Learning how to Breathe

by Neil, Linda;

  I took my violin to India, although I don’t really expect to write songs. I don’t dare to think that any music could come from my tired spirit. But then, a miracle: after the first few weeks of sleep and discovery I begin to write songs again, this time strumming the violin instead of the guitar to accompany myself. In a foreign country my lyrics are different. My voice changes too. Released from service, I feel music coming from somewhere deeper in me.

  I extend my stay in India long beyond the four months I have planned. At the end of six months, I travel to Nepal for a new visa and write songs while looking out from my balcony roof toward Mt Everest. I travel east to Darjeeling then west again to Dharamsala where I do a ten-day Buddhist retreat. The Dalai Lama is in town and holding talks just down the road. Every day, while I am silent, he speaks about compassion and forgiveness to the thousands of pilgrims who have gathered from all over the world to listen to him.

  When I emerge from the retreat I write letters of apology to my sisters. To Paul and Kym. ‘I am sorry for disturbing your lives. With my anguish. My guilt.’ I receive no replies. I suppose, logically, that everyone is getting on with their lives.

  ‘What have you got to be sorry for?’ my friends ask me in emails. I can’t really answer their question. I don’t know where my sorrow comes from, why I feel the need to be forgiven, whether I am mourning for my mother or for other things I have lost. I spend my days walking up hills and back down again. I sip tea, play my songs with other travellers in small cafés, laugh, love, cry and breathe in the Himalayan air. I email back to my friends: ‘It will take some time to understand exactly what has happened, but for the moment I feel that I have suddenly opened my eyes and the view from here is beautiful.’

  Still, I do not return home. Instead, I travel to Paris for the summer where I play violin with Arabs, sing for Jews and entertain the French in cafés and on the street. Influenced by the music halls, street musicians, accordion players and the gypsy fiddlers who frequent the Metro, I unfurl my heart and write more songs.

  ‘I am happy again’, I write to a friend. ‘Happy during this glorious summer in Paris.’

  I hope Mum is happier too. She was a never a woman who begrudged any of her children their adventures She would be pleased, I think, if she could comprehend my letters home, that I am singing and making music again, that I am walking the streets and smiling, that I am once again a woman who loves, a woman who is loved.

  Stephen writes to me during that time that he ‘read your letter out to Mum who occasionally interjected with “Oh, Paris …” or “Oh, violin eh?”, but mostly “More apple pie”, I’m afraid.’

  It takes me a whole year to return home. When I finally see Mum again in December 2005, I am not shocked by her rigid body or her twisted face. I don’t feel sad at all; I am just happy to be with her and to imagine perhaps that inside her bent frame she is serene. And I know I have been right to stay away for so long because there is no fight or sorrow left in me in regard to her. I wonder if she is where she always needed to be – in a quiet, restful place. I think of the home she left in St Lucia and all the places through which she travelled to finally arrive here, with her grandchildren, her sons and all her people around her.

  It is hard to adjust to being back, but I still prefer to be close to where Mum lives so I can visit her regularly. At the beginning of 2006 I settle back into a flat at West End just up the road from the banks of the Brisbane River where my father first saw my mother, and begin to write a book that will share with others the story of that fortuitous meeting – what came before and what came after: a book about breath, about love and learning how to live.

  A SHORT HISTORY OF MUSIC

  The Larousse Dictionary of Music, which is also useful as a short history of music, defines the vibrato as ‘an effect [ … ] whereby a singer or instrumentalist imparts a throbbing quality to a note by oscillating between it and a pitch slightly below. [The louder the note the singer sings], the more pronounced, usually, the vibrato – and the oscillation can become so wide that the hearer may be left in doubt as to just which note is being aimed for. If the technique is applied to a fairly rapid passage the result can be quite unnerving and totally unmusical (except apparently in the opera house).’

  I have always had a love-hate relationship with vibrato, just as I sometimes did with Mum. When I was a little girl the vibrato of a violin used to fill me with deep, mysterious emotion. I later discovered that my grandmother’s old recordings of violinists such as Michael Rabin were the result of recording equipment of the day that sped up the live sound. Contemporary digital remixings of these early recordings have tried to slow down the tempo of these original recordings, thereby making the pitch and vibrato sound more authentic. In old recordings, though, the vibrato seems to oscillate so fast that it sounds like a shaking, or a tremor, or someone crying; listening to it often made me want to cry. I only understood later that it was an unnatural, unrealistic sound so that the emotion it produced in me might have been unnatural or unrealistic as well. Later, I also discovered that the whole area of vibration was a contentious one and that it only came into common use in the third decade of the twentieth century.

  In his autobiography Unfinished Journey, Yehudi Menuhin, my grandmother’s favourite violinist, wrote: ‘To teach vibrato, [my teacher] would shout, “Vibrate! Vibrate!” with never a clue given as to how to do it. I longed to achieve vibrato, for what use was a violin to a little boy of Russian-Jewish background who could not bring a note to throbbing life?’ In a later documentary about his life he is pictured sitting cross-legged on a yoga mat, recalling his childhood as a young prodigy: ‘When will I be able to vibrate, I used to wonder. I couldn’t sing without a lovely sound.’

  A violin without some vibration can sound raw and flat. Sometimes when I listen to certain country and western fiddle players, the vibrato is so wide that I think an old man with no energy must be playing. Yet excessive and excessively quick vibrato can rob a musical line of all its meaning. I used to love the sound of a vibrating high note on the violin. It still moves me, and others, too, comment on how they are affected by the sound of a violin, viola or cello vibrating. But I do not find singers who produce vibrato so appealing. In fact, except for Maria Callas’s voice, especially in recordings after her heart was broken when the wide, shaking vibrato seemed to suggest someone hanging on with all their power not just to their career but to life itself, I have always found it unattractive. I do not like vocalists warbling or swooping either. Yet I love it when a violin swoops and wavers and vibrates; such sounds sometimes seem unearthly to me.

  Mum told me once that the reason she loved the violin was that it produced the sound closest to the human voice. Yet I have never found the sound similar at all; the violin sound has always seemed more abstract, more free, and at the same time, considerably more intense and moving. This may be because I prefer a simple folk song sung in a natural, unproduced voice to the drama and penetration achieved by a fully trained vocalist. On the other hand, I love the violin playing all kinds of dramatic and intense music. When I sing my simple songs, I aim for a totally pure sound, devoid of any oscillation at all. But though my mother and I may have differed widely in our taste in music, art, spirituality, medicine and lifestyle, in one singer we found what we both loved: a singer without a fussy, penetrating vibrato who could sing art songs and folk songs with the same ease and dignity; who was equally loved by the critics and the ‘ordinary people’; whose gifts were, for the most part, untrained, yet who achieved in her short life an artistry and resonance that belied her simple and unschooled beginnings.

  Like my mother, the British contralto Kathleen Ferrier left school before she turned sixteen; unlike Mum, though, who went to work in the typing pool of Queensland Railways, Kathleen began her working life as a telephone operator in Blackburn, England. She married early, to a man called Bert Wilson, and managed to win a local music competition in both the voca
l and piano sections; this encouraged her to try for a professional singing career. Though she took music lessons, as my mother did, she never attended any music academy, university or conservatorium; she had natural gifts – most notably an unusually large throat – that enabled her to develop into one of the world’s finest and best-loved singers. During the Second World War, Kathleen gave many concerts for an organisation called the Council for the Encouragement of Music and the Arts. Her greatest artistic and professional achievements, though, came after the war when she became renowned for her exquisite and moving performances of Mahler, Bach and Handel, her work with contemporary composers and conductors such as Benjamin Britten, Arthur Bliss and Malcolm Sargent, as well as her performances and recordings of British folk songs, in particular ‘Blow the Wind Southerly’. She died of breast cancer at the age of forty-one and was famously carried off from her last public performance on a stretcher.

  These days Mum sometimes goes to sleep with a recording of Kathleen Ferrier singing ‘Blow the Wind Southerly’, among other folk songs, playing on the CD player next to her bed, in a voice in which the vibrato is subtle, appropriate, beautiful and moving. Steve says it soothes her. The vibrato in these recordings seems much more than just an effect or merely a technical oscillation. Sometimes when I listen, it seems to sweep across the sonic space like a paintbrush creating a landscape in sound. And as I listen I sometimes think I can hear – and see – in the music and lyrics of this and other British folk songs, the melancholy topography of my father’s birth country and the brooding, bleak life he left behind to travel all the way to the other side of the world where the sun, as well as the bright, sunny beauty of my mother – and her high, vibrating voice – awaited him. Sometimes I imagine I hear him call to her. And though in many people’s eyes Mum would now be considered a ‘vegetable’, I imagine she might like to sing back to him, as she still sometimes does, in her distorted, broken, and vegetable-like voice.

  Blow the wind southerly, southerly, southerly

  Blow the wind south the bonnie blue sea

  Blow the wind southerly southerly, southerly

  Blow bonnie breeze and bring him to me

  Is it not sweet to hear the breeze singing

  As lightly it comes from the deep rolling sea

  But sweeter and dearer, my heart is wandering

  The welcome of my true love in safety to me

  Cathie: Today I love visiting Mum and Stephen. The house has a feeling of joy, serenity and generosity that is tangible. I have learned not to try and help Steve too much, but to work out what I can do for him – bring scotch, good red wine, and the occasional meal. He has a routine that needs to be respected. But when I see how much care Mum is living with, I realise this is what real love is – it is this giving of yourself. I think Steve lives a life full of value and so do all those carers in this world who are doing a similar job.

  Four times a day Stephen crouches beside my mother as she lolls in her commode wheelchair in the bathroom at Brighton and gracefully wipes the shit from her bottom. The bathroom has been especially renovated so Mum can be moved easily to the toilet from the bedroom and back again. The shower curtain in the bathroom features giant yellow sunflowers and the cupboard above the sink is made from brown wood. The walls and ceiling are white as are the soap holders and shampoo bottles, although some, presents from Marjorie Anderson, who still never forgets Mum at birthdays or Christmas, are decorated with pink and red roses.

  The work of love, muses philosopher Gillian Rose, teaches the heart what the mind knows, and the mind what the heart can understand. The house of love, I might add, is where this work lives and breathes. It is not easy to be graceful when wiping someone’s bottom. I know parents do it all the time, but babies are on the whole soft, tiny and beautiful creatures; they are not old, bruised and broken as my mother is these days. Stephen still looks like a movie star and so sometimes if I catch sight of him in a certain light as I walk past the bathroom, I think that someone famous and beautiful is in there with Mum, waiting with a wad of toilet paper for when her bowels finally move, as he has done every day now for the more than four years he has been caring for Mum.

  Bowel movements are a favoured topic of conversation between Steve and me these days. Bowel movements and desserts, which, despite Mum’s advanced stage of decay, are still her very favourite things.

  Steve used to like a scotch in the evening, but he doesn’t drink spirits much now, although Cathie always brings him a bottle of Johnnie Walker Black, bought duty free, whenever she returns from one of her many overseas trips. He keeps these deluxe bottles for special occasions: birthdays and Christmases. He prefers a glass of good red wine, half a glass usually, at around eight to eight-thirty pm as he eats his dinner in front of the television. He goes to bed early, around nine-fifteen pm most nights, so he can be up at five to begin again, the next day, the work, the duty, the effort of love.

  In the bookshelves in his bedroom Steve has collections of essays by eighteenth-century philosophers, works by Russian and French writers, and modernists such as Joyce and Beckett; next to his computer in the lounge room he keeps the complete series in hardback of Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past, which he bought from Sean, his best friend from school who is still his best friend twenty years on, and who now runs an online bookstore. On the plain laminated coffee table in front of the sofa he keeps the television guide from the local Bayside News, the free newspaper that lands on his lawn every Wednesday. He watches a bit of television every day in between feeding Mum, washing her, cooking for her, wheeling her to the toilet, turning her over, attending to her broken skin, as well as the wound that still regularly weeps on her hip. He sees a bit of the morning shows, the midday ABC news, some British drama, as well as the SBS nightly news. Sometimes he downloads old movies from the Internet and the last time I visited him and Mum there was a copy of a Johnny Depp movie, The Libertine, on his computer desk. What was it like? I asked him, always eager to hear his opinion on anything. So-so, he replied, determined to remain neutral, just like Dad was, and not offer an opinion on anything.

  The plant that I gave him for Christmas when he first came up to Brisbane is doing beautifully, as are the two red Christmas plants I have given him in successive years. He swims every day at the local pool in summer, travels to the heated pool in the next suburb during winter, and worries that falling customer numbers will eventually force the closure of both pools. He regularly peruses the newspaper inserts from the local supermarkets for specials on food items that Mum might particularly like – Tim Tams are a regular favourite, as are banana, carrot and orange cakes – and he is on first name terms with his neighbour Mavis, who still, maddeningly, sometimes calls him Jeff or Peter. Janice regularly sends him copies of the Times Literary Review of Books and the Times Literary Supplement as well as the Threepenny Review from America, and when I visit they are sometimes folded over on the kitchen table, available for me to take if I want to. He is renowned for his spectacularly thoughtful gift-giving at Christmas and on birthdays and for the cryptic messages he pastes onto the newspaper in which he always wraps the presents he now usually buys on eBay.

  Before he came up to Brisbane to look after Mum he worked as a petrol station attendant, during which time he was on several occasions the victim of armed hold-ups. His philosophy was always to let the thieves take what they wanted, because nothing in retail, or perhaps in the oil business itself, he concluded, was worth dying for. He has a freakish gift that he flatly refuses to share with visitors or even, no matter how much I beg, with me: he can whistle all the minor parts of Mozart symphonies, beautifully, perfectly, complete with full dynamic and tonal range. I think – though he has not confirmed this – that he can also whistle Beethoven’s late string quartets, including the elegiac Opus 132, which I imagine must sound perfectly balanced between the light and the dark, between sorrow and comedy, when whistled and not played by cello, viola and
violins. As a child he could also tell you the name, make and model number of most Japanese cars made during the past thirty years and he has told me never to buy a kombi van or Volkswagen of any description. He is also the only person I know whom I could ring, as I did recently, to identify a nagging tune in my head: ‘Is this Brahms’ Lullaby?’ I asked down the mobile after humming the melody. ‘No, that’s Schubert’s Serenade,’ he replied gently but firmly before getting back to the cricket.

  He loves cricket, playing it and watching it, and just the other day we sat together, with Mum between us, watching some of the one-day games of the controversial Tri Series between India, Australia and Sri Lanka. He still enjoys footie on the television and playing cricket in the back yard with Finn and Kel when they pop in to visit with Paul and Kym, who help Stephen in any way they can. Every month, for instance, Paul gives Steve a buzz cut with his old hand-held clippers. Other times he will drop off a pair of new sandshoes or sandals to replace Steve’s old ones. Paul lives the most so-called ‘regular’ life of all of us and now handles all of Mum’s finances, but he is able to describe Stephen’s life with understanding and admiration. To Paul, Stephen has always had his ‘priorities worked out’ and they get on as well as they did as kids. For Finn and Kel, having their ‘Uncle Stevie’ living with their ‘Grandma Joan’ in the next suburb means he is always available for a game of footie or cricket with them in the front yard, the same way Paul and Stephen played as boys with Dad.

  Stephen is especially close to Janice, with whom he shares a gift for laughter and mordant humour. When Janice visited recently, she and Stephen induced in Mum sudden, surprising fits of laughter. I am jealous when I think of them laughing along with her. I do not think I make my mother laugh, not like they can. I wish I had their gift, as my father had too, of inducing hilarity in this woman who loved them – especially, I imagine – for how they could make her smile.