Alexander Chee - The Queen of the Night

Now that she had retired, this salon in Paris was her revenge on those earlier enemies, whatever else it was — a stage in her own house that she commanded, where no one could dismiss or surpass her. Those other singers might have paused at her age as their voices faded; her technique and her command of her repertoire was such that she made more of her ailing voice than most younger singers did with theirs.

Here was Pauline, then, still accompanying herself on her organ, beginning the evening with a song from Sapho, which thrilled us all. She went on to perform songs from Alceste, La Sonnambula, and Orphée et Eurydice, and then, after applause, she gamely gave curtsies to us and then moved down to her piano, where she announced she was to play Chopin’s Nocturne in C Minor, op. 48, no. 1 and began.

If Chopin’s Nocturne in F Minor, op. 55, no. 1 is like looking for a love lost in the darkness, this is the descent into love, in all its richness, mortifications, and subsequent glories. It begins mournfully and then becomes tender, then passionate, then seems to rage in a movement from despair into redemption, then passion again, and at last, a plaintive, even affectionate acceptance that this will die and leave us. In Pauline’s hands that night, it was a storm of arpeggios, a passion made more beautiful by the way it aspires to immortality despite the knowledge of its own death approaching — a love that knows it can be lost and still loves hopelessly as long as it can. Pauline played it as only she could — which is to say, as someone who was a dear friend to Chopin, who had studied with him, collaborated with him, played four-handed beside him, and then sang Mozart’s requiem over his grave. A tenderness mixed with grandeur illuminated it all. Her performance was extraordinary, and the last bars sounded as if they were thrown over that final wall that is death, a last farewell to a lost beloved passing on into whatever lay beyond.

When she was done, the room was silent, humbled. We had been startled by the force of it, I think, or, at least, I had been — and the force of what I felt. I had wept. As I reached for my handkerchief, a movement near the door to the stairs caught my eye: a silver-haired shadow that could only be Turgenev, still in his dressing gown, his eyes bright with tears.

His listening tube abandoned, it had taken him all this time to descend the stairs.

At that moment, Pauline waved for me to come forward, thundering into the introit to the Jewel Song — she intended to accompany me, of course, a great honor. I hesitated — I wanted to ask someone to help Turgenev back to bed, remembering how painful his gout was, or to tell her to sing or play something else for him — but as I looked to the door once more, he put a finger over his mouth, a gleam in his eyes as if he were a naughty child, and then withdrew farther into the shadow.

I went to Pauline’s side instead and obeyed them both as I always had since meeting them.

I was finally able to speak to Pauline alone near the evening’s end when she approached me and thanked me for singing for her — as if I could have refused her.

You have truly grown into your artistry. You sing to give pleasure, she continued, but it is not with that craven approach that goes out begging for applause; instead, it is a gift given from your own store of pleasure, a pleasure taken from the music. This is the only honest way to give this, I think. The result is that your Jewel Song was exquisitely handled. But what’s more, I can tell you finally understand what is in that beautiful throat.

Thank you, I said, made shy by this, but not too shy to ask the questions I had come with, all of which amused her. But Pauline had none of the answers I needed. She apologized for not remembering the name of the Prix de Rome winner from several winters before and said she had heard nothing of Verdi protégés, nor did she know of a writer named Simonet, much less his novel. She, like me, doubted he was Sand’s nephew. I am an old woman at last and have no gossip to share, she said, even as I protested it couldn’t be true.

Only the gossip that comes in with the doctors, she said.

And then she leaned back her head with the faintest smile and, tapping her chin, asked, Are you in love with him, this mystery composer?

How can I be? I asked in return. I don’t even know him.

Almost every opera is about this, she said, her smile growing. Love before first sight.

I laughed.

You laugh, she said, but it is so. How I wish we were still in Baden-Baden, she said. Walking across the lawn back to supper as we used to. Do not forget Sunday, she said, with a wag of her finger.

I promised I would not and kissed her good night. I returned home to contemplate my little mystery some more.

§

Was this love before first sight?

Perhaps , I told myself, as I entered the foyer to my apartment and Doro greeted me there, lifting off the coat and the fur collar I’d worn out, and tutting at me for wearing the emeralds to Pauline’s — they were too ostentatious for a salon! I assured her my hostess had invited this.

Whoever this composer Simonet had mentioned was, yes, perhaps I did already love him, or would. Perhaps it was time to love again. I had loved exactly once. After the circumstances under which my first and only love had died, I decided to set this heart of mine someplace safe forever. If I could not save him or be with him, I at least wanted never to betray him.

But even as I reminded myself of this, I knew my heart had at last begun to disagree with me. It had grown hungry and, at the scent of love in the air, suffered the temptations of any hermit who has stumbled onto what seems to be the preparations for a feast.

I went to stand alone in front of the falcon. I took the earrings from my ears and returned them to their trap.

The answers I sought now, they could very well set me free from at least my suspicions and fears. They could also matter not at all. On that long-ago evening, as the tenor’s carriage passed through the streets of Paris taking me to my next life, I had vowed to learn the nature of what was hidden to me in this transaction, for I was sure the answer was the answer to everything — sure the answer would free me and return my life to me somehow.

But if the earrings were a reminder of that evening’s singular defeat, the falcon that hid them reminded me that when I’d at last fought my way through to my long-sought answers I discovered these answers would not have released me from this strange bondage. And, say that they had — I would never have become a singer. This was the real irony to my situation: Everything I had as a singer I owed to this bargain.

The falcon statue was a gift from the mysterious man who had set the terms of my return to the tenor with the Comtesse. He had given it to me along with my freedom.

That last artificer, hidden up above them all.

§

As a story of discovering you are in another story, Il Trovatore is a tragedian’s sleight of hand. It is a love story until Manrico dies, and the Gypsy’s daughter stands and shouts her victory, and the Count understands he has ordered the murder of his lost brother and driven Leonora to her death. In a single instant, we find we are in another story altogether, the opera only the last chapter in the Gypsy’s daughter’s long plan for revenge begun so long ago.

Victory, defeat, victory, defeat, victory, defeat.

And so my tenor and I had found ourselves to be in quite another story from the one we believed we were in. A story begun when the Comtesse arrived at her first ball in Paris, and the music stopped, and the Emperor and Empress stopped their conversations to see what had happened.