Mauro Cardenas - The Revolutionaries Try Again

—

Not yet asleep on her living room sofa, as she listens to Tabula Rasa amid boxes she still needs to retape and ship to her new life at NYU’s film program, boxes where she may or may not toss in Antonio’s reddened manuscripts, she wonders if years from now she will only remember Antonio because of Tabula Rasa, the only piece out of all the contemporary pieces he’d included in his compendium that turned into a favorite (in a few days she will move away from San Francisco like everyone else, leaving behind friends who were really acquaintances who paired up with her simply to avoid going out at night by themselves and who will not remember her just as Antonio won’t remember them and she won’t remember him — every moment is an ending, Arvo Pärt said, every five minutes there’s an ending do you understand? — no, I don’t —), and perhaps all that will remain of San Francisco for her will be Tabula Rasa and the vague contours of Antonio at his farewell party (why hadn’t she interrupted his drunk ramblings with questions or asides or by shouting at him why are you leaving? — you didn’t want him to think you cared? — I did and didn’t, do you understand? — on the one hand everything will pass and on the other nothing will pass and I miss Antonio’s dumb sprint toward everything in the world —), and perhaps she will also remember that first night with Antonio at Bistro Stelline, and afterwards how surprised she’d been at how much he’d revealed about himself and how quickly she’d accepted his invitation to come to his apartment, although he didn’t phrase it as an invitation but simply slipped his hand on hers and said come, Masha, no, Antonio, she didn’t say, I just met you, no, Masha thinks as she listens to Tabula Rasa, she will toss Antonio’s ersatz fiction in her recycling bin along with her unused canvases and be done with a life in San Francisco she will not remember once she settles in New York.

—

I’d never listened to classical music before, Antonio wrote, at home in Guayaquil no one unwrapped the classical cassette collection compiled by the Encyclopedia Salvat because on the one hand my mother favored the melodrama of José José, not melodrama, no, let’s call it pickled fatalism, while on the other hand I favored the pickled nihilism of Guns N’ Roses: to me symphonic music as elemental as Tchaikovsky’s Pathétique sounded like sap from soundtracks, so to train my ear I started listening to easy Satie piano pieces, then I moved on to Mozart sonatas, a movement at a time, which Annie was glad to supply for me, sharing her recordings of the complete Beethoven sonatas by Richard Goode, of Schumann’s Symphonic Etudes by Alfred Brendel, everything by Sviatoslav Richter and nothing by Glenn Gould, and after I exhausted Annie’s music stash I ventured out on my own, driving to the shopping outlets in Sonoma or Saint Helena and listening to Scriabin’s sonatas or Prokofiev’s piano concertos or whatever I’d purchased at random from the classical music section at Tower Records that same afternoon, no, not at random, those listening / driving sessions were life projects to me so the recordings had to be of (a) longer piano pieces and of (b) composers I didn’t yet know, and perhaps because I didn’t yet know too many classical pieces besides the ones that Annie was introducing me to through analog recordings of Sviatoslav Richter and tapes of master classes she’d attended at Berkeley, which I was borrowing from her because I’d refused to play the little Bach pieces she’d assigned to me from the Notebook for Anna Magdalena Bach and therefore needed to know what else was out there, purchasing a recording before setting out to Sonoma or Saint Helena still felt like a chance activity, and although Annie had cautioned me against listening to piano music while driving because the onrush of road underneath obfuscates the nuances that I should be listening for, especially when the markings of a phrase demanded pianissimo, I did it anyway, purchasing Prokofiev’s piano concertos because Annie frowned upon Prokofiev — if you would have lived in San Francisco with me I would have immediately shared with you that as a young student at the St. Petersburg Conservatory Prokofiev would sneak into the concert hall before a performance to pencil wrong notes into the scores, Leopoldo — and then one night at Annie’s house, after she examined the cover of my sheet music binder that read Antonio’s Piano Career, and after she laughed at it as one laughs at the silly refrains of children, I parked outside Gordo’s Taquería on Solano Street and cloistered myself inside my car, forcing myself to listen to the first movement of Tchaikovsky’s Pathétique until it made sense to me, which must have been a long while because the burrito folk started eyeing me suspiciously: by the time I was done training my ear, I had to accept that it was too late; that there was more to playing the piano than pressing the right notes; that I would never achieve a competitive level of pianism and would never become a pianist: well, why not a writer?

—

I Am Sitting in a Room by Alvin Lucier: I am sitting in a room, Alvin Lucier said, different from the one you are in now. I am recording the sound of my speaking voice, and I am going to play it back into the room, again and again, until the resonant frequencies of the room reinforce themselves. Was this Antonio’s idea of a prank? Or was his insistence to have her listen to this piece just a pretext to seclude himself with her by his bed? Antonio wasn’t laughing, and the door to his bedroom wasn’t locked, but neither was sufficient evidence to refute her hypotheses. So that any semblance of my speech, Lucier said, with perhaps the exception of rhythm, is destroyed. What you will hear, then, if you ignore the reverb and the space sounds of the electronic dance music coming from his living room, where his farewell party wasn’t ebbing yet — can you believe it? Antonio’s going back to do the Peace Corps in his own country! — are the natural resonant frequencies of the room, articulated by speech. What you won’t hear is Antonio relaying his unspoken expectation of her to her: concentrate, Masha, music isn’t just counterpoint and variations. But I regard this activity, Lucier said, not so much as a demonstration of a physical fact, but more as a way to smooth out any irregularities my speech might have. I am sitting in a room, different from the one you are in now. After the seventh or eighth iteration she stopped listening in for surprises. Lucier was simply shearing his voice and what remained was metallic noise. His fingers surprised her by grazing her lips. She didn’t smile so he did it again, this time acting as if he was clearing bread crumbs, stepping back, drunk like the rest of them — all of my friends here are party friends, Mashinka — turning his left hand into a bird, fingers like antlers, as he had done the night they stormed out of the premiere of Messiaen’s San Francis de Assisi. Whatever he saw in her face saddened him but he was a quick one, raising his index finger in mockery, as if he had just remembered something important: aha, yes, he had to stop his double decker and tap the other portable player to check that it was still running. Are you recording this, Antonio? He nodded, motioning with his hand to please recite something for him. Sure, why not? She could recite something he wasn’t likely to know: here is my gift, she could recite, not roses on your grave, not sticks of burning incense: alone you let the terrible stranger in, she could recite, and stayed with her alone: only my voice, like a flute, she could recite, will mourn at your dumb funeral feast: but she didn’t feel like giving him that satisfaction. Later that night, at her apartment, she was to recite those lines out loud to herself. They’re opening a new crêpe place on Gough, she said. I’m sorry I didn’t call you about the party, Masha. I figured you would hate it anyway. Or that you would expect to find painters like you, pianists and poets, a salon. All last minute anyway. I’m leaving. I was going to call you and tell you. To Ecuador? Where else, Masha? Berlin, Barcelona, New York? Guayaquil has one performance arts center named after one of our presidents who was praised by Reagan for his strong armed tactics. The shows mostly comedies there? Antonio laughed. Then he sat down on the bench by his bed and cried. Was this another ploy of his to embarrass her? To expose her callousness? To repulse her with his self pity? No. He probably would have cried even if she wasn’t there. Or wouldn’t have cried if she was there but hadn’t dismissed his manuscripts. Or if she would have asked him to tell her more about Alvin Lucier. How easy it is to discourage aspiring writers. Because of his flower pants and his ruffled shirt she still expected him to turn his crying into a joke. He didn’t. She didn’t know then that this would be the last time she would see him. That her last gestures toward him would be nongestures: no sitting next to him on his bench, arms around his shoulders, trying to convince him to stay. Imagine a different life in Berlin or New York, where you could walk out of operas like Messiaen’s every week. Goodbye, Antonio.