Anne Rice - Violin

Don't be so certain.

"Be careful with your tricks," I whispered. "I learned to play from pain from you.

I can do it agam ,"I said. "I'm not easily deceived, you should know that."

What you will see will chill your blood and you will drop the violin, you will beg me to take it, you will let it fall! You will back off from all you have so admired! You 're not fit for it.

"I think not," I said. "You must remember how well I knew them all, how much I loved them, how much I loved the sickbed and the last small detail. Their faces and their forms are perfect in my memory. Don't try to duplicate that. We'll be at wits against each other."

He sighed. There was a falling off, a sliding away, a longing that chilled my arms and neck. I think I heard the sound of crying.

"Stefan," I said, "try, try not to cling to me or this but. .

I curse you. Damn you.

"Stefan, why did you choose me? Were the others such lovers of death, or just music?"

Martin touched my arm. He pointed. Some distance down the road, Antonio was beckoning for us.

It was a long way down. The bodyguards stood watch.

The mist was very wet now, but the sky was clear. Perhaps that's what happens.

The mist melts to rain and becomes transparent.

There was a small clearing before us, and what seemed an old concrete fountain far back, and round in a circle what appeared to be castoff plastic sacks, vividly blue, simple grocery or drugstore sacks. I'd never seen them in such a color.

"Those are their offerings," said Antonio.

"Who?"

"The Mogambo people, the Candomble. See? Each sack has an offering to a god.

One has rice in it, one has something else, perhaps corn, see, they make a circle. See?

There were candles here."

I was delighted. Yet no sense of the supernatural came over me, only the wonder of human beings, the wonder of faith, the wonder of the forest itself creating this small green chapel for the strange Brazilian religion, so mixed with Catholic saints, that no one could ever untwine the varying rituals.

Martin asked the questions. How long ago had they met here? What had they done?

Antonio struggled for words... a ritual purification.

"Would that save you?" I whispered. Of course, I spoke to Stefan.

No answer came.

Only the forest lay around us, the sparkling forest as the rain came floating down.

I closed my arms tight around the well-covered violin lest some dampness get inside, and I stared at the old circle of

strange tacky blue plastic sacks, the stubs of the candles. And why not blue sacks?

Why not? In ancient Rome, had the lamps of the temple been that different from the lamps of a household? Blue sacks of rice, of corn . . . for spirits. The ritual circle. The candles.

"One stands. . . you know, in the center," Antonio sought for his English, "to perhaps be purified."

No sound from Stefan. No whisper. I looked up through the mesh of green above.

The rain covered my face soundlessly.

"It’s time to go," said Martin. "Triana, you have to sleep. And our hosts. Our hosts have some grand plan of picking you up early. Seems they are inordinately proud of this Teatro Municipale."

"But it is an opera house," said Antonio, placatingly, "and very grand. Many people do enjoy to see it. And after the concert there will be such crowds."

"Yes, yes I want to go early," I said. "It's full of beautiful marble, isn't it?"

"Ah, so you know about it," he said. "It is splendid.

We drove back in the rain.

Antonio confessed with laughter that in all the years he had done such tours he had never seen the rain forest during the rain, and this was quite a spectacle to him. I was wrapped in beauty, and no longer afraid. I figured I knew what Stefan meant to do.

Some thought was taking shape that almost seemed a plan.

It had begun in my mind in Vienna, when I had played for the people of the Hotel Imperial.

I never slept.

The rain teemed on the sea.

All was gray and then darkness. Bright lights defined the broad divisions of Copacabana Boulevard, or the Avenida Atlantica.

In a pastel bedroom, air-conditioned, I dozed perhaps, watching the gray electric night seal up the windows.

For hours, I lay peering at what seemed the real world of the ticking clock, in this the Presidential bedroom of the suite, peering through thin closed eyelids.

I put my arms around the violin, curled against it, holding it as my mother held me, or I held Lily, or as Lev and I, and Karl and I, had snuggled together.

Once in panic I almost went to the phone to call my husband, Lev, my lawfully wedded husband, whom I had so stupidly given away. No, that will only cause him pain, both him and Chelsea.

Think of the three boys. Besides, what made me think he would come back, my Lev? He shouldn't leave her and his children. He should not do that, and I should not think of it, or even wish for it.

Karl, be with me. Karl, the book is in good hands. Karl, the work's done. I drew the haggard confused figure back from the desk. "Lie down, Karl, all the papers are in order now."

There came a loud banging sound.

I woke up.

I must have been asleep.

The sky was clear and black beyond the windows.

Somewhere in the living room or dining room of the suite, a window had blown open. I heard it flapping, banging. It was the window in the living room, the window in the very center of the hotel.

In sock feet, the violin in my arms, I walked across the dark bedroom and into the living room, and felt the strong push of the cleansing wind. I looked out.

The sky was clear and studded with stars. The sand was golden in the electric lights that ran the length of the boulevard.

The sea raged on the broad beach.

The sea rolled in, in countless glassy overlapping waves, and in the lights, the curl of each wave was for an instant almost green, and then the water was black and then there arose before me the great dance of foaming figures.

Look, it was happening all up and down the beach, with every wave.

I saw it once, twice, I saw it to the right and to the left. I studied one great chorus after another. Wave after wave brought them rising with their outstretched arms towards the shore or towards the stars or towards me, I couldn't know.

Sometimes the stretch of the wave was so long and the foam so thick that it broke into eight or nine lithe and graceful forms, with heads and arms and bowing waists, before they lapsed back and the next band came rolling after them.

"You're not the souls of the damned or the saved," I said. "Oh, you are only beautiful. Beautiful as you were when I saw you in prophetic sleep. Like the rain forest on the mountain, like the clouds crossing the face of God.

"Lily, you are not here, my darling, you are not bound to any place any longer, not even one as beautiful as this. I could feel it if you were here, couldn't I?"

There came that thought again, that half-finished plan-that half-conceived prayer to fight him off.

I drew up a chair, and I sat down by the window. The wind blew my hair back.

Wave after wave brought the dancers forth, no one ever the same, each company of nymphs different, as were my concerts, or if there was a pattern to it, only the geniuses of chaos theory knew it. Once in a while, one dancer came so tall as to have legs that seemed ready to leap free.

I watched it until morning.

I don't need sleep to play. I'm crazy anyway. Being crazier still could only help.

The dawn came and all the rapid traffic, and the milling people below, the shops opening their doors, the buses rolling. Swimmers were in the waves. I stood at the window, the sack of the violin hanging over my shoulder.