No World Concerto

by A. G. Porta

  He’s not staying in this hotel, she says. A while later, after ordering breakfast to her room, she practices the 5 Pieces for piano and then some parts of the No World Symphony, the brilliant young composer’s first opus, which she transcribed for piano and will be performing in her home city in a few days’ time. That afternoon she goes to rehearsals. She uses the hotel’s chauffeur service, and amuses herself on the journey to the theater by trying to guess which pedestrians are aliens. First, she thinks, she must determine what features distinguish them from normal human beings. The chin perhaps, or the eyes, the ears, or maybe a special aura about them. . While the driver parks the car, the girl notices, in the crowd, the guy she saw the night before in the trendy bar in town, the one who couldn’t take his eyes off her. He’s tall and dark, around her father’s age, has a receding hairline, and is wearing a black suit. He’s looking at the façade of the theater where the Little Sinfonietta rehearses, as if deciding whether or not to go inside. Then he turns and heads up the sidewalk, disappearing into the crowd. It seems he decided not. The screenwriter sketches some ideas about the possible relationship between this character and the girl. He can almost see him, like a ghost that’s yet to finish manifesting itself. During the rehearsal, the girl finds it difficult to concentrate, still intrigued by the man she saw outside, whose face she can’t quite place. The screenwriter feels comfortable leaving the story at this point. He fixes his hair in the bathroom mirror and picks out a jacket from the wardrobe — he’d feel naked without it, in spite of the heat — and, before long, he’s cantering on the sidewalk, with his conscience clear and a spring in his limp, for having started the day so well. He decides to digress from his usual route and discovers a classical music store. The young woman who attends to him is kind and good-natured. She asks if he’s looking for anything in particular. The screenwriter tells her he’s writing a script about the father of twelve-tone composition, and asks if any of his works are available. The saleswoman turns out to be an expert on dodecaphony and she persuades the screenwriter to buy four compact discs — his most representative works, she says — and her attractiveness convinces him they’re going to be a great help. He likes the way the way she pronounces “dodecaphonic” and, in a strange attempt to impress her, also buys one of the books she recommends. At the cash register, he smiles at her and she responds in kind. With his new purchases in hand, he decides to browse in the jazz section because he has a feeling the girl’s father is a fan of the genre. The screenwriter is well enough acquainted with jazz to be able to cite a number of musicians off the top of his head, so instead of buying anything, he simply takes note of some works he’s half-forgotten, and repeats them to himself as he heads for the exit. On reaching the door, however, he changes his mind and goes limping back to the saleswoman. From a distance, she looks pretty, he thinks, and has a decent body. He imagines her in a tuxedo jacket. The store uniform certainly puts a damper on her style. Maybe she’s like the girl and prefers dressing completely in white. She may be a few years older than the girl, and quite a few pounds heavier, but the screenwriter’s not going to give up on a potential hook-up over the matter of a few pounds. He asks her when she gets off work: he’d like her to tell him more about “dodecaphonic” music. After examining him top to toe, she says there’s more than enough to learn from the merchandise he bought. I bet you’d do anything for a part in my movie, he mutters as he leaves, you just don’t know it yet.

  The screenwriter doesn’t take the time to listen to the CDs, or leaf through the pages of the book, but he knows exactly what he’s going to write. He’d already sketched it in his notebook. The girl is inside a bus-stop shelter, watching her two friends’ silhouettes receding down the street. After the rehearsal, the girl sent the chauffeur back to the hotel; now, she’s waiting for a bus, along with a couple of shopgirls and a salesman, the latter leaning against one of the columns of the shelter, bobbing his briefcase and smoking a cigarette. The girl gives the impression that she’s all alone in the city. The screenwriter listens to her thoughts as if they were a voice-over. At times, she thinks, I act like such a fool. Thoughts like these usually result from one of her daily quarrels with the young conductor: quarrels about the performance, their new arrangement of the piece, anything and everything really. Right now, nothing is more important to the conductor than the upcoming performance in the church, and the rehearsals are critical — an opportunity, he’d say, to repeat certain passages over and over until a steady, automatic rhythm is achieved. Every now and again, they go over the brilliant composer’s compositions: the No World Symphony and the clown’s almost song, almost recitation, for which the chief difficulty is the proper synchronization of a number of music boxes. After the rehearsal, the girl tells them about the guy she’s run into a couple of times, and the young conductor insists they write the opera for which he’d already conceived a music video, the one with a sleazy and sordid setting, and a song with lyrics that tell the story of a guy who accidentally winds up in a trendy bar and looks for a nice young girl to rescue him, to take him somewhere they can dance the bolero together, or something like that. The girl likes to think it’s all a game. They go into one of the bars with foosball tables, but they don’t concentrate on their playing, since they’re engrossed in a discussion about musical tempo.

  The brilliant composer proposes writing without a set meter so he doesn’t have to deal with all the changes in tempo, as all the various mathematical combinations and permutations are bogging him down. It’s late when she says good-bye to them at the bus stop, and leans against a column of the bus shelter, opposite a cigarette-smoking salesman, to watch them recede down the street. She can’t remember the last time she rode a bus. Maybe she’ll grab the first available taxi, or call the chauffeur at the hotel. Maybe she’ll just go for a walk. She wouldn’t mind the fresh air. As she considers what to do, she can’t help taking a look around, in case she sees that familiar face, the guy she’s seen so many times before in the city, whose face she can’t quite place.

  The screenwriter doesn’t feel like cooking, nor is he in the mood to go to a restaurant. So he settles for some cheese and cold cuts while watching TV, before deciding to go to the café. He tries to recall if this is the first time he’s left the hotel at night since he arrived. He’s almost certain it is, but before he can reach certainty on the matter, he’s already at the bottom of the hill, and his attention is diverted by the lights and bustle of the plaza. There’s nowhere to sit in the café, which is now teeming with people holding desperately onto the hem of a vanishing day. It seems paradoxical to have walked through deserted streets and yet find there’s not a single seat available on the terrace. Since he’s in a good mood, however, he settles for a table inside, and looks around for the waitress. He figures she doesn’t work nights, and resigns himself to being waited on by a trainee. The book he bought speaks at length about the composer of the 5 Pieces for piano, which the girl is planning to both perform and record; a composer who dedicated himself to a never-ending search for new sounds, and so substituted conventional tonalities and scales for those in which no single note takes precedence, in which all are of equal importance. He closes the book and looks at his watch. He starts to feel a little anxious: by his reckoning, the girl could be coming to see him in a couple of hours. But the fact he’s made some progress on his work today eases his disquiet. He knows, however, that this is only a transitory feeling, for nothing can guarantee tomorrow’s peace of mind. Back in his hotel room, the hours go by slowly, and when the new day finally arrives, it seems to him as if an eternity has passed. It’s Friday the fifth. The screenwriter puts the calendar next to the typewriter and limps over to the bathroom mirror to smooth out the bags under his eyes. The girl never showed up, and he sacrificed his hours of sleep for a nightlong vigil next to the window. The bags refuse to go away, and all he’s accomplished in trying to smooth them out is make them a little redder. No matter. He grabs his notebook and index cards and deposits them
in his jacket pocket then heads to the café in the plaza. On arriving, he sees there are only a half-dozen customers, and he knows this is one shift the waitress never misses. As she waits on the other tables, the screenwriter goes through his index cards and tries to imagine the circumstances that prevented the girl from visiting the previous night. Perhaps her mother’s gotten back from her trip and she has to keep up appearances. This doesn’t seem a likely excuse. Perhaps she felt particularly threatened by her pursuer, despite her not knowing if the pursuit is real, since the mere suspicion seems to be enough to cause her to retreat into seclusion. The screenwriter considers the possibility she spent the night with the young conductor of the orchestra. Perhaps he’s suspected this all along, and he’s just been ferreting for excuses to avoid the knowledge that he’s just a jealous old man. The screenwriter decides to stop thinking about it and return to his index cards. There are a variety of cards, some devoted to character, for example, others to scenery, although he doesn’t take detailed notes on them, normally writing his outlines in his notebooks and then copying them onto blank but paginated sheets of paper. He still has his idea about the onion, although he’s beginning to think it’s defunct. He wonders if it was ever of any use. There’s no point second-guessing, he says to himself; at least these kinds of ideas allow you to keep moving forward. The waitress returns after serving another table. Their eyes meet, but she still doesn’t smile. You don’t know what you’re missing, he mutters to himself, turning his attention back to the notebook and index cards. An ambiguous character, the girl’s father; a man who got rich through some shady business dealings, unscrupulous, capable of suspending his most cherished principles for the guerdon of a quick buck, a man who knows and can deal with the fact that the world abides by sets of unwritten rules, a man who functions according to these rules, secretly, as though he were above the law and every other manmade institution. The only law is that of the jungle, thinks the screenwriter, a jungle lacquered by the lie of civilization. This could be a potential sketch of the girl’s father, a character with traits not unfamiliar to the screenwriter.

  “Today’s Friday, and my father’s in a bad mood,” the girl writes in her diary, “and when he’s like this, it’s best to just leave him alone. He’s a decent guy overall, but today he seems out of sorts. And it’s not because it’s Friday. Something else is on his mind.” He’d spent half the morning talking on the phone to this McGregor person while the girl was practicing on the piano in the living room. Then he left. In the bar next to the little theater where she rehearses, the girl is in a bad mood. And it’s not because it’s Friday. It’s because she’d rather be writing than drinking, although she knows she never gets anywhere with her writing. Some members of the Little Sinfonietta — the violinist, the clarinetist, and the cellist — are sitting at a table awaiting the arrival of another two. Some of the musicians are so young they have to be accompanied from their dorm to attend rehearsals. The girl could’ve stayed at the same dorm, but her mother thought she’d be more comfortable at the hotel with the English name, and that she’d have more time on her own to practice. The brilliant composer, seated next to her, wants to know why she’s in a bad mood. She says she’s lost, that she can’t find the right approach, the right plot, the right whatever for her work in progress. The brilliant composer offers an impromptu solution: he suggests her No World should be autobiographical. As she noisily slurps the lees of her soft drink, the young conductor appears in the doorway surrounded by other young musicians. The girl doesn’t want to write about herself. She doesn’t believe her life is interesting enough to write about. The brilliant composer, on the other hand, believes quite the reverse.

  Human beings have spent centuries trying to determine their place in the universe, and perhaps the search amounts to nothing more than an investigation into our origins. These are the matters that preoccupy the girl whenever she thinks about her work: that there might be extraterrestrials among us masquerading as humans; that these beings may not be aware they’re aliens; that she may have an important role in the whole affair, but she’s unable to determine what it is. Moreover, the possibility she may never find out drives her up the wall. Perhaps the Earth’s atmosphere wiped her memory. Perhaps her mission is something far simpler, something related to music.

  Hence, the gift with which she’s been bestowed. Supposing twelve-tone music was never invented — no serialism, or any of it. But why a gift for music and not writing? she wonders. In a nearby library, the young conductor of the orchestra consults an encyclopedia and finds, under the entry “Ka,” the description of a certain religious notion. He reads that Ka is the expression of a man’s double, his vital force, a tutelary spirit or genius or guardian angel that’s born at the same time and outlives him. Perhaps this Ka is my guardian angel, she says sarcastically, even though she doesn’t know why she keeps hearing this sound on other people’s lips, as if it were several voices speaking as one, a voice communicating to her from outer space. She thinks it could be a sign, a key to her finally understanding what her mission is on Earth. Or it could be nothing at all.

  It takes a huge effort for the screenwriter to write a couple of pages. Moreover, he’s certain he’s described the same scene more than once. He gets up from his desk and searches in vain among his papers. The image of the library reminds him of the film in which people’s voices are coming from off-screen. They’re not like the ones the girl hears, for they sound like the voice of the multitudes speaking in unison, as if all humanity spoke with a single voice. It’s a voice he’s obsessed with, just as the girl’s obsessed with voices pronouncing her name with a “ka.” This tutelary spirit named Ka is none other than the angel who appears in the film. The screenwriter pauses to listen, as if trying to detect the voices himself. But all he hears is the groaning of a bed from the room next door where a couple’s having sex. He abandons his desk and collapses in an armchair. He feels exhausted, but is certain he’s found a guardian angel for the girl. Someone whose face she knows but cannot place, whose identity will eventually be made clear. The screenwriter sees him as a specter, someone who bears a tangential relationship to her, who crosses paths with her at specific moments in her life. There’s a movie on TV, but the actors are talking too fast for him to understand the dialogue. He switches through the channels until he encounters an old classic he’s seen before. Someone in the movie mentions the girl’s name. Perhaps it’s a sign. Then a noise in the hallway grabs his attention and he turns the TV off. Silence. He checks his watch. Too early to get his hopes up. He imagines the girl in her living room practicing the 5 Pieces for piano. She practices them one at a time, memorizing and repeating each piece over and over, now and then scribbling something onto the score, for each performance is a separate creation, a unique collocation of sounds, no two are alike, and whenever she practices or rehearses, she always has this in mind. She experiments by slowing it down more and more until the notes seem almost lost, until they seem to float freely, independently of each other. At times, she changes her mind, due to her fluctuating moods, although perhaps the pills militate too much on her decision-making. The girl’s finally made up her mind. She wants to perform the pieces more slowly, make them more sonorous, so they reverberate continuously, almost infinitely. At this tempo, the 5 Pieces would take up a whole compact disc. She has more than enough time to practice anyway, since the recording session isn’t until after the concerts are over. The screenwriter would like to be the cause of the girl’s agitation, but he knows this could never be the case, because she’s young and rebellious, ambitious and impatient. . at least that’s the reason he convinces himself of. He pictures her taking a walk near the hotel before returning home to write in her diary. Then he sees her answering a phone call from her mother, jotting down a symbol on the score that he doesn’t understand, which possibly no one understands but her. He rereads the last few pages he’s written, the ones describing the scene in the library and the ones relating to Ka — his nagging idea
of a guardian angel that might help the girl understand herself. The girl thinks she may be abusing the pills the young conductor and brilliant composer are giving her. After leaving the bar alone, she walks down a couple of side streets until she finally encounters a taxi. She looks out at the city through the window, a hackneyed view, something she’s seen countless times on TV — shots of the sidewalks, the buildings, and passersby from a camera inside a car. The screenwriter doesn’t know where these thoughts are leading, but when he finds a thread he feels he has to follow it. Sometimes it leads somewhere, but mostly, it leads nowhere. Despite being tired, he decides to go for a walk along the river. The clouds are passing swiftly overhead as he leans against the railing of the bridge, watching the water moving slowly underneath, his story still buzzing inside him. But there are many unresolved questions. A sixteen-year-old girl, he reflects, is in continual conflict with her environment and herself. And there’s also this peculiar rebel attitude, not typical of a teenager, which makes her so special. The screenwriter contemplates the view of the opposite bank. He likes cities with large rivers flowing through them, especially when they run through the old historical centers. There are no such rivers in his native city. Instead, there’s a beach. What advice would a father give his daughter? He doesn’t have an answer, and he wonders if it’s a worthwhile question, an essential question. It doesn’t matter; all he really wants to do is play around with some ideas. But what would a father say to a pianist daughter who’d rather to be a writer; a daughter who recites or sings — he doesn’t really know — as part of a performance he thinks will only create a nightmarish atmosphere in the theater; a child prodigy who lives a hectic life and has peculiar friends and relatives, including himself? Musical intelligence is very different from other forms, the screenwriter thinks. Had she not been trained from a young age, she could have ended up like everybody else. But that’s irrelevant now. The fact is she was trained, she is a prodigy. Some guys are flirting with a girl next to him. The screenwriter watches them attentively for a few moments. It’s as if the young conductor has been erased from his mind, as if he never existed or had any relationship with the girl. Something’s throwing him off, so he starts thinking about the father again, who in his youth might also have wanted to be a writer. He knows nothing more than what the girl has told him and just uses his years of experience to figure out the rest. Actually, nobody knows very much about the girl’s father. What advice would he give her? He’d want his daughter to be successful. What father wouldn’t? Is he happy? Maybe he’s only pretending to be. They say being able to do this is the ultimate mark of success. And so the screenwriter begins to wonder about happiness, about success, about celebrity and wealth, and about whether happiness and stupidity go hand in hand. He thinks if the world’s so screwed up that certain things are mistaken for others, what sort of books will the girl write? Not necessarily now, but in a few years time. What kind of life would such a father want for his daughter? The life of a concert pianist? A writer, maybe? The screenwriter realizes he’s talking about himself, because he never knew what advice to give his own son. He doesn’t even know what advice he’d give himself. If he thinks about his work, he gets lost in the details; if he thinks about his life, he ends up blaming his misfortune on the cards he’s been dealt. Perhaps the girl’s father has never entertained such thoughts. Perhaps the only thing to do with a girl like this is to protect her. But protect her from what? he wonders. From herself, responds a voice inside him. The screenwriter looks for his glasses in his jacket pocket. The girl goes to visit her father at his hotel, but finds he’s gone out, so she decides to wait for him. She’s surprised he’s staying in such a dump, although she thinks it must be for a good reason. After waiting in the lobby a while, she decides to go outside and stretch her legs. The environs don’t compare with those of the hotel with the English name. When she returns, she sees there’s been a shift change at the reception desk, so she asks for the key to her father’s room — doing so with such aplomb, the new receptionist doesn’t hesitate to hand her the key. The screenwriter considers some other ways to get the girl up to her father’s room. He writes them down, seated on a riverside bench, under a streetlamp. On the bed, she sees a pistol, a passport, some credit cards, together with some old folders filled with documents, but it’s to the pistol the girl gravitates. She picks it up and examines it, gently caresses it, running her fingers along its grooves and edges, and also the butt. She finds it quite heavy. She holds it with both hands, aims it high and low, lining up her sight with one eye closed, and then pretends to draw it from a holster like a cowboy. She needs practice. In front of the bathroom mirror, she imitates the classic stance of a policeman aiming at a bad guy: squat, with legs apart, and aiming with both hands. Before putting it back on the bed, she holsters the gun in her pants, feeling the cold metal against the small of her back. Then she takes a look at the passport. She doesn’t recognize the name, but the man in the picture is definitely her father. For a moment she thought she was in the wrong room. She slowly reads the name aloud. There are numerous credit cards with the same name on them. The girl searches through the documents, all reports from the space agency about unidentified sightings. The girl is intrigued. She didn’t know her father had access to such information. There are also photographs of some people posing beside what appear to be flying saucers. But they don’t look like beings from outer space, and perhaps they’re only witnesses who were photographed after giving their statements. There are also photographs of men in uniform, some wearing shirtsleeves and neckties, standing around a rectangular table inspecting a large map. Later on, when she’s back in her room at the hotel with the English name, the girl writes her father’s alias in one of her notebooks. She then tries but finds it difficult to get some rest, thinking about the guy whose face she can’t quite place, and those provocative photographs, as if they’re somehow calling to her, pronouncing her name with a “ka.” It all has to mean something. There are no such things as coincidences. Perhaps her father’s name, the one she knows him by, is also an alias. She says both names aloud repeatedly and tries to determine which one suits him best. When matched with his picture, the new name sounds strange at first but, little by little, she starts to get used to it. She then puts the notebook away. She has an interview with a journalist and a session with a photographer later, and she still has lots of work to do.