Inez: A Novel

by Carlos Fuentes

  What will emerge will be a song, though you have not imagined it. It will be a song filled with all the things you will not know about yourself until this moment: it will be as if all that you will be living—among the trees, near the sea, on the lonely plain—will now come out naturally in tones of strength and tenderness and longing that will have nothing to do with cries for help or hunger or terror; you will know that you have a new voice and that it will be a nonessential voice; something in it, in the voice itself, will lead you to know that these things you will sing as he paints the wall will not be essential, like looking for food or catching birds or protecting yourself from boars or sleeping curled in a ball or climbing trees or tricking monkeys.

  What you will sing will no longer be a cry of need.

  Farther along you and he will look at one another as you rest, and both of you will know that now you will be together because you will listen to each other and you will feel and see yourselves united forever, you will recognize yourselves as two who will think as one because one will be the image of the other, like those deer that he will paint on the wall while you sing, moving from him to sketch with your hand on the other wall the shadow of the man trying to tell you with the new words of your song that this will be you because this will be me because this we shall be together and because only you and I will be able to do what we are going to do.

  You will go out, both of you, every day to look for sharp stones or to find outcroppings where you can break away smaller rocks to carry back to the cave and sharpen there.

  You will find remains of animals—the plain will be a gigantic graveyard—and you will harvest what the other animals will always have left: marrow bone that neh-el will heat to extract food that will be yours alone because the other animals will never know about it.

  You will also look for the leaves and herbs you will use for food and for curing fevers and aches in your head and body and for cleaning yourself after you defecate or for drying the blood of a wound, things that he will teach you to do, although it will be he who will return naked and wounded from combats that he will never describe to you, who will be leaving the cave less and less frequently.

  One day you will not bleed with the waning moon, and neh-el will hold out his hands before you, shaped like a vessel, and say that he will be here to help you. Everything will be fine. It will be easy.

  Then will come long, cold nights during which everything that can be accomplished through action will be achieved, now thanks to the rest and silence of the night.

  You will learn to be and to rejoice lying side by side, giving voice to the happiness of being together.

  “O merikariu! O merikariba!”

  Neh-el will rest his head on your swollen belly.

  He will say that another voice is coming.

  Both of you will be discovering different tones because love will keep changing and sex too will be different and will begin to seek different voices to accompany it.

  The songs that will come one after another will be more and more free until your pleasures and desires blend together.

  The gestures of need and of song will now be the same.

  More and more often neh-el will have to go out alone, and you will feel his need to look for food as a separation that will make you mute, and this you will tell him, and he will answer that in order to hunt an animal he must be silent. But in his forays he will hear the songs of many birds, and the world will always be filled with tones and cries and also moans.

  “But above it all, I will hear your voice, ah-nel.”

  He will tell you that he will bring fish from the shore but that the water is drawing back and that he will have to go farther and farther to collect clams and oysters. Soon he will be within sight of another land, which will be very foggy and far from the beach of the leaping, murderous fish. But now distant things will seem much nearer.

  He will tell you that this will frighten him because without you he will live alone but also with others.

  Neh-el will go out to look for food in solitude, and for that he will not need to speak. All that will be needed is to take what is there, he will say. That is why he will return with such haste and alarm to the cave, knowing that there he will see you, he will be with you.

  “Merondor dirikolitz.”

  You will ask him if when he goes out alone he will feel the same as you do, that when alone you need only take what is there, or do what you must do, and thus everything will disappear as soon as it is done or taken.

  There will be no sign.

  There will be no recollection.

  Yes, he will agree, together maybe we will be able to remember again.

  You will be surprised to hear that. You will not have realized that little by little you will begin to remember, that in your solitude you will have lost that custom, and that without neh-el your voice will be many things, but especially it will be the voice of suffering and the cry of pain.

  Yes, he will agree, I will cry out when an animal attacks but I will be thinking about what I will feel for you until I get back here, and what I will tell you will be the voice of my body hunting and of my body loving.

  This I will owe to you, ah-nel. (Ah-nel, tradioun)

  Neh-el … I am going to need you. (Neh-el … trudinxe)

  You will tell me when. (Merondor aysko)

  Always. (Merondor)

  That is why the night when her song—your song, ah-nel—will become one prolonged aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa and all the pain to come will return to your brain and your body and you will be asking for help as you did at the beginning and he will give it to you, neither of you will say more than what is needed to ask for help, but the looks you will exchange will say that as soon as need is overcome pleasure will return, you found it and you are not inclined to lose it now you have known it, this you will tell the man who prevents you from giving birth to your young as you would wish, you alone, ah-nel, lying back and reaching to receive the child yourself, with the pain that you will expect as natural but with pain added that will not be natural, that will hurt you from the effort you will make to receive your young yourself, with no help from anyone, as you will have done forever and ever. Before.

  No—neh—el yells—not that way, ah-nel, not that way … (Caraibo, caraibo)

  And you will feel hatred for the man, he will have brought you this enormous pain and now he wants to take from you your instinct to give birth by yourself, bending down over yourself, you and only you receiving the fruit of your womb, pulling from yourself the tiny bloody body as the females of your tribe will always have done, and he preventing that it be you, preventing your being like all the females of your blood, he forcing you to lie back, to distance yourself from the birthing of your own young, he will slap you in the face, he will insult you, he will ask you if you want to break your back, this is not how man’s child is born, you are a woman, not an animal, let me take our child into my own hands …

  And he will force you to take your anxious hands away from your sex, and it will be he who takes the baby girl into his hands, not you, who are agitated, feverish, upset, eager to take the infant from her father so that it will be you who licks her and cleans away the first skin of mucus and cuts the umbilical cord with your teeth, until neh-el seizes the girl from you to tie the cord and bathe her with clean water brought from the white foaming ravines.

  The deer on the walls will forever continue their lovemaking.

  The first thing that neh-el will do when he takes the girl from your avid teat will be to carry her to the wall of the cave.

  There he will imprint the open hand of a tiny girl on the cool wall.

  There the mark will remain forever.

  The second thing that neh-el will do is place around the girl’s neck the leather thong that holds the crystal seal.

  Then neh-el will smile and, laughing, will nip his daughter’s buttock.

  4

  He had always loved people who were open to surprise. Nothing bored him more t
han predictable behavior. A dog and its tree. A monkey and its banana. In contrast, a spider and its web: doing the same thing but never repeating … It was like a repertoire. A Bohème or a Traviata produced only because it pleases the public, without considering that it’s unique music, irreplaceable … and surprising. Cocteau’s famous “surprise me” was for him something more than a simple boutade. It was an aesthetic. Let the curtain rise over Rodolfo’s mansard or Violetta’s salon and we see them for the first time.

  If that didn’t happen, opera didn’t interest him and he joined the legion of its detractors: opera is a monstrosity, a false genre that evokes nothing in nature; it is, at best, “a chimerical assemblage” of poetry and music in which both poet and composer mutually torture one another.

  With The Damnation of Faust, he always had the advantage. However often it was repeated, the work surprised him, his musicians, and the audience. Berlioz possessed a boundless power to astonish. Not because the music was interpreted differently by different ensembles on each occasion—that happened with every piece of music—but because the work itself, Berlioz’s choral symphony, was always presented for the first time. Previous performances didn’t count. More accurately: they were born and they died in the act. The next voice was always the first, and yet the work was laden with its past. Or perhaps on each occasion there was an unacknowledged past?

  This was a mystery, and one he didn’t want to unveil; then it would cease to be a mystery. The way he interpreted Faust was the conductor’s secret: he himself didn’t know. If Faust were a detective novel, at the end no one would know who the murderer was. There was no guilty butler.

  Perhaps these were the reasons that led him that morning to Inez’s door. He did not arrive in innocence. He knew several things. She had changed her real name for a stage name. She was no longer Inés Rosenzweig, she was Inez Prada, a name with more resonance than consonants; it was more “Latin,” and, most of all, it was easier to display and read on a marquee:

  INEZ PRADA

  In nine years the London member of the chorus had moved up to mastery of bel canto. He had listened to her recordings—now the old fragile 78 rpms had been replaced by the novelty of 331/3 LP (a technical advance that was a matter of indifference to him, because he had vowed that no interpretation of his would ever be “canned”)—and he conceded that Inez Prada’s reputation was well deserved. Her Traviata, for example, was new in two ways, one theatrical, the other musical, but both biographical in the sense of giving Verdi’s character a dimension that not only enriched the work but made it unrepeatable … for not even Inez Prada could deliver more than once the sublime scene of Violetta Valery’s death.

  Instead of using her voice to leave this world with a plausible high C, Inez Prada gradually extinguished it (E strano / Cessarono / Gli spasmi del dolore), passing from her arrogant but already ravaged youth of rounds of toasts, to erotic happiness, to the pain of sacrifice, to the nearly religious humbleness of her agony, climaxing, as she gathers all the moments of her life, not in death but in old age. The voice of Inez Prada singing the last scene of La Traviata was the voice of a very ill old woman who in the minutes before her death compresses her entire life, summarizes it, and leaps to the years that fate forbade her: old age. A woman of twenty dies as an old woman. She lives what she could not live, given the immediacy of death.

  In mi rinasce——m’agita

  Isolito vigore

  Ah! Ma io ritorno a vivere …

  It was as if Inez Prada, without betraying Verdi, picked up the macabre beginning of the novel by Dumas fils, when Armand Duval returns to Paris, looks for the courtesan Marguerite Gautier in her home, finds her furniture being auctioned, and learns the terrible news: she is dead. Armand goes to Père Lachaise, bribes the guard, locates the tomb of Marguerite, who had died several weeks earlier, bursts the locks, opens the casket, and is confronted with the putrefying corpse of his wondrous young lover: her face green, her open mouth crawling with insects, the sockets of her eyes empty, her greasy black hair plastered to her sunken temples. The living man throws himself upon the dead woman with passion. Oh, gioia!

  Inez Prada conveyed this beginning of the story while performing its end. It was her genius as an actress and a singer, fully revealed in a Mimi without sentimentalism, inextricably entwined in the life of her lover, preventing Rodolfo from writing, a woman-limpet clamoring for attention, and in a Gilda ashamed of her jester father but shamelessly dedicated to the seduction of the Duke, her father’s patron, anticipating with cruel delight the well-deserved pain of the unhappy Rigoletto … Heterodox? No doubt, and much criticized because of it. But her heresy, Gabriel Atlan-Ferrara had always thought as he listened to her, restored the Greek root to the word: haireticus, he who chooses.

  He had admired her in Milan, in Paris, and in Buenos Aires. He had never gone backstage to greet her. She had never known that he was listening and watching from afar. He let her develop her heresy fully. Now both of them knew that they were going to see each other and work together for the first time since the 1940 blitz in London. They were going to meet again because she had requested him. And he knew the professional reason. The Inez of Verdi and Puccini was a lyric soprano, the Marguerite of Berlioz a mezzo-soprano. Normally Inez would not sing that role. But she had insisted. “My vocal register hasn’t been fully explored or put to the test. I know I can sing not only Gilda and Mimi and Violetta, but Marguerite as well. But the only man who can develop my voice and conduct me is Maestro Gabriel Atlan-Ferrara.”

  She did not add, “We met in Covent Garden when I was singing in the chorus of Faust.”

  She had chosen, and he, arriving at the door of the singer’s apartment in Mexico City that summer of 1949, was also choosing, heretically. Instead of waiting for the scheduled rehearsal of The Damnation of Faust in the Palacio de Bellas Artes, he took the liberty—perhaps committed the imprudence—of arriving at Inez’s door at noon, knowing absolutely nothing of her situation—would she be sleeping? would she have gone out?—with the idea of seeing her in private before the first rehearsal, planned for that same afternoon.

  The apartment was in a labyrinth of multiple stairways with numbered doors on different levels of a building called La Condesa, on Avenida Mazatlán. He had been told it was a favorite place for Mexican painters, writers, and musicians—and also for European artists driven to the New World by the European hecatomb. The Polish Henryk Szeryng, the Viennese Ernst Röhmer, the Spanish Rodolfo Halffter, the Bulgarian Alexis Weissenberg—Mexico had given them refuge. And when Bellas Artes invited the very unsociable and demanding Atlan-Ferrara to direct The Damnation of Faust, Gabriel accepted with enthusiasm, as homage to the country that had welcomed so many men and women who could easily have met their death in the ovens of Auschwitz or the typhoid of Bergen-Belsen. By contrast, the Distrito Federal was Mexico’s Jerusalem.

  For one simple reason, he didn’t want his first meeting with the singer to be at a rehearsal. They had a history, a private misunderstanding that could be resolved only in private. It was a matter of Atlan-Ferrara’s professional egoism. This way, they would avoid the predictable tension of their first meeting since that predawn morning he had abandoned her on the Dorset coast, from which she had never returned to the rehearsals at Covent Garden. Inez disappeared, only to resurface in 1945 in a famous debut at the Chicago Lyric Opera, giving a different life to Turandot through the trick—Gabriel had to laugh—of binding her feet in order to walk like a true Chinese princess.

  Obviously, Inez did not owe her improved voice to this clever device, but North American publicity soared like Chinese fireworks, and once aloft, there it stayed. From that moment, naive critics happily repeated the popular line: to interpret La Bohème, Inez Prada contracted tuberculosis; she holed up for a month in the underground passageways of the Giza pyramid before singing Aida; and she turned tricks in order to convey the pathos of La Traviata. The Mexican diva neither denied nor confirmed these publicity releases. Every
one knows that in the world of the arts there is no such thing as bad publicity, and Mexico, after all, was the land of mythomaniacs: Diego Rivera, Frida Kahlo, Siqueiros, and maybe Pancho Villa … Perhaps a poor and devastated country demanded a full coffer of fascinating personalities. Mexico: hands empty of bread but a head filled with dreams.

  Surprise Inez.

  It was risky, but if she didn’t know how to deal with him, he’d be in command, as he had been in England. Or if she behaved like the diva divina she was, the equal of her former maestro, Berlioz’s Faust would gain in quality, in good, creative, shared tension.

  There would be none—the thought surprised him as he stood with knuckles poised to knock—of the conventional language he detested, because it was so inadequate for expressing passion. The voice that represents desire is the stuff of opera—all opera—and he was gambling by knocking at his singer’s door.

  But he did knock, decisively, and as he did so he told himself he had nothing to fear. Music is the art that transcends the ordinary limits of its own medium: sound. Knocking at the door was itself already a way of going beyond the obvious message (Open up, someone is looking for you, someone is bringing you something) to the unexpected message (Open up, see the face of surprise, let in a turbulent passion, an uncontrollable danger, a harmful love).

  She opened the door in a bath towel hastily wrapped around herself.

  Behind her was a dark-skinned, completely naked young man with a stupid expression, bleary-eyed, dazed, defiant. He had tousled hair, a scrawny beard, and a thick mustache.

  The rehearsal that afternoon was everything he had expected—or more. Inez Prada, as the protagonist Marguerite, was very close to miraculous: she allowed glimpses of a soul lost when the world strips it of passions, passions that Mephistopheles and Faust offer her—and that are as attainable as Tantalus’s fruit.