My first experience of Carmen was not Mérimée's story, and it was not Bizet's opera. It was the version that Oscar Hammerstein made, called Carmen Jones. Hammerstein set the story in the black, urban United States, with prizefighters instead of matadors, and his lyrics to Bizet's music were sharp and tight and witty - some of the best he ever wrote.
I listened to it over and over again on my parents' scratched LP a long time before I knew where the music or the story had come from, and I loved it, not least because those pungent and sensual melodies embodied a quality that was of profound interest to a young boy: they were intensely sexy.
The opening of Mérimée's story, however, is distinctly un-operatic. We find ourselves in a world of dusty scholarship, and our guide is a pedant. The unnamed narrator is a historian, determined to solve some footling problem about the location of a long-forgotten battle, a problem which, he claims conceitedly, "is holding all the scholars of Europe in suspense".
What on earth could there be in this to have generated such passionate and brilliant music? Well, nothing; because at the end of the first paragraph, the historian turns aside from his academic preoccupations with the magical words "I want to tell you a little story."
And at once we know the sort of thing this is. It's one of those tales of adventure or mystery so popular a century or more ago, stories that are told by a traveller, or an old China hand, or a stranger in the smoking-room: someone who has had an unusual experience and who wants to pass it on. And since the story is set in a Spain which, with its bandits and outlaws, its savage landscapes and murderous passions, was early 19th-century Europe's wild west, it's clear that this tale is not going to be about scholarship at all.
This narrative frame has a function, of course, as such frames always do. Within the conventions of this sort of tale, honour is satisfied - the author has gone to the trouble, or paid us the compliment, of giving it a truthful-looking pedigree. We know that everything about it is false, because we know this is fiction, but that doesn't matter, because this is not a court of law, and veracity is not the issue. It's a form of etiquette.
Our historian in Carmen turns out to be a swift and economical story-teller. He sets the scene with a few crisp sentences; he conveys an atmosphere of danger by describing the caution of his guide; he conveys to us the appearance of the stranger he meets by going over in his mind the description of a notorious bandit, and congratulating himself on his perception (which, of course, turns out to be faulty) as well as his courtesy, "No doubt about it! But let's respect his incognito."
In fact, this narrator is decidedly pleased with himself. And when, in the next episode, he meets the beautiful Gypsy Carmencita at dusk on the banks of the Guadalquivir, in Cordova, we are not at all surprised to find him flirting with her and displaying an elaborate gallantry - nor to find him outwitted and robbed of his watch. We can see through him, but if he's not clever enough to disguise his foolishness, we think, then it's likely that he's telling us the truth.
And the real artfulness here, of course, is Mérimée's. How gracefully it's done, and with what little appearance of art! Those two events set the scene for the main story, which is that of Don José himself, told in his own words to our framing narrator in the prison cell where the bandit is awaiting execution by garrotte. It's a story of fatal and obsessive love.
His tale is brilliantly told, with a multitude of the sort of vivid details that are exactly what the mind fixes on when it's falling in love. The costume Carmen is wearing when Don José first sees her; her white stockings, visible under the short red skirt, have holes in them, which he can't get out of his mind later on when he's imprisoned for letting her escape. The acacia flower she flicks at him in mockery, and which, unable to help himself, he picks up surreptitiously and tucks into his tunic. The way she places her mantilla over her head when arrested, so that only one eye is visible; but her eyes are very large and fiercely expressive.
And, again and again, tobacco. Our historian's first interchange with Don José consists of offering him a cigar, and during their meeting in the condemned cell cigars are offered again, and again accepted; but this time Don José takes only as many as he'll have time to smoke before he meets his death. There's an association being built up, perhaps in the narrator's mind, between tobacco and sexuality.
Carmen works in a cigar factory, where she and the other women throw off their clothes in hot weather and work in their undergarments. When the historian first encounters her, it is at a part of the river-bank where at dusk the women disrobe and wash in the stream. Typically, our historian, while remarking on this custom, manages to signal to Carmen his own ineptitude (his impotence?) by throwing away his cigar in what he calls "a very Gallic gesture of politeness". He's no daring and resourceful bandit: he's someone who can be easily gulled and robbed.
I wouldn't want to make too much of this; as Freud is said to have remarked, sometimes a cigar is only a cigar. But it gives the story a fragrance, a pattern of wit.
At the heart of it all is the bewitching character of Carmen herself. It would be a dull reader, man or woman, who didn't fall a little in love with Carmen. The contrast between her and the hapless Don José is visible most clearly in their attitude to fate. When Don José kills Carmen's Gypsy husband, instead of lamenting his cruelty or admiring his daring, she is full of scorn: "He's knocked off better fighters than you. His time had come, that's all. So will yours."
She accepts her fate without complaint. He, on the other hand, is bewildered by his. "Sir, a man can turn into a rogue without even thinking about it. A pretty girl makes you lose your head, you get into a fight over her, there's a nasty accident, you have to live in the mountains, you start out as a smuggler and before you've even thought about it you've turned into a thief."
But Don José will never be a match for Carmen, because he is capable of pity. Twice he refers to her as "poor child". When she's arrested, Carmen asks:
"'So where are you taking me to, officer?' "'Off to gaol, my poor child,' I replied as gently as I could, the way a good soldier should talk to a prisoner, especially a woman." (What a world we have lost! Can anyone imagine a present-day story containing a sentence like that, without a trace of irony?) The second occasion comes in the very last words of the tale. The plot of Carmen is so stark and simple and strong that it was almost bound to become an opera. It's our good luck that it fell into the hands of a composer who wrote such melodies.
But the true power of the story lies in Mérimée's words, and in the interplay between the different narratives - and not least in what turns out to be, after his foolish beginning, the tact of the framing narrator. All learned Europe, as far as we know, is still in suspense as to the site of the Battle of Munda; but we have just read a much better story than that. There is nothing to add to Don José's final words, and after they fall, our historian has the grace to remain silent.
