Anne Rice - Violin

"But you were jealous, consumed with rage, more jealous of her than ever of Lev and all his young girls."

"You're going have to explain this to me."

"With pleasure. You were in an agony of envy, because your reincarnated daughter revealed herself to Susan and not to you! That was your thought. It couldn't be true, because how could the link between Lily and Susan have been stronger! That's what you felt, outrage. Pride, the same pride that let you give away Lev when he didn't know his left hand from his right, when he was sick with gn.ef, when-"

I didn't answer him.

He was absolutely right.

I had been tormented by the very idea that anyone would claim such intimacy with my lost daughter, that Susan in her seemingly addled brain would imagine that Lily, reincarnated, had confided in her instead of me.

He was right. How perfectly stupid. And how Lily had loved Susan. Oh, the bond between those two!

"So, you play another card. So what?" I reached for the violin. He didn't loosen his grip. Indeed, he tightened it.

I fondled the violin but he wouldn't allow me to move it. He watched me. It felt real; it was magnificent; it was lustrous and mate rial and gorgeous in its own right, without a note of music coming forth from it. Ah, to touc h it. To touch such a fine and old violin.

"It's a privilege, I take it?" I asked bitterly. Don't think about Susan and her story of Lily being reborn.

"Yes, it is a privilege. .. but you deserve as much."

"And why is that?"

"Because you love the sound of it perhaps more than any other mortal for whom I've ever played it."

"Even Beethoven?"

"He was deaf, Triana," he said in a whisper.

I laughed out loud. Of course. Beethoven had been deaf! The whole world knew that, as well as they knew that Rembrandt was Dutch, or that Leonardo da Vinci had been a genius. I laughed freely, kind of softly.

"That is very funny, that I should forget." He was not amused.

"Let me hold it."

"I will not."

"But you just said-"

"So what of what I said? The privilege does not extend that far. You can't hold it.

You can touch it, but that's all. You think I'd let a creature like you ever so much as pluck the string? Don't try it!"

"You must have died in a rage."

"I did."

"And you, the pupil, what did you think of Beethoven, though he couldn't hear you play, what was your estimation of him?"

"I adored him," he whispered. "I adored him as you do in your inind without ever having known him, only I did, and I was a ghost before he died.

I saw his grave. I thought when I came into that old cemetery that I would die again of grief, of horror, that he was dead, that a marker stood there for him. .. but I couldn't."

He totally lost the look of spite.

"And it came so quick. That's how it is in this realm. Things are quick. Or lingering and seemingly eternal. Years had passed for me in some haze. Later, so much later, I heard of his great funeral, from the chatter of the living, of how they had carried Beethoven's coffin through the streets. Ah, Vienna loves grand funerals, loves them, and now he has his proper monument, my Maestro." His voice fell almost to silence.

"How I wept at that old grave." He looked off, wondering, but his hand never relaxed on the violin.

"Remember when your daughter died, you wanted the whole world to know?"

"Yes, or to stop or to take one second to reflect or. . . something."

"And all your California friends didn't know how to sit through a simple Mass for the Dead, and half of them lost the trail of the hearse on the freeway."

"So what?"

"Well, the Maestro you so love had the funeral you so desired."

"Yes, and he is Beethoven, and you knew him and I know him. But what is Lily?

Lily is what? Bones? Dust?"

He looked tender and regretful.

My voice wasn t strident or angry.

"Bones, dust, a face, I can recall perfectly-round, with a high forehead like my mother's, not like mine, oh, my mother's face," I said. "I like to think of her. I like to remember how beautiful she was...

"And when Lily's hair fell out and she cried?"

"Beautiful still. You know that. Were you beautiful when you died?"

The violin felt silky and perfect.

"Sixteen ninety was the year in which it was made," he said. "Before I was born, long before. My father bought it from a man in Moscow, where I've never been, not even since, nor would I go on any account."

I looked lovingly at it. I really didn't care much about anything in the world then but it, ghost or fake or real.

"Real and spectral." He corrected me. "My father had twenty instruments made by Antonio Stradivari, all of them fine, but none as fine as this, the long violin."

"Twenty? I don't believe you!" I said suddenly. But I didn't know why I said it.

Rage.

"Jealousy, that you have no talent," he said.

I studied him; he had no clear direction. He didn't know whether or not he hated me or loved me, only that he desperately needed me.

"Not you," he countered, "just someone.

"Someone who loves this?" I asked. "This violin and knows it's 'the long Strad'

that the elder Stradivari made near the end of his life?" I asked. "When he had broken away from the influence of Amati?"

His smile was soft and sad, no-worse than that, deeper than that, full of hurt, or was it thanks?

"Perfect F holes," I said softly, reverently, running my fingers over them on the belly of the violin. Don't touch the string.

"No, don't," he said. "But you can... you can keep touching it."

"You are the one weeping now? Real tears?"

I meant it to be mean but it lost its power. I just looked at the violin and I thought how exquisite, how unexplainable. Try to tell someone who hasn't heard a violin what the sound is like, this voice of this instrument, and think-how many generations lived and died without ever hearing anything quite like it.

His tears were becoming to his long deep-set eyes. He didn't fight them. For all I knew, he made them, made them like he made the whole image of himself.

"If only it were that simple," he confided.

"A dark varnish," I said looking at the violin. "That tells the date, doesn't it, and that the back is jointed-two pieces, I've seen that, and the wood is from Italy."

"No," he said. "Though many of the others were." He had to clear his throat, or the semblance of it, in order to speak.

"It's the long violin, yes, you are right on that; they call it stretto lungo."

He spoke sincerely and almost kindly. "All that knowledge in your head, all those details you know of Beethoven and Mozart, and your weeping as you listen to them, clutching your pillow-"

"I follow you," I said. "Don't forget the Russian madman as you so unkindly call him. My Tchaikovsky. You played him well enough."

"Yes, but what good did any of it do you? Your knowledge, your desperate reading of Beethoven's or Mozart's letters and the endless study of the sordid detail of Tchaikovsky's life? Look, here you are, what are you?"

"The knowledge keeps me company," I said, slowly and calmly, letting my words speak to him as much as to me, "rather like you keep me company." I leant forward, and came as close to the violin as I could. The light from the chandelier was poor. But I could see through the F hole the label, and only the round circle and the letters AS and the year, perfectly written as he had said: 1690.

I didn't kiss this thing, that seemed a wanton vulgar thing even to think 0£ I just wanted to hold it, put it in place on my shoulder, that much I knew how to do, to wrap my left fingers around it.

"Never."

"All right," I said with a sigh.

"Paganini had two by Antonio Stradivari when I met him, and neither was as fine as this-"