Jacob's Ladder

24 Carmen

(1985)

After the Knight fiasco, Tengiz went around gloomy and depressed for several days, slept on a pallet on the floor, and ate almost nothing. He didn’t hit the bottle, as one would expect a Russian man to do in such a situation. They had already discussed the matter of drink and concluded that a Russian drinks from grief and joy, a European with meals, and a Georgian from the pleasure of company. On about the fifth day, bright and early, he woke up and started whistling that most famous of all melodies from Bizet’s opera Carmen. He reached up to Nora’s bed and pulled her down onto the floor with him, saying, “Tell me, woman, why are you in the bed while I’m down here on the floor?”

On the floor, in bed, on a park bench, on a train, on the damp ground—many were the places they had found themselves in each other’s arms over the years.

Tengiz leaned back slightly so he could look at her face. “I’ll say one thing. I’ve had many women. Actresses love directors—they gravitate to you like bees to honey. But afterward you always feel shame and raw regret. A kind of deadly boredom, Nora. It was always that way with me. You’re the only one I’ve never felt this deadly boredom with after copulation. Do you know this feeling, or is it unique to men?”

“I’m not sure,” Nora said, musing on what Tengiz had said. It was the best thing he had ever told her. Actually, he never talked about anything related to the horizontal position. This was a very heady confession. There was nothing to add to it.

Nora reached out to grab a pack of cigarettes, lying conveniently within reach.

“I’m really not sure, Tengiz,” she said. “By the time I was fifteen, I was already adept at keeping sexual matters separate from anything one might call love. So as not to confuse what were inherently different things. This freed me from a lot of emotional unpleasantness. Only once did I mix those things up, and I have yet to extricate myself from the result. No, I’ve never felt deadly boredom; ordinary regret, to be sure. My sexual revolution happened back when I was still in high school.”

“Good, let’s get back to love. To this, I mean.” And again he started whistling “Habañera.”

“Oh, that,” Nora said, laughing. “But Mérimée actually didn’t write it at all. That somewhat vulgar and banal story—the libretto of the opera, I mean—was written by Meilhac and Halévi, a couple of French hack writers.”

“You astonish me, Nora! You’re the most literate person I know. You know everything about everything.”

“That’s a strange statement, coming from the friend of a philosopher like Merab Mamardashvili. I didn’t even graduate, Tengiz. The only education I got was in trade school. Well, it was a solidly respectable trade, of course. But you know my background. I even dropped out of the Moscow Art Theatre studio. That’s where my miserable regret has been spent … I simply have a good memory. I remember everything I read. And I read a lot. And my grandmother, of course, was pushing good books under my nose from early childhood.”

“You’re lucky you had an educated grandmother. Mine was a peasant. Illiterate. She only knew how to sign her name.”

Nora held an unlit cigarette in her hand. Tengiz reached for his jeans, lying in a heap on the floor. He took a lighter out of the pocket to light Nora’s cigarette.

“Well?”

“Mérimée was a genius,” she said. “He was the first person in Europe to appreciate Pushkin. Everyone ignores the last chapter of Carmen, believing it to have been tacked on gratuitously. They all rack their brains trying to figure out why he introduces such a scholarly discussion willy-nilly at the end of the book—but it’s very important.”

Here Tengiz interrupted her. “Hold on. Do you know why I suddenly came back to life? I realized how lucky it was that The Knight in the Panther’s Skin fell through. I hate it, that’s what I realized. And Tariel and Avtandil, his minions, too. They can all go to hell, with their adoration of beautiful women and their subservience to authority. If we have to speak of love, let it be about your Carmen. Go on, tell me more about Mérimée! And let me read it, to see why it’s so brilliant.”

Now, this was happiness. True happiness. They took it apart bit by bit, this unwieldy, hybrid admixture—a traveler’s notes, jottings of a fictional scholar, the literary games of an extraordinary writer. Tengiz’s enthusiasm grew, and hers was fired by his, as always happened when they worked together. She read the book out loud, and from time to time he would raise his finger in the air and say, “That’s exactly what I need.” After two days of slow and painstaking reading, Tengiz told Nora, “Now get some paper and start writing.”

“Are you crazy? I do costumes, and I have the temerity to do set design and décor, too. One time I worked on a play with Sergei Barkhin himself; I did the costumes, and he just watched what I was doing—I learned everything from him. But writing a play? Even Tusya would never take that on. I know that for a fact. I’ve been learning from her my whole life. Barkhin doesn’t write plays, either. And his hand is present in everything I have done.”

“Oh, and I was thinking it was my hand that was present in everything you have done.”

“Pinocchio knows best who his Papa Geppetto is. I can’t argue, though—you honed me still further.”

“Hmm, you’re starting to make me suspicious…”

Nora immediately put him straight: “Stop right there!”

But he understood that he had transgressed an unspoken rule. When they were together, occupying the small islands of life they claimed only for themselves, neither past nor future existed. Tengiz had reprimanded Nora harshly for her trip to Tbilisi—he considered their chance meeting to have been deliberately planned. Their open relationship would have been impossible to maintain if they didn’t observe these sacred boundaries. Tengiz had established these boundaries many years before. It was difficult and painful for Nora to accept them, but with time it seemed that the boundaries were symmetrically enforced, and just as necessary to her.

“Write, Nora, write!” Tengiz said. “We’ve already hammered everything out. We just need to write the play.”

“I’m not a writer,” Nora said.

“How do you know? Have you ever tried it? A writer is someone who takes up a pencil and writes.”

Nora took a pencil and Yurik’s cast-off notebook. After two pages of her son’s childlike scrawl, a new text started to emerge, written in Nora’s certain hand—perpendicular, occasionally left-leaning letters. She wrote down snatches of conversation, dialogues, repartees, conjectures.

They agreed on the lines of demarcation. They’d forget about Bizet, forget about Shchedrin. No musical allusions whatsoever. They’d sound the death knell for the entire surface layer of the narrative, anchored firmly in the history of opera.

“Well, first off, I’d put Mérimée on the stage, making him a character in the play. The author is of course present—the author himself, or the Englishman, or the traveler, but in any case a scholar, an observer. It creates so many possibilities.”

“It’s crucial to decide on the point of departure, as well as the ending.”

“The line of tension runs between Mérimée and Carmen, you understand? Not between Carmen and José.”

They interrupted each other, and got rid of the ballast, and put on the table everything that was indispensable.

“Right, but it’s Carmen who holds sway over the other characters. She makes the Cigarette Girls and the men, and all the others, dance to her tune.”

“Exactly! Mérimée, the author and god of this story, holds the thread of life and death in his hands.”

“No, Carmen is the one who’s in control of everything!”

“But Carmen vanquishes Mérimée’s logic…”

“I don’t know. She’s the one José kills, out in the bushes, or by the side of the road.”

“No, she kills him!”

“I would want there to be objects. Objects that play a role in themselves.”

“You don’t have to look too far to find them; they’re right there for the taking. Gold watches, playing cards—no, cards are rubbish, a garrote is better.”

“Yes, what does it look like, this strangulation wire? We’ll have to look it up. It can’t be just some plain old wire. It must have handles of some sort, right? Or an entire mechanism?”

“I so love the cabbage she doesn’t want to plant! And if there are flowers and little nosegays, we have to think of how to make those work, too.”

“Okay, the cabbage might come in handy. But I somehow don’t want to nod in that direction. I wouldn’t put a flower in her teeth, but a big gold coin.”

“No, it should be a cigar.”

“Hey, she could have gold teeth! Nowadays all Gypsies are supposed to have gold teeth; but back then?”

“No actress is going to agree to come out onstage with gold teeth.”

“What about Fellini? Remember the scene in Fellini when the Gypsy laughs, reading some lady’s palm?”

“Oh, fortune-telling! Yes, of course. A fortune-teller! Obscure, portentous words. An old woman tells Carmen’s fortune: Beware of the soldier. ‘To fear a soldier—in our trade?… What nonsense!’ ‘The soldier will kill you! Beware of the soldier.’ And Carmen knows beforehand that he will kill her. She makes him kill her! To fulfill the designs of fate.”

“Dangerous, very dangerous. We’re straying into the domain of the opera again. And we have to strip away that layer of associations. So there is no trace of that perfumed surface.”

“We could introduce Death as a character, too. We should! An affinity between Carmen and Death. The other side of her freedom is—Death.”

“I don’t get it.”

“You will, though.”

“Our Carmencita isn’t really interested in love at all. She doesn’t even want to hear about it. For her, love is just the manifestation of her will—her willfulness, as it were. And an instrument.”

“And what about him? Who is he?”

“José? He’s nobody. A nobleman who has a fiancée in the village. He became a robber, a brigand, out of stupidity. He’s actually a stupid fellow. Well, not stupid—just a simpleton. There could even be a scene with his fiancée. A conversation between them about ‘our beloved village.’ A tête-à-tête between idiots. He’s a victim, of course, but ultimately his behavior is not too shabby. He just ended up in someone else’s story. When all is said and done, his fate is to plant cabbages; and Carmen glanced his way quite by chance.”

“He would be difficult to love. Except for his ideals—a pure, clean life, white curtains that open onto a white garden—and, in fact, he dreams in white. But he ends up in a life of black-and-red.”

“We’ll have to think about the toreador. Although I’m more interested in the bull, to be honest. The story here would be that whoever she looks at follows her obediently—resisting at first, of course, but ultimately giving in. And in this respect, all the men are the same: José, Matteo, the toreador—even the bull. Not to mention the Englishman. Like they’ve drunk a love potion.”

While Nora was writing the play, trying to cleave to Mérimée and avoid falling into the gravitational field of the opera, Tengiz was negotiating the staging of Carmen in a theater nestled in one of Moscow’s old clubs, the beating heart of the city. Tengiz didn’t work very often in Moscow, but people knew him and held him in high esteem. Moreover, their names were now often yoked together.

Carmen was written over the course of two weeks. Tengiz was responsible for much of how it came to life and cohered internally, but the finale was Nora’s handiwork: the author—Mérimée, that is—brings a cigar into the cell of the hero, José, and José is led off to be garroted with a cigar between his teeth. A long, slow procession follows behind him … The executioner, wrapped in a cloak and wearing the mask of Death, carries out the execution by strangling. The mask falls away. The executioner is Carmen.

On the cover of the notebook, Nora wrote in large, plain script: “Mérimée. Carmen, José, and Death,” and prepared to place the notebook in the desk drawer “until further notice.” At that moment, Tengiz announced that he had already reached an agreement with the theater. The play was included in the repertoire for the following year.