The Polish Boxer

by Eduardo Halfon

  There was another stool there, but Milan remained standing between the two of us. I guessed he must have been about my age. He was wearing a light, loose-fitting tortilla-colored shirt and his fingers were heaped with heavy silver rings. His dark, straight hair almost covered his face entirely, and for some reason I started thinking about bridal veils, which Lía really had a thing about. Maybe because of the shape of his eyes, maybe because of something else much harder to pin down, he seemed to me to have a nocturnal look about him. The look of someone who can see properly only at night, or who wants to see properly only at night. The look of a vampire, but a sad, well-meaning vampire who doesn’t need any more blood, just a long splash in holy water.

  We ordered three tequilas. So you’re from Belgrade? Lía asked him. Yes, Belgrade, though I’ve lived abroad for many years, he said, keeping his gaze fixed on the dark-skinned girl as she served the three drinks. Thanks so much, Miriam, he said flirtatiously. And where have you lived? I asked. What a beauty, he whispered, and then, as if exiting a dark, narrow tunnel, he said he’d studied music in Italy, in Russia, and currently in New York. A little confused, I sat looking at the dark-skinned girl with the Mayan features until Lía gave my leg a good hard pinch. And what will you play tomorrow, Milan? she asked. Who knows, it’s always a mystery, he said mysteriously, with a hint of showy dogmatism. Then he said: Maybe a little Rachmaninoff, or Saint-Saëns, or Liszt, or Stravinsky. Ah, Charlie Parker’s favorite, I said just to say something. Milan smiled. You like jazz? I told him that in my last or second-to-last incarnation, before making the small leap over into a Judeo-Latin American cosmology, I must have been a third-rate black jazz musician playing in some brothel in Kansas City or Storyville (a name so lovely, it seems made up), although I could just as easily have been a black hooker from Kansas City or Storyville who spent all night fucking to the rhythm played by some third-rate jazz musician. Which is to say, I said with all the seriousness of a poor forgotten harlequin, I’ve got jazz deep in my gonads. And I downed the tequila. What kind of jazz do you like? Milan asked, and before I could reply, I felt Lía’s warm hand over my mouth. This one I know by heart, she said. He likes pure jazz, she said. He likes anyone who plays with swing, right? Although Dudú has never managed to explain to me what swing is. I licked her fingers. Laughing, she wiped her hand on my thigh. You can’t explain swing, Milan murmured. I like Bird and early Miles and Coltrane and Tatum and Powell and Mingus, I told him. But my true love is Monk. Ah! cried Milan after a little sip of his tequila, the magnificent Thelonious Monk. And then, as if we were invoking the names of Aztec warriors or of strange Nordic runes, we took turns reciting the titles of everything written by Melodious Thunk, as his wife called him, every single piece, in a jumble that somehow appeared organized by the stiff fingers of that eccentric pianist of dissonances and berets and mystic trances and the cheeks of a happy minnow. Lía listened patiently to us, dropping in questions here and there. You can easily recognize a Monk composition by its style, I replied, but it’s not easy, even for true devotees, to know exactly which piece it is. He didn’t go near the piano in his later years, Milan replied. I think epistrophy is a botanical term, I replied, and Milan immediately gave me a mocking smile. It doesn’t mean anything, he said. That son of a bitch made it up. But isn’t epistrophe also a rhetorical term, something repetitive, very musical, asked Lía, as in the famous: They’re born to thieves, raised among thieves, they study to be thieves, and finally become thieves themselves? And though she was right—Milan responded to the Cervantes quotation with a sour expression that wouldn’t make sense to me till the following day—neither of us answered her. I pointed out that, in an interview with George Simon in Metronome, Monk had said it was a botanical term, signifying the reversion of abnormal to normal. And you believe him, Eduardito? Utter nonsense, he said. I looked it up myself. There are people who say, in the same way, that Monk took the concept from Greek mythology, from epistrophe as associated with Aphrodite and love and sexuality and other such crap, but that’s all nonsense too. Milan paused, and it struck me that he even spoke musically. He said: Some things signify nothing and are beautiful all the same. Epistrophy, he said, and the word fell like a dead dragonfly in a bowl of warm lentil soup. Then, in a fatherly gesture that could well have had more of a spiritual meaning among old Yugoslavs, or could equally have meant nothing at all, Milan, who still hadn’t sat down, stroked my head fondly.

  No one said anything for a few moments, a fitting silence, full of the most intense dignity. Lía stubbed out her cigarette, said excuse me, and went to the bathroom. Milan walked over to the bar and asked the dark-skinned girl for a glass of red wine. And stayed there, flirting with her. A theater director came over to say hello, but I acted uninterested and he soon went off again. Anything for you? said Milan, and I was struck once again by the very Argentinian way he spoke Spanish. A beer, please. He asked me about Lía and I told him her full name was Lía Gandini, that we’d met during the intermission of a performance of some comic monologues after putting up with one very bad-tempered Italian actor and another quite charming one, and that we’d been introduced by a mutual friend, whom we went on to ignore as we drank red wine for the rest of the intermission, too dry (the wine) and too short (the intermission), and I rambled on about one of Dario Fo’s tigers that I liked and she smiled at me with those endless eyelashes of hers. Milan didn’t appear to pick up on the reference. I like her long neck, he said. Like a swan, he said. Like one of Modigliani’s women. I guess, I said, and took a sip of beer. I asked him if there had been any difference between studying classical music in the States and in Europe. God, he said, huge. And he sat down on Lía’s stool. The thing is, he said, the Americans like classical compositions to be played as if one were a machine or a robot. Devoid of all emotion. As if you weren’t there. The music always exactly the same. What they want, he said, is to eliminate the interpreter’s personality altogether. He lit a cigarette and, smiling at the dark-skinned girl, thought for a moment. Do you know who Lazar Berman was? No idea. A great pianist, he told me. A Liszt expert. A Russian Jew who fought against the music of Chopin the Pole, he said, and immediately jumbling up his words, I had thoughts of the Polish boxer fighting every night, followed by thoughts of my grandfather fighting with Polish words. I studied under Berman as a child, Milan said, in Italy. Want one? he asked, and I accepted a cigarette. I remember that on the first day, in his studio, I played Liszt’s Sonata in B Minor, a very complex piece, and the old Jew, sitting on his enormous red velvet sofa, didn’t say a word. Nothing. The second day, I went back to his studio, began playing the same piece and, straight off, Berman got up and began tapping the window with his cane, like this, very softly. Milan, after a long sip of wine, dried his mouth on the sleeve of his shirt. The old man shouted at me in Russian: You’re playing the piece the same way you did yesterday, child. I kept my mouth shut as Berman carried on tapping the window with his cane. I thought he’d lost it. But then he walked over to me, very slowly, put a hand on my shoulder and, with a devilish smile, whispered: Haven’t you noticed, my boy, that it’s raining today? A big difference, Milan said, moving aside so that Lía could sit down. Tomorrow, Eduardito, I’ll play a little Liszt, he concluded, as if this confirmed the truth of his anecdote, and off he went to chat with the dark-skinned girl.

  The restaurant seemed to be emptying out. Lía had a sip of my beer. I stroked her forearm, and she, pouting semierotically—reminding me of a very young Marilyn Monroe, or at least of a very young Natalie Portman doing a poor but sweet impression of Marilyn Monroe—said she wanted to go. Then, exaggerating the pout still further, she said she was itching to draw in her almond-colored notebook. I downed my beer in two gulps.

  Standing up, I said to Milan we’d be coming to listen to him the next day. Definitely. He hugged us both at the same time. A three-way hug, my dears, he said with a fake, forced laugh, the laugh of someone who didn’t really want to laugh.

  Before we got to the ro
om, Lía had already taken her bra off. She liked to take it off while we were driving in the car or walking along, because she knew I liked to imagine her suddenly braless. We began stopping every now and then in the middle of the street to kiss, and she’d take my hand and place it on her cold, bare breasts, shuddering as though no one had ever touched her there. It was hard to tell, tight in each other’s arms, which one of us was trembling. Maybe neither. Then we’d carry on walking, impatient, a little giddy. The bra in her handbag or maybe forgotten on the ground or maybe dangling like some enormous black pod from the branch of a tree.

  Then the uproar of beer and tequila sex. A naked thing that trembled with a thousand legs and a thousand hands and a thousand guava-flavored tongues that could never be enough to make love with. Not saying a word or at least not saying words that made any sense, which always mean more. We ended up half-asleep, connected, inseparable, never finishing (sex is always better in gerunds), until at daybreak I heard the far-off cry of a child or a rooster and felt a breeze across my chest and saw her warm and sitting up in bed. She glowed amber. The almond-colored notebook was open on her lap.

  Lía used to draw her orgasms.

  Since our first time, whenever we finished, she’d get up, make her way across the room completely naked, and come back to bed with a small almond-colored notebook. Then, leaning on one elbow or sitting or sometimes kneeling, she’d begin to sketch the orgasm or orgasms that she’d experienced and that were still fresh in her vaginal memory; to make graphs of them for me, like a scientist would, with everything from convulsions to climaxes, spasms, changes in temperature, and liquid overflows. In general she’d sketch a line that would resemble a mountain or a series of mountains of different heights and widths. Sometimes the plateau was short; often it was round; sometimes it extended horizontally for what appeared to be several kilometers. From somewhere, almost always (but not always) out of a crater, fluvial jets would burst up. Bristling, zigzagging lines would spring out very sporadically on the slopes, like miniature lightning bolts, but I’ve no idea what they meant: that was her one secret, she used to say, and it was of the utmost importance. So, whenever one of these zigzags sprouted up, I’d feel ludicrously satisfied without knowing why. Other times, though, it wouldn’t be mountains she’d draw, but clouds or cotton spirals or something of the kind: throbbing, dense, closed ellipses. She explained to me that she didn’t know how else to represent it, that this was how she perceived her whole body: as a light, palpating mass. I envied her. Other times, the drawing would resemble a grapevine without any grapes. Other times: a knot of electric cables set on top of a post. Other times: a prickly fossil. Other times: the map of some African country, perhaps Angola or Namibia. Only once, on a night in that same room in Antigua, had Lía told me it couldn’t be drawn, her head buried in my shoulder, possibly crying, trembling meekly, her warm vagina dampening my thigh as the last little drops of some ineffable pleasure drained away. And again I envied her or maybe I envied the whole female sex. But usually she’d carry out her studied scribbles with the dedication of a Flemish painter, revealing to me the details, the signs, the keys to interpret her most unfathomable mysteries.

  With my eyes closed, I caressed her bare back and began to dream of an archipelago of freckles. I could hear the rustling sound of the pen as it glided over the paper, followed by a brief silence, and then the rustle of the pen again. I felt a kiss on my belly. Ready, Lía said, and curling up beside me, passed me the notebook.

  A raging sea viewed from a small boat.

  That was what the sketch looked like. I wanted to ask her what it meant, but I felt her rhythmic breathing on the back of my neck and almost immediately fell into a deep sleep as well.

  I don’t know if it was when I woke up or if I was still dreaming when I remembered that Liszt had been the lover of a princess who was related to Wittgenstein, and had also been Wagner’s father-in-law. I told Lía this and she, emerging from the white sheets, lazy as a snake shedding her skin, said it was time for a shower.

  We had coffee and champurradas in the hotel restaurant. Wet patches from Lía’s chestnut-colored hair adorned her grayish T-shirt. She chatted away about her dreams (she always remembered them in great detail). Listening to her, it occurred to me that her husky, ethereal voice sounded as though she was talking to me completely submerged in a bathtub of milk.

  The audience inside the ruins of San José el Viejo was murmuring bashfully. The air was cold, congealed, as if still for centuries, and an exquisite light spread harmoniously throughout the great vaulted space. Ranks of folding chairs had been set out facing a grand piano that rose up ahead of them, a solitary thing on its raised platform. I thought of a black ship about to set sail.

  We took seats in the back row. Lía shushed warm kisses in my ear. A boy of three or four was kneeling on the seat in front and every so often he’d turn around and, slightly mischievously, stare at us with his little macadamia face. Look at him, Lía said, they’ve got him wearing a tie. Hello, handsome, she said to him, and the boy, blushing, grabbed hold of his mother.

  The murmur of the audience died down. A man had clambered up onstage and was smiling smugly as he presented an aberrant biography of the Serbian pianist that he’d most likely only just memorized. He said that Mr. Rakić was from Belfast, had studied under Bazar Lerman in New York, and was now living in Italy. The audience—ever cowardly, as a stuttering friend of mine once put it—applauded all the same.

  Milan emerged and sat straight down at the piano. He remained silent, with his head bowed, hands on his thighs, and maybe his eyes closed, although given the distance and the way that his straight hair hung down over his face like a black curtain, I couldn’t be sure. But that was how it looked. I thought at first he was waiting for people to be quiet, but then, after the quiet had come, I thought maybe he was reviewing in his mind all the pieces he was going to play (there weren’t any scores), but after that, when more than a minute had passed and people, somewhat perplexed, began looking around, I thought maybe he’d just awakened and had a filthy hangover and couldn’t remember a thing, neither how to play the piano nor what the hell he was doing in a ruin in Guatemala, and least of all why he might have abandoned his beloved Belfast.

  The piano began to trickle like water in a slow cascade. Too gentle and sweet, too serene for the Chopin mazurka the program notes claimed it to be. Lía squeezed my arm. It’s Beethoven’s Pathétique she whispered, frowning, holding the piece of paper up to her face and then moving it away, hoping, I suppose, that the words would change with the angle of light, like a hologram. I shrugged, resigning myself to it. I think Milan was playing the third movement, but it could just as easily have been the second or the first. A woman to my right seemed to have fallen asleep. The boy in front was standing on his chair, listening with the genuine surprise of a child still young enough to let people dress him up in a little tie. He shouted something at his mom. She tried in vain to make him sit down. Lía smiled. For some reason, Beethoven’s sonatas always make me feel like changing the world, or at least changing out of my own world. I closed my eyes for a time and imagined all the rings on Milan’s pallid fingers pounding the ivory. Then silence. A round of applause. I opened my eyes and found the boy looking at me, curious, steady, barely blinking. You scare him, Lía said. I made a face like a wild leopard and he almost fell off his chair.

  Head bowed, Milan had placed his hands on his thighs and again possibly had his eyes closed. Observing him in this state of deep concentration took me back to that part in his anecdote about the rainy day with the old Jew. He’s deciding what to play, I whispered to Lía, who was still trying to decipher the program. Saint-Saëns, it says here. It’ll be anything but Saint-Saëns, I assured her. How do you know? Bazar Lerman, I said, and just then, as if invoked by the hushed prayer of a necromancer, a gray or possibly gray-white pigeon flew into the ruins and made its way to the vault’s highest point, directly above the stage. A number of chicks began to screech whi
le the pigeon beat her wings and tried to steady herself. Birdies! the boy shouted, already up on his feet again, pointing at his latest discovery. The audience shifted, embarrassed, and then, irrefutably, up surged Rachmaninoff. It could have been the Piano Sonata no. 2, but equally it could have been any other concerto or prelude for piano. Fast. Intense. Perfectly ordered. Like the unstoppable zephyr of a hurricane or of Lía’s raging sea, I thought (or maybe felt). Then, seeing the boy’s euphoria at the racket being made by the hungry chicks, I thought the music was exactly like a churning swarm of doves or parakeets or blue Amazonian cockatoos, an overcast sky full of blue Amazonian cockatoos flying gently along, screeching with a precise logic that from afar seems so chaotic, so bold, so movingly fortuitous. Milan’s hands were a smudge of skin in motion. Out of focus. His hair buffeting around. The boy carried on pointing toward the roof as he hopped up and down on his metal chair: Birdies, birdies! The chicks had just then gone quiet.

  Applause. Milan with his head bowed once more and another long silence. What next? murmured Lía. I didn’t say anything. The program was now lying on the ground.

  He started playing a forceful, energetic piece that had moments of fading to almost nothing and then, intensely, dramatically, shot upward again. An unrecognizable rise and fall that went on and on for thirty or forty minutes perhaps. But in the midst of this din of opposing emotions, of periods of peace and periods of anxiety that seemed to awaken the drowsy, ingenuous audience, I thought I heard—briefly, from a long way down, and as if tangled up in lots of other chords—a number of Thelonious Monk’s syncopated melodies. Strange, I know. I thought I heard “Straight, No Chaser” and then “Trinkle, Tinkle” and then “Blue Monk” and later maybe even a small segment of “Epistrophy.” Very far off. You might almost say subliminally, but not even that. Segments too fleeting to pin down, I suppose, but clear enough (within that labyrinth) for a devotee of Monk’s works and particularly of his percussive style, of the way in which he used to hammer and punish the keys. Although who knows, really. Sometimes, when confusion reigns, you can only hear the music that’s already inside you.