Sancta Margarita, ora pro nobis
Has! irimuru karabrao! has! has! has!
In the stunned silence that followed the tumult only one ghostly sound is heard, notes never written by Berlioz, a flute playing a melody as swift as the flight of the raptor. Music of a sweetness and melancholy no one has ever heard before. A pale, blond youth the color of sand is playing. His features are so sculpted that one more stroke to his fine nose, his thin lips, or his smooth cheeks would have ruined, perhaps erased, them. The flute is ivory, it is primitive, ancient, or roughly made. It seems to have been recovered from the realm of oblivion, or death. Its solitary persistence wants to sound the last word. The blond young man does not seem to be playing the music. The blond young man is suffering the music; he occupies the center of an empty stage, facing a vacant auditorium.
7
It has been said. She will be again. She will return.
At that moment she will surrender herself to the only company that will console her for something that will begin to be sketched in her dreams as “something lost.”
This her instinct will tell her. What is “lost” will be a timeless village that for her will forever be future, never it was but now it will be, because there she will live the happiness that was not lost, but will be found again.
How will it be, this thing that will be lost only to be found again?
It is what she will know best. If not the only thing, at least it will be the best thing she will know.
There will be a center in that place. Someone will occupy that center. It will be a woman like herself. She will see her and she will see herself, because she will have no other way to speak those terrible words I am without swiftly translating them into the image of the large figure sitting on the ground, covered with rags and metal, objects that will be deemed valuable enough to be traded for meat and vessels, for herds and precious staffs to be traded for other things—of lesser value, she will add, but more necessary for living.
There will be little she will want for. The mother will send men to look for food, and they will return, panting and bleeding, with boars and deer slung across their shoulders, but sometimes they will come back frightened, loping on four feet, and that will be when the father stands up and shows them, this way, standing, forget the other way, that is behind us, now we will be like this, on two feet, this is the law, and first they will stand up, but when the mother again settles her broad buttocks on the throne they will gather around her, they will embrace her and kiss her, they will pat her hands, and she will make signs with her fingers on the heads of her children, and she will repeat what she will always say, This is the law, you will all be my children, I will love all of you the same, none will be better than another, this will be the law, and they will weep and they will sing with joy and they will kiss the seated woman with great love, and she, the daughter, will join in the warm act of love, and the mother will repeat, ceaselessly, You are all equal, this will be the law, everything shared, whatever we need to live and be happy, love, protection, threat, courage, love again, all of you always …
Then the mother will ask her to sing, and she will wish that the protection she will always need will be forthcoming, that is what she sings.
She sings that she wants the company she will always long for.
She sings that she wants to avoid the dangers she will meet along the road.
Because from now on she will be alone and she will not know how to defend herself.
Before, we all had the same voice, and we sang without need to force ourselves.
Because she loved us all the same.
Now has come the time of a single chief who organizes punishments and rewards and tasks. This is the law.
Now has come the time to send away the women and to deliver them to other villages to avoid the horror of brother and sister fornicating together. This is the law.
Now has come a new time in which the father commands and indicates his preference for the oldest son. This is the law.
Before we were equal.
The same voices.
She will miss them.
She will begin to imitate what she hears in the world.
In order not to be alone.
She will be guided by the sound of a flute.
8
He conducted Berlioz’s Faust for the last time in the Festspielhaus in Salzburg, the city to which he had retired to spend his last years. As he was conducting singers, chorus, and orchestra, approaching the apocalyptic end of the work, he wanted to believe that he was again the young maestro who had staged the work for the first time in a place he wanted, also for the first time, but one fatally pervaded with our past.
At ninety-three, Gabriel Atlan-Ferrara scornfully refused the stool they offered so he could conduct while sitting; he might be a little stooped, yes, but he would stand, because only standing could he invoke the musical response to a destructive nature that longed to return to the great beginning and there surrender to the arms of the devil. Was it true that, despite the clamor of the work, he was hearing footsteps approaching the podium, and then a voice in his ear: “Have you come to make amends?”
His answer was vigorous. He didn’t think twice, he would die on his feet, like an oak, conducting the musicians, understanding to the end that music can be nothing more than an impressionist evocation and that it is incumbent on the conductor to impose the serene contemplation without which true passion cannot be instilled. That was the paradox of the music’s creation. The old man had come to realize this, and that afternoon in Salzburg he wished he had known and communicated it in London in 1940, in Mexico in 1949, and again in London in 1967, when the idiotic public left the hall believing that his Faust was aping the nudist vogue of Oh! Calcutta!—never imagining the secret that had been exposed before everyone’s eyes …
Only now, an old man, in Salzburg, 1999, did he understand the musical path from impression to contemplation to emotion. And he wished, with an inaudible moan, he had known that in time to tell Inez Prada …
How was the maestro going to tell the young mezzo-soprano singing Marguerite in Part Three of The Damnation of Faust that in his view beauty is the only proof of divine incarnation in the world? Had Inez known that? Conducting for the last time the work that had united them in life, Gabriel beseeched the memory of the woman he had loved:
“Be patient. Wait. They are looking for you. They will find you.”
It wasn’t the first time he had spoken those words to Inez Prada. Why hadn’t he been able to say, “I am looking for you. I will find you”? Why was it always others, they, who were designated to look for her, to find her, to see her again? Never he.
The intense melancholy that Gabriel Atlan-Ferrara suffered as he conducted this music associated so closely with Inez’s instinct resembled the act of touching a wall only to prove that it didn’t exist. Can I ever believe in my senses again?
That last time, at the Savoy in London, they had asked one another, What have you been doing all this time? so as not to ask, What happened to you? And certainly not, How will it end between us?
These isolated sentences meant nothing to anyone but him.
“At least we never had the dead weight of a failed love affair or an appalling marriage.”
“Out of sight, out of mind, the English say.”
Or, in Inez’s Spanish, “Ojos que no ven, corazón que no siente.”
The first passion is never recaptured. On the other hand, regret stays with us forever. Remorse. Lament. It turns to melancholy and lives in us like a frustrated ghost. We know how to silence death. We do not know how to quiet sorrow. We must be content with a love analogous to the one we remember in the smile of a face no longer there. But isn’t that something?
I am dying but the universe goes on. I can’t bear being separated from you. But if you are my soul and you live in me like a second body, my death will not be as inconsequential as a stranger’s.
The performance was a triumph
, a twilight homage, and Gabriel Atlan-Ferrara quickly and regretfully left the podium.
“Magnificent, maestro, bravo, bravissimo,” the doorman said to him.
“You’ve turned into an old man I’d like to strangle,” Atlan-Ferrara replied bitterly, talking to himself, not the aged and stupefied doorman.
He refused to allow anyone to walk him back to his house. He wasn’t some disoriented tourist. He lived in Salzburg. He had already resolved that when he died he wanted to die on his feet, with no warning, no terror, no help from anyone. He dreamed of a sudden and loving death. He had no romantic illusions. He hadn’t prepared any celebrated “last words,” nor did he believe that death would afford him a lyrical reunion with Inez Prada. He had known ever since that last night in London that she had left with someone else. The blond youth—my comrade, my brother—had disappeared forever from his youthful photograph. He was … elsewhere.
‘Il est ailleurs.“ Gabriel smiled, satisfied in spite of everything.
But Inez was “elsewhere” as well. She hadn’t been seen since that November night in 1967 at Covent Garden. Since the public believed that what happened was part of Gabriel Atlan-Ferrara’s imaginative mise-en-scène, any explanation was acceptable. The media reported that Inez Prada had disappeared in a puff of smoke through a trap door in the stage, with the child in her arms. Pure effect. Coup de théâtre.
“Inez Prada has permanently retired from the stage. This was the last work she planned to sing. No, it wasn’t announced, because then attention would have been directed to her farewell performance and not to the Berlioz itself. She was a professional. She always put herself second to the work, the composer, the conductor, and, as a result, the venerable public. Yes, a complete professional. She had an instinct for the stage.”
Only Gabriel was left, his hair black and unruly, his dark skin burned by sun and sea, his smile brilliant … Alone.
He counted his steps from the theater to the house. It was a mania of his old age, counting the number of steps he took every day. This was the comic part. The sad part was that with every step he felt the wounded earth beneath the soles of his feet. He imagined the scars that were accumulating on the always deeper and harder layers of the crust of dust we live on.
Ulrike, die Dicke, was waiting for him with her hair rebraided and her apron starchy crisp and her gait painful, legs wide apart. She set a cup of chocolate before him.
“Ah!” Atlan-Ferrara sighed, dropping into his easy chair. “Passion is gone. We are left with hot chocolate.”
“Be comfortable,” his servant told him. “Don’t worry. Everything is in order.”
She looked at the crystal seal occupying its usual place: the tripod on the little table in front of the window framing the panorama of Salzburg.
“Yes, Dicke, everything is in order. You don’t need to break any more crystal seals.”
“But, sir, I—” his housekeeper sputtered.
“Look, Ulrike,” said Gabriel, with an elegant wave of the hand. “Today I conducted Faust for the last time. Marguerite has ascended to heaven. Forever. I am no longer the prisoner of Inez Prada, my dear Ulrike.”
“Sir, it was not my intention … Believe me, I am a grateful woman. I know I owe you everything.”
“Easy, easy. You know perfectly well you don’t have any rivals. I need a servant more than a lover.”
“I’ll fix you a cup of tea.”
“What’s the matter with you? I’m already drinking my chocolate.”
“Sorry. I’m very nervous. I will bring you your mineral water.”
Atlan-Ferrara took the crystal seal from the stand and rubbed it.
He spoke in a quiet voice to Inez.
“Help me stop thinking in the past, my love. If we live for the past, we elevate it to the point where it usurps our lives. Tell me that my present is to live attended by a servant.”
“Do you remember our last conversation?” Inez’s voice answered. “Why don’t you tell the whole story?”
“Because the second story is a different life. You live it. I’m holding on to this one.”
“Is there anyone whose existence you’re denying?”
“Maybe.”
“Do you know the price for that?”
“I’ll take it away from you.”
“So? I already lived it.”
“Look at me carefully. I’m a selfish old man.”
“That isn’t true. You’ve spent all these years looking after my daughter. I’m grateful for that, I thank you from the bottom of my heart.”
“Bah. You’re being sentimental. I treat her as who she is.”
“But I thank you anyway, Gabriel.”
“I have lived for my art, not for easy emotions. Goodbye, Inez. Go back to wherever you are.” And he put back the seal.
He looked out on the landscape of Salzburg. Imperceptibly, it was beginning to dawn. He was surprised at how quickly the night had passed. How long had he been talking with Inez? Only a few minutes …
“Didn’t I always say that the next performance of Faust is always the first? Take notice, Inez, of my resignation. The next reincarnation of the work will not be in my hands.”
“There are bodies born to wander and others to be made flesh,” Inez told him. “Don’t be impatient.”
“I’m not, I am satisfied. I was patient. I waited a long time, but in the end I was rewarded. Everything that had to return, returned. Everything that had to be reunited, was. Now I must be silent, Inez, so I don’t break the continuity of things. Tonight in the Festspielhaus I felt you near me, but it was only a feeling. I know you are very far away. And as for me, am I something more than a reappearance, Inez? Sometimes I ask myself how people recognize me, how they know to greet me, when obviously I am not who I am. Do you still remember who I was? Wherever you may be, do you hold a memory of the person who sacrificed everything so that you could be again?”
Ulrike was standing looking at him, not hiding her scorn.
“You’re talking to yourself again. That’s a sign of senile dementia,” said his housekeeper.
Atlan-Ferrara heard the unbearable sounds of the woman’s movements, her stiff skirts, her key ring, her feet dragging from her painful walk, the parted legs.
“So is there another seal, Ulrike?”
“No, sir,” said the housekeeper, her head lowered as she picked up his cup and saucer. “This one here in the living room is the last—”
“I’d like it again, please.”
Ulrike held the object in her hands and showed it to the maestro, her expression brazen and arrogant. “You know nothing, maestro.”
“Nothing? About Inez?”
“Did you ever see her when she was truly young? Did you really watch her grow old? Or did you simply imagine it because calendar time said it was so? How was it that you grew old between the fall of France and the blitz and the time you traveled to Mexico and came back to London while she stayed the same? You imagined her growing old to make her as old as you.”
“No, Dicke, you’re mistaken. I wanted to make her my eternal, my one thought. That’s all.”
Dicke laughed long and loud, and thrust her face close to her employer’s, ferocious as a panther. “She won’t be back now. You are going to die. Maybe you will find her somewhere. She never abandoned her own land. She came here for only a brief time. She had to go back to his arms. And he will never come back. Resign yourself, Gabriel.”
“All right, Dicke,” the maestro sighed.
But to himself he said, Life passes so swiftly, a haven whose only purpose is to offer death a place to exist. We are the pretext for death’s life. Death gives presence to everything we have forgotten about life.
He walked with slow steps to his bedroom and carefully examined two objects on his night table.
One, the ivory flute.
The other, a framed photograph of Inez, gowned forever in the costume of Faust’s Marguerite, her arm around a bare-chested, towheaded young man. B
oth were smiling openly, without mystery. Never to be separated.
He picked up the flute, turned out the light, and with great tenderness played a passage from Faust.
The servant heard him from far away. He was an eccentric, mad old man. She loosened her braids. Her long white hair fell to her waist. She sat on the bed and held out her arms, muttering in a strange tongue, as if convoking a birth or a death.
9
The memory of the lost land will not console her.
She will walk along the shore and then turn away from the sea.
She will try to remember how her life was before, when she had a companion, a hearth, village, mother, father, family.
Now she will walk alone, with her eyes closed, trying in this way to forget and to remember at the same time, shutting out sight in order to surrender to pure sound, trying to be what she can hear, only that, longing for the murmur of the stream, the whisper of the trees, the chattering of monkeys, the roar of the storm, the galloping of aurochs, the clash of the antlered beasts over a female, everything that saves her from the solitude that will threaten her with the loss of communication and memory.
She would like to hear a cry of action, unconscious and interrupted, a cry of passion tied to sorrow or happiness, she would like especially for the two languages, that of action and that of passion, to blend together so that the cries of nature would again be converted into desire to be with the other, to say something to the other, to shout her need for and sympathy for and attention to the other, lost to her since she was driven from her home, expelled by the law of the father.