The Daredevils Read Online Free PDF

do justice to Scarlatti père, to Alessandro (thefather of the keyboard composer known and loved by generations of supple parlor virtuosi such as, for example, Father and Mother, Alexander, Andrew, and Amelia), a genius who had been made out by “the Victorians” to be some kind of villain who’d “nearly destroyed dramatic music.” Mother had commissioned the biography, and one thing led to another . . . and here they were: scholars of music, specialists in the baroque, Mother’s man in Napoli, leading figures in the “authentic practices” movement, seeking on behalf of and with the support of Mother—on her behalf because she was an incontestably great singer and with her support because she was incontestably wealthy—to recreate the way the music made by the Italians and their northern imitators sounded in 1650, in 1700, in 1750 . . . so it was easy, on one hand, to say that the five melancholy notes that had apparently lodged in so many minds were, for Charles, merely pegs to hang his own anxiety on . . . but on the other hand, where had they come from and how had they come by their power?
    Mother, in the limelight, sang the five notes, and Charles’s knees wobbled. He felt his rectal muscles loosen and he thought he might piss his pants as well. It was absurd, it was humiliating, and he did not understand it.
    Mother was looking directly and intently at him as she spoke: “. . . a trumpeter in the band representing the Building Trades Council—” (described for her friends who were unfamiliar with San Francisco labor politics as a group of unions that passed knowledge and membership along only to the sons of union members with a guild-like sense of mastery and exclusion), “—played them in a lull, and a trumpeter in the band representing the San Francisco Labor Council—” (who sneered at such feudalism and were drawing dangerously near the controversial if not outright suicidal acceptance of negroes, the Chinese, the what-have-you, Indians from the Stone Age!), “—picked it up. It was so forlorn and lovely, but it seemed to be a battle cry, because the bands began to move in opposite directions, so as to meet somewhere on Union and do this tiresome thing which is all the rage now, march into each other’s ranks and fight out it, note for note, “A Mighty Fortress Is Our God” versus “LaMarseillaise.” Whose tune will prevail and why? What a question! But those five calling notes—so strange! So enchanting!”
    The house lights had gone down without Charles noticing. Mother spoke to him as if in a play in a dream. Plays within plays within plays—there was no end to it. No beginning. And that was the question: the question that could not be answered. One recognizes oneself, and in that recognition, listen closely, Charles, my poor darling boy, in that recognition one is spontaneously able to recognize all the other selves in the universe. One sees them, literally, as one encounters them, and extrapolates the infinite rest. Those which seem “rare and strange” are no different than those which seem ordinary: they are all complete and particularly themselves. And there, dear Charles, is where we come to ruin and sorrow as human beings. We see the particular and cannot conceive the whole, or sense the whole and cannot remember the particular. We cannot hold them both in our minds at once. It is impossible. Think of the rhomboid your mathematics tutor drew for you: the crystallographer Herr Necker’s cube. The soul tears itself to pieces knowing that it cannot know.
    But she was not speaking. He was not hearing. He was not even thinking. She was gesturing impatiently for him to join her. Tonight was a run-through. The second movement was all his: if he was bad tonight, he would be good tomorrow. God help him if he was good tonight. But good or bad, it would be over. Then it was either to bed or to