Cubop City Blues (19 page)

Early one New Year's Day, as Adalberto was walking home after dropping off a girl, someone came out of the shadows of predawn and stuck a knife into him all the way to the handle. On the ground, barely able to breathe, Adalberto felt his lung collapse. Right then he remembered Bob Rowe's words with such bitterness he could taste it coming out of his mouth and making little red bubbles on his lips. He wound up in the hospital cared for by the Ursuline sisters, who tried to convert him not with their words but with their soft caring ways, and there he waited until he could breathe right. After that he was never able to play his instrument again, not with the verve and heat that were his trademarks. He tried, God knows he tried, but forget the high notes and forget those long, slow ones he coaxed out of the horn. And when he realized it and when his band realized it and when the audience stopped listening and continued on with their drinking and their chatter, he walked away, simply and quietly.

A
dalberto counts change in his room. Adalberto walks to the store for a can of beans, a loaf of bread, three cigarettes. His clothes, frayed, unwashed. He smells of kerosene and cheap wine, and his beard has turned different shades of gray.

A woman at the store suggests he take in students. He says he doesn't read music, never done any teaching. It's all ear. No money to get back to Cuba. Adalberto talks to himself, and the woman looks at him as if he were an apparition, not so strange a thing in New Orleans as people might think.

N
ext afternoon, the woman was at the door with her boy, eight years old or so, holding a case that was almost as big as he. Adalberto looked at the boy: dark skin, bow tie, brown jacket, pants bunching at his heels. Reminded him of himself at that age.

Where's your gig tonight? he asked the boy, who looked at him with scared Mississippi water eyes.

Dollar a lesson, the woman said.

That's fine, Adalberto said. Teach the boy a few tricks.

Adalberto might not have been able to read music, but he was a natural teacher. First he showed the boy how to blow without valves, just to get him used to the mouthpiece on the lips, then sent him home with some homework—fingering exercises, breath exercises, lip exercises, make them strong, keep them from cracking. Keep those lips moist, boy. Drink plenty of water. No milk. Phlegm gets in the way. Coffee's good but you're too young. Tea with honey's not bad.

By the end of that month he had two more students, and a month later he had three more. Six dollars a week. He could afford a bottle of whiskey now and then. Friends stopped by, men he'd played with, club managers. A couple of young horn players just starting out asked for lessons from the old master. Old master? Just for that he charged them double. They came sporadically when they were having difficulties playing. They drank with him, left tipsy. Don't ever play drunk. Mostly you get sloppy, then you get lazy. Musicians are lazy enough by nature. Never mentioned junk because it was below his dignity. That's how he taught, and the students looked up to him like someone sitting under a tree who's made friends with the wind. Not much wind in New Orleans unless a storm blows in.

In a year's time his reputation as a teacher had eclipsed his reputation as a musician. If you asked him, he'd answer he didn't know what music ought to be like. I just know what sounds good and what sounds bad and I try to turn the bad into the good. With some boys it's hopeless. I send them home and tell their parents he should learn another trade. That's what music is, a trade—un oficio—and there are few people, you can count them on one hand, who ever make an art of it. They say Bolden's done it and that rascal Armstrong. Emanuel Perez was a journeyman. On the piano you have Jelly Roll, but he's a pool hustler mostly. And there's Robicheaux and a couple of others.

Then Adalberto would grow pensive. He couldn't draw a deep-enough breath to blow two strong notes together, his trumpet under the bed gathering dust, his lips pursing only for the bottle. He was feeling nostalgic about Cuba, what he'd left there, what he could have been. Haunted by the specter of that truncated future, he'd suck on the bottle some more until eventually he fell asleep, sleep of the drunkard, sleep of the dead. Students knocked on the door, and he didn't answer until the next day or the day after, coming out of his drunk like a man comes back from death, disheveled and ashen, smelling like the grave itself. It got so that he'd have occasional thoughts about China in the middle of a lesson. He waved his hand in front of his face as if he were swatting flies, and the student would be dumbfounded, thinking el maestro had really lost it now. Then he'd recover and continue the lesson as if nothing had transpired.

What he had lost Adalberto found knocking at his door one day when he'd been sober for two weeks. China had put on a little weight, which made her seem less a girl and more a woman, and her mouth was not so eager to smile. Next to her was a thin, reluctant boy. He had her eyes—proud, undaunted, Chinaman's eyes. Adalberto and China looked briefly at each other; then he stepped aside and let them in.

She said she wanted lessons for the boy. He had some talent. Adalberto shook his head no, then looked out the window.

I'm booked, he lied. What happened to your man?

Passed on.

Adalberto wanted to know more but he couldn't well ask in front of the boy. The thought that Bob Rowe was dead passed quickly through his mind and he relished it.

That's his son.

I can't play anymore. Don't have the lungs. All I do now is teach, barely keep food on the table, roof over my head. That was the short version of his life. The long version wasn't worth telling.

Then you can make room for another student, China said.

Bring him around tomorrow afternoon. He turned to the boy and said, You hear that, chico? Tomorrow, four o'clock.

The light tone he used with the boy belied the misery he felt inside. That night he couldn't stop thinking of that woman, who'd nearly cost him his life, and the youthful bravado that made him think he could show up the King of the Tenderloin. At three in the morning he got up and made himself a ham sandwich, took one bite, and put it down. He pulled the case out from under the bed, opened it, and brought the instrument to his lips. He licked the mouthpiece and played a few notes, then a soft bolero he'd learned in his early days in Havana to lull the girls. The heat of the music was gone but he could still turn the notes into words, the words into notes. China. She'd turned his life into a bolero. He lay on the bed with the cornet across his chest and slept soundly for the first time in months.

Adalberto had not the heart to tell the boy or his mother that he should take up another instrument, or better yet, another trade. Secret's in the fingering, he said gently, but the boy's fingers were clumsy and lacked the delicacy to coax the valves down. Feathers, Adalberto called them. Nurse the feathers.

The lessons went on for two months, not because there was any hope of the boy getting better—you either have talent or you don't—but because the weekly visits allowed Adalberto to interact with China. He made an exception to his rule that parents should not be present during the lesson. It was too hot for her to walk back and forth, he insisted, and so she stayed, sitting in a corner of the living room while Adalberto tried his best to bring out the boy's limited ability even if he sounded like a hoarse goose in the best of moments. Adalberto's heart raced, his breath shortened, his concentration became a yellow butterfly flittering back and forth from the kitchen to the bedroom, from the bedroom to the living room. He made sure his pants were clean, his shirt pressed, and his shoes shined. Then he waited, sitting across from the window, where he could watch her come down the street and up the porch steps, pretty as ever, with that relaxed way of walking, her hips moving from side to side like a bell and black hair glistening in the hot sun. Seeing her brought back the wind he had lost, and his confidence, too, though that didn't keep him from getting nervous.

At the end of the second month she showed up without the boy. Adalberto was surprised and pleased. This time she sat on the couch, and he sat next to her after bringing her a glass of water with lime. She liked it that way.

What do you think? she said matter-of-factly.

He might be better off with another instrument, he said. The horn requires delicacy of touch. That's something you're born with—that and a good ear.

He has none of those things, she said.

Adalberto didn't contradict her. Instead he said, He's a good boy, un buen muchacho, but music's not his thing. I want to keep seeing you. He hesitated a moment, and then he added, forcing it like a bad note, I want to marry you.

China let out a loud laugh. My son's father was a pimp. I was his whore. Once a whore, always a whore.

I don't care about any of that.

You should. I've done things you don't even want to think about. Don't mess with me. There was no sadness or resignation in her voice, just a casual dismissal that unsettled Adalberto.

She left then, not letting him say another word. Adalberto spent the next three days sitting on the couch, getting up only to go to the bathroom. The whiskey bottle he'd relied on in times like these sat in the kitchen like a somber sentinel. There were knocks on the door. By then students knew to leave him alone if he didn't answer. He had visions of his sister, who'd died of typhoid fever in Havana, dancing round him like a small jaundiced angel and of his mother, who used to beat him with a broom handle when he misbehaved, and of his best friend, Lolo, who became a thief and was shot in the face by a policeman. He thought of suicide, and he thought of moving away to a place he'd never been and where no one knew him, but he lacked the will.

O
n the fourth day, there was another knock that sounded forceful and insistent, and for reasons he never could explain to himself, he woke from his torpor and answered the door, expecting to find there, if not the devil himself, then one of his emissaries. It was Jelly Roll, someone worse than the devil. Adalberto stood at the door like a fool, waiting for the man to say something.

He was dressed in a perfectly pressed gray suit, white shirt, solid maroon tie with a diamond pin holding it down. He was at the height of his fame then and he gave off the sweet scent of expensive cologne, the scent of success.

I know who you are, Adalberto said stepping to the side. Adalberto pointed to the couch while he sat on the old straight-backed wooden chair where he had his students sit for posture.

I heard you play that Spanish music sometime back, Jelly Roll said.

Cuban music, you mean, Adalberto said. Don't play anymore. My lungs no good.

Somebody told me about that. I first heard that music from you. I'll make it worth your while.

My while's come and gone. Lungs no good. Need a piano.

Piano I got, Jelly Roll said and insisted they go to the same club where he'd stood him up many years before.

It was the middle of the afternoon and the club was closed. Adalberto sat and played a few awkward chords. Piano was not his instrument. What he played was flat and uninspired, and Jelly Roll said to play again, up tempo, with brio. Adalberto let loose, not worrying about the mistakes he was making, and Jelly Roll poured him a tumbler of whiskey. Adalberto did his best and got out a few tunes. Jelly Roll took over and played a rag, slowing the tempo, then picking it up, moving up and down with the right while the left hand stayed in place, harmonizing with the melody, and going off on rhythmic riffs that were identical to what Adalberto used to play on his cornet, only nobody had paid attention because he was a nobody in a nobody's land.

When the session was over, Jelly Roll pulled out a roll of bills and tried to give Adalberto a hundred dollars. Adalberto refused, not out of pride. One hundred dollars more or less wasn't going to make a big difference in his life, and knowing that Jelly Roll had listened to him and learned from him and that some historian years hence would say he stole that Spanish tinge from Adalberto was satisfaction enough. He didn't need money; he needed someone to notice what he'd done back in the day.

Keep your money, Mr. Jelly Roll. I got what I wanted.

Adalberto made it home just as the sun was setting, streaks of clouds moving westward colored a vibrant orange. He was exhilarated and jumpy again, just like he got before a gig, and he wanted more than anything to play a little music, get a little sex from a sweet and sassy woman like China. Whore or no whore, she was the woman for him. He knew that the first time he saw her.

That night he went in search of her, and over the next week he scoured the city—uptown, downtown, Storyville, French Quarter. He asked dozens of people. Some had never heard of her; some had and gave him a conspiratorial smile and shake of the head. None had seen her in years, not since her man was shot at a card game. She was nowhere. He was too old for despair, but after seven full days of looking he told himself, If I can't have her, I won't have any woman.

So he went home and resumed his teaching, this time in a more relaxed manner and without the mordant criticisms he'd dole out when one of his students missed a note or lost his posture or let the horn sag down from his lips like a flower withering. Horn's your dick. Keep it up! Finally he learned what all teachers learn: You don't teach the students you want but the students you get, and he took on all comers.

Occasionally he'd go to a club, especially if one of his former students was playing—they were very insistent he go listen to them—but that club life had lost its luster, and weeks would pass without him leaving the house, except for groceries and liquor. It wasn't a bad life. He was no longer in the thrall of desire, and he could look at a beautiful woman as at a statue, admiring the beauty from a distance as he walked past, and go on about his business. By 9
pm
his eyelids grew heavy, and forty-five minutes later he was in bed, covers up to his chin, even in summer, sleeping deeply through until five when his bladder woke him. Mornings were his to do with as he wished. Most of his students were schoolboys and took their lessons in the afternoon and early evening. Sometimes he did a little cleaning; mostly he sat on the front porch and watched the birds on the yard chase after bread crumbs the old, deaf landlady fed them.