Though this is not a large concert hall it is full and the audience are attentive. Polite rather than enthusiastic – most people seem prepared to take a sensible and sensitive interest in the plight of the persons in these songs. There are some, however, who have begun to wonder how on earth these men have been driven to search out such elusive women despite all the hundreds of thousands they must have encountered back home. The women in the audience become particularly restive and begin to peer more closely into their translations to find the reason for it. This is hard to find. Instead they read that one man has followed a star in mistake for a diamond on an unknown woman’s breast. Reading of this mistake and of this diamond for some reason makes them feel tired beyond belief as well as deeply unsympathetic.
‘Well, I suppose the sea will be better,’ said one, leaning across the man beside her, so that she could speak to the woman on his right.
‘Better? Better songs, you mean?’
‘I mean the sea might be a better place to find these women.’
‘You think so, do you? I can’t see it myself. A man would have to follow her in a boat. Unless she was actually swimming in the sea or under it, in which case he’d have to go in after her. And these men aren’t usually swimmers. They weren’t allowed into the sea as children, you see.’
‘I don’t really know what kind of men we’re talking about.’
‘Neither do I. I just assume there’s been something lacking in the background.’
‘You mean they weren’t allowed into the mountains either?’
‘Probably not.’
‘Nor even into the cities?’
‘We’ll just have to wait and see.’
‘So you think the mothers are to blame? For not letting them run around as children. Isn’t that fearfully unfair?’
‘Everyone is unfair to mothers. Always have been down through the ages. Always will be. No way they can win. Don’t ask me why. I’m not one myself. Something to do with the Greeks, I should think. Those huge, beautiful, tragic, dangerous women.’
An absolute silence falls and a short burst of clapping as the accompanists unobtrusively take their seats again after the interval. There is some time to study them before the singer himself comes back to the platform. The audience stares fixedly at the two women. The young girl who turns pages is wearing a black blouse and a black silk skirt. She is slim, pale, with straight hair swept back from the forehead. Once she is seated they are aware of her startlingly straight back. She waits, modest yet confident, thin fingers clasped on her lap, her head already slightly inclined towards the piano. The pianist – a more formidable woman – waits, her feet firmly planted, strong hands spread out on her knees and her head bowed. She is in black to the ankles. These two wait patiently, unmoving as images. They have waited like this through the months and the years, for the sound of doors opening, for the sound of steps, for great bursts of clapping or cheering. Through these years they have become welded together unawares like some mediaeval tableau carved out of solid black wood – the girl with high, bare, rounded forehead, smoothly carved cheeks and a grave half-smile, the older woman with her large strong-boned fingers spread on the narrow lines of a pleated skirt.
The singer now enters quickly and takes up his stance near the piano amid a prolonged burst of applause. The woman places her hands on the keys and the girl bends her head close to the score. The second group of songs – the water-search – begins with an old Portuguese song about a sea captain looking for his woman through all the oceans. He skirts around volcanic islands, is becalmed amongst the weeds of the Sargasso Sea and hurled about by the stupendous winds and waves of the Southern ocean. There is nothing clear or straightforward about this business. All is driving spray, whistling wind and tangled weed. The situation is a particularly hopeless one. Neither the captain, the singer, the anonymous writer nor the audience know anything about this woman – whether she is sitting on a beach, floating, or sailing in a ship – whether she is perhaps a mermaid or an ordinary bather out of her depth. She is loved. It is all that is known about her.
But isn’t that enough? No, it is not enough. A mixture of feelings in the audience makes for a sort of lassitude. Some men are taken aback by the realization that they ever managed to find a partner as quickly as they did. Wouldn’t it have been better, after all, to wander for most of their lives searching the remoter regions of the earth? And how little opportunity for this there is once the quick choice of partner has been made. As before there is a great deal of doubt in the female part of the audience. Would these men – these sea-captains, scholars, priests, princes and poets – be really happy to find this woman? Would they notice her if they passed her in the street, for instance, rather than spotting her on a high peak or at the back of an ocean cave? Would they be prepared to sit down and actually talk to her rather than offering her a life-long devotion? The sea-songs are finished. A fairly thorough search has been made. Men have broken their legs, their necks, their hearts on the business. The second interval is longer than the first. It gives the audience time to imagine some small room backstage where the singer is resting. Are the accompanists with him? Serving his coffee perhaps? Perhaps even praising him on the purity of his top notes? They imagine the girl, still straight-backed, but leaning a little forward – passive, thoughtful, with lowered eyes, pouring milk into his cup, asking if he takes one, two spoonfuls of sugar and apologizing perhaps for not remembering after all these years. The more formidable woman will be sitting squarely and rather clumsily, her legs apart, elbows on knees, her large hands hanging against the black cloth of her gown. Will she have changed her character backstage? Become motherly? Thankfully the women in the audience guess she is not the motherly type. She is not prepared to brush the biscuit crumbs from the singer’s jacket, to arrange his collar or tuck a pillow behind his back. As well as imagining things backstage the audience also have time to talk again.
‘It will be a lot easier in the cities,’ said one woman. ‘There are so many of us around. Compared to men, I mean. And as statistics go, for better or worse, we do live longer.’
‘Well, you could say there are a lot of older women around. Older women aren’t so much in men’s minds of course. Nor in the poetry, except of course when the poets happen to mention those old mothers, aunts and nurses who had such influence on them, but who – let’s face it – could be just as much hated and feared as they were loved.’
‘All the same I can’t help looking forward to the cities. At any rate I’ll be on solid ground again.’
‘Dangerous ground for meetings, though. Or disappointing, rather. Every excuse for missing people in cities. You can’t count on being noticed what with crowds and traffic and police and traffic wardens moving people on and all that.’
‘I do still think we’ll be easier to spot though. A man has only to use his eyes.’
‘Yes, but the ones we’re hearing about are obviously the long-sighted ones. It’s the very distant things they tend to see and go for – the almost invisible things – really dim women, and the more mist around the better. So naturally they’re frightened of anything too near, and really clear, hard-edged types are an absolute menace. No, I’m afraid I can’t say I’ve got all that much hope for the city either.’
The singer appears again followed by the two women. He is certainly not one of those performers who takes much notice of his accompanists. He seldom looks behind him. He does not beckon them forward, far less indicate by word or gesture that through years of song he has been solely sustained by these two. His smiles, bows and kisses are for the audience. The accompanists settle themselves quietly. The older woman sets up her score, adjusts her music-stool and feels for the pedals. Finally she smooths the page in front of her to show that everything is finally clear and ready. The girl leans forward, one hand already angled to flick over the first page. Again they have the appearance of two skilfully modelled beings in perfect accord. There is something almost too perfect, static and ag
reeable in this composition. In fact it seems scarcely human and belongs rather to the super-human or even to the angelic side of things. For as well as looking good as a fixed pair they have, as individuals, the attraction of total reliability and faithfulness – more suited, perhaps to an altarpiece than to a concert platform.
The audience gradually get their minds round to the third and last section of the recital – the Search in the City. Here are the men who have searched all the cities of the world. They go from street to street and from dawn to midnight, looking for the Woman. There are a good many women around – young, old, gay, serious, pretty and plain. Yet the singer misses out the shopping centres where most of the housewives, at any rate, are to be found in the mornings. He doesn’t linger round child guidance clinics or public health centres. He gives a wide berth to schools, offices, factories, police stations, banks and bars. Instead he concentrates on attics and obscure stairways. He searches for her on the steps of great cathedrals, looks into cloisters and convents amongst groups of attractive nuns. He mixes with gay carnival crowds and funeral processions and goes – totally uninvited – to great balls and weddings. He does not know who he is looking for and he does not find her. The interest of the audience has begun to wander a little from these men and from the singer himself. Most people have had their eyes fixed on the accompanists some distance behind him on the right. There is a hypnotic sort of drill about their movements. Every now and then the girl leans closer in to the piano and quickly flicks over one page of music while the older woman completes and acknowledges it with an almost imperceptible lift of her head before returning her eyes to the top of the new page.
It is in the middle of these last songs that a change comes over the accompanists – not at once noticed by the audience, for the page-turning, the movement of head and hand are still perfectly co-ordinated and the poise of both women is still respectful, still dedicated to the service of the searching, clueless heroes of the songs. Nevertheless one or two persons in the front rows are surprised to see the girl staring intently at her watch as she puts out her arm to turn a page. She bends her head to the watch and lifts it to her ear. They wait to see if she will shake it or even wind it up. Meantime the pianist, while still giving the involuntary head-lift to the top of the page, manages to bend sideways to her companion, her eyebrows raised, lips moving. It is an urgent request for the time.
The last songs are also some of the longest. There is a moment when a man, after scouring the streets, climbs to the top of the highest tower in the city the better to get a bird’s-eye view of the place – its parks, squares and mansions. It is not town-planning that interests him. He is simply trying to spot the Woman amongst the crowd below before it gets too dark to see anything at all. But the singer himself has time to flash one look behind him. He is not so thick after all. Some instinct tells him that the two women there are no longer accompanists. They are accomplices. The girl seems ready as usual to turn over a page. But the woman grips the back of the music-book firmly between finger and thumb, closes it up, and with a confident hand smooths down the front cover – an almost consoling movement, as if explaining a final farewell. Now she leans back more comfortably in her seat – at the same time patting down her hair at the back. Having made herself presentable, as it were, she stands up and stretches both arms above her head, at the same time flexing her fingers. So tall she seems now – away from the piano – like a giantess released from a black box. But now she remembers the main business and begins to rummage about in some hidden pouch at her waist or rather from a long, black-beaded bag swinging from one side of her sash. From this she draws out a strong brown paper bag. She returns to the piano and hands this to her companion who dips her thin fingers inside and draws out several bright red objects which could be large sweets or even polished beads except for the fact that they shine and swing in empty space under her hand.
Only the front rows see it is a loop of cherries. The girl doesn’t eat them at once but hands the bag back to the other woman who puts her whole fist inside and comes out with a handful which she eats more greedily, more deliberately than the girl – throwing her head back and biting the cherries from their stalks like some tropical bird nipping off fruit with its strong beak. These gestures, under the bright platform lights, make for something of a centre-stage performance. A few more cherries and more head-flinging has brought a strand or two of the carefully-pinned hair down onto her shoulders. This gives her the air of a versatile actress in a new rôle – one which enables her to make wild, carefree gestures in place of the careful, rhythmical ones of some former part. She is even careless of the cherry-stones which drop from mouth to hand, from hand to beaded slipper. And now she goes back to her piano-stool again. But not to play. The singer himself has given up all hope of this. Now he is wandering all alone in an ancient city, wavering a little on the cobbled pavements like a drunk man. Cautiously, fearfully he hits his top notes, as cautiously, fearfully he raps on doors and windows in his search. Behind him and in front he senses chaos and confusion. For all he knows there may be cherry-trees between himself and the piano, strong trunks and blossoming branches twisting about the great organ pipes at the back of the platform, branches and blossoms between the rows of rigid seats, or amongst the statuary down the side-aisles of the building where dumb, marble women hold up flaming torches and musical instruments. He sees worse things to come. Far in the future he visualizes twigs, branches and blossoms spreading across court-rooms, conference halls and public platforms, around executives’ desk-chairs and judges’ seats, up pulpits and rostrums. Even the sea-captains who took him here and there around the world on a fruitless quest may be due for a change. And there are fruit-trees planted around the Holy See as well as the public swimming-pool.
The woman on the piano-stool turns sideways to the audience, leans forward meditatively chewing, her heavy arms akimbo, and exchanges friendly, expressive stares with a few women in the front seats. She seems to sense some need, if not an actual appeal. As if rising to this she gets up, shakes out her skirt and goes forward to the edge of the platform. She squats down, giving the bag an encouraging little shake and throws a few loops of cherries into the nearest group of women below. A few hands come up to catch the loops, and there is a slight murmur of acclaim. The accompanist stares intently into the bag, finds half-a-dozen cherries for herself, eats them quickly and drops half-a-dozen stones on the bare boards of the platform. And now even the tight-lipped, listening women further back expand a little. How long – centuries long – they have endured the songs and poems, these hymns of adoration and contempt. This adoration has cost them something; at certain places – stonings and jeers – at certain times – a hand or two cut off or even a head. For once in their lives they forget to fuss about the wet cherry-stones dropping round their feet, the bitten stones along the platform’s edge.
The paper bag is empty. The woman tosses it carelessly aside and gets up slowly, shaking her head and grinning wryly at her own stiffness. She limps back to the piano where the girl is waiting. Meanwhile the singer, willing himself blind to everything around him, has managed to get through, unaided, to the end of his final song. But the great climactic piano chords that sustain his anguish have been lacking, as also are the wild trills and the long, running series of notes which convey the distance he has had to jog in his search.
The final, bitter discord which means that the search will never be ended but will go on till the end of time – this has totally disappeared. The accompanists have disappeared also. Unobtrusively as ever, but not waiting for him, they have gone out through the side door.
A tentative clapping begins to build up after the singer has left the platform. Nobody would call it wild applause and though it goes on steadily the man does not appear again. He can be glimpsed in the dim doorway, looking out. A few women who have actually got up to their feet to clap are looking through him and beyond him over his shoulder into the shadowy room behind. In spite of this the singer
doesn’t set foot over the threshold, wouldn’t for the world appear. Something tells him these women are not applauding the hardships and sorrows of the search. They are applauding their own escape.
‘Well, those two are done for, anyway,’ says a man in the audience to his girlfriend. ‘Finished! Where on earth will they get a job now? Where will they go?’
‘Very likely they’ll be off on the world-trip themselves. I’d be surprised if they don’t land up in those same mountains, or maybe somewhere far out at sea.’
‘Searching for anything?’ says the man.
‘Not at all. You mean, of course, are they, in their turn, to be running after men.’
‘Well, are they?’ her companion replies.
‘They are running,’ says the girl, ‘because they love running around the same as the men. Some have always escaped like those two. Aeons of passivity and hard labour have made the others stiff – the digging, planting, cooking and gathering, the plodding patiently behind with outsize bundles, huge pots and armfuls of babies. And at the end of the day the seat outside the sacred circle.’
‘The older one up there was certainly stiff,’ says the man. ‘But not the young one. She is rather beautiful, to my mind.’
‘Yes, she may soon stiffen inside the walls of her own house,’ the girl replies. ‘Not the huge pots and bundles for her, no doubt, but the cleaning of floors, beds and tables, the shifting of little objects inside drawers and the filling up of store cupboards. Sometimes she will even look back to that straight-backed piano seat with longing.’
The Man Who Wanted to Smell Books Page 31
