Out of Place: A Memoir (17 page)

Before I left for the United States in 1951, my parents had still not made the transition into Cairo society on a major scale. Despite their wealth, the circle of their acquaintances and friends was confined pretty much to various retainers and a few family members such as Isaac Goldenberg, the family jeweler; Osta Ibrahim, the amiable handlebar-mustachioed carpenter whose workshops produced furniture for the house and, on an increasing scale, for my father’s business; Mahmud, Osta Ibrahim’s son-in-law (his other son-in-law was Mohammed Abu-
of); my mother’s youngest brother, Emile, who was now working for my father; Mourad Asfour, a rising young employee at the YMCA who later saddled my father with thousands of pounds in debt when his sports shop failed and the loans my father had guaranteed were called in; Naguib Kelada, a genial Copt who was the YMCA’s general secretary and an important associate of my father’s. Kelada’s daughter Isis possessed a phenomenal alto voice and sang at the American Mission Church. Their circle was completed by a small number of relatives, such as Auntie Melia, and Uncle Al and his strange giggling wife, Emily, their two sons and one daughter, plus the occasional Palestine-based relative on a sporadic visit to Cairo, mostly for shopping or business. These friends and acquaintances turned up for meals at appointed times and days (for instance, the carpenter for Saturday breakfast), and I came to know them best by their eating habits—Osta Ibrahim refused to eat white bread, loved garlic, preferred
foul
(fava beans) to meat, for example. I was meticulously observant of tiny superficial details and became more so as I lived the contrast between American and local environments with increasing intensity that first year at CSAC. Why did the Americans wear colored socks, Egyptians and Arabs not? We had no T-shirts, whereas “they” did.

Miss Clark’s impassive dislike and disapproval of me dogged me at home as well. There were monotonous injunctions against my lack of concentration, seriousness, sense of purpose, and strength of character:
I never learned anything from these injunctions, having taught myself to resist them by reducing them in my mind to pure sound. All pleasures except for parentally certified ones like playing with my Lionel electric train—brought back from the United States by my father in 1946, an extremely complicated thing to set up, requiring the dining table to be cleared, plus the services of someone skilled at electricity, since the connections between cars were never just right—were so ringed with approbation as to seem impossible to enjoy. I was allowed two, and then three, radio programs a week: two from the Children’s Corner, on Sunday afternoon and Wednesday evening, a horribly smarmy “good” collection of aunties and uncles, English during the war, Egyptian after it (all of them affecting ghastly imitation-British accents and revolting names like Auntie Loulou and Uncle Fouad), and one—“Nights at the Opera”—on the BBC every Sunday afternoon at 1:15, which is where I listened to a full-length opera for the first time. When Smetana’s
The Bartered Bride
was broadcast I was entranced, my mind desperately trying to imagine Czech wedding festivities and what the completely incomprehensible words across the airwaves giving me so much pleasure might mean.

Music was, on the one hand, a dissatisfying and boring drill of piano exercises in which Burgmüller, Czerny, and Hanon were the books I was chained to in mindless repetitions that did not seem to improve my keyboard prowess sufficiently, and on the other hand, an enormously rich and haphazardly organized world of magnificent sounds and sights comprising not only what I listened to but also embellished versions of the snapshots and portraits in Gustav Kobbé’s
Complete Opera Book
and Ernest Newman’s
Opera Nights
, both of which were in my parents’ library, combined with imagined scenes generated out of sounds made by the orchestra’s preperformance tune-up, which I learned to cherish on radio broadcasts. Without a clear rationale or system, the family record collection provided me with a strange hodgepodge of Jeanette MacDonald and Nelson Eddy, Richard Strauss, Paderewski, Paul Robeson, and Bach, plus oddities like Deanna Durbin singing Mozart’s
Alleluia
. As I devoted myself to the private experience of music, I saw and heard a vast theater, with lots of black ties and bare-shouldered women (my father had taken to wearing his tuxedo on those nights he went to his top-secret Masonic lodge meetings; my mother took to
wearing evening clothes that emphasized her ample bosom and white shoulders when they began attending regular subscription nights during the Cairo opera and ballet season). All this suggested to my erratically nourished imagination a gala of wonderfully ornate sexual exhibition and impossibly brilliant musical performance, sometimes orchestral in the manner of an MGM film (this, after all, was José Iturbi’s heyday as maestro, a role he carried off with a gigantic baton topped with a gleaming red light, waved around with extremely lush results), sometimes operatic as only scantily indicated by sexually arousing portraits I ferreted out in Kobbé and Newman. One in particular, of Ljuba Welitsch as Salomé in a modified bathing suit, took hold of my fancy, caused it to make opera the embodiment of an erotic world whose incomprehensible languages, savage plots, unrestrained emotions, and dizzying music were extremely exciting.

Wagner remained the great mystery and the most enticing of all. An extremely enigmatic 78 rpm entitled “Hagen’s Watch” on one side and “Hagen’s Call” on the other introduced me at the age of about ten to the
Ring
, none of which I was able to see or hear until 1958, when I made my first visit to Bayreuth. Hagen was sung by an English performer—Albert Coates, I think—who bellowed, growled, and snarled in a suitably compelling manner sounds that represented a marvelously foggy world of spear-carrying villains, terrible oaths, bloody-minded action, all of it as remote as it was possible to be from the prim world of American children and parentally controlled life at home. I am convinced that were it not for the random and broad field provided by the miscellaneous collection of records, which never yielded up the underlying secret of what held it together or revealed to me the rationale of the history of Western music with its schools, periods, developing genres, and an occasional performance here and there, I would have been stifled completely by the sterile drills, “children’s” piano pieces, and, alas, well-meaning teachers to whom I was officially subject.

While at CSAC I had become the pupil of a Miss Cheridjian (who had replaced my first teacher, the kind and patient Leila Birbary), whose weekly appearances for our lessons (first Jean’s, then Rosy’s, then mine) were unpleasant confrontations over my inability to follow her shouted instructions—count ta fa ti fi, forte, piano, staccato—punctuated by loud slurps of the coffee and energetic chomps on the cake brought to
her dutifully by Ahmed, our ironic head
suffragi
. Cherry (as we called her) succeeded only in convincing me that I was a truant and a failed pianist, whereas alone with my records and books I was a kid who knew a great deal about opera plots and a few performers like Edwin Fischer, Wilhelm Kempff, and Bronislaw Huberman (I knew the latter through the recording he made with George Szell of the Beethoven Violin Concerto), and had my highly embroidered fantasies of concert life.

By the late forties I was finally able to attend opera performances—the
“saison lyrique italienne,”
as it was called—at Cairo’s Opera House, originally built by Khedive Ismail for the Suez Canal opening in 1869. My parents’ subscription also included the French Ballet des Champs-Elysées, led memorably by Jean Babilée and Nathalie Phillipart, who to this day represent for me the touchstone of a dazzling, glamorous kind of dancing, a genre in which I placed the stunning Cyd Charisse, all of whose films I saw: to me dance was a spectacular kind of sexual experience only to be had vicariously and surreptitiously. Cairo was then an international city dominated in its cultural life, so far as I could tell, by Europeans, some of whom my father knew through his business. I always felt that I was at several removes from what was most exciting about it, though I was eagerly grateful to have what I could of it, mostly under the rubric of “art.” CSAC, where I stayed through the academic year 1948–49, got smaller and less challenging as I moved up through the ninth grade, less stimulating intellectually and more and more cloistered, straightlaced, gray, sedate, unexciting. Going to the opera in the winter months represented a great increase in my knowledge of music—of composers, repertory, performers, traditions. I can date to those years my exasperated impatience with books by Sigmund Spaeth, the American “tune-detective,” and his tacky “stories behind the world’s greatest music,” as well as with children’s books, of which we had many, on the “great composers.” Only Wagner remained just out of reach: a performance I attended of
Lohengrin
in Italian during the
“saison lyrique”
I remember mystified and disappointed me, for its incomprehensible action, the literal obscurity of an interminable second act, and its general air of despondency and lostness. The pudgy Neapolitan Lohengrin struck me as the very antithesis of what I had expected in nobility and chivalric stature.

The first opera I saw (and never saw again) was Giordano’s
André Chenier
, when I was twelve. I remember asking my father whether “they” sang all the way through, or if there were breaks for speaking (as in the Nelson Eddy–Jeanette MacDonald films and records I was accustomed to). “All the time,” was his brusque reply, but his answer came a few weeks after an excruciating evening at the Diana Cinema attending a concert by the singer Om Kulthum that did not begin until nine-thirty and ended well past midnight, with no breaks at all in a style of singing that I found horrendously monotonous in its interminable unison melancholy and desperate mournfulness, like the unending moans and wailing of someone enduring an extremely long bout of colic. Not only did I comprehend nothing of what she sang but I could not discern any shape or form in her outpourings, which with a large orchestra playing along with her in jangling monophony I thought was both painful and boring. By comparison,
André Chenier
had the dramatic animation and the plot line to keep me absorbed. One of our 78s was
“Nemico della patria,”
so I waited rather expectantly for the aria to occur as the drama unfolded, but was unable to spot it. Gino Bechi, a regular in the visiting company assembled from Rome and Naples’s San Carlo, played Gerard with a panache and intensity I tried to recreate later by bounding and sliding about in the privacy of my room. I had no idea why characters should sing at all, but was compelled by this mystery from the moment I first encountered it on the Cairo stage.

I can date my most important musical discoveries, however, almost to the minute: all of them occurred in private, away from the hectoring demands of the piano as construed by my mother and teachers like Cherry. This disjuncture between what I felt about and what I actually did in music seems to have sharpened my memory considerably, allowing me first to retain, then to play over in my mind’s ear, a sizeable number of orchestral, instrumental, and vocal compositions without much understanding of period or style. I was always tormented by the rarity, the unseizable preciousness, of a “live” musical experience, and therefore was always looking for ways to hold on to it. When I saw
The Barber of Seville
for the first time at age thirteen, I was riveted by the performance, and curiously forlorn at the same time; I knew that what I was witnessing—Rossini’s fecund gaiety and irreverence, Tito Gobbi’s wit and authority, Ettore Bastianini’s mock-solemn
“La Calunnia”—
would not soon recur in any form, although I could hope that “Nights at the Opera” might broadcast an aria here or there, which for some time the program did not. Yet, exactly a year later, ever the alert, not to say snoopy, loiterer around my parents’ room at Christmastime, I suspected that I would be getting a present of records. At about four on Christmas morning I crept into our darkened drawing room, felt my way to the unnaturally green, artificial tree that my mother recovered from the attic, decorated, and restored to its niche year after year, and discovered an eight-record album of selections from the
Barber
sitting at its base. Its cast included Riccardo Stracciari, Dino Borgioli, Mercedes Capsir, Salvatore Baccaloni. Carefully opening the package, I played through the records immediately, doors closed, volume turned down very low, the somber room gradually lightening as the morning dawned. To have had the staged performance as I remembered it confirmed in so private and exclusive a setting was the highest of pleasures, yet I also found myself semiconsciously trapped by that very special quality in a realm of silence and an impossible subjectivity which I had inadequate power to sustain.

More than any other composer, it was Beethoven who informed my musical self-education most consistently. I wasn’t deemed fit for his sonatas as a pianist (Mozart was my bane), although I made repeated covert attempts to play the “Pathétique” Sonata and in the process developed a sight-reading appetite way beyond my digital capacities. Scolded for not practicing my assigned Hanon and Czerny exercises, despite my mother’s ever-watchful presence, I fled into records and illicitly deciphered “grown-up” pieces at the piano by Mendelssohn, Fauré, Handel, who seemed to me programmatically neglected for the trash I was required to persist with for hours on end.