An Evening with Madame F
Her voice was the thing that struck most people; fluctuating, in a
somewhere-in-France accent, from conversing, friendly tones into the small,
scared voice of the young girl then down down into tired and further down
into despairing and finally hitting bottom: defeated...but then, raised up on
aircraft overhead and trains and marching sound, she rose, slowly, and sang.
But I, I was lucky enough close enough awake enough young enough alive
enough to see what the others could not, what the lights of the chapel hid in
their flourescent shadows and washed-out dust of pulpit reading lights; I saw
her eyes. An old woman's eyes, surely, the eyes of someone who has walked
through hell...or rather, been marched through it, barefoot and bleeding. I
know these observations to be false, of course; my mind says "you saw her
earlier; she is young, she is pretentious; she is theater," but, still, I could not
deny the connection, the naked emotion--hatred fear exultation despair
delightful wickedness futility loneliness--the desperation in those eyes that
cried the prostitution of art, vomited it forth on stage each night and died
each time, in order that others might....what? See it too? Hardly. Feel a
twinge, the pin point nudge of forced white American guilt? ...I cannot say---
only, perhaps, to taste the raw ecstasy of Beethoven , the pure holy sinful
dripping full mouthed kiss of Madame Butterfly or the delicate fingers of
Chopin's Eattudes, frail as the hand who composed them, to hear, to see them,
to live them, to lose yourself in their sanctity for one blessed moment...only to
have them ripped out from under you. Abrupt. Sudden. Absolute. To know
that is to know one fractioned splintered second of the lifelong agony of an
unfathomable atrocity.
I did not stay to hear their questions because I did not want to hear
my own. I did not want to know that the circles of Hell traced under her eyes
were swabbed on, the lifeless hair that fell into them a wig, or the conviction
in those eyes a conjuring, a phantom.
Erica Vess, '97
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