Leo said, “What? Who’s Tonio?”
Consuelo continued. “If your niece wasn’t so intent on clawing her way to fame—”
“Shut it,” said Leo. “I asked a question. Who the hell is Tonio?”
“Tonio is the man whose work your sister used so she could have a show. The writer whose story you just read so well.”
“Hold on,” said Leo. “I thought you were talking about Antoine.”
Yannick put his arm around Mignonne.
Consuelo said, “Also known as my husband.”
Yannick nodded. “Antoine. Tonio. Saint-Ex.”
60
When Leo left—with Consuelo—he had not been angry at her machinations, but furious with me. It was as though by allowing him to hope for the best for my future, I had betrayed his own hidden dreams.
“He’ll be here,” Consuelo assured me now. “You’re damn lucky we called this business Studio Saint-Ex. I explained to him that it’s my name on the line. He promised to show up—for me.”
For the past hour, a steady stream of ticket holders had been arriving for the show. A few stragglers still chatted in the foyer while the usher showed others to their seats.
The student volunteers were poised over the lighting controls and the models stood awaiting their cues in the wings. Philippe and Yannick bided their time with a duet of a lengthy, low-key classical number. I resisted the impulse to run back and forth from the lane to the front foyer looking for Leo as I had last night. He knew the way in. He was either coming or he was not. The show would either start with him, late, or it would not start at all.
From the edge of the stage curtain, I scanned the crowd again, looking not for Leo this time, but for Antoine. He, too, had not appeared. Half an hour ago I had been hoping to see him, but now I prayed that he would not show his face, not see my failure. He would feel the effects of it soon enough.
Bernard approached, looking bleak. “I found your brother vomiting in the lane. I put him in a cab and sent him home. He can’t do the voice-over. He’s so drunk he can hardly see.”
Bernard took my arm and steadied me.
There was barely enough time to rush to Antoine’s apartment and return to the auditorium. I didn’t worry anymore that the show would start late; I worried that Consuelo would cancel it before I returned. If the production was going to fail, I wanted it to be in spite of my best efforts.
“Wait here,” I told the cabbie when he had pulled up at the curb. “I’ll be two minutes, then I need you to take me back to the Alliance Française.”
“You want me to wait, pay me for this part of the fare. It’s a busy night.”
“I’m getting something heavy.”
“Give me the fare.”
“I’ll be right back!”
“Just pay me now, lady, so I know you’ll come back.”
I dug into my purse and shoved money toward him as I scrambled out of the cab. “Two minutes!” I yelled.
I hadn’t dared take the time to ask Consuelo if she had a key and provoke a discussion I hoped never to have. I had chosen, instead, to have Bernard find and distract her and assure her that our narrator was on his way.
I ran to the concierge’s desk. “Elmore! I need a big favor. I need you to let me in to Mr. Saint-Exupéry’s apartment.”
“I don’t think he’s in, Miss Lachapelle.”
“I’m sure he isn’t.” Antoine would be out on the streets, smoking. He might even be circling the Alliance, obsessing over what could be happening inside. “I need something from his apartment, from beside his bed.”
“Something you left behind in Mr. Saint-Exupéry’s, um, room?” The concierge rose to his feet with reluctance. His expression betrayed both his embarrassment and affection for me, and his competing unwillingness to forsake the dictates of his post.
“It’s not something of mine. But it’s something that I need, right away, to get him out of a mess. Please, Elmore. I’m trying to help him. Will you help me?”
I followed him away from his desk. Never had an elevator seemed so slow to arrive, so reluctant to ascend. When Elmore had his key in Antoine’s lock, I thanked him incoherently and pushed past him through the door and into the bedroom.
I pulled a blanket from Antoine’s bed. I had only been in his bedroom the one, unforgettable time; now this second time would surely be my last. No matter what happened with the show tonight, Antoine would never forgive me for taking a piece of him and using it—his actual voice—without his permission.
I threw the blanket over the recording instrument and hoisted it into my arms.
“It’s heavy,” Bernard had warned me, “and somewhat delicate. Be careful with it—Saint-Ex could have bought a car with what he paid for it. But it works like magic.”
I know, I had wanted to say. Instead I had given Bernard a grateful and appreciative smile, and the smile he had returned seemed to mirror mine.
In the lobby, I mouthed “Thank you” to Elmore, who was on the phone, opened the door with my hip, and was on the street.
The cabbie was gone. A number of taxicabs passed in the roadway, all of them carrying passengers. I caught sight of an empty one and yelled, but couldn’t lift a hand without dropping the bundled machine, and the cab hurried past.
“I need to put this down,” I said aloud. I swiveled, looking about for a platform of any sort on which to rest my load. A mailbox. A planter. Anything.
Pedestrians swerved around me.
Elmore appeared. “Taxi!”
A cab slowed.
“You’re a lifesaver!”
He took the box while I slid into the back seat. “Not to worry, Miss Lachapelle. I figure my job is pretty safe.” He settled the recording device carefully beside me. “Sounds like Mr. Saint-Ex is leaving anyway, if you can believe what he was hollering when he got his mail the other day.”
I closed the door on Elmore’s words and urged the driver on. From my purse I pulled cash for the driver, and a notebook and pen for the challenge at hand. The dry winter air or the wool of the blanket over the recording device was frizzing my hair. I pushed it off my face as I wrote frantically.
I checked my watch. Bernard had said he would meet me at the front door.
Let him be there. Let him be right. This solution had to work.
He had assured me: “Saint-Ex recorded the whole book. I heard it myself, read in his own voice. He played it for me to persuade me to join your project. It’s an exquisite reading. It’s what convinced me to sign on to your crazy plan.”
At the Alliance, I paid the cabbie and slipped out, pulling the recording device out after me. God, it was heavy; my knees almost buckled.
Wordlessly, Bernard came up and took my burden. I followed him backstage to the table with the microphone.
“You have the discs?” he asked.
I felt the blood leave my face.
He opened the casing. The inside of the lid had a pocket, strapped with leather and lined with heavy pale pink satin. He reached in and pulled out a stack of discs, looked through them, and placed a selection on the table. On each, Antoine’s handwriting indicated “Le Petit Prince” and a number: 1, 2, 3 …
Bernard fitted the first one into the player. Over the sound of the piano—tireless Philippe!—came a thunderclap. I peered through the curtains to see Consuelo, not yet in costume, trying to right a piece of wooden scenery that had fallen onto its face. Bernard left to attend to the problem.
“You try moving things in high heels,” she complained. “Where’s Mignonne? She’s strong.”
Bernard started dragging sandbags onto the stage. “More of these. Come on, Consuelo. Quick.”
How to work this device? I pondered the mechanism and fit the first disc onto the spool. I turned a knob and the disc started spinning, its rhythmic hum not quite drowning out Consuelo’s rant from a few feet away.
“Where the hell is Mignonne? And where is Leo?”
“Mignonne’s finalizing the voice-over.”
“Why does she wreck everything? We should cancel this whole thing!”
Bernard’s voice was firm. “Remember who we’re doing this for. Okay: the scenery looks great. Are the models in position? I will check on Mignonne. We’re almost ready.”
The audience was murmuring. Gingerly, I turned another knob. From the instrument Antoine’s voice boomed, “Le Petit Prince.” I snapped off the device as a hush fell across the entire theater—except in my ears, where my own heartbeat roared.
Consuelo appeared. “Jesus Christ!”
“This is our Leo,” I said. “Go tell Philippe to start playing the opening piece, loudly. Tell him to draw it out for a good few minutes. I have to figure out this contraption. I’ve got to find and mark the passages we’re using so I can skip the ones we don’t need. We’ll start with chapter two and—”
“Where did you get this?”
“I stole it. Tell Philippe that he’s got to play good and loud and lusty between scenes—so I can take that time to line up the next section we’re going to use.”
“You’re deranged. I’ll have your skin if this performance fails!”
“Go. And give the actors their final instructions. This won’t take me long. I’ve already made a list of the scenes I need to find and mark.”
61
When the lights had all been dimmed, and Philippe’s playing had softened to a low background accompaniment, I threw the switch on the microphone and started the audio disc turning. Its spooky rhythm hushed the audience to silence, and into this silence the machine delivered Antoine’s voice: “I had an accident in the Sahara Desert six years ago …” A bit of the tension left my shoulders. “… a thousand miles from any human habitation … You can imagine my surprise at sunrise when an odd little voice woke me up …”
Yannick’s oboe lifted into its mournful warble, and the first model emerged from the wings: the Little Prince.
The voice continued, sure and persuasive. The models passed between the curtained panels on either side of the stage, coming together to enact Antoine’s story in subtle gestures and evocative stances. When the text allowed, when the instruments held the audience captive and still like cupped hands can hold water long enough for a drink, the models held their poses—as motionless on their boxy heels as figures on a page, arms angled to showcase the clothing’s drapery and elegant lines. Then they slipped back into the world of motion and the music of anticipation and action. Every once in a while, a spattering of applause greeted a design, but for the most part the audience was silent—whether in disdain for the creations or out of respect for the storytelling, I couldn’t tell.
Philippe’s piano played in the background all along, rising to take center stage whenever I needed to stop the machine and find the next usable segment, and Yannick’s oboe pulled the listeners’ emotions along the strains of every note. The story was not strictly in line with Antoine’s tale: I had left out the prince’s visits with the men who were so stuck in their ways: a money counter, a lamplighter, a king, and others. In tonight’s story, a boy arrived and demanded drawings from a fallen pilot. He spoke of passion, love, and responsibility, and being bound by them to a rose. He would meet a fox and a poisonous snake, and choose his homeland over his new friends in the barren desert—gracefully giving his life for the choice.
In this story, the snake was a lean, tall young woman with icy blue eyes, the natural rosiness of her lips blotted and dulled with matte pastel lipstick. She writhed in a shimmering sheath that I had covered with transparent sequins over painted metallic scales. The model’s long fingers reached for the girl with the messy blond bob who was the scene’s prince. I pictured the cold hunger of the serpent eyes, the chilling elegance of the angular arms, and felt a pang of fright for the prince—not the one who turned beguilingly at center stage, but the young child who lived in Antoine’s pages and in his heart.
The narrator spoke to the audience as openly as one does to a friend: Antoine did, his disembodied voice melancholy as the pilot who crashed in the desert, plaintive and innocent as the prince, cunning as the snake, and, as the fox, both charmingly exasperated and patient. As I watched the disc spin, I marveled that so intimate an aspect of a man could be captured in such a way, packaged for calling up whenever the desire arose. In a hundred years, I thought, science will replicate sight in a similar parcel, and perhaps imagination as well.
The rising of the oboe drew me out of my reverie. I put a hand on the machine and stopped its whirling. My heart was beating quickly. On the stage, as Philippe’s notes clashed and peaked, as Yannick’s oboe sounded its low warning, the snake returned. The model spun, and her cape of gun-grey imitation silk flared around her—its generous proportions an affront to the fabric restrictions—then she moved slowly toward the Little Prince, who sat unmoving and quiet on the wooden wall.
In Antoine’s book, the boy gave himself willingly to death, his anxiety focused only on the pain it would cause the pilot. In Studio Saint-Ex’s little fashion story, the child hesitated. Sensing the approach of the snake, he lifted his feet off the ground, one after the other in turn, then he climbed high onto the wall. He swayed as he questioned his decision, measuring the costs of first one and then the other action—to embrace his life here in the desert, with his new friends, or to sacrifice his new life to carry out his duty to the rose. The little model danced atop the wall, her gestures an homage to the land the prince had come to visit, and then, lifting her arms, to the planet that was suddenly lit overhead within a canopy of twinkling lights. As the planet stayed fixed in the sky, the blanket of star-lights grew, expanding lower to the stage, and the Little Prince’s movements slowed and stilled.
The snake came close. As it lifted its cape, the stars trembled for a moment and the child slipped down off the sheltering wall. With a burst of light and a cry from the stage, the snake struck. The light flashed acid yellow. Immediately, all went black. Then, slowly, the spotlight was raised on the Little Prince, who was crumpled lifeless at the base of the wall.
A gasp escaped my throat—and I realized that all was quiet in the house. Where was the accompaniment? I couldn’t find the closing lines without the music to cover my search. I moved to catch the attention of the musicians across the stage, where they hid in the opposite wings.
Philippe had covered his eyes; Yannick was staring at the fallen figure. As Yannick lifted his hand to wipe his cheek, his eyes met mine and he started—his hand now darting to his oboe.
But before the instrument reached his lips, a voice rose into the silence: Antoine’s—not the recording, but Antoine himself, projecting from the very back of the audience.
“Now my sorrow is comforted a little. That is to say—not entirely. But I know that he did go back to his planet, because I did not find his body at daybreak.”
The oboe breathed its deep bass sound.
“It was not such a heavy body … and at night I love to listen to the stars. It is like five hundred million little bells …”
In the theater, bells did not peal; instead, the response came in rustles and soft creaks—a delicate wave of sound that built up as one after another of the listeners turned around to watch Antoine speak. I had stepped from the wings to see it. Now Consuelo did the same. Bernard, too, stepped onto the stage. In any other production, it would be as though we were revealing ourselves in order to receive our praise—but all heads were turned away from us.
Applause had begun sporadically. It now joined note to note like a thread mending holes, until there were no discernable weaknesses in the fabric of the audience’s response. Here and there, people stood in ovation. Antoine himself stood beside the rear doors, his large hands clapping slowly and pointedly as he stared at the stage.
His expression was inscrutable, from this distance, but his gaze seemed to focus on me. I felt suddenly that I was laid bare, exposed as a usurper and a thief. I stopped applauding Antoine, my hands falling to my sides, as more and more of the crowd scrambled to
its feet. I was relieved then that most of the audience found the presence of the author at the back of the room to be more interesting than that of the clan of imitators clustered at the front—with a confused gaggle of models elbowing for position behind.
62
I couldn’t convince Consuelo to change out of the dress. She wouldn’t even cover it with her coat outside the Alliance Française, not with photographers pointing lenses her way. She handed her sable to Philippe and demanded that he lock it up wherever he had locked the recording device. Snow was falling steadily. Fat, spiky snowflakes glistened like crystal armor on Consuelo’s shoulders and among the petals of the rose. I was shivering. My own coat had been left in the taxi to Antoine’s before the show. Philippe draped Consuelo’s fur over my shoulders and walked whistling down the street.
In the cab, as we raced to Le Pavillon, Consuelo fixed her makeup and kept patting Antoine’s knee. Bernard was in the jump seat, bracing himself against turns with a hand pressed to the car’s roof. In the front passenger seat, Yannick yelled joyously, “Left at the lights! Straight ahead! Step on it, my friend, we’ve been waiting long enough!”
It had taken ages to tear Consuelo away from the cameras and the fans. It was as though she thought all the kudos must be solely for her. I had watched some Alliance members approach her deferentially, shyly. They and Consuelo must have been aware of each other before, for they knew each other’s names, but it was as though they were meeting her for the very first time.
And in a sense they were: the Consuelo they had known had been a spurned woman. But this woman, this rose-adorned star, was her prince’s very lifeblood, a beauty worth the sacrifice of life itself. And her husband … They had thought he’d grown so bullheaded, when here he had been working on such a thoughtful and humane tale, a love story that one couldn’t help but admire. Funny how such a small thing, a little story of a little prince, could put things in a different perspective. I read this all in their expressions, in their posture, and in their tone.
Anio Szado Page 28
