All That Sang by Lydia Perović.
Title: All That Sang.
Author: Lydia Perović.
Genre: Fiction.
Country: Canada.
Language: English.
Publication Date: 2016.
Summary: A visceral tale of obsession and creativity, unrequited passions and the power of music. A love story in winch art is a foil to companionship, and the intellect an interlocutor of the heart. A Toronto opera critic on assignment in Paris falls in love with the subject she's been sent to interview, France's leading female conductor. But is the attention evenly matched; is genuine connection even possible? The author guides the readers through the panorama that orbits contemporary courtship. The jilted lover, the housekeeper, the chiropractor, the manager, all take part in a chorus of voices that illustrate the unknowable creative spirit whose inaccessibility fires the writer's obsession.
My rating: 7/10.
My review:
♥ Out of the impenetrable fog of sorrow, the shapes of a city will emerge. The colours will divide first out of the blur, the beiges and the whites and the greys of the buildings and pavement, but slowly, so you won't even notice the influx of light. The greys of the clouds will stir once the wind is introduced.
The lines will come into view next, the spikes of the chimneys and slants of the rooftops, the window frames, the chiselled bed for the river, the bridges sloping across. The big tower will pierce its way in, squat and settle, followed by the shorter lines, the antennas, the branches of trees, the eavestroughs, the poles, the gates to courtyards accessible only by code.
Below the street, the metro will churn to life, tunnelling its way through the city, and by its sheer force set into motion other mechanical and human traffic, cars, buses, scooters, bicycles, strollers and those emergency vehicles that wail better here, more humanely, less unpleasantly, than their Toronto counterparts. As if on a conductor's downbeat, the people will swarm the streets to form the hectic chorales of a weekday morning, moving with purpose this way and that. The noise will surge, disperse, and differentiate, and given that you are in bed hiding in the penumbra of your rented garret, it will reach you as the ring of the bell from the school on the block, the noise of the TV in the apartment next, the shutting of the doors and the steps in the stairwell.
♥ There are parts of Montmartre so beautiful that they feel unreal, more a theatre or movie set, cosy and perfectly planned. Your own city doesn't have a talent for beautiful display, something in which you take vague pride, because beauty is for sissies, beautiful isn't truthful.
♥ The city continues to take shape, all the places you went to not to think about her. The Tuileries, where you sat by an empty, yet eager, merry-go-round and thought to yourself, I am not thinking about her. Parc Luxembourgh, where you observed bocce and removed soft tree leaves from your jacket without thinking about her. The top floor of a university building at the southernmost tip of the city, where during a small theatre performance, two actors, the audience of twelve, you wept, but not because of her (it was a play fashioned from the words said by Margaret Duras in interviews, some of them rather moving).
♥ The door opens, you see other people with suitcases on the train, so this must be it. The door closes and suddenly it's unbearably hot. You look up and the blinking light on the digital rendition of the train line is showing Châtelet-Les-Halles. You are on the right train but moving in the wrong direction. Soon enough you get off the train at Châtelet-Les-Halles, wanting to return. But no sign in sight says RER B, destination Charles de Gaulle. You must focus now. You are hot and confused by the crowd and stunned tat she doesn't love you. Why don't those we care for care for us back? It strikes you as a new insight that you are never going to see her again. You must have temporarily forgotten? You ought to move now, and look for the B. Your cross-ocean flight is in two hours. You absolutely cannot afford to stay at Châtelet-Les-Halles.
♥ I wanted to make it clear that the first time I visited Paris, the Paris innocent of her, not ringing with her presence, I was not entirely adverse to being a tourist doing tourist things. There were lieux de memoire, the ones of the personal reading topography, to honour. There was the pigging out on the cassoulet, and of mornings on the butterthings. But eating alone in Paris is more solitary than eating alone anywhere else. Returning home to the lumpy mattress along the narrow streets that survived the de-medievalization is so heavy in dusk that you realize that dusk probably exists for such returns in those streets-it clinches itself as if to its natural groove and never moves away.
Evwn now when I'm in Paris, and even when on the bicycle, I come across the unmoving airs of that dusk. You can follow any number of bicycle paths through the city along the boulevards and discover these pockets of stillness, of chilled air, that cannot be disturbed.
The word "Paris", the notion of it, has been filled by the anglophones with so much kitsch nostalgia that it is almost beyond recuperation. That may not be altogether a bad thing, Paris being a permanent misrecognition, now that I look at it closely, something of a dictionary of faux amis that the English and French languages have in common. You can spend a lot of time getting lost and retracing steps along its intricate streets as have I between the delusionary similarities of the two tongues.
♥ Even in Paris it gives me grief.
I am being evasive, obviously. I am not eager to talk about my times in Paris, but that cannot be avoided. If this were a proper story, that's where the story would legitimately start.
But stories are lies by their very build. They eliminate what doesn't fuel them. Why do we need them so? This isn't a story. I can't tell you a story.
I don't know what I'm attempting to tell if I abandon the story, but I know I have that urge. Of telling without storifying. Of writing without re-enchanting. Without tidying. I have the desire to keep the muddle.
Maybe if this were a proper, mutual, happy love story, it would call for a story indeed. Maybe two people finding each other warrants a retelling, a founding through a story.
Two people, a man and a woman in particular. But we don't have a man and a woman here.
Maybe if I came from a proper, coherent-appearing, long-historicised country, speaking one language-that is if I came from somewhere other than Canada-I would have also wanted to keep alive the tradition of making stories believable.
Maybe if all of this happened within the same language it would have fit better.
Maybe. Probably.
As it is now, I must speak about what is happening, but I can't give you a story. Plot is a form of self-medication: look, rejoice, there's a glimpse of sense. Fragments will come together to mean something. Let's ignore all what conspires against the narrative.
No.
But off we go, regardless. Paris. Grief. Always. Off we go.
♥ I was standing up already during the Kyrie. It had to be the first time she pierced and slashed with the baton the cloth of sound threatening to engulf her. And how her entire body became electrified. It conducted then released what? Forces of some kind? The pulse gradually asserted itself. An insistent timpani underpins the Kyrie (who knew?) that she punctuated with her head.
There was the body, suited, desexualized, but slight and female, which disturbed the surface and produced sound with its movement. If it grew big and surrounded her, she would fence it off, jump and skip it, sweep it, collect it, dissipate it, halt it, buffer it, withhold it and throw it back. And with the electrified shudder, she would thrust herself into it, penetrate repeatedly.
♥ We must be indifferent to each other in order to go on living. It's only when there is a tear in the reality, caused by the occurrences such as falling in love and a sudden overwhelming obsession, that we can see that keeping away from others, not being touched by their existence, is fundamental to life. The one person we love disturbs the happy convivance of indifferent strangers. Why doesn't she need my company. Why isn't she curious about me. Why won't she take me.
..We work and collaborate, then part. We become friends, but can still bear long separations without terrible pain.
Writers and artists whose work changed our lives: we won't feel that we'll die in agony if we remain opaque to them, their personhood, at its most intimate, to us.
It's just that one individual, one dark abyss that drowns the rays of the sunny disposition of amiable indifference, that hints at somewhere parallel and ordinarily out of reach, something that perhaps we shouldn't see.
We must be productive, develop, leave marks, be careerist. Not indulge in self-annihilation. Find pleasures in things other than pain.
♥ Our coordinator asks us to put in how we see ourselves in one year, two years, five years. Where we shall be. Everybody recommends we always strive, and plan, for more. I tell them I've had my share of planning, for members of the family, my own and extended. Now, I am interested in the next day. No: I am interested in the clean lemon smell and having the weather mild enough to be able to open the windows at the end of the cleaning appointment and let everything dry and air. This musician's place is ideal for that because of its view, and because of all the whites.
That's my ambition, that breeze. Yes, it also means task accomplished, something that may lead to more similar work with easily achieved goals, and rent paid in the city I dreamed about and only knew from the films. But it also means simply: that breeze.
♥ THINGS THAT, THOUGH PLANNED, REMAINED UNSAID
I love those soft pools of melancholy around your eyes.
They are like little pillows of uncried tears.
And your chilly blue eyes. Your constellation of freckles.
It's ice and the sun, both.
And your lips, always seeming dry and in need of moisture, to be imparted by a kiss perhaps.
The flame of your hair that makes my hands twitch with anticipation.
The long double necklace that your dress shirt collar sometimes opens to reveal, the gleam of it, a touch of obscene disturbing the sombre of the black suit. The crack into a cave, a secret sex, the gold from the depth of the mine.
♥ When I bicycle up Bathurst, I am also pedaling up Boulevard de Sébastopol, direction north on both. That's how the body recognizes it, the incline is exactly the same degree. Everything else differs around me, but for a cyclist the streets resemble one another on the basis of the heart rate. Sébastopol is wide, Bathurst is wider. Without the trees, Bathurst, but they will come from Sébastopol. Bathurst keeps wide and leaves me alone, to my own speed, something that's impossible for Sébastopol to do.
Never is the other city more alive in me than in the few seconds before I finally fall sleep. Thoughts ramble after the eyes close, and stay nowhere for long, but then they would come to a stop deep in the eighteenth arrondissement, on the very specific if arbitrary places along Pajol, very specific shops, or the overpass on Ordiner, the sidewalks towards Belleville. As if the camera stopped and the colours became life-like, the sight of the street filling with presence, with the right-now-that is the moment when I am about to be lost to sleep. I know I will be gone when there is that zoom-in and sharpening.
It's a matter of time. There is nothing to do about it. I'll wait for time to do its microscopic replacement of the grieving cells. If it is one day, one cell, fine. If it takes a million days.
Sometimes she is the disjointed parts of her body, which I suspect is progress. It's her hands I have difficulty with the most. The memory of the vein that crosses the root of the index finger diagonally, in particular, pulses permanently like an ache. The bulging veins on other women's hands glimpsed anywhere, the rush of circulation breaking through. I've kissed the standout vein, I've mapped its path with my tongue, but not enough times. I've never really kissed her in concentrated prolonged sessions, but I wanted to, and have done so, in my head, countless times. I was always kissing her in my head, in between the instances of living I was permanently kissing, and the kissing was so much more real.
I had to empty all the jars of cinnamon, cocoa and brown sugar. There is no cinnamon, cocoa or brown sugar in the house. I'd tried to find a fitting description for her freckles once and coca and cinnamon came to mind, but then I corrected myself: no, they are the brown sugar. This happened once. They wouldn't be smudged or licked off, even though I tried.
I am only halfway from Queen to Bloor on Bathurst. There is fortunately much distance left to cover at this same reassuring pace. A little but desolate if seen from within a car, but determined, serious, a cyclist in on Bathurst. She earns some respect from the drivers. A figure in an overcoat, she is not in their way. There is a lot of room, she might as well be on Sébastopol. She is pedaling north.
♥ But there is you, now, here, in my field of vision. I could devour you. I had forgotten to utter words, so there's a word. If I only could.
I know you're not enjoying this. No, I know you aren't. You would like to undress, rather than be undressed. You prefer your hands on another. This is how you desire. It is in the doing.
You will have your doing, but please let me now.
Le pantalon is better than either trousers or pants. Fact.
The swishy silky sound they make. The crease cutting a sharp angle. The fold and layers, because you are svelte and thin and so are your limbs.
But you are somehow out of my hands and above me now and I can see closely now the little pools of dark and the gentle hives of wrinkles around the unsmiling eyes. (Wrinkles is a terribly inadequate, almost comic word. These are pools of softness and shadow.) I can clearly see the freckles against your pale mouth. This -th in mouth makes it a little more suitable than lèvres.
You are leaving your shirt on and coming over. You are coming above me.
I will be still now.
Your hair may even rain over my face but I will keep my hands down. My mouth may open to take some of it, but I will keep my hands down. I will look and look and take you in that way.
I will be silent. I promise.
♥ The skeleton is a remarkable feat of nature, but not everything we do suits it. We should be more aware of the bones, joints, and tendons, and not take them for granted. The job of protection that the skeletal structure performs is extraordinary: within its shelter are the brain, spinal cord, lungs and heart, and the reproductive organs in women. Isn't it a miracle that the softest components of our bodies originate inside the hardest: red cells and platelets inside our bones? Where does one end and the other begin? Bones and blood as one. My wife teases me when I get poetic about my profession in front of our friends, but I can't help it. She says any talk of bones reminds her of her own mortality. She says she would rather not think about the parts of the body that will, as her remnants, outlive her. What can I say? Our early dates weren't exactly easiest in the world.
We have three children now and are one of those uneventful couples who love each other without drama. I look at my wedding ring as I'm thinking this. I am no stranger to smugness, I am aware of that.
♥ I've often seen the lean, slight, bony physical types developing either or both, and with some musicians who play instruments I've witnessed various bone deformations in fingers, from diminisment of nails to crookedness in upper fingers and further down in some cases-for example, in string players on large instruments like double bass and cello. But as is the case with many other professions, musicians live with and in fact adopt the minor bodily deformations as a badge of honour. Their instrument is an extra organ, equally cherished as the organs given at birth, therefore some adapting is to be expected.
To feel it in your bones. Something coming too close to the bone. The phrases are not formed by chance. There is wisdom in our bones; the wisdom of the species but also one gained through our own personal history.
♥ Or maybe I put the dress on for the sole reason of wanting to observe her hand sliding the skirt up my thigh? I have been looking for the signs that will tell me if this difference excites her as much as it does me. She does not share information about her excitements. She does not want to be seen. There, for her, lies freedom. I respect that.
♥ Her apartment barely tolerates the smells of cooking. Had I mastered molecular cooking, our eating occasions would have been more in tune with the white cube, scientific lab atmosphere of her place. One late night when I happened to be here, I craved curry, but I tried imagining the cooking fumes clouding around her floor-to-ceiling score cabinets and her grand and electronic pianos and understood it would be a breach of style. Perhaps the apartment would be more amenable to the smell of baking? Yes, I think so. Something strawberryish, with good grains and nuts. Maybe someday.
♥ It took several more encounters for me to realize that her internal film often sometimes runs independently of whatever external ones she may find herself sharing with others. It is a question of the inner screen, I believe, never ceasing the play of its shadows. She sometimes appears inward-looking even in situations of intimacy. Before she got to know me and trust me, I wasn't a stranger to her unease in social situations. The way out of a conversation for her is sometimes walking out of the conversation, leaving before the sentence is over, hers or the other person's. Perhaps the pressure of inadequate words becomes too suffocating. Perhaps language anchors her like pinning a butterfly, too precisely for a creature made of air and flight. As we got to know each other better, there was less of the rapid flight, but not many more words. She would stay in my arms, though. Ça, c'est pas rien.
♥ We really have nothing in common, I imagine myself saying to the camera in a hypothetical documentary film about her life. This one is different from the others as it's the first one in which she talks about her personal life. It's almost a comedy routine between the two of us in this sequence. She speaks French, I speak English. She likes Schumann and Brahms, I like Monteverdi and Bach. Food is among her pleasures, she says of me. Whereas, she doesn't eat. I speak German, she speaks Italian. I have the build of a Slav peasantwoman. Y'know, equipped to plough the fields and raise healthy cannon fodder. Whereas she is the slender, freckly, Isabelle Huppert type meant to occupy salons... and concert halls. I like wine, she likes gin. I can't even read music. She is music, damn her. She takes words seriously. She uses them, all too lightly, like an inflated currency that has never had its gold standard. I get around on a scooter or car, she pedals around. She hangs out with rich people. She automatically presumes everybody who's not struggling to survive is somehow bad-and success is suspect. Yeah I guess it's fair to say she's more to the right. You are extravagantly left from where I stand. She's into the Romantic era and the nineteenth. Like, Heathcliff is her brother in turmoil. Victorian Gothic is the normal. Oh so the seicento and the settecento are, like, closer to our era's sensibilities somehow? I can't believe you worship Schumann. Go listen to some Frauenliebe und -leben. And you those silly fiorituras in Benedetto Ferrari. How could we have ever become close? We love each other, I suppose. Oh right, there is that.
♥ Not having a common language in which we are both fluent can be advantageous-the bodies have to find their way into knowledge without the words. But still I envy the natural ease with which other French speakers slip in and out of conversation with her. There is a sort of shared non-verbal familiarity to fall back on.
Well, I have so much to tell her. In English, because I need all the eloquence I can summon.
Cue the doorbell. The dog. She is back she is back she is finally back.
♥ You know the Handel opera Alcina, was how I was going to start. A sorceress enchants people she loves and keeps them on her island? Well, there's this character in it, Ruggiero, sung by a mezzo, Alcina's favourite, that mainly just mopes around the island to great music, wondering why she in the state she's in, paralyzed yet happily high, not at all herself but somehow taking pleasure in the fact? She was going to nod sympathetically here. Ruggiero is the badly written character of the opera. She is a roaming shadow and can only think one thought: Alcina.
That's how I feel. I've been the badly written character in my own life ever since I've met you-seen you, actually, really taken you in, probably since Mozart's C minor mass. I don't want this to stop, I'm saying the opposite: let me come closer. I am dying to go fuhrer into your life, not just as am enchanted fool roaming the outskirts. Let me travel with you sometimes. Let me kiss you in public. Let's go to things together; not as friends but together. Show me when you need me, don't make me guess. Expect me when you need me. Every cell of me needs you, but that doesn't matter, I don't have any demands. Well, except perhaps at this very moment if we can make love on this table right here because I haven't had a proper taste of you in two agonizing weeks.
♥ No, no, darling girl, you mustn't now. We can't talk if there are tears happening.
Sorry yes, this is embarrassing. I'm good.
She told me other things, perfectly reasonably things that I really should have guessed already. That her life was full and she was content with it as it was, there is simply no room for any radical rearrangements, that ideally it must go on in the exact way it is going now. That she likes seeing me, but that it pains her to see me unsatisfied, lonely, in our admittedly very loose association. That-and she said this very gently, not a trace of cruelty-she probably should have discouraged me from moving to Paris, and giving what we have a narrative that it can't have. And that I know well, if I know her at all, that she prefers to flee other people's narrations, that the telling, the analyzing, the naming tires her, that really she can't be in anybody's story.
♥ You will say that I'm the only thing you desire, but that can't be true. You must honour your other desires, futures, languages, never ever neglect them because if me, think of me as the ornamentation, or the bass line, not the lead melody. And there is no need for any of us to be unhappy. Let's be good to each other.
What I managed to say was that she was breaking my heart. And that I didn't know what to think and what to feel. But that I didn't like this. Who was this person?
You can meet her, she said. You will meet her. You must meet her. I'll have this visiting conductor contract in Austria next year, I will be able to meet with her there, but when I'm back in Paris, I'll be all yours. I hope you'll be mine too. I want you to stay. I need you as much as I need her.
♥ Because time also is a story, a montage, something that we craft, something through which we disperse what we can't approach head-on at once, it is untrue. Time is not, not really, and everything that emerges goes on as had previously gone on, except not within our sight or knowledge.
Once you have called me to come back up the small flight of stairs to kiss me good bye, it cannot be undone. It cannot not exist. You are at the same after-concert reception, with the same people as on that night, forever spotting me leave, forever not letting me go before you're done, forever saying "Viens, viens, viens" to me in that very same way, and I am always and forever turning back and coming to you and settling my cheek next to yours for a kiss.