Quizás, Quizás, Quizás

Almost as soon I got out onto the street this afternoon I started whistling "Quizás, Quizás, Quizás," but at the time I thought the chorus was "que sá, que sá, que sá," which is probably meaningless. When I had crossed Skalitzer Strasse and was walking in front of McDonalds, still whistling, I found myself behind a blond young man carrying a package in one arm and a folder in another. Imagining that he was listening to my whistling, I became conscious of the tune and wondered why I was whistling it at all. Up until then whistling it had been as gratifying and irresistable as patiently scratching the itchy end of a thickly calloused toe. Then I remembered that just before leaving the apartment I happened to glance at the cover of a CD of Bach Cello Suites performed by a relatively unknown French musician whose name my flatmate had asked me earlier that day to correctly pronounce. I had always found French difficult to pronounce, and especially when I'm mostly speaking German, so I paused, sounded it out in my head first, and said, slowly: Queyras.

Later, I searched for the song on the internet but couldn't find it because I didn't know what it was called or that it was sung by Nat King Cole, and instead of googling "Quizás, Quizás, Quizás" I googled, first, "que sa, que sa, que sa," then "que çà, que çà, que çà," then "qui ca, qui ca, qui ca," and finally "qui sa, qui sa, qui sa." I quickly ran through the song in my head searching for whatever text I could remember but found nothing. I vaguely remembered that it was in a film by Wong Kar Wai, but I couldn't remember which, and I wasn't even really sure that it was. The idea of googling "Wong Kar Wai soundtrack" exhausted me. My last desperate thought was to sing into the computer with google's homepage open.

Eventually my flatmate came into my room to chat and, after about 20 minutes of talking about different things, I suddenly realized that I could hum the tune to him, and I did. When I got to the part that went "Quizás, Quizás, Quizás," I was relieved to see a spark of recognition in his face. I continued humming, even with a little swing, and he said he didn't know what it was called but that it was on the soundtrack of Wong Kar Wai's film "In the Mood for Love." He had the CD and brought it to me. Had I not figured out the title of the song, I'm not sure how I could have written this post.