Thus Spat Montalvo

Well, it was an article I had to read, as well as a video—posted below—that I had to watch. And here—doing what every good writer does, namely pissing someone off—is what the article had to say:

I think many white, suburban, and privileged folks in STL think that the only people who care about Mike Brown are uneducated criminals. They comfort themselves with that. That people who know Classical music?! That understand the word Requiem! They care?!!!? GASP!!!

If anyone needs it, here’s the info: STL stands for St. Louis, and Mike Brown was the kid slaughtered by the cops earlier this year in Ferguson, part of the St. Louis metro area. The article was about a protest against the killing Brown at a performance of the Brahms German Requiem. The protestors, stood up, sang a song, unfurled a banner, threw hundreds of pink valentine, oh hell, here’s the picture:

   

You know where this is going to, right? Because I’m white, privileged, and live in a wonderful part of town—Old San Juan—if not a suburb. And if I haven’t written a book on classical music, I’ve certainly written half a blog.

“Motha fuckah! What a Niggah!” exclaimed Montalvo, who turned up again, after a couple of weeks of not being anywhere except—we all hoped—somewhere, and after not responding to my voice mails, which were non-existent, since he has not activated his voice mail. So I get the same damn woman—does she never sleep?—saying the same damn thing—and does she never tire of it?—and refusing to respond when I say, “well, dammit, tell the customer to active ate his damn voice mail! Isn’t that your job?”

“That is so retarded,” sputtered Montalvo, after I had initiated the sputtering by telling him how annoyed I was. “Why should I initiate my voice mail if people can text me? That is SO retarded.”

“Well, I don’t text!”

Since Montalvo’s mother taught him how to text when he got his first cell phone—age three or so—Montalvo was rendered speechless. But that was quite unnecessary: the look said it all.

We were in the sister store, Mi Pequeño San Juan, where Lady had shifted from café owner to housepainter. This she does by sitting down, chatting with whoever comes by, sipping a beer, and painting little plaster houses of Old San Juan. And since Lady had had her birthday last week, Montalvo had arrived with a present, namely a book. But not just any book, but Rilke’s Book of Hours.

“Amazing,” I said, “because guess who sent you Rilke’s Letters to a Young Poet? Susan!”

Susan being an a absolutely tremendous lady—as well as a  “white, suburban, privileged woman who definitely knows what “requiem” means—whom Montalvo doesn’t know, but does, since she sent him another book just a month ago. So Lady gets the  Book of Hours, and Montalvo gets the Letters, and I get nothing but that’s fine because had felt such a surge of love, love of a kind I had never known, a love that was still warming me, even…

…as he was calling me a retard.

So for these occasions did God send the selfie, and here it is:

And sorry Susan, this may be the only thank-you note you're ever get!

   

Well, what’s been the point of this long digression? Well, everybody knows or can figure out who Lady is, Montalvo is holding his book, and I’m floating above them. And Montalvo—on occasion—refers  to himself as a Niggah. Lady doesn’t, but her mother was ebony black, and her father of Scottish origin. So can someone out there peer at the picture and tell me that I’m the obvious white dude? Because I don’t see it.

Well, Lady announces that selfies are all nice and good, but that she’s also really hungry, and what is she to do about that, since can’t we all see that ball an chain around he ankle. We try, we can’t, but we get the message, and run for food.

“And how is your heart, my son,” I tell him, since Montalvo is passionately involved in a half-reciprocated love affair with a “lady” of Florida.

“Motha fuck, how do you know this shit,?” he says, and spills the tale of woe. He can neither stay nor tell her to go…I’ll leave that unsaid, since Montalvo is swearing enough for the both of us. This is, of course, an old, old story; as well, when you are stretched on this rack for the first time, it matters not that millennia of men have endured it. As Montalvo would say, “it’s a motha fucka…”

Do I know the girl? No. Do I like to see Montalvo suffering. Also, no. So, time for a fatherly chat.

“Montalvo, you know what a,,,” lowered voice here, we’re in public, “…cock tease is, right?”

“Yeah,” he said.

“Well, there can also be emotional cock teases….”

“What’s that?”

Well, years of teaching have taught me: students forget definitions, but everybody remembers a good story…

“Look my cousin was religious, and he was crazy enough to hook up with a really religious woman. So he’s twenty-five or something, and he’s visiting this girl for the first time in months, and then Karen—the girl—says to him, ‘Philip, let’s both undress, lie together, and just be together, only holding hands, IN THE PRESENCE OF THE LORD.’”

Well, those caps imply emphasis, which it really wasn’t, since my voice was soaked with sanctimonimoniousness. (I know, computer—you want sanctimony, but it’s not the right word.)

Montalvo explodes with laughter, all heads spin, and all ears hear, “Shit, what a motha fuckin’ fucked-up chick!”

So I told him, “you get it now?” Then the food is ready, and Raf drifts up to the shop, and we drift back to Lady with the visible / invisible—but still very much felt—ball  and chain. And then we doing what we do so well in Puerto Rico: hanging out, talking, enjoying each other’s company, and letting world keep screwing itself up without our notice or worry. And I drift off with Montalvo back to the café, and quiz on that word he always doesn’t remember, to the point of wanting to get it tattooed on his forearm.

“Enjambment,” he says referring, if this were a poem,

to this, the skipping to a new line when it shouldn’t.

And there’s a lot this kid, my son, doesn’t know, though he graduated high school with an over-3.0 GPA and has two years of college. There’s the word, “exasperated…”

“OK, so I’ll tattoo that on my other arm….”

So then Raf drops the news that the Met broadcasts are starting this month, and Montalvo can use the encore ticket: the first opera will be Macbeth, about which Montalvo knows, or at least he knows Shakespeare, since he and I have been reading sonnets together.

And he knows—this Niggah about opera—because we saw Otello this summer, and he—Montalvo, ot Otello—had inquired: did Netflix have any operas?

“I’m gonna watch ‘em all….”

Now then, let’s skip a couple thousand miles north, and get down to listen to the Brahms’ Requiem, or at least to watch the video. What’s my reaction? Well, it more a dialogue:

What does the death of Michael Brown have to do with Brahms and thed Saint Louis Symphony?

Well, isn’t classical music classist? Isn’t it the music of the rich, the privileged? The people who get rather different treatment from the police when stopped? And did you see any black faces at the concert, or anyone under 60?

Did they put a sign up: Whites Only? And just as I think that slavishly trying to be a “whitey,” I also think that be able to be nothing more than “street? A Brotha? Well, that doesn’t get you very far….

 And what in hell is the conductor doing just standing there? Granted he was taken of guard, but I’d have gestured to the orchestra to stand, and then strode over and wrapped my arm around the first—and hopefully cutest—protestor there. Oh, and then dedicated the concert to…

Do I have to tell you?

My point, if any of you Devoted Readers, have stayed with me? Well, I’ve got a self-defined “Niggah,” son who knows the word “enjambment” and will learn the word “exasperated” and wants to see all the operas on Netflix, and had never read a word of Shakespeare until I sat him down and slogged through a sonnet with him.

“Everybody knows the sonnets of Shakespeare,” he said importantly, to a stranger a couple days later….

So we’ve fucked up—we who can allow a perfectly intelligent “Niggah” to go through life with no more hope of an education than the prayer of a chance that he’ll  meet a white “Niggah” willing to take him to the opera and teach him the word “enjambment?”

And one good thing about Montalvo? He welcomes everybody into the shops, tells them to ask any questions…in short, he’s a good worker, and quite polite.

Well, mostly…

Because he had made a sale of one of the little houses to a Japanese lady, explained the uniqueness of what she held in her hand, called her Ma’am, and had told her that Lady, still painting those houses, would personalize the little house, if the Japanese lady so wished. So I stood up, feeling achy and wanting my bed, and Montalvo handed the house to Lady, and sat down, to sip a bit of water from his bottle.

“I leave you,” I said to them…

“…in the presence of God!”

And then it’s BAM! And Raf and Montalvo are exploding with laughter, and I know a good exit when I see one, so I only hear Lady say, “what did I miss?”

“Montalvo spat on the floor,” Raf tells her, and it’s then—only then!—that the Japanese lady whispers apologetically and Orientally:

“…and also my leg…”    

Right, so he does have another side, my opera-loving, enjambment-knowing, lady-spitting son. A side he was willing to show, all to help his month do business at the Gay Pride Day down in Cabo Rojo!

Hey, every blog can use a bit of beefcake once in a while!

   

      

The Homosexual Lurking Outside the Schoolyard!

Dammit, Jack, when in the hell are you gonna get it through your Norwegian granite skull—you died in 1993!

But no, there he was, ordering me from my sick bed on one of the hottest days of the year up the steepest hill in Old San Juan—oh, and we’re also having Sahara Dust, which is sand blown all the way over the ocean to land on cars and make little grey blotches and to paint the sky an eerie fuzzy blue—now, where was I?

Oh, yes, my dead father, a mighty laborer in newspaperly fields, had decreed: I had to go up to Lincoln School—quite lovely, and overlooking the ocean, though no one inside can see it, since they have those stupid slate-things called Miami windows, and my, aren’t I digressive today?

Anyway, when Elizabeth told me that the entire school was closed for the day, and that the first lady of Puerto Rico, in a stunningly lame imitation of Michelle Obama—and by the way, she sent me an email saying “I need you, Marc!” Hmmm, everything OK up there at the White House?—at any rate, when Elizabeth told me that Wilma Pastrana, the first lady of Puerto Rico, is going to plant a garden with the teacherless schoolchildren of Lincoln School next Monday, what did I do? I put one and one together and got…

…three.

True, I’m an ardent conspiracy theorist, but really, what do YOU do when people come to your house? Especially when it’s the governor’s wife? Especially when it looks like this?

Did I find the photo I wanted? Of course not, so here’s a word picture: the average public school in Puerto Rico has either over-grown weeds embedded in trash, or dirt / mud festooned with garbage.

So, I trudged up the hill and finally got to the school and then, feeling totally guilty—what I do for you, Dear yet Demanding Readers!—I began standing on tip-toe and peering over the cement walls surrounding the school. First—checked out the parking lot, and there were cars. But no sign of anyone doing maintenance—as I suspected—so I presumed they were the teachers’ car. So I walked three-quarters of the way around the school, and began to feel REALLY criminal when a car slowed and followed me on my tour? Had I been found out? Even now, was someone calling 911 to report that a tall, middle-aged gringo….

Nope—he was looking for parking!

Halfway around the block, it began to worry me: first I had seen the parking lot, which—unlike the school—enjoys a superb view of the ocean—no wonder those teacher’s cars looked so relaxed—but here’s the point: it was concrete. Next came two basketball courts—more concrete. Then the entrance to the school, with the sidewalk leading up to it—still more you-know-what. 

Next came a wonderful little homage to our greatest president: and this one I found!

    

Why is this photo so big? Well, the statue has a charming story. When I first moved to San Juan, twenty-some years ago, Abe was sitting quite correctly—as well as honestly—in his chair. Unfortunately, he had lost his head, and I don’t mean that metaphorically. Or had he been beheaded? Was his head in the clouds, or was it in the sand? What I am trying to say was there was no head.

Enter—if an aging memory serves—a charming, gringa sculptress, and was she going to suffer that to happen to Abe? Absolutely not! So she strode into her studio and produced a very nice reproduction of that famous head. What happened?

Whoever put the head of Abe Lincoln back on the body of Abe Lincoln stuck it ever so slightly to the left. So for the last ten years or so, poor Abe has had to sit under the hot tropical sun, or alternatively suffer raging hurricanes, all with an acute torticollis, which no Educated Reader of this illustrious blog need be told is a pain in the neck. So, now you know where Abe went off to! Excellent fodder for that cocktail party you’re going to tonight!

So the serious question arose: where in the world was doña Wilma going to plant that garden? Did she have a pick ax, or maybe a jackhammer? Would she be using it, or would she dare to entrust the task to those little boys and girls! Because it sounded great on paper—all right—screen:

Siembra Vida. El programa busca replicar en escuelas y comunidades la iniciativa del huerto casero que la Primera Dama instaló en La Fortaleza. El propósito es promover una mejor seguridad alimentaria para el país y el amor a nuestra tierra, al tiempo que se fomenta la actividad familiar para beneficio de una mejor alimentación.

Do I need to translate? No, because either you know Spanish or you’ve seen Michelle planting gardens and stressing nutrition. Oh, and guess what? Wilma also has a program called Activa tu Vida, and just imagine what that’s about! Dammit, Michelle, think up your own goddamned programs! Really!

 Oh wait, Michelle got there first….

OK—so now I was becoming increasingly alarmed—was it my civic duty to report the lack of a common element of gardens—dirt—to the office of the first lady? Well I squinted into the sun and saw—distantly—something green. So either it was a very large teacher’s green car, or space for a garden. Know what? I was too tired—and it was too hot—to check.

Right, so I went back to the café, passing the fast food restaurant where—so says Lady—the owner will not allow her children to eat. Then I got to the café, where Elizabeth retroactively saved me the entire, arduous journey by informing me that no child in the public school system in Puerto Rico—think it’s about 50,000 kids—has attended school today.

Yeah?

It seems that today is devoted to celebrating the much underlooked school lunch workers!

Yes, those ladies who toil in hot kitchens with offensive smells and kick away the rats as they edge toward the stove, and lug out that rice and those beans and stand over it while food is flung—we hope—all around but past them, accompanied by a din the which there could be no dinnier? What miserable, miserly scoundrel could begrudge them a day off?

Three pages, 1094 words—all for a trip up the corner!

Hey, not bad for a writer!    

One Child, No Teacher

Well, there are problems I can take care of, and problems I cannot.

Hold it—my own problems? Curiously, I’m completely incapable of solving them. However, I may have come through for Elizabeth, the manager of the sister store of the café where I write, but then again…no. Whose shoulders does it fall on?

You.

Elizabeth has two children: a boy and an 11-year old girl. It’s Wednesday, the first day of October, and shortly after noon. So, stretching—and boy, what a stretch it is—back to my own schooldays, I would imagine that this child, like me, would have had English, Arithmetic, Social Studies, and now be in the lunchroom, facing down that peanut butter sandwich that was as invariable as the old green couch in the living room. But what is this child doing?

…lying on two pillows in  the Sala Poética—the back of the store, where poetry is read every Tuesday night. And why is she there?

There’s no teacher.

Somebody finally said it, and he can commit every sin in the book until the end of his days: he’ll still fly through the tollgate into heaven, his heavenpass secured to his forehead. And who is this man? A federal judge, Jose A. Fusté, who said the following:

El juez federal José A. Fusté destacó que "no es un secreto" que la calidad de educación en las escuelas públicas en Puerto Rico es "deficiente, incompleta, vergonzosa, negligente, lamentable y no honorable…"

I could translate, but it’s easier just to do this:

1.     juez/ judge

2.     destacó / stressed

3.     calidad / quality

4.     escuelas / schools

5.     vergonzosa / shameful

Bijjte, as we say down here?

The judge, you see, has been appointed to…wait, I’m too tired to look it up, and the nice thing about the chikungunya, now in its seventh week? I don’t have to trudge fruitlessly through Google. More to the point, it’s a detour. Through the French countryside? Nope—think New Jersey.

“Thirty-four years,” thundered (well, you translate tronó) the judge, referring to the case of Rosa Lydia Vélez, a desperate mother with a kid who needed special education, and who took the school system to court. And guess what? The case is still going on. And the great thing, at least in this case? Judges get to be as peeved as they want, and to say stuff like this:

El juez federal José A. Fusté, utilizó una opinión el martes para dirigir una amenaza de cárcel a los funcionarios del sistema público de enseñanza que no implementan la orden del tribunal para cumplir con los servicios del Programa de Educación Especial para una niña con síndrome Down en el tiempo determinado.

(Short version—the judge is gonna throw the Education Department officials in charge of complying with a court order in the slammer if they don’t get their act together pretty soon….)

Can I be a judge?

What else did the judge say? That there are two systems of education in Puerto Rico: public and private. No surprise there, and that’s true in many countries. But he went on to say that it was completely unfair that those who cannot afford a private school are completely…

…you know, I’m a writer, so I should have a word for this. But I don’t, because the word hasn’t been conceived for the atrocity of taking a child’s future and tossing it in the gutter. Oh and then parking your Jaguar on top of her.

Think I’m exaggerating? Think the schools aren’t that bad?

Well, I can’t find it now—but Puerto Rico ranks 50-something out of 60-something countries. I think we beat out Haiti, though! Oh, but I did come across this:

El Departamento de Educación (DE) publicó sigilosamente en su página de Internet un informe que refleja un panorama muy preocupante de la educación pública puertorriqueña, al concluir que el 91% de las escuelas no cumplen con los estándares de calidad educativa.

In other words, the Department of Education (caps by convention only) is itself admitting that nine out of ten schools don’t meet their own standards.

Enter the governor, who came out yesterday, pointing his finger at the…

…parents!

Sorry—it wasn’t pointing the finger: it was raising the finger. The middle one, if you hadn’t guessed….

Can I find the article? Of course not, so I’ll repeat what Elizabeth—remember Elizabeth, whose child has now seemed to have disappeared?—said:

“The governor said that it was the parents’ fault, for not sending their children to school! So he’s going to crack down on those parents….”

Well, Elizabeth is sending her child to school, and what is the school doing? Sending her child away!

Enter Nico, the father of Naïa; Nico’s the (part) owner of the store. So I ask, “hey, where’s Naïa?”

“She’s in school, of course…”

…a private school.

If anything happened to Naïa, my heart would break. But for Elizabeth’s child?

My heart is breaking….

“The teacher will be out for the entire week.”

That means that this girl will be playing video games all week.

“Great,” I tell Elizabeth, because the chikungunya? It doesn’t improve the mood.

“On Friday, get all the parents who are attending Lincoln School in Old San Juan and whose kids don’t have a teacher together. Demand that the kids go to the school, and then walk their children down to the governor’s mansion, and tell the guard that they’ve gotta do something with their kid, ‘cause they’ve gotta get to work.”

Well, that was the plan, but now? It turns out that there will be no classes for anybody tomorrow, and very likely no one will be at the school. But no problem, since the governor's wife will be up at the school on Monday! And what will she be doing?

Planting a garden

So now the parents are planning a protest for Monday. Will it happen? Who knows?

Did somebody put LSD in the water?

Music We Never Hear

Well, it’s a pleasant problem for a Tuesday morning, and at whose feet do I lay it?

Anybody who has read the Isabel Dalhousie novels of the Scot Alexander McCall Smith will know—a very nice, well-off philosopher will toddle through her days, wondering about moral philosophy. Then an agreeable problem—usually of a criminal nature—will be presented to her. This, of course, she will solve.

Don’t know anything about moral philosophers, or their philosophizing? Neither do I, but an example presented itself just a moment ago, when for the zillionth time a representative from the Canadian Online Pharmacy—no hyperlink there because I’m not sure if that’s really the name, nor is it the point—to ask whether I would be interested in a special on a drug I once bought years ago. (Concerned readers, unfurl your brow: my health is fine, the pill was, shall we say, a stiffening agent.) I knew immediately—thanks to Ms. Dalhousie—what I had to do:

·      Inform him that I was fine

·      Ask him how he was

·      Assure him I was glad

·      Listen to the pitch, and then, at the first nanosecond of a pause…

·      …Thank him and tell him I wasn’t interested

Ms. Dalhousie might have gone further, since I felt that I had done all that was required, and abruptly hung up. But wait—shouldn’t I have gone through the appropriate farewells? Would I have treated my friends in so abrupt a manner?

But he wasn’t my friend, he was some poor guy from halfway around the world—in these days do we live, Dear Reader—having to scramble up a living calling strangers, most of whom would not have treated him as well as I did. So, pats on the back for Marc, right?

As anybody who has read the novels can tell you—it’s not the answer, it’s the question, since Ms. Dalhousie (and why, by the way, can’t I call her Isabel, or perhaps why aren’t I calling her Dr. Dalhousie? She’s fictional, dammit! But why should we accord more respect to the nonfictional than the fictional? Or is it because she’s a Scot, and presumably operating on a more formal plain than I? But if I have extended high honor of inviting her into my blog, shouldn’t she accede—do you see what I mean?)

The above is not sarcasm, not parody—but homage, tribute. Why? Because Alexander Smith knows something so wise that few have grasped it: some things we want to be predictable. Please do NOT under ANY circumstances provide me with pomegranate-flavored coffee, in that first horrible hour of the morning. And if Jamie—Dr. Dalhousie’s young, adorable, sweet husband and why am I using his Christian name—turns out in the next novel to be a transsexual serial killer? I’ll hope his first victim is Alexander McCall Smith.

Why go on about this? Because I have always felt a stab—OK, a pang, or maybe just a twinge—of guilt about embedding YouTube videos into my blog. Why? Well, if Joyce DiDonato goes to all the work of preparing and recording a ravishingly beautiful disc of bel canto arias, isn’t listening to it on YouTube a form of theft?

Sure, there’s an “embed code” right there—how else would a non-geek put it into his blog—but did YouTube ever run over to Ms. DiDonato (damn habit seems to be sticking) and ask her permission? And what if the multitude of readers in this international blog like the album, and download the programs that I know are rife out there, and then burn or grab or whatever-it-is the music for free? Am I colluding in a crime?

My answer, of course, is to say that if my mother were alive, the readership of this blog would increase to four. And when I hear something—like the “Drama Queens” disc that Dr. DiDonato (just remember, she got an honorary doctorate from Juilliard) recorded—what do I do? I go to Amazon—and let’s not, please, start in on that!—and honorably buy it. Is this jesuitry? Sure is, and I don’t give a hoot.

Now then, here’s where Ms. / Dr. Dalhousie would be shuddering in her corner, calling out for Grace, the housekeeper, to bring her a bracing cup of tea, or even scotch. Because today I don’t even want to listen to a YouTube clip, but rather…

…make one.

And ironically, it’s entirely YouTube’s fault that I’m in this predicament, since I had listen to one YouTube clip featuring Marta Casals Istomin speaking with the cellist Stephen Isserlis. And that’s when I found out about the Emmánuel Moór double cello concerto. So it was a finger flick away from hearing a performance, with piano reduction, of the work. And what a revelation! And it was two more clicks before Amazon decided to send me the real deal: not just two cellists and a pianist, but two cellist and an orchestra. The CD arrived two or three weeks ago, before it occurred to me to open it. And wow, what a revelation!

Confession—I don’t need all music to be on the level of the Bach B Minor Mass or Beethoven’s Grosse Fugue. In fact, it might not even be a good thing if every piece of music were at that level: would we appreciate Titian if there were no paintings on velvet of sobbing flower girls, their wilted flowers unsold at the end of the day? Wouldn’t so much beauty get monotonous?

So I’m happy to tell you that the Moór falls a bit short of the “monumental” category. What is it? Well, I’ve just re-listened to the first movement, and it’s lush, tuneful, and utterly gorgeous in spots.

I know, I know—Dr. Dalhousie is not going to let me upload it. But try this on: we worry about the artists and the performers and the recording companies, but doesn’t poor Emmanuel Moór deserve a little consideration, too? He wrote—OK not a masterpiece but a craftsmanspiece—and a craftmanspiece from the very top drawer. I imagine him up there, searching YouTube, discovering music infinitely lesser, and with infinitely more hits. The clip below—the only one that Dr. Dalhousie, very reluctantly, will permit me to post—has less than 500 hits.

Readers—click here to buy a CD of the work. Tell your friends about it, spread it on Facebook, rent billboards, consider self-immolation to protest the ignorance—well, if “remembrance” is “to be remembered, why can’t “ignorance…”—of this wonderful work.

Let’s stop that spinning in Emmánuel Moór’s grave!å