A Separation(18)
When did you realize you could?
When I was very young. Like I said, my mother and my aunt were both weepers, they would sing together, I remember being a child and hearing them perform at a funeral. I would sit with the bereaved, and I would watch them begin the wailing, they were famous, they performed together. So I was young when I began trying to sing. And I learned, they taught me first to sing, then to channel the sadness that is necessary to weeping.
They taught you this when you were only a child?
Even children have experience of sadness. At first, when I was a young woman, I would think about sad stories that I had heard, about soldiers who had been killed at war, and the wives and girlfriends who waited for them in vain. Eventually, as I became older, I had my own losses to call upon, and it became easier: I lost my father, my brother, then my husband, at this point in my life there is no shortage of inspiration.
So you think of a personal loss?
Yes. The songs themselves, they are fixed lamentations, they tell stories. But in order to really feel the songs, in order to trigger the emotion that you need to lament, I need to think about something personal, it is hard if it remains abstract. This is one reason why you become better as you grow older, when you are young, you do not have an intimate experience of death, of loss, you do not have enough sadness in you to mourn. You need to have a great deal of sadness inside you in order to mourn for other people, and not only yourself.
Her eyes were twinkling as she said this and she smiled, as if she had made a joke. Then she cleared her throat and looked at Stefano, as if waiting for him to ask the next question.
Do you think she would be willing to sing for me?
He seemed to hesitate—he had already told me it was unlikely—but then asked the question anyway. She paused, adjusting the folds of her skirt with her hands. She cleared her throat again and then began to sing. Her voice was low and throaty, she began almost tentatively, as if growing accustomed to its weight, raising one hand in the air as she sang in a series of atonal registers. She seemed then to find the thread she had been seeking, her fingers pulled together against her thumb as though she were drawing it through the air.
Her voice, as it unfolded across the room, was not beautiful. It was heavy, as heavy and awkward as the boulders that marked the Mani landscape, a collection of rocks. The notes dropped out of her mouth and tumbled across the room, first one and then the next and then the next. They accumulated, the room was soon full of their discordance. She continued, her voice growing in volume, the objects in the room vibrating, the sound of her singing transforming the kitchen interior where we sat. She began slapping her hand against the table, she closed her eyes and then she rocked back and forth, her hand still keeping rhythm.
Her voice raised an octave or two, she began to make a high keening sound, and as I listened, transfixed, I saw that there were tears gathering in her eyes, which she had opened very slightly, her head still tilted back. The tears rested on the bottom rim of her eye for a long moment before slowly trickling down. She paused for a ragged intake of breath and then continued, as if she were in a trance, her eyes now wide open, the lamentation pouring out of her, her face wet with tears.
I looked at Stefano, I wanted her to stop—she was in pain, and to what purpose? I felt at once the extent of my deception: I was not writing a book, I was not researching the ritual of mourning, there was nothing I could learn from her grief, whose authenticity I did not doubt. Notwithstanding the fact that it was a performance, essentially on demand, the entire situation a fabrication. And I understood that this was why she was paid, not because of her vocal capabilities, not even for the considerable strength of her emoting, but because she agreed to undergo suffering, in the place of others.
She did stop at last, and Stefano handed her a tissue, which she used to wipe away her tears. She took a glass of water, she did not make eye contact with me, I thought she looked—as she drank the water and waved away Stefano’s concerned attentions—embarrassed, as though she had been caught making a scene. I too felt embarrassed and soon stood up. She waved good-bye in a halfhearted way. I didn’t know how to ask Stefano about leaving some money for her so I left some bills on a table by the door. It didn’t feel like the right thing to do, I saw Stefano glance at the bills, but he didn’t say anything. It was still raining when we left, and we walked quickly to the car to avoid the rain.
? ? ?
In my room, I sat down on the bed. Despite the rain, the window was open and the fan overhead turned in slow, rhythmic circuits. I was exhausted, the afternoon had physically depleted me. I was not easy with the deception—the impersonation of Christopher, or at least his interest in Mani, his reason for being here, an act of duplicity that had taken me all the way into that house, that kitchen—still less with the phantom sense I’d had of my husband, sitting at that table, the odor of his presence even stronger than it had been in his abandoned room.
It had been three days since I had arrived, and there was still no sign of Christopher. For the first time, I felt a sense of panic—what if something had happened? I had to admit to myself that I was not clear about what my responsibilities were in this situation, Christopher had every right to disappear without being hounded by me. But hadn’t he been gone too long without word, wasn’t there something strange, something wrong about Christopher’s absence? I called the front desk and asked for a list of hotels in the neighboring villages, without specifying why. The list was not long, within five minutes Kostas had called back with the telephone numbers.