The Melody by Jim Crace

Author:Jim Crace
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2018-06-19T04:00:00+00:00

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Alfred Busi fell asleep sitting on his practice stool but not so deeply as to evade his nightmares or his dreams. He was disturbed frequently, though briefly, whenever he shifted his arms or his head on the hard piano lid, and once by his telephone ringing. He knew he ought to answer it, then find a bed or a couch or even curl up on the rug beneath his feet, but he could hardly summon the energy before he dozed again. He relived the Garden beatings in his semistupor; he revisited the day when Papa had been bitten by the bat; he lost himself in a maze of alleyways and insults, of funerals and storms; he felt his mother’s fingers on his face and then the stinging of the salve; he whirled his clouting stick around his head and went for strangers in the street; and he went for Joseph Pencillon. His slumbers were exhausting and unkind.

Unusually for him, Busi would remember his dreams, or at least a muddled portion of them, when, after more than an hour, he woke and lifted his head from the piano. He would remember either going to the marquee in the town hall gardens and singing for the audience, or not showing up at all, and no one missing him. He would remember booing and applause. He would remember the distant cracking and the smell that interrupted his first piece and caused his admirers and his fans to shift with worry in their seats. It’s just the static from the microphone, he’d said, unconscious as a stone; it’s just the cables burning with the ardor of my songs. But he knew, he’d always known, this final Saturday should be engulfed in flames, and so he made it happen in his dreams.

During that more than an hour of uneasy sleep on his piano stool, Alfred Busi, pluckier than life, had walked out into the villa’s yard, pushing aside the refuse bins. Maybe he had toppled them; perhaps a pair of cats had arched at his passing and spat their curses at him. For the first time in more than fifty years and only in his slumbers, he began to climb the loose limestone scree on the steep embankment of the bosk. At one moment he was naked; at another he was shoeless, bruised, and old; and at another he was just a boy, little Alfred Busi living an adventure while his parents slept. It was nighttime, it was daytime, it was spring and there was blossom on the trees, then there was a nipping wind and spray, and afterward a light that might have been the moon or might have been the sun or might have been the lanterns of the constables hunting with their truncheons for the sleeping poor.

By the time he’d located the well-worn game trail used by the diners at the bins, the wild and ancient woods behind the villa had begun to flatten out. Alfred, Signor Busi,

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