Ave Maria

Ihave a picture of my mother and myself on my bedside table. We are in matching dresses. She had them specially made for a dinner that the Portuguese Consul was to attend. Lemon yellow they were with small butterflies stitched into the hem. I remember her excitement when the official photographer ar-rived and how she swept me up and put me on the table so that she could put her arms around me when we posed. The pho-tographer was quite smitten with her and wanted her to pose by herself, but she insisted that she would be photographed only with her daughter.

There was such a bustle in the house that day. In the evening many grand cars swept up to the door and I was allowed to stay up late to hear her play. She always played the piano at the parties they gave. She had been a promising young classi-cal pianist when my father first saw her perform in Lisbon. It was her first concert, and his first time abroad as an attaché to the Indian Embassy representing the newly liberated state of Goa.

Their courtship took place across the continent. She travelled to give a series of concerts and he drummed up diplomatic concerns in each place that she went to. He followed her around all of Europe. Finally, she fell in love with the tall good looking Indian, and agreed to marry him. They had me within a year.

Her world tour had been a huge success and much was foretold for her. But, heavy with me, she chose to come back to her husband’s ancestral home and give birth. He managed an appropriate posting and for the first six years of my life it was in Goa that we lived.

It was her life in Portugal that my mother recreated. We had dinners and dances and recitals. She had such a court of admirers that the house was filled with flowers and messengers were always delivering presents. Our house was overflowing with people and laughter and music. Above all, music.

I was allowed to stay up late for the parties and only required to go to bed after mother had played. I stayed with my nurse on the edges of the party until mother got up to walk to the piano. Then I would run ahead and slip into the space under the keyboard.

I would sit huddled close to her feet, surrounded by the music. When she pressed the pedals the notes became shivering fingers that ran up and down my spine.

That night, when she played for the Portuguese Consul, he was so moved that the next day he sent her an Icon that came from a church in Portugal. It showed the Madonna with real gilt on the edge of her robe holding a rather fat child. I still have it. Father had a special case made for it with Mother’s name etched in gold.

I remember the evening clearly. But the photograph I have of it is far from satisfactory. The photographer had obviously clicked at the wrong moment. My mother holds me a little to the side and she is looking away. I am smiling. She is not. My hair falls across her shoulder.

My hair was her pride and delight. She would come to my bedroom last thing at night and comb my hair as it lay across the pillow. We talked and laughed as she did this. She loved my hair loose and would not let it be tied up. For hours she would sit, winding it around her fingers until I had a riot of curls.

My favourite time with her was always at the piano. When we were alone I sat on the stool beside her and pressed my hands against hers as they moved on the keyboards. She played for me a repertoire that was meant for concert halls around the world, and I drank in every note.

Whenever I wept she would sweep me into her lap and then play and sing for me. It was the only time she sang. Always the same thing in the original Latin–Ave Maria. Unlike her ex-quisite piano playing, her voice was thin and ordinary. But to me it was beautiful. By the age of three I could pick out Ave Maria on the keys.

I thought we were a happy family. But there are things I understand now that I did not as a child. Small things that come back to me—slammed bedroom doors and loud voices late in the night. My mother standing at her cupboard in a storm of tulle as she ripped a petticoat to shreds with her fingernails.

I remember waking late at night to find her on my bed, her arms around me, weeping fiercely. I clung to her as tightly as I could. She stopped weeping and looked tenderly at me. “Your mother is foolish. You are her sanity. Never leave me.”

These things I only remembered with effort after a certain conversation with my father. For almost all of my childhood I thought my parents had been happy. One particular memory came back to me recently and left me disturbed.

I am five. It is the day after a party. The servants are cleaning up and are busy shifting furniture and scrubbing. No one goes into the private piano room. My mother sits there at the keyboards, her hands not moving. I am at the door watching her but I know I must not go in. She sits unmoving for a long time. Then she picks up her glass and slowly and meticulously pours her wine into the keys of the piano. She picks up the sheaf of music on the rack and flings it into the air. Then she sits there very still, hands folded in her lap, as the music falls in sheets and drifts, aimless, across the floor.

My mother died in an accident when I was seven. A group of friends had gone to picnic at a famous spot in North Goa that was beside a waterfall. I was left behind because I had a heavy cold. The monsoon was just over and the waterfall was swollen and rapid. She slipped and fell into the water and was drowned before anyone could reach her.

I know that she lay in the house for two days, but I have no memory of it at all. The days leading up to the accident and the days after I remember well. But of her wake and her funeral there remains not the slightest impression. I suppose the grief was so great that I shut it out completely. And I suppose that is the reason that her death has seemed neither real nor final to me.

When the crowds were gone, the house was empty and unrecognizable without her. There were no more people, no parties, nothing but furniture swathed in white, black ribbons on the front door, and people who spoke in whispers.

My nurse knelt beside me in the nursery with tears in her eyes and promised that she would give me a mother’s love. I pushed her aside when she tried to put her arms around me, “I don’t need it,” I said. “My mama gives me all the love I need. Don’t squeeze so!”

My nurse was driven to distraction over the next few weeks. I wouldn’t let her near me. I would run from her and hide. Getting me washed and dressed was a marathon. I screamed and wept when she braided my hair. After she had spent an hour doing my hair she would take her eyes off me for ten minutes and inevitably it would be undone. The servants claimed I did it myself. I grew angry with them insisting again and again to my father, “Mother did it! You know she hates my hair to be tied up.” I know that I was convinced that was the true explanation and indignant at not being believed. I have not the slightest memory of ever brushing my hair myself when I was young.

Finally, my father was advised to take me with him and travel. He was glad to distance himself from this house where everything reminded us of mother.

We went away, my father and I. Paris . . . Rome . . . Madrid . . . across Europe—as far as Brazil . . . three short months in China. Further and further from the music room where I sat beneath the piano and trembled to mother’s playing.

With each change of scene I became more and more difficult. I had screaming fits and temper tantrums. I would roll on the floor, shrieking and kicking. A succession of maids came and went. Then there were doctors, analysts, and, one winter in Venice, a psychiatrist who had actually worked with Freud himself.

My poor father. I have no idea how he managed in those years. No matter what he tried, I continued to be wild with grief and anger. Nothing could tame me until, in Paris, he sent me for my first piano lesson.

I remember walking into the room and seeing the piano sitting in a shaft of late afternoon sunshine. I ran to it and put my hands on the keys. Without playing a single note such joy welled up in me that I began laughing hysterically.

As I sat down on the stool and touched the keys I heard mother sigh close to me. Then I felt her sit down. She was there. I had not lost her after all.

I played. Oh, how I played. The days weren’t long enough. I longed for the summers when the light allowed me to stretch my quota of music out into lingering evenings and slow dusks. Suddenly, I was no longer a problem child.

I was twelve when my tutor asked to see my father on a matter of great importance. When I debuted with the Orchestre Philharmonie De Nice my father recounted the conversation to me. He remembered it word for word.

“She is playing things we have not taught her. Music and technique that are far in advance of what can be expected of a child of her years. Have you employed another tutor for her?”

My father denied any such thing.

Professor Marini nodded gravely. “If no one has taught her and this is how she plays spontaneously—then, my dear Sir, you have a genius on your hands. And you will need a tutor with more than my poor talents to nurture it correctly.”

Father knelt proudly by me that evening and told me I was a clever girl. I had learnt more than the Professor had taught me, all by myself.

“But someone did teach me!” I cried. “Mama did.”

“You know we agreed you would not begin that again. You’re a big girl now. Too old to pretend.”

I was angry again. “I am not pretending! She teaches me every evening. Whenever I sit down at the piano she is there.”

“Stop,” said my father putting his fingers against my lips. “You must never say that again.”

I would have protested but he had tears in his eyes as he said, “Let go, my darling. Let her go.” He made me promise. And I pretended that I had. But the truth is that she never let me go.

And here we come to the matter that troubles me. I have always been truthful and it is the truth that she was with me all the time.

I never saw her, though there was always the expectation that I would. Sometimes I would pass a mirror and a move-ment in the glass would tell me she had just walked past. At other times I would walk into a room and it would be fresh with her presence as if she had stepped out a moment before.

I do not know how to describe it. It was the concrete sense of her presence. It was there in every way but for corporeal being. I felt it most when I sat at the piano. The slight shift of mood when I played incorrectly, the patience waiting beside me as I corrected myself. The strong sense that she was always there.

It was for her I played.

By the age of twenty-five I had my own billing on every performance that the orchestra gave. When I played solo the halls were filled. At twenty-seven I did a tour of Europe that was deemed a triumph. I had a career and fame and fans who travelled from city to city to hear me. There was talk of cutting a record. None of it mattered to me. It only mattered that I play.

I have some photographs from that time. I am thin. Very thin with eyes that take up all of my pinched face. There is no sign of the wild girl who screamed and kicked her nurses. Only my hair is still untamed. In photo after photo it hangs down to my waist in a great riotous mass. Even when I played at the Royal Albert Hall and was told that etiquette demanded that I present myself formally and correctly dressed, I refused point blank to tie up my hair.

Love came to me late. I was thirty-two when I finished a concert and stepped out into the rain and found him waiting for me with an umbrella. He had just heard me play and he wanted to talk to me. We talked into the night and when we were walking back his umbrella blew away and we walked on in the rain.

I do not want to chronicle what happened. Suffice to say that I was foolish. He was married but I believed him when he said that he would leave it all for me. For six years I believed everything he said. But when the orchestra was in Berlin, I went to his room to find his wife unpacking for him. It was all lies. I had been foolish to believe him. I see that now. But back then I saw nothing but him. I really believed we were meant to be together and I was happier than I had ever been. It all crumbled in that one moment when the door opened and she looked up from her task of sorting his socks and said, “Yes?”

I shut the door and walked away.

Then I travelled. Seven countries in seven days. A night in each city. Choosing an eighth city I found myself saying, “Bombay. India.”

I came back to the old house in Goa, arriving late one afternoon. The caretaker opened it up for me, then I sent him away. How shrunken the house seemed now that I looked at it with adult eyes. It was musty and stale and everything was under covers. There was green mould growing in corners and the walls were patchy with damp. The beds were stripped and empty. There was no way that I could spend the night.

When I entered the private music room and saw the piano I knew why I had returned.

The space under the piano was still safe and secure. I curled up there. I felt her presence so close, so close. I was not sur-prised when notes suddenly trembled from the piano. It was Liszt’s Liebestraum. Mother was playing for me.

It was just the two of us and music. Such music! It fell upon me layer by layer. It quivered through every atom of me, even my hair shivered as I drew it over my face. I was enveloped in it. It was a blanket that lay warm about me. I was deep and safe, buried in the heart of the music that throbbed and pulsed through me.

They told me later that it was the music that made the neighbours wonder. They listened as the piano played non-stop for three days and four nights. Then it ceased. Scared— they broke open the door and found me. I was in hospital for two months.

Father flew down to be with me. They led me out into the small unkempt courtyard that was at the centre of the hospi-tal. He was waiting on a bench. I looked at him and thought— how old he has become. The little hunched man with the wisp of white hair on his head was all that remained of my hand-some tall father.

He looked up at me and I saw him flinch. I had got lice in hospital and they had shaved my head. He wept as he held me close. Tenderly he touched my head.

We sat in the sun, both of us. He held my hand and spoke.

“Why did you do this to yourself? They tell me they saved you with difficulty. You had starved yourself to collapse. All alone in that house.”

“I was never alone. I know you don’t believe me—but she was always with me. She has never abandoned me for a minute.”

My father sighed and took my hand.

“You are old enough to know the truth. And I think I have been wrong in shielding you from it all this time. Forgive me. I was trying to save you sorrow.”

He looked at me with compassion, then his eyes fell as he began to speak.

“Your mother’s death was no accident. She killed herself. We had fought. She was standing right next to the waterfall. All it took was one step.”

I wrenched my hand away from his. “She loved me! She said she would never leave me! Don’t lie! She never killed herself!” In my overwhelming anger I struck him again and again. He sat there with bowed head letting me hit him.

I ran back to my room and instructed the nurse to shut the door and draw every curtain. She was to tell my father I did not wish to see him. Father sat in the garden until dusk fell. Then he went away.

I did not see my father again. He died two years later in Spain. I never left Goa once I returned to the house. After his death I was visited by a lawyer who explained that Father had made arrangements for me to live without ever worrying about money. I had no need to ever work if I didn’t want to.

I stayed quietly at home for some time, then the lawyer, Mr Gama Rose, suggested piano lessons. “It will bring children into the house and distract you. Children keep you young. I would be honoured if you would begin with my two daughters.”

So I began to give lessons and it was nice to have voices in the house again and feet clattering up the stairs and laughter. We laughed a lot, the children and I. I would amuse them by playing the piano like different people. Their favourite inven-tion of mine was a fat ponderous man with a mouse in his trousers that distracted his playing.

I never gave a public concert again. Late at night when the children were gone and it was difficult to sleep I would hear the piano. Mother often played me to sleep.

Then, as my forties began to close, the music began sounding distant to me. I saw a doctor. He stuck a silver tuning fork close to my ears and questioned me carefully about the pitch and tone that I heard. Mr. Gama Rose said he himself would bring me the results of the tests.

The day he told me the news I saw him out of the house, shut the door and sat at the piano. I put my hands on the ivory and began to play. As I played I pressed myself against the piano as if I was a child again. I felt the notes shiver through me and I wept. I tried to hold the music in my body and in my hands, tried to stop it slipping away.

Of course I had to stop the piano lessons. I still played but it was by the deep vibrations of the music that I was led. I would close my eyes and feel the music in my fingers. Slowly silence descended on me.

Only one sound remains with me. The sound of Mother playing the piano. It is her music that I can hear. All else has slowly faded to whispers. When I am alone at night and feel myself to be so—then she will play. Sometimes when I think it is not worth getting out of bed, she will play me funny little tunes that make me laugh and drag me from under the covers. Recently when I was feverish and near delirious I heard her voice raised in song.

But in the last few months I have been ill and confused. I look back on my life and I am unable to understand much of it. My last conversation with my father comes back to me again and again. I never forgave my father for lying to me. But if he told the truth then all the rest of it is damned as lies.

When we visited the child specialist in Vienna, I retained clearly the exact words he said, not just the impression of them. “This is a highly intelligent sensitive child who is re-imagining her world in the way she wants it. A world where her mother is still with her and always will be.”

I am tormented by the thought. Is it all in my mind? Is none of it real? Even as I think this—I hear the sound of the piano clearly. She is playing Debussy—soft, soft, soothing me to sleep.

I have been seriously ill for the last week. I sat and wrote it all down as soon as I could hold a pen steady enough. The Priest came home this morning to hear my confession. I handed him all that I had written. He read it through sitting close to the window. I sat in my silence and watched him.

When he began to speak I gestured to him to wait. Then I laid my fingers against his lips to read the words.

“All your confession tells me” he said, “is that if one thing alone endures—it is a mother’s love. You have not been haunted. You have been blessed. Do not torment yourself. Rest in peace my child.”

He made the sign of the cross and left. I sat by the window

and the music welled up like an acclamation and absolved me. I am at peace now. I know that I have been loved. As the silence thickens around me I hear the music clearer

and clearer, each note like unclouded crystal. More and more often she sings to me as she sang all those years ago. As her voice touches the second verse it is so tender that I am often moved to tears.

Ave Maria Gratia plena
Maria Gratia plena
Maria Gratia plena
Ave, ave dominus
Dominus tecum

Benedicta tu in mulieribus
Et benedictus
Et benedictus fructus ventris
Ventris tui Jesus

O Maiden hear a maiden’s pleading
O Mother, hear a suppliant child