He comes back to what must now be the opening scene. The tail end of yet another sultry day. Teresa stands at a second-floor window in her father's house, looking out over the marshes and pine-scrub of the Romagna toward the sun glinting on the Adriatic. The end of the prelude; a hush; she takes a breath. Mio Byron, she sings, her voice throbbing with sadness. A lone clarinet answers, tails off, falls silent. Mio Byron, she calls again, more strongly.
Where is he, her Byron? Byron is lost, that is the answer. Byron wanders among the shades. And she is lost too, the Teresa he loved, the girl of nineteen with the blonde ringlets who gave herself up with such joy to the imperious Englishman, and afterwards stroked his brow as he lay on her naked breast, breathing deeply, slumbering after his great passion.
Mio Byron, she sings a third time; and from somewhere, from the caverns of the underworld, a voice sings back, wavering and disembodied, the voice of a ghost, the voice of Byron. Where are you? he sings; and then a word she does not want to hear: secca, dry. It has dried up, the source of everything. So faint, so faltering is the voice of Byron that Teresa has to sing his words back to him, helping him along breath by breath, drawing him back to life: her child, her boy. I am here, she sings, supporting him, saving him from going down. I am your source. Do you remember how together we visited the spring of Arqu?? Together, you and I. I was your Laura. Do you remember?
That is how it must be from here on: Teresa giving voice to her lover, and he, the man in the ransacked house, giving voice to Teresa. The halt helping the lame, for want of better. Working as swiftly as he can, holding tight to Teresa, he tries to sketch out the opening pages of a libretto. Get the words down on paper, he tells himself. Once that is done it will all be easier. Then there will be time to search through the masters - through Gluck, for instance - lifting melodies, perhaps - who knows? - lifting ideas too.
But by steps, as he begins to live his days more fully with Teresa and the dead Byron, it becomes clear that purloined songs will not be good enough, that the two will demand a music of their own. And, astonishingly, in dribs and drabs, the music comes. Sometimes the contour of a phrase occurs to him before he has a hint of what the words themselves will be; sometimes the words call forth the cadence; sometimes the shade of a melody, having hovered for days on the edge of hearing, unfolds and blessedly reveals itself. As the action begins to unwind, furthermore, it calls up of its own accord modulations and transitions that he feels in his blood even when he has not the musical resources to realize them. At the piano he sets to work piecing together and writing down the beginnings of a score. But there is something about the sound of the piano that hinders him: too rounded, too physical, too rich. From the attic, from a crate full of old books and toys of Lucy's, he recovers the odd little seven- stringed banjo that he bought for her on the streets of KwaMashu when she was a child. With the aid of the banjo he begins to notate the music that Teresa, now mournful, now angry, will sing to her dead lover, and that pale- voiced Byron will sing back to her from the land of the shades.
The deeper he follows the Contessa into her underworld, singing her words for her or humming her vocal line, the more inseparable from her, to his surprise, becomes the silly plink-plonk of the toy banjo. The lush arias he had dreamed of giving her he quietly abandons; from there it is but a short step to putting the instrument into her hands. Instead of stalking the stage, Teresa now sits staring out over the marshes toward the gates of hell, cradling the mandolin on which she accompanies herself in her lyric flights; while to one side a discreet trio in knee-breeches (cello, flute, bassoon) fill in the entr'actes or comment sparingly between stanzas.
Seated at his own desk looking out on the overgrown garden, he marvels at what the little banjo is teaching him. Six months ago he had thought his own ghostly place in Byron in Italy would be somewhere between Teresa's and Byron's: between a yearning to prolong the summer of the passionate body and a reluctant recall from the long sleep of oblivion. But he was wrong. It is not the erotic that is calling to him after all, nor the elegiac, but the comic. He is in the opera neither as Teresa nor as Byron nor even as some blending of the two: he is held in the music itself, in the flat, tinny slap of the banjo strings, the voice that strains to soar away from the ludicrous instrument but is continually reined back, like a fish on a line. So this is art, he thinks, and this is how it does its work! How strange! How fascinating!
He spends whole days in the grip of Byron and Teresa, living on black coffee and breakfast cereal. The refrigerator is empty, his bed is unmade; leaves chase across the floor from the broken window. No matter, he thinks: let the dead bury their dead.
Out of the poets I learned to love, chants Byron in his cracked monotone, nine syllables on C natural; but life, I found (descending chromatically to F), is another story. Plink-plunk-plonk go the strings of the banjo. Why, O why do you speak like that? sings Teresa in a long reproachful arc. Plunk-plink-plonk go the strings.
She wants to be loved, Teresa, to be loved immortally; she wants to be raised to the company of the Lauras and Floras of yore. And Byron? Byron will be faithful unto death, but that is all he promises. Let both be tied till one shall have expired.
My love, sings Teresa, swelling out the fat English monosyllable she learned in the poet's bed. Plink, echo the strings. A woman in love, wallowing in love; a cat on a roof, howling; complex proteins swirling in the blood, distending the sexual organs, making the palms sweat and voice thicken as the soul hurls its longings to the skies. That is what Soraya and the others were for: to suck the complex proteins out of his blood like snake-venom, leaving him clear-headed and dry. Teresa in her father's house in Ravenna, to her misfortune, has no one to suck the venom from her. Come to me, mio Byron, she cries: come to me, love me! And Byron, exiled from life, pale as a ghost, echoes her derisively: Leave me, leave me, leave me be!
Years ago, when he lived in Italy, he visited the same forest between Ravenna and the Adriatic coastline where a century and a half before Byron and Teresa used to go riding. Somewhere among the trees must be the spot where the Englishman first lifted the skirts of his eighteen-year-old charmer, bride of another man. He could fly to Venice tomorrow, catch a train to Ravenna, tramp along the old riding-trails, pass by the very place. He is inventing the music (or the music is inventing him) but he is not inventing the history. On those pine-needles Byron had his Teresa - 'timid as a gazelle,' he called her - rumpling her clothes, getting sand into her underwear (the horses standing by all the while, incurious), and from the occasion a passion was born that kept Teresa howling to the moon for the rest of her natural life in a fever that has set him howling too, after his manner.
Teresa leads; page after page he follows. Then one day there emerges from the dark another voice, one he has not heard before, has not counted on hearing. From the words he knows it belongs to Byron's daughter Allegra; but from where inside him does it come? Why have you left me? Come and fetch me! calls Allegra. So hot, so hot, so hot! she complains in a rhythm of her own that cuts insistently across the voices of the lovers.
To the call of the inconvenient five-year-old there comes no answer. Unlovely, unloved, neglected by her famous father, she has been passed from hand to hand and finally given to the nuns to look after. So hot, so hot! she whines from the bed in the convent where she is dying of la mal'aria. Why have you forgotten me?
Why will her father not answer? Because he has had enough of life; because he would rather be back where he belongs, on death's other shore, sunk in his old sleep. My poor little baby! sings Byron, waveringly, unwillingly, too softly for her to hear. Seated in the shadows to one side, the trio of instrumentalists play the crablike motif, one line going up, the other down, that is Byron's.
TWENTY-ONE
