The Man of Feeling Read Free Page A

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