Mawrdew Czgowchwz (26 page)

Achille Plonque's French song recital delighted chiefly by dint of its elegant assurance and elegiac tone, its wistful evocations of haunted memories, its tender sadnesses. The effect the singer sustained was most like that one experiences sitting looking through a quivering window at rain on a November afternoon. The audience, reacting in empathy, consented to ask itself
what it was to live a life
, and not to answer itself. Creplaczx's accompaniment, supportive, plaintive, complemented the tenor as only a genius's must.

Laverne Zuckerman, with Dame Sybil Farewell-Tarnysh, went to town next night in fulfilling performances of Cole Porter's most telling miniatures. The hit of the evening was Laverne's “All through the Night,” during which many eyes, awash, looking backward as far as they must, saw and heard their pasts.

Pèlerin Deslieux and Company cut loose on the fourth night in a program of original works constructed by the group, danced to electronic tapes. Ritualized boundings, turns, leaps, and embracings charged the theater with that particular current—aesthetic/athletic/abstract/sexual—that dance sparks when it succeeds. Limbs sculpting angular formations flung provocation and frustration back and forth in mimetic combat: agitations, calmings, inflictings, caresses. The four pieces (
Abraxas, Borealis, Cataton
, and
Dances of Divided Selves
) wound up and down the aisles. The pas de deux between Pierrot and Carmen in
Cataton
scarified. An audience aroused and provoked returned great thundering rounds of applause, augmented by the clatter of stomping feet.

The farrago soiree, next, was best remembered for the spontaneous creation and “production” of the mock operas
Savonarola
(after Verdi),
Morphine
(after Massenet),
Plotziful
(after Wagner), and
La Farfalla di New York
(after Puccini). Dame Sybil's faultless pastiche accompaniment underpinned the erratic, batty numbers the singers improvised, first in hasty “rehearsals,” then again, after a breather, in “performance.” Beltane's collaboration with Dame Sybil in the
Savonarola
—the frantic scena, aria, curse, and cabaletta, “
Tutt' è vanità e smut!
” ending in a celestial oltrano top F—drew gasps, cheers, hoots, and cackles. The doleful Czgowchwz offering, “
Le chemin assez connu
” from
Morphine
, sung faultlessly one tone flat throughout, took more than one giggling listener wobbling briefly back to the Neri Era. Achille Plonque's bombastic, insipid, delightful “
Ach, er hat mir gewesen
” from
Plotziful
touched a few sensitive nerves, but succeeded. In finale, Laverne Zuckerman's overwrought “
O mio un bel sogno
” from
La Farfalla di New York
, sung gloriously one tone sharp, and acted out verismo with a cigarette, caused yelps of glee and demands for encores.

The supper dance went on all night.

The Czgowchwz-Beltane recital proffered various delights. Most memorable were the “Duetto per due gatti” by Rossini, to which a whole new interpretation was impishly given; the Diana-Endymion scene from Cavalli's
La Calisto
, querulous, tender, suave, prickly; the anonymous sixteenth-century fragment “The Unicorn and the Lady without Shame,” a forth-right staccato piece, fretted with oblique meaning; and Hollenius's treacherous cantata
The First Meeting of Narcissus and Echo
(in the revised Creplaczx version for two oltrani). Again the oltrani achieved perfect communion. The recital, wider in scope than their first, demonstrated Czgowchwz's continuing and Beltane's quick-evolving mastery of coloration, each piece exactly imbued with the shading it required. Invisible, perfect technique—breathing, phrasing, pointing, rounding—achieved another time that rarest effect, the wedding of word to music, the contoured interlock of syllable and sound.

All that was left thereafter was
NOIA
.

The weather on Manitoy had been quite perfect, parading seasonal varieties of light and air across the spans of successive late-summer, sun-drenched days. That all blew away in the early-morning hours of the festival's seventh day.

Walking with his lady along the beach from the Neaport Yacht Club to the Stein beach house (the Steins were stay-ing at Neap Inn), Jacob Beltane waded into the shallow surf under a crescent moon. Halting at once in the sudden rip tide, he cocked his majestic head slightly to the left and listened. Looking straight up at the moon the way children look up to a parent—with an apprehensive trust—the tall oltrano spoke out.

“Well, batten down the hatches!”

Mawrdew Czgowchwz drew a breath. “Batten down the ... What, a storm?”

Jacob beamed in frank delight. “Within the hour. Wow, how apt!”

The diva shivered aptly. “‘Wow,' in a word. O Weather!”

Waxing enthusiastic, Jacob discoursed on Huracan, the Mayan “triple heart of the universe.” They reached the beach house. Insisting on sitting up to wait, he relished the suspense, marveling at the luck: a chance to compare a western Atlantic storm with the great North Sea gales.

Hurricane Amneris blew in like a judgment.

Jacob stood lost in wonder at an unshuttered back bay window while the beach house shook violently around him. Then the bay window blew in...

Jacob stood marveling, quite unharmed, absolutely satisfied. The room lay awash in destruction. Mawrdew Czgowchwz lay asleep upstairs, dreaming sweetly. “What a magnificent tempest,” the warlock proclaimed.

Communications severed, it became impossible to learn what a person was expected to
do
(or not). Then, gradually, some untold psychic mechanism commenced exerting binding force on the entire, frightened festival audience. To the incredulous stupefaction of the townsfolk of Neaport, thirteen-hundred-odd persons clad in fashionable assortments of weatherproof gear gathered on street corners to form arm-locked groups and make their utterly determined way up Neap Hill to the Mawrdew Czgowchwz Theater, in defiance of Amneris's howling fury. Led on by ropes, tumbling in and out of the shrubbery, ducking falling trees, no one was harmed. Singing together like the last, beatified elect, artists and audience convened in a hurricane, to make and to hear music drama.

The wind and the rain's demented force diminished slightly during this astonishing progress, as if Amneris, her bluff called, had decided to go menace elsewhere. She weakened steadily thereafter throughout the afternoon, until in the Mawrdew Czgowchwz Theater atop Neap Hill at Neaport on the island of Manitoy, in the final moments of Creplaczx's
NOIA
, the hollow sound of the perishing tempest moaning in eerie imitation of the woodwinds supporting the final Czgowchwz-Beltane duet died away altogether. Nature's thrust met art's and surrendered, kneeling.

Remembering the turbulence of that operatic matinee in vain pursuit of the elusive act, attempting any definition of the commotion, attempting analyzing
NOIA
—to pin it down—one fails. The truth forbids conveyance.

The path to madness winds through darkness in a tempest. The protagonists whirl helplessly through the tragedy, which seemingly tells at the outset of a family entertaining guests, of a father, a mother, an older brother, younger brother-sister twins, each matched with a visiting fiancé. The initial mise en scène depicts a garden on a late summer afternoon at the turn of the present century. The locality is “Anywhere.” The characters are nameless.

As they endure the passing hours, a succession of tormented monologues, sung between bits of trivial conversation, then fused into a fugal agon whose impact is as devastating as anything in twentieth-century music, compels the characters, each, all, alone and together, to reveal themselves in mythic terms. Façades crumble, masks corrode. (The scenic design itself begins to alter.) Fissiparous influences wreak terrifying effect on time. Years fall out of any reckoned sequence. Nightmare family secrets explode in shrieking anguish. The family Romance, the ageless conflict of unconscious archetypes, incest taboos branded upon all human intercourse, the crises of identity and self-encounter interweave thematically to precipitate a mangled denouement. Characters playing identity charades stalk through one another's memories like wretched fiends.

In titanic rage and terror the central, paternal force collapses, releasing the protagonists (the twins) from their bondage in the world of real time. They flee down paths to all-embracing madness. Fantasy gains full control. (The scenery has undergone an entire transmogrification.) The characters onstage metamorphose, becoming a king, his queen, their princess and her adored, adoring fool, a scheming, wicked courtesan, a menacing foreign prince, and a lord of the Inner Chamber.

At a spectral masked ball intended to celebrate the betrothal of the princess to the foreign prince, the intended is repulsed. (The odious lord of the Inner Chamber had overseen the betrothal intrigue in the privy service of the tyrant king and his limp, impassive queen.) The fool, in gibberish incantations, sings of mournful things—death, anguish, lost bliss. Raising himself to a frenzy, he calls upon night's demons, raising a violent storm, the climax of the work. The princess and her fool escape the palace and their hateful kingdom in the tempest and, in a golden coracle, cross miraculously unharmed to the shore of the land of “Whereas.”

The initial scenic picture, Home, slowly re-forms. Pale lights discover the twins, parted from the others, free of family, of tyrannous espousals, of fearful carnal initiations, and of the thrall of desiccate time. Retreating mystically into one another, seeking out that secret place at the bottom of the garden—rendezvous of their childhood—they remain interlocked, alone together, awaiting death. They dismiss the world and its occasions.

Taking his single bow in the final moments of a howling ovation, Creplaczx, embracing both his oltrano protagonists together, kissed each one gratefully, then walked off the stage, up the aisle, and out of the Mawrdew Czgowchwz Theater as the skies broke open, spilling brilliant sunlight over the island of Manitoy. He flew to New York directly, overcome.

The most dazzling sunset imaginable signaled a perfect finish to the First Annual Czgowchwz Endeavor Life Trust Festival of Music and Dance. They all went back to New York.

Summer came to an entirely good end. Its passing saw the resolution of a crucial cycle in the life of Mawrdew Czgowchwz. Years of diverse bounty lay ahead for the diva—in opera, on the recital platform, in the film world, in conjugal life. She would delight millions on the screen. She would bear another child—to Beltane. She would sing for years and years. She would approach perfection.

All that lay beyond the autumnal equinox, in the unmeasured duration stretching on past now/then, in unworded future perfect hopes in seasons yet unschemed. A single grand occasion loomed between the end of the festival on Manitoy and the sailing of the oltrano couple on the first day of autumn on the
Arcadia
to Cobh: the CELT Autumnal Equinox Bazaar and Costume Ball, in honor of themselves.

This festive extravaganza was initiated by Czgowchwz stalwart Goodman Tangent Percase. The same fierce dedication he had displayed in bringing the Neaport festival to happy issue now energized Percase and the Secret Seven to seek out everyone and everyone's connections to produce a carnival: a classless, proletarian, anarchic, posh blowout the town took to “like so many ecstatic tots to Toyland, tootsie!” (Paranoy, to the Countess Madge, floating in regatta).

Ralph, related matrilineally to certain of the several heads of groups who twice each year organize those Italian street festivals south of Houston, was able, after fending off some initial flak from diehard Neriacs (chastised
in absentia
one Sunday in a pointed sermon delivered by Dom Gesualdo Svelato, O.M.F.), to contract for a reproduction of the famous
carnevale
uptown in the Park. Bands, food stalls, street singers, money wheels, a Ferris wheel, midway booths of all descriptions, and a downtown opera company—the Adorato —were engaged.

Arpenik summoned the New York Armenian crowd. Hundreds of women came away from their stoves that day, exuberant broods in tow, to cook and serve, dance and sing. They took over the entire wine tent.

Paranoy contracted show-biz professionals of various talents for a nostalgic vaudeville interlude.

Gaia della Gueza, with her apprentice craftsmen, hastened to the boathouse at dawn on the very day, to graft elaborate, disguising façades—plywood and gauze canopies, baroque poops, and festooned decks—onto scores of drab little workaday rowboats. They fashioned gondolas, sampans, floating norimons, toy triremes, frigates in miniature, model Egyptian barges, and Polynesian reed rafts in riotous designs and colored them with paints that glow in the dark. (The regatta's participants, selected by lot over WCZG, were allowed the luxury of devising their own costumes.)

Consuelo Gilligan booked gypsies and flamenco dancers, two trained bears called Bertram and Matilda, and a brigade of midget clowns.

Pèlerin Deslieux rounded up his mime troupe.

The Countess Madge, truculent, agreed nevertheless to engineer the Feis appearance, for Czgowchwz. Never having been on the best of terms with the mass of her expatriate compatriots in the diocese, she nonetheless reckoned blood thicker than bile, so set about getting the boyos to come to the shindig. (“They
will
keep saying, ‘The one hand washes the other!'”)