by Laura Furman
“You called it charming.”
“Well, sure. Papillons and all that. You can’t deny it's pretty stuff.” “A cadaver comes up to you and wants to dance—you consider that charming?”
“What are you talking about?” “Listen to Carnaval.”
When Miguel returned from the vacation, his playing grew soberer, solider, focused. Some chronic misgiving seemed to have been resolved, some inner reorganization effected: the same chord, voiced more cogently. Yet he was also feverish, brooding; one day a confession, long pent up, gushed out of him:
“We took the train down to the coast. The motion of the carriage kept jogging our arms against each other—hers cool, mine hot. I was in a sweat. The craving in me! What I’d felt for the others was—froth. All that time longing for Rosario, courting her from behind my mask—and now to have this chance. It gave me qualms. And there was Lilí, curled up across our thighs, sucking her thumb.
“The train arrived late. The hotel clerk informed us that we’d forfeited our reservations: the only thing he had available was a room with a double bed and a cot for the little girl. Rosario winked at me: ‘I don’t think it would kill either of us to sleep together.’ Was it that I couldn’t bring myself to abuse her naïveté? Or pure cowardice? I slipped the clerk a thin wad. Adjacent rooms materialized. Rosario and Lilí, at least, got a good night's sleep.
“The next morning, early, I heard them stirring. I washed up and joined them for breakfast on Rosario's terrace. As soon as we’d finished, we grabbed our bathing gear and made for the beach. I hired a cabaña. While Rosario and Lilí changed, I scanned the panorama. The sand, the air, the sea—all sparkling. I felt sparkling myself. The cabaña's door opened, and Lilí flittered out. Then Rosario stepped onto the deck. She tossed her mane, loosening it to the breeze. I couldn’t swallow. I could hardly breathe. It hadn’t occurred to me to prepare for this sight—not that I could have. The swimsuit was a sleek one-piece, modest compared to the bikinis that many other women were sporting—but what it concealed, it revealed more than nudity itself, including the precise, sand-dollar forms of the nipples. It was her utter lack of self-consciousness, as much as anything, that undid me. I scuttled into the dressing room.
“When I emerged, Rosario was sitting on the sand, watching Lilí romp with some children in a tidal pool. I sank down beside her. She stretched her limbs and let out a groan of relaxation, as if only at that moment had she shed her burdens. ‘Would you rub some lotion on my back?’ she asked, not taking her attention off her daughter. The swimsuit was cut low in the rear, almost to the sacrum. The flesh was smooth as meerschaum, except for a tiny heart-shaped mole near the fifteenth vertebra (I counted them in an effort to calm myself). My hand was on fire. A crushing ache had me in torment. I tried to relieve this through speech, telling Rosario how voluptuous I found her. The liberties I allowed myself only inflamed me more. Of course, I was also testing the waters. ‘Oh, Miguel,’ she said, ‘you and your flattery!’
“Don’t do anything rash, I cautioned myself. Bide your time. Didn’t the sheer freedom to luxuriate in Rosario's presence amount to progress?
“We had lunch on the patio. Lilí was transfixed by the fan-pleated napkins, the staff's uniforms, the Noah's ark of new faces. A waiter brought her a cushion to perch on and helped her choose from the menu. He was lame. After he left, she said to us, quite stricken: ‘That poor man, he's like Esmeralda’—her doll, who had lost a foot. She laid out the seashells she’d collected, and aligned them by order of preciousness. When the waiter presented the check, she shyly pushed her three prize specimens in his direction.
“While Lilí had her nap, Rosario and I sat on the terrace. The canvas awning cast a shadow that stopped on her thighs just at the line where her skirts usually fall. The sun floodlit those legs of hers. I kept glancing at them, insatiable. She appeared to be drowsing. It sounds absurd, but I would swear her knees caught me spying. More than once I’ve been unnerved by the way that her gaze—which I live for—suddenly retracts. Well, now she locked her legs—rigid, canted off to one side—and her entire body seemed to retract. I actually shivered. Then they did something negligible, and momentous—to this day, I have the impression it was the legs alone, independent, that did it. They opened far enough for a fist to slide in between them, and the farther one slowly rose about an inch, as if to gauge my reaction. The movement was so—brazen.
“Somebody began to whisper with furious intensity, telling Rosario all my secrets. Only as the torrent subsided did I realize who was talking. Rosario jumped to her feet. Had I outraged her? Was she storming off to phone Roberto? A hoarse cry—‘Mommy!’—came from the room. Rosario must have picked up an earlier cry that I, in my agitation, had missed. For a second, she stared at me.”
The doorbell rang. Miguel, stranded on the sunstruck terrace, blinked.
“My next student.”
“Ah.”
“Roberto.”
I went and let him in. Seeing Miguel, he smiled.
“Did you mention my idea?” Roberto asked him.
“No… I wanted you to.”
“Miguel and I both need to work on mechanics, right? Why not coach each other, to accelerate the process? One week, say, Miguel practices leaps: I zero in on the problems. The next week he does the same for me. That way, we’ll get to the four-hand repertoire before we grow long beards! Maybe once a month, we could have a joint session with you, to make sure we’re not leading each other astray.”
“Bravo! How soon do you start?”
They set up an appointment on the spot.
The following time, Miguel did an impressive job with some exercises by Clementi. He was anxious to finish telling me his story:
“That afternoon, after my outburst, the world seemed to be holding its breath. Rosario behaved as though nothing had happened. On the beach, I sought refuge in Lilí—her uncomplicated light. Together we built a sand castle—a château, in fact, with all the fairy-tale trappings—and I spun tales in which she starred as its resident princess. We had supper around five, for her sake. Both Rosario and I spontaneously dressed up for the hotel's rather pretentious restaurant, and Lilí got to wear her ‘royal gown’ (a velvet frock). Rosario had somehow managed to manicure her nails. I refused to let myself believe she had done this for me. I half convinced myself that if I indulged such a presumptuous fantasy, those crimson rake-teeth would lash out and flay me. A tasty terror.
“Afterward I lay on my bed, clothed, letting myself be mesmerized by the revolutions of the ceiling fan. The dimness around me thickened. I was conscious only of a thudding right beneath my Adam's apple. Someone knocked. Rosario—in a silk nightgown that tied behind the neck.
Without a word, she floated past me and tiptoed to the door that communicated with her room, opened it a crack, listened. I began to say something. Her palm muzzled me, warmly. I kissed it. She stepped back. My hopes froze. She reached behind her neck and undid the bow.
“I’ve usually found in even the most alluring woman some falsity, some tinge of coarseness that diminishes my respect for her. It was just the opposite with Rosario. One detail made our intimacy especially poignant: she was both with me and with her sleeping child. An instinctive vigilance radiated from her—a wave of tenderness combined with a coiled readiness to spring, if necessary, to her daughter's defense. I sensed this as palpably as one feels the sun on one's skin.
“Then the idyll was over. Dismal! In the last eighty-one days, I’ve seen Rosario alone exactly four times. I mustn’t push for more. She's devoted to Lilí and Roberto.
“Every day I’m not with her weighs like jail. All I want to do is hibernate—but I can’t fall asleep, thinking about her. It's turning me into a zombie. I play a lot, to distract myself.” He paused. “Can I study that new piece you gave her?”
“Which one?”
“By Mompou.” He hummed the theme. “It won’t leave me alone.”
I produced a score for him. “Start by working o
ut the fingerings.”
“What's the title?”
“Secreto.”
His teeth clamped down on his lip.
It was around then that I performed Prokofiev's Paysage for Miguel, to demonstrate what delights lay in store if he stuck at his drills. I finished, and he exclaimed, “You don’t mean to tell me that's how all women are!”
“Of course not.”
It puzzled him that Roberto disallowed this sort of comprehension: “We’ll hear a piece at a concert. His only comment is ‘I liked it’ or ‘I didn’t like it’—as if it were a flan. When I try to discuss what it's about, he gets sarcastic: ‘I don’t need to make up stories to go with the soundtrack.’”
Even with me, Roberto practically brandished this incapacity. (Or was it puerile resistance, a stance adopted in order to distinguish himself from his more aesthetic friend?) “I honestly can’t see anything more in music than a formally pleasing arrangement of melodies, harmonies, and rhythms.”
“Only that, Roberto?”
He would shrug.
One day, having played a piece by Schumann, he said: “This moves me.”
“Why?”
He flicked his nose. “I just feel an affinity….”
I launched into my own rendition, emphasizing certain of the ideas.
“Wait! Is it his family?”
“He and his wife and his children, all joined in some activity—that's his heaven. They’re a hearth that cheers him and drives off the world's chill….”
He became keen to learn the language of music, notwithstanding his limited aptitude. Every week he would turn up with some new revelation. Frequently he was guessing rather than hearing; nevertheless, he gained increasing trust in his own ear. “This passage demands a crescendo here,” I would tell him, demonstrating. He would acquiesce but venture: “Maybe a tad softer, eh?”
Rosario, for her part, had a vivid sympathy with the Romantic repertoire, so much so that she was often disturbed by the anguished passions it depicted. Like a child who cannot bear stories in which dumb beasts are threatened, she shied away from extreme emotions. If she was unsettled by one of Chopin's evocations of jealousy, say, she felt free to leaven it with some congenial sentiment of her own, or simply to use the music as a vehicle for her mood of the moment. Although this disqualified her as an interpreter, it need not have prevented her from developing into a competent instrumentalist. She could have cloaked her failing beneath the ensemble of a chamber group, or excelled as a soloist in those grandiloquent calliopes which are the warhorse piano concertos. Empty compositions would have come out sounding expressive with her.
As the summer receded, I had less time for my students beyond the ambit of their lessons. Miguel gradually resigned himself to scant, sporadic trysts. He and Roberto carried on their reciprocal coaching. Soon they were plodding through Schubert's Ländler, D. 814. I advised Roberto to prepare a similar piece with Rosario. He contended it was too difficult to coordinate their schedules. The flimsiness of the alibi made me suspect that what really thwarted him was the fear that playing side by side with her would show him to poor advantage.
He declared his intention to acquire a grand piano.
“What's the matter with your upright?” I asked him.
“I don’t do things by halves,” he retorted. “Besides, Rosario should have an instrument worthy of her talent.”
At his insistence, I referred him to el señor Alvear, proprietor of the Casa de Pianos. Soon afterward, I was hurrying along a street downtown when a tubby, florid figure up the block began bouncing toward me, waving: el señor Alvear. He had on a beret and a muffler (no overcoat), and as usual he toted a wicker basket filled with bonbons. “Catch, catch!” he cried in his flügelhorn voice, and lobbed foil-wrapped candies at me.
Flushed, beaming, he bussed me on the cheek. “You’ve sent me a tycoon! The man has to have a full-size grand, no less.”
“You didn’t sell him one….”
“Anything larger than three-quarters was excessive, I told him. That only made him want to buy a full-size more.”
“A baby grand will do him fine.”
He cocked his head. “A smaller piano means a smaller commission for you.”
“Así es.”
When I next stopped at Roberto's and Rosario’s, a Blüthner Aliquod baby grand loomed in the twilight of the living room. Rosario went to get me a glass of juice from the kitchen, where Lilí was being given dinner by the maid. Roberto was talking on the telephone in the study. An odd dissonance charged the atmosphere. I sat down at the piano to try it out. Feathery action, pedals that yielded without the slightest creak, ringing tones in every range.
Roberto sauntered in. “How do you like it?”
“How do you like it, is the question.”
“Not bad for its size, I suppose.”
“But it's magnificent!”
“He knows it's magnificent,” Rosario said, stepping into the room. “He's just grumpy because he won’t be playing it himself.”
“What do you mean?”
“Well, not for a while,” he conceded, chagrined. “My company bid for a job down south. It's so much bigger than anything we’ve done before, we didn’t think we’d win it. The word came yesterday. I’ve been put in command.”
“Everybody agrees that Roberto is the one best qualified,” said Rosario. “And it's such an opportunity. Still, what a wrench…”
“I’ll be marooned, away from my family.” Roberto made a gesture encompassing his wife, the Blüthner, me.
“You won’t quit practicing,” I growlingly admonished him.
“That I promise! Even if I have to use one of those mute keyboards.”
It was pouring outside. With his wet slicker and dripping curls, Miguel seemed to sweep the whole hectic vigor of the cloudburst into my apartment. From his sodden briefcase we extracted his music, damp at the edges. I brought him a towel, and he rubbed his crown into a spume of fluffy ringlets. “I have a message for you from Rosario,” he announced. “She's canceling her lesson tomorrow.”
Rosario had always notified me of such changes herself, and in good time. After weeks of specially assigned exercises, she had been eager to attack Scriabin's Prelude for the Left Hand.
“She's well?”
“Wonderful.” A manic treble suggested that he had shared a delicious secret with me. “She's gone to see Roberto,” he added, in the manner of one obliged to furnish a gross hint.
“Ah.”
“He's been away for over two months.” Then, as if discarding all restraint: “She needed to see him.”
“That's a long separation.”
Miguel couldn’t shake his itchiness. When he played, he hit many wrong notes. Suddenly he seized my arm: “She's pregnant!”
As soon as Rosario returned, I went to give her a lesson. She greeted me with news of her husband. An efficient housekeeper was fixing him wholesome meals. His project, though formidable, was advancing smoothly; if the weather continued mild, he would finish it on schedule. “And you’d be proud of him. He's rented a spinet: no matter how busy the day, he does scales for at least twenty minutes.”
I signed for her to sit down at the keyboard. She did, but remained motionless, looking straight ahead. Mainly to herself she said: “I missed Roberto. It was a mistake to sleep with him. Now he’ll inevitably presume… It will be that much harder to tell him. I’ll have to wait for the proper moment. Isn’t there some music about this?”
At the end of the session, I answered: “Transfigured Night. ” “That's it!” She brightened. “Schoenberg will be my patron saint.”
Rosario was one of those women who live on easy terms with pregnancy. Her condition remained almost imperceptible. A gossamer smile betokened the dreaminess that enveloped her and that seemed only to enrich her faculties. She devoured pieces as fast as I fed them to her, wanting to spend all her time at the piano when she was not with Lilí.
Once he had made his disclosure
, Miguel kept his own counsel— except for issuing the occasional contented sigh, and offhandedly mentioning his conviction that Rosario was carrying a boy.
I was early. The maid let me in. Believing that Rosario was not yet home, and tempted by the Blüthner, I began to toil over the Liszt sonata. I don’t recall how far I got before I became conscious of her standing in a doorway. She wore a look of horrified rapture.
“Please, don’t stop.”
“It may not be healthy for you to hear this when you’re…”
“I’ve never been stronger. It's now that I can face such things.”
I glanced at my watch. “We’d better start your lesson.”
The next week she told me that she had been listening to recordings of the sonata.
“Horowitz's version is all about Horowitz. Arrau conveys perhaps half of what's there.”
“Even that much is a miracle.”
“Then how to describe what you convey?”
“He has a vast repertoire. I don’t.”
She began a campaign to get me to perform the entire piece for her. Soon Miguel took up the same refrain. She must have spoken to Roberto about it as well: he wrote me a postcard appealing for a future “Liszt recital.”
That sonata is an intelligent, seductive cobra.
Rosario's labor commenced on a frosty afternoon about seven months after her initial visit to Roberto. In order to spare him anxiety, she put off alerting him until the last possible moment. Within a couple of hours, she was able to report to him that it was a boy, astonishingly robust. Ecstatic, he flew back on the next plane. His first impression: “The spit and image of Rosario!” The engineering project was so close to completion that he was able to turn it over to a partner and stay home to be with his son.
Miguel had accompanied Rosario throughout her accouchement. Inspired by his friends devotion, Roberto insisted that the baby's name incorporate both of theirs: Guelberto. Following some discussion, this became Gilberto, which quickly, via Gilbertito, contracted to Tito.