Authors: Bel Canto
It was during that performance of
Rigoletto
that opera imprinted itself on Katsumi Hosokawa,
a message written on the pink undersides of his eyelids that he read to himself
while he slept. Many years later, when everything was business, when he worked
harder than anyone in a country whose values are structured on hard work, he
believed that life, true life, was something that was stored in music. True
life was kept safe in the lines of Tchaikovsky’s
Eugene
Onegin
while you went out into the world and met the obligations
required of you. Certainly he knew (though did not completely understand) that
opera wasn’t for everyone, but for everyone he hoped there was something. The
records he cherished, the rare opportunities to see a live performance, those
were the marks by which he gauged his ability to love. Not his wife, his
daughters, or his work. He never thought that he had somehow transferred what
should have filled his daily life into opera. Instead he knew that without
opera, this part of
himself
would have vanished
altogether. It was early in the second act, when Rigoletto and Gilda sang
together, their voices twining, leaping, that he reached out for his father’s
hand. He had no idea what they were saying, nor did he know that they played
the parts of father and
daughter,
he only knew that he
needed to hold to something. The pull they had on him was so strong he could
feel himself falling forward out of the high and distant seats.
Such love breeds loyalty, and Mr. Hosokawa was
a loyal man. He never forgot the importance of Verdi in his life. He became
attached to certain singers, as everyone does. He made special collections of
Schwarzkopf and Sutherland. He believed in the genius of Callas above all
others. There was never a great deal of time in his days, not the kind of time
such interest clearly merited. Custom was that after having dinner with clients
and completing paperwork, he would spend thirty minutes listening to music and
reading librettos before falling asleep. It was impossibly rare, maybe five
Sundays a
year, that
he found three consecutive hours
to listen to one opera start to finish. Once, in his late forties, he ate a
spoiled oyster and suffered a vicious bout of food poisoning that kept him home
for three days. He remembered this time as happily as any vacation because he
played Handel’s
Alcina
continually, even while he
slept.
It was his eldest daughter, Kiyomi, who bought
him his first recording of Roxane Coss for his birthday. Her father was a
nearly impossible man to buy gifts for, and so when she saw the disc and a name
she did not recognize, she thought she would take a chance. But it wasn’t the
unknown name that drew
her,
it was the woman’s face. Kiyomi
found the pictures of sopranos irritating. They were always peering over the
tops of fans or gazing through veils of soft netting. But Roxane Coss looked at
her directly, even her chin was straight, her eyes were wide open. Kiyomi
reached for her before she even noticed it was a recording of
Lucia di Lammermoor
. How many recordings of
Lucia di Lammermoor
did
her father own
?
It didn’t matter. She gave her money to the girl at the counter.
When Mr. Hosokawa put the CD in the player and
sat down in his chair to listen, he did not go back to work that night. It was
as if he was a boy in those high seats in
over and over, skipping impatiently past anything that was not her voice. It
was soaring, that voice, warm and complicated, utterly fearless. How could it
be at once controlled and so reckless? He called Kiyomi’s name and she came and
stood in the doorway of his study. She started to say something—yes?
or
, what?
or
, sir?—but before she
could make out the words she heard that voice, the straight-ahead woman from
the picture. Her father didn’t even say it, he simply gestured towards one
speaker with his open hand. She was enormously pleased to have done something
so right. The music praised her. Mr. Hosokawa closed his eyes. He dreamed.
In the five years since then he had seen
eighteen performances featuring Roxane Coss. The first was a lucky coincidence,
the other times he went to the city where she would be, creating business to
take him there. He saw
had never sought her out or made himself to be anything more than any other
member of the audience. He did not assume his appreciation for her talent
exceeded anyone else’s. He was more inclined to believe that only a fool would
not feel about her exactly how he felt. There was nothing more to want than the
privilege to sit and listen.
Read a profile of Katsumi Hosokawa in any
business magazine. He would not talk in terms of passion, as passion was a
private matter, but opera was always there, the human interest angle to make
him appear more accessible. Other CEOs were shown fly-fishing in Scottish
rivers or piloting their own Learjets into
home in the leather chair he sat in when he listened, a Nansei EX-12 stereo
system behind him. There were the inevitable questions about favorites. There
was the inevitable answer.
For a price that was considerably more than the
entire cost of the rest of evening (food, service, transportation, flowers,
security) Roxane Coss was persuaded to come to the party, as it fell in between
the end of her season at
Scala
would not attend the dinner (she did not eat before she sang) but would arrive
at the end of the meal and perform six arias with her accompanist. Mr. Hosokawa
was told by letter that he could make a request upon accepting the invitation,
and while the hosts could make no promises, the request would be given to Miss
Coss for her consideration. It was Mr. Hosokawa’s selection, the aria from
Rusalka,
which she had just completed when the lights went
out. It was to be the end of the program, though who is to say if she might
have sung an encore or even two had the lights remained on?
Mr. Hosokawa chose
Rusalka
as a measure of his respect for Miss Coss. It was the centerpiece of her
repertoire and would require no extra preparation on her behalf, a piece that
surely would have been included in the program had he not requested it. He did
not seek something achingly obscure, an aria from
Partenope
perhaps, so as to prove himself an aficionado. He simply wanted to hear her
sing
Rusalka
while standing close to her in a room.
If a human soul should dream of me, may he still remember me on
awaking!
His translator had written it out for him from the Czech years
ago.
The lights stayed off. The applause began to
show the slightest downward sweep. People blinked and strained to see her
again. A minute passed, then two, and still the group remained comfortably
unconcerned. Then Simon Thibault, the French Ambassador, who had, before coming
to this country, been promised the much more desirable post of
had been unfairly given to another man as a payoff for a complicated political
favor while Thibault and his family were packing) noticed the lights beneath
the kitchen door were still on. He was the first to understand. He felt like he
had been startled from a deep sleep, drunk from liquor and pork and Dvořák. He
took his wife’s hand, reached up for it in the darkness as she was still
applauding, and pulled her into the crowd, dark bodies he could not see but
pushed himself into. He went towards the direction of the glass doors he
remembered being at the far end of the room, craning his head to try and catch
a glimpse of starlight for orientation. What he saw was the narrow beam of a
flashlight, one and then another, and he felt his heart cave down inside his
chest, a feeling that could only be described as sadness.
“Simon?” his wife whispered.
It was already in place, without him seeing any
of it, the web was spun and snug around the house, and while his first impulse,
the natural impulse, was to press ahead anyway and see if he might beat out the
odds, clear logic held him. Better not to draw attention to yourself. Better
not to be an example. Somewhere in the front of the room the accompanist was
kissing the opera singer, and so Ambassador Thibault drew his wife, Edith, into
his arms.
“I’ll sing in the dark,” Roxane Coss called
out, “if someone will get me a candle.”
With these words the room stiffened and the
final moment of applause turned to silence as it was noted that the candles,
too, were dark. It was the end of the evening. By now the bodyguards napped
inside limousines like great, overfed dogs. All across the room men slipped
their hands into pockets and found only neatly pressed handkerchiefs and
folding money. A surge of voices went up, there was some shuffling, and then,
as if by magic, the lights came on.
* * *
It had been a beautiful party, though no one
would remember that. White asparagus in hollandaise, a fish course of turbot
with crispy sweet onions, tiny chops, only three or four bites apiece, in a
cranberry demiglaze. Usually struggling countries longing to impress the heads
of important foreign corporations chose Russian caviar and French champagne. Russian
and French, Russian and French, as if that
was
the
only way to prove prosperity.
On every table sprays of yellow
orchids, each flower no bigger than a thumbnail, all locally grown, trembled
and balanced like mobiles, rearranging themselves with every exhalation of a
guest.
The effort that had gone into the evening, the positioning of
each stem, the sweeping calligraphy of the place cards, had been lost without a
moment’s appreciation. Paintings had been borrowed from the national museum: a
dark-eyed Madonna presenting a tiny Christ on her fingertips, his face oddly
knowing and adult, was placed over the mantel. The garden, which the guests
would see only for a moment when they walked the short distance from their cars
to the front door or if they happened to glance out the window while it was
still light enough, was polished and composed, birds of paradise and tightly
wrapped canna lilies, banks of lamb’s ear and emerald fern. They were not far
from the jungle, and even in the most domesticated garden the flowers strained
to overtake the dull stretch of neat Bermuda grass. From early in the morning
young men had worked, wiping the dust from the leathery leaves with damp
cloths, picking up the fallen blossoms of bougainvillea that rotted beneath the
hedges. Three days before they had put a fresh coat of whitewash on the high
stucco wall that surrounded the home of the Vice President, careful that none
of the paint should fall on the grass. Every element was planned: crystal
saltcellars, lemon mousse,
American
bourbon. There was
no dancing, no band. The only music would be after dinner, Roxane Coss and her
accompanist, a man in his thirties from
* * *
Two hours before the beginning of Mr.
Hosokawa’s birthday party, President Masuda, a native of this country born of
Japanese parents, had sent a note of regret saying that important matters
beyond his control would prevent him from attending the evening’s event.
There was great speculation about this decision
after the evening turned bad. Was it the President’s good luck? God’s divine
will? A tip-off, conspiracy,
plot
? Sadly, it was
nothing so random. The party was scheduled to begin at eight o’clock and should
have lasted past midnight. The President’s soap opera began at nine. Among the
President’s cabinet members and advisers it was an open secret that matters of
state could not be held Monday through Friday for one hour beginning at two in
the afternoon or Tuesday evening for one hour beginning at nine. Mr. Hosokawa’s
birthday fell on a Tuesday this year. There was nothing that could be done
about that. Nor could anyone conceive how to have a party that commenced at ten
o’clock at night or had concluded by eight-thirty and which allowed time for
the President to return home. It was suggested that the program could be taped,
but the President abhorred taping. There was enough taping to endure when he
was out of the country. All he asked of anyone was that certain hours of his
week remain unquestionably open. The discussion of the problem of Mr.
Hosokawa’s ill-timed birthday party lasted for days. After a great deal of
negotiating, the President relented and said he would attend. Hours
before
the party began, for an obvious and unstated reason,
he firmly, irrevocably, changed his mind.
While President Masuda’s commitment to his
programs was completely known and acknowledged by his political inner circle,
this commitment somehow managed to remain utterly unknown to the press or the
people. The host country was mad for soap operas, and yet the President’s
unwavering devotion to his television set was so potentially embarrassing his
cabinet would have gladly traded it in for an indiscreet mistress. Even members
of the government who were themselves known to follow certain programs could
not bear to see the obsession played out so rigidly in their head of state. So
for many of the people at the party who worked with the President, his absence
was noted with disappointment and no real surprise. Everyone else inquired,
Has
there been an emergency? Is President Masuda unwell?