by jordi Nopca
“You can’t take it with you, you know!” I’d heard her yell on more than one occasion.
The difference that morning was that, after taking it on the chin, Grandpa hadn’t moved from the armchair he’d been sitting in since he’d finished breakfast. His was set on staying home. For once, there was no changing his mind.
“Apparently, he told your grandmother, ‘When you leave, I’m going to throw myself off the balcony,’” my mom continued. “She dared him to follow through—that’s what your father told me. Then, your grandfather got up from the chair, very angry, took two steps, and collapsed.”
“I can’t believe it.”
“That’s what happened.”
“And then what?”
My grandmother had tried to revive him, but it wasn’t possible. She had run down to the street, screaming for help. Three men and a woman had reacted immediately and followed her up to the apartment. Maybe because they were strangers, when they knelt down beside my grandfather, speculating on what was happening to him, he had opened his eyes. Without a word, he’d put both hands on his chest and started panting.
“Heart attack! Heart attack!” one of the men had shouted.
Another had called an ambulance, and the medical team took only five minutes to show up. My grandmother had been curled up in the armchair during that time. She hadn’t thought to call my dad until they were already at the hospital, but he hadn’t answered right away, because he was at the music school and didn’t yet know there was no service in there.
###
When my dad’s first sax lesson ended, he stayed for a few minutes, talking to the teacher. He was pleased to learn that for the last five years his teacher had been in the orchestra that’d played at the festival in Sant Pol, the town where we summer. I doubt he mentioned that mom had had to drag him to the concert like a kid to the dentist, and that every summer they came home earlier: I have no way of knowing for sure, but it’s likely that very same “marvelous” concert my dad was going on about yesterday had been the source of some small marital rift. Things had changed so much over the last few months that my father now imagined himself, after a prudent amount of time had passed, playing in the same orchestra as his teacher, as he would tell me later in the emergency waiting room at the Clínic. Some night, they would go to Sant Pol to perform, and his bandmates would let him do an extra solo, because he would have acquaintances, friends, and family members in the audience, who would be shocked to find he’d become a saxophone virtuoso.
The day of his inaugural lesson, he learned how to put together the instrument, drew the basic scale on a page of sheet music for the first time, and received a photocopy explaining how to play it on the saxophone. During the class, he had managed to make the sounds of two notes: G and A. He was dying to get home, pick up his sax, and keep practicing. The teacher had given him homework—not a lot, because the priority that first week was familiarizing himself with the instrument.
“Playing the tenor saxophone well is complicated, but not impossible. In music, the most important thing is keeping at it,” his teacher had said, encouraging him. “It’s better to spend fifteen minutes a day than a whole hour on Saturday and nothing else the rest of the week.”
###
My mother put the case into the trunk of the car. Before going back to the hospital, she lit a cigarette. I watched her smoke without saying a word. I didn’t speak even when the security guard came over and demanded, not particularly politely, “Put out the cigarette.”
She obeyed without complaint, maybe even a little ashamed.
Then we went back out onto the street. We passed by two restaurants, which awakened my appetite—I hadn’t had anything to eat or drink since the coffee before lit crit.
“Are you hungry?” my mother asked. “Why don’t you go eat something with your sister?”
Twenty minutes later, my sister and I had the first courses of a Vietnamese meal placed in front of us. After the sweet-and-sour soup came chicken with almonds and a bowl of rice for each of us. We didn’t talk about Grandpa. We laughed a little, imagining Dad up onstage, playing the sax, distorted by colored lights and wearing a hat.
“He’s destined for greatness,” she said, or maybe it was me.
When we returned to the hospital, our parents went out to find some sandwiches. Grandma didn’t want to leave the waiting room until she knew how the operation had gone.
“If there’s any news, let us know and we’ll come right back,” my father said.
We promised we would. Grandma, who didn’t say much when my parents were there, came back to life when she was left alone with us. She explained that in the row of chairs to our right (“Don’t look; they’ll realize we’re talking about them”) was a father and a mother whose son was very sick with pneumonia (“Poor thing. So young, and he might not make it”). Then, without any sort of transition, she started reminiscing about her wedding day. She had danced with her father, who already moved with the rigid majesty of the elderly. Grandma said that the past was a place filled with light. My sister and I listened to her in silence, aware that sooner or later we would have to face our own memories. When our grandparents died, we would remember snippets of time spent with them: some memorable meals—or maybe the regular ones, the ones where nothing ever happened—or that day they took us to the zoo or that other one where they steeled up their courage and dived headfirst into the pool; the procession of the Three Kings, seen from their balcony, overflowing with distant relatives who came once a year and filled the apartment with different smells, smells that were always a little too sweet.
My sister teared up slightly when Grandma started to run a hand through her hair. She had to get up and go back to the bathroom so she could cry again freely. Grandma took that opportunity to look into my eyes and make the revelation she’d been containing.
“Remember everything I told you on Friday about the neighbors downstairs, the ones with the candles and the robes?”
I nodded.
“On Friday, they were supposed to send away the spirit they’d summoned in that ritual.”
I impatiently signaled with my hands for her to continue.
“Well, we were wrong. What they did on Friday was send it to our apartment. It was wandering around all weekend, and today it decided to take your grandfather. Why didn’t it pick me? Wouldn’t that have been better for everyone? Wouldn’t that have been fairer?”
CREDITS AND ATTRIBUTIONS
Pages 1 & 2
“Turning idiots into geniuses …”
“Like a great philosophical chatterer …”
Georg Christoph Lichtenberg, The Waste Books, trans. Steven Tester (Albany: SUNY Press, 2012).
Page 23
“In the shop’s window a pretty woman …”
Boris Vian, Mood Indigo (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2014).
Page 78
“I might look like a cool guy …”
Aki Kaurismäki, “Interview: Sevent Rounds with Aki Kaurismäki,” The Guardian, April 4, 2012.
Page 101
“For ever warm and still to be enjoy’d …”
John Keats, “Ode on a Grecian Urn,” in John Keats: Selected Poems (Penguin Classics: Poetry) (New York: Penguin, 2007).
Page 126
“It wasn’t a long conversation …”
Peter Stamm, “In the Outer Suburbs,” in In Strange Gardens and Other Stories, trans. Michael Hofmann (New York: Other Press, 2010).
Page 162
“He bade me out into the gloom …”
William Butler Yeats, “The Heart of the Woman,” in The Collected Poems of W.B. Yeats (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1996).
Page 190
“They were not men who liked …”
Roald Dahl, Fantastic Mr. Fox (New York: Puffin Books, 2007).
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