Prodigies

by Angélica Gorodischer

  21. Opera

  As she would never do on any stage whatsoever, where she always had to act severe and haughty regardless of the heroine she was singing that night and whether the tatters of the Fiordiligi wardrobe scattered on the floor frightened her, Madame Simeoni, sunk deep in her cushions, covered, hidden, and stentorian, moved her grand buttocks on the seat of her armchair. She had recently discovered how to change her position without too much effort and most of all without Nehala realizing she could do it: she pressed her hands and forearms against the armrests softly at first, then with increasing strength beneath the shawls and blankets, leaned just the littlest bit forward from the waist, dropped her neck and head between her shoulders, and who would have known how marvelously the muscles and tendons went up and down on the large pillow she sat on and relaxed, almost lost contact or as she liked to think all contact disappeared, and from that moment the only thing that remained for her to do was move the lower part of her body, the left half first, then the right, toward one side, toward the other, also forward or backward if she had spent too much time seated against the chair back. She sighed, which managed to make Nehala look at her, but now it did not matter, she could even think that this was what she had been seeking, to make Nehala look at her without needing to call her attention. Would they go down to the dining room tonight? No, they would not, there was not enough time now for Nehala to dress her and arrange her hair; she also remembered that they had gone down the previous night, and she knew it was best not to be too generous with herself, to be there all the time like the Chinese woman or the old idiot. It was preferable to be absent from time to time; she smiled thinking about what they would ask, what they would say, what they would suppose, while she was wrapped in a world of tulle, gauze, ribbons, and crowns: the sacrificial tunic, whatever was required for her to stand out, count the beats and raise her head, magnificent, as if she could make out their faces and hats, sip again the sweetness of the golden liquor, far from the applause. Floria Tosca was an idiot, obviously, although no more than Norma, and she had never wanted to sing Leonora because Azucena was too powerful. Aïda, that was her favorite. There had been so many things on stage, marbleized columns, capes thrown over a chair, stained-glass windows, screens, staircases, and more humble objects, writing pens, a lute, a mortar, dried flowers, a hammer, where had there been a hammer? a kerchief, Desdemona’s, and when injured Nedda tried to escape, Silvio and Otello appeared and stabbed her, it was Otello, wasn’t it? and Alfio killed Turiddu: the comedy had ended, which was a pity because Nehala was coming on stage. Madame Simeoni, head held as high as at the end of the second act, looked at Nehala as she drew close, Aïda, she thought, Amneris was very much a princess, but Aïda, that was her favorite, she could sing her again with just a few rehearsals, sing Aïda again as she had that time in Buenos Aires. She did not want Nehala to dress her, she did not want to go down to the dining room. The people there talked too much and it bothered her; when she sang conversations and even insignificant noises bothered and distracted her: they should be quiet. Nehala assured her that the voices did not come from the lower floor but from the street, where children ran around shouting, and Nehala seemed satisfied with that. She did not insist on dressing her and doing her hair to go down to the dining room, she walked right past her armchair to look out the window at the children playing in the street.

  22. The Red Moon

  Of the nineteen possible orbits of the moon that Aristarchus of Samos postulated and which according to him depended on the fifty-seven movements of the Earth around the sun, a theory that won him not mere suspicion but scorn from his contemporaries, there are three that can slide open the bolt on the door of madness in men’s souls: the so-called elastreon (from ελαστρεω, move forward), the neopostic (from νεωποιεω, erect a temple), and sinomic (from σινομα, damage, injury, harm). It was later said that the coachman had suffered an attack of red madness due to the lunar trajectory that night; also that the gentleman for whom he was driving had jumped into the coachman’s seat, snatched the whip, and had lashed the horses with an untiring arm; and finally, that the shouts of the children as they played in the street had frightened the animals. Some authors maintain that Aristarchus of Samos had a happy childhood, which one may suppose took place beneath blue skies on white beaches where he would picnic and play with azure stones before submerging his feet and eyes in the sea, something that almost certainly cannot be said about the other Aristarchuses who wander through history with their exiles, always-frustrated ambitions, envies, dire illnesses, and terrible deaths. But the Aristarchus who designed the nineteen possible orbits of the moon and thought of death as more of a transit, an innate coloration that obscures the perseverance of life as it grows and spreads, would have comprehended in an instant the inclination toward misfortune that night on Scheller Street when there was no more light in the sky, and comprehended the way Katja understood it when she shouted without knowing how the shout had arisen in her throat, and thanks to Luduv she had always known how to fill the silence that no one but her perceived.

  Only the lights revealed by the windows and balconies, only the sparks from the horses’ hoofs, only Samos’s unsteady moon that did not yet face directly into the street, still rising behind respectable buildings after having dragged itself through the alleys and taverns next to the river, only that light and the soul’s red madness which is less garish, less than a dashing torch, less than a votive flame: there was only that light and no more, so it was logical that Madame Nashiru did not know what to say after it was all over, shielding herself in her condition as a foreigner so she would not be called to testify by a knock on her door, perhaps even looking for her behind the curtains in the back office without windows in the “Pearls of the Orient” jewelry story to urge her to remember with elusive precision the confused moment in which she prepared to cross the street, attentive only to the step she was about to take from the curb to the pavement. It would be unfair to say that Madame Nashiru as a girl had not played on white beaches beneath porcelain skies because not only had she done so but she had also had little soft feathered animals and picture boards, abacuses, rattles, tiny mother-of-pearl trees, and miniature carts. When she heard the thump she was not thinking about lost childhood or certain death in the thunder of racing animals; she was not thinking about pearls, about the strange world of the sea or tortoiseshell combs, wide silk sashes, bright threads, or the separate partitions of a house trembling during storms. To tell the truth, she was not thinking about anything: she looked up at the far end of the street and saw beyond the runaway horses, beyond the coach and trees and silhouettes of houses darker than the dark night, beyond Aristarchus of Samos although she did not know it was him waving the paper lantern that she thought was the moon, to the time when she was too small to arrange pieces on a playing board and too big to stain the white silk of her dress with fruit preserves. Someone had told her once that eyes of wonder see genies at crossroads, but for them, cardinal points are not the end of roads but yesterday and tomorrow, down and up, neither present nor here. It seemed to her that there was more light than before and that some absent hands were moving pieces on the playing board and that she would have to be alert instead of paying so much attention to sparks and the nineteen probable orbits of the moon. So she backed up over the curb again, one hand quickly raised to her cheek, the other clutching her purse so she would not drop it; while another hand deep in the pocket of his black jacket tried not to brush the metal of his keys against the fish-man, which rang, he did not know how but it rang, capered impatiently, finally liberated and free, freer than the first light of the sun, freer than the noise of the wind, and much, much freer than its owner. Mr. Pallud did not know how perhaps because it was not him but the fish-man who had made him fail to find the keys, let his hand rest quietly with his fingers barely curved between the stringy fabric of his pocket, then suddenly turn his head and see the carnival that sparks outlined on the dark ground. He had never d
isguised himself, not even with a mask, not even a small one as a prank or joke, or had hidden to jump out with a shout to frighten someone, or done anything that would make him transfer his soul disposed to red madness to another being for a moment, even just a second, to say nothing about white beaches but, yes, about the austere bedroom in which shoes poking out from the doors of the closet seemed to herald the lord of autumn’s automaton made of dead leaves who wore those shoes, a courteous companion with agendas and obligations and an unknown master who did not show its power, immense as it was, waiting, and its power was in waiting. He was afraid then and about to close his eyes but he did not. He saw the coach pass: he let himself do that and not just that, he also clung to the fish-man, felt it grow inside his hand, smelled the metal made of molecules of his blood, saw with his own eyes death in the middle of the street, sated, a squalid smiling pig, fishy black, slow to disappear, heavy as indigestion from gold, gold from mountains, gold from rapid rivers, gold in veins in ritual caves; the same gold that shines in the teeth of the man that Lola finds prowling around her, surrounding her again and again as if she were calm but she is not, and he looks at her smiling, at times showing his gold teeth as if purposely, an upper front one very visible, the other one only when he opens his mouth and she sees it shine by the light of the candle at the head of the bed in the back of his jaw like a warning. But Miss Esther alone and in white without anything golden or any color to relieve it did not see the sparks from the horses’ hoofs on the stones or the fireworks that had frightened them: she hid her face against her father’s shoulder who softly laughed at her fear and said but my child, what are you doing, for she would cover her ears when she saw the malignant flash of lightning through the curtains, hold her ears tight and close her eyes so firmly the lids wrinkled, never hearing the thunder that choked and drowned her although it lasted on and on only for a few seconds. She only saw the back of the coach and heard the gallop and noise of wheels on stones, only saw something in the middle of the road, a lighter-colored shadow, a mere nothing, something that frightened her more than thunder, something silent and not bellowing, but something that shook her from her torpor and demanded her attention like childhood maps, like Mr. Celsus’s jokes about colors, like a portrait artist’s work, like women’s eyes. There were maps on the walls of her childhood bedroom, maps ripped from an atlas her father had bought in Wielischplatz that continued to hold up the colossal cloudy Heavens even without its covers, index, and references: maps of Iceland, Livonia, Martinique, Hajis, Mahé, Tubuai, Yannson, Peru, Jabal-Shammar, Ceylon, and Swaziland. There was a town in Brazil called Aguapeny and a port in Ecuador called Zorritos and a river in Columbia called Mururuti and a place in Argentina called Llao-Llao. All of this and time made up the world, all this and a single instant is the sum left to the heir, dressed in white seeing without knowing in what instant it would come. She had played with letters, too, but this had to be before the maps, painted on colored cubes, and she threaded little stones with holes drilled into them and she took them off the threads, pushing them with her fingers that moved quickly, squeezing and squeezing until her skin burned on the little cord so she could hear them like a rattle of hailstones on the table and floorboards: looking for the beads that fell was part of the game, to call them, to hear how they called to each other as they rolled on the floor, and to feel sorry for the ones that were lost and would never find their companions again; sad like Wulda scrubbing pots to hear Katja’s shout and think that she was going to grow old and die scrubbing pots and would never get to rest like her mother in a bed next to the window waiting for the sun. The sun or perhaps the moon appeared on the horizon in the window of the kitchen and Wulda dreamed while awake for the first time, thanks to one of the possible orbits that Aristarchus of Samos had drawn, about salons of marble and glass, harp music, diamonds in her ears and a heavy dress with golden thread that covered her to her feet when she descended an imperial staircase. United to an uncomfortable and free Lola and to Katja who saw what no one else did, united the way the world’s trees were by their seven thousand times seven million roots, she felt herself separate into fragments, more and more fragments of herself that were still her, scrubbing pots, and each fragment heard different music, words, sudden thumps, and shouts because she still had the ears of all the herselves in the kitchens and on the imperial stairways, discovering passages in the earth and innumerable orbits of the lights in the Heavens.

  Upstairs Madame Helena and Nehala on far ends of the building heard the crash and if the afternoon had been kept distant from them by rain darkening the windows, they managed to see a tangle of hoofs, wheels, helmets, muzzles raised to the air like buffalodonts on the moon, arms in the air, legs foreshortened, and a useless whip that rolled over the paving stones. Madame Sophie Simeoni asked what had happened down there when she saw Nehala turn toward her pale, her mouth covered by both hands, one over the other, her eyes so wide that they were white all around, two frightened little staring black balls, but the truth was that Madame Sophie did not care and had asked just because, because the girl had turned so brusquely that she had to say something so that she would not give her another one of those frights again and at that moment could not think of any way to reproach her, but she did care about the cushions, shoes, coral necklace, and blanket already too heavy for the season. Nehala did not answer: her games had been played in the best reigns, in theaters, train cars, ship cabins, and she had played at being characters from operas: gypsy, tyrant, slave, Spaniard, poet, captain of the guard, but she never worried about the stories, she only played at what they were doing, sitting or still or dead or stopped in a dance step. She had possessed, and remembered it very clearly, an adored toy hidden so her mother would not pick it up, look at it, and ask where she had gotten it, a metal rose that the Countess Ceprano had used in the first act, kept it for years until it got tarnished and broken and she threw it into the sea during a voyage, perhaps the last one, a leaden-gray sea on a freezing winter afternoon when Aristarchus of Samos patrolled the frozen fire of the final stars. On the other hand, Madame Helena had played with hoops, jump ropes, swings in gardens, and blonde dolls who sat on diminutive hammock seats in playrooms: she chanced to see a body thrown forward, spinning, injured, beaten by the horses’ hoofs, and she did not put her hands on her mouth but she did open her eyes wide without a shout or moan, leaning on the windowsill because she felt too heavy for her legs that she found were weak and shaking, and the coach went on amid shouts, after an instant or not even an instant of silence, held breaths, something that cloistered voices, suspended gesturing hands, and nailed feet to the ground. The General’s boots struck the pavement in a victorious parade of war cars down avenues, bloody flags on the flagstaffs, minuscule bare feet stepping on glass beads in the basins of fountains, soldierly merits, naked bodies destroyed by blasts in the water that springs up like the gold of the earth. He thought, when he became aware of his surroundings, the body was hers and the pain of the votive became fury that sought an exit, emerged from concealment, tried to run, blood coagulating in his throat, knuckles white, the soles of his boots stuck to the soles of his feet and his feet like stone roots, dead, poor imitations, as he looked not at what remained lying on the ground after the coach had passed but at the gray motionless silhouette at the edge of the pavement, upright, light as the sound of clappers wrapped in felt that strike the bells in the houses of the dead, like the steps of predators in dense jungles, fragile, incomplete, trying to convince himself that she was calling him.