MY PROFESSION OFTEN OBLIGES ME to lead a very solitary life in the great capitals of the world, and four years ago, Madrid, the city in which I spent much of my childhood and much of my adolescence, was no exception. Indeed, after a long period without visiting it, few cities I have been to on my numerous trips abroad have seemed to me sadder or more solitary. More even than English cities, which are the worst in the world, the most miserable and the most hostile; more even than those of East Germany, which are so disciplined and so deadened that to walk down the street whistling has a cataclysmic effect; more even than those of Switzerland, which are at least clean and quiet and give free rein to the imagination precisely because they say nothing.
Madrid, on the other hand, seems in a hurry to say everything, as if it were aware that the only way it can win over the traveler is through unchecked noise and vehemence. It does not, therefore, allow for any long-term expectations, any reticence or reserve, nor does it allow the visitor (not to mention the perpetually harassed resident) the smallest imaginative or imaginary hope that anything more might exist — hidden, unexpressed, omitted or merely contingent — than what is brazenly offered to him as soon as he steps out along its dirty, suffocating streets. Madrid is rustic and talkative and lacks all mystery, and there is nothing so sad or so solitary as a city with no apparent enigma or even the appearance of an enigma, there is nothing so dissuasive, nothing so oppressive to a visitor. I, both in my dream and four years ago, was a visitor to this city despite having lived in it and in its environs when I was no more than a child and entirely dependent on my godfather, who took me in and moved me there from Barcelona when my mother died. (I was for many years what is known as a poor relation: I was quite literally that, and it was then that I lived in Madrid. On the other hand, at the time, four years ago, I had long since ceased to be a poor relation and was making a good living, but, given my prolonged absence and the minimal contact I had had with my former benefactor since my emancipation, I was just as much a visitor to Madrid as I had been to Venice and Milan and Edinburgh a few weeks earlier.)
As I said, I was taken there and am still taken to all these cities by my profession, which, contrary to popular belief, is one of the saddest and most solitary of professions — people only ever see us on stage, on record covers, on posters and in the occasional televised gala performance: that is, always in full make-up. The truth is that, in essence, we are not so very different from traveling salesmen, except, of course, that profession is slowly dying out and is in danger of disappearing altogether, doubtless because the people in charge of large companies, though, on the whole, highly pragmatic individuals not known for their humanitarianism, have realized that no one can lead such a hard, disparate life. I have known traveling salesmen who have ended up in mental hospitals, or have murdered a would-be customer, or committed suicide in a luxury hotel, knowing that their unusual excesses (indoor swimming pool, sauna, massages, cocktails, but, above all, the dry-cleaning bill) would be vainly deducted from a posthumous salary that they had taken good care to overspend and which no one would notice anyway. At least they would die with their suit pressed.
Opera singers always stay in luxury hotels and our excesses are neither unusual nor excessive, but rather the norm and what is required, yet our life in the city where we have come to work is not so very different from that of a traveling salesman. In every hotel in which I have stayed — in every hotel, therefore, in which there was a singer — there was at least one traveling salesman who, during my sojourn, slashed his wrists in a bubble bath or ruthlessly knifed a bellboy, performed a striptease in the foyer, set fire to a carpet, used the fire extinguisher to smash the mirrors in his luxury suite or, in the elevator, fondled the wife of a member of some government. And before or after such an outburst, I have always identified with some detail, some characteristic, some gesture of utter weariness which I had noticed in the salesman when we coincided in the elevator late at night, tie dishevelled and eyes docile; in a shared, sideways glance of patience and defeat; in the discreet way we smoothed our hair or mopped our brow with a handkerchief; in the unoriginal manner of their suicide. I have on occasion found myself in the company of just such a moribund traveling salesman in the hotel bar, perched on stools a few yards apart, letting another already dead hour pass in that area which is always the first place you seek out as soon as you move in, so as to have a third refuge or support (the first is your room, the foyer is the second) to protect us or guard us from having to go straight out into the world, into the new, unknown and unknowing city, where nothing needs us and where we are ignored by everything. On such occasions, however, if the salesman has happened to find out what or who I am, he has not regarded me as I have him, as an equal or as a fellow sufferer, but with envy and resentment. Indeed, even if they didn't find out: my clothes are better, my self-confidence more apparent, my way of holding my glass more nonchalant, my legs always loosely crossed, the handkerchief with which I dab my forehead is clean and neatly folded and possibly colorful, while his is crumpled and dirty and invariably white; and his brow more furrowed. The difference has less to do with the degree of fame (non-existent in his case) or an awareness of the prestige to be gained by the exercise of our respective professions than with our familiarity with a certain type of terrain: thus while the traveling salesman is only staying in a luxury hotel out of extreme despair and cannot but feel himself to be an intruder — a poor relation whose admittance there is an exception, for there he will give full rein to his disquiet or else celebrate his own death — I am an artist and a man of the world and I am there because of my work, my despair is either latent or merely in the incubating stage, and I cannot see my own presence in that place as a transgression or an abuse of trust or even as a challenge, but rather as merely routine; to me, my presence there does not, as it does for him, have either a symbolic meaning or the character of an ultimatum. It is in no way a cry for help, as it is in his case. Nor does it portend anything. However, this has not prevented me from occasionally seeing in the destroyed or potentially self-destroying traveling salesman a shadow or an anticipation of what awaits me. He is at the end of a sad, solitary life, while the opera singer has still not reached the end of his for the simple reason that he is never quite as convinced as the traveling salesman that this life of his is, in fact, sad and solitary. The greasepaint makes him less clear-sighted.
But, notwithstanding all these differences, I say again that life in the big cities is very similar for both professions. We opera singers arrive in a place: we are met at the hotel (although not always, and, of course, never at the airport or the station) and we are mildly feted on the first night by the organizers (that is, by the impresarios, by the contracting party who pretend to have invited us). All the honors and almost all the niceties end there, because from the next day onwards we begin a period of one or two or even three weeks during which we have strict obligations to fulfill, and all we do is rehearse, snack, rehearse and sleep, barely departing from the route taken between hotel and rehearsal hall or, if making a recording, the studio. Bearing in mind that impresarios always judge that they are doing us a great favor by arranging for the two places to be close to each other, the routes we take through the cities we visit are often only a few hundred yards long (unless the existence of an old friend in the locality causes us to deviate or if, out of rebelliousness or curiosity, we propose other routes). I am not a conformist, but, rather, an exception, for I have colleagues for whom an immense city with thousands of inhabitants consists of one or two or three streets which they travel only on foot. When you go to a place to work, you don't feel like visiting it; on the contrary, what we opera singers try to do is forget that we are in a different place from the one we've just been to, in the hope that we will avoid a geographical (as well as, in our case, linguistic) schizophrenia, which could lead us to the same crazed, criminal or suicidal end as that of so many traveling salesmen. To the great good fortune of most of us singers, one luxury hotel is always much like any other luxury hotel, and one recording studio or rehearsal hall is much like any other recording studio or rehearsal hall, and, ultimately, one cheering, applauding audience is much like any other audience who respond in more or less the same way, so much so that many of my colleagues manage to persuade themselves — intermittently — that every time they leave home and go off to work in another country or another town, the country or town in question does not vary, but is always the same. By means of this fiction, they try to convince themselves that they are not completely abnormal, itinerant people, that they are no different, for example, from university teachers who live in a capital city but teach in a provincial town, cramming all their classes into two days, or soccer players, who are only away on Saturdays and Sundays (and international soccer players on occasional Wednesdays), but that they are, on the other hand, quite different from professional golfers and lecturers, tennis champions, bullfighters during the season, and traveling salesmen.