No World Concerto (8 page)

Still lying in bed, the screenwriter realizes he’s commenced the same ritual as always: remaining in bed a long time, staring up at the ceiling, and listening to the sounds from the street below. He slept very little, and he suspects the girl is still floating around somewhere in his unconscious. He only vaguely recollects what he’s written. He gets out of bed to freshen up, has a look at himself in the bathroom mirror, takes a deep breath, and makes his way down to the canteen. The elevator takes its time arriving. He gets the feeling he may be better off taking the stairs. He’d do it if it wasn’t for his damned limp. He grips his cane impatiently and knocks it against the floor a couple of times, the strokes, muted by the carpet, rendering the act meaningless. He doesn’t like the muffled thud, he says to himself, because it probably unleashed a cloud of dust mites that are now colonizing his socks and the hem of his pants. He passes some time in the lobby reading the newspaper. He reads something about a country too far away for him to care about, peruses the personal ads, and encounters an article about the queen of porn that says she’s buried in one of the local cemeteries. He remembers there are many cinematic luminaries buried there: actors, actresses, directors, and of course people from other professions who neither matter nor warrant a visit. He went there once with a friend. He remembers her clearly: a woman with whom he was romantically involved some forty years before, and with whom he corresponded for quite some time. He reckons it’s been a decade since he last heard from her. He doesn’t recall the reason they went to the cemetery; he doesn’t recall when they started writing to each other, or why their correspondence came to an end. There’s a notice about the Little Sinfonietta’s concert in the events section. The screenwriter hurriedly finishes his breakfast and heads out. A cemetery’s quite a cinematic location. Maybe he’ll be able to set some of his scenes there. On the way, he considers some of the possibilities for the location, but he struggles to focus, and his ideas seem to dissipate before assuming any definite shape. Near the entrance, a map points to the sites of celebrity graves. He makes a rough sketch of it in his notebook, marking the ones he plans to visit. The tomb of the inventor of the cinematic spectacle is nearby: although he doesn’t consider him the most alluring figure, the screenwriter decides to pay him a visit nonetheless. He struggles up the hill with his limp, and then has a hard time finding the grave among so many anonymous ones in a sort of narrow embankment. The history of film is short, he thinks. The inventor of the cinematic spectacle died fifty-six years earlier, and his tomb is in a terrible state, not unlike all the others around it, facing the wall that separates the cemetery grounds from the street and the apartments on the other side. It seems sad and pitiful. He then wonders about people like himself, the kind who won’t go down in history, who’ll rest in unvisited tombs. He strikes his cane forcefully against the ground while making his way back to the main footpath. He’s lost the strength that got him here, replaced it with sadness, and although he continues walking, he does so without a destination in mind, and soon begins to flag. Some small pebbles and rocks have been placed haphazardly, or so it seems, atop some of the gravestones. There are people leaving postcards or small scraps of paper with messages for the dead. A few are ambling casually among the graves, some may be family members, others tourists, and there’s no telling about the rest. A woman reads while sitting on the tomb of a great writer. The screenwriter supposes it’s one of that writer’s great works, although he’s too shy to approach her and corroborate his suspicion. He’s tired from hobbling along under the hot sun, so he sits down in the shade beside a marble headstone and wipes his forehead with a handkerchief. This part of the cemetery is more modern. He reads on the tombstones the names and dates of some of the deceased. He could use them to conceive some fascinating stories: a young man dead at twenty-five, and then only a year later, the death, at forty-eight, of what appears to be his mother. It really makes you think.

After writing in the afternoon, the screenwriter rested a couple of hours. Then he took a shower, and awaited her arrival. He’s had too much to drink, and his throat is raw from all the smoking. He’s still stoned, and he can’t help but keep staring out the window on the empty street below. It’s almost dawn, and he suspects the girl is going to stand him up. He raises his eyes to look for his neighbor in the building across the street. It might be too late for her, or perhaps too early. Either way, she’s probably asleep. Her window is black, empty. Maybe black actually signifies the opposite of empty. No matter. He scans the front of the building, then the shop windows on the lower floors: the real-estate agency on the corner, the bakery, the shop selling women’s lingerie, and the shoe and handbag store that’s closed for the August vacation. It doesn’t matter, the girl isn’t coming. The screenwriter assumes her mother returned from her trip. She wouldn’t have missed the concert for anything in the world, especially after the poor performance the girl gave in her native city. Then she calls him. The concert went perfectly, she tells him on the phone, as if she were a journalist submitting a last-minute review. Before the performance, she paid tribute to the famous composer of dodecaphonic music, describing him as a teacher, an arranger of operettas, and a conductor of cabaret orchestras. His actual compositions took a backseat, and she gave them brief mention in her peroration, alluding mostly to his theory of harmony and his role as inventor of the twelve-tone method of composition. The girl has a curious fondness for odd composers, the screenwriter thinks to himself, forgetting momentarily that he’s the one responsible for her predilections. It seems she only cares about extremes, and the possibility of encroaching on them, surpassing them, of transgressing the norm. Immediately following her introduction, she began the concert with the famous composer’s
5 Pieces for piano
, a difficult work, both for the performer to execute and the auditor to appreciate, although the girl knew they’d applaud anyway, for the audience came mainly to catch sight of a celebrity, not to admire her pianissimo or to listen to her rendition of what most of them would’ve thought a baffling composition. The screenwriter listens in silence, transcribing her words as fast as he can. The scene will be hazy, subjective, quite involved, and he wants to be sure it accurately reflects the reality. He makes use of the program notes for ideas on how it might be filmed. Simple ideas, really, some shots of the girl seated at the piano, alone or with the orchestra, and then some others of her transformed into a clown. Vocals aren’t her strong point, but she has the desired effect when playing the role of the cosmic clown. All she needs is a red nose, the kind that’s held in place with a rubber band, a red speckle to contrast with her black and white tuxedo, and a nasal voice that sounds like a transmission from another galaxy, a voice reciting verses about a clown who wanders in the moonlight with a shiv in his hand. At this moment, the screenwriter listens to the very same piece from a CD, ensconced in his hotel room, sitting at his desk scribbling notes for scenes. The images he records are seen first by the girl, refracted first through the lenses of her eyes. Before leaving the presbytery, which was transformed for the Little Sinfonietta into a concert venue, the young orchestra conductor, the brilliant composer, and the girl wave to the audience with a practiced air of humility. The girl then removes the red nose from her pocket and tosses it to the crowd, whose applause continues unabated. They cheer as if for a pop star, and it suddenly dawns on her that now she’ll have to repeat the same stunt every night, because she saw how their eyes gleamed when the photographers flashed in unison. Afterward, her mother shows up in the sacristy, a starlet’s makeshift dressing room, and drives her away to attend a celebratory dinner with the concert organizers.

It’s late the next time he speaks to her. The girl calls him from the ladies’ room of a fashionable nightspot where the group’s ended up. She’s had a confrontation with the young conductor of the orchestra who was unhappy with her performance. The dispute then evolved into a jealous altercation, and the young conductor left with another girl. The screenwriter wants to know if she was beautiful. Very, she replies. The applause and admiration she receives from the public doesn’t tally with the young conductor’s animadversions. Moreover, the brilliant composer also takes issue with her interpretation of his
No World Symphony
. She says they’re only jealous, and then she starts crying. Does she know the address, or at least the name of the place she’s at? He could grab a taxi and come get her, come rescue her, he says. They could even make love right there in the ladies’ room, if she wants, or in some secluded part of the building. But first he needs to know where she is. She stammers something through her sobs. She feels like a fool. Not an uncommon feeling for her. He tells her to leave the restroom and ask someone for the address. She promises to call him back. The screenwriter waits by the phone, drinking, lighting his next cigarette with the previous one, finishes that, lights another in the same manner, empties his glass, fills it again, thinks how long it’s been, a minute, an hour perhaps, he can’t tell exactly. He doesn’t think she’ll call. He doubts he’ll be able get a taxi in his state. At last, the phone rings. Although muffled, he can hear the dance music blaring in the background. He wants to ask her where she is but struggles to articulate the question. The girl’s voice is beginning to falter. She says she’s in one of the rooms at the fashionable nightspot, a storeroom or office, she’s not sure, and someone’s there with her, a stranger. The screenwriter listens, hears her heavy breathing, her moaning, the occasional groans of the guy she’s screwing. He doesn’t dare say anything, ask anything, but only listens. He doubts she’d be able to respond to him anyway. They start screaming so loudly he can hear them when he holds the phone away from his ear. Afterward, he listens as the girl begins to argue with the guy; it only last a few seconds, but it seems to go on forever. Then someone slams a door. The screenwriter whispers her name, waits, whispers it again, then again. Then he yells her name. He doesn’t know what else to do. Suddenly, at long last, the girl responds. He hit me, she says, and hangs up the phone.

It’s a cool morning. According to the TV, the temperature has dropped to seventeen degrees Celsius. The screenwriter takes a look out the window. He didn’t sleep well, and the girl’s words are still ringing in his ears, the voice on the other end of the phone that said he hit me, and then nothing, silence. He turns the TV off. He hit me, the screenwriter says, unconsciously mouthing the words in front of the bathroom mirror as he washes up. He runs his fingers proudly through his hair, still thick after all these years. His mouth is dry. He fills a glass from the cold tap and drinks the water slowly, examining the saggy bags under his eyes. He decides to head for the café in the plaza, limping as always, repeating her words to himself, mouthing them unconsciously, even up to the point the waitress sets down his double espresso and a small cruet of milk on the table. He wishes it had been him who violated her instead of some stranger. Maybe it was one of the other teenagers, or one of the patrons of the Scholastic Institute. He notices he has an erection. Then he asks himself what sort of life he expected to lead in the neighboring country’s capital: to be locked away with her in a hotel room perhaps, or a garret, old and derelict, where he could embark on a new adventure with her. No, that wasn’t it. The scene of her being slapped in the storeroom or office of a fashionable bar is worth exploiting. At a table in a corner of the café, a young guy is working on his laptop. He’s surrounded by a mountain of paper. For a moment, the screenwriter thinks he’s a writer, perhaps a screenwriter like himself, but instead of notebooks and index cards, he sees what appear to be invoices and packing slips, so he looks away dismissively. The screenwriter still uses a portable typewriter — no longer state-of-the-art, as in its day — and a notebook he carries with him everywhere. He’s too old to learn how to use a computer. Some accordion music is playing softly over the café’s speakers. He uses little details like this to focus his thoughts when he finds it difficult to concentrate, a scatterbrain centering itself on something trivial. He needs to write the scene, but feels chagrined at his inability to do so. The girl’s like that, he says to himself, surprised at her capacity to navigate between extremes of sluggish inactivity when feeling uninspired, and of rebellious excitability during a fit of passion. He doesn’t know why she behaves like this, and he believes discovering the answer will tax the very limits — as he’d put it — of his comprehension. He writes half a dozen lines that help him forget about it, and having written something at last, his conscience eases, so he decides to go to the park he visited on his first day in town. On his way there, he indulges in an erotic daydream, and eventually decides to go into a lingerie store to buy a pair of sexy panties. Afterward, he continues his fantasizing en route to the park, imagining the girl wearing the panties he bought, masturbating in them, writhing, her body twisting into the kinds of positions only a contortionist could manage. He imagines himself watching her through a peephole. Once again he develops an erection, so he decides to sit down on a bench and allow some time to pass, his mind to wander, and his excitement to abate. In the park, he pays close attention to everything going on around him, since a few of his scenes are likely to take place there. Next to the wrought-iron fence separating the park from the avenue, there’s a jogging path on which some young athletes are running, or maybe they’re only amateurs decked out to look like accomplished athletes. Years before, when he was young, and regularly visited the neighboring country’s capital, nobody jogged in the park. Perhaps the jogging path didn’t even exist back then, he thinks. In fact, back in his day, nobody jogged at all, unless they were training to be athletes. On the top floor of the hotel with the English name, somewhat recovered from the previous night, the girl is running on a treadmill. She looks out through the windows at the city, at the river dividing it in two, at the approaching clouds above, and the diminutive creatures below who listen to her music and read about her in magazines. Sometimes, the young conductor or brilliant composer exercise along with her; occasionally, they all go running together in the woods nearby. The screenwriter doesn’t really care who goes jogging where; he only thinks about what actors and actresses could play these roles. The girl ought to play herself, of course. No one could do it better. No one her age could perform those piano pieces the way she does, or even simulate her performances, her body language, her poise, the way she deliberates at every note before striking, the way she accents every note on striking, the way her hands engage and then withdraw from the keyboard. No one could recreate the voice she uses when reciting those poems in the guise of the cosmic clown. All of this runs through his mind as he ambles to the pond and takes a seat on one of the benches next to it. Perhaps he’s writing a musical and doesn’t know it yet. Half a dozen sailboats scud from one side to the other through the water, their captains steering them with long sticks from the pond’s edge. A few ducks are soliciting food from some other park visitors. A guy who must be around thirty is mingling with some of the children, launching and recovering his own sailboat. The screenwriter believes this to be unacceptable behavior. People shouldn’t be allowed on the pond with a sailboat once they pass a certain age, he thinks, although what really bothers him is that the man seems completely at ease, tripping nonchalantly around the pond, barefoot, while playing with his toy. There are tourists everywhere, some stop to watch the sailboats, sitting on the grass or lying in the sun, a few eventually moving off to explore the rest of the park. The screenwriter jots down a few notes before growing weary of the heat. He looks out on the water, the children, the sailboats, and at the guy he thinks should act his age. He puts his notebook in his jacket pocket and gets up to accost him. Do you know how many infectious diseases you could catch? he says to the guy, signaling at his bare feet with a flourish of his cane, inadvertently striking one of his toes. Slightly hurt and taken aback, the guy answers the screenwriter with a disconcerted look. You should be more careful, the screenwriter says contemptuously while turning away. The guy mutters something unintelligible behind his back before returning to the pond’s edge, tripping nonchalantly around it, barefoot, and playing with his little toy.