Aloha, Mozart Read online

  ALOHA, MOZART

  WAIMEA WILLIAMS

  LUMINIS BOOKS

  Published by Luminis Books

  1950 East Greyhound Pass, #18, PMB 280,

  Carmel, Indiana, 46033, U.S.A.

  Copyright © Waimea Williams, 2013

  PUBLISHER’S NOTICE

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Certain Hawaiian words such as lei, hula, luau, etc. have entered the world vocabulary and are not italicized in this book or given now standard punctuation. Less familiar words are punctuated and translated according to current use. Common place names such as Hawaii, Kauai, Oahu, and Waikiki are left in their familiar form.

  Cover design for Aloha, Mozart by Carol Colbath.

  Hardcover ISBN: 978-1-935462-66-8

  Paperback ISBN: 978-1-935462-63-7

  Printed in the United States of America

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  Advance praise for Aloha, Mozart:

  “Few know the secrets of Salzburg in 1968: the glamorous, high-stakes world of young competitors for renown in classical music. The most wonderful reward of the novel is the immersion it provides in a beautiful old culture, the cuisine and the architecture and the customs and the high art, as well as the corruption, of a great civilization.”

  —Louis B. Jones, author of Ordinary Money, Particles and Luck, California’s Over, and Radiance

  “With this poetic debut novel—set in 20th century Hawai’i, Manhattan, and Salzburg—Waimea Williams delivers the bittersweet story of Maile Manoa. Gorgeously conceived and enacted and textured, this richly pleated story unfolds with dark and thrilling suspense.”

  —Al Young, California poet laureate, author of more than 25 books; poems and novels

  “Aloha, Mozart really got under my skin; the knowing narrative voice, the quiet passion and intensity of the story, the sensuality with which Williams evokes place. I came away feeling it took me to places I’d never been, but recognized completely. The only thing this wonderful novel lacks is a soundtrack.”

  —Cai Emmons, author of The Stylist and His Mother’s Son

  To teachers, for passing on knowledge that must be learned early in life and at the start of a career.

  Acknowledgments

  It’s been a very long road. Gratitude for taking the trip with me goes. . .

  To my agent April Eberhardt, who manages to be both gracious and tenacious.

  To Luminis Books for treating a first novel with care and providing a chance to be heard.

  To the Ragdale Foundation for its generosity.

  To the Squaw Valley Community of Writers, for years of support and kindness. Mahalo nui loa.

  To Richard Ford, Robert Stone, Oakley Hall, and Ann Close, for encouragement when I was green.

  To the Breadloaf and Napa Valley conferences for scholarships.

  To Roger Jellinek for over a decade of support and friendship.

  To Joy Johannessen, a brilliant editor who asked all the right questions.

  To teachers and musicians in Hawaii and Salzburg, gone now and yet not:

  Shigeru Hotoke, Patsy Saiki, Hanna Ludwig, Paul Schilhawsky, Robert Kuppelwieser, Erik Werba, Kumu John Keolamaka‘āinana Lake.

  To the Austrian government for giving support to a foreign student.

  To Donna Levin of San Francisco for years of sharing her devotion to novels and fiction.

  To present day friends outside the field of writing who remain sources of inspiration:

  Mahea Kauka Wong, Kaponoi‘ai Molitau, Mahi‘ai Cummings.

  Aloha mai no, aloha aku. Love given is love returned.

  Aia no ka mea e mele ana. Let the singer select the song.

  —‘Ōlelo No‘eau, Hawaiian Proverbs, M.K. Pukui

  Nichts ist gefährligher als eine schöne Melodie. Nothing is more dangerous than a beautiful melody.

  —Frederich Nietzsche, Der Fall Wagner

  1

  MAILE MANOA’S SINGING came from the ocean, people said, from the mountains, from flowers. It floated on the wind like a message sent to each listener, a voice of ancient beauty, ancient power. Some claimed that dogs and horses stopped eating to listen to her, chickens in the yard, even sharks out beyond the reef. She knew all the verses to more than a hundred songs and hymns, and could pull a melody out of the air, pitch perfect, rhythm perfect, as if capturing a spirit and releasing it to share. Impressive for a girl of eleven, but she didn’t consider herself special. Singing was simply something she did.

  One afternoon Maile’s sixth-grade teacher at Lihue Grammar School pulled a black disk from an album of records in brown paper sleeves. “Art and music illuminate the world,” he told the class. “This is music none of you have heard, from my own collection. It was composed by a man named Verdi.”

  The class quieted in expectation. Records were made on the main-land and came to Hawaii by ship, a journey of two thousand five hundred miles. On the outer island of Kauai, the only records in the school library were recitations of the multiplication tables for students who needed help with arithmetic.

  The teacher set the disk to spinning on a small phonograph and lowered the arm. “Now,” he said, “imagine you are in ancient Egypt. On the banks of a river. It’s nighttime.” The needle made contact. From the speaker came scraping orchestral sounds, a whirring of flute tones, then a voice, slow, strong, high-pitched: “Oooo pa-treee-aa mee-a . . .”

  The students stiffened in surprise. Maile sat forward. Her long black braid swung over one shoulder, and tiny hairs at the back of her neck stood up. The sounds ground onward, on instruments she couldn’t name, in a melody that kept getting longer, more complicated, unlike any of the songs she knew. Some lady screaming, she thought. Why put that on a record?

  The teacher watched his pupils wincing and frowning. He raised the phonograph arm and regarded them with a stare of patient disappointment. This music, he explained, came from a great country in Europe, Italy, which they had just studied, and which also had great art, all those scenes from the Bible, remember? Yes, they could locate Rome on the wall map, and they recalled the paintings of Abraham’s Sacrifice and the Slaughter of the Innocents. They remembered pyramids, pharaohs, and mummies, but could make no connection to the music their teacher had tried to give them. Finally he excused them a few minutes early. They picked up their books in silence and bolted out to the playground to wait for the last bell.

  The twenty students in Maile’s class were a typical outer-island combination of Japanese, Filipinos, mixed-blood Hawaiians, and a few Caucasian children of plantation owners. Their school was bordered on three sides by fields of high green sugarcane topped by thick clusters of white tassels. To the south the sugar mill’s smokestack poked into the blue sky. A stream of soot flakes drifted down onto the playground as the students traded jeers and hoots at a safe distance from their teacher: “Oooo pa-tree-a!” Anyone with Caucasian ancestors was singled out to explain the weird music, the more white blood the better. The son of a plantation owner said his ancestors were American, not Italian. The daughter of an Irish rancher sided with him. Maile was Hawaiian-Chinese-German, and a girl of Japanese ancestry asked her, “You got haole blood, you know wat’s ‘at music, e?”

  “S’posed to be singing,” Maile said.

  “Not!” a Filipino boy shouted, and the challenge was passed to other students who were part Portuguese, Spanish, Scottish. All refused any connection to the teacher’s music.

  What bothered Maile most was the unfamiliarity of the sounds. Everyone she knew played some kind of instrument.
Every town on the island was full of musicians. Guitars and ukuleles were common, although sharkskin temple drums had disappeared long ago, and violins were unknown. From Nāwiliwili to Hā‘ena, upright pianos in assembly halls were in constant use, no matter how rusted and warped. A string bass could always be borrowed or made from a bucket and a length of clothesline. Few families owned a radio or record player, although people heard music all week: “My Country ‘Tis of Thee” at school, backyard Waikiki hula after work, Japanese farm ditties, jump rope chants, blunt Protestant hymns on Sunday in English and Hawaiian. Nothing was even close to this Vur-dee.

  The bell rang and the students scattered off the playground. Maile headed toward Kanemā‘ulu village, crossing the bridge over the rail-road yard at the sugar mill. Under the trestle a train from the cane fields chuffa-chuffa-chuffed toward the unloading dock. On the outside wall of the mill the exposed hooks of the cane-washing machinery clattered in an exciting rhythm. From inside came the creak and screech of the massive cane crushers. Maile listened to the cacophony and heard underneath it the opening melody on the record, the high, powerful voice. Italy and Egypt.

  Other than schoolbooks, Maile’s only link to the world beyond Kauai was her grandmother’s radio. The Korean War was nearly over, but Tūtū still listened faithfully for news of local soldiers. Reception was often spotty, though at times the radio could pick up Honolulu stations from a hundred miles away across the rough Ka‘ie‘iewaho channel. Programs originated in distant New York, the Empire State, where people were Americans. Before Maile was born, the radio had come by freighter from San Francisco all the way to Nāwiliwili harbor. Since then it had stood in the front room of her grandmother’s small house, an object of veneration and suspicion, cared for like an infant, fed with electricity, its case dusted regularly and polished with kukui nut oil.

  When Maile got home, Tūtū was outside grating coconut meat and chatting with neighbors. She wouldn’t turn on the radio for another two hours, and then only for twenty minutes of local news, because on Wednesdays the next show was Fibber McGee and Molly, a mainland comedy no one understood.

  Maile fed the rabbits and the ducks. Inside the house she cut lengths of string to mend a scoop net for shrimp. With slow precision she completed a page of arithmetic homework. She was hānai, by tradition adopted at birth by Tūtū so her grandmother wouldn’t be lonely when Maile’s parents moved to Honolulu to find jobs that paid cash money. She hadn’t seen her family since, because only plantation owners could afford traveling to other islands to visit relatives. The Manoa clan did not write letters or make phone calls, except at Christmas or to report a death. There were now nine children, but Maile didn’t really miss the parents and siblings she had never known. She was the one who waded onto the reef to catch Tūtū’s favorite squid, who sat next to her in church with the adults, who found her eyeglasses when they went missing, and was rewarded with a warm embrace and a hand that smoothed her hair. Having Tūtū to herself felt better than sharing a mother and father with a crowd of brothers and sisters, like most children had to do.

  From out in the yard came squawking: Paka-paka-paaaaa! Pak, pak!

  The old rooster Maile was supposed to catch, kill, pluck, and clean for dinner. Tough meat needed to stew until dark. She groaned and headed for the kitchen to heat water for scalding feathers. From nearby came another sound, the soft haaa . . . haaa of her grandmother’s broom sweeping fish scales from the packed clay by the back door. Together the sighing and stabbing tones made a tantalizing combination: chicken and broom, each with a pattern predictable enough almost to form a melody. The schoolteacher’s strange music stirred under her skin. Why would anyone go to the trouble of making a record unless it meant something to a lot of people?

  With the stealth of a river crab, Maile turned away from the stove. She was not allowed to enter the front room until five o’clock, when Tūtū sat down for the news, and only after washing her hands and feet of the red dust that drifted in from the cane fields. The room and the radio were otherwise taboo. Tūtū’s Hawaiian-language Bible was kapu too, along with touching the chiefly birthstones at Wailua river, going near a burial cave, or talking loudly at an ancient temple. The limitless power of kapu also meant never sassing a teacher and always sharing food. Life on Kauai had one basic rule: Everything wrong came from greed and me-only, and everything right began with respect and sharing. Long ago Maile had accepted that “I want” came last. Still, she knew by now that the world was not simply separated into good and bad. There were always shadings, although balance had to be maintained. Mostly good with a little bad was okay, was the way life worked.

  Paka-paka-paaak! Haaa . . . haaa . . .

  She crept into the front room. In the far corner the radio stood on its thin wooden legs. Five times in the past two years she had secretly listened to strange songs, turned down very low. Wanting music was an itch inside her head, a place she couldn’t reach. Besides, Tūtū’s super-strict rule was for little kids, not a sixth grader. She glanced around, then gave the radio’s brown knob a turn that produced a neat click. Its green eye pulsed with the silent rhythm of warming up. She bit her lips in concentration and advanced the dial past soft, crackling static, like schools of reef fish escaping a barracuda. Faint ukulele music faded in and out against a gentle whoop-whoop of background noise. She dialed on. Once there had been circus music, another time a melody played on what sounded like tiny bells.

  A man’s voice shot from the speaker: “. . . an unbelieeevable catch as the runner sliiiides into third, first out of the ‘53 Series!” She snapped off the radio. Rapid footsteps came through the kitchen. Tūtū entered the front room, broom in hand, her eyes lit with anger. “What you listen?” she demanded. “Tcha!”

  Maile imagined leaping out the window, but that was too stupid for someone her age, and she considered excuses, bargaining, then slumped and turned around. “You old enough to know, e?” her grandmother said. Maile eyed Tūtū’s bare feet, her curled broom with fish scales glinting in its bristles, her sun-bleached blue mu‘umu‘u, her thick hands, long arms, and wide shoulders, her smooth-skinned face with black eyes like oiled pebbles. The heap of white hair that made her taller than most men.

  A prolonged squawk came from the yard: Paka-paka-pak! Maile flinched.

  Tūtū assigned her extra chores for the rest of the week. “Go catch ‘at sassy bird,” she added, and gave her a swat with the broom like a reminder that naughty girls deserved spankings.

  To save face, Maile sauntered outdoors, but knew that by nightfall everybody would be talking. She was not Tūtū’s little sweetie, had to sort fish guts for days while her friends splashed in the surf. Because of the radio. Because she still had to obey little-kid rules.

  Glumly Maile eyed the old rooster. It skittered under a low noni branch as if sensing its fate. “Ooo,” she cooed to it, “pa-tree-ah . . .” She inched toward the noni tree, repeating the phrase. For a moment the bird stood hypnotized. Then it zigzagged through a tomato patch and flapped down to safety in a gulch full of keawe thorns. Now grabbing the rooster meant getting scratched bloody, or catching it with the repaired shrimp net, which would tear again. But if she could just reach a piano, she could pick out the entire song. Maybe even fill in some of the instrument parts in the background. The melody coursed in her head, a stream rushing down a steep hill.

  She hurried through an avocado grove toward the church parish hall, but adults stood out front with brushes and cans of paint, covering black streaks of mold with a fresh coat of white. They would tell her to help them. She hung back out of sight and felt the melody slipping away. What came next, after the tune got complicated? —meeeaahh, something, something.

  The minister and his wife were also painting the hall. There was a piano at their house, although used only for wedding and funeral receptions, which made it doubly kapu to children of any age. Maile was sure it would be safe if she just barely touched the keys. Nobody would hear that from a distance. She ran to
the minister’s house and called out, “Hui!” Only a saggy-eyed mongrel let out a mild snort of greeting.

  Inside, she went to the front room and slid open the piano lid. In soft repetition she plinked a middle key, O pa-tri-a, then one note down, mi-a, one more note down, da, da-da-da-da, and another note down: da. To her delight the scrap of melody developed. Gradually she attached six more notes to it, reconstructing the song tone for tone. In her excitement and concentration she didn’t notice that the dog had come inside, that people were entering the room behind her, the minister with paint on his hands, mothers and fathers, Tūtū, all of them silent.

  MAILE HAD TO kill, pluck, and clean forty chickens for the luau that Sunday celebrating the first birthday of the minister’s baby boy. She started at dawn. By noon she was too tired to complain, or even cry about not being asked to sing for the event. Tūtū helped by carrying the stinking remains to the garbage pit, but she didn’t speak until after lunch, as Maile continued ripping out feathers. Life, Tūtū said, was lōkahi, balance, and for Maile that meant Hawaiian values, German-American good manners, and Chinese patience. Like everyone in her family, Maile possessed three spirits—ancestral, upper, and lower—in addition to the mana that came before birth and persisted after death. The clan was proud of being Hawaiian, and that heritage accounted for almost half her blood, but the other ancestors had to be honored as well.

  As Tūtū talked, Maile nodded to avoid being scolded for resisting an old lesson. Her Hawaiian grandfather, dead for two years now, had been a strict Christian who forbade all talk of ancestors because they had been pagans; the old days and ways were junk. You stay with Jesus, he’d insisted to Maile, you watch out for the black devil on your left shoulder and respect the angel on your right. She yanked out pin-feathers with a pair of pliers and wondered why being any amount of Hawaiian was a matter of Kauai pride. Hawaiians had less of everything than the American descendants of missionaries and traders who owned the plantations.