“What?”
“Love. God. They’re part of my How to Talk to Your Teen series.”
“Have you written about music?”
“Sure, here and there. A few notes.” He tried to signal his joke with a smile.
“I seem to have made you tense. I’m sorry. I have a right to ask, if I’m to consider you for the job.”
“Of course, Señora.” Lockwood felt that there was little he could do to rescue the interview. “You have my résumé. Writing samples,” he said lamely.
“I’m an artist. But you will tell me if I sound like an insufferable egotist?”
“A bit of ego won’t hurt, Señora. Readers will expect this of you.”
“The whole of my life story, since I first sang publicly at age four, seems like one long, uninterrupted performance. Not just the great roles as Lucia and Gilda and Norma and Violetta. The way I slurp soup in a restaurant has been observed by someone. A moment of whispered conversation raises speculation. The dash of a pen when I sign my name, the ornate M, the bold C. Everything I do is considered a deliberate artistic act, measured by someone somewhere. It has been a cumbersome way to live, you understand.”
“I can only imagine, Señora.”
“Good. I need your imagination, your empathy. I’m afraid to trust my life to a hack.”
He cleared his throat defensively. “There’s something to be said for hacks. They get the job done.”
“Well, I certainly need you for that. I’m eighty . . . something; my memory is erratic, and I’ve already been paid an advance for my memoirs.”
“I’m your man.”
“Of the first five writers I’ve talked to, you are the only one who isn’t a bigger prima donna than I.”
“It will be your words that matter, Señora.”
“Understand this, Mr. Lockwood: Singing is a spiritual act for me. Not one of those churchy things with men in taffeta and triangle hats. When I sing, there are aspects of the universe that take on a sharp and luminous clarity. I am like Einstein—without the mathematics.”
“I’m eager to hear your story.”
She nodded as if already taking his cooperation for granted. She pushed herself off the chair and walked to a cabinet at the end of the living room. After some consideration, she selected a disc from the rows of tightly packed CDs.
“Take Tosca home. I sing Floria. It may give you a headache the first time you hear it. Keep playing it until it doesn’t hurt. Don’t sleep, read, eat, or talk through it. You can glance at the libretto. But only at the Italian. It doesn’t matter if you don’t understand every word. Just sit and listen. Then call Mr. Holloway, if you still want to do this.”
A GENEROUS KILL FEE.
By early afternoon the tying-up of the Señora’s affairs is in full progress. Earlier, Perla made phone calls, wrote a report, filled in her last time sheets. Lockwood collected his notes and then went through the stuffed file wallets the Señora had always kept at her side to search when his questioning made her want to reach beyond her memory into the interviews, letters, photos, reviews she had saved through the years. On impulse, he hastily stuffed the folders into his leather satchel. It had taken only moments for the now unmoored Lockwood to reach a decision: He would finish the project they had started together.
Perla came up behind him as he buckled the satchel. “Ladronzuelo,” she teased. Little thief.
“I’ve still got her book to write,” he explained.
“I won’t tell.” She pressed a finger to her lips.
Dr. Velasco and Hank Holloway arrived at the same time to take care of the two sides of the Señora, the body and the legend. The two men studied each other discreetly in the elevator, one in a smoky-gray suit and starched shirt, armed with a leather medical bag, the other in lime-green pants, black linen jacket, carrying an alligator attaché case. They finally acknowledged each other, one through Ray-Bans, the other through tor-toiseshell bifocals.
“Quite a tragedy,” they murmured when they realized they were both going up to the twenty-eighth floor. “Yes, indeed.”
“The passing of an era,” said Holloway, also known as Hollywood Hank. “A wonder for the ages.”
“Death by drowning,” the doctor decided ahead of his examination. “According to the ancient Mexicans, it’s the passport to the happiest of all heavens. To the realm of Tlaloc with no detours or side trips. It’s the only happy place in the afterlife, where the Señora will become like a child again to sing and dance and chase butterflies in a rain as soft as mist. I can see her, you know, truly happy for the first time.”
“Are you some kind of writer?”
“No, you can trust me. I’m her doctor.”
“I knew her well, too. I’m her agent.”
They shared parallel objectives. Dr. Velasco would deal with a police report, sign the death certificate, and let the nurse go. Hollywood Hank would do his best to get rid of the writer amicably. Settling accounts with the nurse of a dead patient presented no ambiguities. The matter of the book-in-progress would be awkward.
As soon as he’d heard of the Señora’s accident, Hollywood Hank had placed a call to Alonzo Baylor with an offer to do the life story of the famous diva. The celebrated author had shown, with his highly intrusive Salvador Dalí and Martha Graham biographies, that he was good with the passions of art and flesh, the longing of the old and the regrets of the famous. Alonzo Baylor might not know anything about opera, but then, Hollywood Hank was sure he hadn’t known a whole lot about modern art either, before he’d taken on the great Dalí.
Dr. Velasco was in the business of life—as opposed to death. He held the Señora’s wrist, his fingers feeling for her pulse even though anyone could see that it was too late for such ceremonies. Gazing down on her face in the water, as accustomed as he was to the placid expression of death, Dr. Velasco was nevertheless moved to observe, “Ah, those are pearls that were her eyes!”
Standing before the naked floating Señora, Hollywood Hank could only muster a solemn nod or two, a requisite sigh. Waiting beside him was the writer he had sent to Mercè Casals to help her pour her heart out. At the time, Lockwood had been what was needed, a proficient wordsmith who knew how to crank out the prose and deliver a manuscript on deadline with a minimum of fuss. After sending his client five other writers, this was the one that Mercè Casals had decided she liked, and trusted. “He’s a listener,” she had said.
The agent took Lockwood by the arm and gently, almost seductively, pulled him away from the bathroom and into the parlor, as if the tenor of the conversation that would follow might disturb the dead Casals.
Things were different now. Hollywood Hank envisioned royalties for all eternity and special commemorative editions and tributes to the fallen star. La Casals was a gift for the ages, her book in the hands of someone more
