Alexander Chee - The Queen of the Night

I do, I said.

Are you performing now? he asked.

Under my wool skirt I could feel the leather garters I still wore against my thighs. No, I said.

You must not, he said. It is very likely someone would try to exploit your voice and get you to sing too soon, in the dance halls or the cabarets. Everything you learn here, should we admit you, could come to nothing if your voice fails, he said. He paused and a silent council moved between them all, and then he said, We will confer. Please await our letter. And until then, sing nothing.

He was a tender old man, someone who had grown old here, clearly. In my fear and nervousness I stood staring around the room. Then I picked up my music case.

The woman professor, whom I would later know very well, came and took my arm, walking me to the door. She had a matronly air but a maiden’s figure. My dear, she said, it is not a bird, this Falcon. The first Falcon gave it her name: Marie-Cornélie Falcon. She was my teacher. She was an elegant gentlewoman and an inspired singer, but her career lasted just eight years. I wish you many more. She clasped her hands over mine and, with a pat, released them.

She was too late. As I walked the rue du Faubourg Poissonnière afterward, I could feel the wings trailing off my back, the wind in the street beating against them.

§

I left the area quickly and returned home. I did not want to risk arrest for conspiring against the honor of the lady professor.

All over Paris, I saw them, young men and women carrying these handsome leather music cases like the one under my arm, students at the Paris Conservatoire, formerly l’Hôtel des Menus-Plaisirs, the place Odile had studied, the state-run school that trained and educated the musicians, singers, and dancers who sang for the pleasure of the Emperor Napoléon III and his Empress Eugénie on the stage of the Paris Opera. I hoped to truly be one of them — and that my past would not prevent this.

There was much Euphrosyne had neglected to tell me of her situation, and so I alternately regretted and rebelled against my entry into the register. In this life, I was forbidden to be on certain streets altogether, forbidden to be on any street during daylight, and my head was always to be covered if I was outside. I could never be in the company of unregistered women, and every two weeks I was to renew the registration in person. The door to my apartment, if I was to live away from the brothel, was to have oversized numerals on it, announcing to all who passed the nature of the woman who lived there, and I was never to be seen at my open window. To disobey any of these rules meant I could be arrested.

While at first I obeyed these laws, I soon went about by day with a bare head, couldn’t remember the forbidden streets until I was on them, and had not renewed my registration in more than a month. To go now, though, was to be jailed for lateness as well. I’d allowed my life with the tenor to take me over. I was sure, without any reason to think so, that our time together would end in my freedom. I could see it in the change in expressions from the professors — at the beginning they had looked on, almost embarrassed to see me. By the end, there was real respect.

I was a Falcon.

A Falcon, my dangerous teacher said questioningly, when he arrived a little later at the apartment he had bought for me. I walked to him as he threw himself across my bed.

He wore evening dress at all hours of the day. I am either going out or returning from going out, he would say of it to anyone who asked. His blond hair glowed blue in the winter sun coming through the window. I put my hand against the black velvet along his collar and then ran it against his beard. His eyes were likewise a pale blue. The French spoke of a color that calmed the horses and a color that frightened them. I was not sure which these were.

And likewise, sometimes it reassured me to be with him, and sometimes it terrified me.

In singing, nothing hides, especially not from your teacher. I learned quickly my dangerous teacher could tell if I had been singing too much or too little, if I was having my menses or was hungry. It frightened me at first. It was as if I could never be hidden again.

During the months prior to my audition I had been rehearsing and taking lessons inside the unfinished Opéra Garnier with him, who was better known to the jury at the Conservatoire and to the city of Paris as the Prussian heldentenor at Salle Le Peletier, the current home of the Paris Opera. Charles Garnier, the architect of the new home for the Paris Opera, had enlisted the tenor to come and sing at various stages in the construction in order to hear how the sound changed inside the theater. The tenor had suggested the place for our rehearsals and Garnier was delighted.

He is tuning it, the tenor said to me one day. Really, it can only help him.

I met Garnier only once and then never saw him, and I soon forgot he listened, if he ever did — the tenor was the sort to obtain a great deal through charm, and much of what he said was never true — we had never prodded each other on this, either, for his lies, so far, had not affected me. Not in any way I knew. In the meantime, the unfinished Garnier had come to feel like my own home, in part because the tenor had said to me, It will be your new home, and he encouraged me to treat it familiarly. To rehearse there, he felt, would give me a certain advantage over the other sopranos. This is the only place any of us will want to sing, he said, when it is done. Your first time here you will know your voice in it perfectly.

Yes, comprimario, I said. I am a Falcon.

Since beginning the rehearsals at the Garnier, we called each other comprimario and comprimaria, the opera terms for the supporting cast.

The Garnier was more beautiful with each arrival and even with each departure. A new corner was always being painted or shaped or plastered, or a statue had arrived, or a frieze had been finished. There was very little natural light, and as the stage lights were not yet installed, we sang by candlelight into the dark theater over the stepped slope where the velvet chairs would be someday while workmen pressed gilding across the walls and ceilings. A sketch would be a god or goddess the next time I passed, a marble statue turned to gold.

It was, on reflection, the perfect place to turn a fille en carte into a Falcon soprano.

We shall have to hood you at night to make sure you do not get lost, he said. Very dangerous and very beautiful, the professor said of your voice?

Yes. It is exactly what he said.

It is clear he’s already in love with you. I can’t allow you to go to this school, the tenor said, and drew me into his arms as he laughed at his own joke and I pretended to laugh as well.

§

He introduced me to his friends. I soon discovered it was my duty to entertain them as well, as he pleased.

They were mostly good men: a Japanese painter, an English dramatist, the tenor’s former lieutenant, in Paris on diplomatic missions. An Italian baritone from Trieste who liked to stay the night. This preference enraged the tenor, though he allowed it, and so I had to allow it, though the baritone snored like a dragon.

The painter painted me as a prelude to his affections; the dramatist gave me poems or spoke forever of his desire to introduce me to London, creating eventually a long story of turning me into a star of the Royal Opera; the former commander aspired to be a composer and rarely asked for a single erotic favor, instead asking me to sing his relatively simple compositions.

Euphrosyne’s warning returned to me. You will tire of him. I had. What had first seemed to be a long play was, in fact, more like a repertory in which much of my role was silent and I had to manage the cues as they arrived. It was tiring to always have to please him, to always have to pretend he made me happy, to pleasure him, to pleasure his friends. At the Majeurs-Plaisirs at least there were hours when you could be left alone.