Violin (41 page)

I saw it once, twice, I saw it to the right and to the left. I studied one great chorus after another. Wave after wave brought them rising with their outstretched arms towards the shore or towards the stars or towards me, I couldn’t know.

Sometimes the stretch of the wave was so long and the foam so thick that it broke into eight or nine lithe and graceful forms, with heads and arms and bowing waists, before they lapsed back and the next band came rolling after them.

“You’re not the souls of the damned or the saved,” I
said. “Oh, you are only beautiful. Beautiful as you were when I saw you in prophetic sleep. Like the rain forest on the mountain, like the clouds crossing the face of God.

“Lily, you are not here, my darling, you are not bound to any place any longer, not even one as beautiful as this. I could feel it if you were here, couldn’t I?”

There came that thought again, that half-finished plan—that half-conceived prayer to fight him off.

I drew up a chair, and I sat down by the window. The wind blew my hair back.

Wave after wave brought the dancers forth, no one ever the same, each company of nymphs different, as were my concerts, or if there was a pattern to it, only the geniuses of chaos theory knew it. Once in a while, one dancer came so tall as to have legs that seemed ready to leap free.

I watched it until morning.

I don’t need sleep to play. I’m crazy anyway. Being crazier still could only help.

The dawn came and all the rapid traffic, and the milling people below, the shops opening their doors, the buses rolling. Swimmers were in the waves. I stood at the window, the sack of the violin hanging over my shoulder.

A sound disturbed me.

I turned, jumped. But it was only a bellman who had come in, and in his arms he held a bouquet of roses.

“Madam, I knocked and knocked.”

“It’s fine, it was the wind.”

“There are young people down there. You mean so much to them, they have come so far to see you. Madam, forgive me.”

“No, I want to do it. Let me hold the roses and wave to them. They’ll know me when they see me with the roses and I’ll know them.”

I went to the window.

The sun glared on the water; in an instant I found them, three slim young women and two men, scanning the face of the hotel with shaded eyes, then one saw me, saw the woman with the brown bangs and brown hair holding the red roses.

I lifted my hand to wave. I waved and waved. I watched them jump up and down.

“There is a song in Portuguese, a classic song,” said the bellman. He was fussing about with the little refrigerator right near the window, making certain of the drinks and the temperature.

The kids down there leapt in the air. They threw kisses.

Yes, kisses.

I threw them kisses.

I drew back, throwing kisses until it seemed the moment had reached its fullest, and then I let the window close. I turned to the side, the violin like a hump on my back, the roses in my arms. My heart was pounding.

“The song,” he said. “It was famous in America, I think. It is ‘Roses, Roses, Roses.’ ”

18

I
T WAS
the corridor with the Greek key mosaic in the floor, the deep thick scrolls of gold, the brown marble.

“Very beautiful, yes, oh, God,” said Roz, “I’ve never seen such a place. All of this is marble? Look, Triana, the red marble, the green, the white …”

I smiled. I knew. I saw.

“And this was in the cloisters of your memory?” I whispered to my secret ghost, “and you didn’t mean for me to see it? Rushing to my bed?”

It must have sounded to the others like humming. He didn’t answer me. A terrible sorrow overcame me for him. Oh, Stefan!

We stood at the foot of the staircase. To left and right stood the bronze-faced figures. The railings were a marble as green and clear as the sea in the afternoon sun, the balusters squared and thick, the stairway branching as it does in all such opera houses, it seemed, and behind us, as we mounted the stairs, the three doors of leaded glass with spoked fanlights above.

“Will they come in this way tonight?”

“Yes, yes,” said the slender one, Mariana, “they will come. We are sold out. We have people who are waiting now. That’s why I took you in the side door below. And we have a treat for you, a special treat.”

“What could be grander than this?” I asked.

All together, we climbed the steps. Katrinka was suddenly stricken and sad. I saw her eyes meet Roz’s eyes.

“If only Faye were here!” she said.

“Don’t say that,” said Roz, “you’ll only make her think about Lily.”

“Ladies,” I said, “rest your minds, there is no waking hour when I don’t think of Faye and of Lily.”

Katrinka was suddenly shaken and Martin had come to put his arms around her, to make her stop carrying on, to shame her somewhat, even as he pretended to comfort her, the disciplinarian.

As we turned and went up the left side, I saw the great mezzanine and I saw the three magnificent stained-glass windows.

Mariana’s soft voice told me the names of the figures, just as she had done in the dream. Lucrece, the darling woman beside her, smiled and commented too, on how each figure had its meaning in music or poetry or theater.

“And there, down there, are murals in that far room,” I said.

“Yes, yes, and in the one at the other end, you must see …”

I stood still, the sunlight pouring through these painted pictures in glass, past these buxom, half-naked beauties with their raised symbols, surrounded by their garlands and their drapery.

I looked up and up and saw the paintings far above. I thought my soul would die in me in quiet, and nothing
mattered now but what had mattered in the dream—not whence it came to me or why, but only that it was, this place, that someone had made it out of nothing and it stood, still, this place, for us, in its spectacular grandeur.

“You like it?” Antonio asked.

“More than I can ever say,” I answered with a sigh. “Look, up there, the round plaques on the wall, the bronze faces, that’s Beethoven.”

“Yes, yes,” said Lucrece graciously, “they are all there, the great opera composers, you see Verdi, ah, you see Mozart, you see there the … the … playwright …”

“Goethe.”

“But come, we don’t want you to be tired. We can show you more tomorrow. Let’s go now, for our special surprise.”

Laughter all around. Katrinka wiped her face, glaring angrily at Martin.

Glenn whispered to Martin to leave her alone.

“I lie awake all night,” Glenn whispered, “wondering about Faye. Just let her cry.”

“Don’t draw attention to yourself,” Martin said.

I took Katrinka’s hand. I felt her hold tight to me.

“Surprise?” I said to Mariana and Lucrece. “What is it, my dears?”

We went down the splendid stairs together, the brilliant glass, the shining marble, the streaks and streaks of gold all melded in a canopy of glorious harmony—a man-made thing that seemed to rival the very sea with its tossed and leaping ghosts, the very forest in the rain, where the banana trees plunged down and down and down into the glade.

“This way, all of you, come this way …” Lucrece led. “We have a strange surprise.”

“Yes, I think I know,” said Antonio.

“But you see it’s not just that.”

“What is it?” I asked.

“Oh, the most beautiful restaurant in the world, and it’s here under the opera house.”

I nodded and smiled.

The Persian palace.

We had to go out to come in, and suddenly we found ourselves surrounded by the blue glazed tile, and the columns with the bulls, their hooves gathered and bound at the top, and Darius in the fountain slaying the lion, and all those étagères filled with sparkling glass, so like the cabinets of Stefan’s burning palace.

“Now let me cry if you will,” said Roz. “It’s my turn to cry. Look, you see the Persian lamp? Oh, God, I want to live here forever.”

“Yes, in the forest,” I whispered. “In the old ruined hotel one stop down from the foot of Christ.”

“Let her cry,” said Martin, crossly, staring at his wife.

But Katrinka was brightening.

“Oh, this is magnificent,” she said.

“It was meant to be the palace of Darius, you see.”

“And look, amid all this,” said Glenn softly, “people are eating, look at the tables, people are having coffee and cake.”

“We have to have coffee and cake.”

“But first let us show you the surprise. Come this way.” Lucrece beckoned. I knew.

I knew as we went past the old carved wood bar and down the passage. I heard the huge engines.

“These run the cooling and the heating for the building,” she said. “They are very old.”

“God, there’s a bad smell here,” said Katrinka.

Then I heard nothing. I saw the white tile; we passed the metal lockers. We walked round the big engines with
their giant oldfashioned screws like the engines of the old ships; we walked on and on, and the talk was soft and agreeable around us.

I saw the gate.

“Our secret,” said Mariana. “It is an underground tunnel!”

I laughed with appreciative delight. “Really? It is truly that? Where does it go?” I drew near the gates. My soul ached. Darkness back there, beyond these rusted spokes of iron on which I laid my right hand, getting it filthy, filthy.

Water gleamed on the cement floor.

“To the palace, you see, the palace is just across the street and in the old days, when the Opera house was first built, they could come and go through the secret tunnel.”

I pressed my forehead against the pickets.

“I adore this, I’m not going home,” said Roz. “Nobody’s going to make me go home. Triana, I want the money to stay here.”

Glenn smiled and shook his head.

“You can have it, Roz,” I said.

I stared into the darkness.

“What do you see there?” I asked.

“I don’t know!” said Katrinka.

“Well, it is wet and damp, and there is something leaking there …” said Lucrece.

So none of them saw the man lying with his eyes open, and the blood pouring from his wrists, and the tall black-haired phantom, arms folded, leaning against the dark wall, glaring at us?

No one saw this but mad Triana Becker?

Go on. Go ahead. Go on the stage tonight. Play my violin. Display your wicked witchery.

The dying man climbed to his knees, confounded,
fuddled, blood streaming on the tile. He rose to his feet to join his companion, the ghost who’d driven him mad, driven out his music, just before coming to me, with these vivid memories his soul, this ghost, his tissue-thin soul that overflowed with all this, unwillingly.

No.
It had a hint of panic.

The others talked. There was time for cake and coffee and rest.

Blood. It ran from the dead man’s wrists. It ran down his pants as he staggered towards me.

No one else saw.

I looked beyond this stumbling corpse. I looked at the agony in the face of Stefan. So young, so lost, so desperate. So afraid of utter defeat again.

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