Not far from the Grand Place—which is situated, I think, in the old quarter of the Marolles or close to it—is the rue des Eburons, where my Aunt Claire lived. I confess that despite my attachment, I have not returned to that street since the period when my aunt lived there, sharing the true doll’s house that was her minuscule townhouse with a servant of whom I remember that, not very young and of most honest deportment, she bore a first name ending in a like an opera buffa soubrette, and that after many years of total abnegation, her head suddenly turned by a lover, she ran off, helping herself to the most precious things the pretty little candy box contained. At the time of this trip, what connected me to that street had grown stronger inside me and touched me through a channel too open for me not to have a frank desire to go there, with the reservation, however, that, though I might wish to take a walk, I felt repugnance at the idea of a pilgrimage. To explain to my friends why I was bent on inserting this visit into a program that was already full, to ask them, if necessary, to guide me there, would have led me to make remarks about my feelings in which I’m quite willing to indulge if I do it in writing, with the greater distance inherent in this mode of expression, but which I could not broach viva voce without experiencing a certain embarrassment, in this case all the stronger because I happened to be engaged in prospecting that very layer of memories, for the work that is, here, finding its formal realization. To instigate a visit that would have recalled a number of things to me at just the right moment—this should not have been done, anyway, on any account, because it would have amounted, in fact, to organizing the collection of documents and impressions that, added to what my memory was already furnishing me on its own, would have filled some gaps, but so mechanically that it would have encumbered the whole thing with a dead weight. I very nearly, therefore, left Brussels without going back to the rue des Eburons, whose name I remembered because of my Aunt Claire, of course, but just as much because of what is odd about it for a child who may view the “Eburons” [Eburones, Germanic people of Belgian Gaul] as tradespeople (bûcherons [woodcutters] or forgerons [blacksmiths]), as well as the sort of Hurons who were, if names have a meaning, that nation whose membership in our circle is not marked by any natural line of descent like that which connects the Alamans [third-century confederation of Germanic tribes] to the Allemands [Germans] and the Burgondes [fifth-century Germanic people] to the Bourguignons [Burgundians]. But by chance, the matter was resolved without there being any need of a formal request: passing through the Grand Place in our hostess’s car, I asked whether it was not in this vicinity that one could find the rue des Eburons, where a relative of mine had lived who sang in the Théâtre de la Monnaie. No sooner said than done: at a slower speed, we drove up the peaceful street that I had known and that was in fact quite nearby. At an intersection with another street, I had time to see the creamy whiteness of a very small house situated on the corner whose corner ground-floor room, topped with a small terrace, pointed into the intersection of the two streets like the prow of a ship. This was definitely the place I was looking for and, had I examined it more closely, perhaps I would have recognized other details that might have opened up a path for my memories . . . In any case, I contented myself with this quick view, for I did not want—since I would have felt I was doing it too conspicuously had we stopped the car—to assume, with respect to the rediscovered house, the attitude of the painter in arrested motion, his eyes squinting and his pencil already poised, before the site or the slice of life that is no longer for him more than a motif from which he will try to extract all that his skill may permit him to extract.
Apart from its exterior, which I did not think, incidentally, I would remember well enough to recognize it right away, what I recall about this house is reduced to very little: the calm and order that reigned in the parlor, whose candy-box preciosity did not conform very well with the robust beauty of its inhabitant, who was created on the scale of the lyric-theater stages on which she appeared; the presence, in a good spot in this excessively mincing parlor, of a glass-fronted cabinet where my aunt kept objects of which I would be incapable today of drawing up an inventory—even if limited to general categories—but of which I know that several at least related to her life in the theater. Among the bibelots thus kept behind glass, I think that my aunt showed us a small Spanish dancer similar to those we had seen in the second act of Carmen when we went to the Monnaie to hear her in that opera; but it is very possible that here I am only transferring into the glass case a memory of the show at which we had been present, and that I am seeing now, shrunk to the proportions of a slender figurine, what was originally a ballerina perceived from the entire distance that separated me from the stage. I recall most distinctly, on the other hand, the slightly intimidated joy I felt when my aunt showed us and allowed us to touch—extracted from this treasure of bibelots, perhaps also taken from a tabletop or out of a drawer—the pair of castanets that was the very same one she had used when she sang the role of the cigarette girl who knows how to handle a knife, turn men’s heads, roam the mountains helping smugglers, and read the imminence of her death in a combination of cards against which her cunning can do nothing.
That my aunt had learned to wield a pair of castanets in order to give Carmencita all her pungency and local color, seemed to me evidence of a professional conscientiousness worthy of the great artist that she was. But that she should add this talent to her other talents, and precisely this one, was for me a thing as marvelous as if she had demonstrated that the extent of her gifts was unlimited: she, who, if need be, could join to the art of professional singer that of the gypsy—was there any performance or transformation of which she would not be capable, should one of her roles demand it? The pair of castanets which reminded us that in the home of our citizen of Brussels we were also in the home of Carmen had, thus, all the weight of a piece of evidence, and I would not be able to say by which virtue it impressed me more, when my aunt presented it to us as one among others of the objects that made up the setting of her daily life: as theater accessory and—like a fairy’s wand that I could touch with my finger—emblem of a magic brought suddenly, in this way, inside the four walls of a parlor, or as formal proof of the multiple capacities of this beautiful and good opera singer whom I had the happiness of coming close to, through the kinship that connected us.
In Brussels, I had seen my Aunt Claire on a theater stage for the first time, and, also for the first time, I had seen her in her private life. We had met her closest family: a sister, I believe, and a brother-in-law of whom I now know that he was the director of a furniture company, whereas I thought until just recently that he owned a glassworks and that we had even visited his factory, an irritating confusion because it forces me to wonder where on earth I could have seen that glassworks, of which, not having a more complete picture, what remains in my memory is one specific image (a worker blowing a bottle or other receptacle before our eyes), and because it obliges me to regard as suspect many childhood memories which, until now, were for me certainties. These people were the parents of a nice little brown-haired girl whom they called “Clairot,” a diminutive of Claire, her aunt’s first name. You know, Clairot . . . , her mother often said to her in a soft and modulated voice, with an accent by which my own parents were constantly amused, like so many French people, sensitive only to what seems to them a deformation of their language, and inclined to smile at inflections that, in certain mouths, nevertheless merely embellish the words with a few flourishes and give them a new flavor.
My aunt certainly did not have a Belgian accent. But that is really all I can remember, negatively, about her everyday voice. When she sang, the richly timbred voice did not seem either to emerge from her throat nor to reach your ears. It was a wave that enveloped you, moved you without your knowing where exactly its power came from: from the dramatic nature of the words that were uttered (and that were illustrated by the singer’s face, so easily convulsed), from the character of the melody in which these words w
ere incarnated, or from the substance of the sound alone, as ample as the very body of the woman producing it, of whom it appeared to be, even more than the expression, the irradiation or the transposition into another register. What would that voice do to me if I heard it now? And what precisely did it do to me when the entire volume of air enclosed in my parents’ parlor was so penetrated by it that I have the impression, in retrospect, that what we were breathing was this voice itself? The only certainty is that this is how the memory she left me comes back to me, and that, if I listen today to a voice of the same type, what serves me as a touchstone by which to judge the gold of this other voice is what I believe I have retained of her voice.
D’art et d’amour [Of art and of love] . . . Thus begins, in the French language version, the soprano’s great aria in the second act of Tosca, of which my aunt, who was already known in Belgium, had been the first to sing the role in Paris, as I recently found out from a review I read in an old magazine. Along with the great aria of Louise, that of Samson and Delilah dedicated to “spring which is beginning,” the aria of the Cards from Carmen and the Song of the Heart in La Glu, this aria was one of the main pieces in her repertoire, at the time when she came to sing at the house and when, too young still to quibble over my pleasure and to trouble myself with frivolous aesthetic discriminations, I allowed myself in all simplicity to be intoxicated by the vocal philter of which, her very nature being straightforward, she possessed as though from birth the secret of creating.
At that period, I had only a very confused notion of Puccini’s opera, of which I had heard only the aria in which the singer Floria Tosca pours out her passion and the one in which her lover, on the point of being shot down, says goodbye to life. I scarcely paid any attention to the exact meaning of the words; but, on a level deeper than that of the anecdote, the union of art and love, the union of love and a despairing death, were conveyed not so much by the words as by the melody, as though art, love, and despairing death had been by definition included in that music, whose beauty expressed, by its existence alone, that the high points of human emotion must involve those three. In order to impress this truth upon me, or at least to give me a sort of obscure prescience of it, all that was needed, therefore, was a song, along with these few guiding words: art and love, love and death, links in a single chain or planets in a single system.
As for the voice that thus deployed something analogous to what is called in cartomancy the great play—I remember that it was ample, pure, powerful, and velvety. But the memory I have of it, though it allows me to evaluate the treasure that my Aunt Claire possessed, does not correspond to it except in a completely formal way and does not have the necessary sharpness for me to be able, mentally, to hear her sing again. Perhaps this voice touched me so closely because I let myself be permeated by it almost without listening to it? Perhaps it was for me only one of the ways, among others, she had of manifesting herself, this radiant creature whom I cannot now succeed in separating distinctly from the setting in which her epiphanies occurred and whose real presence, also, I more or less confound with the image engraved in me, since then, by her photographs? The mantelpiece of white marble with its two candelabras of twisted bronze, the piano, the chandelier which, when the time of our vacation came, was wrapped in a yellowish and slightly shiny cloth that resembled sticking plaster, the large “lusol” lamp whose light seemed to me to have such brilliance, and that other object often seen in the parlor, which, in our house, was the music room, my brother’s violin, of cabinet wood with the undulations of chestnut hair, with its neck, the extremity of which curved back into a lovelock or a bishop’s crook and its bow of white horsehair that the violinist, each time he was to play, would rub on a block of rosin (which, if I think of it with some persistence, appears to me of the same half-translucid blond as a myrrh stone)—those things, once inanimate, are an integral part of all that I have retained of my Aunt Claire as visible person: the blackness of her hair and eyebrows, the red of her strongly drawn mouth, the whiteness of her skin, her rather heavy femininity, even more luxuriant than was appropriate in those first years of the century, and the comfortably gaudy dresses that clothed this plump goddess when, kindly and without the least condescension of a star, she came to pay us a visit.
The large plumed hat, the long beribboned cane, and the slightly too labored elegance that mark, in Floria Tosca, a lowering of social position comparable to that which was for a long time evoked for me by the odd qualifier of “demimondaine”—it is through a portrait of my aunt produced by the studio of some photographer or other, well known at the time, that I see these features. This portrait of her, in a character whose peculiarities of costume appear natural, since they can be explained by the fact that the person involved here is a woman of the theater, show her to me in her true being, in some sense, since the profession of artist was the most important part of her life and since, of that life, I scarcely knew more than this one aspect. Other portraits—which I have contemplated many times—represent her as both herself and something other than herself: Salomé gazing at the severed head of Yokanaan, Electra dancing with her torch, Leonore dressed as Fidelio (an outfit that did not suit her at all and made her look like an ocean-nymph washerwoman who had been induced by unfortunate illusions about her type of beauty to dress up for some costume ball as a chimney sweep or little marmot-exhibiting Savoyard), a princess of the ancient city of Ys in a voluminous crown, or, in contrast, an old Breton woman in a headdress rolling her tragic eyes, a charming farm girl offering a pitcher of wine with a bright smile, a fresh strapping young woman also from Les Pêcheurs de Saint-Jean, her head bearing a huge basket filled with flowers, fruit, fish, or some other sort of victuals. Seen, almost all of them, at Nemours among the great numbers of souvenirs from which my sister has never separated, these other portraits have more reality for me than that one—too distant—of my aunt in finery that evidently situates Tosca, killer of the policeman who is persecuting her lover, midway between the great-hearted courtesan and the beautiful spy. However, the portrait that I would be inclined to say I was infatuated with is that first one, so nebulous that it is cast in doubt and I eventually have to ask myself whether—starting from a photo of my relative in formal visiting dress or from photos of showgirls brilliantly decked out as I used to see them in the pages of programs, and proceeding to a sort of collage such that a figure enriched perhaps artificially with the radiant features of Claire Friché is leaning on a cane that in fact another singer carried in Act I of the drama when I saw it performed a few years ago—I have not, in large part, reconstructed it with the innocent bad faith of a restorer of monuments who believes he is giving a greater impression of authenticity by adding a tower to an old château or a spire to a cathedral.
In the rue des Eburons, at the time of my last visit to Brussels, I had been restrained by a certain fear: that I would appear at once too misty-eyed, in asking that we stop, and too eager to derive a professional advantage from that stop. Yet now I find myself—like a man in love or a scholar examining archival documents—bending over photographs that I am seeking to resurrect in order to rediscover in them the real image of my aunt, at the same time as they provide me, literarily, with what in the language of films is called a sequence of scenes. Is this equivocal manipulation of reflections that I put into words more defensible than the action—quite natural, in truth—that I denied myself? I would doubt it, if there were not this difference: it is one thing to contrive things in such a way that I may artificially fatten my stock of memories, another thing to prepare, shape, and set end to end the sentences in which memories I possess already, without having expressly sought them, reassume a little solidity.
Of these photos that I inspect—in my mind—in order to draw closer to someone who had dazzled me, I have none at hand. But it is probably better that they not be documents to which I could lazily refer: thus hidden, they create, between their subject and me, a connection all the more positive because I find myself, in
some way, precipitated into the wake of the absent woman by this race to which I am incited by images that must always be grasped again and formed again.
If I can scarcely do more than catalogue these portraits, none of which I have seen again since the pursuit was begun, there is one other that I did not know about but have now complete latitude to contemplate and describe, having cut it out of the women’s weekly where it was published more than a year ago, when Italy celebrated Puccini’s centenary. Here, my aunt is shown as she was in 1903, at the time of the first French performance of Tosca, in other words at a time preceding that of my first memories. Very young, and even more beautiful than I knew her, she is seen in profile, her arms bare (with two large bracelets above her two elbows), her head crowned with a heavy mane of hair restrained by a superb headdress: this was her costume in the middle act of the opera, when Floria Tosca has just sung to the court and goes to the home of Baron Scarpia, whom she finally strikes with a knife snatched up from a table. Her lower lip thick and her eyelids half closed, my aunt has in this photo something of the quality of a very gentle animal, and, in the sensual and fierce melancholy into which she seems to have withdrawn, something also of the quality of an odalisque such as one might conceive of them from Rimsky-Korsakov’s Scheherazade (whose orientalism, in the past, was a rich pasture for my adolescent imagination). Her hair, which swells out over her forehead and entirely hides her temples and nape, is dressed with a curious harness that, on top, compresses it with two reins joined together at their base (just above the two ears) and in back supports it in a sort of hairnet whose form recalls rather distantly that of a slice of watermelon cut very thick or, better, that of a chin piece of a helmet that is hooked on, on either side of the head, in the same place as the two reins. At the approximately hexagonal attachment shared by this hairnet and those two reins, a pearl or other precious concretion hangs down in the form of a drop of water, on the brown mop of hair covering the ear, on the lobe of which is fixed a rather long pendeloque whose terminal cross seems appropriate to the piety of this Floria, who will take care—after the murder—to arrange two lit torches beside the body of the torturer who has become her victim and to sanctify it by placing on its chest a crucifix.
The Rules of the Game Series, Volume 3 Page 18