Lucia's Masks Page 29

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Bird Girl and the Dance

  BIRD GIRL HUGS THE MASK TIGHTLY to her chest. Never before has she felt so fully alert and alive. Is it because of this place at which they have finally arrived? There is some all-restoring sustenance coming from the dark solid rock whose roots she senses reaching deep into the earth, and from the steadying motion of the lake-like-a-sea, which is so huge she cannot see its opposite shore. The air tastes cool and cerulean on her tongue.

  The landscape gives of itself so openly and cleanly she is sure it is bestowing these qualities on her thought. She is seized by the certainty that this is the place and time, exactly now, when all five of them can enact the ritual that has gradually been taking shape in her mind.

  It was Chandelier who’d suggested that the six theatre masks had probably been used for a dramatic chorus, with all the actors speaking in unison, precisely, to the last syllable. Not just a shared voice and intonation, but a common breath and pulse. She was sure this was why she had felt compelled to bring the masks. They would all put them on, and after a little rehearsing, they would speak or chant together in a perfectly achieved harmony. She imagined them creating a temple of sound, with fluted columns that let in the light and air. It would be a holy place made of human voice and breath, and of an unforced and unbounded passion.

  The yearning in her — to perform the ritual here and now — was sharper than any desire she had ever known; keener even than her desire to possess an entire library or to be reunited and reconciled with her mother. It crossed her mind that perhaps this was what it was like when gifted people felt impelled to create a work of art. Then she pushed this idea away as far too self-regarding for her purposes. The ritual was not her creation. They must build this temple of sound together: she and Chandelier and Harry and Lucia and the Outpacer. Her part was to explain to them why it was so necessary.

  First, they must do this for Lola. Bird Girl knew she would never be at peace until she had fittingly acknowledged Lola’s sacrifice, and helped to create a ceremony that was artistic, dignified, and worthy of the old lady’s gift.

  And second, they must do it for their own sake: as thanksgiving for having survived the forest’s traps and trials and in recognition of the destiny they had forged as a group. She doubted that any one of them could have made it through alone. Each of them, even Candace, had added to and fortified the life-story they shared.

  Sometimes she thought she glimpsed this story’s actual plot, like a braid of silver water running through the welter of events and heavy, tangled emotions. There must be a way to catch it and reveal its actual shape: just the way the choruses in Greek tragedies had done it. Chandelier had told her how the actors in the chorus would stand on their own and comment on the essence of the action, so that the audience was made aware of the overarching truth of what was really happening on the stage. Those choruses would say things like: “Vengeance feeds on vengeance” or “Suffering maketh wisdom.”

  Bird Girl had thought about it carefully and decided that for their chorus a chanting of pure sound would be best. For one thing, she hadn’t been able to come up with the right set of words that could contain everything she wanted the ritual to convey. She wanted grief and joy and thanksgiving. And yes, she wanted the words to hold the wisdom/suffering equation too, and to let that much-tested truth ring out like a bell. So she asked Chandelier to teach her all the Ancient Greek ritual cries he remembered from his reading of the tragedies. She had somehow managed to weave these cries into a supple song. It surprised her how well all the individual utterances cohered. She was sure she could teach these interwoven cries to the others very easily indeed. What concerned her was the process of wearing and speaking through the masks themselves. She had foolishly supposed it would be a simple matter of putting the mask on and pulling taut the two leather straps at the back that held the glazed face snugly in place.

  But once she had it on, the panic set in almost immediately. Paradoxically, she felt she was smothering inside the featherweight mask. She was taken over by the irrational idea that some doom was about to descend on her; that she had eaten Socrates’ seeds of hemlock and that her limbs were already growing cold. She only just managed to control the impulse to pull the mask off, and apply her mother’s counsel on what to do when fear-filled panic threatened to unravel you. Bird Girl began to breathe strongly from her pelvic floor until she was calm enough to start chanting through the black cavern of the mask’s mouth.

  Abruptly, she was rocked back on her heels. Zeus, or some other thunder god, was amplifying these sounds she uttered, doubling and deepening them so that they resonated powerfully within the hollow bulging forehead of the mask. God-speak, she thought. The cavity was full of a divine sound now, a humming that originated in the electric currents of earth and sky, setting the flesh of her forehead a-tingle. Next, it was as if someone had tripped a switch. Every cell in her body was quickened and filled with a honey-gold light. She both saw and felt this fluid light, which was suddenly a winged being ascending within her. This is ecstasy at last, she thought. Then she thought no more, until the moment she ceased chanting. She took off the mask and shook her head in wonder at where she had been.

  Just to be certain that what had happened was not an aberration, she waited an hour or so and tried it again. The result was the same: she experienced the strangling panic and cold doom when she first put on her mask; then when she disciplined herself to the deep breathing and steady chanting, she activated the sublime sound box again. The god-speak reverberated against her vulnerable human flesh. And off she sped, light-footed and wide-winged.

  Now Bird Girl had to grapple with a thorny moral dilemma. Did she have the right to ask the others to endure the state of cold-doom panic the mask brought on at first: like being immured alive in a tomb, with iron bands about one’s chest? In Harry’s case especially, does she have to right to ask?

  She guessed that the revelation of the mask’s sound box secret would only work fully if it came as a surprise. She examined the question again and again and finally decided that the ritual would not have the correct fittingness and potency without the masks. What they would be making was a work of art, albeit invisible and fleeting. And the first stage in the making of art was often painful, was it not — a period of doubt and helplessness that must be endured with courage and faith? One waited in the thick darkness, trusting that the inrush of inspiration would come. Wasn’t that what artists of all kinds did?

  Bird Girl resolved to counsel the others well. She would encourage them and teach them how to cope with that first petrifying panic when they donned the masks. They would succeed in speaking with one voice. They would see through the same eyes. They would do this for Lola’s sake . . . She makes one of her little balletic leaps toward them where they sit, each wrapped in their own thoughts, upon the wide crescent of the strand.

  “This is the time and place,” she announces. She looks directly at each of them in turn. “We need to have a performance, a ritual, something to mark all we have come through. And I want each of us to put on our masks.

  “To hold what has happened in remembrance,” she adds urgently. “To give it a shape. And for Lola. With Chandelier’s help, I have worked out what we will chant. It will not take long, truly.

  “Please,” she implores. And again: “Please.”

  They all look at her quizzically. She senses their reluctance, but knows she must persuade them at all costs. This is, and must be, the moment.

  “I will coach you,” she tells them, “in the sounds we will make with the masks on. These are ritual cries Chandelier taught me, which he remembers from the ancient Greek plays he studied in his father’s library.

  “I have thought carefully about this,” she reassures them. “I am certain these are the sounds the masks demand. They are simple sounds, but powerful. This is the place, ruled by wind and light and rock and water, where they must be loosed again into the world.

  “Evoi,
evan, alali, io, ia, iache, papapape.”

  They humour her and comply, practising the cries until she is satisfied. When they flag or grew restive, Bird Girl chides them lovingly, praises their efforts and inspires them anew to try to make “a living temple of sound.”

  “Raise the temple higher,” she encourages them. “Raise it.” Under her tutelage, the five transform the series of ritual cries into a chorus that is both sculptured and fluidly alive. Bird Girl is amazed at the visceral joy she experiences at hearing Harry’s tenor blend with the Outpacer’s bass, Lucia’s contralto, Chandelier’s countertenor, and her own soprano. She sees from their beaming faces, their uplifted arms, how pleased they all are with what they have made. The light reflected from the lake swings around and beneath them in a magnificent loop.

  “We are ready,” Bird Girl tells them, “to put on our masks.”

  She sees Harry and then Lucia frown. “But why,” Lucia asks. “We’ve managed to produce this splendid, soaring sound together. Why must we confine our voices inside those hard, ugly masks?

  “You will see why,” Bird Girl responds with all the assurance she can muster. “Please trust me on this.”

  Harry struggles to overcome his reluctance and perceives a similar slowness in Lucia, the Outpacer, and Chandelier as they take their masks out of their packs.

  Bird Girl has put on her woman’s mask with its broad, wide cheekbones, hypnotic black eyes, and chasm mouth. Already she is not herself, but some hybrid that makes Harry’s flesh prickle. He feels more uneasy still when he puts on his old man’s mask with its grey-white beard and sagging eyelids. Despite the lightness of the papier mâché, the mask seems to him a heavy, choking thing once it encloses his face. Abruptly, a blind panic mounts in him. He feels he is being smothered. He cannot breathe. The sensation behind the mask is akin to death. Images of the frozen faces of Admiral Scott and Birdie Bowers flash upon his mind’s eye. He puts up his hand with the intention of plucking the mask from his face. He is a very old man who must protect what breath he has left. Bird Girl’s childish game strikes him now as not only absurd, but dangerous. For one poisonous instant, he hates her and her foolish demands.

  “Breathe.” It is her voice he hears, booming from inside her woman’s mask. “Breathe deeply and produce your sound from the pelvis. As deep as you can.”

  How ridiculous, he thinks. From the pelvis. But he obeys, and lets his arm drop. Glancing round, he sees through the eye-holes of the mask that Lucia, the Outpacer, and Chandelier are all following suit; he guesses that they too have experienced the same mortifying panic and the urge to tear these polished faces from off their own flesh. The girl in her gleaming wise-woman’s mask continues to urge them on. They begin again the sequence of ritual cries they had perfected.

  From the pelvis. Harry seeks the source of breath and sound from deep within, and strives over and over to keep at bay the fear of smothering death. He utters his sounds they have so carefully rehearsed. He joins in the chorus. Gradually he becomes aware of an extraordinary force filling the cavity of the mask’s bulbous forehead. So powerful is the resonance of his own voice and breath in this hollow that he is initially stunned. Whatever is happening is electric. Then, just as unexpectedly, the reverberation triggers an ecstasy, and a current of joy passes through him. He feels clean and light, as if his body were somehow boundless.

  When he looks out again through the eyes of his mask, he cannot at first believe what he sees. Bird Girl has taken off the glazed face, and she is dancing a kind of stately pavane with a great blue heron, whose long toes mark out perfect time upon the sand.

  Harry plucks off the mask and rubs his eyes. When he looks again, the great bird is still there, dancing with the young woman. For an instant, as it turns, Harry and the heron exchange a glance.

  See, I am returned, its eye seems to say. What had been lost is found again.

  Harry continues to watch the slow, circling dance of bird and girl in rapt amazement, his mouth agape in an uncanny mimicry of the mask he holds before his chest. He looks at his companions and sees it is the same with them.

  At first, Bird Girl is aware only of a flutter of blue. Then she sees the narrow head, topped by the black plume, the gleaming scimitar-like beak and the golden eyes with their unfathomable ebony pupils.

  She takes off her mask and sees mere feet away from her the proud angular heron whose beauty makes her want to weep. He is as tall as she. His spindly legs strike her as absurdly delicate, but she notes their obvious strength as he makes an elegant side-step and inclines his head toward her. He bends his head again, and takes another sideways step. She understands then that he is asking her to dance with him, to mark out a graceful circle upon the sand.

  Four times round they go, in keeping with a rhythm she recognizes as from the chant, which still moves through the air although they are all silent. She watches and keeps pace with each slow step and the high lift of the heron’s knee, suspended for a moment. It is a dance performed in discrete parts, and it dawns on her that what the heron is doing is stitching one dimension to another with his delicate, elegant movement — not just space to time, but also the invisible to the visible.

  On the completion of their fourth turn, the heron lowers his head, takes two steps back toward the lake. Then he turns, lifts high his great wide wings and rises up and off over the water. They all watch silently until he breasts the cliff to their left and disappears.

  Harry is the first to bend down and touch with reverence one of the imprints of the heron’s toes upon the sand. Then each of the others does this in turn, as if this gesture too is now part of the ritual they have performed upon the beach.

  “A harbinger,” says the Outpacer.

  “A miracle,” says Lucia.

  “I did not think I would live to see this day,” says Harry.

  Bird Girl smiles widely at Chandelier and blows him a kiss.

  “I am happy here,” she says.

  Epilogue

  I KNOW, MY BELOVED DAUGHTER, THAT you are as yet too young understand my words. But these are things I wish to tell you now, so that you can begin to absorb them as readily as you do the clear light and air of our northern home.

  Since we came here, I often think of what happened when I put on the theatre mask at Bird Girl’s insistence. At first I panicked badly. Wearing the mask was like being entombed alive. I felt the muscles of my face and my lungs begin to harden. I wanted to pull the wretched thing off before it succeeded in sucking all my breath from me and turning me to stone. I was terrified that the mask would kill me where I stood.

  What stopped my hand was the example of Keats’s courage through the ordeal of the making of his life mask. I thought of the many hours he had suffered with the thick plaster encasing his face, and how he was able to draw only the most meagre of breaths through the two tiny straws. He had undergone this gruelling procedure at the request of his artist friend. For my sake too, and the thousands of others like me over the generations who treasured the actual likeness of a great poet on one particular day in his twenty-fourth year. If Keats could endure this sense of suffocation and near-death for Benjamin Haydon’s sake, I chided myself, then I could do the same for Bird Girl who was so desperate to pay homage to Lola’s memory.

  “Breathe and produce your sound from the pelvis,” I heard Bird Girl urge us. I strove to follow her counsel, and almost immediately wearing the mask became more bearable. Once we joined again in chorus to utter those strange ritual cries we had practised, I forgot about the mask altogether. It was as if we five now all shared a common breath. I had the sense of a greater company of beings speaking with us, perhaps even countless beings.

  Then the first mystery showed itself. My speech-breath filling the bulbous forehead cavity revivified the ancient science of the mask. It was a sound box, designed thousands of years ago, to trigger a state of ecstasy in the wearer. The thrumming resonance in the cavity made every nerve and cell in my body vibrate. It was a shock, like an
actual electrification of my entire being. I was opened, head to toe. There was a fountain of golden light inside me. I seemed to look out of other eyes, perhaps even out of the eyes of the original maker of these masks with their vast ritual power.

  I knew I had been purified. I walked upon a terrace of stars. I ceased, I think, to be Lucia. A warm and sensuous wind bore me upward. Amidst the rushing stars, I saw faces, including my parents’, as they were when they were young and unburdened. I saw the poet, seated beside an open window, listening to the nightingale sing upon the heath. I saw the long, lean face and body of the Outpacer as we lay together at your making. It was then I saw the glistening Egg come spinning out of the night. The state of ecstasy, as I now know, is preceded by a blinding flash. I could not look at him for long: the majestic, winged being who stepped forth from the Egg. His face and body were of such radiance, I had to close my eyes. When I opened them again, I saw Bird Girl dancing with the heron.

  Bird Girl believes the heron was drawn to the tremulous quiver of our bodies and voices as we chanted inside our masks. She thinks the bird recognized our human desire to rise above what we are, and that he came to us in fellowship. There is no doubt he and Bird Girl made sublime partners. As they circled one another in the formal dance he defined, I was magnetized by his godly self-containment and awkward grace. I noticed that the bird kept a good distance between them so as not to hurt Bird Girl with his sharp beak. I also remember thinking: this cannot be happening. This dance Bird Girl is performing with the blue heron is a hallucination that will leave me desolate. But I had only to glance at the others, at their astonished eyes and open mouths, to be reassured. We all partook in this extraordinary privilege.