The Memory of Dreams
Dear Lisa,
I'm having trouble with my computer. It's working badly. Since my work involves research, and I must access all sorts of things on the web, it must be viruses. A guy is coming today to see what's happening. He charges a lot of money but he's good. In the meantime, I've been trying to empty the computer's HD by getting rid of stuff I decidedly don't need anymore. That's how I ran into the original text of an eerie LiveJournal entry from January of 2007. I was taken aback to imagine myself writing it. I had forgotten all about having once been in such a state of mind (I didn't even remember having been in bloody Amazônia!)
I believe the almost eight years that have gone by must have turned me into someone who would never react to the events in question in such a dramatic way. That isn't me. And yet, there I am, talking like the male version of Sarah Bernhardt, or Isadora Duncan, or one of those. How utterly ridiculous. But then ... how utterly fascinating it is to think that journal entries can slip from the memory the way dreams do when you wake up. I wonder what would happen if dreams could be saved to a computer's memory. Anyway, here's the (disgustingly long) entry ...
Thursday, January 4th, 2007 - These have been difficult times for me, more so than any other time I can remember. When this crisis began, I wrote about being haunted by a recurrent question, "What was there for me once, what is there for me now?" I still don't know the answer. Or maybe I do but am too scared to face it. When I finished high school, I went on to study acting, and a bit later, as my father had asked me to not long before he died, I went to university and graduated as a teacher. I didn't realize then that I was taking up not only one but two professions that required absolute physical plenitude. I was unbelievably young (gosh, how can you ever be so young?) and the idea had never crossed my mind that the concept of finitude had to do not only with small little things like mountains, when they erode, rivers, when they run dry, or even stars, when they burn out, but was equally related to this frail, surprisingly ephemeral body we're given at the beginning to go again and again on a crazy journey around the sun.
Like anyone else at that age, I thought of myself as indestructible. Life had to do with eternity, just like the never-ending summer, when I had the days all for myself and became one with the waves as I dived under them before they broke, and swam away to the open sea to look at the beach from afar and marvel at how tiny people looked from that perspective. Or the time I spent with my grandfather at his property in Miguel Pereira, a place in the mountains near Rio, where I had a horse. I would ride it for hours, imagining that I was entering the woods for the first time and had become one with the trees, the mountains, the two lakes down there, the stream that connected them, and the horse itself, and could so easily feel that I had got in touch with limitlessness. Time became a very vague concept and finitude a non-applicable word. I certainly didn't think about neurological diseases suddenly making you so scared of a rhetorical question like, "What is there for me now?"
No more horses, no more swimming in the open sea. All I can ride now is my bike, along the bikelane with the others. As for swimming, it's restricted to a club's swimming pool, under the careful watch of a lifeguard. In fact I must do both things. As my neurologist told me, biking, which I’ve always done anyway, is a much needed exercise to keep my legs, especially the right one, in shape. And methodical swimming under the supervision of a coach is mandatory for anyone at such an early stage of the disease. Along with the drugs it prevents, or so I'm being led to believe, its development into a more serious stage. I must take their word for it. There's nothing else I can do. But I'm very scared. I know what was there for me once. I've been writing about it since I began the paper version of this journal, which I wrote in Portuguese. But I have no idea what is there for me now.
In October, when I had just begun taking the two drugs I now completely depend on, I made an appearance (as the American consul in the Amazon, early in the 20th century) in TV Globo's big epic mini-series Amazônia. It was raining when I went to the 19th century palace, now a museum, for location work. I was not feeling well that day. In its early stage, the treatment was expected to cause a reaction of ups and downs, with moments in which I would appear to be much worse. I had been warned about it, and that happened to be one of the bad days. My right arm was shaking beyond control, and the spastic tremor of the right hand was plainly visible to anyone. When the time came for me to do my stuff (a key scene with the leading character, essential to the understanding of the historical background of the whole story), I nearly panicked to think that I might not be able to do it. As the director gave me his instructions, I once again felt as hopeless as a lost child. I kept my hand closed very tightly in the pocket of the rather heavy period coat I was wearing, so that no one would notice anything. But in a moment I would have to take it out and play the goddamn scene.
Luckily, I had been taught a Chinese exercise, having to do with principles that can also be related to the yoga concept of mudra through which the hand (and, as far as possible, the whole arm) is moved in the air as if it were a snake in the water, the hand being the snake's head. Somehow it manages to deceive the brain into recognizing the tremor as part of the movements of the snake in the water. Once the snake gets gradually motionless, the brain "reads" this motionlessness as being the end of the process that had begun with the tremor. And it stops. Also, if somebody observes you, it looks like a physio-therapeutic exercise of some kind, or perhaps like a little eccentricity, like that thing Leo DiCaprio did all the time with two fingers of his right hand when he played the mentally handicapped boy in What's Eating Gilbert Grape. It doesn't look like a neurological problem. On a bad day, the effect doesn't last very long, but long enough to halt the tremor for a while, which is what I needed.
I felt miserable and wanted to cry. But I didn't. I looked through the window at the blessed rain outside and, in a moment, in my mind, I was quietly going over the old Stanislavskian notion every single actor learns at drama school, that any kind of physical idiosyncrasy you may have can be incorporated into the character you're playing. "Action" was shouted and, as the somewhat sinister American consul took in his hands the leather folder containing the document that was up to him to approve or reject, his whole attitude to this rather tense meeting with representatives of the Brazilian government became even more threatening as he took his right hand away from the folder and started to move his fingers around it in such a bizarre way.
It worked. The director, who on account of the rain was running behind schedule, was as happy as a kid for this not-so-easy-to-shoot scene (too many technical problems, especially with sound) to have come out OK after just the third go. I don't remember having got so many compliments and thank you's for such a small scene. On Tuesday, as the mini-series went on the air, I watched chapter one, the exquisitely photographed scenes of workers travelling by boat on the Amazon river, and had mixed feelings about it. I'm happy for being on the show (even though it's one of the most insignificant parts I've ever played), and I'm looking forward to watching my next-to-nothing of a scene on Friday. But for how long will I be able to do this kind of job?
The water snake and how it helped me out of trouble while doing my work may sound like a good story to tell, but it isn't. In fact, it very dangerously invites being interpreted as self-praise, bordering on vanity, the kind of attachment that hampers any movements towards growth. The only way to justify it is by pointing out that it shows how frail and vulnerable I have been feeling since I came down with this disease. The water snake has become a major character in my own private tragedy, and I find it very difficult to cope with.
Feeling so completely lost scares me. I've been acting brave, and aloof. I've been going about the usual things, talking about the usual plans, even goofing about the same old stuff, but I don't fool myself when I'm all alone in my bedroom, listening to music in the dark, or just thinking. I'm terrified of being led by a water snake whose head comes out of my right hand to a place not only I had never been to, but didn't even know about, because it's never been on any map I could read. The year-end made me more scared than ever. What awaits me? Will I be able to go on doing the kind of work I've always done? How? By letting the water snake lead the way? For how long? What if I'm faced with the reality that I'm planning to go on doing things I'm no longer equipped for? How can I compete with the others, those who don't need a water snake to lead them the way dogs lead the blind? And what will I do if I can't do my work?
Thinking about these things got me depressed, not a good combination with being so scared. Then it happened. After finally sending replies to the many new year messages I had got, I started playing around on the Internet, which I can't do at home, where I still don't have Internet access (I'm at my aunt's, using João's computer). I had been thinking about searching for this and that on YouTube when I ran into a list of performances of Mon Coeur s'ouvre à ta Voix, the highlight of Saint-Saëns's famous opera Samson et Dalila. This aria, although I've never been an opera fan, brings back many memories. The only time I ever tried myself as an author (there was a second time, but it was an adaptation) was when I wrote and acted in a two-character one-act play called Depois da Chuva (After the Rain). It was about a young man and a young woman who had been married when they were just a pair of kids, had separated, and now meet by accident at the bar both had run into to wait for the rain to diminish outside.
As they try to sustain a feeble conversation, a line, or simply a word they say keeps throwing them into a flashback to the time when they lived together. The flashbacks have no chronological order. The only link is the music coming through the walls of the connecting apartment where, again and again, an invisible opera-loving neighbor listens to Mon Coeur s'ouvre à ta Voix. The two characters' consuming passion, their incredible happiness, their perplexity at finding out that life is quietly putting them apart, the way they're hurt by the discovery that they have become too different from their former selves, and the final break up, everything in the flashbacks is paced by segments of the aria. Then the rain stops and they get ready to leave the bar. As they say goodbye, a radio program starts airing Mon Coeur s'ouvre à ta Voix. Only this time, the aria is heard in a different recording, with a different singer and a different orchestra.
The play had a public reading in Rio, the response was good, and it was produced as part of a show called Trilogia (Trilogy), one of the other two being God, a very funny play by Woody Allen. I played the young man, an incredibly gifted girl called Blanca Queiroga played the young woman, my friend Carlos Fariello directed (it was his, absolutely brilliant idea to have a different recording for the ending at the bar, when the long lost aria invaded the two characters' present, but, like them, it had changed), and we opened in Santos Dumont, a small town in the state of Minas Gerais, some six hours by car from Rio, to a packed house who laughed and cried with the same intensity and kept applauding at the end of every single flashback scene. Then the ending came on. While saying goodbye, the guy and the girl started talking about their old apartment. Suddenly, their lines overlapping, they went into, "It was so good," "So good," "So--," "good. So--," "good--," "good--," "good--", as an obviously different recording of the aria was heard, its volume raising to the point of making the two actors inaudible, and the light faded.
During rehearsals we felt that the music covering the dialogue at the end had been a good idea. But none of us expected the music to be covered by something else. On the opening night, as soon as the two characters began to overlap their lines, even before the aria could be recognized, there was this thunderous, absolutely wonderful sound of applause that, rather than diminishing the way the rain was supposed to have done outside the bar in the play itself, grew into a standing ovation that made us all, cast and crew, cry like kids.
Once again I can imagine people dismissing these memories as nothing but self-praise and vanity. Actors' vanity, to be more precise, which is generally thought to be the worst kind. Too bad. Yesterday, as I played around on YouTube, they came to me like a compensatory dream, memories of a time when water snakes remained in the rivers and ponds where they are supposed to. They didn't become a part of you, leading you out of the embarrassment of seeing in their faces how shocked people are at realizing that you have become a handicapped person.
While searching for Mon Coeur s'ouvre à ta Voix I found an amazing video of Marlilyn Horne, the aria's most celebrated performer to date, whose endlessly moving rendition we used in the flashbacks (for the ending, at the bar, an obviously old, scratched, and rather precarious 78 rpm recording was unearthed, with the voice of an old-time mezzo named Ebe Stignani as if, like the two leads' early youth, the aria their neighbor used to play all the time now sounded like a thing of the past). Music has that strange power of making you fly back to a time that seemed to have been locked away from you. It opens the gates.
Images came back to my mind of Blanca and me in the packed subway, coming back from rehearsals, she to her apartment on an incredibly quiet street in Flamengo, and I to mine, in Botafogo, where I lived for twelve years. As soon as we got on the train, we started saying the play's most intimate lines, a series of double entendres the two characters threw at each other which, once out of context, became suspicious of being more sexual than would be appropriate for the subway at peak hours. We did it as a crazy exercise. Would people around us suspect these were learned lines, or would they sound spontaneous? Most times we managed to make them sound natural, which could be easily measured by the indignation in people's faces. Sometimes we cracked up laughing and had to rush off to wait for the next train to the relief of Cristina, the girl who lived with Blanca and was acting as assistant director, whose sense of propiety, whenever we started doing it, made her blush till her face was as red as a tomato. It was so funny!
This was all in 1987. Twenty years later, quite a few things didn't turn out as expected (yeah, I can hear the voices: "Tell me something I don't know"). In spite of the delicacy of her work, Blanca didn't get anywhere as an actress. After personal problems of the kind nobody wants to handle away from home, she went back to the south of Brazil, where she is from, and for many years I had no news of her. Now I hear she's all right and trying to get going as a singer. I don't know whatever happened to the adorable Cristina whom everybody liked so much to have around.
Carlos Fariello was involved in an appalling car accident that left him permanently handicapped. He now lives in São Paulo, his native town, where his family can be around for him. He and I exchange e-mails in which lots of plans are made for us to meet.
After the amazing Santos Dumont opening, Depois da Chuva remained unseen in Rio. There was talk of producing it together with two similar plays by different authors, telling the same story over again, one of them having two girls as the couple, and the other having two guys. The one about the two guys went as far as being written by my beloved friend Regina Fontenelle, who died in 1999, ended up being produced together with stuff that was not on the same level, and the show flopped. Sadly, I didn't save a copy for myself, and I really don't know what Regina's family did with her papers. So, perhaps all I'll have to remember is the play's ending, in which one of the two characters, a high-school boy, said to the other, "We go through life trying to reach for this beautiful star in which we see the stuff happiness is made of. Then we find out that of all the stars in the sky the one we want to reach is the most distant and difficult to get to. A lifetime wouldn't be enough to make even half the way." And of course I will remember how much I liked the title A Estrela Mais Distante (The Most Distant Star). As for the third play, after being commissioned to a number of different authors, it was never written.
I thought about all of them as I heard again the sound that used to come from the neighbor's apartment. Then I thought about the water snake, about the future and the uncertainty that suddenly seems to be there for me. Not the kind of thought to cheer up the first week of the year. I was now going over the list of the aria's different performances to be found on YouTube. In all the topics, the title Mon Coeur s'ouvre à ta Voix was plainly visible with the performer's name. All but one, titled simply Delilah's Aria with no mention to the artist's name. I thought this might be a case of trompe-l'oeil, but the thing is that the image from the video being used as the topic's icon picture distinctly appeared to show a guy.
I clicked on the link and my mind boggled. On a bare stage a guy was playing the piano on the left, with another guy sitting beside him to turn the pages of the music for him, and standing on the right was the somewhat self-effacing figure of a small guy dressed along the lines of the way people dressed in China at the time of Mao-Tse-Tung.
After a few bars from the piano, that guy began to sing and I immediately recognized the music and the initial words, which he uttered with unusually good pronunciation. Even so, I found it difficult to make sense of the whole thing. I thought, wait wait wait, there's too much going on here. This surely hasn't got anything to do with Mon Coeur s'ouvre à ta Voix. I mean, I knew my mind had been wandering, but I was pretty sure I hadn't had anything to do with peyote.
Then the camera zoomed into a middle shot and, as he sang the words, "Comme s'ouvrent les fleurs aux baisers de l'aurore," I didn't know anymore what startled me most: the amazing sound of his voice, the realization that he looked Chinese, the absolutely fascinating way these people had had the guts to change the aria's tempo, making it much slower, or the sheer madness running free over the whole thing.
By the end of the aria's first segment, I had frozen. My eyes didn't blink, and my mouth was literally open. I didn't know what to think, so I didn't think about anything. I just watched and listened. He looked like a child sometimes. Sometimes his face turned into a mask of tragedy. I have never, in my entire life, seen so much self-assurance, such an absolute acceptance of fate. Or maybe I have, but that would have to be on the few occasions when I was face to face with mad people, like the Italian woman who, all those years ago, used to wander around the downtown area, always in black, always with a rag doll in her hands, always staring into the air, and asking in Italian always the same question: "Where have the spirits gone?"
His voice is phenomenal. It's hard to believe, even at these times of countertenors and the like, that anyone at all could have developed such a voice. In the credits at the end of the video, he doesn't call himself a countertenor. He calls himself a mezzo. A mezzo!! Like Marilyn Horne herself, or Frederica Von Stade. Like a dragon, or an elf, or someone who inhabits a mythical place. You call yourself what you believe you are, and if you do, people will believe it too. You will become your own myth. And it will live.
Now for the famous second half, beginning with, "Ah, reponds! Reponds à ma tendresse!" If you watch other videos of this aria, you can see how some of the greatest mezzos of the 20th century are obviously calling for their deepest resources just before going into the enormous challenge of hitting the initial high note and then, unlike the pattern of soprano arias, bring it gradually down, to the bottom of their voices. In one of them, the famous Russian mezzo Elena Obraztsova visibly smiles with satisfaction, if not relief simply for having got there. And then up again, to the unbelievably high note of "Ah, verse moi---," going down again, into, "---l'îvresse."
As Stephen Chen (that's his name) got ready to go, even though I was absolutely fascinated, it crossed my mind that he might not be able to make it. The challenge was too big and I was afraid his voice would wobble. It didn't. He hit the high note perfectly and then brought it down quite effortlessly. Then he went up again and hit that incredibly high note with the kind of boldness nobody has. Nobody but children, drunkards, and mad people. I didn't know anymore what I was watching. Was this a performance of Mon Coeur s'ouvre à ta Voix or a mythical creature of some sort reminding us that nothing ever is limited by anything? Nothing!!
Between the aria's two parts, as the pianist goes about the introduction to the second part, he walks to the left side of the stage. He actually walks!! Nobody does a thing like that. You don't move around on the stage as you sing an opera aria in a recital. Well, this is supposed to be a studio, so maybe he does it for video purposes. Whatever. I'm so completely spellbound that there's no such thing as what you do or what you don't. Besides, most people would probably say you definitely don't sing Mon Coeur s'ouvre à ta Voix if you are a Chinese-looking guy with the face of a mad child.
On the left side there's a chair. He stays beside it, making you wonder if the chair was just left there. He begins the second part, which is just like the first one all over again with more intensity. As he is about to hit the highest note, probably to include the pianist in the picture, the camera gives the stage a long shot and you find out the most incredible thing. There is a live audience!! This is a performance to a live audience!! Just for singing this aria in the first place this guy is inviting comparison to legends like Maria Callas, Jessye Norman, Shirley Varrett, Marian Anderson, Regina Resnik, and Risë Stevens, not to mention Horne and Obraztsova. He sings it completely out of his natural register. He looks like a scared child who's just been rescued from the most ferocious of wars, no special lighting, no theatrical make-up, and he has the guts to go out there, face a live audience and sing an aria everybody recognizes and knows to have been written for a mezzo!!
I was feeling totally overwhelmed by this extraordinary, almost unearthly happening I had run into entirely by chance. As he finished, I couldn't help wondering what the hell that chair had been left on the stage for, like a ghost. Then he uttered a sound halfway between a whisper and a moan and sat down. As he did so, I realized there was this big lump in my throat, not in the least a common reaction for me to have to a performance, and least of all one I could only watch through the small, somewhat precarious image on a computer's screen. But there didn't seem to be limits to the way this guy kept surprising me.
A shiver went down my spine when I realized he was getting ready to go into the finale, originally written for Samson to sing, which even great singers, like Callas herself, often chose to leave out while recording the aria. Once again I held my breath, knowing that in a few seconds he was going to face the enormous challenge of sustaining, this time for longer, and with much more intensity, another unbelievably high note.
Challenges, however, didn't seem to mean anything for the frail figure sitting on that chair, looking abandoned, as if all hope had gone. As he hit the high note and sustained it quite beautifully, he stretched out his left hand, the one of the heart, as if the child he looked like were trying to reach the star in Regina's play. Then, perhaps for learning that no one can ever do it, his face turned into a perfect reproduction of a Greek mask of tragedy, as he undid the gesture, putting his fingers on his lip, lowering his head very slowly, to rest it on his right arm, over the back of the chair. The video ended. I stayed absolutely quiet for a while. I couldn't be more startled. Then I raised my hands and wiped the tears that were beginning to run down my face.
What had I just seen? Why was it meant for me to watch this video at this point? The first thing that came to my mind was something Joseph Losey once said about actors. That technique is admirable but it's not everything. Some actors are technically impeccable, but they never take your breath away, while some have the kind of fearlessness that borders on the self-destructive. They look like divers throwing themselves from an unbelievably high cliff without wanting to know if they're going to survive the fall. They don't give a damn. They just dive.
He was talking specifically about Vanessa Redgrave, but his description applies to other artists, and even to a few common people who go on their way, living common lives without ever becoming famous for any special reason. It certainly applies to one artist called Stephen Chen, whose website http://www.stephenmusic.com/ says he is originally from Singapore but has lived in Canada for many years now, and his main activity, although he has studied music very thoroughly, is photography.
There are a few comments to the video by people who talk of imperfections having to do with vibratos, intonation, being below pitch, and general inadequacy. The tone of the comments ranges from the diplomatic ("Dalila is a woman, of course, and it makes no sense for a male to sing this aria--even if you have the range") to the brutal ("Ha Ha Ha! What an embarrassing "performance?" Hey, singer, you are a guy. This is Dalila singing to Samson, not the other way around. You do not even sound right. In fact, this is disgusting").
As I said before, I'm not an opera fan. I find it boring and, most of the time, I think it's too noisy and overdone. It just isn't my kind of music. But I like isolated arias, the ones for the female voice, which I listen to as if they were songs, or lieder. For some reason I dislike tenors, whom I find laughable, even though I can see how extraordinary their achievements are. I have a number of CDs of sopranos and mezzos (definitely my favorite register) singing selected arias, but I have none of tenors (well, I have one somebody once gave my mother, who hardly ever listened to it, of good ol' Pavarotti singing stuff like bloody Sole Mio), and I have never even considered buying the recording of an entire opera (Heaven forbid!) Unlike opera buffs, I'm not equipped to go into any technical discussions. But reading the criticisms, I can't help thinking of Artaud's famous statement that madness is being different from the others. I send a comment saying:
"I'm immensely grateful for having seen this amazing video so early into the new year. As an actor, I hope I can go about my work in 2007 with one inch of Stephen Chen's unbelievable bravery, in the purest, noblest sense of that word. As a person, I hope I can face challenges with one inch of the self-assurance with which he faced his audience on that magical day in May of 2006. Bravo, Stephen!! You are an artist to cherish and a person to look up to. I hope I'm lucky enough to see you sing live some day. Before that day comes, I'll be eagerly looking forward to buying your CDs whenever they come out."
Monday, January 8th - As the days go by and this journal entry doesn't get posted because, to the despair of everybody who subscribes to it, the Internet service provider I'm using suddenly appears to be run by Jerry Lewis, or The Three Stoogies, or one of those, the year-end aura begins to disperse. As January moves ahead, I'm carried on by the usual demands, worries and tribulations of daily life (how will I get the money to pay the dentist??!!), and, inevitably, what I wrote just a few days before starts looking curiously old, as if it had been written by somebody else. But nothing ever happens without a reason. I've had more time to think about Stephen Chen's performance and the absolutely electrifying effect it had on me. I have become more prepared to look into my own symbols. The ideograms look more clear now.
On Friday, January 5th, my scene in Amazônia was aired. I had nothing to worry about. It came out quite all right. Those who didn't know what was going on when it was shot didn't notice anything. In fact it was a very good scene in which the American consul moved around with just the kind of elegance and spoke with just the kind of authority expected from this kind of character. I didn't look insecure at all, and seeing the good result on the air was very reassuring. Trouble is that, as I said before, it was the most insignificant thing I've ever done on TV in which, in a single long shot, designed to show the luxurious interior of the amazing place being used as location, the four characters in the scene were barely visible. There was another, even smaller appearance, two years ago, but in that case there would have been more to do at the end if the last three chapters hadn't been completely rewritten. Now, from the start, it really was a next-to-nothing bit part they once again got me stuck with because I'm "that actor who plays the foreign bit parts."
The irony involved is that I go to extremes, always, to do my best, nothing ever being allowed to get in the way, when in fact it doesn't matter. When you play such a small scene on TV, nobody notices if you do a good job or if you mess it up. Most people may not even notice if you have any lines at all to say or if this is an extra, briefly seen with the leads in a quick take that wouldn't be missed if for whatever reason it were edited out, the ever-so-funny joke in this case being that my name in the final credits was visible on the screen for longer than my image in the scene itself. Yes, very funny!
I can only think of one thing funnier than that. That would be if, contrary to the prognosis being persistently, and very emphatically presented to me, I ended up turning into an irreversably handicapped person no one in his right mind would hire for acting jobs of whatever size in any medium. I would stay home and wait for some musical neighbor to play a couple of CDs so that I could hear the sound coming to me through the walls, since my hand would be too shaky to handle my own CDs. If I were lucky, that sound would be the beautiful voice of a mezzo. Otherwise it would be the stentorian voice of Pavarotti, or Placido Domingo, or one of those. That would be so funny I'm afraid I might collapse on the floor from too much laughter. Then I'd have to think of a way to get up from the floor without causing the furniture to crumble down on top of me.
Tuesday, January 9th - The ideograms have indeed become more clear. It has always intrigued me that so many people, with all kinds of backgrounds, should resist so fiercely to symbols being part of human nature. Now I'm convinced the reason why I couldn't understand this bizarre attitude has to do with how amazingly simple the explanation is. I must have become suspicious of it, because that's what we all do. We always expect truth to be in the core of something tremendously complex. It cannot possibly be expressed simply, with just a couple of traces, like prehistoric art. Like saying that symbols are language in its absolutely pure state. You can deceive yourself and the others when you turn symbols into words under the pretext that there's no communication without words. But you don't deceive anyone, least of all yourself, when symbols manifest in your mind in a totally pure state.
As I said before in this freakishly long journal entry nobody around LiveJournal is going to read, it's one of my strongest beliefs that nothing ever happens without a reason. There seems to be an author behind this crazy play in which we all appear to be acting (a metaphor I'm very far from being the first one to employ--in fact I should know better than to make use of such an old shoe). Sometimes the author doesn't seem to bother about being a little more economical with deus ex machina artifices. Thus, since I'd have to wait until Jerry Lewis and The Three Stoogies finally decided to give me the honor, the pleasure, and the infinite joy of letting me post my journal entry, it was still unsent when I got a reply to my comment to Stephen Chen's YouTube video in which the same person who called his performance "disgusting" now questioned the authenticity of my comment. At one point, he/she wrote, "Can you clarify? Or are you the singer yourself?" I sent a reply saying, "No, I'm not the singer. He's a Singaporean-Canadian photographer who also sings (see his website). I'm a Brazilian actor who also does translation work (see my website). I had never heard of him before."
Now, over a week after watching his video for the first time, everything becomes more visible, and I know why Stephen Chen's performance moved me so much. In a way, I was lying in my reply to the obnoxious creature who disliked Delilah's Aria so intensely that he/she claimed to suspect I was the singer praising himself under an alias. The truth is that I am Stephen Chen. I was all the time looking into the mirror, although I know only too well that this interpretation would also be dismissed by most as an old shoe.
I've always been someone nobody recognizes as an equal, one of the gang, quite simply because I don't look like most people in my own country. I look foreign. More often than not I'm wrongly (although I prefer to say "stupidly") mistaken for the kind of foreigner whose mere being around, Brazilians tend to resent on account of historical shenanigans, not helped by the frequency and lack of elegance with which some foreign residents vilify Brazil the way they wouldn't tolerate Brazilians to do in their countries, and in one way or another I've always been ostracized for it.
I never bring it up because I'd be raising the wrath of my countryfolk who like to think of Brazil as this wonderful place where people came to live from all over the world, and there has never been such a thing as ethnic or cultural segregation. I would be accused of making a storm in a teacup, probably to get away from the real reasons for feeling ostracized. And anyway, mine is the problem of an irrelevant minority (at least in the part of Brazil where I was born and grew up). But it hurts. As a kid, people would call me "English boy," which I sort of tolerated, or "Little Lord," which made me want to throw up. Sometimes they meant it nicely. Sometimes it was obvious that they meant it in a derogatory way. As an adult, my work is permanently hampered by the fact that, as casting directors have pointed out so many times, audiences don't see their own friends, relationships, or family members in me. I'm the outsider. I might as well be a Singaporean living in Canada.
As far as acting goes, a major setback has now been added to the foreign-looking problem. I mean it when I say that I don't completely trust the exceedingly optimistic prognosis for my case. I see people with the same disease who, in spite of all the best medicine has to offer, go all the way down the hill, becoming gradually handicapped to the point where they can't work anymore. A few, like the lady (a friend of my cousin's) I first met some ten years ago, when she was going through the initial stages of the disease, can hardly talk or move around. She is now confined to a wheel-chair. This can of course be counterbalanced by the well-known examples of people like Michael J. Fox, whose story the whole world knows, or Paulo José, whose reputation as a fine actor and director is restricted to Brazil. There's a site on the Internet with a long list of famous people of many different areas with the same disease. Not very cheerful. I've seen it once, but I don't want to look at it again.
Oddly, I'm more confident about controlling the tremor and keeping the body in shape than I am about preventing my speech ability from deteriorating. In my case, the speech impairment that often comes with the disease would be fatal. I wouldn't be able to act or teach anymore. At this point in my life, I would have to start doing something else in which I wouldn't have to talk. I think about it and it makes me feel as if I were suffocating. That's what I mean when I say that I've never been so scared. It doesn't help that I feel guilty for not having started the singing lessons yet I was told I must take, or the practise of singing three songs in a row every day/other day, to be chosen among the ones that will force my voice up and down and make me sustain some difficult notes (stuff like Ol’ Man River). This practice was emphatically recommended to me by a speech therapist who insists that people with this disease whose speech ability becomes hampered are always the ones who didn't fight back. Trouble is that singing lessons cost money, and I'll be able to pay for them only in February when I finish paying something else. Meanwhile, the good news is that so far my speech ability hasn't been affected.
Clinical details, however, are totally irrelevant. This is like a war. It doesn't matter whether the enemy attacked in such and such a style of military strategy, how many soldiers came on, or if the bombs fell late in the night or early in the evening. The scourge is the same. It's time for me to face this disease and whatever comes with it. It was written that way in my own private play and I can't change it. Nobody can. I may face it with courage or fear, but I must face it. I don't care if using this kind of symbolism would be dismissed by many as a cheap artifice. It makes me see more clearly what is there for me now.
A live audience expects me to go on the stage and sing. I must face it. A chair appears to have been left there for no reason, like a ghost. The music begins. Now I must sing my aria. People will say it doesn’t make sense for me to sing it, never mind if I have the range. Some will say I don’t even sound right, not anymore, and call it disgusting. I won’t be singing for them. I’ll be singing for the others, the ones in whom I’ve seen myself. I’ll be singing for the Italian woman, forever asking, “Dove stanno gli spiriti?” I'll be singing completely out of my voice's natural register. It’s all right, I can do it. From the beginning, long before the scourge came on, I was made to feel as if I were singing out of my voice’s natural register. I had to fight hard to be one of the gang. This won’t be different. It may be even easier. Or perhaps more difficult. It doesn’t matter. The tempo will have been altered. Everything will appear to have slowed down. People will look as if they were being observed from the open sea. Very slowly I will take the challenge of hitting the initial high note and bring it gradually down, to the bottom of my voice. Then I'll go up again to the frightfully high note making it plain that mine is a long and difficult way down the scale. People will fear for me, expecting my voice to wobble. But I will make it. The water snake will lead me and I will be grateful to it. I will feel safer knowing that it will be there for me, leading my way through any difficult-to-shoot scenes. The rain outside will make me believe I can go on being what I’ve always been, doing the things I’ve always done. I will go on calling myself a working actor. You call yourself what you believe you are and people will believe it too. For better or for worse, you become your own myth, a dragon, an elf, or someone from a mythical place, and it lives on. As I approach the end, I will walk on the stage, even though I know you don’t move around as you sing an opera aria in a recital. I will get close to the ghost chair and hit that high note again with more intensity. I will have gone up and down the scale so many times that disasters, big or small, won’t matter anymore. I will sit down knowing that the time has come for the finale so many singers in the past have chosen to leave out. I will sing it. I’ll stretch out my left hand, the one of the heart, and think about how much it has always impressed me that truly great authors could sometimes catch in a few words, which they used as a title, the essence of what they were meant to see along their own crazy journey around the sun. I will think of Regina and The Most Distant Star. I will surely think of Paul Auster and his Dream Days at the Hotel Existence. Then I will think of Leonard Woolf and how The Journey, Not the Arrival, Matters.
Wednesday, January 10th - I got the money for the dentist.
Thursday, January 12th - It seems that Jerry Lewis and The Three Stoogies are having the time of their lives. There's no way I can post to LiveJournal. If I try, I keep getting that famous "Page not found" message. It's ridiculous to write a journal entry over a period of almost 10 days without being able to post it. The thing starts looking like one of those monsters in old Japanese sci-fi movies who, on account of radiation or some such shit, began to grow non-stop until the point where they had become bigger than skyscrapers and got out of control. My online journal is full of such entries. It's a mess. I should save the text to a diskette and go to a cybercafe, with a different ISP. Then, if the angels say "Amen," perhaps this freak will finally get posted.
Friday, January 13th - I went to the cybercafe, but couldn't post the entry. The goddamn place didn't have Word, which is beyond my comprehension, and, brave though they were, all attempts to get the text transferred to another, similar system failed most miserably. (Heck! "Brave though they were??!!" I'll be damned if this is the kind of English I wanted to write when I started out being someone who writes in English at all!! That's what happens when so long after writing the stuff you can't post a simple journal entry. It becomes Victorian!!) I had to come back to the beginning and go on trying to cajole João's computer into letting me send my entry. I'm beginning to feel like Charlie Brown trying to fly a kite.
On my way to the cybercafe, I dropped by the dentist's and paid the bill. Now I must think about the money I need for new contacts, the old ones dating back to the time when Napoleon invaded Spain causing the Portuguese kingo to run away with the missus and their court to the land that God forgot, aka Brazil. In fact, I’ve been wearing them for so alarmingly long that the right eye’s got this peculiar resemblance to vanilla gelatine and I had to throw it out. Since then, I’ve been either wearing glasses, or, especially when I’m doing stuff for TV, seeing the world through my left eye only, like a one-eyed pirate.
Saturday, January 14th - After a long and difficult evening, during which bitter things were said that hurt me very deeply, I feel that I'm going to sleep very soundly during the night. That's exactly what happens. The rain outside and the cool weather make me sleep like a child. I have two dreams. The first one is too confused and I can't remember it very well. I'm in Switzerland, of all places, visiting my paternal grandmother who actually had nothing whatsoever to do with Switzerland (I suspect she hardly ever thought about Switzerland). More dream non-sense: this is now, which means my grandmother, who died at 88, has lived to be 113!! Not only that, but she doesn't look like my grandmother at all. She looks like a total stranger. A plumpish Swiss lady with a congenial face who seems to be happy to see me, although I suspect she doesn't understand me in the least. I give her a big hug and say, almost like a whisper, to her ears, "He and I didn't live together when I was growing up, but my father was a wonderful father. When I embrace you, I feel as if I were embracing him. You have the same scent, especially your hair. And it soothes me."
Later on in the same night I wake up very thirsty, my mouth very dry (a common side effect of one of the drugs I’m taking), and I go to the kitchen to get myself some water. Back to bed, I fall asleep again very easily. But just before drifting off, totally out of the blue, I think about Stephen Chen's photography, especially the black-and-white pictures which I've seen on his webpage, and how beautiful they are. The last thing I think about is how perfect it is for the same person to be so talented as a musician and a photographer. I don't quite understand why, nor do I want to, but I think there is poetic justice in such a combination of talents. I hope he goes on being both. I hope he never gives one of them up for the other.
Then I fall asleep and have the second dream: I'm alone in a darkened room, perhaps my own bedroom, trying to remember something Krishna says to Arjuna in the Bhagavad Gita. Although it caused a tremendous impression on me when I first read it, as if an extraordinary light had flashed in front of me, and I've said many times that I think it contains the essence of the entire Gita, I can't remember it. It doesn't make sense! It's one of the most famous quotes from the book. It's like forgetting the words "the Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want," of Psalm 23. I get very upset. I keep very quiet and try to concentrate. It doesn't work. I just can't remember the words. Suddenly, as if it were somebody else's, I hear my own voice saying in the dark, "There was never a time when I did not exist, nor you. Nor the others. Nor will there be any future in which we shall cease to be."
I'm having trouble with my computer. It's working badly. Since my work involves research, and I must access all sorts of things on the web, it must be viruses. A guy is coming today to see what's happening. He charges a lot of money but he's good. In the meantime, I've been trying to empty the computer's HD by getting rid of stuff I decidedly don't need anymore. That's how I ran into the original text of an eerie LiveJournal entry from January of 2007. I was taken aback to imagine myself writing it. I had forgotten all about having once been in such a state of mind (I didn't even remember having been in bloody Amazônia!)
I believe the almost eight years that have gone by must have turned me into someone who would never react to the events in question in such a dramatic way. That isn't me. And yet, there I am, talking like the male version of Sarah Bernhardt, or Isadora Duncan, or one of those. How utterly ridiculous. But then ... how utterly fascinating it is to think that journal entries can slip from the memory the way dreams do when you wake up. I wonder what would happen if dreams could be saved to a computer's memory. Anyway, here's the (disgustingly long) entry ...
Thursday, January 4th, 2007 - These have been difficult times for me, more so than any other time I can remember. When this crisis began, I wrote about being haunted by a recurrent question, "What was there for me once, what is there for me now?" I still don't know the answer. Or maybe I do but am too scared to face it. When I finished high school, I went on to study acting, and a bit later, as my father had asked me to not long before he died, I went to university and graduated as a teacher. I didn't realize then that I was taking up not only one but two professions that required absolute physical plenitude. I was unbelievably young (gosh, how can you ever be so young?) and the idea had never crossed my mind that the concept of finitude had to do not only with small little things like mountains, when they erode, rivers, when they run dry, or even stars, when they burn out, but was equally related to this frail, surprisingly ephemeral body we're given at the beginning to go again and again on a crazy journey around the sun.
Like anyone else at that age, I thought of myself as indestructible. Life had to do with eternity, just like the never-ending summer, when I had the days all for myself and became one with the waves as I dived under them before they broke, and swam away to the open sea to look at the beach from afar and marvel at how tiny people looked from that perspective. Or the time I spent with my grandfather at his property in Miguel Pereira, a place in the mountains near Rio, where I had a horse. I would ride it for hours, imagining that I was entering the woods for the first time and had become one with the trees, the mountains, the two lakes down there, the stream that connected them, and the horse itself, and could so easily feel that I had got in touch with limitlessness. Time became a very vague concept and finitude a non-applicable word. I certainly didn't think about neurological diseases suddenly making you so scared of a rhetorical question like, "What is there for me now?"
No more horses, no more swimming in the open sea. All I can ride now is my bike, along the bikelane with the others. As for swimming, it's restricted to a club's swimming pool, under the careful watch of a lifeguard. In fact I must do both things. As my neurologist told me, biking, which I’ve always done anyway, is a much needed exercise to keep my legs, especially the right one, in shape. And methodical swimming under the supervision of a coach is mandatory for anyone at such an early stage of the disease. Along with the drugs it prevents, or so I'm being led to believe, its development into a more serious stage. I must take their word for it. There's nothing else I can do. But I'm very scared. I know what was there for me once. I've been writing about it since I began the paper version of this journal, which I wrote in Portuguese. But I have no idea what is there for me now.
In October, when I had just begun taking the two drugs I now completely depend on, I made an appearance (as the American consul in the Amazon, early in the 20th century) in TV Globo's big epic mini-series Amazônia. It was raining when I went to the 19th century palace, now a museum, for location work. I was not feeling well that day. In its early stage, the treatment was expected to cause a reaction of ups and downs, with moments in which I would appear to be much worse. I had been warned about it, and that happened to be one of the bad days. My right arm was shaking beyond control, and the spastic tremor of the right hand was plainly visible to anyone. When the time came for me to do my stuff (a key scene with the leading character, essential to the understanding of the historical background of the whole story), I nearly panicked to think that I might not be able to do it. As the director gave me his instructions, I once again felt as hopeless as a lost child. I kept my hand closed very tightly in the pocket of the rather heavy period coat I was wearing, so that no one would notice anything. But in a moment I would have to take it out and play the goddamn scene.
Luckily, I had been taught a Chinese exercise, having to do with principles that can also be related to the yoga concept of mudra through which the hand (and, as far as possible, the whole arm) is moved in the air as if it were a snake in the water, the hand being the snake's head. Somehow it manages to deceive the brain into recognizing the tremor as part of the movements of the snake in the water. Once the snake gets gradually motionless, the brain "reads" this motionlessness as being the end of the process that had begun with the tremor. And it stops. Also, if somebody observes you, it looks like a physio-therapeutic exercise of some kind, or perhaps like a little eccentricity, like that thing Leo DiCaprio did all the time with two fingers of his right hand when he played the mentally handicapped boy in What's Eating Gilbert Grape. It doesn't look like a neurological problem. On a bad day, the effect doesn't last very long, but long enough to halt the tremor for a while, which is what I needed.
I felt miserable and wanted to cry. But I didn't. I looked through the window at the blessed rain outside and, in a moment, in my mind, I was quietly going over the old Stanislavskian notion every single actor learns at drama school, that any kind of physical idiosyncrasy you may have can be incorporated into the character you're playing. "Action" was shouted and, as the somewhat sinister American consul took in his hands the leather folder containing the document that was up to him to approve or reject, his whole attitude to this rather tense meeting with representatives of the Brazilian government became even more threatening as he took his right hand away from the folder and started to move his fingers around it in such a bizarre way.
It worked. The director, who on account of the rain was running behind schedule, was as happy as a kid for this not-so-easy-to-shoot scene (too many technical problems, especially with sound) to have come out OK after just the third go. I don't remember having got so many compliments and thank you's for such a small scene. On Tuesday, as the mini-series went on the air, I watched chapter one, the exquisitely photographed scenes of workers travelling by boat on the Amazon river, and had mixed feelings about it. I'm happy for being on the show (even though it's one of the most insignificant parts I've ever played), and I'm looking forward to watching my next-to-nothing of a scene on Friday. But for how long will I be able to do this kind of job?
The water snake and how it helped me out of trouble while doing my work may sound like a good story to tell, but it isn't. In fact, it very dangerously invites being interpreted as self-praise, bordering on vanity, the kind of attachment that hampers any movements towards growth. The only way to justify it is by pointing out that it shows how frail and vulnerable I have been feeling since I came down with this disease. The water snake has become a major character in my own private tragedy, and I find it very difficult to cope with.
Feeling so completely lost scares me. I've been acting brave, and aloof. I've been going about the usual things, talking about the usual plans, even goofing about the same old stuff, but I don't fool myself when I'm all alone in my bedroom, listening to music in the dark, or just thinking. I'm terrified of being led by a water snake whose head comes out of my right hand to a place not only I had never been to, but didn't even know about, because it's never been on any map I could read. The year-end made me more scared than ever. What awaits me? Will I be able to go on doing the kind of work I've always done? How? By letting the water snake lead the way? For how long? What if I'm faced with the reality that I'm planning to go on doing things I'm no longer equipped for? How can I compete with the others, those who don't need a water snake to lead them the way dogs lead the blind? And what will I do if I can't do my work?
Thinking about these things got me depressed, not a good combination with being so scared. Then it happened. After finally sending replies to the many new year messages I had got, I started playing around on the Internet, which I can't do at home, where I still don't have Internet access (I'm at my aunt's, using João's computer). I had been thinking about searching for this and that on YouTube when I ran into a list of performances of Mon Coeur s'ouvre à ta Voix, the highlight of Saint-Saëns's famous opera Samson et Dalila. This aria, although I've never been an opera fan, brings back many memories. The only time I ever tried myself as an author (there was a second time, but it was an adaptation) was when I wrote and acted in a two-character one-act play called Depois da Chuva (After the Rain). It was about a young man and a young woman who had been married when they were just a pair of kids, had separated, and now meet by accident at the bar both had run into to wait for the rain to diminish outside.
As they try to sustain a feeble conversation, a line, or simply a word they say keeps throwing them into a flashback to the time when they lived together. The flashbacks have no chronological order. The only link is the music coming through the walls of the connecting apartment where, again and again, an invisible opera-loving neighbor listens to Mon Coeur s'ouvre à ta Voix. The two characters' consuming passion, their incredible happiness, their perplexity at finding out that life is quietly putting them apart, the way they're hurt by the discovery that they have become too different from their former selves, and the final break up, everything in the flashbacks is paced by segments of the aria. Then the rain stops and they get ready to leave the bar. As they say goodbye, a radio program starts airing Mon Coeur s'ouvre à ta Voix. Only this time, the aria is heard in a different recording, with a different singer and a different orchestra.
The play had a public reading in Rio, the response was good, and it was produced as part of a show called Trilogia (Trilogy), one of the other two being God, a very funny play by Woody Allen. I played the young man, an incredibly gifted girl called Blanca Queiroga played the young woman, my friend Carlos Fariello directed (it was his, absolutely brilliant idea to have a different recording for the ending at the bar, when the long lost aria invaded the two characters' present, but, like them, it had changed), and we opened in Santos Dumont, a small town in the state of Minas Gerais, some six hours by car from Rio, to a packed house who laughed and cried with the same intensity and kept applauding at the end of every single flashback scene. Then the ending came on. While saying goodbye, the guy and the girl started talking about their old apartment. Suddenly, their lines overlapping, they went into, "It was so good," "So good," "So--," "good. So--," "good--," "good--," "good--", as an obviously different recording of the aria was heard, its volume raising to the point of making the two actors inaudible, and the light faded.
During rehearsals we felt that the music covering the dialogue at the end had been a good idea. But none of us expected the music to be covered by something else. On the opening night, as soon as the two characters began to overlap their lines, even before the aria could be recognized, there was this thunderous, absolutely wonderful sound of applause that, rather than diminishing the way the rain was supposed to have done outside the bar in the play itself, grew into a standing ovation that made us all, cast and crew, cry like kids.
Once again I can imagine people dismissing these memories as nothing but self-praise and vanity. Actors' vanity, to be more precise, which is generally thought to be the worst kind. Too bad. Yesterday, as I played around on YouTube, they came to me like a compensatory dream, memories of a time when water snakes remained in the rivers and ponds where they are supposed to. They didn't become a part of you, leading you out of the embarrassment of seeing in their faces how shocked people are at realizing that you have become a handicapped person.
While searching for Mon Coeur s'ouvre à ta Voix I found an amazing video of Marlilyn Horne, the aria's most celebrated performer to date, whose endlessly moving rendition we used in the flashbacks (for the ending, at the bar, an obviously old, scratched, and rather precarious 78 rpm recording was unearthed, with the voice of an old-time mezzo named Ebe Stignani as if, like the two leads' early youth, the aria their neighbor used to play all the time now sounded like a thing of the past). Music has that strange power of making you fly back to a time that seemed to have been locked away from you. It opens the gates.
Images came back to my mind of Blanca and me in the packed subway, coming back from rehearsals, she to her apartment on an incredibly quiet street in Flamengo, and I to mine, in Botafogo, where I lived for twelve years. As soon as we got on the train, we started saying the play's most intimate lines, a series of double entendres the two characters threw at each other which, once out of context, became suspicious of being more sexual than would be appropriate for the subway at peak hours. We did it as a crazy exercise. Would people around us suspect these were learned lines, or would they sound spontaneous? Most times we managed to make them sound natural, which could be easily measured by the indignation in people's faces. Sometimes we cracked up laughing and had to rush off to wait for the next train to the relief of Cristina, the girl who lived with Blanca and was acting as assistant director, whose sense of propiety, whenever we started doing it, made her blush till her face was as red as a tomato. It was so funny!
This was all in 1987. Twenty years later, quite a few things didn't turn out as expected (yeah, I can hear the voices: "Tell me something I don't know"). In spite of the delicacy of her work, Blanca didn't get anywhere as an actress. After personal problems of the kind nobody wants to handle away from home, she went back to the south of Brazil, where she is from, and for many years I had no news of her. Now I hear she's all right and trying to get going as a singer. I don't know whatever happened to the adorable Cristina whom everybody liked so much to have around.
Carlos Fariello was involved in an appalling car accident that left him permanently handicapped. He now lives in São Paulo, his native town, where his family can be around for him. He and I exchange e-mails in which lots of plans are made for us to meet.
After the amazing Santos Dumont opening, Depois da Chuva remained unseen in Rio. There was talk of producing it together with two similar plays by different authors, telling the same story over again, one of them having two girls as the couple, and the other having two guys. The one about the two guys went as far as being written by my beloved friend Regina Fontenelle, who died in 1999, ended up being produced together with stuff that was not on the same level, and the show flopped. Sadly, I didn't save a copy for myself, and I really don't know what Regina's family did with her papers. So, perhaps all I'll have to remember is the play's ending, in which one of the two characters, a high-school boy, said to the other, "We go through life trying to reach for this beautiful star in which we see the stuff happiness is made of. Then we find out that of all the stars in the sky the one we want to reach is the most distant and difficult to get to. A lifetime wouldn't be enough to make even half the way." And of course I will remember how much I liked the title A Estrela Mais Distante (The Most Distant Star). As for the third play, after being commissioned to a number of different authors, it was never written.
I thought about all of them as I heard again the sound that used to come from the neighbor's apartment. Then I thought about the water snake, about the future and the uncertainty that suddenly seems to be there for me. Not the kind of thought to cheer up the first week of the year. I was now going over the list of the aria's different performances to be found on YouTube. In all the topics, the title Mon Coeur s'ouvre à ta Voix was plainly visible with the performer's name. All but one, titled simply Delilah's Aria with no mention to the artist's name. I thought this might be a case of trompe-l'oeil, but the thing is that the image from the video being used as the topic's icon picture distinctly appeared to show a guy.
I clicked on the link and my mind boggled. On a bare stage a guy was playing the piano on the left, with another guy sitting beside him to turn the pages of the music for him, and standing on the right was the somewhat self-effacing figure of a small guy dressed along the lines of the way people dressed in China at the time of Mao-Tse-Tung.
After a few bars from the piano, that guy began to sing and I immediately recognized the music and the initial words, which he uttered with unusually good pronunciation. Even so, I found it difficult to make sense of the whole thing. I thought, wait wait wait, there's too much going on here. This surely hasn't got anything to do with Mon Coeur s'ouvre à ta Voix. I mean, I knew my mind had been wandering, but I was pretty sure I hadn't had anything to do with peyote.
Then the camera zoomed into a middle shot and, as he sang the words, "Comme s'ouvrent les fleurs aux baisers de l'aurore," I didn't know anymore what startled me most: the amazing sound of his voice, the realization that he looked Chinese, the absolutely fascinating way these people had had the guts to change the aria's tempo, making it much slower, or the sheer madness running free over the whole thing.
By the end of the aria's first segment, I had frozen. My eyes didn't blink, and my mouth was literally open. I didn't know what to think, so I didn't think about anything. I just watched and listened. He looked like a child sometimes. Sometimes his face turned into a mask of tragedy. I have never, in my entire life, seen so much self-assurance, such an absolute acceptance of fate. Or maybe I have, but that would have to be on the few occasions when I was face to face with mad people, like the Italian woman who, all those years ago, used to wander around the downtown area, always in black, always with a rag doll in her hands, always staring into the air, and asking in Italian always the same question: "Where have the spirits gone?"
His voice is phenomenal. It's hard to believe, even at these times of countertenors and the like, that anyone at all could have developed such a voice. In the credits at the end of the video, he doesn't call himself a countertenor. He calls himself a mezzo. A mezzo!! Like Marilyn Horne herself, or Frederica Von Stade. Like a dragon, or an elf, or someone who inhabits a mythical place. You call yourself what you believe you are, and if you do, people will believe it too. You will become your own myth. And it will live.
Now for the famous second half, beginning with, "Ah, reponds! Reponds à ma tendresse!" If you watch other videos of this aria, you can see how some of the greatest mezzos of the 20th century are obviously calling for their deepest resources just before going into the enormous challenge of hitting the initial high note and then, unlike the pattern of soprano arias, bring it gradually down, to the bottom of their voices. In one of them, the famous Russian mezzo Elena Obraztsova visibly smiles with satisfaction, if not relief simply for having got there. And then up again, to the unbelievably high note of "Ah, verse moi---," going down again, into, "---l'îvresse."
As Stephen Chen (that's his name) got ready to go, even though I was absolutely fascinated, it crossed my mind that he might not be able to make it. The challenge was too big and I was afraid his voice would wobble. It didn't. He hit the high note perfectly and then brought it down quite effortlessly. Then he went up again and hit that incredibly high note with the kind of boldness nobody has. Nobody but children, drunkards, and mad people. I didn't know anymore what I was watching. Was this a performance of Mon Coeur s'ouvre à ta Voix or a mythical creature of some sort reminding us that nothing ever is limited by anything? Nothing!!
Between the aria's two parts, as the pianist goes about the introduction to the second part, he walks to the left side of the stage. He actually walks!! Nobody does a thing like that. You don't move around on the stage as you sing an opera aria in a recital. Well, this is supposed to be a studio, so maybe he does it for video purposes. Whatever. I'm so completely spellbound that there's no such thing as what you do or what you don't. Besides, most people would probably say you definitely don't sing Mon Coeur s'ouvre à ta Voix if you are a Chinese-looking guy with the face of a mad child.
On the left side there's a chair. He stays beside it, making you wonder if the chair was just left there. He begins the second part, which is just like the first one all over again with more intensity. As he is about to hit the highest note, probably to include the pianist in the picture, the camera gives the stage a long shot and you find out the most incredible thing. There is a live audience!! This is a performance to a live audience!! Just for singing this aria in the first place this guy is inviting comparison to legends like Maria Callas, Jessye Norman, Shirley Varrett, Marian Anderson, Regina Resnik, and Risë Stevens, not to mention Horne and Obraztsova. He sings it completely out of his natural register. He looks like a scared child who's just been rescued from the most ferocious of wars, no special lighting, no theatrical make-up, and he has the guts to go out there, face a live audience and sing an aria everybody recognizes and knows to have been written for a mezzo!!
I was feeling totally overwhelmed by this extraordinary, almost unearthly happening I had run into entirely by chance. As he finished, I couldn't help wondering what the hell that chair had been left on the stage for, like a ghost. Then he uttered a sound halfway between a whisper and a moan and sat down. As he did so, I realized there was this big lump in my throat, not in the least a common reaction for me to have to a performance, and least of all one I could only watch through the small, somewhat precarious image on a computer's screen. But there didn't seem to be limits to the way this guy kept surprising me.
A shiver went down my spine when I realized he was getting ready to go into the finale, originally written for Samson to sing, which even great singers, like Callas herself, often chose to leave out while recording the aria. Once again I held my breath, knowing that in a few seconds he was going to face the enormous challenge of sustaining, this time for longer, and with much more intensity, another unbelievably high note.
Challenges, however, didn't seem to mean anything for the frail figure sitting on that chair, looking abandoned, as if all hope had gone. As he hit the high note and sustained it quite beautifully, he stretched out his left hand, the one of the heart, as if the child he looked like were trying to reach the star in Regina's play. Then, perhaps for learning that no one can ever do it, his face turned into a perfect reproduction of a Greek mask of tragedy, as he undid the gesture, putting his fingers on his lip, lowering his head very slowly, to rest it on his right arm, over the back of the chair. The video ended. I stayed absolutely quiet for a while. I couldn't be more startled. Then I raised my hands and wiped the tears that were beginning to run down my face.
What had I just seen? Why was it meant for me to watch this video at this point? The first thing that came to my mind was something Joseph Losey once said about actors. That technique is admirable but it's not everything. Some actors are technically impeccable, but they never take your breath away, while some have the kind of fearlessness that borders on the self-destructive. They look like divers throwing themselves from an unbelievably high cliff without wanting to know if they're going to survive the fall. They don't give a damn. They just dive.
He was talking specifically about Vanessa Redgrave, but his description applies to other artists, and even to a few common people who go on their way, living common lives without ever becoming famous for any special reason. It certainly applies to one artist called Stephen Chen, whose website http://www.stephenmusic.com/ says he is originally from Singapore but has lived in Canada for many years now, and his main activity, although he has studied music very thoroughly, is photography.
There are a few comments to the video by people who talk of imperfections having to do with vibratos, intonation, being below pitch, and general inadequacy. The tone of the comments ranges from the diplomatic ("Dalila is a woman, of course, and it makes no sense for a male to sing this aria--even if you have the range") to the brutal ("Ha Ha Ha! What an embarrassing "performance?" Hey, singer, you are a guy. This is Dalila singing to Samson, not the other way around. You do not even sound right. In fact, this is disgusting").
As I said before, I'm not an opera fan. I find it boring and, most of the time, I think it's too noisy and overdone. It just isn't my kind of music. But I like isolated arias, the ones for the female voice, which I listen to as if they were songs, or lieder. For some reason I dislike tenors, whom I find laughable, even though I can see how extraordinary their achievements are. I have a number of CDs of sopranos and mezzos (definitely my favorite register) singing selected arias, but I have none of tenors (well, I have one somebody once gave my mother, who hardly ever listened to it, of good ol' Pavarotti singing stuff like bloody Sole Mio), and I have never even considered buying the recording of an entire opera (Heaven forbid!) Unlike opera buffs, I'm not equipped to go into any technical discussions. But reading the criticisms, I can't help thinking of Artaud's famous statement that madness is being different from the others. I send a comment saying:
"I'm immensely grateful for having seen this amazing video so early into the new year. As an actor, I hope I can go about my work in 2007 with one inch of Stephen Chen's unbelievable bravery, in the purest, noblest sense of that word. As a person, I hope I can face challenges with one inch of the self-assurance with which he faced his audience on that magical day in May of 2006. Bravo, Stephen!! You are an artist to cherish and a person to look up to. I hope I'm lucky enough to see you sing live some day. Before that day comes, I'll be eagerly looking forward to buying your CDs whenever they come out."
Monday, January 8th - As the days go by and this journal entry doesn't get posted because, to the despair of everybody who subscribes to it, the Internet service provider I'm using suddenly appears to be run by Jerry Lewis, or The Three Stoogies, or one of those, the year-end aura begins to disperse. As January moves ahead, I'm carried on by the usual demands, worries and tribulations of daily life (how will I get the money to pay the dentist??!!), and, inevitably, what I wrote just a few days before starts looking curiously old, as if it had been written by somebody else. But nothing ever happens without a reason. I've had more time to think about Stephen Chen's performance and the absolutely electrifying effect it had on me. I have become more prepared to look into my own symbols. The ideograms look more clear now.
On Friday, January 5th, my scene in Amazônia was aired. I had nothing to worry about. It came out quite all right. Those who didn't know what was going on when it was shot didn't notice anything. In fact it was a very good scene in which the American consul moved around with just the kind of elegance and spoke with just the kind of authority expected from this kind of character. I didn't look insecure at all, and seeing the good result on the air was very reassuring. Trouble is that, as I said before, it was the most insignificant thing I've ever done on TV in which, in a single long shot, designed to show the luxurious interior of the amazing place being used as location, the four characters in the scene were barely visible. There was another, even smaller appearance, two years ago, but in that case there would have been more to do at the end if the last three chapters hadn't been completely rewritten. Now, from the start, it really was a next-to-nothing bit part they once again got me stuck with because I'm "that actor who plays the foreign bit parts."
The irony involved is that I go to extremes, always, to do my best, nothing ever being allowed to get in the way, when in fact it doesn't matter. When you play such a small scene on TV, nobody notices if you do a good job or if you mess it up. Most people may not even notice if you have any lines at all to say or if this is an extra, briefly seen with the leads in a quick take that wouldn't be missed if for whatever reason it were edited out, the ever-so-funny joke in this case being that my name in the final credits was visible on the screen for longer than my image in the scene itself. Yes, very funny!
I can only think of one thing funnier than that. That would be if, contrary to the prognosis being persistently, and very emphatically presented to me, I ended up turning into an irreversably handicapped person no one in his right mind would hire for acting jobs of whatever size in any medium. I would stay home and wait for some musical neighbor to play a couple of CDs so that I could hear the sound coming to me through the walls, since my hand would be too shaky to handle my own CDs. If I were lucky, that sound would be the beautiful voice of a mezzo. Otherwise it would be the stentorian voice of Pavarotti, or Placido Domingo, or one of those. That would be so funny I'm afraid I might collapse on the floor from too much laughter. Then I'd have to think of a way to get up from the floor without causing the furniture to crumble down on top of me.
Tuesday, January 9th - The ideograms have indeed become more clear. It has always intrigued me that so many people, with all kinds of backgrounds, should resist so fiercely to symbols being part of human nature. Now I'm convinced the reason why I couldn't understand this bizarre attitude has to do with how amazingly simple the explanation is. I must have become suspicious of it, because that's what we all do. We always expect truth to be in the core of something tremendously complex. It cannot possibly be expressed simply, with just a couple of traces, like prehistoric art. Like saying that symbols are language in its absolutely pure state. You can deceive yourself and the others when you turn symbols into words under the pretext that there's no communication without words. But you don't deceive anyone, least of all yourself, when symbols manifest in your mind in a totally pure state.
As I said before in this freakishly long journal entry nobody around LiveJournal is going to read, it's one of my strongest beliefs that nothing ever happens without a reason. There seems to be an author behind this crazy play in which we all appear to be acting (a metaphor I'm very far from being the first one to employ--in fact I should know better than to make use of such an old shoe). Sometimes the author doesn't seem to bother about being a little more economical with deus ex machina artifices. Thus, since I'd have to wait until Jerry Lewis and The Three Stoogies finally decided to give me the honor, the pleasure, and the infinite joy of letting me post my journal entry, it was still unsent when I got a reply to my comment to Stephen Chen's YouTube video in which the same person who called his performance "disgusting" now questioned the authenticity of my comment. At one point, he/she wrote, "Can you clarify? Or are you the singer yourself?" I sent a reply saying, "No, I'm not the singer. He's a Singaporean-Canadian photographer who also sings (see his website). I'm a Brazilian actor who also does translation work (see my website). I had never heard of him before."
Now, over a week after watching his video for the first time, everything becomes more visible, and I know why Stephen Chen's performance moved me so much. In a way, I was lying in my reply to the obnoxious creature who disliked Delilah's Aria so intensely that he/she claimed to suspect I was the singer praising himself under an alias. The truth is that I am Stephen Chen. I was all the time looking into the mirror, although I know only too well that this interpretation would also be dismissed by most as an old shoe.
I've always been someone nobody recognizes as an equal, one of the gang, quite simply because I don't look like most people in my own country. I look foreign. More often than not I'm wrongly (although I prefer to say "stupidly") mistaken for the kind of foreigner whose mere being around, Brazilians tend to resent on account of historical shenanigans, not helped by the frequency and lack of elegance with which some foreign residents vilify Brazil the way they wouldn't tolerate Brazilians to do in their countries, and in one way or another I've always been ostracized for it.
I never bring it up because I'd be raising the wrath of my countryfolk who like to think of Brazil as this wonderful place where people came to live from all over the world, and there has never been such a thing as ethnic or cultural segregation. I would be accused of making a storm in a teacup, probably to get away from the real reasons for feeling ostracized. And anyway, mine is the problem of an irrelevant minority (at least in the part of Brazil where I was born and grew up). But it hurts. As a kid, people would call me "English boy," which I sort of tolerated, or "Little Lord," which made me want to throw up. Sometimes they meant it nicely. Sometimes it was obvious that they meant it in a derogatory way. As an adult, my work is permanently hampered by the fact that, as casting directors have pointed out so many times, audiences don't see their own friends, relationships, or family members in me. I'm the outsider. I might as well be a Singaporean living in Canada.
As far as acting goes, a major setback has now been added to the foreign-looking problem. I mean it when I say that I don't completely trust the exceedingly optimistic prognosis for my case. I see people with the same disease who, in spite of all the best medicine has to offer, go all the way down the hill, becoming gradually handicapped to the point where they can't work anymore. A few, like the lady (a friend of my cousin's) I first met some ten years ago, when she was going through the initial stages of the disease, can hardly talk or move around. She is now confined to a wheel-chair. This can of course be counterbalanced by the well-known examples of people like Michael J. Fox, whose story the whole world knows, or Paulo José, whose reputation as a fine actor and director is restricted to Brazil. There's a site on the Internet with a long list of famous people of many different areas with the same disease. Not very cheerful. I've seen it once, but I don't want to look at it again.
Oddly, I'm more confident about controlling the tremor and keeping the body in shape than I am about preventing my speech ability from deteriorating. In my case, the speech impairment that often comes with the disease would be fatal. I wouldn't be able to act or teach anymore. At this point in my life, I would have to start doing something else in which I wouldn't have to talk. I think about it and it makes me feel as if I were suffocating. That's what I mean when I say that I've never been so scared. It doesn't help that I feel guilty for not having started the singing lessons yet I was told I must take, or the practise of singing three songs in a row every day/other day, to be chosen among the ones that will force my voice up and down and make me sustain some difficult notes (stuff like Ol’ Man River). This practice was emphatically recommended to me by a speech therapist who insists that people with this disease whose speech ability becomes hampered are always the ones who didn't fight back. Trouble is that singing lessons cost money, and I'll be able to pay for them only in February when I finish paying something else. Meanwhile, the good news is that so far my speech ability hasn't been affected.
Clinical details, however, are totally irrelevant. This is like a war. It doesn't matter whether the enemy attacked in such and such a style of military strategy, how many soldiers came on, or if the bombs fell late in the night or early in the evening. The scourge is the same. It's time for me to face this disease and whatever comes with it. It was written that way in my own private play and I can't change it. Nobody can. I may face it with courage or fear, but I must face it. I don't care if using this kind of symbolism would be dismissed by many as a cheap artifice. It makes me see more clearly what is there for me now.
A live audience expects me to go on the stage and sing. I must face it. A chair appears to have been left there for no reason, like a ghost. The music begins. Now I must sing my aria. People will say it doesn’t make sense for me to sing it, never mind if I have the range. Some will say I don’t even sound right, not anymore, and call it disgusting. I won’t be singing for them. I’ll be singing for the others, the ones in whom I’ve seen myself. I’ll be singing for the Italian woman, forever asking, “Dove stanno gli spiriti?” I'll be singing completely out of my voice's natural register. It’s all right, I can do it. From the beginning, long before the scourge came on, I was made to feel as if I were singing out of my voice’s natural register. I had to fight hard to be one of the gang. This won’t be different. It may be even easier. Or perhaps more difficult. It doesn’t matter. The tempo will have been altered. Everything will appear to have slowed down. People will look as if they were being observed from the open sea. Very slowly I will take the challenge of hitting the initial high note and bring it gradually down, to the bottom of my voice. Then I'll go up again to the frightfully high note making it plain that mine is a long and difficult way down the scale. People will fear for me, expecting my voice to wobble. But I will make it. The water snake will lead me and I will be grateful to it. I will feel safer knowing that it will be there for me, leading my way through any difficult-to-shoot scenes. The rain outside will make me believe I can go on being what I’ve always been, doing the things I’ve always done. I will go on calling myself a working actor. You call yourself what you believe you are and people will believe it too. For better or for worse, you become your own myth, a dragon, an elf, or someone from a mythical place, and it lives on. As I approach the end, I will walk on the stage, even though I know you don’t move around as you sing an opera aria in a recital. I will get close to the ghost chair and hit that high note again with more intensity. I will have gone up and down the scale so many times that disasters, big or small, won’t matter anymore. I will sit down knowing that the time has come for the finale so many singers in the past have chosen to leave out. I will sing it. I’ll stretch out my left hand, the one of the heart, and think about how much it has always impressed me that truly great authors could sometimes catch in a few words, which they used as a title, the essence of what they were meant to see along their own crazy journey around the sun. I will think of Regina and The Most Distant Star. I will surely think of Paul Auster and his Dream Days at the Hotel Existence. Then I will think of Leonard Woolf and how The Journey, Not the Arrival, Matters.
Wednesday, January 10th - I got the money for the dentist.
Thursday, January 12th - It seems that Jerry Lewis and The Three Stoogies are having the time of their lives. There's no way I can post to LiveJournal. If I try, I keep getting that famous "Page not found" message. It's ridiculous to write a journal entry over a period of almost 10 days without being able to post it. The thing starts looking like one of those monsters in old Japanese sci-fi movies who, on account of radiation or some such shit, began to grow non-stop until the point where they had become bigger than skyscrapers and got out of control. My online journal is full of such entries. It's a mess. I should save the text to a diskette and go to a cybercafe, with a different ISP. Then, if the angels say "Amen," perhaps this freak will finally get posted.
Friday, January 13th - I went to the cybercafe, but couldn't post the entry. The goddamn place didn't have Word, which is beyond my comprehension, and, brave though they were, all attempts to get the text transferred to another, similar system failed most miserably. (Heck! "Brave though they were??!!" I'll be damned if this is the kind of English I wanted to write when I started out being someone who writes in English at all!! That's what happens when so long after writing the stuff you can't post a simple journal entry. It becomes Victorian!!) I had to come back to the beginning and go on trying to cajole João's computer into letting me send my entry. I'm beginning to feel like Charlie Brown trying to fly a kite.
On my way to the cybercafe, I dropped by the dentist's and paid the bill. Now I must think about the money I need for new contacts, the old ones dating back to the time when Napoleon invaded Spain causing the Portuguese kingo to run away with the missus and their court to the land that God forgot, aka Brazil. In fact, I’ve been wearing them for so alarmingly long that the right eye’s got this peculiar resemblance to vanilla gelatine and I had to throw it out. Since then, I’ve been either wearing glasses, or, especially when I’m doing stuff for TV, seeing the world through my left eye only, like a one-eyed pirate.
Saturday, January 14th - After a long and difficult evening, during which bitter things were said that hurt me very deeply, I feel that I'm going to sleep very soundly during the night. That's exactly what happens. The rain outside and the cool weather make me sleep like a child. I have two dreams. The first one is too confused and I can't remember it very well. I'm in Switzerland, of all places, visiting my paternal grandmother who actually had nothing whatsoever to do with Switzerland (I suspect she hardly ever thought about Switzerland). More dream non-sense: this is now, which means my grandmother, who died at 88, has lived to be 113!! Not only that, but she doesn't look like my grandmother at all. She looks like a total stranger. A plumpish Swiss lady with a congenial face who seems to be happy to see me, although I suspect she doesn't understand me in the least. I give her a big hug and say, almost like a whisper, to her ears, "He and I didn't live together when I was growing up, but my father was a wonderful father. When I embrace you, I feel as if I were embracing him. You have the same scent, especially your hair. And it soothes me."
Later on in the same night I wake up very thirsty, my mouth very dry (a common side effect of one of the drugs I’m taking), and I go to the kitchen to get myself some water. Back to bed, I fall asleep again very easily. But just before drifting off, totally out of the blue, I think about Stephen Chen's photography, especially the black-and-white pictures which I've seen on his webpage, and how beautiful they are. The last thing I think about is how perfect it is for the same person to be so talented as a musician and a photographer. I don't quite understand why, nor do I want to, but I think there is poetic justice in such a combination of talents. I hope he goes on being both. I hope he never gives one of them up for the other.
Then I fall asleep and have the second dream: I'm alone in a darkened room, perhaps my own bedroom, trying to remember something Krishna says to Arjuna in the Bhagavad Gita. Although it caused a tremendous impression on me when I first read it, as if an extraordinary light had flashed in front of me, and I've said many times that I think it contains the essence of the entire Gita, I can't remember it. It doesn't make sense! It's one of the most famous quotes from the book. It's like forgetting the words "the Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want," of Psalm 23. I get very upset. I keep very quiet and try to concentrate. It doesn't work. I just can't remember the words. Suddenly, as if it were somebody else's, I hear my own voice saying in the dark, "There was never a time when I did not exist, nor you. Nor the others. Nor will there be any future in which we shall cease to be."