Blow-Up (28 page)

“Well, all I did was transcribe literally what you told me in Baltimore,” I say defensively, not knowing what I’m being defensive about.

“Sure, that’s all, but in reality it’s like in a mirror,” Johnny persists stubbornly.

“What more do you want? Mirrors give faithful reflections.”

“There’re things missing, Bruno,” Johnny says. “You’re much better informed than I am, but it seems to me like something’s missing.”

“The things that you’ve forgotten to tell me,” I answer, reasonably annoyed. This uncivilized monkey is capable of … (I would have to speak with Delaunay, it would be regrettable if an imprudent statement about a sane, forceful criticism that … 
For example Lan’s red dress
, Johnny is saying. And in any case take advantage of the enlightening details from this evening to put into a new edition; that wouldn’t be bad.
It stank like an old washrag
, Johnny’s saying,
and that’s the only value on the record
. Yes, listen closely and proceed rapidly, because in other people’s hands any possible contradiction might have terrible consequences.
And the urn in the middle, full of dust that’s almost blue
, Johnny is saying,
and very close to the
color of a compact my sister had once
. As long as he wasn’t going into hallucinations, the worst that could happen would be that he might contradict the basic ideas, the aesthetic system so many people have praised … 
And furthermore, cool doesn’t mean, even by accident ever, what you’ve written
, Johnny is saying. Attention.)

“How is it not what I’ve written, Johnny? It’s fine that things change, but not six months ago, you …”

“Six months ago,” Johnny says, getting down from the rail and setting his elbows on it to rest his head between his hands. “Six months ago. Oh Bruno, what I could play now if I had the kids with me … And by the way: the way you wrote ‘the sax, the sex,’ very ingenious, very pretty, that, the word-play.
Six months ago. Six, sax, sex
. Positively lovely. Fuck you, Bruno.”

I’m not going to start to say that his mental age does not permit him to understand that this innocent word-play conceals a system of ideas that’s rather profound (it seemed perfectly precise to Leonard Feather when I explained it to him in New York) and that the paraeroticism of jazz evolved from the washboard days, etc. As usual, immediately I’m pleased to think that critics are much more necessary than I myself am disposed to recognize (privately, in this that I’m writing) because the creators, from the composer to Johnny, passing through the whole damned gradation, are incapable of extrapolating the dialectical consequences of their work, of postulating the fundamentals and the transcendency of what they’re writing down or improvising. I should remember this in moments of depression when I feel dragged that I’m nothing more than a critic.
The name of the star is called Wormwood
, Johnny is saying, and suddenly I hear his other voice, the voice that comes when he’s … how say this? how describe Johnny when he’s beside himself, already out of it, already gone? Uneasy, I get down off the rail and
look at him closely. And the name of the star is called Wormwood, nothing you can do for him.

“The name of the star is called Wormwood,” says Johnny, using both hands to talk. “And their dead bodies shall lie in the streets of the great city. Six months ago.”

Though no one see me, though no one knows I’m there, I shrug my shoulders at the stars (the star’s name is Wormwood). We’re back to the old song: “I’m playing this tomorrow.” The name of the star is Wormwood and their bodies’ll be left lying six months ago. In the streets of the great city. Out, very far out. And I’ve got blood in my eye just because he hasn’t wanted to say any more to me about the book, and truly, I don’t know what he thinks of the book, which thousands of fans are reading in two languages (three pretty soon, and a Spanish edition is being discussed, it seems that they play something besides tangos in Buenos Aires).

“It was a lovely dress,” Johnny says. “You do not want to know how beautifully it fit on Lan, but it’ll be easier to explain it to you over a whiskey, if you got the money. Dédée sent me out with hardly three hundred francs.”

He laughs sarcastically, looking at the Seine. As if he hadn’t the vaguest idea of how to get drink or dope when he wanted it. He begins to explain to me that really Dédée is very goodhearted (nothing about the book) and that she does it out of kindness, but luckily there’s old buddy Bruno (who’s written a book, but who needs it) and it’d be great to go to the Arab quarter and sit in a café, where they always leave you alone if they see that you belong a little to the star called Wormwood (I’m thinking this, and we’re going in by the Saint-Sévérin side and it’s two in the morning, an hour at which my wife is very used to getting up and rehearsing everything she’s going to give me at breakfast, along with the cup of coffee, light). So I’m walking with Johnny, so we drink a terrible cognac, very
cheap, so we order double shots and feel very content. But nothing about the book, only the compact shaped like a swan, the star, bits and hunks of things, that flow on with hunks of sentences, hunks of looks, hunks of smiles, drops of saliva on the table and dried on the edge of the glass (Johnny’s glass). Sure, there are moments when I wish he were already dead. I imagine there are plenty of people who would think the same if they were in my position. But how can we resign ourselves to the fact that Johnny would die carrying with him what he doesn’t want to tell me tonight, that from death he’d continue hunting, would continue flipping out (I swear I don’t know how to write all this) though his death would mean peace to me, prestige, the status incontrovertibly bestowed upon one by unbeatable theses and efficiently arranged funerals.

Every once in a while Johnny stops his constant drumming on the tabletop, looks over at me, makes an incomprehensible face and resumes his drumming. The café owner knows us from the days when we used to come there with an Arab guitarist. It’s been some time now that Ben Aifa has wanted to go home and sleep, we’re the last customers in the filthy place that smells of chili and greasy meat pies. Besides, I’m dropping from sleepiness, but the anger keeps me awake, a dull rage that isn’t directed against Johnny, more like when you’ve made love all afternoon and feel like a shower so that the soap and water will scrub off everything that’s beginning to turn rancid, beginning to show too clearly what, at the beginning … And Johnny beats a stubborn rhythm on the tabletop, and hums once in a while, almost without seeing me. It could very well happen that he’s not going to make any more comments on the book. Things go on shifting from one side to another, tomorrow it’ll be another woman, another brawl of some sort, a trip. The wisest thing to do would be to get the English edition away from
him on the sly, speak to Dédée about that, ask it as a favor in exchange for so many I’ve done her. This uneasiness is absurd, it’s almost a rage. I can’t expect any enthusiasm on Johnny’s part at all; as matter of fact, it had never occurred to me that he’d read the book. I know perfectly well that the book doesn’t tell the truth about Johnny (it doesn’t lie either), it just limits itself to Johnny’s music. Out of discretion, out of charity, I’ve not wanted to show his incurable schizophrenia nakedly, the sordid, ultimate depths of his addiction, the promiscuity in that regrettable life. I set out to show the essential lines, emphasizing what really counts, Johnny’s incomparable art. What more could anyone say? But maybe it’s exactly there that he’s expecting something of me, lying in ambush as usual, waiting for something, crouched ready for one of those ridiculous jumps in which all of us get hurt eventually. That’s where he’s waiting for me, maybe, to deny all the aesthetic bases on which I’ve built the ultimate structure of his music, the great theory of contemporary jazz which has resulted in such acclaim from everywhere it’s appeared so far.

To be honest, what does his life matter to me? The only thing that bothers me is that if he continues to let himself go on living as he has been, a style I’m not capable of following (let’s say I don’t want to follow it), he’ll end up by making lies out of the conclusions I’ve reached in my book. He might let it drop somewhere that my statements are wrong, that his music’s something else.

“Hey, you said a bit back that there were things missing in the book.”

(Attention now.)

“Things are missing, Bruno? Oh yeah, I said there were things missing. Look, it’s not just Lan’s red dress. There’re … Will there really be urns, Bruno? I saw them again last night, an enormous field, but they weren’t so buried
this time. Some had inscriptions and pictures on them, you could see giants with helmets like in the movies, and monstrous cudgels in their hands. It’s terrible to walk around between the urns and know there’s no one else, that I’m the only one walking around in them and looking for … Don’t get upset, Bruno, it’s not important that you forgot to put all that in. But Bruno,” and he lifts a finger that does not shake, “what you forgot to put in is me.”

“Come on, Johnny.”

“About me, Bruno, about me. And it’s not your fault that you couldn’t write what I myself can’t blow. When you say there that my true biography is in my records, I know you think that’s true and besides it sounds very pretty, but that’s not how it is. And if I myself didn’t know how to blow it like it should be, blow what I really am … you dig, they can’t ask you for miracles, Bruno. It’s hot inside here, let’s go.”

I follow him into the street, we wander a few feet off and a white cat comes out of an alley and meows at us; Johnny stays there a long time petting it. Well, that does it; I’ll find a taxi in the place Saint-Michel, take him back to the hotel and go home myself. It hasn’t been so awful after all; for a moment there I was afraid that Johnny had constructed a sort of antitheory to the book’s and that he was trying it out on me before spilling it at full speed. Poor Johnny petting a white cat. Basically, the only thing he said was that no one can know anything about anyone, big deal. That’s the basic assumption of any biography, then it takes off, what the hell. Let’s go, Johnny, let’s go home, it’s late.

“Don’t think that that’s all it is,” Johnny says, standing up suddenly as if he knew what I was thinking. “It’s God, baby. Now that’s where you missed out.”

“Let’s go, Johnny, let’s go home, it’s late.”

“It’s what you and people like my buddy Bruno call God. The tube of toothpaste in the morning, they call that God. The garbage can, they call that God. Afraid of kicking the bucket, they call that God. And you have the barefaced nerve to mess me up with that pigsty, you’ve written that my childhood, and my family, and I don’t know what ancestral heritage of the Negro … shit. A mountain of rotten eggs and you in the middle of it crowing, very happy with your God. I don’t want your God, he’s never been mine.”

“The only thing I said is that Negro music …”

“I don’t want your God,” Johnny says again. “Why’ve you made me accept him in your book? I don’t know if there’s a God, I play my music, I make my God, I don’t need your inventions, leave those to Mahalia Jackson and the Pope, and right now you’re going to take that part out of your book.”

“If you insist,” I say, to say something. “In the second edition.”

“I’m as alone as that cat, much more alone because I know it and he doesn’t. Damn, he’s digging his nails into my hand. Bruno, jazz is not only music, I’m not only Johnny Carter.”

“Exactly what I was trying to say when I wrote that sometimes you play like …”

“Like it’s raining up my asshole,” Johnny says, and it’s the first time all night that I feel he’s getting really sore. “A man can’t say anything, right away you translate it into your filthy language. If I play and you see angels, that’s not my fault. If the others open their fat yaps and say that I’ve reached perfection, it’s not my fault. And that’s the worst thing, the thing you really and truly left out of your book, Bruno, and that’s that I’m not worth a damn, that what I play and what the people applaud me for is not worth a damn, really not worth a damn.”

Truly a very rare modesty at this hour of the morning. This Johnny …

“How can I explain it to you?” Johnny yells, putting his hands on my shoulders, jerking me to the right and to the left. (Cut out the noise! they scream from a window). “It isn’t a question of more music or less music, it’s something else … for example, it’s the difference between Bee being dead and being alive. What I’m playing is Bee dead, you dig, while what I want to, what I want to … And sometimes because of that I wreck the horn and people think that I’m up to my ears in booze. Really, of course, I’m always smashed when I do it, because, after all, a horn costs a lot of bread.”

“Let’s go this way. I’ll get a taxi and drop you at the hotel.”

“You’re a mother of goodness, Bruno,” Johnny sneers. “Old buddy Bruno writes everything down in his notebook that you say, except the important things. I never would have believed you could be so wrong until Art passed that book on to me. At the beginning I thought you were talking about someone else, about Ronnie or about Marcel, and then Johnny here and Johnny there, I mean it was about me and I wondered, but where am I?, and you dish it out about me in Baltimore, and at Birdland, and my style … Listen,” he added almost coldly, “it isn’t that I didn’t realize that you’d written a book for the public. That’s very fine, and everything you say about my way of playing and feeling jazz seems perfectly okay to me. Why are we going on talking about the book? A piece of garbage floating in the Seine, that piece of straw floating beside the dock, your book. And I’m that other straw, and you’re that bottle going by bobbing over there. Bruno, I’m going to die without having found … without …”

I catch him under his arms and hold him up, I prop him against the railing above the pier. He’s slipping into
his usual delirium, he mutters parts of words, spits.

“Without having found,” he repeats. “Without having found …”

“What is it you want to find, brother,” I tell him. “You don’t have to ask the impossible, what you have found is enough for …”