The Witch Narratives: Reincarnation (30 page)

“I do hope, Signorina Amelita that you are not suffering from nerves,” Pierre said.

“I am not nervous. I am merely surrounded by, how you say it—imbeciles. And you,” she yelled at Salia. “You are always underfoot. Get out,
stupida. I don’t need you about. I’m not going to break a leg, unless Pierre trips me with his clumsiness.”

Salia looked over at Pierre, and he dismissed her. “Don’t forget that we go on in three hours,” he said.

“You get out, too,” Amelita yelled at Pierre. She dismissed her Italian maid, Sophia, with a wave of her hand. She rested on the silk divan, her makeup perfectly in place, her hair flattened by a hair net. She had not yet put on her wig. She was clothed in her dressing gown, her fat free of its girdle, both chubby legs suspended by a fluffy pillow. Her eyes were closed. She was sleeping lightly.

There was no window. Sophia had lowered the lamp to a dim flicker, the dressing room in shadows.

She was awoken by laughter, like tinkling crystal.

“Who is it?”

There it was again, laughter, like ice cubes clinking against crystal.

“Sophia? Is that you? I told you I am not to be disturbed.”

Once more laughter filled the room, only it sounded more like musical notes being played through a wind tunnel. The laughter had an otherworldly flavor to it.

“You’re not being funny, Sophia,” she said, angrily. She sat up on the divan with a sluggish motion. She blinked her eyes, trying to see through a grey mist enveloping the room. The mist crawled over the walls, the floor and the divan.

She gagged, slapping a hand over her nose and mouth. The grey mist covered everything with an overwhelming stench of rotting corpses.

From out of the mist a man appeared, as if from the very air.

He floated in front of her, with a long white beard infested with spiders, small, darting spiders, and long-legged spiders, chasing the smaller spiders. Bloated, black spiders consumed baby spiders as soon as they broke free of cocoons matted in his beard. His head was a den of giant, hairy tarantula spiders.

She scampered to the furthest end of the divan, her heart feeling as if it might burst.

The man cackled at her fear.

She slapped him hard.

He cursed at her in Italian with a big smile on his face and no teeth.

She opened her mouth to scream, and the man breathed into her throat an air so foul, it bloated her stomach and plastered the lining, as if she had eaten her own feces after a piggish meal.

The man vanished in a puff of smoke.

High-pitched laughter followed the grey mist seeping beneath the door.

She fainted, vomit spewing from her lips.

Her maid found her a few minutes later and screamed, “Help. Help.”

Amelita’s teeth had blackened. Her tongue was pocked with ashes, and there was a putrid smell on her breath.

Sophia gagged, holding a jar of smelling salts under her nose.

Amelita came to, moaning, “Oh, the inside of my head is pounding, as if thunder raped my ears.”

Pierre came running into the dressing room.

“Spiders, everywhere,” she cried out, slapping her body at invisible spiders. “They’re crawling on my head!” She yanked at her hair and cursed such foul language, Pierre blushed. Every word which came out of her mouth was either a curse word or a threat.

“She is possessed by a demon,” he told Sophia.

Two men arrived and tied handkerchiefs across their noses. They wrestled her onto a stretcher, forced to strap the singer down.

Amelita thrashed about, cursing and screaming, foaming at the mouth. The ugliness of the depravities coming from her mouth was greater than the stink coming from her lungs.

The men put Amelita in an ambulance and took her to the hospital.

Coincidentally, her understudy was also hospitalized, claiming that every time she looked in the mirror, she saw an ugly, old lady with worms crawling on her face.

It seemed like fate that Salia was waiting in the wings, dressed in an identical costume which Amelita wore for the opening Act. She was ready, when a very upset Pierre came for her. His eyes were damp with tears.

“Don’t try to overact,” he advised in a nervous stutter. “Don’t try to underact. Just survive. Try not to stumble too badly. When you do stumble, try to recover. Make up the lines, if you have to, but don’t be too imaginative, else the others won’t be able to follow you. Keep an eye on the other actors, and they’ll help you as best they can. I never expected Amelita and the understudy to go crazy. It must be the mountains. Oh dear, I forgot about the
Italian. Just sing in plain English and I’ll make up some statement about you being educated in England. No. America. Just speak like yourself. Oh, hell. You have that damned Spanish accent. Just hum.”

“Mio padre,” she said in perfect Italian with a flawless accent. “Caro nome.”

He opened his eyes in astonishment. “Where did you learn Italian so fluently and how do you manage to look so…Italian?”

“I know her role,” she assured him. “I have been studying it.” And she opened her mouth and sang like a bird the opening notes of Gilda.

He was stunned at her performance and shoved her onto the stage when Gilda made her entrance.

When it came time for a costume change, Salia went into Amelita’s dressing room and locked the door, telling Sophia to stay out. She clutched her piedra imán, whispering to the lodestone and lovingly rubbing the ugly rock against her cheek. She held up her arms, twirling faster and faster, laughing wickedly. When she stopped twirling, she had transformed herself, and not just her costume. There was nothing left of Salia Esperanza in the expression on her face, the look in her eyes, the way she held her body. It was as if she was possessed by another being, the sweet, pure, naive Gilda.

When the opera was over, she brought the audience to their feet. She had made them laugh and cry with her singing. Her performance caused the audience to project themselves into the heart, the mind, the very soul of Gilda, and she had the voice of an angel.

Salia earned the respect of the other actors in the opera, who now looked at her as a superior singer, better than the famous Amelita Galli-Curci, who barely held her own in a quarantined room at the hospital.

It was written the next morning in the
Santa Fe New Mexican
that Salia’s performance was so deliberate, so painstaking, that it was eerie.

She was the talk of New Mexico, and crowds rushed to Madrid to see the opera,
Rigoletto
. The seats were sold out for every performance.

There was only one box of seats in the theatre that remained empty.

Night after night, Salia looked up from the stage to Samuel’s box.

His box was always empty.

35

I
t was the final night of the opera,
Rigoletto
. Salia delivered her lines perfectly until she looked up, as she always did, to Samuel’s box. Her face grew flushed, and she fumbled her lines. Silently, she just stood there staring at Samuel, dumbstruck.

Pierre stood by the curtain and coughed into his hand.

Even from here, she could see Samuel’s white teeth flashing. His amusement at her discomfiture infuriated her. What angered her even more was that he looked away first, turning his attention to the elaborately coiffed blonde sitting beside him with a feather in her hair.

She turned her head away from him and his woman.

The actor playing the Duke repeated his lines, bringing Salia back to the moment. The ploy worked, and the audience seemed none the wiser. She still felt a landslide of emotions but continued with the opera. Not once did her eyes stray back to the box above her, on her right.

Never did she grip her stomach, though she felt an excruciating ache. Her heart was a tight ball threatening to explode. Not once did she rub her chest where her heart squeezed, making her wonder if her heart might shrink so small, she would shrivel up and die on the stage, in front of Samuel and his woman.

She was especially dramatic in the final scene, declaring she was glad to die for her beloved.

The ending was prophetic when his daughter, Gilda, dies in his arms and Rigoletto cries out, “The curse!”

Her death would have served Samuel right, if she had gone with him like he begged, and died on the train when the tracks left Madrid.
He would have replaced me quick enough
, she thought bitterly.

She could hear Samuel breathing, and felt his breath stirring her hair, from here, on the stage.

She could hear every movement of his chair, when he turned to his woman to give her his loving attention. She felt like holding her hands above her ears and screaming, but had to wait for the curtain to close.

With the scent of a coyote, she could smell his familiar after shave, the odor assaulting her senses, making her dizzy with yearning. She sniffled, trying to wash his scent with her mucus.

She licked her lips and could taste the saltiness of his skin, the hair on his chest tickling her nose. The curtain closed and she delicately wiped her lips, running her hand down her cheek, feeling his fingers, his velvet touch, his hands caressing her. Her neck. Her breasts. From here. On the stage.

She wondered how she ever got through the performance.

She must have done well. The audience stood, clapping for her, yelling her name. She must have finished the play without missing a single cue, but did not remember even speaking her lines. Her performance passed in a daze, as if she was in a nightmare from which she could not awaken.

For the first time since the opening night of the play, she refused to come out to take her bows. “I’m too tired. I shall probably fall down and die,” she told Pierre.

“I’ll just have to say that you have taken ill.”

“No! I’ll come out. The audience mustn’t ever think I’m weak. That they’ve won,” she said, panicking.

He stared at her curiously.

She took her final bows but did not look to the right. She held her head high, her eyes sparkling, and smiling with a false bravado.

She left the stage and hurried to her dressing room, feeling a sense of urgency. She slammed the dressing room door behind her.

She no longer had to change in a broom closet but had the spacious dressing room of the star. Amelita was still ill in the hospital and had gotten no better. The doctors in Albuquerque scratched their heads at her condition.

Salia required no maid to undress her. She clutched her piedra imán to her chest, twirling. When she stopped, she was wearing her own clothing, which was as fashionable as a dress could be, bought in Madrid. She felt like throwing the piedra imán across the room. She didn’t dare change into clothing like she’d seen in magazines, and raise even more suspicions among the villagers.

She hung her head, feeling like Samuel shoved a knife through her heart.
Why did he have to come at all, if only to flaunt another woman in my face? This proves he was only slumming. He said he had many women, so I should have been prepared and have no right to feel hurt. There is really nothing between us. I have no
hold on him. Quit acting like a jealous fishwife! Stop it! Stop it! He doesn’t care if my heart splinters, cutting me to pieces
.

She poured a glass of water.

Someone knocked.

Her hand shook, spilling her glass of water.

The door was flung open and there stood Samuel, with the other woman’s arm draped through his.

“How dare you! I never gave you permission to enter.”

“You may be the star but this is my theatre, Miss Esperanza. In case you’ve forgotten.”

“I have not forgotten, Patrón,” she said, softly.

“Really? Your silence all these months contradicts your words,” he snapped.

“This may be your theatre, but this is my dressing room while I am performing here, and I demand privacy.”

As she expected, Samuel ignored her demands that he leave. He merely lifted his eyebrow in that infernal way he had as if to say,
make me
. She felt like smacking him across the face.

“I have brought a fan to meet you,” he said, bowing. “Emilia, this is New Mexico’s newest star, Salia Esperanza.”

The woman held out her hand, gushing over her singing.

Salia squeezed her hand a bit too tightly. She did not return the woman’s curtsy. Her eyes were hooded, examining her rival. “It is easy to give a great performance when one has such material to work with, E-mule-la,” she said in a thicker than normal Spanish accent.

He chuckled, his eyes sparkling at her wit, knowing Salia thickened her accent on purpose, but her ploy did not work. The slower Emilia stared back at her with worshipful eyes, unoffended at being called a mule.

“Artists are a bit eccentric,” he explained to Emilia. “Never mind Miss Esper-ass-a’s frigidness,” he said in a thicker than normal Eastern accent.

Salia gasped at the insult, and then dismissed them both with a haughty wave of her hand. “You have introduced your lady. Now you may leave.”

Silence. He didn’t contradict his relationship with Emilia. Salia gave him a dirty look.