Authors: Julio Cortazar
I found the marquesa with Marcel Gavoty and Art Boucaya, and they happened just at that moment to be talking about the sides Johnny had recorded the previous afternoon. They fell all over me as if I were the archangel himself arriving, the marquesa necked with me until it was beginning to get tedious, and the boys applauded the performance, bassist and baritone sax. I had to take refuge behind an easy-chair and stand them off as best I could, all because they’d learned that I’d provided the magnificent sax with which Johnny had cut four or five of the best. The marquesa said immediately that Johnny was a dirty rat, and how they’d had a fight (she didn’t say over what) and that the dirty rat knew very well that all he had to do was beg her pardon properly and there would have been a check immediately to buy a new horn. Naturally Johnny hadn’t wanted to beg her pardon since his return to Paris—the fight appears to have taken place in London, two months back—and so nobody’d known that he lost his goddamned horn in the metro, etcetera. When the marquesa started yakking you wondered if Dizzy’s style hadn’t glued up her diction, it was such an interminable series of variations in the most unexpected registers, until the end when the marquesa slapped her thighs mightily, opened her mouth wide and began to laugh as if someone were tickling her to death. Then Art Boucaya took advantage of
the break to give me details of the session the day before, which I’d missed on account of my wife having pneumonia.
“Tica can tell you,” Art said, pointing to the marquesa who was still squirming about with laughter. “Bruno, you can’t imagine what it was like until you hear the discs. If God was anywhere yesterday, I think it was in that damned recording studio where it was as hot as ten thousand devils, by the way. You remember
Willow Tree
, Marcel?”
“Sure, I remember,” Marcel said. “The fuck’s asking me if I remember. I’m tattooed from head to foot with
Willow Tree
.”
Tica brought us highballs and we got ourselves comfortable to chat. Actually we talked very little about the recording session, because any musician knows you can’t talk about things like that, but what little they did say restored my hope and I thought maybe my horn would bring Johnny some good luck. Anyway, there was no lack of anecdotes which stomped that hope a bit, for example, Johnny had taken his shoes off between one cutting and the next and walked around the studio barefoot. On the other hand, he’d made up with the marquesa and promised to come to her place to have a drink before the concert tonight.
“Do you know the girl Johnny has now?” Tica wanted to know. I gave the most succinct possible description of the French girl, but Marcel filled it in with all sorts of nuances and allusions which amused the marquesa very much. There was not the slightest reference to drugs, though I’m so up tight that it seemed to me I could smell pot in Tica’s studio, besides which Tica laughed in a way I’ve noted in Johnny at times, and in Art, which gives the teahead away. I wondered how Johnny would have gotten heroin, though, if he’d had a fight with the marquesa; my
confidence in Dédée hit the ground floor, if really I’d ever had any confidence in her. They’re all the same, at bottom.
I was a little envious of the equality that brought them closer together, which turned them into accomplices so easily; from my puritanical world—I don’t need to admit it, anyone who knows me knows that I’m horrified by vice—I see them as sick angels, irritating in their irresponsibility, but ultimately valuable to the community because of, say, Johnny’s records, the marquesa’s generosity. But I’m not telling it all and I want to force myself to say it out: I envy them, I envy Johnny, that Johnny on the other side, even though nobody knows exactly what that is, the other side. I envy everything except his anguish, something no one can fail to understand, but even in his pain he’s got to have some kind of in to things that’s denied me. I envy Johnny and at the same time I get sore as hell watching him destroy himself, misusing his gifts, and the stupid accumulation of nonsense the pressure of his life requires. I think that if Johnny could straighten out his life, not even sacrificing anything, not even heroin, if he could pilot that plane he’s been flying blind for the last five years better, maybe he’d end up worse, maybe go crazy altogether, or die, but not without having played it to the depth, what he’s looking for in those sad
a posteriori
monologues, in his retelling of great, fascinating experiences which, however, stop right there, in the middle of the road. And all this I back up with my own cowardice, and maybe basically I want Johnny to wind up all at once like a nova that explodes into a thousand pieces and turns astronomers into idiots for a whole week, and then one can go off to sleep and tomorrow is another day.
It felt as though Johnny had surmised everything I’d been thinking, because he gave me a big hello when he came in, and almost immediately came over and sat beside
me, after kissing the marquesa and whirling her around in the air, and exchanging with Art and her a complicated onomatopoetic ritual which made everybody feel great.
“Bruno,” Johnny said, settling down on the best sofa, “that’s a beautiful piece of equipment, and they tell me I was dragging it up out of my balls yesterday. Tica was crying electric-light bulbs, and I don’t think it was because she owed bread to her dressmaker, huh, Tica?”
I wanted to know more about the session, but Johnny was satisfied with this bit of braggadocio. Almost immediately he turned to Marcel and started coming on about that night’s program and how well both of them looked in their brand-new grey suits in which they were going to appear at the theater. Johnny was really in great shape, and you could see he hadn’t used a needle overmuch in days; he has to take exactly the right amount to put him in the mood to play. And just as I was thinking that, Johnny dropped his hand on my shoulder and leaned over:
“Dédée told me I was very rough with you the other afternoon.”
“Aw, you don’t even remember.”
“Sure. I remember very well. You want my opinion, actually I was terrific. You ought to have been happy I put on that act with you; I don’t do that with anybody, believe me. It just shows how much I appreciate you. We have to go someplace soon where we can talk over a pile of things. Here …” He stuck out his lower lip contemptuously, laughed, shrugged his shoulders, it looked like he was dancing on the couch. “Good old Bruno. Dédée told me I acted very bad, honestly.”
“You had the flu. You better now?”
“It wasn’t flu. The doc arrived and right away began telling me how he liked jazz enormously, and that one
night I’d have to come to his house and listen to records. Dédée told me that you gave her money.”
“So you could get through all right until you get paid. How do you feel about tonight?”
“Good, shit, I feel like playing, I’d play right now if I had the horn, but Dédée insisted she’d bring it to the theater herself. It’s a great horn, yesterday it felt like I was making love when I was playing it. You should have seen Tica’s face when I finished. Were you jealous, Tica?”
They began to laugh like hell again, and Johnny thought it an opportune moment to race across the studio with great leaps of happiness, and between him and Art they started dancing without the music, raising and lowering their eyebrows to set the beat. It’s impossible to get impatient with either Johnny or Art; it’d be like getting annoyed with the wind for blowing your hair into a mess. Tica, Marcel and I, in low voices, traded our conceptions of what was going to happen that night. Marcel is certain that Johnny’s going to repeat his terrific success of 1951, when he first came to Paris. After yesterday’s job, he’s sure everything is going to be A-okay. I’d like to feel as confident as he does, but anyway there’s nothing I can do except sit in one of the front rows and listen to the concert. At least I have the assurance that Johnny isn’t out of it like that night in Baltimore. When I mentioned this to Tica, she grabbed my hand like she was going to fall into the water. Art and Johnny had gone over to the piano, and Art was showing him a new tune, Johnny was moving his head and humming. Both of them in their new grey suits were elegant as hell, although Johnny’s shape was spoiled a bit by the fat he’d been laying on these days.
We talked with Tica about that night in Baltimore, when Johnny had his first big crisis. I looked Tica right in the eye as we were talking, because I wanted to be sure
she understood what I was talking about, and that she shouldn’t give in to him this time. If Johnny managed to drink too much cognac, or smoke some tea, or go off on shit, the concert would flop and everything fall on its ass. Paris isn’t a casino in the provinces, and everybody has his eye on Johnny. And while I’m thinking that, I can’t help having a bad taste in my mouth, anger, not against Johnny nor the things that happen to him; rather against the people who hang around him, myself, the marquesa and Marcel, for example. Basically we’re a bunch of egotists; under the pretext of watching out for Johnny what we’re doing is protecting our idea of him, getting ourselves ready for the pleasure Johnny’s going to give us, to reflect the brilliance from the statue we’ve erected among us all and defend it till the last gasp. If Johnny zonked, it would be bad for my book (the translation into English or Italian was coming out any minute), and part of my concern for Johnny was put together from such things. Art and Marcel needed him to help them earn bread, and the marquesa, well, dig what the marquesa saw in Johnny besides his talent. All this has nothing to do with the other Johnny, and suddenly I realized that maybe that was what Johnny was trying to tell me when he yanked off the blanket and left himself as naked as a worm, Johnny with no horn, Johnny with no money and no clothes, Johnny obsessed by something that his intelligence was not equal to comprehending, but which floats slowly into his music, caresses his skin, perhaps is readying for an unpredictable leap which we will never understand.
And when one thinks things out that way, one really ends up with a bad taste in the mouth, and all the sincerity in the world won’t equalize the sudden discovery that next to Johnny Carter one is a piss-poor piece of shit, that now he’s come to have a drink of cognac and is looking at me from the sofa with an amused expression. Now it’s
time for us to go to the Pleyel Hall. That the music at least will save the rest of the night, and fulfill basically one of its worst missions, to lay down a good smokescreen in front of the mirror, to clear us off the map for a couple of hours.
As is natural, I’ll write a review of tonight’s concert tomorrow for
Jazz
. But now at intermission, with this short-hand scrawl on my knee, I don’t feel exactly like talking like a critic, no comparative criticisms. I know very well that, for me, Johnny has ceased being a jazzman and that his musical genius is a façade, something that everyone can manage to understand eventually and admire, but which conceals something else, and that other thing is the only one I ought to care for, maybe because it’s the only thing really important to Johnny himself.
It’s easy to say it, while I’m still in Johnny’s music. When you cool off … Why can’t I do like him, why can’t I beat my head against the wall? Pickily enough, I prefer the words to the reality that I’m trying to describe, I protect myself, shielded by considerations and conjectures that are nothing other than a stupid dialectic. I think I understand why prayer demands instinctively that one fall on one’s knees. The change of position is a symbol of the change in the tone of voice, in what the voice is about to articulate, in the diction itself. When I reach the point of specifying the insight into that change, things which seemed to have been arbitrary a second before are filled with a feeling of depth, simplify themselves in an extraordinary manner and at the same time go still deeper. Neither Marcel nor Art noticed yesterday that Johnny was not crazy to take his shoes off at the recording session. At that moment, Johnny had to touch the floor with his own skin, to fasten himself to the earth so that his music was a reaffirmation, not a flight. Because I feel this also in
Johnny, he never runs from anything, he doesn’t shoot up to get out of it like most junkies, he doesn’t blow horn to squat behind a ditch of music, he doesn’t spend weeks in psychiatric clinics to feel protected from the pressures he can’t put up with. Even his style, the most authentic thing he has, that style which deserves all the absurd names it’s ever gotten, and doesn’t need any of them, proves that Johnny’s art is neither a substitute nor a finished thing. Johnny abandoned the language of
That Old Fashioned Love
more or less current ten years ago, because that violently erotic language was too passive for him. In his case he preferred desire rather than pleasure and it hung him up, because desire necessitated his advancing, experimenting, denying in advance the easy rushing around of traditional jazz. For that reason, I don’t think Johnny was terribly fond of the blues, where masochism and nostalgia … But I’ve spoken of all that in my book, showing how the denial of immediate satisfaction led Johnny to elaborate a language which he and other musicians are carrying today to its ultimate possibilities. This jazz cuts across all easy eroticism, all Wagnerian romanticism, so to speak, to settle firmly into what seems to be a very loose level where the music stands in absolute liberty, as when painting got away from the representational, it stayed clear by not being more than painting. But then, being master of a music not designed to facilitate orgasms or nostalgia, of a music which I should like to call metaphysical, Johnny seems to use that to explore himself, to bite into the reality that escapes every day. I see here the ultimate paradox of his style, his aggressive vigor. Incapable of satisfying itself, useful as a continual spur, an infinite construction, the pleasure of which is not in its highest pinnacle but in the exploratory repetitions, in the use of faculties which leave the suddenly human behind without losing humanity. And when Johnny, like tonight, loses
himself in the continuous creation of his music, I know best of all that he’s not losing himself in anything, nothing escapes him. To go to a date you can’t get away from, even though you change the place you’re going to meet each time. And as far as what is left behind, can be left, Johnny doesn’t know or puts it down supremely. The marquesa, for example, thinks that Johnny’s afraid of poverty, without knowing that the only thing Johnny can be afraid of is maybe not finding the pork chop on the end of the fork when it happens he would like to eat it, or not finding a bed when he’s sleepy, or a hundred dollars in his wallet when it seems he ought to be the owner of a hundred dollars. Johnny doesn’t move in a world of abstractions like we do; the reason for his music, that incredible music I’ve listened to tonight, has nothing to do with abstractions. But only he can make the inventory of what he’s taken in while he was blowing, and more likely, he’s already onto something else, losing that already in a new conjecture or a new doubt. His conquests are like a dream, when he wakes up he forgets them, when the applause brings him back from his spin, that man who goes so far out, living his quarter of an hour in a minute and a half.