Anarchist Fiction dot Net

Adrián del Valle Costa (1872-1945), a.k.a. Palmiro de Lidia, Fructidor, and Hindus Fakir, was, in the words of Kirwin Shaffer, “at the forefront” of Cuba’s anarchist literary world. Notable for having created “[p]erhaps the strongest female character in Cuban anarchist literature,” the eponymous heroine of his novela La Mulata Soledad (1929), the expatriate Catalan del Valle had a hand in editing or writing what would seem at first sight to have been half the Spanish-language anarchist publications on this side of the Monroe Doctrine: New York’s El Despertar, El Rebelde, and Cultura Obrera, Tampa’s Revista Cubana, El Esclavo and Verdad y Tierra, and in Havana, Cuba, the journals Nuevo Ideal, Pro-Vida, ¡Tierra!, Tiempos Nuevos, Cuba y América, La Reforma Social, La Nación…

The man seems never to have been at a loss for words.

Rather than dwell on his long list of accomplishments, though I’d like to present one of his short stories with only a slight introduction. The story, “El Músico Polaco [The Polish Musician],” is the first in his 1903 collection, Cuentos Inverosímiles [Implausible Stories]. It features — I don’t think this can be considered a spoiler, as it appears on the first page — a talking cello. Implausible enough for you? It is not, however, a story about a talking cello. Instead, it is about a musician who faces death by starvation in a world where music has no value, where it “matters little,” as he puts it. What is truly implausible, grotesque, is not (only) that an object should take on life — a life to which, as the musician argues, “a mere instrument, an object without a soul” should have no claim — but that a thinking, feeling, creative subject should be reduced to the status of a mute and meaningless object.

This motif of transfer and displacement, of the subject and object switching places, recurs again and again in anarchist culture. Understandably so: it is the theme of life under capitalism.

Here is my attempt at a translation of “El Músico Polaco.” Warning: some fiction makes you feel strong; some fiction carries strong feeling that can overwhelm. Do not read this if you are already sad. (In that case I’d recommend instead something like Félix Martí-Ibáñez’s “Threshold of the Door.”)

THE POLISH MUSICIAN

Sitting in a chair before his beloved cello, William Koseck, the old Polish musician, thought sadly of his miserable fate.

A muffled voice distracted him from his meditations:

“What are you thinking of, William Koseck?”

He raised his head, startled, looking around. There was nobody in the room, weakly lit by the dim light of a winter evening.

“I’m the one talking to you,” repeated the voice, which seemed to come from inside the cello.

“You? It’s you?…”

“Surprised you, didn’t I?”

Koseck shook his head sadly and replied:

“Nothing can surprise me.”

“You have suffered a lot of disappointment.”

“You know it well, my friend.”

“You dreamed of winning glory.”

“And you see, I only found poverty and disregard.”

“It was your own fault.”

“Don’t be cruel.”

“You lack the will, the courage, the burning desire to succeed.”

“Say rather that I lacked genius.”

The cello laughed, loudly vibrating its strings.

“How naive you are, Koseck,” it finally replied. “Often genius is merely a bit of art or science, a bit of originality and daring, and a lot of luck. Some men are geniuses and others are heroes due to a set of happy circumstances. You’d have to be a genius, but your modesty, your shyness, always made you blend in with the common heap, that anonymous heap which, with its admirable works, only serves to set off and give fame to the daring, preeminent personality: that of the genius.”

Koseck, flattered in his vanity – to be modest is somewhat vain – cast a look of gratitude on the cello.

“Actually,” he said “I am not without my qualifications. In my heyday, for many years, I was regarded as one of the best performers among the professors of the Grand Opera House. I understand that I was not the equal of distinguished cello virtuosos like Romberg and Servnis, but I never failed to play with feeling the musical wonders created for you, O divine cello, by Mozart, Beethoven, Boccherini. I do not know if it is because passion has blinded me, but I have always believed that you are the king of instruments. Gentle and melancholy at some times, energetic and witty at others, always sonorous and majestic, in the hands of an expert, you know how to move, with your plays of harmony, how to lift the soul to the purest regions …”

“Ah,” groaned the cello, “What good are such great wonders to me, if I cannot enjoy them?”

“And why the hell do you want to enjoy them?” Koseck objected. “You are a mere instrument, an object without a soul …”

“Ingrate! … After what I have contributed to your livelihood, you treat me with contempt. How do you know that I don’t have a soul of my own, that I cannot feel, after my own fashion?”

“Don’t be conceited, don’t ascribe to yourself qualities that you don’t have. Only living beings have sensations.”

“Everything that exists has sensation, to varying degrees.”

“But look here, you villain, how can you feel things if you have no life?”

“Well, old fool, what is life? Can you tell me what life is?”

Koseck opened his mouth to reply, but kept it open.

“You see?” continued the cello. “Despite your pride in being a feeling, thinking, living animal, you do not know what life is. Go, ask the wisest of your fellow men the reason for life; cut all four of my strings and pull out my pin if, with all his science, he can give you a satisfactory answer. In your seventy years of futile existence, useless efforts, cruel disappointments, hunger, and want, you should at least have learned that you have lived without knowing why.”

“I lived for art,” cried Koseck.

“Art! Art,” repeated the cello mockingly. “Don’t be silly, viejo mío. Art is a fiction, like life.”

“Don’t blaspheme. Art is the most sublime creation of human beings.”

“Bah! Empty words. Can you define art? Can you give it a clear, accurate, true explanation? No. Art varies according to seasons, climates, customs, temperaments. The emotion that art provokes can be reduced to sensations, varying according to the individual. Art itself is nothing but a sensation for the person who produces it and for the one who enjoys it. And you see fit to classify and define sensations, which are infinite, variable, and contradictory!”

“Your words make me despair. And tell me, if art is a fiction, what is glory?”

“Vanity, nothing more than vanity. Longing for glory, for admiration and flattery, for honors, for considerations and even for the riches they bring. Can you bring yourself to enjoy glory in the darkness, forgotten, poor and hungry? As to posthumous glory … go offer that bone to another dog. Nobody works to be celebrated after death.”

“Ah,” exclaimed Koseck. “Poor me, who have spent my life dreaming of art, longing for glory, to learn at the end of my journey, old, poor and forgotten, that life, art and glory are nothing more than wishful fictions! …”

“You have learned it late, but you may console yourself by thinking that others never learn.”

“You have stolen my dearest hopes.”

“Rejoice in it. At your age, all you have left to hope for is death.”

Koseck raised his fist and struck a tremendous blow to the charlatan instrument.

“Ah, damn you, you’re making fun of me…” he screamed angrily.

The cello fell down, jangling its strings disharmonically as a great cry of pain and protest.

Koseck awoke with a jerk.

* * *

The room was shrouded in darkness. The old musician was very cold in body and even colder in his soul. Recalled for a moment the strange dream and enlarged to infinity felt her sadness and loneliness. No hopes, no dreams, only the distressing reality of homelessness, poverty, old age, helpless and lonely.

He had not had a bite to eat in two days, and his stomach was imperatively demanding its rights. To eat, to eat anything, was now the only concern of the hungry man; but he had no money nor any valuable object to bring to the pawn shop, the great devourer of the poor, which only serves to prolong the torments of poverty.

The almost imperceptible notes of the fallen cello still rang in his ears. He thought they would be his immediate salvation. Why not hock it? He would have a few days more to spend; later … there would always be time to starve to death.

There, fallen before him, was the cello. Koseck picked it up and hugged it lovingly in his arms. He understood that deep emotion that invaded him. Would it worth it, if he had to lose that instrument, reassurance in his sorrows, faithful interpreter of his feelings, which reminded him of his long life as an artist, his hopes, his past successes and enthusiasms? No, it was not possible to abandon his beloved cello, repaying its service with the blackest ingratitude, simply to satisfy the material demands of the stomach, to extend his miserable existence a few days. He could not let strange hands desecrate this instrument that had been almost the only love of his life. He had rather die with it, recalling the triumphs of the past to forget the bitterness of the present.

His emotion grew, and in a transport of infinite tenderness, the old musician embraced the old instrument, sobbing, crying out:

“Oh, my cello! …”

For a long time was hugging him, moistening with tears, kissing him lovingly, caressing the slender fingers that plucked from the string sad notes and cries of suffering, tender and loving sighs, comforting it with a mother’s caresses, soft, incoherent notes; endless, indefinite vibrations …

Then he rose, lifted his grizzled head and took the bow, began to play, with a firm hand, Chopin’s funeral march. What accents of infinite sadness tore the docile instrument! What effects of supernatural harmony! What expressions of melancholy, of eternal farewell! Never in his life had he played with so much feeling, with such sincere inspiration. He was transported to ethereal regions, far from the earth, far from men, he believed himself a being purified by pain, rising to unfathomable heights in search of eternal peace, the ideal of tired spirits … When the last vibration of the last note was extinguished, Koseck, having returned to reality, wept silently, his tears falling on the silent cello.

* * *

It was snowing. Koseck painstakingly walked through the deserted, whitened streets, his cello on his back, feet sinking into the snow, feeling his face ravaged by the innumerable flakes that fell without interruption.

As they passed a modest restaurant, he stopped, hesitated a moment and finally went in. Nobody was eating, so he could not accomplish his intention, but he wanted to try his luck with the owner.

“Sir,” he said, “I have been without food since yesterday, and if you would kindly give me something to eat, I would play a beautiful sonata to repay you.”

“Good old man,” he replied, “if you want to eat, pay in more solid cash; music is money that blows away in the wind.”

Koseck left, thinking wistfully that art matters little before the materiality of life. He walked on, impervious to the weather, which was not as harsh as the vagaries of fate that afflicted his soul.

Wishing to try his luck again, he entered a tavern. There were few people. At the counter, two men fought with the bartender; in the background, several parishioners were playing cards; alone at a table, a drunk incoherently addressed the glass of brandy that he held in trembling hands.

The musician set down his cello and sat in a chair. For the first time in his life, he was going to play in a public institution to ask humbly for alms. Embarrassment burned his wrinkled face and beads of cold sweat ran down his body. But he did not hesitate: he set up his instrument, and with a hand that was awkward at first, then firm, he played some passages from Beethoven with exquisite feeling. The men continued arguing at the counter; the customers at the table went on playing; only the drunk paid attention, ceasing to talk and trying to follow the music with his head.

Finishing, Koseck took off his hat and went timidly to ask with that gesture, because his mouth was unable to utter a word. Nobody paid any attention; he was about to leave without having dared to ask the drunk, when the man called to him: “Hey you, musician, come here … take this, drink to my health,” and handed him a glass of brandy.

Koseck took it, emptying it in one gulp, and rushed out.

Once outside, he breathed hard. Having had a hard time, he was unwilling to repeat it. He felt more cheerful and even a little happy, probably because of the liquor he had drunk, but his stomach still stubbornly rebelled and reminded him irritably that it had been more than forty-eight hours since he had eaten.

Where to go? He did not know for sure, but his feet unconsciously seemed headed for a place to which his poverty had introduced him. After walking a long distance through the narrow streets of the city, he stopped at the doorway of a miserable-looking house. In the bottom window, which conveys the light inside, he read, in big characters: Pawn Shop. Koseck, standing at the door with tears in his eyes, gazed at his cello, the inseparable companion of his life as an artist; he clasped it in his arms, kissed it and went into the house that deserves to die in the gloomy chapel.

* * *

Koseck dozed, leaning his head on the small table, on which leftover bread and cheese could be seen. When he awoke, it was dawn. Through the window, covered in frost, penetrated a diffused light that filled the room with inconclusive shadows. He looked around for something. And the cello? he thought. Suddenly, like a thunderbolt, the reality flashed upon his brain. The cello, his life-long companion, the only thing that might alleviate his pains and soothe his misery, was not there, and never would be again, ever. Never, never! … He thought he would die from the anguish. He got up, feeling a lump in his throat and a great weight on his chest. His suffering was so intense that he tried to calm himself by walking with long strides across the room, clutching his chest with both hands.

He went and opened the window. It was still snowing. The deserted street, the quiet houses, the bare trees, the gray sky, all that cold, wet atmosphere gave off such a feeling of melancholy and solitude that Koseck, instead of relief, had the gnawing sense that the pain of life was too sharp for him and could be relieved only by death.

He abruptly left the window, reached into a drawer for a cello string, climbed atop the table, tied one end of the string to a ceiling beam, made a noose on the other end, placed his head through the noose, and, jumping from the table, rushed into eternity.

The string, receiving the strong jolt, gave off a moaning note, barely discernible, and William Koseck’s body rocked gently, face set in a horrible grimace.

Outside, snow was falling, covering everything with white melancholy, that vast shroud of dead nature.