by I. Bismuth

December 27: This evening, despite my pleas for a little quiet Scrabble, Rose treated herself to yet another orchestral concert. Lying on the sofa, legs comfortably crossed at the ankles, hands palms downward at her sides, eyes shut, and chin pointing to heaven, she was a soundbather. And as she received her ear-tanning, I was jealous of a periwigged composer. She was in his company, not mine. I was intruding. Here was a scene for two, and I was some poor devil at a keyhole. Once the last movement had finished with her, though she opened her eyes at me, her smile was for my rival in the machine.

But young old Mozart finds she is hard to please. The music lover is a greedy lover. The brief life of her illicit composer makes her peevish. She reproaches him with having breathed his last long before his inspiration was feeling even slightly run-down. The filling to capacity of Köchel’s catalogue is not enough for her. Only up to K626? No further? If he had employed better time management techniques to his last twenty-four hours on earth he could have dashed off a couple of divertimenti between death rattles. He had disappointed her.

No, even worse—his early departure was criminally inartistic, a kind of burglary. He is a note-thief who sneaked past her too young to his grave, his brain stuffed like a pocket with her rightful musical pleasure.

December 28: Though Rose turned me down yet again and I was expecting no triple word scores this evening either, I was in for a surprise.

She was still on the sofa, but her infidelity differed in three ways from yesterday’s: the concert was televised, and the untimely dier was not periwigged but bespectacled (Schubert was deputizing for Mozart). The third difference was that I came to see my misgivings about her relationship with music not as discreditably personal and motivated by resentment at her canoodling with the spectral masters of sonata form, but as socially responsible and motivated by the moral imperative of stamping out all traces of racism, wherever they may be found. Let me explain how I found them in the insolent beauty of a symphony.

The symphony in question was Schubert’s in C major, nicknamed “Great” for the benefit of the tin-eared.

By now the themes of the second movement were progressing. There was no stopping them. The music was a vector quantity. It had magnitude and direction. But in what did its greatness consist and where was it going?

Then it dawned on me. It was the sound of the White man on the move. It was a threat. It was a promise. It was all there in the open. Nothing hidden. Nothing obscure. It had the mystery of clarity. It meant itself. It explained itself. Its notes were its footnotes. I understood it all. I deplored it all. Music is a universal language, but we should not always listen to what it says.

This is when I began to panic. The orchestra was one that had made some faltering progress towards diversity, but as I watched the players’ postures and gestures, those of the Vietnamese violinists, the Sudanese cellists, the Moroccan clarinetists, the Nigerian trombonists, and the Maori bassoonists all struck me as too self-assured, too poised, too balletic, altogether too haughty, as if they were afflicted with transitory Whiteness, as if some epidemic of racial shape-shifting was raging among the dinner jackets. Even the conductor, with each waft of his baton, was becoming ever more gentile. Yes, there in my own sitting room I was witnessing how very real was the danger of acoustic Aryanism.

If a symphony could do this to the very bearers of diversity, what might it do to members of the race that needs diversifying? What atavisms might it foment? What velleities for self-preservation? What acquired distaste for nonexistence? These were indeed chilling questions.

My immediate concern was for the safety of Rose’s own attitudes. Certainly she had been listening to this stuff for years without apparent ill-effect. Never have I known anyone more dedicated to racial betrayal than she is (with the possible exception of myself). On the other hand, I had seen her face when those disturbing pressure waves from Mitteleuropa were working their mischief with her nervous system. Something unwholesome was being done to her then, and, whatever it was, I had seen it done repeatedly. What if classical enwhitening was insidious and cumulative? After a lifetime’s music loving even she might not know how far it had gone. Perhaps all it would take for her to start heiling was one more allegro vivace.

It was a risk I was unwilling to take. The sublimity had to stop. It had to stop now. I must kill that symphony before it could say any more.

But no sooner had I begun my mercy dash towards the remote control than Rose sat up, reached out for it herself and pressed the mute.

“Bizzy,” she said, “I’ve been thinking. I’d like to change my will.”

I was still absent in the symphony.

“Will?” I gasped. “The Will?” It was crossing my mind that I was already too late and she was getting ideas about the Triumph.

“My will,” she repeated. “I want to make a new will.”

“Oh, your will. You want to make a new will.”

“That’s it.”

“Rose, I hope you’re not off-colour.”

“I hope you’re not, because I want you to change yours too.”

“Do you?”

“Let’s face it. Lucy has been a terrible disappointment to us.”

“There’s no denying our first grandchild was fathered by Gel-Head Jack.”

“I can never forgive her. Can you, Bizzy? Can you honestly?”

“She’s very young. There’s time for her to tire of him and to make a wiser, darker choice when she wants to expand her family. After all, her boyfriend record up to him was perfect.”

“No, she has shown her true colours now—her true colour. Before, she was obviously only playing at Anti-Racism. Nkwanwu, Abdul, Tiwonge, Kwame, Najib, Kalimba, Manandafy, Foluwashola, Seewoosagur, she was just using them, the poor boys.”

“Well, what do we put in our new wills?”

“We went wrong very early in our lives. When we decided we wanted a child, why did we take it for granted that we had to go into the baby production business ourselves?”

“I didn’t take it for granted.”

“Parenthood is a lottery, but if we had adopted an African, we would have been sure of getting a winning ticket.”

“Exactly.”

“I always had an urge to mother the other. I should have succumbed to it. No African would have let us down like this.  No African could have let us down like this.”

“That’s what I thought.”

“You thought that twenty years ago? You might have mentioned it at the time.”

“Before I could, you were showing me a calendar and telling me when the baby was due.”

“So Lucy was my fault, was she?”

“Weren’t you telling me about our making new wills?”

“All right. But you needn’t think we won’t be revisiting this part of the conversation.”

“You want us to cut Lucy out of our wills?”

“I want us to do what’s right. Who should finally get what we have worked so hard for all our lives? Shouldn’t it be whoever needs it?”

“It should.”

“What does our daughter need of what we have? I mean, what does she really need?”

“Really need? Nothing really.”

“What do a hundred Africans need of what we have?”

“They need everything. They really do.”

“One White girl or a hundred Africans? The first we can help to live comfortably. The second we can help to live. The moral choice is so obvious, I wonder why we waited so long to make it.”

“I’ll call Hussein, Hussein and Hussein first thing tomorrow morning.”

Rose gave a satisfied nod and aimed the remote control at the orchestra as it completed the silent scherzo.

“Here comes the finale,” she said. “When it’s over, we’ll shake those letter tiles.”

So I joined her on the sofa and took in the rest of the greatness without a care in the world. Sometimes I do worry too much.