Over another beer, we talked about the decadence of youth, about counts who walled up their adversaries, about superstring theory (Lía might have been studying medicine, but she had a thing for quantum physics), about oral sex according to Tibetan Tantra and oral sex according to a Cor-tázar story. Seeing the time, she said there was a marimba concert at Panza Verde. I kissed her neck. Come on, Dudú, just for a bit, she said as she closed her eyes and lifted her chin slightly, offering me still more of her neck. I paid for the beers.
We walked over to Panza Verde, or Green Belly, a restaurant that flaunts that questionably noble nickname for the people of Antigua — for their growing as well as eating so many greens, I’d been told. The men were in jackets and ties, the women all dressed up in furs and jewels and magnificent evening gowns, almost all of them black (for our part, we were looking particularly swanky in leather sandals and old T-shirts). Someone, somewhere, was playing the marimba. Several ambassadors, with champagne and chortling potbellies, were chatting at the back. The members of an Austrian quartet, who Lía told me had been playing Mozart that morning, were sticking together around a table, fearful, I suppose, of getting separated and having to face alone the dangers of the Third World. The Venezuelan baritone could be heard bawling about politics and, like any good Venezuelan, clucking incessantly about Chávez. There were some Guatemalan poets, drunk already, telling jokes about queers and about Rigoberta Menchú. Charming, I whispered as we dodged perfumes and waved hello and made our way straight to the bar in search of two tequilas and a little privacy.
A dark-skinned girl asked us what kind of tequila. We’ve got all sorts, she concluded, smiling conspiratorially, as if to say comrades, we’ll die here together. Ándele, cried Lía, white tequila, the best you’ve got. And we toasted the dark-skinned girl. Another? she said, wiping down the bar with a filthy cloth. Her hands looked too small to me. Then they looked like two muddy starfish. Then like two sad, puffed-up tarantulas locked in a territorial contest neither was ever going to win. And raising our glasses once more, we toasted Lee Marvin (we’d seen The Killers recently, the second film to be based on the story by Hemingway, shot in 1964 and directed by Don Siegel, during the entire filming of which Mr. Marvin was utterly, beatifically drunk). Someone left a tray of canapés in front of us.
Look, over there, said Lía, and I followed her gaze. A guy with long hair was drinking red wine at the far end of the bar. On his own. As if forgotten amid all the chaos. Hold this, she said, giving me the lit cigarette as she stood up. Lía was like that. She loved rescuing frail little birds and stray dogs. Once, when she was a girl, for her kindheartedness, she’d gotten a bite taken out of her left thigh by a huge, dirty English sheepdog.
May I introduce Milan Rakić? Pleased to meet you, he said in impeccable Spanish, albeit with an unabashedly Argentinian lilt. I asked if he was Argentinian. Serbian, he said, but my girlfriend’s from Buenos Aires. Gde si bre čoveče, I declaimed. Hey, you know Serbian? he cried, giving me a slap on the back. Lía smiled. As if, I said — too many Kusturica films. Then I said I remembered having read something about a Serbian pianist in the festival program. Yours truly, he exclaimed, smiling and jerking his thumb at his chest. And have you already played? Lía asked. He lit a cigarette. Tomorrow, at midday, he said, sighing a nervous or possibly desperate lungful of smoke.
There was another stool there, but Milan remained standing between the two of us. I guessed he must have been about my age. He was wearing a light, loose-fitting tortilla-colored shirt and his fingers were heaped with heavy silver rings. His dark, straight hair almost covered his face entirely, and for some reason I started thinking about bridal veils, which Lía really had a thing about. Maybe because of the shape of his eyes, maybe because of something else much harder to pin down, he seemed to me to have a nocturnal look about him. The look of someone who can see properly only at night, or who wants to see properly only at night. The look of a vampire, but a sad, well-meaning vampire who doesn’t need any more blood, just a long splash in holy water.
We ordered three tequilas. So you’re from Belgrade? Lía asked him. Yes, Belgrade, though I’ve lived abroad for many years, he said, keeping his gaze fixed on the dark-skinned girl as she served the three drinks. Thanks so much, Miriam, he said flirtatiously. And where have you lived? I asked. What a beauty, he whispered, and then, as if exiting a dark, narrow tunnel, he said he’d studied music in Italy, in Russia, and currently in New York. A little confused, I sat looking at the dark-skinned girl with the Mayan features until Lía gave my leg a good hard pinch. And what will you play tomorrow, Milan? she asked. Who knows, it’s always a mystery, he said mysteriously, with a hint of showy dogmatism. Then he said: Maybe a little Rachmaninoff, or Saint-Saëns, or Liszt, or Stravinsky. Ah, Charlie Parker’s favorite, I said just to say something. Milan smiled. You like jazz? I told him that in my last or second-to-last incarnation, before making the small leap over into a Judeo-Latin American cosmology, I must have been a third-rate black jazz musician playing in some brothel in Kansas City or Storyville (a name so lovely, it seems made up), although I could just as easily have been a black hooker from Kansas City or Storyville who spent all night fucking to the rhythm played by some third-rate jazz musician. Which is to say, I said with all the seriousness of a poor forgotten harlequin, I’ve got jazz deep in my gonads. And I downed the tequila. What kind of jazz do you like? Milan asked, and before I could reply, I felt Lía’s warm hand over my mouth. This one I know by heart, she said. He likes pure jazz, she said. He likes anyone who plays with swing, right? Although Dudú has never managed to explain to me what swing is. I licked her fingers. Laughing, she wiped her hand on my thigh. You can’t explain swing, Milan murmured. I like Bird and early Miles and Coltrane and Tatum and Powell and Mingus, I told him. But my true love is Monk. Ah! cried Milan after a little sip of his tequila, the magnificent Thelonious Monk. And then, as if we were invoking the names of Aztec warriors or of strange Nordic runes, we took turns reciting the titles of everything written by Melodious Thunk, as his wife called him, every single piece, in a jumble that somehow appeared organized by the stiff fingers of that eccentric pianist of dissonances and berets and mystic trances and the cheeks of a happy minnow. Lía listened patiently to us, dropping in questions here and there. You can easily recognize a Monk composition by its style, I replied, but it’s not easy, even for true devotees, to know exactly which piece it is. He didn’t go near the piano in his later years, Milan replied. I think epistrophy is a botanical term, I replied, and Milan immediately gave me a mocking smile. It doesn’t mean anything, he said. That son of a bitch made it up. But isn’t epistrophe also a rhetorical term, something repetitive, very musical, asked Lía, as in the famous: They’re born to thieves, raised among thieves, they study to be thieves, and finally become thieves themselves? And though she was right — Milan responded to the Cervantes quotation with a sour expression that wouldn’t make sense to me till the following day — neither of us answered her. I pointed out that, in an interview with George Simon in Metronome, Monk had said it was a botanical term, signifying the reversion of abnormal to normal. And you believe him, Eduardito? Utter nonsense, he said. I looked it up myself. There are people who say, in the same way, that Monk took the concept from Greek mythology, from epistrophe as associated with Aphrodite and love and sexuality and other such crap, but that’s all nonsense too. Milan paused, and it struck me that he even spoke musically. He said: Some things signify nothing and are beautiful all the same. Epistrophy, he said, and the word fell like a dead dragonfly in a bowl of warm lentil soup. Then, in a fatherly gesture that could well have had more of a spiritual meaning among old Yugoslavs, or could equally have meant nothing at all, Milan, who still hadn’t sat down, stroked my head fondly.