Javier Marias - The Man of Feeling

"And what does the Cordoba over there think of our Cordoba over here?" It was an idiotic question, of course, but precisely because of that a particularly difficult question for a Madrid girl who had probably never been out of the country and, therefore, an excellent question with which to test her imaginative powers. It bothered me that she did not want to answer it: hiring a prostitute also means, in large measure, acquiring the right to dictate a performance, and her reaction annoyed me in exactly the same way as, when I was child, it used to annoy me if, during our games of make-believe, my playmate did not stick to the plot and to the dialogues that I had thought up for each occasion.

"Look, Emilio," she said, "I haven't got much time, you know. I'm already running late for another appointment I made earlier. Don't get me wrong, but I only made time for you because Cespedes asked me to."

So Claudina the prostitute called the night porter-cum-emissary "Cespedes," I thought, and I immediately wondered what Natalia Manur would call me, by my first name or by my surname, when she mentioned me to Dato or to Manur himself. The hum of cars became audible again, once our ears (mine) had grown accustomed to that longer silence. However, all my agitation and my vitality were draining away after only a few minutes' exposure to the indifference and conversational ineptitude of this other person. My discourteous attitude had been a mistake, but, after all, I thought, it is usually women who set the tone in any encounter or conversation. Even Claudina the prostitute was capable of disarming me and dissuading me from my initial intentions simply by not looking at me. I was glad that I had not forced a second encounter with Natalia Manur that night: if she too had failed to look at me, I might very well have ceased to desire her, just as I no longer felt the slightest desire for Claudina the prostitute after only five minutes of her indifferent, lying, unimaginative, weary, and (my fault this) still standing presence. Nevertheless, I tried to make my position clear.

"Well, in that case, at least allow me to decide how I fill the time," I said sourly.

"All right, I've got twenty minutes." And she looked at her watch just as Manur had looked at his on the one occasion when I had spoken to him. "What do you want me to tell you about? Not my childhood, please."

No, that wasn't the way. Now I really did feel offended, and the fact is that I did not want her to tell me anything, just to entertain me in my own way, to change personalities for a while, to act, perhaps to play. I should not have treated her like that, she had taken offence and had proceeded to treat me coldly and precipitately. Any possibility of a novel conversation or drama and the harmonious and fair distribution of roles had been spoiled from the start.

She had sat down at last when she said "all right" and now — legs crossed, her gaze still distracted, wandering here and there — she was revealing the whole of her thighs, so I sat down in turn on the left arm of the chair and touched them lightly — full frontally — with my fingertips. She immediately uncrossed her legs to make it easier for me to do so, but there was nothing provocative about this movement, it was made out of sheer indolence. Her thighs were softer than they looked, in fact, they were too soft and had a scar-like texture that did not make them exactly pleasant to the touch. At that same moment, I noticed that Claudina the prostitute was not dark-skinned enough to wear the color mauve. She should have waited a little longer, until the summer, to wear that dress, but she probably didn't realize that. Prostitutes are not educated in colors. I continued touching her, with my whole hand this time, and her pale, soft thighs, firm and smooth, artificially taut, suddenly reminded me of my own thighs when I was a boy (a fat boy) and when I had no option but to see them all the time, because my godfather did not allow me to wear long trousers until I was sixteen years old, on the pretext that the continual rubbing of my plump legs would wear the trousers out. And although Claudina the prostitute's thighs were slim and shapely, I had the feeling that I was touching the thighs of a former me. I found the thought troubling. Claudina the prostitute opened her legs slightly, offering me her inner thigh, but she did so lethargically and hastily, if those two qualities can coexist.

"No," I said, and she, slightly bemused, finally fixed her grey eyes on me. I closed her thighs and got to my feet. I picked up her unseasonable overcoat from the other armchair: it was a gesture that brooked no appeal. "It would be best if we just take this time as filled and you get off to your next appointment. Have you got the bill? The night porter said you would bring one."

"There's no need to be like that, I can always be late for an appointment," said the prostitute, still seated, with a touch of amour propre and a tone that bordered on the conciliatory, just the bare minimum of conciliatoriness to allow money to change hands, however well or ill gotten that money might be, however it was obtained.

But there was no point in starting all over again. I had absolutely no wish to remain with Claudina, especially if I couldn't have a quiet conversation with her and ask her, for example, how it was that she had such a strong Madrid accent, if she had been born in Argentina.

"You haven't even got an Argentinian accent," I said as I handed her three or four (I can't quite remember) of the same notes I had handed to the night porter for the favor.

"What do you mean?" she replied with genuine surprise. "I've done everything I can to get rid of my accent, but I just can't do it. I should know, I've lost several roles in the theater and on TV because of it."

I did not sleep well that night. I had murky dreams that this morning's dream chose not to reproduce. But at least I managed to get to sleep as soon as I was alone, tormented in the midst of the ever longer silence of the city by the belated doubt which I will now never be able to resolve, whether Claudina the prostitute was, after all, a real Argentinian and a magnificent actress, who had managed miraculously and unwittingly to suppress all trace of her origins, or if, on the contrary, she was an extremely stupid girl from Madrid doing her level best to disguise her accent and thus give some verisimilitude to her lies, although, if that were the case, only she would ever know. When I closed my eyes, after looking briefly at the empty wall and thinking, as I used to then, that this would be yet another night spent with no one watching over my sleep, the whole room still smelled of Claudina the prostitute, and the truth is, it smelled good.

INSTEAD OF BEING HERE WITH THIS pen and these sheets of paper for the better part of the day, I should have been studying the new role, in yet another Verdi opera, that I will soon be singing in Verona and in Vienna: it will be the first time I will have sung the role of Radames in Aida. A tenor has no option but to sing Verdi all his life unless he specializes in Wagner, something which I haven't done and never will do. Wagnerian singers are obsessive creatures and tremendously finicky, or, rather, as well as being finicky — as we musicians all tend to be — they insist on trying to appear original both in their singing and in their habits, and that desire, as everyone who has had any direct contact with the production or transmission of the art will know, is the most maddening thing there is. I myself have many eccentricities. (For example, the pen I am writing with at the moment has, as do all my other pens, a matte black nib, because a shiny, gold nib — as most nibs are— would hurt my eyes which, as I write, inevitably remain fixed only millimetres away from that gleaming nib as it scratches over the surface of the paper.) But I will never reach the same extremes as Hörbiger, who, although he had already appeared in Madrid four seasons before in the role of Otello, sang mainly Wagner, especially the Wagnerian roles of Tristan and Tannhauser. In his day, he was a brilliant and innovative interpreter of these roles, but his craving for originality grew gradually stronger and more all-encompassing as, over the years, his powers declined, and in the latter part of his career, he used to boast about his own eccentricities and say very proudly that in order to feel even moderately well, he needed to have eleven hours' sleep a night, to change his clothes four times a day, to bathe three times and to make love twice. If that were true, I really don't know how he had time for anything else. But his real mania and his real obsession was that he could not set foot on the stage if, from his hiding place behind the curtain a few moments before the performance began — one swift, bloodshot eye coinciding every few seconds with the crack in the curtain — he could see that there was a single stalls seat empty. He didn't care what was happening in the circle (although he preferred it to be full), but, accustomed as he was to the constant ovations of his youth, he could not abide there to be any gaps in the stalls or in the boxes. However, this is precisely the situation a minute before any performance begins, because there are always some members of the audience who come late, and Hörbiger would make the impresarios raise the curtain five, seven, ten, twelve, even fifteen minutes later than the appointed hour in order to allow time for the stragglers to arrive, so that he could peer out and find that all the seats in the stalls and the boxes were occupied. Those who had arrived promptly would grow irritated and, to the anguish of their ears, the orchestra, grown bored, would keep tuning and re-tuning their instruments. But despite these generous delays— to which the organizers of these events always agreed beforehand in order to avoid Hörbiger's bouts of despair, his loud yells (sometimes audible on the other side of the curtain), his threatened fainting fits and his insulting remarks, for he was always quick to brand the organizers as incompetents or saboteurs and to accuse them of having plotted with some vengeful colleague by not advertising his performance widely enough — there are always season-ticket holders or invited guests who fall ill or are away traveling and forget to hand on their tickets to friends, and so Hörbiger, once he had grasped this problem, was in the habit of tirelessly and boorishly nagging the other singers and the conductor to make sure, when using their quota of invitations, to give them to people who would, wider no circumstances, fail to turn up or else would take care that someone went in their place. And not content with this, he would demand that the impresarios should have at least fifteen or so employees or hired hands ready in the theater corridors ("They do it on television, don't they?" I heard him say in loud, threatening tones to the mayor of Madrid himself — the late mayor), who, if there was a problem, and if, after a quarter of an hour's postponement, there were still empty seats, would irrupt into the auditorium and, without delay, eliminate any lacunae. Hörbiger's problem grew more acute with every season, and from having been a real genius in his youth and an artist of immeasurable talent in his maturity, during his latter years, he rapidly lost both voice and artistry, and attracted fewer and fewer people to each performance he gave, so that gradually the admission time for stragglers was extended further and further (but they, for their part, fully aware of Hörbiger's obsession and reluctant to endure the inevitable waiting, arrived later and later, thus closing the vicious circle) and the number of employees or hired hands, who had to be ready when the order came to intervene and occupy those irremediably empty seats, grew larger and larger. At his last appearances, colleagues say that the corridors and the foyers of the respective theaters in which these took place were peopled by strange, tie-wearing rustics whom one could tell had never been to an opera before in their lives and who — being doubtless exclusively television viewers — did not even seem to know that they should keep quiet during the performance. And on his very last appearance, in Munich and again in the role of Otello which I saw him play, they say that more than half the stalls seats were filled not only by these false aficionados or hired laborers and by the very few spectators up in the circle who had been invited to come downstairs — to the fury of those who had paid more for their tickets — but also by all the ushers, porters, cloakroom attendants, cleaning women and even box office staff, whose presence was so urgently needed that they did not even have time to replace their uniforms, overalls and work clothes for something more presentable, even if it was one of those twisted, clumsily-knotted ties which, only a short time before, had sufficed to fill other theaters and which Hörbiger had never imagined that all too soon he would miss. That day, in Munich, not far from the summer scene of his greatest Wagnerian triumphs, the mighty Hörbiger brought his incredible career to a close in a way that was as fitting as it was unexpected: when, forty-five minutes after the hour appointed for Verdi's Otello to begin, and when, as I have said, they had recruited everyone in the building (they even had to resort to vital behind-the-scenes workers) to fill up the stalls and the boxes; when, as I say, the most admirable Heldentenor or heroic tenor of our times once more pressed his reddened eye to the opening in the curtain and, with the help of a small Japanese telescope which he sometimes used to inspect the vaster auditoria, he espied with horror an empty seat in the antepenultimate row of the right-hand aisle, an extraordinarily shrill note that no one has ever been able to repeat, and for which the word "moan" — they say — is but a poor definition, echoed round the whole theater. I suppose that last, irredeemably empty seat finally upset the balance of his already fragile sanity, for the fact is that, in full Otello costume, with his blacked-up face, his wild, curly wig, his eyes and lips made to look bigger with makeup, an earring in one ear and his telescope in his hand, the magnificent Hörbiger stepped onto the stage, climbed down into the stalls area, strode through it, to the astonishment of an already irritable public, and sat down in that one accusing seat, thus completing the audience that had been his downfall. When the conductor in person (Parenzan, an old friend of his) went to fetch him and, with kind words and great tact, tried to persuade him to return to the stage in order to begin the performance, assuring him that he would go straight out into the street and invite some passer-by to occupy his seat, Hörbiger, completely deranged by then and unable even to recognize Parenzan, the colleague who had shared in so many of his triumphs, started yelling that he had paid to see and hear the "divino" and that he had no intention of leaving his seat or of giving up to some interloper a ticket for which he had been forced to scrimp and save for months and then to stand in line for days outside the box office of that ghastly theater. And it was high time, he shrieked indignantly, that they stopped messing about and began the performance. The audience picked up on that one phrase and applauded it, thus unconsciously recognizing the tenor's double role and unwittingly giving a last ovation to the cause of his malaise. Hörbiger left the Munich opera house dressed as the Moor of Venice, borne thence by his colleagues Iago, Cassio, Roderigo and Montano, who had no option but to drag him forcibly from that far-flung aisle seat, amidst a genuinely mutinous audience. Hörbiger has not performed since. I don't know where he is now, and I prefer not to think about it as I fix my gaze on the black nib scratching across the paper, because I fear that it may be a place where they encourage him to sleep out his indispensable eleven hours and allow him to bathe and to change his clothes as often as he likes, but where it may prove difficult for him to enjoy his twice-daily love-making. Whatever the truth of the matter, what one can say to his credit is that, however fantastic and fraudulent his methods, the great Hörbiger always managed to fill the stalls and the boxes in every theater from the night of his debut to that of his unexpected retirement, although in order to achieve this, on that last night when he uttered only one note and heard only one ovation, he was obliged to transform himself into the most impatient, unstinting and long-suffering spectator of himself. Poor, great Hörbiger. A similar end, or one not much better, awaits us all, but I am convinced that the reason Wagnerians are the most prone to such spectacular collapses is their excessive love of originality. That is why I am not a Wagnerian and never will be.