On my last birthday I was ninety-three years old. That is not young, of course. In fact, it is older than ninety. But age is a relative matter. If you continue to work and to absorb the beauty in the world about you, you find that that age does not necessarily mean getting old. At least, not in the ordinary sense. I feel many things more intensely than ever before, and for me life grows more fascinating.
Not long ago my friend Sasha Schneider brought me a letter addressed to mye by a group of musicians in the Caucasus Mountains in the Soviet Union. This was the text of the letter:
Dear Honorable Maestro-
I have the pleasure on behalf of the Georgian Caucasian Orchestra to invite you to conduct one of our concerts. You will be the first musician of your age who receives the distinction of conducting our orchestra.
Never in the history of our orchestra have we permitted a man under one hundred years to conduct. All oof the members of our orchestra are over one hundred years old. But we have heard of your talents as a conductor, and we feel that, despite your youthfulness, an exception should be made in your case.
We expect a favorable response as soon as possible.
We pay travel expenses and of course shall provide living accommodations during your stay with us.
Respectfully,
Astan Shlarba
President, 123 years old
Sasha is a man with a sense of humor; he likes to play a joke. That letter was one of his jokes; he had written it himself. But I must admit i took it seriously at first. And why? Because it did not seem to me implausible that there should be an orchestra composed of musicians older than a hundred. And, indeed, I was right! That portion of the letter was not a joke. There is such an orchestra in the Caucasus. Sasha had read about it in the London Sunday Times. He showed me the article, with photographs of the orchestra. All of its members were more than a hundred years old. There were about thirty of them-they rehearse regulary and give periodic concerts. Most of them are farmers who continue to work in the fields. The oldest of the group, Astan Shlarba, is a tobacco grower who also trains horses. They are splendid-looking men, obviously full of vitality. I should like to hear them play sometime-and, in fact, to conduct them, if the opportunity arose. Of couse I am not sure they would permit this, in view of my inadequate age.
There is often something to be learned from jokes, and it was so in this case. In spite of their age, those musicians have not lost their zest for life. How does one explain this? I do not think the answer lies simply in their physical constitutions or in something unique about the climate in which they live. It has to do with their attitude toward life; and I believe that their ability to work is due in no small measure to the fact they do work. Work helps prevent one from getting old. I, for one, cannot dream of retiring. Not now or ever. Retire? The work is alien and the idea inconceivable to me. I don't beleive in retirement for anyone in my type of work, not while the spirit remains. My work is my life. I cannot think of one without the other. To "retire" means to me to begin to die. The man who works and is never bored is never old. Work and interest in worthwhile things are the best remedy for age. Each day I am reborn. Each day I must begin again.
For the past eighty years I have started each day in the same manner. It is not a mechanical routine but something essential to my daily life. I go to the piano, and I play two preludes and fugues of Bach. I cannot think of doing otherwise. It is a sort of benediction on the house. But that is not its only meaning for me. It is a rediscovery of the world of which I have the joy of being a part. It fills me with awareness of the wonder of life, with a feeling of the incredible marvel of being a human being. The music is never the same for me, never. Each day it is something new, fantastic and unbelievable. That is Bach, like nature, a miracle.
I do not think a day passes in my life in which I fail to look with fresh amazement at the miracle of nature. It is there on every side. It can be simply a shadow on a mountainside, or a spider's web gleaming with dew, or sunlight on the leaves of a tree. I have always especially loved the sea. Whenever possible, I have lived by the sea, as for these past twelve years here in Puerto Rico. It has long been a custom of mine to walk along the beach each morning before I start to work. True, My walks are shorter than they used to be, but that does not lessen the wonder of the sea. How mysterious and beautiful is the sea! How infinitely variable! It is never the same, never, not from one moment to the next, always in the process of change, always becoming something different and new.
My earliest recollections are associated with the sea. You might say I discovered the sea when I was still an infant. Then it was the Mediterranean on the coast of Catalonia near the town of Vendrell, where I was born. When I was less than a year old, my mother began taking me to the nearby seaside hamlet of San Salvador. She took me there, she later told me, for the sea air. There was a small church at San Salvador that we would visit, an old church of Romanesque design. Light sifted through the windows, and the only sound was the whisper of the sea. It seems to me that this was the beginning of my conscious life-a sense of sunlight and the sound of the sea. As I grew older, I would remain for hours gazing from those windows at the sea, marveling at how it stretched endlessly away, and how the waves marched tirelessly to the shore and the clouds formed changing patterns in the sky. It was a sight that never ceased to enthrall me.
A man who acted as a caretaker lived beside the church in a primitive dwelling with an earth floor. He was an old sea dog , a small gnarled man who walked with a limp. He had a very high voice. He loved to tell me stories about his adventures at sea. I don't think he knew how to read or write, but I learned a great deal from him. He seemed to know everything, especially about the ways of nature. His name was Pau and his wife's name was Senda, and people called him "Ell Pau de la Senda." We became close friends. He would take me for strolls along the beach, and it was he who taught me how to swim. Friends of ours loaned us the use of their cottage at San Salvador. There was nothing fancy about the place, but how we loved it! I went there often with my mother.
I have repeatedly tried to write about my mother. I have wanted to record her as she was. But what I have written has never been right. I have looked at the words and said, No, this will not do, I cannot write about her. I have known many people during my life, and among them remarkable individuals, extraordinary personalities, men and women of rare abilities and talents. I have known artists and statesmen, scholars and scientists and kings. But I have never known anyone like my mother. She dominates the memory of my childhood and youth, and her presence has remained with me throughout the years. Under all sorts of circumstances, in times of difficulty and when there were important decisions to be made, I have asked myself what she would do, and I have acted accordingly. It is forty years since my mother died, but she has continued to be my guide. Even now she is with me.
My mother was born in Mayaguez, Puerto Rico. Her parents came form Catalonia and were members of distinguished Catalan families. When she was still a young woman, just eighteen, my grandmother brought her to Spain to visit relatives in Vendrell. Her father was already dead. He had been a man of strong democratic principles, who opposed the autocratic and oppressive rule of Spain in Puerto Rico. The regime persecuted and tortured liberals, and when he could no longer endure the ordeal, this good man killed himself. A brother of my mother also died by his own hand for the same reason. Those were bitter times for the Puerto Rican people.
It was in Vendrell that my mother met my father. He was then in his early twenties. He was the church organist, and he gave piano lessons. My mother became one of his pupils, and they fell in love. When they were married, my mother gave away her lovely clothes and began wearing simple inexpensive things. It was her way of saying she was now the wife of a poor man. Years later, when my father was dead, and I was already making a success with my career, I once came to her and said, "Mother, you are so beautiful, you should wear some jewelry, perhaps a small pearl brooch. Please let me get you one." She said, "Pablo, you are making money; you will become richer. But I shall always be the wife of a poor man." And she would not wear jewelry. That was how she was.
There was no medical care to speak of in Vendrell at the time of my mother's marriage. When children were born, a woman who was the wife of the coal dealer acted as midwife. No doubt he was a good man at his trade, but his wife knew little about delivering children. Many infants died from infections and other complications. Seven of my mother's eleven children died at birth. I myself almost did not survive. I was born with the umbilical cord twisted around my neck. My face was black, and I nearly choked to death. Though my mother had a tender heart, she never spoke of her grief at the death of her children.
For my mother, the highest law was a man's own conscience. She used to say, "In principle, I do not respect the law." She would say that one law might have some merit and another none, and that a man had to decide for himself what was right and what was wrong. She knew that certain laws can serve some people and injure others, as in Spain today, where the law in general benefits the few and harms the many. This understanding came from within her. She always acted on principle, not on what others said but on what she herself knew to be right. When my brother Enrique was nineteen, he was called to serve in the Spanish army in accordance with the law of the time. He came to my mother. I was there, and the scene is stamped on my memory. "My son," she told Enrique," you do not have to kill anybody, and nobody has to kill you. You were not born to kill or be killed. Go away...leave the country." So Enrique fled from Spain. He went to Argentina. My mother felt a special tenderness for Enrique, who was the youngest of her children, but she did not see him again for eleven years. He returned home when there was an amnesty for those who had broken the conscription law. I think that if all the mothers of the world would tell their sons, "You were not born to be killers or to be killed in war. Do not fight," there would be no more war.
When my mother told my brother Enrique to go away, it was not for her simply a matter of saving the life of her son. It was a matter of doing what was right. On another occasion there was an epidemic of cholera in our region. It was a frightful calamity. One moment you would see a man walking and talking naturally, and an hour later he would be dead. Thousands died in the area, and many in Vendrell. Almost all the doctors died. We were making our home then in San Salvador. My brother Luis, who was about eighteen, used to go away every evening to Vendrell. He would go to the houses where the people had died from cholera and take their bodies during the night to the cemetery. "Someone must do it, " he said. The danger of contagion was very great. My mother of course knew that he was risking his life every day, but she never said a word, not a single word, to stop him from doing what he felt he had to do. There was no equivocation in my mother. She was straight, always straight. It was so in small matters as well as large.
She had no use for petty regulations. When I was a young man and giving many concerts, I had several bank accounts. One of them was in Barcelona, and I used to give the receipts for my deposits to my mother. She would put them away and keep them for me. Once the bank asked me for a receipt they had given me the previous year, and I told my mother. She looked for it but could not find it.
I said to her,"Well, mother dear, they want to see it."
"Why, Pablo?" she said.
I said, "Because it is the rule."
"The rule Don't they know the money is yours?
"Yes, they know it."
"Well, then, it is not necessary to give them the receipt. They know the money is yours. You tell them that."
I informed the bank that I couldn't find the receipt, and they said it would be all right, I could forget about the matter.
"What did I tell you?" my mother said. "You see it wasn't necessary to give them that receipt."
She regarded rigid formallities as foolish. She was that way in everything.
When I was still a small boy, my father told me, "Pablo, when you grow up, you will see machines that fly. Mark my words; it will surely happen." Today that does not seem remarkable; jet planes fly over my house faster than sound-though what a sound they make!-and children take it for granted that they themselves will soon visit the moon. But when I was born, the automobile had not yet been invented. My father had a lively imagination and an inquiring mind. Music was his great love but only one of his interests. Physics fascinated him. He was especially interested in scientific discoveries. He had been born in Barcelona and lived all his adult life in Vendrell; he could not afford to travel; but he managed to get periodicals from other countries-from France in particular-and he followed the latest developments in science. He himself had an unusual ability with his hands; it seemed to me that he could make almost anything. He had a special workroom in our house, a room which was kept locked, and he used to spend hours in it. He made all sorts of things out of wood and other materials. He was a real craftsman. Once he made me a bicycle. He even made a clock out of wood; I still have it at my house in San Salvador, though I have not seen it since I went into exile thirty years ago. He was very painstaking with his work, a perfectionist. He was patient about everything-he suffered badly from asthma but he never complained. He was a quiet and gentle man; I cannot recall hearing him raise his voice. At the same time, he was a man of strong convictions, an ardent liberal, and during the Carlist wars in Catalonia he had risked his life for the Republican cause. That was shortly before he married my mother. Naturally, he was a staunch advocate of autonomy for Catalonia.
My father's life was built around music. If he had had a real musical education, he could have been an accomplished composer or an outstanding pianist. But he was satisfied to be what he was, the church organist at Vendrell, and to give piano and singing lessons, and to write the songs and other music he composed. He organized a small choral society in the village-that was about a hundred years ago, and the society still exists. He played at the village festivals and dances, and when he did, he put his whole heart and soul into his playing. Beauty was his aim, and he was without pretension.
My father recognized that I had musical talent as a child, but he was such a musician himself that he took it for granted his son should also be one. He never said, "Oh, my boy is a wonderful musician," or anything like that. He saw nothing unusual in my ability to play and cmpose at an early age; it seemed entirely natural to him. My mother's attitude was very different. She didn't talk about my ability either; but she was convinced that I had a special gift and that everything should be done to nourish it. My father did not believe I could earn a living as a musician; he knew from experience how hard it was to do this. He thought it would be mnore practical for me to have a trade; and, if fact, when I was still a youngster he made plans with a carpenter friend for me to become his apprentice. I have always regarded manual labor as creative and looked with respect-and, yes, wonder-at people who work with their hands. It seems to me that their creativity is no less than that of a violinist or a painter. It is of a different sort, that is all. And if it had not been for my mother's conviction and determination that music was my destiny, it is quite conceivable that I would have become a carpenter. But I do not think I would have made a very good one. Unlike my father, I never had a knack for making things or even doing the simplest manual tasks. Only recently I couldn't open a container of cottage cheese! It exasperated me; I told my wife, my lovely Marta, "You know, I can't do anything with my hands!" She said that was not entirely true, and she pointed to my cello, which was standing in the corner. She was right, of course-there have been some compensations.