The gypsy left, but the invisible pianola remained, constantly playing that same paso doble. A little later the gypsy returned and stuck his saucer, which now held more coins, back in through the window. ‘La perrita,’ he said.
This recurred several times, with the monk’s playing becoming, if possible, even worse. Each time there was more money on the saucer. When, finally, there was a small pile lying there, the monk leaped up and smacked the gypsy’s hand, sending the perritas flying in all directions.
The whole time I hadn’t been able to stop wondering what it was about the monk’s back that was so oppressive, and when he stood up and gave me more of a side view, my stomach felt as if it had been hit with a battering ram as long as the room and words that sounded like ‘Daumler! Daumler!’ escaped from my chest with the power of explosions.
Before the monk sat down again, he turned half towards me, giving me a clear view of his profile and the scars on his cheek. Sweat was pouring down his face and running in rivulets through his scars. He opened his mouth wide and stayed motionless like that for several seconds, bent half over and with his mouth gaping, before changing his mind and sitting down again to resume playing without answering me.
Furiously he kicked at the pedal keyboard. His legs got tangled in the ropes, but he played on even though many of the organ pipes could no longer be silenced and were constantly whistling. His brown habit was pulled up to his knees. I saw that he was wearing white socks that had slipped down and were now bunched around his scrawny calves in thick rolls.
Translated by David Colmer
13
F. B. Hotz
Women Win
Vrouwen winnen
It was the autumn of ’59 or ’60.
Armand was at the wheel, and the other seven were sleeping. His fatigue had reached the point where hallucinations forced him to keep his foot over the brake. After first seeing the disembodied wing of an aeroplane and then a towering ship ploughing down the pitch-black road ahead of him, he pulled the bus over into a parking lane. ‘Whaddya doin’?’ someone said with a yawn, but Armand had already given himself permission to sleep. His head of curly hair, which women loved, sagged onto the steering wheel, and he looked dead.
Now they all slept soundly. There’s not much traffic at 3 a.m., and the few passing lorries didn’t wake up anyone. The only sounds in the bus were air drawn into nostrils and occasional childish lip-smacking. The bandleader, riding shotgun next to Armand, slept as straight and stiff as a seated corpse shot through the forehead. One of the brass men clutched his case to his chest like a mother with her child, and the bass player reclined with his head against the canvas cover and his arms around the neck of his bass, which jutted out over the back of his seat. Now and then came the soft sound of wind brushing through the rubber net around the bass drum on the roof.
The sleep of the just – or at least, the justified. Their lives were well spent. They had talent and they used it; they earned – and deserved – the money they handed over to their wives and girlfriends. But more than that, they took intense pleasure in their work, although none of them would ever let it show. It was bon ton for them to curse their profession, which was no more than playing around and was even called playing. The griping started out mild – ‘How the hell did I get into this business?’ – and rapidly grew worse, but always with a half-smile suggesting their true feelings. Sometimes they’d make some old joke about the worthlessness of their profession; they’d pretend to be jealous of a passing baker, bus driver or office worker and sadly say, ‘If only I’d learned a trade.’ They sometimes used that line on stage too, when they had to play something appalling – a conga, say.
Every aspect of their work was filled with that almost completely unacknowledged pleasure. The trips in their own bus and the group coffee breaks along the roadside were unspoken highlights. All they ever talked about was the wind and cold.
They returned to the dead silence of their houses just before dawn, only to hit the road again a few hours later, yawning, swearing and burping.
Autumn is a fine season for musicians. Their appointment books are full, and they depart mid-morning, as a cheerful sun is cutting through the mist.
That morning was no different; they went to the regular meeting place and greeted each other as usual in front of the Volkswagen bus, nodding slowly and gravely at the cats who were already there and mumbling things like ‘Aha, so you made it’ and ‘Aw, jeez, not you again’. All this was intended and understood to be esoteric language used among friends and incomprehensible to squares.
No one goes to work as light-hearted as a musician, usually after a jocular pseudo-quarrel about the route. Their wives can’t join them, because there’s barely enough room on the bus for the band and the boss. So there are no watchful eyes, and a day and night of full and satisfying freedom can begin. It’s enough to make a one-legged blind man smile. Besides, they could always make room for a cute extramarital hitchhiker along the way.
They laughed and joked as they loaded the bus that morning – a ceremony of theirs, as if they could placate the gods by telling the same old saws over and over again. The bass drum, strapped to the roof rack with its web of rubber cords, shot loose the first time like it always did. ‘Why do you guys laugh every time?’ the drummer asked. ‘The first three or four times, sure, it’s funny, but we must be up to sixty by now.’ He wasn’t really mad, despite all his gloomy head-shaking; in fact, he was clearly honoured that his instrument was the centre of attention.
After searching for a missing oilcan in the street – they imitated the crawling and groping of botanizing field biologists, until it was retrieved, with boyish cheers, from under the bus – they were finally ready to go. Fifteen minutes late, so they drove fast on the main road.
While they waited for the car ferry across the IJ, Tom passed out strong eucalyptus drops. The trombonist spat his out immediately, saying in genuine shock, ‘That fucking thing’ll cost me my lip.’ The other guys chuckled.
‘Those are anti-embouchure drops, my friend,’ Tom said. ‘If you can suck on one of those and still blow afterwards, you know you’re a real musician.’
‘Don’t throw that shit on the floor, it gets stuck in the mat,’ the bandleader growled. It was his bus. This nasal tirade inspired several parodies, because when people work and travel together, they develop a need for a common half-enemy. They went on that way for a while, swapping gags that were savoured all the more for their staleness, especially if they had anything to do with the music business.
After an hour, the group began belting out the usual coffee song, their voices wobbling stridently over the constant roar of the engine in the back. The leader warned them they didn’t have much time.
Although they were all around thirty years old, they elbowed their way out of the bus like schoolboys and dashed towards the converted farmhouse restaurant, which was flying a cola flag. Inside, they slumped sophomorically in the wooden folding chairs and tossed cardboard coasters at each other. (‘Gentlemen!’ the leader barked.) When a country girl arrived with coffee, they made lascivious noises until she started to sweat and spill their drinks. They were having fun. It was the same kind of fun they had on every trip, but what difference did that make?
Back on the road, they killed time at closed railway crossings by tapping on their windows at waiting girls and, once they caught their attention, making idiotic, screwed-up faces – a questionable strategy for attracting hitchers. ‘Ah, cut it out,’ the leader groaned. ‘Remember, our name’s painted on this thing.’
The bandleader, with his large head full of worries and straight nose – which he sometimes stroked dubiously as if making music weren’t all he had hoped it would be – thought many times a day, I take care of the contracts, the rides, the publicity; I repair their instruments and give them advances on their wages; and precious little thanks do I get. They’re like children, expecting to be waited on hand and foot. But he was the same as the rest of them;
grumbling was in his musical blood, and he no more wanted to be rid of them than they of him. Stray thoughts of a different line of work were quickly suppressed (though often with a sigh). ‘Keep your eyes on the road, Armand,’ he shouted. ‘What are you doing, man? We were supposed to turn right at that corner.’ He had to keep an eye on everything.
They acted like fools because they felt superior to everyone else. That included other types of artists, whom they sometimes tolerated and sometimes treated like dirt. At a high-society club in Amsterdam, a renowned poet in a dark jumper had once said to them, ‘What you do with sound is like what we do with paint or words.’ They had heard that one before, and their only response was, ‘Uh-huh.’ (They never referred to themselves as artists, by the way, but as hard-working jazzmen.) They were stricter than Calvin when it came to predestination; no matter how goofy they might act, salvation was guaranteed thanks to their musicianship. ‘If I happen to feel like lying down fully clothed in a full bathtub,’ Armand once said, ‘I’ll still be Armand B.’ That was the essential thing. They believed that their audiences believed it too, and they were usually right. They were magicians and princes among men, although they may have had that feeling in part because they normally saw their spectators engaged in that supremely futile, laughable and failure-prone activity – having fun.
But they did have to prove themselves. There was a natural hierarchy among them, headed not by the eldest, or by the best stylists or specialists in their fields, but by those with the most undeniable general skills, the kind of musician who could face any key signature without flinching, read like a fiend and recite the chord progressions of 800 standards (a talent subject to frequent, tiresome demonstrations during rehearsals).
The autumn sun disappeared, and the weather turned cold. There were shouts to turn on the heat. The second trumpet’s spirits were sinking; he was worried his slow valve would act up on him. He handed the bandleader his instrument, naked and vulnerable out of its case in that cramped, moving bus. The leader unscrewed the valve and then screwed it back in. ‘I don’t see anything special,’ he said. That infuriated the owner. ‘You think I’d say it was sticking if there was nothing wrong with it?’ he snarled at the leader. The others backed him up, shouting that he was absolutely right. ‘Take it easy, take it easy,’ said the leader, ‘I’ll take a look at that thing backstage before we start.’
The long drive put a damper on their mood. For a while they sang children’s songs in high falsetto voices, but soon a few of them lapsed into silence, while others spoke in low tones to their neighbours about cars, stereo equipment and, above all, other musicians. ‘That guy X doesn’t know what he’s doing’ was followed by, ‘But how about that Y – he’s been blowing like mad lately!’ They also knew their classics and spoke with the refined smiles of connoisseurs about Beiderbecke, Rank, Trumbauer, Lang, Nichols, Busse and Mole. It was like they were performing pages from John O’Hara without even knowing it.
As they neared their destination, they got their second wind, yapping like kids in a crowded school bus. ‘I’m gonna play the bejesus out of “Body and Soul”,’ one of them said. ‘I hope so, ’cause I’ve almost lost my faith,’ another replied. Once again, sincerity was strictly forbidden.
The bus pulled into the schoolyard. It was ten past nine in the evening – they were about ten minutes behind schedule, but no doubt the usual school play was in progress. They always ran late. They parked in the middle of a cluster of teachers’ cars. ‘Right this way, gentlemen,’ said a pimply-faced boy with a band around his arm.
There were already quite a few students on the stone steps at the entrance, who apparently considered themselves too old for the party inside and were waiting to welcome the band. As they watched the men approaching with their instruments, the girls among them had a brazen, critical look in their eyes – with perhaps even a hint of mockery. They did not lower their gaze as the musicians passed only a few feet away, though a couple of them did blush slightly. A magnificent blonde, who could just as easily have been twenty-seven as seventeen – only her cherubic cheek revealed her true age; the rest put most grown women to shame – whispered to a friend, ‘That one looks so grouchy!’ She meant Koos, who was still worrying about his instrument.
‘You think?’ Tom asked, in a not-too-friendly tone, bringing his impressively tall, broad frame to an abrupt halt in front of her. Ordinary citizens of both sexes had to learn to behave themselves around musicians. A certain distance had to be not maintained, but created. ‘Watch yourself,’ they sometimes said, as if they were teachers. At the same time, it must be admitted, Tom had a degree of enthusiastic, tongue-clacking appreciation for female beauty.
The girl blinked once, with her long lashes, but Tom vented the rest of his indignation on the pimply boy, who had dared to remark, ‘You’re a little late, gentlemen.’
‘Looks like you’re a little late with everything,’ Tom retorted, taking in the short, scrawny figure from top to toe. After that, the boy kept quiet.
Through a mobbed, dimly lit, insipidly decorated dance hall that smelled like lukewarm cola, children’s sweat and floury pudding, they wound their way towards the stage. Holding their instruments over their heads like coolies, they pushed through the crowd, brushing their bodies – some more deliberately than others – against the girls lined up along the wall. Even the youngest ones were whispering to each other about the musicians’ looks and clothing, but the teachers hissed at them to be quiet, since the play, as expected, was still in full swing. Armand and Tom saw a number of eyes glittering at them in the dark, as they shouted, ‘Coming through!’ and, ‘Move over, will ya?’ You had to use words to keep those pretty little hoodlums in their place. If you tried to be a ‘gentleman’, they’d just take advantage of you later when you were on stage.
The opening skirmish had not yet been won. Once all eight of them had made it backstage and were putting together their instruments (as the wooden acting continued – they could clearly hear the prompter’s despairing whisper), the same blonde-haired girl they’d seen at the entrance came up the stairs, her swaying backside clamouring for attention. She planted herself next to the drummer, following his every move as he adjusted his cymbals and attached his pedal. ‘What’s buzzin’, cuzzin?’ he asked in a friendly tone. She gave a start, then smiled again and looked him in the eyes. ‘Tom,’ he said, ‘gimme a hand here, I dunno what to do with this chick.’ Tom came over, grabbed her by her fleshy upper arm, pushed her back towards the stairs, and said, ‘You belong down there, horseface, unless you’re looking for the toilets.’ A little crudity never hurt. ‘Outta here, sister,’ echoed the leader, who was polishing Koos’s trumpet. ‘Shhhh, shhhhh!’ came angry voices from the audience. But if you let even one of them on stage, before you know it they’re all over the place, stomping on the instruments like elephants. And they remembered how, in their own schooldays, the girls could do no wrong; male teachers developed creepy infatuations, and female teachers had half-baked theories about the superiority of their sex. No one cared about the boys. Well, now they had a chance to turn the tables.
Meanwhile, the play showed no signs of ending. The audience grew noisier, and the young actors yelled nervously over the ruckus. Some rowdy pupils were already calling out things like, ‘Stop!’ and, ‘Enough!’ The crowd was no longer laughing at the lines, but at their clumsy delivery. An irrepressible impatience filled the hall.
‘I can’t believe I floored it over here for this,’ Armand said. A couple of guys wanted to go back out into the dance hall, and though the leader said, ‘Certainly not!’, off they went.
As the bass player, moving through the mob, passed a smaller, less defiant-looking girl, he ran his hand over her hair. She bent double in a fit of coughing, her baby face turning beet red. ‘Shhhhhh,’ hissed a teacher. ‘They always pick the same girls for that sort of thing,’ she muttered irritably to a male colleague. He nodded.
It seemed as though the impatience was rapidly turning
into something else. Those halting recitations on stage were bound to stop sometime soon, and then something would finally happen. The mood of nervous infantilism that had settled over everyone would dissolve. Already, the schoolchildren were starting to exude a giggly aura of erotic expectation. And not only the schoolchildren. Teachers looked on from their chairs, wearing the most avuncular expressions possible, at certain girls lined up against the wall, and in the packed hall the musicians got a little gropy, now moving girls out of the way not with their voices, but with their hands. The leader, still standing by the steps in front of the stage, tried to wave to his boys to come back; it seemed to him that the time had come to start playing.
And sure enough, the crowd began cheering in sarcastic enthusiasm and clapping in malicious relief. The young actors – first-formers – and the director were showered in appreciation. There was even a bunch of flowers for the prompter.
But first came the interval.
‘Jeez-us,’ Armand said again. ‘It’s already past ten. I’m leaving at midnight, a contract is a contract.’
‘Ah, the hell you will,’ said the other guys, smiling. They headed over to the makeshift bar, clearly wrought by children’s hands.
The caterers who manned this structure were taking orders from the young student princes with pointed, ironic little bows: ‘Two colas for you, sir?’ The hubbub of children’s voices was like a thick porridge running into their ears; there was no escaping it. The boys crowed hoarsely and the girls squawked. Someone mounted the stage and shouted – after first moving his mouth noiselessly in front of a dead mike – that it was time for the first and second forms to go home. The little girl who’d been stroked on the head stamped her feet on the parquet floor in fury. ‘Gosh darn it, why now?’ she cried with unexpected volume, considering her small stature, but a much bigger blonde started shoving her towards the exit. ‘C’mon,’ the leader said nervously, as he tugged his boys by their shoulders off the bar stools, where they’d been silently bestowing signatures on a clutch of bashful boys.
The Penguin Book of Dutch Short Stories (Penguin Modern Classics) Page 25