Chapter Twenty-Six
Frau Gilda Hühnerbeinstein, at the same instant as Mifkin and Bartoff’s rapture, had hidden her head beneath her pillow and was cursing her existence when a flash of light, variously attributable to biologically emitted phosphenes or divine communication, played patterns across the insides of her eyelids. This happens to us all. But in Gilda’s case, at just this instant, in the context of the pointlessness of life which she’d finally found the courage to admit, the flash was so overwhelmingly intense that she could trace it to no other source than God, and so, at a stroke, her life up to that point was wiped out and a new Gilda Hühnerbeinstein was born. Not literally—for there was no womb, and if there had been, her present size would have caused in her mother vaginal ruptures of an appalling magnitude. I meant it spiritually. She cast aside, at once, her artistic, Bohemian leanings; the pendulum which had been wont to swing between experience and rectitude creaked to a halt on the latter side; the fluttering butterflies of possible truths dropped out of the air and breathed no more; the river-rapids dammed up and stilled into serenity. Many more metaphors crowded Gilda’s brain, which the reader will thank me for sparing them, but I will relate the vision which visited her from her history, at this moment; the final breeze through the pages of her past before she shut the cover for good, and, for good measure, burnt the book: she’d been a cheeky child, always up for a laugh, always off for a game when studying called, but some unfulfilled dream of her parents made them push her into a puberty of brutal operatic training. From that day on, she knew nothing else. She rose, through no will of her own, to become the most acclaimed diva of her time, a pinnacle reached about a decade ago and from which she’d descended, owing to a combination of senescence, vocal cord rigidification and lapses in mental health, about two-thirds of the way down. What about love?, you ask, Reader? A series of affairs with leading baritones along the opera circuit, all of them devoid of meaning or pleasure, but morally satisfying in that she could tell herself that her body was being debased and irreparably spoilt, just as surely as was her talent, for the gratification of others, in tandem with the torture it exercised on herself, took the role of love, for which it was rather miscast. At some point along the way, she found herself in a room above a Chinese eatery on tour in Limehouse, east London, having an abortion, after which she was told by a doctor that she would never again be able to conceive; a piece of news she took with the barest shrug, the idea of wilfully visiting the desecration to the soul that was life on Earth upon another human creature who hadn’t asked to be born having never troubled her mind.
Like an ancient papyrus midwifed from the sand, uncorked, held up to the light and read, once, in the instant of its disintegration, these memories presented themselves to Gilda, then died, sunk out of the story of her life. Had they happened, at all? Perhaps—to another Gilda Hühnerbeinstein, who had done the best she could, at times, and made mistakes, at times, splashing around haphazardly in the chaotic, boiling cauldron of life into which she’d been tossed. The new, true Gilda Hühnerbeinstein wished that woman well, as she withered into myth. The new, true Gilda Hühnerbeinstein bade her rest in peace, and turned to tomorrow.