Read Inez: A Novel for Free Online

her that the moon and the fox had conspired to halt the blind speed of the automobile and invite them—he got out, he opened the door, he offered his hand to her—to join them at the ruin in the middle of this British grassland, abandoned by Rome, abandoned by the legions of Hadrian, as were the beasts and gladiators who died forgotten in the underground cells of the Casterbridge coliseum.
    “Do you hear the wind?” asked the maestro.
    “Barely,” she said.
    “Do you like this place?”
    “It surprises me. I never imagined anything like this in England.”
    “We could drive a little farther, north of Casterbridge, to Stonehenge, where there’s a big prehistoric circle more than five thousand years old, and in its center alternating pillars and obelisks of sandstone and ancient blue stones. It’s like a fortress of the beginning. Do you hear it?”
    “Sorry?
    “Do you hear the place?”
    “No. Tell me how.”
    “Do you want to be a singer, a great singer?”
    She didn’t answer.
    “Music is the image of the incorporeal world. Look at this Roman amphitheater. Imagine the millenary circles of Stonehenge. Music can’t reproduce them because music doesn’t copy the world. You’re hearing the perfect silence of the heath, and if you listen sharply the coliseum will act as the sound box of a place without time. Believe me, when I conduct a work like Berlioz’s Faust, I give up measuring time. The music gives me all the time I need. Calendars are superfluous.”
    He looked at her with his dark eyes, savage at that hour, and was surprised that in the moonlight the eyelids of this woman listening to him became transparent.
    He placed his lips on hers, and she didn’t protest, but neither did she respond.
    He had rented the house—well, the cottage—before the war, when he was beginning to be asked to conduct in England. It was an opportune decision—the conductor smiled ironically—although I, well, no one could have foreseen how fast France would fall to the invaders.
    It was an ordinary little house on the coast. Narrow, two stories, pitched roof, living room, dining room, kitchen downstairs, and two bedrooms and a bath upstairs. And the attic?
    “I use one of the bedrooms for storage.” Gabriel smiled. “A musician collects too many things. I’m not an old man, but I have a century’s worth of stuff, piles of scores, notes, sketches, costume drawings, set maquettes, reference books, whatever …”
    He looked at her, unblinking.
    “You can sleep in the living room.”
    She was about to shrug her shoulders. He had been blocking her view of the stairway. It was so steep that it looked more like a ladder than a stairway, requiring you to use hands as well as feet to climb, rung after rung—like ivy, like an animal, like a monkey.
    She looked away.
    “Yes, whatever you like.”
    He fell silent, then said it was late, there were eggs, sausage, a coffeepot in the kitchen, maybe some stale bread and an even harder chunk of Cheddar.
    “No.” She shook her head. First she wanted to see the ocean.
    “It isn’t much.” The last thing in the world he would do would be to lose his pleasant smile, but it always held a hint of irony. “The coast here is flat and undramatic. The beauty of the region is inland, the part we drove through tonight. Casterbridge. The Roman amphitheater. The gentle, whispering wind. I like even the most arid parts. It pleases me to know that behind me is a whole backbone of quarries, chalk hills, and centuries of clay. All of it pushes you toward the sea, as if the force and beauty of the English landscape were sweeping you seaward, driving you from a land jealous of its somber, rainswept solitude. Look, there, across from where we’re standing. See that treeless little islet, that barren rock? Imagine when it emerged from the sea, or was separated from the land; calculate that not in thousands of years, but millions.” He pointed, his arm fully extended. “Now, because of the