"And you died for just this one?"
"I would have died for any of them," he said. He let his eyes move over the instrument. "I almost did die for all of them. I . . . But this one, this was mine, or so we always said, though of course I was only his son, and there were many and I used to play all of them." He seemed to be musing.
"You did truly die for this violin?"
"Yes! And for the passion to play it. If I'd been born a talentless idiot like you, an ordinary person like you, I would have gone mad. It's a wonder you don't!"
Instantly he seemed sorry. He looked at me almost apologetically.
"But few have ever listened like you, I'll give you that."
"Thank you," I said.
"Few have ever understood the sheer language of music as you do."
"Thank you," I whispered.
"Few have ever . . . longed for such a broad range." He seemed puzzled. He looked almost helplessly at the violin before him.
I said nothing.
He became flustered. He stared at me.
"And the bow," I said, suddenly frightened that he would go, go again, disappear out of vengeance. "Did the great Stradivari make the bow too?"
"Perhaps, it's doubtful. He didn't much bother with bows. But you know that.
This one could be his, it could, and of course you know the wood." His smile came again, intimate and a little wondering.
"I do? I think I don't," I said. "What wood is it?" I touched the bow, the long broad bow. "It's wide, very wide, wider than our modern bows, or those used today."
"To make a finer sound," he said, looking at it, "Oh, you do notice things."
"That is obvious. Anyone would have noticed that. I'm sure the audience in the Chapel noticed that it was a wide bow."
"Don't be so certain of what they noticed. Do you know why it is so wide?"
"So that horsehair and wood don't touch so easily, so that you can play more stridently."
"Stridently," he repeated, with a smile. "Strident. Ah, I never thought of it in that way."
"You attack often enough, you come crashing down. A slightly concave bow is necessary for that, isn't it? What is the wood of the bow, it's some special wood. I can't remember. I used to know these things. Tell me."
"I would like to," he said. "The maker I don't know, but the wood I do know and did when I was alive, and the wood is pernambuco." He studied me as if expecting something. "Does that ring no chords in your memory, pernambuco? Does it have no resonance for you?"
"Yes, but what is pernambuco? I don't-"
"Brazilwood," he said. "And it was only from Brazil that it came at the time this bow was made. Brazil."
I studied him. "Ah, yes," I said.
Suddenly, the wide sea appeared, the brilliant sparkling sea, and the moonlight flooding it, and then a great course of waves. The image was so strong it blotted him out and caught me, but then I felt him lay his hand on my hand.
I saw him. I saw the violin.
"You don't remember? Think."
"Of what? " I asked. "I see a beach, I see an ocean, I see waves."
"You see the city where your friend Susan told you your child was reborn," he said sharply.
"Brazil-." I looked at him. "In Rio, in Brazil, oh, yes, that's what Susan wrote in the letter, Lily was .
"A musician in Brazil, just what you always sought to be, a musiaan, remember?
Lily was reincarnated a musician in Brazil."
"I told you, I threw the letter away. I've never seen Brazil, why do you want me to see it?"
"I don't!" he said.
"But you do."
"Then why do I see it? Why do you wake me when I see the water and the beach?
Why did I dream of it? Why did I see it just now? I didn't recall that part of Susan's letter. I didn't know the meaning of the word 'pernambuco.' I've never been-"
"You're lying again, but you're innocent," he said. "You really don't know it.
Your memory has a few merciful rips in it, or places where the weave is too worn. St.
Sebastian, he is the patron saint of Brazil."
He looked up at Karl's Italian masterpiece of St. Sebastian above the fireplace.
"Remember that Karl wanted to go, to complete his work on St. Sebastian, to gather the Portuguese renderings of St. Sebastian that he knew were there, and you said you'd rather not."
I was hurt and unable to answer. I had said this to Karl, I'd disappointed him. And he had never been well enough again to make the trip.
"Ah, she faults herself so naturally," he said. "You didn't want to go because it was the place that Susan had mentioned in her letter."
"I don't remember."
"Oh, yes, you do, because I wouldn't know it if you didn't."
"I can't make any sea pounding on a beach in Brazil. You're going to have to find something worse, something more specific. Or disentangle it from yoursel£ because you don't want me to see it, which can only mean-"
"Stop your stupid analysis."
I sat back.
Pain had for the moment won out. I couldn't speak. Karl had wanted to go to Rio, and there had been many a time when I was very young that I had wanted to go-south to Brazil and Bolivia and Chile and Peru-all those otherworldly places, and Susan had said it in the letter, that Lily had been reborn in Rio, and there was something else, some fragment, some detail.
"The girls," he said.
I remembered.
In our building in Berkeley, in the apartment above Susan, the beautiful Brazilian woman and her two daughters and how they said when they left, "Lily, we'll never forget you." University people from Brazil. There had been several families. I went to the bank and got silver dollars for them and gave them each five, those beautiful girls with the deep, throaty voices, and soft... oh, yes, those were the accents of the speech in the dream! I looked at him.
The language of the marble temple was Portuguese.
He stood up in rage. He drew back the violin.
"Give in to it, suffer it, why don't you? You gave them the silver dollars, and they kissed Lily and they knew she was dying but you thought Lily didn't. It was only after Lily died that her friend, her motherly friend Susan, told you that Lily had known all along she was going to die."
"I won't, I swear I won't." I stood up. "I'll exorcise you like some cheap demon before I'll let you do this to me."
"You do it to yourself."
"You go too far, much too far, and for your own purposes. I remember my daughter. That's enough. I..."
"What? Lie with her in an imaginary grave? What do you think my grave is like?"
"You have one?"
"I don't know," he said. "I never looked. But then they would never have put me in consecrated ground, or given me a stone."
"You look as sad and broken as I feel."
"Never," he said.
"Oh, we are some pair."
He drew back, as if he were afraid of me, clutching the violin to his chest.
I heard the dull stroke of a clock-one of several, the loudest perhaps coming from the dining room. Hours had passed, hours as we sat here sparring.
I looked at him and a terrible malice grew in me, a vengeance that he even knew my secrets, let alone drew them out and played with them. I reached for the violin.
He drew back. "Don't."
"Why not? Will you fade if it leaves your hands?"
"It's mine!" he said. "I took it with me into death and with me it remains. I don't ask why anymore. I don't ask anything anymore."
"I see, and if it is broken, shattered, smashed in any sense?"
"It can't be."
"Looks to me like it could."
"You're stupid and mad."
"I'm tired," I said. "You've stopped crying and now it's my turn."
I walked away from him. I opened the back doors of the room to the dining room.
I could see straight through it and Out the back windows of the house, and there the tall cherry laurels were lighted against the fence of the Chapel priest house, bright leaves in a flash of electric lights, moving as if there were a wind, and I hadn't-in this big house, creaky as it might be-hadn't even noticed the wind. Now I heard it tapping the panes, and creeping beneath the floors.