For this was how it was possible for me. All of the love I had for him, everything I would have said, all became this performance of alienation. I needed him to believe what I did not want him to believe, that I no longer loved him. We were done, and there was nothing between us now except his ring, which I had found that night as I undressed.
I put it in my jewel safe. I knew to wait before returning it. I’d endured repeated proposals before, but always as a kind of crisis of my connection with an admirer. You needed to reject them in such a way that the liaison was protected, and yet to do so also required an affection from you or the liaison was over. A proposal repeated in the face of rejection required more of the same, though I suspected some admirers of proposing, at the least, to receive the repeated reassurance that came with my rejections.
If the liaison was unwanted, then the proposal allowed you to end it gracefully. No, of course, my dear, we cannot see each other now.
Rings had their own protocols. If I returned the ring too quickly, it would be cruel; too slowly, and it would encourage him; to keep it kept him encouraged against a day that could never come. And so I decided to write to him as to the ring after two weeks’ time, and then Carmen began and all of my attention was there.
Three weeks, then, I said to myself. And then it was four.
At the first rehearsal, the director warned me to consider an approach that would not offend the conservative audiences who, when the opera had debuted, he said, were repulsed by her.
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 F?cher 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?