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 like the 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, and 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 and it seemed as though 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 face 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 receding 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. I plucked at my light summer dress, which felt weighty against my ribcage. Everything seemed wrong. This must be the derangement that comes with suspicions no one else can corroborate. There had been a crime or violation of some kind. Hadn’t we all felt it? Something about that music had been noxious to my spirit. Soul. 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 of Guadalajara. 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.
The concert had been my idea. We’d had to queue at the ticket office ten minutes before the start time. In line were not just the usual distinguished heads but younger, well-dressed patrons. Everyone was sweating. At two hundred pesos apiece, two tickets totaled twenty bucks.
Joel was twisted up, too, I could tell. We could always find language for times like this and it was one reason I loved him. That whole concert, 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 Olivier Messiaen’s Couleurs de la Cité Céleste, composed in 1963. The Colors of the Heavenly City. Joel and I weren’t musicians or connoisseurs. 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 discernable pattern or structure. The more I strained for a shape the more horrifically random it 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, but I’m—upset.
It’s what destruction is, I ventured. Music should have a shape. Wasn’t that the point? Because only death was formless. What did I know? Maybe because I was a painter I could tell myself that I knew something about acts of creation and destruction, and I was susceptible to that kind of thinking, to seeing reality that way, like a series of veils overlaying increasingly more mysterious aspects of the world, and an artist’s job was to describe their textures and peel them back. I was primed for metaphors and monitoring death’s garments full of secrets, and studying the veil to catch a sudden flutter, exposing unseen realms and all the illusions of the material world. I don’t think I’m special in this.
Music was supposed to have a shape, I told my husband. The shape was meant to tell you something about the truths of life, how it goes up and down and has harmony sometimes and discord sometimes and terrible things and beauty. If it had no correspondence to what we recognized as living then it was doing the dying. And now I was sensing death everywhere, and a cartoon reaper tangled me in its robes. Was I a happy person? Did I have the defenses, the talismans, the whatever staves it off—gratitude, bright colors, a chemical rush, a flush bank account, the laughter of babies? Death was children eating ice cream in the plaza and opiates invisibly changing hands, and plastic water bottles in the garbage and fallen blossoms crushed underfoot. Death was an afternoon concert. Death was many things.
A chime signaled the end of intermission. Let’s not go back in, Joel said. He paid for the wine, and I tucked the program in my bag and we stepped from the terrace into the plaza. Now I was watching for death and I would be chased down cracked pavement on 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.
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