A Guide for the Perplexed

by Jonathan Levi

  No longer a scale of Western chromatics, or Eastern quarter-tones, or all-encompassing glissandi whose compass is still limited by physics and anatomy—the Perfect Sound will capture the disembodied moment of infinite possibility.

  The moment between the upswing of the bow and the down. The moment of the touching of the string. The moment between the climax and the eruption, the wide-eyed stare shared by sperm and egg before the inevitable. The moment before birth, the unborn baby still undistanced. It will be a moment carrying thought and potential in all their musical brilliance, before life disappoints and diminishes. It will be a triumph over Time, Motion, and Beauty.

  Remember—“How do you get to Carnegie Hall?” is a question as much of motion as of ambition.

  —Sandor, In Search of the Lost Chord, A Brief Guide, p. 265

  A NOTE FROM A READER

  A distinguished traveler, the Khalsoum Professor of Ethnomusicology and Comparative Literature, writes:

  Dear Ben,

  When I was a young man, there was no music that pleased me, that excited my sense of sound, of taste, of smell, of vision, of passion, as completely as that of flamenco. I sought out the pure, the rough. I traveled with the gypsies of Spain and North Africa. I ate with them, traded stories, shared cold skies and hard ground. I joined the chastened company of Cervantes, who learned “there is no gypsy girl twelve years old who does not know more than a Spanish lady of twenty-five.”

  As the dabble of youth turned into the study of a lifetime, I was honored with invitations to flamenco juergas, solely as an aficionado, but certainly thanks to my familiarity with the gypsy music of Spain and elsewhere. While the purpose of the juerga is to trade repertoire, performance, and anecdote, the ancestry of flamenco often squeezes its callused rump into the firelight and demands its share of wine and debate.

  The dust is blown from the familiar genealogies—that flamenco was brought to Spain by the gypsies in the fifteenth century; that flamenco grew out of the Arabic music of the Moors. Each camp has its worthy share of intellectual knights and emotional squires.

  It was on a recent trip to Córdoba, however, that a tour guide (one of those free-lance linguists who ruminate just inside the portico of the Mezquita) pulled me into just such a discussion. We had crossed the ocean of marble and alabaster columns of the mosque of Abd-ar-Rahman II, circumnavigated the pungent Basilica of Charles V, and were standing in the echo chamber of the mihrab of Caliph Hakam, when the wail of a saeta, the flamenco call to the Virgin, filtered through the stone lattice of the outer wall.

  “There is a little-known fact about flamenco, Señor,” he said, pulling me into the shadow, “that is familiar to all knowledgeable Spaniards but shared with very few outsiders. As you seem to be a man of some considerable acquaintance with flamenco and skepticism about the state of the world, I would like to invite you into our community.”

  I followed him out of the Mezquita and through the alleys of the Judería to a cup of Moroccan coffee at the low, dark tables of the Bar Abulafia. I expected little more revealing than where an Anglo tourist might find flamenco danced in the altogether.

  “The fact is, Señor,” he continued, “that the true flamenco, the Cante Jondo, is of neither Islamic nor gypsy parentage, but is the bastard grandson of the passionate sadness of the Spanish Jews.”

  I sipped my coffee, a delaying tactic I employ when my leg feels heavily pulled.

  “You may not believe tonight,” he continued. “You will believe tomorrow.”

  He opened with the etymology of Cante Jondo—not Deep Song, as I had always believed, Song of the Roots, of the Earth. Rather, Cante “Yom Tov,” Song for the Good Day—Holiday, in Hebrew. The saeta, the flamenco verses to the Virgin we heard through the lattice of the Mezquita, was born from the womb of the Kol Nidre, the Aramaic song of lamentation sung on Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement. In the Kol Nidre, the conversos, the Jews forced to convert by the Inquisition, sang to Yahweh, the God of the Israelites. They begged him to wipe them dry of their spurious baptism, and renew their Covenant with the God of their fathers. The remorse, the sense of shame, heated by the full-lipped fire of the Sephardic tune, became the trademarks of the saeta. The guttural “Ayyyy” to Yahweh became the rough gitano “Ayyyy” to the Virgin. The wail of the Jews, cornered in their house of worship by the gangsters of the Inquisition, became the wail of the gypsies, cornered in a cave in Granada, a town dump outside Columbus, a council flat in Manchester.

  That evening, I sought out a little-known flamenco tablao, in the shadow of the yellow lights off the Avenida del Generalísimo. Garbage muffled the sounds of the street. A heavy-skirted mother squatted on the doorstep, nursing her child with one arm, grabbing for my pants leg with the other. The gypsies inside the tavern sang five notes and whined for money. I refused to pay, and the lights went out. On the walk home, I digested the message. I was stopped three times by the Guardia Civil, and had my pocket picked in the vestibule of my hotel. Was it always this way? Had I never noticed?

  I know little but flamenco, I live for nothing but flamenco. Never again will I listen to flamenco. If not for tenure, I would die.

  HANNI—HAPPINESS

  Ach, Benjamin,

  What to make of it?

  There were weekend train excursions in the 1980s—mostly in the United States, where the population has a fat man’s hunger for that confused fiction called mystery—during which a seemingly innocent passenger was stabbed, shot, or garrotted in the wee hours of Friday night. The remaining passengers, some of them paid actors—like the poor corpse, presumably—some of them paying guests, passed the rest of the weekend attempting to solve the murder. Meals and naps were taken as directed by an unseen artistic hand. By Sunday night, the mystery was solved, willy-nilly.

  It is now Tuesday, December 31, 1991. Sunday night is decades off. Do I have to wait until the end of the week, or just the end of the year?

  After Holland ran off in pursuit of Isabella, I sat on your albatross and munched through half a dozen kipferln, a gray-blue early morning pick-me-up. I’ve always accepted the bottomlessness of my bottomless jar of kipferln as an act of faith. I’ve never questioned how Penina’s tarts passed down to Esau’s family, how Esau carried them from Córdoba to Mariposa, from Mariposa to La Rábida, from La Rábida to Florida, how they survived the storm that swallowed his four companions, how they survived the next five hundred years. When Papa stowed them in my portfolio with the Esau Letter, I never asked whether my thousands of cousins each had his own personal supply, or whether I alone bore the self-reproducing manna for the bottomless family hunger. I never sat up with strong coffee, camera at hand, watching the jar for the miracle of mitosis. I never asked whether the key was cookie or container. I never tired of the taste of hazelnut and butter and sugar.

  Until this morning. In the silence that followed storytime.

  I wandered through Sandor’s villa looking for clues, the unremembered details that might re-create my passage with Zoltan, that might tell me with the clarity of dawn that Zoltan and Sandor were one and the same. Nothing. No photographs, no awards. No letters, no music. None of his recordings bore his picture. The only books seemed carved into the stone—Spanish, Hebrew, Arabic, old, words unread, pages uncut.

  I grazed through the handwritten manuscript on his desk—In Search of the Lost Chord, A Brief Guide. A book of aphorisms more than techniques, more Gibran than Flesch, a lot of disembodied hoodoo about the Perfect Sound, the Perfect Player, the Perfect Ear. Not my Zoltan at all. The Zoltan of the apple scent of the Auvergne was a man who gloried in impulse. He was a Zoltan who could touch a measure of a Beethoven sonata fifty-seven different ways and fall in love with each like an underfed teenager. His desire for knowledge was a desire for experience, not ideas. His desire for happiness was the full peasant downbow of a Hungarian folk song, the meaty slap of thigh against thigh on the planks of a German boxcar. If Sandor was Zoltan, he was Zoltan grown old, dried, and wrinkled in the Andalusian sun
. Almost eighty.

  Wishful thinking, Benjamin. Is that the reward of old age? Where is the promise of Wisdom, of my ancestress Kima? Shot full of holes by K’sil the Fool?

  “Good morning, Señora.” Señor Carranque looked unnervingly fresh. His feathered hat still clung to his bear-oiled head. But somewhere, somehow, he had exchanged the baggy suit for a fresh pair of slacks, a clean shirt, and a sleeveless plaid sweater-vest. I confirmed my own impossibly dry and independent scalp and thought, Of course, the rest of the world is civilized, the rest of the world books a hotel room, shower and breakfast included.

  “How did you know where to find me?”

  “There are not that many taxis in Mariposa. I have already warned the Junta Andalucía that they will have a riot on their hands when the Americans arrive next summer.” I looked out the window through the front gate, at a fender and a tailpipe that could very well have belonged to the chariot that rescued us a few hours before.

  “I don’t think I paid him last night,” I began. Carranque held up his hand.

  “All transfers included.”

  “A travel agent!”

  “Answers later, breakfast first.”

  “But the taxi?”

  “Will wait.”

  “I can make …”

  “You’ve had too much coffee, Señora, if you’ll pardon my saying so. If you wouldn’t mind boiling some water, I have an infusion.” Carranque pulled a golden cloth pouch from the pocket of his sweater-vest. “Maté de Avellana. I serve it to my clients in Cuzco. For the altitude.”

  “We are only a few hundred feet above the Mediterranean, Señor.”

  “Don’t you expect to be flying today?”

  We took our maté out to the fountain. Through the smoke hole of a sky above us, a few puffs of clouds had burned red with the dawn. Far down the hill, the kerosene engine of a motocyclette droned toward us, away, unseen.

  “You should have left the trunk at Maraquita’s.”

  I said nothing, sipped on the drink, bitter, late autumn, dead leaves and smoke. Isabella had disappeared down a rabbit hole. Holland had run after. Your trunk, Benjamin, could have been left, happily, snugly, safely at Cristóbal Colón.

  “I only meant that Maraquita’s clientele is made up of a trustworthy sort of person.”

  “Is that what you are, Señor Carranque,” I asked, “a trustworthy sort of person?” He frowned, a little pout of modesty. “I took those letters, you know, the ones you left at the flamenco.”

  “I expected you would.”

  “I haven’t read them yet.”

  “Ah. That I did not expect.”

  “But I did find the Esau Letter.”

  “And you read that?” I nodded. “Another surprise.”

  “There is a young girl, a student of Sandor’s most likely, very pretty, thirteen years old, long, dark hair, eyes …” I sipped on my maté, missing my Isabella and my Holland. “She had the Esau Letter in her violin case, wrapped in an ancient purple hair ribbon.”

  “That much I know,” he said. “What I did not expect was that you would read the Esau Letter first. Before my letters, that is.” I stared hard at Carranque. His nonchalance woke me more completely than the maté.

  “How could you possibly know?”

  He held up a palm. “My questions first. Did you enjoy the Esau Letter?”

  “More maté,” I grumbled. He stood to pour, inclined from the waist, the telltale of the better class of travel agent.

  “Señora Hanni.” He sat next to me on your steamer trunk. “Much of what seems cloudy would be blazingly clear if only the sun were higher in the sky.”

  “But as it’s not …”

  “Patience.” He put his hand on my arm. “You were about to tell me. The Esau Letter. Was it as you remembered?”

  I stood and moved away. I set my teacup on the lip of the fountain and looked past the surface into the reflection of the blushing clouds. I dipped my hands in the water, cold through the knuckles, pressed the backs of my wrists to my eyes, looked at myself, wrinkled, rippled, wrinkled.

  “No, not the same.” He waited for more. I waited. He waited—he could edit out the pauses later. “I hadn’t remembered the old Esau,” I said. “The young one, yes. The bar mitzvah boy, the Esau of the cave, of the barrel. Especially the Esau of the beach, the Esau discovering Florida once, twice. I had remembered the Letter”—and I turned back to Carranque, looking up at me with encouragement, his hat tilted back the merest inch from his clear hairline—“as a story. I had forgotten it as a letter. I had forgotten it was a letter to a son. I had forgotten the son.”

  “Eliphaz.”

  “The son.” I didn’t need to tell Carranque the story of my son. I was too far sunk in need to wonder anymore at the source of his deep knowledge.

  “Here.” Carranque offered me my bag, Zoltan’s leather portfolio bursting out the top, holding the unread letters. “Would you like to read them, or would you prefer to listen.” I preferred. “I am going to help you find your son.”

  “You know where he is?”

  “You said ‘listen.’ I will help you, Señora. But these letters may help you more.” I sat back on your trunk.

  “Do you remember the story your mother used to tell, the story of Kima?” Carranque asked.

  Of course I did. But for a moment, so close to my so-long-lost Esau Letter, I could not figure out which Kima he meant—the lute-playing triplet of Mohammed, or the social-worker daughter of Maimonides.

  “Maimonides’ Kima,” Carranque added, shaking my memory briefly to attention. “You remember how the poor girl’s husband, Joseph ibn-Shimon, wrote to his father-in-law complaining of his wife’s infertility.” I nodded. “And you also remember how Maimonides responded, scolding Joseph for his own lack of faith?” I nodded again. Carranque opened the portfolio and held up half a dozen pages.

  “A loose translation from the Arabic”:

  My Most Revered Teacher, Moses ben Maimon:

  Listen, please listen!

  We are of one tongue and one mind. Yet you attack the friend who came to rest his soul in the inviting shade of your love. You attack the friend who opened his heart to your intellect and his mind to your faith.

  Listen, please listen!

  I, it is I, Joseph, who speak. And you must speak too. You must, if you have words, refute me.

  In days not long gone by, Kima, your favorite daughter, captured my heart. I wooed her according to the law of faith and the Halakha of Mount Sinai. I gave her friendship money as the price of courtship. I wrote her a poem of the thousand names of love. I presented myself as her bridegroom. I invited her into the tent of joy. I did not force her, I did not press her. My love won her love. My soul embraced her soul.

  But under the canopy of the perfect marital sky, she turned her affections to other friends. She became an adulteress. The sky grew dark. She found no failing in me, yet she left me. She stole out of my tent and covered her face, her lovely face, her lovely voice.

  You did not scold your daughter for her insolence. You did not reproach her for abandoning her duty. To the contrary—you encouraged her, you spurred her on! O noble teacher, that was not right. Restore the wife to the man—he will pray for you, for your long life. And he will pray for her, and for her honor.

  Blessed is the man who restores lost goods. Thrice blessed is he who restores a beautiful woman, the husband’s crown. I stand here, awaiting her return.

  The truest of your devoted servants, whose desire is to look upon your honor’s countenance and embrace your feet in the dust:

  Joseph ben Judah ben Shimon

  “I didn’t catch anything about infertility,” I said. “Only infidelity.”

  “Infidelity? You are certain?” Carranque turned his neck to me, his elbows on his knees, working the papers between thumbs and forefingers.

  “Infertility?”

  “Infidelity.”

  “That seems pretty clear.”

  “Shh.�
� He stopped me. I forgot. No questions. Not even those phrased as statements. “Maimonides’ reply:”

  Ayyy Joseph,

  Hear, O sages, my words. Come closer. Cup your wrinkled hands behind your downy ears. Settle a dispute between me and my favorite son, and, if I have erred, then testify against me.

  I married Kima, my child, to K’sil. But he regarded the girl, reared in the sphere of faith, as tainted with sin because she covered her face. As soon as she fell into his clutches and, to his disgrace, stood before him in her nakedness, the spirit of jealousy came over him. He began to despise his wife. He deprived her of food, clothing, a place to live. He lied about her, told fabulous tales, brought her ill fame. He burned her bridal gifts in the fires of jealousy.

  His goal was to make her disreputable in my eyes. Thus the husband said to me: “Your daughter became adulterous under the marital sky. Oh, look upon her shame and avenge her sin and adultery, and compel her to return to her husband, for he will pray for you and her.”

  You sages, you know the man and the way he speaks. He lies in wait for the opportune moment, for just the right occasion to undermine a reputation with a grand phrase or two. He is known to be a man whose lips can be read many different ways. But she, Kima, my child, is immaculate. No hands have ever touched her. It is impossible for her to break her troth to the lord of her marriage.

  O my son, my K’sil, your thoughts are a perplexed people, none of which shows reflection. But you, and you alone, are the master of your people. Listen and learn. You are ill-advised to cast suspicion of immorality on any wife, especially your own. Take care, lest your lips bring your mouth to the brink of ruin.

  Listen to me, my son. Here is your wife, take her and go. Do not let your tongue lead your flesh to sinful ways. My lips announce only truth. You may seek and sift, you will find nothing false or twisted. If you are wise, then you are so for yourself, to understand and to teach.