RIVER SECRET
BY ANNE SWARDSON
She took one tiny step toward me. Another — then hesitated. Her mother leaned down and murmured a few words in her ear. Reassured, the girl toddled forward more confidently and then, halfway to where I was playing, stopped again.
She wore a white wool coat that reached almost to her knees. A few strands of curly brown hair escaped from the fur around her hood, which had been carefully tied at the neck. By her sleek-haired mother, probably. Those dimpled hands were too little to tie anything.
Fortunately for me, they could hold a two-euro coin.
The child looked at her mother again. It was time to reel her in. I ended “Sous le Ciel de Paris” a verse early — kids never went for the melancholy material — and put the accordion down on its stand with a click. The girl turned her eyes back to me. I transitioned into 2/4 rhythm with the foot pedal on the bass drum. After picking up the trombone, I launched into the “Bayrische Polka,” keeping the oompah with the drum, adding a cymbal stroke to each downbeat with my other foot, and bobbing forward each time the slide came out with a wailing
A big smile appeared on the little girl’s face. She walked confidently to the beret lying upside down on the bricks in front of me and dropped in the coin. I grinned too and gave her another duck, almost a half bow, with a forward slide of the trombone. The girl looked amused, then beckoned her mother to come as she held out her hand for another coin.
A few more spectators peeled off from the stream of Paris tourists who were coming down the steps of the Solferino footbridge over the Seine on their way to the tunnel leading to the Tuileries Garden. They joined the gaggle of Americans in tracksuits around me and my drums, horns, and stands, attracted by the polka lilt and by the exquisite little girl standing before me.
My location, at the entrance to the underground passage between the bridge and the stairs to the gardens, was the best in the business. When I blew a long note on the trumpet, the tones reverberated off the rounded tunnel ceiling. The cymbals were sharper, the drums crisper because of those acoustics. The river’s flowing water gave a sense of space and openness. And with my back to the passage wall, I could spot the oncoming Italians in high-heeled sandals, the rotund British, and the tall Dutch wearing backpacks, and then adjust the musical selection accordingly.
Still, each day I needed something special to get an audience going, something to lure a real crowd around me. I needed that more than most, since I never sang, only played. The more people, the more likely I could pass the hat at the end of a set. It was always more lucrative than just waiting for the coins to drop in one by one.
If I was lucky, that moment had arrived.
But Maman wasn’t about to chip in another coin. She was distracted by a squat woman wearing a kerchief over her hair. In her grimy fingers, the woman held out a dull, gold-looking ring as she sidled closer to her target.
“Leave us alone, you disgusting thing! We’re just trying to enjoy the music!” Maman held up a forbidding hand as the beggar took a step closer, waving the ring and giving a sidelong glance in the direction of the lady’s Hermes handbag.
The mother tossed her head, cinched the tie of her cashmere coat, put one hand firmly around the clasp of her purse, and held out the other to her daughter. “Come, Marie-Christine. Let’s go watch the boys sail the boats in the basin.” The little girl ran to her, and without another look at me they were gone, up the steps and into the gardens. I tried to save the day by playing “Hello, Dolly,” replete with plenty of slides and bass thumps, but it didn’t help. The crowd melted away. There was silence.
Only the kerchiefed woman was left standing there. She looked at me like a whipped dog, her head down, barely meeting my eyes. I stared angrily. I didn’t speak, because I never did. I didn’t cross my arms or shake my finger at her, as I had sometimes done before. But she knew she had driven away my clientele, and she knew I was angry. It was one of our agreements. She was supposed to do her job, and I would do mine.
She twisted her hands in her skirt and sighed.
“I’m sorry, Baptiste. I thought I could help. Top us up a little.”
Why I had decided to extend a hand to Tatiana I will never know. I had everything I wanted: a city license to play my one-man setup in a rainproof location that sucked in half the tourists in Paris; enough money to pay for my tiny studio in the Eighteenth Arrondissement and for the frozen dinners I bought each night at the Picard store. There was enough to send to my family in the south too, back when I used to do that. Back when I talked to them. Back when I talked. Before my memory told me I should speak no longer.
I nodded firmly toward the gardens and she knew what I meant: “Leave my customers alone. If people pay you for those stupid rings, they won’t pay me for my music. And they certainly won’t put money in my beret if they find their wallets missing.”
She shuffled off slowly, cowering as she went. I turned back to my instruments, my anger passing. She needed the money more than I did, and every coin she pickpocketed in the park reduced the number I felt compelled to slip her at the end of the day.
Maybe I shared with Tatiana because no one else would. Gypsies are human rats, I’d heard the policemen say after they’d chased the beggars, pickpockets, and scamsters from the gardens. Send them back where they came from. Don’t touch them; they’re dirty. Even American tourists, the most gullible of all the nationalities that walked by me, eyed the rings the Gypsies proffered with suspicion, then turned their backs and patted their wallets.
So Tatiana got a few coins from me each day, coupled with a warning that if she ever stole from me, she’d never see another euro. She understood everything from my face, my gestures. I’d give her a shake of the head when I wanted her elsewhere, a tilt when a good potential mark walked by. I’d bring her the odd bit of
What Tatiana mostly got from me was something no one else gave her: an ear. As I packed up each night, she’d come by and tell me in broken French about her life: growing up in a camp outside Plovdiv, making her way with others of her kind in a series of ragtag caravans from Bulgaria, across Hungary, over the Austrian Alps, then here. Camping, stealing, camping. Along the way there had been a man, and a child or two. She didn’t know where they were now.
I SAW THE little girl again not long after that. It was warmer, but she still wore the white coat. She was with her mother, and so was a handsome black-haired young man — younger than the woman. His arm was wrapped around the waist of his companion. His eyes were on the woman’s face; his hand was atop the little girl’s head, stroking her hair.
I wasted no time in pulling out the trombone and starting up the polka.
The girl pointed to me and made an excited little jump. The Mother — what else could I call her? — reached for her purse, but the man pushed her hand away. Fishing in his pocket, he pulled out a pink ten-euro note and inserted it in the little girl’s fist. He took her other hand in a firm grip, plastered a big smile on his face, and started walking with her across the paving stones toward my waiting beret. I kept up the beat. Tatiana, happily, was nowhere to be seen.
The child lost enthusiasm with each step. The farther she got from her mother, the more her feet dragged, the more she tried to turn back. Her face twisted into a pout. The beret was forgotten. The man kept the smile fixed in place and continued forward, pulling on her hand, trying to ignore her reluctance. The tourists were nudging
