I was to learn later that he had composed and published several such papers and even delivered lectures which, considering his style of talking, must have been something, and it was also later that, on my remarking about his diverse talents, he spoke of himself as a well of worthless information and unmarketable achievements with the exception of his bandleading.
He was sitting again and improvised a short melody followed by several chords remotely connected by suspensions as if to round up his demonstration: “One likes to leave these remnants of music about when in the vein. They get lost among the cushions and the drapes and under furniture and perhaps even in that little machine, and then, in moments devoid of inspiration, one can rummage about, finding a chord here, a piece of melody there, no end. Have found it very useful in making arrangements for my band — a little musical reserve fund, eh, Chink?”
It was then, I think, that I realized that the Chink was there. Old, corpulent, with his marked Oriental look, he moved his head up and down slowly in grave assent as the Moor went on:
“You ought to understand — remarkable, this Chink.” He was speaking to the rest of us now: “Long, long ago, like all Oriental things, this fellow used to throw change around his rooms when he was in funds, so as to find it when he was broke. You remember, Dr. Jesucristo.” He meant de los Rios, of course.
Next thing he was pointing at the machine with his stick: “A clever little gadget this, a better time machine than any clock for impractical purposes. The slit differentiates, gives the derivative, and lifting the frame is equivalent to integrating, but it is also a rather misleading analogy and very inconsistent. It reduces our capacity for dimensionality instead of increasing it, and the lines were moving behind the scenes when the whole idea is the denial of all motion as such. Very sly and sophistic these little lines and they don’t fool anybody, but we’ll let them get away with it for purposes of illustration.”
His Cuban boy moved about quietly. At any rate I don’t remember hearing him and all I recall is his bright smiling teeth. He glided unobtrusively, filling our glasses, placing percebes, thick slices of chorizos, sobreasada on squares of Spanish bread, which they call Sicilian here; all in small dishes.
“Oh, tapitas! Come, Dr. Jesucristo, Chink, everybody. Help yourselves to tapitas. Very castizo, like the cheap taverns of our land. Let’s see what we have here — aha, aha — what! No shrimps?” And the shrimps appeared as if by enchantment and, of course, the olives. No true tapita without olives.
Then he was addressing himself to de los Rios while the rest of us tried to follow and he was expounding his favorite theory of knowledge. One can learn only what he already knows. Man knows everything he will ever learn, but must have it pointed out by study, given the tools to measure it, the magnifying mirror in which to see himself. That is why all learning must begin by fundamental assumptions which we accept because we know them to be true within ourselves and in the end everything is referred back to us as the ultimate judge. Thus proceeds all logic, all method. Impossible to learn what one cannot conceive. Our capacity for learning is limited only by our wisdom.
But to everything he gave an air of esoteric necromancy and exalted mysticism, presenting the miraculous as the result of logical understanding. With an understanding of the structure of matter, to walk upon the water should not appear impossible, but only uncommon and perhaps unexpected, like rising from the dead. Passing right through a wall, only highly improbable, only a matter of statistics. His was the habit of inflating a point of logic into a balloon of occultism and sending it aloft beyond the reach of anyone who could explode it.
Sucking on a percebe like a cigar butt, he concluded the first part of Schumann’s Carnaval in the grand manner, only to remove the percebe and resume his talk:
“Extraordinary, Schumann. The moderns have not caught up with him yet, but his heritage did flourish in Debussy. Not only the preoccupation with the novelty in elegance which constitutes so much of the charm of romanticism, but the romanticism essentially musical in the pursuit of new harmonies and coloring — compare their arabesques — the spirit of acoustic experimentalism”—and he played something about a girl with flaxen hair— “And yet, there is where he might have gone wrong. Those whole tone progressions, you know, deceptive and illicit as the little lines behind the frame. The effect constitutes a novel but fallacious illustration. Every note standing in the same relationship to all the others destroys the feeling of tonality and consequently of modulation — one of the most beautiful devices of musical structure — as in the case of the chromatic scale of equal temperament. It reduces everything to a question of pitch—” there was his laughter again. “Like the little lines behind the frame, reducing instead of increasing.”
He played from a very slow waltz, also Debussy, and spoke in gloomy tones of waltzes in general and in particular of a very sad one of Sibelius: “That is not a waltz, it is a dance macabre. People could not dance to that; only the dead could dance to it.”
Garcia began to talk to me and although I can’t remember what he said and don’t think I paid much attention, it created enough of a distraction. The Chink seemed to have gone to sleep but I noticed that he opened his eyes intermittently to help himself to the tapitas or a drink of manzanilla. Perhaps he was listening and concentrating, because the Moor, who was now playing a waltz, said to him: “This is for you. It brings back memories, eh, Chink?” and the Señor Olózaga opened his eyes and smiled a faraway smile and seemed to go into a contented reverie. That was his favorite tune, the Moor said very mysteriously, and the Señor Olózaga’s smile broadened and he settled himself more comfortably in his chair. He was enigmatic.
I noticed that the tapitas had been growing in size under the masterful guidance of the Cuban boy, who anticipated all our wishes, until after a while we were eating rice with clams out of regular dishes and the Moor a bowl of garlic soup. Magnificent confusion and disorder. I read from the notes in my hand:
Unlike Newton who claimed to make no hypotheses, one must make one fundamental and radical hypothesis for everything in the world of our experience to fall neatly into place and account for all phenomena. This is the advantage of this view over all others which have been advanced with the same purpose, but are full of patchwork and compromises of reason so that mechanics and cosmology rest — if this can be called rest — on two independent bases and are incapable of solving or explaining the simplest physical facts, including ourselves.
The secret and the key is the fourth perpendicular. Euclid with a fourth coordinate.
My attention was arrested by a pause in the conversation that was filled with some Spanish music of remarkable brilliance. Many have characterized the Spanish school of playing as excelling in its filigree delicacy and tenuous shading, crisp and frosty in the icicles of its expression. Not him. His was a style impetuous and abandoned. He played more like a natural musician than a trained virtuoso, where lack of digital dexterity is compensated by overconfidence of understanding and purpose in the conviction of being able to turn any blunder into an improvisation.