From The Fallen Bassoonist (work in progress)

(The bassoonist [a Frenchman] is writing a libretto. Unfortunately for him, it must be in English. He's better at German and Italian.)


THE MEZZO-SOPRANO IN PURGATORY
SCENE I

The stage is dark. One can hear only the voices.

Violette: Oh oh, my back seems to be split in two but I can feel nothing, nothing at all. Shit. It is too dark! Where is it that I have been borne?

Voice (bass, masculine): You haven’t. Yet. If, in fact, you will never to be. Again. One would think, perhaps.

Violette: Fear grows in darkness, spreads fast. But this fear is oddly abstract, coming from a great distance like weather. My heart screams like a broken cuckoo clock, though still.

Voice: Soon there will be no fear. No heart. Weather is absent. Time is vacancy.

Violette: Who are you? And why are there no lights? Please to put them on.

Voice: There are no lights. There are never the lights save moons, on occasion and unpredictable. No import who I am or . . . was.

Violette: But where is it that we are? Oh, oh, where? Where?

Voice: You are neither here nor there nor the other place. Neither from whence you came nor where to whence you have arrived. Then. To put it as it is, as a matter of fact, you are dead, obliterated, past imperfect.

Violette: I am totally confusing.

Voice: Soon, you will not be confusing and realize the absence of death.

Violette: That gives me more greater fear. I think.

Voice: You will get over it soon. Soon you will get over everything and you will feel nothing, nothing at all. Only some boredom on and off.

Violette: Then well, is this what one calls Hell?

Voice: Well, it is certainly not Heaven, as far as I know and I is not.

Violette: But is it not Hell, is it not?

Voice: One says that Hell is overcome by a tyrant fascist totalitarian who enjoys to inflict the pain. So there is much pain in Hell. But not here. There is no pain. Soon there will be no I, no one, for you. No you. No applause.

Violette & Voice: No joy. No hunger. No applause. No sex. No arguments. No passions. No reveries. No dreams. No hope. No despair.

Chorus (2 sopranos, 2 altos, 2 basses, 2 tenors): No joy. No hunger. No applause. No sex. No arguments. No passions. No reveries. No dreams. No hope. No despair. No fear. No I. No you. No one. Soon. No time. No place. No soon.

Violette: I can feel almost numb. To say I begin to not feel. But is there a way out of this how to call it . . . condition?

Voice: Only one way. But one says it is extremely difficult this way. One would have to come over the not feeling first and then second to grope about to find a what is known as one’s true love. One of course must have to have the faith in that sort of thing. But then, one is not one here in no place.

Violette: But but . . . then, the way out of no place?

Voice: Then that is to say it is said that after communion it is necessary to foreswear the true love with abnegation and humility. And prostrate one’s self before the Ideal which is not the Ideal which is not not the Ideal. But listen, one says there is the maze full of fowl beasts breathing the fire. An apparency, of course.


The bassoonist saves the document, thinking he’s accomplished enough for one day. The plot has been laid out and it’s quintessentially operatic.

When his housekeeper arrives at 7:00 pm with home-made dinner, he is asleep in his wheelchair, dreaming about the woman across the square. She is nude, playing a cello solo with an orchestra. The conductor, who resembles his father, is leering at her, while his mother is trying to turn his attention away from the cellist. She is screaming, compelling his “father” to stop conducting. He pushes her away and resumes. His ”mother” withers to a bag of bones.

The soloist is now a reed thin woman who resembles the bassoonist’s ex-wife. She is playing a tenor clarinet out of tune. The audience cheers.

The scene shifts. He is now in a concert hall with dim lights. There are plump nude women writhing all over the floor, tongues flapping. He stumbles on tongues and breasts, and falls. He looks desperately about for his mother as the women encircle him, licking their lips, ravenous. He tries to escape the dream but can’t. He’s still in the room with the women dreaming that he’s trying to get out of it.

The housekeeper awakens the bassoonist and gives him his dinner out on the patio. She busies herself with cleaning and helps him into bed when she’s finished. He is too tired to read Sartre.

***

(Violette is the woman the bassoonist is obsessed with, though he doesn't know who she is. She lives across the square and he watches her every morning, with the assistance of his opera glasses. She's always nude at that time.)

Violette opens her French windows, looks out at the morose early morning sky and virtually vacant square, stretches and combs her hair with her fingers. She looks down at her body, tightens her stomach, frowns. A pity that exercise bores me, not that it would help.

Violette pops her morning dose of the antipsychotic drug she can hardly pronounce. If she stops the meds, the shrinks might haul her back to the hospital for another round of shock therapy. They could do anything to her, without her agreement or knowledge. I’m beyond being shocked. I feel nothing. And that is what they want.

Violette catches movement coming from the patio in the building directly across the square. Her eyesight is poor. She can barely see the man who sits there every morning, can’t be sure that he’s aiming binoculars in her direction. If so, she doesn’t care. Let him look. There is nothing to look at but a baggage of lard with the brain of a goose. If she were off her meds, she might perform a belly dance and gesture lewdly. She might even sing Voi, che sapete Then her horrible old neighbors would call the police and she’d be back in the hospital.

There are 16 framed photographs perched atop Violette’s living room mantel-piece. Many of them depict younger versions of Violette in various operatic costumes and with various opera stars. One of them depicts a very young version of a vibrant and scrumptious looking Violette in an ivory and gold wedding gown. The black bearded bridegroom on her arm resembles famous tenors There are several photographs of Violette and her husband, at apparently different ages, then one of him on a mountain, spreading his arms wide like Christ of the Andes. Then there is formal portrait of her parents in their house in Cannes with Violette and her younger brother when they were children.

Of course, she didn’t fall off a mountain in the Andes. Some said that her descent prompted her husband’s disappearance. Others said that her husband’s disappearance propelled her fall. He was gone, her guide and god. Possibly, he’d been gone for years. In any event, his actual departure was a shock with foreseeable consequences. Violette was always so “high strung” and “eccentric,” her brother told reporters.

Nobody knew why Violette screamed and trembled from delusions, hallucinations of hearts sliming the floor with blood, swiftly marching tubas with sharp teeth, Violette’s dead father striking her with a metronome -- nothing that made sense to anyone without sufficient imagination to comprehend the over-riding realism of metaphor. A few psychiatrists had theories, but neither the psychiatrists nor the theories were fool-proof.

Once, during her years at the conservatory, Violette had flushed a toilet in a British soprano’s house and announced loudly to everyone present: I am flushing Cannes from zee can. The guests had laughed politely when she emerged dancing the can-can, lifting her dress up to her chin, exposing purple polka-dotted bikini’s. The guests were present to launch the soprano’s new album, popping champagne and making idiotic toasts: Down the hatch, all the way to the snatch. “Violette gets that way,” the soprano remarked to one of her friends. “I sometimes think she doesn’t know what she’s doing and doesn’t care.” There were other incidents displaying Violette’s “outré artistic temperament,” her tendency to mock and humiliate herself and engage in “inappropriate,” exhibitionist behavior.

Violette does what she does every weekday, slowly and methodically, as if one misstep will catapult her into vertigo. She showers, dresses, feeds and waters Carmen the cat, in that order. She makes espresso, spreads toast with butter and raspberry jam, and eats it She retrieves her sheet music from the piano bench, places it in her shopping bag, and inspects the living room, in that order. The room is dull and listless, she imagines hard of hearing -- but in order. Violette calls the lift and walks three blocks to the music school where she teaches budding mezzo’s how to sing with their throats open to the voices of her past perfect gods.

Back to Writing: The state of everything is beyond hopeless to me.

I am writing a fictional invention called The Fallen Bassoonist. Here are a few excerpts.


The Fallen Bassoonist



I.


At 7:30 every weekday morning, he opens the French doors to his small patio overlooking the square and maneuvers his wheelchair to the railing to watch the women. On weekends, his sister picks him up to take him to her house a short distance from Nice. He entertains the children and enjoys his brother-in-law’s dinners, accompanied by the refined regional wines from the cellar. These days, he is teaching 12 year old Pierre how to maneuver his mouth about the delicate though seemingly tough reed of the bassoon without breaking the reed with his teeth. Pierre’s fingers have grown long enough to reach the keys. Little Manon wants to learn, but her lungs are fragile. She is taking piano lessons instead.

He is grateful to his sister for preserving the aesthetic passions of their parents. Fortunately, it seems that she hasn’t inherited the abstract frigidity of their father, who. died several years ago. Since then, their mother’s mind has degenerated into a spool less thread. The man and his sister speak little of her, visit her infrequently at the government-run nursing home. He wishes that he had been able to hire professional caretakers for their mother at home. Perhaps her mind would not have declined as rapidly, detached from the residence of her heart. Instead, his sister had insisted on selling the old house to pay their father’s debts – it couldn’t be helped. At the time, he was touring the world with his quartet.

The uncle and his nephew start with simple exercises. Soon he will bring the boy scores by Mozart, then Schubert. Then perhaps Bartok, when the boy is older and ready to take his first steps into the world of abstract emotions and thoughts, the one the man inherited reluctantly from his father. The boy is still superstitious, with a crucifix above his bed. He is rebelling from his godless heritage.

There is never enough suitable music solely for the bassoon. The violins are the bullies of the classical world, alongside the piano, of course, he thinks. Such a simplistic, melodramatic instrument, the piano. Bang bang Rachmaninoff. Make the girls cry, piano and violin. The piano is not as subtly nuanced or sensuous as the bass, the cello, the bassoon. Not deep and complex, rich . . . primal. How many children opt for bassoons over pianos? Not to mention the guitar, that over-rated pop instrument, easy to learn, vapid as easy listening music, well, unless a master like Segovia is playing..

At 7:30 every weekday morning, the bassoonist looks through his opera glasses into a window on the other side of the street. On this summer morning, in lucid, not overwhelming light, he can see the woman clearly. She opens her shutters, stretches, yawns, combs her long hair with her fingers. As always, she is naked. Perhaps she knows or wishes that someone is watching.

The woman’s arms are substantial, thicker than a bassoon. Her face is broad, Slavic shaped. He shifts his focus to her breasts. Also generous and round, though drooping somewhat. On the verge of middle age, no longer springy but full with surprisingly modest light aureoles. Now she turns. As she walks away from the window, he focuses his opera glasses on the bass-like curve of her thick wide buttocks; adjusts the glasses to close in on the sight. Delicious and profound, and so alluringly imperfect. He loves to look at her and imagine that she is looking at him.

The bassoonist always wants to linger on this woman’s breasts and buttocks with his long fingers, lick and suck on her with his tongue drenched in the finest Bourdeaux mixed with the juices from her cunt. Ha! He chooses the English word for its tone, the deepest, most primal note he can achieve. CUNT. He wants to swallow it, wants to hear the woman’s body applaud, whoever, whatever she is. It hardly matters. She could be nothing, no one. He wants. He wants. That suffices for now. He is not yet strong enough to wheel himself down the street, someday to walk perhaps, loathes the social workers and physiotherapists, preposterously poor actors like his parents’ church friends. Talking to him as though he were a child: everything will be fine.

He will mobilize himself when he is sufficiently motivated, gaining his strength from necessity, the necessity to culminate desire. He is gearing up to garner the urge to ambulate with his hideous faux legs, now that he is resigned to devote himself to a search for something other than glory -- something more basic, essential, less abstract . . . less ephemeral. Maybe something he had understood once, as a child. He lifts his robe to look down on the legs that aren’t his, plastic below the knee. Merde, they are ugly. Dégoutant. That is what is. Rien à faire. I must not fall prey to thinking that I am my legs. But I will never be the subject of documentaries on the famous bassoonist who overcame adversity. After the fall. Merde, that mountain!

The memory of reactions after his fall prompts the bassoonist to spike his espresso with Drambuie. When high on his brilliance, he had rarely imbibed alcohol before dinnertime, and only wine -- infrequently liquor or liqueur. .

We will pray for you, his acquaintances and fans had written. They had sent him flowers and cliché-drenched cards: Our prayers are with you, cher Bernard. Don’t hesitate …. You will be back on stage soon. You have your wonderful hands. You are a genius! .....

He peers through his opera glasses, sees nothing but a vacant, dull room through the window all beiges and browns. The woman has vanished; presumably, he missed her exit. But what would he say when he rang the cow’s bell? Then, which bell? Surely, there are several apartments on the 5th floor of her building. If they were to meet, however, she would see him as a cripple, not an object of desire, despite his eloquent, aesthetic face and slender, strong body – above the prosthetic limbs. He would have to woo her, whoever she is.

The bassoonist shifts direction, prompted by movement below. There is the Moroccan woman from his building, floor below. She is walking with her son, taking him to school. The bassoonist and the Moroccan woman exchanged formal greetings in the lift on occasion, and she’d introduced him to her son, who spoke politely with no trace of a foreign accent. She’d never looked at the bassoonist directly, though she didn’t wear purdah and was dressed in Western clothes. He has never seen her with a man. She seems shy, but her shyness may be cultural.

He wonders what the woman smells like up close, without clothes. It is hard to tell how old she is, as her face is full of shadows from within, lined despite the freshness of her flesh. She is wide below the waist, narrow above, with merely adequate breasts. He prefers them more generous. But the form of the thighs beneath her skirt is enticing and the curve of her buttocks, promising. She flows when she walks. Taking the Arab woman, considering her culture and his disability, would be a challenge he’d relish. Does she taste like lemons and cumin? Salty like olives? Are her aureoles the color of eggplants?

The liqueur is giving him a soporific buzz. He will have toast and another espresso, again adding Drambuie. Eventually, he will listen to Schubert and Brahms, possibly Count Basie or Georges Brassens. If inclined, he will work on his libretto.

He returns to the patio with his espresso and two sweet-buttered toasts lavished with preserves from sweet black plums in his sister’s garden. It is not so bad to be homebound, simply to enjoy the warmth of the sun on his face and watch the women. He has just noticed a new one, lightly plump with youth and happy featured, sitting on a bench with a Jack Russell. She is reading a book. The dog nuzzles her, wanting attention, licks her face. She laughs and pushes him back. The dog sits and watches pigeons. She strokes him idly as she reads.

The bassoonist becomes the dog. He closes his eyes, tilts his head back, and emits a purr-like growl. He pushes his cold nose under the woman’s pink cotton dress, sees that her panties are pink and her pubic curls black. She smells like sweet black plums. He pushes his wet nose beneath her panties, into her wet CUNT. She sighs and shoos him off of her. Then a man arrives to remove her from the bench. They kiss, walk away holding hands, neglecting the dog sagging behind like a forgotten breast.

He returns to himself to himself, listens to Schubert as he sits on the patio. He sees no women that interest him. He daydreams about a plump young woman he met in Italy.

The bassoonist is writing a libretto for an opera about a mezzo-soprano who has fallen into Purgatory from a mountain in the Andes. He has only dreamed of the Andes. The mountain from which he fell is relatively unknown.

He wants to start a draft of the second act today. The opera was solicited with no guarantees by a friend with connections to the most prominent and therefore wealthiest member of the Sydney Opera House Board of Directors. The bassoonist will compose the music once he has finished the libretto. Ass backwards, perhaps, but that’s his preferred method. Unfortunately, the libretto must be in English. He is better at German and Italian. Never mind, the editors will mutilate his finished product, he is certain. Fuck the editors. Long live the editors.

The bassoonist is now under the influence of a confluence of alcoholic delights, having imbibed several espresso’s with Drambuie and a bottle of Pouilly-Fuissé with the Croque Madame he ordered from the brasserie next door. He is feeling philosophically giddy as he writes: