A Guide for the Perplexed

by Jonathan Levi

  I grabbed my wheels and my camera and ran out into the street, where the moon was blinking like a strobe light behind the shutter of hundreds of planes. A taxi screeched to a halt, a door flew open. It was only after I’d thrown Spinoza and wheels into the empty back seat with one hand, that I felt the young girl with the violin holding my other. I pushed her in, closed the door, shouting Sandor’s address to the driver, knowing that this is what I wanted all along, then looked up and saw, in the front seat next to the driver, the wild-haired White Rabbit.

  The taxi shot through the narrow streets of the market, curved under the eternal scaffolding of the Catedral, climbed up the Calle Victoria around the Roman ruins, higher into the darkness, past the Gibalfaro, cut into the unpaved turning, and suddenly broke into the open blue-black of the sea, sky, and moon that signalled the height of the town and the massive gate to Sandor’s villa. I climbed out and ran to the gate, pulled at it, pushed at it, all locked and dark, as the sound began again and I had to run for the road, my camera out, to somehow film, record, just bear witness to the phenomenon of the music of the plane, as the last, solitary fighter flew so close that its belly lights lit up the taxi as it sped away down the mountain, and showed, as clearly as if it were daylight, the young girl with the violin, prying loose a bit of brick from a stanchion, and, with the iron key beneath, calmly, as if she did this every week, unlocking the gate to Sandor’s villa.

  I didn’t need to be told. I picked up one end of the White Rabbit’s trunk, flung it inside the gate, the metal clanged shut, and except for the distant continuo of the planes—which could as easily have been the sea or the concentrated breathing of three women—all was quiet.

  ITINERARY TWO

  VILLA GABIROL

  The true criminal is the aficionado. He has a terrible addiction to faces—a dark, soulful Eastern European to play Tchaikovsky and Dvorak, a complex Oriental, preferably a woman dressed in red with shoulders bare, to tackle Bartok and Stravinsky, a broad-backed Swede, male or female, to pull and jerk Beethoven. Those who find the face of Heifetz in a Wieniawski polonaise are as profoundly simpleminded as the pilgrims who worship the shroud of Turin.

  To free the note from the nose, the rhythm from the arch of the eyebrow, the twitch of the lip. To free the downbow from the wrist, the pizzicato from the finger. To find the heart of the music, and hear it pure, disembodied, ungeographied, de-raced, un-sexed, with all trace of the Human removed except that initial shove called Composition—that is the goal of the true musician.

  —Sandor, In Search of the Lost Chord, A Brief Guide, p. 103

  THE VILLA GABIROL—A BRIEF HISTORY

  The Villa Gabirol was designed at the end of the last century by the Spanish industrialist and architect Marrano in the Mudejar style, and built on the ruins of the ancient fortress of the Almoravides. Four sets of apartments on two levels, not including the renovated and re-plumbed baths dug into the hillside, surround a squarish courtyard.

  Before the Civil War, the Villa served as the centerpiece of the Mariposan social season. The Picasso exhibition of 1924, the famous Heifetz/Rubinstein/Casals recital of ’32, the Lorca/de Falla Concours de Flamenco, all provided occasions for the unlocking of the massive gates to the garden. Citizen and tourist alike were treated to a view of the open Mediterranean, a view that once made Jews, Christians, and Muslims bury their enmity in a common worship of salt and water, sun and wind.

  Shortly after moving into the Villa in 1950, the Russian violinist Sandor established a master class for half a dozen promising students. The final week of the July session was given over to recitals. Every evening, one of the young violinists held court by the fountain for an audience of fifty of Mariposa’s worthy. Only at the end of the week, after each of his students had laid his offering on the altar, did the maestro take the stage. Sunday-night tickets were harder to come by than a box behind the president of the Corrida. They were given as wedding presents, bequeathed in last testaments. A pair of front-row seats served as collateral on any number of loans and gambling debts. The crush of the great unwashed outside the gates was matched only by the reverential silence with which every Mariposan ear strained for a single drop of Sandor’s matchless tone. It was a tone that was said to sweeten the most bitter humor, to soothe the most profound despair. Five minutes of Sandor could change a senator’s vote, ten could move an entire parliament. At one famous recital, a woman claimed she sat down barren and stood up three months pregnant.

  Sandor last played in public in 1966. The gates closed on his master classes ten years later. Although Sandor has continued to teach, the numbers have dwindled in recent years to perhaps a single student. The view from the road outside the gate is also spectacular, and pilgrims climb the hill as much for the sight as in the hope of hearing the master at practice.

  Best chance: 6:00 A.M.

  Ben

  HANNI—HOLLAND’S TALE

  Dear Benjamin,

  I have a few answers.

  My Lady Journalist has a name. A single name. Holland. Explanation follows, although perhaps you’ve already heard the story, as I have discovered that you are also her travel agent.

  The young violinist does not. Or perhaps she does, and it is just my Spanish, or my and Holland’s Spanish, as she worked on the girl while I heated the milk. Even nameless, she is an exquisite thing, and I am not accustomed to finding myself moved by young girls. I grew up in an age of bobbed, rational hair, and the sight of a long, virginal mane is enough to make me weep for an innocence I never had. Her eyes, Benjamin—undoubtedly you are her travel agent too.

  The owner, the owner of the villa, has a name (Sandor), a hobby (violins), a profession (hermit), and apparently a hotel bed (Carlyle) and a recital (Carnegie) in New York tomorrow night (New Year’s Eve).

  The young girl may be his student. Then again, she may not. All I know for certain is that she is familiar not only with the location of all gates, doors, keys, locks, combinations and permutations of the villa, but with the whereabouts of milk, coffee, and chocolate. Despite the language barrier, she is a cinch to direct. Within a few minutes I had her carrying a tray out to the courtyard, where Holland had plumped several cushions around your massive steamer trunk.

  Balmy and clear, an odd, welcome December night. Quiet now that the planes have gone. The fountain at the center of the courtyard quiet too, rippleless. The warm stones underfoot—heat pipes, Holland claims—the shelter of the arcade, the hot drinks, and my bottomless jar of kipferln make for a cozy, late-night tea party. The slice of winter garden I have seen, the bit of copper-potted and clay-dished kitchen, unlit Moorish lanterns, pitted marble columns, fragmented capitals—all is familiar and inviting in a way that nothing has been in Spain. I am glad our host is away. A man—I suspect even you, Benjamin—would disrupt the peace and balance of women’s voices in such a comforting place.

  With her scarf off and in a seated position, My Lady Journalist is a good deal more gemütlich than I’d supposed. Perhaps her ordeal on the stage of La Rábida softened her corduroy. Perhaps it softened mine. Holland, it seems, is an expert—although she, in a lovely self-deprecating way (am I becoming that soft?), never spoke the word—has been spending the past year producing a documentary on the subject of our absent host. Of course I know of Sandor, of his reputation. Leo refused to have his records in the house—bad for the arteries—and, having my own sentimental favorites, I never complained. But Holland is enthusiastic about her film, especially proud of the tape she made of Sandor playing Bach—ergo, the box on wheels. The film, she said, will be part of a series on the five hundredth anniversary of Columbus’s discovery of America.

  You’d be proud of me, Benjamin. I didn’t rise to the worm—not a single insult to Columbus, not a word about Esau or Maimonides. I slipped out of my shoes and rolled my stockings from my feet, bit down on a stray fragment of hazelnut, and let the sound of my crunching carry a neutral message for Holland’s interpretation. I think the subject would have melted
with the kipferln if the girl hadn’t spoken up for the first time all evening.

  “Tell me a story,” she said, lifting her eyes first to me, then to Holland. The voice was deep, the language was English, or at least the phrase, learned like some seafaring parrot—a surprise, but not a shock at 3:30, hours till dawn, till you would release your answering machine and give us some answers.

  I had never told a bedtime story. But something about traveling alone, about being a woman alone, about a month of simple foreign explanations to simple foreign strangers, had left me—both of us perhaps—eager for more complicated conversation, even at such an hour, the conversation of women, for the chance to pour my history down a willing set of feminine ears.

  “Shall I?” I wondered. Holland looked at the girl with open-mouthed interest. “Shall we?” I felt the same question floating unspoken between our minds. Purely rhetorical. It was a decision made, made when I first saw the girl under the statue of Columbus in the Plaza La Rábida, made while listening to Zoltan forty-seven years before. And I, for one—perhaps it was the fountains, the violins, Spain—knew exactly which story I would tell.

  “Once upon a time,” Holland began—and I was grateful that she spoke first, the decision to confess being much easier than the act—“there was a young girl. A young girl not too different from you …”

  “Isabella.” She might as well have said Beelzebub. But it made no difference. I was in love.

  “From you, Isabella,” Holland continued. “Her name does not matter, because shortly after my story begins, she changed her name. What is important is that this girl had a name, and she had a life, and she had a husband, and she was relatively content with all three.”

  “Tell me a story,” Isabella said again.

  I poured Holland another cup of coffee. It was only later, halfway through Holland’s tale, that I realized she was speaking to a girl who understood no English, that I wondered who was listening.

  The morning after my divorce I began to grow. It took me a full day to recognize the symptoms—it is not one of the more common signposts of turning thirty-two. Weariness in the joints and a hard swelling in the glands behind the ears led me to a preliminary diagnosis of summer flu, the low-grade fever of relief I contract as soon as any project is in the can. The usual cure, which could hardly be grudged by the BBC, is a day’s lie-in, supplemented by duty-free bath oils, a fresh nightie, squid with black bean sauce from the local take-away, and pots and pots of tea with a well-congealed half pint of Devonshire cream. But as it was a Sunday, and my neighbours were off tramping around the Fens, I could indulge in a little nude sunbathing in the late-summer afternoon, order an early supper, take two pages of Margaret Drabble, and fall asleep.

  The dark limbo of Monday morning stirred me to the peculiar truth. Not a flu but a liquid weight between my chest and the bed—a rubber cushion, a floating bolster that could not be heaved off, a new attachment to my unattached body, a well-upholstered something keeping me from total communion with the mattress. There was nothing E. A. Poe-ish about the awakening, no sudden panic, flailing about in an unfamiliar language against straps or rusty springs, no premonition of CANCEROUS LUMPS set in twelve-point type. It was a cozy weight, a familiar weight, a weight I hadn’t dreamed in fifteen years, since the teenage nights when I hoped to tears that the double islands of Atlantis would rise from the subterranean floor of my boyish breast. I rolled onto my back and massaged myself into dream.

  I saw my sister standing next to Adolescent Envy. I dreamed of her body at ten, already fully hipped and bra-ed, of her armpit hair and the thick growth between her legs that neither nightgown nor bikini could hide, while I, even four years later, could still swim in knickers without a vest with nary a glance from the sixteen-year-old public. I dreamed of her body at twenty, I dreamed of our wedding dresses—mine, a functional Bauhaus of lace up to the throat; hers, a baroque pulpit of whalebone and mystery.

  And Liaden proceeded to have children, dozens of them, at least one a year, five, or was it six at last census? While we, Foss would repeat afterwards in his Jonathan Miller TV surgeon’s voice, we —and by that he meant me —remained barren, despite the thermometers and the ovulation tests, despite the sonograms and the sperm counts, despite in vitro, ex nihilo, and sub rosa, despite—and this from his favourite obstetrician—a veritable Amazon of the fastest, strongest sperm since Man O’ War.

  And yet, for all her rococo charms, how staid and wallpapered Liaden had turned out, while the smell of unwashed sex dripped like fresh paint from my marriage. Even at the end, months after Foss had moved out, when Lingfield, my solicitor, told me he would drop the case if I didn’t stop sleeping with my husband, we would meet under assumed names in chintz-smothered Russell Square B&Bs for frantic, groping, always loud and unconscious lovemaking.

  I jumped at the alarm, fully dreamus interruptus. My hand reached at its automatic length for the clock, but toppled a lamp before retreating and finding the button. There it stayed for a heart-thumping minute. I returned slowly from my dream, my senses as alive as in any hot encounter with Foss. It was less the rising blood and damp, less the bedclothes gone and my nightie bunched up below my chin. It was the elbow against the headboard, bent, where I had always needed a straight-armed lunge for the alarm; it was the hand that could grasp the clock like a Spanish plum; it was the vertigo of my head on the pillow and my heels dangling like bananas off the foot of the bed. And yes, as I ventured with my un-alarmed hand below the bunch of the nightie, the no-longer-palm-sized tomatoes, but full-flowing, wobbly, hanging-slightly-off-the-side-to-kiss-the-sheets, womanly breasts.

  The sun burst around my curtains—my hand had not lied—shining on England’s green and pleasant land in full Jerusalem strength, striking my new body in new, largely vulnerable places. I had been flung full-blown, smack into the middle of an ancient Greek soap opera. I had been pumped up—doubtless by the bellows of an overly imaginative Hephaestus, under the supervision of an equally ditto Venus in Sunglasses—into the perfect Helen, with the legs of Cyd Charisse and the breasts of Sophia Loren. And somewhere this side of the next commercial break, the Sun God, Apollo—played with grim wit by Arnold Schwarzenegger—was hurtling down from Olympus, across the North Circular and Hampstead Heath at the speed of a television signal, only seconds away from smashing through the double glazing onto my new John Lewis down-filled duvet.

  A passing cloud took pity and covered my distress. I guided my legs over the side of the bed. I attempted a stand—one foot, one leg, and then the companions. There was no pain, no acrophobia. There was my chair—O Comforting Chair! There was my bed—Soft Friend of My Happiness! There my books, there my paintings, there the mantel, slightly dusty, above my fire—O, O, O, clear and brilliant and new and of course! I hopped on my long toes across the carpet to the bathroom, bouncing and jiggling, my nightgown no more than an ill-fitting chemise. I felt, well, of course, this is how I’ve always felt. This is the body I was born in—the other a flat-chested five-foot fiction. I am only now getting independent visual verification. And what I am getting is far more than the two stone and twelve inches that my scales tell me have drifted onto my soul in the last twenty-four hours. I have found the physique to match my libido, the words to match the thought. I have become the bombshell to case the bomb. Mount St. Venus has erupted. I have solved the Mind/Body Problem.

  That morning, I discovered I had twenty-seven portable mirrors in the house, not including the two full-length on the doors of the master bathroom. That morning, I discovered that I had nothing to wear. And that morning, the voice that answered my phone at work belonged to an American affiliate named Hook.

  “Congratulations!” the voice said, by way of introduction. “I heard about your weekend.” Ah yes, my divorce. “We figured you’d probably take a couple of days off to celebrate. Don’t worry, everything’s under control.” From the beginning he knew how to pull my chain. Control, indeed!

  “You’ve settled in, I take it?�
�� I asked, trying out my new expanded voice, which, comfortingly enough, sounded recognizable.

  “I thought I’d drop by around six,” he continued. “We can have a drink and run through this week’s schedule.”

  “Let me speak to Monica,” I said, suddenly impatient at being bull-phoned by a strange American man while totally starkers.

  “She gave birth last night,” Hook said, “didn’t you hear? See you at six.” He rang off.

  I sat by the phone for a minute, suddenly less concerned about the chaos in my department than about my utter lack of wardrobe. With my sister and her herd on holiday and Monica in hospital, there was no one I could trust to shop for me, to measure me, to teach me, for Christ’s sake, how to hook a bra! And what about Monica’s baby?

  “A girl,” Hook said, picking up my call on the first ring. “Seven pounds five and a half ounces. Alison Patricia.”

  I tired of the mirrors. I drank coffee, tried to read, watched a video of The Women, dusted the mantel. I retrieved a pair of Foss’s overalls from the garden shed and weeded around the acer. I dialled three digits of Foss’s phone number, four of Lingfield’s. I thought for a moment about calling my last gynecologist. But after her encomium to Foss’s testicles—I moved her name to the bottom of the list, and when I reached it, crossed it off.

  At five minutes to six, I squeezed into a pair of sunglasses, zipped up the front of the overalls, stepped into two undersized zoris, turned the key in the lock, and limped across the street to the Heath to avoid the confrontation and, by the by, see what the world made of me.