Skylight

8

When Adriana appeared around the corner, walking fast, the day was already growing dark and one could sense the night in the quiet onset of twilight, which all the noise of the city could not cancel out. She took the stairs two at a time, her heart protesting at the effort, then rang the bell frantically and waited with some impatience for her mother to open the door.

“Hello, Mama. Has it started yet?” she asked, kissing her mother on the cheek.

“Slow down, child, slow down. No, it hasn’t started yet. Why all the rush?”

“I was afraid I might miss it. I was kept late at the office, typing some urgent letters.”

They went into the kitchen. The lights were on. The radio was playing softly in the background. Isaura was still busy sewing, hunched over a pink shirt. Adriana kissed her sister and her aunt, then sat down to catch her breath.

“I’m absolutely exhausted! Good heavens, Isaura, what is that hideous thing you’re making?”

Her sister looked up and smiled:

“The man who’s going to wear this shirt must be a complete and utter idiot. I can see him now in the shop, gazing goggle-eyed at this ‘thing of beauty,’ ready to give the clothes off his back to pay for it!”

They both laughed. Cândida commented:

“You two don’t have a good word to say about anyone!”

Amélia agreed with her nieces and, addressing Cândida, said:

“So, in your opinion, would it be a sign of good taste to wear a shirt like that?”

“People can dress as they like,” said Cândida with unusual forthrightness.

“That’s not an opinion!”

“Shh!” said Isaura. “Listen!”

The announcer was introducing a piece of music.

“No, that’s not it,” said Adriana.

There was a package next to the radio. Given the size and shape, it looked like a book. Adriana picked it up and asked:

“What’s this? Another book?”

“Yes,” said her sister.

“What’s it called?”

“The Nun.”

“Who’s the author?”

“Diderot. I’ve never read anything by him before.”

Adriana put the book down and promptly forgot about it. She didn’t care much for books. Like her sister, mother and aunt, she adored music, but she found books boring. They took pages and pages to tell a story that could have been told in just a few words. She couldn’t understand how Isaura could spend so much time reading, sometimes into the small hours. With music, on the other hand, Adriana could happily sit up all night listening and never tire of it. And it was a pleasure they all enjoyed, which was just as well, because there would have been terrible arguments if they didn’t.

“That’s it,” said Isaura. “Turn the volume up.”

Adriana twiddled one of the knobs. The announcer’s voice filled the apartment.

“… The Dance of the Dead by Honegger. Libretto by Paul Claudel. Performed by Jean-Louis Barrault.”

In the kitchen, a coffeepot was whistling. Aunt Amélia removed it from the gas. They heard the sound of the needle being placed on the record, and then the stirring, dramatic voice of Jean-Louis Barrault made the four walls tremble. No one moved. They stared at the luminous eye on the front of the radio, as if the music were coming from there. In the interval between the first record and the second, they could hear, coming from the next room, the strident, grating, metallic sound of ragtime. Aunt Amélia frowned, Cândida sighed, Isaura stabbed her needle hard into the shirt, and Adriana shot a murderous glance at the wall.

“Turn it up,” said Aunt Amélia.

Adriana did as asked. Jean-Louis’s voice roared out “J’existe!” the music swirled across the “vaste plaine,” and the jittery notes of ragtime mingled heretically with the dance “sur le pont d’Avignon.”

“Louder!”

The chorus of the dead, in a thousand cries of despair and sorrow, declared their pain and remorse, and the Dies Irae smothered and overwhelmed the giggling of a lively clarinet. Blaring out of the loudspeaker, Honegger managed finally to vanquish that anonymous piece of ragtime. Perhaps Maria Cláudia had grown tired of her favorite program of dance tunes, or perhaps she had been frightened by the bellowing of divine fury made music. Once the last notes of The Dance of the Dead had dissolved in the air, Amélia, grumbling, set about making supper. Cândida moved away, fearing an approaching storm, even though she felt equally indignant. The two sisters, carried away by the music, were ablaze with holy anger.

“It just seems impossible,” Amélia said at last. “I don’t mean that we’re better than other people, but it just seems impossible that anyone could possibly like that music of the mad!”

“But some people do, Aunt,” said Adriana.

“I can see that!”

“Not everyone grows up listening to good music,” added Isaura.

“I know that too, but surely everyone should be capable of separating the wheat from the chaff, putting the bad on one side and the good on the other.”

Cândida, who was getting the dishes out of the cupboard, ventured to say:

“That’s just not possible. The good and the bad, the bad and the good, are always intermingled. No one and nothing is ever completely good or completely bad. At least that’s what I think,” she added timidly.

Amélia turned to her sister, brandishing the spoon she was using to taste the soup.

“Now this soup is pretty good, and surely that’s how you know if something is good, because you like it.”

“Not necessarily.”

“So why do you like it, then?”

“I like it because I think it’s good, but I don’t know it’s good.”

Amélia pursed her lips scornfully. Her sister’s general inability to be sure of anything and to make fine distinctions grated on her practical common sense, her desire to divide the world into two clear halves. Cândida said nothing, regretting having spoken at all. Not that this subtle way of reasoning came naturally to her; she had learned it from her husband, simplifying its more problematic aspects.

“That’s all very nice,” Amélia went on, “but someone who knows what he wants, and what he has, runs the risk of losing what he has and not getting what he wants.”

“How very confusing!” said Cândida, smiling.

Her sister was aware that she had been unnecessarily obscure, and this only irritated her all the more.

“It’s not confusing, it’s true. There is good music and bad music. There are good people and bad people. There is good and evil. And you can choose between them…”

“If only it were that easy. Often we don’t know how to choose. We haven’t learned how…”

“Some people can only choose evil, because they’re naturally twisted!”

Cândida winced as if in pain, then said:

“You don’t know what you’re saying. That can only happen when people are mentally ill. We’re talking about people who, according to you, are capable of making a choice. Someone as sick as that wouldn’t be able to!”

“You’re trying to trip me up, but you won’t succeed. All right, let’s talk about healthy people, then. I can choose between good and evil, between good music and bad!”

Cândida raised her hands as if about to launch into a long speech, but immediately lowered them again:

“Let’s forget about music for the moment, because it’s just getting in the way. Tell me, if you can, what is good and what is evil? Where does one end and the other begin?”

“I’ve no idea, there’s no answer to that. What I do know is that I can recognize good and evil when I see them…”

“That depends on your particular point of view…”

“Of course it does. I can’t make judgments using other people’s ideas!”

“There’s the sticking point! You’re forgetting that other people have their own ideas about good and evil, ideas that might be better than yours…”

“If everyone thought like you, we would never get anywhere. We need rules, we need laws!”

“But who makes them? And when? And why?”

Cândida paused for a moment before adding, with an innocently mischievous look:

“So when you think, are you using your own ideas or are you using rules and laws written by someone else?”

Having no answer to these questions, Amélia turned her back on her sister, saying:

“Oh, I should know by now that there’s no talking to you!”

Isaura and Adriana smiled. This argument was merely the latest of many they had heard between those two poor old ladies, entirely restricted now to the domestic sphere, a long way from the days when they had broader, livelier interests, when their economic state allowed for such interests. There they were, lined and bent, gray and increasingly frail, their flickering fire throwing out its final sparks, resisting the accumulating ashes. Isaura and Adriana looked at each other and smiled again. In comparison to that crumbling old age, they felt young and vibrant, like a taut piano string.

Then they had supper. Four women sitting around the table. The steaming plates, the white tablecloth, the ceremonial of the meal. On this side — or perhaps on the other side too — of the inevitable noises lay a dense, painful silence, the inquisitorial silence of the past observing us and the ironic silence of the future that awaits us.