Everything Might Just Happen
by Gresham Cash
“The Silence of Music by Janet Larrea
He blew hard. She blew harder. Her greatest fear was having cheeks like Dizzy Gillespie. His fear was reality—he’d made it and there was nowhere higher to go.
Ramon was the golden child of a musical Catalan family. He’d been handed a trumpet at age five and told, “This is your future.” He weakly held the brass thing, heavy and foreboding, and tremored. His life was decided. Ramon was a depressive drunk with wicked chops.
Sylvia was born into a family of government clerks. Her father handed her a trumpet on her tenth birthday and said, “I won’t feel bad if you leave Argentina for good.” She was born two years after the ousting of Videla and, shortly thereafter, Viola. The last time Sylvia was in Argentina, she kissed her mother and told her that she was infected with the desire to follow her dreams. Her mother cursed her father.
Sylvia’s older brother moved to Barcelona in 2010. He was pursuing a master’s degree in some vague hinterland of socio-economics. He, among many others in Barcelona, saw problems in his homeland, in Spain, wherever people lived, and he wanted to discover a way for people to live in economic stability. Sylvia told him that there was no such thing. She studied trumpet in Buenos Aires until she bought a ticket to Barcelona in 2019.
She arrived with the ambition of embodying the genius of Miles Davis and the sex appeal of Lola Flores. She mimicked Miles’s style, his runs. She wore a gaucho hat and smoked hash on Monday nights. Under the yellow lights of El Raval, she sang tango melodies on street corners and accepted ten- and twenty-cent pieces from enamored men who’d grown up in tropical climates.
Eventually, she moved out of her brother’s apartment. She’d found her club—the location and the people. A dirty, dark hangout on a street named for thieves. But it was Ramon who discovered her one night on the Rambla del Raval. He was depressed again. I can tell you now, there is no redemption for Ramon. His chemical imbalance, his ruptured sensibility, whatever it was that plagued the depressive, was irreparable. Without a lifestyle change, he would stay right where he was.
So, he was drunk, depressed, and walking laps around the Rambla. He watched teenagers stealing bicycles; needles hanging from dope addicts lying against the walls of Filmoteca; prostitutes calling out to lost tourists; Pakistanis lined up in locutorios selling identical products. He walked in a circle aimlessly, never realizing that a circle can’t be aimless—unless you count the schizophrenic beating the same loop in front of the parochial school just off the Rambla. God help me. I was terrified of a future with a melted brain.
But just off a side street, beneath a towering scaffold and next to a segunda mano shop, he heard her voice. She was singing in an oddly convincing American accent. (She later told me that she was American too. That I should fuck right off with my high and mighty attitude. Then the bartender introduced me to a soupy old Catalan as his “Americano” friend. I once told Sylvia that as easy as my life seemed, we Americans lived in a constant state of irony. She went off on a tirade in sh-sh-sh Argentinian Spanish.)
Obviously, Ramon was smitten. He broke his lap around the Rambla and went straight for the voice. Everything happens to me, she sang. And Ramon, most assuredly, felt like everyone else that hears that song—how does she know? She finished on a maj7add9 that only she could hear. Ramon added the root.
“It’s all about the Bill Evans version,” he said as she lowered her hat in front of him.
She said, “I prefer the Billie Holiday. You know, singing.”
Ramon wanted to mention the Charlie Parker version with strings; Sylvia kept secret her fierce attraction to anything that Monk had touched. Intuiting this unspoken conversation, Ramon invited Sylvia to a jam session at a nearby club and then dropped a euro in her hat.
For about two weeks, he wasn’t depressed. He walked around El Raval after leaving his job at a print shop and hoped to run into the Argentinian singer.
She was in her room that looked out onto an unfinished building—a concrete cavern with plastic netting blowing like sheer curtains in a haunted house. Her time to herself was very important. She could only compose without distraction. She also intentionally never used her Spanish phone number. She did all of her messaging through email. That way, her phone would never throw a chiming C into her stew of Bb.
Two weeks later, she came to the jam session. She blew harder and longer than Ramon. She received more fanfare for her blues runs on “Straight, No Chaser.” Ramon flew around in Dorian but landed alone. He, like all of the others in the combo, myself included, thought that it was only right that Sylvia fall in love with a saxophonist, guitarist, drummer. But we were so far from her bullseye.
She didn’t believe in love. It wasn’t real. It wasn’t possible. It was a joke.
I spun my glass of beer in tight circles on a cardboard coaster and nodded in tacit agreement. I’d been in love, I told her. She said that Americans sold love just like everything else. I suggested that perhaps Argentines had over-ripened love. There was too much passion, and now the fruit was exploding in the excess heat. Soy argentina. And I said that was the problem—her language, nationality, and identity were all one. I said that I spoke English, was American and a believer in love. She gently grabbed my ears, almost as a non-sequitur, and I thought we were about to kiss. She pulled me to her face and then slapped me.
In my own language, I was undefinable. I tried to explain that without being American, I was nothing. Estadounidense didn’t even exist in my own language. I was North American, but so was Oscar Peterson, a Canadian, and Octavio Paz, a Mexican. They got their own labels. What was mine? She said that perhaps I was her slave. I was a drummer after all. I couldn’t exist without the notes of others.
We stepped outside to smoke a cigarette. From the shadows, Ramon approached, tears streaming down his face, and said that he had just thought of his ex-girlfriend. And now he was crying. I thought about a few of my ex-girlfriends briefly and realized that I never truly loved any of them. I couldn’t even feel a hint of sadness. Sylvia handed him a smoke and lit it. He didn’t even look at me, because he thought that I couldn’t understand Spanish. Sylvia put her hand on my shoulder and we watched him walk towards a wall covered with love messages—Elektra! Te Amo.
Sylvia said, “He wouldn’t be like this if he didn’t believe in love.” Ramon approached a pile of trash that encircled a homeless man’s bed and began aimlessly kicking pieces of cardboard. I think his family lineage was getting to his head. Sylvia said, “He wants to fuck me.”
Later, we were smashing away on some Sun Ra tune and Ramon stood up for his solo. I watched him just over my ride cymbal, eyes closed, blowing love into his horn as hard as he could. Sylvia stood in the dark at the back of the room.
Somewhere around that time, Sylvia and I met in my practice space in Hospitalet. It was in a post office basement and felt like tombs for living musicians. The walls were heavily graffitied with angry protests about God and government. There were tattered sheets of paper that announced everyone’s need for a bass player, a drummer. Barcelona was as full of guitarists as it was covered with love messages. I wondered if it bothered Sylvia that on the door to my rehearsal space it said, “I love myself.” Surely, this vanity was allowed in her world devoid of love.
We rehearsed, sans pianist, for about two hours before we rolled a porro with chocolate. Then we jammed for another three hours. I vamped as close to the percussion in Miles Davis’s “In a Silent Way” as I could get. Sylvia laughed at me. She knew that I was using her trumpet master to try to connect with her.
It didn’t work. But neither did it work for Ramon.
Again, we met at my rehearsal space. Understandably, mildewed rooms in basements full of drum hardware are fairly uninteresting places to imagine. But it’s necessary to picture the stale darkness. We rotated instruments. Arnau, the pianist trying out for our trio, was very handsome. He was a good player but carried it more with his charm. Arnau started vamping on my Fender Jazz Bass. Sylvia picked up her trumpet and started to climb the scale. I sat at the piano playing soft chords, trying as much as I might to sound like Mingus on the keys. The bass fell quiet. But I stared ahead into the dented black wood of the upright. Sylvia’s scale tapered off. I closed my eyes and kept playing.
For a brief moment, I mixed Ahmad Jamal with Ravi Shankar and drifted off. Behind me, Arnau and Sylvia were thrusting in time on the dirty floor of my practice space.
Later, I told Sylvia that I didn’t want to play with Arnau anymore. I said that we needed to focus on the package we were presenting to the audience. He wasn’t good enough, I claimed. She drained her drool from the trumpet and said, “No te vendas.” She didn’t want me to bring my Americanness, or wherever I was meant to claim, to our group. We would not sell ourselves.
I went to my practice space alone one night—paradiddles, paradiddle-diddles. Unfettered violence. I beat my drums to death. I wasn’t allowed a nationality, an identity, to sell myself, or to love. I wondered if Ramon was doing his lonely circles in El Raval with his horn in hand. I lit a cigarette and stared at the stained carpet in front of my drum kit.
Sylvia and Ramon agreed, there would be no love between them. She spruced him up a few times before our shows, gave him handjobs in the green room. You’ll be great. But she didn’t consider that Ramon was depressed because he already thought he was great. He was depressed too because neither did he believe in love. Infatuation, obsession, sex. But not love.
A few years later, both of our phones buzzed in our pants pockets on the floor. I reached over and lightly touched Sylvia’s nipple. She stirred. Then our phones buzzed in tandem again. I laughed to myself that eventually everyone would have to give in to technology. You could barely get into restaurants anymore without a QR code, let alone leave the country. They buzzed again. I reached over and grabbed my phone.
Russia invaded Ukraine as I lay in bed with Sylvia insisting that I wasn’t in love and never could be. I don’t know how much any of us believed our own lies. Ramon got lost on some side street in El Raval crying in Bb. A sad believer in genius and love. Sylvia smiled and hummed to herself. If everything was happening to her, then maybe that could too.
Janet Larrea was born and raised on the NJ hudson waterfront to immigrant parents who practiced art and music. She has studied art and music with an intention to have both work together in her visual work. You can visit her website www.janetstudio.com and instagram @sol_77__44.
Gresham Cash is a writer, musician, and filmmaker from Athens, Georgia. His writing has been published in Oxford American, Popshot Quarterly, and Midway Journal. 2024 sees the festival premiere of his first feature-length documentary, The Green Flash. He is currently collaborating with artists in Europe and the US combining a wide variety of sound, video, dance, and literary elements. His music ranges from ambient scores for films to multilingual rock music. He currently lives in Barcelona.
Insta: @greshamcash https://www.instagram.com/greshamcash/
Music: https://open.spotify.com/artist/3PspRwGIEQgRsMlDpZiQGq?si=uTqIoKrXR0SWKCr50ScZfw