by Donna Leon
Falling in Love
Also by Donna Leon
Death at La Fenice
Death in a Strange Country
Dressed for Death
Death and Judgment
Acqua Alta
Quietly in Their Sleep
A Noble Radiance
Fatal Remedies
Friends in High Places
A Sea of Troubles
Willful Behaviour
Uniform Justice
Doctored Evidence
Blood from a Stone
Through a Glass, Darkly
Suffer the Little Children
The Girl of His Dreams
About Face
A Question of Belief
Drawing Conclusions
Handel’s Bestiary
Beastly Things
Venetian Curiosities
The Jewels of Paradise
The Golden Egg
My Venice and Other Essays
By its Cover
Gondola
Donna Leon
Falling in Love
Atlantic Monthly Press
New York
Copyright © 2015 by Donna Leon
Jacket photograph © Mark Delavan and Adrianne Pieczonka; Canadian Opera Company’s 2012 production of Tosca
Photo: Michael Cooper
Author photograph © Regine Mosimann/Diogenes Verlag AG Zürich
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Published simultaneously in Canada
Printed in the United States of America
ISBN 978-0-8021-2353-4
eISBN 978-0-8021-9183-0
Atlantic Monthly Press
an imprint of Grove Atlantic
154 West 14th Street
New York, NY 10011
Distributed by Publishers Group West
groveatlantic.com
For Ada Pesch
Le voci di virtù
Non cura amante cor, o pur non sente.
A loving heart pays no attention to the voice of virtue,
or cannot hear it.
Rodelinda
Handel
1
The woman knelt over her lover, her face, her entire body, stiff with terror, staring at the blood on her hand. He lay on his back, one arm flung out, palm upturned as if begging her to place something into it; his life, perhaps. She had touched his chest, urging him to get up so they could get out of there, but he hadn’t moved, so she had shaken him, the same old sleepy-head who never wanted to get out of bed.
Her hand had come away red and, without thinking, she pressed it to her mouth to stifle her scream, knowing she must make no noise, not let them know she was there. Then horror overcame her caution, and she screamed his name again and again, telling herself he was dead, and it was all over; like this, in blood.
She looked at where her hand had been and saw the red blotches: how had so much blood come from them, so small, so small? She rubbed her clean hand across her mouth, and it came away coloured with the blood on her face. Panicked, seeing the blood, she spoke his name. All over, all over. She said his name again, this time louder, but he could no longer hear or answer her, or anyone. Unthinking, she leaned forward to kiss him, grabbed at his shoulders in a vain attempt to shake some life into him, but there was to be no more life, for either one of them.
A loud cry from the leader of the gang that had killed him came from her left, and she pressed her hand to her breast. Fear drove out speech, and she could only grunt ‘Ah, ah’, like an animal in pain. She turned her head and saw them, heard their shouting but had no idea what they were saying: all she knew was terror and, suddenly, fear for herself, now that he was dead, and for what they wanted to do to her.
She pushed herself to her feet and moved away from him: no looking back. He was dead, and it was all gone: all hope, all promise spent and dry.
The men, four of them on the left, then five more from the right, came out on to the littered rooftop where the murder had taken place. The leader of the pack shouted something, but she was beyond hearing him or hearing anyone or anything. She knew only the need to escape, but they had her blocked in from both sides. She turned and saw behind her the edge of the roof, no other building in sight: no place to go, no place to hide.
There was choice, but there was really no choice: death was better than any of this, either what had just happened or what was sure to happen once they got their hands on her. She stumbled once, twice, as she ran towards the ledge, stepped up on to it with unexpected grace and turned back to look at the men who were running towards her. ‘O Scarpia, avanti a Dio,’ she cried, turned, and leaped.
The music crashed out and then continued to boom around a bit, as it always did at the end of this shabby little shocker, and then there was a long moment of stunned silence as the audience realized what they had just heard and seen. Not since Callas – and that had been half a century ago – had anything like this Tosca been seen or heard. Tosca had really killed Scarpia, the chief of police, hadn’t she? And her lover really had been shot by those creeps in uniform? And she’d really jumped into the Tiber. By God, the woman could act and, even better, she could sing. It’s completely real: the murder, the fake execution that turned out to be real, and her final leap when there was nothing left and nothing to lose. It’s romantic balderdash, the whole thing is beyond parody, but then why was the audience sitting there clapping the skin off their hands and shouting like banshees?
The curtains slowly parted at the centre, and Flavia Petrelli slipped through the narrow space. She wore red, redder than red, and a tiara that had apparently survived her plummet into the river. She looked out at the audience, and stunned delight slowly lit up her face. For me? All that noise for me? Her smile grew, and one of her hands – somehow magically free of blood or whatever had been used to resemble it – rose to the exposed flesh above her breasts and pressed at her heart, as if to force it to remain in place in the midst of all this excitement.
She took her hand away and opened one arm as if to embrace them all, then the other, exposing her entire body to the assault of the applause. Then both hands again found their way to her breast, and she sank in a graceful motion, half bow, half genuflection. The applause increased, and voices, both male and female, shouted out ‘Brava’, or, for those who were either blind or not Italian, ‘Bravo’. She didn’t seem to mind, so long as they shouted. Another bow, and then she raised her face as if to bathe it in the cascade of applause.
The first rose, long-stemmed and yellow as the sun, fell just in front of her. Her foot pulled back from it involuntarily, as if she were afraid of doing it an injury, or it her, and then she bent, so slowly as to make her motion seem studied, almost practised, to pick it up. She pressed it to her bosom and crossed her hands upon it. Her smile had faltered when she saw it – ‘This is for me? For me?’ – but the face she raised to the upper balconies gleamed with joy.
As if summoned by her reaction, the roses continued to fall: first two, then three more, tossed individually from the right side,
and then more and more, until dozens of them lay at her feet, turning her into a Joan of Arc, brushwood rising to her ankles, and above.
Flavia smiled into the thunder of the applause, bowed again, stepped back from the roses, and slipped through the curtains. A few moments later, she emerged, holding her no-longer-dead lover by the hand. Like the shouts of Scarpia’s henchmen, the applause mounted at the sight of him, heading towards that delirium that so often rose at the sight of a handsome young tenor who had all the high notes and used them generously. Both of them looked nervously below them, trying to avoid stepping on the carpet of roses, then they abandoned the attempt and crushed them underfoot.
Responding instinctively to some note in the applause that told her it was for him, Flavia took a step backwards and joined in, raising her hands high as she clapped with the audience. Just at the moment when the applause started to diminish, she stepped up beside him, took his arm and leaned into his side, then kissed him briefly on the cheek, the companionable peck one gives a brother or a good colleague. He, in his turn, grabbed her hand and thrust their joined hands above their heads, as if announcing the winner of a contest.
The tenor took one step back to make room for her, crushing more roses, and she slipped in front of him and through the curtains; he followed her. After a moment, the resurrected Scarpia, the front of his brocade jacket still incarnadined, stepped through the curtains and moved to the right, avoiding most of the roses. He bowed, bowed again, and crossed his hands on his bloody chest to show his thanks, then, returning to the opening in the curtain, he reached in and withdrew Flavia, whose other hand was attached to the hand of the young tenor. Scarpia led the conga line of three no-longer-dead people to the right, crushing the blossoms, the hem of Flavia’s gown sweeping them aside. They raised their linked hands, bowing together, their faces equally radiant and transformed by pleasure and gratitude at the audience’s appreciation.
Flavia unhooked herself from the two men and slipped behind the curtain again, this time to emerge hand in hand with the conductor. He was the youngest person on the stage, but his self-possession matched that of his older colleagues. He walked forward, not even noticing the roses, and scanned the audience. He smiled and bowed, then waved the orchestra to its feet for their share of the applause. The conductor bowed again, then stepped back and placed himself between Flavia and the tenor. The four of them moved forward and bowed, then again, always pleased and grateful. The level of applause diminished minimally; sensitive to this, Flavia waved happily to the audience, as if she were about to board a train or a ship, and led her male colleagues behind the curtain. The applause tapered, and when the singers did not appear again, trickled to a halt, until one male voice rose up from the first balcony, shouting, ‘Evviva Flavia,’ a cry which evoked some wild clapping, and then silence and only the sound of murmurs and low talk as the audience wormed its way towards the exits.
2
Behind the curtain, the acting stopped. Flavia walked away from the three men without a word and made towards her dressing room. The tenor looked after her with the same sort of look that had animated Cavaradossi’s face when he thought of her ‘dolci baci, o languide carezze’, the loss of which would be worse than death. Scarpia pulled out his telefonino to call his wife and tell her he’d be at the restaurant in twenty minutes. The conductor, who had no interest in Flavia save that she obey his tempi and sing well, left his colleagues with a silent nod and headed for his own dressing room.
Halfway down the corridor, Flavia caught the heel of her shoe in the hem of her scarlet gown and lurched forward, managing to save herself from falling only by lunging towards one of the costume assistants. The young woman proved surprisingly strong, as well as quick-thinking: she wrapped her arms around the singer and managed to support her weight and thrust without being knocked to the ground.
As soon as Flavia was steady on her feet, she pulled herself free of the younger woman, asking, ‘Are you all right?’
‘It’s nothing, Signora,’ the assistant said, reaching across her body to rub at her shoulder.
Flavia placed a hand on the woman’s forearm. ‘Thank you for catching me,’ she said.
‘I didn’t really think about it: I just grabbed you.’ Then, after a moment, ‘One fall is enough for tonight, don’t you think?’
Flavia nodded, thanked her again, and continued down the corridor to her dressing room. She started to open the door but paused, shaking in delayed reaction to her near-fall and with the adrenalin rush that always followed performances. Feeling slightly faint, she rested her other hand against the jamb and closed her eyes. Moments passed, and then the sound of voices at the other end of the corridor energized her, and she opened the door and went in.
Roses here, roses there, roses, roses everywhere. She caught her breath at the sight of the flowers, every surface covered with vases filled with dozens of them. She stepped into the room and closed the door. Motionless, she studied the sea of yellow, growing even more uneasy when she noticed that the vases were not the usual catch-alls that most theatres kept for such occasions: chipped, even paint-smeared, some of them obviously taken from the prop room to be put to less visible use.
‘Oddio,’ she muttered, going back through the open door. Her usual dresser stood to the left, a dark-haired woman old enough to be the mother of the costume assistant who had saved her from falling. As she had after every performance, she’d come to take Flavia’s costume and wig back to the storeroom.
‘Marina,’ Flavia ventured, ‘did you see who brought these flowers?’ She waved vaguely and stepped back to let her into the room.
‘Oh, che belle,’ Marina exclaimed when she saw them. ‘How much they must have cost. There’s dozens and dozens.’ Suddenly she, too, noticed the vases and asked, ‘Where’d those come from?’
‘Don’t they belong to the theatre?’
Marina shook her head. ‘No. We don’t have anything like that. They’re real.’ Seeing Flavia’s confusion, she pointed to a tall vase of alternating white and transparent stripes. ‘Glass, I mean. That one’s Venini,’ she said. ‘Lucio used to work there. I can tell.’
‘I don’t understand,’ Flavia said, wondering how the conversation had led to this. She turned her back on the woman and said, ‘Can you unzip me?’
She raised her arms, and Marina helped her step out of the shoes and then the costume. Flavia pulled her dressing gown from the back of a chair and sat in front of the mirror and, almost without thinking, began to wipe at the thick makeup. Marina hung the dress on the back of the door and stood behind Flavia to help her remove her wig. She slipped her fingers under the back and prised it from Flavia’s head, then peeled away the tight rubber cap that covered her hair. As soon as her head was free, Flavia dug her fingers into her hair and scratched her head for a full minute, sighing with relief and pleasure.
‘Everybody says that’s the worst part,’ Marina said. ‘The wig. I don’t know how all of you stand it.’
Flavia spread her fingers and ran them through her hair repeatedly, knowing it would dry quickly in the overheated room. It was as short as a boy’s, one of the reasons she was so seldom recognized on the street, her fans having in mind the long-haired beauty they saw on stage, not this woman with a short cap of curly hair in which there were already faint traces of grey. She rubbed harder, enjoying the continued relief as her hair dried.
The phone rang; with some reluctance, she answered with her name.
‘Signora, could you tell me how much longer you’ll be?’ a man’s voice asked.
‘Five minutes,’ she answered, the response she always gave, whether she would be that amount of time or half an hour longer. They’d wait.
‘Dario,’ she said before he could hang up. ‘Who brought those flowers?’
‘They came on a boat.’
Well, since they were in Venice, it was unlikely they’d come any other way, but she said only, ‘Do you know who sent them? Whose boat it was?’
‘I don’t know, Signora. There were two men, and they brought everything to the door here.’ Then, after a moment, he added, ‘I didn’t see the boat.’
‘Did they give a name?’
‘No, Signora. I thought that . . . well, I thought that, with so many flowers, you’d know who they came from.’
Ignoring this, Flavia repeated, ‘Five minutes,’ and replaced the phone. Marina had gone, taking the gown and the wig with her, leaving Flavia to the silence and solitude of the dressing room.
She stared at her reflection, grabbed a handful of tissues and wiped her face until most of the makeup was gone. Remembering that there would be people waiting for her at the exit, she lined her eyes with mascara and smoothed some makeup over the signs of tiredness under her eyes. She picked a lipstick from the table and applied it carefully. A wave of tiredness swept over her, and she closed her eyes to wait for the adrenalin to fight it away and buoy her up again. She opened her eyes and studied the objects on the table, then took the cotton shoulder bag from the drawer and swept everything – makeup, comb, brush, handkerchief – into it. She no longer carried anything of value into the theatre – into any theatre. Once, in Covent Garden, her coat had been stolen; at the Palais Garnier, it had been her address book, the only thing taken from the purse she had left in a drawer. Who in God’s name would want her address book, and given the fact that she had had it for ages, who would be able to decipher the hodgepodge of cancelled names and addresses, updated email addresses and phone numbers that kept her in touch with other members of this strange geographically liquid profession of hers? Luckily, most of the addresses and numbers were also in her computer, but it had taken her weeks to get some of the others back. Then, unable to find an address book she liked, she decided to trust to her computer and prayed that no virus or crash would sneak in and erase them all.
It was only the third performance in the run, so there were sure to be people waiting. She pulled on a pair of black tights and put on the skirt and sweater she had worn to the theatre. Slipping on her shoes, she took her coat from the closet and wrapped a woollen scarf – red as her dress had been – around her neck: Flavia often referred to her scarves as her hijab: she could never leave the house without wearing one.