Orfeo
Page 33
Decades ago, this man, too, wrote like a believer in the infinite future. He studied at the feet of fearsomely progressive masters. Music poured out of him, splendid with math and rigor, music like a formal proof, heady stuff admired by dozens, perhaps even hundreds of discerning connoisseurs. He reveled in all those once-required shibboleths, now given up as so much discredited zeal. But this song—ah, this one will travel, go everywhere, get out and see the world, and even the tone-deaf will hear something forgotten in it.
So what to do with that failed revolution, the hundred years of uncompromising experiment? The need for something beyond the ordinary ear: Disown it? Discipline and punish? Shake your head and smile at the airs of youth? No: Strangeness was your voluntary and your ardent art. You fought alongside the outsiders for something huge, and knew the odds against you. No take-backs now. No selective memory; no excuses. There’s only owning up to everything you ever tried for, here at the end of the very long day.
But what to do with this—these love songs, the autumnal harmonies hurting your chest? What to call it? A repudiation. A return. A hedge. A sellout. A deathbed conversion. A broadening. A diminishment. Music to kill the last fifty miles of a cross-country drive.
Call it nothing, then, or call it music, for there are no movements or styles or even names for the sounds that wait for you, where you’re headed. Listen, and decide nothing. Listen for now, for soon enough there’ll be listening no longer.
The music tenses. A quick raising of stakes, a nervous drawing in: a gesture stolen from somewhere, sure, but where? From no one in a position to sue. The touch of conventional suspense breaks the spell; you would have built a different contrast. And that’s the curse of a life spent looking for transcendence: nothing real will ever suffice, nothing that you won’t want to tweak. And yet, and still—another swell, a rhythmic fault line, a change of instrumental color, and you think: Why not? Then even approval gives way to simple hearing.
El tiempo, el agua errante, el viento vago . . .
Time, flowing water, shifting winds. The dying composer has gone on record: he wants to apologize to generations of his students for leading them down a mistaken path. Wrong back then, the music says, but righted at last, here at the finish line. It’s a happy enough story, and one that should hold until the flock wheels next and the changing winds of fashion declare again who’s in, who’s out, who loses, and who wins. There will be reverses still; that’s how music works. Listen, only listen, and do not worry too much about keeping score. Reunion has you now, for a while, and a while is all you get. The grip of this enchantment lasts no more than a moment. Pudimos no encontrarnos en el tiempo. Love, we might never have found each other in time.
They thaw you, the rays of this late sun. But soon enough these harmonies, too, will set and cool. Even beauty exhausts itself and leaves the ear wanting other sounds. Need will turn to something harder, some training ground for the difficulty to come. But for a while, this song, this one.
The first, expanding figure returns one more time. All the notes align, and it’s like you’ve written them yourself. Not here, not in this life, not in the world where you worked and lived. But maybe in the one you might have reached, in time. Esta pradera en que nos encontramos. In this meadow where we meet. The long, luxurious lines forecast your past and remember your future in detail. You can’t imagine how you missed the fact, for all those years. It might have been okay, even fine, to have written something so simple and pacific. To have made a listener want to be more than she is.
And yet: You did what you did and made what you made. Here you are. And to tell the truth, this meadow had its moments. Oh pequeño infinito! O little infinity! We give it back. We give it back.
YOU STAND IN the evening rain, on the steps of her trim gingerbread. The Voice got you here, a last, best act of navigation. She opens, a woman in the foyer of middle age. Her face freezes in the happy irritation she’s prepared for someone else. She, your cells’ lone heir and executor, is busy with joys and fears you don’t even have the right to ask about. But now her whole task is you. She swallows her half scream back down her throat and pulls you inside.
There’s anger and there’s excitement. Hurried questions, distress and fuss thrust at you, along with a serving of noodles left over from a dinner for one. She towels dry your hair. The words pour out of her, unbearable. But they won’t need bearing for long. Are you feverish? What happened to your lip? What’s wrong with you? Jesus, Daddy, try to eat something.
She’s living in a two-page spread from a furniture catalog. The townhouse is as clean as a C major scale. The curtains have just been ironed. The throw pillows pile up on the sectional in chilling symmetry. Photos of her crossing finish lines in tech clothing and various stages of pain grace the walls. Four posture-correcting ladder-back chairs surround the dining room table as if they’ve been lined up with a ruler. An umbrella stand flanks the front door and, next to it, a shoe rack with several identical coral-colored running shoes. All a gift from you, this rage for rational management. It’s what happens when you teach an eight-year-old that nothing—nothing at all—is secure.
But there’s a piano, too. A six-foot baby grand, its keyboard open, Schumann’s Scenes from Childhood on the music rack, and the lid open on the short stick. It doesn’t seem possible.
You’re playing again? Why didn’t you say anything?
She doesn’t answer. She’s at the window, glancing up and down the street, then pulling shut the curtains.
On the near side of the music rack is a photo: A young man and woman amusing themselves together. The man crouches over a toy piano, arms above his head, fingers poised to pounce on the tiny keys. The woman holds up one hammy palm, eyes closed, her mouth a ringing O! You knew those kids, knew the photographer. How long did it last, that amateur duet? Not even ten years, from start to finish. Pero este amor, amor, no ha terminado. But this love, Love, has no finish line.
In the background of the photo grins a fearless girl. She’s in the kitchen now, making tea with an electric kettle and tea bags taken from an elegant roundel. Two vanilla wafers for each of you. She comes back into the dining room where you sit, her brows a single mound of worry in the middle of her forehead.
You think: My only decent composition.
Other photos on the sideboard tell the truer story: preteen and her fledgling half-sister, at the foot of a bumper Christmas tree. Mother, stepfather, and happy grad, her mortarboard caught in midair. Young woman and her feckless man in front of Half Dome, their walking sticks raised in a mock-joust. All the dense, long years of daily being, the real heft of it, not the mere soundtrack you imagine. You know nothing of her causes, the pulls on her compass, what she does all day to pay the mortgage on this trim place. In her life, you were mostly an itinerant sower of pain. And still she came and found you out in your self-made wilderness, kept you phone company every week when you had none, bought you a dog.
She sits and pours. First the tea, then a cookie go into her mouth like she’s blowing on a pitch pipe.
Please tell me you didn’t write those things.
The ones that proliferate like living things, all over the Net. You’d like to tell her that. You almost could. It’s almost true.
You shrug, and the shrug makes her curse you. The pent-up stress of forty years. More profanity, and she starts to cry. You take her hands, but she flicks yours away and pulls hers to her neck. She closes her eyes, bows her head, pinches the bridge of her nose. You see wild gray strands in her hair. You, who never see anything.
Her voice wavers like a student violin. I don’t get you. What are you trying to do?
But music doesn’t do. It is. Dust in the wheat, sand among the sands.
So many noises abroad tonight, it’s hard to add a thing. The air fills with trivial ecstasies. And here, at last, it’s enough to attend, to keep still and add nothing to the mix. The spring wind takes the metal blinds and scrapes them against the window casement. There are sirens
, miles away. Fire or violence, someone’s life ending. A trickle of radio from a passing car. The chirping of gadgets. The chime of a glockenspiel broadcast from an ice-cream truck three blocks and sixty-six years away. The television of neighbors through the townhouse walls, tuned to the eternal national talent show. The hum of air conditioners, like frogs in the trees. A cheering crowd, an echoing PA. A cloud of buzzing insects and the silent pings of bats that hunt them in crazy knots across the sky. The coursing of blood in the capillaries of your ears. No place is greater than where you lived.
I wanted to make you proud.
She shakes her head, incredulous. Proud? I thought you were God.
Until I left.
She shakes her head, denying the denial.
The phone rings. She finds the offending device and kills it. But not before you hear the ringtone three times. It’s as familiar as breathing, but you can’t place it. Then you can.
What is that? Where did you . . .?
She doesn’t answer you—you, the one person on Earth who doesn’t need that ringtone identified. Instead, she rises and whisks the tea service away before you can finish. No lingering, this one. There are problems to solve, systems to work, old nightmares to keep from reprising.
You can stay here. I’ll hide you. We’ll call that lawyer tomorrow, the one I told you about. He’ll figure out something.
You hear the first van pull up and a door open. She looks at you, thick with hope, ready to believe that even now, every misguided public confession might still be called back. Then her face clouds over again with pain. You really did that?
You squint: Did what? There’s much to plead guilty to. But you want to be sure.
She can’t stop looking, scrutinizing you for evidence. Her eyes say: You turned a living cell into a music box? A CD? Something in the look could almost pass for excitement.
Somebody says they’ve isolated it already. Somebody uploaded . . .
No, you say. Not possible.
The rattle and thump of another van, on the other side of the house. Boots hitting pavement. You can’t make out how many. Then your daughter asks what she hasn’t asked since childhood.
What does it sound like?
Her eyes shoot toward the piano. A shy request: Play it for me, this thing that the world will only ever be able to guess at. Once, on another coast, you told a terrified eight-year-old, Nothing is going to change. We’ll still be like we always were. Now your frightened forty-two-year-old triathlete data miner needs another lie.
A cordon assembles around the house. The pound of boots, the sawtooth whine of something electronic.
It’s a fine piano, better than any you’ve ever owned. You try out a few chords. They ring like the brightest future. Your fingers say: Love, let’s not give sadness any more ground. They remember something, your digits, a song you wrote for her mother, way back when, on a dare. After a few stumbles, it comes back. Resurrected.
She laughs in surprise. Oh, no! You didn’t. You didn’t use that.
No; you smile, a little puckish. No, you’re right. It seems important to be as far out of the house as possible when they reach you, as free and clear as you can get. You say, I can’t believe you remember that one.
On the far side of the music rack is a bud vase filled with fresh-cut lily of the valley. It’s ready-made, if a little theatrical. Useful to have something in your hand, and the bud vase will look much like lab glassware in the dark. You pick it up and hold it to you.
You’d be surprised, she says.
You look down at the keys, those twelve repeating black and white prison bars. There’s something in there that you’d still love to jailbreak, even here, even this late, tonight. You will not find the key in this life. But the still-unfolding sounds, the music you felt and lost, the combinations you just missed finding, the dangerous songs still waiting to be made: y así como no tuvo nacimiento no tiene muerte. No birth, and so no death. That river of remembered futures will go on without you, changing nothing but its course, its lips. This love, Love: this love has no end.
Listen, you say. Hear that?
She goes to the window and lifts the curtain. A cry tears out of her. Oh, shit. Her body retreats from the glass and her arms fend off the fact. Shit! Her eyes dull and dilate. Her face goes gray. Daddy, she pleads. No. Oh, please, no.
Sara, you say. Safe though all safety’s lost. Sar? Let’s make something.
She shakes her head, sick with terror. Her eyes search yours: Make what?
Something good. Good loud. Good lively. A rose no one knows.
When she nods, even a little, you’ll head to the door and through it. Run out into a place fresh and green and alert again to whole new dangers. You’ll keep moving, vivace, as far as you can get, your bud vial high, like a conductor readying his baton to cue something luckier than anyone supposes. Downbeat of a little infinity. And at last you will hear how this piece goes.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
For my account of the creation and premiere of Olivier Messiaen’s Quatuor pour la fin du temps, I am indebted to Rebecca Rischin’s excellent book For the End of Time.
COPYRIGHT
Copyright © 2014 by Richard Powers
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Powers, Richard, 1957–
Orfeo : a novel / Richard Powers. — First Edition.
pages cm
ISBN 978-0-393-24082-5 (hardcover)
ISBN 978-0-393-24268-3 (e-book)
1. Composers—Fiction. 2. Time travel—Fiction. 3. Music—Quotations,
maxims, etc.—Fiction. 4. Musical fiction. I. Title.
PS3566.O92O74 2014
813'54—dc23
2013031952
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ALSO BY RICHARD POWERS
Generosity: An Enhancement
The Echo Maker
The Time of Our Singing
Plowing the Dark
Gain
Galatea 2.2
Operation Wandering Soul
The Gold Bug Variations
Prisoner’s Dilemma
Three Farmers on Their Way to a Dance