Ahmed's Revenge (33 page)

The four of us went into the theatre together, but since Dr Zir's two seats were in the back somewhere, Ralph and I ventured down the aisle alone. Though I wanted to, I didn't look around for Mr Smith or for others in the crowd I would know, schoolmates and university colleagues and old family friends, people who'd known for decades that my father was capable of slapping another man. It seemed an extraordinary moment, as if I were permanently being defined, widowhood locked forever on my brow, a father's daughter, beaten by the genes he'd passed on. I was sure that everyone was watching me, that the hush that had just then come over the hall was in observance of my entrance and not of the fact that the house lights had simultaneously gone down.

“We're almost there,” Ralph said, but all I could see was the orchestra pit, and around Ralph's calmness all I could hear was cacophonous sound.

Our two seats were in the centre of the front row, next to Miro's father, who stood and embraced me when we arrived.

“My dear,” he said. “It is good of you to have come, to honour my daughter on her big night.”

When we sat down Miro's father kept hold of my hand, and it was just then that applause greeted the conductor and the orchestra stopped its coughing and sweetly found its voice. It was good of me to have come out for his daughter's big night. I turned around and stared at the full house behind me, black faces and Asian faces and white, like the intermingling of independent planets, together right now but with no common orbits on ordinary nights. I looked at Miro's father again, and had the music not kept me from it, I would have told him that it wasn't good of me at all, that I didn't know his daughter, that we'd become friendly only just now. If the music hadn't stopped me I would have said that I hadn't come to hear her sing but to collect my dead husband, who was impatient with opera and was waiting outside. It was a horrible moment. All of my confidence from earlier in the day was gone, all of my sense of conclusion washed away with the rising sound.

But I didn't speak, of course, and such thoughts only served to make me late in paying attention to the opening scene of the opera's first act. An American sailor was in a garden, anticipating the arrival of his bride, a young Japanese geisha girl. The sailor's love was of the cynical kind—we knew it because he was singing and carrying on, telling a friend who was with him that he'd keep this Japanese girl, but only for a while, that though she was really quite lovely, what he looked forward to in his deepest heart was the day when he would return to America and find a real American wife.

Until Miro came on stage I let my attention wander away from the awful attitude of the American sailor and the dark admonitions of his friend. They were both good singers, I suppose, but they reminded me of my father and Dr Zir: imperial England and its loyal Asian confidant. Still, the sailor's tenor and the friend's baritone worked together pretty well to cover up their limitations of power and range. Everyone in the opera was local. The sailor was a music teacher at the German school, his friend a Kimeru businessman, president of a company that imported engine parts and tyres.

When I first met Jules in London I think our courtship was a lot like the one taking place on stage. I didn't have the innocence or the youth of Madam Butterfly, but it was nevertheless I who fell in love first and hardest, I who most clearly heard that inner whisper telling me that Jules was the one. I believe Jules loved me during his life, I'm sure of it even now, but he loved the idea of Africa, the idea of high savannah, of elephants on the open range, at least as well. Since Jules was a romantic he thought of life in Kenya as romantic too, and he believed I shared his sense of adventure, whereas in fact elephants on the open range were for me a common girlhood memory, farming above Narok a prescription for season after season of unending toil. I'm not saying that I didn't love our farm, that I don't love it still, but that during our first year or two of marriage I altered my idea of what I loved until it became the farm, until I could see the world only through Jules's eyes. That's what love does, I guess, that's what a woman does, I know. Since I loved my husband with all my heart, I simply quickened that heart, making it beat like his, until it loved what he did too.

When Miro made her entrance there was a perceptible change in everything. I could feel it in the attentiveness of the audience and see it on stage in the postures of the American sailor and his friend, in all the extras who played members of her Japanese family and the citizens of the town. Even the orchestra seemed improved. When Miro sang her first notes they were plaintive and strong and haunting, and easy in their range. It was like the introduction of the world's finest wine into a glass that still contained a sip or two of something poor. Next to Miro's, the American sailor's voice, which had to wind around it in the wedding song, seemed a stringy vine, and the friend's baritone, though it held up better, made the friend seem slow. Who could fail to love Madam Butterfly when she could sing like that? And why couldn't she see the duplicity of the American sailor when the rest of us could see it so well?

I sat up straighter in my chair, then chanced a look at Miro's father sitting by my side. He was crying, shiny dark tear tracks ran all the way from his eyes to the corners of his mouth, but his face was such a picture of pure love and concentration that I couldn't look away. Miro's voice was not strictly soprano, I know it because she told me it leaned a little bit toward mezzo. She had a voice with body, a voice with depth and flavour, like a wine again, though Miro had also said it was ultimately the pure sopranos who got the best parts, the high voices that garnered the greatest fame.

Miro was perfection, but otherwise Act One of the opera contained too much busy stage movement, people shouting and marching around. I had paid spotty attention and when the act ended I was surprised. Madam Butterfly's uncle had disowned her, not so much for marrying a foreigner but for casting her religion aside in order to embrace the American's, for taking her sense of everything from her husband, just as I had, including her sense of God. I could easily understand why it angered her uncle so. It angered me too. Why couldn't she be herself with this man? Why couldn't the American love her for what she was and leave all these alterations alone?

The performance had two intermissions, and when the people near us started to stand, I stood too, looked around one time, and then quickly sat back down. I had glimpsed Mr Smith with his own sad father, sitting behind us and off to the side. Mr Smith hadn't seen me, but his expression was nevertheless sallow and mean. It wasn't a look of victory or defeat, but a public reflection of his soul.

“There are drinks in the lobby,” said Ralph. “Shall we get you one? I could choose something for you and bring it back down.”

“I want a cup of coffee,” I said.

When Ralph asked Miro's father the same question he said he would like coffee too, with hot milk. Miro's father seemed a wonderful man, gentle and kind, but why were there so many men and so few women in the world I occupied? Had Miro's mother, and Mr Smith's too, died young, like my own, had they both departed life early, like Ralph's wife and Dr Zir's, leaving all these men to carry on? Was it the job of my generation to begin a change of emphasis, so that for the next thirty years only the women survived?

I touched Miro's father's arm and said, “She really is marvellous. I knew she'd be good but I had no idea.”

That was true enough. Miro had talked about succeeding as a singer in the outside world, about her father's calling her back just as her reputation was starting to grow, but when she said those things I'd listened lightly, with barely half an ear. I, too, had wanted the outside world—that's why I'd gone to Oxford—yet both Miro and I had come back home. Now, however, though I would surely stay, it seemed impossible that Miro would remain here, impossible that she would not be lifted onto the shoulders of the real opera world, wildly celebrated and swept away.

“She is God's gift,” Miro's father told me, “her voice is God's instrument for us to behold.”

Ralph came back just as the lights dimmed once more. He was carrying three glasses of wine.

“The coffee is finished,” he said. “Your father bought these and insisted I bring them to you with his compliments.”

When the curtain came up on Act Two, the American sailor, now Madam Butterfly's husband, had apparently been gone for quite some time, and Madam Butterfly was waiting on a hillside, gazing out to sea. Her maid sat with her, and Madam Butterfly listened while the maid sang her own sad song. The maid's devotion to Madam Butterfly was clear, but she was forlorn, sure the American sailor would never return. Miro's father had refused the wine, so while we watched I had two glasses in my hands. The maid was a pretty good singer too, better than either of the principal men, but when she finished her song and Miro leaned forward, about to admonish the maid for her lack of faith, Miro's father leaned forward too. “I love this part,” he said. He wasn't speaking to me, I realised, but was uttering a little prayer, and just then Miro's voice came slowly up. Like a magnificent wind off the sea of Japan, a single note floated from the stage and, filling the theatre, lifted me out of my self.

That a human voice could have such properties in the face of a crumbling world, that it could combine so with grief and longing and steadfastness of spirit, was suddenly enough to make me wild. I had followed the English libretto during the first act, but the wine in my hands and the music in the air made me forget it now. Miro's father was crying again and I was too. It was 1904, it was Japan, and somehow my new and only friend had found a way to touch and heal me far more profoundly than the switching of the tusks had done. Miro's voice was the one I'd been digging for, the one locked in my heart for so long.

The rest of the second act was an unhappy affair. It was clear to everyone but Madam Butterfly that the American sailor would never return. He had no steadfastness of spirit, no sense of longing, so the real tragedy was that she, Miro, Madam Butterfly, had fallen in love with the wrong man.

But what hope it gave me sitting there. I had not loved the wrong man but had loved the right man, who had acted wrongly, and what a difference there was in that, what power it gave me, what renewed strength. Jules hadn't betrayed me, as the American sailor had Miro, but had betrayed, instead, an aspect of himself. And, oh, how he'd grieved for it, oh, how clearly he'd known what he had done.

I was set free by Miro, though for poor Madam Butterfly there could be no freedom short of death. There was a second intermission, but all I did was drink my wine. I think my father and Dr Zir came down, I know they did, to greet Miro's father and to stand with Ralph, posing and grimly staring across the room at poor Mr N'chele with his deplorable son. All these men casting their eyes about aggressively, like bulls in tuxedos snorting across an open field: my own father, so culpable once and so untethered now, especially if the day grew long; Mr N'chele, his mind clear but his son a blemish on his heart; and Mr Smith, using the echo of that slap as a reason to spend his time on earth in evil ways. These were the men in my life, and they were just like Madam Butterfly's uncle in the world on stage, raving and walking this way and that, in Japan and in Kenya, years ago and now and in untold years to come.

In the third act a child came out, a boy of about three years of age, and my first impulse was to be critical of the structure of the play, of Puccini's decision to hide this child from us for so long. But he was a beautiful boy, with hair of a colour no Japanese child's could be and a way of walking across the stage that beguiled me with its innocence and its unselfconsciousness. The American sailor came back after all, not for Miro, whose wretchedness had compelled her to sleep at the very moment of his return, but with his big American wife, and in order to take the child away, in order to claim the boy so that he could grow up in a wider and more profitable world.

When Miro awoke and sang her final aria, a farewell to her beautiful child and to her awful existence as well, I thought she would sing
“Un bel dì”
one more time. I wanted her to, I wanted once again to feel it soar from my heart, but she did not. The orchestra let the slightest strain of it seep into the song she did sing, a glorious echo, but that high and golden note did not come out to waft across the room and torture us again. It couldn't, of course, because it had been a note of hope, and Madam Butterfly's hope was gone. And when she died, at her own hand, the audience sat stunned as the final curtain came down.

Dear God, I had not expected anything like this. I hadn't known that anything like this was possible in the world, that something like this could happen on a stage and before the naked eyes of ordinary humankind. I hadn't even wanted to come. Before the opera I had been lost—small of heart and grousing on about the scandal that my presence in the theatre would bring—but now I was at home again. It seemed to me that Miro had given the absolute performance of a lifetime and that it was directed only at me, a gift from my friend, a gift from her father's God, and, if you like, perhaps a gift from Julius Grant as well: the tragedy and drama of Madam Butterfly's life and my own life, there on the stage for everyone to see.

It took the audience a long time to begin to applaud, but once it started it simply wouldn't stop. When the American sailor and his friend came out there was a surge in the clapping and when Madam Butterfly's maid came out there was more, but when Miro reappeared, gorgeous and exhausted, such a roar went up from the throats of the people behind me that I nearly turned to see if something else had happened that was causing it. Miro bowed and stood and bowed again, and as I watched her, I could see Madam Butterfly leaving through the room's thin air. Flowers came from everywhere, falling across the entire stage floor, and when Miro's father went forward with a bundle of his own, who knows where he got them, the audience went wild again, one last adoring surge, before it remembered itself and stood and filled up the aisles and headed for the doors.