What is my situation? I asked, and smiled as our soups were set down in front of us.
Wurstsuppe, the waiter said, and then left.
That you were rejected from the Conservatoire, the tenor said. And could lose your voice. She can teach you to be a Falcon properly.
I nodded.
I do this for love of you, he said.
At this, I smiled with the appropriate expression of gratitude but looked down to the creamy surface of my soup. I did not want to speak of or lie about loving him yet. But I could see he also wanted to be complimented so very much for having chosen this voice teacher, and I did not want to do it, not yet. I was still afraid of her precisely because he had chosen her.
Another maxim of Odile’s came to me then: If you cannot compliment a man but you must, ask him to speak of himself instead, this has the same effect. I remembered I had meant to ask him of his Fach, and so I did.
Please, tell me what is a heldentenor?
He smiled the more, nearly preening.
I am the tenor version of you, he said. A tenor who is almost a baritone, deeper, richer in the lower range, but with a seemingly hidden high range that surprises and can sustain high notes with force.
What does this mean, helden? I asked.
Helden means hero, he said, making a fist and shaking it playfully, as if to smite an enemy. It is the voice you hope to have if you are a German tenor. This voice is for singing Mozart, he said. And for singing Wagner, too. I think in Germany men who can give voice to tragedy, those are our heroes or, at the least, that is how we want our heroes to sound when they sing.
He grinned at this, and his eyebrows rippled as if he had surprised himself.
I was always hoping to find someone like you, he said.
So we could give voice to a tragedy together, I said, trying my hand at banter.
Yes, he said. That is exactly right.
Before this luncheon, I had wondered who I was now. The question was not a simple one. Now I knew.
The tenor had not installed a new woman in my place during the time he believed me dead. Whatever it was he felt for me, it had not dimmed, not once, not even in death. I found the apartment kept like a mausoleum to me when he brought me there proudly that first night after we left the Café Anglais. The furniture shrouded, the clothes still there, some of them packed into three trunks, waiting by the door for the footman, who loaded it into the carriage. As I peered into the apartment from the foyer, he assured me all would be kept as it was until my return. Only as he locked the door and we descended the stairs did I understand I was the woman he was installing in my place; Jou-jou’s life, for I did not think of myself as her anymore, was truly over, and whoever I was to be next had been given her things.
We then set off for the tenor’s own apartment, where he showed his trophies to me: his antique swords and pistols, the stuffed kills from his hunts, the relics of his family. We drank a liqueur made from mirabelle plums from tiny glasses, and he told me the story of the boar he’d killed as a boy, which stood by the entranceway, a sentinel shaggy with age, along with his more recent prize, an elk head mounted on the wall. The taxidermist had given the elk some serene gaze as it no doubt looked somewhere into an eternal Germany, which I now entered for the first time at his side.
I had given no further thought as to who I was—it was easy to forget that it even mattered. But the question had returned just before this luncheon, in the form of the conductor, who appeared at the door to our compartment asking for our papers. The tenor had supplied them immediately and did not look at me once, and neither did the conductor, who examined them and then bid us a good day.
This had been the most telling detail to me. The woman who had left him, that woman was still legally dead and could not be resurrected without questions neither he nor I wanted answered. And she had no papers, could cross no borders on a train. I had papers, however. Or rather, the tenor had them, and he returned them to his coat. I thought to concoct ruses in order to read them. What did they say? What name was there? When he would introduce me to Pauline, what name would he use?—but I would know then, it seemed to me. And perhaps it was better, quieter, to wait. The thought of asking what my name was now seemed likely to pull this little world asunder.
After the conductor left, I understood I was still waiting for the tenor to show some sign that it was all just a game, that he would return to our old ways, but the longer he did not, and the more he continued to be tender to me, and kind, the more curious I became.
This would be easier if I could love him, I thought, as we finished our luncheon, stood, and returned to our cabin to prepare to disembark. And could I love him or grow to love him? He was handsome, devoted to me, willing to spend a considerable sum of money on me and even to forgive that I had run from him as I had twice now. He had made a case for me with this foreign voice teacher and was now accompanying me to her side.
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 Païva’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 thr
oughout 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.
Think of it as a García tradition, then, if you will, to bring her into this circus now. I can understand that you might fear she would be overlooked in the tumult, but please accept my reassurances. My own education began as we toured and continued no matter if we had been feted with all due glory the night previous or robbed by Mexican brigands—the next day my father sat me at the piano again wherever we were. He wrote airs for me to practice that I still know and occasionally sing, written just for my voice. In this way, he has remained with me despite his death when I was still quite young, and so I have lived most of my life feeling both as if I never knew him and that he is always with me. You know how strong is the force of my will; you know I will keep after her. She will have the chance to witness the various demands, successes, and failures of this life firsthand, as all my students will, all at once. They are my good luck charms, even this young woman I have not met. I feel certain this will toughen her in the best way—you see my own upbringing has not failed me. After all, once her career begins, it will be one of constant travel, so her education may as well include accommodating herself to it. So, please, come at once, without delay, with your Falcon. Join us in Baden-Baden and follow us on to wherever we go next.
The tenor smiled at the last page and then looked up. You meet Madame Viardot-García at an extraordinary time, he said, folding the letter and shaking it at me. But she promises to make the most of it and you. In fact, it seems she is set on making a García of you.
I smiled and turned my attention back to the window.
On the train I’d made a little picture of the misery I was sure awaited me here, imagining days spent in a small room like the one in Paris, with lessons of some kind, unimaginable to me. I’d hoped at least for something like the pleasures of gin and cards, which I already missed dearly. I had added to this imaginary scene with each detail the tenor offered previously, but the letter extinguished all of this and even strangely reassured me.
I knew a little of the ways of a traveling show.
Despite this elegant explanation, there did not seem to be a single pause or uncertainty in the pace at which I had been brought to her. Her change of mind sounded sincere, but was some other pressure applied? Had she been threatened or paid? And how was my education paid for, and what had Pauline been told of me, other than my needing an education as a Falcon?
I smiled, looking away, and turned my attention to the window.
Baden-Baden itself would not let me stay anxious, however, and had begun to work its magic on me through the air alone, clean and sweet as I breathed it in, a relief after Paris. Against my will, I relaxed. The mountains were the dark green of winter approaching, when the pines are the only trees still dressed. The town itself, visible from the road that led to Pauline’s house, gave the appearance of a village growing a city in its midst. The elegant pale stone buildings of the casinos and baths, covered in grand statues and columns, stood beside the staid older German houses of brick or plaster and made a mix of the grand and the quaint together, their green and red rooftops shining in the afternoon sun. The summer season was more for the gamblers, the tenor had said. By winter Baden-Baden would belong mostly to the patients who came to be cured by the waters. Those who came for music, though, came all year, and the more so now that Pauline lived here—a colony had grown around her, and this was what we entered now.
Beneath my various fears and imaginings, I was aware of a growing anticipation for the teacher herself. While I was still suspicious of her, this news that Pauline had written an opera that was being produced and honored with a command performance was the most interesting detail anyone had ever told me about her, or any woman, for that matter. I had never once heard of a woman composer before this. In every respect she took on the aspect of a creature of myth. And part of the myth, I recalled, was that she was ugly.
The Comtesse had said of her, as we parted ways, She is very quixotic, very whimsical. She may even meet you at the station! You will see her right away, she is famously ugly, but she really is very well dressed.
I’d forgotten this detail until I saw the caricature, and so I asked the tenor, Is she really as ugly as they say?
You will have to decide for yourself, the tenor said. This was debated in the papers at the time of her debut, I understand—was she beautiful or not, and did this affect her art? He laughed. Once you know her, she’s lovely, however. And you will know her instantly when you meet her. You will see. She is very correct in her appearance, very elegant, he noted. I think she is a beauty—a beauty like a queen out of legend is a beauty, he said. And as she is the ruler of this world of music, that, at least, is true.
We rode on in silence a little more and he said, As a girl, she was cursed to be the younger sister of a great singer who was also a great beauty. Maria Malibran. Those who’ve seen both will say Pauline is the greater singer, but not in front of her. Maria died very young, and Pauline, she worshipped her. He paused and then said, When people say she is ugly, they mean she is not her sister—a debased cruelty, I think. And Pauline knows she is not her only too well.
At this, the carriage made its way onto Fremersbergstrasse, her street.
Pauline came down to greet us at her gate as we arrived, waving cheerfully, and I understood what the tenor meant at once. In her presence I was embarrassed to have asked my question. She was handsome and queenly indeed—she radiated a magnetic authority. Her thick dark hair was worn close to her head that day and pulled back at her neck in the plain style of a busy woman, but it flattered her beautiful brow. Her eyes were large and dark, lit with a mischievous intelligence, and they seemed to comprise nearly half of her face, though I think it was mostly because they were entrancing. The mouth was generous and expressive, her chin soft, her nose oddly smaller when you faced her than in profile, but this can be one of the physiognomic signs, I know now from her, of a powerful singing instrument.
And with that instrument, she could speak and sing in French, Russian, Italian, German, Spanish, and English, what she jokingly called her salad of tongues. She could accompany herself as she sang with the impeccable force of a virtuoso and had been, as her father and sister before her, a legend in all the capitals of Europe. She had retired at the height of her fame after a successful run seven years earlier in Paris, singing in Gluck’s Orphée et Eurydice, and now she was one of the most distinguished music teachers alive, as well as a woman composer. Over time, it seems to me, people called her ugly because they felt they needed one thing to be counted against her brilliance.
The question of beauty in a woman, as a result, amused her greatly, as I saw when she greeted me.
Ah, they’ve sent me the cocotte I ordered at last, she said, after the curtsy I made for her. She held my hands and took me in. You’re so beautiful they’ll come just to see you walk on the stage. But we will ma
ke sure they hear you also.
I stood before her in the general’s coat, worn over my poplin, the ruby flower pinned to my chest like a medal. She tugged at my coat’s cuffs and then looked to my four trunks—the one from the Comtesse, the three from the tenor. I’d not seen them lined up this way until now as the driver and footman set them down.
And you’ve brought costumes for us all, she teased.
I blushed, embarrassed—I’d imagined my luggage modest—but then I saw the humor of it and saw her wait for me to find it. This endeared her to me, and any apprehensions I had about her vanished in front of her immediately. Whether or not I knew her, as the tenor had put it, I knew I belonged to her and would do anything she asked.
She winked. Come, my dear. Let’s get you inside.
And you, she said to the tenor. You rogue. When did I last see you? Was it in Leipzig with Liszt? And what will you do with yourself while she studies? Where are we to put you?
He gestured to the air. I’m sure there’s something here that requires my attention, he said.
My Haustheater, I’m sure, she said, with a proud lift of her head. We sometimes need a tenor to sing across from the girls. Perhaps you’ll do.
§
Her Haustheater was really two houses side by side—her villa, where she lived with her husband, Louis, and Villa Turgenev next door, built for Turgenev. The two sat close to each other away from their neighbors at the end of the road. They made for a strange pair: the Viardot villa looked to be of a piece with its neighbors down the road, but Turgenev’s villa was newer, built soon after Pauline and her husband had moved to Baden-Baden, and had the appearance of a strangely new French château but in the old French style. Her traditional German villa seemed to be keeping time with a French stranger who’d snuck out of the forest, acting as if he’d always been there.
The Queen of the Night Page 27