But I did not love him as I did not love him.
This was the gift I had asked the Comtesse for, the last test of my apprenticeship to her. But how to have it?
As I contemplated his back as he spoke to the porters, and thought of the packet of papers I now knew to be hidden in his breast pocket, the Comtesse’s description of the secret to La Pa?va’s success seemed instructive in that moment.
Favors? Favors are nothing to this.
The details of who I was now mattered less than who he believed he was now with me, someone he’d longed to be all this time. A world he’d waited for to be born came into being with my return to him, and I was now the source of it. I mattered more than I ever had, lost to him twice, now his again by choice, the tragic soprano perfectly matched to his tragic tenor. As long as I was this woman, all would be well. And as to who this woman was, I had but one clear answer.
I was his partner in tragedy.
§
How I congratulate you on your triumph in Il Trovatore and devoutly wish I could have seen it. I have heard nothing but elated reports of your performances, and so we will greet you and your Leonora with all due glory and celebrations here in our Gypsy camp in the mountains when you arrive. And you must, you must come at once.
We were in a carriage hired at the station, riding up a hill just outside of Baden-Baden toward Pauline’s villa. The tenor read to me from a letter from her and occasionally interjected, a startling affection in his face as he did so. He was merry, like someone on holiday. I’d never seen him so gay.
You may have heard that I am a Gypsy; my father did not know his father, this is true; and he is from that part of Seville where the Gypsy blood is strong, though it distressed my dear mother to no end whenever we made light of this.
He stopped reading and laughed, and then held out the letter to me, smiling. She’s really quite clever at these, he said.
I assumed he was showing me proof of her compliment to him, but I stared in amazement instead to see a caricature she’d drawn of herself as Azucena the Gypsy in Il Trovatore. She stood next to a cauldron, a shawl over her head, and had written Azucena implores the spirits to reveal her new student’s fate!
She plays a game you will like, where you must draw a face, and then all present invent ideas for the character’s name, identity, and destiny, the tenor said.
I laughed. Of course, I thought, chilled even as I laughed. If I was to be his Leonora, we would need an Azucena. Pauline’s joke but Fate’s as well.
If before this I felt abandoned by Fate, now I feared that I had Fate’s full attention.
Pauline was a true Gypsy’s daughter, though she did not, I think, plot revenge there in Baden-Baden, only operas—operas and her students’ careers. Her father, as she explained beneath her caricature, was Manuel García, a Spanish Gypsy tenor and one of the world’s most famous singers, as the tenor noted. With her mother, the soprano Joaquina Sitchez, he raised the García children in what resembled a traveling circus family, but devoted to opera. The García family had toured America and Mexico throughout Pauline’s early childhood, performing a repertoire of Italian operas and García’s own original compositions. García, his wife, his oldest daughter, Maria, and his son, also named Manuel, performed the major roles while Pauline, the youngest, looked on from the wings.
Pauline’s letter explained she had nearly put me off until the following spring as she would spend much of the winter between Karlsruhe and Weimar, at work on the production of an opera she’d written as well as planning a command performance of this opera the following April in honor of the birthday of the Grand Duchess Sophie of Saxe-Weimar-Eisenach. She had changed her mind, however, as she feared treating me too daintily. As this opera of hers was something she’d written to give her students to practice with, much as her father had done with his own students, and as they had performed it originally in her Haustheater in Baden-Baden to audiences in her salon, and as this, in turn, led to its current successes, she had decided she would bring her students in Baden-Baden with her to Karlsruhe and Weimar, and one of them might even perform in the formal production. And as she had been educated amid tours and productions, so then would I begin my education in the wings.