Violin (23 page)

“Turn on the light,” she said in her drunk voice. “Pull the shade, Triana, turn on the light.”

“But that,” I said, “but that.” I moved closer to it, pointing, the Kotex white cotton pad creased in the middle and clotted with blood. It was swarming with ants! That’s why it glittered! Oh, God, look at it, Mother! Ants, ants everywhere over it, ants, you know, the way they could come and take over a plate left outdoors, swarming, devouring, tiny, impossible to kill.

“Mother, look, it’s covered with ants, the Kotex!”

Now if Katrinka saw that, if Katrinka crawled and found something like that, if anyone saw—I went closer and closer. “Look,” I said to her.

She coughed and coughed. She waved her right arm as
if to say, Leave it alone, but you couldn’t leave something like this alone, it was a Kotex covered with ants, just thrown in the corner. It was near the heater. It could catch fire, and the ants, you stop ants. Ants could get all over everything. You locked up the old world of 1948 or ’49 tight from ants, you never let them get a head start; they ate the dead birds as soon as they fell in the grass; they made a line creeping under the door and up the kitchen counter to find the one spill of molasses.

“Ah,” I made some noise of disgust. “Look at it, Mother.” Oh, I didn’t want to touch it.

She stood up, wobbling, coming behind me. I bent down pointing at it, crinching up the features of my face.

Behind me she struggled to speak, to say, Stop, Stop. She said, “Leave it alone,” and then coughed so hard she seemed to strangle. She grabbed my hair, slapped me.

“But Mother,” I said. I pointed at it.

Again, she slapped, and again, so that I cowered, arms up, slap after slap coming down on my arm. “Stop it, Mother!”

I went down on my knees on the floor, where the heater made a flaming reflection even in the dusty boards with their old shellac, and I smelled the gas and saw the blood, the thick collection of blood covered with ants.

She slapped me again. I put out my right hand. I screamed. I broke my fall, but my hand almost touched it, and the ants swarmed, the ants went into a frenzy, racing at ant speed over the thick blood. “Mamma, stop!”

I turned around; I didn’t want to pick it up, but somebody had to pick it up.

She stood looming over me, unsteady, the thin pink panties stretched high over her little belly, her breasts sagging and brown-nippled, and her hair a big tangle over her face, coughing and waving furiously for me to
get away, to go out, and then she lifted her knee and her naked foot and she kicked me, hard in the stomach. Hard.

Hard, hard.

Never in all my living life had I known this!

This wasn’t pain. This was the end of everything.

I couldn’t breathe. I couldn’t breathe. I wasn’t alive. I couldn’t reach or find my breath. I felt the pain in my stomach and chest and I had no voice to scream and I thought I will die, I would die, I would die. Oh, God, that she did that, you kicked me, I wanted to say, you kicked me, you didn’t mean to do it, you couldn’t mean it, Mother! But I couldn’t breathe, let alone speak, I was going to die and my arm brushed the hot heater, the burning iron of the heater.

She grabbed for my shoulder. I did scream. I did. I panted and panted and screamed and screamed—and I screamed now, as I had then, but now—that Kotex glittering with the swarming ants and the pain in my stomach and the vomit coming up in my scream, that was all there was, You didn’t mean, you didn’t … I couldn’t get up.

No. Put an end to it!

Stefan.

His voice. Ethereal and loud.

The cold house of present time. Any less haunted?

He stood crumpled beside the four-poster bed. It was now, forty-six years later after that moment, and all of them gone to the grave, but me and the baby upstairs who grew up to be so full of dread, and so full of hatred of me that I couldn’t save her from these things, and didn’t—and he, our guest, my ghost—bent double, grabbing the fancy carved post of the mahogany bed.

Yes, please let it all come back, my counterpanes of lace, my curtains, my silk, I never, my Mother, she didn’t
mean, she couldn’t … that pain, absolutely unable to breathe, then hurt, hurt, hurt and nausea, can’t move!

Vomit.

No! No more, he said.

And he hooked his right arm around the post of the bed, and let go of the violin safely on the big soft mattress of the bed, atop the feathered counterpane. With both hands, he held the bedpost and he cried.

“Such a little thing,” I said, “She didn’t cut me with a knife!”

“I know, I know,” he cried.

“And think of her,” I said, “naked like that, how ugly she looked, and she kicked me, she kicked hard with her naked foot, she was drunk, and my arm got burned on the heater!”

“Stop it!” he pleaded with me. “Triana, stop.” He lifted both hands to his face.

“Can’t you make music of that,” I said drawing near. “Can’t you make high art of something so private and shameful and vulgar as that, as that!”

He cried. Just like I must have cried.

The violin and the bow lay on the counterpane.

I rushed at the bed, grabbed both of them—violin and bow—and stepped back away from him.

He was astonished.

His face was wet and white. He stared at me. For a moment, he couldn’t grasp what I’d done, and then his eyes fixed on the violin and he saw it and he understood.

I lifted the violin to my chin; I knew how; I lifted the bow and I began to play. I didn’t think on it or plan or dread to fail; I began to play, to let the bow, barely grasped between two fingers, fly against the strings. I smelled the horsehair and the resin of the bow, I felt my left fingers stomping up and down the neck of it,
damping down the throbbing strings, and I tore at the strings wildly with the bow, and in the stroking and in the pound of my fingers, it was a song, a coherent song, a dance, a drunken frenzied dance, with note following too fast upon note for the mind to direct, a devil’s dance, like that long ago drunken picnic, when Lev had danced and I’d played and played, and could let the bow and my fingers move without stopping. It was like that, and more, and it was a song, a crazed, plunging discordant rural song, wild, wild, like the songs of the Highlands and the dark mountain places, and grim weird dances in memory and in dreams.

It had come into me … 
I
love you, I love you, Mamma, I love you, I love you, I love you.
It was a song, a real true bright and shrieking and throbbing song coming out of his Stradivarius, unbroken, streaming out as I rocked back and forth, the bow sawing wildly and my fingers prancing. I loved it, loved it, this untutored dark and rustic song, my song.

He grabbed for the violin.

“Give it back to me!”

I turned my back on him. I played. I went motionless, then drew the bow down in a long low mournful wail; I played the saddest slowest phrase, dark and sweet, and in my eyes I dressed her and made her pretty and saw her in the park with us, her brown hair combed, her face so beautiful; we never, any of us, ever had her beauty.

Years and years wrapped round all this and meant nothing as I played.

I saw her crying in the grass. She wanted to die. During the war, when we were so small, Rosalind and I, we always walked beside her, holding her hands, and one evening, we were locked by mistake in the dark museum of the Cabildo. She wasn’t afraid. She wasn’t drunk. She
was full of hope and dreams. There was no death. It had been an adventure. Her smiling face as the guard came to our rescue.

Oh, draw the bow out long and let the notes go deep, so deep that they scare you that anything could make this sound. He reached for me. I kicked him! I kicked him as sure as she had kicked me, only my knee came up and he went whirling back.

“Give it to me!” he demanded, struggling to regain his balance.

I played and played so loud I couldn’t hear him, turning away from him again, seeing nothing but her,
I love you, I love you, I love you.

She said she wanted to die. We were in the park, and I was a young girl and she was going to drown herself in the lake. Students had drowned themselves in the lake of the park—it was deep enough. The oaks and fountains hid us from the world of the Avenue, the streetcars. She was going to go down into that slimy water and drown.

She wanted to, and desperate Rosalind, pretty Rosalind of fifteen years old, with her glossy perfect frame of curls, begged her and begged her not to do it. I had breasts under my dress but no brassiere. I had never even put one on.

Forty years later or more, I stood here. I played. I slashed and slashed at the strings with the bow. I stamped my foot. I drew out the sound, I made it scream, this violin, twisting this way and that.

In the park, near the filthy gazebo where the old men made urine and would always stand, leering, near there, eager to show a limp penis in a hand, pay them no mind, near there I had Katrinka and little Faye in the swings, those small wooden swings they had for the little little kids with the slide bar in front so they wouldn’t fall out, but I
could still smell the urine, and I was pushing both of them in the swings, taking turns, one push for Faye, one push for Katrinka, and these sailors wouldn’t leave me alone, these boys, who were hardly any older than me, just the teenager sailor boys who were always in port in those days, English boys maybe or boys from up north, I don’t know, boys walking along Canal Street, smoking their cigarettes, just boys.

“Is that your mother? What’s wrong with her?”

I didn’t answer. I wanted them to go away. I didn’t think anything even in answer. I just stared and pushed at the swings.

He had forced us out, my Father; he had said, You have got to get her out of this house, I have to get her out of here and clean this place, I can’t stand it, you’re taking her out, and we knew she was drunk, stinking drunk, and he made us take her; Rosalind said, I will hate you till the day I die, and we had all together gotten her on the streetcar and she had nodded and wagged, drunken and half asleep as the streetcar rocked uptown.

What did people think of her then, this lady with her four girls; she must have worn some respectable dress, yet all I can recall is her hair, prettily combed back from her temples and her lips pursed and the way she shook herself awake and straightened up, only to wag forward again, eyes glazed, little Faye clinging tight to her, tight, tight.

Little Faye, head against her Mother’s skirts, little Faye, unquestioning, and Katrinka, solemn and shamed and mute and staring with numbed eyes already at that tender age.

When the streetcar came to the park, she said, “Here!” We all went with her to get off the streetcar by the front door, because we were nearer to the front. I remember.
Holy Name Church across the street and on the other side the beautiful park with its balustrades and fountains and the green, green grass where she used to take us all the time, years before.

But something was wrong. The streetcar stood still. The people in the wooden seats stared. I stood on the pavement looking up at her. It was Rosalind. Rosalind sat in a back seat looking out the window pretending that she wasn’t one of us, ignoring Mother, as Mother said so ladylike you would have never dreamt she was drunk, “Rosalind, dear, come on.”

The driver waited. The driver stood there as they did at that time, in the front window of the car, with the controls, the two knobs, and waited, and everyone on the streetcar stared. I grabbed Faye’s hand. She almost wandered into the traffic. Katrinka, sullenly, sucking her thumb, round-cheeked and blond, and lost, stared dully at all that took place.

My mother walked back down the length of the car. Rosalind couldn’t hold out. She had to get up, and she came.

And now, in the park, as Mother threatened to drown herself, as she fell back on the grass sobbing, Rosalind begged her and begged her not to do it.

The sailor boys said, “How old are you? Is that your Mother? What’s wrong with her? Here, let me help with that little girl.”

“No.”

I didn’t want their help! I didn’t like the way they looked at me. Thirteen. I didn’t know what they wanted! I didn’t know what was wrong with them, to crowd around me like that, and two little children, and over there, she lay on her side, her shoulders shaking. I could hear her sobs. Her voice was lovely and soft as the pain
perhaps grew less sharp, the prick of it that Rosalind had tried to stay on the car, that Mother was drunk, that my Father had forced her out, that she was drunk, that she wanted to die.

“Give it back to me!” he roared, “give me the violin.”

Why couldn’t he take it? I didn’t know. I didn’t care.

I went on and on with the chaotic dance, the jig, my feet moving, prancing like the feet of the deaf mute Johnny Belinda in the movie, to the vibrations of the fiddle she could only feel, dancing feet, dancing hands, dancing fingers, wild, mad, Kerry rhythm, chaos. Dancing on the bedroom floor, dancing and playing and letting the bow dip to the left then bringing it down, fingers choosing their own path, bow its own time, yes, jam, jam, as they said at the picnic, let it go, jam.

Blow it out, let it go. I played and played.

He grabbed at me, clutching me. He wasn’t strong enough to overpower me.

I backed up against the window, and wrapped my arms over the violin and the bow against my chest.

“Give it back,” he said.

“No!”

“You can’t play it. It’s the violin that’s doing it; it’s mine, it’s mine.”

“No.”

“Give it to me, it’s my violin!”

“I’ll crush it first!”

I crunched my arms tight against it, I didn’t want to make the bridge collapse, but he couldn’t tell how hard I held it. I must have been all elbows and huge eyes to him, holding it.

“No,” I said. “I played it, I played it that way before, I played my song, my version of it.”

“You did not, you lying whore! Give me the violin
now, damn you, I tell you, it’s mine! You can’t take such a thing.”

I shivered all over staring at him. He reached for me, and I shrank in the corner and tightened my grip.

“I’ll smash it!”