Every Good Boy Does Fine

06/12/2021, 16:30 Every Good Boy Does Fine | The New Yorker
Personal History April 8, 2013 Issue
Every Good Boy Does Fine

A life in piano lessons.
By Jeremy Denk
April 1, 2013
T
wo summers ago, I was playing concerts in Santa Fe, some five hours’ drive from where I
grew up. Travel is more difficult for my parents than it used to be, but they made the trek to
hear me. They brought along a strange gift—a black notebook with my name on the front,
written in my best prepubescent cursive. It had been excavated from a closet and smelled faintly of
mothballs. I’d forgotten it existed but recognized it instantly: my piano-lesson journal. Starting in
1981, when I was eleven, it sat on my music rack, so that I could consult, or pretend to consult,
my teacher’s comments. Week after week, he wrote down what I’d played and how it went, and
outlined the next week’s goals.
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2013/04/08/every-good-boy-does-fine 1/15
Photograph by Mauricio Alejo
I paged through nostalgically, reflecting on how far I’d come. But a few days later I was onstage,
performing, and a voice made itself heard in my head: “Better not play faster than you can think.”
It was the notebook talking. I was indeed playing faster than I could think—sometimes your
fingers have plans of their own. The notebook voice went on. “Keep back straight,” it said.
“Beware of concentration lapses.” Through several subsequent concerts, it lodged complaints and
probed weaknesses, delivering opinions worse than any reviewer’s. It took me weeks to silence the
voice and play normally again.
In popular culture, music lessons are often linked with psychological torment. People apparently
love stories about performing-arts teachers who drive students mad, breaking their spirits with
pitiless exactitude. There’s David Helfgott in “Shine,” Isabelle Huppert’s sadomasochistic turn in
“The Piano Teacher,” the sneering Juilliard judges for whom Julia Stiles auditions to redeem her
mother’s death in “Save the Last Dance.” (I can testify that the behavior of the judges at my real-
life Juilliard audition was even meaner and funnier.) I’ve often rolled my eyes at the music-lesson
clichés of movies: the mind games and power plays, the teacher with the quaint European accent
who says, “You will never make it, you are not a real musician,” in order to get you to work even
harder. But as the notebook recalled memories of lessons I’d had—both as a child and later, once
the piano became my life—I wondered if my story was all that different.
W
hen I was five, my parents, desperate to find me an outlet, noticed that I had a thing for
music. Family lore has me singing the Hallelujah Chorus in the checkout lane at a
grocery store—an early warning of my classical predilections and their dire social consequences.
We were living in Englishtown, New Jersey, and one day my dad drove me to a nearby Suzuki
school, where I observed a long row of child violinists playing “Twinkle Twinkle,” their bows all
moving back and forth together, as if tethered. They faced a wall of mirrors, so that each child
duetted with a diabolical backward twin. I threw a tantrum, and the violin was nixed.
Not long afterward, I began taking piano lessons with Mona Schneiderman, who lived down the
street and had a spinet covered with tchotchkes, next to the kitchen. There was a candy bowl, and
sometimes the smell of cookies or chicken soup. She taught me to read music—Every Good Boy
Does Fine, and so on—and before long suggested a more advanced teacher, Lillian Livingston.
Livingston had a dedicated music room, with two grand pianos, and a dark waiting room, where
you endured the last moments of preceding lessons—other seven-year-olds playing their Clementi
and Kabalevsky, music so transcendentally mediocre that it is thought a child cannot ruin it.
When I was ten, we moved to Las Cruces, New Mexico, and I began lessons with a teacher
named William Leland. He taught at New Mexico State University but consented to take me on
after an audition. He insisted that I get a new black composition notebook for his weekly
comments. At first, lessons were at his gloomy campus studio, but later they were at his house—a
ranch house in a modest neighborhood with an enormous, shiny, improbable Bösendorfer grand
greeting you as you came in the door. Like my father, he favored a gently ironic tone of voice.
Leland’s notebook is surprisingly visual. In place of the paste-on stars used by piano teachers
everywhere, Leland drew stars by hand, giving nuance to his praise: sometimes the stars were
beaming with pride, sporting halos or crowns; sometimes they had sidelong glances, to reflect
mitigated success; some stars were amputees, and limped on crutches; and sometimes things were
so generally disappointing that he drew a slug, or a caterpillar, or even, on one terrible occasion, a
toilet. There were other artistic annotations, such as a drawing of a large check from the Screwball
Bank of West Burlap, dated April 7, 1981, and made out to me for a million dollars: I had at last
remembered to play a correct F-sharp in place of an erroneous F-natural.
On a typical page of the notebook (March 12, 1981), Leland writes, “Scale practice is getting
sloppy.” He suggests practicing scales in a series of rhythms—eighth notes, triplets, sixteenths—
and urgently switches to capitals: “use metronome.” This heartless device is invoked constantly:
“Metronome! You need an outside policeman every time the inner policeman breaks down”; “Use
Metroyouknowwhat”; and on and on. Anyone who has taken music lessons knows the indignity
of emulating a machine until every last human vagary vanishes. The clicking monster was also
part of Leland’s cunning scheme to prevent me from playing everything as fast as I possibly could.
In response to my performance of William Gillock’s “Forest Murmurs,” Leland writes, “Forest
Murmurs, not Forest Fire!” Below a carefully drawn portrait of a sullen Beethoven saying, “Man
muss zufrieden sein! (One must be happy!),” he complains that my tempo “sounds like a Hell’s
Angels motorcycle race.” At the bottom of another page, there is a “Quote of the Week”—“It’s
amazing what you can do when you go slower!”—attributed to me in the act of discovering this
brilliant truth.
Most of all, Leland required my conscious attention. In 1982, he wrote, “Practicing a passage is
not just repetition but really concentrating and burning every detail into your nervous system.”
When I failed to focus, he drew diagrams of my head, mostly empty, with a pea-size brain rattling
around inside. There were surveillance stratagems: once, two-thirds of the way down a page full of
advice, he wrote, “If you’ve read this far, call me up.” The word “detail” is everywhere. Reading it
now, I notice that technical corrections are enumerated very specifically, but that the musical
observations tend to be generic: “2nd mvt. beautiful! now this is making music!” or “This is
getting very musical.” This is a common redundancy. After a concert, you often hear people
saying, “It was so musical,” as if they had expected something else. Seeing these comments makes
me realize something about my teen-age self: how I withheld from Leland some of my most
personal feelings about music, in the same way that you hold things back from your parents, who
are all the more infuriating for having your best interests at heart.
Learning to play the piano is learning to reason with your muscles. One of the recurring story
lines of my first years with Leland was learning how to cross my thumb smoothly under the rest
of my hand in scales and arpeggios. He devised a symmetrical, synchronous, soul-destroying
exercise for this, in which the right and left thumbs reached under the other fingers, crablike, for
ever more distant notes. Exercises like this are crucial and yet seem intended to quell any natural
enthusiasm for music, or possibly even for life. As you deal with thumb-crossings, or fingerings
for the F-sharp-minor scale, or chromatic scales in double thirds, it is hard to accept that these
will eventually allow you to probe eternity in the final movement of Beethoven’s last sonata.
Imagine that you are scrubbing the grout in your bathroom and are told that removing every last
particle of mildew will somehow enable you to deliver the Gettysburg Address.
One May, right after I gave a solo recital, Leland wrote in the notebook, “Welcome to the
summer during which you will learn to hate me. We are going to do precision drills: Exercises in
perfection of fingering, notes and rhythm. . . . Every slip means back to beginning.” That was the
summer the music died—long, tedious lessons solely on scales, arpeggios, repeated notes, chords.
But this misery proved a success. Paging through the notebook, I recognize that I have not really
changed at all: I’m the sort of person who, if he has to suffer, wants to suffer full time. In the
couple of years that followed, I passed a commitment boundary. Between the lines of the
notebook, I can sense references to fraught conversations with my parents about the escalating
role of the piano in my life. And, by the time the notebook breaks off, everything has become
more serious: there is a swirl of preparation for recitals and the compilation of a college audition
tape.
I
went to Oberlin, and my single teacher split into ten or twenty. As a piano student, you spend
a lot of time accompanying fellow-students—sopranos, violinists, bassoonists—at their
lessons, and their teachers offered lifetimes of perspectives on how music ought to go. My piano
teacher, Joseph Schwartz, was a natural musician with a beautiful Romantic sound and a calm,
avuncular style. He did once say that my Chopin Berceuse was “unbelievably terrible,” but mostly
he was encouraging, if reticent. Luckily and unluckily, many of his colleagues were not reticent at
all. I began to recognize the various species of teacher: the holistic nurturers and the sarcastic
beraters; the belittlers, the analyzers, the gym coaches, and the old hands who believe that
musicianship can’t really be taught. Teachers would tell me that other teachers were misguiding
me, and I began to perceive a hidden web of personal agendas and resentments. It was upsetting
how often one lesson contradicted another. Without realizing it, I slipped into the dangerous state
of craving a guru, someone who would tie it all together.
One night in my senior year, I went to hear the Hungarian pianist György Sebők, who was
visiting from Indiana University, where he taught. He was then in his late sixties—short and
squat, almost triangular, and epically bald down the middle of his head. After a serious, hefty
program, he offered an evanescent encore, the Gigue (or Jig) from Bach’s first Partita. The witty
premise of the piece is hand-crossings: the right hand burbles away in the middle of the keyboard,
filling in the harmony, while the left darts over and under it, picking out scraps of melody and
bass line. Toward the end, Bach arrives emphatically on the bass note F. He is, in music-theory
terms, just one step away from the home key—the imminent end of the piece is implied—but,
instead of wrapping things up, he doubles the pace of hand-crossing and tightens the frame, so
that the hands seem to whirl around each other. A clever paradox: though the piece is frozen in
place, it seems to be moving faster than ever. As the hands whirl, the notes descend, and Bach
visits every daring harmony he can, while sitting in the driveway mere moments from harmonic
home. At last, in a flash, the piece resolves, and the left hand leaps up several octaves, like a
slingshot or a skipping stone.
While performing this devilish sleight of hand, Sebők appeared angelic and unperturbed. The
words “musical” and “unmusical” did not apply. It was as if the concepts behind the notes, playful
and profound, had come alive. As he revealed each audacious but logical chord change, I
experienced both shock and comprehension—surprise at something that made perfect sense. I can
still see the last notes, his left arm gracefully crossing over his right, describing an arc to the final
B-flat, his face conceding a small shadow of a smile. That moment felt like music escaping from
the boring necessity of sound. It determined the next five years of my life.
The next day, Sebők gave a master class, at which I was scheduled to play. He was elegantly
dressed, and smoked, in flagrant contravention of college rules, from a long cigarette holder. He
rested his smoking elbow in the palm of his other hand, while I played through the first
movement of Brahms’s Second Concerto. Quite early, the pianist must enter very grandly, with
low bass notes leaping up to treble chords. I played with nervous caution, missing a few notes. In
front of everyone, Sebők told me to close my eyes for a full minute. There was silence, and I could
smell the smoke from his cigarette. Then he told me that I knew the piano better than I
imagined. (This rang some bell in me.) He had me visualize the whole area of the keyboard
around and including that low F that I had to start with; he enumerated notes to think about, the
dangerous E-natural next door, the F-sharp just above; and then—he was very rational as he led
me, step by step, through this mystical procedure—he had me play the very treacherous passage
with my eyes still closed, throwing my left hand confidently into darkness. Whether it was
chance, or whether Sebők had managed to unlock a subconscious knowledge of the keyboard
accumulated through years of practice, I nailed the passage. The sound was deeper and richer,
even thunderous. A lifetime of difficulty had been replaced with a moment of ease.
S
ix months later, I was in Bloomington, Indiana, to study with Sebők. I paced around the
circular gray hallways of the music school, reading the names of the legendary faculty
members: the Italian violinist Franco Gulli; the Hungarian cellist János Starker; and the Russian-
born violinist Josef Gingold. I was surrounded by Europe and at the same time marooned in
cornfields, with a frat house across the street. I’m afraid to say that I turned up for my first lesson
in a T-shirt, shorts, and sneakers. Sebők came down the corridor in a three-piece suit and
appraised me silently in the few moments it took to unlock his door. It was clear that we had no
business meeting for any other purpose than music.
I played the Mozart C-Minor Sonata, and when I finished the first movement he got up and
went over to a Michelangelo drawing he had on the wall, along with an enormous, ornate
diploma from the Liszt Academy, in Budapest. (My diploma from Las Cruces High School was
definitely outclassed.) He pointed out various lines in the drawing, ranging from quite dark to
almost invisible. He began to flesh out a metaphor: Mozart is made up of two-, three-, four-, and
eight-bar phrases, all in a row, punctuated by cadences of various kinds. If you’re not careful, the
row can resemble a string of sausages. The solution was to find more varied and more sensual
ways of ending phrases—like drawing charcoal over paper, creating a curved or straight line. I
continued on to the second movement, and he neither praised nor criticized it. Instead, he told
me it was a Don Juan serenade, and began to demonstrate, drawing a connection between
Mozart’s florid ornamentation and the art of flirtation. The presence of sex behind Mozart’s
ruffles had been mostly unknown to me.
The aim of that first lesson, I later realized, was to ennoble the art of practicing. You were not
practicing “phrasing”; you were drawing like Michelangelo, or seducing like Don Juan. Sebők said
many times that you don’t teach piano playing at lessons; you teach how to practice—the daily rite
of discovery that is how learning really happens.
At that first lesson, too, he did one of his sublime parlor tricks. He played a stretch of melody that
culminated in a long held note, and warned me with a raised eyebrow to listen. The absolute
limitation of the piano is that every note decays after it is played, but as he shifted the underlying
harmony I heard the melody note crescendo and blossom, by some confluence of overtones. Sebők
was full of impossibilities like this. I remember a class where a young woman thundered away at
Liszt’s First Mephisto Waltz—thrashing, head shaking, hair thrown about. His response was
bemused: “If I did what you just did, I would be exhausted. I’d need”—he paused for the prosaic
word—“a vacation.” He had her replay one of the biggest passages, smiling and savoring her
inefficiency. Then he went to the piano and, with his cigarette holder dangling from his mouth,
brought his arms slowly down, creating a focussed sound ten times as large. The room gasped.
His huge sound had no trace of ugliness, and there was no recoil; his body was unaltered, like a
boulder with arms. We all had a desperate urge to be able to do that.
Gradually, a few basic Sebők principles consolidated themselves. He was, by turns, spirit guide
and physics teacher. His goal was to bridge the gap between boring technical detail and the
mysteries of the universe. He would make you focus on the myriad hinges of the arm and wrist,
sometimes looking for the arm to resemble a sewing machine, with up-and-down linear
simplicity, other times looking for curves, circles, spirals. The mechanism of bone and muscle
brought to bear on the piano is very complex; the hidden responding mechanism inside the piano
is also very complex; and the interaction of the two is a lifetime’s study. Putting a heavy ashtray on
top of the piano, he offered a lesson in motion: “If I want to move this thing, I don’t come at it
with a lot of speed”—he showed how the ashtray would tip over if you hit it hard—“but slowly, at
the speed I want to move it.” He approached the ashtray with his outstretched hand, which
resembled a lion’s paw, and made it glide across the piano lid. He believed that matching one’s
motions to the gestures within the music was essential to unlocking the emotions in a piece. “If
you don’t smile, can you really be happy?” he asked rhetorically. He conceded that, yes, you could
be happy without smiling, but insisted that the most complete happiness tended to find a physical
outlet. All this led to a question: wasn’t it perverse to play a phrase with body language that was
opposed to the musical idea itself ?
Unlike studio classes at Oberlin, where students played nervously for their peers and received one
another’s guarded comments, Sebők’s classes were happenings. They took place at night in his
tiny studio, which fit maybe twenty-five people; it was always uncomfortably packed. The only
light came from a small desk lamp next to where he sat, which made him seem to glow. One
night, he warned all of us gathered there not to become inured to even the most textbook
harmonic progressions. As a student played a Mozart concerto, he got up from the desk, sat at a
second piano, and added chords quietly from time to time, to enunciate a higher rhythm of
events. At first, there were two harmonies alternating every couple of bars, then the alternation
sped up, every bar, every half bar, and suddenly Mozart released everything into eight sailing bars
—a balloon drifting, all ties to the earth cut. It was unforgettable, this demonstration of the
poetry of structure, and many times, sitting in concerts, I’ve wished that Sebők would come
onstage and start playing those chords, so that the performers would stop producing sausage-
string phrases and give us ones that know their surroundings.
There is an aura to these studio sessions that no performance can match. They are beautiful acts
of attention, in which the revelatory detail is cherished for its own sake, freed from the narrative
necessities of performance. The climax of my Sebők experience was a class at which someone
played the Bartok Suite, Opus 14. In the third movement, the student was having trouble
negotiating wild skips around the keyboard, and Sebők offered, “Motion is not that important,
but mobility is.” I was still digesting that Zen distinction when the student began the darkly
lilting last movement. Sebők listened to the student play as if he were tired of teaching and hoped
to experience the music for its own sake. At last, he couldn’t take it anymore, and demonstrated a
few measures. Suddenly the music was wandering, halting, sick-sounding. There was a stunning
distance between the eloquence of what he did and the student’s attempt—an awakening of
melancholy possibility. He stopped playing in the middle of a phrase, and we all waited, knowing
that something special was about to happen. Then he said, “To show love for someone, but not to
feel that love”—long pause—“that is the work of Mephistopheles.”
Hanging with the smoke in the dimly lit room, that fantastic remark verged on camp. He made
no further explanation; we had to interpret it for ourselves. Ever since, when I’ve played the piece,
I’ve thought of Baudelaire’s “beauties of sickness,” of dishonest harmonies that at once seduce and
repel. “That is enough for tonight,” he said.
bout a month into my time with Sebők, I got a sense of how uncomfortable it would be to feel his
disappointment. I played the Chopin Fantaisie for him, a difficult and elusive piece, and
A my playing was a muddle. In my search for fantasy, the structure disintegrated, as when
you add too much water to a dough and end up with a pasty soup. He was furious at my lack of
attention to Chopin’s phrasings, dynamics, and meticulously marked pedallings. I tried to do what
he was telling me, but was weirdly unable to respond. A couple of days later, I found out that I
had mononucleosis, and all was forgiven. But the honeymoon period had been brought to a
premature end, and the possibility of mutual frustration entered the relationship.
Sebők was in town only for a few weeks at the beginning of the semester; then he would leave to
teach in Paris and Tokyo, and return for a few weeks at the end of the semester. There were long
months without his inspiration, when I wondered what I was doing there; music itself began to
seem a bit pale, Midwestern, monotonous. One dreadful time, I forgot a lesson. I can still
remember his angry Hungarian voice on the phone, as I uttered stumbling apologies. I couldn’t
believe that I’d endured weeks and weeks in Bloomington without him, only to fail to show up
once he was back.
I was so dazzled by Sebők that I sometimes didn’t pay attention to what he actually said—you
sometimes love a piece so much that you don’t really look at the score. As the years went by, I
became dependent on his magic, and I didn’t seem to be making much progress in a career. My
idea of music had merged with the idea of him. A member of the faculty who had befriended me
dropped hints about the dangers of idols, and I realize now that I couldn’t bear to leave Sebők.
But a key experience changed that. In my fourth year, in studio class, I played Beethoven’s
“Eroica” Variations—an ambitious, virtuosic piece. Sebők had previously gone over it with me,
demonstrating how much humor it contained, and I had run with his ideas. I had worked hard
and, as I played, felt reasonably confident. The other students gave me warm and generous
applause after I finished. Sebők smoked for a while. Perhaps I turned to him looking a bit jaunty.
And then, very coolly and evenly, he said, “You need to learn the difference between character and
caricature.” The room went silent, absorbing this elegant, lacerating remark. It got worse.
Variation after variation, he demonstrated how I had converted high humor into low slapstick. In
a manner that I now recognize as distinctively European, he seemed to blame me for my
enthusiasm for his own ideas. People patted me on the back outside afterward, hugged me, as if I
had been the victim of an assault. I was stunned. Over the next few days, I began to think that
there might have been a less cruel way of telling me I had gone too far. It seemed an injustice that
he was meanest to me when I felt I had played my best. I grasped the rationale, but I couldn’t
quite swallow it.
Lessons began to feel less like progress and more like some odd repetitive dream. Sebők gave me
an important lesson in rhythm, using the theme of the last movement of Beethoven’s Opus 109.
The theme is a saraband—a slow Baroque dance in triple time—and Sebők demonstrated how to
get a magical lilt: you subtly elongate the second beat and shorten the third, in effect playing the
third beat slightly late. The next week, I offered him a limping, nearly drunken saraband; he was
not happy. The week after that, I tried to cultivate his reserve, his refinement; he told me I was
playing “like an old man.” Maybe we were both realizing that our time had run its course. Evil
moment, when you doubt the magician’s magic, when you wonder if it was more image than
insight.
I
moved to New York and began trying to cultivate a career, but I returned periodically to teach
at Indiana University, alongside my former master. I now got to see him in faculty meetings.
A new dean came to the school and asked for a mission statement from the piano department, so
that our goals could be incorporated into the “business model” of the school as a whole. Sebők
smoked as various earnest options were presented. Finally, he offered, “We want to teach excellent
students, very well,” and looked wearily off into the distance. I sat smirking. His sarcasm was a
joy, now that it wasn’t directed at me. He treated me kindly, too, and was pleased that things were
starting to go well for me in New York. But I didn’t play for him anymore; it was too painful.
As I taught my students in Bloomington, I absorbed the ironies of role reversal. When you give
ideas to students, they tend either to ignore them or to exaggerate them. The first is distilled
futility, but the second is grotesque: there is the student, trying to be you with all his youthful
might. You look on with horror at this knockoff, this puppet—yourself to the _n_th degree as
interpreted by someone who doesn’t know all the other parts of you. Then a thought occurs: what
if this really is you, and that only through the imitation of this struggling student do you see what
you’re really about. I recalled the moment when Sebők accused me of playing like an old man.
One thing no one teaches you is how much teaching resembles therapy. You can be working with
a student you’ve recently met, and you begin to tinker with one thing, even the movement of an
arm. It becomes clear that some important muscle has been blocked for a decade or more. It’s an
intimate thing, being shown these years of lost possibilities, and before long you’re giving advice
about boyfriends, and explaining why parents are such a drag. There are diabolically opposed
incentives, too: while the teacher is trying to express the truth about the student and discover
what isn’t working, the student is in some way trying to elude discovery, disguising weaknesses in
order to seem better than she is. In this complicated situation, a teacher must walk a thin line,
destroying complacency without destroying confidence.
Teaching makes you understand what your own teachers must have endured—frustrations as great
as any performer’s. Ninety per cent of a teacher’s job is directing students to read what’s plainly on
the page. The other ten per cent is attempting to incite their imagination about what’s behind and
between the notes, what could never be written down in any score—and sometimes this seems
unteachable, like the creation of life itself.
Sebők died in 1999. When I heard, I was in my apartment in New York watching some idiotic
TV show. The news felt like a warning not to waste my life and my time. Ten years later, I was
sitting at a post-concert dinner with my Oberlin professor, Joseph Schwartz, whom I hadn’t seen
in many years. We were at an Applebee’s in Florida, near Sarasota, the only place open. We
exchanged summaries of our lives, and then, just when the conversation was flagging, out of
nowhere he said, “Do you remember that Bach Gigue Sebők played at Oberlin?” Yes, I did, I said,
and found myself tearing up. I couldn’t believe that, twenty years later, in this land of traffic lights
and strip malls, we were both still carrying the memory of those two minutes of Bach.
Very recently, during a recital in Philadelphia, I lifted my arm confidently to play a passage. A
flurry of wrong notes rang out. I had a moment of panic, a quick intake of breath, and was
beginning a litany of self-blame when I heard a voice in my head with a quaint Hungarian accent:
“The problem with you is that you’re a perfectionist.” It was quite a different voice from that of
the black notebook, an antidote, even. I played more freely; there suddenly seemed to be more
options. Leland had been right to remind me that there was no end to the details one could strive
for, but Sebők was also right—the desire for perfection could be a deadly weakness. Living
comfortably in that paradox, without even knowing it, is part of being a musician. There’s a
labyrinth of voices inside your head, a counterpoint of self-awareness and the remembered sayings
of your guides and mentors, who don’t always agree. Sometimes you wish you could go back and
ask your teachers again to guide you; but up there onstage, exactly where they always wanted you
to be, you must simply find your way. They have given all the help they can; the only person who
can solve the labyrinth of yourself is you. ♦
Published in the print edition of the April 8, 2013, issue.
More: Childhood Indiana Indiana University Jeremy Denk Johann Sebastian Bach Learning
Memories Music Musicians Pianists Piano Lessons Students Teachers Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart
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06/12/2021, 16:30 Every Good Boy Does Fine | The New Yorker

Personal History April 8, 2013 Issue

Photograph by Mauricio Alejo

Published in the print edition of the April 8, 2013, issue.

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