Carlos Fuentes - A Change of Skin

Kamilla, and at times Hanna, for she liked to help, labored hard to keep the professor’s instruments polished and gleaming. And he, for all his spirituality, with no apology minutely scrutinized his accounts and carried on a permanent inquiry with Kamilla concerning the fate of the crowns earned by five lessons, seven students a day, fourteen tiring hours, with three bottles of pivo at the end of it. Well, why not pivo? Beer is a fit drink for a man who earns his livelihood by working with the classical wind instruments: the flute, the oboe, the clarinet, and the bass horn: windy work, foamy refreshment, eh? And Franz and Hanna would hold hands and know that the moment had come for stories, for the old music teacher to remember the origins of his instruments the way other men remember great events or the faces of women they have loved or the names of their noblest ancestors. Take the oboe, for example. He reached out and caressed the instrument. The oboe was born in the court of Louis XIV. Oboe, hautbois. When Lully was named superintendent of music for the royal chamber, he introduced the Italian style of indoor music-making and little by little shifted the former open-air concerts into the rooms of the palace, thus converting music from what one heard in the background during public ceremonies into an entertainment based on intimacy, closed doors. The musicians of the Écurie du Roi accepted the style and from their effort at refinement was born the oboe, invented by Jean Hotteterre and Michel Philidor. And so the good professor drank and orated, waxing eloquent as he referred to the clarinet, invented by Denner in Nuremberg and discovered by Mozart thanks to the musicians of Mannheim, the oboe di caccia and the oboe d’amore of Bach; and the Arabic instrument, the lute, first manufactured by the German craftsmen of Bologna, the Malers, Hans Frei, and Nikola Sconvelt first, later the Germans of Padua, the Hartungs, and of Venice, Magno Dieffopruchar, and of Rome, Büchenberg. The Germans of Italy … that German weakness for sunny skies!

Kamilla served the knedlik with a kind of mustard sauce and between bites Maher would go on reminiscing, as if he had at that moment entered an ancient hall in which in a single circle were gathered all his loved instruments, the viola, the rebec, the zither, the lute, the psaltery, the harp, the drum, the trumpets, the horns, the cymbals, the bells, the timbrels, the flutes, the German cornet, the various medieval bagpipes: the cornemuse, the chevrette, the muse de blef. And Hanna, smiling, followed the score of Guillaume de Machaut while Maher sang from memory and concluded: “And to me it seems that such a melody has never been seen or heard…”

They continued to see each other every Friday evening at the concerts in the Wallenstein Palace, sitting on folding chairs in front of an open hall with stucco decorations and mythological frescoes illuminated by floodlights. They listened to Brahms’s German Requiem sitting closer and closer together, their shoulders and arms touching, then holding hands, then Franz’s arm around her.

“Aren’t you cold?”

“No, I’m fine now.”

Grant them eternal rest, oh Lord, and eternal light. Two groups of cellos. Separated by the gloomy violas. The choir at its softest. A lament. But the melancholy and sadness of the instruments is endowed with a certain gaiety by the human voice. The voices in two groups too: the men low, the women higher-toned, happier. The brilliant sounds of the violins, the clarinets, and the flutes are here excluded. The lament of the cellos, their chords opening and stretching to unite them, a movement that is interrupted by the violas. The meaning of the tonal color: that we do not go down to sadness, we rise to it. It is a scream that is not a scream, an ascending unhappiness that contains yet conceals its secret shriek.

“Where do you live, Hanna?”

“In a boarding house. My family live in Zvolen. I used to go see them during vacation. But there are so many things to do, to hear in Prague in the summer. I think they understand. And you?”

The resigned, melancholy file of mourners moves forward. They bear the body of the one who has died. They carry him, and us, to the place of rest. They remember him. The harp remembers. Life lives surrounded by grief. That tension increases. In counterpoint the voices of the men and the women endure their suffering, elevate it. But the organ drags them downward again, prevents them from remembering, forces the music into a funerary march dominated by the voices of the men. Those of the women repeat in a tone that tries to recapture fleeing life.

“I’ll go to Germany in the fall. To study architecture.”

“Oh…”

Now the violas in a struggle burdened with pain. Memory tries to enter. It becomes the razor’s edge between life and death, but it cannot separate them and melts, becomes confused. A mixed choir now: memory and life and death are one. A solemn acceptance, dignified, not weeping. The women alone, soft, slow. The men again with prolonged accents: the march resumes. A horn announces that they had stopped, impels them to continue moving toward the place of rest. They walk slowly, their voices rising to create the illusion of a haste that wants to escape pain while their bodies desire to prolong it.

“No, there’s no one in the boarding house Sundays. They all go out. Especially now, when it’s so warm and beautiful.”

“Hanna.”

The invitation of the harp: let us rest, remember, for one instant. Let us stop and remember. The march resumes. Death is with us already. Memory cannot resurrect life. It cannot bring back the beat of a heart, sweat in a palm, the blink of living eyes. In their highest registers the violin and the viola accompany the mourners, are doubled, and finally attend the unconscious transformation of the march into dance.

“Hanna! Stop! Wait for me! What’s wrong?”

“Never mind, it’s nothing, nothing. I’m tired, that’s all. Don’t pay any attention. I ran and got tired. Really, that’s all. Come on now, catch me.”

“Hanna!”

“It’s just the wind, that’s all. It makes me cry. Always. Catch me!”

The women’s voices as they separate from the mourners and sinuously move their arms above their heads. A muted diminuendo thins and at the same time makes brilliant. Spectral happiness, its eyes shut, leads the dancers. The dance and the funeral procession advance together. They recognize each other. For a brief moment happiness. And when it is suspended, the tone of grief does not return. A different tone appears, a natural, almost everyday tone. It distracts them. It contrasts with sorrow that is authentic, just as the happiness was authentic. A celebration now. Every act in which we join together must be festive. Birth. Marriage. Death. Feasting. Everything that unites us, that takes us away from our solitude. Dance. A duel. Drunkenness. War. A party.

“I love you.”

“We’ll have time, Hanna. More than enough. I promise you.”

“Don’t talk. Come.”

A brilliant, spectral, happy, sorrowing fugue. The organ stops all movement. For a moment so brief. Only a moment. The dance of death is a hymn of happiness. Listen. Don’t stop listening. Johannes Brahms. Who worked for ten years on this funeral file of voices and tones, this wreath that cannot be touched, this Deutsches Requiem. He found the title in a forgotten notebook that had belonged to his teacher, Robert Schumann. Now almost a pizzicato. It dies, ends. The dancers return to their places in the procession. Their voices are silent as the horn speaks. The march. The lament. An effort to recapture the dance.

“Why?”

“It’s like learning to remember you.”

The procession has created its own memory. First that of the corpse they carry on their shoulders. Now memory of the procession itself, its grave pace, its lament, its dance. Even what is happening in this moment is memory. The orchestra begins to recover all the loose threads. The voices, dispersed for a little, unite. What they have been is reviewed and remembered and then they burst forth with the jubilation of trumpets: a plea for resurrection, the will to be born again. The brasses that formerly were sad now are gay in a great double fugue of faces rising toward the light, voices set free but nevertheless prescient of a grieving horn that proclaims desire and denies its fulfillment.