I don’t know if it was when I woke up or if I was still dreaming when I remembered that Liszt had been the lover of a princess who was related to Wittgenstein, and had also been Wagner’s father-in-law. I told Lía this and she, emerging from the white sheets, lazy as a snake shedding her skin, said it was time for a shower.
We had coffee and champurradas in the hotel restaurant. Wet patches from Lía’s chestnut-colored hair adorned her grayish T-shirt. She chatted away about her dreams (she always remembered them in great detail). Listening to her, it occurred to me that her husky, ethereal voice sounded as though she was talking to me completely submerged in a bathtub of milk.
The audience inside the ruins of San José el Viejo was murmuring bashfully. The air was cold, congealed, as if still for centuries, and an exquisite light spread harmoniously throughout the great vaulted space. Ranks of folding chairs had been set out facing a grand piano that rose up ahead of them, a solitary thing on its raised platform. I thought of a black ship about to set sail.
We took seats in the back row. Lía shushed warm kisses in my ear. A boy of three or four was kneeling on the seat in front and every so often he’d turn around and, slightly mischievously, stare at us with his little macadamia face. Look at him, Lía said, they’ve got him wearing a tie. Hello, handsome, she said to him, and the boy, blushing, grabbed hold of his mother.
The murmur of the audience died down. A man had clambered up onstage and was smiling smugly as he presented an aberrant biography of the Serbian pianist that he’d most likely only just memorized. He said that Mr. Rakić was from Belfast, had studied under Bazar Lerman in New York, and was now living in Italy. The audience — ever cowardly, as a stuttering friend of mine once put it — applauded all the same.
Milan emerged and sat straight down at the piano. He remained silent, with his head bowed, hands on his thighs, and maybe his eyes closed, although given the distance and the way that his straight hair hung down over his face like a black curtain, I couldn’t be sure. But that was how it looked. I thought at first he was waiting for people to be quiet, but then, after the quiet had come, I thought maybe he was reviewing in his mind all the pieces he was going to play (there weren’t any scores), but after that, when more than a minute had passed and people, somewhat perplexed, began looking around, I thought maybe he’d just awakened and had a filthy hangover and couldn’t remember a thing, neither how to play the piano nor what the hell he was doing in a ruin in Guatemala, and least of all why he might have abandoned his beloved Belfast.
The piano began to trickle like water in a slow cascade. Too gentle and sweet, too serene for the Chopin mazurka the program notes claimed it to be. Lía squeezed my arm. It’s Beethoven’s Pathétique she whispered, frowning, holding the piece of paper up to her face and then moving it away, hoping, I suppose, that the words would change with the angle of light, like a hologram. I shrugged, resigning myself to it. I think Milan was playing the third movement, but it could just as easily have been the second or the first. A woman to my right seemed to have fallen asleep. The boy in front was standing on his chair, listening with the genuine surprise of a child still young enough to let people dress him up in a little tie. He shouted something at his mom. She tried in vain to make him sit down. Lía smiled. For some reason, Beethoven’s sonatas always make me feel like changing the world, or at least changing out of my own world. I closed my eyes for a time and imagined all the rings on Milan’s pallid fingers pounding the ivory. Then silence. A round of applause. I opened my eyes and found the boy looking at me, curious, steady, barely blinking. You scare him, Lía said. I made a face like a wild leopard and he almost fell off his chair.
Head bowed, Milan had placed his hands on his thighs and again possibly had his eyes closed. Observing him in this state of deep concentration took me back to that part in his anecdote about the rainy day with the old Jew. He’s deciding what to play, I whispered to Lía, who was still trying to decipher the program. Saint-Saëns, it says here. It’ll be anything but Saint-Saëns, I assured her. How do you know? Bazar Lerman, I said, and just then, as if invoked by the hushed prayer of a necromancer, a gray or possibly gray-white pigeon flew into the ruins and made its way to the vault’s highest point, directly above the stage. A number of chicks began to screech while the pigeon beat her wings and tried to steady herself. Birdies! the boy shouted, already up on his feet again, pointing at his latest discovery. The audience shifted, embarrassed, and then, irrefutably, up surged Rachmaninoff. It could have been the Piano Sonata no. 2, but equally it could have been any other concerto or prelude for piano. Fast. Intense. Perfectly ordered. Like the unstoppable zephyr of a hurricane or of Lía’s raging sea, I thought (or maybe felt). Then, seeing the boy’s euphoria at the racket being made by the hungry chicks, I thought the music was exactly like a churning swarm of doves or parakeets or blue Amazonian cockatoos, an overcast sky full of blue Amazonian cockatoos flying gently along, screeching with a precise logic that from afar seems so chaotic, so bold, so movingly fortuitous. Milan’s hands were a smudge of skin in motion. Out of focus. His hair buffeting around. The boy carried on pointing toward the roof as he hopped up and down on his metal chair: Birdies, birdies! The chicks had just then gone quiet.
Applause. Milan with his head bowed once more and another long silence. What next? murmured Lía. I didn’t say anything. The program was now lying on the ground.
He started playing a forceful, energetic piece that had moments of fading to almost nothing and then, intensely, dramatically, shot upward again. An unrecognizable rise and fall that went on and on for thirty or forty minutes perhaps. But in the midst of this din of opposing emotions, of periods of peace and periods of anxiety that seemed to awaken the drowsy, ingenuous audience, I thought I heard — briefly, from a long way down, and as if tangled up in lots of other chords — a number of Thelonious Monk’s syncopated melodies. Strange, I know. I thought I heard “Straight, No Chaser” and then “Trinkle, Tinkle” and then “Blue Monk” and later maybe even a small segment of “Epistrophy.” Very far off. You might almost say subliminally, but not even that. Segments too fleeting to pin down, I suppose, but clear enough (within that labyrinth) for a devotee of Monk’s works and particularly of his percussive style, of the way in which he used to hammer and punish the keys. Although who knows, really. Sometimes, when confusion reigns, you can only hear the music that’s already inside you.
Milan vanished without a word. The people were on their feet, applauding and smiling serenely and begging for more. Clearly, he wouldn’t be coming back on.
We found him in an ad hoc dressing room: on his own, smoking, a light blue towel around his neck. Lía kissed him on both cheeks. I embraced him. I don’t know why, but he had the air of a wounded soldier, not fatally wounded, but vitally wounded, happily wounded, buoyantly wounded, contentedly wounded, wounded in such a way that finally he’d be able to abandon the war and go back to the peace and quiet of his home. Right, he said, stubbing out his cigarette, should we go get some food?
Lía needed to rest, she said, sleep for a few hours, but she’d join us after lunch for a coffee, she promised, and say goodbye to Milan before he made his way to the airport. He was flying back to New York that night.
We went to La Cueva de los Urquizú—a rustic, basic eatery with plastic tablecloths, plastic trays, and disposable cutlery that was probably never disposed of — so Milan could get a taste of Guatemalan food.