The Price of Art
Europe was kind enough to civilize black Africa. First, it smashed the map and swallowed the pieces, stole the gold, the ivory, the diamonds, kidnapped Africa’s strongest children and then sold them into slavery.
Then, to complete their education, Europe treated black Africans to numerous punitive military expeditions.
At the end of the nineteenth century, British soldiers carried out one such pedagogical incursion in the kingdom of Benin. After the butchery and before the burning, they carted off the booty: a phenomenal quantity of masks, sculptures, and carvings, torn from the sanctuaries that gave them life and shelter.
It was the largest body of African art ever collected, covering a thousand years of history. In London, the disturbing beauty of these works evoked some curiosity and nothing in the way of admiration. The output of the African zoo was of interest to only a few eccentric collectors and museums specializing in primitive customs. Nevertheless, when Queen Victoria auctioned the treasures off, the take was enough to pay for the entire military expedition.
Thus the art of Benin financed the devastation of the kingdom where it had been born and bred.
First Music
It sounded like mosquitoes in summer, but it wasn’t summer.
One night in 1964 Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson could not work in peace. On top of a ridge in the Appalachians the two astronomers were trying to capture radio waves emitted by who knows which impossibly far-off galaxy, but the buzz from their antenna made their ears hurt.
Later on they figured it out. The buzz was the echo of the explosion that gave birth to the universe. What made the antenna vibrate weren’t mosquitoes, but the very blast that began time and space and the planets and everything else. And who knows, but I’d venture to say that the echo still resounded in the air because it wanted us to hear it, since we little Earth people are also echoes of that long-ago cry of the newborn universe.
The Price of Progress
Apollo, sun of the Greeks, was the god of music.
He invented the lyre, which put flutes to shame. When he plucked its strings, he conveyed to mortals the secrets of life and death.
One day his most musical son discovered that strings of ox gut sound better than those of linen.
Alone with his lyre, Apollo tried them out. He strummed the new strings and confirmed their superiority.
Then the god treated his palate to nectar and ambrosia, picked up his war bow, took aim at his son from afar, and split the boy’s chest in half.
Flutes
Dance life away, eat life away; the city of Sibari in the south of what we now call Italy was once devoted to music and good food.
But the Sibaris wanted to be warriors. They dreamed of conquest, and Sibari ended up destroyed. Crotone, the enemy city, erased it from the map twenty-five centuries ago.
On the shores of the Gulf of Taranto the final battle was fought.
The Sibaris, trained in music, were by music defeated.
When the Sibari cavalry charged, the Crotone soldiers unsheathed their flutes. The galloping horses recognized the melody. They stopped short, reared up, and began to dance. It wasn’t the most opportune moment, given the circumstances, but the horses kept on dancing, as was their custom and pleasure, while the horsemen fled and the flutes went on trilling.
The Dance
Helena was dancing inside a music box where hoop-skirted ladies and bewigged gentlemen twirled and bowed and spun. The porcelain figurines were a bit ridiculous, but they were pretty and it was fun to pirouette with them in time to the whirling music, until Helena tripped and fell and broke.
The blow woke her up. Her left foot hurt like hell. She tried to get up and couldn’t walk. Her ankle was swollen and sore.
“I fell down in another country,” she confessed, “and in another time.”
But she didn’t say that to the doctor.
Drummings
Like dreams, drums resound in the night.
In the Americas, slave revolts were hatched by day, to the beat of the lash, and they exploded at night, to the beat of the drum.
When the French burned alive a rebel named Makandal, who had stirred up the blacks of Haiti, it was drums that announced he had turned himself into a mosquito and escaped the blaze.
The masters did not understand the language of drumbeats, but all too well they knew how demonic rhythms passed on forbidden news and summoned secret gods or even the Devil himself, who danced to the beat with bells on his ankles.
The masters never did learn that on the full moon the drum played itself, with no hands. In those moments, when the drum beat the drum, the dead arose to listen to the wonder.
The Piano
When the city of Tarija was populated by fourteen thousand nine hundred and fifty servants and fifty for them to serve, the only woman being served who didn’t own a piano was Dona Beatriz Arce de Baldiviezo.
A concerned uncle sent her a Steinway from Paris, to help her regain her color and composure, for she was green with envy and consumed by sighs.
Packed in one immense box, the piano traveled by ship, by train, and then by shoulder. It was hand-carried deep into Bolivia: forty peons bushwhacked across the sierra saddled with the weight, improvising bridges, stairs, and paths. For five months they made the atrocious trek through gorges and up and down ravines, until the gift arrived at last, without a scratch, at the home of Dona Beatriz.
It wasn’t just any old piano. The Steinway had been baptized by the hands of Franz Liszt, and was adorned with awards won in several European kingdoms.
Years passed; people passed. With time, Tarija grew and changed.
And one day Maria Nidi Baldiviezo, who had inherited the piano, left her doctor’s office diagnosed with cancer.
Of the family fortune, only the piano and nostalgia remained, so Dona Maria put the piano up for sale to pay for her trip to the hospital in Houston.
The first bid came from Japan. She turned it down. The second came from the United States, and she refused it. The third prospective buyer called from Germany, and she wouldn’t budge. It was the same with offers from Buenos Aires, La Paz, and Santa Cruz. The seller said no to the low bids, no to the high bids, and no to those in the middle.
From her sickbed, Dona Maria called together Tarija’s music lovers, theater lovers, art lovers, and other lovers and made them a proposition: “Give me whatever you have, and the Steinway is yours.”
Dona Maria died with neither trip nor treatment.
The piano had no desire to leave Tarija. There it found love, and there it remains, giving service at cultural events, patriotic ceremonies, and all the city’s public occasions.
The Harmonium
To get to Buenos Aires, Hermógenes Cayo walked thousands of miles from the distant heights of Juyjuy. He made the trip in 1946 together with other Indians fighting for their land; on impulse he stopped at Lujàn, where he’d heard there was a cathedral that would knock you over.
When he got home, he erected a Lujàn cathedral in miniature at the entrance to his stone house. He made the Gothic arches out of adobe and the stained-glass windows from bits of broken bottles, using all the colors he could find. The copy turned out identical to the original, only a bit better. Jorge Peloràn took pictures to prove it.