On the bus ride home Daddy realized that they could now have afforded a taxi. Taxis were the fourteenth best transportation in the world, whereas buses were at only three hundred and forty-seven. “Never mind,” he laughed. “Taxis only from this point on! I’m proud of you, son. Not a bad day’s work, eh?” And the little boy agreed. “I’m going to write some more songs now,” he said, “I’m already getting ideas!”
But he didn’t have time for writing for a while. The boy was famous. Truth to tell, the press wouldn’t usually have taken much interest in the story. Every few months someone or other was breaking a song into the bottom hundreds of the canon, shoving aside others that had only just been put in. And it may have been the nine hundred and fourteenth best song in the world, but it was also the eighty-seventh worst, which didn’t sound half so impressive. But the boy was twelve years old. That was something which caught the listeners’ imagination, and his song was rerecorded in many different styles to sate the interest: reggae, rap, a cappella. The boy was referred to as a genius in the making, a wunderkind, a veritable Mozart. Mozart was a famous composer. He’d managed to get no less than fourteen songs into the top thousand, he was really very good indeed.
At school he’d been so dreamy he’d barely made an impression. But now he was the epitome of romance. He won the hearts of all the girls, and quite a few of the teachers as well, one or two quite got into trouble over him. He barely noticed, he looked on in some bemusement as his classmates wept for his love, as his form mistress was disciplined by a tribunal and put on probation. And he didn’t stay at the school for long; he had no need for geography or physics or gym anymore, and the boy could now afford a special education at which he could focus upon his gifts. He learned how to write in musical notation, he learned to pick apart the songs he’d once enjoyed so uncritically. He wrote a few songs, and of course everyone in academe buzzed with expectation, what fresh classics might he be concocting under their very noses? But they were to be disappointed; the boy always destroyed these efforts, saying that they weren’t good enough, he wasn’t yet ready to give a second masterpiece to the world. By the time he graduated his original song had slipped down the rankings, and was now nine hundred and thirty-third. One of his fellow students at last managed to catch his attention, and then to catch his heart. She was the envy of all her friends, and received a couple of death threats from the most jealous. As they walked down the aisle, with his mummy and daddy looking so proud, and the boy no longer quite a boy, no longer quite a wunderkind, the song that was played was his own. The bride had chosen it especially. She said it was that song that had made her fall in love with him. Of course it had been. At this point it was the nine hundred and forty-seventh best love song in the world.
The fact was, the boy didn’t like the song very much. No matter how much it was digitally remastered, or re-remastered, he heard it for what it was. A melange of other people’s songs that had just got lucky. There was love in it, and it was his love, but it wasn’t the love it pretended to be—a love for the love that others feel is still a borrowed love, it’s no love at all. The boy knew he had to find within his heart some passion that was sincere. He dedicated himself to his wife. He knew that she loved him, and that ought to make him love her—but was it really a love strong enough to produce a good tune? He worked on it. He studied her from every angle. He’d adore the nape of her neck, he’d delight in the kink of her nose. He taught himself to feel ecstasies over the little jokes she made he knew really weren’t that funny at all. And at last he thought the preparation was over. He wrote a new song. He read it back critically. He prised it apart, put it back together, tweaked the chorus, softened the guitars a bit. He thought about destroying it. He was all set to tear it up. And then he realized how much it would hurt him, to lose even one note of it. It was finished, his second attempt at love. His previous effort was now ranked at nine hundred and seventy-four.
As a composer in the top thousand, he could bypass the usual registration process. He didn’t have to queue. He could come to the city with his post office form and his sheet music, and no matter how busy the office, the doors of the cubicles would be flung open wide for him. “Hello, sir!” said the clerk, “and welcome!” The clerk fed the new song into the computer. The computer whirred, but it didn’t ping, it grunted. “Oh!” said the clerk, checking his readout, much surprised. “Better luck next time.” And took the song from the feeder tray, and shredded it before the young composer’s eyes.
Maybe his love had been too clean, he hadn’t fought hard enough for it. He began to have affairs. Nothing major at first, just the odd grope with likely looking women in the back of pubs; he was no longer hailed as a genius, but telling a pretty girl he’d written the nine hundred and eighty-second greatest love song was always an icebreaker notwithstanding. Seeking further inspiration, he moved on to afternoon trysts, and then evening trysts, and then weekend trysts. A five-day fling with identical blonde twins provoked him to compose a full seven and a half minute ballad. The computer rejected it, as it did all his other songs. The doors of the registration office were still flung open wide to him, but with markedly less enthusiasm. His wife left him. She said that she no longer knew him. She said that maybe she never had. He wrote a song about how that made him feel. The computer didn’t care. His daddy died. Quite unexpectedly of a heart attack, there was no warning. His mummy, who had never raised a voice to him, who had bought him a radio and made him tuna sandwiches, told him that his father had been so appalled by the way he’d treated his wife that the shame had killed him. The composer cried for days. He wept it all out into a new song. The computer barely gave it a blip, let alone the much-sought ping. The clerk studied the readout and said, yes, the computer could see that the composer in question was upset, and it offered him its condolences. But that didn’t mean he’d written a good song.
One day a bar pianist in Portugal hit the news. Afonso Guttierez had been playing his own songs to customers as they ate their tapas, and had been persuaded by concerned friends to take a selection of his work for registration; it would have taken only one disgruntled diner unhappy with the calamari to stop him. He offered fourteen songs. Eight were rejected, but that still left an unprecedented six that were accepted automatically by the Lisbon computer. The pianist was thirty-four years old, but in spite of that still hailed as a new wunderkind, a new Mozart. All six of the songs ranked higher than our composer’s effort, which now came to rest at a precarious nine hundred and ninety-seven. The composer decided that he needed to get a song accepted into the canon immediately before he lost his placing altogether, and for the next few nights worked hard on his latest masterpiece—he pushed and prodded at all of his feelings, dredging his heart for something that might sound beautiful. But it was too late. By the time he took his new work into the city everything had changed. Fired up by his success, Guttierez had returned to his bar, and written up for submission a further fifty-eight of the songs he’d squirreled away over the years. All fifty-eight were accepted. When our composer reached the office, he found he now had to queue like everybody else. He had to take a ticket and wait his turn. And when he at last reached a cubicle, tired and angry, it was to find only that his childhood success had been erased, deleted from the computer, wiped from the world’s iPods. The clerk apologized. He fed the new song into the computer. It was rejected.
“What if I wrote a song that wasn’t about love at all?”
The clerk said, very slowly, “I don’t think that’s possible.”
“It has to be possible.”
“Every song expresses love for something,” said the clerk. “A few hundred years ago, love of God was all the rage. Now it’s all about love of sex. Give it another hundred, it’ll be love of silicon chips, who knows? But in any good song, there’s always a love you can’t get around. And that’s love for the music itself. That’ll always be there. You can’t beat it.”
“A man can try,” said the ma
n who had once been a composer.
For two long months the man worked hard. Fortified by broccoli and lukewarm beer, he cut out anything from his diet that might excite his taste buds, anything that might get translated accidentally as passion in melody form. The stipend had been withdrawn, so he was obliged to go out to work during the day, concentrating on his music only once his shifts were over. He wasn’t trained for anything, so took on a series of menial temp jobs, stacking shelves, stuffing envelopes. But even that helped, he was able to channel the numbness of the day into the numbness of his music. He composed through the night, every night, his desk turned so he was facing a blank wall, and every time he came up with a note that even reached for emotion he’d quash it. The music wasn’t bad; he couldn’t simply afford to be bad, anyone could write bad music. It took a very certain sort of genius to write something instead that was so good and so fully formed, and yet stillborn.
He went to register his song. He took the day off work. They’d just have to find someone else to hold a placard advertising golf sales. He took his ticket. He waited. There was a child across the aisle sitting with his father, no doubt thinking this whole process of assessment and rejection was some fun day out. He glared at him and made him cry. He went to the toilet. His face looked haggard with lack of sleep, his hair had greyed.
The song was fed into the computer. It whirred for a bit, and then whirred some more. The screen froze. The clerk had to get out the manual, turn the computer off and then back on again. “Well,” he said, at last, “it’s not a love song. We don’t know what it is, but it’s not a love song. And so it’s outside our jurisdiction. It doesn’t need to be destroyed.” He took the sheet music from the feeder, and instead of shredding it, handed it back to the composer.
“You’ll buy it?” said the composer.
“God, no.”
On his way home, for want of something to do, the composer read over his song. He didn’t finish it. He left it on the bus behind him.
He vowed he’d never write music again. He needed a career, something permanent, something he could commit to. He applied for a job at the local McDonald’s; McDonald’s was a fast food chain specializing in burgers, and the six hundred and sixth best in the world. He was much older than any of his fellow workers, they all thought that was impressive. And he worked hard there, he began the week as a mere team member but by Thursday he was team leader, he had five gold stars on his name badge and he was on a roll. His managers were in awe, they’d never seen anyone scale the ladder of convenience food industry so quickly, he was astonishing, a wunderkind. He loved his job. He flipped the burgers and wiped the tables and gave service with a smile, this was something he was good at. The restaurant played an endless stream of Muzak, simplified versions of the love songs he’d once admired and competed with. And sometimes they played Guttierez.
One day the televisions all reported breaking news. The world had a new best love song. Nothing composed in the last fifty years had even made it near the top ten, there was something so established about those classics that was just hard to beat. But the latest from Afonso Guttierez had taken the number one spot, knocking down into second place some ditty by Verdi. Always one to shy away from publicity, Guttierez had only reluctantly agreed to a TV interview, in which he mumbled in broken English that he was pleased people a-liked his song. People more than liked it; it was adored. Everyone played it for their loved ones, and although doing that was immediately a cliché, it somehow wasn’t, because the song seemed to speak personally to whoever heard it, it was universal but was also specifically about them. The former child prodigy, former composer, gave the song a listen. He didn’t much care for it.
He couldn’t have explained why he caught that flight to Lisbon. Why from there he took a seven-hour coach trip into the Portuguese hinterland. He didn’t know what he was going to do when he found Guttierez. Only that by now Guttierez had three hundred and four songs in the top thousand, and, if that wasn’t bad enough, the other composers of the world had cottoned on, they were writing their songs in the style of Guttierez; they weren’t quite as good as Guttierez, of course, but they were perfectly suited for adaptation as background music, for elevators, for supermarkets—there was suddenly a strange sticky homogeneity to the music of the world, and there was a new name already coined for it, it was used freely and without shame by all the critics and all the disc jockeys, and that name was Guttierezesque. He’d been working so hard at his Big Macs to make a bit of money. Now he’d blown all his savings. Some of it had gone on the fare to Lisbon, the rest had gone on the gun.
They said that the genius of Guttierez was that he didn’t appear to compose his songs at all, he’d just play at the piano and somehow they’d pour out. It was why he was so extraordinarily prolific. He said he needed the audience, that before his success he’d tinkered before customers in a bar, and that he couldn’t change the way he worked now. That was why, shy as he was, he still performed. He’d sold up the small bar, of course, and now owned a large restaurant. The food was only adequate, and was served on paper plates and with plastic cutlery to minimize the clatter of knife and fork. But no one came to Restaurante Guttierez to eat.
The maître d’ asked if he had a reservation. “No, I’m sorry. Can you squeeze me in?” “I’m sorry, senhor, tonight we’re fully booked.” “I see. Can I reserve a table for tomorrow?” “Senhor, we are fully booked for the next five months. Senhor Guttierez, he is very popular.” “Please. I need to see him. I’ve flown all the way from England.” “We have many visitors from England, senhor. From Japan, from Australia, from the Americas, from all over the world.” “I’m begging you. I’m a composer too. I compose love songs. I used to compose love songs. We’re the same, him and I. We’re the same. Please. Please.” The maître d’ let him in.
He was given a little table at the back, with two chairs. He looked at the menu. The wine cost a fortune. He couldn’t afford it. He ordered a carafe.
At last the lights dimmed, and Guttierez appeared. He shuffled toward the piano. He was just a little man, a little man. He was wearing shirt and tails, like a concert pianist, but they didn’t really fit him, he looked scruffy. He darted a glance at the audience, but didn’t look at them directly, didn’t want them there. There was a smattering of applause, but Guttierez ignored it. He sat down at the piano.
The team manager from McDonald’s carefully took the gun from his coat pocket.
Guttierez frowned at the piano. As if it were something he was trying to remember, trying to place. He raised a finger. He hesitated. He dropped it onto a key. Plonk. It was a C. He thought about this, then raised the finger once more, thought a bit further, then dropped it onto the F. Then back onto the C. Then back onto the F. He gave this some consideration. He took his hand away from the piano altogether, stared at it once more. Then raised his hand, raised his finger. Held it in the air—then let it fall, at last. Back onto the C. Then faster, another C, another F, another C. Then the single finger exploring further, excited, picking out other notes, at random, a mess.
Our hero wanted to laugh. Guttierez wasn’t worth killing. He wasn’t worth the price of a wine carafe. He got up to leave.
“No,” said the woman beside him.
He hadn’t realized there was a woman beside him. That someone had taken that second chair. He couldn’t make her out in the dim light. She said something to him in a whisper.
“What?”
“Escute. Listen.”
So he listened. And there wasn’t much to be impressed by. Not for a while. But then Guttierez visibly relaxed. The notes began to smooth. They still seemed random, at least at first—not so discordant now, even pleasing to the ear, nothing special of course, nothing of any worth—but then that was all stripped away, it was as if it had been a game all along, those notes weren’t random, they’d been building up to something, building up a rhythm, you could hear those simple Cs, those Fs, every now and ag
ain being picked out, as if winking at an audience who took them so much for granted before, we’re building up to something, they said, we’re building up to . . . and here on the top of them there was. . . .
He gasped. And was flooded by the music.
Guttierez opened his mouth. For a while nothing came out. The fingers continued to dance upon the piano, the music hadn’t reached his head yet, the mouth hung open, waiting for it to do so. And then words tumbled out. Guttierez was not a great singer. He didn’t have to be.
He didn’t know what Guttierez was singing about. He didn’t have to.
He didn’t have to know anything.
He wasn’t a composer anymore, or a man who had once been a composer and had given up, or a man who had once been a composer and who could never give up, not really, no matter how much he failed. He was a little boy. He was a little boy who listened to love songs. He was a little boy in love with love.
He turned to the woman, and he could barely see her. It dawned on him that this was because he was crying.
She put what she was holding onto the table, and with her hand now freed, reached for his. He looked at her closely. And he knew that he loved her. It wasn’t that she was beautiful, it wasn’t that. But she was there. She was there, amongst the music.
They Do the Same Things Different There Page 40