canon d i a l o g u e .

[solosection]

"Elio."
"I wish I could be with you all."



"Elio."
"He exaggerates, there's so little to tell."
"So what should we do?"
"Promise not to laugh at us, though, because we are ridiculous."
"The chick with the oranges?"
"Actually, the café where we're headed is sort of vigilly."
"I'm his son."
"Who's going to stay with you?"
"Have you told her what she's getting into?"
"I came here three years ago trying to have a private vigil with a girl and it was a disaster."
"Yet quite a few years ago here is where I had my first inkling of what my life as an artist living among artists would be like. My father and I come here each time he's in Rome."
"I'm superstitious, so I should watch what I say, but they've been very reassuring - my years as a pianist, that is. The rest, well, we don't discuss the rest."
"The rest, Dad, is a closed book these days. But the first time I came here, I was seventeen and I was with people who read a lot, loved poetry, were deeply involved in cinema, and knew all there is to know about classical music. They inducted me into their clan and every vacation I had from school and later from university, I'd come to Rome to stay with them and just learn."
"But more than my friendship with them, you above everyone else made me who I am today. We never had secrets, you and I, you know about me, and I know about you. In this I consider myself the luckiest son on earth. You taught me how to love - how to love books, music, beautiful ideas, people, pleasure, even myself. Better yet, you taught me that we have one life only and that time is always stacked against us. This much I know, young as I am. It's just that I forget the lesson sometimes."
"Because I can see you now - not as my father, but as a man in love. I've never seen you like this. It makes me very happy, almost envious to see you. You are so young suddenly. It must be love."
"No, not Via Belsiana today. I want to take you somewhere I've never taken you before."
"Not recent at all. But it marks a moment where for a short while, I held life in my hands and was never the same afterward. Sometimes I think my life stopped here and will only restart here."
"I have no idea if Miranda is up for this and perhaps neither are you. But we've confided enough already not to stop now. So let me take you there. It's just a two-minute walk away."
"I never told you this, Dad, but I was drunk out of my mind one night, I had just vomited by the statue of the Pasquino and couldn't have been more dazed in my life yet here as I leaned against the very wall, I knew, drunk as I was, that this, with Oliver holding me, was my life, that everything that had come beforehand with others was not even a rough sketch or the shadow of a draft of what was happening to me. And now, ten years later, when I look at this wall under this old streetlamp, I am back with him and I swear to you, nothing has changed. In thirty, forty, fifty years I will feel no differently. I have met many women and more men in my life, but what is watermarked on this very wall overshadows everyone I've known. When I come to be here, I can be alone or with people, with you for instance, but I am always with him. If I stood for an hour staring at this wall, I'd be with him for an hour. If I spoke to this wall, it would speak back."
"What would it say? Simple: 'Look for me, find me.'"
"I say the same thing. 'Look for me, find me.' And we're both happy. Now you know."
"You're wrong about my courage. I've never even had the courage to call him, to write to him, much less to visit him. All I can do when I'm alone is whisper his name in the dark. But then I laugh at myself. I just pray I'll never whisper it when I'm with someone else."
"A friend with a car."
"Please, please do. I'll have two tickets waiting for you at the box office."
"I will say one thing. You said it to me once years ago, now it's my turn: I envy the two of you. Please don't ruin it."



"No, I'm not."
"I guess I am, aren't I?"
"You're blushing too."
"I've been interested in the cellist and I figured that as it's rumored that they're traveling later this year before possibly disbanding, our paths might never cross again. So here I am."
"Someone my age?"
"Are you a fan of the Florian?"
"Do you play?"
"Piano."
"Vocation. I hope."
"Sometimes, but not always."
"Do you want me to wait for you?"
"I'll wait for you outside."
"Just like a Brassaï photo."
"It's about a man who comes back home from work and asks his beloved to get dressed and come outside and dance with him. There is such an eruption of joy on their street that eventually the whole city bursts with joy."
"Order for me."
"They ended up in Birkenau. My mother frequently spoke about her uncles when I was growing up. They too, as in your father's case, cast long shadows on my mother's family."
"She bakes wonderful cakes."
"You don't show your age at all."
"I know what you meant."
"I wouldn't be sitting here with you, would I?"
"No awkwardness at all."
"And now you're the one blushing."
"I don't know. I've never really thought about it."
"So if it wasn't fate, what brought you to the concert tonight?"
"What is it?"
"Me?"
"But you didn't know you'd meet me."
"Too, too deep for me."
"Yes, of course."
"You know I'd like to."
"I usually have coffee or a juice somewhere."
"Mind if I join?"
"Very good surprise."
"It would have taken you a long time."
"But weren't we planning on meeting this coming Sunday?"
"I have wonderful memories of last Sunday."
"She's a very talented third-year student from Thailand, very, very gifted."
"Yes, she came all the way here to study with me."
"You mean tonight? Nothing."
"Someone like me?"
"There is no one."
"Nobody."
"I don't do the occasional."
"Never."
"There was."
"We were friends, then we were lovers, then she split. But we stayed friends."
"Yes."
"He got married."
"I thought so too at the time. But they've been together for years now. They were together before he started with me."
"We haven't spoken in ages, and I don't know that we're friends, though I'm sure that we will always be. He's always read me extremely well, and I have a feeling that he suspects that if I never write, it's not because I don't care but because a part of me still does and always will, just as I know he still cares, which is why he too never writes. And knowing this is good enough for me."
"Even though he's the one who got married. And besides, he teaches in the US, and I'm here in Paris - kind of settles it, doesn't it? Unseen but always there."
"Fifteen years."
"It belongs to the past."
"When I'm alone - sometimes, yes. But it doesn't intrude, doesn't make me sad. I can go entire weeks without thinking of him. Sometimes I want to tell him things, but then I put it off, and even telling myself I'm putting it off gives me some pleasure, though we may never speak. He taught me everything. My father said there were no taboos in bed; my lover helped me cast them off. He was my first."
"Not many. All short-lived. Men and women."
"Maybe because I never really let go or lose myself with others. After an instant of passion, I always fall back to being the autonomous me."
"Why?"
"My father used to say so as well, because I could never decide on anything, what to do in life, where to live, what to study, whom to love. Stick to music, he said. Sooner or later, the rest would come. He started his career at the age of thirty-two - so I still have some time, though not much, if I'm to time myself to his clock. We've been exceptionally close, ever since I was a baby. He was a philologist and writing his dissertation at home while my mother was a therapist in a hospital, so he was the one in charge of diapers and all the rest. We had help but I was always with him. He's the one who taught me to love music - ironically, the very same piece I was teaching when you walked in this afternoon. When I teach it I still hear his voice."
"You make me nervous."
"I don't know. Maybe because I don't really know what you're after, or where you'd want me to stop and not go further."
"Why?"
"And by the way, I'm not very good at beginnings."
"Maybe."
"Do we look alike?"
"Do you still go together?"
"But the two of you are close?"
"How did they find out?"
"How?"
"I'm sorry."
"Not a mistake."
"Maybe I was - a bit."
"I'm not doing anything tonight."
"Paying."
"I wasn't."
"Let's not say goodbye, not just yet."
"Don't let me go home tonight, Michel."
"This?"
"I do love this."
"No, me and you. It's what we should have done two nights ago."
"I lied about the occasionals."
"In a while."
"It was a gift. A friend - just a friend."
"Yes, just cold."
"More. I told you I get nervous."
"So much better."
"Brazilian?"
"Less than two years."
"I used to think it was good old ordinary domesticity that killed what we had. But it was more than that. He wanted to adopt a child, he even wanted me to father the child. What he wanted was a family."
"I don't know that I didn't. I just knew that I wasn't ready, I was entirely devoted to music and still am. The real truth is, I couldn't wait to live alone again."
"I don't know."
"Age is no problem."
"I told you so on Sunday. How quickly we forget."
"You're losing your memory."
"And I wasn't?"
"Much. Just hold me again, please."
"Do anything you want. You make me happy as it is."
"No, not any longer."
"Why not, if you want to."
"You're not hurting me, you're not hurting me, you're not hurting me, you're not hurting me, you're not, you're not."
"Yes?"
"Seriously? Can't you tell?"
"The obvious says it pretty loudly. How many Jews or Muslims have you seen naked?"
"Come back to bed."
"Bathroom."
"Not leaving."
"Me too."
"Yes."
"I want them to know."
"I want one more hug."
"Totally free."
"What time?"
"And others?"
"I've spent the most wonderful day of the year."
"I still haven't figured out why, but it may have something to do with last night."
"You're wonderful, I've been meaning to tell you, you're just wonderful."
"I'm not at all hungry."
"Why?"
"A single malt. With nuts and salted things?"
"Where to?"
"When does the clock strike midnight? When does the honeymoon end?"
"Is there an expiration date?"
"Don't you say this to everyone?"
"A likely story."
"Great. But is it tuned?"
"When, though?"
"For no reason, I suppose."
"So you knew I'd come."
"And masturbate."
"Do you miss him?"
"Could this be my role?"
"You're scaring me a bit, because it means I'll never pass muster unless your father approves, and since he'll never know me, you'll never approve."
"Would you have sought me out anyway?"
"What a waste that would have been."
"You already asked me this."
"I know."
"Promise not to laugh."
"Last November."
"And even then..."
"Why did your father stop playing?"
"Puzzling."
"Is this where you recharge?"
"You mean it has nothing to do with my looks or my youth or the sheer brilliance of my intellect, to say nothing of my ripped body?"
"Clearly because I'm here. Or maybe because I'm happy, too."
"I'm trying to hide it, can't you tell?"
"They do. I told him on Thursday when he called. Miranda also knows."
"They do. My father, incidentally, is twice her age."
"Because it matters, that's why. And don't ask me if it does."
"Enough with my generation! And stop saying things like this. This kind of talk upsets me."
"Please hold me, just hold me."
"Corot country!"
"What's in it?"
"Whom am I speaking to now, second, third or first self?"
"You're such a pessimist."
"But you have me here and now."
"This is not a sonata, it's a cadenza -"
"Are we on an airplane?"
"Not a sonata, but a cadenza."
"It's a brief one-to-two minute moment in a piano concerto when the soloist improvises upon a theme already explored in the concerto itself. Usually, the signal for the orchestra to come clamoring back in and close the movement is a trill played by the pianist at the very end of his cadenza. I couldn't figure out what the trill was when I first saw it but now it makes perfect sense. This cadenza, however, goes on and on, I don't know for how long yet, but it's obviously more than five to six minutes long."
"I suppose."
"I'm not sure yet. I have to study this. Léon keeps echoing the Waldstein."
"Don't tell me you're twice my age and you've never heard the Waldstein Sonata."
"You're fibbing. I know it. I can tell."
"Then sing it."
"Sing it with me."
"Don't stop."
"Keep singing."
"Why?"
"Don't you sing in the shower sometimes?"
"I like that we sang."
"Did it make you sad?"
"You, shy? I don't think you're shy at all."
"You spoke to me out of nowehere, picked me up actually, and in a church of all places, and then you took me out to dinner. Shy people don't do any of this."
"So you left me stranded all alone with my backpack, my bicycle and my helmet. Thanks!"
"I did mind. I was hurt."
"My generation again?"
"Let me explain to you how a cadenza works."
"Who told you to buy this?"
"Okay."
"That was Murray Perahia playing. Very elegant, very clear, simply superb. The key to his cadenza is these few notes taken from the main theme. I'll sing them for you and then you will, too."
"Donn't be a baby."
"Your turn now."
"You have a good voice."
"It would make me happy."
"Would you let me be your teacher."
"Oh, shush!"
"Luminous."
"There are many others. One was even composed by Mozart's own son."
"This can go on forever, if you wish."
"And you will. I'd be better at the piano if I'd practiced earlier this morning, but someone had other plans for the day."
"I wanted to."
"You mean this?"
"What's interesting here is that after our friend Léon's cadenza quotes a few bars from the Waldstein Sonata, something far crazier happens."
"It seems to me, and I'm not sure yet, that at some point after quoting the Waldstein Léon dithers awhile until he slips from the Beethoven to something that very possibly inspired another piece by Beethoven, something called Kol Nidre."
"Kol Nidre is a Jewish prayer. You see, the Jewish theme is very veiled but it's smuggled in there... and my hunch is that unless someone were musically trained, only a Jew who reads music would recognize that the centerpiece of this cadenza is not the Beethoven but Kol Nidre. Those few measures are repeated seven times, so Léon knew exactly what he was doing. Then, of course, he goes back to the Waldstein, and to the trill that announces the return of the full orchestra."
"It's an Aramaic prayer at the start of Yom Kippur, the holiest day in the Jewish calendar, and represents the recantation of all vows, all oaths, all curses, all obligations made to God. But the melody has charmed composers. My hunch is that Léon knew that your father would recognize it. It was like a coded message between them."
"Where did you hear it?"
"There are two ways in which your father could have known this tune. Either Léon hummed or played it for him - why, I have no idea, unless it was to prove that Jewish liturgy had beautiful music - or your father attended a Yom Kippur service, which might suggest a closer bond between the two. The service on that day is not an occasion for tourists to come and watch how celebrate the Day of Atonement."
"So many things I haven't had time to examine yet."
"Unless the cadenza was thought up in dire circumstances and was a Jewish salvo composed from hell itself."
"Maybe."
"Léon is Jewish, is hated by your grandparents, is most likely considered a bad influence on your father's career, and the servants think he's beneath them. France is already occupied and soon the Germans will be living under this very roof, if they aren't already eating at this very table, which you told me they did. Léon cannot be in the same house, unless he is hiding in the attic, which no one here would have tolerated. So how does the score fall into your father's hands?"
"Can you just focus, please?"
"It's stunning. But why are you constantly interrupting?"
"We still need to figure out how the score ended up here. Who brought it? And when? For a Jew to come here to deliver a score in 1944 seems absurd. In fact, how it got here might say everything about this score. It might even say more than the music itself."
"In this case, it may be just so."
"Was it delivered by mail, by hand, or did Adrien pick it up himself? Was a third party involved? A friend, or a nurse in a hospital, or someone from the camps? This is 1944 and the Germans are still occupying France. So he could have fled or been captured. If he was in the camps, which camp was it? Was he in hiding? Did he survive?"
"There are two things that might tell us a lot. And we're missing both. Why did the composer draw the staves himself? And why are the notes so crammed together like this?"
"Because my hunch is that perhaps these notes were not jotted down hastily at all. Notice, there's not a single scratch mark, nothing was crossed out where the composer might have changed his mind while composing. These notes were being transcribed, and in a place where score paper was impossible to come by, where it was even difficult to find ordinary paper. The notes are so terribly crammed - as though he were afraid he would run out of paper."
"Looking for a watermark. A watermark might tell us a lot: where was the paper manufactured, in which part of France. Or elsewhere, if you follow my drift."
"All I can deduce is that it was cheap onion paper. So, the composer of the cadenza already knows these themes and transfers the notes in this compressed form. He wants your father to have this cadenza. This is all we know."
"Do you think he meant to return it to Léon or to someone dear to Léon? Or did he simply not know what to do with it and didn't have the heart to be rid of it - the way you continue to keep your father's tennis rackets?"
"There is no Léon."
"Perhaps your father studied with Alfred Cortot. But I doubt that Léon did."
"Cortot was anti-Semitic and became even more so under the occupation."
"Why do you ask?"
"I love it too, very much."
"I told you, I don't think in those terms."
"This here tonight is wonderful."
"What's wrong?"
"Give me more Calvados."
"I love what you're doing."
"See you in a bit."
"I don't need to go home. I don't want to go home."
"Do you want me to?"
"I was on the verge of saying it. But no! You, sir, had to walk away!"
"I was even able to obtain his old address. The family name is Deschamps. The only problem is that Deschamps isn't exactly a Jewish name."
"Could be. But there are many Léon Deschampses on the Web, assuming they are all alive, or still live in France. The search could take months."
"But why?"
"In any event, I've even found Léon's picture in the yearly class photo. Here, take a look."
"He is very handsome. And looks very Catholic, very conservative."
"Are you thinking what I'm thinking?"
"So you knew all along!"
"Is that why you brought me here last week?"
"I still think our discovery is too neat, too easy. Part of me doesn't trust it. Let's not rush to conclusions yet."
"Because I can't think of a single reason why a well-to-do Catholic man from the Lycée J. whose parents probably subscribed to the Action Francaise would want to touch Kol Nidre."
"That our Léon may not be Léon Deschamps."
"Something kept gnawing at me. First that your father continued to go to the Sainte U. o Sundays. Might the church have been tied in some mysterious way to Léon? Perhaps the church itself also had something to do with the Florian Quartet. I knew that the Florian had been playing for years at the same church and you yourself told me that you father had subsidized their concerts. So I looked them up online and eventually found out, as I suspected, that there were not one or two, but three incarnations of the Florian. The Florian started in the mid-1920s, not as a quartet but as a trio: violin, cello and piano. And now comes the part that shows I'm a true genius. The pianist of the trio was not Léon Descahmps, as the two of us thought, but someone who had been with the trio for ten years, who played the piano but also the violin. His name was Ariel Waldstein. So I looked up Ariel Waldstein and sure enough he was a Jewish pianist who didn't just die in the camps but was beaten to death there because he owned an Amati violin and refused to part with it. He was sixty-two years old."
"I put the puzzle together early this morning - how, I've no idea. In Hebrew Ariel means 'lion of God': in short, Léon. Many Jews have a Jewish and a Latin name. In the twenties the violinist is listed as Ariel; in the early thirties he becomes Léon, possibly because of rising anti-Semitism. The easiest way to find out more about him is to inquire at Yad Vashem in Jerusalem."
"I thought we had a date."
"Stop!"
"But why?"
"Don't think this way. We've almost solved a mystery today. What we need to do is ask the cellist tonight if he remembers Ariel. He may not but all the same, we'll ask."
"No, but it might make him happy, which will make you happy."
"I'll play it late this coming spring when I tour the States, and in the fall when I'm back in Paris. I promise."
"In America, I'm planning to drop in on someone I haven't seen in ages."
"Being with you reminds me of him. If I meet him, the first thing I'll want to do is tell him about you."
"No, because you and he are the standard. Now that I think of it, there's only been the two of you. All the others were occasionals. You have given me days that justify the years I've been without him."
"Walk?"
"What I think we should do is find out who Ariel Waldstein was. Perhaps there is someone who might know more about him."
"So Ariel was probably twice your father's age at the time."
"You're a snake!"
"Us, you mean?"
"But what if there are no descendants, what if the line stopped with him, what if there isn't a trace of him and there is not a thing more to learn?"
"You know about my great-uncles. I also think my great-grandmother died Auschwitz. But I'm not sure. You die, and then no one speaks of you, and before you know it, no one asks, no one tells, no one even knows or wants to know. You're extinct, you never lived, never loved. Time never casts shadows and memory doesn't drop ashes."
"Kol Nidre."
"No, that prayer is called the Kaddish."
"Every Jewish boy learns it. We're taught to rehearse for the death of loved ones before we know what death even is. The irony is that the Kaddish is the only prayer one cannot use on oneself."
"Because you can't recite it and be dead at the same time."
"You know, there is more than a strong possibility that this whole Léon-Ariel thing is nothing more than fiction."
"God, I did tell you how much I wanted you to hold me and ask me to come home with you that night? I was almost at the point of saying something, but then I held back."
"Perhaps not."
"A bit."
"I get cold when I'm nervous."
"I don't want this to end."
"No reason."
"You need?"
"November."



"You probably don't remember me."
"Fifteen, I counted them last night on my way here. Actually, that's not true. I've always known."
"I'd love to -"
"You don't understand. I'd love to. But I can't."
"Forgive. There was nothing to forgive. If anything, I'm grateful for everything. I remember good things only."
"The truth is, I'm not sure I can feel nothing. And if I am to meet your family, I would prefer not to feel anything."
"Perhaps it never went away."
"I don't think it went away."
"So."
"So, that's why I can't come over for drinks."
"It used to be mine, but you've owned it far, far longer than I have."
"It has a long history."
"Your predecessor. No, nothing like that. Whom will you give it to one day?"
"Yes. For one night. I'm seeing some people at the university tomorrow morning, then I'm off."
"Let's have a drink at my hotel."
"I said a drink, not a fuck."
"What are these?"
"Yes, I promise."
"And like the old men who sat around the piazzetta facing the Piave memorial, we'll speak about two young men who found much happiness for a few weeks and lived the remainder of their lives dipping cotton swabs into that bowl of happiness, fearing they'd use it up, without daring to drink more than a thimbleful on ritual anniversaries."
"And on that evening, when we grow older still we'll speak about these two young men as though they were two strangers we met on the train and whom we admire and want to help along. And we'll want to call it envy, because to call it regret would break our hearts."
"Perhaps I'm not yet ready to speak of them as strangers."
"I think we should have another."
"The first night is the one I remember best - perhaps because I fumbled so much. But also Rome. There is a spot on via Santa Maria dell'Anima that I revisit every time I'm in Rome. I'll stare at it for a second, and suddenly it'll all come back to me. I had just thrown up that night and on the way back to the bar, you kissed me. People kept walking by but I didn't care, nor did you. That kiss is still imprinted there, thank goodness. It's all I have from you. This, and your shirt."
"And you? What moment?"
"I'm glad I came too."
"Shoot."
"Why are you asking?"
"Would I start again if I could? In a second. But I've had two of these, and I'm about to order a third."
"What does this say about the life you've lived, then?"
"You are the only person I would like to say goodbye to when I die, because only then will this thing I call my life make any sense. And if I should hear that you died, my life as I know it, the me who is speaking with you now, will cease to exist. Sometimes I have this awful picture of waking up in our house in B. and looking out to the sea, hearing the news from the waves themselves, he died last night. We missed out on so much. It was a coma. Tomorrow, I go back to my coma, and you to yours. Pardon, I didn't mean to offend - I am sure yours is no coma."
"Do these things die out on their own or do some things need generations and lifetimes to sort themselves out?"
"I wonder about our fathers, though."
"What I don't want is to receive a letter from your son with the bad news: And by the way, enclosed please find a framed postcard my father asked me to return to you. Nor do I want to answer with something like: You can come whenever you please, I am sure he would have wanted you to stay in his room. Promise that won't happen."
"What did you write on the back of the postcard?"
"I'm too old for surprises. Besides, surprises always come with a sharp edge that is meant to hurt. I don't want to be hurt - not by you. Tell me."
"Let me guess: If not later, when?"
"I give up."
"Suppose I walk you to your car."
"Suppose I did."