Melodrome Read online

  Munava is stimulated by the challenge of getting a handle on Lerena. Suano senses that she would like to regard the world as mere illusion, to profess a categorical nihilism and be done with the weight of her personality, but she has taken on too much executive power to shuck her self away.

  Munava waits for them, seated on her little keg, in front of a damp-stained wall. There is a bucket of water beside her, from which she wets her face occasionally; two other kegs have been placed for the visitors, and anoebe tea, raisins and nuts are served on a formica table in the middle.

  They talk. Munava makes them talk, sometimes in the inhibiting presence of a robot or one or two watchful Clearseers of either sex, who remain silent but not impassive. Thirsty for knowledge as ever, Suano tries desperately to puzzle out their system, but doesn’t get far because he has to take in and analyse what is said in their meetings.

  Munava, for example, says: All things in the universe are moved by opposite forces clashing; who thinks rightly in the midst of those clashes is on the path towards the good; help will sometimes fall from the sky; and if all matters relating to work and sharing the fruits of work are in order, the group organised by the right-thinking one is also on the path.

  Lerena insists that she was helped by a gift that fell from the sky; she believes with all her heart that a part of that gift belongs by right to the Dona, who will know, in any case, how to invest it in her organisation; that is why she is asking if the Dona will kindly accept her share.

  Mebs like that for you, cousin, but for me the gift isn’t falling from the sky; it’s coming from you. And what do I know about the path you’ve followed up till now? Anyway, I don’t give a prap about your path, because I don’t trust your judgement.

  In other words, says Suano, you decide how much help your people are allowed to receive from the supernatural.

  The sky isn’t supernatural, cousin. What’s wrong with you?

  Nothing, madam; but I think it’s interesting how groups of people, like soldiers or merchants or regional administrators, fabricate their own moral systems and claim that their group is pure of all evil, just as you say that if things are strictly organised, no wrong can be done.

  Sright, that’s what I say, Munava confirms. That’s why you have a choice: either you see the bad in others but not in yourself, and believe that only your own group is doing good; or you realise that all creatures are weak and plickle, which is going to make you anxious; so some people try to repress their anxiety by saying that good and bad are meaningless; but those people rot away soonorlater, cousin. Here, though, we have searched tirelessly for a path to knowledge of the good.

  You’re not the only ones, says Suano.

  Lerena pinches his neck as if turning off a tap. She murmurs: Dona, listen to me, not him.

  Munava goes on: But we’re not searching anymore, cousin; not even I can find the path, though it matters more than anything to me; I guess that’s why the sky is helping me to find it.

  What the young lady has brought for you, says Suano, is something that she won on the day when she happened to see you.

  I’M NOT THE SKY, COUSIN, shouts the Dona, exasperated, but calms down again immediately. What the sky gives is bread.

  Fine, says Lerena, I can buy you a whole lot of flour and we can all bake together.

  Silence for an answer. End of the session.

  Another afternoon, Munava says to Lerena: You’ve come palending to do good, but maybe what really brought you here is egoism.

  What brought me is the need to do the right thing, madam, says Lerena.

  When the need fills your whole body up, cousin, there’s no space left for thinking right.

  Okay, okay, says Suano, perhaps you can explain why it is that you’re the one who gets to decide which needs are good and which are bad. Is it bad not to want to be hungry, Dona?

  Madam, I don’t have much strength, and I’m putting it all into an idea, says Lerena.

  Strength is not a scutch of use, not on the path to the good, cousin; strength is not always the strongest.

  Let’s get this clear, says Suano, the fairest organisation, the best thing for the region, is whatever you and your people come up with?

  Mmm, the Dona hesitates, mmm. And as soon as she notices what she’s doing, she exaggerates the hesitation. Look, cousin, when the time comes, I’ll be happy to step down; I’m nothing.

  First one thing, then another, says Suano.

  Cousin, it’s very rude to presume that people are deceiving themselves.

  Where there is nothing, there is room for a gift of gratitude, says Lerena.

  Munava lifts her back end from the keg: Look, cousins, we have heaps of stuff to do, so let’s wind up this birrel, shall we?

  But you keep asking us to come back every afternoon, says Lerena.

  Young lady, you came rolling down the hill to me, Munava replies. And sends them away.

  A few minutes later, she calls them back. Now there’s a colossus beside her, with reddish skin and silvery plaits, holding a little square of multi-coloured glass. Show the cousins, Luraz, Munava tells him. Luraz obeys: he takes a bite out of the glass, chews for a minute and proceeding unhurriedly, as tears run from his eyes, spits all the shards out in a drizzle of blood.

  We don’t eat glass here, says Munava.

  Shuddering with nausea, Lerena says: What I’m doing here is bringing you the best I have to offer.

  Come back tomorrow afternoon, Munava says in reply.

  By means of an insinuation, Suano tries unsuccessfully to confront Munava with the pleasure that she is taking from indefinite deferral. He’s not surprised by Lerena’s firm stance, given that Munava is so unlikely to yield. He observes their fierce determination. And this is what he sees: Munava’s soul is a labyrinth trying to project itself as a social regime; Lerena’s is a bank of fog. And yet, if both are resisting definition, it’s because they can glimpse a truth in the depths. Labyrinth and fog are natures, sources of dignity, each in its own way. Except that Munava is cruel to others, while Lerena hurts others by cruelty to herself. In Suano’s opinion, Lerena is beginning to realise that the cruelty within us all should be endured by each of us alone.

  Some warmth escapes from a fissure in the autumn. In Lerena’s backpack, the bundle of bitcards sits undisturbed like a votive offering. Lerena and Suano smell of machine oil, well-shared wool clothing and fish broth. After each evening meeting, Lerena washes the clothes that she has worn that day and insists on washing Suano’s as well. As he hangs the washing out to dry on the agapythium’s clothesline, he thinks; for example, about absurdity and how much of it there is, not just in what is happening to them, but in general, in all lives and life itself. Yes: absurdity.

  One evening it occurs to him, as if he had never known this before, that the only thing that makes sense of the world is love. If there is a universe, it must have been drawn from the void by a propensity to exist, a desire on the universe’s part to consist of discrete things brought together. It doesn’t matter that love is possessive, or an excuse, or an invention. Even if somebody loves because they have decided to, or because they are guided by a prejudice or a plan, the driving force of love still had to be there as spirit, spectre or ideal. Love absorbs all things, and could even be their underlying cause, but it only absorbs if it is a love that is applied to something. Love propels and affirms itself in the attachment to particular things and particular beings; it begins by loving the existence of something or someone, in all its poignant transience, and that marvel gives it a sense of its own imperishable power, its unexplained infinity, and so it breaks loose and proliferates; the only thing we know about love is that it is something given; and that is why to love truly is to give oneself. It doesn’t happen all that often. When it happens, it simplifies life. The fluid impersonality of love shows that in fact you can get by with very little. Love is in fact what allows you to do this, and although there are some things you have to have, love enriches them. Love li
quefies the block of stone buried deep in all beings.

  Unfortunately, for the moment, no love is flowing from Suano’s wound – it has closed. The process wasn’t quick, and he is afraid to let the wound reopen.

  One night, say the eighteenth night of their stay in the agapythium, Suano wakes up with the presentiment that Lerena is not in the cell. He’s right. So he goes out to look for her and, hearing the groans and laughter of lovers trying out polyhedral configurations in the other cells, makes his way to the terrace, where he finds her. Distractedly, by way of a greeting, she holds out half a joint of kayfra. The weather has turned cool again. The autumn sky is very clear. Strangely, given the time of night, birds are making a din in the marshes. I’m looking at the stars, Suano. Can’t you hear them purring? Like cats? he asks, to encourage her. But she says nothing in reply.

  From that night on, Lerena begins to voice a part of what she is thinking, and she is thinking a lot. This is the only comfort that she allows herself. At the same time, she is eating less and less, turning her hunger into a complaint, it seems, and barely sleeping, because she feels that she must remain alert to what is happening to her. I don’t want to go on being hopelessly distracted, she mutters. Some nights later she says that although the work on the assembly line is hard, it creates a harmony, for her at least, a regulation, because its only purpose is to establish an order, but it’s nothing like the fagus order that the Dona manages, which is too domineering and actually rather chaotic. These ideas come to her as she looks at what there is to see, as she simply pays attention, no need to rack her brains, and she concludes that Munava’s cerebral tyranny over the region is a result of her thinking before she has taken the time to see. It’s bad, Suano, thinking before seeing. I’m not saying she does it on purpose, but it makes her sort of unnatural, even degenerate.

  The following night she admits that if not for Munava’s severity, she wouldn’t be looking at the stars, because the space inside her, which had been large until recently, for example when they stopped on the highway, began to shrink when they entered the Felinezo; but since the confrontation with Munava suppressed her appetite and need to sleep, that interior space has been growing again.

  Suano tries to moderate her consumption of kayfra.

  Some afternoons, Lerena says, I feel like I’m going to snap like a biscuit.

  She lets her gaze slide over Suano’s forehead but says nothing more. She’s hunched over, an oblique furrow saddening her face, and she has exhausted her reserves of reasoning. Thought gives way to hallucination. On the dark terrace, Suano notices that both of them have gooseflesh, no doubt for different reasons. Not even the most gifted therapist could analyse precisely what is happening. At a certain point, Suano seizes up; then his wound begins to think for him; by all indications it has begun to suppurate again. If he gave himself up to it, heart and soul, perhaps he would finally understand; but the giving up would have to be mutual, and he can tell that Lerena is not content to place herself at his level: something in her aspires to rise. Although it’s a spiritual aspiration, Suano’s provisional diagnosis – and it saddens him to reach it – is that Lerena is still overacting.

  But the aspiration that remains is also a guarantee of defiance. Her insistence on paying is becoming excessive.

  It doesn’t disconcert the Dona. One afternoon they find her absorbed in a padlet. The words that she is reading twinkle on her glasses. They are especially careful not to ask her any questions. Both of them mumble: All that matters is paying the debt…All that matters is…The courtyard is full of a diffuse, opalescent light, as if the setting sun had vaporised.

  After a while, the lightning begins.

  A minute later, drops of rain like glycerine pearls are falling, then drops the size of olives and others big as figs. Munava knows that exposure to these conditions is not the hardest test she might have set for a pair like this, but maybe it’s all she can think of for now. Jagged blue lines saw at the sunset.

  Lightning strike me dead, says the Dona.

  Hup, so now we want to die, observes a peeved Lerena.

  But this unexpected reaction doesn’t make the Dona smile. It’s a negative spell, cousin; the sky likes a game; it sparks up the clouds.

  No, that’s not what happens, madam, Suano interrupts. Between the top and the bottom of that tall cloud, there’s a difference in electric potential of several million volts; a discharge from one point lights up an arc; the air heats up and radiates; then it expands explosively, and the shock wave is the thunder.

  Thunder is unlucky, says the Dona. Thunder bursts the Body of Binnasu.

  Who is Binnasu?

  All-the-beings-in-the-world, silly.

  No point pretending, Dona, says Suano. You’re not one bit superstitious.

  The Dona flourishes the padlet, hardly a primitive artefact. She says: We know how to benefit from the lightning’s energy, cousin.

  I believe you, Dona, says Lerena. You have command over all of nature.

  Long silence. Although the moment is propitious, Suano fails to seize it and press his advantage home. The drops are briskly wetting clothes and skin, preparing to soak into muscular tissue. And then, with her hair slicked down by the rain and her T-shirt drenched, the Dona says to Lerena: All right, all right, let’s get to what’s keeping us here, my girl. What’s your idea of paradise? Come on, talk for once.

  Ehem, Lerena puts in hastily. And again: Ehem.

  Suano can see that if she goes on hesitating, she’ll end up digging her own grave. But then he hears her say:

  Paradise was my father’s desk.

  What do you mean? asks the Dona.

  Lerena lifts her nose towards the lightning: Just something I remember from when I was a kid: the drawers of my father’s desk, full of bills and documents; his pipes; the padlets and the stubbooks; the scent of his aftershave; the inkpencils; the massager in the armchair; the musibase; chocoladas in a cup.

  Suano is stunned; he has to admit that he has never been able to extract a childhood memory like that from Lerena. In spite of all her business experience, she is unable to read the world – her egocentrism gets in the way – and has fought no hard campaigns; she could never seize an uncommon objective; but it is clear to Suano that sincerity has just saved her and, faced with that sincerity, he feels superfluous and disarmed.

  By blowing her nose, the Dona manifests compassion and disgust. Then she stands up.

  Please, says Lerena. Please. Why not?

  You want to purify your money, says the Dona. Exactly, says Suano. So?

  The Dona leaves.

  There is no soliloquy that night on the terrace. Not that Lerena stays inside; she goes up to look at the stars as usual, but neither of them says a word as they stand there in the peaceful drizzle, and when it stops, they simply let the capes provided by the agapythium dry off in the breeze.

  When they get back to the cell, they find that her backpack has been stolen.

  All the following day, Suano seethes with fury, something he hasn’t done for at least two years, and although his anger is dampened slightly by the sight of Lerena continuing calmly with her work – for her, the theft has solved, in a sense, the problem of the debt – it flares up again when he hears her coughing: Kheuk, kheuk.

  Kheuk, kheuk.

  At their evening audience, the Dona badmouths charity. To organise the poor effectively, she says, you have to be so poor yourself you have nothing to give, not even a pittance; poor in everything except the means of organisation.

  All right, okay, says Suano. But the problem is, Dona, when you’re finished organising, and the poor have been freed of their poverty, you and your people will have nothing to do; you’ll be of no use; you’ll have to disappear.

  Rising to her feet, the Dona summons a certain Asbante, a freckled woman with red, curly hair and serious muscles, who walks straight over to Suano, raises her left hand and places the tip of her middle finger between his eyebrows. With that finger, cousin, says
Munava, Asbante can punch a hole in a pumpkin.

  And why don’t you want me to move? asks Suano.

  No, it’s not that, cousin, says Munava, sitting down again. She gives an order. A young boy with a catlike air comes into the courtyard with Lerena’s backpack and places it on the ground in front of them. No-one expects explanations from Munava; this situation is inexplicable. And yet Lerena ventures to say: Dona, that money is no longer mine.

  Munava wheezes.

  Then Lerena begins to shake, surprised by the voltage of what she is about to say: You know what? I’m going to take it.

  Munava stares at her with a suffocating warmth, more like a sister than a cousin, a big sister whose suspicions have finally been confirmed. Oh no you don’t, sweetheart, don’t even think about it; I’m not going to say it’s no longer yours; but you can’t just take it away; it was never yours in the first place; it’s not up to you to return that luck.

  Cut, says Lerena.

  But when you possess it truly, deeply, when you assimilate it, then you’ll be able to give it away; and when that time comes, frankly, we wouldn’t mind if you made a substantial donation.

  There’s only one way to assimilate things, madam, says Suano.

  One way, cousin, true, just one.

  Lerena tilts her head to the side; she’s indicating something, an opening perhaps, and her eyes are spinning like roulette wheels. Suano sees her squat; he sees the skirt crease between her thinner but no less shapely thighs; he sees her reach into the backpack and pull out a bundle of bitcards, remove the elastic band, stand up, smooth her skirt, sweep her hair back as she must have done when she was vaunting the benefits of investment in natural sites; and he sees her take the first bitcard.