She hadn’t sung five minutes before they started booing. A couple of shots were fired and some of the men started muttering in loud tones.
She glanced at Captain Montgomery, saw that his eyes were scanning the crowd, one hand on his pistol, the other on his sword, ready to draw them if need be.
Maddie stopped singing. She turned and went to Frank. “Do you have the music from that new opera?”
“Carmen?”
She nodded. “Give me some of the overture and then play the ‘Habanera.’ Play it three times. Play it as though your life depended on it.”
He looked out over the crowd with an uneasy eye. “In this place it might.”
She tried to get the attention of the men to tell them the story of Carmen and about the song she was going to sing, but no one listened to her. She looked at Captain Montgomery and saw the worry on his face.
I shall show them, she thought. I shall be Carmen, the lusty girl who works in a cigarette factory.
Frank started playing some of the overture, and Maddie began to unbutton her blouse. What her singing couldn’t do her skin did. She had the attention of the first row now. And when she unpinned her hair, letting it flow down her back, she gained the attention of the next five rows.
Carmen was a mezzo soprano’s role and Maddie’s voice didn’t have quite the necessary darkness, but she had the emotion. The first words to the “Habanera” were “Love is a rebellious bird that nobody can tame, and it’s all in vain to call it if it chooses to refuse.”
As she sang the words about love being a Gypsy child, she acted them out. She swished her skirt so that her ankles in their black silk stockings were exposed. When she got to where she sang “L’amour” several times, she drew it out as seductively as she knew how.
She’d never done anything like this in her life, but as she started to sing the song for the second time, Maddie began to regret that she had never before acted like this. She could feel the captain’s eyes on her. Yesterday she’d been forward with him and he’d told her no, but the wide eyes of the men in the audience told her that none of them would tell her no.
She left the stage and went down among the men. Her blouse was open to her waist now and, as Edith had predicted, a great deal of her was coming up over the top of the bright, gaudy red satin corset. She leaned over men and sang, speaking of love, “You think you can hold it, it escapes you,” and as she did so she slid away from the men’s clutching hands.
By the third rendition of the “Habanera,” she was practically slithering around the room, from table to table. She was the promiscuous, luscio
us Carmen and she could entice any man in the world—but they couldn’t have her.
When she finished the song for the third time, Maddie looked at Frank. He was trying to keep the surprise off his face, but he wasn’t succeeding. Captain Montgomery was scowling at her. She smiled at him and then slid into the next song from Carmen, the song where she tells Don José that her heart belongs to no one.
She suspected that most of the men could not understand the French words, but she knew that Captain Montgomery did. She sang the song with real feeling, giving it all she had when she said that she’d take her lover with her to keep her from being bored. Then when she remembers that she’s between lovers, Maddie put her back to a post in the building and rubbed up against it, moving down, her knees bent but slightly wide as she asked who wanted to love her. Who wanted her heart?
The miners might not have understood the words, but at her actions and her tone about five of them made a lunge for her. She slipped away from their grasp and sang that she was going to Lillas Pastia’s tavern to drink manzanilla.
It was at the end of the chorus that Maddie got what must have been the surprise of her life, for out of the crowd came a scruffy-looking older man, who marched to her and told her, in French, in a quite pleasant tenor, to keep quiet, not to speak.
Maddie recovered from her shock and sang to him that she could sing all she wanted, that she was thinking of a certain army officer who she could possibly love. Her eyes slid to Captain Montgomery, who was watching her with the intensity of a hawk watching its prey.
The gray-haired man sang, “Carmen!”
Maddie sang to him that she was a Gypsy in love with a man other than him and she could make do with that man, hinting that she didn’t need an officer like Don José.
The man, singing Don José’s part, asked her if she could love him, and Maddie said yes.
The miners were grinning and punching one another as they watched ol’ Sleb sing to this beautiful woman. They watched as Maddie, as Carmen, teased him, her face and body showing that she may or may not love him, as the mood took her. Poor Sleb looked like all the men there felt: that he would sell his soul to the devil if he could have her and that he might end his life if he could not.
Sleb sang his agony while Maddie sang the role of the woman in command, her voice so powerful that every note could be heard above all the movement and noise of the many men around her.
They cheered when Sleb pretended to be untying Maddie’s hands from the rope that bound them, and then they watched as she sang again that she was going to the tavern to drink and dance, while poor Sleb looked at her with lust and longing.
They cheered more when the two voices blended in a short duet.
At the last chorus, Maddie made her way back to the stage. Her blouse was open all the way down to her waist now and hanging out of her skirt. She flipped her skirt and sang one last time about going to the tavern and ended with a magnificent tra-la-la-la-la.
When the miners’ cheers shook the foundations of the building, it was a gratifying sound. She looked at Captain Montgomery and was pleased to see that he was frowning at her. She bowed to the audience and held out her hand to the man who had so unexpectedly sung the part of Don José.
But the men weren’t going to allow her to have an ordinary ending. In one frightening motion they surged toward the stage. Maddie saw ’Ring make a leap for her, but he was lost to her sight as the men grabbed her and put her on their shoulders. She yelled, “ ’Ring!” a couple of times, but no one could hear her over the noise and confusion.