Montalvo Perdu

It hadn’t been a good day, nor is it ever a good thing when a dear friend calls you and asks immediately if you’re sitting down.

“Yes,” I told Lady, “and what is it?”

It was the call that I had feared, since I knew perfectly well that Montalvo, who alone could have conceived the theft of a rare blue macaw—it was variably pining on his shoulder as Montalvo walked home. Second explanation: Montalvo, greatly aided by chemicals legal in only a few states, had formed a mystical connection with the bird. After paying homage to the moment—selfies were taken—the united pair repaired to La Perla. (Sorry about all that alliteration….) Since the bird was not unattached—the owner was nearby, though apparently distracted—the police intervened.

A judge decided—wisely—that Puerto Rico’s prison population was already burdened enough, and could anyone take a parrot rustler seriously? Please! So Montalvo got probation, which came along with counseling, a curfew, and drug testing.

Know where this is going?

I did and I didn’t. Because the first time he tested positive, I felt like I had been kicked in the stomach by a horse. Yes, I was literally reeled over in the café, so sure was I that this kid—who calls me Dad—was going to go before the judge. And what had the judge told him? That he was running out of options, and one strike was all it would take to un-suspend the seven-year sentence. (Was it seven years? It hardly matters, because Montalvo, though strong and street savvy, is at least a hundred pounds lighter than most of the guys in La Regional—the “correctional facility” to which he would be sent.)

I am a pessimist by nature—show me a swimming pool and I’ll throw in the drowned child, and the fact that I still have two feet? Due only to my father, of a dye darker than I, who could not help telling me to be careful, when mowing the lawn, never to mow backwards. Each Saturday, in the living room, he would act out the scenario: the unheeding Marc, illicitly mowing backwards, the mower moving over the—probably barefoot—foot, and the moment the furious blades slashed into the foot. The agony, the shout, the fall to the ground as I lay bleeding to death….

The point of this vignette? The judge would send Montalvo to jail, and what would face him there? Rape? Murder? Both have been known to happen in Puerto Rican jails. Oh, and also in the states.

It turned out Montalvo knew the system very well. He told me exactly how it would play out: his counselor would sit him down, stay very quiet for an intentionally uncomfortable few minutes, and then ask him, “Montalvo, is there anything you need to tell me?”

“Man, I hate it when they ask that question!”

“Then why do you put yourself in a position…”

Right, he hated that one too….

And that’s how it played out. So the fact that I had utterly crumpled, and was sobbing as I listened to the saddest aria ever written—Piangero la Sorte Mia—was all quite irrelevant. Montalvo had to go more often to therapy, and piss more often in bottles, but prison was avoided. And then, it became apparent over the months that—from time to time—Montalvo would slip up.

Why?

Who can say? My best guess is that he was bored and frustrated, since he had had and lost several jobs in rapid succession.

“I don’t think they’ll have me back,” he admitted about one restaurant job. True, the restaurant had closed for the slow season, but that had hardly been a problem. And also true, the customers had loved him, and left sizable tips. The problem? Montalvo, instead of quietly stuffing the money in his pocket, had very visibly and audibly displayed it. His word for it?

“I guess I was kind of cocky….”

It was in vain to tell him: many an incompetent worker goes on to get that gold watch. Who gets fired? The pains in the asses. So Montalvo had time on his hands, and he was bored, and he was pissed, because why was life hitting him so hard? And how was he going to pay his rent? And how does a kid deal with all of that?

Now you know why I had to be sitting, when Lady called, and why, for most of the weekend, I was uttered dejected.

I only know that I will see him. I also know that he will be wearing an orange prison suit, and will have been shorn military style, for “security” reasons. And I know the people who will be there, because for years I rode in the same minivan with them. They were, in fact, mostly quite cheerful, and they consisted of girlfriends and wives and mothers. Off hand, I can recall no fathers.

So Lady and I will go, this Friday, to see him. And that is what I don’t know: what will I say to him? I thought about it all weekend, picturing and more often hearing my father.

No son of mine has ever gone to jail….

This had better be the LAST time I see you in this place.

The day my mother died? That’s about how bad this day is.

Lady is more pragmatic.

“You knew this was coming, right? OK, but the good news is that he’s accepting responsibility for being there, and says it’s where he needs to be. And he’ll be out in three weeks….”

I don’t tell her what I’m thinking, which is…

…yeah, and how long will he be in the next time? 

  

Slacking away at Religion

“Who would have thought you a slacker,” said Lady, imaginatively passing by my tables, “since I see you writing here all the time? But where is the parable for last week? You know, the one about the king’s son’s wedding? Though to preserve the Biblical flavor, perhaps we should eschew the Saxon Genitive, and call it the wedding of the son of the king.”

“That does sound better,” I told her. “And really, inventing this religion is much more of a bother than I could have imagined. I see now why Jesus is so completely inadequate, when it comes to the miracles and the parables. This week, for example, the readings are drawn from Ephesians and from John. So I checked that out, and got the usual adjurations about putting on the shield of God, since the devil…OK, let’s bring on the King Jame’s…”

For we wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world, against spiritual wickedness in high places.

“How prescient of the Bible to foresee the presidencies of George W. Bush,” said Lady. “OK—got that message. Now then, moving on to John?”

“Well, the reading—John 4: 46-54, with which I’m sure you’re intimately familiar….”

“I believe I was discussing the passage the other day with Elaine Pagels,” Lady replied.

“Yeah? The Harrington Spear Paine Professor of Religion at Princeton?”

“Yes, she calls, once in a while, when a particularly knotty problem presents itself….”

“Good of you to help out,” I said. “Anyway, you undoubtedly remember that Jesus, fresh from turning water into wine—a really superior miracle, by the way—now sets about healing the nobleman’s son. This he does telepathically, since the son is some distance away. Anyway, the nobleman returns home and finds his son was healed at the seventh hour of the previous day, which was just when the nobleman was talking to Jesus. So bam! It’s legit!”

“Good news indeed. So now you’re a parable and a miracle behind. Get to work!”

“You know, I begin to despair, which is a grave sin indeed. Because not only do I have to produce miracles and parables, I’ve also had to listen to three of the darkest cantatas ever written. And here, courtesy of the bachvespersnyc.org, is just a teaser….”

By Jesus' grace alone will there be

     comfort before us, and forgiveness,


     for due to Satan's deceit and cunning


     the entire life of humanity


     is a sinful abomination before God.

“Lovely,” said Lady. “Nothing like that old time religion!”

“The problem is that Bach is all over the place, emotionally. There are four cantatas for the 21^st Sunday after Trinity, and two or three of them are musical incitements to suicide.  Cantata BWV 38 is particularly bad, being drawn—again!—from the psalm ‘out of the depths I cry to you,’ though here it’s ‘out of deep agony I cry to you.’”

“Very nice,” said Lady. “Throwing in the word ‘agony’ does lighten the picture, doesn’t it?”

“Then there’s BWV 109, which is just as bad. In fact, it takes its inspiration from Mark 9:24, which, since you hobnob with the glitteriest of biblical scholars…”

“’I believe Lord; help me in my disbelief,’” finishes Lady.

“Well, you as a poet should understand that, and it may be that I do as well. But anyway, the first three or four movements are all about spiritual crisis, doubt, and lack of faith. And boy, is the music grim! Bach, when he wants to be, can be completely nasty! But then the alto sails in, and sweeps that all away, saying that God never fails anyone, no matter how dark that night of the soul is. Of course, what he doesn’t say is precisely when he will step in and give succor to the unbelieving. In my case, he’s waited for decades.”

“You have to persevere,” said Lady. “And perhaps do some mortification of the flesh. You know, you might fast for forty days and nights. Or have you considered self flagellation?”

“I refuse to consider it,” I told her. “Though I have contemplated doing a pilgrimage from Arnstadt to Lübeck—walking it as Bach did, when he went to see Buxtehude.”

“Excellent idea,” said Lady. “We could crowd-fund it—you can count on me for a generous contribution. But how long would it take?”

“Maybe ten days,” I told her. “Unless, of course, I choose to do it on my knees, which is getting a bit extreme, don’t you think? But the real question is what I do when, at the end of the journey, I arrive in Lübeck just as infidel as I started.”

“Very easy,” said Lady, “Walk back to Arnstadt again!”    

The Past, The Present

And so, I have been called from my well-earned rest back to life, only to be insulted by a half-witted and unemployed “writer!”

He finds my humor lacking, it seems, and makes several condescending remarks about the coffee houses of my day. Might I be allowed a few observations of my own?

I have studied the denizens of the coffee house in which he writes—or rather, I have glanced at them, and gleaned all there is to know. For in my day, people gathered, drank, smoked, and made friends—and occasionally, enemies. There was laughter, there was music, there was above all camaraderie. But in this new coffee house? I find nothing by zombies connected to devices.

Two girls—sisters—are slouched on a sofa nearby, and though physically touching, they are worlds apart. Their “smart phones” are feeding them music or games or social media—whatever that is—and they are “connected.” Indeed?

I don’t understand. Where is their mother or father, to tell them to sit up straight? Surely flopping down on a couch and remaining there for hours is not good for them—what of their spines? And have they no chores to do, no rooms to straighten and arrange and clean? They can play no instrument, they cannot sing, they know but one language.

They have the advantages I never had. Yes, I grew up in a family of musicians, and yes, my part of Germany—and especially Leipzig—was at a crossroads in Europe. But how I strived to educate myself—I who, at the age of these girls, knew German, Latin and Greek. Later, I would acquire a bit of French and Italian. Yes, I strove to improve myself, even when my own health suffered, as a child, and I was often absent from school. And how much I had to depend on luck! Were it not for a relative travelling abroad, I would never have been introduced to Vivaldi, and how greatly my music would have suffered!

We had little; we made the most of it. They have everything; they do nothing.

I listen in complete astonishment at my music being played to his ears: what extraordinary achievement! The precision, the passion of these players of the Bach Stiftung! Not a note misplaced, not a nuance lost—I never had the chance to work with musicians anywhere nearing this level! And this “writer” knows no German, but is that a problem? No because the machine keeps playing the divine sounds, and somehow the screen appears with the German and the English translation! There is a church in Boston, apparently, that has been playing my cantatas for decades; they have “uploaded” their translations.

The amount of information is staggering—one could study the architectural plans of any one of Thailand’s 4,000 Buddhist temples, but what do they use the Internet to do? Examine the nether parts of Thai girls!

It was never so easy for me. I walked in 1705 from Arnstadt to Lübeck—nearly 300 miles, all to hear and study with the great organist and composer Buxtehude. Then I walked back again, to an employer who was considerably annoyed with my prolonged absence. Did I care? Of course not—I cared only to learn more, to develop my gifts. The organist I had left in my place did a perfect adequate job—how much skill was needed to plunk out the chorales and hymns each Sunday?

Yes, I walked those hundreds of miles to attain knowledge, but this man who has awakened me, what does he do? He rises in the morning, and his machine feeds him a steady stream of misfortune. I peered over his shoulder, yesterday, and what did I learn? A reporter from a paper in New York, which his machine delivers to him in Puerto Rico, is in a part of India, in which half of the children are stunted.

Are you confused? New York, Puerto Rico, India? Like everybody else, he is everywhere but where he is. Even the air he breathes has been chilled to his liking, so much so that he will take a sweater to the “opera.” Why the quotes? Well, it is opera if you are seeing it in New York, at the Metropolitan Opera. But it is “opera” if you are seeing it as he does, for the affair is being filmed and beamed up to a dish in the sky, which beams it down again to every part of the world!

They have found a way, these modern people, to do seemingly everything. How curious it is that, having done that, they can think of nothing better to do with the riches they possess!

I knew every foot of the ground between Arnstadt and Lübeck: I saw the flowers growing alongside the road, I heard the birds sing, I felt the cold and damp. But today? The trip would be made by a tube in the sky, and how convenient! Except, of course, that they have missed what I savored: the wind on my skin, the fatigue at the end of the day.

What did the trip teach me? That anything worth having can be achieved by patient, methodical, and seemingly endless routine. They marvel at me—these centuries later! How could I have produced such a huge amount of work? The keyboard music alone would have been an enormous legacy, but add in the cantatas, the passions, the B Minor Mass, and then the secular works! The concerti, the suites, the sonatas and partitas for violin! This great mass of music, which is only half of what I had written, the rest being lost! How did the great Bach do it!

I did it the same way I got to Lübeck. I took no short cuts, though if a farmer going to market offered me a ride with the turnips, I gratefully accepted. There was no machine that accepted my “clicks” and delivered the quivering face of Buxtehude. And when I arrived there, unknown and unwashed, and demanding that my talent and youth be heard? He saw my worn shoes, my sun burned skin, and he gave me his seat at the organ.

He taught me much, and when I walked again back to Arnstadt, I had the time to reflect on his words and consider his message. I had the time, you see, to learn and to grow.

Time these “modern” people don’t have!

    

  

Knocking Off the God Stuff

“You know, I think all this religiosity is seriously affecting your mood, Marc,” said Lady. “Surely Bach must have written something cheerful? Of his two hundred whatever cantatas, they can’t all be entirely gloomy….”

“In fact, he wrote twenty or so secular cantatas,” I told her. “And I just got done listening to two of them. The first is the Wedding Cantata, and the second is the Coffee Cantata.”

“Bach wrote a cantata about coffee?”

“He certainly did, since it was a big issue at the time. Coffee was relatively new in Germany in the 1730’s, and people were still getting their heads around it. It had a buzz, everybody agreed, but was that a good thing? Was it sent from the devil? So some sects of some churches were banning it—I could tell you which, but the Internet at the café took off last night on a bender, and is lying drunk in the gutter somewhere. If you see it, would you tell it to come back? Anyway, coffee was taking Europe by storm, and the coffee houses of the day were filled with people, all arguing the latest political, social, and religious issues of the day. Must have been lively places….”

“So what’s the cantata about?”

“Well, it’s Bach trying to be light-hearted, which is about as painful as seeing Karl Marx do stand-up comedy. Anyway, a father is distraught because his daughter is spending all her time hanging out in the café, guzzling coffee, and he goes through a gamut of threats to get her to stop. No new ribbons, no new dresses, no going out or even looking out the window. The girl always says no, so what does poppa do? He tries the carrot instead of the stick, and says that he’ll run out and get the girl a husband! So the girl goes into a really lovely little aria about how good poppa is; the little minx does, however, put the word out on the street that any suitor will have to sign a marriage contract. And guess what that specifies?”

“That she can drink all the coffee she wants?”

“Right—and not particularly subtle. So it ends up with the father throwing in the towel, since if granny, mamma, and all the rest of womanhood are drinking coffee, well, how are you going to keep your daughter from doing the same?”

“And?”

“That’s it.”

“That’s it?”

“I told you, it’s as weak as a wet, sick kitten. But there is some nice music, though.”

“OK—one down. What about the Wedding Cantata?”

“Well, he wrote it about the time that he got married to his second wife, Anna Magdalena. And she was a professional singer, whom he may or may not have heard even before his first wife died. At any rate, it’s for solo soprano, and it’s in turn rapturous and then joyful. No wonder everybody records it….”

“So is that what you’ll play for your wedding?”

“Ugh, let’s not talk about that—I’m getting some serious cold feet about getting married.”

“Why? You’ve been with Raf for what, thirty years?”

“Think it’s 32, but who knows? But anyway, that’s not the problem. The real issue is the time and the organization and the planning of it all. Just thinking about whom to invite is a nightmare, since even if you keep it at immediate family only…”

“Yes?”

“There are little tensions in all families,” I told her. “And trying to organize Raf’s family—six siblings, many with titanic personalities—is like trying to herd cats. Anyway, I don’t even like parties, so why would I want to organize one? It’ll be thirty people at least, if everybody comes.”

“So do it somewhere where you can escape and recharge.”

“A thought,” I told her. “But it feels kind of weird, getting my brothers to come all the way to Puerto Rico to see me get married, especially since I am married—though by a justice of the peace with a couple of clerks as witnesses. Besides, we’ve been together for so long—I mean, none of Raf’s or my nephews and nieces have ever not known us. We’re sort of like the Queen, you know—always been there.”

“All the more reason to get married.”

“Then there’s the money,” I said. “And don’t tell me to keep it simple, because absolutely every couple starts down that road, and guess where they end up? Deciding whether they can afford the tray of asparagus wrapped in Norwegian smoked salmon as canapés for the sit-down dinner of Scottish grouse in a truffle sauce. The grouse having been hunted especially by gentlemen of your favorite Scottish clan, wearing their authentic kilts. Oh, and they’ll be flying over the Atlantic to serve the grouse at your table—one Scot per table—since only they know how to carve the grouse. Cheap at $75,000, don’t you think?”

“Marc?”

“Then of course we come to the little matter of the favors—you know, the little gifts you’re supposed to give the people who have spent all this money to come to this event that you have spent all this money to provide them. So…”

“Marc, I really think…”

“So that means that we have to commission Nick Quijano—since he’s a friend—to do a special silk screen for the occasion. And Nick is marvelous, as he should be, since his originals go for anywhere in the six figures. So that will consume pretty much all of our vacation money for the next sixty years, but no problem, since we’ve had so many nice vacations already! I mean, who needs more? And we’ll always have memories of our wedding!”

“Marc, you don’t…”

“Of course, you could see this as our contribution to the Puerto Rican economy—currently in crisis—since I’ve got it into my head: this is Puerto Rico, and a tropical paradise. So it’s obviously a destination wedding, which means that…”

“It’s certainly not a destination wedding…”

“…so boutique hotels—I mean, is my brother the Pulitzer-prize-winner gonna stay in a Hotel 6 or 8 or whatever the number is? Of course not, so let’s see, El Convento—with its charming atmosphere of 17^th century Spanish Colonial architecture, and its rumored ghost of the founding abbess doña María del Pilar del Zaragonza whatever she was….”

“Marc, you’re being completely…”

“Then the tours! You can’t have your guests wandering around aimlessly all day, bored out of their minds by the white sandy beaches and the azure skies and the emerald water, can you? Nay, nay—so you’ll have to hire fifteen or so carriages authentically designed to mimic the early nineteenth century style, each pulled by 8 pasofinos to go deep into the mountains, where guides dressed in authentic jíbaro garb, specially created…”

“STOP!”

“Hunh?”

“Marc, you are being completely crazy! This isn’t a destination wedding, and you don’t have to do all this stuff. We got married in a courtroom, and there was a murder trial on one side, and a rape trial on the other.”

“I remember—but wait. I thought you had a real wedding, and you put up the French side of the family at the Atlantic Beach Hotel.”

“I did!”

“Lady, how could you!”

“Well, they said they wanted something cheap, and something on the beach, and…”

“Lady, the Atlantic Beach is one step up from—wait, the Atlantic Beach is a gay bathhouse. If not—quite frequently—a brothel!”

“Well, Nico’s family was a little puzzled at how very friendly the other guests were, especially to the male members. But we assured them it was that famous, Caribbean zest for living. Anyway, they loved it!”

“Only you could get away with it. Can you imagine if I did it? It would confirm everybody’s worst suspicions….”

“The point is…”

“I finally figured it out. I don’t want to have a wedding! But…”

“Yes?”

“I want to have had one!”