DONNA ANNA (1986)

BY MASAHIKO SHIMADA

Tr. Kenneth L. Richard

My dear black crow has flown to parts unknown. Where are you now? Whose thing are you? I hate the empty life I lead with your shadow. My memory blots you out; I can not make out what you look like. I grow more and more dysfunctional without you. Time eddies like sludge; I am immobile.

That beautiful nape of your neck. Where would I find another? Your navel like a screw hole? Your little blind academic arguments? Those cunning looks you used to give me? That face of yours like a cadaver when you slept? That cocky strut you had when we took walks together. How I’d like to walk with you again. Your sighs and the way you used to cluck your tongue at the least sign of boredom. I’d like to hear that again. I’m finished spending my nights with nothing to hug but my pillow. Come back soon, my Happy Prince!

My sweet boy, my dear black crow, my Christ, my pain, my past, a part of my body that’s been torn away....

Anna met the Happy Prince two winters ago, though their initial encounter had nothing in common with Love Story.

She was spending one of her rasre days off in the nearby park, with the pigeons. It was late in the afternoon; the park was almost empty, except for a bag lady, a middle-aged jogger, and a couple of old men chatting on a bench. No young people, no roller bladers, no frisbies. Time swirled slowly to a halt.

For more than thirty minutes, Anna, wrapped in her fur coat, contentedly watched the bobbing pistons of the pigeon’s necks as she hummed to herself. A sallow-faced young man, swathed in black from his muffler to his shoes, approached her as though he already had intimate knowledge of her. Anna took one look at this black crow and stopped her humming. Then, feigning indifference, she studied the pigeons intently as if she were a biologist.

“A stroke of luck. I mean hearing a famous soprano humming to herself. I myself sat in this very spot yesterday.”

It was unclear whether he had spoken to Anna or was just muttering to himself, but Anna simple smiled: the boy seemed harmless.

“Certainly looks like a warm coat. Is it fox? Bewitchingly foxy? You know about clever foxes. How does a fox win in a tussle with a wolf? Guess. Fighting is no way to win, so it shaves its fur off and slathers itself with oil. Sliding into the wolf, the fox bites him at will.”

“You’re very up on foxes.”

Anna took another look at the black crow, this time from a different perspective. An extraordinary come-on, she thought.

“May I sit down next to you?”

“Why not? I don’t own the bench.”

“I’ve never sat next to a famous soprano before. I’m honored.”

“I see you know who I am.”

The boy scratched his head like a spastic marionnette. He was not scratching out of embarrassment; he was embarrassed at scratching.

“I’m in love with your voice, Anna.”

“You’re so young.”

“I was five, twenty years ago. I’ve been a fan of yours, Anna, for the past two years. I first heard you on the radio, the time you took first place in that competition. Ever since then.”

It crossed Anna’s mind that it might be nice for her to take advantage of his admiration, but her experience told her to keep her distance from a fan. Fans were always ‘they.’ Never be too familiar. Best way to avoid a fight is to remain a stranger.

“No one ever speaks to me in public. You must have quite a taste for relative unknowns to know my voice and name. Did you perhaps switch to opera singers because there’re too many people swarming around the pop idols?”

The boy shook his head in stubborn refusal. Anna, realizing she might have given him the impression that opera singers had a warped sense of superiority, hurried to add: “it’s just a joke.”

“When is your next concert?”

“Next Spring. I’m singing Shostakovich. Symphony Number 14 ‘Lyrics for the Death.’ Do you know it?”

“Never heard it sung live, should I say. To be honest, I’ve racked by brain about how I could approach you, Anna. I’ve been coming here regularly hoping to see you. I looked up your address. Today is a very lucky day. I should have brought you a bouquet. On the other hand, I had no idea I would hear you humming such a ridiculous song. That really got me.”

“Now you sound like an Italian! Is that the latest come-on line?”

“Sorry about that. I didn’t mean to be so fresh, but you’re always with me on your tapes and records.”

“You mean you have this relationship with with my voice even though you don’t even know me.”

“Yes. Anna, it’s like you have two selves. One of them is as ageless as a recording. Never gets ugly. I envy that. You have to love that.”

Darned if I can tell f rom his face that he’s ever had a life to live. He seems so untouched, as though if I looked away, he would evaporate into thin air.

Anna let her thoughts wander in a game of free association.

I’ve had a number of men, so-called fans, but none of them ever amounted to anything. This kid has possibilities. Better this than fans who are only after my body and never admit it. I wonder if he’s ever made love to a woman? Doesn’t seem the type who has hard-ons just for the sake of a hard-on. Doesn’t seem that he’d settle for just the platonic. Can’t let myself be fooled by that blank facade. His face is nothing special. Intellectual perhaps, but wait, he looks like someone I know. Of course. That famous sucky comedian friend of mine. What was it he said? Ah, now I get it. I’ll bet he’s got a knack for ingratiating himself with just about anybody. Maybe he’s a salesman, loafing on the job. That’s why he’s here. But he’s not wearing a tie, and he’s in black sneakers. That baby face! So collected, so cute. He’s eyeing me enigmatically. Ah, that’s his way of being sexy. And he’s very good at making out he’s inept. Wants me to think he’s sincere, I guess. He has nerve, and yet he’s humble. I’m sure he’s much too meek to be a complete playboy. What does he have in mind, I wonder? He’s special and that’s what he’s using as his appeal. I can tell he had no friends in his student days, and probably hung around the house reading Dostoeveskii. He’s been trying to change his character, escape his dark childhood. That’s the whole of it. Difficult to manage and difficult to get on with. He’s lost,obviously. Too bad.

Anna stood up and looked the boy square in the face. The pigeons, pushed to the limit, fled.

“Going home? It is cold out here,” the boy mumbled and drawled, and looked away at the fleeing pigeons with his slightly crossed eyes.

“What’s your name?” Anna asked him, standing on the same spot from which he had first spoken.

“Prince, as in royalty. That’s my real name. In school, I used to be called the Happy Prince.”

“It suits you. A slightly screwy little Prince. The kind terrorists are fond of kidnapping and keeping under lock and key. What did you study at university?”

“Physics. I wanted to learn how to make a hydrogen bomb.”

“Oh, you make H-bombs?”

“No, never did. I’m not that clever. No one’s allowed anyway in this country. Some people know how, but the cost would be outrageous.”

Anna took a deep breath, smiling back graciously, but at a dead loss. Though mildly interested in him as a person, she decided to maintain a smokescreen around her feelings.

“What kind of conversations do you usually have with women?”

“We talk about life, things like how nothing ever stays the same and how even inanimate things have lives. Take the protons in a nuclear bomb; somehow or other, they too have a life span. Nothing is static in this world.”

Suddenly Anna was taken with the false notion that she had met this boy five years ago, despite having always said she disassociated herself from fans. His talk bored her to death, yet his face seemed as appealing as a favorite stuffed animal.

Anna forgave the boy his precociousness because he was so transparent. His sophomoric skill at ingratiating himself with her without revealing anything about himself -- she saw the value in that.

“I won’t bring you bouquets, but you have my passionate devotion,” the boy said as he invited Anna to have a bowl of hot noodle-and-egg soup. He continued to press the shredded garlic garnish on her despite her refusal because of a lesson she had to give the next day.

“Would a call or so a month be too much for you? I won’t be obnoxious.”

Anna consented to the Happy Prince’s self-effacing request. Thanking her for having made his day, he left her at the station, scampering off toward the shopping arcade, both hands locked triumphantly above his head.

All Anna recalled of the Happy Prince were his words; the face had been unremarkable. Were she to meet him again, Anna was sure she would not recognize him; his speech would be her only confirmation of his existence.

She had recollections of him at the oddest moments; while watching television, or out walking. Though she could not remember his exact face, anybody’s could shift and become his, ready and waiting with something to say. Anna took stock:

Am I starved for a man?

Groundless, she thought. There were always several men orbiting like satellites around her. Each satellite was unaware there were others, or what those others looked like. The life span of a satellite was, at the shortest, two months; at the longest, two years.

Surely nothing wrong with that rate of metabolism. She used her body in the most highly efficient manner-never getting too tired, never going too far. Violetta's aria in Act One of 'La Traviata' described her perfectly:

Sempre libera degg'io

Folleggiar di gioia in gioia

(Leave me wild, leave me free

To enjoy pleasure after pleasure.)

She was a collector of men. She wore men the way she wore dresses.

Anna had no experience as a prostitute, but she knew that if the phrase ‘all women are whores’ were mentioned, she would be considered a good representative of what was meant. Whores often say they'll sell their bodies, but not their hearts. Some even refuse to kiss, believing their lips to be the branch office of their heart. Men want most what they can not have easily. By hook or crook, they are in hot pursuit of a prostitute's affections, twining them around their little fingers with the Western philosophic idea of 'love,' cajoling them with a kind of Christian morality they call 'compassion,' or pursuing them with a promise of 'marriage.' Yet when they have them women’s affections in their clutches, men find it’s not what they're looking for.

Women are not at fault when men say 'somehow you're not the same any more.' They’re trying to make a big deal out of something that’s never been there. Men are at fault for wanting the wrong thing.

Anna had a knack for getting away from men who wanted to love her. Men who were after Anna's heart had a definite tendency to categorize her and their relationship to her. And as if that weren't enough, they demanded that she act according to their categorization. They had their guidelines for what love should be and expected her to follow suit. Anna came straight to the point with this sort of man.

'You can have my body but that's it.'

Men retaliate brutally. 'What are you, a whore?'

'Have I ever asked you for money?'

'Well then, what is it? Men are just your play things?'

'If you think you're having a good time, that shouldn’t stop you. I'm not to hate you for it.'

'Why am I the only one you don’t want to love? Maybe you don’t even know what the word means.'

'I'll take the operatic kind, thank you.'

'There's a difference between the stage and real life.'

'Wrong. They're both the same.'

Winners and losers in this battle of the sexes are a foregone conclusion. On departing, men re-define Anna as a cold bitch. There is a difference between a cold bitch and a frigid woman, however, even between that and a man-hater. Pundit that she was in these matters, she pulled herself back from the brink of letting a man completely destroy himself; at other moments, she performed magic that transubstantiated his feelings into another dimension. On the other hand, those who had been discarded were not as complacent in their acceptance.

Anna never thought of men as her teachers, but more as test papers. Read the skill testing questions-figure the pattern-the rest was inevitable. It was only a mater of when. Her tentacles moved only to the next intriguing man.

The Happy Prince faithfully phoned Anna in the evening on the third Sunday of every month. For five minutes he occupied the line with pre-meditated small talk as though he were sure he was taking her away from her love-making, and then hung up. He was so self-deprecating that Anna felt obliged to tell him to just call anytime.

On their first meeting, the Happy Prince had said he was in love with Anna's voice. Everytime he phoned, he repeated these words.

He had even said to Anna that he now had a monopoly on her voice. Furthermore, he was an excellent judge of her feelings from the tone of her voice, never alienating her by trying to appropriate her mannerisms to his way of speaking.

Anna imagined him to be a devotee of telephone sex. She anticipated the moment he would come out into the open and use obscene language, but there was no indication whatsoever of this tendency, and so she was oddly disappointed.

Anna was not at all resentful of the Happy Prince's off-centered conversations. As time went on, she would think of ways to keep him from hanging up, leading him on.

From the Happy Prince's voice and conversation, Anna constructed an image of her type of desirable young boy. She felt she had to see him again to test the image she bore in her head with the genuine article.

Because 'Lyrics For the Death' required special orchestration, the program for the day of the concert included only one preceeding piece, Bartok's 'Divertimiento for Strings.' Not a popular program, yet it was difficult to spot empty seats in the hall. Unlike a performance of Beethoven's Ninth, the audience was discreetly knowledgeable.

At precisely seven o'clock the string emsemble takes the stage, finishes its final tuning, waits for the audience to control its urge to cough, then begins serenely to etch out the staccato rhythm. The rhythm becomes a tremor rumbling through the audience's bodies-the violin melody swells to an eddy flowing into a fjord, washing over the audiences's ears. From time to time the crashing wave of a pizzicato flys in the hall.

Throughout, a man in a black uniform on a riser does an initation of a basketball dribble which, on closer examination, proves to be a dervish-like, trembling dance. At times the man appears to be a gendarme directing traffic.

Second Movement--Guided by the man on a riser, the audience moves into the depths of a dark forest. Then, the blackness of the night and the light of the moon fall . The man stands on a rock with the moon behind him and begins his act of hypnotism. His sweeping gestures resemble those of the leader of a religious cult. The music arcs from peace to exhultation until the audience loses itself in an undulating orgasm.

Third Movement--Change, as the music flows on a tranquil sea. The orchestra, like a pirate ship, ricochets back and forth through the hall. In the sea of the hall, the man on the riser, like a penguin, rides the waves that are the audience. The crew of the pirate ship, spying their unknown quarry on the horizon, become aroused. The ship churns the sea into froth, with sails billowing... full speed ahead. And then, discovering a huge cataract beyond the horizon, they cry out and are engulfed.

A moment of silence and then applause. The man who until now has kept his back to the audience, turns and smiles, shakes sweaty hands with the concert master. The entire crew of the pirate ship rises. Applause. The penguin-like man exits the stage. The crew follows.

Fifteen minute intermission.

In the interval, chairs for the solo singers are placed on both sides of the podium. The bass sits to the audience's right, the soprano to the left.

Anna sits before her mirror in the dressing-room. Performing a pre-concert ritual, she smears tiger balm on her chest. To pass the remaining moments, she occassionally turns to the mirror to guffaw or to sob. This is an etude that neutralizes her mental state, allowing her to skillfully control the production of emotional response.

There is a knock. The manager pokes his head in to announce the call for five minutes. Anna grasps her black evening dress by the folds in the pelvic area, pulls up the hem, cuts through her pre-performance jitters, and goes to the wings. The conductor's wide-open stare reaches Anna's bosom. Her cleavage seems a shade dewy.

“Chic and daring,” the bass next to the conductor remarks. The surrounding percussionists grin diplomatically.

The pirate ship's crew come on stage, finish tuning, then, with Anna in the lead, two penguin men face stage front and acknowledge the audience applause with a bow.

First Movement--From a deep abyss, an adagio. In pianissimo, the violins tear silk. The surface of a lake enveloped in mist is as quiet as a darkened mirror. The bass begins to sing, as though reciting a sutra, a requiem for a hundred enamored men who have chosen death. As she listens, Anna thinks:

'For starters, his voice has no timbre. It's a nice soft voice, but why can't he be sharper in his articulation? I can tell he’s slow. Well, dullness sometimes has its place, I suppose. I will get through this somehow without having an argument. ‘Chic and daring,’ he says? How about this? Next time I'll say: 'Why don't you come here, honey, and rub a little tiger balm on my chest?' Having sex with him would be a drag.'

The First Movement ends with two glissandi from the contra-bass. The delicate upper register in the violins lingers forever on the ears.

Second Movement--Malaguena, alegretto. The violins forge the scale in a fast passage. Anna sings. She is, first of all, an hysteric woman.

'La muerte

entra y sale

de la taberna,

....

sale y entra,

entra y sale...

de la taberna.'

(Death comes and goes

from the tavern.

goes and comes,

comes and goes,

from the tavern.)

She sings like the paranoid Lady Macbeth washing her hands of invisible blood. Rasping strings tear the air. Soon after she begins to sing, Anna notices that her own voice seems to reverberate back from huge speakers somewhere in the audience. She thrills at such moments. There is both the Anna who sings, and the Anna who listens in judgement.

'All ends well that begins well. I'll be great today. A bad start leads to misery later; the voice gets heavy.'

Third Movement--Loreley- Castanets, cello, and contra-bass score the desperate rhythm-two lashes of a whip. As the music changes, Anna must transform herself from an hysteric woman into Loreley. The bass becomes a bishop who brings Loreley before the Inquisition. But the bishop falls prey to Loreley's blazing eyes and is unable to bring her to trial. What sort of woman can make even a priest fall madly in love? Just one of her kind would make it so easy to topple several governments. Yet the Loreley of this work is very heroic. She, not the bishop, gives an account of her crimes, thus assuring her own death sentence. After much deliberation, the bishop orders her to a nunnery instead. Infatuated by her reflection in the Rhine River, she throws herself in.

Anna rubs her hands the most in this movement. She sings in the guise of an untouched virgin, but as she is drawn more deeply into the lyric, she faces an inescapable quandary. Loreley has a lover. In the trial, Loreley appeals constantly to the Bishop:

'Fort von hier zog mein Liebster nun ist alles so leer

Sinnlos ist diese Welt Nacht ist rings un mich her.'

('The day my lover left, the world became despicable until

I embraced the night of the world in my heart.'

'It's strange that Loreley could love, but more than that, I wonder what kind of man (or woman for that matter) could have been her lover? It is unthinkable that Loreley was simply in love with herself. Loreley must have been some flagrant narcissist. Think of having no one to kiss.'

Anna made up her mind to believe that Loreley had a lover.

Fourth Movement--Suicide-Adagio. As Anna listens to the solo cello's plaintive melody played out in eight beats, she has to change from Loreley into the buried corpse of a suicide. The corpse sings of three lilies on its grave without a crucifix. The first plant springs from its wound, the second from its heart, and the third rends its mouth. The decomposed body trusts itself to the lilies.

Some of the audience shed tears on hearing Anna sing this.

Fifth Movement--Lively, unfailing alegretto. The xylophone beats out a murky march rhythm. And then, tympani-like tin drums. 'Pom-po-po-pom-pom. Pan-cha-pan-cha.'

From the corpse, Anna metamorphosed into the goddess of death. She sings as she watches over soldiers nearing death on the frontlines. She takes all the dying men to her own, becoming ever more beautiful.

Anna clearly discerns that the audience's focus has changed. The eyes of the men in the audience glint with passion. She sings to them as though they are the dying soldiers:

'Celui qui doit mourir se soir dans les tranchees

C'est un petit soldat mon frere et mon amant.'

(To you who will die before the night is through,

My little soldiers, my brothers, my loves.')

As she sings, Anna accidentally discovers the Happy Prince in the audience, devouring her with his eyes. She knows how unusual it is for her to recognize a fan's face three months old. The movement comes to an end with the single shot of a whip.

Sixth Movement--Madame ecoutez-moi-Adagio. The bass enters on a long chordal sigh: 'Vous perdez quelque chose.' Anna, no longer the goddess of death, becomes an iron maiden:

'C'est mon coeur pas grand-chose.'

('Tis but a trifling thing, my heart.')

In this movement, a woman wails that her heart matters little when death intervenes. She laughs in exultation as though at a joke, at times derisively, desperately. Sometimes, she throws her schizoid laughter to the wind, or laughs forcibly through her tears.

Seventh Movement--In the LaSante prison-Adagio. The bass, now imprisoned for a crime he didn't commit, laments his life on the block. The contra-bass apes the sound of a guard's footsteps, the sound of dripping water, and the beat of the prisoner's heart.

There is no part for Anna. She takes her seat and like a hot-air balloon, inhales, exhales. Then she looks for the Happy Prince in the audience...but she can't find him. She'd seen him there for sure in the fourth row, to the right, when she sang the fifth movement. No, it had been the left. Now Anna spots him on the other side. She quickly scans the second floor balcony seats. Funny. There he is. And then, wondering who the other person could have been, she looks again and he's gone.

Eighth Movement--Response of the Cossack Zaporogues to the Sultan of Constantinople-Allegro. Barbarous rhythm. Demented chords, the whole lyric filled with abuse.

'How would it feel to bathe in a torrent of such filthy insults? The ranks of feminist ‘wannabes’ are on the increase, but I don’t think they could measure up to this foul-mouthed male explosion of four-letter words. I’ll take the blood-and-guts. Some poetry, though. Where does one get words like these? Eye-less, nose-less poxy bastard, mother-fucking little cock born out of your own mother's runny-bowelled shit, puss-laden asshole, bruisy pig-face. Look at that conductor. He's aroused. Don't toss your head around so much! You threw sweat in my face earlier.

Ninth Movement--O Delvig-Andante. Now, in complete contrast, the bass sings a romantic paean to a poet. The strings accompany in full vibrato.

'His expression hasn't changed in the slightest. How about putting a little drama in it? Really a dumb bastard. I'd like to thrash him good with that whip from the fifth movement. Here comes the sweat again. Shit! I got in my face! He's overdoing it. You don't have to force the strings that much. It's only a sentimental movement, after all. What a face! Looks like he's going to have an orgasm. I'd go to bed with you, you young stud. The other one can go for. I wonder whether he'd close his eyes and wave his head around like that in bed. I must be past my prime. I'll be thirty-five this Spring. God, how it all goes by so fast. How old did that boy say he was, twenty-five? Ten years younger? I haven't been sleeping with anybody that young lately. Wouldn't be so bad, that fresh smooth skin and smell...ah, I'm on again.' Tenth Movement--Death of the Poet-Largo. Return to the melody of the first movement. The muted violins sing of a scene as cold and still as a frozen lake:

'Er lag. Sein aufgestelltes Antlitz war

bleich und verweigernd in den steilen Kissen,

seitdem die Welt und dieses Von -ihr-Wissen,

von seinen Sinnen abgerissen,

zuruckfiel an das teilnahmslose Jahr.'

('The poet is dead. The ashen face harbors the denial,

for once it knew all the world;

but now the knowledge fades,

as it returns to its own senselessness.')

As Anna sings, images of the poet's face, the dying soldiers, and the face of Loreley's lover fuse in her mind. They are all like the Happy Prince; mannequins without eyes, noses, or mouthes. She feels a strange eroticism. Numbers of overlapping images take the nebulous shape of a man's body which then carresses her from head to foot, brushing up against the grain of her body hair.

Eleventh Movement--Finale-Moderato. Col-legno (Striking the strings with the back of the bow) and pizzicato chords. Duet:

'Der tod ist gross.

Wir sind die Seinen lachenden Munds

Wenn wir uns mitten im Leben meinen,

wag er zu weinen mitten in uns.'

('Death is pervasive.

It watches over us in times of joy

And at the moment of our greatest trimph, it agonizes within us;

It bides its time, crying within us.') End

As the fortissimo of the final eight bars from the string section melts into the air, the conductor turns to Anna, winks, and leaves the podium. Applause resounds in her empty stomach. Anna slowly rises, bowing deeply, streches her torso, and takes a confident stance. She has absolute faith that her performance today is as good as her teacher's had been when she had recorded this.

For two days after the concert, Anna felt drained. Three of her companions for casual sex came by, but Anna, complaining of her post-performance fatigue, had it off with them in short order and sent them away.

When on stage with the opera, Anna doled out limitless nervous energy to give life to her fictional characters, spent her total physical strength on them. And so, after the performance, she was unable to easily recover her real self. Many times she remained for a time in the empty shell of her dramatic role. This time it had not been an opera, yet she had transformed herself into seven fictional women from the amnesiac Loreley to the goddess of death. She slept as though she were brain dead. She spent fifteen hours a day in bed.

On the third day, Anna returned to herself, once again able to perform her best role as the non-fictional Anna. The Happy Prince called just as she was coming around. She was suffering from conversational withdrawal symptoms and was dying to talk to anyone.

“I was moved by 'Lyrics for the Death.' I read the translated texts, I listened, I cried. I even imagined that you were singing it just for me, Anna.”

“I did actually.”

“Don't be silly. I don't know how to say it; listening to your voice made me ashamed of being a man.”

“What do you mean?”

“I'd find that difficult to explain to you now.”

“Besides, you didn't bring me a bouquet of flowers.”

“I didn't forget to. I thought of bringing flowers, but it takes courage to pass them up to the stage. If your timing is off, the singer passes you by.”

“Nice excuse. Why don't you come directly to my home next time? You can give them to me in person.”

“You want me to come to you? Is it allright?”

“Think of it as a favor. Just for you. You have a responsibility to explain to me why you felt ashamed about being a man.”

Anna felt compelled to see the Happy Prince. As she had sung the tenth movement 'Death of the Poet', reaching the peak of her exultation in the song, she had seen an articulate vision of the Happy Prince. Her curiosity was not prepared to let that vision remain just a vision. She needed to know why, after all, he wanted to get close to her. And she had an physical interest in the body of a twenty-five year old boy.

Soon after, she arranged their reunion.

In spite of her principle to associate with a fan from a distance, still Anna thought of the potential refresher course she might get from the Happy Prince - falling in love for the first time - something she hadn't achieved with the others.

It had been a long time since Anna had lost her ability to understand what 'love' meant. Physically, what she had come to feel as love in her teens had become deformed as she had grown older, until all she experienced now was more and more the exception to the rule. Her ample body, reminiscent of a Rubens tableau, had consumed many men until it had matured like cognac, yet her consciousness of love had become only more futilely jaded until all she was left with was pain.

When she was training to be a soprano, her voice teacher, going on fifty, who prided herself on being an experienced virgin, had this to say to Anna:

'A singer has to make her body interchangeable with many others. You may be a fine young girl from a good background, but you'll have to become a bar maid or a prostitute if necessary. You may be a baroness, and at the same time a murderous courtesan. You must not be just one woman, but all women. To accomplish this, you must make love. You must know many men. Love is a wonderful teacher. The more you have relations with men, the more breadth and depth you'll have in your voice. Take Maria Callas for example. It's no exaggeration to say that her voice was made by men.'

Happily or otherwise, Anna did not want for men. She left the door of her body wide open to any man who approached her. She faithfully carried out her voice teacher's advice, always trying to get someone else to live in her body. She led herself to believe that she couldn't live without men, and in time her body followed. If she didn't constantly have the male form inside her, she feared she would self-destruct.

She may have had love without understanding what it was. Or maybe she thought the slight trembling she felt when she lay next to an older boy as she had in her teens, or the unaccountable suffocation she felt when he wasn't with her--that these moments were all there was to love. After all, first romances ending in disappointment had been pall bearers to her concept of love.

Anna faced her dressing table mirror and began to apply her cosmetics. A woman going on thirty-five couldn't show her face unless it had been prepared-even if her companion knew that she had two hairs growing from the mole on her back.

The intercom rang. She picked up the receiver. “Hello. I’ve brought you a bouquet.” Pausing to slip on a gown over her underwear, she ushered in the Happy Prince. Somewhat self-consciously, he presented her with a bouquet of Gerberas and mini-carnations. Anna sensed his unease.

“Think of this as the theatre dressing room. Come on in.”

“Much rather it were a beach.”

“Why?”

“I don't know. Just came out. It's hot, isn't it.”

Artlessly, he removed his blazer. Anna scanned him up and down like an X-ray machine, from his scrawny chest and bony frame down to his crotch and when she had finished, only then did her eyes focus on his discarded coat.

“I prefer putting people rather than coats on hangers.”

Taking his coat, Anna looked at him, hanging a question mark on his face like a hanger. Something very odd about this boy. No, he's just nervous.

“Sit down. Something to drink? Alcoholic if you like.”

“I'll have water please.”

“Water with what? Don't be shy. I'm the one who asked you over.”

“I see. Well, give the water to the flowers. I'll have whatever you're having.”

Anna had a way to get rid of the Happy Prince's nerves. He might, after we've had dinner together, just feel obliged to demonstrate some masculine charm. She did think, however, that she would do her best to let on that she didn't feel it a necessity. After all, how could she get in the mood with a man like this, a man who has no characteristic smell?

Anna handed him a glass of Armagnac, sat on the sofa opposite him and asked in the manner of a counsellor:

“You say you have problems with your manhood...I mean, when you hear me sing.”

“That wasn’t the first time. You're more feminine than any woman, and, in comparison to a man who's a sick version of a woman, you're more masculine. In the first place, being a male is unnatural. If I don't keep telling myself I'm male, I turn into a kind of debased female. It's an anatomical fact.”

“Are you O.K.? You're talking nonsense.”

“Do you think so? I'm not talking gynephobia or anything like that, mind you....”

“Do you want to listen to some music?”

“Sure. I'd certainly like to hear a recording of the concert, if you have it.”

Anna nodded and put on a tape cassette, volume turned low. The Happy Prince squirmed back and forth in discomfort. For a while, the two listened silently to 'Lyrics for the Death.' Anna observed him, as she would a caged monkey, as he fidgeted without knowing where to rest his eyes. Anna's eyes shone with unmasked voyeurism. She meant to give him a taste of how miserable silence could be, she thought. Her refresher course in romance grew progressively perverse until it threatened to turn into a love vendetta.

The music reached the second movement. Seeing his empty glass, she purposely addressed him like a sister.

“You might as well say I don't know anything at all about you. And yet I have a feeling I've known you before. From time to time, I think about you. Why? I wonder. Funny.”

Anna refilled his Armagnac. He took the glass so as to avoid touching Anna's hand. It went straight to his mouth.

“There are such things, you know, as coincidental resemblance.”

“Yes, of course. When you're in the same room with a man you haven't the faintest idea about, you can think he looks like someone you know. It's a clever way, I think, to put yourself at ease.”

“My, I must say you've become quite sassy since we first met. Well, anyway, forget it. Why don't you tell me what you were like as a student. Tell me something about who you are.'

“I, uh...was a serious student. I spent every day with molecules. My idea of organisms was that they were more collections of molecules than masses of cells. It was a boring subject, but I studied it like an automaton. I made a travesty out of humanity, because when you examine things from the level of molecules, a human, a dog, and an amoeba are all the same thing.”

“Now that I think of it, I suppose you're right.”

“It's true. One can distinguish between a man and dog at a glance. With very little thought, one can undestand the difference between self and others. But if one thinks too far, it becomes impossible to recognize those distinctions. For example, on the level of molecular biology, one can not explain the differences. A man named Bateson says that science does not prove anything. Most molecular biologists have taken this to heart, sort of like a golden rule. But of course that’s nonsense because they can’t take anything to heart. And some clever philosopher would surely disagree that the heart had anything to do with what they were doing. What they're doing, molecular biology, is a tragedy. I'm fed up with theoretical puzzles. I'll bet the human brain has turned into a Moebius circle. Words themselves are Moebius circles. However they put it, there are no solutions, a vicious circle. Why don't they call it cruising around in Hell! That's about all I have to say. Frankly, I just chucked molecular biology. I don't have the right dispoosition for it. I’m easily bored.”

“You've been through some rough spots.”

“My head has. Overuse of the head, they say, makes you look like an idiot.”

The Happy Prince drained his glass and listened to the music as he stared blankly into the air. The music had already reached the Fourth Movement.

“Idiot- well yes, but you know what they say, if the mind tires, try using the body.”

“I've tried a number of things, rehabilitation-wise; going to a boxing gym, getting drunk every night, making love even. I've done it all, and it bores me. I wanted to make over my mind, my body along with it. I cruised them all; anyone who wasn't an academic, that is. Day laborer, transvestite, actor, zen monk, motorcycle gang, you name it. This's beginning to sound like I need help.”

“I guesss what you’re saying is you went through the motions at least. With love too?”

“So far I've had five people, sex forty-four times. I think about making love the same way a molecular biologist thinks about putting heart into his theory. Love's just a word to me. All I wanted to do was get physical. Feel the reality of my body. I even slept with a fifteen-year old girl. Thirty-three times. Scared me silly. And,believe me, it wasn't about getting arrested. I was paranoid about what the influences were likely to be with a fifteen-year old girl.”

“You mean on you?”

“Right. I don't know. She and I got on like a psychiatrist and a patient. I never asked her for sex. I knew it was rotten of me, but I let her set the pace....

Her name was Satomi, a ninth-grader with the high-school entrance exams breathing down her neck. I was her tutor. She had average grades at school, but she was quick on the uptake. Her Dad was away on business and her mother was preoccupied with calligraphy classes; everyone did their own thing in that family. At school, she was more bullied that bullying which enhanced her vulnerability. The only reason she went to school was to get through it. Seemed like her only refuge was her own room; you know, a run-of--the-mill type little cubicle with a colored-pencil set, a writing desk, and a doll with one arm longer than the other sprawled on the bed. Her idea of fun was to sleep with her doll, and fantasize. She made a hobby out of keeping a dream diary.”

“Dismal way to spend your youth, isn't it.”

“Let's talk about something else, O.K.? I got a little carried away. I'm not even drunk.”

“Don't worry. Go on. I'd like to hear.”

“It's not that I mind talking about it. Think of it as a lot of hot air that happens to be fact.”

The Happy Prince had been unwittingly sucked into the black hole of Satomi's subconscious. Once in, there was no exit, nor possibility of going back to the beginning. Satomi spun him like a yoyo.

Satomi made little sense of her dreams or her idle, indulgent fantasies. Her notes were a jumbled mess of sinister implications without an object. She buried herself in her bed after finishing her homework in English and math, jabbering at him like a terminal patient spelling out her will. His tutoring turned into something more like bedside sitting.

She said she was thrilled to find someone at last to whom she could confess her pain. Until he appeared, she had, it seems, confided solely in the doll called Zoltan. She had called him her steely brother. Zoltan was the cleverest man in the world, with a brain and a heart of stone; he took whatever was done to him without batting an eye; he never ran amok. Zoltan knew everything there was to know, he kept his mouth shut to the world, happy to lie asleep on her bed.

Satomi tore open Zoltan's head and chest for the Happy Prince. She must have found all his stuffing along a riverbed; his brains were extremely wrinkled round gray pebbles, and the stones of his heart were pink agates.

Zoltan found a new life inhabiting the Happy Prince’s body. Satomi called the Happy Prince her mentor Zoltan or her brother Zoltan, and he indulged her to the point of feeling ridiculous. Initially, she had been a taciturn young lady who paid only superficial attention to anyone, but after the second month, she sent him letters containing fairly serious SOS signals. Short of making it a practice to listen to any and every complaint, he put aside as much time as he could spare to the task of keeping a poor injured princess company as she poured out her own A Thousand and One Nights.

Satomi wove her story for his approval, never pushing the Happy Prince to the point of arousal. The story's content was ambivalent in every respect.

For example, she watched how other people acted, what they said or even whispered; any little linguistic faux-pas she interpreted as a crime. Take the story of the computerized cockroach who was so sinister he had solar batteries embedded in his wings, and sprang into action at the smallest bit of light. She worried she might have such a talking cockroach in her room, and so she purposely left it a shambles; at night she was careful to leave the flourescent lights on, and cleaned regularly.

Then there was her groundless conviction that if she were to remove a single book from her shelf, her nipples would come falling out, having been crushed into saltines.

Everytime she would try do something, somebody without a face would appear and tell her to quit being a copycat. Whether she was just walking, or waiting for a light to change, or hiding in the station toilet to avoid being seen, this woman with a featureless face like an egg would peer in at her, warning her again not to copy. Confused and frightened, she would get down on all fours and try to slip away, ridiculed by passersby, dogs howling at her.

Then there was the story about the time she read in an introduction to science about the brain being divided into left and right spheres and she got a headache. From that time on, whenever she thought of the left and right brains, she was convinced that her body had been put together in two parts like a plastic mannequin. She was tormented by the fear that her body would split into two pieces at the slightest provocation.

Though no real danger lurked that the Happy Prince might do damage to Satomi's delicate nervous system, he preferred to keep his distance. He knew that it would be enough just to keep quiet and listen-after all, he was Zoltan's double with a heart and brain of stone. Any stupid slip in his psychoanalysis would cause him to turn into that sinister computerized cockroach she so feared, and he wanted no part of that. Anyway, her fifteen-year old virginal body gave off such a divine light that he hesitated to leave as much as a fingerprint on it. He was terribly nervous, never knowing where to rest his eyes as Satomi lay defenselessly on the bed in front of him, unaware of her upturned skirt. As his eyes wandered over her, a man planning rape and a young girl trembling in fear before than man came alive in his inner consciousness.

This bright but shy and injured princess trusted the Happy Prince implicitly. But wasn't this man who was on the receiving end of a young girl's unconditional trust, the victim? If he were to tell her now that he wasn't worthy of her trust, fleeing from contact with those eyes that bore no doubt, he'd be her betrayer, and if she were to honestly put into practice the advice he gave her in response to her trust in him, then he would have no way of accepting responsibility for failure. If he were to get sucked into a young girl's private consultations where the cogs just did not mesh right, then he ran the risk of losing his own marbles. Whatever the case, verbal solutions to to the worries that plagued her made no sense. The Happy Prince had no intention of falling more than once into a hell of words. What else could he do but, like Zoltan, be silent, be supine: Zoltan knew, quite rightly, everything there was to know about the world.

Still, for all this, Satomi expected Zoltan (alias the Happy Prince) to be a flesh-and-blood man. She pressured him persistently when he stayed silent, and so, to get through the impasse, he would tell her there was no such thing as her computerized cockroach, or that she had two perfectly good nipples on her breast. He tried to control the situation, but still she accused her bubba Zoltan of thinking her abnormal.

It seemed to the Happy Prince that Satomi’s subconscious had been implanted in him. She insisited he experience life the same way she did. 'Love me, feel as I do. Be a part of my body, Baby, or I’ll fall apart,' she would say.

Satomi then threw away her doll Zoltan and took her real man Zoltan into her bed. It came to him. Yes. He had a way to avoid betraying Satomi's trust, to avoid the distaste of a verbal hell once and for all. He need only to give her the resilience and warmth of his body never begrudging the resonance of the words 'I love you.’ At the moment, no one else in particular required such analytic therapy of him. He was, first and foremost, a simple tutor gaining his pittance. He had no responsibility to preserve society's morals. He made himself believe that what he was about to do with a fifteen-year old virgin bordered on pure philanthropy.

“You do love me, I knew it.”

The Happy Prince replied he had no idea. He tried to go on, but the words failed him; he mustered a groan that sounded like a tape recorder with low batteries, nodding over and over as though it were a foregone conclusion. He remembered now the taste of Satomi's body. There wasn't a need even to recall, it was with him. Her body was a canker branded on his flesh.

Satomi's body had felt like vinyl filled with warm water. When he was rough with her, the vinyl skin seemed to rip abruptly, allowing her meat to flow out. The Happy Prince understood the reason the Middle Ages had feared young virgins.

Satomi, stripped, was ashamed to look at her own discarded clothes, yet for all that was indifferent to her exposed nipples or pudenda. She seemed to think of her own body as something she made take a shower, get dressed or undressed. She said 'hold me' as though she were quoting a snippet from the movies or a comic book. He embraced a vinyl doll, his arms moving as though on remote control. Their lips were magnets, at first negative poles discharging in mid-air, then as she changed to the positive pole, his lips were sucked into hers. A tongue slipped inside. Where had she learned such lizard's technique? She loved having the Happy Prince fondle her nipples. He didn't know whether it was because they were erogenous zones, or because it liberated her from the oppressive idea of her nipples being like flattened crackers.

She also loved her pubescent pain. When the act was over, the slighly sweaty vinyl doll ordered her body to dress, and said:

“I'm so happy. I had to have proof from my buba Zoltan.”

Satomi went on wanting her buba Zoltan's body.