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"Of course I don't mean that!" I answered.
What I should have told her, but I didn't dare, was that I was bisexual. It wasn't my writing that kept me from being politically involved; it was that, in 1963, my dual sexuality was all the politics I could handle. Believe me: When you're twenty-one, there's a lot of politics involved in being sexually mutable.
That said, on this November Friday, I would soon regret I'd ever given Esmeralda the idea that I thought she was hedging her bets about becoming a soprano--or leaving the door open to failing as an opera singer--because she was such a political person.
FOR THE FIRST SEATING at Zufall, there were more Americans among the clientele than either Karl or I had expected. There were no other foreign tourists--no English-speaking ones, anyway--but there were several American couples past retirement age, and a table of ten obstetricians and gynecologists (all of them Americans) who told me they were in Vienna for an OB-GYN conference.
I got a generous tip from the doctors, because I told them they'd picked a good opera for obstetricians and gynecologists. I explained that part in Macbeth (act 3) when the witches conjure up a bloody child--the child famously tells Macbeth that "none of woman born" can harm him. (Of course, Macbeth is screwed. Macduff, who kills Macbeth, announces that he had a caesarean birth.)
"It's possibly the only opera with a c-section theme," I told the OB-GYN table of ten.
Karl was telling everyone that my girlfriend was the soprano singing the Lady Macbeth part tonight, so I was pretty popular with the early-seating crowd, and Karl made good on his promise to let me leave the restaurant in plenty of time for the start of act 1. But something was wrong.
I had the weird impression that the audience wouldn't settle down--especially the uncouth Americans. One couple seemed on the verge of a divorce; she was sobbing, and nothing her husband had to say could soothe her. I'm guessing that many of you know which Friday night this was--it was November 22, 1963. It was 12:30 P.M., Central Standard Time, when President Kennedy was shot in Dallas. I was seven hours ahead of Texas time in Vienna, and Macbeth--to my surprise--didn't start on time. Esmeralda had told me that the Staatsoper always started on time, but not this night.
I couldn't have known, but things were as unsettled backstage as they appeared to me in the audience. The American couple I'd identified as headed for a divorce had already left; both of them were inconsolable. Now there were other Americans who seemed in distress. I suddenly noticed the empty seats. Poor Esmeralda! It was her debut, but it wasn't a full house. (It would have been 1 P.M. in Dallas when JFK died--8 P.M. in Vienna.)
When the curtain simply would not open on that barren heath in Scotland, I began to worry about Esmeralda. Was she suffering from stage fright? Had she lost her voice? Had Gerda Muhle changed her mind about taking a night off? (The program had an insert page, announcing that Esmeralda Soler was Lady Macbeth on Friday, November 22, 1963. I'd already decided that I would have this page framed; I was going to give it to Esmeralda for Christmas that year.) More irritating Americans were talking in the audience--more were leaving, too, some in tears. I decided that Americans were culturally deprived, socially inept imbeciles, or they were all philistines!
Finally the curtain went up, and there were the witches. When Macbeth and Banquo appeared--the latter, I knew, would soon be a ghost--I thought that this Macbeth was far too old and fat to be Esmeralda's husband (even in an opera).
You can imagine my surprise, in the
very next scene in act 1, when it was not my Esmeralda singing "Vieni, t'affretta!" Nor was it Esmeralda calling on the ministers of hell to assist her ("Or tutti sorgete"). There onstage was Gerda Muhle and her polyp. I could only imagine how shocked the English-speaking clientele at our early seating at Zufall must have been--those ten obstetricians and gynecologists included. They must have been thinking: How is it possible that this matronly-looking load of a soprano is the girlfriend of our young, good-looking waiter?
When Lady Macbeth smeared the sleeping guards with the bloody dagger, I imagined that Esmeralda had been murdered backstage--or that something no less dire had happened to her.
It seemed that half the audience was crying by the end of act 2. Was it the news of Banquo's assassination that moved them to tears, or was it Banquo's ghost at the dinner table? About the time Macbeth saw Banquo's ghost that second time, near the end of act 2, I might have been the only person at the Vienna State Opera who didn't know that President Kennedy had been assassinated. It wasn't until the intermission that I would learn what had happened.
After the intermission, I stayed to see the witches again--and that terrifying bloody child who tells Macbeth that "none of woman born" can harm him. I stayed until the middle of act 4, because I wanted to see the sleepwalking scene--Gerda Muhle, and her polyp, singing "Una macchia" (about the blood that still taints Lady Macbeth's hands). Maybe I'd imagined that Esmeralda would emerge from backstage and join me and the other students faithfully standing at the rear of the Staatsoper, but--by act 4--there were so many vacated seats that most of my fellow students had found places to sit down.
I did not know that there was a soundless TV set backstage, and that Esmeralda was glued to it; she would tell me later that you didn't need the sound to understand what had happened to JFK.
I did not wait till the end of act 4, the final act. I didn't need to see "Birnam Wood remove to Dunsinane," as Shakespeare puts it, or hear Macduff tell Macbeth about the caesarean birth. I ran along the crowded Karntnerstrasse to Weihburggasse, passing people with tears streaming down their faces--most of them not Americans.
In the kitchen at Zufall, the crew and the waitstaff were all watching television; we had a small black-and-white TV set. I saw the same soundless accounts of the shooting in Dallas that Esmeralda must have seen.
"You're early, not late," Karl observed. "Did your girlfriend blow it?"
"It wasn't her--it was Gerda Muhle," I told him.
"Blode Kuh!" Karl cried. "Stupid cow!" (The Viennese operagoers who were fed up with Gerda Muhle had called her a stupid cow long before Esmeralda started calling her the Polyp.)
"Esmeralda must have been too upset to perform--she must have lost it backstage," I said to Karl. "She was a Kennedy fan."
"So she did blow it," Karl said. "I don't envy you living with the outcome."
There was already a scattering of English-speaking customers, Karl warned me--not operagoers, evidently.
"More obstetricians and gynecologists," Karl observed disdainfully. (He thought there were too many babies in the world. "Overpopulation is the number-one problem," Karl kept saying.) "And there's a table of queers," Karl told me. "They just got here, but they're already drunk. Definitely fruits. Isn't that what you call them?"
"That's one of the things we call them," I told our one-eyed headwaiter.
It wasn't hard to spot the OB-GYN table; there were twelve of them--eight men, four women, all doctors. Since President Kennedy had just been killed, I didn't think it would be a good idea for me to break the ice by telling them that they'd all missed the c-section scene in Macbeth.
As for the table of queers--or "fruits," as Karl had called them--there were four men, all drunk. One of them was the well-known American poet who was teaching at the Institute, Lawrence Upton.
"I didn't know you worked here, young fiction writer," Larry said. "It's Bill, isn't it?"
