No World Concerto (6 page)

The girl dreams she’s surrounded by invisible aliens that talk to her incessantly. One of them talks about the planet and its destruction. It’s hard to accept that something which took so much time and effort to build up could disappear in an instant. One supreme instant, the voice says, in which the world blows up and vanishes from sight. The girl looks around, disbelieving. She can’t see them, but she knows the voices aren’t lying. The thought then occurs to her that perhaps this has already happened, and that the world she knows is nothing but a transitory ripple in eternity’s ocean, a ripple careening through space, perhaps a part of the expanding shock wave propelling outwards from that initial explosion. Maybe we’re only information in a microchip, or in a machine that can recreate the past and fabricate the future. Maybe we’re nothing at all, she says while smiling at the emptiness around her from which the alien voices seem to come. When the alarm sounds the next morning, she’s hungover, and can barely remember her dream or her argument with the young conductor. It’s going to be a long day, she thinks, as she opens the curtains and looks down on the city through the double-paned windows, which insulate her from the noise outside. She hears the distant muttering of her father in the living room talking on the phone. She can’t utter a single word that doesn’t set off the throbbing in her head, so she avoids him. The air conditioner has the temperature much too low and she starts shivering, although maybe her hangover’s at fault, the alcohol and drugs having screwed up her body temperature. She takes a quick shower and then goes outside to breathe in the air and feel the pleasant warmth of the sun on her skin. But it seems the sun doesn’t agree very well with hangovers, for the bright light almost cleaves her head in two, so she quickly retreats back inside. Her father’s no longer on the phone and is sitting down reading a newspaper. Do you believe aliens really exist? she asks. The screenwriter’s having a hard time with this father-daughter scene. After writing and rewriting, the dialogue is still unconvincing, so he ends up just jotting down the main idea: a scene in which they go over their flight schedules, the TV interview, and the concert in her native city. They also talk about topics of interest to the girl. As regards the aliens, her father says, if they’re not around, it’s because they don’t exist. If they existed, she muses, there’d be an organization set up to prevent us from knowing anything about them.

The girl is practicing on the piano. In its first few measures, the brilliant composer’s work flows clearly and smoothly, although a little farther on, it segues into a rough and discordant mishmash of notes. Someone told her it’s mathematically perfect, but the girl pays no attention to the score or its mathematical properties, and focuses solely on the keys. She’s performed the
No World Symphony
so often now that her fingers move without hesitation, and perhaps only a few people would notice that she’s straying from the score and encroaching on new territory. Then she stops playing the piano, goes over to the table, and spreads out the sheet music for the clown’s part in
Dress Rehearsal for Voice and Music Boxes
. She plays a cassette that reproduces the sound of the music boxes, and checks her reflection in the bathroom mirror before beginning the recitation. She notices the horrible bags under her eyes. She takes a pill from her pocket and swallows it with a sip of water. Maybe she needs two, just in case. She recites whole verses, forgets some others, while continuing to stare at herself in the mirror, perhaps looking for something she’s been purposely ignoring until now. I shouldn’t worry about anything, she sings, almost recites, putting her own words to the music.

Then she adds a deuteragonist to the scene: You shouldn’t fight with the young conductor, she says to the reflection in the mirror. And try not to worry about the voices, about your future, your father or what his real name might be, not even about extraterrestrials or your writing. Bags under your eyes, she sneers with an actress’s hammy delivery, beautiful teenage bags under your eyes. She can’t help thinking of the screenwriter at this point. Maybe it’s because he can relate to having bags under the eyes, unlike the young conductor of the orchestra. She goes back into her room and sits on her bed, trying to write while waiting for the pill to take effect. She could go in search of Cousin Dedalus, try to uncover his real story, because she doesn’t believe what she’s been told up until now. She calls her mother and asks about him, but this proves to be a mistake. Her mother doesn’t like it when people ask about her cousin, and she assures the girl they’ve completely lost track of him. Why do you want to know? she asks. The girl wants to go in search of him but she doesn’t know where to start looking. He more than likely changed his name, in which case there’s nothing more to be said. She could just make it all up, as novelists do with their characters. But she already has her
No World
. So to speak. Since all she really has is the title. Writing is such an ordeal for her. Perhaps it would be easier if her book was based on a true story.

The girl spends a few hours canceling her appointments in the neighboring country’s capital. She’s ostensibly traveling to her native city for a TV interview and to perform a concert. In reality, her trip has taken on a new significance, because she’s going in search of an image, a clue perhaps, some vestige of her lost cousin Dedalus. She signs some autographs at the airport while waiting in the VIP area. The next shot shows her alighting from a car in front of her home and asking the chauffeur to wait. We then see her walking around a spacious, luxurious apartment very few families could afford. The floor is completely empty, perhaps because the servants are on vacation. Then we see her looking through a photo album. There are pictures of the girl, her father and mother, and various other relatives and friends. She glances over the pictures one at a time, pausing at her favorite ones, the ones she links to pleasant memories: pictures of the garden of her old house; of her first attempts at playing the piano; of her father when he was younger. In a panoramic shot of a swimming pool, she’s shown next to the brilliant composer, who was only known as the talented boy back then. She reckons it was taken about ten years earlier because they’re only little kids. It’s a charming photo: both their faces are covered in chocolate, and neither is wearing a school uniform. She remembers how strange he looked without a school uniform, without his navy-blue blazer, gray pants, white shirt, and necktie. There are also pictures of her mother when she was younger. She looks happy; much different from the way she looks today. While leafing through the album, the girl recites some verses from the piece they’ve entitled
Dress Rehearsal for Voice and Music Boxes
. She plays the clown, but uses her own lyrics, the ones that tell her not to care about her father’s real name, or worry about herself; words that remind her not to fight with the young conductor, and to stop fretting about her writing. There’s one photo she particularly detests, in which she’s posing with a doll that was quite popular at the time, before she developed her aversion for dolls. All of a sudden, she finds what she was looking for: a snapshot of her cousin Dedalus, taken before he fled to the neighboring country’s capital. He’s posing on a pier she assumes is somewhere in her native city, and there’s a boat behind him whose name she can’t quite make out. He looks young in it, but the most striking thing about him is his face, it is the face of the man she keeps seeing in the neighboring country’s capital. The man she saw sitting at the bar in the dance club, and standing in front of the theater where she rehearses. She’s certain he’s her cousin, only he looks a lot older now. The girl strains to read the name of the boat behind him, but gives up because she’d need a magnifying glass. Perhaps she’s reading too much into it — that the boat betokens his intention to embark on a journey. There’s also a passport-sized photo, and another of him sitting beside the girl’s mother at some sort of family reunion. The screenwriter leaves his glasses on the desk and lights a cigarette, taking a deep drag as he fixes his gaze on the building across the street. He leans back in the chair and contemplates the unfeasibility of matching up the time it takes to show so many images with the speed at which the girl would tend to flip through the album. In any case, he should have enough time to show the most important ones. Perhaps he need only show a few. His likens his writing process to the way some painters work, marking off areas of the canvas before drawing their preliminary sketches, the figures gradually coming to life as they take on more definite features. He extinguishes his cigarette, puts his glasses back on, and turns toward the typewriter. For some reason, the girl’s convinced there are no such things as coincidences, despite being unable to understand why she keeps running into the man she presumes is her cousin. She goes out to take a hurried look into her mother’s study, ferreting frantically through her correspondence and the agendas she keeps in meticulous order, because the girl feels that the photographs are a testament of the past, reminding her of certain moments in her life, urging her to discover more. It’s possible her cousin doesn’t sign his correspondence with his own name or the pseudonym Dedalus, so she pays close attention to any letter with a sender or addressee she doesn’t recognize. She’s running out of time, so she starts focusing on specific dates. She answers a call on the landline. The chauffeur is getting nervous because they’re going to be late. Some of the letters are quite strange. One is a donation request for an ostensibly noble cause, but the girl thinks it’s probably a scam. But then she’s suddenly taken aback by the following line: “Since our genetic code reveals that all living things have a common ancestry, it might lead one to believe that life on Earth was seeded by extraterrestrial engineers.” She searches in vain for her mother’s response. She gets the impression she’s missing something crucial, but intuits she won’t find anything else pertaining to her cousin, so decides to put an end to the investigation. Before leaving the apartment, she takes out a black dress from the back of a closet. She can’t give a concert in a white T-shirt and jeans. She looks through the mail and listens to a message on the answering machine. Once again, the Principal of the Scholastic Institute wants to speak to the girl’s mother. She erases the message.

The girl is speaking to her mother on her cell phone while waiting in the airport terminal. Her mother is annoyed, not only because her daughter was late for all her appointments, but her concert performance left a lot to be desired. How do you know? asks the girl. Who do you think they call when you don’t show up on time? Who do you think they come crying to when your performance isn’t up to scratch? The girl mumbles some excuses, saying at first that she went to the apartment to get in some last-minute practice on the piano and also to fetch her dress, but then she ends up admitting her real motive for going was to satisfy her curiosity in her mother’s cousin. She can no longer hide from her the fact she’s run into him. She’s seen him twice already, she tells her mother, who doesn’t believe her in the least. But she doesn’t realize her daughter also went home to get some photographic confirmation. She asks her where and how she ended up seeing him, insisting it couldn’t be their cousin but only someone who bears a passing resemblance. Why doesn’t her mother believe her? In the following scene, she’s back in the neighboring country’s capital, and it will be obvious to the audience a few hours have passed since the girl’s conversation with her mother. It begins in the middle of another conversation about which we know none of the preliminaries. It’s around midnight, and the girl and her father are walking back to the hotel after dining at a nearby restaurant. They’re talking about her future as a writer. She pouts with annoyance, because whenever he talks about her future, she can hear all his misgivings in his voice. Perhaps it’s because he too wanted to be a writer when he was young. He no longer writes. He says there’s no point; everything’s already been said, more or less. By reading a certain number of books, one can see that every subject and style, every possible form that could ever exist has already been anticipated by someone else. Music, on the other hand, gives the performer a chance to recreate a chosen piece. According to him, there are only three reasons people write: for money, for fame, or to realize a deluded ambition to be original. So for which reason do you suppose I write? she asks her father. He shrugs his shoulders and maintains that routine expression on his face which could be interpreted to mean anything. Why can’t he believe she could write as well as the novelist he admires so much, the one who wrote about jealousy and the passage of time? The girl aspires to be ranked with the Olympians, something her father doesn’t even think her capable of dreaming about. She could try something unprecedented like writing a story without a theme. She’ll do it, one of these days, but not now. In music, someone said it took years to be able to compose without a theme, and she doesn’t feel prepared to try it in her writing. She’d like to construct a theory of atonality, but applied to literature: the dodecaphonic novel, but she doesn’t dare mention it to her father. Come to think of it, her father is always hindering her ambitions. Not by erecting obstacles, as such, but he builds roads and bridges that lead nowhere. If their conversation were taking place in the hotel, the girl would go to her room, but walking back together, she just silently endures it. If she’s managed to succeed as a concert pianist since the age of thirteen, why couldn’t she be a writer at sixteen? She wonders if her precocity is limited to music. It’s been a while since her father pronounced her name with a “ka.” The girl sticks her fingers in her ears. Things aren’t much different with her mother. She’s always had a cold and distant relationship with her. She’s like a corset, fitting her to a daily schedule, and the girl feels as uncomfortable talking to her about the future as she does with her father. Plus, her mother dismisses all literary fiction as complete nonsense. The girl thinks if her father was still writing, he’d only be doing it for the money. The screenwriter rereads the scene and wonders whether he should bore the audience with so much dialogue. Maybe he should make some cuts. He’s still in doubt after rereading it several times, and ultimately chooses to postpone his decision. Perhaps he only wrote it for the girl. Once she’s read it, he may decide to remove her from the story altogether. He needs a turning point though, something to move it in another direction. Why has everything already been said and written? he wonders. The same thought probably crossed the minds of the greatest writers, both of this century and the last, and of every century before that, all the way back to antiquity.