Violin by Anne Rice

Author:Anne Rice [Rice, Anne]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi

His face was wet and white. He stared at me. For a moment, he couldn't grasp what I'd done, and then his eyes fixed on the violin and he saw it and he understood.

I lifted the violin to my chin; I knew how; I lifted the bow and I began to play. I didn't think on it or plan or dread to fail; I began to play, to let the bow, barely grasped between two fingers, fly against the strings. I smelled the horsehair and the resin of the bow, I felt my left fingers stomping up and down the neck of it, damping down the throbbing strings, and I tore at the strings wildly with the bow, and in the stroking and in the pound of my fingers, it was a song, a coherent song, a dance, a drunken frenzied dance, with note following too fast upon note for the mind to direct, a devil's dance, like that long ago drunken picnic, when Lev had danced and I'd played and played, and could let the bow and my fingers move without stopping. It was like that, and more, and it was a song, a crazed, plunging discordant rural song, wild, wild, like the songs of the Highlands and the dark mountain places, and grim weird dances in memory and in dreams.

It had come into me . . .1 love you, 1 love you, Mamma, I love you, I love you, I love you. It was a song, a real true bright and shrieking and throbbing song coming out of his Stradivari5s, unbroken, streaming out as I rocked back and forth, the bow sawing wildly and my fingers prancing. I loved it, loved it, this untutored dark and rustic song, my song.

He grabbed for the violin.

"Give it back to me!"

I turned my back on him. I played. I went motionless, then drew the bow down in a long low mournful wail; I played the saddest slowest phrase, dark and sweet, and in my eyes I dressed her and made her pretry and saw her in the park with us, her brown hair combed, her face so beautiful; we never, any of us, ever had her beauty.

Years and years wrapped round all this and meant nothing as I played.

I saw her crying in the grass. She wanted to die. During the war, when we were so small, Rosalind and I, we always walked beside her, holding her hands, and one evening, we were locked by mistake in the dark museum of the Cabildo. She wasn't afraid. She wasn't drunk. She was full of hope and dreams. There was no death. It had been an adventure. Her smiling face as the guard came to our rescue.

Oh, draw the bow out long and let the notes go deep, so deep that they scare you that anything could make this sound. He reached for me. I kicked him! I kicked him as sure as she had kicked me, only my knee came up and he went whirling back.

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