Lucia's Masks (37 page)

Harry is not much interested in the generator. But he looks forward to some insulation from the damp night air and soil, and to viewing the sky through a window cut into stout logs. He is more than ready for looking at the world again from within a snug enclosure. Is this an ancient human need insisting itself, he wonders, or just the weariness of his old bones?

A tortured groan breaks in upon his thoughts and his spine stiffens in fear. The irrational fancy comes to him that what he hears is the lamentation of his mother’s ghost, mourning his own imminent death. He shakes himself, and turns round to see Bird Girl at the water’s edge. She holds aloft one of the papier mâché masks from the theatre box on which he had banged his shin. He sees she is using the mask as a sound box, funnelling the breeze from the lake through the wide-stretched mouth in the shellacked face.

He struggles to quell a prickling anger, whose sharpness is all the more surprising given that he has never had anything but the most benign feelings for the young girl. What is it about the inhuman mouthings from the black hole in that artificial face which disturbs him so? Why does this sound, and the look of this object that Bird Girl still holds skyward, make his sparse flesh contract even more tightly on his bones?

He has found the masks offensive since he first saw them staring up at him from inside the wooden box. Their slippery gloss, unnatural yellow and green flesh tones, bulbous foreheads and yawning mouth cavities, all stir in him the deepest unease. He had only agreed to carry one because Bird Girl was so insistent. He tries, as far as possible, not to think of the heartless, rigid old man’s face that accompanies him as he walks, stuffed at the bottom of his drawstring sack.

Bird Girl springs round and makes one of her little leaps forward. Harry thinks her eyes look uncharacteristically wild. She holds her woman’s mask, with its black lacquered hair and heavily lidded eyes, up against her chest. For a second, Harry feels a genuine fear for her sanity. Or perhaps for his own, for from his perspective it does look as if she cradles a cleanly decapitated head, the wide-open mouth frozen in a last attempt to speak. He glances at Lucia and the Outpacer, who still sit upon the sand, and at Chandelier, who has been staring out at the waves. On all their faces, he sees a mirror of his own concern.

Chapter Twenty-One
Bird Girl and the Dance

B
IRD
G
IRL HUGS THE MASK TIGHTLY
to her chest. Never before has she felt so fully alert and alive. Is it because of this place at which they have finally arrived? There is some all-restoring sustenance coming from the dark solid rock whose roots she senses reaching deep into the earth, and from the steadying motion of the lake-like-a-sea, which is so huge she cannot see its opposite shore. The air tastes cool and cerulean on her tongue.

The landscape gives of itself so openly and cleanly she is sure it is bestowing these qualities on her thought. She is seized by the certainty that this is the place and time, exactly now, when all five of them can enact the ritual that has gradually been taking shape in her mind.

It was Chandelier who’d suggested that the six theatre masks had probably been used for a dramatic chorus, with all the actors speaking in unison, precisely, to the last syllable. Not just a shared voice and intonation, but a common breath and pulse. She was sure this was why she had felt compelled to bring the masks. They would all put them on, and after a little rehearsing, they would speak or chant together in a perfectly achieved harmony. She imagined them creating a temple of sound, with fluted columns that let in the light and air. It would be a holy place made of human voice and breath, and of an unforced and unbounded passion.

The yearning in her — to perform the ritual here and now — was sharper than any desire she had ever known; keener even than her desire to possess an entire library or to be reunited and reconciled with her mother. It crossed her mind that perhaps this was what it was like when gifted people felt impelled to create a work of art. Then she pushed this idea away as far too self-regarding for her purposes. The ritual was not
her
creation. They must build this temple of sound together: she and Chandelier and Harry and Lucia and the Outpacer. Her part was to explain to them why it was so necessary.

First, they must do this for Lola. Bird Girl knew she would never be at peace until she had fittingly acknowledged Lola’s sacrifice, and helped to create a ceremony that was artistic, dignified, and worthy of the old lady’s gift.

And second, they must do it for their own sake: as thanksgiving for having survived the forest’s traps and trials and in recognition of the destiny they had forged as a group. She doubted that any one of them could have made it through alone. Each of them, even Candace, had added to and fortified the life-story they shared.

Sometimes she thought she glimpsed this story’s actual plot, like a braid of silver water running through the welter of events and heavy, tangled emotions. There must be a way to catch it and reveal its actual shape: just the way the choruses in Greek tragedies had done it. Chandelier had told her how the actors in the chorus would stand on their own and comment on the essence of the action, so that the audience was made aware of the overarching truth of what was really happening on the stage. Those choruses would say things like: “Vengeance feeds on vengeance” or “Suffering maketh wisdom.”

Bird Girl had thought about it carefully and decided that for their chorus a chanting of pure sound would be best. For one thing, she hadn’t been able to come up with the right set of words that could contain everything she wanted the ritual to convey. She wanted grief and joy and thanksgiving. And yes, she wanted the words to hold the wisdom/suffering equation too, and to let that much-tested truth ring out like a bell. So she asked Chandelier to teach her all the Ancient Greek ritual cries he remembered from his reading of the tragedies. She had somehow managed to weave these cries into a supple song. It surprised her how well all the individual utterances cohered. She was sure she could teach these interwoven cries to the others very easily indeed. What concerned her was the process of wearing and speaking through the masks themselves. She had foolishly supposed it would be a simple matter of putting the mask on and pulling taut the two leather straps at the back that held the glazed face snugly in place.

But once she had it on, the panic set in almost immediately. Paradoxically, she felt she was smothering inside the featherweight mask. She was taken over by the irrational idea that some doom was about to descend on her; that she had eaten Socrates’ seeds of hemlock and that her limbs were already growing cold. She only just managed to control the impulse to pull the mask off, and apply her mother’s counsel on what to do when fear-filled panic threatened to unravel you. Bird Girl began to breathe strongly from her pelvic floor until she was calm enough to start chanting through the black cavern of the mask’s mouth.

Abruptly, she was rocked back on her heels. Zeus, or some other thunder god, was amplifying these sounds she uttered, doubling and deepening them so that they resonated powerfully within the hollow bulging forehead of the mask. God-speak, she thought. The cavity was full of a divine sound now, a humming that originated in the electric currents of earth and sky, setting the flesh of her forehead a-tingle. Next, it was as if someone had tripped a switch. Every cell in her body was quickened and filled with a honey-gold light. She both saw and felt this fluid light, which was suddenly a winged being ascending within her.
This is ecstasy at last
, she thought. Then she thought no more, until the moment she ceased chanting. She took off the mask and shook her head in wonder at where she had been.

Just to be certain that what had happened was not an aberration, she waited an hour or so and tried it again. The result was the same: she experienced the strangling panic and cold doom when she first put on her mask; then when she disciplined herself to the deep breathing and steady chanting, she activated the sublime sound box again. The god-speak reverberated against her vulnerable human flesh. And off she sped, light-footed and wide-winged.

Now Bird Girl had to grapple with a thorny moral dilemma. Did she have the right to ask the others to endure the state of cold-doom panic the mask brought on at first: like being immured alive in a tomb, with iron bands about one’s chest? In Harry’s case especially, does she have to right to ask?

She guessed that the revelation of the mask’s sound box secret would only work fully if it came as a surprise. She examined the question again and again and finally decided that the ritual would not have the correct fittingness and potency without the masks. What they would be making was a work of art, albeit invisible and fleeting. And the first stage in the making of art was often painful, was it not — a period of doubt and helplessness that must be endured with courage and faith? One waited in the thick darkness, trusting that the inrush of inspiration would come. Wasn’t that what artists of all kinds did?

Bird Girl resolved to counsel the others well. She would encourage them and teach them how to cope with that first petrifying panic when they donned the masks. They would succeed in speaking with one voice. They would see through the same eyes. They would do this for Lola’s sake . . . She makes one of her little balletic leaps toward them where they sit, each wrapped in their own thoughts, upon the wide crescent of the strand.

“This is the time and place,” she announces. She looks directly at each of them in turn. “We need to have a performance, a ritual, something to mark all we have come through. And I want each of us to put on our masks.

“To hold what has happened in remembrance,” she adds urgently. “To give it a shape. And for Lola. With Chandelier’s help, I have worked out what we will chant. It will not take long, truly.

“Please,” she implores. And again: “Please.”

They all look at her quizzically. She senses their reluctance, but knows she must persuade them at all costs. This is, and must be, the moment.

“I will coach you,” she tells them, “in the sounds we will make with the masks on. These are ritual cries Chandelier taught me, which he remembers from the ancient Greek plays he studied in his father’s library.

“I have thought carefully about this,” she reassures them. “I am certain these are the sounds the masks demand. They are simple sounds, but powerful. This is the place, ruled by wind and light and rock and water, where they must be loosed again into the world.

“
Evoi, evan, alali, io, ia, iache, papapape
.”

They humour her and comply, practising the cries until she is satisfied. When they flag or grew restive, Bird Girl chides them lovingly, praises their efforts and inspires them anew to try to make “a living temple of sound.”

“Raise the temple higher,” she encourages them. “Raise it.” Under her tutelage, the five transform the series of ritual cries into a chorus that is both sculptured and fluidly alive. Bird Girl is amazed at the visceral joy she experiences at hearing Harry’s tenor blend with the Outpacer’s bass, Lucia’s contralto, Chandelier’s countertenor, and her own soprano. She sees from their beaming faces, their uplifted arms, how pleased they all are with what they have made. The light reflected from the lake swings around and beneath them in a magnificent loop.

“We are ready,” Bird Girl tells them, “to put on our masks.”

She sees Harry and then Lucia frown. “But why,” Lucia asks. “We’ve managed to produce this splendid, soaring sound together. Why must we confine our voices inside those hard, ugly masks?

“You will see why,” Bird Girl responds with all the assurance she can muster. “Please trust me on this.”

Harry struggles to overcome his reluctance and perceives a similar slowness in Lucia, the Outpacer, and Chandelier as they take their masks out of their packs.

Bird Girl has put on her woman’s mask with its broad, wide cheekbones, hypnotic black eyes, and chasm mouth. Already she is not herself, but some hybrid that makes Harry’s flesh prickle. He feels more uneasy still when he puts on his old man’s mask with its grey-white beard and sagging eyelids. Despite the lightness of the papier mâché, the mask seems to him a heavy, choking thing once it encloses his face. Abruptly, a blind panic mounts in him. He feels he is being smothered. He cannot breathe. The sensation behind the mask is akin to death. Images of the frozen faces of Admiral Scott and Birdie Bowers flash upon his mind’s eye. He puts up his hand with the intention of plucking the mask from his face. He is a very old man who must protect what breath he has left. Bird Girl’s childish game strikes him now as not only absurd, but dangerous. For one poisonous instant, he hates her and her foolish demands.

“Breathe.” It is her voice he hears, booming from inside her woman’s mask. “Breathe deeply and produce your sound from the pelvis. As deep as you can.”

How ridiculous, he thinks.
From the pelvis
. But he obeys, and lets his arm drop. Glancing round, he sees through the eye-holes of the mask that Lucia, the Outpacer, and Chandelier are all following suit; he guesses that they too have experienced the same mortifying panic and the urge to tear these polished faces from off their own flesh. The girl in her gleaming wise-woman’s mask continues to urge them on. They begin again the sequence of ritual cries they had perfected.