INEZ PRADA
In nine years the London member of the chorus had moved up to mastery of
bel canto
. He had listened to her recordings—now the old fragile 78 rpms had been replaced by the novelty of 33
1/3
LP (a technical advance that was a matter of indifference to him, because he had vowed that no interpretation of his would ever be “canned”)—and he conceded that Inez Prada’s reputation was well deserved. Her
Traviata
, for example, was new in two ways, one theatrical, the other musical, but both biographical
in the sense of giving Verdi’s character a dimension that not only enriched the work but made it unrepeatable … for not even Inez Prada could deliver more than once the sublime scene of Violetta Valery’s death.
Instead of using her voice to leave this world with a plausible high C, Inez Prada gradually extinguished it (
E strano / Cessarono / Gli spasmi del dolore
), passing from her arrogant but already ravaged youth of rounds of toasts, to erotic happiness, to the pain of sacrifice, to the nearly religious humbleness of her agony, climaxing, as she gathers all the moments of her life, not in death but in old age. The voice of Inez Prada singing the last scene of
La Traviata
was the voice of a very ill old woman who in the minutes before her death compresses her entire life, summarizes it, and leaps to the years that fate forbade her: old age. A woman of twenty dies as an old woman. She lives what she could not live, given the immediacy of death.
In mi rinasce——m’agita
Isolito vigore
Ah! Ma io ritorno a vivere
…
It was as if Inez Prada, without betraying Verdi, picked up the macabre beginning of the novel by Dumas
fils
, when Armand Duval returns to Paris, looks for the courtesan Marguerite Gautier in her home, finds her furniture being auctioned, and learns the terrible news: she is dead. Armand goes to Père Lachaise, bribes the guard, locates the tomb of Marguerite, who had died several weeks earlier, bursts the locks, opens the casket, and is confronted with the putrefying corpse of his wondrous young lover: her face green, her open mouth crawling with insects, the sockets of her eyes empty, her greasy black hair plastered to her
sunken temples. The living man throws himself upon the dead woman with passion.
Oh
,
gioia!
Inez Prada conveyed this beginning of the story while performing its end. It was her genius as an actress and a singer, fully revealed in a Mimi without sentimentalism, inextricably entwined in the life of her lover, preventing Rodolfo from writing, a woman-limpet clamoring for attention, and in a Gilda ashamed of her jester father but shamelessly dedicated to the seduction of the Duke, her father’s patron, anticipating with cruel delight the well-deserved pain of the unhappy Rigoletto … Heterodox? No doubt, and much criticized because of it. But her heresy, Gabriel Atlan-Ferrara had always thought as he listened to her, restored the Greek root to the word:
haireticus
, he who chooses.
He had admired her in Milan, in Paris, and in Buenos Aires. He had never gone backstage to greet her. She had never known that he was listening and watching from afar. He let her develop her heresy fully. Now both of them knew that they were going to see each other and work together for the first time since the 1940 blitz in London. They were going to meet again because she had requested him. And he knew the professional reason. The Inez of Verdi and Puccini was a lyric soprano, the Marguerite of Berlioz a mezzo-soprano. Normally Inez would not sing that role. But she had insisted. “My vocal register hasn’t been fully explored or put to the test. I know I can sing not only Gilda and Mimi and Violetta, but Marguerite as well. But the only man who can develop my voice and conduct me is Maestro Gabriel Atlan-Ferrara.”
She did not add, “We met in Covent Garden when I was singing in the chorus of
Faust
.”
She had chosen, and he, arriving at the door of the singer’s apartment in Mexico City that summer of 1949, was also choosing, heretically. Instead of waiting for the scheduled rehearsal of
The Damnation of Faust
in the Palacio de Bellas Artes, he took the liberty—perhaps committed the imprudence—of arriving at Inez’s door at noon, knowing absolutely nothing of her situation—would she be sleeping? would she have gone out?—with the idea of seeing her in private before the first rehearsal, planned for that same afternoon.
The apartment was in a labyrinth of multiple stairways with numbered doors on different levels of a building called La Condesa, on Avenida Mazatlán. He had been told it was a favorite place for Mexican painters, writers, and musicians—and also for European artists driven to the New World by the European hecatomb. The Polish Henryk Szeryng, the Viennese Ernst Röhmer, the Spanish Rodolfo Halffter, the Bulgarian Alexis Weissenberg—Mexico had given them refuge. And when Bellas Artes invited the very unsociable and demanding Atlan-Ferrara to direct
The Damnation of Faust
, Gabriel accepted with enthusiasm, as homage to the country that had welcomed so many men and women who could easily have met their death in the ovens of Auschwitz or the typhoid of Bergen-Belsen. By contrast, the Distrito Federal was Mexico’s Jerusalem.
For one simple reason, he didn’t want his first meeting with the singer to be at a rehearsal. They had a history, a private misunderstanding that could be resolved only in private. It was a matter of Atlan-Ferrara’s professional egoism. This way, they would avoid the predictable tension of their first meeting since that predawn morning he had abandoned her on the Dorset coast, from which she had never returned to the rehearsals at Covent Garden. Inez disappeared, only to resurface in 1945 in a famous debut at the Chicago Lyric Opera, giving a different life to Turandot through the trick—Gabriel had to laugh—of binding her feet in order to walk like a true Chinese princess.
Obviously, Inez did not owe her improved voice to this clever device, but North American publicity soared like Chinese fireworks, and once aloft, there it stayed. From that moment, naive critics happily repeated the popular line: to interpret
La Bohème,
Inez Prada contracted tuberculosis; she holed up for a month in the underground passageways of the Giza pyramid before singing
Aida
; and she turned tricks in order to convey the pathos of
La Traviata
. The Mexican diva neither denied nor confirmed these publicity releases. Everyone knows that in the world of the arts there is no such thing as bad publicity, and Mexico, after all, was the land of mythomaniacs: Diego Rivera, Frida Kahlo, Siqueiros, and maybe Pancho Villa … Perhaps a poor and devastated country demanded a full coffer of fascinating personalities. Mexico: hands empty of bread but a head filled with dreams.
Surprise Inez.
It was risky, but if she didn’t know how to deal with him, he’d be in command, as he had been in England. Or if she behaved like the
diva divina
she was, the equal of her former maestro, Berlioz’s
Faust
would gain in quality, in good, creative, shared tension.
There would be none—the thought surprised him as he stood with knuckles poised to knock—of the conventional language he detested, because it was so inadequate for expressing passion. The voice that represents desire is the stuff of opera—all opera—and he was gambling by knocking at his singer’s door.
But he did knock, decisively, and as he did so he told himself he had nothing to fear. Music is the art that transcends the ordinary limits of its own medium: sound. Knocking at the door was itself already a way of going beyond the obvious message (Open up, someone is looking for you, someone is bringing you something) to the unexpected message (Open up, see the face of
surprise, let in a turbulent passion, an uncontrollable danger, a harmful love).
She opened the door in a bath towel hastily wrapped around herself.
Behind her was a dark-skinned, completely naked young man with a stupid expression, bleary-eyed, dazed, defiant. He had tousled hair, a scrawny beard, and a thick mustache.
The rehearsal that afternoon was everything he had expected—or more. Inez Prada, as the protagonist Marguerite, was very close to miraculous: she allowed glimpses of a soul lost when the world strips it of passions, passions that Mephistopheles and Faust offer her—and that are as attainable as Tantalus’s fruit.
Thanks to this affirmative negation of herself, Inez/Marguerite demonstrated Pascal’s truth: uncontrolled passions are like poison. Dormant, they are vices, they feed the soul, and the soul, deceived, or believing it is being nourished, is in fact being poisoned by its own unknown and unruly passion. Is it true, as other heretics, the Cathars, believed, that the best way to rid oneself of passion is to bring it into the open and indulge it, with no restraint of any kind?
Together, Gabriel and Inez succeeded in giving physical visibility to the invisibility of hidden passions. Eyes could see what the music, in order to be art, had to hide. Atlan-Ferrara, rehearsing almost without interruption, felt that had this work been poetry instead of music, it wouldn’t have to be exhibited, displayed, presented. But at the same time, Inez’s sublime voice made him think that through the chink of possible imperfection in the passage from soprano to mezzo-soprano, the work became more communicable and Marguerite more convincing, transmitting the music through its very imperfection.
A wonderful complicity grew between conductor and singer, a complicity in work that was imperfect in order not to become hermetically sacred. Inez and Gabriel were the true demons, who as they prevented
Faust
from closing in on itself made it communicable, amorous, and even dignified … They put Mephistopheles to flight.
Did this result have anything to do with the unexpected meeting that morning?
Inez had a lover; Inez wasn’t the virgin of nine years ago, when she’d been twenty and he thirty-three. Who took her virginity? That didn’t concern him, nor could he attribute the deed to the poor annoyed, insulting, dazed, vulgar young man who had tried to protest the stranger’s intrusion and merely earned Inez’s peremptory command: “Put on your clothes and get out.”
He had been warned about the punctual caprice of summer rain in Mexico. Mornings would be sunny, but around two in the afternoon the skies grew dark as ink, and around four a torrential rain, an Asian monsoon, would descend upon the once-crystalline valley, settling the dust of the dry lakebed and barren canals.
Lying with his hands clasped behind his neck, Gabriel breathed in the new-green smell of dusk. Drawn by the scent of wet earth, he got up and went to the window. He felt satisfied, and that sensation should have put him on his guard; happiness is a momentary trap that disguises stubborn problems and makes us more vulnerable than ever to the blind legitimacy of bad luck.
Now night was falling over Mexico City, but he didn’t let himself be deceived by the serenity of the fresh, green scents of the valley. Odors flushed away by the storm were returning. The
moon was coming up, slyly, making one believe in its silvery winks. Full one day, waning the next, a perfect Turkish scimitar this night—although the metaphor itself was another deceit. All the perfume of the rain couldn’t hide the sculpture of this land Gabriel Atlan-Ferrara had come to without prejudice but also without forewarning, guided by a single idea: to direct
Faust
and direct it with Inez singing, she too directed by him, guided along the difficult path of changing her vocal range.
Standing there, he watched Inez sleep, naked, on her back, and he asked himself if the world had been created only so those breasts could be known—full like moons but with no danger of waning or eclipse—and the waist that was the gentle and firm coast of the map of pleasure, the mound of shining curls between her legs that was the perfect announcement of persistent loneliness, penetrable only in appearance, defiant as an enemy that dares desert only to deceive and capture us over and over. We never learn. Sex teaches us everything. It’s our fault that we never learn, and again and again fall into the same delicious trap.
Maybe he could compare Inez’s body to opera itself. Making visible what the absence of the body——body we remember and body we desire—gives us visibly.
He felt tempted to cover Inez’s exposed sex with the sheet that had been thrown aside, catching light like that from an Ingres or Vermeer open window. He stopped, because tomorrow at rehearsal the music would act as veil for the woman’s nakedness, the music would fulfill its eternal mission of hiding certain objects from view in order to deliver them to the imagination.
Would music steal words as well, not merely vision?
Was music the great mask of paradise, the true fig leaf of our shames, the final sublimation—beyond death—of our mortal visibility: body, words, literature, painting? Was only music
abstract, free of visible ties, the purification and illusions of our mortal bodily misery?
He was watching Inez sleep after the lovemaking he had coveted ever since she had sunk into oblivion and hibernated for nine years in his subconscious. Love as passionate as unpredictable. Gabriel didn’t want to cover her, because he understood that in this instance modesty would be a betrayal. One day very soon, next week, Marguerite would be the victim of the passion of her body, seduced by Faust through the cunning of the great procurer, Mephistopheles, and when she was snatched from hell by the choir of angels that would carry her to heaven, Atlan-Ferrara, given his wish, would opt for
daring
in his production of Berlioz, he would have the heroine ascend to heaven
naked,
purified by her nakedness, defiant in her beauty. I sinned, I pleasured, I suffered, I was forgiven, but I will not renounce the glory of my pleasure, the integrity of my freedom as a woman to enjoy sex, I have not sinned, you angels know it, you may be carrying me to paradise grudgingly but you have no choice but to accept the sexual joy I found in the arms of my lover; my body and my pleasure have triumphed over the diabolical pacts of Mephisto and the vulgar carnal appetite of Faust; my woman’s orgasm has defeated two men, my sexual satisfaction has made two men expendable.