Love Story

by Janine Boissard

  Shortness of breath and, at the same time, the impression of never having breathed so well.

  Since her disappearance, he had missed his breath. To breathe was like having to move a mountain inside of him. The entire universe? And if he imagined himself with her, he felt released.

  An impossible burning, Laura had said. And all that one asks is to continue to burn.

  A single evocation of her name, of a slender body in his arms, a photo of a little girl in a library, and he was aflame. And no, God, he didn’t want to continue burning since she wasn’t here to extinguish the fire.

  Finally, shyly, as though astonished by her own words, Laura had said, You have the feeling that, before, you only seemed to live.

  Really? When he had possessed his two eyes and, full of passion for his profession, he had gone from success to success, Claudio had only seemed to live? If so, he wasn’t asking for anything but to re-enlist.

  You speak as the songs do, he had mocked.

  She had agreed. As Mozart’s songs do.

  This one, for example?

  How could I live, oh little girl, without you?

  Stranger to all joy, I survive in suffering.

  A song entitled “Song of Separation.”

  The rehearsals began at the Champs-Élysées Theater. The director was the same as three years before: a friend of Claudio’s. The Italian baritone who was given the role of Germont, Alfredo’s father, was also a friend. They had often sung together.

  All was in place, as though Claudio’s return to the stage, his successful operation, had been awaited and planned for.

  David hired a publicist. Male. Alerted to this return to the stage, the journalists were generally discreet about the operation. Remembering that the singer had slammed the door when they questioned him about his infirmity and the circumstances surrounding it, they spoke mostly about Verdi’s work and the exceptional couple that Claudio made with his usual partner, Hélène Reigner.

  Ah! If you were mine

  I would watch over your pleasant days

  Like a caretaker.

  This afternoon there were many on stage to rehearse the first act when, during a joyous festival where Alfredo declared his passion to Violetta, Hélène suddenly pushed Claudio away.

  “That’s enough!”

  Her voice was furious, her face aflame with indignation. Everyone stiffened.

  “Look at me,” she ordered the tenor in a rough voice.

  “But I’m not doing anything but that—”

  “Not like before. You’re not looking at me like before.”

  “It’s because I no longer have only sightless eyes to admire you with,” Claudio teased.

  Hélène shook her head angrily.

  “You’re not singing for me, you know that very well.”

  And to general consternation, she walked off the stage.

  Claudio kept quiet. Yes, he knew.

  It had happened the night before. They had just left the theater, six o’clock, a soft and fragrant evening. To relax, they had decided to take a little walk.

  A rehearsal is both a moment of exaltation and a test. The moment for the artist to abandon himself to his character, to struggle to feel what the character feels, to make his character’s feelings his own and to convey them, without disappearing himself. That’s how he convinces others.

  A kind of childbirth from which you emerge happy and emptied.

  Claudio and Hélène had reached the Champs-Élysées. A small crowd was milling in the pathways under trees exploding with buds. Hélène took her companion’s arm. Unusually, she was silent. Preoccupied?

  Suddenly Claudio stiffened. That fragrance! A fragrance that obliterated all others: that of the eau de toilette, “Her.”

  The young woman wearing it had just passed them. Small, thin, shoulder-length chestnut hair, she was alone. Claudio’s heart raced, he couldn’t control his hope. He let go of Hélène’s arm and caught up with the young woman. He put his hand on her shoulder.

  “Laura?”

  The young girl turned. She had a pretty face, dark eyes.

  “My name isn’t Laura, sir.”

  Claudio’s hand fell. No, it was not Laura. And it wasn’t her voice, wild honey, either. How had he imagined it? Decidedly, he had become mad.

  “Excuse me, miss.”

  The unknown woman continued on her way. Near Claudio, Hélène held herself upright, her eyes shining with anger and humiliation.

  “So it’s that,” she hissed between her teeth. “It’s her.”

  He didn’t deny it.

  You’re not singing for me, you know that very well.

  Hélène just left the stage. Everyone surrounded Claudio.

  “What was that all about? What did she want to say? Do you understand this?” asked the director.

  Claudio forced a laugh.

  “The caprice of a diva. Don’t worry; she’ll come back.”

  While waiting, they rehearsed another scene. Inconveniently, Violetta was omnipresent in La Traviata. All the action centered around her and her feelings: love, generosity, renunciation. And when she was absent, people only spoke of her.

  Hélène did not return until the next day.

  36.

  The newspaper was open on the kitchen table, a best-selling tabloid. Maria had brought it with the fresh bread.

  Coming in to greet Maria and ask for his breakfast, Claudio saw the newspaper.

  Under the headline “Claudio Roman and Hélène Reigner: A Love Story?” was a full-page photo of the couple. Leaning toward his partner, Claudio seemed ready to devour her while Hélène shot him a passionate look. A photo taken during a rehearsal.

  Since the dress rehearsal wasn’t scheduled for another two weeks, the two were wearing their normal clothes. For Claudio, jeans and a sweater; for Hélène, a light blouse and skirt. You could have imagined them anywhere but on stage: a couple in love, like so many others.

  Anger filled Claudio. He dropped into a chair to read the interview that accompanied the photo.

  Hélène asserted her happiness to play the heroine of the famous opera with her favorite partner: a plan long in the making, a beautiful dream realized at last.

  Emboldened, the journalist alluded to more intimate relations.

  “It would seem that Claudio Roman and you, you know each other well.”

  “Some would say even ‘better than well,’” Hélène seemed to amuse herself by saying.

  Smelling a scoop, the journalist hadn’t hesitated to push further.

  “About this ‘better than well,’ Hélène Reigner, do you see for yourself a less cruel future that than of Violetta and Alfredo?”

  “Chi lo sa?” Hélène replied.

  “Who knows…the bitch, how dare she?” cried Claudio.

  He got up. Maria made herself very small.

  “Excuse me, sir, I thought you knew.”

  “Knew what?”

  He showed her the headline capping the photo. “About our love story? Did you know?”

  He went out into the courtyard and tried to breathe. A terrible fear suffocated him: if Laura saw this photo, if she read this story, wouldn’t she think that he had erased her from his life?

  The courtyard adjoined the back of the house. It served as Maria’s cleaning and garbage area. Among the bottles to be thrown out was a champagne bottle. To our engagement? Hélène had asked.

  Then there was the young girl on the Champs-Élysées.

  It was clear: she was getting revenge.

  He returned to the kitchen, which was filled with the aroma of coffee. Maria had already put a cup and some bread and jam on a platter. He was no longer hungry.

  He raised his eyes and saw the birdhouse on a shelf. He himself had taken it from the pine tree and put it there. Once, he had thought of keeping it in his bedroom. Why not in the living room, while he was at it. What a jackass he had become.

  Would it be useful next winter?

  He was gripped wit
h pain.

  “Why did she leave?” he murmured.

  Maria watched him, seeming to hesitate.

  “Why, Maria? Do you know?”

  “She must have been afraid, sir. You’re not from the same world.”

  “But that means nothing today,” he argued.

  “For us, yes it does, sir.”

  The coffee was ready. She filled a pot and put it on the platter.

  “Will you take your breakfast in the living room?”

  “Here, please.”

  He took a seat at the table. Maria had folded the newspaper as if to protect him, but she hadn’t dared to take it away. Not from the same world…Claudio knew very well that she was right. It meant that she called him “sir” and he called her by her first name, that she made his bed, washed his clothes, polished his shoes, prepared his meals, and, over some fifteen years of co-existence, they hadn’t shared a single meal.

  Neither one of them found that unusual.

  Try to avoid introducing her to your mother. I’m not sure that she’d appreciate it. Jean Roman had said, laughing, when Claudio had told him that Laura was a baker’s daughter.

  And the baker’s face when he saw the chauffeur-driven car said the same thing.

  Two different worlds.

  “Sorry, Maria,” Claudio murmured.

  He gestured to the photo in the newspaper with a sigh.

  “But you see, it’s not that woman whom I want near me.”

  The woman whom David laughingly called his “nana,” nodded her head as though she understood. He hadn’t mentioned her name once, yet the “little one,” the insignificant one, the modest one about whom he had apparently so little to say, filled the place with her presence.

  “So you love her too,” Maria said.

  Too?

  Claudio’s heart beat harder. Did Maria just tell him that Laura loved him?

  Hélène Reigner also lived on a sixth floor. But with a large elevator, in an apartment with a terrace that looked out onto the Bois de Boulogne that could have held ten sparrow perches.

  Eleven o’clock had chimed when Claudio rapped at her door. She had several times offered to give him a key, but he had always refused.

  A pretty woman in an apron, belonging to the other world, welcomed him with a huge smile.

  “Mr. Roman. Madame will be happy.”

  “Madame” had gone to bed late and just had her bath. He found her on the terrace.

  Hélène, sitting in a rocking chair in her dressing gown, was opening mail, protected from noise and the looks of others by a hedge. She raised her eyes to Claudio.

  “Well, it’s you.”

  He approached and threw the newspaper onto her knees.

  “What gave you the right?”

  She calmly unfolded it and looked at their photo, nodding her head.

  “We’re rather good, don’t you think? I didn’t have the right?”

  In her eyes were irony and defiance. He hated her. It was vengeance.

  “This photograph was published without my approval.”

  “But with mine and that of the production team, my dear. As for the interview, it didn’t seem to me to be a betrayal of state secrets. Our relationship is well known, and aren’t we partners in a great and beautiful adventure?”

  She got up from the chair, letting the newspaper slide to the floor.

  “As for our future, I want to hope that it still exists when you rid your head of that little nothing.”

  Her voice trembled with rage. She returned to the living room. Claudio followed her.

  “You seem to forget that that little nothing allowed me to regain my sight. And that it’s thanks to her that the ‘adventure’ you speak of can be realized,” he said icily.

  “So, grazie, grazie tanto,” Hélène jeered, pretending to grovel.

  She looked him over with pity.

  “You have become completely mad, my love. You should pay attention. If it were known, your reputation as a great seducer could suffer.”

  “I’m not your love,” he said.

  Hélène staggered. She was quiet a moment, trying to catch her breath.

  “You know very well that if you want her, it’s only because she left you,” she said in a husky voice. “Nothing like it has every happened to you before, right?”

  Pain filled her eyes.

  “Believe it or not, my most ardent wish is for you to find her. If I knew where she was hiding, I’d go and get her and bring her here so that you could fuck her. If, however, you still want to after having seen her,” she added with a laugh. “That you fuck her once and for all and never talk about it again.”

  Suddenly she came close to him, her dressing gown open; warm, perfumed, offering herself.

  “Oh, Claudio. Why are you ruining everything?”

  Claudio looked at the tears in Hélène’s eyes and wasn’t moved by them. He didn’t doubt her love, but he didn’t want it anymore: it jeopardized Laura’s return.

  Without pity, he opened his arms, which she hoped would encircle her.

  “You’re wrong,” he said. “If Laura were here, I wouldn’t fuck her; I’d make love to her.”

  He interrupted himself.

  “Besides, I’ve already made love to her. And, as you see, we’re still talking about it.”

  37.

  David heard the piano from the gate. The French doors of the living room were wide open, so he knocked lightly on a pane of glass and went in. Claudio didn’t move from his stool. Schubert.

  The agent threw his briefcase on a chair and awaited the end of the piece, looking at the garden in bloom. Some preferred one season over another, usually this one: spring. David preferred mornings, whatever morning, with a sun rising over a day of work and not of misery as was the case during his childhood in Sofia, Bulgaria. Sometimes he should even prevent himself from getting up too early so that he had enough energy in the evenings.

  “So?” Claudio asked to his back.

  Lost in his thoughts, David hadn’t heard him approach. He turned and saw a face full of mistrust, a dark look…Claudio must suspect why he came.

  “So Hélène is threatening to stop everything, does that surprise you? Can you tell me what happened?”

  “Did you see the newspaper?”

  “I saw it. And I saw nothing in it that justifies the scandal that you created at her apartment.”

  “Scandal is a big word. And it’s Hélène who created it when I asked her to stop telling nonsense about our private life.”

  “I don’t see where the nonsense is.”

  “It’s finished with her, David,” Claudio snapped.

  “One could say that you have chosen the perfect moment for ending…”

  The agent turned his back on the singer and went into the living room. He had promised himself to stay calm; anger didn’t solve anything. But the situation was getting out of his control and he hated that.

  “I had our theater director on the phone,” he told Claudio. “With the director of the opera, the two tried to get Hélène to come back. In vain. According to them, she’s having a nervous breakdown. If, by some bad luck, she makes good on her threat, they see no one they can replace her with. We’re too close to the dress rehearsal.”

  David approached Claudio. Claudio looked at him. Was he really listening to him?

  “In any case, whether you like it or not, the show rests on both your names. People are waiting to hear you together. And the photo that you blamed Hélène for will soon be everywhere; others too. That’s the game. It has nothing to do with your private life. And don’t tell me that Hélène won’t be a superb Violetta. Three years ago, it seemed to me that you wanted her at any price. What changed?”

  “Everything,” murmured Claudio.

  “Such as?”

  The singer turned abruptly toward David.

  “Do you remember Teresa Stratas?”

  David was bewildered. Teresa Stratas had played Violetta in Zeffirelli’s fi
lm. What did she have to do with this?

  “I listened to the CD,” Claudio said. “You didn’t notice? She was like a wounded bird, very fine, very fragile. You wanted to take her in your hands to warm her. That’s no doubt why I fell in love at the time: a sparrow.”

  Incredulity and a kind of fear filled David’s head. Did he understand correctly? Was Claudio comparing Zeffirelli’s Violetta to…Laura?

  “Plácido Domingo could have taken her in his arms without stopping his singing, as happened with Patricia Brooks; everyone talked about it.”

  He’s gone mad, Hélène had cried over the phone. David, that woman has made him crazy.

  And if it were true? If the return of his sight, of his life, had been too abrupt? And the disappearance of she who had made it possible…

  “Do you think she loves me?” Claudio asked in a feverish voice. “Maria thinks so. She told me yesterday morning. She said, So you love her too. Too…”

  Despite his best intentions, David exploded in anger. This was too much. Claudio should understand that their production was at stake.

  “You too? What does that mean?” he cried. “How could you love a girl you’ve never seen?”

  “Stop!” ordered Claudio.

  He held himself upright. In all his splendor, David thought, because in his anger, Claudio had never been so handsome.

  “Stop! Not you! Don’t tell me that if I saw her I wouldn’t want her anymore. Don’t tell me that you didn’t understand anything, you who know her.”

  I who know her…David heard Laura’s voice: He will see, David, he will see, I know it. That faith, that generosity. I think I’m a little afraid, she had also admitted. That birdlike fragility. He remembered the lunch when she had stolen several gulps of scotch. Her humor.

  Was Laura loveable? Could David have loved her?

  The answer was yes.

  Whereas with Hélène, the answer would have been negative: admiration, respect, but certainly not love.

  “Tell me what I didn’t understand,” he asked Claudio gently.

  The singer took a deep breath.