by Rambo, Cat
Haydn dips his hand and presses his finger to the glass. A clear, high tone fills the room.
I make room for him on the bench, and he lays his hands on the rims. A jangled chord. He frowns and tries again. “Better,” I tell him.
Haydn picks out a simple tune, one of his own composition. I blush. This is Joseph Haydn. What am I thinking, correcting him?
By now, guests have trickled into the alcove. The music draws them. I glance up into the mirror looking for Sophie, but she must be in some other room. Perhaps she’s found some shadowed niche with La Ronge. I should not blame her. Opportunities come but once, and how can I feel abandoned when I have left her for Joseph Haydn?
Haydn finishes his tune and picks out a few more notes. “Ingenious. I’ve heard street performers play the glasses in London, but this instrument makes those look like toys.” He returns to middle C. “Such a disorienting timbre. Almost celestial, this sound. It lingers like a harp strung with starlight.”
Mme. Geoffrin brings her chair close to Haydn. “Dr. Mesmer lent it to us.” I follow her eyes to a man with a tight vest and a heavy German face. Surely it cannot be the Dr. Mesmer, the famed animal magnetist, but then again, I remember where I am.
Mme. Geoffrin turns toward him. “Tell me, Dr. Mesmer, in your medical opinion, does the armonica drive its listeners insane?” She strokes her braid.
Mesmer leans forward. “My dear lady. Each discovery in this age of overheated imagination spawns a multitude of rumors. The proof or disproof can only come from experiment.”
Mme. Geoffrin widens her eyes theatrically, delighted. When she speaks, every word is warmed by her smile. “Then by your logic, we shall run our own experiment tonight. What do you think, my guests, shall we risk ourselves in the name of science?”
Voices cry out in playful assent.
“Will you play for us, Dr. Mesmer?” asks Mme. Geoffrin.
“No, what a waste. Let us hear the boy play,” says Dr. Mesmer.
Haydn relinquishes his seat.
All the emotion that hovered on Mesmer’s words descends onto me. I wet my fingers and settle my hands over the rims. Looking up into the mirror, I see all the guests from both rooms spilling into the alcove. Sophie is there. Sophie on La Ronge’s arm. My eyes jump to Haydn’s frown. Mesmer’s intense gaze. There is no safe place to look.
I close my eyes and play. And while I play, the music closes over me. I lose myself. But in the music, somehow a stray thought surfaces. Might the woman in carmine appear when I open my eyes? Amarante. My heart, for no reason, lodges in my throat.
Only as the song nears its end do I risk a glance at my audience. Haydn’s eyes are closed. Sophie’s cheeks glisten with tears. Mesmer watches me in the mirror.
But then I see a movement behind Mesmer’s head. Is it she? For a moment I think it is a trick of the doubled mirrors, that I’ve caught a glimpse of myself reflected from the other room. But reflections do not wear strange clothes. The man stands in the back of the room. His eyes are closed, and his jacket is torn. His head is bleeding.
My hands go still against the rims.
The man with my face opens his eyes. They meet mine in the mirror. It isn’t just that he looks like me. He is me. Confusion and recognition flash between us in the space of a heartbeat.
The last reverberation dies away.
The man with my face slumps to the floor.
No one sees him fall.
Haydn’s hand is on my shoulder, and Sophie’s lips brush my ear. “Rapturous, Persèe.”
Applause fills the room. My ears fill with the ocean roar of my pulse. The sensation of falling, a flash of carmine....
I lean past my mistress, past the wigs and upswept coiffures. The man is gone. No blood on the parquet floor. No proof that he ever existed.
* * *
If ever I needed sobriety, it is this night. Sophie bids me adieu at Café Procope, a stone’s throw from my drafty apartment. Even this late, the café is crowded. I slide past the women in low-cut dresses recruiting for the army.
My friends have a table in the back. Coffee cups and papers scrawled with diagrams cover its surface. Moreau and Laurent shout over one another, so far gone in their debate that they scarcely pause as I arrive. Saber smokes a cigarette.
“Durand.” Saber kicks out a chair for me. He hails the waitress to bring fresh coffee. “Welcome back to the bourgeoisie.”
I drop into the chair and bury my face in my hands. “If you were going insane, would you want to be self-aware?”
“Gibbering, drooling insane?”
“Visions of your own death. In this case, it looks as if I’ve been trampled by a carriage.”
Saber props his feet on my leg. “I suppose foreknowledge might be helpful in the event you’d like to prevent your untimely death.”
Laurent holds up a hand to Moreau as he turns to me. “Self-awareness is a fundamental construct of man. Giving it up would imply loss of self-hood, ipso facto, insanity.”
“I disagree,” says Moreau, his face flushed and his eyes slightly out of focus. “Man’s natural state is a tabla rasa, a blank slate. Giving up unwanted knowledge would bring him closer to the ideal.”
Laurent cocks his head at me. “What’s making you insane? Is it the artificiality of civil society? The corruption of the aristocracy? I bet it’s a woman.”
“No,” says Moreau. “It’s his artistic temperament. All that Sturm und Drang.”
“There was a woman,” I say, because it is only here that I remember her. It is easier to speak of her than whatever it was that happened with the armonica.
My friends push their coffee cups aside.
“She sat in the second row.” Again I see her fall. Carmine spilling across the floor. An awful connection sparks. “My God.”
“What?” Laurent jars my elbow.
My mangled self, the woman falling.... “I think I saw her death.”
The three of them fall very quiet against the noise of the café.
Saber asks, “You saw a stranger’s death? A woman you’ve never seen before?”
“Amarante.”
Laurent leans forward. “Was she noble or bourgeoisie?” Saber and Moreau elbow him. “What? The last thing he needs is to get involved with two titled women.”
I see his point. Sophie would destroy her. She would drop me. I would lose Vienna.
“I don’t know,” I answer.
“Do you have reason to think these visions are more than your imagination?” asks Saber.
I turn my cup. I feel again the pressure of Mesmer’s eyes, the thrill of meeting Haydn, the stimulation I hold at arm’s length every moment I spend with Sophie. “No.”
But then, why does her name linger like perfume? Why did I hear my own voice whisper it in my ear? I shake my head to clear it.
All three of them relax. Moreau downs the last of his coffee. Laurent squeezes my shoulder. Saber swings his legs off my lap and finishes his cigarette.
“You spend too much time on music,” says Laurent. “Come sit with us more often.”
I shake my head. “My star is rising. It will be more music and worse company for me, I’m afraid.”
Saber rises with me. “Gentlemen,” he nods to the others. He drapes an arm across my shoulders and walks me out the door.
The night is warm, and humidity makes halos around the lamps. “I’ve thought about your question,” he says.
“Oh?”
He stops and lights another cigarette. Then he returns his arm to its usual place. “The self-aware are not insane.”
I match my steps to his. “Rationalists do not believe in visions.”
The end of his cigarette glows. “True. And your experience corresponds to the typical hysteria of an overheated mind. Nevertheless, I’m escorting you home.”
“Whatever for?”
“Let’s just say I appreciate the potential of carriages.”
* * *
I rise early enough to spend the dre
gs of morning combing the streets of Paris. My plan is unformed, my steps, aimless. But my eyes roam the passers-by.
Who is she? A real woman in the crowd, a phantom, a vision?
With every turn of auburn hair, my breath catches. So many tragic faces. None of them hers. None of them wear carmine.
Her name came to me like armonica music on the wind.
I have never told Sophie, for fear she would end her patronage, but the songs I play come in snatches, in daydreams, like glimmers of gold beneath the sea. Fleeting. Uncontrolled. I have tried to capture them on paper. The songs slip through my hands. Only when I play can I remember.
I never studied the armonica. When first I laid my hands against the rims, the songs pulled me along. The songs that wander through me like zephyr-winds.
As now this woman wanders through my mind.
My rambles last too long, and I am nearly late for the evening’s engagement. A coach is waiting. I hurry upstairs to brush out my jacket and tie my hair with a black ribbon. Sophie was in a strange mood last night, and I have no wish to rile her. The last musician who did so never played this city again.
The house is deep in Old Paris, where the avenues slide into the curves of the river. I sprint up the steps.
The hostess herself greets me at the door. “Welcome, Monsieur Durand. We have a special place for you.” The woman is kind. My smile is heartfelt.
A liveried servant leads me to a dining room lit with crystal and roses. I am seated across from Sophie, who beams at me. Beside her is Franc La Ronge.
The young woman on my right turns to me with eyes like stars. “Monsieur Durand, your music transports me.” Her dress is the rose of the table flowers, the perfect hue to accent her delicate blush. Matching roses adorn her hair. The hostess’s daughter.
“The pleasure is mine.” Politeness requires me to kiss her hand.
From my left, a tap on my arm draws my attention to an older woman with a fantastic coiffure crowned with pheasant feathers. It balances her décolletage. Her accent is Prussian. “Tell me, musician, do you dance as well as you play?”
Across the table Sophie’s smile has turned brittle.
Dinner becomes performance. Under Sophie’s eye, I elude the Prussian’s overtures and redirect the young hostess’s tender admiration. Across the table, Franc La Ronge whispers in Sophie’s ear.
At last the meal is ended. The hostess claps her hands and invites everyone to the music room. She pulls me aside.
“This armonica belonged to Marie Antoinette when she was a young princess in Vienna. Monsieur La Ronge was able to procure it for us.”
I gaze at the instrument. A piece of Vienna. An instrument made for royalty. I try not to caress it.
I take my seat facing the intimate audience. The guests drift in around me. The only sound is the rustle of petticoats. I have made my mind clear and calm, but my heart remembers her name. Amarante, will I see you tonight? My heart accelerates. It is all I can do to contain it within my chest.
My hands to the rims, my foot to the treadle, I play.
From the first note, I see her. Again, she sits in the second row. Shadowed eyes, that yearning posture. Her hands clench in her lap. She looks at no one else, only me. She searches my face, hopeful, anxious. Frightened.
I play the chorus three times just to watch her. With each repetition, I grow more anxious. Whatever she seeks, it is precious. I would take her hand, but of course that is impossible. Her need calls to me, and I want with all that is in me to answer.
For the first time, I allow our eyes to meet. I allow myself to hope, to anticipate—what?
Confusion and disbelief bloom in her face. I miss a note. She crumples forward with silent sobs.
If I have an immortal soul, a piece of it dies in this moment.
Petticoats rustle. I look up to see I am losing my audience. Sophie frowns at me. My notes have wandered. I pull together a last melodic flourish and still the rims.
Looking out into the room, I search the second row in awful expectation of crumpled carmine. Instead, I see the man with my face. He wears an unbalanced smile and powder-burns on his lips.
* * *
Saber smokes and paces. “You’ve never been suicidal.”
“No.” I cross my arms and lean out the apartment window. “I dislike firearms.”
“Did you see what kind it was?”
“I didn’t see it at all.”
Saber draws deeply on his cigarette and then tosses it into the street. “I think you should stop playing the instrument.”
My head is shaking. “That’s not an option.”
Saber steps away from the window. He brings me a broadsheet. Squeezed between milliner’s advertisements and notices of land for sale is a block headline:
PHYSICIAN USES ARMONICA TO CAUSE, CURE INSANITY, WAKE THE DEAD!
The short article that follows describes Dr. Mesmer’s sojourn in Paris.
“You think I’m calling ghosts?”
“I think you need to speak with an expert. Either your mind is damaged and you need a cure, or your instrument is dangerous and you should stop playing it.”
“Dangerous? How can you say that? Vienna draws closer with every performance!”
“Let Mesmer help you! We have his address.” He thumps the paper.
“To stop playing would be madness.”
He crosses his arms. “You’ve seen the woman again, haven’t you?”
I do not answer.
“Tell me you’re not falling in love with her. She’s an apparition.”
“She comes to me for some purpose.” Heat rises in my face.
Am I in love with her? I want to see her again, even if she is an apparition, even if seeing her in pain hurts almost as not seeing her at all. Is this what love feels like?
“Why do you insist she’s real?” Saber asks.
I search for a rational explanation for him, for myself. The closest I come is a half-truth. “Since I’m not dead, I can’t be seeing ghosts of myself. They must be visions. Why would one be a vision and not the other? If I find out who she is, perhaps I can save her life.”
What I will not say even to myself is that I cannot walk away from her. The intensity of my need to find her shakes me to my foundation. “Wouldn’t you want to help if you foresaw someone’s death?”
Saber turns away. He folds the news sheet like a handkerchief and tucks it into my breast pocket. He presses it there, his hand against my heart.
* * *
I go to the river and find an artist. For fifty sous, he sketches a portrait from my description. I study his rendering of carmine dress and auburn hair. It is inexact, but it is the first step toward finding Amarante.
The marshals examine the portrait, but with so few facts, they assure me an investigation would be impossible. They direct me to the morgue.
The ornate halls of the waiting mortuary yawn into vaulted ceilings that echo with lost voices. It reminds me of an empty concert hall, alive with the memory of stirred air. Strings of bells run from the feet of corpses to the desks of attendants listening and waiting for signs of life. The further I walk, the deeper fear sinks below my skin. The only music here is the stir of bells as I pass. I find no whisper of Amarante.
Outside, I lean against the stone façade. Warm, bright daylight throws its arms around me. I breathe like a drowned man. She must be alive. There’s still time.
But time runs finite through the glass, and I must keep moving.
As I walk, I consider every option. If I hit one more dead end, I may have to resort to asking Sophie. If anyone knows every beautiful face in Paris, it is my patroness. Perhaps if I showed her the portrait, if I explained, she would trust me.
I want to believe, but I have seen how many faces Sophie wears. The strain is beginning to show around her eyes. The dream has drawn so near. She will not welcome complications.
I will try one more avenue, at least.
There is a dress shop on Rue de Ton. The
proprietor remembers every gown she made this season. Not one among them was carmine.
“Try Mon Petit Chou,” she tells me. “They specialize in exotics.”
I memorize the address and step out into the street, and it is then the music comes to me. My armonica music. This time, it is so strong and achingly bittersweet it slides like a knife between my ribs. My feet catch on cobbles. For a long moment, I fall.
The river closes over me. I’m drowning in song. The cold shock. Water fills my lungs. The song, the song. My lips move, but all I hear is music. It has never been this loud before.
Someone pulls me out.
Gasping on the cobbles, I try to drive the song from my mind. But then, it has never been mine to control. My memory twists back to Amarante’s face.
Someone tells me I should go to the hospital.
I never thought the music could be dangerous until now.
Where does it come from?
The song works its barb deeper into my heart. I feel as if I am the instrument. A lifetime, a heartbeat, and it is over.
Someone checks my pockets and finds Mesmer’s address. They lift me up into a coach.
* * *
The coach jostles. Soon the tangled streets spread out into Old Paris. When we arrive, I check the house number. It is the home of the hostess from the last concert, and the driver assures me he has made no mistake.
The front door opens, and a maid pulls me in. “They are waiting for you, Monsieur Durand.” She eyes my disarrayed clothes.
Questions stumble off my tongue, but half of them are answered at a glance.
The sitting room is full of women: the hostess, her admiring daughter, and Sophie. An armonica faces their semicircle.
I walk among them half-convinced I’ve slipped into a dream. Cold sweat beads my skin.
The hostess gives me both hands to kiss, but her eyes are worried. “I’m so glad you could come on short notice, Monsieur Durand.”
I kiss the daughter’s hand.
Sophie leans in as I brush her cheek. “Where have you been?”
