Carmen is accustomed to the attention of every man everywhere she goes. It insults her to have one who will not look.
There is a rose between her breasts. Near the end of the act she throws it to the young soldier who will not look at her for shame over the feelings she arouses in him. He wants to keep himself for the young Mica?la, the girl his mother wants him to marry. His mother is dying and would like him to be settled with a good girl.
He picks up the rose and smiles at Carmen, and the string section trills with the premonition of death.
I was still singing songs with roses.
L’amour, la mort, she sings, by turns gaily and seductively. Love, death. Love. Only in French do they rhyme.
§
The weeks went by with no word from him. The autumn deepened; the trees turned black and gold again. Faust ended; rehearsals for Carmen began in earnest. The rumor of the curse, that I was leaving the stage, meant, as I’d expected, more new offers came in and the tickets for Carmen went at a run. Nothing had been repudiated by my accepting the role, and it did not matter except to me.
Now my plan was underway. I had only to survive it.
Aristafeo’s opera would succeed without me, and he would find future patrons, lovers, and stars. And the honor of originating a role, of performing in his opera, was nothing beside the honor of protecting him as he returned.
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.