The Polish Boxer

by Eduardo Halfon

  I got a postcard of the Golden Gate Bridge, sent from San Francisco. Milan wrote: Last night, as I was playing in a beautiful auditorium, everything began to tremble. Some people stood. Others left. And I kept playing Stravinsky as if nothing much were happening. Nothing much was happening. In Romany, Eduardito, earthquake is I phuv kheldias, which means the earth danced.

  I got two giant postcards, on the same day, from Orlando.

  Liszt I, the first was titled, and it was a picture of Donald Duck dressed as a fireman. Milan wrote: You asked me that night, in that strange cafeteria in Antigua, why I felt such an attraction to Liszt’s music. Remember? And I replied with some nonsense about improvisation, which I suppose is true. But there’s always more than one truth to everything. And a movie was made based on that other truth, a very complicated truth that is the life and music of Franz Liszt. I can’t recall the name of the movie and it’s not even very good, but it illustrates the point I want to make. I hope you understand. It’s the year 1840, or thereabouts. Franz Liszt and Count Teleky arrive at a Gypsy carnival in Pest, Hungary. As they saunter through the town square, Liszt is talking to his friend about the difference between a mere performer and a true composer. Suddenly, Liszt’s attention is captured by a Gypsy boy playing the violin with such virtuosity that he immediately reminds him of Paganini. Josy, the boy’s name is, and he says he’ll do a magic trick if they give him some spare change. Count Teleky gives him some coins and the boy disappears, running off. They set out down the town’s narrow streets to look for him but only find his older brother and grandmother, a very shrewd and very kind old lady who, after a brief debate, ends up reading Liszt’s future. I can’t recall what she says, but he, frightened, slips into the crowd. That night, Liszt is sitting there at his piano, trying to recall the melody Josy played. He can’t. He gets mad, goes out to look for him, and finally finds him at the Gypsy camp, playing the violin once more. Liszt attempts to convince the boy’s family that talent like his needs instruction and tutelage and refinement and culture, but Josy loves his freedom too much and won’t accept the offer. Liszt insists. He wants to save him from savagery. He wants to Europeanize him. When the grandmother finds out that the man will not only teach him free of charge but also cover his room and board, she agrees, on the condition that she accompany her grandson. Later, all three pull up to Liszt’s residence in a carriage. The servants wash and dress Josy, but the boy eats with his hands, runs wild, scribbles all over a bust of Beethoven. Meanwhile, Count Teleky bets Liszt that he won’t be able to train the Gypsy boy in time for the annual music competition. Josy is wary of musical scores, believes in improvisation, refuses to learn music theory, and keeps playing by ear. Liszt begins to grow desperate. With a bit of help from the grandmother, Josy agrees at least to try this new way of playing music, and he and Liszt start playing together. And they both like it. They have a good time. One night, Josy hears his teacher give a recital and is enthralled. After the recital, at some type of dinner or formal reception, I don’t really remember, Josy agrees to play a piece for the guests. But suddenly a woman screams that someone’s stolen her gold bracelet, and everyone suspects the Gypsy. Humiliated, Josy runs away. The bracelet, of course, turns out to have fallen between some cushions or onto a rug or something. On returning home that night, Liszt finds Josy in the bathtub, scrubbing and scraping himself raw with a bar of soap. He wants, he says, sobbing, to wash off his Gypsy color. Every time I see this scene it makes me want to vomit.

  Lía glanced at the postcard, said Goofy had always been her favorite, and then asked me sweetly, as if it was nothing, if Franz Liszt hadn’t been an anti-Semite.

  The second postcard from Orlando was titled Liszt II. It was another Donald Duck drawing, but this duck was dressed as a painter or a bricklayer, maybe—it wasn’t too clear. Milan wrote: The day of the competition arrives. Josy is ready. When it’s finally his turn, he begins to play beautifully, a virtuoso, a child prodigy, but then suddenly, for no apparent reason, he begins to improvise. The judges disqualify him. Josy is furious and disappointed and runs off. Back at home, Liszt sits before the piano and, still moved by the Gypsy boy’s music, composes a piece, one of his Hungarian Rhapsodies, I think, without realizing the influence Josy’s music has had on him. Count Teleky points this out, but Liszt resents the idea that he might have needed any Gypsy influences to finally become a true composer. Liszt accepts that he has lost the bet. Josy leaps into the room. He’d been spying on them through the window, from the garden. He accuses Liszt of using him just to win a bet, and no matter how Liszt tries to make him see that he has a magical ability to capture the true spirit of music, Josy says they come from two different worlds that will never meet. The movie, in my opinion, should have ended there. Though perhaps not. I don’t know. At any rate, Liszt rushes off to the Gypsy camp and returns with all of Josy’s family and friends. He wants the boy to play his own music, with his own people, for Liszt’s guests. Josy is upstairs. He refuses to come down. Slowly, the Gypsy music begins. Everyone shouts and sings and dances. Josy can’t deny his true character and descends the stairs, picks his old violin up off the floor, and joins in the Gypsy revelry. Everyone applauds. Bravo. Liszt has accepted the Gypsies and has also accepted the spirit of Gypsy music and everyone’s happy and the world is fucking peachy and that’s the end. Do you understand?

  I got a postcard that should have arrived much earlier, lost for a time in the hidden recesses of Milan’s subconscious or perhaps in the hidden recesses of the post office’s labyrinthine inefficiency, or both. The postmark said Savannah, Georgia. It was a sepia-colored photo of two elderly black men, solemn and looking preserved in a sweltering vat of muggy air. They were on the porch of a stately old southern home, relaxing in wooden and wicker rocking chairs and sipping lemonade or perhaps iced tea. Also on the porch were a brown cat and a porcelain pot, probably a spittoon. One of the old men had a peg leg. Milan wrote: Ciganin, that’s what they called me at school. It means Gypsy, in Serbian. Ciganin. Or sometimes Cigo. Cigo, and then they’d call me names or throw rocks at me or give me a kick in the ass. To Serbs I’ve always been a piece of shit Gypsy, a filthy good-for-nothing Gypsy. And to Gypsies I’ve always been a piece of shit gadje, a piece of shit non-Gypsy. My mother’s family rejected us. My father’s family rejected us. I’m a Gypsy who can’t be a Gypsy and a Serb who can’t be a Serb. What’s a boy to do, Eduardito, when he’s excluded by one group and excluded by the other and detested by both? He withdraws, that’s what he does. He retreats into himself. And that, no doubt, is my greatest talent. Not music, but the ability to close myself off, ignore people and, what’s more, get people to ignore me. It’s not that I become invisible, as invisibility still implies presence, observation, being a witness, even if a distant, disinterested witness. I can absent myself entirely. Eliminate myself entirely. Not like a corpse, but more like someone who never existed. A world without me.

  Maybe because of the photo of the two elderly black men, maybe because of the confessional tone Milan used, this was Lía’s favorite postcard. She would come into my studio and, lighting the obligatory cigarette, contemplate it for a long time as though contemplating something sacred, something mysterious, something that was in fact something else or at least seemed to be something else.

  Gyorgy, read the title on the next postcard, a very large postcard of the London Underground logo. In minuscule letters, Milan wrote: Last year the body of a Gypsy trumpeter named Gyorgy Krompachy turned up floating in the Copşa Mică River, in Romania. No one knows why. I’d met him at a weeklong Gypsy music festival in Lucerne. Even though he was my age, he looked much older. He smoked a mixture of hash and tobacco and drank vodka from a rusty canteen. He said vodka was good for playing in seven-eight time, whiskey was good for playing in six-eight, absinthe for playing in nine-eight. I think he was right. Though he was born in Bulgaria, he didn’t consider himself Bulgarian. He’d hop around from Serbian bands to Macedonian bands to Romanian bands to Turkish ba
nds without thinking twice, as if they were modern versions of kumpanias or the caravans of his ancestors. But what he liked to play best, he said, were Serbian kolos, very fast circular dances that were really intense and made him feel, he said, as though he had a very high fever. Similar to Jewish dances. With overstated pride, Gyorgy told me he’d made a brief appearance in the bunker scenes of the Emir Kusturica movie Underground “(I thought of him, Eduardito, when I bought this postcard a few weeks ago). I didn’t believe him, of course, though a long while later I discovered it was true. There he was, Gyorgy Krompachy, smiling and composed and playing his trumpet on top of the spinning cake when the bride goes flying over them. The last night of the festival, after playing a couple of čočeks with Kočani Orkestar, a band from Macedonia, Gyorgy asked me to accompany him to the outskirts of town, on an errand. He was dressed in black, with a sparkling green vest and sparkling white shoes. First, we went to a bar, where Gyorgy had one vodka, and then another vodka, and then, in exchange for a few bills, pawned his trumpet. I remember that before he handed it over, he showed me the inside of its black case, papered over with naked ladies, all Asian. After that, we went to a little shack of mud and corrugated metal, in the middle of nowhere. A Gypsy woman, maybe forty or fifty years old, opened the door. She had gold teeth. Smelled bad. Gyorgy gave her the money and the woman, smiling maliciously, closed the door. That was it. We walked back to the festival tents, with Gyorgy smoking his tobacco and hash and going on and on about Thai vaginas and how enormous they are. The next day, when I woke up he’d already left.

  I got a postcard of the streets of New York City. In Central Park, a couple of perfect models with perfect tans skated into a perfect sunset. Milan wrote: Some time ago, Félix Lajkó, the most famous Gypsy violinist from Novi Sad, was passing through town. He played in Madison Square Garden. After the concert, several of the Serbian artists living in Manhattan decided to take him out to dinner. Writers, painters, a filmmaker. I didn’t say a word the whole night. I spent two hours sitting next to one of my idols, in the most absolute silence, petrified. When the coffee was finally served, Lajko turned to me and said that he knew an accordionist whose last name was Rakić who was also from Belgrade, and maybe he was family. Without looking up from my espresso, I whispered that no relative of mine was an accordionist in Belgrade. And that was it.

  I got a postcard of a cowboy on horseback, from San Antonio, Texas. Milan wrote: Long, long ago, the Gypsies built a church of stone and the Serbs built a church of cheese. When each of the churches was finished, they decided to swap. The Gypsies would give the Serbs the church of stone, and the Serbs would give the Gypsies the church of cheese, plus five cents. But as the Serbs had no money, they still owed the Gypsies the five cents. Immediately the Gypsies began to eat their church of cheese, and little by little they polished it off. And then they had no church. The Serbs still owe the Gypsies five cents, and the Gypsies still demand it every day. I think the time has come, Eduardito, to settle that five-cent debt with myself. Tshiocha, I cry, like that beautiful black Welsh woman.

  There then followed a long silence. As if the angst had overwhelmed him and so, wishing me the best, he’d dived headfirst into the earth’s core. Initially, I thought perhaps something had gone wrong at the post office, some technical failure or some kind of epistolary disruption, but I quickly discarded that theory, given all the bills and junk mail I kept receiving. Then I thought something had happened to Milan. An illness, or something worse. His postcards had been so punctual, one a week, sometimes two or three a week, and I’d gotten hooked on them almost without realizing it, the way you might get hooked on sleeping pills or a bad soap opera or a six o’clock Cinzano with lots of ice. Lía made fun of me, look how worried you are, Dudú, watching me arrange and then rearrange and then disarrange all of the postcards on my studio wall: first chronologically, then geographically, then thematically, then photographically. I was worried, no doubt, but I also understood, even if only hypothetically, that part of Milan’s game consisted of straying from the path, absenting himself, disappearing for a time and leaving no trace, no signs of any sort. It was one more way of breaching boundaries and borders: the boundaries and borders of a routine or of a preestablished, systematic path. It was, I suspect, one more way of always playing the least predictable piece.

  Making the most of two weeks we had off from the university—Lía from her last few anatomy courses, and I from giving a yearlong series of seminars on screenplays adapted from short stories—I packed all of my recently acquired Gypsy music and, for seven days, we escaped to a frozen, secluded cabin in a village called Albores, in the Sierra de las Minas: a biosphere reserve in the cloud forest, almost three thousand meters above sea level.

  We spent the days looking for venomous snakes (pit vipers and rattlers, mostly), noisy howler monkeys, owls, wild turkeys, pink-headed warblers, and, astonishingly, a flock of shimmering red-and-green quetzals perched on the branches of immense wild avocado trees, and which later took off with the synchronized, rhythmic undulations of a paper kite. We regularly came across peccaries’ tracks in the mud and, from time to time, those of a big cat. Jaguars, the park ranger told us with hazy affability. Each morning, over our first coffee, a mob of blue magpies breakfasted with us on the balcony, pecking our crumbs off the floor and the table and sometimes even out of our hands.

  We spent the nights making love (there’s nothing like making love in a biosphere reserve) and listening to the violin and magic sitar of Félix Lajkó; the Hungarian café music called olah, by Kek Lang and Kalyi Jag; the robust songs of Rajasthan; Darko Macura’s duduk; Turkish clarinets; Egyptian drums; Kálmán Balogh’s cimbalom; the brash, fast trumpets of Boban Marković and Jova Stojilković; the unstoppable guitars of French Manouche Gypsies; the voice of Macedonian singer Esma Redžepova; and a lot of flamenco. The music played and we made love in an almost primitive manner, an almost prehistoric manner, as if all of the cries and the drums and the pain and the moon and the clouds and the shrieking of all those bats were also there with us, between the sheets.

  Lía, like a doctor, or perhaps more like a scientist, or perhaps more like a zealous disciple of quantum physics, ended up associating various types of Gypsy music with different positions. Automatically. Without realizing it, of course. I began to infer certain patterns on the third or fourth night, but they remained unconfirmed until the fifth. Kolos: her on top. Sambas: me on top. Olahs: both seated, facing one another, legs entwined. Flamenco: her on top, both faceup. Rumbas: both on our sides, facing each other. Čočeks: me on top, her facedown. Ciftetelis: the position she called zero gravity because that’s apparently what she felt, zero gravity, but which I find nearly impossible to describe. The music would change and Lía, just as quickly, would turn me over or push me down or jump on top of me with the uninhibited agility of a young gazelle. And the more drumming, needless to say, the more noise she made. On our last night, I explained this all to her and Lía laughed and said you’re crazy, Dudú, and made me turn off the music before I could take off her clothes.

  Perhaps it was that music, perhaps it was the mountain altitude and the cold, or perhaps it was the fact that we were so alone and when two people are so alone their spirits seek to express themselves even more exquisitely, but even Lía’s orgasms were transformed. Seven sketches made by someone else, drawn by another hand. Seven pages of her almond-colored notebook that bore no relation to any of the pages that had come before and that would bear no relation to any of the pages that were to come. A seven-orgasm parenthesis, one might say, though I’m not entirely convinced by that stylistic device. The lines were now more curved than straight, much more tenuous and unsure, as though they’d been drawn when frightened or perhaps when sleepy. The blank spaces took on greater importance, giving the sketches a desert-like air or a flighty air, where the emptiness seemed exclusively to be filled with more emptiness and where silence was the only thing you could hear and the only thing really worth hearing. The differe
nt signs and symbols also underwent a profound metamorphosis: streams and clouds and craters and spasms were still there, but nearly unrecognizable. On that last night, the seventh, with only the music of all the bats twittering in the grooves of the ceiling, Lía sat on the edge of the bed, turned on a small lamp, and covered in goose bumps from the cold or perhaps from something more esoteric, closed that brief parenthesis with a quick sketch of a spiderweb being spun.

  We returned to the city exhausted. The pinkish sun was setting slowly, like the fake backdrop to an indulgent final scene. We showered together and then Lía made us two cups of coffee. Lazily, stretched out across my bed, we smoked a couple of cigarettes and played footsie and perhaps we dozed off. I don’t know why I waited so long to check my mailbox. Probably because it was Sunday. Probably because, deep down, I already knew what was awaiting me and, even deeper down, I also knew what I’d inevitably have to do.

  One postcard.

  From above, the Danube looked like a dead earthworm, or maybe like a dying earthworm, amid so much gray debris. A vast white bridge intersected it like a fishhook. Little houses dotted one shore, and on the other, surrounded by a considerable patch of green, stood some sort of citadel or fortress or medieval castle. Kalemegdan, it said on the lower right of the photo. Srbija, read the postmark unequivocally.

  Once upon a time, dear Eduardito, there was a half-Serbian and half-Gypsy boy who wanted to be a Gypsy musician and travel in a Gypsy musician caravan, but something held him back. Perhaps fear. Perhaps something else. As he was walking one morning through the damp forests of Belgrade, there suddenly appeared before him a very large man with purple eyes, dressed in red, with two little horns on his head and a hoof for one of his feet, and he told the boy, as he stroked him with a long, sharp fingernail, that he could turn him into a Gypsy musician, a great Gypsy musician, on one condition. Just one. There’s always a condition, right, Eduardito? Always a sacrifice. That’s the law of the universe. So the boy, happy and sad, said goodbye to his father forever and said goodbye to his mother forever, and weeping in the forests of Belgrade which were now to become his home, he performed a single pirouette.