The Cat's Table - Michael Ondaatje [10]
Bitch. Womb.
He was talking to three boys on the verge of pubescence, and he probably knew the effect he was having. But he also imparted to this junior audience stories of musical honour, and the person he celebrated most was Sidney Bechet, who while playing a set in Paris was accused of hitting a false note and in response challenged the accuser to a duel, winged a pedestrian in the fracas that followed, was thrown into jail and deported. “Le Grand Bechet—Bash—they called him. You boys will live a long, long life,” Mazappa said, “before you come across such a defence of a principle.”
We were amazed, as well as shocked, by the huge borderless dramas of love that Mazappa’s songs and his sighs and confabulations depicted. We assumed that his career’s fatal tumble was caused by some deceit or by his too-great love for a woman.
Every month, the changing of the moon.
I say, every month, the changing of the moon,
The blood comes rushing from the bitch’s womb.
There was something extraterrestrial and indelible about the verse Mazappa sang on that afternoon, whatever the words meant. We heard it just once, but it remained hidden in us like a stone-hard truth whose bluntness we would continue to veer away from, just as we did then. The verse (by Jelly Roll Morton, I would later discover) was bulletproof and watertight. But we did not know it then, too confused by the directness of it—the words in that last line, its surprising and fatal rhyme, coming so economically after the repetitive opening. We dissolved away from his presence in that ballroom, suddenly aware of stewards up on ladders preparing for the evening’s dance, aiming coloured lights, lifting the arches of crepe paper that crisscrossed the room. They were snapping open the large white tablecloths to drape them over the wooden tables. At the centre of each they positioned a vase of flowers, civilizing and romanticizing the bare room. Mr. Mazappa did not leave with us. He stayed at the piano looking at the keys, unaware of the camouflage taking place around him. We knew that whatever he would be playing with the orchestra that night would not be what he had just been playing for us.
MAX MAZAPPA’S STAGE NAME—or his “war name,” as he called it—was Sunny Meadows. He began using it after a printing error on a poster advertising his performance in France. Perhaps the promoters had wished to avoid the Levantine quality of his name. On the Oronsay, where his piano class was announced in the ship’s bulletin, he was also referred to as “Sunny Meadows, Master of the Piano.” But he was Mazappa to us at the Cat’s Table, for sunny and meadows were hardly words that could exist alongside his nature. There was not much that was optimistic or well trimmed about him. Yet his passion for music invigorated our table. He spent one whole lunch regaling us with that duel of “Le Grand Bechet,” which had ended up more like a gun battle in the early hours of Paris in 1928—Bechet firing his pistol in the direction of McKendrick, the bullet grazing his accuser’s Borsalino, then continuing until it embedded itself in the thigh of a Frenchwoman on her way to work. Mr. Mazappa acted it all out, using salt and pepper shakers and a piece of cheese to depict the trajectory of the bullet.
He invited me one afternoon to his cabin to listen to some records. Bechet, Mazappa told me, used the Albert System clarinet, which had a formal and luxurious tone. “Formal and luxurious,” he kept repeating. He put on a 78 and whispered alongside the music, pointing out the impossible descants and swaggers. “You see, he shakes the sound out.” I did not understand, but was in awe. Mazappa signalled to me each time Bechet made the melody reappear, “like sunshine on a forest floor,” I remember him saying. He fumbled within a waxy-looking suitcase, brought out a note-book, and read what Bechet had told a student. “I am going to give you one note today,” Bechet had said. “See how many ways you can play the note—growl it, smear it, flat it, sharp it, do anything you want to it. It