think the lines are crossed, Leo. Typical of our backward . . .
. . . an outsider could sweep the elections and effect real change . . .
–Juana I gave you enough change for eggs.
He yells at you because he loves you, Juana.
. . . at last our chance to . . .
–Juana, carajo, quit eavesdropping on the politicians and go basket some eggs.
Hello?
Barely hear you.
–Quit clowning and hang up already. Juana?
Vote for us, Juana’s husband.
We always wanted an audience and here at last . . .
–How much for my vote?
Free milk?
Free housing?
–I’m voting for El Loco.
El Loco’s not coming back, sir.
–That’s what you people said last time.
How come we haven’t heard from Juana?
Juana’s husband and his imaginary wife, Juana, are voting for El . . .
–I’ll track you two conchadesumadres and . . .
Hang up and call again?
I think we have a chance, Antonio.
–Quit my phone line already!
Hello?
Everyone thinks they’re the chosen ones, Masha wrote on Antonio’s manuscript. See About Schmidt with Jack Nicholson. Then she quoted from Hope Against Hope by Nadezhda Mandelstam, because she was sure Antonio hadn’t read her yet: Can a man really be held accountable for his own actions? His behavior, even his character, is always in the merciless grip of the age, which squeezes out of him the drop of good or evil that it needs from him. In San Francisco, besides the accumulation of wealth, what does the age ask of your so called protagonist? No wonder he never returns to Ecuador.
Why had her comments in Antonio’s manuscripts been so mean spirited? She’d been transferring the contents of her closet to boxes that will be transported to her new apartment in New York soon and she’d come across Antonio’s manuscripts inside a hatbox, where she’d also come across the compendium of contemporary classical music he had recorded for her, which she was listening to as she read his manuscripts again. She hadn’t seen Antonio or thought about him in at least twelve months, since around the time of his farewell party, and because she doesn’t remember marking his manuscripts with such virulence, reading them now was akin to discovering that while she was asleep or away someone who turns out to be her had defaced an entrusted room with a red pen. Had she somehow subscribed back then to the asinine notion that one couldn’t just barge into art, as Antonio had been desperately trying to do, without a lineage that justified one’s so called artistic inclination? Her father was a physicist and her mother had been a violinist and unlike Antonio she grew up alongside the Western Canon but she hadn’t become a great painter.
—
D Sharp Minor Etude, No. 12, Opus 8 by Alexander Scriabin: Horowitz wrong noted the D sharp etude in Moscow, Antonio said to Masha, listen, toward the end, Vladimir must have been nervous, or overwhelmed, or trying to both perform and watch himself perform because he’s eighty three years old and hasn’t been to Russia in sixty one years, and yet what’s amazing, or perhaps not so amazing, I know you’ll grumble if you don’t think it’s at least mildly amazing that, if you put on your headphones and scan every second of that recording of Horowitz in Moscow, you have to conclude that he’s not crying, unless he’s a silent weeper, now listen to this Valentin Silvestrov piece called Postludium, Antonio said — I absolutely agree with you, Masha, Silvestrov’s concept of the postlude, of a nostalgia for tonality expressed as a dissipation of tonality, sounds more interesting than his music — now listen to this piece by Arvo Pärt called Tabula Rasa, Antonio said, recounting for her what he knew about this music with so much glee that she began to think he couldn’t even believe he knew so much about a repertoire that just a few years ago had been foreign to him. She might have found his glee appealing then, or maybe she hadn’t, but since she had been new to San Francisco and hadn’t known anybody yet she had allowed herself to find his glee appealing (his glee and his excessive focus on researching the music, as if to atone for the deficiencies in his musical training he was trying to become a librarian of sounds — did you know that Messiaen composed his Quartet for the End of Time in a German war camp? — I don’t care I still don’t like his monotheistic bird music, Antonio —), but now she chooses to dismiss his glee and his librarianism as a noxious attempt to differentiate himself from others, no different than a dentist sporting heavy metal tank tops emblazoned with creatures that could extirpate Messiaen’s birds on earth, although the need to differentiate themselves had been what brought Masha and Antonio together: their contempt for those who stopple their lives for the promise of stocks, for instance, their unstated belief that what really matters exists in a parallel San Francisco of performances and paintings and poetry readings and yet unlike Antonio she detested poetry readings: why undermine your quiet text with your loud, needsome voice? At Antonio’s farewell party the loud voices of the women there had confused her. Were these not the same philistines they had targeted with what they liked to call, in homage to Nabokov, their plumed opprobrium?
All the guests at Antonio’s farewell party had been women. A blond American had opened Antonio’s door. She seemed to know that she needed to pull the door extra hard against the bristly carpet, although she looked confused about why her pull also spilled her drink, and either because she was drunk or because Masha refused to smile at the girl’s performance of cute bewilderment, the girl interrupted the welcoming skit that she’d seemed ready to enact for Masha, and yet as the girl in the tight jeans and pink pumps retreated down the hall, holding her Styrofoam cup as if it were a pet soaked in pee, and as the teleological dance beats coming from the living room concluded in a collective singalong — we want your soul! — Masha didn’t keep Antonio’s manuscripts rolled in her hand but returned them to her messenger bag, stashing them among his copy of A Werewolf Problem in Central Russia and her new palette knives and what was left of a bottle of corner store Pinot, the same brand that Antonio had offered her on the night they first met. She shouldn’t have come unannounced. That she’d felt entitled to because she wanted to know if the fictions Antonio had given her were true seemed ridiculous to her now. That she’d been trying to make herself believe that was the real reason she’d come was even more ridiculous. She knew then as she knows now, as she listens to Scriabin’s D Sharp Minor Etude from Antonio’s compendium, that her five or six months with Antonio entitled her to nothing. She also knew, because he’d told her, that not only were all of his friends in San Francisco women, but all of his relationships with them lasted less than six months. Why return to these moments at his farewell party then? Just toss his manuscripts and his tiresome compendium. Does she find solace in reminding herself that the moment’s over and she’s become the only spectator of that embarrassing moment, Masha in her black turtleneck by Antonio’s front door, trying to decide whether to leave what turned out to be Antonio’s farewell party, or wade into the party and confront him with absolutely nothing? On the other side of his living room Antonio was dancing in the exuberant way he probably thought American women expected from him, just like his exuberant clothes were probably what Antonio
