From The Woman Who Chased After the Wind by João Tordo
translated by Zoe Perry
Chapter 2: pp 62 to 70
Jost was her last student on the day Hans Braune brought the hawk. He was a new pupil, with whom Lisbeth was still unacquainted. She had agreed to teach the boy as a special request from Neumann, her neighbor across the street, who, on behalf of a civil servant from Ostallgäu, had interceded in favor of the boy, describing him as a peculiar child, with special needs but tremendous talent. He came to try out a violin last year, confessed Neumann, I've never seen anything like it. That afternoon, before Jost arrived, feeling that sense of powerlessness overtaking her tiny body (Casper had described her, at the age of twelve, as a wispy girl), Lisbeth altered her routine slightly and went to the cemetery in the middle of the afternoon, as soon as the falconer left. He had promised her he'd silence the pigeons, but he didn't know how. She was afraid that before he was able to fulfill his promise, her delicate mental condition would crack, bringing back the turbulent episodes that had plagued her for so many years after losing her virginity in that field.
She crossed the main avenue with her head down, and kept her eyes on the ground as she passed the basilica. At that time of day, between two and three in the afternoon, the Reichenstraße was quiet, with very few people about: some ladies on their way to tea, one or two merchants at their shop doors, the watchmaker sitting, as usual, on a wooden bench, tuning up one of his fancy pocket watches, his slender fingers gripping the tweezers inserted into the delicate mechanism. He glanced at Lisbeth, then resumed the painstaking operation. The pharmacy, the Höfler bakery, the Italian café and then, the Augsburgerstraße, where the city began to thin out, gradually turning into hillsides and slopes punctuated from time to time by the home of wealthy family, so unlike the typical Bavarian dwellings in the center of Füßen, with their colorful facades and flower boxes in the windows, neighbors a few steps away, non-existent privacy.
She climbed the gentle incline up to the entrance to the cemetery. A black wrought iron gate with cherubs awaited her half-open, the branches of a nearby oak tree casting a shadow. She began her usual stroll. Out of the blue, the sound of her feet on the cold earth brought back the memory of her father's footsteps on the stairs. Boots on wood; the door wide open. Naked, her back to the wall in a corner, screaming. She doesn't remember why. Even back then she didn't know the cause of her affliction. So many years had gone by and she still wondered about those black holes in her memory: one moment she, Lisbeth, was a girl of thirteen or fourteen or fifteen, and the next she was a wounded animal on the floor, blood running from between her legs, stripped naked, her clothes strewn haphazardly on the floor. She awakened from her trance screaming, her father bursting through the bedroom door. Cover yourself, the man asked, put some clothes on, for God's sake! And, kneeling on the floor, she gathered her clothes in a hurry, covering her bosom and pubis as best she could, before her father helped her onto the bed, getting dressed properly. Her father took her to a doctor, Dr. Fleischer, whose name (meaning butcher) really frightened her, and whose obsessive, grim gaze studying her body made her tremble from head to toe. Fleischer concluded that the episodes of “forgetfulness” and “delirium” were due to the onset of menstruation; that some women, before losing their virginity, reacted “supernaturally” to the Lord's ways, seemingly possessed by forces that corroded their soul, that left them prostrate and helpless, or hysterical and crimson from head to toe—especially their faces, red with rage.
Get out, please, the doctor ordered the poor, ignorant shopkeeper, and Lisbeth's father left. Fleischer commanded Lisbeth to lie down on a table and palpated every part of her body relating to her womanliness as he exclaimed, Ah!—or let out muffled noises disguised as confirmation of some discovery, or something more like a prolonged moan.
She stopped in front of her father's grave. The tombstone was tucked away, hidden from the main thoroughfare of graves where the magistrates, politicians and former mayors of Füßen, the region's prominent landowners, and the former ruler of Neuschwanstein Castle were laid to rest. No, her father had not belonged to such stock. He'd been a simple, practical man whose shop had occupied the ground floor of the house where they'd lived, and which Lisbeth had turned into her music studio, where she taught students from in and around the city: solfeggio, composition, piano.
The headstone was overgrown with moss, the dark green weaseling its way into the crevices of the rock. She never knelt in front of the grave, never brought flowers, never performed any sort of ritual. The chords of Mendelssohn's Piano Concerto No. 1 in G Minor still rang in her ears, which she had been teaching to Natasha, the goldsmith's daughter, an unnerving, pasty girl who lacked talent. She remembered her father lying in his bed the day he died. He hardly spoke anymore, his breathing a cavernous gasp. With his icy, trembling hands, the old man clutched his daughter's arm, begging her to come closer. Lisbeth put her ear to her father's parched, dying mouth and heard: I'm afraid of the dark. Then he passed. He was eighty-eight years old and nearly blind when he died, at lunchtime, between two pupils. Instead of crying, the daughter called the priest, and as her father was gently ushered into the everlasting, she taught a ten-year-old child the difference between a binary and a ternary bar, then closed the piano, blew out all the candles in the room and washed up, combing her long, dark hair with her mother's horsehair brush and put on her nightgown. Shivering as she sat on the edge of the bed, her father's corpse in the next room, his soul disappearing into an abyss, she lay down, tears welling up in her eyes, and thought how she too was afraid of the dark, and perhaps that fear might never go away and was the eternal matter out of which reality is made.
“Goodbye, Father,” Lisbeth said into the humid, dusk air, her words forming a slight mist, which soon dispersed into the grove of sycamores and oaks sweetened by the tenderness of a purple, almost brown sunlight that faded into evening.
Wilhelm, the boy's father, was a shy man.
He stood almost two meters tall, and had to crouch in order to walk through the door to Lisbeth's house. Now he gripped the boy's shoulders with both hands, their knuckles hairy. Sitting on the piano bench, Lisbeth watched Jost and was perplexed. He looked like his father: light brown hair, cropped short, vacant eyes, a stuporous expression. What a strange boy, Lisbeth thought, he must surely have some disability. Wilhelm told the teacher that his son had shown great aptitude for music at school and that his tutor in Wald told him that with the proper training the boy could become a great musician. The man spoke with his eyes fixed on his son's hair, he didn't look at her; his words came out in a monotone whisper, like the quiet raps of a stagehand.
“You came to see Neumann,” said Lisbeth.
“Yes,” the man nodded. “He tried the violin.”
Lisbeth looked to Jost.
“Did you not like it?”
The boy looked at her, but it was as if he didn't see at her—or as if he his eyes were turned backwards and were looking inward.
“These are his hands,” Wilhelm said, and he leaned over to take his son's right hand (he had to bend over quite a bit, almost in half). He showed it to Lisbeth. It was an unusual hand for such a young man, too long, with very slender fingers. “He knows where the notes are, all the notes,” his father continued, “but he has difficulty hitting them with these jackknives he has for fingers.”
“Have a seat here,” asked Lisbeth, getting up from the piano.
The boy didn't seem to understand. He had not said a word since entering the house, he was simply there, his arms slumped at his sides. The father interceded and, with a push, moved the boy toward the piano.
Finally, Jost seemed to understand and sat down. Lisbeth asked him to place his hand on the keys: she showed him, touching one key, then another, then a chord. But the boy did nothing. Instead of lifting up his arms and placing his hands on the piano, as anyone would do in that situation, he let them drop onto the red velvet bench. Sitting there next to the teacher, he began to rock back and forth.
“Do as the lady says,” Wilhelm ordered.
Lisbeth gently took Jost's right wrist and, lifting up his arm, placed his hand on the keys.
“My apologies,” said the father. “Sometimes he can be disobedient. It's a problem we have with the boy.”
Jost's fingers touched one key, then another. The sound echoed in the quiet room. G, F sharp.
“Now like this,” said Lisbeth.
She opened her hand and played an octave. Jost looked at her hands and imitated her, a C octave. Then, without the teacher asking him, he played a scale, then arpeggiated the chord. Finally from his lips came a murmur, playing back the C-minor chord: C, E flat, G. Lisbeth's heart began to race, her face flushed as the boy began to move his right hand along on the piano and found, with the ease of a predestined being, music's key combinations. Three more arpeggios: G major, B-flat major, A.
She hadn't feel that way since Casper.
Suddenly, Jost stopped. He did so in the middle of a beautiful B-flat sixth, sundering the pleasure that had begun to rise inside the teacher, who, sat beside him, tried not to make a sound or move a muscle. His attention seemed to have gone astray; it was no longer on the keys, nor on his father's voice, urging him to go on. He had focused on something above his eyes. He raised his arm and, with a smile on his lips, picked up the little porcelain frog on the piano lid. Rapt, the boy put his other hand on the object and began to stroke it, seemingly fascinated by its texture and embossing. It was an ugly frog, dressed in a tuxedo, with its mouth agape, a piece of sheet music nestled between its legs; it looked like it was singing, croaking an aria.
“Put that down,” said Wilhelm.
But Lisbeth rested her hand protectively on Jost's shoulder.
“It's okay,” she said. “They say the great Norwegian composer Edvard Grieg has a frog like this one and carries it everywhere in his coat pocket.”
Out of the corner of her eye, she discerned a twinkle in Jost's eye, a fleeting satisfaction. There was something about her house that seemed to please him, that brought him out of his shell, if just for a moment. What joy, Lisbeth thought, rising from the bench, leaving the young man to his ruminations with the knick-knack she'd bought at a street fair in Munich, the only time she'd been to a big city. It had been one month since her father died and Lisbeth, alone in the world at the age of thirty-six, had awakened with the feeling that there was nothing to keep her from dying either, from closing the door with the stubborn latch, sinking into the four-poster bed where her parents had conceived her and waking up in the afterlife. She raced through the streets of Füßen at dawn (even Neumann was still asleep at this hour) and sat down on one of the train station benches. She got on the first one, at a quarter past five, which took her to the Bavarian capital, and spent two days there, lost in a huge, strange place, a single woman walking around alone in Munich. On the second day it snowed, and having rented a little room in a skeptical old lady's boarding house, she spent the afternoon watching snowflakes fall over Grünwald Park, curiously remembering not her father, who had just departed, but her mother, who'd left this world when Lisbeth was still a child, and in such a bold manner, suddenly fainting in the middle of the Jesuitergaße like a snowflake melting on the frozen ground. They walked hand in hand, and she, still a child, felt her right arm, always raised when walking beside her mother, lose its leverage and fall with the force of gravity. When she looked beside her, her mother, who always smelled of jasmine, was lying on the ground with her eyes open and a kind of grin on her unstirring face.
Then, nothing. A crowd of people, some ladies shrieking. A hand on her shoulder. Lisbeth turned back to her child self, her long, still very blonde hair dancing in the summer breeze, and saw Franz Braune, the lumberjack's father, smiling at her as if he were sad, taking her by the hand and leading her far away from where her mother had fallen down, never to get back up. Then the doctor, and her father, weeping.
Snow falling over all of Bavaria.
“Is the boy any good?” Wilhelm asked.
He hadn't moved from where he was standing, his arms wrapped around his long, skinny torso. There was about 40 centimeters distance between him and Lisbeth, who was now standing before the man; she looked up at him, tilting her neck back. And yet she felt vastly superior to this man whose timid nature did not allow him to face the teacher, a person thought to be learned, erudite, famous in the region for her musical education.
“He's a prodigy,” she revealed.
His father tried to hold back a smile, but was unable to, and grinned broadly, revealing his crooked, yellow teeth; he was missing an incisor.
“I knew it,” he said. “I knew it.”
“But he needs a lot of instruction.”
“We have no money,” the man lamented. “I am a farmer, we struggle to get by. Just getting here takes almost two hours, the horses are old and tired.”
“Forget about the money,” Lisbeth said. “Bring him on Thursdays, same time.”
“Okay. I'm very much obliged to you.”
And that was when she first heard the voice of that boy who wasn't quite there, lost in his own mysterious world. He mimicked the cooing of the pigeons that, from outside the house, tormented Lisbeth's soul. The teacher's heart sank. The very foundation of the earth was indeed being upended.