He was insulted and furious, but he smiled. Hadn’t she always been unpleasant, an awkward blunderer? He could barely speak, he was so angry. But only shrugged. “That’s my music. My music, that’s what they want to hear and what I play. Tex-Mex, tejano with more snap, more country in it, and the traditional conjunto our father played, that is my music.” The recording of the Italian accordion music filled the room with tremolo. “There’s plenty musicians try new stuff. But they come back to the old stuff too, they come to the well with their pitchers.” His coffee cup was empty. He waited for Félida to notice, refill it. His hand shook. She looked across the room at the husband coming out of the bathroom, zipping up his fly. The room seemed filled with bitterness and the quivering Italian music. Baby’s glance focused on his accordion case near the door, the corners scuffed, the festival stickers peeling. He pushed out of the rump-sprung chair and got the accordion, walked deliberately to the entertainment center and turned off the Italian. They didn’t know what to do. They were glaring at him, frowning.
He had a feel for silence, for leading to an unsounded note the listener yearned for and finally had to supply from his mind, the stopped phrases like a held breath, the faded ending or scantily echoed notes, the thin line of a beginning like a colorless trickle down a rock in the woods but growing to standing waves, a waterfall, a whirlpool, undertow and riptide. This hostile silence he attacked with powerful and rapid fingering from the beginning, too fast to make sense, a kind of anger bursting from the instrument. He played without stopping for about ten minutes, jumping around through twenty songs, a phrase or a line, intros and transitions, broken octaves, sliding his fingers over the buttons for the difficult but beautiful glissandi effect. He raised his head now and then to look across the room at his sister and her husband, and stopped abruptly.
“How about you,” he sneered. “You used to play. Our father said you were the true musician in the family, the one with the real Mexican soul. But that was before he cursed you, before you left in the night like a criminal, before you broke your mother’s heart and turned your back on your family and your people. Before you learned to be an Italian. Can you still play your own people’s music? Or is it just the olive oil crap?” He extended his accordion, held it out in courteous fury.
“How dare you,” she said. “Oh yes, I should have stayed, played the chile queen until I married some Chicano fruit picker, had fifteen kids and made tortillas three times a day by hand, keep my head down, watch for the evil eye and wear out my knees on the stone church floor. You hold out the accordion to me? I’m surprised. Surely you believe, as our father believed, that it is a man’s instrument. Well, I think it is the instrument of unsuccessful men, of poor immigrants and failures. I was only a child but I saw that years ago. I saw that before I left, our father the busboy and his precious green accordion—that one right there—and the way he stood, all hot and sweaty, and that ridiculous hair, and came in drunk, a drunk Mexican, a busboy with an accordion, his moment of glory, and he would let the accordion hang down, the bellows open, just let one end go, and I saw that big moldy thing hanging down and I hated him, and that’s when I knew the accordion was a man’s instrument and men play it like they fuck. As you have just played it. I decided to play it as a musical instrument. And it is true, I can play anything. I am not stuck with conjunto. Anything! I do not bother with the button accordion, a nasty toy for amateurs and drunks. I play the piano accordion and I am a professional musician in a way you will never understand, a responsible musician.”
He felt a kind of horror. “What a bitch you’ve turned into!” he cried.
“Don’t you speak to Betty—” The husband put his hands on the arms of his chair.
“Shut up.” He turned to Félida. “The piano accordion makes a stupid, domineering sound—it is a clown’s instrument—yes, I can see you toddling out on Saturday nights with Mr. Baton to some Jew birthday party, you and a bunch of old hacks who can’t play the scale, ‘Happy Polack Birthday to You—’” he sang in a whiny sneer. “Corny band playing stale oldies. ‘Happy You, Happy Me, Happy Fuckups in a Tree.’”
“You bastard! You don’t know anything about it. I spent years playing with fine musicians, I worked hard, I was just a kid, learning the instrument, I played many years in four-piece bands, drums, accordion, trumpet, somebody who could double on clarinet and saxophone, and we were good enough to sound like ten instruments. I’d like to see you do it, cover standards and Latin and ethnic and pop, yes, and swing and hot jazz, even hillbilly and semiclassical, you see how long you’d last. You’d be tossed on your tail in five minutes with your lousy, dinky squeezebox.” As she shouted she was pulling an enormous case from the hall closet, a heavy black case, and from it she took a large chromed accordion—it looked to him as though it were made from the front end of a Buick.
“You bastard,” she panted. “You don’t even know I can replace an entire sax section. You do not even know that although I married, I continued my music!” She passed her arms through the straps and hoisted the huge instrument. Glaring at Baby she played. He thought she might do some show-off medley, some bell-ringing patchwork full of squeals and whistles, a showstopper that dumped “Little Brown Jug” into “Tickle Tickle Hee Hee Hee” and ended with “Bill Bailey, Won’t You Please Come Home” or a show tune, but she surprised him. She stared at the ceiling, said, “por Chencho, Tomás, por Papá Abelardo,” then sang the heart-wrenching “Se Me Fue Mi Amor,” which Carmen y Laura had recorded in the last year of the war. Her bellows control technique was extraordinary, with dramatic swells and choking, sforzati explosive effects. She scratched and rubbed and struck the keys, ran the back of her nails across the folds of the bellows. The accordion gave the perfect illusion that a bajo sexto and a bass as well as a highly original percussion player supported the accordion, and from it came the melting harmony of the missing sister’s voice to twine and burn with the sweet, smoldering fire of Félida’s sad voice.
“It is the most beautiful music in the world,” she said and went into the bathroom where her sobs echoed off the tiles.
“You ought to hear her play ‘Flight of the Bumblebee,’ she’s fantastic,” said the husband.
Baby put Abelardo’s green accordion in the case, looked at the stupid Italian and walked out, leaving the door ajar like Richard Widmark, heard it slam as he punched the elevator button.
In the street Baby walked toward the lake, shivering in the evening damp. Two men walked ahead of him under the lights, but they turned off and entered a building. There was a faraway guitar, a blues line, the but-tut-tut of drums, escaping from an open door. He walked toward the black lake, heard the liquid suffering of the water. He thought of ships backing slowly out from their docks. After a while he began to yawn. How tired he was. And chilled. He walked away from the water and when he saw a taxi gliding toward him, its roof light yellow and warm in the northern street, he raised his hand, ran toward it.
“Fortune Hotel.” Ay, what a beautiful, beautiful voice she had, wasted on an Italian club-band man, trampled by that large, overbearing accordion. Tears flooded his eyes.
In the hotel lobby he realized he had left the green accordion on the floor of the cab. He rushed to the street but the taxi was gone. He made call after call, no, he did not notice the cabbie’s number or name; no, he did not know what cab line it was, he remembered nothing except the yellow light on top and it could not be recovered.
A smell of burning
In the apartment the agitated husband walked back and forth.
“What a yo-yo,” he said. He scratched his arms. “I smell something burning,” he said finally.
“It’s him. He always stank of old cigarettes and burned wood.” She began to cry and when the old husband came toward her with his arms out to comfort, she pushed him away. An Italian!
Hitchhiking in a Wheelchair
On the streets of Paris
Charles Gagnon, whiny and given to crying (the motive, Sophie,
his deranged mother, said, for her attempt to drown him), entered working life in 1912 at age five, sucking on a harmonica and begging for centimes on the streets.
Sometime during the Great War, when he was nine or ten, the whore Yvette, who had saved him from drowning and in whose room he sometimes slept, pushed a little one-row accordéon diatonique at him, a ratty castoff pasted over with multicolored stars, a gift from one of her clients who was sick of hearing the mewling harmonica and who felt some pang for the bruised macaroni-face harvesting cigarette butts from the gutter, sorry for him because of his shitty past—imagine!—trussed up with coat hangers by his crazy mother and thrown into the river, pulled out by skinny Yvette who, as a girl, had dreamed of swimming the English Channel (a decade later when Gertrude Ederle did so, she felt betrayed); but he said to Yvette who gave the brat a place to sleep, a real heroine, he said only, doesn’t he get enough of the filthy harmonica out on the street? Does he have to keep on when he comes in? Here, give the little shit-ass a real instrument. And speaking of real instruments, see this?
With the button box—the buttons were loose, the bellows leaked, it sounded like a sick dog trying to bark—Charles worked the roughest bals musette (the fashionable men in their mink trousers and zip jackets never came there), playing doggedly for tips in the smoke and shouts and fights, the rhythm accompaniment provided by his stamping feet, sometimes alone, sometimes in competition with other players. There were no breaks. When he stopped for a piss or a drink the dancers screamed curses and threw things at his skinny back. His pay, often enough, was un petit vin blanc which was the cheapest and which became his realest pleasure then and forever. So he sniveled toward taking his place in the world of men, half starved and often drunk, sleeping at Yvette’s when he could, when she didn’t have customers, sometimes under a pair of chairs in the corner of a bistro, a part of the dockside life with his runny nose and burst shoes and a touchy hauteur based on nothing.
By the time he was sixteen this accordion irked him greatly—it did not have enough volume, it could barely be heard so much air poured out of the cracked bellows, it had an unprepossessing appearance, yes, it resembled a stiff rag, a dead turkey. Then there was the matter of the music. He was drawn to jazz, crazy to learn, to try cranky, strange progressions, but if he experimented—he had made up something that came close to “Honeysuckle Rose”—the patrons shouted their displeasure, pecked at him, come on, come on, drop that shit and play real music, the dim couples shifting around the floor on stiff western legs, the crêpe de Chine tubes of the women’s dresses flashing around their shins, the men’s two-toned feet pivoting and pointing, surrounded by candle fires on the white tablecloth plains, the music sad and jaunty, the hands and fingers of the men touching the ribs of the women through the heated fabric. The boy played derisively, mocking the flowery patterns on female rump and thigh, the brilliantined hair and cautious hands of the men.
His hero was Jo Privat who could play what he liked, le jazz hot mixed in with gypsy music, who sat in with those gypsy brothers Ferré and Django, was facile with the old bourrées and polkas, at home with the most desperate chansons musette. He had connections, did Privat, he knew muscle men, gangsters, he was always the star turn, le clou de la soirée. He was lucky, the bastard, got the lucky breaks, and Charles Gagnon never would. He had no luck, the ace of spades turned up every time. Jazz in the waterfront dives? Never, nothing but sentimental tripe with idiot refrains, songs that went with drinking and no hope, the kind of music sung by women whose men beat them, vinous crying, torrents of pained memories and defiant songs of nobodies. He got the idea that in the cosmic scheme his ill fortune counterbalanced the success of Jo Privat; if Privat went down in the world then Gagnon could rise. For a while he dreamed of killing Privat; he would rush up to him with a smile as though to thank him for his music, then make the lightning stab and disappear into the crowd. After a few weeks he would stroll into one of Privat’s haunts and begin to play. At the end of the evening Privat would be forgotten and there would be a new star. But it could not happen with this dead turkey of an accordion.
He made an arrangement with Gaétan the Necktie; an accordéon chromatique, a big black box with six rows of buttons and a bellows that nearly took the full stretch of his arms and that sounded like a locomotive crossing a trestle, appeared one evening; just a few francs every week until a certain sum was paid, better not forget, eh? and the Necktie punched him on the arm with his hard fist.
He would have been content with a two-row button accordion, but in this world you take what you can get. To learn this myriad of buttons, to cast from his mind the old simple pattern, to train his fingers to dance like those of someone at a typewriter was difficult, but he learned quickly because the sonority of the instrument and the rich possibilities of the chromatic scale rewarded him. What an incredible number of notes. He would never go back to a diatonique. The big chromatic was loud, it was enormously versatile and it was heavy. After a night of playing, his legs trembled. But what tricks he could make it do. Now, when a drunk bellowed for some drooling valse musette, Charles Gagnon would scream “ta gueule! Shut up!” and keep playing, drown him out. The big chromatic enjoyed musette tuning: three reeds for each note, one tuned to pitch, another a slice above true pitch, the third a cut below, so a note sounded in an aching tremble. It was silver-tongued, louder, better than any diatonique. And because of its weight he used it with success in one or two fights, slammed it down on some mec’s head, the guy went to his knees, his eyes rolled up as if he were examining the underside of his brain.
With this strong accordion he became an adult, the weepy, cringing childhood replaced by a formidable presence, heavy shoulders and arms, a thick neck, and a face with fleshy ears. His eyes were dark and suspicious, the black hair parted in the middle. He had hard nerves and his mouth was narrow and tight, pinching the ends of his cigarettes flat. He was in trouble so often it did not matter.
The café fire
Sooner or later he had to get into a real mess. He was made to stand up with Julie, forced by her brothers and Old Denis, the vicious father whose motto was “buvez et pissez,” a walking corpse with a liver as big as a portmanteau in him, so there had to be drinks first, drinks before a wedding or a pissing as the old man said, and as Charles took his glass in the café in an atmosphere of commingled anger and triumph, from the corner of his eye he could see the satin on the girl’s tight belly gleam and darken as sunlight sifts through cloud shadow; it was the kid inside squirming. There were a few more drinks and a crowd pressed into the Café Girandole, named for its dusty chandelier with most of the crystals missing, decorated for this occasion with twisted streamers of crepe paper, and after an hour or two all of them were drunk and Julie, short and already stout, dancing like a cow with an electric prod au cul, when there was an uproar of Senegalese at the door.
Olive, the elegant black girl he liked, advanced on Julie, fingers crooked like a garden fork and a blowtorch of abuse pouring from the pomegranate mouth, her round, hard belly advancing into the battle ahead of the rest of her body. In the doorway were her male relatives, enormous black men with bunched muscles and sleek cropped heads bearing greased ears that could never be gripped. The eyes of these men were red-veined and focused on invisible phantoms about a meter and a half in front of them.
Julie’s brothers and father leaped up, smoke and curses pouring from their mouths, throwing down their cigarettes. The two pregnant women shrieked and darted at each other; Julie gave Olive a tremendous slap that sent blood arcing from her nose, and Olive returned it with a blow on the satin belly, and then Old Denis lunged at the door, bottles and knives glittered, chairs splintered, the women rolled on the floor, a black man got Charles’s unshaven cheek in his teeth and began to chew. Moisture fell on them, there was a flash of light, a narrow flame ran along the floor and burst with a soft hus into a ball of fire. The crepe paper roared. He tumbled through the door with the black man, his shirt on fire, rolling in th
e wet street, and got away, clean away, leaving a piece of flesh in the teeth of his opponent, leaving the women burning up alive and his quickening bastards in their permanent dark chambers. Old Denis, badly scorched, got away as well and swore death to Charles by melted lead poured into his eyes, his ears, his mouth, slivers of steel pressed under his nails, up his urethra, fillets of flesh cut from him with a carpenter’s saw.
À Montréal
It was 1931 and Charles worked his way across the Atlantic to Québec, found a woman almost at once, and in less than a year was a father, married, and living in the east end slums of Montréal in the middle of the Depression. He had a job for a few months delivering white ashtray sand to luxury hotels and apartment buildings, but the concessionaire replaced him with a nephew and then there was no work. The big accordéon was in and out of the pawnshop. Besides, he disdained the drawling, mangled language and the Québécois musette style, hurried and without savor, worse than anything he’d ever heard. There was no jazz at all, and he despised the stupid reels and gigues of the carrot farmer and bûcheron, the gibberish mouth-music of crazy syllables and the way musicians danced their feet while playing. He stole a few records of Jo Privat although he had no Victrola, imagining the taste of Paris in his throat, the flavor of his old street life.
The wife, Delphine, went stale quickly, changed from a not-bad-looking girl, quick to bring him little comforts, to a woman nailed on an invisible cross. She came from an impoverished farm family undistinguished since an ancestor of quarrelsome temperament had landed in Québec in the late seventeenth century and within six weeks was brought before the court for calling his neighbor “une sauterelle d’enfer,” a grasshopper from hell, “un bougre de chien,” and striking him with a hen, for which mischief he was sentenced to a fine and a public amende honorable, a statement of repentance and apology. He quickly left the settlement and went on to become a voyageur and coureur de bois, scattering mixed-blood children across the continent before settling on a small acreage on the west bank of the rivière Saguenay and fathering seven more children on a half-Abenaki woman. (Delphine’s father, descended from one of those seven, died in 1907 when the cantilever railway bridge in construction across the St. Lawrence collapsed and he tumbled, with seventy-three others, assorted wheelbarrows, shovels, poles, blocks and tackles, and lunch pails, into the black water.)