The Ground Beneath Her Feet (86 page)

For everyone looking forward to Mira’s début, there are five people hoping for various reasons to see her fail.

At one point during the months of gestation—this is before we get to the airplane hangar—I myself get a little carried away. Mira tells me that Ormus’s plan is to make the new show an exploration of the ourworld/otherworld duality with which he’s wrestled most of his life. He’s interested in the theme of dissolving the frontiers between the worlds, so there’s a narrative he’s developing about an overworld/underworld love story, perhaps a rescue.… When I realize he doesn’t know about the music that came before him—how much, subconsciously, he must still resent his scholarly father, how much he must be suppressing!—I get excessively hot and bothered and go out and buy a stack of early operas, Jacopo Peri’s
Euridice
(1600) with the Ottavio Rinuccini libretto, Monteverdi’s 1607
Orfeo
, libretto by Alessandro Striggio, and of course the Gluck, from which Vina sang her last song at Tequila. I can’t find Giulio Caccini’s rival setting of the Rinuccini libretto, but I don’t care because it really isn’t very good.

When Mira next goes over to the Rhodopé I tag along and bring Ormus the CDs. He accepts my gift and puts on the Peri and even listens patiently to what I have to say, that not only does the whole history
of opera begin with these works, but it’s a myth that crosses all cultural frontiers, you hear echoes of it in the Odin story, in Celtic traditions, even, I believe, in certain Native American tales, and all those versions have their own songs too, you should really have someone hunt them down. I tell him about the birth of a new style of accompanied solo song—his own art form!—in sixteenth-century Florence, at the court of Count Giovanni Bardi in the late 1570s: a song aimed at expressing the meaning of the text. This radical departure from the madrigal principle of ornamentation by division of parts made possible opera, the aria, the whole modern tradition of song right down to the three-minute Tin Pan Alley hit single with a catchy hook. This, too, is a part of his history, I tell him, and he should know it.

I try to evoke for him the first performance of Peri’s opera at the Pitti Palace, on the occasion of the wedding of Maria de’ Medici to Henry IV of France, and the later première of the Monteverdi at the Accademia degli Invaghiti at carnival time in Mantua, whose Gonzaga duke was patron to both Monteverdi and Striggio.… But before I can start in on the technicalities, strophic variation,
stile concertato
, etc., he interrupts me, very gently. I get it, it’s an old tale, it’s been sung before, especially in Italian, he whispers, not unkindly. I guess that’s always so with any story. But what I’m trying to make here is still mine, and I’ll just keep going down this stumbling path I’m on, if it’s okay with you.

Okay, excuse me, I mutter, embarrassed, I just wanted to mention that the problem everybody has is with the ending, because she isn’t supposed to be saved, you know. Everyone gives it a happy ending one way or another, but that’s wrong, I just wanted to mention that. After all, Vina wasn’t, and here I stop and bite my tongue.

Good, says Ormus, giving no sign of having heard the last few words. Unhappy ending. Got it. Thanks for stopping by.

Vina knew all this stuff, I mumble foolishly, and perhaps just a tad mutinously, and go home.

(While we’re on the classics, I should say that Ormus has set the
Dies Irae
to music. Mira must have recited it to him too, and clearly he didn’t pat
her
on the head and shoo her away.
O Angry Day
may be the first-ever rock lyric to be translated from a Latin original written by a
duecento
Italian monk.)

•  •  •

To proceed: the idea is to do a first, short Anglo-American tour in smaller venues, Roseland, the United Center, the Cambridge Corn Exchange, the Labatt’s Apollo, no more than half a dozen gigs in total, to let the band bed down before launching, six months later, into a full, eighteen-month-long, six-continent stadium program of performances. The famous stadium rock set designer Mark McWilliam is devising a grand fantasia of an environment for this grand tour. By contrast, these first evenings will have a stripped-down, raw, back-to-basics feel. Lets get the music right, Ormus murmurs, before we get into the show.

His own singing voice is in good working order once more, though its smaller than it used to be, needs more amplification. However, his guitar playing, according to Eno, with whose ear I do not presume to argue, is perhaps even better, more emotional, than before. He’s back all right, and the band’s sound is fat and hot. On our last day in the aircraft hangar there’s a full as-live concert before an invited audience, with nothing held back except that nobody’s in stage clothes. Even in jeans and T-shirts, however, they sound right on the money. The applause is long and sincere. VTO lives.

We’re at Roseland, September 1993, just one week after the concert in the hangar, and a couple of thousand fans are in a high state of excitement, stroked by roving spotlights into an ever greater frenzy of anticipation, and then the VTO engine room starts up.

One-two-three-four!

The drummer, Patti LaBeef, the original tall Texan and one of the first women drummers to make it into the big league, is in her own monosyllabic way as much a hall-of-famer as Ormus and Vina up front. In the early days young men in the audience would yell at her,
God, you’re horny
and she’d ignore them, spit, and get on with her job. The VTO bassman, Bobby Bath, comes from Montserrat, island of earthquakes and sound studios, and plays as if his life’s ambition is stability, no more.
Plenty of players got more tricks
, he says,
but it was always the basics that I loved, to be rock solid, yeah?, to lay down that bass line and let them up at the front dance all over she
. Bobby Bath was briefly married
to the outcast Simone, but he has no problem about being back in the lineup.
What she’s against, I’m for, baby
, is his attitude.
That’s a bad-tastin’ drink of rum and I drunk me all I need
.

And here’s dagover, there’s a big cheer for diamond lil, her personal fan club’s out in force tonight, and then the dry ice clears and Ormus Cama’s in his bubble with his pedal steel guitar, plunging into the intro for the first song, a souped-up version of the hard-driving oldie “Ooh Tar Baby.” He takes the first verse himself and it’s just like old times, only better, because lil dagover is fitting in well and filling the band’s old Bath-shaped hole, and then Mira runs out and things start going badly wrong.

I’m sitting with Mo Mallick and we both see the problem at once, we see that Mira was one hundred percent right and Ormus, blinded by his need to believe in Vina Apsara’s return from the dead, was very, very wrong. The audience isn’t pleased.
What, you’re really sending out a girl in a Vina costume and we’re supposed to swallow it?
The moment we see the reaction we know the evening’s a bust, and VTO could die again tonight. Here in this old ballroom it’s looking like Ormus Cama’s last dance.

Or not-dance, because the kids in front aren’t moving, they’re just standing stony-faced and staring up at the stage, pouring out their dumb hostility at Mira. How long before they start to boo? How long before they walk out?

At this point Mira Celano does an astonishing thing. She holds up her hand and the band stops playing. Then she addresses the angry crowd.

Okay, fuck you too, she says. You don’t like my look, and the truth is neither do I, but for now we’re both stuck with it, so why not just let’s see if the music’s any good, okay?, I mean if the music’s no good then shoot me, fine, you’re entitled, but if it’s music you came for we’ve got some to give, and if you don’t like my outfit, take my tip?, open your ears and shut your fucking eyes.

Patti LaBeef comes in here: a thunder-roll on the drums, a cymbal smash. Patti’s rooting for the girl, and Patti has a lot of money in the bank with the paying public, Patti’s credible. The crowd settles, grum-bling, half convinced. Then it’s lil, it’s dagover, who fought Mira most of the way to tonight, blasting out the famous “Tar Baby” riff. That
does it.
Five-six-seven-eight
. Ooh Tar Baby won’t you hold me tight. We can stick together all thru the nite.

Ormus and Mira have discussed stage-diving. He can’t do it—he’s fifty-six years old and trapped in a soundproof cubicle—but she thinks she should. If we’re talking about blurring the frontiers, she argues, then we’ve got to erase the line between us and them.

I’m against it, but my being protective only drives Mira further into danger, and so it’s settled, she’s going to do it, about halfway through the gig in the middle of the sequence of
Quakershaker
songs. But now that the show has gotten off to such a rough start, and even though the band is playing brilliantly the crowd is only about eighty percent with them, surely she won’t go through with it, I think, surely she’ll be smart enough to hold back.

She dives.

For an instant I think
they aren’t going to catch her
, I imagine her body broken and trampled beneath the crowd’s surly lethal feet, I think of Tara. But the arms do go up, they’re holding her, she’s swimming over the sea of hands, she’s safe.

That’s what I think, but I can’t see what she can—the anger in many of the faces below her helpless body—I can’t feel the hands that are starting to claw at her body. Only when somebody rips off her red Vina wig does it become clear. I’m on my feet now, Mallick is yelling into his walkie-talkie, it’s a riot, get her out of there, but before the security guards can wade in she has somehow managed to regain the stage, and when she stands up we can all see the cuts on her midriff, her back, even her face, her long dark hair is blowing wild and ragged at her back and the bustier has gone, but she won’t stop singing, she doesn’t miss a beat, she stands front and center in her ripped leather pants and sings bleeding and bare-breasted right into their goddamn murderous ungrateful faces and that’s when I know, when every one of us at the Roseland concert hall knows for certain that Mira Celano is going to be a big, big star.

Afterwards, backstage, I want to hold her and comfort her and to hell with Ormus and his delusions. But she’s on fire and needs encircling by no man’s strength. She has come off stage to lay down the law. It’s not much of a greenroom and we’re all crowded in there and we all know what has to be said and that a woman with the guts to stagedive
into a crowd she can’t trust also has the balls to face up to Ormus Cama and tear the scab off his deepest wound.

No more Vina, she says. She’s standing toe-to-toe with him, she’s the taller and stronger of the two and isn’t planning on letting him get away. Okay, Ormus? We do it my way or let’s forget the whole thing right now. Are you listening? Can you deal with this? Nobody comes back from underground. Nobody did return. Vina Apsara’s gone.

But Ormus Cama is away in a Bombay record store, talking to a tall under-age beauty about the authorship of “Heartbreak Hotel.”

Mira’s shouting. Ormus? Did you hear what I said?

Yeah, Ormus whispers. He’s actually humming the song.

Don’t go crazy on me, Ormus. You’re not so crazy now. I need to know your answer on this right away.

What’s that? asks Ormus Cama, quietly. Vina Apsara? Oh, I’m sorry, she died.

18
D
IES
I
RAE

O
angry day, O angry day, When Time, like ash, will blow away. That’s what King David and the Sibyl say
.

In the West the earthquakes have stopped and the construction teams have moved in. Banks and insurance companies are building their new palaces over the faults, as if to assert the primacy of their authority, even over the misbehaving earth itself. The scars left by the quakes are being transformed into regeneration zones, gardens, office blocks, cineplexes, airports, malls. People have already started to forget and so, inevitably, resent those who remember. Ormus Cama and VTO, among others, are accused of negativity and scaremongering, because they continue to play the
Quakershaker
songs and their new gospel-influenced arrangement of Thomas of Celano’s ancient minatory lines.

In the South, however, the devastation continues. It’s as if the earth were discriminating against its most disadvantaged children. In India, where houses are built of mud and dreams, where the structures of life are fragile, their foundations weakened by corruption, poverty, fanaticism and neglect, the damage is immense. This is not pleasing to those who hold that India is not different from anywhere else, who deny that
particularity of circumstance which makes a place itself. The fact is that the ground in America is not shaking, but some patch or other of Indian soil, one or another Indian city street, is hit by subterranean tremors almost every day.

To many third-world observers it seems self-evident that earthquakes are the new hegemonic geopolitics, the tool by which the superpower quake-makers intend to shake and break the emergent economies of the South, the Southeast, the Rim. The boastful triumphalism of the West during the revolutionary upheavals of 1989–90 has come back to haunt it. Now all earth tremors are perceived as Euro-American weapons, what were once classified by insurance brokers as acts of god are now close to being treated by entire states as acts of war, and the altruism with which ordinary Western citizens contribute to disaster relief funds, and even the indefatigable efforts of the international aid agencies, look like post-facto attempts at salving the guilty consciences of the powerful after the damage has been done. India, Pakistan, Israel, Syria, Iran, Iraq and China all announce the allocation of gigantic “plate wars” budgets. A new kind of weapons scramble has begun.

Exhaustive efforts by skeptical Western journalists and politicians to investigate and challenge the claims of responsibility made by their own military-industrial complex for the 1989–90 transglobal quakeathon are treated as disinformation by the participants in the new quake race, and interventions by international peace movements are largely ignored. Appeals from world leaders to the quake-racers to freeze their dangerously destabilizing new “rift bomb” building programs are branded arrogant and hypocritical. The U.N. Secretary-General’s shuttle-diplomacy initiative to persuade all relevant parties to attend an urgently convened HARF (Hands Across the Rifts and Faults) symposium, where they might enter constructively into conflict-resolution talks, is ineffective. There are mass public demonstrations in support of the decisions taken by the leaders of all the Seismic Seven. Self-respect and national pride are invoked and people declare themselves ready to let their children starve in order to acquire the ability to shake the world, which they appear to equate with victory in such other prestigious contests as the Miss World pageant and the soccer World Cup. The very walls of Delhi, Islamabad and the other
seismohawk capitals shout pro-quake-technology slogans.
No HARF measures. When we can quake land will be time to shake hand
.