“Everyone knows there’s no cure for this,” she pronounced as soon as Mama Fresia stepped across her threshold two days later.
“Is my baby going to die, then?”
“That I cannot say, but she will suffer, oh that I do not doubt.”
“What is it she has?
“She has a fixation on love. Strong trouble. That girl left her window open one clear night and it crawled into her body while she was asleep. There’s no spell can cure it.”
Resigned, Mama Fresia went back home. If the art of that all-wise machi could not change Eliza’s fate, then the little she knew, and all her saints’ candles, were not going to help.
Miss Rose
Miss Rose kept an eye on Eliza with more curiosity than compassion; she knew the symptoms well and, in her experience, time and obstacles extinguish even the most stubborn fires of love. She had been barely sixteen when she’d fallen head over heels in love with a Viennese tenor. She was living in England at that time, and dreamed of being a diva despite the stubborn opposition of her mother and her brother Jeremy, who had been head of the family since their father’s death. Neither of them considered the opera to be a desirable occupation for a lady, principally because it was performed in theaters, at night, and wearing low-cut gowns. Nor could she count on the support of her brother John, who had joined the navy and showed up at home barely a couple of times a year, always in a rush. Exuberant and tanned by the sun of far-off lands and exhibiting some new tattoo or scar, he would always manage to disrupt the routines of the small family. He handed out gifts, dazzled them with his exotic tales, and immediately disappeared into the red-light district, where he stayed until the moment to ship out again. The Sommers were country gentry without any great ambitions. They had owned land for several generations, but the father, bored with dumb sheep and poor harvests, had wanted to try his fortunes in London. He loved books so much that he was quite capable of depriving his family of food and going into debt to acquire first editions signed by his favorite authors, but he lacked the greed of dyed-in-the-wool collectors. After fruitless ventures into commerce, he decided to give rein to his true vocation, and ended by opening a shop for antiquarian books and others he published himself. In the back of the bookstore he set up a small press, which he operated with the help of two assistants, and in an upstairs room of the same shop his trade in rare books grew at a snail’s pace. Of his three children, only Rose shared his interests; she grew up with a passion for music and reading, and when she was not sitting at the piano or doing her voice exercises they could find her in a corner reading. Her father lamented that Rose was the one who loved books and not Jeremy or John, who could have inherited his business. At his death, the male heirs liquidated the press and bookshop. John went off to sea and Jeremy took over the care of his widowed mother and his sister. He earned a modest salary as an employee of the British Import and Export Company, Ltd., and had a small income from his father, in addition to his brother John’s sporadic contributions, which often arrived in the form of contraband instead of negotiable currency. Jeremy, scandalized, would store those accursed boxes in the garret, unopened, until the next visit of his brother, who then took responsibility for selling the contents. The family moved to modest chambers that were expensive for their means but well situated in the heart of London. Jeremy considered it a good investment; they must marry Rose well.
At sixteen, the girl’s beauty began to flower and there were suitors to spare, well placed and prepared to die of love, but while her friends busied themselves looking for husbands, Rose was looking for a singing master. Which was how she met Karl Bretzner, a Viennese tenor who had come to London to perform in several Mozart works, which were to culminate one stellar night in The Marriage of Figaro with the royal family in attendance. Bretzner’s appearance revealed nothing of his enormous talent: he looked like a butcher. His physique—barrel-chested but thin in the pins—lacked elegance, and his ruddy face, topped with a mass of salt-and-pepper curls, added up to a rather vulgar whole, but when he opened his mouth to delight the world with the torrent of his voice he was transformed into a different creature: he grew taller, his potbelly was sucked up into the cavern of his chest, and his Teutonic, apoplectic face was filled with Olympic light. At least that was how he was seen by Rose Sommers, who was able to get tickets for every performance. She would come to the theater long before it opened and, defying the scandalized glances of passersby little accustomed to seeing a girl of her class unaccompanied, wait at the actor’s entrance for hours to catch a glimpse of the maestro getting out of his carriage. On Sunday night, the man noticed the beauty stationed in the street, and went over to speak to her. Trembling, she answered his questions and confessed her admiration for him and her wishes to follow in his footsteps in the arduous but divine path of bel canto—to use her words.
“Come to my dressing room after the performance and we shall see what I can do for you,” he said in his precious, strongly Austrian-accented voice.
And that she did, walking on air. When the standing ovation faded, an usher sent by Karl Bretzner led Rose behind the wings. She had never seen the inner workings of a theater but she wasted no time admiring the ingenious machines for making storms or the painted landscapes on the drops; her only goal was to meet her idol. She found him enveloped in a gold-trimmed, royal-blue dressing gown, still wearing his makeup and an elaborate wig of white curls. The usher closed the door and left them alone. The room, crammed with mirrors, furniture, and draperies, smelled of tobacco, stage makeup, and mold. In one corner stood a screen painted with scenes of rosy-fleshed women in a Turkish harem and costumes on clothes racks lined the walls. Seeing her idol so near, Rose’s enthusiasm flagged for a few moments, but he soon regained the lost ground. He took her hands in his, lifted them to his lips, and kissed them slowly, then from deep in his chest voiced a do that rattled the screen of the odalisques. Rose’s last hesitations crumbled, like the walls of Jericho, in the cloud of powder that rose from the wig as the artist peeled it from his head with a passionate, virile gesture and tossed it upon a chair where it lay as inert as a dead rabbit. His hair was crushed beneath a tightly knit hair net that, added to the makeup, lent him the air of an aged courtesan.
Upon the same chaise longue where the wig had landed, Rose would offer Bretzner her virginity a couple of days afterward, at exactly three-fifteen in the afternoon. The Viennese tenor had made a date with her, using the pretext of showing her the theater that Tuesday when there was no performance. They met secretly in a tearoom, where he delicately savored five cream éclairs and two cups of chocolate while she stirred her tea, so frightened and excited she couldn’t swallow. From there they went straight to the theater. At that hour there was no one around but two women cleaning the foyer and a man readying the oil lamps, torches, and candles for the following day. Karl Bretzner, skilled in the perils of love, produced a bottle of champagne with a magician’s dexterity and poured each of them a glass, which they drank down in a toast to Mozart and Rossini. He then installed Rose in the imperial plush box where only the king sat, every inch of which was adorned with chubby cupids and overblown roses, then went down to the stage. Standing on a segment of painted plaster column, lighted by the foot lamps, he sang for her alone an aria from The Barber of Seville, displaying all his vocal agility and the soft delirium of his voice with endless embellishments. As the last note of his homage faded he heard the distant sobs of Rose Sommers; with unexpected agility he ran toward her; crossing the hall, he gained the box in two bounds and fell to his knees at her feet. Breathless, he laid his large head upon the girl’s skirt, burying his face in folds of moss-colored silk. He wept with her because, without intending it, he, too, had fallen in love; what had begun as yet another fleeting conquest had in a few hours been transformed into incandescent passion.
Rose and Karl got to their feet, supporting one another, stumbling, terrified before the inevitable, and with no idea how, they walked down a long corridor in darknes
s, climbed a short staircase, and reached the area of the dressing rooms. The cursive letters of the tenor’s name marked one of the doors. They went into the room cluttered with furniture and dusty, sweaty costumes where they had been alone for the first time only two days before. The room had no windows and for a moment they sank into the refuge of darkness, recovering breath lost in sobs and sighs while he lighted first a match and then the five candles of a candelabrum. In the trembling yellow light of the flames they admired one another, confused and clumsy, filled with a torrent of emotions but unable to articulate a single word. Rose could not withstand the eyes stripping her bare and hid her face in her hands, but he pulled them away with the same delicacy he had earlier used to demolish the cream pastries. They began with tiny, tear-wet kisses, dove pecks, which developed naturally into serious kisses. Rose had experienced tender, but very hesitant and hasty, encounters with some of her suitors, and one or two of them had managed to brush her cheek with his lips, but she had never imagined it possible to reach such a degree of intimacy that another’s tongue could wind around hers like a lewd snake or that she could be slathered with someone else’s saliva externally and invaded internally, but her initial repugnance was soon conquered by the stimulus of youth and her enthusiasm for the lyrical. Not only did she return Bretzner’s caresses with equal intensity, she took the initiative by removing her hat and the short gray karakul cape around her shoulders. From there to allowing him to unbutton her jacket, and then her blouse, was but a few capitulations. She was able to follow the mating dance step by step, guided by instinct as well as the forbidden books she had furtively pulled from her father’s shelves. That was the most memorable day of her life, and she would remember it—adorned and exaggerated—in the most minute detail in the years to come. That was to be her source of experience and knowledge, the fount of inspiration for nourishing her fantasies and, years later, for creating the art that would make her famous in certain very secret circles. That marvelous day she could compare in intensity with only one other, two years later in Valparaíso, in March, when the newborn Eliza fell into her arms as consolation for the children she would never have, for the men she would never love, and for the hearth she would never call hers.
The Viennese tenor turned out to be a very refined lover. He loved and knew women to their marrow, but he was able to erase from his memory the relics of past loves, the frustrations of multiple farewells, the jealousies, disasters, and deceptions of other relationships and give himself with complete innocence to his brief passion for Rose Sommers. His experience had not come from pathetic embraces with squalid whores; Bretzner prided himself on never having had to pay for pleasure because women of varied station, from humble chambermaids to arrogant countesses, gave themselves to him unconditionally after they heard him sing. He learned the arts of love at the same time he learned those of singing. He was ten when he fell in love with the person who was to be his mentor, a Frenchwoman, old enough to be his mother, with the eyes of a tigress and breasts of pure alabaster. She, in turn, had been initiated at the age of thirteen, in France, by Donatien-Alphonse-François de Sade. Daughter of a gaoler in the Bastille, she had met the famous marquis in the filthy cell in which he wrote his perverse stories by the light of a candle. She used to watch him through the bars with a child’s simple curiosity, unaware that her father had sold her to the prisoner in exchange for a gold watch, the impoverished noble’s last possession. One morning when she was peering through the peephole in the cell door, her father took the large ring of keys from his waist, opened the door, and, as one feeds a lion his prey, with a push thrust the girl into the cell. What happened there she could not remember; it was enough to know that she stayed with de Sade, following him from gaol to the worse poverty of freedom, learning everything he had to teach her. When in 1802 the marquis was locked up in the madhouse of Charenton, she was left on her own without a centime but with a vast storehouse of amatory wisdom that helped her win a husband fifty-two years older than she, and very wealthy. He died not long after, exhausted by the excesses of his young wife, and she finally was free and with money to do whatever she wished. She was thirty-four years old; she had survived her brutal apprenticeship at the side of the marquis, the poverty of bread crusts in her childhood, the turmoil of the French Revolution, the terror of the Napoleonic wars, and now she had to put up with the dictatorial repression of the empire. She had had enough, her spirit yearned for a truce. She decided to look for a safe place to spend the rest of her days in peace, and chose Vienna. It was during this period in her life that she met Karl Bretzner, her neighbors’ son; he was barely ten, but even by then he was singing like a nightingale in the cathedral choir. Thanks to her, now the friend and confidante of the Bretzners, the boy was not, as the choir director had recommended, castrated that year to preserve his cherubic voice.
“Do not touch him, and before you know it he will be the best-paid tenor in Europe,” she predicted. She was not mistaken.
Despite the enormous discrepancy in age, an unusual relationship developed between the woman and the young Karl. She admired the boy’s purity of sentiment and his dedication to music; in her he found the muse who not only saved his manhood but also taught him to use it. By the time his voice had changed and he had begun to shave, he had mastered the eunuch’s proverbial talent in pleasing a woman in ways not foreseen by nature and custom, but with Rose Sommers he took no risks. No fierce assault in a flurry of overly daring caresses, for this was not a time to shock with tricks of the seraglio, he decided, never suspecting that in less than three practical lessons his student would surpass him in inventiveness. He was a man who was careful about details and he knew the hallucinatory power of le mot juste in the hour of love. With his left hand he undid one by one the small mother-of-pearl buttons down Rose’s back while with the right he took the pins from her hair, never losing the rhythm of kisses interspersed with a stream of compliments. He spoke of the smallness of her waist, the pristine whiteness of her skin, the classic roundness of her throat and shoulders, all of which, he said, kindled a fire in him, an uncontrollable madness.
“I am deranged. I do not know what is happening to me, never have I, never shall I, love anyone as I do you. This is the miraculous meeting of two souls destined never to part,” he murmured again and again.
He recited his entire repertoire, but without hypocrisy, deeply convinced of his own honesty and dazzled by Rose. He untied the strings of her corset and removed petticoats until she was wearing only her long batiste underdrawers and a sheer camisole that revealed the strawberries of her nipples. He did not remove her high-laced kid shoes with the curved heels or the white stockings fastened at her knees with embroidered garters. At that point he stopped, panting, with a planetary clamor in his breast, convinced that Rose Sommers was the most beautiful woman in the universe, an angel, and that his heart was going to explode and scatter him in pieces if he did not calm himself. He picked her up effortlessly, crossed the room, and stood her before a large mirror with a golden frame. The winking light of the candles and the theatrical wardrobe on the walls, a confusion of brocades, feathers, velvets, and faded laces, gave the scene an air of unreality.
Disarmed, drunk with emotion, Rose looked at herself in the mirror and did not recognize that woman in her undergarments, her hair wild and cheeks aflame, whom some man, also unrecognizable, was kissing on the neck as he greedily fondled her breasts. That avid interlude gave the tenor time to catch his breath and some of the lucidity he had lost during their preliminary skirmishes. He began taking off his clothes, facing the mirror, uninhibited, and—it must be said—looking much better out of his clothes than in them. He needs a good tailor, Rose thought. She had never seen a naked man, not even her brothers as children, and her information was based on overblown descriptions in the racy books and Japanese postcards she had discovered in her uncle John’s luggage, in which the male organs were depicted in frankly optimistic proportions. The rosy, perky gherkin revealed before he
r eyes did not frighten her, as Karl Bretzner had feared, but instead provoked irrepressible and joyful giggles. And that set the tone for what followed. Instead of the solemn, rather doleful ceremony a deflowering can be, they pleasured themselves in playful caperings, chasing one another around the room, hopping over furniture like children; they drank the rest of the champagne and opened another bottle to spray one another with bubbling foam; risqué phrases rolled out with laughter, whispers brought oaths of love, as they bit and licked and frolicked in the bottomless tidal pool of newly discovered love, all through the afternoon and well into the night, without a thought for the time or for the rest of the universe. Only they existed. The Viennese tenor led Rose to epic heights, and she, a diligent student, followed without hesitation and, once at the summit, took wing on her own with surprising natural talent, guided by signs and asking what she could not guess, dazzling hér maestro and finally besting him with her improvised skills and the annihilating gift of her love. When they could bear to pull themselves apart and return to reality, the clock showed ten o’clock. The theater was empty, darkness ruled outside, and, to top everything off, a fog thick as meringue had settled in.
A frenetic exchange began between the lovers—notes, flowers, bonbons, copied verses, and small sentimental trinkets—that lasted as long as the season in London. They met where they could; passion caused them to lose all prudence. To gain time they looked for hotel rooms near the theater, indifferent to the possibility of being recognized. Rose escaped the house with ridiculous excuses, but her terrified mother said nothing to Jeremy of her suspicions, praying that her daughter’s madness was temporary and would disappear without leaving a mark. Karl Bretzner came late to rehearsals, and from whipping off his clothes at any hour he caught a cold and missed two performances. Far from being sorry, he used the time for lovemaking enhanced by feverish chills. He would come to the rented room with flowers for Rose, champagne to drink and to bathe in, cream pastries, poems written on the fly to read in bed, aromatic oils to rub into places until then sealed, erotic books they paged through seeking the most inspiring scenes, ostrich feathers for tickling, and countless other props for their games. The girl felt that she was opening like a carnivorous flower, emitting demonic perfumes to attract her man like a Venus’s-flytrap, crushing him, swallowing him, digesting him, and finally spitting out the splinters of his bones. She was suffused with unbearable energy, she was drowning, she could not sit quiet an instant, devoured with impatience. In the meantime, Karl Bretzner was floundering in confusion, at times uplifted to the point of frenzy, at others drained, trying to meet his musical obligations, but he was deteriorating in full view and the critics, implacable, said that Mozart whirled in his grave when he heard the Viennese tenor execute—literally—his compositions.