Hopscotch: A Novel (Pantheon Modern Writers Series) (15 page)

“Shit,” Oliveira thought. “What a fucking program.”

Somehow a double-chinned, white-haired gentleman appeared in back of the piano. He was dressed in black and his pink hand fingered a chain that hung across his fancy vest. Oliveira thought he noticed grease spots on the vest. A young lady in a purple raincoat and gold-rimmed glasses started to applaud in a flat tone. With a croaking voice that had an extraordinary resemblance to that of a macaw, the double-chinned old man introduced the concert by explaining that Rose Bob was a former pupil of Madame Berthe Trépat and that the
Pavan
by Alix Alix had been written by a distinguished army officer who concealed himself behind that modest pseudonym, and that both pieces were written in the most rigorous observation of the most modern form of musical composition. As for the
Délibes-Saint-Saëns Synthesis
(and here the old man rolled his eyes on high), it represented for contemporary music one of the most profound innovations to which the composer, Madame Trépat, had given the name “prophetic syncretism.” The term was quite precise, since the musical genius of Délibes and Saint-Saëns tended towards osmosis, towards interfusion and the inter-phonic approach which had become paralyzed by the excessively
individualistic interpretation of Western music and thus prevented from surging forth into a higher and more synthetic creation which had been awaiting the genius and intuition of Madame Trépat. In fact, her sensitivity had discovered affinities which most listeners had missed and she had undertaken the noble but arduous task of being the mediumistic bridge by which the meeting of these two noble sons of France was to be consummated. It was pre-eminently the moment to remind everyone that in addition to her activities as a music teacher, Madame Berthe Trépat would soon be celebrating her twenty-fifth anniversary as a composer. The speaker would not take it upon himself in a simple introduction to a concert, much as he would like to, to go on at deserving length with an analysis of Madame Trépat’s musical accomplishments, because the audience was growing impatient. In any case, and so that he could give the key to those who would be hearing for the first time the works of Rose Bob and Madame Trépat, he would sum up their art by mentioning antistructural constructions, that is to say, autonomous cells of sound, the result of pure inspiration, held together by the general intent of the work but completely free of classical molds, dodecaphonic or atonal (he stressed the last two words). Thus, for example, the
Three Discontinuous Movements
by Rose Bob, one of Madame Trépat’s favorite students, had their start in the reaction aroused in the spirit of the composer by the sound of a door being slammed shut, and the thirty-two chords which made up the first movement were the resulting repercussions of that sound on the aesthetic plane; the speaker did not think that he would be violating a confidence if he told his cultured audience that the technique employed in the composition of the
Saint-Saëns Synthesis
was based on the most primitive and esoteric forces of creation. He would never forget the rare privilege he had had of being present at one phase of the synthesis as Madame Trépat held a dowsing pendulum over the scores of the two masters in order to choose those passages whose influence upon the pendulum corroborated the astounding intuitions of Madame Trépat. And although he could say much more, the speaker felt that he should retire after saluting in Madame Berthe Trépat one of the beacons of French genius and a pathetic example of how the general public lives in ignorance of misunderstood genius.

His jowls were shaking and the old man, seized by a fit of
coughing and emotion, withdrew behind the curtains. Forty hands gave out with a dry applause and several matches lost their heads. Oliveira slouched in his seat as far as possible and felt better. The old man in the accident must have been feeling better too in his hospital bed, sunk in the sleepiness which follows shock, that happy interregnum in which one abdicates self-government and the bed becomes a ship, with paid vacations, any break at all with daily routine. “I’m almost capable of going to visit him one of these days,” Oliveira said to himself. “But at best I would just spoil his desert island and become the footprint in the sand. God, but you’re getting sentimental.”

The applause made him open his eyes and observe the hard work Madame Berthe Trépat was putting into her bow of thanks. Before he even had taken a good look at her face, her shoes had stopped him in his tracks, men’s shoes, incapable of disguise by any skirt. Square and heelless, with useless feminine ribbons. What followed up from them was both stiff and broad, a fat-lady stuck into a merciless corset. But Berthe Trépat was not really fat; the best you could say was that she was robust. She must have had sciatica or lumbago, something which made her move all at once, frontally now, waving with effort, and then from the side, outlined between the stool and the piano and folding herself geometrically until seated. From that position the artist turned her head around brusquely and bowed again, although the applause had stopped. “Somebody up above must be pulling strings,” Oliveira thought. He liked marionettes and puppets, and he was expecting miracles of prophetic syncretism. Berthe Trépat looked at the audience once more, all the sins of the moon suddenly seemed concentrated in her face that appeared to be covered with flour, and her cherry-red mouth opened up to assume the shape of an Egyptian barge. Profile once again, her little parrot-beak nose pointed for a moment at the keyboard while her hands perched on the keys from C to B like two dried-up chamois bags. The thirty-two chords of the first discontinuous movement began to sound. There were five seconds between the first and the second, fifteen between the second and third. On arriving at the fifteenth chord, Rose Bob had decided on a pause of twenty-five seconds. Oliveira, who at first had appreciated the good Weberian use of silence that Rose Bob was utilizing in her pauses, noticed that overuse was rapidly dissipating the effect. Between chords 7 and
8 there was coughing, between 12 and 13 somebody struck a match noisily, between 14 and 15 he clearly heard the expression
“Ah, merde alors!”
contributed by a young blond girl. Around the twentieth chord one of the more ancient ladies, a real virginal pickle, gripped her umbrella and opened her mouth to say something that was mercifully swallowed up by the twenty-first chord. Amused, Oliveira looked at Berthe Trépat, suspecting that the pianist was studying them all with what is called the corner of her eye. Out of that corner of the hooknosed profile of Berthe Trépat a celestial gray glance seemed to come, and it occurred to Oliveira that probably the poor woman was counting the house. At chord 23 a man with a neat, round bald spot got up indignantly and after snorting and huffing left the hall, digging in his heels during the eight-second silence ordained by Rose Bob. After chord 24 the pauses began to get smaller, and between 28 and 32 there was a rhythm like that of a dirge which could not help but have some effect. Berthe Trépat took her shoes off the pedals, put her left hand in her lap, and started on the second movement. This movement lasted for only four measures, each of three notes of equal value. The third movement consisted mainly in coming from the extreme registers of the keyboard and in approaching the middle chromatically, repeating the operation back out again, all in the midst of triplets and other adornments. At a given moment, which no one could foresee, the pianist stopped playing and stood up quickly, bowing with an air which seemed to bespeak a challenge, but in which Oliveira seemed to discern a note of insecurity or even fear. One couple applauded madly; Oliveira found himself applauding in turn and not knowing why (and when he found out why he got angry and stopped applauding). Berthe Trépat went back to her profile almost at once and ran her finger over the keyboard while she waited for them to quiet down. She began to play the
Pavan for General Leclerc.

In the two or three minutes that followed, Oliveira had some trouble in dividing his attention between the extraordinary stew that Berthe Trépat was boiling up at full steam and the furtive or forthright way in which young and old were leaving the concert. A mixture of Liszt and Rachmaninoff, the
Pavan
was the tiresome repetition of two or three themes which then got lost in innumerable variations, bits of bravura (rather poorly played, with holes and stitching everywhere) and the solemnities
of a catafalque upon a caisson, broken by sudden fireworks which seemed to delight the mysterious Alix Alix. Once or twice Oliveira was worried that the towering Salammbô hairdo of Berthe Trépat would suddenly collapse, but who knows how many hairpins were reinforcing it, amidst the rumble and tumble of the
Pavan.
The orgiastic arpeggios which announced the end came on, and three themes were successively repeated (one of which had been lifted bodily from Strauss’s
Don Juan
), and Berthe Trépat let the chords rain down with growing intensity, modified by the hysterical repetition of the first theme and two chords composed of the gravest notes, the last of which came out markedly false for the right hand, but it was something that could happen to anyone and Oliveira applauded warmly; he had really enjoyed it.

The artist turned around to face the audience with one of her rare springlike motions and bowed. Since she seemed to be counting the house with her eyes, she could not have failed to calculate that there were no more than eight or nine people left. With dignity Berthe Trépat went off stage left, and the usher drew the curtain and sold candy to the audience.

On the one hand he wanted to leave, but all during the concert there had been an atmosphere which had fascinated Oliveira. After all, poor Madame Trépat had been trying to present works in première, which in itself was a great thing in this world of the polonaise, the clair de lune, and the ritual fire dance. There was something moving about that face of a burlap-stuffed doll, of a plush turtle, of an immense nitwit stuck in a rancid world of chipped teapots, old women who had heard Risler play, art and poetry lectures in halls covered with old wallpaper, of budgets of forty thousand francs a month and furtive touches on friends to get through the month, the cult of au-then-tic Akademia Raymond Duncan art, and it was easy to imagine what Alix Alix and Rose Bob looked like, the base calculations before renting the hall, the mimeographed program done by some well-meaning pupil, the fruitless lists of people to invite, the empty feeling backstage when they saw the empty hall and still had to go on, gold medal and all, she still has to go on. It was almost a chapter out of Céline and Oliveira felt himself incapable of thinking beyond the general atmosphere, beyond the useless and defeatist survival of such artistic activities among groups of people equally defeated and useless. “Of
course it had to be my fate, getting stuck inside this moth-eaten fan,” Oliveira raged to himself. “An old man underneath a car, and now Madame Trépat. And let’s not think about the lousy weather outside or about myself. Above all, let’s not talk about myself.”

Four people were left in the hall, and he thought it best to go sit in the first row to accompany the pianist a little better. He was amused by this bit of solidarity, but as soon as he was seated down front he lit a cigarette. For some reason a woman decided to leave at the exact moment in which Berthe Trépat had come back on stage, and she took a strong look at her before she drew herself up to make a bow to the empty hall. Oliveira thought that the woman who had left deserved a hard kick in the ass. He suddenly realized that all of his reactions came from a certain sympathy for Berthe Trépat, in spite of the
Pavan
and Rose Bob. “It’s been a long time since something like this has happened to me,” he thought. “I wonder if I’m getting soft with age.” So many metaphysical rivers and suddenly he wants to go visit the old man in the hospital, or he is surprised to find himself applauding this madwoman in a corset. Strange. It must be the cold, his wet shoes.

The
Délibes-Saint-Saëns Synthesis
must have been going on for three minutes or so when the couple who had been the mainstay of the audience that remained got up and ostentatiously left. Again Oliveira thought he could make out a side-glance from Berthe Trépat, but now it was as if her hands had gone stiff, she bent over the piano and with tremendous effort, taking advantage of every pause to glance out of the corner of her eye at the seats where Oliveira and a peaceful-looking man were listening with what seemed to be the signs of rapt attention. The prophetic syncretism was not long in revealing its secret, even for a layman like Oliveira: three measures of
Le Rouet d’Omphale
were followed by four more from
Les Filles de Cadix
, then her left hand offered
“Mon coeur s’ouvre à ta voix,”
while the right one spasmodically interspersed the theme of the bells from
Lakmé
, together they passed successively into the
Danse Macabre
and
Coppélia
, until other themes which the program attributed to the
Hymne à Victor Hugo, Jean de Nivelle
, and
Sur les bords du Nil
alternated showily with the better-known ones, and as far as prophetic was concerned, nothing could have been more successful, as was shown by the
soft laughter of the peaceful-looking man while as a person of good breeding he covered his mouth with his glove, and Oliveira had to admit the guy was right, that he shouldn’t be asked to be quiet, and Berthe Trépat must have felt the same because she kept making more and more mistakes, it seemed as if her hands had become paralyzed, she kept leaning forward shaking her forearms and raising her elbows like a hen settling into her nest.
“Mon coeur s’ouvre à ta voix,” “Où va la jeune hindoue?”
again, two syncretic chords, a stray arpeggio,
Les Filles de Cadix, tra-la-la-la
, like a hiccup, several notes together (surprisingly) in the manner of Pierre Boulez, and the peaceful-looking man let out a sort of bellow and ran out holding his gloves up to his mouth, just as Berthe Trépat lowered her hands and looked fixedly at the keyboard, and a long second passed, an interminable second, something desperately empty between Oliveira and Berthe Trépat alone in the hall.