The Fugitivities, стр. 69

“It’s all in the way it bends,” he said. “It bends toward the heart, always.”

“But how do I know…how do I find it?”

“The ear bends to the heart, brother, when you play everything rightly.”

“Just play it right?”

“Play all the notes…Don’t skip none now…You gotta let each one know they already there…show they was ready to begin with…the thing is…if I messed up it wasn’t cause I didn’t love the music…my spirit was always right with the music…whatever I got to answer for…please let them know brother…that every note I played…I did my best to play it rightly.”

Jonah awoke with a start. He was in another country.

The trees were snowing in Montevideo. A dandruff of silky pollen came off the branches along the avenues, along all the hushed boulevards running down to the ocean. Jonah advanced in a daze, happy just to be off the bus. A bright pan of sunlight rinsed over the squat buildings that lined the boulevards, its warmth cut by the icy quills of the Southern Ocean. He leaned into the wind and the tumbling tufts of pollen flew in his eyes.

To Jonah the trees felt oddly familiar, their arrangement and disposition, the personality of their crowns. They looked just like French plane trees, and in fact the whole city seemed carved out of some idea of Paris in the late nineteenth century, as though a fragment had set sail and washed ashore at the mouth of the Río de la Plata. Like the French, the Uruguayans were fond of their cafés and bookstores, tons of them it seemed, especially for a country that was probably by population about the size of Queens. Inside a librería in the Ciudad Vieja he quickly discovered they were proud of their poets too. Perhaps the trees were a token of gratitude on the part of the French, in exchange for all the morose and maleficent Uruguayan exiles and dandies who pollinated their poetry—Lautréamont, Supervielle, Laforgue—who tasted the ozone of these austral latitudes.

Not far from the Rambla he entered an empty tavern where the bartenders looked like toughs from a Jean-Pierre Melville flick. The local whiskey seemed to be the thing. It went down fiery and marine. When he eventually stumbled out again, he was filled with hunger. In his sullen march for food and lodging he passed through the Parque Rodó.

The grounds of the park were impeccably kept and desolate. Making his way under the tall green palms, Jonah arrived before a huge obelisk done in Eurofascist thirties-style concrete. It was dedicated to Uruguayan writers and artists, and to the youth of Latin America. Dusk was enclosing the greenery around him in a canopy of chittering twilight. He turned from the monument in a mummified stupor. He was trying to gauge the quickest path back to the street, but he couldn’t make it out. He felt like a feral spirit stranded on an island in someone else’s world. And for a flickering moment, he was certain some oppressive force would try to keep him there, holding him in a state of wild captivity, solitary and enslaved, a native hypnotized into submission by a colonial magician. But the queasiness passed, and he eventually made his way down along a lake lined with eucalyptus trees, before finding his way out onto yet another avenue that abutted the park. A few streets farther on, he turned and came upon a catacombic alley illuminated by a single bulb of light. Jonah followed it like a beacon and came to a small pensión where the words EL VASCO had been lettered in green and red on the window. Without so much as a glance at the menu, he walked in.

Behind a lectern stood a man dressed in a frumpy tan jacket and drooping bowtie, his hair slicked back, his thin moustache regularly agitated by a twitch in one eye. The impression was of a slightly shabby and possibly shifty variation on the standard model.

“Hola,” said Jonah. “Por favor, quiero una mesa para cena y una cama para la noche. Es posible?”

The man did not reply but instead looked around the room then up the stairs behind him. The tiny restaurant only had four tables. They were all empty. Four keys hung from hooks untaken by guests. He turned back to Jonah with a strained look, as if he were trying to dislodge a crumb scratching in his throat.

“All our tables and rooms are booked this evening,” he said in unmoved Oxfordian English.

“Okay, so…” Jonah switched to English while steadying himself against the implication he was beginning to recognize. “Well, look, can I at least eat? I can be quick if the reservations aren’t until later. Or…is there a problem here?”

The maître d’ shook his head, expressionless. “The chef has not yet started to cook. By the time he begins, the guests with reserved tables will have arrived.” He raised his hands in a slight shrug. “I’m afraid you will have to find somewhere else to eat.”

The maître d’ was now staring at him coldly, as if he were trying to glare him out the door. Jonah was trying to make up his mind on how far to take it. He was hungry, and now he was pissed too. On the other hand, he was a stranger in a strange land a million miles from home, and it was probably not the best time to test out the response time of the local cops.

From the kitchen came a sudden and loud clatter of pots and pans along with a shout of “Maldita!” The kitchen doors opened and a man with a chef’s hat emerged, the cap ill-suited to his rather enormous head. The maître d’ rushed over to him, initiating a ping-ponging of excited Spanish between them. Then the chef looked over at Jonah. His countenance changed from one of annoyance to glee.

“Miguel!” he said, slapping the maître d’ on the chest. “No me dijiste que teníamos un invitado!”

Jonah couldn’t understand what