Free THE BASS SAXOPHONE by Josef Škvorecký Page A

a smile, I said, Let me see you smile, laugh the whole night through. Smile for me now, smile the whole night through. Nobody for years, now he’s here to save you, she looked at me, the smile on her lips, her eyes smiling the same smile, the saxophone wailing and moaning. Listen! See that flame glimmer in the night, see in infinite black, love’s flickering light, Dark rain’s over, love’s season is in sight, and then Emöke laughed aloud and said, That’s a nice poem! Who wrote it? But I shook my head and continued, This time, baby, this is my this time song. Coming at you from nowhere, it’s here and then it’s gone. Sing it for my little lady this time, this time song. Emöke threw her head back, the saxophone sobbed and groaned and the words flowed through me, on and on, from a strange inspiration never before and never since encountered, at that moment as beautiful as the Song of Solomon because this girl had never heard the like in her life, no one had ever called her the Rose of Sharon, no one had ever addressed her with that Pythagorean axiom of love, O thou fairest among women, because for all her short life she’d been no more than purchased property,a hot-water bottle of flesh and blood and bones, but now she was hearing it, a poem composed just for her by a man, a poem flowing from a man’s heart, borne by the strange magic of this crazy age of telecommunications from the heart and throat of a half-stoned black shouter of the Memphis periphery to the vocal chords of a Prague intellectual in this social hall in a recreation center in the Socialist state of Czechoslovakia, but then she didn’t know anything about the picturesque genealogy of the song, she perceived it only in the ideal manner of perceiving poetry, because every poem is created ad hoc, for some woman, and if it isn’t, it’s not a poem, it’s not worth reading or hearing since it doesn’t come from that unique, genuine and true inspiration of all poetry; it seemed that she was happy and she said in a whisper, May I believe you? Do you really mean it? Yes, Emöke, I said, and my soul or my heart or whatever it was, brought forth more and more verses of those alcoholic, triadic blues. I don’t know, but at that moment I entered into matrimony with her, at that moment I gained a wisdom long forgotten by this age, an awareness that marriage — the life of a man with a woman — isn’t, can’t be, must not be that odd jumble of passion and sentimentality, smut, and gastronomic indulgence, complementary souls and common interests, since it isn’t a matter of understanding,equality of intellect, dovetailing personalities and support and a balanced diet and the way to a heart through a stomach, and it isn’t that ludicrous relationship canonized by Hollywood in the twenties and still adhered to in socialist-realist novels of the fifties — a relationship valid at best for the instinctive eroticism of adolescent infatuations or for the fossils of middle-class Victorianism — and that winds up in loathsome divorce proceedings claiming the no less ludicrous relationship of conjugal incompatibility, but it is the relationship between a male of the species and a female of the species, the primal cave couple of two equal but totally different individuals, one of whom has mastered the club and the other the fire, one of whom brings home the game and the other kneads the bread, together bringing their young into the world according to the primal laws of the species, for the unique beauty of perpetual regeneration, the joy of sunlight on naked skin and of digestive juices and the poetry of the blood and that finer joy of hearts obedient to the law that man must again attain the level of animals, but higher by one twist of the spiral, and rid himself of the psychoneurotic dross of conventional sentimentality that has been sloughed off on the relationship of the human pair by centuries of war and thievery and perverse mysticism and male servitude