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FIVE
I would not
have blamed Gabriella for a moment if she had left me there in my Space Needle
collapse, had written me off as a full-gonzo head case, not to mention an
unneeded distraction. It was I, after
all, who had thrust myself into her life, juicing salvation from her singing,
and her life was a suitcase already packed to the hilt with ambitions to fill,
challenges to meet, flights to catch.
All I can
figure is that knowledgeable opera fans must be hard to come by in the Great
Northwest, because instead she bundled me up, got me in a cab to the ferry
station, and saw me all the way across to Bainbridge, leaving me alone below
deck only long enough to fetch me a bad cup of coffee from a vending
machine. Then she trudged the five
uphill blocks with me to the hotel, tucked me into bed, and called to the desk
for a rollaway so she could stay in the room with me.
I suppose
she thought I might be suicidal, but I was far too exhausted for suicide. I wouldn’t have had the energy to lift the
pills to my mouth if I had them. I woke
the next day to the sound of Gabriella singing Rosina, the second act, “Contro
un cor.” But the sound was far away and tinny.
I opened my eyes to find her in my bathrobe, hovering over my
microcassette recorder and a stack of carefully labeled tapes. Gabriella saw my open eyes and flushed, as if
she were the one who had been caught.
“I’m
sorry,” she said. “I didn’t mean to wake
you. I just couldn’t resist the
opportunity to listen to myself.”
My response
was the first few words of English I’d spoken since fleeing from the elevator
the night before. It came out all breath
at first, until my ignition kicked in and sparked it into tone. “No. I’m sorry. I shouldn’t be... bootlegging your performances.”
“As long as
I don’t find them selling for twenty-five-ninety-nine at Tower Records, I think
we’ll be okay. Do you really listen to
all these?”
“I know
your every hiccup. I’m especially fond
of that aria you were just playing. It
gets a little lost amidst all the comedy, doesn’t it?”
“Precisely. ‘Una voce poco fa’ has a lot more emotional
space around it. It’s a cavatina, a
showpiece. You know, my favorite Rossini
is actually ‘Selva opaca,’ Matilde’s aria from Act Two of ‘Guglielmo
Tell.’ Same thing – presentation, lots
of space around it. Oh, you should hear
Tebaldi do it. Unless it’s in French –
and of course that’s the language Rossini composed it in. It was commissioned by the Paris Opera:
Swiss hero, German villains, written in French by an Italian composer. The Esperanto of operas. But he’s not fooling me – Rossini liked those
French frog-mouthed syllables like a cat likes a hot tub. Italian is so much more natural and I
know... I, um... don’t...
rhythms... and.…”
I had been
wondering what this ramble was all about, and towards the end Gabriella found
herself gasping for breath as she came to my bedside. She knelt beside me and dropped her head
against my shoulder, exhausted.
“Oh Billy,
you wore me out. I’ve been so worried
about you; all night I worried. I’ve
never seen somebody go through that kind of...
transformation before. You really
snapped on me.” She stopped and looked around the room for something, then
spotted it on the nightstand.
“Here. I saved you a croissant
and some orange juice from your so-called continental breakfast. They’re probably a little stale, but that’s
what you get for sleeping in so late.”
I rubbed my
eyes and waved my head back and forth, rattling marbles. “How late?” I asked.
“One
o’clock.”
“Yee-ipes!”
I croaked. I swung my legs slowly to the
edge of the bed, and was surprised to find them still sheathed in denim.
“Sorry,”
she said, following my expression, handing me a napkin. “I don’t feel that our friendship has yet
progressed to the point where I would be comfortable... undressing you.”
“You’ve
done more than enough for me,” I replied, biting one end of my croissant. It was not the best of croissants, not the
worst; a little chalky from overexposure, but it was good just to have some
sustenance headed into my system. This
small spark of carbohydrate worked quickly, and soon the engine in my head was
spitting out chunks from the night before: my chaotic run from the Space
Needle, the grass in my fingers and that haunting, life-sucking wind off Lake
Union. I suddenly found it difficult to
look Gabriella in the eyes.
She read my
glance like a road sign, and returned to kneel at my feet, wrapping a hand over
my knee. “Billy,” she said. “You know, you do so much for me, you really
do.” She slid her eyes toward the door, and for that one flash of a moment
looked more beautiful than I had ever seen her.
“But Billy, I can’t do all this for you without some, without some fuel
to run on. You’ve got to tell me
something about that deep dark life of yours.
Something small, even. What are
you doing here, Billy? What is it that brought you to Bainbridge Island?”
I chewed
and swallowed and drank from my orange juice, fibrous tang on my teeth,
listening to the squeal of children outside in the swimming pool, short-short
long, an upward glissando of screams, and heard a dog barking somewhere, small
and yippy, a Scottish terrier, maybe.
Yip yip. Yip yip-yap. Then I looked midway down my rumpled blue
jeans and found a beautiful red-haired girl in a kelly green bathrobe looking
up at me with brown eyes, a whole damn painter’s palette of affection. The girl had asked me something, I was sure
of it, but it had vanished seven measures before, poco a poco ritardando. And so, I thought, this must be music. This is how we live, from one beat to the
next.
“What was
that song?” I asked. “That song you sang
to me.”
The muscles
in Gabriella’s face tensed up, fighting that too-easy squint, trying to be
patient with me.
“That was
‘Deh vieni, non tardar,’ Susanna’s aria, final act, ‘Marriage of Figaro.’ It’s
really silly – she’s basically trying to make her newlywed husband Figaro
jealous by pretending she’s having a rendezvous with some other man – but it’s
quite pretty, and she sings it outside in a garden, at night. I guess that’s why I thought of it. We’re doing that next, you know – auditions
are next week. I did Susanna a couple
years ago, but my voice is a lot bigger now, so I’m going to do the Countess
instead – Rosina, basically, only now she and the Count Almaviva are on the
outs and.… Oh hell, Billy! Would ya answer the fucking question?”
I wiped the
orange juice from my lips. “I’m sorry,”
I said. “What was it?”
She
answered in a flustered sigh. “Your
life. When are you going to tell me
something about your life?”
I dropped
my jaw and rubbed my hands down both jowls, trying to force myself to be
coherent, then took a couple of cleansing breaths. “Three things,” I said. “There are three things I can tell you. But I can only tell you one thing at a
time. I will tell you one today, but the
problem is, this island is too fucking beautiful. I can’t possibly tell you something so awful
in such beautiful surroundings. In
fact,” I laughed nervously, “I may have to ask you to do something about
yourself, too – maybe black out a few teeth, or use that opera makeup and
scrawl a few wrinkles across your face.”
“I
suppose... I will take that as a
compliment,” said Gabriella.
I rose from
the bed, feeling the crackle in my knees, and pulled Gabriella up from the
floor. “Do you know of some cheap,
sleazy, sordid place in the general vicinity?”
Gabriella
smiled mischievously. “Oh boy, do I.”
“Fine,” I
said. “Let me shower the grass out of my
hair, and the weeds out of my brain, and then you may conduct me thither.”
“I’ll go
fetch us a newspaper,” said Gabriella.
She planted a kiss on my cheek and skipped out of the room, green
bathrobe and all. I felt that spot on my
face and grogged along toward the bathroom, thinking, I do not deserve this... any of it.
But I’m glad she came my way.
* * *
It’s got to
be some sort of ethno-cultural lacking (and if you think about it, not
necessarily a bad one), but the average American Indian tribe is not very good
at assembling a decent casino. As much
as I enjoy the poetic justice of the Crow Tribe shaking down white tourists a
mere mile from the Custer Memorial, I‘ve yet to find anything in these
aboriginal houses of sin to compare with the divinely seedy elegance of Reno or
Vegas. Perhaps they need to bring in the
Mafia as consultants.
Gabriella
and I were sequestered in the buffet slum of the Suquamish Casino, just over
the Agate Passage from Bainbridge, at the east end of the Port Madison Indian
Reservation. (With the care and concern
so often exhibited by the white invaders, the Suquamish were lumped onto the
Reservation with the Duwamish tribe, a group of natives with whom they were not
on friendly terms.) Jabbing my fork
through a Braquean collage of limp salad, plastic green beans and a tepid
little shrunken head of a steak only days off the grill, I gave up and went
instead for my vodka gimlet.
Gabriella
eyed me with concern, especially since it had been her winnings at the
blackjack table that had paid for our so-called supper. I ignored her and took a gander down the
gray-blue cylinder ceiling, looming over the poker tables and wheels of fortune
with all the subtle charm of an airplane hangar. A trio of plaid-shirt islanders, trying hard
to look like they were not having a good time, returned my gaze with the
passive curiosity of dairy cows.
“You sure
know how to pick ‘em, Rosina.”
Gabriella
took a long swallow of milk and eyed the Mariners game flashing by on the
big-screen TV over my left shoulder.
“Unless I’m mistaken, signore, Jay Buhner has just taken one deep to
left and I...” – she folded her fingers together under her chin and eyed me
expectantly – “...and I have provided just exactly the conditions you
requested. Are you now depressed enough
to spill the beans?”
“If I eat
this steak, I will be,” I replied. “Let
me see if I know where to start.” My eyes were drawn to a young Suquamish man,
dark-complected, large bird-like nose, dumping a tray of ribs over the
steak-pile. Instead, I pictured him in a
canoe, plowing through the dark water off Port Angeles with a cargo of freshly
netted salmon, and felt slightly better.
“My
grandmother,” I began. “It’s about my
grandmother. Take this from the view of
an adoring descendant, but she had a great fiery laser beam of a soprano voice,
sent to her by God’s personal secretary to slice holes through orchestras like
an X-acto knife through a cheesecake.
“The way my
mother has told me – and this only when my father was off on business –
grandma, a Scottish Presbyterian, once caught the ear of a neighboring Catholic
priest. He’d been invited to their
talent show, and heard her sing there.
The Father offered to hire her away from his Protestant colleague so she
could sing solos in the big Latin masses.
“Being
something of a singer himself, and blessed with a generous heart, the
Presbyterian minister realized that my grandmother’s talent was too substantial
to be wasted on dry, plodding English hymns.
So he decided not to protest the move.
As for my great grandmother – well, she knew she could use the extra
money. Her husband had died in World War
I, and she worked day and night as a laundress and housemaid to support my
grandmother and her little brother.
“The power
and dexterity of my grandmother’s voice was such that she was quickly promoted
to the diocesan cathedral, twenty miles away in the city. She would take the train up on Saturday
mornings, spend the night with the family of the choir director, then head back
on Sunday afternoon. For a seventeen-year-old,
it was quite a life.
“One Easter
she sang, oddly enough, a transposed tenor solo from Puccini’s ‘Messa di
Gloria’ (one can only guess that the bishop was eager to show off his new
prize, and that the choir director had already ordered the scores for a mass
with no female solos). There in the
cathedral that Sunday was a visiting voice teacher from the Accademia di Santa
Cecilia in Rome. The teacher fell in
love with my grandmother’s voice, went to her immediately after the service and
offered her a full scholarship to the Accademia and passage to Rome. She would continue her liturgical studies,
but he also wanted her to sing opera.
“This, for
my grandmother, was a dream come true.
Unbeknownst to her mother, she had spent most of her Saturday nights
around the choir director’s piano, learning art songs and arias from his wife,
who herself used to perform in the opera chorus in Florence. For my grandmother, this passionate Italian
music was an exotic, intoxicating discovery, and she took to it like a dog to a
tree.”
At the
moment of this last comment, Gabriella was sipping a soda, and fought hard not
to perform a spit-take.
“Sorry,” I
said. “Just checking to see if you were
paying attention. Let’s see. Where was I?”
“Going to
Rome,” she said.
“Right. Now, as much as my great grandmother enjoyed
taking money from the Catholics, she was still a born-and-bred Protestant, and
trained to believe that the papacy was the center of evil in the world. It didn’t help matters that her husband had
perished in the Battle of Vittorio Veneto, fighting the Austrians along the
Italian border in World War I (and so eager to fight that he had joined the
British army a year before the United States declared war).
“It was bad
enough that her daughter was spending her weekends with a houseful of Dago
musicians – now they wanted to ship her off to the front porch of the Pope
himself. They would probably make her
the Pope’s personal Protestant soprano, punishing her for her wayward
upbringing by making her sing to him in the Vatican as he bathed and dressed in
the morning before mass, sort of like a human radio. All my great grandmother’s inbred bigotry was
set aflame, and when she discovered musical scores amongst her daughter’s
things bearing names like “Catalani” and “Bellini” and illustrations of Italian
singers in passionate embraces – well, that cut it!
“Not only
did she forbid my grandmother from going to Rome, she also made her leave her
job at the cathedral and spend her Sundays practicing ‘Onward Christian
Soldiers’ and ‘The Old Rugged Cross.’”
“Ooh!” said
Gabriella, as if this last punishment were the unkindest cut of all. “How awful!”
“Yes. About the best they could do was let her sing
Handel once in a while, but for a girl who had been exposed to the gorgeous
intricacies of opera, it was a slow, musical death. And when she was twenty, and ready to move
out on her own – that was when my great grandmother had her first stroke. The illness was horribly debilitating and
horribly long; she died seven years later, and by that time the operatic
impulse in my grandmother’s heart had completely died out.
“She met a
nice druggist from the next town over, got married, and had three
children. It was not until the age of
fifty, once her youngest, my mother, had waltzed off to college, that her love
of singing returned. She began voice
lessons and made her debut at fifty-three, singing Violetta in a
pasted-together production of Traviata in the cafeteria of the local high
school. She continued singing improbably
young roles – Cio-cio-san was her favorite – until the day she died, thirty
years ago this month.”
I
stopped. Gabriella blinked her eyes,
unsettled. “But... is that so bad? I mean, she made it, didn’t
she? She eventually... performed.”
“No,” I
said, perhaps a bit too vehemently. “Put
yourself in her shoes. Hell, you are in
her shoes. Would you be happy with
that?”
“Well. No.”
“My
grandmother was one of the special ones, Gabriella, one of the magic voices,
like yours. She belonged in Covent
Garden, La Scala, The Met, the Seattle Opera press room, not in church talent
shows and Fourth of July picnics. Those
are nice – and thank God she had those at least – but we’ll never know how good
she could have been. And all because of
my great grandmother’s bigotry, and prudishness, and narrow-mindedness. That’s what kills me: such stupid, stupid
reasons.”
Gabriella
started to say something hopeful, but it dried up in her mouth. She looked down at her hands and said,
“God. That is depressing.”
“I
sometimes wish she had told the old biddy off and shipped out to Rome anyway,”
I said. “But then, I guess I might not
be here.”
“No,” said
Gabriella. “You would’ve been a nice
little Italian boy named Stefano, hanging out with your mother backstage and
checking out all the young sopranos.”
I
laughed. “Well, maybe so. But anyway, that’s part one of the family
epic – that’s where it starts. Give me a
while, and maybe I will tell you more.”
“Your
mother?”
“I’m
sorry,” I said. “I can’t talk about it
now. Give me time. Okay?”
“Okay.”
I left my
seat rather abruptly and ventured to the dessert table, where I carved out some
coconut cake and a slice of apple pie, hoping against hope that one of them was
edible.
Photo by MJV
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