Autumn enters like a presentiment; The leaves are falling in the rain and I start to think how beautiful sadness is when accompanied by the music of Chet Baker. Sometimes I have these things while the last cigarette is consumed by the onslaught of memories and I listen autumn leaves, the song that Chet Baker recorded with Ruth Young, his girlfriend, before the heroin tore them apart, slowly, quietly, like worn fabric tearing where it hurts most.
It is the melody of the musician who plays at the cost of his vices and who lets himself be carried away like a derailed train on a siding. There’s a certain tendency toward defeat in autumn, a slow, twilight season matched only by a jazz song like this. My sentimental memory is triggered every time I hear Chet Baker’s troubled voice singing the first notes. So I go out into the rain again, enveloped in an atmosphere as literary as it is urgent, and I look for someone to sell me an ounce of happiness to continue writing this and other things while I hum the bitter taste of the song. that brings me here today.
The first time I heard autumn leaves It was in the living room of my house, which we called the “living room”, and it was on a record by Yves Montand that my father played when he counted the leaves which fell behind the window splashed with rain, and the sadness appeared in his eyes a hallucinated loneliness which ended his life. Dead Leaves.
I then wanted to be like Scott Fitzgerald, a beautiful and cursed writer capable of transferring the deepest sensations onto the surface of a burning paper. There’s a lot of Fitzgerald in Baker and a lot of Baker in Fitzgerald, as if the exquisite prose of Great Gatsby preceded the suicidal, mind-numbing melody of the man who played the trumpet with the abandoned liturgy that brings a rush of heroin .
Both died beyond their means, one without finding his name in bookstores; the other, charging less than his vices, leaving the sound of saliva and cries stuck, like a crust, to the edge of his trumpet. Anyone who passes certain subjects can be a civil engineer, lawyer or political scientist. For a journalist, you still need less. On the contrary, not everyone can write like Fitzgerald or play the trumpet like Baker, two artists as similar as they are equal, always on the verge of being swallowed up by the abyss of their own destruction. Finally, they got it.
When I come home smoked and my steps slide on the autumn leaves, the ghosts arise on my path and cross my path to the rhythm of Autumn leaves; a song that can be improvised; a beautiful love song that makes death cease to be eternal.
