The First Person: And Other Stories - By Ali Smith Page 0,19

starved and tyranted, buried alive, for being themselves, for saying the truth, for standing up to the status quo.

Tyranted’s not a word, you say in my ear.

You say it lovingly. You are holding me in your arms. We are both naked. You are warm behind me. You make my back feel blessed, the way you are holding me. I can feel the curve of your breasts at each of my shoulder blades.

Imagine all the things that Florestan must have meant, then, I say, to those people, in that audience in 1915, then 1961.

It’s an opera, you say. It’s nothing to do with history.

Yes, but it is, I say. It’s post-Napoleonic. That’s obvious. Imagine what it meant to its audience in 1814. Imagine watching the same moment in this opera at different times in history. Take the moment when Fidelio asks whether she can give the prisoner a piece of old bread. It’s the question of whether one starving man can have a piece of mercy. All the millions of war dead are in it there, crowding behind that one man. And the buried, unearthed truth. And the new day dawning, and all the old ghosts coming out of the ground.

Uh huh, you say.

What if Fidelio had been written by Mozart? I say.

It wasn’t, you say.

The knockabout there’d have been with Fidelio in her boy’s clothes, I say. The swagger Mozart would have given Rocco. The good joke the girl who’s ironing at the start would have become, and the boy too, who thinks he can just marry her because he’s made up his mind he wants to.

You yawn.

Though there’s something really interesting in the way Beethoven doesn’t force those characters to be funny, I say. The ironing girl, what’s her name? There’s something humane, in the way they’re not just, you know, played for laughs.

You kiss the back of my neck. You use your teeth on my shoulder. It’s allowed, you biting me. I quite like to be gently bitten. I’m not allowed to bite you, though, in case it marks you.

I still have no idea whether you like being gently bitten or not.

Not long after we’d met, when I said I’d never heard much, didn’t know much about Beethoven, you played me some on your iPod. When I said I thought it sounded like Jane Austen crossed with Daniel Libeskind, you looked bemused, like I was a clever child. When I said that what I meant was that it was like different kinds of architecture, as if a classically eighteenth century room had suddenly morphed into a postmodern annexe, you shook your head and kissed me to make me stop talking. I closed my eyes into the kiss. I love your kiss. Everything’s sorted, and obvious, and understood, and civilised, your kiss says. It’s a shut-eye lie, I know it is, because the music I didn’t know before I knew you makes me open my eyes in a place of no sentimentality, where light itself is a kind of shadow, where everything is fragment-slanted. A couple of months later, when I said I thought you could hear the whole of history in it, all history’s grandnesses and sadnesses, you’d looked a bit annoyed. You’d taken the iPod off my knee and disconnected its headphones from their socket. When I’d removed the dead headphones from my ears you’d rolled them up carefully and tucked them into the special little carrying-case you keep them in. You’d said you were getting a migraine. Impatience had crossed your face so firmly that I had known, in that instant, that now we were actually a kind of married, and that our marriedness was probably making your real relationship more palatable.

Sometimes a marriage needs three hearts beating as one.

I’ve met your partner. She’s nice. I can tell she’s quite a nice person. She knows who I am but she doesn’t know who I am. Her clothes smell overwhelmingly of the same washing powder as yours.

Ten days before Christmas, smelling of sex in a rented bed, with half an hour to go before you have to get the half past ten train home, I hold the new Fidelio in my hands. I think of the ironing girl, holding up the useless power of her own huge love to Fidelio in the first act like a chunk of dead stone she thinks is full of magic. I think of Fidelio herself, insufferably righteous. I think about how she makes her first entrance laden with chains that aren’t