The Metropolis Case_ A Novel - Matthew Gallaway [144]
Filled with fear and doubt, she hated him and whatever or whoever was responsible for this moment; she leaned precariously over the rail, seasick with futility, until her Brangäne pulled her back into position, where—perhaps aided by the touch of a fellow singer—she began to concentrate. She spent a few seconds analyzing his voice, the way it seemed to weave through the house, around the columns, and under and over the wooden-backed seats. It was big and stentorian, but not shrill or athletic; his diction was perfect, and she decided he must be German after all, or Viennese. She remembered what he had said to her—not in the dressing room but twenty years earlier—about his belief in performance, and she felt a spark. Maybe—no, what was she fucking thinking?—definitely like him, she could not live without opera; in fact, everything she had ever done—and more than that, everything that had ever happened to her—was in preparation for this moment. She now saw Leo less as a challenge than as a fellow acolyte, ready to welcome her into the fold. She stood up and—beaming with reverence—sang with a conviction as intense as the corresponding anger and doubt that had preceded it. Bombs and missiles could have exploded around her and left her unfazed; she could have played hopscotch or walked a tightrope over a deep canyon, all without missing a single note.
THEY SHARED THE love potion, which poured down her throat like hot poison, and then became an open wound of desire that grew more infected with each passing second. When the act ended and she was ripped from Leo’s arms, it was an apocalypse: writhing, she had to be passed to her dressing room like a bucket of water by a line of production assistants and there propped onto a couch and spoon-fed sips of tea to keep her throat moist. Outside the theater, the audience ran laps around the gardens, reviving an old German tradition as they considered what they had just witnessed and, even more important, prepared for what was still to come.
In the final minutes of the intermission, Maria galloped to the stage. She hardly noticed when the curtain parted and the music began, as she sat with Leo under the cloak of moonlight. They sang to each other while he removed the pins and combs holding up her long black hair, then wrapped it around his hands, pulling her closer and closer, until Maria was sure that their hearts had been fused. That their love was an illicit betrayal of the king only heightened her sense that every second spent with him was more valuable than an entire lifetime apart, and she knew she would rather die than endure another separation. When the king’s man drew his sword and plunged it into Tristan, Maria looked down at her own body with disbelief; the pain she experienced made it impossible not to believe that she, too, had been impaled, and that her blood also ran down the stage. After the curtain closed, she staggered as if newly blinded back to her dressing room, clutching the walls for support.
During Act III, listening from the wings to her mortally wounded Tristan, she had to be restrained from taking the stage to comfort him. At last freed, she rushed out, only to realize as she saw his ashen face and held his limp hand that it was too late; she heard the echo of his dying words. Tristan was dead, and now it would be Isolde’s turn: she turned to face the audience one last time and began her final song of love and death, her Liebestod. As Isolde prepared to die for Tristan, Maria—now but a dim star on a misty night—expected to follow. What was the point of living? She had given everything to her voice and to the music for which it was made; she felt exonerated from the pain of life, and could not bear the thought of renewing it; she had never felt so exhausted.
She entered the last bars of her aria, and as her heart slowed—the ultimate control of an involuntary muscle—to a final beat, she closed her eyes and savored for