Inez, wrapped in a long black cape lined with deerhide to offset the November cold, took Gabriel’s arm. The conductor was dressed for the weather: wool suit and, wrapped around his neck, a red muffler that from time to time caught the wind like an enormous trailing flame.
“Reconciliation or fear?” Inez picked up the discussion.
“Should I have held on to you then, Inez?” he asked, not looking at her, head bowed, eyes on the tips of his shoes.
“Should I have held on to you?” Inez thrust her gloveless hand into Gabriel’s jacket pocket.
“No,” he observed. “I think that eighteen years ago neither of us wanted to take on the obligation of something that wasn’t his own career—
“Ambition,” Inez interrupted. “Our ambition. Yours and mine. We didn’t want to sacrifice that for someone else. Is it true? Is it enough? Was it enough?”
“Perhaps. I felt ridiculous after that beating. I never believed it was your doing, Inez, but I did think that if you were capable of going to bed with a character like that you weren’t a woman I could love.”
“Do you still think that?”
“I’m telling you I never believed it. It’s simply that your idea of sexual freedom wasn’t the same as mine.”
“Do you think I went to bed with that boy because I thought he was inferior, someone I could toss aside on a whim?”
“No, I think it wasn’t that you weren’t discriminating enough, but actually that you were easily embarrassed, and that’s why you made your choices public.”
“So no one could accuse me of being a sexual snob?”
“No, not that either. Precisely so no one would think you discreet … That gave you even greater freedom. It had to end badly. Sexual relations have to be kept quiet.”
Irritated, Inez jerked away from Gabriel. “We women are much better at keeping bedroom secrets than you men. You’re all too macho, too much the peacock. You have to strut about like a triumphant kob after winning the battle over a female.”
He stared at her pointedly. “That’s what I mean. You chose a lover who would talk about you. That was your indiscretion.”
“And that’s why you left without a word?”
“No. I have a more serious reason.” He laughed and squeezed her arm. “Inez, it’s possible that you and I were not born to grow old together. I can’t imagine you running down to the corner for a quart of milk while I shuffle out to look for the paper and we end the day watching the telly as a reward for being alive.”
She didn’t laugh. She disapproved of Gabriel’s joke. He was straying from the real subject, which was about going separate ways after the Faust in the Bellas Artes. Almost twenty years …
“There’s never a story that doesn’t have its ghosts,” Gabriel offered.
“Were there ghosts in your life all this time?” she asked with real affection.
“I don’t know what to call the waiting.”
“Waiting for what?”
“I don’t know. Maybe for something that should have happened to make our being together inevitable.”
“To make it fatal, you mean?”
“No, to avoid fatalism.”
“What do you mean?”
“I don’t really know. It’s a feeling I recognize only now, seeing you after so much time has passed.”
He told her he’d feared that love might bind her to a fate that wasn’t hers and, maybe, selfishly, not his either.
“Did you have many women, Gabriel?” Inez replied in a mocking tone.
“Yes. But I don’t remember a single one. What about you?”
Inez’s smile turned to laughter. “I got married.”
“I heard you did. To whom?”
“Do you remember that musician, or poet, or official censor, or whatever, who used to sit in on our rehearsals?”
“The fellow who loved the beans and tortillas?”
She laughed. Yes, that one: Licenciado Cosme Santos.
“Did he get fat?”
“He got fat. And do you know why I chose him? For the weakest and most obvious reason in the world. He made me feel secure. I have to admit he wasn’t the he-man type who’s a real stud, not the stallion whose sexual vigor never flags—and don’t let anyone kid you, there’s never been a woman who can resist that. But neither was he the great artist, the supreme ego who promised to be a creative partner only to abandon me, leave me all alone, in the name of the very thing that should have drawn us together, Gabriel: sensibility, love of music …”
“How long did your marriage to this Cosme Santos last?”
“Not even a minute.” She made a little face, and shivered. “It wasn’t a meeting of minds, or of sex. That’s why we lasted five years. It didn’t matter to me. But he didn’t hold me back. As long as he didn’t steal my thunder or meddle in my life, I tolerated him. When he decided to become important for my sake, poor man, I left him. And what about you?”
They had made a complete circle of the tree-lined streets around Holland Park and now were crossing a field where small children were playing soccer. Gabriel took his time answering. She felt that he was holding something back, something he couldn’t say without affecting himself more than her.
“Do you remember when we met?” Inez said finally. “You were my protector. But then you walked out on me. In Dorset. You left me with a mutilated photograph from which a boy I would have liked to fall in love with had disappeared. Then, in Mexico City, you left me again. That’s twice. I’m not berating you for it. You have the crystal seal I gave you on the beach in England in 1940. Do you think you can do me a favor now in return?”
“Possibly, Inez.”
There was such doubt in his voice that Inez made hers warmer. “I want to understand. That’s all. And don’t tell me that it was the other way around, that I left you. Was it that I was too available, and you rebelled against something that seemed far too easy? You like to conquer, I know that. Did you think I was handing myself to you on a silver platter?”
“There’s never been a woman as difficult to conquer as you,” said Gabriel as they walked back to Kensington High Street.
“How do you mean?”
The sudden noise of traffic was deafening.
They crossed with the green light and stopped in front of the marquee of the Odeon cinema at the corner of Earls Court Road.
“Where do you want to go now?” he asked.
“Earls Court is very noisy. Let’s go this way. There’s a little alley around the corner.”
They heard the loud soundtrack from the movie all the way down the alley, typical James Bond music. But at the end of the lane lay the small, shady, fenced-in park on Edwardes Square, with its elegant houses and iron balconies and flower-bedecked pub. They went in, found a seat, and ordered two beers.
Gabriel said, as he looked around, that a place like this was a refuge and what he felt in Mexico City was just the opposite. In Mexico there was no shelter, everything was unprotected, a person could be blotted out in an instant, without warning.
“And you abandoned me to it, knowing that?” Inez whistled, but not accusingly.
He looked her straight in the eye. “No. I saved you from something worse. There was something more dangerous than any threat of living in Mexico City.”
Inez didn’t dare ask. If he didn’t understand that she couldn’t ask him directly, she’d be better off saying nothing.
“I wish I could tell you what that danger was. The truth is, I don’t know.”
She wasn’t angry. She didn’t feel he was hiding anything when he told her that.
“All I know is that something in me prevented me from asking you to be with me forever. It was my loss and your gain.”
“And you still don’t know what it was that stood in the way, why you didn’t tell me—?”
“I love you, Inez. I want you to be with me forever. Be my wife, Inez … That’s what I should have said.”
“Even now you won’t say it? I wou
ld have accepted.”
“No. Not even now.”
“Why?”
“Because the thing I fear still hasn’t happened.”
“But you don’t know what you’re afraid of?”
“No.”
“Aren’t you afraid that what you fear has already happened, and that what happened, Gabriel, is what didn’t happen?”
“No. I swear to you it hasn’t happened yet.”
“What hasn’t?”
“The danger I am to you.”
Much later, they wouldn’t remember whether they had said some things face to face or only thought them as they looked at each other after all that time, or if they had thought them before or after their meeting, when they were alone. They didn’t trust one another, didn’t trust anyone. Who remembers exactly the order of a conversation, who knows exactly if the words in a memory were really said or only thought, imagined, spoken under the breath?
Whatever the case, before the concert Inez and Gabriel couldn’t remember whether one of them had dared to say, We don’t want to see each other anymore because we don’t want to see each other grow old, and maybe for the same reason we can’t love each other now.
“We’re fading away like ghosts.”
“We always were, Inez. I told you that there is never a story without its ghost, and sometimes we confuse something we can’t see with our own unreality.”
“Do you have any regrets? Are you sorry about something you could have done but let slip by? Should we have married in Mexico?”
“I don’t know. All I can say is, it’s our good fortune that we never had the dead weight of a failed love affair or an appalling marriage.”
“Out of sight, out of mind.”
“At times I’ve thought that falling in love with you again would be a sign of voluntary indecision.”
“On the other hand, I sometimes think that we don’t love each other because we don’t want to watch ourselves growing old.”
“But have you thought about how the ground would shake if one day I walked across your grave?”
“Or I across yours?” Inez hesitated, but laughed.
Atlan-Ferrara went out into the November cold thinking, Our only salvation is to forget our sins, not pardon them but forget them.
She, meanwhile, stayed in the hotel and drew herself a luxurious bath, thinking, A failed love affair must immediately be put out of mind.
Why, then, did both Inez and Gabriel, independently, sense that this love, this affaire, wasn’t over—however often they both might say not only that it had ended but maybe in the deepest sense that it had never begun? What was it between them that thwarted the continuation of what had been and prevented the occurrence of what never was?
Inez, soaping herself with pleasure, could have been thinking that the first throes of passion are never recaptured. Gabriel, walking along the Strand (German blitz in 1940, hippie bliss in 1967), would argue that ambition had outweighed passion, but the result was the same: We’re fading away like ghosts. Both thought that at least nothing should interrupt the flow of events. And events now were not contingent on passion or ambition, or on the will of Gabriel Atlan-Ferrara or Inez Prada.
Both were exhausted. What had to be, would be. They would play out the last act of their relationship. Berlioz’s The Damnation of Faust.
In her dressing room, dressed for the performance, Inez Prada was doing what she had been doing, obsessively, ever since Gabriel Atlan-Ferrara put the photograph in her hands and left the Savoy without a further word.
It was the old photo of Gabriel in his youth, smiling, hair tousled, his features less defined but his lips communicating a happiness Inez had never seen. He was bare-chested; the snapshot stopped at the waist.
Inez, alone in the hotel suite, slightly dazzled by the interplay between the silver decor and a winter sun pale as a child unborn, studied the photo, the stance of young Gabriel, whose left arm was held away from his body, as if embracing someone.
Now, in the dressing room in Covent Garden, the image was filling in. What that afternoon had been absence—Gabriel, alone, Gabriel, young—had gradually been changing; first the palest tints, then more and more precise outlines, and now an unmistakable silhouette, a palpable presence in the photograph. Gabriel’s arm was around a slim blond youth who, like Gabriel, was smiling, a smile that was the precise opposite of Gabriel’s, open, free of mystery. The mystery was the slow, nearly imperceptible materialization of the boy who had been missing from the photo.
It was a picture of a swaggering camaraderie, with the pride of two arrogant beings meeting and recognizing one another in their youth and swearing to stick together through a lifetime, never to be parted.
“Who is he?”
“My brother. My comrade. If you want me to talk about myself, you will have to hear about him.”
Was that what Gabriel had said in the hotel? He had said it more than twenty-five years ago.
It was as if the invisible photo had been developed by Inez’s obsessive gazing at it.
The photo she saw today was again the one she had seen during that visit to the cottage on the shore.
The youth who had disappeared in 1940 had reappeared in 1967.
It was he. No doubt.
Inez repeated the first words of their meeting: “Help me. Love me. Eh-dé. Eh-mé.”
She was overwhelmed with a terrible desire to weep over what had been lost to her. In her imagination she felt a mental barrier that sealed off the past: forbidden to touch memories, forbidden to step on already trodden ground. But she couldn’t stop staring at that image in which the boy’s features were filling in because of the intense gaze of a woman who was herself absent. Was it enough simply to concentrate on something to make the disappeared reappear? Is everything hidden merely awaiting our intense attention?
She was interrupted by her call.
They were midway through the oratorio, and she didn’t come onstage, carrying a lamp, until Part Three. Faust has hidden. Mephistopheles has escaped. Marguerite is going to sing for the first time:
Ah, but the air is stifling!
I’m as frightened as a child!
Her eyes met those of Atlan-Ferrara, who was conducting with an absent, totally abstracted, professional air, except that his look denied that serenity, it held a cruelty and a terror that frightened her as she began the next line, It was the dream I had last night that has upset me, and, at that instant, though she was still singing, she no longer heard her own voice or the music of the orchestra, she stared at Gabriel as another song deep inside Inez, a ghost from Marguerite’s aria, stepped outside her and into an unknown rite, took possession of her actions onstage as if in a secret ceremony that others, everyone who had bought tickets for the Damnation of Faust performance in Covent Garden, had no business watching: the rite was for her alone, but she didn’t know how to enact it, she was confused, she couldn’t hear herself, she saw nothing but the hypnotic eyes of Atlan-Ferrara recriminating her for her lack of professionalism—what was she singing? what was she saying?—my body doesn’t exist, my body isn’t in touch with the earth, the earth begins today, until she cried a cry outside of time, an anticipation of the infernal ride to the abyss that will end the opera.
Yes, blow, hurricanes,
Ring out, dark forests,
Crash down, boulders …
And then the voice of Inez Prada seemed to be transformed into first an echo of itself, then a companion to itself, and finally a different, separate voice, a voice with power like that of galloping black steeds, like beating nocturnal wings, like blinding storms, like the screams of the damned, a voice swelling from the rear of the auditorium and flowing toward the orchestra pit, first amid the laughter, then the astonishment, and finally the terror of the public: dignified men, clipped and powdered and shaved and handsomely attired, dried up and pale or red as tomatoes, and their women in decolletage and perfume, white as Brie or fresh as ethereal roses, the distinguished public of
Covent Garden now on their feet, wondering for a moment whether this was the supreme audacity of the eccentric French conductor; was the “frog” Atlan-Ferrara capable of carrying to extremes this performance of a suspiciously “continental,” not to say “diabolical,” work?
The chorus cried out as if the oratorio had collapsed like an accordion, skipping all of Part Three to rush to Part Four, the scene of the violated heavens, raging storms, sovereign earthquakes, Sancta Margarita, aaaaaaah!
From the rear of the auditorium, advancing toward the stage, came a naked woman with writhing red hair, her black eyes glittering with hatred and vengeance, her mother-of-pearl skin scourged and bruised, carrying in her extended arms the motionless body of a little girl, a child the color of death, rigid in the arms of the woman, who was offering her as one would offer an insupportable sacrifice, a little girl streaming blood from between her legs, surrounded by the screams, the scandal, the indignation of the public, until this woman reached the stage, paralyzing the spectators with terror, presenting the body of the dead girl to the world as Atlan-Ferrara allowed the most ferocious fires of creation to flash through his eyes, his hands continuing to conduct, the chorus and the orchestra obeying, though maybe this was yet another innovation of the brilliant maestro, hadn’t he said more than once that he would like to direct a naked Faust?; the exact double of Marguerite climbed naked to the stage with a bloody child in her arms as the chorus sang Sancta Maria, ora pro nobis and Mephistopheles could think of nothing to sing except the words of the lyrics but Atlan-Ferrara sang it for him, hup! hup! hup!, and the strange woman who had taken over the stage hissed has! has! hays! and walked toward a motionless, serene Inez Prada, whose eyes were closed but whose arms were open to receive the bloody child and who, unresisting, let herself be stripped of her clothing, scratched, lacerated by the intruder with the red hair and black eyes, has, has, has, until both were naked, standing before a public paralyzed by conflicting emotions, the two of them identical except that now it was Inez who was holding the child, Inez Prada transformed into the ferocious woman, as in an optical illusion worthy of the grand mise-en-scène of Atlan-Ferrara the savage woman blended into Inez, disappeared into her, and then the one naked woman occupying the center of the stage fell to the floorboards still embracing the violated child, and the chorus exhaled a terrible scream,