Rupert Thomson - Air and Fire

‘I do.’

‘You must like it very much,’ Rodrigo said, ‘to come all the way up here with that bad foot.’

‘It’s good for it. The doctor told me. It’s exercise.’

‘Exercise. I see.’ Rodrigo was still polishing the glass, only much more slowly now.

‘An orange juice and a beer,’ Wilson said, ‘when you’re ready, that is.’

‘No beer today, Señor.’

‘I’ll have two orange juices then.’

‘What about yesterday?’

‘What about yesterday, Rodrigo?’

‘You didn’t pay me for yesterday. Or the day before.’ Rodrigo made a few languid calculations on his fingers. ‘You owe me forty-five pesos.’

Wilson sighed.

‘I know, I know,’ Rodrigo said. ‘One day you’ll find your gold and then you’ll pay me everything.’

When Rodrigo brought the drinks, some ten minutes later, Wilson turned to the Frenchwoman and apologised. ‘You know, the oranges come from Mulege,’ he said. ‘It’s about forty miles south of town. The time it takes Rodrigo to make a glass of juice, I reckon he probably goes down there and picks them himself.’

‘It doesn’t matter. I’m not in a hurry.’ She smiled. ‘We saw Mulege from the boat. There were many palm trees. And a rock shaped like a hat.’ She sipped at her drink. ‘And you, Monsieur,’ she said, ‘where are you from?’

As if he, too, were a species of fruit.

‘San Francisco,’ he said.

‘San Francisco?’ The name had the effect of widening her eyes and softening her voice.

‘That’s where I learned to play the piano.’

He found himself talking about his childhood, San Francisco in the early days. You could only mine for gold from April until October, and the city was almost empty then. In the winter everyone returned. There were not enough jobs to go around. Pay was low. His father had worked down at the docks unloading cargo. Only five dollars a ton, but he was lucky to have a job at all. It seemed to rain all the time. There was great poverty, great frustration. People got killed over nothing, and the punishment for murder was death.

The city was so new, unformed. Many of the streets did not even have names. He would make them up himself. In those days the cost of storing merchandise was more than the merchandise itself was worth. Goods were often dumped outdoors, simply abandoned. There was a sidewalk close to where Wilson lived that was built out of sacks of flour from Shanghai. He called it Chinese Flour Street. There were others too: Saucepan Alley, Tobacco Way –

‘The street where I grew up,’ he said, ‘it was always called Piano Street.’

‘There were pianos?’

‘A dozen of them, maybe more. And some still worked. That was how I learned to play, right there, in the middle of the street. With people passing by. Sometimes they would throw me money.’

‘Did you play concerts for them?’

Wilson nodded. ‘I even did a funeral once.’

A friend of his, John Goode by name, had died of pneumonia. Wilson had played the ‘Funeral March’ by Chopin for John Goode’s family as they carried the boy’s coffin up the street. It had rained that day and he could still remember the feeling of his fingers slipping on the black keys.

He stopped and looked at her. She was gazing down into her glass. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘Maybe I talked too fast.’

‘No, no,’ she said. ‘I understand almost everything.’

At last she looked up and wonder filled her face so full, it almost seemed as if it could have been poured. He saw that he had brought her some kind of happiness, though he did not know how, nor could he begin to guess.

‘Pardon me for asking, ma’am, but what’s your name?’

Her hand moved to hide her mouth. ‘Oh, I’m sorry, Monsieur. How impolite of me.’ But she was smiling — or at least her eyes were, leaves narrowing and sharpening at the edges.

‘It’s nothing,’ he said. ‘We just forgot.’

‘I am Suzanne Valence.’

He rose to his feet and, after first wiping his hand so as not to soil her glove, offered it to her.

‘Wilson Pharaoh,’ he said.

‘I’m delighted to meet you, Mr Pharaoh,’ she said. ‘Now please, I beg you, tell me more about Piano Street.’

Wilson placed his glass on top of the piano and lifted the lid. The keyboard seemed to grin at him. For the last week he had been making his way up to the Calle Francesa every afternoon — it had taken real determination; once he had even walked — and he had played the piano for an hour each time, but he had been denied even a glimpse of the woman in the yellow dress. Only the day before he had decided to give up on it: the piano, the woman — everything. Now it turned out that she had been staying in the hotel, one floor above, that she had been listening to him all along. And here he was, about to play for her in person! The tips of his fingers rested on the keys. He would begin with something spritely, a dance tune that his father used to whistle.

It was a while later and he was just embarking on a piece of Schubert when the doctor ran lightly up the hotel steps. As he entered the lobby he saw Suzanne, and bowed from the waist. ‘Madame.’ Then his eye fell on Wilson, over at the piano. ‘Ah, Monsieur Pharaoh.’ He launched himself across the room. ‘But I am sure that I told you to rest. Or is my English so bad?’

The doctor was wearing a different waistcoat today, but it was no disappointment: a brocade design in colours that could only be described as burgundy and lightning.

‘Your English is not bad at all, Doctor. Your English is very good.’

‘Then what am I to understand? That you cannot live without music? That, without this,’ the doctor clutched at the air, ‘this opportunity for self-expression, your life would be a misery?’

‘A little piano practice,’ and Wilson spread his hands. ‘Surely that cannot hurt.’

The doctor leaned down, a glint of mischief in his eye, and lowered his voice. ‘And the company of a beautiful woman,’ and he tapped Wilson on the shoulder with the backs of his fingers. ‘Am I wrong, Monsieur Pharaoh?’

He waited until he saw that Wilson could not find an answer, then he stood back, rolling one wing of his moustache between finger and thumb. A smile darted nimbly from one part of his face to another.

‘Try to rest, Monsieur Pharaoh. Just a little. For me.’ And, dusting one palm against the other, the doctor spun on his heel and glided from the room. His waistcoat flickered in the gloom of the long corridor that led to the back of the hotel.

‘What did he say?’ Rodrigo asked, in Spanish.

Wilson spoke over the staccato notes of Carmen. ‘Well, Rodrigo, it was just like I said the other day. He told me to keep playing. For the exercise.’

‘Mr Pharaoh,’ came Suzanne’s voice from the far end of the room, ‘you are the most terrible liar.’

‘Yes, ma’am. That’s true.’ And the distance between them gave him the courage to voice the first thought that came to mind. ‘But I would never lie to you.’

A few minutes later, he walked back across the room towards her, walked into her soft applause.

‘I remember when that was first performed in France.’ She smiled. ‘Everybody hated it.’

‘It’s one of my favourite pieces,’ he said.

‘Mine too.’ Her smile widened. ‘And now you have brought it here,’ she said, ‘to Santa Sofía.’ She turned her glass on its base and then lifted her eyes to his. ‘Tell me, Monsieur. Do you like it here?’

It was not something he had thought much about. He shifted in his chair. ‘It’s a town full of strangers. There’s nobody that belongs, not really.’

‘You’re talking about us,’ she said, ‘the French.’