by Ali Smith
But then the prison governor announces to the gaoler, in private, that he has just decided to have this prisoner killed. I’m not murdering him, the gaoler says when the governor tells him to. Okay, I’ll do it myself, the prison governor says. I’ll take pleasure in it. And I’ll give you a bag of gold if you go and dig a grave for him in the old well down there in his cell.
It’s agreed. In the next Act, the gaoler will take the boy Fidelio down to the deep dungeon and they’ll dig the grave for the man who, we’ve begun to gather, is Fidelio’s imprisoned husband. Meanwhile, as the First Act draws to a close, Fidelio has somehow managed to get all the other prisoners in the place released out of the dark of their cells into the weak spring sun of the prison yard for a little while.
They stagger out into the light. They stand about, ragged, dazed, heartbreakingly hopeful. They’re like a false resurrection. They look up at the sunlight. Summer time, they sing, and the living is easy. Fish are jumping and the cotton is high.
Then they all look at each other in amazement.
Fidelio looks bewildered.
The gaoler shakes his head.
The conductor’s baton droops.
The orchestra in the pit stops playing. Instruments pause in mid-air.
The girl who was doing the ironing at the beginning is singing too. She’s really good. She shrugs at her father as if she can’t help it, can’t do anything about it. Your daddy’s rich, she sings, and your mammy’s good-looking.
Then a man arrives in a cart pulled by a goat. He stops the cart in the middle of the stage. Everybody crowds round him. He’s black. He’s the only black person on the stage. He looks very poor and at the same time very impressive. When the song finishes he gets out of the cart. He walks across the stage. He’s got a limp. It’s quite a bad limp. He tells them all that he’s looking for Bess. Where is she? He’s heard she’s here. He’s not going to stop looking for her until he finds her. He glances at the gaoler; he regards Fidelio gravely for a moment. He nods to the girl. He approaches a group of prisoners. Is this New York? he says. Is she here?
Yeah, but, you say. Come on. I mean.
But what? I say.
You can’t, you say.
Can’t what? I say.
Culture’s fixed, you say. That’s why it’s culture. That’s how it gets to be art. That’s how it works. That’s why it works. You can’t just change it. You can’t just alter it when you want or because you want. You can’t just revise things for your own pleasure or whatever.
Actually I can do anything I like, I say.
Yeah, but you can’t revise Fidelio, you say. No one can.
Fidelio’s all about revision, I say. Beethoven revised Fidelio several times. Three different versions. Four different overtures.
You know what I mean. No one can just, as it were, interject Porgy into Fidelio, you say.
Oh, as it were, I say.
You don’t say anything. You stare straight out, ahead, through the windscreen.
Okay. I know what you mean, I say.
You start humming faintly, under your own breath.
But I don’t think interject is quite the right word to use there, I say.
I say this because I know there’s nothing that annoys you more than thinking you’ve used a word wrongly. You snort down your nose.
Yes it is, you say.
I don’t think it’s quite the right usage, I say.
It is, you say. Anyway, I didn’t say interject. I said inject.
I lean forward and switch the radio on. I keep pressing the channel button until I hear something I recognize.
It’s fine for you to do that, you say, but if you’re going to, can you at least, before we get out of the car, return it to the channel to which it was originally tuned?
I settle on some channel or other, I’ve no idea what.
Which channel was it on? you say.
Radio 4, I say.
Are you sure? you say.
Or 3, I say.
Which? you say.
I don’t know, I say.
You sigh.
Gilbert O’Sullivan is singing the song about the people who are hurrying to the register office to get married. Very shortly now there’s going to be an answer from you. And one from me. I sing along. You sigh out loud again. The sigh lifts the hair of your fringe slightly from your forehead.
You’re so pretty when you sigh like that.
When we arrive at the car park you reach over to my side of the radio and keep the little button pressed in until the radio hits the voices of a comedy programme where celebrities have one minute exactly to talk about a subject, with no repetitions. If they repeat themselves, they’re penalized. An audience is killing itself laughing.
When you’re sure it’s Radio 4, you switch the radio off.
We are doomed as a couple. We are as categorically doomed as when Clara in Porgy and Bess says: Jake, you ain’t plannin’ to take de Sea Gull to de Blackfish Banks, is you? It’s time for de September storms. No, the Sea Gull, a fictional boat, moored safe and ruined both at once in its own eternal bay, is less doomed than we are. We’re as doomed as the Cutty Sark itself, tall, elegant, real, mundanely gathering the London sky round its masts and making it wondrous, extraordinary, for the people coming up out of the underground train station in the evening, the ship-of-history gracious against the sky for all the people who see it and all the people who don’t even notice it any more because they’re so used to seeing it, and just two months to go before there’ll be nothing left of it but a burnt-out hull, a scoop of scorched plankwork.
We are doomed on land and doomed on sea, you and me; as doomed holding on to each other’s arms on the underground as we are arguing about culture in your partner’s car; as doomed in a bar sitting across from each other or side by side at the cinema or the opera or the theatre; as doomed as we are when we’re pressed into each other in the various beds in the various near-identical rooms we go to, to have the sex that your partner doesn’t know about us having. Of all the dooms I ever thought I might come to I never reckoned on middle-classness. You and me, holding hands below the seats at Fidelio, an opera you’ve already seen, already taken your partner to; and it all started so anarchically, so happily, all heady public kissing in King’s Cross station. Mir ist so wunderbar. That’s me in the £120-a-night bed, and you through in the bathroom, thoroughly cleaning your teeth.
I’ve read in the sleeve notes for the version of Fidelio I have on CD that at an early point in the opera, when all four people, the girl, the thwarted young man, the woman dressed as a boy and the gaoler, are singing about happiness and everybody is misunderstanding everybody else and believing a different version of things to be true, that this is where ‘backstairs chat turns into the music of the angels.’ How wonderful it is to me. Something’s got my heart in its grip. He loves me, it’s clear. I’m going to be happy. Except, wunderbar here doesn’t mean the usual simple wonderful. It means full of wonder, strange. How strange it is to me. I wish I could remember her name, the ironing girl who loves Fidelio, the light-comedy act-opener, the girl for whom there’s no real end to it, the girl who has to accept – with nothing more than an alas, which pretty soon modulates into the same song everyone else is singing – what happens when the boy Fidelio is suddenly revealed as the wife Leonore, and everybody stands round her in awe at her wifely faithfulness, her profound self-sacrifice. O namenlose.
Which is worse to her, the ironing girl? That Fidelio is really Leonore, a woman, not the boy she thought he was? Or that her beloved Fidelio is someone else’s wife, after all, and so, in this opera about the sacredness of married love, will never, ever be hers?
Oh my Leonore, Florestan, the husband, the freed prisoner, says to Fidelio after she’s unearthed him, after she’s flung herself between him and certain death, between him and the drawn blade of the prison governor. Point of catharsis. Point of truth. After she does this, everything in the whole world changes for the better.
Oh my Leonore, what have you done for me?
Nothing, nothing, my Florestan, she answers.
Lucky for her she had a gun on her, that’s what I say, otherwise they’d both be dead.
Oh, I got plenty o’ nuttin. And nuttin’s plenty fo’ me.
It’s famously unresolved, you know, I say. Even though its ending seems so celebratory, so C-major, so huge and comforting and sure, there’s still a sense, at the back of it all, that lots of things haven’t been resolved. Look at the ironing girl, for instance. She’s not resolved, is she? Beethoven called it his ‘child of sorrow.’ He never wrote another opera after it.
Half a year ago you’d never heard of Fidelio, you say.
Klemperer conducted it at two really extraordinarily different times in history, I say.
I am flicking through the little book that comes with the version of Fidelio you’d just given me. The new CD is one of my Christmas presents. Christmas is in ten days’ time. We have just opened our Christmas presents, in a bedroom in a Novotel. I bought you a really nice French-looking jumper, with buttons at one side of the neck. I know that you’ll probably drop it in a litter bin on your way home.
Imagine, I say. Imagine conducting it in 1915 in the middle of the First World War. Then imagine the strangeness of conducting it in the 1960s, when every single scene must have reminded people of the different thing it meant, for a German conductor, the story of all the people starved and tyranted, buried alive, for being themselves, for saying the truth, for standing up to the status quo.
Tyranted’s not a word, you say in my ear.
You say it lovingly. You are holding me in your arms. We are both naked. You are warm behind me. You make my back feel blessed, the way you are holding me. I can feel the curve of your breasts at each of my shoulder blades.
Imagine all the things that Florestan must have meant, then, I say, to those people, in that audience in 1915, then 1961.
It’s an opera, you say. It’s nothing to do with history.
Yes, but it is, I say. It’s post-Napoleonic. That’s obvious. Imagine what it meant to its audience in 1814. Imagine watching the same moment in this opera at different times in history. Take the moment when Fidelio asks whether she can give the prisoner a piece of old bread. It’s the question of whether one starving man can have a piece of mercy. All the millions of war dead are in it there, crowding behind that one man. And the buried, unearthed truth. And the new day dawning, and all the old ghosts coming out of the ground.
Uh huh, you say.
What if Fidelio had been written by Mozart? I say.
It wasn’t, you say.
The knockabout there’d have been with Fidelio in her boy’s clothes, I say. The swagger Mozart would have given Rocco. The good joke the girl who’s ironing at the start would have become, and the boy too, who thinks he can just marry her because he’s made up his mind he wants to.
You yawn.
Though there’s something really interesting in the way Beethoven doesn’t force those characters to be funny, I say. The ironing girl, what’s her name? There’s something humane, in the way they’re not just, you know, played for laughs.
You kiss the back of my neck. You use your teeth on my shoulder. It’s allowed, you biting me. I quite like to be gently bitten. I’m not allowed to bite you, though, in case it marks you.
I still have no idea whether you like being gently bitten or not.
Not long after we’d met, when I said I’d never heard much, didn’t know much about Beethoven, you played me some on your iPod. When I said I thought it sounded like Jane Austen crossed with Daniel Libeskind, you looked bemused, like I was a clever child. When I said that what I meant was that it was like different kinds of architecture, as if a classically eighteenth century room had suddenly morphed into a postmodern annexe, you shook your head and kissed me to make me stop talking. I closed my eyes into the kiss. I love your kiss. Everything’s sorted, and obvious, and understood, and civilised, your kiss says. It’s a shut-eye lie, I know it is, because the music I didn’t know before I knew you makes me open my eyes in a place of no sentimentality, where light itself is a kind of shadow, where everything is fragment-slanted. A couple of months later, when I said I thought you could hear the whole of history in it, all history’s grandnesses and sadnesses, you’d looked a bit annoyed. You’d taken the iPod off my knee and disconnected its headphones from their socket. When I’d removed the dead headphones from my ears you’d rolled them up carefully and tucked them into the special little carrying-case you keep them in. You’d said you were getting a migraine. Impatience had crossed your face so firmly that I had known, in that instant, that now we were actually a kind of married, and that our marriedness was probably making your real relationship more palatable.
Sometimes a marriage needs three hearts beating as one.
I’ve met your partner. She’s nice. I can tell she’s quite a nice person. She knows who I am but she doesn’t know who I am. Her clothes smell overwhelmingly of the same washing powder as yours.
Ten days before Christmas, smelling of sex in a rented bed, with half an hour to go before you have to get the half past ten train home, I hold the new Fidelio in my hands. I think of the ironing girl, holding up the useless power of her own huge love to Fidelio in the first act like a chunk of dead stone she thinks is full of magic. I think of Fidelio herself, insufferably righteous. I think about how she makes her first entrance laden with chains that aren’t actually binding her to anything.
I open the plastic box and I take out one of the shiny discs. I hold it up in front of us and we look at our reflection, our two heads together, in the spectrum-split plastic of the first half of the opera.
So is marriage a matter of chains? I say.
Eh? you say.
Or a matter of the kind of faithfulness that brings dead things back to life? I say.
I have absolutely no idea what you’re talking about, you say.
I lean my head back on your collarbone and turn it so that my mouth touches the top of your arm. I feel with my teeth the front of your shoulder.
Don’t bite me, you say.
Marzelline. That’s her name.
Gershwin wrote six prayers to be sung simultaneously, for the storm scene in Porgy and Bess. As an opera, Porgy and Bess did comparatively badly at the box office. So did the early versions of Fidelio; it wasn’t till 1814 that audiences were ready to acclaim it. At the end of one, all the prisoners are free and all the self-delusion about love is irrelevant. At the end of the other, there’s nothing to do but go off round the world, on one good leg and one ruined leg, in search of the lost beloved. I guess you got me fo’ keeps, Porgy, Bess says, before she’s gone, gone, gone, gone, gone, gone, gone.
Will I dress as a boy and stand outside your house, all its windows lit for your Christmas party, its music filtering out into the dark? Will I stand in the dark and take a pick or a spade to the hard surface of the turf of your midwinter back lawn? Will I dig till I’m covered in dust and earth, till I uncover the whole truth, the house of dust under the ground? Will I shake the soil off the long iron chain fixed to the slab of rock deep in the earth beneath the pretty lavenders, the annuals and perennials of your suburban garden?
It is Saturday night. It is summertime on a quiet hot street in a port town. A man plays a sleepy lament on a piano. Some men play dice. A woman married to a fisherman is rocking a baby to sleep. Her husband takes the baby out of her arms and sings it his own version of a lullaby. A woman is a some-time thing, he sings. The baby cries. Everybody laughs.
Porgy arrives home. He’s a cripple; he rides in a cart pulled by a goat. He goes to join in the dice game. A man arrives with a woman in tow; the man is Crown and the woman is Bess. His job is the unloading and loading of cargo from ships. Her job is to be his, and to keep herself happy on happy dust, drugs. These dice, Porgy says shaking them, are my morning and my evening stars. An’ just you watch ‘em rise and shine for this poor b
eggar.
But Crown is high on drink and dust. When he loses at dice he starts a fight. He kills someone with a cotton hook. Get out of here, Bess tells him, the police will be here any minute. At the mention of the police, everybody on the street disappears except the dead man, the dead man’s mourning wife, and Bess, who finds all the doors of all the houses shut against her.
Then, unexpectedly, one door opens. It’s the door of Porgy, the cripple. She’s about to go in, but at the last moment she doesn’t. She turns and looks at the side of the stage instead. Everything on stage stops, holds its breath.
The orchestra stops.
A white girl has entered from the wings. She is standing, lost-looking, over by the edge of the set.
Bess stares at her. Porgy, still at his door, stares at her. Serena, the dead man’s wife, stares at her. The dead man, Robbins, opens his eyes and puts his head up and stares at her.
The doors of the other houses on the set open; the windows open. All the other residents of Catfish Row look out. They come out of the houses. They’re sweating, from the heat under the stage-lights, under the hot summer night. They stand at a distance, their sweat glistening, their eyes on the white girl with the iron in her hand.
The girl starts to sing.
A brother has come to seek her brothers, she sings. To help them if she can with all her heart.