His clothes, under my hands, were new and well made, even expensive, and the wings of hair I remembered so well were combed close to his head with pomade, his whiskers evenly trimmed. He had come from nearby, it seemed, neither reborn from the bones I had sometimes imagined to be still on the roof of the Paris Opera nor having clawed his way through the earth from the underworld. He had made some other bargain, a more ordinary one, and had chosen to live in secret, apart from me, and so the shock I felt, and the happiness, transmuted from happiness to fear and then anger. The sight of him alive burned me as his death had before.
We danced silently at first, his hands on my hands, his face glancingly touching mine, and then he said, You must leave him and come with me, tonight if possible. He must not stop us.
I could see the tenor along the far wall, seated, speaking to someone I could not see.
I cannot, I said.
Hear me out, then. If you do not leave with me tonight and you marry our tenor friend, if this is true, then I will never speak to you again so we must speak now instead.
Speak, then, I said. Tell me everything.
The crowd swirled around us, their faces flashing by in the turns of the dance like a storm of masks. I watched them as he told me of his time away from me.
The knife wounds had taken away his playing somehow—the hands were mute. But my cries that day had been heard and saved his life. Eugène, hearing them, finally guessed Aristafeo’s identity and stopped himself before he made the killing blow.
He was not, as he’d hoped, about to murder the Prussian spy.
It’s your ring she wears, isn’t it? he’d said. When Aristafeo weakly nodded, Eugène swore and said, My friend, I’ve cut you badly. I apologize. Let me help get you to a hospital.
Aristafeo never saw him again. His attacker brought him to the temporary hospital kept in the home of the courtesan La Pa?va, who took an instant liking to him and made him her new cause. When she understood he was too badly wounded to likely play again but that he was a composer, she was moved and became one of his biggest supporters and eventually brought him to the attention of Verdi.
Verdi’s protégé, after all.
While he would never again play as he once had, he did thrive all the same, though his wounds and long convalescence had changed him. His hair had gone silver; he walked now with this limp and a stoop, the wolfish confidence changed into something else, something more forlorn, even a little ragged.
His time as a Prix de Rome winner afforded him travel after a long struggle. There, encouraged by Verdi, he collaborated on the libretto with this new friend, a French novelist he’d met who was in need of a story and who then bought the house Aristafeo once owned in the Marais after he’d told him the story of his affair with me. With the help of their powerful friends, the opera was under commission to the Imperial Court of Russia as an entertainment for the young Alexander, to be presented in honor of his birthday.
On the night of the Sénat Bal, he had waited upstairs for me and had meant it to be our grand reunion.
As he’d waited on the Luxembourg Palace balcony amid new friends, he’d found himself next to the tenor, who did not seem to recognize him; his habits of long nights and drink meant he lived in a steady riot of acquaintances, everyone equally familiar and unfamiliar, with friends of longstanding whom he could not call by name and strangers he was sure he loved. The tenor relied constantly on his celebrity to keep up his friendships. That evening he had been busy narrating the evening for the party of men on the balcony that night and never once recognized Aristafeo.
Aristafeo, however, knew him instantly.
As my fame had grown, the tenor’s had as well, as someone who dined out on his stories of me. Earlier, over dinner at a restaurant in Les Halles with these same men, he had begun with the story of how, after attending a performance of Lucia di Lammermoor, I had turned to him and tried to make him laugh by, with no training whatsoever, singing in imitation of the diva in the street outside the Paris Opera and he believed I had surpassed her. To his amazement, the other theatergoers mistook me for her in the dark, thinking perhaps she’d come outside to greet her fans.
A lie told to hide my past at the Majeurs-Plaisirs.
He described the secret lessons inside the unfinished Garnier and the first audition, the discovery that I was a Falcon and the rejection by the first jury, at which they all shook their heads in amazement.