The bond between Carmen and José is between two people who, at first sight, recognize that they share a separateness from all those around them. Carmen is of course the aggressor in their first encounter, but José plays his role, conspicuously ignoring her while fussing with his equipment, specifically, an épinglette. ^(I)The shared separateness is double, of both an ethnic and a personal variety. Yet these two are of very different temperament and life perspective. José’s progression is linear—he is seeking to overcome his past and build a future. Carmen, though, is above all adaptable, accustomed to sizing up a new situation quickly and dropping all previous assumptions to deal with it and if possible take advantage of it, thereby preserving her sense of self amid the new circumstances. She and José have radically different, almost atavistically ingrained, conceptions of permanency and of the state of “being in love,” of commitment. And of who’s boss. José believes that he must first submit to her—the moments leading into the Air de fleur show that he will if necessary force her to accept his submission. Once the relationship is established, though, he assumes he will take on what he views as normal male responsibilities and privileges—and, having burned his bridges, that this state of affairs will endure. Carmen, on the other hand, while happy to accept his submission as a required condition of their union at this moment, in this situation, in the long run has no respect for the gesture, and no intention of playing wife or mistress on an ongoing basis. When she’s approached by a man possessed of a charisma and self-assurance equal to her own, who clearly cannot be manipulated, she’ll make the switch without a second thought. There are no bridges, only new and unforeseen turns on the path.

Carmen is a somewhat romanticized, theatricalized bundle of real Gypsy traits. Like the much less developed Preziosilla in La Forza del destino (see the last post), she dances (and when she does so in private, for José, it’s not just a tease and a lure—it’s an honor) and she tells fortunes, both for others and, when the time calls to her, for herself. Whatever she thinks of her readings for others, she has a deep occult faith, a vestige of her ancestral religion, in her own. Of the characters in the opera, she alone has access to this truth; she is a seeress. ^(II) The sounding of the Fate motive at her first meeting with José tells us that she knows from the start that, no matter what happens between them, he is her Destined One. For she believes, in the depths of her being, in a Destiny even more implacable than the one played out in Forza. That destino, however avverso, is containable within a Christian (Catholic) framework—it even allows the possibility of redemption.