Bolero
War: Euskal Herria
His mother opens the curtain (as a girl she embroidered green blades of grass along the bottom seam) and says to Felix: I was happy here.
The boy sits up in bed and sees that she has powdered her eyelids, steel. The color reaches to the black line of her brows and two circles of rouge target her cheeks. He knows she is leaving.
Felix, honey, she says and tousles his hair, Don’t be a goosey. Your grandfather will teach you about music and sheep.
Against his scalp, her fingers are cold and the underside of her wrist smells of lilac.
Good-bye, he says.
In a while, Crocodile, she singsongs, Honest Injun.
In the beginning, refugees straggle up the road to France. They travel by night, shedding property: a weighty urn, a pair of shoes, a dogeared Cántico by Jorge Guilen that Felix brings home in the waist of his pants.
The boy learns to play the piano, flute, and alboka, two animal horns joined by a mouthpiece. But the violin is still his favored instrument. He cradles it, trailing the sheep over scanty paths, and drapes himself across the back of an old ewe to practice scales. His grandfather shows him how to jig his fingers, to bump and drag the bow. Tempo, Aitor tells the boy, is a heartbeat. Music, too, needs to live.
They clean sheep manure from the heels of their boots. The front door flings open; church bells clang from the north. A woman wearing a black shawl steps into the house. Aviones! Aviones! she shouts and leaves.
Aitor throws water on the fire, leans out the door, and whistles. Glancing at the sky, he sees a squadron of planes flying south toward the village. When the dog pushes past his legs, he shuts the door. Felix turns down the gas lamps, pulls the shutters closed. And as he, Aitor, and the dog huddle under the stout dinner table, the first wave of planes sweep the house. The roof shudders. In the cabinets, the plates and glasses quake.
The initial bombing is fast. Through the patter of spraying dirt, Felix hears the rooster crow from the henhouse. (I forgot to latch the screen, he says.) Aitor grips the legs of the table and watches the clock. They hear planes dropping close again and the drumming of heavy bombs. The wood floor buckles beneath them, the shutters flap and groan. Aitor rasps a thumb over his chin (my heart, Felix thinks, will pump from my chest), and then they hear the planes turning, coming back. There is a shriek, spanning three octaves. A rumble. The house tilts, the cabinet doors burst open, and plates shatter on the floor. Be calm, be calm, Felix tells the dog.
On his hands and knees, Aitor crawls from under the table and grabs Felix’s violin. He orders the boy to stand (Up, Up) and drags him to the piano. At first Felix struggles (Let me go; the dog is frightened), then he takes the violin from his grandfather and holds it to his chest. Aitor pulls out the piano bench. They hear the fence splinter and the sheep snorting in panic.
Play! Aitor commands, and lays his fingers on the piano keys, sounding the introductory phrase of Violinsonaten in C minor, Beethoven. Uneasy, Felix and his violin join in late, an untuned semiquaver, a sixteenth note accompaniment. There is a battering at the front door, and it falls inward with a bang. The dog barks steadily. A few sheep skitter into the house, and Felix notices a buzz on his D string.
The piano part veers away from the violin; the violin pursues, struts, and for a few bars they twine together. From Aitor’s left hand, a torrent of chords; the violin flits away. Felix leans into his chin rest. Under the table, the dog cowers as bricks course down the chimney. The lamps sputter and smoke. Down, down the keyboard, Aitor’s right hand chases his left, and finally the confrontation of the first movement, the butting of heads, like two warring sheep.
When they begin the second movement, adagio, the roof is shaking (it will fly off, twirl away, Felix thinks) and sheep are streaming through the front door. They defecate on the floor, bleating and knocking over chairs. The wind, bilious, thick, follows the sheep inside, and the dog splits the flock, herding half upstairs and bunching the other half in a corner, behind the padded chairs. Felix and Aitor play on, fingers running, arms pumping. The piano unfurls a cadenza; the violin answers with fitful chops. The clock topples and splits open, scattering silver gears.
Allegretto, they launch into the third movement, the music kicking up its heels, a few sheep lying down. Night comes on and the darkness inside purples. Machine guns strafe the windows, cracking the glass in jigsaw shapes. The dog nips at the sheep, bundling them closer together. The lamps throw shadows onto the wall behind the piano, and Felix sees a horse with a spike for a tongue. In miniature, nervous darts, Aitor’s fingers strike the keys and then, together, piano and violin play through the finale.
The boy lays down his instrument and wipes his palms. At the base of the stairs, he sees an unfamiliar grey cat. Do you know what that was? Aitor says hoarsely, wading through a haze of ash and plaster. He pushes Felix back under the table. They sit on the dust of obliterated bricks, and Aitor says, That was defiance. Felix begins to cry, Where is the dog, he sobs, I left the latch up, and his grandfather soothes: It’s all right, everything’s fine.
Through the gaping front door they see an old sheep, its fleece on fire. As it clatters up the front steps, it is gunned down. A duck wanders inside and dies near the stairs. The hills are black and trees flare like candles. The sky flashes with pale yellow lights. Music fills Felix’s head, the beat of planes, the reedy spill of bombs. The grey cat, bleeding from its ears, shakes the duck twice, then drops it.
Evolution
When he finds the pregnant ewe, Felix swings the lantern, calling, Here, Here. Her throat is ripped open, and blood covers the ground in frozen rills. With a knife, Aitor slices at her belly and drags the lamb out. Slick from his mother’s death and his own new life, the lamb freezes to the ground. It will die, Aitor says, but we’ll do our best.
To cut a circle in the ice, they use an axe. The sound of the hacking is high, metallic. The lamb opens his gummy mouth, wheezes; his visible eye flickers. The skin on Felix’s fingers shreds as he helps his grandfather pry the slab from the ground. They lift the thick circle of ice, the lamb adhered to it, and see a wolf standing under a pear tree.
Let him finish, Aitor says, This winter has been hard for all of us.
A new clock, a wooden birdhouse, hangs above the stove. On the hour, the roof pops up and a cardinal with green glass eyes and a leather tongue sings “Claire de Lune.” Felix whistles along with the bird. His grandfather’s omelets taste the same as his mother’s: buttery, browned, and sprinkled with grated cheese.
She was right to name you for Mendelssohn, his grandfather says.
The sheep mill around Felix, their ropy shag tangled with twigs. It is part of the boy’s duties to groom the wool, to keep it clean and loose, but on this day he feels idle. He lies on his back, watching the wind shove clouds across the sky, the violin rising and falling on his stomach.
In the next pasture, over a low stone wall, a brown pony bucks. The smell of manure is sweet, and lying there, Felix isolates sounds: the thudding of the pony’s hooves, her gait on grass (spongy) and on packed dirt (grumose), the clacking jaws of the sheep, the mushy wallop of wind in his ears.
Standing, he tucks the violin under his chin and holds the bow in place above the strings. He dribbles his fingers up the fingerboard, splays his feet. A pear falls from a tree. Felix plays. The violin ululates. He holds the bow low in his palm, freeing his fingers to pizzicato. The pony streaks around the field, her blonde tail and mane flying, and Felix matches his bowing to her pace. Faster and faster, he plays a cycle of notes, the music shaped like a ball, like the path of the pony, and then Felix lifts the bow up, away from the strings.
He points the bow at a sheep. It bleats. The bow sweeps toward the sky, and the wind huffs. To the trees the bow arches and a bird twits. Felix knows he is not causing the sounds; he is anticipating them. Warm and solid, the sheep press against him, nosing at his back. He looks at the brown pony, her ribbony mane and tail: the hair of his bow is alive and streams out from his hand, galloping.
Finding a stick with a bulbous end, Felix picks it up. He holds the small knob, lightly, between his right thumb and forefinger, and uses the stick as a baton to keep the meter of the dropping pears, the wind, the pony, brisk and buoyant. And later, as the sun sets in an orange sky and the sheep, growing restless, rub their black faces against his legs, he drops the stick and uses only his hands to conduct.
Time Passes
Felix buries his grandfather in a pine box under the pear trees (he finds the coffin, filled with spare shears and a broken flute, in the attic). He dons Aitor’s beret, takes the bus into Gernika and sends his mother a telegram: Atr dead. Pls Come. Yrs Flx.
When she comes, she sells the herd, the house, the piano, the orchard. A mink snuggles against her neck. They drive to Barcelona. She takes Felix to Parc Guell where they walk a passage cut into a hillside. The ceiling of the promenade leans fiendishly, reminding Felix of ribs. Pillars plummet from the ceiling, like tree trunks, growing down. Hearing the cooing of doves, the boy feels the gash of his grief sealing over. The place is like Stravinsky, turned to stone. Absently, his mother strokes the flattened ears of her mink.
She says: You’re going to the new Julliard School of Music, it’s what your grandfather said you wanted, he made me promise to sell the land and the house to fund your education. He said you were a great musician who happened to love sheep. And I am sorry about the flock, I know you are sad, and I know that you blame me for leaving. Her voice echoes through the hall. Felix counts the repetitions.
His mother walks ahead of him to the car. In the trunk are his violin and a suitcase full of clothes. Felix takes his grandfather’s beret from his head and wears it on his knee. They drive by Sagrada Familia, the unfinished spires, riddled with holes.
Years later, when Felix is a guest conductor for the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra, a Spanish cellist tells him what she saw in Pablo Picasso’s living room—a huge anettone, chewed to ruin by mice. What is it? she asked Picasso, and spitefully, with relish, he answered: Gaudi’s Model.
The first time Felix jumped a horse (the same brown pony with blonde mane and tail) it refused a two-foot wall. His grandfather told him, You must put the horse in the correct frame of mind. Then it will carry you over.
What is an orchestra, if not a huge animal, or pack of animals that must be put in the correct frame of mind? When conducting, Felix has his strings practice unified bowing. Think like a mob, he tells them, Be like a crowd with one idea. Woodwinds and brass practice breath control to sustain long passages: Sounds mealy, he admonishes. Militaristic, that’s the key. Without precision, emotion is drippy. His rehearsals are laborious: Bow sparingly on the G, For bar 223, stay in the middle, Play the next passage stately, legato, Sing, sing like a bicycle racing uphill, For God’s Sake, Do NOT drop the C# appoggiatura or we will start again, The beat is wrong, go Ba-DUM-DUM-DUM-da-da, not BA-dum-DUM-dum-da-DA.
Jean-Baptiste Lully, the Maître de musique at the court of Louis XIV, used a staff as tall as himself and topped by a jeweled crown to keep time. A human metronome, he pounded his stick against the floor so his beats would be heard by the orchestra. While directing a Te Deum to celebrate His Majesty’s recovery from an illness, Lully, in a powdered wig, high-heeled buckled shoes, and frilly ruff, was overcome. Rapping forcefully upon the stage with his staff, he accidentally stabbed himself in the foot. The wound he suffered proved to be gangrenous. On his deathbed, he composed a hymn, “Sinner, Thou Must Die,” and sang it for friends.
After the Communist Revolution, Russian conductors directed without a baton, and in 1922, Moscow’s preeminent orchestra eliminated the role of conductor. This communal, socialist symphony came to be known as Persimfans. Musicians were expected to conduct themselves. Persimfans perished in a few short weeks.
Felix loves these two stories.
Again, My Heart
When Felix sees Ilona vaulting over the backs of velvet seats in Carnegie Hall, a sheaf of music clamped between her teeth, he feels no paternity, no lust, nothing but recognition. At the time, she is thirty-seven and Felix, sixty-five. Raising both of his hands, he calls out, Again, my brave strings, from the beginning! and waits for Ilona, his mezzo-soprano, to arrive.
As she hauls herself ungracefully on stage, he clucks at her feet in flat sandals. A grey dress, strapless and cotton, wraps around her like a towel. In the future, you’ll be punctual, he says, and purses his lips at the timpanist for missing a cue.
Ilona is short, built like a gourd with a shaved head and a face full of angles. At the tip, her hooked nose shines. In the plain dress, she reminds Felix of a monk with a violent face, formed cataclysmically, like mountains.
Why are you late? he asks. The orchestra entrance was locked; I had to come through the auditorium. She gestures behind her at the velvet seats but looks directly at him. He feels the same sweep of recognition. Nodding, he raises his hands: Again, my brave strings, from the beginning! In a grieved voice he adds, Viola, viola, I heard no viola.
Ilona stands on stage, beside the timpani, and rubs the back of her head. To warm up, I’ll sing Malcom, from La donna del lago, aria Mura felici, she says. Just so you know, I’m not actually a mezzo-soprano, but a contralto. You have a range of more than three octaves? Felix asks. Yes, high notes like a soprano, low notes like an alto, and the technique to sing coloratura. I sing with three voices. A Trinity, says Felix, Malcom, it is then, the lovestruck man.
Ilona clenches her fists, opens her mouth and works it into a line, a circle, a hexagon. With her fists, she raps lightly on her stomach and looks at Felix, who stares at the strings. Seven measures before the solo, Atto Primo, he says, lifting an eyebrow.
There is a rustle of scores, the scrape of music stands and chairs. The strings introduce Ilona. She waits for Felix to glance at her and jab with his left hand, and then, she closes her eyes and sings.
Her voice punches from her mouth, sliding between a baritonelike treble and a piercing soprano. She keeps her fists clenched at her sides and her eyes closed, but responds to all of Felix’s directives as if she can see him. Her lips are tan and malleable, and Felix is aware of the fixed instrument mouths that surround her: the trumpet spout, grimacing bass, round flute.
At the close of the aria Felix asks her: Have you ever sung Rosina? Yes, she answers, drawing back her lips to reveal a set of skewed teeth, She’s a tricky little strumpet, isn’t she? The orchestra laughs along with Felix, and the timpanist gives Ilona a drumroll. They begin rehearsing the performance piece, Un Ballo in Maschera, Ilona singing the part of Ulrica, a witch. The character and tempo of Verdi suit her, and she, in gratitude, with joy, directs her voice at the ceiling.
After the first act, Felix lifts his hands toward Ilona and calls out, Again, my heart, from the beginning! Throwing back her head, she closes her eyes, her sharp chin pointing to Felix. She sings, hunched like a gerbil, the tip of her nose shining, the threat of her brawny shoulders rising with her breaths. She reacts to the whisper of bows on wire, currents of air between Felix’s conducting hands. It is as if he pulls the sound, the tones from her body. Both of their mouths form the same words as he whispers along with her.
Translations
Naked, Ilona is a violin. Her knobbish ears, shoulders at right angles to neck, her dipped waist, and shining, brown flesh. You are made of eighty pieces, Felix says, bumping a finger down the center of her back. Frets, like a Renaissance fiddle. He rubs her shaved head; it feels like a handful of beach.
Did you know that Alexander Scriabin painted his piano, each key corresponding to a color: C red, G orange, D yellow, and so on?
Yes, Felix answers, I’d heard that. Georgia O’Keeffe also patterned sound. Me, I hear animals. The ratio of mulish oboes to ursa tubas must be balanced, for mules and bears do not thrive in the same environment, and a group of bears will devour a pack of mules. The tuba has more tooth and claw and pound. Although it will never be as spry or dependable as the oboe. The bassoon is my sole mythic. In it, I hear a centaur, not as instructive or owllike as the French horn, more prophetic.
I see, I see.
About ten years ago, I heard Bernstein give a lecture where he claimed a movement is the equivalent of a sentence. He gave an equation for the translation of music to language: note = phoneme; motive = morpheme; phrase = word; section = clause; movement = sentence; piece = piece.
Do you agree?
No, but he said one thing that I cannot forget.
Tell me.
He said when a phrase is heard more than once, repetition becomes expected, and when that expectation is violated, you have variation. The violation is the variation.
Makes sense.
Yes; I listened to Beethoven’s Pastorale and this is what I heard: The lark sings yellow tunes, the book is open in the grass, the lark sings yellow tunes, ants cross page eighty-four, the book, the grass, the ant, the frosty trees are green in summer.
Hm.
I am afraid of the dark, Ilona, so you must leave the light on.
You’re joking.
No, I fear the dark; I am too easily engulfed.
For one so old, you are young.
For one so young, you are old.
Your heart is beating quickly.
Is it?
My mother, also named Ilona, was Kutchi, a gypsy. She left me pebbles in the soil, black ribbons strung from trees, and I was to recognize her in them, to translate, follow for miles and miles, and find her. The gypsies, she always said, are lost sheep, wandering in search of a flock.
I was once a shepherd, and I have found you.
Your face, when you said that.
An orchestra tuning up is a herd of sheep, reluctant to move, frightened.
We, Ilona and Ilona, came to New York when I was ten. My father was Turkish. He died in Topkapi Palace. We walked from Rajasthan to see the clocks. It was too much for him. Where did you get this scar?
My village, twenty kilometers from Gernika, was bombed.
You were alive then?
Go jump in a lake.
When you are with me, Ilona, how do you feel?
Like I’m listening to Liszt. And your feeling for me?
Korsakov.
In many ways we are the same.
We are not the same. You don’t fear the dark, Ilona; you can walk inside it without being lost.
Then everything has been said, everything of importance, all of this will tug forever between us, an undertow, repeated perhaps in different cities, with different words, but the same, nonetheless. We have spoken.
Scheherazade, Op. 35, Rimsky-Korsakov
It begins with the voice of Shahryar. Eleven plodding strokes from the bass, descending in a warning, snakish rattle: this is how to identify him. Now, a pause, a silence. And the scale of change, the ascension of flutes. They ring twice, preparing Shahryar for the entrance of his latest wife.
Here is Scheherezade, not as she sounds when she haggles for the ripest melons, nor as she sounds when she calls to her father, the Grand Vizier, to join her while she feeds the ducks, for she has not seen him all day and cherishes his company. This is the girl’s voice, altissimo, pulsing with the desire to live—a violin fueled by a loose wrist, clean draws, and perpendicular arm. But do not be fooled, for she is not without guile. It is easy to hear: a strumming harp, disarming against her violin voice. And so Scheherezade is made entirely of strings, and no hand but her own plays them.
Mostly, she sings alone, but sometimes with other bodies of wood and steel. Scheherezade did not learn all of her stories from books, although she is always reading. She collects the tales (strums them) from people. Some she has gathered from the woman who plaits her hair, some from the sweeper’s niece who defeathers the chickens, a few from the old gardener who was once a sailor and before that a soldier, and who has circled the globe thrice. Like every storyteller, she is a scavenger: her eyelashes, commas; her lips, parenthetical. It is said she will deliver the daughters of the kingdom, Insh’Allah.
Night after night, her stories continue, Scheherezade falling silent at the approach of dawn and the most beguiling point in her tale. She narrates (the King buries his nose in her hair at the height of coitus) until she has told all she knows.
She says to the King: My mind is empty. He smiles and envisions a green bowl.
Hear the strings plucked as one, a flock of hummingbirds.
September 11, 2001
Ilona cries like a trombone. Felix hears the static and ring of tinnitus. She makes kadu. Still, we must eat, she says, but he hears only the ringing and ringing. The stench blows in through the windows. She eats to live. He hears the ringing and pushes the rice around his plate.
Felix on the Subway Platform: Halloween
A child in a Superman cape asks his mother: “What does invincible mean?”
“That you can’t be hurt.” The mother tips the child’s face, so he looks up at her.
“Why—do you think you’re invincible?”
He ponders. Fingers his cape, picks at his blue tights: “Not.”
A woman dressed as Nancy Reagan says to her friend, Elvira. “It was an inhuman act.”
Ah, but it was human. Human made, human caused, human inflicted and suffered.
I cannot listen to music, cannot bear the sound. Ilona hides inside a Mets cap and removes her gypsy bangles. She can read nothing but poetry.
Ilona at the Met
In the crowd at Topkapi Palace
my father said: “I feel Turkish.”
I remember the room of clocks,
ticking in tune,
Swiss, German, and French.
Here, in New York,
I stand in front of a small statue,
a man in a nightgown
of handblown glass.
The man has one blue, glass arm
(Jai Shyam)
and one brown.
I am kin to both,
mismatched
and free
of 18th-century portraits,
a population with white,
small hands.
The man in the nightgown
has no lid to his porcelain skull.
He is brainless, indecent
in his transparent dress.
I bend and stare at the hills
of his marble buttocks,
and see no dangle
of testicle or prick.
The man holds a baby,
neutered, too,
with the face of a man,
wrinkled as a sundried tomato.
I see the clumsy seams
where granite shoulders
fit to glass arms,
porcelain clavicles
to wooden chests.
I wish I had a photograph
of me, a baby with a man’s face
in my parent’s arms.
I would keep it in my wallet
and look at it
when I needed to.
On the plaquette
I read the artist
considers her man and child
“tormented little figures.”
She says she would not
have made them
that way
if she thought it was easy
to be a human being.
A gaggle of children
surround me.
They look at the statue
of the man and child.
The Brooklyn accent
of the tour guide
makes me lonely.
I like English accented
with the familiarity
of another tongue.
The guide tells the children
“Police have devices,
small metal ones
with antennae to find all the bombs.”
The children look worried
until a small one shouts
“Gosh, look at the ceiling!”
It is vaulted and gold.
I think of Topkapi Palace
and the splendour
of invisibility.
I imagine a clan of people
with blue and brown,
unfragile, glass arms.
They can lift heavy things,
like people
and buildings.
In the museum bathroom,
in the water-spattered mirror
that reflects everyone as a bust,
I see my face.
I hear the drip of toilets
and am startled by my beauty.
Felix Dreams of the Dead
Rows of child-sized coffins: lidded, black, with varnished piano-skin. A silver tablet nailed to the first box reads:
Here lies Oboe who had a range from B-flat below middle C to the third G above middle C, the highest and chief member of the double-reed instruments. 1932-1946.
Only fourteen years old, Felix sighs (the war, the war) and opens the coffin. He touches the black flare at the oboe’s base.
Inside the next coffin, Felix finds a honey-colored violin. A tag hangs from the lower right peg:
A Gagliano, with four strings tuned at intervals of a fifth and a range from G below middle C to the fourth C above. 1884–1926.
The bow is warped and crisscrossed with termite passageways.
Atop the next coffin sits Ilona. Her boots are covered with sheep manure. She points to a plaque:
Here lies French Horn, who roused hunters but was mutilated in Leeds by a rabid hound. This brass instrument had a range in pitch of more than three octaves upward from two octaves below middle C. 1799–1820.
Conduct my heart, Ilona says and pulls Felix’s head to her chest. Show me the shape of my tempo.
Closing his eyes, Felix listens.
It is the pattern of a two-beat legato (he pauses), and after a measure, it turns to a four-beat staccato. In the air, he sketches a triangle with a long, horizontal tail.
It looks like a torn kite, she says.
Yes. Can they be saved?
Lay your hands on them and they will live. She sounds like a clarinet; her words rise in a disciplined scale.
Felix walks toward a pear tree. The procession of caskets decrease in size. He looks at a miniature coffin, made for a fairy, he thinks, squinting to read the plaque. The words make him weep:
Here lies Piccolo, small and shrill, pitched an octave above Flute. 1929–1975.
Under the pear tree, Felix finds his grandfather in a pine casket, a heap of chipped piano keys next to him. He claps his hands over his mouth. Remembering Ilona’s instructions (Lay your hands on them) he leans down and touches his grandfather’s cheek. He picks up the keys and hurls them against the pear tree. He hears a trill, ending in a chord: C major.
Over here! Felix calls. Come and play them! Come and make them live!
He leans against a coffin with the epitaph:
Here lies Cymbal, who lost his twin and died of grief 1962–2001.
The room is filled with people, strangers to Felix. He watches them open coffins and lift the dead instruments. Some they put to their mouths, some they cradle, some they prepare to pluck. Suddenly, a high C from little piccolo. A low G from a cello played by a boy astride a casket. A blast from a crooked bassoon.
Resurrected! Felix cries.
At a one-legged piano, he finds Ilona: she bears no instrument.
You don’t fool me, he tells her. I know where you hide it.
She taps her throat.
Play it for me, will you?
Opening her mouth, she drops her chin and narrows her lips into an oval. She sings: lone notes, bouncy, the veins in her neck strain, her stomach rounds and relaxes. Gradually, she warbles into sotto voce and Felix hears the other instruments bawling, a gruesome din of moldy wood, dented metal, and moth-eaten horsehair. Beneath the clamor, he discerns a melodic line. It is off-key, but he recognizes it.
