This was the signal for the remainder of the cast to march in from the rear of the garden: musicians playing military marches, clowns assaulting one another with slapsticks, dwarfs from medieval courts, an equestrienne standing on her mount, a bearded lady, dogs on bicycles, an ostrich costumed as Columbine and, finally, a team of boxers in satin trunks and boxing gloves pushing a wheeled platform crowned by a painted cardboard arch. And there, on the dais of a stage-set emperor, sat Horacio Fortunato, his mane slicked down with brilliantine, grinning his irrepressible gallant’s grin, pompous beneath his triumphal dome, surrounded by his outrageous circus, acclaimed by the trumpets and cymbals of his own orchestra, the most conceited, most lovesick, and most entertaining man in the world. Patricia laughed, and walked forward to meet him.
TOSCA
Her father first sat her down at the piano when she was five years old and, when she was ten, Maurizia Rugieri, dressed in pink organza and patent leather shoes, gave her first recital in the Club Garibaldi before a benevolent public composed principally of members of the Italian colony. At the end of the presentation they placed bouquets of flowers at her feet, and the president of the club gave her a commemorative plaque and a porcelain doll bedecked with ribbons and lace.
“We salute you, Maurizia Rugieri, as a precocious genius, a new Mozart. The great stages of the world await you,” he declaimed.
The girl waited for the applause to die down and then, making her voice heard above the sound of her mother’s proud sobs, she spoke with unexpected hauteur:
“This is the last time I ever play the piano,” she announced. “I want to be a singer.” And she left the room, dragging the doll by one foot.
When he recovered from his embarrassment, her father enrolled her in voice classes with a severe maestro; for every false note he bestowed a rap on the knuckles but he did not succeed in killing the child’s enthusiasm for the opera. As she emerged from adolescence it became clear that she had a small, birdlike voice barely strong enough to lull an infant in the cradle; despite all her efforts, she was forced to exchange her dreams of being an operatic soprano for a more banal fate. When she was nineteen, she married Ezio Longo, a first-generation immigrant, an architect without a degree and builder by trade who had proposed for himself the goal of founding an empire on cement and steel and, at thirty-five, had nearly achieved it.
Ezio Longo fell in love with Maurizia Rugieri with the same dedication that had made it possible for him to strew the capital with his buildings. He was short in stature, heavy-boned, with the neck of a draft animal and an expressive if somewhat brutal face with thick lips and black eyes. His work forced him to dress in rough clothing, and from being so much in the sun his skin was dark and crisscrossed with wrinkles, like tanned leather. He was good-natured and generous, he laughed easily, and he loved popular music and abundant, simple food. Under this rather common exterior hid a refined soul and a delicacy he did not know how to translate into deeds or words. When he gazed at Maurizia his eyes sometimes filled with tears and his chest contracted with a tenderness that shame caused him to disguise with a cuff or a smack. It was impossible for him to express his feelings for Maurizia, and he thought that by showering her with gifts and bearing with stoic patience her excessive mood swings and her imaginary ailments he would compensate for his failings as a lover. She provoked in him an urgent desire renewed each day with the ardor of their first encounters; frustrated, he would embrace her, hoping to bridge the abyss between them, but his passion dissipated on contact with the affectations of his wife, whose imagination was eternally fired by romantic novels and recordings of Verdi and Puccini. Ezio would fall asleep, conquered by the fatigue of the day, exhausted by nightmares of twisting walls and spiral staircases, but he awakened at dawn to sit on the edge of the bed and observe his sleeping wife with such attention that he learned to divine her dreams. He would have given his life to have her return his affection with equal intensity. He built for her a mammoth mansion supported by columns, in which the confusion of styles and profusion of adornment disoriented the senses, and where four servants worked constantly merely to burnish the bronzes, polish the floors, clean the crystal teardrops of the chandeliers, and beat the dust from the gold-footed furniture and imitation Persian rugs imported from Spain. The house had a small amphitheater in the garden with loudspeakers and stage lights where Maurizia Rugieri liked to sing for their guests. Ezio would never have admitted under threat of death that he was unable to appreciate those birdlike twitterings, not only to conceal his lack of culture but, especially, because of his respect for his wife’s artistic inclinations. He was an optimistic man, and extremely self-confident, but when a weeping Maurizia announced that she was pregnant, he was overwhelmed by an ungovernable apprehension; he felt his heart would burst open like a watermelon, and that there was no place for such joy in this vale of tears. He feared that some violent catastrophe might wreak havoc on his precarious paradise, and he prepared to defend it against any attack.
The catastrophe came in the guise of a medical student Maurizia met on a streetcar. The child had been born by that time—an infant as vital as his father, who seemed immune to all harm, even the evil eye—and his mother had recovered her girlish waistline. The student sat down beside Maurizia en route to the city center, a slender, pale youth with the profile of a Roman statue. He was reading the score of Tosca and quietly whistling an aria from the third act. Maurizia felt that all the day’s sunlight was captured on his cheekbones, and her bodice grew moist with sweet anticipation. Unable to restrain herself, she sang the words of the unfortunate Mario as he greeted the dawn before being led to the firing wall. And thus between two lines of the score, the romance began. The young man’s name was Leonardo Gómez, and he was as mad about bel canto as Maurizia.
In the following months the student received his medical degree and Maurizia relived, one by one, all the tragedies from the operatic repertoire, and no few from romantic literature. She was killed successively by Don José, tuberculosis, an Egyptian tomb, a dagger, and poison; she was in love in Italian, French, and German; she was Aïda, Carmen, and Lucia di Lammermoor and, in every instance Leonardo Gómez was the object of her immortal passion. In real life they shared a chaste love, which she longed to consummate but did not dare initiate, and which he fought in his heart to preserve out of respect for Maurizia’s married state. They met in public places, occasionally holding hands in a dark corner of some park. They exchanged notes signed Tosca and Mario; naturally, Scarpia was Ezio Longo, who was so grateful for his son, for his beautiful wife and all the blessings heaven had bestowed, and so busy working to provide for his family’s security that, had a neighbor not come to repeat to him the gossip that his wife was riding the streetcar too often, he would never have learned what was going on behind his back.
Ezio Longo had prepared for the contingency of a business failure, and for any illness or accident that in his worst moments of superstitious terror he had imagined might befall his son, but it had never occurred to him that a honey-voiced student could steal his wife from beneath his nose. When he heard the story, he nearly laughed aloud, because of all misfortunes this seemed easiest to resolve. After his first reaction, however, his bile flowed with blind rage. He followed Maurizia to a discreet tearoom where he surprised her drinking chocolate with her beloved. He did not ask for explanations. He seized his rival by his lapels, lifted him off his feet, and threw him against the wall amid the crashing of broken china and shrieks of the clientele. Then he took his wife by the arm and led her to his car, one of the last of the Mercedes imported into the country before the Second World War had interrupted commercial relations with Germany. He locked Maurizia in the house and posted two of his bricklayers at the doors. Maurizia lay two days in bed, weeping, without speaking or eating. During her silence, Ezio Longo had time to think things over, and his rage was transformed into a mute frustration that recalled the neglect of his infancy, the poverty of his youth,
the loneliness of his existence—all that bottomless hunger for affection he had suffered before he met Maurizia Rugieri and had believed was resolved through love. On the third day he could bear no more, and he went into his wife’s room.
“For our son’s sake, Maurizia, you must get these fantasies out of your head. I know I am not very romantic, but if you help me, I can change. I’m not a man to wear the horns, and I love you too much to let you go. But if you give me the chance, I will make you happy, I promise.”
Her only answer was to turn to the wall and prolong her fast for another two days, at the end of which her husband returned.
“Dammit, I would like to know what it is you don’t have in this world; tell me, and I’ll try to get it for you,” he said, defeated.
“I don’t have Leonardo. Without him, I will die.”
“Very well. You can go off with that clown if you want, but you will never see our son again.”
Maurizia packed her suitcases, put on a muslin dress and large veiled hat, and called a rented car. Before she left, she kissed the boy, sobbing, and whispered into his ear that very soon she would come back for him. Ezio Longo, who in a week’s time had lost a dozen pounds and half his hair, tore the child from her arms.
Maurizia Rugieri arrived at her beloved’s boardinghouse to find that two days earlier he had left to work as a doctor in an oil field, in one of those hot provinces whose name evokes Indians and snakes. She could not believe that he had left without saying goodbye, but she attributed it to the drubbing he had received in the tearoom; she concluded that Leonardo was a poet, and that her husband’s brutality had disrupted his behavior. She moved into a hotel, and for days sent telegrams to every conceivable place Leonardo Gómez might be. Finally she located him, and telegraphed him that for his sake she had given up her only son, defied her husband, society, and God Himself, and that her decision to follow him until death should them part was irrevocable.
The journey was a wearing expedition by train, bus, and, in some places, riverboat. Maurizia had never been alone outside a radius of some thirty blocks surrounding her home, but neither the grandeur of the landscape nor the incalculable distances held any terror for her. Along the way she lost two suitcases, and her muslin dress became limp and yellow with dust, but finally she reached the river landing where Leonardo was to meet her. When she descended from her conveyance she saw a pirogue at the dock and ran toward it with tattered veil and escaping curls flying. Instead of Mario, however, she found a black man in a pith helmet, and two melancholy Indian oarsmen. It was too late to turn back. She accepted the explanation that Doctor Gómez had been detained by an emergency, and climbed into the boat with the remnants of her battered luggage, praying that these men were neither bandits nor cannibals. Fortunately they were not, and they bore her safely through a huge expanse of precipitous, savage territory to the place where her lover awaited her. There were two small settlements, one of large dormitories where the workers lived, and another for staff consisting of the company offices, twenty-five prefabricated houses brought by airplane from the United States, an absurd golf course, and a stagnant green swimming pool filled each morning with gigantic frogs, all enclosed within a metal fence with a gate guarded by two sentinels. It was an encampment of transient men; life turned around that dark ooze that poured from the bowels of the earth like inexhaustible dragon vomit. In these solitudes there were no women but a few suffering companions of the workers; the gringos and bosses all journeyed to the city every three months to visit their families. The arrival of Doctor Gómez’s wife, as they called her, upset the routine for a few days, until everyone grew used to seeing her pass by with her veils, her parasol, and her dancing slippers, like a character escaped from some tale.
Maurizia Rugieri did not allow the roughness of the men or the unrelenting heat to vanquish her; she intended to live out her destiny with grandeur, and she very nearly succeeded. She had converted Leonardo Gómez into the hero of her personal opera, investing him with utopian virtues, and exalting to the point of mania the quality of his love, never pausing to measure her lover’s response, or gauge whether he was keeping pace with her in their grand passion. If Leonardo Gómez showed signs of lagging behind, she attributed it to his timid character and the poor health made worse by the accursed climate. In truth, he seemed so fragile that she cured herself once and for all of her imagined ills and devoted herself to caring for him. She accompanied him to his primitive hospital, and learned the duties of a nurse in order to assist him. Attending victims of malaria and treating the terrible accidents from the wells seemed better to her than lying in the house beneath a ceiling fan reading for the hundredth time the same old magazines and romantic novels.
Among the syringes and bandages she could imagine herself as Florence Nightingale, one of those brave heroines she sometimes saw in the films shown in the camp clubhouse. She refused with suicidal determination to acknowledge any diminution of her reality; she insisted on embellishing every moment with words, though in fact she now had no other alternative. She spoke of Leonardo Gómez—whom she continued to call Mario—as a saint dedicated to the service of mankind, and set herself the task of demonstrating to the world that they were the protagonists of an exceptional love—which served at least to discourage any company employee who might have been stirred by the only white woman around. Maurizia called the rusticity of the camp “contact with nature,” ignoring mosquitoes, poisonous insects, iguanas, the hellish heat of the day, the breathless nights, and the fact that she could not venture alone beyond the gate. She referred to her loneliness, her boredom, her natural love of the city, her desire to dress in the latest fashions, to visit her friends and attend the theater, as a vague “nostalgia.” The only thing she could not give a different name to was the animal pain that sank its claws in her every time she thought of her son—so she chose never to mention his name.
Leonardo Gómez worked as a camp doctor for more than ten years, until tropical fevers and climate destroyed his health. He had lived so long within the protective fence of the National Petroleum Company that he lacked the spirit to make a new beginning in a more competitive atmosphere; in addition, he had never forgotten Ezio Longo’s fury as he threw him against the wall, and thus never considered the possibility of returning to the capital. He sought a post in an out-of-the-way corner where he could continue his low-key existence, and in this way one day found himself in Agua Santa with his wife, his medical instruments, and his opera recordings. It was the decade of the fifties, and Maurizia Rugieri descended from the bus dressed in the latest style, a tight polka-dotted dress and enormous black straw hat she had ordered from a catalogue in New York, a vision like none ever seen in Agua Santa. They were, at any rate, welcomed with typical small-town hospitality, and in less than twenty-four hours everyone knew the legend of the exceptional love between the new arrivals. They called them Tosca and Mario, without the least idea of who those people were, though Maurizia soon made it her business to instruct them. She gave up her nursing duties at Leonardo’s side, formed a parish choir, and offered the first voice recitals held in that village. Mute with amazement, the citizens of Agua Santa saw Maurizia on an improvised stage in the schoolhouse, transformed into Madame Butterfly, decked out in an outlandish bathrobe, with knitting needles in her hair, two plastic flowers over her ears, and her face painted plaster white, trilling away in her little bird voice. No one understood a single word of the song, but when she knelt and pulled out a kitchen knife, threatening to plunge it into her stomach, the audience cried out with horror and a spectator rushed to the stage to dissuade her, grabbing the weapon from her hands and pulling her to her feet. Immediately following the performance there was a long discussion about the reasons for the Japanese lady’s tragic decision, and everyone agreed that the North American sailor who had abandoned her was a soulless brute, and that he was not worth dying for since life goes on and there are many men in the world. The evening ended wit
h general merrymaking when an improvised band played cumbias and everyone began to dance. That memorable night was followed by others: song, death, explication of the opera’s plot by the soprano, public discussion, and closing party.