Daughter of Fortune (12 page)

The Viennese tenor turned out to be a very refined lover. He loved and knew women to their marrow, but he was able to erase from his memory the relics of past loves, the frustrations of multiple farewells, the jealousies, disasters, and deceptions of other relationships and give himself with complete innocence to his brief passion for Rose Sommers. His experience had not come from pathetic embraces with squalid whores; Bretzner prided himself on never having had to pay for pleasure because women of varied station, from humble chambermaids to arrogant countesses, gave themselves to him unconditionally after they heard him sing. He learned the arts of love at the same time he learned those of singing. He was ten when he fell in love with the person who was to be his mentor, a Frenchwoman, old enough to be his mother, with the eyes of a tigress and breasts of pure alabaster. She, in turn, had been initiated at the age of thirteen, in France, by Donatien-Alphonse-François de Sade. Daughter of a gaoler in the Bastille, she had met the famous marquis in the filthy cell in which he wrote his perverse stories by the light of a candle. She used to watch him through the bars with a child's simple curiosity, unaware that her father had sold her to the prisoner in exchange for a gold watch, the impoverished noble's last possession. One morning when she was peering through the peephole in the cell door, her father took the large ring of keys from his waist, opened the door, and, as one feeds a lion his prey, with a push thrust the girl into the cell. What happened there she could not remember; it was enough to know that she stayed with de Sade, following him from gaol to the worse poverty of freedom, learning everything he had to teach her. When in 1802 the marquis was locked up in the madhouse of Charenton, she was left on her own without a centime but with a vast storehouse of amatory wisdom that helped her win a husband fifty-two years older than she, and very wealthy. He died not long after, exhausted by the excesses of his young wife, and she finally was free and with money to do whatever she wished. She was thirty-four years old; she had survived her brutal apprenticeship at the side of the marquis, the poverty of bread crusts in her childhood, the turmoil of the French Revolution, the terror of the Napoleonic wars, and now she had to put up with the dictatorial repression of the empire. She had had enough, her spirit yearned for a truce. She decided to look for a safe place to spend the rest of her days in peace, and chose Vienna. It was during this period in her life that she met Karl Bretzner, her neighbors' son; he was barely ten, but even by then he was singing like a nightingale in the cathedral choir. Thanks to her, now the friend and confidante of the Bretzners, the boy was not, as the choir director had recommended, castrated that year to preserve his cherubic voice.

“Do not touch him, and before you know it he will be the best-paid tenor in Europe,” she predicted. She was not mistaken.

Despite the enormous discrepancy in age, an unusual relationship developed between the woman and the young Karl. She admired the boy's purity of sentiment and his dedication to music; in her he found the muse who not only saved his manhood but also taught him to use it. By the time his voice had changed and he had begun to shave, he had mastered the eunuch's proverbial talent in pleasing a woman in ways not foreseen by nature and custom, but with Rose Sommers he took no risks. No fierce assault in a flurry of overly daring caresses, for this was not a time to shock with tricks of the seraglio, he decided, never suspecting that in less than three practical lessons his student would surpass him in inventiveness. He was a man who was careful about details and he knew the hallucinatory power of
le mot juste
in the hour of love. With his left hand he undid one by one the small mother-of-pearl buttons down Rose's back while with the right he took the pins from her hair, never losing the rhythm of kisses interspersed with a stream of compliments. He spoke of the smallness of her waist, the pristine whiteness of her skin, the classic roundness of her throat and shoulders, all of which, he said, kindled a fire in him, an uncontrollable madness.

“I am deranged. I do not know what is happening to me, never have I, never shall I, love anyone as I do you. This is the miraculous meeting of two souls destined never to part,” he murmured again and again.

He recited his entire repertoire, but without hypocrisy, deeply convinced of his own honesty and dazzled by Rose. He untied the strings of her corset and removed petticoats until she was wearing only her long batiste underdrawers and a sheer camisole that revealed the strawberries of her nipples. He did not remove her high-laced kid shoes with the curved heels or the white stockings fastened at her knees with embroidered garters. At that point he stopped, panting, with a planetary clamor in his breast, convinced that Rose Sommers was the most beautiful woman in the universe, an angel, and that his heart was going to explode and scatter him in pieces if he did not calm himself. He picked her up effortlessly, crossed the room, and stood her before a large mirror with a golden frame. The winking light of the candles and the theatrical wardrobe on the walls, a confusion of brocades, feathers, velvets, and faded laces, gave the scene an air of unreality.

Disarmed, drunk with emotion, Rose looked at herself in the mirror and did not recognize that woman in her undergarments, her hair wild and cheeks aflame, whom some man, also unrecognizable, was kissing on the neck as he greedily fondled her breasts. That avid interlude gave the tenor time to catch his breath and some of the lucidity he had lost during their preliminary skirmishes. He began taking off his clothes, facing the mirror, uninhibited, and—it must be said—looking much better out of his clothes than in them. He needs a good tailor, Rose thought. She had never seen a naked man, not even her brothers as children, and her information was based on overblown descriptions in the racy books and Japanese postcards she had discovered in her uncle John's luggage, in which the male organs were depicted in frankly optimistic proportions. The rosy, perky gherkin revealed before her eyes did not frighten her, as Karl Bretzner had feared, but instead provoked irrepressible and joyful giggles. And that set the tone for what followed. Instead of the solemn, rather doleful ceremony a deflowering can be, they pleasured themselves in playful caperings, chasing one another around the room, hopping over furniture like children; they drank the rest of the champagne and opened another bottle to spray one another with bubbling foam; risqué phrases rolled out with laughter, whispers brought oaths of love, as they bit and licked and frolicked in the bottomless tidal pool of newly discovered love, all through the afternoon and well into the night, without a thought for the time or for the rest of the universe. Only they existed. The Viennese tenor led Rose to epic heights, and she, a diligent student, followed without hesitation and, once at the summit, took wing on her own with surprising natural talent, guided by signs and asking what she could not guess, dazzling hér maestro and finally besting him with her improvised skills and the annihilating gift of her love. When they could bear to pull themselves apart and return to reality, the clock showed ten o'clock. The theater was empty, darkness ruled outside, and, to top everything off, a fog thick as meringue had settled in.

A frenetic exchange began between the lovers—notes, flowers, bonbons, copied verses, and small sentimental trinkets—that lasted as long as the season in London. They met where they could; passion caused them to lose all prudence. To gain time they looked for hotel rooms near the theater, indifferent to the possibility of being recognized. Rose escaped the house with ridiculous excuses, but her terrified mother said nothing to Jeremy of her suspicions, praying that her daughter's madness was temporary and would disappear without leaving a mark. Karl Bretzner came late to rehearsals, and from whipping off his clothes at any hour he caught a cold and missed two performances. Far from being sorry, he used the time for lovemaking enhanced by feverish chills. He would come to the rented room with flowers for Rose, champagne to drink and to bathe in, cream pastries, poems written on the fly to read in bed, aromatic oils to rub into places until then sealed, erotic books they paged through seeking the most inspiring scenes, ostrich feathers for tickling, and countless other props for their games. The girl felt that she was opening like a carnivorous flower, emitting demonic perfumes to attract her man like a Venus's-flytrap, crushing him, swallowing him, digesting him, and finally spitting out the splinters of his bones. She was suffused with unbearable energy, she was drowning, she could not sit quiet an instant, devoured with impatience. In the meantime, Karl Bretzner was floundering in confusion, at times uplifted to the point of frenzy, at others drained, trying to meet his musical obligations, but he was deteriorating in full view and the critics, implacable, said that Mozart whirled in his grave when he heard the Viennese tenor execute—literally—his compositions.

With panic the lovers watched the moment of parting draw near, and entered the phase of love obstructed. They discussed running away to Brazil or committing suicide together, but the possibility of marriage was never mentioned. In the end, the appetite for life was stronger than the temptation of tragedy, and after Bretzner's last performance they hired a carriage and traveled to a seaside hotel in the north of England. They had decided to enjoy a few days in anonymity before Karl Bretzner went ahead to Italy to honor his contracts. Rose would meet him in Vienna once he found appropriate lodgings, got settled, and sent money for the journey.

They were breakfasting beneath an awning on the terrace of their small hotel, legs covered with a wool blanket because of the sharp, cold air of the coast, when they were interrupted by Jeremy Sommers, indignant and solemn as a prophet. Rose had left such a clear trail that it had been easy for her older brother to follow and find her in this out-of-the-way resort. When she saw him, her cry was more one of surprise than fear, emboldened as she was by the tumult of her love. At that instant, she felt for the first time a sense of what she had done, and the weight of the consequences was revealed in all its magnitude. She rose to her feet, resolved to defend her right to live her life however she pleased, but her brother cut her off before she could speak, directing his remarks to the tenor.

“You owe my sister an explanation. I suppose you have not told her that you are married and that you have two children,” he sputtered to the seducer.

That was the one thing Karl Bretzner had failed to tell Rose. They had talked themselves out; he had confessed even the most intimate details of previous love affairs, not overlooking the excesses of the Marquis de Sade that his mentor, the French woman with the eyes of a tiger, had described to him, because Rose had demonstrated a morbid curiosity to know when, with whom, and especially how he had made love, from the time he was ten until the day before he met her. And once he learned how much she liked listening to him and how she incorporated the information into her own theory and practice, he told her everything, without reservation. But of his wife and children he had said nothing, out of compassion for this beautiful virgin who had given herself to him unconditionally. He hadn't wanted to destroy the magic of that coming together: Rose Sommers deserved to enjoy her first love to the fullest.

“You owe me satisfaction,” Jeremy Sommers challenged, slapping Bretzner across the face with his glove.

Karl Bretzner was a man of the world, and he had no intention of doing anything as barbaric as fight a duel. He understood that the moment had come for him to retreat, and he regretted not having a few moments in private to try to explain things to Rose. He did not want to leave her with a broken heart or with the idea that he had seduced her in bad conscience only to abandon her. He needed to tell her once more how much he truly loved her and that he was sorry he was not free to live out their dreams, but he saw on Jeremy Sommers' face that he would not allow that. Jeremy took the arm of his sister, who seemed stupefied, and led her firmly to the carriage, denying her the opportunity to say good-bye to her lover or to collect her few belongings. He drove her to the home of an aunt in Scotland, where she was to stay until her condition could be determined. If the worst happened, which was how Jeremy referred to a possible pregnancy, her life and the honor of the family would be forever besmirched.

“Not a word of this to anyone, not even to Mama or John, you understand?” were the only words he spoke during the journey.

Rose lived a few weeks of uncertainty, until she knew she was not pregnant. That brought a sigh of enormous relief, as if the heavens had absolved her. As atonement, she spent three months knitting for the poor, reading, and writing on the sly without shedding a single tear. During that time, she reflected on her fate and something shifted inside, because when she left her aunt's home she was a different person. Only Rose was aware of the change. She reappeared in London exactly as she had left, smiling, tranquil, interested in opera and literature, without a word of bitterness to Jeremy for having dragged her from the arms of her lover or of nostalgia for the man who had deceived her, Olympian in her posture of ignoring gossip and the mournful faces of her family. On the surface she seemed the same girl she had always been; not even her mother could find the chink in her perfect composure that would allow her a reproach or counsel. On the other hand, the widow was not in a situation to help or protect her daughter, a cancer was rapidly devouring her. The one modification in Rose's behavior was her fancy for spending hours closed in her room, writing. In her tiny hand she filled dozens of notebooks, which she kept under lock and key. As she never tried to post a letter, Jeremy Sommers, who feared nothing so much as ridicule, stopped worrying about the vice of writing and assumed that his sister had had the good judgment to forget the ill-omened Viennese tenor. Not only had she not forgotten him, however, she remembered with noonday clarity every detail of what had happened and each word he had spoken or whispered. The only thing she erased from her mind was the disenchantment of having been deceived. Karl Bretzner's wife and children simply disappeared, because they had never been given a place in the vast fresco of her memories of love.