* * *
Dram said that he taught Cello to drive in the empty, cracked streets of the old diplomatic quarter and they probably conceived Otto in a squelchy expanse somewhere between the sealed Japanese and Italian embassies. It was very uncharacteristic of him to say such a thing. We were taking garbage down the circular back stairs to be recycled.
I’d been lying to Cello about attending AA meetings and the next Saturday, when I said I was going to the American soldiers’ meeting down in Dahlem, I went to a straight-porn cinema instead, and was fascinated to observe Rosen-Montag a few rows ahead of me and off to my right. He held a beer and was smiling up at the dubbed hijinks. The blonde next to him looked just like the blonde getting hammered in the film, except she clearly wasn’t getting what she wanted and wasn’t willing to fake anything.
She turned toward Rosen-Montag in her seat and whined something, smoothing a strand of hair behind her ear. Her nails were incredibly long and vulgar and unhygienic looking. She had a terrifically angry nose. But Rosen-Montag was ignoring her, smiling at the tit dunes up on the screen. Then the beer dived out of his fingers and the blonde threw her legs over his lap. Rosen-Montag looked back over his shoulder, as though for a waiter, and didn’t see me. I thought I detected glassine excitement in the size of his pupils, even at that distance.
The story of Saint Paul in Rome is the story of a major party killer. I came up from the downstairs porn theater and lit another cigarette. The smoke blew me in the direction of the Europa Center. I had not had a drink in more than a year, but I was twenty-eight years old and I had not been naked with another human being in an even longer time than I’d not had a drink.
THREE
In 1934 a composer’s widow comes in secret to dangerous Berlin in order to fulfill her dying daughter’s last wish. She must abduct the young Ethiopian prince, whose presence they have heard is magic. She must rescue him from the Nazis, who have him under arrest in the cellar of the Crown Prince Palace. They have hidden him away from the sound of music. When he hears music, he dances, and when he dances, he enchants, he brings peace, ends war.
The composer’s widow sings an old Gypsy folk song that lulls its hearers to sleep. With the help of the Berlin envoys of Haile Selassie, she smuggles the prince from the palace. The child is frightened and inadvertently gives them away. The composer’s widow betrays the emperor’s emissaries and outruns them, as well as the Nazis, to the Austrian border. But the story about the little prince is untrue. He is no dancer, no gentle creature. She soothes the prince to sleep with Gypsy song. He is agitated when he wakes. She gets him to the bedside of her daughter. The little white girl is happy to have the royal golliwog to entertain her. The little black boy, however, is far from happy. He isn’t full of magic; he’s a prince.
The prince goes on a rampage around the isolated villa. He throws objects, smashes windows, swings the cat by its tail. He eludes capture. The composer’s widow sings the old Gypsy folk song and it puts him to sleep. But if she stops singing, he wakes up and flies at her. It is a curse. Other pieces of music will not pacify him. She must sing the Gypsy song over and over. While singing, she writes a note for her daughter to take to the gamekeeper. She carries the prince into the woods so that her daughter can wake. The little girl wakes, sees the note on her pillow, and crawls to the gamekeeper’s cottage.
The gamekeeper finds the exhausted composer’s widow and the sleeping prince in the woods. The gamekeeper has come with Gypsies he’s paid to sing. They put the little prince in a cage and stop singing. He rages as they carry him to jail. After Germany annexes Austria, the euthanasia laws of the Nazi regime come into effect and the little prince is taken away to a concentration camp.
* * *
Hayden Birge wanted to call the opera he was supposed to be writing Freaking Black, but Cello didn’t like the title. He said it was based on a strange story his favorite teacher, a dear old queen, had told him about Alma Mahler’s purchase of an Ethiopian prodigy to entertain her daughter, who was dying of polio. The boy played beautifully, but he was seriously disturbed: whenever he wasn’t playing, he exhibited disgusting antisocial behavior, shitting over everything. Hayden said that Cello’s libretto was not what he had been expecting.
To me, her libretto sounded like children’s theater, and I detested both folklore and children’s theater. Hayden said its plot problems were the least of it. He said he had had in mind a libretto of utter craziness, like those letters in which Mozart tells the people he loves to shit so much in their beds that their beds explode. Cello feared they would appear to be ripping off Amadeus.
Hayden had had a success two years before with a concert performance of a chamber opera that he said was about uptight Europe—Lully’s Toe. The right people in West Berlin saw it and it got written about. Cello phoned a Swiss foundation that paid his musicians. Then she persuaded the director of her father-in-law’s institute to donate its stage. The institute hadn’t been behind the piece until the first night, when it was clear that people liked it. Once Hayden had introduced the sextet and soprano and countertenor and reminded the Germans that they could laugh, they did. But Hayden’s program note was positively ghoulish about how fatally infected Lully’s toe got after he smashed it with a heavy stick he was using to beat time. Hayden said that in the piece he went overboard on the things about Europe that the inability to keep time and the crushed toe were metaphors for.
Somehow, after that, Cello began to think of herself as his collaborator, he said. He didn’t say anything about her access to funds and institutes and city politicians, her cachet as a Berlin personality, the retired black American artist married to Schuzburg Tools. We were having lunch in Café Einstein, near Nollendorfplatz, Herr Issyvoo’s old stomping ground, and I would have wagered that some of its cultured clientele had heard of Cello. It felt as though Hayden and I were meeting in secret, because he had asked me not to tell her of our appointment.
I wanted to ingratiate myself to him. I liked the conspiratorial atmosphere, but I couldn’t think what would be the equivalent of nylons in our exchange. When he complained about Cello’s tendency to rewrite his music, he ended by laughing it off, saying that she was just headstrong, and rubbing his sinewy neck.
He said he didn’t mind if I smoked, but he wouldn’t. I emptied two sugar packets into my cup. He only smoked after dinner. No wonder my skin was the way it was and his was perfect. He never used cologne; what beguiled was his wonderful Bond Street soap. His gray cashmere sweater was fragrant. His shoes were Italian, a brand I’d never heard of. He confessed to a weakness for clothes. He was a gay guy who got the boys he went after. I could tell. He did his hunting late at night, in clothes I never saw, among boys loaded with attitude and shirtless in autumn.
Stravinsky had three face-lifts, Hayden said. He said that Cello couldn’t bring herself to write about a black person shitting on Europe. It was going to be a problem, he said. Maybe Rimsky-Korsakov could set what she’d written, but he couldn’t. He said he thought better of letting me read her libretto because it was bad enough that he had even told me about their collaboration. She’d not mentioned it to me.
* * *
Cello and I were communicating mostly through the occasional phone message she left on my tiny bed. Rosen-Montag’s people called more often than Chicago. I hadn’t been around for dinner in a long time, and the one Sunday lunch out in Wannsee that I’d gone to over the summer had been a torment because I was missing a date with Manfred. When I told Hayden about Manfred, he said, “For who can make straight what God hath made a ’mo.”