Disturbance of the Inner Ear  
 
Chapter 1		  
     
  (falling, as a body falls)  
     
  Signor Perso was the last person who knew what I’d done, and when I awoke to the silent absence of his breathing, my stomach fluttered with giddy, untethered possibility. I set my passport in the hotel ashtray and lit its pages on fire; before the flames withered, I had thrown on my clothes. But when I opened the door a flurry of ashes swirled up into the restive air, and instead of leaving, I rushed back to try and catch them before they could drift down onto his body. His utter stillness ridiculed my frantic, stupid groping until I quietly stood over him amid the black snow. After a while, though I knew I shouldn’t, I touched his face. My finger scudded against his dead cheek, and there I was, sitting on the bed in our pension room, stuck behind a wall he had sailed over effortlessly, without me, in his sleep.
``` I turned off the light and sat down. Unbuttoned my coat. There was no point, really, in fleeing. With my history it would only be quixotic not to expect this sort of thing, wherever I went. I'd been waiting for this to happen since our last night in Milwaukee: even at the Milan airport, as Signor Perso breezed through the customs line for Italian nationals, I'd gotten stuck in a line of Americans so long and stagnant it curled back onto itself like a tangled fly strip, and when I suddenly couldn't see him, I was sure he was dead. So that now, a week later, I was not terribly surprised. I emptied the ashtray in the toilet. With a wet washcloth, I dabbed the dark fingerprint I'd left on Signor Perso's cheek and proceeded to lift the flecks of ash from his perfectly groomed white mustache, his tissue-thin eyelids, from his dressing gown, from the hands folded over the little volume on his chest as if he’d laid himself out for the occasion, and then started on the bed and carpet. Once all visible evidence of ash had been removed, I confirmed the pronunciations of cadavere and coffina in my handy plastic-coated dictionary and compiled a short list of new words I might now need. And while the Italian police put me on hold, I practiced his signature, over and over, until my scrawl matched the top of his traveler’s checks.
```There was one minor problem. I'd found Signor Perso in the middle of the night, and towards dawn, I got horribly hungry. There were two eggs in the tiny kitchenette refrigerator. I thought I should probably eat them. But I had never actually cooked breakfast: I had lived in hotels with my father, Yuri, since I was seven; when I wasn’t touring, my mother cooked; and later Signor Perso had insisted on making me breakfast in bed, every morning, because he had stroke-induced aphasia, kept losing the words for things, and the ritual of breakfast was a firth flowing surely back toward memory. Still, I got out a spoon, determined to scramble the eggs. But something was wrong: no matter how hard I stirred, stubborn gobs floated up to the surface. I thought I remembered from TV that you put milk in scrambled eggs, but there wasn't any milk, and now the eggs were gooey and ruined and I couldn't even boil them. For a minute everything started closing in, how little I knew about anything. But then a notation came into my ear, in my father's cutting basso, about how to handle the passage: (as if for the hundredth time). Yuri’s standard refrain, if I complained about a difficulty in a passage I was practicing, was to tell me that boot leather tastes like steak once you eat it for the hundredth time. The fact was, this death was not my first.

 
     
  ```(as if for the hundredth time)  
     
  I held my breath  
  to slow down my heart, the way I used to do before I went onstage, and counted the number of minutes Signor Perso had now been dead. Once I had a number, I could breathe again. It was proof that time was passing, was a current that would slowly tow this latest death downstream. I turned on the spigot, poured the egg goo down the drain, took a shower, thoroughly cleaned the bathtub behind me, and dressed. Beneath the thin silk fabric of his gown, Signor Perso seemed too naked, so I wrestled him into a suit and tie. Then, as a flat slate light diffused the dark, I played to him.
```No one heard me. For years now I have muted my cello by wrapping a thick silk sash around the bridge and wedging its ends firmly into the É holes. To save my ear from being dulled by too much sound. That was how it started, anyway: I used it on tour, to warm up for performances. The silence forced me inside, forced the music back up into my nervous system until I walked onstage with all the notes of a perfect performance streaming through my flesh at once, the sound bursting from my bow's first slice like the flesh of an overripe plum.
```In any case: I was not arrested. At dusk, after fourteen hoursóluckily Signor Perso had just bathedóa commedia buffa traipsed in. The bumbling carabinieri in their tri-cornered hats were surprisingly manageable; they seemed to feel that Signor Perso's Italian passport simplified his death. The interrogation was of limited duration. Once they understood that I was neither the wife nor the granddaughter, they let the matter drop and took a protective, tactful stance. Their only direct question was the captainís greasy, expectant Looks like my size? as he fingered the hem of Signor Perso's pants, prompted by the detectiveís astute observation that pleats that looked that good on a dead guy had to be Italian tailoring. The detective mentioned his cousin, a mortician; I understood the deal that was being cut and asked about the price. He said that depended. Presumably, he said, the body would be cremated? My voice stuck in my throat at the thought of burning him in an oven. The detective said they'd give me the day to decide. Though the deposit he requested was six out of my seven travelerís checks, I signed them over. And avoided further discussion when, after several unsuccessful attempts to upend Signor Perso's body into the pension's tiny elevator, they dropped him on the carpet and lit up. After a suitable caesura I simply walked out into the hall, retrieved the cuff link that had fallen from Signor Perso's wrist, and set it atop the ashtray's tiny, pristine dune, thus forcing them to extinguish their cigarettes between their fingertips before carrying him down the eight flights of stairs.

  
     
  At the memorial, though, something happened that I could not have expected. The basilicaís acoustics were abysmal, the organist's junky spinet piano a joke, the world-famous cello, not in great shape. There was no rosin in the case, and I had to make due with a stub of chalk from a blackboard in the basement. The ancient bridge was parched and shrunken, the action far too low, and the strings buzzed when I shifted. They were unwrapped steel and cut into the pads of my fingers. It felt like the bass board was coming unglued. I had been playing muted for nearly a decade, and as I rocked the bow over the strings in a balance exercise, the precision of movement needed to bring out a decent tone was wildly beyond my musclesí atrophy. Right away I cramped my hand trying to bow hard enough to fill the damp Romanesque basilica. The Savant had nowhere near the attack of a Strad or a Montagnana. The mousy sound stayed muffled within its body, like a cello wrapped in a cocoon. What a joke, I thought, the old saw about instruments picking up the tone and pattern of their former ownersóif the Savant had absorbed anything from its years of being played by Vrashkansova, its wood had long since ceased to resonate at her frequency.
```I was having so much trouble manipulating the belly that I was practically leg wrestling the thing. But then I somehow pulled off a phrase a bit like the way Vrashkansova did it on that old Victor 78 of her last public recital, in Prague, in '37. It slid out without my doing, as if she had reached up from the dead to grasp my bowing hand. Everything became different then, the way someone's looks change when you fall in love with them. I stopped trying. Suddenly the Savant's laryngitis took on texture and mystery, and we saturated the dome. A long still spell opened where each note came in slow motion. Phrases fell like ribbons. I was playing the FaurÈ ElÈgiÈ, and for a second, for literally an instant, I shut my eyes and forgot the death.
``` Vrashkansova was Signor Perso's idol. In Paris, before the war, he had taken a master class with her that he said had changed his life. In photos she wore dark mourning dresses; she was tiny, always slightly hunched; you had the feeling she carried the weight of the world on the small hump that peeked out between her shoulders. On the recordings her low voice hovers behind the Savant, like a mourner at a wake, quietly chanting a ritual lament. Music resonated through her body, took physical control. She was, herself, an instrument, and Signor Perso had lived for the moment when I would take her place. His leftover confidence, his huge memory of hearing me as a child, had been crushing me for years. By the time we met, six months after my parents died, my talent was unraveling like a string stuck to their heels, but Signor Perso straightened his tie and cleared his throat as if I were his arranged-marriage bride. Someone like yourself, he suggested nervously, ought to go down to Chicago? Then I started sawing away, and he understood. He'd tried to help me for nearly a decade, taught me piano, played duets with me for hours, played me poetry records late into evening, but the longer he held fast to his faith in me, the more ashamed I was to make a sound. Until finally, I just stopped making them.
What I heard now was a sound beyond Vrashkansova, a voice so sacred and whole that it occurred to me to wonder whether an inanimate object could possess the spirit of God. When I drew back my bow I felt it tugging the breath of the mourners. A frisson of excitement jolted through me. I wondered what he would say.		  
     
  ```(adagio)  
     
  Signor Perso.  
  It had not occurred to me until that moment how enormously dead he actually was. Like a plane door blown open my pretence of surviving exploded, and then I was spiraling, the piece nearly over, I was outside the cello and outside my playing, the music devoid of breath, the sound flat and hard and too correct. What followed was the usual pillar-of-salt disaster: my hands rushing through it, dying to get it over with, my heart sitting by the roadside, begging to go back and start again. And the music was gone, shriveled back into its score, to clusters of spots as still and lifeless
``` Performance is final, final the way things are that burn up time. A great performance is precious for the same reason an awful one grows tumorous in memory, because it can never be repeated. 		 
 

*

  
 
```Outside the basilica, there were no taxis. It was a Saturday evening, but other than the triumphal statue of Augustus presiding over the piazza, the street was empty, the shabby shops behind the monumental colonnade, dark. Fog curdled above the gray heaps of snow. Signor Perso and I had arrived in Milan at the end of the coldest November on record; but that afternoon, as I was leaving for my interview at Mr. Pettyward's, the owner of the pension near the Brera where Signor Perso and I were staying had banged on the door and demanded money; so I had put on my best black dress, because I knew that no matter what happened at the interview, I could not come back to the pension before the service, or indeed, ever again.
```A light snow had begun to fall. In my thin wool dress and coat, I was freezing. I stood a while in the deserted piazza, deciding what to do, while not deciding anything. Before my eye I saw Signor Perso, after our first time together, saw his hands falling, fingers wiggling, as he searched for the word for snow. After the stroke, the aphasia had eaten into the farthest recesses of his mind; that morning he'd gone out without a shirt. When he got home and saw me looking at him, he looked down and saw his naked chest, and lay down and wept. We both understood then that it was the beginning of the end, that he would not recover. I'd put on the radio and sat down beside him and rested my head on his chest. The skin was leathery, but his flesh surprised me. It wasn't old. It was hard with experience. I raked the long white hairs with my fingers, liking his safe smell, the way age had muted his chest into something neither male nor female. And I'd kissed it.
```But, us, why, he asked afterwards. I'd assumed all along that he was waiting for me: why else had he settled my aunt’s debts, and asked me to move in, and never mentioned my parents? Why else would someone read you the Bible and Shakespeare and Dante, or take you on a boat across the Great Lakes, for your twenty-first birthday, just to hear the falls? But then he asked again, Why now, you with me? On the radio, Christa Ludwig was coming into the slow, luminous rise toward the end of the Alto Rhapsody. I lay my head down on his chest, and for a while I lay listening, under his slow wheeze. Finally I asked him why, why he'd kept on teaching me for so long, when we both knew I couldn't learn. That was when he told me about the old piano teacher in Doctor Faustus who gave his incomprehensible lectures on Beethoven. What mattered was not whether the people in his village had understood his ideas. It was Important Simply to Hear Them. Then the music ended, and Signor Perso lost his words again, but he got urgent to finish. He raised his arms, and then his hands floated down, fingers wiggling, as if playing a falling piano. What is the notes, he said, the white notes falling? Snow? I said. He nodded. In a garden, the snow, it wets, he said. Not asking where the seeds are hiding.
```On our last night in Milwaukee, our last night in his big oak bed, a gap had opened inside me as we were making love: all at once I looked at the packed suitcases, the travel clothes he’d laid out for me on top of my trunk, and knew, as I hadn't before, that we were moving to Italy to end his life. I missed him. Signor Perso saw the wanting in my eyes, had tried, again, but in the end it was the same as every other time. I’d been watchful, while he cried out. Afterwards I lay awake, my years of failing grinding against his empty mortar-bowl of waiting. Once his breathing steadied, I disentangled my limbs and snuck down to the basement to try and play for him, one last time. A while later he'd found me laboring over Bach, playing muted. With the bottom of his nightshirt he blotted the sweat on my temples. His eyes saw the frantic overtrying, saw my hands toiling like blind, frantic ants. And did not speak. When I looked again, his eyes had cohered into grief.

*

A grimy orange streetcar squealed up in front of the colonnade like a cattle car. The piazza was now blanketed in white. I realized I had been standing outside the basilica for nearly an hour; I could not feel my feet. I had never been on a tram; it would cost money; this was not the time to waste what little I had getting caught and fined for traveling without a ticket. Besides, the tram was headed out through a huge arch in the ancient city wall, which seemed like the wrong direction, because the Pettywards lived near the centro. As it hurtled into the dark, a spark ignited a vast overhead web of wires I hadn't noticed. I hoisted up the cello and headed in the other direction. It did occur to me, as I stumbled forward, that someone might try to steal the instrument. One of the doughy, well-meaning librarians at the Milwaukee Public Library had cautioned that in Italy, everybody steals everything. But (as if for the hundredth time) seemed to indicate that this passage ought to be played out without precautions, that precautions might actually bring on what was dreaded. If I had learned anything from Yuri, it was how to remain innocuous. Carrying the Savant on foot, I reasoned, I would look like a student. I had not slept in days, and though my hair was pinned in a bun, I looked scruffy, a bit unkempt; no one would speculate long about the instrument in my scuffed brown case. For Italians, the notion that a young woman with puffy eyes and a boxy American coat could be carrying a rare sixteenth-century cello, let alone one of the thirty-eight instruments that Charles IX ordered from Andrea Amati in the early 1560s, was not within the realm of possibility. That I would have the Amati, the freak Amati, sized smaller and completed in error, the only one he made that both swelled with the warmth and complexity of the best cognac in France—Amati's signature tone—but also had the burn of it, the acoustics for a modern hall, the caterwaul of a Strad: to a bunch of people so steeped in style and beauty that they seemed to have lost the gene for depth perception, the notion would seem absurd.
```I suppose I was under the spell of the kind of insane yet practical thinking that subtly undermines everything during a crisis. I remember spot-calculating that I had passed the three-day anniversary of Signor Perso's death and taking it as a sign that I was surviving. It was the first winter night, ever, that I had gone out without wearing gloves—I had decided I no longer needed them. And so in spite of the bitter cold, despite the instrument I was carrying, though I was wearing stockings and pumps and everything was icy, I thought I should save the last of Signor Perso's money, my last traveler’s check, and try and walk.
```I wandered for hours. At some point, a lovely post-performance coda, the theme from Schubert's Unfinished Symphony, drifted into my ear. That afternoon, at my interview in Mr. Pettyward's palatial living room, I had gradually tuned in to someone humming it behind the door. When I finally tipped my head in the direction of the humming, Mr. Pettyward announced, My son Clayton, as if he were presenting a fancy car or an antique. As if on cue, a tall, gangly kid with curly red hair walked in, his finger in a book. He looked me over defeatedly — either this had happened many times before, or he saw right away that something about me was terribly off — but then he said, Yeah, fine, and picked up the Schubert again. Under his corduroy shirttails, what seemed an unnatural lump bulged in his pants. He caught me staring, and his lips curled upward, watching me blush. Then he reached in his pocket—the Schubert picking up momentum—and wriggled out a green rubber fish. Flashing me a happy-face, he swam it out of the room.
``` The Schubert kept up, from the hall. As quietly as I could, I asked about the bandage on Clayton's scalp. Mr. Pettyward got up and flipped a switch on the wall, and a thick blanket of white noise drowned out the humming: There seemed to be machines in every corner, their sounds settling over us like layers of Vesuvian ash. He sat back down and cleared his throat defensively. In a low voice, he said that Clayton lisped. That he was left-handed. That he tripped frequently. That for the last set of stitches he'd had to wait seven hours in the polyclinico. This time he'd taken Clayton to an absurdly expensive private clinic in San Pretorese. Without the slightest trace of humor he said he thought the time differential just about made up the cost. He said he was banking on the fact that Clayton's head was worth it. Or at least it would be after I taught him to play.
``` At the very least, Mr. Pettyward added, his son seemed to have quite a durable head.

 
     
  For as long as I can remember, exposure to cold has pitched me close to hysteria. That pain's petty tyranny, the tiny focus it exacts, exceeds my interest in the quotidian. But I didn't panic immediately. The blocky neoclassical facades looked familiar, and the Schubert was a trusted companion. Mr. Pettyward had sent his driver to pick me up that morning; through the tinted glass windows, I had not noticed the route we were taking; and after the interview I hurried off to the funeral, without taking note of the address. Still, I wandered Milan's twisting streets, hiking over heaps of plowed snow, confidently expecting the building to appear at any moment. Mr. Pettyward and his son lived across from a church, so whenever I spotted a spire, I headed towards it. At some point I glanced across the street and saw an arrow-topped gate undulating beneath four small archways. Behind the tiny courtyard it guarded sat the fat square brick tower of the old Roman circus that Signor Perso had pointed out when we visited the home of his acquaintance, Marie-Antoinette de Something. Her home was nowhere near Mr. Pettyward's. It suddenly got much colder. I sprinted out into the cross-street, to try to find somewhere to go, but my heel caught in some tram tracks. I slipped. And once I knew I was falling I let go and I fell like a dead body falls.