The Word of the Speechless

by Julio Ramón Ribeyro

  Thanks to Teodorito, my affinity for music was reborn and strengthened, and I could go on forever if I started to describe the endless nights I spent in his temple listening to symphonies—heroic, pathetic, Italian, fantastic, and new world—as well as sonatas, overtures, fugues, suites, and concertos. At home, on my own, I spent more long hours with my ear glued to Radio Selecta and writing down in a notebook the names of the pieces I listened to. Thus, upon finishing high school, I was able to consider myself if not an erudite scholar of music, at least a young and enthusiastic aficionado. Unfortunately, however, my knowledge of this art suffered from one serious deficiency: it was purely bookish knowledge, so to speak, for I had never attended a public concert nor listened to a live symphony orchestra. Never, until the appearance of the maestro.

  How in the world did Hans Marius Berenson end up in Lima? Through a series of circumstances in which Führer Adolf Hitler played a principal role. Berenson was a young, brilliant, and polymorphous instrumentalist in the Vienna Symphony Orchestra of the nineteen-thirties under the direction of the celebrated Bruno Walter. Though he began his career as a cellist, he continued as a violinist, then became first violinist, until he was promoted to assistant music director. Everything indicated that one day he would replace the elderly Bruno at the helm of this prestigious orchestra. But clouds were gathering over Europe, Nazi Germany annexed Austria, the Second World War broke out, and Bruno Walter and his disciple, both Jews, were suddenly forced to leave Austria or risk losing their lives as well as their jobs. Berenson spent some time in Paris, then London, then emigrated to the United States, where he spent a few years and had difficulty finding work, this due to fierce competition and the best positions having already been filled by other European musicians who had arrived before him. Through a friend, he heard that Peru’s symphony orchestra was being reorganized and was in need of a competent music director. Hence, he decided to play the South American card and landed one day in Lima with his wife, his violin, and a trunk full of sheet music.

  It was Teodorito who informed me of the appearance of this “genius of the baton,” as he called him, and the compelling need to go hear him. After only a few months in Lima, according to Teodorito, he had managed to make the national symphony orchestra sound as sublime as a rose. It was summer and Sunday concerts were held in the open air, in the outdoor amphitheater of the Campo de Marte.

  One Sunday I decided to accompany him. I was excited and terrified. I wondered what it would be like to see an orchestra as well as listen to it, if the direct and visual experience of the music would enhance or detract from my pleasure, which until then had been purely auditory. The experience was decisive. Although at first it was unnerving to have to associate melodies I knew so well with a hundred-odd gentlemen in tuxedos laboriously playing their instruments, in the end I understood that the two things were inseparable and that my entire knowledge of music had been, until that day, wholly phantasmagoric. To all this one must add the presence of Hans Marius Berenson, his fragile and elegant silhouette, and his winged baton, which seemed to weave and unweave the chords with infallible accuracy. My devotion reached its zenith when the orchestra attacked Beethoven’s Fifth, the centerpiece of the program. I had listened to this symphony hundreds of times and knew it almost by heart, but when that fourfold stampede of chords announced its opening, I leapt out of my seat as if “the blow of fate” had resounded within me. I listened to the entire piece in a state of ecstasy, and when it ended to thundering applause I was unable to budge, and Teodorito had to pull me by the arm to remind me that we had to leave quickly if we wanted to reach the bus stop before the rest of the audience. I obeyed him like a zombie, staggering over the grass of the Campo de Marte, making my way through the thousands of spectators who continued to applaud, watching Teodorito run to the bus stop with his back to the stage, though, in homage to the orchestra, leaping into the air every few minutes and making a hundred-and-eighty-degree turn in the air and clapping his hands before his feet touched the ground, only to regain his original position and continue along his way.

  From that moment on I became an avid devotee of the National Symphony Orchestra and Berenson, and I came to swell the ranks of Lima’s not-very-numerous but highly select crowd of music lovers. After the summer season was over, the concerts started up again in the Teatro Municipal, and not a week went by when either alone or with Teodorito I didn’t climb, panting, the five flights of stairs that led to the gallery, the theater section that, according to the cognoscenti, offered the best acoustics as well as the cheapest tickets in the house. The gallery was always full of a mostly young and well-versed crowd, and a festive air reigned in the aisles. There were students from the conservatory, one or another composer, painters, aspiring philosophers, poets, journalists, and a few beautiful or emancipated or sophisticated girls who embodied for me the full flowering of artistic intelligence. It was the audience in the gallery that clapped most heartily, whistled loudest when appropriate, and whose clamorous bravos summoned the orchestra’s encores.

  But my musical passion did not end there. When I began studying law, I had no choice but to walk past the Teatro Municipal to reach the building where my classes were held. As I was always in a hurry, I barely had time to glimpse out of the corner of my eye the posters announcing the next weekly concert and to hear a few muffled chords of the orchestra rehearsals. One morning, I could no longer resist the temptation and snuck in through the artists’ entrance. For the first time, I could attend a concert rehearsal from backstage, and see, from just a few feet away, Berenson, in shirtsleeves, trenchant and sweating, as he executed the perfect performance piece by piece and after thousands of interruptions and repetitions, like a writer who achieves the long dreamed-of page after infinite corrections. My admiration for the maestro grew, and from then on, most mornings that I walked past the Teatro Municipal, I would blow off my law classes and allow myself to get sucked in through the artists’ entrance. My musical education flourished while my law studies floundered. By the end of the year I could recognize with closed eyes the sound of a violin as opposed to that of a viola and could distinguish the slightest wrong note from one of the trumpets, but I failed to pass my exams in family and civil law.

  This was not the only effect my musical passion had on my life. It also had consequences in my family circle and in particular on my older sister’s destiny. Mercedes was eighteen years old and had a throng of suitors. After giving several the boot, she retained two and was unable to decide between them, for they both conformed to the same type rather than each being an individual. Both were cadets at the military academy, both were young, handsome, well-built, sons of well-known families of the Miraflores bourgeoisie, equally dogged in their courting and assiduous in their visits. In addition, they came together to see her, both taking advantage of their weekend leave. My brother and I had no preference and couldn’t have cared less about her final choice. Hernán was perhaps better-looking, but Genaro was more intelligent. Until, that is, we found out that Genaro loved classical music and that his family had a noteworthy record collection. Genaro, also aware of our passion for music, immediately understood the advantage he could thereby wield over Hernán, and from then on, a Saturday did not pass in which he failed to bring us a record from his house. For the most part they were operas sung by Enrico Caruso, Beniamino Gigli, and Amelita Galli-Curci, rare recordings worthy of a collector and that delighted my brother, who disdained symphonic music and preferred bel canto. As Genaro’s record collection diminished, our affection for him increased. And this affection turned into open complicity and underhanded combat against his rival. Not only did we disparage Hernán’s qualities and glorify Genaro’s within the intimacy of the family circle, but because Mercedes remained undecided we employed the lowest of means, such as failing to pass along phone messages from Hernán, or even worse, inventing romances he was carrying on in other neighborhoods of Miraflores, employing vague and unverifiable allusions, such as “I think I
saw him . . .” “Someone said . . .” et cetera. Mercedes, who was jealous and possessive, was easily deceived, and without Hernán ever understanding why, she sent him packing for good. Two years later she married Genaro.

  Teodorito and I could not, as it were, marry Maestro Berenson, despite adoring him quite as much as my sister did Genaro, but we continued to pay our respects by attending his concerts at the Teatro Municipal. Other conductors passed through Lima, such as Erich Kleiber or Fritz Busch, but we continued to prefer the nervous, fragile, and elegant Hans Marius Berenson and his flying baton, which—through its finesse and intelligence—seemed like one more musical instrument.

  At last, one night, we decided to wait for him after a concert, approach him, and confess to him our great admiration. Stationed at the main doors, we watched as the audience dispersed and some members of the orchestra departed. We then realized that other musicians were leaving through the artists’ entrance around the corner. This worried us, so we decided that Teodorito would watch the main door and I the other one. At last Teodorito came running to announce that the maestro had left alone and was walking toward Jirón de la Unión, the main pedestrian street. We turned to follow him and when we got there, we saw him heading toward the Plaza San Martín. We followed, about twenty steps behind, uncertain how and when to approach him. At moments we would lose sight of him among the other pedestrians, then we’d pick up our pace. We watched him pause hesitantly at the Plaza San Martín. We thought he might be trying to decide whether to take a taxi or the express bus back to Miraflores. But suddenly he turned resolutely toward the Romano. A few minutes later we entered and saw him in that noisy, bustling establishment, leaning on the bar and drinking a beer. We had no choice but to go up to him, and that is just what we did. When Teodorito began with “Maestro Berenson, we—” the maestro seemed quite taken aback and inspected us with clear and penetrating eyes. From close up we saw his smooth, rosy skin, which made him look younger, but there was a certain weariness in his expression, something anxious and old. When Teodorito finished his halting speech, the maestro very courteously thanked him for his words of appreciation, then quickly finished off his beer, and with a brusque “good night,” he got up and walked out, leaving us quite frustrated.

  In spite of this, Teodorito and I remained loyal to the concerts of the symphony orchestra, and every week we climbed the five flights of stairs in the Teatro Municipal to fiercely applaud our Viennese idol. New and brilliant musicians brought by Berenson—in particular an oboist and a flautist—had joined the orchestra, and the group reached masterful heights of sonority. The celebrated Hermann Scherchen, who came to Lima to conduct a few concerts, said in an interview that our symphony orchestra was the best in South America, due specifically to the excellence of its current music director.

  This praise filled us with renewed pride, and Teodorito and I again considered the possibility of approaching the maestro. We finally did so under quite unusual circumstances. It was October and in celebration of Lima’s patron saint, El Señor de los Milagros, the Lord of Miracles, lively street fairs and bazaars were held in various neighborhoods. As a result, and because we felt like living it up, we decided to forgo, for the first time, that night’s concert in order to enjoy the fair on Avenida Tacna. We wandered past the kiosks, pitching pennies, participating in drawings, eating grilled chicken hearts, and drinking various fermented corn brews, including cachina and chicha de jora. A little before midnight we remembered that the orchestra was holding its weekly concert just a few steps away, and, imbued with courage from the alcohol, we made our way toward the Teatro Municipal to await the maestro. The doors were closed and the hall was in total darkness. The concert had ended half an hour before. Far from deflated, we made off toward the Jirón de la Unión, the Plaza San Martín, and the Romano, with a remote hope of finding him. At that late hour, the bar was filled with euphoric denizens of the night, who seemed to stagger and drift toward the irreparable. Then we spotted him in the crowd. He was leaning on the bar, like the first time, but now he was accompanied by two of his musicians, the oboist and the violist, who had left their instrument cases leaning against the wall behind the bar. From the doorway we watched him converse, laugh, and offer toasts. The presence of his colleagues had dampened our spirits. Luckily, they both soon offered him their hands, picked up their cases, and departed, leaving the maestro alone in the crowd in front of his glass of beer. That was the moment to approach him. He may have recognized us, though there was no way for us to know, but this time his small, keen, and shining eyes seemed friendlier as they looked us over. Teodorito took the opportunity to launch into his old routine about our passion for music and our admiration for him. The maestro received these declarations with modesty and offered to buy us a drink. We ordered pisco martinis and a short time later we were engaged in an animated conversation. He asked us what we did, and when he found out we were not students at the National Conservatory of Music but rather anonymous habitués of his concerts, his interest in us seemed to grow.

  He invited us to a second round, and he ordered another beer, accompanied, I noticed, by a shot of pisco, which he drank by taking small sips of each in turn. He spoke for a long time about his musical training, his life in Vienna before the war, while I, as I was starting in on my third martini, began to sink into a dense fog, from the depths of which I required an enormous effort to understand what the maestro was saying and remain aware of where I was. At one particular moment the noise and lights of the bar were left behind, and we found ourselves on the street—the maestro, myself, and a Teodorito whom I barely perceived as a tiny scrap of ectoplasm. Berenson waved his arm, probably trying to hail a taxi. When one stopped, he shook our hands goodbye, then, when he found out we lived in Miraflores, offered to give us a ride. We sat down in the backseat, and just as the car took off I felt my head spin, and a cold sweat drenched my forehead. The fact is, I was totally drunk. My situation got worse as we continued along Avenida Arequipa, watching the swiftly moving parade of cars and trees. When we were halfway there, I could no longer contain myself, and I began to vomit. What a fiasco! I thought, what a terrible impression I am making on Maestro Berenson! The driver blew up, shouting and insulting me, threatening to throw me out of the car, and just when I thought the maestro would come to my rescue and take a stand against that madman’s suggestions, I heard him tell the driver to stop in the middle of the block, where he opened the door and practically threw me out of the taxi, saying things I couldn’t make out but which seemed to be expressions of intense disgust. I ended up sprawled on the dark and lonely sidewalk, drowning in a sea of my own vomit, feeling as if I were dying of nausea, shame, and humiliation.

  I woke up at noon in the house of an uncle who lived near where I had fallen, a place I reached thanks to some unknown instinct. I vowed never to repeat that mixture of cachina, chicha, and martinis (a vow I kept but mocked by indulging in other equally mortal mixtures). Only in the evening could I make it to Teodorito’s house to discuss with him the not-so-glorious moments of the previous night. Teodorito was in his musical temple, listening to the overture to The Mastersingers of Nuremberg at full volume. When he saw me he turned off the music. He looked pale, agitated, on the verge of exploding. I thought he was going to scold me harshly for my behavior the night before, accuse me of grinding our eventual friendship with the maestro into the dust forever, but I was wrong, for he lit a cigarette and took a long pause, then began one of his slow and long-winded stories, this one about the continuation of his ride with the maestro in the taxi along Avenida Arequipa. He told me about how the driver kept grumbling, about some birds chirping in the trees along the way (which evoked for me a trip I had taken as a child to an Andean village), about Maestro Berenson’s silence punctuated by short sighs, about the sleepiness that overwhelmed him, and finally about a strange sensation, something like a weight on his leg, something slithery and warm on his thigh, finally a hand, the maestro’s hand caressing him, more and more deli
berately, moving up toward his belly . . .

  “I had to get out!” he shouted with rage. “I told the driver to stop before he got to the park in Miraflores. The old man got out, too, I don’t know what he was saying, but I took off running along Pardo to my house.”

  He said “the old man,” not the maestro. That in itself was sufficient.

  Our disappointment was deep but did not prevent us from continuing to attend the concerts at the Teatro Municipal. But we listened to them now without the same passion, perhaps making greater demands, believing at moments we had discovered some minor error in the performance. Once in a while we’d walk by the Romano after a concert and occasionally we spotted the maestro at the end of the bar, with a glass of beer and a shot of pisco, alone or conversing with some occasional and young drinker. Rumors then began to circulate that Berenson had been implicated in a nocturnal scandal, the details of which never became clear, and that some members of the orchestra were questioning the maestro’s competence. This last item was doubtful, for toward the end of the year he conducted some memorable concerts when Claudio Arrau and Yehudi Menuhin passed through Lima, and both musicians lavished high praise on the orchestra and its music director.

  Some time later Teodorito got married and, to complement my studies, I took a job with a law firm. This not only created distance between us but also diminished our devotion to the concerts. We went rarely, until we didn’t go at all. I then began to make preparations for my trip to Paris, and Teodorito was awaiting his first child. Shortly before I left Peru I heard that the maestro had triumphed with a moving performance of Tchaikovsky’s Symphony Pathétique just days before his wife left him to return to Vienna.

  I spent many years in Europe, where my passion for music grew, diversified, became more refined, until finally, though it didn’t die altogether, it achieved a moderate level of serenity, roughly halfway between obligation and boredom. Such is probably the fate of all passions. After hearing the grand philharmonic orchestras of Paris, Vienna, London, and Berlin, I stopped attending concerts altogether and returned to my youthful preference for recordings, which I listened to calmly and distractedly at home. I managed to acquire a valuable record collection—my brother-in-law Genaro would have paled with envy—which accompanied me like a sonorous decor during my exercise of other passions, such as love and writing. Once in a while as I listened, there passed through my mind the memory of the maestro, with his strengths and his defects, memories I welcomed with gratitude and indulgence.