Ugly Bartholomew

Caprice No. 11, from Twenty-Four Caprices for Violin

Call me Bartholomew. It helps. It helps because I’m ugly. Not grotesquely deformed, which would elicit a measure of sympathy, nor plain, which goes unremarked, but ugly, which acts like a kind of centripetal force to push everyone away. Insisting on my full name compels people to engage with me for just that little bit longer, even though it makes them uneasy.

I knew something was terribly amiss by the age of three when my mother, bless her, would say things like ‘You’re no Clark Gable but I love you.’ The photos of my father, whom I never met, showed a dashing roué, a veritable ladies’ man. And although my mom, as I eventually discerned when I grew into my teens, was no beauty in the conventional sense, she was far from being ugly. In fact, she was forever warding off suitors, possibly because she had a great deal of charm and wit.

It is very difficult, being ugly, to cultivate charm. In the first place, one must hold an audience long enough for what is charming to be revealed. Which for me was impossible.

The disadvantages of ugly are quite numerous. It is a little known fact that ugly people do not like other ugly people: we are as repulsed as others by ugliness. The strength of our desires for the beautiful is matched only by the depths of our inevitable failure to attain it or to be more precise, her. I supposed that a truly ugly person, if extremely rich, might procure a beautiful girlfriend, or even wife, but even then would be forced to live with the knowledge that avarice overrode aesthetic judgment. A poor consolation.

The Abstract Expressionist painter, Willem de Kooning (who could make beautiful people look ugly), once said the worst thing about being poor was that it took up all of one’s time. The same goes for ugly. It is an inescapable ever-present state of being of which one is always aware.

Ugly people tend not to get breaks. For example, a bank employee is unlikely to let an ugly person slip in thirty seconds before closing time for an urgent transaction, whereas a suitably obsequious non-ugly person would have a fifty-fifty chance, and a beautiful one would be guaranteed an extension.

The ugly bleed, cry, grow impatient, lie, steal, become insanely rabid partisans at a football game, hunt for bargains and secretly explore pornography. Our trespasses however are never forgiven because saintliness is demanded of us as the price of social tolerance. We may mingle, if we must, ONLY if we behave.

We sometimes console ourselves with the idea of age, the great leveller that turns even the most beautiful into an ugly, but because the pain of living with ugliness tends to shorten the spans of our lives, even this pleasure is ultimately denied. All in all, ugly is not to be recommended. However, from four decades of experience I conclude that it does confer one distinct advantage: it makes it easy to be alone.

My mother often spoke of inner beauty, of not judging books by covers, of counting what was inside rather than outside, etc., but these concepts were impossible for me to apply to myself because the mirror gave me no outward comeliness to introject. She was determined to mitigate the sorrows of my affliction and in the wisdom arising from desperation she introduced the violin.

‘You’ll be so good at this that people will love you!’ She left out ‘despite how you look’ but I fully understood.

And indeed I took to the instrument, having long isolated hours at my disposal, and I became very very very good, so good that I was able to obtain employment first with an orchestra and then with several quartets. ‘Several quartets?’ you may ask. Yes, unusual, and this brings me to the nub.

Music in general and the violin in particular, in addition to providing me with an occupation and one of my few sources of joy, also enabled the discovery that I had perfect pitch, and then some. Not long ago – and I will get to this in a moment – I was retrospectively diagnosed with a very rare disorder: Intolerance of Imperfect Intonation, or the triple “I” syndrome as it is allegedly known in the mental health field.

Whether or not ugly people are more likely to suffer from mental problems requiring professional treatment is unclear. I read often of extremely attractive women and men who require psychiatric and psychological intervention, for problems I would happily absorb if accompanied by such looks, but so be it.

My insistence on perfect pitch from very early on was both blessing and bane. It accounted for my playing with relatively superb intonation, though intonation that was never ideal. This made me a valued ensemble performer while at the same time creating incessant difficulties. For example, I was always painfully cognisant of my failure to achieve the intonation I strove for on the violin, but my colleagues’ far more alarming and, sadly enough, routine departures from pitch caused actual physical distress. And because my faculties for discriminating pitch were so finely developed, the vagaries of tuning even for instruments of fixed pitch like the piano, made me wince. Once a joker asked me to tune my fiddle to the A of his tuning fork, which he had had deviously constructed to produce a note vibrating at 443 Hz. I did not find this amusing.

Although I had while quite young been appointed to the first violin section of an orchestra with an international reputation, the maddening divergence from true pitch from all quarters nearly drove me to alcohol. Playing with earplugs insulated me from the worst of it, but the sheer number of off-pitch instruments became overwhelming, inescapable and all-encompassing: in a word, ugly. So I resigned, forfeiting a lucrative lifetime tenure. (I might add that a solo career, which my playing on its own merits might well have sustained, was out of the question owing to my looks.)

I was welcomed into the Andromeda Quartet as the second, and less visible, violin, one of the “inner voices” (as elusive perhaps as inner beauty), and I soon found that the assault of three poorly pitched instruments on my ears was every bit as devastating. I attempted at every opportunity to “lift” the ensemble, which drifted flat often by as much as a quarter-tone, to correct pitch, frequently having to call a halt in the midst of rehearsals, but this seemed to annoy the others to the point of resentment. Whether through inability or sheer laziness, they were impervious to the ideals of playing in proper tune.

The Ciandelli Quartet, whose principal violin had impetuously run off with a software developer on the eve of an important concert featuring the late quartets of Beethoven, beckoned. I hoped that a position of leadership would enable me to exert greater influence. During our last-minute rehearsal of op. 131, which I had memorised, I refused to proceed beyond the first four bars until they were rendered with appropriate – not approximate – intonation. When I realised that we would never make it beyond these initial measures I stalked off, glaring at the cellist, who was an especially arrogant and sloppy executant, though not ugly. I learned later that he had virtually pushed the former first violinist, a strikingly curvaceous woman, into the arms of another, having grown weary of her. The concert was cancelled, and rightly so, sparing prospective listeners and Beethoven the agony of desecration.

Practical life, for ugly perfectionists, can be quite difficult. With trepidation I auditioned (and thankfully it was a blind one, otherwise I am sure I would not have been selected), for the second violin in the fledgling Cassiopeia Quartet, who were ambitious to make a name for themselves and escape from the lowest tier of touring troupes. The principal violin was a very handsome young man with long hair, and I bore him absolutely no malice despite his undeserved advantages; the violist, an anorexic but beautiful blonde who had just turned thirty; and the cellist a pudgy twenty-something Asian with glasses. Pudgy is being kind: she was quite heavy, but not by any means downright ugly.

I persisted despite the inevitable assault on my auditory apparatus and my principles. Frankly speaking, I needed the job.

I hope I have not given the impression that I was at all satisfied with my own playing. On the contrary I was more keenly aware of my shortcomings than anyone else, though these shortcomings were not nearly as short of the mark as those of my fellow musicians, liberally speaking.

Each rehearsal was a trial and each performance, though wildly applauded, proof of the victory of public ignorance. In quartet playing it is the custom for eye contact to occur as an aid to the timing of entries and also, to some extent, to indicate expressive changes. I had grown used to being thoroughly ignored so I simply played with eyes focussed on the score. Nevertheless I would occasionally sneak a look around and invariably I found Suzy, the cellist, doting upon the shenanigans of Emilio, the first fiddle, as he rocked and swayed and even tapped his feet. A reprehensible spectacle I stoically endured until one day, at the beginning of the second movement of Schubert’s divinely sweet Rosamunde Quartet in A minor, I spied Emilio blowing a kiss to Suzy, who blushed, at which point I gently nudged Emilio’s music stand with my foot, inducing it to topple.

Well. This caused an uproar and being ugly, the ramifications for me were unusually severe: management placed me on probation. I had three months in which to seek help and resolve my problems, problems which antedated this recent culminating act of unacceptable insolence, problems which had been noticeable since I joined them, and which included: 1) fidgeting, 2) rolling of the eyes, 3) exasperated audible sighs, 4) an indelible frown, and 5) making everyone else feel bad all the time. I put it all down to ugliness, and high ideals, a very devastating combination.

Heavy in heart I trudged off for “help” and suffered the indignities of Rolfing, the Alexander technique, Feldenkrais, yoga hot and cold, Tai Chi, pharmacopsychiatry and Cognitive Therapy, in that order. The cognitive therapist, a woolly sort of grey-haired woman who wore oversized sweaters and drank cocoa and had a beaver-like enthusiasm for positive thinking gave me homework; but no amount of visualisation would change the way I looked. It was like asking an amputee to imagine he had two legs instead of one. And to think I paid her good money! I had fortunately resisted the attempts of the psychiatrist to medicate me for “Intolerance of Imperfect Intonation,” the occult syndrome he delightfully diagnosed and convinced me I had suffered from since childhood.

I was at my wits’ end when an acquaintance of an acquaintance gave me a referral to someone who had helped another acquaintance, and so I found myself dubiously walking down a quiet corridor to the offices of one Dr. Sol. Scriabin was playing on CD in his waiting room, though the piano was not tuned to equal temperament, which I found QUITE curious. When Dr. Sol opened the door to greet me I looked at him, and he looked at me and I looked at him hardly believing my eyes: he was as ugly as I.

‘Come in anyway,’ he said.

For the first ten minutes I was speechless. How could a man this ugly achieve so much? His dog, some kind of terrier, came up and sniffed and begged to be patted.

‘Go ahead, she likes you.’

Dr. Sol leaned back, with half-closed eyes as I attempted to describe my predicament.

‘You’re no Clark Gable,’ he replied at length, ‘but neither am I. However, I think I can help you. Incidentally, there is no such thing as triple “I” syndrome.’

My word! I asked him if I would have homework.

‘Just show up every week and try not to be afraid of your thoughts and feelings when we speak.’

I confess that I was hardly optimistic, but as I had no other options to speak of I decided to give it a go.

So I trundled off every week to Dr. Sol’s, cynically, to be honest, but punctually. His dog waited for her pats and curled up near my chair, which allowed me to stroke her ears while I tried to think of something important to say.

‘Don’t worry about important, just say whatever.’

So I said whatever. My probationary period was nearing an end and – and I really don’t know how this was happening – the others seemed pleased with my so-called progress. What progress? I wondered. Their playing continued to rankle, as did mine.

Dr. Sol said very little during my visits, which I initially found disconcerting. He offered no advice, though occasionally he’d make a comment, such as ‘Perfection is the enemy of the good.’ That got me angry, and I found out later that it wasn’t even original.

‘It’s okay to be angry: talk it out.’

Now I was really confused, but I let him have it. He took it in stride and shook my hand at the end of our session and his dog rubbed up against me as if I hadn’t done anything wrong!

I kept coming weekly and I noticed that, ugly though I was, I had at least begun to enjoy the way I was thinking. Peculiar. One day, after I had gone on and on about intonation Dr. Sol asked me to come to the waiting room, where he had a Victrola. I thought it was merely a conversation piece but no, it was a functioning device. He rummaged through a stack of 78s, placed one onto the felt-covered turntable, cranked up the machine and set the needle, attached to an intricate soundbox, onto the record. It was Caruso singing an aria from The Pearl Fishers: “De Mon Amie.”

We listened to that rough, huge and incredibly imperfect tenor voice which even broke a bit on a note. But it was . . . beautiful, I don’t know how else to put it, beautiful, as unstoppable as an avalanche, and as warm and golden as sunlight, despite the primitive mechanism from which it issued. In this enchanting captivation I had nearly forgotten about pitch!

At our next and final session Dr. Sol with his bushy eyebrows uncharacteristically urged, ‘Maybe it isn’t a bad idea to strive for imperfection.’

I took it to heart and began to experiment on the violin, playing around the note by infinitesimal degrees. At rehearsal Emilio stilled himself and Sharon, our thin gorgeous violist, bit her lip. Suzy looked up at me and – and I smiled. Did that feel strange! It took a while for my face to recover. And somehow, quite inexplicably, their playing had ceased to irk.

On our second date Suzy confided that she had never been able to talk to anyone with such ease before.

‘Even though …’ I stammered.

‘Yeah, even though. Now shut up and buy me some ice cream.’

I half-winced at her coarseness until I reflected that maybe, just maybe, it was part of why I found her so darned lovely.

Emanuel E. Garcia

Copyright 2012

Caprice No. 11 from Twenty-Four Caprices and Caprice d’Adieu, a collection of whimsical, fantastic, poignant, macabre and capricious tales, each of which features the violin. Set in wide-ranging locations and milieux, from Vienna to Nashville, Florence to New York, Venice to New Zealand, they capture the bittersweet and ridiculous nature of human follies — romance, repression, vanity, fidelity, ugliness, adultery, mischief, mastery, innocence and betrayal.

If you like the story consider clicking on the ebook link above, where the entire collection may be purchased for under 3 dollars. Spoiler alert: I will probably be uploading a few more from this volume in the coming weeks.