Come On Up

by jordi Nopca

  After perverting “Yesterday,” the Japanese virtuoso took on the challenge of “Michelle,” another song dripping with melancholy, and I couldn’t bear to listen. Locked in my bedroom, the flatulent sounds were muffled, and they disappeared completely when I stuck some earbuds in and detoxified with 69 Love Songs, by the Magnetic Fields.

  ###

  The day of his first sax lesson was approaching, and my father’s nervousness was growing. One day, as the four of us were having dinner, he said that, after a while, once he was good, he’d like to play with a band on the street. There was an uncomfortable silence. My mother stuck a piece of fish into her mouth. My sister gave me a sarcastic look and said that if he couldn’t find a band to join, he could always buy a goat and go around playing songs to get the animal dancing on a chair.

  “I don’t have to beg for change just yet,” he replied.

  No one said anything else during the rest of the dinner. Not even the comedy show on TV could camouflage the discomfort we were all, for a variety of reasons, feeling. Afterward, as I helped my mother load the dishwasher, she confessed that the whole sax thing was starting to be worrisome.

  “He spends the whole darn day listening to that blasted Japanese CD. He’s imagining he’ll start a band, or get hired by an orchestra, or play on the street. Does that seem normal to you?”

  Then she told me that one day he’d even told her that he wanted to buy himself an amplifier and do playback over famous songs, like the musicians who go from car to car in the metro, repeating without rhyme or reason “O Sole Mio,” “Bésame Mucho,” “Tico-Tico,” or “Porqué te vas,” and occasionally daring to take on more recent hits, like “Dragostea din tei” or “Ai se eu te pego.”

  “How can he play anything when he hasn’t even managed to quit smoking?”

  My mother’s question was reasonable, although I tried to make her see that the two things didn’t necessarily have to be related. The challenge of learning the sax occupied one part of his brain. His tobacco addiction was hidden in some other dark corner. I figured that if he devoted enough time to the instrument and found it relatively easy to learn, my dad could achieve some results. The way I saw it, the main problem wasn’t that he smoked, but whether he would be able to keep up with his practicing and not let his ambition fade out quickly. On the other hand, Mom smoked two or three cigarettes a day, and nobody was on her about it; that was just how it was.

  “There aren’t a lot of successful saxophone players who started playing after sixty. Maybe he isn’t really seriously hoping to learn,” replied my mother. My thought was that she should just button her lip, let him get it out of his system. “So why is he bothering with this? Couldn’t he do something easier?”

  When CDs became the standard, my uncle—my father’s brother—gave him two compilations that rarely emerged from the back of the drawer they’d ended up in: a selection of pieces played on the trumpet, and another on the sax. The adaptations were hopeless, but not as awkward as those of the Japanese guy, who managed to turn the Beatles’ repertoire into mortifying elevator music. I remember once hearing him say that the trumpet and sax were “lovely instruments” and that, if he ever had “enough time,” he would learn to play them. The moment had arrived.

  “I get that he needs some sort of distraction,” continued my mother. “And the truth is, he’s always had a good ear. When we were young, he could play any song he wanted to, on the harmonica and that weird flute he still has in the office.”

  “The melodica.”

  “Yeah. That’s it. The … melodica.”

  His melodica playing had always been sporadic. It was that strange object, rescued from a prehistory in which neither my sister nor I existed, that was kept in the same drawer as the stapler, the scissors, the paper clips, and, later, the Post-its.

  “Maybe now he’ll really try, Mama. You never know,” I said.

  I was trying to avoid thinking that the whole sax affair could be a small failure. All the clues scattered throughout the years pointed to negative conclusions. Not even I, thirty-five years younger than my dad, had been able to pull off an instrument mastered by many more hobbyists. My guitar had been exiled to the back of a closet strewn with moth-repellent sachets, even though the souvenir scar on my left hand remains in the same place as ever.

  That very night, as my father slept on the sofa and my mother finished hanging up the laundry, my sister and I went into the office, pulled the sax out of its case, and put it together. Getting the reed in the right spot on the mouthpiece wasn’t easy, but when we did, we tried to play the instrument. Neither of us could get a single note out, just a half dozen consolation squeaks. We quickly abandoned our attempts, our faces etched with disappointment.

  “This is bullshit,” she said.

  “It’s too hard.”

  “Total bullshit.”

  ###

  On the Friday before Dad’s first lesson, I went over to my grandparents’ for lunch. Every week, we repeated the same ritual. They asked me to come at two on the dot, and I could never get there on time because my classes ended at one-thirty and it took at least thirty-five minutes to get from the university to their house. When I rang their bell—2B—my grandmother informed me that I was late even before asking who was there. This strategy had led, on more than one occasion, to her having scolded the guy who came to collect the monthly portion of burial fees that both she and my grandfather had been paying off for more than four decades. We had more than once argued over the point of those payments, but I always got the same response: They wanted to leave this world without a single debt, unlike some people they knew who’d left the cost of their coffin and funeral to their families.

  That Friday, I entered their apartment at ten after two. My grandfather had already finished his first course and was waiting with the patience of a saint for my grandmother to polish off the last few boiled potatoes on her plate before serving the second course.

  “You’re always late.”

  We ate while watching the news on TV. The sports segment generated the most comments, at least from my grandpa. During the only cultural information in the entire show—a segment with no script that showed rotating images of a ceramics exhibition—my grandmother got up noisily from her chair and went out onto the balcony to get a few pieces of fruit. On the way, without meaning to, she jogged her husband’s arm, sending his last bite of marinated pork loin onto the worn floor tiles. Since she didn’t realize, neither I nor my grandfather felt the need to draw attention to the transgression. As she chose the riper tangerines, I surreptitiously grabbed the bit of meat and placed it back on his plate. I had to stifle an appalled expression when my grandfather put it in his mouth.

  As we drank our coffee after the meal, it was time to travel eighty years into the past. The stories ranged from the declaration of the Second Republic to the end of ration cards in the fifties. The more times their collection of anecdotes were repeated, the more contextual information they lost, increasingly focused on seemingly unimportant details. The day Franco’s troops entered Barcelona was remembered for the textbooks that were left in the empty closets by the classrooms.

  “The bastards never let us get them,” declared my grandpa.

  To keep from getting emotional, he moved on to another fragment of his life. He could talk about summer camps, boxing matches on the street, or his love of soccer—he’d been a Sants fan until, shortly before Camp Nou opened, he halfheartedly switched to rooting for Barça. If he was in a bad mood, he would spew out some memory of the Francoist police or the things people would do for more generous rations.

  “There were mothers who let them cop a feel in exchange for a little more food. And there were daughters who had to tolerate the looks the cops gave them as they groped their mothers. They would have preferred the young flesh. You get my drift?”

  That Friday, I was lucky and my grandfather reminisced about an evening at the start of the war when he went to the movies with his little
brother. Halfway through the film, the air-raid sirens went off. Before they could get out of their seats, the theater went completely dark. Everyone started running. My grandfather did the best he could with his brother piggyback. When they were already in the lobby, a man bumped into them, almost sending the house of flesh tumbling down, but failing—even when he pushed them and even when he punched his barely seven-year-old enemy in the face. My grandfather had to accept the blow without retaliating even verbally, and continue fleeing the movie theater. It wasn’t until he was outside that he realized he still had his little brother on his back, and that, unlike him, the younger boy was crying in silence.

  My grandmother, who at some point in his story had gone to the kitchen, came back in, muttering enthusiastic words.

  “Come here! Come here!” she finally shouted when she was standing by the table, gesturing us over. “They’re at it again, Josep. You hear me?”

  “What do you mean?” asked my grandfather, his head still a bit fuzzy with the memory of the punch in the face at the movies.

  “The candles. The robes. The neighbors!”

  On the way to the kitchen, I got up to speed on my grandma’s latest detective investigation. A couple of weeks ago, one night when she’d gone to take the clothes off the line, she saw a light in apartment 1A. Their kitchen window offered a privileged view into one of the neighbors’ rooms. That day, instead of spying on Antònia picking her nose or having a glass of muscatel behind her husband Ramon’s back, she saw her dressed in a black robe and lighting a bunch of candles, which were distributed at strategic points throughout the room. My grandmother sensed that something was going on in there, so she turned off the kitchen light and was very still, until her neighbor’s husband appeared, also in a robe, and shortly after that two strangers, dressed in the same severe, gleaming uniforms.

  “Then I heard some strange singing. In Latin! My blood froze. I went to find your grandfather, and by the time I managed to get him out of his armchair and over to the window, the neighbors had taken off their robes and were naked, and the strangers, who were still dressed, were painting their faces red.

  “That wasn’t the end of the ritual. The music continued, accompanied by the four participants’ solemn voices, and every once in a while a nude body appeared by the window, picked up a candle, and lit it.”

  “Did they do anything else?” I asked.

  Irked, my grandmother explained that Antònia’s husband had felt the need to draw the curtain.

  “Did they see you?”

  She assured me they hadn’t. According to her telling of the events, Ramon had closed the curtain for another reason: “The spirit they had invoked was about to arrive.”

  ###

  We looked through the window as my grandmother’s words gradually impregnated the room with a supernatural atmosphere. Below us we saw a black robe folded on a table, and a bag filled with thin white candles. We waited for something more to happen, our eyes fixed on the two objects, accompanied—I couldn’t say exactly since when—by my grandfather’s nervous panting as he listened to the story and nodded his head every once in a while.

  The spirit had come on the night of the ritual, and it was still nearby, trapped inside 1A. My grandmother assured me that it needed to be freed and allowed to return to the world of the dead as soon as possible.

  “Now we can rest easy,” she continued. “Tonight they are going to send it back home.”

  She paused dramatically to give us each a deep, penetrating stare—first my grandfather, then me.

  “I was afraid they’d summoned it to take one of us away.”

  ###

  Yesterday was Monday. We’d just closed the door on a mediocre week: My parents had left the house only to shop for groceries; my sister had barely been out of her room, in love with a Canadian she was trying to get to know better over Skype; I had spent night and day rewriting a short story that I wasn’t convinced I’d conquered and had finally abandoned on Sunday evening, shortly after Barça scored their third goal and I heard a group of neighbors celebrating it. Such manifestations of primitivism made me suspect literature’s ability to wield influence, condemned as it was to a marginal role in a world dominated by sports euphoria.

  Yesterday, when I got up at eight-thirty, I had to wait for my dad to finish showering. We fought, but he ended up winning because his sax lesson started at nine and my class didn’t start till nine-thirty. I made it to school just in time, but my professor of literary criticism was twenty minutes late, so we went down to get coffees from the bar in the basement. The stuttering waiter kept us a little too long with stories of his marital woes. Ever since we’d started engaging him in conversation—because we were amused by his speech defect, but also because we were fond of him—the waiter had been telling us about his life. The day he decided that he’d squeezed the last drop out of his past, he’d started in on his present love life, which was murky and hopeless.

  The day was moving right along, compelled by nothing more than routine. In class, as I absorbed basic notions of Russian formalism, I didn’t think about my father or his sax even once. After lit crit, I had to leave behind the dusty, crumbling classrooms of the old department building to enter the impersonal terrain of the new facilities. I was doing two optional philology courses there. The first recalled the old countercultural glories of North American letters; the second was structured around the magnificent Catalan literary production in exile, but all the texts we discussed gave off a disquieting aftertaste of dregs and draff. The professor, who had broken her arm two months earlier, had set aside the good novels to focus on those “pearls” that had been overlooked for decades. We didn’t know what to make of her archaeological efforts, in part because none of us had yet read the canonical books. We would pass the course without ever studying Joan Sales, Mercè Rodoreda, Pere Calders, or Joaquim Amat-Piniella.

  Once we’d had our daily dose of academic decrepitude, it was time for lunch. I left the department with a classmate and we strolled past the restaurants on Carrer de la Diputació, comparing their prix fixe menu offerings. We were about to flip a coin between the Japanese place or taking a chance on the Indian—always a little too spicy—when my cell phone rang. Before I answered I saw, to my surprise, that it was my father calling.

  I didn’t even have time to say hello. He told me that my grandfather had fallen (“Fallen? How?”) and that he’d been taken in an ambulance (“In an ambulance?”) to the Hospital Clínic (“Have you been there long?”). He asked me if I could meet him there; he had just told my mom, who had left work, and next he would call my sister.

  “Don’t worry. I’ll call her,” I promised.

  “Get here fast. It’s urgent. I mean it’s … it’s serious.”

  I rushed toward the hospital. At the first red light, I called my sister. My mother was about to pick her up in the car. I asked her if she knew what had happened, exactly, to our grandfather, and at first she said no, but that it might be worse than we were imagining, because our parents didn’t like to share bad news with us. We only found out when things were really bad or irreversible. I insisted a little and she uttered a terrible confession.

  “They say he had an attack.”

  “An attack? Dad told me he fell.”

  “A heart attack.”

  I ended the call before I was sure that my sister was about to start crying. Her voice was still just trembling a bit.

  My sprint was only a little more than ten minutes, but I can’t remember anything about it, and I can’t describe the face of the receptionist who told me how to get to the urgent care ward, from where they sent me to the cardiovascular surgery floor. The first thing I saw when I rushed into the waiting room closest to the surgery unit was my father’s sax case, left there on the floor. Beside it I recognized the legs of my grandmother and of my mother. My eyes traveled up their bodies as I hurried over to them. The first thing they said was that my grandfather had had a heart attack and had to have open-
heart surgery.

  “They must be just about to begin,” said my grandmother. “The doctor just came for your father. He’s explaining the details to him, Lord knows why.”

  “How did it happen? When did it start?”

  My grandmother sat down in the chair and covered her eyes with a handkerchief, which held back the tears that streamed down her cheeks for a very few seconds. Meanwhile, my mother brought a finger to her lips to ask me to be silent.

  We were there for a good long while without saying anything. At some point, my sister showed up—she had been in the bathroom to let it all out in private—and sat down next to Grandma. I had to admit, even before they opened their mouths, that they looked alike; it was the first time I’d noticed that unsettling and devastating resemblance. Someday my sister would be an old lady and with any luck she’d have a granddaughter whose chin, in desperate circumstances, would tremble the same way, who would have identical dimples, and would wring her hands with her precise impetuous energy.

  My mother knelt down to pick up the sax case from the floor and said to me, “Come. Let’s put this in the car.”

  We walked to the parking lot as she reconstructed what Grandma and Dad had told her. That morning, my grandfather had refused to leave the house to go to the doctor. Every time he got his “dander up”—those were my mother’s words—my grandmother ended up arguing with him. Normally, she would reproach him for letting himself go and not doing anything to “keep his spirits up.” If her speech got any pushback, she would attack with delayed-action bombs: She would fault him for never taking her on a vacation and always having that “useless obsession with saving.”