Maybe it's crazy, like the life of the main actor in this book, Eddie Balchowsky, but holy madness, that when I read it Joan Perucho's Book of Chivalry came to mind, a story with a protagonist who also embarks on a mysterious sea voyage. through. They have something to do with the mythical book of our most awarded novelist judge and How did you lose your arm, Balchowsky? , by the journalist Toni Orensanz (Falset, 1970).
Key difference. Perucho's was an adventure novel that introduces us to the medieval world. Orensanz's is not just another work in the genre of narrative journalism. It is a text to which he has applied method, exhaustiveness and rigor, with his research on a character (here real) who was, just like the author, a good storyteller. A storyteller, a storyteller, who hooked you to his story from start to finish.
With only some parts of his life, we would have to make novels with substance from beginning to end. And in this book, Orensanz concentrates it and makes it flow all in one, with the vital evolution of a protagonist, the total antihero, who, among others, single-handedly destroys the epic battle of the Ebro. Did Balchowsky, to whom Would you like to listen to him, in a defeatist key? Not basically like the loose verse that he always was.
A free soul and one-armed pianist since he lost his arm fighting in the Spanish civil war. There he fought as a member of the International Brigades, a movement that, according to the author, is clear that it was more complex than classically explained. The protagonist of this story, in fact, did not cross the pond to fight for communism or anything like that, but so that everyone could play Bach in freedom.
His place, at that moment, was there, because of how he had been an abused child. And it is that Balchowsky was a playboy in the most explicit sense of the word, because of how long he lived and survived, even as a little boy. He was born as the son of the only Jewish family in Frankfort, a tiny city in the state of Illinois, south of Chicago, founded as a result of the construction of one of those railroads that the Yankees built when they were launched to conquer the Far West.
And Balchowsky survived that childhood of bullying due to the condition of his family. But that would only be the beginning of a life full of adventures and misadventures, which in the book are recalled with the clear starting point of how the protagonist ended up becoming a kind of guru and a living legend of the Chicago of the seventies, adored by emerging stars of contemporary American music such as Utah Phillips, Jimmy Buffett or Tom Waits.
How did a one-armed pianist get that? It is part of the excitement of this true story that discovers worlds that seem to be from another universe. A story that many of us will discover, for example, how Paul Wittgenstein, brother of Ludwig, the famous philosopher, was one of those one-armed pianists who, after his misfortune during the First World War, managed to get the scores to be played. with one arm. Rich people who paid for composers to write specifically for them and who pulled the sustain pedal to build their melodies.
And Balchowsky, a kind of Forrest Gump, who wherever he went seemed to find a story written and waiting for him to live it, survive it and tell it, caught that too.
