The Music Read online

  In the event, National Pirbit Week went off flawlessly. At the King’s request all the major concerts were broadcast over the radio so no-one in his tiny nation need feel deprived. The BBC noticed this almost at once and by Monday evening were announcing in their droll way that Radio Enclave had abruptly gone off the air and its programmes had been replaced by solemn music. As the days passed the picture they drew of events in the provinces became ever more vivid yet ever more obscure. It was almost as though immediately beyond the capital’s outskirts the light dimmed to a menacing dusk in which a series of tableaux was enacted, Daliesque juxtapositions of objects stranded in a combat zone. Pikel Tarza was far too preoccupied with the music festival to pay it much heed but he did register that out in the countryside it was once again the season for agendas to be pursued and earmarked. Another year gone! How time sped by when one was busy! The reports left him vaguely uneasy and he decided that as soon as the opera was over on Sunday night he would ask someone knowledgeable what on earth was going on. It was the impression of waning light that most worried him. Out there hopes were rapidly fading and terms and deals were constantly having to be spelled out. Addresses too, presumably, which would have made a postman’s job (for example) extremely trying and would explain the open-ended packages lying about the landscape, one of which apparently belonged to a locksmith and must have been urgent for it was described as a key package which somebody was rushing to finalise.

  Yet none of this weird confusion touched the capital, which was sunny and warm and full of people sitting with glasses of wine at little tin tables while a band played endless sets of Pirbit’s minuets and contredanses. Towards the end of the week some of the younger citizens, in particular, were betraying signs of having heard enough of Lugo Pirbit’s music to last them the next two hundred years, so by the time Sunday came there was a national sense of both expectation and relief. The great Byzantine cathedral in the historic city centre was jammed an hour before the concert was scheduled to begin and little Prince Tassil entertained the waiting audience with a pot-pourri of Pirbit’s simpler organ works. These were for manuals only, which was why he could play them: his slippered feet swung three inches above the pedal board. After an adroit half-hour recital he was helped down off the bench to great applause.

  Punctually at seven o’clock the main concert began. The overture to ‘The Millionaire Shepherd’, Pirbit’s excellent opera buffa, was successfully followed by two of his later symphonies, opp. 167 and 171. The audience listened with quiet pleasure, but it was clearly the balalaika concerto they were waiting for and they awarded the soloist a standing ovation both before and after his glittering performance. Then came the interval which gave time for all those involved in the opera to change into their costumes as well as for a few props to be carried on, including a throne of gilded oak.

  Meanwhile, outside in the precincts’ ancient alleys and piazzas the extras had been assembling, roughly costumed. Konrad the demagogue roamed nervously among them sucking menthol bonbons, occasionally grimacing and massaging his throat before essaying a loud Fah-ah-ah-ah! on ascending notes or Ti-ti-ti-ti! in his vibrant heroic tenor. Pitchforks and cudgels glinted in the setting sun. Children munched salted melon seeds and played with yo-yos. Their mothers, squeezed into hastily run-up bodices of vaguely eighteenth-century cut, fanned themselves and tried not to breathe too deeply. And suddenly from within the cathedral the first chords of the opera’s overture could be heard. Habszabrugye Khust had started at last.

  It was a triumph. As far as the audience was concerned it had everything: drama, action, the King himself in a starring role and – above all – brevity, since the entire score ran to just under the hour. They loved it. The mob had been well drilled and invaded the cathedral with just the right degree of sinister belligerence, spitting melon seed husks and packing the side aisles while down the nave strode Konrad in leather jerkin and fierce mustachios, a balsa wood cudgel in one fist and trailing a strong smell of menthol. His subduing by wise King Othmar held everyone spellbound. Not a person there missed the dramatic irony of seeing Vazimil III impersonating a monarch whose enlightenment wins for his people liberation from the dark threat of mob rule. It was more than a resurrected opera, it was a timely parable; and many an eye sparkled with unshed tears. One of the most moving moments came when the King with a single raised hand stopped the tumultuous laughter at Konrad’s expense. Behind the laughter the organ and orchestra had been getting louder and louder on a pedal point in the dominant and when the King held up his hand and an echoing silence fell for five seconds the music, having reached a key crossroads, hung a right into the tonic and Vazimil launched into his affecting aria, ‘Stay my friend’. He sang it surprisingly well and Pikel Tarza, who was conducting and had been dreading this very moment, managed without difficulty to keep orchestra and soloist together. At the King’s final repetition of ‘Spradi burot y’min’ many in the audience were weeping openly.

  While this drama was being played out in the cathedral the BBC was busy giving its listeners its own account of events as they developed in the disputed Enclave. A reporter, lurking in the streets of the capital, was bouncing messages off a satellite to the effect that a heavily armed mob had been seen to converge on the cathedral where it was known King Vazimil was attending a service. Tension was mounting. Shouts and then laughter had been heard to drown out the sound of music within. At the moment when Othmar was being crowned King the reporter announced that confusion was reigning in the capital, and in a further happy coincidence added that obscurity now surrounded the King’s whereabouts. At that very instant this was no less than the truth since Vazimil was standing beneath a single spotlight in the dramatically darkened cathedral.

  None of this was of the least consequence to the Enclave’s citizens since nobody was at home listening to their short-wave radios. Habszabrugye drew to its grand close and the audience, many of whom had sung along with the final chorus despite not knowing the music, burst into patriotic cheering and prolonged applause which the smiling Patriarch readily forgave. What was God’s house for if not for the occasional expression of joy? Two hours later, with the cathedral emptied and the happy crowds dispersed, King Vazimil, still a-tremble with his delirious success, at last stopped breaking into fragments of his aria and collapsed into an overstuffed armchair. In due course his exhausted Kapellmeister was able to totter away to his own apartment and firmly shut the door. The week had been a triumph after all. Lugo Pirbit had been well and truly served and Pikel Tarza had just been proclaimed a Companion of the Golden Clef, an order which the King had invented on the spot and which carried a lavish pension.

  ‘We’ll work out a heraldic device tomorrow,’ Vazimil had burbled. ‘It’ll all tie neatly together in one design, just you see. A treble clef, clavis, a key, wholly surrounded by an Enclave or.’

  Swiftly Tarza undressed and sank into bed, his head still ringing with music. From force of habit he switched on the radio and, as he dozed off, once more found himself transported by the BBC to that twilit zone which stretched out there beyond the capital. In the dusk-filled distance some sinister figures were obscurely busy. There was menace in the way their arms rhythmically rose and fell. At length he thought he could see what they were doing. They were dashing hopes against a tariff barrier in defiance of the authorities who stood leaning impotently on their brooms, their sweeping powers temporarily exhausted. In the shadow cast by a nearby wall of silence he could make out the figure of a BBC reporter watching. Pikel Tarza felt sorry for him that he’d missed the concert: the opera really had been splendid as well as full of interest and significance for Enclave-watchers. But the man just went on standing there in his headphones, impervious as ever to the Enclave’s cultural life, his spectacles lit by the eerie twinkle of flashpoints.

  Bambi Bar

  THE NIGHTCLUB itself was confined to the ground floor but the thud of its music and the singers’ wails permeated the rest of the building. On the floor above were va
gue areas for the hostesses, performers and the band strewn with elasticated Bambi tails, satiny costumes, make-up boxes, knickers, an electric guitar or two, a chair surrounded by the scattered tufts of an impromptu haircut. Congealing cups of coffee and a row of empty San Miguel beer bottles stood on the window-sill overlooking the gridlocked street. The view outside was of the gimcrack façades of the bars and clubs opposite and the battered tin rectangles of jeepney roofs down below jammed together as higgledy-piggledy as crazy paving. Traffic noise beat up through the glass. Amplified bass notes tingled the floor, sending up spurts of dust from between the boards. A further flight up were the club’s offices as well as a couple of plywood rooms kept for the odd high-rolling patron who had nowhere else to take his Bambi girl. If the police ever happened by, they were told the rooms were where the singers slept in between acts, though no singer would ever dare sleep there and risk being caught by the club’s owner, Mrs Tan.

  Even up here the music was audible. To escape it the singers would go right on up to the flat roof where, among the TV antennae and rusty air extractor trunking from the kitchen, lengths of reed matting had been rigged into a shade. Beneath it the girls crawled on to mats and slept, wrapped in cotton blankets against the cockroaches and the soot which rose in clouds from the traffic four floors down. Then they were shaken awake, stumbled downstairs again (quick squirt of breath freshener, thicken up the lashes) and on to the tiny stage, a bit of brain still stranded back home in the provinces where sleep had abandoned them.

  ‘Dulce! Dulce! Hoy, gising! You’re on in five.’

  ‘What’s the time?’

  ‘Two-fifteen.’

  The bright sunlight of her home village overlaid the strobes and neons of nightbound Manila, fading them to a dreamscape. Still within its radiance, she tripped onstage into the freezing cockpit with its air-conditioned reek, the chilled smoke and beer fumes. Danny Alonzo would wink and give her a riff on his keyboard and she would be off into ‘The Sunny Side of the Street’ even as she half expected to hear her voice launch of its own accord into ‘Mayong pinagpala’ or ‘Santa Elena’ or another of her favourite Flores de Mayo songs.

  ‘I’m so tired, Danny.’

  ‘Don’t moan, kid. It’s the same for all of us. You’ll get used to it. All you have to do is sing and waggle your parts. Thank your lucky stars you’re not a hostess.’

  ‘All they do is waggle. They don’t have to sing as well. And nobody really listens to your voice, do they? It’s just background noise.’

  ‘They listen. Old Lettie was saying only this morning the word’s getting around, people are coming here on purpose to listen to you. Quite the little high-flyer. You’ve got talent, Dulce. I’ve got talent. We’re waiting for a break, okay? We’ve a long way to go. Bambi Bar’s just the first stop. It pays the rent.’

  ‘Sure, Danny. I know.’ She would give his hand a grateful squeeze which Danny returned encouragingly, protectively. For it seemed as though all the performers felt protective towards Dulce. Although half of them were themselves nice girls from the provinces trying to hack it in the big bad city they knew she was different, even more vulnerable than they. The ruefully generous among them would also admit she was more talented. She could pick up a song at a single hearing and her voice had a rounded purity which, out of place as it was in Bambi Bar, suggested sensibility. Her chief regret was that she didn’t have a fraction of the money for proper voice lessons, still less for the college music course she would have loved.

  Dulce was always whacked when she went home at around five in the morning, regardless of how much sleep she’d managed to snatch in between acts. Yet as soon as she got off the jeepney and began walking the last few blocks something awoke in her which spread a sad alertness throughout her body. At that hour and in this residential area traffic noise was limited to the occasional car passing unseen in the surrounding streets. Cats and rats were at work in heaps of rubbish and, behind high walls, a palm or a papaya could be glimpsed here and there outlined against the paling sky. A fresh breeze, too, might be drifting in from the seafront only eight blocks over, rattling the fronds and easing away the city’s soot and monoxides towards Laguna. It blew into Dulce’s heart a crippling homesickness for the village by the sea where her family were even then – according to her Chinese quartz watch – up and about. Beneath little squares of rusty tin the first bibingkas would be rising and browning in their clay dishes, wreathed in the fragrance of charcoal and baking. Sleeping mats would be rolled and stowed while from outside the house would come the sound of Marisil’s brush strokes as she swept fallen leaves, sweet wrappers and cigarette packets into heaps for burning. Dulce could see the various efforts to wake her oldest brother Noriel, who was about to graduate from high school. He would still be curled up in the room he’d curtained off for himself beneath the stairs, the lazy pig, surrounded by posters of the film actresses he fancied and the electronic stuffing from various radios and Walkmans he’d undertaken to repair. Her eyes filled with tears at the vividness of the picture, at the certain knowledge that these things were actually happening at this very moment in a place far away, that she was seeing and smelling and hearing a reality in which she was only an absence. ‘Ay, na sa Maynila si Dulce.’ How clearly she could hear the phrase with its mixture of pride and hopefulness and apprehension. Maybe by dint of hard work and luck she could change her family’s fortunes. Maybe with a Guardian Angel’s protection she could avoid the profusion of horrid fates which danced attendance on country girls who went to Manila.

  As Dulce reached her rented lodgings her nostalgia was compounded by guilt. She hadn’t dared tell her parents where she was working. Not that she’d actually lied in her letters home; rather, she’d blurred the business of her work in such a way as to leave the impression that she was a singer in one of the city’s international hotels: the Ramada or the Hilton, the Hyatt or Holiday Inn. To have confessed to Bambi Bar in Pasay would have been a truthfulness which could only have led to endless worry and disappointment. She let herself in, amazed as usual that no-one was stirring. People here in the city certainly kept very different hours. Upstairs the double row of cubicle doorways showed no activity other than the curtains billowing and shuddering to the draught of electric fans. She went into her own plywood cell and shook awake fat Lerma, the cook’s daughter, who otherwise would have had to sleep on the floor downstairs with the cockroaches. Lerma, who was fourteen, came awake without a sound, stared at Dulce from sodden eyes, slowly wrapped her sheet around her and still without a word padded barefoot out of the cubicle like an obedient mummy. Next to the bed was a tea-chest covered in printed cotton which served as a table and Dulce could see at a glance that Lerma had left behind some elastic hair-bands and a squeeze bottle of body lotion by Charmis called ‘Frenzy’. Somewhere down in the kitchen regions a cock crowed. She wanted a shower but was too tired. Besides, she could now hear sounds of movement from the other cubicles and couldn’t face the competitive queuing and impatient door-poundings involved in eleven other girls all trying to use the two cement stalls downstairs at the same time, morning ablutions made desperately against the clock. No, far better to bathe later when she awoke and the house was practically empty. Besides, maybe by then there’d be a letter from home. She might even write to Noriel, newly emboldened by Danny’s secondhand compliments. People were actually coming to hear her sing, then? And was she really getting a reputation as a high-flyer? Wrapping herself in her own blanket Dulce fell asleep on the slat bed as around her the other cubicles sprang to life and the girls, duly showered and smelling of Camay and Lifebuoy and Tawas, arrayed themselves variously in their uniforms as college students, shop assistants, nurses and office workers. From downstairs drifted the smell of frying fish and the sound of the TV in the passageway.

  – Dulce, Dulce – her Guardian Angel might have whispered as she slept. – My dear, my sister, my love. What is this great plan of yours that you throw yourself into my protection, yield your only life i
nto my hands? –

  But there was no plan, not as such. In a way it was negative planning based on the idea that if one had a talent it had no future in the provinces. Nothing ever happened in the provinces and nothing ever would, except predictable things such as pregnancy and marriage. By going to Manila one was at least putting oneself in the path of change, into the way of a remote possibility where luck might strike, a gift be recognised, a job be offered with a salary large enough for remittances to be sent home. This negative planning – or positive wishful thinking – brought young people flocking to the city each year in their tens of thousands, the great majority of whom had far less reason than Dulce to feel they merited the touch of luck’s wand.

  For Dulce really did have talent and had always done the best she could to develop it. Ever since elementary school she had wanted to be a singer. As she grew up a difference became apparent between herself and all the other local girls who planned to be singers. What they really wanted, she thought, was to be there in the spotlight, the centre of attention. It wouldn’t much matter to them what they were doing; some of them (she considered bleakly and disloyally) might as well become strippers as singers. They read the fanzines avidly, followed all the stories about Vangie this, Sharon that, Dawn the other, Vic, Gloria, Lorna. They were gripped by the mythmaking of showbiz and filmland where romances were larger than life, success was measured on the Richter scale, and fortunes were too huge to be worth counting. Dulce, too, read the same magazines, but her secret was of a different sort and she kept it hidden from all but her closest friends. It was that she loved the songs themselves more than the singers and wanted in turn to sing them because it was the best way she had of expressing her love. If ever she yearned to be up there onstage in the spotlights it was because she wanted other people to hear the songs, to feel that lift which came when a tune really got into your bones and made your whole body hum. She couldn’t imagine having a mood for which no song suggested itself. There was no aspect of life which couldn’t be sung.