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 decided. 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.