Someone, waiting for me among the violins
met with a world like a buried tower
sinking its spiral below layered leaves
colour of sulphur,
and lower yet in a vein of gold,
like a sword in a scabbard of meteors…
Glossy wooden floor, yellow electric lights.
You come to a door, same featureless wood, opening outwards onto black.
Four walls, close. Carpet, crunchy, synthetic. Another door.
You focus every fibre on opening that door silently, on slipping inside unnoticed.
The sound is so quiet, you don’t even hear it. In fact, it’s the air you notice first.
Thick, like the thick grey that came before the lightning forked and the rain beat and the smell rose rich from the earth.
Heavy, like the heavy blue that made the white walls glow, and the equally blue domes vanish, and the cross standing between them shine with fury.
The island is Circe’s still; no place for the artist voyager to linger long, if he cares for his soul.
In this air, the harp’s strings move so slowly, you feel their vibrations rather than hear them.
The horns drift in and out. Like the breath that lifted the corner of the gauze hanging across the tall double windows. That let the glittering water, cupped by the bay, through in snatches to dance across the whitewashed walls.
No water murmurs but what my flute pours on the chord sprinkled thicket; and the sole wind prompt to exhale from my two pipes, before it scatters the sound in a waterless shower…
You hurry to a seat. With your head bowed, as though not seeing is the equivalent of not being seen, you don’t notice the choir.
So, for just an instant, as their sound emerges from half-closed lips, it is a voice that comes to you from far beyond the stage.
Far beyond those hills, all untidy thirsty brown, that rose up to cut the blue and blue in half.
Far beyond the tip of the red carpet, that crawled with pilgrims, and snaked amongst the scrub and the dovecotes and the sleepy windmills, then disappeared into the cool of the Panagia Evangelistria atop the hill.
Far beyond it all. From where the dawn broke copper and scattered the stars; from where the lapis reached out to colour in the sea again and bake the island once more.
Waving good-bye in the midst of the flapping sheets that rose up with her, abandoning with her the environment of beetles and dahlias and passing through the air with her as four o’clock in the afternoon came to an end, she was lost forever in the upper atmosphere where not even the highest-flying birds of memory could reach her.
And so, for the first time, you hear Ravel’s Daphnis and Chloe.
Well, perhaps not strictly for the first time. But you pretend it is…
Ps. Want the footnotes?
Just email me for a full list of where these quotes come from…
Pps. Think you can’t write a prize-winning novel in the second person?
I didn’t either. Then I read the trashy-sounding How to get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia by the ever-brilliant Mohsin Hamid. Wow.
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