That afternoon, I remember, I’d attempted to perform back surgery on a dwarf who had gotten so stooped and hump-shouldered that she could barely walk. Neighborhood children had been throwing rocks at her for years. She was brilliant and very funny, but struggled with a terrible speech impediment, and was also cursed with a disastrous fashion sense that would have been merely amusing if the overall effect had not been so tragic. She would shrug the burden that was her shoulders and say, it is like trying to find clothing for a box, do you see?
I had learned to converse with this woman, but only with great difficulty. Her original language was Portuguese, and she spoke the local tongue with a clipped, husky accent, embellished with a stutter. I’d been playing chess with her at the local café for years before I became her physician, and we had a shared passion for jazz and American rhythm and blues. She had, without a doubt, the best record collection in the entire town, and the only decent library of books in English.
I was in a dark mood that day, as I made my way home through the tight and crowded streets. It was insufferably hot, and the rain was already moving in. The fat sun was sinking through dark clouds building in the western sky. The surgery hadn’t gone well; my skills in that arena are poor, and truth be told I am no great shakes as a doctor. Pity is a dangerous and useless quality in a physician, and I was troubled by my foolish involvement in an unnecessary procedure.
Even with a capable young doctor from another city assisting, at my expense, the surgery had been a terrible failure. I had made arrangements to use a surgical theater in a local clinic, and these facilities were barely adequate. This is a bad case, the other surgeon, a Frenchman, had said. He kept repeating it, mumbling through his mask. Oh my, this is a very bad case. It is too risky.
It was a very bad case indeed. It became apparent that there was nothing we could do to help the poor little woman, and I felt terrible surveying the mess we had made. Even our relatively simple exploratory operation would result in a long and painful recovery and rehabilitation. Medical facilities in that part of the country were primitive, and I knew that the patient’s only hope would involve a long and arduous trip to another city in the south, where there would be a better hospital and more capable physicians, a trip that I knew full well she could not afford and would never undertake.
All that day I’d been looking forward to going home to my apartment and listening to jazz. A friend in the U.S. had recently sent me a couple of new Cecil Taylor reissues on CD, and I had planned to spend the evening sitting in my big green chair and drinking beer while I listened to them. I once spent a month alone in a friend’s cabin in upstate New York, and the entire time I did nothing but listen to six Lee Morgan records from his prime years on Blue Note. I played those records every day, over and over. It was all, really and honestly, I did. I sat on the couch and listened to Lee Morgan. I had made a careful study of the progression from Fats Navarro to Clifford Brown to Lee Morgan, and that month was the end of that particular road.
Now, suddenly, I no longer felt like listening to Cecil Taylor. I needed something that required less concentration. I had a vision—a memory, really—of the humpbacked woman dancing awkwardly in her cluttered little apartment to a Wilson Pickett record.
The next morning I had the unpleasant task of delivering the bad news to my little friend. Although saddened, she was expert in the art of resignation. I long ago accepted that I would never be beautiful, she said. I suppose I can accept that I will never walk upright.
She asked if I would bring to the clinic her portable phonograph player and some records. That day’s mail brought me a live Sam Cooke record from the States, and I took it with me when I paid her a visit in the afternoon. I set up her phonograph and instructed the young nurse attendant in its use. I cued up the Sam Cooke record and handed the jacket to the poor woman. She was lying on her side, huddled beneath the terrible eminence at the top of her spine. She held the record jacket in her right hand, which was dangling from the bed, and she had to peer over the edge of the mattress toward the floor to scrutinize it. There was a lengthy Peter Guralnick essay on the reverse side, and she had to pull the jacket close to her face to make out the tiny print. I watched as she did this, as Sam Cooke and his band launched into “Chain Gang.” She was engrossed in the words on the record jacket, and I could see her toes wiggling beneath the bed sheet.
I wish there were a way I could show you myself in that moment. I was standing there, helpless, a stranger even to myself. I no longer had any clear idea what it was that had brought me to that part of the world, the odd conflation of desperation and restlessness that had torn me—so long ago now—from all my old notions of what my life would be. I was stunned by the sad realization that this poor woman, lumped like a broken-down seal beneath the sheets, probably understood me better than anyone else on the planet. I felt as if my heart were breaking.
I announced that I would be going. With a great effort my friend turned her head to find me standing at the foot of the bed, and she stuttered her thanks through an immense smile that was both painful and wondrous to behold.
Brad Zellar lives in Minneapolis and writes the weblog Open All Night.
