We will leave aside the current self-visited tortures of our letter writers and their ongoing anguish over relationships and sexuality, the role of fathers, the legacy of Peig Sayers, the everyday profusion of legal jargon and the place of the feminist supremacist (in today's society, need I add). Nor can I help with the requested definition of an arch-liberal, other than to point out it is not the same as an arch liberal, such as Noel Coward in his heyday. Right. According to this paper the other day, David Leavitt's new novel is set in "the insecure and ruthless world of the professional pianist".
Presumably because the book is about turning pages, it is called The Page Turner. Its central character is, not too surprisingly, a page-turner, a person who - well, turns pages, for concert pianists, who, through poor forward planning, whether by God or piano designers or music composers, have to use two hands to play the piano and thus have no hand free to turn pages for themselves. You might think that being a page-turner is uninteresting. It isn't. I ought to know. I was one. In Rome, according to David Leavitt, "the page turner is usually the same person - a very pretty woman of about 25".
Yes. Well, Leavitt is right up to a point. And clearly he knows Francesca, the ubiquitous young woman in question. When he says "about 25" he does not mean there are about 25 Francescas. It just seems that way. People who frequent concerts in Rome will know what I, and Leavitt, mean.
But I am getting ahead of myself.
From a very early age, I seemed to be destined for page-turning. As a young man, I first tried woodturning, but it was unsatisfactory. Whatever way I turned it, it always looked the same. But page-turning was still an unknown world to me.
Then I got a job in Rome in the Vatican library, where I discovered the insecure and ruthless world of the professional librarian. Initially I was bored. I had hoped to be, like the page-turner, the epitome of invisibility. Instead I was stared at by the public as if I were one of the Vatican treasures. Gradually I discovered the joys of page-turning. I regularly disappeared in the pages of Aquinas's Summa Contra Gentiles and Spinoza's Tractus de Intellectus Emendatione. Soon, however, though I could never wait to see what happened next (which was later to prove my undoing), the satisfaction of turning pages merely for myself began to pall. I had heard of Francesca. Her fame, or infamy, had spread throughout Rome. The duplicitous or multiplicitous Francesca had the page-turning market almost entirely tied up for many years. I went to see her. This was not easy, she being the epitome of invisibility, but I eventually found her.
To my delight, my page-turning skills impressed her. My years in the Vatican library had not been entirely wasted.
Page-turning in front of Francesca, I managed to make myself entirely disappear, spare hand and all. Only when she stopped turning pages herself, and was reincarnated as a flesh-and-blood woman, in all her considerable Italian allure, did I briefly falter. She laughed (in Italian) at my discomfiture, but employed me anyway. Clearly I would not have this problem on stage. Unfortunately, my new career was cut off even as it began. On my very first night, employed to turn the pages at an open-air concert on the Piazza Navona for the eminent classical pianist Enrico Casabragli, I became so engrossed in the musical notation for Stravinsky's Serenade in A Major, and the story it told, that I committed the cardinal sin of turning over the page before the pianist was ready.
The result was a sudden hideous cacophony, as if Casabragli had mixed an Elizabethan madrigal with a saxophone obbligato and topped it all off with a trumpet solo. The audience was horrified as his forte became a pianissimo, his con brio faltered to an andante. He struggled to the end of the piece, purple with rage, and ran from the stage. I followed, at a safe distance.
From that day on, Francesca has had the Roman concert page-turning market to herself.
