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D Sharp Minor Etude, No. 12, Opus 8 by Alexander Scriabin: Horowitz wrong noted the D sharp etude in Moscow, Antonio said to Masha, listen, toward the end, Vladimir must have been nervous, or overwhelmed, or trying to both perform and watch himself perform because he’s eighty three years old and hasn’t been to Russia in sixty one years, and yet what’s amazing, or perhaps not so amazing, I know you’ll grumble if you don’t think it’s at least mildly amazing that, if you put on your headphones and scan every second of that recording of Horowitz in Moscow, you have to conclude that he’s not crying, unless he’s a silent weeper, now listen to this Valentin Silvestrov piece called Postludium, Antonio said — I absolutely agree with you, Masha, Silvestrov’s concept of the postlude, of a nostalgia for tonality expressed as a dissipation of tonality, sounds more interesting than his music — now listen to this piece by Arvo Pärt called Tabula Rasa, Antonio said, recounting for her what he knew about this music with so much glee that she began to think he couldn’t even believe he knew so much about a repertoire that just a few years ago had been foreign to him. She might have found his glee appealing then, or maybe she hadn’t, but since she had been new to San Francisco and hadn’t known anybody yet she had allowed herself to find his glee appealing (his glee and his excessive focus on researching the music, as if to atone for the deficiencies in his musical training he was trying to become a librarian of sounds — did you know that Messiaen composed his Quartet for the End of Time in a German war camp? — I don’t care I still don’t like his monotheistic bird music, Antonio —), but now she chooses to dismiss his glee and his librarianism as a noxious attempt to differentiate himself from others, no different than a dentist sporting heavy metal tank tops emblazoned with creatures that could extirpate Messiaen’s birds on earth, although the need to differentiate themselves had been what brought Masha and Antonio together: their contempt for those who stopple their lives for the promise of stocks, for instance, their unstated belief that what really matters exists in a parallel San Francisco of performances and paintings and poetry readings and yet unlike Antonio she detested poetry readings: why undermine your quiet text with your loud, needsome voice? At Antonio’s farewell party the loud voices of the women there had confused her. Were these not the same philistines they had targeted with what they liked to call, in homage to Nabokov, their plumed opprobrium?
All the guests at Antonio’s farewell party had been women. A blond American had opened Antonio’s door. She seemed to know that she needed to pull the door extra hard against the bristly carpet, although she looked confused about why her pull also spilled her drink, and either because she was drunk or because Masha refused to smile at the girl’s performance of cute bewilderment, the girl interrupted the welcoming skit that she’d seemed ready to enact for Masha, and yet as the girl in the tight jeans and pink pumps retreated down the hall, holding her Styrofoam cup as if it were a pet soaked in pee, and as the teleological dance beats coming from the living room concluded in a collective singalong — we want your soul! — Masha didn’t keep Antonio’s manuscripts rolled in her hand but returned them to her messenger bag, stashing them among his copy of A Werewolf Problem in Central Russia and her new palette knives and what was left of a bottle of corner store Pinot, the same brand that Antonio had offered her on the night they first met. She shouldn’t have come unannounced. That she’d felt entitled to because she wanted to know if the fictions Antonio had given her were true seemed ridiculous to her now. That she’d been trying to make herself believe that was the real reason she’d come was even more ridiculous. She knew then as she knows now, as she listens to Scriabin’s D Sharp Minor Etude from Antonio’s compendium, that her five or six months with Antonio entitled her to nothing. She also knew, because he’d told her, that not only were all of his friends in San Francisco women, but all of his relationships with them lasted less than six months. Why return to these moments at his farewell party then? Just toss his manuscripts and his tiresome compendium. Does she find solace in reminding herself that the moment’s over and she’s become the only spectator of that embarrassing moment, Masha in her black turtleneck by Antonio’s front door, trying to decide whether to leave what turned out to be Antonio’s farewell party, or wade into the party and confront him with absolutely nothing? On the other side of his living room Antonio was dancing in the exuberant way he probably thought American women expected from him, just like his exuberant clothes were probably what Antonio thought American women expected from him, a South American in San Francisco, although his clothes were so outlandish that they looked more like a parody of what Antonio thought American women expected from him, or perhaps his clothes were a rebuff for expecting him to dress like this, or perhaps the extra slim white bell bottoms with the crimson flowers printed on them and his extra tight white linen shirt abloom with ruffles were simply a ploy to make American women think that he wasn’t vain; that he favored the absurd not the vainglorious; that his clothes just happened to be tailored to accentuate his body and just happened to be expensive and that, unlike most Russian immigrants she didn’t associate with, he wasn’t brandishing these clothes as proof of European membership. On the other hand the more obvious possibility: Antonio had been having fun. Don’t you wish Antonio would have taken you to at least one of those all night dance parties, Masha? Yes. Maybe I would have tolerated the dumb trochaic rhythms of his electronic dance music just to watch him twirl in his slim flower pants inside a warehouse in the South of Market, no, I wouldn’t have tolerated it. I would have countermanded the excesses of the evening, which is probably why he never invited me. Or I would have drunk too much to thwart my tirades about his absurd costumes and a generation of young men hexed by, oh, enough, Mashinka. Enough.
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I wanted to become a Jesuit priest, Antonio wrote, hoping his impulse to become a Jesuit priest when he was fifteen or sixteen and still living in Guayaquil could sustain a novella or at least a short fiction about youth and god and so on, the kind of fiction that would rhapsodize his volunteer work with Leopoldo at the hospice Luis Plaza Dañín and would exalt their roles as catechists to the poor in Mapasingue, and yet a week or two after writing down that first sentence about wanting to become a Jesuit priest, a week like every other week for him in San Francisco (happy hour at 111 Minna on Wednesdays, a launch party for a new technology startup on Thursdays, an all night warehouse dance party on Fridays, and because he lived right behind Davies Symphony Hall and the War Memorial Opera House, and because he wanted to see and hear everything in the world — to become an expert on the unconscious one needs to know everything, Carl Jung said, and Antonio liked to believe that applied to becoming a writer, too — a symphony or an opera on Saturdays), Antonio concluded that although he wanted to write about his impulse to become a Jesuit priest when he was fifteen or sixteen, he wasn’t interested in dramatizing his impulse to become a Jesuit priest through scenes and reversals and recognitions from the time of Aristotle, yes, let us please not follow the pious Ecuadorian boy who, after a series of intense religious experiences, including the apparition of La Virgen del Cajas, which Antonio was absolutely not going to write about for anyone in the United States (Leopoldo had been there, too), loses his faith as everyone eventually does, no, dramatizing his impulse to become a Jesuit priest with scenes and reversals and recognitions seemed to him contrary to everything he valued about fiction (his first adult encounter with fiction had been Borges, and it was only after he enrolled in an introductory fiction class at the Berkeley Extension that he was shown the flat world of Best American Realism — I discovered Borges because of Michaela from Sweden, Antonio would have liked to tell Leopoldo over the phone, a fellow economics student from Sweden who allowed me to stay with her during the winter break of my senior year at Stanford because I didn’t have any money to fly anywhere that resembled home — listen to this, Leopoldo, a Mexican grad student who also had a crush on Michaela had handwritten a dedication on Borges’s Ficciones that read Dear Michaela, after reading this book, you’ll finally understand me — how does anyone understand anyone via Borges, Leo? — fiction that unfolds solely in Judas’s head was how Antonio liked to think of Borges’s fictions), so Antonio