Refrain

Midnight Mass: A New Year Crónica

Out of all the instincts I've inherited from my formative years, this one frustrates me the most: I still seek refuge in churches.

This is not to say that I'm a regular church goer. Indeed, apart from events involving music (mostly on the stage, and sometimes in the audience) I make a point to skip all church functions, Christmas mass included.

Rather, I'm talking about midday strolls ambushed by rain showers, against which I duck into the nearest church in town, to wait it out with a book, in a far corner where I can't see the crucifix. Or the times when I hear choral evensong seeping out of the stained glass windows, made specially thin for music to penetrate, and promulgate, prompting you to step inside—and fall for it, because it reminds me too much of Louis.

Louis was an avid evensong attendee, as K once told you. During those awkward parts where the chaplain asked everyone to read aloud from the Book of Common Prayer, sometimes even on your knees or turned to the altar, Louis would always humour them and play along, while I in the next seat would resist the liturgy in silence, thinking it a huge pity that some of the greatest music on Earth was made with my mental allergen as a key ingredient. K is like myself on this matter: while serving the Grail, he detests the church; not its God, but its naïveté exclusive to modernity.

So it came as a surprise that K and I had been going to mass for four nights in a row, from the first to the fourth day of Spring Festival, in a half-abandoned shopping mall 500 meters away from my grandparents' house in the city, in that distant, godless country.

The country is godless not by choice but by force, so human powers can run rampant. Its reticence about Christianity was plain as day when we visited the shopping mall at night: the mall managed to forge Europe without employing the cross as a design element A Single Time.

Its first part was themed 'Spain' (bronze bulls play-fighting with gaudy statues of matadors and Flamenco dancers)—second part 'Italy' (Gondolas stranded on a counterfeit St Peter's Square)—third part 'Germany' (a parody of Cologne Cathedral blatantly called Dom)—and the last part 'France', with its last row of shops labelled Champs-Élysées, the Holy Grail for all shopping streets. A chimera, a monster, but with the strongest artistic vision in that part of town, against all odds. I found it beautiful.

Our mass was held every evening around midnight in 'Germany', right across the Dom with its cross conveniently missing, in a rooftop jazz bar. We went there—me, K, and my filmmaker cousin—because we all genuinely needed a drink by the end of each day's festivity which, despite its warmth, was always too much, enough to fry our brains: my aunt's 8-month-old Welsh Corgi fighting my grandparents' elderly mongrel; endless food and force feeding in a potluck of languages, with every sentence shouted at least three times to reach all ears.

'Thank God,' my cousin would exhale as we headed down the narrow path that led from my grandparents' house to the shopping mall around midnight, dark and desolate like the River Styx. 'Breathing free at last. I feel like myself again.'

The rooftop looked otherwise haunted. It was usually empty by the time we arrived, but it'd trick us first with oversized silhouettes near the balustrade—not real people, only mannequins of occidental blondes, in Dirndls and holding giant glasses of beer. It had other horror film staples: carousel horses; Jacks in the Box; armless alabaster statues, their breasts hanging out of their togas, shimmering in the pale LED light. We'd walk past them as quickly as we could, with K glancing around anxiously, on the lookout for real ghosts, because my cousin had teased us about local ghosts being on duty between 11 PM and 5 AM.

Then the automatic door to the bar would slide open, calm, graceful, and music would flow out—

Instant peace. A sanctuary.

Our priest, the only mixologist who hadn't gone home for New Year, would greet us, still drying a glass:

'Good evening. I've missed you.' Even though technically we'd only been away for less than a day.

Because of New Year, the four nights we were there, the bar was deserted. The only people moving were us at the bar, drained of sober words and waiting for drunken ones to flow out; the Priest behind it, who mixed cocktails on a livestream with zero viewers; a bartender, our nun, who sacrificed an American TV show every night by streaming it muted, on the screen in the chancel: Day 1 and 2 were 2 Broke Girls; Day 3 The Good Doctor with gory surgery scenes; Day 4, our last day, was Friends, perhaps orchestrated out of sweet sentimentality.

Those four nights broke the dam of my alcohol intolerance. I've never been that drunk my whole life, after the illicit parties back in the German boarding school, the open-bar college balls at Oxford, and various concert afterparties over the years. K as well, who collects wine for a hobby and is usually a good drinker, was so alarmed by the amount he'd imbibed across three nights that on the last night, he enforced a teetotal decree on himself (which he broke in the end with a farewell shot, alas).

We talked about various things, smart things, I'm sure. Useless things: showoff knowledge on lesser-known composers and arthouse cinema; self-gratifying anecdotes about incidents on the stage or, in my cousin's case, the set; K didn't talk much, and posed with the first thirty pages of a thick book...

Most details of our talks were washed away by the booze as soon as they were uttered. The ones that had survived the flood were sharp enough to puncture inebriation, its roots planted deep into my consciousness—sharp enough to count as too personal for your eyes.

But let me share this one fragment, on the second night there. When we left it was already past closing time, though the Priest and the Nun never once tried to chase us out (very clerical of them). Outside the door by the parapet was an upright piano, its fallboard invitingly open. Even in the dark I could imagine it being battered by sun and rain on that unsheltered spot, a decoration rather than a functioning instrument. But I was drunk, and struck by fancy.

I pressed a chord. It was awfully off-tune as expected. But I wasn't in the mind to care.

I heard the door slide open behind me, followed by the Priest's voice:

'The one inside was tuned mere days ago. But you just have to play this one?' It sounded like scolding, but tasted like bantering. I laughed. I was happy.

Temperature, temperature, I muttered in my head, which probably ended up out loud, in a concoction of all the languages I know. Pipes turn flat when cold, and sharp when warm...
So I played it like an organ, for Mozart's Requiem. The unfinished piece that was finished several times.

A most ominous piece for New Year. But weirdly fitting, not only for the unpalatable bottle of chocolate liquor made in Salzburg, which we'd brought there to be stirred into cocktails and cured. I felt like the sheer scalding madness of it all—food, words, food, words, my white trousers dirtied by wet paws, washed and tumble dried, dirtied and washed again—could use some solemnity. The notes that might sound mournful now as they flew into the night, by the time we woke up, they'd have long been purged away in the new sun and the rising temperature (22 degrees C in February—insane!) and the endless expanse of scarlet red, on lanterns, in firecrackers, everywhere, in the smoke, in your smiles, your words that you had to say threefold because you were privileged, and lucky, and blessed with a whole table of listeners, all intact, and living. In your blood that now felt the temperature, your hearts.

Your hopes. Both realistic and blind.

Everything was constantly boiling, and our sanity kept at boiling point. It was madness. A mad joy. But joy all the same.

Thank Mozart. You rock.