Angelica Lost and Found

Chapter 27. Cigarettes and Heart Trouble

I switched on KDFC a little before eleven just to be on the safe side. ‘Carmencita,’ Smith was saying, ‘which has put me in the mood for Georges Bizet’s masterpiece. Carmen is one of those classics every mezzo has to face. Year after year they step up to the plate to see if they can knock it out of the park. Most of them get a base hit but not too many put a home run up on the scoreboard. You’re about to hear one who who belts it like the old Bambino, Babe Ruth himself. Elina Garanca truly does the biz for Bizet: Carmen sings the seguidilla seated in a chair with her hands tied behind her back. She’s knifed another girl at the cigarette factory where they both work and now, under arrest, she is alone with Don José, the dragoon corporal guarding her while she waits to go to prison. Carmen methodically sets out to seduce him, he unties her hands and she’s off like a shot to join her smuggler pals at Lillas Pastia’s tavern.

‘Garanca’s mezzo can do anything and her Carmen could have seduced the whole platoon, let alone a mama’s boy like Don José.’

‘ “Près des remparts de Seville,” ’ she sings,

‘ “Chez mon ami Lillas Pastia.

Nous dansons la seguidille

Et boirons du Manzanilla.

Tra la la la la la!” ’

Her voice transported me to that time, illo tempore, when my father and I danced our seguidilla in the foreign country that is the past. ‘ “Va, pensiero!” ’ I sang, and listened for the Babylon-river Greenbergs to join me. But Hoyt Smith was gone and I was hearing the news, I had missed my message to whoever was listening.