Violin (27 page)

A great crowd with candles in their hands, cloaked figures, figures with gleaming black top hats, and long dresses, full skirts gently sweeping the earth, dark gloved fingers protecting tiny quivering flames. Here and there the lights clustered to illuminate a whole gathering of attentive and eager faces. The music was fragile then bursting with strength, a deluge, an assault.

“Where are we?” I asked. This smell, it was the smell of death, of the rotting dead. We were crowded amongst mausoleums and stone angels. “Those are graves, look,
marble graves!” I said. “We stand in a cemetery. Who is playing? And who are these people?”

He only cried. Finally he lifted his head. Dazzled, he stared at the distant crowd, and only now did the music seem to strike him, to awaken him.

The distant solo violin had broken into a dance, a dance for which there was a name but I couldn’t recall it, a country dance which always carries with it in any land some warning of the destruction inherent in abandon.

Not turning away, only releasing me a little, and looking over his shoulder, he spoke.

“We are in the cemetery, true,” he said. He was tired and worn from crying. He held me close again, carefully regarding the violin, not to hurt it, and nothing in his poise or manner suggested he would try to snatch it.

He stared as I did at the distant crowd. He seemed to inhale the power of the leaping music.

“But this is Venice, Triana,” he kissed my ear. He gave some soft moan like a wounded thing. “This is the graveyard of the Lido. And who do you think plays there, for effect, for praise, for whim? And the city under Metternich all full of spies for the Hapsburg State which will never let another Revolution come or another Napoleon, a government of censors and dictators; who plays here, taunting God as it were, on sacred ground with a song no one would consecrate.”

“Yes, on that we do agree,” I whispered. “No one would consecrate it.” The notes brought the inevitable chills. I wanted myself to play, to take up my violin and join as if it were a country dance and fiddlers could step forward. What arrogance!

It came like steel, this song, but such dexterity, such swiftness, such boundless and tender power, and now it did glide into its appeal. I felt my heart shrink as if the
violin were begging me, begging me as Stefan had for the violin I still held, for something else far more precious, for everything, for all things.

I tore my eyes off the scattering of candles and faces. Marble angels protected no one in the dripping night. I reached out with my right hand and touched a marble grave with pediment and doorway. This is no dream. This is as solid as was Vienna. This is a place. The Lido, he had said, the island off the city of Venice.

I looked up at him and he down at me, and he seemed sweet, almost, and wondering. I think he smiled, but I couldn’t be sure. The candles gave a poor light and it was far away. He bent and kissed my lips. The sweetest shiver.

“Stefan, poor Stefan,” I whispered, kissing him still.

“You hear him, don’t you, Triana?”

“Hear him! He’s going to take me prisoner,” I said. I wiped at my cheek. The wind was far less cold than that in Vienna. It had no bite, this wind, only its freshness, and the deep corruption of the sea and the cemetery carried lightly on it. In fact, the stench of the sea seemed to fold into it the stench of the grave and declare that both were only natural.

“Who is the virtuoso?” I asked. I deliberately kissed him again. There was no resistance. I reached up and touched the bone of his forehead under his satin eyebrows, the ridge across which they were so straightly and thickly drawn. Soft, brushed hair. Very thin and flat and dark, wide but not thick, that is, and his eyelashes danced willingly against the palm of my hand.

“Who plays like this?” I asked him. “Is it you, can we move through the crowds? Let me see you.”

“Oh, not I, my darling, no, though I might have given him a little sport, you’ll soon see that, but come, look for yourself, look. There I stand, see? A spectator. A worshiper.
Candle in hand, listening and shivering with all the rest as he plays, this genius, for the love of the thrill he makes in us, for the love of the spectacle of the cemetery and its candles, who do you think he is, whom would I come to hear, so far from Vienna, on dangerous Italian roads—see my dirty hair, my worn coat. For whom would I come this long way?—if not the man they called the Devil, the possessed one, the Master, Paganini.”

The living Stefan came into focus, cheeks flushed, eyes catching two identical candle flames, though he himself held none, gloved hands twisting, right fingers around the left wrist, listening.

“Only you see …” said the ghost beside me. He turned my face away from the living. “Only, you see … there’s a difference.”

“I understand,” I said. “You really want me to see these things, you want me to understand.”

He shook his head as if this was too harsh and too horrifying, and then faltering, he said, “I’ve never looked at them.”

The music went soft; the night closed, opened on a different shade of light.

I turned. I tried to see the graves, the crowd. But something else altogether had taken its place.

We two, ghost and traveler—lover, tormentor, thief, whatever I was—we two were invisible spectators, without locus, though I felt the violin safely in my hands as ever, and my back firmly against his chest, and my breasts, with the violin held reverently between them, covered by his arms. His lips were on my neck. It felt like words spilling out against the flesh.

I looked forward.

“Want me to see—?”

“God help me.”

12

T
HIS WAS
a narrow canal; the gondola had turned from the Canale Grande into the strip of dark green reeking water between the rows of shoulder-to-shoulder palaces, windows of Moorish arches, all color bled out in the darkness. Great overbearing façades of clustered splendor rooted in water, an arrogance, a glory, this: Venice. Its walls on either side were so drenched and glazed with slime in the lamplight that Venice might have likely risen from the depths, bringing up nocturnal rot into the moon’s light with sinister ambition.

Now I understood for the first time the sleekness of the gondola, the sly black facility of this long, high-prowed boat for striving swift between these stony banks, beneath these rocking feeble lanterns.

Young Stefan sat in the gondola, talking frantically to Paganini.

The man himself, Paganini, seemed enraptured. Paganini, with the large hooked nose and giant protuberant eyes given him in many a painting, a burning presence in
which drama has surpassed ugliness effortlessly to make pure magnetism.

In our invisible window on this world, the ghost beside me shuddered. I kissed the fingers curled on my shoulder.

Venice.

From a high flapping shuttered window that opened out like a perfect square of yellow in the night, a woman threw flowers, shouting in Italian, the light spilling down on the blooms as they tumbled onto the virtuoso, her sentence ringing in a peculiarly Italian crescendo: “Blessed Paganini, that he would play without recompense for the dead!” Like a necklace with the very mid-phrase flung out the farthest and then breath drawn back on the word for the dead.

Others echoed the same cry. Shutters opened above. From a rooftop, running figures heaved roses from baskets onto the green water ahead of the boat.

Roses, roses, roses.

Laughter shot up the damp crawling stones; the doors were alive with hidden listeners. Shapes hovered in the alleyways, and a man darted over the bridge just above as the gondola went under it. A woman in the very middle of the bridge leant down to bare her breasts in the light of the passing lantern.

“To study with you, I came,” said Stefan, in the gondola, to Paganini. “I came with the clothes on my back, and without my father’s blessing. I had to hear you with my own ears, and it was not the Devil’s music, curse those who say that, it was the enchantment yes, ancient, most likely true, but not the Devil in this.”

A great rip of laughter came from the more hunched figure of Paganini, whites of his eyes bright in the dark. Beside him, a woman clung to him, like a hump growing
all over his left side, with only a handful of red curls snaking down his coat.

“Prince Stefanovsky,” said the great Italian, the idol, the Byronic fiddler par excellence, the romantic love of little girls, “I’ve heard of you and your talent, of your house in Vienna, where Beethoven himself presents his work, and that once Mozart came there to give you lessons. I know who you are, you rich Russians. You take your gold from a bottomless coffer in the hands of the Czar.”

“Don’t mistake me,” Stefan said, gentle, respecting, desperate. “I have money to pay you well for these lessons, Signore Paganini,” said Stefan. “I have a violin, my own, my cherished Stradivarius. I didn’t dare to bring my violin, traveling the post roads, days and nights to get here, I came alone. But I have money. I had to hear you first, to know that you would accept me, that you see me as worthy—”

“Oh, but Prince Stefanovsky, must I school you on the history of Czars and their Princes? Your father is not going to permit you to study with the peasant Niccolò Paganini. Your destiny is the service of the Czar, as it has always been with your family. Music was a pastime in your house, oh, don’t take offense, I know that Metternich himself”—he leant forward to whisper to Stefan—“the happy little dictator himself, plays the violin and well, and I have played for him. But for a Prince to become what I have become. Prince Stefanovsky, I live by this, my violin!” He gestured to the instrument in its case of polished wood, which seemed ever so much like a tiny coffin. “And you my handsome Russian youth must live by Russian tradition and Russian duty. The military awaits you. Honors. Service in the Crimea.”

Cries of praise from above. Torches at the dock.
Women in rustling clothes rushing up against a new and steeper bridge. Pink nipples in the night, bodices laid back like wrapping to display them.

“Paganini, Paganini.”

Roses again, falling down on the man as he brushed them away and looked intently at Stefan. The great cloaked hump of the woman beside him flashed a white hand down in the dark between Paganini’s legs, fingers playing as if his private parts were a lyre, if not a violin. He seemed not even to notice.

“Believe me, I want your money,” Paganini said. “I need it. Yes, I play for the dead, but you know of my stormy life, the lawsuits, the entanglements. But I am a peasant, Prince, and I will not give up my itinerant victories to prison myself up in Vienna in a drawing room with you—ah, the critical Viennese, the bored Viennese, the Viennese who did not even give Mozart his bread and butter; did you know him, Mozart? No, and you cannot remain with me. Already, no doubt, Metternich, at your father’s behest, has sent someone to look for you. I’ll become accused of some nasty treason in all this.”

Stefan was crushed, head bowed, cheeks so tender with pain, and deep-framed eyes glittering with the reflected light from the torpid but shiny water.

An interior:

A Venetian room, unkempt and blistered from the damp, chalky dark walls and soaring yellow ceiling with only faded remnants of a pagan swarm that had burnt so new and bright before its death in Stefan’s rich Viennese palace. A long drape, a slash of dark dusty burgundy velvet and a deep green satin tangled with it, hung from a high hook, and out the narrow window, I saw the ochre colored wall of the palace opposite so close that one
could reach across the alley if one wished and knock upon the solid wood green shutters.

The unmade bed was heaped with tapestried robes and crumpled linen shirts with costly Reticella lace, the tables stacked with letters, wax seals broken, and here and there lay the stubs of candles. Everywhere bouquets of dead flowers.

But, look:

Stefan played! Stefan stood in the middle of the room, on the shiny Venetian oiled floor, playing not this, our spectral violin, but another undoubtedly by the same master. And round Stefan, Paganini danced, playing variations that mocked Stefan’s theme, a contest, a game, a duet, a war perhaps.