He leaned down to kiss my forehead.
“I stared at Father with disbelief. ‘When will you come back, papá? ’
“ ‘In the evening.’ He called over his shoulder to Pep Saval, ‘You can give her advice with her singing if she lets you.’ ”
THE ABANDONED CHILD.
Lockwood didn’t trust his memory. The shadowy area between remembering and imagining was a trap. He would have liked to believe that Mercè Casals was an object of his own creation. That he was the one calling the tune—could say, “Señora, do this, stand there, say that, sing.” A realm where she could be any age he wanted her to be, as beautiful as he could imagine her, as passionate as he could feel her, as unhappy as he could bear her to be.
And yet Mercè Casals was the author of her own life. He was not to think of her as the voice in his head but as the voice on the tape. The cassettes were multiplying. He kept them in chronological order, in stacks of ten, neatly labeled, rewound, and cued up. In time he would listen to all of them. At home in the evenings he sat on his creaking leather chair and cleared a space on the glass-ringed desktop, buffed by years of slow, anxious writing. He rewound the day’s cassettes, stuck a label on the box, and wrote the date of the interview along with the subject of the conversation:
1) The snakes at La Scala (a hired claque hissing from the gallery)
2) Fucking the Prince (not language that La Señora would like, but she need never know)
3) Drowning in Florence (the Arno flooding)
4) Favorite foods (Camembert, artichokes, crema catalana)
5) Her first Lucia (How she loved going mad!)
6) Singing for Franco, J. Paul Getty, Nancy and Ron Reagan, Mao, and Nixon (he could hardly hear a thing for the thickets of hair sprouting out of his ears!)
7) Trying to sing flamenco with gypsies in the caves above Granada.
8) Great lovers with small penises (as they say in Barcelona, el pot petit té bon confit)
He listens to a cassette labeled The abandoned child. He remembers the moment clearly because the Señora never spoke of her father again. Sitting at the Mac, he types in the latest working title, and the bold 16-point Times Roman makes everything official: The Wonder Singer: My Story, by Mercè Casals as told to Mark Lockwood.
Now, as her words flutter all around him, he listens to her voice from deep inside him. Facing the silently scolding blink of the cursor, he waits for the courage to inhabit his subject:
Looking back, I can see that the story of my life is punctuated by men. Men as heroes and men as villains. I was abandoned by men. I was owned by men. Men taught me, manipulated me, stifled me, adored me, exploited me. And finally, I gave up the last man in my life in much the same way one gives up smoking or exercise. Painful at first, but ultimately liberating.
The last time I saw my father was in 1929, in the ripeness of summer long before the war between brothers and sisters brought its horrors to Catalonia. When night fell and he hadn’t returned, Pep Saval didn’t know what to say to me. He told me I had the most beautiful voice he had ever heard in a girl my age. When I did not acknowledge the comment he went on to explain to me that he had been a manager of singers, that he could help me take care of my gift, learn how to sing without strain. I didn’t know what he was talking about.
By evening I had retreated to a corner of the main room wrapped in a borrowed blanket. My mood from earlier in the day had not changed. I had awakened knowing that my father would not return. Children are like that, anticipating abandonment even in routine absences. I had started grieving from the moment he had left without me. Pep Saval did not know what to do with an unhappy child. I returned his quizzical smiles with empty looks.
That first night after my father disappeared, I didn’t want to sing. I turned down the innkeeper’s wife, who offered supper in return for a few songs. I resisted the entreaties from some of the inn’s guests who had heard me the night before. Then when a cook brought out a bowl of broth with a chicken wing, I looked up to Pep Saval and he encouraged me with a nod. Instead of expecting me to sing for my supper, he placed a coin on the table. I ate with relish, ignoring everyone around me, and held my dish out for a second helping.
The next day, waking up to the knowledge that Father was not coming back, I couldn’t stop weeping.
To cheer me up, Pep Saval argued that there were towns we could travel to, where fairs were being held and where my father might still be found, if his health was sound and his mind had not suffered some derangement. I didn’t know what to believe.
. . . YOU’LL NEVER WRITE A TRUE WORD AGAIN.”
Perla confided to Lockwood that sometimes, especially toward the end of the week, after six twelve-hour days taking care of the Señora, she felt she could hardly breathe. The thermostat, in response to the mild fluctua-tions of the weather, was set either too cold or too warm. The air inside the apartment grew close and heavy.
Occasionally the Señora complained that smells of burning beans and ripening garbage and soiled clothes were seeping in from neighboring apartments. She guessed that the source blowing in through the air conditioning was most likely the wealthy young couple with babies in 1409 or the incontinent old German in 1807 who tried to court her. At such times she ordered the vent flaps to be shut and the air conditioning turned off. She attempted to mask smells that only she was aware of with essential oils combined in therapeutic aromas and simmering in a little electric diffuser.
Nothing was allowed to express its own smell. Linens were laundered in “fresh-scented” Cheer, the kitchen counters had to be wiped daily with lemon Fantastik, the bathroom fixtures with Formula 409, a special carpet deodorizer was sprinkled after vacuuming, containers of round blue pellets hung inside toilet bowls.
Other times the Señora feared that she might be the one exuding a not very pleasant body odor. So she soaked in hot, scented baths and squirted on Giorgio or Givenchy or Joy. These gave Perla headaches and made her nose itch.
“God, I need a breath of air,” Perla exclaimed when the Señora seemed to have dozed off. She actually craved a cigarette. Lockwood did not tease her about her brand of fresh air because he had been trying to ingratiate himself with her for weeks.
She left Lockwood in charge and went for a walk along the beach. He would have offered to accompany her, but the Señora would be upset to awaken and not find either of them at their posts.
Lockwood listened for signs that the Señora was awaking from her chair by the window. It was only two in the afternoon, and their schedule called for him to be working on the autobiography through a six-hour day, plus evenings at home sorting out his thoughts and reviewing the recordings. The material was richest when she groped for the significant event and brought up instead a small telling moment.
The Señora’s pleasures were simple. She took long baths, she listened to recordings of her past performances spinning out endlessly, sometimes loudly, at other times faintly in the background. At four P.M. chatting stopped so she could watch her favorite Mexican soap opera—María la del Barrio—about a domestic worker who was employed by a rich family and ended up marrying the young heir to the ancestral fortune.
“These are wonderful stories of poor girls blessed by
