Richard Powers - The Time of Our Singing

Anyone but a musician might tell you that all silences sound the same. But Ruth’s silence, on the way home, modulated into a new song.

I heard Delia’s Bach not long after that. She soloed across town in a pan-Philadelphia performance of the B Minor Mass. Jonah might not have favored such high-powered magnificence. But even he, hearing this, would have been delivered. Delia’s Laudamus Te carried all the rapture that that Latin-writing Lutheran posted forward in it. Every note was faultless, as written. And yet it swung, kicking back and dancing like there was no tomorrow. Which there isn’t. Ever. That eerie, unearthbound work had found its celebrant. Praise is praise, my cousin’s voice said. Music’s music. Don’t let anyone tell you otherwise.

Two nights later, I heard her sing Villa-Lobos’s Bachianas brazileiras no.5. The piece had long ago become a theme-park poster for itself, as over-played and unhearable a monument as Wilson Hart’s adored Rodrigo, done in by too much love. But in Delia Banks’s sinuous, ethereal turns, it went desperate for me again, mystic, possessed, sexy, a single endless sequence spun out of one breath. It wasn’t even that I’d never heard it properly. I’d simply never heard it. Her version sighed past any of the scores of recordings I knew. And hers would never be recorded.

I had lunch with her, just the two of us, almost clandestine, in the same diner where my mother and grandmother had once secretly met. “Ghosts everywhere,” Delia said. “We’re lucky they’re so big on sharing.”

I didn’t know how to speak my pleasure. “You could have… Name the life you want.” Times had changed. Or would have to, for this woman. “You can have the international concert career of your choice.” I knew the odds, yet knew, too, how little I was exaggerating. A person could live his whole life chasing music and be lucky to hear one time-sent voice. I was near kin to two of them.

My cousin favored me with a high-watt version of her stage smile, the one that made her audiences love her before she opened her throat. “Thank you, sir. You say the sweetest things, for a lost soul.”

“I’m serious.”

“I know you are.” The waitress came and Delia traded barbs with her. When the woman left, my cousin shook her head at me. “You ever sing at Salzburg?”

“Several times. A beautiful place. You’d love it.”

“I know. I’ve seen the movie. The one with that spinning nun? You ever sing at the Festival d’Art lyrique d’Aix-en-Provence?”

“We once won a prize there.” As I answered, it dawned on me: Delia already knew.

“You happy?” She knew the answer to that one, too. “Ask me if I’m happy. Ask me what kind of career I want. I got everything in the world already, cuz. Got my church. Who’d need a bigger stage than that? I’ve got people I love singing with me, building the sound, taking me higher. Every piece we do, we make our own, whatever post office it came on through. I got a repertoire long enough to last me two lifetimes. One short and the other long.”

I went wily and virtuous all at once. “You owe it…to the source of your gift not to hide that light under a bushel. To bring that sound to as many people as possible.”

Delia thought about my words. They troubled her, a slip of evil moving about in the Garden. “No. This isn’t about bigger numbers. Are you happy? You can’t make anyone happy if you’re not happy yourself.”

She had my X-rays clipped up on the light box just to the side of our booth, and she didn’t at all like what she saw. I had to take the offensive, before she finished me off. “Are you afraid?”

The idea amused her. “Of who?”

I might have drawn her up a list: all the people who’d want you dead just for traveling on the only passport you get. She knew the costs, hidden and obvious, even just for singing across town. Avoidance might not be fear. It might be more like fear’s opposite. “Simple preference, then?”

“Oh, I’ll sing whatever glory’s sitting on the music stand.”

“But only religious music.”

Delia played with the salt and pepper shakers. “All music’s religious music. All the good parts anyway.” It was true: Even her languorous, sultry Portuguese siren song had seduced for a brighter flame.

“Well, I’ve heard what you did to that backwoods German cracker. So I know this isn’t about cultural ownership.”

“Oh, but it is.” As soon as she spoke the words, everything was. No culture without owners, without owned.

“You’re anti-Europe?” Sick, imperial, supremacist, and striving to please the eternal angels.

“‘Anti-Europe’?” Delia rolled her eyes. “Can’t very well be that. Though Europe has cost me more cars than we’re going to talk about today, honey. No, can’t be anti-Europe without doing more amputation than is good for a body. Every song we sing’s got white notes running through it. But that’s the beauty of the situation, cuz. We’re making a little country here, out of mutual theft. They come over into our neck of the woods, take all we got. We sneak over into their neighborhood, middle of the night, grab a little something back, something they didn’t even know they had, something they can’t even recognize no more! More for everybody that way, and more kinds of everybody.” She shook her head. A low mezzo growl of despite came out of her chest. “No. Can’t be anti-Europe when everyone’s part Europe. But got to be pro-Africa, for the same reason.”

Surely her church loved her too much to keep her to themselves. “Thousands could hear you. Hundreds of thousands.”

“As many as hear your brother?” She regretted the words as soon as they were out.

“You could change the way people think.”

“Change! You still waiting for music to cure us? Bach? Mozart? Nazis love them, too. Music never cured anyone. Look at your poor sister. Look at her man. Figure that out with music. Do you have a single song you can sing her to take care of her now? One single song that can do anything for her, that won’t shrivel up and die of helpless shame?”

It wasn’t too late for me to learn a trade. Some honest living. I could still type. Typing and filing for a pro bono law firm. I took a breath, went down into my bass days with Voces Antiquae, already ancient history. “The song is only as good as its listener.”

“Your sister. For her. For her.”

I looked for what I believed. “Maybe we sing for ourselves.”

“At least that. Nothing without that. But nothing if only that. We need a music that sings to anyone. That makes them sing. No audience!”

“AM radio.”

“Can’t hurt me with that.”

“Gospel sings to anyone?” I had another list for her, if she wanted it.

“Anyone with ears to hear.”

“That’s just it. Our ears only hear what sounds people get a chance to know.”

“Oh, people know. Listen. Every beautiful sound comes from saying what’s happened to us. Well, name someone who’s had more happen to them than us.”

“Us?”

“Yes, cuz.”

Her words blunted the ones that were loaded in my throat. I had no comeback but the one that shamed me most. “I’m greedy. I want to hear…” All those implicated, complicit, compromised old warhorses. She could work their salvation. Only a black voice could do that now. “I want to hear that music…redeemed.” Hear it be, at last, what it had always pretended to be.

Delia glowed a moment with the thought. But I was the devil, tempting her to turn stones into bread. “Cuz, cuz. You’re not getting this. I’ve got my church. My Jesus.”

“Doesn’t he come from Europe?”

She grinned. “Ours comes from a little south of there. Listen to me. I’ve got my work. I’ve got ours. You hear how glorious that word sounds? I don’t blame you for living your life. You were raised when we still thought the only way to get what they got is to copy their stuff. We’re us and ain’t never gonna be them, and where’s the pain in that? Just as big — bigger, given the whole story. Why you working so hard over something you can’t save and doesn’t want to be?”