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  • Flying Backwards
  • Hoyt Rogers (bio)

The world vanished, like the last echo of a closing chord, as soon as she landed on his shoulder. Why the staccato toward the end, not wine but red? In the final loop, when she glided down to meet him, Gonzalo unwound all the tunes he’d ever written—in reverse, a crab canon at breakneck speed. On the verge of blacking out, he’d seen her boomerang from the horizon: she snapped free of the kite string, drawing figure eights across the sky. He felt relieved by that sudden arabesque, since he’d tired of his dreary coda: the bland ostinato of tablets and capsules, pumpkin soup and crackers, queasy diapers and bad TV, tepid sponge baths and sinking spells. His nephew, Angel Maria, had grabbed a goose-down pillow from the bed and pressed it firmly over his face, so hard he could feel the stiff damask pattern of the slipcover on his cheeks. Right before, after playing “A Reverie of Loss” one last time, presto con brio, he’d shut the piano lid with a thud. But Gonzalo already foresaw what was coming from the terse prelude to that evening, when his nephew had announced: Tío, I’ve given the staff a night off . . . so we can be all alone.

As the agronomist rotted away, his heir’s daily rendition of the “Sonata Sonata” was his only solace. With almost twice the notes to hit, the new version proved fiendishly difficult, and Angel Maria outdid himself to nail it down. Following the old man’s instructions, he’d swiftly transposed the four-handed score into a piano solo. He owed this much to Gonzalo, who’d willed his stocks and bonds to him: he’d wired them to a shell company in Bermuda, beyond his children’s clutches. By selling the securities off, Angel Maria could pay his most urgent gambling debts—and they’d become more pressing with each spendthrift month. Plying the keyboard was only a minor pastime for the busy playboy, who’d already frittered away his wife’s fortune on gaming, cockfights, and mistresses; there was something about a blue poker chip, copper-green tail, or fuzzy peach vulva that he couldn’t resist. Still, he didn’t mind playing his uncle’s archaic pieces, when the hamster wheel of blackjack and resin spurs, bedsprings and climax, let him hop off for an hour or two.

On Gonzalo’s orders, the farmhands had set up his four-poster bed in the music room, between the harpsichord and the Bösendorfer grand. Ironwood-paneled, almost windowless, the chamber was meant for nighttime use; but even if his vision hadn’t failed, he wouldn’t have peeked outside. By 2010, the ragged vestiges of Gonzalo’s farm had soared in value, as the city of Santo Domingo sprawled toward the west. The [End Page 10] hazy panorama from his terrace—the Isabela River creeping through mist-drizzled hills—had succumbed to a legoland of two-car garages and stucco facades. Built of ochre coral-stone a century before, the Berridos mansion, with its flaky balustrades and vine-choked gardens, loomed over those crass intruders like a reproach. While he lay half-paralyzed in the shuttered house, his children were paving the last remaining lots with ever smaller bungalows, squeezing profits from the parcels he’d reluctantly granted them a few years back. In the mid-eighties, carving up adjacent lands he’d sold in a fit of pique, developers had launched the blight with a hideous suburb, Cuesta India, a chunky excretion of cookie-cutter “units.” Thank God his stroke had left him purblind, so he could no longer see how his mother’s ancestral estate had been defiled.

Six months earlier, Gonzalo’s wife, Lidia, had brought to term a rare form of snail-paced cancer. But after her twenty-five years of slow extinction, the slapdash housekeepers, giggly Petronila and saturnine Tatica, noticed no changes in the daily routine. Lidia’s commandeering nurses had kept the patient’s room off limits, even to her husband, and in less than a week they’d returned to look after...

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