But she had a different impression of the winter night and of the blazing beauty of the cold but intensely green forested landscape; she was grateful for the tree-covered lanes, because
they protected her from the flaming air, from death from the skies …
“The really beautiful coast is in the west,” Gabriel continued. “Cornwall, too, is land edged toward the Atlantic Ocean by fields of heather. What happens on that coast is a battle. Rock pushes against ocean, and ocean against rock. As you might suppose, the ocean ends up winning. The water is fluid, and generous in that it’s always offering form; the land is hard, and scarred, but the encounter is magnificent. Granite cliffs rise almost three hundred feet above the sea; they resist the Atlantic battering them mercilessly, but in their whole formation is the work of that incessant attack of pounding surf. There are advantages.”
Gabriel put his arm across the singer’s shoulders. This cold early morning facing the sea. She did not reject it.
“The land defends itself against the sea with its ancient stone. There are caves everywhere. The sand is silvery. They say that the caves were smugglers’ dens. But footprints in the sand betray. Best of all, the weather is very mild and the vegetation abundant, thanks to the Gulf Stream, the heating system for Europe.”
She looked at him, moving a little away from the embrace.
“I’m Mexican. My name is Inés. Inés Rosenzweig. Why haven’t you asked me?”
Gabriel’s smile broadened, but it was joined by a frown. “For me you have no name or nationality.”
“Please, don’t make me laugh.”
“Forgive me. You’re the singer who rose above the chorus to give me her beautiful voice: singular, yes, but still a little savage, needing to be cultivated …”
“Thank you for that. I didn’t want sentiment …”
“No. Simply a voice that needs to be cultivated, like the English heaths.”
“You should see where the mesquite grows in Mexico.” Nonchalantly, Inés moved away.
“In any case,” Gabriel continued, “a woman without a name, an anonymous creature who crossed my path one night. A woman without age.”
“Romantic!”
“And who saw me urinate in an alley.”
They both laughed, he longer than she.
“A woman you bring for the weekend and forget on Monday,” Inés suggested, untying her kerchief and letting the wind whip her red hair.
“No.” Gabriel put his arms around her. “A woman who enters my life identical
to
my life, the equivalent of the conditions of my life …”
What did he mean? The words intrigued her, and for that reason Inés said nothing.
They drank coffee in the kitchen. The dawn was slow to come, this December day would be short. Inés began to notice what was around her, the simplicity of the house, the rough whitewashed brick. The few books in the living room—most of them French classics, some Italian literature, several editions of Leopardi, of Central European poets. A broken-down sofa. A rocking chair. A fireplace, and on the mantel the photograph of a very young Gabriel, a late-teenager, maybe twenty, with his arm around a boy who was his exact opposite: quintessentially blond, wide smile, without mystery. The two youths weren’t wearing shirts, and the photo stopped at their waists. It was a photograph of a swaggering camaraderie, solemn but proud, with the pride of two people meeting and recognizing one another in their youth, appreciating the unique opportunity to face life head-on together. Never to be separated. Not ever.
In the living room two wooden stools were set apart at the distance—Inés calculated instinctively—of a body lying full-length. Gabriel explained that in rural houses like this in England twin stools were placed where the coffin of the deceased would be set during a wake. He had found the two stools like that when he took the house, and he hadn’t moved them, well, out of superstition—he smiled—or maybe not to disturb the ghosts.
“Who is he?” she asked, putting the steaming cup of coffee to her lips without taking her eyes from the photograph, indifferent to the maestro’s asides on folklore.
“My brother,” Gabriel answered simply, looking away from the funerary stools.
“You don’t look at all alike.”
“Well, I say ‘brother’ the way you might say ‘comrade.’”
“We women never call each other ‘sister’ or ‘comrade’ or things like that.”
“‘Love,’ ‘friend’ …”
“Yes. I guess I shouldn’t press you. Sorry. I don’t mean to pry.”
“No, no. It’s just that my words have a price, Inés. If you want me to talk about myself—want, not press—you’ll have to tell me about you.”
“All right.” She laughed, amused by the way Gabriel had turned things around.
The young maestro glanced around his no-frills cottage and said that if it were up to him there wouldn’t be a stick of furniture in it, nothing. In empty houses, echoes are the only things that flourish: voices flourish, if we know how to listen. He came here—he stared deep into Inés’s eyes—to hear the voice of his brother …
“Your brother?”
“Yes, because most of all he was my companion. Companion, brother,
ceci, cela,
whatever …”
“Where is he?”
Gabriel didn’t just look down. He looked … down.
“I don’t know. He always liked long, mysterious disappearances.”
“Doesn’t he keep in touch with you?”
“Yes.”
“Then you do know where he is.”
“His letters have no date or return address.”
“Where are they mailed from?”
“I left him in France. That’s why I chose this place.”
“Who brings them to you?”
“Here I’m closer to France. I can see the coast of Normandy.”
“What does he say in the letters? Oh, I apologize … I know you haven’t given me permission—”
“Yes, yes, don’t worry. Look, he likes to reminisce about our life as teenagers. Mmh, he remembers, I don’t know, how he envied me when I asked the prettiest girl to dance and showed her off on the dance floor. He confesses he was jealous of me, but being jealous just means making the person we’d like to have all to ourselves more important. Jealousy, Inés, not envy. Envy is poisonous, pointless, because we want to be a different person. Jealousy is generous—we want the other person to be ours.”
“What was he like? He didn’t dance?”
“No. He preferred to watch me dance and then tell me he was jealous. He was like that. He lived through me and I through him. We were comrades, can you understand? We had this deep tie that the world rarely understands and always tries to destroy: isolating us in jobs, ambition, women, habits we acquire on our own … history.”
“Maybe it’s best that way, maestro.”
“Gabriel.”
“Gabriel. Maybe if that wonderful youthful friendship had been prolonged, it would have lost its luster.”
“Nostalgia preserves it, you mean?”
“Something like that, maestro … Gabriel.”
“And you, Inés?” Atlan-Ferrara brusquely changed the subject.
“Nothing special. My name is Inés Rosenzweig. My uncle is a Mexican diplomat in London. Ever since I was little, people have said I have a good voice. I went to the Conservatorio de Mexico, and now I’m in London”—she laughed—“sowing confusion among the chorus of
The Damnation of Faust
and giving the celebrated young maestro Gabriel Atlan-Ferrara fits.”
She lifted her coffee cup as if it were a champagne flute. She burned her fingers. She was just going to ask the maestro again, “Who brings the letters?” but Gabriel beat her to the punch.
“Don’t you have a boyfriend? Didn’t you leave someone behind in Mexico?”
Inés shook her head no, and the movement highlighted the cherry tones in her hair. She rubbed her burned fingers discreetly on her skirt. Just at the thigh. The rising sun seemed to pale with envy as it struck the girl’s fiery aureole. But her eyes were for the photo of Gabriel and his brother-companion, a beautiful boy, as different from Gabriel as a canary from a crow.
“What was his name?”
“
Is
his name, Inés. He isn’t dead. He’s just disappeared.”
“But you get letters from him. Where do they come from? Europe is cut off—”
“You talk as if you would like to know him.”
“Of course. He’s interesting. And very beautiful.”
A Nordic beauty very different from Gabriel’s Latin looks. Was he really handsome or merely
striking
? Brother? Companion? Inés stopped fretting over the question. It was impossible to look at the photograph without feeling something for this boy: love, uneasiness, sexual desire, intimacy maybe, or perhaps a certain icy disdain. Indifference? No. Not permitted by those eyes clear as lakes never furrowed by any craft, straight blond hair like the wing of a splendid heron, slim muscular torso. The torso of the young blond corresponded to features sculpted so finely that one further touch to the nose, thin lips, or smooth cheekbones might have ruined, even erased them.
This nameless youth merited
attention.
That was what Inés told herself that early dawn. The love the brother or comrade demanded was
attentive
love. Don’t let an opportunity slip by. Don’t lose focus. Be there for him because he was there for you.
“Is that what this photo makes you feel?”
“I’ll be frank with you. It isn’t the photo, it’s him.”
“I’m in it too. He isn’t alone.”
“But you’re here beside me. I don’t need a photo to see you.”
“And him?”
“He is his image. I’ve never seen such a beautiful man.”
“I don’t know where he is,” Gabriel concluded, and looked at her with irritation and a kind of embarrassed pride. “If you want, you can believe that I write the letters myself. That they don’t come from anywhere. But don’t be surprised if one day he shows up.”
Inés didn’t want to back off or show surprise. It was obvious that one rule of getting along with Gabriel Atlan-Ferrara was precisely to affect normality in every situation except moments of great musical creativity. It wouldn’t be she who fed the fire of his
domineering creativity, it wouldn’t be she who laughed at him when she went into the one bathroom without warning—the door was half open, she wasn’t violating any taboo—and found him before the mirror preening like a peacock capable of recognizing its own reflection. The laugh came from him, a forced laugh, as he quickly combed his hair, shrugging his shoulders to express disdain, and explaining:
“I’m the son of an Italian mother. I cultivate
la bella figura.
Don’t worry. It’s to impress other men, not women. That’s the secret of Italy.”
She was wearing nothing but a cotton robe she had hastily thrown into a weekend case. He was completely naked, and he walked toward her, excited, and embraced her. Inés held him away.
“I’m sorry, maestro. Do you think I came here, docile as a doe, just to answer your sexual summons?”
“You take the bedroom, please.”
“No, the sofa in the living room is fine.”
Inés dreamed that the house was crawling with spiders and all the doors were closed. She tried to escape from the dream but was stopped by the walls of the house, which were streaming blood. She couldn’t find an open door. Invisible hands knocked on the walls, tap-tap-tap, tap-tap-tap … She remembered that owls eat mice. She managed to get out of the dream but still could not distinguish reality. She saw herself walking toward a cliff and saw her shadow stretching across silvery sand. Except the shadow was looking at her, forcing her to run back to the house and through a rose garden where a macabre little girl crooning to a dead animal smiled, revealing perfect teeth that were dripping blood, and looked up at her, at Inés. The animal was a silver fox, newly created by the hand of God.
When she woke, Gabriel Atlan-Ferrara was sitting at her side, watching her sleep.
“It’s easier to think when it’s dark,” he said in a normal voice, so normal that it seemed to be rehearsed. “Malebranche could write only when the curtains were closed. Democritus tore out his eyes in order to be a true philosopher. Only when he was blind could Homer see the wine-dark sea. And only when he was blind could Milton recognize the figure of Adam, molded from clay, calling out to God:” … it were but right / And equal to reduce me to my dust …”
He relaxed his savage black eyebrows. “No one asked to be brought into the world, Inés.”
After a frugal breakfast of eggs and sausage, they went out for a walk by the sea. He in his turtleneck pullover and wool trousers, she in a heavy gray wool suit, with the kerchief tied around her head. He told her, jokingly, that this was capital country for hunting. “If you pay attention, you will see flocks of shorebirds with those long beaks for routing out food, and if you look toward land you’ll see red woodcocks searching for their breakfast of heather, red-footed partridges, sleek pheasants, mallards and teal … Yet all I have to offer you, like Don Quixote’s routine Saturday diet, is ‘scraps and scrapings.’”