View all notes
[...] This was the late summer of his life, the year he met Anna, and he had no idea whether he would ever be able to return to the corralling work that art was, to have whatever he needed to make even a simple song. Dissolving into darkness was enough, for now. Or playing from memory an old song by a master, something his mother had loved or his father had whistled, when he accompanied his father on a walk, for there was one specific song his father always muttered or whistled. In the past Rafael had travelled from village to village, argued a salary, invented melodies, stolen chords, slashed the legs off an old song to use just the torso—but he had come to love now most of all the playing of music with no one there. Could you waste your life on a gift? If you did not use your gift, was it a betrayal?
But the next day, standing in the meadow, he invites Anna to visit the trailer, and she hesitates, thinking the offer is a commitment on his part, even a tentative one. It implies too much knowledge of the other—his home could be a capsule of the past or of a possible future. Her own hesitation at breaking their formality is interpreted by Rafael as shyness, or modesty, or a desire not to take the relationship further. And in some way this is not a misinterpretation of Anna. For she too has lived a stranger’s life. There are layers of compulsive secrecy in her. She knows there is a ‘flock’ of Annas, and that the Anna beside this unnamed river of Rafael’s is not the Anna giving a seminar at Berkeley on one of Alexandre Dumas’ collaborators and plot researchers, is not the Anna in San Francisco walking into Tosca’s or eating at the Tadich Grill on California Street.
okay i need to go to both those places
In spite of everything that had existed between Coop and Anna for those two months on the Petaluma farm, they had remained mysterious to each other. They’d really been discovering themselves. In this way they could fit into the world. But years later, never having married, never having lived with anyone in a relationship that intended permanence, she still sidled beside her lovers as if she were on Coop’s deck, glowing in secret with the discovery of herself. So there had always been and perhaps always would be a maze of unmarked roads between her and others. That emotional map of France was still true in the present, full of subtexts, social intricacies, unspoken balances of power. One still needed to move warily, with hesitance, within it.
So Rafael discovered the privacy of music, its hidden chords, all those disguised narratives. From then on, conflicts were to be within his art. And, being surrounded by the intimacy of his parents, he knew he had to somehow protect it. He was still the playful and loved son, but his mother noticed him removing himself easily from the conversations in their trailer. He had found his own enchantment, he had his own ‘emergency.’ He had an escape from the world. As if the chair he sat in was a horse to gallop into unknown distances.
Who taught him this secret? Once, as a young musician, he witnessed a pair of dancers who began rehearsing on their own, before anyone had taken out an instrument, to a recording of piano music that they pulled across like a screen between themselves and the others who were there. They were alone already, in their intimate preparation. [...]
When I wrote, the man said, that was the only time I would think. I would sit down with a notebook and a pen, and I would be lost in a story. The old writer, seemingly at peace, thus casually suggested to Rafael a path he might take during his own life, and taught him how he could be alone and content, guarded from all he knew, even those he loved, and in this strange way, be fully understanding of them. It was in a sense a terrible proposal of secrecy—what you might do with a life, with all those hours being separated from it—that could lead somehow to intimacy. The man had made himself an example of it. The solitary in his busy and crowded world of invention. It was one of the last things the writer talked to him about.
After work, Claire would sometimes meet up with Vea for a drink at Fog City, watching that little oil slick on his vodka martini curling dangerously. Aldo Vea was the most principled man Claire knew, and he had taught her how to survive in this profession of crime and retribution, how to accept the flawed barrier between cause and effect, how to see that the present continually altered the past, just as the past was a strange inheritance that fell upside down into one’s life like an image through a camera obscura. All that was consistent was a principle. ‘You believe in the principle,’ Vea would say, ‘if you cannot believe in the man. You meet monsters and you help defend them. You believe in the principle of full justice. When a murderer fights the death penalty, he is not the one asking to be pardoned, he doesn’t deserve to ask, we are the ones asking.’ Vea had been in Vietnam between the ages of seventeen and nineteen, and he had seen the monster. He knew how the monster could come upon you.
Claire felt that Vea had implanted a cause in her, a guiding principle for what she could do with her life, and so she would do anything for him. He never approached her except as a compatriot, alongside the honour of his work, although god knows what his darknesses and hidden emotions were. Vea’s wife, she knew, could map him intricately. She took Claire to symphony concerts and the ballet, things that Vea could not sit still for. Ballet had not enough words to keep him awake. The closest he got to formal was Thelonious Monk, whose music, in the neglected recordings, were, he said, like imprisoned birdsongs. When Claire went to the Veas’ for dinner, he would be once more rebuilding his homemade sound system, and this always led to a discussion of the most recent eavesdropping equipment on the market. ‘There’s a laser scope,’ he would say, ‘that can measure the vibrations in the glass of a window across the street, and then translate them into sounds. From there it’s one step to hearing the conversation going on in that room. And we’re the ones who lost the war....’
She often had books on the table beside her. Chemistry, he thought he saw in a title once. She was in her early or middle thirties. She always seemed to be there at the same hour with the man. Her professor, perhaps. Or brother. They never touched each other, although they talked constantly while they ate. Like Cooper, they always sat at the same table. Sometimes he got there first, sometimes they did. Occasionally the woman looked over at him and acknowledged his presence—once charmingly in the middle of her laughter about something, and he had smiled back. So there was this small moment between them that he folded carefully away. Then sometime in the middle of a meal she would stretch her legs out. She did not fit or belong inside this wooden-walled diner, where the lighting clarified mostly the wrinkled necks of old gamblers and their season-long partners. Whatever the lighting was at Jocko’s, it should have been bottled, he thought, and gone on tour with her, its sole purpose to follow this woman for the rest of her life, parting from her only after the funeral rites.
What he wanted was to simply look at that face that he couldn’t read at all. That face, the blond hair. It wasn’t the beauty, it was the variousness. Maybe in Vienna the woman might go unnoticed, but in Santa Maria she was this panther who came in and fit herself somehow between that chair and table near him every Monday and Friday, opposite a man who perhaps was an amateur magician in this semi-suburban California town—who sawed her in half in some unhealthy bar down the road. She leaned forward to whisper to the friend, or whatever he was.
We returned to the car and drove towards Dému. All my life I have loved travelling at night, with a companion, each of us discussing and sharing the known and familiar behaviour of the other. It’s like a villanelle, this inclination of going back to events in our past, the way the villanelle’s form refuses to move forward in linear development, circling instead at those familiar moments of emotion. Only the rereading counts, Nabokov said. So the strange form of that belfry, turning onto itself again and again, felt familiar to me. For we live with those retrievals from childhood that coalesce and echo throughout our lives, the way shattered pieces of glass in a kaleidoscope reappear in new forms and are songlike in their refrains and rhymes, making up a single monologue. We live permanently in the recurrence of our own stories, whatever story we tell.
[...] And yet, with all his modesty, he loved the grandeur of Victor Hugo— and those slow, obedient descriptions that walked towards revolution.
aaahh