God knows it. The angels know it, and that is why the opera ends with Marguerite’s ascension during the invocation to Mary, whose face I, Gabriel Atlan-Ferrara, would cover with the veil of Veronica … or maybe the hood of the Magdalene.
An organ-grinder began to play not far from the window where Gabriel was gazing into the Mexican night. Following the sudden rain, the streets gleamed like patent leather, and the perfumes of the cloudburst were disappearing before the onslaught
of sputtering grease, the pungent scent of griddle-warmed tortillas, and the rebirth of the maize of the gods of this land.
How different these aromas, sounds, hours, and labors from London’s—clouds racing the pale sun, the nearby sea scenting the core of the urban soul, and the cautious but determined step of islanders threatened and protected by their insularity, the blinding green of their parks, the waste of a disdainful river that turns its back to the city … and despite everything, the acrid odor of English melancholy, disguised as cold and indifferent courtesy.
As if every city in the world made different pacts with day and night, so that nature, briefly but for as long as necessary, might respect the arbitrary collective ruins we call “city,” “the accidental tribe,” as Dostoyevsky described another capital, the yellow doors, lights, walls, faces, bridges, and rivers of Petersburg.
Inez interrupted Gabriel’s musings, picking up the organ-grinder’s song from where she lay in bed: “You, only you, are the cause for all my tears, for my disillusion and despair …”
He addressed the chorus with the energizing certainty that at forty-two he was among the conductors most in demand on the new musical planet that had emerged from this most atrocious of wars, a conflict that produced the greatest number of dead in all of history. And because of that he would demand of this Mexican chorus—which should at the least have memories of deaths during their civil war, as well as in daily life—that they sing
Faust
as if they too had witnessed the endless chain of extermination and torture and tears and desolation that were like the signature of the world at mid-century; as if they had seen a naked baby screaming at the top of its lungs amid the ruins of a bombed-out
railway station in Chungking; as if they had heard the mute cry of Guernica as Picasso painted it, not a cry of pain but a cry for help, answered only by the whinny of a dead horse, a horse useless in the aerial warfare overhead, the war of Berlioz’s black birds beating their wings against the faces of the singers, obliging the horses to moan and tremble, and to take flight, manes flowing, like Pegasuses of death, in order to escape the great cemetery the earth was becoming.
In the Bellas Artes production, during the final ride to the abyss, Gabriel Atlan-Ferrara planned to project the film of the discovery of mass graves in the death camps; the terrible, apocalyptic evocation of Berlioz would become visible, skeletal cadavers stacked up by the hundreds, starved, lewd, skin, bone, indecent baldness, obscene wounds, shameful sexes, embraces of intolerable eroticism, as if even in death desire endured:
I love you, I love you, I love you …
“Cry out as if you were going to die loving the very thing that kills you!”
The authorities forbade running the film of the death camps. “A cultivated and very respectable class of Mexican comes to the Bellas Artes,” a stupid official who kept buttoning and unbuttoning his parrot-shit-colored jacket had said. “They don’t come here to be offended.”
On the other hand, “Berlioz’s work is really impressive,” was the opinion of a young Mexican musician who attended the rehearsals with the never explicit, though obvious, purpose of checking out this conductor with the reputation for being a rebel, in any case
a foreigner,
and as such
suspicious
in the eyes of Mexican bureaucracy. “Let the composer speak to us of the horror of hell and the end of the world in his own way,” said the musician-bureaucrat with the particularly Mexican quiet voice
and delicacy of manners that were as distant as insinuating. “Why push so hard, maestro? In short, why would you want to
illustrate?”
Atlan-Ferrara berated himself and agreed with the affable Mexican. He was putting down his own argument. Hadn’t he told Inez just last night that an opera’s visibility consists in hiding certain objects from view so the music can evoke them without degenerating into simple thematic painting, or into further, though futile, degradation into a “chimerical ensemble” in which conductor and composer mutually torture one another?
“The opera isn’t literature,” said the Mexican, sucking his gums and teeth in a genteel effort to extract the remains of some succulent and suicidal meal. “It isn’t literature, although its enemies would have it so. Let’s not make them think they’re right.”
Gabriel did tell his cordial bureaucrat that
he
was right. Whatever kind of musician he might be, he was a good politician. What was Atlan-Ferrara thinking? Did he want to teach the Latin Americans who had escaped the European conflict a lesson? Did he want to shame them by comparing historical violences?
The Mexican discreetly swallowed the tiny piece of meat and tortilla that had been lodged between his teeth. “The cruelty of war in Latin America is fiercer, maestro, because it’s invisible and has no time frame. Besides, we’ve learned to hide our victims and bury them at night.”
“Are you a Marxist?” Atlan-Ferrara inquired, amused now.
“If you mean that I don’t seem to be participating in the current anticommunist phobia, you would be right to a point.”
“Then can Berlioz’s
Faust
be presented here with no justification beyond being what it is?”
“Yes, it can. Don’t divert attention from something we understand
very well. The sacred isn’t alien to terror. Faith doesn’t redeem us from death.”
“Then you’re also a believer?” The conductor smiled in return.
“In Mexico even we atheists are Catholic, maestro.”
Atlan-Ferrara stared at the young musician-bureaucrat offering this counsel. This Mexican wasn’t blond, distant, slim: absent. He was dark, and warm; he was eating a tortilla with meat, cheese, mustard, and jalapeño peppers, and his intelligent raccoon eyes darted into every corner. He wanted to get ahead, that you could see. He was going to put on weight very fast.
No, it wasn’t him, Atlan-Ferrara thought with a certain leaden nostalgia. He wasn’t the long-sought, long-desired friend of the conductor’s early youth.
“Why did you leave me behind on the coast?”
“I didn’t want to interrupt anything.”
“I don’t understand you. You interrupted our weekend. We were there together.”
“You would never have given yourself to me.”
“And so? I thought my company was enough.”
“Was mine?”
“Do you think I’m that stupid? Why do you think I accepted your invitation? Because my uterus was in an uproar?”
“But we weren’t together.”
“No, not like now …”
“And we wouldn’t have been.”
“That’s true, too. I told you that.”
“You had never been with a man.”
“Never. I told you that.”
“You didn’t want me to be the first.”
“Not you, not anyone. I was different then. I was twenty. I lived with my aunt and uncle. I was what the French call
une jeune fille bien rangée.
I was starting out. Maybe I was confused.”
“Are you sure?”
“I was a different person, I tell you. How can I be sure about someone I no longer am?”
“I remember how you stared at the photo of my friend.”
“Your brother, is what you told me.”
“The man closest to me. That’s what I meant.”
“But he wasn’t there.”
“Yes, he was.”
“Don’t tell me he was there.”
“Not physically.”
“I don’t understand you.”
“Do you remember the photograph you saw on the mantel?”
“Yes.”
“He was there. He was with me. You saw him.”
“No, Gabriel. You’re mistaken.”
“I know that photograph by heart. It’s the only one I have of the two of us.”
“No. You were alone in the photograph. He had disappeared.” She looked at him with curiosity, to keep from showing alarm. “Tell me the truth. Was that boy ever in the photo?”
“Music is an artificial portrait of human passions,” the maestro told the group under his direction in Bellas Artes. “Have no illusion that this is a realistic opera. I already know that you Latin Americans cling desperately to logic and reason—concepts totally foreign to you—because you want to escape the supernatural
imagination that is your heritage—though not inevitable, and especially to be scorned in the light of a supposed ‘progress’ that you will never achieve, make no mistake, through embarrassing, slavish imitation. For a European, you see, the word ’progress’ always,
s’il vous plaît,
appears in quotation marks.”
He smiled at the wall of solemn faces.
“Imagine, if it is helpful, that as you sing you are repeating sounds of nature.”
His imperious gaze swept across the stage. How well he played the role of peacock! He laughed at himself.
“An opera like Berlioz’s
Faust,
especially, can deceive all of us and make us believe we are listening to the imitation of a nature violently pushed to its limits.”
He stared hard at the English horn, until the musician was forced to look down.
“This can be true. But musically it’s of no value. Imagine, should you find it helpful, that in this terrible last scene you are repeating the sound of a gently flowing river or of a crashing waterfall.”
He opened his arms in a large, generous gesture.
“If you like, imagine that your singing is imitating the sound of the wind in the forest, or the lowing of a cow, or the thump of a stone against a wall, or the shattering of some crystal object; imagine, if you like, that you are singing with the whinnying of a horse and the beating of crows’ wings.”
Crows began to fly, beating against the orangeish dome of the concert hall; lowing cows crowded down the aisles of the theater; a horse galloped across the stage; a rock exploded against the Tiffany-glass curtain.
“But I tell you that noise never reaches our ears in the form of more noise. Everything in the world that’s audible must be converted
into song, because it is more than guttural sounds, and if the musician wants the burro to bray, he must make him sing.”
And the voices of the chorus, animated, motivated as he wanted by the enormity of an impenetrable, fierce nature, responded: Only you bring a break to my endless boredom, you renew my strength, I am alive again.
“This isn’t the first time, you know, that a group of singers has believed that their voices are an extension of, or a response to, the sounds of nature.”
He was silencing them, little by little, one by one, banking the choral fire, cruelly extinguishing it.
“One may think she is singing because she hears a bird—”
Marisela Ambriz plummeted wingless to the ground.
“Another because he imitates the tiger—”
Sereno Laviada purred like a house cat.
“Still another because he hears a waterfall inside him—”
The musician-bureaucrat noisily blew his nose from the orchestra pit.
“None of this is true. Music is artificial. Ah, you will say, but human passions aren’t. Let’s forget the tiger, Señor Laviada, and the bird, Señorita Ambriz, and the thunder, señor-who-eats-sandwiches-and-I-don’ t-know-your-name,” he said, turning toward the pit.
“Cosme Santos, at your service,” the accused replied with automatic courtesy. “Licenciado Cosme Santos.”
“Ah, very well, friend Cosme, let’s talk about the passion awakened by music. We need to remember that the first language of gestures and cries is manifest as soon as a passion appears that takes us back to when we needed that passion.” He ran nervous hands through his black, tousled gypsy hair.
“Do you know why I learn the names of each and every one
of the chorus members?” His eyes opened like two eternal scars. “To make you understand that the common, everyday language of men, women, and animals, is
af
fective; it is a language of cries, orgasms, happiness, flight, sighs, and deep laments.”
And the open scars were two black lakes.
“Of course”—now he smiled—“as each of you sings—Señor Moreno, Señorita Ambriz, Señora Lazo, Señor Laviada—as each one of you sings, the first thing that occurs to you is that you are giving voice to the natural language of passions.”
Dramatic pause by Gabriel Atlan-Ferrara. Inez smiled. Whom was he fooling? Everyone, no less.
“And it’s true, it’s true. The passions we keep inside can kill us, blow up inside us. Song liberates them, and finds the voice that characterizes them. So, then, music would be a kind of energy uniting the primitive, latent emotions you would never display when you catch a bus, Señor Laviada, or when you’re preparing breakfast, Señora Lazo, or taking a shower—forgive me—Señorita Ambriz. The melodic tone of the voice, the movement of the body in dance, liberates us. Pleasure and desire come together. Nature dictates tones and cries: these are our oldest words, and that is why our first language is an impassioned song.”