Violin (40 page)

“Ah, well, yes,” said Antonio, with a smile. “We can see it on the way down. In fact, let me call now.” He pulled out his small cellular phone. “I will have the van come up to meet us there if you like. It was a hotel once. It is abandoned now.”

“Oh, yes,” I said, “I have to see it.” I looked back, but we had turned the bend. We went higher and higher.

Finally we had come to the end, and to the crowd of tourists waiting to return. We stepped onto the cement platform.

“Ah, yes, well,” said Antonio. “Now we climb the steps to Christ.”

“Climb the steps!” declared Martin.

Behind us, the bodyguards sauntered side by side, moving their khaki vests back so we and everybody else could see their shoulder holsters and their black guns. One of them gave me a tender respectful smile.

“It is not so bad,” said Antonio. “It is many many steps, but it is broken up, you see, and there are places to stop at every … how would you say it? … stage, and you can get something cool to drink. You do wish to carry the violin yourself? You don’t want me to—?”

“She always carries it,” said Martin.

“I have to go to the top,” I said. “Once as a child, I saw this in a film, Christ with his arms outstretched. As if on a crucifix.”

I walked ahead.

How lovely it was, the crowds slack and lazy, and the little shops selling cheap trinkets and canned drinks, and people sitting idly at the scattered metal tables. All so mellow in this beautiful heat, and the fog blew up the mountain in white gusts.

“These are clouds,” said Antonio. “We are in the clouds.”

“Magnificent!” I cried. “The balustrade, it’s so beautifully done, Italian isn’t it? Martin, look, here everything is mixed, old and new, European and foreign.”

“Yes, it is very old, this balustrade, and the steps, see, they are not steep.”

We crossed landing after landing.

Now we walked in perfect dense whiteness. We could see each other and our feet and the ground, but scarcely anything else.

“Oh, this is not Rio,” said Antonio. “No, no, you must come back when the sun is out, you cannot see.”

“Point out Christ, which direction?” I asked.

“Miss Becker, we are standing at the very base of the statue. Step back here and look up.”

“To think we are standing in the heavens,” I said.

Like Hell.

“It’s all mist to me,” said Martin, but he gave me an amiable smile. “You’re right, this is some country, some city.” He pointed to the right where a great hole had opened up and we could see the metropolis below, greater than Manhattan or Rome, sprawled out before us. The gap closed.

Antonio pointed above.

Suddenly a common miracle occurred, small and wondrous.

The great giant granite Christ appeared in the white mist, only yards away from us, his face high above us, and his arms rigid as they reached out, not to embrace but to be crucified; then the figure vanished.

“Ah, well, keep watching,” said Antonio, pointing again.

A pure whiteness covered the world, and then suddenly the figure appeared again, in the obvious thinning of the air. I wanted to cry, and I started to cry.

“Christ, is Lily here? Tell me!” I whispered.

“Triana,” said Martin.

“Anyone can pray. Besides, I don’t want her to be here.” I backed up, the better to see Him again, my God, as once again the clouds opened and closed.

“Ah, it’s not so bad on this cloudy day, perhaps, as I supposed,” said Antonio.

“Oh, no, it’s divine,” I said.

You think this will help you? Like pulling your Rosary out from under the pillows that night I left you?

“Are there any cloisters left to your mind?” I barely moved my lips, the words a near senseless murmur. “Didn’t you learn anything from our dark journey? Or are you all bent out of nature now, like the wraiths that used to ragtag after you? I wasn’t supposed to see your Rio, was I, only the memories of my own for which you hungered. Jealous that I love it so? What holds you back? The strength is ebbing away, and you hate and you hate …”

I wait for the ultimate moment for your humiliation.

“Ah, I should have known,” I whispered.

“I wish you wouldn’t say the Hail Marys out loud,” said Martin lightly. “It makes me think of my Aunt Lucy and the way she made us listen to the Rosary on the radio every evening at six o’clock, fifteen minutes, kneeling on the wooden floor!”

Antonio laughed. “This is very Catholic.” He reached out, touched my shoulder and Martin’s shoulder. “My friend, it is going to rain. If you want to see the hotel before the rain, we should go to the tram now.”

We waited for the clouds to break one final time. The great severe Christ appeared. “If Lily’s at peace, Lord,” I said, “I don’t ask that you tell me.”

“You don’t believe that crap,” said Martin.

Antonio was shocked. Obviously he couldn’t know how much everyone in my immediate family lectured me daily and eternally.

“I believe that wherever Lily is, she has no need of me now. I believe that of all the truly dead.”

Martin didn’t listen.

There, once more, loomed our Christ, arms rigid as though he were on the crucifix at the end of the Rosary.

We hurried to the tram.

Our bodyguards, lounging against the balustrade, crunched their drink cans and tossed them into the trash bin and followed along.

The mist was wet by the time we reached the car.

“It’s the first stop?” I asked.

“Oh, yes, and we can’t miss it,” Antonio said. “I have called for the car. It is a very steep drive up, but not so hard down, you see, and we can take our time if you like, and then it won’t matter if it rains, of course, I mean I am sorry that the sky is not clear …”

“I love it.”

Whoever used this first tram stop? This stop beside the abandoned hotel?

There was a parking lot here. Some drove up, no doubt, in powerful little cars, parked here, and took the tram to the summit. But there was nothing else to shelter one here.

The vast ocher-colored hotel was solid, but obviously utterly in neglect.

I stood spellbound looking at it. The clouds did not press so far down here, and I could see the view of the city and the sea that these shuttered windows had once commanded.

“Ah, such a place …”

“Yes, well,” said Antonio, “there were plans, many plans, and perhaps … see, here, look through the fence.” I saw a walkway, I saw a courtyard, I looked up at the faded ocher shutters that covered the windows, at the tiled roof. To think, I could … I really could … if I wanted to …

Some impulse was born in me, some impulse I hadn’t felt anywhere else in our travels, to stake out some beautiful retreat on this spot, to come here at times away from New Orleans and breathe the air of this forest. There seemed no more beautiful place on earth than Rio.

“Come,” said Antonio.

We walked past the hotel. A thick cement railing guarded us from a gorge. But we could see now the great depth of the building and how it was positioned out over the valley. It broke my heart, this loveliness. Beneath me, the banana trees plunged in a straight line, down and down the mountainside as if following the path of one root or spring, and all round the lush growth reached up, and the trees swayed over our heads. Across the road, in back of us, the forest was steep and dark and rich.

“This is Heaven.”

I stood quiet. I let it be known. Just a moment. I didn’t have to ask. It was matter of gestures. The gentlemen moved away, smoking their cigarettes, talking. I couldn’t hear them. The wind didn’t blow here as it did on the peak. The clouds were moving down, but slowly and thinly. It was quiet, and still, and below lay the thousands upon thousands of houses, buildings, towers, streets, and then the exquisite placid beauty of the endless blue water.

Lily was not here. Lily had gone, as surely as the spirit of the Maestro had gone, as surely as most spirits go, the spirit of Karl, the spirit of Mother, surely. Lily had better things to do than to come to me, either to console or torment.

Don’t be so certain.

“Be careful with your tricks,” I whispered. “I learned to play from pain from you. I can do it again,” I said. “I’m not easily deceived, you should know that.”

What you will see will chill your blood and you will
drop the violin, you will beg me to take it, you will let it fall! You will back off from all you have so admired! You’re not fit for it.

“I think not,” I said. “You must remember how well I knew them all, how much I loved them, how much I loved the sickbed and the last small detail. Their faces and their forms are perfect in my memory. Don’t try to duplicate that. We’ll be at wits against each other.”

He sighed. There was a falling off, a sliding away, a longing that chilled my arms and neck. I think I heard the sound of crying.

“Stefan,” I said, “try, try not to cling to me or this but …”

I curse you. Damn you.

“Stefan, why did you choose me? Were the others such lovers of death, or just music?”

Martin touched my arm. He pointed. Some distance down the road, Antonio was beckoning for us.

It was a long way down. The bodyguards stood watch.

The mist was very wet now, but the sky was clear. Perhaps that’s what happens. The mist melts to rain and becomes transparent.

There was a small clearing before us, and what seemed an old concrete fountain far back, and round in a circle what appeared to be cast-off plastic sacks, vividly blue, simple grocery or drugstore sacks. I’d never seen them in such a color.

“Those are their offerings,” said Antonio.

“Who?”

“The
Mogambo
people, the
Candomblé.
See? Each sack has an offering to a god. One has rice in it, one has something else, perhaps corn, see, they make a circle. See? There were candles here.”

I was delighted. Yet no sense of the supernatural came
over me, only the wonder of human beings, the wonder of faith, the wonder of the forest itself creating this small green chapel for the strange Brazilian religion, so mixed with Catholic saints, that no one could ever untwine the varying rituals.

Martin asked the questions. How long ago had they met here? What had they done?

Antonio struggled for words … a ritual purification.

“Would that save
you
?” I whispered. Of course, I spoke to Stefan.

No answer came.

Only the forest lay around us, the sparkling forest as the rain came floating down. I closed my arms tight around the well-covered violin lest some dampness get inside, and I stared at the old circle of strange tacky blue plastic sacks, the stubs of the candles. And why not blue sacks? Why not? In ancient Rome, had the lamps of the temple been that different from the lamps of a household? Blue sacks of rice, of corn … for spirits. The ritual circle. The candles.

“One stands … you know, in the center,” Antonio sought for his English, “to perhaps be purified.”

No sound from Stefan. No whisper. I looked up through the mesh of green above. The rain covered my face soundlessly.

“It’s time to go,” said Martin. “Triana, you have to sleep. And our hosts. Our hosts have some grand plan of picking you up early. Seems they are inordinately proud of this Teatro Municipale.”

“But it is an opera house,” said Antonio, placatingly, “and very grand. Many people do enjoy to see it. And after the concert there will be such crowds.”

“Yes, yes I want to go early,” I said. “It’s full of beautiful marble, isn’t it?”

“Ah, so you know about it,” he said. “It is splendid.”

We drove back in the rain.

Antonio confessed with laughter that in all the years he had done such tours he had never seen the rain forest during the rain, and this was quite a spectacle to him. I was wrapped in beauty, and no longer afraid. I figured I knew what Stefan meant to do. Some thought was taking shape that almost seemed a plan.

It had begun in my mind in Vienna, when I had played for the people of the Hotel Imperial.

I never slept.

The rain teemed on the sea.

All was gray and then darkness. Bright lights defined the broad divisions of Copacabana Boulevard, or the Avenida Atlantica.

In a pastel bedroom, air-conditioned, I dozed perhaps, watching the gray electric night seal up the windows.

For hours, I lay peering at what seemed the real world of the ticking clock, in this the Presidential bedroom of the suite, peering through thin closed eyelids.

I put my arms around the violin, curled against it, holding it as my mother held me, or I held Lily, or as Lev and I, and Karl and I, had snuggled together.

Once in panic I almost went to the phone to call my husband, Lev, my lawfully wedded husband, whom I had so stupidly given away. No, that will only cause him pain, both him and Chelsea.

Think of the three boys. Besides, what made me think he would come back, my Lev? He shouldn’t leave her and his children. He should not do that, and I should not think of it, or even wish for it.

Karl, be with me. Karl, the book is in good hands. Karl, the work’s done. I drew the haggard confused figure back
from the desk. “Lie down, Karl, all the papers are in order now.”

There came a loud banging sound.

I woke up.

I must have been asleep.

The sky was clear and black beyond the windows.

Somewhere in the living room or dining room of the suite, a window had blown open. I heard it flapping, banging. It was the window in the living room, the window in the very center of the hotel.

In sock feet, the violin in my arms, I walked across the dark bedroom and into the living room, and felt the strong push of the cleansing wind. I looked out.

The sky was clear and studded with stars. The sand was golden in the electric lights that ran the length of the boulevard.

The sea raged on the broad beach.

The sea rolled in, in countless glassy overlapping waves, and in the lights, the curl of each wave was for an instant almost green, and then the water was black and then there arose before me the great dance of foaming figures.

Look, it was happening all up and down the beach, with every wave.