Hugo Hamilton - Every Single Minute

The ushers were calling out in German and in English, asking people to begin taking their seats. The foyer had chandeliers and gold-painted beading around the walls, like a palace. People were dressed up in their best gear, so to speak, their opera costumes. Women with off-the-shoulder dresses. Men wearing really good suits. Only one thin man in the middle of the crowd dressed in a crumpled jacket and a faded pink T-shirt. He was not interested in style. He was staring into the distance as though he could only concentrate on the opera ahead, like he didn’t eat very much and lived only through music, a human ear in the shape of a man.

As we went in to take our seats she was smiling, like she was home at last. The usher took the wheelchair and said he would bring it back in at the interval, it was going to be right outside the door, just so we knew. The place was packed out, including all the private boxes. She looked at the circular dome above and the chandeliers. And then came the moment she was waiting for, when all the voices of people talking at once come together with the instruments tuning up, a million words mixed up with the random sounds of the orchestra, everyone for themselves and no order to it, only a big blur of notes and words before the lights go down and the silence returns and the performance begins.

Can I silence the love within me?

She reminded me of what happens in the opera.

Can I silence that love? The key moment to watch out for, she said, as if she was saying it to herself.

I wondered why Don Carlos doesn’t run away, that’s what I would have done. It’s the first thing that would occur to me, running away. Doesn’t everybody do that? Don’t we all run away? But I’m not Don Carlos and it’s not possible to escape from love. Because Don Carlos is in love with the Queen, the woman his father stole from him. So he can’t leave. No more than any one of us can leave. He’s trapped inside his life. All the people on stage are trapped in their lives, trapped inside the family. They can’t run away because their lives will come after them.

And then something quite strange happened on stage. As the story begins to unfold and the King decides to kill the love inside himself to uphold his reign, he begins ruthlessly exercising his power and all these naked captives appear on stage, tied up with ropes around their wrists and feet. They are in very bad shape, tortured and starved, with lash marks across their bodies. I remembered walking by the sea once with my mother on a stormy day in the summer and we saw a man like that with cuts all over his body, like a crucifix, my mother said. He had been thrown without mercy against the rocks by the waves. He was shivering, I remember. Under his shoulder, the skin had been torn right off, like a piece missing, his knees were red and his towel was pink with blood and he was just staring back at the waves that nearly killed him. That’s what the King in Don Carlo had ordered his men to do to these people on stage, make them look like male and female people on the cross.

While the King is having dinner with his family, his son stands up and threatens his father with a knife. There is a struggle and the knife is taken from Don Carlos. Then everything carries on as planned and the half-crucified people get strung up. Men in black paramilitary gear come in and pour petrol all over them. The naked and lashed people are left hanging by their feet, upside-down, above the stage, covered in petrol. I’m serious. All these half-alive men and women suspended by ropes around their ankles over the stage, blood and petrol dripping from their bodies and their hair falling down, they look like carcasses. While the King continues having his dinner and drinking wine, the Queen has to sit there and keep him company, even though she doesn’t love him, she loves his son instead, Don Carlos.

What is that for? Úna said. What are all those poor people doing naked on stage?

They’re the victims, so I gather. People who spoke against the King.

That is ridiculous, she said.

She actually laughed out loud. More like a laugh and a shout together. What? Because she had seen this particular opera many times and she had never seen anything like this before. Never, she said. They had nothing like this at the Met. Have they no imagination left? Does everything barbaric have to be so barbaric on the stage, she said.

It is a bit barbaric, I agreed.

This is terrible, Liam. This whole thing is wrong.

She was getting quite worked up. Rubbish, she was saying, which I believe she was quite entitled to do, responding emotionally to the drama. People were shouting bravo every now and then to make sure they could be heard listening. So what was wrong with her offering her opinion as well.

This is awful, she shouted. Awful. Awful. Awful.

I asked her to keep her voice down but she couldn’t. Her imagination was too big. She didn’t have her bag with her either, so there was no medication at hand to calm her down.

Please, one of the men close to us said.

And then luckily the interval came. The men in paramilitary gear came to set fire to the naked people. So I ran and got the wheelchair. She was still shouting on the way out, saying it was wrong not to allow us to imagine the worst for ourselves. But then I knew it was not the naked people that were bothering her so much as her own brother up on stage. Her own family in front of her eyes.

She didn’t want to go back after the interval. We were waiting in the foyer and once the audience began to take their seats again for the second part of the evening, she put her hand up to let me know that she wanted to stay out.

I don’t want to see my brother like this, she said.

So we didn’t take our seats again. We stayed in the foyer watching all the people drifting back inside. The orchestra started to tune up again without us. We had the foyer to ourselves, except for one of the ushers coming to ask us if we were waiting for a taxi. She didn’t want to stay and she didn’t want to leave. She wanted to remain close by and listen without seeing, particularly the aria where the King sings about the Queen having no love for him.

I was curious to find out what happens in the end, how the father kills his own son. I asked her how Don Carlos dies, but she seemed to forget which family I was talking about. She said he came back to Dublin and he could never find his feet again. She said she bought an apartment for him to live in but that didn’t mean all that much to him and he was not really able to live on his own. She couldn’t give him any more money because she thought he would only kill himself with it, that’s how she put it. I didn’t want to kill him with money. He was taking all kinds of drugs and drinking heavily and nobody could rescue him. She was in New York at the time and she kept asking to find out how he was, but it was hard to come back and see him going downhill, not even feeding himself, only drinking and hiding to forget. And then he was found one day lying out in the back garden, face down like his own mother.

She said it was not her father who killed him. Her father and mother were in love, and maybe that’s the danger of people being so insanely in love, they didn’t care about their children. Her brother was a casualty of love, she said.

Instead of continuing to accuse her father of murder, this time she was pointing the finger at herself. I think it was hard for her to say this. She said she should have looked out for her brother a bit more, she could have rescued him.

I cannot forgive myself, she said.

After the interval, in the foyer, she said this to me. She spoke in a quiet voice, still listening to the music, possibly made aware of something by the music that she had not allowed herself to say before. I cannot forgive myself, she said, for letting my brother down. For not allowing him to look into my eyes, back in London, when he needed me. He was the youngest, you know, and I should have cared for him. I should have been his mother for him. I should have been his father for him. Instead of sending him off into the world on his own.