But this night during the London blitz, what was it that prevented Atlan-Ferrara from closing his eyes and lifting his arms to direct Berlioz’s at once classic and romantic, cultivated and savage cadences?
It was that woman.
That singer who rose above the chorus kneeling before a cross—Sancta Maria, ora pro nobis; Sancta Magdalena, ora pro nobis—yes, kneeling like all the other women and yet imperious, majestic, distinct, separated from the chorus by a voice as black as her lidless eyes and as electric as the flaming hair curling like an ocean surf of enervating, magnetic distraction, bursting the unity of the ensemble, as above the sun-orange aureole of her hair and below the nocturnal velvet of her voice she was heard as something apart, something singular, something disturbing that endangered the equilibrium-from-chaos so carefully fashioned by Atlan-Ferrara this night when the bombs of the Luftwaffe were reducing central London to ashes.
He interrupted the rehearsal with a furious, unaccustomed gesture, pounding his right fist into his left hand. A blow so loud that it silenced everything except a passionate voice, not insolent yet insistent, a singer at center stage, standing out yet kneeling before the altar of the Sancta Maria.
Ora pro nobis, the woman’s high, crystalline voice filling the space of the stage, the singer possessed or empowered by the very gesture attempting to silence her, the conductor’s pounded fist. Tall, vibrant, mother-of-pearl skin, red hair, and dark gaze, the singer disobeyed—disobeyed him and disobeyed the composer, for Berlioz himself would not have tolerated a solitary, narcissistic voice rising above the chorus.
The furious bombardment outside imposed silence—the firebombing that since summer had kept the city in flames, a phoenix reborn again and again from its ashes—although this was neither an accident nor an act of local terrorism but aggression from without, a rain of fire that thundered hell for leather through the skies, recalling the final part of Faust; everything gave the impression that the hurricane of the skies was erupting like a rumbling earthquake, up from the entrails of the city, that the thunder was the fault of the earth not the sky …
It was the silence broken by the rain of bombs that inflamed Atlan-Ferrara, who unconsciously attributed his rage not to what was happening outside, or to its relation to what was happening inside, but to the rupture of his exquisite musical equilibrium—imposing balance on chaos—by that high and profound, isolated and proud voice “black” as velvet and “red” as fire affirming itself by rising above the women’s chorus, solitary as the presumed protagonist of a work that wasn’t hers, not because it belonged solely to Berlioz or to the director, the orchestra, the soloists, or the chorus, but because it belonged to everyone, and yet the woman’s voice, sweetly obstructive, proclaimed, “This music is mine.”
“This isn’t Puccini, and you’re not Tosca, Mam’selle Whatever-Your-Name-Is!” the maestro shouted. “Who do you think you are? Am I some cretin who can’t express himself clearly? Or are you some mental case who can’t understand me? Tonnerre de Dieu!”
The concert hall was his territory, he knew, and the success of the performance depended on the tension between the director’s energy and will and the obedience and discipline of the ensemble under his command. The woman with the electric hair and velvet voice was challenging his authority. The woman was enamored of her own voice, she caressed it, took pleasure in it, and she was conducting it herself: the woman was doing with her voice what the conductor did with the ensemble—dominating it. She defied the conductor. She was saying to him, with her insufferable arrogance, Once you’re out of this building, who are you? Who are you when you step down from the podium? And deep inside he was silently asking her, How dare you, from your place in the chorus, display your solitary voice and your beautiful face like that? Why do you show such lack of respect? Who are you?
Maestro Atlan-Ferrara closed his eyes. He was overcome by an uncontrollable desire, a natural, even savage impulse to rebuff and scorn this woman who was interrupting the perfect fusion of music and ritual so essential to Berlioz’s dramatic legend. But at the same time he was fascinated by the voice he heard. He closed his eyes, believing that he was being seduced to enter the marvelous trance spun by the music, while in truth he wanted to isolate the voice of this rebellious, unthinking woman—though he didn’t know that yet. Nor did he know if, feeling these things, what he wanted was to make the woman’s voice his, to appropriate it.
“It is forbidden to interrupt, mademoiselle!” he shouted, because he had the right to shout whenever he wanted, and to see if his thunderous voice, his voice alone, would drown out the sound of the bombing outside. “You are whistling in a church at the moment of the sacrament!”
“I thought I was contributing to the work,” she said in her ordinary voice, and he thought the way she spoke was even more beautiful than the way she sang. “As they say, variety never stands in the way of unity.”
“In your case, it does,” the maestro stormed.
“That’s your problem,” she replied.
Atlan-Ferrara checked his impulse to ask her to leave. That would be a sign of weakness, not authority. It would look like vulgar revenge, a childish tantrum, or something worse …
“Ah, love scorned …” Gabriel Atlan-Ferrara smiled and shrugged his shoulders, dropping his arms, resigned, in the midst of the laughter and applause of the orchestra, soloists, and chorus. “Can’t be helped,” he sighed.
In his dressing room, naked to the waist, toweling sweat from his neck, face, chest, and underarms, Gabriel looked at himself in the mirror and succumbed to the vanity of knowing he was young, thirty-three, one of the youngest chefs d’orchestre in the world. Briefly, he admired his aquiline profile, his black, curling mane, the infinitely sensual lips. The dark, gypsy-olive skin worthy of his Mediterranean and Central European hyphenated names. Now he will dress in a black turtleneck sweater and dark wool trousers and will throw on the Spanish cape that gives him the soignee air of a kob, a splendid antelope in prehistoric meadows that would swagger into the street wearing a silver collar like the ruff of a Spanish hidalgo …
Nevertheless, as he regarded himself with deep regard (and liking his likeness), he no longer saw his own vain image; it was being obliterated by that of the woman, a very special woman who dared plant her person in the center of the musical universe of Hector Berlioz and Gabriel Atlan-Ferrara.
It was an impossible image. Or maybe merely difficult. He admitted that. He wanted to see her again. The idea distressed him and pursued him as he strode arrogantly into the night of the German blitzkrieg over London; it wasn’t the first war, it wasn’t the first terror of the eternal combat of man-is-the-wolf of-man, but, making his way, as sirens wailed, among the people forming a queue to go down to the underground, he told himself that these bureaucrats with headcolds, bone-tired waitresses, mothers with babies, old men clutching thermoses, children dragging blankets, these Londoners with their weariness and bleary eyes and insomniac skin were unique, they belonged not to “the history of war” but to the specific actuality of this war. What was he in a city where more than fifteen hundred people could die in a single night? What was he in a London where bombed-out shops displayed signs proclaiming BUSINESS AS USUAL? What was he, leaving the sandbagged theater in Bow Street, but a pathetic figure captured amid the terror of a rain of ice from a shattered shop window, the whinnying of a horse frightened by the flames, and the red aureole that lit up the crouching city?
He walked toward his hotel on Piccadilly, the Regent’s Palace, where a soft bed was waiting, a place to forget the voices he overheard as he cut through the lines for the underground.
“Don’t waste any shillings in the gas meter.”
“Chinese all look alike, how do you tell them apart?”
“We’ll all sleep together, it’s not too bad.”
“Yes, but next to whom? Yesterday my butcher touched me.”
“Well, we English know about perversion from elementary school on.”
; “Thank God the children are in the country.”
“Don’t be too complacent. Southampton, Bristol, and Liverpool have all been bombed.”
“And in Liverpool there wasn’t any anti-aircraft defense; why, that’s dereliction of duty!”
“It’s the Jews who’re to blame for this war, as usual.”
“They’ve bombed the House of Commons, the Abbey, the Tower of London. Aren’t you surprised when you find you still have a house?”
“We know ‘ow to take it, mate, we know ’ow to take it.”
“And we know ’ow to help a buddy, more nor ever, mate.”
“More nor ever.”
“Good evening, Mr. Atlan,” said the first violin, wrapped in a sheet that had little effect against the night cold. He looked like a ghost that had escaped from the Faust oratorio.
Gabriel nodded with dignity, but at just that moment he was seized by the most un-dignified of urgencies. He needed desperately to urinate. He hailed a taxi to speed his return to the hotel. The taxi driver smiled at him amiably.
“First, gov’ner, I don’t know me way around the city anymore. Second, the streets are bang-up with broken glass, and tires don’t grow on trees. Sorry, gov’ner. It’s too risky where you want to go.”
He looked for the first alleyway among the many that weave together Brewer’s Yard and St. Martin’s Lane, trapping the odor of chips, lamb cooked in lard, and rancid eggs. The city’s breath was sour and melancholy.
He unbuttoned his fly, took out his cock, and urinated with a sigh of pleasure.
A musical laugh made him turn and stop in midstream.
She was looking at him with affection, with amusement, with attention. She was standing at the entry to the alleyway, laughing.
Then she cried, “Sancta Maria, ora pro nobis!” with the terror of someone pursued by a beast, her face beaten by the wings of nocturnal birds, her eardrums pierced by the sound of hooves racing through skies raining down blood …
She was afraid. London, with its underground stations, was undoubtedly safer than this open country.
“Then why do they send children to the country?” Gabriel asked as they careened down the road in his yellow sports car, top down despite the cold and wind.
She wasn’t complaining. She tied a silk kerchief around her head to keep her red hair from beating her face like the ominous birds in Berlioz’s opera. The maestro could say what he wanted, but, driving away from the capital and toward the sea, weren’t they inevitably getting closer to France, to the Europe occupied by Hitler?
“Remember Poe’s ‘The Purloined Letter’? The best way to hide something is to leave it out in the open. If they come after us, thinking we’ve disappeared, they would never look for us in the most obvious place.”
She didn’t have much faith in the chef d’orchestre, who was driving the little open car with the same vigor and unbridled concentration he devoted to conducting an orchestra, as if he wanted to proclaim to the four winds that he was also a practical man and not just a long-haired musician, as men like him were called in Anglo-American circles, a synonym for an almost idiotically impractical person.
She turned her attention from the speed, the roadway, her fear, to an appreciation of where she was, allowing herself to feel a plenitude that granted this round to Gabriel Atlan-Ferrara—nature endures as the city dies—and made herself focus on the gardens along the road, the woods and the smell of dead leaves, the fog dripping from the hedgerows. She was assaulted by the sensation that sap, an invincible and nurturing energy boundless as a great river with no beginning or end, was flowing without regard for the criminal madness only human beings introduce into nature.
“Do you hear the owls?”
“No, the car’s making too much noise.”
Gabriel laughed. “The sign of a good musician is to know how to listen to many things at the same time, and to pay attention to them all.”
She should listen to the owls. They were not only the night watchmen of the countryside but its scullery maids as well.
“Did you know that owls catch more mice than a good mouser?” Gabriel made this more a pronouncement than a question.
“Then why did Cleopatra bring her cats to Rome?” she asked, but not argumentatively.
She thought that it might be nice to have owls around as zealous housekeepers. But who could sleep with that constant screeching?
During the drive from London to the sea, she gave herself to the vision of a full moon so bright in the night sky that it seemed it was there to aid the German planes in their raid. The moon was no longer an excuse for romance. It was the beacon for the Luftwaffe. The war changed the times of everything, but the moon insisted on counting the passing of the hours, and they, despite everything, continued to act like time, and perhaps even the time of time, mother of hours … Without the moon, the night would have been a void. Thanks to the moon, the night was defining its monumentality.
A silver fox ran across the road, swifter than the automobile. Gabriel braked and was grateful for the darting fox and for the moonlight. A faint, whispering breeze floated across the heath of ancient Durnovaria and lightly stirred the straight, slender larches whose soft needles of brilliant green seemed to point toward the splendid moon-flooded amphitheater of Casterbridge.
He told her that the moon and the fox had conspired to halt the blind speed of the automobile and invite them—he got out, he opened the door, he offered his hand to her—to join them at the ruin in the middle of this British grassland, abandoned by Rome, abandoned by the legions of Hadrian, as were the beasts and gladiators who died forgotten in the underground cells of the Casterbridge coliseum.
“Do you hear the wind?” asked the maestro.
“Barely,” she said.
“Do you like this place?”
“It surprises me. I never imagined anything like this in England.”
“We could drive a little farther, north of Casterbridge, to Stonehenge, where there’s a big prehistoric circle more than five thousand years old, and in its center alternating pillars and obelisks of sandstone and ancient blue stones. It’s like a fortress of the beginning. Do you hear it?”
“Sorry?
“Do you hear the place?”
“No. Tell me how.”
“Do you want to be a singer, a great singer?”
She didn’t answer.
“Music is the image of the incorporeal world. Look at this Roman amphitheater. Imagine the millenary circles of Stonehenge. Music can’t reproduce them because music doesn’t copy the world. You’re hearing the perfect silence of the heath, and if you listen sharply the coliseum will act as the sound box of a place without time. Believe me, when I conduct a work like Berlioz’s Faust, I give up measuring time. The music gives me all the time I need. Calendars are superfluous.”
He looked at her with his dark eyes, savage at that hour, and was surprised that in the moonlight the eyelids of this woman listening to him became transparent.
He placed his lips on hers, and she didn’t protest, but neither did she respond.
He had rented the house—well, the cottage—before the war, when he was beginning to be asked to conduct in England. It was an opportune decision—the conductor smiled ironically—although I, well, no one could have foreseen how fast France would fall to the invaders.
It was an ordinary little house on the coast. Narrow, two stories, pitched roof, living room, dining room, kitchen downstairs, and two bedrooms and a bath upstairs. And the attic?
“I use one of the bedrooms for storage.” Gabriel smiled. “A musician collects too many things. I’m not an old man, but I have a century’s worth of stuff, piles of scores, notes, sketches, costume drawings, set maquettes, reference books, whatever …”
He looked at her, unblinking.
“You can sleep in the living room.”
She was about to shrug her shoulders. He had been blocking her view of the stairway. It was so steep that it looked more like a ladder t
han a stairway, requiring you to use hands as well as feet to climb, rung after rung—like ivy, like an animal, like a monkey.
She looked away.
“Yes, whatever you like.”
He fell silent, then said it was late, there were eggs, sausage, a coffeepot in the kitchen, maybe some stale bread and an even harder chunk of Cheddar.
“No.” She shook her head. First she wanted to see the ocean.
“It isn’t much.” The last thing in the world he would do would be to lose his pleasant smile, but it always held a hint of irony. “The coast here is flat and undramatic. The beauty of the region is inland, the part we drove through tonight. Casterbridge. The Roman amphitheater. The gentle, whispering wind. I like even the most arid parts. It pleases me to know that behind me is a whole backbone of quarries, chalk hills, and centuries of clay. All of it pushes you toward the sea, as if the force and beauty of the English landscape were sweeping you seaward, driving you from a land jealous of its somber, rainswept solitude. Look, there, across from where we’re standing. See that treeless little islet, that barren rock? Imagine when it emerged from the sea, or was separated from the land; calculate that not in thousands of years, but millions.” He pointed, his arm fully extended. “Now, because of the war, the lighthouse there is blacked out. To the Lighthouse!” Gabriel laughed. “No more Virginia Woolf.”
But she had a different impression of the winter night and of the blazing beauty of the cold but intensely green forested landscape; she was grateful for the tree-covered lanes, because they protected her from the flaming air, from death from the skies …
“The really beautiful coast is in the west,” Gabriel continued. “Cornwall, too, is land edged toward the Atlantic Ocean by fields of heather. What happens on that coast is a battle. Rock pushes against ocean, and ocean against rock. As you might suppose, the ocean ends up winning. The water is fluid, and generous in that it’s always offering form; the land is hard, and scarred, but the encounter is magnificent. Granite cliffs rise almost three hundred feet above the sea; they resist the Atlantic battering them mercilessly, but in their whole formation is the work of that incessant attack of pounding surf. There are advantages.”
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