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“What if a lion comes by our campsite?” I asked. My friend Linda had run motorcycle safaris to view wildlife in the bush country of Kenya for several years, and I was hoping she’d say we were still too far away from our destination in the Samburu tribal lands for that to be a concern.
“That’s very unlikely,” she said calmly. “And if one does, he’ll only be looking for food…”
Until then, I had never thought of myself as food even though I knew she was referring to what we had brought to eat. We had driven north from Nairobi in a jeep she had borrowed and stopped at dusk to pitch our tents, build a fire and cook some supper.
“In all the years I ran the safaris, there was only one lion and just a few other times when animals came into the campsite. They never bothered the people, just tried to get at the food. Don’t worry – nothing bad will happen.” Her assurance was accompanied by a gentle laugh which was mercifully not the nervous kind that reinforces anxiety. I admired her composure and sense of place as we continued conversing after the meal. Facing another day of driving over rough roads, we retired early.
But I was worried. I was new to this land of world-class predators, and she had no advice to offer about preventive measures other than not bringing food into my tent. So instead of falling asleep, I tried to think about what I could do to protect myself. We had no guns, and I wouldn’t have known how to use one anyway, though I did begin to reconsider my views on gun ownership. My only weapon was a Swiss army knife with a blade that was great for cutting fruit but nothing much tougher. I accepted the fact that if the lion got inside my tent, I would fast become a carcass, so I switched my focus to what I might do to keep the beast on the other side of the flimsy fabric that constituted my house that night. This was my temporary territory, an observation that inspired an idea.
“Pete – what are you doing?” Linda asked from inside her tent.
“I’m marking my territory the way animals do,” I said, as I peed my way around my tent, having just enough to complete the circle. “You might want to do it, too – I’ve got nothing left.”
“That’s sweet of you to think of me, but no thanks. Try to get some sleep – we’ve got a long day tomorrow.”
She was clearly unimpressed with my initiative and frankly, I didn’t think it would stop a lion either. I did manage to fall asleep for awhile, but woke up in the middle of the night. I pulled down the door flap and looked out, gladly noting that there were no predators circling our site. I walked toward the jeep, thinking about substituting the thick steel walls of its cabin for the thin cloth of my tent.
But then I looked up at the sky and saw more stars, many more than ever before – amazing in their clarity and brightness, uncontaminated by any trace of artificial light because of our remote location. So many stars, so densely packed in the black void of space! We were near the equator, widening the view, offering a glimpse of infinity. Star-struck, I lay down in the back of the jeep and gazed at the sparkling sky. This part of the jeep was open and unprotected above its low sidewalls, but my mind was elsewhere now. I drifted into a heavenly sleep that ended around sunrise at the sound of Linda’s voice.
“Smart move, Pete! That box you slept next to is where I put our food. Lucky you!”
We had planned a morning stop to visit one of the local Samburu chiefs that Linda knew from her safari business. She spoke Swahili and acted as an interpreter after introducing me to the chief, who then brought us to meet the village elders. We all sat on the ground around a blazing firepit, drinking fresh milk from a gourd that was making its way round the circle, and talked about how they resolved problems within the tribe. While working as a novice trial lawyer a few years before, I had volunteered for an experimental mediation program and was intrigued by this approach to dispute resolution that was so different from the adversarial legal tradition in which I had been trained. In Africa, I was hoping to gain some insight into the origins of mediation, perhaps even pick up a new technique or two from some old masters.
Their lives seemed much less complicated than ours, at least on the technological plane. The tribe’s spearmaker did his work in a way that probably had changed very little in the last few thousand years. But a simpler way of life did not mean there was any shortage of disputes. Tension within the village had to be addressed because their society was based on collaboration and everyone lived so close together. Arguments between a husband and wife or among siblings were especially disruptive, but any dispute could tear the social fabric of the village if it dragged on unresolved.
Sometimes the chief or a respected elder would talk with each disputant separately, shuttling back and forth like a mediator until an agreement was reached. Sometimes the chief acted more like a judge, hearing both sides and then deciding who was right. The end result was usually a village feast, a celebration of re-established harmony, with anyone determined by the chief to be a wrong-doer required to slaughter one of his cattle and prepare the food.
Afterwards, Linda and I headed off to a wild animal reserve on another portion of their tribal land. It was hot and dusty, the many holes in the road making the ride slow and bumpy. We picked up an African hitch-hiker, a young man in some type of uniform. He explained in choppy English that he was a policeman and that his unit’s car had been broken for awhile. He was going to a village down the road to make an arrest for murder, news which made us glad we were picking him up on the way there and not back.
A few hours later, we stopped to take a break in a small town about halfway to our destination. Linda went off to get a cup of tea, but I had decided to drink some canteen water, walk around a bit and take a music break with my fiddle. As I stepped out of the Jeep, my attention was immediately drawn to a nearby commotion – a loud, animated argument between two Samburu women, tension on the faces of several onlookers, a screaming baby. Here there was need for some mediation, but I felt blocked by cultural limitations. I certainly had no words to offer. I watched the escalating discord for awhile, then thought about my original plan for this break, and I wondered….
I sat on a rock some distance away and began to play, somewhat timidly, an American folk tune. Heads turned. There was a momentary pause in what had been non-stop shouting, then another. Encouraged, I started to play louder; and the shouting began a steady decrescendo. By the time I was halfway into the tune, some of the onlookers were drifting over in my direction. Before I slid into the last note, the arguing had ended and the baby was no longer crying. I launched into another tune without stopping to catch my breath. The rest of the group moved toward me, eyeing me with curiosity.
I smiled. Several of the Samburus smiled back, then some started to clap along with the vigorous folk tune I was fiddling. People began dancing to the music and moving with its rhythms. We grew into an increasingly festive crowd, joined now by the combatants of earlier on. I noticed a tentative grin from one of them, and when I saw the other join in the dancing, I knew I had done something good.
Linda returned after her tea break, somewhat startled by the scene before her. I kept fiddling, and she threw herself into the dancing. When we climbed back into the Jeep a little while later, there were waves, smiles and laughter all around us. It remains the most enjoyable mediation I’ve ever done, and I didn’t have to say a single word.
2. An Escape
I did not start out as a musician or a mediator. I started in the high-powered litigation departments of large corporate law firms in New York City and San Francisco, where entry for the previously unwelcome children like me of first generation immigrants was provided by ivy degrees, where wealth and status were the rewards for those who play by the rules. One of the rules is that you work long and hard to advance the interests of big corporations in legal battles where the cost of doing so is often of no concern to them. These were the 1970's, and American Airlines did not like the federal government’s new noise pollution regulations – I and others like me wrote memoranda of law that helped them limit laws designed to protect human health. The big oil companies were being sued by the attorney general of California for price-fixing – I believed they were fixing prices, but I wrote the brief that helped them win a very minor battle in that protracted war. The partner supervising my work, a congenial man, called me into his office and told me that imitation was the sincerest form of flattery, that most of the other oil company law firms had based their briefs on mine, and that I would be on a fast track to partnership with work like that.
But I didn’t want to do work like that. I wanted to play music, travel and have adventures. So I lived simply and saved every dollar I could from the relatively substantial salary the protectors of my corporate sponsors paid me. About a year and a half later I had saved an amount that I thought could modestly support me for a year or so of living abroad. Mine was a goal-oriented sellout, none the better for that but carefully calculated to fund my escape. I wanted some structure, though, in all this upcoming uncertainty – perhaps I could study for awhile in an Italian music conservatory, hoping they would somehow overlook that I was an unqualified amateur folk fiddler. If that didn’t work out, perhaps I would explore Europe, or spend time with the part of my grandmother’s family that still lived in the mountains of central Italy and worked the land. There was also the possibility of traveling to more exotic places, all in search of new experiences. My mood rode the common pendulum that swings between excitement and anxiety – it was all so up in the air as I boarded a cheap flight to Luxembourg.
3. The Lady of the Lake, and Two Weddings With Some Jams In-between
Kenya was the first of the exotic, post-European places, and it took years to get there. Not long after arriving, I boarded the overnight train from Nairobi to Mombassa, the colorful city on the Indian Ocean. I had been on the coast for a few days the week before and heard about a luxury beach front resort whose manager was a folk music enthusiast. I had stopped by, fiddled him a few tunes and arranged to perform there a week later in exchange for a free stay at the resort. He said he’d set things up and do some publicity in the interim.
Stepping up into that quaint English train at the Nairobi station was like stepping back into the colonial past, with well-preserved railway cars proudly dressed in burnished wood, and an immaculate linened dining car noted for serving excellent food. I reserved a place for the last dinner sitting and enjoyed the striking scenery that began soon after leaving the city. Later, I found myself assigned to a dining car table opposite a young African woman. It was my custom to carry my violin with me as I moved about, both as a theft precaution and conversation starter, and I placed it under the table against the wall.
“What instrument do you have in your case?”
“A violin.”
“Are you a musician?”
“Yes; and I really enjoy hearing local musicians as I travel around. Any advice on where to go?”
“I like music, too. My tribe is the most musical in all of Kenya. Our most important instrument is the orutu – it’s a kind of folk fiddle. Have you ever seen it played?”
“No, but I’d like to. I think I’ve heard it on the radio here. I’m always interested in seeing how the fiddle and its relatives are used in different musical cultures.”
She was from the Luo tribe, based in the Lake Victoria region on the opposite side of the country, but had gone to college in England and then found a job there. Her tribal name was something like Atiena, her Christian name Joyce, and she was back in Kenya for a month of visiting family and friends. She was twenty-four, bright, attractive and curious, with a radiant smile and an honest laugh. Our dinner conversation flowed along with the wine, accompanied by rhythmic reverberations from the rails.
“I’ll be visiting some friends in Mombassa for a few days, then relatives in Nairobi. But after that, I’ll be home with my mother in Kisumu. She has a small hotel there. If you go to Lake Victoria during your visit to Kenya, come stay with us.”
My concert the following night went well, with an enthusiastic mixed crowd dancing to the up-tempo fiddle tunes and country waltzes I played. Afterwards, a few guys pulled out guitars and African drums, resulting in an impromptu jam session. They played in some pop styles whose chord progressions were simple and predictable enough for me to join in the music-making.
The food, drinks, facilities and services were all at a level far beyond what I was accustomed to when I would be paying the bill. I was therefore not shy about ordering the best meals, enjoying a steady stream of fresh-squeezed tropical drinks, taking wind-surf lessons from a master African surfer, or using the boats and other equipment that interested me. This was my first musical performance since leaving Europe, and I hoped I would be able to negotiate similar arrangements later on. I had already learned that work permit restrictions would prevent me from being paid, so bartering was the way to go.
Joyce had given me the phone number of the relatives she’d be staying with in Nairobi, and we met at a coffeehouse in the city center several days later for an afternoon of pleasant conversation. About a week after that, I stepped down in the Kisumu bus station following the long ride from Nairobi, eager to explore the Lake Victoria corner of Kenya and hoping to hear some live orutu music. I also wondered what might happen if Joyce and I spent some more time together.
I went to her mother’s tiny hotel, met Joyce’s cousin, the front desk clerk, who told me that Joyce had been delayed in Nairobi and would return late that night. Her mother and some other cousins joined us, and I asked where I could go that evening to hear live music. As her relatives described a show at a nearby upscale hotel, it became apparent that it was created solely for tourists. I asked for a place where the local Africans went to hear Luo music. They told me about a club on the outskirts of the city and where to catch the bus that would bring me there.
The club’s main room had a restaurant and bar, but I heard music nearby and followed my ears to an adjoining room filled with people listening, at times dancing, to the music of a Luo nyatiti player. The nyatiti is a type of folk lyre, with strings on a frame attached to a gourd that serves as the resonating chamber; the player plucks a melody line from the strings and uses his toes, some of which are ringed by thick steel discs, to tap out a rhythmic accompaniment on the base of the gourd. This musician often sang verses, all in the tribal language, which the audience reacted to with a mix of applause, comments and occasionally laughter. Sometimes people came up to him, put some money in the basket by his side and talked to him. They then stood by as he sang verses that seemed directed at them. Though I couldn’t understand the words, the interactive vigor of this music was immediately appealing.
“I see you, too, are a musician,” said a middle-aged African man sitting across the table from me. “I can tell by the way you are moving your head and feet.”
I had also walked into the room with my fiddle case slung over my shoulder before resting it under the table, but had no reason to doubt his motivation in starting a conversation. I was the only white person in the place, and in fact had seen only a handful of whites so far in Kisumu. Aside from Africans working in tourism and services, most of my personal encounters since arriving in Kenya a few weeks before had been with other whites or in settings where the races were mixed; I was eager to have some experiences more African in hue.
“Yes, I play the violin. Can you tell me what he’s singing?”
“This is our traditional music. It was originally about singing the praises of the chief. Now, the musicians more commonly improvise verses about our political leaders, especially during this election campaign that is underway.”
“I’ve noticed all the political activity and have been to some festive rallies.”
“Did you notice how people sometimes put money in his basket? They then get to hear him sing their praises, or perhaps those of their favorite politician. Sometimes they just give him a topic, and he then makes up verses on the topic while improvising an accompaniment on his instrument.”
I was grateful for the cultural insights he provided as our conversation continued, and curious about whether the musicians dared to be critical of those in power, but backed off when he seemed uncomfortable with the subject. I had noticed that a photograph of the autocratic Kenyan president, Daniel Arap Moi, hung in many restaurants, hotels and other such places, including this one. Earlier travels in the communist dictatorships of eastern Europe had taught me that is more likely an indicator to be careful about what you say in public places than a sign of respect for a benevolent leader.
One of the waiters pointed to my violin case and asked what it was. When I took it out, I realized that no one seemed to recognize it; some asked if it was a small guitar, others looked like they wanted to hear it, so I played a few hard-driving American fiddle tunes and was happy to see them clapping and dancing to the music. The nyatiti player spoke only Luo, so I told him through my new friend how much I enjoyed his music and then sat back and enjoyed the rest of his performance.
The next morning, I met Joyce. She told me one of her cousins was being married later that day and would I please bring my violin to play during the traditional African ceremony in his village? Would I? I mentally kissed my fiddle while saying “Of course!”
The village was about a twenty minute drive outside Kisumu. Just before arriving there, we stopped in the tiny village where Joyce had been born and where her father, now in his seventies, still lived with several of his wives and children. His original home was the thatched mud hut in the middle of a semi-circle of five homes. As he added new wives, her father would build a new home for each wife and the children he would have by her. The most recent of the homes had amenities such as tin roofs and white plaster on the exterior walls, the most recent wife a woman not yet thirty, with several small children running around. Joyce was one of six children (all now adults) by his second wife, who by some unexplained circumstances left the village for the small guest-house that she now owned in the city. They were separated, but still on good terms. The father would move among the simple homes in his compound, overseeing family and business matters, while his wives did the farm chores and tended the crops and cattle that sustained the entire family. It struck me as not a good place to be a woman, but polygamy was quite common in this part of the country, formed the foundation for their social support network and somehow co-existed with the Catholicism they also practiced.
In fact, the wedding party would soon arrive from the morning matrimonial service in Kisumu’s Catholic Church, so we left for the nearby village of Joyce’s uncle, who had a similar compound. He was the father of the groom and, as the oldest of several brothers, the leader of their clan. The traditional marriage celebration began just after we got there with the ritual welcoming of the bride to her new home. The wedding party entered the village and slowly walked toward the house of the groom’s mother to receive her greeting, but occasionally took some backward steps - marriage was not something to be hastily undertaken, nor would its course necessarily be a smooth forward progression. The group sang the whole way, alternating between rhythmic Christian spirituals, heavily syncopated traditional songs honoring the newlyweds, and call & response chants led by a strong female voice. Several times people broke out into raucous, joyous yelps that seemed derived from bird or monkey calls.
We wound our way around the village to a large open-air tent where the exotic feasting moved from the ears to the taste buds. While we filled up on freshly prepared Luo dishes and beverages, various rituals were enacted under the leadership of a master of ceremonies. Many involved the giving of gifts or placing of money in a basket on the bridal table. From time to time, a family elder would make a celebratory toast or speech. The ceremony leader would direct the group in a type of ritual applause after each of these - sets of three loud claps, with the number of sets determined by the leader’s opinion of the quality of the immediately preceding speech. There were humorous moments, too, as when some of the women showed the bride the correct way of carrying baskets on her head. The nyatiti player I had seen the night before was there, improvising verses about the newlyweds and married life which evoked more laughter.
As the only white person among the more than one hundred guests, I was an object of some curiosity. Joyce asked me to play something when the African musician had finished his performance, and I fiddled some rhythmic American folk tunes. In addition to some dancing, each of these elicited spontaneous applause rather than the tripled claps I had heard before. Joyce told me that meant the guests enjoyed it enough to respond immediately rather than wait to be led in the ritual claps.
The celebration continued through the afternoon with festive mingling, though at a more relaxed pace; and I had good conversations in elementary English with some boys who had recently graduated from the high school nearby. They liked growing up in a small village and the extended family bonds created by polygamy; there seemed to be no practical distinction made between siblings and cousins. In fact, they found it curious that I occasionally tried to clarify which category they were referring to. They each hoped to have several wives, but it was getting harder because you had to have a certain level of wealth to attract them and jobs were scarce, virtually non-existent in the villages. They all hoped to find work in the city, but without good contacts, that too would be difficult. When I asked how the women felt about polygamy, they said it was what they all were accustomed to, what they all felt comfortable with, male and female. I looked at the boys and tried not to be overtly judgmental - it must be hard to see things other than your way when you’re part of the group in charge. Joyce’s renunciation of this traditional support system conveyed a different message. Their society was changing, but for now at least, breaking out of the old ways was not something that could be easily done.
Dusk settled as things wound down. I asked Joyce if there was any place we could go to hear some live music on the orutu, the African folk fiddle she had told me about during our train ride to Mombassa. She checked around and the two of us, along with her girlfriend Alala, headed off in her mother’s car for some villages on another side of Kisumu. As the night turned black, we drove for almost an hour through increasingly remote countryside, with some stops for further inquiries by Joyce and Alala. Apparently, there was an orutu player who lived in the area, but no one seemed sure if or where he might be playing. After a few dead ends, we pulled into a village without electricity that had at its center a well-constructed mud and wood building. The single room inside served as a general store & restaurant, its contents and few tables illuminated by the gentle glow of candles and lanterns. But my ears pulled me quickly through the room towards the large courtyard to its side, lit not only by lanterns but torches as well, pulsating to a vibrant music.
The beat was insistent, infectious and multi-faceted, an amalgam of cross rhythms produced by a half dozen Africans, some slapping home-made drums, others banging together blocks of wood or pieces of steel. In their midst was a young guy vigorously drawing a bow back and forth across a single-stringed instrument. The string was attached at one end to a stick inserted into a gourd, which anchored the string’s other end and allowed its sound to resonate. This was the orutu, the only melody instrument of the group but also an equal partner in the creation of this music’s torrential rhythmic waves, visibly expressed in the body movements of all the musicians. The audience surrounding them moved and shouted in time with the music. Some of them danced – alone, with partners, and in larger groups, too.
The raw vitality of it all immediately swept me inside. I eagerly listened and moved along with them. Again, I was an object of some curiosity, both as the only white and because of the (to them) strange-looking instrument case by my side. When the musicians stopped for a break, some of them pointed to my case. I showed them my violin, started playing and was excited to see first one and eventually all the percussionists join in, laying heavily syncopated African rhythms under my straight-forward Appalachian fiddle tune. We smiled amidst the applause and comments from the audience, none of which I understood since they were all in Luo.
The musicians began playing again and beckoned me to join them. I fumbled around quietly for awhile, unsuccessfully attempting to somehow blend into this music that was unlike any style I had ever played before. Earlier that year, I had worked hard on improving my limited skills as an improviser, but now I felt frustrated at not being able to better engage this extraordinary opportunity.
I stopped and listened more carefully, trying to analyze what I was hearing and seeing. The heart of this intoxicating music was its rhythm. The orutu player was making low-pitched sounds that at times seemed to have simple melodic contours but which were always highly rhythmic. When I began some rhythmic noodling with a few random pitches on my bottom string, things got better, but with a grafted-on quality. How could I make what I was playing sound more organic?
I turned my eyes into laser beams and focused all my attention on his bow wrist. When I made motions with my wrist that were similar to his, we fell into the same rhythmic grove and then really took off. It was as if the melody notes from our two fiddles didn’t matter much; there was no chord progression to figure out and follow, indeed no harmony at all, just two contrapuntal lines, creating both consonance and dissonance, blending together over the most hard-driving cross-rhythms I had ever heard. When I got in the rhythm, I got in the music. We all smiled, our bodies swaying to these joyous sounds. As my confidence grew, I relaxed more and let my ears shape the melodies and rhythms now flowing freely from my fiddle.
My spirits soared. At one point, the orutu player and I exchanged instruments and each briefly played the other’s fiddle. What fun we were having! My portable tape recorder was being repaired in Nairobi – shit! what a time for it to be broken – but that made it even more important to savor this experience as it unfolded. Did we play for an hour? Two? More? I don’t know because I had moved outside of time. At least, that’s the way it felt. Until Joyce abruptly pulled me back.
“Peter, we have to leave.”
“WHAT!?... Why? Making music with these guys is great. Can’t we stay? I’m ready to play all night.”
“Yes, it sounds grand, but we have to go right away.”
She pulled me aside and lowered her voice. “See that group of rough-looking men in the corner of the courtyard over there. Alala and I overheard them talking about luring you outside and beating you up.”
Alala added, “They are going to steal your money and your violin, too. We must go.”
I was stunned. Instantly persuaded, too. It was clearly time to not only come back down to earth but also get the hell out of there as quickly as possible. This would be a much different trip without my fiddle. My money supply was already limited, and I had a strong dislike for violence, especially when the victim would be me. The three of us slipped out of the courtyard and moved briskly through the inner room. Were those guys that got up in the corner following us? We quickened our pace, then ran to the car, never looking back. We threw open the car doors, jumped in and sped off into the night.
During the ride home, I remained on an emotional high but the feeling of musical ecstasy from earlier on had been transformed into a burning anger. There I was having one of the peak experiences of my life, and it came to an abrupt end because some guys had decided to rob me. Why couldn’t they just enjoy the music like everyone else that was there?
It took me a while to gain some perspective on that evening. All the people in that isolated village were poor, desperately so by our standards. What was for me an incredible musical opportunity was apparently for some of them an extraordinary economic opportunity. Money is usually trump, especially where it’s very scarce, especially if you’re not playing the music but just there, watching some outsider passing through having the time of his life, a white westerner’s life that makes money much easier to come by, much easier to replace if taken. It also helped to think about the bittersweet quality of much that happens to us, life’s way of balancing things out. Yeah, I could rationalize what happened. But I was still pissed.
It took longer still to move beyond that way of thinking, to arrive back at a feeling that expresses what that evening truly means for me. On one magical night, I stepped into a world radically different from mine, amid people I could not even say “Hello” to, yet made sounds that enabled me to speak with them in a joyful wondrous way, thanks to music. That is what really happened that night. The rest is just background noise that’s often there in one form or another, but that we shouldn’t ever allow to define our experience. The memory of that evening always brings a feeling of exhilaration and satisfaction like no other.
It was well past midnight when we got back to the city. Alala and Joyce shared a room down the hall from mine at her mother’s guest-house. The three of us sat on the two beds in their room and talked for a long time; the playfulness in their conversation and easy way of laughing had restored me to a positive mood again. I got up to use the bathroom in the corridor and said good night to them. Sitting on the flushable throne got me thinking. There had been an inviting quality in Joyce’s eyes when she looked into mine, an openness to the smiles shaped by her thick lips. I decided to go back to their room rather than continue on to mine.
They had turned off the light but were still talking to each other in the dark, now in Luo. I sat on the edge of Joyce’s bed, holding her hand.
“Yes, I’d like that, too, Peter, but not tonight. I’m too tired. Alala will probably have you in her bed.”
“Peter, come here,” said Alala. I was both motionless and speechless. By the moonlight coming through the window, I saw Alala approach me and felt her stroke my hair. “You are a lion. Come to my bed.”
I’m not a lion – too short of stature and conflict-averse, among other dissimilarities. Alala just wanted to get laid, but I wasn’t interested – I liked her joviality, but not the rolls of fat on her body. Anyway, I was attracted to Joyce, wanted to be with her, and gently said so while thanking Alala for her offer.
Joyce began to tenderly rub my hand. I leaned over and kissed her - her full lips seemed to swallow mine. We were soon wrapped around each other. I tried not to think about Alala being there. Joyce had meaty legs, compounding her earthy sensuality. When I found myself between them a little later, I got excited and turned out to be more a gazelle than a lion. Things would go a lot better in the following days, but hoping it would wind up that way didn’t provide much consolation that first night.
“I know how you people really feel. We’re all just no-good niggers. Doesn’t matter whether we’re here in Africa or there in America. And look at what you did to the Indians! You killed them just like your nigger slaves, didn’t you.”
How do you convince a racist that you’re not a racist? It can’t be done. There was no point responding any further to his relentless attack, so I walked away. It had started almost a half hour earlier with simple enough questions from him, the kind that had often served as bridges into interesting conversations throughout my travels – “How do you like it here? What are you doing?” – but there was an edge to his tone that I hoped could be softened by sincerity and the universal appeal of music. His response to my enthusiasm for the local folk music was a clear indicator of where this discussion was headed.
“What do you know about our folk music? Nothing! The orutu you say you like? It’s a gourd – not like your fancy vi-o-lin, is it? You’re just slumming, boy. Picking up experiences to chuckle over with your friends back home. That’s where you should have stayed!”
Though he directed his aggressive comments at me, they were intended to impress his friends, who nodded their approval as they watched me squirm in a futile attempt to pull something positive out of this encounter. It was my last afternoon in Kisumu, and I was waiting for Joyce to get back, minding my own business in the small lobby/bar of her mother’s hotel. They all had drinks in their hands, their eyes bleary, their words sometimes slurred. For awhile after the onslaught began, I attempted a reasoned counter-argument, admitting that racism was a reprehensible part of American history, focusing on the progress of the civil rights movement.
“Crumbs!” he said. “Don’t you feel ashamed, whitey? You enslaved us, turned us into disposable pieces of property. That history is still too near. How would you feel if we had done that to you?”
Joyce later told me he was a local politician who drank there every weekend with his entourage - a neighborhood big shot and his courtiers passing time, looking to amuse themselves. They always drank too much, she said, and I shouldn’t let it bother me. But it did.
Black and white. They provide a dramatic color contrast, and the same was true of the two weddings I attended during my stay in Kenya. When I returned to Nairobi from Kisumu, I stopped by a cooperative gallery run by several women as an outlet for their artwork. Linda had been a member of this cooperative for awhile, gave me the address and suggested I look them up. I had already done that right after arriving in Kenya, had some pleasant visits with them, and popped in now to just say hello.
“How was your trip to Kisumu?” asked Vicki, a chirpy divorcee’ who was firmly rooted in upper-class colonial society.
“Great, but I’ll have to tell you about it some other time. I didn’t sleep well on the overnight train back, and I’m headed to my hotel for a long nap."
“Well, we’re headed to a fancy wedding at the Stilton estate. It’s out near Mount Kenya and there’s just enough room in the car for you and your fiddle.”
“Sounds like fun, but I’m too tired for anything other than a nap.”
“This will be more than fun – it’s THE society wedding of the season. Interesting people, great food. Come on, you’ll have a grand time. The bride is a good friend and I know she’ll enjoy your music.”
Six of us, including one African, piled into Vicki’s car, then stopped at her house for a quick lunch and to change clothes. I pulled out my last clean shirt, brushed the dust off my shoes, and used a wet cloth to transform a food stain on my chinos into a ghost-like ambiguity, hopefully below the threshold of perceptibility. Scandalous society gossip provided the entertainment during the two hour ride to the Stilton estate. It had a magnificent setting on a gentle slope, with a stunning view of Mount Kenya glistening in the bright sun. The road leading up to the stone and iron entry gate left me with the impression of being in an earlier era, entering a plantation, with the black workers lining the roadside, smiling and waving at us.
On the other side of the gate, a large gathering of wealthy colonial descendants engaged in civilized conversation, though occasional bursts of laughter provided evidence that this was in fact a festive event. A string quartet played in the background, tastefully restrained in both the selection and execution of their music. Like many of the guests, the table linens were a bit stiff, perhaps from the starch that completed their whiteness. Black servants moved discretely among us, carrying trays of hor d’oeuvres imported from Europe. A handful of African guests, obviously well-to-do, seemed at ease in this crystalline ensemble but somehow simultaneously out of place. They were surrounded by mazungas, a word used by Africans to refer to whites but that doesn’t actually describe a color. Among the definitions I heard for this elusive word, the one that made the most sense is “the hurried ones.” When whites draw racial distinctions, we use words of color, black and white, a superficial difference that tells us nothing about character or quality. The Africans instead focus on differences in the use of time – rather than “whites,” we are mazungas, the ones in a hurry. Rather perceptive.
The bride was from one of Kenya’s most prominent settler families, the groom a German engineer who had come there on an elaborate work project and liked what he found. The numerous toasts, invariably witty and literary, provided an excuse to drink still more of the expensive French champagne our hosts had specially shipped in for the wedding. Gift-giving was hidden from view. After a satisfying meal of international cuisine, a band began playing dance music, but there was more discussing than dancing to be had from this sated group. As Vicky promised, there were many interesting people to talk with, but also much silent scanning of surrounding territory by bored faces. When she asked me to fiddle a few tunes, the bride (who was very down-to-earth despite her blood line) danced with some of her friends, but by this point, not even music could turn around the steadily decreasing pulse of our weary celebrants. All in all, though, quite nice - Quite.
It was late when we got back to Vicky’s spacious house, which by night more resembled a fortress. She had a private security force of several Africans, all armed with guns, some with automatic weapons. As we approached, one of them opened the large steel gate to her property, which was surrounded by a high solid fence topped off with barbed wire. Had I not noticed this heavy security earlier in the day? Vicky said there was always an armed guard on duty, but more of them at night, when the incidence of break-ins was high, along with the danger level. This was an affluent white suburb outside Nairobi, and virtually all the property owners hired their own black mini-armies to protect them and their possessions. Vicky’s guards made the rounds of her house in a business-like fashion, but I found the open display of weaponry unnerving, and wondered how reliable this security system would be in times of turbulence.
Our sextet formed a circle on comfortable cushions in the middle of her living room floor and passed a joint around. The conversation made its way back to the scandalous behavior of their upper class colleagues.
“Did you see that cute little snit that Nigel is running around with now. I can’t believe he brought her to the wedding; she must be at least twenty years younger. I wonder how Maggie felt.”
“Well you know that Maggie started it by fucking one of her security guards, so don’t feel bad for her. But the guy she brought with her was obviously just there for show - I think he’s the lawyer who does her divorces.”
“That guy is a cocaine addict…”
I had little to contribute, but in my now more relaxed state, listened with interest to their tales of colonial decadence, all of which seemed natural expressions of who and what they were. Just as I was beginning to feel bloated by dissipation, my attention drifting, Vicky turned the conversation toward something strange and mystical.
“Did you hear that Charles is back at it again? I can’t believe he even survived.”
Charles was a middle-aged Brit who had moved to Kenya many years before. A sensitive vegetarian and contemplative soul, he chose to live off the land out in the bush country. Gradually, he developed deep spiritual feelings about his place in nature and the unity of all life forms. He put these beliefs into practice by taking long hikes in the bush, unarmed, among the wild animals, predators and prey alike, walking and talking with them. As his story spread by word of mouth, he became a charismatic, cult-like figure, the man who walked in peace with lions. People sought him out, eager to have his aura of serenity envelop them and cleanse their spirit.
But then a lion attacked him, biting deeply into his flank, leaving a grossly unnatural curvature in the side of his body and a definite demystification of his persona. Had he been spiritual and brave for so many years, or merely stupid but lucky? People viewed him differently afterwards, though he apparently did not feel that way about himself. After a long, painful convalescence, he returned to walking with the animals. But only he knew if it is was with a fear not there before.
4. A Different Kind of Artist
I am at the other end of life now, traveling again as I did in my youth, alone and with my fiddle, in search of a different kind of experience. But I can’t find what I’m now looking for, a traditional music club in the lively Taksim district of Istanbul. I’m apparently not the only one lost - when they see that I don’t understand their question to me in Turkish, two men ask me in accented but good English about a place they are trying to find. They are well-dressed business types, late thirties, engineers in FIAT’s international division, one from another part of Turkey, the other from northeast Greece. They also tell me they are staying at the Intercontinental Hotel and are at the end of a week-long conference, out to enjoy their last night in the city. I explain that I, too, am looking for a place, and we walk together toward the tram station. We chat pleasantly about their jobs and my extended Mediterranean journey, now well underway in its senior edition. When we see the club I am looking for, they say they have heard of it and suggest we get a beer there. It’s basically a restaurant with a strolling music group and a beer garden where we sit down and order three drafts of Turkish beer.
They refer to their wives and kids, but also sound like they are on the make. Our conversation is animated, much of it about European soccer, international business practices, and Turkish food & customs. They are both very simpatico, with the Turk striking me as especially smooth and charming. I try to pay for the beer but they don’t let me. They joke that I can pay when they come to Italy, but this is their home territory. They want to take me to a bar near their hotel which they say has good music, and where we can close out the evening with a traditional drink of Turkish rakki.
“You’ve been here almost a week and still haven’t had rakki?”
“No, but I’ve noticed how popular it is.”
“You must have some. There’s a good place near our hotel; I pay for the cab.”
They hail a cab that takes us to a place on the area’s main boulevard. It looks classy on the outside and is dark enough on the inside to take a few moments of eye adjustment. There are rotating lights splashing color around, illuminating a few women dancing on a low platform to some recorded European pop music. I am disappointed that this isn’t the folk music I was hoping to hear, but they already have a corner booth for us and I don’t want to offend my generous hosts by complaining. They put me between them and order our rakki along with several trays of snacks & fresh fruit, because “in Turkey you never drink rakki without also eating.”
We drink the rakki and continue our conversation. The Turk gets up to go to the bathroom and comes back a few minutes later with three women, all in their 30’s but already showing excess mileage beneath their heavy make-up. One of them sits next to me.
“You’re from America? You have a nice time here?”
I’m not interested in extending the evening by conversing with new people, especially given what I suspect is now underway, but don’t want to be rude in case my suspicions turn out to be unfounded.
“I like Istanbul very much.”
“When did you arrive?”
“Last week”
“Can I have a drink?”
“Ask him,” I say, pointing to my new Turkish friend. “He brought me here for a rakki; he’s our host tonight.”
She continues looking at me as she again asks “Can I have a drink?”
It’s clear now what is going on, though at first I look for reasons to believe it’s not really happening to me. These guys are so likeable, our earlier conversation seemed so pleasant and authentic. I’m too smart, too experienced to fall for a scam that I had read about just days before in a Turkish guide book at my hotel.
“Can I have a drink?”
The prey is always a guy on his own, usually older; the predators always have a clean-cut business look. After ingratiating themselves, they take the prey to a club where he is wined and dined in the company of younger women, then told he has to pay thousands of dollars. If he refuses, strong arm tactics normally follow, including being taken into the back “office” for hands-on persuasion. Here I am, armed with this advance knowledge yet now in the middle of a booth, surrounded by two of these con artists and their three female accomplices. My anxiety level quickly shoots up, my initial thought – how stupid of me not to have put the pieces together sooner. But recriminations can come later; right now I have to get myself out of this jam, hopefully without giving up too much money or suffering any physical pain.
I launch a high road initiative, telling them how happily married I am, how uncomfortable I now feel, and that I am leaving. Why I ever thought that an appeal to conventional morality would work with this group remains a mystery to me. Instead, they close in around me and insist we continue to “enjoy the evening”. I try to match their insistence level and decide there’s no harm in some reality based discussion.
“Listen - I know what’s going on because I read about it. You guys invited me here, and you placed the food & drink orders. You’ll be better off spending your time on others because I’m leaving.”
As I say these words, I look around. It’s dark but I notice one other prey. He seems to be going along with things, though it’s not clear if that’s out of naivete’, resignation, or something else. One thing is certain – there are no alliances to be formed in this room; I’m on my own. My insistence produces one positive effect, though.
“OK. OK” says the Greek. “We’ll get the bill and each pay our share. Divide it by three.”
I am slightly hopeful that the special rapport I believe I have developed with the Turk will result in some mercy, but my alleged share of a few drinks and some snack food comes to almost $500. Should I be grateful that it is not a multiple of that, as the guide book indicated it might be? Should I try to get the number as low as possible and then internally declare victory?
The bill is presented to me by the burly club manager, who stands at the open end of the booth. Flickering candles draw my attention to the facial scar and pock marks which give character to the area between his very short black hair and his square, steely chin. From the way the others look at him, I know that this is the man I must negotiate with. My engaging “friends” from the enjoyable earlier part of the evening are apparently mere employees, or perhaps agents on commission.
As I move toward him, I first try a tough, rational approach.
“I’m not paying; the price is ridiculous and these guys told me I would be their guest.”
That produces a sneer from him as the other two tell me we all have to pay our share. I decide to try a conciliatory gesture.
“Look, I don’t want trouble. Maybe I could pay $10 or $20; that’s a fair amount for what I drank and ate.”
He and I are now face-to-face. His words are heavy, his tone threatening.
“You pay your part. If you don’t want trouble, you pay me now.”
Two points from the guide book now enter my mind: the back office might very well be my next stop; and the “Tourist Police” is the agency that deals with these kinds of scams. I tell him if he doesn’t let me go, I will call the Tourist Police. He grabs my arm in a crushing grip and gives me a menacing look as he more deliberately repeats his last words “You pay me now!”
I surprise myself by breaking free of his grip (an adrenalin rush can do a lot, even at age 64). I pull out my cellphone and, in the most earnest voice that I can muster, again threaten a report to the Tourist Police as I move with false confidence toward the door.
“Take him to the back office, boys.” Those are the next words I expect to hear, but instead, he hesitates. Over the sound of my pounding heart, I hear him mutter something, accompanied by a waving-off hand gesture. I run out the door, not looking back until I jump into a cab half a block away. No one is in hot pursuit, and I am awash in feelings of relief and self-congratulations.
Why did he let me go? I was outnumbered by younger, stronger men. If this had been a film noir scene, my threat to call the police might have produced guffaws and comments about the local cops also being on their payroll. But tourism is an important part of Turkey’s economy, and the Tourist Police were given jurisdiction in this sector to protect against the negative effects of these kinds of scams. Did I fortuitously invoke an authority that is both feared and incorruptible in a part of the world where that combination may be hard to find? Was that bar already on some kind of watch list? Since it was only 11 PM, perhaps it was just too early in that night’s harvest to fuss with a cranky sucker who hadn’t run up much of a tab yet.
Of course, the next day I thought of several other things I could have said that would have left me with no doubt that my successful escape resulted from ingenious quick-thinking on my part.
“Here’s your bill back, and I want you to listen very carefully to what I’m going to tell you. I’m a stubborn, savvy lawyer, and I always get even with people who cross me. I’m visiting a good friend here with an important position in the American Consulate, and we will have the authorities shut down your so-called business tomorrow unless …”
I developed numerous variations on this theme (the only accurate part of which was that I did have a law degree), occasionally asking myself two things: Why am I spending hours on this now useless exercise? And why are we so much more clever about how to deal with situations when it’s too late to do anything about them. The value of learning from mistakes might provide some comfort and has its own evolutionary justification, but I’d rather get it right the first time.
I did wind up being less hard on myself about falling for a scam I had read about just a few days earlier. In addition to being thoroughly engaging, these guys were absolute masters of their deceitful craft - their appearance, the low-key entry, the naturalness of the mid-game conversation which was tailored to my interests and subtly handled to avoid raising suspicions about ulterior motives, the fluidity of the transitions from one stage of the hustle to the next… Now that I’m thinking about it, their entry ploy – asking about directions in the local language before using English – was the same one that Barcelona pick-pockets profitably used on me at the beginning of this trip several months before. It disarms you by making you think that they believe you to be a local instead of a tourist. As my degreeless but savvy mother often says, maybe I need another four years of school. And why didn’t their eagerness to pass a few hours with someone almost twice their age get me wondering about motivations?
Vanity provides one explanation – when you think you’re likeable and interesting, no red flags get raised when others (seem to) want to spend time with you and also pick up the check. But I think the main reason is that I’ve had so many wonderful experiences with strangers during my youthful travels as a wandering fiddle-player that my guard is down, perhaps permanently. There is an interesting symmetry in my running into talented rip-off artists at opposite ends of this Mediterranean trip - Spain and Turkey - and opposite ends of the con man social spectrum – scruffy street pickpockets in Barcelona & smooth business hustlers in Istanbul. I briefly wonder whether this double dose might make me hesitant about interacting with strangers during future travels. We do tend toward caution as we age and add to our experience base. But earlier experiences can be much stronger than later ones, because they have shaped parts of our character that become anchors in our sense of who we are. It takes decades to get those, and they are not easily dislodged.
So I don’t expect to be raising my guard much. But then, it’s not hard to be philosophical about getting conned when the total cost for being exposed to memorable performances by two teams of consummate international artists playing on different fields in different leagues is so low - the 50 euros lifted from my wallet in Barcelona, with nary a bruise in either place. I’ve paid more for many a boring baseball game, and once got hit by a ball.
5. Autumn Journey
My early travels as a roving musician did more than lower my guard with strangers. Music opened doors to life-changing experiences for a young man in search of adventure & self-definition. Decades later, with kids grown and an understanding wife, what started as simple curiosity about what it would be like to be a white-haired wandering fiddler has matured into a decision to try it. Not to re-capture the adventures and emotions of before (though some of that would be nice, too) - more rather to observe and reflect, free from the youthful pressure to be the protagonist. Free also to focus more on something beyond the sensual pleasure seeking that so easily dominates young adulthood. There is wisdom in the emphasis of some traditional cultures on going off in search of deeper spiritual understanding after completing one’s primary householder responsibilities. I learned much from the world and its peoples before undertaking those responsibilities, and I wondered what they might teach me later in life.
Risks, too, must be factored in. But the risks of improvising a musical journey abroad that concern me at this stage of life do not involve con men, nor (as before) wondering how I will pay my way or put a career together afterwards. Instead, I wonder if the crustiness of age and habit will keep me from trying for what might be; if comparisons with the freshness and intensity of my earlier travels, especially in their peak moments, will result in disappointment and boredom. Important decisions about time and place must be made, too. The Mediterranean feels like the right setting because the more I have come to know its people and cultures, the more fascinated I have become. As is often the case with big plans, the main question is now or later; but later often means never, and the problems recently diagnosed in my right hand threaten my long-term ability to play the violin, so the time must be now.
But where to start? Several months in the Mediterranean sounds great, but what’s the first stop? The beginning of a journey sets its tone, shapes your expectations. Since this is to be a time of both renewal and reflection, it should mix together new places and ones already visited – to check for changes in them, and me.
To start, though, someplace new - Barcelona, because in late September it is about to begin its magnificent annual festival, La Merce’, in honor of its patron saint. Over time, religion has given way to music & the region's Catalan folk culture as the spiritual core of the celebration. I instinctively like the people who shaped that transition even though I have not yet met one of them. I hope the local musical culture will be vibrant, & that it will present opportunities to play my fiddle with musicians there. I also am intrigued by pictures of some of Barcelona’s architecture, buildings that I want to see close up.
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The city’s vibrancy and cosmopolitan flair are immediately apparent. The start of the festival is still two days away, enough time to take an overview tour, go to a lovely sandy beach, and hear one of Spain’s best guitarists play a concert of Spanish classics. My hotel room is small but immaculate & quiet for such a central location. It’s just off the Rambla, the main promenade, around the corner from the festival headquarters with its giant puppets already on display and across the street from the historic gothic quarter. La Merce’ started in the 1800’s in honor of the Virgin Mary but has evolved into a lively celebration of music & popular culture – parades featuring the giant puppets, fire-breathing dragons, Catalan folk music & dances, colorful, imaginative light shows on the city hall façade, & most of all, concerts by excellent musicians in many styles on stages erected in Barcelona’s main plazas. I especially enjoy a jazz group that draws on the rich traditions of its gypsy & arab musicians, and an evening of flamenco guitar filled with energy & passion.
A major fireworks competition on the beach features companies from Spain, France & the USA, each given an evening to show what it can do – they are all magnificent. The city, though, puts on the most intense display before more than 200,000 people to close out the festival, just after a music & light show at a huge, multi-function fountain at the far end of Barcelona’s largest plaza. |
 Giant puppets ready for parade  Catalan folk dance competition |
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 Castellers |
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The city is famous for the art nouveau style that the Catalans call modernisme, but walking around, much of it seems highly mannered & derivative in an uninspired way. The genius of Antoni Gaudi’ & Domenech i Montaner, however, is readily apparent. Curves & natural shapes are everywhere – in some of Gaudi’s buildings it is hard to find a straight line. The fluidity of their work often seems like music in three dimensions.
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Finding local musicians to play with, though, requires some experimentation. My first attempt, through what I thought would be the easiest route, goes nowhere. I am a member of the Amateur Chamber Music Players, a musicians’ network with a website that lists people all over the world who enjoy getting together to play chamber music. We provide the website with contact information and languages spoken. When you’re traveling, you contact a local member and they organize, e.g., an evening of string quartets. We also rate ourselves on a scale that goes from “Professional” and then from “A” (“Excellent”) down to “D” (“Beginner”). The incentive for candor is the interest we all share in avoiding embarrassment – how would you feel if everyone else in the group is playing way over your head? Moreover, elementary etiquette would advise trying to pleasantly surprise new musical hosts rather than making them wonder what else you’re lying about. There was only one string playing member in Barcelona; we had Italian as a common language, but she listed herself in the “Professional” category. Does she not respond to my email because she is a pro and I am only a “B+”? She is on tour and too busy with concerts? She didn’t receive ……. Why am I looking for explanations? Why does “Why?” matter so much?
So, on to other, more informal attempts. During my youthful journeys, playing in a park on a nice day would often draw other musicians and result in a friendly jam session. Those sessions also easily came together in the colorful pedestrian zones at the heart of many European cities, where the musician buskers would play for whatever listeners they could attract. Barcelona is loaded with buskers, but I am put off by the aggressive amplification used by virtually all of them. Back in the 1970’s, the natural sound of an unamplified instrument would be heard by those who chose to come nearby in order to listen, and who would then also choose whether or not to put money in an open case. But the technology now used by this new generation of buskers enables them to impose their music on whoever happens by, taking away the listener choice that previously characterized this open musical marketplace. My initial reaction is to avoid them, as well as to wonder why opportunism so often combines with new technology to ruin what should be positive liberties. Expanded communication should be a social good, not one that degenerates into spam on the internet or forced listening in the open spaces of our cities. Besides, I can use the nice sign I had printed up before leaving the States. It concisely describes a key component of this journey, the Musical Conversation, in both Spanish & English as follows: The Musical Conversation: a global communication experiment without words Subject of the conversation – the first note played. We start quietly & end quietly on this same note (“the ground”). Inbetween, we improvise a conversation with music - we take turns playing musical phrases, trying to comment in some way on the phrase just played. Before ending, we weave the musical lines together by commenting simultaneously for awhile (something words cannot do). To participate, play a note to start our conversation! How clever to have such foresight, designing and laminating this sign to perfectly fit both in my suitcase and on my portable stand, with attractive lightweight ties to keep it there on breezy days and a small battery-powered light to illuminate it on warm evenings. What musician upon seeing it would not be willing to give it a try? But now that the time to use it is at hand, my earlier mood of optimistic self-congratulation is replaced by doubt and pessimism. Nonetheless, a sunny day that’s not hot enough for the beach (which has become a major distraction) combines with a rational internal pep talk – “what’s there to lose? it’s always enjoyable to play music outside on a nice day; why spend a 100 bucks on a sign if I’m not going to use it?” The result puts me, my fiddle & sign in a nearby park. I make sure to close my case and put it behind me so people will understand I’m not looking for money. I spend a few very pleasant hours across from a beautiful fountain playing whatever comes into my head. I have several simple, amicable conversations with Catalans, and lots of people come by to listen. Some take pictures of my sign and comment on what an interesting idea it is. But no musicians with instruments appear; I realize that this approach will take patience & luck.
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I approach three guitarists from Argentina who are playing some hot gypsy jazz that I like a lot. I find their fast tempos intimidating, but when they see my fiddle, they invite me to join them and graciously slow things down enough for me to sort of keep up. I haven’t played that style in awhile and never really got comfortable with it because I can't think fast enough for its blistering tempos. Despite my weak contribution, they are good-spirited enough to beckon me over for another tune when I return to the park a few days later. It’s a great setting to start the playing part of this trip – warm sunny days in a beautiful park, making music on a very long curved bench designed by Gaudi’ and covered with his mosaics.
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 Parc Guell curved bench* |
I play with much better results in other parts of the park with a Catalan guitarist & his Mexican girlfriend whose striking appearance probably attracts listeners as much as the music we make. She plays tabla, the Indian drums; and the guitar he bought in India is actually an interesting blend of sitar & guitar. Once I figure out the drone note it has, it‘s pretty easy to play nice counter-melodies in that key with him. When the chords are simple and the tempo slow, I'm fine. After we finish, they offer me part of the money in the case. I thank them but tell them that I’m only in it for the music. They confirm what a Flamenco guitarist from Argentina told me earlier that day – the money in the case is usually meager. Most of their earnings come from selling their self-produced CD’s, and it takes many hours of playing (on what would be considered a “good day”) to bring in the euro equivalent of $100 in CD sales & case money. All three of them had left office jobs, willing to accept less economic security for more freedom.
On another day there, I hear some great blues coming from up above where I’m walking. The sound leads me to a weathered looking American expatriate from Tennesee playing his dobro, He’s been living in Barcelona for the past 13 years and looks to be fiftyish. He tells me he has a few students, occasionally plays in the local clubs and only recently returned to busking. We jam nicely on several of his tunes. I wonder afterwards - could this have been me if I had continued the expatriate musician’s life?
The most intriguing opportunity presents itself in the form of a young Chinese woman who is plucking a traditional instrument of her country, producing lovely, folk-like melodies. I approach to compliment her. She speaks no English & only a few words of Spanish, not enough to ask her about trying to play something together. I sit on a rock nearby & noodle around quietly on my fiddle. The drone note of her instrument gives me a base to work with, but the melodies she plays have more in them than the 5 note pentatonic scale that my limited knowledge of Chinese music leads me to expect. I expand a bit my palette of notes to play around with, but stay rooted in the 5 notes of the drone key. She looks in my direction and says what sounds like the Spanish word for “louder,” although her pronunciation & my Spanish comprehension are so poor….. could it instead be “Too loud!” Which interpretation to choose??
I press down on my bow & jump in. We trade some phrases that sound musical, each of us occasionally picking up from the other a small grouping of notes to copy or vary somewhat. We thereby bring some structure to our sonic ramblings, and instinctively alternate taking the lead. When she takes the lead, I resort to the safety of rhythmic drone notes on my fiddle. When you can’t talk, ending the music becomes problematic; I think I just let my drone notes die away, the sound dissolving into mutual semi-smiles on our faces. We do something similar two more times, after which I’m not sure if she would like to continue or concentrate again on playing her music to sell her CD’s. The music we made was pleasant, but not compelling, so I give the benefit of the doubt to the economics of her situation and decide to leave. We smile one last time, I pack up & depart.
Later, several thoughts come to mind. Thirty-five years before, when (unamplified) busking financed my extended stay in Europe, I was at times annoyed when other musicians insinuated themselves into my goal-oriented music-making. A mediocre German guitarist who expected me to accompany his out-of-tune, heavily-accented rendition of “Hey, Mr. Tambourine Man” was a prime example. That’s not how things were supposed to be.
Back then, I found myself during that first summer in a beautiful pedestrian zone in the historic center of Munich. It had been rebuilt after the war with people rather than cars in mind, and was newly flourishing now with musician buskers, dancers, mimes & sidewalk artists, surrounded by appreciative groups of Germans. When I looked at the money piled up in the cases of some of the buskers, I decided to give it a try. If I didn’t make enough money that summer, I would have to return to the States before long. For an hour or so, I played some Bach solo pieces mixed in with Appalachian fiddle tunes, and then counted out almost $40 in German money (worth a multiple of that today). I celebrated with a hearty meal in a nearby beer hall, washed down with lots of Augustiner beer. A second hour of fiddling later on resulted in a similar purse. I found that many European cities had wisely converted their historic centers into pedestrian zones, freshly abloom with the free artistic spirit of the times. I played once in the Paris metro (subway) but with everyone rushing about, I felt more like a beggar than a musician and vowed never to repeat that kind of experience. The charming pedestrian zones where applauding audiences spontaneously gathered were the ideal location. As I traveled around making music, there would also often be invitations from European listeners to join them for dinner, or to stay over at their place. That’s the way things were supposed to be.
There were also times when, instead of Mr. Tambourine Man, other musicians got their instruments out and wonderful things happened. That’s how it was with Barry & Roger, two gifted British blues guitarists I met that way. But we were able to talk about what to do. That wasn’t possible with the Chinese woman in Barcelona. Playing with her was more challenging, more ambiguous. I remind myself that the musical conversation is an important part of what this trip is about. I must will myself though initial hesitations, past easy thoughts of “that’s something I can do later” when these opportunities present themselves. I was able to do that to at least get us started; but I was the one who gave up and left. I decide that next time, when the situation remains uncertain after a few attempts, I will hold my fiddle at my side and wait for some signal from my new colleague.
In addition to playing opportunities, Barcelona’s musical life offers many spectator opportunities, too. The opera house is just around the corner from my hotel, but the new season opens with “L'arbore di Diana” by Vicent Martín i Soler, a Spanish composer I have never heard of. When I learn online that his now infrequently performed operas were more popular than those of Mozart when they were rivals in the late eighteenth century, my level of interest shoots up and I buy a good ticket. Both composers used the same gifted librettist, Lorenzo da Ponte, which makes it especially hard to believe that audiences of that time preferred this pleasant work to great masterpieces such as “Don Giovanni” and “The Marriage of Figaro”. Is there a better teacher than time? The opera’s highlight is a brilliant coloratura soprano aria that sounds too much like the Queen of the Night’s famous arias in the Magic Flute, composed by Mozart a few years later. The talented normally steal from the genius, but theft can go in the other direction, too.
The strongest non-musical impression I take away from this night at the opera involves food. I have seen pro football fans put away huge amounts of (mainly junk) food, but I have never seen any audience eat the quantity or quality of the food that the Barcelonans consume during the opera intermission. These elegantly-dressed fans make a bee-line for an enormous eating area as soon as the curtain drops, a curtain that will stay down for more than a half hour before rising again as digestion begins. Perhaps the 8 PM starting time in a society that normally dines later provides the explanation, but the artistic looking multi-layered meats & fresh or grilled vegetables placed between beautifully-crusted bread must have something to do with it, too, especially when compared to the fries covered with cheese & chili so evident at my last NFL game.
On another day there, I hear some great blues coming from up above where I’m walking. The sound leads me to a weathered looking American expatriate from Tennesee playing his dobro, He’s been living in Barcelona for the past 13 years and looks to be fiftyish. He tells me he has a few students, occasionally plays in the local clubs and only recently returned to busking. We jam nicely on several of his tunes. I wonder afterwards - could this have been me if I had continued the expatriate musician’s life?
The most intriguing opportunity presents itself in the form of a young Chinese woman who is plucking a traditional instrument of her country, producing lovely, folk-like melodies. I approach to compliment her. She speaks no English & only a few words of Spanish, not enough to ask her about trying to play something together. I sit on a rock nearby & noodle around quietly on my fiddle. The drone note of her instrument gives me a base to work with, but the melodies she plays have more in them than the 5 note pentatonic scale that my limited knowledge of Chinese music leads me to expect. I expand a bit my palette of notes to play around with, but stay rooted in the 5 notes of the drone key. She looks in my direction and says what sounds like the Spanish word for “louder,” although her pronunciation & my Spanish comprehension are so poor….. could it instead be “Too loud!” Which interpretation to choose??
I press down on my bow & jump in. We trade some phrases that sound musical, each of us occasionally picking up from the other a small grouping of notes to copy or vary somewhat. We thereby bring some structure to our sonic ramblings, and instinctively alternate taking the lead. When she takes the lead, I resort to the safety of rhythmic drone notes on my fiddle. When you can’t talk, ending the music becomes problematic; I think I just let my drone notes die away, the sound dissolving into mutual semi-smiles on our faces. We do something similar two more times, after which I’m not sure if she would like to continue or concentrate again on playing her music to sell her CD’s. The music we made was pleasant, but not compelling, so I give the benefit of the doubt to the economics of her situation and decide to leave. We smile one last time, I pack up & depart.
Later, several thoughts come to mind. Thirty-five years before, when (unamplified) busking financed my extended stay in Europe, I was at times annoyed when other musicians insinuated themselves into my goal-oriented music-making. A mediocre German guitarist who expected me to accompany his out-of-tune, heavily-accented rendition of “Hey, Mr. Tambourine Man” was a prime example. That’s not how things were supposed to be.
Back then, I found myself during that first summer in a beautiful pedestrian zone in the historic center of Munich. It had been rebuilt after the war with people rather than cars in mind, and was newly flourishing now with musician buskers, dancers, mimes & sidewalk artists, surrounded by appreciative groups of Germans. When I looked at the money piled up in the cases of some of the buskers, I decided to give it a try. If I didn’t make enough money that summer, I would have to return to the States before long. For an hour or so, I played some Bach solo pieces mixed in with Appalachian fiddle tunes, and then counted out almost $40 in German money (worth a multiple of that today). I celebrated with a hearty meal in a nearby beer hall, washed down with lots of Augustiner beer. A second hour of fiddling later on resulted in a similar purse. I found that many European cities had wisely converted their historic centers into pedestrian zones, freshly abloom with the free artistic spirit of the times. I played once in the Paris metro (subway) but with everyone rushing about, I felt more like a beggar than a musician and vowed never to repeat that kind of experience. The charming pedestrian zones where applauding audiences spontaneously gathered were the ideal location. As I traveled around making music, there would also often be invitations from European listeners to join them for dinner, or to stay over at their place. That’s the way things were supposed to be.
There were also times when, instead of Mr. Tambourine Man, other musicians got their instruments out and wonderful things happened. That’s how it was with Barry & Roger, two gifted British blues guitarists I met that way. But we were able to talk about what to do. That wasn’t possible with the Chinese woman in Barcelona. Playing with her was more challenging, more ambiguous. I remind myself that the musical conversation is an important part of what this trip is about. I must will myself though initial hesitations, past easy thoughts of “that’s something I can do later” when these opportunities present themselves. I was able to do that to at least get us started; but I was the one who gave up and left. I decide that next time, when the situation remains uncertain after a few attempts, I will hold my fiddle at my side and wait for some signal from my new colleague.
In addition to playing opportunities, Barcelona’s musical life offers many spectator opportunities, too. The opera house is just around the corner from my hotel, but the new season opens with “L'arbore di Diana” by Vicent Martín i Soler, a Spanish composer I have never heard of. When I learn online that his now infrequently performed operas were more popular than those of Mozart when they were rivals in the late eighteenth century, my level of interest shoots up and I buy a good ticket. Both composers used the same gifted librettist, Lorenzo da Ponte, which makes it especially hard to believe that audiences of that time preferred this pleasant work to great masterpieces such as “Don Giovanni” and “The Marriage of Figaro”. Is there a better teacher than time? The opera’s highlight is a brilliant coloratura soprano aria that sounds too much like the Queen of the Night’s famous arias in the Magic Flute, composed by Mozart a few years later. The talented normally steal from the genius, but theft can go in the other direction, too.
The strongest non-musical impression I take away from this night at the opera involves food. I have seen pro football fans put away huge amounts of (mainly junk) food, but I have never seen any audience eat the quantity or quality of the food that the Barcelonans consume during the opera intermission. These elegantly-dressed fans make a bee-line for an enormous eating area as soon as the curtain drops, a curtain that will stay down for more than a half hour before rising again as digestion begins. Perhaps the 8 PM starting time in a society that normally dines later provides the explanation, but the artistic looking multi-layered meats & fresh or grilled vegetables placed between beautifully-crusted bread must have something to do with it, too, especially when compared to the fries covered with cheese & chili so evident at my last NFL game.
 Palace of Catalan Music interior* |
Montaner’s Palace of Catalan Music is so enchanting during a daytime tour that I want to see a concert there, and am happy to get a good seat for a program featuring Manuel de Falla’s El Amor Brujo by the Valles Symphony Orchestra. The surroundings are gorgeous, but I have never before seen a symphony orchestra use microphones and loudspeakers in a concert hall. The hall’s moderate size and reflective materials provide excellent natural acoustics and make amplification unnecessary. Surprise turns to shock when the beautifully designed rear wall of the stage is covered with a garish pink and purple light show.
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 Palace of Catalan Music exterior |
The orchestra was organized less than two decades ago but plays very well; its members and director are young and energetic. Is this their idea of how to make classical music appealing to new listeners? I find it very distracting and don’t wish to encourage this sort of thing; but almost everyone else in the large audience is vigorously applauding, except for a nearby pair of stuffy-looking elderly women. They have such heavy make-up on that the cheeks of one resemble those of a clown. We exchange slight smirks evidencing mutual distaste for what we have just seen. Ordinarily, being in a tiny group with allies such as these against an enthusiastic multitude would get me wondering – am I missing something? But not here; my first encounter with this orchestra will also be the last.
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I will gladly go to see Barcelona’s superb soccer team again, however. During my first meal in the city, I had a superficial conversation in my limited Spanish with a matronly Catalan woman seated next to me. She was feeding her wheelchair-bound mother, and when they turned the conversation from food to Barcelona’s soccer team and its Argentine superstar, Lionel Messi, I suspected this squad had a very broad fan base. Huge billboards link the team’s tradition of excellence to the image of Barcelona and to affiliated businesses as well. As human society becomes increasingly complex, our interests more specialized & our loyalties divided, it is illuminating to see which organizations are still able to draw enthusiastic support across all social classes – these squads of
elite physical competitors in sports valued by the local culture are among the
few remaining that can do it. A good seat for the
Champions League game between Barcelona and Dynamo Kiev, the Ukranian powerhouse,
costs a lot, but the quality of the play and the excitement of the 90,000 or so
fans watching the home team’s masterful victory pull me again into the grip of
European soccer passion.
On the way back from the game, I approach my hotel via the Rambla, Barcelona’s central promenade. It is reputed to be the arena where some of the world’s most highly-skilled pickpockets perform daily. I had been forewarned and took what I thought was the virtually fool-proof step of moving my wallet from my back to my front pocket. Anyone attacking it would have to get past my protective perimeters of sight (full front view) and touch (that pocket is next to a particularly sensitive area). It’s after midnight but the Rambla is still busy when two guys stop me about a block from the hotel with a question in Spanish & English about directions. They are anxiously pointing to a map. My brain’s profiler kicks into gear: they appear to be a pair of scruffy-looking Arabs or Turks, but they also seem close to my age and have a pleasant manner, perhaps too old and nice to be pickpockets. I decide to slyly avoid them by responding in Italian and saying that I don’t speak any other language. When they answer in broken Italian, I am disarmed and wind up caught in a gesture filled conversation that quickly turns from pointing at their map (probably the attention-distracter that enabled them to learn my wallet was not in my back pocket) to the quality of Italian belts. When one of them goes beyond commenting on my belt to grabbing it, my instinctive reaction is to yell at them to leave me alone as I put my hand into the pocket containing my wallet. When I realize that it is still there, I at first feel relief and a little smug at having out-foxed them; but when they politely leave, my relief mixes with feelings of shame. Has a racism that I normally only see in others caused me to misjudge them?
Shortly thereafter, I look in my wallet and notice that the 50 or so euros & a small amount of dollars are all missing from the billfold section; everything else is still there, though – credit cards, debit card, license, & slips of paper with important information. My feelings now undergo a dramatic transformation. Why did I drop my guard when they got past my initial avoidance strategy? Was it my fear of feeling/seeming racist? Were they just too clever for me? The only answer I’m sure of is to the last question, and it’s a resounding “Yes.”
My feelings get sorted pretty quickly, though. Since I didn’t have much cash in the wallet, it’s no big loss. They were both pleasant and appeared to need money. Most of all, I’m impressed and grateful. Impressed that they so quickly & expertly located & removed my wallet, extracted the money inside, and returned it to its starting place in my front pocket, all unbeknownst to me. And grateful that they only took the money and not the other things that would have created much inconvenience and cost me many hours sending formal notifications, getting replacements, etc. I decide to view them not only as masters of their craft but gentlemen thieves as well – they took only what had more value to them than me, and left what had more value to me than them. In my work as a mediator, I always try to help the parties to a negotiation accomplish this same result in their bargaining with each other. Although I had no say in the outcome of this Rambla encounter, I’m thankful that my adversaries respected this basic principle of a successful transaction.
They also got me thinking back to the trip in 1970 that hooked the 25-year-old me on serious traveling. I spent half a year wandering around South America (including one month in the Amazon jungle on the way to Carnival in Rio), and matched wits one day with a much younger colleague of theirs in Columbia’s black market. In that era before plastic cards, essentially the only way to change money was to go into a bank and exchange your travelers checks or dollars for the local currency at “the official rate of exchange.” That rate in Columbia was a joke, and you could get a multiple of the official rate if you were willing to take a chance on the black market. That involved dealing with shady characters and very stiff fines if you were caught. Necessity made me more of a risk-taker back then, so I found out where one of those markets was located and dressed like a tourist to increase my chances of being solicited. A kid quickly approached and asked if I wanted to change dollars for pesos. He seemed no more than 16, probably too young to be one of the cops that I kept looking out for. When I negotiated a favorable rate of exchange, I figured my few extra years of life experience were putting me in control of this situation, even though it was my first time. He was supposed to give me 890 pesos according to our agreement, and I of course carefully counted the pile of bills he handed me – seven 100 peso bills and the rest in 10’s on top of the bottom 700, but he only gave me a total of 880 pesos. I complained; he counted them quickly and insisted there were 890. I counted them again with the same 10 peso deficit as before; he did likewise and again claimed there were 890 pesos in the pile. I was getting impatient and the 10 peso difference didn’t amount to much, but I didn’t want to be cheated as a matter of principle, especially by a teenager. I insisted he give me the missing 10 pesos, so we wound up doing yet another round of counting, after which he apologized and said I was right. I felt vindicated and triumphant as I watched him place a new 10 peso note on top of the pile. In a gloating tone, I told him that I was one gringo he wouldn’t be able to take advantage of, to which he replied “Si, Señor.” What I didn’t realize until later was that he had deftly palmed five of the 100 peso notes off the bottom in that last round while adding the extra 10 peso note on top. Since he had already tricked me into counting the big pile of bills three times, I didn’t think of doing it a fourth time. I can still see the fresh, unlined face and bright white teeth in the smile that accompanied his “Si, Señor.” It took me a much longer time to get over that con job.
The Catalans I meet are friendly and justifiably proud of their history and culture; some are ardent separatists. They view themselves as the hard-working economic center of Spain and have a strong business presence throughout Europe. Barcelona has opened its doors wide to people from all over the world, visiting, working and walking about. It has the look and feel of an international city. As a solo foreign visitor, I normally am the one who has to start a conversation when I feel like switching from the loner to the social me. But I am pleasantly surprised by two Argentine women shortly after midnight at a crowded rock concert in the Cathedral plaza. My walk back to my hotel from a wild Turkish folk-rocker in another plaza gets interrupted here because of the interesting harmonies I hear coming from Barcelona’s most popular rock group. I’m listening & moving in time to the strong rhythms they’re producing when the two Argentines leave their partying group and approach me to ask some questions. After a few preliminaries (“what do you think of the music?” “where are you from?”...), they get increasingly personal – “what are you doing here?” “how old are you?” do you have a family?” etc. As they pull out my story, their eyes widen in reaction to the traveling fiddler in two eras part. Then I get them to respond to some of my questions. They came to Barcelona from Argentina a few years before when they were in their early 30’s and have jobs as English teachers. They were intrigued to see a grey-haired man enjoying a rock concert after midnight and wanted to learn more. I look around and notice that I appear to have at least twenty years on most of the other people there. Both of them want to see more of the world, and we exchange some life philosophy thoughts before they rejoin their group.
“I knew I would have you as soon as I saw you” Rachelle later said in her delightfully accented English. Our eyes had first momentarily locked at an evening jam session in 1976 during the Fleadh Cheoil, Ireland’s annual celebration of its rich traditional music heritage. She was a university student from Paris, the voluptuous, exotic-looking creation of a French mother & Moroccan father. I thought I was pursuing her during the mating ritual that unfolded when I saw her at the Irish fiddle competition. But she took the lead at several critical moments, and I happily went along. Back then, the combination of music settings and attractive young women often led to romantic adventure (or humbling rejection). No longer an object of desire, I have now become an object of curiosity in such a setting. But I have not been in the hunt for a long time. The woman I love awaits me in Florence. And I am glad that the curiosity of the two Argentine women leads to an interesting conversation.
6. The Italian Siren
My original plan for getting from Barcelona to Italy was to look for a gig as a strolling violinist on a cruise ship headed in that direction. I’d never taken a cruise, mainly because most of the ships seem to be enormous floating hotels, teeming with big eaters and serious shoppers. The more I thought about it, the less attractive that seemed, especially since I’d already had an enjoyable time as a strolling violinist during my younger journeys, trading music for room & board in the high-end hotels of Africa & Asia. Back then I was short on money and long on time, but now I have the means to be selective about which experiences to seek out. We place a premium on how to use the shortening period of time when good health allows us to do what we want.
I have long been intrigued by the idea of going to sea as a ship’s fiddler. A centuries-old tradition, the ship’s fiddler originally played rhythmic tunes so repetitive work like hoisting the anchor could be done in unison. He also performed at the captain's command for festive occasions. He was the ship’s primary source of music and entertainment before technology made him obsolete. Would it be possible to resurrect this quaint tradition in a contemporary setting? What about decadent European aristocrats about to take yet another island-hopping trip on their yachts with easily-bored friends – wouldn’t it be a refreshing change to have a fiddler on board playing tunes and telling stories? As I fantasized how to make it happen, I imagined myself near the end of my stay in Barcelona going down to its docks and spending a day or two doing what I always enjoy doing in beautiful weather by the water – playing my fiddle. I’d need a multi-lingual sign (just like the one for the “musical conversation”) and a simple way to enable my prospective hosts to confirm that I would be an interesting addition rather than a loose-screwed threat to their voyage. That was the impetus to creating the FiddlingAround.net website – I put its web address, which contains my background information, on the sign so they could quietly check me out before welcoming me aboard. I also bought a very small portable chair well suited to dockside music-making.
I scout the docks shortly after arriving in Barcelona and see several yachts, but they look uninhabited and inaccessible. I contact the city’s two yacht clubs with information for posting on their bulletin boards, but get no response. I explain my plan to a Catalan working on his boat, and he says it will be difficult since the peak sailing season is behind us. The only cruise ships in port are the big factory ones. I think about taking the ferry to the island of Majorca and trying my luck there, but some quick research on the web shows me that many of its hotels are closing up in October, and also that all of the island’s boat lines go back to Spain but not on to Italy. There is, however, a convenient overnight ferry from Barcelona to the Italian island of Sardinia, so I book a cabin and look forward to the next leg of this trip.
As the ferry leaves Barcelona further behind, my sense of well-being mixes together with some disappointment that I am not at sea as a ship’s fiddler, and also that my musical conversations there were not at the levels reached with the Indian sitar player and Kenyan folk fiddler in my earlier travels. One purpose of this trip is to seek out opportunities that can create peak experiences. I am happy that life has given me probably more than my share of those but greedy enough to want more. Though time is shorter now, I am more patient. After a good night’s sleep, I am on deck in a warm breeze, admiring the majestic emerald island that, though I have never seen it before, is part of a country that has become my second home.
Shortly thereafter, I look in my wallet and notice that the 50 or so euros & a small amount of dollars are all missing from the billfold section; everything else is still there, though – credit cards, debit card, license, & slips of paper with important information. My feelings now undergo a dramatic transformation. Why did I drop my guard when they got past my initial avoidance strategy? Was it my fear of feeling/seeming racist? Were they just too clever for me? The only answer I’m sure of is to the last question, and it’s a resounding “Yes.”
My feelings get sorted pretty quickly, though. Since I didn’t have much cash in the wallet, it’s no big loss. They were both pleasant and appeared to need money. Most of all, I’m impressed and grateful. Impressed that they so quickly & expertly located & removed my wallet, extracted the money inside, and returned it to its starting place in my front pocket, all unbeknownst to me. And grateful that they only took the money and not the other things that would have created much inconvenience and cost me many hours sending formal notifications, getting replacements, etc. I decide to view them not only as masters of their craft but gentlemen thieves as well – they took only what had more value to them than me, and left what had more value to me than them. In my work as a mediator, I always try to help the parties to a negotiation accomplish this same result in their bargaining with each other. Although I had no say in the outcome of this Rambla encounter, I’m thankful that my adversaries respected this basic principle of a successful transaction.
They also got me thinking back to the trip in 1970 that hooked the 25-year-old me on serious traveling. I spent half a year wandering around South America (including one month in the Amazon jungle on the way to Carnival in Rio), and matched wits one day with a much younger colleague of theirs in Columbia’s black market. In that era before plastic cards, essentially the only way to change money was to go into a bank and exchange your travelers checks or dollars for the local currency at “the official rate of exchange.” That rate in Columbia was a joke, and you could get a multiple of the official rate if you were willing to take a chance on the black market. That involved dealing with shady characters and very stiff fines if you were caught. Necessity made me more of a risk-taker back then, so I found out where one of those markets was located and dressed like a tourist to increase my chances of being solicited. A kid quickly approached and asked if I wanted to change dollars for pesos. He seemed no more than 16, probably too young to be one of the cops that I kept looking out for. When I negotiated a favorable rate of exchange, I figured my few extra years of life experience were putting me in control of this situation, even though it was my first time. He was supposed to give me 890 pesos according to our agreement, and I of course carefully counted the pile of bills he handed me – seven 100 peso bills and the rest in 10’s on top of the bottom 700, but he only gave me a total of 880 pesos. I complained; he counted them quickly and insisted there were 890. I counted them again with the same 10 peso deficit as before; he did likewise and again claimed there were 890 pesos in the pile. I was getting impatient and the 10 peso difference didn’t amount to much, but I didn’t want to be cheated as a matter of principle, especially by a teenager. I insisted he give me the missing 10 pesos, so we wound up doing yet another round of counting, after which he apologized and said I was right. I felt vindicated and triumphant as I watched him place a new 10 peso note on top of the pile. In a gloating tone, I told him that I was one gringo he wouldn’t be able to take advantage of, to which he replied “Si, Señor.” What I didn’t realize until later was that he had deftly palmed five of the 100 peso notes off the bottom in that last round while adding the extra 10 peso note on top. Since he had already tricked me into counting the big pile of bills three times, I didn’t think of doing it a fourth time. I can still see the fresh, unlined face and bright white teeth in the smile that accompanied his “Si, Señor.” It took me a much longer time to get over that con job.
The Catalans I meet are friendly and justifiably proud of their history and culture; some are ardent separatists. They view themselves as the hard-working economic center of Spain and have a strong business presence throughout Europe. Barcelona has opened its doors wide to people from all over the world, visiting, working and walking about. It has the look and feel of an international city. As a solo foreign visitor, I normally am the one who has to start a conversation when I feel like switching from the loner to the social me. But I am pleasantly surprised by two Argentine women shortly after midnight at a crowded rock concert in the Cathedral plaza. My walk back to my hotel from a wild Turkish folk-rocker in another plaza gets interrupted here because of the interesting harmonies I hear coming from Barcelona’s most popular rock group. I’m listening & moving in time to the strong rhythms they’re producing when the two Argentines leave their partying group and approach me to ask some questions. After a few preliminaries (“what do you think of the music?” “where are you from?”...), they get increasingly personal – “what are you doing here?” “how old are you?” do you have a family?” etc. As they pull out my story, their eyes widen in reaction to the traveling fiddler in two eras part. Then I get them to respond to some of my questions. They came to Barcelona from Argentina a few years before when they were in their early 30’s and have jobs as English teachers. They were intrigued to see a grey-haired man enjoying a rock concert after midnight and wanted to learn more. I look around and notice that I appear to have at least twenty years on most of the other people there. Both of them want to see more of the world, and we exchange some life philosophy thoughts before they rejoin their group.
“I knew I would have you as soon as I saw you” Rachelle later said in her delightfully accented English. Our eyes had first momentarily locked at an evening jam session in 1976 during the Fleadh Cheoil, Ireland’s annual celebration of its rich traditional music heritage. She was a university student from Paris, the voluptuous, exotic-looking creation of a French mother & Moroccan father. I thought I was pursuing her during the mating ritual that unfolded when I saw her at the Irish fiddle competition. But she took the lead at several critical moments, and I happily went along. Back then, the combination of music settings and attractive young women often led to romantic adventure (or humbling rejection). No longer an object of desire, I have now become an object of curiosity in such a setting. But I have not been in the hunt for a long time. The woman I love awaits me in Florence. And I am glad that the curiosity of the two Argentine women leads to an interesting conversation.
6. The Italian Siren
My original plan for getting from Barcelona to Italy was to look for a gig as a strolling violinist on a cruise ship headed in that direction. I’d never taken a cruise, mainly because most of the ships seem to be enormous floating hotels, teeming with big eaters and serious shoppers. The more I thought about it, the less attractive that seemed, especially since I’d already had an enjoyable time as a strolling violinist during my younger journeys, trading music for room & board in the high-end hotels of Africa & Asia. Back then I was short on money and long on time, but now I have the means to be selective about which experiences to seek out. We place a premium on how to use the shortening period of time when good health allows us to do what we want.
I have long been intrigued by the idea of going to sea as a ship’s fiddler. A centuries-old tradition, the ship’s fiddler originally played rhythmic tunes so repetitive work like hoisting the anchor could be done in unison. He also performed at the captain's command for festive occasions. He was the ship’s primary source of music and entertainment before technology made him obsolete. Would it be possible to resurrect this quaint tradition in a contemporary setting? What about decadent European aristocrats about to take yet another island-hopping trip on their yachts with easily-bored friends – wouldn’t it be a refreshing change to have a fiddler on board playing tunes and telling stories? As I fantasized how to make it happen, I imagined myself near the end of my stay in Barcelona going down to its docks and spending a day or two doing what I always enjoy doing in beautiful weather by the water – playing my fiddle. I’d need a multi-lingual sign (just like the one for the “musical conversation”) and a simple way to enable my prospective hosts to confirm that I would be an interesting addition rather than a loose-screwed threat to their voyage. That was the impetus to creating the FiddlingAround.net website – I put its web address, which contains my background information, on the sign so they could quietly check me out before welcoming me aboard. I also bought a very small portable chair well suited to dockside music-making.
I scout the docks shortly after arriving in Barcelona and see several yachts, but they look uninhabited and inaccessible. I contact the city’s two yacht clubs with information for posting on their bulletin boards, but get no response. I explain my plan to a Catalan working on his boat, and he says it will be difficult since the peak sailing season is behind us. The only cruise ships in port are the big factory ones. I think about taking the ferry to the island of Majorca and trying my luck there, but some quick research on the web shows me that many of its hotels are closing up in October, and also that all of the island’s boat lines go back to Spain but not on to Italy. There is, however, a convenient overnight ferry from Barcelona to the Italian island of Sardinia, so I book a cabin and look forward to the next leg of this trip.
As the ferry leaves Barcelona further behind, my sense of well-being mixes together with some disappointment that I am not at sea as a ship’s fiddler, and also that my musical conversations there were not at the levels reached with the Indian sitar player and Kenyan folk fiddler in my earlier travels. One purpose of this trip is to seek out opportunities that can create peak experiences. I am happy that life has given me probably more than my share of those but greedy enough to want more. Though time is shorter now, I am more patient. After a good night’s sleep, I am on deck in a warm breeze, admiring the majestic emerald island that, though I have never seen it before, is part of a country that has become my second home.
Alghero, the northwestern Sardinian port, provides a gentle transition because centuries ago this corner of the island was part of Barcelona’s Mediterranean empire. Along with Italian and the Sardinian dialect, Catalan is still spoken here. Though overrun with tourists in the summer, things are pretty quiet now and the days pass pleasantly. But during a walk along the beach, my gaze is drawn to three grossly obese tourists. Two are women in their fifties whose two-piece bathing suits look like colored stripes at the top and bottom of the enormous flabby spheres that are their bellies. They are seated next to an even fatter man, all three voraciously consuming the pile of food and large pitcher of beer on the table between them, occasionally pausing to grunt something at each other in German or use their towels to wipe the sweat dripping from the many folds in their bodies. This visual assault is successfully treated by my next stop, Cagliari, a city that bathes the eyes with her beauty. Cagliari has seen so many civilizations come and go over thousands of years that it is now an extraordinary distillation of Phoenician, Carthaginian, Roman, Arab, Byzantine, Spanish and Italian influences blended together with its own ancient culture. I spend days walking around its streets and beaches, absorbing the mist from its sea and its history.
I enjoy the same kind of pleasant stay as in Alghero; but I am feeling the attraction of nearby Florence. My wife, Giovanna, is directing Smith College's junior year abroad program there this school year, and I miss her warmth and exuberance. Florence is an even older friend, so captivating that I long ago fell in love with her. But the beginning of our relationship was very strange - I insulted her cultural intelligence and she responded with gross irrationality.
I asked Florence to allow me to study violin at her music conservatory. This was a dumb request, proof of the detachment from reason of which a young male is capable. I knew that good conservatories are supposed to put the finishing touches on already highly accomplished classical musicians in their teens. I was a 29 year-old who had only taken lessons for a few years as a kid. In my mid-twenties, I fell under the spell of folk fiddle tunes; and its much simpler technique enabled me to become a decent folk fiddler.
But my classical technique had enormous holes – I couldn’t even draw the bow smoothly from one end to the other, which is the very foundation of playing the instrument. Every down stroke had a scratchy, slightly out of control middle section. What made me think that a classical European conservatory would accept an overage folk fiddler whose every second stroke produced defective sound? It is true that I had an excellent excuse for my deficits. All the violin students in my New Jersey middle school were girls except me. My boy friends teased me for playing a sissy instrument. I was making excellent progress and loved music, but it just wasn’t cool. Too bad. Not then appreciating the enormous power our younger forms thoughtlessly cede to group mentality, I quit.
I was not so naïve as to think that a good excuse would help me get in to the conservatory. In fact, I wasn’t thinking much at all, at least not rationally. Instead, I was reacting to two powerful impulses rooted in emotion and intuition. I wanted a good enough classical technique to play great chamber music well, and I wanted to spend some time living in Italy.
Chamber music is considered an ideal form of musical expression because a small group of individuals converse with each other using a musical dialogue written by the greatest composers, often at the peak of their inspiration. The musical ideas and their development must both be of the highest quality because they are so exposed, and cannot be covered up with big orchestral sound or color. The unsurpassed quality of the string quartet as a vehicle for great music is evident from how quickly it reached perfection in the hands of its early practitioners, Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven, and how consistently it has elicited masterpieces from the best composers of each generation since then.
I occasionally played chamber music but not well and normally the second violin part. When you hear a beautiful melody soaring up into the sky it almost always springs from the bow of the first violinist. For me, that was out of reach. Chamber music was too much a sequence of technical hurdles, and that kept me from bringing it to life. But the glimpses I had of what that might be like provided the strongest impulse to forming this plan. I knew how exhilarating it felt to play folk fiddle with good musicians. My comfort with that easier technique allowed me to focus on shaping the musical sound, giving it line and pulse. I could only imagine what it would be like to do that playing a Beethoven quartet.
The second impulse came from my grandmother. One summer during college I had a construction job near her home in Pennsylvania, so I lived with her. She was a strong peasant woman, who was in her twenties when she arrived in this country from Italy with a fourth grade education, her husband, and the baby daughter who would one day become my mother. They had four more girls, but he was impossible to live with so she threw him out and raised the girls herself. I was the first male to enter this feminine (but definitely not feminist) enclave, and my early life came wrapped in a warm blanket of love and attention from all these women. Since we lived only a few blocks away, I saw my grandmother almost daily, and every Sunday afternoon my aunts & uncles & cousins would gather at her home for good food & company (to be repeated every Sunday evening with my father’s family). By second grade, though, we lived a few hours drive away, so it was good to reestablish daily contact the summer that I worked there.
Culturally, she remained very Italian; the rest of us were Italian-Americans, a different breed. She and I had good talks during dinner and then played briscola, her favorite card game, afterwards. Often, her Italian friends would stop by for animated conversation on the front porch. I couldn’t understand the words, but I definitely felt the warmth and good humor of people very much at ease with each other. Over that summer, the respect and love I had for my grandmother deepened; and I resolved to spend some time living in the country that produced these engaging people. Why not do that and study music at the same time?
So that’s how this Italian music conservatory scheme got concocted. Not because I was well-prepared to do it but rather because I very much wanted to do it. For someone trained in the rational world of law, my request of Florence was a presumptuous and irrational act. For someone with her proud history and high cultural standards, opening her conservatory doors to someone as unqualified as me would be an even more irrational act.
But that’s what happened. Hers was a well-intentioned act, made possible by the egalitarian reforms that ended the widespread social unrest of the late 1960’s and offered virtually universal access for a while to educational opportunities previously reserved primarily for the elite. This elite was playing defense throughout Europe, accused of having privileges for itself and its children that were unfairly denied to others. Access was determined by money. Some asked if that was any different from controlling access through party connections in the authoritarian communist world. Though I did not know it when I knocked on the conservatory door, the rational rules of meritocracy had been temporarily pushed aside in Italy by the ideals of equality and open access.
The road to that door, though, was strewn with disorganization and anxiety. When I asked the Italian Consulate in San Francisco what the application process was, I learned that it was very informal - I filled out a few forms but would have to go to Italy and play a successful audition at the beginning of the school year, probably in October but the date wouldn’t be determined until a month or two before it occurred. This is not the organizational model that a tooth grinding American lawyer wants to deal with. I was quitting a well-compensated position in a large corporate law firm, and glad to be leaving behind a job that made me feel both guilty and bored. But what if I closed out my life in San Francisco, went to Florence and then didn’t get into the conservatory? I had some fall-back travel ideas, but most of all I wanted to become a better violinist.
From the outset, the omens were mixed. I got an inexpensive flight to Luxembourg and realized after a bus ride from the airport to the city that I no longer had my passport and travelers checks, my primary source of money other than the small amount I had changed for local currency at the airport. I retraced my steps and luckily found my passport and travelers checks on the same airport counter top where I had carelessly left them more than an hour earlier. An internal Freudian voice wondered if my subconscious was telling me that my plan was so foolhardy that I might as well let someone else put the money I had saved to better use. The only thing I hadn’t provided was the pen to sign the checks.
Music is what pushed me onto that plane, so I decided to put my romanticized notions about its power to an immediate test. I went to a nice park near the center of town and started to play fiddle tunes. Two students asked if they could sit down and listen; and would I like to have a glass of wine with them? After a few more tunes, some more Luxembougers joined us; one jammed along with his harmonica while others danced, which in turn attracted a tourist from Alabama who kept saying “Golleee!” Our spirited group conversed mainly with gestures, played and danced some more and then parted ways with much smiling and hand-shaking. It was encouraging to see the fiddle exert such a magnetic attraction in my first effort at playing abroad. My earlier anxiety was replaced by a renewed optimism. But that again gave way to more anxiety the next day when I was told by bureaucrats at the Italian Consulate that my Italian student visa could only be granted in Italy after the conservatory officially accepted me. They were very pleasant, but it got me worrying about my audition; the Appalachian fiddle tunes that drew together my group in the park wouldn’t do anything for me with the maestri who would determine my fate in Florence.
I spent several weeks making my way through France and northern Italy. If I wasn’t accepted, the fallback scenario was for me at least to do some quality traveling, and this was to see what that might be like. I learned about the music festival in Besancon, France and bought a ticket for an all-Vivaldi program by one of Italy’s best baroque orchestras. In the large church of a small town, I sat down next to a striking French woman, late 30’s but dressed younger, black hair, dark eyes and black clothes. We started a simple conversation, but she saw that French was a real struggle for me. She didn’t speak English but had picked up elementary Italian from her travels there. Though I had studied that language for the prior two years, that was pretty much still my level, too, so we switched to Italian and carried on nicely - it’s easy to converse when you both speak slowly and use simple words & constructions . When we went to a café for a glass of wine, I began to fantasize about where this might wind up. She was an attractive free spirit; but she looked forlorn, and was reluctant to talk about herself. There was a deep melancholy in her voice and eyes, an air of tragedy about her. It all felt very mysterious and romantic, but she only briefly considered my proposal for passing the night before rejecting it. I had been excited, hopeful - why wasn’t she feeling the same way about this? We parted ways with a short hug at the main road going through the town; she to hitch a truck ride to her home in southern France, and I to take a late night train.
I missed the train, but saw the concert’s mandolin soloist waiting on an almost deserted platform. I complimented him on his performance, he told me he was really a lawyer from Milan, and we then launched into a lively discussion on our efforts to combine the two professions. He loved music and therefore didn’t mind that his colleagues thought him a bit odd. I liked his smile and easy manner, but after he got on his 2 AM train and I waved good-bye, the mystery woman returned to my mind. Too exhausted to walk into town and look for a hotel, I made my way to a nearby field, crawled into my sleeping bag and looked up at the sky. It was gently illuminated by a bright moon more than half full. I thought of her, what might have been, and gazed at the stars. Although it had been more than a decade since I left the Catholic Church, the heavens consoled me that night, though in a different way.
Wine tasting in the Burgundy region and several days on the French Riviera provided a pleasant distraction from what was often somewhere in the back of my mind, the looming audition. On the plane ride over, a nice conversation with a French schoolteacher named Rosalie turned into an invitation to visit the Riviera home where she lived with her husband and young son. A German friend of theirs named Irmgart was also visiting. While the others went to work, Irmgart and I took off in her car for a beautiful, isolated nude beach behind St. Tropez where I made my au naturale debut in the midst of sand, crystal clear water and charming coves, relieved that a newly exposed body appendage remained naturally at rest and unburned by the sun.
A few days later I was in Italy, happy to finally be in a place where language presented less of a barrier and fascinated by the hand gestures which accompany spoken Italian. One evening in a café, I needed both careful observation and confirmation from one of the locals to distinguish a table where a group of deaf people met regularly to converse in sign language; hand and arm movements at the other tables were at only a slightly lesser level of intensity. I went to a festival of avant-guard music in Como, still not knowing when the school year would begin, and met some conservatory students there who told me it would start the following week.
And so, eager and anxious, I arrived in Florence. As I walked around looking for a place to stay, a pigeon shit on my head. I later learned that Italians consider that a sign of good luck, but it didn’t seem that way at the time. Literally shity hair doesn’t make a good first impression when you’re looking for lodgings, so I went to the public rent-a-shower at the train station and washed it out. All the places I looked at were either full or too expensive until I found a pensione that was nice but packed with English-speaking tourists. I wanted a place that would force me to learn more Italian, but checked in and planned to continue my search the next day after going to the conservatory.
I was pleased that the forms I prepared in San Francisco had been received and was told to return the next day for an audition. I learned then that a new director had recently been appointed, things were “a little disorganized” and that my audition was being postponed until the following week. A few days later, I was waiting for the bus when an elderly woman noticed the violin slung over my shoulder and enthusiastically exclaimed “Ah, la musica – e’ la piu bella cosa che ci sia! (Ah, Music – the most beautiful thing there is!)” Her poetic outburst encouraged me that I had chosen well, but this dream still had to get past one major hurdle.
Roberto Michelucci, the violin maestro I had been assigned to was off concertizing in other parts of Europe, so it was two weeks before I finally had my audition. I began in carefully rehearsed but still hesitant Italian explaining to him a little about my background and that I had developed some bad habits in my bowing hand. It turned out that there was no need to lower expectations or even to be anxious. He said I had a very good ear and that almost all my problems involved the bow, but that these were correctable if I was willing to work very hard. That’s all there was to it – I was now officially a violin student at the Florence Conservatory because of a temporarily reformed admissions policy that I still was not aware of. I felt relieved and happy. It was only much later that I appreciated the paradox in this fantasy plan of mine. If it had been the narrower one of studying music in an American conservatory, that would have been impossible. But naively expanding the fantasy to have it take place in Italy is what enabled it to happen.
Each violin maestro had six or so students; at least one of them was a young beginner who went to a regular elementary school and also came to the conservatory for music lessons. Enough of them quit to raise the question – is this a good use of such high quality teaching talent? But then the truly gifted are shaped from the very beginning by an accomplished maestro. Inefficient, however …..
Another example of inefficiency but without any such supporting rational was that no effort was made to match up the best students with the best teachers. I provided strong proof of that, something I realized even before my first meeting with Michelucci. I heard a recording of his on the radio and then listened to the announcer describe it as a prior year winner of the Grand Prix du Disque, the classical music world’s highest award. When I asked a conservatory employee if that was the same person I had been assigned to study with, I also learned that he had been the soloist with “I Musici” when the revered conductor, Arturo Toscanini, called it the best chamber orchestra in Europe. He was in fact the star of the violin faculty. In his early 50’s, he was in his prime; and though he lacked the international fame of violinists like Jasha Heifitz and Isaac Stern, he commanded the stage with great musicality and complete technical fluency. Some mathematicians find beauty in randomness; I found a magnificent maestro that way.
Despite my limited skills in both the language and the instrument, we got along very well from the outset. He had an artistic temperament but learned patience as a teacher from being required by conservatory policy to occasionally work with the young beginners. He thus didn’t seem to mind having to start me from scratch with the bow, showing me a better way to hold it and explaining what’s involved in a good stroke. I knew my older, habit-stiffened muscles wouldn’t learn these fluid mechanics in the naturally assimilative way a youngster does, so I tried to compensate by using what I did have, the analytic mental tools of the lawyer. I was constantly asking questions, trying to better understand the reasons for doing things this way rather than that. Michelucci loved that approach. He frequently told all his students that a violinist plays with his brain, not with his hands and arms, so his philosophy of the instrument and my analytic method were well suited to each other. His younger students learned by watching his demonstrations and doing what he told them. I added the “why” and other questions that he welcomed and thoughtfully responded to. He also seemed to enjoy the conversations on non-musical subjects that we occasionally had after the other students had left.
It’s nice when you have a great teacher that you also get along with well, but I still had a major bowing problem to fix. The sound produced by a bow on a string tells the world the internal state of the player as nothing else can. That’s because you have two highly elastic materials, the string and the bow hairs (from a horse’s tail), in contact with each other. This extraordinary suppleness between the string and bow hair means that even the slightest changes in bow pressure, position or movement will all be heard in the sound produced. This gives the player of a bowed instrument a unique ability to create the subtlest of nuances and an expressive power that has fascinated music-lovers all over the world for centuries. But it also means that any imbalance or tension will also be heard in the sound. There was no way for me to cover up the slight loss of control in the middle of each downbow - a smooth stoke was absolutely essential to good sound production. Was this just from a bad habit I had formed as a kid? Or was this a sign that I was out of balance internally, too tightly wound to be capable of the relaxed fluidity that beautifully bowed sound requires?
There was no denying that the compulsive world of law school and lawyers that I was leaving behind had attracted and helped shape the competitive, tooth-grinding person who now wanted more than anything a smooth musical stroke. I believed that would be possible, but Michelucci advised me not to expect too much at first; correcting a problem as long ingrained as this would take a great deal of effort and patience.
7. Blood Relations
Though I look forward to their visit, I know I can never pay back what I owe them because it is a debt beyond number. They have not been to Florence since they visited me in the tiny apartment of a struggling music student 35 years before, when I slept on a hard marble floor so they could have my bed. As then, they bring what they have raised and made – the vegetables, eggs, cheeses, liqueurs, chickens, and pork products. They no longer make their own wine; they are trying to lessen their chores as the years pass. Carla apologizes for not bringing more as all the empty spaces in our refrigerator fill up. Her husband Ricardo almost never travels by train, preferring to stay in the valley just below L’Aquila where he was born. But the devastating earthquake of a year before and their son Sergio’s impending divorce have seriously beaten up their traditional sense of home and family.
I first knew them as my grandmother’s nephew and niece, but they have welcomed me into their home so often that they have become my Italian uncle and aunt. At least, that’s the way I think of them, though they are only 10 years older than me and are actually second cousins. I learned from their example the virtues of self-sufficiency - planting & harvesting with them, feeding the chickens, rabbits, sheep and pigs, making wine, prosciutto, and ricotta cheese. Like all my other relatives there, they built their own home, methodically and patiently, moving to the next step only when there was enough money to buy high quality materials. It can take the better part of a decade. An extra floor was prepared but left unfinished for when their son married. They were surprised to learn I had never done these things. I was surprised at how rooted their lives were in centuries-old customs, and how far removed a single generation in the United States had transported me away from all that.
I have long carried the guilt of a man who can never reciprocate. Riccardo and Carla will not fly, making a visit to my New England home impossible. So I host them at our Florence apartment, with the spacious guest bedroom that didn’t exist before. Conversation is easy and familiar, often reminiscent.
“Your first visit is when I learned how much more seriously Italians take their Labor Day holiday (“May Day”) than we do in America. Everything shut down, even the city buses that ran on all the other holidays.”
“Yes,” Carla says, “I remember the long walks to the city center and back that day. Riccardo’s feet both had blisters afterwards!”
Riccardo smiles as he recalls sitting in my only chair, with Carla soaking his feet in warm water and salt. When they left the next day back then, was it because of his aching feet? Or had they noticed I was sleeping in a sleeping bag on a floor in the empty room between the bedroom & kitchen and didn’t want to inconvenience me? I resolved this visit would last longer, and early on give them a quick tour of the apartment so they see that it has comfortable bedrooms for all of us. I also make liberal use of cabs & buses as we tour the city over the next few days. I try to be an informative tour guide, but Riccardo makes it poignantly clear when he’s had enough.
“Pietro, after awhile these palaces and cathedrals all look alike to me. I don’t know much about history or art - I only finished elementary school! Don’t waste any more money.”
The days end with a long dinner, and the two prepared by my wife are more enthusiastically consumed than the one in the middle that I make, built around the toughest pork chops I’d ever encountered. The man who showed me many years before how they butcher their pigs, explains why.
“Pietro, when you went to the market, you picked the nice-looking pink chops?”
“Yes”
“They look better, but the best-tasting chops come from a different part of the pig.” He points to a part of his back. “They’re more tender.”
He looks back at his chop, takes a deep breath and presses hard on his knife, determinedly sawing his way through this highly resilient meat. I see a metaphor for his life, but merely apologize for my misguided selection at the butcher shop.
After dinner, we remain at the table, our conversation now accompanied by fruit, nuts and small glasses of the liqueur Carla made from local herbs. I know from earlier phone conversations that the devastating earthquake one year earlier had dramatically transformed their lives, and am eager to learn more about it.
“What was that first night like?”
“Our animals had been nervous all evening, and the loud noise of the first shock woke us up,” Carla says. “It made the house shake. The second one came a few minutes later and was even stronger. Sergio came down from upstairs. It was cold but the two of us went outside; we were afraid the house would fall down. Riccardo wouldn’t leave – he just stayed in bed. Stubborn!”
“I thought we’d be ok inside,” says Riccardo, without convincing any of us. I wonder why he stayed in the house. Perhaps when you’ve built it yourself, seen all the concrete and iron in its structural elements, invested years of your work and that of your brothers, made it the center of your life, a place you almost never leave overnight, “house” takes on a different meaning for you. I was there for a few days helping out while they built a younger brother’s house, amazed by the solidity of their traditional construction practices, but doubt that faith in the strength of what he had built provided a full explanation for his staying inside. This was an irrational act by a man close to nature in the face of one of nature’s most powerful forces. A few hours later, after still more shocks, Riccardo reconsidered and joined his wife and son outside.
About three hundred people died in the earthquake. I ask about the response of the government, and hear them describe it as uncharacteristically swift and efficient.
Carla - “By the next evening, the civilian authorities and army had organized food distribution centers, and tents were set up for sleeping. The food was good and the tents were heated.”
Riccardo - “Berlusconi [the controversial right-wing prime minister] said his government would give us the money to rebuild our homes and they did. They started sending steel containers to live in during reconstruction a few days later.”
I had read about accusations of corruption, and ask him “Didn’t Berlusconi give the lucrative reconstruction contracts to his friends?”
“Some people say that but I don’t care. He got the job done, not like the big earthquake a few years ago in a region down south when the left was in power. They took a long time to do hardly anything – who knows where the money wound up. We expect our politicians to be corrupt. What counts is if they get the job done. Usually in Italy they don’t; but Berlusconi did.”
I think of how often my salt-of-the-earth relatives have provided a counterbalance to the opinions of my Florentine friends, almost all of whom lean decidedly to the left, even the wealthy lawyers. Regardless of political orientation, Italians share a deep cynicism, the result of a civilization that, as it evolved through the millennia, has seen the very best and chillingly worst of which humanity is capable. In Florence, I feel carried away by the flights of artistic and intellectual imagination so evident everywhere. With my relatives in the mountains of the Abruzzi, however, I return to a reality rooted in peasant traditions and, above all, in experience.
The first time I met them was a true test of family. It was over the Christmas holidays after my arrival in Florence to study at the conservatory. I had moved into a small Florentine rooming house that fall and began to develop a feeling for Italian family life from the owners, a very friendly middle-aged couple who lived there with their two children. Signora and Signore Taiuti spoke no English, and most of their eight boarders were Italian. It was an ideal living arrangement for me – learning their language and way of life, inexpensive, a bountiful daily meal included, normally with all twelve of us at the table for one to two hours of good food and animated conversation. Becoming fluent in a new language is hard at 29, especially when your mind hasn’t already been thoroughly exercised by successfully doing it before. High school Latin and traveler’s Spanish showed me I didn’t have a special talent for it. Certainly, fluency would be required if I expected to develop genuine relationships with Italians and enter their culture. Most of my day was spent on music study, a solitary activity. But I almost always made room for an hour or more of reading Italian or learning grammar, and often listened to news and discussions on radio or TV.
Speaking a new tongue has a deceptively low initial hurdle. You can pretty easily learn the tourist talk because most of it is simple questions to elicit simple answers. Wow – I can get directions and other useful information, and be courteous to boot by just making some memorized sound combinations! But to really talk with someone, you must study a language more seriously, especially its grammar. Once you learn enough words and can fit them within a few verb tenses and some basic rules, you can convey meaning. You control the sound-making in speaking, but not in understanding; and so the second hurdle is enormous – how to make sense of that flood of new sounds you can get in return, especially in a country with talkative people. Understanding – what a challenge!
By the time I went to my relatives, I was well beyond tourist talk and could sustain a social conversation as long as the comments and questions were uncomplicated. And I was willing to guess, whether speaking or listening, though always with a feeling of discomfort. What if I misunderstood and responded with something inappropriate, perhaps highly embarrassing? But guessing was a necessary step. Otherwise, you’d stand still, waiting for a level of comfort from study alone that is not attainable without first taking your chances with experience.
L’Aquila - a former fortress city, the highest in the Appenine spine of Italy, set in the valley below its imposing summit, the Grand Sasso (“big rock”). There is a solidity here that has spread to the people from their surroundings. They are short of stature, but with the sturdiness that comes from broad bodies and wide faces, close to the ground. Surrounded by solidity - yet the earth here has violently shaken itself with crippling force, each time unexpectedly (though the animals sense its approach), forcing an acknowledgment of overwhelming, uncontrollable power even where everything seems to us most strong.
There is a resilience here in the face of adversity. My grandmother’s sister sent her husband Domenico and a middle period son to pick me up at the train station. Domenico lost an eye in a mishap many years before; in place of a patch, he had scar tissue covering the socket, squarely set in his smiling face. I smiled back, we shook hands and exchanged some pleasantries.
“You’re Angela’s grandson?”
“Yes. Hello, it’s so good to meet you.”
“Welcome. This is my son, Dino.”
Especially when compared to his very lively father, Dino was a man whose appearance suggested some slowness of mind. He responded with a string of sounds so mumbled I had no chance of comprehension, which however did not keep me from speaking to him.
“Nice to meet you, too. Your face reminds me of my grandmother.”
Dino again mumbled unintelligible sounds, then smiled nicely.
“Aha…” I said.
More undecodeable sounds from Dino, followed by that unfeigned smile.
“Yes…” I responded.
Normally, pleasantries are no problem, but Dino was a master mumbler. He had such a gentle laugh (also mumbled) and cordial demeanor, however, that even when I didn’t have a clue what he was saying, an occasional smile or affirmative nod seemed safe. I often did that then. Of course, our conversation could easily have gone:
“Nice to meet you, too. Your face reminds me of my grandmother.”
Unintelligible sounds
“Sorry, I didn’t understand.”
Unintelligible sounds
“Excuse me, but can you please repeat that?”
Unintelligible sounds
“Sorry.”
That would be the honest way to handle not only extreme situations such as this, but also the cases of partial comprehension I routinely experienced even with clearly enunciating Italians. Between the embarrassment possibly resulting from faking understanding and the embarrassment from repeatedly admitting I was still incapable of consistent comprehension, I usually chose to take my chances with the former. I preferred to keep the conversation moving forward in the hope I would better understand the next sentences. That would often make obvious at least the subject matter; with luck, all the content too. Instead of bringing everything to a grinding halt with honesty, I gambled.
We drove in Dino’s car to the old family farmhouse five minutes outside the city. This visit started with my grandmother writing her younger sister, Angela Maria, who now stood before me.
“Ciao, Pietro – welcome to our home.”
“Ciao – thank you, Zia (Aunt).”
I was struck by her resemblance to my grandmother as we exchanged the alternating cheek kisses that serve as the common Italian greeting. We were in the sparsely furnished large room that served as the dining & living room, surrounded by more than a dozen smiling faces, all double kissed and greeted during the blur of the next several minutes. The enthusiasm and warmth, though not all the words, came readily through; and I did manage to figure out that the family plot provided a home to the families of three of Angela Maria & Domenico’s five children, including an assortment of grandchildren.
“Please sit here. You must be hungry after the long train ride,” Angela Maria said, as Carla placed a dish of soup before me.
“Oh, thank you. I ate on the train, but yes, I’ll try some.” In fact, I wasn’t at all hungry. The train arrived around 9 PM, and I had already eaten two sandwiches on board a little earlier. But I knew how important food was in Italian culture and didn’t want to refuse their hospitality. They had all already eaten dinner, so I was the only one eating, trying simultaneously to respond to the questions and comments coming from all around.
“Here’s a picture of your grandmother during her last visit ten years ago.”
“She hasn’t changed much since. Still looks in charge. She sends her greetings to all of you.”
“Here – have some home-made pasta.”
“I’m pretty full. But it really tastes good!”
The food was excellent, but as I ate the pasta I realized that my stomach was rapidly running out of room.
“How do you like Florence? What is it like in America? Do you have a family? How is….”
This was the kind of simple conversation I had already mastered, but it was harder tonight. They often used words from their Abruzzese regional dialect that were different from the Italian words I expected. However, I felt comfortable guessing because they were all so friendly. Zia Angela Maria was especially sweet and soft-spoken, and I realized that her resemblance to my grandmother was only physical. I wondered if they had different personalities growing up together in Italy, determining which of them would be drawn to cross the ocean in search of something better, or if instead the challenges of immigrant life produced the assertiveness in the older sister that the younger one lacked.
“Have some of our chicken and salad from the garden.”
“Thanks, but I’m really too full.”
“You’ll enjoy it – it’s good!”
Before I could protest again, the plate was in front of me. Not wishing to offend, I did my best to eat the food though I was now moving well past the threshold of pain. When Dino’s wife Giuseppina placed yet another dish in front of me, I realized I had to take a more dramatic defensive step. I had been using the word “pieno” which I knew meant “full”, but that obviously wasn’t working. I really felt stuffed, and that sensation hatched my new plan. I had already learned that there are many Italian adjectives that have the same base as in English, but with “ato” at the end instead of “ed” – governato=governed, privilegiato=privileged, guidato=guided. If I was stuck for an adjective, I sometimes tried an English word and Italianized it by adding “ato” at the end. I felt stuffed and so told them earnestly that I was “stufato.” I felt comfortable taking a chance with that word because I remembered hearing it used in Florence, though I didn’t remember the context or know its meaning. It definitely produced an effect – the food was taken away, the festive conversation ended and shortly thereafter, people began saying “Good night” to me as Riccardo led me up the stairs to show me my bedroom.
What had I said? When I saw the somewhat startled expressions on a few of their faces, I quickly followed up “stufato” by saying again how “pieno” I was, simultaneously patting my belly; but it felt like the damage had already been done and it would probably be futile to attempt further explanation. I normally carried a little dictionary in my back pocket, but I had forgotten to bring it with me for this trip. With a mixture of curiosity and anxiety, I flipped through its pages as soon as I returned to my room in Florence a few days later:
"Stufato – adj. bored, annoyed."
Notwithstanding, my relatives invited me back a few months later for Easter – a fact which amply demonstrates how seriously the family bond is taken in this country. And we had some good laughs when I explained how I came to such a maladapted word choice on my first evening in their midst.
“What must you have been thinking about me?” I asked.
“It was an odd thing to say,” commented Marcello, one of Riccardo’s younger brothers, using the mischievous tone that was often accompanied by a twinkle in his eyes. He had both the quickest smile and mind among the brothers.
“But you all were so nice to me, taking turns inviting me for meals with your families, showing me how to make pasta ...”
Making taglatelli was pretty easy during that first visit, mixing the flour, water and eggs, working the dough, flattening it with the rolling pin and cutting it into the long, thin strips that go so well with tomato sauce and parmesan cheese. On another day I ventured into the risky world of gnocchi – too much potato and they become lead sinkers, too much water and they turn into a gluey mess. Under the guidance of Zia Angela Maria and Carla, the gnochhi I made were well-received.
“Complementi, Pietro.”
“Very good!”
“Indeed!”
That made me cocky. I announced I would make them on my own the next day, followed the same procedures as before, and produced a slimy pile of little turd-shaped inedibles; no one, including me, had more than a spoonful.
“Don’t feel so bad, Pietro. Good gnocchi are hard to make. It’s a very fussy form of pasta; even the weather can affect it!”
Joining them in the butchering of Riccardo’s pig required getting past some queasiness. I didn’t like the idea of assisting in the killing of an animal. I wasn’t even comfortable with the idea of watching it. But I ate meat. Why not directly confront what that necessarily implies, in the traditional peasant manner, far from the industrial-strength procedures that isolate us from what we eat. If I’m going to eat meat, I should be aware of what that means, look it straight in the eye. Most of what you eat here you either plant and then harvest, or raise feed and then kill. If it’s a chicken, you break its neck with your hands; if it’s a pig, calf, rabbit or lamb, you slit its throat with a knife.
The pig is quite an intelligent animal. That much I surmised when I heard its apprehensive squeals as the three brothers and Sergio, Riccardo’s son, approached its pen. They tied the pig with some difficulty because of its agitated, forceful movements. Carla brought out the knife and a large pan which would soon catch its blood. Though the pig had never before seen an animal slaughtered and couldn’t see (nor would it have recognized) the butcher’s tools, it fought frantically the entire twenty meters between the pen and the pan, forcing the men to drag its more than 300 pounds the whole way. Its squeals had now become shrieks, loud and desperate. How did it know? These men the pig was now resisting with all its strength were the same ones it was accustomed to seeing peacefully gathered around it; two of them regularly cleaned its pen and brought it food every day. Perhaps that was a clue – the pig is not fed the last few days so its intestines can empty, making them easier to clean for the sausages and salamis they will encase. But if you were hungry and hadn’t seen the person who fed you for awhile, wouldn’t you be happy to see that person approaching you again? Those early squeals I heard, however, were clearly not of delight – how did it figure things out so quickly?
The pig was close to the pan when Marcello slipped another rope around its body and the men pulled it to the ground on its side. Riccardo thrust the point of the dagger into its neck, then again, opening the wound so the blood could drain. The pig continued its shrieks, violently kicked with its legs, then less so as its life flowed out, the stream of blood gradually turning into dark red droplets, dripping into the pan. After the convulsions ended, there were some muffled sounds and heaving attempts at breathing, then all was still. At least, the scene I saw became still, but it was replayed in those days after Christmas throughout the region, throughout the centuries.
The pig was carried to the garage where it was hung upside down, cut lengthwise, and its organs removed. A few days later, we gathered in the room where I first met my relatives and spent the entire day turning that pig into prosciutto, salami, sausages, pork chops and many other cuts. The blood had coagulated and was used for making the special type of sausage that carries its name. Nothing was thrown away except the eyes; the many odd scraps remaining were ground up and vigorously boiled in the fireplace kettle on their way to becoming a form of scrapple which looks very unappetizing in its natural grey color, though not for that reason alone.
We all shared a celebratory dinner at Riccardo’s house that evening, enjoying the choicest cuts just brought in from his wood-burning grill. The bread they made in the outdoor brick oven was being dipped into a large dish filled with a liquid.
“What’s that?”
“Melted pig fat – we always have it the first night. Here, dip some bread into it – it’s good.”
“Don’t you normally use olive oil for that?”
“Yes, but this is a special occasion.”
It did taste good, and I fortunately was still years away from learning about cholesterol, though I could tell from watching the liquid slowly thicken as it cooled and then turn into a mix of white grease-spots in yellowish sludge that this was probably not healthy. And the pork chops? If I were at all inclined toward vegetarianism, what I experienced on the day the pig was killed should have pushed me over the line. But the chops from the grill smelled great and tasted still better. Even the revulsion of mind and heart can be trumped by the pleasure of the senses.
Three of Zio and Zia’s four sons lived on the family parcel. A daughter, Gina, had moved to her husband’s village when they married almost twenty years before. The youngest son, Parisi, left for Rome, an hour and a half away, when he got a job there as a policeman. He married a Roman woman, who was treated cordially but not really liked by the family because of what they called her city “airs.” All the other spouses were from nearby villages. As his sons came of age, Zio added simple, small apartments to the original farmhouse, combining his mason’s skills with the construction abilities that were possessed to one extent or another by various relatives and friends. Dino and Marcello still lived in these apartments, each with a wife and two children; but they were slowly saving enough money to build their own homes on small plots within the original family parcel, as Riccardo had recently done. They had helped him build his house, and he would reciprocate later on.
This generation had learned the peasant’s broad range of life skills from their parents, but also had jobs. Riccardo used to make money as a mason, and now worked in a unionized factory that made telephones. Dino was a delivery driver and Marcello an orderly in a hospital; neither earned much, but because Marcello’s wife Adriana also worked in the hospital, they were able to start building their home before older brother Dino. The main difference from the prior generation was that the building materials purchased were of a higher quality, especially the marble, and money was sometimes paid in exchange for more complicated labor provided by friends, such as electrical work, though often that too was bartered. Relatives were never paid, but they definitely kept score of who had done what for whom, creating the risk of resentments later on. My initial visits with my Italian relatives, however, were bathed in such warm family spirit that I thoroughly romanticized that part of their lives. And no wonder. I had long, engaging meals with each of the four families there, getting to know them better in smaller groups. Moving around at mealtime lessened the stress I often felt when conversing in this still uncomfortable language because I could talk about the same subjects and ask similar questions. When your repertory is limited, it’s good to have different groups to play through it with.
At first, I was worried about not having enough in common with them to have extended conversations. But that concern was quickly erased.
“Zia, what was it like when you & my grandmother were growing up?”
“Angelica was smart, so our parents let her stay in school until fourth grade. The rest of us left after second or third grade to work in the home and on the farm. There was no electricity or indoor plumbing then. We ate more potatoes than pasta – pasta was more of a luxury before Mussolini’s time. When we got older, our parents talked with other parents about what marriages might be made. But that was not the only way couples came together. We had an older sister, and normally, you wouldn’t marry someone until after your older sister was married. But our older sister was a little lame. That made others less interested in her. Besides, your grandmother had a mind of her own. When your grandfather came courting from the next village over, she married him. A few years later, after your mother was born, they went to America.”
“Did you ever think of going to America?”
“No, no,” she said after a gentle laugh. “My home is here. “
I smiled and looked at her husband.
“Zio Domenico, what happened here during World War II?”
“It was a dangerous time. We went in the cellar when we heard the American planes overhead, but they dropped most of their bombs on the cities. The German soldiers were very bad. They took what they wanted and didn’t care at all about us. If they were angry, they could be ruthless. And the Italian partisans weren’t much better.”
“But I’m reading a book now that describes the partisans as heroic fighters for the resistance.”
“What heroes! They took food from us and other things they needed, then went back to hiding in the mountains, attacking the Germans. When they killed a German soldier, the partisans returned to their hiding places and we suffered the consequences. The Germans randomly gathered up the nearest Italian villagers. They shot and killed ten of us for each German killed by the partisans.”
“”Weren’t you afraid?”
“I watched out for myself and my family.”
“Did you ever go hungry?”
“Life was harder, but we kept growing our food and had enough to eat. Many of the people who had moved to the city before the war came back. Sometimes wealthy people from Rome came here, trying to buy food, but what good was their money then!”
He shook his head, his voice trailing off as he added “It was a difficult time…”
I tried to imagine what it must have been like. I had grown up in safe, prospering post-war America. What I knew about war came mainly from books. But this direct, dramatic testimony hit me in a way that book words could not.
Zio was quiet for awhile, his eyes cast down. Then he looked up and asked “Pietro, how do you support yourself studying music in Florence?”
“I saved as much money as I could working as a lawyer for almost two years and living very simply. I also live very simply in Florence, but it’s fine because I love studying music. I started out in an inexpensive pensione, and will move next month to share a small attic apartment with a Sicilian tailor and a student from Syria. It doesn’t have central heat or hot water, so it’s very cheap; but I’ll have my own room and will buy a small electric heater. I also heard about a special dining hall for conservatory and fine arts students. I can get government subsidized meal tickets for about 25 cents each and will start eating there when I leave the pensione.”
Though I had only met this financially rather poor peasant relative a few days before, he looked at me with concern in his eyes and earnestly said “If you need money for your studies in Florence, tell me. I’ll give you the money.”
When I wasn’t learning about family matters or history, I was hearing from different relatives about how to make wine or harvest crops or do a hundred other practical things that my ancestors had done for hundreds of years, basic life skills they took for granted that had been completely lost to me in a single generation. I was determined to soak up as much of their life experience as I could. I suspected (correctly) that I was not ambitious enough to integrate their skills into my daily life, but recognized (also correctly) that here was a worthwhile opportunity among good, unpretentious people.
The central role of food in Italian culture meant that meals were almost always special occasions. The appetite-stimulating antipasto was usually followed by homemade soup or that marvelous blending of taste and practicality called pasta. Next up, normally, was a grilled meat and vegetables or salad, then local fruit, cheeses and nuts, finished off with an herbal or walnut based liqueur, purportedly to help in the digestion of all that came before. Virtually everything that entered the mouth was either planted or raised and nourished with something else grown by them. Simple ingredients, basic flavors – olive oil, garlic, tomatoes, salt … The only weak link in this food chain was their wine. Because of the high mountain elevation, the growing season was too short for the grapes to properly mature, lowering not only the alcohol content but also the flavor of the wine. Years later, after harvesting the grapes and making wine with them, I came to believe that its simple purity at least partially compensated for its weak body. You could also wash down more of their sturdy food without getting drunk. There were of course no sulfites, just juice from the grapes in wooden barrels, maturing into the clear wine they would begin drinking after a few months, lasting until the next year’s wine was ready. There was a cyclical nature to the entire food enterprise, genuine and self-sustaining.
Whichever of the families I ate supper with, the whole group eventually wound up in Zio & Zia’s living/dining room afterwards in front of the fireplace, the crackling sound of dry wood punctuating the simultaneous conversations that invariably developed. We didn’t gather round the fireplace, as I do with my family, because it is esthetically and emotionally pleasing. Instead, the purpose was much more practical - it was a warm corner in a cold mountain. For festive celebrations such as Christmas, the pig dinner and New Years Eve, we all gathered at Riccardo’s or at his parent’s. Riccardo’s kitchen/dining room also had a fireplace in the corner where we would roast chestnuts after the meal and play briscola (which I already knew from playing with my grandmother) or scopa (which took some time to learn because it used a different deck of cards, with Neapolitan symbols). At midnight on New Year’s eve, the men and boys set off small firecrackers, while Riccardo and Sergio shot rifles into the air. I played several folk fiddle tunes and got some of them dancing with a few tarantellas.
Besides its entertainment value, music gave me a break from the heavy concentration required by conversation in Italian. Since I was a conservatory student, my relatives understood that I needed to practice my violin for a few hours each day; but I don’t think they realized how important that time alone was for me. I needed to recharge, away from words and the pressure to understand and respond. They were always pleasant, sometimes delightful; but I’m not built for continuous socializing, and usually took a nap after lunch, though I almost never fell asleep. There were also some day trips to smaller villages nearby, to have dinner with Zia’s daughter Gina, her husband and three children, and to meet Anselmo, my grandmother’s youngest brother and make the rounds of more relatives. Each stop involved something to eat and a glass of wine, filled to the rim – “if not, your sons will become priests” their local expression warned.
It was perhaps to be expected that their young American relative, raised in an individualistic society that prized specialization in higher education and beyond, would find much to admire in this collaborative way of life, still so close to nature and self-sufficient. But I recognized even during these first contacts that it came at a high price. Despite their healthy organic diet, they all looked older than their years, with leathery, furrowed skin. The endless chores and outdoor work took a heavy toll on their bodies and minds. None of the three brothers’ children seemed interested in preparing for a university education, though Italian society offered it free of charge. For my train ride back to Florence, they filled my bags with their food and my mind with much to think about.
8. The Trembling Bow in Its Second Apparition, with a Return to Its First
I call the cab that will take Riccardo, Carla and me to the Florence train station for their train back to L’Aquila. They have stayed the five days that I hoped they would, and our time together has for the most part gone very well. I don’t have home-grown food to give them, but the results of my earlier struggles with their language enable me to tell them with fluency and sincerity how grateful I am to them for everything they’ve done over the years, how glad I am that I could host them for a change. We exchange warm embraces on the platform. They step onto the local train which will take twice as long to get them home, but at a much lower price than the high-speed alternatives they quickly dismissed from consideration. Sergio has taken care of the daily chores that normally structure their time in lives otherwise lived in large part outside of time.
I think of the routines we will now return to, and of how different mine is because my grandmother chose to leave theirs ninety years earlier. A light sleeper, I normally awake early but instead of feeding the animals, listen to news and commentary on Italian radio. During a typical day here I read, write, play my violin and walk around Florence, occasionally visiting with friends. I especially enjoy going to concerts at Teatro della Pergola, a beautiful seventeenth century gem that is said to be the oldest opera house in Italy. Its intimate size now makes it more appropriate for chamber music, and I have been looking forward to tonight’s concert featuring Salvatore Accardo playing in the string quartet he formed with the ex-student who became his second wife. He long ago established a major international reputation by flawlessly playing the fiendishly difficult concertos and caprices of Paganini. He had dazzled me decades earlier with the extraordinary musicality, rich tone, and technical mastery of his performances with Florence’s symphony orchestra. His musical personality was so strong that he deceived my ears for the one and only time that I am aware of in my entire life.
The concerto repertory is filled with great leaps of the left hand from the bottom of the instrument’s fingerboard to its top. Since the fingerboard has no frets to hide behind, the end of these dramatic leaps must be perfectly positioned or the note will be out of tune. Your ear must be exquisitely sensitive to the slightest gradations of pitch by gift of nature - if not, you can’t even learn the violin or other fretless stringed instruments. And the physics of strings, which is more forgiving on lower notes, leaves absolutely no margin for error on the highest notes. Total fluidity of motion is essential. It takes years of repeatedly practicing those leaps to master them, yet even the greatest virtuosi are not capable of hitting them 100% of the time. Accardo undershot a highly exposed leap in the Tchaikovsky concerto by an entire semi-tone, which had a startling, grating effect on my ears. But his countenance and musical conviction were such that I called my own trusted ears into question. The perfection of his playing before and immediately after the error, without the slightest physical manifestation of discomfort or loss of concentration, caused me to wonder if perhaps I had misheard.
Thirty years later, it is apparent from the beginning of the concert that something is wrong. There are empty seats in a hall that he would have easily sold out before. Too many of Accardo’s notes are out of tune, his sound thin and constrained, his formerly rich vibrato virtually non-existent in the higher positions on the fingerboard. His wife and the quartet’s other two musicians play well, but Accardo apparently has developed serious limitations in his left hand. What a fall from such a pinnacle! Why is he still performing in public? Now almost seventy, he had recently fathered a child with his new wife, who seems at least thirty years younger. Is it so they can have a career together for awhile, as she launches hers and he ends his? When Jasha Heifitz first noticed his phenomenal technique beginning to slip a bit, he stopped performing in public; likewise for Michelucci, who put his Stradivarius in its case and never played it again, not even for himself. He said if he couldn’t play at the level he was accustomed to, he preferred not to play at all, and instead devoted his time to collecting art.
Pride can be a dangerous emotion; when felt to excess, it can easily lead to humiliation, even downfall. But it can also protect us, as it did Heifitz and Michelucci. Accardo had been in the top tier of the classical music world for several decades, but has not yet realized that it is time to leave the stage. His many admirers will not forget the thrilling performances he has given us in the past; but sadly, we will also remember and speak of his sorry decline, as an old friend, Richard Maury, and I now do during intermission.
“Can you believe how badly he plays now?” he says to start our conversation.
I first met Richard when I was at the conservatory; he was a serious amateur violinist who, with his cellist wife, constituted the hub of Florence’s amateur chamber music life. I had been at their place many times for delightful evenings of dinner and string quartets. He was a gifted artist, struggling to support his young expatriate family in a rent-controlled apartment with his brilliant but then unfashionable style of realistic painting. Gradually, the art market came to recognize his talents, but both before and after achieving success, he always dedicated an hour or more a day to practicing his violin, bringing the same passionate intensity to his music-making as to his art work. So when I approach him to see how he’s been doing during the almost ten years since we last talked and played at his home, it does not surprise me that he avoids preliminary small talk and immediately tears into Accardo.
“His sound dies for everything above third position. Something must be wrong with his left hand, so many notes slightly out of tune…”
“Yes, and his intonation used to be so flawless that he once caused me to-“
“How can he still play in public?” Richard interrupts, agitatedly. “It’s so sad. That solo passage in the slow movement of the Mendelssohn quartet had no life in it. He must hear how it sounds, must notice how tepid the audience applause is.”
“Especially compared to the enthusiastic ‘Bravos’ we showered him with years ago. But Richard, you’re looking well; how have you been?”
He does carry his seventy-odd years well. His eyes sparkle, as always, above an animated, whiskered face, set firmly above a well-tailored sports jacket that he could never have afforded decades earlier when we would occasionally run into each other in the balcony upstairs.
“Actually, I’ve been recuperating from some serious health problems. I was pretty much on my back for several months. Couldn’t paint, couldn’t do much of anything. But it turned out well and I’m much better now. Back to painting, too.”
“How about chamber music? Let’s get together for some string quartets”, I suggested.
“I don’t play my violin anymore,” he said, shaking his head with a pained expression. “I wasn’t able to play at all during my recuperation, and sounded like shit when I tried practicing again. The long lay-off, combined with the effects of the illness … I realized I’d never get back to where I’d been before, not even close, no matter how much I worked at it. So I gave it up. It’s been a hard thing to adjust to, hard to accept…”
Even though I was there beside my wife as she fought through cancer shortly after the birth of our second child, I don’t pretend to understand what it’s like to confront a life-threatening disease But I do understand Richard’s loss because I have been struggling with a similar problem, trying to postpone its distressing result. Several years ago, I noticed my handwriting getting worse. I also had problems parting my hair – there was a slight wobble in my right hand just as the comb was about to make contact with my head. Since my handwriting was still legible (and never had been very good anyway), and since I could get a straight part by holding the comb with two hands, I did nothing about these minor annoyances. I hoped they would go away on their own.
I also seemed to have less bow control when playing my violin, but at first attributed that to not playing enough, or perhaps not being sufficiently focused or relaxed. Eventually, I began to wonder if these things were related. A few visits to a neurologist specialized in movement disorders resulted in a diagnosis of “essential tremor” in my right hand, an often hereditary breakdown of connections between neurons. In my case, it affects the end of voluntary movements. It was not that long ago that scientists realized a distinction should be drawn between these tremors that afflict almost ten per cent of Americans over the age of 60 and the tremors of Parkinson’s Disease, which are unrelated to voluntary movements. Although much research is now underway, the doctor told me that the disease is not yet well-understood, but that it would probably get worse over time and in about ninety per cent of cases spreads to both hands. Brief trial runs of the commonly prescribed medications used to treat the tremor resulted in improvement from one of them, but it made me very nauseous the first day. Even though there was only a little nausea the second day and none noticeable after that, my body’s initial reaction tells me to avoid using it as long as possible. If the time arrives when a shaky hand keeps me from socializing over food or playing music I enjoy, I will revisit this medication but probably not before then.
In the meantime I must decide what adjustments to make, what non-prescription therapies to try. Legible writing becomes much slower, requiring a different grip of the pen. Eating is filled with voluntary, targeted movements but not much affected yet. Drinking is fine except for picking up small coffee or tea cups - not a problem since I rarely do that and can avoid the embarrassing shake entirely by using both hands. Although I like the aroma of good coffee brewing, I never developed a taste for caffeinated beverages because I didn’t like the wired feeling they created in me. Caffeine significantly aggravates the symptoms of essential tremor, so I have an additional reason for avoiding it.
Violin playing has many potential problem areas, one of which fortunately is not the escape-proof one afflicting the grand Accardo - inaccuracies in placing the fingers on the string. I shouldn’t have those intonation problems until/unless the tremor moves into my left hand. But placing the bow on the string is the end of a complex voluntary movement of my dominant right hand. In order to do that without an unpleasant scratching sound, violin students practice arduously to cultivate a wide range of landings, some of which must be very delicate. My wobble at the movement’s last moment makes that impossible. Playing on the string as much as possible is a way around the problem, but that takes away several bowings needed for classical music. Fortunately, the impact on other styles of playing is much less. But all violin music gets its pulse, its life from the right hand’s subtle adjustments of bow pressure, and this is a capability I am gradually losing. I don’t want my music-making to end, but neither do I want to end up viewed by the friends I play music with as someone who kept at it too long, an amateur version of Salvatore Accardo. One way or another, I have to resolve this dilemma.
My tiny room at Pensione Taiuti had a mirror on the door that enabled me to watch my right arm movements as I patiently practiced the beginner level exercises Michelucci prescribed for my bowing problem. We spent the first several lessons on the mechanics of a smooth stroke, and he impressed upon me the importance of a fluid wrist, a soft thumb, and letting go somewhat. I was too controlling, and the sound I produced reflected a certain rigidity in my body and physical movements. Michelucci modified the way I held the bow. It felt very awkward, but I was willing to try whatever he advised to get rid of that annoying hiccup in my down stroke. Two to three hours a day with no music to play, just exercises using an uncomfortable new grip made the next several weeks go by very slowly. I was elated when something seemed to suddenly click, but in our next lesson, Michelucci demonstrated how the solution I found created more problems than it solved. I was discouraged but returned again to his fundamentals. The will required by this effort left me feeling drained, but my hopes for what might result kept me going. I made some progress, and was rewarded with an etude and other more musical assignments being added to the exercises and scales I had been studying exclusively. That became self-reinforcing, and as I worked my way up to five or more hours a day of systematic practicing, the pace of my improvement accelerated. The down bow hitch lessened in intensity, then gradually receded into the shadows as I worked hard on learning one by one the imposing number of difficult bow strokes necessary for solid classical technique.
Most of my fellow students were teenagers. I envied the way their younger muscles and brain circuitry enabled them to learn more spontaneously what I labored to accomplish. But even for them, youthful natural ability was no substitute for hard work on such a demanding instrument. I later befriended two conservatory students majoring in conducting, which required a year or more of lessons on each of ten different instruments – both said that the violin was the most difficult to learn. We all had to study some piano, music theory and sight-singing, but the focus was always on the twice-a-week lessons with the maestro of your instrument, in a class setting with three to five fellow students, so you could learn from watching each other’s lesson. At Michelucci’s discretion, your lesson could last anywhere from 15 minutes to more than an hour; if he felt after a few minutes that you were unprepared, he would gruffly command you to go home, take some deep drags on the ever-present cigarette between his fingers and mutter about how he hated having his time wasted. It was somewhat intimidating to be called up to the lesson stand after such a scene, but the many hours of effort I put in between lessons meant I almost always got conscientious instruction from him. If you worked hard, he did, too. Michelucci was somewhat restrained with praise, making his occasional “Buona lezione” (“Good lesson”) all the more appreciated. One of the things that helped me make it through my early struggles with the bow was overhearing him tell his protégé about his new older student from America who had some serious bowing defects but also the “passione & talento” to overcome them.
The left hand technique was less problematic because my foundation there was merely insufficient rather than defective. It still required a huge investment of time with scales, chords, and etudes designed for its specific challenges. The Italian conservatory diploma in violin performance occupies ten years of study. I had no interest in obtaining the degree; I just wanted to get to a level where I could play chamber music well with good musicians. As I worked over the fall and winter to get rid of the bow hitch, Michelucci also gave me material to study from the third and fourth years of the violin curriculum. I realized that achieving my goal would require a few more years of concentrated study. The motivation was certainly there. My conservatory ID got me into the Saturday afternoon chamber music series at Teatro della Pergola for free, where I heard many of the world’s greatest musicians playing the music I most loved. As the beautiful Florentine spring unfolded, delighting my eyes, I had already made enough progress to appreciate that it was just a question of time, effort and will. I could feel my ears salivating at the prospect of playing that music with satisfaction rather than frustration. I had lucked into an ideal situation at the conservatory, was living very cheaply, but had to develop a way of sustaining it all. I had saved enough money for a year or so abroad but hadn’t really thought things through beyond that – it was all so vague when I left the States.
I had a solid relationship with my parents, but one thing I definitely did not want to do was ask them for money. They had grown up in lower class immigrant families and came of age during the Great Depression and World War II. The GI Bill enabled my dad to go to college in his mid-30’s, at the same time working multiple part-time jobs to support his young family. They scrimped their way into the middle class, and education was the entry ticket. They were somewhat bewildered by a son who had graduated from an ivy league law school less than two years before and then left a lucrative law firm job to study an instrument which he had abandoned, against their wishes, as a young teen. If I wanted to be independent, I should also be self-supporting. I didn't even know at that point what "busking" was. But I did know that if I wanted to stay at the conservatory, there would have to be another way to pay for it than asking my parents.
9. Florence Outside the Notes
Sublimation is one way to characterize all the time I was spending on music, because underneath I was getting pretty horny. Florence has long had a large American community, including many students in the multitude of American programs based there. It probably would have been easy to organize a robust social life within this community, but I deliberately avoided that, seeking instead friendships with Italians, focused on learning their language and ways. I met a group of Italian architecture students through one of them who lived in the room next to mine at Pensione Taiuti. The leaders of this fun-loving group were Tommaso and Vito, both from the heel of the Italian boot, and Mauro, the group’s lone northerner. These three shared a nearby apartment where a dozen or more students informally gathered several nights each week. I wondered how seriously they took their studies because they spent a great deal of time socializing and obviously gave it a high priority in their lives. The conversation was noisy and multi-layered, the constant joking around often based on slang or word-play, all of which made comprehension difficult for me; but a smile and simple questions or statements got me through most evenings.
They kept inviting me back, though, not because of my lame conversation, nor because I was their token foreigner. I think instead it was my yodeling, at best mediocre in quality but consistently capable of making groups of Italians laugh. One of my first times there, they were passing a guitar around the room, energetically singing Italian pop tunes. I knew a few chords on the guitar and sang “Mother, the Queen of My Heart,” a country music classic with a humorous story line, the gist of which I translated before singing - most of them spoke little if any English despite having studied it for years. When I got to the mother’s line (in falsetto) chastising her son for becoming a hard-drinking gambler and then the son’s mournful yodeling after forever swearing off his vices, they erupted in raucous laughter and stomped their feet. From then on, I frequently had a guitar handed to me at these get-togethers with a request for the funny song about the mamma with the high voice and her yodeling son. They also enjoyed the tunes I occasionally fiddled, and I was grateful they included me in their socializing.
The group’s Italian women to whom I was attracted, though, all had Italian boyfriends - likewise among the friendships I began forming at the conservatory. I did develop a good relationship with Juliette, an elegant, very bright student from Belgium who moved into Pensione Taiuti soon after I did, and who shortly thereafter also entered the circle of Tommaso et al. Although she spoke excellent English, we usually conversed in Italian so we could both get better at it, lapsing into English whenever either of us got stuck. She had a broad range of cultural interests, and we went to concerts, museums and the opera together. One evening the two of us were in her room and, not wishing to be misunderstood, I switched over to English.
“Juliette, I enjoy the time we spend together, and I like you a lot. How do you feel about moving our relationship beyond just being friends.”
She looked down for awhile and then responded, “Well, I’m thinking about it.” After another pause, she continued, “I like doing things together, too; but I don’t want to ruin a good friendship. That is what has happened to me in the past.”
I was moderately horny by then and perfectly willing to take that chance, though I didn’t put it that way. Instead, I asked her to think about it some more. She said she would, and soon after began an affair with one of her Italian professors, probably thirty years her senior. Her roommate later gave me more details than I cared to hear, such as finding grey pubic hairs on the bed of the apartment they had recently moved into. But we stayed good friends and left it at that.
I always looked forward to Signora Taiuti’s delicious multi-course meals and the spirited conversation among the dozen or so of us normally at the table. We students had been there for a few months by this time, and the two older guests even longer than that. The signora was originally from Sardinia and had brought her folk customs along with her; as a result, whenever we numbered thirteen, she would eat in the kitchen with her daughter. She also would not allow any changing of rooms on Tuesdays or Fridays because it invited bad luck. Our genial host at the head of the table was Signore Taiuti, a retired Florentine policeman who occasionally spoke well of Mussolini. This would invariably elicit a heated response from their son Giacomo, an activist in Lotta Continua (“Ongoing Struggle”), the militant leftist group that viewed the Italian communists as right-wing sell-outs. But Signore Taiuti always maintained a calm demeanor, whether discussing politics with his hot-headed son or savoring uccelletti arrosto, a Tuscan dish of little birds, roasted with only their feet removed, that provoked looks of disgust from the fastidious Signorina Bianchi. She was a middle-aged single woman from northern Italy, too polite to clarify whether her reaction stemmed from opposition to Signore Taiuti’s favorite pastime, hunting (which had produced our main course), or to the birds’ sadly endearing appearance on the plate, caused mainly by their small size and their still attached heads. That last part is what made me fill up on vegetables and pasta that day.
Signorina Bianchi was very talkative, which was almost never a problem because there were usually multiple conversations going on simultaneously. But one day she made a comment that dramatically changed the course of that meal.
“Did you see the story on the news about how many people are on public assistance in the south?”
“And why do you find that interesting, Signorina?” The questioner was Paulo, a student from Calabria, as far south as you can get in the Italian boot. Bianchi’s comment was not even addressed to him, but he picked up on it, the irritation in his voice producing silence in the room.
“Well,” she responded, somewhat flustered, “I mean, it would be better if they were working.”
“Do you know how hard it is to find a job in the south?”
“Well, I know the government has invested a lot of money to bring more jobs there; I don’t understand why there are still so many unemployed people.”
“Yea, I know – you northerners think it’s because we’re lazy, that we’d rather collect public assistance than work. Lots of that money the government set aside for jobs never made it past the politicians. Why do you think so many of us go up north looking for work? Because we’re lazy? I’ve heard your little remarks before and I’m tired of them.”
“But…. I’m not prejudiced against southerners. I don’t think they’re lazy and criminals.” Bianchi was leaning back now, her neck arched defensively, the fingers of her right hand splayed beneath it. “In Milan we have lots of workers from the south.”
As Bianchi clumsily looked for a way out, Paulo was getting more agitated. “I know what you really think. I know how the north feels about the south. Shit! When I’m around northerners, I feel embarrassed to speak with a southern accent. And that pisses me off. Why should I have to feel embarrassed about being Calabrese?” His face was now bright red, his gestures putting the wine and water glasses at risk. “Why the hell can’t…..”
“Signorina, jobs are scarce where we come from,” Marcello, also from Calabria and Paulo’s roommate, interjected in a subdued, searching voice. His hands moved in small circles. He looked like a younger version of one of my favorite uncles, also named Marcello. “The universities aren’t very good either; that’s why we’re here.”
Signore Taiuti added, “Good God, it’s been a difficult problem for a long time, and it’s certainly true that there’s too much corruption in all of Italy, not just the south.” He continued in a similar vein, but there were more flare-ups when Paulo sought to justify his outbursts and Bianchi played more defense, neither with much success. Some at the table offered partisan comments, others followed Signore Taiuti’s lead, but it was mainly his measured words of understanding that gradually calmed the tension in the room. His wife also helped by placing a few after dinner liqueurs on the table and steering the conversation to lighter topics; there were some smiles, then a few jokes and some general laughter. The storm had passed. The next day, as we walked in to take our places, conversing, a resolute Tuscan sun brightened the dining room.
Shortly after returning to Florence from that Christmas holiday visit with my relatives, I moved into a sixth floor attic apartment in a five hundred year old, rather poorly maintained building opposite Santa Maria Novella, one of the city’s most historic churches. My room in Pensione Taiuti had looked out on an even more impressive piazza in the very heart of Florence, containing the enormous cathedral and medieval baptistery. But I needed something cheaper if I wanted to keep this going for another year. With no elevator, no heat or hot water and two other tenants to divide the rent with, my share for this new place came to less than twenty dollars a month.
The man I paid the rent to was Gianni, a sly Sicilian who years before had found work in Florence and also this apartment. It was ridiculously low-priced because of a rigid rent control law that the communist local government had passed to deal with a speculative real estate crisis that was pushing working class families out of the city’s low-cost housing. The law blocked evictions in this category of housing and froze rents at a tiny fraction of their current market rate as long as the tenant remained in the apartment. It also made subletting of all rent-controlled units illegal.
Among the side-effects of this well-intentioned regulation were that landlords spent little or nothing on maintenance but often did spend tens of thousands of dollars bribing tenants to leave so that the apartments could be converted to renovated condominiums and then sold at the inflated market prices. Despite nervous, shifty eyes and very oily, very thin hair, Gianni managed to marry a mildly attractive Florentine and then moved into her apartment. He illegally sub-let his apartment at enough of a profit to still put money in his pocket after covering the expenses of defending (more accurately described as “stalling”) a years’ long eviction lawsuit being prosecuted by his landlord. The tortoise-paced Italian court system, plus a lawyer who was a relative of his from Sicily, made this an economically rational decision for him because he and the landlord could not agree on a bribe amount. But at some future point there would either be an eviction or an agreement on the buona uscita (“good exit”), as Italians euphemistically called the bribe.
And so in mid-winter I moved into this somewhat precarious location with my violin and a newly acquired electric space heater. My room had its own little terrace opening onto the building’s air shaft and looking out over thousands of picturesque red-tiled rooftops toward the imposing tower of Palazzo Vecchio, built in the 14th century and the current seat of the city government which had blocked any increases in the rents of our building.
My music routine now was to practice scales, arpeggios and technical exercises for two or three hours starting about 10 AM, then after lunch work on etudes (music designed to address specific problems of violin technique) and finally on a Tartini sonata, Vivaldi concerto, or other piece assigned by Michelucci that was not too technically demanding but still provided an opportunity to play real music. I looked on this as my daily reward for the all the solid effort preceding it, and by the time I finished it was often 8 PM or later.
The old building was solidly constructed and had thick walls. I wondered how much sound carried down the air shaft and whether it affected the people living on the floors below. The answer, albeit indirectly, came several weeks later when I was walking down the stairs on my way to a lesson. After passing the door to the third floor apartment, I encountered the elderly woman who lived there with her son and his family. She stopped her slow, methodical ascent toward her home and responded to my “Good morning, signora” by pointing to my violin while saying
“You’re the one who plays……. always.”
The heavy sigh that prefaced “always” combined with its melancholy, plaintive tone to tell me everything. On the way back from my lesson, I stopped at a music store and bought a practice mute, the lead-filled sound-deadening variety, which I thereafter often used to dampen at least the scales and technical exercises. Everyone loves to hear beautiful music well-performed, but the process which makes that possible comes at significant cost not only to the student musician but also to his immediate neighbors.
During the warmer months when the windows were open, these unfortunate families living on the floors beneath me were actually doubly afflicted. Next to the airshaft on the ground floor was the bedroom of a prostitute who lived in the apartment and serviced her customers there. An hour or two after my violin practicing stopped sending its sounds down the airshaft, the sounds of her work often began traveling up the airshaft. Being a professional, she never made noise, but the same could not be said of her bedsprings and clients, especially the ones vigorous in movement or vocalization. I felt bad for the families in between us, but took some comfort in knowing that the parents could more easily explain to their young children my sounds than hers.
Just around the corner from our building was the Via delle Belle Donne, the “Street of the Beautiful Women,” in an earlier time the bustling red light district of Florence, now the cheerless site where crusted women with thick legs encased in unflattering skirts occasionally hung around, looking to turn a trick. I was horny but not desperate, the opposite of how they appeared. I often passed through the street on my way about the city; when I saw my neighbor from the ground floor I would say hello. Once, in a different but similar part of the city with women a little less worn, a thought crossed my mind but bothered my stomach, and I walked quickly away.
As spring approached, however, sublimation through music was in danger of being swamped by hormones. I had already decided to liberalize my policy about socializing with Americans when I received a letter from Rosalie, the French woman I had met on the plane to Europe and then briefly visited on my way to Italy. She had separated from her husband after several years of marital problems and was coming to Florence on vacation. She asked if we could meet.
On the evening of her arrival, we enjoyed a pleasant dinner in a local trattoria and then headed back to her hotel, both with the same thing in mind. During her week-long visit, we spent much time strolling leisurely about the city, charmed by its blossoming spring. We spent almost as much time in bed, satisfying long-felt needs, delighting in each other’s re-awakening touch. The last several months’ inactivity could have turned me into a voracious, greedy animal that week, but Rosalie was a few years older than me, with a different life experience rooted in motherhood and her job as a teacher. The smile on her sweet face radiated warmth and a sober form of contentment. Her gentleness and maturity channeled our passion, the heat and flames transforming themselves into a warm glow that lingered well past our goodbye kiss at the train station.
My apartment had a tiny kitchen which I almost never used - just before I left Pensione Taiuti, I had discovered the government subsidized meal plan available to all students. There was no information sheet or list of services provided by the conservatory about this; it was just something you were expected to know about. That’s how the Italian educational system operated – national policies that all Italians were familiar with because they were the same for everybody throughout the country. At the beginning of each month, I noticed conservatory students picking up tickets in the office, and when I finally inquired, learned that they were redeemable at a nearby restaurant where, by adding a cash payment of about 25 cents, I could eat a dish of pasta, risotto or soup, followed by a main course of meat and vegetable, finishing up with a piece of fresh fruit, all washed down with a quarter liter of wine or small bottle of mineral water. The restaurant was far from fancy, but the food was freshly prepared and usually quite tasty. It was open to the public, but a large share of its customers were students from the conservatory and the school of fine arts, all with these subsidized tickets. Students from the other divisions of Florence University had to eat at a large student dining hall about a block away which served cafeteria style food. I wondered if this distinction was happenstance, or a reflection of societal priorities.
Back at the apartment, I formed friendships with the other two men who rented from Gianni. Salvatore was from Gianni’s village in Sicily, mid-30’s, a skilled tailor who supported himself doing occasional overflow alterations for other tailors. Though he struggled economically and lacked a good education, he usually wore a genial face and nice clothes. He loved to sing Italian pop tunes but was also thoroughly familiar with Verdi, Puccini and the rest of the standard Italian operatic repertory. I never could stump him with a request for an aria – he would immediately begin singing it in a pleasant voice framed by a broad smile. Salvatore was prematurely bald, but his good-natured sincerity caused me to reassess my belief that guys trying to hide their shiny dome beneath a flimsy comb-over were desperate, perhaps even devious. But then Gianni would show up on the first of the month to collect the rent, his scalp glistening with skimpy, greasy strands of unnaturally placed hair floating on beads of sweat. My prejudice was immediately reinforced - Salvatore was merely an exception that proved the rule.
Our other apartment-mate was Shamil, a Syrian student finishing his degree in political science at the university. Gregarious and courteous, he was capable of remarkably nuanced thinking when the subject matter was unrelated to religion. If it was in the Koran, however, it was true beyond question, and Shamil seemed to draw conviction and confidence from that. I envied the relief that must offer from the difficult search for answers, always tentative, to the most important questions. Shamil could freely focus his energy and talents on other areas of life, secure in knowing that moral dilemmas would be resolved by the guidance of an infallible holy book.
He bowed toward Mecca in daily prayer, then walked out into a rich tapestry of European influences. Shamil enjoyed the easy socializing western society permitted between the sexes, dated occasionally and a few times brought women to his room and locked the door. He was good-looking, a stimulating conversationalist with a fine sense of humor. His social qualities won him friends of both genders; but he insisted he would only marry a virgin, probably from Syria.
When some friends from the USA visited me, I planned on doing a dutch-treat dinner with them at the conservatory restaurant. When Shamil heard of that, he said “No No No No No! I will make us some pasta tonight.” After a pleasant meal, my friends began to clean the dishes, only to hear again “No No, No, No, No! Guests are not allowed to clean up.” And he insisted on washing the dishes, too. I felt relatively useless and ill-mannered. He was equally hospitable during a visit from my mother, who was thoroughly charmed by him.
Shamil made honesty and diplomacy seem like natural companions. His hearty laugh and bubbling enthusiasm were capable of transforming any clouded mood in his vicinity. We had thought-provoking political discussions, but if we disagreed, he made sure we did so agreeably. His generosity of spirit, however, did not extend to Jews. During the spring, I met an Israeli classical guitar student who stopped by our apartment one afternoon when Shamil was there. After she left, he turned to me and calmly said,
“Tell her not to come here again.”
“Why?”
“I don’t want an Israeli in my home.”
“That’s not a good reason - it’s my home, too.”
“They stole Arab land, killed people – I don’t want her here.”
“You can’t tell me who…” and I heatedly worked my way into a lecture of sorts on tolerance and my right to decide who my visitors would be. Shamil listened and made some comments, unpersuaded by my words, believing me to be the unfair one. He finally backed off his insistence, but asked that I not bring her home when he was there. I was noncommittal because I felt there was still something wrong about that. She came one more time. I had not told Shamil beforehand; but fortuitously he was not there, so a confrontation was avoided. Soon after, though, her annoying bossiness sparked a confrontation with me that mooted the whole matter.
The furrows in his forehead that were mere suggestions when we first met are now deep, but the engaging manner and laugh are the same. Shamil tells me about his teenaged children and how difficult it is to pass on to them his Moslem culture living here in Italy. It is clear from our conversation that, although we both started our families somewhat late, they have been at the center of our lives since. He had married a Syrian woman on a trip to his home town and brought her back to Florence, where he has made a living facilitating commercial deals between Italian and Arab businessmen. We are seated at an outdoor café opposite Florence city hall, and after catching up on family and work, turn to what always fascinated me most in our discussions decades earlier –political and social issues.
“What did you think about the attacks back in 2001 on the twin towers in New York City?” I ask.
“It was terrible. But the Jews were behind it. You’ve probably only read western accounts in the years since it happened. I’ve also followed it in the Arab press. It was a conspiracy to generate hostility towards Islam and sympathy for Israel.”
“But a major part of the city’s financial sector was housed in those skyscrapers, and Jews are very prominent in that community; many of the people who died were Jews.”
“The American government may also have been involved,” Shamil goes on unphased. “Bush was looking for an excuse to attack Iraq – that part is about oil and revenge by Bush for the time when Saddam Hussein tried to kill his father. You see what’s happened since – there were never any weapons of mass destruction, no link between Saddam and the twin towers.”
“You may be right about Iraq, and I really dislike Bush, but how can you believe that he would kill three thousand Americans as part of a strategy to take out Saddam and control Iraqi oil?”
“Politics, big money, protecting interests – that’s the way it works. The guy running Syria is even worse. Don’t be naïve my friend,” he says smiling.
We continue on awhile, never moving beyond stalemate, then change the subject when he points to a headline in his Italian newspaper on catholic priests who had raped young boys.
“Those men should be killed.”
“I know how you feel. But I would rather put them in prison for the rest of their lives with no chance for release. When I was in law school, I worked as a prison guard summer replacement in Newark, New Jersey. It was a place of physical brutality. The child molesters and rapists were at highest risk of getting beaten up by other inmates – ‘coulda been my kid, my old lady.’ Good – take your violence out on them. I’m normally opposed to torture, but I’d add one other thing. Once a year the child's family members are allowed in a safe prison room with the perpetrator and enough guards to protect them. They get to inflict supervised physical pain on him. No taking of life or limb, but some serious pain, screaming….”
“Yes,” he says enthusiastically, “that, too! But homosexuality is a grave sin. It goes directly against the harmony that God has created for us. Muhammad is clear – homosexuals who commit sodomy should be killed.”
We spend some time disagreeing about that before turning to the opera buffa of Italian politics, where we share similar opinions. Our visit together finishes up later on with an exchange of pleasantries and a warm embrace.
As he walks away, I watch him with a mix of thoughts and emotions. How can a man who has chosen to live the majority of his life in western Europe, who is so intelligent and otherwise big-hearted remain so close-minded and intolerant in some areas? How powerful the influence of growing up Arab and Muslim must be. I wonder if a meaningful level of understanding with that world can ever be achieved before they free themselves of the yoke of their holy book, until they too have their renaissance.
But Shamil also has questions about me. How can I possibly attempt to lead a good life in a decadent world without God’s guidance? How can I not sufficiently appreciate the injustice done to the Arabs by the Jews that is so obvious to him? If friendship were purely rational, we would never have become or remained friends. I had decided I liked him as a person before becoming aware of how prejudiced he could be about some things. And I make allowances for him, as he does for me, because of the very different worlds that formed us early on. I am curious about his thoughts and feelings, and glad he is my friend. Even more, I am grateful to the brave humanists who centuries before in this very place began to lead us out of the shadows.
10. On the Road
Directing Smith College’s junior year abroad program for its 22 young women in Florence is much more than a full-time job for my wife Giovanna. In addition to all her administrative duties, she teaches for the program and mothers her students with 24/7 availability, dedicating a passionate energy to them that enriches lives, theirs and hers. She also understands how important traveling is in my life, especially when we are in the Mediterranean. So after a winter together in Italy, I begin a solo journey to Greece on Rhodes, the island of the sun. The transition between winter and spring has begun in my mind, but not yet in the Greek Islands this year. There is a cool, often strong March wind that seems to blow away the sun’s rays. The Colossus of Rhodes, one of the seven wonders of the ancient world, once towered above the sailing ships entering the island's thriving harbor. It is no longer there, destroyed by an earthquake in 226 BC; and it is no longer wind but enormous engines that bring to Rhodes the huge cruise ships which much of the local economy feeds on. Apparently the season has not yet begun because all the restaurants and shops in the downtown commercial zone are locked up. They abruptly come to teeming life two days later when a single ship releases its 2,000 passengers on shore, and just as abruptly shut down again a few hours later, when the ship takes back its human cargo.
I am this year’s first guest in the small b&b whose Japanese owner has recently arrived from Norway to open it up. His Norwegian wife will join him in a few weeks when things pick up for Easter. After putting my suitcase and fiddle in the room, we sip a Greek liqueur at the dining table.
“Are there any restaurants open? Everything looked closed on the way in?”
“Yes, but only a few,” he says. “I eat at home, but I can tell you what my guests say about them. What do you like to eat?”
“Fresh fish, local cuisine.”
“Then you should go to a place called Nireas. It’s a little expensive, but many guests have told me how much they enjoyed the food there. It’s just a short walk, and I think it’s open. I'll show you where it is.”
Several hours later, it's dark and cold enough for blowing warm air into cupped hands. I look over the menu posted outside the restaurant, then pass through the large outdoor dining area, uninhabited tables surrounded by plants, leafy vines and lanterns. It is easy to imagine it balmy and alive, filled with laughing and lingering. Inside, I find the owner speaking Greek to a young couple finishing their meal. He moves towards me and smiles.
“Yes, please; where would you like to sit?” he asks in unaccented American English.
I look around the attractively appointed main dining room, realizing the extent of the choice he has offered me. All the other tables are empty. I choose the table near the front door, next to the space heater warming the hands he now vigorously rubs together.
“Where are you from?” he asks.
“I’m an American, but living this year in Italy. Do you have some fresh fish?”
“You’re in the right place. My father visited our fisherman today; he can tell you what’s good; doesn’t speak English well even though we lived in America for six years when I was a kid. You speak Italian? His Italian is very good. I’m trying to learn more; we get a lot of Italian visitors during the season. My name is Theo,” he says, extending his freshly warmed hand.
His father, Savas, is a small, upright man in his seventies with bright blue eyes. Savas went to school during the Italian occupation prior to World War II and so learned the master’s language. I wonder where in America he lived without learning much English – perhaps an urban Greek community? I learn instead that he lived in Hanover, New Jersey, right next to Livingston, the town I grew up in. Theo went to high school as “Ted,” and though our adolescence was a decade apart, we pleasantly reminisce about the rivalry between our schools. He pulls up a chair after bringing my salad and we discuss Greek politics and the local economy, which he says is dismal. Since the global recession deepened, the banks are no longer extending loans to small businesses like his that use the money to get going each season and then pay the banker back a few months later when tourism refloats the island’s economy. He started the restaurant almost twenty years before, business usually has been good, but he’s never seen a time as difficult as this and is desperately seeking a bridge loan from a friend.
Savas joins us after proudly bringing in my fish, perfectly grilled and garnished, and provides us with some perspective. He speaks to me in Italian, with an occasional English or unintelligible Greek word thrown in. I am sure Theo knows these stories by heart, but he listens attentively, trying to understand them in their Italian version. After the Italians surrendered to the Allies in 1943, the Nazis occupied the island and protected their Balkan flank by defeating the British campaign to capture all Italian islands in the area. It was one of the last German victories of the war, and it came at a high price to the local inhabitants. Savas’s father and brother both died of hunger, his father stubbornly refusing to leave Rhodes despite the horrors being inflicted by the Nazis. Savas was the younger son, and his mother took him to the tiny island of Symi, where he had been born; they both managed to survive the war with the help of relatives and friends. His eyes and breathing speak the pain of those years even more than his words, but he seems at peace. Savas’ wife died last year, and he has lived since then with Theo, Constance and their four children.
Constance is an American, at least ten years younger than Theo. She moved to Greece one month after meeting him in America during one of his visits to see relatives still there. I come to know this sturdy family over a week of almost daily meals and conversation with them. It’s not just that they have few other patrons and most of the island’s other restaurants aren’t yet open. These are good rock-solid people, and we enjoy each others company. Later in the season they would be far too busy to spend so much time with me. My premature arrival on the island has resulted in an unexpected benefit.
Theo is a charming, passionate guy, and I can understand how Constance was swept away by him. But a romantic, beach-bound and sun-soaked beginning evolved after marriage and the launching of their restaurant into hard work and punishing hours, at least for Constance. All four of their children are boys, their number augmented by stubborn efforts to have a girl. Caring for them is a demanding undertaking throughout the year, but she is the true workhorse of the restaurant, cooking & cleaning seven days a week starting after Easter and going through September. She is bright and pretty, but all that responsibility lines her forehead, making someone who would otherwise look younger than her years incapable of deceiving.
While Constance labors in the kitchen, her husband chats up the customers and occasionally runs to a nearby market for an avocado or other missing ingredients. One day I walk by at mid-afternoon and wave to Theo, who is with a small group of boisterous Greeks eating at one of the outside tables. When I return for dinner, they are still there, eating, drinking and dancing; they leave around 10 PM to continue their festivities at a nearby club that has just opened.
The couple’s eldest son, also named Savas, is a handsome, athletic blond who has recently been accepted by some good American universities; the family now anxiously awaits the financial aid decisions that will determine if and where he will go. The junior Savas has recently discovered Beethoven and tells me how taken he is by this powerful music. He listens online, and I provide him with a list of other classical compositions to try, hoping to nourish his healthy new appetite and enjoying the pleasure of giving a gift that is beyond price.
Walking around the medieval old town is absorbing, with its distinct Byzantine, Turkish & Jewish quarters. The most impressive is the area where the Knights of St. John lived, a religious and later military order founded in Jerusalem during the eleventh century by Italian merchants to care for sick pilgrims. After the Muslim recapture of the Holy Land forced them to move westward, they eventually settled in Rhodes, ruling the island through an early form of international government. They were organized by language and culture, with celibate knights originally from Spanish, French, Italian, Germanic, English and other regions of Europe living in separate but adjoining buildings, self-governing sub-groups guided by a grand master chosen from their ranks. For over two centuries, the Knights battled Barbary pirates and withstood Muslim attacks, finally withdrawing to Sicily in 1523 after a six month siege by Ottoman forces which outnumbered them by more than ten to one.
I decide to explore the rest of the island by renting a motorcycle, and go to an agency owned by a friend of Theo’s. He welcomes me but says that a recent Greek law makes it illegal to rent a motorcycle to anyone without a specialized license; I just have a standard American automobile license, and he doesn’t want both of us to get into trouble. Since I have already formed an impression that Greeks share the Italians’ casual attitude towards law, I check a few other agencies but am disappointed to learn that this law is apparently enforced frequently enough to make it respected. So I take a bus out of the city through some towns to a village about half way down the island. A bright sun lessens the sting of a wind that gains strength as I hike up a nearby mountain. After an hour or so of climbing, the stupendous views over the sea below provide the motivation for a choice of path that an earlier experience tells me I might regret.
I was in Nepal, half a life younger and twice as imprudent, on an equally sunny afternoon when I decided to leave the security of a paved road that would eventually go to a hostel atop the mountains that ring the Katmandu valley. I had negotiated a day off from my evening strolling violin duties in exchange for performing at a birthday party for the hotel manager’s young son, and was not due back until the following evening. My plan was to make that hostel my overnight stop, then enjoy the morning views of the sun rising behind Mount Everest and the other Himalayan peaks which would be visible from that vantage point. The road ascended the mountain via a circuitous series of widely separated switch-backs, necessary for the occasional car that passed but very inefficient for the two feet providing my means of transport. I found a trail that I hoped would be more scenic and direct, but it never strayed far from the road. I wondered why there were no trails heading up the mountain but was reluctant to make my own way – it was impossible to see where the upper stretches of the road were, and there was a lot of high brush growing in the ravines that roughened the upward slope. Besides, a four foot high wire fence now ran along the upper side of the trail. A fence says “Stay out” without the need for signs. But a mile later, what does a permanently constructed set of wooden steps going over the fence say? And why are there some steps on each side of the fence rather than a gate? Strange. I pondered the conflicting messages and decided on “Stay out, but if you want, come over here.” And I wanted to go over. There was a trail a meter wide on the other side, heading up the mountain. That would save time, probably lots of it.
A half hour later, buoyed by my faster rise, I noticed the trail was gradually narrowing and the brush thickening. There were webs between some of the branches, habitats for large spiders with irridescent green bodies. I carefully avoided them, then used a stick to clear them out of my path as they became more numerous and the brush hosting them grew thicker still. The trail got very narrow, then fragmented and finally disappeared entirely. I continued on for awhile in what I hoped was the right direction, then stopped and looked around, trying to orient myself. There was no sign of the road above or below me, nor of the fickle trail that duped me into climbing the ladder. I thought about returning to the ladder, but the way back was as uncertain as its original message. Plus I didn’t want to lose all that time. I noticed a few homes perched near the top of the mountain, several miles off in the distance. Were they on the upper part of the road?
No better idea came to mind, so I headed off toward the homes. The many ravines cutting across the upward slope and the spider-infested brush slowed me down. The brush was now so thick that it often hid from view the smaller gullies running through the ravines. I stumbled into a few, then slowed down and made my spider clearing stick do double duty – it was now also a gully poker. This was not the place to sprain or break an ankle.
An hour later, I seemed almost as far away from the homes as before. Soon it would start getting dark, and it was that time of autumn when cold evenings and freezing nights followed warm days. I was totally unprepared to spend the night out there. I imagined the mountain cold slowly penetrating my light-weight jacket, and wondered whether my small Swiss army knife would provide any protection against wild nocturnal animals that might be moving about. I had managed with some effort to stay calm up to this point, but was now becoming more worried about overnight exposure than I was about those big creepy spiders or injuring my ankle. I picked up the pace, then went as fast as I could, occasionally falling into the camouflaged gullies, using my hands more to push through the brush than to flick away the spiders scurrying about my body. I’m normally somewhat afraid of spiders, but if these had poisonous bites, I would have noticed by now, and all I was feeling was panic, not pain or arachnophobia. The spider webs stuck to my skin and clothes as I crashed recklessly through them. However, unless they covered my eyes, nose or mouth, my hands had more urgent matters to occupy them.
I was not one of the fortunate few who pass through their twenties secure in their sense of composure. By my thirties, though, and largely thanks to my solo travel experiences, I had incorporated that into my self-image. That would need reassessment, given my current melt-down, but now all energies were focused on finding that damn road. Why had I left it?!
I looked for the homes. Shit - still too far away. I continued on but after awhile noticed something moving in my direction, high above me, perhaps on a ledge. When I realized it was a man, I began shouting and frantically waving. He stopped, probably sensing the anxiety in my voice, scanned the area and then waved back. What relief I felt! When he got to a point on the ledge above me, he patiently waited while I climbed up to the ledge. He was Nepali, on some kind of trail, and he understood enough of my English and gestures to point out the way to the paved road. I thanked him profusely, and just before dark reached the hostel.
The hostel was small, its dining room filled with a dozen or so European hippy types. There was lots of hash around, which made the hearty food freshly prepared by the woman who owned the hostel taste even better. But when I returned to my room and got into bed, my mind repeatedly replayed the fears of earlier that day. I began to shiver. It was cold enough in the room to see your breath, but when I added an extra blanket and my shivering got worse, uncontrollably so for a while, it was clear there was another cause.
My mind revisits that day as I survey the panorama below my Rhodes mountain perch, contemplating the choice I have to make. I have come to the end of a dirt road and must now decide whether to walk down to the paved road with its hourly bus back to the city or make my way up the mountain on a skinny path of unknown duration. There are bushes and trees, but they are small and spread apart, even more so as I scan the higher elevations. It looks to be a manageable ascent. The views will be even better up there, and I like serendipity. Besides, I know what direction to head in if the path disappears or the bushes get too thick.
The setting sun colorfully illuminating the sea around Rhodes and the rising sun sparkling among the snow-capped Himalayan peaks are both far beyond mere beauty. Scenes that striking cannot be meaningfully compared, easily overwhelming the capabilities not only of words, but even of the mind’s eye when one attempts to recall them. The risk and adventure, however, as experienced by the older version of me that day were much tamer, and that was just fine. An intrepid explorer who would later die on one of the early polar expeditions summed it up in these words - “Adventure is poor planning.”
On another day, I hike up to the acropolis and see the small theater where many of the great orators of ancient Rome came to learn their craft at Rhodes’ renowned school of rhetoric. I watch some of their progeny at the courthouse and approach a young prosecutor who politely answers my questions about the criminal trials I just saw. But the most striking thing in the main courtroom is the huge painting which hangs above the judges bench – a ten foot high crucified Christ, in evident agony and dripping blood. I wonder what it feels like to be a Jew or Moslem on trial there.
The suffering depicted in the painting also expresses itself in the rembetika music I hear live in a nearby club. It’s a different kind of suffering, a soulful rendering of the personal and social problems of marginalized refugees. What adds to its poignancy is that these are not foreigners struggling to make their way in a new land, but repatriated Greeks, sent back to their homeland in 1923 during the huge population exchange following the Greco-Turkish war. Like the blues in America, this gripping music with its tales of hard times and failed love, drug addiction and discrimination passed from its underclass origins to mainstream popularity, despite being repressed by the fascist Metaxas regime in the 1930’s and banned by the military junta that seized power thirty years later. Rembetika has strongly influenced Greek popular music, and it is refreshing to listen to the radio in a country where almost all of the popular music is by local musicians singing in their native language, not the homogenized Euro-American pop that so often predominates elsewhere. You don't need to understand Greek to be touched by rembetika - it speaks directly to the heart.
Later in the week, Theo invites me to join his family for dinner, which they eat before opening the restaurant in the evening. Hearty lentil and orzo soup, Greek salad and grilled octopus (to enhance its natural flavors, they bathe it in sea water & then let it dry in the sun) accompany pleasant conversation in their living quarters above the restaurant. Afterwards, their sons start their school homework while Theo, Constance, Savas Senior and I move to the restaurant’s kitchen. I fiddle them a few tunes, lightening the mood as we wait for the few customers who will later show up. Savas tells me about growing up in an Italian colony and speaks well of Mussolini. Unlike the oppressive Ottoman Turks who ruled before them, the Italians built schools and provided public services. I wonder if there can be such a thing as a benevolent master or if it’s just a matter of comparing before and after. Savas says they are still well-regarded by most of the local population for what they did to improve living conditions on the island.
Theo has given up on getting a bank loan in this frozen business climate and has asked some of his friends if he can borrow money – the bridge loan he needs is about $15,000. Financial pressure is widespread, and the responses have so far been negative, but he is hopeful that a Belgian friend will come through. His cellphone rings while we are chatting. Theo looks down at the phone and nervously says “The Belgian.” I watch his expression change from anxious to dejected, though politely so - “Yes, I understand; things are bad all over,” he says.
I think about loaning him the money he needs, though he has never even remotely hinted at that. Since savings are paying for my extended travels, I try to avoid splurges (except for concert tickets and food); but I can afford to help out this new friend if I want to. They say if you loan money to a friend, you lose both money and friend. I vividly remember dealing with it once earlier in life. Several years before his desperate call, I had been the best man at Fred’s wedding in Canada, but his life there had fallen apart. He was divorced and unable to support his kids on a low-paying job as a public radio stringer. We had been close during our year together as Vista Volunteers in San Francisco and occasionally phoned each other, but it had been over a year since we last spoke. I felt his humiliation as I listened to Fred’s plea over the phone for several thousand dollars to catch up on his rent and child support. I was just starting my family life and careful about money. Say “No” and a friendship probably dies; say “Yes” and probably never see the money again. My solution seemed rational at the time – I gave him a few hundred dollars as a gift, telling him I didn’t want to put our friendship under the pressure of a loan. He took it, but it wasn’t enough to make a real difference in his situation. In retrospect, it seems more a cop-out by someone not willing to take a chance on a former close friend.
There’s no request now, and I’ve only known him for a matter of days, yet I spend time thinking about loaning Theo the money. He’s extremely simpatico, and I instinctively trust him. But I don’t do it, instead mumbling something about wishing I could help. I once again realize I’m not as generous as I feel I should be, but don’t feel guilty enough to do something about it. Maybe that’s another reason why I didn’t last as a Catholic.
I spend my last night on Rhodes in the kitchen area of the restaurant, drinking, eating and chatting with them as they wait for customers. The tempo is still relaxed and our farewell embraces warm. The next day, I leave an island more in bloom, a gentler wind carrying the fresh scents of fruit trees and wildflowers bursting with color. Hordes of tourists will soon descend, and I am glad that I arrived too early.
11. Crete
My next stop is Crete, the southernmost Greek island, grantor to European antiquity of its first great civilization, the Minoan, more than four thousand years ago. The sun is more genial now, warming the terrace of a sea view hotel room I have negotiated a good price for, the result more of pre-season vacancies than negotiating skill. The terrace overlooks a lovely deserted beach I will spend some time on later.
But the better quality time is again passed in places where food is served or sold. When I first arrive in a new town, I like to find restaurants where there are mainly local people eating. An empty restaurant or one filled with tourists are both good indicators to go elsewhere, but it’s only a little after seven-thirty, too early by Greek standards, and the tourist season still hasn’t begun, so I am adrift. The town is Sitia, 8,000 strong; the menu displayed outside one of its restaurants has some interesting dishes and an even more interesting owner/chef. She sits down across from me when the server relays my question about an ingredient in one of her dishes.
“I don’t know how you say it in English, but it’s a spice we often use here.
“Is it a traditional dish of the island?”
“No, it’s a variation. I’m from here, but I lived many years in other countries and also traveled a lot. I like to take food ideas I get from other cuisines and blend them with Cretan dishes.”
“Is that what they call fusion cooking?”
“You could call it that. I look at what we have fresh at the market and try to come up with good combinations. My ex-husband was head chef in some important restaurants abroad, but I only started really cooking afterwards. When I decided to return here, it was to open this restaurant. My name is Melina. And yours?”
She is fiftyish, with both the look and sound of someone simmered and well seasoned. I take her suggestion on what to order, and she sits again at my table after I begin to eat.
“Your food is delicious. I, too, like to travel, and I also play music. We share a similar method – I pick up musical ideas as I move about, then try to mix them into my music.”
“Yes, putting it together can be so exciting! It doesn’t always work, but when it does… Ah!”
Our discussion of process is animated. We both note similarities in approach despite our different fields, and how some of the lessons learned apply to life in general. Her enthusiasm reminds me of Giovanna. Eventually, her work responsibilities call her back to the kitchen, but she returns at the end of my meal with a complimentary glass of champagne, and we chat a little more before I leave for a concert of local folk music.
Several days later, a long bus ride winds through steep mountains with striking views below of coastal Crete and its eternal sea, bringing me to the opposite end of the island. Chania is a bustling port city, strategically enough located to attract Venetian domination starting in the 1400’s, followed by conquering Turks who ruled until 1898. The big battle tonight, though, is between the two best professional soccer teams in Greece, a much-anticipated match-up from Athens shown only on a premium television service. Responding to my expression of interest, the owner of my b&b tells me the whole country will be watching. The best place for me to see it will be at one of the outdoor restaurants the Greeks call tavernas. We are in the heart of the old city, and many of them are nearby, touristy, he warns, but with large tv screens set up to show the game. Tourist season has already started here, so I arrive an hour early; but there is not an empty chair to be found in any of them, the usual tourist groups supplanted by excited, abnormally prompt Greeks willing to put up with mediocre food to watch the game. The crowd is loud, the quality of the soccer excellent. I hover on the fringes of the tavernas, alternately looking at the game and for a place to sit and get some food. A single seat finally opens up during half-time; I enjoy the atmosphere, but resolve to find a better place to eat my next meal.
A different though equally arresting atmosphere prevails on the national holiday celebrating Greece’s independence from Turkey. There is a huge parade of modest means – the bulk of the marchers are groups of high school students, each group colorfully dressed in different folk costumes. Loudspeakers line the parade route, booming out a recorded drumbeat for the young marchers that is often out of phase with the drums being imprecisely played by some of the groups. Any connection, though, between a drumbeat and the hitting of foot on pavement is at best tenuous, so it doesn’t really matter. Only two bands break up the seemingly endless line of marching high schoolers, but the large crowd lining the parade route seems as much engaged by patriotism as by the prospect of waving to a marching son or daughter. The procession passes before a reviewing stand of local dignitaries. At its center are the three local chiefs: the mayor, the bishop and the commander of the nearby armed forces base, a triumvirate demonstrating how constant the power centers – political, religious and military – have remained since the earliest civilizations.
I’m hungry afterwards and go down to the port area, passing by the tourist traps and continuing on for awhile, stopping when I find a small fish taverna filled with Greeks. The waiter adds a small table to the outdoor eating area for me and brings me a simple meal so good that I return the next afternoon. It is much quieter now that the big holiday is over. I recognize my waiter from yesterday repairing nets on the fishing boat docked just across from the taverna and ask him if this is his day off.
“No, no days off,” he says in halting English. “My brother and me, this is our boat. When we not fishing, we work in the taverna. Ours, too, me and my brother. I remember you here yesterday.”
“Now I understand why the fish tastes so fresh! I’m back for more. How often do you go fishing?”
“Every morning when no rain. Early! Then we come to the taverna. Lots more to do. Nets break, too. I fix this one.” He smiles as he recounts his grueling schedule; a few teeth are chipped, his face fittingly lined, his stout body well-weathered. “Where are you from?”
“Italy now, but I was born in America. I’ve been in Crete since last week; really enjoying the music and food. How long have you and your brother owned the taverna?”
“My father bought it during the war. From the Germans. Just before they left. Bad people. They took over everything. My father was okay. He made no trouble. Just a fisherman. Just a small space here. The Germans had supplies, weapons in all these.” He points to the hillside behind us into which a half dozen vaulted excavations had been made, once apparently housing munitions. The one on the end has served since then as the kitchen and small interior space of his family’s taverna; the other vaults appear to be port warehouses. I wonder if his father had problems validating his title to property purchased from Nazi usurpers, but he has already changed the subject to his boat.
“Our boat is old, but it runs good; has a good engine – Italian, not German,” he says proudly. “My motorscooter over there – that’s Italian, too.”
As we continue our conversation, I learn that his name is Niko. He pulls some fotos out of his pocket and beams with satisfaction as he shows me the one on top – he’s on this same dock, standing between his boat and a huge fish.
“I caught it – worth 1,800 euros in the market!”
“Wow – that must have made you happy!”
“Yes!” He shuffles through the fotos. “Here, look at these – my family.”
“Do any of them work here besides you and your brother?”
“Come – I show you.”
Niko brings me inside the restaurant to the kitchen and introduces me to his sister, who is cooking, and his niece, busy prepping vegetables. They don’t speak English, but we exchange well-meaning smiles. A little later they bring to my sun-soaked table a perfectly grilled fish, side dishes and some local white wine, followed by a complimentary dessert and drink – like the Italians, my host says it helps digestion. As in Rhodes, I return several more times, prompting a question in my mind. Is traveling in this phase of life more about food and conversing with its purveyors than about the adventure-seeking of before? As a young traveler, I was always looking for the exciting and the new, even in the next day’s eating place. Now when I find something good, I return there to savor the flavors & the people. Is it a preference for depth rather than variety of experience? For comfort rather than risk? Adventure becomes muted, the senses bridled as the mind moves the body away from the center.
The market is the birthplace of all the world’s economies. Central marketplaces are great to explore because the competition among the small but specialized merchants within them normally keeps prices low, and the merchandise is usually indigenous and colorfully-displayed. Panatagios does not own a restaurant, though one just down the corridor from his wine shop serves freshly prepared local dishes listed on a chalkboard that only speaks Greek. After the first of several lunches there, I stroll about his shop and get his recommendation for a good wine from a nearby vineyard, one that will go with the cheese, olives, fruit and bread I have already bought from his neighbors for my dinner tonight.
I return the next day to tell him how much I enjoyed his selection and he invites me to join him for a coffee in the café opposite him. We quickly identify a mutual passion for folk music and I ask him where I can hear good lyra players in the city. The lyra is a small, pear-shaped fiddle that is bowed in an upright seated position. It is the most vigorous surviving form of the medieval Byzantine lyra, a progenitor of the European violin, its three strings vibrating at the very center of Cretan traditional music for centuries. I heard a great concert in Sitia and am eager for more.
“Psarantonis is playing in one of the local clubs later this week,” he says. “He has been one of Crete’s most popular musicians for decades now. Doesn’t have the voice he once had, but still plays well; he’s almost seventy. The best of the younger lyra players is Nikos Zoidakis. I think he’s performing tonight, but I’m not sure where.”
He looks in the paper, finds the listing and tells me the club, then shows me on my map how to walk there. By now, I know not to take the advertised start time seriously and arrive an hour late. It will be still another hour before Zoidakis enters, though not yet to play. Instead, he makes the rounds of the tables, shaking hands and talking with his many fans that pack the large room. It is mainly a young crowd that dances to his energetic fiddling and singing, his compositions traditional in style but with updated touches - a modern drum set reinforces the up-tempo rhythms generated by the lyra, bouzoukis and guitars. Audience members send up drinks for the musicians; some buy trays of flower petals from pretty waitresses who then shower the players with them. Totally absorbed in their music-making and interactions with the crowd, the musicians play on for two hours without a break. I don’t know how long that continues because I can no longer breathe the thick smoke that impersonates air in the club. The atmosphere is intoxicating, but the air is toxic. My delighted ears sacrifice themselves for the sake of my burning eyes and lungs.
A few nights later, the atmosphere is different but the smoke equally oppressive. The playing of Psaradonis is more restrained, the exuberance inherent in lyra music tempered by age and the audience’s obvious reverence for the shaggy gray master. As before, the star moves slowly about the room before playing, chatting and shaking hands on his way to the stage. Virtually everyone in the room smokes heavily, and the servers spend almost as much time emptying ashtrays as bringing drinks and food. Psaradonis not only breathes this air but also chain-smokes through his performance, and it is no wonder that his voice has succumbed to decades of this doubled form of abuse. The music started only eighty minutes late, but the air is fetid and I am driven out less than an hour later.
The next day I take Panatagious to the café where we first became acquainted. I tell him what happened in the music clubs and how nice it was to see so many young people enjoying their traditional folk music, dancing & singing. He chuckles quietly behind the smoke curling upward from his mouth.
“I’m glad you enjoyed the music, and yes, our folk music is also our popular music. It usually gets better as the night goes on, sometimes until 3 or 4 in the morning. Too bad you couldn’t stay later, but the smoking - it’s like that all over Greece. We know it’s unhealthy but so many of us have the habit. I like to smoke. It would be useless for the government to try to stop it. We are anarchists, like the Italians. That’s why dictators are part of our history. Isn’t it ironic! The birthplace of democracy and the land of republican Rome; they both have provided a home for anarchists and dictators this past century. But they need each other. Things get too far out of hand and down comes the iron fist. I grew up with the generals in charge, but afterwards, the socialists weren’t much better. Too much corruption. That’s why we are so cynical.”
“I’ve noticed that in both countries, but why so much cynicism? You and the Italians are the products of a sun-bathed, fertile land surrounded by a marvelous, life-giving sea. Look at your incredible achievements, what you have given to all humanity!”
Panatagios leans towards me.
“Peter, we were once a brilliant diamond, shining a greater truth than what came later, a truth based on reason and experience, not religion. We looked around us and were curious about what we saw; we asked questions, used our minds, debated the opinions we arrived at, expressed what we felt in our art. Look at the depictions of the afterlife in the art of the ancient Greeks – you see grand feasting, food and wine, music and sex. Do you prefer being among saints with halos, venerating a bearded God?”
“I’d much rather be there with the Greeks than the Christians, but the whole concept of surviving this life strikes me as wishful thinking. If we have led a good life and had some impact on other people, our spirit may live on through them; other than that, it’s over when we die. The universe is filled with cold, dead space that doesn't care about us or our gods. The earliest humans had it right – if we’re going to worship anything, it should be the sun. That’s the true source of all that lives. Pantheism also makes sense to me. Why is monotheism viewed as such a great cultural advance?”
“Yes, I've wondered about that, too,” he interjected. "What do you think?"
“Perhaps it was a necessary intermediate step to give us confidence in ourselves as human beings, to allow belief in our ability to shape our own destiny," I speculated. “We substituted a father figure who resembled us for a superstitious belief in a strange multiplicity of supernatural powers. But it’s still superstition. Science should enable us to move beyond an anthropomorphic conception of god and return to where we correctly started – being in awe of nature! That's the source of everything. Religions have it upside down – it’s humans that create gods. They do it to escape death, to explain the great mysteries. But meaning and values don’t come off a shelf in packages any more. They are created, not adopted. If we care, we struggle to develop them through the way we live, learning from experience and reflection. Life as a human on this lush planet is a unique opportunity. We should do the best we can while we’re here.”
“I don’t believe in an afterlife either," says Panatagios. "But I understand why most people do. The ancient Greek vision of paradise was more true to our human nature. How magnificent we were, and look how far we have fallen! Think about it - centuries of being a relic, revered but long humbled, a cultural fountain whose ancient waters have absorbed many tears and much blood."
“Well, you’ve seen it all, like the Italians –the best and worst of what we can do. As I think about it, how can you not be cynical?... But who knows how to enjoy life better than Greeks and Italians?”
“You see – they go together, too! If only our politicians governed as well as we manage to enjoy life. But corruption – the Italians also have a serious problem. The politicians in both countries have too much influence in the economy. That means bribes and kick-backs to open doors.”
“Yes,” I say, “even for blue-collar jobs in Italy. My cousin was hired as a city bus driver in L’Aquila because his father knew a local politician who used to live in their village. This guy’s party controlled a share of city transit jobs; it was based on the last election results. Money was scarce at home, so my uncle gave him two prosciuttos, several salamis and a big wheel of cheese he had made. Highly valued peasant currency! Did a similar deal for one of his other sons, too. It’s hard to get any kind of job there without connections.”
“Same here in Greece, probably worse. There are so few opportunities; so many young people without jobs.”
“I’ve noticed that a lot of sons in Italy take the same career path as their fathers. What about here?”
“Yes, that too. And do you know why so many of us do what our parents did? We are stuck! Not enough social mobility. My father had a small shop and helped me get this one going. It’s hard enough to get by doing what your father did. Doing something new, with no personal contacts? Too frustrating, almost impossible! Too many bureaucrats looking out for their own relatives and friends. I know you have lots of bureaucrats in America, too; but you are still enough of a meritocracy to open up opportunities for new people. That’s why so many immigrants still want to go there.”
“True, but connections and family money are important in America, too. You know what makes a big difference? A more decentralized system of decision-making. That creates more opportunities for new people and new ideas. Like when I tried to become a mediator of court cases. I had studied mediation in college, knew it had been used for a long time to reach agreements in labor-management bargaining; but in our legal system it was virtually non-existent. When I became a lawyer and tried some cases, I saw how hard the battles in court were on people; usually very expensive, often emotionally draining. I thought trying to mediate agreements first made sense and was able to start a program in my region’s court system. All I needed was the okay from some local judges. Took less than a year from design to approval to implementation. It worked well and then got copied in other parts of the state. In Italy, a program like that would have taken a decision from the chief judicial authorities in Rome, perhaps even an act of parliament or national implementation. Many years of maneuvering, organizing, getting recommendations.”
“Yes, we need more flexibility. There’s too much centralization of power here in Europe. Our history, our traditions – that’s a heavy weight. Darwin said that it’s not the strongest or the smartest who survive but those most adaptable to change. We have changed too little, at least in our corner of the continent.” He exhales deeply, and then continues, “But we take better care of our people than your country does. Maybe not as much opportunity, but more security. Health care, university education – it’s all free of charge. We have more suffering in our past, maybe that’s why.”
Panatagios lights another cigarette, takes a deep draw, then looks at it and smiles.
“The government tried to stop us from smoking in places like this years ago, but everyone ignored it. Now there’s a new law, but it won’t work. People will still do it. We have lots of laws, but they don’t all get enforced. Who’s going to stop us? The owner? He wants my business, and he probably smokes, too; same for the police. It will never happen here.”
“That’s what they said in Italy, too, when I was a student there. Everyone smoked in movie theaters, just like in your music clubs, and then the government outlawed it. Lots of discussion and dissension in the media. The day the new law went into effect, I went to the movies to see what would happen. About half the people, many of them young soldiers, were smoking before the show even started. After the previews, a message in large print filled the screen, citing the name of the new law and that it was now rigorously forbidden to smoke in the theater. Hooting and whistling filled the room, and even more people lit cigarettes. Lots of guys shouted out ‘Fan culo’ (‘Go fuck yourself’).
“Yes, we understand that expression even here,” he says.
“The movie was one I wanted to see, so I put up with the hazy cloud from my back row seat. But as soon as the movie ended, I hurried to the aisle behind the seats, near the exit, and yelled out ‘Vietato fumare!’ (‘It’s forbidden to smoke!’). Heads turned and the ‘FAN CULO’ screams were instantaneous and raucous. It seemed like I was being hit by a wave. I got out of there fast. But the law started to be enforced after a chaotic beginning. When I came back a few years later, no one smoked in the movies.”
Panatagios smiles as he takes another drag and shakes his head. “Not here, my friend. I don’t think so.”
12. Give Us a Tune
“There’s another place you would probably enjoy,” says Panatagios. “It’s a café’ where good local musicians go just for the fun of playing together; our traditional music – I think it’s almost every night.”
The next evening I go there with my fiddle, expecting to hear some lively music, hoping there will be a way for me to join in. There are less than ten people in the place when I first sit down to order a draft of Greek beer, but two of them take out instruments and begin playing in a corner of the room, soon after joined by a lyra player. In between pieces they chat and occasionally laugh; the café owner brings them some food and drink, then joins them in a song. I catch their eye and smile, talking briefly with the owner when he next passes by my table. These are traditional melodies of Crete, he explains, but the verses of the songs are improvised and conversational. He notices the fiddle case next to me and asks if I play but doesn’t ask me to join in or play anything. That’s the way it stays – no opportunities, no invitations. I enjoy listening for another hour or so as more people come in, then a little disappointment mixes with a lot of smoke to push me out the door and back to my bed.
"Come on lad, give us a tune.”
With a fiddle slung over my shoulder, I had just walked through the door of the only pub in a small town at the southern end of the Scottish highlands. The conservatory school year had ended, and I was traveling around northern Europe, not due back in Florence for another two months. Much of the American fiddle music I love comes directly from Scots-Irish folk music, and I wanted to explore those roots. “Go to the pubs!” I was told, and here I was, in my first pub, surprised by the immediacy of the invitation. I normally like to get a feel for a new place before deciding how or whether to take some initiative. But I was here to listen and play, so why not jump right in? I had learned a few Scottish tunes back in the states and without premeditation played my favorite among those – “Give the Fiddler a Dram.”
“Look over there, lad. Those are for you,” said the same man, pointing at the bar as I put my fiddle down and acknowledged the applause of those in the pub. Lined up on the bar were some drafts of ale and drams of whiskey. I grabbed one of the ales, held it up and thanked the room.
“Let’s hear another, lad.”
I played a few more tunes, which added to the line of drinks and more importantly resulted in two of the men going behind the bar to get their instruments out. Another asked the bartender for a set of spoons, immediately using them to play some catchy rhythms. I complimented him on his skill, mentioned that spoons also went great with American folk music and asked him to show me how he did it. I couldn’t get the hang of it, but our chat expanded as the other two joined us with their instruments in hand. They asked where I was from, what I was doing; I asked about their folk music, and soon our quartet was being seated at the end of the bar, talking as we tuned up.
The time for playing had arrived, and I hoped I would be able to fit in – I had only been in a few jam sessions before, most of the time feeling inadequate. I was fine playing tunes I already knew, but my first exposure to learning how to play music was reading notes on a staff. That’s the way classical technique had been taught for centuries, and it would take another few decades for classical musicians to appreciate what folk musicians world-wide had understood from the beginning of time – first you learn music by ear, its base in the senses, not through the eye. That can come later. How many other obvious truths are we academically trained people overlooking? The originator eventually becomes conservative, so it should not surprise us that change had to come from outside Europe. It is curious, however, that it came not from America, the innovative child of Europe, but from Japan, a tradition-bound foreign land which was relatively new to western classical music and then exported the Suzuki method to transform it.
Fortunately, I was not totally anchorless among these genial Scotsmen. When I was drawn to learn American fiddle music as an adult, I got some excellent advice – learn the tunes by ear from recordings, not from the book called “One Thousand Fiddle Tunes” that I had bought as my entry vehicle. “The music is in the phrasing, the articulation,” a guitarist friend told me. “You can’t learn that from notes on a page.” It was painfully slow, listening again and again to learn a tune phrase by phrase. Eventually I got better at it, but not to the point where I felt comfortable improvising in a jam session. That’s a much more advanced set of skills.
But my new companions were accommodating, asking me to play any Scottish tunes I knew, and they would play along. “Flowers of Edinburgh” and the few others I had learned got us off to a felicitous start, but what next? I knew several Irish tunes, and was pleased to see that the shared Celtic culture enabled them to recognize and join in on almost all of them, though a few had picked up different names crossing the Irish Sea. The pub owner kept sending over more drinks and his wife brought us some sandwiches. I told my new friends I’d like to hear them play more Scottish folk music, and that I’d do my best to play along, which I quietly did, avoiding major mistakes by watching the guitarist and playing notes in the chords his left hand was forming. We played for almost an hour, and I stayed til closing time, chatting with the many people who came up afterwards.
Hunter Donaldson, one of the musicians in our group, invited me home for a final dram of scotch and more talk about folk music and the Scottish independence movement. He was both the head greenskeeper and pro of the village golf course. I thus found myself not only back for tea the next day, but also fumbling my way through a round of golf with his eldest son, using Hunter’s clubs while he tended the greens. His son was a bright university senior who shared his father’s congeniality as well as his fervor for an independent Scotland. Many of the Scots I met shared this sentiment, and as I hitch-hiked around the country, the song I heard most on the radio was “Flower of Scotland.” Though it was written less than a decade before, it had already become the unofficial national anthem, a stirring appeal to throw off English rule as they had done temporarily in 1314. The blending of melancholy and determination in its beautiful melody fully displayed music’s power to grab our emotions; despite not having a drop of Scottish blood, I too felt moved as I sang along with them:
O Flower of Scotland, when will we see your like again
That fought and died for your wee bit hill and glen.
And stood against him, proud Edward's army,
And sent him homeward to think again.
On Hunter’s advice, I next went to Blairgowrie, in the heart of the northeastern region known for Scottish fiddle music, the rest of the country being somewhat more partial to the bagpipes. A friend of his there introduced me to Jimmy Moncur, an amiable old farmer with a passion for the fiddle, who invited me to pitch my tent by the little lake on his farm. I spent a very pleasant few days there chatting with Jimmy and his wife over tea or her home-cooked, home-grown meals, hiking around the beautiful country-side, taping some of Jimmy’s recordings of Scottish fiddle music, and getting advice from him on how to play the strathspey, a form of Scottish dance music that I took an immediate liking to.
One evening Jimmy’s son drove me to the next farmhouse for a session of Appalachian mountain music with an American guitarist. He lived there with his wife and kids during the half of each month when he wasn’t up in the North Sea working on one of the big oil rigs. It was hard, dirty work, and he often felt cold and lonely up there, but he earned a multiple of what he had been making in the States. When an American friend already there told him about a job opening on the rig, he took it and soon after moved his family to the house down the road from Jimmy’s farm. His plan was to save as much as he could for a few years and then go back home.
On my last afternoon in town, I went to a session in one of the pubs led by the man Jimmy said was the premier fiddle-player in the area. It was a hard-drinking crowd; the fiddler was smashed but able to give me some tips on playing strathspeys, slurredly explaining “I’m the best around at these.” He then had me play a few American tunes, with the rest of the band joining in while the crowd hooted and danced. An enormous and thoroughly drunk truck-driver grabbed my hand in a bone-crushing grip and dragged me over to the bar to buy me a pint. That was fine, though a bit painful. But he did it twice more as I played a few more tunes and chatted with some other people. When I saw him headed in my direction a fourth time, I decided I had had enough of his unusually aggressive hospitality. My hand hurt, and I had already had more than enough to drink, so I kept a few steps ahead of him, smiling and waving to the others as I threaded my way through the thick crowd and slipped out the door.
Hitch-hiking was a common way to get around then, and my fiddle helped me get a lot of rides. It couldn’t have been the music because drivers in cars usually wouldn’t be able to hear it before stopping, and sometimes the fiddle was in its case. If I wasn’t playing, I made sure my fiddle-shaped case was on display at my side. Just about everybody likes music; perhaps an instrument is proof of a shared interest or makes a person seem safer, though most people weren’t afraid of hitch-hikers until later. It was an instant conversation starter, and conversations could be of remarkable quality when your driver was interesting, from a different culture and sharing a small space with you for perhaps many hours. You’ll almost certainly never see each other again, so if you get into personal subjects, why hold anything back? It’s a general attitude about traveling encounters that I find liberating.
Once, in central Europe, a distinguished looking elderly gentleman gave me a ride that lasted all day. Our conversation started off conventionally enough, but it became increasingly apparent that this man knew a lot about many things. He was a successful businessman from Austria, twice married, who also had a keen appreciation for music, art, philosophy, history and the wonders of nature. From the experiences he recounted, it was obvious that he had traveled widely and tasted deeply of life’s pleasures. I was still trying to figure out who I was, who I wanted to be. As morning turned to afternoon and then to evening, the more this wise man revealed of himself, the more I saw him as an exemplar, a model of a life well-lived. I spoke freely with him throughout the day about my interests and ideas, but the sun had already set when I told him about this strong impression he had made on me, that I saw him as someone to emulate. We were approaching the place where I was getting off when his tone changed dramatically from self-assured to plaintive as he told me of his one great regret, that he never had children. Yes, he appreciated these other aspects of his life but could not escape this feeling of an overwhelming void, that it was all pointless, pleading with me not to make the same mistake he had. Before I met him, I felt I would probably eventually become a father; afterwards, as I looked in his eyes, shook his hand and stepped out into the night, I had no doubt.
Sometimes hitching a ride would not only get you from one place to another with good company; it could also lead to a serendipitous adventure. That’s the way it was with Denise and Laura, two young nurses from Switzerland on a motor trip through Great Britain. They worked at the same hospital in Zurich and were on a two week vacation together. I was fiddling on the side of the road, across from the small bed & breakfast I had checked out of a short time before, when they pulled over and invited me to hop into their rented car. I wasn’t headed anyplace in particular, and neither were they, other than riding around the Scottish highlands for a few days. We drove through lovely mountain scenery, stopped for some lunch, and then went to Loch Ness. We hiked along the slope above the lake but didn’t see any sign of the huge water monster whose supposed sightings have long drawn people to the area. Later on we took a break by another lake, and the girls danced merrily while I fiddled some tunes.
We pulled into a small village as it got dark and found two rooms available in a b&b. A nearby pub provided us with a hearty dinner and news of a folk concert that evening in the town hall. The fiddler and pianist drank throughout their program, in the second half getting so plastered that they couldn’t remember the names of the tunes which they nonetheless played remarkably well, perhaps the result of customarily performing in that condition. I was even more impressed with this accomplishment after the concert when we joined the locals in thanking the musicians and I saw close-up how glassy and bloodshot the fiddler’s eyes were.
Next morning at breakfast I thanked the Swiss nurses and politely said I didn’t want to interfere with their vacation plans, but they insisted that I continue along with them, exactly what I was hoping to hear. They were lively, smart and pretty, especially Denise; both spoke excellent English, with a car to boot! We took turns driving and, after narrowly avoiding a few head-on collisions, began reminding each other to stay on the left. In one town, we came across a highland games competition and spent the day there enjoying the bagpiping, dancing and drumming events. A group of large, beefy men in kilts competed in tossing the caber, a heavy wooden pole almost twenty feet long. Since this event grew out of throwing logs to provide a bridge across chasms, the scoring was based more on accuracy than distance. We later found a place to stay and spent a pleasant evening in the local pub. They were both so fresh and spontaneous, so much fun to be with, especially Denise, with her playful manner and impish smile. She told me she had studied the violin but played it badly, then gamely gave poof of her self-evaluation by scratching out a Swiss folk tune when I handed her mine. They talked about returning to England for their final week of vacation after one more day in the highlands.
We drove through some more imposing scenery the next day, then pulled into a small village near the island of Skye. Some trees had home-made posters advertising a barn dance later that afternoon, a dance that would bring some underwater currents up to the surface. We found a good band plus a friendly crowd there and joined in the dancing, trying to copy the movements of the amused locals, benefiting from the impromptu lessons they gave us. I danced with both girls but was specially drawn to Denise, a feeling that had been growing from the first day on; we really clicked together during the gay gordons, a spirited circle dance that was easy to pick up and earned us applause from the others in our circle when it came to its rousing conclusion. That was a short-lived triumph, because our legs got entangled during the more complicated dance which came next, sending us crashing to the ground. Our eyes and hands held each other as we got up, laughing; I gently pulled her closer, and her unspoken response confirmed what I had hoped. After a few more dances, we walked out of sight behind the barn, kissed and wrapped our arms around each other, our bodies pressed together. I asked her if she would spend the last week of her vacation traveling with me.
“I’d like that.” She paused, her smile fading as she exhaled, then shook her head and continued, “But that wouldn’t be fair to Laura. We planned this vacation together. She senses what is happening. She told me during the dance. I couldn’t do that to her.”
“But you’re feeling the same way I am. She’ll understand. Please think about it, talk with her.”
Denise paused again, looking down before meeting my earnest gaze. “I want to spend time with you, but it can’t be now. Later on, some other place, but not now. Laura and I have been friends since school, we work in the same hospital – I can’t leave her; that would be wrong.”
I hoped she would change her mind, but the next morning they left for England. The three of us had a cordial breakfast, chatting about the good times we had during our days together, then exchanging contact information and hugs before their departure.
The day was appropriately overcast. I missed Denise, feeling a dull ache on my side where I had imagined she would be. When you travel alone, there’s more room for adventure and romance, but also more loneliness, sometimes lots of it, especially when prospects are aroused that then fail to materialize. I took a long walk, consoling myself by playing my fiddle on the hillside. Feeling particularly alone that night in my tent, I thought about her and what had happened. For me, it would have been an easy decision. Years before, when I was traveling in Latin America with my best friend from college, I met a dark-haired Costa Rican senorita I wanted to pursue and so suggested that he go on without me. I’d catch up with him later in Columbia - didn’t think twice about it; and my friend didn’t mind, though the slight look of envy when he told me that was replaced by a slight look of relief when I told him the following week that it hadn’t worked out.
Was the difference a gender thing? A cultural disparity? Good manners versus bad? Denise was right – there would be a time and place but it wasn’t now. That would come seven months later when I went to see her in Zurich, a visit filled with fun and tenderness. Instead, now was a time for me to learn something from her example about the meaning of friendship and loyalty. Her decision saddened me, but I admired her for it.
Soon after, I decided to head for Ireland, and several hitched rides got me from the highlands to a little town in southern Scotland. It was late when the last ride dropped me off, and the few bed & breakfast places had all their lights out, their owners obviously asleep for the night. One guy still up asked if I had a tent and advised me to pitch it in the public park just outside town. He didn’t think the police would mind, adding that they never went out there at night anyway. So that’s what I did. Around 3 AM, I was brusquely awakened by a loud announcement – “Come out – this is the police!” – accompanied by vigorous tapping on my tent. I saw the shadows of two men with flashlights and a big police dog, snorting menacingly as it pulled tight on the leash, its head inches from mine, separated only by a thin tent wall. I was out in record time and began profusely apologizing for being there, explaining that I had arrived late and -
One of them cut me off, saying they just wanted to ask me a few questions and see my identification. A nearby home had been broken into a half hour before and they were investigating. After determining that I wasn’t the burglar and that I hadn’t seen or heard anything, they very politely thanked me.
"Sorry to wake you up, lad,” one of them said as they walked away.
A few years before, the words had been much different. “No, putting it back is your problem. We can go through your stuff and leave it on the ground. That case was just decided here in California – look it up, counselor!” The policeman who had emptied my pack after finishing the body search said this with a sneer on his face that also found expression in his voice. I was hitchhiking back to San Francisco with some other guys in a conservative part of the state. The highway patrolmen had pulled over suddenly, checked our ID and asked what we did. I stupidly responded “law student,” naively thinking that might get us better treatment. I asked why they were searching us - we were only hitchhiking. The same cop said there had been a robbery nearby and they were investigating. As he said the words, his voice had the sound of repetition, his gestures the look of routine. This was the end of the 1960’s but the beginning of the bitter culture wars we have by now adjusted to. It had the intensity and violence of all sharp breaks; there was suspicion and mistrust on each side. I didn’t believe him.
“Who’s looking for him, and why?” asked the diminutive guy in the fisherman’s cap. It was late afternoon, and this middle-aged man and the burly younger guy standing next to him were the only people around. I had made it to a village in Wales not too far from the ferry to Ireland thanks to a ride from a rugged Welsh truck driver whose paranoia and cold-blooded tales of his time as a mercenary in the Congo kept me from expressing opinions about anything; he was not someone I wanted to risk antagonizing in any way. I felt relieved as I stepped down from his truck and saw these two friendly-looking guys engaged in animated conversation in front of the pub, interrupting them to ask if either of them knew Vic Neeps.
“I play in a band with some friends of Vic in Florence, Italy,” I responded to the small guy’s question. “They asked me to look him up.”
“Buzz and Karin?”
“Yes, how did you know?”
“Because I’m Vic!” he said mischievously. “Ah, they’re such good folks, and it’s been a few years since I last saw them. Let’s go in for a pint. How are they?”
The three of us took turns buying rounds in the pub over the next couple of hours. Vic was an artist and sculptor who had left his professor’s post a while back for the more independent country life he now led. His friend Gareth was leaving the next day for an eight month world tour playing tuba in a jazz band. Like his instrument, he was large, round and brassy, though with a reddish-brown beard. Vic called his wife, then invited me home for dinner, after which we went to a hard-drinking going-away party for Gareth that seemed to have a healthy percentage of the village in attendance. Gareth’s booming laugh got heartier and more frequent with each of the many shots that he downed. Vic had Gareth and me try a special whisky he had brought along for the occasion, pronouncing it “so smooth, it walks down your throat in velvet slippers.”
“You didn’t just make that up now, did you?” I asked.
“Yes,” he said matter-of-factly. “Why?”
“Because then you’re a poet, too, and I hope you don’t mind if I use that line myself.”
“Whenever the occasion calls for it, and I hope there are many,” he said with a twinkle in his eye.
Vic proved to be a man of many talents, banging out some decent-sounding guitar accompaniments to the tunes I fiddled as the party moved into full swing. His wife Phyllis, a research scientist, was as witty and amiable as Vic. When we got home, we continued talking long into the night, and I slept soundly on their couch. After breakfast, Vic and I picked up a red-eyed Gareth, who kept holding his head, trying unsuccessfully to gently shake the headache out. We parted ways at the train station, Gareth eastward-bound to join his bandmates in London for the start of their tour, I headed west for the ferry to Dublin.
13. Rambling Around the Emerald Isle
The Royal Dublin Horse Show is apparently the social event on Ireland’s yearly calendar and thus attracts not only horse enthusiasts but prominent socialites as well as others wishing to be seen with or noticed by them. I unfortunately timed my arrival with the take-over of the city by this well-heeled herd. Contemplating a quick departure, I went to the Comhaltas building, the headquarters of the Irish traditional music society, to pick up information on their folk music festivals before taking off.
That turned out to be a felicitous move for a number of reasons. They had some guest rooms upstairs, one of which they let me rent on a b&b basis for a few days. The friendly people who worked there told me August might be a bad time to be in Dublin, but it was the best time of year for Irish traditional music. The local and county competitions would be starting next week, culminating at month’s end in the national championships, the Fleadh Cheoil (Irish for “Festival of Music”). This year it was to be held in Buncrana, a town near the border with Northern Ireland, close to Derry, the site of recent violent battles in the ongoing war between Catholics and Protestants there. The choice of location was deliberate, the hope being that the shared musical heritage would help calm tensions in the region. The week before the festival, Comhaltas holds a traditional music school for Ireland’s most talented young musicians, taught by the country’s best, many of them former champions. Back then they also allowed some foreigners to attend for a small fee, so I immediately signed up.
On a couple of evenings during my stay in Dublin, there were lively music sessions in the Comhaltas basement pub to whet my appetite for what was coming up. One night I was able to get a ticket to the Abbey Theater’s 50th anniversary production of Sean O’Casey’s “The Plough and the Stars.” The play deals with characters caught up in the early stages of the Irish civil war; and it felt eerie stepping out of the theater into an Ireland still struggling with the problems left unresolved by that bloody conflict. The play caused riots when first presented because of what some saw as its cynical view of nationalist heroics, particularly in its treatment of the war’s impact on the poor. I thought back to my conversation in L’Aquila with Zio Domenico. Though they probably had never heard of O’Casey or his play, my relatives who had lived through World War II had a similar view of the Italian partisans whom history would later judge to be heroes.
The Comhaltas people told me that the best place to hear traditional music played in its natural settings was in the western part of the country. So, I took a bus to the outskirts of Dublin and pointed my thumb in that direction. My first encounter with the west, however, was not with its music but as a pawn in a high-stakes, long-running family soap opera.
David, who set it all in motion, was the youngest son of the socially prominent O’Leary family, which ritually met every August at their summer estate on the west coast. He was driving there after attending the Royal Dublin Horse Show, saw me fiddling by the side of the road and offered me a lift in his convertible. David was an engaging conversationalist. Family contacts and high grades had landed him a job in a prestigious Dublin law firm after his recent graduation from Ireland’s top law school, so our conversation quickly shifted from music to our experiences working in the staid world of corporate law. He was the first Irishman I met who spoke with a British accent, the sound of his otherwise deep voice modulated by being pushed through a slightly clenched nose. When I asked him about the horse show, he recounted meeting some interesting people through his girlfriend, matter-of-factly adding that she was the prime minister’s daughter. He seemed intrigued by my efforts to mix together such disparate interests as music and law, questioning me extensively about both. A few hours later when we arrived at the family estate, he said he’d like to invite me to stay over but first had to make sure it would be alright with Father.
As I stood before his elderly father, whose girth slightly displaced our handshake, I heard myself described as a lawyer from the United States, a graduate of the Harvard Law School, currently vacationing in Ireland, enjoying its music; a short time later, I was making myself comfortable in one of the guest rooms. I told David I was puzzled by the way he presented me to his father, since I viewed myself primarily as a musician during this phase of life.
“Yes, you made that clear during the ride out; but I know Father. One does what one has to,” he responded with a chuckle. “You do like it here, don’t you?”
Deception was only one of the games played in this fascinating family. Various forms and degrees of humiliation were also occasionally practiced. The main character was clearly Father, a bespectacled 70 year-old, one of Ireland’s leading surgeons and a complete tyrant in his personal life. Mother was a colorless appendage, but their children were a collection of brilliant and superficially successful people, with chronic streaks of alcoholism and nervous breakdowns twisting through them. Though there was a veneer of civility in the family members’ interactions with one another, the occasional cutting comment and the sarcasm in their humor meant that any break in the underlying tension would be temporary.
After dinner, David told Father he was bringing me into town to the pub, which Father said he was sure I’d enjoy. We drove in, and I asked which of the several pubs on the main street we were going to.
“That’s entirely up to you,” he said. “The one thing I’m sure of is that you wouldn’t want to waste time in the only pub my family goes to - dreadfully dull. No music there either.”
We checked a few of the others out, and I wound up trading tunes with some of the local musicians in one. When the pub closed, they invited us to a party at the apartment of one of their friends. The atmosphere was rowdy and the politics radical – many of the men there were Provos, soldiers in the outlawed branch of the Irish Republican Army that was fighting the British in Northern Ireland, down for some R&R. These guys and their girlfriends partied hard and sang a lot of radical songs. I followed my by now usual practice of watching the chords the guitarists were playing and managed to blend in pretty well. David, however, looked very uncomfortable and did not join in the singing. His upper class accent and attitudes gave way here to an Irish brogue and silence whenever the subject turned to politics. Good tactical moves, I thought, but he still seemed out of place.
“Thanks for sticking around,” I said during the drive back.
“I’ve never been to a party like that before,” he said. “Thank you for opening the door to such an interesting experience.”
Of course, we didn’t mention the party the next day at home. Father asked me what kind of work I did in the law; I explained that I had taken a job with a corporate law firm, disliked that type of practice, but it had enabled me to save enough money to study violin now at the Florence Conservatory. Later on, he asked some additional questions about law and music which I also answered honestly. I told him how much I enjoyed playing folk music in the pubs of Scotland and Ireland with local musicians, and that I was financing an extension of my time at the conservatory with money I made busking in Germany and the Scandinavian countries. I saw in his tightly drawn eyes that a judgment was being rendered and suspected that it would not be in my favor.
Father ruled his family in a manner that was rather polite on the surface – he made “suggestions” to the others which they invariably accepted. At one point, a young granddaughter began crying over the loss of a favorite toy and, when she snappily refused his order to stop, was immediately removed from the room, at his suggestion. The grandchildren, in fact, were the only ones who dared to openly confront him, not yet aware that the very substantial wealth he had accumulated was reason enough for accommodating his wishes, lest one be disinherited.
I was not a mere observer during my stay with the O’Learys; I also became a character in their ongoing drama, manipulated by David to strike out at Charles, an older brother that he detested. Like Father, Charles was a doctor, in his mid-thirties, who lived in a nearby town with his wife and two young children. Because his home was so close to the estate, he and his family did not stay there but were expected to visit and also host visiting relatives. Charles was away for a few days, but David drove me to his home one afternoon, explaining that he wanted me to meet Molly, Charles’ wife.
“She’s one of the few in the family whose company I really enjoy,” he said. “I think you’ll like her, too – she’s charming. A bit bored, though, by her life here in the countryside. Bring your fiddle - there’s a good pub near her house where we can go afterwards.”
In fact, Molly was not only charming; she was beautiful, with a slender, tanned body and ingratiating smile. The three of us sat in the living room, chatting over a drink, at one point joined by Brian, an older cousin who was visiting for a few days. When the nanny brought in Molly’s two toddlers, I fiddled a few tunes that sparked them into some delightful free-form dancing which in turn elicited vigorous applause from the adults. Brian left to meet some friends for dinner and pub-hopping. David invited Molly to have dinner with us at the pub down the road, and we spent the next several hours there drinking, eating and laughing amidst a boisterous crowd. One of the men brought over a pint of stout, pointed at my fiddle and asked for a tune; I obliged with several, caught Molly’s eye and returned her smile, then recruited her and David to help me drink the other pints which arrived at our table.
We were all pretty lit when we got back to her home. Molly thanked us, said she was going to check on the kids and with the nanny, then go to bed. I admired her from behind as she walked away and disappeared into her children’s bedroom.
“Didn’t I tell you how nice she was?” David said.
“Umh – you were so right!”
“I think she fancies you,” he continued.
My mind was dulled by drink, but I started making some connections.
“David, what are you doing - Charles is your brother.”
“Charles is a two-faced, alcoholic prick. I can’t stand him. He’s supposed to be on a business trip, but he’s probably off with one of his wenches somewhere. He does that a lot. Don’t worry about Charles - he won’t be back until late tomorrow. ”
I watched David’s nose curl up when he talked about his brother, as if reacting to a stench. Already smitten, I didn’t need any more encouragement at this point, but my colleague in law continued pleading his case, concluding with some practical instructions.
“I heard Molly close her bedroom door a few minutes ago. It’s at the end of that corridor, if you’d like to try your luck. I’ll wait for you here.”
I took a deep breath, walked down the hall and knocked on the door of her bedroom, saying I wanted to ask her something.
She opened the door, the small light next to her bed illuminating the black silk nightgown which made her bronzed body even more alluring. I asked my question without words, leaning forward to kiss her, closing the door behind me as I felt her return my kiss. A minute later we were on the bed, but as I turned the light out, she pulled away.
“Wait. What’s going on here? I don’t really know you. Do you think you can just fiddle a few tunes and then get any girl you want? Is that what you do?”
I wished it were that easy, but didn’t know what to say, other than “No, I just like you.”
Awkward silence. She looked so beautiful in the moonlight. I kissed her again, prepared to leave if she didn’t respond. She kissed me back, deeply, then began stroking my cock. Soon, our naked bodies were moving vigorously about the bed.
As we lay caressing under the covers afterwards, I remembered that David was waiting in the other room for me. I started to tell her I had to leave when we heard some noise outside and saw a shadowy male figure approaching the glass door that connected her bedroom to a terrace.
“Is that Charles?” I asked anxiously, my heart pounding anew.
“Oh God, I hope not!” she said.
I instinctively rolled out of bed to crawl underneath, but lay motionless on the rug when I realized I couldn’t make it under in time, before the figure pressed his face up against the glass, peering inside at Molly in the bed. It was their cousin, Brian, returning from his night of carousing. Was he drunk and forgot where his room was? Could he see me in the dark, lying still and flat on the floor? We heard him enter the house and begin talking with David in the living room. I quickly dressed, kissed Molly goodbye and entered the living room as if returning from the bathroom, having just flushed a toilet there.
“Hi, Brian. How was your evening?” I asked, hoping I sounded calmer than I felt.
After a few minutes of small talk, David and I left to go home.
Brian visited the estate the next day and joined us for lunch. He was talking about his activities the previous evening and at one point made a comment that “Peter looked like he was having fun!”, but left the time frame ambiguous. He and his friends had stopped in our pub for awhile when I was fiddling. Is that what he was referring to? His tone of voice and the look he gave me when he said it, though, told me it would be better not to seek clarification. Someone changed the subject, and I felt relieved.
After three days there, David told me I would have to leave – Father had suggested that I find another place to stay. No, he had not heard anything about Molly and me.
“If Brian decides to disclose that, it will be at a more opportune time, and for different purposes than chasing you away,” David said.
I wondered if he was making a similar calculation.
Father, instead, was displeased that I was the cause of his son’s spending time with coarse people in the wrong pubs and that I had left a productive job in law for the idle pastime of music. Bad influence, case closed, no need to see Father or anyone else before leaving. David apologized as he drove me to the train station.
“Father doesn’t like people that upset his view of how things should be.”
“He’s such an uptight man,” I commented. “Don’t you regret the control he has over your life?”
“He doesn’t know half of what I do in the city. I can’t wait for the old bastard to die, the reading of the will…” He paused and thought for a minute. “There is one thing, though, that I regret about your visit.”
“What’s that?”
“I would have liked to fuck you.”
I decided not to seek clarification on that comment, too. Perhaps he was bisexual; was that the half Father didn’t know about? If he meant it in a nasty figurative sense, why tell me? No - David struck me as a basically decent guy, struggling with a bad upbringing and negative role models, trapped by his father’s money in a suffocating social environment, a smart young man trying to figure out, like the rest of us, how to live his life. I think he wanted to break out of what he was in, but his fascination with what he labeled my ”detachment” and some very common sense observations I made about trying to live on your own terms indicated he was stuck inside pretty deep. Perhaps it’s harder to walk away from substantial wealth if you become accustomed to it from birth rather than see from outside the cost it imposes.
On the Comhaltas list of local music festivals was one that weekend in Ballydesmond, a village less than an hour away in a region with a rich tradition of folk music; so that’s where I headed next. One of the things I had learned about villages is that the general store is a good place to get information.
“Yes, the music festival is this weekend, but there aren’t any b&b’s or campgrounds in this area. We don’t get tourists. There are only a few hundred of us living here, mostly farmers. If you’ve got a tent in that pack next to your fiddle, you’re welcome to camp in my field. It’s just past the end of the village, on the left side of the road. There’s a well spigot nearby.”
I thanked the store owner and returned after pitching my tent to find his wife now minding the store. I asked her where I could buy something to eat.
“There aren’t any places here that serve meals. Sorry. But I can make you a ham and cheese sandwich.”
I couldn’t convince her to take money for the hearty sandwich she prepared, so I fiddled her a tune.
“Oh, you’ll have a good time here this weekend, son. We’re a tiny town but we’ve got four pubs. That’s where the music will be.”
That first night, Thursday, was pretty quiet, but some of the men I met swapping tunes in the pub told me about John O’Connell, a farmer in his seventies who, in his prime, was the area’s best fiddle player. He had been a student of one of Ireland’s legendary figures, Patrick O’Keeffe, renowned both for his extraordinary ability with the fiddle and his capacity with the bottle. John was the best source of fiddle tunes and lore, they said. When I mentioned I was looking forward to meeting him, they told me he wouldn’t be coming in to town - decades of hard work and arthritis made it too difficult for him to move around – and he didn’t have a phone, but they didn’t think he’d mind if I just showed up. So that’s what I did the next afternoon, walking the three miles to his farmhouse, fiddle and tape recorder in hand. It’s never easy as an outsider to knock on someone’s door unannounced and explain yourself. I hoped I wouldn’t be bothering him.
“Yes, come in lad. Would you like a cup of tea?” John said, with the straight sound of one who does not easily add inflection to his words. He looked neither happy to see me nor bothered by my arrival. I imagined him thinking “Well, you’re here so let’s just move to the next step.”
That next step was chatting about fiddle music over tea in his living room. The furnishings were spare and looked home-made. John spoke in a very matter-of-fact manner. The first sign of a smile came after he began playing some tunes and telling the stories that related to them. The stories were delivered without embellishment, in a voice that rarely changed volume or expression. He didn’t smile often, but when he did, it came on gently, spread to his eyes and did not end with his words. It lingered there along with the memories evoked, quietly.
He said he didn’t play much anymore. John’s left hand still had good intonation, but his bowing arm had lost its life. The thin, airy sound he produced was more the fault of worn-out bow hairs, but age and arthritis had taken away the rhythmic lift the area’s best fiddler would have once displayed. I didn’t wonder then how losing that ability affected him, although I am very curious about that now. If only we knew at the time all the questions that should be asked!
I fiddled a few tunes for him which he seemed to like, though his face didn’t convey much more expression than his voice. For the next couple of hours, he played, I recorded, we talked. He resembled dying embers, occasionally flickering into a gentle flame, then back to embers again. Here was a man worn down by life, coming back to life, momentarily and partially at least, through his musical recollections. I thanked him for his time, he thanked me for the visit, and I walked back to town with a memory of my own to recall.
Most music festivals are put on for commercial purposes. But when I saw farmers coming into town late that afternoon on their tractors, some with instruments slung over their shoulders, I sensed I was in for the real thing. These tractors not only pulled the carts carrying their fresh milk to the depot, but also served as their cars. From Friday through Sunday, the main day of the festival, things got increasingly lively. There were spontaneous music and dancing sessions in the pubs and on Ballydesmond’s only street. Pub life was here at its colorful best. A steady supply of Guinness Stout flowed through the taps, mixing with the live music to produce an atmosphere of good cheer and celebration. These were people who showed physical wear and tear, but who seemed at ease with themselves. Their laughs were unaffected, their conversation without pretension, their eyes warm. It was surprising how many of them could scratch out at least a few tunes when a fiddle was passed around the room.
In a formal sense, the culmination of all this activity was the competition held on Sunday for the various instruments and dances of Irish folk music. A make-shift stage on the side of the road provided the setting. John Dunnigan and Maurice O’Keefe, two very talented fiddlers, won the adult and youth competitions. The competitions, though, appeared only incidental to the music, dancing and general merriment going on throughout the weekend. I had met John the first night playing duos outside with a pennywhistler, and then met Maurice the next day. Both enthusiastically taught me tunes that caught my ear, both were friendly every time we ran into each other. That’s the way it was with everyone I met there. There was no sense of hierarchy, musical or social; I felt enveloped in a communal joy rooted in the love these people shared for their traditional music.
Of almost equal interest to the music on that last day was Sunday mass. I wondered if the Irish were as religious as their reputation. Unlike Italy, I found the church packed, and with as many men as women. The priest made an emotional appeal during his sermon for less of the excessive drinking he said went on among the men all year long, but especially now during the festival. I looked around to see the women nodding in agreement and most of the men looking shamefully down at the floor. One of them was the farmer who had promptly invited me into a pub for a pre-mass pint when we met on the way to church - we had had a good time chatting and playing music the night before. It was now only mid-morning, but the men in the pub were drinking Guinness, not tea or coffee. After mass, people shook the priest’s hand and concurred with his message as they filed out; then half the congregation moved into the pubs, washing away the words of their spiritual leader in still more of their beloved stout.
I had previously arranged to pay a modest sum to have Sunday dinner with a friendly family living near the field where I had pitched my tent. The result was not only a delicious, home-cooked meal on my last day there but also several invitations to tea earlier on. These farm families I met throughout my stay in the village were all good, sturdy people. They had a calm, straight-forward manner that was so refreshing after my time earlier that week with the O’Learys. When I left Ballydesmond I had the nicest feeling of having been accepted into that close-knit community as a friend rather than a visitor. It was just what I needed then.
The economic ladder extends from deprivation and hunger at the bottom to almost total control at the top over any aspect of life that can be influenced by the expenditure of money. The more the better was my goal early on, but experience was imposing reconsideration. Where is the zone on that economic ladder best suited to a life that is qualitatively good and generally happy? This question was often in the back of my mind as I traveled about, meeting new people and observing their station. I didn’t have to worry about being in the lower rungs because I was born in an affluent country with an extensive social services network. And if I wanted, I had a good chance of making it into the upper rungs from my middle class start because of the elite law degree I had in my pocket. I realized I was jeopardizing that chance by abandoning my law firm job and studying music. The more I thought about it, however, the less appeal the upper rungs had for me. I had spent almost two years in the culture of the corporate law firm, my easiest route up, but didn’t like working to advance the interests of the already rich and powerful; and the hours demanded were far too long to have quality time left for music, family, and other activities I enjoyed.
I also saw what too much money did to people like the O’Learys. Wealth at that level had become a toxin, and no one in that extended family seemed remotely happy. Deceit, anxiety, manipulation – these were the forces that shaped their lives. Did I romanticize the warmth and simplicity of Ballydesmond’s residents? Probably, at least to some extent. The contrast with the O’Learys was so stark that it would have been hard not to. Wealth has many facets, but I left that week of dramatic differences with a better appreciation of its dark side.
No one doubts that money can make life much easier. My youthful travel experiences were richer and more instructive because I could not buy easy solutions, but I didn’t want to live the rest of my life at that economic level, carefully weighing every expenditure. I felt humiliated and embarrassed one night in a group of young Italians at a restaurant. They routinely pay an equal share of the bill, if not fighting to pay it all. I deliberately ate and drank less to avoid wasting money, said that my share of the bill was only #, and regretfully watched the chaotic scene of math calculations I caused among people who weren’t used to keeping track.
The ultimate question is always the same – how much is enough? I observed the frivolities the idle rich spent their inherited money on, the crushing time burden the working rich endured to pamper (and often spoil) their children, the increased likelihood among them all of the resentments and contrivances personified by the O’Learys. I also spent time with wealthy people who were contented and generous, noticed the ease and enrichment of their lives, saw in Africa and Asia ranks of the miserable poor. Money was obviously complicated - what should my personal aspiration level be?
Imagine accumulating extraordinary wealth through hard work and successful investments, then seeing your marriage end in a bitter divorce and having your children sponge off you all their lives, pursuing interests incapable of providing economic independence. Imagine being able to always buy whatever you want without ever having to consider its cost, totally ignorant of one of life’s most fundamental calculations. Imagine growing up in luxury, fearing its loss, experiencing the lifelong, aching doubt that you would have made it on your own. Imagine wondering if others want to be with you because of who you are or what you have. I met these people during my travels and did not wish to be one of them. We all value freedom, but being free implies self-sufficiency, not wasteful excess or financial dependence.
It was the people between the top and bottom rungs of the economic ladder who seemed to have the better chance at living a good life, one that offered the stimulation of both challenges and rewards. For an educated person living in a developed country, it should not be too difficult to earn enough to cover basic needs and have some level of comfort. The question then becomes how much more we want for additional comforts and economic security. Until quite recently, so many of the comforts we now take for granted (like chocolate and electricity) were luxuries available only to the very rich. That gives perspective. Additional layers of comfort are fully subject to the economic law of diminishing returns, like the toys (child and adult) we purchase with the extra money. How much property can you accumulate before its maintenance becomes a burden, requiring a trust placed in others who seem to follow your commands but whose envy and avarice can increase your cynicism? Even economic security has its limits, as I learned from Zio Domenico’s tale of the rich but hapless urbanites who came to his farm during the Second World War in search of food.
Wealth is in large part numbers in accounts. That was the first form of writing, clearly demonstrating its importance to civilization. But numbers in accounts mean nothing if we merely watch them go up and down. Financial resources have significance only as we use them strategically to improve the quality of our lives and those we care about. The wealth we accumulate should be sufficient to offer us meaningful choices in our quest for a good life. Yet too often, in the pursuit of wealth, we give up control over the most important choice of all – how we will spend our time. The word “spend” incorporates the concepts of both scarcity and choice. We “spend” both money and time, often trading one for the other, valuing too much the scarcity of the former though the only thing certain in life is that it will end. My travels led me to these conclusions. I turned an inclination into a determination – when I returned home, my life would not be focused on money. The goal remained the nebulous one of a qualitatively good and generally happy life, but the path was still being constructed.
“Lovely, Johnny, lovely!” shouted the school director.
Johnny Doherty, the dean of Irish fiddlers, had just finished playing some tunes for the Comhaltas traditional music school that preceded the Fleadh Cheoil, Ireland’s national music festival and championship competition. Johnny looked in his eighties and was no longer the master of his instrument, but he was obviously revered by the school’s faculty. They led the vigorous applause and adulatory comments about Johnny and his highly influential style of playing. The Irish students knew they were in the presence of one of their country’s musical deities, and the general enthusiasm spread to the few of us who were foreigners.
My fiddle teacher at this extraordinary week-long school was Paddy Glackin, a disciple of Johnny and, though only in his twenties, several times the national fiddle champion. Twice a day there was a small group lesson for each of the folk instruments. Paddy started off the first day by going around the group asking each of us to play a favorite tune so he could get an idea of how we played. I fiddled an American folk tune I knew inside-out and was glad to have the opportunity to establish some musical credibility because my Irish playing style was well below the level of the others. I explained that I hoped to discover the secret to their effortless embellishments and accented bowings (which unfortunately turned out to be growing up in the culture and practicing a lot). I also wanted to become more familiar with their music because it was one of the most important roots of what developed into traditional American fiddle music. They seemed pleased with my tune and words, so I was off to a comfortable start. Traveling around, you face a lot of new situations, and I learned to always look for a way to turn off the pressure which that can cause.
In addition to the small group lessons, we were exposed to the whole range of Irish traditional music through an excellent series of lectures and recitals by a faculty that included some of the country’s best musicians. One of the things I liked most about Ireland was how integrated their folk music was into the general culture. Spontaneous music sessions were a normal part of group gatherings and pub life; but that made it harder for musicians to earn a living from their music. People expected to hear it well-played and free. Paddy, for example, worked as a fireman to supplement his earnings from music.
Although the festival didn’t officially open until the first round of competitions on Friday, people began drifting into town much earlier in the week from all over Ireland, other European countries and the United States as well. Buncrana was a town of about 3,000; the location of the Fleadh Cheoil changed each year, but the idea was always to hold it in a place large enough (and with enough pubs) to accommodate the influx of people but small enough to be completely taken over by the festival. Traffic was banned in the center of town and, as things picked up, there was virtually non-stop music-making in the pubs and on the main street by all varieties of musicians.
Once the competitions started, they filled the days and early evenings. I met up with John and Maurice, the fiddlers from Ballydesmond, and cheered them on when they competed. Unfortunately, nervousness kept both of them from playing at the high level I had heard in the more relaxed atmosphere of their home town. Panels of judges had the difficult task of deciding who among the regional winners of scores of instrumental and vocal categories would advance to the final round for the different age levels. I went to all the fiddle events with my portable tape recorder and collected several hours of good tunes.
The crowds were so big by the final weekend that the pubs, stretched well beyond legal capacity, often had to close their doors until enough space opened up to squeeze in more bodies. In the extreme northwest corner of the Repubic of Ireland, Buncrana was only fifteen miles from the city of Derry in Northern Ireland, then a war zone. The good intentions of the Fleadh’s organizers to highlight the shared musical traditions of the two Irelands were marred on the final nights when the heavy drinking which went on throughout the festival combined with hell-raising by very rough groups of teen-aged boys from Derry. These kids had spent their entire lives growing up in the midst of bloodshed, and their idea of entertainment was to pick fights in the streets. The police managed to keep the violence largely under control, but it was a disturbing sign of what a war culture does to its young.
The best music sessions were in the pubs, usually late at night, and especially when Paddy Glackin and his friends got their instruments out. They could never keep up with the steady supply of pints surrounding them, and as the school week went on, Paddy began to look exhausted. One day he arrived late for the morning lesson, queasy from a pub session that had ended only a few hours before, his eyes heavy and red. The music in the street, though, was almost as good. On the final night I noticed the guy who won the adult fiddle championship celebrating with an impromptu concert on the sidewalk at 1:30 AM, well-Guinnessed but sounding great. He was still going strong when I left around 3 AM.
The busy week of school activities created a nice bond among the students, and we had the pleasant feeling of being a sort of inner circle once the festival got crowded. School started with a meeting the first night explaining what we’d be doing that week and featuring performances by some of the faculty. I was attentive but distracted, my glance returning across the room to a girl with a striking face and shape. She was next to a plain-looking, somewhat paunchy young guy, occasionally talking with him. Could he be her boyfriend? Probably just a friend; she was too physically imposing for him.
I did not see her the next day and only briefly from afar the day after, holding hands with that guy. I was envious and wondered what he offered in order to attract her. That night I went alone to a pub session. There she was – on the other side of a packed room, with a group of people, looking beautiful and exotic in the auburn light. As our eyes met for the first time, I felt a charge go through my body, then a smile slowly develop, expressing my interest and delight. A warm, responsive smile took shape on her face. I gently nodded several times, and her eyes appeared to agree, then moved smoothly away as her boyfriend grabbed her hand. I soon left to listen to music in another pub.
The next day was the school trip to a small village nearby for the master fiddle session with Johnny Doherty. She and her boyfriend stepped down from the other bus, and we smiled as our paths cross. I mentioned something to them about the ride, and their response was friendly. They were university students from Paris, here to enjoy the Irish folk music which he had lately taken to on the pennywhistle. Soon after, the session began inside the pub, and she appeared to be alone, seated on a bench along the wall. She smiled as I approached and sat down next to her. Her name was Rachelle, and our conversation flowed along freely with the music. I mentioned I played the fiddle; she nodded, as if she already knew. She said she didn’t play an instrument but loved to dance, and did so with only minor prodding, in a peasant style that matched her colorful skirt. Rachelle’s body flowed gracefully though the dance steps, the play of windowed sunlight on her translucent white blouse displaying full breasts, also dancing. She seemed so fresh, but also self-assured and sensual. I ached to touch her.
The next morning I was happy to see her at the opening session of the fiddle competitions, alone. She seemed glad and unsurprised when I joined her. We had tea during the break and, after the session ended, talked of meeting again for the early evening competitions. Though we left the time and location a bit vague, we had no trouble finding each other as twilight set in. The championship round was still a day away, but the fiddling was excellent.
Afterwards, we spent some time walking about, conversing pleasantly, her French accent adding to an erotic allure that contrasted with her calm demeanor. I suggested checking out the pubs for jam sessions. Rachelle said she would like that but first wanted to go back to her tent for a light jacket. We walked to the huge temporary campground that the Fleadh had set up on the other side of town from my campground. She asked me to wait outside while she went into a tent that had the sounds of a pennywhistle coming from inside. The sounds stopped and I heard a brief, unintelligible conversation in French. A few moments later she came out and we headed toward the center of town.
The first pub we entered was swarming with people and had a lively session going on in the back room. A little later, we walked along the street, hand in hand, occasionally stopping to listen to the various groups which had formed for music-making and dancing. I began to feel restless, my mind trying to figure out what was going on. She was obviously in Buncrana with her boyfriend, but was also making herself available to spend time with me, holding my hand since we threaded our way through the crowd in the pub. Hoping to clarify this ambiguous situation, I leaned over and kissed her on the cheek. She smiled, then turned to meet my lips with hers, our kiss soft and full.
We walked away from the crowds, snuggling, becoming less inhibited as we left the edge of town and its people, our kisses deeper, our bodies pressed firmly together, vigorously grinding; I swelled with anticipation. Rachelle pushed away, her eyes now sparkling and sharp, her calm manner thoroughly displaced. She began darting about, pecking at me with her lips and teasing my already excited dick with her hands. She was a kitten, playing with me. Her face wore a daring smile as she put her hand inside my pants and fondled me.
We pawed at each other during an erotic romp down the path to the tent I had fortuitously pitched in an isolated clearing near the beach. Once inside, though, we slowed down, tempered by an unspoken desire to savor what was happening. We undressed each other, my eyes and hands feasting on the voluptuous curves of her body. As we slipped off her panties, I surrounded her pussy with kisses, my tongue lingering within its contours. Rachelle caressed my cock before taking it into her mouth and stroking it with supple lips. I wondered how much longer I could contain the explosion.
More play, spontaneous and free, then a momentary pause to discuss birth control. Surprised and pleased that I have raised the subject, she said she had already taken care of that. Our petting began building again in intensity, two writhing bodies next to a calm sea, filling a small tent with motion and heat. This would be the wave to ride. We coupled in a slow thrusting, rolling above and below each other, my eyes roaming excitedly over her glowing face, then below to join in the delight of my hands playing with her big tits. Our rhythmic thrusting gradually passed into a lateral and then circular swinging movement, eventually becoming more frenzied and vocalized as I felt the delicious eruption begin inside, my body deliriously swallowing all consciousness for those precious seconds. Our thrusting continued as Rachelle’s waves rolled in right after mine, low at first, then surging forward in rising moans.
The only sound afterwards - heavy breathing underneath a few light giggles and some sighs, subsiding into the still quieter sound of arms and thighs caressing. Some words and kisses, softly sent. Tenderness. Then talking and laughing before playing again. Music transformed, in the body but beyond dance, at the sweaty source.
14. Thinking About Sex and Marriage
There are many processes in life; the most important of these is evolution and sex lies at its core – that explains our obsession with it. Sex produces some of the greatest highs we will ever experience. It has a power over us like no other life force. This applies across societies (including the ones where repression reinforces its fascination) as well as over time. It is especially true when we are young, and at 20, Rachelle had made a conscious choice to pursue its pleasures beyond her boyfriend. She had read some erotic French literature at her university, seen some films from the same genre, and decided she wanted to broaden her base of sexual experience. She was not interested in other relationships, just sex that was varied and good. Her boyfriend was ok with that; this was the decade following the social revolution of the late 1960’s – almost everything previously contained opened up, including the minds of the young. He was struggling more with the political changes of the times, the son of very rich Parisians, embarrassed by his parents’ wealth and the luxury it bought. She was the daughter of a French mother and Moroccan father – that accounted for her exotic look and, in combination with her body and charm, guaranteed the male attention she had decided to more actively engage.
As we cuddled in my tent afterwards, I told her how she had struck me that first evening of the school. She said she had noticed me then, too, adding she knew right away that she would have me. How wonderful to be a beautiful woman, I thought, able to be sure of something for which a man could only hope. But there was a complicating factor. This was still an era when the male was expected to do the pursuing, at least the overt part, and I had felt blocked by the presence of an obvious boyfriend. Her comment explained why I found her sitting alone at the Johnny Dougherty session and also the next day at the fiddle competition, waiting for my arrival. I wished she had started earlier in the week; perhaps we both needed that mid-week locking of eyes to provide the impetus to action.
The human form is a marvel of nature. An attractive body is a delight, drawing at least the gaze, no matter how old the eyes. Feminism made persuasive arguments back then against viewing women as sex objects; but we need only look now at the images we watch and the fashions young bodies put on to see how resilient sex is, the apparent solution to the objectification issue being to treat both males and females as sex objects. Rachelle was merely ahead of her time.
When sex fully unleashes itself, grabbing our bodies tightly and totally, we lose our heads. The head, however, has a way of striking back, especially in those of us who give thinking a large role in shaping what we do. That night with Rachelle was pure sex at its best, but I have left more than one ardent woman unsatisfied by my occasional speed or unresponsiveness. I never figured out why it happened those times, except that I was probably thinking too much. Our minds define our place in the animal world, though at a cost. Sex can bring pressure and disappointment as well as pleasure, but the pleasure is so intense that we will always come back for more.
Sex was part of the adventure I was seeking in traveling alone in my late twenties and after. I expected eventually to be in love in a long-term relation resulting in marriage and children. But the strength of this urge to roam meant I wasn’t ready for that level of responsibility. As for love, I was still trying to figure out what it was, what it felt like. I had been in a few relationships lasting over a year that involved more than enjoying each other’s company and regular sex, but it didn’t feel like love. Self-absorption combined with an idealized concept of romantic love to smother the expanded form of love that developed later on. That seed may have been somewhere inside, waiting to grow, but it was now stifled by young hormones and ego. I didn’t realize how long the gaps in sexual activity might get moving through different places and cultures, usually engrossed in other things than the desire to get laid. So when it came together well, the high was more intense.
Every high is only temporary, and even normal can seem low afterwards by comparison. But I had good reason to be dispirited while thumbing a ride back to Dublin after the Fleadh and Rachelle. The weather was cold and dreary, more so after several luckless hours beside the road. Many cars leaving town were full, others had drivers looking haggard or hung-over, apparently uninterested in passengers or conversation, and after awhile there were hardly any cars at all. It was late afternoon when a guy pulled over to offer a lift. He was going all the way to Dublin but planned to take a short cut through Northern Ireland’s war zone – did I still want the ride? I asked if the route he would be taking was safe, and he said he had done it a few times in the past year without incident. I opened the door and got in.
The driver, Pat, was a folk singer. He was leaving Buncrana late because he had been in an all night session and then slept most of the day. The border was blockaded; we were stopped and thoroughly searched by British soldiers who were heavily armed and very serious. The recent violence had killed several of their colleagues, and I hoped there were no overly anxious fingers on those triggers. The landscape was as cold and grey as the air. In Derry, the walls of buildings bore the scars of war. There were piles of rubble, stretches of barbed wire and barricaded roads. I thought of the Derry kids who had come to Buncrana on the last nights of the festival; but there were few people outside, an eerie quiet adding to the pallor. There were, however, lots of British soldiers with rifles and automatic weapons along our route through the North. We were stopped at several more checkpoints, and got lost for awhile because the road Pat had taken before was blocked. He said there was more security this time, probably because of the recent flare-ups, but that this shortcut was still saving us some time.
We went through a final control at the border before entering the Republic of Ireland and soon after arrived in a town about two hours west of Dublin where Pat had some musician friends. He pulled the car up next to the rundown farmhouse they lived in. It was dark, and what I wanted most was to sleep after all the activity of the past week. Instead, they handed us each a bottle of Guinness and brought us along to a gig they had at a club in the center of town. Pat and I joined in the late night session and drinking that followed their performance, then crashed on the couches back at their house. I was exhausted and by now had had my fill of both Irish sessions and Guinness.
I made room for a little more of each, though, back at the pub in the Comhaltas headquarters. I would be leaving Dublin the next day, heading to Cologne, one of Germany’s largest cities. I read that it had been heavily bombed in World War II and, like Munich, had reconstructed its center as a large pedestrian zone. My cash supply was shrinking and I hoped that, also like Munich, it would be a good place to busk and finance my next year in Florence. I tried a little next to one of Dublin’s parks, but the money was meager compared to Germany. I did get something precious, though. I was glad to return to classical music again after all the Irish folk music of the past weeks, and played a sorrowful sarabande by Bach. I put as much feeling into it as I could and noticed a tattered older woman listening carefully, tears welling up in her eyes, some dripping onto tired-looking clothes. “Thank you so much!” she said after the piece, poignantly adding that she had no money but wanted me to know how the music had moved her.
I stayed in one of the Comhaltas guest rooms that last night in Ireland, and decided to play in one final session at their pub. That’s where I met Clara, a Dutch girl who gave the impression of being interested in more than the lively conversation we were enjoying. She seemed fun-loving and open, adding to the turn-on of another great body. Unfortunately, she was visiting Dublin with her parents, who seemed to be keeping a close eye on her, probably with reason given her uninhibited presentation. As with Denise earlier that summer, it looked like this would be another case of aroused expectations failing to materialize, but she gave me her phone number in Amsterdam and asked me to call if my travel plans brought me there.
Plans? Other than having to be back in Florence in mid-autumn for the beginning of conservatory lessons, mine were always subject to modification depending on what was happening in any particular place. After a Florentine school year that was artistically stimulating but sexually quiet, heavily religious Ireland (of all places) had put me on a roll. Anyway, Amsterdam was on the way to Cologne and thus became a new stop on this ride.
It was dark when my train arrived at Amsterdam’s central station. I checked the schedule for overnight trains to Germany in case I wasn’t able to reach Clara, but my call from a station phone booth found her home and glad to hear from me. A short time later, we were walking around the city together, talking and laughing. Clara was a cute, busty blond with granny glasses sitting on an up-turned nose. She seemed free- spirited and had been living with her boyfriend, a 39 year-old drug dealer. However, she was in the process of leaving him and planned on moving back in with her parents temporarily. We sat down at an outdoor tavern where people were drinking and openly smoking hash. We ordered some beer and then, her eyes twinkling, Clara pulled some hash out of her pocket that we smoked. That led to more laughing along with some kissing and a little mutual grabbing. Amsterdam had a reputation for being a city where pretty much anything goes, and I was beginning to see why.
We took a bus that dropped us off about a mile from the nearest campground, both with the same thing in mind. The walk there had lots of stops for groping and grinding; fortunately, it was late enough that no one was around. We pitched my tent in an out-of-the-way area and, with anticipation running high, smoked some more hash inside. Our clothes came off slowly, revealing Clara’s voluptuous body. Her style of fucking was fast and frenzied. We both got off well, but I had almost a detached observer’s feeling, especially the second time when she got on top and frantically pumped away. I laid back, disembodied, and watched a female in heat fuck me.
Next morning Clara got up, saying she had to go to class. I asked how far away the university was, then learned that she was turning 18 and went to an alternative lyceum; the normal one bored her. We met again in the afternoon and later went to her parents’ home for supper. I had talked with them briefly in the Dublin pub, and we all conversed pleasantly enough while Clara and her mother prepared the food. I felt somewhat strange, the older vagabond musician that their daughter had brought home. But they seemed to have dispositions that were both tolerant and resigned. Perhaps they were thinking how much younger and more conventional I was than her boyfriend, whom they obviously disliked.
Afterwards, Clara and I strolled around the center of Amsterdam, then returned to my tent. We were more playful this time, and I got very aroused when she mounted me and started banging her huge breasts against my face, swinging from side to side with a naughty tit-slapping motion. We again slept stuffed inside my sleeping bag. My mind drifted back to Rachelle, and how much more she drew me in. Should I try to see her again in Paris? I will. Can such a night ever be repeated? It cannot. Is that exhilarating, enveloping wave of total sensation better left to memory?
Melina’s complimentary glass of champagne is adding to the effects of the dinner wine as I leave her restaurant, telling her how much I enjoyed our conversation and thanking her for preparing such an excellent meal. I head toward Sitia’s only folk music club, where one of Crete’s best lyra players introduces me to the music that will draw me back for more later on in Chania. Its rhythms are captivating and the musicians friendly as they tell me about their music during the break. The club is filled with locals, some of whom dance in the space in front of the small stage. One of the dancers is a beautiful woman with long dark hair, part of a group of Greeks in their early thirties at a nearby table. They are not in pairs, but dance in a circle; her short skirt shows off perfect legs in sheer black stockings moving fluidly to the music, her breast contours highlighted by an arched back, raised arms and a head held high. There was a time when I would have approached her, eagerly, anxiously. Instead, I now merely watch and silently sigh at my table, taking pleasure in a bit of fantasy, alone but with sweet memories.
The irrationality of physical attraction and the remembrance of firm young bodies entwined in full bloom can affect sexual experiences later in life. Too many years put the dancer out of reach, but not so the restaurant owner of earlier that evening. She embodied creativity, trickled a refined sensuality. Her life experience gave her more to offer than the dancer, and her scintillating conversation was delightful. Was she inviting as well as friendly? Her manner and body language raised the possibility, but there was no push from my body to find out. Fantasy carried the look of the dancer, not the charming but portly restaurateur. Physical attraction is not age appropriate, and memory can spoil us, stop us.
But I was also blocked by something else. I have never been unfaithful to my wife, though that is the wrong word - fidelity is better placed in the heart and mind, not the genitalia. Giovanna and I met at a Smith Italian department party. Over the course of several weeks, we became interested in each other and there was a sexual charge in the air, but I hesitated. At forty, I was finally ready to marry and have children, actively looking for a wife, but didn’t want a strong sexual attraction to drive the choice. I feared its grip - once it gets going, it can easily take over, at least for awhile. Other things were more important now, and I needed an undistracted head to help me figure things out. When things got steamy, I cooled us off once, but that didn’t last long.
Before getting married a year later, we talked through expectations each of us felt we had to agree on – kids, and how many; priority of parenting over career and money; responsibilities to our own parents as they aged. I knew a shared Italian culture and joy in living would give us a good base, and also sensed that she would be a loving mother to our children. I asked Giovanna how important sexual exclusivity was to her. I was eager for family life but also aware of appetites stimulated by my years as a wandering fiddler. Traveling alone as I did meant some long stretches of abstinence but also times of sexual adventure. It was hard then to imagine never having sex with any another woman for the rest of my life. If, after we had kids, she would break up our family over that, then I didn’t think we should get married. I would be faithful, yes, but perhaps not forever in the physical sense. I proposed that this understanding apply to both of us and never involve anyone within our circle of friends or acquaintances. I believed that if it were ever to happen, it would be in the distant future, when routine might make the sexual pull of variety overpowering. She didn’t like the idea, but thought about it for a week or so and said she could learn to live with it.
My next proposal was the more traditional “Will you marry me?”, delivered a short time later on valentine’s day and in Italian – “Mi sposerai?” Her response was immediate and came in the English we normally spoke in:
“You’re kidding! But you can’t use the future tense in Italian to ask that.”
Stunned, the only thing I could think of to say was “Why not?”
“English uses the future, but in Italian we use the conditional tense, ‘Mi sposeresti?’, otherwise it sounds like a command.”
“But I thought commands used the imperative tense – ‘Sposami!”
“That sounds even worse than the future tense; the conditional is best.”
Yes, she was a professor of Italian, but I was too flabbergasted by the surreal exchange following my question to rephrase it in the proper tense. I thought she would be touched by my romantic gestures – asking her on Valentine’s day in her native language to marry me – but instead got a lesson in Italian grammar! Maybe that was her way of saying she wanted more time to think about it, but her heavy hints in the preceding months about getting married made that unlikely. In any event, I changed the subject. When I woke up the next morning, it was clear that her answer was yes – she was in the other room on the phone inquiring about the availability of the college chapel and faculty club for wedding services.
Three years later she was diagnosed with breast cancer, her magnificent body needing a knife to save her life. After surgery, she made clear that she felt disfigured and vulnerable; she was never comfortable with the sexual part of our pre-marriage agreements and wanted it nullified. Her needs had changed along with her body, and I adjusted.
For more than 25 years I have resisted temptation, though it has never felt particularly onerous. When you love someone, you don’t want to hurt them, especially someone as sensitive as Giovanna. In this area of life, my mind keeps my body under control, though I can imagine being carried away, sometimes fantasizing about it, as with the beautiful dancer in Crete. We normally think of fantasy as being an escape from reality, but for me, it combines with memory to keep reality in check.
15. Spiritual Sightings
The body is normally contrasted with the mind, but that often leads to confusion because they are so interconnected. The truer distinction to draw is between body and spirit. During my earlier travels, I spent over three months in India and Nepal and never got laid, or even kissed. Instead of bodily stimulation, I found there a spiritual dimension to life as nowhere else. A central tenet of Hindu belief is that a person’s essence lies beyond body and mind, in something that is pure, infinite and eternal. They call it atman, and though it transcends the material world, there were times when I felt as if it were nearby.
One evening I walked back to my hotel as dusk set in and saw Indians lighting candles in their shops and homes, placing them on tables and rooftops, in windows and around buildings, creating a marvelous illumination everywhere. Millions of candles topped with beautiful flames! There was no need for electric lamps, which would have seemed harsh and out of place. People and things glowed warmly in the midst of this natural light, and I felt uplifted before I knew the festival’s name or significance. This was Diwali, the festival of lights, a celebration of the triumph of good over evil, of knowledge over ignorance, of the inner, transcendent light that nourishes spirit and drives out darkness. Diwali comes after the harvest and dates back to ancient times in India, its symbolism ultimately based on the sun, the source of all light and life. I walked aimlessly for hours, enchanted.
Another day I walked down to the banks of the Ganges, the holy river of the Hindus. I was in Varanasi, one of the oldest continuously inhabited cities in the world and the spiritual center of Hinduism. It swarms throughout the year with pilgrims, some of whom come there at the end of their lives. They believe that dying in this holiest of cities releases the soul from its cycle of transmigrations. I had read that Hindus bathed in the Ganges to wash away sins, but also saw the many other ways they used its polluted waters – some drank it (though most merely rinsed their mouths), some put it in a pot to boil food over a fire back on shore; everyone prayed in the river before filling a bottle to bring home. The banks, too, were teeming with activity and rituals, including several places with dead human bodies stacked on wooden biers. Bonfires were prepared and then lit one after another, flaring up in a brilliant mix of red flame and black carbon after the body was moved into the fire. The dead were sent off in a glorious blaze to a reincarnated life or final release, leaving only ashes to be collected by family members and perhaps scattered in the river before the next piling up of branches and dropping of the torch.
But it was an elderly Hindu woman and the sun rather than the fires cremating the dead that left the deepest impression during my visits to the river. I had arrived before sunrise that day and watched her approach the water’s edge, slowly and methodically, her thin, hunched body closed in upon itself. She wore a simple sari and shawl, covering her from the top of her head to the toes of her bare feet. Just before the sun began its rise over the other side of the Ganges, she entered the river, praying. When its first rays spilled upon us, she straightened up and raised her arms, then opened them, embracing the sun as the shawl dropped to her shoulders and exposed her head. She closed her eyes; her praying intensified. While the sun rose just above the horizon, its altar in this holy shrine of nature, she continued in a more animated way, moving toward the light, the caress from beyond seeming to energize her. Sun worship – a form of spiritual expression from the dawn of humanity, still among us; awe inspired by the true giver of life. She bathed in its warmth and glory for several minutes more, then opened her eyes and turned her attention down to the river, calmly washing her face and arms in its waters, completing the sacred ritual.
Early human efforts to connect to the spiritual realm took other forms, many of them raw and blood-splattered. Like India, Nepal has a devout Hindu majority, but its perch at the top of the Himalaya mountain chain and lack of transportation links until recent times kept its people isolated from the rest of the world. Its culture provided a window into traditions virtually untouched by occident or orient – and also into the past.
Animal sacrifice was once a common religious practice, but it has disappeared from most of the earth. When I learned there was a temple in the Katmandu valley where it was still done, I wanted to see it. An early bus brought me to a small village bustling with people and animals moving about. There was a long line of believers, local people with their goats and chickens, waiting at an open air temple to reach the two priests. These priests wore no vestments, their clothes simple robes, stained with blood from the knives in their hands. They slit the animal’s throat on a stone altar that drained the blood into a trough at their feet. It ran between a temple wall and a floor of stones with wild grass growing among them. Occasionally, the priests threw small internal organs into the trough.
When it came her turn, a woman gave the priests her chicken and prayed while she watched them slaughter it. Except for its head, she could take it home afterwards to eat; but if she wanted the head, she would have to pay money to the temple. She left the head on the altar, put the chicken in her bag and stepped next to the trough. She bent over and put her cupped hand into the trough, then drank the blood she brought up to her lips. Her hand returned to the trough, this time to pick up some small animal organs that she put in her mouth and swallowed whole. I felt my head knock back, my stomach turn and my eyes sear. There were only two other foreigners among the crowd and I heard one of them shriek, but my eyes stayed with the woman as she walked away from the altar. My mind flashed back to something I never understood and even found strange as a devout Catholic boy – the Holy Eucharist, the miraculous conversion of bread and wine into the actual body and blood of Jesus Christ, consumed by the faithful in order to become one with God. Had I just witnessed the origin of a sacrament that brought much of the world to its knees?
Back in the center of Katmandu, I was returning to the Oberoi hotel for my evening strolling violin duties, marveling at the colorful religious activity in the little Hindu shrines all over the city. I passed by a terrifying statue almost ten feet tall - it was the deity that Nepalis call the truth god. Believers say it is impossible to speak a lie in the presence of this god. Before the development of a legal system, disputants were bought here to determine who was telling the truth; some still come for that purpose. Before history itself, kings were worshipped as gods, and the king of Nepal was not only an absolute monarch but also considered to be a reincarnation of the god Vishnu. There was however one person he bowed down before – the virgin goddess Kumari.
A deity incarnate is a common enough theme in Christianity and some other religions, but this was a bizarre variation on that theme, starting with her selection. Priests search for the goddess among very young girls born into the caste of goldsmiths; she must have a fortuitous horoscope as well as thirty-two distinct attributes ranging from the shape of various body parts to bravery and serenity. One of the critical tests puts the child candidates in a darkened room filled with the bloodied heads of sacrificial animals and frightening sounds from masked dancers and priests. The true goddess will remain calm throughout this terrifying ordeal. Once identified, she is taken from her family to live in an ornately carved wooden palace and becomes an object of worship. She only leaves the palace once or twice a year decked in jewels on a golden litter for the most important religious ceremonies. The Kumari goddess hardly ever even walks since her feet are considered especially sacred and are kissed by the king. Her divinity ends when she reaches puberty or otherwise sheds blood. She then is viewed as an ordinary human and expected to marry, though she can hardly be normal after such an experience. Finding a spouse is complicated by a superstition that the husband of an ex-goddess is likely to meet an early death.
I went to her palace twice during my month in Nepal. Only believers are allowed inside to get her blessing, but I saw her briefly from the courtyard one afternoon, on a balcony above, looking much more like a bored and spoiled nine year old girl than a goddess.
Buddha was born a prince in Nepal but renounced a life of indulgence and began his long spiritual journey there. After attaining enlightenment, he taught others the way and asked, unsuccessfully, that he not be worshipped nor have monuments built in his honor. One day I rode a bicycle out of Katmandu to an important Buddhist stupa and watched some robed pilgrims praying as they circled the huge mound-like shrine. I entered the austere temple inside just as several monks were coming in from a side door, carrying exotic-looking instruments. After some silent meditation, they began a low-pitched, monotonous chant which slowly lulled the senses. The breath deepens, the pulse slows. The eyes and ears suspend their attention.
Stillness. Broken unexpectedly by an explosion of sound - coming from the ten foot long horns some of the monks stridently blew into, punctuated by thunderous drums and cymbals. It was a raucous, frightening blare that seemed to shout from the bowels of the earth, perhaps even from another world. My body tingled, my nerve endings excited by the vibrations passing through them, deep and strong. Just as suddenly the cacophony ended, followed by silence and then more quiet chanting before the next shriek of horns. This pattern repeated several times, though I was unsure afterwards how long the ceremony lasted - I was outside time. By pure luck, I had come there during a sacred monthly ritual; I sat off in a corner unaware of its purpose but transfixed, a silent, sole observer catching a glimpse of something beyond, alternately peaceful and terrifying.
Not all my experiences in that part of the world had a spiritual connection. The basic material needs - food and shelter - had to be met or I would be forced to leave India soon after arriving and spend the limited money I had left on a plane ticket home. My successful trade of music for a free stay at the beach-front hotel in Kenya several weeks before encouraged me to try again when I arrived in Bombay. Despite some initial expressions of interest, I was told that the national labor law foreclosed that possibility. The same thing had happened in Nairobi, where one of the major hotels had recently been heavily fined for hiring some foreign musicians. I decided to try one more time when I arrived in New Delhi a week later and called the manager of the Oberoi-Intercontinental, the crown jewel of India’s most luxurious hotel group, to pitch my proposal. He said he had never heard of such an arrangement, but seemed interested and told me to come the next day to play for him. In the meantime, he would check on potential legal problems.
A well-dressed assistant led me through an impressive lobby to the office area. The elegant surroundings added not only to my desire to stay there but also to my nerves. Fortunately, the manager was occupied in another part of the hotel and would be back as soon as possible. I was told to wait in the room outside his office, which gave me a chance to warm up by quietly playing the pieces I had prepared and also to relax the stiff wrist I had picked up during the bus ride to the hotel. The bus was already crowded but I had managed to wedge my way into the standing area, then watched helplessly as still more people got on, pressing against me, jamming my wrist into an unnatural, painful position with no way to move it. It’s usually annoying when the person you are meeting is late for an appointment, but this was a delay that I sorely needed.
Mr. Nain was cordial but got right down to business as soon as he returned. He listened and liked what I played, said the hotel’s lawyer had advised him that Indian law prohibited payment without a work permit (a process that would take months), but there was apparently nothing illegal about bartering musical services for room and board at the hotel. We agreed that I would play two hours of strolling violin music per day with one day a week off, in exchange for a standard guest room, anything on the menus, and laundry service. Later that afternoon, I left my tiny room with shared bath in a very modest guest house and entered the world of five star opulence.
Within a few days I settled into a loose routine, starting each morning with several glasses of freshly squeezed juice and a hearty breakfast, then meandering around the city before returning to the hotel for dinner and music-making. This teeming city displayed the most jarring juxtapositions of poverty and wealth, tradition and modernity, cultural refinement and coarse survival. Throngs of people moved busily about, sacred cows and other animals often in their midst, temporarily stopping the incessant traffic though just barely. It was a constant, overwhelming blur of color and scent, motion and noise.
It peaked in Old Delhi, much aged but little changed. Tiny shops, one after another, combined with street vendors and walking crowds to form a bustling protocapitalist market. New Delhi instead expressed itself in its government buildings, the management center for this enormous mass of people. With so many rules and regulations, there were bureaucrats everywhere. I observed a highly effective one thanks to a letter I had earlier sent to the Indian Law Institute, resulting in an invitation to observe the chief labor official mediating between negotiators representing big industry and big labor. He intervened frequently and was very forceful in moving them toward settlement, a dramatic contrast to the Italian mediator I had observed just months before. The Italian passively listened to gesticulating negotiators argue for awhile, then left them squabbling and stepped into the hallway to discuss something with his brother who had stopped by, returning to listen again before calmly making a few agreeable suggestions. Similar end point, different means. I watched and tried to learn – this is what I wanted to do, though how to do it was very unclear. There was obviously no single method to master.
Indian culture was rich and highly articulated. Struck by the fluidity of a classical dancer’s movements, I joined the group complimenting her backstage and shook what was more a thick liquid than an arm. Concerts drew me into the world of Indian music, classical and folk, much of it improvised, all of it pulsing with exotic, oscillating sounds. Hindu themes and gods filled the many fascinating museums; an impressive shrine honored Gandhi, their secular saint. The Indians used different languages and even calligraphies, but they all loved cricket. Sharp exchanges between judges and lawyers often turned the courtrooms into theaters as entertaining as the Bollywood films that packed the movies.
But the quantity of people! How inspiring to find democratic institutions and a free press in such an enormous country! Some aspects of this multitude, however, were hard to look at – defeated faces, deformed bodies, the tent homes made of plastic bags draped over poles and string, so many lives unfolding in the streets without a shred of privacy or dignity. Confronted every day by so many outstretched hands, what do you do? I tried many responses, all of them dismaying. Children most easily attract our sympathy, but give money to a beggar child and be encircled by dozens more, especially loud and insistent now because they have seen you give. “Mister, please – me, too. Mister…” Is this behavior I want to reinforce in a child? I decided to ignore them, no easy task, and offer money only to adults.
But how to choose among so much need? For awhile, I gave a little to lots, trying to select the most desperate-looking for my nominal contributions. That left me feeling overwhelmed and hopeless. Then I tried giving more money but only to the first and last beggars of the day, an approach that lifted the burden of choice but was too random to ease my discomfort. I finally decided to try to ignore the beggars and support instead those attempting to earn money at the margins – the street vendors selling pieces of fruit or glasses of juice, and others like them struggling to get by. I pretty much stopped taking the bus and began hiring independent drivers whose only possession (unless rented) was a beat-up bicycle pulling a rustic rickshaw. Bargaining was expected in these transactions, and I liked having the opportunity to sharpen an essential life skill; so the strategy I developed was to negotiate the best deal I could and then include an unexpectedly generous tip at the destination, normally a satisfying result for the driver and doubly so for me.
One day I had a free ticket provided by the hotel for a tour van and was waiting outside at the stop. A weathered-looking, shabbily-dressed man pulled up in a dented rickshaw and offered his services. When I told him I already had a ticket for the van that was due momentarily, he began pleading with me to hire him.
“Please - I am a poor man. Six hungry children at home. I can take you to these places. I can tell you about them. Please...”
I at first resisted but finally gave in and we agreed on a price. During the two hours he drove me around, he told me about his health problems and worries about not being able to support his family. I decided to surprise him at the end of the trip and make myself feel good by paying him more than five times the price we had set. He put the money I proudly gave him in his pocket and stuck his hand in front of me.
“Give me more. I need it. You don’t need it like I do. Give me more money.”
He moved his hand under my face, not in a threatening way but insistently, his voice plaintive. I reminded him of our agreement and that I had already grossly overpaid him. He repeated his pleas, raising his tone as well as his cupped hand. I was stunned and walked away shaking my head. It was only much later that I wondered if there was a connection between his reaction to my gesture and the selfish motive I had in expecting gratitude. True generosity is selfless. I was not capable of that, though I disliked the manner of his lesson.
I took a couple of photos during our trip together; later on, when I had the 36 shots on that role of film developed, all of them came out well except two. One was a photo of him and his rickshaw which I took when I had earlier decided I was going to handsomely reward him – it was to be a souvenir of my generosity, but it came out blurry and distorted. The other was of a Moslem shrine we stopped at. He was a devout Moslem and told me that it was forbidden to photograph this holy place. Because of its interesting architecture, I nevertheless snapped a picture when his back was turned. That photo failed completely, a blackened reminder of a bewildering afternoon.
Depending on the day, I might return to the luxury of the Oberoi hotel feeling relief or guilt, exhaustion or exhilaration. My room was next to the outdoor pool and I often ended the hot days with a dip in the water and a chat with the guests. The wealthy clientele was pretty evenly split between foreigners and Indians. The tourists were usually there on high end packages organized around sightseeing and shopping that seemed designed to insulate them from Indian daily life. I occasionally saw these groups following their guides and was struck by two images.
Video recorders were an expensive, bulky novelty then, and one day I saw several male tourists walking around with them perched on their shoulders. They dutifully pointed these devices toward the sight their guide was describing, but when she moved without pause to the next two sights near them, some swung their recorders without ever stopping to look with the naked eye. One of the places had expansive natural beauty, seen by these viewers only through a narrow lens, a metaphor for the experience they would bring home. The other image came several weeks later from a similarly well-off tourist group on the Ganges River in Varanasi. Their motorized boat zoomed close to several pilgrims who were clearly startled by the cameras being shoved just a few feet from their faces, interrupting their prayers. The tour guide described the quiet piety of the pilgrims over a blaring megaphone, adding a layer of irony to this rude attack.
My most interesting conversations at the hotel were usually not with the guests but with the junior managers, recent graduates from India’s best universities. They were invariably so bright and broadly cultured that I wondered why they weren’t using their degrees in a sector of the economy better suited to their talents. After a few weeks there, I became friendly enough with one to ask him and learned that they had few alternatives. Oberoi had a highly-regarded management training program. The hospitality industry was one of the very best career paths at this stage of their country’s economic development, a situation we both hoped would change, and which did so dramatically over the next few decades.
I worked at the New Delhi Oberoi for more than a month. Mr. Nain wanted to use me as a strolling violinist in the hotel’s cocktail lounge, so my initial problem was how to look and act like a strolling violinist. I had been hired to do it only once before and flopped, at an inn outside Florence for a New Year’s Eve party. The inn served up tasteful tradition and fine food in several small, candle-lit rooms. My first trip through went well and generated applause. But the main event of this evening was conviviality. I got drawn in and simply spent too much time talking and partying. The innkeeper rightfully expected that I would play music thoughout the evening, but for the final hour or two, I hardly played any.
“Go to the tables and play something!”
“But everyone is talking, no one seems interested in listening,” I responded, not sufficiently appreciating that the ambiance he wanted to create did not require the more careful listening I unreasonably expected. This was a party, not a concert performance, and I wasn’t doing my job. But more than unwarranted arrogance, the problem was that these people were just so congenial! Italians have developed being together socially into an art form centered on animated conversation, often with several going on simultaneously at maximum volume. I eagerly joined in, accepting the glass of wine offered at many tables, merrily engaging the celebrants with words more than music; but I woke up the next morning with a painful hangover, feeling incompetent and irresponsible. The owner paid me the agreed price, though it was clear that he was disappointed.
Knowing how not to do it, I was eager for another chance. I had packed two neckties and a vest for this trip and, immediately after getting the Oberoi gig, purchased a second vest in a used clothing store. These alternated on top of my three long-sleeved shirts, which the hotel laundry service kept clean and nicely pressed. With my outfit in place, I had to figure out what to do. I had learned the cardinal rule at the Florentine inn – just be part of the background, but that was hardly a sufficient guide. Though I had rarely been in places classy enough to have a strolling violinist, I combined what I had observed with even vaguer memories of a few movie scenes set in elegant restaurants to develop an initial strategy. I walked around the room at a leisurely pace, playing from a mix of several dozen tunes that I knew by heart and hoped would have wide appeal. When someone smiled and established eye contact, I stopped to finish the tune there. That usually was followed by some small talk and another tune or two before a final exchange of pleasantries and a return to musical meandering. I quickly learned that a smile was not always a signal to stop, especially when business was being discussed; consistent eye contact was a better indicator. Though I was a little inhibited at first, I also realized that conversation with willing guests was almost as important as the music.
“Where are you from?” “How is your stay going?” Whether asked by me or the guest, questions like these provided easy entry into the chit-chat part, with which I soon became comfortable. These sometimes developed into interesting conversations that continued after “work” was over. Business executives and corporate lawyers seemed particularly intrigued if I mentioned my law degree, information that often elicited expressions of envy but also an occasional look of pity. Some guests offered me handsome tips which I always declined, explaining that I was well taken care of by the hotel. Whether I was busking in Europe or doing music trades in the luxury hotels of the third world, I always tried to avoid situations that might make me feel more like a beggar than a musician.
People often expect strolling violinists to play requests, something that worried me in the beginning. My repertory was broadly based across the styles that I played – mainly classical, folk, pop and standards – but initially limited to the pieces I had memorized. The most commonly requested tunes came from shows and movies that had been international hits, so I quickly taught myself several of those. If someone requested a piece I didn’t know, a common occurrence, I asked what style of music they liked best, then played something I knew from that style. This deflection strategy served me well throughout the trip, though I also experimented with bolder tactics. If I had never played the tune but knew what it sounded like, I would sometimes offer to try playing it on the spot. That worked well if the melody was simple, but sounded tentative and rough if it was too complex. To avoid embarrassment, I learned to do a fast mental scan of the melody before making the offer. As I became better at that, I decided to go a step further.
Guest - “Do you know “Time Will Tell”?
“No, I’ve never heard it; but if you sing me the melody, I’ll try to play it for you.”
When this turned out well, it invariably brought forth spontaneous applause and admiring comments. More often, though, the melody was either too complicated or indecipherable because the singer was incapable of carrying a tune, a situation which required delicate handling.
Guest - “No, no, not like that; like this – dum-de-dum … (indecipherable)
“I’m having a little trouble following the melody; let’s try again, just the first section.”
“Dum-de-dum… (hopelessly indecipherable)
If I was lucky, someone else at the table who knew the tune and had a decent singing voice might enable me to play it. If not but the people were of good humor, we could all have a good laugh, whether at the vocalist’s expense or mine. If nothing worked, I went into deflection mode and fell back on old faithful.
“Sorry I can’t get it, but let me play you something I do know. What style of music do you like best?”
As time went by, I learned more tunes and, more importantly, how to handle the different situations that unfolded and thus felt confident I could deal with whatever arose – with one major exception. That came after I returned to the United States and used my law degree to launch a career as a mediator of lawsuits. Because this was a brand new field, I had to develop my own opportunities and support myself in the meantime, which I did by continuing what had worked so well during my long trip home – playing strolling violin music. I got hired to play every Saturday evening at a fancy restaurant in western Massachusetts, which paid enough to cover living expenses with a minimal investment of time. The most important mediation opportunity I was developing involved persuading the twelve Superior Court judges in our district to adopt a program I had designed and use me as the complex case mediator. Legal mediation was novel then; many hard-nosed lawyers and judges were skeptical, some considered it flakey. Who was this new guy trying to get it going? Meeting with all the judges in their different courthouses took several months and things were progressing well; but I worried the whole time that one of them might show up at the restaurant while I was playing. I imagined entering their minds and saw there a simple question - why is this guy who says he’s a mediator moonlighting as a strolling violinist?
That would be hard to explain, so I thought about options. Should I wear a disguise? Hide and escape through the back door? Ask what style of music the judge liked and play a tune? I couldn’t come up with a good solution. If it happened, I would just have to wing it and hope for the best. Fortunately, none of them came while I was working there, my project got off the ground and everything turned out fine. There are some situations that you just can’t prepare for, that depend entirely on luck even though your future might hang in the balance.
After the first week, Mr. Nain told me to come to his office the next morning to discuss some changes.
“Are you satisfied with my playing?” I asked with some concern the following day.
“Yes, very much. I want you to keep doing the same type of music in the lounge, but for the final half hour, I’d like to feature you playing in the restaurant with our band.”
The hotel had four restaurants, two of them with live music. I knew he couldn’t be referring to the group playing Indian music in the restaurant serving local cuisine, but the main restaurant had an international menu accompanied by a jazz band, almost equally problematic for me.
“I’m sorry Mr. Nain, but I don’t play jazz. They are fine musicians, I’ve heard them, but I can’t really play that style, certainly not like they do.”
“I’m sure you’ll be able to work something out. I told the band you will be at their rehearsal later this morning – 11 AM at the restaurant stage. I’d like you to start performing with them this evening at 9 PM.”
Mr. Nain was already shaking my hand, saying it would be fine and telling his secretary to bring in his next appointment. He was a man of few words, cordial but decisive. I was pleased with his confidence in me, but anxious about how this might turn out. I had listened to the band a few nights before and was impressed by the fluidity of their improvisations, especially during the up-tempo tunes, something I could never do. There were four of them, with matching tuxedos that made them look as professional as they sounded. How was I ever going to fit in? I decided to at least try looking good and showed up for the rehearsal in an embroidered, traditional Indian shirt I had recently bought. As we exchanged greetings, I noticed that they all wore t-shirts and blue jeans.
Joe Santana, short, squat and smiling, was the band leader. He played sax and violin, an unusual combination because their techniques are so dissimilar. His younger brother also named Joe but with a different middle name, played the drums. A trumpeter and electric guitarist filled out the group. All four of them were descendants of settlers in Goa, the former Portuguese colony that had become a city on the west coast of India and the main source of its players of western music. I told them how much I enjoyed their performance the other night and also a little about my background. Joe suggested that we get to work.
“Mr. Nain said we should prepare a half hour or so of music for tonight. What would you like to start with, Peter?”
I decided I should lower expectations before playing a note.
“Joe, this was all Mr. Nain’s idea – I told him I that I know a few Gershwin tunes and some other standards, but that I definitely am not a jazz improviser. I’ve done some simple improvisations with slow folk tunes and blues, but that’s it.”
“Just do what you feel comfortable with. We like Gershwin, too. Which ones do you know?”
“The Man I Love? In G?”
“Yes, whatever key you want. You lead off with the tune.”
I played the melody, then listened while they took turns improvising, and joined in again at the end when the melody returned. It sounded good, though I felt a little inadequate about not being able to improvise with them. We used the same formula with Summertime and a couple of other standards, including a tango I had heard them play which was also in my strolling violin repertory. We needed a few more pieces to fill out the set, so they asked me to fiddle them some American folk tunes and said they would make up an accompaniment, which they quickly did. My ears were accustomed to hearing acoustic guitar, banjo and mandolin back up Ragtime Annie and The Ranger’s Waltz, not sax, trumpet and drums, so it sounded strange. But I was feeling better – these guys were nice, and it looked like this was probably going to turn out okay.
Though they were the real musicians, Mr. Nain had arranged for an over-blown image of me to be on a large sign in the lobby touting the violinist performing in the Taj Restaurant. This visual hype was belied by the response from the restaurant audience to my appearance on stage during the band’s second set. It started with a drum roll, which continued as I stepped up onto the bandstand while Joe announced “And now, ladies and gentlemen, our featured guest artist from the United States of America, Peter Contuzzi!”, followed by a cymbal crash. And then… silence. Most people continued eating, some looked up with blank facial expressions that said “Who?” while their hands remained busy with knives and forks. The whole scene was made worse on the second evening by two customers who tepidly clapped for the few seconds it took them to realize that no one else cared, so why should they?
Not wishing to endure any more of such mortifying entrances, I told Joe that we had to change the introduction. The problem was getting rid of the embarrassing silence, so we cut out the cymbal crash and, the instant Joe finished saying my name, jumped into a hard-driving fiddle tune - Ragtime Annie, my best piece, the one I always relied on to make a strong initial impression. We picked up the tempo to break-neck speed the last time through, producing robust applause and a successful launch of my thirty minutes in the spotlight.
Within a few days, I was not only comfortable playing with them but enjoying it, too. I practiced improvising on slow bluesy tunes like Summertime in my room, and then began doing it on the bandstand. After my melody and a couple of simple improvisations, they invariably kicked in with torrents of notes and well-crafted solos, but their encouragement kept me from suffering the comparison. As Joe generously pointed out, it always makes more sense to go from the simple to the complex rather than the other way around.
I usually joined the guys for a chat after our set together. One evening the subject turned to classical music, and the two Joes told me they also played in the violin section of the New Delhi Symphony Orchestra.
“Well,” I said, “you guys are certainly versatile.”
“We are rehearsing Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony later this week for a concert at the end of next month. Come along with us, Peter. The conductor will be happy to have you sit in.”
“Yes,” added the younger Joe, “we can meet you here and go together.”
My idea of a symphony orchestra in a large city was based on the many concerts I had been to in America and Europe. It was something way out of my league, requiring musicianship at the highest level, so I begged off. But they insisted and I finally relented, tempted by the chance to play Beethoven and consoled by the knowledge that this would only be a rehearsal, an unlikely setting for me to inflict any serious damage. I still wondered, though - how and why do I keep getting myself into situations that will probably make me feel that I’m in over my head? I like to swim but not to drown.
Again, my anxiety was misplaced. Despite its imposing name, the New Delhi Symphony was not a professional orchestra. Many of its members were amateurs, and the professional musicians all earned their living playing in hotels. This was a labor of love for everyone, so I quickly felt at ease. In fact, we could only do an approximation of the Fifth Symphony because there were no violists, just two cellists and an incomplete wind section. For the concert, musicians would be brought in from Bombay and Calcutta to fill out the orchestra. The conductor hummed the missing parts, in a voice without character, but playing Beethoven is always exciting, even when he’s not all there. What we lacked in quality, we made up for in enthusiasm. The two Joes introduced me to several of the musicians, so there was a nice social component to the evening as well. I thanked them both for their insistence.
A few days later, they invited me to their home to have lunch and meet their family. I arrived at 11 AM and stepped into a crowded, buzzing household. In his early thirties, Joe was the eldest of several brothers and sisters, all of whom lived with their parents in a modest home that also accommodated Joe’s wife and four-year-old daughter. A new trumpet player that Joe was breaking in for the band was temporarily staying there as well, practicing scales and exercises. Both Joes and I sat chatting in the living room as other family members moved in and out, frequently joining in the conversation.
The furnishings were simple, dominated however by a huge record collection along the walls of the room. Joe said that the band’s sole exposure to jazz was through recordings of American and European groups, but by listening and then playing along with the records, they had learned the idiom. There were also recordings of pop music from many different countries, which explained why they had a tune ready for any occasion or group. The night before, they had played some Russian drinking songs for Russian tourists who sang along as they polished off a bottle of vodka. Joe even sang in Japanese for the tour group from Japan, though he now confessed that he didn’t have a clue what the words meant and showed me the record from which he had memorized the vocal sounds.
Pleasant conversation continued during the tasty meal prepared by Joe’s mother and sisters. The family name, Santana, remained Portuguese; but as I looked around the room it was clear not only from the food on the table but also their manner and complexion that India had thoroughly absorbed them. Our ancestors were born in the Mediterranean but wound up on opposite ends of the earth in search of a better life. Two offspring of Europe had become through assimilation an Indian and an American. Joe’s transformation had taken place in a traditional society over many generations, mine in just a single generation but in a country that signifies rapid change more than any other. How different we had become despite our shared roots in southern Europe! And how wonderful that music had brought us back together.
Several days later I contracted food poisoning, ironically from food I ate at the spotless Oberoi hotel rather than the rough-looking places I occasionally had lunch or snacks in. I spent the next 24 hours in bed, leaving it only (though frequently) to crawl to the bathroom for a violent discharge of vomit or diarrhea. When the band arrived for their evening performance, Mr. Nain told them I was sick and would not be able to play. The next day all four of them came to my room to see how I was doing and, since I was already feeling better, stayed for some socializing. With my spirits lifted and the bug out of my system, I was able to join them on stage that evening.
My last night in New Delhi came about a week later. The band and I played a good final set together for a receptive audience, then chatted and reminisced at a table near the bandstand during the break before their last set of the evening. Joe knew I still had to pack for an early train the next morning, but asked me to stay just a little longer. When they were all on stage again, Joe announced that the band would like to dedicate their next tune to the violinist they had enjoyed playing with this past month, then pointed to me as he began singing “Goodbye My Friend.”
A letter of reference from Mr. Nain opened the doors to playing music in luxury hotels for the rest of my time in India and Nepal. The letter was concise but very positive because I wrote it. There was no forgery involved – when I requested the letter, Mr. Nain asked that I save him some time by providing a draft, an offer I immediately accepted. Nepal did not have any work permit restrictions, so when I got there I was able to negotiate a weekly salary in addition to the free room and board. My compensation was in Nepali rupees, but it was a multiple of what the Katmandu Oberoi paid most of its other employees. I bought a ticket to see the Himalayan peaks up close in a small plane and had more than enough money for other splurges. Nepali law required me to spend all the rupees before leaving the country, a pleasant predicament I had never before encountered.
Another letter of reference, this one not written by me, also opened some doors. It came from the United States Consulate in Florence, Italy where several months earlier I had performed a program of American folk music. I contacted the cultural director of the American Embassy soon after my arrival in Nepal and was hired to play a similar program. The $200 paycheck bought me a plane ticket to Bangkok, my last stop before flying home. Though everything was up in the air when I left Italy for the long trip home (as it was when I left the United States for Italy years before), one thing was leading nicely to another. At this point, I was even running a modest profit.
The Embassy invited local cultural dignitaries, mainly musicians and artists, to attend my concert. At the reception afterwards, I met the violin professor from The Royal Academy. We talked about our different musical traditions, and he invited me to a rehearsal for an upcoming concert of Nepali classical music that he was preparing with some colleagues at the Academy. I enjoyed chatting with them the following day, but was surprised at the sloppiness of his violin technique when they began playing. He was the sole professor of violin at Nepal’s most prestigious musical institution, yet his playing was mediocre, and that of his colleagues not much better. Was this the best a country of more than fifteen million people had to offer? How could this be?
A clue came from another Nepali that I met at the reception. Prem was a young reporter who had been assigned to write an article about the concert by Nepal’s leading English language newspaper. He stayed after the reception to interview me and finished our conversation with an invitation to visit him at the newspaper a few days later.
After showing me around the office, he put me on the back of his motorcycle and brought me to his home for a snack. Prem was in his twenties and lived with his parents in one of Katmandu’s grandest homes. He had recently graduated from the university and obtained the newspaper job through his father, who was the city’s chief of police. That explained how this pleasant though not particularly bright young man wound up in such a good position fresh out of school despite high unemployment. As he showed me around the large living and dining room areas, newly finished, he spoke with remarkable candor. He liked living so comfortably but could never build such a house. His father had accomplished the feat by assigning several of his policemen to construct it instead of doing their regular police work. This was a daily occurrence for over a year; in fact, some of them were there working in the garden on the day of my visit. I silently wondered what the source of the money was for the marble and other luxuries the home contained.
Nepal was at that time a virtual absolute monarchy. Your position in life would much more likely be determined by how close you were to the royal family than by your talents. Prem and the violin professor were nice persons, but should it be surprising that such a system bred nepotism, incompetence and corruption? The Embassy official also put me in contact with a lawyer at Katmandu’s most important law firm. The modest quarters of this four-man office reflected the status of lawyers, a profession in Nepal only since the mid-twentieth century. There was an endearing folk quality to the judge at the equally modest Supreme Court; he snacked on some nuts while hearing a case. It was apparent that the rule of law had shallow, fragile roots here. The lawyer explained that their legal system was gradually developing toward the goal of providing vigorous, independent advocacy; however, one had to be cautious where the interests and friends of the royal family were concerned. It helped that we were alone and colleagues of a sort, but he still lowered his voice as he spoke of them.
India, by way of comparison, was a virtual meritocracy. Banaras Hindu University in Varanasi has long been one of India’s finest, and its violin professor, N. Rajam, had been described to me as the best violinist in the country and a national treasure by several enthusiasts of Indian classical music. I wanted to hear her play, but she had no concerts scheduled in the places I visited. Perhaps I could meet her when I went to Varanasi, my last stop in India. In my own country I would never have the courage to call Itzhak Perlman or Joshua Bell and request a meeting; here, though, I was a foreign violinist performing at her city’s best hotel, someone especially curious about improvisation in the Indian music she played and taught. Would that be enough? I found a telephone listing in the directory and, after rehearsing what I would say, took a deep breath and made the call. As the phone rang, I secretly hoped there would be no answer so I could avoid the embarrassment of rejection yet still feel I had at least tried. Instead, a family member answered and called her to the phone to hear my petition. She said she was quite busy with teaching and preparing some upcoming concerts, but then asked if I could come for tea later that week at her home on campus.
Her daughter met me at the University bus stop and led the way, pointing out the two medical schools on opposite sides of the street. One taught traditional Indian medicine, the other the modern scientific variety familiar to Westerners; she said both were valued in her country. She studied violin with her mother and carried the name “Sangeeta,” the Hindi word for music, here taking the form of a beautiful girl filled with adolescent enthusiasm.
Rajam’s husband greeted me at the door; he was not a musician, but broadly cultured and protective of his wife’s artistry. He said she was with a disciple but would join us shortly. A few minutes later, she calmly entered the room, wearing a gentle smile under bright eyes and a red dotted forehead crowned with jet black hair. She seemed much younger than her forty-five years as she extended her hand. We sat down and a young woman brought in tea and biscuits. After some general pleasantries, I turned the subject to her musical formation.
“My father taught me how to play violin at our home in southern India,” she said, “but afterward I came to Varanasi for many years of rigorous training. My guru was not a violinist but a vocalist, Omkarnath Thakur, one of our legendary singers. I learned artistry from him, breathing and phrasing. But I had to develop on my own a violin technique that would enable me to echo what he sang. Human emotion is above all in the voice; I wanted my violin to speak in that voice when I accompanied him on stage.”
“Indian classical music sounds so exotic to my ears, with all the slides and oscillations,” I said. “”But our voices usually do spend more time gliding around than making the discrete changes in pitch so common in Western music. I have heard Indian violinists bend notes in ways that sound like anguished cries, or sometimes like gentle sighs.“
“Yes, and other sounds of the heart, too,” she added. “Music without emotion has no life, no meaning. We must speak with our instruments what words cannot say. I try to express on my violin the subtle vocal nuances that Thakur employed to bring a rich emotional quality to his singing. He taught me to approach the notes with tenderness, with love and humility.”
“Our best music relies so much on shifts in harmony for its emotional impact,” I said. “Yours has no harmony, yet it attains a similar level of intensity.”
“Without harmony, our music developed more complexity of rhythm and melody," she commented. "Above all, it is melody that moves us here, especially when the performer is spontaneously inspired by the audience reaction.”
I had heard concerts where the audience clapping and vocalizations drive musicians to an intensity of expression that brings the listeners to a state near frenzy. The mutual feeding is thrilling. The glow on her face showed she had often experienced this feeling.
“I know that much of your classical music is improvised,” I said. “Mozart and many other great Western composers were also masters of improvisation. It was an important part of their training. But that died out before 1900 - we attached too much reverence to their written notes. Except for pieces they have memorized, most classical musicians I know can’t even play music unless they are reading it off a page. How do you make it up as you go along? Where does it come from?”
“Ah, these are difficult questions you ask. Important questions, but very difficult.” She drew a deep breath, then continued hesitatingly. “It comes from both the brain and the spirit… it must be free… it requires great discipline.”
She paused as I mulled over the paradox in her words. Her eyes were radiant, their irises huge, deep and dark. Her facial expression suggested there was much more involved, but also that it was ineffable. I wanted more detail, and so turned to a technical question.
“How do you teach improvisation to your students?”
“Yes, that I can explain to you,” she responded, smiling. “I give them one note and tell them to play with it for a week. If this limitation makes them bored, they must push past the boredom with play. There can be a world of sound in one note if you experiment with different rhythms, different undulations of pitch, different bow pressures and placements on the string. Limits help you to be free; they keep you from feeling crushed by too many choices. When they find music in one note, I give them two notes to play with - an interval - and tell them to continue experimenting; then three notes… It takes intense effort over a long time, and it includes absorbing our musical traditions. But it must be done with great playfulness so the result can be free and natural.”
“What are you thinking of when you improvise during a concert?” I asked.
“My mind is focused on the raga. Always on the raga. The music I make comes from that base. I caress the sounds, sometimes I cajole them. If there are other musicians, we listen to each other, giving and taking. But the source is always the raga.”
My elementary familiarity with the word must have been apparent, because she went on with a simple explanation.
“A raga is a sequence of several notes, something like your modal scales but enriched – enriched by the melodic patterns particular to each raga and its associations with the seasons, with different times of day. It creates the mood, provides the framework for improvisation. In Sanskrit ‘raga’ means ‘to color.’ We use musical sound to color emotions and express them, to evoke passions – love, desire, joy…”
She sighed, though it was barely perceptible. Some of her students had joined us in the living room, for the most part listening and watching, though when Rajam and I asked them a few questions, they eagerly responded. At one point she told them, “The secret to playing well is no secret – it is practice! And then still more, so there is a cost, things you must forego.”
Whatever the sacrifice, they seemed willing to make it, eager to be like her. As I watched the way they interacted with her and heard about how much time they spent with her, it became evident that the term her husband had used was the correct one – these young people were not merely students but disciples, and Rajam was more than a music teacher or a mentor. She was their guru. Though it has developed some negative connotations in the West, the term “guru” retains its vitality in India and is rooted in the interplay of darkness and light. A guru is one who dispels the darkness of ignorance, an earthly guide to spiritual wisdom, a giver of knowledge and light, a recipient of reverence and devotion. Disciples often live with their guru, absorbing as well as learning. I don’t know if any of Rajam’s disciples other than her daughter lived with her. But I had no doubt that she would shape their lives at least as much as any mother or father.
The hotels I worked in always had a copy of the Bhagavad Gita next to the Bible in the night table beside the bed. This Hindu holy scripture was composed a century or two before Christ and was influenced by the sacred texts of the Upanishads, which predate it by more than half a millennium and contain religious concepts central not only to Hinduism, but also to Buddhism and Jainism. The Gita takes the form of a dialogue between the god Krishna and Arjuna, a prince who, on the eve of a great battle between warring branches of his family, is distressed over the prospect of his relatives killing each other. I often read parts of this ancient epic, hoping to better understand their highly evolved spiritual world and the wisdom it might contain. The Gita says this about the guru:
“Acquire the transcendental knowledge from a Self-realized master by humble reverence, by sincere inquiry, and by service. The wise ones who have realized the Truth will impart the Knowledge to you.”
This long journey of mine was born in curiosity and a desire for adventure, but was maturing into a type of sincere inquiry. I was not merely seeing the world but living among its peoples, entering radically different cultures through an international language on both my tongue and my fiddle, having life-forming experiences with interesting people from a wide range of backgrounds. This journey had become my guru, the world I encountered the Self-realized master, its prophets and teachers the wise ones I was meeting along the way.
So where did sex fit into this spiritual world? With such an enormous population there was obviously lots of it going on. But India valued modesty – whenever I saw a Hindi movie, the love scenes always ended in a fade-out after the first kiss. There had been a time and place, however, when sex was celebrated by religious culture. The temples at Khajuraho, dating from the 10th and 11th centuries, contain magnificent sculptures, some of them highly erotic and sexually explicit. I planned to explore them for a day on my way to Varanasi.
It was on the bus to Khajuraho that I first heard of Balram Shukla. A young Indian businessman told me he was the best sitar player in that part of India and that he performed each evening at Khajuraho’s Oberoi Hotel. I had enjoyed the ground-breaking “West Meets East” recordings of Ravi Shankar, India’s famous sitar player, and Yehudi Menuhin, one of the West’s most distinguished violinists. I imagined what it might be like trying a similar, minor-league collaboration here. Around mid-morning I entered the Oberoi hotel and soon after met with the manager, the son of a maharaja, now required to work for a living following the abolition of all royal titles and stipends more than a decade before. He read Mr. Nain’s letter and quickly agreed to the trade terms I proposed.
“I heard you have a sitar player who performs here,” I said. ”I wonder if it also might be possible to talk with him about playing together.”
“That would be interesting to listen to, but it will of course be up to him,” he replied. “He performs with his father every evening before dinner. Talk to them.”
As he left the room to take a call, another man entered and started conversing with me. He wore an enormous diamond set in a golden ring, a burden to his finger but probably designed more for the observer’s eye than the wearer’s hand.
“Do you also work at the hotel?” I asked at one point.
“I own it,” he said matter-of-factly. He was a rich jeweler who had paid Oberoi to build and manage the hotel for him. A generation earlier, the maharaja would have sent his son to this man to buy precious gems, not to work. The traditional system, however, no longer applied. The British made the first inroads, often governing through local princes while imposing the British legal system on the Indian social order. Its long evolution in England had developed the concept of rule by law, which inevitably erodes the power of kings and turns it over to another class. In democratic India, as in many other places, it was the merchant rather than the monarch who now ruled.
I spent the afternoon at the temples but was back in plenty of time to hear Balram Shukla’s sitar performance. He was accompanied by his father on tabla, the Indian drums. They were both excellent musicians. I introduced myself afterwards, but couldn’t say much other than that I really enjoyed their music - I was scheduled to play during the dinnertime which was about to begin. After they finished their meal, I was glad to see that they stayed in the dining room to listen to my music. We chatted at their table during my breaks. Balram spoke very basic English and translated for Mr. Shukla, who spoke only Hindi. When I raised the possibility of trying to play together, they seemed interested and later invited me to their home in Chhatarpur for lunch the following day.
I arrived by bus and after meeting Balram’s family, wound up on the back of a motorcycle for a quick tour of the small city. At the public radio station, Balram introduced me to the director, a highly congenial man and ardent enthusiast of his country’s music. When I spoke of my interest in Indian music, he invited me to return in a few days for a private concert by some of the musicians employed at the station.
Back at the Shukla home, I asked if I could use the bathroom before starting lunch. That led to some perplexed looks and discussion in Hindi, after which someone took me outside to the field adjoining the house and said, “This is the bathroom,” sweeping his pointed finger from one end of the field to the other.
Balram’s mother and sisters served the flavorful meal they had prepared, after which he suggested we move into a nearby room to play some music. I felt relieved because by then, language limitations had made conversation laborious – no one in the family spoke English other than Balram, and his was rudimentary.
My relief soon turned to frustration because we couldn’t get anything going that sounded like music. Each of us played in the classical, folk and pop styles of his own musical culture, so I was hopeful we would be able to blend something together, but it just wasn’t working. Disappointment set in. After more than a half hour of futility, I was ready to give up when Balram said there was a tune I had played the prior evening that he especially liked. I realized he was talking about an Italian tarantella, an energetic folk tune with a basic, repetitive rhythm. I began playing it and when he picked up the rhythmic groove on his sitar, the result finally started to resemble music. How stupid of me! I had forgotten the insight gained a few months before in Kenya playing with the African musicians – keep it simple and focus on rhythm. It still sounded rough, though, because we had two melody instruments using different vocabularies. But the beat was there, holding us together, as we continued experimenting.
When I suggested that we try improvising a simple conversation with our instruments, things got still more promising. I would listen to a short melodic phrase from Balram’s sitar, then respond on my violin, altering or copying the phrase, turning it upside down or commenting on it in some other way. Balram responded in kind, and we continued tossing our musical thoughts back and forth. This formula gave us the possibility of developing a shared musical language, and its tentative first efforts were apparently enough to bring Mr. Shukla into the room. He had wisely avoided getting involved during that initial period of hapless fumbling, but his drums now provided a solid rhythmic foundation for our experiment in musical dialogue.
Though we certainly finished our session better than it had started, I hesitated when Balram proposed that we perform together at the hotel that evening. He and his father were masters at improvisation, a skill I was just learning, and to the extent that we wound up making some music together, what seemed effortless for them took intense concentration on my part. This was all too new for me to be comfortable with it. I had felt humiliated on stage a few times in the past and hated the feeling of weakness and embarrassment it brought. But they were the ones who lived and worked here, whose livelihoods depended in good measure on this job. If they were willing to try it, why shouldn’t I? If things didn’t work out, I could just hit the road again. Traveling around as I did had its share of risk and uncertainty, but when problems developed, there was always an easy solution. A stationary life is stingy with fresh starts, but the traveler finds them readily available at the nearest bus or train station.
I wound up staying the rest of the week, performing with the Shuklas every evening. There were some uneven stretches, but we played through them and sounded better each day. During our set, Balram and I each did a solo piece – for me it was my old reliable, Ragtime Annie. Mr. Shukla liked it so much that, from the second evening on, he put intricate Indian rhythms underneath this quintessentially American fiddle tune. The same straight-ahead 4/4 tune that had previously been surrounded by the raucous syncopations of African drums now danced above the ornate, often delicate patterns of an Indian tabla – a hillbilly in two dresses, dramatically different yet equally exotic.
As in our first session, talking to each other with our instruments generated the best music. I was able to enjoy some of this musical conversation as we played it, but more often the heavy concentration it required made it difficult to delight in the moment. I was too busy thinking about what to do with the sound I had just heard from Balram, trying not to let my occasional weak responses distract me from doing better with the next phrase. If only fluency could be willed! The audience seemed to like most of what we did, and one tourist came back several evenings in a row with his tape recorder, somewhat easing my doubts.
After dinner started, I would replace my embroidered Indian shirt with a tie & vest, and move into the dining room for an hour or so of strolling violin music. One evening I noticed a striking woman, slim and blonde, eating alone. She seemed interested in chatting when I played a tune near her table, and our conversation continued afterwards. She was American, one of the early female graduates of the Harvard Business School, made rich enough by her job in investment banking to quit by her early thirties and become a consultant to international non-profit agencies. Now in her second year on her own, she already had some Asian clients and was in India to consult with one of them. I admired her autonomy and success; she was very attractive, though in a cool, professional way. It was hard to tell if my temporary though lengthy switch from law to music struck her as commendable or profligate.
She was spending two nights at the hotel, and our conversation resumed the following evening, flowing smoothly from one topic to another. But that wry manner, so hard to read! Her mind was as sharp as her clothes, though I imagined them off, on the floor next to a bed. When the dining room closed, I asked if she might be interested in spending more time together, perhaps having a drink in either of our rooms; I mentioned where mine was located. She smiled inscrutably as we got up from the table. She said she had an early flight and was too tired, but then looked like she might be considering it as we parted ways. I went to my room and left the door unlocked, horny and hopeful, but never saw her again.
Before each of our evening performances, Mr. Shukla prayed in the magnificent hotel lobby where we also played our music. Near the middle of the room, a sumptuous spiral stairway in gleaming white marble looked like it led to paradise rather than the second floor. Mr. Shukla did not pray to a single, all-powerful God, but to several Hindu gods, each representing different aspects of the human spirit. They were among the beautiful statues that lined the lobby walls, rendered in a smooth reflective stone, some of them in abstract form. He stood before them one at a time, his hands clasped upward, his eyelids shut. His mouth prayed inaudibly, after which he briefly bowed his head. He opened his eyes, reached out and touched the god statue, then moved on to another.
Afterwards, the three of us would sit silently in a quiet room off to the side. For Balram and his father, music was something holy, an expression of all that you are - what you eat, do, think and feel - everything. Playing music was a deeply spiritual experience that required a clearing of the mind. They closed their eyes and slowed their breathing, and I copied them. I peeked a few times early on and saw two men deep in meditation. I tried my best to enter where they were, lifted by the feeling in the room, but was only able to put my mind at rest for a few moments at a time. You never know what’s really going on in another person’s head, but they appeared at peace, and I wanted to join them there.
Our trio’s final performance went especially well, but it was our parting that made the greatest impression on me. As usual, we weren’t able to say much to each other after our instruments were in their cases. We had done all our speaking before, in a language of sound that we had created playing music together. Before going our separate ways, we embraced warmly. Though not many words had passed between us that week and I couldn’t even communicate with one of them, I felt a genuine emotional bond with both. Mr. Shukla looked at me and said something in Hindi that Balram translated - “Don’t go, Peter – play more music with us. Live here for a few more months and you will play as we do.”
I doubted the optimism in his prediction, though not the sentiment behind his words. Here was an opportunity for revelatory experience, rich in potential both musically and spiritually, with free room and board at the hotel included! But I left, as I always did then, restless, not yet knowing when to stay.
16. The Masai Meet Bach
I had first walked away from a spiritual world in my late teens, when I could no longer accept what Catholicism told me to believe. As a boy, I had on a few occasions experienced a brief but ecstatic sensation of religious bliss. As an adult, however, I was drawn to reason and philosophy, which initially seemed incompatible with spirituality. When music absorbed me, it created threads that would eventually contribute to integration, but my travels also enabled me to better appreciate that we are more than just body and mind. What lies beyond them is Spirit, which participates in a unity that is beyond time and dimension, unseen and unheard. Many attempt to approach it through religion, meditation, or great art. But transcendent experience can also make it accessible.
When I was in Africa, I had entered the primordial Rift Valley, where the human journey began, on my way to the Masai Mara wildlife preserve. Enormous herds of wildebeest, zebra and gazelle make an annual migration through the preserve in search of water and grass, trusting that the safety of the herd will protect them from the lions and cheetahs they know will attack. At one point, our jeep was quietly sitting in the midst of several thousand peacefully grazing wildebeest when some of them sensed the approach of lions and started a stampede. Surrounded, we moved in rhythm with them thanks to an experienced driver. I felt like a cell in a swiftly moving mass of life, caught up in a roaring river of adrenaline, fueled by the beasts’ fear and our exhilaration. Eventually they slowed down and separated as some began grazing again, allowing us to get out.
Evolution has made magnificent physical specimens of them all, with rippling muscles under coats that glisten in the sunlight. But it is not only their wildness and powerful beauty that attracts us. This is the grandest stage of all for the struggle between life and death. The kill is bloody, brutal, gripping, an essential element of animal life in the savanna, the life we once lived in this very place, before civilization.
One morning I felt an urge to play my violin and watch them at the same time. I walked away from the lodge and about twenty minutes later was on a ridge overlooking the herds. The animals stretched out to the horizon and, focusing my eyes on them, I began improvising, taking inspiration from what I saw. After a while, I moved on to Appalachian fiddle tunes.
I heard sounds from behind me – I continued playing while I turned and saw some Masai tribesmen approaching. The Masai are a nomadic people who have lived essentially the same way for thousands of years; they build temporary huts of mud and branches on their territorial lands and tend their cattle, moving to new grazing areas as needed. According to Masai tradition, a boy must kill a lion with a spear before he can be considered a man. To be a man is to be a warrior.
These Masai smiled pleasantly as they formed a small semi-circle in front of me. When I finished the tune, the oldest one spoke – just one word, heavily accented and very drawn-out, but I recognized it:
“Niiice.”
I responded in English but no one understood. I tried some simple comments and questions, but again, no one understood. That one complimentary word, however, plus the mixture of curiosity and interest in their expressions encouraged me to play on. I launched into another vigorous fiddle tune. Its steady beat set heads bobbing in time with the music, with more smiles and some unintelligible but positive sounds. When I finished, the same man spoke, again just a single, drawn-out word:
“Gooood.”
I smiled, grateful that the music was providing me not only with an imagined link to the animals beyond, but also with an observable link to these good-spirited people directly in front of me. That’s when Bach entered my mind. The violin and Western classical music were not known in these tribal lands. I could tell that my audience liked the rhythmic American folk tunes I had fiddled; but I wondered what would happen if I were to play some Bach.
I began a movement from one of Bach’s solo pieces. The Masai at first reacted as before. As they continued listening, though, I noticed that their expressions were changing. Some leaned toward me, drawing closer. There was an intensity of concentration in their eyes that had not been there before; it grew as Bach’s music spun out its lovely melody, modulating tonalities, and rich patterns. They seemed to instinctively understand that this was more complex music, demanding closer attention. They became very quiet and listened carefully.
When I finished, the old man took a deep breath and gazed into the back of my eyes. Again, he spoke a single word. But he seemed to choose it more carefully this time, saying it very slowly and with profound feeling:
“Beeyoootiful!!”
And then we all smiled together.
The grandeur of the wild animals I saw roaming the Kenyan plains dominated my thoughts and feelings the whole time I was there. I had the peak spiritual experience of my life, but did not even realize it, nor did it involve those magnificent beasts. An appreciation of what had truly happened came later, after reflection.
On that day, music had enabled me to do more than communicate. In essence, I had mediated an encounter between folk and genius, between traditional and high culture. Here were people from the cradle of human life, little changed since then, meeting one of their far-flung offspring, one likely to be revered as long as humanity endures. On that day, the most impressive animals were clearly the human ones - a musical giant from eighteenth century Europe and the timeless Masai of Africa. My struggles learning Italian showed me that speaking and comprehending were different skills, each so difficult to master when not acquired instinctively, as a child. On that day, speaking and comprehending both occurred at the highest and the deepest levels, beyond words, across millennia. On that day, we celebrated the unique ability of human beings to forge wondrous connections, to communicate and understand each other across immense barriers of culture, and language, and time.
Beeyoootiful!!
Whenever I need my faith in the human spirit restored, I think of this marvelous memory. Invariably, that brings on a feeling of well-being, unleashing emotions much more intense than the pleasant surprise I felt while it was happening. Experience is the substance of living - it stimulates our senses, grabs our mind, defines existence. But memory is sometimes better than the original experience because it has the benefit of context and reflection. Real time is a blur, a flood of impressions, actions and reactions, made up on the go. Over time, the raw data of experience accumulate and interconnect, creating personal history. Without reflection, this is little more than a time line, a story without themes or significance. Reflection is the mind’s greatest achievement because it imparts perspective and assigns meaning to memory, our most precious possession, all that remains as each fleeting moment rushes into the next. Though the passage of time may cloud the details, some things stay sharply imprinted. The sound of the old man’s words! I hear them now as clearly as before, but see things that then lay hidden.
17. Young & Old Among the Arabs
It’s again been a cloud covered, wet winter in Florence, and I need some time in the sun. A few years earlier, when Giovanna last directed Smith’s JYA program, I escaped to Rhodes and Crete, but this time I’m looking straight south. Tunisia is close, but the birthplace of the “Arab Spring” is in the news now because a leader of the secular opposition has been assassinated, bringing down the moderate Islamist government and sparking street violence. Political tension in its equally sunny Arab neighbors is even worse, so I decide to stay in Florence. Then my prudence starts bothering me. When you have kids at home and a monthly mortgage, it makes good sense to play it safe; but those brakes no longer apply. During my younger travels, I eagerly went to protest demonstrations and political rallies of both political extremes during turbulent times to see what they were like. They were exciting - so why am I being so cautious?
There is one other thing simultaneously holding me back and pushing me there. I had visited many places as a young man and enjoyed all of them with one exception. My time in the Arab world was short and restricted to only a few countries, but I often felt unwelcome and uncomfortable. It has always seemed strange to me that I took away positive impressions everywhere but there, and I wonder what it would be like now, during this hopeful, albeit chaotic transformation of their societies. The only way to find out is to go, and it’s another cold, rainy day in Florence, so I buy a ticket to Tunisia, where the forecast is warm and sunny. I reserve a room in a highly-recommended b&b and am glad that the Arabs and I will have another chance.
“No, that was the last bus today,” said the border guard. “Sometimes they wait, sometimes they don’t. That’s the chance you take with that company.”
I watched in amazement as the rickety bus pulled away from the Spanish-Moroccan border while I got my passport stamped, even though I had purchased a ticket all the way to the Moroccan city of Tetouan and we had only arrived at the border a few minutes before. Life was becoming less rational since leaving the southern tip of Spain, which is British and called Gibraltar, and entering the northern tip of Morocco, which is Spanish and called Ceuta. But power politics can explain that illogic.
Shadows were getting longer when a lucky ride from a Frenchman brought me from the border to the city. A walk through its medina quarter the next day was more like going back in time than from place to place. In its narrow, crooked paths, animals mixed freely with darkened people wearing robes and sandals. The walled medina was an enclosed bedlam of carts and colors, mosques and prayers, shops and cafes, sweet mint tea and men calmly smoking hashish in elaborate pipes. The only modern intrusion was an occasional sign of electricity.
When I simultaneously scratched an itchy scalp and passed what looked like an empty barber shop, my dirty hair motivated a move from observation to participation. I stepped inside, but it was quickly apparent from our mutually incomprehensible vocal sounds that we had no common language. I made finger movements on my head as if doing a shampoo. The young barber didn’t understand my gesture, but he responded with a friendly smile and definitely seemed interested in turning me into a customer. After additional gestures got across the idea of a shampoo, the message on his shaking head was that shampoos are not part of barbershop services here. His expression, though, quickly moved from disappointment to problem-solving, then to solution. In a brightened manner, he dispatched what looked like a kid brother with some coins from his pocket.
We sat down for more smiles and gesturing. He took out a match and lit the hash pipe near his chair, took a puff and then passed it to me. The strong stuff inside gave the shop a warm, hazy glow. Kid brother returned and handed him a small tube of bright blue liquid. The barber looked pleased and motioned me over toward a sink so tiny that I couldn’t get my head under its faucet. He thought a bit, then filled a large glass with water from the tap. My head sat uncomfortably on the edge of the sink as little brother poured water over my hair and the barber worked the blue liquid into a lather. A good rinse, though, would require hot water, something his sink did not provide. That was expeditiously addressed by starting a small fire under the teapot in the corner. As the brothers worked their way through the technical problems presented by my shampoo, their conversation was spirited, their actions purposeful, and my occasional gestures of encouragement received with great enthusiasm.
My hair really felt clean. I didn’t need a haircut, but I liked these guys and wanted to give them some more business. That solution came quickly, and the barber immediately understood my gesture requesting one of his standard services - a shave. Our broad smiles expressed delight with the success of our communication; and I was happy with the straight-razor shave he gave me, smooth and without skin irritation. Afterwards, there were more broad smiles, this time seeming to communicate mutual satisfaction with our business interaction, leaving a single but very important item to be determined – price.
Normally in this type a transaction, the price is known in advance. There may have been a list of prices on the wall, but I didn’t understand a letter of Arabic and didn’t see anything that even looked like a number. Plus I had received a shampoo, a totally new service for this shop, one the barber had to make up as he went along. This was a highly unusual setting for a negotiation. In the shops of his neighbors who sold merchandise, either party could walk away if they couldn’t agree on a price, but he had already given and I had received services that we both knew in advance would involve a payment.
I took out my wallet; various parts of my face, and especially my eyebrows, were asking – how much? He raised most of the fingers on two hands. I had no idea if that was a lot or little, but my instinctive reaction must have involved a subtle recoil because he immediately pulled down some fingers. I quickly nodded my assent to his counter-offer, and the smiles returned to our faces as money was exchanged. My whole head now felt good. The barber and I parted with friendly gestures, a handshake, then a wave and final smile. As I walked away, I noticed that his little brother had more of a grin than a smile.
Outside the city, the beachfront campground where I stayed blended the picturesque with the squalid. I pitched my tent in a lovely grove of palm trees looking out on a large sandy beach. A thatched roof covered an expansive camp center, freshly white-washed, featuring comfortable cushions for relaxing and listening to good music. But the stench inside the lavatory building was so disgusting that breathing was difficult, and you had to fight your way through flies to get to the toilets.
That first night, I had stepped off a bus that brought me nearby and was immediately approached by a pleasant teenager who spoke pretty good English. He offered to show me the way to the campground and helped me set up my tent, then lit some hash he had for sale. We chatted amiably as we smoked. Neither hash nor marijuana crossed my path in Florence during the conservatory school years, so I bought enough to keep me stoned through much of my five day stay there.
An equally pleasant teenager, Ahmed, worked in the camp’s food hut and also sold hash on the side. I told him I had already bought some from the guy I met getting off the bus and was moreover approached both at the bus station and on the bus. He said there were few job opportunities in Morocco for young guys other than dealing hash to foreigners. Ahmed believed that developing his language skills would give him better opportunities.
“If only I could learn English!” he said in the simple Spanish that was the only language we shared. “I already know French. I learned it from reading a book that has Arabic on one side, French on the other. All I need now is a book that has a French-English translation. I wish I could find one here.”
I considered his wish a plea for help, which was probably its intention. When I next returned to the United States, I bought a Penguin book with French-English parallel text and mailed it to him.
One night Ahmed got me devastatingly stoned on the special quality hash the boy dealers kept for themselves. I lay on one of the cushions and watched, as if in a trance, a life and death struggle unfold above me. A large winged insect flew into the silky web of a much smaller spider which was waiting off to the side. Its fluttering wings succeeded at first in driving back the attacking spider several times, but also had the effect of burying it more deeply in the sticky threads of the web. Despite its increasing entrapment, the movements of both body and wings were most frantic prior to the final, fatal attack, followed by a few weak flickers before all motion ceased. It was similar to my cousin Riccardo’s pig reacting to the knife, or Carla’s chicken in the grip of hands that would snap its neck. Perhaps we humans are the only species capable of calmly resigning ourselves to an inevitable death, though often we do not.
One day I was relaxing on the beach when three young men who were walking by struck up a conversation with me. I expected a dope hustle, but they were students who just wanted to practice some of their rudimentary English. One of them, Mohammed, was enrolled at the local military academy. I had come of age in the anti-military mentality produced by the Viet Nam war, which must have been apparent, because he repeatedly stressed how very fortunate he considered himself to have this opportunity to move up in life through a career in the army. My expectation of their intentions as they approached me proved him right about that. I asked some questions about Moroccan politics and freedom of expression. Mohammed said their king was a fine leader and a good man but that he didn’t really know much about the king or the other questions I was asking. His two companions nodded in agreement. I silently wondered if these were questions they were afraid to ask, or if, as Mohammed implied, they were outside the control of ordinary people and therefore had no meaning for him.
Back then, I did not fully appreciate how lucky I was to be born in a wealthy, open society, but I better understood the future Mohammed was trying to escape when I thought back to my first afternoon in the city. A short distance past a busy mosque, in one of Tetouan’s main squares, some Moroccan males beckoned me to join them in what looked like a café. They were probably in their twenties, though wrinkled faces made them look older. Their hard smiles and unnatural friendliness should have put me on guard, but my pleasant encounter with the young barber earlier that day (as well as some residual mellowness from his hash) left me eager for more interaction with the locals. They spoke some Spanish and invited me to smoke hash with them, leading me into a small room with one portal to the tea room inside and another open to the square.
The room had a table with three guys already sitting there, one of them a young, blond American who gave me a feeble smile underneath uncomfortable eyes. I started to get a bad feeling. The Moroccans fired up some hash and passed the pipe around while we drank tea and attempted some light conversation in a language none of us knew well. It wasn’t clear how long blondie had been there or what had happened before my arrival, but he definitely looked anxious to leave. After several more minutes he said “thank you” a few times in a nervous voice. He rose from the table in a tentative way, his head crouched uneasily between sloped shoulders, his eyes darting around. His movements became more deliberative as he walked toward the portal and then quickened dramatically when he entered the square, looking behind at us but not to wave goodbye. My heart began to beat faster as I took all this in. Was he escaping, or was this the aftermath of a forced purchase? The one thing I was sure of was that this was not just a friendly smoke among people getting acquainted.
The Moroccans had some vigorous discussion among themselves in Arabic, after which the one with a heavily wrinkled forehead turned toward me.
“How much do you want to buy?” he asked in a calm voice traveling through a false smile.
“Thanks,” I said, “but I already bought what I want last night at the campground where I’m staying.”
He was sitting next to me, but leaned slowly forward, bringing his face closer. It was a dark, stout face, unsmiling now, with a thickly-eyebrowed frown that produced still more wrinkles above eyes flashing red.
“To smoke, and not to buy - VERY BAD!”
He drew out the final two words for emphasis, leaning closer still, tapping me on the chest. The tone of his voice matched the expression on his face, a face that would be frightening under any circumstances but, intensified by the hash we had smoked, became that of the devil incarnate. My already fluttering heart beat even faster as I said I was sorry, I didn’t know… He shook his head and turned his gaze on his comrades while they barked their comments. I anxiously watched their animated discussion. The looks they occasionally shot me said I was in serious trouble. The devilish one turned aggressively to me again. His deep voice had a sinister sound.
“If you smoke, you have to buy. That’s the rule.”
“I understand that now. I’m sorry, but I don’t need any. I didn’t know.”
More group discussion. It would aggravate my predicament if they were feeling stiffed by the American who had just left; but if instead they had forced him to buy, why not just do it again? I normally like to give ambiguous situations a positive interpretation, at least initially, but couldn’t come up with one here. I was probably screwed no matter how they were looking at this.
The open portal to the square gave me some comfort. I doubted they would beat me up with so many people nearby, and could also use it to make a run if I had to. The simple solution would have been to buy some hash from them. But I needed all the money I had just raised busking in Europe to stay at the conservatory another year, not to squander on hash I would have to throw away before crossing the next border, so I didn’t even consider it. Money can buy security in situations like this, but when it’s scarce, you take chances.
After they stopped talking, the devil stood up next to me. I rose to receive judgment, looking with apprehension into narrowed eyes, burning with fire.
“You are lucky,” he said. “Usually, we don’t allow people to break the rule.”
When I heard that, all I wanted to do was leave, but I realized it was better to listen until his angry lecture ended, lest they change their minds about letting me go with just a stern warning. When he finished, I walked quickly away. Moments later, I listened to the call to prayer coming from the mosque and watched it fill up with worshippers, trying to calm my pounding heart with deep breaths. One of the things people seek in religion is mercy. I had just been granted mercy by a group of thugs, but the devil’s eyes told me there was none left for the next one to sin.
I chose my interactions more carefully after that. Other than my violin, the only material possession I was proud of then was my shoes, an expensive Italian splurge with birthday money. They were made of a soft buttery leather, light tan in color and beautifully finished, but now they were filthy. I approached a shoe shine man in one of the squares and asked if he spoke Spanish. My question elicited an affirmative nod, though I later realized that didn’t mean he understood me. He was as dirty as my shoes, with dark skin of a much tougher leather, a man obviously beaten down by decades of depravation, left with fewer teeth than fingers, and he was missing two of those. My weak Spanish produced a convoluted declaration, probably unintelligible even to a Spaniard, that all I wanted was a cleaning – no polishing or the leather would be ruined. The salesman in Florence had emphasized that when I bought them a few months before. The old Moroccan nodded affirmatively again as he began slowly brushing off my shoes. After he put down the scraggy brush, he used one of his rags to apply a liquid that I hoped was cleaning fluid but that turned out to be a muddy colored polish. The parched leather eagerly soaked it up, instantly and permanently turning an ugly dark shade of brown that resembled dried shit. From the first instant, it was already too late to do anything about it, and being painful to watch, I just looked around the square as he finished his work. There were lots of old men with beat-up boxes and rags, waiting to give someone a shoe shine. And lots of young men talking to foreigners or scanning the area, looking for an opportunity. Or just doing nothing, waiting.
Later on, outside the walls of the medina, a traditional wedding party in colorful dress made its way up the hill. They were led by a group of fez-capped men who periodically performed a ritual dance that involved a vigorous twirling of muskets. At the end of the dance, they pointed the muskets up in the air and shot them, making a loud noise that startled me. I wondered how guns wound up in weddings, and also where the bullets would land. The rest of the wedding party moved along behind to the reedy sounds of oboe-like instruments, drums and cymbals. I followed them to the top of the hill, then turned to admire a vast panorama below. This was a land ruled by a king and, above all, a holy book from the seventh century. I wondered how much Europe was like this before its Renaissance. And how much longer the Arabs would wait.
The beginning of the conservatory school year was only a couple of weeks away, and my plan was to go overland through Algeria and Tunisia and then take a boat to Italy. I needed a visa to get into Algeria, but found the Algerian consulates in Morocco closed because of a war between them on their southern flank, a border battle over sand in the Saharan desert. The closest Algerian embassy was in Madrid, so I went back by boat and bus, stayed overnight in a cheap hotel, and the next morning got my visa. A few hours of busking in Plaza Mayor raised enough money to cover my detour expenses and buy a ticket on the afternoon flight to Algiers. I sat on the plane feeling relieved at circumventing an overland return and the hassles of making bus connections from Morocco to Algiers. I also felt soft and lazy. Easy money creates easy solutions but subtracts from the earthy experience I was seeking in my travels, though I happily made the trade-off that day.
An unconcerned employee of the state tourist office in Algiers told me he couldn’t help me find a place to stay because a pan-Arab convention had filled every room in the city. No, he said, I couldn’t leave my pack there while I looked for a room, and No, the bus and train stations did not offer luggage deposit services, nor would there be any buses or trains headed east until the next morning.
I met a high school student, Bassam, nearby who spoke some English and had an idea on where I might be able to at least leave my pack. He brought me to a cellar café and arranged with an employee there to store it in a caged area behind the kitchen. When I complained about the high price, I didn’t have to wait for the translation to understand that the guy’s response was essentially “well then, fuck off.” His gestures and tone said it all. Bassam acknowledged that the price was a rip-off but told me I probably would do no better elsewhere and that there were many thieves in the city.
We chatted as we walked to the Casbah, the old quarter. It was getting dark, and he had to go home for dinner and schoolwork. I continued walking around, both fascinated and intimidated by this teeming part of Algiers. Men stood along the streets behind small tables displaying what they had for sale. Many of the streets were narrow and terraced, lined with crowded shops and cafes with clear plastic screens in front of their televisions to protect them from thrown objects.
I crossed into the modern part of the city, walked around the main streets and made inquiries in some hotels, but all were full; one clerk after another told me I would not find any rooms available until after the conference ended. Tired and discouraged, I rested on a bench in the dilapidated park at the center of the now quiet city, reading my pocket-sized paperback under a flickering lamp.
Before midnight, I walked to the train station, figuring I would just sleep on a bench there waiting for the first morning train, but it was locked. I saw a few employees inside who heard my knocks but ignored me. I sat on the curb trying to think of what else I might do, when the doors to the station suddenly opened, but only for the ten minutes it took for a late train, headed the wrong way, to arrive and leave. During that time, my weak French enlisted the aid of a young employee, who said he would ask the station master if I could stay inside on one of the benches. The response was “No waiting there at night, no exceptions!” There were two raggedy Algerian men standing next to me, apparently interested in the same thing. I disliked them, thinking they may have hurt my chances. An older employee suggested I try the nearby police station, pointing the way as he moved the three of us out and locked the doors again.
A few minutes later, the young officer on duty outside the police station said he could not allow me to stay inside. Yes, he had heard all the rooms in the city were full, but I should find something just the same because it was not safe to be out in the city late at night. Perhaps I could get permission from someone with more authority in the next precinct, a fifteen minute walk up the slope. As he pointed out the way, he said to be especially careful going up the stairway and through the tunneled passageway at its top because it often had thieves lying in wait. He was pleasant and smiling; I was exhausted and getting paranoid listening to him but, having no better alternatives, decided to try his suggestion.
The area around the long flight of stone stairs was eerily quiet, but I felt okay going up because it was within eyesight of the policeman, who I hoped would be watching me. The tunnel beyond, though, was spooky – not dark enough to scare me away, but not bright enough to allow me to walk through confidently. The weak street light filtering in created a shadowy interior that kept me nervously looking around for motion. My pulse quickened along with my pace, and I felt lucky to get through without incident. That feeling ended soon after as I watched the other precinct’s desk officer shake his head in response to my carefully rehearsed plea. He pointed to the door and told me to leave.
I returned to the young cop, who rejected my final entreaties with a friendly smile. He didn’t mind my hanging around nearby (which by now was the only place I felt safe); he just wasn’t allowed to let me inside. The police parking lot next to the station was small and contained only one car. I lay down on the sidewalk alongside it to rest, and when I got tired of not sleeping, pulled out my book to read under the lot’s single lamp. A man approached from a dark area about a hundred meters away where there were several large trucks parked. He offered me a blanket and space to sleep in his truck, but my police protector, watching from the steps of the station, walked over and shook his head – “don’t take a chance; you’ll get robbed.” At that point, he was the only guy in the country that I trusted, so I turned down the offer.
The cop and I went to an all night café for tea and pastry during his 4 AM break. I dozed off in a chair there, mumbling goodbye as he returned to work. At dawn, I picked up my pack and left on the first bus east. I was very tired and not enjoying Algeria at all.
The bus took me to Constantine, an inland city where I experienced similar frustrations – no campground, rooms unavailable in my price range except for two small hotels that were filthy and run by people sleazy in appearance and disagreeable in manner. The rest of the day’s buses to Tunisia were already fully booked, so I bought a ticket for the next train, leaving at 3 AM. Context conditions emotion, and I was feeling very grateful that the train station here allowed me to wait inside that night, dozing on a bench. In Tunis, I was able at last to find a room in a small hotel, though with dirty sheets on the beds. The young attendant expressed interest in my fiddle, so I played him a tune. That elicited not only a smile but also a valuable reward – he gave me some clean sheets.
Eager to board the ferry to Sicily, I had my last meal in North Africa next day at the port. I was reading “L’Espresso,” a leading Italian newsmagazine, to catch up on Italian politics and culture. At the back of the culture section was a photo of a young woman naked above the waist. As I turned to that page, the waiter passing by stopped in his tracks, absolutely enthralled.
“Please, can I look at it? We don’t have that kind of picture here.”
He held the magazine in his hands as he savored the photo, then asked if he could show it to the cook, whose arched eyebrows and cooing sounds showed that he was equally delighted. The food was good and I left a nice tip, but the vigorous handshakes and animated expressions of thanks I received at the end of my meal were more likely for the picture that I tore out and left with them.
I arrive in Tunis airport with a mixture of hope and anxiety. I want the experience to be better this time, but things are not starting well. The taxi driver wants three times the usual fare to take me into Tunis, but some back and forth as I walk away brings us quickly to agreement at what I had learned in advance is the normal price. I have him drop me off at the train station where the internet has also told me I can take the 2:30 PM train to Sousse, a coastal city two hours to the south where I have made an online reservation at a b&b. As I approach the station, I am thankful for the modern technology that has enabled me to avoid the housing and transportation problems that plagued the younger me.
But the train is not running today because of the holiday celebrating Tunisian independence from France, something you’d think the national railway website would know about. It’s more than a three hour wait for the next train, and when I try to alert the b&b owner, I realize my cellphone is useless here. I notice a telephone office next to the station with some pay phones that don’t take coins. The only employee is a teenager whose French is almost as bad as mine, though we eventually succeed in getting a call through to my host. I have three hours to kill now. A walk around the square outside the station makes me glad I’m not beginning my visit in this dirty, chaotic capital city. I do, however, get a good shoe shine from one of the old men there, most of whom look familiar. I return to the station planning to sit down and read my book, but all the benches in the lobby are full and it will be almost a half hour before a space opens that is not taken before I get to it. Some unpleasant memories come to mind, but it helps to view myself as an observer, the flashbacks merely providing background for a mind that must stay open.
It is twilight by the time the train leaves the city and moves through a countryside filled with olive trees that somehow thrive in soil freckled with litter, most of it plastic. Sousse, my destination, attracted me in part because it offers sandy beaches, an active musical culture and one of the best-preserved medinas in the Arab world. The main reason, though, was the online reviews by people who have stayed in the small b&b to which I am headed – you will feel at home and part of the family, an inside view of Tunisia, great dinners and conversations, etc. I haven’t bothered to brush up on the traveler’s French I picked up decades earlier, partially out of laziness but also because all my emails to the b&b owner, Rabaa, received responses in flawless English, including her offer to pick me up at the train station. The first thing I notice is that Rabaa doesn’t speak English. Her email responses were routed through her older daughter who is a university student in Paris. So much for easy, meaningful communication during this visit. After a delicious, heavily spiced late dinner, I try to fall asleep in a neighborhood filled with loud dogs that keep barking; I think back on my first day and start to get a bad feeling.
Communication is not easy, but it gradually becomes more meaningful and personal. When Hiba, the younger daughter, is not home to provide translations, Rabaa listens patiently to the forty-year old remnants of an ugly, error-filled French that I am pulling out of my ass. It is patched with Italian words that have their final vowel chopped off and are pronounced with a lame French accent. This mish-mash works just often enough to keep me trying, sometimes producing a sympathetic laugh. I like that she doesn’t try to finish my sentences when she hears me struggling (unlike most of her relatives that I meet there); instead, she allows me to find a solution, only offering suggested completions when I give up. Rabaa talks slowly and in short sentences, using a very basic vocabulary, sounding calm and sincere rather than condescending.
Seated at her kitchen table, drinking freshly-squeezed breakfast orange juice or lingering after an always excellent dinner, I learn the source of the sad serenity she exudes. The subject is raised initially by my expression of surprise at finding an elevator in her home. After getting married, her husband landed a white-collar job in France where she gave birth to their two daughters. A few years later, he was involved in a terrible automobile accident that left him in a wheel chair. They returned to Sousse with the insurance money and built this large, elevator-equipped home near her brothers and sisters, but he died from injury complications soon after. Before the money ran out, she converted a few of the rooms upstairs into guest rooms and has been running the b&b for almost a year.
Rabaa was bitter and depressed for a long time after her husband’s death, but realized she had to accept and adjust if she was to be a good mother. I can see she is that; also that she takes consolation in the company of her relatives, who stop by daily, and in her work, especially the cooking. Resignation did not come easily, nor has it lifted the melancholy her face wears. She is, however, warm and very friendly. Her smile is sometimes happy, more often poignant, like her eyes. We talk of the challenges in raising children, our love of music and our need at times for solitude. I tell her how I am struggling to accept the limitations my infirmities place upon my music-making, though the resignation I seek is mild compared to hers. The concepts we discuss are sometimes complex, unlike the short words and phrases we always use. In my mid-60’s, I learn for the first time that a simple conversation can also be profound.
Through Rabaa, I meet Fadi, a 26 year-old violin teacher at the Sousse conservatory who speaks some English and gives me a good overview of Arabic fiddle music. It gets an exotic sound from back and forth mini-slides in the longer notes and extremely quick finger flick patterns, all foreign to the techniques I had learned and too difficult to pick up on first hearing. We jam for awhile, producing a few lively sections of music but more often sounding like two people talking simultaneously in different languages. It shouldn’t be surprising because the musical vocabularies we use are so dissimilar, but that was also true of my experiences decades earlier in Kenya and India. We were able to make music then by meeting on a more basic level – most importantly, getting in rhythm and keeping melodies straight-forward. But Fadi stays for the most part in the complexities of his idiom despite my attempts at simplification. The techniques of his musical language obviously required years of hard work to master, and perhaps he is not yet ready to climb down from a mountain-like conquest in order to walk together at a lower altitude. We play tunes for each other in the styles we know, talking about them, to our mutual enjoyment as well as to the others in the home after a late dinner. They sing along with some Tunisian songs he plays and clap rhythmically to the folk dances I fiddle. Fadi’s eyes brighten as he pulls out the melody in one of them he especially likes.
When we switch from musical tones to those of English words, our communication is consistently warm and animated. Here, I am the one who must simplify in order to make our conversation meaningful, an easier task that I eagerly undertake. He teaches students and plays in a professional group that tours. Fadi says he believes in god (though not in an afterlife) and has absorbed Moslem culture but does not practice its rituals or follow its rules. He readily joins me in drinking some fine Tunisian wine as we play and talk. He bubbles with an infectious enthusiasm that involves much eyebrow raising and head movements.
“Music! So wonderful when it touches us! When I play, I listen to that spirit. We are five in my group. In the middle section of each piece, we improvise. I try not to think, try to let it just come through me. Ah! So sweet! Here, listen to this one – I will show you how we improvise in the middle”…
When the subject turns to the Arab Spring, he says, “Almost two years since the revolution – started here. I didn’t like Ben Ali when he was in power, He was a dictator; made himself rich; his relatives and friends, too. But now I want him back. Yes, he was a dictator, but we felt safe then. Better economy, too. They protected secular rights. Now, who knows! The fundamentalists feel more bold.”
Rabaa tells me how they started celebrating Christmas during their years in France and still decorate a Christmas tree. For the first time, she got nasty comments this past December from fundamentalist men as she drove by with the tree in her car. This is a secular, liberal household that however also follows Islam. Before bringing wine into the house, I asked Rabaa’s permission; she readily gave it, but none of them drink. She worries along with her female relatives and friends that women will lose rights not long enough established to avoid attacks, including from within the Muslim parties that dominate Tunisian politics. There is more freedom of expression now, but demonstrations sometimes turn violent. Female attire in public has become an issue, and Hibi says she and her student friends are talking about organizing a “bikini protest.” Rabaa is proud that her daughter cares about secular rights, but says it is too risky – in fact, a young Tunisian woman who did a topless protest a short time before mysteriously disappeared afterwards.
Two sunny days at opposite ends of Sousse’s long sandy beach are revealing. The tourist zone features large resorts with roped-off, patrolled areas and foreign guests, many of them pink-skinned and fat, sipping cocktails. The large and equally beautiful (though less clean) public beach at the center of the city features local kids playing, their families talking nearby, and also some hustlers. I ignore the guys selling drugs and trinkets, but respond to the twelve year old boy who sits down next to me and sounds like he just wants to practice some very simple English. He asks where I’m from, what I do, and we talk about his school. Then he takes out a pack of cigarettes, lights one and asks for money, a combination that doesn’t work with me.
“The smoke bothers me. Please move further away,” I tell him.
“Please, I am hungry – want money to eat. Please.”
“I don’t like the smoke. Please move.”
He stays there, still dragging on the cigarette, and a minute later looks at me and says “I suck you now?”
I look back at him sadly, give him enough coins for a meal and ask him again to leave. He stands up silently, looks around and then walks away.
Fadi phones to tell me about a concert of modern Tunisian music by a local composer that he knows. We meet there the next evening at Sousse’s concert hall; he takes me backstage afterwards and introduces me to the many musicians in the twenty piece group who are his friends. As I shake the composer’s hand, I say something nice even though I found the pop style of his pieces highly repetitive and overly simplistic, especially compared to the much richer traditional music that Fadi had played for me. Rabaa came with me to the concert and she invites Fadi back to her house for a late dinner with several of her relatives. We again trade fiddle tunes afterwards, the others occasionally singing and dancing. There is good spirit in the room, and we continue until around 1 AM.
I originally planned on spending the last few nights in Tunis, but all the good places to stay I found online have been full since I first made initial inquires several weeks before. I call some of them on the Tunisian cellphone Rabaa has loaned me, and learn that an international conference has swallowed up all availability until after my departure – a familiar problem, but easily dealt with this time. I am happy and comfortable where I am, and Rabaa is pleased to have my stay extended. I like these people very much and am grateful that they have allowed me into their home and lives during this time of great uncertainty. They have some hope for the future but are also anxious, ready to adjust, not yet knowing to what.
18. Contrasting Nights with a Fantasy Mixed In
Successful professional performers deserve the respect we give them in large part because they must often overcome terrifying stage fright in order to try to live up to our expectations of them. A man who became a highly-regarded author started adult life intending to be a cellist. After graduating from a music conservatory, he walked on stage for his first professional solo concert gripped by a crippling fear. Fidgeting anxiously, he sat down behind his cello and then vomited all over it before playing a single note. He walked off the stage, totally humiliated, and never played music again.
Long after he first conquered the world of classical music, the great violinist Isaac Stern was asked by a journalist if he still got nervous before a performance. With characteristic bluntness, he said it was a stupid question – of course he did. What did the audience that night care about who he was or how well he played in his last concerts? They wanted to moved by his performance in front of them, so each evening the pressure was on to be at his best, something no one can do. That made him nervous.
Though I moved in a much different league, I sometimes got very nervous playing music in front of others, especially classical music because I lacked confidence in the bowing technique I had laboriously constructed to play it. If I started off shaky, I normally calmed down within the first few minutes of playing, but getting to that point could be bewildering. My goal was much more modest than always being at my best - I just wanted to be good, or at least avoid embarrassment. During my adult student days in Florence I feared the bow, at times hesitating before taking it out of the case, wondering how something so simple in construction, so subject to basic laws of physics, could be so intimidating. If only I had mastered it as a boy, unaware and unafraid. I eventually achieved enough control over it to comfortably play challenging chamber music with good musicians for our own enjoyment. What satisfaction it brought!
Now all that is slipping away. Folk fiddle music still sounds pretty good and is fun to play, but the bowing adjustments I cobbled together to address the medical problems in my right hand work less reliably as time passes. I told my musician friends early on about my movement disorder so they would know why my bowing was becoming erratic. Physical causes are more readily explained and accepted than psychological ones, so I always added its physiological root to my disclosure, the proper word because I hid this from them for awhile, hoping it wouldn’t effect me much. I have played regularly with some of them for decades, becoming close friends through music. They say not to worry about it – they still enjoy playing together. But I don’t want friendship to lead to presumption. Am I becoming what I wanted to avoid, someone hanging on too long?
I play with friends less frequently now, but occasionally my bowing surprises me by being almost like before. I still avoid medication, so what explains these temporary spells of fluent bowing? Is it the alcohol, which some doctors have recommended because it lessens the effects of the tremor? Beethoven’s Archduke Trio was almost as good as ever after a few glasses of wine one night. More often than not, though, it doesn’t do much. Perhaps it is the music itself sometimes acting as therapy, telling me to push my anxieties aside and allow it to carry me beyond these new limitations. That’s what I would most like to believe; but if that’s the true cause, I need more faith.
When I’m playing well, the feeling of elation carries into the following days, encouraging me to keep trying, teasing me into thinking that I can get it back. What has returned as strong as before, however, is my fear of the bow. As I watch my control over it slowly dissolve, I realize that I merely tamed it for a few decades. Control starts with the choices forced upon us by the limits of time. In which areas of life will we seek a certain level of mastery – what do we care enough about to spend time on and get better at? How hard it is then to watch an arduously acquired skill drift away - not evenly, but as if on the surface of waves, moving up and down, gradually receding. I notice some early signs that the tremor disorder is moving into my left hand, as the neurologist told me would probably happen. All this makes me anxious about playing now, aggravating my situation. The physical and psychological intertwine, causing and effecting without delineation, both implicated in an inevitable decomposition.
The audience members were definitely not engaged; some even started talking to each other loud enough for me to hear while I performed my set. I was on the stage of a municipal theater in a provincial Italian city and not playing well, so I couldn’t blame them. Italian audiences are less inhibited than most others and will at times vocally express their opinions during the performance. I didn’t get booed, but not by a lot. Tepid, thinly distributed applause tells you everything. I didn’t even deserve that. When I heard how lifeless the sound from my fiddle was, I got upset with myself, and then nervous, something that almost never happened when I played folk music in public. But there I was, tightening up, clutching my fiddle and bow, trying to recover from mistakes. I fell slightly out of rhythm at times; my breathing was irregular and shallow. I just hoped I could make it through without a major breakdown.
The night before in a nearby city had been triumphant - a packed house applauding vigorously, listening attentively to all my tunes and stories. My fiddling was filled with pulse and energy, the shouts of bravo at the end sending my already sky-high spirits even higher. People came up afterwards to offer their thanks and compliments. The dancers were in good form, too, and got a similar response – we fed off each others energy, and not just onstage. These were creative, fun-loving young artists I was performing with. We chatted amiably before and after rehearsals earlier that week, our evenings together lingering on, nourished by good food and wine.
Does it get any better than this? The only thing missing was my fantasy woman, and she would finally be arriving in Italy in just a few more days. Everything was going so right …
A few months before, an Italian dancer had invited me to accompany her small troupe for performances in two cities in central Italy. She had heard the album I recorded with an American folk group in Florence, liked some of the tunes and choreographed them for her dancers; she wanted to use the recording for the performances, but could I come and play some fiddle tunes to open the program and for the first few dances?
They couldn’t pay much, but it sounded like fun and a good way to fill the last weekend before Katy’s arrival in Florence. Katy had swept me away several years before when I saw her playing violin in the orchestra at a summer music festival in South Carolina – a talented blonde beauty in a clinging black dress. I approached her after that first concert and we chatted pleasantly. I pursued her over the next few days, and after a festival party we walked to the beach together, embraced and kissed. But she pulled back - she had just graduated from Duke and married her college boyfriend earlier that summer. She thought it might have been a mistake to get married so early, but she wanted to give it a chance, and what we were doing had to stop.
She stayed in my mind, though, and grew there over time, making it impossible for the other women I met to measure up. When I called her out of the blue a few years later, her marriage was breaking up. We met for an afternoon just before my return to Florence; my attraction to her was instantly rekindled, stronger than before, and I asked her to join me in Italy, ignoring the fact that I hardly knew her, acting instead on intuition and infatuation. She said yes, but also that it would be a few months before her separation from her husband would be complete. It took longer than that, my sense of anticipation heightened by the letters we exchanged during the wait. I often dreamed of her, my mind consumed by her; I imagined us playing great music together, followed by stimulating conversations and passionate love-making.
It would be just a few more days, I thought, as I looked out at the standing ovation from the audience that first night. I was doubly elated, which made my crash the next day that much harder. Katy’s voice at the other end of the phone was weak and tired. She had finally moved out, but the long ordeal had left her devastated, unable to leave her mother’s home. She hadn’t expected it to be this way. Katy needed time to heal, lots of time – leaving now for Italy had suddenly become impossible.
I walked around in a daze that afternoon, then onto the stage that evening feeling utterly deflated. My performance reflected my emotional condition – drained, deadened. My malady was contagious, spreading to the dancers who were watching offstage; when it came time for them to dance, they were as distracted and mistake-prone as they had been focused and precise the night before. Two performances of the same material by the same people, separated only by a day and a phone call, but as different as revelry and a funeral.
19. The Adopted Father
“Did you make love with this woman before asking her to come live with you here in Italy?” Agapito’s question was direct, like his manner.
“No. We only had that one afternoon together before I came back to Florence,” I responded. “We just walked around the park and talked. She held my hand; kissed me passionately before she had to leave – there wasn’t time, the place wasn’t right for anything more.”
“But dear Peter, how presumptuous of you! This is real life, not some fantasy you will into being.”
I didn’t always agree with Agapito, especially where women were involved, but I did always listen carefully to what he had to say. Over a period of years, he had developed into my spiritual father, the kind of man I wanted to become. Coincidently, I had met him at the same place I met Katy, the Festival of the Two Worlds, held annually in Spoleto, Italy and Charleston, South Carolina, a celebration of great music, dance and art. Agapito was a prominent Italian sculptor who had been invited by the Festival to exhibit his work. He and his daughter were speaking Italian as they arranged his sculptures for display on the day before the Charleston festival began. I was walking by and said something that blossomed into a lively conversation, then spent much of the next week conversing, dining and attending festival activities with this extraordinary Renaissance man, perhaps initially because there were few others who spoke his language in this bastion of the old south, but then from mutual delight in being together. His success as an oral surgeon only added to his drive to express himself artistically through his sculpture, his true passion, yet he still found time to fly planes and sail his boat around the Mediterranean. Physically, he was small, but his sculptures were imposing in scale and concept, his mind as bright as his sparkling eyes, his voice strong and confident. He was a torrent of energy and ideas.
Our friendship deepened over the course of many visits to his large estate after I returned to Italy. Agapito had an insatiable curiosity and read widely. He was often also reflective.
“Life is experience,” he said, as we talked in his studio. “You do well to travel and try different things. I would have done the same as a young man, but the war and its aftermath took that away from my generation. I lost years of my life! What a waste, and surrounded by so much pointless suffering. Our leaders were arrogant fools. How could they presume to exercise such control over us? What made them think they could impose their will on everything?! Bastards! And look who has taken their place – a corrupt group of whores!”
There was anger in his voice and his face reddened. You could always see how Agapito felt.
“But surely we are wiser now for all that,” I said.
“I doubt it,” he replied. “Progress there is an illusion. You didn’t live through the war. People who have experienced it would never do it again. Never! Then a new generation without that experience arrives in positions of power. They see war as a policy choice where risks and rewards are carefully calculated. But … believing that this time, the horrors will be avoided because we have better technology, know more and can win with minimal pain. What folly! Imbeciles!”
Agapito cursed them before pursuing a related thought, his black hair barely covering the rapid firing of the circuitry underneath.
“For 2,500 years we have possessed the most important truth from the wisest man who ever lived – ‘I know that I do not know.’ Socrates would be saddened by how full of ourselves we have become. What egoism! Think about it - without his admission of ignorance, science is impossible, most of what we call knowledge would not exist. And think about where that has brought us - we are insignificant specks, temporarily moving about in a chaotic universe that doesn’t give a shit about us.” His voice rose as he stated his inference, his enlarged eyes looked squarely at me.
“To what end, then? What does it all mean to you?” I asked.
“You want to know if there is purpose or meaning in all this? Nature’s only purpose is that we struggle to reproduce ourselves, nothing more. Nature would have men travel about, constantly copulating and leaving children everywhere.” He briefly smiles at the thought. “But civilization modifies nature… And look at civilization – so impressive and accomplished, yet our grandest monuments eventually crack and crumble. The time will arrive when Leonardo’s “Mona Lisa” no longer exists. Everything dies, including our sun and our world along with it. You look for meaning in this?”
Agapito paused and looked out the window, then continued in a quieter voice.
“But the result should not be despair. Meaning? You have to find it yourself, from within. No one has the right to proclaim ultimate explanations - no person, no religion, no philosophy... Life is a struggle to emerge from mass mediocrity. Does that make it meaningful?”
“That would make it meaningful for me,” I said. “The experience of human life from the inside, playing the ultimate game when the stakes are real and time is limited - what could have more meaning than that?”
“Yes, certainly in the personal sense,” he continued. “But beyond that? I want more than an interesting life. More than playing the game well. Do you seek wealth? I have lots of it, but what I value, authentic experience, is not sold in the marketplace. Neither is happiness, which comes and goes, never staying long enough. For me, meaning comes from striving to make art.”
I looked around his studio, filled with drawings and sculptures in various states of formation. Bright sun flooded the room; the impression was primordial,
“Where does your art come from, what is the source of all this?” I asked.
“Nature at its most elemental – filled with violence and struggle, using basic forms and materials – rock, wood, iron. And from the human condition, too – rooted in the pagan, before ideology, restricted by circumstance. Fate! Think about it –each one of us is here as he is, with no control over his construction, a product of nature, unable to modify its program for him. And we think that we can choose. Another illusion!”
“But what about free will? I don’t believe in Fate,” I quickly interjected. “That’s superstition – one that may lift the burden of responsibility but robs life of its meaning. My choices make a difference in the life I lead. I chose to come to Italy, to leave the law and study music. Those were hard decisions, a mix of intuition and analysis, lots of thinking, weighing. That wasn’t something predetermined – it was the product of choices that I made of my own free will.”
Agapito brought me over to the door of his studio, opened it and pointed to the imposing mountains off in the distance.
“You see those. The magnificent Apennine Mountains, the backbone of Italy. You come from those, your mother was born there, all your ancestors were people of those mountains. This land is in your blood. Do you really think you could have chosen not to come here? And the violin you came to study - where is its home? Is not Stradivari its most prized maker? And Paganini the greatest master of its art? What does it do to you when you make it sing? I listened outside your room before dinner yesterday while you were playing a Bach Partita and heard a musician. Do you think your free will could have chosen not to do that?”
He paused, I pondered. Then he continued.
“Our lives unfold within coordinates set by chromosomes. They force our choices toward paths that are the only ones possible. It is only through chance encounters and mutations that we have the possibility of rewriting the script.”
“Well, I certainly agree that our choices are often restricted, not only by our circumstances but also by choices already made,” I said. “You speak of powerful forces that push us. Yes, but I think I will always believe that I make my own choices. Isn’t that why we developed minds?”
“Our minds have developed so that we survive and multiply," he said firmly, before going on in a softer tone - "Dear Peter, these are matters of faith, and much more important than those that normally occupy that realm.”
We lapsed into silence, lost in thought… A little later, I returned to an earlier topic.
“We were talking about your art before we wound up tangled in fate and free will. And meaning, too … What does this art mean? What are you trying to express?”
“Look here,” he said, guiding me towards some large sculptures in a corner of the room. “The dark, weathered wood, old railroad ties, vertical and angled, their stability attacked by a violent force inserted into them and whose weight they bear. Or that one, with the straps that constrict and bind.”
He mumbled something under his breath, then went on.
“Explaining art, though, is futile. Great art engages us wholly, both the head and the heart, but no one really knows what it is. The human mind is a marvelous achievement, that much we can be sure of, but it comes later. We feel, then we think. Our hearts move us more than our minds because we had emotions before we had thoughts. Sometimes I just put a pencil on paper and let it move to see what comes out.”
“But then your mind-“
“Yes,” he continued, having absorbed my point faster than I could state it, “I may think long and hard, planning and developing - but then I’m rationalizing, as an afterthought. The spark comes from another place, and only if the spirit is alive and charged in that moment, ready to give. That’s why we cultivate the spirit, otherwise we are dead. It’s elusive – the intuition always seems better than its execution, so we remain dissatisfied.”
“I almost always feel that way with words – what comes out doesn’t fully express the flash of thought and feeling inside. Same with music, though my shortcomings there also result from deficiencies of technique. I would love to have enough technique to move on to the creativity problems you confront. Michelucci, my maestro, says a true artist is never satisfied. If that’s so, I will never be a real artist – all I’m trying to create is a good, satisfying life.”
“Dear Peter,” he went on, “that too is a great challenge, one that requires creativity. You are still young and full of possibilities. You will find your way, feeling, thinking.” He looked up, then turned his gaze back toward me, his eyes glowing. “The mind is a marvel - our greatest resource, a gift of nature! Think about this miraculous interplay of mind, heart and hand – that’s what creates art. When artists are swept up in creating a work of art, we love it to the point of believing it will survive time. We transfer to it our desire for immortality.”
“Yes,” I said, “even if we don’t believe in an afterlife, we can still touch the eternal. I get that kind of intuitive feeling playing the old violin I bought in Florence. It was made in 1750 – it played the baroque masterpieces I’m now studying when they were freshly composed! And it will continue doing so, along with the music of the future, long after I’m gone. It doesn’t belong to me – I belong to it, and it belongs to music, which will never die.”
Agapito smiled, then showed me another part of his studio, filled with sculptures that had not found a home outside his, complaining about the space they took up. I knew that many of his pieces were in collections and museums, with some of the huge ones in city squares, and that he had been a featured artist at Italy’s most prestigious art festival, the Venice Biennale. Given the bond we had developed over the years, I didn’t think he would mind a delicate question that my curiosity insisted on.
“Agapito, you have often told me that you don’t care what anybody else thinks, that you think and do what you want. But does it bother you that much of this work may not find an audience or a buyer?”
He thought for a moment, his eyes showing the steely self-confidence that I trusted would keep him from taking offense. “Yes – that’s not the way I would have it. Artistic expression seeks its public or risks becoming masturbation. I want what I do to reach people, communicate something to them. But if not always, I must accept that and never allow it to stop me. I am driven to spend my time doing this because of the great void – this is the way I fight it.”
20. The Brothers
Only an hour away by the sturdy two-car train that cut through the mountain between them was my cousin Claudio. His life was as physical as Agapito’s was intellectual, each man so remarkably accomplished within his own domain, their lives so complementary. I normally visited one after being with the other, passing from the creative to the traditional, from a world of mind and art into one rooted in working the land. I greatly admired them both, hopelessly thinking how magnificent it would be to combine their talents, to be a man complete.
Claudio is the youngest of five siblings who all have raised families in the rustic village of their birth. At fifteen he left school for work and by seventeen was laboring in Switzerland with his older brother, a brick-layer. A few years later, he returned to begin a job driving buses between the mountain villages and the nearby city of L’Aquila, the job he would hold until retirement, procured by his father with the home-made prosciutto, salami and cheese he gave to a local politician. Claudio found a spouse within a few kilometers walk, as did most members of the half-dozen extended families that made up the bulk of the village’s three hundred or so inhabitants. He and his two brothers built their homes next to each other on a field their father had given them, using savings from their bus and truck driving jobs to purchase materials, doing the construction themselves, helping each other with the practical skills they had mastered.
Sitting high up in the mountain meant the air and water were pure but the growing season shortened by a cool climate. Virtually everything they ate came from their own fields and barnyards. Over the years, I visited them in every season, planting and harvesting the crops, feeding and slaughtering the animals, making and drinking the wine, marveling at how they stoically performed the rugged labor demanded by this way of life.
In all this, they were similar to Riccardo and his brothers, my cousins who lived closer to the city. Family support and obligations were at the center of all their lives, their holidays always spent together, their most important ceremonies focused on family rites of passage. There was rarely a need to request or offer because it was all done as a matter of course. I was exposed to family and brotherhood in both places as one might imagine them in an ideal world – solid, like a stone fortress, until a feud brought it crashing down for Riccardo and his brother Marcello.
It started after the death of their parents, with a dispute over a boundary line between their adjoining plots of land, involving no more than a few meters. But it escalated out of control, becoming a cauldron for all the tensions and misunderstandings that can accumulate over a lifetime passed at close quarters. When I first learned of it during a trip back to Italy, I met with them separately and offered to mediate the problem using the skills I was learning in my new profession. Neither was interested. I didn’t press them, feeling certain their differences would be resolved by the overwhelming sense of family that enveloped them. It was just a matter of time. Instead it festered, eventually developing into a lawsuit that dragged on for twelve years, aggravated rather than resolved by the judge’s decision in Riccardo’s favor. More years passed. They spoke only with glares rather than words.
I made another attempt at mediation during a recent visit, motivated by the warm memories of my experiences among them several decades before. I walked the few paces between their homes, as the brothers had done routinely during an earlier life but never since. Riccardo was eighty-two, Marcello in his late seventies. I asked each of them the same question.
“Do you remember what it was like then? I saw you build your homes together, raise each other’s children. Do you want the next visit with your brother to be at his funeral?”
“No, Pietro, I don’t want that. But that’s the way it will be. He was wrong but too stubborn to admit it. Too much has been said and done. It’s too late.”
I heard essentially the same fatalistic response from both of them, their battle-weary voices flaring up in words of blame and self-justification before lapsing into muttering and silence. Though one had been declared the winner, both brothers seemed utterly defeated by what had happened. My further appeals were futile, my expertise useless. Family had always been an anchor in my life, my appreciation of its importance so powerfully reinforced by what I found among these very people from the time I first met them. How could it be turning out this way?
Should I have been so surprised and disappointed? My grandmother was not the only one from her family to seek a better life in America. Her sister and brother-in-law had come as well, but I never knew him and was only allowed to meet her after he died, when I was in my forties. At some point after their arrival, the two families had argued over something that no one now remembers, causing a rupture that was virtually complete. When I first met Riccardo and his relatives, they all asked not only about my grandmother but also her sister, their other “American” aunt. I was embarrassed to tell them that I did not know her, that though we lived nearby, our families had no contact. Perhaps the only thing as strong as an Italian family is the obstinacy of an Italian family feud.
Claudio and his brothers, instead, exemplified Italian family life at its unchanging best. Whenever one needed help, the others provided it. The children moved freely among the homes, playing together, learning to help with the chores, secure in the multi-generational network of blood and marriage that nurtured them. When they finished high school, Claudio’s children rode his bus into L’Aquila to study at the university, his daughter becoming a vascular surgeon, his two sons engineers who then started a successful construction company together. They continued living at home, though one recently married a woman from a neighboring village and moved into the flat below his parents. All the extended family members seemed so comfortable in each other’s presence – there was often much talking but also times of easy silence. There was no obligation to make conversation, just to be and do.
During the twentieth century, the Italian government instituted a comprehensive social security system, but the only one Claudio trusted was the traditional one that had endured for countless centuries – the family. The physical and emotional security these bonds provided struck the younger me as solid and permanent. It is reassuring to visit Claudio's village now and see how strong and enduring the bonds remain, though I once felt that way about Riccardo and his brothers before their feud, and also about L’Aquila, the fortress mountain city, before its earthquake.
21. Of Bands and Bonds
The noise under our sixth floor apartment in Florence will be loud tonight. Every month or so, the merchants of Via Gioberti organize a street fair; for this evening they have hired some live bands to attract people to stores that will remain open for business well past normal closing time. One of the bands sets up beneath our window, and when I hear the fiddle player warm up, it sounds like the music will be of good quality. I go down to listen to their lively eastern Mediterranean folk tunes and approach the violinist during their break.
“Bravo, I am really enjoying your music. Are you all Italians?”
“Yes, but I’m just filling in tonight. I normally play with a group here in Florence that does Irish music.”
“Whisky Trail?”
“Yes; you know us?”
“Yes. I saw the posters for your festival concert last month and so knew the band still existed. When Whisky Trail first got started back in the mid-70’s, I played fiddle in an American folk group here. We also did some Irish tunes and both bands went to some of each other’s concerts. At one point later on, they had a recording session scheduled but their fiddler was having a baby, so they asked me to sit in for a few tracks.”
“Small world! I first joined them in ‘96.” he said.
“But your bowing is so fluid. Are you classically trained?” I asked.
“Yes, I studied violin at the conservatory here.”
“With Stefano Michelucci?”
“Yes. But how did you know?”
“Because I studied here for a few years with his father, Roberto, and you bow the same way he did! Stefano had just graduated, trained by his father – he also helped Stefano get appointed to the faculty later.”
The coincidences light us up but don’t end there. He also has traveled the world with his fiddle, teaching himself different styles and how to improvise, playing in various orchestras and groups throughout Europe and Latin America, busking too. He will soon be forty, and is now thinking about settling down, getting married and having some children…
As we talk, a store window reflects our angled images – more of my back, more of his front. We are a generation apart, born on opposite sides of the Atlantic, in different phases of similar lives.
Under Roberto Michelucci’s guidance, my bowing got much better, though not steadily. The different bow strokes of classical technique varied in the height of their hurdles. I always tried to analyze the movements each required, breaking them into pieces for practice, then slowly putting those pieces back together again. There was an important stroke I never could master – the bouncing bow. Its best practitioners get a rich palette of fluttery sound, the result of lightly guiding the natural motions which result from bouncing the bow on the string. I could not let go enough to get it comfortably assimilated; the stroke required a relaxation, a loosening of control that at thirty years old I could no longer achieve. Will can only push you so far – conditioning and earlier choices set limits. After two years of intense effort, my analytical method got me a fluid sound on enough other strokes so that I could bring musical phrases to life. But I was working so hard on technique that I rarely played with others.
Then a student at the conservatory put me in touch with a friend of hers who taught music at an American college in Florence. Buzz had to organize a concert of American folk music for the college’s students, to be held in its villa overlooking the city. Would I like to meet with a small group he was putting together just for that concert? I by now felt ready to play with other musicians, and had enough Italian friends to stop avoiding Americans. We met at an art show featuring one of them - Rob – prints he had done at the print-making school of his teacher, Dennis, who was also in the proposed group. Good artists, obviously – and they were musicians, too? After the exhibition, we played some folk tunes that we all knew, and it sounded good enough to move us to the next step – practice sessions, trying out tunes and figuring out how to play them together.
Human society requires us to spend much of our time in groups, and in most of them, there is someone or something to dislike. Other than family, I had never particularly cared for groups or their dynamics, puzzled by the inordinate influence some individuals (who never seemed to be me) had over what the group did. In work and social groups, status and rules usually determine outcomes. Our group had no rules, and though Buzz had the status of being its organizer, he was disinclined to exercise leadership. We had only a few weeks to put the concert together and, with no direction, lots to do.
Buzz was calm and facilitative; his wife Karin had a manner as sweet as her lovely singing voice. Rob and Dennis were both a bit hyper, but expressed it in their energetic playing, leaving their social personalities wholly congenial. Each of us made suggestions about which tunes to play and how to play them. The ultimate response was invariably a form of “Let’s try it!” When it sounded good, there was mutual satisfaction, often accompanied by suggestions to make it better; when it sounded bad, a sincere comment or some good-spirited humor normally provided a graceful way out. When we weren’t unanimous on whether it was good or bad, we tried it again until we reached agreement. There were none of the ego problems and score-keeping that so often mar group efforts, so consensus became and remained our decision-making process. If any one of us maintained an objection to something, we just didn’t do it, which in turn caused everyone to limit the rare objection to something truly important. Majority votes were never really part of our practice sessions, and we remained leaderless. This is ordinarily a recipe for a non-functional group, but our playing kept getting better and better.
The concert at the American college went well, and though our reason for joining together had accomplished its objective, we wanted to keep making music. Some of their Italian friends asked us to play for home parties, which were always enjoyable – no public performance pressure, interesting people to meet and good food to eat. In stark contrast to my experience among Americans, I don’t remember ever seeing an Italian get drunk at a party. They almost always drank some wine, but usually to accompany food, and most of them had multiple interests, keenly pursued, which made conversation easier.
The first party led to a gig at a local folk music club, where the enthusiastic response of the audience encouraged us further. We kept working on making our tunes as good as possible and trying new ones. Eventually, we settled on calling ourselves “Angel Band” - it was not only the name of a favorite song in our repertory but also easy for Italians to pronounce and understand. Besides being warm and friendly, they were all fine musicians, and my newly-acquired technique allowed me to play with a confidence and expressiveness I had lacked before. What a great new feeling!
Though he planned to be a visual artist, Rob had mastered the guitar and could play almost any instrument you put in his hands. He was a good singer, too, and for someone so richly talented, the self-doubt he often conveyed was surprising. It combined with highly focused discipline to feed a perfectionism extending well beyond his artistic efforts. The mandolin and banjo were fairly new instruments for him, but since they added variety of sound to several of the tunes we were learning, he regularly set his alarm an hour or two early to fit practice time into his busy schedule and soon played them both with great musicality. Rob supported himself and the post-graduate art studies he was completing by playing lead guitar in the house band at Florence’s leading discotheque. At twenty-five, he was also tall, witty and fairly good-looking, but never attracted the female interest he merited or desired. The attractive women at the disco, instead, flocked to Tino, his Italian bandmate whose Latin persona, movie-star looks and ready smile were irresistible. Perhaps that made it easier to accept, though Rob was by nature deferential, and philosophical, too, spinning out thoughts as imaginative as the improvisations he launched through his instruments. His doubt was expressed in words and actions, never in the easily flowing music he played.
Dennis had come to Italy as a Fulbright scholar a decade earlier and liked it so much that he never left. In his mid-thirties, he was a lively, well-brewed stout, bubbling with all the energy required by the many roles he had taken on – artist, husband, father, owner of a business in Florence teaching art to college students, its main professor, too. Through him I first learned that someone could be hyper and stressed yet still be thoroughly enjoyable. His tenor voice was clear and true, his guitar-playing crisp, often highly inventive. Dennis’ sensibility was evident and genuine, but at times came spiced with a candor that was invariably instructive if not always easily heard. Like Rob, he was multi-talented - his musical accomplishments included wizardry at whistling, playing the spoons and the renaissance recorder. Also like Rob, he had passed well beyond fluency in Italian, communicating comfortably using the local accent and expressions, including slang, the marker of mastery.
Karin’s rosy warmth radiated through big dimpled cheeks whose color fluctuated from soft pink to wine red. She liked wearing costumes, was invariably optimistic and often sighed. Karin delighted in the young children she and Buzz were raising, especially when they all made up new games or shows. Her voice was exquisite and round, like her person. The sounds she produced had a rich timbre that must have been be innate, and she had learned enough technique to sing gorgeously shaped musical lines. Not whenever she chose, however. On days when Karin lost confidence, the lines suffered and sometimes broke down completely. But when she regained confidence, her voice soared like a bird in flight, sounding like the free spirit that she was. I learned from her about vulnerability, something I hoped to avoid in my life but instead was only able to postpone.
Her husband could almost have been in an older generation than the rest of us but was not, instead maintaining an open stance, mellowed rather than hardened by the numerous vicissitudes his longer life had brought him. Buzz radiated serenity and laughed gently. Though he played several instruments, he was mainly a teacher and a composer. He loved literature and composed for us settings of evocative poems by Thomas Hardy and e. e. cummings, one on unrequited love, beautifully melodic and melancholic, the other a concise reflection on one man’s life and death, as movingly captured in music as in words. If you could pick your relations, Buzz would be your older brother or a favorite uncle. He listened much more than he talked, rarely rendered a judgment, and when he did, it was invariably sympathetic and well-considered.
Here was finally a group that I unreservedly enjoyed, and we got together often during the year we all lived in Florence. Whenever Angel Band performed for an audience, people would usually come up to thank or compliment us after we finished playing. Once, an older Italian woman effused about the music, then said she had fallen in love with me during the concert. She was sweet, physically unattractive and married, standing in fact next to her much older husband who seemed unfazed by her comment. Barbara, however, was very physically attractive, also older and married, but she said it was over and that she had separated from her husband. When she repeated that information later on during the party, I wondered if it was an invitation. She was a flutist and an interesting, opinionated conversationalist. I asked if she’d like to meet for a drink the next afternoon and she said yes.
It took off from there. She implied that divorce proceedings were well underway, something which turned out not to be true. We continued our afternoon trysts on the thin mattress of my single bed, but also in the comfortable apartment she and her husband owned in the city. I later found out that they still lived together in their country home, that he knew about me and openly expressed his jealousy, that he occasionally came unexpectedly to their city apartment, and that he was capable of highly emotional outbursts – all this in a country that back then still enshrined the delitto d’onore (“crime of honor”). In that stagnant corner of the Italian legal system, jealousy was mixed in (or more accurately, confused) with honor. Catching a spouse in the act allowed you, in a moment of anger, to kill either or both of them and face, instead of a life sentence, as little as three years in jail if your reaction was sufficiently emotional. Our affair was brief, and we were both safer when it ended.
What was not very safe, however, were the piazze, the public squares of Italy. There were numerous political bombings and assassinations carried out by fanatics of both the left and the right during the 1970’s and early 1980’s, known in Italy as “the years of lead” (i.e., bullets). The country was a hotbed of social and economic turmoil, its Communist Party (“PCI”) by far the largest in capitalist Western Europe. Enrico Berlinguer, the party’s pragmatic leader had broken with Moscow over the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia, insisting that the national communist parties should take their own path toward a democratic form of socialism. The PCI’s dominant presence in the Italian labor movement and some well-governed regions combined with a highly organized network of social service and recreation centers to steadily increase its popularity with voters. In 1976 the party won more than a third of the seats in Parliament, only 4% behind the first-place Christian Democrats, causing pronounced anxiety throughout the capitalist countries of Europe and America. Would Italy soon become the first democratic country to vote communists into power? More importantly, would they relinquish that power if later voted out? No party calling itself Communist had ever allowed that to happen. Tension abounded amid rumors of extremist conspiracies and CIA-supported military coups. Italy was on the front line of the Cold War at a time when the stakes were huge and the domino theory held sway.
But far from instigating the violence in the streets, the Communists tried desperately to stop it. The party’s long campaign to persuade Italian voters and the country’s capitalist allies that it was different, that its commitment to democracy was sincere, was now so close to success. Victory at the ballot box was within reach, probably at the next election. When such a fundamental change of orientation is in the offing, violent fringe groups thrive at both ends of the political spectrum, nourished by fear and opportunism. The PCI was viewed by radical leftists as a conglomeration of sell-outs who had lost their revolutionary fervor, its leaders targeted for assassination along with policemen, judges and prominent members of the ruling political establishment. This culminated in the 1978 kidnapping and murder by the Red Brigades of the Italian Prime Minister, a Christian Democrat sympathetic to forming a coalition with the PCI.
Teetering on the brink of communism, Italy was then only a few decades removed from the twenty years it spent as a fascist dictatorship. Though the fascist party was banned by the 1948 Italian constitution, right-wing extremism still had its adherents, their terrorist faction responsible for the deadliest massacre during the “years of lead,” a bomb which killed 85 and wounded more than 200 people at the Bologna train station. The radical leftists had much wider support among young Italians, especially university students, but there were enough neo-fascist fanatics to fuel the street violence which could erupt without warning between zealots of both extremes.
One day I turned a corner while walking near the University of Florence and became a momentary spectator at a pitched battle between these zealots. The two sides were throwing rocks at each other as the police approached from another street, pistols drawn, occasionally firing warning shots in the air. Someone launched a Molotov cocktail which exploded close enough to send me running away. I heard the crackle of gunfire and another explosion as I took an alternate route to my apartment.
Between these political extremes, there were a dozen or so parties represented in Parliament, a fascinating contrast to the bland two-party system in which I had grown up. The most colorful of these was the small but influential Radical Party. They maintained that politicians were essentially whores and made their point by nominating as one of their candidates Cicciolina, a star of hard-core pornographic films. This blatant appeal to the wry humor and cynicism of Italian voters was wildly successful - she was elected, continued her porn career while serving as a Member of Parliament and one day exposed her breasts there.
My interest in Italian politics extended in all directions. Communism, fascism, anarchism – they all flourished or were born here, exercised with the passion that flows so often through things Italian. Campaign rallies were huge spectacles, and I attended many of them. The major parties filled the largest piazzas of Florence with lively entertainment, enormous banners, and flamboyant rhetoric. By general agreement, the best speaker in a country that prized talking as an art form was Giorgio Almirante, the leader of a right-wing party that attracted most of the ex-fascists. Even people who despised what he stood for acknowledged his great rhetorical gifts, and I wanted to hear him live.
I saw posters announcing his coming to Florence, and read in the newspaper that the police required the rally to be held in a theater for security purposes – there had been several bomb threats and also earlier episodes of violence at some of his rallies. For Almirante and his followers, this was enemy territory. Florence and nearby Bologna formed the heart of the “red belt,” the regions of central Italy where the communists had won the local elections almost without interruption since the end of World War Two, where hatred of fascism was especially strong. None of my friends wanted to go, the Italians in particular urging me to stay away. But I was armed with a young man’s feeling of invincibility – bad things only happened to other people.
The streets around the theater were abnormally quiet. Heavily armed policemen almost outnumbered audience members inside, and the tense atmosphere was sufficiently worrisome to keep me near the door. When Almirante walked on stage he was greeted with shouting and energetic applause from the party faithful, some of them extending the same fascist salute that had hailed Mussolini. He was a magnificent orator, fully exploiting the natural cadences and beautiful sounds of the Italian language, his resonant voice effortlessly shaping phrases that seemed extemporaneous. Here was a man making an odious message sound like music. But then I heard a loud boom and saw smoke begin to fill the room. There were panicked shouts and frantic movement all around. I ran out of the theater and heard more explosions, some of them outside, where I also saw men scurrying about with pistols drawn and cops brandishing machine guns. A few weeks earlier, I had happened upon the street battle near the University by chance, but I had foolishly chosen to attend this rally, and now I was scared, really scared. My heart pounded my ribs as I looked around for a safe way home.
Bad things don’t just happen to others – they can happen to you, too. That’s an important lesson, the more dramatic the better, to get at an appropriate time in life - too early and it can crush your enthusiasm for life’s expanding possibilities, too late and you may be finished before your time. “Risk analysis,” our most useful skill – I didn’t know its name then, but got an instant appreciation for its importance that afternoon.
Throughout the United States and beyond, countless organizations sponsored free concerts in 1976 to celebrate the American Bicentennial, but who would have imagined that one of those organizations would be the Communist city government of Florence, Italy? or that the location for a concert of American hillbilly tunes would be the Salone dei Cinquecento, whose walls display famous sculptures by Michelangelo and other Italian masters as well as enormous Renaissance tapestries, perhaps the grandest public hall in all of Italy and the most incongruous conceivable for this style of music? or that the ex-lawyer who had become a conservatory student through pure luck would be in the band handsomely paid to play for the thousand people who filled the hall?
Yet that’s what happened. Not because we had earned that kind of exposure on such a grandiose stage, nor because Dennis knew one of the employees who worked at Palazzo Vecchio, the Florentine city hall. It always helps, of course, to know someone who can at least open a door to the labyrinth of Italian bureaucracy, but approval for such a big undertaking required a solid political rationale. Florence and its red belt neighbors propelled the Communists to their national success in 1976 because they were examples of local governments providing well-organized social services, relatively free of the corruption so prevalent in other areas of the country. In contrast to the Christian Democrats, when Communists spent public money it was expected to have a purpose other than rewarding cronies. Political calculations, however, were inescapable, especially with power at the national level so close-at-hand. The Communists had already demonstrated they could run clean, efficient local governments in Italy, but too many voters (and western allies like the United States) were still anxious - Italians did not want to be absorbed into the monolithic communist bloc to their east. Party members saw this as an opportune time for pro-Western cultural initiatives, to develop linkages, to create a zone of comfort for the anxious, and Angel Band was a direct beneficiary of that policy.
Huge red posters all over Florence announced the upcoming “Concert in Honor of the American Bicentenial,” and the city’s cultural department did extensive media publicity. When the evening finally arrived, the introductory remarks were less about music and Angel Band, more about the durable bonds between Italy and America and their mutual dedication to liberty. People, however, had come to hear a concert and now it was time to play. The elegant surroundings and size of the audience were intimidating. We were well-prepared but untested in such a setting, and though we never said it, unsure we could do it.
I tried to will away my growing anxiety as the day went on but could only bring it, with conscientious effort, under temporary control. We strode on stage with a pretended confidence, shot uneasy smiles at each other and beneath the tapestries jumped into a country rag. The audience applause showed they liked it, and that helped settle our nerves a bit. Music – stay focused on the music. Over the next few tunes, nervous neurons gradually converted into an excitement of emotion that was positively charged and freely flowing, completely in the moment, a natural, tingling high. I was floating, joyfully, my fiddle an extension of body and soul, giving and receiving.
Afterwards, we celebrated at a small hillside trattoria that we and our friends completely took over. White candles softly illuminated smiling faces gathered around a large table, covered with food and flasks of Tuscan wine. Our mood was euphoric, and we followed the Italian custom for such occasions by making many spontaneous toasts. The level of oratory varied but not the sincerity of the words, which were received with always wholehearted, sometimes fervent applause. Inbetween, there was much animated conversation and easy laughter. The luminosity in this rustic room was multi-nourished, palpable. An adrenaline rush that peaked during our backstage warm-up and opening tune had transformed itself, first into the floating sensation of play, then the warmth of jubilant companionship, finally dissipating as the sun rose, allowing me a dreamy sleep.
Giuliano Giunti, the owner of a small recording studio in Florence, was in the audience that night and saw an opportunity. “Whisky Trial,” a local group of musicians, had introduced Florentine audiences to Irish traditional music two years before and quickly attracted a following throughout Italy. They had sold many records for a competitor, and Giuliano thought he might be able to do something similar with Angel Band. Would we come to his studio to do some recording and see how it turned out? He agreed to give us copies of the tapes he made, so it was (if nothing else) a simple way to get a good quality recording for our own enjoyment of the tunes we played.
Now it was a mass of microphones and equipment that seemed intimidating. Which makes you more nervous, performing in front of warm bodies or surrounded by cold metal? The nice thing about studio recording is that you can keep doing it until you get it right. After a while we felt comfortable there, too, except for one Sunday night. Giuliano had scheduled us for a session at 8 PM that I didn’t get to until after 11 PM. I had gone to see Michelucci play a recital that afternoon in Arezzo, ordinarily an hour away by train, and if all went according to schedule, I would make it back by 6:30 PM. Dennis advised me not to chance it, especially on a Sunday, when everything in Italy slowed down. My train back to Florence left late, crawled and sat, then crawled and sat some more, arriving almost five hours late. This was before cellphones, so they were all there waiting, expecting me to arrive any minute the whole time, doing a slow burn. My apology and explanation placated everyone except Dennis, who remained extremely pissed.
“Why did you have to leave the city today? You knew how much we had to do. You could see your fucking maestro some other time.”
That triggered an argument between the two of us that escalated until Giuliano insisted we get to work; we had already wasted enough of his time. Dennis’ normally fair-skinned face was an angry red as I tuned my fiddle, hot and flushed. My hands were almost shaking; my arms and brain felt wired by our mutual irritation. I wondered how we could possibly play together and avoided his glare as Rob’s mandolin intro kicked off “Gilderoy’s Reel,” one of our most difficult uptempo tunes. I felt like I was on a sharp edge the whole way through, expecting to fall off at any moment. Somehow, magically, the music totally took over, rechanneling all that charged emotion, like an overwhelming force pulling wild energy into phase. We played the tune with more drive and passion than ever before - it would be the best cut on the album. Hours later we finished the session, exhausted but exhilarated. Dennis and I walked home together in the quiet of late night, expended, reconnected.
At first we all knew each other more as part of a group than as individuals. The bonds of personal friendship would develop later and last a lifetime, though for geographic reasons I would see much more of Rob, the best man at my wedding, and Dennis, whose home in the Tuscan hills has been the site of many a happy gathering. Buzz and Karin settled in Washington state, and stopped coming back east for visits after their kids finished New England colleges and returned home. We stayed in occasional contact by phone and letter, but less so as time went by. When Buzz died over thirty years after we first met, I had not seen him for almost twenty years, yet I cried as never before on hearing of a friend’s death, sobbing intensely when I listened to our playing of his songs. Music and friendship are tied in with emotions at an elemental level, overwhelming when they combine forces, pushing away time and distance.
Giuliano didn’t like distractions, but he allowed Maria and Tara into one of our recording sessions. They were both studying at Dennis’ art studio, liked American folk music and came to the parties and gigs we played. After fussing over our microphone settings for a while, Giuliano moved into the glass-enclosed recording booth and announced that we would start with “that tune Peter sings with his voce di merda,” literally meaning “voice of shit.” I of course realized from the day I first met the others that they were the real singers and that any singing I might do in the group would be limited to fiddle tunes where vocal quality was unimportant. I also knew by then that Giuliano sometimes used sarcasm to keep us loose, and I liked him a lot, but still…, hearing your singing voice described that way by the recording engineer doesn’t boost your confidence as you watch the red light go on, telling you the tape is rolling. We played “Give the Fiddler a Dram,” started well and rode a wave all the way through on the first take. I noticed Maria and Tara in a corner of the booth, moving with the music. Maria had her eyes closed, absorbing the sound, turning the tune’s plaintive drone into a rhythmic swaying. Tara’s bright eyes engaged mine; her lips formed a soft smile. I felt better.
Maria had done more than boost my confidence a few months earlier. I knew her mainly as a friend of a friend, but she came to my apartment one night and said she wanted to be with me. That had never happened before, not during my quasi-monastic time as a conservatory student and certainly not when I was a lawyer. Is this the way it was for performing musicians?
Tara instead I first met when she was infatuated with Lance, the male model from England. He was extraordinarily handsome and lived in the room next to mine in an apartment I had moved to that year. Lance supported himself by posing nude for art classes in Florence, which is how Tara first saw him. She and a girlfriend came by to visit one evening, and the four of us talked amiably in his room. It was obvious that Tara was smitten, but so were lots of women, and men too. At least, that’s what I heard from others. Lance rarely brought anyone to his room. I didn’t wonder then if it might be because of my heavy practice schedule, unpleasant for me too because my room was so tiny that I could barely draw the bow from one end to the other.
But another reason was that our apartment caught fire and we all had to move out. It started very late at night in a corner of the kitchen where we kept a pile of newspapers. About a foot away was the gas-fueled heater that warmed us in winter. I not only was aware of that proximity, I also saw small blue flames escaping from the bottom of the heater a few times starting about a month before the fire. This was not a case of poor risk analysis, this was pure oblivion. And my roommates were equally uncomprehending.
Katie, an Australian student whose bedroom adjoined the kitchen, was awakened by the crackling flames burning everything combustible in that corner. Her screams of “Fire!” brought Eugenio and Lance into the kitchen, where I quickly joined them after first placing my violin outside. Eugenio called the fire department while Lance grabbed some buckets from the closet. All three of us threw water at the fire, at first haphazardly, but then in a line formation starting at the spigot. The flames had spread to some cabinets and were slapping at others nearby. We doused the fire’s front line there, trying to drive it back to the masonry wall where it was running out of fuel. Some flames were more than halfway up the room, threatening a jump to wooden beams in the ceiling. But we had advanced from nervously instinctive reaction to methodically focused action, with Lance keeping the coolest head and making the best suggestions. The water finally began to push the flames back, then slowly finished them off. It took more than a half hour to get it under control, and twenty minutes after it was out, the fire truck arrived.
We were celebrating our triumph with a glass of wine in a soaked kitchen that reeked of smoke and ashes. The firemen, after inspecting the premises and ascertaining that the fire was really out, did not return to the firehouse but instead accepted our offer of some wine and stayed there chatting with us for another half hour. We never did ask why it took them so long to get to our centrally-located building, nor did they offer an explanation; but Eugenio did receive a bill the following week from the municipal fire department for about fifteen dollars. We wondered what rationale could possibly underlie such a charge or its amount, and never even considered paying it.
Flames. Tara couldn’t get any going with Lance, notwithstanding her striking red hair and attractive looks. She was statuesque, but he was a blond Olympian god, too far out of reach. After the fire, he found a place in the hills above Florence. I only had a few months before leaving Italy and moved into an extra room that Dennis and his wife Suzy had up in their attic. Suzy was also an artist and taught a class at her husband’s studio that Tara was taking. One evening, Suzy and I were talking in the living room when Tara stopped by to discuss her art project, and the three of us had a nice conversation.
“She likes you.” Suzy said after Tara left.
“What makes you think that?” I asked. Tara hadn’t said or done anything to give me that impression, and I had seen her eyes when she looked at Lance several weeks earlier.
“Didn’t you see? The way she looked and moved? You should ask her out. She didn’t come here just to talk about our class. I can tell that she likes you.”
Suzy had been deaf since childhood and was an expert lip reader. She saw the words that I heard, but also more. Her other senses, especially the visual and emotional, had been sharpened by silence. I respected her intuition and willingly acted upon it. Tara had in fact lowered her sights, and I was the beneficiary.
In addition to Giuliano’s recording studio, the concert at city hall sent Angel Band off to a mountain top. The head of the American Consulate and his wife were in the audience, and a few days afterwards we got a call from the cultural office at the Consulate. They wanted us to play a concert in tiny San Marino, the oldest surviving constitutional republic in the world. We instantly agreed, not caring whether the Communist connection of the first concert was triggering a Cold War response or if it was just the Consulate spending some money already budgeted for cultural exchange programs. We were to be well paid, and the consular official said he would take us after the concert to one of his favorite restaurants in all of Europe. When Tara asked if she could join me for the trip, it looked as if all bases would be covered for a fantasy weekend.
We climbed the Apennines in the Consulate’s van and arrived mid-afternoon in this microstate of 20,000 people, then strolled around before entering the theater to warm up for the concert. I looked out from backstage fifteen minutes after the 9 PM starting time, wondering why it was so quiet. Less than thirty people had come. Although we played well, my fantasy didn’t include those acres of empty seats.
It was already approaching midnight when our group entered the restaurant, a handsomely vaulted room of candle-lit stone in an historic palace. A tuxedoed host handed us crystal glasses filled with prosecco.
“Buona sera. Prego!”
He pointed to an elaborately carved table elegantly set with flowers, fine china and antique silverware. The tablecloth itself was a work of art, as were the curvaceous candelabras. We chatted pleasantly under their glow with the San Marino government officials who accompanied us. Then the unhurried procession of beautifully presented food began with prosciutto-wrapped melon slices and other antipasto dishes. The wines were all of high quality and well paired with the many courses that followed – freshly made pastas, roasted meats and vegetables, salads, richly flavored cheeses, nuts, fruits and pastries, all of them regional specialties. Though it was now almost 3 AM, some in our group finished with an espresso. I instead drained the last of many glasses, this one a well-structured vino rosso, and had some of the after-dinner liqueurs.
When Tara and I returned to our charming hotel room, I was too sated by food and drink to do much other than fall asleep. Though my fantasy had us finishing the night with great sex after a triumphant concert, I flopped in bed and we drifted into slumber, quietly burping the residue of the evening’s only event that met and indeed far exceeded expectations.
There was yet another phone call after the Bicentennial concert, this one from the Consul-General’s wife, Mrs. Cootes. She had scheduled a private party at their hillside estate and wanted Angel Band to play. Rob and I were the only ones available on that date, but she said that would be fine, though she grumbled about the price I proposed before agreeing to it. We needed a name, something that sounded folky but also acknowledged our base in Florence, and thus became the Arno Valley Boys. We had never played as a duo before and put together some tunes during one very long rehearsal.
Mrs. Cootes also graciously invited us to the dinner that would start the evening. The twenty guests were a mix of Americans and Italians, from the class that inhabits the social register, all engaged in intelligent, often witty conversations about politics and culture. Gossip, too, and I overheard some serious name-dropping, the best from a plump, bejeweled woman on the board of Chicago Lyric Opera - “Well, backstage after the performance, Luciano told me…” - she leaned toward her listener as if conveying a confidence about the grand Pavarotti, but in a voice loud enough for anyone in the vicinity to hear. Even so, they were all quite congenial. I wondered how our lowbrow folk music would go over with this sophisticated set.
Some rousing fiddle tunes got them clapping, and when the delightful Mr. Cootes began dancing, many of the others followed. At sixty, he remained a party boy from Princeton, having successfully turned those early good times into a career in diplomacy. In fact, these were all seasoned partiers, and they kept us going beyond the hour of tunes we had semi-prepared. We had to wing our way through an extra hour or so, but their listening standards were by then as loose as our playing.
After Mr. Cootes paid us, I thought of how well the Arno Valley Boys might do busking in Munich, but it took several weeks to convince Rob to try it. I told him how much I made there the past summer, plus we had some tunes ready and it was fun playing them. He finally agreed, primarily because we both needed an infusion of cash.
The pedestrian zone in the heart of Munich was as lively as ever, with perfect fall weather and appreciative audiences. At one point, a reporter from the city’s main newspaper interviewed us for an article he was writing on the local renaissance of busking; he seemed particularly interested when I told him how much money we were earning. Many others came up to chat, some were musicians who wanted to jam, and the most likeable of all was Gunter, a young German who made guitars and loved American folk music. He invited us to stay at the apartment he shared with his girlfriend, and when we left a few days later, he asked if he could organize some concerts in Bavaria for us.
“Sure, but I’ll be leaving Europe in early spring,” I told him.
“That gives me plenty of time,” he said. “It would just be folk clubs, small theaters, places like that. Send me a picture so I can do some do some posters.”
The time to leave Florence came too soon, but I looked forward to the concert mini-tour Gunther had arranged. On the night of our departure, Rob stoned Dennis, Tara and me while he packed, then quenched our thirst with water from a bottle whose label claimed that Michelangelo drank from this same spring to flush himself out. Tara was renting the extra room in Rob’s apartment from him, but Rob had reserved the right to have a visiting friend use the smaller of two mattresses on the floor of her room. Unfortunately, his friend had arrived just a few days before. Having another guy in the room made for an awkward final night with Tara, but it was mercifully short because by 3 AM, we were already on Rob’s motorcycle, riding through muted, misty streets to catch a pre-dawn train to Munich.
We practiced some of our newer tunes on the way up. Our repertory had been bolstered during the winter by preparing for weekly programs on American folk music that we did for a Florentine elementary school, another lucky result of the conservatory’s open door policy. The schoolteacher who hired us was the wife of a government employee who had taken early retirement - he had always wanted to be a pianist and decided to enroll in the conservatory. We were working together on a Mozart sonata in the chamber music class, sometimes practicing in his home before the Tuscan meals that his wife prepared. Our professor was Franco Rossi, a member of the Quartetto Italiano, one of the world’s top string quartets, further proof that Italian conservatories during this egalitarian era made no effort to match best students with best teachers, instead allowing even two older amateurs to study with one of the country’s most renowned musicians. Rossi was as friendly as Michelucci, too; both invited me to their homes for dinners and accepted my return invitations. Over the years, Michelucci became a good friend. No professor in law school had even bothered to learn my name.
Gunter set up our first concert for a school auditorium outside Munich on the evening of our arrival, but the train ran late, forcing him and a musician friend to entertain the audience while another friend raced us there in his car. Rob and I entered the hall almost two hours after the scheduled starting time, thoroughly exhausted from the 17 hour train ride and starting to catch cold. After a hasty consultation with Gunther, we apologized for the long delay, played a few tunes and told the spectators to keep their tickets because we would come back several days later to do a full program.
We played next at a folk club in Nuremburg, where the energetic audience reaction produced some unconsummated groupies and a return booking for the one night we had free later in the week. Depending on the location of each evening’s gig, we either stayed with Gunther’s cherubic mother and teenaged sisters in the quaint village where they lived, or else at his apartment near Munich University where he was completing his degree. Our lives became very nocturnal - the gigs ended late and were always followed by partying and jamming with Gunther’s friends. We often returned home around dawn to a quiet kitchen and still more drink and food, including the same cheeses, bread and deli meats that we would have again for an early afternoon breakfast.
One day in Munich we chatted with some of the buskers. Two of them had the same complaint – the money wasn’t as good as before because a few months ago some jerk had told a reporter how much he was making. When the article appeared in the paper, people thought it was too much and started putting less money in the cases. I felt guilty about my earlier boasting, but did not have the courage to confess.
By the time of our reappearance at the school auditorium, Rob and I both had well-developed colds, but we played a solid concert and were glad to make up for our feeble opening night. The simple German chit-chat I had been working on all week was by now good enough to cultivate some real audience rapport and even get a few laughs. Our return gig in Nuremburg, however, was flat compared to the first – our playing was a little off and the crowd not as responsive. That all turned around at our final concert, a raucous, drunken evening in a town beer hall. What fun! – our liveliest crowd, howling over my fractured German story line for “Mother, the Queen of My Heart,” screaming and stomping for encore after encore. A thoroughly upbeat finish to a whirlwind tour. We had been minor-league stars for a week, and I loved every minute in the spotlight.
But I also realized that a steady diet would probably get old pretty fast, eventually knock me out and definitely not be well-suited to the kind of family life I imagined in my future. I didn’t like the odds of trying to make a career in music, especially given my late start. It made more sense to dust off my law degree when I returned to the States, perhaps some type of solo practice with an ethnic dimension in the Italian district of Boston, or maybe try to develop something with mediation and the law. That would get sorted out later. I was, however, sure of two things – I would return often to Italy, its people and culture already firmly lodged as life pillars, and music would be my passion, not my job.
22. Sunset in Crete
Many years later I am nearing the end of my journey in its senior edition, but still have a few weeks before going back to Florence. I am leaving Crete tomorrow, flying to meet Giovanna in Cairo during her week-long vacation from the Smith JYA program; we are both excited about cruising the Nile together on a riverboat. On this last day, I make the rounds of the acquaintances I have made during my stay in Chania to say good-by. Andrea, owner and sole employee of an Italian clothing boutique, is the first stop. I entered his tiny shop one morning when I saw its Italian name and asked where I might find a good cappuccino in town. His face brightened to hear his native language; his response was that there weren’t any such places here. He had emigrated to Chania a decade earlier after marrying his Greek wife, and during his first visit back to Italy bought the small espresso machine that stood on a table in the corner. A few minutes later it produced an excellent cappuccino which he proudly gave me. I now exchange some final pleasantries with him, and later with Niko, the fisherman & taverna owner. As usual, the most stimulating conversation is with the erudite Panatagios, over a drink in the café across from his wine shop. It normally takes more time for a relationship to become a friendship, but travel condenses time; it combines with solitude to thicken experience. As with many before them (few of whom I ever see again), these are my friends in this moment and place, and I will miss them for awhile.
On this last evening alone I perform a favorite ritual - watching the sun set while playing my fiddle and occasionally chatting with those who happen by. Chania has many beautiful promenades along the sea. The ones at the center of the port are always busy, so I walk out to a quieter area, where there are only intermittent passers-by, where I am less likely to disturb or be disturbed but still open to interacting with those who stop and listen. I am the only person on some benches facing west across a gently surging bay. An imposing mountain separates bay from sky, but darkness is still a few hours away. A golden sun brilliantly illuminates the white foam of waves breaking against the large rocks that protect a few dozen small fishing boats. Across from the boats is the isolated restaurant I ate at two days before, where I asked for some fish and the cook crossed the street to get it fresh off the boat of his friend.
My music-making draws many smiles and a sequence of small audiences - three Greek high school students, a German couple who both play cello, and some others. As the sun approaches the peak of the mountain, a lively group of French university students draws near. I am playing some classical pieces, and a few of the students sit down next to me. They are studying Greek here, but speak good English. The most animated is an attractive young woman named Nina; she has an intelligent, engaging personality and a sympathetic taste in music, asking me to play for her Bellini’s great operatic aria, “Casta Diva,” and the Allegretto from Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony. I warn her that a single instrument can do no more than outline some melodies in the Beethoven symphony, but she responds enthusiastically, telling me afterwards that the music has made this the best sunset of her life.
As we continue our conversation, I think of where this might be headed thirty-five years earlier. But a new feeling has been developing during this journey. The conversation and sunset are more than enough, evoking memories that connect past and present in a resonant harmony. We shake hands before she leaves to join her friends. After several steps, she turns toward me with a radiant smile, the hand that left mine moments ago now waving. I smile and wave back, then watch the sun as it passes behind the mountain overlooking the bay, quietly moving lustrous colors from sea surface to sky.
© Peter Contuzzi 2010-14
* Web image (all others are personal photographs)
I enjoy the same kind of pleasant stay as in Alghero; but I am feeling the attraction of nearby Florence. My wife, Giovanna, is directing Smith College's junior year abroad program there this school year, and I miss her warmth and exuberance. Florence is an even older friend, so captivating that I long ago fell in love with her. But the beginning of our relationship was very strange - I insulted her cultural intelligence and she responded with gross irrationality.
I asked Florence to allow me to study violin at her music conservatory. This was a dumb request, proof of the detachment from reason of which a young male is capable. I knew that good conservatories are supposed to put the finishing touches on already highly accomplished classical musicians in their teens. I was a 29 year-old who had only taken lessons for a few years as a kid. In my mid-twenties, I fell under the spell of folk fiddle tunes; and its much simpler technique enabled me to become a decent folk fiddler.
But my classical technique had enormous holes – I couldn’t even draw the bow smoothly from one end to the other, which is the very foundation of playing the instrument. Every down stroke had a scratchy, slightly out of control middle section. What made me think that a classical European conservatory would accept an overage folk fiddler whose every second stroke produced defective sound? It is true that I had an excellent excuse for my deficits. All the violin students in my New Jersey middle school were girls except me. My boy friends teased me for playing a sissy instrument. I was making excellent progress and loved music, but it just wasn’t cool. Too bad. Not then appreciating the enormous power our younger forms thoughtlessly cede to group mentality, I quit.
I was not so naïve as to think that a good excuse would help me get in to the conservatory. In fact, I wasn’t thinking much at all, at least not rationally. Instead, I was reacting to two powerful impulses rooted in emotion and intuition. I wanted a good enough classical technique to play great chamber music well, and I wanted to spend some time living in Italy.
Chamber music is considered an ideal form of musical expression because a small group of individuals converse with each other using a musical dialogue written by the greatest composers, often at the peak of their inspiration. The musical ideas and their development must both be of the highest quality because they are so exposed, and cannot be covered up with big orchestral sound or color. The unsurpassed quality of the string quartet as a vehicle for great music is evident from how quickly it reached perfection in the hands of its early practitioners, Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven, and how consistently it has elicited masterpieces from the best composers of each generation since then.
I occasionally played chamber music but not well and normally the second violin part. When you hear a beautiful melody soaring up into the sky it almost always springs from the bow of the first violinist. For me, that was out of reach. Chamber music was too much a sequence of technical hurdles, and that kept me from bringing it to life. But the glimpses I had of what that might be like provided the strongest impulse to forming this plan. I knew how exhilarating it felt to play folk fiddle with good musicians. My comfort with that easier technique allowed me to focus on shaping the musical sound, giving it line and pulse. I could only imagine what it would be like to do that playing a Beethoven quartet.
The second impulse came from my grandmother. One summer during college I had a construction job near her home in Pennsylvania, so I lived with her. She was a strong peasant woman, who was in her twenties when she arrived in this country from Italy with a fourth grade education, her husband, and the baby daughter who would one day become my mother. They had four more girls, but he was impossible to live with so she threw him out and raised the girls herself. I was the first male to enter this feminine (but definitely not feminist) enclave, and my early life came wrapped in a warm blanket of love and attention from all these women. Since we lived only a few blocks away, I saw my grandmother almost daily, and every Sunday afternoon my aunts & uncles & cousins would gather at her home for good food & company (to be repeated every Sunday evening with my father’s family). By second grade, though, we lived a few hours drive away, so it was good to reestablish daily contact the summer that I worked there.
Culturally, she remained very Italian; the rest of us were Italian-Americans, a different breed. She and I had good talks during dinner and then played briscola, her favorite card game, afterwards. Often, her Italian friends would stop by for animated conversation on the front porch. I couldn’t understand the words, but I definitely felt the warmth and good humor of people very much at ease with each other. Over that summer, the respect and love I had for my grandmother deepened; and I resolved to spend some time living in the country that produced these engaging people. Why not do that and study music at the same time?
So that’s how this Italian music conservatory scheme got concocted. Not because I was well-prepared to do it but rather because I very much wanted to do it. For someone trained in the rational world of law, my request of Florence was a presumptuous and irrational act. For someone with her proud history and high cultural standards, opening her conservatory doors to someone as unqualified as me would be an even more irrational act.
But that’s what happened. Hers was a well-intentioned act, made possible by the egalitarian reforms that ended the widespread social unrest of the late 1960’s and offered virtually universal access for a while to educational opportunities previously reserved primarily for the elite. This elite was playing defense throughout Europe, accused of having privileges for itself and its children that were unfairly denied to others. Access was determined by money. Some asked if that was any different from controlling access through party connections in the authoritarian communist world. Though I did not know it when I knocked on the conservatory door, the rational rules of meritocracy had been temporarily pushed aside in Italy by the ideals of equality and open access.
The road to that door, though, was strewn with disorganization and anxiety. When I asked the Italian Consulate in San Francisco what the application process was, I learned that it was very informal - I filled out a few forms but would have to go to Italy and play a successful audition at the beginning of the school year, probably in October but the date wouldn’t be determined until a month or two before it occurred. This is not the organizational model that a tooth grinding American lawyer wants to deal with. I was quitting a well-compensated position in a large corporate law firm, and glad to be leaving behind a job that made me feel both guilty and bored. But what if I closed out my life in San Francisco, went to Florence and then didn’t get into the conservatory? I had some fall-back travel ideas, but most of all I wanted to become a better violinist.
From the outset, the omens were mixed. I got an inexpensive flight to Luxembourg and realized after a bus ride from the airport to the city that I no longer had my passport and travelers checks, my primary source of money other than the small amount I had changed for local currency at the airport. I retraced my steps and luckily found my passport and travelers checks on the same airport counter top where I had carelessly left them more than an hour earlier. An internal Freudian voice wondered if my subconscious was telling me that my plan was so foolhardy that I might as well let someone else put the money I had saved to better use. The only thing I hadn’t provided was the pen to sign the checks.
Music is what pushed me onto that plane, so I decided to put my romanticized notions about its power to an immediate test. I went to a nice park near the center of town and started to play fiddle tunes. Two students asked if they could sit down and listen; and would I like to have a glass of wine with them? After a few more tunes, some more Luxembougers joined us; one jammed along with his harmonica while others danced, which in turn attracted a tourist from Alabama who kept saying “Golleee!” Our spirited group conversed mainly with gestures, played and danced some more and then parted ways with much smiling and hand-shaking. It was encouraging to see the fiddle exert such a magnetic attraction in my first effort at playing abroad. My earlier anxiety was replaced by a renewed optimism. But that again gave way to more anxiety the next day when I was told by bureaucrats at the Italian Consulate that my Italian student visa could only be granted in Italy after the conservatory officially accepted me. They were very pleasant, but it got me worrying about my audition; the Appalachian fiddle tunes that drew together my group in the park wouldn’t do anything for me with the maestri who would determine my fate in Florence.
I spent several weeks making my way through France and northern Italy. If I wasn’t accepted, the fallback scenario was for me at least to do some quality traveling, and this was to see what that might be like. I learned about the music festival in Besancon, France and bought a ticket for an all-Vivaldi program by one of Italy’s best baroque orchestras. In the large church of a small town, I sat down next to a striking French woman, late 30’s but dressed younger, black hair, dark eyes and black clothes. We started a simple conversation, but she saw that French was a real struggle for me. She didn’t speak English but had picked up elementary Italian from her travels there. Though I had studied that language for the prior two years, that was pretty much still my level, too, so we switched to Italian and carried on nicely - it’s easy to converse when you both speak slowly and use simple words & constructions . When we went to a café for a glass of wine, I began to fantasize about where this might wind up. She was an attractive free spirit; but she looked forlorn, and was reluctant to talk about herself. There was a deep melancholy in her voice and eyes, an air of tragedy about her. It all felt very mysterious and romantic, but she only briefly considered my proposal for passing the night before rejecting it. I had been excited, hopeful - why wasn’t she feeling the same way about this? We parted ways with a short hug at the main road going through the town; she to hitch a truck ride to her home in southern France, and I to take a late night train.
I missed the train, but saw the concert’s mandolin soloist waiting on an almost deserted platform. I complimented him on his performance, he told me he was really a lawyer from Milan, and we then launched into a lively discussion on our efforts to combine the two professions. He loved music and therefore didn’t mind that his colleagues thought him a bit odd. I liked his smile and easy manner, but after he got on his 2 AM train and I waved good-bye, the mystery woman returned to my mind. Too exhausted to walk into town and look for a hotel, I made my way to a nearby field, crawled into my sleeping bag and looked up at the sky. It was gently illuminated by a bright moon more than half full. I thought of her, what might have been, and gazed at the stars. Although it had been more than a decade since I left the Catholic Church, the heavens consoled me that night, though in a different way.
Wine tasting in the Burgundy region and several days on the French Riviera provided a pleasant distraction from what was often somewhere in the back of my mind, the looming audition. On the plane ride over, a nice conversation with a French schoolteacher named Rosalie turned into an invitation to visit the Riviera home where she lived with her husband and young son. A German friend of theirs named Irmgart was also visiting. While the others went to work, Irmgart and I took off in her car for a beautiful, isolated nude beach behind St. Tropez where I made my au naturale debut in the midst of sand, crystal clear water and charming coves, relieved that a newly exposed body appendage remained naturally at rest and unburned by the sun.
A few days later I was in Italy, happy to finally be in a place where language presented less of a barrier and fascinated by the hand gestures which accompany spoken Italian. One evening in a café, I needed both careful observation and confirmation from one of the locals to distinguish a table where a group of deaf people met regularly to converse in sign language; hand and arm movements at the other tables were at only a slightly lesser level of intensity. I went to a festival of avant-guard music in Como, still not knowing when the school year would begin, and met some conservatory students there who told me it would start the following week.
And so, eager and anxious, I arrived in Florence. As I walked around looking for a place to stay, a pigeon shit on my head. I later learned that Italians consider that a sign of good luck, but it didn’t seem that way at the time. Literally shity hair doesn’t make a good first impression when you’re looking for lodgings, so I went to the public rent-a-shower at the train station and washed it out. All the places I looked at were either full or too expensive until I found a pensione that was nice but packed with English-speaking tourists. I wanted a place that would force me to learn more Italian, but checked in and planned to continue my search the next day after going to the conservatory.
I was pleased that the forms I prepared in San Francisco had been received and was told to return the next day for an audition. I learned then that a new director had recently been appointed, things were “a little disorganized” and that my audition was being postponed until the following week. A few days later, I was waiting for the bus when an elderly woman noticed the violin slung over my shoulder and enthusiastically exclaimed “Ah, la musica – e’ la piu bella cosa che ci sia! (Ah, Music – the most beautiful thing there is!)” Her poetic outburst encouraged me that I had chosen well, but this dream still had to get past one major hurdle.
Roberto Michelucci, the violin maestro I had been assigned to was off concertizing in other parts of Europe, so it was two weeks before I finally had my audition. I began in carefully rehearsed but still hesitant Italian explaining to him a little about my background and that I had developed some bad habits in my bowing hand. It turned out that there was no need to lower expectations or even to be anxious. He said I had a very good ear and that almost all my problems involved the bow, but that these were correctable if I was willing to work very hard. That’s all there was to it – I was now officially a violin student at the Florence Conservatory because of a temporarily reformed admissions policy that I still was not aware of. I felt relieved and happy. It was only much later that I appreciated the paradox in this fantasy plan of mine. If it had been the narrower one of studying music in an American conservatory, that would have been impossible. But naively expanding the fantasy to have it take place in Italy is what enabled it to happen.
Each violin maestro had six or so students; at least one of them was a young beginner who went to a regular elementary school and also came to the conservatory for music lessons. Enough of them quit to raise the question – is this a good use of such high quality teaching talent? But then the truly gifted are shaped from the very beginning by an accomplished maestro. Inefficient, however …..
Another example of inefficiency but without any such supporting rational was that no effort was made to match up the best students with the best teachers. I provided strong proof of that, something I realized even before my first meeting with Michelucci. I heard a recording of his on the radio and then listened to the announcer describe it as a prior year winner of the Grand Prix du Disque, the classical music world’s highest award. When I asked a conservatory employee if that was the same person I had been assigned to study with, I also learned that he had been the soloist with “I Musici” when the revered conductor, Arturo Toscanini, called it the best chamber orchestra in Europe. He was in fact the star of the violin faculty. In his early 50’s, he was in his prime; and though he lacked the international fame of violinists like Jasha Heifitz and Isaac Stern, he commanded the stage with great musicality and complete technical fluency. Some mathematicians find beauty in randomness; I found a magnificent maestro that way.
Despite my limited skills in both the language and the instrument, we got along very well from the outset. He had an artistic temperament but learned patience as a teacher from being required by conservatory policy to occasionally work with the young beginners. He thus didn’t seem to mind having to start me from scratch with the bow, showing me a better way to hold it and explaining what’s involved in a good stroke. I knew my older, habit-stiffened muscles wouldn’t learn these fluid mechanics in the naturally assimilative way a youngster does, so I tried to compensate by using what I did have, the analytic mental tools of the lawyer. I was constantly asking questions, trying to better understand the reasons for doing things this way rather than that. Michelucci loved that approach. He frequently told all his students that a violinist plays with his brain, not with his hands and arms, so his philosophy of the instrument and my analytic method were well suited to each other. His younger students learned by watching his demonstrations and doing what he told them. I added the “why” and other questions that he welcomed and thoughtfully responded to. He also seemed to enjoy the conversations on non-musical subjects that we occasionally had after the other students had left.
It’s nice when you have a great teacher that you also get along with well, but I still had a major bowing problem to fix. The sound produced by a bow on a string tells the world the internal state of the player as nothing else can. That’s because you have two highly elastic materials, the string and the bow hairs (from a horse’s tail), in contact with each other. This extraordinary suppleness between the string and bow hair means that even the slightest changes in bow pressure, position or movement will all be heard in the sound produced. This gives the player of a bowed instrument a unique ability to create the subtlest of nuances and an expressive power that has fascinated music-lovers all over the world for centuries. But it also means that any imbalance or tension will also be heard in the sound. There was no way for me to cover up the slight loss of control in the middle of each downbow - a smooth stoke was absolutely essential to good sound production. Was this just from a bad habit I had formed as a kid? Or was this a sign that I was out of balance internally, too tightly wound to be capable of the relaxed fluidity that beautifully bowed sound requires?
There was no denying that the compulsive world of law school and lawyers that I was leaving behind had attracted and helped shape the competitive, tooth-grinding person who now wanted more than anything a smooth musical stroke. I believed that would be possible, but Michelucci advised me not to expect too much at first; correcting a problem as long ingrained as this would take a great deal of effort and patience.
7. Blood Relations
Though I look forward to their visit, I know I can never pay back what I owe them because it is a debt beyond number. They have not been to Florence since they visited me in the tiny apartment of a struggling music student 35 years before, when I slept on a hard marble floor so they could have my bed. As then, they bring what they have raised and made – the vegetables, eggs, cheeses, liqueurs, chickens, and pork products. They no longer make their own wine; they are trying to lessen their chores as the years pass. Carla apologizes for not bringing more as all the empty spaces in our refrigerator fill up. Her husband Ricardo almost never travels by train, preferring to stay in the valley just below L’Aquila where he was born. But the devastating earthquake of a year before and their son Sergio’s impending divorce have seriously beaten up their traditional sense of home and family.
I first knew them as my grandmother’s nephew and niece, but they have welcomed me into their home so often that they have become my Italian uncle and aunt. At least, that’s the way I think of them, though they are only 10 years older than me and are actually second cousins. I learned from their example the virtues of self-sufficiency - planting & harvesting with them, feeding the chickens, rabbits, sheep and pigs, making wine, prosciutto, and ricotta cheese. Like all my other relatives there, they built their own home, methodically and patiently, moving to the next step only when there was enough money to buy high quality materials. It can take the better part of a decade. An extra floor was prepared but left unfinished for when their son married. They were surprised to learn I had never done these things. I was surprised at how rooted their lives were in centuries-old customs, and how far removed a single generation in the United States had transported me away from all that.
I have long carried the guilt of a man who can never reciprocate. Riccardo and Carla will not fly, making a visit to my New England home impossible. So I host them at our Florence apartment, with the spacious guest bedroom that didn’t exist before. Conversation is easy and familiar, often reminiscent.
“Your first visit is when I learned how much more seriously Italians take their Labor Day holiday (“May Day”) than we do in America. Everything shut down, even the city buses that ran on all the other holidays.”
“Yes,” Carla says, “I remember the long walks to the city center and back that day. Riccardo’s feet both had blisters afterwards!”
Riccardo smiles as he recalls sitting in my only chair, with Carla soaking his feet in warm water and salt. When they left the next day back then, was it because of his aching feet? Or had they noticed I was sleeping in a sleeping bag on a floor in the empty room between the bedroom & kitchen and didn’t want to inconvenience me? I resolved this visit would last longer, and early on give them a quick tour of the apartment so they see that it has comfortable bedrooms for all of us. I also make liberal use of cabs & buses as we tour the city over the next few days. I try to be an informative tour guide, but Riccardo makes it poignantly clear when he’s had enough.
“Pietro, after awhile these palaces and cathedrals all look alike to me. I don’t know much about history or art - I only finished elementary school! Don’t waste any more money.”
The days end with a long dinner, and the two prepared by my wife are more enthusiastically consumed than the one in the middle that I make, built around the toughest pork chops I’d ever encountered. The man who showed me many years before how they butcher their pigs, explains why.
“Pietro, when you went to the market, you picked the nice-looking pink chops?”
“Yes”
“They look better, but the best-tasting chops come from a different part of the pig.” He points to a part of his back. “They’re more tender.”
He looks back at his chop, takes a deep breath and presses hard on his knife, determinedly sawing his way through this highly resilient meat. I see a metaphor for his life, but merely apologize for my misguided selection at the butcher shop.
After dinner, we remain at the table, our conversation now accompanied by fruit, nuts and small glasses of the liqueur Carla made from local herbs. I know from earlier phone conversations that the devastating earthquake one year earlier had dramatically transformed their lives, and am eager to learn more about it.
“What was that first night like?”
“Our animals had been nervous all evening, and the loud noise of the first shock woke us up,” Carla says. “It made the house shake. The second one came a few minutes later and was even stronger. Sergio came down from upstairs. It was cold but the two of us went outside; we were afraid the house would fall down. Riccardo wouldn’t leave – he just stayed in bed. Stubborn!”
“I thought we’d be ok inside,” says Riccardo, without convincing any of us. I wonder why he stayed in the house. Perhaps when you’ve built it yourself, seen all the concrete and iron in its structural elements, invested years of your work and that of your brothers, made it the center of your life, a place you almost never leave overnight, “house” takes on a different meaning for you. I was there for a few days helping out while they built a younger brother’s house, amazed by the solidity of their traditional construction practices, but doubt that faith in the strength of what he had built provided a full explanation for his staying inside. This was an irrational act by a man close to nature in the face of one of nature’s most powerful forces. A few hours later, after still more shocks, Riccardo reconsidered and joined his wife and son outside.
About three hundred people died in the earthquake. I ask about the response of the government, and hear them describe it as uncharacteristically swift and efficient.
Carla - “By the next evening, the civilian authorities and army had organized food distribution centers, and tents were set up for sleeping. The food was good and the tents were heated.”
Riccardo - “Berlusconi [the controversial right-wing prime minister] said his government would give us the money to rebuild our homes and they did. They started sending steel containers to live in during reconstruction a few days later.”
I had read about accusations of corruption, and ask him “Didn’t Berlusconi give the lucrative reconstruction contracts to his friends?”
“Some people say that but I don’t care. He got the job done, not like the big earthquake a few years ago in a region down south when the left was in power. They took a long time to do hardly anything – who knows where the money wound up. We expect our politicians to be corrupt. What counts is if they get the job done. Usually in Italy they don’t; but Berlusconi did.”
I think of how often my salt-of-the-earth relatives have provided a counterbalance to the opinions of my Florentine friends, almost all of whom lean decidedly to the left, even the wealthy lawyers. Regardless of political orientation, Italians share a deep cynicism, the result of a civilization that, as it evolved through the millennia, has seen the very best and chillingly worst of which humanity is capable. In Florence, I feel carried away by the flights of artistic and intellectual imagination so evident everywhere. With my relatives in the mountains of the Abruzzi, however, I return to a reality rooted in peasant traditions and, above all, in experience.
The first time I met them was a true test of family. It was over the Christmas holidays after my arrival in Florence to study at the conservatory. I had moved into a small Florentine rooming house that fall and began to develop a feeling for Italian family life from the owners, a very friendly middle-aged couple who lived there with their two children. Signora and Signore Taiuti spoke no English, and most of their eight boarders were Italian. It was an ideal living arrangement for me – learning their language and way of life, inexpensive, a bountiful daily meal included, normally with all twelve of us at the table for one to two hours of good food and animated conversation. Becoming fluent in a new language is hard at 29, especially when your mind hasn’t already been thoroughly exercised by successfully doing it before. High school Latin and traveler’s Spanish showed me I didn’t have a special talent for it. Certainly, fluency would be required if I expected to develop genuine relationships with Italians and enter their culture. Most of my day was spent on music study, a solitary activity. But I almost always made room for an hour or more of reading Italian or learning grammar, and often listened to news and discussions on radio or TV.
Speaking a new tongue has a deceptively low initial hurdle. You can pretty easily learn the tourist talk because most of it is simple questions to elicit simple answers. Wow – I can get directions and other useful information, and be courteous to boot by just making some memorized sound combinations! But to really talk with someone, you must study a language more seriously, especially its grammar. Once you learn enough words and can fit them within a few verb tenses and some basic rules, you can convey meaning. You control the sound-making in speaking, but not in understanding; and so the second hurdle is enormous – how to make sense of that flood of new sounds you can get in return, especially in a country with talkative people. Understanding – what a challenge!
By the time I went to my relatives, I was well beyond tourist talk and could sustain a social conversation as long as the comments and questions were uncomplicated. And I was willing to guess, whether speaking or listening, though always with a feeling of discomfort. What if I misunderstood and responded with something inappropriate, perhaps highly embarrassing? But guessing was a necessary step. Otherwise, you’d stand still, waiting for a level of comfort from study alone that is not attainable without first taking your chances with experience.
L’Aquila - a former fortress city, the highest in the Appenine spine of Italy, set in the valley below its imposing summit, the Grand Sasso (“big rock”). There is a solidity here that has spread to the people from their surroundings. They are short of stature, but with the sturdiness that comes from broad bodies and wide faces, close to the ground. Surrounded by solidity - yet the earth here has violently shaken itself with crippling force, each time unexpectedly (though the animals sense its approach), forcing an acknowledgment of overwhelming, uncontrollable power even where everything seems to us most strong.
There is a resilience here in the face of adversity. My grandmother’s sister sent her husband Domenico and a middle period son to pick me up at the train station. Domenico lost an eye in a mishap many years before; in place of a patch, he had scar tissue covering the socket, squarely set in his smiling face. I smiled back, we shook hands and exchanged some pleasantries.
“You’re Angela’s grandson?”
“Yes. Hello, it’s so good to meet you.”
“Welcome. This is my son, Dino.”
Especially when compared to his very lively father, Dino was a man whose appearance suggested some slowness of mind. He responded with a string of sounds so mumbled I had no chance of comprehension, which however did not keep me from speaking to him.
“Nice to meet you, too. Your face reminds me of my grandmother.”
Dino again mumbled unintelligible sounds, then smiled nicely.
“Aha…” I said.
More undecodeable sounds from Dino, followed by that unfeigned smile.
“Yes…” I responded.
Normally, pleasantries are no problem, but Dino was a master mumbler. He had such a gentle laugh (also mumbled) and cordial demeanor, however, that even when I didn’t have a clue what he was saying, an occasional smile or affirmative nod seemed safe. I often did that then. Of course, our conversation could easily have gone:
“Nice to meet you, too. Your face reminds me of my grandmother.”
Unintelligible sounds
“Sorry, I didn’t understand.”
Unintelligible sounds
“Excuse me, but can you please repeat that?”
Unintelligible sounds
“Sorry.”
That would be the honest way to handle not only extreme situations such as this, but also the cases of partial comprehension I routinely experienced even with clearly enunciating Italians. Between the embarrassment possibly resulting from faking understanding and the embarrassment from repeatedly admitting I was still incapable of consistent comprehension, I usually chose to take my chances with the former. I preferred to keep the conversation moving forward in the hope I would better understand the next sentences. That would often make obvious at least the subject matter; with luck, all the content too. Instead of bringing everything to a grinding halt with honesty, I gambled.
We drove in Dino’s car to the old family farmhouse five minutes outside the city. This visit started with my grandmother writing her younger sister, Angela Maria, who now stood before me.
“Ciao, Pietro – welcome to our home.”
“Ciao – thank you, Zia (Aunt).”
I was struck by her resemblance to my grandmother as we exchanged the alternating cheek kisses that serve as the common Italian greeting. We were in the sparsely furnished large room that served as the dining & living room, surrounded by more than a dozen smiling faces, all double kissed and greeted during the blur of the next several minutes. The enthusiasm and warmth, though not all the words, came readily through; and I did manage to figure out that the family plot provided a home to the families of three of Angela Maria & Domenico’s five children, including an assortment of grandchildren.
“Please sit here. You must be hungry after the long train ride,” Angela Maria said, as Carla placed a dish of soup before me.
“Oh, thank you. I ate on the train, but yes, I’ll try some.” In fact, I wasn’t at all hungry. The train arrived around 9 PM, and I had already eaten two sandwiches on board a little earlier. But I knew how important food was in Italian culture and didn’t want to refuse their hospitality. They had all already eaten dinner, so I was the only one eating, trying simultaneously to respond to the questions and comments coming from all around.
“Here’s a picture of your grandmother during her last visit ten years ago.”
“She hasn’t changed much since. Still looks in charge. She sends her greetings to all of you.”
“Here – have some home-made pasta.”
“I’m pretty full. But it really tastes good!”
The food was excellent, but as I ate the pasta I realized that my stomach was rapidly running out of room.
“How do you like Florence? What is it like in America? Do you have a family? How is….”
This was the kind of simple conversation I had already mastered, but it was harder tonight. They often used words from their Abruzzese regional dialect that were different from the Italian words I expected. However, I felt comfortable guessing because they were all so friendly. Zia Angela Maria was especially sweet and soft-spoken, and I realized that her resemblance to my grandmother was only physical. I wondered if they had different personalities growing up together in Italy, determining which of them would be drawn to cross the ocean in search of something better, or if instead the challenges of immigrant life produced the assertiveness in the older sister that the younger one lacked.
“Have some of our chicken and salad from the garden.”
“Thanks, but I’m really too full.”
“You’ll enjoy it – it’s good!”
Before I could protest again, the plate was in front of me. Not wishing to offend, I did my best to eat the food though I was now moving well past the threshold of pain. When Dino’s wife Giuseppina placed yet another dish in front of me, I realized I had to take a more dramatic defensive step. I had been using the word “pieno” which I knew meant “full”, but that obviously wasn’t working. I really felt stuffed, and that sensation hatched my new plan. I had already learned that there are many Italian adjectives that have the same base as in English, but with “ato” at the end instead of “ed” – governato=governed, privilegiato=privileged, guidato=guided. If I was stuck for an adjective, I sometimes tried an English word and Italianized it by adding “ato” at the end. I felt stuffed and so told them earnestly that I was “stufato.” I felt comfortable taking a chance with that word because I remembered hearing it used in Florence, though I didn’t remember the context or know its meaning. It definitely produced an effect – the food was taken away, the festive conversation ended and shortly thereafter, people began saying “Good night” to me as Riccardo led me up the stairs to show me my bedroom.
What had I said? When I saw the somewhat startled expressions on a few of their faces, I quickly followed up “stufato” by saying again how “pieno” I was, simultaneously patting my belly; but it felt like the damage had already been done and it would probably be futile to attempt further explanation. I normally carried a little dictionary in my back pocket, but I had forgotten to bring it with me for this trip. With a mixture of curiosity and anxiety, I flipped through its pages as soon as I returned to my room in Florence a few days later:
"Stufato – adj. bored, annoyed."
Notwithstanding, my relatives invited me back a few months later for Easter – a fact which amply demonstrates how seriously the family bond is taken in this country. And we had some good laughs when I explained how I came to such a maladapted word choice on my first evening in their midst.
“What must you have been thinking about me?” I asked.
“It was an odd thing to say,” commented Marcello, one of Riccardo’s younger brothers, using the mischievous tone that was often accompanied by a twinkle in his eyes. He had both the quickest smile and mind among the brothers.
“But you all were so nice to me, taking turns inviting me for meals with your families, showing me how to make pasta ...”
Making taglatelli was pretty easy during that first visit, mixing the flour, water and eggs, working the dough, flattening it with the rolling pin and cutting it into the long, thin strips that go so well with tomato sauce and parmesan cheese. On another day I ventured into the risky world of gnocchi – too much potato and they become lead sinkers, too much water and they turn into a gluey mess. Under the guidance of Zia Angela Maria and Carla, the gnochhi I made were well-received.
“Complementi, Pietro.”
“Very good!”
“Indeed!”
That made me cocky. I announced I would make them on my own the next day, followed the same procedures as before, and produced a slimy pile of little turd-shaped inedibles; no one, including me, had more than a spoonful.
“Don’t feel so bad, Pietro. Good gnocchi are hard to make. It’s a very fussy form of pasta; even the weather can affect it!”
Joining them in the butchering of Riccardo’s pig required getting past some queasiness. I didn’t like the idea of assisting in the killing of an animal. I wasn’t even comfortable with the idea of watching it. But I ate meat. Why not directly confront what that necessarily implies, in the traditional peasant manner, far from the industrial-strength procedures that isolate us from what we eat. If I’m going to eat meat, I should be aware of what that means, look it straight in the eye. Most of what you eat here you either plant and then harvest, or raise feed and then kill. If it’s a chicken, you break its neck with your hands; if it’s a pig, calf, rabbit or lamb, you slit its throat with a knife.
The pig is quite an intelligent animal. That much I surmised when I heard its apprehensive squeals as the three brothers and Sergio, Riccardo’s son, approached its pen. They tied the pig with some difficulty because of its agitated, forceful movements. Carla brought out the knife and a large pan which would soon catch its blood. Though the pig had never before seen an animal slaughtered and couldn’t see (nor would it have recognized) the butcher’s tools, it fought frantically the entire twenty meters between the pen and the pan, forcing the men to drag its more than 300 pounds the whole way. Its squeals had now become shrieks, loud and desperate. How did it know? These men the pig was now resisting with all its strength were the same ones it was accustomed to seeing peacefully gathered around it; two of them regularly cleaned its pen and brought it food every day. Perhaps that was a clue – the pig is not fed the last few days so its intestines can empty, making them easier to clean for the sausages and salamis they will encase. But if you were hungry and hadn’t seen the person who fed you for awhile, wouldn’t you be happy to see that person approaching you again? Those early squeals I heard, however, were clearly not of delight – how did it figure things out so quickly?
The pig was close to the pan when Marcello slipped another rope around its body and the men pulled it to the ground on its side. Riccardo thrust the point of the dagger into its neck, then again, opening the wound so the blood could drain. The pig continued its shrieks, violently kicked with its legs, then less so as its life flowed out, the stream of blood gradually turning into dark red droplets, dripping into the pan. After the convulsions ended, there were some muffled sounds and heaving attempts at breathing, then all was still. At least, the scene I saw became still, but it was replayed in those days after Christmas throughout the region, throughout the centuries.
The pig was carried to the garage where it was hung upside down, cut lengthwise, and its organs removed. A few days later, we gathered in the room where I first met my relatives and spent the entire day turning that pig into prosciutto, salami, sausages, pork chops and many other cuts. The blood had coagulated and was used for making the special type of sausage that carries its name. Nothing was thrown away except the eyes; the many odd scraps remaining were ground up and vigorously boiled in the fireplace kettle on their way to becoming a form of scrapple which looks very unappetizing in its natural grey color, though not for that reason alone.
We all shared a celebratory dinner at Riccardo’s house that evening, enjoying the choicest cuts just brought in from his wood-burning grill. The bread they made in the outdoor brick oven was being dipped into a large dish filled with a liquid.
“What’s that?”
“Melted pig fat – we always have it the first night. Here, dip some bread into it – it’s good.”
“Don’t you normally use olive oil for that?”
“Yes, but this is a special occasion.”
It did taste good, and I fortunately was still years away from learning about cholesterol, though I could tell from watching the liquid slowly thicken as it cooled and then turn into a mix of white grease-spots in yellowish sludge that this was probably not healthy. And the pork chops? If I were at all inclined toward vegetarianism, what I experienced on the day the pig was killed should have pushed me over the line. But the chops from the grill smelled great and tasted still better. Even the revulsion of mind and heart can be trumped by the pleasure of the senses.
Three of Zio and Zia’s four sons lived on the family parcel. A daughter, Gina, had moved to her husband’s village when they married almost twenty years before. The youngest son, Parisi, left for Rome, an hour and a half away, when he got a job there as a policeman. He married a Roman woman, who was treated cordially but not really liked by the family because of what they called her city “airs.” All the other spouses were from nearby villages. As his sons came of age, Zio added simple, small apartments to the original farmhouse, combining his mason’s skills with the construction abilities that were possessed to one extent or another by various relatives and friends. Dino and Marcello still lived in these apartments, each with a wife and two children; but they were slowly saving enough money to build their own homes on small plots within the original family parcel, as Riccardo had recently done. They had helped him build his house, and he would reciprocate later on.
This generation had learned the peasant’s broad range of life skills from their parents, but also had jobs. Riccardo used to make money as a mason, and now worked in a unionized factory that made telephones. Dino was a delivery driver and Marcello an orderly in a hospital; neither earned much, but because Marcello’s wife Adriana also worked in the hospital, they were able to start building their home before older brother Dino. The main difference from the prior generation was that the building materials purchased were of a higher quality, especially the marble, and money was sometimes paid in exchange for more complicated labor provided by friends, such as electrical work, though often that too was bartered. Relatives were never paid, but they definitely kept score of who had done what for whom, creating the risk of resentments later on. My initial visits with my Italian relatives, however, were bathed in such warm family spirit that I thoroughly romanticized that part of their lives. And no wonder. I had long, engaging meals with each of the four families there, getting to know them better in smaller groups. Moving around at mealtime lessened the stress I often felt when conversing in this still uncomfortable language because I could talk about the same subjects and ask similar questions. When your repertory is limited, it’s good to have different groups to play through it with.
At first, I was worried about not having enough in common with them to have extended conversations. But that concern was quickly erased.
“Zia, what was it like when you & my grandmother were growing up?”
“Angelica was smart, so our parents let her stay in school until fourth grade. The rest of us left after second or third grade to work in the home and on the farm. There was no electricity or indoor plumbing then. We ate more potatoes than pasta – pasta was more of a luxury before Mussolini’s time. When we got older, our parents talked with other parents about what marriages might be made. But that was not the only way couples came together. We had an older sister, and normally, you wouldn’t marry someone until after your older sister was married. But our older sister was a little lame. That made others less interested in her. Besides, your grandmother had a mind of her own. When your grandfather came courting from the next village over, she married him. A few years later, after your mother was born, they went to America.”
“Did you ever think of going to America?”
“No, no,” she said after a gentle laugh. “My home is here. “
I smiled and looked at her husband.
“Zio Domenico, what happened here during World War II?”
“It was a dangerous time. We went in the cellar when we heard the American planes overhead, but they dropped most of their bombs on the cities. The German soldiers were very bad. They took what they wanted and didn’t care at all about us. If they were angry, they could be ruthless. And the Italian partisans weren’t much better.”
“But I’m reading a book now that describes the partisans as heroic fighters for the resistance.”
“What heroes! They took food from us and other things they needed, then went back to hiding in the mountains, attacking the Germans. When they killed a German soldier, the partisans returned to their hiding places and we suffered the consequences. The Germans randomly gathered up the nearest Italian villagers. They shot and killed ten of us for each German killed by the partisans.”
“”Weren’t you afraid?”
“I watched out for myself and my family.”
“Did you ever go hungry?”
“Life was harder, but we kept growing our food and had enough to eat. Many of the people who had moved to the city before the war came back. Sometimes wealthy people from Rome came here, trying to buy food, but what good was their money then!”
He shook his head, his voice trailing off as he added “It was a difficult time…”
I tried to imagine what it must have been like. I had grown up in safe, prospering post-war America. What I knew about war came mainly from books. But this direct, dramatic testimony hit me in a way that book words could not.
Zio was quiet for awhile, his eyes cast down. Then he looked up and asked “Pietro, how do you support yourself studying music in Florence?”
“I saved as much money as I could working as a lawyer for almost two years and living very simply. I also live very simply in Florence, but it’s fine because I love studying music. I started out in an inexpensive pensione, and will move next month to share a small attic apartment with a Sicilian tailor and a student from Syria. It doesn’t have central heat or hot water, so it’s very cheap; but I’ll have my own room and will buy a small electric heater. I also heard about a special dining hall for conservatory and fine arts students. I can get government subsidized meal tickets for about 25 cents each and will start eating there when I leave the pensione.”
Though I had only met this financially rather poor peasant relative a few days before, he looked at me with concern in his eyes and earnestly said “If you need money for your studies in Florence, tell me. I’ll give you the money.”
When I wasn’t learning about family matters or history, I was hearing from different relatives about how to make wine or harvest crops or do a hundred other practical things that my ancestors had done for hundreds of years, basic life skills they took for granted that had been completely lost to me in a single generation. I was determined to soak up as much of their life experience as I could. I suspected (correctly) that I was not ambitious enough to integrate their skills into my daily life, but recognized (also correctly) that here was a worthwhile opportunity among good, unpretentious people.
The central role of food in Italian culture meant that meals were almost always special occasions. The appetite-stimulating antipasto was usually followed by homemade soup or that marvelous blending of taste and practicality called pasta. Next up, normally, was a grilled meat and vegetables or salad, then local fruit, cheeses and nuts, finished off with an herbal or walnut based liqueur, purportedly to help in the digestion of all that came before. Virtually everything that entered the mouth was either planted or raised and nourished with something else grown by them. Simple ingredients, basic flavors – olive oil, garlic, tomatoes, salt … The only weak link in this food chain was their wine. Because of the high mountain elevation, the growing season was too short for the grapes to properly mature, lowering not only the alcohol content but also the flavor of the wine. Years later, after harvesting the grapes and making wine with them, I came to believe that its simple purity at least partially compensated for its weak body. You could also wash down more of their sturdy food without getting drunk. There were of course no sulfites, just juice from the grapes in wooden barrels, maturing into the clear wine they would begin drinking after a few months, lasting until the next year’s wine was ready. There was a cyclical nature to the entire food enterprise, genuine and self-sustaining.
Whichever of the families I ate supper with, the whole group eventually wound up in Zio & Zia’s living/dining room afterwards in front of the fireplace, the crackling sound of dry wood punctuating the simultaneous conversations that invariably developed. We didn’t gather round the fireplace, as I do with my family, because it is esthetically and emotionally pleasing. Instead, the purpose was much more practical - it was a warm corner in a cold mountain. For festive celebrations such as Christmas, the pig dinner and New Years Eve, we all gathered at Riccardo’s or at his parent’s. Riccardo’s kitchen/dining room also had a fireplace in the corner where we would roast chestnuts after the meal and play briscola (which I already knew from playing with my grandmother) or scopa (which took some time to learn because it used a different deck of cards, with Neapolitan symbols). At midnight on New Year’s eve, the men and boys set off small firecrackers, while Riccardo and Sergio shot rifles into the air. I played several folk fiddle tunes and got some of them dancing with a few tarantellas.
Besides its entertainment value, music gave me a break from the heavy concentration required by conversation in Italian. Since I was a conservatory student, my relatives understood that I needed to practice my violin for a few hours each day; but I don’t think they realized how important that time alone was for me. I needed to recharge, away from words and the pressure to understand and respond. They were always pleasant, sometimes delightful; but I’m not built for continuous socializing, and usually took a nap after lunch, though I almost never fell asleep. There were also some day trips to smaller villages nearby, to have dinner with Zia’s daughter Gina, her husband and three children, and to meet Anselmo, my grandmother’s youngest brother and make the rounds of more relatives. Each stop involved something to eat and a glass of wine, filled to the rim – “if not, your sons will become priests” their local expression warned.
It was perhaps to be expected that their young American relative, raised in an individualistic society that prized specialization in higher education and beyond, would find much to admire in this collaborative way of life, still so close to nature and self-sufficient. But I recognized even during these first contacts that it came at a high price. Despite their healthy organic diet, they all looked older than their years, with leathery, furrowed skin. The endless chores and outdoor work took a heavy toll on their bodies and minds. None of the three brothers’ children seemed interested in preparing for a university education, though Italian society offered it free of charge. For my train ride back to Florence, they filled my bags with their food and my mind with much to think about.
8. The Trembling Bow in Its Second Apparition, with a Return to Its First
I call the cab that will take Riccardo, Carla and me to the Florence train station for their train back to L’Aquila. They have stayed the five days that I hoped they would, and our time together has for the most part gone very well. I don’t have home-grown food to give them, but the results of my earlier struggles with their language enable me to tell them with fluency and sincerity how grateful I am to them for everything they’ve done over the years, how glad I am that I could host them for a change. We exchange warm embraces on the platform. They step onto the local train which will take twice as long to get them home, but at a much lower price than the high-speed alternatives they quickly dismissed from consideration. Sergio has taken care of the daily chores that normally structure their time in lives otherwise lived in large part outside of time.
I think of the routines we will now return to, and of how different mine is because my grandmother chose to leave theirs ninety years earlier. A light sleeper, I normally awake early but instead of feeding the animals, listen to news and commentary on Italian radio. During a typical day here I read, write, play my violin and walk around Florence, occasionally visiting with friends. I especially enjoy going to concerts at Teatro della Pergola, a beautiful seventeenth century gem that is said to be the oldest opera house in Italy. Its intimate size now makes it more appropriate for chamber music, and I have been looking forward to tonight’s concert featuring Salvatore Accardo playing in the string quartet he formed with the ex-student who became his second wife. He long ago established a major international reputation by flawlessly playing the fiendishly difficult concertos and caprices of Paganini. He had dazzled me decades earlier with the extraordinary musicality, rich tone, and technical mastery of his performances with Florence’s symphony orchestra. His musical personality was so strong that he deceived my ears for the one and only time that I am aware of in my entire life.
The concerto repertory is filled with great leaps of the left hand from the bottom of the instrument’s fingerboard to its top. Since the fingerboard has no frets to hide behind, the end of these dramatic leaps must be perfectly positioned or the note will be out of tune. Your ear must be exquisitely sensitive to the slightest gradations of pitch by gift of nature - if not, you can’t even learn the violin or other fretless stringed instruments. And the physics of strings, which is more forgiving on lower notes, leaves absolutely no margin for error on the highest notes. Total fluidity of motion is essential. It takes years of repeatedly practicing those leaps to master them, yet even the greatest virtuosi are not capable of hitting them 100% of the time. Accardo undershot a highly exposed leap in the Tchaikovsky concerto by an entire semi-tone, which had a startling, grating effect on my ears. But his countenance and musical conviction were such that I called my own trusted ears into question. The perfection of his playing before and immediately after the error, without the slightest physical manifestation of discomfort or loss of concentration, caused me to wonder if perhaps I had misheard.
Thirty years later, it is apparent from the beginning of the concert that something is wrong. There are empty seats in a hall that he would have easily sold out before. Too many of Accardo’s notes are out of tune, his sound thin and constrained, his formerly rich vibrato virtually non-existent in the higher positions on the fingerboard. His wife and the quartet’s other two musicians play well, but Accardo apparently has developed serious limitations in his left hand. What a fall from such a pinnacle! Why is he still performing in public? Now almost seventy, he had recently fathered a child with his new wife, who seems at least thirty years younger. Is it so they can have a career together for awhile, as she launches hers and he ends his? When Jasha Heifitz first noticed his phenomenal technique beginning to slip a bit, he stopped performing in public; likewise for Michelucci, who put his Stradivarius in its case and never played it again, not even for himself. He said if he couldn’t play at the level he was accustomed to, he preferred not to play at all, and instead devoted his time to collecting art.
Pride can be a dangerous emotion; when felt to excess, it can easily lead to humiliation, even downfall. But it can also protect us, as it did Heifitz and Michelucci. Accardo had been in the top tier of the classical music world for several decades, but has not yet realized that it is time to leave the stage. His many admirers will not forget the thrilling performances he has given us in the past; but sadly, we will also remember and speak of his sorry decline, as an old friend, Richard Maury, and I now do during intermission.
“Can you believe how badly he plays now?” he says to start our conversation.
I first met Richard when I was at the conservatory; he was a serious amateur violinist who, with his cellist wife, constituted the hub of Florence’s amateur chamber music life. I had been at their place many times for delightful evenings of dinner and string quartets. He was a gifted artist, struggling to support his young expatriate family in a rent-controlled apartment with his brilliant but then unfashionable style of realistic painting. Gradually, the art market came to recognize his talents, but both before and after achieving success, he always dedicated an hour or more a day to practicing his violin, bringing the same passionate intensity to his music-making as to his art work. So when I approach him to see how he’s been doing during the almost ten years since we last talked and played at his home, it does not surprise me that he avoids preliminary small talk and immediately tears into Accardo.
“His sound dies for everything above third position. Something must be wrong with his left hand, so many notes slightly out of tune…”
“Yes, and his intonation used to be so flawless that he once caused me to-“
“How can he still play in public?” Richard interrupts, agitatedly. “It’s so sad. That solo passage in the slow movement of the Mendelssohn quartet had no life in it. He must hear how it sounds, must notice how tepid the audience applause is.”
“Especially compared to the enthusiastic ‘Bravos’ we showered him with years ago. But Richard, you’re looking well; how have you been?”
He does carry his seventy-odd years well. His eyes sparkle, as always, above an animated, whiskered face, set firmly above a well-tailored sports jacket that he could never have afforded decades earlier when we would occasionally run into each other in the balcony upstairs.
“Actually, I’ve been recuperating from some serious health problems. I was pretty much on my back for several months. Couldn’t paint, couldn’t do much of anything. But it turned out well and I’m much better now. Back to painting, too.”
“How about chamber music? Let’s get together for some string quartets”, I suggested.
“I don’t play my violin anymore,” he said, shaking his head with a pained expression. “I wasn’t able to play at all during my recuperation, and sounded like shit when I tried practicing again. The long lay-off, combined with the effects of the illness … I realized I’d never get back to where I’d been before, not even close, no matter how much I worked at it. So I gave it up. It’s been a hard thing to adjust to, hard to accept…”
Even though I was there beside my wife as she fought through cancer shortly after the birth of our second child, I don’t pretend to understand what it’s like to confront a life-threatening disease But I do understand Richard’s loss because I have been struggling with a similar problem, trying to postpone its distressing result. Several years ago, I noticed my handwriting getting worse. I also had problems parting my hair – there was a slight wobble in my right hand just as the comb was about to make contact with my head. Since my handwriting was still legible (and never had been very good anyway), and since I could get a straight part by holding the comb with two hands, I did nothing about these minor annoyances. I hoped they would go away on their own.
I also seemed to have less bow control when playing my violin, but at first attributed that to not playing enough, or perhaps not being sufficiently focused or relaxed. Eventually, I began to wonder if these things were related. A few visits to a neurologist specialized in movement disorders resulted in a diagnosis of “essential tremor” in my right hand, an often hereditary breakdown of connections between neurons. In my case, it affects the end of voluntary movements. It was not that long ago that scientists realized a distinction should be drawn between these tremors that afflict almost ten per cent of Americans over the age of 60 and the tremors of Parkinson’s Disease, which are unrelated to voluntary movements. Although much research is now underway, the doctor told me that the disease is not yet well-understood, but that it would probably get worse over time and in about ninety per cent of cases spreads to both hands. Brief trial runs of the commonly prescribed medications used to treat the tremor resulted in improvement from one of them, but it made me very nauseous the first day. Even though there was only a little nausea the second day and none noticeable after that, my body’s initial reaction tells me to avoid using it as long as possible. If the time arrives when a shaky hand keeps me from socializing over food or playing music I enjoy, I will revisit this medication but probably not before then.
In the meantime I must decide what adjustments to make, what non-prescription therapies to try. Legible writing becomes much slower, requiring a different grip of the pen. Eating is filled with voluntary, targeted movements but not much affected yet. Drinking is fine except for picking up small coffee or tea cups - not a problem since I rarely do that and can avoid the embarrassing shake entirely by using both hands. Although I like the aroma of good coffee brewing, I never developed a taste for caffeinated beverages because I didn’t like the wired feeling they created in me. Caffeine significantly aggravates the symptoms of essential tremor, so I have an additional reason for avoiding it.
Violin playing has many potential problem areas, one of which fortunately is not the escape-proof one afflicting the grand Accardo - inaccuracies in placing the fingers on the string. I shouldn’t have those intonation problems until/unless the tremor moves into my left hand. But placing the bow on the string is the end of a complex voluntary movement of my dominant right hand. In order to do that without an unpleasant scratching sound, violin students practice arduously to cultivate a wide range of landings, some of which must be very delicate. My wobble at the movement’s last moment makes that impossible. Playing on the string as much as possible is a way around the problem, but that takes away several bowings needed for classical music. Fortunately, the impact on other styles of playing is much less. But all violin music gets its pulse, its life from the right hand’s subtle adjustments of bow pressure, and this is a capability I am gradually losing. I don’t want my music-making to end, but neither do I want to end up viewed by the friends I play music with as someone who kept at it too long, an amateur version of Salvatore Accardo. One way or another, I have to resolve this dilemma.
My tiny room at Pensione Taiuti had a mirror on the door that enabled me to watch my right arm movements as I patiently practiced the beginner level exercises Michelucci prescribed for my bowing problem. We spent the first several lessons on the mechanics of a smooth stroke, and he impressed upon me the importance of a fluid wrist, a soft thumb, and letting go somewhat. I was too controlling, and the sound I produced reflected a certain rigidity in my body and physical movements. Michelucci modified the way I held the bow. It felt very awkward, but I was willing to try whatever he advised to get rid of that annoying hiccup in my down stroke. Two to three hours a day with no music to play, just exercises using an uncomfortable new grip made the next several weeks go by very slowly. I was elated when something seemed to suddenly click, but in our next lesson, Michelucci demonstrated how the solution I found created more problems than it solved. I was discouraged but returned again to his fundamentals. The will required by this effort left me feeling drained, but my hopes for what might result kept me going. I made some progress, and was rewarded with an etude and other more musical assignments being added to the exercises and scales I had been studying exclusively. That became self-reinforcing, and as I worked my way up to five or more hours a day of systematic practicing, the pace of my improvement accelerated. The down bow hitch lessened in intensity, then gradually receded into the shadows as I worked hard on learning one by one the imposing number of difficult bow strokes necessary for solid classical technique.
Most of my fellow students were teenagers. I envied the way their younger muscles and brain circuitry enabled them to learn more spontaneously what I labored to accomplish. But even for them, youthful natural ability was no substitute for hard work on such a demanding instrument. I later befriended two conservatory students majoring in conducting, which required a year or more of lessons on each of ten different instruments – both said that the violin was the most difficult to learn. We all had to study some piano, music theory and sight-singing, but the focus was always on the twice-a-week lessons with the maestro of your instrument, in a class setting with three to five fellow students, so you could learn from watching each other’s lesson. At Michelucci’s discretion, your lesson could last anywhere from 15 minutes to more than an hour; if he felt after a few minutes that you were unprepared, he would gruffly command you to go home, take some deep drags on the ever-present cigarette between his fingers and mutter about how he hated having his time wasted. It was somewhat intimidating to be called up to the lesson stand after such a scene, but the many hours of effort I put in between lessons meant I almost always got conscientious instruction from him. If you worked hard, he did, too. Michelucci was somewhat restrained with praise, making his occasional “Buona lezione” (“Good lesson”) all the more appreciated. One of the things that helped me make it through my early struggles with the bow was overhearing him tell his protégé about his new older student from America who had some serious bowing defects but also the “passione & talento” to overcome them.
The left hand technique was less problematic because my foundation there was merely insufficient rather than defective. It still required a huge investment of time with scales, chords, and etudes designed for its specific challenges. The Italian conservatory diploma in violin performance occupies ten years of study. I had no interest in obtaining the degree; I just wanted to get to a level where I could play chamber music well with good musicians. As I worked over the fall and winter to get rid of the bow hitch, Michelucci also gave me material to study from the third and fourth years of the violin curriculum. I realized that achieving my goal would require a few more years of concentrated study. The motivation was certainly there. My conservatory ID got me into the Saturday afternoon chamber music series at Teatro della Pergola for free, where I heard many of the world’s greatest musicians playing the music I most loved. As the beautiful Florentine spring unfolded, delighting my eyes, I had already made enough progress to appreciate that it was just a question of time, effort and will. I could feel my ears salivating at the prospect of playing that music with satisfaction rather than frustration. I had lucked into an ideal situation at the conservatory, was living very cheaply, but had to develop a way of sustaining it all. I had saved enough money for a year or so abroad but hadn’t really thought things through beyond that – it was all so vague when I left the States.
I had a solid relationship with my parents, but one thing I definitely did not want to do was ask them for money. They had grown up in lower class immigrant families and came of age during the Great Depression and World War II. The GI Bill enabled my dad to go to college in his mid-30’s, at the same time working multiple part-time jobs to support his young family. They scrimped their way into the middle class, and education was the entry ticket. They were somewhat bewildered by a son who had graduated from an ivy league law school less than two years before and then left a lucrative law firm job to study an instrument which he had abandoned, against their wishes, as a young teen. If I wanted to be independent, I should also be self-supporting. I didn't even know at that point what "busking" was. But I did know that if I wanted to stay at the conservatory, there would have to be another way to pay for it than asking my parents.
9. Florence Outside the Notes
Sublimation is one way to characterize all the time I was spending on music, because underneath I was getting pretty horny. Florence has long had a large American community, including many students in the multitude of American programs based there. It probably would have been easy to organize a robust social life within this community, but I deliberately avoided that, seeking instead friendships with Italians, focused on learning their language and ways. I met a group of Italian architecture students through one of them who lived in the room next to mine at Pensione Taiuti. The leaders of this fun-loving group were Tommaso and Vito, both from the heel of the Italian boot, and Mauro, the group’s lone northerner. These three shared a nearby apartment where a dozen or more students informally gathered several nights each week. I wondered how seriously they took their studies because they spent a great deal of time socializing and obviously gave it a high priority in their lives. The conversation was noisy and multi-layered, the constant joking around often based on slang or word-play, all of which made comprehension difficult for me; but a smile and simple questions or statements got me through most evenings.
They kept inviting me back, though, not because of my lame conversation, nor because I was their token foreigner. I think instead it was my yodeling, at best mediocre in quality but consistently capable of making groups of Italians laugh. One of my first times there, they were passing a guitar around the room, energetically singing Italian pop tunes. I knew a few chords on the guitar and sang “Mother, the Queen of My Heart,” a country music classic with a humorous story line, the gist of which I translated before singing - most of them spoke little if any English despite having studied it for years. When I got to the mother’s line (in falsetto) chastising her son for becoming a hard-drinking gambler and then the son’s mournful yodeling after forever swearing off his vices, they erupted in raucous laughter and stomped their feet. From then on, I frequently had a guitar handed to me at these get-togethers with a request for the funny song about the mamma with the high voice and her yodeling son. They also enjoyed the tunes I occasionally fiddled, and I was grateful they included me in their socializing.
The group’s Italian women to whom I was attracted, though, all had Italian boyfriends - likewise among the friendships I began forming at the conservatory. I did develop a good relationship with Juliette, an elegant, very bright student from Belgium who moved into Pensione Taiuti soon after I did, and who shortly thereafter also entered the circle of Tommaso et al. Although she spoke excellent English, we usually conversed in Italian so we could both get better at it, lapsing into English whenever either of us got stuck. She had a broad range of cultural interests, and we went to concerts, museums and the opera together. One evening the two of us were in her room and, not wishing to be misunderstood, I switched over to English.
“Juliette, I enjoy the time we spend together, and I like you a lot. How do you feel about moving our relationship beyond just being friends.”
She looked down for awhile and then responded, “Well, I’m thinking about it.” After another pause, she continued, “I like doing things together, too; but I don’t want to ruin a good friendship. That is what has happened to me in the past.”
I was moderately horny by then and perfectly willing to take that chance, though I didn’t put it that way. Instead, I asked her to think about it some more. She said she would, and soon after began an affair with one of her Italian professors, probably thirty years her senior. Her roommate later gave me more details than I cared to hear, such as finding grey pubic hairs on the bed of the apartment they had recently moved into. But we stayed good friends and left it at that.
I always looked forward to Signora Taiuti’s delicious multi-course meals and the spirited conversation among the dozen or so of us normally at the table. We students had been there for a few months by this time, and the two older guests even longer than that. The signora was originally from Sardinia and had brought her folk customs along with her; as a result, whenever we numbered thirteen, she would eat in the kitchen with her daughter. She also would not allow any changing of rooms on Tuesdays or Fridays because it invited bad luck. Our genial host at the head of the table was Signore Taiuti, a retired Florentine policeman who occasionally spoke well of Mussolini. This would invariably elicit a heated response from their son Giacomo, an activist in Lotta Continua (“Ongoing Struggle”), the militant leftist group that viewed the Italian communists as right-wing sell-outs. But Signore Taiuti always maintained a calm demeanor, whether discussing politics with his hot-headed son or savoring uccelletti arrosto, a Tuscan dish of little birds, roasted with only their feet removed, that provoked looks of disgust from the fastidious Signorina Bianchi. She was a middle-aged single woman from northern Italy, too polite to clarify whether her reaction stemmed from opposition to Signore Taiuti’s favorite pastime, hunting (which had produced our main course), or to the birds’ sadly endearing appearance on the plate, caused mainly by their small size and their still attached heads. That last part is what made me fill up on vegetables and pasta that day.
Signorina Bianchi was very talkative, which was almost never a problem because there were usually multiple conversations going on simultaneously. But one day she made a comment that dramatically changed the course of that meal.
“Did you see the story on the news about how many people are on public assistance in the south?”
“And why do you find that interesting, Signorina?” The questioner was Paulo, a student from Calabria, as far south as you can get in the Italian boot. Bianchi’s comment was not even addressed to him, but he picked up on it, the irritation in his voice producing silence in the room.
“Well,” she responded, somewhat flustered, “I mean, it would be better if they were working.”
“Do you know how hard it is to find a job in the south?”
“Well, I know the government has invested a lot of money to bring more jobs there; I don’t understand why there are still so many unemployed people.”
“Yea, I know – you northerners think it’s because we’re lazy, that we’d rather collect public assistance than work. Lots of that money the government set aside for jobs never made it past the politicians. Why do you think so many of us go up north looking for work? Because we’re lazy? I’ve heard your little remarks before and I’m tired of them.”
“But…. I’m not prejudiced against southerners. I don’t think they’re lazy and criminals.” Bianchi was leaning back now, her neck arched defensively, the fingers of her right hand splayed beneath it. “In Milan we have lots of workers from the south.”
As Bianchi clumsily looked for a way out, Paulo was getting more agitated. “I know what you really think. I know how the north feels about the south. Shit! When I’m around northerners, I feel embarrassed to speak with a southern accent. And that pisses me off. Why should I have to feel embarrassed about being Calabrese?” His face was now bright red, his gestures putting the wine and water glasses at risk. “Why the hell can’t…..”
“Signorina, jobs are scarce where we come from,” Marcello, also from Calabria and Paulo’s roommate, interjected in a subdued, searching voice. His hands moved in small circles. He looked like a younger version of one of my favorite uncles, also named Marcello. “The universities aren’t very good either; that’s why we’re here.”
Signore Taiuti added, “Good God, it’s been a difficult problem for a long time, and it’s certainly true that there’s too much corruption in all of Italy, not just the south.” He continued in a similar vein, but there were more flare-ups when Paulo sought to justify his outbursts and Bianchi played more defense, neither with much success. Some at the table offered partisan comments, others followed Signore Taiuti’s lead, but it was mainly his measured words of understanding that gradually calmed the tension in the room. His wife also helped by placing a few after dinner liqueurs on the table and steering the conversation to lighter topics; there were some smiles, then a few jokes and some general laughter. The storm had passed. The next day, as we walked in to take our places, conversing, a resolute Tuscan sun brightened the dining room.
Shortly after returning to Florence from that Christmas holiday visit with my relatives, I moved into a sixth floor attic apartment in a five hundred year old, rather poorly maintained building opposite Santa Maria Novella, one of the city’s most historic churches. My room in Pensione Taiuti had looked out on an even more impressive piazza in the very heart of Florence, containing the enormous cathedral and medieval baptistery. But I needed something cheaper if I wanted to keep this going for another year. With no elevator, no heat or hot water and two other tenants to divide the rent with, my share for this new place came to less than twenty dollars a month.
The man I paid the rent to was Gianni, a sly Sicilian who years before had found work in Florence and also this apartment. It was ridiculously low-priced because of a rigid rent control law that the communist local government had passed to deal with a speculative real estate crisis that was pushing working class families out of the city’s low-cost housing. The law blocked evictions in this category of housing and froze rents at a tiny fraction of their current market rate as long as the tenant remained in the apartment. It also made subletting of all rent-controlled units illegal.
Among the side-effects of this well-intentioned regulation were that landlords spent little or nothing on maintenance but often did spend tens of thousands of dollars bribing tenants to leave so that the apartments could be converted to renovated condominiums and then sold at the inflated market prices. Despite nervous, shifty eyes and very oily, very thin hair, Gianni managed to marry a mildly attractive Florentine and then moved into her apartment. He illegally sub-let his apartment at enough of a profit to still put money in his pocket after covering the expenses of defending (more accurately described as “stalling”) a years’ long eviction lawsuit being prosecuted by his landlord. The tortoise-paced Italian court system, plus a lawyer who was a relative of his from Sicily, made this an economically rational decision for him because he and the landlord could not agree on a bribe amount. But at some future point there would either be an eviction or an agreement on the buona uscita (“good exit”), as Italians euphemistically called the bribe.
And so in mid-winter I moved into this somewhat precarious location with my violin and a newly acquired electric space heater. My room had its own little terrace opening onto the building’s air shaft and looking out over thousands of picturesque red-tiled rooftops toward the imposing tower of Palazzo Vecchio, built in the 14th century and the current seat of the city government which had blocked any increases in the rents of our building.
My music routine now was to practice scales, arpeggios and technical exercises for two or three hours starting about 10 AM, then after lunch work on etudes (music designed to address specific problems of violin technique) and finally on a Tartini sonata, Vivaldi concerto, or other piece assigned by Michelucci that was not too technically demanding but still provided an opportunity to play real music. I looked on this as my daily reward for the all the solid effort preceding it, and by the time I finished it was often 8 PM or later.
The old building was solidly constructed and had thick walls. I wondered how much sound carried down the air shaft and whether it affected the people living on the floors below. The answer, albeit indirectly, came several weeks later when I was walking down the stairs on my way to a lesson. After passing the door to the third floor apartment, I encountered the elderly woman who lived there with her son and his family. She stopped her slow, methodical ascent toward her home and responded to my “Good morning, signora” by pointing to my violin while saying
“You’re the one who plays……. always.”
The heavy sigh that prefaced “always” combined with its melancholy, plaintive tone to tell me everything. On the way back from my lesson, I stopped at a music store and bought a practice mute, the lead-filled sound-deadening variety, which I thereafter often used to dampen at least the scales and technical exercises. Everyone loves to hear beautiful music well-performed, but the process which makes that possible comes at significant cost not only to the student musician but also to his immediate neighbors.
During the warmer months when the windows were open, these unfortunate families living on the floors beneath me were actually doubly afflicted. Next to the airshaft on the ground floor was the bedroom of a prostitute who lived in the apartment and serviced her customers there. An hour or two after my violin practicing stopped sending its sounds down the airshaft, the sounds of her work often began traveling up the airshaft. Being a professional, she never made noise, but the same could not be said of her bedsprings and clients, especially the ones vigorous in movement or vocalization. I felt bad for the families in between us, but took some comfort in knowing that the parents could more easily explain to their young children my sounds than hers.
Just around the corner from our building was the Via delle Belle Donne, the “Street of the Beautiful Women,” in an earlier time the bustling red light district of Florence, now the cheerless site where crusted women with thick legs encased in unflattering skirts occasionally hung around, looking to turn a trick. I was horny but not desperate, the opposite of how they appeared. I often passed through the street on my way about the city; when I saw my neighbor from the ground floor I would say hello. Once, in a different but similar part of the city with women a little less worn, a thought crossed my mind but bothered my stomach, and I walked quickly away.
As spring approached, however, sublimation through music was in danger of being swamped by hormones. I had already decided to liberalize my policy about socializing with Americans when I received a letter from Rosalie, the French woman I had met on the plane to Europe and then briefly visited on my way to Italy. She had separated from her husband after several years of marital problems and was coming to Florence on vacation. She asked if we could meet.
On the evening of her arrival, we enjoyed a pleasant dinner in a local trattoria and then headed back to her hotel, both with the same thing in mind. During her week-long visit, we spent much time strolling leisurely about the city, charmed by its blossoming spring. We spent almost as much time in bed, satisfying long-felt needs, delighting in each other’s re-awakening touch. The last several months’ inactivity could have turned me into a voracious, greedy animal that week, but Rosalie was a few years older than me, with a different life experience rooted in motherhood and her job as a teacher. The smile on her sweet face radiated warmth and a sober form of contentment. Her gentleness and maturity channeled our passion, the heat and flames transforming themselves into a warm glow that lingered well past our goodbye kiss at the train station.
My apartment had a tiny kitchen which I almost never used - just before I left Pensione Taiuti, I had discovered the government subsidized meal plan available to all students. There was no information sheet or list of services provided by the conservatory about this; it was just something you were expected to know about. That’s how the Italian educational system operated – national policies that all Italians were familiar with because they were the same for everybody throughout the country. At the beginning of each month, I noticed conservatory students picking up tickets in the office, and when I finally inquired, learned that they were redeemable at a nearby restaurant where, by adding a cash payment of about 25 cents, I could eat a dish of pasta, risotto or soup, followed by a main course of meat and vegetable, finishing up with a piece of fresh fruit, all washed down with a quarter liter of wine or small bottle of mineral water. The restaurant was far from fancy, but the food was freshly prepared and usually quite tasty. It was open to the public, but a large share of its customers were students from the conservatory and the school of fine arts, all with these subsidized tickets. Students from the other divisions of Florence University had to eat at a large student dining hall about a block away which served cafeteria style food. I wondered if this distinction was happenstance, or a reflection of societal priorities.
Back at the apartment, I formed friendships with the other two men who rented from Gianni. Salvatore was from Gianni’s village in Sicily, mid-30’s, a skilled tailor who supported himself doing occasional overflow alterations for other tailors. Though he struggled economically and lacked a good education, he usually wore a genial face and nice clothes. He loved to sing Italian pop tunes but was also thoroughly familiar with Verdi, Puccini and the rest of the standard Italian operatic repertory. I never could stump him with a request for an aria – he would immediately begin singing it in a pleasant voice framed by a broad smile. Salvatore was prematurely bald, but his good-natured sincerity caused me to reassess my belief that guys trying to hide their shiny dome beneath a flimsy comb-over were desperate, perhaps even devious. But then Gianni would show up on the first of the month to collect the rent, his scalp glistening with skimpy, greasy strands of unnaturally placed hair floating on beads of sweat. My prejudice was immediately reinforced - Salvatore was merely an exception that proved the rule.
Our other apartment-mate was Shamil, a Syrian student finishing his degree in political science at the university. Gregarious and courteous, he was capable of remarkably nuanced thinking when the subject matter was unrelated to religion. If it was in the Koran, however, it was true beyond question, and Shamil seemed to draw conviction and confidence from that. I envied the relief that must offer from the difficult search for answers, always tentative, to the most important questions. Shamil could freely focus his energy and talents on other areas of life, secure in knowing that moral dilemmas would be resolved by the guidance of an infallible holy book.
He bowed toward Mecca in daily prayer, then walked out into a rich tapestry of European influences. Shamil enjoyed the easy socializing western society permitted between the sexes, dated occasionally and a few times brought women to his room and locked the door. He was good-looking, a stimulating conversationalist with a fine sense of humor. His social qualities won him friends of both genders; but he insisted he would only marry a virgin, probably from Syria.
When some friends from the USA visited me, I planned on doing a dutch-treat dinner with them at the conservatory restaurant. When Shamil heard of that, he said “No No No No No! I will make us some pasta tonight.” After a pleasant meal, my friends began to clean the dishes, only to hear again “No No, No, No, No! Guests are not allowed to clean up.” And he insisted on washing the dishes, too. I felt relatively useless and ill-mannered. He was equally hospitable during a visit from my mother, who was thoroughly charmed by him.
Shamil made honesty and diplomacy seem like natural companions. His hearty laugh and bubbling enthusiasm were capable of transforming any clouded mood in his vicinity. We had thought-provoking political discussions, but if we disagreed, he made sure we did so agreeably. His generosity of spirit, however, did not extend to Jews. During the spring, I met an Israeli classical guitar student who stopped by our apartment one afternoon when Shamil was there. After she left, he turned to me and calmly said,
“Tell her not to come here again.”
“Why?”
“I don’t want an Israeli in my home.”
“That’s not a good reason - it’s my home, too.”
“They stole Arab land, killed people – I don’t want her here.”
“You can’t tell me who…” and I heatedly worked my way into a lecture of sorts on tolerance and my right to decide who my visitors would be. Shamil listened and made some comments, unpersuaded by my words, believing me to be the unfair one. He finally backed off his insistence, but asked that I not bring her home when he was there. I was noncommittal because I felt there was still something wrong about that. She came one more time. I had not told Shamil beforehand; but fortuitously he was not there, so a confrontation was avoided. Soon after, though, her annoying bossiness sparked a confrontation with me that mooted the whole matter.
The furrows in his forehead that were mere suggestions when we first met are now deep, but the engaging manner and laugh are the same. Shamil tells me about his teenaged children and how difficult it is to pass on to them his Moslem culture living here in Italy. It is clear from our conversation that, although we both started our families somewhat late, they have been at the center of our lives since. He had married a Syrian woman on a trip to his home town and brought her back to Florence, where he has made a living facilitating commercial deals between Italian and Arab businessmen. We are seated at an outdoor café opposite Florence city hall, and after catching up on family and work, turn to what always fascinated me most in our discussions decades earlier –political and social issues.
“What did you think about the attacks back in 2001 on the twin towers in New York City?” I ask.
“It was terrible. But the Jews were behind it. You’ve probably only read western accounts in the years since it happened. I’ve also followed it in the Arab press. It was a conspiracy to generate hostility towards Islam and sympathy for Israel.”
“But a major part of the city’s financial sector was housed in those skyscrapers, and Jews are very prominent in that community; many of the people who died were Jews.”
“The American government may also have been involved,” Shamil goes on unphased. “Bush was looking for an excuse to attack Iraq – that part is about oil and revenge by Bush for the time when Saddam Hussein tried to kill his father. You see what’s happened since – there were never any weapons of mass destruction, no link between Saddam and the twin towers.”
“You may be right about Iraq, and I really dislike Bush, but how can you believe that he would kill three thousand Americans as part of a strategy to take out Saddam and control Iraqi oil?”
“Politics, big money, protecting interests – that’s the way it works. The guy running Syria is even worse. Don’t be naïve my friend,” he says smiling.
We continue on awhile, never moving beyond stalemate, then change the subject when he points to a headline in his Italian newspaper on catholic priests who had raped young boys.
“Those men should be killed.”
“I know how you feel. But I would rather put them in prison for the rest of their lives with no chance for release. When I was in law school, I worked as a prison guard summer replacement in Newark, New Jersey. It was a place of physical brutality. The child molesters and rapists were at highest risk of getting beaten up by other inmates – ‘coulda been my kid, my old lady.’ Good – take your violence out on them. I’m normally opposed to torture, but I’d add one other thing. Once a year the child's family members are allowed in a safe prison room with the perpetrator and enough guards to protect them. They get to inflict supervised physical pain on him. No taking of life or limb, but some serious pain, screaming….”
“Yes,” he says enthusiastically, “that, too! But homosexuality is a grave sin. It goes directly against the harmony that God has created for us. Muhammad is clear – homosexuals who commit sodomy should be killed.”
We spend some time disagreeing about that before turning to the opera buffa of Italian politics, where we share similar opinions. Our visit together finishes up later on with an exchange of pleasantries and a warm embrace.
As he walks away, I watch him with a mix of thoughts and emotions. How can a man who has chosen to live the majority of his life in western Europe, who is so intelligent and otherwise big-hearted remain so close-minded and intolerant in some areas? How powerful the influence of growing up Arab and Muslim must be. I wonder if a meaningful level of understanding with that world can ever be achieved before they free themselves of the yoke of their holy book, until they too have their renaissance.
But Shamil also has questions about me. How can I possibly attempt to lead a good life in a decadent world without God’s guidance? How can I not sufficiently appreciate the injustice done to the Arabs by the Jews that is so obvious to him? If friendship were purely rational, we would never have become or remained friends. I had decided I liked him as a person before becoming aware of how prejudiced he could be about some things. And I make allowances for him, as he does for me, because of the very different worlds that formed us early on. I am curious about his thoughts and feelings, and glad he is my friend. Even more, I am grateful to the brave humanists who centuries before in this very place began to lead us out of the shadows.
10. On the Road
Directing Smith College’s junior year abroad program for its 22 young women in Florence is much more than a full-time job for my wife Giovanna. In addition to all her administrative duties, she teaches for the program and mothers her students with 24/7 availability, dedicating a passionate energy to them that enriches lives, theirs and hers. She also understands how important traveling is in my life, especially when we are in the Mediterranean. So after a winter together in Italy, I begin a solo journey to Greece on Rhodes, the island of the sun. The transition between winter and spring has begun in my mind, but not yet in the Greek Islands this year. There is a cool, often strong March wind that seems to blow away the sun’s rays. The Colossus of Rhodes, one of the seven wonders of the ancient world, once towered above the sailing ships entering the island's thriving harbor. It is no longer there, destroyed by an earthquake in 226 BC; and it is no longer wind but enormous engines that bring to Rhodes the huge cruise ships which much of the local economy feeds on. Apparently the season has not yet begun because all the restaurants and shops in the downtown commercial zone are locked up. They abruptly come to teeming life two days later when a single ship releases its 2,000 passengers on shore, and just as abruptly shut down again a few hours later, when the ship takes back its human cargo.
I am this year’s first guest in the small b&b whose Japanese owner has recently arrived from Norway to open it up. His Norwegian wife will join him in a few weeks when things pick up for Easter. After putting my suitcase and fiddle in the room, we sip a Greek liqueur at the dining table.
“Are there any restaurants open? Everything looked closed on the way in?”
“Yes, but only a few,” he says. “I eat at home, but I can tell you what my guests say about them. What do you like to eat?”
“Fresh fish, local cuisine.”
“Then you should go to a place called Nireas. It’s a little expensive, but many guests have told me how much they enjoyed the food there. It’s just a short walk, and I think it’s open. I'll show you where it is.”
Several hours later, it's dark and cold enough for blowing warm air into cupped hands. I look over the menu posted outside the restaurant, then pass through the large outdoor dining area, uninhabited tables surrounded by plants, leafy vines and lanterns. It is easy to imagine it balmy and alive, filled with laughing and lingering. Inside, I find the owner speaking Greek to a young couple finishing their meal. He moves towards me and smiles.
“Yes, please; where would you like to sit?” he asks in unaccented American English.
I look around the attractively appointed main dining room, realizing the extent of the choice he has offered me. All the other tables are empty. I choose the table near the front door, next to the space heater warming the hands he now vigorously rubs together.
“Where are you from?” he asks.
“I’m an American, but living this year in Italy. Do you have some fresh fish?”
“You’re in the right place. My father visited our fisherman today; he can tell you what’s good; doesn’t speak English well even though we lived in America for six years when I was a kid. You speak Italian? His Italian is very good. I’m trying to learn more; we get a lot of Italian visitors during the season. My name is Theo,” he says, extending his freshly warmed hand.
His father, Savas, is a small, upright man in his seventies with bright blue eyes. Savas went to school during the Italian occupation prior to World War II and so learned the master’s language. I wonder where in America he lived without learning much English – perhaps an urban Greek community? I learn instead that he lived in Hanover, New Jersey, right next to Livingston, the town I grew up in. Theo went to high school as “Ted,” and though our adolescence was a decade apart, we pleasantly reminisce about the rivalry between our schools. He pulls up a chair after bringing my salad and we discuss Greek politics and the local economy, which he says is dismal. Since the global recession deepened, the banks are no longer extending loans to small businesses like his that use the money to get going each season and then pay the banker back a few months later when tourism refloats the island’s economy. He started the restaurant almost twenty years before, business usually has been good, but he’s never seen a time as difficult as this and is desperately seeking a bridge loan from a friend.
Savas joins us after proudly bringing in my fish, perfectly grilled and garnished, and provides us with some perspective. He speaks to me in Italian, with an occasional English or unintelligible Greek word thrown in. I am sure Theo knows these stories by heart, but he listens attentively, trying to understand them in their Italian version. After the Italians surrendered to the Allies in 1943, the Nazis occupied the island and protected their Balkan flank by defeating the British campaign to capture all Italian islands in the area. It was one of the last German victories of the war, and it came at a high price to the local inhabitants. Savas’s father and brother both died of hunger, his father stubbornly refusing to leave Rhodes despite the horrors being inflicted by the Nazis. Savas was the younger son, and his mother took him to the tiny island of Symi, where he had been born; they both managed to survive the war with the help of relatives and friends. His eyes and breathing speak the pain of those years even more than his words, but he seems at peace. Savas’ wife died last year, and he has lived since then with Theo, Constance and their four children.
Constance is an American, at least ten years younger than Theo. She moved to Greece one month after meeting him in America during one of his visits to see relatives still there. I come to know this sturdy family over a week of almost daily meals and conversation with them. It’s not just that they have few other patrons and most of the island’s other restaurants aren’t yet open. These are good rock-solid people, and we enjoy each others company. Later in the season they would be far too busy to spend so much time with me. My premature arrival on the island has resulted in an unexpected benefit.
Theo is a charming, passionate guy, and I can understand how Constance was swept away by him. But a romantic, beach-bound and sun-soaked beginning evolved after marriage and the launching of their restaurant into hard work and punishing hours, at least for Constance. All four of their children are boys, their number augmented by stubborn efforts to have a girl. Caring for them is a demanding undertaking throughout the year, but she is the true workhorse of the restaurant, cooking & cleaning seven days a week starting after Easter and going through September. She is bright and pretty, but all that responsibility lines her forehead, making someone who would otherwise look younger than her years incapable of deceiving.
While Constance labors in the kitchen, her husband chats up the customers and occasionally runs to a nearby market for an avocado or other missing ingredients. One day I walk by at mid-afternoon and wave to Theo, who is with a small group of boisterous Greeks eating at one of the outside tables. When I return for dinner, they are still there, eating, drinking and dancing; they leave around 10 PM to continue their festivities at a nearby club that has just opened.
The couple’s eldest son, also named Savas, is a handsome, athletic blond who has recently been accepted by some good American universities; the family now anxiously awaits the financial aid decisions that will determine if and where he will go. The junior Savas has recently discovered Beethoven and tells me how taken he is by this powerful music. He listens online, and I provide him with a list of other classical compositions to try, hoping to nourish his healthy new appetite and enjoying the pleasure of giving a gift that is beyond price.
Walking around the medieval old town is absorbing, with its distinct Byzantine, Turkish & Jewish quarters. The most impressive is the area where the Knights of St. John lived, a religious and later military order founded in Jerusalem during the eleventh century by Italian merchants to care for sick pilgrims. After the Muslim recapture of the Holy Land forced them to move westward, they eventually settled in Rhodes, ruling the island through an early form of international government. They were organized by language and culture, with celibate knights originally from Spanish, French, Italian, Germanic, English and other regions of Europe living in separate but adjoining buildings, self-governing sub-groups guided by a grand master chosen from their ranks. For over two centuries, the Knights battled Barbary pirates and withstood Muslim attacks, finally withdrawing to Sicily in 1523 after a six month siege by Ottoman forces which outnumbered them by more than ten to one.
I decide to explore the rest of the island by renting a motorcycle, and go to an agency owned by a friend of Theo’s. He welcomes me but says that a recent Greek law makes it illegal to rent a motorcycle to anyone without a specialized license; I just have a standard American automobile license, and he doesn’t want both of us to get into trouble. Since I have already formed an impression that Greeks share the Italians’ casual attitude towards law, I check a few other agencies but am disappointed to learn that this law is apparently enforced frequently enough to make it respected. So I take a bus out of the city through some towns to a village about half way down the island. A bright sun lessens the sting of a wind that gains strength as I hike up a nearby mountain. After an hour or so of climbing, the stupendous views over the sea below provide the motivation for a choice of path that an earlier experience tells me I might regret.
I was in Nepal, half a life younger and twice as imprudent, on an equally sunny afternoon when I decided to leave the security of a paved road that would eventually go to a hostel atop the mountains that ring the Katmandu valley. I had negotiated a day off from my evening strolling violin duties in exchange for performing at a birthday party for the hotel manager’s young son, and was not due back until the following evening. My plan was to make that hostel my overnight stop, then enjoy the morning views of the sun rising behind Mount Everest and the other Himalayan peaks which would be visible from that vantage point. The road ascended the mountain via a circuitous series of widely separated switch-backs, necessary for the occasional car that passed but very inefficient for the two feet providing my means of transport. I found a trail that I hoped would be more scenic and direct, but it never strayed far from the road. I wondered why there were no trails heading up the mountain but was reluctant to make my own way – it was impossible to see where the upper stretches of the road were, and there was a lot of high brush growing in the ravines that roughened the upward slope. Besides, a four foot high wire fence now ran along the upper side of the trail. A fence says “Stay out” without the need for signs. But a mile later, what does a permanently constructed set of wooden steps going over the fence say? And why are there some steps on each side of the fence rather than a gate? Strange. I pondered the conflicting messages and decided on “Stay out, but if you want, come over here.” And I wanted to go over. There was a trail a meter wide on the other side, heading up the mountain. That would save time, probably lots of it.
A half hour later, buoyed by my faster rise, I noticed the trail was gradually narrowing and the brush thickening. There were webs between some of the branches, habitats for large spiders with irridescent green bodies. I carefully avoided them, then used a stick to clear them out of my path as they became more numerous and the brush hosting them grew thicker still. The trail got very narrow, then fragmented and finally disappeared entirely. I continued on for awhile in what I hoped was the right direction, then stopped and looked around, trying to orient myself. There was no sign of the road above or below me, nor of the fickle trail that duped me into climbing the ladder. I thought about returning to the ladder, but the way back was as uncertain as its original message. Plus I didn’t want to lose all that time. I noticed a few homes perched near the top of the mountain, several miles off in the distance. Were they on the upper part of the road?
No better idea came to mind, so I headed off toward the homes. The many ravines cutting across the upward slope and the spider-infested brush slowed me down. The brush was now so thick that it often hid from view the smaller gullies running through the ravines. I stumbled into a few, then slowed down and made my spider clearing stick do double duty – it was now also a gully poker. This was not the place to sprain or break an ankle.
An hour later, I seemed almost as far away from the homes as before. Soon it would start getting dark, and it was that time of autumn when cold evenings and freezing nights followed warm days. I was totally unprepared to spend the night out there. I imagined the mountain cold slowly penetrating my light-weight jacket, and wondered whether my small Swiss army knife would provide any protection against wild nocturnal animals that might be moving about. I had managed with some effort to stay calm up to this point, but was now becoming more worried about overnight exposure than I was about those big creepy spiders or injuring my ankle. I picked up the pace, then went as fast as I could, occasionally falling into the camouflaged gullies, using my hands more to push through the brush than to flick away the spiders scurrying about my body. I’m normally somewhat afraid of spiders, but if these had poisonous bites, I would have noticed by now, and all I was feeling was panic, not pain or arachnophobia. The spider webs stuck to my skin and clothes as I crashed recklessly through them. However, unless they covered my eyes, nose or mouth, my hands had more urgent matters to occupy them.
I was not one of the fortunate few who pass through their twenties secure in their sense of composure. By my thirties, though, and largely thanks to my solo travel experiences, I had incorporated that into my self-image. That would need reassessment, given my current melt-down, but now all energies were focused on finding that damn road. Why had I left it?!
I looked for the homes. Shit - still too far away. I continued on but after awhile noticed something moving in my direction, high above me, perhaps on a ledge. When I realized it was a man, I began shouting and frantically waving. He stopped, probably sensing the anxiety in my voice, scanned the area and then waved back. What relief I felt! When he got to a point on the ledge above me, he patiently waited while I climbed up to the ledge. He was Nepali, on some kind of trail, and he understood enough of my English and gestures to point out the way to the paved road. I thanked him profusely, and just before dark reached the hostel.
The hostel was small, its dining room filled with a dozen or so European hippy types. There was lots of hash around, which made the hearty food freshly prepared by the woman who owned the hostel taste even better. But when I returned to my room and got into bed, my mind repeatedly replayed the fears of earlier that day. I began to shiver. It was cold enough in the room to see your breath, but when I added an extra blanket and my shivering got worse, uncontrollably so for a while, it was clear there was another cause.
My mind revisits that day as I survey the panorama below my Rhodes mountain perch, contemplating the choice I have to make. I have come to the end of a dirt road and must now decide whether to walk down to the paved road with its hourly bus back to the city or make my way up the mountain on a skinny path of unknown duration. There are bushes and trees, but they are small and spread apart, even more so as I scan the higher elevations. It looks to be a manageable ascent. The views will be even better up there, and I like serendipity. Besides, I know what direction to head in if the path disappears or the bushes get too thick.
The setting sun colorfully illuminating the sea around Rhodes and the rising sun sparkling among the snow-capped Himalayan peaks are both far beyond mere beauty. Scenes that striking cannot be meaningfully compared, easily overwhelming the capabilities not only of words, but even of the mind’s eye when one attempts to recall them. The risk and adventure, however, as experienced by the older version of me that day were much tamer, and that was just fine. An intrepid explorer who would later die on one of the early polar expeditions summed it up in these words - “Adventure is poor planning.”
On another day, I hike up to the acropolis and see the small theater where many of the great orators of ancient Rome came to learn their craft at Rhodes’ renowned school of rhetoric. I watch some of their progeny at the courthouse and approach a young prosecutor who politely answers my questions about the criminal trials I just saw. But the most striking thing in the main courtroom is the huge painting which hangs above the judges bench – a ten foot high crucified Christ, in evident agony and dripping blood. I wonder what it feels like to be a Jew or Moslem on trial there.
The suffering depicted in the painting also expresses itself in the rembetika music I hear live in a nearby club. It’s a different kind of suffering, a soulful rendering of the personal and social problems of marginalized refugees. What adds to its poignancy is that these are not foreigners struggling to make their way in a new land, but repatriated Greeks, sent back to their homeland in 1923 during the huge population exchange following the Greco-Turkish war. Like the blues in America, this gripping music with its tales of hard times and failed love, drug addiction and discrimination passed from its underclass origins to mainstream popularity, despite being repressed by the fascist Metaxas regime in the 1930’s and banned by the military junta that seized power thirty years later. Rembetika has strongly influenced Greek popular music, and it is refreshing to listen to the radio in a country where almost all of the popular music is by local musicians singing in their native language, not the homogenized Euro-American pop that so often predominates elsewhere. You don't need to understand Greek to be touched by rembetika - it speaks directly to the heart.
Later in the week, Theo invites me to join his family for dinner, which they eat before opening the restaurant in the evening. Hearty lentil and orzo soup, Greek salad and grilled octopus (to enhance its natural flavors, they bathe it in sea water & then let it dry in the sun) accompany pleasant conversation in their living quarters above the restaurant. Afterwards, their sons start their school homework while Theo, Constance, Savas Senior and I move to the restaurant’s kitchen. I fiddle them a few tunes, lightening the mood as we wait for the few customers who will later show up. Savas tells me about growing up in an Italian colony and speaks well of Mussolini. Unlike the oppressive Ottoman Turks who ruled before them, the Italians built schools and provided public services. I wonder if there can be such a thing as a benevolent master or if it’s just a matter of comparing before and after. Savas says they are still well-regarded by most of the local population for what they did to improve living conditions on the island.
Theo has given up on getting a bank loan in this frozen business climate and has asked some of his friends if he can borrow money – the bridge loan he needs is about $15,000. Financial pressure is widespread, and the responses have so far been negative, but he is hopeful that a Belgian friend will come through. His cellphone rings while we are chatting. Theo looks down at the phone and nervously says “The Belgian.” I watch his expression change from anxious to dejected, though politely so - “Yes, I understand; things are bad all over,” he says.
I think about loaning him the money he needs, though he has never even remotely hinted at that. Since savings are paying for my extended travels, I try to avoid splurges (except for concert tickets and food); but I can afford to help out this new friend if I want to. They say if you loan money to a friend, you lose both money and friend. I vividly remember dealing with it once earlier in life. Several years before his desperate call, I had been the best man at Fred’s wedding in Canada, but his life there had fallen apart. He was divorced and unable to support his kids on a low-paying job as a public radio stringer. We had been close during our year together as Vista Volunteers in San Francisco and occasionally phoned each other, but it had been over a year since we last spoke. I felt his humiliation as I listened to Fred’s plea over the phone for several thousand dollars to catch up on his rent and child support. I was just starting my family life and careful about money. Say “No” and a friendship probably dies; say “Yes” and probably never see the money again. My solution seemed rational at the time – I gave him a few hundred dollars as a gift, telling him I didn’t want to put our friendship under the pressure of a loan. He took it, but it wasn’t enough to make a real difference in his situation. In retrospect, it seems more a cop-out by someone not willing to take a chance on a former close friend.
There’s no request now, and I’ve only known him for a matter of days, yet I spend time thinking about loaning Theo the money. He’s extremely simpatico, and I instinctively trust him. But I don’t do it, instead mumbling something about wishing I could help. I once again realize I’m not as generous as I feel I should be, but don’t feel guilty enough to do something about it. Maybe that’s another reason why I didn’t last as a Catholic.
I spend my last night on Rhodes in the kitchen area of the restaurant, drinking, eating and chatting with them as they wait for customers. The tempo is still relaxed and our farewell embraces warm. The next day, I leave an island more in bloom, a gentler wind carrying the fresh scents of fruit trees and wildflowers bursting with color. Hordes of tourists will soon descend, and I am glad that I arrived too early.
11. Crete
My next stop is Crete, the southernmost Greek island, grantor to European antiquity of its first great civilization, the Minoan, more than four thousand years ago. The sun is more genial now, warming the terrace of a sea view hotel room I have negotiated a good price for, the result more of pre-season vacancies than negotiating skill. The terrace overlooks a lovely deserted beach I will spend some time on later.
But the better quality time is again passed in places where food is served or sold. When I first arrive in a new town, I like to find restaurants where there are mainly local people eating. An empty restaurant or one filled with tourists are both good indicators to go elsewhere, but it’s only a little after seven-thirty, too early by Greek standards, and the tourist season still hasn’t begun, so I am adrift. The town is Sitia, 8,000 strong; the menu displayed outside one of its restaurants has some interesting dishes and an even more interesting owner/chef. She sits down across from me when the server relays my question about an ingredient in one of her dishes.
“I don’t know how you say it in English, but it’s a spice we often use here.
“Is it a traditional dish of the island?”
“No, it’s a variation. I’m from here, but I lived many years in other countries and also traveled a lot. I like to take food ideas I get from other cuisines and blend them with Cretan dishes.”
“Is that what they call fusion cooking?”
“You could call it that. I look at what we have fresh at the market and try to come up with good combinations. My ex-husband was head chef in some important restaurants abroad, but I only started really cooking afterwards. When I decided to return here, it was to open this restaurant. My name is Melina. And yours?”
She is fiftyish, with both the look and sound of someone simmered and well seasoned. I take her suggestion on what to order, and she sits again at my table after I begin to eat.
“Your food is delicious. I, too, like to travel, and I also play music. We share a similar method – I pick up musical ideas as I move about, then try to mix them into my music.”
“Yes, putting it together can be so exciting! It doesn’t always work, but when it does… Ah!”
Our discussion of process is animated. We both note similarities in approach despite our different fields, and how some of the lessons learned apply to life in general. Her enthusiasm reminds me of Giovanna. Eventually, her work responsibilities call her back to the kitchen, but she returns at the end of my meal with a complimentary glass of champagne, and we chat a little more before I leave for a concert of local folk music.
Several days later, a long bus ride winds through steep mountains with striking views below of coastal Crete and its eternal sea, bringing me to the opposite end of the island. Chania is a bustling port city, strategically enough located to attract Venetian domination starting in the 1400’s, followed by conquering Turks who ruled until 1898. The big battle tonight, though, is between the two best professional soccer teams in Greece, a much-anticipated match-up from Athens shown only on a premium television service. Responding to my expression of interest, the owner of my b&b tells me the whole country will be watching. The best place for me to see it will be at one of the outdoor restaurants the Greeks call tavernas. We are in the heart of the old city, and many of them are nearby, touristy, he warns, but with large tv screens set up to show the game. Tourist season has already started here, so I arrive an hour early; but there is not an empty chair to be found in any of them, the usual tourist groups supplanted by excited, abnormally prompt Greeks willing to put up with mediocre food to watch the game. The crowd is loud, the quality of the soccer excellent. I hover on the fringes of the tavernas, alternately looking at the game and for a place to sit and get some food. A single seat finally opens up during half-time; I enjoy the atmosphere, but resolve to find a better place to eat my next meal.
A different though equally arresting atmosphere prevails on the national holiday celebrating Greece’s independence from Turkey. There is a huge parade of modest means – the bulk of the marchers are groups of high school students, each group colorfully dressed in different folk costumes. Loudspeakers line the parade route, booming out a recorded drumbeat for the young marchers that is often out of phase with the drums being imprecisely played by some of the groups. Any connection, though, between a drumbeat and the hitting of foot on pavement is at best tenuous, so it doesn’t really matter. Only two bands break up the seemingly endless line of marching high schoolers, but the large crowd lining the parade route seems as much engaged by patriotism as by the prospect of waving to a marching son or daughter. The procession passes before a reviewing stand of local dignitaries. At its center are the three local chiefs: the mayor, the bishop and the commander of the nearby armed forces base, a triumvirate demonstrating how constant the power centers – political, religious and military – have remained since the earliest civilizations.
I’m hungry afterwards and go down to the port area, passing by the tourist traps and continuing on for awhile, stopping when I find a small fish taverna filled with Greeks. The waiter adds a small table to the outdoor eating area for me and brings me a simple meal so good that I return the next afternoon. It is much quieter now that the big holiday is over. I recognize my waiter from yesterday repairing nets on the fishing boat docked just across from the taverna and ask him if this is his day off.
“No, no days off,” he says in halting English. “My brother and me, this is our boat. When we not fishing, we work in the taverna. Ours, too, me and my brother. I remember you here yesterday.”
“Now I understand why the fish tastes so fresh! I’m back for more. How often do you go fishing?”
“Every morning when no rain. Early! Then we come to the taverna. Lots more to do. Nets break, too. I fix this one.” He smiles as he recounts his grueling schedule; a few teeth are chipped, his face fittingly lined, his stout body well-weathered. “Where are you from?”
“Italy now, but I was born in America. I’ve been in Crete since last week; really enjoying the music and food. How long have you and your brother owned the taverna?”
“My father bought it during the war. From the Germans. Just before they left. Bad people. They took over everything. My father was okay. He made no trouble. Just a fisherman. Just a small space here. The Germans had supplies, weapons in all these.” He points to the hillside behind us into which a half dozen vaulted excavations had been made, once apparently housing munitions. The one on the end has served since then as the kitchen and small interior space of his family’s taverna; the other vaults appear to be port warehouses. I wonder if his father had problems validating his title to property purchased from Nazi usurpers, but he has already changed the subject to his boat.
“Our boat is old, but it runs good; has a good engine – Italian, not German,” he says proudly. “My motorscooter over there – that’s Italian, too.”
As we continue our conversation, I learn that his name is Niko. He pulls some fotos out of his pocket and beams with satisfaction as he shows me the one on top – he’s on this same dock, standing between his boat and a huge fish.
“I caught it – worth 1,800 euros in the market!”
“Wow – that must have made you happy!”
“Yes!” He shuffles through the fotos. “Here, look at these – my family.”
“Do any of them work here besides you and your brother?”
“Come – I show you.”
Niko brings me inside the restaurant to the kitchen and introduces me to his sister, who is cooking, and his niece, busy prepping vegetables. They don’t speak English, but we exchange well-meaning smiles. A little later they bring to my sun-soaked table a perfectly grilled fish, side dishes and some local white wine, followed by a complimentary dessert and drink – like the Italians, my host says it helps digestion. As in Rhodes, I return several more times, prompting a question in my mind. Is traveling in this phase of life more about food and conversing with its purveyors than about the adventure-seeking of before? As a young traveler, I was always looking for the exciting and the new, even in the next day’s eating place. Now when I find something good, I return there to savor the flavors & the people. Is it a preference for depth rather than variety of experience? For comfort rather than risk? Adventure becomes muted, the senses bridled as the mind moves the body away from the center.
The market is the birthplace of all the world’s economies. Central marketplaces are great to explore because the competition among the small but specialized merchants within them normally keeps prices low, and the merchandise is usually indigenous and colorfully-displayed. Panatagios does not own a restaurant, though one just down the corridor from his wine shop serves freshly prepared local dishes listed on a chalkboard that only speaks Greek. After the first of several lunches there, I stroll about his shop and get his recommendation for a good wine from a nearby vineyard, one that will go with the cheese, olives, fruit and bread I have already bought from his neighbors for my dinner tonight.
I return the next day to tell him how much I enjoyed his selection and he invites me to join him for a coffee in the café opposite him. We quickly identify a mutual passion for folk music and I ask him where I can hear good lyra players in the city. The lyra is a small, pear-shaped fiddle that is bowed in an upright seated position. It is the most vigorous surviving form of the medieval Byzantine lyra, a progenitor of the European violin, its three strings vibrating at the very center of Cretan traditional music for centuries. I heard a great concert in Sitia and am eager for more.
“Psarantonis is playing in one of the local clubs later this week,” he says. “He has been one of Crete’s most popular musicians for decades now. Doesn’t have the voice he once had, but still plays well; he’s almost seventy. The best of the younger lyra players is Nikos Zoidakis. I think he’s performing tonight, but I’m not sure where.”
He looks in the paper, finds the listing and tells me the club, then shows me on my map how to walk there. By now, I know not to take the advertised start time seriously and arrive an hour late. It will be still another hour before Zoidakis enters, though not yet to play. Instead, he makes the rounds of the tables, shaking hands and talking with his many fans that pack the large room. It is mainly a young crowd that dances to his energetic fiddling and singing, his compositions traditional in style but with updated touches - a modern drum set reinforces the up-tempo rhythms generated by the lyra, bouzoukis and guitars. Audience members send up drinks for the musicians; some buy trays of flower petals from pretty waitresses who then shower the players with them. Totally absorbed in their music-making and interactions with the crowd, the musicians play on for two hours without a break. I don’t know how long that continues because I can no longer breathe the thick smoke that impersonates air in the club. The atmosphere is intoxicating, but the air is toxic. My delighted ears sacrifice themselves for the sake of my burning eyes and lungs.
A few nights later, the atmosphere is different but the smoke equally oppressive. The playing of Psaradonis is more restrained, the exuberance inherent in lyra music tempered by age and the audience’s obvious reverence for the shaggy gray master. As before, the star moves slowly about the room before playing, chatting and shaking hands on his way to the stage. Virtually everyone in the room smokes heavily, and the servers spend almost as much time emptying ashtrays as bringing drinks and food. Psaradonis not only breathes this air but also chain-smokes through his performance, and it is no wonder that his voice has succumbed to decades of this doubled form of abuse. The music started only eighty minutes late, but the air is fetid and I am driven out less than an hour later.
The next day I take Panatagious to the café where we first became acquainted. I tell him what happened in the music clubs and how nice it was to see so many young people enjoying their traditional folk music, dancing & singing. He chuckles quietly behind the smoke curling upward from his mouth.
“I’m glad you enjoyed the music, and yes, our folk music is also our popular music. It usually gets better as the night goes on, sometimes until 3 or 4 in the morning. Too bad you couldn’t stay later, but the smoking - it’s like that all over Greece. We know it’s unhealthy but so many of us have the habit. I like to smoke. It would be useless for the government to try to stop it. We are anarchists, like the Italians. That’s why dictators are part of our history. Isn’t it ironic! The birthplace of democracy and the land of republican Rome; they both have provided a home for anarchists and dictators this past century. But they need each other. Things get too far out of hand and down comes the iron fist. I grew up with the generals in charge, but afterwards, the socialists weren’t much better. Too much corruption. That’s why we are so cynical.”
“I’ve noticed that in both countries, but why so much cynicism? You and the Italians are the products of a sun-bathed, fertile land surrounded by a marvelous, life-giving sea. Look at your incredible achievements, what you have given to all humanity!”
Panatagios leans towards me.
“Peter, we were once a brilliant diamond, shining a greater truth than what came later, a truth based on reason and experience, not religion. We looked around us and were curious about what we saw; we asked questions, used our minds, debated the opinions we arrived at, expressed what we felt in our art. Look at the depictions of the afterlife in the art of the ancient Greeks – you see grand feasting, food and wine, music and sex. Do you prefer being among saints with halos, venerating a bearded God?”
“I’d much rather be there with the Greeks than the Christians, but the whole concept of surviving this life strikes me as wishful thinking. If we have led a good life and had some impact on other people, our spirit may live on through them; other than that, it’s over when we die. The universe is filled with cold, dead space that doesn't care about us or our gods. The earliest humans had it right – if we’re going to worship anything, it should be the sun. That’s the true source of all that lives. Pantheism also makes sense to me. Why is monotheism viewed as such a great cultural advance?”
“Yes, I've wondered about that, too,” he interjected. "What do you think?"
“Perhaps it was a necessary intermediate step to give us confidence in ourselves as human beings, to allow belief in our ability to shape our own destiny," I speculated. “We substituted a father figure who resembled us for a superstitious belief in a strange multiplicity of supernatural powers. But it’s still superstition. Science should enable us to move beyond an anthropomorphic conception of god and return to where we correctly started – being in awe of nature! That's the source of everything. Religions have it upside down – it’s humans that create gods. They do it to escape death, to explain the great mysteries. But meaning and values don’t come off a shelf in packages any more. They are created, not adopted. If we care, we struggle to develop them through the way we live, learning from experience and reflection. Life as a human on this lush planet is a unique opportunity. We should do the best we can while we’re here.”
“I don’t believe in an afterlife either," says Panatagios. "But I understand why most people do. The ancient Greek vision of paradise was more true to our human nature. How magnificent we were, and look how far we have fallen! Think about it - centuries of being a relic, revered but long humbled, a cultural fountain whose ancient waters have absorbed many tears and much blood."
“Well, you’ve seen it all, like the Italians –the best and worst of what we can do. As I think about it, how can you not be cynical?... But who knows how to enjoy life better than Greeks and Italians?”
“You see – they go together, too! If only our politicians governed as well as we manage to enjoy life. But corruption – the Italians also have a serious problem. The politicians in both countries have too much influence in the economy. That means bribes and kick-backs to open doors.”
“Yes,” I say, “even for blue-collar jobs in Italy. My cousin was hired as a city bus driver in L’Aquila because his father knew a local politician who used to live in their village. This guy’s party controlled a share of city transit jobs; it was based on the last election results. Money was scarce at home, so my uncle gave him two prosciuttos, several salamis and a big wheel of cheese he had made. Highly valued peasant currency! Did a similar deal for one of his other sons, too. It’s hard to get any kind of job there without connections.”
“Same here in Greece, probably worse. There are so few opportunities; so many young people without jobs.”
“I’ve noticed that a lot of sons in Italy take the same career path as their fathers. What about here?”
“Yes, that too. And do you know why so many of us do what our parents did? We are stuck! Not enough social mobility. My father had a small shop and helped me get this one going. It’s hard enough to get by doing what your father did. Doing something new, with no personal contacts? Too frustrating, almost impossible! Too many bureaucrats looking out for their own relatives and friends. I know you have lots of bureaucrats in America, too; but you are still enough of a meritocracy to open up opportunities for new people. That’s why so many immigrants still want to go there.”
“True, but connections and family money are important in America, too. You know what makes a big difference? A more decentralized system of decision-making. That creates more opportunities for new people and new ideas. Like when I tried to become a mediator of court cases. I had studied mediation in college, knew it had been used for a long time to reach agreements in labor-management bargaining; but in our legal system it was virtually non-existent. When I became a lawyer and tried some cases, I saw how hard the battles in court were on people; usually very expensive, often emotionally draining. I thought trying to mediate agreements first made sense and was able to start a program in my region’s court system. All I needed was the okay from some local judges. Took less than a year from design to approval to implementation. It worked well and then got copied in other parts of the state. In Italy, a program like that would have taken a decision from the chief judicial authorities in Rome, perhaps even an act of parliament or national implementation. Many years of maneuvering, organizing, getting recommendations.”
“Yes, we need more flexibility. There’s too much centralization of power here in Europe. Our history, our traditions – that’s a heavy weight. Darwin said that it’s not the strongest or the smartest who survive but those most adaptable to change. We have changed too little, at least in our corner of the continent.” He exhales deeply, and then continues, “But we take better care of our people than your country does. Maybe not as much opportunity, but more security. Health care, university education – it’s all free of charge. We have more suffering in our past, maybe that’s why.”
Panatagios lights another cigarette, takes a deep draw, then looks at it and smiles.
“The government tried to stop us from smoking in places like this years ago, but everyone ignored it. Now there’s a new law, but it won’t work. People will still do it. We have lots of laws, but they don’t all get enforced. Who’s going to stop us? The owner? He wants my business, and he probably smokes, too; same for the police. It will never happen here.”
“That’s what they said in Italy, too, when I was a student there. Everyone smoked in movie theaters, just like in your music clubs, and then the government outlawed it. Lots of discussion and dissension in the media. The day the new law went into effect, I went to the movies to see what would happen. About half the people, many of them young soldiers, were smoking before the show even started. After the previews, a message in large print filled the screen, citing the name of the new law and that it was now rigorously forbidden to smoke in the theater. Hooting and whistling filled the room, and even more people lit cigarettes. Lots of guys shouted out ‘Fan culo’ (‘Go fuck yourself’).
“Yes, we understand that expression even here,” he says.
“The movie was one I wanted to see, so I put up with the hazy cloud from my back row seat. But as soon as the movie ended, I hurried to the aisle behind the seats, near the exit, and yelled out ‘Vietato fumare!’ (‘It’s forbidden to smoke!’). Heads turned and the ‘FAN CULO’ screams were instantaneous and raucous. It seemed like I was being hit by a wave. I got out of there fast. But the law started to be enforced after a chaotic beginning. When I came back a few years later, no one smoked in the movies.”
Panatagios smiles as he takes another drag and shakes his head. “Not here, my friend. I don’t think so.”
12. Give Us a Tune
“There’s another place you would probably enjoy,” says Panatagios. “It’s a café’ where good local musicians go just for the fun of playing together; our traditional music – I think it’s almost every night.”
The next evening I go there with my fiddle, expecting to hear some lively music, hoping there will be a way for me to join in. There are less than ten people in the place when I first sit down to order a draft of Greek beer, but two of them take out instruments and begin playing in a corner of the room, soon after joined by a lyra player. In between pieces they chat and occasionally laugh; the café owner brings them some food and drink, then joins them in a song. I catch their eye and smile, talking briefly with the owner when he next passes by my table. These are traditional melodies of Crete, he explains, but the verses of the songs are improvised and conversational. He notices the fiddle case next to me and asks if I play but doesn’t ask me to join in or play anything. That’s the way it stays – no opportunities, no invitations. I enjoy listening for another hour or so as more people come in, then a little disappointment mixes with a lot of smoke to push me out the door and back to my bed.
"Come on lad, give us a tune.”
With a fiddle slung over my shoulder, I had just walked through the door of the only pub in a small town at the southern end of the Scottish highlands. The conservatory school year had ended, and I was traveling around northern Europe, not due back in Florence for another two months. Much of the American fiddle music I love comes directly from Scots-Irish folk music, and I wanted to explore those roots. “Go to the pubs!” I was told, and here I was, in my first pub, surprised by the immediacy of the invitation. I normally like to get a feel for a new place before deciding how or whether to take some initiative. But I was here to listen and play, so why not jump right in? I had learned a few Scottish tunes back in the states and without premeditation played my favorite among those – “Give the Fiddler a Dram.”
“Look over there, lad. Those are for you,” said the same man, pointing at the bar as I put my fiddle down and acknowledged the applause of those in the pub. Lined up on the bar were some drafts of ale and drams of whiskey. I grabbed one of the ales, held it up and thanked the room.
“Let’s hear another, lad.”
I played a few more tunes, which added to the line of drinks and more importantly resulted in two of the men going behind the bar to get their instruments out. Another asked the bartender for a set of spoons, immediately using them to play some catchy rhythms. I complimented him on his skill, mentioned that spoons also went great with American folk music and asked him to show me how he did it. I couldn’t get the hang of it, but our chat expanded as the other two joined us with their instruments in hand. They asked where I was from, what I was doing; I asked about their folk music, and soon our quartet was being seated at the end of the bar, talking as we tuned up.
The time for playing had arrived, and I hoped I would be able to fit in – I had only been in a few jam sessions before, most of the time feeling inadequate. I was fine playing tunes I already knew, but my first exposure to learning how to play music was reading notes on a staff. That’s the way classical technique had been taught for centuries, and it would take another few decades for classical musicians to appreciate what folk musicians world-wide had understood from the beginning of time – first you learn music by ear, its base in the senses, not through the eye. That can come later. How many other obvious truths are we academically trained people overlooking? The originator eventually becomes conservative, so it should not surprise us that change had to come from outside Europe. It is curious, however, that it came not from America, the innovative child of Europe, but from Japan, a tradition-bound foreign land which was relatively new to western classical music and then exported the Suzuki method to transform it.
Fortunately, I was not totally anchorless among these genial Scotsmen. When I was drawn to learn American fiddle music as an adult, I got some excellent advice – learn the tunes by ear from recordings, not from the book called “One Thousand Fiddle Tunes” that I had bought as my entry vehicle. “The music is in the phrasing, the articulation,” a guitarist friend told me. “You can’t learn that from notes on a page.” It was painfully slow, listening again and again to learn a tune phrase by phrase. Eventually I got better at it, but not to the point where I felt comfortable improvising in a jam session. That’s a much more advanced set of skills.
But my new companions were accommodating, asking me to play any Scottish tunes I knew, and they would play along. “Flowers of Edinburgh” and the few others I had learned got us off to a felicitous start, but what next? I knew several Irish tunes, and was pleased to see that the shared Celtic culture enabled them to recognize and join in on almost all of them, though a few had picked up different names crossing the Irish Sea. The pub owner kept sending over more drinks and his wife brought us some sandwiches. I told my new friends I’d like to hear them play more Scottish folk music, and that I’d do my best to play along, which I quietly did, avoiding major mistakes by watching the guitarist and playing notes in the chords his left hand was forming. We played for almost an hour, and I stayed til closing time, chatting with the many people who came up afterwards.
Hunter Donaldson, one of the musicians in our group, invited me home for a final dram of scotch and more talk about folk music and the Scottish independence movement. He was both the head greenskeeper and pro of the village golf course. I thus found myself not only back for tea the next day, but also fumbling my way through a round of golf with his eldest son, using Hunter’s clubs while he tended the greens. His son was a bright university senior who shared his father’s congeniality as well as his fervor for an independent Scotland. Many of the Scots I met shared this sentiment, and as I hitch-hiked around the country, the song I heard most on the radio was “Flower of Scotland.” Though it was written less than a decade before, it had already become the unofficial national anthem, a stirring appeal to throw off English rule as they had done temporarily in 1314. The blending of melancholy and determination in its beautiful melody fully displayed music’s power to grab our emotions; despite not having a drop of Scottish blood, I too felt moved as I sang along with them:
O Flower of Scotland, when will we see your like again
That fought and died for your wee bit hill and glen.
And stood against him, proud Edward's army,
And sent him homeward to think again.
On Hunter’s advice, I next went to Blairgowrie, in the heart of the northeastern region known for Scottish fiddle music, the rest of the country being somewhat more partial to the bagpipes. A friend of his there introduced me to Jimmy Moncur, an amiable old farmer with a passion for the fiddle, who invited me to pitch my tent by the little lake on his farm. I spent a very pleasant few days there chatting with Jimmy and his wife over tea or her home-cooked, home-grown meals, hiking around the beautiful country-side, taping some of Jimmy’s recordings of Scottish fiddle music, and getting advice from him on how to play the strathspey, a form of Scottish dance music that I took an immediate liking to.
One evening Jimmy’s son drove me to the next farmhouse for a session of Appalachian mountain music with an American guitarist. He lived there with his wife and kids during the half of each month when he wasn’t up in the North Sea working on one of the big oil rigs. It was hard, dirty work, and he often felt cold and lonely up there, but he earned a multiple of what he had been making in the States. When an American friend already there told him about a job opening on the rig, he took it and soon after moved his family to the house down the road from Jimmy’s farm. His plan was to save as much as he could for a few years and then go back home.
On my last afternoon in town, I went to a session in one of the pubs led by the man Jimmy said was the premier fiddle-player in the area. It was a hard-drinking crowd; the fiddler was smashed but able to give me some tips on playing strathspeys, slurredly explaining “I’m the best around at these.” He then had me play a few American tunes, with the rest of the band joining in while the crowd hooted and danced. An enormous and thoroughly drunk truck-driver grabbed my hand in a bone-crushing grip and dragged me over to the bar to buy me a pint. That was fine, though a bit painful. But he did it twice more as I played a few more tunes and chatted with some other people. When I saw him headed in my direction a fourth time, I decided I had had enough of his unusually aggressive hospitality. My hand hurt, and I had already had more than enough to drink, so I kept a few steps ahead of him, smiling and waving to the others as I threaded my way through the thick crowd and slipped out the door.
Hitch-hiking was a common way to get around then, and my fiddle helped me get a lot of rides. It couldn’t have been the music because drivers in cars usually wouldn’t be able to hear it before stopping, and sometimes the fiddle was in its case. If I wasn’t playing, I made sure my fiddle-shaped case was on display at my side. Just about everybody likes music; perhaps an instrument is proof of a shared interest or makes a person seem safer, though most people weren’t afraid of hitch-hikers until later. It was an instant conversation starter, and conversations could be of remarkable quality when your driver was interesting, from a different culture and sharing a small space with you for perhaps many hours. You’ll almost certainly never see each other again, so if you get into personal subjects, why hold anything back? It’s a general attitude about traveling encounters that I find liberating.
Once, in central Europe, a distinguished looking elderly gentleman gave me a ride that lasted all day. Our conversation started off conventionally enough, but it became increasingly apparent that this man knew a lot about many things. He was a successful businessman from Austria, twice married, who also had a keen appreciation for music, art, philosophy, history and the wonders of nature. From the experiences he recounted, it was obvious that he had traveled widely and tasted deeply of life’s pleasures. I was still trying to figure out who I was, who I wanted to be. As morning turned to afternoon and then to evening, the more this wise man revealed of himself, the more I saw him as an exemplar, a model of a life well-lived. I spoke freely with him throughout the day about my interests and ideas, but the sun had already set when I told him about this strong impression he had made on me, that I saw him as someone to emulate. We were approaching the place where I was getting off when his tone changed dramatically from self-assured to plaintive as he told me of his one great regret, that he never had children. Yes, he appreciated these other aspects of his life but could not escape this feeling of an overwhelming void, that it was all pointless, pleading with me not to make the same mistake he had. Before I met him, I felt I would probably eventually become a father; afterwards, as I looked in his eyes, shook his hand and stepped out into the night, I had no doubt.
Sometimes hitching a ride would not only get you from one place to another with good company; it could also lead to a serendipitous adventure. That’s the way it was with Denise and Laura, two young nurses from Switzerland on a motor trip through Great Britain. They worked at the same hospital in Zurich and were on a two week vacation together. I was fiddling on the side of the road, across from the small bed & breakfast I had checked out of a short time before, when they pulled over and invited me to hop into their rented car. I wasn’t headed anyplace in particular, and neither were they, other than riding around the Scottish highlands for a few days. We drove through lovely mountain scenery, stopped for some lunch, and then went to Loch Ness. We hiked along the slope above the lake but didn’t see any sign of the huge water monster whose supposed sightings have long drawn people to the area. Later on we took a break by another lake, and the girls danced merrily while I fiddled some tunes.
We pulled into a small village as it got dark and found two rooms available in a b&b. A nearby pub provided us with a hearty dinner and news of a folk concert that evening in the town hall. The fiddler and pianist drank throughout their program, in the second half getting so plastered that they couldn’t remember the names of the tunes which they nonetheless played remarkably well, perhaps the result of customarily performing in that condition. I was even more impressed with this accomplishment after the concert when we joined the locals in thanking the musicians and I saw close-up how glassy and bloodshot the fiddler’s eyes were.
Next morning at breakfast I thanked the Swiss nurses and politely said I didn’t want to interfere with their vacation plans, but they insisted that I continue along with them, exactly what I was hoping to hear. They were lively, smart and pretty, especially Denise; both spoke excellent English, with a car to boot! We took turns driving and, after narrowly avoiding a few head-on collisions, began reminding each other to stay on the left. In one town, we came across a highland games competition and spent the day there enjoying the bagpiping, dancing and drumming events. A group of large, beefy men in kilts competed in tossing the caber, a heavy wooden pole almost twenty feet long. Since this event grew out of throwing logs to provide a bridge across chasms, the scoring was based more on accuracy than distance. We later found a place to stay and spent a pleasant evening in the local pub. They were both so fresh and spontaneous, so much fun to be with, especially Denise, with her playful manner and impish smile. She told me she had studied the violin but played it badly, then gamely gave poof of her self-evaluation by scratching out a Swiss folk tune when I handed her mine. They talked about returning to England for their final week of vacation after one more day in the highlands.
We drove through some more imposing scenery the next day, then pulled into a small village near the island of Skye. Some trees had home-made posters advertising a barn dance later that afternoon, a dance that would bring some underwater currents up to the surface. We found a good band plus a friendly crowd there and joined in the dancing, trying to copy the movements of the amused locals, benefiting from the impromptu lessons they gave us. I danced with both girls but was specially drawn to Denise, a feeling that had been growing from the first day on; we really clicked together during the gay gordons, a spirited circle dance that was easy to pick up and earned us applause from the others in our circle when it came to its rousing conclusion. That was a short-lived triumph, because our legs got entangled during the more complicated dance which came next, sending us crashing to the ground. Our eyes and hands held each other as we got up, laughing; I gently pulled her closer, and her unspoken response confirmed what I had hoped. After a few more dances, we walked out of sight behind the barn, kissed and wrapped our arms around each other, our bodies pressed together. I asked her if she would spend the last week of her vacation traveling with me.
“I’d like that.” She paused, her smile fading as she exhaled, then shook her head and continued, “But that wouldn’t be fair to Laura. We planned this vacation together. She senses what is happening. She told me during the dance. I couldn’t do that to her.”
“But you’re feeling the same way I am. She’ll understand. Please think about it, talk with her.”
Denise paused again, looking down before meeting my earnest gaze. “I want to spend time with you, but it can’t be now. Later on, some other place, but not now. Laura and I have been friends since school, we work in the same hospital – I can’t leave her; that would be wrong.”
I hoped she would change her mind, but the next morning they left for England. The three of us had a cordial breakfast, chatting about the good times we had during our days together, then exchanging contact information and hugs before their departure.
The day was appropriately overcast. I missed Denise, feeling a dull ache on my side where I had imagined she would be. When you travel alone, there’s more room for adventure and romance, but also more loneliness, sometimes lots of it, especially when prospects are aroused that then fail to materialize. I took a long walk, consoling myself by playing my fiddle on the hillside. Feeling particularly alone that night in my tent, I thought about her and what had happened. For me, it would have been an easy decision. Years before, when I was traveling in Latin America with my best friend from college, I met a dark-haired Costa Rican senorita I wanted to pursue and so suggested that he go on without me. I’d catch up with him later in Columbia - didn’t think twice about it; and my friend didn’t mind, though the slight look of envy when he told me that was replaced by a slight look of relief when I told him the following week that it hadn’t worked out.
Was the difference a gender thing? A cultural disparity? Good manners versus bad? Denise was right – there would be a time and place but it wasn’t now. That would come seven months later when I went to see her in Zurich, a visit filled with fun and tenderness. Instead, now was a time for me to learn something from her example about the meaning of friendship and loyalty. Her decision saddened me, but I admired her for it.
Soon after, I decided to head for Ireland, and several hitched rides got me from the highlands to a little town in southern Scotland. It was late when the last ride dropped me off, and the few bed & breakfast places had all their lights out, their owners obviously asleep for the night. One guy still up asked if I had a tent and advised me to pitch it in the public park just outside town. He didn’t think the police would mind, adding that they never went out there at night anyway. So that’s what I did. Around 3 AM, I was brusquely awakened by a loud announcement – “Come out – this is the police!” – accompanied by vigorous tapping on my tent. I saw the shadows of two men with flashlights and a big police dog, snorting menacingly as it pulled tight on the leash, its head inches from mine, separated only by a thin tent wall. I was out in record time and began profusely apologizing for being there, explaining that I had arrived late and -
One of them cut me off, saying they just wanted to ask me a few questions and see my identification. A nearby home had been broken into a half hour before and they were investigating. After determining that I wasn’t the burglar and that I hadn’t seen or heard anything, they very politely thanked me.
"Sorry to wake you up, lad,” one of them said as they walked away.
A few years before, the words had been much different. “No, putting it back is your problem. We can go through your stuff and leave it on the ground. That case was just decided here in California – look it up, counselor!” The policeman who had emptied my pack after finishing the body search said this with a sneer on his face that also found expression in his voice. I was hitchhiking back to San Francisco with some other guys in a conservative part of the state. The highway patrolmen had pulled over suddenly, checked our ID and asked what we did. I stupidly responded “law student,” naively thinking that might get us better treatment. I asked why they were searching us - we were only hitchhiking. The same cop said there had been a robbery nearby and they were investigating. As he said the words, his voice had the sound of repetition, his gestures the look of routine. This was the end of the 1960’s but the beginning of the bitter culture wars we have by now adjusted to. It had the intensity and violence of all sharp breaks; there was suspicion and mistrust on each side. I didn’t believe him.
“Who’s looking for him, and why?” asked the diminutive guy in the fisherman’s cap. It was late afternoon, and this middle-aged man and the burly younger guy standing next to him were the only people around. I had made it to a village in Wales not too far from the ferry to Ireland thanks to a ride from a rugged Welsh truck driver whose paranoia and cold-blooded tales of his time as a mercenary in the Congo kept me from expressing opinions about anything; he was not someone I wanted to risk antagonizing in any way. I felt relieved as I stepped down from his truck and saw these two friendly-looking guys engaged in animated conversation in front of the pub, interrupting them to ask if either of them knew Vic Neeps.
“I play in a band with some friends of Vic in Florence, Italy,” I responded to the small guy’s question. “They asked me to look him up.”
“Buzz and Karin?”
“Yes, how did you know?”
“Because I’m Vic!” he said mischievously. “Ah, they’re such good folks, and it’s been a few years since I last saw them. Let’s go in for a pint. How are they?”
The three of us took turns buying rounds in the pub over the next couple of hours. Vic was an artist and sculptor who had left his professor’s post a while back for the more independent country life he now led. His friend Gareth was leaving the next day for an eight month world tour playing tuba in a jazz band. Like his instrument, he was large, round and brassy, though with a reddish-brown beard. Vic called his wife, then invited me home for dinner, after which we went to a hard-drinking going-away party for Gareth that seemed to have a healthy percentage of the village in attendance. Gareth’s booming laugh got heartier and more frequent with each of the many shots that he downed. Vic had Gareth and me try a special whisky he had brought along for the occasion, pronouncing it “so smooth, it walks down your throat in velvet slippers.”
“You didn’t just make that up now, did you?” I asked.
“Yes,” he said matter-of-factly. “Why?”
“Because then you’re a poet, too, and I hope you don’t mind if I use that line myself.”
“Whenever the occasion calls for it, and I hope there are many,” he said with a twinkle in his eye.
Vic proved to be a man of many talents, banging out some decent-sounding guitar accompaniments to the tunes I fiddled as the party moved into full swing. His wife Phyllis, a research scientist, was as witty and amiable as Vic. When we got home, we continued talking long into the night, and I slept soundly on their couch. After breakfast, Vic and I picked up a red-eyed Gareth, who kept holding his head, trying unsuccessfully to gently shake the headache out. We parted ways at the train station, Gareth eastward-bound to join his bandmates in London for the start of their tour, I headed west for the ferry to Dublin.
13. Rambling Around the Emerald Isle
The Royal Dublin Horse Show is apparently the social event on Ireland’s yearly calendar and thus attracts not only horse enthusiasts but prominent socialites as well as others wishing to be seen with or noticed by them. I unfortunately timed my arrival with the take-over of the city by this well-heeled herd. Contemplating a quick departure, I went to the Comhaltas building, the headquarters of the Irish traditional music society, to pick up information on their folk music festivals before taking off.
That turned out to be a felicitous move for a number of reasons. They had some guest rooms upstairs, one of which they let me rent on a b&b basis for a few days. The friendly people who worked there told me August might be a bad time to be in Dublin, but it was the best time of year for Irish traditional music. The local and county competitions would be starting next week, culminating at month’s end in the national championships, the Fleadh Cheoil (Irish for “Festival of Music”). This year it was to be held in Buncrana, a town near the border with Northern Ireland, close to Derry, the site of recent violent battles in the ongoing war between Catholics and Protestants there. The choice of location was deliberate, the hope being that the shared musical heritage would help calm tensions in the region. The week before the festival, Comhaltas holds a traditional music school for Ireland’s most talented young musicians, taught by the country’s best, many of them former champions. Back then they also allowed some foreigners to attend for a small fee, so I immediately signed up.
On a couple of evenings during my stay in Dublin, there were lively music sessions in the Comhaltas basement pub to whet my appetite for what was coming up. One night I was able to get a ticket to the Abbey Theater’s 50th anniversary production of Sean O’Casey’s “The Plough and the Stars.” The play deals with characters caught up in the early stages of the Irish civil war; and it felt eerie stepping out of the theater into an Ireland still struggling with the problems left unresolved by that bloody conflict. The play caused riots when first presented because of what some saw as its cynical view of nationalist heroics, particularly in its treatment of the war’s impact on the poor. I thought back to my conversation in L’Aquila with Zio Domenico. Though they probably had never heard of O’Casey or his play, my relatives who had lived through World War II had a similar view of the Italian partisans whom history would later judge to be heroes.
The Comhaltas people told me that the best place to hear traditional music played in its natural settings was in the western part of the country. So, I took a bus to the outskirts of Dublin and pointed my thumb in that direction. My first encounter with the west, however, was not with its music but as a pawn in a high-stakes, long-running family soap opera.
David, who set it all in motion, was the youngest son of the socially prominent O’Leary family, which ritually met every August at their summer estate on the west coast. He was driving there after attending the Royal Dublin Horse Show, saw me fiddling by the side of the road and offered me a lift in his convertible. David was an engaging conversationalist. Family contacts and high grades had landed him a job in a prestigious Dublin law firm after his recent graduation from Ireland’s top law school, so our conversation quickly shifted from music to our experiences working in the staid world of corporate law. He was the first Irishman I met who spoke with a British accent, the sound of his otherwise deep voice modulated by being pushed through a slightly clenched nose. When I asked him about the horse show, he recounted meeting some interesting people through his girlfriend, matter-of-factly adding that she was the prime minister’s daughter. He seemed intrigued by my efforts to mix together such disparate interests as music and law, questioning me extensively about both. A few hours later when we arrived at the family estate, he said he’d like to invite me to stay over but first had to make sure it would be alright with Father.
As I stood before his elderly father, whose girth slightly displaced our handshake, I heard myself described as a lawyer from the United States, a graduate of the Harvard Law School, currently vacationing in Ireland, enjoying its music; a short time later, I was making myself comfortable in one of the guest rooms. I told David I was puzzled by the way he presented me to his father, since I viewed myself primarily as a musician during this phase of life.
“Yes, you made that clear during the ride out; but I know Father. One does what one has to,” he responded with a chuckle. “You do like it here, don’t you?”
Deception was only one of the games played in this fascinating family. Various forms and degrees of humiliation were also occasionally practiced. The main character was clearly Father, a bespectacled 70 year-old, one of Ireland’s leading surgeons and a complete tyrant in his personal life. Mother was a colorless appendage, but their children were a collection of brilliant and superficially successful people, with chronic streaks of alcoholism and nervous breakdowns twisting through them. Though there was a veneer of civility in the family members’ interactions with one another, the occasional cutting comment and the sarcasm in their humor meant that any break in the underlying tension would be temporary.
After dinner, David told Father he was bringing me into town to the pub, which Father said he was sure I’d enjoy. We drove in, and I asked which of the several pubs on the main street we were going to.
“That’s entirely up to you,” he said. “The one thing I’m sure of is that you wouldn’t want to waste time in the only pub my family goes to - dreadfully dull. No music there either.”
We checked a few of the others out, and I wound up trading tunes with some of the local musicians in one. When the pub closed, they invited us to a party at the apartment of one of their friends. The atmosphere was rowdy and the politics radical – many of the men there were Provos, soldiers in the outlawed branch of the Irish Republican Army that was fighting the British in Northern Ireland, down for some R&R. These guys and their girlfriends partied hard and sang a lot of radical songs. I followed my by now usual practice of watching the chords the guitarists were playing and managed to blend in pretty well. David, however, looked very uncomfortable and did not join in the singing. His upper class accent and attitudes gave way here to an Irish brogue and silence whenever the subject turned to politics. Good tactical moves, I thought, but he still seemed out of place.
“Thanks for sticking around,” I said during the drive back.
“I’ve never been to a party like that before,” he said. “Thank you for opening the door to such an interesting experience.”
Of course, we didn’t mention the party the next day at home. Father asked me what kind of work I did in the law; I explained that I had taken a job with a corporate law firm, disliked that type of practice, but it had enabled me to save enough money to study violin now at the Florence Conservatory. Later on, he asked some additional questions about law and music which I also answered honestly. I told him how much I enjoyed playing folk music in the pubs of Scotland and Ireland with local musicians, and that I was financing an extension of my time at the conservatory with money I made busking in Germany and the Scandinavian countries. I saw in his tightly drawn eyes that a judgment was being rendered and suspected that it would not be in my favor.
Father ruled his family in a manner that was rather polite on the surface – he made “suggestions” to the others which they invariably accepted. At one point, a young granddaughter began crying over the loss of a favorite toy and, when she snappily refused his order to stop, was immediately removed from the room, at his suggestion. The grandchildren, in fact, were the only ones who dared to openly confront him, not yet aware that the very substantial wealth he had accumulated was reason enough for accommodating his wishes, lest one be disinherited.
I was not a mere observer during my stay with the O’Learys; I also became a character in their ongoing drama, manipulated by David to strike out at Charles, an older brother that he detested. Like Father, Charles was a doctor, in his mid-thirties, who lived in a nearby town with his wife and two young children. Because his home was so close to the estate, he and his family did not stay there but were expected to visit and also host visiting relatives. Charles was away for a few days, but David drove me to his home one afternoon, explaining that he wanted me to meet Molly, Charles’ wife.
“She’s one of the few in the family whose company I really enjoy,” he said. “I think you’ll like her, too – she’s charming. A bit bored, though, by her life here in the countryside. Bring your fiddle - there’s a good pub near her house where we can go afterwards.”
In fact, Molly was not only charming; she was beautiful, with a slender, tanned body and ingratiating smile. The three of us sat in the living room, chatting over a drink, at one point joined by Brian, an older cousin who was visiting for a few days. When the nanny brought in Molly’s two toddlers, I fiddled a few tunes that sparked them into some delightful free-form dancing which in turn elicited vigorous applause from the adults. Brian left to meet some friends for dinner and pub-hopping. David invited Molly to have dinner with us at the pub down the road, and we spent the next several hours there drinking, eating and laughing amidst a boisterous crowd. One of the men brought over a pint of stout, pointed at my fiddle and asked for a tune; I obliged with several, caught Molly’s eye and returned her smile, then recruited her and David to help me drink the other pints which arrived at our table.
We were all pretty lit when we got back to her home. Molly thanked us, said she was going to check on the kids and with the nanny, then go to bed. I admired her from behind as she walked away and disappeared into her children’s bedroom.
“Didn’t I tell you how nice she was?” David said.
“Umh – you were so right!”
“I think she fancies you,” he continued.
My mind was dulled by drink, but I started making some connections.
“David, what are you doing - Charles is your brother.”
“Charles is a two-faced, alcoholic prick. I can’t stand him. He’s supposed to be on a business trip, but he’s probably off with one of his wenches somewhere. He does that a lot. Don’t worry about Charles - he won’t be back until late tomorrow. ”
I watched David’s nose curl up when he talked about his brother, as if reacting to a stench. Already smitten, I didn’t need any more encouragement at this point, but my colleague in law continued pleading his case, concluding with some practical instructions.
“I heard Molly close her bedroom door a few minutes ago. It’s at the end of that corridor, if you’d like to try your luck. I’ll wait for you here.”
I took a deep breath, walked down the hall and knocked on the door of her bedroom, saying I wanted to ask her something.
She opened the door, the small light next to her bed illuminating the black silk nightgown which made her bronzed body even more alluring. I asked my question without words, leaning forward to kiss her, closing the door behind me as I felt her return my kiss. A minute later we were on the bed, but as I turned the light out, she pulled away.
“Wait. What’s going on here? I don’t really know you. Do you think you can just fiddle a few tunes and then get any girl you want? Is that what you do?”
I wished it were that easy, but didn’t know what to say, other than “No, I just like you.”
Awkward silence. She looked so beautiful in the moonlight. I kissed her again, prepared to leave if she didn’t respond. She kissed me back, deeply, then began stroking my cock. Soon, our naked bodies were moving vigorously about the bed.
As we lay caressing under the covers afterwards, I remembered that David was waiting in the other room for me. I started to tell her I had to leave when we heard some noise outside and saw a shadowy male figure approaching the glass door that connected her bedroom to a terrace.
“Is that Charles?” I asked anxiously, my heart pounding anew.
“Oh God, I hope not!” she said.
I instinctively rolled out of bed to crawl underneath, but lay motionless on the rug when I realized I couldn’t make it under in time, before the figure pressed his face up against the glass, peering inside at Molly in the bed. It was their cousin, Brian, returning from his night of carousing. Was he drunk and forgot where his room was? Could he see me in the dark, lying still and flat on the floor? We heard him enter the house and begin talking with David in the living room. I quickly dressed, kissed Molly goodbye and entered the living room as if returning from the bathroom, having just flushed a toilet there.
“Hi, Brian. How was your evening?” I asked, hoping I sounded calmer than I felt.
After a few minutes of small talk, David and I left to go home.
Brian visited the estate the next day and joined us for lunch. He was talking about his activities the previous evening and at one point made a comment that “Peter looked like he was having fun!”, but left the time frame ambiguous. He and his friends had stopped in our pub for awhile when I was fiddling. Is that what he was referring to? His tone of voice and the look he gave me when he said it, though, told me it would be better not to seek clarification. Someone changed the subject, and I felt relieved.
After three days there, David told me I would have to leave – Father had suggested that I find another place to stay. No, he had not heard anything about Molly and me.
“If Brian decides to disclose that, it will be at a more opportune time, and for different purposes than chasing you away,” David said.
I wondered if he was making a similar calculation.
Father, instead, was displeased that I was the cause of his son’s spending time with coarse people in the wrong pubs and that I had left a productive job in law for the idle pastime of music. Bad influence, case closed, no need to see Father or anyone else before leaving. David apologized as he drove me to the train station.
“Father doesn’t like people that upset his view of how things should be.”
“He’s such an uptight man,” I commented. “Don’t you regret the control he has over your life?”
“He doesn’t know half of what I do in the city. I can’t wait for the old bastard to die, the reading of the will…” He paused and thought for a minute. “There is one thing, though, that I regret about your visit.”
“What’s that?”
“I would have liked to fuck you.”
I decided not to seek clarification on that comment, too. Perhaps he was bisexual; was that the half Father didn’t know about? If he meant it in a nasty figurative sense, why tell me? No - David struck me as a basically decent guy, struggling with a bad upbringing and negative role models, trapped by his father’s money in a suffocating social environment, a smart young man trying to figure out, like the rest of us, how to live his life. I think he wanted to break out of what he was in, but his fascination with what he labeled my ”detachment” and some very common sense observations I made about trying to live on your own terms indicated he was stuck inside pretty deep. Perhaps it’s harder to walk away from substantial wealth if you become accustomed to it from birth rather than see from outside the cost it imposes.
On the Comhaltas list of local music festivals was one that weekend in Ballydesmond, a village less than an hour away in a region with a rich tradition of folk music; so that’s where I headed next. One of the things I had learned about villages is that the general store is a good place to get information.
“Yes, the music festival is this weekend, but there aren’t any b&b’s or campgrounds in this area. We don’t get tourists. There are only a few hundred of us living here, mostly farmers. If you’ve got a tent in that pack next to your fiddle, you’re welcome to camp in my field. It’s just past the end of the village, on the left side of the road. There’s a well spigot nearby.”
I thanked the store owner and returned after pitching my tent to find his wife now minding the store. I asked her where I could buy something to eat.
“There aren’t any places here that serve meals. Sorry. But I can make you a ham and cheese sandwich.”
I couldn’t convince her to take money for the hearty sandwich she prepared, so I fiddled her a tune.
“Oh, you’ll have a good time here this weekend, son. We’re a tiny town but we’ve got four pubs. That’s where the music will be.”
That first night, Thursday, was pretty quiet, but some of the men I met swapping tunes in the pub told me about John O’Connell, a farmer in his seventies who, in his prime, was the area’s best fiddle player. He had been a student of one of Ireland’s legendary figures, Patrick O’Keeffe, renowned both for his extraordinary ability with the fiddle and his capacity with the bottle. John was the best source of fiddle tunes and lore, they said. When I mentioned I was looking forward to meeting him, they told me he wouldn’t be coming in to town - decades of hard work and arthritis made it too difficult for him to move around – and he didn’t have a phone, but they didn’t think he’d mind if I just showed up. So that’s what I did the next afternoon, walking the three miles to his farmhouse, fiddle and tape recorder in hand. It’s never easy as an outsider to knock on someone’s door unannounced and explain yourself. I hoped I wouldn’t be bothering him.
“Yes, come in lad. Would you like a cup of tea?” John said, with the straight sound of one who does not easily add inflection to his words. He looked neither happy to see me nor bothered by my arrival. I imagined him thinking “Well, you’re here so let’s just move to the next step.”
That next step was chatting about fiddle music over tea in his living room. The furnishings were spare and looked home-made. John spoke in a very matter-of-fact manner. The first sign of a smile came after he began playing some tunes and telling the stories that related to them. The stories were delivered without embellishment, in a voice that rarely changed volume or expression. He didn’t smile often, but when he did, it came on gently, spread to his eyes and did not end with his words. It lingered there along with the memories evoked, quietly.
He said he didn’t play much anymore. John’s left hand still had good intonation, but his bowing arm had lost its life. The thin, airy sound he produced was more the fault of worn-out bow hairs, but age and arthritis had taken away the rhythmic lift the area’s best fiddler would have once displayed. I didn’t wonder then how losing that ability affected him, although I am very curious about that now. If only we knew at the time all the questions that should be asked!
I fiddled a few tunes for him which he seemed to like, though his face didn’t convey much more expression than his voice. For the next couple of hours, he played, I recorded, we talked. He resembled dying embers, occasionally flickering into a gentle flame, then back to embers again. Here was a man worn down by life, coming back to life, momentarily and partially at least, through his musical recollections. I thanked him for his time, he thanked me for the visit, and I walked back to town with a memory of my own to recall.
Most music festivals are put on for commercial purposes. But when I saw farmers coming into town late that afternoon on their tractors, some with instruments slung over their shoulders, I sensed I was in for the real thing. These tractors not only pulled the carts carrying their fresh milk to the depot, but also served as their cars. From Friday through Sunday, the main day of the festival, things got increasingly lively. There were spontaneous music and dancing sessions in the pubs and on Ballydesmond’s only street. Pub life was here at its colorful best. A steady supply of Guinness Stout flowed through the taps, mixing with the live music to produce an atmosphere of good cheer and celebration. These were people who showed physical wear and tear, but who seemed at ease with themselves. Their laughs were unaffected, their conversation without pretension, their eyes warm. It was surprising how many of them could scratch out at least a few tunes when a fiddle was passed around the room.
In a formal sense, the culmination of all this activity was the competition held on Sunday for the various instruments and dances of Irish folk music. A make-shift stage on the side of the road provided the setting. John Dunnigan and Maurice O’Keefe, two very talented fiddlers, won the adult and youth competitions. The competitions, though, appeared only incidental to the music, dancing and general merriment going on throughout the weekend. I had met John the first night playing duos outside with a pennywhistler, and then met Maurice the next day. Both enthusiastically taught me tunes that caught my ear, both were friendly every time we ran into each other. That’s the way it was with everyone I met there. There was no sense of hierarchy, musical or social; I felt enveloped in a communal joy rooted in the love these people shared for their traditional music.
Of almost equal interest to the music on that last day was Sunday mass. I wondered if the Irish were as religious as their reputation. Unlike Italy, I found the church packed, and with as many men as women. The priest made an emotional appeal during his sermon for less of the excessive drinking he said went on among the men all year long, but especially now during the festival. I looked around to see the women nodding in agreement and most of the men looking shamefully down at the floor. One of them was the farmer who had promptly invited me into a pub for a pre-mass pint when we met on the way to church - we had had a good time chatting and playing music the night before. It was now only mid-morning, but the men in the pub were drinking Guinness, not tea or coffee. After mass, people shook the priest’s hand and concurred with his message as they filed out; then half the congregation moved into the pubs, washing away the words of their spiritual leader in still more of their beloved stout.
I had previously arranged to pay a modest sum to have Sunday dinner with a friendly family living near the field where I had pitched my tent. The result was not only a delicious, home-cooked meal on my last day there but also several invitations to tea earlier on. These farm families I met throughout my stay in the village were all good, sturdy people. They had a calm, straight-forward manner that was so refreshing after my time earlier that week with the O’Learys. When I left Ballydesmond I had the nicest feeling of having been accepted into that close-knit community as a friend rather than a visitor. It was just what I needed then.
The economic ladder extends from deprivation and hunger at the bottom to almost total control at the top over any aspect of life that can be influenced by the expenditure of money. The more the better was my goal early on, but experience was imposing reconsideration. Where is the zone on that economic ladder best suited to a life that is qualitatively good and generally happy? This question was often in the back of my mind as I traveled about, meeting new people and observing their station. I didn’t have to worry about being in the lower rungs because I was born in an affluent country with an extensive social services network. And if I wanted, I had a good chance of making it into the upper rungs from my middle class start because of the elite law degree I had in my pocket. I realized I was jeopardizing that chance by abandoning my law firm job and studying music. The more I thought about it, however, the less appeal the upper rungs had for me. I had spent almost two years in the culture of the corporate law firm, my easiest route up, but didn’t like working to advance the interests of the already rich and powerful; and the hours demanded were far too long to have quality time left for music, family, and other activities I enjoyed.
I also saw what too much money did to people like the O’Learys. Wealth at that level had become a toxin, and no one in that extended family seemed remotely happy. Deceit, anxiety, manipulation – these were the forces that shaped their lives. Did I romanticize the warmth and simplicity of Ballydesmond’s residents? Probably, at least to some extent. The contrast with the O’Learys was so stark that it would have been hard not to. Wealth has many facets, but I left that week of dramatic differences with a better appreciation of its dark side.
No one doubts that money can make life much easier. My youthful travel experiences were richer and more instructive because I could not buy easy solutions, but I didn’t want to live the rest of my life at that economic level, carefully weighing every expenditure. I felt humiliated and embarrassed one night in a group of young Italians at a restaurant. They routinely pay an equal share of the bill, if not fighting to pay it all. I deliberately ate and drank less to avoid wasting money, said that my share of the bill was only #, and regretfully watched the chaotic scene of math calculations I caused among people who weren’t used to keeping track.
The ultimate question is always the same – how much is enough? I observed the frivolities the idle rich spent their inherited money on, the crushing time burden the working rich endured to pamper (and often spoil) their children, the increased likelihood among them all of the resentments and contrivances personified by the O’Learys. I also spent time with wealthy people who were contented and generous, noticed the ease and enrichment of their lives, saw in Africa and Asia ranks of the miserable poor. Money was obviously complicated - what should my personal aspiration level be?
Imagine accumulating extraordinary wealth through hard work and successful investments, then seeing your marriage end in a bitter divorce and having your children sponge off you all their lives, pursuing interests incapable of providing economic independence. Imagine being able to always buy whatever you want without ever having to consider its cost, totally ignorant of one of life’s most fundamental calculations. Imagine growing up in luxury, fearing its loss, experiencing the lifelong, aching doubt that you would have made it on your own. Imagine wondering if others want to be with you because of who you are or what you have. I met these people during my travels and did not wish to be one of them. We all value freedom, but being free implies self-sufficiency, not wasteful excess or financial dependence.
It was the people between the top and bottom rungs of the economic ladder who seemed to have the better chance at living a good life, one that offered the stimulation of both challenges and rewards. For an educated person living in a developed country, it should not be too difficult to earn enough to cover basic needs and have some level of comfort. The question then becomes how much more we want for additional comforts and economic security. Until quite recently, so many of the comforts we now take for granted (like chocolate and electricity) were luxuries available only to the very rich. That gives perspective. Additional layers of comfort are fully subject to the economic law of diminishing returns, like the toys (child and adult) we purchase with the extra money. How much property can you accumulate before its maintenance becomes a burden, requiring a trust placed in others who seem to follow your commands but whose envy and avarice can increase your cynicism? Even economic security has its limits, as I learned from Zio Domenico’s tale of the rich but hapless urbanites who came to his farm during the Second World War in search of food.
Wealth is in large part numbers in accounts. That was the first form of writing, clearly demonstrating its importance to civilization. But numbers in accounts mean nothing if we merely watch them go up and down. Financial resources have significance only as we use them strategically to improve the quality of our lives and those we care about. The wealth we accumulate should be sufficient to offer us meaningful choices in our quest for a good life. Yet too often, in the pursuit of wealth, we give up control over the most important choice of all – how we will spend our time. The word “spend” incorporates the concepts of both scarcity and choice. We “spend” both money and time, often trading one for the other, valuing too much the scarcity of the former though the only thing certain in life is that it will end. My travels led me to these conclusions. I turned an inclination into a determination – when I returned home, my life would not be focused on money. The goal remained the nebulous one of a qualitatively good and generally happy life, but the path was still being constructed.
“Lovely, Johnny, lovely!” shouted the school director.
Johnny Doherty, the dean of Irish fiddlers, had just finished playing some tunes for the Comhaltas traditional music school that preceded the Fleadh Cheoil, Ireland’s national music festival and championship competition. Johnny looked in his eighties and was no longer the master of his instrument, but he was obviously revered by the school’s faculty. They led the vigorous applause and adulatory comments about Johnny and his highly influential style of playing. The Irish students knew they were in the presence of one of their country’s musical deities, and the general enthusiasm spread to the few of us who were foreigners.
My fiddle teacher at this extraordinary week-long school was Paddy Glackin, a disciple of Johnny and, though only in his twenties, several times the national fiddle champion. Twice a day there was a small group lesson for each of the folk instruments. Paddy started off the first day by going around the group asking each of us to play a favorite tune so he could get an idea of how we played. I fiddled an American folk tune I knew inside-out and was glad to have the opportunity to establish some musical credibility because my Irish playing style was well below the level of the others. I explained that I hoped to discover the secret to their effortless embellishments and accented bowings (which unfortunately turned out to be growing up in the culture and practicing a lot). I also wanted to become more familiar with their music because it was one of the most important roots of what developed into traditional American fiddle music. They seemed pleased with my tune and words, so I was off to a comfortable start. Traveling around, you face a lot of new situations, and I learned to always look for a way to turn off the pressure which that can cause.
In addition to the small group lessons, we were exposed to the whole range of Irish traditional music through an excellent series of lectures and recitals by a faculty that included some of the country’s best musicians. One of the things I liked most about Ireland was how integrated their folk music was into the general culture. Spontaneous music sessions were a normal part of group gatherings and pub life; but that made it harder for musicians to earn a living from their music. People expected to hear it well-played and free. Paddy, for example, worked as a fireman to supplement his earnings from music.
Although the festival didn’t officially open until the first round of competitions on Friday, people began drifting into town much earlier in the week from all over Ireland, other European countries and the United States as well. Buncrana was a town of about 3,000; the location of the Fleadh Cheoil changed each year, but the idea was always to hold it in a place large enough (and with enough pubs) to accommodate the influx of people but small enough to be completely taken over by the festival. Traffic was banned in the center of town and, as things picked up, there was virtually non-stop music-making in the pubs and on the main street by all varieties of musicians.
Once the competitions started, they filled the days and early evenings. I met up with John and Maurice, the fiddlers from Ballydesmond, and cheered them on when they competed. Unfortunately, nervousness kept both of them from playing at the high level I had heard in the more relaxed atmosphere of their home town. Panels of judges had the difficult task of deciding who among the regional winners of scores of instrumental and vocal categories would advance to the final round for the different age levels. I went to all the fiddle events with my portable tape recorder and collected several hours of good tunes.
The crowds were so big by the final weekend that the pubs, stretched well beyond legal capacity, often had to close their doors until enough space opened up to squeeze in more bodies. In the extreme northwest corner of the Repubic of Ireland, Buncrana was only fifteen miles from the city of Derry in Northern Ireland, then a war zone. The good intentions of the Fleadh’s organizers to highlight the shared musical traditions of the two Irelands were marred on the final nights when the heavy drinking which went on throughout the festival combined with hell-raising by very rough groups of teen-aged boys from Derry. These kids had spent their entire lives growing up in the midst of bloodshed, and their idea of entertainment was to pick fights in the streets. The police managed to keep the violence largely under control, but it was a disturbing sign of what a war culture does to its young.
The best music sessions were in the pubs, usually late at night, and especially when Paddy Glackin and his friends got their instruments out. They could never keep up with the steady supply of pints surrounding them, and as the school week went on, Paddy began to look exhausted. One day he arrived late for the morning lesson, queasy from a pub session that had ended only a few hours before, his eyes heavy and red. The music in the street, though, was almost as good. On the final night I noticed the guy who won the adult fiddle championship celebrating with an impromptu concert on the sidewalk at 1:30 AM, well-Guinnessed but sounding great. He was still going strong when I left around 3 AM.
The busy week of school activities created a nice bond among the students, and we had the pleasant feeling of being a sort of inner circle once the festival got crowded. School started with a meeting the first night explaining what we’d be doing that week and featuring performances by some of the faculty. I was attentive but distracted, my glance returning across the room to a girl with a striking face and shape. She was next to a plain-looking, somewhat paunchy young guy, occasionally talking with him. Could he be her boyfriend? Probably just a friend; she was too physically imposing for him.
I did not see her the next day and only briefly from afar the day after, holding hands with that guy. I was envious and wondered what he offered in order to attract her. That night I went alone to a pub session. There she was – on the other side of a packed room, with a group of people, looking beautiful and exotic in the auburn light. As our eyes met for the first time, I felt a charge go through my body, then a smile slowly develop, expressing my interest and delight. A warm, responsive smile took shape on her face. I gently nodded several times, and her eyes appeared to agree, then moved smoothly away as her boyfriend grabbed her hand. I soon left to listen to music in another pub.
The next day was the school trip to a small village nearby for the master fiddle session with Johnny Doherty. She and her boyfriend stepped down from the other bus, and we smiled as our paths cross. I mentioned something to them about the ride, and their response was friendly. They were university students from Paris, here to enjoy the Irish folk music which he had lately taken to on the pennywhistle. Soon after, the session began inside the pub, and she appeared to be alone, seated on a bench along the wall. She smiled as I approached and sat down next to her. Her name was Rachelle, and our conversation flowed along freely with the music. I mentioned I played the fiddle; she nodded, as if she already knew. She said she didn’t play an instrument but loved to dance, and did so with only minor prodding, in a peasant style that matched her colorful skirt. Rachelle’s body flowed gracefully though the dance steps, the play of windowed sunlight on her translucent white blouse displaying full breasts, also dancing. She seemed so fresh, but also self-assured and sensual. I ached to touch her.
The next morning I was happy to see her at the opening session of the fiddle competitions, alone. She seemed glad and unsurprised when I joined her. We had tea during the break and, after the session ended, talked of meeting again for the early evening competitions. Though we left the time and location a bit vague, we had no trouble finding each other as twilight set in. The championship round was still a day away, but the fiddling was excellent.
Afterwards, we spent some time walking about, conversing pleasantly, her French accent adding to an erotic allure that contrasted with her calm demeanor. I suggested checking out the pubs for jam sessions. Rachelle said she would like that but first wanted to go back to her tent for a light jacket. We walked to the huge temporary campground that the Fleadh had set up on the other side of town from my campground. She asked me to wait outside while she went into a tent that had the sounds of a pennywhistle coming from inside. The sounds stopped and I heard a brief, unintelligible conversation in French. A few moments later she came out and we headed toward the center of town.
The first pub we entered was swarming with people and had a lively session going on in the back room. A little later, we walked along the street, hand in hand, occasionally stopping to listen to the various groups which had formed for music-making and dancing. I began to feel restless, my mind trying to figure out what was going on. She was obviously in Buncrana with her boyfriend, but was also making herself available to spend time with me, holding my hand since we threaded our way through the crowd in the pub. Hoping to clarify this ambiguous situation, I leaned over and kissed her on the cheek. She smiled, then turned to meet my lips with hers, our kiss soft and full.
We walked away from the crowds, snuggling, becoming less inhibited as we left the edge of town and its people, our kisses deeper, our bodies pressed firmly together, vigorously grinding; I swelled with anticipation. Rachelle pushed away, her eyes now sparkling and sharp, her calm manner thoroughly displaced. She began darting about, pecking at me with her lips and teasing my already excited dick with her hands. She was a kitten, playing with me. Her face wore a daring smile as she put her hand inside my pants and fondled me.
We pawed at each other during an erotic romp down the path to the tent I had fortuitously pitched in an isolated clearing near the beach. Once inside, though, we slowed down, tempered by an unspoken desire to savor what was happening. We undressed each other, my eyes and hands feasting on the voluptuous curves of her body. As we slipped off her panties, I surrounded her pussy with kisses, my tongue lingering within its contours. Rachelle caressed my cock before taking it into her mouth and stroking it with supple lips. I wondered how much longer I could contain the explosion.
More play, spontaneous and free, then a momentary pause to discuss birth control. Surprised and pleased that I have raised the subject, she said she had already taken care of that. Our petting began building again in intensity, two writhing bodies next to a calm sea, filling a small tent with motion and heat. This would be the wave to ride. We coupled in a slow thrusting, rolling above and below each other, my eyes roaming excitedly over her glowing face, then below to join in the delight of my hands playing with her big tits. Our rhythmic thrusting gradually passed into a lateral and then circular swinging movement, eventually becoming more frenzied and vocalized as I felt the delicious eruption begin inside, my body deliriously swallowing all consciousness for those precious seconds. Our thrusting continued as Rachelle’s waves rolled in right after mine, low at first, then surging forward in rising moans.
The only sound afterwards - heavy breathing underneath a few light giggles and some sighs, subsiding into the still quieter sound of arms and thighs caressing. Some words and kisses, softly sent. Tenderness. Then talking and laughing before playing again. Music transformed, in the body but beyond dance, at the sweaty source.
14. Thinking About Sex and Marriage
There are many processes in life; the most important of these is evolution and sex lies at its core – that explains our obsession with it. Sex produces some of the greatest highs we will ever experience. It has a power over us like no other life force. This applies across societies (including the ones where repression reinforces its fascination) as well as over time. It is especially true when we are young, and at 20, Rachelle had made a conscious choice to pursue its pleasures beyond her boyfriend. She had read some erotic French literature at her university, seen some films from the same genre, and decided she wanted to broaden her base of sexual experience. She was not interested in other relationships, just sex that was varied and good. Her boyfriend was ok with that; this was the decade following the social revolution of the late 1960’s – almost everything previously contained opened up, including the minds of the young. He was struggling more with the political changes of the times, the son of very rich Parisians, embarrassed by his parents’ wealth and the luxury it bought. She was the daughter of a French mother and Moroccan father – that accounted for her exotic look and, in combination with her body and charm, guaranteed the male attention she had decided to more actively engage.
As we cuddled in my tent afterwards, I told her how she had struck me that first evening of the school. She said she had noticed me then, too, adding she knew right away that she would have me. How wonderful to be a beautiful woman, I thought, able to be sure of something for which a man could only hope. But there was a complicating factor. This was still an era when the male was expected to do the pursuing, at least the overt part, and I had felt blocked by the presence of an obvious boyfriend. Her comment explained why I found her sitting alone at the Johnny Dougherty session and also the next day at the fiddle competition, waiting for my arrival. I wished she had started earlier in the week; perhaps we both needed that mid-week locking of eyes to provide the impetus to action.
The human form is a marvel of nature. An attractive body is a delight, drawing at least the gaze, no matter how old the eyes. Feminism made persuasive arguments back then against viewing women as sex objects; but we need only look now at the images we watch and the fashions young bodies put on to see how resilient sex is, the apparent solution to the objectification issue being to treat both males and females as sex objects. Rachelle was merely ahead of her time.
When sex fully unleashes itself, grabbing our bodies tightly and totally, we lose our heads. The head, however, has a way of striking back, especially in those of us who give thinking a large role in shaping what we do. That night with Rachelle was pure sex at its best, but I have left more than one ardent woman unsatisfied by my occasional speed or unresponsiveness. I never figured out why it happened those times, except that I was probably thinking too much. Our minds define our place in the animal world, though at a cost. Sex can bring pressure and disappointment as well as pleasure, but the pleasure is so intense that we will always come back for more.
Sex was part of the adventure I was seeking in traveling alone in my late twenties and after. I expected eventually to be in love in a long-term relation resulting in marriage and children. But the strength of this urge to roam meant I wasn’t ready for that level of responsibility. As for love, I was still trying to figure out what it was, what it felt like. I had been in a few relationships lasting over a year that involved more than enjoying each other’s company and regular sex, but it didn’t feel like love. Self-absorption combined with an idealized concept of romantic love to smother the expanded form of love that developed later on. That seed may have been somewhere inside, waiting to grow, but it was now stifled by young hormones and ego. I didn’t realize how long the gaps in sexual activity might get moving through different places and cultures, usually engrossed in other things than the desire to get laid. So when it came together well, the high was more intense.
Every high is only temporary, and even normal can seem low afterwards by comparison. But I had good reason to be dispirited while thumbing a ride back to Dublin after the Fleadh and Rachelle. The weather was cold and dreary, more so after several luckless hours beside the road. Many cars leaving town were full, others had drivers looking haggard or hung-over, apparently uninterested in passengers or conversation, and after awhile there were hardly any cars at all. It was late afternoon when a guy pulled over to offer a lift. He was going all the way to Dublin but planned to take a short cut through Northern Ireland’s war zone – did I still want the ride? I asked if the route he would be taking was safe, and he said he had done it a few times in the past year without incident. I opened the door and got in.
The driver, Pat, was a folk singer. He was leaving Buncrana late because he had been in an all night session and then slept most of the day. The border was blockaded; we were stopped and thoroughly searched by British soldiers who were heavily armed and very serious. The recent violence had killed several of their colleagues, and I hoped there were no overly anxious fingers on those triggers. The landscape was as cold and grey as the air. In Derry, the walls of buildings bore the scars of war. There were piles of rubble, stretches of barbed wire and barricaded roads. I thought of the Derry kids who had come to Buncrana on the last nights of the festival; but there were few people outside, an eerie quiet adding to the pallor. There were, however, lots of British soldiers with rifles and automatic weapons along our route through the North. We were stopped at several more checkpoints, and got lost for awhile because the road Pat had taken before was blocked. He said there was more security this time, probably because of the recent flare-ups, but that this shortcut was still saving us some time.
We went through a final control at the border before entering the Republic of Ireland and soon after arrived in a town about two hours west of Dublin where Pat had some musician friends. He pulled the car up next to the rundown farmhouse they lived in. It was dark, and what I wanted most was to sleep after all the activity of the past week. Instead, they handed us each a bottle of Guinness and brought us along to a gig they had at a club in the center of town. Pat and I joined in the late night session and drinking that followed their performance, then crashed on the couches back at their house. I was exhausted and by now had had my fill of both Irish sessions and Guinness.
I made room for a little more of each, though, back at the pub in the Comhaltas headquarters. I would be leaving Dublin the next day, heading to Cologne, one of Germany’s largest cities. I read that it had been heavily bombed in World War II and, like Munich, had reconstructed its center as a large pedestrian zone. My cash supply was shrinking and I hoped that, also like Munich, it would be a good place to busk and finance my next year in Florence. I tried a little next to one of Dublin’s parks, but the money was meager compared to Germany. I did get something precious, though. I was glad to return to classical music again after all the Irish folk music of the past weeks, and played a sorrowful sarabande by Bach. I put as much feeling into it as I could and noticed a tattered older woman listening carefully, tears welling up in her eyes, some dripping onto tired-looking clothes. “Thank you so much!” she said after the piece, poignantly adding that she had no money but wanted me to know how the music had moved her.
I stayed in one of the Comhaltas guest rooms that last night in Ireland, and decided to play in one final session at their pub. That’s where I met Clara, a Dutch girl who gave the impression of being interested in more than the lively conversation we were enjoying. She seemed fun-loving and open, adding to the turn-on of another great body. Unfortunately, she was visiting Dublin with her parents, who seemed to be keeping a close eye on her, probably with reason given her uninhibited presentation. As with Denise earlier that summer, it looked like this would be another case of aroused expectations failing to materialize, but she gave me her phone number in Amsterdam and asked me to call if my travel plans brought me there.
Plans? Other than having to be back in Florence in mid-autumn for the beginning of conservatory lessons, mine were always subject to modification depending on what was happening in any particular place. After a Florentine school year that was artistically stimulating but sexually quiet, heavily religious Ireland (of all places) had put me on a roll. Anyway, Amsterdam was on the way to Cologne and thus became a new stop on this ride.
It was dark when my train arrived at Amsterdam’s central station. I checked the schedule for overnight trains to Germany in case I wasn’t able to reach Clara, but my call from a station phone booth found her home and glad to hear from me. A short time later, we were walking around the city together, talking and laughing. Clara was a cute, busty blond with granny glasses sitting on an up-turned nose. She seemed free- spirited and had been living with her boyfriend, a 39 year-old drug dealer. However, she was in the process of leaving him and planned on moving back in with her parents temporarily. We sat down at an outdoor tavern where people were drinking and openly smoking hash. We ordered some beer and then, her eyes twinkling, Clara pulled some hash out of her pocket that we smoked. That led to more laughing along with some kissing and a little mutual grabbing. Amsterdam had a reputation for being a city where pretty much anything goes, and I was beginning to see why.
We took a bus that dropped us off about a mile from the nearest campground, both with the same thing in mind. The walk there had lots of stops for groping and grinding; fortunately, it was late enough that no one was around. We pitched my tent in an out-of-the-way area and, with anticipation running high, smoked some more hash inside. Our clothes came off slowly, revealing Clara’s voluptuous body. Her style of fucking was fast and frenzied. We both got off well, but I had almost a detached observer’s feeling, especially the second time when she got on top and frantically pumped away. I laid back, disembodied, and watched a female in heat fuck me.
Next morning Clara got up, saying she had to go to class. I asked how far away the university was, then learned that she was turning 18 and went to an alternative lyceum; the normal one bored her. We met again in the afternoon and later went to her parents’ home for supper. I had talked with them briefly in the Dublin pub, and we all conversed pleasantly enough while Clara and her mother prepared the food. I felt somewhat strange, the older vagabond musician that their daughter had brought home. But they seemed to have dispositions that were both tolerant and resigned. Perhaps they were thinking how much younger and more conventional I was than her boyfriend, whom they obviously disliked.
Afterwards, Clara and I strolled around the center of Amsterdam, then returned to my tent. We were more playful this time, and I got very aroused when she mounted me and started banging her huge breasts against my face, swinging from side to side with a naughty tit-slapping motion. We again slept stuffed inside my sleeping bag. My mind drifted back to Rachelle, and how much more she drew me in. Should I try to see her again in Paris? I will. Can such a night ever be repeated? It cannot. Is that exhilarating, enveloping wave of total sensation better left to memory?
Melina’s complimentary glass of champagne is adding to the effects of the dinner wine as I leave her restaurant, telling her how much I enjoyed our conversation and thanking her for preparing such an excellent meal. I head toward Sitia’s only folk music club, where one of Crete’s best lyra players introduces me to the music that will draw me back for more later on in Chania. Its rhythms are captivating and the musicians friendly as they tell me about their music during the break. The club is filled with locals, some of whom dance in the space in front of the small stage. One of the dancers is a beautiful woman with long dark hair, part of a group of Greeks in their early thirties at a nearby table. They are not in pairs, but dance in a circle; her short skirt shows off perfect legs in sheer black stockings moving fluidly to the music, her breast contours highlighted by an arched back, raised arms and a head held high. There was a time when I would have approached her, eagerly, anxiously. Instead, I now merely watch and silently sigh at my table, taking pleasure in a bit of fantasy, alone but with sweet memories.
The irrationality of physical attraction and the remembrance of firm young bodies entwined in full bloom can affect sexual experiences later in life. Too many years put the dancer out of reach, but not so the restaurant owner of earlier that evening. She embodied creativity, trickled a refined sensuality. Her life experience gave her more to offer than the dancer, and her scintillating conversation was delightful. Was she inviting as well as friendly? Her manner and body language raised the possibility, but there was no push from my body to find out. Fantasy carried the look of the dancer, not the charming but portly restaurateur. Physical attraction is not age appropriate, and memory can spoil us, stop us.
But I was also blocked by something else. I have never been unfaithful to my wife, though that is the wrong word - fidelity is better placed in the heart and mind, not the genitalia. Giovanna and I met at a Smith Italian department party. Over the course of several weeks, we became interested in each other and there was a sexual charge in the air, but I hesitated. At forty, I was finally ready to marry and have children, actively looking for a wife, but didn’t want a strong sexual attraction to drive the choice. I feared its grip - once it gets going, it can easily take over, at least for awhile. Other things were more important now, and I needed an undistracted head to help me figure things out. When things got steamy, I cooled us off once, but that didn’t last long.
Before getting married a year later, we talked through expectations each of us felt we had to agree on – kids, and how many; priority of parenting over career and money; responsibilities to our own parents as they aged. I knew a shared Italian culture and joy in living would give us a good base, and also sensed that she would be a loving mother to our children. I asked Giovanna how important sexual exclusivity was to her. I was eager for family life but also aware of appetites stimulated by my years as a wandering fiddler. Traveling alone as I did meant some long stretches of abstinence but also times of sexual adventure. It was hard then to imagine never having sex with any another woman for the rest of my life. If, after we had kids, she would break up our family over that, then I didn’t think we should get married. I would be faithful, yes, but perhaps not forever in the physical sense. I proposed that this understanding apply to both of us and never involve anyone within our circle of friends or acquaintances. I believed that if it were ever to happen, it would be in the distant future, when routine might make the sexual pull of variety overpowering. She didn’t like the idea, but thought about it for a week or so and said she could learn to live with it.
My next proposal was the more traditional “Will you marry me?”, delivered a short time later on valentine’s day and in Italian – “Mi sposerai?” Her response was immediate and came in the English we normally spoke in:
“You’re kidding! But you can’t use the future tense in Italian to ask that.”
Stunned, the only thing I could think of to say was “Why not?”
“English uses the future, but in Italian we use the conditional tense, ‘Mi sposeresti?’, otherwise it sounds like a command.”
“But I thought commands used the imperative tense – ‘Sposami!”
“That sounds even worse than the future tense; the conditional is best.”
Yes, she was a professor of Italian, but I was too flabbergasted by the surreal exchange following my question to rephrase it in the proper tense. I thought she would be touched by my romantic gestures – asking her on Valentine’s day in her native language to marry me – but instead got a lesson in Italian grammar! Maybe that was her way of saying she wanted more time to think about it, but her heavy hints in the preceding months about getting married made that unlikely. In any event, I changed the subject. When I woke up the next morning, it was clear that her answer was yes – she was in the other room on the phone inquiring about the availability of the college chapel and faculty club for wedding services.
Three years later she was diagnosed with breast cancer, her magnificent body needing a knife to save her life. After surgery, she made clear that she felt disfigured and vulnerable; she was never comfortable with the sexual part of our pre-marriage agreements and wanted it nullified. Her needs had changed along with her body, and I adjusted.
For more than 25 years I have resisted temptation, though it has never felt particularly onerous. When you love someone, you don’t want to hurt them, especially someone as sensitive as Giovanna. In this area of life, my mind keeps my body under control, though I can imagine being carried away, sometimes fantasizing about it, as with the beautiful dancer in Crete. We normally think of fantasy as being an escape from reality, but for me, it combines with memory to keep reality in check.
15. Spiritual Sightings
The body is normally contrasted with the mind, but that often leads to confusion because they are so interconnected. The truer distinction to draw is between body and spirit. During my earlier travels, I spent over three months in India and Nepal and never got laid, or even kissed. Instead of bodily stimulation, I found there a spiritual dimension to life as nowhere else. A central tenet of Hindu belief is that a person’s essence lies beyond body and mind, in something that is pure, infinite and eternal. They call it atman, and though it transcends the material world, there were times when I felt as if it were nearby.
One evening I walked back to my hotel as dusk set in and saw Indians lighting candles in their shops and homes, placing them on tables and rooftops, in windows and around buildings, creating a marvelous illumination everywhere. Millions of candles topped with beautiful flames! There was no need for electric lamps, which would have seemed harsh and out of place. People and things glowed warmly in the midst of this natural light, and I felt uplifted before I knew the festival’s name or significance. This was Diwali, the festival of lights, a celebration of the triumph of good over evil, of knowledge over ignorance, of the inner, transcendent light that nourishes spirit and drives out darkness. Diwali comes after the harvest and dates back to ancient times in India, its symbolism ultimately based on the sun, the source of all light and life. I walked aimlessly for hours, enchanted.
Another day I walked down to the banks of the Ganges, the holy river of the Hindus. I was in Varanasi, one of the oldest continuously inhabited cities in the world and the spiritual center of Hinduism. It swarms throughout the year with pilgrims, some of whom come there at the end of their lives. They believe that dying in this holiest of cities releases the soul from its cycle of transmigrations. I had read that Hindus bathed in the Ganges to wash away sins, but also saw the many other ways they used its polluted waters – some drank it (though most merely rinsed their mouths), some put it in a pot to boil food over a fire back on shore; everyone prayed in the river before filling a bottle to bring home. The banks, too, were teeming with activity and rituals, including several places with dead human bodies stacked on wooden biers. Bonfires were prepared and then lit one after another, flaring up in a brilliant mix of red flame and black carbon after the body was moved into the fire. The dead were sent off in a glorious blaze to a reincarnated life or final release, leaving only ashes to be collected by family members and perhaps scattered in the river before the next piling up of branches and dropping of the torch.
But it was an elderly Hindu woman and the sun rather than the fires cremating the dead that left the deepest impression during my visits to the river. I had arrived before sunrise that day and watched her approach the water’s edge, slowly and methodically, her thin, hunched body closed in upon itself. She wore a simple sari and shawl, covering her from the top of her head to the toes of her bare feet. Just before the sun began its rise over the other side of the Ganges, she entered the river, praying. When its first rays spilled upon us, she straightened up and raised her arms, then opened them, embracing the sun as the shawl dropped to her shoulders and exposed her head. She closed her eyes; her praying intensified. While the sun rose just above the horizon, its altar in this holy shrine of nature, she continued in a more animated way, moving toward the light, the caress from beyond seeming to energize her. Sun worship – a form of spiritual expression from the dawn of humanity, still among us; awe inspired by the true giver of life. She bathed in its warmth and glory for several minutes more, then opened her eyes and turned her attention down to the river, calmly washing her face and arms in its waters, completing the sacred ritual.
Early human efforts to connect to the spiritual realm took other forms, many of them raw and blood-splattered. Like India, Nepal has a devout Hindu majority, but its perch at the top of the Himalaya mountain chain and lack of transportation links until recent times kept its people isolated from the rest of the world. Its culture provided a window into traditions virtually untouched by occident or orient – and also into the past.
Animal sacrifice was once a common religious practice, but it has disappeared from most of the earth. When I learned there was a temple in the Katmandu valley where it was still done, I wanted to see it. An early bus brought me to a small village bustling with people and animals moving about. There was a long line of believers, local people with their goats and chickens, waiting at an open air temple to reach the two priests. These priests wore no vestments, their clothes simple robes, stained with blood from the knives in their hands. They slit the animal’s throat on a stone altar that drained the blood into a trough at their feet. It ran between a temple wall and a floor of stones with wild grass growing among them. Occasionally, the priests threw small internal organs into the trough.
When it came her turn, a woman gave the priests her chicken and prayed while she watched them slaughter it. Except for its head, she could take it home afterwards to eat; but if she wanted the head, she would have to pay money to the temple. She left the head on the altar, put the chicken in her bag and stepped next to the trough. She bent over and put her cupped hand into the trough, then drank the blood she brought up to her lips. Her hand returned to the trough, this time to pick up some small animal organs that she put in her mouth and swallowed whole. I felt my head knock back, my stomach turn and my eyes sear. There were only two other foreigners among the crowd and I heard one of them shriek, but my eyes stayed with the woman as she walked away from the altar. My mind flashed back to something I never understood and even found strange as a devout Catholic boy – the Holy Eucharist, the miraculous conversion of bread and wine into the actual body and blood of Jesus Christ, consumed by the faithful in order to become one with God. Had I just witnessed the origin of a sacrament that brought much of the world to its knees?
Back in the center of Katmandu, I was returning to the Oberoi hotel for my evening strolling violin duties, marveling at the colorful religious activity in the little Hindu shrines all over the city. I passed by a terrifying statue almost ten feet tall - it was the deity that Nepalis call the truth god. Believers say it is impossible to speak a lie in the presence of this god. Before the development of a legal system, disputants were bought here to determine who was telling the truth; some still come for that purpose. Before history itself, kings were worshipped as gods, and the king of Nepal was not only an absolute monarch but also considered to be a reincarnation of the god Vishnu. There was however one person he bowed down before – the virgin goddess Kumari.
A deity incarnate is a common enough theme in Christianity and some other religions, but this was a bizarre variation on that theme, starting with her selection. Priests search for the goddess among very young girls born into the caste of goldsmiths; she must have a fortuitous horoscope as well as thirty-two distinct attributes ranging from the shape of various body parts to bravery and serenity. One of the critical tests puts the child candidates in a darkened room filled with the bloodied heads of sacrificial animals and frightening sounds from masked dancers and priests. The true goddess will remain calm throughout this terrifying ordeal. Once identified, she is taken from her family to live in an ornately carved wooden palace and becomes an object of worship. She only leaves the palace once or twice a year decked in jewels on a golden litter for the most important religious ceremonies. The Kumari goddess hardly ever even walks since her feet are considered especially sacred and are kissed by the king. Her divinity ends when she reaches puberty or otherwise sheds blood. She then is viewed as an ordinary human and expected to marry, though she can hardly be normal after such an experience. Finding a spouse is complicated by a superstition that the husband of an ex-goddess is likely to meet an early death.
I went to her palace twice during my month in Nepal. Only believers are allowed inside to get her blessing, but I saw her briefly from the courtyard one afternoon, on a balcony above, looking much more like a bored and spoiled nine year old girl than a goddess.
Buddha was born a prince in Nepal but renounced a life of indulgence and began his long spiritual journey there. After attaining enlightenment, he taught others the way and asked, unsuccessfully, that he not be worshipped nor have monuments built in his honor. One day I rode a bicycle out of Katmandu to an important Buddhist stupa and watched some robed pilgrims praying as they circled the huge mound-like shrine. I entered the austere temple inside just as several monks were coming in from a side door, carrying exotic-looking instruments. After some silent meditation, they began a low-pitched, monotonous chant which slowly lulled the senses. The breath deepens, the pulse slows. The eyes and ears suspend their attention.
Stillness. Broken unexpectedly by an explosion of sound - coming from the ten foot long horns some of the monks stridently blew into, punctuated by thunderous drums and cymbals. It was a raucous, frightening blare that seemed to shout from the bowels of the earth, perhaps even from another world. My body tingled, my nerve endings excited by the vibrations passing through them, deep and strong. Just as suddenly the cacophony ended, followed by silence and then more quiet chanting before the next shriek of horns. This pattern repeated several times, though I was unsure afterwards how long the ceremony lasted - I was outside time. By pure luck, I had come there during a sacred monthly ritual; I sat off in a corner unaware of its purpose but transfixed, a silent, sole observer catching a glimpse of something beyond, alternately peaceful and terrifying.
Not all my experiences in that part of the world had a spiritual connection. The basic material needs - food and shelter - had to be met or I would be forced to leave India soon after arriving and spend the limited money I had left on a plane ticket home. My successful trade of music for a free stay at the beach-front hotel in Kenya several weeks before encouraged me to try again when I arrived in Bombay. Despite some initial expressions of interest, I was told that the national labor law foreclosed that possibility. The same thing had happened in Nairobi, where one of the major hotels had recently been heavily fined for hiring some foreign musicians. I decided to try one more time when I arrived in New Delhi a week later and called the manager of the Oberoi-Intercontinental, the crown jewel of India’s most luxurious hotel group, to pitch my proposal. He said he had never heard of such an arrangement, but seemed interested and told me to come the next day to play for him. In the meantime, he would check on potential legal problems.
A well-dressed assistant led me through an impressive lobby to the office area. The elegant surroundings added not only to my desire to stay there but also to my nerves. Fortunately, the manager was occupied in another part of the hotel and would be back as soon as possible. I was told to wait in the room outside his office, which gave me a chance to warm up by quietly playing the pieces I had prepared and also to relax the stiff wrist I had picked up during the bus ride to the hotel. The bus was already crowded but I had managed to wedge my way into the standing area, then watched helplessly as still more people got on, pressing against me, jamming my wrist into an unnatural, painful position with no way to move it. It’s usually annoying when the person you are meeting is late for an appointment, but this was a delay that I sorely needed.
Mr. Nain was cordial but got right down to business as soon as he returned. He listened and liked what I played, said the hotel’s lawyer had advised him that Indian law prohibited payment without a work permit (a process that would take months), but there was apparently nothing illegal about bartering musical services for room and board at the hotel. We agreed that I would play two hours of strolling violin music per day with one day a week off, in exchange for a standard guest room, anything on the menus, and laundry service. Later that afternoon, I left my tiny room with shared bath in a very modest guest house and entered the world of five star opulence.
Within a few days I settled into a loose routine, starting each morning with several glasses of freshly squeezed juice and a hearty breakfast, then meandering around the city before returning to the hotel for dinner and music-making. This teeming city displayed the most jarring juxtapositions of poverty and wealth, tradition and modernity, cultural refinement and coarse survival. Throngs of people moved busily about, sacred cows and other animals often in their midst, temporarily stopping the incessant traffic though just barely. It was a constant, overwhelming blur of color and scent, motion and noise.
It peaked in Old Delhi, much aged but little changed. Tiny shops, one after another, combined with street vendors and walking crowds to form a bustling protocapitalist market. New Delhi instead expressed itself in its government buildings, the management center for this enormous mass of people. With so many rules and regulations, there were bureaucrats everywhere. I observed a highly effective one thanks to a letter I had earlier sent to the Indian Law Institute, resulting in an invitation to observe the chief labor official mediating between negotiators representing big industry and big labor. He intervened frequently and was very forceful in moving them toward settlement, a dramatic contrast to the Italian mediator I had observed just months before. The Italian passively listened to gesticulating negotiators argue for awhile, then left them squabbling and stepped into the hallway to discuss something with his brother who had stopped by, returning to listen again before calmly making a few agreeable suggestions. Similar end point, different means. I watched and tried to learn – this is what I wanted to do, though how to do it was very unclear. There was obviously no single method to master.
Indian culture was rich and highly articulated. Struck by the fluidity of a classical dancer’s movements, I joined the group complimenting her backstage and shook what was more a thick liquid than an arm. Concerts drew me into the world of Indian music, classical and folk, much of it improvised, all of it pulsing with exotic, oscillating sounds. Hindu themes and gods filled the many fascinating museums; an impressive shrine honored Gandhi, their secular saint. The Indians used different languages and even calligraphies, but they all loved cricket. Sharp exchanges between judges and lawyers often turned the courtrooms into theaters as entertaining as the Bollywood films that packed the movies.
But the quantity of people! How inspiring to find democratic institutions and a free press in such an enormous country! Some aspects of this multitude, however, were hard to look at – defeated faces, deformed bodies, the tent homes made of plastic bags draped over poles and string, so many lives unfolding in the streets without a shred of privacy or dignity. Confronted every day by so many outstretched hands, what do you do? I tried many responses, all of them dismaying. Children most easily attract our sympathy, but give money to a beggar child and be encircled by dozens more, especially loud and insistent now because they have seen you give. “Mister, please – me, too. Mister…” Is this behavior I want to reinforce in a child? I decided to ignore them, no easy task, and offer money only to adults.
But how to choose among so much need? For awhile, I gave a little to lots, trying to select the most desperate-looking for my nominal contributions. That left me feeling overwhelmed and hopeless. Then I tried giving more money but only to the first and last beggars of the day, an approach that lifted the burden of choice but was too random to ease my discomfort. I finally decided to try to ignore the beggars and support instead those attempting to earn money at the margins – the street vendors selling pieces of fruit or glasses of juice, and others like them struggling to get by. I pretty much stopped taking the bus and began hiring independent drivers whose only possession (unless rented) was a beat-up bicycle pulling a rustic rickshaw. Bargaining was expected in these transactions, and I liked having the opportunity to sharpen an essential life skill; so the strategy I developed was to negotiate the best deal I could and then include an unexpectedly generous tip at the destination, normally a satisfying result for the driver and doubly so for me.
One day I had a free ticket provided by the hotel for a tour van and was waiting outside at the stop. A weathered-looking, shabbily-dressed man pulled up in a dented rickshaw and offered his services. When I told him I already had a ticket for the van that was due momentarily, he began pleading with me to hire him.
“Please - I am a poor man. Six hungry children at home. I can take you to these places. I can tell you about them. Please...”
I at first resisted but finally gave in and we agreed on a price. During the two hours he drove me around, he told me about his health problems and worries about not being able to support his family. I decided to surprise him at the end of the trip and make myself feel good by paying him more than five times the price we had set. He put the money I proudly gave him in his pocket and stuck his hand in front of me.
“Give me more. I need it. You don’t need it like I do. Give me more money.”
He moved his hand under my face, not in a threatening way but insistently, his voice plaintive. I reminded him of our agreement and that I had already grossly overpaid him. He repeated his pleas, raising his tone as well as his cupped hand. I was stunned and walked away shaking my head. It was only much later that I wondered if there was a connection between his reaction to my gesture and the selfish motive I had in expecting gratitude. True generosity is selfless. I was not capable of that, though I disliked the manner of his lesson.
I took a couple of photos during our trip together; later on, when I had the 36 shots on that role of film developed, all of them came out well except two. One was a photo of him and his rickshaw which I took when I had earlier decided I was going to handsomely reward him – it was to be a souvenir of my generosity, but it came out blurry and distorted. The other was of a Moslem shrine we stopped at. He was a devout Moslem and told me that it was forbidden to photograph this holy place. Because of its interesting architecture, I nevertheless snapped a picture when his back was turned. That photo failed completely, a blackened reminder of a bewildering afternoon.
Depending on the day, I might return to the luxury of the Oberoi hotel feeling relief or guilt, exhaustion or exhilaration. My room was next to the outdoor pool and I often ended the hot days with a dip in the water and a chat with the guests. The wealthy clientele was pretty evenly split between foreigners and Indians. The tourists were usually there on high end packages organized around sightseeing and shopping that seemed designed to insulate them from Indian daily life. I occasionally saw these groups following their guides and was struck by two images.
Video recorders were an expensive, bulky novelty then, and one day I saw several male tourists walking around with them perched on their shoulders. They dutifully pointed these devices toward the sight their guide was describing, but when she moved without pause to the next two sights near them, some swung their recorders without ever stopping to look with the naked eye. One of the places had expansive natural beauty, seen by these viewers only through a narrow lens, a metaphor for the experience they would bring home. The other image came several weeks later from a similarly well-off tourist group on the Ganges River in Varanasi. Their motorized boat zoomed close to several pilgrims who were clearly startled by the cameras being shoved just a few feet from their faces, interrupting their prayers. The tour guide described the quiet piety of the pilgrims over a blaring megaphone, adding a layer of irony to this rude attack.
My most interesting conversations at the hotel were usually not with the guests but with the junior managers, recent graduates from India’s best universities. They were invariably so bright and broadly cultured that I wondered why they weren’t using their degrees in a sector of the economy better suited to their talents. After a few weeks there, I became friendly enough with one to ask him and learned that they had few alternatives. Oberoi had a highly-regarded management training program. The hospitality industry was one of the very best career paths at this stage of their country’s economic development, a situation we both hoped would change, and which did so dramatically over the next few decades.
I worked at the New Delhi Oberoi for more than a month. Mr. Nain wanted to use me as a strolling violinist in the hotel’s cocktail lounge, so my initial problem was how to look and act like a strolling violinist. I had been hired to do it only once before and flopped, at an inn outside Florence for a New Year’s Eve party. The inn served up tasteful tradition and fine food in several small, candle-lit rooms. My first trip through went well and generated applause. But the main event of this evening was conviviality. I got drawn in and simply spent too much time talking and partying. The innkeeper rightfully expected that I would play music thoughout the evening, but for the final hour or two, I hardly played any.
“Go to the tables and play something!”
“But everyone is talking, no one seems interested in listening,” I responded, not sufficiently appreciating that the ambiance he wanted to create did not require the more careful listening I unreasonably expected. This was a party, not a concert performance, and I wasn’t doing my job. But more than unwarranted arrogance, the problem was that these people were just so congenial! Italians have developed being together socially into an art form centered on animated conversation, often with several going on simultaneously at maximum volume. I eagerly joined in, accepting the glass of wine offered at many tables, merrily engaging the celebrants with words more than music; but I woke up the next morning with a painful hangover, feeling incompetent and irresponsible. The owner paid me the agreed price, though it was clear that he was disappointed.
Knowing how not to do it, I was eager for another chance. I had packed two neckties and a vest for this trip and, immediately after getting the Oberoi gig, purchased a second vest in a used clothing store. These alternated on top of my three long-sleeved shirts, which the hotel laundry service kept clean and nicely pressed. With my outfit in place, I had to figure out what to do. I had learned the cardinal rule at the Florentine inn – just be part of the background, but that was hardly a sufficient guide. Though I had rarely been in places classy enough to have a strolling violinist, I combined what I had observed with even vaguer memories of a few movie scenes set in elegant restaurants to develop an initial strategy. I walked around the room at a leisurely pace, playing from a mix of several dozen tunes that I knew by heart and hoped would have wide appeal. When someone smiled and established eye contact, I stopped to finish the tune there. That usually was followed by some small talk and another tune or two before a final exchange of pleasantries and a return to musical meandering. I quickly learned that a smile was not always a signal to stop, especially when business was being discussed; consistent eye contact was a better indicator. Though I was a little inhibited at first, I also realized that conversation with willing guests was almost as important as the music.
“Where are you from?” “How is your stay going?” Whether asked by me or the guest, questions like these provided easy entry into the chit-chat part, with which I soon became comfortable. These sometimes developed into interesting conversations that continued after “work” was over. Business executives and corporate lawyers seemed particularly intrigued if I mentioned my law degree, information that often elicited expressions of envy but also an occasional look of pity. Some guests offered me handsome tips which I always declined, explaining that I was well taken care of by the hotel. Whether I was busking in Europe or doing music trades in the luxury hotels of the third world, I always tried to avoid situations that might make me feel more like a beggar than a musician.
People often expect strolling violinists to play requests, something that worried me in the beginning. My repertory was broadly based across the styles that I played – mainly classical, folk, pop and standards – but initially limited to the pieces I had memorized. The most commonly requested tunes came from shows and movies that had been international hits, so I quickly taught myself several of those. If someone requested a piece I didn’t know, a common occurrence, I asked what style of music they liked best, then played something I knew from that style. This deflection strategy served me well throughout the trip, though I also experimented with bolder tactics. If I had never played the tune but knew what it sounded like, I would sometimes offer to try playing it on the spot. That worked well if the melody was simple, but sounded tentative and rough if it was too complex. To avoid embarrassment, I learned to do a fast mental scan of the melody before making the offer. As I became better at that, I decided to go a step further.
Guest - “Do you know “Time Will Tell”?
“No, I’ve never heard it; but if you sing me the melody, I’ll try to play it for you.”
When this turned out well, it invariably brought forth spontaneous applause and admiring comments. More often, though, the melody was either too complicated or indecipherable because the singer was incapable of carrying a tune, a situation which required delicate handling.
Guest - “No, no, not like that; like this – dum-de-dum … (indecipherable)
“I’m having a little trouble following the melody; let’s try again, just the first section.”
“Dum-de-dum… (hopelessly indecipherable)
If I was lucky, someone else at the table who knew the tune and had a decent singing voice might enable me to play it. If not but the people were of good humor, we could all have a good laugh, whether at the vocalist’s expense or mine. If nothing worked, I went into deflection mode and fell back on old faithful.
“Sorry I can’t get it, but let me play you something I do know. What style of music do you like best?”
As time went by, I learned more tunes and, more importantly, how to handle the different situations that unfolded and thus felt confident I could deal with whatever arose – with one major exception. That came after I returned to the United States and used my law degree to launch a career as a mediator of lawsuits. Because this was a brand new field, I had to develop my own opportunities and support myself in the meantime, which I did by continuing what had worked so well during my long trip home – playing strolling violin music. I got hired to play every Saturday evening at a fancy restaurant in western Massachusetts, which paid enough to cover living expenses with a minimal investment of time. The most important mediation opportunity I was developing involved persuading the twelve Superior Court judges in our district to adopt a program I had designed and use me as the complex case mediator. Legal mediation was novel then; many hard-nosed lawyers and judges were skeptical, some considered it flakey. Who was this new guy trying to get it going? Meeting with all the judges in their different courthouses took several months and things were progressing well; but I worried the whole time that one of them might show up at the restaurant while I was playing. I imagined entering their minds and saw there a simple question - why is this guy who says he’s a mediator moonlighting as a strolling violinist?
That would be hard to explain, so I thought about options. Should I wear a disguise? Hide and escape through the back door? Ask what style of music the judge liked and play a tune? I couldn’t come up with a good solution. If it happened, I would just have to wing it and hope for the best. Fortunately, none of them came while I was working there, my project got off the ground and everything turned out fine. There are some situations that you just can’t prepare for, that depend entirely on luck even though your future might hang in the balance.
After the first week, Mr. Nain told me to come to his office the next morning to discuss some changes.
“Are you satisfied with my playing?” I asked with some concern the following day.
“Yes, very much. I want you to keep doing the same type of music in the lounge, but for the final half hour, I’d like to feature you playing in the restaurant with our band.”
The hotel had four restaurants, two of them with live music. I knew he couldn’t be referring to the group playing Indian music in the restaurant serving local cuisine, but the main restaurant had an international menu accompanied by a jazz band, almost equally problematic for me.
“I’m sorry Mr. Nain, but I don’t play jazz. They are fine musicians, I’ve heard them, but I can’t really play that style, certainly not like they do.”
“I’m sure you’ll be able to work something out. I told the band you will be at their rehearsal later this morning – 11 AM at the restaurant stage. I’d like you to start performing with them this evening at 9 PM.”
Mr. Nain was already shaking my hand, saying it would be fine and telling his secretary to bring in his next appointment. He was a man of few words, cordial but decisive. I was pleased with his confidence in me, but anxious about how this might turn out. I had listened to the band a few nights before and was impressed by the fluidity of their improvisations, especially during the up-tempo tunes, something I could never do. There were four of them, with matching tuxedos that made them look as professional as they sounded. How was I ever going to fit in? I decided to at least try looking good and showed up for the rehearsal in an embroidered, traditional Indian shirt I had recently bought. As we exchanged greetings, I noticed that they all wore t-shirts and blue jeans.
Joe Santana, short, squat and smiling, was the band leader. He played sax and violin, an unusual combination because their techniques are so dissimilar. His younger brother also named Joe but with a different middle name, played the drums. A trumpeter and electric guitarist filled out the group. All four of them were descendants of settlers in Goa, the former Portuguese colony that had become a city on the west coast of India and the main source of its players of western music. I told them how much I enjoyed their performance the other night and also a little about my background. Joe suggested that we get to work.
“Mr. Nain said we should prepare a half hour or so of music for tonight. What would you like to start with, Peter?”
I decided I should lower expectations before playing a note.
“Joe, this was all Mr. Nain’s idea – I told him I that I know a few Gershwin tunes and some other standards, but that I definitely am not a jazz improviser. I’ve done some simple improvisations with slow folk tunes and blues, but that’s it.”
“Just do what you feel comfortable with. We like Gershwin, too. Which ones do you know?”
“The Man I Love? In G?”
“Yes, whatever key you want. You lead off with the tune.”
I played the melody, then listened while they took turns improvising, and joined in again at the end when the melody returned. It sounded good, though I felt a little inadequate about not being able to improvise with them. We used the same formula with Summertime and a couple of other standards, including a tango I had heard them play which was also in my strolling violin repertory. We needed a few more pieces to fill out the set, so they asked me to fiddle them some American folk tunes and said they would make up an accompaniment, which they quickly did. My ears were accustomed to hearing acoustic guitar, banjo and mandolin back up Ragtime Annie and The Ranger’s Waltz, not sax, trumpet and drums, so it sounded strange. But I was feeling better – these guys were nice, and it looked like this was probably going to turn out okay.
Though they were the real musicians, Mr. Nain had arranged for an over-blown image of me to be on a large sign in the lobby touting the violinist performing in the Taj Restaurant. This visual hype was belied by the response from the restaurant audience to my appearance on stage during the band’s second set. It started with a drum roll, which continued as I stepped up onto the bandstand while Joe announced “And now, ladies and gentlemen, our featured guest artist from the United States of America, Peter Contuzzi!”, followed by a cymbal crash. And then… silence. Most people continued eating, some looked up with blank facial expressions that said “Who?” while their hands remained busy with knives and forks. The whole scene was made worse on the second evening by two customers who tepidly clapped for the few seconds it took them to realize that no one else cared, so why should they?
Not wishing to endure any more of such mortifying entrances, I told Joe that we had to change the introduction. The problem was getting rid of the embarrassing silence, so we cut out the cymbal crash and, the instant Joe finished saying my name, jumped into a hard-driving fiddle tune - Ragtime Annie, my best piece, the one I always relied on to make a strong initial impression. We picked up the tempo to break-neck speed the last time through, producing robust applause and a successful launch of my thirty minutes in the spotlight.
Within a few days, I was not only comfortable playing with them but enjoying it, too. I practiced improvising on slow bluesy tunes like Summertime in my room, and then began doing it on the bandstand. After my melody and a couple of simple improvisations, they invariably kicked in with torrents of notes and well-crafted solos, but their encouragement kept me from suffering the comparison. As Joe generously pointed out, it always makes more sense to go from the simple to the complex rather than the other way around.
I usually joined the guys for a chat after our set together. One evening the subject turned to classical music, and the two Joes told me they also played in the violin section of the New Delhi Symphony Orchestra.
“Well,” I said, “you guys are certainly versatile.”
“We are rehearsing Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony later this week for a concert at the end of next month. Come along with us, Peter. The conductor will be happy to have you sit in.”
“Yes,” added the younger Joe, “we can meet you here and go together.”
My idea of a symphony orchestra in a large city was based on the many concerts I had been to in America and Europe. It was something way out of my league, requiring musicianship at the highest level, so I begged off. But they insisted and I finally relented, tempted by the chance to play Beethoven and consoled by the knowledge that this would only be a rehearsal, an unlikely setting for me to inflict any serious damage. I still wondered, though - how and why do I keep getting myself into situations that will probably make me feel that I’m in over my head? I like to swim but not to drown.
Again, my anxiety was misplaced. Despite its imposing name, the New Delhi Symphony was not a professional orchestra. Many of its members were amateurs, and the professional musicians all earned their living playing in hotels. This was a labor of love for everyone, so I quickly felt at ease. In fact, we could only do an approximation of the Fifth Symphony because there were no violists, just two cellists and an incomplete wind section. For the concert, musicians would be brought in from Bombay and Calcutta to fill out the orchestra. The conductor hummed the missing parts, in a voice without character, but playing Beethoven is always exciting, even when he’s not all there. What we lacked in quality, we made up for in enthusiasm. The two Joes introduced me to several of the musicians, so there was a nice social component to the evening as well. I thanked them both for their insistence.
A few days later, they invited me to their home to have lunch and meet their family. I arrived at 11 AM and stepped into a crowded, buzzing household. In his early thirties, Joe was the eldest of several brothers and sisters, all of whom lived with their parents in a modest home that also accommodated Joe’s wife and four-year-old daughter. A new trumpet player that Joe was breaking in for the band was temporarily staying there as well, practicing scales and exercises. Both Joes and I sat chatting in the living room as other family members moved in and out, frequently joining in the conversation.
The furnishings were simple, dominated however by a huge record collection along the walls of the room. Joe said that the band’s sole exposure to jazz was through recordings of American and European groups, but by listening and then playing along with the records, they had learned the idiom. There were also recordings of pop music from many different countries, which explained why they had a tune ready for any occasion or group. The night before, they had played some Russian drinking songs for Russian tourists who sang along as they polished off a bottle of vodka. Joe even sang in Japanese for the tour group from Japan, though he now confessed that he didn’t have a clue what the words meant and showed me the record from which he had memorized the vocal sounds.
Pleasant conversation continued during the tasty meal prepared by Joe’s mother and sisters. The family name, Santana, remained Portuguese; but as I looked around the room it was clear not only from the food on the table but also their manner and complexion that India had thoroughly absorbed them. Our ancestors were born in the Mediterranean but wound up on opposite ends of the earth in search of a better life. Two offspring of Europe had become through assimilation an Indian and an American. Joe’s transformation had taken place in a traditional society over many generations, mine in just a single generation but in a country that signifies rapid change more than any other. How different we had become despite our shared roots in southern Europe! And how wonderful that music had brought us back together.
Several days later I contracted food poisoning, ironically from food I ate at the spotless Oberoi hotel rather than the rough-looking places I occasionally had lunch or snacks in. I spent the next 24 hours in bed, leaving it only (though frequently) to crawl to the bathroom for a violent discharge of vomit or diarrhea. When the band arrived for their evening performance, Mr. Nain told them I was sick and would not be able to play. The next day all four of them came to my room to see how I was doing and, since I was already feeling better, stayed for some socializing. With my spirits lifted and the bug out of my system, I was able to join them on stage that evening.
My last night in New Delhi came about a week later. The band and I played a good final set together for a receptive audience, then chatted and reminisced at a table near the bandstand during the break before their last set of the evening. Joe knew I still had to pack for an early train the next morning, but asked me to stay just a little longer. When they were all on stage again, Joe announced that the band would like to dedicate their next tune to the violinist they had enjoyed playing with this past month, then pointed to me as he began singing “Goodbye My Friend.”
A letter of reference from Mr. Nain opened the doors to playing music in luxury hotels for the rest of my time in India and Nepal. The letter was concise but very positive because I wrote it. There was no forgery involved – when I requested the letter, Mr. Nain asked that I save him some time by providing a draft, an offer I immediately accepted. Nepal did not have any work permit restrictions, so when I got there I was able to negotiate a weekly salary in addition to the free room and board. My compensation was in Nepali rupees, but it was a multiple of what the Katmandu Oberoi paid most of its other employees. I bought a ticket to see the Himalayan peaks up close in a small plane and had more than enough money for other splurges. Nepali law required me to spend all the rupees before leaving the country, a pleasant predicament I had never before encountered.
Another letter of reference, this one not written by me, also opened some doors. It came from the United States Consulate in Florence, Italy where several months earlier I had performed a program of American folk music. I contacted the cultural director of the American Embassy soon after my arrival in Nepal and was hired to play a similar program. The $200 paycheck bought me a plane ticket to Bangkok, my last stop before flying home. Though everything was up in the air when I left Italy for the long trip home (as it was when I left the United States for Italy years before), one thing was leading nicely to another. At this point, I was even running a modest profit.
The Embassy invited local cultural dignitaries, mainly musicians and artists, to attend my concert. At the reception afterwards, I met the violin professor from The Royal Academy. We talked about our different musical traditions, and he invited me to a rehearsal for an upcoming concert of Nepali classical music that he was preparing with some colleagues at the Academy. I enjoyed chatting with them the following day, but was surprised at the sloppiness of his violin technique when they began playing. He was the sole professor of violin at Nepal’s most prestigious musical institution, yet his playing was mediocre, and that of his colleagues not much better. Was this the best a country of more than fifteen million people had to offer? How could this be?
A clue came from another Nepali that I met at the reception. Prem was a young reporter who had been assigned to write an article about the concert by Nepal’s leading English language newspaper. He stayed after the reception to interview me and finished our conversation with an invitation to visit him at the newspaper a few days later.
After showing me around the office, he put me on the back of his motorcycle and brought me to his home for a snack. Prem was in his twenties and lived with his parents in one of Katmandu’s grandest homes. He had recently graduated from the university and obtained the newspaper job through his father, who was the city’s chief of police. That explained how this pleasant though not particularly bright young man wound up in such a good position fresh out of school despite high unemployment. As he showed me around the large living and dining room areas, newly finished, he spoke with remarkable candor. He liked living so comfortably but could never build such a house. His father had accomplished the feat by assigning several of his policemen to construct it instead of doing their regular police work. This was a daily occurrence for over a year; in fact, some of them were there working in the garden on the day of my visit. I silently wondered what the source of the money was for the marble and other luxuries the home contained.
Nepal was at that time a virtual absolute monarchy. Your position in life would much more likely be determined by how close you were to the royal family than by your talents. Prem and the violin professor were nice persons, but should it be surprising that such a system bred nepotism, incompetence and corruption? The Embassy official also put me in contact with a lawyer at Katmandu’s most important law firm. The modest quarters of this four-man office reflected the status of lawyers, a profession in Nepal only since the mid-twentieth century. There was an endearing folk quality to the judge at the equally modest Supreme Court; he snacked on some nuts while hearing a case. It was apparent that the rule of law had shallow, fragile roots here. The lawyer explained that their legal system was gradually developing toward the goal of providing vigorous, independent advocacy; however, one had to be cautious where the interests and friends of the royal family were concerned. It helped that we were alone and colleagues of a sort, but he still lowered his voice as he spoke of them.
India, by way of comparison, was a virtual meritocracy. Banaras Hindu University in Varanasi has long been one of India’s finest, and its violin professor, N. Rajam, had been described to me as the best violinist in the country and a national treasure by several enthusiasts of Indian classical music. I wanted to hear her play, but she had no concerts scheduled in the places I visited. Perhaps I could meet her when I went to Varanasi, my last stop in India. In my own country I would never have the courage to call Itzhak Perlman or Joshua Bell and request a meeting; here, though, I was a foreign violinist performing at her city’s best hotel, someone especially curious about improvisation in the Indian music she played and taught. Would that be enough? I found a telephone listing in the directory and, after rehearsing what I would say, took a deep breath and made the call. As the phone rang, I secretly hoped there would be no answer so I could avoid the embarrassment of rejection yet still feel I had at least tried. Instead, a family member answered and called her to the phone to hear my petition. She said she was quite busy with teaching and preparing some upcoming concerts, but then asked if I could come for tea later that week at her home on campus.
Her daughter met me at the University bus stop and led the way, pointing out the two medical schools on opposite sides of the street. One taught traditional Indian medicine, the other the modern scientific variety familiar to Westerners; she said both were valued in her country. She studied violin with her mother and carried the name “Sangeeta,” the Hindi word for music, here taking the form of a beautiful girl filled with adolescent enthusiasm.
Rajam’s husband greeted me at the door; he was not a musician, but broadly cultured and protective of his wife’s artistry. He said she was with a disciple but would join us shortly. A few minutes later, she calmly entered the room, wearing a gentle smile under bright eyes and a red dotted forehead crowned with jet black hair. She seemed much younger than her forty-five years as she extended her hand. We sat down and a young woman brought in tea and biscuits. After some general pleasantries, I turned the subject to her musical formation.
“My father taught me how to play violin at our home in southern India,” she said, “but afterward I came to Varanasi for many years of rigorous training. My guru was not a violinist but a vocalist, Omkarnath Thakur, one of our legendary singers. I learned artistry from him, breathing and phrasing. But I had to develop on my own a violin technique that would enable me to echo what he sang. Human emotion is above all in the voice; I wanted my violin to speak in that voice when I accompanied him on stage.”
“Indian classical music sounds so exotic to my ears, with all the slides and oscillations,” I said. “”But our voices usually do spend more time gliding around than making the discrete changes in pitch so common in Western music. I have heard Indian violinists bend notes in ways that sound like anguished cries, or sometimes like gentle sighs.“
“Yes, and other sounds of the heart, too,” she added. “Music without emotion has no life, no meaning. We must speak with our instruments what words cannot say. I try to express on my violin the subtle vocal nuances that Thakur employed to bring a rich emotional quality to his singing. He taught me to approach the notes with tenderness, with love and humility.”
“Our best music relies so much on shifts in harmony for its emotional impact,” I said. “Yours has no harmony, yet it attains a similar level of intensity.”
“Without harmony, our music developed more complexity of rhythm and melody," she commented. "Above all, it is melody that moves us here, especially when the performer is spontaneously inspired by the audience reaction.”
I had heard concerts where the audience clapping and vocalizations drive musicians to an intensity of expression that brings the listeners to a state near frenzy. The mutual feeding is thrilling. The glow on her face showed she had often experienced this feeling.
“I know that much of your classical music is improvised,” I said. “Mozart and many other great Western composers were also masters of improvisation. It was an important part of their training. But that died out before 1900 - we attached too much reverence to their written notes. Except for pieces they have memorized, most classical musicians I know can’t even play music unless they are reading it off a page. How do you make it up as you go along? Where does it come from?”
“Ah, these are difficult questions you ask. Important questions, but very difficult.” She drew a deep breath, then continued hesitatingly. “It comes from both the brain and the spirit… it must be free… it requires great discipline.”
She paused as I mulled over the paradox in her words. Her eyes were radiant, their irises huge, deep and dark. Her facial expression suggested there was much more involved, but also that it was ineffable. I wanted more detail, and so turned to a technical question.
“How do you teach improvisation to your students?”
“Yes, that I can explain to you,” she responded, smiling. “I give them one note and tell them to play with it for a week. If this limitation makes them bored, they must push past the boredom with play. There can be a world of sound in one note if you experiment with different rhythms, different undulations of pitch, different bow pressures and placements on the string. Limits help you to be free; they keep you from feeling crushed by too many choices. When they find music in one note, I give them two notes to play with - an interval - and tell them to continue experimenting; then three notes… It takes intense effort over a long time, and it includes absorbing our musical traditions. But it must be done with great playfulness so the result can be free and natural.”
“What are you thinking of when you improvise during a concert?” I asked.
“My mind is focused on the raga. Always on the raga. The music I make comes from that base. I caress the sounds, sometimes I cajole them. If there are other musicians, we listen to each other, giving and taking. But the source is always the raga.”
My elementary familiarity with the word must have been apparent, because she went on with a simple explanation.
“A raga is a sequence of several notes, something like your modal scales but enriched – enriched by the melodic patterns particular to each raga and its associations with the seasons, with different times of day. It creates the mood, provides the framework for improvisation. In Sanskrit ‘raga’ means ‘to color.’ We use musical sound to color emotions and express them, to evoke passions – love, desire, joy…”
She sighed, though it was barely perceptible. Some of her students had joined us in the living room, for the most part listening and watching, though when Rajam and I asked them a few questions, they eagerly responded. At one point she told them, “The secret to playing well is no secret – it is practice! And then still more, so there is a cost, things you must forego.”
Whatever the sacrifice, they seemed willing to make it, eager to be like her. As I watched the way they interacted with her and heard about how much time they spent with her, it became evident that the term her husband had used was the correct one – these young people were not merely students but disciples, and Rajam was more than a music teacher or a mentor. She was their guru. Though it has developed some negative connotations in the West, the term “guru” retains its vitality in India and is rooted in the interplay of darkness and light. A guru is one who dispels the darkness of ignorance, an earthly guide to spiritual wisdom, a giver of knowledge and light, a recipient of reverence and devotion. Disciples often live with their guru, absorbing as well as learning. I don’t know if any of Rajam’s disciples other than her daughter lived with her. But I had no doubt that she would shape their lives at least as much as any mother or father.
The hotels I worked in always had a copy of the Bhagavad Gita next to the Bible in the night table beside the bed. This Hindu holy scripture was composed a century or two before Christ and was influenced by the sacred texts of the Upanishads, which predate it by more than half a millennium and contain religious concepts central not only to Hinduism, but also to Buddhism and Jainism. The Gita takes the form of a dialogue between the god Krishna and Arjuna, a prince who, on the eve of a great battle between warring branches of his family, is distressed over the prospect of his relatives killing each other. I often read parts of this ancient epic, hoping to better understand their highly evolved spiritual world and the wisdom it might contain. The Gita says this about the guru:
“Acquire the transcendental knowledge from a Self-realized master by humble reverence, by sincere inquiry, and by service. The wise ones who have realized the Truth will impart the Knowledge to you.”
This long journey of mine was born in curiosity and a desire for adventure, but was maturing into a type of sincere inquiry. I was not merely seeing the world but living among its peoples, entering radically different cultures through an international language on both my tongue and my fiddle, having life-forming experiences with interesting people from a wide range of backgrounds. This journey had become my guru, the world I encountered the Self-realized master, its prophets and teachers the wise ones I was meeting along the way.
So where did sex fit into this spiritual world? With such an enormous population there was obviously lots of it going on. But India valued modesty – whenever I saw a Hindi movie, the love scenes always ended in a fade-out after the first kiss. There had been a time and place, however, when sex was celebrated by religious culture. The temples at Khajuraho, dating from the 10th and 11th centuries, contain magnificent sculptures, some of them highly erotic and sexually explicit. I planned to explore them for a day on my way to Varanasi.
It was on the bus to Khajuraho that I first heard of Balram Shukla. A young Indian businessman told me he was the best sitar player in that part of India and that he performed each evening at Khajuraho’s Oberoi Hotel. I had enjoyed the ground-breaking “West Meets East” recordings of Ravi Shankar, India’s famous sitar player, and Yehudi Menuhin, one of the West’s most distinguished violinists. I imagined what it might be like trying a similar, minor-league collaboration here. Around mid-morning I entered the Oberoi hotel and soon after met with the manager, the son of a maharaja, now required to work for a living following the abolition of all royal titles and stipends more than a decade before. He read Mr. Nain’s letter and quickly agreed to the trade terms I proposed.
“I heard you have a sitar player who performs here,” I said. ”I wonder if it also might be possible to talk with him about playing together.”
“That would be interesting to listen to, but it will of course be up to him,” he replied. “He performs with his father every evening before dinner. Talk to them.”
As he left the room to take a call, another man entered and started conversing with me. He wore an enormous diamond set in a golden ring, a burden to his finger but probably designed more for the observer’s eye than the wearer’s hand.
“Do you also work at the hotel?” I asked at one point.
“I own it,” he said matter-of-factly. He was a rich jeweler who had paid Oberoi to build and manage the hotel for him. A generation earlier, the maharaja would have sent his son to this man to buy precious gems, not to work. The traditional system, however, no longer applied. The British made the first inroads, often governing through local princes while imposing the British legal system on the Indian social order. Its long evolution in England had developed the concept of rule by law, which inevitably erodes the power of kings and turns it over to another class. In democratic India, as in many other places, it was the merchant rather than the monarch who now ruled.
I spent the afternoon at the temples but was back in plenty of time to hear Balram Shukla’s sitar performance. He was accompanied by his father on tabla, the Indian drums. They were both excellent musicians. I introduced myself afterwards, but couldn’t say much other than that I really enjoyed their music - I was scheduled to play during the dinnertime which was about to begin. After they finished their meal, I was glad to see that they stayed in the dining room to listen to my music. We chatted at their table during my breaks. Balram spoke very basic English and translated for Mr. Shukla, who spoke only Hindi. When I raised the possibility of trying to play together, they seemed interested and later invited me to their home in Chhatarpur for lunch the following day.
I arrived by bus and after meeting Balram’s family, wound up on the back of a motorcycle for a quick tour of the small city. At the public radio station, Balram introduced me to the director, a highly congenial man and ardent enthusiast of his country’s music. When I spoke of my interest in Indian music, he invited me to return in a few days for a private concert by some of the musicians employed at the station.
Back at the Shukla home, I asked if I could use the bathroom before starting lunch. That led to some perplexed looks and discussion in Hindi, after which someone took me outside to the field adjoining the house and said, “This is the bathroom,” sweeping his pointed finger from one end of the field to the other.
Balram’s mother and sisters served the flavorful meal they had prepared, after which he suggested we move into a nearby room to play some music. I felt relieved because by then, language limitations had made conversation laborious – no one in the family spoke English other than Balram, and his was rudimentary.
My relief soon turned to frustration because we couldn’t get anything going that sounded like music. Each of us played in the classical, folk and pop styles of his own musical culture, so I was hopeful we would be able to blend something together, but it just wasn’t working. Disappointment set in. After more than a half hour of futility, I was ready to give up when Balram said there was a tune I had played the prior evening that he especially liked. I realized he was talking about an Italian tarantella, an energetic folk tune with a basic, repetitive rhythm. I began playing it and when he picked up the rhythmic groove on his sitar, the result finally started to resemble music. How stupid of me! I had forgotten the insight gained a few months before in Kenya playing with the African musicians – keep it simple and focus on rhythm. It still sounded rough, though, because we had two melody instruments using different vocabularies. But the beat was there, holding us together, as we continued experimenting.
When I suggested that we try improvising a simple conversation with our instruments, things got still more promising. I would listen to a short melodic phrase from Balram’s sitar, then respond on my violin, altering or copying the phrase, turning it upside down or commenting on it in some other way. Balram responded in kind, and we continued tossing our musical thoughts back and forth. This formula gave us the possibility of developing a shared musical language, and its tentative first efforts were apparently enough to bring Mr. Shukla into the room. He had wisely avoided getting involved during that initial period of hapless fumbling, but his drums now provided a solid rhythmic foundation for our experiment in musical dialogue.
Though we certainly finished our session better than it had started, I hesitated when Balram proposed that we perform together at the hotel that evening. He and his father were masters at improvisation, a skill I was just learning, and to the extent that we wound up making some music together, what seemed effortless for them took intense concentration on my part. This was all too new for me to be comfortable with it. I had felt humiliated on stage a few times in the past and hated the feeling of weakness and embarrassment it brought. But they were the ones who lived and worked here, whose livelihoods depended in good measure on this job. If they were willing to try it, why shouldn’t I? If things didn’t work out, I could just hit the road again. Traveling around as I did had its share of risk and uncertainty, but when problems developed, there was always an easy solution. A stationary life is stingy with fresh starts, but the traveler finds them readily available at the nearest bus or train station.
I wound up staying the rest of the week, performing with the Shuklas every evening. There were some uneven stretches, but we played through them and sounded better each day. During our set, Balram and I each did a solo piece – for me it was my old reliable, Ragtime Annie. Mr. Shukla liked it so much that, from the second evening on, he put intricate Indian rhythms underneath this quintessentially American fiddle tune. The same straight-ahead 4/4 tune that had previously been surrounded by the raucous syncopations of African drums now danced above the ornate, often delicate patterns of an Indian tabla – a hillbilly in two dresses, dramatically different yet equally exotic.
As in our first session, talking to each other with our instruments generated the best music. I was able to enjoy some of this musical conversation as we played it, but more often the heavy concentration it required made it difficult to delight in the moment. I was too busy thinking about what to do with the sound I had just heard from Balram, trying not to let my occasional weak responses distract me from doing better with the next phrase. If only fluency could be willed! The audience seemed to like most of what we did, and one tourist came back several evenings in a row with his tape recorder, somewhat easing my doubts.
After dinner started, I would replace my embroidered Indian shirt with a tie & vest, and move into the dining room for an hour or so of strolling violin music. One evening I noticed a striking woman, slim and blonde, eating alone. She seemed interested in chatting when I played a tune near her table, and our conversation continued afterwards. She was American, one of the early female graduates of the Harvard Business School, made rich enough by her job in investment banking to quit by her early thirties and become a consultant to international non-profit agencies. Now in her second year on her own, she already had some Asian clients and was in India to consult with one of them. I admired her autonomy and success; she was very attractive, though in a cool, professional way. It was hard to tell if my temporary though lengthy switch from law to music struck her as commendable or profligate.
She was spending two nights at the hotel, and our conversation resumed the following evening, flowing smoothly from one topic to another. But that wry manner, so hard to read! Her mind was as sharp as her clothes, though I imagined them off, on the floor next to a bed. When the dining room closed, I asked if she might be interested in spending more time together, perhaps having a drink in either of our rooms; I mentioned where mine was located. She smiled inscrutably as we got up from the table. She said she had an early flight and was too tired, but then looked like she might be considering it as we parted ways. I went to my room and left the door unlocked, horny and hopeful, but never saw her again.
Before each of our evening performances, Mr. Shukla prayed in the magnificent hotel lobby where we also played our music. Near the middle of the room, a sumptuous spiral stairway in gleaming white marble looked like it led to paradise rather than the second floor. Mr. Shukla did not pray to a single, all-powerful God, but to several Hindu gods, each representing different aspects of the human spirit. They were among the beautiful statues that lined the lobby walls, rendered in a smooth reflective stone, some of them in abstract form. He stood before them one at a time, his hands clasped upward, his eyelids shut. His mouth prayed inaudibly, after which he briefly bowed his head. He opened his eyes, reached out and touched the god statue, then moved on to another.
Afterwards, the three of us would sit silently in a quiet room off to the side. For Balram and his father, music was something holy, an expression of all that you are - what you eat, do, think and feel - everything. Playing music was a deeply spiritual experience that required a clearing of the mind. They closed their eyes and slowed their breathing, and I copied them. I peeked a few times early on and saw two men deep in meditation. I tried my best to enter where they were, lifted by the feeling in the room, but was only able to put my mind at rest for a few moments at a time. You never know what’s really going on in another person’s head, but they appeared at peace, and I wanted to join them there.
Our trio’s final performance went especially well, but it was our parting that made the greatest impression on me. As usual, we weren’t able to say much to each other after our instruments were in their cases. We had done all our speaking before, in a language of sound that we had created playing music together. Before going our separate ways, we embraced warmly. Though not many words had passed between us that week and I couldn’t even communicate with one of them, I felt a genuine emotional bond with both. Mr. Shukla looked at me and said something in Hindi that Balram translated - “Don’t go, Peter – play more music with us. Live here for a few more months and you will play as we do.”
I doubted the optimism in his prediction, though not the sentiment behind his words. Here was an opportunity for revelatory experience, rich in potential both musically and spiritually, with free room and board at the hotel included! But I left, as I always did then, restless, not yet knowing when to stay.
16. The Masai Meet Bach
I had first walked away from a spiritual world in my late teens, when I could no longer accept what Catholicism told me to believe. As a boy, I had on a few occasions experienced a brief but ecstatic sensation of religious bliss. As an adult, however, I was drawn to reason and philosophy, which initially seemed incompatible with spirituality. When music absorbed me, it created threads that would eventually contribute to integration, but my travels also enabled me to better appreciate that we are more than just body and mind. What lies beyond them is Spirit, which participates in a unity that is beyond time and dimension, unseen and unheard. Many attempt to approach it through religion, meditation, or great art. But transcendent experience can also make it accessible.
When I was in Africa, I had entered the primordial Rift Valley, where the human journey began, on my way to the Masai Mara wildlife preserve. Enormous herds of wildebeest, zebra and gazelle make an annual migration through the preserve in search of water and grass, trusting that the safety of the herd will protect them from the lions and cheetahs they know will attack. At one point, our jeep was quietly sitting in the midst of several thousand peacefully grazing wildebeest when some of them sensed the approach of lions and started a stampede. Surrounded, we moved in rhythm with them thanks to an experienced driver. I felt like a cell in a swiftly moving mass of life, caught up in a roaring river of adrenaline, fueled by the beasts’ fear and our exhilaration. Eventually they slowed down and separated as some began grazing again, allowing us to get out.
Evolution has made magnificent physical specimens of them all, with rippling muscles under coats that glisten in the sunlight. But it is not only their wildness and powerful beauty that attracts us. This is the grandest stage of all for the struggle between life and death. The kill is bloody, brutal, gripping, an essential element of animal life in the savanna, the life we once lived in this very place, before civilization.
One morning I felt an urge to play my violin and watch them at the same time. I walked away from the lodge and about twenty minutes later was on a ridge overlooking the herds. The animals stretched out to the horizon and, focusing my eyes on them, I began improvising, taking inspiration from what I saw. After a while, I moved on to Appalachian fiddle tunes.
I heard sounds from behind me – I continued playing while I turned and saw some Masai tribesmen approaching. The Masai are a nomadic people who have lived essentially the same way for thousands of years; they build temporary huts of mud and branches on their territorial lands and tend their cattle, moving to new grazing areas as needed. According to Masai tradition, a boy must kill a lion with a spear before he can be considered a man. To be a man is to be a warrior.
These Masai smiled pleasantly as they formed a small semi-circle in front of me. When I finished the tune, the oldest one spoke – just one word, heavily accented and very drawn-out, but I recognized it:
“Niiice.”
I responded in English but no one understood. I tried some simple comments and questions, but again, no one understood. That one complimentary word, however, plus the mixture of curiosity and interest in their expressions encouraged me to play on. I launched into another vigorous fiddle tune. Its steady beat set heads bobbing in time with the music, with more smiles and some unintelligible but positive sounds. When I finished, the same man spoke, again just a single, drawn-out word:
“Gooood.”
I smiled, grateful that the music was providing me not only with an imagined link to the animals beyond, but also with an observable link to these good-spirited people directly in front of me. That’s when Bach entered my mind. The violin and Western classical music were not known in these tribal lands. I could tell that my audience liked the rhythmic American folk tunes I had fiddled; but I wondered what would happen if I were to play some Bach.
I began a movement from one of Bach’s solo pieces. The Masai at first reacted as before. As they continued listening, though, I noticed that their expressions were changing. Some leaned toward me, drawing closer. There was an intensity of concentration in their eyes that had not been there before; it grew as Bach’s music spun out its lovely melody, modulating tonalities, and rich patterns. They seemed to instinctively understand that this was more complex music, demanding closer attention. They became very quiet and listened carefully.
When I finished, the old man took a deep breath and gazed into the back of my eyes. Again, he spoke a single word. But he seemed to choose it more carefully this time, saying it very slowly and with profound feeling:
“Beeyoootiful!!”
And then we all smiled together.
The grandeur of the wild animals I saw roaming the Kenyan plains dominated my thoughts and feelings the whole time I was there. I had the peak spiritual experience of my life, but did not even realize it, nor did it involve those magnificent beasts. An appreciation of what had truly happened came later, after reflection.
On that day, music had enabled me to do more than communicate. In essence, I had mediated an encounter between folk and genius, between traditional and high culture. Here were people from the cradle of human life, little changed since then, meeting one of their far-flung offspring, one likely to be revered as long as humanity endures. On that day, the most impressive animals were clearly the human ones - a musical giant from eighteenth century Europe and the timeless Masai of Africa. My struggles learning Italian showed me that speaking and comprehending were different skills, each so difficult to master when not acquired instinctively, as a child. On that day, speaking and comprehending both occurred at the highest and the deepest levels, beyond words, across millennia. On that day, we celebrated the unique ability of human beings to forge wondrous connections, to communicate and understand each other across immense barriers of culture, and language, and time.
Beeyoootiful!!
Whenever I need my faith in the human spirit restored, I think of this marvelous memory. Invariably, that brings on a feeling of well-being, unleashing emotions much more intense than the pleasant surprise I felt while it was happening. Experience is the substance of living - it stimulates our senses, grabs our mind, defines existence. But memory is sometimes better than the original experience because it has the benefit of context and reflection. Real time is a blur, a flood of impressions, actions and reactions, made up on the go. Over time, the raw data of experience accumulate and interconnect, creating personal history. Without reflection, this is little more than a time line, a story without themes or significance. Reflection is the mind’s greatest achievement because it imparts perspective and assigns meaning to memory, our most precious possession, all that remains as each fleeting moment rushes into the next. Though the passage of time may cloud the details, some things stay sharply imprinted. The sound of the old man’s words! I hear them now as clearly as before, but see things that then lay hidden.
17. Young & Old Among the Arabs
It’s again been a cloud covered, wet winter in Florence, and I need some time in the sun. A few years earlier, when Giovanna last directed Smith’s JYA program, I escaped to Rhodes and Crete, but this time I’m looking straight south. Tunisia is close, but the birthplace of the “Arab Spring” is in the news now because a leader of the secular opposition has been assassinated, bringing down the moderate Islamist government and sparking street violence. Political tension in its equally sunny Arab neighbors is even worse, so I decide to stay in Florence. Then my prudence starts bothering me. When you have kids at home and a monthly mortgage, it makes good sense to play it safe; but those brakes no longer apply. During my younger travels, I eagerly went to protest demonstrations and political rallies of both political extremes during turbulent times to see what they were like. They were exciting - so why am I being so cautious?
There is one other thing simultaneously holding me back and pushing me there. I had visited many places as a young man and enjoyed all of them with one exception. My time in the Arab world was short and restricted to only a few countries, but I often felt unwelcome and uncomfortable. It has always seemed strange to me that I took away positive impressions everywhere but there, and I wonder what it would be like now, during this hopeful, albeit chaotic transformation of their societies. The only way to find out is to go, and it’s another cold, rainy day in Florence, so I buy a ticket to Tunisia, where the forecast is warm and sunny. I reserve a room in a highly-recommended b&b and am glad that the Arabs and I will have another chance.
“No, that was the last bus today,” said the border guard. “Sometimes they wait, sometimes they don’t. That’s the chance you take with that company.”
I watched in amazement as the rickety bus pulled away from the Spanish-Moroccan border while I got my passport stamped, even though I had purchased a ticket all the way to the Moroccan city of Tetouan and we had only arrived at the border a few minutes before. Life was becoming less rational since leaving the southern tip of Spain, which is British and called Gibraltar, and entering the northern tip of Morocco, which is Spanish and called Ceuta. But power politics can explain that illogic.
Shadows were getting longer when a lucky ride from a Frenchman brought me from the border to the city. A walk through its medina quarter the next day was more like going back in time than from place to place. In its narrow, crooked paths, animals mixed freely with darkened people wearing robes and sandals. The walled medina was an enclosed bedlam of carts and colors, mosques and prayers, shops and cafes, sweet mint tea and men calmly smoking hashish in elaborate pipes. The only modern intrusion was an occasional sign of electricity.
When I simultaneously scratched an itchy scalp and passed what looked like an empty barber shop, my dirty hair motivated a move from observation to participation. I stepped inside, but it was quickly apparent from our mutually incomprehensible vocal sounds that we had no common language. I made finger movements on my head as if doing a shampoo. The young barber didn’t understand my gesture, but he responded with a friendly smile and definitely seemed interested in turning me into a customer. After additional gestures got across the idea of a shampoo, the message on his shaking head was that shampoos are not part of barbershop services here. His expression, though, quickly moved from disappointment to problem-solving, then to solution. In a brightened manner, he dispatched what looked like a kid brother with some coins from his pocket.
We sat down for more smiles and gesturing. He took out a match and lit the hash pipe near his chair, took a puff and then passed it to me. The strong stuff inside gave the shop a warm, hazy glow. Kid brother returned and handed him a small tube of bright blue liquid. The barber looked pleased and motioned me over toward a sink so tiny that I couldn’t get my head under its faucet. He thought a bit, then filled a large glass with water from the tap. My head sat uncomfortably on the edge of the sink as little brother poured water over my hair and the barber worked the blue liquid into a lather. A good rinse, though, would require hot water, something his sink did not provide. That was expeditiously addressed by starting a small fire under the teapot in the corner. As the brothers worked their way through the technical problems presented by my shampoo, their conversation was spirited, their actions purposeful, and my occasional gestures of encouragement received with great enthusiasm.
My hair really felt clean. I didn’t need a haircut, but I liked these guys and wanted to give them some more business. That solution came quickly, and the barber immediately understood my gesture requesting one of his standard services - a shave. Our broad smiles expressed delight with the success of our communication; and I was happy with the straight-razor shave he gave me, smooth and without skin irritation. Afterwards, there were more broad smiles, this time seeming to communicate mutual satisfaction with our business interaction, leaving a single but very important item to be determined – price.
Normally in this type a transaction, the price is known in advance. There may have been a list of prices on the wall, but I didn’t understand a letter of Arabic and didn’t see anything that even looked like a number. Plus I had received a shampoo, a totally new service for this shop, one the barber had to make up as he went along. This was a highly unusual setting for a negotiation. In the shops of his neighbors who sold merchandise, either party could walk away if they couldn’t agree on a price, but he had already given and I had received services that we both knew in advance would involve a payment.
I took out my wallet; various parts of my face, and especially my eyebrows, were asking – how much? He raised most of the fingers on two hands. I had no idea if that was a lot or little, but my instinctive reaction must have involved a subtle recoil because he immediately pulled down some fingers. I quickly nodded my assent to his counter-offer, and the smiles returned to our faces as money was exchanged. My whole head now felt good. The barber and I parted with friendly gestures, a handshake, then a wave and final smile. As I walked away, I noticed that his little brother had more of a grin than a smile.
Outside the city, the beachfront campground where I stayed blended the picturesque with the squalid. I pitched my tent in a lovely grove of palm trees looking out on a large sandy beach. A thatched roof covered an expansive camp center, freshly white-washed, featuring comfortable cushions for relaxing and listening to good music. But the stench inside the lavatory building was so disgusting that breathing was difficult, and you had to fight your way through flies to get to the toilets.
That first night, I had stepped off a bus that brought me nearby and was immediately approached by a pleasant teenager who spoke pretty good English. He offered to show me the way to the campground and helped me set up my tent, then lit some hash he had for sale. We chatted amiably as we smoked. Neither hash nor marijuana crossed my path in Florence during the conservatory school years, so I bought enough to keep me stoned through much of my five day stay there.
An equally pleasant teenager, Ahmed, worked in the camp’s food hut and also sold hash on the side. I told him I had already bought some from the guy I met getting off the bus and was moreover approached both at the bus station and on the bus. He said there were few job opportunities in Morocco for young guys other than dealing hash to foreigners. Ahmed believed that developing his language skills would give him better opportunities.
“If only I could learn English!” he said in the simple Spanish that was the only language we shared. “I already know French. I learned it from reading a book that has Arabic on one side, French on the other. All I need now is a book that has a French-English translation. I wish I could find one here.”
I considered his wish a plea for help, which was probably its intention. When I next returned to the United States, I bought a Penguin book with French-English parallel text and mailed it to him.
One night Ahmed got me devastatingly stoned on the special quality hash the boy dealers kept for themselves. I lay on one of the cushions and watched, as if in a trance, a life and death struggle unfold above me. A large winged insect flew into the silky web of a much smaller spider which was waiting off to the side. Its fluttering wings succeeded at first in driving back the attacking spider several times, but also had the effect of burying it more deeply in the sticky threads of the web. Despite its increasing entrapment, the movements of both body and wings were most frantic prior to the final, fatal attack, followed by a few weak flickers before all motion ceased. It was similar to my cousin Riccardo’s pig reacting to the knife, or Carla’s chicken in the grip of hands that would snap its neck. Perhaps we humans are the only species capable of calmly resigning ourselves to an inevitable death, though often we do not.
One day I was relaxing on the beach when three young men who were walking by struck up a conversation with me. I expected a dope hustle, but they were students who just wanted to practice some of their rudimentary English. One of them, Mohammed, was enrolled at the local military academy. I had come of age in the anti-military mentality produced by the Viet Nam war, which must have been apparent, because he repeatedly stressed how very fortunate he considered himself to have this opportunity to move up in life through a career in the army. My expectation of their intentions as they approached me proved him right about that. I asked some questions about Moroccan politics and freedom of expression. Mohammed said their king was a fine leader and a good man but that he didn’t really know much about the king or the other questions I was asking. His two companions nodded in agreement. I silently wondered if these were questions they were afraid to ask, or if, as Mohammed implied, they were outside the control of ordinary people and therefore had no meaning for him.
Back then, I did not fully appreciate how lucky I was to be born in a wealthy, open society, but I better understood the future Mohammed was trying to escape when I thought back to my first afternoon in the city. A short distance past a busy mosque, in one of Tetouan’s main squares, some Moroccan males beckoned me to join them in what looked like a café. They were probably in their twenties, though wrinkled faces made them look older. Their hard smiles and unnatural friendliness should have put me on guard, but my pleasant encounter with the young barber earlier that day (as well as some residual mellowness from his hash) left me eager for more interaction with the locals. They spoke some Spanish and invited me to smoke hash with them, leading me into a small room with one portal to the tea room inside and another open to the square.
The room had a table with three guys already sitting there, one of them a young, blond American who gave me a feeble smile underneath uncomfortable eyes. I started to get a bad feeling. The Moroccans fired up some hash and passed the pipe around while we drank tea and attempted some light conversation in a language none of us knew well. It wasn’t clear how long blondie had been there or what had happened before my arrival, but he definitely looked anxious to leave. After several more minutes he said “thank you” a few times in a nervous voice. He rose from the table in a tentative way, his head crouched uneasily between sloped shoulders, his eyes darting around. His movements became more deliberative as he walked toward the portal and then quickened dramatically when he entered the square, looking behind at us but not to wave goodbye. My heart began to beat faster as I took all this in. Was he escaping, or was this the aftermath of a forced purchase? The one thing I was sure of was that this was not just a friendly smoke among people getting acquainted.
The Moroccans had some vigorous discussion among themselves in Arabic, after which the one with a heavily wrinkled forehead turned toward me.
“How much do you want to buy?” he asked in a calm voice traveling through a false smile.
“Thanks,” I said, “but I already bought what I want last night at the campground where I’m staying.”
He was sitting next to me, but leaned slowly forward, bringing his face closer. It was a dark, stout face, unsmiling now, with a thickly-eyebrowed frown that produced still more wrinkles above eyes flashing red.
“To smoke, and not to buy - VERY BAD!”
He drew out the final two words for emphasis, leaning closer still, tapping me on the chest. The tone of his voice matched the expression on his face, a face that would be frightening under any circumstances but, intensified by the hash we had smoked, became that of the devil incarnate. My already fluttering heart beat even faster as I said I was sorry, I didn’t know… He shook his head and turned his gaze on his comrades while they barked their comments. I anxiously watched their animated discussion. The looks they occasionally shot me said I was in serious trouble. The devilish one turned aggressively to me again. His deep voice had a sinister sound.
“If you smoke, you have to buy. That’s the rule.”
“I understand that now. I’m sorry, but I don’t need any. I didn’t know.”
More group discussion. It would aggravate my predicament if they were feeling stiffed by the American who had just left; but if instead they had forced him to buy, why not just do it again? I normally like to give ambiguous situations a positive interpretation, at least initially, but couldn’t come up with one here. I was probably screwed no matter how they were looking at this.
The open portal to the square gave me some comfort. I doubted they would beat me up with so many people nearby, and could also use it to make a run if I had to. The simple solution would have been to buy some hash from them. But I needed all the money I had just raised busking in Europe to stay at the conservatory another year, not to squander on hash I would have to throw away before crossing the next border, so I didn’t even consider it. Money can buy security in situations like this, but when it’s scarce, you take chances.
After they stopped talking, the devil stood up next to me. I rose to receive judgment, looking with apprehension into narrowed eyes, burning with fire.
“You are lucky,” he said. “Usually, we don’t allow people to break the rule.”
When I heard that, all I wanted to do was leave, but I realized it was better to listen until his angry lecture ended, lest they change their minds about letting me go with just a stern warning. When he finished, I walked quickly away. Moments later, I listened to the call to prayer coming from the mosque and watched it fill up with worshippers, trying to calm my pounding heart with deep breaths. One of the things people seek in religion is mercy. I had just been granted mercy by a group of thugs, but the devil’s eyes told me there was none left for the next one to sin.
I chose my interactions more carefully after that. Other than my violin, the only material possession I was proud of then was my shoes, an expensive Italian splurge with birthday money. They were made of a soft buttery leather, light tan in color and beautifully finished, but now they were filthy. I approached a shoe shine man in one of the squares and asked if he spoke Spanish. My question elicited an affirmative nod, though I later realized that didn’t mean he understood me. He was as dirty as my shoes, with dark skin of a much tougher leather, a man obviously beaten down by decades of depravation, left with fewer teeth than fingers, and he was missing two of those. My weak Spanish produced a convoluted declaration, probably unintelligible even to a Spaniard, that all I wanted was a cleaning – no polishing or the leather would be ruined. The salesman in Florence had emphasized that when I bought them a few months before. The old Moroccan nodded affirmatively again as he began slowly brushing off my shoes. After he put down the scraggy brush, he used one of his rags to apply a liquid that I hoped was cleaning fluid but that turned out to be a muddy colored polish. The parched leather eagerly soaked it up, instantly and permanently turning an ugly dark shade of brown that resembled dried shit. From the first instant, it was already too late to do anything about it, and being painful to watch, I just looked around the square as he finished his work. There were lots of old men with beat-up boxes and rags, waiting to give someone a shoe shine. And lots of young men talking to foreigners or scanning the area, looking for an opportunity. Or just doing nothing, waiting.
Later on, outside the walls of the medina, a traditional wedding party in colorful dress made its way up the hill. They were led by a group of fez-capped men who periodically performed a ritual dance that involved a vigorous twirling of muskets. At the end of the dance, they pointed the muskets up in the air and shot them, making a loud noise that startled me. I wondered how guns wound up in weddings, and also where the bullets would land. The rest of the wedding party moved along behind to the reedy sounds of oboe-like instruments, drums and cymbals. I followed them to the top of the hill, then turned to admire a vast panorama below. This was a land ruled by a king and, above all, a holy book from the seventh century. I wondered how much Europe was like this before its Renaissance. And how much longer the Arabs would wait.
The beginning of the conservatory school year was only a couple of weeks away, and my plan was to go overland through Algeria and Tunisia and then take a boat to Italy. I needed a visa to get into Algeria, but found the Algerian consulates in Morocco closed because of a war between them on their southern flank, a border battle over sand in the Saharan desert. The closest Algerian embassy was in Madrid, so I went back by boat and bus, stayed overnight in a cheap hotel, and the next morning got my visa. A few hours of busking in Plaza Mayor raised enough money to cover my detour expenses and buy a ticket on the afternoon flight to Algiers. I sat on the plane feeling relieved at circumventing an overland return and the hassles of making bus connections from Morocco to Algiers. I also felt soft and lazy. Easy money creates easy solutions but subtracts from the earthy experience I was seeking in my travels, though I happily made the trade-off that day.
An unconcerned employee of the state tourist office in Algiers told me he couldn’t help me find a place to stay because a pan-Arab convention had filled every room in the city. No, he said, I couldn’t leave my pack there while I looked for a room, and No, the bus and train stations did not offer luggage deposit services, nor would there be any buses or trains headed east until the next morning.
I met a high school student, Bassam, nearby who spoke some English and had an idea on where I might be able to at least leave my pack. He brought me to a cellar café and arranged with an employee there to store it in a caged area behind the kitchen. When I complained about the high price, I didn’t have to wait for the translation to understand that the guy’s response was essentially “well then, fuck off.” His gestures and tone said it all. Bassam acknowledged that the price was a rip-off but told me I probably would do no better elsewhere and that there were many thieves in the city.
We chatted as we walked to the Casbah, the old quarter. It was getting dark, and he had to go home for dinner and schoolwork. I continued walking around, both fascinated and intimidated by this teeming part of Algiers. Men stood along the streets behind small tables displaying what they had for sale. Many of the streets were narrow and terraced, lined with crowded shops and cafes with clear plastic screens in front of their televisions to protect them from thrown objects.
I crossed into the modern part of the city, walked around the main streets and made inquiries in some hotels, but all were full; one clerk after another told me I would not find any rooms available until after the conference ended. Tired and discouraged, I rested on a bench in the dilapidated park at the center of the now quiet city, reading my pocket-sized paperback under a flickering lamp.
Before midnight, I walked to the train station, figuring I would just sleep on a bench there waiting for the first morning train, but it was locked. I saw a few employees inside who heard my knocks but ignored me. I sat on the curb trying to think of what else I might do, when the doors to the station suddenly opened, but only for the ten minutes it took for a late train, headed the wrong way, to arrive and leave. During that time, my weak French enlisted the aid of a young employee, who said he would ask the station master if I could stay inside on one of the benches. The response was “No waiting there at night, no exceptions!” There were two raggedy Algerian men standing next to me, apparently interested in the same thing. I disliked them, thinking they may have hurt my chances. An older employee suggested I try the nearby police station, pointing the way as he moved the three of us out and locked the doors again.
A few minutes later, the young officer on duty outside the police station said he could not allow me to stay inside. Yes, he had heard all the rooms in the city were full, but I should find something just the same because it was not safe to be out in the city late at night. Perhaps I could get permission from someone with more authority in the next precinct, a fifteen minute walk up the slope. As he pointed out the way, he said to be especially careful going up the stairway and through the tunneled passageway at its top because it often had thieves lying in wait. He was pleasant and smiling; I was exhausted and getting paranoid listening to him but, having no better alternatives, decided to try his suggestion.
The area around the long flight of stone stairs was eerily quiet, but I felt okay going up because it was within eyesight of the policeman, who I hoped would be watching me. The tunnel beyond, though, was spooky – not dark enough to scare me away, but not bright enough to allow me to walk through confidently. The weak street light filtering in created a shadowy interior that kept me nervously looking around for motion. My pulse quickened along with my pace, and I felt lucky to get through without incident. That feeling ended soon after as I watched the other precinct’s desk officer shake his head in response to my carefully rehearsed plea. He pointed to the door and told me to leave.
I returned to the young cop, who rejected my final entreaties with a friendly smile. He didn’t mind my hanging around nearby (which by now was the only place I felt safe); he just wasn’t allowed to let me inside. The police parking lot next to the station was small and contained only one car. I lay down on the sidewalk alongside it to rest, and when I got tired of not sleeping, pulled out my book to read under the lot’s single lamp. A man approached from a dark area about a hundred meters away where there were several large trucks parked. He offered me a blanket and space to sleep in his truck, but my police protector, watching from the steps of the station, walked over and shook his head – “don’t take a chance; you’ll get robbed.” At that point, he was the only guy in the country that I trusted, so I turned down the offer.
The cop and I went to an all night café for tea and pastry during his 4 AM break. I dozed off in a chair there, mumbling goodbye as he returned to work. At dawn, I picked up my pack and left on the first bus east. I was very tired and not enjoying Algeria at all.
The bus took me to Constantine, an inland city where I experienced similar frustrations – no campground, rooms unavailable in my price range except for two small hotels that were filthy and run by people sleazy in appearance and disagreeable in manner. The rest of the day’s buses to Tunisia were already fully booked, so I bought a ticket for the next train, leaving at 3 AM. Context conditions emotion, and I was feeling very grateful that the train station here allowed me to wait inside that night, dozing on a bench. In Tunis, I was able at last to find a room in a small hotel, though with dirty sheets on the beds. The young attendant expressed interest in my fiddle, so I played him a tune. That elicited not only a smile but also a valuable reward – he gave me some clean sheets.
Eager to board the ferry to Sicily, I had my last meal in North Africa next day at the port. I was reading “L’Espresso,” a leading Italian newsmagazine, to catch up on Italian politics and culture. At the back of the culture section was a photo of a young woman naked above the waist. As I turned to that page, the waiter passing by stopped in his tracks, absolutely enthralled.
“Please, can I look at it? We don’t have that kind of picture here.”
He held the magazine in his hands as he savored the photo, then asked if he could show it to the cook, whose arched eyebrows and cooing sounds showed that he was equally delighted. The food was good and I left a nice tip, but the vigorous handshakes and animated expressions of thanks I received at the end of my meal were more likely for the picture that I tore out and left with them.
I arrive in Tunis airport with a mixture of hope and anxiety. I want the experience to be better this time, but things are not starting well. The taxi driver wants three times the usual fare to take me into Tunis, but some back and forth as I walk away brings us quickly to agreement at what I had learned in advance is the normal price. I have him drop me off at the train station where the internet has also told me I can take the 2:30 PM train to Sousse, a coastal city two hours to the south where I have made an online reservation at a b&b. As I approach the station, I am thankful for the modern technology that has enabled me to avoid the housing and transportation problems that plagued the younger me.
But the train is not running today because of the holiday celebrating Tunisian independence from France, something you’d think the national railway website would know about. It’s more than a three hour wait for the next train, and when I try to alert the b&b owner, I realize my cellphone is useless here. I notice a telephone office next to the station with some pay phones that don’t take coins. The only employee is a teenager whose French is almost as bad as mine, though we eventually succeed in getting a call through to my host. I have three hours to kill now. A walk around the square outside the station makes me glad I’m not beginning my visit in this dirty, chaotic capital city. I do, however, get a good shoe shine from one of the old men there, most of whom look familiar. I return to the station planning to sit down and read my book, but all the benches in the lobby are full and it will be almost a half hour before a space opens that is not taken before I get to it. Some unpleasant memories come to mind, but it helps to view myself as an observer, the flashbacks merely providing background for a mind that must stay open.
It is twilight by the time the train leaves the city and moves through a countryside filled with olive trees that somehow thrive in soil freckled with litter, most of it plastic. Sousse, my destination, attracted me in part because it offers sandy beaches, an active musical culture and one of the best-preserved medinas in the Arab world. The main reason, though, was the online reviews by people who have stayed in the small b&b to which I am headed – you will feel at home and part of the family, an inside view of Tunisia, great dinners and conversations, etc. I haven’t bothered to brush up on the traveler’s French I picked up decades earlier, partially out of laziness but also because all my emails to the b&b owner, Rabaa, received responses in flawless English, including her offer to pick me up at the train station. The first thing I notice is that Rabaa doesn’t speak English. Her email responses were routed through her older daughter who is a university student in Paris. So much for easy, meaningful communication during this visit. After a delicious, heavily spiced late dinner, I try to fall asleep in a neighborhood filled with loud dogs that keep barking; I think back on my first day and start to get a bad feeling.
Communication is not easy, but it gradually becomes more meaningful and personal. When Hiba, the younger daughter, is not home to provide translations, Rabaa listens patiently to the forty-year old remnants of an ugly, error-filled French that I am pulling out of my ass. It is patched with Italian words that have their final vowel chopped off and are pronounced with a lame French accent. This mish-mash works just often enough to keep me trying, sometimes producing a sympathetic laugh. I like that she doesn’t try to finish my sentences when she hears me struggling (unlike most of her relatives that I meet there); instead, she allows me to find a solution, only offering suggested completions when I give up. Rabaa talks slowly and in short sentences, using a very basic vocabulary, sounding calm and sincere rather than condescending.
Seated at her kitchen table, drinking freshly-squeezed breakfast orange juice or lingering after an always excellent dinner, I learn the source of the sad serenity she exudes. The subject is raised initially by my expression of surprise at finding an elevator in her home. After getting married, her husband landed a white-collar job in France where she gave birth to their two daughters. A few years later, he was involved in a terrible automobile accident that left him in a wheel chair. They returned to Sousse with the insurance money and built this large, elevator-equipped home near her brothers and sisters, but he died from injury complications soon after. Before the money ran out, she converted a few of the rooms upstairs into guest rooms and has been running the b&b for almost a year.
Rabaa was bitter and depressed for a long time after her husband’s death, but realized she had to accept and adjust if she was to be a good mother. I can see she is that; also that she takes consolation in the company of her relatives, who stop by daily, and in her work, especially the cooking. Resignation did not come easily, nor has it lifted the melancholy her face wears. She is, however, warm and very friendly. Her smile is sometimes happy, more often poignant, like her eyes. We talk of the challenges in raising children, our love of music and our need at times for solitude. I tell her how I am struggling to accept the limitations my infirmities place upon my music-making, though the resignation I seek is mild compared to hers. The concepts we discuss are sometimes complex, unlike the short words and phrases we always use. In my mid-60’s, I learn for the first time that a simple conversation can also be profound.
Through Rabaa, I meet Fadi, a 26 year-old violin teacher at the Sousse conservatory who speaks some English and gives me a good overview of Arabic fiddle music. It gets an exotic sound from back and forth mini-slides in the longer notes and extremely quick finger flick patterns, all foreign to the techniques I had learned and too difficult to pick up on first hearing. We jam for awhile, producing a few lively sections of music but more often sounding like two people talking simultaneously in different languages. It shouldn’t be surprising because the musical vocabularies we use are so dissimilar, but that was also true of my experiences decades earlier in Kenya and India. We were able to make music then by meeting on a more basic level – most importantly, getting in rhythm and keeping melodies straight-forward. But Fadi stays for the most part in the complexities of his idiom despite my attempts at simplification. The techniques of his musical language obviously required years of hard work to master, and perhaps he is not yet ready to climb down from a mountain-like conquest in order to walk together at a lower altitude. We play tunes for each other in the styles we know, talking about them, to our mutual enjoyment as well as to the others in the home after a late dinner. They sing along with some Tunisian songs he plays and clap rhythmically to the folk dances I fiddle. Fadi’s eyes brighten as he pulls out the melody in one of them he especially likes.
When we switch from musical tones to those of English words, our communication is consistently warm and animated. Here, I am the one who must simplify in order to make our conversation meaningful, an easier task that I eagerly undertake. He teaches students and plays in a professional group that tours. Fadi says he believes in god (though not in an afterlife) and has absorbed Moslem culture but does not practice its rituals or follow its rules. He readily joins me in drinking some fine Tunisian wine as we play and talk. He bubbles with an infectious enthusiasm that involves much eyebrow raising and head movements.
“Music! So wonderful when it touches us! When I play, I listen to that spirit. We are five in my group. In the middle section of each piece, we improvise. I try not to think, try to let it just come through me. Ah! So sweet! Here, listen to this one – I will show you how we improvise in the middle”…
When the subject turns to the Arab Spring, he says, “Almost two years since the revolution – started here. I didn’t like Ben Ali when he was in power, He was a dictator; made himself rich; his relatives and friends, too. But now I want him back. Yes, he was a dictator, but we felt safe then. Better economy, too. They protected secular rights. Now, who knows! The fundamentalists feel more bold.”
Rabaa tells me how they started celebrating Christmas during their years in France and still decorate a Christmas tree. For the first time, she got nasty comments this past December from fundamentalist men as she drove by with the tree in her car. This is a secular, liberal household that however also follows Islam. Before bringing wine into the house, I asked Rabaa’s permission; she readily gave it, but none of them drink. She worries along with her female relatives and friends that women will lose rights not long enough established to avoid attacks, including from within the Muslim parties that dominate Tunisian politics. There is more freedom of expression now, but demonstrations sometimes turn violent. Female attire in public has become an issue, and Hibi says she and her student friends are talking about organizing a “bikini protest.” Rabaa is proud that her daughter cares about secular rights, but says it is too risky – in fact, a young Tunisian woman who did a topless protest a short time before mysteriously disappeared afterwards.
Two sunny days at opposite ends of Sousse’s long sandy beach are revealing. The tourist zone features large resorts with roped-off, patrolled areas and foreign guests, many of them pink-skinned and fat, sipping cocktails. The large and equally beautiful (though less clean) public beach at the center of the city features local kids playing, their families talking nearby, and also some hustlers. I ignore the guys selling drugs and trinkets, but respond to the twelve year old boy who sits down next to me and sounds like he just wants to practice some very simple English. He asks where I’m from, what I do, and we talk about his school. Then he takes out a pack of cigarettes, lights one and asks for money, a combination that doesn’t work with me.
“The smoke bothers me. Please move further away,” I tell him.
“Please, I am hungry – want money to eat. Please.”
“I don’t like the smoke. Please move.”
He stays there, still dragging on the cigarette, and a minute later looks at me and says “I suck you now?”
I look back at him sadly, give him enough coins for a meal and ask him again to leave. He stands up silently, looks around and then walks away.
Fadi phones to tell me about a concert of modern Tunisian music by a local composer that he knows. We meet there the next evening at Sousse’s concert hall; he takes me backstage afterwards and introduces me to the many musicians in the twenty piece group who are his friends. As I shake the composer’s hand, I say something nice even though I found the pop style of his pieces highly repetitive and overly simplistic, especially compared to the much richer traditional music that Fadi had played for me. Rabaa came with me to the concert and she invites Fadi back to her house for a late dinner with several of her relatives. We again trade fiddle tunes afterwards, the others occasionally singing and dancing. There is good spirit in the room, and we continue until around 1 AM.
I originally planned on spending the last few nights in Tunis, but all the good places to stay I found online have been full since I first made initial inquires several weeks before. I call some of them on the Tunisian cellphone Rabaa has loaned me, and learn that an international conference has swallowed up all availability until after my departure – a familiar problem, but easily dealt with this time. I am happy and comfortable where I am, and Rabaa is pleased to have my stay extended. I like these people very much and am grateful that they have allowed me into their home and lives during this time of great uncertainty. They have some hope for the future but are also anxious, ready to adjust, not yet knowing to what.
18. Contrasting Nights with a Fantasy Mixed In
Successful professional performers deserve the respect we give them in large part because they must often overcome terrifying stage fright in order to try to live up to our expectations of them. A man who became a highly-regarded author started adult life intending to be a cellist. After graduating from a music conservatory, he walked on stage for his first professional solo concert gripped by a crippling fear. Fidgeting anxiously, he sat down behind his cello and then vomited all over it before playing a single note. He walked off the stage, totally humiliated, and never played music again.
Long after he first conquered the world of classical music, the great violinist Isaac Stern was asked by a journalist if he still got nervous before a performance. With characteristic bluntness, he said it was a stupid question – of course he did. What did the audience that night care about who he was or how well he played in his last concerts? They wanted to moved by his performance in front of them, so each evening the pressure was on to be at his best, something no one can do. That made him nervous.
Though I moved in a much different league, I sometimes got very nervous playing music in front of others, especially classical music because I lacked confidence in the bowing technique I had laboriously constructed to play it. If I started off shaky, I normally calmed down within the first few minutes of playing, but getting to that point could be bewildering. My goal was much more modest than always being at my best - I just wanted to be good, or at least avoid embarrassment. During my adult student days in Florence I feared the bow, at times hesitating before taking it out of the case, wondering how something so simple in construction, so subject to basic laws of physics, could be so intimidating. If only I had mastered it as a boy, unaware and unafraid. I eventually achieved enough control over it to comfortably play challenging chamber music with good musicians for our own enjoyment. What satisfaction it brought!
Now all that is slipping away. Folk fiddle music still sounds pretty good and is fun to play, but the bowing adjustments I cobbled together to address the medical problems in my right hand work less reliably as time passes. I told my musician friends early on about my movement disorder so they would know why my bowing was becoming erratic. Physical causes are more readily explained and accepted than psychological ones, so I always added its physiological root to my disclosure, the proper word because I hid this from them for awhile, hoping it wouldn’t effect me much. I have played regularly with some of them for decades, becoming close friends through music. They say not to worry about it – they still enjoy playing together. But I don’t want friendship to lead to presumption. Am I becoming what I wanted to avoid, someone hanging on too long?
I play with friends less frequently now, but occasionally my bowing surprises me by being almost like before. I still avoid medication, so what explains these temporary spells of fluent bowing? Is it the alcohol, which some doctors have recommended because it lessens the effects of the tremor? Beethoven’s Archduke Trio was almost as good as ever after a few glasses of wine one night. More often than not, though, it doesn’t do much. Perhaps it is the music itself sometimes acting as therapy, telling me to push my anxieties aside and allow it to carry me beyond these new limitations. That’s what I would most like to believe; but if that’s the true cause, I need more faith.
When I’m playing well, the feeling of elation carries into the following days, encouraging me to keep trying, teasing me into thinking that I can get it back. What has returned as strong as before, however, is my fear of the bow. As I watch my control over it slowly dissolve, I realize that I merely tamed it for a few decades. Control starts with the choices forced upon us by the limits of time. In which areas of life will we seek a certain level of mastery – what do we care enough about to spend time on and get better at? How hard it is then to watch an arduously acquired skill drift away - not evenly, but as if on the surface of waves, moving up and down, gradually receding. I notice some early signs that the tremor disorder is moving into my left hand, as the neurologist told me would probably happen. All this makes me anxious about playing now, aggravating my situation. The physical and psychological intertwine, causing and effecting without delineation, both implicated in an inevitable decomposition.
The audience members were definitely not engaged; some even started talking to each other loud enough for me to hear while I performed my set. I was on the stage of a municipal theater in a provincial Italian city and not playing well, so I couldn’t blame them. Italian audiences are less inhibited than most others and will at times vocally express their opinions during the performance. I didn’t get booed, but not by a lot. Tepid, thinly distributed applause tells you everything. I didn’t even deserve that. When I heard how lifeless the sound from my fiddle was, I got upset with myself, and then nervous, something that almost never happened when I played folk music in public. But there I was, tightening up, clutching my fiddle and bow, trying to recover from mistakes. I fell slightly out of rhythm at times; my breathing was irregular and shallow. I just hoped I could make it through without a major breakdown.
The night before in a nearby city had been triumphant - a packed house applauding vigorously, listening attentively to all my tunes and stories. My fiddling was filled with pulse and energy, the shouts of bravo at the end sending my already sky-high spirits even higher. People came up afterwards to offer their thanks and compliments. The dancers were in good form, too, and got a similar response – we fed off each others energy, and not just onstage. These were creative, fun-loving young artists I was performing with. We chatted amiably before and after rehearsals earlier that week, our evenings together lingering on, nourished by good food and wine.
Does it get any better than this? The only thing missing was my fantasy woman, and she would finally be arriving in Italy in just a few more days. Everything was going so right …
A few months before, an Italian dancer had invited me to accompany her small troupe for performances in two cities in central Italy. She had heard the album I recorded with an American folk group in Florence, liked some of the tunes and choreographed them for her dancers; she wanted to use the recording for the performances, but could I come and play some fiddle tunes to open the program and for the first few dances?
They couldn’t pay much, but it sounded like fun and a good way to fill the last weekend before Katy’s arrival in Florence. Katy had swept me away several years before when I saw her playing violin in the orchestra at a summer music festival in South Carolina – a talented blonde beauty in a clinging black dress. I approached her after that first concert and we chatted pleasantly. I pursued her over the next few days, and after a festival party we walked to the beach together, embraced and kissed. But she pulled back - she had just graduated from Duke and married her college boyfriend earlier that summer. She thought it might have been a mistake to get married so early, but she wanted to give it a chance, and what we were doing had to stop.
She stayed in my mind, though, and grew there over time, making it impossible for the other women I met to measure up. When I called her out of the blue a few years later, her marriage was breaking up. We met for an afternoon just before my return to Florence; my attraction to her was instantly rekindled, stronger than before, and I asked her to join me in Italy, ignoring the fact that I hardly knew her, acting instead on intuition and infatuation. She said yes, but also that it would be a few months before her separation from her husband would be complete. It took longer than that, my sense of anticipation heightened by the letters we exchanged during the wait. I often dreamed of her, my mind consumed by her; I imagined us playing great music together, followed by stimulating conversations and passionate love-making.
It would be just a few more days, I thought, as I looked out at the standing ovation from the audience that first night. I was doubly elated, which made my crash the next day that much harder. Katy’s voice at the other end of the phone was weak and tired. She had finally moved out, but the long ordeal had left her devastated, unable to leave her mother’s home. She hadn’t expected it to be this way. Katy needed time to heal, lots of time – leaving now for Italy had suddenly become impossible.
I walked around in a daze that afternoon, then onto the stage that evening feeling utterly deflated. My performance reflected my emotional condition – drained, deadened. My malady was contagious, spreading to the dancers who were watching offstage; when it came time for them to dance, they were as distracted and mistake-prone as they had been focused and precise the night before. Two performances of the same material by the same people, separated only by a day and a phone call, but as different as revelry and a funeral.
19. The Adopted Father
“Did you make love with this woman before asking her to come live with you here in Italy?” Agapito’s question was direct, like his manner.
“No. We only had that one afternoon together before I came back to Florence,” I responded. “We just walked around the park and talked. She held my hand; kissed me passionately before she had to leave – there wasn’t time, the place wasn’t right for anything more.”
“But dear Peter, how presumptuous of you! This is real life, not some fantasy you will into being.”
I didn’t always agree with Agapito, especially where women were involved, but I did always listen carefully to what he had to say. Over a period of years, he had developed into my spiritual father, the kind of man I wanted to become. Coincidently, I had met him at the same place I met Katy, the Festival of the Two Worlds, held annually in Spoleto, Italy and Charleston, South Carolina, a celebration of great music, dance and art. Agapito was a prominent Italian sculptor who had been invited by the Festival to exhibit his work. He and his daughter were speaking Italian as they arranged his sculptures for display on the day before the Charleston festival began. I was walking by and said something that blossomed into a lively conversation, then spent much of the next week conversing, dining and attending festival activities with this extraordinary Renaissance man, perhaps initially because there were few others who spoke his language in this bastion of the old south, but then from mutual delight in being together. His success as an oral surgeon only added to his drive to express himself artistically through his sculpture, his true passion, yet he still found time to fly planes and sail his boat around the Mediterranean. Physically, he was small, but his sculptures were imposing in scale and concept, his mind as bright as his sparkling eyes, his voice strong and confident. He was a torrent of energy and ideas.
Our friendship deepened over the course of many visits to his large estate after I returned to Italy. Agapito had an insatiable curiosity and read widely. He was often also reflective.
“Life is experience,” he said, as we talked in his studio. “You do well to travel and try different things. I would have done the same as a young man, but the war and its aftermath took that away from my generation. I lost years of my life! What a waste, and surrounded by so much pointless suffering. Our leaders were arrogant fools. How could they presume to exercise such control over us? What made them think they could impose their will on everything?! Bastards! And look who has taken their place – a corrupt group of whores!”
There was anger in his voice and his face reddened. You could always see how Agapito felt.
“But surely we are wiser now for all that,” I said.
“I doubt it,” he replied. “Progress there is an illusion. You didn’t live through the war. People who have experienced it would never do it again. Never! Then a new generation without that experience arrives in positions of power. They see war as a policy choice where risks and rewards are carefully calculated. But … believing that this time, the horrors will be avoided because we have better technology, know more and can win with minimal pain. What folly! Imbeciles!”
Agapito cursed them before pursuing a related thought, his black hair barely covering the rapid firing of the circuitry underneath.
“For 2,500 years we have possessed the most important truth from the wisest man who ever lived – ‘I know that I do not know.’ Socrates would be saddened by how full of ourselves we have become. What egoism! Think about it - without his admission of ignorance, science is impossible, most of what we call knowledge would not exist. And think about where that has brought us - we are insignificant specks, temporarily moving about in a chaotic universe that doesn’t give a shit about us.” His voice rose as he stated his inference, his enlarged eyes looked squarely at me.
“To what end, then? What does it all mean to you?” I asked.
“You want to know if there is purpose or meaning in all this? Nature’s only purpose is that we struggle to reproduce ourselves, nothing more. Nature would have men travel about, constantly copulating and leaving children everywhere.” He briefly smiles at the thought. “But civilization modifies nature… And look at civilization – so impressive and accomplished, yet our grandest monuments eventually crack and crumble. The time will arrive when Leonardo’s “Mona Lisa” no longer exists. Everything dies, including our sun and our world along with it. You look for meaning in this?”
Agapito paused and looked out the window, then continued in a quieter voice.
“But the result should not be despair. Meaning? You have to find it yourself, from within. No one has the right to proclaim ultimate explanations - no person, no religion, no philosophy... Life is a struggle to emerge from mass mediocrity. Does that make it meaningful?”
“That would make it meaningful for me,” I said. “The experience of human life from the inside, playing the ultimate game when the stakes are real and time is limited - what could have more meaning than that?”
“Yes, certainly in the personal sense,” he continued. “But beyond that? I want more than an interesting life. More than playing the game well. Do you seek wealth? I have lots of it, but what I value, authentic experience, is not sold in the marketplace. Neither is happiness, which comes and goes, never staying long enough. For me, meaning comes from striving to make art.”
I looked around his studio, filled with drawings and sculptures in various states of formation. Bright sun flooded the room; the impression was primordial,
“Where does your art come from, what is the source of all this?” I asked.
“Nature at its most elemental – filled with violence and struggle, using basic forms and materials – rock, wood, iron. And from the human condition, too – rooted in the pagan, before ideology, restricted by circumstance. Fate! Think about it –each one of us is here as he is, with no control over his construction, a product of nature, unable to modify its program for him. And we think that we can choose. Another illusion!”
“But what about free will? I don’t believe in Fate,” I quickly interjected. “That’s superstition – one that may lift the burden of responsibility but robs life of its meaning. My choices make a difference in the life I lead. I chose to come to Italy, to leave the law and study music. Those were hard decisions, a mix of intuition and analysis, lots of thinking, weighing. That wasn’t something predetermined – it was the product of choices that I made of my own free will.”
Agapito brought me over to the door of his studio, opened it and pointed to the imposing mountains off in the distance.
“You see those. The magnificent Apennine Mountains, the backbone of Italy. You come from those, your mother was born there, all your ancestors were people of those mountains. This land is in your blood. Do you really think you could have chosen not to come here? And the violin you came to study - where is its home? Is not Stradivari its most prized maker? And Paganini the greatest master of its art? What does it do to you when you make it sing? I listened outside your room before dinner yesterday while you were playing a Bach Partita and heard a musician. Do you think your free will could have chosen not to do that?”
He paused, I pondered. Then he continued.
“Our lives unfold within coordinates set by chromosomes. They force our choices toward paths that are the only ones possible. It is only through chance encounters and mutations that we have the possibility of rewriting the script.”
“Well, I certainly agree that our choices are often restricted, not only by our circumstances but also by choices already made,” I said. “You speak of powerful forces that push us. Yes, but I think I will always believe that I make my own choices. Isn’t that why we developed minds?”
“Our minds have developed so that we survive and multiply," he said firmly, before going on in a softer tone - "Dear Peter, these are matters of faith, and much more important than those that normally occupy that realm.”
We lapsed into silence, lost in thought… A little later, I returned to an earlier topic.
“We were talking about your art before we wound up tangled in fate and free will. And meaning, too … What does this art mean? What are you trying to express?”
“Look here,” he said, guiding me towards some large sculptures in a corner of the room. “The dark, weathered wood, old railroad ties, vertical and angled, their stability attacked by a violent force inserted into them and whose weight they bear. Or that one, with the straps that constrict and bind.”
He mumbled something under his breath, then went on.
“Explaining art, though, is futile. Great art engages us wholly, both the head and the heart, but no one really knows what it is. The human mind is a marvelous achievement, that much we can be sure of, but it comes later. We feel, then we think. Our hearts move us more than our minds because we had emotions before we had thoughts. Sometimes I just put a pencil on paper and let it move to see what comes out.”
“But then your mind-“
“Yes,” he continued, having absorbed my point faster than I could state it, “I may think long and hard, planning and developing - but then I’m rationalizing, as an afterthought. The spark comes from another place, and only if the spirit is alive and charged in that moment, ready to give. That’s why we cultivate the spirit, otherwise we are dead. It’s elusive – the intuition always seems better than its execution, so we remain dissatisfied.”
“I almost always feel that way with words – what comes out doesn’t fully express the flash of thought and feeling inside. Same with music, though my shortcomings there also result from deficiencies of technique. I would love to have enough technique to move on to the creativity problems you confront. Michelucci, my maestro, says a true artist is never satisfied. If that’s so, I will never be a real artist – all I’m trying to create is a good, satisfying life.”
“Dear Peter,” he went on, “that too is a great challenge, one that requires creativity. You are still young and full of possibilities. You will find your way, feeling, thinking.” He looked up, then turned his gaze back toward me, his eyes glowing. “The mind is a marvel - our greatest resource, a gift of nature! Think about this miraculous interplay of mind, heart and hand – that’s what creates art. When artists are swept up in creating a work of art, we love it to the point of believing it will survive time. We transfer to it our desire for immortality.”
“Yes,” I said, “even if we don’t believe in an afterlife, we can still touch the eternal. I get that kind of intuitive feeling playing the old violin I bought in Florence. It was made in 1750 – it played the baroque masterpieces I’m now studying when they were freshly composed! And it will continue doing so, along with the music of the future, long after I’m gone. It doesn’t belong to me – I belong to it, and it belongs to music, which will never die.”
Agapito smiled, then showed me another part of his studio, filled with sculptures that had not found a home outside his, complaining about the space they took up. I knew that many of his pieces were in collections and museums, with some of the huge ones in city squares, and that he had been a featured artist at Italy’s most prestigious art festival, the Venice Biennale. Given the bond we had developed over the years, I didn’t think he would mind a delicate question that my curiosity insisted on.
“Agapito, you have often told me that you don’t care what anybody else thinks, that you think and do what you want. But does it bother you that much of this work may not find an audience or a buyer?”
He thought for a moment, his eyes showing the steely self-confidence that I trusted would keep him from taking offense. “Yes – that’s not the way I would have it. Artistic expression seeks its public or risks becoming masturbation. I want what I do to reach people, communicate something to them. But if not always, I must accept that and never allow it to stop me. I am driven to spend my time doing this because of the great void – this is the way I fight it.”
20. The Brothers
Only an hour away by the sturdy two-car train that cut through the mountain between them was my cousin Claudio. His life was as physical as Agapito’s was intellectual, each man so remarkably accomplished within his own domain, their lives so complementary. I normally visited one after being with the other, passing from the creative to the traditional, from a world of mind and art into one rooted in working the land. I greatly admired them both, hopelessly thinking how magnificent it would be to combine their talents, to be a man complete.
Claudio is the youngest of five siblings who all have raised families in the rustic village of their birth. At fifteen he left school for work and by seventeen was laboring in Switzerland with his older brother, a brick-layer. A few years later, he returned to begin a job driving buses between the mountain villages and the nearby city of L’Aquila, the job he would hold until retirement, procured by his father with the home-made prosciutto, salami and cheese he gave to a local politician. Claudio found a spouse within a few kilometers walk, as did most members of the half-dozen extended families that made up the bulk of the village’s three hundred or so inhabitants. He and his two brothers built their homes next to each other on a field their father had given them, using savings from their bus and truck driving jobs to purchase materials, doing the construction themselves, helping each other with the practical skills they had mastered.
Sitting high up in the mountain meant the air and water were pure but the growing season shortened by a cool climate. Virtually everything they ate came from their own fields and barnyards. Over the years, I visited them in every season, planting and harvesting the crops, feeding and slaughtering the animals, making and drinking the wine, marveling at how they stoically performed the rugged labor demanded by this way of life.
In all this, they were similar to Riccardo and his brothers, my cousins who lived closer to the city. Family support and obligations were at the center of all their lives, their holidays always spent together, their most important ceremonies focused on family rites of passage. There was rarely a need to request or offer because it was all done as a matter of course. I was exposed to family and brotherhood in both places as one might imagine them in an ideal world – solid, like a stone fortress, until a feud brought it crashing down for Riccardo and his brother Marcello.
It started after the death of their parents, with a dispute over a boundary line between their adjoining plots of land, involving no more than a few meters. But it escalated out of control, becoming a cauldron for all the tensions and misunderstandings that can accumulate over a lifetime passed at close quarters. When I first learned of it during a trip back to Italy, I met with them separately and offered to mediate the problem using the skills I was learning in my new profession. Neither was interested. I didn’t press them, feeling certain their differences would be resolved by the overwhelming sense of family that enveloped them. It was just a matter of time. Instead it festered, eventually developing into a lawsuit that dragged on for twelve years, aggravated rather than resolved by the judge’s decision in Riccardo’s favor. More years passed. They spoke only with glares rather than words.
I made another attempt at mediation during a recent visit, motivated by the warm memories of my experiences among them several decades before. I walked the few paces between their homes, as the brothers had done routinely during an earlier life but never since. Riccardo was eighty-two, Marcello in his late seventies. I asked each of them the same question.
“Do you remember what it was like then? I saw you build your homes together, raise each other’s children. Do you want the next visit with your brother to be at his funeral?”
“No, Pietro, I don’t want that. But that’s the way it will be. He was wrong but too stubborn to admit it. Too much has been said and done. It’s too late.”
I heard essentially the same fatalistic response from both of them, their battle-weary voices flaring up in words of blame and self-justification before lapsing into muttering and silence. Though one had been declared the winner, both brothers seemed utterly defeated by what had happened. My further appeals were futile, my expertise useless. Family had always been an anchor in my life, my appreciation of its importance so powerfully reinforced by what I found among these very people from the time I first met them. How could it be turning out this way?
Should I have been so surprised and disappointed? My grandmother was not the only one from her family to seek a better life in America. Her sister and brother-in-law had come as well, but I never knew him and was only allowed to meet her after he died, when I was in my forties. At some point after their arrival, the two families had argued over something that no one now remembers, causing a rupture that was virtually complete. When I first met Riccardo and his relatives, they all asked not only about my grandmother but also her sister, their other “American” aunt. I was embarrassed to tell them that I did not know her, that though we lived nearby, our families had no contact. Perhaps the only thing as strong as an Italian family is the obstinacy of an Italian family feud.
Claudio and his brothers, instead, exemplified Italian family life at its unchanging best. Whenever one needed help, the others provided it. The children moved freely among the homes, playing together, learning to help with the chores, secure in the multi-generational network of blood and marriage that nurtured them. When they finished high school, Claudio’s children rode his bus into L’Aquila to study at the university, his daughter becoming a vascular surgeon, his two sons engineers who then started a successful construction company together. They continued living at home, though one recently married a woman from a neighboring village and moved into the flat below his parents. All the extended family members seemed so comfortable in each other’s presence – there was often much talking but also times of easy silence. There was no obligation to make conversation, just to be and do.
During the twentieth century, the Italian government instituted a comprehensive social security system, but the only one Claudio trusted was the traditional one that had endured for countless centuries – the family. The physical and emotional security these bonds provided struck the younger me as solid and permanent. It is reassuring to visit Claudio's village now and see how strong and enduring the bonds remain, though I once felt that way about Riccardo and his brothers before their feud, and also about L’Aquila, the fortress mountain city, before its earthquake.
21. Of Bands and Bonds
The noise under our sixth floor apartment in Florence will be loud tonight. Every month or so, the merchants of Via Gioberti organize a street fair; for this evening they have hired some live bands to attract people to stores that will remain open for business well past normal closing time. One of the bands sets up beneath our window, and when I hear the fiddle player warm up, it sounds like the music will be of good quality. I go down to listen to their lively eastern Mediterranean folk tunes and approach the violinist during their break.
“Bravo, I am really enjoying your music. Are you all Italians?”
“Yes, but I’m just filling in tonight. I normally play with a group here in Florence that does Irish music.”
“Whisky Trail?”
“Yes; you know us?”
“Yes. I saw the posters for your festival concert last month and so knew the band still existed. When Whisky Trail first got started back in the mid-70’s, I played fiddle in an American folk group here. We also did some Irish tunes and both bands went to some of each other’s concerts. At one point later on, they had a recording session scheduled but their fiddler was having a baby, so they asked me to sit in for a few tracks.”
“Small world! I first joined them in ‘96.” he said.
“But your bowing is so fluid. Are you classically trained?” I asked.
“Yes, I studied violin at the conservatory here.”
“With Stefano Michelucci?”
“Yes. But how did you know?”
“Because I studied here for a few years with his father, Roberto, and you bow the same way he did! Stefano had just graduated, trained by his father – he also helped Stefano get appointed to the faculty later.”
The coincidences light us up but don’t end there. He also has traveled the world with his fiddle, teaching himself different styles and how to improvise, playing in various orchestras and groups throughout Europe and Latin America, busking too. He will soon be forty, and is now thinking about settling down, getting married and having some children…
As we talk, a store window reflects our angled images – more of my back, more of his front. We are a generation apart, born on opposite sides of the Atlantic, in different phases of similar lives.
Under Roberto Michelucci’s guidance, my bowing got much better, though not steadily. The different bow strokes of classical technique varied in the height of their hurdles. I always tried to analyze the movements each required, breaking them into pieces for practice, then slowly putting those pieces back together again. There was an important stroke I never could master – the bouncing bow. Its best practitioners get a rich palette of fluttery sound, the result of lightly guiding the natural motions which result from bouncing the bow on the string. I could not let go enough to get it comfortably assimilated; the stroke required a relaxation, a loosening of control that at thirty years old I could no longer achieve. Will can only push you so far – conditioning and earlier choices set limits. After two years of intense effort, my analytical method got me a fluid sound on enough other strokes so that I could bring musical phrases to life. But I was working so hard on technique that I rarely played with others.
Then a student at the conservatory put me in touch with a friend of hers who taught music at an American college in Florence. Buzz had to organize a concert of American folk music for the college’s students, to be held in its villa overlooking the city. Would I like to meet with a small group he was putting together just for that concert? I by now felt ready to play with other musicians, and had enough Italian friends to stop avoiding Americans. We met at an art show featuring one of them - Rob – prints he had done at the print-making school of his teacher, Dennis, who was also in the proposed group. Good artists, obviously – and they were musicians, too? After the exhibition, we played some folk tunes that we all knew, and it sounded good enough to move us to the next step – practice sessions, trying out tunes and figuring out how to play them together.
Human society requires us to spend much of our time in groups, and in most of them, there is someone or something to dislike. Other than family, I had never particularly cared for groups or their dynamics, puzzled by the inordinate influence some individuals (who never seemed to be me) had over what the group did. In work and social groups, status and rules usually determine outcomes. Our group had no rules, and though Buzz had the status of being its organizer, he was disinclined to exercise leadership. We had only a few weeks to put the concert together and, with no direction, lots to do.
Buzz was calm and facilitative; his wife Karin had a manner as sweet as her lovely singing voice. Rob and Dennis were both a bit hyper, but expressed it in their energetic playing, leaving their social personalities wholly congenial. Each of us made suggestions about which tunes to play and how to play them. The ultimate response was invariably a form of “Let’s try it!” When it sounded good, there was mutual satisfaction, often accompanied by suggestions to make it better; when it sounded bad, a sincere comment or some good-spirited humor normally provided a graceful way out. When we weren’t unanimous on whether it was good or bad, we tried it again until we reached agreement. There were none of the ego problems and score-keeping that so often mar group efforts, so consensus became and remained our decision-making process. If any one of us maintained an objection to something, we just didn’t do it, which in turn caused everyone to limit the rare objection to something truly important. Majority votes were never really part of our practice sessions, and we remained leaderless. This is ordinarily a recipe for a non-functional group, but our playing kept getting better and better.
The concert at the American college went well, and though our reason for joining together had accomplished its objective, we wanted to keep making music. Some of their Italian friends asked us to play for home parties, which were always enjoyable – no public performance pressure, interesting people to meet and good food to eat. In stark contrast to my experience among Americans, I don’t remember ever seeing an Italian get drunk at a party. They almost always drank some wine, but usually to accompany food, and most of them had multiple interests, keenly pursued, which made conversation easier.
The first party led to a gig at a local folk music club, where the enthusiastic response of the audience encouraged us further. We kept working on making our tunes as good as possible and trying new ones. Eventually, we settled on calling ourselves “Angel Band” - it was not only the name of a favorite song in our repertory but also easy for Italians to pronounce and understand. Besides being warm and friendly, they were all fine musicians, and my newly-acquired technique allowed me to play with a confidence and expressiveness I had lacked before. What a great new feeling!
Though he planned to be a visual artist, Rob had mastered the guitar and could play almost any instrument you put in his hands. He was a good singer, too, and for someone so richly talented, the self-doubt he often conveyed was surprising. It combined with highly focused discipline to feed a perfectionism extending well beyond his artistic efforts. The mandolin and banjo were fairly new instruments for him, but since they added variety of sound to several of the tunes we were learning, he regularly set his alarm an hour or two early to fit practice time into his busy schedule and soon played them both with great musicality. Rob supported himself and the post-graduate art studies he was completing by playing lead guitar in the house band at Florence’s leading discotheque. At twenty-five, he was also tall, witty and fairly good-looking, but never attracted the female interest he merited or desired. The attractive women at the disco, instead, flocked to Tino, his Italian bandmate whose Latin persona, movie-star looks and ready smile were irresistible. Perhaps that made it easier to accept, though Rob was by nature deferential, and philosophical, too, spinning out thoughts as imaginative as the improvisations he launched through his instruments. His doubt was expressed in words and actions, never in the easily flowing music he played.
Dennis had come to Italy as a Fulbright scholar a decade earlier and liked it so much that he never left. In his mid-thirties, he was a lively, well-brewed stout, bubbling with all the energy required by the many roles he had taken on – artist, husband, father, owner of a business in Florence teaching art to college students, its main professor, too. Through him I first learned that someone could be hyper and stressed yet still be thoroughly enjoyable. His tenor voice was clear and true, his guitar-playing crisp, often highly inventive. Dennis’ sensibility was evident and genuine, but at times came spiced with a candor that was invariably instructive if not always easily heard. Like Rob, he was multi-talented - his musical accomplishments included wizardry at whistling, playing the spoons and the renaissance recorder. Also like Rob, he had passed well beyond fluency in Italian, communicating comfortably using the local accent and expressions, including slang, the marker of mastery.
Karin’s rosy warmth radiated through big dimpled cheeks whose color fluctuated from soft pink to wine red. She liked wearing costumes, was invariably optimistic and often sighed. Karin delighted in the young children she and Buzz were raising, especially when they all made up new games or shows. Her voice was exquisite and round, like her person. The sounds she produced had a rich timbre that must have been be innate, and she had learned enough technique to sing gorgeously shaped musical lines. Not whenever she chose, however. On days when Karin lost confidence, the lines suffered and sometimes broke down completely. But when she regained confidence, her voice soared like a bird in flight, sounding like the free spirit that she was. I learned from her about vulnerability, something I hoped to avoid in my life but instead was only able to postpone.
Her husband could almost have been in an older generation than the rest of us but was not, instead maintaining an open stance, mellowed rather than hardened by the numerous vicissitudes his longer life had brought him. Buzz radiated serenity and laughed gently. Though he played several instruments, he was mainly a teacher and a composer. He loved literature and composed for us settings of evocative poems by Thomas Hardy and e. e. cummings, one on unrequited love, beautifully melodic and melancholic, the other a concise reflection on one man’s life and death, as movingly captured in music as in words. If you could pick your relations, Buzz would be your older brother or a favorite uncle. He listened much more than he talked, rarely rendered a judgment, and when he did, it was invariably sympathetic and well-considered.
Here was finally a group that I unreservedly enjoyed, and we got together often during the year we all lived in Florence. Whenever Angel Band performed for an audience, people would usually come up to thank or compliment us after we finished playing. Once, an older Italian woman effused about the music, then said she had fallen in love with me during the concert. She was sweet, physically unattractive and married, standing in fact next to her much older husband who seemed unfazed by her comment. Barbara, however, was very physically attractive, also older and married, but she said it was over and that she had separated from her husband. When she repeated that information later on during the party, I wondered if it was an invitation. She was a flutist and an interesting, opinionated conversationalist. I asked if she’d like to meet for a drink the next afternoon and she said yes.
It took off from there. She implied that divorce proceedings were well underway, something which turned out not to be true. We continued our afternoon trysts on the thin mattress of my single bed, but also in the comfortable apartment she and her husband owned in the city. I later found out that they still lived together in their country home, that he knew about me and openly expressed his jealousy, that he occasionally came unexpectedly to their city apartment, and that he was capable of highly emotional outbursts – all this in a country that back then still enshrined the delitto d’onore (“crime of honor”). In that stagnant corner of the Italian legal system, jealousy was mixed in (or more accurately, confused) with honor. Catching a spouse in the act allowed you, in a moment of anger, to kill either or both of them and face, instead of a life sentence, as little as three years in jail if your reaction was sufficiently emotional. Our affair was brief, and we were both safer when it ended.
What was not very safe, however, were the piazze, the public squares of Italy. There were numerous political bombings and assassinations carried out by fanatics of both the left and the right during the 1970’s and early 1980’s, known in Italy as “the years of lead” (i.e., bullets). The country was a hotbed of social and economic turmoil, its Communist Party (“PCI”) by far the largest in capitalist Western Europe. Enrico Berlinguer, the party’s pragmatic leader had broken with Moscow over the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia, insisting that the national communist parties should take their own path toward a democratic form of socialism. The PCI’s dominant presence in the Italian labor movement and some well-governed regions combined with a highly organized network of social service and recreation centers to steadily increase its popularity with voters. In 1976 the party won more than a third of the seats in Parliament, only 4% behind the first-place Christian Democrats, causing pronounced anxiety throughout the capitalist countries of Europe and America. Would Italy soon become the first democratic country to vote communists into power? More importantly, would they relinquish that power if later voted out? No party calling itself Communist had ever allowed that to happen. Tension abounded amid rumors of extremist conspiracies and CIA-supported military coups. Italy was on the front line of the Cold War at a time when the stakes were huge and the domino theory held sway.
But far from instigating the violence in the streets, the Communists tried desperately to stop it. The party’s long campaign to persuade Italian voters and the country’s capitalist allies that it was different, that its commitment to democracy was sincere, was now so close to success. Victory at the ballot box was within reach, probably at the next election. When such a fundamental change of orientation is in the offing, violent fringe groups thrive at both ends of the political spectrum, nourished by fear and opportunism. The PCI was viewed by radical leftists as a conglomeration of sell-outs who had lost their revolutionary fervor, its leaders targeted for assassination along with policemen, judges and prominent members of the ruling political establishment. This culminated in the 1978 kidnapping and murder by the Red Brigades of the Italian Prime Minister, a Christian Democrat sympathetic to forming a coalition with the PCI.
Teetering on the brink of communism, Italy was then only a few decades removed from the twenty years it spent as a fascist dictatorship. Though the fascist party was banned by the 1948 Italian constitution, right-wing extremism still had its adherents, their terrorist faction responsible for the deadliest massacre during the “years of lead,” a bomb which killed 85 and wounded more than 200 people at the Bologna train station. The radical leftists had much wider support among young Italians, especially university students, but there were enough neo-fascist fanatics to fuel the street violence which could erupt without warning between zealots of both extremes.
One day I turned a corner while walking near the University of Florence and became a momentary spectator at a pitched battle between these zealots. The two sides were throwing rocks at each other as the police approached from another street, pistols drawn, occasionally firing warning shots in the air. Someone launched a Molotov cocktail which exploded close enough to send me running away. I heard the crackle of gunfire and another explosion as I took an alternate route to my apartment.
Between these political extremes, there were a dozen or so parties represented in Parliament, a fascinating contrast to the bland two-party system in which I had grown up. The most colorful of these was the small but influential Radical Party. They maintained that politicians were essentially whores and made their point by nominating as one of their candidates Cicciolina, a star of hard-core pornographic films. This blatant appeal to the wry humor and cynicism of Italian voters was wildly successful - she was elected, continued her porn career while serving as a Member of Parliament and one day exposed her breasts there.
My interest in Italian politics extended in all directions. Communism, fascism, anarchism – they all flourished or were born here, exercised with the passion that flows so often through things Italian. Campaign rallies were huge spectacles, and I attended many of them. The major parties filled the largest piazzas of Florence with lively entertainment, enormous banners, and flamboyant rhetoric. By general agreement, the best speaker in a country that prized talking as an art form was Giorgio Almirante, the leader of a right-wing party that attracted most of the ex-fascists. Even people who despised what he stood for acknowledged his great rhetorical gifts, and I wanted to hear him live.
I saw posters announcing his coming to Florence, and read in the newspaper that the police required the rally to be held in a theater for security purposes – there had been several bomb threats and also earlier episodes of violence at some of his rallies. For Almirante and his followers, this was enemy territory. Florence and nearby Bologna formed the heart of the “red belt,” the regions of central Italy where the communists had won the local elections almost without interruption since the end of World War Two, where hatred of fascism was especially strong. None of my friends wanted to go, the Italians in particular urging me to stay away. But I was armed with a young man’s feeling of invincibility – bad things only happened to other people.
The streets around the theater were abnormally quiet. Heavily armed policemen almost outnumbered audience members inside, and the tense atmosphere was sufficiently worrisome to keep me near the door. When Almirante walked on stage he was greeted with shouting and energetic applause from the party faithful, some of them extending the same fascist salute that had hailed Mussolini. He was a magnificent orator, fully exploiting the natural cadences and beautiful sounds of the Italian language, his resonant voice effortlessly shaping phrases that seemed extemporaneous. Here was a man making an odious message sound like music. But then I heard a loud boom and saw smoke begin to fill the room. There were panicked shouts and frantic movement all around. I ran out of the theater and heard more explosions, some of them outside, where I also saw men scurrying about with pistols drawn and cops brandishing machine guns. A few weeks earlier, I had happened upon the street battle near the University by chance, but I had foolishly chosen to attend this rally, and now I was scared, really scared. My heart pounded my ribs as I looked around for a safe way home.
Bad things don’t just happen to others – they can happen to you, too. That’s an important lesson, the more dramatic the better, to get at an appropriate time in life - too early and it can crush your enthusiasm for life’s expanding possibilities, too late and you may be finished before your time. “Risk analysis,” our most useful skill – I didn’t know its name then, but got an instant appreciation for its importance that afternoon.
Throughout the United States and beyond, countless organizations sponsored free concerts in 1976 to celebrate the American Bicentennial, but who would have imagined that one of those organizations would be the Communist city government of Florence, Italy? or that the location for a concert of American hillbilly tunes would be the Salone dei Cinquecento, whose walls display famous sculptures by Michelangelo and other Italian masters as well as enormous Renaissance tapestries, perhaps the grandest public hall in all of Italy and the most incongruous conceivable for this style of music? or that the ex-lawyer who had become a conservatory student through pure luck would be in the band handsomely paid to play for the thousand people who filled the hall?
Yet that’s what happened. Not because we had earned that kind of exposure on such a grandiose stage, nor because Dennis knew one of the employees who worked at Palazzo Vecchio, the Florentine city hall. It always helps, of course, to know someone who can at least open a door to the labyrinth of Italian bureaucracy, but approval for such a big undertaking required a solid political rationale. Florence and its red belt neighbors propelled the Communists to their national success in 1976 because they were examples of local governments providing well-organized social services, relatively free of the corruption so prevalent in other areas of the country. In contrast to the Christian Democrats, when Communists spent public money it was expected to have a purpose other than rewarding cronies. Political calculations, however, were inescapable, especially with power at the national level so close-at-hand. The Communists had already demonstrated they could run clean, efficient local governments in Italy, but too many voters (and western allies like the United States) were still anxious - Italians did not want to be absorbed into the monolithic communist bloc to their east. Party members saw this as an opportune time for pro-Western cultural initiatives, to develop linkages, to create a zone of comfort for the anxious, and Angel Band was a direct beneficiary of that policy.
Huge red posters all over Florence announced the upcoming “Concert in Honor of the American Bicentenial,” and the city’s cultural department did extensive media publicity. When the evening finally arrived, the introductory remarks were less about music and Angel Band, more about the durable bonds between Italy and America and their mutual dedication to liberty. People, however, had come to hear a concert and now it was time to play. The elegant surroundings and size of the audience were intimidating. We were well-prepared but untested in such a setting, and though we never said it, unsure we could do it.
I tried to will away my growing anxiety as the day went on but could only bring it, with conscientious effort, under temporary control. We strode on stage with a pretended confidence, shot uneasy smiles at each other and beneath the tapestries jumped into a country rag. The audience applause showed they liked it, and that helped settle our nerves a bit. Music – stay focused on the music. Over the next few tunes, nervous neurons gradually converted into an excitement of emotion that was positively charged and freely flowing, completely in the moment, a natural, tingling high. I was floating, joyfully, my fiddle an extension of body and soul, giving and receiving.
Afterwards, we celebrated at a small hillside trattoria that we and our friends completely took over. White candles softly illuminated smiling faces gathered around a large table, covered with food and flasks of Tuscan wine. Our mood was euphoric, and we followed the Italian custom for such occasions by making many spontaneous toasts. The level of oratory varied but not the sincerity of the words, which were received with always wholehearted, sometimes fervent applause. Inbetween, there was much animated conversation and easy laughter. The luminosity in this rustic room was multi-nourished, palpable. An adrenaline rush that peaked during our backstage warm-up and opening tune had transformed itself, first into the floating sensation of play, then the warmth of jubilant companionship, finally dissipating as the sun rose, allowing me a dreamy sleep.
Giuliano Giunti, the owner of a small recording studio in Florence, was in the audience that night and saw an opportunity. “Whisky Trial,” a local group of musicians, had introduced Florentine audiences to Irish traditional music two years before and quickly attracted a following throughout Italy. They had sold many records for a competitor, and Giuliano thought he might be able to do something similar with Angel Band. Would we come to his studio to do some recording and see how it turned out? He agreed to give us copies of the tapes he made, so it was (if nothing else) a simple way to get a good quality recording for our own enjoyment of the tunes we played.
Now it was a mass of microphones and equipment that seemed intimidating. Which makes you more nervous, performing in front of warm bodies or surrounded by cold metal? The nice thing about studio recording is that you can keep doing it until you get it right. After a while we felt comfortable there, too, except for one Sunday night. Giuliano had scheduled us for a session at 8 PM that I didn’t get to until after 11 PM. I had gone to see Michelucci play a recital that afternoon in Arezzo, ordinarily an hour away by train, and if all went according to schedule, I would make it back by 6:30 PM. Dennis advised me not to chance it, especially on a Sunday, when everything in Italy slowed down. My train back to Florence left late, crawled and sat, then crawled and sat some more, arriving almost five hours late. This was before cellphones, so they were all there waiting, expecting me to arrive any minute the whole time, doing a slow burn. My apology and explanation placated everyone except Dennis, who remained extremely pissed.
“Why did you have to leave the city today? You knew how much we had to do. You could see your fucking maestro some other time.”
That triggered an argument between the two of us that escalated until Giuliano insisted we get to work; we had already wasted enough of his time. Dennis’ normally fair-skinned face was an angry red as I tuned my fiddle, hot and flushed. My hands were almost shaking; my arms and brain felt wired by our mutual irritation. I wondered how we could possibly play together and avoided his glare as Rob’s mandolin intro kicked off “Gilderoy’s Reel,” one of our most difficult uptempo tunes. I felt like I was on a sharp edge the whole way through, expecting to fall off at any moment. Somehow, magically, the music totally took over, rechanneling all that charged emotion, like an overwhelming force pulling wild energy into phase. We played the tune with more drive and passion than ever before - it would be the best cut on the album. Hours later we finished the session, exhausted but exhilarated. Dennis and I walked home together in the quiet of late night, expended, reconnected.
At first we all knew each other more as part of a group than as individuals. The bonds of personal friendship would develop later and last a lifetime, though for geographic reasons I would see much more of Rob, the best man at my wedding, and Dennis, whose home in the Tuscan hills has been the site of many a happy gathering. Buzz and Karin settled in Washington state, and stopped coming back east for visits after their kids finished New England colleges and returned home. We stayed in occasional contact by phone and letter, but less so as time went by. When Buzz died over thirty years after we first met, I had not seen him for almost twenty years, yet I cried as never before on hearing of a friend’s death, sobbing intensely when I listened to our playing of his songs. Music and friendship are tied in with emotions at an elemental level, overwhelming when they combine forces, pushing away time and distance.
Giuliano didn’t like distractions, but he allowed Maria and Tara into one of our recording sessions. They were both studying at Dennis’ art studio, liked American folk music and came to the parties and gigs we played. After fussing over our microphone settings for a while, Giuliano moved into the glass-enclosed recording booth and announced that we would start with “that tune Peter sings with his voce di merda,” literally meaning “voice of shit.” I of course realized from the day I first met the others that they were the real singers and that any singing I might do in the group would be limited to fiddle tunes where vocal quality was unimportant. I also knew by then that Giuliano sometimes used sarcasm to keep us loose, and I liked him a lot, but still…, hearing your singing voice described that way by the recording engineer doesn’t boost your confidence as you watch the red light go on, telling you the tape is rolling. We played “Give the Fiddler a Dram,” started well and rode a wave all the way through on the first take. I noticed Maria and Tara in a corner of the booth, moving with the music. Maria had her eyes closed, absorbing the sound, turning the tune’s plaintive drone into a rhythmic swaying. Tara’s bright eyes engaged mine; her lips formed a soft smile. I felt better.
Maria had done more than boost my confidence a few months earlier. I knew her mainly as a friend of a friend, but she came to my apartment one night and said she wanted to be with me. That had never happened before, not during my quasi-monastic time as a conservatory student and certainly not when I was a lawyer. Is this the way it was for performing musicians?
Tara instead I first met when she was infatuated with Lance, the male model from England. He was extraordinarily handsome and lived in the room next to mine in an apartment I had moved to that year. Lance supported himself by posing nude for art classes in Florence, which is how Tara first saw him. She and a girlfriend came by to visit one evening, and the four of us talked amiably in his room. It was obvious that Tara was smitten, but so were lots of women, and men too. At least, that’s what I heard from others. Lance rarely brought anyone to his room. I didn’t wonder then if it might be because of my heavy practice schedule, unpleasant for me too because my room was so tiny that I could barely draw the bow from one end to the other.
But another reason was that our apartment caught fire and we all had to move out. It started very late at night in a corner of the kitchen where we kept a pile of newspapers. About a foot away was the gas-fueled heater that warmed us in winter. I not only was aware of that proximity, I also saw small blue flames escaping from the bottom of the heater a few times starting about a month before the fire. This was not a case of poor risk analysis, this was pure oblivion. And my roommates were equally uncomprehending.
Katie, an Australian student whose bedroom adjoined the kitchen, was awakened by the crackling flames burning everything combustible in that corner. Her screams of “Fire!” brought Eugenio and Lance into the kitchen, where I quickly joined them after first placing my violin outside. Eugenio called the fire department while Lance grabbed some buckets from the closet. All three of us threw water at the fire, at first haphazardly, but then in a line formation starting at the spigot. The flames had spread to some cabinets and were slapping at others nearby. We doused the fire’s front line there, trying to drive it back to the masonry wall where it was running out of fuel. Some flames were more than halfway up the room, threatening a jump to wooden beams in the ceiling. But we had advanced from nervously instinctive reaction to methodically focused action, with Lance keeping the coolest head and making the best suggestions. The water finally began to push the flames back, then slowly finished them off. It took more than a half hour to get it under control, and twenty minutes after it was out, the fire truck arrived.
We were celebrating our triumph with a glass of wine in a soaked kitchen that reeked of smoke and ashes. The firemen, after inspecting the premises and ascertaining that the fire was really out, did not return to the firehouse but instead accepted our offer of some wine and stayed there chatting with us for another half hour. We never did ask why it took them so long to get to our centrally-located building, nor did they offer an explanation; but Eugenio did receive a bill the following week from the municipal fire department for about fifteen dollars. We wondered what rationale could possibly underlie such a charge or its amount, and never even considered paying it.
Flames. Tara couldn’t get any going with Lance, notwithstanding her striking red hair and attractive looks. She was statuesque, but he was a blond Olympian god, too far out of reach. After the fire, he found a place in the hills above Florence. I only had a few months before leaving Italy and moved into an extra room that Dennis and his wife Suzy had up in their attic. Suzy was also an artist and taught a class at her husband’s studio that Tara was taking. One evening, Suzy and I were talking in the living room when Tara stopped by to discuss her art project, and the three of us had a nice conversation.
“She likes you.” Suzy said after Tara left.
“What makes you think that?” I asked. Tara hadn’t said or done anything to give me that impression, and I had seen her eyes when she looked at Lance several weeks earlier.
“Didn’t you see? The way she looked and moved? You should ask her out. She didn’t come here just to talk about our class. I can tell that she likes you.”
Suzy had been deaf since childhood and was an expert lip reader. She saw the words that I heard, but also more. Her other senses, especially the visual and emotional, had been sharpened by silence. I respected her intuition and willingly acted upon it. Tara had in fact lowered her sights, and I was the beneficiary.
In addition to Giuliano’s recording studio, the concert at city hall sent Angel Band off to a mountain top. The head of the American Consulate and his wife were in the audience, and a few days afterwards we got a call from the cultural office at the Consulate. They wanted us to play a concert in tiny San Marino, the oldest surviving constitutional republic in the world. We instantly agreed, not caring whether the Communist connection of the first concert was triggering a Cold War response or if it was just the Consulate spending some money already budgeted for cultural exchange programs. We were to be well paid, and the consular official said he would take us after the concert to one of his favorite restaurants in all of Europe. When Tara asked if she could join me for the trip, it looked as if all bases would be covered for a fantasy weekend.
We climbed the Apennines in the Consulate’s van and arrived mid-afternoon in this microstate of 20,000 people, then strolled around before entering the theater to warm up for the concert. I looked out from backstage fifteen minutes after the 9 PM starting time, wondering why it was so quiet. Less than thirty people had come. Although we played well, my fantasy didn’t include those acres of empty seats.
It was already approaching midnight when our group entered the restaurant, a handsomely vaulted room of candle-lit stone in an historic palace. A tuxedoed host handed us crystal glasses filled with prosecco.
“Buona sera. Prego!”
He pointed to an elaborately carved table elegantly set with flowers, fine china and antique silverware. The tablecloth itself was a work of art, as were the curvaceous candelabras. We chatted pleasantly under their glow with the San Marino government officials who accompanied us. Then the unhurried procession of beautifully presented food began with prosciutto-wrapped melon slices and other antipasto dishes. The wines were all of high quality and well paired with the many courses that followed – freshly made pastas, roasted meats and vegetables, salads, richly flavored cheeses, nuts, fruits and pastries, all of them regional specialties. Though it was now almost 3 AM, some in our group finished with an espresso. I instead drained the last of many glasses, this one a well-structured vino rosso, and had some of the after-dinner liqueurs.
When Tara and I returned to our charming hotel room, I was too sated by food and drink to do much other than fall asleep. Though my fantasy had us finishing the night with great sex after a triumphant concert, I flopped in bed and we drifted into slumber, quietly burping the residue of the evening’s only event that met and indeed far exceeded expectations.
There was yet another phone call after the Bicentennial concert, this one from the Consul-General’s wife, Mrs. Cootes. She had scheduled a private party at their hillside estate and wanted Angel Band to play. Rob and I were the only ones available on that date, but she said that would be fine, though she grumbled about the price I proposed before agreeing to it. We needed a name, something that sounded folky but also acknowledged our base in Florence, and thus became the Arno Valley Boys. We had never played as a duo before and put together some tunes during one very long rehearsal.
Mrs. Cootes also graciously invited us to the dinner that would start the evening. The twenty guests were a mix of Americans and Italians, from the class that inhabits the social register, all engaged in intelligent, often witty conversations about politics and culture. Gossip, too, and I overheard some serious name-dropping, the best from a plump, bejeweled woman on the board of Chicago Lyric Opera - “Well, backstage after the performance, Luciano told me…” - she leaned toward her listener as if conveying a confidence about the grand Pavarotti, but in a voice loud enough for anyone in the vicinity to hear. Even so, they were all quite congenial. I wondered how our lowbrow folk music would go over with this sophisticated set.
Some rousing fiddle tunes got them clapping, and when the delightful Mr. Cootes began dancing, many of the others followed. At sixty, he remained a party boy from Princeton, having successfully turned those early good times into a career in diplomacy. In fact, these were all seasoned partiers, and they kept us going beyond the hour of tunes we had semi-prepared. We had to wing our way through an extra hour or so, but their listening standards were by then as loose as our playing.
After Mr. Cootes paid us, I thought of how well the Arno Valley Boys might do busking in Munich, but it took several weeks to convince Rob to try it. I told him how much I made there the past summer, plus we had some tunes ready and it was fun playing them. He finally agreed, primarily because we both needed an infusion of cash.
The pedestrian zone in the heart of Munich was as lively as ever, with perfect fall weather and appreciative audiences. At one point, a reporter from the city’s main newspaper interviewed us for an article he was writing on the local renaissance of busking; he seemed particularly interested when I told him how much money we were earning. Many others came up to chat, some were musicians who wanted to jam, and the most likeable of all was Gunter, a young German who made guitars and loved American folk music. He invited us to stay at the apartment he shared with his girlfriend, and when we left a few days later, he asked if he could organize some concerts in Bavaria for us.
“Sure, but I’ll be leaving Europe in early spring,” I told him.
“That gives me plenty of time,” he said. “It would just be folk clubs, small theaters, places like that. Send me a picture so I can do some do some posters.”
The time to leave Florence came too soon, but I looked forward to the concert mini-tour Gunther had arranged. On the night of our departure, Rob stoned Dennis, Tara and me while he packed, then quenched our thirst with water from a bottle whose label claimed that Michelangelo drank from this same spring to flush himself out. Tara was renting the extra room in Rob’s apartment from him, but Rob had reserved the right to have a visiting friend use the smaller of two mattresses on the floor of her room. Unfortunately, his friend had arrived just a few days before. Having another guy in the room made for an awkward final night with Tara, but it was mercifully short because by 3 AM, we were already on Rob’s motorcycle, riding through muted, misty streets to catch a pre-dawn train to Munich.
We practiced some of our newer tunes on the way up. Our repertory had been bolstered during the winter by preparing for weekly programs on American folk music that we did for a Florentine elementary school, another lucky result of the conservatory’s open door policy. The schoolteacher who hired us was the wife of a government employee who had taken early retirement - he had always wanted to be a pianist and decided to enroll in the conservatory. We were working together on a Mozart sonata in the chamber music class, sometimes practicing in his home before the Tuscan meals that his wife prepared. Our professor was Franco Rossi, a member of the Quartetto Italiano, one of the world’s top string quartets, further proof that Italian conservatories during this egalitarian era made no effort to match best students with best teachers, instead allowing even two older amateurs to study with one of the country’s most renowned musicians. Rossi was as friendly as Michelucci, too; both invited me to their homes for dinners and accepted my return invitations. Over the years, Michelucci became a good friend. No professor in law school had even bothered to learn my name.
Gunter set up our first concert for a school auditorium outside Munich on the evening of our arrival, but the train ran late, forcing him and a musician friend to entertain the audience while another friend raced us there in his car. Rob and I entered the hall almost two hours after the scheduled starting time, thoroughly exhausted from the 17 hour train ride and starting to catch cold. After a hasty consultation with Gunther, we apologized for the long delay, played a few tunes and told the spectators to keep their tickets because we would come back several days later to do a full program.
We played next at a folk club in Nuremburg, where the energetic audience reaction produced some unconsummated groupies and a return booking for the one night we had free later in the week. Depending on the location of each evening’s gig, we either stayed with Gunther’s cherubic mother and teenaged sisters in the quaint village where they lived, or else at his apartment near Munich University where he was completing his degree. Our lives became very nocturnal - the gigs ended late and were always followed by partying and jamming with Gunther’s friends. We often returned home around dawn to a quiet kitchen and still more drink and food, including the same cheeses, bread and deli meats that we would have again for an early afternoon breakfast.
One day in Munich we chatted with some of the buskers. Two of them had the same complaint – the money wasn’t as good as before because a few months ago some jerk had told a reporter how much he was making. When the article appeared in the paper, people thought it was too much and started putting less money in the cases. I felt guilty about my earlier boasting, but did not have the courage to confess.
By the time of our reappearance at the school auditorium, Rob and I both had well-developed colds, but we played a solid concert and were glad to make up for our feeble opening night. The simple German chit-chat I had been working on all week was by now good enough to cultivate some real audience rapport and even get a few laughs. Our return gig in Nuremburg, however, was flat compared to the first – our playing was a little off and the crowd not as responsive. That all turned around at our final concert, a raucous, drunken evening in a town beer hall. What fun! – our liveliest crowd, howling over my fractured German story line for “Mother, the Queen of My Heart,” screaming and stomping for encore after encore. A thoroughly upbeat finish to a whirlwind tour. We had been minor-league stars for a week, and I loved every minute in the spotlight.
But I also realized that a steady diet would probably get old pretty fast, eventually knock me out and definitely not be well-suited to the kind of family life I imagined in my future. I didn’t like the odds of trying to make a career in music, especially given my late start. It made more sense to dust off my law degree when I returned to the States, perhaps some type of solo practice with an ethnic dimension in the Italian district of Boston, or maybe try to develop something with mediation and the law. That would get sorted out later. I was, however, sure of two things – I would return often to Italy, its people and culture already firmly lodged as life pillars, and music would be my passion, not my job.
22. Sunset in Crete
Many years later I am nearing the end of my journey in its senior edition, but still have a few weeks before going back to Florence. I am leaving Crete tomorrow, flying to meet Giovanna in Cairo during her week-long vacation from the Smith JYA program; we are both excited about cruising the Nile together on a riverboat. On this last day, I make the rounds of the acquaintances I have made during my stay in Chania to say good-by. Andrea, owner and sole employee of an Italian clothing boutique, is the first stop. I entered his tiny shop one morning when I saw its Italian name and asked where I might find a good cappuccino in town. His face brightened to hear his native language; his response was that there weren’t any such places here. He had emigrated to Chania a decade earlier after marrying his Greek wife, and during his first visit back to Italy bought the small espresso machine that stood on a table in the corner. A few minutes later it produced an excellent cappuccino which he proudly gave me. I now exchange some final pleasantries with him, and later with Niko, the fisherman & taverna owner. As usual, the most stimulating conversation is with the erudite Panatagios, over a drink in the café across from his wine shop. It normally takes more time for a relationship to become a friendship, but travel condenses time; it combines with solitude to thicken experience. As with many before them (few of whom I ever see again), these are my friends in this moment and place, and I will miss them for awhile.
On this last evening alone I perform a favorite ritual - watching the sun set while playing my fiddle and occasionally chatting with those who happen by. Chania has many beautiful promenades along the sea. The ones at the center of the port are always busy, so I walk out to a quieter area, where there are only intermittent passers-by, where I am less likely to disturb or be disturbed but still open to interacting with those who stop and listen. I am the only person on some benches facing west across a gently surging bay. An imposing mountain separates bay from sky, but darkness is still a few hours away. A golden sun brilliantly illuminates the white foam of waves breaking against the large rocks that protect a few dozen small fishing boats. Across from the boats is the isolated restaurant I ate at two days before, where I asked for some fish and the cook crossed the street to get it fresh off the boat of his friend.
My music-making draws many smiles and a sequence of small audiences - three Greek high school students, a German couple who both play cello, and some others. As the sun approaches the peak of the mountain, a lively group of French university students draws near. I am playing some classical pieces, and a few of the students sit down next to me. They are studying Greek here, but speak good English. The most animated is an attractive young woman named Nina; she has an intelligent, engaging personality and a sympathetic taste in music, asking me to play for her Bellini’s great operatic aria, “Casta Diva,” and the Allegretto from Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony. I warn her that a single instrument can do no more than outline some melodies in the Beethoven symphony, but she responds enthusiastically, telling me afterwards that the music has made this the best sunset of her life.
As we continue our conversation, I think of where this might be headed thirty-five years earlier. But a new feeling has been developing during this journey. The conversation and sunset are more than enough, evoking memories that connect past and present in a resonant harmony. We shake hands before she leaves to join her friends. After several steps, she turns toward me with a radiant smile, the hand that left mine moments ago now waving. I smile and wave back, then watch the sun as it passes behind the mountain overlooking the bay, quietly moving lustrous colors from sea surface to sky.
© Peter Contuzzi 2010-14
* Web image (all others are personal photographs)