by Paul Bailey
‘That’s Mona Randall to the left of me. She got to sing what my lovely Paddy called the “loudmouths” – Brünnhilde, Turandot, Isolde, Aida. Cancer carried her off, the poor darling, in her prime. That rock behind us, Kitty, was pure decoration. It would have crumbled to nothing if one of us had placed so much as a foot on it. We didn’t bother with verismo in those days. Virgil lingered over this photograph, my dear. In disbelief, I suspect.’
‘Did he?’
‘Oh yes. His eyes lit up at the sight of us. I wasn’t surprised. We look ridiculous without the music, if you understand me. Paddy was working as a stage-hand when I met him. He was at his happiest on Mozart and Verdi nights, but down in the dumps when it was Wagner. He considered Wagner’s music an “almighty pain in the rectum” – his words – and renamed Götterdämmerung Götterdämmorrhoids, the disrespectful beast. This is Paddy, with the bloom of youth on him.’
‘What a handsome man.’
‘Yes, my dear, he was. Handsome was and handsome did before the fool of a man walked under a bus. I had to avoid the 39 route for years. Just seeing the number at a stop distressed me. Enough, enough. Here I am as Nedda in I Pagliacci.’
‘At Covent Garden?’
‘Heavens, no. This was taken in some godforsaken barn, on tour. We trailed Cav and Pag everywhere. My triumphant appearance at the Royal Opera House was for one night only, never – alas – to be repeated. I was the management’s last, desperate choice to stand in for the famous diva who was stricken with laryngitis – seven other well-known Neddas were all Nedda-ing in different parts of the globe and I was the one Nedda who wasn’t. There was no time for a rehearsal. I was advised to linger downstage right and let the other members of the cast move me about, which they did. They sang in Italian, I in English, and somehow I survived the absurd experience. My father was in the audience, blinking back tears of pride and joy. I was described as “plucky” and “brave” and “appealing” in the papers, but no one mentioned my voice. The tour’s nearly over with, my dear, if you’re wilting.’
‘Not yet.’
‘As I say, I wasn’t invited back to Covent Garden. I went to Buenos Aires instead, courtesy of Mona Randall, who had suddenly become a big name out there. “Come and squawk with me” her telegram said. So I left my darling Paddy here and went and squawked in Argentina. Mona could demand anything and anyone she wanted, and she wanted me as Liù in Turandot and Musetta in La Bohème, two roles for which I was startlingly ill-equipped. Mona was a very forceful Mimi, my dear. But no one seemed to notice how dire I was, especially the critics. I have to confess that I actually came off-stage one night thanking God at the top of my speaking voice that Elsa Latimer was safely dead and buried in her Twickenham grave, and well out of earshot of her promising pupil. “Bit wobbly this evening, the pair of us,” Mona said afterwards, blaming the conductor for our wobbles. “The bastard must have had a train to catch or an urgent date to keep with his mistress, to judge by his tempi in the last act. I’ll strangle the shit if he does it again.” And she would have done if he had, but he didn’t. She frightened the daylight out of him, bless her.’
‘She looks very noble in this picture.’
‘And even larger than usual. This will amuse you, I hope, Kitty. She is carrying excess baggage. I am, too, in all these photos from the South American period. Money, my dear. Tons of paper money. Thousands upon thousands of pesos. I can tell you’re mystified. Let me explain. Mona’s first words to me when I arrived in Buenos Aires were: “You have to watch these buggers. Do as I do, Freda. Blackmail them. Bleed them, or they’ll bleed you.” She had sung in opera houses in Argentina and Brazil on the assumption – the perfectly rational assumption – that she would be paid for her services. The trusting Mona had given everything and received nothing, apart from a couple of bouncing cheques. She advised me to insist on cash before each performance and to laugh them to scorn when they told me the banks were closed. “To hear them speak, you would think the banks were never open,” she said. “No cash, no show – it’s that simple.” Hence the excess baggage, Kitty. Night after night, and at quite a few matinees, Mona and I would go on stage with pesos stuffed into our brassieres and panties. These were the only safe places on the premises, according to Mona, because the dressers and theatre staff were thieves to a man and a woman. Once, when I was just about to sing as Liù, I got into a panic and peed myself with fright. I could feel all those soggy pesos down below while I belted out my big aria, and it was a real effort to concentrate on the music. I had to put the notes out to dry when I came off.’
Freda Whiteside laughed and Kitty laughed with her.
‘End of tour, my dear.’ She snapped the album shut. ‘I was over there for six months. I came home with a small fortune and delusions of a happy retirement. Then Paddy collided with the bus and there were no more photographs.’
‘Thank you, Freda. Thank you for diverting me.’
‘My pleasure. I should thank you for being so patient and attentive. Have another whiskey for the road.’
‘A little one, please. Otherwise I shall be reeling.’
‘He might grow tired of being a missing person, you know. He might come to his senses and return to you.’
‘Who?’
‘Who, my dear? Who else but Virgil?’
Kitty heard herself gasp. She looked into the watery-blue eyes that were fixed on her and said, ‘He won’t come to his senses. He won’t return. He’s gone from me.’)
She folded Virgil’s letter in two and placed it between the pages of the book of Tagore’s verses Freddy had given her.
‘They were what they were,’ Constantin Florescu pronounced, pouring the dregs of the uicã into the glass. ‘And what they were was no longer acceptable.’
In the densest silence of his life, Virgil Florescu thought: this is the man I have called Tatã since childhood; this is the man who fathered me – who happily fathered me – with his beautiful young bride five years after; this is a man who has passed among ordinary men, pretending to be ordinary.
This is a man who, knowing what he had done, should have reached for the poison; should have put a gun to his temple or a knife to his heart; should have found some way to cease being a man.
‘My intellectual son appears to be lost for words.’
‘You had to get drunk to tell me.’
‘No, that isn’t true. In vino veritas, eh? No, Virgil. My tipsiness is coincidental. The secret I have shared with you is not a guilty one. I have no guilt. I have been secretive for reasons of diplomacy. For those alone.’
‘Have you told Relu?’
‘Yes, I have. I told him what I have told you. I was the model of sobriety.’
‘When?’
‘Is it important when? When he graduated from the military academy.’
‘And?’
‘And what?’
‘What did he say?’
‘He said he understood and I believed him. He is my sensible son.’
‘And Mamã?’
‘Matilda was made aware of the – the event by a not-so-chance remark, by common gossip. One of her female friends dropped a heavy hint and your mother picked it up. She was not open to reason after that.’
It was comfort of a kind for him, bleak comfort though it was, this assurance that his beloved mother, his still beloved mother, had deafened her ears to Constantin Florescu’s reasonable words. She had not been sullied. She had retreated into her own darkness, but she had not been sullied.
‘I was young. I had ideals. I was someone, Virgil, you might try to understand: I was a Romantic. Yes, the dreams I had for my country were Romantic, my clever son. Unity, liberty, purity – those were the things I and my brothers-inarms wanted for Romania. We even had our national poet Eminescu on our side.’
‘He was dead, Tatã.’
‘Not his ideas, not his ideals. They were alive. They are alive to this day.’
‘You are shouting.’
‘Am I?’ Cons
tantin Florescu spoke quietly now. ‘Forgive me.’
‘I think I can forgive you for shouting.’
Because of economy measures the room in which they had eaten countless meals – Tatã at one end of the shining oak table, Mamã at the other – was lit this evening by a single lamp. His father, slumped in the high-backed oak chair that resembled a throne – the heavy, frayed, wine-coloured velvet curtains drawn behind him – looked indeed like some tired old actor playing at being the flawed hero, the unhappy monarch worn down by treachery and intrigue. The setting seemed fit, the sparse lighting apt – except that the tragic king had begun to snore.
In this same room, one sunlit morning, he had helped his mother polish the furniture. ‘Mamã, why is it that gypsies have no church to pray in?’ he had asked and she had smiled at his unusual question.
‘You are not supposed to be curious about religion, Virgil. Religion belongs to the past. I can only answer by telling you a story I heard from my Grandmother Monica.’
Then she became annoyingly silent, he recalled, as he sat across from the snoring man who had fathered him.
‘The story, Mamã,’ he had prompted her.
‘It is silly, Virgil. You are not meant to believe it. There used to be a proverb when I was the age you are now.’
‘Seven, Mamã. Seven and three-quarters.’
‘Yes, yes. We used to say of a man who has spent all his money on food, “He has eaten his credit, like the gypsy his church.” Are you with me?’
‘You can’t eat a church.’
‘Of course you can’t. Well, I was anxious to know how and why the gypsy had eaten his church, so my grandmother gave me an explanation. A long time ago, she said, the gypsies decided to build a church of their own, which they wanted to stand for ever, until the very end of the world. They held a council to discuss the matter, but they couldn’t agree on which material to use. Someone suggested wood, but “Wood rots and does not last as long as the world” someone else put in, and another someone mentioned iron, but “Iron grows rusty and isn’t everlasting” yet another someone responded. Then someone had the idea of stone, but someone pointed out that stone breaks, so they threw out that idea too. At last they agreed on cheese, and they built their church – yes, they built their church – with cheese.’
‘Which cheese?’
‘A hard one, I expect. Anyway, no sooner was the church built than there came a terrible winter, with the snow deep on the ground. There was no food for people to eat. So all the gypsies gathered round the church and ate it – nibble, nibble; bit by bit – until it completely disappeared. And that is why the gypsies have no church to pray in, Virgil. It is a story the peasants handed down and not to be believed.’
‘No, Mamã.’
Constantin Florescu stirred, opened an eye and closed it. He farted loudly, but the noise did not waken him. He slept on, and snored.
In the London attic, Virgil Florescu remembered those sounds of bodily contentment, of an old man who had eaten and drunk his fill. An old survivor, with nothing to perturb him but the prospect of his own imminent death. His own decease, in natural circumstances. In a hospital bed, perhaps, with a nurse in attendance; or suddenly, mercifully, without his knowing of it – the quick gathering up of the good and the just.
But no. Let the man who spawned me never die. Let him live on and on, like the Russian soldier with the knapsack who thought he could escape the grave. Let him live to find life itself unendurable.
‘There’s brightness in your eyes again,’ Freda Whiteside remarked. ‘Come downstairs and have your supper with me. A mushroom omelette, my dear, and an unburnt rice pudding. I think I’ll give you my permission to go to work tomorrow.’
He arrived at her house with a bunch of snowdrops. ‘The first flowers of spring, I am told, Kitty.’
‘Yes, they are.’
‘I have been promoted from litter. I have been moved to Kensington Gardens. I am helping one of the gardeners there. I am happy.’
‘Come in.’
She closed the door behind him and said, ‘It can’t be possible, but you’re thinner. You’ve lost weight, sweetheart. I never imagined you could be thinner.’
‘I will disappear soon,’ he joked, ‘if I lose any more. There will be nothing left of me.’
(Once, caressing his cock, she said softly, ‘This doesn’t fit the rest of you. It’s so fat, Virgil. It’s plump. It doesn’t really belong.’
And then, afterwards, she would dream one night that the most substantial part of her lover had been separated from his skinny, bumpy body. There it was, complete in itself, moving inside her, slowly, steadily. She called his name and made to stroke his back, but there was no back to stroke, no hair to run her fingers through, no lips to kiss, no eyes looking into her eyes – only the near-darkness of the bedroom, the familiar shapes of a chair and wardrobe. She heard his voice, the voice from nowhere, telling his beautiful Kitty Crozier that he had sent this gift ahead of him by express delivery. He hoped she liked it. ‘Oh, I do,’ she answered the voice. ‘You know I do.’ She moaned with pleasure and the voice whispered ‘La revedere’ and said it had to be going now, all the way to a mother’s grave in Bucharest, and she would awake and see his gaunt face for the briefest instance, and sob again at the cruel loss of him.)
‘There’s about enough of you left for the time being. Enough to keep me satisfied.’
Later that evening he spoke of his affection for London – ‘My unanticipated city’ – while she prepared supper. It was even more cosmopolitan than Rome, which he had revisited during his illness, in a state of half-sleep, a slave to memory.
Every race was here, every colour, every language. His eyes and ears were constantly surprised, constantly delighted. Influenza, if that’s what it really was, had deprived him of those sights and sounds, causing him to drift back into his past, to the city of wide boulevards from which races, colours, languages were banished.
‘I think I wish to stay in London.’
‘I hope you wish to stay in London.’
‘For the rest of my life, possibly.’
‘Then we could grow old together.’
‘We could.’
‘But – just for the moment, sweetheart – let’s eat.’
He predicted, with a smile, that there would be heavy rain in the morning. ‘And snow, perhaps. And sleet. And a ferocious south wind.’
It was a Saturday afternoon in March and they were sitting in the garden, enjoying the strangely warm weather.
‘The sun is alone in the sky today, but his race against St Theodor isn’t over yet.’
‘I’m listening.’
‘It is one of our legends.’
‘I had an idea it might be.’
In this particular legend, Virgil said, God has entrusted the sun with the task of lighting up the earth. The sun enjoys the job to begin with and shines brightly on all the natural wonders below. He is, so to speak, in his element. But then, as the centuries go by, his once pleasant task becomes a burden to him, a daily torture. He finds himself ever more distressed by the wrongs and injustices and evils he is witness to, and attempts to run away. He does this twice a year. In the spring he makes for the south; in the early autumn he edges himself northwards. He is always outwitted – or has been so far – by Nicora, the saint in the north, and Theodor, the saint in the south. They know better than to let him escape.
‘He’s been joined by a cloud. That means the witches are still at work.’
‘Does it?’
‘Oh yes, Kitty. Yes, it does. There are nine of them in the sun’s carriage, which is driven by nine horses. They use their witchcraft to produce snow and rain and thunderstorms – a thunderstorm is their pièce de résistance – to hinder St Theodor’s pursuit of them. These witches are old women. What is your word? Hags. Yes, they are hags. Like Dochia, our March witch, who sheds her sheepskin coats at the first glimpse of sunlight and freezes to death just before the arrival of spring.’
(She would remember how talkative he was that Saturday. The frequent glint of his Communist tooth offered her evidence enough that he felt relaxed and contented. He was in a communicative mood, wanting to share with her the unwritten literature – ‘An oxymoron, yes?’ – of his forebears. It pleased him, he said, to realise that the preposterous stories his mother had told him long ago in a voice which was not entirely serious were still lodged somewhere in his mind.
She had to interrupt him once, to ask for a translation. He was in the middle of a story about a peasant who opens his door one morning to confront a stark, wintry landscape. The poor man, blinded by the intense whiteness, is convinced that the world has ended. The earth and sky seem to be one, and there is no sound. He listens, in the hope of hearing a crow or magpie, but the terrifying silence persists. In his fear he mutters ‘a venit vremea de apoi’ over and over again. The prophecy in the old legend has been fulfilled, and yes, it is true, a venit vremea de apoi.
‘What does that mean?’
‘It is one of our sayings, Kitty. It means “The time of afterwards has come”. We use it on days when the birds have disappeared, when the trees have no leaves, when the immediate world looks deserted. We would not use it today. Not with the sun beaming down on us.’)
In bed that night, before they made love, she told him how lucky she was to have counted ten glimpses of stainless steel. He smiled and said, ‘Here is an eleventh for you.’
