The moment the music ended I saw that we had been under a spell, and whatever screen that had protected us had been lifted, and everything was bad. A contamination swept through the theater, an animal agitation or premonition of storm or slaughter, and a sense that something had gone terribly wrong but no one knew what it was. The applause subsided and the musicians left the stage. We began to rise from our seats and gather in the aisles, speaking in low tones as we filed out for intermission. Phones that had rung throughout the concert were silent. It felt like any sudden disturbance in the sheen of procedure might spark a riot.
A hand caught my elbow, my husband Joel’s. He had been seated a row behind me, and now his expression was blank and he spoke into my ear, let’s get out of here. Our procession shuffled into the foyer, where we fanned out around a crystal chandelier encircled by stone columns that rose three stories above us to a milky, stained-glass dome. A woman in black lace practically collapsed against a column and beat wind against her face with her program.There had just been a crime or a violation of some kind. Hadn’t we all felt it? Something about that music had been noxious to my spirit. While it was playing, whatever was harmonious and symmetrical in life had convulsed grotesquely out of alignment.
Joel took my arm and steered us through the crowd toward the theater café. He ordered glasses of white wine frosted with moisture, and we sat in the shade under an umbrella on the terrace overlooking Plaza de la Liberación. Across the plaza stood the cathedral. People milled around in the June heat and sat at the edge of the fountain shaded by tabachin trees. Children climbed on the terrace to beg for money. Someone dressed in an orange Garfield costume was distributing leaflets. Municipal Police stationed at the corner in camouflage-painted trucks angled their massive, mounted guns into the square at forty-five degrees and patterns of light and shadow crazed the scene with a narcotic unreality.
What was that? Joel said, frowning. Joel always had strong feelings and something to say, and this was one of the reasons I loved him. I have no idea, I said.
The concert had been my idea. To buy tickets we’d had to queue at the kiosk ten minutes before the start time. In line were not just the usual distinguished heads but younger, well-dressed patrons, and everyone was sweating. Our tickets totaled four-hundred pesos, about twenty dollars. Who let concert tickets be so cheap? It felt like stealing. That whole time, Joel said, I was having apocalyptic visions of chaos and disorder and nuclear wasteland. I felt like I was going insane. I swear to god I was about to get up and leave.
I opened the program. The piece was called The Colors of the Heavenly City, composed by Messiaen in 1963. Joel and I weren’t musicians or connoisseurs by any description. Tastes may be acquired, but this wasn’t about class. How could I describe it? It was like death. It was just sounds. There was no sense to it, no evident pattern or structure. The more I strained for a shape the more horrifically random it had seemed. In my mind lingered an image of the musicians in black formalwear, arrayed cultishly before the conductor like insects in thrall to a light.
I’m not offended, Joel said, like I wasted my money. I’m weirdly upset.
It’s what destruction is, I ventured. Music was supposed to have a shape. The shape was meant to tell you something true about life, how it goes up and down and has harmony sometimes and discord and terrible things and beauty. Wasn’t that the point? Because only death was formless. I was a painter, so I could tell myself that I knew something about acts of creation and destruction. I was prone to seeing reality that way; a series of veils obscured increasingly more mysterious aspects of the world, and an artist’s job was to describe their textures and peel them back. So I was primed for metaphors, and monitoring death’s garments for sudden flutters, exposing unseen realms and all the illusions of the material world. I don’t think I’m alone in seeing things that way.
But it wasn’t just random noise, that’s what’s disturbing, Joel said. A bunch of untrained dopes in sweatpants blowing horns would have been better.
A chime signaled the end of intermission. Let’s not go back in, Joel said. He paid for the wine. I tucked the program in my bag and we stepped from the terrace into the plaza.
But now I was beginning to conjure death everywhere, and a cartoon reaper tangled me in its robes as I tried to run. Was I a happy person? Did I have the defenses, the talismans, the whatever staves it off—bright colors, gratitude, the laughter of babies, a flush bank account? Death was children eating ice cream in the plaza and plastic water bottles in the garbage, and opiates invisibly changing hands and fallen blossoms crushed underfoot. Death was an afternoon concert. Death was many things. Now that I was watching for it I would be chased down shadeless streets without possibility of concealment or escape. I would feint and juke and argue, and fling bits of life at it, and try to push it back.