Disgrace (23 page)

Is this the heroine he has been seeking all the time? Will an older Teresa engage his heart as his heart is now?

The passage of time has not treated Teresa kindly. With her heavy bust, her stocky trunk, her abbreviated legs, she looks more like a peasant, a
contadina
, than an aristocrat. The complexion that Byron once so admired has turned hectic; in summer she is overtaken with attacks of asthma that leave her heaving for breath.

In the letters he wrote to her Byron calls her
My friend
, then
My love
, then
My love for ever
. But there are rival letters in existence, letters she cannot reach and set fire to. In these letters, addressed to his English friends, Byron lists her flippantly among his Italian conquests, makes jokes about her husband, alludes to women from her circle with whom he has slept. In the years since Byron's death, his friends have written one memoir after another, drawing upon his letters. After conquering the young Teresa from her husband, runs the story they tell, Byron soon grew bored with her; he found her empty-headed; he stayed with her only out of dutifulness; it was in order to escape her that he sailed off to Greece and to his death.

Their libels hurt her to the quick. Her years with Byron constitute the apex of her life. Byron's love is all that sets her apart. Without him she is nothing: a woman past her prime, without prospects, living out her days in a dull provincial town, exchanging visits with women-friends, massaging her father's legs when they give him pain, sleeping alone.

Can he find it in his heart to love this plain, ordinary woman? Can he love her enough to write a music for her? If he cannot, what is left for him?

He comes back to what must now be the opening scene. The tail end of yet another sultry day. Teresa stands at a second-floor window in her father's house, looking out over the marshes and pine-scrub of the Romagna toward the sun glinting on the Adriatic. The end of the prelude; a hush; she takes a breath.
Mio Byron
, she sings, her voice throbbing with sadness. A lone clarinet answers, tails off, falls silent.
Mio Byron
, she calls again, more strongly.

Where is he, her Byron? Byron is lost, that is the answer. Byron wanders among the shades. And she is lost too, the Teresa he loved, the girl of nineteen with the blonde ringlets who gave herself up with such joy to the imperious Englishman, and afterwards stroked his brow as he lay on her naked breast, breathing deeply, slumbering after his great passion.

Mio Byron
, she sings a third time; and from somewhere, from the caverns of the underworld, a voice sings back, wavering and disembodied, the voice of a ghost, the voice of Byron.
Where are you?
he sings; and then a word she does not want to hear:
secca
, dry.
It has dried up, the source of everything.

So faint, so faltering is the voice of Byron that Teresa has to sing his words back to him, helping him along breath by breath, drawing him back to life: her child, her boy.
I am here
, she sings, supporting him, saving him from going down.
I am your source. Do you remember how together we visited the spring of Arquà? Together, you and I. I was your Laura. Do you remember?

That is how it must be from here on: Teresa giving voice to her lover, and he, the man in the ransacked house, giving voice to Teresa. The halt helping the lame, for want of better.

Working as swiftly as he can, holding tight to Teresa, he tries to sketch out the opening pages of a libretto. Get the words down on paper, he tells himself. Once that is done it will all be easier. Then there will be time to search through the masters – through Gluck, for instance – lifting melodies, perhaps – who knows? – lifting ideas too.

But by steps, as he begins to live his days more fully with Teresa and the dead Byron, it becomes clear that purloined songs will not be good enough, that the two will demand a music of their own. And, astonishingly, in dribs and drabs, the music comes. Sometimes the contour of a phrase occurs to him before he has a hint of what the words themselves will be; sometimes the words call forth the cadence; sometimes the shade of a melody, having hovered for days on the edge of hearing, unfolds and blessedly reveals itself. As the action begins to unwind, furthermore, it calls up of its own accord modulations and transitions that he feels in his blood even when he has not the musical resources to realize them.

At the piano he sets to work piecing together and writing down the beginnings of a score. But there is something about the sound of the piano that hinders him: too rounded, too physical, too rich. From the attic, from a crate full of old books and toys of Lucy's, he recovers the odd little seven-stringed banjo that he bought for her on the streets of KwaMashu when she was a child. With the aid of the banjo he begins to notate the music that Teresa, now mournful, now angry, will sing to her dead lover, and that pale-voiced Byron will sing back to her from the land of the shades.

The deeper he follows the Contessa into her underworld, singing her words for her or humming her vocal line, the more inseparable from her, to his surprise, becomes the silly plink-plonk of the toy banjo. The lush arias he had dreamed of giving her he quietly abandons; from there it is but a short step to putting the instrument into her hands. Instead of stalking the stage, Teresa now sits staring out over the marshes toward the gates of hell, cradling the mandolin on which she accompanies herself in her lyric flights; while to one side a discreet trio in knee-breeches (cello, flute, bassoon) fill in the entr'actes or comment sparingly between stanzas.

Seated at his own desk looking out on the overgrown garden, he marvels at what the little banjo is teaching him. Six months ago he had thought his own ghostly place in
Byron in Italy
would be somewhere between Teresa's and Byron's: between a yearning to prolong the summer of the passionate body and a reluctant recall from the long sleep of oblivion. But he was wrong. It is not the erotic that is calling to him after all, nor the elegiac, but the comic. He is in the opera neither as Teresa nor as Byron nor even as some blending of the two: he is held in the music itself, in the flat, tinny slap of the banjo strings, the voice that strains to soar away from the ludicrous instrument but is continually reined back, like a fish on a line.

So this is art, he thinks, and this is how it does its work! How strange! How fascinating!

He spends whole days in the grip of Byron and Teresa, living on black coffee and breakfast cereal. The refrigerator is empty, his bed is unmade; leaves chase across the floor from the broken window. No matter, he thinks: let the dead bury their dead.

Out of the poets I learned to love
, chants Byron in his cracked monotone, nine syllables on C natural;
but life, I found
(descending chromatically to F),
is another story. Plink-plunk-plonk
go the strings of the banjo.
Why, O why do you speak like that?
sings Teresa in a long reproachful arc.
Plunk-plink-plonk
go the strings.

She wants to be loved, Teresa, to be loved immortally; she wants to be raised to the company of the Lauras and Floras of yore. And Byron? Byron will be faithful unto death, but that is all he promises.
Let both be tied till one shall have expired.

My love
, sings Teresa, swelling out the fat English monosyllable she learned in the poet's bed.
Plink
, echo the strings. A woman in love, wallowing in love; a cat on a roof, howling; complex proteins swirling in the blood, distending the sexual organs, making the palms sweat and voice thicken as the soul hurls its longings to the skies. That is what Soraya and the others were for: to suck the complex proteins out of his blood like snake-venom, leaving him clear-headed and dry. Teresa in her father's house in Ravenna, to her misfortune, has no one to suck the venom from her.
Come to me, mio Byron
, she cries: c
ome to me, love me!
And Byron, exiled from life, pale as a ghost, echoes her derisively:
Leave me, leave me, leave me be!

Years ago, when he lived in Italy, he visited the same forest between Ravenna and the Adriatic coastline where a century and a half before Byron and Teresa used to go riding. Somewhere among the trees must be the spot where the Englishman first lifted the skirts of his eighteen-year-old charmer, bride of another man. He could fly to Venice tomorrow, catch a train to Ravenna, tramp along the old riding-trails, pass by the very place. He is inventing the music (or the music is inventing him) but he is not inventing the history. On those pine-needles Byron had his Teresa – ‘timid as a gazelle,' he called her – rumpling her clothes, getting sand into her underwear (the horses standing by all the while, incurious), and from the occasion a passion was born that kept Teresa howling to the moon for the rest of her natural life in a fever that has set him howling too, after his manner.

Teresa leads; page after page he follows. Then one day there emerges from the dark another voice, one he has not heard before, has not counted on hearing. From the words he knows it belongs to Byron's daughter Allegra; but from where inside him does it come?
Why have you left me? Come and fetch me!
calls Allegra.
So hot, so hot, so hot!
she complains in a rhythm of her own that cuts insistently across the voices of the lovers.

To the call of the inconvenient five-year-old there comes no answer. Unlovely, unloved, neglected by her famous father, she has been passed from hand to hand and finally given to the nuns to look after.
So hot, so hot!
she whines from the bed in the convent where she is dying of
la mal'aria. Why have you forgotten me?

Why will her father not answer? Because he has had enough of life; because he would rather be back where he belongs, on death's other shore, sunk in his old sleep.
My poor little baby!
sings Byron, waveringly, unwillingly, too softly for her to hear. Seated in the shadows to one side, the trio of instrumentalists play the crablike motif, one line going up, the other down, that is Byron's.

TWENTY-ONE

R
OSALIND TELEPHONES
. ‘Lucy says you are back in town. Why haven't you been in touch?' ‘I'm not yet fit for society,' he replies. ‘Were you ever?' comments Rosalind drily.

They meet in a coffee-shop in Claremont. ‘You've lost weight,' she remarks. ‘What happened to your ear?' ‘It's nothing,' he replies, and will not explain further.

As they talk her gaze keeps drifting back to the misshapen ear. She would shudder, he is sure, if she had to touch it. Not the ministering type. His best memories are still of their first months together: steamy summer nights in Durban, sheets damp with perspiration, Rosalind's long, pale body thrashing this way and that in the throes of a pleasure that was hard to tell from pain. Two sensualists: that was what held them together, while it lasted.

They talk about Lucy, about the farm. ‘I thought she had a friend living with her,' says Rosalind. ‘Grace.'

‘Helen. Helen is back in Johannesburg. I suspect they have broken up for good.'

‘Is Lucy safe by herself in that lonely place?'

‘No, she isn't safe, she would be mad to feel safe. But she will stay on nevertheless. It has become a point of honour with her.'

‘You said you had your car stolen.'

‘It was my own fault. I should have been more careful.'

‘I forgot to mention: I heard the story of your trial. The inside story. ‘

‘My trial?'

‘Your inquiry, your inquest, whatever you call it. I heard you didn't perform well.'

‘Oh? How did you hear? I thought it was confidential.'

‘That doesn't matter. I heard you didn't make a good impression. You were too stiff and defensive.'

‘I wasn't trying to make an impression. I was standing up for a principle.'

‘That may be so, David, but surely you know by now that trials are not about principles, they are about how well you put yourself across. According to my source, you came across badly. What was the principle you were standing up for?'

‘Freedom of speech. Freedom to remain silent.'

‘That sounds very grand. But you were always a great self-deceiver, David. A great deceiver and a great self-deceiver. Are you sure it wasn't just a case of being caught with your pants down?'

He does not rise to the bait.

‘Anyway, whatever the principle was, it was too abstruse for your audience. They thought you were just obfuscating. You should have got yourself some coaching beforehand. What are you going to do about money? Did they take away your pension?'

‘I'll get back what I put in. I am going to sell the house. It's too big for me.'

‘What will you do with your time? Will you look for a job?'

‘I don't think so. My hands are full. I'm writing something.'

‘A book?'

‘An opera, in fact.'

‘An opera! Well, that's a new departure. I hope it makes you lots of money. Will you move in with Lucy?'

‘The opera is just a hobby, something to dabble at. It won't make money. And no, I won't be moving in with Lucy. It wouldn't be a good idea.'

‘Why not? You and she have always got on well together. Has something happened?'

Her questions are intrusive, but Rosalind has never had qualms about being intrusive. ‘You shared my bed for ten years,' she once said – ‘Why should you have secrets from me?'

‘Lucy and I still get on well,' he replies. ‘But not well enough to live together.'

‘The story of your life.'

‘Yes.'

There is silence while they contemplate, from their respective angles, the story of his life.

‘I saw your girlfriend,' Rosalind says, changing the subject.