Violin (38 page)

We convinced ourselves that Faye had to share this with us, that somewhere somehow she already did, because we reached out for her. Faye, come home. Faye, don’t be dead. Faye, where are you? Faye, it is fun in the limousines, and the beautiful rooms; it is fun to push through the crush at the stage door, it is fun.

Faye, the audience gives us love! Faye, it is warm now forever.

One night in New York, I stood behind a stone griffin, I think it was near the top of the Ritz-Carlton Hotel. I looked out over Central Park. The wind blew cold like it had in Vienna. I thought of Mother. I thought of a time when she had asked me to say the Rosary with her, and
she had spoken of her drinking to me—which she had never mentioned to any of the others—when she had said it was a craving in the blood, and that her father had it, and his father. Say the Rosary. I closed my eyes and I kissed her.
The Agony in the Garden.

That night on the street, I played for her.

And soon my fifty-fifth year would be complete. October would come and I would be fifty-five.

Then finally—as I knew it would—the inevitable moment came.

How kind of Stefan and how perfectly impulsive and unwise to have written it himself with his very own ghostly hand, or had he gone into the body of a human being to inscribe these letters?

Nobody in this day and age had a script so perfect as this, in long sharp strokes of a dipped pen, and grand purple ink—on parchment no less, new, of course, but as firm as any he might have chosen in his time.

He didn’t keep any secrets.

“Stefan Stefanovsky, your old friend, cordially invites you to come for a benefit concert in Rio de Janeiro, and looks forward to seeing you there. All expenses to be paid for you and your family at the Copacabana Hotel, Rio. Further arrangements and details at your pleasure. Please call the following numbers collect when it is convenient for you to do so.”

Katrinka handled the details on the phone. “At what theater? The Teatro Municipale?”

Sounds modern, sterile, I thought.

I would give you Lily if I could.

“You don’t want to go down there, do you?” asked Roz. She had had her fourth beer and was mellow and soft, her arm around me. I was dozing against her and looking out the window. This was Houston, a tropical
city, really, with a great ballet and an opera, and audiences which had been so warm to and unquestioning of us.

“I wouldn’t go there,” said Katrinka.

“Rio de Janeiro?” I said. “But it’s a beautiful place. Karl wanted to go. He wanted to complete his work on the book. St. Sebastian, his saint, his …”

“Academic field,” said Roz.

Katrinka laughed.

“Well, that’s all done, his book,” said Glenn, Roz’s husband. “It’s being shipped now. Grady says everything is going splendidly.” Glenn pushed his glasses up on his nose.

He sat down and folded his arms.

I looked at the note. Come to Rio.

“I can see it in your face; don’t go!”

I simply stared at the note; my hands were wet and shaking. His handwriting, his very name.

“What in the name of God,” I asked, “are you all talking about?”

Exchange of looks. “If she doesn’t remember now, she will,” said Katrinka.

“That woman who wrote to you, your old friend from Berkeley, who told you …”

“That Lily …” I asked, “had been reborn in Rio?”

“Yeah,” said Roz, “that’s going to make you miserable to go there. I remember when Karl wanted to go. You said you had always wanted to see that place, but you just couldn’t take it, remember? I heard you tell Karl …”

“I didn’t remember that I told him,” I said. “I only remember that I didn’t go, and he wanted to. Now I have to go.”

“Triana,” said Martin, “you’re not going to find the reincarnation of Lily anywhere.”

“She knows that well enough,” said Roz.

Katrinka’s face was full of dull well-learned misery. I didn’t want to see this.

She had been so close to Lily. Roz had not been with us in Berkeley and San Francisco during those times. But Katrinka had been at the bedside, the coffin, the cemetery—through all of it.

“Don’t go,” said Katrinka in a thick voice.

“I’m going for another reason,” I said. “I don’t believe Lily’s there. I believe that if Lily exists, Lily has no need of me or she would have come to—.”

I stopped. His stinging, hateful words came back.

You were jealous, jealous that your daughter made herself known to Susan and not to you, admit it! That’s what you thought. Why didn’t your daughter come to you? And you lost the letter, you never answered, even though you knew Susan was sincere and you knew how she had loved Lily and how much she believed—

“Triana?”

I looked up. Roz had the old tinge of fear in her eyes, fear such as we knew in bad times, before there was all we wanted before us.

“No, don’t worry, Roz. I’m not looking for Lily. This man … I owe something to him,” I said.

“Who, this Stefan Stefanovsky?” Katrinka asked. “The people I spoke to down there don’t even know who he is. I mean the invitation is firm, but they haven’t any idea what sort of man—”

“I know him well,” I said. “Don’t you remember?” I got up from the table. I picked up the violin, which was never more than four inches from me, and had been resting by the chair.

“The violinist in New Orleans!” said Roz.

“Yes, that’s Stefan. That’s who he is. And I want to go there. Besides … they say it’s a beautiful place.”

Could it be? The place of the dream? Lily would have known to choose Paradise.

“Teatro Municipale … sounds dull,” I said. Had someone said those words before?

“It’s a dangerous city,” said Glenn. “They’ll kill you for your sneakers. It’s full of the poor who build their shacks up the mountainsides. And Copacabana Beach? It was all built up decades ago …”

“It’s beautiful,” I whispered.

The words weren’t audible. I held the violin. I plucked the strings.

“Oh, please, don’t start playing now, I’ll lose my mind,” said Katrinka.

I laughed. So did Roz.

“I mean, not every moment—” Katrinka hastened to say.

“It’s all right. But I want to go. I have to go. Stefan’s asked me to go.”

I told them they didn’t have to come. After all, it was Brazil, but by the time we boarded the plane, they were eager for this exotic and legendary world, of the rain forest and the great beaches, and this Teatro Municipale, which sounded like a concrete city auditorium.

Of course it was not that at all.

You know it.

Brazil is not another country. It is another world, where dreams take different forms, and humans reach to spirits day by day, and saints and African gods are fused on Golden Altars.

You know what I found. Of course …

I was afraid. The others saw it. They felt it. It did make me think of Susan, and not only of her letter, but of what
she’d told me after Lily’s death. I thought over and over of her, and how she had told me after Lily’s death that Lily had known she was going to die. I had wanted to keep that secret always from Lily. But Lily had told Susan, “Guess what, I’m going to die.” And laughed and laughed. “I know because my Mom knows and my Mom’s afraid.”

But I owe you this, Stefan. I owe to your dark assaults the very marrow of my strength. I can’t refuse you this.

So I forced the smile. I kept my counsel. To talk of a dead child wasn’t such a hard thing. They had long ago stopped asking me how I had gotten to Vienna. They didn’t connect any of this with the mad fiddler.

And so off we went, and it was laughter again, and beneath, fear, fear like the shadows in the long brown hollow of the house when Mother drank and babies slept in the sticky heat and I feared the house would catch fire and I couldn’t get them out, and our father was off I didn’t know where, and my teeth chattered, even though it was warm and the mosquitoes moved in the darkness.

17

S
LEEPY AND
sluggish from the long flight south, past the equator, over the Amazon and down to Rio, we were dazed as the vans carried us through a long black tunnel, beneath the rain-forested mountain of Corcovado. That splendor—the granite Christ on the peak with his arms outstretched—I had to see this Christ before we left.

I carried the violin now all the time in a new padded burgundy velvet sack, stuffed with cushioning, and safer to sling from my shoulder.

There was no hurry for us to see all the wonders of this place—Sugarloaf Mountain, and the old palaces of the Hapsburgs who had come here in fear of Napoleon and with reason, as he dropped his shells on Stefan’s Vienna.

Something touched my cheek. I felt a sigh. Every hair on my body stood on end. I didn’t move. The van jolted along.

As we came out of the tunnel, the air was cool and the sky immense and bountifully blue.

As soon as we plunged into the thick of Copacabana, I
felt the chills on my arms, I felt as if Stefan were next to me; I felt something brush my cheek and I hugged the violin in its soft safe sack of velvet, trying to fight off this fit of nerves and see what lay around me.

Copacabana was dense with towering buildings and sidewalk shops, with street vendors, businessmen and -women on the march, slouching tourists. It had the throb of Ocean Drive in Miami Beach, or midtown Manhattan, or Market Street in San Francisco at noontime.

“But the trees,” I said. “Look, everywhere, these huge trees.”

They sprang up straight, verdant, spreading out in scalloped umbrellas of large green leaves to make a pure and lovely shade in the pressing heat. Never in such a dense city had I seen anything so green and rich, and these trees were everywhere, rising out of soiled pavements, undaunted by the shadows of skyscrapers, the swarm of those on the pavements.

“Almond trees, Miss Becker,” our guide said, a tall willowy young man, very pale, with yellow hair and translucent blue eyes. He was named Antonio. He spoke with the accent I heard in my dream. He was Portuguese.

We were here. We were in the place surely of the foaming sea and the marble palace. But how was it to unfold?

I felt a great warm shock pass over me when we hit the beach and took a turn; the waves were quiet but it was the sea of my dreams, most perfectly. I could see its farthest limits, before us and behind, the arms of mountains stretching out, which marked it off from the other many beaches of the city of Rio de Janeiro.

Our sweet-voiced guide, Antonio, spoke of the many beaches that went on and on south to the Atlantic, and how this was but one in a city of eleven million people.
Mountains rose up straight from the earth. Grass-roofed huts along the sand sold cool drinks. Everywhere buses and cars pushed for room, springing free to race. And the sea, the sea was a vast ocean of green and blue seemingly without limit, though in fact it was a bay and did have beyond its horizon other hills we couldn’t see. The sea was God’s finest harbor.

Rosalind was overcome. Glenn snapped pictures. Katrinka stared with faint anxiety at the endless train of white-dressed men and women wandering on the broad band of beige sand. Never had I seen a beach as wide as this, as beautiful.

There was the patterned sidewalk I had glimpsed in my dreams—the strange design which I now saw was a careful mosaic.

Our guide, Antonio, spoke of a man who had built the whole long Avenue of the Atlantic along the beach, with these mosaic patterns, to be seen from the air. He spoke of the many places we might go, he spoke of the warmth of the water, of the New Year’s and the Carnivale, those special days for which we must return.

The car made a left. I saw the hotel rise up before us. The Copacabana Palace, a grand old-style white building of seven floors, its broad second-floor terrace lined with pure Roman arches. No doubt the convention rooms and the ballrooms lay behind those huge arches. And the comely white plaster façade had an air of British dignity to it.

The Baroque, the faint last echo of the Baroque, here amid all the modern apartment towers that had crowded up against it but could not touch it.

Almond trees clustered in the middle of its circular drive, trees with big broad shiny green leaves, none too great, as though nature itself kept them to a human scale.
I looked back. The trees spread down the boulevard, they spread in both directions. They were the same lovely trees of the busy streets.