Free THE BASS SAXOPHONE by Josef Škvorecký

he never considered that it is just as hard, if not harder, and just as worthy, if not worthier, and probably far more beautiful to be able to control the delicate mechanism of a precision lathe, to turn out silvery shining bolts and nuts, to observe the milky flow of oils and other fluids that flush and lubricate the cutters and drills, than it is to scratch out the natural expressions of childhood with red ink, molding them into uniform monstrosities of correct grammar and acceptable style, and to implant in children’s souls such deep-rooted subconscious convictions as “i before e except after c,” yet he did know that my erudition (even though it was only a glorified nonerudition, the kind of intellectual fraud committed by ninety-nine percent of all high school graduates with the exception of the one percent that become theoretical physicists, astronomers, paleontologists, paleographers, chemists and experimental pathologists) was greater, more impressivethan his — as was my suit, made by a good Prague tailor, while his pudgy body, half a head shorter than Emöke’s slouched in a Sunday suit of a style beyond style that had never even been in style, aggravated by a necktie in that eternal pattern of indeterminate slots and slashes; and so with his baleful, helpless eyes, eyes of the weak, the outcast, the handicapped, he followed me around the dance floor as I danced with Emöke.
    For a long time, we didn’t speak. I could feel her body, feverish with the inner warmth of young women, of the music, the stuffy room, the wine and the dance. We didn’t speak to each other, and then the fiddler cut loose with a wailing, rapid Gypsy melody in a spasmodic rhythm, first a long drawn-out note, growing stronger, finally exploding into a brief syncopation, almost a dead end, to continue on another note, and Emöke began to sing in Hungarian, a hard, beautiful, primitive song of her nomadic ancestors, she was transformed once again into what she really was, a young girl concentrating all her energy in the essence of her female life, and we wheeled in some wild Hungarian dance, smudges of faces and figures and silver musical instruments spinning past as when a camera turns too quickly in a movie panorama.
    I don’t know for how long. For quite a while. Then toward midnight they began to play a tearfuland sentimental slow foxtrot, from his alto sax the saxophone player drew the most heartrending sobs that could ever be wrung from that most perfect product of instrumental inbreeding, and Emöke stopped singing and I began to talk, from somewhere out of my subconscious memory of the innumerable blues that have never failed to thrill me came lines of verse, in triads, as they must come to black guitarists high like I was high on wine, and into Emöke’s happy, lovely little ear I spoke line upon line of the only blues I ever composed in all my life, colored by that rural sax player who didn’t even know the secret of black syncopation and who transformed the saxophone into a wailing instrument of cheap saccharine emotion made beautiful by the primitive and eternal beauty of that convulsive, alcoholic moment, when the alcohol, man’s enemy but a greater friend, reveals to him the truth about his own self, the truth about Emöke. First time, first time, baby, last time, only time too. Short time, short time, baby, first and last time too. We wait such a hard long time for this time, what else can we do? and Emöke stopped short, in the smokescreen of nicotine and spotlights above the tables I could see her long charcoal lashes and I said, Like a dying fire we wait to die, die in the flame. In a living death we burn, burn in the cold rain. Fire and ashes everything changes, still is the same. Nowis the time, I continued, for us to meet somehow, Just this time, lady, can we meet somehow? Listen, little darlin’, to the sweet sound of now, and Emöke’s lips, usually wilting, a convent rose of frosty asceticism, had broken into