In an unpretentious Italian restaurant where all the pasta had been made by hand, the chatting-family atmosphere fell into something much deeper and richer and darker. A cellist had walked in and in his overcoat sat down on a backless chair in front of the servery and began to play. Something, I don’t know what. He drove his fibres of unholy sound into the great grail of all of us, each of us, like an ochre long-blown off the palm of his hand. I saw the small boy with dark lozenges of eyes climb down from his chair at the corner table in the second room and go to stand, unconsciously in the waiter’s path, his head a jar for the tadpoles of surety this man was making for us. He stood and stood, listening and watching, lost to every other thing. Behind him his parents and their friend kept chatting and only the older, grizzled, quizzical looking man at another table let his gaze rest on the little music lover so fondly, brimming with acceptance, and I let my gaze rest on him in turn and the music rested on all of us, like snow, that spares no needle in the pine forest and lifts its shifting darkness turn to stars.
Tag: music
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the hurly-berlin
Berlin, Berlin. Familiar and overwhelming. On the train back from the airport a girl with an extraordinary voice hopped on and busked. At the end of the song, the guitarist accompanying her took a bow and people burst into applause. “Wow!” she said, opening up her hat. A cute couple jumped off and a guy with his afro razored up the sides leaned after them, silently proferring the phone and wallet the girl had left lying on the seat. Two muscular men slightly running to fat had their dog with them, a pug named Princess Sheba. We got talking. The one holding the dog on his lap obeyed signals from the other one who said, wiping his own eye, she has something near her eye, and so forth. Princess Sheba stood upright on her owner’s sturdy legs, balancing against the train’s movement like a surfer. These trains travel high above the street and at intervals feel like you’re lost in the woods. The cool breeze flooded in every time someone got on or got off. “Mind the gap,” the safety announcement said in English. Later in the evening a guy snarled at me for making eye contact and called my German companion a Nazi. He was walking along spoiling for it, followed us, taunting, through some misery of his own. “Like the black women in Brooklyn say,” he said, bitterly, chasing us, “stay away from white people.” Berliners smoke in cafes and the street is filled with old litter. If you eat out, people beg, and sell newspapers, and beseechingly play the harmonica. At the next table a middle-aged blond woman painted her lips against a little mirror while her boyfriend watched absorbedly. It took both of them to make her beautiful, it was their tradition. She made faces at herself as though she were having a very emotional, silent conversation. We saw two Romany boys whom I’d seen busking last summer, a year ago now, the little one is bigger and wirier and his chubby brother is chubbier. The younger plays the trumpet and has a loud ghetto blaster with which he drives away all the other musicians. But he’s getting better. Last year he was confident but terrible. I told him, your playing has improved! so much! you’re getting good! and for the first time in all the dozen times we have spoken he gave me his slow, curling, lopsided and personal smile.
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the coins, the crowns
Such a jolly lady in the village post office just now. She really made my day happier. Expertly popping up and then deconstructing one box after another until I could figure out which size I needed to buy, each with a hint of a flourish, like an auctioneer. “And here… we have the Number 3…. This one is the Number 4.” I opened my palm and showed her the mess of Swiss coins, fishing out extraneous Danish crowns, Euros, Australian dollars, and a shard of porcelain I found in Lisbon. “I’d really like to get rid of these,” I told her, picking through the various sizes and counting out the right change with agonizing slowness. “Sie haben gut gesungen,” she offered brightly: You must have sung really well. It took me a moment. “You mean because… people have thrown these… in the street?” “Yes,” she said, beaming, mocking herself just a little. “That is what we like to call Swiss Humour. You sang well.”
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the Dolly Lama
Hearing an old song on the radio this morning, the earwormly Islands in the Stream, it suddenly pierced me how sad I will be when Dolly Parton dies. I hope she’s happy and I hope it’s not for a long, long time. Some people remember what the world was like and they remind us how we can be human, I think.
To Dolly. Who even on the surface was beautiful long before it ‘took a lot of money to look this sheep.’
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beats like butter, baby
Cavernous cafe in Berlin during the changeover period from Friday afternoon caff to Friday night bar. The music is gradually speeding up and the staff become flirtier, including with each other. People still working on their laptops are hunched with concentration, trying to get it all down. Two extremely buff men who came in with an old-fashioned upright pram have their son on their laps, spoon-feeding him. The boy is fat as butter and looks calmly round the shadowy room. In German I read in a gossip magazine how dearly Brad Pitt loves Angelina Jolie and how he was tirelessly by her side during her recent ordeal. Outside, the sun is glary-bright and like snowflakes the fluffy little seeds of some flowering tree pursue their airy way through the day. Things seem slow and sunstruck but with the glimmering promise of sex with a stranger, the inimical glamour and disillusion of city evenings. A thin guy rolls in behind his stack of pallets of soft drinks on a sack truck. A muscular guy whose muscle is running to fat pulls over blaringly in his topless black vehicle, parks at an angle and leaves the engine running with an intolerably loud and banal dance track pumping. I am thinking about running out to turn the volume down, just to piss him off. I’m drinking a milkshake with cucumber and mint. Its clear fresh milky taste pleases my body. Berliners are smokers, people walk by with their head in the clouds. The fat muscleman leaps into his car and pulls out, jerking his hand to let the taxi driver who’s had to screech to a halt know, I am going first. The taxi driver is Turkish: he stretches his mouth whimsically. His hand falls on its back like a cat. He’s relaxed. “If you want to, man. If you have to, dude.”
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coffee breathe
I was in a strange city recently, got lost, felt overwhelmed momentarily, & needed comfort. Ducked inside a Guitar Shop to touch all the guitars. You pluck one string and wait for it slowly to come into stillness. At the back a man in a fisherman’s cap was playing a song of his own, I think, for the politely-smiling Guitar Shop man… they sat on matching, facing stools and one leaned in and one leaned back. Leaving the shop I felt just that bit more tuned in to sounds and to music, the traffic seemed rhythmic and spare, I kept hearing in the street the repeated curve-notes of a wolf whistle from somewhere high, or far away. Five times, six times, seven times, eight: was it a nerdy, somewhat serious guy who having gotten up the courage to catcall was now determined the object of his passing affection would not walk by without learning how beautiful he found her? Actually it was two college girls, leaning out of a fifth-storey window wolf-whistling their friend who was unlocking her bike oblivious in a stand of bikes downstairs, her hair wrapping itself around her in the wind. Wit-wheel! Wit-wheel! is how my ex used to spell it (and say it): Wit-wheel!
I went into a crowded little food boutique that had a whole wall of small-brew beers. They had beautiful, grotesque, weird, colourful labels. They were honey-coloured, molasses-coloured, golden, greenish, dark. I bought a chocolate wrapped in sardine-printed foil for a friend who is overcoming a phobia of fish. I went to the back of the store and picked up the brown-paper packages of whole coffee beans and held them to my face and breathed in.
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golden lion
I went upriver two nights ago with a box of matches in my pocket. It was overcast and just beginning to get dark. Went down a green gladed path that I know and found the place I’d found before. I’ve never seen anybody there but once there was a girl playing her guitar on the next promontory, sitting on a fallen tree with her hair falling over her face.
As I went I collected twigs and dried stalks and small fallen branches. I made a bristling bundle with each hand, I stretched my palm to carry more. At the place I built a fire. Last week someone had played a game there: twelve squares deep and ten squares wide, etched into the dirt, it had three teams: one playing with smooth stones, one with dandelion flowers, one with short sticks each piercing a leaf.
In front of the fire I sat down to rest my back against a tree. The water rushed behind me, rushing rushing. It had begun to rain, not too heavily, I put on my coat and let the tree shelter me. A blue egg had fallen from the nest, egg-blue and speckled. On the inside its broken shell was white as teeth. Last night I took a different way and when I came to the clearing downstream where a bench and firepit have been built, in front of the bench someone had made a heart with stones. The stones said: “I <3 ..." The inner body of the stone heart had been filled with clumps of moss, and every few inches the green dense moss was punctuated by a golden dandelion flower. Again it grew dark, and again it rained, and I sat and watched by the water.
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fado menu
Well, I’m never leaving here. Restaurant down some tiny steps with a hand-lettered menu in the window and a tiny castle built out of corks. On ordering sardines what you get is a plate piled with whole grilled fish and a small mound of potatoes, boiled then tossed in butter. Everything perfectly simple. We ordered half the dessert menu and dipped our spoons contentedly. A very drunk man wearing double denim (I explained to my companion this could also be a verb: you’re not *double deniming*, are ya?) made his way up and down the stairs repeatedly, with determined attention and heavy breathing with effort. The owner stood in the narrow doorway smoke from his cigarette filling the room; his luscious daughter and her mother, a jowlier, fuller version, ran between the tables. In fact after poring over the Portuguese menu for a while I asked the daughter had they a menu in English. She summoned her father. He unfolded his glasses and peered into a few blue vinyl folders before triumphantly producing a version neatly typed in French. By comparing the two versions we could triangulate. Near midnight a man came in with his guitar and tuned up at the counter. His songs were written on laminated cards, he considered them for over half an hour. Then he turned to the long table of local people – there were only 14 of us in the restaurant – and began to play, inviting the room to the chorus. A bosomy lady in ferocious print danced, shimmying her hips expertly and directly in front of the face of the younger man, maybe 50, who had come in with his friend and who she evidently thought was a bit of alright. The singer sang on and she danced solemnly, proudly, stomping a little on the turns. Flushed and excited she raced up to the singer and whispered in his ear. “Another time,” he said in Portuguese: something like “Un autre mal.” I was mortified for her. She crossed between the head of the table and the serving counter with some difficulty and sat down, her bosom heaving. But within minutes she too was singing along with the rest of us, lustily but not loudly. When we left, the prize male and his elderly neighbour looked over their shoulders to say with careful enunciation, “Heff… a good… evening.” “Obrigada,” I said, “you too!” The beautiful one said, “Alfama! Ees beautiful!” Oh yes, I said, my hand on my breathing: beautiful. “And the people…” “Wonderful!” Steep, cobbled, gristly with careening streetcars: yes, wonderful.
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a last-minute shimmy of the hips
Last night was the first evening in Portugal for either of us & we wanted to hear fado. Went for an evening stroll, and lo! on the first hilly corner was a handwritten sign saying, Fado Tonight. And on the next corner! And the next! We’re in the old quarter and fado is a boom industry. Touts walked backwards in front of us, crooning, Just buy one drink & entry’s free. Prices in the fado restaurants are oddly Scandinavian. We kept climbing. Up a side street festooned with colourful laundry, pelargoniums spilling from plastic pots, was a stooping little bar with crumbling steps. The bar owner was affable and had a genial, rubbery face. We ordered dessert. In a shadowy corner two fellows were playing guitar. One of them tilted his curly head back against the wall and began to sing. After his first song there was a modest commotion at the doorway: up there at street level stood a small, gleaming, bald man of 70 or 75 resplendent in a cream suit with wide lapels and the most gorgeous pale blue tie. He came down the steps and conferred with the musicians. Then standing easily with no affectation of manner he closed his eyes and sang. His voice was throaty and weathered, from time to time it throbbed. Caramel rice custard dissolved down my throat like sweet tears. He sang two songs and then vanished with a kind of conqueror’s wave. Then it was the turn of the bar owner, who turned up some canned background music and puffed out his chest. His voice was big and round, his gestures dramatic, he was a natural-born ham. His wife kept serving, stoically. He slid past all the tables and with three pinched fingers took up a trilby hat from the top of the cash register. Setting it on his head he went on singing, oh so roundly, oh so bigly. His wife behind him gestured to a table of Germans “two beers? oh, three? three beers” and as her husband simperingly launched a second song (“I sing just one more,” he said, “one more,” so apologetically that my heart rushed to love him and their hard-working marriage) she glided round the bar with three beers and presented them, carrying a little last-minute shimmy of the hips. He had tears in his eyes when he finished. Because music makes queens of us all.
