VALPARAÍSO (12)
19.
Harry Winter bobbed slowly in the metal porch chair, a faint smile at play in the sunken canvas of his face. We were far into the evening there on Alex’s deck in Berkeley and I no longer knew which one of us was the drunker. Famished, I’d fetched crackers and cheese from the kitchen, hoping to get Harry to eat too. Now smears of Brie stuck to his sleeve, crumbs cascaded down his tattered tweed jacket front.
“So there I was, freshly arrived in San Francisco, and here was our Alex on the radio, spinning his divine playlist. Perfect, I thought. I’ve come to witness your brother in his glory, as in London a thousand years ago he’d witnessed mine.”
Watching Harry fumble again for his fueling flask, I thought how time’s acid etches itself onto the plate of the body.
“So my friend called a friend who had Alex’s home number. I called him the next day, wondering of course if he’d wish I hadn’t. What use did your brother have for an old ghost from that rough time? But I have little time to spare, Garth, as you can see. And I had something rather important to tell him…”
Harry snuck a look at me. In the sky over the bay, a quarter-moon hung now.
“Alex answered, clearly taken aback but not unfriendly. When I explained that I didn’t have the wherewithal to get there he came and picked me up. It was raining and we came back here, sat at the kitchen table. Awkward gab about high school, people we’d known. Brief allusions to Maddie Haden, what had happened back then. Not a word about Dryden Poe - nor of our odd encounter in London, I might add. Of course I could see Alex’s shock at my, ah, considerable ruin…”
It was turning cold on Alex’s deck and I went inside and brought out a couple of blankets. Harry swaddled himself in one and went on.
“A few years ago in Bogotá I fell off the back of a boy’s motorcycle. There’s a pin in my ankle now and pain that won’t go away. I minister to it with the spirits. Now I’ve come here for tests. Seems I contracted a bit of something in the Upper Amazon…”
Harry tipped his container a final time, draining whatever was in it, while I burrowed deeper into my blanket.
“Valparaíso, Garth. Wonderful, strange city. Have you been? I ended up there last year after a rather disastrous ride by bus and burro down through Peru. I’d been busking the streets of Lima until I was unceremoniously rousted by the local flics. I was hoping a Dutch sailor friend I knew in Valparaíso putting me up for a while. I tracked him down in the German hospital there, quite ill. The next day I gave a little outdoor concert on a plaza down by the port and there was the lovely nurse I’d met in the hospital the day before. She was standing with a tall, pale, bearded man around my age, dressed in a rumpled white linen suit and a straw hat. Then it started to rain, dispersing the crowd. As I was trying to get my drenched cello back in its case, the man in the suit stepped forward and dropped a sizable donation in my hat.”
Harry drew his blanket tight around him like a shroud.
“I thanked him, of course. Then he asked in English if he could offer me a glass of wine. Magic words, as I was sorely in need. The rain had let up a little, and we walked, the three of us, to one of those little funicular trolleys that run up the hills of Valparaíso. The nurse, her name was Marimar, said goodbye to us there, and we rode upwards in silence, the man and I. By the time we got off at the landing, I already had this vague inkling that I knew him from somewhere…
“We climbed through drizzle to a little house shaped like a boat, set on a steep corner. Inside there were books, medical manuals, a cat - and some marionettes, I remember. The man took off his hat, opened a bottle of Chilean vino tinto, and poured out two glasses. We sat at a small table just looking at each other, not speaking. I thought he might have in mind a private recital, or maybe a bit of sex. He had clear blue eyes, very remote, lit with some distant memory - of pain, perhaps, or remorse. His skin looked burnished, scoured, as if seared by flame. Then he raised his glass and said, ‘Harry Winter.’
“Well. This happens often enough and in the remotest places. How many performances before faceless audiences? How many gropes in nameless beds? The planet isn’t so lonely after all, Garth. But by then it was starting to dawn upon me. That long ago night of rehearsals in the house in the LA canyon. The cold boy in the bathrobe with the snarling dogs. Remember?”
I saw Harry back then, mixing whiskey and water in the Poe family’s huge, empty kitchen, whispering, “They’re spies, you know, Garth.”
“So I said to my host, ‘Dryden? Dryden Poe?’ He didn’t affirm or deny it but just looked at me, as if we were to understand there would be no names here. But it was him, Garth, I swear it was.” Harry jutted an arm out of his blanket and waved it. “When I told your brother last week, he said no, he’d seen Dryden’s dead body in a Mexico City hotel room bathtub twenty-five years ago. I sad Alex, I assure you I saw him alive. One thing I remember is voices. Intonations, cadences. The flat, clean mid-Atlantic accent. And those empty blue eyes. And as I said, I’d been rather taken by the young Dryden with his pretty facade. This Arturo Wright had no facade at all, I’ll tell you that. Stripped to the marrow. But I could still see and hear Dryden Poe.”
Recalling Alex that summer day long ago in Dad’s den, back from Mexico with a fresh scar over his brow, I found it hard to credit what Harry was saying. “If it really was Dryden, why do you think he chose to reveal himself to you?”
“The shock of seeing me? The pressure of being someone else all those years? Maybe he was ready to be found. And here I was, fate’s angel, so to speak. Maybe Dryden is as haunted by Maddie Haden’s death as the rest of us. Maybe he hoped I’d tell Alex. But then I had no idea where Alex was, you see, or what had become of him. Until by chance last week I turned on the radio …”
A stiff wind came up, rustling the trees surrounding us, toppling a flower pot nearby and sending a cat scurrying.
“It rained heavily that night in Valparaíso. After we finished the bottle of wine, I slept on Arturo’s couch downstairs. The next morning I wanted to play for him but my cello body was warped beyond repair from the soaking the day before. I was in utter despair. I live by my cello. That afternoon Arturo took me to Santiago and bought me a new one. I’ll never forget it. I played him the Bach suites in their entirety, then left him my old cello body as a souvenir. It was all I had to give.”
Harry began to cough. A fog was rolling in off the bay and I was wondering how I was going to get him inside. I couldn’t believe he had more words in him or breath to deliver them, but his hacking abated and he went on.
“So as I told your brother about this last week, and it began to sink in, I watched him change in front of me. I saw my childhood friend, keening on the lavatory floor of that little demo studio where Maddie lay dying, hurling himself upon her inert body in the ambulance. All that love lost, all the music unheard. The life he’d made here - the radio show, the house - was thin as cardboard, Garth. Inconsolable loss lurked beneath Alex’s surface like some heaving, viscous lava flow. He’d never gotten free of Dryden Poe. Not one bit.”
I thought of Alex’s early years of anguish, the gradual submergence beneath the cultivated surface of alternative deejay, collaging other’s music in lieu of making his own. The life you intended doesn’t come to pass yet you’re still here, so you live the alternative. The musician and composer Alex wasn’t. The distinguished educator Ray Garnett wasn’t. The great concert cellist Harry Winter wasn’t. The author I wasn’t.
Maddie Haden, who wasn’t.
“So that night Alex drove me back to the house in Oakland where I was staying,” Harry said. “The next morning he called from the San Francisco airport and said I could stay here while he was away and told me where to find the spare key. I didn’t ask him where he was going. I didn’t have to...”
Somehow I managed to lift and drag Harry as far as Alex’s living room couch where we both collapsed. I brought him water and watched him gulp a fistful of pills, then I covered him in more blankets.
“You’re in a lot of pain, Harry,” I said.
Harry smiled beatifically up at me. “Don’t you know, Garth? Cellists never fret.”
A wry musician’s joke he must have used a thousand times, and I’d carry it with me on the flight back to LA the next morning, having left him huddled and snoring on Alex’s couch. I arrived at my empty apartment at the Sea Castle, still redolent of the sad perfume of Lara Tree’s departure. Ten minutes later I was online, booking my flight to Chile.
20.
From the pensión bed, I watched Marimar’s silhouette shift behind the shower curtain. She emerged, a blue towel gathered about her, head bowed before my ardent gaze, hair spilling. My eyes followed her across the room. How could I have dared call it living without this? Neruda’s lines came:
Body of my woman, I will persist in your grace.
My thirst, my boundless desire, my shifting road…
By the time we arose later, sun was hitting the curtain. We dressed to the sweet burnt aroma of pastel de choclo from the kitchen below. I wondered if this was the day Alex would arrive back in Valparaíso.
“I need to collect Arturo’s mail,” Marimar said as we left the room.
We embraced in the entrada, then stepped out into traffic and gulls’ cries. As we walked along el plan to the funicular, she said, “My father is leaving tonight.”
At the top of Cerro Concepción, we turned to take in the familiar sweep of the harbor. Then, our hands locked, we climbed up to Cerro Alegre.
“Look,” Marimar said as we neared Arturo’s boat-shaped house on its steep corner.
The mail had been gathered, the papers and flyers and editions of El Mercurio gone. A light shone in the ship’s transom window upstairs.
“Arturo’s home,” Marimar said happily, releasing my hand and hurrying towards the door.
I hung back, gripped by fear and a sudden sense of displacement. What could I feel for this Arturo Wright, or Dryden Poe, but loathing? On this bright morning of love I couldn’t bear to lose, the last thing I wanted was to be drawn back into that old story that had never really been mine. Watching Marimar raise her hand to knock on the door, I wanted to rush forward and entwine it back in my own, bear her off among the cerros, inscribe her into the narrative I’d waited all these years to find.
Marimar knocked again, and when no answer came she opened the door with her key. Arturo’s tabby, the one she always came to feed, slipped between her legs and ran outside, mewing. I heard Marimar cry out.
I rushed to the door and saw her on her knees in the dim entry, feeling for the pulse of the figure on the floor. The little Beretta automatic I’d once found in an upstairs drawer lay beyond the reach of the inert hand, bathed in blood seeping from the entry wound at the back of the head.
I looked up and saw, through a tangle of puppet strings, my brother Alex, haggard and glazed, crouched at the top of the caracole stairway.
“No,” he mouthed, over and over. “No…”
Up along the cerros, police sirens drew near.