his first sentence about wanting to become the president of Ecuador or at least the minister of finance and coming to the United States to prepare himself to return and run for office with Leopoldo because what he had come to understand was that he didn’t know how to write the kind of fiction he wanted to write, didn’t think he had another option but to continue to work as a database analyst during the day and read as much as he could during the night until one day maybe he would come to know how to write the kind of fiction he wanted to write (to manufacture a sense of daily anticipation during his workweek at the check cashing technology startup where he ran database queries he would order novels without tracking numbers from different websites and wait for them to arrive before lunch so he could read them during his two hourlong lunches outside South Park Café), and then one day Leopoldo called him and said come back to Ecuador, Drool, and despite Antonio’s copious explanations to himself about why he was no longer interested in returning to Ecuador to run for office (if the goal of running for office was simply to increase people’s income — people we don’t even know, Microphone — then he wasn’t interested because playing the piano or writing fiction was more challenging and for him more personally rewarding — dilly dally all you want, Leopoldo would have countered, have your fun, we’ll wait —), he didn’t tell Leopoldo he wasn’t interested in returning to Ecuador anymore, didn’t explain anything to Leopoldo but instead said let me think it through — what exactly do you have to think through, Leopoldo would have countered if the phone lines had been less crossed — and the week or weeks after Leopoldo called him Antonio was surprised and not surprised that he’d been expecting Leopoldo’s call even though he hadn’t talked to Leopoldo in years (even on his deathbed he would still be expecting Leopoldo’s call — out of bed, old man, the time to revolt is now — I do receive discounts on air travel now that I’m old and decrepit, Microphone —), even on his deathbed he would remember wanting to become a Jesuit priest when he was fifteen or sixteen because the logic of his impulse to become a Jesuit priest had been inarguable to him: if god was the pinnacle of life, one should dedicate one’s life to god, but that hadn’t been the last time he was inarguably certain about what to do with his life: the impulse to come to the United States and study at a school like Stanford to prepare himself to return to Ecuador and run for office had been as inarguable a plan as wanting to become a Jesuit priest, and what he told himself to explain the evaporation of his impulse to return to Ecuador to run for office included the discovery of Borges and Scriabin, Merce Cunningham and Virginia Woolf (Antonio liked to tell his American acquaintances that if he hadn’t come to the United States he would have never discovered Pina Bausch and Stanley Elkin, for instance — quit it with your Elkin and your Pina Bausch, Drool, what really changed your life plan was that you underperformed in your macroeconomics class at Stanford and discovered women, or rather you discovered that, unlike in Guayaquil, here women actually pay attention to you, the exotic Ecuadorian), Cortázar and António Lobo Antunes, Claude Simon and Leonid Tsypkin, discovering the possibility of an alternative life in which he did not have to submit to embarrassing myths about himself — everyone thinks they’re the chosen ones, Drool — although he had approached fiction and piano playing the same way, thinking of them not simply as activities to pass the time before he died but as transcendental callings, which was an exhausting way to live: but what I really wanted to tell you is that I loved Annie, Leopoldo, loved driving up to the Berkeley Hills to take piano lessons with this stern, elderly French lady named Annie, loved her two grand Steinway pianos and her tall bookcase with shelves like mail slots for sheet music only, her high heels clacking on the floorboards between her piano and her front door, loved how I tried to please her every week by switching on her metronome and showing her how much faster my fingers had become and at the same time displease her by picking piano pieces I wasn’t ready to play, her husband, Bruce, a composer who praised my imprecise yet according to him tempestuous rendition of Scriabin’s D Sharp Minor Etude and allowed me to practice in his piano shop by the Gilman Street freeway exit, loved hearing about Annie & Bruce’s Evening Games in which she would play different records of the same piece for him, Chopin’s Ballade No. 1, for instance, and then her husband had to guess who was the pianist, and one night, at the annual Halloween recital she organizes for her students, I showed up shirtless, wearing shiny red leotard pants and a boa around my neck, ready to perform Brahms’s Ballade No. 1, and afterward one of her students, an Austrian psychotherapist who favored Maurice Ravel, said to me I couldn’t concentrate on your Brahms because I kept imagining you in my bed, Antonio, to which neither I nor her husband had anything witty to add, and just as Antonio had intermixed two of Borges’s fictions to come to think of Borges’s fiction as fiction that unfolds solely in Judas’s head, he’d also intermixed Annie with his impulse to return to Ecuador, Annie frowning at him like she always did after he attempted to play Scriabin’s D Sharp Minor Etude and scolding him and saying you are a foolish one, Antonio José, for what made you think you were going to be allowed to stay in San Francisco and not return to Ecuador?
—
After a twenty one year absence my father returned to the church. The pious boy I was back then had convinced him to attend Christmas Mass, and, according to my grandmother, his return that night was what led to the baby christ’s tears. Most in my family readily adopted my grandmother’s version, as I was to do in the years that followed, sharing it with my American friends as another example of the quaint superstitions of my Third World country, which would often prompt in them comparisons to eyewitness news reports of Virgin Mary sightings on trunks of trees or mortadella sandwiches. Of course I suspected my grandmother’s version was far too simple, but nothing ever compelled me to elaborate on it by implicating others or by including events that began long before that night.
Masha had forgotten to ask him about his grandmother’s baby christ, just as she’d forgotten to hand him his manuscripts at his farewell party despite the inordinate amount of time she spent reddening them with recommended readings, allusions, panels of question marks, imagining a late night at Antonio’s in which she was to hold forth, by Socratic questioning, like Akhmatova must have done with Osip — Akhmatova never piled obloquies on Osip, Masha — on the defects of his work. Did Antonio really witness a baby christ cry? Did his classmates at Stanford really mistake him for the son of the dictator of Ecuador? How could anyone expect her to have been the one to convince him to stay if he didn’t even share anything about his life in Ecuador?
—
I enrolled in piano lessons soon after graduating from Stanford and accepting a lukewarm job at an economic consultant firm with absolutely no ties to Latin American development, Antonio wrote, hoping that by writing about the life he had chosen in San Francisco he could counter his impulse to return to Ecuador, an impulse that he knew was imprudent to pursue outside of his imagination and that was extensively documented in literature as a terrible idea — just because I was born in a poor country doesn’t mean I’m obligated to return, right? I can become something else: why not a pianist? — so Antonio tried to write about his attempt to become a pianist after graduating from Stanford, beginning with his first piano lesson, Annie guiding his index finger to middle C, for instance, Annie tapping his knuckles with a number two pencil, him fumbling through his first le petit pieces to the delight of the Japanese premed students who happened to be studying in the common area where he’d found an upright piano and who happened to interrupt his clunkers with their variant of American snark, which of course drove him to practice longer and louder, and then he tried to write about how after just a year of practicing three hours a day he was able to play challenging pieces like Scriabin’s D Sharp Minor Etude, and then he tried to write about how exhilarating it had been to discover Olivier Messiaen, who used to voyage to canyons and forests around the world to transcribe birdsongs, some of which can even mimic the city sounds around them, a French composer called Olivier Messiaen, who meticulously inked all of his birds, which he called, without irony, little servants of immaterial joy, into an opera about San Francis of Assisi: at the North American premiere of San Francis of Assisi, from the balcony section of the War Memorial Opera House, I watched San Francis praying about what he calls the perfect joy, Leopoldo, in other words about the acceptance of suffering, which the orchestra and the ondes Martenots and the xylophones granted to him by performing an insistent, nervewrecking squawk of every single birdsong Messiaen had ever transcribed — can you imagine what Father Villalba would have said about calling such racket the Sermon of the Birds? — in unison
