Alexander Chee - The Queen of the Night

The first illustration of me appeared in the newspapers the next day. I was drawn in a gown with a bustle of a size that can exist only in drawings and that general’s coat, my souvenir of that costume ball at Compiègne — I wore it all winter, that night in particular — and so it was I was drawn as a general on horseback riding down a Paris street, the hem of my train and the tails of the coat billowing out behind me and breaking apart into the shapes of men chasing after me.

You could barely make out the horse — the hooves looked nearly like my own feet.

The caption read La Générale et la légion.

You were an ordinary woman until you earned your sobriquet. La Païva, La Malibran, La Présidente. Cora Pearl was, in fact, such a famous horsewoman she was sometimes called La Centauresse.

The coat, the drawing, and the riot would all make me more famous than any reviews of the debut. The driver was unharmed, the press and the public were electrified, and my admirers loved me more than if I had stayed in the carriage, but I was furious. The end of the night of my debut found me weeping in anger, wishing it had never happened, even that it could all be undone; but then it mattered less than it might have, and I was soon too busy to notice — La Générale it was. Off I went to make my name in the capitals of Europe.

And so it was for eight years until the time when this story begins.

The story of the undoing.

IN THE PERFORMANCES of Faust that followed the Sénat Bal, there were times when I was onstage and the gaslight border erased all but the most stubborn features, the flashes off the biggest jewels, the three tiers there like a portrait of the afterlife — Heaven, Limbo, Hell — the chandeliers the angels guarding each circle, the crystal points the blazing light of their fiery swords.

And then it was like looking at the rooftops, and the streets, and a vision even of the streets beneath Paris.

And then it was only crystal and flame and the rattle of the crowd.

The worst seats are the highest and are called the gods. If they were to sneak in among us, that is where they’d hide.

Those were the only gods I believe in, I would tell anyone. No more secret gods for me. Not my mother’s God, not one. This was what I had sworn to myself when I left Germany. No more omens, no more prophecies.

But now I was back in Paris, waiting for an opera invented out of my life, and as I waited, as I thought I could decide whether to accept, decide whether or not the curse was true, my whole life had become the opera. The curse did not seem to care as to whether I believed in it. My secret god still waited for me to reach my lesson’s end.

The house lights were going down. The stage lights would soon go up. My turn was here.

§

During the years after Aristafeo’s death, I sometimes met those who said their loved ones were still with them — they came to them in dreams, appeared in mirrors, left some token on a pillow — their scent, at times, or a touch. I reflected then on how I was not one of those lucky enough to claim a connection between this world and the other.

His ghost had never found its way to me before this, if this is what this opera was.

I had seen him stabbed twice. This pallor that would never leave me was, in its strange way, a daily reminder of the distance between us.

You are alive and he is dead, this color said to me when I saw my reflection.

I believed in his death more than I believed in God. And yet I had not properly mourned him, it seemed to me, as I sat in his house in the Marais again these ten years later and waited for Simonet to return with the Settler’s Daughter’s things that I’d asked to see.

The house was not entirely unfamiliar now, but no trace remained of what it had been inside, having been redecorated entirely. As I waited, I wondered if it was easier or harder to be there, given how different it was from before.

I decided that it was both.

I stood and went to the wall where I knew the secret room to be and hesitantly reached out my hand to the new soft blue paper and for a moment felt fear as if, were I to touch it, I might feel his heart beating there.

I had come to see for myself, in much the same way I’d gone to see Euphrosyne, the tenor, and the Comtesse. I wanted, if not a confrontation with his ghost, then to see the house and my things at the least. More important, Aristafeo had never shown me the opera he’d been writing for me. I never knew whether it even existed. If it did exist, I now suspected Simonet of discovering it. This seemed a more likely answer than a ghost in that hidden room, still writing it, handing off pages to Simonet, a last act before oblivion called him from this plane.

The puzzle for me was how to ask after it, given I was supposed to be innocent of the house and its past. As my hand lingered on the paper, it was all I could do not to peel it back from the walls.

There was not even a sign of the mechanism, however, and then I heard Simonet’s footsteps on the stairs and returned to my chair so that I was sitting as he came back into the room with my old circus trunk in his hands.

I’m so amazed to think you’ve finally read it, he said, smiling and nervous.

Yesterday, I said, and smoothed out my skirt. I did nothing else.

He patted at his hair, still wild. I could see that he had dressed hurriedly from his half-tucked shirt front, which he then tucked as he noted my notice.

I was not expecting company, he said. I was up until quite late last night, forgive me.

Forgive me for surprising you, I said. I was near and thought to call. This is, to be sure, a whim. But I was very moved, and after finishing the novel, I wanted to see her things.

In truth, I had hoped to surprise him. Perhaps even to catch him and the composer at work.

In his hands, the object he held looked so small I wondered that I had ever carried it.

He set the trunk down on the table between us, undid the latch, and pulled the ruby rose out first. Do you see? he asked. It’s incredible.

Yes, I said. It is.

I took it from him, turning it in the light; it was as whole as it had been the day I received it.

Am I to understand you are with us, then, truly with us? Simonet sat back in his chair.

I am nearly with you, I said. I’ve still to see the music. But this is truly inspiring. I remain interested.

I set the rose down and then picked up the diary, as my new friend had called it. In a circus they called it a route book, and in it I’d kept the entries of my passage during my time as the Settler’s Daughter. It was one of the few things I had taken with me when I’d left, as I’d thought I might someday want to find them again. I had not.

Instead, I had turned it into something of a composition book, a practice book, where I wrote lists of the words I did not know alongside lists of the ones I’d learned. I only occasionally wrote my own entries.

There were no entries from the time I’d spent in Compiègne, to my memory, and yet… how had he guessed this? It was more than a guess, it had to be.

We were concerned, he said, in a tone I found strange.

We looked at each other for a moment, uncertain. There’s a rumor, he said finally. That you are turning down roles…

It seems to me I have always turned down roles, I said. Even as I have accepted others.

And then it came to me — Where is the chapel you spoke of? I asked. Where you found these objects? May I see it?

I was sure it would be the unveiling of his deception when I asked. I was sure it didn’t exist. But instead he raised his eyebrows in surprise. Of course, he said. Follow me. I will stage it for you.