The Pacific and Other Stories Read Free Page A

despite the most despicable noise and distraction, a monstrous woman, really, floating in a sea of ineffable beauty and transforming the world about her without either self-consciousness or delicate temperament.
    You know how great singers and musicians are always supposed to be prisoners of temperament? It’s the opposite of what’s true. In fact, what so distinguishes them in this regard is that they have no temperament: they are absolute. It is we, who are not great, who are prisoners of mood. It is we who vary and change, and when we who spend our lives trimming and ducking encounter those who make no adjustments we imagine that it is they who are in a frenzy, such are the laws of relative motion.
    I have never seen Rosanna sing with adjustment for anything. She couldbe in a dirty garage in Saarbrücken or at a command performance for the queen of England, and it would be—indeed, it was—exactly the same. Indeed, she is a miracle of temperament, or lack of it. She is seized each time by the divinity of the music and she neither varies nor falters. Well, she does sometimes falter, but only when her body has failed her and she is sick. Even then, though she may not sing well, she sings better than most, and when you see her struggling against her affliction—she is not anymore a healthy woman—you know that to finish her aria she would sing even unto death.
    But when not singing, she’s intolerable. She has always been intolerable. In our almost forty years of association I have seen several hundred of the scores of thousands of young men who have fallen in love with her voice. These are the ones who, like the hardier sperm that can swim close to the egg, come to her entranced and obsessed. And then, unlike sperm, they turn away in horrified disillusion. Most women would have been suicidal after two or three such rejections, but (though it doesn’t happen anymore, because she is too fat) it did not affect Rosanna. “They’re idiots,” she used to say. “They’re in love with something Mozart or Bellini plucked from the ether, not with me. That’s why they could never sing themselves. They try to make their lives something other than pedestrian, because they have nowhere else to go. When I come back from where I go, I want just to be a laundress. And when I come back from where I go, I have no strength left to be anyone else. Besides, I never loved anyone but Quagliagliarello, until you took him away from me.”
    “I didn’t take him from you, he was jealous of your career.”
    “Can you blame him? He got back from New Zealand and what did he see? Did he see Rosanna Scungili, laundress, who hangs wet sheets and sings like a nightingale?”
    “And eats like a hippo.”
    “I had a high metabolism. No, he sees Rosanna Cadorna, just become world famous, who rides around in long cars and talks to the Pope, who makes in one night by opening herself to others like a whore, more than he has made in his life, who lives in the most expensive suites of the best hotels, and who, in two years, has become old. What was he supposed to do?”
    “Anything but what he did.”
    “He was a soldier, he had a gun.”
    “He should have killed me, not himself. That’s what I would have done.”
    “No. I was gone, and could never come back. It was too late.”
    “Do you think, Rosanna, that had you stayed a laundress and married Quagliagliarello when he got back from New Zealand, you would have been happy?”
    “I don’t know. I loved him. We could have had children.”
    “You would have given everything up for your singing. You wouldn’t have been able to help it. If I hadn’t found you, someone else would have. You could have waited for Quagliagliarello, but remember how quick you were to go to Pflanzenberg?”
    “Yes,” she said. “I know. I hardly hesitated an instant.”
    A FTER H EILBRONN , where we were in a real theater with lights, we went on to Nürnberg, Stuttgart, Munich, and Vienna. Her mastery of the