Gael

by Mok, Judith;

  I was the woman who answered the phone to people who called him a thief and a crook. I was the one who had inherited a valuable painting from her parents. He was the one who had taken it and sold it without asking her. I was the one who refused to believe what people said about him. I was the one he called ten times a day, no matter what part of the world I was in, while I was never allowed to call him, in case he was concentrating and not to be disturbed. I was his maid, scrubbing, cooking, ironing the shirts he insisted on wearing. I was the one. The one who admired his work. He was the one who had promised her a future with a big house and cars and horses running alongside, all for them, her and her son. His son. He was the husband who could lay waste, lose and destroy, he was the creator, the genius, the master of the perfect lie. And I was the woman who had just discovered that you could hate the person you love. All this I wanted to say but could not.

  Antonio was happy with the bits and pieces he received and sent a final cheque to encourage him to finish the work. Word went around the art world that the work was going to do very well. Even if it was tough now and we said harsh things to each other, soon we would be able to live properly.

  21

  Now he is free to paint, because the gods have given him the light. They have shown him the path to the moon. They have conquered the sun and clouded its burning. They have presented him with the ultimate vision. Soon he will present them with his completion. The sea is sound and he is so sane in every belief he enters on every holy ground he treads. They have embraced him, the gods, and have led him to their silence, their divine ignorance. He wades from one large pocket of emptiness towards the next one of nothingness, to be cleansed of his past and look at his hands, always ready for work. Did he not buy them a castle, did he not build them a city, did he not create a cheerful crowd in all his future dreams? They sat on the towers of books and all of them had it written. From those towers they could see it so clearly, they could read the names of the ones who wrote the future. He shared this with them and gathered them to him in his robes, his wife and child. Fatimah has her eye on the world and their son has his eye on him. He bedded Fatimah and she became one of his wives before the prophet. His son is the prophet of his people. Small people who walk the earth without casting their shadow. His son and his hope, he will ride it soon and not feel the hard ground again. Ever.

  He can already walk above the ground, his feet bare like a lucky beggar who knows he does not need any shoes to be with them: the fearless gods.

  He has been allowed to open the windows of the great mosque and lead the people in to watch his life unfold. In his image he paints in blasphemous pleasure the forbidden creatures and himself with them, tailed and winged, furred and finned.

  Cormorants winged and veiled, flying chadors, beaks closed on secrets, her sisters sit on a rock. She joins them every day to contemplate his downfall and spreads the width of her wings to block out the sea and show him the power of feathered unbending black. Their claws hold on to greater things than his ephemeral images of sea and light, they hold on to slippery stones carved out in ancient times. They are creatures born out of the water who carefully watch the ones that come from the land.

  These took to veils white and black and narrowed down their lives. For a few bearable centuries they were close: Mohammed’s daughters and the brides of Jesus Christ. The laws were those of the brutally religious robed males, and they took to their rocks and confined the sinless sisters to their huts. Sisters who stole the word and shed their wrappings to bare themselves in another world later, much later.

  But the cormorants remained the same and never spoke. Like his Fatimah, who carries his secret and keeps it from him with the sea.

  Still he hits the shore and is pulled back again by a current that prevents him from ever reaching the inner painting.

  22

  The dog and my husband were snoring. I was awake and feeling sick.

  The six-month lease was up and the movers had come to take our things. On a Sunday they came in a big old truck. The driver wore a black patch over his eye and looked like a pirate. We hadn’t managed to find a new place yet and were camped on the floor in the house of a friend, the mother of Sam’s best pal.

  With what we had left I suggested leaving the country and finding a cheap and pleasant place in the south of France. Sam had nearly finished his primary school and had done well. Sam and his father loved this country and were willing to sleep on its streets if necessary. But Ireland held no future for us, I thought; it was too expensive to lead a civilized life in. After ten days of camping and suffering stomach pains, however, my husband came and shook a new lease under my nose.

  This one was not beside the sea. I sat on the floor and did nothing. Concerts were announced in the paper with my name and photograph on the posters.

  He kept saying he couldn’t finish it without the sea.

  When I went with him to look at the paintings, they looked finished to me. I gave him my advance payments for the concerts, a few months’ rent, which left me without the wherewithal to buy a meal.

  We’d had our usual fight before I left; I’d entered the forbidden zone of his studio. I needed the mobile phone with me on tour. Calling from a hotel room was out of the question. It was lost in the piles of rubbish on the studio floor. I went there at night to look for it, but he woke and dragged me out, leaving me covered in bruises.

  The next day he said he was sorry and that he would come and see me at my hotel. He did, and we made love. We ate sandwiches, then made love again, and felt lost to ourselves. We talked about people and politics until it was time for him to take the train back home. It was strange to hide from my colleagues like that. I hid my bruised arms as I hid my hunger. A woman can always be on a diet. The art of excuses had to be perfected. Ah no, I liked walking back from the concert hall, no need for me to share a taxi. Soon the biscuits at the interval became more important to me than my solos.

  They took his paintings, Antonio and his assistants, and declared them finished. He wanted them back and screamed at them until they let go and handed them over again.

  I stood in a public phone box and listened to the hysterical optimism in his voice. Everything had gone really well with Antonio, he just wanted to make a few changes to the work and then, then we were going to be rich. I ran out of credit.

  Sam was staying with his friend, and when I rang him a few days later his father answered the phone. He had left our house because the rent couldn’t be paid. Had I not given him enough? Ah no, he needed that for something else. Not to worry now, our things were safely packed and stored away. My scores, my paintings, my piano in storage? Yes, and in a few months time the money would be here for his finished work and we would buy a house and get our things back. I wanted to believe him.

  The tights were going to cost me too much. They were the price of my fare. My fare they would pay in a month’s time. Nobody could tell that there were holes in my tights underneath the dress.

  We were rehearsing in a morgue: it was free rehearsal space. My hands were cold, but I still had gloves. Hang on to those, new ones are out of the question. Don’t lose anything. Check. Check again. A sandwich, toothpaste. For the day. This day is cold. What is it I am doing?

  Maybe I can get a warm bite tomorrow before the concert, remember what you have to play. Sam and his daddy are far away. In which house? It changes every month. Sam has his books and studies in front of other people’s TVs; he gets up out of other people’s beds early in the morning to go to school. Sam, who told me that his daddy had taught him how to travel without a ticket. Why could I not have a million tentacles and juggle with bills and payments? The chores continued. Cook, play, clean, pay, wash and check, play again and get paid. Where was he living, what was he telling his classmates, his teachers? I was a failure, my son had lost his home. He had put his bed and his medals for horse-riding into storage, along with everything else. My son had parents who could not get them back. They were all he had.
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br />   What is it I am playing? Marin Marais.

  Listen, listen to this and how I remember encountering this music for the first time.

  I was leaning against the wall, long, red boots touching my thighs under a short skirt, small flowers in my hair that hung over an embroidered jacket. The teacher of baroque music had a Breughel face, his hair flowing, black. He had looked at her often in the narrow hallways of the academy, with lust and fear because she was sixteen and he was thirty. They had never said a word to each other.

  I stood leaning outside his room, listening to him play. It was a less polished sound than I had been taught. Closer to the open air, the shriek of a bird of prey, the passion of the gypsy for freedom. Ringing sounds, come closer to the door they said, soaring sensuality pulling through my body, his body handling the bow. My hand on the door handle now, I wanted to know. I stayed with him for two hours, and never spoke to him again after that. Just gazed at his photograph on the record sleeve and listened to him playing for me only, succumbing to the romance I had written for myself.

  And ten years later I buy the score and it becomes my music, and he leans against the pillar in a church to listen to me, and again we don’t say a word to each other. I play it for him now, naked for him. Entirely naked.

  My breath accompanied me in little puffs of cloud as I walked to the bus stop. Was I not coming for a drink, some musicians asked me? I was tired, I said, though that wasn’t true. It had been cold on the path to the moon in our first house, and yet I missed it. Now I was frozen with the wind’s harsh complaints close to my ears.

  A few people came out of the woodwork offering their friendship. A house for a period of eight or nine months. Again there were telephone calls, angry voices telling me about my husband’s debts. My gallery wanted new work. I was wanted to play on the continent. But there were plane and boat fares to be paid in advance. I couldn’t go. Sam needed me. My husband needed me. I had to choose between food or washing powder at the supermarket. We were going to be rich soon.

  Meanwhile he walked the streets, secretly selling valuable belongings of mine, including the first painting I had made for him.

  He took the dog for a long walk, so long I never saw it again.

  Someone called, asking me to play a Bach concert. He said he was sending a journalist over to interview me. To this empty house? I persuaded the music shop to rent me a piano by showing them my contract for the concert.

  My husband was whispering on the phone early in the morning.

  Just clear away some furniture, make space for the piano, it is coming. I visualize a piano and students in the borrowed house that is mine for a while. I gather flowers from the garden and decorate the mantelpiece for the photograph in the newspaper. I wait for the doorbell. All day rehearsing Bach.

  They said that she looked like the Klimt painting of the young woman in evening dress showing the dark cherry nipple of one breast. Her hair piled on top of her head, her decadent smile. The sophisticated rings on her hands. The simple white dress she chose for the concert. Bach being played in the city of music. Where the listeners were solemn in their conservative love of the composer and forgot about him throwing his wig in fury at his pupils or siring an army of illegitimate children in his spare time. She is his pupil still. She is taught by the maestro who had what Bach wanted, what Bach meant, passed on to him from generation through generation. The maestro is conducting tonight in the old concert hall where nothing ever changes. Inside that building there have been no wars or even peace negotiations. There has only ever been music.

  She walks between the two young men, holding their arms to help keep her balance on impossibly high heels. As soon as the hall is reached she brushes them off softly: she would like to be alone now. Alone in her seat when the lights go out and the music flares up. But now she suddenly sees herself sitting there, she has the name of the woman in the painting, the assimilated one who shows her flesh and can afford to. The music comes to her with all its clarity. She admires the coldness of the precision but she is still waiting when it is all over, waiting for the song.

  And there are her suitors again at the bottom of the velvet-covered stairs. They are going to greet the maestro.

  He embraces her and invites her for the souper afterwards, after the signing of autographs and nodding to admirers. She waits for him and is distracted by his professional small talk.

  ‘Yes, yes,’ he totally agrees with the tall gentleman who shakes his hand, ‘Jews should not play Bach, anything else, yes, absolutely, but not Bach.’ He sees her looking at him and he winks. When the crowds are gone he grabs her arm and whispers in her ear that this man is a formidable sponsor. So you don’t agree? ‘Well,’ he touches her cheek, ‘I think we should discuss that over supper.’ She asks her suitors to go home and to please get her violin.

  Again she walks the city between them. Her violin is on her back on the way to the famous restaurant where the maestro is having supper with some friends. Already she is known for her talent amongst these people. She climbs on to the table before they have noticed her and stands between the porcelain holding her violin, lifting her arm so that her dress opens up too much and shows the cherry-red of her nipple. She plays the Partita. ‘Never heard it played so well,’ says one of the biggest music agents in the world before he clears his plate. The maestro is not smiling. She will never play in this city again.

  I phoned the shop to inquire about the piano. The man on the phone sounded surprised. My husband had been there yesterday to get the deposit back. I asked him about it that night. ‘You know what your problem is?’ – he did not look me in the eye – ‘You are far too focused on me. You really should get out more.’

  I told him I would get out a good deal more. That as a matter of fact I was getting out for good the next morning.

  23

  The man is the monk is the master. His desires are purified. He has cast her off like an old snakeskin and is keeping that skin in a cupboard. A parchment memory with fading folds and flakes written all over it. To remember her, he reads it with his hands like a blind man reads Braille. He recognizes her, but he does not recognize the animal that the skin belonged to.

  He sleeps with his paintings in rooms that he finds around the city. He does not beg for food or money. A monk gets what he deserves. People worship him, bring him goods, offer him blankets and a coat. Want to share his infinite wisdom. Like what the colours stand for and why they have to breathe it every day, the same monotonous green. And he tells them it is not monotonous, it is the eternal green. It is not an island, it is a planet drifting on a coloured sea of time. Surrounded by animals that do not share their stupid presumptions about life. He shows them how the state of being early or late is a laughing matter, for who is to say. Build your own time, paint your own hours, live the longest minute if that is your wish. Swim the waters with the seals and the fish, dance to the bird tunes, bark with the dogs if you must. Even in Ireland these things are possible. Soon he will become the Irish Guru and his paintings will become holy. Sometimes he walks with his son to show him the way of his world. And when he is gone, he sits again in time. Time was his master and forced him to spoil his divine work. Now he has spoken with Buddha and has become the master of time. He is not with his herd anymore. He has strayed into a new eternity where nothing can touch him. Feelings were never his forte, it was the thought that brought him all this, these paintings. He still hears the names. His son and his son’s mother are present when he says the names. And Antonio. Antonio is a presence that carries a promise. To pay for the goddesses that he painted. They did not believe in him, they became one huge dismissive creature surrounded by their reality. He had Maria, Laxmi, the Banshee and Fatimah. But there is no need for them now. A future. He can now build on his future forever. He feeds his body enough to become light, so light that he can feel himself floating slightly above the ground. Other bodies had dragged him down in the past. No need for those anymore.

  The flesh does
not partake of time. He moves his body along in the city and meets meditating monks like himself, creations of Buddha. Not that he speaks to them. Language is for the poor of mind. Everything is written and found within silence. Silence was the music she could never produce.

  24

  We had two rooms, Sam and I. Sometimes heated up by a fire, mostly chilly. The damp made my fingers curl in to a comic cramp. Sam laughed when he saw me unfold my hands in the morning. His laughing cheered me up. As long as he was in the rooms, and I tried to make his life enjoyable , those arthritic hands were bearable. The conductors did not even smile when I said I needed more time to warm up. My sound was croaky at the beginning of rehearsals. I didn’t have enough strength left in me to join an orchestra. Whenever I tried I heard a surprised manager on the phone who wondered why I, a soloist, would want to join an orchestra. In any event I couldn’t leave the country because I had to look after Sam. Sam needed his food and books and money to spend on ridiculous ‘cool’ things with his teenage friends. My friends found it harder to reach me. I had no phone or computer.

  But I had my two cats to talk to and stroke their warm bellies if they needed affection. I needed none. No men’s hands or lips. The threat was too great. Behind every gentle gesture I saw the gaping void, the burning venom of love.

  I met women who avoided the subject of men. I, too, felt that there was nothing I wanted to share with the male species. Not even an orgasm.

  We had our knock on the door every evening, Sam and I. It was his father, standing on the steps in front of the house, shivering slightly. Sam would come out with an umbrella and some coins and spend some time going over his schoolwork sitting on the stairs. My landlady had strong objections to my husband coming into the house. At first she had quite liked his entertaining stories and she had let him in, during my absences, out of the rain or the cold, sure the poor fellow couldn’t be that bad. But then she claimed that things went missing in her quarters and she wouldn’t have him around any more. I couldn’t believe it was him. It was more the stories that circulated about him and must have reached her eager ears. Stealing from other people’s houses would have been too much of an effort for my husband. He couldn’t have dealt with the fear. Most of the time we never knew where he lived or slept. He seemed to be clean enough when occasionally we had sex. He was no longer a man but a zombie, who flirted with religions and sometimes remembered the functions of his body. Sam cheerfully denied there was anything wrong with him. I was the mad one who had walked out on his adored father. He didn’t like me for it. But he did like my kisses and my presents and the fact that I was a real parent, one that you could annoy and curse and kick.