Two weeks before her birthday he bought two tickets for Rigoletto. This year he did the right thing. She was turning 36 on May 30th — her hair still fully black, her body limber, and her figure slim. The habitual expression masking her face was one of remote disappointment.
She would turn her gaze slightly beyond the horizon, exhale smoke from a freshly lit cigarette and look over to where her perfect life resided – a country entirely unknown to us. We could only look at her looking at it.
While the envelope with the opera tickets lay in the drawer of the little phone table in the corner, things were different.
She laughed as I came out of the bathroom with my two braids clipped on the top of my head, framing my ears in two exaggerated circles. She petted the dog on the chest shaking the nametag into a cheerful jingle leaving the scent of hand lotion on his fur. When she lit a cigarette she looked straight ahead while shuffling the smoke with her left hand to prevent it from getting into our eyes.
She even ran her hand slowly through my dad’s overgrown hair and said softly, “I can cut it before the opera next week.” My father, also in an uncharacteristic manner, grabbed her hand, weaved his fingers through hers and looked into her eyes for a long moment, as if taking a long exposed photo in a dimmed room.
I sang a line from Rigolleto rolling my Rs like an Italian, tensing my throat to reach the highest pitch, or more accurately, the highest scream, somehow knowing she wouldn’t get upset.
By now, I knew the opera by heart having listened to it play almost every Saturday morning that year. She played it even when they fought.
When Rigoletto would tell his daughter, Gilda, how much he loved her and wanted to protect her from the frivolous duke, my tears would start to well up. I was devastated knowing what they did not know. Time and again, I would try to whisper to Gilda her tragic destiny hoping she would listen to her father.
We had already gone through La Boheme and Carmen — I learned that ends don’t change. Yet hope was emanating from the corner of the small table secured by two tickets in its drawer. Maybe if I really tried things could turn out differently.
The collection of operas in a big book was another well of anticipation and excitement. The opera book had a red cover with gold letters. First came an envelope for the records, then a transcript of the entire story in the original language, then a few pages of photographs of the singers, the orchestra, and the conductors. For the composers, who where mostly born before the camera was invented, there were paintings or sculptures. Sometimes, I would get scared thinking, “what will happen when we run out of operas?” But then I took a quick glance at the drawer of the small table and the book of operas again became heavy with promises.
That Saturday he put the record on and laid the opera book between them on their unmade bed; she, with her beige soft nightgown and a cup of coffee he made for her; and he, with his blue shorts, bare tanned chest divided by a line of black hair.
When Gilda declared her uncompromised love for the duke, who even death would not extinguish – she rose to the highest octaves as if daring to touch the edge of death with her voice — my mom would turn to the side and whimper into the pillow.
My father translated the Italian dialogue to Hebrew with a whisper so as not to disturb Gilda whose broken heart made my mom’s lips quiver. Gilda’s voice rose up and down in a twin ship dance with my mom’s cigarette smoke.
I listened to my dad intently. He magically turned sounds into meaning. His voice, quiet and contained, filled the silence in between arias and told the story succinctly. “In this last act,” he said softly, “Rigolleto is talking directly to Gilda outside the tavern. He assures her that the Duke’s idea of love has nothing to do with fidelity.” In the final tragic scene my dad’s soft voice cracked when he said, “Rigoletto is watching the dying Gilda who, for the love of the Duke, had let herself be murdered in his place.”
Mixed with the feeling of claustrophobic doom was a sheer pride and love for my dad who could speak five different languages. He and I are different than Rigoletto and Gilda, I assured myself; I would never do to him what Gilda did to her dad.
After she cut his hair he looked younger and more modern with pronounced sideburns. That night, he wore his black suit and his wedding shoes, which tapped the floor with every step thanks to a crescent metal piece on the bottom. She had on her black strapless long dress, a fake pearl necklace and earrings he gave her years before and new high heel shoes she had just bought for herself.
My brothers promised for the third time to be good to me and never to open the door to strangers, while she put on her red shawl and picked up her black purse.
I hurried and brought her embroidered handkerchief with the pink flowers, knowing that when Gilda killed herself to save the duke my mom’s tears, big and warm, would stream out quietly. She smiled and buried it in her purse.
I thought to myself, maybe when you see them alive, the end can be changed if you actually warn them — whisper their destiny with mighty intention so it gets into their heads. This thought seemed so real, so promising, that I said: “Tell her not to do it…”
She kissed her palm and blew into it as if spreading seeds of plants around. My father bent and kissed my forehead. He then threaded his elbow through hers, and locked the door behind them. Only a cloud of fresh smells was left with us — a mixture of shampoo, cologne and shaving cream.
I ran to the little table in the corner to look for the tickets. The empty drawer seemed ominous and hollow. In seconds, it turned from being a source of light to a black hole. The absence, the sudden awareness of what was gone forever, marked for the first time a threshold. Only Rigoletto’s voice when he realized Gilda’s death touched the verge of that unknown.
A few years later, on my dad’s grave I pondered the word “committed suicide” repeatedly, which in Hebrew comes from the root to lose. He lost himself — lost — as he broke through that threshold to the other side. I on one side, he on the other and Rigoleto’s voice a river in between. A river where the active and the passive merge, the big and the small conflate, and the now — is stagnant and still.
In the morning they looked smaller, haggard and wrinkled, drained of hope. The spark was gone with the tickets, the hope spent, even the opera book on the shelf seemed to have shrunken.
The difference between the people who left for the opera and the people who were sitting in the kitchen was so baffling yet so inevitable like the end of all operas.
As my mother reached for the ceramic ashtray from the kitchen counter I heard myself asking her without real curiosity “Did she kill herself last night?” She looked ever so slightly above my head and blew out a white wave, which collapsed into it while spreading out a few hopeless tentacles.
My father sipped his coffee silently — the spoon still in — staring at the white corner above the little phone table.
“Don’t do it, …” I whispered to him.