The Madrigal Read online

  Waste of time, anyway, firing up a barbeque for a hunk of soy protein.

  ONCE, I ASKED MY MOTHER what she would have named my twin. I was still very small. I can remember looking up at her from a great distance, my small arms wound around her thigh; the top of my head was perhaps level with the loose elastic waistband of her full cotton skirt.

  She looked down at me, her coal-haired singleton, as if surprised to find me tangled in her clothing.

  “You don’t have a twin,” she said. Even then, I could tell that there was accusation in her voice, as well as relief.

  “If I did,” I insisted.

  “Filander,” she said, absently, and turned away towards the sound of glass breaking in the kitchen. I was dislodged, and tumbled on the worn pine boards. I stretched my scarred hands out and felt the draft under the front door.

  “Fil?” I asked, but her back was already all I could see, her skirt swaying down the long dark hallway.

  I lay on the floor a long time, until my fingers were stiff from the gusts coming under the doorstep. I believe it must have been winter outside. The thin white lines along the outside of each of my palms turned blue in the cold and stood up like zippers running from my wrists to the bottom of my baby fingers. I lay there, pretending to unzip my hands, as more glass shattered in the kitchen and the SS sobbed and howled distantly.

  If only I could get my hands open, unzipped, I thought, I would find the rest of Filander. I knew when he emerged he would only have four fingers on each hand, four toes on each foot. The Ns told me that I’d come home from the hospital with six digits at the end of each limb; the doctors had spent a year trying to convince my mother to agree to the removal of the extras. Around my first birthday she finally acquiesced, tired of the ignorant public attention that made me a different kind of freak than my six twin brothers.

  All I had had of Filander had been surgically eliminated by bone excise and plastic surgery.

  WE HAD A LOT OF BOOKS ABOUT TWINS in our house; they were the only books we had. It seemed that they came in by the box-load: classmates, neighbours, friends, and relations brought or sent them gaily wrapped on my brothers’ birthdays and at Christmastime. Most of them had photographs of beaming look-alike faces, and over-used phrases like “special bond” and “close connection.” I’m not sure why anyone thought that, after living every day as a twin among twins, my brothers would have any interest in reading about it—even supposing they had any interest in the quiet and sedentary pursuit of reading. They were the phenomena; even the occasional book with a photograph of the six of them held no more than momentary interest. For them, it would have been like reading about breathing or sleeping soundly or eating something dull, like meatloaf. Two-ness just was.

  I was the only one who read those books, or rather, since I couldn’t yet read when I discovered them, I looked at the pictures in the kind quietude—since even AA was in school by the time I was born—between fine, breakfast time, and the noisy overture of supper.

  The morning sun came slanting in silently, gracing every surface with dust motes. I lay on my belly in the upstairs hall, where our house’s only bookshelf leaned up against the railing. The only things it held were the books on twins, two ancient copies of National Geographic my mother had found in a garbage can on Princess Street, and the extra rolls of toilet paper. The pages of the books were crisp and turned with minute sighs, dolce. I was always careful to wash the elderberry juice from my fingers first. I flipped through the identical smiles, legato. Two-thirds of the way through most of the books were the pictures of almost-complete twins incompletely separated: joined at the hip, or the top of the head, or back to back. But one book had pictures of an entirely different kind: a woman with a third leg emerging from the full skirts of her dress; a young girl with four arms; a bearded man with another face, upside-down, on his forehead; a naked little boy, about my age, with a whole extra miniature body, with arms and legs but no head, protruding from his abdomen.

  I asked Nicholas about the pictures.

  “Par-a-sit—parasitic twins,” he said, reading the chapter heading hesitantly, with his stocky finger sliding underneath the letters. Nathaniel hung over his shoulder and squinted.

  “What’s paras-tic-tic?” I asked him, without taking my eyes from the book. There was no answer but a sound like psssssssssss, and when I did manage to slide my eyes from the page and look up they both had their flies unzipped and were pretending to pee on me before running off to the bathroom, singing like gibbons.

  I BELIEVE MY EARLY CHILDHOOD was more chaotic than most, though perhaps this is what everyone thinks about their own upbringing. I’ve hardly ever heard anyone say they had a normal, happy, uneventful childhood. But seven children in any family is a lot, and the complete absence of girls—somehow my mother didn’t seem to count as female—meant there was no balance or temperance to my brothers’ energy. I can see now that they were not initially bad children, just exuberant, willful, and uncontrolled. The six of them shared something, some unshakable knowledge of their own specialness, which made them expect, and eventually command, attention. They commanded it, and, at first, I hid from it. When the authorities began to warn my mother, I hadn’t yet started school, and when the police began to come for them, I was nine. I sat stern-faced in the dark in my dining-room-turned-bedroom, behind the two Canadian flags I’d finally hung across my doorway, and I listened to my mother weeping: A ballade for her boys.

  Until I was eleven, I grew up entirely on social assistance and pin money from the twin research. Back then social assistance was called “the Welfare.” I believe it’s still called that by the people who receive it, but political correctness has changed the official jargon. We lived in one of many row houses owned by a slum landlord, who also happened to be the real estate agent with the area’s highest house sales every year. When I was in my early twenties, there was an investigation; it turned out that he was selling most of the houses to himself. But at the time I was a child, so all I knew was that our landlord was a big shot in the city. And I knew that he would never fix the leaking sink trap or the rotten step or the sagging wallboard or the window that wouldn’t fully close—the house was perpetually drafty and hazardous and smelled like mould and must.

  Naturally, when I was very small, there was no money for music lessons, even if someone had noticed that I longed for them. Instead, I listened.

  FROM THE BEGINNING I HEARD MUSIC everywhere, from the safety of a myriad of silent hiding places. The thudding feet, thrown balls, and door slamming of my brothers gave way to an even more boisterous symphony of the street, to which I listened from behind the elderberry, green and shady enough in summer to hide a small child. The ground was always cool, and damp stained the thin seat of my already-thrice-worn shorts. I leaned up against the crumbling brickwork and listened to hissing buses, impatient drivers, and frantic dogs as a backdrop to the robins’ gentle melody line. It was like a song about a lost world.

  When I went to school, I hid under the half-flight of steps at the bottom of the stairwell and listened to the fearful buzzer that called children in from the playground—all wound up like metal springs from sugar and bullying, their voices a battlefield—and I felt the vibrations of a hundred feet rise above my head like a percussive detonation. It was a song about the end of the world, where only dust was left in the ensuing silence.

  And I, of course, was always late for class.

  When I began to sing in public, in my last year of elementary school, it was hard to shake the feeling that it was better to remain unseen. But I was determined not to be like my mother, even though, when I sang, I began with the tunes I had effortlessly learned from her.

  ON SUNDAYS, SINCE I DON’T GO TO CHURCH anymore to talk to God, I go to the nursing home to see my mother. It is really the only day I have enough time off. It’s hard to know if she ever gets other visitors, because my mother doesn’t say anyt
hing directly anymore, but usually by the time I get there on Sunday afternoons, the flowers in her room are all dead—and they’re the same flowers that I brought the previous week. I know I could ask the staff, but I don’t really want to know if my brothers ever come. After young adulthood, they scattered in three directions, leaving me my hometown, and my mother’s care, and the fading fame of “The Madrigal Twins” all to myself.

  When I went to see her yesterday, this is what she told me:

  “The landlord has not prepared the sink. (Pointing at the night table.) Do you have a biscuit? I never can, it’s on the sly. Fix him! Fix him! I can’t do it! (Hands tighten on the arms of her wheelchair.) Look! (Pointing to the foot of the bed, where a plaid blanket is neatly folded.) The children are all asleep. Oh, tell him they will drown! (Getting agitated; I put my hand on her thin arm. It burns my palm like dry ice.) I saw a cat yesterday. Not cat, no, no. Like marmalade on toast. Jenny thinks that is funny. Funny funny funny funny funny. No, fanny. Drowning children!”

  “There aren’t any drowning children, Mother,” I said, before she could get too worked up. I picked up on what I thought was a safer thread: “Why was the cat funny?”

  “Cat in the Trap. The Cat in the Trap. The Cat in the Trap.”

  “Hat,” I said, finally.

  “No,” she said. “Fanny.”

  “Oh,” I said.

  “Jennifer won’t eat toast.” Jenny was my brother Salvador’s girlfriend for about six months, over twenty years ago.

  “Jenny’s gone,” I told her.

  “Jennifer,” she said.

  That’s how our conversations go. Well, conversations—if there is a place where our words intersect, where we might appear to be talking together about the same subject, it is purest accident.

  I’M THE KIND OF GUY WHO APPEARS to be a bargain garment until the seams are more closely examined. Women like me all right, until they get to know me. Once they do, they decide I’m strange, and a strange man might do anything. They suspect me of being unpredictable, even though I am pretty much the most boringly predictable guy in the entire world. After a few dates, they clamour for a refund.

  Every morning I have the same thing for breakfast—a poached egg on toast, a banana, and a very small glass of orange juice. I save the coffee for later—the stuff goes right through me—and I walk along the river to the sorting station, grunt at all the other posties, and sort my mail. By the time I walk downtown, the mail is in my relay box, and I start my route. I can finish within ten minutes either side of four hours, twenty minutes, no matter what the weather. Then I walk home again, through the park by the river, and have a late lunch, rather than eat on my route: canned soup and a sandwich, or some leftover stuff if I ordered in the night before. On the nights I have choir, I usually take a short nap in the middle of the afternoon; other days I fix the leaky tap or rake the leaves or pay the bills. I drink coffee like crazy from when I get home until it’s time for me to walk back over to the music shop. My first lesson is usually around three-thirty or four, when school gets out. There is a soundproof practice room with glass windows so that customers can watch the classes in progress without the embarrassment of hearing the mistakes. I think this is meant to be both inspiring for prospective students, and a clear message of safety so that everyone, on both sides of the glass, knows there can be no funny business going on behind the closed door. I teach fifty-minute lessons. There’s a toilet at the back of the shop, through the storage room. I always have to go after the first and second lesson, and sometimes the third as well. As I make my way there, Ed always says: “Clean up while you’re back there, eh Frederick?”

  He means it as a joke, but I do have to clean up a little in order to get through to the washroom door. For days after a new shipment of electric guitars or African drums, I can hardly push the storage room door open, there are so many boxes piled haphazardly along the narrow passage.

  On Mondays and Wednesdays I don’t teach after six o’clock. On Mondays, I quick-step it along to the United Church, accelerando, so I can be there before the choir. On Wednesdays, I run home to meet up with the other three of the Four Consonants. On Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Fridays, I take home some new music from the shop, and Ed is as likely as not to turn up in my living room, especially if he is thirsty.

  My weekends are equally routine. On Saturdays, I teach most of the day, and drink coffee unchecked, for energy. After six long days of work I don’t have to think too much about Saturday nights, about how I’m not going out on the town with a date nor going home with her. If Ed doesn’t come over, and there’s no performance at the Grand or the Wellington Street that I want to see, I go to bed early with a library book, and fall asleep with it cracked open on my chest, the pages bent over crisply like unused bed sheets. And on Sundays I go to see my mother, feed her marmalade on toast in the visitors’ kitchen, and listen hard for my name in her confused and disjointed speech. Picked out of the bargain bin, it feels like a full enough life.

  After the first date, I try to explain all this, but it never gets me anywhere.

  I LEAVE OUT THE MOST IMPORTANT THING, though, and that thing is not so much a thing as it is a way of being. I can explain to anyone—though I rarely do—what I do on Sundays and Mondays, and how many times I order takeout in a week, and what kinds of books I take out of the library. The numbers and quantities of objects or actions are measurable and definable and lend themselves easily enough to language, whether oral or numerical.

  What I can’t explain is music.

  The meaning we attach to the word “music” is entirely a social construct. In other times and places, the constructs were different. Some cultures had no global word that incorporated all music, but had a separate word for the sounds that each instrument produced. So one word might mean the-noise-made-by-a-drum, and another might mean the-noise-made-by-a-flute. Still other peoples used a single word to include vocalizing, banging on drums, and moving bodies. Their musical activity was always participatory, since playing, dancing, and singing could not be imagined as separate pursuits. I find I can’t explain music, because the words we are accustomed to use simply will not let me. Whenever I try, it seems it is not even another culture of this world that I come from, but a distant planet, where “music”’ means the-sound-of-breathing.

  IN PLATO’S SYMPOSIUM, Aristophanes describes human beings in their original form. The mythology goes a long way toward explaining what seems an almost universal longing for a reunion. In that regard, it does a better job than the Christian bible.

  It seems that In the Beginning, we were all twins. Each person was a rounded whole and had two faces on one head, four arms, and four legs, in three varieties: a double female, a double male, or one of each—an androgyne. They never had to walk backwards, but walked forward in both directions. Running was accomplished by turning cartwheels on the lawn. Everyone was perfectly happy; everybody already had their other half. I suppose there was a lot to celebrate.

  After a while, people got delusions of grandeur, as people do. They started making attempts to climb up to heaven, so they could attack the gods and take their places. The gods got worried and called a meeting, during which they decided to cut everybody in half. This would not only weaken human power, but instantly double the number of individuals tending the fires of godly worship. So Zeus cut everybody in half, and Apollo went around turning their heads 180 degrees, and gathering the cut edges of skin and tying a knot in the middle of their bellies, so they would all be reminded of the reason for their fate by looking at their scars.

  And so we humans are compelled forever to search for our other halves, in unsuccessful attempts to once again become whole. Denied our original form, doomed to twinlessness, we make do. We keep searching, but often settle for second best. As Aristophanes concludes, the desire and the pursuit of the whole is called love.

  As I read, I could feel the white lines on th
e outside of my palms tighten. It is no news to me that I am only half a man.

  I take a lot of books out of the library—way more than I could ever read—because I’m in love with the librarian.

  I’ll admit that after I read the Symposium, I stood naked in front of the full-length mirror on the back of my bedroom door, navel gazing with a vengeance.

  OF COURSE THERE WERE TIMES when we were tumbled all together, and I was just one of the Madrigal boys—when my mother took us all to the grocery store or, once that I remember, to the park. But in many ways I was an only child. I was five years younger than the youngest of them and so was left behind from the moment I was born. They were already leaping into karate moves and trying out the latest swear words while I was still in diapers. But beyond that, my brothers lived in a world of their own. It was impossible that I should be included; I understand that now. They ran through the world like a double-breasted suit, like a right and left foot, like flame and heat, like breathing and air. They had a lexicon of two, a language of six.

  An only child, a sole child—as my mother said, when I was still small enough to think words could only have one meaning. I don’t know now if she meant sole or soul. Looking back, I see that I had her to myself in a way my brothers never did. I remember laying my head in her lap in the kitchen one night, her stroking my ear, absently, as if I were a sleeping cat. She was there and not there with me. I wanted something more from her, but I was too young to know what. Even the touch of her hand was elusive, a breath of wind when you know there are no windows left open to cause a draft. She nagged or swore or yelled at my brothers as if she were only a shadow of a self that lived in another realm. She could not be called forth, by me or anyone, and seemed to spend those years in a state of longing, hardly ever fully in her body in the present tense. How could I ever know my mother, under such circumstances? Maybe later she came to regret that herself; perhaps she felt if she had given me more of herself, I would not have left her as I did. Maybe it was her greatest regret. I will never know.