Gabriel turned to look at the musician, bureaucrat, and perhaps censor. “True, Señor Santos?”
“Of course, maestro.”
“A lie.
Music is not a substitute for natural sounds sublimated by artificial sounds.” Gabriel Atlan-Ferrara stopped, and, more than glancing around or staring, his eyes penetrated each and every one of his singers.
“Everything in music is artificial. We have lost the original unity between speech and song. Let us mourn that. Sing a requiem for nature. RIP.”
His expression became melancholy.
“Yesterday I heard a plaintive song in the street. ‘You, only you, are the cause for all my tears, for my disillusion and despair.’”
If an eagle could talk, it would look like Atlan-Ferrara.
“Was that street singer expressing in music the deepest sentiments of his soul? It’s possible. But Berlioz’s
Faust
is the complete opposite. Señoras and señores,” Atlan-Ferrara concluded, “emphasize the distancing of what you sing. Rid your voices of all sentiment and recognizable passion, convert this opera into an oratorio to the unknown, to words and sounds that have no antecedents, no emotion but their own, in this apocalyptic instant that may be the instant of creation: invert time, imagine music as an
inversion
of time, a song of origin, a voice of the dawn, with no antecedent and no consequence.”
He lowered his head with feigned humility.
“Let us begin.”
Then, nine years ago, she hadn’t wanted to yield to him. She had waited for him to come and yield to her. He had wanted to make love to her on the English coast, and had stored forever ridiculous sentences for a moment he imagined or dreamed of or wanted, or all those things at the same time—how would he know?—“We could walk together across the bottom of the sea”—only to find a different woman, one capable of dispatching a casual lover.
“Put on your clothes and get out.”
And who was capable of saying that not just to the poor mustached devil, but to him, Maestro Gabriel Atlan-Ferrara. She obeyed him in rehearsals. Even better: they had a perfect understanding.
It was as if that arc of Art Nouveau stage lights united the two of them, orchestra pit to stage, in a miraculous meeting between conductor and singer that also energized the tenor, Faust, and the bass, Mephistopheles, drawing them into the magic circle of Inez and Gabriel, as in tune and alike in artistic interpretation as they were at odds and unlike in their carnal relations.
She dominated.
He admitted it.
She had the power.
He wasn’t used to that.
He studied himself in the mirror. He had always thought of himself as haughty, vain, swathed in the imaginary cape of a grand gentleman.
She remembered him as emotionally naked. Slave to a memory. The memory of another youth. The boy who didn’t grow old because no one ever saw him again. The boy who had disappeared from the photograph.
Through that opening—through that absence—Inez slipped in to dominate Gabriel. He regretted it and he accepted it. She had two whips, one in each hand. With one she said to Gabriel, I have seen you stripped, defenseless before an affection you insist on disguising. With the other she lashed him: You didn’t choose me, I chose you. I didn’t miss you then and I don’t miss you now. We make love to assure the harmony of the work. When the performances are over, you and I will be through, too.
Did Gabriel Atlan-Ferrara know all this? Know it and accept it? In Inez’s arms he said yes, he accepted it, in order to have Inez he would accept any arrangement, any humiliation. Why did it always have to be she who mounted him—he on his back and she on top, she directing the sexual game but demanding of
him, in his trapped, submissive, prostrate position, all manner of touchings, imperatives, obvious pleasures that he could do nothing but grant her?
He grew used to being the one with his head on the pillow, flat on his back, watching her body rise above him like a monument to the senses, a column of enthralling flesh, a single carnal river from her sex joined to his, to spread thighs, buttocks bucking on his testicles, to hips flowing toward a waist at once noble and amused, like a statue laughing at the world by grace of a similarly amused navel, and finally to the firm but bouncing breasts, flesh merging into a neck of insulting whiteness as the face grew distant, alien, hidden behind the mass of red hair, the mane like a mask of veiled emotion …
Inez Prada. (“It looks better than Inés Rosenzweig on the marquees and is easier to pronounce in other languages.”)
Inez Revenge. (“I left everything behind me. And you?”)
For what? My God, what was she getting even for? (“The prohibition belonged to two different times that neither of us wanted to violate.”)
The night of the opening, Maestro Atlan-Ferrara stepped up on the podium amid applause from an expectant public.
This was the young conductor who had drawn such unsuspected sounds—latent? no, lost—from Debussy, Ravel, Mozart, and Bach.
This night he was conducting for the first time in Mexico, and everyone wanted to assess the strength of the personality announced in his photographs: long black curly hair, eyes somewhere between flashing and dreamy, demoniac eyebrows that reduced Mephisto’s disguises to comedy, imploring hands that made Faust’s gestures of desire seem awkward …
They said that he was better than his singers. However, the perfect, evolving, and enviable harmony between Gabriel Atlan-Ferrara and Inez Prada, between lovers with a dual dynamic in bed and onstage, dominated everything. Because, however much she fought for the agreed-on equality, in the theater he imposed his will, he led the game, he mounted her, he subjected her to his male desire, though at the end, at the finale, he placed her in the center of the stage, hand in hand with the child seraphim. Singing beside the celestial spirits, making her aware that, contrary to anything she might suspect, she was always the one who dominated, the center of the relationship that (neither of them could think otherwise) achieved parity only because she was queen of the bed and he master of the theater.
The maestro, conducting the final scenes, quietly spoke the words,
The heavenly virgins will dry the tears, Marguerite, torn from you by earthly sorrows, have hope,
and then Marguerite, who is Inez, holding the hands of the children of the chorus, each holding the hand of another, and the last giving his to a singer in the celestial choir, and this singer to her neighbor, and the next to the next, until all the choir, with Marguerite/Inez in the center, was truly a single choir united by the chain of hands, and then the two angels at either end of the semicircle formed on the stage each held out a hand to the box closest to the proscenium and took the hand of the nearest member of the audience, and this person the one nearest him, and she to the next, until everyone in the Bellas Artes was a choir of hands holding hands, and although the chorus was singing,
Have hope and smile upon your blessings,
the theater was a great lake of flames, and in the depths of every soul a horrifying mystery was taking place: they were all going to hell, they had thought they were climbing to paradise
but they were going to the devil; Gabriel Atlan-Ferrara shouted in triumph,
Has! Irimuru kara-brao, has, has, has!
He was alone in the abandoned hall. As they took their bows, Inez had told him, “I’ll see you in an hour. At your hotel.”
Gabriel Atlan-Ferrara, sitting in the first row of seats in the empty theater, watched them lower the great glass curtain fabricated over a period of nearly two years by Tiffany craftsmen, a million tiny gleaming pieces fitted together until, like a river of lights emptying into the auditorium, a panorama of the valley of Mexico was formed, with its awesome and loving volcanoes. They faded like the lights of the theater, of the city, of the concluded performance. But, like crystal seals, the lights of the glass curtain continued to glitter.
In his hand Gabriel Atlan-Ferrara held and stroked the smooth shape of the crystal seal Inez Rosenzweig-Prada had put there amid applause from an enthusiastic audience.
He left the auditorium and walked out into the pink marble vestibule, with its strident murals and installations of lustrous copper, all in the Art Nouveau style that in 1934 ended a construction begun with Caesarian ostentation in 1900 and interrupted for a quarter-century by civil war. Outside, the Palacio de Bellas Artes was a great wedding cake conceived by an Italian architect, Adamo Boari, surely with the idea that the Mexican building would be the bride of Rome’s monument to King Vittorio Emmanuele: the wedding would have been consummated with marble phalluses and crystal hymens between meringue sheets, except that in 1916 Boari fled from the Revolution, horrified that the lace of his dream was being trampled by the horses of Zapata’s and Villa’s troops.
It sat there, abandoned, a skeleton of iron, and that was what Gabriel Atlan-Ferrara saw when he left the small plaza in front of the Palacio: naked, stripped, rusting for a quarter-century, a castle of scrap sinking into the rancorous mud of Mexico City.
He crossed the street to Alameda Park, and a black obsidian mask greeted him, making him feel happy. The death mask of Beethoven stared at him with closed eyes, and Gabriel bowed and said good evening.
He walked into the lonely park, accompanied only by words from Ludwig van, talking to him, asking him whether in fact music is the one art that transcends the limits of its own means of expression, which is sound, in order to manifest itself in such sovereign fashion in the silence of a Mexican night. The Aztec city—the Mexican Jerusalem—was kneeling before the mask of a deaf musician capable of imagining the sound of Gothic stone and the Rhine River.
The treetops were swaying softly in the hours after the rain, funneling the docile powers of the heavens from their leaves. Berlioz was behind, still resonating in the marble cavern with his valiant French vowels bursting the prisons of harsh consonants, that “horrid” Germanic articulation structured of verbal armor-plate. The flaming sky of the Valkyries was a stage prop. The Faustian hell of black birds and careening horses was flesh and blood. Paganism does not believe in itself, because it never doubts. Christianity believes in itself, because its faith is always being tested. The colonial Inquisition executed its victims in these peaceful gardens of the Alameda, and before that, Indian merchants had bought and sold slaves. Now tall, rhythmic trees covered the nakedness of motionless white statues, erotic and chaste only because they were marble.
The distant organ-grinder broke the silence of the night.
“Only your fatal shadow, the shadow of evil, follows wherever I go.”
The first blow landed on his mouth. His arms were pinned to immobilize him. Then the mustached man with the scrawny beard kneed him in the belly and testicles, punched him in the face and chest, as Atlan-Ferrara tried to focus on the statue of the woman kneeling in a posture of anal humiliation, offering herself,
malgré tout,
to the amorous hand of Gabriel Atlan-Ferrara, who was staining her marble buttocks with his blood and trying to understand those foreign words:
cabrón, chinga tu madre,
mother-fucker, don’t go anywhere near her again, you goddamn ball-less fag, she’s my woman …
Has, has, Mephisto, hup, hup, hup!
Was an explanation of his behavior on the English coast required? He could tell her that he always fled from situations in which lovers adopt the habits of an old married couple. The postponement of pleasure is a principle of true eroticism, at once practical and sacred.
“Ah, so you were imagining a bogus honeymoon?” Inez smiled.
“No, I wanted you to have a mysterious and loving memory of me.”
“Arrogant and unsatisfied.” She stopped smiling.
“Let’s just say that I left you behind at the cottage to preserve the curiosity of innocence.”
“Do you think you gained something by that, Gabriel?”
“Yes. Sexual union is momentary, and at the same time permanent, however fleeting it may seem. On the other hand, music is permanent, and yet it is short-lived compared with the lasting
power of the truly instantaneous. How long does the most prolonged orgasm last? And how long renewed desire?”
“It depends. On whether two are involved … or three.”
“Were you expecting that at the shore? A
ménage à trois?”
“You introduced me to a man who wasn’t there, remember?”
“I told you, he comes and goes. His absences are never conclusive.”
“Tell me the truth. Were you ever that boy in the photo?”
Gabriel didn’t answer. He watched the rain washing everything and said he wished it would last forever, take everything.
They spent a blessed night of peace and deep fulfillment.
Only at dawn, Gabriel tenderly stroked Inez’s cheeks and felt obliged to tell her that maybe the boy for whom she felt such an attraction would reappear one day.
“Honestly, haven’t you ever found out where he went?” she asked, without many illusions.