Buy the book at Amazon.com.
EIGHTEEN
A Brief Description of Items
in Possession of the Singer
on the Night of His Reemergence:
First item
is some sort of shell, a fan-shaped scallop approximately two inches in diameter,
much like one of those things that Venus rode in on. The base of said shell cuts a straight
perpendicular line, a rectangular shoulder chipped away at one side. The shell’s coloring takes in all the range
of the eastward sky opposite a sunset, beginning with erratic sprays of muddy
red and working up the fan in wide bands of mauve, choral and plain old pink,
with a single thin line of salmon a quarter inch from the top (perfect enough
to have been drawn with a pencil). The
inside of the shell projects a pearlescent white, the color of moonmilk,
exposing subtle striations beneath the colored bands of its opposite side.
Origin of
item: Said object was one of a basket of one hundred assorted and various
shells purchased by the subject’s mother on a trip to Hawaii in the early
fifties. Subject received this heirloom
from his father on the occasion of subject’s graduation from college, at the
age of twenty-two.
Dispensation
of items: Subject has apparently been redistributing said shells by tossing them,
one by one, into national and international bodies of water. Recent deposits include the Atlantic Ocean
off Gloucester, Massachusetts; the Gulf of Mexico off Galveston, Texas; Lake
Michigan near Evanston, Illinois; and Ten Sleeps Creek in Wyoming’s Bighorn
Mountains.
Number of
items thus disposed: ninety-nine.
Item number
two is a dark brown leather cord strung with a single metallic pendant and
thirty-two African trade beads. The
pendant is a small silver globe, about one inch in diameter, overlain with
organic brass shapes meant to approximate the continents of the Earth. Said globe contains an interior device,
commonly described as a “fairy bell,” which produces a pleasant tinkling sound
when shaken.
The trade
beads are cylindrically shaped and composed of glass, ranging from a quarter
inch to a half inch in length, bearing a base color resembling butter, and
marked with small geometric figures in a variety of hues: green exes, red and
blue polygons, pink and blue spirals, and white bars.
Origin of
item(s): Globe pendant and leather cord were worn by subject’s mother during
her brief opera career in the late forties, and considered by the original
owner to be something of a good luck charm.
(The pendant can be seen, in fact, in a publicity photo from her final
performance, in Verdi’s “Il Trovatore,” in the summer of 1947.) Subject received said pendant, once again
from his father, on the occasion of his little brother’s death, sometime in the
late nineties.
The trade
beads were created in 18th-century Venice, for use by European colonists in
Africa. The beads ended up in Kenya,
where they were purchased some two centuries after their manufacture by two
South African women of English ancestry.
The women took these and other artifacts when they emigrated to the town
of Ferndale, on the Northern California coast just south of Eureka, where they
opened an import shop. The beads were
subsequently purchased by the subject on a return trip from San Francisco,
during the winter preceding the reported incident, and added to the
aforementioned leather cord and silver-and-brass pendant.
Dispensation
of item number two: Said item is currently hanging from the neck of subject as
he enjoys his favorite meal – cream of mushroom soup, a large bowl of steamed
mussels in white wine sauce, and a gin martini (straight up, two olives) – at
the Madrona Restaurant, on Eagle Harbor, Winslow, Bainbridge Island, Washington
State.
* * *
I managed
to finish all three of my dinner items in a grand epicurean triptych. I swiped a chunk of sourdough through the
last of my soup and chewed it down. I
dug the last mussel shell from its wine-and-butter pond, harpooned its little
pink seafood heart with my junior fork and let it slide like saline silk down
the length of my mouth. Then I lifted
the toothpicked olives from my martini, shot down the last spoonful of
fire-water (inhaling cool sea air over my teeth), slid off the olives and
chewed them up.
The filthy
Roman side of my soul was very heartened by this, but I felt an odd pressure
against my heart. I patted a hand over
my shirt pocket and rediscovered the Last of the Mohicans, the hundredth of one
hundred, reached in to lift it out, hold it next to my dinner candle and run
its rough edges against my thumb. It was
almost time for the opera, and that meant it was time to perform my final
burial-at-sea. I descended the steps of
the Madrona’s harborfront deck, crossed its perfect little square of lawn and
presented myself to my audience, hundreds of sailboats lifting their bare masts
at the sky. I braced my legs against the
garden railing, felt for the edge of the scallop and let it fly, tossing it
over the bank in a pleasant fifteen-foot arc.
It landed with a tasty plunk in a square of dark water framed by
walkways, messing up neighboring stripes of reflected light with its dancing
concentrics. About the time they
smoothed back out I lifted my face to the opposite hills, tall shadows of fir
trees picketing the ridgetops, and whispered the same phrase I had whispered ninety-nine
times before: “La mamma morta.” My now-empty hand wandered to the globe
dangling against my sternum, my fingers sailing the smooth reaches of silver
ocean in search of a brass Africa.
I settled
my tab and wandered in slow overfed steps up the hill to Bjune, then turned the
corner to sight the craggy Rushmore silhouette of Maestro Umbra, standing in
the marquee lights of Bainbridge Theater as he conducted his vivid, rhythmic
small talk opposite a dark, petite, energetic figure.
As usual, I
was much more intrigued by Maestro’s fashion sense than his companion. Over the past six months I had seen him
deploy a wide range of jazzy Dapper Dan suits with brightly colored sets of
ties and matching socks, the latter artfully exposed by high-tide pant cuffs. It reminded me of Johnny Green, an old-time
Hollywood conductor I saw in concert at Lincoln Center. No one under sixty could possibly get away
with that look anymore, but draped across rakish old figures like those of
maestros Green and Umbra, it was truly the cat’s pajamas. Tonight, Il Professore’s ensemble featured a
mustard suit with cream-colored shirt, solid flame-red silk tie and matching
socks. (Ooh, mamma!) Maestro gave a
quick sideward glance at my approach, flashed that devil smile at his
companion, then turned at precisely the right moment to accept my handshake and
proffer an introduction.
“Ah! Now
THIS... is just the paisano about whom I have been telling you. THIS... is William Harness, a quite
knowledgeable opera-teur, one of our most cherished patrons AND... Gabriella’s
dearest friend. Bill, this is Licia
Albanese.”
That was
surprise number one, so lost in my textile observations that I had forgotten
the purpose for the evening. Licia was
much less decked out than at my previous sighting, wearing black polyester
pants, a delicate charcoal button-up sweater with tiny silver checks, and a
high-collared white blouse – all business but no mistake, I knew that
quick-fire smile and that sharp Italian nose from the “Traviata” publicity shot
in my grandmother’s scrapbook. I held
her small, strong hand in both of mine and tried to assemble a decent homage.
“Signora
Albanese, it’s truly... an honor. I can’t tell you how many hours of pleasure
you have given to myself and my family.”
“Grazie,
grazie,” she said, then released my hands and put a finger to the side of her
chin as she sized me up. “Yes, you are
right, Giuseppe. I can see it in the
eyes, and the cheekbones and the lips.”
I looked to
Maestro for some kind of hint, and he placed an apologetic hand on my
shoulder. “I HOPE... you do not mind, Bill, but I have repeated
what I know of your family HISTORY... what I have heard from Gabriella, to
Licia, and LICIA... seems to BELIEVE... that she once performed with your
mother.”
That would
be surprise number two. One hundred
shells had made their separate ways back to the water, but here was one of the
world’s great divas conjuring my mother right back into flesh.
“Oh! I am sure of it, Maestro. It was one, two years after the War, and I
was doing a kind of apprentice opera in Albany, New York, ‘Le Nozze di Figaro.’
Your mother was performing Susanna, but during my visit she stepped aside so
that I could play the role instead, and she played Barbarina. Well!
I will tell you, when she came out in the fourth act to sing ‘L’ho
perduta,’ I turned to the director and said, ‘You will excuse me, sir, but I
think we have made a mistake. I should
be singing Barbarina, and that young lady out there should be Susanna.’ Like a
bird she sang, a human bird, so light, so effortless, so loving the way she
handled her line, her dynamics. And her
face! Light pouring out from her face,
so lit up from singing, so joyous, like nothing else mattered as much in the
world as this one little song!
“I talked
to her afterward, and she said she was learning Leonora for ‘Il Trovatore’ – a
difficult role, as you know – and that she had just been invited to final
auditions for the Met. And then, after
that ‘Figaro’ – nothing, I heard nothing.
Whatever became of her?”
I had
become so wrapped up in this most wonderful posthumous tribute, that I hated to
let Licia down with the sour outcome. I
shuffled my feet and fished out an answer.
“She... I’m afraid she... had to leave the opera. She had medical problems.”
“Oh! I am so sorry! Is she...”
She turned
out her palms to me, a gesture I could read pretty easily.
“No. She...
passed away ten years later.”
“Oh, and so
young. I am so sorry. I am afraid that is the cost sometimes of
being eighty-four. So many of my
contemporaries are no longer with us.
Have you taken up the torch, by chance?”
Before I
could answer, the five-minute bells rang.
Maestro took Licia by the elbow, the two of them lent me a pair of
parting smiles, and they ambled into the theater. I picked up my regular ticket at the
will-call window and trailed in with the crunch of patrons. Utterly distracted, I failed to notice
another thing until the prophetic tidal-wave crash of Puccini’s opening chords.
I was
pleased to find Gabriella completely on her game. With the jittery first weekend now gone and
the work ground deeply into her bones, she was free to lighten up on matters of
musical technique and shift more of her conscious attentions to the drama. This was especially important considering the
nature of her single-diva target audience.
The middle of the twentieth century had seen the first real emphasis on
performers who could act as well as sing, and Licia had been one of the first
to earn the label “singing actress,” with all of its implicit skills: eloquent
movement and gesture, the ability to subtly pantomime the text (especially for
English-speaking audiences before the advent of supertitles), and the internal
energy needed to project the opera’s intrinsic emotionality to the farthest
balconies of spacious halls.
Every word
of the master class came back to Gabriella as she sang. “Give life to the words,” said Licia. “Every word needs a life. Walk, walk.
That way you don’t get tense while you’re singing. Don’t rush it – this is Puccini! Wait!
Wait! Make the last note long;
that way, the people will know you’re finished.
This is opera. You have to give
to them so they come back, to hear you.”
Watching Licia, said Gabriella, was like
watching history: here in the form of a human mind, body and voice was
literally a walking, talking and singing archive of opera performance, deeply
inscribed with gestures, turns of phrase and vocal inflections that had made
their first muscle-memory marks years ago on stages in New York, Milan, London
and San Francisco. And who knows how
many decades, even centuries, these secrets had traveled before that, how many
teacher-vessels had given their lives to pass them along?
To a lesser
extent, Joe was also firing in on his Scarpia – and Rodrigo was simply
performing out of his league. State
Ferry was following the fairly common practice of lumping acts one and two
together, and by the time Cavaradossi was dragged in by Scarpia’s henchmen,
blood trickling down his temples from the Baron’s sordid little torture
headband, Rodrigo had worked himself into a bedraggled froth. He appeared genuinely faint and nauseous,
sweat pouring from his brow, and bloodshot, beaten eyes. For a guy who generally hid behind his voice,
this level of dramatic authenticity was extraordinary.
Waves of
stunned applause rang down after the Act Two curtain, and I strolled
contentedly to the lobby to track down our guest prima donna for some more
stories about my mother. Before I could
find her, however, I was greeted by the sight of flashing lights on the street
outside. I broke through the lobby doors
to find Maestro Umbra, pacing anxiously along the sidewalk, hand held to his
forehead in a Cavaradossian gesture of torture.
When I gave a questioning tap to his shoulder, he turned to me with
tired, nervous eyes.
“Oh,
Billy. I’m glad you are here. It’s Rodrigo.
I don’t know, I don’t know.
During the torture scene, when he was offstage, he became suddenly
sick... threw up. It is a MIRACLE... it came between his parts. I have rarely seen a thing so heroic as that,
the way he fought through the rest of that act.
When he came BACKstage... after
the scene, he collapsed. Dear boy. I am very worried, verry very worried. The paramedics, they think perhaps it is food
poisoning, and they say that he will probably be okay. But we...
oh, Billy, I think we will have to cancel the performance. We are a small company, we cannot afford
understudies. Oh, this is very bad.”
I gripped
the sleeve of Maestro’s jacket. “No,
Maestro! Not tonight, not when Licia...”
Maestro
aimed his palms at the sky and gave a sad smile. “But what will we do, Billy? ‘Tosca’ is not
‘Tosca’ without a third act, and the third act is nothing without Cavaradossi,
without ‘E lucevan.’”
“God, God,”
I muttered, trying to think. “Maestro –
where is Gabriella? Does she know?”
“How could
she not? I think she is in her dressing
room. Perhaps it would be good if
you...”
“Yes,
yes. I will.”
I tried to
pass through the lobby wearing something of a neutral air, but I didn’t appear
to be fooling anybody. A hundred eyes
watched me go, and a hundred others were gathered at the front door, fixed on
the ambulance pulling away down Bjune. I
traveresed the back of the house and turned up the staircase, passing a squad
of red-clad soldiers awaiting duty with the firing squad. Joe was just inside the dressing-room door,
half-in half-out of his recent death clothes, wearing a grim expression.
“She’s in
there,” he said, waving his wig toward the wardrobe room. “She’s not in very good shape.”
I tapped on
the door, got no answer, and slipped inside down a long aisle of medieval coats
and Victorian gowns. The single light
was an exit sign on the back door, and under its faint glow I found her, curled
up in Tosca’s emerald green gown atop a pile of fabric scraps, face down, her
body shaking with sobs. I knelt on the
floor beside her and placed a hand on her arm.
She glanced up, found my silhouette and rolled toward me, burying her
face against the lapel of my jacket. It
took her a minute to rediscover speech, and when she did it had lost all the
rhythms of normal language, a creaking whisper laced with fragments of leftover
sing-song.
“Oh God,
Billy! I was so... I was so close, Billy. I was right there, Billy. And poor Rodrigo... is he okay?”
I ran my
hand along her hair. “Yes. Rodrigo is sick, but he’ll be okay.” I leaned
her back into a sitting position along the scraps and lay at her feet, holding
and stroking her hands.
“God,
Billy. It’s just like your grandmother,
isn’t it? I see it now. And it hurts! God Billy, it’s awful.”
She doubled
forward as if in pain and held my hands to her lips, dousing my knuckles with
tears.
I was
empty, completely lost, but still I hoped beyond all reason to conjure a way
out of this. I was not about to accept
another loss. I began with questions.”
“Is... Do you think that was enough, though? I mean, she heard you for two acts.”
Gabriella
flailed her hands into the air like birds.
“It’s not enough, Billy! For her
to do something like invite me to New York – it has to be perfect. And there is not perfect Tosca without a
third act. It’s so unprofessional. And I wouldn’t blame Licia at all,
Billy. She has to have her
standards. It’s just not going to happen
this time, not this time, and I’m just going to have to... live with it.”
These last
three words had the simultaneous effect of sending Gabriella right back into
her crying and firing strange daggers of pain into my ribs. Live with it, live with it, live with
it. I fetched Gabriella a Kleenex from a
nearby makeup table and left her to clean her face as I wandered back to the
wardrobe racks, breathing in the musty perfume of fabric, leather and backstage
dust as preposterous ideas began to assemble themselves in my head. I turned and gave a long backward glance at
my beloved subject, brightness incarnate, brightness burrowed into a nest of
scraps, placed a hand on my mother’s pendant and found South America, Tierra
del Fuego, with the tip of my index finger.
And spoke.
“What if I
sing the part?”
Gabriella
snuffled, and cocked her head at me, but gave no answer. I covered my tiny silver world with a fist
and repeated myself.
“What if I
sing the third act?”
Gabriella
turned her gaze to the floor and answered me with a disappointed, scornful
tone. “Billy... I don’t know if that’s
your idea of a joke, but I...
The voice
was made of Venusian breath, the exhale of an inhale I had taken ten years
before. A creature of brass and warmth,
it seized up the blue genesis of Cavaradossi’s regret, the center of “E
lucevan” when he at last takes up the brooding clarinet theme and brings it
back down in a swelling Puccinian arc of unrealized memory. “Oh! dolci baci, o languide carezze, mentr’io
fremente le belle forme disciogliea dai veli!” (“Oh, sweet kisses, languorous
caresses, while I, trembling, would free her lovely limbs from their veils!”)
The line fell back down in our little dark room and Gabriella rose to her feet,
her eyes wide with disbelief.
“Billy? Is that... is that really you?”
I answered
her with the following line, and continued to the end, the repeat of “tanto la
vita!” a final grace note and slight portamento that I had picked up from my
first voice teacher maybe thirty years before.
The force of the music broke away the crust, filled the muscles of my
arms and legs with blood, sent the air into unused pockets of my lungs. And then, silence. The firing squad in the room next door had
ceased its chattering. The door behind
us swept open on squeaky hinges, revealing the puzzled, ghostly countenance of
Maestro Umbra.
“Rodrigo? Am I hearing things. Who is that?”
Gabriella
leapt from her parapet of rags and raced to Maestro’s side. “Maestro!
Billy is going to sing Cavaradossi!”
Maestro
eyed me up and down with a wry look on his face. “And I suppose that I will be the Pope.”
Gabriella
shifted quickly to the task of crisis management.
“Let him
explain later, Maestro, but for now why don’t you go out and tell the audience
that we will have a substitute tenor for Act Three. Now go.
Go!”
Maestro
disappeared around the corner, speaking to himself in Italian. Gabriella, back in her element, marched up to
me and began leafing through the wardrobe racks.
“What’s
your waist, Billy?”
“Forty.”
“Forty. Painter.
Eighteen hundred. Ah! Marcello!
Close enough.”
She yanked
out a costume and handed it to me. “Joe
is a mite beefier than you, but I think it’ll work. It’s from last year’s ‘Bohème.’ If it’s a
little baggy, there are some pins on the makeup table, but otherwise you’ll
just have to sing with one hand on your pants.
You might as well forget the makeup, we don’t have time. I’ll meet you at curtain left in five minutes
and...
Her
stage-mother calm fled and she fell into a spasm of exhilaration, hugging me
tightly and planting grateful paprika kisses on my cheeks. Once recovered, she found my mother’s
pendant, held it like a robin’s egg between her hands and looked up to me with
tired walnut-shell eyes and a relieved smile.
“Dear
Billy. You had one more story, didn’t
you?”
Having just
volunteered myself for the firing squad, words did not come easily. I gave my response by taking Rhiannon’s Knot
from Tosca’s neck and lifting it to my lips.
Gabriella
whispered Tosca’s Act One entrance line – “Mario, Mario, Mario!” I gave
Cavaradossi’s descending response: “Son qui.” I am here.
“I love
you, Billy,” she said, then pointed an instructional finger at my nose. “Five minutes. Curtain left.
And be sure you’ve got a ring to bribe the gaoler with.”
“Si.”
She put a
hand against the side of my face, then fled through the door, leaving me alone
with five or six centuries’ worth of costumes.
I began my rapid identity change, first with a French painter’s pants,
then with the weathered fabric of Cavaradossi’s final precious minutes – his
fear, his love, his art, his loss, his great pride – five minutes to assemble a
life from the stage up, five minutes to tear open the skin and let the old
music dig back into its channels. Through
the wall I could hear the audience returning to the theater, the orchestra
tuning up. Through my skin I could feel
the blood running into my veins, the warmth rising in my throat, the voice
leaving the body, the voice rising to heaven.
It had been
ten years since I had played Cavaradossi. And I really did believe that it
would kill me.
Photo by MJV
No comments:
Post a Comment