for leather through the skies, recalling the final part of Faust ; everything gave the impression that the hurricane of the skies was erupting like a rumbling earthquake, up from the entrails of the city, that the thunder was the fault of the earth not the sky …
It was the silence broken by the rain of bombs that inflamed Atlan-Ferrara, who unconsciously attributed his rage not to what was happening outside, or to its relation to what was happening inside, but to the rupture of his exquisite musical equilibrium—imposing balance on chaos—by that high and profound, isolated and proud voice “black” as velvet and “red” as fire affirming itself by rising above the women’s chorus, solitary as the presumed protagonist of a work that wasn’t hers, not because it belonged solely to Berlioz or to the director, the orchestra, the soloists, or the chorus, but because it belonged to everyone, and yet the woman’s voice, sweetly obstructive, proclaimed, “This music is mine.”
“This isn’t Puccini, and you’re not Tosca, Mam’selle Whatever-Your-Name-Is!” the maestro shouted. “Who do you think you are? Am I some cretin who can’t express himself clearly? Or are you some mental case who can’t understand me? Tonnerre de Dieu!”
The concert hall was his territory, he knew, and the success of the performance depended on the tension between the director’s energy and will and the obedience and discipline of the ensemble under his command. The woman with the electric hair and velvet voice was challenging his authority. The woman was enamored of her own voice, she caressed it, took pleasure in it, and she was conducting it herself: the woman was doing with her voice what the conductor did with the ensemble—dominating it. She defied the conductor. She was saying to him, with her insufferable arrogance, Once you’re out of this building, who are you? Who are you when you step down from the podium? And deep inside he was silently asking her, How dare you, from your place in the chorus, display your solitary voice and your beautiful face like that? Why do you show such lack of respect? Who are you?
Maestro Atlan-Ferrara closed his eyes. He was overcome by an uncontrollable desire, a natural, even savage impulse to rebuff and scorn this woman who was interrupting the perfect fusion of music and ritual so essential to Berlioz’s dramatic legend. But at the same time he was fascinated by the voice he heard. He closed his eyes, believing that he was being seduced to enter the marvelous trance spun by the music, while in truth he wanted to isolate the voice of this rebellious, unthinking woman—though he didn’t know that yet. Nor did he know if, feeling these things, what he wanted was to make the woman’s voice his, to appropriate it.
“It is forbidden to interrupt, mademoiselle!” he shouted, because
he had the right to shout whenever he wanted, and to see if his thunderous voice, his voice alone, would drown out the sound of the bombing outside. “You are whistling in a church at the moment of the sacrament!”
“I thought I was contributing to the work,” she said in her ordinary voice, and he thought the way she spoke was even more beautiful than the way she sang. “As they say, variety never stands in the way of unity.”
“In your case, it does,” the maestro stormed.
“That’s your problem,” she replied.
Atlan-Ferrara checked his impulse to ask her to leave. That would be a sign of weakness, not authority. It would look like vulgar revenge, a childish tantrum, or something worse …
“Ah, love scorned …” Gabriel Atlan-Ferrara smiled and shrugged his shoulders, dropping his arms, resigned, in the midst of the laughter and applause of the orchestra, soloists, and chorus. “Can’t be helped,” he sighed.
In his dressing room, naked to the waist, toweling sweat from his neck, face, chest, and underarms, Gabriel looked at himself in the mirror and succumbed to the vanity of