The Queen of the Night

by Alexander Chee

  I Masnadieri, he said.

  I smiled and looked down to my risotto. This offer surprised me. When he’d asked me to dinner that night, I’d thought it was to discuss some further detail of the Milan production. I knew this other opera a little—I would be killed by bandits instead of dying in my cell this time—and I was about to say yes, as I usually would to such an offer, and then did not.

  Speak freely, my dear, he said. Something bothers you.

  How to say it? I was tired of dying this season, tired of playing so long at death and madness. My initial hesitation began there and was joined by the irony of his granting an old wish—acting as if I did belong to him—even as a new one had appeared. The idea of originating a role written by a protégé of his had taken root in me over the course of the day and had even grown into a romantic fable, the more plausible to me as I sat here. Giuseppina had met Verdi when he was a struggling young composer beginning his career with Nabucco. She had created both the lead soprano role and her life with him, leaving behind the more famous Donizetti for the handsome young composer. Composers often courted singers with original roles in operas, as they both knew well.

  I thought of myself as a Giuseppina then, waiting for my own Giuseppe to appear and hoping, perhaps, that he had.

  But I had not yet met this new Giuseppe. They, it seemed, had; they knew who he was. I couldn’t say no to Verdi, though, especially for an opera without a score, written by the protégé I had meant to ask after next. He would eventually find out, and this would insult him. And so I could not say yes, and I could not say no, and I could not ask my question, not right then. I could lie, the thought came, but as quickly came the thought that to lie to him was a grave sin against our friendship. For he would know.

  What’s more, I had no lie prepared.

  This is a surprise. We were so sure you’d be pleased, Giuseppina said. She raised an eyebrow, and they sat back in their chairs again. Verdi held his glass to the side near the candle flame, and along the tablecloth a deep red shadow pooled.

  My novels, I heard the writer say, in my memory of the night before. They all come true. And I knew what I would say.

  As you can tell, I said, I am afraid to consent.

  The lie was still forming on my tongue when a feeling came, like that premonitory trill of the string section in an opera, the warning of danger.

  I feel it brings a curse, I said.

  Verdi squinted and looked up. The red light from his glass flashed along the pressed white linen tablecloth.

  I fear the roles I take come true, I said. Condemn me to repeat the fates of my characters in life. This I worded as a suspicion, for I already regretted this lie, which had seemed small and ridiculous just a moment before, but still useful somehow, and now was an explosion, the words still in the air around me like smoke, a smoke that could grow to cover my entire life. And Verdi’s face was now so grave, so solemn, I was about to contradict myself, or laugh, or agree to take the role if only to please him when Giuseppina reached for my hand. She glanced at her husband, who did not meet her eyes, and then she leaned very close to me.

  Of course they do, my dear, she said. This is why I have sung nothing since marrying.

  Verdi put his glass down. Cursed? I wonder. What have you dared? He stroked his beard as he met my eyes, a faint smile on his face.

  The great tragedies are told of the families who’d caught the attention of the gods with their hubris, struck down but known forever to us. The House of Atreus, for example, he said. But perhaps you are cursed. Perhaps when we do as we do, he said, the gods learn something or are entertained. Certainly we do not. He pulled my free hand to him and kissed it, as if I had bid him good night. Take very good care, he said. Our prayers are with you. I do understand. And if this means you must withdraw from the other production, please, tell me.

  I sat silent before them, humiliated, unable to answer until I remembered the matter of my other mission and decided to proceed as plainly as possible.

  What is this I hear of a protégé? I asked. A young composer, a recent winner of the Prix de Rome?

  Verdi said nothing but stood and removed our plates and then returned to the table with grappa, which I took.

  It’s nothing to speak of, he said. I’m sure I just made the mistake of doing someone a favor, and now he is telling people he is my protégé.

  He exchanged the briefest look with Giuseppina before turning back to me.

  If I had as many protégés as I am said to have, I would command an army, he said.

  There was no avoiding any longer that the evening, and perhaps more, was spoilt, and the only rescue for it began with my exit.

  I excused myself, they brought my cape, we exchanged muted kisses good night, and I hired a driver home.

  As the little calèche made its way to my home through the dark, past the Tuileries, the Palais-Royal, on its way to the avenue de l’Opèra, I pushed back into the seat, and the wood and hide creaked. In the wind, I could smell the mushroom whiff of dead leaves and earth.

  He had lied to me, you see. That was clear from the look he’d exchanged with Giuseppina—he had lied to me and was warning her not to contradict him. But this had the effect of telling me the protégé was real. The new mystery as I left was as to why he’d lied.

  And as to what I had dared that might offend the gods, well, I had lied to Verdi. And he knew.

  The Paris I’d met when I first arrived during the last days of the Second Empire and Napoléon III was a series of ascents that looked at first like descents; going down brought you up—succès de scandale. The women I met then dressed as if choosing weapons; their balls, parties, and dinners were a series of duels and mêlées, and the salons and ateliers of the city, outfitters for a vast assassins’ guild too decorated by half. A girl could enter this world as a grisette, taking in laundry, and in a week or two, be at Worth for a gown; two weeks more, leave at dawn in the carriage of an Austrian industrialist, having been stolen from the bed of the Emperor just to be protected from the Empress. She’d be returned within the month if the industrialist were either assassinated for presumptuousness or titled for his rescue of the Emperor’s happiness. Everyone I met had the look of seeing a story repeated in front of them, actors in a rehearsal on a marked stage: the laundress, the couturier, the industrialist, the Emperor, the Empress. As I passed each, I soon saw that this world was new only to me; and when I was done with my turn, I had found my place and learned to listen for the wooden shoes of the next girl as she came through.

  Napoléon III was now dead, in his mausoleum in England, the Second Empire replaced by the Third Republic, but I could still make out the shapes of the new grisettes in the dark, walking and waiting for their lovers, careful of the police, studying me and my calèche carefully as they shifted from foot to foot, as I once had, and wondering how to become one such as me. I nearly saluted from where I sat.

  By one unhappy thought, the chorus sings in Lucia di Lammermoor, a thousand joys are lost. Perhaps, I told myself, I could write to Verdi in the morning and accept. I could tell him it was foolishness and beg his forgiveness. But each time I thought it, there stood Madame Verdi, with her blithe assurance that my lie was the truth, greeting me at what I did not know would be this next station in my journey.

  Her quick acknowledgment of my little lie as some long-standing secret truth among singers did not reassure me, though. Instead, it made the lie seem like a spell I’d been tricked into casting on myself, one that made it so. As if I had cursed myself.

  The music for Un Ballo in Maschera as well as I Masnadieri waited on my tray at home, no doubt sent over before or during our dinner—he had been so certain! There was a note, a short Brava! And his looping signature below.

  I prepared to send the one back and then could not—not just yet.

  In Un Ballo in Maschera, my character, Amelia, was dishonored but would live. The orphan Amalia in I Masnadieri was murdered. They were like so many of the roles I’d pl
ayed, roles close to my life, a procession of orphans, grisettes, courtesans, wronged lovers, the disgraced ones. But Amelia, the American, Amalia, the orphan, they were very close, like some strange duo that was really the same girl leading the way. The letter e in Amelia changing to an a, like a tiny mask just for me, all of them, perhaps, leading to this next role, if I agreed to it, as the Settler’s Daughter in Le Cirque du Monde Déchu.

  Me, as I once had been.

  What was her fate? Was her ending happy or sad? The writer had said something about an angel and love, and Hell, of course.

  Why was there never an opera that ended with a soprano who was free?

  The first thing determined in the career of a singer is her Fach. The word is German and sounded like Fate to me the first time I heard it. It is a singer’s fate, for it describes the singer’s range and the type of roles the singer will sing. Some soprano tones are associated with virtue, others with seduction, others with grief. If your voice is a collection of the highest notes, you are to play the good girl. If your voice reaches only to the near heights, you are the spurned one or the dishonored. A bit lower and you are the rival or the seductress, and still lower, the maid or matron. To move from the confines of your Fach was to risk sounding suddenly as if there had been no education in singing at all. The voice loses all its qualities.

  Mine was a voice that sounded at first as if it did not have the capacity for high notes, until they emerged, surprising, with great force. A voice for expressing sorrow, fear, and despair. The tragic soprano is what I was called, also known as a Falcon.

  Nothing to fear from a fate that was already yours, then, except, perhaps, that it would never leave you.

  Three

  THE PIONEER EQUESTRIENNE remembered by Simonet and his composer friend took her first steps out onto the streets of Paris when she was sixteen years old, as a member of the Cajun Maidens and the Wonders of the Canadian Frontier, a small traveling cirque. The Emperor Napoléon III had emptied out the world’s pockets for the audiences at the Exposition Universelle of 1867. And as France was especially mad for stories of America and Canada, settlers and Indians, horses and beasts from the woods, we came to supply them.

  We came to Paris for the pleasure of the Emperor. Him, his appetites, his reign, all controlling me even then.

  We were three palomino horses, and Mela, the roan, with an actual Iroquois for our Indian Chief, a Russian Jewess from Saint Petersburg for the Indian Princess, and a troupe of five clowns—four brothers from Minsk and a woman from Portugal who was certainly not their sister—as their tribe. The magician was from Palermo and got himself up as the Medicine Man, and there were three trapeze artists for the Spirits of the North, two women and one man, who all hailed from Poland and were, I think, lovers, all three. A Swedish giant, a complete gentleman, wore a suit of fur and a false monster head, and was called the Wendigo, summoned forth by the Medicine Man. The show’s stars were the Cajun Maidens, five powerfully built sisters, all truly from Quebec, who began their routine as if doing ordinary household chores but with extraordinary tools—sweeping a broom the size of a husband, balancing firewood on their head—and then led up to ax juggling, knife throwing, somersaults on and off of horses.

  Together they were my family for five months.

  The show told the story of a young woman’s escape from captivity—mine. I played the Settler’s Daughter, adopted by the Cajun Maidens after having been “captured by the Indians and raised in their wild ways.” It was said I could fire a bow and arrow or a rifle, track an animal through the woods, and while I’d lost my English living among the Indians, I could still sing one song, a song my mother taught me, which I came out and sang in a round at the end.

  By appearance, I am often thought to be Bohemian or Italian, though sometimes French, English, or Scandinavian. As a girl, I was slender, small, but with a large head and features—large brown eyes, dark red hair nearly brown. Any kind of beauty I had seemed to me to be in my hair, and when I wore it bound close to my head in braids, it was like a secret.

  The Settler’s Daughter was a part invented by the show boss—he’d gone looking for one to replace the girl who’d left. I never knew her, and no one ever spoke of her. The story he invented he’d adapted for me because there was no other way to explain that this girl he’d found in New York could sing but not speak.

  I was silent because I believed I was damned. I was sure I was a foul liar before God, a girl who’d tried to invent a miracle, and He’d taken my whole family except me to show me what He thought of me.

  The one song I sang, I believed, was all that the Lord had left me. It was the song my mother had loved to hear, the one noise I thought He’d let me make and live. As for why I joined, it was because I could do this and, I swore, only this until I had been safely returned to my mother’s people, her family in Lucerne.

  When I arrived in Paris, I thought I’d nearly made it there.

  The girl I was when I arrived in Paris, she came believing herself cursed as well. If my voice really was cursed, I was sure it was that one, somehow still with me all these years.

  She is coming for me out of the dark, the girl I once was. She hasn’t spoken in years past remembering. I can’t tell you her name and she won’t, either. Not for shame at my family’s modest origins—I became something they couldn’t imagine, something they would have kept me from becoming, and that, it seems to me, was always in my nature to become. They would not be proud of me.

  I never belonged to them, though they tried.

  To truly tell you my story, we start not with the Settler’s Daughter, then, but the one before her, the one who hid inside her, who walked down to the pier, where she found a tent full of horses and music that took her in.

  §

  My invented miracle began as a prank. It was only to punish my mother for punishing me.

  I was the child of a Scottish father and a Swiss mother who’d met when they came to settle America for God, Methodist settlers, farming the new state of Minnesota. My father received his plot in 1862, given land in the Homestead Act, and we moved from Ohio, even as the Dakota War began that summer, and the Civil War burned the lands farther east.

  It could have been my fate to have lived out the story I would later perform, but instead, we passed these conflicts strangely unharmed, so much so that my mother and father said we were blessed, and so I was allowed to grow up to be a girl approaching the age of my Confirmation and First Communion in the summer of 1866.

  I was a tomboy, to the despair of my mother, whom I loved. While the singers I knew were studying in convent schools, I was chasing storms on our horses and drinking the rain. To prepare me, and to tame me, my mother tested me on my Bible subjects, the names of the apostles, the trials of Jesus, the story of creation, and when she was done, said, Well, I’m glad you at least know the name Jesus.

  No other God before me, my mother quoted to me. Do you think when your time comes and you appear before the Lord, He’ll want you to sing? That He’ll forgive all the rest?

  It was, in fact, what I was sure was true.

  I loved to go to church with her, but it was only to sing the hymns. This little church was my first theater. When the time came to sing, I was the very picture of an eager Christian, standing first out of the whole congregation, hymnal open, waiting impatiently for the pastor’s wife to pick out the refrain on the church’s piano. But when the singing was over, I’d sit numb for the rest of the service until my mother pulled my sleeve to show we were leaving. As we left, the congregation would come to say to her what a voice I had and wasn’t she so proud of me. And I would glow beside her, beaming at her, waiting for her to be proud of me. She would sometimes reach out and tuck my hair behind my ears if it had come loose.

  I loved my mother but I did not love God. For reasons unknown to me still, I’d never quite taken to the idea of God. At this age I could only imagine the words we said in church going off into the empty air. In the presence of my mo
ther’s assertions about the Lord, I tried to assume the same gravity that everyone around me had, but whenever I said Lord my God, I never believed it and knew myself to be a liar.

  I did it only because I loved her, but I was not sincere, and she could tell, and so it dismayed her, and she punished me as proud.

  The next Sunday, after my failure at my Bible test, she met me at the door with a piece of black ribbon and velvet, and she tied them in place over my mouth.

  You’ll wear this today and think of how, when you know what you should know as a proper Christian, you can sing in church again, she said, and pushed my hair back into place around the collar of my coat. Your voice is a gift from God, and it deserves to be treated with respect—as does the Lord.

  As we climbed down from our buggy in the yard by the church, the other members stared, but my mother had told her friends of her plan, and they quickly murmured the story to those who didn’t know, so that no one asked me about it, not even the pastor when I shook his hand at the door. I noticed he threw occasional anxious glances my way, but my mother’s stern regard seemed to quiet him.

  I’ve perhaps made a mistake in telling you it’s a gift, this voice of yours, my mother said to me, as she removed the ribbon gag at home and folded it into her sewing kit. But it’s a test as well. There’s no gift like yours without a test.

  The weeks leading up to the ceremony drifted by with a terrible slowness. Each Sunday I made my way past the staring children and sat out the service; each week I sat at the table with the prayer book at home and recited the prayers to my mother as she cooked dinner, as if I were praying to her. As if she were the angry and vengeful God, her back to me while she tended to the fry pan.

  Unlike God’s, her replies to my prayers were straightforward. Very good, she’d say. Again.

  And then, mercifully, the long-awaited day came. I dressed in a new dress; I appeared in the church as I once had, my mouth uncovered. I stood before the pastor and repeated the prayers in a steady voice. And then he said, Body and blood of Christ, and he dipped the bread in the wine and put it on my tongue.