Oscar

by Mauricio Segura

  When the train, out of steam, entered the station, he quickly threw on his coat, grabbed his suitcase and cane, and got off, despite his initial intention not to make a stop in Montreal. Coming out of the station, he hailed a taxi. As the vehicle made its way down towards his neighbourhood, despite being happy to see again the old prospects and streets, he apparently didn’t recognize very much: where there was once a stretch teeming with jazz clubs, they’d put up soulless condominiums that looked down on the rest of the neighbourhood; a new park, built of concrete, was all desolate darkness; and there was no trace of the ball-playing kids of yesteryear. Had he imagined all that? Leaning back in the rear seat of the taxi, he breathed out slowly, certain that the familiar ritual was about to take place, and that the driver, eyeing him in the rearview mirror, had recognized him. He paid, leaving an extravagant tip—not so much out of generosity as to cut short any exchange—climbed the house stairs while holding onto the stone railing and, when he turned the knob to push open the door, saw Prudence, the phone propped between her ear and her shoulder, happy to see him appear, as it was him she was trying to reach. They embraced for a long time, while he sensed that despite the dense traffic overhead, there was a grave silence muffling the slightest sound. It’s said that while still thinking of Norman G. and his deceits, he made his way towards the bedroom and saw her, stretched out on the marriage bed, her matchless profile looking serene, almost smiling. Even dead, she did things her own way. Oscar dragged a chair to the bed and sat down to lay his hands on those of his mother, still warm and astonishingly smooth despite their lines. Gazing down on the beautiful, noble face, he wept all the tears his body held, trembling like a child, realizing too late, it seemed, as he told his sisters, how much this strong woman, captivating and down to earth, meant to him. Just what had she been trying to tell him in her last telepathic message? Although he was seeing him no more, he swore never again to set eyes on Norman G.—a promise he did not keep.

  Stretched out on his chaise longue, Oscar caught on the fly the beach ball his daughter had thrown. Over his head, beyond the soughing of the maple leaves, the sky was still just as calm, the air as pure, and the few clouds just as fluffy. The thought then came to him that after his mother’s death he had entered the last chapter of his life, one of serenity, but where in time every movement became an ordeal, an experience inconceivable for someone who isn’t old.

  7

  Over the succeeding years, Oscar played in several sorts of groups, accompanied by musicians from all over the world, but no collaboration suited him as much as his duo with a bald and moustachioed guitarist, as close-mouthed and baggy-eyed as an undertaker. It’s said that he saw Joe P. both as an alter ego—for he too, thanks to his virtuosity, had mastered his instrument, the electric guitar, through his own efforts—and as his opposite, since his new acolyte was as short as he was tall. Whatever the case, he was the ideal partner, since not only was he not intimidated by Oscar’s extravagant inventiveness, but he too was fond of spectacular solos. In fact, O.P. now preferred playing alone on stage, to give free rein to his improvising without having to worry about anyone else. They divided their show into two parts, first performing separately and then, each of the two titans throwing off sparks, crossing swords in tumultuous duos, and taking no prisoners.

  In those days Oscar liked coming onstage leaning heavily on his cane, his mouth half open, his eyes half-closed, presenting the audience with a picture of extreme fatigue, if not degenerative illness. When they applauded, he responded with a painful grin, lifting his cane in greeting before dragging himself to the piano and taking forever to seat himself. Most often, he began with a childlike melody that he improvised in a playful way, as if it were an exercise to loosen up his fingers. After a few bars, however, his left hand began to bear down, and those in the know, scattered through the hall, applauded to tip off the artist and their neighbours that they’d recognized such-and-such a standard. A few bars later the make-believe posture gave way entirely to frontal attacks resembling the growling of wild animals, the swarming of bees, games of cat and mouse, and the sound of thousands of pigeons in flight, signalling to the public that here a genius was at work. Often, without ceasing to play, he’d scan the crowd, seeking in the awestruck eyes of each face signs of astonishment, his having just given the lie to his supposed lethargy. The spectators had the dizzying impression that there were two pianos playing at the same time, rising in their seats in search of another musician on stage—for it’s doubtless true that Oscar, never having recovered from that long-ago blow, sought to reproduce in the public mind the shock he’d had on hearing Art’s music for the first time. His playing was a masterly succession of furious descents and chortling returns, culminating, against all expectations, in a sense of renewal and a rejuvenating optimism. After that, as if it had come to expect more miracles, the crowd took it in its stride that in response to this tidal wave of notes there materialized a group of fantastical dancers right out of an artist’s sketchbook, who, inspired by Oscar’s godlike pianism, swayed their hips on stage to swing- era choreography. When came the moment for the thundering applause, he responded to it with a solemn air, as if to concede that, yes, his unequalled playing, far transcending that of any rival, was deserving of that rapture.

  It’s said that between concerts, he remained cloistered in his hotel room, spending his peaceful afternoons reading, sleeping, eating, and tinkling at the piano. He had become a legend, to the point where it wasn’t uncommon to see people not in the know, spotting him in a hotel lobby, exclaim in admiration, stupefied to discover that he was still alive.

  It seems that Oscar’s concerns during this period were not of an artistic nature. Apparently, when he paid visits to his now-adult children, he saw that his chronic absences precluded him from sharing in the remembrance of a particular family celebration, in the comprehension of a certain humorous, complicit remark. And at any moment he might meet with a sullen attitude on the part of one of his daughters, or a nasty jibe from one of his sons, making him feel like a stranger in his own family. On the way home, in the solitude of a taxi’s back seat, it seemed to him that he was paying dearly for what his work had required of him: going away on tours. In truth, people had short memories: Had they forgotten the efforts he made to spare them a precarious existence? What did they think? That the private schools they attended, the fancy clothes they wore, the good food they relished were paid for by the grace of God, bloodseed? He went back to his apartment, not beaten down, but furious, and it took hours for his anger to subside, superseded by the unshakable conviction that for his family he’d been irreplaceable.

  He began to take pleasure in solitude, tired of furtive encounters with the opposite sex that led, according to him, either to melodramatic fallings out or simply to dead ends. He sat alone in his spacious dining room with its dark, modern furnishings, from where he could see the Toronto lights that lost themselves in the large bay, and swallowed the rice and red beans that usually accompanied the barbecued chicken he bought at the local supermarket. It seems that one night, steeped in the half-light of youthful reminiscence, he heard himself asking his mother out loud if she’d have the time to make him the ginger cake she’d promised him. When he realized what he’d done, he smiled, not without sorrow. Now, when he heard Davina’s voice from the other end of the table, he lifted his head and suppressed a smile: Promises are sacred! All he had to do was to tell her in his thoughts how pleasant it was to hear the timbre of her voice for her to reply: What about my voice? I say what I have to say, that’s all. From then on, their dialogues became routine.

  It was around this time that a rumour began to circulate: Oscar was in love again. Apparently, the match had been lit at dusk one night, in a restaurant over the water on the edge of a Florida mangrove. While a breeze wafted his way, its fragrance enhanced by the bald cypresses, a brunette decades younger than he was, with high cheekbones and translucent skin, bent over his table to take his
order. She was actually the head waiter, but also a great fan, which she confessed from the outset. What was it that charmed our pianist? The impetuosity deep in her eyes? Her flashes of wit? Whatever the case, she left her job to follow him on tour after only three romantic rendezvous. And it was then that Oscar reconnected with the light-hearted verve of his childhood. He replaced his dark suits with summery garb, his costly, drab shirts with Hawaiian designs, and began to wear scarves whose colours evoked blue sky, a blackbird’s red wings, and the yellow bananaquit. Was this transformation entirely attributable to Helen, his new flame, now his new wife? Not entirely, because when she told him she was pregnant, it seems that he greeted the news with tears of joy: at last he could take seriously the role of father, which he’d sidestepped up to then. Now he refused to go on tour without his wife and daughter, determined to spend as much time at home as onstage, not so much out of love for those close to him, said the skeptics, but because the demons of old age that attack, as is common knowledge, one’s joints and the sacred fire of one’s will, prohibited him now from travelling as he used to.

  It’s said that his one sorrow, during those years, was to see how swiftly time passes when you’re perfectly happy. Agreeing to undertake one last tour in Japan, he hoped to say farewell to his many admirers, among his most faithful anywhere in the world. In a burst of enthusiasm, he had the idea of taking this opportunity to reunite, one last time, his trio with Ray and Herb, to which he owed so much. The two musicians, whom he saw frequently, since the first was a close friend and the second had stopped drinking years earlier, were enchanted by the idea, and readily accepted the invitation. Arriving a week in advance, Oscar, Helen, and their daughter spent as much time strolling through the parks made fragrant by cherry blossoms and visiting temples with great incurved roofs as visiting photo shops, where he stocked up on accessories of all sorts.

  Despite the advanced age of the three musicians, the shows, in the course of which, as in the old days, they tossed each other the ball like fearless kids, resulted in many moments of grace. The night of the last performance, after the hearty applause that greeted him onstage, Oscar confessed to the audience that it was with a heavy heart that he was leaving the next day this land for which he had such esteem and tenderness. As he spoke those words, imbued with a sincerity that he no longer displayed in public, he glanced around at the crowd as he liked to do, and had the thought, according to his admirers, that he could depart this world in peace, now that he had received in return for his music some of its richest rewards. Just as he embarked on the first piece, he felt a dizziness that seemed to him to be the first signs of a cold. To give himself courage, he turned towards his friends, but the malaise—which, he said, was like a storm against which he had to fight—was now full upon him. Soon a furious blizzard attacked him head-on, veiled his view, and coated the arm and hand playing the bass line with layer upon layer of frigid snow. The entire left side of his body entered into a deep sleep, buried under ice, conquered by the cold. Out of pride, then perhaps out of the conviction that he was invincible, he decided to let nothing be seen of the struggle he was secretly waging, and to carry on as if everything was normal, and many years later, near death, and not without regret, he wondered if in halting his performance he might have escaped the worst. He came to himself when Ray asked him, wide-eyed, wordless, with a nod of his chin, and just like in the past, if everything was all right, but he was too weak to respond. Ray saw that he had to make do without him for the next piece, and he signalled Herb to play the melody of “Falling in Love with Love,” even though it wasn’t on the program. It seems that at that very moment, Oscar thought of Norman G., and mustered the strength to seek him out in the crowd. Did he really see him, as he confided to his friends? At the last moment, drawing energy from who knows where, he managed to play the theme of the piece, just with his right hand, like a child at his first piano lesson, his eyes shifting from the keyboard to the man at the back of the hall, with whom he’d signed a pact that had poisoned his life, and who, like a grotesque apparition, or so it appeared, raised his cocktail glass, wishing him health for eternity.

  The show over, as applause flooded the hall, Helen rushed towards him and called for an ambulance. At the hospital, lying in bed, just like when he was ill with tuberculosis, Oscar was surrounded by doctors who took turns explaining to Helen in layman’s terms what the problem was. Not that the terms were very clear because neither he nor Helen understood very much. They had the strange impression that those gentlemen wanted to keep the diagnostic secret to themselves. We don’t know quite how a dispatch spread abroad the news of his stroke, but reactions flooded in, and his friends were left stunned. For some of his denigrators, a deep weariness, caused by decades of collusion with the most diabolical forces in the music industry, had taken possession of the left side of his body to plunge it into a lethargy that would be, if not permanent, at least of long duration. Others spoke rather of the dietary negligence of an elderly man who, they asserted, given his excess weight, had been playing with fire.

  The fact remains that on that night, O.P. found himself poised between life and death. Despite his mouth being twisted on the left side and his inability to raise his eyelids, he was to all appearances conscious, ready to die if necessary, tired of fearing the devil, if indeed he had come to fetch him. But when he remembered his daughter—how could he have forgotten her, rawtid?—he pulled himself together. Did he not want to be there for the crucial stages in her life? To teach her all he could in order to spare her troubles and worries? And how could he abandon Helen just like that, with no warning? When he thought about his music, he wondered if he’d ever again be able to play the piano, and the idea of that being impossible did not shatter him as much as one might have thought. What was going on in his head? As he was slipping into the world of shades, victim to the charms of eternal sleep, he heard, according to his fans, a familiar and indomitable voice call out to him, as gruff as ever: You’re in a pickle now, eh? Davina was grumbling as if she were mulling things over on high, and she said, all in one breath: Just hold your horses and wait until you see how the war’s going between the Good Lord’s soldiers and the devil’s army, because as long as you don’t know, you’re not even a player in all that. Those words, surprisingly, inspired in him a powerful longing to hang onto life.

  Soon afterwards, he was released. He was bedridden for months, in the master bedroom of his new house in the Toronto suburbs, mired in the swamp of a convalescence that seemed less stifling and unjust than one might believe. He wasn’t so much angry as immersed in a deep melancholy, propitious to self-reflection. What had he done with his life? What principles governed it? Had he lost his way along the road? When he looked at himself in the mirror, rigged out in a nightshirt and an awkward involuntary grimace that reminded him of Art, it’s said that he asked himself, seriously, whether someone somewhere was getting back at him for the intolerable jealousy he’d harboured towards his rival. Settled under the covers, he spent his days reading his daughter stories about girls smarter than their parents, helping to dress her dolls, and, at nightfall, studying the drawings she made of him, seeking there an avenue to the future: as though calling him to order she always drew him at the piano, the keyboard unspooling like toilet paper, with musical notes drifting over his head like stars lighting up the lives of the music lovers she sketched in a few monochrome strokes in the corner of the page, all of them with wide smiles. Then, one morning, he asked to be brought downstairs. He stayed there for a long time studying the studio he’d set up: a grand piano, stacked electric keyboards, mixing boards, amplifiers, guitars, trumpets, and saxophones. Suddenly, this space that he’d seen just a few weeks earlier as his lair, his sanctuary even, seemed inexpressibly vain. Before asking to be taken back upstairs, he told his wife that he’d decided to sell it all, with the single exception of the piano.

  Apparently, a year went by without his going back down to the basement. When summer cam
e, he began to install himself on the chaise longue next to the pool, from which he followed his daughter’s progress as a swimmer, lulled by the blissful joys of inaction, persuaded that life could go on just that way, serenely.

  It’s said that, one afternoon, drowsy from the effort it took to digest his food, he saw his wife coming towards him, along with a fairly sturdy elderly man missing his left hand, his hair grey and his back bent. Oscar took off his sunglasses: yes, it was Chester, whom he hadn’t seen for ages, bloodseed! He was attending a gathering of veterans in Toronto, and he’d decided to pay a visit to his little brother. While Chester talked to him in very simple terms, he had trouble persuading himself that it was really him; he seemed to have shrunk and lost his former combativeness. Even his voice, which once had a forceful resonance, had mutated into a kindly old man’s wisp of a voice. They spent the afternoon catching up on old times, stuffing themselves with chicken wings washed down with several glasses of beer, occasionally interrupted by Helen, who, from the swimming pool, tried to stem their penchant for hyperbole. At day’s end, when Helen and her daughter had gone in after having kissed them goodnight, Oscar brought out a bottle of rum. In honour of their reunion, they began to down glass after glass, as if they were giving short shrift to old age, so much so that after a time Oscar began to see in Chester signs of his former verve. It’s true that life had not been easy for him: once a prominent union leader, he’d experienced a slow but implacable decline, like so many of his fellow travellers, since the virtual disappearance of the manufacturing sector in Montreal. People, Chester argued, couldn’t make the proper judgments. All the advances acquired thanks to the unions were now passed over in silence when they were not scoffed at, casualties of a collective amnesia and a deification of the present day. After having lost his job as a docker at the port, and as the unions’ influence dwindled, the truth was that he’d lived from hand to mouth, going from one job to another, in the end resigning himself to his fate and living off his meagre pension, his activism long behind him.