Work Text:
"Una canson de fémena se stende
comò caressa colda sul paese;
el gran silensio fa le maravegie
per quela vose drío de bianche tende. "
"A lady's song spreads across town
like warm caresses; it marvels
as her music flows from behind
the white curtains.”
- Biago Marin
Kumiko steps out into a sun-baked sliver of the courtyard floor, and takes a deep breath as she lets the heat spread through her body. The fragrant warmth of a fresh Iberian morning steals through the open ceiling, letting the hazy shaft of light mingle softly with the cool, tiled floor below. It felt dreamlike; as if the entire essence and colour of the world had been distilled into that single pool of light, titrating its contents into a slow trickle of consciousness, slowly clearing Kumiko’s sleepy head.
Yes, she thinks, but where are you?
She follows the sinuous shadows drawn by the narrow arcade, her line of sight filtering through a cradling gradient of the yellows, greens, and reds of the potted garden, and finally finds her. Reina sits on an old ottoman, barefooted and clad in a long, silk pyjama camisole; notebook open, trumpet in hand. Kumiko moves her legs on impulse, caught in that secret magnetism that Reina never failed to exact on her—feeling beckoned, in a way. Sitting next to her, she leans back against the cold, mosaicked wall and allows herself to be spirited away by the clarion tones of Reina’s song.
To Kumiko, Reina’s sound had always been a sonic reflection of love; a roll of wind through the plains of Bohemia, the gentle flow of the spotted Aegean. She felt it abstract, perhaps a bit arbitrary, to ascribe the structures of human language to a trumpet’s pitch and timbre, but Kumiko could not remember a time when she hadn’t recognized and completely understood them. And plus, she figures, any other way to explain it would, paradoxically, result in even more abstract, immaterial understanding; it would sift right through her hands and be carried by the wind, like fine sand in a windy day.
She had almost lost Reina once, and would never want to stand at the mouth of that precipice ever again.
She spots the open page in Reina’s notebook, populated with her frantic yet conspicuously precise musical hand notation. Kumiko hums the melody to herself as Reina settles back into the delicate silence that always follows a performance—that crisp, cathartic stillness that alights on a port city after a gentle summer rain.
“It’s beautiful,” Kumiko says, reaching what she figures to be a b-section of sorts. “Very…how should I put this? Sentimental—very French?”
“I have my moments,” Reina chuckles quietly and, turning away from Kumiko in a rare, wonderful display of softness, she replies. “You don’t think it suits me?”
“I didn’t say that; if it didn’t, you know that I would’ve just told you,” Kumiko laughs, returning the notebook to its original page and location. “I guess I always thought of you as more of a…I don’t know, stoic? German? You know, a regular Wagnerian.”
Reina laughs in spite of herself, placing the trumpet on the side and laying her hand down, palm facing up, on the surface of the Ottoman. Without a moment’s hesitation, Kumiko’s hand alights on it—a tranquil equilibrium, like the Dnieper flowing into the the depths of the Black Sea.
“Hey, Kumiko,” Reina says, breaking the silence—somewhat prematurely, Kumiko notices.
“Hmm,” Kumiko hums tentatively, by way of an answer.
“I was thinking that we should get married.”
A small bird darts its way across the morning sky and, somewhere in the distance, up high above where an ancient minaret used to watch over the square, the church bells toll over an Andalusian city centre.
“Get…married?” Kumiko says, for both an inopportune lack of something to say, and because she simply did not anticipate the question.
Reina turns her head ever so slowly, facing Kumiko and unwavering.
“You don’t want to?” She asks.
“Of course I want to,” Kumiko laughs. “It should go without saying that I want to.”
“But you don’t think we should,” Reina parries, releasing Kumiko’s hand ever so slightly.
“I never said that,” Kumiko hurries, doubling down on her own hold. She steadies herself, taking a deep breath. “This is just…I didn’t feel like we really needed to yet. I mean, your family doesn’t know about us yet.”
“My family,” Reina interrupts, breaking her line of sight and looking down to her bare feet. “My…mother knows. At least, I’m pretty sure she does. We talked a bit last night after my performance.”
Kumiko breaks into cold sweat; they had, with almost disturbing efficiency, been hiding their relationship from Reina’s family for almost a year, and this sudden revelation washes sharply over her body.
“I…what? What did she say?” Kumiko asks, leaning into Reina as if they were exchanging a series of clandestine messages. In a way, they were.
Reina eyes her curiously.
“Stop that,” she plays, and twists her mouth into a smile—her first of the day. “You made the same face when your sister walked in on us.”
“This is completely different!” Kumiko says, throwing her hands into the air, but she feels her heart swell at the sight of Reina’s expression. “Forget that! How did she find out?…what did she say?”
“Like I said, she never said that she knew anything, per se,” Reina says. “All of a sudden, she brought up the fact that she was happy to see that we had managed to reconnect, and that we seem to still be getting along well.”
“That’s…not a secret,” Kumiko says, failing to extract any deeper meaning.
“I know that, but then she—,” she starts, and Kumiko feels the weight of words getting stuck in Reina’s throat, coming out as a dry, quivering whisper. “She said that relationships like ours are hard to find, and easy to lose. That if I, you know…if I took you for granted, you would vanish again—this time for good. Like smoke.”
“Like smoke,” Kumiko parrots. She could practically hear Reina’s mother uttering the words. She loved her daughter, it was clear, but she could be devastatingly direct with matters of importance.
“Like smoke,” Reina says, barely audible. “And the worst part is that I can actually picture it; you would slowly rise away from me, leaving barely an impression of your presence to remind me of what I’ve done.”
Reina unravels her hand and allows her thumb to softly alight on Kumiko’s parted lips. She caresses them gently before cupping Kumiko’s cheek, who is still held fast to this sudden revelation. Kumiko feels a vertiginous sense of urgency spreading across her chest, allowing old demons to seep back in.
“That’s ridiculous,” Kumiko says, taking Reina’s hand in hers once more. “After going through what we did, in what world would I ever feel taken for granted?”
“I don’t know,” Reina says, shrugging her shoulders. She offers a smile, but allows her eyes to lose focus. “Why would my mother say that, then?”
This gives Kumiko pause. The last year had indeed felt much like a waking dream—a surreal kind of euphoria where her love for Reina would be reaffirmed and consolidated with even the most innocent touches. She understood, suddenly and implicitly, that what Reina’s mother meant to say was that euphoria is an imbalance—a wonderful, if solipsistic, manifestation of the soul’s dialectic. But it was only one half of a total reality. It would eventually need to return, in other words, to its central equilibrium—and both Kumiko and Reina should be prepared to face it.
“I guess I can’t say for sure,” Kumiko says, quiet and pensive, giving Reina’s hand a small squeeze. “But I agree. She does seem to be hinting at something.”
“I’m sorry,” Reina says, tilting her head and smiling sadly. “I don’t mean to worry you. It’s just been on my mind since last night.”
“No, I’m glad that you told me. Don’t be sorry,” Kumiko says, sighing and leaning back against the cool wall. “We’ll have to give it some thought, I guess.”
Reina opens her mouth, as if to say something, but seems to decide against it. Instead, she too leans back and takes the calm of the morning in. A birdsong descends gently into the spacious courtyard, layered in diverging textures as its sound coils into a garden arabesque. It sounds like music—everything sounds like music when the two of them are around; two passing notes in an eternal, timeless counterpoint.
After some time, Kumiko feels a silly kind of warm smile rise on her face, and turns to face Reina again. “Oh, so that’s why.”
“What?” Reina asks, furrowing her brows.
“No, no, nothing bad. I mean, like,” Kumiko says, gesturing awkwardly. “You were really, um…into it…last night. You know, really passionate. It kind of surprised me.”
“I—,” Reina gapes. “Am I not always passionate? You’re terrible.”
“I didn’t say that!” Kumiko laughs, holding up her hands in defense. “All I’m saying is that we’re usually, you know, at an allegro…ma non troppo. And last night felt more like a just…allegro.”
Reina crosses her arms over her stomach, looking bemused, and scrutinises Kumiko the way she would a child; Kumiko just shrugs.
“Are those the kinds of jokes that you make to your students?”
“I don’t think they’d be very interested in hearing about our sex life, Reina,” Kumiko says. “Even via innuendo.”
“Maybe not about mine. And that’s not even what I meant,” Reina mumbles, and sharply turns forward, eyes closed. After a moment, she glances at Kumiko, who looks like she’s holding something in. “What?”
“It’s really very cute of you to get jealous,” Kumiko says. “The great Kousaka Reina.”
“I take it back,” Reina says. “I don’t want to marry you.”
Kumiko laughs sweetly, and loosely coils herself around Reina’s arm, resting her head on her shoulder. After offering some token resistance, Reina, too, allows herself to melt into Kumiko, who sighs with conspicuous pleasure. The revving of a scooter is heard somewhere past the walls; the town was waking up.
“We should get something to eat,” Kumiko says. She lifts her head and kisses Reina’s bare shoulder.
“Wait,” Reina says, holding Kumiko’s arms as they begin unfolding.
She bends down toward her trumpet cases and reaches for what Kumiko instantly recognises to be a small, black felt box—all shapes and sounds surrounding them gently blur until it is only Reina she sees, and her voice she hears.
“Here,” Reina says, a lovely pink flowering across her face, as she flips the box lid open. “I will not say it, because I think it’s too cheesy.”
The ring that Kumiko plucks out is of a delicate rose gold, with an obverse semiperimeter of several miniature diamond crystals. They converge into a floral motif centre where, surrounded by that same gold, rests a lustrous, slightly larger pear-shaped stone. Its design is so seamless and harmonious that, Kumiko reckons, it could have been chiseled, as is, from some fantastical, otherworldly rough. It’s small, gentle and elegant—bursting with life and significance, just like them.
“I’ve had it for a while, before you ask. I asked your mother for the size,” Reina says, facing down, as she absently thumbs on to the box. “Quite frankly, I don’t know what made me get it, when, or even if I was ever going to give it to you, but I put a lot of thought into picking it.”
Kumiko feels the cool of the morning dissipate as the blaze of the sun consumes the greater part of the courtyard ground. The ancient fountain, built right in its centre, begins its daily correspondence with the garden as its clear, laminal water jets start streaming through, spreading across the air. The gentle mist reaches her eyes as she, too, begins to wake into reality.
“Kumiko,” Reina says. “You’re crying.”
Kumiko turns, intent on denial, when she feels a drop fall onto her hand. She blinks, and a few more become party to the first. She faces Reina who regards her with a tenderness so manifest that it could fill all the cracks in her heart with liquid gold, like an ancient piece of earthenware.
She lets gravity surrender her onto Reina, who offers a gentle laugh as she holds her fast against her beating chest.
“What is it about this country and us?”
“That, I legitimately would one day like to know.”