The Man of Feeling Page 6

  But to be honest, it takes an enormous effort on my part to remember Berta, to remember that I lived with her and, like Navarro, slept with her, and that she always did her best to be at home, waiting for me whenever I returned from my operatic travels so that I would not be assailed by the same feeling of misfortune—of arriving in a place where no one knew me and where no one was expecting me—that I experienced in every city I visited as I walked into the hotel room reserved for me. I find it inexpressibly hard to recall her cheerful nature and her diaphanous eyes, the sudden touch of her hands and the ill-matched colors of her clothes, her easy laughter, her child-like smell, her slow way of talking, her impassive back turned to me during my hours of insomnia. The fact of her death adds nothing to her, rather it takes something away: not only is she now nothing in my imagination, in my thoughts, in my life, she is nothing in her imagination, her thoughts, in her life. She does not even have a life. From now on, if such a thing is possible, she will grow in my forgetting.

  HOW CAN ONE DESTROY OR supplant a man whom one barely knows, about whom one knows little and with whom one has no dealings? That was the question which, as the last week of my stay in Madrid began, tormented me and came to obsess me, as it did for several minutes (dream minutes, long minutes) in my dream this morning. They were the busiest, most complicated days, during which I had the least free time, the days of our final rehearsals for the première of Verdi’s Otello at the Teatro de la Zarzuela and the days when everything seemed about to end in disaster: suddenly and belatedly, two days before the first night, ancient, conceited Hörbiger, Otello, announced that he was entirely incompatible with and unable to sing with Volte, who kept deliberately confusing him on stage in order to discredit and outshine him; the slimy, insatiable Volte, Iago, inexplicably showed signs of losing his voice, a claim I rejected from the start as false: an utterly unimaginative act of retaliation, an absolute classic among singers; and the lovely, silly Priés, Desdemona, began to neglect her accent and to fluff her words and then delayed the dress rehearsal for two whole hours, engaged as she was in a tempestuous flirtation with the orchestra’s ugly and mediocre first violin (a Spaniard), who was also missing from his post (they arrived within a minute of each other, their hair dishevelled and their lips wet with saliva, she still fastening her costume and revealing her breasts, he with his bow tie in tatters). During that time, the conductor broke several batons and argued with everyone: at one point, when all the principal singers flounced out of the room, all of us with our own reasons for feeling offended, thus leaving him with no opponents, he brutally insulted the peace-loving theater staff, who threatened to go on strike on the days of the performances. Everything seemed to point to either cancellation or disaster. Even I, Cassio, for the first time I can remember, scaled down my sacred daily practice sessions and paid scant attention to my own part, strangely captivated by that of the other tenor—the Heldentenor, the heroic tenor, the tenore di forza, Otello, Hörbiger—and distracted by the beginning of my unexpected suffering.

  After meeting Manur and seeing his strength, I realized how very brief that extraordinary time was and how it was approaching its end when it had only just started, and that, at its close, I would have to return to Berta’s undesired side and to continue losing myself indefinitely in various hotel rooms and to continue shading away into nothing in various other cities and on other journeys with no real point of reference, far from Natalia (whom I would no longer see every day, whom I would perhaps never see again), while the Manurs and Dato would return to Belgium to their ordinary lives of which—I realized—I knew absolutely nothing. I still knew nothing of any substance about Hieronimo Manur, the banker from Flanders, but even more amazing—I realized—was that I knew nothing of substance about Natalia Manur either, about his wife of many years and my companion of seven days. (That may be why I have not yet told you anything about her, about all the things I learned at the time and have found out since.) During our long conversations—with the imperturbable, taciturn Dato as constant witness—we talked about many things, but never about her, that is, never about her history or past or life. I had had occasion to observe her person minutely and with growing (but unthinking) passion: her unhurried gestures (as if, when she moved, space became somehow denser and more resistant), her facial expressions that had grown so un-Spanish (free of anger and indifference), her grave, sorrowful voice that sounded at times as if it were emerging from a cloud of smoke, her prolonged silences, like absences, before she replied to my sudden questions on an endless variety of topics, her liquid, dreaming eyes, the interminable strides taken by her long legs, the look on her face which was perpetually indefinable or dissolving into melancholy, and her occasional laughter too that revealed large, perfect, very white teeth: an African smile. Likewise she had been able to introduce me to her tastes: her taste in food, at the numerous lunches and suppers we had shared and in the occasional patisserie; her taste in clothes, when I went shopping with her a couple of times and watched her touching fabrics with wise fingers and repeatedly appearing from and disappearing into changing rooms, while Dato and I awaited her judgements, only pretending to offer our opinions; her taste as a collector, at an important auction that was held during that period and in which she—via Dato’s sharp, ghostly hand, which rose like a stiletto in response to her desires—made off with two paintings (one Díaz de la Peña and a very small Paret), the centenary edition of Flaubert’s complete works and a beautiful penknife designed by Ravilious, with a mother-of-pearl blade and a silver handle, which, given its large size, looked like nothing so much as an iridescent dagger. But I knew nothing at all about her history or past or life, apart from the scant information vouchsafed to me in Dato’s self-absorbed and fragmentary complaint during the first and only opportunity I had had to talk to him alone (too soon for my curiosity to have learned how to direct its questions) and from the enthusiastic remarks which, rarely and only in passing, she made about her brother, Roberto Monte, that recent émigré to South America. (She seemed to admire him so much that on more than one occasion I wondered if I were not unwittingly merely standing in for him in the city of Madrid; for we had barely spent a minute apart since the day we met, exactly, according to Dato, as she and Monte used to do when they got together; and, like her brother—I thought—I too had introduced her to a few fleeting people who would not see her again without my being there, although they were not from Madrid and were only the waning Hörbiger, the presumptuous Volte, the irresponsible Priés and the bellicose conductor.) After a week of being unconditionally present, I still had no idea, therefore, about the nature of the ills afflicting Natalia Manur and which Dato claimed to know so well, nor why it was so illogical—according to him—that she should have no lovers, nor the reason for her profound, irremediable discontent, nor why she and Manur led such separate diurnal lives, when to all appearances they did lead some kind of shared nocturnal life, since, each night, when our trio said goodbye in the hotel elevator, each of us going off to our respective luxury room, Natalia and Manur presumably slept together in theirs. Perhaps the Flemish banker’s cognac-colored eyes opened the moment he heard the sound of the key in the lock, or even before, when he sensed, as he waited and dozed, his wife’s light steps along the carpeted corridor; perhaps Manur, wearing a pair of improbable green silk pajamas (the same color as his incredible transatlantic fedora), would see Natalia leave her jacket and her handbag on an armchair, go to the bathroom and then, back in the bedroom, undress in order to get into the double bed. Perhaps he received her there with warm words and open arms or perhaps he complained bitterly about how late she was or perhaps they did not speak at all and merely lay in the same bed for eight hours from which all diurnal memory was erased, without looking at each other, without touching, not even in dreams, two bodies together night after night, in mutual oblivion, for years. Or it might be that the cognac-colored eyes, slightly paler and brighter than hers, but (by the way) the (exact) same shape as hers, would remain
awake (offended, irascible, impatient), pondering balance sheets and transactions and prices or, who knows, speed-reading some novel, possibly with the aid of a pair of glasses imposed on him by age. How would Natalia Manur enter their luxury room? In the dark, her elegant Della Valle or Prada shoes dangling from two of her long, gnarled fingers in order not to disturb the exhausted banker’s repose, or, rather, to avoid answering questions? Or perhaps she would make as much noise as possible (kicking off her shoes so that they thumped against the wardrobe door) and put on all the lights to enjoy the vision denied to her all day, that of her absent and beloved and much-missed husband, whose lack she would have tried, palely, to mitigate in the animated company of a burly, talkative and extremely amiable opera singer? “Hello,” she would perhaps say. He would already be in bed, wearing those hypothetical glasses, which mask his plebeian features and soften his chilling gaze. “What sort of day did you have? Everything all right? How was work?” Manur lowers his glasses though he does not take them off, and peering over the top of them with eyes accustomed to being flattered by the things of this world, he does not reply immediately. He looks older with his glasses perched on his nose, although he might have pushed them up onto his forehead, like an aviator, and that, on the other hand, makes him look younger. Natalia does not insist, she was probably just asking out of habit. Quite naturally (like someone in their own house, alone or in front of their life-long husband), she goes into the bathroom, turns on the light and starts removing the make-up she had put on for the evening. She uses cotton balls. Manur continues reading his documents or, more likely, takes the opportunity to perfume himself a little (a small bottle of cologne in the drawer of the bedside table) and to smooth the few hairs that fail to ennoble his prematurely bald pate. (A vain man, even with his own wife.) Natalia keeps the door open as she brushes her teeth, then closes it for a few seconds. Manur pricks up his ears, tries to hear the fall of liquid on liquid. Or perhaps, against his wishes, he cannot help but hear it. He has put his documents to one side, thus demonstrating that there was no need for him to look at them, that he had just been killing time until Natalia arrived. Wait. Wait. Natalia reappears, turns out the bathroom light and starts nonchalantly getting undressed, as if there were no one else there (but I don’t know if the lights are on or off or if only the table lamp by whose light Manur was reading is still on), because in reality it is almost as if there was no one there: what can it mean to Manur now to see her taking off her shirt, her skirt, even her dark (seamless) stockings? And what can it mean to Natalia that Manur should see her? Natalia Manur is in her underwear now—one or two pieces, I couldn’t say—and she glances at the full-length mirror opposite the bed. It is a fleeting glance, lasting only a matter of instants, probably in the half-light. She is no longer young. Her figure would still seem highly attractive and desirable to any man who could see it, and still is to those who do see it, but she notices the changes: a slight generalized slackening; her breasts are not as high as they were when she was twenty (although no one would think to call them “sagging,” rather “precisely as they should be”); her flat, firm stomach announces (but only to her) that it will soon cease to be quite so flat and firm; her legs, which once were supernatural, are still perfect—slim and straight—but they are beginning to appear mortal. Perhaps Manur notices these changes too. The sight that Natalia sees today is familiar, changes go unnoticed on a daily basis, then, inexplicably and unfairly, one day, which is in no way different from the previous day or the next, something has altered and that alteration remains. One never knows if the offending defect, the irreversible wrinkle, its progressive deepening, the age spot on the hand, the thickening neck, the vertical line above the lip, the fat, the pallor, a mark, has actually appeared on that precise day or if, on that particular day, one’s own sight is simply more penetrating or more courageous or perhaps simply decides quite arbitrarily to notice it. There is nothing new today, no stain that yesterday passed unnoticed, although the scrutiny was only very superficial, a glance, nothing. It is late, Manur is in a bad mood. It’s best to keep the preliminaries to sleep short and to try to immerse oneself in it quickly, where we will be safe for at least eight hours, perhaps, with luck, twenty-four. Natalia Manur removes her underwear—probably a teddy—and for a moment she stands naked in the middle of the room, while those piercing, cognac-colored eyes flicker over that clean, unclothed body, seen from the side, in a rather unfavorable pose and in movement. She cannot bear anything but the sheets on her legs at night, so she puts on a pajama top and sleeps with her underpants on, she may not have taken them off (yes, she did; she will have changed them, those worn at night to sleep in are clean, and we can agree now that she wore only one piece of underwear, a teddy, so she must have taken the underpants out of a drawer and put them on). She gets into bed and from there turns out the main light. The lamp on Manur’s side is still on. Manur finally speaks: “What did you do today? Did you go out with that singer again? Odd fellow. I don’t like the look of him.” “He amuses me,” says Natalia, “which you never do.” “And how far does that amusement go?” asks Manur, his tone of voice unchanged, simultaneously disdainful and neutral. Natalia Manur does not answer, she turns over, like someone wanting to go to sleep immediately, just as Berta used to do when she lived with me, after we had said goodnight. “And how far does that amusement go?” Manur asks again (he has taken off his glasses and now his expression is as incisive as it was when I saw him in the train). “Far enough for me not to want to leave his company until now.” Manur does not want to argue, he just wants to know. “Where have you been?” “I want to go to sleep.” “Tell me first.” “Where we’ve been every day: at the rehearsal most of the time, the opera opens soon.” “What’s he like as a singer?” “Very good, I think. Of all of them, he’s the one I like best; and now I want to sleep.” Manur puts on his glasses again, his gaze moderated: he does not dare or does not want to ask anything else, although in Natalia’s answer there are still many hours that remain unexplained, in fact, there is no explanation. But Manur does not care, he knows from Dato what we do or don’t do every day, from the morning when we meet in the hotel dining room to the night when we say goodbye in the elevator, that is, from five minutes after his morning farewell to five minutes before this scene takes place. (We, on the other hand, know nothing about his activities in the city of Madrid.) But he will not know what happened today until tomorrow morning when, before the three of us have breakfast together, he and Dato phone each other from their respective rooms, he probably phones Dato, taking advantage of the minutes Natalia spends in the shower. If, however, Manur wants to know if anything new has happened today without waiting until tomorrow, then he has to ask Natalia. Can he wait? He can wait. Perhaps he isn’t really interested. Perhaps Natalia doesn’t interest him, despite what Dato gave me to understand when he spoke to me of his theoretical obligations and loyalties to his boss. Perhaps Manur feels absolutely nothing when he sees Natalia getting undressed, when he sees her half-naked, when he sees her naked, when he has her warm, smooth, perfumed body next to him for the eight hours that exist in neither of their lives. Natalia is not interested in him either, although perhaps an awareness of his presence makes her feel nostalgic now and then: that awareness comes to her above all from the smell which, for years now (and in better times), continues to emerge immutably from Manur’s neck; the unvarying smell that rises up from his chest mingled with the remnants of his usual cologne, which he put on in the morning and perhaps in the evening too, but which he has possibly not renewed now, while she was in the bathroom: no, it is just a trace and it is precisely such traces that give rise to nostalgia. Things that have only just ended and things that do not exist. Thus Natalia Manur misses the desire she once felt from Manur, and she does not yet dare replace it with the desire of this burly, talkative and very amiable tenor. She does not know his smell, or his chest, she has no idea how his large hands would feel if they touched her, or if, indeed, they ever would.
The tenor is not asexual, but he does not make his desire for her clear, which is essential if she is to desire him. He is cautious or too respectful, or else he fears Dato and his theoretical loyalties, unaware that Dato is entirely venal, more than that, that he is for sale to the highest bidder, like all those books, penknives, ashtrays, statuettes, carpets and paintings. Or maybe the singer is homosexual, like so many other theater artistes. He might simply be apprehensive—the very negation of love. He never touches her, however lightly, not even in a companionable way as they cross a street or while they are sitting down, elbow to elbow, in the stalls in the Teatro de la Zarzuela during a pause in the rehearsals. León de Nápoles doubtless loathes physical contact. Singers are famous for taking great care of themselves. How would a singer kiss? Would he spray his mouth before or afterwards? Would he, as legend has it, clear his throat with the clear white of an egg? Would his kisses therefore taste of white of egg? And how does egg white taste on its own? What would he do with all those useless yolks? Waste them? Put them all together in a bowl for the moment? Cook them? Give them to some omnivorous pet who would happily devour even raw yolks? Throw them away? Where? And what if the egg is rotten and the singer doesn’t realize it and tosses it back and swallows the stinking, clear white of egg that was supposed to clear his throat? Ugh.