She remembers some of his sharp aphorisms: “All art is in the resistance.” “No theory without praxis, no praxis without theory.” “No objectivity without subjectivity. And vice versa. You can only know the world through yourself. But if you don’t know the world outside yourself, you will have no self.” He believed in condensation, Wolfe did; but he was right about many things, she knows that now …
She pauses at the picture window again, and sees some miniature figures of surfers gliding in and out of the waves, their
tanned torsos sprayed by white foam. Through this measure, Wolfe’s diary comes from an archaic age. What are his contortions, in comparison to these healthy, agile bodies? A lurid medieval form of self-torment, tinged with traces of religious rites, with the stigmata of irredeemable history, and the need to atone for sins not one’s own. The ambition of it, or the arrogance … Perhaps Jane is right to pour the brisk water of ridicule on the whole enterprise. And yet no, she cannot muster Jane’s light-hearted disdain. The business of art has been going on for so long, she thinks, only because it is necessary to us … As necessary, apparently, as the business of killing. She thinks of Wolfe’s sculpted face and his concave chest, and his attempt to whittle away at himself till he was nothing but a conduit for music, the inner music of the world he wanted to hear at the heart of things. Without his kind of struggle, she thinks, what are we but bodies surfing the foamy surfaces, bodies which live and die. But as she looks through the windowpane at the toylike figures below, at their straining to keep balance within their graceful glides, she thinks, perhaps even they are questing for something; for the Perfect Wave. We apparently cannot do without this, we must strain and strive … must mold ourselves and the elements we live in, our humanity and our inhumanity. Wolfe should have forgiven himself, should have found someone to forgive him. She should have put up her hand to his cheek when they said good-bye. Across the distance of time, she feels the brush of something against her mind, as of a wing … Wolfe’s mind against her own; her own angel of the past, passing across a certain kind of knowledge.
Walking along the sandy strip of beach, she notices a woman wearing a gauzy mauve scarf, and looks away instantly, as if the flimsy piece of silk had stabbed at her eyes. Mauve scarf, Kolya’s sign. His stylish signature. Then she forces herself to look at the
woman, who has stopped to examine a seashell, and to follow the delicate fall of mauve material over a billowing white shirt. It’s only a piece of silk fabric, she admonishes herself, worn by somebody else … It’s not a symbol, we do not live in a forest of symbols, or the sea of allegory. Or the empyrean of extra meanings. But it comes back to her, or at her anyway, as she stands on the white sand: the very heart of pity. She sees Kolya being lifted on the stretcher, his body supine and helpless, but still glowing with taut, graceful youth. It was the look he directed at her, as he was about to be carried out of the dingy room, that has bored itself into the center of her soul. The look, simply and eloquently, said, so you see, my sister, I have wanted love, and now I am dying. I am young and full of vigor, and I am capable of death. His face, with its smooth skin over high cheekbones, was oddly purified, almost transparent; he extended his hand toward her, and then he closed his eyes.
The pity of it. The pity. The membrane between life and death is very thin, she knows that for a fact now, and Kolya slipped through it almost unwittingly. But he took nobody else with him, she thinks, the comparison hitting her with chilling clarity. A beautiful death, Anzor said, all that time ago—it seems an epoch now—as they were lying back among comfortable pillows, in their erotic lassitude. He wanted to go toward death as toward a misty vastness, wanted vast justification to enlarge his acts; instead, he created a tangle of destroyed flesh in which all space collapses. Whereas Kolya died only for himself and through himself; not from hate, but from the lack of love.
It is so hard to traverse our trajectories the whole way, she thinks yet again, so much easier to hurtle toward oblivion. Perhaps that is the secret we cannot bear. The membrane between life and death is paper-thin and easily, oh-so-easily crossed. And also, she adds to herself, between Kolya and
Anzor, Wolfe and Anzor, Anzor and herself … Between making meaning and destroying human flesh. A hair’s breadth difference, the thinnest line, a quaver between one turn of the soul and another. And yet, the membrane mustn’t be pierced, the line mustn’t be crossed; everything depends on it. Perhaps that is the only choice, she thinks, the minute choice leading to enormous consequences.
The woman in the mauve scarf straightens out, and looks quizzically at Isabel, whose concentrated gaze she doesn’t quite understand. Isabel waves at her reassuringly, and begins to walk along the ocean’s edge.
It is upon her again, the return of meaning. She buys herself a small radio and finds she can listen to music. One afternoon, she happens upon the Mozart Requiem, which Wolfe had heard on his crucial day. It is not easily bearable, its beauty. Who was Mozart, what was he? Unless one posits a most capricious god, implanting the plasma of divinity in a scatologically inclined imp, he was one singular person, endowed with an unerring attunement to the motions of the human heart, and with a musical language which increased his genius to the nth power. His impalpable, all-potent instrument.
The applause—this is a live broadcast—jolts her like some small trauma; through it, she hears the sound of the detonation, as if it were right there in the room. The thud, the screams, the menace. She walks about, calms herself down, and thinks, but it is nothing to the force of Mozart, the immensity he traverses, the Herculean effort to shape the energies which course through us and sometimes tear us apart. The struggle to contain our rage and yearning in lucid form till they become eloquent with meaning. There, she says to Anzor, actually enunciating the words in her agitation, there is the beginning of purpose: in the molding of our forces till they are no longer brutal. Not in your rage, or
even your Cause … or your crude instruments. In comparison to the music she’s just heard, the detonation was cramped, stupid … literal. A short cut, quick and easy, and without pity … Sometimes it’s right to hate the rightful objects of hate, she continues her argument; but not with such wanton ease. Not without mercy for our human smallness, our vulnerable flesh. For the trembling pity of it all, our utter transience. She thinks she can hear, through the still audible Requiem, some vibrating, delicate, radiating energy at the heart of things. It is that which is my answer to you, she thinks, speaking, still, to Anzor. For she will now always have to speak to him, she will always have to rise to his challenge. She knows she cannot hold on to her reply for long; she knows it will come and go. But for the first time in weeks, she feels something like peace.
Tenderness; it’s upon her again. Tendrils of tenderness, entirely unjustified, entirely unreasonable, uncurling toward arbitrary objects, haphazard faces she encounters, the tiny terns drawn by the tide, the cries of seagulls in the late afternoon. The small courtyard in the back of a café she has discovered, suddenly seems to her poignant with loveliness, with the lushness of the cascading bougainvillea against the trellised enclosure. She looks about, savoring the gentle sway of the breeze, the low hum of conversation, and smiles with bemusement at a pretty girl in a Muslim hijab, saying, into her cellphone, “So yeah, so I’m going to chill out for a while.” Chill out, yes, what a good idea. A very old lady, bent and with scarce white hair, shuffles in on her walker, and Isabel feels a twist at her heart, yes, it is her heart, at the frailty, the need to bear the knowledge of our own passing. Ordinary human pain, of which there is enough.
She listens to the stilled moment, playing its counterpoint with the sharp diagonal shadows of the setting sun, the low clinking of the forks and spoons, the occasional burst of rap from
a portable radio. Images come to her unbidden, fragments moving through her mind with only their own rhyme and reason. An anonymous street in Buenos Aires … Why does she remember that so vividly, as if it were the most important thing? A dusty street, empty with a Sunday vacuity, hot and bored. And then, the Étude, streaming suddenly out of a window. A cascade of peerless sound thrown across the emptiness. Chopin, No. 23. She was stopped, as if shot through by a bolted arrow. Stopped in her tracks, in a street now suffused with Chopin’s liquid light. It was nothing but a stream of sound, and it had the force to arrest her and make her gasp. Blitz of beauty.
She has tried to take her own short cuts, to elation; to exaltation, to Chopin’s synoptic wholeness; and now she feels again an obscure guilt. She should have paid attention to the ordinary moments in between, the unfinished provisional prose of life. She goes down to the beach, and the flow of memory continues. The concert in Kenya, and then a trip to a village school. The children listening wide-eyed, and then beginning to sway to Bartók, as to an African drumbeat. The Bartók Suite came off her fingers electrically, as if powered by a magic motor. The savannah; the sun-baked glow of earth and grass; that’s still in her skin, as the packed sand of the beach is under her bare feet. She remembers animal eyes through the tall grass, fixed and fixing hers. An exchange, silent and gnomic. Something had been communicated, so she was sure she should walk on, quietly.
The charm of her meetings with Peter, near Columbia and Juilliard, the movies,
Jules et Jim
,
Chinatown
, being young and smart, best and brightest, the new bohemians, the adventure of it, the excitement … The first concert, her nervousness, sharp and new, sending febrile currents down her arms. Then a calm, miraculous, as if she were faced with her own end and had accepted it; and the stage, bathed in dazzling light.
And Kolya, listening to her play Schubert’s Impromptu, his face rapt and serene. The wheel of Ixion’s torture stops for the duration of Orpheus’ song.
In the slow dusk, the moments come back to her with an acuteness that is almost melodious. Her own collection of motifs, arbitrary and cherishable. Something has accumulated in her nomadic life, her own private repertory. It is only tenderness which gives these frail fragments meaning, which surrounds its objects with enchantment. Otherwise, the world is barren and unbearable. She feels her breath come in and out, the basic beat, the measure of the body. What else is there to feel for the world, except tenderness? For its adventitious loveliness, its soft tissue, its utter fragility? It is what’s left after the fear and rage are gone. Always justified rage, always unjustified tenderness. She begins to hear, in her mind, something like a motif, an intimation of a sound coming both from within and from somewhere else. It’s nothing she has heard before, and it summons her attention, like a faraway bird cry or a bugle call. Then it begins to mingle with the deeper textures of her memories, with the swish of the sea and the urban surf of the traffic. She doesn’t know what it is, but she senses, with a kind of certainty, that what she’s hearing is the beginning of a composition.
The news from Anzor’s country is of random violence and slaughter. It seems his lot is now on the losing side, although it is beginning to seem remote again, the battle fought in that part of the world; the name of the country no longer throbs for her with pain and relief as if it were the name of a human being. But it has entered her dreams now, the imagery summoned by the news and by Anzor; jagged hoary ruins, severe stone towers; a child’s dead body; processions of scarved Shades moving with an uncanny steadiness. Our time’s inferno, waiting to reveal its instruction.
In other dreams, plane trees from Budapest rustle her on to some dark cul-de-sac, the warm brick of Amsterdam presses up with a libidinal richness against a blurry suburban railroad, where she discovers with a vague and boundless fear that she has lost her suitcases and nobody will help her … That curve in the street beyond which she tried to peer as a child, and that will always stand for enigma. A path in the Paris park that leads, each time, to the unfolding of light. Her own metropolitan poetry, made from fortuitous fragments.
Through her dream, or reverie, she winds her way back to an image, so lovely and so ungraspable that she feels a line of longing arching back toward it, as expressive as a most lyrical melody. It must have been in the hacienda where they spent their summers when she was a child, and she can remember—feel—a white muslin curtain fluttering in a gentle breeze, and her mother’s face, warm to the touch, bending over her, looking at her aslant, the curve of her neck bent by tenderness. Someone opening the white curtains, and then the breeze coming in with the new-morning light (Schubertian, Schumannesque). Going out on the balcony of the long, low house, to find her father standing there already, in his pajamas, looking out at the early sun and the dew. She ran into the garden in her bare feet, with the expanse of the pampas just beyond, into that all-encompassing sensation of happiness, happiness and beauty all combined, the rolling grasses and the breezes which combed and ruffled them like waves over changing water. She was breathless with the living beauty of it, with wanting somehow to leap into the harmonious motion rushing through the open space, so that she could be part of it, part of its great utterance. And now she thinks, perhaps this is one of the deep old sources too; the urge to give homage to the world not for its goodness, but for its Being; to give voice to it in all its permutations.
And just beyond these memories, beyond the reach of any
images, there are the inchoate spaces of the imagination, with their intimations of as yet unsung melodies, as yet unknown tones. She listens to something burgeoning within those spaces, to strange new textures and timbers, a premonition of aural shapes and motions, which she will have to transform, by whatever effort, into intelligible structure and articulate sound.
She knows she’ll be leaving her isolation cell soon; but before she does, she has an unexpected visitor: Marcel. He is in California to conduct some important negotiations, having to do with the wine trade between France and the U.S. She still can’t follow this kind of thing in detail, but perhaps she isn’t obliged to. He has tracked her down through Peter in New York, and he quickly tells her that he knows all about the recent drama. “Or is it melodrama, my dear Isabel?” he asks. He casts his skeptical eye over her apartment, and she is once again surprised to see how pleased she is to see him, how much she likes the effect of his unfailing, unflappable poise.