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 He had listened to her recordings—now the old fragile 78 rpms had been replaced by the novelty of 331/3 LP (a technical advance that was a matter of indifference to him, because he had vowed that no interpretation of his would ever be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. Everyone 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.
Thanks to this affirmative negation of herself, Inez/Marguerite demonstrated Pascal’s truth: uncontrolled passions are like poison. Dormant, they are vices, they feed the soul, and the soul, deceived, or believing it is being nourished, is in fact being poisoned by its own unknown and unruly passion. Is it true, as other heretics, the Cathars, believed, that the best way to rid oneself of passion is to bring it into the open and indulge it, with no restraint of any kind?
Together, Gabriel and Inez succeeded in giving physical visibility to the invisibility of hidden passions. Eyes could see what the music, in order to be art, had to hide. Atlan-Ferrara, rehearsing almost without interruption, felt that had this work been poetry instead of music, it wouldn’t have to be exhibited, displayed, presented. But at the same time, Inez’s sublime voice made him think that through the chink of possible imperfection in the passage from soprano to mezzo-soprano, the work became more communicable and Marguerite more convincing, transmitting the music through its very imperfection.
A wonderful complicity grew between conductor and singer, a complicity in work that was imperfect in order not to become hermetically sacred. Inez and Gabriel were the true demons, who as they prevented Faust from closing in on itself made it communicable, amorous, and even dignified … They put Mephistopheles to flight.
Did this result have anything to do with the unexpected meeting that morning?
Inez had a lover; Inez wasn’t the virgin of nine years ago, when she’d been twenty and he thirty-three. Who took her virginity? That didn’t concern him, nor could he attribute the deed to the poor annoyed, insulting, dazed, vulgar young man who had tried to protest the stranger’s intrusion and merely earned Inez’s peremptory command: “Put on your clothes and get out.”
He had been warned about the punctual caprice of summer rain in Mexico. Mornings would be sunny, but around two in the afternoon the skies grew dark as ink, and around four a torrential rain, an Asian monsoon, would descend upon the once-crystalline valley, settling the dust of the dry lakebed and barren canals.
Lying with his hands clasped behind his neck, Gabriel breathed in the new-green smell of dusk. Drawn by the scent of wet earth, he got up and went to the window. He felt satisfied, and that sensation should have put him on his guard; happiness is a momentary trap that disguises stubborn problems and makes us more vulnerable than ever to the blind legitimacy of bad luck.
Now night was falling over Mexico City, but he didn’t let himself be deceived by the serenity of the fresh, green scents of the valley. Odors flushed away by the storm were returning. The
moon was coming up, slyly, making one believe in its silvery winks. Full one day, waning the next, a perfect Turkish scimitar this night—although the metaphor itself was another deceit. All the perfume of the rain couldn’t hide the sculpture of this land Gabriel Atlan-Ferrara had come to without prejudice but also without forewarning, guided by a single idea: to direct Faust and direct it with Inez singing, she too directed by him, guided along the difficult path of changing her vocal range.
Standing there, he watched Inez sleep, naked, on her back, and he asked himself if the world had been created only so those breasts could be known—full like moons but with no danger of waning or eclipse—and the waist that was the gentle and firm coast of the map of pleasure, the mound of shining curls between her legs that was the perfect announcement of persistent loneliness, penetrable only in appearance, defiant as an enemy that dares desert only to deceive and capture us over and over. We never learn. Sex teaches us everything. It’s our fault that we never learn, and again and again fall into the same delicious trap.
Maybe he could compare Inez’s body to opera itself. Making visible what the absence of the body——body we remember and body we desire—gives us visibly.
He felt tempted to cover Inez’s exposed sex with the sheet that had been thrown aside, catching light like that from an Ingres or Vermeer open window. He stopped, because tomorrow at rehearsal the music would act as veil for the woman’s nakedness, the music would fulfill its eternal mission of hiding certain objects from view in order to deliver them to the imagination.
Would music steal words as well, not merely vision?
Was music the great mask of paradise, the true fig leaf of our shames, the final sublimation—beyond death—of our mortal visibility: body, words, literature, painting? Was only music
abstract, free of visible ties, the purification and illusions of our mortal bodily misery?
He was watching Inez sleep after the lovemaking he had coveted ever since she had sunk into oblivion and hibernated for nine years in his subconscious. Love as passionate as unpredictable. Gabriel didn’t want to cover her, because he understood that in this instance modesty would be a betrayal. One day very soon, next week, Marguerite would be the victim of the passion of her body, seduced by Faust through the cunning of the great procurer, Mephistopheles, and when she was snatched from hell by the choir of angels that would carry her to heaven, Atlan-Ferrara, given his wish, would opt for daring in his production of Berlioz, he would have the heroine ascend to heaven naked, purified by her nakedness, defiant in her beauty. I sinned, I pleasured, I suffered, I was forgiven, but I will not renounce the glory of my pleasure, the integrity of my freedom as a woman to enjoy sex, I have not sinned, you angels know it, you may be carrying me to paradise grudgingly but you have no choice but to accept the sexual joy I found in the arms of my lover; my body and my pleasure have triumphed over the diabolical pacts of Mephisto and the vulgar carnal appetite of Faust; my woman’s orgasm has defeated two men, my sexual satisfaction has made two men expendable.
God knows it. The angels know it, and that is why the opera ends with Marguerite’s ascension during the invocation to Mary, whose face I, Gabriel Atlan-Ferrara, would cover with the veil of Veronica … or maybe the hood of the Magdalene.
An organ-grinder began to play not far from the window where Gabriel was gazing into the Mexican night. Following the sudden rain, the streets gleamed like patent leather, and the perfumes of the cloudburst were disappearing before the onslaught
of sputtering grease, the pungent scent of griddle-warmed tortillas, and the rebirth of the maize of the gods of this land.
How different these aromas, sounds, hours, and labors from London’s—clouds racing the pale sun, the nearby sea scenting the core of the urban soul, and the cautious but determined step of islanders threatened and protected by their insularity, the blinding green of their parks, the waste of a disdainful river that turns its back to the city … and despite everything, the acrid odor of English melancholy, disguised as cold and indifferent courtesy.
As if every city in the world made different pacts with day and night, so that nature, briefly but for as long as necessary, might respect the arbitrary collective ruins we call “city,” “the accidental tribe,” as Dostoyevsky described another capital, the yellow doors, lights, walls, faces, bridges, and rivers of Petersburg.
Inez interrupted Gabriel’s musings, picking up the organ-grinder’s song from where she lay in bed: “You, only you, are the cause for all my tears, for my disillusion and despair …”
He addressed the chorus with the energizing certainty that at forty-two he was among the conductors most in demand on the new musical planet that had emerged from this most atrocious of wars, a conflict that produced the greatest number of dead in all of history. And because of that he would demand of this Mexican chorus—which should at the least have memories of deaths during their civil war, as well as in daily life—that they sing Faust as if they too had witnessed the endless chain of extermination and torture and tears and desolation that were like the signature of the world at mid-century; as if they had seen a naked baby screaming at the top of its lungs amid the ruins of a bombed-out
railway station in Chungking; as if they had heard the mute cry of Guernica as Picasso painted it, not a cry of pain but a cry for help, answered only by the whinny of a dead horse, a horse useless in the aerial warfare overhead, the war of Berlioz’s black birds beating their wings against the faces of the singers, obliging the horses to moan and tremble, and to take flight, manes flowing, like Pegasuses of death, in order to escape the great cemetery the earth was becoming.
In the Bellas Artes production, during the final ride to the abyss, Gabriel Atlan-Ferrara planned to project the film of the discovery of mass graves in the death camps; the terrible, apocalyptic evocation of Berlioz would become visible, skeletal cadavers stacked up by the hundreds, starved, lewd, skin, bone, indecent baldness, obscene wounds, shameful sexes, embraces of intolerable eroticism, as if even in death desire endured: I love you, I love you, I love you …
“Cry out as if you were going to die loving the very thing that kills you!”
The authorities forbade running the film of the death camps. “A cultivated and very respectable class of Mexican comes to the Bellas Artes,” a stupid official who kept buttoning and unbuttoning his parrot-shit-colored jacket had said. “They don’t come here to be offended.”
On the other hand, “Berlioz’s work is really impressive,” was the opinion of a young Mexican musician who attended the rehearsals with the never explicit, though obvious, purpose of checking out this conductor with the reputation for being a rebel, in any case a foreigner, and as such suspicious in the eyes of Mexican bureaucracy. “Let the composer speak to us of the horror of hell and the end of the world in his own way,” said the musician-bureaucrat with the particularly Mexican quiet voice
and delicacy of manners that were as distant as insinuating. “Why push so hard, maestro? In short, why would you want to illustrate?”
Atlan-Ferrara berated himself and agreed with the affable Mexican. He was putting down his own argument. Hadn’t he told Inez just last night that an opera’s visibility consists in hiding certain objects from view so the music can evoke them without degenerating into simple thematic painting, or into further, though futile, degradation into a “chimerical ensemble” in which conductor and composer mutually torture one another?
“The opera isn’t literature,” said the Mexican, sucking his gums and teeth in a genteel effort to extract the remains of some succulent and suicidal meal. “It isn’t literature, although its enemies would have it so. Let’s not make them think they’re right.”
Gabriel did tell his cordial bureaucrat that he was right. Whatever kind of musician he might be, he was a good politician. What was Atlan-Ferrara thinking? Did he want to teach the Latin Americans who had escaped the European conflict a lesson? Did he want to shame them by comparing historical violences?
The Mexican discreetly swallowed the tiny piece of meat and tortilla that had been lodged between his teeth. “The cruelty of war in Latin America is fiercer, maestro, because it’s invisible and has no time frame. Besides, we’ve learned to hide our victims and bury them at night.”
“Are you a Marxist?” Atlan-Ferrara inquired, amused now.
“If you mean that I don’t seem to be participating in the current anticommunist phobia, you would be right to a point.”
“Then can Berlioz’s Faust be presented here with no justification beyond being what it is?”
“Yes, it can. Don’t divert attention from something we understand
very well. The sacred isn’t alien to terror. Faith doesn’t redeem us from death.”
“Then you’re also a believer?” The conductor smiled in return.
“In Mexico even we atheists are Catholic, maestro.”
Atlan-Ferrara stared at the young musician-bureaucrat offering this counsel. This Mexican wasn’t blond, distant, slim: absent. He was dark, and warm; he was eating a tortilla with meat, cheese, mustard, and jalapeño peppers, and his intelligent raccoon eyes darted into every corner. He wanted to get ahead, that you could see. He was going to put on weight very fast.
No, it wasn’t him, Atlan-Ferrara thought with a certain leaden nostalgia. He wasn’t the long-sought, long-desired friend of the conductor’s early youth.
“Why did you leave me behind on the coast?”
“I didn’t want to interrupt anything.”
“I don’t understand you. You interrupted our weekend. We were there together.”
“You would never have given yourself to me.”
“And so? I thought my company was enough.”
“Was mine?”
“Do you think I’m that stupid? Why do you think I accepted your invitation? Because my uterus was in an uproar?”
“But we weren’t together.”
“No, not like now …”
“And we wouldn’t have been.”
“That’s true, too. I told you that.”
“You had never been with a man.”
“Never. I told you that.”
“You didn’t want me to be the first.”
“Not you, not anyone. I was different then. I was twenty. I lived with my aunt and uncle. I was what the French call une jeune fille bien rangée. I was starting out. Maybe I was confused.”
“Are you sure?”
“I was a different person, I tell you. How can I be sure about someone I no longer am?”
“I remember how you stared at the photo of my friend.”
“Your brother, is what you told me.”
“The man closest to me. That’s what I meant.”
“But he wasn’t there.”
“Yes, he was.”
“Don’t tell me he was there.”
“Not physically.”
“I don’t understand you.”
“Do you remember the photograph you saw on the mantel?”
“Yes.”
“He was there. He was with me. You saw him.”
“No, Gabriel. You’re mistaken.”
“I know that photograph by heart. It’s the only one I have of the two of us.”
“No. You were alone in the photograph. He had disappeared.” She looked at him with curiosity, to keep from showing alarm. “Tell me the truth. Was that boy ever in the photo?”
“Music is an artificial portrait of human passions,” the maestro told the group under his direction in Bellas Artes. “Have no illusion that this is a realistic opera. I already know that you Latin Americans cling desperately to logic and reason—concepts totally foreign to you—because you want to escape the supernatural
imagination that is your heritage—though not inevitable, and especially to be scorned in the light of a supposed ‘progress’ that you will never achieve, make no mistake, through embarrassing, slavish imitation. For a European, you see, the word ’progress’ always, s’il vous plaît, appears in quotation marks.”
He smiled at the wall of solemn faces.
“Imagine, if it is helpful, that as you sing you are repeating sounds of nature.”
His imperious gaze swept across the stage. How well he played the role of peacock! He laughed at himself.
“An opera like Berlioz’s Faust, especially, can deceive all of us and make us believe we are listening to the imitation of a nature violently pushed to its limits.”
He stared hard at the English horn, until the musician was forced to look down.
“This can be true. But musically it’s of no value. Imagine, should you find it helpful, that in this terrible last scene you are repeating the sound of a gently flowing river or of a crashing waterfall.”
He opened his arms in a large, generous gesture.
“If you like, imagine that your singing is imitating the sound of the wind in the forest, or the lowing of a cow, or the thump of a stone against a wall, or the shattering of some crystal object; imagine, if you like, that you are singing with the whinnying of a horse and the beating of crows’ wings.”
Crows began to fly, beating against the orangeish dome of the concert hall; lowing cows crowded down the aisles of the theater; a horse galloped across the stage; a rock exploded against the Tiffany-glass curtain.
“But I tell you that noise never reaches our ears in the form of more noise. Everything in the world that’s audible must be converted
into song, because it is more than guttural sounds, and if the musician wants the burro to bray, he must make him sing.”
And the voices of the chorus, animated, motivated as he wanted by the enormity of an impenetrable, fierce nature, responded: Only you bring a break to my endless boredom, you renew my strength, I am alive again.
“This isn’t the first time, you know, that a group of singers has believed that their voices are an extension of, or a response to, the sounds of nature.”
He was silencing them, little by little, one by one, banking the choral fire, cruelly extinguishing it.
“One may think she is singing because she hears a bird—”
Marisela Ambriz plummeted wingless to the ground.
“Another because he imitates the tiger—”
Sereno Laviada purred like a house cat.
“Still another because he hears a waterfall inside him—”
The musician-bureaucrat noisily blew his nose from the orchestra pit.
“None of this is true. Music is artificial. Ah, you will say, but human passions aren’t. Let’s forget the tiger, Señor Laviada, and the bird, Señorita Ambriz, and the thunder, señor-who-eats-sandwiches-and-I-don’ t-know-your-name,” he said, turning toward the pit.
“Cosme Santos, at your service,” the accused replied with automatic courtesy. “Licenciado Cosme Santos.”
“Ah, very well, friend Cosme, let’s talk about the passion awakened by music. We need to remember that the first language of gestures and cries is manifest as soon as a passion appears that takes us back to when we needed that passion.” He ran nervous hands through his black, tousled gypsy hair.
“Do you know why I learn the names of each and every one
of the chorus members?” His eyes opened like two eternal scars. “To make you understand that the common, everyday language of men, women, and animals, is affective; it is a language of cries, orgasms, happiness, flight, sighs, and deep laments.”
And the open scars were two black lakes.
“Of course”—now he smiled—“as each of you sings—Señor Moreno, Señorita Ambriz, Señora Lazo, Señor Laviada—as each one of you sings, the first thing that occurs to you is that you are giving voice to the natural language of passions.”
Dramatic pause by Gabriel Atlan-Ferrara. Inez smiled. Whom was he fooling? Everyone, no less.
“And it’s true, it’s true. The passions we keep inside can kill us, blow up inside us. Song liberates them, and finds the voice that characterizes them. So, then, music would be a kind of energy uniting the primitive, latent emotions you would never display when you catch a bus, Señor Laviada, or when you’re preparing breakfast, Señora Lazo, or taking a shower—forgive me—Señorita Ambriz. The melodic tone of the voice, the movement of the body in dance, liberates us. Pleasure and desire come together. Nature dictates tones and cries: these are our oldest words, and that is why our first language is an impassioned song.”
Gabriel turned to look at the musician, bureaucrat, and perhaps censor. “True, Señor Santos?”
“Of course, maestro.”
“A lie. Music is not a substitute for natural sounds sublimated by artificial sounds.” Gabriel Atlan-Ferrara stopped, and, more than glancing around or staring, his eyes penetrated each and every one of his singers.
“Everything in music is artificial. We have lost the original unity between speech and song. Let us mourn that. Sing a requiem for nature. RIP.”
His expression became melancholy.
“Yesterday I heard a plaintive song in the street. ‘You, only you, are the cause for all my tears, for my disillusion and despair.’”
If an eagle could talk, it would look like Atlan-Ferrara.
“Was that street singer expressing in music the deepest sentiments of his soul? It’s possible. But Berlioz’s Faust is the complete opposite. Señoras and señores,” Atlan-Ferrara concluded, “emphasize the distancing of what you sing. Rid your voices of all sentiment and recognizable passion, convert this opera into an oratorio to the unknown, to words and sounds that have no antecedents, no emotion but their own, in this apocalyptic instant that may be the instant of creation: invert time, imagine music as an inversion of time, a song of origin, a voice of the dawn, with no antecedent and no consequence.”
He lowered his head with feigned humility.
“Let us begin.”
Then, nine years ago, she hadn’t wanted to yield to him. She had waited for him to come and yield to her. He had wanted to make love to her on the English coast, and had stored forever ridiculous sentences for a moment he imagined or dreamed of or wanted, or all those things at the same time—how would he know?—“We could walk together across the bottom of the sea”—only to find a different woman, one capable of dispatching a casual lover.
“Put on your clothes and get out.”
And who was capable of saying that not just to the poor mustached devil, but to him, Maestro Gabriel Atlan-Ferrara. She obeyed him in rehearsals. Even better: they had a perfect understanding.
It was as if that arc of Art Nouveau stage lights united the two of them, orchestra pit to stage, in a miraculous meeting between conductor and singer that also energized the tenor, Faust, and the bass, Mephistopheles, drawing them into the magic circle of Inez and Gabriel, as in tune and alike in artistic interpretation as they were at odds and unlike in their carnal relations.
She dominated.
He admitted it.
She had the power.
He wasn’t used to that.
He studied himself in the mirror. He had always thought of himself as haughty, vain, swathed in the imaginary cape of a grand gentleman.
She remembered him as emotionally naked. Slave to a memory. The memory of another youth. The boy who didn’t grow old because no one ever saw him again. The boy who had disappeared from the photograph.
Through that opening—through that absence—Inez slipped in to dominate Gabriel. He regretted it and he accepted it. She had two whips, one in each hand. With one she said to Gabriel, I have seen you stripped, defenseless before an affection you insist on disguising. With the other she lashed him: You didn’t choose me, I chose you. I didn’t miss you then and I don’t miss you now. We make love to assure the harmony of the work. When the performances are over, you and I will be through, too.
Did Gabriel Atlan-Ferrara know all this? Know it and accept it? In Inez’s arms he said yes, he accepted it, in order to have Inez he would accept any arrangement, any humiliation. Why did it always have to be she who mounted him—he on his back and she on top, she directing the sexual game but demanding of
him, in his trapped, submissive, prostrate position, all manner of touchings, imperatives, obvious pleasures that he could do nothing but grant her?
He grew used to being the one with his head on the pillow, flat on his back, watching her body rise above him like a monument to the senses, a column of enthralling flesh, a single carnal river from her sex joined to his, to spread thighs, buttocks bucking on his testicles, to hips flowing toward a waist at once noble and amused, like a statue laughing at the world by grace of a similarly amused navel, and finally to the firm but bouncing breasts, flesh merging into a neck of insulting whiteness as the face grew distant, alien, hidden behind the mass of red hair, the mane like a mask of veiled emotion …
Inez Prada. (“It looks better than Inés Rosenzweig on the marquees and is easier to pronounce in other languages.”)
Inez Revenge. (“I left everything behind me. And you?”)
For what? My God, what was she getting even for? (“The prohibition belonged to two different times that neither of us wanted to violate.”)
The night of the opening, Maestro Atlan-Ferrara stepped up on the podium amid applause from an expectant public.
This was the young conductor who had drawn such unsuspected sounds—latent? no, lost—from Debussy, Ravel, Mozart, and Bach.
This night he was conducting for the first time in Mexico, and everyone wanted to assess the strength of the personality announced in his photographs: long black curly hair, eyes somewhere between flashing and dreamy, demoniac eyebrows that reduced Mephisto’s disguises to comedy, imploring hands that made Faust’s gestures of desire seem awkward …
They said that he was better than his singers. However, the perfect, evolving, and enviable harmony between Gabriel Atlan-Ferrara and Inez Prada, between lovers with a dual dynamic in bed and onstage, dominated everything. Because, however much she fought for the agreed-on equality, in the theater he imposed his will, he led the game, he mounted her, he subjected her to his male desire, though at the end, at the finale, he placed her in the center of the stage, hand in hand with the child seraphim. Singing beside the celestial spirits, making her aware that, contrary to anything she might suspect, she was always the one who dominated, the center of the relationship that (neither of them could think otherwise) achieved parity only because she was queen of the bed and he master of the theater.
The maestro, conducting the final scenes, quietly spoke the words, The heavenly virgins will dry the tears, Marguerite, torn from you by earthly sorrows, have hope, and then Marguerite, who is Inez, holding the hands of the children of the chorus, each holding the hand of another, and the last giving his to a singer in the celestial choir, and this singer to her neighbor, and the next to the next, until all the choir, with Marguerite/Inez in the center, was truly a single choir united by the chain of hands, and then the two angels at either end of the semicircle formed on the stage each held out a hand to the box closest to the proscenium and took the hand of the nearest member of the audience, and this person the one nearest him, and she to the next, until everyone in the Bellas Artes was a choir of hands holding hands, and although the chorus was singing, Have hope and smile upon your blessings, the theater was a great lake of flames, and in the depths of every soul a horrifying mystery was taking place: they were all going to hell, they had thought they were climbing to paradise
but they were going to the devil; Gabriel Atlan-Ferrara shouted in triumph, Has! Irimuru kara-brao, has, has, has!
He was alone in the abandoned hall. As they took their bows, Inez had told him, “I’ll see you in an hour. At your hotel.”
Gabriel Atlan-Ferrara, sitting in the first row of seats in the empty theater, watched them lower the great glass curtain fabricated over a period of nearly two years by Tiffany craftsmen, a million tiny gleaming pieces fitted together until, like a river of lights emptying into the auditorium, a panorama of the valley of Mexico was formed, with its awesome and loving volcanoes. They faded like the lights of the theater, of the city, of the concluded performance. But, like crystal seals, the lights of the glass curtain continued to glitter.
In his hand Gabriel Atlan-Ferrara held and stroked the smooth shape of the crystal seal Inez Rosenzweig-Prada had put there amid applause from an enthusiastic audience.
He left the auditorium and walked out into the pink marble vestibule, with its strident murals and installations of lustrous copper, all in the Art Nouveau style that in 1934 ended a construction begun with Caesarian ostentation in 1900 and interrupted for a quarter-century by civil war. Outside, the Palacio de Bellas Artes was a great wedding cake conceived by an Italian architect, Adamo Boari, surely with the idea that the Mexican building would be the bride of Rome’s monument to King Vittorio Emmanuele: the wedding would have been consummated with marble phalluses and crystal hymens between meringue sheets, except that in 1916 Boari fled from the Revolution, horrified that the lace of his dream was being trampled by the horses of Zapata’s and Villa’s troops.
It sat there, abandoned, a skeleton of iron, and that was what Gabriel Atlan-Ferrara saw when he left the small plaza in front of the Palacio: naked, stripped, rusting for a quarter-century, a castle of scrap sinking into the rancorous mud of Mexico City.
He crossed the street to Alameda Park, and a black obsidian mask greeted him, making him feel happy. The death mask of Beethoven stared at him with closed eyes, and Gabriel bowed and said good evening.
He walked into the lonely park, accompanied only by words from Ludwig van, talking to him, asking him whether in fact music is the one art that transcends the limits of its own means of expression, which is sound, in order to manifest itself in such sovereign fashion in the silence of a Mexican night. The Aztec city—the Mexican Jerusalem—was kneeling before the mask of a deaf musician capable of imagining the sound of Gothic stone and the Rhine River.
The treetops were swaying softly in the hours after the rain, funneling the docile powers of the heavens from their leaves. Berlioz was behind, still resonating in the marble cavern with his valiant French vowels bursting the prisons of harsh consonants, that “horrid” Germanic articulation structured of verbal armor-plate. The flaming sky of the Valkyries was a stage prop. The Faustian hell of black birds and careening horses was flesh and blood. Paganism does not believe in itself, because it never doubts. Christianity believes in itself, because its faith is always being tested. The colonial Inquisition executed its victims in these peaceful gardens of the Alameda, and before that, Indian merchants had bought and sold slaves. Now tall, rhythmic trees covered the nakedness of motionless white statues, erotic and chaste only because they were marble.
The distant organ-grinder broke the silence of the night.
“Only your fatal shadow, the shadow of evil, follows wherever I go.”
The first blow landed on his mouth. His arms were pinned to immobilize him. Then the mustached man with the scrawny beard kneed him in the belly and testicles, punched him in the face and chest, as Atlan-Ferrara tried to focus on the statue of the woman kneeling in a posture of anal humiliation, offering herself, malgré tout, to the amorous hand of Gabriel Atlan-Ferrara, who was staining her marble buttocks with his blood and trying to understand those foreign words: cabrón, chinga tu madre, mother-fucker, don’t go anywhere near her again, you goddamn ball-less fag, she’s my woman … Has, has, Mephisto, hup, hup, hup!
Was an explanation of his behavior on the English coast required? He could tell her that he always fled from situations in which lovers adopt the habits of an old married couple. The postponement of pleasure is a principle of true eroticism, at once practical and sacred.
“Ah, so you were imagining a bogus honeymoon?” Inez smiled.
“No, I wanted you to have a mysterious and loving memory of me.”
“Arrogant and unsatisfied.” She stopped smiling.
“Let’s just say that I left you behind at the cottage to preserve the curiosity of innocence.”
“Do you think you gained something by that, Gabriel?”
“Yes. Sexual union is momentary, and at the same time permanent, however fleeting it may seem. On the other hand, music is permanent, and yet it is short-lived compared with the lasting
power of the truly instantaneous. How long does the most prolonged orgasm last? And how long renewed desire?”
“It depends. On whether two are involved … or three.”
“Were you expecting that at the shore? A ménage à trois?”
“You introduced me to a man who wasn’t there, remember?”
“I told you, he comes and goes. His absences are never conclusive.”
“Tell me the truth. Were you ever that boy in the photo?”
Gabriel didn’t answer. He watched the rain washing everything and said he wished it would last forever, take everything.
They spent a blessed night of peace and deep fulfillment.
Only at dawn, Gabriel tenderly stroked Inez’s cheeks and felt obliged to tell her that maybe the boy for whom she felt such an attraction would reappear one day.
“Honestly, haven’t you ever found out where he went?” she asked, without many illusions.
“I suppose far away. The war, the camps, desertion—there are so many possibilities in an unknown future.”
“You say that you used to ask the girls to dance and that he watched and admired you.”
“I told you he was jealous of me, not envious. Envy is resentment of the good things that happen to other people. Jealousy increases the importance of the person we wish belonged only to us. Envy, as I told you, is poison, and futile—we want to be the other person. But jealousy is generous—we want the other person to be ours.” Gabriel’s expression imposed a long pause. Finally he said, “I want to see him to make amends.”
“I want to see him so I can go to bed with him,” Inez replied without a trace of malice, only icy virginity.