Confession Of A Torch Singer

Kim hasn't budged from the terrace all morning.  He is wearing his uniform, faded blue jeans and a white T shirt.  He is short and still very thin.  But for a bit of a scraggly van dyke his face is clean-shaven. His hair as always is just past his ears and worn swept back.  It is just beginning to show grey at the temples and it is also becoming thin at the hairline.  He hasn't worn a dress or makeup in four years. It is nearly the end of the rainy season and the morning has  been sunnier and clearer than usual today with occasional drizzle and a generous offering of rainbows.  In November at the end of the rainy season there are rainbows every day.  Although he has lived here for almost a year he has only recently discovered this elegant hideaway in the jungle and almost regrets having invited the Canadian journalist to meet him here.  This will be his first interview in years.  He expects it will also be his last.  She arrives just as he is starting on his second Americano.  She is a study in understated stylishness with her khaki shirt and black jeans.  Already cloud and mist are rolling in from thie distant ocean, its tendrils like sinister grey fingers clawing at the trees of the legendary forest.

 

"I'm afraid we're about to lose our spectacular view", he says.

 

"Yes, isn't that a pity," she says as she removes her sunglasses and sets them on the table. The half-dozen or so gold and silver bangles on her arm make a vaguely musical jingling sound.  She seems young and pretty at first though he is sure that she isn't much younger than he is (fifty next month.)  Her hair is shoulder length with blonde streaks.  Her nails appear to have been recently done at a spa, with shining acrylic tips of turquoise festooned with gold.  She seems like a famous actress playing the role of a famous journalist in a movie, perhaps Candice Bergen as Margaret Bourke-White in "Gandhi."

 

"Do you mind if I tape the entire conversation?"

 

"Well, this is an interview, I suppose".  He looks her over casually, as though to be reassured that she is a real person, a solid Canadian woman seated across from him at the table here in far away Central America. Her pale blue eyes have a calculating coolness that he finds nearly as off-putting as the needy "Like me! Like me!" tone of her voice.  He almost asks her where she got her nails done, whether here or in Canada.  The magazine she represents is new to Kim.  He has never heard of it before.  The Google search he did last night indicates a glossy pictorial publication with a large national readership.  There are travel articles with big bright pictures of palm trees, all-inclusive resorts and flawlessly beautiful couples, young women and men half-naked and sublimely photo-shopped. There are articles on local and international celebrities, recipes and urban themes centred on home-decor and dining out.  The readership is made up primarily of bored retired women with wealthy husbands and tons of disposable income, his primary audience when he was a famous torch singer. "What would you like, anyway, I can get Yolanda's attention from here."

 

A regular latte would be lovely."

 

"Yolanda!" he says in impressive Spanish.  "Por favor nos llevas un cafe con leche. (Please bring us a latte.)

 

"How long have you lived here?"

 

"Almost a year."

 

"How do you like it so far?"

 

"Its great."

 

"Yes this country is beautiful.  You know this is only my first time here?"

 

"Up here or in the entire country?"

 

"The entire country."

 

"Remember our agreement.  None of your readers are to know what country I am in.  This has to be agreed upon if we are to proceed with the interview."

 

"Agreed."  He finds that she has a rather beautiful mouth, with coral pink lips.  He wonders how this shade of libstick would look on him.  It has been more than four years since he wore make up.

 

"Do you ever sing here?"

 

"Only at church on Sundays, but in a quiet voice, so no one can tell it's me."

 

"Tell me a little about this church."

 

"It's a small Quaker fellowship made up mostly of American ex-pats.  No one has a clue of who I am, or should I say, of who I was."  Quakers or other religious and socially concerned folk likely would never have attended one of Kim's concerts, nor even heard of her, or cared that she existed.  He has chosen the perfect country for his metamorphosis.

 

"And you're perfectly comfortable living as a male now."

 

"Well, they say I was born that way.  It was only when I was twelve that I began to show, should we say, secondary characteristics.  I grew a lovely set of breasts even though I peed standing up.  Then in my later teens I began growing whiskers, not many, and don't let the van dyke fool you, because this is the only kind of beard I'm still able to grow and even this is pretty thin and scraggly.  The boobs are gone, as you can see.  It just took a little surgery."  Irene has rather lovely breasts, he can see, if a  bit smallish.  The natural line and the shadow of nipple behind the khaki shirt suggest that she is not wearing a bra.  He suddenly finds this incredibly sexy.

 

"You had it done here?"

 

"I had it done here, two years ago before taking up permanent residency."

 

"How did that go?"

 

"Money in this country speaks in a very loud voice.  It has not been difficult buying the hospital's silence."  The waitress stops by with a glass mug full of beige coloured coffee and milk for Irene, the visiting journalist.  Yolanda is young and very pretty, her caramel coloured hair wound in a loose knot and her face and posture suggesting a Parisian model though she likely has never stepped outside of her own country.  Many of the people here are poor, too poor to travel the world, too poor to even leave their own tiny country, city or village.  The waitress smiles perfunctorily as Irene offers her a gushy Canadian "Thank you", then retreats with silent elegance as though along a fashion catwalk.  In faded blue jeans, and a black T shirt she is ravishing.  Kim suddenly would like to get his nails done with identical turquoise and gold extensions as Irene's.

 

"This is a lovely cafe", she says.

 

"It's a well-kept secret."

 

"Do locals come here as well?"

 

"Never.  This place is for tourists and ex-pats,  The locals all have their own sodas, taverns, bars and cafes where they congregate. I think the fact that it occupies the local bat museum also helps keep it hidden."

 

"They're live bats, aren't they?"

 

"Oh yes.  But that isn't why I come here.  They are not my favourites among things that fly."

 

"The birds here are lovely."

 

"As are the butterflies.  Have you seen the Morphos since coming here?"

 

"Those are the big blue ones, right?"

 

"Have you noticed that they fly kind of funny?"

 

"Why is that?"

 

"They're notorious lushes.  They feed only on rotten fruit, which produces alcohol.  So, they're always a bit shit-faced.  I learned this at the local bug museum.

 

"Could you tell me please what else you do with your days?"

 

"I do a lot of volunteer work.  I assist in guided tours in the Cloud Forest, but my duties are limited to research, since the government is very picky about foreigners not taking jobs from the citizenry.  I also teach English in the Institute down the highway."

 

"Do you do anything related to music?"

 

"Nada.  Absolutely nothing."

 

"This doesn't feel to you like a loss?"

 

"I still sing every day, but only when I'm sure no one can hear me.  I have free access to all the local cloud forest reserves and in the rainy season when no one's around.  That's when I go hiking and that is when I sing, as loud as I want."

 

"Tell me about your last concert."

 

"Oh my, that was my finest hour, I think.  I was just winding up a tour that finished in Mexico City."

 

"That was headlined as the 'Fairwell Tour of the Last of the Torch-Singers.'"

 

"Well, I would like to think that other than a certain skinny French Canadian woman whom I won't name, that I could be called the last of a famous tradition, in line with such as Dusty Springfield, Julie London, Vicki Carr, Shirley Bassie, to name a few.

 

"What inspired you to give it all up?"

 

"It no longer felt real.  It never did actually, but for my voice."

 

"But for your voice."

 

"My voice never completely broke during puberty, but it gained power so that I sounded like one of the Castrati in Baroque Venice,.  I had to be taken out of school because I was being victimized by chronic bullying, so my parents got the brilliant idea of enrolling me in a music academy."

 

"At that time you still identified as female."

 

"Correct.  I was only twenty when I started performing Baroque opera."

 

"You created quite a stir."

 

"It was my voice as well as my youth.  As I said it never broke but it simply ripened into one of the most powerful contraltos known in our times.  They couldn't categorize me, really.  Had I gone on identifying as a male they would have said, 'Oh, a counter-tenor,'  Another girly-man voice on the stage.  But this is a voice, as I mentioned, such as should have died with the last Castrato."

 

"Was it hard, living as a female?"

 

"No, not really.  I'm intersex, you know.  When I was a boy growing up I felt a bit like a girl but also a bit like a boy.  When I grew breasts and started wearing bras and skirts I still felt a bit like a boy and a bit like a girl, but something other, as well, something I can't really describe."

 

"As though the whole is greater than the sum of the parts?"

 

"Why be both when you can be neither?  I've always felt more human than male or female.  I know, for the majority of people their humanity, their sense of human identity, their personal identity gets channelled through their gender identity, but this has never been my personal experience."

 

"Do you still think of yourself as transgender?"

 

"I never did."

 

"What made you switch back to a male identity?"

 

"I wanted to simplify my life.  When I retired from singing five years ago.  I mentioned that my performance in Mexico City was my last.  I felt I'd been running against a wall.  That living as a woman had come to stifle my creativity.  I thought of returning to classical and baroque but I no longer had the heart for it.  There was nothing left for me to do.  I could not reinvent myself again as a singer.  So, I opted to reinvent my gender."

 

"Hence, the mastectomies."

 

"Hence, the mastectomies."

 

"Do you feel like a man, now?"

 

"No more than I feel like a woman."

 

"How does this feel?"

 

"Well, I had to make some kind of choice, not to get over my own feelings of ambiguity, because I've never suffered from ambiguity.  You see, only the breasts marked me as a woman.  I have no ovaries, no uterus, no fallopian tubes.  No vagina.  But to live here, where people tend to be a little more conservative, I didn't want to draw attention to myself.  It was also for me a matter of accepting trade-offs.  For me, to be a woman, is to have the ability, the biological capacity of giving birth, of becoming pregnant, carrying a child to term, bearing the child, nursing it with my own breasts.  Aside from the breasts I've never had any of that.  Physically I'm male with female secondary characteristics.  But, as I was saying, I don't want to draw attention to myself here, and this country, for all it's social and economic progress is still very conservative in a lot of ways."

 

"Do they treat you differently here?"

 

"It's hard to say.  The people here are usually friendly and welcoming to visitors, but it's superficial.  They remain a closed entity I think to all outsiders.  There isn't here the kind of open and inclusive immigration policy we take for granted in Canada.  Only by marrying into the culture do you ever become part of it, and this is something I'm not prepared to do.  I mean, this has nothing to do with sexual preference, since I have enjoyed having partners of all genders, but because now I'm pretty much asexual, and you know I think I always was, really."

 

"How do you get on with the locals now?"

 

"It's live and let live. There's one fellow I see a couple of times a week.  He has a cafe at the entrance to the Cloud Forest Reserve.  We talk a lot of Spanglish.  It turns out he wants to keep his English up and he is also very accommodating with my Spanish.   So, in the cafe when it isn't busy we visit quite a bit and often his wife and baby are there so we can all visit.  I've had them over to my place several times for dinner, for drinks.  They never reciprocate, but it isn't expected.  The people here are only friends with their immediate family and people they grew up with.  All the rest are outsiders.  Most of my friends are other ex-pats, most of whom I know at the institute.  But one English teacher there is married to one of the local women and they have three beautiful children, so this has kind of opened that door a bit.  But for the most part we inhabit different worlds.  It's a bit ironic you know because one of my reasons for moving here in the first place was to find a sense of belonging, which is there for me but it exists only on it's own terms."

 

"Fame and stardom must have been quite a lonely experience for you."

 

"Well, I wasn't exactly living a lie, but it was isolating.  In my late twenties I began my crossover into pop and jazz, beginning with the songs of Jacque Brel.  Then I went off the charts, "If We Only Have Love", became my signature piece and my fame was an acknowledged fact.  But I was very lonely.  My audiences adored me of course.  I had no friends, only admirers.  This is where fame becomes a very cruel mistress.  On top of this I was living a very well-concealed lie concerning my gender.  There was a little bit of suspicion in some quarters, because, frankly, no woman singer had been knwon to deliver with such power.  But they had nothing to catch me with and I was of course very selective about whom I would undress for.  It is my good fortune that none of my few paramours has ever given me away." 

 

The interview is drawing to a close.  The red hummingbird feeder dangling nearby has not been visited, not since Irene arrived.  There were hummingbirds earlier, a small swarm fighting in midair over tepid sugar syrup.  An American tourist couple is standing at the rail to the left of the bird feeder, observing a small troop of white face monkeys in the trees nearby.  From the branches they watch them curiously, with naked pale human looking faces, slightly wizened ancient crone and wise old man faces.  The clouds have rolled in creating a viscous grey fog that obscures everything.  He almost mentions the only time he has heard one of these monkeys scream, a few months ago, outside his cabin in the jungle, where a small troop used to visit for handouts of fruit and lettuce.  One monkey, startled by his own reflection in the window, began to shriek in confused distress.  He thinks of saying something to Irene about this but instead just offers her another latte that she politely declines.  She has done her work for the day and now she must go.  She effusively says goodbye and trudges toward the exit, her canvas carry-all hanging from her shoulder like a burden of shame and embarrassment.

 

Kim tries to think of all the things he might have said to her and perhaps should have since this after all will be his final interview.  She leaves the cafe and he orders a chocolate brownie slathered in fudge sauce and ice cream.  The ice cream is made locally, a short walk from his small cabin in the forest.  Every day he sees the cows that produce the milk and cream that make the ice cream, yogurt and cheese that Kim delights to eat here.  He has remained steadfastly thin and he still never worries about his weight.  He left his laptop at home and suddenly wants to send his son an e-mail.  No one knows that he is a father, or that he only learned about his son's existence just before deciding to have his breasts removed.  And not until this little magazine article is published are they even going to know that the legendary Kim Salinger now lives as a man in this famous international cloud forest.  He could never tell this pretty journalist the whole truth.  He knows this about interviews with glamorous journalists, to give

them just a little bit less than what they want to hear and even less than to what they feel entitled.  His son Joel is coming here in two months to see his father.  He remembers fondly the mother of his son, Lena, his former manager.  Joel doesn't know that his father used to be a woman, a famous singer, the Great Kim Salinger.  He has probably never even heard of her.  He is twenty-five now and in university studying to be a pharmacist.  He mentioned in his most recent e-mail that he has a particular interest in hormonal treatments for gender reassignment.  Kim doesn't know what he is going to say to his son.  Briefly the sun breaks through, casting its magical incandescence on the surrounding trees.  A shining purple hummingbird, known as a Violet Sabre Wing, appears at the feeder nearby, the first to appear since Irene's visit.  The hummingbird hovers, then darts, then comes another, slightly smaller, shining green with magenta throat and azure head, then drab and grey looking as he changes his angle and dodges the querulous thrust of his rival's bill.  The sun disappears as suddenly as it had appeared and in the drab light arrive more hummingbirds, squabbling, hovering, darting and competing for their little sip of artificial nectar.  Kim fills his face with more brownie and ice cream and feels secretely satisfied that the hummingbirds, the best part of his visit here, did not appear till after Irene the glamorous Canadian journalist finished the interview and left.  He does want them to be here for Joel when he arrives here in two months.  He savours the last bite of brownie, the final mouthful of ice cream, then orders from the beautiful Yolanda his third and final cafe Americano.

 

There is a change in the music.  Usually they play Mozart and Vivaldi in the mornings.  But this is different.  It isn't classical and suddenly he knows.  There is no mistaking, neither the lyrics or the voice.  The last song she ever sang in public, her shining satin ivory gown trailing around her like the glory of God in Mexico City:

 

 If we only have love
Then tomorrow will dawn
And the days of our years
Will rise on that morn
If we only have love
To embrace without fears
We will kiss with our eyes
We will sleep without tears

 

He has forgotten how good he sounded, not having heard his own recordings in two or three years.  He shivers as though a cold wind has just blown in from the distant Pacific.

If we only have love
With our arms open wide
Then the young and the old
Will stand at our side
If we only have love
Love that's falling like rain
Then the parched desert earth
Will grow green again

He begins singing with himself, his live voice deeper, more resonant, a little more masculine than his recorded echo, and he knows this is the live recording of his final performance in Mexico City.  How did they get this recording?  But how couldn't they?  Have they guessed?  Has he blown his cover?

 

If we only have love
For the hymn that we shout
For the song that we sing
Then we'll have a way out
If we only have love
We can reach those in pain
We can heal all our wounds
We can use our own names

 

He forgets where he is, his voice rising as though of it's own volition and the spirit of song possesses him, playing him like a violin or a cello.

If we only have love
We can melt all the guns
And then give the new world
To our daughters and sons
If we only have love
Then Jerusalem stands
And then death has no shadow
There are no foreign lands
If we only have love
We will never bow down
We'll be tall as the pines
Neither heroes nor clowns
If we only have love
Then we'll only be men
And we'll drink from the Grail
To be born once again
Then with nothing at all
But the little we are
We'll have conquered all time
All space, the sun, and the stars.

 

Kim is the only customer present.  Yolanda who has been standing staring stupidly at him is the only server, her reserve and elegance swallowed alive in this thrall of rapture and wonder.

"Don Kim, usted canta muy bonito," (Kim, sir, you sing beautifully) she whispers in awe, then looks over at the violet sabre wing hummingbird that has returned to the feeder.  She stands watching the bird for a while, then, removing his soiled plate from his table gives Kim a brief, sly sideways glance and returns silently into the cafe.  The sun disappears again and the wind blows more clouds and mist against the solid green mountain he is living on.