Electrico W (11 page)

She slipped a program into my pocket with a conspiratorial expression and narrowed her eyes mischievously. She knelt before us, crucifying the fabric of her dress with all the aplomb of a little countess in a silk gown playing in a dusty alleyway.

“Are you comfortable here? I won’t be far away, and I’ll be watching you the whole time.”

She snatched Antonio’s hand and opened it like a rose.

“But … where’s the bird? Did you frighten it? Did it fly away?”

And before Antonio could reply, she was kissing him on the lips and running off toward the wings. After a moment of stupefaction, he looked rather bemused and turned toward me. In the lamplight, his black eyes had gone the harsh green of a hornbeam leaf.

“That girl is …”

“Yes, isn’t she.”

I was smiling, amused by the helplessness on Antonio’s face. I was amazed to feel no jealousy at all. Aurora was very pretty, beautiful even, but I wasn’t attracted to her. I’m not attracted to women who are too beautiful, because they wear their refusal to seduce like a badge, because a cold hostility seeps out of them, helping them avoid being pestered too often.

And yet Aurora was not a sensual desert. She was well aware of her charms, but tried to please with daring and gentleness. She was sincere and naive, like a girl who
doesn’t know she has a woman’s face and who hasn’t yet learned to see herself in men’s expressions. To crown it all she had a natural candor that forgave everything else. I would never have dared envy Antonio the tenderness she showed him, because she held the secret to ultimate propriety, she knew how to be desirable to him alone.

The hall was filling up and I opened the simple program printed on a lightweight card. The ensemble was called Quatuor Papageno, they were going to play some Purcell, some Dubois, and some Moulinié. I pointed out a line in the program to Antonio.

“Look, that’s where your Aurora’s going.”

Antonio snatched it from my hand. Among the musicians was Aurora Oliveira, tenor viola. Antonio read and reread those few words, shook his head, and turned to me: “Have you ever heard of a tenor viola?”

“No. Do you think it’s like a viola da gamba?”

“I …”

Antonio bit his lower lip as if to repress a laugh.

The bell, darkness, one last creak of the seats. As the hubbub died, the curtain rose. A narrow beam of moonlight came through the glass roof. It caressed the smooth face of a young woman standing onstage. Once again I failed to recognize Aurora. I was disarmed to discover how pure her features were, how perfect the oval of her face. Her cheeks glowed with a touch of pink, her lips
with a hint of vermilion. Behind her, in the half light, the silhouettes of three musicians were just visible.

Aurora stepped forward, hesitantly at first, like a child about to give a little speech, but her voice proved surprisingly assured: “Moulinié’s Fantasy for Four Violas.”

She then went and sat in the middle of the quartet. She braced her instrument against her chin, the musicians tuned their instruments one last time, and the concert began.

Antonio never took his eyes off Aurora. I closed mine, to be alone with the music, or perhaps just alone.

I was six years old when I was taken to a concert for the first time. I can remember the rough feel of the worn crimson velvet of the seats, how uncomfortable they were, how my tie squeezed too tightly around my neck. But not the music. It must have been something by Mozart. A child’s first concert is always Mozart. I was probably treated to the inevitable: “At your age, little Wolfgang had composed his first symphony,” which can convince the most robust that their life is already a waste. I don’t remember it.

I have few childhood memories. In the most detailed one, I must be about four. I’m going into a very white villa, I’m wearing shorts that are too big for me, held up by a leather belt that isn’t mine. An old woman with dyed black hair hands me a glass of orangeade, but it manages to be both too sugary and too bitter, I pour it over the floor and scream and cry. The woman slaps me, my mother
intervenes, defending me. We leave, in a hurry, running over the noisy gray gravel.

That woman doesn’t exist, that scene never took place, my mother told me so a hundred times. Even so, this false memory grows more real every year. I know the color of the sky, I can feel the moisture in the hot air, I can still hear the slap of that dry, lined hand on my cheek. Oddly, there is a word associated with this experience I never had, the word “beaver,” which meant nothing to me for a long time. To this day I don’t know whether that beaver is masking or perhaps belongs to a buried slice of real memories. One day much later, I learned that it was a rodent with large yellow teeth and a strange flat tail. Later still, I knew it was sometimes used to mean a woman’s vulva.

I also remember one afternoon in June. June 15 to be precise, because if was my ninth birthday. My great aunt had died a few days earlier. Aunt Odile. I was walking along the sunny street, the rue Lecourbe, where I lived with my parents in a small apartment at number 19, and thinking about Aunt Odile who always smelled of violets, a rather stout, red-faced woman I would never see again. An idea struck me with terrifying force, petrifying me there on the sidewalk with my satchel in my hand: Aunt Odile belonged in the past. I was only nine and yet I had a past, and I existed now because I was aware of it. I went home, devastated by the discovery. I stayed
awake all night on June 15, my eyes bulging in the dark. I tried to remember the scene, to rewind back to my summer vacation by the sea, to my last birthday present, but my mind was so abuzz that, in my terror and confusion, nothing came back completely. So in the morning I made a decision never to forget anything again, ever, in order to stay alive.

That is how I was born a second time when I was nine. Before that date of June 15 nothing feels real to me at all. In my own puerile way, I had lived each perishable moment in the present, or rather on the slope of the present that is already sliding toward the future.

I opened my eyes. A smile hovered on Antonio’s lips as he watched Aurora play. I realized how much I could loathe this man whose memory was anchored so far out and so deeply, who had been given the gift of existing so early on. If women were drawn to him, then it was because of this past that carried him, making him both lighter and more weighty, a force that told them there was an invisible secret in him, a mysterious “before” that would never be accessible to them.

AURORA JOINED
us on the terrace shortly after the concert ended. It was a hot, humid, almost suffocating night, and in the darkness the jungle inside the hothouse
seemed to go on forever. Hundreds of sparrows perching up in the palm trees cheeped busily, barely disturbed by the electric lighting.

Aurora had showered, the ends of her damp hair clung to her temples, her forehead was still moist from the steam. A feral child in evening dress. Antonio handed her a handkerchief and she ran it over her face.

“Did you see?” she laughed happily. “Three encores …”

She was about to return the handkerchief, but two pale red initials embroidered on it stopped her short. She turned it over in her hand, intrigued. An I and an S.

“I.S.? Like International Socialist? Intelligence Service? Are you an English spy, Antonio? Or is it … Irresponsible Savage?”

Antonio took the square of cloth from Aurora’s hand without a word.

I.S. Irene Simon. It was Irene’s. It was even that same handkerchief, I’m sure of it, that she had waved with a pretense of emotion from the window of a Paris—Rome train one autumn morning. The train was still stationary, she had lowered the window and waggled the piece of white cotton mockingly to point out how ridiculous I was to stay there on the platform. Then she sat down, opposite a young student who was already showing an interest in her, and she pretended to be immersed in some women’s magazine.

Her face had disappeared behind a stranger’s profile. All that was left in view for me was a fold in the fabric of
her jacket, the tips of her gloves, and the colorful carousel of pages as she leafed lazily through them. With a labored creak, the doors closed, the train swayed, and I stood there stupidly watching it move away. The scene tore open like an old bedsheet, I was left empty of all feeling except for my longing for this woman, who was suddenly as unreachable as the distant glitter of those train cars following their tracks on the horizon.

When I remember that handkerchief dancing in the air and that actor’s smile you gave to everyone, I realize how much the gesture was calculated to make fun of me and my hangdog eyes. The young man watching you who must eventually have struck up a conversation with you, the ticket collector who helped you carry your cases on board, and even the surly boy in the station buffet, they must all have been privately laughing at me, they had all worked out that you clearly didn’t love me.

And yet there were nights when you decided to sleep by my side. I think I amused you just enough for you to want to stay. I spent hours in sleepless torment, inhaling the smell of your body, swamped by your sharp perfume, choked by your heat and coldness like a gnat in a spider’s cocoon. I listened to you breathing and couldn’t get to sleep, frantic with desire for you. You said you hated that bed where I had slept with other women, I should have burned the sheets, moved house, and you complained when I looked at other women even though you refused to give yourself to me.

Antonio folded the handkerchief and put it in his pocket.

A ripple ran through the crowd and the loudspeakers crackled, started a hum of interference that was quickly stifled. An English blues song came from nowhere, something like Paul Armstrong’s “I’m the Flirt of Jesus,” and a dozen or so teenagers started dancing on the paved terrace.

Aurora slipped between Antonio and me, and took us by the arm.

“Come on, come and dance … it’s such a warm evening …”

But Antonio took a step back, intimidated, and she pirouetted in front of him. She jigged like a little girl, then began a slow sway with her hips. In the blue shadows above her, with his pair of glasses grafted to a branch, Monstro leaned forward to watch.

Every move Aurora made opened a slit in her dress, her leg was revealed up to the top of her thigh, and Antonio stared irresistibly at her dark skin exposed for a moment and almost immediately hidden. Aurora danced like the jubilant waters of a spring. She was alive, carnal, sensuality itself.

Disconcerted, Antonio stepped backward, apparently wanting to melt into the crowd.

Aurora was dancing, alone, a few paces from him but not with him. She smiled at everyone and no one, and he felt a rush of bitterness, an icy wind that made him back
away. The whole world toppled and Antonio understood. She was offering herself to anyone who watched her and wanted her. She didn’t belong to him, and he was just realizing that he could lose her at any moment.

Antonio turned to me. He affected indifference, but his unspoken fear had suddenly aged him.

“Do you want to go back to the hotel, Vincent?”

“Didn’t you want to dance?”

He shook his head and I remembered
that
night, in Verona, the night when Irene was drunk.

She too danced, stumbling, abandoned, laughing a drunken laugh, flaunting herself on that dance floor, her dress riding up, revealing her tanned thighs, attracting stares, fanning flames. Two men behind me were laughing and talking loudly, one of them used the word
puttana
, whore. I didn’t have the courage to hit him, neither did I find the strength to leave, to tear myself away from that spectacle that was nothing but treachery, betrayal. I was drained of all energy, and I stood there, crushed by powerless anger, and watched Irene dance. Of course I could have gotten up, taken her hand, and dragged her off the dance floor, but she would have pushed me away, driven me off, slinging sarcastic comments at me. That night I should have turned my rage to contempt, my defeat to derision, my blindness to strength. I should have left that woman who didn’t want to be mine.

Antonio was now also having his doubts that Aurora
had ever wanted to be his, he was finally realizing there was too little in life to connect them, that she would leave one day, was already moving away now, he would suffer, and was suffering already.

Perhaps a man would come and take Aurora by the waist, twirl her around and pull her to him, making her laugh in his arms. Their bodies would touch, their faces would be so close he would have to look away. It would feel as if the other man were possessing her right there in front of him, as if she were abandoning herself to pleasure. This other man would lead her away, taking her arm, and she would hold his hand. She wouldn’t even acknowledge Antonio, poor idiotic Antonio, she would have forgotten him already, and he would feel dirtied and then, over time, just dirty. He would want to be left alone to imagine those endlessly repeated moves of fingers and mouths over bodies.

The blues song had finished and the music continued with a slower jazz rhythm, perhaps a Negro spiritual. Possibly Neil Oven’s “God Is Sitting on My Knee”? Now that’s something Harry would have known.