It took a matter of seconds for the violin to eclipse all conversation. A woman being heavy-handed with her fork was treated to an eye-popping stare by her companion, and put down her cutlery. The waiter stopped taking orders and leaned against the window. He stared at Aurora, open-mouthed. The very thrum of the street came to a stop. Antonio couldn’t take his eyes off Aurora. Irene silently plowed on with her half lobster.
Balancing on the wooden crate, Aurora drew a pure yet fragile sound from her instrument, like a soprano at the peak of an aria, but there was not a moment’s fear that she might fail. She allowed herself no leeway, even frowning and going back over a difficult passage where she alone could possibly have known she had gone wrong. I realized that Aurora could not cheat, that it wouldn’t have occurred to her. This deep-seated insistence on truthfulness was her trademark, her nobility, and her strength. It’s a cliché, I know, but the only image that came to me was of a princess on an orange box.
I sneaked a glance at Irene. I loathed wanting her so much, hated the violent appetite that urged me to look over at her Medusa eyes, the indolent back of her neck, her bare legs, her ass—no other word seemed more apt. For my desire was now tempered with contempt, a scheme to have her and humiliate her. If Irene had let me touch her that day, I wouldn’t so much have made love to her as taken her, avidly and vengefully, with no tenderness or feeling. Perhaps she detected this brutality in me, perhaps the evidence that I wanted her so badly drove her still further from me. I had even imagined every detail of this carnal scene and written the whole sequence in my notebook, so that I could realize it in a dream on paper and get it out of my system, but the words were so crude and violent they only increased my frustration and torment. I haven’t copied out any of that ignominious sequence in which I abased myself even more than her.
Aurora stopped playing abruptly, and everyone clapped for a long time. But she did not step off the crate. With her violin in one hand and her bow in the other, she waved and said simply,
“A poem by Fernando Pessoa. ‘Autopsychography.’
O poeta é um fingidor.
Finge tão completamente
Que chega a finger que é dor
Ador que deveras sente.
E os que lêem o que escreve,
Na dor lida sentem bem,
Não as duas que ele teve,
Mas só a que eles não têm.
E assim nas calhas de roda
Gira, a entreter a razão,
Esse comboio de corda
Que se charma coração.
The poet is a faker
Who’s so good at his act
He even fakes the pain
Of pain he feels in fact.
And those who read his words
Will feel in what he wrote
Neither of the pains he has
But just the one they don’t.
And so around its track
This thing called the heart winds,
A little clockwork train
To entertain our minds.”
There was some clapping, Aurora played a short legato and I thought she would step down and bow, but she carried on: “I recited that poem by Pessoa, it’s … one of his most famous poems, but we can never tire of hearing it because it is about lying and illusion and sincerity. I’m … now going to read you a text by … Jaime Montestrela … a major Portuguese poet who lived in Brazil during the dictatorship … an extract from one of his books … I Meet You.”
Her voice didn’t waver. She did not look Antonio in the eye once. If she looked at me it was only fleetingly, but the name Montestrela aroused Irene’s curiosity, and she whispered in my ear, “Is Montestrela that well known, then?”
Aurora plucked the strings of the violin to set a rhythm to her words.
“You have to read I Meet You as if it were an improvisation, the author … Jaime Montestrela … even indicates places where … where you have to stammer just like that so that listeners don’t know whether they’re already listening to I Meet You … It’s a text about a man or rather a young woman who thinks she’s met a man but all he did was spend some time with her and she’s hurt by this because … one morning after he’s slept at her house after they’ve made love no no no not made love those words don’t belong here at all says Jaime Montestrela we have to be accurate and describe this openly because the young woman leads him over to her bed she gently takes his clothes off then undresses herself and there she is naked offered she gets on top of him she guides him and now yes we can say the words they make love it’s still half dark but look the walls of the room are already being colored pink the sun is coming up over the city and the man wakes and looks at her she’s sleeping naked on the white sheet she’s so young her body’s so firm so taut almost a child’s body and something about her frightens him really frightens him it must because he gets out of bed that’s right he doesn’t stroke her doesn’t kiss her doesn’t even breathe in the smell of her hair no he gets up and dresses he has trouble tying his shoelaces and ridiculously he buttons his shirt too quickly and does it wrong and then he leaves he doesn’t leave a note on the table he’s never known what to say anyway he doesn’t even drink a glass of water in the kitchen no he opens the door as quietly as he can and there he is outside like a thief he closes the door without a sound he goes down the stairs on tiptoe and runs away that’s right he runs away the young woman knows this because no she was not sleeping no she stayed there motionless with her eyes closed and she heard his breathing his irritated groan about his uncooperative laces and when he was gone she walked over to the window and now she can see him running along the street and she understands yes yes yes he could have put down roots in her life like a lily on a pond who knows whether a water lily has roots or just floats on the water like Ophelia’s corpse … but there it is, that man would never have been able to melt into her no no he lets everything slip through his fingers like sand and with each betrayal his world becomes as tiny as he is … but here at this point Montestrela uses the young woman’s words he switches imperceptibly from she to I it’s a pivotal moment …”
The crate wobbled slightly but, light-footed, Aurora immediately steadied herself … Young Karamazov couldn’t take his eyes off her. He loved her of course. A guardian angel. Who was he? A childhood friend, an older brother, or younger, a faithful admirer? His inscrutable face expressed neither suffering nor resentment, barely even anxiety. He knew how tight a thread Aurora was balancing on, and yet was in no doubt it would hold fast.
“A pivotal switch from she to I yes but it is done very naturally because Montestrela is a fine workman when it comes to style a little too lyrical perhaps but you should be listening really it is the young woman talking she says what took you away from me you my prince of one luminous night you my Bohemian who wants none of eternity was it my overardent words intended to console you the inconsolable do you know that I wanted to run red through your veins like all the gold on earth do you know that I wanted to make pebbles burst into flower to reassure you to make you love me at last but I will not say anything no I will not say anything because I can feel my tears rising it’s true I am made like that all it takes is a piece of music or a poem and there they are spilling out of me it’s absolutely grotesque all this uncontrollable irrational emotion there was that poem that I read and reread twenty times I wanted to empty it of all my tears I wanted to rob it of all meaning but its intensity would not falter and yet it wasn’t even the most beautiful of poems no it was just a needle wounding my flesh so I thought never mind I shall love these tears they’re as much my strength as my weakness You are alive they cry You you whose life has only just started but but but shall I ever Lord God who does not exist shall I ever exhaust my reservoir of tears shall I stop being moved by anything but myself like old people who have not lived enough Lord so I started drawing up a list of all the things that can bring tears to my eyes until I realized it would be endless but that does not matter Montestrela still launches into this l
ist and makes a note of everything and who cares if some of it is clichéd he includes the fine dirty gray rain that falls in autumn and the little girl playing hopscotch the woman looking for traces of her youth in the mirror he includes the little boy so proud to be on his father’s shoulders and the woman weeping with rage at the gates of the factory and the dead sparrow drying out on the ground and the blue toy giraffe forgotten under the wardrobe and more and more let’s stop talking about Montestrela and I Meet You and the young woman no no I am now going to play the first movement of Sibelius’s Violin Concerto because it made me cry a lot.”
Aurora took up her violin again and launched straight into the piece. She played to perfection once again, showing just as much bravura and technique. And yet there was something about her movements that surprised me, they were expansive and supple, and I eventually realized that, unusually, she was resting the violin on her right collar bone, so that the strings were back to front. Aurora must have been transposing every move of the bow as, with her left hand very high in the air, she attacked the high notes with more resolve than ever. She finished the first movement and bravos rang out. She bowed twice, then stepped down from her Jaffa crate, put away her violin, and waved rather insistently at Karamazov. He hesitated, reluctant, but had to walk around the tables with his hat, which must never have housed a single coin in its felt existence. It was a good harvest, a lot of bills.
Irene wanted to give some money too. She rummaged through her bag, but the two young people slipped away without bringing the hat to our table. Fiddling automatically under the effect of his nerves, Antonio had strewn the tablecloth with dozens of tiny balls of bread. He didn’t say a single word for the whole rest of the meal.
DAY SEVEN
PAUL
I dreamed of Irene and Manuela that night. A muddled hallucination in which Irene was taking a poodle called Extra for a walk through Lisbon. It started to snow and she opened an umbrella with an ornate handle shaped liked a toucan’s beak. At this point Manuela appeared. She was wearing one of those Cretan dresses from the Minoan civilization, revealing firm breasts with imperious, erect nipples. She walked toward Irene, who was wearing the dog’s collar around her neck but was meowing. A volcano then erupted in the middle of the Tagus (the reds and ochres of the image in my dream mimicked Turner’s Vesuvius in Eruption). Gray ash covered the city, and I woke—in a sweat, confused by this unfathomable dream—to the sound of the telephone.
It was my brother Paul. The loan our father had taken out for the apartment on the rue Lecourbe had another eight years to run, and the bank’s insurance company was refusing to cover for a suicide, since “the suicide of the insured party constitutes grounds for exclusion in the case of real estate.” The company was asking us to reimburse the outstanding capital due “within twelve months” or to “take personal responsibility for continued monthly payments.” The letterhead was familiar: it was from the bank to which our father had devoted his entire career. The management had sent a wreath for the funeral.
Paul had taken advice: in order to avoid the repayments, we needed a doctor’s certificate stating that our father no longer “had all his mental faculties,” and was not “conscious of the consequences of his act.” But our father’s doctor was refusing to testify to this. In his view Dad was in full possession of his senses and was not of a depressive disposition. Paul had gotten angry. So you could buy a rope from the do-it-yourself store in Courtenay, tie it to a beam, climb onto a Formica stool that you brought through from the kitchen, and slip your head into a running knot, all with a perfectly balanced mind. “Not all suicides are pathological,” the doctor had kept saying. “Look at Romain Gary.” The example had not struck Paul as persuasive.
To try to understand, Paul and I had read books on the subject. They stated that hangings are the work of the melancholic, that the act itself often takes place in the morning after a sleepless night spent mulling over morbid thoughts or pondering the recent loss of a loved one. But Mom had died more than eight years earlier. It could also involve the sudden redundancy of retirement. This was sometimes an explanation, but he had retired two years ago already. He had also met Laurence, a divorcée tackling her fifties with energy and fun, whom he had introduced to us and saw more and more regularly. In the church she had stared at the coffin and kept saying, “Why, but why?” and her eyes were sad and caring, but dry.
It was a religious funeral. An initiative of Uncle Simon’s, he took care of everything. Dad was not a believer, perhaps even something of a blasphemer, but his brother believed in the cathartic value of rituals, in ceremonies, and tradition. In his sermon, the priest talked about “great sorrow” and said we must “not despair of eternal salvation for a man who has died by his own hand. By means known only to Himself, God would grant him repentance. Let us pray for Jacques, who took his own life. Praise the Lord.” No one repeated the words “Praise the lord,” as they are supposed to, but after waiting for a moment, the priest carried on as if nothing untoward had happened.
Thinking of those empty pronouncements reminded me of one of Montestrela’s tales that I had just translated:
The people of the Adjiji archipelago are convinced that God, whom they call Niaka, is very evil and that the Devil, whom they call Puku, is good. They follow the moral codes decreed by Puku’s prophets, exhorting them to renounce Niaka. When all is said and done, this does not change much.
At one point during the service Uncle Simon leaned over to us and tilted his chin toward the back of the nave. A rather chubby woman with permed blond hair and a veil was hanging back, standing beside a pillar, clutching an embroidered handkerchief. We didn’t know her: could this be “Solange”? Dad had once admitted to Simon that he had a mistress, a client from his bank branch, a “very beautiful woman” (those were his words) who was also married. Their relationship began in the safety deposit room, under neon lights, surrounded by locked drawers, a setting that made their liaison all the more unimaginable. According to Simon, she and Dad were still seeing each other even when our mother had to go into the hospital. They had broken off all contact after her death, as if, with Mom dead, it was now impossible for Dad to be unfaithful to her. It must have been Solange: she left very quickly, without saying hello to anyone.
The police inquiry had retraced what Dad did on his last day. He must have caught the 10:15 train to Courtenay and the bus to Montcardon, sitting at the back, as he always did, then walked to his little house on the rue du Mail. There he set up his incident in the barn, a cinder-block building attached to a windowless wall. But beforehand he had had lunch in the local restaurant. The owner hadn’t noticed anything unusual. Dad had the dish of the day, mushroom lasagna, drank a glass of Côtes du Rhône, and had a decaf coffee. It was this decaf that most surprised the inspector. Our father’s doctor had warned him to avoid caffeine, but what difference would it make on a day like that? Perhaps he wasn’t yet thinking about dying. Or had simply developed a taste for decaf.
Dad left no letter, nothing that explained anything. Paul and I searched through the house. Nothing. I resented him for that, I still do. I’d have been happier if he had left with a declaration of paternal love, the only one he would ever have made to us. A sort of absolution for having failed to see or notice anything. A few tender sentences we could have clung to while the coffin was being lowered into the ground. I spent many nights dreaming of that letter. It would have to start with the words “My sons, my dear sons …,” and I didn’t really give a damn about the rest. But Dad had always been the silent type, and it was a bit late now for him to change.
He must have lain down in his first-floor bedroom, the bedspread was still crumpled. He had taken out a few yellowed books—or perhaps they just hadn’t been put away. I had never known him to read those books, but I couldn’t see what to make of them. Still, I did note down the titles, as if they held some impenetrable secret: Mallarmé’s Verse and Prose, the Teubner edition of the Odyssey, Jules Verne’s Voyage to the C
enter of the Earth, and an old 1898 edition of Leon Bloy’s The Ungrateful Beggar. Its epigraph was a quote from Barbey d’Aurevilly: “The most beautiful names borne by men were the names given by their enemies.”
Dad had forgotten to close the iron gate, as well as the door to the barn. Unless he had actually left them open deliberately so that someone would notice, would think there had been a burglary. That was what happened. A neighbor found his body the same day, shortly before nightfall. The pathologist had set the time of death at about four in the afternoon.
No, the insurance would not pay, and Lecourbe would bring in a lot less than anticipated. Paul also suggested dropping the price of Montcardon, to close the deal swiftly, and to give it to an estate agent’s office in Paris. I agreed: of course, the agents in Courtenay weren’t going around telling prospective buyers that the previous owner had hanged himself in the barn, but the facts always came out in the end, and the sale had already fallen through three times.
Paul said a few more words about what an idiot our father’s doctor was and the elegance of the bank’s last gesture, and we hung up.
Paul wanted to sort everything out as quickly as possible. It was his way of running away, of hurrying through grief. Back when our mother died, he had set up house in Milan for no apparent reason. He found work in an architect’s office, pitching up for a few days every Christmas with a big panettone and some Asti Spumante. His exile lasted three years, then he came back to France. Once the inheritance had been carved up, I knew he would go away again, and that we would gradually become what we had always been to each other, although we never admitted it: strangers. I thought he would get back in touch with me when his children were born, when he had them. I hadn’t imagined for one moment that I myself might be a father.
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