The two singers stared at me, bemused. Perhaps they hadn’t understood the introduction.
“I go talk to president of board. Rehearsals closed, even for big shots. My Macbeth surprise for everyone but cast.” Vladik took himself and the guacamole off in the direction of the neurosurgeon, and good luck to Opera at the Pass’s artistic director, I thought, if he believed that he could convince the very conservative Dr. Peter Brockman that the drug-war Macbeth had been a cultural triumph and should be followed by more, not less, avant-garde productions.
What did Vladik have in mind? I wondered. Carmen set among the cardboard shacks in the squatter barrios of Juarez with the smugglers transformed into coyotes sneaking illegal aliens across the Rio Grande? La Boheme in a New Mexico ’60s hippie commune? Actually, that might work. Even my Carmen idea might work. In fact, I had rather enjoyed the weird Macbeth but mostly because of the voices.
“What an honor to meet you, Senora Ojeda-Solano,” I said, shaking the Chilean soprano’s hand. She had an empty flute of champagne in the other hand and was wearing a very regal garnet satin gown and a tiara. I’m not sure I’ve ever actually met anyone wearing a tiara. “Your Lady Macbeth was wonderfully powerful.” She nodded in queenly acceptance of my compliment. Didn’t the woman speak? “I see that you need another drink. Would you like to try a margarita?”
“I dreenk only champagne,” she replied. “Mexican cactus dreenks ees bad for the throat. So ees strange—” She looked disapprovingly at a tray of my canapés. “—theengs on plate.” She touched her throat as if to ascertain that it had not been damaged by our humble border offerings.
I waved a waiter over to refill her champagne flute and turned to the Chinese baritone. Initially I had thought a Chinese Macbeth even stranger than a drug lord Macbeth, but Mr. Zhijian, a stocky man with thick black hair, had proved to be not only a fine singer, but also an excellent actor. By the end of the production I had accepted him as a Juarense with a desire to garner the whole drug trade for himself. “What a pleasure to meet you, Mr. Zhijian. I enjoyed your performance so much.” I’m sure I butchered the pronunciation of his name.
“Not Mr. Zhijian. Wang my family name. Zhijian mean firm in spirit. In English you, Carolyn; I, Firm in Spirit. You, Blue; I, Wang.” He nodded cheerfully. “I like you food things.” He popped a jalapeno-peach canapé into his mouth. “Vely good taste, like dragon fire on tongue.” He consumed another and then tossed down the margarita a waiter had just provided.
Noting that Mr. Wang was not only very cheery but also somewhat glassy eyed, I said, “Margaritas taste better if you sip them.”
“Yes,” he nodded with a wide, loopy smile. “Taste vely good. I have another.” And he did. If I had drunk two, or however many, margaritas straight down, I’d have fallen flat on my face, which is almost what Mr. Wang did. Luckily, those of us in the circle, excluding Senora Ojeda-Solano, caught him before he could hit the floor, after which several male members of the chorus helped him away, while the Chilean soprano looked on with raised eyebrows and sipped her champagne. I noticed that the bottle the waiter poured for her was Tattinger’s, while the bottles on the table for the rest of us were some American brand I was unfamiliar with—perhaps of the five-dollar variety.
With Mr. Wang gone, I told Senora Ojeda-Solano how fond I was of the novels of Isabel Allende, especially The House of the Spirits. Although Allende was a fellow countrywoman and a famous author, the soprano had never heard of her and didn’t seem receptive to my recommendation. She turned and began a conversation in Spanish with Barbara Escobar, the banker’s wife. I went looking for Vladik in case there was any guacamole left. I almost caught up with him, but he had flitted off with the bowl, leaving me to catch a conversation between Dr. Brockman and Frank Escobar.
“We’ve got to get rid of him,” said the neurosurgeon, shaking a very long finger in Escobar’s face. “It’s bad enough that he snuck that atrocious staging of Macbeth in under our noses, but now he insists that more of the same is just what El Paso needs. We’ll be the laughing stock of the opera world when this gets out.”
I wasn’t convinced that the greater world of opera was that cognizant of what we were doing in El Paso, but I didn’t say that.
“I did not participate in establishing Opera at the Pass to be made a fool of by some upstart Russian,” the doctor continued. “I have to wonder now where the university found him. Probably some place like Uzbekistan.”
“Or Chechnya,” suggested Frank Escobar. “They’re a group of troublemakers. I think the university suckered us when they suggested we take him on. I’ve heard that the new fad there is zarzuela, not grand opera. Not that I don’t like a good zarzuela. Barbara and I always attend the performances at the Chamizal. But imagine what Gubenko would do to a zarzuela.”
“I heard him say that he doesn’t like zarzuela,” I told them. I didn’t like it that much myself. The one I saw was a sort of Spanish operetta without subtitles or program notes. I had no idea what was going on.
“He won’t even be able to ruin that program,” said Brockman. “I’m sure you’re aware, Carolyn, being connected by marriage with the university, that state budget cuts are hurting spending on education. I’m told the music department took a severe hit.”
“Scientific research funding too,” I agreed. Jason had been complaining, although a lot of his funding comes from outside sources, thank goodness. Otherwise, I’d never hear the end of the blow to science dealt by short-sighted state legislators and a penny-pinching Republican governor.
“Let’s hope the music critic from the Times is still sick,” said Frank Escobar. “I’d just as soon not have this production reviewed.”
“Yes, I was very upset when I initially heard there’d be no review of the Friday night performance, but it turned out to be a blessing that the critic is the first reported flu case in the city,” Brockman agreed.
I murmured my excuses, having spotted Vladik with a group of university people. He’d only managed to finish half the guacamole. I accepted another margarita from a passing waiter and joined the new circle. My husband was trying to convince Vladik that the administration wasn’t singling him out for unwarranted budget cuts.
“President hate me,” said Vladik stubbornly.
I thought he looked rather sickly, but then who wouldn’t after eating a half-vat of guacamole. I helped myself to some in the interest of his health.
“Vice president for Academic Affairs hate me,” he persisted. “Music chairman hate me. All jealous of Vladik. My Macbeth make them give money. They see many Hispanics come. Many applaud loud and shout, ‘Bravo’.”
I personally thought that if the upper administration had been in attendance—I hadn’t seen any—that they’d take away his budget entirely.
Melanie Collins, who is married to a geology professor, said, “I thought it was wonderful. My first opera, and I was absolutely enthralled. I think the university is treating you dreadfully, Vladik. It’s shameful.” She laid a sympathetic hand on his arm and smiled at him like a girl with a teenage crush.
“You would say that,” snapped her newly arrived husband, who, instead of a tuxedo, was wearing dusty khakis and heavy hiking boots.
“Why Brandon, I thought you were still on a field trip,” said his wife. “Couldn’t you have changed your clothes before you came to the party?”
“And give you time to trot off with this Russian puke? You think I don’t know you’ve been sleeping with him?” Brandon Collins turned on Vladik and snarled, “I ought to break your scrawny neck, you communist son of a bitch.” He actually put his hand on a pointed hammer that was holstered on his heavy leather belt—some geological tool, no doubt, but it did look dangerous.
Those of us in the circle were, needless to say, both embarrassed and alarmed at this turn of events. The opera’s artistic director, who had turned a sickly shade of green, said, “Vladik sick. Very sick.” He thrust the guacamole bowl into my hands and stumbled away before Professor
Collins could smack his head as if it were a rock of scientific interest.
“Some lover you picked,” Collins said to his pink-faced wife. “He didn’t even have the guts to stay and fight for you, did he?”
“It might have been the guacamole,” I murmured, “or even the margaritas.”
The simplest recipe for a margarita, according to the authors of The El Paso Chile Company’s Texas Border Cookbook is 3 ounces gold tequila, 3 ounces orange liqueur, and 3 ounces lime juice shaken with ice and poured into a cold glass, the rim of which has been coated with salt. But what of the tequila? It first became popular in the United States when Mexican Revolutionaries and their American counterparts across the border favored the drink. However, tequila did not gain a wider distribution in our country until the Second World War, when European liquors became hard to get. It has gained steadily in popularity since then.
In Mexico it dates back into Indian history before the Spanish Conquest when pulque was distilled from the agave cactus and drunk at religious ceremonies by priests and nobles, who were working themselves up to the high point of the event when a person or persons were sacrificed on the altars. The lower classes were not allowed to drink it unless they were to be sacrificial victims. Then presumably their fears were muted by drunkenness.
Later Mezcal wine or brandy was distilled from the agave, and finally tequila, which was produced from huge cactus plantations, where the sap is harvested and then distilled—in early days in rawhide containers—latterly in barrels of oak and even plastic. The distilleries are mostly in the state of Jalisco, and the processes are closely kept secrets. An interesting footnote is that women are not welcome in the distilleries. They are still considered “unclean” and “bad luck.”
Carolyn Blue, “Have Fork, Will Travel,”
Charleston, Southern Messenger.
4
“Our Cultural Establishment Has Suffered A Great Loss”
Carolyn
Jason and I were ensconced comfortably in the padded lounges on our patio, drinking coffee and reading the Sunday papers. Last month we discovered that we could have the Sunday New York Times delivered right to our door, so Jason was reading that while I browsed through the El Paso Times before going into the kitchen to fix brunch—eggs ranchero. Sometimes we have mimosas with them, but after the margaritas last night, I didn’t feel like drinking alcohol. The truth is, I’d been sick during the night, a rare event for me, and I didn’t think I’d had that many cocktails.
Ah well, I felt fine in the morning, and it was such a beautiful day. Blue skies, sunshine, temperatures in the 60s. El Paso can be quite lovely in the winter—at least when there’s no inversion layer to trap toxic air in the river valley. Today the air was so clear that the city below us and the mountains across the border in Juarez stood out in sharp delineation. A house with a view. I felt extremely contented and picked up the newspaper again.
There was no review of the opera—I’d looked—but there was an article on the editorial page, of all things. “Listen to this, Jason.” And I read him the editorial, which was titled “Insult Shrouded in Beauty.”
“For those of us attending an opera for the first time, the Opera at the Pass production of Verdi’s Macbeth at the Abraham Chavez Theater was an eye-opener in more ways than one. We were an audience dressed in seldom-used finery, El Paso being a casual sort of town. Having spent as much on tickets as a big-name rock star might command, we were prepared to be bored by a stuffy, classical experience or, for the more optimistic, amazed by the talents of the composer and singers. We were certainly amazed.
“Ms. Ojeda-Solano and Mr. Wang Zhijian, from Chile and China respectively, are possessed of voices both beautiful and loud. They rocked the auditorium without the aid of microphones—eat your heart out, Ricky Martin. Local singers and instrumentalists from the university and the city distinguished themselves as well. And the music was melodic, sometimes even foot tapping. My wife came away humming one of the arias. For those of us who suffered through Macbeth in school and then promptly forgot the whole thing, translations in English and Spanish, projected above the curtain, kept us apprised of what was happening on stage.
“On the basis of what I have said so far, you might think that El Paso has come of age, has joined the mainstream, culturally speaking. Not so. Instead of spending our expensive evening watching tragedy evolve among Scottish kings and thanes, Artistic Director Vladislav Gubenko served up his own inappropriate revision of the story. El Paso was treated to a distasteful and demeaning tale of murderous drug dealers. Perhaps Mr. Gubenko thinks that we are incapable of appreciating anything more uplifting. Perhaps Opera at the Pass needs a director with more respect for the local audience.
“Although our proximity to Mexico certainly gives us a front-row seat for the violent activities of the drug cartels, we do not need to be entertained with the spectacle of contemporary lawlessness when better things are available. If we want the drug culture dramatized for us, we can go to the movies. Many of us may be cultural Philistines, Mr. Gubenko, but we are not all drug dealers, and we bought enough tickets to sell out the theater. Your made-for-El Paso version of Verdi’s and Shakespeare’s classic tale is an insult to the city.”
“What do you think of that?” I asked my husband.
“I think Vladik’s going to be upset. He was pretty proud of that staging.”
“I know, but did you like it?”
“Macbeth and Lady Macbeth were excellent,” said Jason. “Never heard of either of them, but we were lucky to get voices like that, and I kind of liked the trio of witches, but the drug-dealer theme was over the top. I can’t say it worked for me. Still, I doubt that Vladik meant to insult anyone.”
He leaned over to rustle through sections of the New York Times, probably looking for the sports pages, or possibly the travel section. Personally, I like the wedding section. It’s so different from wedding descriptions in my youth. The New York paper offers us strange brides and grooms, too old to have stayed single so long, and avant-garde weddings. It’s very entertaining. Still, I wish Jason wouldn’t drop the paper on the cement. By the time I get to it, I often find ants scurrying over the news item I want to read.
“Weren’t you going to fix eggs ranchero this morning?” Jason asked hopefully.
I glanced at my watch and got up. “Ten minutes,” I promised and went into the kitchen. Eggs ranchero aren’t hard to make, and they are delicious. To think I’d never tasted them before we moved here. Obviously I was getting acclimated, which is not all that easy for a lifelong Midwesterner transplanted to the border. I turned the radio to KTEP, National Public Radio in El Paso, or so I thought, and poured vegetable oil into a large frying pan. Instead of classical music, I got a news bulletin:
“We interrupt our programming for this local news item just in. Vladislav Gubenko, artistic director of Opera at the Pass and Professor of Music at the university, was found dead in his condo at Casitas del Paso this morning by a neighbor walking her dog. Retired El Paso Police Lieutenant Luz Vallejo discovered the opera director in his bedroom after following an unpleasant trail from her front yard through the open front door of his house.
“A preliminary statement from the coroner indicates that Gubenko may have aspirated his own vomit during a violent attack of stomach flu. Sergeant Arthur Guevara of Crimes Against Persons suggested that the deceased overindulged in alcohol the night before, as there was a distinctive odor of tequila at the scene.
“Gubenko’s innovative staging of Verdi’s Macbeth received its second and final performance last night at the Abraham Chavez Theater. Dr. Peter Brockman, president of Opera at the Pass said, during a telephone interview, “In the death of Professor Gubenko, our cultural establishment has suffered a great loss.” I was so shocked that I broke the yolk of the third egg into the frying pan and had to scrape it out of the oil I had used to soften the tortillas.
Carolyn’s Easy Eggs Ranchero
As a Middle Westerner, I always
thought of breakfast as hot oatmeal on cold winter mornings, cold cereal with milk and fresh fruit in season, eggs and bacon occasionally, never spicy sausage (I didn’t know there was such a thing), and an occasional venture into the exotic—cinnamon toast. Then I moved to Tex-Mex land and discovered that breakfast can be spicy enough to turn your ears pink and clear your sinuses. I highly recommend, for instance, huevos rancheros. For brunch, you might even add margaritas or mimosas.
• Assemble vegetable oil, 6-inch corn tortillas, eggs, Pace Medium Picante Sauce or similar product, a wedge of longhorn cheddar cheese, and cilantro sprigs (optional).
• Warm a thin layer of oil in a frying pan large enough to hold four fried eggs.
• Soften the tortillas one by one by dipping on each side in the oil. Lay the tortillas flat in a shallow grilling or roasting pan.
• While frying the eggs over easy in the remaining oil, grate the cheese. Then place one egg on each tortilla, while frying more eggs if necessary.
• Spread hot sauce over each egg and almost to the edge of any uncovered part of the tortilla.
• Sprinkle grated cheese liberally over the salsa.
• Place the pan under the broiler until the cheese melts.
• Lift each tortilla carefully onto a plate—one or two per plate—garnish with cilantro sprigs, and serve hot.
Holy Guacamole! Page 3