The Queen of the Night

by Alexander Chee

Accept our congratulations on a distinguished audition, he said finally. I can’t think of when I knew Abigaille’s first aria to be sung with appropriate force and it is an extraordinarily difficult aria, not at all what we are used to hearing in auditions. It was very dangerous but very beautiful, he said. Whoever you are studying with should likely be reprimanded. He cleared his throat and continued. You are too young, however, he said, and paused. And here the woman at his elbow looked sternly to him. And while you appear very intelligent, you lack a proper French education, and this is another obstacle, and not a small one, he said. But we have been assured that you will work hard should you be allowed. If you are accepted, you must commit to a very disciplined training to make up for this. Do you understand me? he asked.

  I do, I said.

  Are you performing now? he asked.

  Under my wool skirt I could feel the leather garters I still wore against my thighs. No, I said.

  You must not, he said. It is very likely someone would try to exploit your voice and get you to sing too soon, in the dance halls or the cabarets. Everything you learn here, should we admit you, could come to nothing if your voice fails, he said. He paused and a silent council moved between them all, and then he said, We will confer. Please await our letter. And until then, sing nothing.

  He was a tender old man, someone who had grown old here, clearly. In my fear and nervousness I stood staring around the room. Then I picked up my music case.

  The woman professor, whom I would later know very well, came and took my arm, walking me to the door. She had a matronly air but a maiden’s figure. My dear, she said, it is not a bird, this Falcon. The first Falcon gave it her name: Marie-Cornélie Falcon. She was my teacher. She was an elegant gentlewoman and an inspired singer, but her career lasted just eight years. I wish you many more. She clasped her hands over mine and, with a pat, released them.

  She was too late. As I walked the rue du Faubourg Poissonnière afterward, I could feel the wings trailing off my back, the wind in the street beating against them.

  §

  I left the area quickly and returned home. I did not want to risk arrest for conspiring against the honor of the lady professor.

  All over Paris, I saw them, young men and women carrying these handsome leather music cases like the one under my arm, students at the Paris Conservatoire, formerly l’Hôtel des Menus-Plaisirs, the place Odile had studied, the state-run school that trained and educated the musicians, singers, and dancers who sang for the pleasure of the Emperor Napoléon III and his Empress Eugénie on the stage of the Paris Opera. I hoped to truly be one of them—and that my past would not prevent this.

  There was much Euphrosyne had neglected to tell me of her situation, and so I alternately regretted and rebelled against my entry into the register. In this life, I was forbidden to be on certain streets altogether, forbidden to be on any street during daylight, and my head was always to be covered if I was outside. I could never be in the company of unregistered women, and every two weeks I was to renew the registration in person. The door to my apartment, if I was to live away from the brothel, was to have oversized numerals on it, announcing to all who passed the nature of the woman who lived there, and I was never to be seen at my open window. To disobey any of these rules meant I could be arrested.

  While at first I obeyed these laws, I soon went about by day with a bare head, couldn’t remember the forbidden streets until I was on them, and had not renewed my registration in more than a month. To go now, though, was to be jailed for lateness as well. I’d allowed my life with the tenor to take me over. I was sure, without any reason to think so, that our time together would end in my freedom. I could see it in the change in expressions from the professors—at the beginning they had looked on, almost embarrassed to see me. By the end, there was real respect.

  I was a Falcon.

  A Falcon, my dangerous teacher said questioningly, when he arrived a little later at the apartment he had bought for me. I walked to him as he threw himself across my bed.

  He wore evening dress at all hours of the day. I am either going out or returning from going out, he would say of it to anyone who asked. His blond hair glowed blue in the winter sun coming through the window. I put my hand against the black velvet along his collar and then ran it against his beard. His eyes were likewise a pale blue. The French spoke of a color that calmed the horses and a color that frightened them. I was not sure which these were.

  And likewise, sometimes it reassured me to be with him, and sometimes it terrified me.

  In singing, nothing hides, especially not from your teacher. I learned quickly my dangerous teacher could tell if I had been singing too much or too little, if I was having my menses or was hungry. It frightened me at first. It was as if I could never be hidden again.

  During the months prior to my audition I had been rehearsing and taking lessons inside the unfinished Opéra Garnier with him, who was better known to the jury at the Conservatoire and to the city of Paris as the Prussian heldentenor at Salle Le Peletier, the current home of the Paris Opera. Charles Garnier, the architect of the new home for the Paris Opera, had enlisted the tenor to come and sing at various stages in the construction in order to hear how the sound changed inside the theater. The tenor had suggested the place for our rehearsals and Garnier was delighted.

  He is tuning it, the tenor said to me one day. Really, it can only help him.

  I met Garnier only once and then never saw him, and I soon forgot he listened, if he ever did—the tenor was the sort to obtain a great deal through charm, and much of what he said was never true—we had never prodded each other on this, either, for his lies, so far, had not affected me. Not in any way I knew. In the meantime, the unfinished Garnier had come to feel like my own home, in part because the tenor had said to me, It will be your new home, and he encouraged me to treat it familiarly. To rehearse there, he felt, would give me a certain advantage over the other sopranos. This is the only place any of us will want to sing, he said, when it is done. Your first time here you will know your voice in it perfectly.

  Yes, comprimario, I said. I am a Falcon.

  Since beginning the rehearsals at the Garnier, we called each other comprimario and comprimaria, the opera terms for the supporting cast.

  The Garnier was more beautiful with each arrival and even with each departure. A new corner was always being painted or shaped or plastered, or a statue had arrived, or a frieze had been finished. There was very little natural light, and as the stage lights were not yet installed, we sang by candlelight into the dark theater over the stepped slope where the velvet chairs would be someday while workmen pressed gilding across the walls and ceilings. A sketch would be a god or goddess the next time I passed, a marble statue turned to gold.

  It was, on reflection, the perfect place to turn a fille en carte into a Falcon soprano.

  We shall have to hood you at night to make sure you do not get lost, he said. Very dangerous and very beautiful, the professor said of your voice?

  Yes. It is exactly what he said.

  It is clear he’s already in love with you. I can’t allow you to go to this school, the tenor said, and drew me into his arms as he laughed at his own joke and I pretended to laugh as well.

  §

  He introduced me to his friends. I soon discovered it was my duty to entertain them as well, as he pleased.

  They were mostly good men: a Japanese painter, an English dramatist, the tenor’s former lieutenant, in Paris on diplomatic missions. An Italian baritone from Trieste who liked to stay the night. This preference enraged the tenor, though he allowed it, and so I had to allow it, though the baritone snored like a dragon.

  The painter painted me as a prelude to his affections; the dramatist gave me poems or spoke forever of his desire to introduce me to London, creating eventually a long story of turning me into a star of the Royal Opera; the former commander aspired to be a composer and rarely asked for a single erotic favor, instead asking me to sing
his relatively simple compositions.

  Euphrosyne’s warning returned to me. You will tire of him. I had. What had first seemed to be a long play was, in fact, more like a repertory in which much of my role was silent and I had to manage the cues as they arrived. It was tiring to always have to please him, to always have to pretend he made me happy, to pleasure him, to pleasure his friends. At the Majeurs-Plaisirs at least there were hours when you could be left alone.

  I also missed the company of the girls late at night. The dorm now seemed like a paradise by comparison to the apartment, where I had only the maids he’d provided for company, Doro and Lucy. Doro was a slight Italian woman with a fierce, hard face softened, usually, by an expression of perpetual amusement in her eyes. She seemed of an indeterminate age, her thick dark hair graying slightly. Lucy was young, a plump French girl, pink and blond, who said so little I almost thought her slow, but she was not, or her wit was not, at least. She liked to wink before she burst into the bawdy laughter I soon knew to expect from her.

  I was unused to maids and didn’t know how to let them do for me, and so I tried to befriend them instead, and at first they resisted. I sometimes heard them in the kitchen, or the rooms they shared off the kitchen, and tried to catch them, but if they heard me, I was met with silent, blank, expectant faces—faces waiting for requests or commands. Finally, I crept into the kitchen late one night to find them drinking gin and playing bezique. They stared at me as if at a mouse, and then as if at their lady, silent.

  Please, I said finally.

  They looked at me for another long moment, and then Doro, who it seemed was in charge, relented and gestured with her chin at the chair between them. I sat down as she dealt me in.

  §

  In the month of waiting for the letter from the Conservatoire, cards and gin were not enough, and so any night I found myself free, I went to the Mabille instead, even taking the risk of going alone when the tenor or his friends wouldn’t take me. I danced until morning, relishing the walk home, my hair wet, steam rising off me in the cold like smoke.

  There I was a champion. The clap of my back on the hard wooden tables, my legs in the air, my skirt a wheel, and the cold air on my thighs while I was drunk from the screams in the room and the misery of my dance-floor rivals, whether those of an hour or a week or a year. All of us were trying to kick higher or fall faster, but I had learned to win with a one-legged kick I could hold, one hand in the air, one on my hip, my skirt around my waist as I swiveled my hips. If you did it wrong or hadn’t practiced, you’d fall over backward, very painful, so challengers had to know in order to get it right. A first challenge could undo you, but I could stand there and do at least four in a row.

  I missed Euphrosyne even though I was too hurt still to write to her or otherwise invite her. She seemed to feel the same of me. But on the nights her gentlemen brought her, we were tentatively reunited, and soon we were joining our arms again as before, kicking and whirling as groups of men gathered to cheer us on.

  Her efforts at forgiving me were aided by the tenor’s never being there. Mine were aided by our both knowing she was right; I had a future unlike hers. I could be more than this, and she could not.

  I soon wore my cancan shoes as often as I could, for they were very sturdy, and if I wore them always, I could dance on any evening. I liked the clip-clop they made as I walked across a street, as if I were a mythological creature with hooves instead of feet.

  It was better in this life if you weren’t altogether human, I would think, as I heard the sound. It was easier to bear.

  §

  Given the Conservatoire jury professor’s warning me not to use my voice, in lieu of rehearsals, the tenor took me to the opera much more than before.

  He had not relinquished his role as my teacher. It is my greatest wish, he said, that you fall in love with one of the roles you see on the stage. Your talent will lack focus until then, he said. And so I went along, waiting to be moved.

  No longer did I have to entertain his friends as before. The dresses that were delivered to the apartment were finer than ever. He dismissed Doro from dressing me, enjoying the task himself. He was like a boy with the corset, which he liked to pull shut almost as much as he liked to pull it open.

  In his box at the opera, he regularly introduced me to his friends now as his protégée and spoke of how we were awaiting the results of my audition at the Conservatoire.

  And her voice? these new friends all asked with a thrill I did not yet understand.

  A Falcon, he would say, and they would draw back, startled. As if they were in the presence of something rare.

  I typically said little during these occasions, only smiled and nodded, afraid of betraying to them the quality of my French. I still could not imagine being like the women I saw on the stage or the women in the other boxes, no matter how finely he dressed me, and these introductions made me nervous. The more I waited, the more I was sure the Conservatoire had given me the audition only due to the letters of support the tenor had provided—that I was never to be taken seriously—and that his friends must know this also. And so I was nervous in the company of these celebrities and distinguished personages, and drank too much, ate too little. When I became drunk, I used the pin from my brooch on my legs so as not to fall asleep, pricking myself under my garters until he took me home.

  We never spoke of what would happen if I was rejected. We acted instead as if it were impossible. Each time he left me, however, I feared it. If I failed him, it seemed to me this game would quickly reach its end.

  §

  We must get you to see Delsarte, he said to me one evening, as we exited the opera. That the Conservatoire jury cannot reproach me for.

  I did not think to ask why, but to Delsarte I went.

  Delsarte was one of the most famous voice teachers in Paris, though if you called him such, he would disavow it. He taught what he called “singing false,” by which he meant accomplishing in the singer the appearance of emotions the singer did not actually feel, so as to move the audience. He taught this in his famous salon of portraits, the walls covered in paintings of the expressions of the different emotions.

  Your face is a mask, he said. Do you know the masks of comedy and tragedy? I told him I did. Then think of your face as a perfect mask. A magical one. Able to assume the shapes at command, and he struck the portraits one by one with his pointer, counting them off. Anger, Terror, Laughter, Love, all of them yours to command!

  Our first lesson consisted of my singing the Nabucco audition piece for him, and as I did so, he pointed to each of the portraits for the shape my face was to make at each part of the song. He was disappointed I could not accompany myself on the piano—a singer must be able to do so, he said, as the occasion demands—and grudgingly allowed the tenor to accompany me, who did so quite well, never once flinching as I did when Delsarte smacked each portrait.

  I was anxious not to disappoint either of my teachers, but the fierce expectancy in Delsarte as I sang and he pointed to a portrait was comical to me, and I found myself moving between terror and hilarity no matter what my face did.

  Stop, he said, as the tenor began at the piano once more. One moment. He came over to me and said, Close your eyes.

  I did so.

  He took his fingers and set them on my face. Anger, he said, and the image of his pointer at this particular portrait appeared in my mind. As my face tried to assume the expression, he pressed against it, pushing it into the shape. Grief, he said. And again pressed my face to order it. We did this for some time before he let the tenor play the piano again. The fingers of the old genius pushing my face into place.

  Your face appears to be only a mask, he said to me, of his decision to teach this way. It does not appear to know the shapes. Instead, everything is in your eyes, but we cannot see your eyes from the audience. So I closed your eyes so that you would have to speak another way.

  Speak with your whole face, he said. Not as a lunatic, but as an ar
tist. I think you fear you are giving something away, yes? But not if you can master this. If you master this, you can give and never give away anything.

  This I could understand, and soon he praised me as a quick student.

  §

  I had another concern, one I could not even mention to the tenor: My voice had disappeared before. When the Conservatoire professor had said, You could destroy your voice just in the training, it was like finding myself in Hades and being told I could leave, but the bargain was that there was just one candle to get me out and it might not last the way. And I wouldn’t know until I’d begun.

  When I returned to Delsarte next, I told him of what the jurist had said and of how my speaking voice had once disappeared, and I asked how this could be.

  This problem you describe, it is very interesting, Delsarte said. Your speaking voice and singing voice are located in two different parts of the throat—this is true of everyone—but it bears examining.

  He had various instruments he brought forth to observe my throat as he had me intone various syllables and then sing.

  I think the disappearance, it is perhaps a part of the Falcon voice, he said, as he put the instruments away. You must be careful. Your voice, the tones it makes, it sounds so strong, as if it could never go away. But it might, all at once, without warning. Certainly it was true for Marie, he said.

  He knew the woman for which the voice was named, of course, and then he told me of how she had lost her voice midperformance as she sang Niedermeyer’s Stradella.

  The line she was to sing was “Je suis prête.”

  It might be you are the next Falcon, as the Conservatoire seems to think, he said. You could do worse. But it might also be, if you are careful, that you could do better.

  §

  The letter from the Conservatoire said that despite a brilliant audition there was too much to overcome, and it suggested private training. The tenor had brought it himself, still sealed.