51
In the deserted house I listen to Beethoven’s quartet, Opus 130, over and over again. Stale coffee slithers like a black octopus over the chipped porcelain of the chipped sink where I drown my sorrows by doing the washing-up. Still on the table are two cigarettes, forgotten in the rush of leaving, still here are her soft fingerings, here, just here. Thanks to the phenomenon known as persistence of vision, my retinas turn the cracked walls of this house into white screens for a shadow puppet of her.
52
The intensity of our connection is too strong, storms erupt. She turns nasty, she screams till the walls shake, she falls to her knees, racked with heartrending sobs. She gets back up, staggers, comes to nestle in my arms, apologizes. One word too many and she starts shrieking again, saying this can’t go on this can’t go on, and slamming doors. She lets me catch up with her at the last minute, she doesn’t fight when I undress her and force her to get into the bath where I wash her meticulously under the astonished eye of the resident cat, she cries silently while I go shhhhh between my teeth, shhhhh like someone soothing a teething child or a strapping man felled by fever or an old man preparing to die, come on, shhhhh, it’s over, there, shhhhh.
Ludwig van Beethoven’s String Quartet No. 13 in B-flat major, Opus 130, was completed in December 1825 and published before the composer’s death. It has six movements and originally ended with the Grosse Fuge. But, faced with the bafflement of audiences and on the insistence of his editor, Beethoven resolved to separate the fugue from the rest of the quartet. In the autumn of 1826 he composed a substitute finale, which remains his last finished work. The Cavatina that serves as the fifth movement is considered the dramatic highpoint of the work and one of the most poignant melodies Beethoven ever wrote. Most present-day performances of this quartet revert to using the Grosse Fuge as the finale because the Cavatina’s dramatic intensity is too powerful and needs this liberating conclusion.
53
In mid-August she flies off to Istanbul for six days, which feels like an eternity to us. She calls me every day. She describes the city, a place I already know but discover all over again through her words. She tells me when she’s playing the violin alone in the apartment while her traveling companions are out strolling along the Bosporus. She seems disappointed when I say I won’t be there when she flies home. It doesn’t occur to her that this is a ploy of mine. She arrives, looking rather tired, she doesn’t suspect I’m here at the airport, she doesn’t suspect that I’ve been here for hours already, pacing like a tiger in a cage, having drunk coffees from every available machine in Terminal B, having studied and studied again the arrivals board, the metal doors and the faces of travelers. She doesn’t know I’m watching her as she says goodbye to her traveling companions, that I’m scrutinizing every part of her body, and her face, that I laugh to see her laugh, that my whole body shudders at the thought of holding her close any minute. She jumps back when I pop up right next to her, she drops her bag, throws her arms around my neck and dissolves into tears. She intertwines her legs with mine in the taxi taking us to her apartment, to her bed, her bower in Les Lilas, her lilac town. She sets off again on tour very early the next morning. She grabs my hand to run through the corridors of the Gare de Lyon. She’s late, as usual, she just couldn’t get up on time after a night of all-consuming lovemaking. Even so, she stops by the station’s piano and, with her violin on her back, standing in the middle of the crowd, she starts to play a syrupy tune from the eighties, striking the notes without looking at them, not looking at them because it’s me she’s looking at. I’m embarrassed and I’m proud, she looks me right in the eye and, standing there in the middle of the crowd, she sings – loudly, at the top of her lungs – dreams are my reality.
54
It’s all about that, it’s all about Sarah the unknown woman, Sarah the honorable maiden, Sarah the prudent lady, Sarah the extravagant woman, Sarah the bizarre woman. Sarah the lone woman.
55
The telephone rings just once unanswered and then the hold music starts up. It’s Vivaldi. The Four Seasons. Summer. A man’s voice eventually says hello, Paris emergency service. He listens in silence while I describe what’s happening to me, the persistent sharp pain in my chest, on the left-hand side, spreading through my left arm so that I almost can’t move it. The voice on the other end asks me a number of specific questions, tells me to make several movements. The man seems astonished. He says hold the line, I’m going to speak to the duty doctor. I hear him put down the headset, his heavy footsteps lumber away in my ear, I wait, I can hear other telephone operators also asking questions, I keep waiting, a good while. The footsteps come back. The man’s voice says hello, it says hello, Miss, are you in a relationship at the moment, do you think that what you actually have is an aching heart, or maybe, you know, a heavy heart?
She writes come and join me it’s still summer here. She writes I can’t take sunshine and heat without you, I hear the cicadas every morning but I want to wake up with you. She writes get off at Avignon station, I’ll come and pick you up by car, I’ll manage somehow, come on my love, it’s too complicated when we’re apart. She doesn’t know that I thrill at these words, that I pack my bag within the hour, that I jump onto the first train to Avignon. She’s waiting for me on the platform, in an implausible bright-red dress, she’s well dressed for once, well dressed with neat hair, not at all thrown together, she’s bought me a coffee, she wants to show me an article about her quartet in a magazine, she doesn’t do it on purpose but she steals the magazine, she forgets to pay the newsagent, so exhilarated that we’re together again, she comes out of the shop with the magazine under her arm, it makes her laugh, a great loud laugh, then she asks me what’s this about a pain in your chest, you’re not doing breast cancer on us, are you, she laughs again, at her marvelous joke, I mumble no it’s nothing actually it’s already gone, she almost runs to the car and I run after her, the car is scorching from sitting in unforgiving sun, which beats down straight and hard, she opens the windows and lurches off before fastening her seatbelt, she howls with laughter as she does a bonkers U-turn in the car park, at the sound of the tires squealing, she says I’m going fast so they don’t come after us for the magazine, we are thieves after all, she heads toward Arles, she sighs when I run my hand up her thigh, when I push aside the two halves of the bright-red dress to stroke her where she’s her softest, her tenderest, at the top of her thighs, she closes her eyes for a fraction of a second when I put my finger into her wet snatch, she bites her lip when I put in a second finger, she puts her foot on the accelerator and comes, with the windows open, at ninety kilometers an hour, in the stifling heat of the car and the relentless, maddening song of cicadas.
56
The cool temperature in the abbey is a relief, as if the old stones graciously make a point of refreshing whoever steps into this sacred place. She’s rehearsing with her seven associates. She told me they were playing an octet, she explained this in the crumpled sheets of dawn and I didn’t really listen, dazzled by the sight of her naked body in the sunlight filtering through the shutters. She’s first violin. She glances at me often, and I look back from where I’m sitting in the cloisters, reading Hervé Guibert. The abbey fills with people, they shuffle up on the small wooden benches, she messages join me in the dressing room, she opens the door and I discover a beehive of frenetic activity, the girls checking themselves in the mirror, hard-faced as they apply mascara or a last dab of lipstick, the only boy is buttoning up his shirt while nibbling on a piece of fruit, everyone’s joshing, quips ping back and forth. She asks me to do up her dress, to say if her bun is okay. She says go on, go back out, you’ll lose your seat, and she’s right, there are no seats left by the time I get there, I park myself by one of the pillars in the cloisters, sheltered under these centuries-old stones, they walk onstage, she comes out first, she’s holding her violin and bow in the same hand, she stops, she waits for the other seven to be onstage, they bow, they move their instruments into position, there’s a pause, two or three seconds of nothingness, of coughs from the audience and then everyone holds their breath. She looks at her fellow players, she inhales deeply and throws herself headlong into the music.