‘But why on Opus Zero?’ Merrill pressed. ‘Let’s switch the première to the week after.’
‘Paul, you’re missing the point. Let me fill you in. Sometime yesterday Madame Gioconda paid a private call on LeGrande. Something she told him persuaded him that it would be absolutely wonderful for her to have a whole hour to herself on one of the feature music programmes, singing a few old-fashioned songs from the old-fashioned shows, with a full-scale ultrasonic backing. Eager to give her a completely free hand he even asked her which of the regular programmes she’d like. Well, as the last show she appeared on ten years ago was cancelled to make way for Ray Alto’s Total Symphony you can guess which one she picked.’
Merrill nodded. ‘It all fits together. We’re broadcasting from the concert studio. A single ultrasonic symphony, no station breaks, not even a commentary. Your first world première in three years. There’ll be a big invited audience. White tie, something like the old days. Revenge is sweet.’ He shook his head sadly. ‘Hell, all that work.’
Alto snapped: ‘Don’t worry, it won’t be wasted. Why should we pay the bill for LeGrande? This symphony is the one piece of serious music I’ve written since I joined V.C. and it isn’t going to be ruined.’ He went over to Mangon, sat down next to him. ‘This afternoon I went down to the rehearsal studios. They’d found an ancient sonic grand somewhere and one of the old-timers was accompanying her. Mangon, it’s ten years since she sang last. If she’d practised for two or three hours a day she might have preserved her voice, but you sweep her radio station, you know she hasn’t sung a note. She’s an old woman now. What time alone hasn’t done to her, cocaine and self-pity have.’ He paused, watching Mangon searchingly. ‘I hate to say it, Mangon, but it sounded like a cat being strangled.’
You lie, Mangon thought icily. You are simply so ignorant, your taste in music is so debased, that you are unable to recognize real genius when you see it. He looked at Alto with contempt, sorry for the man, with his absurd silent symphonies. He felt like shouting: I know what silence is! The voice of the Gioconda is a stream of gold, molten and pure, she will find it again as I found mine. However, something about Alto’s manner warned him to wait.
He said: ‘I understand.’ Then: ‘What do you want me to do?’
Alto patted him on the shoulder. ‘Good boy. Believe me, you’ll be helping her in the long run. What I propose will save all of us from looking foolish. We’ve got to stand up to LeGrande, even if it means a one-way ticket out of V.C. Okay, Paul?’ Merrill nodded firmly and he went on: ‘Orchestra will continue as scheduled. According to the programme Madame Gioconda will be singing to an accompaniment by Opus Zero, but that means nothing and there’ll be no connection at any point. In fact she won’t turn up until the night itself. She’ll stand well down-stage on a special platform, and the only microphone will be an aerial about twenty feet diagonally above her. It will be live – but her voice will never reach it. Because you, Mangon, will be in the cue-box directly in front of her, with the most powerful sonovac we can lay our hands on. As soon as she opens her mouth you’ll let her have it. She’ll be at least ten feet away from you so she’ll hear herself and won’t suspect what is happening.’
‘What about the audience?’ Merrill asked.
‘They’ll be listening to my symphony, enjoying a neurophonic experience of sufficient beauty and power, I hope, to distract them from the sight of a blowzy prima donna gesturing to herself in a cocaine fog. They’ll probably think she’s conducting. Remember, they may be expecting her to sing but how many people still know what the word really means? Most of them will assume it’s ultrasonic.’
‘And LeGrande?’
‘He’ll be in Bermuda. Business conference.’
FIVE
Madame Gioconda was sitting before her dressing-table mirror, painting on a face like a Hallowe’en mask. Beside her the gramophone played scratchy sonic selections from Traviata. The stage was still a disorganized jumble, but there was now an air of purpose about it.
Making his way through the flats, Mangon walked up to her quietly and kissed her bare shoulder. She stood up with a flourish, an enormous monument of a woman in a magnificent black silk dress sparkling with thousands of sequins.
‘Thank you, Mangon,’ she sang out when he complimented her. She swirled off to a hat-box on the bed, pulled out a huge peacock feather and stabbed it into her hair.
Mangon had come round at six, several hours before usual; over the past two days he had felt increasingly uneasy. He was convinced that Alto was in error, and yet logic was firmly on his side. Could Madame Gioconda’s voice have preserved itself? Her spoken voice, unless she was being particularly sweet, was harsh and uneven, recently even more so. He assumed that with only a week to her performance nervousness was making her irritable.
Again she was going out, as she had done almost every night. With whom, she never explained; probably to the theatre restaurants, to renew contacts with agents and managers. He would have liked to go with her, but he felt out of place on this plane of Madame Gioconda’s existence.
‘Mangon, I won’t be back until very late,’ she warned him. ‘You look rather tired and pasty. You’d better go home and get some sleep.’
Mangon noticed he was still wearing his yellow peaked cap. Unconsciously he must already have known he would not be spending the night there.
‘Do you want to go to the stockade tomorrow?’ he asked.
‘Hmmmh . . . I don’t think so. It gives me rather a headache. Let’s leave it for a day or two.’
She turned on him with a tremendous smile, her eyes glittering with sudden affection.
‘Goodbye, Mangon, it’s been wonderful to see you.’ She bent down and pressed her cheek maternally to his, engulfing him in a heady wave of powder and perfume. In an instant all his doubts and worries evaporated, he looked forward to seeing her the next day, certain that they would spend the future together.
For half an hour after she had gone he wandered around the deserted sound stage, going through his memories. Then he made his way out to the alley and drove back to the stockade.
As the day of Madame Gioconda’s performance drew closer Mangon’s anxieties mounted. Twice he had been down to the concert studio at Video City, had rehearsed with Alto his entry beneath the stage to the cue-box, a small compartment off the corridor used by the electronics engineers. They had checked the power points, borrowed a sonovac from the services section – a heavy duty model used for shielding VIPs and commentators at airports – and mounted its nozzle in the cue-hood.
Alto stood on the platform erected for Madame Gioconda, shouted at the top of his voice at Merrill sitting in the third row of the stalls.
‘Hear anything?’ he called afterwards.
Merrill shook his head. ‘Nothing, no vibration at all.’
Down below Mangon flicked the release toggle, vented a long-drawn-out ‘Fiivvveeee! . . . Foouuurrr! . . . Thrreeeee! . . . Twooooo! . . . Onnneeee . . . !’
‘Good enough,’ Alto decided. Chicago-style, they hid the sonovac in a triple-bass case, stored it in Alto’s office.
‘Do you want to hear her sing, Mangon?’ Alto asked. ‘She should be rehearsing now.’
Mangon hesitated, then declined.
‘It’s tragic that she’s unable to realize the truth herself,’ Alto commented. ‘Her mind must be fixed fifteen or twenty years in the past, when she sang her greatest roles at La Scala. That’s the voice she hears, the voice she’ll probably always hear.’
Mangon pondered this. Once he tried to ask Madame Gioconda how her practice sessions were going, but she was moving into a different zone and answered with some grandiose remark. He was seeing less and less of her, whenever he visited the station she was either about to go out or else tired and eager to be rid of him. Their trips to the stockade had ceased. All this he accepted as inevitable; after the performance, he assured himself, after her triumph, she would come back to him.
He noticed, however,
that he was beginning to stutter.
On the final afternoon, a few hours before the performance that evening, Mangon drove down to F Street for what was to be the last time. He had not seen Madame Gioconda the previous day and he wanted to be with her and give her any encouragement she needed.
As he turned into the alley he was surprised to see two large removal vans parked outside the station entrance. Four or five men were carrying out pieces of furniture and the great scenic flats from the sound stage.
Mangon ran over to them. One of the vans was full; he recognized all Madame Gioconda’s possessions – the rococo wardrobe and dressing table, the couch, the huge Desdemona bed, up-ended and wrapped in corrugated paper – as he looked at it he felt that a section of himself had been torn from him and rammed away callously. In the bright daylight the peeling threadbare flats had lost all illusion of reality; with them Mangon’s whole relationship with Madame Gioconda seemed to have been dismantled.
The last of the workmen came out with a gold cushion under his arm, tossed it into the second van. The foreman sealed the doors and waved on the driver.
‘W . . . wh . . . where are you going?’ Mangon asked him urgently.
The foreman looked him up and down. ‘You’re the sweeper, are you?’ He jerked a thumb towards the station. ‘The old girl said there was a message for you in there. Couldn’t see one myself.’
Mangon left him and ran into the foyer and up the stairway towards Studio 2. The removers had torn down the blinds and a grey light was flooding into the dusty auditorium. Without the flats the stage looked exposed and derelict.
He raced down the aisle, wondering why Madame Gioconda had decided to leave without telling him.
The stage had been stripped. The music stands had been kicked over, the stove lay on its side with two or three old pans around it, underfoot there was a miscellaneous litter of paper, ash and empty vials.
Mangon searched around for the message, probably pinned to one of the partitions.
Then he heard it screaming at him from the walls, violent and concise.
‘GO AWAY YOU UGLY CHILD! NEVER TRY TO SEE ME AGAIN!’
He shrank back, involuntarily tried to shout as the walls seemed to fall in on him, but his throat had frozen.
As he entered the corridor below the stage shortly before eight-twenty, Mangon could hear the sounds of the audience arriving and making their way to their seats. The studio was almost full, a hubbub of well-heeled chatter. Lights flashed on and off in the corridor, and oblique atmospheric shifts cut through the air as the players on the stage tuned their instruments.
Mangon slid past the technicians manning the neurophonic rigs which supplied the orchestra, trying to make the enormous triple-bass case as inconspicuous as possible. They were all busy checking the relays and circuits, and he reached the cue-box and slipped through the door unnoticed.
The box was almost in darkness, a few rays of coloured light filtering through the pink and white petals of the chrysanthemums stacked over the hood. He bolted the door, then opened the case, lifted out the sonovac and clipped the snout into the canister. Leaning forward, with his hands he pushed a small aperture among the flowers.
Directly in front of him he could see a velvet-lined platform, equipped with a white metal rail to the centre of which a large floral ribbon had been tied. Beyond was the orchestra, disposed in a semicircle, each of the twenty members sitting at a small box-like desk on which rested his instrument, tone generator and cathode tube. They were all present, and the light reflected from the ray screens threw a vivid phosphorescent glow on to the silver wall behind them.
Mangon propped the nozzle of the sonovac into the aperture, bent down, plugged in the lead and switched on.
Just before eight-twenty-five someone stepped across the platform and paused in front of the cue-hood. Mangon crouched back, watching the patent leather shoes and black trousers move near the nozzle.
‘Mangon!’ he heard Alto snap. He craned forward, saw Alto eyeing him. Mangon waved to him and Alto nodded slowly, at the same time smiling to someone in the audience, then turned on his heel and took his place in the orchestra.
At eight-thirty a sequence of red and green lights signalled the start of the programme. The audience quietened, waiting while an announcer in an off-stage booth introduced the programme.
A compère appeared on stage, standing behind the cue-hood, and addressed the audience. Mangon sat quietly on the small wooden seat fastened to the wall, staring blankly at the canister of the sonovac. There was a round of applause, and a steady green light shone downwards through the flowers. The air in the cue-box began to sweeten, a cool motionless breeze eddied vertically around him as a rhythmic ultrasonic pressure wave pulsed past. It relaxed the confined dimensions of the box, with a strange mesmeric echo that held his attention. Somewhere in his mind he realized that the symphony had started, but he was too distracted to pull himself together and listen to it consciously.
Suddenly, through the gap between the flowers and the sonovac nozzle, he saw a large white mass shifting about on the platform. He slipped off the seat and peered up.
Madame Gioconda had taken her place on the platform. Seen from below she seemed enormous, a towering cataract of glistening white satin that swept down to her feet. Her arms were folded loosely in front of her, fingers flashing with blue and white stones. He could only just glimpse her face, the terrifying witch-like mask turned in profile as she waited for some off-stage signal.
Mangon mobilized himself, slid his hand down to the trigger of the sonovac. He waited, feeling the steady subliminal music of Alto’s symphony swell massively within him, its tempo accelerating. Presumably Madame Gioconda’s arranger was waiting for a climax at which to introduce her first aria.
Abruptly Madame Gioconda looked forward at the audience and took a short step to the rail. Her hands parted and opened palms upward, her head moved back, her bare shoulders swelled.
The wave front pulsing through the cue-box stopped, then soared off in a continuous unbroken crescendo. At the same time Madame Gioconda thrust her head out, her throat muscles contracted powerfully.
As the sound burst from her throat Mangon’s finger locked rigidly against the trigger guard. An instant later, before he could think, a shattering blast of sound ripped through his ears, followed by a slightly higher note that appeared to strike a hidden ridge half-way along its path, wavered slightly, then recovered and sped on, like an express train crossing lines.
Mangon listened to her numbly, hands gripping the barrel of the sonovac. The voice exploded in his brain, flooding every nexus of cells with its violence. It was grotesque, an insane parody of a classical soprano. Harmony, purity, cadence had gone. Rough and cracked, it jerked sharply from one high note to a lower, its breath intervals uncontrolled, sudden precipices of gasping silence which plunged through the volcanic torrent, dividing it into a loosely connected sequence of bravura passages.
He barely recognized what she was singing: the Toreador song from Carmen. Why she had picked this he could not imagine. Unable to reach its higher notes she fell back on the swinging rhythm of the refrain, hammering out the rolling phrases with tosses of her head. After a dozen bars her pace slackened, she slipped into an extempore humming, then broke out of this into a final climactic assault.
Appalled, Mangon watched as two or three members of the orchestra stood up and disappeared into the wings. The others had stopped playing, were switching off their instruments and conferring with each other. The audience was obviously restive; Mangon could hear individual voices in the intervals when Madame Gioconda refilled her lungs.
Behind him someone hammered on the door. Startled, Mangon nearly tripped across the sonovac. Then he bent down and wrenched the plug out of its socket. Snapping open the two catches beneath the chassis of the sonovac, he pulled off the canister to reveal the valves, amplifier and generator. He slipped his fingers carefully through the leads and coils, seized them as firmly as he
could and ripped them out with a single motion. Tearing his nails, he stripped the printed circuit off the bottom of the chassis and crushed it between his hands.
Satisfied, he dropped the sonovac to the floor, listened for a moment to the caterwauling above, which was now being drowned by the mounting vocal opposition of the audience, then unlatched the door.
Paul Merrill, his bow tie askew, burst in. He gaped blankly at Mangon, at the blood dripping from his fingers and the smashed sonovac on the floor.
He seized Mangon by the shoulders, shook him roughly. ‘Mangon, are you crazy? What are you trying to do?’
Mangon attempted to say something, but his voice had died. He pulled himself away from Merrill, pushed past into the corridor.
Merrill shouted after him. ‘Mangon, help me fix this! Where are you going?’ He got down on his knees, started trying to piece the sonovac together.
From the wings Mangon briefly watched the scene on the stage.
Madame Gioconda was still singing, her voice completely inaudible in the uproar from the auditorium. Half the audience were on their feet, shouting towards the stage and apparently remonstrating with the studio officials. All but a few members of the orchestra had left their instruments, these sitting on their desks and watching Madame Gioconda in amazement.
The programme director, Alto and one of the compères stood in front of her, banging on the rail and trying to attract her attention. But Madame Gioconda failed to notice them. Head back, eyes on the brilliant ceiling lights, hands gesturing majestically, she soared along the private causeways of sound that poured unrelentingly from her throat, a great white angel of discord on her homeward flight.
Mangon watched her sadly, then slipped away through the stage-hands pressing around him. As he left the theatre by the stage door a small crowd was gathering by the main entrance. He flicked away the blood from his fingers, then bound his handkerchief round them.
He walked down the side street to where the sound truck was parked, climbed into the cab and sat still for a few minutes looking out at the bright evening lights in the bars and shopfronts.
The Complete Stories of J. G. Ballard Page 20
