The moment the music ended I saw that we had been under a spell, and an animal agitation swept through the theater like a premonition of storm or slaughter. The forced applause subsided and the orchestra left the stage. We began to rise from our seats and gather in the aisles, speaking in low tones and filing out for intermission. Phones that had rung during the performance were silent. No one coughed or exclaimed. I made my way to the exit, barely daring to breathe. It seemed as though any sudden disturbance in the sheen of procedure might spark a panic.
A hand caught my elbow, my husband Joel’s. He had been seated a row behind and now he spoke into my ear: Nik. Let’s get out of here. I followed him up the aisle between red velvet seats. Our procession spilled into the foyer, where we spread out around stone columns encircling a tiered crystal chandelier. High above us was a milky, stained-glass dome. A woman in black lace leaned against a column and fanned her face with a program. I felt sick.
Hadn’t we all felt it? A premonition of violence. Some disturbance that the music had alerted us to—or summoned. The illusion of normalcy dropped. I imagined a stampede, the elderly crushed. Snipers in the square. A coup. A broad avenue, a grim succession of black marshal vehicles turning into the causeway. Maybe it was outside. Maybe it was already happening.
Joel took my arm and steered through the crowd toward the theater café. There were no screams. No shots fired. No one ran. Okay.
We seated ourselves at a table on the terrace overlooking Plaza de la Liberación. A server poured us chilled glasses of sparkling water. Across the plaza stood the cathedral with its gleaming yellow domes and towers. People were milling around in the June heat and lounging at the edge of the fountain in the shade of tabachin trees. A child climbed on the terrace and went table to table, palm open, until the server shooed him away. Someone in an orange Garfield costume was distributing leaflets. At one corner of the plaza, two camouflage policía vehicles angled massive mounted guns over the crowd, and flickering patterns of light and shadow glazed the scene in a narcotic shimmer.
I relaxed a little.
Okay, what the hell was that? Joel said.
I rooted in my bag for the program. The concert had been my idea. I was still searching for words.
Joel went on: I felt like I was going insane. I was having these apocalyptic visions. Of like, chaos and disorder and nuclear wasteland.
The piece we’d just heard was called The Colors of the Heavenly City, composed by Olivier Messiaen in 1963. How could I describe it?
It was like death, I said.
It was just sounds. There was no sense to it, no evident pattern or structure. The more I strained for a shape the more random and horrific it became. Music was supposed to have a shape. The shape was meant to tell you something about life. How it goes up and down and has harmony sometimes and discord and terrible things and beauty. Wasn’t that the point?
It’s what destruction is, I ventured again.
I hated it, Joel said. Viscerally. I swear to god I was about to get up and leave. Or punch someone in the face.
We weren’t musicians or connoisseurs by any description. I was a painter. I could tell myself I knew something about acts of creation and destruction. An artist’s job was to peel back a series of veils obscuring ever more mysterious aspects of reality and the illusions of the material world. I was always monitoring them for flutters.
What’s most disturbing is that it was intentional, Joel said. It meant to piss you off.
A chime signaled the end of intermission.
I don’t think I can, he said.
Let’s go, I said. I was picturing the conductor from the back, the black jacket straining and flapping as he moved his arms, the flashes of bloodred lining.
Joel and I stepped into the plaza. Here was a shape, a square. The shape of public spectacles and revolutions. I had begun to conjure death.