Gabriel put his arm across the singer’s shoulders. This cold early morning facing the sea. She did not reject it.
“The land defends itself against the sea with its ancient stone. There are caves everywhere. The sand is silvery. They say that the caves were smugglers’ dens. But footprints in the sand betray. Best of all, the weather is very mild and the vegetation abundant, thanks to the Gulf Stream, the heating system for Europe.”
She looked at him, moving a little away from the embrace.
“I’m Mexican. My name is Inés. Inés Rosenzweig. Why haven’t you asked me?”
Gabriel’s smile broadened, but it was joined by a frown. “For me you have no name or nationality.”
“Please, don’t make me laugh.”
“Forgive me. You’re the singer who rose above the chorus to give me her beautiful voice: singular, yes, but still a little savage, needing to be cultivated …”
“Thank you for that. I didn’t want sentiment …”
“No. Simply a voice that needs to be cultivated, like the English heaths.”
“You should see where the mesquite grows in Mexico.” Nonchalantly, Inés moved away.
“In any case,” Gabriel continued, “a woman without a name, an anonymous creature who crossed my path one night. A woman without age.”
“Romantic!”
“And who saw me urinate in an alley.”
They both laughed, he longer than she.
“A woman you bring for the weekend and forget on Monday,” Inés suggested, untying her kerchief and letting the wind whip her red hair.
“No.” Gabriel put his arms around her. “A woman who enters my life identical to my life, the equivalent of the conditions of my life …”
What did he mean? The words intrigued her, and for that reason Inés said nothing.
They drank coffee in the kitchen. The dawn was slow to come, this December day would be short. Inés began to notice what was around her, the simplicity of the house, the rough whitewashed brick. The few books in the living room—most of them French classics, some Italian literature, several editions of Leopardi, of Central European poets. A broken-down sofa. A rocking chair. A fireplace, and on the mantel the photograph of a very young Gabriel, a late-teenager, maybe twenty, with his arm around a boy who was his exact opposite: quintessentially blond, wide smile, without mystery. The two youths weren’t wearing shirts, and the photo stopped at their waists. It was a photograph of a swaggering camaraderie, solemn but proud, with the pride of two people meeting and recognizing one another in their youth, appreciating the unique opportunity to face life head-on together. Never to be separated. Not ever.
In the living room two wooden stools were set apart at the distance—Inés calculated instinctively—of a body lying full-length. Gabriel explained that in rural houses like this in England twin stools were placed where the coffin of the deceased would be set during a wake. He had found the two stools like that when he took the house, and he hadn’t moved them, well, out of superstition—he smiled—or maybe not to disturb the ghosts.
“Who is he?” she asked, putting the steaming cup of coffee to her lips without taking her eyes from the photograph, indifferent to the maestro’s asides on folklore.
“My brother,” Gabriel answered simply, looking away from the funerary stools.
“You don’t look at all alike.”
“Well, I say ‘brother’ the way you might say ‘comrade.’”
“We women never call each other ‘sister’ or ‘comrade’ or things like that.”
“‘Love,’ ‘friend’ …”
“Yes. I guess I shouldn’t press you. Sorry. I don’t mean to pry.”
“No, no. It’s just that my words have a price, Inés. If you want me to talk about myself—want, not press—you’ll have to tell me about you.”
“All right.” She laughed, amused by the way Gabriel had turned things around.
The young maestro glanced around his no-frills cottage and said that if it were up to him there wouldn’t be a stick of furniture in it, nothing. In empty houses, echoes are the only things that flourish: voices flourish, if we know how to listen. He came here—he stared deep into Inés’s eyes—to hear the voice of his brother …
“Your brother?”
“Yes, because most of all he was my companion. Companion, brother, ceci, cela, whatever …”
“Where is he?”
Gabriel didn’t just look down. He looked … down.
“I don’t know. He always liked long, mysterious disappearances.”
“Doesn’t he keep in touch with you?”
“Yes.”
“Then you do know where he is.”
“His letters have no date or return address.”
“Where are they mailed from?”
“I left him in France. That’s why I chose this place.”
“Who brings them to you?”
“Here I’m closer to France. I can see the coast of Normandy.”
“What does he say in the letters? Oh, I apologize … I know you haven’t given me permission—”
“Yes, yes, don’t worry. Look, he likes to reminisce about our life as teenagers. Mmh, he remembers, I don’t know, how he envied me when I asked the prettiest girl to dance and showed her off on the dance floor. He confesses he was jealous of me, but being jealous just means making the person we’d like to have all to ourselves more important. Jealousy, Inés, not envy. Envy is poisonous, pointless, because we want to be a different person. Jealousy is generous—we want the other person to be ours.”
“What was he like? He didn’t dance?”
“No. He preferred to watch me dance and then tell me he was jealous. He was like that. He lived through me and I through him. We were comrades, can you understand? We had this deep tie that the world rarely understands and always tries to destroy: isolating us in jobs, ambition, women, habits we acquire on our own … history.”
“Maybe it’s best that way, maestro.”
“Gabriel.”
“Gabriel. Maybe if that wonderful youthful friendship had been prolonged, it would have lost its luster.”
“Nostalgia preserves it, you mean?”
“Something like that, maestro … Gabriel.”
“And you, Inés?” Atlan-Ferrara brusquely changed the subject.
“Nothing special. My name is Inés Rosenzweig. My uncle is a Mexican diplomat in London. Ever since I was little, people have said I have a good voice. I went to the Conservatorio de Mexico, and now I’m in London”—she laughed—“sowing confusion among the chorus of The Damnation of Faust and giving the celebrated young maestro Gabriel Atlan-Ferrara fits.”
She lifted her coffee cup as if it were a champagne flute. She burned her fingers. She was just going to ask the maestro again, “Who brings the letters?” but Gabriel beat her to the punch.
“Don’t you have a boyfriend? Didn’t you leave someone behind in Mexico?”
Inés shook her head no, and the movement highlighted the cherry tones in her hair. She rubbed her burned fingers discreetly on her skirt. Just at the thigh. The rising sun seemed to pale with envy as it struck the girl’s fiery aureole. But her eyes were for the photo of Gabriel and his brother-companion, a beautiful boy, as different from Gabriel as a canary from a crow.
“What was his name?”
“Is his name, Inés. He isn’t dead. He’s just disappeared.”
“But you get letters from him. Where do they come from? Europe is cut off—”
“You talk as if you would like to know him.”
“Of course. He’s interesting. And very beautiful.”
A Nordic beauty very different from Gabriel’s Latin looks. Was he really handsome or merely striking? Brother? Companion? Inés stopped fretting over the question. It was impossible to look at the photograph without feeling something for this boy: love, uneasiness, sexual desire, intimacy maybe, or perhaps a certain icy disdain. Indifference? No. Not permitted by those eyes clear as lakes
never furrowed by any craft, straight blond hair like the wing of a splendid heron, slim muscular torso. The torso of the young blond corresponded to features sculpted so finely that one further touch to the nose, thin lips, or smooth cheekbones might have ruined, even erased them.
This nameless youth merited attention. That was what Inés told herself that early dawn. The love the brother or comrade demanded was attentive love. Don’t let an opportunity slip by. Don’t lose focus. Be there for him because he was there for you.
“Is that what this photo makes you feel?”
“I’ll be frank with you. It isn’t the photo, it’s him.”
“I’m in it too. He isn’t alone.”
“But you’re here beside me. I don’t need a photo to see you.”
“And him?”
“He is his image. I’ve never seen such a beautiful man.”
“I don’t know where he is,” Gabriel concluded, and looked at her with irritation and a kind of embarrassed pride. “If you want, you can believe that I write the letters myself. That they don’t come from anywhere. But don’t be surprised if one day he shows up.”
Inés didn’t want to back off or show surprise. It was obvious that one rule of getting along with Gabriel Atlan-Ferrara was precisely to affect normality in every situation except moments of great musical creativity. It wouldn’t be she who fed the fire of his domineering creativity, it wouldn’t be she who laughed at him when she went into the one bathroom without warning—the door was half open, she wasn’t violating any taboo—and found him before the mirror preening like a peacock capable of recognizing its own reflection. The laugh came from him, a forced laugh, as he quickly combed his hair, shrugging his shoulders to express disdain, and explaining:
“I’m the son of an Italian mother. I cultivate la bella figura. Don’t worry. It’s to impress other men, not women. That’s the secret of Italy.”
She was wearing nothing but a cotton robe she had hastily thrown into a weekend case. He was completely naked, and he walked toward her, excited, and embraced her. Inés held him away.
“I’m sorry, maestro. Do you think I came here, docile as a doe, just to answer your sexual summons?”
“You take the bedroom, please.”
“No, the sofa in the living room is fine.”
Inés dreamed that the house was crawling with spiders and all the doors were closed. She tried to escape from the dream but was stopped by the walls of the house, which were streaming blood. She couldn’t find an open door. Invisible hands knocked on the walls, tap-tap-tap, tap-tap-tap … She remembered that owls eat mice. She managed to get out of the dream but still could not distinguish reality. She saw herself walking toward a cliff and saw her shadow stretching across silvery sand. Except the shadow was looking at her, forcing her to run back to the house and through a rose garden where a macabre little girl crooning to a dead animal smiled, revealing perfect teeth that were dripping blood, and looked up at her, at Inés. The animal was a silver fox, newly created by the hand of God.
When she woke, Gabriel Atlan-Ferrara was sitting at her side, watching her sleep.
“It’s easier to think when it’s dark,” he said in a normal voice, so normal that it seemed to be rehearsed. “Malebranche could write only when the curtains were closed. Democritus tore out his eyes in order to be a true philosopher. Only when he was blind could Homer see the wine-dark sea. And only when he was blind could Milton recognize the figure of Adam, molded from clay, calling out to God:” … it were but right / And equal to reduce me to my dust …”
He relaxed his savage black eyebrows. “No one asked to be brought into the world, Inés.”
After a frugal breakfast of eggs and sausage, they went out for a walk by the sea. He in his turtleneck pullover and wool trousers, she in a heavy gray wool suit, with the kerchief tied around her head. He told her, jokingly, that this was capital country for hunting. “If you pay attention, you will see flocks of shorebirds with those long beaks for routing out food, and if you look toward land you’ll see red woodcocks searching for their breakfast of heather, red-footed partridges, sleek pheasants, mallards and teal … Yet all I have to offer you, like Don Quixote’s routine Saturday diet, is ‘scraps and scrapings.’”
He asked her to forgive him for what had happened the night before. He wanted her to understand. Every artist sometimes has the problem of not distinguishing between what passes for everyday normality and creativity—which is also everyday, and not exceptional. It’s a well-known fact that the artist who sits around waiting for “inspiration” dies in the waiting, watching the woodcock wing by, and ending up with a fried egg and half a sausage. For him, for Gabriel Atlan-Ferrara, the universe was alive in every moment and in every object. From a stone to a star.
Inés was gazing with hypnotic, instinctive fascination toward the distant island she could see on the ocean horizon. The moon was late going to bed and was precisely above their heads.
“Have you seen the moon during the day before?” he asked.
“Yes,” she replied without a smile. “Often.”
“Do you know why the tide is so high today?”
She shook her head, and he elaborated: because the moon was exactly overhead and at the moment of its most powerful magnetic attraction. “The moon makes two orbits around the earth every twenty-four hours and fifty minutes. That’s why there are two high tides and two low tides every day.”
She looked at him, amused, curious, impertinent, asking him silently, And where is all this going?
“To conduct a work like The Damnation of Faust requires me to convoke all the powers of nature. You have to keep in mind the nebula of the beginning, you have to imagine a sun, twin to ours, that one day exploded and scattered into planets, you must imagine the entire universe as one enormous tide without beginning or end, in perpetual expansion, you have to feel pain for the sun, which in some five billion years will be an orphan, with no oxygen, shriveled like a child’s deflated balloon …”
He talked as if he were conducting, convoking acoustic powers with one arm extended and one fist closed.
“You have to imprison the opera inside a nebula that conceals an object invisible from the outside, the music of Berlioz deep in the luminous center of a dark galaxy. It will reveal its light only through the luminosity of the singing, the orchestra, the hand of the conductor … revealed thanks to you and me.”
He was silent for a brief moment, and then again he smiled at Inés.
“Every time the tide rises at this point where we are standing on the English coast, Inés, it falls at a place in the world exactly opposite from here. I ask myself, and I ask you, does time appear and reappear the way the tide rises and falls so punctually at two opposite points on the earth? Is history replicated and reflected in the opposing mirror of time, only to disappear and reappear by chance?”
He picked up a pebble and skipped it, swift and cutting, arrow and dagger, across the surface of the water.
“And if at times I’m sad, what does it matter that there’s no joy in me if there is joy in the universe? Listen to the sea, Inés, listen with the ear of the music I conduct and you sing. Do we hear what the fisherman or the barmaid hears? Maybe not, because the fisherman has to know how to get the jump on the early bird, and the waitress how to cut an abusive client off short. No, because you and I are obliged to recognize the silence in the beauty of nature that becomes noise when you compare it with the silence of God. That is true silence.”
He skipped another pebble.
“Music is the midpoint between nature and God. With luck it connects the two. And along with art, we musicians are intermediaries between God and nature. Are you listening? You’re a million miles away. What are you thinking about? Look at me. Don’t gaze off into the distance like that. There’s nothing there.”
“There’s an island hidden in the fog.”
“There’s nothing.”
“I’m seeing it for the first time. It’s as if it ha
d been born during the night.”
“Nothing, I say.”
“There’s France,” Inés said finally. “You told me that yourself yesterday. You live here because from here you can see the coast of France. But I don’t know what ‘France’ is. When I came here, France had already surrendered. What is France?”
“It’s my country,” Gabriel said, with no change in tone. “And one’s country is loyalty or the lack of it. Look, I’m conducting Berlioz because his music is a cultural specific of the territorial specific we called France.”
“And your brother, or comrade?”
“Has disappeared.”
“He isn’t in France?”
“Possibly. Do you realize, Inés, that when you don’t have any information about someone you love you imagine him in every possible situation?”
“No, I don’t believe that. If you know a person, you know what … let’s say … what his repertory of possibilities is. Dog doesn’t eat dog, dolphin doesn’t kill dolphin.”
“He was very calm as a boy. All I have to do is think of that serenity to believe that it’s what destroyed him. His bliss. His serenity.” He laughed. “Maybe my excesses are an inevitable reaction to the danger posed by angels.”
“Aren’t you ever going to tell me his name?”
“Let’s say his name is Scholom, or Solomon—Hills, or Hearth. Give him whatever name you want. The important thing about him wasn’t the name, but his instinct. Do you understand? I have transformed my instinct into art. I want music to speak for me, although I know perfectly well that music speaks only of itself, even when it demands that we enter it and become a part of it. We can’t see it if we stay outside, because then we wouldn’t exist for the music.”
“Him, talk to me about him,” Inés urged impatiently.
“Him. Chaim. Any name that suits you.” Gabriel smiled back at the nervous girl. “He was constantly remaining in his instincts. He’d tediously revise everything he’d just done or said. And that’s why it’s impossible to know his fate. He was uncomfortable in the modern world, which forced him to reflect, stop, exercise the caution of the survivor. I think he longed for a free and natural world that wasn’t burdened with oppressive rules. I told him nothing like that had ever existed. The freedom he wanted was the search for freedom, something that we never achieve but that makes us free as we fight for it.”
Inez Page 4