Mawrdew Czgowchwz (14 page)

The taunting sailor's chanty descended from the rigging.

The captive Irish princess-witch exploded, howling. WER WAGT MICH ZU HÖHNEN?!!!!

Mawrdew Czgowchwz had begun.

Old Mary Cedrioli answered the front door. Admitting a giggling hag who clung (with filthy
strega
fingers) to a blazing lock of Mawrdew Czgowchwz's hair, the devil-driven
venditrice
of the Neriac high command felt something (she imagined) like lust rumbling in her high colonic regions. Wickedness furled a murky density through every dingy room of Casa Cedrioli. Mary's mother, nearly ninety and weary of this world, woke alone in a back bedroom in pitiful distress—whining, however, far too weakly to be attended to (even supposing the daughter just then willing to take time away from the casting of malignant spells to minister to the familiar dying).

The whole while this nasty work went on offstage, onstage frantic scenes of recognition, fated love, avowal, betrayal, whirling bliss, chromatic anguish, and doomed waiting took up the evening and held it apart.

Readers at the score desks, poised hovering over bar lines sweeping relentlessly through their brains, scored scores of bars and phrases in their scores for special recall, while all over the house tape recorders hidden under seats drank in the splendor for all time.

At “
Luft! Luft! Mir erstickt das Herz!
” Jameson O'Maurigan ripped open the tie his sister had done up, letting the cellulose collar fall open; visions swam before his eyes.

At “
Mir erkoren, mir verloren
,” Leda Freitag, in the executive guest box, thought now perhaps she must release her claim.

When Achille Plonque sang “
Keinem gönnt' ich diese Gunst
” in just
that
way, Laverne Zuckerman veered close to falling out of character. “Guerdon, guerdon,” Jameson murmured desolately, silently, alone.

At “
er sah mir in die Augen
,” Mawrdew Czgowchwz turned her fixed gaze for a split second downstage. Many in the audience turned sharply away as from the accusing sun.

At “
Nun dien' ich dem Vasallen
,” the threshold of the Curse, the Countess Madge nearly spoke: “Mawrdew, it's too
dangerous
!” The Curse went forward, blazing desire's fated trail. Vengeance and death were summoned. Then rip tides of remorse and pain—“
Wie könnt' ich die Qual bestehen?
”—led on the exposition of intertwining, ophidian desires, threats, surrenders, and treasons: “
Tristan, gewinn' ich Sühne?
” The first act drew to an eddying close. The potion was drunk; the principals faced each other. Mawrdew Czgowchwz receded into mystic, half-tone wonder. Achille Plonque exulted, mezza voce. “Tristan!” “Isolde!” The audience went under.

Downtown, Old Mary Cedrioli's mother died alone.

The second act built, spun out of Czgowchwz's firm declaration, “
Frau Minne will, es werde Nacht
.” The Countess Madge was reminded again and again of one of her own distant triumphs at the Théâtre Guichet. (The
Phèdre—
“
C'est Vénus toute entière
...”) On the theme of Let-Us-Forget-That-We-Live, the lovers of guilty time succumbed to Destiny. Laverne Zuckerman sang the Watch more beautifully than she had ever supposed she might (coming into her own that night as New York's own threshold star). The Liebesnacht rose, swelled, and burst in empty space. Creplaczx forged ensemble sounds the colors and the weights of which so fortified the ringing voices as to...

During King Marke's lamentation, Jameson O'Maurigan went over to Bill's Bar to quench his special fearful thirst. He met a Reuters correspondent he knew there and lost his way (back to the Czgowchwz event). The two drinking companions left Bill's drunk, moments before the second-act intermission at the opera house, so that when Lavinia and Jonathan came in looking for Jameson, the barman could only give them another of the poet's recurrent fugue messages—worrying, hide-and-seek directions invariably hinting at doom in cryptic, allusive complaint.

During this same interval, there was complaint elsewhere —in huddled groups indoors and out, in short but agitated cloakroom queues, and from the backs of certain Mercedes-Benz limousines driving away from the scene. Many of the most guttural, entrenched Wagnerites were seeing fit to leave the performance in huffs, denouncing everything. As Paranoy would recall in the article “Czgowchwz at Stake”: “She gave them dramatic soprano vocalism
in extremis
: passion, anguish, obsession, terror. They, the recusant old guard, bleated back nursery demands. They wanted Isolde
their
way—mellifluous,
mit Schlag
.” (It must be recorded that Leda Freitag seemed never to stop applauding. One might have thought
that
enough.)

Backstage, Mawrdew Czgowchwz went to Laverne Zuckerman's dressing room to let her know just how well she had managed the Watch. The young mezzo was herself nearly beside herself with rapt admiration for the way the Liebesnacht had sounded in her ears upstage. There was still something dreamlike to Laverne Zuckerman about the past months she had spent being, as Mawrdew Czgowchwz kept insisting, “a sister, a real sidekick.” At the same time, the nervous atmosphere—the supercharged, turbulent quality of this night's performance—frightened her. She remembered the way certain favorite recurring dreams can suddenly careen offtrack some nights in troubled sleep, approaching unfamiliar fantasies in regions darker than the darkest off-stage wings. Mawrdew Czgowchwz was telling her what she felt coming back from the audience that night. “A lot of them hate what we're doing; they'll just have to learn.” The two singers then slipped into the darkened wings together, taking the positions they would hold throughout Act III, until their entrance. Laverne Zuckerman imagined what that would occasion...

Trixie Gilhooley shouted up at the Countess Madge from her seat in Row G of the Orchestra: “Where the hell's everybody going? She's a STAR!” The Countess looked straight ahead.

In every tier, insulting reactions mouthed by desiccated sensibilities clashed with ardent commitment in scattered sorties. The main theater of action was the front lobby leading out onto Broadway. There the Juilliard and Riverdale contingents, fired with loyalty and visionary zeal, had set up a gamut of the best and fiercest Czgowchwz Jacobins in town, whose drill-formation harangues drove the Old Guard into the outer darkness. A few outraged haughty flinthearts dared round on the militants, threatening to summon the police. “Which ones, you beasts, the S.S.?” they taunted back.

Ralph checked out the whole rough scene. He saw Paranoy turn a shade he reckoned close to Metrocolor scarlet trying desperately (it seemed) to get up enough spit to let one fierce old Hunnish dowager have it right between the eyes, while other “gem-leashed reptiles” slithered down the grand staircase mumbling abuses impotently in the teeth of the Paranoy scorn. He heard Tangent Percase snap, “Why, you dim bitch!” at some epicene confection in the Grand Tier foyer. In the Balcony alcove, Ralph himself turned to one dissenting frump ranting on to many others at the refreshment stand. “Get out of this opera house!” he demanded. As it happened, they all did.

Shock and no slight terror shot through the box adjacent to the one Grace Jackson-Haight and her party had taken that evening. Left alone at the intermissions, Sister Rose Rotten Rodney Bergamot, tippling from a pint flask in the privacy of the rear salon behind the box's drapes, had overheard a particularly mucky sample of the Old Guard anti-Czgowchwz cant rattling on sforzato next door and, as a result of the prickings of righteous ire (and a particularly prickly starched wimple), forgot herself. Grace and her cortege returned to find a tacky incident developing—one that threatened to spread dangerously along the string of boxes. Complaints were already on their way to the front-of-the-house manager (that hated buffoon the standees had dubbed “Scarpia”) concerning what seemed to be an improbable version of that cheap old joke: the foul-mouthed drunken nun running amok. Grace was just able in the event to drag Sister Rose Mouth out of the action and down the side stairs to the packed front area of the house-right Orchestra standing room (where Rotten Rodney, less wimple, managed to disappear in among the receptive mob), and to return herself barely in time to bat innocent eyes and coo, “I beg your pardon; in
here
?” to the bleary lackeys representing the complaint, before the houselights went down for the final act.

Achille Plonque lay finishing his dictation. It had become his habit in the months since he had first sung leading tenor roles in four languages opposite Mawrdew Czgowchwz to record his continual amazements into a small portable Dictaphone. The feverish heldentenor had thrown himself down for a few hasty minutes on the dressing-room couch, in costume for Act III, to deliver his recollection of the Liebesnacht. In Ralph's English version: “These are again the immediate dazzled reactions of one who by the most fortunate exigency in the working out of intention into realized occurrence [Ralph was wrestling here with a quantity of German chain words, since it was Plonque's habit to record his thoughts in the language of the performance involved] has been partner and as it were catalyst perhaps to the creation of dramatic-musical effects nearly as disturbing as they are perfect. We are told somewhere that such is always the necessary way of revelation, is that not so? [
Nicht wahr?
] Mawrdew Czgowchwz's Isolde...”

Tangent Percase had returned to his perch in the Paranoy box to scribble a few heartfelt, deathless appreciations of his own onto vellum (in a tastefully calf-bound pocket daybook), in a microscopic hand (in authentic mollusc-mauve ink). He commenced puzzling out some half thoughts (“To teach is merely to learn”) on what must now become the matter of his next public inquiry at the New School: “The Function of Ecstasy.”

Never once that night, from the time the curtain rose on the first act until the middle of the Liebestod, did Pèlerin Deslieux either rise from his seat in the center of the front row of the Dress Circle or allow anyone to disturb him by passing either way in front of him as he sat there. A complete and utter repose possessed him (sitting there) so that he became, in the midst of so much eddying conflict,
the
keystone of endurance.

Neither did the Countess Magdalen O'Meaghre Gautier either leave her box or answer any questions. Nor did either of these so much as look back or forth to one another at the intermissions. There was no good reason to, and all good reason not to: each had a premonition...

The third act began in a hush. The shepherd's plaintive horn sounded high up on the slanting geometric precipice of Tristan's castle's watchtower, set at a dizzy angle against a restless cycloramic sea-and-sky projection representing the horizon off the coast of Brittany. The music keened on, a stark stretch. Dozens of subtly graduated light cues created weird, unsettling effects. In the wings, immobile behind a jagged, vaulted flat, Mawrdew Czgowchwz, still searching for that key to the Liebestod, slipped into meditation, into reverie, into the sea-sky, anxiety-ridden projection, into the horn's melisma...

Isolde on the high seas seeking Tristan. Mawrdew Czgowchwz away back, as if submerged, in a memory. High on the Irish Sea that last summer, in the company of the Countess Madge, Dame Sybil, G-G, Achille Plonque, Creplaczx, and Paranoy, sailing with the light crew of the
Deirdre
: a waspish Wexford captain, and two young boatswains, each of whom the diva recalled as a perfect example of the astonishing open beauty the Irish possess, undifferentiated by gender—the men and the women matching feature to feature, seemingly all compact of variant qualities in the single angelic order of androgyny.

They had sailed a calm, lake-like sea, bound south-south-east for Cornwall. The air that day had the taste of mint. They stood together at the prow, drinking whiskey and talking dreaming. Suddenly, with no warning, “free, gratis, and fer nuthin',” a squall came up to knock them about on the deck, drenching them, frightening Creplaczx, delighting the Countess Madge. And then it was past and gone, just in fair time for them to see the first outline of Tintagel appear out of the mists on Cornwall's Atlantic coast.

Tintagel's ruins, splendid, murky, loomed above the party aboard the
Deirdre
. Mawrdew Czgowchwz declared she saw spectral figures weaving in the shadows, heard them whispering in the echo chambers deep in the huge phantom cave where they beached at high tide. Centuries of bygone life drifted together, present now in the ravaged towers, on the strand, up on the jutting rocks, and in the fields that had been the royal apartments. A fiercely attractive flash of melancholy had seized the diva on the voyage from Wexford. She felt it had to do with something other than the beauty of the Irish boys. At Tintagel some ayenbite gripped and stung.

Achille Plonque had launched into Tristan's narration. “
Ich war, wo ich von je gewesen, wohin auf je ich geh': im weiten Reich der Weltennacht
.”

Mawrdew Czgowchwz stood motionless, expressionless, and unhearing. She looked down from Tintagel's abandoned cliffs. Yseult, the Irish princess, had sailed these waters as a captive. “What can it be,” Czgowchwz had pondered, vexed, “that draws me so to this creature?” On the promontory, floating back through time, she had stood in the open courtyard, her loosed hair flowing attractively: heraldic banners. She watched them all living there about her, singing, dancing, at dalliance in high-vaulted chambers, covered in the skins of animals. She had joined them as a captive, in her mind—where indeed it was all just happening...