The Write Thing

There are things that literature can teach us. I was thinking yesterday of those things I have learned from or realized in books. One of them is that when you give oral sex to a woman, her smell stays in your hair. That was d’après Milan Kundera’s The Unbearable Lightness of Being.

That is why, when I am in a similar situation, I never forget to wash my hair before leaving…

I belong to the group of people who believe that the reader gains from the knowledge of the context that shapes the writing process. We live
what we write and write what we live, so severing the verbs to extract the final work that results from this unique combination is like seeing only a piece of the pie.

I have been thinking about a universal human feeling these days — jealousy. Here’s how the English and the French would put it:

Harold Nicolson, Vita Sackville-West’s husband, to Vita in a letter after she had eloped with Violet Trefusis and seemed unreachable:

…but I know how extremely busy you are and how much of your time is taken up by playing tennis and talking to your dirty little friend. At times I get racked with longing for you, and the slightest thing gives me a crise de jalousie, not jealous of your loving other people (you know I am calm about that), but jealous simply of your being with other people dont je ne connais pas la puissance sur ton coeur.

[January 8, 1919]

But perhaps my favorite definition of jealousy is given by Proust in La Prisonnière:

D’ailleurs la jalousie est de ces maladies intermittentes, dont la cause est capricieuse, impérative, toujours identique chez le même malade, parfois entièrement différente chez un autre. Il y a des asthmatiques qui ne calment leur crise qu’en ouvrant les fenêtres, en respirant le grand vent, un air pur sur les hauteurs, d’autres en se réfugiant au centre de la ville, dans une chambre enfumée. Il n’est guère de jaloux dont la jalousie n’admette certaines dérogations. Tel consent à être trompé pourvu qu’on ne le lui dise, tel autre pourvu qu’on le lui cache, en quoi l’un n’est guère moins absurde que l’autre, puisque si le second est plus véritablement trompé en ce qu’on lui dissimule la vérité, le premier réclame en cette vérité, l’aliment, l’extension, le renouvellement de ses souffrances.
Bien plus, ces deux manies inverses de la jalousie vont souvent au-delà des paroles, qu’elles implorent ou refusent les confidences.

Interestingly, Proust defines jealousy as a “maladie”, whereas Nicholson seems surprised to feel something of the kind — or maybe it’s simply a form of English understatement. What Proust points out very well — à la Proust, without being too explicit — is that no matter what the jealous heart decides to do, suffering will not cease.

Oh, La Bohème! The idea of delving into the vast Uroboros of Internet and finding out what to do a weekend in Houston excited me. I had everything I needed for the ride: a car, a GPS system — I admit it; I could not find my way around any single town without it, one of my Penelope Glamour traits — and the fantasy to go for it.

The Houston Grand Opera website appeared first in my Google search options — the Chances bar experience will be left for another entry.

I clicked, I saw, I bought. The last performance of La Bohème was on, and I said to myself I would go. It had been a long time since I had last seen the opera. Probably around 15 years ago, when I met my prospective suitor/opera critic by chance on a bus to the Teatro Argentino de La Plata (oh, Adelaida Negri in Turandot, forgive me Maria, I did not mean to betray you). I digress, again.

Back to Houston’s Bohème. It was on Saturday May 3, 2008. An evening performance, a good seat. The opera house is immense, and I would have expected Mimi to wear a stetson, but she did not. No, sir. I was not seeing La Fanciulla del West, but La Bohème.

When you read the opera brochure they give you as they usher you to your seat, you realize how much money goes into the whole venture. Oil companies fund the opera with generous offerings going beyond the US$ 100k figure. And that’s what you get for their money. Soprano Ana Maria Martínez is a regular, trained at home, and she is one of the most seductive and technically apt voices you can get in today’s opera scene by and large. After Natalie Dessay’s decadence in the past few years (her once pristine voice is no longer so, alas!), to listen to a group of singers with full-bodied voices and amazing stage presence amusing the audience (yes, Americans do laugh at opera performances when the script is funny) was a once-in-a-lifetime return to the roots. At home in Buenos Aires, the Colón will remain closed until further notice and, when it opens, God knows what quality we’ll get. I saw great operas there, now it seems I will be able to see them in Houston, of all places. God bless America, for Opera’s sake…