Alexander Chee - The Queen of the Night

My name, taken from the little graveyard by the East River, hadn’t sounded like the stolen thing it was in years.

Mermaids and nightingales, Columbus wrote, of what he saw in the New World. Creatures of music, monstrous and fair. I was home.

§

The Americans favor a dark color, at least in New York, the people there colored like crows and sparrows. When I make my first entrance, on a trapeze decorated like a crescent moon, I feel them below me, the heat of them rising through the cold night air, the tobacco, the smoke, the cologne, and the perfume all together. I watch the jewels of the women flash in the dark as I descend. When I look down, the indigo silk panels to the backdrops, hung to make it look like night, are not as dark as the crowd, and so it looks, each time as I enter the ring, as if some of the real night from outside has come inside to wait below me.

My future, then: a traveling show, a hippodrama with a year-long tour featuring two stars, a beautiful young man from Paris who plays the captured angel and me. And now we are in trains, the opera about a circus now a circus opera; and the crowds move in and out, all applause and tobacco, oily smoke off the tapers; and the tents rise, fill, fall. The angel wears taxidermy wings taken from a condor and isn’t, according to the posters, allowed to fly because then he might “escape.” He holds me tightly instead from behind as I ride the horse with him around the tent, the wings flapping in an imitation of flight. The man himself never wants to leave, and sometimes neither do I.

Though there’s only one escape I long for now.

The boy who plays the angel in our show is from Pest. He’s unspeakably beautiful, taller than aerialists usually are, with pale white skin to match my own and long dark hair that flies in the air behind him like a flag. He’s from a family of aerialists; his family has performed in circuses for at least a century. Perhaps since the birth of Christ. He launches himself into the air with only a rope tied to the roof of the tent. The prop master and the taxidermist used three normal condor wings each to make them. No living thing has ever used them to fly.

Of course, if there’s wings that can’t be trusted, I want to try them on.

At night, I go to the train’s roof with him. When the cars wait patiently in the dark for some night procedure, and as the trainmen shout to one another, he hands the wings up to me, and I slide the harness on. As he ties them in place, a passing wind tugs the nets of feathers, bones, and glue, and I can feel where, if the harness wings were to grow into place, these might allow me to shrug up into the air. In the sky my eyes follow the path of the wind’s gesture. I see for a moment as if from the place I would have gone to then, the distant train below me, how this boy would stare at me as I left, soaring.

I watch that spot as he comes behind me and undoes the knots, and then we return to our compartments. Alone again, I draw back the curtains and watch the sky until the vertigo and the wishing go away.

I had always imagined any return home would wait until after my death when perhaps, at my mother’s Lord’s command, this would be His only mercy to me, that I would have those wings. What kind of angel would I be? I ask myself. And yet I know. I’d ride storms like they were old ponies, sing off-key from behind the statue of Saint Mark, organize the pigeons to scald the bishop’s miter with their dung. But I would obey finally, at the end, for the chance to fall from the sky’s belly over the ruined farm, wings spread wide, in a gown as dark as crows, the angel face so bright the lightning dims. I’d obey for the chance to be the one who comes for her then, on the Lord’s return. To open her grave, me hidden in that final storm she waits for to wash her tenderly from the ground under my direction until she is clean again. Until she should feel newborn.

§

When I make my entrance now on the trapeze swing, the tent painted to look like the sky at night, I want it then, ask for it from God. As I step to the ground, the applause sounds to me at moments like hard rain. I try not to search for the places in the sky where I would be if I could fly. And yet, the wind at my back, this new appetite awakes, and I do.

For now, it seems, the heroine is separated from her lover by the act he had hoped would bind them. I can feel the miles run under me, and I hope, by the tour’s end, I will know which was greater, curse or fate. Soprano or song.

In my compartment at night, where I write this now, I draw back the curtains and see myself in flight, riding down the dome of the night sky, the stars a road descending to the composer’s windows in London. Knocking on his shutters, I would be wearing the Russian Empress’s sapphire crown, our ransom lifted gently from her sleeping brow. My first stop.

New ending, I would say, and press a finger to shut the lower lip of his astonished mouth. The equestrienne steals the angel wings. And then the wings would swing shut around us both.

And I would tell him, as we rise into the air, The curse is not that we cannot choose our Fates .

The curse, the curse we all live under, is that we can.

This novel began one day in 1999 after a conversation with the late David Rakoff on the street in the East Village of New York City. He told me a long story about the opera singer Jenny Lind, the Swedish Nightingale, starting with her discovery as a child at her music lesson, overheard from the street, and ending with her mysterious early retirement and her subsequent two-year farewell tour of America promoted by P. T. Barnum — a tour that left her a very rich woman.

I am pretty sure David called her a nineteenth-century Cher.

By the time I got home that day, I had an image of an opera singer on a train, singing in a circus at night, and making her way across the United States, her life full of secrets.

A little research quickly showed that what I’d imagined wasn’t anything like the real Jenny’s life. But I liked my shadow Jenny better — and I knew she was the seed of a novel.

I still don’t know why David told me that story. I just know that if he hadn’t, I would never have written this novel. I cannot express how much I regret that I did not finish in time for him to read it. Any acknowledgments could only begin with him.

§

This is a work of fiction. Lilliet bears only the lightest resemblance to Jenny Lind — she is not Swedish, but American born, and sings in an era where Jenny Lind is a vivid memory, not a rival. If she is meant to resemble anyone, it is Pamina, from The Magic Flute —this book is meant as a reinvention of the Mozart opera as a novel.

There are many historical figures in these pages, however, and many texts proved invaluable as a resource. I have listed them in order of appearance with any credits regarding sources.

Giuseppe and Giuseppina Verdi came to life for me first in the letters of Giuseppina Verdi, translated as a part of Hans Busch’s Verdi’s “Aida”: The History of an Opera in Letters and Documents ; I was also aided by Verdi: A Biography by Mary Jane Phillips-Matz.

The scene with Cora Pearl’s famous performances in Orpheé aux Enfers and then her party afterward is a fiction based on a fiction and derives from the description of the performance and afterparty that appeared in Zola’s Nana —Zola based Nana partly on Cora, but had Nana sing the role in his novel. Some of those performance details were confirmed in Cora Pearl’s autobiography, The Memoirs of Cora Pearl .

The description of Eau de Lubin was made possible by the distinguished French perfume house Lubin, who shared their ancient recipe with me; I am grateful to them, Colleen Williams, and Barbara Herman, who put me in touch with Lubin as the scent is allergenic and so isn’t available now; thank you also to Brian Chambers, who helped me understand how the fragrance would wear.