He set his dossier to one side, first making sure the album was tightly closed so no photograph, program, or clipping could fall out, and felt for something inside his skimpy jacket — velvet, I remember now, with very wide lapels, a jacket more for an obsolete crooner than a piano player — and for a moment his expression turned to alarm as he patted all his pockets, looking at me with a smile of embarrassment and apology, as if I were a policeman who’d asked for identification. But then the anxious fingers touched what they were looking for, the flexible covers of a passport so tenderly handled that it looked new, just like the identification card the pianist now showed me, his color photograph sealed beneath the smooth plastic along with his strange Romanian or Slavic name, which I’ve forgotten.
His long, pale fingers stroked those documents with reverence, with amazement that they existed, with the anxiety that they could be lost. So many years living in a country he wanted to get out of to visit another that he knew only through books and music, through the sonorous names in the scores he learned so well at the conservatory, all that tension on the eve of the final decision, when he climbed out the washroom window of his dressing room on the tour through Spain to avoid being seen by the agents watching him and his companions, all the waiting, giving statements in police stations and presenting papers, living in Red Cross shelters or filthy boardinghouses, with the fear of being expelled or, worse, repatriated, what a horrible word, he told me, with no money, no identity, in a no-man’s-land between the life he’d left and the one he had yet to begin, divested of the security and privileges he had enjoyed as a renowned pianist in his country, uncertain about the chances of beginning a new career here, of being unknown.
The bewildered look of one who has nurtured a dream for years and actually accomplished it contrasted, on his face and in his eyes, with the melancholy of one who has gradually capitulated to reality. He had been a child prodigy in the conservatory at Bucharest or Sofia, and his collection of clippings and programs attested to a distinguished career in the concert halls of Eastern Europe. But now he was spending entire mornings in the reception room of my office, awaiting a decision on a contract that would guarantee him, at most, two or three performances in cultural centers on the outskirts of the city, in theaters with bad acoustics and mediocre, badly tuned pianos.
He wasn’t allowing himself to be discouraged, and if he came into my office and I told him that the manager wouldn’t be in that day or that we hadn’t even begun processing the forms for his contract, he would smile weakly, thank me, and bow as he left with a mixture of old-fashioned Central European courtesy and Communist stiffness: a timid deference toward any official that he would probably never lose. He was a young man, smalclass="underline" in my now-faded memory he looks something like Roman Polanski, a fleeting liveliness in the eyes and gestures that at a certain distance erases the signs of age.
He was giving private lessons, and he sought and accepted concerts anywhere, earning almost nothing, a fee sometimes so low that when he was going over the figures, he told himself, using one of those Spanish sayings he liked so much, “Minimum pay, food for the day.” He also told himself, “Better than stone soup,” and, “A bird in the hand is worth scores on the wing” in the painstaking Spanish so passionately learned in a capital with broken-down streetcars, long winters, and early nightfalls, practiced privately and with the dream of escape and rebellion, much as he learned to play the most difficult passages of Albéniz’s Iberia or Ravel’s Rhapsody Espagnole. Now, although the fruits of his dream were so meager, because in Spain his career as a piano virtuoso meant nothing and he had to perform in lamentable venues, wearing worn clothing and living under the constant strain of poverty, he refused to give in to depression and continued to show his gratitude and enthusiasm for his new country. It was a pathetic happiness, as of a man in love who knows he is scorned by his beloved but still gives her his boundless devotion.
ONE DAY THE PIANIST TOLD ME — I don’t know whether it was in my office or one of the bars on the side streets where we lower-echelon employees ate breakfast, possibly he had invited me to have a cup of coffee or a tot of rum to celebrate modestly, that he finally got a contract for a concert.
He told me how he was coming back to Spain from Paris on a night train scheduled to reach the border at Irún by dawn. He had gone to play in a festival benefiting exiled artists of his country, and this was the first time he had traveled with his new Spanish passport. He couldn’t sleep all night because of the discomfort of his second-class seat and the added aggravation of rude passengers, and at nearly every station the French conductors forced him to get up because his ticket, the cheapest available, gave him no right to claim a specific seat. And he was nervous: it was the first time he would enter Spain with the new identity papers, which he had been given only a short time before. In the darkened compartment, among the snoring passengers, he kept touching the pockets of his jacket and overcoat, checking again and again for his ticket, passport, ID, and each time it seemed that he’d lost them or that he had one document but not the others, and he kept putting them in a more secure place, inside a lining or in the zippered pocket of his travel case, and when he dozed off and his eyes jerked open, he would forget where he’d put them, this time sure that he’d lost them or that one of those thieves who roam the night trains had taken them. After hours of anguish at border posts in Communist countries, the laborious review of papers and the flash of alarm each time some bureaucratic flaw in a document held him up, he decided not to go back to sleep. He tried to see what time it was by the pale violet light in the car ceiling, and at the stops he noted the names of the stations, calculating how much farther it was to Irun, eager to get there but also increasingly afraid as the train neared the border. Meanwhile the Spanish and French passengers slept tranquilly in his compartment, sure of the order of things and perfectly allied with their world, unlike him, an intruder who took nothing for granted and always feared the unexpected.