Violin (8 page)

“It’s too cold for you to open it now.”

“I know, I only want to see.…”

“—no chocolate, no books, you no want your music, your radio, I got your disks off the floor, I got all that put away, Rosalind come and put all that in order, she say Mozart with Mozart, Beethoven with Beethoven, she show me where …”

“No, just to rest, kiss me.”

She bent down and pressed her silky cheek to mine. She said:

“My baby.”

She covered me with two big comforters, all silk, and no doubt filled with down, Mrs. Wolfstan’s style, Karl’s style, that everything be real goose down, loving the weightless weight. She pushed them around my shoulders.

“Miss Triana, why you never call Lacomb and me when that man was dying, we woulda come.”

“I know. I missed you. I didn’t want you to be frightened.”

She shook her head. Her face was very pretty, much darker than Lacomb’s, with big lovely eyes, and her hair was soft and wavy.

“You turn your head to the window,” she said, “and you sleep. Ain’t nobody coming in this house, I promise you.”

I lay on my side looking straight out the window, through twelve shining clean panes at the distant trees and oaks, the color of traffic.

I loved again to see the azaleas out there, pink and red and white, crowded everywhere so luxuriantly along the
fence, and the delicate iron railing painted so freshly black and the porch itself so shining clean.

So wonderful that Karl should give this to me before he died, my house restored. My house with every door to properly click, and lock to work, and every faucet to run the proper temperature of water.

Perhaps five minutes I looked dreaming out the window, perhaps longer. The streetcars passed. My lids grew heavy.

And only out of the corner of my eye did I make out a figure standing there on the porch, my tall gaunt one, the violinist, with his silky hair hanging lank down on his chest.

He hung about the edge of the window like a vine himself, dramatically thin, almost fashionably cadaverous yet very alive. His black hair hung so straight and glossy. No tiny braids tied back this time. Only hair.

I saw his dark left eye, the strong sleek black eyebrow above it. His cheeks were white, too white, but his lips were alive, smooth, very smooth, living lips.

I was scared for a minute. Just a minute. I knew this was wrong. No, not wrong, but dangerous, unnatural, not a possible thing.

I knew when I dreamed and when I did not, no matter how hard the struggle to move between the two. And he was here, on my porch, this man. He stood there looking at me.

And then I was scared no more. I didn’t care. It was a lovely burst of utter indifference. I don’t care. Ah, it is such a divine emptiness that follows the desertion of fear! And this was a rather practical point of view, it seemed at the moment.

Because either way … whether he was real or not real … it was pleasing and beautiful. I felt the chills on
my arms. So hair does stand on end, even when you are lying, all crushed in your own hair on a pillow, with one arm flung out, looking out a window. Yes, my body went into its little war with my mind. Beware, beware, cried the body. But my mind is so stubborn.

My voice, interior, came very strong and determined, and I marveled at myself, how one can hear a tone in one’s head. One can shout or whisper without moving the lips. I said to him:

Play for me. I missed you.

He drew closer to the glass, all shoulders for a moment it seemed, so tall and narrow, and with such torrential and tempting hair—I wanted so to feel it and groom it—and he peered down at me through the higher windowpanes, no angry glaring fictional Peter Quint searching for a secret beyond me. But looking right at what he sought. At me.

The floorboards creaked. Someone trod the path right to the door.

Althea came again. As easily as if it were any common moment.

I didn’t turn over to look at her. She merely slipped into the room as she always did.

I heard her behind me. I heard her set down a cup. I could smell hot chocolate.

But I never took my eyes off him with his high shoulders and dusty tailored wool sleeves, and he never took his deep brilliant eyes off me as he stared without interruption through the window.

“Oh, Lord God, you there again,” Althea said.

He didn’t move. Neither did I.

I heard her words in a soft near unintelligible rush. Forgive this translation. “You here right at Miss Triana’s window. Some nerve you got. Why, you like to scare me
to death. Miss Triana, he be waiting all this time, night and day, saying he would play for you, saying he couldn’t get near to you, that you loved his playing, that you can’t do without him, he say. Well, what’s you gonna play now that she come home, you think you can play something pretty for her now, the way she is, look at her, you think you gonna make her feel all right?”

She came strolling around the foot of the bed, portly, arms folded, chin stuck out.

“Come on now, play something for her,” she said. “You hear me through that glass. She home now, she so sad, and you, look at you, you think I’m going to clean that coat for you, you got another think coming.”

I must have smiled. I must have sunk a little deeper into the pillow.

She saw him!

His eyes never moved from me. He paid her no respect. His hand was on the glass like a great white spider. But there at his side in the other hand was the violin, with the bow. I saw the dark elegant curves of wood.

I smiled at her without moving my head, because now she stood between us, boldly, facing me, blotting him out. Again, I translate what is not a dialect so much as a song:

“He talk and talk about how he can play and he play for you. How you love it. You know him. I ain’t seen him come up here on the porch. Lacomb should have seen him come. I ain’t scared of him. Lacomb can run him off right now. Just say so. He don’t bother me none. He played some music here one night, I tell you, you never heard such music, I thought, Lord the police will be here and nobody here but Lacomb and me. I told him, You hush now, and he was so upset, you never saw such eyes, he looked at me, he say, You don’t like what I play, I say, I like it, I just don’t want to hear it. He say all kind of crazy
things like he know all about me and what I got to bear, he talk like a crazy man, he just jabbering on and on, and Lacomb say, If you’re looking for a handout we gonna feed you Althea’s red beans and rice and you gonna die of poison! Now, Miss Triana, you know!”

I laughed out loud but it didn’t make very much noise. He was still there; I could see only a little of the big lanky darkness of him behind her. I hadn’t moved. The afternoon was deepening.

“I love your red beans and rice, Althea,” I said.

She marched about, straightened the old Battenburg lace on the night table, glared at him, apparently, and then smiled down at me, one satin hand touching my cheek for a moment. So sweet, my God, how can I live without you?

“No, it’s perfectly fine,” I said. “You go on now, Althea. I do know him. Maybe he will play, who knows? Don’t bother about him. I’ll look out for him.”

“Look like a tramp to me,” she muttered under her breath, arms folded tight again most eloquently as she started out of the room. She went on talking, making her own song. I wish I could better render for posterity in some form her rapid speech, with so many syllables dropped, and above all her boundless enthusiasm and wisdom.

I nestled into my pillow; I crooked my arm under the pillow and snuggled against it, staring right up at him, his figure in the window, peering over the top of the sash through the double panes of glass.

Songs are everywhere you look, in the rain, in the wind, in the moan of the suffering, songs.

She shut the door. Double click, which means, with a New Orleans door, invariably warped, that she really closed it.

The quiet came back over the room as if it had never
been mussed in the slightest. The Avenue gave forth a sudden crescendo of its continued rumble.

Beyond him—my friend peering at me with his black eyes and showing me only a smileless mouth—the birds sang in a late-afternoon spurt that comes each day by their clock and always surprises me. The traffic made its cheerful dirge.

He moved his tall unkempt form into the full window. Shirt white and soiled and unbuttoned; dark hair on his chest like a shadow or fleece. An opened vest of black wool because its buttons were all gone.

This is what I think I saw, at least.

He leaned very close against the twelve-paned frame. How thin he was, sick perhaps? Like Karl? I smiled to think it might all unfold once more. But no, that seemed very far away now, and he so vivid as he looked down at me, so very remote from the real weakness of death.

There came a chiding look from him, as if to say, You know better. And then he did smile, and his eyes gave a brighter ever more secretive gleam, as he gazed at me possessively.

His forehead was pale and bony above his lids, but it gave the eyes their lovely sly shadowy depth, and his black hair grew so thick from his beautiful hairline with its widow’s peak and well-proportioned temples that it lent him a hefty beauty even in his thinness. He did have hands like spiders! He stroked the upper panes with his right hand. He made prints that I saw in the dust, as the light made tiny inevitable shifts, as the garden beyond him with its dense cherry laurels and magnolias moved and breathed with breeze and traffic.

The thick white cuff of his shirt was soiled, and his coat gray with dust.

A slow change came over his expression. The smile
was gone, but there was no animosity there and I realized now that there had never been. An air of superiority, of secretive superiority, had marked him before, but this expression was unguarded and spontaneous.

A baffled tender feeling passed over his face, held it and then released it to what seemed anger. Then he became sad, not publicly or artificially sad, but deeply, privately sad, as if he might lose his grip on this little spectacle of spookdom on the porch. He stepped back. I heard the boards. My house proclaims any movement.

And then he slipped away.

Just like that. Gone from the window. Gone from the porch. I couldn’t hear him beyond the shutters at the far corner end. I knew he wasn’t there. I knew he had gone away, and I had the most pure conviction that he had in fact vanished.

My heart thudded too loudly.

“If only it wasn’t a violin,” I thought. “I mean, thank God it’s a violin, because there isn’t any other sound on earth like that, there’s …”

My words died away.

Faint music, his music.

He hadn’t gone very far. He’d just chosen some dark distant part of the garden way out in the back, near to the rear of the old Chapel Mansion on Prytania Street. My property meets the Chapel property. The block belongs to us, to the Chapel and to me, from Prytania to St. Charles along Third Street. Of course there is another side to the block, where other buildings stand, but this great half of the square is ours, and he had only retreated perhaps as far as the old oaks behind the Chapel.

I thought I would cry.

For one moment, the pain of his music and my own feeling were so perfectly wedded that I thought, I cannot
be expected to endure this. Only a fool would not reach for a gun, put a gun in the mouth and pull the trigger—an image that had haunted me often when I was, in younger years, a hopeless drunk, and then again almost continuously until Karl came.

This was a Gaelic song, in the Minor Key, deep and throbbing and full of patient despair and ambitionless longing—he had the Irish fiddle sound in it, the hoarse dark harmony of the lower strings played together in a plea that sounded more purely human than any sound made by child, man or woman.

It struck me—a great formless thought, unable to take shape in this atmosphere of slow lovely embracing music—that that was the power of the violin, that it sounded human in a way that we humans could not! It spoke for
us
in a way that we ourselves couldn’t. Ah, yes, and that’s what all the pondering and poetry has always been about.

It made my tears flow, his song, the Gaelic musical phrases old and new, and the sweet climb of notes that tumbled inevitably into an endless testimony of acceptance. Such tender concern. Such perfect sympathy.

I rolled over into the pillow. His music was wondrously clear. Surely all the block heard it, the passersby, and Lacomb and Althea at it at the kitchen table with their playing cards or epithets; surely the birds themselves were lulled.

The violin, the violin.

I saw a day in summer some thirty-five years ago. I had my own violin in my case, between me and Gee, who rode his motorcycle, as I clung to him from the back, keeping the violin safe. I sold the violin to the man on Rampart Street for five dollars.

“But you sold it to me for twenty-five dollars,” I said, “and that was just two years ago.”

Away it went in its black case, my violin; musicians must be the mainstay of pawnshops. Everywhere there hung instruments for sale; or maybe music attracts many bitter dreamers such as me with grandiose designs and no talent.

I had only touched a violin two times since—was that thirty-five years? Almost. Save for one blazing drunken time and its hangover aftermath, I never even picked up another violin, never never wanted to touch the wood, the strings, the resin, the bow, no, not ever.

But why did I bother to think of this? This was an old adolescent disappointment. I’d seen the great Isaac Stern play Beethoven’s
Violin Concerto
in our Municipal Auditorium. I’d wanted to make those glorious sounds! I’d wanted to be that figure, swaying on the stage. I wanted to bewitch! To make sounds like these now, penetrating the walls of this room.…

Beethoven’s
Violin Concerto
—the first classical piece of music I came to know intimately later from library records.

I would become an Isaac Stern. I had to!

Why think of it? Forty years ago, I knew I had no gift, no ear, could not distinguish quarter tones, hadn’t the dexterity or the discipline; the best teachers told me as kindly as they could.