An Equal Music

by Vikram Seth

  "Where's the dawn?" I ask. The sky is becoming light.

  "It's these clouds. I don't think we'll see it," says Julia

  sadly.

  I am still groggy. We meander on, ending up once or twice in alleys that drop off into canals. A baker's boy emerges from somewhere with a tray, a man wheels out a newspaper stand, pigeons land with a flap of wings on a huge open square. A bronze horseman surveys us from his sleepless height. We arrive at the Fondamenta Nuove just in time to see our boat pulling away. "Too late," I say. "And now?" "Now we savour the sky," suggests Julia. "Right."

  We walk along to a bridge, and stand on it, looking northwards to the island made memorable to us by its apricot ice cream. Our boat is moving away in its direction.

  "If you hadn"t been so slow . .." begins Julia. "If you hadn't taken so many wrong turnings ..." I point out.

  "You were supposed to be the map-reader." "And you were the one who claimed to know the route from experience."

  "Well, you must admit it's beautiful." I admit it. The sky has opened up with a burst of pale gold over the cemetery island and a clear pink flush over Murano. But the next boat is in more than an hour. It is too cold to stand here on the bridge, and too desolate to sit at the Torcello stop, so we sit at a contiguous one,

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  where there are at least some comings and goings. The gangplanks squeal as a boat comes in. A priest in a brown habit gets off and a few blue-shirted navvies get on. The shop opposite opens, and we get some coffee. We then go next door to a bar that has just opened, and I drink a defiant grappa.

  Julia keeps her comments to herself. Two minutes before the next boat is due to leave, I order another grappa.

  "Hair of the dog," I say.

  "Don't be annoying," she says.

  "Let me savour it. I've been doing a lot of savouring lately."

  "Michael, I'll leave without you."

  "Remember the train? The plane? You did catch them, didn't you, but only just."

  She glares at me, grabs the grappa off the counter, gulps it down herself, and drags me across to the boat.

  ,.t, --L ' 6.12 ..;; ::-; • .•.- , •-

  Log-bundles mark the lanes in the lagoon like bunches of asparagus. Cypresses haunt the island of the dead, wellpopulated with the illustrious like the great graveyard of Vienna. Static foam flecks the grey water. I look back at the green-black fringe of Venice. Too soon, too soon: it is Sunday already.

  A lighthouse tower, tall and white, is mollified by a frieze of the Pietà. We pass under broken factory windows, then out again into the low lagoon, almost featureless.

  The airport is on my left. How small that plane is; and there she will be in two days, much smaller in the air; and there her lips, her eyes, her arms, her legs, her breasts, her

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  soul, her shoulders, her hair, her toes, her voice, all swiftly moving away; and in the hold the blue porcelain frog which I have yet to give her.

  Is the tide low? Gulls sit on the exposed mudflats of the malarial lagoon, staked with tilting towers. Look: there is a human being doing something strenuous with a pole and a white something on the mudflat to the left. What is he doing with so much effort? Need we care? Now we hoot and chug in a passage between islands. Now we are there.

  All the others have got off at Mazzorbo. So what are we two doing at eight in the morning on Torcello? On two red benches sit two grey cats, tiger-striped.

  The canal we walk along is dishwater grey. There is a cool breeze. Sweet birds sing, cocks crow distantly, an engine putters. We walk along the herringbone brick. Weeeee-weeeee-weeeee-weeeee-weeeee-chuk-chuk-chukchuk. Nothing can she hear. But she can see vines and figs, poppies, dark roses to the front of an inn; she can see a dog barking, its tail stiff, its eyes furious. Plump, wellfed three-legged dog, why do you need to growl? You sniff, you pee, you run alongside us, you bound clumsily up the Devil's Bridge. Let us through, let us admire these trees with their silver-white leaves, this early emptiness. Do not distress yourself; we will not breach the peace. Chuk-chuk-chuk. Weeeeee.

  Peace in little Santa Fosca. She kneels in silence, I sit in a hail of sound. A short fat priest in black mops his brow under a white rim of hair. An old assistant wearily holds out an orange bag. The week's takings pour into the bag from the boxes, one by one. Money, money, luscious lire: coins showering in, and the distinct sound of notes mixed in with them, the closing of the boxes, the shuffling and shambling; and through all this the birdsong, so distinct,

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  and the distant engine rumbling softly through the open door.

  The priest coughs, kneels before Mammon in the aisle, his back to Christ. It is a wooden collection box on a stand. Restless, I rise; to the left of the altar, Mary, twelve-star-crowned with miniature electric bulbs, holds her infant in her arms. He is a good child, he does not smirk as some do, who know they are the light of the world. To the right, a man kneels before a trusted and benevolent God; his hammer and the other tools of his work laid down, his chin alone visible as he tilts his head upwards and raises his obscuring arms in prayer.

  She lights two candles, and looks at me. I hesitate for a second, then light one as well.

  We walk outside, into the sunlight, and after a while into the cathedral.

  6.13

  '*.

  In God's great b'arn the souls are weighed. In the fiend's lap sits the false Christ, pert and mild. Great beams thrust off the wall and strut the roof. The queen of grace, dressed all in blue, holds up her wise-faced child.

  The day of doom is swathed with gold. The wild beasts hear the last trump sound and spew forth those on whom they gorged. The dead wind off their sheets. The calm damned, stoked in red flames, show no pain. In zones of black, worms pierce their eye-holed skulls.

  The saved stand and praise God. This is their fate through time.

  Once more she kneels. The bells toll. The priest and his small flock, no more than ten in this vast hall, take up a chant. Cease your plaint, round priest, do not sing high and low: it is out of tune and time, it is harsh to my ears.

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  I am bored, jarred. I make as if to go. She will not have it. I sit out the hour-long Mass, but am not here.

  The bread and wine are blessed. Not sure at first, she goes to take the host. And then, praise be to God, there is no more to do but go.

  But now I look and see the trance that is on her. Oh, to be moved like this, to be so struck, to feel there is this aim, this clear good at the end. I too knelt down, but not to This or That. I was not pierced as she was to the bone. What shall I say to her or she to me when we have left this place?

  6.14

  We emerge into throngs: cold drinks, lace tablecloths, knick-knacks; Murano glass. The desert has in an hour become a marketplace. I buy some postcards. Dad and Auntie Joan like receiving separate postcards from foreign parts. With a twinge of guilt I realise I didn't send them anything from Vienna.

  We escape into the back-marshes with their brackish channels and salty air. A cuckoo sings down a third, again and again. It must have drizzled while the priest droned on; the fields are moist. Wild oats and barley grow along the path and, where it falls off into the lemon-green swamp, plastic bottles, petrol cans and broken shells of styrofoam shore themselves up in banks of debris.

  For five minutes or more she does not speak.

  From my satchel I take out the porcelain frog and give it to her. Its blue is the lapis of the Madonna's mosaic robe.

  "This is lovely."

  "Isn't it?"

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  "Thank you for being so patient in the church."

  "Not at all," I say a bit sheepishly. "And where's my present?"

  "I Jeft it at home - I mean, at the apartment. It's ready now. I worked on it Jast night. Anyway, if you tried to unwrap it here, it would get drizzled on."

  "Why are you leaving Venice so soon?"


  "I have to. Don't make it so hard. Please don't keep asking me why."

  "I've got to spend at least an hour practising tomorrow. And then there's a rehearsal. The time's going too fast."

  "If only there were two of me," she says.

  "Are you going back to London or Vienna?"

  "London."

  "And all this will be over?"

  "Michael, I'm happy here with you. You're happy here with me. Isn't that true? It's a miracle we're here at all. Isn't that enough?"

  I am silent for a.while and concentrate on that. Yes, it is true, but no, it "is not enough. .,„._.

  ,..,.. 6.15 , , ..

  We are sitting in the garden of the Palazzo Tradonico on a stone bench near the fountain. It is late Monday morning. The sun is bright. We are shaded by a tree, nameless to me, with glossy leaves and small, intensely fragrant white flowers. A book rests on my lap. The maker's card has fallen out of it. I pick it up: name, telephone number, the numerical address in the sestiere of San Marco, the name of the street: Calle della Mandola.

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  "What does 'Mandela' mean?" I ask, looking at the card.

  "Mandolins," she says. "Or is it almonds? No, mandolins."

  "Oh, really?"

  " 'Oh, really?' " she says with a smile. "Is that all you can say?"

  "I can't say anything," I say. "I really can't. No one has ever given me anything so beautiful. Not even you."

  It is a handmade book from a small bindery we passed by on our first day here. Like an old music copy-book, it is broader than it is high. Its cover is a light marbled grey, its contents more than a hundred pages of heavy paper. Each page has eight blank five-line staves. On the first few pages, in her hand, and with a dark brown ink, so different from her usual blue, she has copied out from my score the first eighty or so bars - in fact, the whole of the first fugue - of the "Art of Fugue".

  Not one note has been crossed or whited out, so far as I can tell. It must have cost her hours, to take such pains with rare clefs, yet the pages look fluid, unlaboured.

  On the spine, embossed in small dull silver unserifed capitals are the words: Das Grosse Notenbuch des Michael Holme.

  On the first page she has written: "Dear Michael, Thank you for persuading me to come here, and for these days. Love, Julia."

  I rest my head on her shoulder. She runs her hand over my forehead and through my hair. "You should go in. It's almost eleven."

  "Will you play it for me? We still have a few minutes before the rehearsal."

  "No. How can I?"

  "I remember you playing a little of it in Vienna, years ago."

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  "That was for myself. You crept up on me!" she says. "Well?"

  "I can't read these clefs fluently enough, Michael. You haven't brought your score with you, have you? It's got a piano transcription."

  "No. It's at the apartment. If I had known . . ."

  "Well, there's my excuse."

  "Maybe some of it's still in your fingers?" .-•'

  She sighs, and acquiesces.

  We cross the bridge and go to the music room. I place my gift on the piano and stand by to turn the pages. She sits down, plays the bass line for a couple of bars, then picks at the soprano and the inner parts. She closes her eyes, and lets her hancis and her inner ear remember. From time to time her fingers stop; she opens her eyes, registers a little more, and continues. What she plays is heavenly: an interrupted heaven. Finally, about halfway through, she holds up her hands and says: "It's there somewhere, but,where? " ; "You're doing really well."

  'Oh no, oh no; and I know it."

  "I don't."

  "I played through th is fugue that night after I heard you play it at the Wigmore Hall. I should remember it better."

  "Well, then, in Lond on?"

  She hesitates. Does th at word define her unsettled, toosettled life? She softly stays, "I don't know, Michael."

  "Perhaps?" ? "Well, perhaps."

  "Make that a promisse, Julia. The second half of my present."

  "I can't promise. It's such a different . . . situation. I don't even know if I'll want to play this there."

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  "You've taken five days away from me, Julia. Can't you give me this?"

  "All right," she says at last. "But this isn't something I would ever play for anyone but you."

  6.16

  She takes my book off the piano and goes back to the garden.

  After a few minutes Helen, Piers and Billy enter, and we tune up. We are rehearsing for tomorrow's concert at the Scuola Grande di San Rocco. Julia's plane leaves at

  6:30 in the evening; I will not even be able to see her off at the airport.

  One of the pieces we are playing is the Brahms C minor that we performed a few months ago. I play it better than before because I can hardly bring myself to care. It does not knot me up with frustration as it used to. Anyway, most of myself is in the garden across the small rio. If the others sense my absence, they do not say so.

  We take a break much earlier than expected. I wander into the garden. Julia must have gone inside. The book lies on the bench beneath the tree. Her bag is on the ground nearby.

  I notice a sheet of paper sticking out from between the pages, and open it. It is a fax addressed to her husband in that easy, slanting hand. It is a private communication, but my shameless eyes, greedy for anything I can learn about her, compel me on. . ,._,;<

  Dearest Jimbo,

  I miss you terribly - both of you. I am longing to see you again. Jenny sends her best wishes. She's house-bound for much of the day, so we haven't

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  spent as much time together as we'd have liked to. It's tough on her; I think I mentioned her kids have measles. And though she has help, they don't want to let her out of their sight. According to her, they normally spend their time fighting - fraternally but quite fiercely. But now they're too listless and spotted to do even that. Incidentally, they are not at the infectious stage, so my two Hansen men are quite safe. I will not, like Mutti's poodles and pekes, have to be kept in quarantine.

  I have been having a most wonderful time in Venice. I am so very glad I came. Vienna was becoming too stressful, and if I had gone with Maria to Kàrnten, with her husband and their little son, I'd only have made myself miserable.

  I needed this break. I feel so refreshed. I walk miles every day. But I miss you both and can't bear the thought of being away from you for another week, which is why I'm returning early. The other day Jenny and'*I had lunch at the Cipriani, and I thought of you, staying there without me and thinking of me. Tell Luke that if he forgives me for going away for so long, he will get two surprises, one small and one big, from Venice, together with a present from his Oma. A huge hug to my little Benetton bear. Not that, with his grandmother fussing over him and spoiling him rotten, he will even remember me when I return.

  I'll be back tomorrow (Tuesday) on the Alitalia flight arriving at Heathrow at y:z5 in the evening. I'll look out for you, but please, darling, don't bother to come to the airport if you have work or something else on. I know I haven't given you much warning. I'll get a taxi. I don't have too much luggage.

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  I love you so much and think of you all the time. I hope you haven't been overworking. It is so hard not to be able to phone you. One of my worst fears is that I will lose the sound of your voice.

  Lots of love, Julia

  I brea'k off a bunch of those white, fragrant flowers. I feel ill. I feel like a thief who has entered a house to find in it goods stolen from his own.

  The worn, bored lion leaning on his shield yawns as if to say: "Well, what's the big deal? What did you expect?"

  A black carp nudges an orange one aside, and continues to circle goallessly round the fountain.

  I cross the bridge. From somewhere inside I hear Teresa's cheerful, rapid Italian, followed by Julia's voice, more hesitant. I can
make out the words "Wessen", "Billy", "Londra". I feel sick at heart.

  We continue with our rehearsal. Everything goes as it should. Our performance tomorrow should be one of our standard successes. ,

  6.17

  "What is the matter with you?" she says. She has turned on the bedside lamp and is looking at me, shocked and frightened.

  I have bitten her gently before, on the side of her neck, on her shoulders, on her arms, light nips that, I hardly know how, bring out the maddening scent of her body perhaps this is Virginie's strange behavioural bequest to me - but tonight in the bitterness of my passion I don't

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  know what happened. I hardly felt it was love I was making to her - I was not in my mind.

  "You're mad," she says. "Look at these marks."

  "Poor Jimbo: I wonder what he'll make of them when he meets you at Heathrow. Do you think he'll bring the Benetton bear along, or will it be past his bedtime?"

  My tongue is as brutal as my teeth. She stares at me and cries out - a horrible sound of rage and hurt and disbelief and violation - then covers her face with her hands and her hair. I try to touch her. She slaps my hand away.

  She begins to cry almost with fury. I try to put my arms around her, but she shakes them off. I try to say something, but she cannot see my words.

  Abruptly she turns off the light, and lies in the dark, unspeaking. I try to take her hand; she pushes it off. I kiss her cheek, the edge of her lips. I lick away her tears. Slowly she grows still. Again I take her hand, to spell out a word of apology., Two letters into the five she understands and'*withdraws her hand once more. What cari excuse my gouging words?

  Strangely, she falls asleep soon, and I am left wakeful, bitter with her and the world she is so enmeshed in, and with shame and regret at what I have done.

  Her sleeping arms are around me when I wake, but I do not feel that I am forgiven. The bruises remain on her shoulder. They will turn yellow and stand out for days. How can they be talked away?

  6.18

  A walk at the end of the world, the earthquake plate, alone; the mudflats of subsidence and flood, and the hermitage of the one who found the true cross. Then in