“The house is filling,” Claudio said with a laugh. “Miller also asked me.”
Not to mention his father and Laura.
In the Concorde, he and David hadn’t spoken of anything else: the next opera in which Claudio would perform. His agent claimed to have already had that little idea, but hadn’t wanted to reveal any more to him.
“There’s someone whom you can also thank: your little sister,” said Leblond.
“But I don’t have a little sister, you know that. I’m an only child.”
The doctor smiled mischievously.
“It is, however, she who came to see me to get me to find a transplant quickly.”
“Laura?” asked Claudio, his heart beating faster. “Laura told you that she was my sister?”
“To be sure that I would agree to see her. And she hauled me over the coals when I told her that I couldn’t operate on you at once.”
Claudio closed his eyes for a second. He felt as though he was ceaselessly knocking on a closed door that Laura was behind. Since his return to Paris, Friday evening, he had tried, without success, to contact her. At her home, at The Agency…David had finished by admitting to him that she had left her cell phone at the Pierre. If this continued, he would end up calling her parents. He hadn’t yet dared.
“Tell me how she is,” he begged.
Leblond looked at him, surprised.
“But you know her better than I do.”
“I haven’t yet seen her,” Claudio explained with some difficulty. “She stayed with me until the operation and then disappeared. She wasn’t there when I woke up.”
The doctor heard a cry of distress in his patient’s voice. The little one had disappeared? It was incomprehensible. She had seemed so attached to her singer.
A face full of anxiety awaited his response.
“From what I could tell, she’s a damned good woman,” Leblond said. “Armed with a faith that could move mountains, certain that she knew how to convince you when everyone else had failed, and persuaded that the operation would be a success.”
He remembered Laura, sitting in the same armchair now occupied by Claudio, torn between tears and rebellion, vibrant, alive.
“She brandished Alfredo before her, saying we had to liberate him to allow you to sing La Traviata. When I told her that we didn’t have enough cornea donors in France, do you know what she proposed?”
Claudio shook his head. Leaning forward, he avidly drank in every word Leblond spoke.
“She offered to give you one of her own.”
It hit Claudio in the chest. One of Laura’s corneas? For him? If that wasn’t a joke, if he was that important to her, why did she leave?
“You have to admit, even Violetta wouldn’t do more,” Leblond added with a laugh.
You will be Alfredo, Laura had said to Claudio before disappearing. He felt dizzy.
“And that’s when I spoke about my friend Miller and New York,” Leblond continued. “She was ready to go to the ends of the earth if that would give you the chance to see again.”
“And equally ready to pay for the trip out of her own pocket,” Claudio added.
David had told him that too. And that she had paid for her return flight.
But in the end, he thought, didn’t Violetta destroy herself for Alfredo?
“What is she like, physically?” he asked the doctor.
It was a great frustration not to be able to see for himself, now that he could.
“Small, cute. You would never guess that she had such strength. Another thing: given my profession, I’ve become a specialist in eyes. Hers are…special. Very lively. Hurt. And, after tears, a veritable rainbow.”
Claudio felt Laura’s tears on the tips of his fingers. He had made them fall several times. He would never forgive himself.
Leblond wrote the prescription: wash the eye regularly with the drops. Next appointment in three weeks; earlier if Claudio thought it necessary.
He got up and walked Claudio to the door. The waiting room was full.
“You know, I’m still asking myself how Laura managed to convince you,” the doctor said.
“She got an absurd promise out of me and threatened to leave me if I didn’t fulfill it. In brief: a brazen challenge.”
“And that’s how she saved you,” Leblond concluded.
28.
She saved you.
As if he didn’t know. His desire, more and more frequent, to end, in one way or another, to escape the terror of complete darkness, the shooting pain of not only never being Alfredo, but also Rodolphe and don Carlos and every other major operatic role, where would all of that have led him had Laura not come into his life?
Laura and her shoulder, just at the height of his hand. Laura and her patience, her humor, her modesty. Laura, her baker father, and her sister, Agatha, whom she called “the beautiful one” with a crack in her voice indicating that she suffered from not being “the beautiful one”?
All this was leading to one conclusion: that she had more charm than beauty. Small, cute, a rainbow in her eyes…and that slender body that had held him tight while her arms had held him prisoner.
A field sparrow’s prisoner.
Claudio had known many women. David ungraciously joked with him often on this subject: They all fall for you. Can’t you leave one or two of them for me?
His blindness had changed nothing, awakening in some of them a maternal feeling that he didn’t know what to do with; his mother had largely seen to that. He had fallen in love, but it hadn’t lasted. Very quickly, one or another had made herself too important in his life. And when he retreated, it was always the same reproach: You don’t really love me. It was difficult to make a woman in love accept that music, singing, was the most important thing to him and that it required total freedom.
Jean-Pierre braked abruptly. “Sorry, sir.”
They were near the Maillot gate and the traffic was heavy. Claudio looked at the cars with some curiosity. In three years, their colors had changed: more lively, metallic, almost aggressive. When he could drive again, he promised himself to get a more discreet car than the one that had been attacked.
The bastards.
They never found them.
A car that no one would notice. Like Laura’s?
He covered the eye that had been operated on with his hand and saw nothing but vague, milky whiteness. Then he removed his hand and the curtain of his life was raised.
I see!
Every time he did that, his heart swelled with cheer. He did it often.
“Sir, can I tell you how happy I am?”
He replied to the chauffeur with a smile into the rearview mirror.
“And what about me? If you would like, Jean-Pierre, we will continue together.”
“Thank you, sir.”
Jean-Pierre was David’s driver. After the attack, David had “loaned” him to Claudio. Since then, he and David had decided to share Jean-Pierre until Claudio could drive again.
“And the little lady?” Jean-Pierre asked.
“She’s resting at the moment,” Claudio said. “Now that you ask: how was she with you?”
He couldn’t stop himself from asking questions about her. He would have stopped passersby if he had known that they knew her.
“Very nice, very down-to-earth. She never wanted me to take her back home from Neuilly. She said, ‘I’m used to the Metro, Jean-Pierre. Besides, it’s much faster. You want to race?’ If I may, sir, she wasn’t like some of the other ones.”
Claudio smiled: the other ones…Corinne Massé, for example, his ex-publicist who, because he had shared her bed once or twice, believed she had full rights over him. Or the beautiful Hélène, who never hesitated to use the car to run her errands.
He had known Hélène Reigner some months before the attack, when she had auditioned for the role of Violetta in La Traviata. Young, talented, ardent. And a voice with a purity that contrasted with the unbridled sexual experience of a…courtesan. He
had been smitten with her, but when, after his accident, she had, very generously, suggested that she come to live with him, it was, as it had been for the others, no.
Claudio had only decided the day before to call her to let her know about his trip to the United States and to tell her that he had regained his sight. At first she had been speechless, then, crying with happiness, she had insulted him profusely. How could he have left her in the dark about what he was plotting? He was a monster. She hated him.
Her excesses made him smile. He found her again. And had she not been in a show that evening in Brussels, there was no doubt that she would have gone directly to his house.
Hélène was a gossip; that was why he had kept from her the secret of his operation. He didn’t want the press to know about the operation too soon.
The car moved through the calm avenue bordered by chestnut trees in bud. The driver stopped in front of the gate of the house. Claudio got out.
“Thank you, Jean-Pierre.”
In general, Jean-Pierre didn’t leave until having seen his boss climb the steps, his keys in hand. Guessing that he was pleased to be able to manage by himself, the driver left.
The garden gleamed in the sun, a peaceful lake, green and gold. He had planted some flowers: big clumps of daisies, yellow roses. Leblond had prescribed corrective lenses that he would change as many times as necessary. Claudio hoped not to be obliged to wear glasses on stage. Maria Callas, who could hardly see, did well without them. She even asserted that, freed from the signals of the conductor, she could be entirely in her character, making it that much easier to play her role.
He stopped in the middle of the path.
Wasn’t there a touch of color on the low branch of the pine tree?
His heart suddenly beating hard, he strode across the lawn. It was the bird feeder that Laura had put into his hands when he had surprised her in her studio: red roof, yellow walls, white inside.
He was filled with a mad hope. He let go of the bird feeder and ran to the house. The door wasn’t closed. Laura had the key.
“Laura? Are you here, Laura?”
Two women emerged from the living room: his mother and Hélène. He froze.
“At the risk of disappointing you, it’s just me,” Hélène said. “I’ve come to tell you that I’ll never forgive you for your secrecy.”
She approached and he could read love in her eyes, shining with happiness. He had forgotten how beautiful she was, with her long blonde hair, her generous body. His Valkyrie.
He opened his arms and she threw herself into them.
“All that we will achieve together,” she promised with a sob.
Then Claudio’s mother approached and hugged him. She cried too. He thought of a rainbow in someone’s eyes and stepped away.
“If you’re looking for Laura, she’s not here,” his mother said.
29.
A famous opera singer had once confided to a journalist that, every morning as she woke, she feared that she had lost her voice. Thus, in her own words, she let loose a trill and felt reassured. No, her voice, the salt, the meaning of her life, had not abandoned her.
Since the evening when Hélène had told him—oh, how innocently—that La Traviata was on television, Claudio hadn’t sung again. What good would it do if he would never be Alfredo?
The delight that he had felt, as an adolescent, in discovering Violetta in the Zeffirelli film, had never diminished. Yes, it was love, that perfect union between two beings, body and soul overwhelmed in a single passion. It was in the complete giving that you forgot yourself for the happiness of another.
Already mad about music, if he had wanted so much to play the role of Alfredo one day, it was only in his young man’s dreams that Claudio had changed the story’s ending. He saved Violetta, thus justifying the last words of the opera: “Oh joy!”
And if my voice has left me? If I have lost it in regaining my sight? he asked himself that morning, like the opera singer.
Standing very straight near the piano, his shoulders relaxed, he began by breathing, making the air circulate through his body, turning himself into a wind instrument. Then, his heart beating hard, he took his place in front of the keyboard and began his exercises.
His voice was there.
Different?
This minute change of color, this dark luster, this quivering that ran through it, it seemed to him that only he could perceive them because they came from deep inside him, from a soul transformed by trial.
He had been a brilliant young tenor, happy in his success, in love with life and with women, so his voice had reflected the happiness of living.
During three years of hell, he had become a mortally wounded man, the most important part of his repertoire taken from him, deprived of a future, who sang only abandonment, suffering, and night.
This morning he was miraculously healed, still hesitant on the edge of light, on the edge of joy.
Your voice taught me to see the colors of life more clearly.
A young girl had timidly spoken those words. She had allowed him to see these colors again, and then she had taken off.
Claudio stopped singing.
The day before, without telling anyone, he’d had Jean-Pierre take him to The Agency. His appearance there had provoked a minor frenzy. A swarm of young, pretty women had assailed him. Although he was wearing dark glasses, he couldn’t hide the fact that he saw them. The most talkative, and also the most moved, was Monique, Laura’s assistant.
When he expressed his desire to speak with her alone, he felt a gust of jealousy.
There were two long tables in her office. Apart from a telephone, Laura’s table was empty. On the walls, Claudio saw several photos of himself, a poster. He went over. It was the poster announcing his concert in Auxerre, there where he had gotten to know the sparrow.
He returned to Monique.
“When did you last see her?”
“Monday morning, when she came to get her things.” That he knew; David had told him.
“Did she tell you where she was going?”
The young woman sadly shook her head.
“She only told me that she was quitting and that I should stay to take calls and pass them on to Mr. May.”
“She didn’t leave a phone number?”
“Nothing.”
Claudio looked at the photos on the wall. The idea that Laura could be standing a few feet from him and that he would be unable to recognize her was intolerable. Quaking with fear and hope, he asked the question he had come to ask.
“Do you have a picture of her?”
Monique laughed.
“Don’t you know, Mr. Roman? Laura hated photographs. It’s even a big joke around here. As soon as a photographer appears, she flies off.”
His sparrow flew off.
He had nothing more to do there.
All the young women swarmed around again as he was led to the exit. Monique had caught up with him at the door and held out an envelope.
“When you see her, Mr. Roman, could you give her this? She forgot it.”
Claudio hadn’t had the patience to wait until he was back home to open the envelope. He ripped it open in the car.
It contained a spiral notebook like the ones used by students. Laura had written her name on the first page and, seeing her writing instead of seeing her, Claudio had been relieved that Jean-Pierre couldn’t see his face.
It was small, straight, tight writing, over which he had to glue his nose to decipher it. Writing like a secret told to herself. In the notebook, he had found the names of all the cities to which she had accompanied him, the names of the pieces he had sung there, and the dates of the trips. For each entry, she had noted the gardens, parks, and churches but never museums or exhibitions. It was a map of walks.
Migratory bird, she had also noted Vienna, Geneva, Brussels, London.
Don’t you want to walk a little? she had proposed the day after each concert. I found some interesting places. A
nd he had been astonished that she had known the places so well.
Everything had been meticulously prepared in secret.
Sometimes he agreed, sometimes not. Sometimes he snubbed her, as in Vienna, where he had sung don José in Carmen before the attack. To see what? The opera house? I know it, believe me.
So without saying anything, Laura must have closed her notebook on the booty she collected for him.
That’s why, one day, when Claudio asked her how she spent her evenings, she had replied with a light laugh: I travel.
He put his hands back on the piano. Mozart lied: “Evening Song for Laura.”
30.
“He’s singing, sir. He began again,” a delighted Maria said to David, who had barely put his foot into the entryway.
David stopped and listened. Claudio was singing at half voice, accompanying himself on the piano.
Maria took his gabardine coat, hung it up, then signaled for him to follow her into the kitchen, the site of their plotting. She had been very useful to him during these difficult weeks. He would always be grateful.
“The woman left yesterday,” she confided in him. “It didn’t go well.”
“Tell me.”
“They argued over Miss Laura. The woman said that she was just a pretentious woman who had shown herself to be very disagreeable with her. Mr. Claudio got angry. She slammed the door.”
“Well, good riddance, then,” David said.
Maria smiled. Then her face darkened.
“Why isn’t Miss Laura here?” she asked. “Mr. Claudio needs her.”
David May didn’t reply. He won’t need you anymore. How much longer would he reproach himself with those words spoken too lightly to a little girl with a heart burning with love? This morning he was convinced: Laura loved Claudio. If she was staying away, it was out of fear that he would be disappointed when he saw her. She’d rather leave when they had good feelings toward each other. Could he blame her?
He didn’t feel he had the right to tell Maria this. It seemed to him it would be a betrayal of friendship. So he contented himself with putting his hand on the good woman’s shoulder.
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