Issue 21

Evelyn Martinez

Life or death? I am twenty-six years old, standing at the edge of a scenic overlook a few miles from Lake Arrowhead. Far below, the Inland Empire extends its freeway and housing tracts into the orange-gray haze. It is a warm afternoon in late fall 1974. The mountain smells of pine and pollution.

He is thirty-three, with narrow eyes that are almost black. Those red-veined eyes are bleeding into my soul. Nick is not tall, but he is broad and muscular and in fighter’s stance, leaning into me. My heels slip on the gravel. I sense the steep drop behind me. He shakes with alcohol and fury. Terror and desperation paralyze me.

Forty-three years later I am at the San Francisco Opera, mesmerized by a raw and brutal production of Bizet’s Carmen directed by Calixto Bieito. I never understood Carmen until I witnessed onstage the life and death of this modern-day gypsy, a girl I might encounter on the #14 Mission bus, laughing with her friends, flirting with the guys. She is young, but self-aware and determined to live her truth in a world where honest women are not tolerated. It is the final act of the opera. On the big stage I see the slender, mini-skirted Carmen tottering on her spindly high heels while José, her former lover, stalks her. She is clutching a little pastel-colored purse on a flimsy chain. Her long hair tumbles into her eyes.

And on a long-ago, much smaller and dingier stage, I see myself in my plaid miniskirt and scuffed heels, my long, unruly hair.

I see opera Carmen and plain Evelyn making split-second, irrevocable choices. Both are alone and utterly vulnerable. Carmen spits out her answer, proud and defiant. Like the tortured bull goring the torero in the groin, she attacks José’s tender ego. Not just no, but hell, no!

When José begs her not to leave him in that final, excruciating scene, Carmen declares, “Jamais je n’ai menti; entre nous, tout est fini.” “I have never lied; all is over between us.” She is afraid but resolute: “Carmen will never yield! Free she was born and free she will die!” Her death is intimate and real and heartbreaking. Never has the juxtaposition of the assertive woman and the stubborn bull getting killed simultaneously been more shockingly transparent to me. And my tears won’t stop.

One can wonder if Carmen was ever truly free. But what haunts me is this: What if Carmen had lied? What if she had lied and survived that last confrontation with José?

Per one standard definition, to lie is to make a false statement with the deliberate intent to deceive. Yet what if to lie also means to choose life over death? Life. More compelling than the voyeuristic catharsis of a splayed female body at opera’s end.

Or is it? Would the audience still show up? Of note, Bieito’s Carmen was vilified by traditional opera fans who felt cheated by his “Euro-trash” production. Where was their beloved gypsy, that fiery femme fatale who flaunts her glamorous bandit’s life and gets what she deserves at the end? Bieito’s ordinary but spirited young girl could have been anyone’s daughter or sister or friend who gets mixed up with the wrong crowd.

I wonder how many young women have teetered on the edge of that life or death precipice—and lied? Deliberately deceived their murderer in the hope of living to tell their truth? I am one.

First, the short, lurid story of Nick and Evelyn. He was the brother of a friend, Mexican-American like me. Married to an older woman, he had three small children and many debts. They rented a tiny bungalow in the San Bernardino barrio. I was twenty-two, from San Francisco, out of college, and out of ideas as to how to proceed with my life. Delia, Nick’s wife, had crossed over the border at Juárez after much hardship. She was smart and a kind woman. Nick was ashamed of her stained teeth and lack of education. Delia offered me friendship, and I betrayed her. Did genuine love ever exist between Nick and me? I don’t remember.

My final confrontation with him on the mountaintop happened long ago but persists on endless replay in my heart. Earlier that afternoon, he had suddenly appeared at the house we shared, but for which I was the sole provider. Nick had caught me packing the last of my belongings into my 1970 grass-green Datsun. I was running away. Again. So many times I had escaped, only to be caught. But this time I had a car and money, the chance to transfer from the women’s prison at Frontera to San Quentin to work the gun towers. Another female correctional officer and I had made plans to caravan to the Bay Area. She was picking up her paycheck that day and heading north. I would be right behind her.

But he’d outsmarted me again. The fights, the violence, were beyond my control at this point. It was him or me. I was small and weak. He was big and brutally strong. Killing him while he was passed out from drugs and alcohol would bring no sympathy in court. Every day I worked with women who had done what I dreamed of doing, women who had been sentenced to seven years to life for it.

Nick’s voice is quiet, a little slurred. “Listen, I won’t stop you if you really want to leave. Let’s just take a drive, get some air. Talk things over. What’s the rush? Come on.” Calmly, soothingly, he has eased me into his 1965 black Mustang. I sink into the red bucket seat, inhale hot leather and spilled beer.

“Where are we going?”

“Up there, where the air is rare.” His smile is sad and scary.

The Mustang takes the steep curves fast and wild. We meet no other vehicles. Not far from the closed Lake Arrowhead resort, he rolls to a slow stop.

“Let’s check out the view. One last time. Before you split on me.”

It begins. He mouths the same words, phrases, avowals, promises, hopes, and schemes. The same, but cranked up a few notches. They have worked magic in the past. No more. “Doing time” in the California Institution for Women has shaken me awake. I will leave Nick. I will not back down.

“No. No. Never.” I am righteously angry, adamant. And weary.

I feel air currents off the mountain and slither another few inches backward. Nick’s face is huge, distorted. I am lost.

Then … something kicks in. My gut. That implacable will to survive. I shift haltingly from mindless despair to wiliness. I experience my one grand opera moment, improvising my virtuosic “Lie” aria, the whispered recitative broken by a barely audible sob, revealing the tiniest crack in my iron resolve. I lift my brown eyes—wide, yearning for love. He relaxes into manly confidence mode. He articulates and weaves his clever web of words. Damn, he’s good. I don’t give in right away. Make him work for it.

A corner of my heart feels sorry for Nick, dark-skinned and acne-scarred Nick, cruelly mistreated as a young boy. Nick with the bright questing mind, who loves art and music and words. Nick who is stuck in Berdoo with a wife and kids, working nights as a mail handler at the post office.

But feeling sorry does not equal love. A lifetime or two later we are back in the Mustang, a new plan in place. He’s done it again. Spun me a shimmering castle of sweet sugar and spice, cajoled me into giving him “one more chance to do right.” At the house, we empty the car. Completely.

I offer Nick a shy girlish kiss. “I know what! Let’s celebrate, go out for a big dinner and wine at our favorite Italian restaurant. We love their spaghetti and meatballs! Then we’ll come home and …” Another kiss, promising much more. “My treat. I’ll just run by CIW and pick up my paycheck.”

A flash of doubt hardens his face.

“Look, everything’s back in the house. Don’t even have a toothbrush on me. And I’m starved after all this.”

One last lingering kiss, a smile. With unwavering control, I slip into my little car. Back out smoothly, lean out to touch my lips to his one last time. And I drive away. I take with me the sweat-drenched outfit I put on that morning, and my purse. I keep going and don’t look back. I will be on the run for several years to come, always one half-step ahead of his dogged pursuit. And one day I will no longer feel Nick’s shadow at my shoulder.

It is now forty-five years since I left San Bernardino. I sit in the front row of the San Francisco Opera and watch this season’s Carmen, the familiar one with the snapping castanets and swirling gypsy skirts. I study her, this exotic, oh-so-tragic diva of the grand opera stage. In the dimly lit wings, I spot another young woman, ordinary but spirited, one whose stage was never grand, but who found a way to write herself a different ending.

And I ask … What if Carmen had lied?

Would the audiences still come?