A singer learned her roles for life—your repertoire was a library of fates held close, like the gowns in this closet, yours until your voice failed. Though when you put them on, it was then you were the something worn—these old tragedies took you over.
Here was my old tragedy, then. Waiting, held open, as if the writer had come to me with my old costume, asking me to put it on.
Had there been even one poster left somewhere, still on the side of a wall, peeling away? The Settler’s Daughter had been my first role. I did not know how to be her again, the girl who sang her way over the sea with a single hope in her heart, abandoned here—abandoned, in fact, the morning after she took the Emperor’s favor from his hand. To be her again or, really, perform as this odd shadow of her? This was too much.
The life I led now I’d made so I would never be her again. I’d never wanted to be reminded of her and her struggles again. And yet I knew I had always been her; I still was her. I had come back to Paris once again with one hope in my heart, sure of my moment of destiny, and had been given this, the past I’d hoped to forget, asking to be my future.
An earlier suspicion returned then, renewed, something odd in Simonet’s story I could not forget. He had mentioned a chapel, and there was no chapel that I remembered. The other details he’d mentioned were so close to my life, this alone of all of it seemed a lie, even a clue. Less like the work of Fate, then, and more like an imitation of Fate. A plot.
That little ruby flower, I knew the reason I had left that flower behind. I knew just where I had left it, the exact room of the house. It was no chapel. To be recognized from my song that day at the Exposition Universelle, this alone did not bother me. The one secret that mattered to me could be said to be there in the Marais with Simonet.
Whatever this was, it had come from that room.
Two
THE NEXT EVENING, after my performance, I washed the maquillage from my face, exchanged my Marguerite prisoner cap for the wig I wore as a disguise, and easily passed by the men waiting outside the theater, fogging the streets with their hundred kinds of tobacco smoke. I arrived to my dinner with the Verdis that night determined to get an answer on the question of the protégé.
Verdi’s verdict on his talent, character, and prospects would make my decision final, I had decided.
Verdi had cooked, as was his custom when circumstances allowed, and Giuseppina usually made sure this was so. The maestro insisted on eating only his favorite foods, even when working abroad, and always only in the ways he could make them. He was as proud of his risotto as he was of Aida, perhaps the more so. Whatever problems he encountered as he worked, with publishers, theater owners, or sopranos, his wife knew the recipes to these various foods were the recipe to him. To eat something else would literally unmake him. So he traveled crated down with dry risotto, maccheroni, and tagliatelle; anything that could not be brought would be arranged for by Giuseppina at whatever the cost. To dine with him was to dine on food prepared either by him personally or by his chef, who usually came with him, nearly as dear to him as his wife. We did not go much to restaurants.
When I entered their hotel suite, I was greeted by Giuseppina, who took my hand in hers, and led me to the dining room while poking at my wig and laughing.
Who is this woman of mystery? And where is our Lilliet? she said, her voice deepening as if she were onstage. From somewhere out of sight, Verdi laughed in answer as he finished some final preparation.
Giuseppe and Giuseppina were slim, gray in the same ways, oddly twinned, her profile more Roman than his. Her eyes were darker and intent, his filmed over, as if by ghosts; they were like sentinels of a kind, one who watched for the living, the other, the dead.
Verdi had lost his first wife and children when he was a young man, and was rumored to have fathered a secret daughter on Giuseppina, born to them from before their marriage. Giuseppina herself was said to have two other children, back from when she was the imperious soprano lover of Donizetti, but I had never met any of them. When I came to see them, I liked to pretend I was the secret daughter, abandoned and then found again. I wanted to belong to them forever. No one could fit easily between them, though a few had tried.
I sat with them at the small elegant table laid out in their suite, relieved by the familiar smell of his maccheroni. Giuseppina asked me about the ball of the night previous—had I really returned in a new gown? And why?
For the Jewel Song, of course, I said. A costume change. And I winked. I was inspired by the way the ball resembled the fifth act ballet.
Verdi looked to her gently before he poured champagne for us all and made a toast.
To Gounod, Faust, and . . . and the fifth act ballet, he said.
We laughed, raised our glasses, and drank.