You were a savage
Yes, a savage.
You couldn’t comprehend
Why the Spanish took your land
You were too savage
For European law and rule.
To a savage we seem cruel
We landed on your shore,
Cried, ‘Choose death or be our whore!’
We killed because
We are so savage.”
At the end of the chorus, the piano segued, just as the woman under the viaduct had done with her plastic upright, to the funereal meter of Purcell. The vocal line took up “Remember me, but announce my fate” for a few measures, and then, while the piano stuck to “Dido’s Lament,” the singer began wailing the single word “savage” over and over.
The volume and the intensity of the music brought conversations in the room to a halt. A couple of tables signaled for their bills. One woman clicked to the exit on stilettos and said, “I come to a bar for a drink, not for political indoctrination. I won’t be back.”
Sal swallowed a scowl and nodded to her bartender. Erica began moving among the tables with samples of Trader’s Folly on a tray. After a few minutes, people were talking and laughing again.
At the bar, Peter read over my shoulder as I scrolled through the highlights of Lydia Zamir’s life. Bernie’s passionate summary had skimped on some of the facts. Zamir had grown up in Kansas, where her gifts as a pianist were recognized early. After study at the New England Conservatory of Music, she’d played with some regional symphonies and summer festivals. At a festival in Santa Fe, she met and apparently fell in love with a Chilean-American writer named Hector Palurdo.
Over the course of a few years, Zamir stopped performing the classical repertoire. She taught herself guitar—“Really, a piano with six strings instead of eighty-eight,” she said in an interview—and began setting Palurdo’s poetry to music, along with that of Mistral and Neruda, two earlier Chilean poets.
Then, four years ago, Zamir and Palurdo were performing at a fund-raiser at an outdoor venue in Kansas when the shooting occurred. Someone opened fire from a hilltop. Seventeen people were killed, including Palurdo. Fifty-two were wounded. Zamir apparently survived. She’d held a concert in Hector’s memory, with proceeds going to the families of the dead, and then she’d stopped singing.
“She grew up in Kansas and he was killed there. Jealous lover?” Murray, who’d retrieved his phone from Sal, was hunting the same information. “She’s from some map-dot called Eudora and the murders were near Salina, a bigger map-dot. . . . About three hours from her hometown—no distance for an angry lover to cover.”
He scrolled further, reading aloud under his breath. “Palurdo grew up in Chicago, but his father was an immigrant from Chile. He came here in the seventies, worked as a welder, died about eighteen months before his son was murdered. Hector wrote poetry, short stories based on folk stories of indigenous people, but he was mostly an essayist, covering human rights in the Americas. North and South.”
Murray drained his bottle. “You stumbled on a genuine mystery, Warshawski.” He changed his tone to sound like an old-time radio announcer. “Who is this homeless woman and how come she’s playing Zamir’s music?”
I made a face. “You want me to say she’s Lydia Zamir.”
Murray grinned wolfishly. “Great story, if she is.”
“She could be, I suppose, but—how did she end up here?”
“Her lover’s home was Chicago,” Peter said.
“I suppose,” I agreed. “The music is so idiosyncratic, it’s not something that a random street person would—would inhabit, the way this woman under the viaduct seems to. But how could a gifted musician be so lacking in supports that she ended up in a pile of rags on Forty-seventh Street?”
“Hey, Vic, you know how this goes,” Sal said. “No one is immune.”
Sal and I sit on the board of a shelter for refugees from domestic violence—she’s right: family disconnect covers all levels of talent and economics.
Murray rolled the empty bottle of Dark Lord between his fingers. “Falls from the heights always make good stories. Grammy for ‘Savage,’ shared a stage with Beyoncé, known as the star-crossed lover of a South American revolutionary, ends up on Chicago’s streets.”
“Was Palurdo a revolutionary?” Peter asked, going through the screens on his own phone. “It sounds as though he covered the same kind of territory as Luis Urrea and Isabel Allende.”
“South American writers are always revolutionaries, at least in Hollywood’s imagination. I see a winning series here: How do our overachievers tumble from Mount Everest to Death Valley?” Murray sketched something careering down a mountainside in the air.
“Right,” I snapped. “Washed-up basketball stars loading UPS trucks, former Pulitzer Prize winners reduced to preening on cable.”
I regretted those toads as soon as they hopped out of my mouth. I put a conciliatory hand on Murray’s arm. “That was below the belt: sorry.”
He gave a perfunctory nod but took off soon after without saying anything else.
“He won a Pulitzer?” Sansen’s sandy eyebrows went up.
“Yep. It was an important story and he did a great job with it, about a group of aldermen who owned a shell company that was using school grounds on the West Side as hazmat dumping grounds. The story brought a flurry of federal interest to City Hall for a few short months, but then Global bought the paper, and it was clear Global management wanted to be good old boys together with the perps. The follow-up story was killed.”
“It was a hard business,” Sal agreed, “but Murray didn’t have to sign whatever he signed to agree to kill the follow-up. Could’ve taken it to an indie outlet and given up that Merc convertible he drives.”
The talk shifted. Sansen and I left soon after to go dancing at Colibri, a hot new venue on Lake Street. When we got back to my place, I looked up “Savage,” the first track on Zamir’s album Continental Requiem (in D minor).
YouTube had a recording of Zamir and Palurdo singing “Savage,” not a video, but one of those recordings where still images of the singers flash on the screen: Zamir bent over her guitar, strong fingers on the strings, Zamir looking at Palurdo, love and daring in her face, teeth gleaming white, dark hair falling in waves below her shoulders. Palurdo’s teeth were crooked and cigarette stained. In one photo, Palurdo held up a sign, i can’t sing, while Zamir held one reading, he says he can write.
I felt a contraction below my diaphragm. They’d been vibrant, in love. I don’t think I’d ever felt that deep joy, not in my youth when those feelings are so intense they pierce you. And then—murder. Carnage. Seeing her lover die with all those others killed and wounded. Small wonder if PTSD had driven her to live below a train track with a toy piano.
Sansen took my hand and held it gently. “Do you think the woman you saw today is Lydia Zamir?”
“You can’t tell from these pictures, but it’s the sound, the splicing of Grieg with her own rhythms for ‘Swan Song.’ Same here in ‘Savage,’ where she’s interwoven Purcell with that Haitian kompa beat. It would have been fun to see where she would have gone next with her music, but I’m guessing the carnage she witnessed silenced her voice.”