Wild Dreams: The Best of Italian Americana

Libretto

308 libretto Libretto Mary Jo Salter (1999) Libretto. That’s the first Italian word she wants to teach me: ‘‘little book.’’ This afternoon (but why are we alone? Were Daddy and my brothers gone all day, or has memory with its flair for simple compositions airbrushed them from the shot?) she’s set aside just for the two of us, and a lesson. On an ivory silk couch that doesn’t fit the life she’s given in Detroit, we gaze across the living room at the tall ‘‘European’’ drapes she’s sewn herself: a work of secret weights and tiers, hung after cursing at her own mother’s machine. She lets the needle fall onto the record’s edge; then turns to pull a hidden cord, and the curtain rises on Puccini’s strings and our front view of shut two-car garages, built for new marriages constructed since the war. Well, not so new. It’s 1962 and though I’m only eight, I know that with two cars, people can separate. He went away; came back for more operatic scenes heard through my wall as if through a foreign language. Muffled fury and accusation, percussive sobs: they aren’t happy. Who couldn’t tell without the words? Libretto. On my knees the English text, the Italian on hers, and a thrill so loud the coffee table throbs. I’m following her finger as ‘‘Libretto’’ from A Kiss in Space: Poems by Mary Jo Salter, copyright 1999 by Mary Jo Salter. Used by permission of Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc. Mary Jo Salter 309 we’re looping to a phrase already sung or reading four lines at a time of people interrupting and just plain not listening, and yet the burden of the words is simple: Butterfly must die. Pinkerton will betray her, though the theme rippling before him like a hoisted flag is the Star-Spangled Banner. Mother, why would a Japanese and an American sing Italian at each other? Why would he get married and not stay? And have a child he’d leave to wait with the mother by the screen with her telescope for the ship of hope? Why, if he knew it wouldn’t last, did he come back to Japan? —But I’m not asking her. That’s men is her silent, bitter answer; was always half her lesson plan. O say can you see . . . yes, now I can. Your dagger’s at the throat and yet I feel no rage; as tears stream down our faces onto facing pages fluttering like wings, I see you meant like Butterfly to tie a blindfold over a loved child’s eyes: the saving veil of Art. For it is only a story. When the curtain drops, our pity modulates to relief she isn’t us, and what’s in store for you, divorce and lonely death, is still distant. We have our nights to come of operas to dress up for, our silly jokes, our shopping, days at home when nothing is very wrong and in my chair I read some tragedy in comfort, even a half-shamed joy. You gave me that— my poor, dear parents, younger then than I am now; with a stagestruck, helpless wish that it wouldn’t hurt and that it would, you made me press my ear against the wall for stories that kept me near and far, and because the hurt was beautiful 310 libretto even to try to write them; to find that living by stories is itself a life. Forgive whatever artifice lies in my turning you into characters in my own libretto—one sorry hand hovering above the quicksand of a turn-table in a house in Detroit I can’t go back to otherwise. ...