter, it need not have prevented her from developing into a competent instrumentalist. She could have cloaked her failing beneath the ensemble of a chamber group, or excelled as a soloist in those grandiloquent calliopes which are the warhorse piano concertos. Empty compositions would have come out sounding expressive with her.

As the summer receded, I had less time for my students beyond the ambit of their lessons. Miguel gradually resigned himself to scant, sporadic trysts. He and Roberto carried on their reciprocal coaching. Soon they were plodding through Schubert's Ländler , D. 814. I advised Roberto to prepare a similar piece with Rosario. He contended it was too difficult to coordinate their schedules. The flimsiness of the alibi made me suspect that what really thwarted him was the fear that playing side by side with her would show him to poor advantage.

He declared his intention to acquire a grand piano.

“What's the matter with your upright?” I asked him.

“I don’t do things by halves,” he retorted. “Besides, Rosario should have an instrument worthy of her talent.”

At his insistence, I referred him to el señor Alvear, proprietor of the Casa de Pianos. Soon afterward, I was hurrying along a street downtown when a tubby, florid figure up the block began bouncing toward me, waving: el señor Alvear. He had on a beret and a muffler (no overcoat), and as usual he toted a wicker basket filled with bonbons. “Catch, catch!” he cried in his flügelhorn voice, and lobbed foil-wrapped candies at me.

Flushed, beaming, he bussed me on the cheek. “You’ve sent me a tycoon! The man has to have a full-size grand, no less.”

“You didn’t sell him one…”

“Anything larger than three-quarters was excessive, I told him. That only made him want to buy a full-size more.”

“A baby grand will do him fine.”

He cocked his head. “A smaller piano means a smaller commission for you.”

“Así es.”

When I next stopped at Roberto's and Rosario’s, a Blüthner Aliquod baby grand loomed in the twilight of the living room. Rosario went to get me a glass of juice from the kitchen, where Lilí was being given dinner by the maid. Roberto was talking on the telephone in the study. An odd dissonance charged the atmosphere. I sat down at the piano to try it out. Feathery action, pedals that yielded without the slightest creak, ringing tones in every range.

Roberto sauntered in. “How do you like it?”

“How do you like it, is the question.”

“Not bad for its size, I suppose.”

“But it's magnificent!”

“He knows it's magnificent,” Rosario said, stepping into the room. “He's just grumpy because he won’t be playing it himself.”

“What do you mean?”

“Well, not for a while,” he conceded, chagrined. “My company bid for a job down south. It's so much bigger than anything we’ve done before, we didn’t think we’d win it. The word came yesterday. I’ve been put in command.”