From the Archives: Brick 68, Fall 2001

The Lion Whose Stomach was a Beehive
A meditation on Verdi’s Requiem

ANTHONY MINGHELLA

First music: Verdi’s Requiem begins, fades during the reading.

      VERDI:

My stomach is a beehive. It’s on fire, as if bees were swarming in my gut. And my bones—when I lie down, I feel as if every bone in my body were somehow in the wrong place. My doctor, a Venetian, insists the stomach is psychological, he declares the bees are the grumblings of my muse. I declare merde to him. He says my bones cannot hurt. They do hurt. This is another reason to dislike the Venetians. Along with their inability to properly calculate my royalties.
      It is not even dawn, just the cruel light which precedes dawn. I am going out later to shoot birds, a sack of birds. I steal all their notes. I send them to you as my music. Soon they will be in your mouth, Teresa. Dead birds. I am writing a requiem.
      It is not for the shooting—God knows Italy, the new Italy we crave for, will be a country without birds, such is our appetite for bringing down anything which flies—no, it is the walking, dragging myself over this godforsaken land I was born in, it is the walking which gets me up each morning. I walk for an hour and every inch of earth belongs to me.
      In the field young bulls are rearing onto each other’s flanks, rehearsing dry thrusts, my turn, then your turn. I like to watch them in my fields. They remind me of why I no longer write opera. These are the future, these bulls: my turn then your turn. Let us content ourselves with birds, you and I, and steal their song.
      You ask me how I am. I am longing for you.
      Peppina says I am trying to write opera for the church. What she hears as theatre is actually terror. This morning she sang the Libera me. Deliver me, O Lord, from eternal death on that dreadful day. I have written this for you. It came to me complete, during the night, as if an angel were over my head, great wings beating, and sang God’s judgement of me.
      I sit with my scores. I sit with them sometimes. The number of notes! I have begun to count them. I have always preferred figures to notes. I have a strong desire to learn how many notes I have written. This requiem commemorates the death of the great writer Mazzini, but you must know it is really for me, for my own reckoning, the composer kneeling before God, holding the bag of birds. God will count my sins and I will offer the notes as payment. So when you sing, you sing for me, you sing my repentence.
      Did I tell you I wake now each morning in the clay light and it is my dead children I think of, before I know which day it is, before I even know who I am? I see those two dear babies and I am tormented by their smiles, tormented by their tenderness. I want to tell them don’t smile at me: I was in Milan, I neglected you. And I show them the cartoon you sent me from Paris, the maestro as lion, two paws at the piano, and the thick tail playing the third part—look how ridiculous I am, but they smile, they don’t know that in French the word tail is slang for the male sexual part.

It is not opera, Peppina is hearing—
      It is terror of those smiles, waiting for me.
      She turned to me in the night and asked me why I do not love her. It is a proper question. It is hard to remember she was wild, once. And such a voice. I pursued her voice from theatre to theatre, would not rest until I’d caught it. Let me tell you of the sacrifice she made for me, the greatest voice in all Europe, I smuggled her like contraband to this wretched town, without the passport of a wedding ring on her finger, and left her to the stares of those who like to stare, left her to the silence of those who punish with silence, for years, for years. And even if I wrote to the mayor, damn you for your small minds, I wrote from London or from a suite in Lausanne. And so now, imagine, she sits next to me at the piano and sings in her poor cracked throat this music intended for your voice, and we sing, Remember kind Jesus, together, my own growl in duet, and we finish, and she says, you love her.

Music 2: Remember Kind Jesus . . .

      PEPPINA:

She watches him in the night, or hears him, groaning, grinding his teeth, or getting up going into the next room, the clink of medicine bottles, knows there is music coming when his stomach rages. His doctor had warned her: if I cure the stomach I could stop the music.
      And so he groans, the notes spilling out of him, the lamp too bright for her to sleep and his tuneless humming, la da da di da da da in no key. Slapping the bed. La da da di da da da. She knows better than any other his genius is rhythm, rhythm, placing the notes in space.

He is so meticulous with the part given to the soprano voice. He stabs at the staves and weeps. He doesn’t notice this, just wipes his eyes with his sleeve, as if his tears were prompted by the acrid smoke from the kerosene lamp. And later, when she copies it out, he hovers, accepting her neat pen, not realising she knows that—notwithstanding the music’s dread—every note she copies out for him is a love letter. To someone else. She is secretary of his love for someone else.
      There was a time when she was the woman to be smuggled into hotels, checking in under false names. Leone was their favourite. Mr and Mrs Lion. That life disappeared as her voice disappeared, which went when she saw there was only so much flame and he needed to burn, to be phosphorescent, and she must be extinguished, folding herself into the tight corsets of being his wife. The woman she was then, when men waited outside the theatre for her, when a man would cut into his arm with a knife at her refusal of him, when men begged her. He himself had begged entry to the dressing room, had mumbled something about her voice but with his eyes only on her belly. He who knew nothing about women despite the fact he was already a widower, his wife taken in childbirth, another daughter already in the grave. He knew nothing. Came to her impatient as a bull in a field, unbuttoning himself, stabbing at her petticoats. Was that him, was that her, was that her?
      She listens to him clearing his throat, silence, then clearing the throat. Uh-hrrm. Growling, as if dislodging the notes, as if the music was all lodged in the throat. Who would have understood them at his piano, her cracked memory of a voice, his growl? They had performed Violetta and Alfredo, Leonora and Di Luna, alone in the study at Sant’Agata, the true premieres. He had clutched her hand at the end of Aida, overcome as they stood over the paper, summoning its gestures, croaking and growling, like lovers, moved by themselves, moved by something beautiful they were making, that they were witnessing, like lovers blushing at their own candour, their mysterious noises. And in this, she told herself, they were still man and wife.

Music 3

      JOSEPH:

He is driving north. There has been so much rain the road is a mirror. Leaves are falling and they fly across the mirror like birds. He watches this with a driver’s detachment, the car sluicing through the water, his mind elsewhere, the music so loud that the images shifting in front of him are like a screen, as if he were watching a journey and not making a journey.
      He is driving to a hotel. The car is rented. He has left his own car in the garage, with its child seat, with its feeding cup, with its tub of wet-ones. He has removed the compact discs from their covers so that his wife might not notice their absence, a fistful of them, including the requiem of Verdi. He listens to that now. The radio has an unnerving device which automatically scans local stations for traffic updates, and so the music is constantly invaded by presenters startled in mid-sentence.
      Problems on the M something, holdups on the junction somewhere. It’s filthy out there, the roads are flooded, the motoring organisations recommend you only make essential journeys, or stay at home, best stay at home.
      Then the Verdi suddenly returns, shocking him.
      They call themselves Mr and Mrs Fox. He and his lover. It gives them an unaccountable pleasure. Fox suits her more than him. She has tiny teeth. She can get her paws into a dustbin. He is another kind of animal. If you asked how many lies were involved in him sitting in this car, at this moment, travelling this road river, not staying at home, this essential journey, how many lies . . .

The woman he calls Mrs Fox is a singer. People recognise her. He is not recognised. He often does not recognise himself. If you stopped him now, let’s say the flood stopped him, the car marooned, and you asked him what are you doing, what do you want, where are you going? Imagine the radio device suddenly kicked in and a voice said Mr Fox, what are you up to? He wouldn’t know. He thinks about this for a long time. He doesn’t know.
      As a child he had loved what he thinks are called chinese boxes. You push, you pull, you twist; a drawer comes open. His raincoat had had a secret pocket where he kept a small broken plastic comb. He dug a hole among the roots of an horsechestnut tree and left his marbles there, and a Civil War card from a packet of chewing gum. He wanted a place to hide secrets before he actually had any secrets to hide. He is suddenly aware he is singing. I was born under a wandering star. The noise had been irritating him, the same line over and over, battling with the Requiem. I was born under a wandering star.
      He is driving north. He makes room for an oncoming car. Their headlights pool and catch a real fox, its head ridiculously red and bobbing, astonished by the depth of water it has fled into, a lake which yesterday had been a road. He automatically stamps the brake and the car becomes a boat. And he is sailing.

Music 4

      TERESA:

The jukebox syndrome. Joseph has that. He sings his inner being, in truly the most transparent way. He has no idea. I can’t get no satisfaction, in the bathroom before bed, I can’t get no girl with action. Or Bach’s mache dich mein hertze rein in the shower, make this my soul clean as he lathers up. This morning, Running away to get away, from Sly and the Family Stone, as he packed his overnight bag. You’d laugh if it weren’t so, so something.
      I don’t sing. I can’t sing. Even Leonora asks me not to. Don’t, mum. And you know this could be because I have no inner being, although Joseph pointed out that being unaware of something and something not being there is not the same thing.
      And when we talked yesterday, to prove this, he insisted I was constantly shutting the kitchen door. Which I denied. You are, Teresa! I open it, you close it.
      Which was absurd, which I told him was absurd. Until he shouted look! look! his foot against the door, and I looked and I saw my hand pressing at it.
      How did I get there? I was at the sink, my hands in the bowl, what said go there, shut the door?
      It can’t just be he wants to open the door, I want to close it; he wants to leave I want him to stay. Is that all it is—for all of us, that we don’t know how to reach out to each other, don’t even know we want to, and so our souls struggle to make contact, through gesture or through song. I close the door. He sings. Hear me. Tell me what I am trying to tell you. He has taken my copy of the Verdi Requiem, I drove Leonora to playschool this morning and the box was empty.

Does everything mean something?
      Verdi’s Requiem. Did someone die? Without the jukebox I would know nothing about him.
      Or without his stories to Leonora.
      Lying next to her on her bed, her rotating lamp projecting golden animal shapes onto the wall, a giraffe, a bird, a fox. He spins her tales, and even when they’re sinister, which they sometimes are, or sad, I don’t interrupt because Leonora loves them, and I catch up with him, catch up with what’s in his heart.
      He lies next to her and begins with a title:
      The bull who got lost in a chinese box. The man who sailed in his car to Madagascar, then couldn’t remember why he went there.
      The lion whose stomach was a beehive.
      And when the story’s finished she clings to him. Let me tell you how much I love you, he says to our little girl, let’s measure it. More than one centimetre?
      —Yes.
      More than a big jump?
      —Yes.
      More than a big house?
      —Yes.
      More than a big mountain?
      —Yes
      Then how big?
      And Leonora ponders and says,
      More than you love Mummy?

I am at the kitchen door, closing it. The wireless is on.
      Floods in the north, better not to drive.
      And I think, as I shut the door, thank God he’s on a train, thank God he’s going south.


(From Brick 68, Fall 2001.)