He asked her to forgive him for what had happened the night before. He wanted her to understand. Every artist sometimes has the problem of not distinguishing between what passes for everyday normality and
creativity
—which is also everyday, and not exceptional. It’s a well-known fact that the artist who sits around waiting for “inspiration” dies in the waiting, watching the woodcock wing by, and ending up with a fried egg and half a sausage. For him, for Gabriel Atlan-Ferrara, the universe was alive in every moment and in every object. From a stone to a star.
Inés was gazing with hypnotic, instinctive fascination toward the distant island she could see on the ocean horizon. The moon was late going to bed and was precisely above their heads.
“Have you seen the moon during the day before?” he asked.
“Yes,” she replied without a smile. “Often.”
“Do you know why the tide is so high today?”
She shook her head, and he elaborated: because the moon was exactly overhead and at the moment of its most powerful magnetic attraction. “The moon makes two orbits around the earth every twenty-four hours and fifty minutes. That’s why there are two high tides and two low tides every day.”
She looked at him, amused, curious, impertinent, asking him silently, And where is all this going?
“To conduct a work like
The Damnation of Faust
requires me to convoke all the powers of nature. You have to keep in mind the nebula of the beginning, you have to imagine a sun, twin to ours, that one day exploded and scattered into planets, you must imagine the entire universe as one enormous tide without beginning or end, in perpetual expansion, you have to feel pain for the sun, which in some five billion years will be an orphan, with no oxygen, shriveled like a child’s deflated balloon …”
He talked as if he were conducting, convoking acoustic powers with one arm extended and one fist closed.
“You have to imprison the opera inside a nebula that conceals an object invisible from the outside, the music of Berlioz deep in the luminous center of a dark galaxy. It will reveal its light only through the luminosity of the singing, the orchestra, the hand of the conductor … revealed thanks to you and me.”
He was silent for a brief moment, and then again he smiled at Inés.
“Every time the tide rises at this point where we are standing on the English coast, Inés, it falls at a place in the world exactly opposite from here. I ask myself, and I ask you, does time appear and reappear the way the tide rises and falls so punctually at two opposite points on the earth? Is history replicated and reflected in the opposing mirror of time, only to disappear and reappear by chance?”
He picked up a pebble and skipped it, swift and cutting, arrow and dagger, across the surface of the water.
“And if at times I’m sad, what does it matter that there’s no joy in me if there is joy in the universe? Listen to the sea, Inés, listen with the ear of the music I conduct and you sing. Do we hear what the fisherman or the barmaid hears? Maybe not, because the fisherman has to know how to get the jump on the early bird, and the waitress how to cut an abusive client off short. No, because you and I are obliged to recognize the silence in the beauty of nature that becomes noise when you compare it with the silence of God. That is true silence.”
He skipped another pebble.
“Music is the midpoint between nature and God. With luck it connects the two. And along with art, we musicians are intermediaries between God and nature. Are you listening? You’re a million miles away. What are you thinking about? Look at me. Don’t gaze off into the distance like that. There’s nothing there.”
“There’s an island hidden in the fog.”
“There’s nothing.”
“I’m seeing it for the first time. It’s as if it had been born during the night.”
“Nothing, I say.”
“There’s France,” Inés said finally. “You told me that yourself
yesterday. You live here because from here you can see the coast of France. But I don’t know what ‘France’ is. When I came here, France had already surrendered. What is France?”
“It’s my country,” Gabriel said, with no change in tone. “And one’s country is loyalty or the lack of it. Look, I’m conducting Berlioz because his music is a cultural specific of the territorial specific we called France.”
“And your brother, or comrade?”
“Has disappeared.”
“He isn’t in France?”
“Possibly. Do you realize, Inés, that when you don’t have any information about someone you love you imagine him in every possible situation?”
“No, I don’t believe that. If you know a person, you know what … let’s say … what his repertory of possibilities is. Dog doesn’t eat dog, dolphin doesn’t kill dolphin.”
“He was very calm as a boy. All I have to do is think of that serenity to believe that it’s what destroyed him. His bliss. His serenity.” He laughed. “Maybe my excesses are an inevitable reaction to the danger posed by angels.”
“Aren’t you ever going to tell me his name?”
“Let’s say his name is Scholom, or Solomon—Hills, or Hearth. Give him whatever name you want. The important thing about him wasn’t the name, but his instinct. Do you understand? I have transformed my instinct into art. I want music to speak for me, although I know perfectly well that music speaks only of itself, even when it demands that we enter it and become a part of it. We can’t see it if we stay outside, because then we wouldn’t exist for the music.”
“Him, talk to me about him,” Inés urged impatiently.
“Him. Chaim. Any name that suits you.” Gabriel smiled
back at the nervous girl. “He was constantly remaining in his instincts. He’d tediously revise everything he’d just done or said. And that’s why it’s impossible to know his fate. He was uncomfortable in the modern world, which forced him to reflect, stop, exercise the caution of the survivor. I think he longed for a free and natural world that wasn’t burdened with oppressive rules. I told him nothing like that had ever existed. The freedom he wanted was the search for freedom, something that we never achieve but that makes us free as we fight for it.”
“You’re saying there is no destiny without instinct?”
“No. Without instinct you can be beautiful, but you will also be petrified, like a statue.”
“The opposite of you.”
“I don’t know. Where does inspiration come from, energy, the unexpected
vision
you need for singing, composing, conducting? Do you know?”
“No.”
Gabriel opened his eyes with mocking amazement. “And I who always believed that every woman is born with more innate experience than a man can acquire in a lifetime.”
“That’s called instinct?” said Inés, more calmly.
“No!” exclaimed Gabriel. “I assure you that a
chef d’orchestre
needs more than instinct. He needs more personality, more strength, more discipline, precisely because he isn’t a creator.”
“And your brother?” Inés insisted, with no fear now of a forbidden suspicion.
“Elsewhere,” Gabriel answered simply.
This affirmation opened a broad horizon of free associations for Inés. She kept to herself the most secret one, which was about the boy’s physical beauty. She gave voice to the most obvious ones: France, the lost war, the German occupation.
“Hero or traitor, Gabriel? If he stayed in France—”
“Oh, a hero, obviously. He was too noble, too committed. He didn’t think about himself, he thought about serving … even if simply to resist, without acting.”
“Then I can imagine him dead.”
“No, I imagine him a prisoner. I would rather think he’s been captured. Yes. You know, as boys we were fascinated with maps of the world, and globes, and we’d throw dice to see who won Canada or Spain or China. When one of us won some territory or other, we’d yell and shout, you know, Inés, like those terrible cries in
Faust
I was demanding from all of you yesterday, we’d scream like animals, like screeching monkeys marking their territory and communicating its boundaries to the other monkeys in the jungle. Here am I. This is my land. This is my space.”
“Then maybe your brother’s space is a cell.”
“Or a cage. Sometimes I imagine him in a cage. I’ll go further. Sometimes I imagine that he chose the cage himself and has confused it with freedom.” Gabriel’s dark eyes looked toward the other side of the Channel.
The retreating sea was gradually giving up the land it had won. It was a cold, gray afternoon. Inés was cross with herself for not having brought a muffler.
“I hope that like a captive animal my brother defends his space—by that I mean the territory and the culture of France. Against Nazi Germany. An alien and diabolical enemy.”
Winter birds flew by. Gabriel looked at them with curiosity. “Who teaches a bird to sing? Its progenitors? Or are its instincts randomly organized? It inherits nothing, and has to learn everything from scratch?”
Again he put his arms around her, this time roughly, a disagreeable
roughness she read as fierce machismo, the decision not to take her back alive to the corral … The worst of it was that he disguised it, masked his sexual appetite as artistic zeal and fraternal feeling.
“It’s possible to imagine anything. Where did he go? What was his fate? He was the brilliant one. Much more so than me. Then why am I the one to triumph and he the one to lose, Inés?” Gabriel was squeezing her harder, pressing his body against hers but avoiding her face, avoiding her lips. Finally he touched his lips to her ear.
“Inés, I’m telling you all this so you will love me. Understand that. He exists. You’ve seen his photograph. That proves that he exists. I’ve seen your eyes when you look at the photo. You like that man. You want that man. Except that he isn’t here. I’m the one who’s here. Inés, I’m telling you all this so—”
Calmly, she moved away from him, hiding her disgust. He did not restrain her.
“If he were here, Inés, would you treat him the way you’re treating me? Which of us would you prefer?”
“I don’t even know his name.”
“Scholom, I told you.”
“Stop making things up,” she said, now without hiding the bitter taste the situation left in her mouth. “You’re exaggerating terribly. Sometimes I wonder whether men really love us; what they want is to compete with other men and best them … You still wear your war paint, you men. Scholom, Solomon, Hearth, Chaim … You take advantage.”
“Imagine, Inés.” Gabriel Atlan-Ferrara became decidedly insistent. “Imagine that you threw yourself off a cliff rising four hundred feet above the sea—would you be dead before you hit the waves?”
“Were you what he couldn’t be? Or was he everything you couldn’t be?” Inés fired back, angry now, her instinct liberated.
Gabriel’s fist was clenched from intense emotion and intense anger. Inés pried open his hand and deposited an object on the open palm. It was a crystal seal, with a light of its own and illegible inscriptions.
“I found it in the attic,” Inés said. “I had the impression that it wasn’t yours. That’s how I got the nerve to offer it to you as a gift. A gift from a dishonest guest. I went into your attic. I looked at the photographs.”
“Inés, pictures sometimes lie. What happens to a photograph over time? Do you think a photo doesn’t live and die?”
“That’s what you said before. With time, our portraits lie. They aren’t us anymore.”
“How do you see yourself?”
“I see myself as a virgin.” She laughed uncomfortably. “A good daughter. Mexican. Bourgeois. Immature. Learning. Discovering my voice. That’s why I don’t understand why memory comes back when I least desire it. It must be that I have a very short memory. My uncle the diplomat always said that our memory of most things lasts no longer than seven seconds or seven words.”
“Didn’t your parents teach you anything? To put it a better way, what did your parents teach you?”
“They died when I was seven.”
“To me the past is the
other
place,” said Gabriel, staring toward the far shore of the English Channel.
“I don’t have anything to forget.” She moved her arms in a way that wasn’t hers, that felt strange. “But I feel an urgency to leave the past behind.”
“I, on the other hand, sometimes want to leave the future behind.”
The sand absorbed their footsteps.
He left abruptly, without saying goodbye, abandoning her, in wartime, on a lonely coast.
Gabriel raced back through Yarbury Forest and the heath of Durnovaria, until he stopped at a high, square, clod-filled field near the river Frome. From there the coast was no longer visible. The land was like a protective frontier, an unfenced boundary, an outdoor sanctuary, a deserted ruin with no obelisks or sandstone columns. The sky of England moves so swiftly that you can stop but still think you are moving as fast as the heavens overhead.
Only there could he tell himself that he had never learned to distinguish the distance between a woman’s abject submission and her absolute purity. He wanted her forgiveness. Inés would remember him as misguided, whatever he did … He didn’t deny that he wanted her or that he had to abandon her. If only she wouldn’t remember him as a coward or a traitor. If only she wouldn’t give flesh to the other in the person of Atlan-Ferrara, the companion, the brother, the one who was
elsewhere
… He prayed that the young Mexican girl’s intelligence, so superior to the concept she seemed to have of herself, would always know to distinguish between him and the other—for he was in today’s world, forced to fulfill obligations, to travel, to establish order, while the other was free, could make choices, could give all his attention to her. Love her—maybe even that: love her … He was elsewhere. Gabriel was here.