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Did this suggest that music boxes were something for idlers, for those who loafed around cities, and, in their more modern form, around the world?âNo. He, at any rate, sought out jukeboxes less in times of idleness than when he had work, or plans, and particularly after returning from all sorts of foreign parts to the place he came from. The equivalent of walking out to find silence before the hours spent writing was, afterwards, almost as regularly, going to a jukebox.âFor distraction?âNo. When he was on the track of something, the last thing in the world he wanted was to be distracted from it. Over time his house had in fact become a house without music, without a record player and the like; whenever the news on the radio was followed by music, of whatever kind, he would turn it off; also, when time hung heavy, in hours of emptiness and dulled senses, he had only to imagine sitting in front of the television instead of alone, and he would prefer his present state. Even movie theaters, which in earlier days had been a sort of shelter after work, he now avoided more and more. By now he was too often overcome, especially in them, by a sense of being lost to the world, from which he feared he would never emerge and never find his way back to his own concerns, and that he left in the middle of the film was simply
running away from such afternoon nightmares.âSo he went to jukeboxes in order to collect himself, as at the beginning?âThat wasn't it anymore, either. Perhaps he, who in the course of the weeks in Soria had tried to puzzle out the writings of Teresa of Avila, could explain “going to sit” with these objects after sitting at his desk by a somewhat cocky comparison: the saint had been influenced by a religious controversy of her times, at the beginning of the sixteenth century, between two groups, having to do with the best way to move closer to God. One groupâthe so-called
recogidos-believed
they were supposed to “collect” themselves by contracting their muscles and such, and the othersâ
dejados,
“leavers,” or “relaxers”âsimply opened themselves up passively to whatever God wanted to work in their soul, their
alma.
And Teresa of Avila seemed to be closer to the leavers than to the collectors, for she said that when someone set out to give himself more to God, he could be overwhelmed by the evil spiritâand so he sat by his jukeboxes, so to speak, not to gather concentration for going back to work, but to relax for it. Without his doing anything but keeping an ear open for the special jukebox chordsâ“special,” too, because here, in a public place, he was not exposed to them but had chosen them, was “playing” them himself, as it wereâthe continuation took shape in him, as he let himself go: images that had long since become lifeless now began to move, needed only to be written down, as next to (in Spanish
junto
, attached to) the music box he was listening to Bob Marley's “Redemption Song.” And from Alice's “Una notte speciale,” played day after day,
among other things, an entirely unplanned woman character entered the story on which he was working, and developed in all directions. And unlike after having too much to drink, the things he noted down after such listening still had substance the next day. So in those periods of reflection (which never proved fertile at home, when he tried, at his desk, to force them; he was acquainted with intentional thinking only in the form of making comparisons and distinctions), he would set out not only to walk as far as possible but also out to the jukebox joints. When he was sitting in the pimps' hangout, whose box had once been shot at, or in the café of the unemployed, with its table for patients out on passes from the nearby mental hospitalâsilent, expressionless palefaces, in motion only for swallowing pills with beerâno one wanted to believe him that he had come not for the atmosphere but to hear “Hey Joe” and “Me and Bobby McGee” again.âBut didn't that mean that he sought out jukeboxes in order to, as people said, sneak away from the present?âPerhaps. Yet as a rule the opposite was true: with his favorite object there, anything else around acquired a presentness all its own. Whenever possible, he would find a seat in such joints from which he could see the entire room and a bit of the outside. Here he would often achieve, in consort with the jukebox, along with letting his imagination roam, and without engaging in the observing he found so distasteful, a strengthening of himself, or an immersion in the present, which applied to the other sights as well. And what became present about them was not so much their striking features or
their particular attractions as their ordinary aspects, even just the familiar forms or colors, and such enhanced presentness seemed valuable to himânothing more precious or more worthy of being passed on than this; a sort of heightened awareness such as otherwise occurs only with a book that stimulates reflection. So it
meant
something, quite simply, when a man left, a branch stirred, the bus was yellow and turned off at the station, the intersection formed a triangle, the chalk was lying at the edge of the pool table, it was raining, and, and, and. Yes, that was it: the present was equipped with flexible joints! Thus, even the little habits of “us jukebox players” deserved attention, along with the few variations. While he himself usually propped one hand on his hip while he pushed the buttons, and leaned forward a little, almost touching the thing, another person stood some distance away, legs spread, arms outstretched like a technician; and a third let his fingers rebound from the buttons like a pianist, then immediately went away, sure of the result, or remained, as if waiting for the outcome of an experiment, until the sound came (and then perhaps disappeared without listening to any more, out onto the street), or as a matter of principle had all his songs selected by others, to whom he called out from his table the codes, which he knew by heart. What they all had in common was that they seemed to see the jukebox as a sort of living thing, a pet: “Since yesterday she hasn't been quite right.” “I dunno what's wrong with her today; she's acting crazy.”âSo was one of these devices just like any other, as far as he was concerned?âNo. There were telling differences, ranging
from clear aversion to downright tenderness or actual reverence.âToward a mass-produced object?âToward the human touches in it. The form of the device itself mattered less and less for him as time went on. As far as he was concerned, the jukebox could be a wartime product made of wood, or could be calledâinstead of WurlitzerâMusic Chest, or Symphony, or Fanfare, and such a product of the German economic miracle could look like a small box, even have no lights at all, be made of dark, opaque glass, silent and to all appearances out of commission, but then the list of selections would light up once you put the coin in, and after you pushed the buttons that internal whirring would begin, accompanied by the selector light on the black glass front. Not even the characteristic jukebox sound was so decisive for him anymore, emanating from the depths as from under many soundless layers, the unique roaring that could often be heard only if one listened for it, similar, he thought one time, to the way the “river” in William Faulkner's story can be heard far below the silent, standing ocean waters in the land the river has flooded from horizon to horizon, as the “roaring of the Mississippi.” In a pinch, he could make do with a wall box, where the sound came out flatter, or more tinny, than it ever had from a transistor radio, and if absolutely necessary, if there was so much noise in the place that the actual sound of the music became inaudible, even a certain rhythmic vibration sufficed; he could then make out the chorus or even just one measureâhis only requirementâof the music he had selected, from which the whole song would play in his
ear, from vibration to vibration. But he disliked those music boxes where the choice of songs, instead of being unique and “personally” put together at that location, was itself mass-produced, the same from one place to the next throughout an entire country, without variation, and made available to the individual establishments, indeed forced on them, by an anonymous central authority, which he could picture as a sort of Mafia, the jukebox Mafia. Such unvarying, lockstep programs, with choices among only current hits, even in a fine old Wurlitzerâby now there was hardly anything else in all countriesâcould be recognized by the fact that there was no longer a typed list; it was printed, completely covering the slots for individual song titles and performers' names. But, strangely enough, he also avoided those jukeboxes whose list of offerings, like the menu in certain restaurants, was done in a uniform handwriting from top to bottom, from left to right, although, as a rule, precisely there every single record seemed intended for him alone; he did not like a jukebox's program to embody any plan, no matter how noble, any connoisseurship, any secret knowledge, any harmony; he wanted it to represent confusion, with an admixture of the unfamiliar (more and more as the years went by), and also plenty of pieces for escape, among them, to be sure, and all the more precious, the very songs (just a few, to be hunted down among all the chaotic possibilities, were enough) that met his needs at the moment. Such music boxes also made themselves known in their menu of choices; with a hodgepodge of machine-and handwritten notations, and, above all, handwriting
that changed from title to title, one in block letters, in ink, the next in flowing, almost stenographic secretary style, but most, even with the most dissimilar loops and slants of the letters, showing signs of particular care and seriousness, some, like children's handwriting, as if painted, and, time and again, among all the mistakes, correctly written ones (with proper accents and hyphens), song titles that must have struck the waitress in question as very foreign, the paper here and there already yellowed, the writing faded and hard to make out, perhaps also taped over with freshly written labels with different titles, but where it showed through, even if illegible, still powerfully suggestive. In time, his first glance more and more sought out those records in a jukebox's table of choices that were indicated in such handwriting, rather than “his” records, even if there was only one such. And sometimes that was the only one he listened to, even if it had been unfamiliar or completely unknown to him beforehand. Thus, in a North African bar in a Paris suburb, standing in front of a jukebox (whose list of exclusively French selections immediately made it recognizable as a Mafia product), he had discovered on the edge a label, handwritten, in very large, irregular letters, each as emphatic as an exclamation point, and had selected that smuggled-in Arab song, then again and again, and even now he was still haunted by that far-resonating SIDI MANSUR, which the bartender, rousing himself from his silence, told him was the name of “a special, out-of-the-ordinary place” (“You can't just go there!”).
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Was that supposed to mean that he regretted the disappearance of his jukeboxes, these objects of yesteryear, unlikely to have a second future?
Â
No. He merely wanted to capture and acknowledge, before even he lost sight of it, what an object could mean to a person, above all what could emanate from a mere object.âAn eating place by a playing field on the outskirts of Salzburg. Outdoors. A bright summer evening. The jukebox is outside, next to the open door. On the terrace, different patrons at every table, Dutch, English, Spanish, speaking their own languages, for the place also serves the adjacent campgrounds, by the airfield. It is the early eighties, the airfield has not yet become “Salzburg airport,” the last plane lands at sundown. The trees between the terrace and the playing field are birches and poplars, in the warm air constant fluttering of leaves against the deep yellow sky. At one table the locals are sitting, members of the Maxglan Working Man's Athletic Club with their wives. The soccer team, at that time still a second-division club, has just lost another game that afternoon, and will probably be dropped from the league. But now, in the evening, those affected are talking about the trees for a change, while there is a constant coming and going at the window where beer is dispensedâfrom the tents and back. They look at the trees: how big they've gotten and how straight they've grown, since they, the club members, went out and with their own hands dug them up as seedlings from the black mossy soil and planted them here in rows in the brown clay! The song the jukebox
sends out again and again that evening into the gradually oncoming darkness, in the pauses between the rustling and rasping of the leaves and the even buzz of voices, is sung in an enterprising voice by Helene Schneider, and is called “Hot Summer Nites.” The place is completely empty, and the white curtains billow in at the open windows. Then at some point someone is sitting inside, in a corner, a young woman, silently weeping.
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âYears later. A restaurant, a
gostilna,
on the crown of the Yugoslavian karst, at some remove from the highway from Stanjel (or San Daniele del Carso). Indoors. A mighty old-fashioned jukebox next to a cupboard, on the way to the restroom. Visible behind ornamental glass, the record carousel and turntable. To operate it, one uses tokens instead of coins, and then it is not enough to push a button, of which there is only one; first, one has to turn a dial until the desired selection lines up with the indicator arrow. The mechanical arm then places the record on the turntable with an elegance comparable to the elbow flourish with which an impeccably trained waiter presents a dish. The
gostilna
is large, with several dining rooms, which on this evening in early fallâwhile outside the
burja,
or
bora,
blasts without relief over the highland, coming from the mountains in the northâare full, mostly with young people: an end-of-term party for several classes from all the republics of Yugoslavia; they have met one another for the first time here, over several days. Once the wind carries the distinctive signal of the karst train down from the cliffs, with the dark sound of a
mountain ferry. On the wall, across from the customary picture of Tito, hangs an equally colorful but much larger portrait of an unknown: it is the former proprietor, who took his own life. His wife says he was not from around here (even if only from the village in the next valley). The song, selected this evening by one student after another, that wafts through the dining rooms over and over again is sung in a self-conscious and at the same time childishly merry unison, even, as an expression of a people, dance able, and has one word as its refrain: “Jugoslavija!”