Butterfly

In the heyday of Italian opera, in the late 1800s, February was the season of premieres. See the crowd of men in overcoats and top hats, the horses stamping before carriages in the cool Milan mist; hear the brush of satin on silk in the lobby of La Scala. It's February, 1893, and Puccini's Manon Lescaut is about to premiere. Or it's February, 1896, and the curtain is about to rise on La boheme. Finish that glass of cognac, friend; the gas lamps are afire, and the glass doors glow with reflections, and the members of the orchestra are tuning their instruments.

The scene makes a certain heartwarming sense to me, because February, it seems, can be a cruel month. Recently, we've been surrounded by news of uncles dying, of computers rendered useless in puddles of water, of dogs lost, and vast ice storms. Cleo's cough drags on; a branch that fell on a neighbor's car now lies in a small, chainsawed pile. Some form of relief, however small, seems due.

And so today, as Cleo worked industriously on her lunch (and L. caught up with girlfriends in Atlanta) I put on my CD of Madame Butterfly. We'd listened to fragments before, but today I managed to read the brief synopsis of the opera, in Milton Cross' Complete Stories of the Great Operas, as the closing scenes of Act 1 swirled about us, in our dining room. Pinkerton, the suave and coolly pragmatic American lieutenant temporarily in Japan, coos to Butterfly, the beautiful local woman he's chosen as his wife - until, at least, he returns to America in a few months. The new bride changes out of her wedding dress, and into something more comfortable; Pinkerton is both amused by his new situation - a husband, for the first, but not the last, time - and sincerely overwhelmed by her grace. He thinks of her as a squirrel, delicate and precise in her motions; he calls her child; he compares her to a lily.

Throughout, I thought of the child next to me: so close, as well, and, too, so distant. Cleo picked at a cereal bar, and tried to stand backwards in her chair. I listened to the music; she asked for water. And, as I retrieved her water bottle, I heard the lines that resonated most fully to me, for reasons distinctly (but perhaps not entirely) separate from those intended by Puccini:

Ma intanto finor non m'hai detto,

ancor non m'hai detto che m'ami.

But you will, I hope, you will. And I, unlike Pinkerton, will not have left your side when you do.