When the bottle was empty and the mosquitos had become nasty, it’s said that Oscar unfolded his wheelchair and hoisted himself into it with the help of his brother, moving to the back door. Inside, in a large room where toys were scattered about, he took a photo album from the bookcase against the wall. They were instantly drawn to the old sepia pictures of their parents dating from their arrival in Canada, where in Sunday clothes they seemed to be standing at attention, solemn as judges, sometimes in front of a wooden house with a tilting roof, sometimes in a square bordered by perky palm trees and taros with their leaves like elephant ears. You’d think it was an old film! Chester exclaimed. After a long silence during which Oscar turned the album’s pages with a child’s curiosity, they observed, simultaneously, that neither of them had ever set foot on that island. They looked at each other conspiratorially, burst out laughing, and shook hands. Are you thinking what I’m thinking? asked Oscar. Seeing the hesitant smile on his brother’s face, he added: Do you remember what Mudda said? Youth is a short mistake, and old age a long regret. Chester smiled with all his bad teeth, and at once they shook on it again in manly fashion.
A week later, they flew off to the capital of the British Virgin Islands. Oscar rented a colonial house that gave on a chalky cliff where the waves came to die a thunderous, misty death. During their strolls through town, dressed in guayaberas, with flat knitted caps on their heads and sunglasses perched on their noses, they made their way along the stone road like two snails, Oscar settled in his wheelchair, Chester equipped with a cane. O.P. was delighted by everything: a popular expression—Cheese on bread!—called out by a seller of spiced nuts, the winding path leading to a plantation, the smell of a fresh bunch of coriander heightening a salad, the sea views so beautiful that they could melt a heart of stone, but above all the wonderful performances of the street musicians, which clearly charmed him. Quick-witted, their music was imbued with a vitality he not only recognized, but that he felt he’d carried inside him forever. It was one thing to understand the phenomenon at a distance, but it was another to see with his own eyes that his music was part of an age-old tradition, invested with all the island’s sounds, whether they were the products of nature, the living, or the dead. And if this West Indian ingredient was the spice that heightened his music and made it different from that of all other jazz pianists?
One afternoon, after a violent storm that left the ground strewn with brown puddles, it’s said that he and Chester hailed a taxi, determined to visit their parents’ village. The car forced its way through the dense, stiff foliage, bouncing along the road, with its back wheels sliding in the mud. After paying the driver, they continued on foot, avoiding the puddles. As they walked, the villagers halted their conversations, left coffee cups suspended at their lips, stopped braiding the hair of a young girl, lost interest in a cricket match to gawk at them. Several times they asked their way, and each time they were answered with puzzled amusement, followed by a playful exchange, without their ever being questioned as to what they were looking for, though it was clear that everyone wanted to know. When at last they arrived at the street they were seeking, they were disappointed to find that a church had been built—for a sect that, apparently, had become very popular on the island—right where there their parents’ first home once stood. They studied the church for a long time, scrutinizing both its foundations and its simple wooden steeple, as if they were trying to imagine in its place the little house with its roof’s two slopes, which appeared in the photos. They made their way laboriously to a drab square whose spectacle of sickly palm trees and battered benches robbed them of their last reserves of enthusiasm.
They approached two old women—one of whom, it’s said, was the spitting image of old Jackson—who talked away at them, cigars in their mouths, seated in rocking chairs in the shade of a veranda. Led back in time via the comical anecdotes inseparable from the village’s history, they realized that both of them had known Davina! The brothers were filled with joy, but after a moment, it seems that Oscar’s face went dark: How could that be possible, given that they themselves were in the autumn of their lives? Bloodseed, but how old were these women? When, in the course of an animated exchange, they made reference to the years of colonization as if they’d been there in the first-row seats, he remembered his own thoughts of a few days earlier regarding the long life of the street musicians’ songs, and, his hand over his mouth, he understood. Speaking rapidly and in a monotone, they’d remembered Davina, one after the other, as if they’d run into her at the market just the previous day. They’d described her in detail: her proverbial outspokenness, her uprightness, and the advice she offered to one and all even if it was not requested. Oscar’s tearful gaze shifted from the inconstant sky to a telephone pole where a red-winged blackbird was perched, darting nervous glances over its shoulder like the local gangsters of his childhood. What was he then thinking? Would he have become a musician had he grown up in this place? Was he, rather, meditating on the West Indian tradition he bore within him, which gave him a new perspective on the innovations in his music?
A taxi brought them back to town. It’s said that they spent the afternoon on the beach, their feet in the warm sand, contemplating the drowsy sea overhung by what was now a cloudless horizon. Chester told him how happy he was to see him again, but, if he could be allowed, there was one question he’d been wanting to ask ever since they’d gotten together. Why had he given up the piano? As Oscar remained silent, Chester impressed on him that when you have the good fortune to be guided by a passion, you had to fight for it to the death, bredda. Oscar gave his brother a kindly look, and the conversation ended there. Did Chester’s words influence him? Did receiving that outpouring of brotherly love make him want to return to his music? It’s said that during the rest of the day, he let slip his utensils in a restaurant, called a young saleswoman “sir,” almost slid and fell backwards in an open-air market where the ground was strewn with shrimp shells, totally absorbed, it would appear, in monitoring the disputes being waged by the various voices in his head. The vanity proper to all artists, music seen as a sacred fire, the cult of competitiveness, God in heaven, how had he been able to haul around all those antagonistic visions for so long?
Back home, Oscar agreed to undertake, at the urging of his doctor, some floor exercises, with his rehabilitation in view. A short time later, impressed by the degree to which his mobility had improved, he asked to be brought down to the basement, but after several weeks his intimates asked him what he was doing, since no note had been heard. One morning, a childlike phrase wafting up from below, though played with unprecedented and disturbing slowness, drew tears of joy from his wife and stifled cries from his daughter. After a moment, it was accompanied by a chord that soon, as if bashful, was heard no more. It’s said that it took months, or almost a year of relentless work, for him to learn to play again, for that is what he had to do. He tried in every way he could to begin afresh: no longer to play to impress the audience, nor to be the fastest, nor to assert some kind of domination, nor to help the cause of jazz, even less to provide for his needs. Now he seemed to want to play, and that was all.
Musician friends visited, but only those close to him were accorded the privilege of going downstairs, of which only three were allowed to hear him play, and one alone—Ray—to accompany him. A few tried to persuade him to come back onstage, some by buttering him up, others by teasing him about his scruples. For him, there was only one important question: Could he offer people a music of quality? Everyone assured him that his admirers would be enchanted to see him onstage again, and wouldn’t care if he didn’t play as rapidly as before. For Oscar, that was avoiding the real question, so he told them that he’d think about it, and they understood, not being stupid, that he was saying no, even though it appeared, as Ray confirmed, that he much enjoyed their sessions in his den.
Months passed without his giving any sign of life, until the morning when it was announced in th
e newspapers that he would appear the following summer at the Montreal Jazz Festival. The day of the concert, he appeared onstage decked out in a tuxedo and sitting in a wheelchair being pushed by a technician. His forced smile and his rueful air didn’t fool anyone, everyone could see that the left side of his face no longer obeyed him. When the crowd applauded, he raised his hand as if his ears were being assaulted in order to silence this outburst of sympathy. He slid with some difficulty from the chair to the piano bench, aided by the technician, struggling manfully, to the point where a murmur of fear went through the crowd, uneasy at the idea that the worst might happen: Would this genius, the city’s favourite child, tip over backwards, his feet in the air, like a little baby? And there were more murmurs when it was seen that his left hand fell directly down, because it wasn’t playing, just hanging at the end of his arm like a foreign body.
The next day, most of the critics tied themselves in knots with accounts in which the allowances they made were interspersed with fine sentiments. How wonderful to see him again onstage, because, even diminished, he remains one of the great figures of jazz! But really, they asked themselves obliquely, usually at the ends of their articles, has the Oscar P. we knew disappeared forever? The one plainspoken critic, who for half a century had been praising him to the skies, had these poignant words: In my worst nightmares, I would not have imagined such a sorry show. It hurts me deeply to have to say this, but the Oscar of today is but a caricature of what he was in happier times. Doubtless, it would have been better for him to stay at home and never again to appear in public.
When such words were repeated timidly to Oscar, he replied that his music had certainly changed, but if the magic no longer worked for others, what could he do, eh? In his opinion, he’d never played better. You really think so, O.P.? asked a friend. But of course! he exclaimed, and his eyes and voice were imbued with a sincerity so noble that one began to believe what he said. And on that note of tongue-in-cheek confidence, happy to have piqued the curiosity of his questioner, he described the reflection of his hands in the varnished dark wood of the piano, where they were transformed into couples dancing with the energy of despair.
It’s said that one night that same summer, as much to ward off insomnia as for his own pleasure, he was rehearsing in his basement, lit only by a seven-branch candlestick, when he received a telephone call from Norman G., who began talking to him cheerfully about this and that, as if they’d just seen each other the day before. He’d settled in Switzerland, where life was sweet, and where, he made no secret of it, the taxation of his assets was more advantageous. It was certainly him, and his voice, even weakened, seemed to want to communicate everything at once. Had he become senile? Norman paused to indicate that he wanted to see him again, and his blood froze. Why should Oscar agree to meet once more with this man who had poisoned his life?
A few days later he boarded a plane, accompanied by his wife and child, although once they arrived he decided to visit Norman alone. When he opened the door to his house, they stared at each other for a long time in silence: both in the twilight of their years, each one manoeuvring in a wheelchair. As they chatted in the living room about one thing and another, while a dozen greying heads in oil paintings kept watch over them out of the corners of their eyes, Oscar studied, it’s said, Norman’s aged face, replete with the nose, eyes, and mouth of an old man, from which there emerged an old man’s distinctive voice, and he thought to himself that despite the ravages of time Norman still filled him with horror, the one difference being that, now that he no longer had all his faculties, he could not be silenced and behaved like a condemned man who’d been given a few hours’ reprieve. At nightfall, Norman rolled towards the tall doors, followed by Oscar. Beneath a starry sky, on the marble floor of a spacious balcony with wrought iron beams, were distributed dozens of telescopes and a desk, where, it seemed, he scribbled notes. Since retiring from the world of music, that was his new passion, he said. When Oscar reminded him that his father Josué also had a love for astronomy, Norman, one eye at the eyepiece of an instrument, shot back: You never wanted to admit it, but we’re made of the same stuff.
The same stuff? asked Oscar. Is that a joke, or what? Norman fixed him with his ancient madman’s eyes. In other parts of your life, he said, you were original, but on this point, to be honest, you were like all my other musicians. You had to blacken me to invent for yourself an artistic purity that is just a fiction, an abominable lie. You always demonized me, Oscar, and I guess that must have done you a lot of good for it to have gone on for such a long time. Even if we no longer saw each other, there were people who kept me up to speed on all the nonsense you were saying about me. What do you think?
His eyes focused on the wrought iron as if his animosity was such that he could not resolve to look Oscar in the eyes, Norman went on: Once you were famous you kissed me off, then you avoided me for decades. But let me tell you, you’d have been nothing without me, nothing at all! You know, in the end I got used to taking hits, I got so many, from you and all the other musicians. Oh, it’s easy to hold a businessman in contempt, isn’t it, while never saying no to money? I mean, no musician I ever knew said no to a payday. Isn’t that strange? And what about the artists who live the lives of lords? They deserved their money, I suppose? While me, I’m some sort of swine, the devil incarnate? What hypocrisy!
It’s said that Oscar was dying to reply, but dying just as much to follow this twisted logic to its end. At times, Norman rolled himself up to a telescope to peer through an eyepiece, then went to his desk to jot down a calculation before returning to Oscar, so that when he picked up the thread of the conversation, his account of their relationship found echoes in his astonishing familiarity with the craters of Mars, the planet which, from what he said, obsessed him.
And was this madman right? thought Oscar. And if he’d been spinning himself yarns his whole life long, convinced that his ex-impresario was responsible for every misfortune that ever befell him? And if, during all those years, he’d been living in the cave of his own mind, on the walls of which were cast his shadow and those of his entourage? All lies! his admirers would say. Oscar gave everyone a chance, but when someone wanted to take advantage of him, he was right to cut him off, bloodseed. And then, it was quid pro quo, since each had gotten rich thanks to the other. In the end Oscar cut short Norman’s fevered oration to initiate, at least at the start, a true dialogue of the deaf. Despite his opposite’s indifference, Oscar argued that if everything were to do over again, he’d handle things in pretty much the same way. He’d still walk a fine line between a jazz that made no compromises and one that was more accessible and would not turn its back on entertainment, because he wasn’t stupid, he knew that his artistic decisions broke faith with his past, his youth, during which he’d acquired almost all his musical tastes. But he was certain that he’d find himself a different impresario, one more attuned to his music and less obsessed by financial success. The other remained silent, then burst out laughing and asked him if he was serious. They spent all night talking, bare-knuckled, each spilling his guts, forgetting to eat, their throats raw from scotch.
At dawn, when Norman came around to saying that Davina was an avaricious woman who’d exploited him, a witch disguised as a loving mother, it’s said that Oscar threw himself at him like a wild animal. Norman’s wheelchair tipped over, throwing his ex-impresario onto his back, and Oscar climbed onto him, straddled him, pressing his thumbs to his unshaven throat. He derided him like the gangsters hanging around on street corners when he was a child: I could kill you easily, no one would know, no one’s got your back anymore. Norman, not the least bit frightened, gave a little laugh before answering back: It’s not worth it, you idiot. I’m dying, I’ve got only a few weeks left. According to Norman, a tumour was spreading through him like a spider deploying its long hairy legs. After hesitating for a long time, Oscar crawled to his wheelchair and turned back once more towards Norman, prone on the grou
nd, a look of malicious pain on his face. Then he left. Some say this story is nonsense, and that Oscar, a peaceful soul if ever there was one, would never have paid him the courtesy of even a snub. Whatever the case, less than a month later Oscar learned from the paper, along with everyone else, that Norman G. had died. According to those near to him, he greeted the news with a shrug of the shoulders and a long silence, during which he stared at the floor without blinking or moving an inch.
It was about this time that he began to set down on paper some thoughts on his life. It’s said that at first he undertook the project with no thought of publication, just getting his bearings, but bit by bit he realized that he was writing his autobiography. The more he advanced, the more pleasure he took in spending time again with Brad, seeing once more Marguerite’s ghostly features in the hospital, and hearing himself performing his favourite standards alongside Ray and Herb. His pleasure consisted in revisiting those places at his own speed. He scribbled page after page dealing with his strange relationship with his impresario, fascinated by each of their meetings, persuaded that every scene generated more questions than answers, determined to stop himself whenever, against his will, he was distorting the truth to favour an illusory life he’d never led. It appears that a number of questions arose in the course of his writing: Did he want this story spread abroad in the public arena? Was he getting too wrapped up in the project, given that after all he was not a writer? Had he not said everything he had to say in his music? One winter night, he tossed into his fireplace all the chapters where he’d expressed himself with the candour of an adolescent writing a personal diary. As we know, he conserved only his tributes to his family members, to the musicians he admired, to Canada, and to his West Indian roots.
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