Duende
[3]
–error. Yet it did not lessen his engagement with her blind performance. The act of singing had moistened his lips. His head was clearing.
The precise pattering of her heels and toes was midnight rain.
He accompanied her the only way he knew how. He sang—
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–each line delivered with greater intensity than the one before.
“The lamb upon his throne.”
The words were framed within a throaty snarl. Still, it would be a falsehood to say it lacked melody. It was the very essence of melody. She bit her bottom lip. Released it. No expression. She remembered her training. She urged her facial muscles to relax. Demanded. Neutral. The lights would soon fire. She had to be perfect.
The echo of his song filled the gaps living between the rapping of her heels. She focused her mind on the dance for fear of letting his singing become a–
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–distraction. He smelled perfume. Late summer sweetness, though in truth, summer had only just begun. The forecasters predicted a long and hot season; perhaps the hottest on record. That prophecy did not govern his present, since the room was artificially cooled. Surely the fabricated chill was the reason his skin shivered beneath his white silk shirt? It couldn’t be the voice he had heard introducing the song. Even though–
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–she gasped. Her right heel. Without comprehending how, she had slipped on the varnished wooden boards. A twinge of pain stabbed from one side of her ankle through to the other. She never made mistakes.
“Hark how the heavenly anthem drowns.”
Though her faltered beat, he continued singing. She had to keep up. Step. Step. On a throbbing ankle and bruised toes. Tight denim cutting into her flesh. Hair stuck to her cheek by uninvited perspiration. She matched his rhythm. Any moment now, the light–
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–flooded the space. Instantaneous transition. He could think only of lightning. And even as his eyes squinted against the spotlight glare emanating from all four corners of the room, her rhythm continued. Her dance. And all he could do was sing along. Employing deeper breath, he sung–
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–louder still: “All music but its own.”
She was used to the abrupt switch from dark to light. From experience, her audience would require a moment to adapt. The man was no exception. His eyes were squinting in response to the white glare, though he made no attempt to move his hand to shield his vision. She noted his long nose, and how it fit his face, which was long and thin also. His skin was tanned, like leather, and was drawn tight to his carved basswood features. His thin lips, curled downwards, tremored with the final syllable of the word freshest on his tongue.
She executed a half jump; trailing leg bent at the knee to form a two-sided triangle. Front leg outstretched; toe pointed down. A bullet crack as the toes and heel landed. Her knee absorbed the impact. As she had been taught. The back foot followed. Spin. Left. But eyes still fixed on him. He only escaped her gaze when she blinked.
“Awake, my soul, and sing.”
She noted the quaking of his thin lips as he continued to sing; vibrating piano strings drawn tight between rawhide cheeks. The shudder travelled down through the man’s body. His slim neck; white-shirted chest; black jeans, skin tight and in defiance of his apparent age. Rhythm and lyrics descending through crocodile skin boots and into the grain of the aged teak floor, where it flowed still, as if following hidden fault lines. Direct to her. A lonely, hungry melody, grasping at her heels as she danced the same tune. Up calves; thighs. Tireless flesh quivering–
–beneath fishnet tights. The dazzle from the fluorescent lights dissipated and he could open his eyes fully again. They found the ghostly cream of her skin; flowing paint coating the ceaseless pistons that were her legs.
Of him. His own words resonated beneath his skull as he watched her skip. Her movement was coached elegance, keeping perfect time with his tempest gospel. Who. Lithe muscles atop olivewood bone, all bound with wire rope tendons; above, a veneer of softer flesh that pressed against the fishnets and formed raised diamonds carved from silken skin. A vision perfect and disciplined yet unforgivingly feminine. Died. Denim. Soft blue. Cut-off high and low, and bound to her figure; the frayed end of the material tracing that holy place where upper-thigh met backside. A double hop with feet kissing in mid-air as her back turned toward him. Higher, a sheer black top beginning halfway up her back, the skin there stretched over vertebrae so strained the musician was certain he could hear the bones sing, though it was really him, singing his obsolete poetry across the tap-tap of her heels. The antique flooring was chorus. For. Dizzy now, him, as when she spun so did his soul, twisted, and he failed to understand how she was doing it to him, though he welcomed it all the same. Rotating. Facing him with porcelain belly and pierced navel, silver, the sheer top barely covering a grey bra he knew was the same shade as his eyes, like thunderclouds, her chest risen only to a modest curve–though it was enough. Thee. Grey eyes, his, staring out at him from a million album covers promoting the songs that had made his name. Eyes the music press had described as gateways to the beyond; and the soul. Yet pale in comparison. To hers. Her steps wound him like a rusted spring primed to snap. But her eyes. Terrible and beautiful: glass-fired lotus leaves the most vivid shade of green; the same shade as the tree vipers early morning hikers might come across in the hills above the city where he was born. Face round and apple shaped. Lips full. Pink. Faint freckling that transformed her cheeks into powdered galaxies. Hair giddy red fire, and he was breathing it in so that it scorched his lungs and if he was inhaling smouldering ashes.
Yet he kept singing.
She continued–
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–dancing. She was so well-drilled in the movements there was no fatigue; only the moment. Existence in a single beat. Or tone. In the time and space she inhabited, she split from past and future, a marionette puppet with strings tethered only to the limitations of the song. Far-removed from the bulging eyes and ruddy faces of the liquor-bathed men and women she remembered from the smoky lounge of her parents’ freehouse, and the dutiful role she had been expected to perform there. In the blazing light, and under the enigmatic gaze of the watching man, she was the wind. The wind never tires. Or so the thin woman told her and the other girls each day during practice. It never finds a home, either, one of her comrades had said, before suffering icy rebuke.
Home. Stage. Action. Three notions occupying the same shared page in the songbook. She spun like a leaf caught between two quarrelling breezes as the man’s eyes–her audience’s eyes–followed her every pivot from his leather chair throne. Head to toe. Though there was something else; a hidden strain within the turbulence of his gaze. She was sure of it. Pain? Or merely memory surfacing from unlit depths?
She beat out the next line with her toes. He parted his lips to join her.
“And hail him as thy matchless king,” he sang, and she felt the disconnect between the look in his eyes and the words themselves.
She whipped her head to the left. A flash of berry red–overripe–that was the same colour as her mother’s hair. The strings tying her to the present were cut.
Right foot planted. Left foot hanging like a twig near torn from its parent branch. She faced him as his voice still cast echo in the naked brightness of the room. It was a stark and terrible Heaven.
His voice echoed in the light. She closed her eyes. Blind again. Safe. She opened them. Stared into his. She knew those eyes. The voice. A man had come. A singer. When she was a child. To her family’s home and business. On stage, he sang. Their eyes had met then, too. She had been so young, yet he had taken something from her at that moment, even if it had not been his intention to do so.
She bent her elbow at a right angle and placed her long fingers atop her hip, the upper edge of which protruded above her shorts and caught the harsh light from above. Muscles tensed. Eyes fixed. On his. She breathed in the remainder of the smoke that had trailed him into the room; the bittersweet alcohol that clung to his breath like liquid glue; his sweat; and the desperate freshness of her own perfume. Inhaled. All.
She parted her lips. A thread of silk-gauze spittle linked them, momentarily, before it was broken by the pink tip of her tongue as it tasted the air before the final line of the verse could be sung.
His mouth was open, too. Imminent words. She watched his chest rise beneath his silk shirt.
His eyes like storm clouds.
Her chest also–
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–rose, and as he noted the artful swell of her breasts pushing against the translucence of her blouse, he knew what was coming.
“Through all eternity.” Her voice. His was silent.
He heard flame meeting water. Scalding steam wrapped in wind and rain. Past made present.
The musician was tired. So tired. His mouth remained open. But she had stolen his song. Nevertheless, he still had words to offer.
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“What now?” the man said.
The dancer relaxed her shoulders. Exhaled. Face devoid of expression, as she’d been taught.
“Performance is over,” she said. “Lights out.”
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Her footsteps faded in an off-key rhythm. He heard a door open. Close.
In the dark, the tired musician rubbed at his eyes.
End
