I nestled into my pillow; I crooked my arm under the pillow and snuggled against it, staring right up at him, his figure in the window, peering over the top of the sash through the double panes of glass.
Songs are everywhere you look, in the rain, in the wind, in the moan of the suffering, songs.
She shut the door. Double click, which means, with a New Orleans door, invariably warped, that she really closed it.
The quiet came back over the room as if it had never been mussed in the slightest.
The Avenue gave forth a sudden crescendo of its continued rumble.
Beyond him-my friend peering at me with his black eyes and showing me only a smileless mouth-the birds sang in a late-afternoon spurt that comes each day by their clock and always sur prises me. The traffic made its cheerful dirge.
He moved his tall unkempt form into the full window. Shirt white and soiled and unbuttoned; dark hair on his chest like a shadow or fleece. An opened vest of black wool because its buttons were all gone.
This is what I think I saw, at least.
He leaned very close against the twelve-paned frame. How thin he was, sick perhaps? Like Karl? I smiled to think it might all unfold once more. But no, that seemed very far away now, and he so vivid as he looked down at me, so very remote from the real weakness of death.
There came a chiding look from him, as if to say, You know better.
And then he did smile, and his eyes gave a brighter ever more secretive gleam, as he gazed at me possessively.
His forehead was pale and bony above his lids, but it gave the eyes their lovely sly shadowy depth, and his black hair grew so thick from his beautiful hairline with its widow's peak and well-proportioned temples that it lent him a hefty beauty even in his thinness. He did have hands like spiders! He stroked the upper panes with his right hand. He made prints that I saw in the dust, as the light made tiny inevitable shifts, as the garden beyond him with its dense cherry laurels and magnolias moved and breathed with breeze and traffic.
The thick white cuff of his shirt was soiled, and his coat gray with dust.
A slow change came over his expression. The smile was gone, but there was no animosity there and I realized now that there had never been. An air of superiority, of secretive superiority, had marked him before, but this expression was unguarded and spontaneous.
A baffled tender feeling passed over his face, held it and then released it to what seemed anger. Then he became sad, not publicly or artificially sad, but deeply, privately sad, as if he might lose his grip on this little spectacle of spookdom on the porch. He stepped back. I heard the boards. My house proclaims any movement.
And then he slipped away.
Just like that. Gone from the window. Gone from the porch. I couldn't hear him beyond the shutters at the far corner end. I knew he wasn't there. I knew he had gone away, and I had the most pure conviction that he had in fact vanished.
My heart thudded too loudly.
"If only it wasn't a violin," I thought. "I mean, thank God it's a violin, because there isn't any other sound on earth like that, there's .
My words died away.
Faint music, his music.
He hadn't gone very far. He'd just chosen some dark distant part of the garden way out in the back, near to the rear of the old Chapel Mansion on Prytania Street. My property meets the Chapel property. The block belongs to us, to the Chapel and to me, from Prytania to St. Charles along Third Street. Of course there is another side to the block, where other buildings stand, but this great half of the square is ours, and he had only retreated perhaps as far as the old oaks behind the Chapel.
I thought I would cry.
For one moment, the pain of his music and my own feeling were so perfectly wedded that I thought, I cannot be expected to endure this. Only a fool would not reach for a gun, put a gun in the mouth and pull the trigger-an image that had haunted me often when I was, in younger years, a hopeless drunk, and then again almost continuously until Karl came.
This was a Gaelic song, in the Minor Key, deep and throbbing and full of patient despair and ambitionless longing-he had the Irish fiddle sound in it, the hoarse dark harmony of the lower strings played together in a plea that sounded more purely human than any sound made by child, man or woman.
It struck me-a great formless thought, unable to take shape in this atmosphere of slow lovely embracing music-that that was the power of the violin, that it sounded human in a way that we humans could not! It spoke for us in a way that we ourselves couldn't.
Ah, yes, and that's what all the pondering and poetry has always been about.
It made my tears flow, his song, the Gaelic musical phrases old and new, and the sweet climb of notes that tumbled inevitably into an endless testimony of acceptance.
Such tender concern. Such perfect sympathy.
I rolled over into the pillow. His music was wondrously clear. Surely all the block heard it, the passersby, and Lacomb and Althea at it at the kitchen table with their playing cards or epithets; surely the birds themselves were lulled.
The violin, the violin.
I saw a day in summer some thirty-five years ago. I had my own violin in my case, between me and Gee, who rode his motorcycle, as I clung to him from the back, keeping the violin safe. I sold the violin to the man on Rampart Street for five dollars.
"But you sold it to me for twenty-five dollars," I said, "and that was just two years ago."
Away it went in its black case, my violin; musicians must be the mainstay of pawnshops. Everywhere there hung instruments for sale; or maybe music attracts many bitter dreamers such as me with grandiose designs and no talent.
I had only touched a violin two ti mes since-was that thirty-five years? Almost.
Save for one blazing drunken time and its hangover aftermath, I never even picked up another violin, never never wanted to touch the wood, the strings, the resin, the bow, no, not ever.
But why did I bother to think of this? This was an old adolescent disappointment.
I'd seen the great Isaac Stern play Beethoven's Violin Concerto in our Municipal Auditorium. I'd wanted to make those glorious sounds! I'd wanted to be that figure, swaying on the stage. I wanted to bewitch! To make sounds like these now, penetrating the walls of this room....
Beethoven's Violin Concerto-the first classical piece of music I came to know intimately later from library records.
I would become an Isaac Stern. I had to!
Why think of it? Forty years ago, I knew I had no gift, no ear, could not distinguish quarter tones, hadn't the dexterity or the discipline; the best teachers told me as kindly as they could.
And then there was the chorus of the family, "Triana's making horrible noises on her violin!" And the dour advice of my father that the lessons cost too much, especially for one so undisciplined, lazy and generally erratic by nature.
That ought to be easy to forget.
Hasn't enough common tragedy thundered down the road since then, mother, child, first husband long lost, Karl dead, the toll of time, the deepening understanding-.
Yet look how vivid the long ago day, the pawnbroker's face, and my last kiss to the violin-my violin-before it slid across the dirty glass countertop. Five dollars.
All nonsense. Cry for not being tall, not being slender and graceful, not being beautiful, not having a voice either with which to sing, or even enough determination to master the piano sufficiently for Christmas carols.
I had taken the five dollars and added fifty to it with Rosalind's help and gone to California. School was out. My mother was dead. My father had found a new lady friend, a Protestant with whom to have an ''occasional lunch,'' who cooked huge meals for my neglected little sisters.