Faraway Music

by Loretta Bigg


            I woke up to it late every Sunday, the blues calling me in São Paulo. Fourteen notes, simple and always the same on the last day of the week, played on unrecognizable instruments, like the tin, in Tin Pan Alley. First seven sweet tones, a long pause, a siren call, then seven more aching notes, mourning the siren, searching, calling, “Where are you? I can’t find you. Where are you? Love, I’ve lost you.”
            Fourteen tinkling sounds and then nothing more till the following week. I never heard a voice explaining, “These notes are me.” The music reached up to my apartment from the bottom of the world, but I could never find the source of it even though I searched the sidewalks, empty Sunday. But I only saw someone too late for the bus, a child playing with paper or a man driving a truck full of gas canisters.
            It wasn't sparrow song. I had never seen many birds in my poor little part of the great city. How could such a small life survive in this mass of cars 12 million strong called São Paulo? One dead starling, crushed on the sidewalk, just recognizable from my 9th floor window.
            But then my beautiful song passed by again, like mourning the little bird: "What happened? Why did you die?"
            How to describe a sound? Those notes filled me with aching desire, paused my coffee as I raised it to my lips. Made me forget I waited for Luiz to arrive or to cancel as usual: "Re-mem-ber. and come to me," the notes whispered. They felt like billowing sheets, belly sweat, or just the weight of him I missed so much. Eternal, we were, at least for a moment.
            I waited for the tune below to pass me by, then returned to my coffee and my newspaper. I tried to dissect how it played and paused and faded and then disappeared till the next Sunday. A zither? Soft as down. A feathered oboe? French horn? Stolen from the throat of São Paulo, a last bird or a woman's strangled plea? "Don't go yet. Please don't go yet."
            How to describe a melody in words, this string of blues that caught me, paused for a minute to be forgotten, then raised me up again in the middle of a toothbrush stroke, a held breath, the mystery of his eyes like ghosts on an empty pillow. A dirge, an elegy, an epitaph. "Where are you? I cannot find you." I waited for the answer, but the song stayed lost. And memories of him trembled in the zither strings, tumbling cataracts of water, kneading fingers on my shoulders, phantom mouth.
            I dressed quickly, hurried out into the street to catch it at last but could see nothing.
            One day, I asked Luiz about the secret of this passing music, but he wasn't really interested.
            "It's fourteen notes. You forget the past. You forgive. Once a week."
            "Sing it," Luiz said.
            But I could never imitate the sounds. They disappeared like water down the drain as soon as they passed my window. They were too simple to replicate.
            Luiz decided it must be a street musician in love with me. "Poor man, If he only knew how crazy you are." He shook his head and went back to sleep. I realized later that he couldn't connect what I was talking about with a tune he also heard every week.
            One morning, he lay snoring beside me, a two-note melody, boredom mixed with too much booze. I stared up at the blank ceiling, wondering what he was doing here still, why he hadn't left me yet. Wine on the sheets, white walls.
            I'd forgotten it was Sunday.
            Without warning, there it was, my faraway music, fourteen notes: "Life is hard. You'll survive, love." Then "All will pass, all will pass, love." My oboe, my zither, my unknown secret, I jumped out of bed to the window before it was too late, but saw nothing but a truck full of canisters.
            Luiz stirred. "What is it, what's wrong?"
            "That music, don't you hear it?"
            "What music?"
            "Faraway, like us, like... forever."
            And for once he listened, too, without that cynical look. The siren came, she sang for him.
            "Ah," he said, smiling. "You need gas?"
            "You know what this music is? It's been bothering me for forever."
            "It's been bothering everyone in Brazil for years." He turned back to sleep.
            I realized I was making a mistake, that I would lose something with his next words but I had to know. "I've always thought it was our song," I said.
            "Our song?" He looked at me like I was crazy again. "This isn't even a song, it's a cheap ad. It's the gas company. It's the guys selling those gas canisters. See down there, that man with the truck? Gas company music." And the notes drifted up to me again, metallic, below my 9th story window And I saw that, yes, it came from that truck, painted in peeling colors.
            "Why this music?" I asked, too late to stop. "Why this pretty song?" Of course it was just a jingle.
            "They used to have some kind of announcement but people got sick of it. So now it's this melody. See, it's Brazil. Even the gas company likes to sing, but it means nothing except. "Petro gas, you out of gas?"
            He laughed and turned his back on me again, white flesh brick wall I'd learned to face if I wanted him to stay. The music drove by one more time, Eros shot by his own arrow, falling to Earth, fading down the street: "I'm not yours, I fly away I am gone, so far away."
            Luiz soon stepped out of my life as nimbly as off an elevator.
            And I never heard my siren song again in that tinny jangle of notes.


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]Loretta Bigg is a dual American/Canadian citizen. She has a Master’s Degree in Creative Writing and several short plays performed in Canada and San Diego. Published work: short story, Everyday Fiction; short story, second place TEAL writing contest; two listening text books with Lynx Publishing. She made the top 100 in the last Launchpad prose contest. Soon to be published in Ariel Chart. She is retired but still works as the troupe musician for Vancouver Playback Theater, and as a standardized patient (actor) for doctors and nurses.