He was a delicate man with a trim, clean beard and bifocal glasses low on his thin nose.
He was, I decided, determined to make the same mistakes as last time.
As we make our return to the original the audiences now say they want, he said, there’s every reason to expect the show may have the same problems here it had before. The French do not change so much.
I took out my notebook and wrote to him, She has not yet seduced them, with a little smile for the stage manager beside him, and when he shrugged, I added, Don’t worry. Let’s begin.
The effect of working with so many former classmates from the Conservatoire was to feel a little as if I had returned there, to those days spent in the dark muddle of sounds made by beginning singers at their lessons, practicing at being surprised by love or the knife. Again. Sing it again, your teacher would insist. And in front of you would be some former legend looking like the ghost of the character you were trying to master. You could not sometimes guess at the force they’d once mustered. If you did not know what they asked for, if after many attempts this was still a little outside your imagining, then the singing teacher would straighten—they had always warmed up, of course—and the ghost would come to life. There, through the unsteady air, came the notes that would remind you of their legends.
You took custody of something when you learned a role that could make your fortune or ruin it (or leave it untouched, which, in some ways, was worse, to my mind—but then I was still sure glory was the cure for me). All the while, that first real lesson of singing—you don’t choose the role, the role chooses you—it seemed I was always learning it again. Your Fach was your fate as a singer, as far as roles went, and so no wonder if we felt our fates came from our Fächer as well.
I knew I had succeeded when it felt as if my throat were a spindle, the voice a thread, the stage some vast loom for something drawn from me into the air, where it caught and filled out to fit the shape of something greater, greater than all of us onstage and that only visited me there.
So I studied Carmen as if I were in school again. I started a new notebook, like the one I kept one for each of the roles in my repertoire. I always began learning my music by copying out the lyrics by hand, and I marked the music above them. My mornings before rehearsal were spent with a pencil and the blank pages of a journal that came with me to the rehearsal, where I made notes, writing down thoughts the director and the conductor gave as well. I translated the libretto in order to understand, as much as possible, what I sang and what, if anything, might come of it. But she would not come to me.
I could not reach Carmen at all.
§
The night of the dress rehearsal for Carmen, the tenor arrived wearing a new black velvet frock coat and with red silk roses for me. He brought my maids as well, a dress rehearsal tradition for me. My maids had become quite expert at music, and I relied on their opinions. Mademoiselle is flat in the end of her aria near the middle of the second act, Doro might say. Mademoiselle could extend her pause in the caesura, Lucy would add.
They gained nothing if I was to be out of work due to the mistakes flattery exposes you to.
The tenor was solicitous with them as he never had been in our first days. In front of others, he was kind and affectionate to me. In private, we almost never spoke.
He had kept up his affair with Maxine, I knew, even as he continued his very public courtship of me. I could only understand both as compulsions—I was sure he understood neither pursuit. Maxine, for her part, did not complain, humiliated by her inability to vanquish me. Any connection to him was valuable. I could not fault her as I had done the same.
From the stage at the end, as I stood and my tiny audience applauded and shouted, I looked out through the gaslights, the brightness separating us, and for an instant they were as dim in that moment as the faces of the dead, as if I saw Doro and Lucy from on the other side of this veil.
The sensation left me then, and we went back to my apartment and they made their comments to me at home as I sat and played bezique with them and we soaked sugar cubes in gin as the tenor looked on, drinking champagne and teasing, occasionally pointing out our cards to spoil this or that hand.
I barely heard any of it.
Some final separation was coming, approaching through the dark on the other side of all these days, I was sure of it. I could not see what it would be. I only knew, whatever this was, I would welcome it all the same.
§
I spent the next day alone, in preparation for the performance that evening. When the tenor asked to stop by, I put him off.
I didn’t feel prepared. There hadn’t been enough rehearsal time, it seemed to me, and I was nervous because I felt I was still searching for her, for Carmen. I knew my music, my cues, all this was correct and had been checked again and again, like the seams of my dresses—the seamstress had even obliged me by pricking herself as she sewed those foolish fishing weights into my costume, though to do this deliberately felt like its own sort of bad luck. The director appreciated my ability to perform Carmen’s dance on the table and smoke convincingly. He liked everything I was doing and it made me nervous, for I did not.
My Carmen was a woman with a lover’s impatience with the whole world, a woman who feared when she did not get what she wanted that it meant she was not loved by creation itself; her need for success at seduction was like her need for dinner or breakfast. When her death is foretold to her by a Gypsy near the opera’s end, she is calm. She has always imagined one day that the world would leave her, and she is not surprised.
This much I understood.
I did not like the end, which seemed implausible to me and thus contemptible. She is a huntress, a ruthless sorceress of desire. She has her own knife but she does not draw it. She pleads with Don José instead.
I tried to imagine why I would not draw my own knife. I reached down to touch it.
She faces her murderer outside the arena, her toreador lover inside, killing a bull for her. Toreador, love awaits for you, the chorus sings, as she dies.
Which one does she love? I asked myself. Does she not draw her knife because she loves him?
I spent the day at this fruitlessly and then finally went to the theater; dressed myself; greeted the cast cordially, the director also; and took my place backstage.
The orchestra began. The insistent back and forth of the strings slipped over me and there was the familiar music appearing in my mind a moment ahead of where it was in my ear. I stood. Perhaps it was the same audience as at the opera’s debut. I couldn’t see these men and women as the limelights burned, only the smooth seashell walls of the Comique and the gaps where the boxes were, like the sockets in a skull, a depthless dark from the moment the curtain went up. I could still hear the chatter and clatter of the subscribers, but it was low. They were on their best behavior tonight.
She loves neither the toreador nor the killer, it came to me as I went on the stage. More than these men, she loves her freedom.
At the end, as my Don José approached, I watched the knife in his hand, watched it move across the stage toward me in the dark until it was time for me to fall.
I understood at last.
She chose herself. She chose death.
§
From the cheering at the end, when I roused myself, I knew the voice at least had had another of its victories. I had sensed, however, during my death cry, something unfamiliar.
The voice had nearly failed.
I smiled at the director, and we gestured at each other, and the applause continued. He gestured as to the possibility of a curtain call. I nodded, and we went out onto the stage.
In the orchestra was an oboist I recognized from the Conservatoire, a round-headed young man who had been close to Bizet. The oboist turned up just the left side of his mouth in a smile as he examined the crowd and then looked down.
I looked to the oboist again. His face was still turned down. I will ask him to have a drink with me, I decide
d. I could ask him about his friend. And then I saw that he wept.
The conductor’s eyes met mine and he bowed to me. I curtsied to him. I withdrew, walking backward through the curtains and refusing further curtain calls. The curtain smacked with flowers and shouted pleas.
I changed quickly and went outside. As the calèche passed in front, the oboist sat on the steps, his head in his hands, a cigarette burning. I made the driver stop and then waited a moment, undecided.
He could still hate me as all of my Conservatoire classmates did.
I got out and walked to him. He didn’t recognize me until I sat down.
His eyes glittered. Really, he said. He exhaled his cigarette heavily. He poked at one of my wig’s ringlet curls. The first theatergoers came outside to smoke and wait for those still talking inside. The carriages began to line up.
We waited.
They chose you for this role, he said, and stopped himself. He tossed his cigarette into the street and spit after it. The crowd moved down the stairs. He stood somewhat unsteadily and faced me. Did they know your secret? he asked. Did they know how well they chose?
I said nothing, only waiting.
I was never fooled, he said. He waved a finger in the air until it pointed at me. I knew you from the Bal Mabille. I played for money there; I saw you night after night after night, though it was before your transformation into La Dame Blanche.
I had not heard this name for me before.
Jou-jou, I believe, he said. Yes?
I nodded my head yes slowly, a little afraid.
We, he said. Are disgusting. But you are a disgrace.
I left him there.
My dresser the next evening told me of how the oboist had gone with some of the others, including the house manager, to splash champagne on his friend Bizet’s grave. They had worked together performing at the dances where Bizet had worn himself out playing through the night.
As I left to find the oboist, my director appeared in front of me, holding the newspaper, excited. The review he thrust at me heralded the opera’s return. The run is secure; she has finally seduced them, my director said, and kissed me twice in greeting.
I smiled at him, nodding my head, and continued walking across the dark stage to the orchestra pit. When the oboist saw me, he greeted me by saying, I apologize for last night; I was drunk and full of grief. I cannot blame you for the world that makes us all.
I shrugged and handed him an envelope with Aristafeo’s name on it and waited as he recognized it, as I suspected he would.
The note inside was simple: Please tell me how to return the ring.
The oboist nodded, as if he knew of me from him, and put it in his breast pocket.
§
My answer came after a fortnight.
The envelope had the appearance of an ordinary letter left for me in the last mail of the night and now on my breakfast tray. Inside was music, written out by hand, no accompanying note of any kind, no name signed to it, no title, no lyrics.
I took it into the music room, sat down, and began to play.
I knew the melody at once.
I had mocked him for not having music, and now there was this.
Play this for me always, I heard myself say, so many years ago, in this same room.
I paused, my hands over the keys.
I had regretted my message. In retrospect, the impulse struck me as indulgent, and it endangered what I’d sacrificed to create. I had told myself I wanted to return the ring so he could give it to a woman worthy of it, but, of course, I’d only wanted to see him again. I had questions now, as well. The first among them was as to where he’d been hidden all this time. He hadn’t confessed where he’d been, only that he was sorry to have stayed away.
My hands hesitated still. I pressed one finger down into the first note.
I stopped then pressed it again. The clear note rang out and I let it fade.
I pressed the first and second then, and then the third until I was repeating it and then began again when I was done. It was nearly like pressing his finger to mine—near enough. His hands, the ghost of them, making this.
When the time came for me to prepare my voice before leaving for the theater, I had spent the day this way, and so I sang the theme as my vocalize.
Wherever it is he was, wherever he had been in the last decade apart from me, he was writing for me. Ten years away from me, with this, his long dream of me. This opera that began as the theme he played to cover our conversation.
This was the one way I could keep him with me then, no matter the rest. If I learned his music, I would never lose him.
§
That night the tenor came by my dressing room. He remarked it had been published that the soprano had fainted at the end. Did you faint? he asked. If so, I didn’t notice. Apologies if I left you alone in a faint.
Of course not, I said. I refused to appear in the later curtain calls.
The moment of trouble with my voice had not returned, but I decided against exposing myself to even the suggestion of an encore.
The crowds around the theater tripled at the rumor I’d fainted, however, and now the audiences came in at the beginning, seated and silent with waiting.
Each night as Carmen, I threw a rose to the soldier Don José, the one man who didn’t whistle and jeer at me as I passed him by. Each night he kept the rose to show me later, to prove his devotion. Each night he murdered me.
The spell works, she tells him. Le charme opère. Keep it, she tells him, and he doesn’t hear her, and each night it leads, circumstance by circumstance, to Carmen’s death under Don José’s knife. As the soldiers passed me nightly, I found I held the flower before throwing it. The gesture, as rehearsed, was meant to appear like careless coquetry. My hesitation soon deepened.
Five
REMEMBER FOR NOW Carmen’s rose. See it float in the wind to land at the feet of the young soldier. Her song to him as he turns to her, about the rebel heart, how it obeys no rules.
This flower with the power to turn strangers into lovers, lovers into murderers. He picks it up.
§
Félix wrote to say he had made me a gown, a gift, he said, to thank me for a glorious season. I wasn’t sure I would hear from him after the scene with the Comtesse had so foully exposed me. He seemed to care not at all.
I was, of course, delighted.
At his atelier, as he fitted me for it, he described a dream of Carmen, naked in the river, washing off the blood of her stab wounds, alive again. She turned to him and smiled, and the river filled with roses that left on the current.
Paris was under a siege of dreams.
You must wear it when you celebrate the end of Carmen, he said. Perhaps another ball? And it must be thrown for you by someone in love with you. Who is in love with you? Anyone? There must be at least a few, or have you lost all your skill at these things?
I laughed as I swatted him.
You’re in love, he said then. Or you would have thought of it already. I wouldn’t even be speaking of it.
I gave him as much of a mocking glare as I dared for having struck me to the quick.
Does he love you also? Is he very rich? He should be very rich. The place should be very grand, with a staircase appropriate for your entrance.
He pushed at my waist to smooth a piece of cloth there.
He’s poor, isn’t he? he said, for I had said nothing, stunned into silence.
He drew a deep breath. Is he the one you’re said to be marrying?
No, I said, very quickly. No, no. And I’m not marrying.
He unlaced and unhooked me, the fitting was done, and sent me behind a screen where his femmes stripped me bare. As they did their work, he said, over the screen, Don’t marry poor. But perhaps don’t fear to love poor. Better to be wise than a coward, yes? This was my mother’s advice to my sisters.
I was soon in my own dress again. Are your sisters very happy? I asked.
Yes, I believe so.
/> When you know the room, he said, we’ll go and see it and prepare accordingly. You must be stunning, a goddess. He must be very handsome, he said.
He was, I said finally.
Well, then it’s better, he said. You won’t love him too much.
I came from behind the screen at last, and he saw my face and everything there.
Except you do, of course, already. You already do, don’t you? It’s what the dress is for, isn’t it?
We had never once exchanged even the slightest affection, and he gave me the very lightest kiss.
Ah, dearest one, there, there, he said. It was going to happen eventually.
Six
I SENT NO OTHER messages, received no more music. Finally, a note.
You will receive an invitation to Rouen.
This will be from a friend, to her salon there. Bring the ring, and if you are still intent on returning it, you can present it to me there.
Several days later a card from the tenor waited in my hall. There was a salon, he wrote. An old friend with a new interest in opera. Would I come sing the Habanera and a few other songs for her and her friends on one of my free evenings? It would be out at her château in Rouen, and he would come for me. She had guests there for the week but we would not stay the night, only sing and return by evening on the train.
She does not normally invite women, the tenor had written underneath the rest and underlined it, and he had included her note to him.
If she has no other appointments that day, you must bring her out to Rouen.
The tenor told me of her as he waited for me to dress that day. She was a widowed baroness who had her fortune and title from a baron killed in a duel he’d fought and lost with her lover. That lover, certain of his claim, had left for South America as quickly as he could once she’d explained she could not take up with her husband’s killer. Her recent interest in opera took the form of a new lover, a young composer who lived at her house in Rouen as he struggled with his commission from the Imperial Court of Russia.
The Queen of the Night Page 47
