Antonio pointed above.
Suddenly a common miracle occurred, small and wondrous.
The great giant granite Christ appeared in the white mist, only yards away from us, his face high above us, and his arms rigid as they reached out, not to embrace but to be crucified; then the figure vanished.
"Ah, well, keep watching," said Antonio, pointing again.
A pure whiteness covered the world, and then suddenly the figure appeared again, in the obvious thinning of the air. I wanted to cry, and I started to cry.
"Christ, is Lily here? Tell me!" I whispered.
"Triana," said Martin.
"Anyone can pray. Besides, I don't want her to be here." I backed up, the better to see Him again, my God, as once again the clouds opened and closed.
"Ah, it's not so bad on this cloudy day, perhaps, as I supposed," said Antonio.
"Oh, no, it's divine," I said.
You think this will help you? Like pulling your Rosary out from under the pillows that night I left you?
"Are there any cloisters left to your mind?" I barely moved my lips, the words a near senseless murmur. "Didn't you learn anything from our dark journey? Or are you all bent out of nature now, like the wraiths that used to ragtag after you? I wasn't supposed to see your Rio, was I, only the memories of my own for which you hungered. Jealous that I love it so? What holds you back? The strength is ebbing away, and you hate and you hate ..."
I wait for the ultimate moment for your humiliation.
"Ah, I should have known," I whispered.
"I wish you wouldn't say the Hail Marys out loud," said Martin lightly. "It makes me think of my Aunt Lucy and the way she made us listen to the Rosary on the radio every evening at six o'clock, fifteen minutes, kneeling on the wooden floor!"
Antonio laughed. "This is very Catholic." He reached out, touched my shoulder and Martin's shoulder. "My friend, it is going to rain. If you want to see the hotel before the rain, we should go to the tram now."
We waited for the clouds to break one final time. The great severe Christ appeared. "If Lily's at peace, Lord," I said, "I don't ask that you tell me."
"You don't believe that crap," said Martin.
Antonio was shocked. Obviously he couldn't know how much everyone in my immediate family lectured me daily and eternally.
"I believe that wherever Lily is, she has no need of me now. I believe that of all the truly dead."
Martin didn't listen.
There, once more, loomed our Christ, arms rigid as though he were on the crucifix at the end of the Rosary.
We hurried to the tram.
Our bodyguards, lounging against the balustrade, crunched their drink cans and tossed them into the trash bin and followed along.
The mist was wet by the time we reached the car.
"It's the first stop?" I asked.
"Oh, yes, and we can't miss it," Antonio said. "I have called for the car. It is a very steep drive up, but not so hard down, you see, and we can take our time if you like, and then it won't matter if it rains, of course, I mean I am sorry that the sky is not clear ..."
"I love it."
Whoever used this first tram stop? This stop beside the abandoned hotel?
There was a parking lot here. Some drove up, no doubt, in powerful little cars, parked here, and took the tram to the summit. But there was nothing else to shelter one here.
The vast ocher-colored hotel was solid, but obviously utterly in neglect.
I stood spellbound looking at it. The clouds did not press so far down here, and I could see the view of the city and the sea that these shuttered windows had once commanded.
"Ah, such a place ..."
"Yes, well," said Antonio, "there were plans, many plans, and perhaps ... see, here, look through the fence." I saw a walkway, I saw a courtyard, I looked up at the faded ocher shutters that covered the windows, at the tiled roof. To think, I could ... I really could ... if I wanted to ...
Some impulse was born in me, some impulse I hadn't felt anywhere else in our travels, to stake out some beautiful retreat on this spot, to come here at times away from New Orleans and breathe the air of this forest. There seemed no more beautiful place on earth than Rio.
"Come," said Antonio.
We walked past the hotel. A thick cement railing guarded us from a gorge. But we could see now the great depth of the building and how it was positioned out over the valley. It broke my heart, this loveliness. Beneath me, the banana trees plunged in a straight line, down and down the mountainside as if following the path of one root or spring, and all round the lush growth reached up, and the trees swayed over our heads. Across the road, in back of us, the forest was steep and dark and rich.
"This is Heaven."
I stood quiet. I let it be known. Just a moment. I didn't have to ask. It was matter of gestures. The gentlemen moved away, smoking their cigarettes, talking. I couldn't hear them. The wind didn't blow here as it did on the peak. The clouds were moving down, but slowly and thinly. It was quiet, and still, and below lay the thousands upon thousands of houses, buildings, towers, streets, and then the exquisite placid beauty of the endless blue water.
Lily was not here. Lily had gone, as surely as the spirit of the Maestro had gone, as surely as most spirits go, the spirit of Karl, the spirit of Mother, surely. Lily had better things to do than to come to me, either to console or torment.
Don't be so certain.
"Be careful with your tricks," I whispered. "I learned to play from pain from you. I can do it again," I said. "I'm not easily deceived, you should know that."
What you will see will chill your blood and you will drop the violin, you will beg me to take it, you will let it fall! You will back off from all you have so admired! You're not fit for it.
"I think not," I said. "You must remember how well I knew them all, how much I loved them, how much I loved the sickbed and the last small detail. Their faces and their forms are perfect in my memory. Don't try to duplicate that. We'll be at wits against each other."
He sighed. There was a falling off, a sliding away, a longing that chilled my arms and neck. I think I heard the sound of crying.
"Stefan," I said, "try, try not to cling to me or this but ..."
I curse you. Damn you.
"Stefan, why did you choose me? Were the others such lovers of death, or just music?"
Martin touched my arm. He pointed. Some distance down the road, Antonio was beckoning for us.
It was a long way down. The bodyguards stood watch.
The mist was very wet now, but the sky was clear. Perhaps that's what happens. The mist melts to rain and becomes transparent.
There was a small clearing before us, and what seemed an old concrete fountain far back, and round in a circle what appeared to be cast-off plastic sacks, vividly blue, simple grocery or drugstore sacks. I'd never seen them in such a color.
"Those are their offerings," said Antonio.
"Who?"
"The Mogambo people, the Candomble. See? Each sack has an offering to a god. One has rice in it, one has something else, perhaps corn, see, they make a circle. See? There were candles here."
I was delighted. Yet no sense of the supernatural came over me, only the wonder of human beings, the wonder of faith, the wonder of the forest itself creating this small green chapel for the strange Brazilian religion, so mixed with Catholic saints, that no one could ever untwine the varying rituals.
Martin asked the questions. How long ago had they met here? What had they done?
Antonio struggled for words ... a ritual purification.
"Would that save you?" I whispered. Of course, I spoke to Stefan.
No answer came.
Only the forest lay around us, the sparkling forest as the rain came floating down. I closed my arms tight around the well-covered violin lest some dampness get inside, and I stared at the old circle of strange tacky blue plastic sacks, the stubs of the candles. And why not blue sacks? Why not? In ancient Rome, h
ad the lamps of the temple been that different from the lamps of a household? Blue sacks of rice, of corn ... for spirits. The ritual circle. The candles.
"One stands ... you know, in the center," Antonio sought for his English, "to perhaps be purified."
No sound from Stefan. No whisper. I looked up through the mesh of green above. The rain covered my face soundlessly.
"It's time to go," said Martin. "Triana, you have to sleep. And our hosts. Our hosts have some grand plan of picking you up early. Seems they are inordinately proud of this Teatro Municipale."
"But it is an opera house," said Antonio, placatingly, "and very grand. Many people do enjoy to see it. And after the concert there will be such crowds."
"Yes, yes I want to go early," I said. "It's full of beautiful marble, isn't it?"
"Ah, so you know about it," he said. "It is splendid."
We drove back in the rain.
Antonio confessed with laughter that in all the years he had done such tours he had never seen the rain forest during the rain, and this was quite a spectacle to him. I was wrapped in beauty, and no longer afraid. I figured I knew what Stefan meant to do. Some thought was taking shape that almost seemed a plan.
It had begun in my mind in Vienna, when I had played for the people of the Hotel Imperial.
I never slept.
The rain teemed on the sea.
All was gray and then darkness. Bright lights defined the broad divisions of Copacabana Boulevard, or the Avenida Atlantica.
In a pastel bedroom, air-conditioned, I dozed perhaps, watching the gray electric night seal up the windows.
For hours, I lay peering at what seemed the real world of the ticking clock, in this the Presidential bedroom of the suite, peering through thin closed eyelids.
I put my arms around the violin, curled against it, holding it as my mother held me, or I held Lily, or as Lev and I, and Karl and I, had snuggled together.
Once in panic I almost went to the phone to call my husband, Lev, my lawfully wedded husband, whom I had so stupidly given away. No, that will only cause him pain, both him and Chelsea.
Think of the three boys. Besides, what made me think he would come back, my Lev? He shouldn't leave her and his children. He should not do that, and I should not think of it, or even wish for it.
Karl, be with me. Karl, the book is in good hands. Karl, the work's done. I drew the haggard confused figure back from the desk. "Lie down, Karl, all the papers are in order now."
There came a loud banging sound.
I woke up.
I must have been asleep.
The sky was clear and black beyond the windows.
Somewhere in the living room or dining room of the suite, a window had blown open. I heard it flapping, banging. It was the window in the living room, the window in the very center of the hotel.
In sock feet, the violin in my arms, I walked across the dark bedroom and into the living room, and felt the strong push of the cleansing wind. I looked out.
The sky was clear and studded with stars. The sand was golden in the electric lights that ran the length of the boulevard.
The sea raged on the broad beach.
The sea rolled in, in countless glassy overlapping waves, and in the lights, the curl of each wave was for an instant almost green, and then the water was black and then there arose before me the great dance of foaming figures.
Look, it was happening all up and down the beach, with every wave.
I saw it once, twice, I saw it to the right and to the left. I studied one great chorus after another. Wave after wave brought them rising with their outstretched arms towards the shore or towards the stars or towards me, I couldn't know.
Sometimes the stretch of the wave was so long and the foam so thick that it broke into eight or nine lithe and graceful forms, with heads and arms and bowing waists, before they lapsed back and the next band came rolling after them.
"You're not the souls of the damned or the saved," I said. "Oh, you are only beautiful. Beautiful as you were when I saw you in prophetic sleep. Like the rain forest on the mountain, like the clouds crossing the face of God.
"Lily, you are not here, my darling, you are not bound to any place any longer, not even one as beautiful as this. I could feel it if you were here, couldn't I?"
There came that thought again, that half-finished plan--that half-conceived prayer to fight him off.
I drew up a chair, and I sat down by the window. The wind blew my hair back.
Wave after wave brought the dancers forth, no one ever the same, each company of nymphs different, as were my concerts, or if there was a pattern to it, only the geniuses of chaos theory knew it. Once in a while, one dancer came so tall as to have legs that seemed ready to leap free.
I watched it until morning.
I don't need sleep to play. I'm crazy anyway. Being crazier still could only help.
The dawn came and all the rapid traffic, and the milling people below, the shops opening their doors, the buses rolling. Swimmers were in the waves. I stood at the window, the sack of the violin hanging over my shoulder.
A sound disturbed me.
I turned, jumped. But it was only a bellman who had come in, and in his arms he held a bouquet of roses.
"Madam, I knocked and knocked."
"It's fine, it was the wind."
"There are young people down there. You mean so much to them, they have come so far to see you. Madam, forgive me."
"No, I want to do it. Let me hold the roses and wave to them. They'll know me when they see me with the roses and I'll know them."
I went to the window.
The sun glared on the water; in an instant I found them, three slim young women and two men, scanning the face of the hotel with shaded eyes, then one saw me, saw the woman with the brown bangs and brown hair holding the red roses.
I lifted my hand to wave. I waved and waved. I watched them jump up and down.
"There is a song in Portuguese, a classic song," said the bellman. He was fussing about with the little refrigerator right near the window, making certain of the drinks and the temperature.
The kids down there leapt in the air. They threw kisses.
Yes, kisses.
I threw them kisses.
I drew back, throwing kisses until it seemed the moment had reached its fullest, and then I let the window close. I turned to the side, the violin like a hump on my back, the roses in my arms. My heart was pounding.
"The song," he said. "It was famous in America, I think. It is 'Roses, Roses, Roses.' "
18
IT WAS the corridor with the Greek key mosaic in the floor, the deep thick scrolls of gold, the brown marble.
"Very beautiful, yes, oh, God," said Roz, "I've never seen such a place. All of this is marble? Look, Triana, the red marble, the green, the white ..."
I smiled. I knew. I saw.
"And this was in the cloisters of your memory?" I whispered to my secret ghost, "and you didn't mean for me to see it? Rushing to my bed?"
It must have sounded to the others like humming. He didn't answer me. A terrible sorrow overcame me for him. Oh, Stefan!
We stood at the foot of the staircase. To left and right stood the bronze-faced figures. The railings were a marble as green and clear as the sea in the afternoon sun, the balusters squared and thick, the stairway branching as it does in all such opera houses, it seemed, and behind us, as we mounted the stairs, the three doors of leaded glass with spoked fanlights above.
"Will they come in this way tonight?"
"Yes, yes," said the slender one, Mariana, "they will come. We are sold out. We have people who are waiting now. That's why I took you in the side door below. And we have a treat for you, a special treat."
"What could be grander than this?" I asked.
All together, we climbed the steps. Katrinka was suddenly stricken and sad. I saw her eyes meet Roz's eyes.
"If only Faye were here!" she said.
"Don't say that,"
said Roz, "you'll only make her think about Lily."
"Ladies," I said, "rest your minds, there is no waking hour when I don't think of Faye and of Lily."
Katrinka was suddenly shaken and Martin had come to put his arms around her, to make her stop carrying on, to shame her somewhat, even as he pretended to comfort her, the disciplinarian.
As we turned and went up the left side, I saw the great mezzanine and I saw the three magnificent stained-glass windows.
Mariana's soft voice told me the names of the figures, just as she had done in the dream. Lucrece, the darling woman beside her, smiled and commented too, on how each figure had its meaning in music or poetry or theater.
"And there, down there, are murals in that far room," I said.
"Yes, yes, and in the one at the other end, you must see ..."
I stood still, the sunlight pouring through these painted pictures in glass, past these buxom, half-naked beauties with their raised symbols, surrounded by their garlands and their drapery.
I looked up and up and saw the paintings far above. I thought my soul would die in me in quiet, and nothing mattered now but what had mattered in the dream--not whence it came to me or why, but only that it was, this place, that someone had made it out of nothing and it stood, still, this place, for us, in its spectacular grandeur.
"You like it?" Antonio asked.
"More than I can ever say," I answered with a sigh. "Look, up there, the round plaques on the wall, the bronze faces, that's Beethoven."
"Yes, yes," said Lucrece graciously, "they are all there, the great opera composers, you see Verdi, ah, you see Mozart, you see there the ... the ... playwright ..."
"Goethe."
"But come, we don't want you to be tired. We can show you more tomorrow. Let's go now, for our special surprise."
Laughter all around. Katrinka wiped her face, glaring angrily at Martin.
Glenn whispered to Martin to leave her alone.
"I lie awake all night," Glenn whispered, "wondering about Faye. Just let her cry."
"Don't draw attention to yourself," Martin said.
I took Katrinka's hand. I felt her hold tight to me.
"Surprise?" I said to Mariana and Lucrece. "What is it, my dears?"
We went down the splendid stairs together, the brilliant glass, the shining marble, the streaks and streaks of gold all melded in a canopy of glorious harmony--a man-made thing that seemed to rival the very sea with its tossed and leaping ghosts, the very forest in the rain, where the banana trees plunged down and down and down into the glade.