The Revolutionaries Try Again

by Mauro Javier Cardenas

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  I wanted to become a Jesuit priest, Antonio wrote, hoping his impulse to become a Jesuit priest when he was fifteen or sixteen and still living in Guayaquil could sustain a novella or at least a short fiction about youth and god and so on, the kind of fiction that would rhapsodize his volunteer work with Leopoldo at the hospice Luis Plaza Dañín and would exalt their roles as catechists to the poor in Mapasingue, and yet a week or two after writing down that first sentence about wanting to become a Jesuit priest, a week like every other week for him in San Francisco (happy hour at 111 Minna on Wednesdays, a launch party for a new technology startup on Thursdays, an all night warehouse dance party on Fridays, and because he lived right behind Davies Symphony Hall and the War Memorial Opera House, and because he wanted to see and hear everything in the world — to become an expert on the unconscious one needs to know everything, Carl Jung said, and Antonio liked to believe that applied to becoming a writer, too — a symphony or an opera on Saturdays), Antonio concluded that although he wanted to write about his impulse to become a Jesuit priest when he was fifteen or sixteen, he wasn’t interested in dramatizing his impulse to become a Jesuit priest through scenes and reversals and recognitions from the time of Aristotle, yes, let us please not follow the pious Ecuadorian boy who, after a series of intense religious experiences, including the apparition of La Virgen del Cajas, which Antonio was absolutely not going to write about for anyone in the United States (Leopoldo had been there, too), loses his faith as everyone eventually does, no, dramatizing his impulse to become a Jesuit priest with scenes and reversals and recognitions seemed to him contrary to everything he valued about fiction (his first adult encounter with fiction had been Borges, and it was only after he enrolled in an introductory fiction class at the Berkeley Extension that he was shown the flat world of Best American Realism — I discovered Borges because of Michaela from Sweden, Antonio would have liked to tell Leopoldo over the phone, a fellow economics student from Sweden who allowed me to stay with her during the winter break of my senior year at Stanford because I didn’t have any money to fly anywhere that resembled home — listen to this, Leopoldo, a Mexican grad student who also had a crush on Michaela had handwritten a dedication on Borges’s Ficciones that read Dear Michaela, after reading this book, you’ll finally understand me — how does anyone understand anyone via Borges, Leo? — fiction that unfolds solely in Judas’s head was how Antonio liked to think of Borges’s fictions), so Antonio discarded his first sentence about wanting to become a Jesuit priest when he was fifteen or sixteen just as he had discarded his first sentence about wanting to become the president of Ecuador or at least the minister of finance and coming to the United States to prepare himself to return and run for office with Leopoldo because what he had come to understand was that he didn’t know how to write the kind of fiction he wanted to write, didn’t think he had another option but to continue to work as a database analyst during the day and read as much as he could during the night until one day maybe he would come to know how to write the kind of fiction he wanted to write (to manufacture a sense of daily anticipation during his workweek at the check cashing technology startup where he ran database queries he would order novels without tracking numbers from different websites and wait for them to arrive before lunch so he could read them during his two hourlong lunches outside South Park Café), and then one day Leopoldo called him and said come back to Ecuador, Drool, and despite Antonio’s copious explanations to himself about why he was no longer interested in returning to Ecuador to run for office (if the goal of running for office was simply to increase people’s income — people we don’t even know, Microphone — then he wasn’t interested because playing the piano or writing fiction was more challenging and for him more personally rewarding — dilly dally all you want, Leopoldo would have countered, have your fun, we’ll wait —), he didn’t tell Leopoldo he wasn’t interested in returning to Ecuador anymore, didn’t explain anything to Leopoldo but instead said let me think it through — what exactly do you have to think through, Leopoldo would have countered if the phone lines had been less crossed — and the week or weeks after Leopoldo called him Antonio was surprised and not surprised that he’d been expecting Leopoldo’s call even though he hadn’t talked to Leopoldo in years (even on his deathbed he would still be expecting Leopoldo’s call — out of bed, old man, the time to revolt is now — I do receive discounts on air travel now that I’m old and decrepit, Microphone —), even on his deathbed he would remember wanting to become a Jesuit priest when he was fifteen or sixteen because the logic of his impulse to become a Jesuit priest had been inarguable to him: if god was the pinnacle of life, one should dedicate one’s life to god, but that hadn’t been the last time he was inarguably certain about what to do with his life: the impulse to come to the United States and study at a school like Stanford to prepare himself to return to Ecuador and run for office had been as inarguable a plan as wanting to become a Jesuit priest, and what he told himself to explain the evaporation of his impulse to return to Ecuador to run for office included the discovery of Borges and Scriabin, Merce Cunningham and Virginia Woolf (Antonio liked to tell his American acquaintances that if he hadn’t come to the United States he would have never discovered Pina Bausch and Stanley Elkin, for instance — quit it with your Elkin and your Pina Bausch, Drool, what really changed your life plan was that you underperformed in your macroeconomics class at Stanford and discovered women, or rather you discovered that, unlike in Guayaquil, here women actually pay attention to you, the exotic Ecuadorian), Cortázar and António Lobo Antunes, Claude Simon and Leonid Tsypkin, discovering the possibility of an alternative life in which he did not have to submit to embarrassing myths about himself — everyone thinks they’re the chosen ones, Drool — although he had approached fiction and piano playing the same way, thinking of them not simply as activities to pass the time before he died but as transcendental callings, which was an exhausting way to live: but what I really wanted to tell you is that I loved Annie, Leopoldo, loved driving up to the Berkeley Hills to take piano lessons with this stern, elderly French lady named Annie, loved her two grand Steinway pianos and her tall bookcase with shelves like mail slots for sheet music only, her high heels clacking on the floorboards between her piano and her front door, loved how I tried to please her every week by switching on her metronome and showing her how much faster my fingers had become and at the same time displease her by picking piano pieces I wasn’t ready to play, her husband, Bruce, a composer who praised my imprecise yet according to him tempestuous rendition of Scriabin’s D Sharp Minor Etude and allowed me to practice in his piano shop by the Gilman Street freeway exit, loved hearing about Annie & Bruce’s Evening Games in which she would play different records of the same piece for him, Chopin’s Ballade No. 1, for instance, and then her husband had to guess who was the pianist, and one night, at the annual Halloween recital she organizes for her students, I showed up shirtless, wearing shiny red leotard pants and a boa around my neck, ready to perform Brahms’s Ballade No. 1, and afterward one of her students, an Austrian psychotherapist who favored Maurice Ravel, said to me I couldn’t concentrate on your Brahms because I kept imagining you in my bed, Antonio, to which neither I nor her husband had anything witty to add, and just as Antonio had intermixed two of Borges’s fictions to come to think of Borges’s fiction as fiction that unfolds solely in Judas’s head, he’d also intermixed Annie with his impulse to return to Ecuador, Annie frowning at him like she always did after he attempted to play Scriabin’s D Sharp Minor Etude and scolding him and saying you are a foolish one, Antonio José, for what made you think you were going to be allowed to stay in San Francisco and not return to Ecuador?

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  After a twenty one year absence my father returned to the church. The pious boy I was back then had convinced him to attend Christmas Mass, and, according to my grandmother, his return that night was what led to the baby christ’s tears. Most in my family readily adopted my grandmother
’s version, as I was to do in the years that followed, sharing it with my American friends as another example of the quaint superstitions of my Third World country, which would often prompt in them comparisons to eyewitness news reports of Virgin Mary sightings on trunks of trees or mortadella sandwiches. Of course I suspected my grandmother’s version was far too simple, but nothing ever compelled me to elaborate on it by implicating others or by including events that began long before that night.

  Masha had forgotten to ask him about his grandmother’s baby christ, just as she’d forgotten to hand him his manuscripts at his farewell party despite the inordinate amount of time she spent reddening them with recommended readings, allusions, panels of question marks, imagining a late night at Antonio’s in which she was to hold forth, by Socratic questioning, like Akhmatova must have done with Osip — Akhmatova never piled obloquies on Osip, Masha — on the defects of his work. Did Antonio really witness a baby christ cry? Did his classmates at Stanford really mistake him for the son of the dictator of Ecuador? How could anyone expect her to have been the one to convince him to stay if he didn’t even share anything about his life in Ecuador?

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  I enrolled in piano lessons soon after graduating from Stanford and accepting a lukewarm job at an economic consultant firm with absolutely no ties to Latin American development, Antonio wrote, hoping that by writing about the life he had chosen in San Francisco he could counter his impulse to return to Ecuador, an impulse that he knew was imprudent to pursue outside of his imagination and that was extensively documented in literature as a terrible idea — just because I was born in a poor country doesn’t mean I’m obligated to return, right? I can become something else: why not a pianist? — so Antonio tried to write about his attempt to become a pianist after graduating from Stanford, beginning with his first piano lesson, Annie guiding his index finger to middle C, for instance, Annie tapping his knuckles with a number two pencil, him fumbling through his first le petit pieces to the delight of the Japanese premed students who happened to be studying in the common area where he’d found an upright piano and who happened to interrupt his clunkers with their variant of American snark, which of course drove him to practice longer and louder, and then he tried to write about how after just a year of practicing three hours a day he was able to play challenging pieces like Scriabin’s D Sharp Minor Etude, and then he tried to write about how exhilarating it had been to discover Olivier Messiaen, who used to voyage to canyons and forests around the world to transcribe birdsongs, some of which can even mimic the city sounds around them, a French composer called Olivier Messiaen, who meticulously inked all of his birds, which he called, without irony, little servants of immaterial joy, into an opera about San Francis of Assisi: at the North American premiere of San Francis of Assisi, from the balcony section of the War Memorial Opera House, I watched San Francis praying about what he calls the perfect joy, Leopoldo, in other words about the acceptance of suffering, which the orchestra and the ondes Martenots and the xylophones granted to him by performing an insistent, nervewrecking squawk of every single birdsong Messiaen had ever transcribed — can you imagine what Father Villalba would have said about calling such racket the Sermon of the Birds? — in unison all instruments mimicking a different birdsong, instruments with names as thrilling as the names of Messiaen’s composition methods: nonretrogradable rhythms, limited modes of transposition — why shouldn’t I be able to compose fiction or music or anything with names like that, Leopoldo? — and then a Russian painter called Masha said I can’t take this racket anymore, Antonio, and Antonio said to hell with these birds, let’s get out of here, standing up, the disapproval of the audience around him enlivening him so he laughed and tarried on purpose, pantomiming a clumsy, sluggish retreat along the row of wincing footwear, and then back at his apartment, emboldened by the champagne he’d ordered for them at Absinthe, Masha surprised him by taking off all her clothes except for her underwear, ambling toward him with her arms crossed to cover her chest, purposefully exaggerating her shyness so as to conceal her shyness, both of them outstretched on his sofa, the lights off in his apartment but on outside his windows, hearing the drunk tenors stumbling back to their station wagons because the night had been surprisingly warm so the living room windows were open, or perhaps he has ascribed the drunk tenors to that moment in retrospect because the San Francisco Opera’s parking lot happened to be in front of his apartment building on Fulton Street and late at night he could often hear the drunk tenors stumbling back to their station wagons, wailing their arias in self mockery, and as Antonio tried to write about his attempt to become a pianist he came to realize that just as he used to think of himself as the boy who taught catechism to the poor and vowed to return to rescue them (he still thinks of himself as the boy who teaches catechism to the poor and vows to return to rescue them), he now also thinks of himself as the Ecuadorian who listens to extravagant classical music, and isn’t it wonderfully freeing that no one here expects an Ecuadorian to know anything about Silvestrov’s postludes or Messiaen’s birdsongs?

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  I drink so I can bear talking to people, Antonio wrote. I acknowledge my conversational alcoholism. The more people converse with me, the more alcohol I am bound to imbibe. My liver, that most handsome of organs, was heard gossiping to my other organs about the absurdity of my social neurosis. Thank god my kidneys stood up for me and said shut up liver, you’re drunk again. So your narrator drinks at parties, Masha wrote along the margins, then what? Yet another tale about the agonies of partying in the USA? Why not include some of your actual travails?

  One morning she’d commented on the expensive red leather pants strewn on his bedroom floor and he’d whispered to her, as if they could hear them, they’re uninvited guests, Mashinka, crashing for the night. Can you believe I allowed my cheap Acura Integra to be repossessed not only because I didn’t need it anymore but because I wanted to use the monthly payment to buy more clothes? Can you believe I was fired from my first job at an economic consulting firm for falsifying receipts for meals I did and didn’t have? Antonio behaved as if he’d come from money but that morning he told her his only income was his junior database analyst salary. He also told her that after all the startups in the South of Market ran out of cash and were forced to shutter their businesses, including the startup where he collected his paycheck, the only company hiring in San Francisco had been Bank of America. I interviewed for yet another database analyst position at Bank of America last week, Masha. A former marine who’s now in charge of managing twelve million checking accounts asked me about challenges I’ve faced. Weaknesses? Where do you see yourself in five years? Sir, to tell you the truth, sir, this job would be temporary: I’m going to become the liberator of the Americas so I can only stay twenty to forty years tops.

  Months later, at his farewell party, she enticed him away from the other women by telling him she had carefully read his manuscripts, avoiding at first any references to the actual travails he’d shared with her. So what do you think, Mashinka? Any hope for me as a writer? Wait, let’s have another round of shots first. Antonio finished his shot and hers. She had forgotten that, although she didn’t hand him his manuscripts with her comments, she did tell him what she thought of them, paraphrasing most of the red comments she has been rereading while listening to Tabula Rasa. You claim to despise so called conventional fiction, she said to him, you mock me for listening to Bach instead of John Cage, and then you write this extremely conventional fiction about a miraculous baby christ who cries because of the corruption of the narrator’s father. She looked away while she said this, although she knows she’s softening her defiance so she can feel better about herself. She knew Antonio had been writing for less than two years. Would he have stayed in San Francisco if she had lied and told him his fictions showed promise? Hints of brilliance? You seem to purposely exclude any clues as to why you’re throwing all these words at us, Masha said. How can we distinguish the important and serious from th
e less important? Neither the festive atmosphere nor the shots lessened the impact of the harsh words she was foisting on him. Had she expected him to banter about her critiques? To refute her comments amusingly? He didn’t. He looked embarrassed that he’d disappointed her. I’m sorry, Antonio. I wish I would have told you back then to wait, keep going, no one can write decent fiction in less than two years. The other day the televisions at my gym were showing a special about astronauts, Antonio said. Did you know my neon gym is my one link to American pop culture? I was on the Treadmaster watching all those silent televisions, and in spite of their muteness I could easily tell what the shows and the commercials were all about because they had cued up all their moments for me. Here’s the moment of truth. Here’s the moment of cereal. Plus some of the televisions had subtitles. What does it mean, Masha? When all our narratives have been cued up for us? Here’s a moment for you: There was a radical old priest at my Jesuit high school and we were all in awe of him and for years I used to think of him as my mentor but I only spoke to him once, maybe twice. By the time I arrived at San Javier he had abdicated his role as a spiritual counselor because he thought my classmates and I were the problem. I wasn’t the exception, but for years I imagined he’d been my spiritual sensei, my Narcissus, my Mister Miyagi. But it doesn’t really matter, right? Our faux narratives affect us just the same. Here’s a narrative for you: one time I stayed on the Treadmaster for more than two hours because the music channel was showing a documentary about a former member of Menudo, a Latin American boy band that was popular when I was in middle school. This represents at least a hundred words I was not counting on. Come, Antonio said, pulling her to his bedroom, I want you to meet Alvin Lucier.