“Let’s hope she comes back.”
The door to the living room was ajar. A habit since the time Claudio couldn’t see, to discreetly reassure himself that everything was all right. A habit to quit.
Before entering, David stopped for a few seconds. He came with two pieces of news: one good, one bad. When you asked people which one they’d rather hear first, nearly all responded “the bad,” hoping to be comforted by the good.
David decided to do the opposite. He would tell the excellent news first to deaden the shock of the bad. What Maria had just told him encouraged him.
He went into the living room and listened.
David had followed the evolution of this beautiful, dusky voice for nearly sixteen years. He knew its every nuance. He thought that he had helped Claudio forge his instrument, that it was a little thanks to him that the singer’s talent had developed, and, even though he treated himself like an old fart, this idea made David feel important and rooted him in his itinerate life.
Mozart.
Thus flew the most beautiful hours of my life.
Thus they flew as if dancing.
David closed his eyes to hear better. Wasn’t there a new tint to Claudio’s voice? A kind of deep, dark quivering that made it more…like a cello?
The curtain falls.
For us, the play is over.
Tears filled his eyes. This was no longer a cry of rebellion he heard, but a muted moan, that of a wounded soul.
Claudio stopped singing. He stayed still for several seconds, then turned.
“I heard the man with the big feet.”
David laughed and went toward him.
“The admirer, the fan…You sing well, my son.”
Claudio closed the piano and rose.
“What good wind brings the father?”
“Big news.”
“Should I sit down?”
“Stay standing; you’ll be able to fly easier that way.”
“My wings are already unfolded.”
“The Champs-Élysées Theater wants to put on a production of La Traviata with you in the role of Alfredo. The show is scheduled for mid-June. Rehearsals begin in two weeks.”
Claudio stiffened. Then, with a slow and uncertain step, he moved toward the French windows, opened them, and went out into the garden.
Happiness that is too great is violence, David thought. He craves silence.
As soon as he had returned from New York, and after being assured by Dr. Leblond that Claudio could take on the role, David had called his friend, the director of the ChampsÉlysées Theater. It was for that same theater that Claudio had rehearsed La Traviata before the attack. The chance, the luck, David couldn’t stop himself from thinking “the destiny,” that someone had cancelled and had left the latter half of June free. The day before, he had met the theater director and the director of the opera. All they needed was Claudio’s assent to put the plan in motion.
Claudio stopped near the pine tree in the middle of the lawn. David joined him there. A little, colorful house was hanging from a branch of the tree. Claudio rocked it with his finger.
“You will be Alfredo…That’s the last thing she said to me,” he growled in a dark voice. “She said that to me, then she left.”
David was abashed. He had hoped for a shout of joy, but instead Claudio raised the subject of Laura. If he had thought intensely about what Claudio represented to Laura, he had barely asked himself what Claudio felt for her. Could he love her too?
No, it was impossible. He had never seen her with his own eyes. And never bedded her, as he liked to say of his conquests. His tastes always ran toward dazzling, fiery, talented women. Like Hélène.
So what, then? Habit? Affection? Gratitude?
Claudio turned toward him.
“I went to The Agency yesterday,” he said with defiance.
“I know. Henri told me,” David replied calmly. “He called me. He was sorry he wasn’t there. It seems that you created quite a stir. The women only spoke about you, your recovery. After that, there is no hope that journalists are going to remain ignorant of the miracle.”
“She didn’t leave anything,” Claudio continued as though he hadn’t heard. “Not an address, not a phone number.”
“And you know what that means?” David said. “That she wants to be left in peace. Stop looking for her; respect her decision.”
“I’ll respect her decision when she explains it to us,” Claudio exploded. “When I have her here, in front of me.”
“But that’s exactly what she doesn’t want, don’t you understand? She doesn’t want you to see her.”
“How do you know that?”
David took a small envelope out of his pocket. It was time to announce the bad news.
“I found this in my mail. It’s the key to this house, without a word.”
Claudio seized the envelope, took out the key, clenched it in his fist. There was nothing in his face but suffering.
“Why now? Why didn’t she leave it at the Pierre with everything else? I would hope…”
“Very probably because she hadn’t taken it with her to New York and she waited until we returned to give it back,” David explained in a gentler voice.
Claudio reached his fist toward the birdhouse, and for an instant David thought he was going to destroy it. The fist fell, and the singer turned around and went back into the living room. David followed.
“The role of Violetta is going to be offered to Hélène. If you agree, of course.”
It was what he had foreseen three years earlier. They had begun rehearsing the main duets of the opera together.
“Of course,” Claudio said in a dim voice.
“She doesn’t know about this. Do you want me to tell her?”
“That’s pointless. I’ll do it myself. She’s coming this afternoon.”
31.
He looked at the woman lying on his bed, so beautiful. This artist full of fire and talent who just gave herself to him, with whom he had shared pleasure, his mistress, his dazzling partner, and he said to himself, I should be happy.
When, at the beginning of the evening, cloaked in perfume, gold, and muslin, she had rung the bell, he had decided to be happy. He had opened a bottle of champagne for her and they had played a guessing game.
“What are we toasting?”
She had three guesses.
“To your recovery?” she had asked.
“That’s already over. Go further.”
“To a future concert that we’re going to give together.”
“You’re very warm. But it’s even better.”
With a timid laugh, she, who wasn’t timid at all, had tossed out, “To our engagement?”
Surprised, he had clinked his glass against hers, laughing.
“To you. To Violetta.”
And she had cried with happiness.
She opened her eyes, saw his face above her, and smiled.
“Let’s go away,” she said. “A few days just by ourselves. You could do with some sun.”
“My new eye isn’t allowed to see the sun,” he joked.
“OK then, let’s go north; it doesn’t matter where. To erase what happened and return to what we had before.”
Before…when they had just met, Claudio was in love. When they began rehearsing La Traviata. Before the unhappiness.
“You don’t erase,” he said. “You navigate around the past in trying to go forward.”
She raised her arms to stretch, and her numerous bracelets clinked together. She did what was necessary to remain tan all year, and the blondeness on her matte skin made him think of a lioness.
“I’m so happy,” she sighed. “I can’t believe it.”
“I can hardly believe it either,” he admitted.
She lay against him and they were silent for a minute. He suddenly wanted to be alone.
“If you don’t mind, don’t say anything to journalists yet.”
“But why?” Hélène compla
ined.
The media were a part of the strategy. They both understood that.
“How is it that you still haven’t announced that you’ve regained your sight?” she asked.
“I don’t want any chatter right now. I don’t want to answer questions.”
“You’ll have to, one day.”
“David will be in charge of that when I give him the green light.”
She propped herself up on an elbow, watching his reaction, speaking in a flat voice. “Speaking of that, your little publicist: Are you keeping her?”
“She resigned,” he said.
“That’s good,” she said. “A sweet girl, but certainly not up to handling your return to the stage. That will be an enormous event: our return!”
Without taking her eyes off Claudio, she put her hand on him, walking her fingertips, with their scarlet, almost black, fingernails, down his belly. Her fingers, those of a diva, sumptuously jeweled, just grazed his groin, then abandoned it, before taking his sex, squeezing it, leaving it again, a kind of lovers’ blackmail: I want, I don’t want anymore, I decide, call me, surrender.
He closed his eyes. The last woman he had had in his bed had been the little publicist who wasn’t up to the task. And it was she who had allowed him to return to the stage.
You will be Alfredo.
He imagined Laura’s hand on him, fine, light, without any rings, without nail polish, and he was seized by a violent desire. He pushed Hélène aside and left the bed.
“Are you fleeing?” she asked.
“I’m hungry,” he lied. “I invite you to dinner, wherever you’d like, Madame.”
He went to the bathroom. It must have been close to eight o’clock. After dinner, he would ask Hélène to put him into a taxi. If she insisted on accompanying him back to his house, he would not invite her in.
Even in love, he had never wanted to have a woman stay overnight, to find her when he woke, to share his breakfast. He always reserved two hotel rooms, even during pleasure trips. Hélène had often complained about it. His mornings were sacred, he explained, reserved for silence and singing.
Are we going to drink to our engagement? she had asked an instant before. He must be careful not to let her get the wrong idea.
He started the shower. The memory of a slender body in his king-size bed at the Pierre returned to him. A modest body, as though looking to forget itself. A sparrow resting a moment within reach of his hand before flying off. For which skies? The absence engulfed him like dark water.
Hélène was waiting for him at the door to the bathroom, naked. She held out a glass of champagne.
“Io amo Alfredo,” she said.
32.
One day—Claudio must have been eight, the age when one still wrote essays at school—he had been asked to define “optimism” and “pessimism.” In his homework, he had naively written: “Optimism is Daddy, pessimism is Mommy.”
His father was always positive: plans, excursions, trips…skating on the Central Park Lake. Claudio’s mother put the brakes on everything: too risky, too far, too dangerous…when it wasn’t unreasonable or ridiculous. As though to dream, to create, or simply to amuse himself seemed to her useless, if not contemptible.
When he had abandoned his law studies to devote himself to singing, his father had encouraged him: If that’s what you want, go for it! Be careful, his mother had said.
And when, upon his return from the United States, he had announced to her I’ve already regained more than one-fifth of my sight, she showed her joy, but even as she whispered into his ear, Look after yourself, all the same, which had chilled his heart.
Agreeing to meet with his father after almost three years of silence, Claudio had asked himself how he should greet him. Jean Roman had been content with a few moving words, and he clasped Claudio in his arms.
I was sure that everything would be all right.
He had been one of those who, the day after the accident, had pushed Claudio to apply for a cornea transplant. Claudio hadn’t wanted to hear about it.
It’s important to have a father who believes in miracles, Laura had said before asking him for a small piece of the moon: to reconcile with his father.
Looking at the man in front of him, an energetic face full of happiness at finding his son again, Claudio understood once more that his mother had secreted her poison.
Your father left. He couldn’t stand seeing you diminished. Men are, in the end, cowards in the face of adversity. I’m here.
She had tried everything to impose herself on him in Neuilly. Thank God—and David—he had held firm in his refusal. But he had broken with “the fugitive.”
With one sentence, Jean Roman had just set the record straight.
“I couldn’t stand the atmosphere of permanent mourning in which she insisted I live. I believed in you.”
Forgive him, Laura had pleaded.
He looked his father in the eye.
“Forgive me,” he said.
They had finished dining in a restaurant on the Seine, near the Champs-Élysées Theater. He hadn’t chosen it by chance. Barges trimmed with ribbons slid along the water. In the avenues, the trees were beginning to bud.
I see.
“Do you intend to go back to live with Mother?” Claudio asked.
“Would you be angry with me if I said no?”
Claudio shook his head; the decision relieved him.
He remembered Hélène yesterday. When they had returned from the restaurant, she had insisted that he take her home with him, and when he had refused, she had treated him like a selfish man, an aged boy.
Was it because of the difficult relations between his parents, his mother, a wet blanket and possessive, that he had never wanted to commit himself? The fear of being trapped? Hadn’t music been an easy pretext? This evening, as he asked himself the question, he felt a sense of liberation.
But that wouldn’t make it easier for his relations with his fiery partner.
The maître d’ served the cognac they had ordered in large, balloon glasses and opened a box of cigars in front of them. The cigars were of every type. Jean Roman chose one with care before lighting it himself. Claudio missed none of his gestures, and the rough, woody, honeyed aroma filled him with a forgotten sense of well-being. Finding that again, he realized that sense wasn’t only the embraces and the forgiveness; it was also becoming reacquainted with old pleasures resting in the still waters of memory, what one called the “rootlets,” attached to the deepest roots.
“Would you like to hear some big news?” he asked. “You will very soon be able to admire your son in La Traviata.”
His father’s eyes glowed.
“Alfredo? Really?”
“Alfredo and the beautiful Hélène in the role of Violetta.”
Jean Roman also called the singer “the beautiful Hélène.” Claudio had introduced them before his accident and said that he was madly in love.
“My God! What a superb recovery gift you’re offering us, my son. You’re going to have a great success.”
Is that wise? his mother would have asked.
Claudio turned toward Paris. He looked for the lit dome of Sacré-Coeur, Montmartre.
“I met someone,” he said.
Jean Roman pricked up his ears, surprised by his son’s voice, suddenly hoarse, as though astonished by his own words. It was rare for Claudio to confide in him.
“A singer?” he asked carefully. “Do I know her?”
“No. She’s not a singer, but she understands music.” In a more lively tone: “I promised her that I would invite you both to the première of La Traviata. That would be a double pleasure for me.”
Claudio sipped some cognac, as did his father. He had abandoned his cigar. To be there, available, with nothing pressing…Don’t break the fragile thread of trust, of confidences.
“I imagine that she’s very beautiful,” he said.
Claudio shook his head.
“It seems that she’s n
ot. Not even pretty. But she is charming, with beautiful eyes.”
“It seems?” Jean Roman was abashed. Claudio gestured to the full dining room.
“You see, if Hélène walked in here, all eyes would be on her, all conversations would be interrupted. The other, you wouldn’t even notice her.”
“And how did you meet her?”
Claudio hesitated.
“We were introduced. She’s from a little village in Normandy. Her father is a baker.”
Jean Roman couldn’t stifle a laugh.
“Try to avoid introducing her to your mother. I’m not sure she’d appreciate it.”
Claudio was serious. Had Jean really heard?
“She is cheerful, like a little girl, and wild, like a bird,” Claudio continued. “Also stubborn as a mule, and more generous than a fucking nun. Besides, she believes in miracles.”
Again he looked at the city, seeming to search there for the one of whom he had just painted this curious portrait. Claudio had often talked about his love affairs. As often as possible, he had joked. Sometimes he spoke crudely about women he had “had,” so as not to use another word. This was the first time that his father had heard him speak of love.
“Will I have to wait until the première to be introduced?” he asked.
“Let’s hope not,” Claudio replied.
And Jean Roman wondered why the look on his son’s face was again dark, as though obscured by the night.
33.
Hearing, one more time, a masculine voice reply to him, almost mechanically, Claudio dialed the number of the studio, trembling uncontrollably.
Later he would ask himself why.
He asked to speak with Laura Vincent.
“But she doesn’t live here anymore. I’m the new tenant,” the man replied, and Claudio’s chest relaxed.
“Can I come over?” he heard himself ask.
At the other end of the line, there was hesitation: seven o’clock at night, some unknown person…and who knew if the person to whom he was speaking was getting ready to go out? So Claudio revealed who he was. Usually he avoided it.
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