Learning to Lose (25 page)

Leandro went out to take a walk around the neighborhood, taking advantage of the hours of clean winter sun. He wandered haphazardly in the Mercado Maravillas, among the stalls he’s known forever but where he avoids familiarity. On the street, he caught the performance of Gypsy women selling clothing, lipsticks, scarves. Sometimes he would lose himself in the small streets and his steps would lead him to the Tuning Fork
Academy, and during class hours he would listen to some music theory or piano student playing with young, tentative fingers. For thirty-three years, he had taught classes there.

His worry over the state of his finances had kept him away from the chalet. He had gone to great lengths in taking care of Aurora, as if that task would keep him from temptation. On some afternoons, he locked himself in his room to listen to a record and fantasized that he was done with his disgraceful behavior. His son, Lorenzo, stops by the house every day and asks him if everything’s okay. Can you manage everything, Papá? Ask for help if you need it, please.

One Sunday he found his granddaughter seated at the piano and he sat beside her. He helped her determine the notes to the melody she sang softly with some English words, as if composing a song in the air.

Aurora asks him to wait outside, they’ll do tests and weird things, it’s best if you don’t come in, and she forces him to stay on the other side of a door with a sign on it warning about radioactive levels. Leandro amuses himself in the hallway, rubbing each of his fingers with the other hand, walking up and down to avoid going back into the waiting room filled with chance conversations.

Where did it happen, when, Leandro doesn’t understand how the wall rose up between them, that protective area where they don’t get involved in the other’s suffering, in what the other is feeling. Aurora, so open, alive, sincere, always available, happy, enthusiastic, but reserved when it came to anything that could affect him, inconvenience him. She had respected his space, his silence, his lack of implication, and she had done her best to keep anything from disturbing it. Now Leandro is ashamed of having a relationship like that. His wife isn’t going to share her
fear and pain with him and it may be that she needs to, but she’ll keep it inside, she’ll act strong and self-sufficient, because that is what she learned to do at his side.

Perhaps they’d established that way of being right when they met. Leandro was twenty-three years old and visiting an office in the former Ministry of Education headquarters to try to get financial help in postponing his studies so he could travel to Paris. He went from window to window, with a written recommendation he showed to anyone willing to read it. Aurora was hammering away at a typewriter, and she was the one who noticed him and offered to help, even though she was just a temporary secretary. Maybe Leandro already sensed he was ill-equipped to face those challenges, that he needed someone to resolve the domestic catastrophes, the smallest fears. Aurora took an interest in his case when Leandro, sitting on a wooden bench, rubbing his frozen hands together, was only expecting to get a final no to his request. He told her he was looking for a scholarship for a school in Paris and she asked him about his field of study. He said classical piano. And Aurora’s eyes, on that day so many years ago, opened enormously wide, and it seemed as if Leandro held the only key capable of opening them that way.

Classical piano.

Leandro always thought it had been those two words that had opened up Aurora’s heart. He said them with smug intention. Madrid, 1953, classical piano. It was like talking about life on other planets. Aurora read the recommendation written by some luminary and asked him to wait a moment. She disappeared down a back hallway and was gone quite a while. So long that when she came back, Leandro responded to her smile with, are you sure I’m not wasting a lot of your time? But Aurora shook her head. I hate my job, any interruption is a stroke of luck.

In spite of Aurora’s good intentions, Leandro only got a few kind words and promises that never materialized. On the street, that first day, he took his leave of Aurora with a proper squeeze of her hands, and he headed off, raising the lapels of his coat. He didn’t look back to see her in the dark doorway. He didn’t want to force himself to be nice or thank her for her effort. That was how he presented himself as a romantic candidate, laden with silences, an aura of mystery, and a very hidden warmth. When he walked away from those offices on Calle Trafalgar, he knew he would see her again, that he would go looking for her behind that window to offer her the nothing he had to offer, the little he had to say. I don’t think I thanked you enough for all you did for me, he went to tell her two days later. Then she blushed like a schoolgirl.

They strolled that afternoon along the downtown sidewalks. Leandro faded out his on-again, off-again passion for a ballerina he had met at the ballet auditions where he worked as a pianist for hire. Aurora dashed all the hopes of a young colleague of her father’s, whom her father had insisted on inviting over to eat at the house so he could moon at her over his soup with his solicitous husband eyes. After six months of reading
Primer Plano
to choose what movie to see, of avoiding puddles on the street or the stench of bums on the sidewalk, of listening to the radio together, Aurora handed over her savings and told him, go to Paris and give it a shot. At that point they knew they were in love, but their financial future was not at all secure. Joaquín’s letters to Leandro promised him a shared destiny.

After the war, Joaquín’s father reappeared like the living dead, but victorious and heroic. Nothing like those who came back from the front or the internment camps like languid shadows. Rumormongers said he had been leading a double life
romantically and was now purging his sins by becoming a devoted father who dragged everyone in his path to daily Mass. He magnanimously helped the less fortunate in the neighborhood and from the first day he insisted that Leandro share piano classes with his son Joaquín.

Three afternoons a week, an old professor, who had lost his post at the conservatory for socialist sympathies, came over. Too old to be sent to the firing squad, too stubborn to change ideas now, was how he had described himself once in a very rare glint of intimacy with his students. Don Alonso tried to discipline the two boys in front of the piano. They learned as much from their lessons as from his taciturn sadness, the bitter gratitude with which he received his payment from Joaquín’s father at the end of class, the careful way he put away the worn scores in his leather satchel that was coming unstitched. Leandro always thought of Don Alonso, and his exercises for the left hand, affectionately. He remembered one afternoon when the professor told them about music schools in Russia, about the discipline of their conservatories, the natural selection of talent from the entire country, and he spoke in such a quiet, guilty voice that it was as if he were telling them about an orgy in forbidden brothels. He also remembered the silences, deep as wells. Even though Leandro and Joaquín, at eleven and twelve years old, were devoted almost exclusively to life’s joys, they still noticed their professor’s downbeaten integrity.

That parallel life with Joaquín, seated in front of the piano, had perhaps given Leandro false expectations. Their families were quite different, their economic realities even more so. As Joaquín started to squander money on entertainment, Leandro was working to help his widowed mother. And the thousands of hours
shared on the street and later in the cafés, all the conversations and the confidences, would be left behind when Joaquín went to Paris.

From Paris, Leandro wrote two long letters to Aurora. They were few compared to what she was expecting, but they were very expressive in their bitterness. Leandro didn’t earn a spot at the conservatory, nor did he manage to establish himself in the city. Joaquín had a celebrated teacher, an Austrian émigré who spoke leaden French, for whom Leandro auditioned. He had the courage to take on Mozart’s
Jeunehomme
piano concerto and she asked him why he was playing that piece. Leandro answered the same thing he still thinks today, that it is perhaps the most beautiful piece ever composed for piano. The woman’s declaration at the end of his audition was devastating. We didn’t choose this profession to make beautiful things sound conventional. Leandro went back to Madrid after three months. His mother’s health had worsened and he missed Aurora. Joaquín told him something that even then sounded like a compassionate lie, you can achieve the same thing in Madrid as I can here.

Aurora and Leandro began an official courtship, happy and intimate, isolated from the world and its limitations. They were waiting for Leandro to finish school before marrying and living together. He could string together two or three jobs and get a salary that would allow them to pay the rent comfortably. She kept her secretarial job until she got pregnant. When Leandro’s mother died, they sold her apartment and bought another one in the Plaza Condesa de Gavia. By then Aurora had already grown accustomed to Leandro’s reserve. It was enough for Aurora to know that he felt much more for her than he was ever able to express. Then she was fueled by her baby’s energy, by the newborn’s vitality.

By then Joaquín was flying solo. He had an agent and had moved to Vienna for some master classes and to assist Bruno Seidlhofer and give his first performances. His letters were increasingly shorter and more infrequent. There he spent time with pianists such as Friedrich Gulda, Alfred Brendel, Ingrid Haebler, Walter Klien, Jörg Demus, Paul Badura-Skoda. Yesterday I saw Glenn Gould play, he wrote to Leandro, in a concert where he destroyed Bach, as usual. Or he went to the Staatsoper to see Clemens Krauss or Furtwängler conduct and to see pianists like Fischer and Alfred Cortot, who they had listened to countless times on a recording from the 1930s of the twenty-four Chopin preludes that Don Alonso had taught them to revere. Shortly after, Joaquín would sign a contract with the Westminster record label and Leandro would become an old childhood friend in a Madrid he visited as little as possible, especially after his public declarations against the regime became frequent and well-known in his adopted Paris.

Returning home that morning, Leandro just led the attendants up the stairs as they carried her. On each of the steps that he had traveled over thousands of times, he sees the shadow of what they once were and thinks that Aurora’s legs will never again walk up to their apartment, loaded down with a child in her arms or shopping bags. Leandro helps her get undressed and comfortable in bed. A little later, he will place a tray of food on her lap and settle into the nearby armchair. They will listen to the radio news of the day. Aurora will not share the details the doctor gave her with him. Neither will Leandro confess his pressing need to leave, to go back to the chalet where Osembe works. After two weeks of abstinence, he will see her again that evening.

Around noon on Saturday, Lorenzo is setting the table for the midday meal. Sylvia is surprised. It’s early. Are you going to the stadium? No, but I have plans, he answers cryptically. She cooks some pasta and two steaks and they eat in front of some celebrity gossip show and the start of the news. Sylvia tells him that she is going to spend the afternoon at her grandmother’s house.

Have you talked to your mother lately? Sylvia nods. Do you have exams soon? In two weeks. Are you studying? I do what I can.

Two hours later, Lorenzo waits for Daniela in front of her door. When he sees her, he notices she’s got makeup on, a bit of violet eye shadow and lip liner. She’s wearing tight elastic pants and a fuchsia T-shirt beneath a jean jacket. Her damp hair falls over her back. A large canvas bag hangs from her shoulder. You look very pretty.

One Monday Lorenzo had waited for that uncertain hour of the morning when everyone is occupied with chores and the unemployed stand out with their slow gait along the sidewalks and their overly persistent gazes into shop windows. He went up the stairs to the floor above and rang the bell. Daniela opened the door. Behind her you could hear the television and the boy’s gurgling in front of cartoons. Once again she wore that challenging expression, somewhat put out, but pleasant. She stepped forward across the doorway, as if that ensured she was not committing any wrongdoing in their home.

Pardon the intrusion, but I think I have something for your friend. Wilson? Lorenzo nodded. Tell him to call me. It’s a little job he might be interested in. I’ll tell him, thanks.

The conversation ended quickly, but she remained there, with the trace of a half smile. Lorenzo took the plunge. And one other thing, would you like to go to El Escorial this Saturday? I’d love to take you, remember I promised you I would? I don’t know, this Saturday … Daniela lets her thoughts drift. You don’t have to … You can bring your friend, if you want. I don’t know if she’ll be able to. Ask her, I’d love to. Okay, I’ll let you know.

Lorenzo apologized again for having come up and then disappeared down the stairs. Half an hour later, his cell phone rang. It was Wilson. He hadn’t gotten more than sporadic construction jobs, nothing regular, every morning he waited early in a plaza in Usera for the vans that picked up daily workers. I get in line there, I stick out my chest to show off my muscles, and lower my face to hide my crazy eye. Lorenzo explained that that afternoon he was going to start emptying out a house and the money would depend on how long it took them to do it.

The job opportunity came up during a dinner with friends at Óscar’s house. Lalo had mentioned an apartment that the real estate agency he worked for had just bought. It belonged to one of those old men who obsessively hoarded trash, upsetting his neighbors. Why do they do that? someone asked. I remember an old lady in my neighborhood who lived with a million cats, she was like that, too. Diogenes syndrome, said Ana. It’s a psychological disorder called Diogenes syndrome. It’s becoming more and more common. Óscar said that it must be some kind of social rejection, something you did when you hated your environment. Craziness. Fear of the void, said Ana, they’re all old people who live alone. Well, we have to empty it out this week, and you can’t imagine how creeped out we are about what we
might find there, there must be at least six tons of garbage, said Lalo. I’ll take care of it, said Lorenzo, to everyone’s surprise.