Given the Conservatoire jury professor’s warning me not to use my voice, in lieu of rehearsals, the tenor took me to the opera much more than before.
He had not relinquished his role as my teacher. It is my greatest wish, he said, that you fall in love with one of the roles you see on the stage. Your talent will lack focus until then, he said. And so I went along, waiting to be moved.
No longer did I have to entertain his friends as before. The dresses that were delivered to the apartment were finer than ever. He dismissed Doro from dressing me, enjoying the task himself. He was like a boy with the corset, which he liked to pull shut almost as much as he liked to pull it open.
In his box at the opera, he regularly introduced me to his friends now as his protégée and spoke of how we were awaiting the results of my audition at the Conservatoire.
And her voice? these new friends all asked with a thrill I did not yet understand.
A Falcon, he would say, and they would draw back, startled. As if they were in the presence of something rare.
I typically said little during these occasions, only smiled and nodded, afraid of betraying to them the quality of my French. I still could not imagine being like the women I saw on the stage or the women in the other boxes, no matter how finely he dressed me, and these introductions made me nervous. The more I waited, the more I was sure the Conservatoire had given me the audition only due to the letters of support the tenor had provided—that I was never to be taken seriously—and that his friends must know this also. And so I was nervous in the company of these celebrities and distinguished personages, and drank too much, ate too little. When I became drunk, I used the pin from my brooch on my legs so as not to fall asleep, pricking myself under my garters until he took me home.
We never spoke of what would happen if I was rejected. We acted instead as if it were impossible. Each time he left me, however, I feared it. If I failed him, it seemed to me this game would quickly reach its end.
§
We must get you to see Delsarte, he said to me one evening, as we exited the opera. That the Conservatoire jury cannot reproach me for.
I did not think to ask why, but to Delsarte I went.
Delsarte was one of the most famous voice teachers in Paris, though if you called him such, he would disavow it. He taught what he called “singing false,” by which he meant accomplishing in the singer the appearance of emotions the singer did not actually feel, so as to move the audience. He taught this in his famous salon of portraits, the walls covered in paintings of the expressions of the different emotions.
Your face is a mask, he said. Do you know the masks of comedy and tragedy? I told him I did. Then think of your face as a perfect mask. A magical one. Able to assume the shapes at command, and he struck the portraits one by one with his pointer, counting them off. Anger, Terror, Laughter, Love, all of them yours to command!
Our first lesson consisted of my singing the Nabucco audition piece for him, and as I did so, he pointed to each of the portraits for the shape my face was to make at each part of the song. He was disappointed I could not accompany myself on the piano—a singer must be able to do so, he said, as the occasion demands—and grudgingly allowed the tenor to accompany me, who did so quite well, never once flinching as I did when Delsarte smacked each portrait.
I was anxious not to disappoint either of my teachers, but the fierce expectancy in Delsarte as I sang and he pointed to a portrait was comical to me, and I found myself moving between terror and hilarity no matter what my face did.
Stop, he said, as the tenor began at the piano once more. One moment. He came over to me and said, Close your eyes.
I did so.
He took his fingers and set them on my face. Anger, he said, and the image of his pointer at this particular portrait appeared in my mind. As my face tried to assume the expression, he pressed against it, pushing it into the shape. Grief, he said. And again pressed my face to order it. We did this for some time before he let the tenor play the piano again. The fingers of the old genius pushing my face into place.
Your face appears to be only a mask, he said to me, of his decision to teach this way. It does not appear to know the shapes. Instead, everything is in your eyes, but we cannot see your eyes from the audience. So I closed your eyes so that you would have to speak another way.
Speak with your whole face, he said. Not as a lunatic, but as an artist. I think you fear you are giving something away, yes? But not if you can master this. If you master this, you can give and never give away anything.
This I could understand, and soon he praised me as a quick student.
§
I had another concern, one I could not even mention to the tenor: My voice had disappeared before. When the Conservatoire professor had said, You could destroy your voice just in the training, it was like finding myself in Hades and being told I could leave, but the bargain was that there was just one candle to get me out and it might not last the way. And I wouldn’t know until I’d begun.
When I returned to Delsarte next, I told him of what the jurist had said and of how my speaking voice had once disappeared, and I asked how this could be.
This problem you describe, it is very interesting, Delsarte said. Your speaking voice and singing voice are located in two different parts of the throat—this is true of everyone—but it bears examining.
He had various instruments he brought forth to observe my throat as he had me intone various syllables and then sing.
I think the disappearance, it is perhaps a part of the Falcon voice, he said, as he put the instruments away. You must be careful. Your voice, the tones it makes, it sounds so strong, as if it could never go away. But it might, all at once, without warning. Certainly it was true for Marie, he said.
He knew the woman for which the voice was named, of course, and then he told me of how she had lost her voice midperformance as she sang Niedermeyer’s Stradella.
The line she was to sing was “Je suis prête.”
It might be you are the next Falcon, as the Conservatoire seems to think, he said. You could do worse. But it might also be, if you are careful, that you could do better.
§
The letter from the Conservatoire said that despite a brilliant audition there was too much to overcome, and it suggested private training. The tenor had brought it himself, still sealed.
Comprimaria, I heard him say behind me. What news? Please, he said, let me see the letter.
I tried to hold it away, and as he reached for it, I ran for the door.
No, he said. No, no, no, and he caught me and then tried to hold me. I struggled, pushing him, and then screamed.
He couldn’t console me, and yet he was all I had.
No, he said, it is a mistake.
Nothing could happen with him, I understood, as he stroked my back. Whatever his intentions, for me to be a singer, to really be a singer, I needed to be rid of him.
Dark thing, night, shooting stars. How ridiculous. How beautiful and how cruel to know what I was or could be, and yet to be kept from it—and to know it could vanish as I reached for it. Still, it was enough to be everything I wanted, and this was when I knew.
I pushed away from him and ran out to the street, a street where I knew I was not to be, and having spent so much time avoiding arrest, I knew exactly what to do next. I drew my knife as I had at the Bal Mabille and walked slowly toward the police officers I saw who rushed for me.
When I looked back, I saw him at the gate to the apartment, startled. He ran to speak with the police, desperately shouting first at me and then to the police, insisting they release me. They asked if he was my husband, and when he said he owned me, they told him to come to the jail for me and bring my contract and bill of sale.
I would not look at him again after this; there was nothing more to say. I did not know what was next, only that it began here.
§