“And I’m Richard,” the other man said.
“Pleased to meet you.” Frank introduced Debby and himself.
“Terrible weather,” Alexander said.
“Sure is,” Debby agreed.
“We drove all the way from Albuquerque,” Richard said.
“I can beat that,” Frank told them. “I came all the way from Los Angeles.”
The two men went to get their food. Frank poured wine for Debby and himself, then offered to pour for Alexander and Richard when they came back.
“No, thanks,” Alexander said.
“It makes me sleepy,” Richard said.
The pair bowed their heads in a silent prayer. Self-conscious, Frank and Debby did the same. Then the four of them ate and discussed opera, how they preferred the Italian ones, could tolerate the German ones, and felt that French operas were sometimes an ordeal.
“The rhythm’s so ponderous in some of them,” Frank said, “it’s like being on a Roman slave ship, rowing to a drumbeat, like that scene in Ben-Hur.”
“But Carmen’s good. A French opera set in Spain.” Richard found that amusing. “And tonight’s opera is French. I’ve never heard it, so I have no idea whether it’s worth our time.”
Frank was pleased by how easy they were to talk to. They had an inner stillness that soothed him after his frustrating Hollywood meetings and his difficult journey home.
“What do you do in Albuquerque?” Debby asked Richard.
“He doesn’t live there. I do,” Alexander said. “I’m a retired computer programmer.”
“And I’m a monk,” Richard said. “I live at Christ in the Desert.” He referred to a monastery about thirty miles north of Santa Fe.
Frank hid his surprise. “I assumed the two of you were together.”
“We are,” Alexander said. “I often go on weekend retreats to the monastery. That’s where Brother Richard and I became friends.” Alexander referred to the practice of leaving the clamor of everyday life and spending time in the quiet of a monastery, meditating to achieve spiritual focus.
“Alexander doesn’t drive well at night anymore,” Brother Richard said. “So I went down to Albuquerque to get him. This opera has a subject of obvious interest to us.”
What he meant was soon explained as the after-dinner lecture began. An elegant woman stood at a podium and explained that Dialogues of the Carmelites was based on a real event during the French Revolution when a convent of Carmelite nuns was executed during the anti-Catholic frenzy of the Reign of Terror. The composer, the speaker explained, used the incident as a way of exploring the relationship between religion and politics.
As the lecture concluded, Frank wished that he’d followed Alexander and Brother Richard’s example, abstaining from the wine, which had made him sleepy.
The group got up to walk from the tent to the opera house.
“It was good to chat with you,” Frank said.
“Same here,” Brother Richard said.
By then it was half past eight. Santa Fe’s operas usually started at nine. Darkness was gathering. Alexander and Brother Richard proceeded into the gloom, while Frank and Debby went to restrooms near the tent.
Minutes later, after a chilly walk, Frank and Debby entered the opera house, made their way through the crowd, found the row they were in, and stopped in surprise.
Alexander and Brother Richard were in the same row, five seats from Frank and Debby.
Smiling, the two men looked up from their programs.
“Small world,” Debby said, smiling in return.
“Isn’t it,” Alexander agreed. Frail, he shivered as the wind increased outside, gusting through the open spaces on each side of the opera house.
“Could be a better night,” Brother Richard said. “Let’s hope the opera’s worth it.”
Frank and Debby took their seats. A row ahead, a well-coiffed woman in a flimsy evening gown hugged herself, typical of many in the audience, presumably visitors who hadn’t been warned about Santa Fe’s sudden temperature drops.
As the wind keened, Debby looked over at Alexander, noticing that he shivered more violently.
“I’ll lend him our blanket,” she told Frank.
“Good idea.”
The five intervening seats remained empty. Debby went over, offered the blanket, which Alexander gladly took, and held out the thermos of hot chocolate, which he also took.
“Bless you, how thoughtful.”
“My good deed for the day,” Debby said when she came back.
Ten minutes into the opera, Frank wished that he’d stayed with his friends in Los Angeles. Dialogues of the Carmelites turned out to be aptly named, for the cast droned its musical lines in a dreary operatic approximation of dialogue. Although the female singers needed to lower their pitch to accommodate the atonal effects, they nonetheless gave the effect of screeching.
Worse was the libretto, which had been translated into En-glish and took one of the most unspiritual approaches to religion that Frank had encountered, claiming that the Carmelite nuns were emotional invalids dominated by a masochistic abbess who convinced her charges to linger and wait to be executed so that she could prove how powerfully she controlled them.
Halfway through the first act, lightning flashed. The storm clouds unloaded, sending a torrent past the open sides of the opera house, causing the audience in those sections to retreat up the aisles.
Nature as critic, Frank thought.
He had a headache by the time the seemingly interminable first act ended. Ushers hurried to the wet seats near the open sides, toweling them. As Frank and Debby stood, they found Alexander and Brother Richard coming over.
“I don’t know how I’d have gotten through that act without your charity,” the elderly man said, looking even colder.
“A terrible opera,” Brother Richard added. “You should have stayed in Los Angeles.”
“Don’t I wish.”
“Thanks for the blanket and the thermos.” Alexander returned them. “We’re going home.”
“That bad?”
“Worse.”
“Well, we enjoyed meeting you.”
“Same here,” Brother Richard said. “God bless.”
They disappeared among the crowd.
“Well, if I’m going to be able to sit through the second act, I’d better stretch my legs,” Frank said.
“You’re determined to stay?” Debby asked.
“After all the trouble I went through to get here? This damned opera isn’t going to beat me.”
They followed the crowd to an outside balcony. The rain had again stopped. There were puddles in the courtyard below them, where well-dressed men and women drank cocktails, coffee, or hot chocolate. In the distance, lightning lit the mountains. Everybody oohed and aahed.
Frank shivered, then pointed at something in the courtyard. “Look.”
About a third of the audience was leaving through the front gate. But coming from the opposite direction, from the parking lot, Alexander and Brother Richard emerged from the darkness, making their way through the courtyard. What puzzled Frank wasn’t that they had left and were coming back. Rather it was that a spotlight seemed to be following them, outlining them, drawing Frank’s attention to their progress through the crowd. They almost glowed.
The two men went into the gift shop across from the balcony. Almost immediately they returned without having bought anything and again made their way through the crowd. They disappeared into the darkness past the gate.
“What was that all about?” Debby asked.
“I have no idea.” Frank couldn’t help yawning.