by Donna Leon
Years ago, Brunetti had vowed never to engage strangers in discussions of politics or social behaviour, aware that it was the safest way to avoid armed conflict. ‘Then the performance won’t . . .’ he began when Flavia interrupted to say, ‘I’m going to change and make those calls. Come back in twenty minutes.’ Brunetti and Vianello started off down the corridor, aiming to take a slow walk around that floor of the theatre.
When they disappeared, Flavia said, pulling at the skirt of her costume, ‘I’ll hang it up and leave it. You can go home, Marina. You have a key, don’t you, to get in tomorrow?’
‘Yes, Signora.’ And then, ‘I’ll be at work,’ she said, with heavy emphasis on the pronoun.
Flavia opened the door to the dressing room, switched on the lights above the dressing table, and turned and locked the door from inside.
‘Good evening, Signora,’ a woman’s voice said softly from behind her. Flavia gasped, regretting her hurry to make those calls, her eagerness to rebuff Brunetti’s caution.
‘Your performance tonight was glorious.’
Flavia willed herself to remain calm, forced a smile on to her face, and turned to see a woman standing to the side of her dressing table. In one hand she held a bouquet of yellow roses. In the other she held a knife. Was it the knife she’d used to stab Freddy? was Flavia’s first thought, but then she saw that the blade was longer than the one she had been told had been used on him.
As Flavia watched her, the woman went in and out of focus, or at least Flavia saw different parts of her but failed to make out the whole. Try as she might to see her face, at first all she could see were the eyes and then the nose and then the mouth, but no matter how she concentrated, she could not bring them together to tell what the woman looked like. The same thing happened when she looked at the body. Was she tall? What was she wearing?
Flavia softened her expression and kept facing in the direction of the shifting form near her dressing table. Dogs smell fear, she had once been told; they attack when they sense weakness.
She recalled an old saying of her grandmother’s: ‘Da brigante uno; a brigante, uno e mezzo.’ If a brigand gives you one, give him back one and a half. But first you had to calm the brigante; you had to lull the monster into sleep.
The knife had never gone out of focus, but Flavia ignored it to the degree that she could, pointed to the flowers and said, ‘Then it’s you who’s sent me those roses. I’m glad, finally, to be able to thank you for them. I’ve no idea where you managed to find them at this time of year. And so many.’ She was a prattling fool, utterly transparent but unable to come up with better lines. The woman would sense her fear; soon she would smell it, too.
The woman, however, behaved as if she found Flavia’s comments perfectly normal, as in a sense they were, and said in response, ‘I didn’t know what colour you’d like, but then I remembered you wore a yellow dress to dinner in Paris a few years ago, and I thought it might be right.’
‘Oh, that old thing,’ Flavia said in her most dismissive girls-all-together voice. ‘I found it in the sales and bought it on impulse – you know how it is – and, well, I’ve never been sure it really suited me.’
‘I thought it looked lovely,’ the woman said, sounding wounded, as if she had given Flavia the dress, only to have it rejected.
‘Thank you,’ Flavia said, then walked very slowly and naturally to the dressing table, pulled out the chair in front of the mirror and sat. She waved to the sofa and said, ‘Why don’t you have a seat?’
‘No, I’ll stand.’
‘Do you mind if I take off my makeup?’ Flavia asked, reaching for the box of tissues.
‘I like you with it,’ the woman answered in a voice so astrally cold that Flavia’s hand stopped above the box and refused to move, either to take a tissue or to move back to her lap, where the other one was. She stared at it, willed it to move, to come home to her. And after a moment it did, fleeing to her lap, where it wrapped itself around its mate and curled up into a ball.
‘You’re lying,’ the woman said calmly.
‘About what?’ Flavia asked, managing to sound curious and not at all defensive.
‘About the flowers.’
‘But they are beautiful.’
‘But that man, the one you had the affair with, he brought them out and threw them on the street, the same night I gave them to you,’ she said heatedly. And then, in a voice grown icy, she added, ‘I saw him.’
‘Freddy?’ Flavia asked with an easy laugh. ‘He’s terrified of his wife, and he was so afraid she’d think he’d sent them to me that, the instant he saw them, he panicked and said he had to get them out of the house.’
‘But it didn’t stop him from having you in the same house with him, did it?’ she asked, voice suddenly heavy with insinuation.
‘That was his wife’s idea,’ Flavia said easily. ‘That way, she said, it would be easier for her to keep an eye on us.’ She was about to make some slighting remark about jealous women when one look at the expression on the woman’s face led her to abandon the idea. ‘Besides, in her heart she knows there’s nothing between us any more.’ Then, as if the thought had just come to her, she added, ‘Hasn’t been for twenty years, really.’
The woman, whose reflection Flavia now saw in the mirror in front of her, did not respond, and she was tempted to let herself grow slack and stop this mad play, but the mirror had cleared her vision, and the sight of the reflected knife was enough to prod her spirits and make her say, ‘Why is it you’re here?’ She had once sung Manon with a tenor who had spat on her during a rehearsal, and she put the same warmth into her question that she had put into the duets with him, and the same skill.
‘I saw you before, you know,’ the woman said.
Flavia was about to say that, if the woman knew she had worn a yellow dress in Paris, that was no surprise, but she said, instead, ‘And I suppose you’ve heard me sing.’
‘And I wrote to you,’ she said with fierce energy.
‘I hope I answered,’ Flavia said and smiled at their joint reflections.
‘You did. But you said no.’
‘About what?’ Flavia asked with curiosity she did not have to fabricate.
‘Music lessons. I wrote to you three years ago about taking music lessons from you, but you wouldn’t do it.’ Flavia watched as the woman bent down to place the flowers on the floor. But only the flowers.
‘I’m sorry, but I don’t remember doing that.’
‘You refused,’ she insisted.
‘I’m sorry if I offended you,’ Flavia said, ‘but I don’t give singing lessons.’ Then, to make it sound like a principle, she added, ‘It’s not my talent.’
‘But you talked to that student,’ the woman said, her voice veering up towards rage.
‘That girl?’ Flavia asked with convincing disdain. ‘Her father’s the best of the ripetitori here, the best one to work with. What else could I say to her?’ she asked, making it sound like an entreaty for a friend’s understanding of a moment of human weakness.
‘Would you have given her a lesson if she’d asked?’ the woman demanded.
Thinking of the first act of Traviata, Flavia repeated the scornful tinkle of descending notes she’d used when Alfredo had first declared his love. ‘Please don’t make me laugh. If I were to give a singing lesson, it wouldn’t be to a young thing like that: she doesn’t know a solfeggio from a shoe.’
For the first time since this nightmare began, the hand holding the knife lowered slightly, to mid-thigh. The woman leaned forward, and Flavia began to make sense of her face. She might have been in her mid-thirties, but there was a dry, tired look around her eyes that made her look older. Her nose was small and straight, her eyes disproportionately large in relation to her other features, as if she’d lost weight suddenly in a severe illness.
She held her mouth tight as if in habitual disapproval, or perhaps pain, though it came to Flavia that, in the end, they did pretty much the same thing to a per
son. She wore a simple black woollen coat, open over a dark grey dress that fell to her knees.
‘Would you ever give a lesson?’ she asked.
Flavia saw a tiny flash of light from the keyhole of the prison in which this woman had trapped her. Would she give a lesson?
There came a tapping at the door. ‘Flavia, are you there?’ she heard Brunetti ask.
‘Ciao, Guido,’ she said with effortful ease. ‘Yes, I’m here, but I’m not done. My daughter’s on Skype with her boyfriend and told me to call back in five minutes. And I still haven’t called my son.’ This much, at least, was true. ‘I’ve decided not to bother with dinner, so why don’t you and your wife go home, and I’ll see you tomorrow?’ As she finished speaking, she looked down and saw that the nails of her right hand had torn two strips from the velvet of her gown.
Brunetti’s voice came back, casual and light. ‘You must be beat. I understand. We’ll go around to Antico Martini. If you feel like joining us on your way home, we’ll be there. Otherwise I’ll see you tomorrow morning; eleven or so. Ciao, and thanks for the performance.’
As if the voices had not interfered with them, the woman repeated her question, ‘Would you ever give a lesson?’
Flavia forced an easy smile on to her face and said, ‘Not while wearing this thing, I wouldn’t. People have no idea how hard it is to sing wearing all this stuff.’ She ran tired hands across the bodice of the dress and down the thick folds of the skirt.
‘If you could change, would you give a lesson?’ the woman asked with monomaniacal insistence.
Flavia upped the wattage of her smile and said, ‘If I could change, I’d give a lesson in tap dancing.’ She stopped herself from laughing, and left it to the woman to get the joke. But she seemed not to find it funny. As Flavia thought back over their conversation, she realized that the woman had taken everything she’d said with dead earnestness and was deaf to anything other than the literal meaning of words. Best not to play with this woman, then.
‘Well, if I could be comfortable, I suppose I could think about it,’ she said.
‘Then change,’ the woman said, gesturing towards her with the hand that held the knife. Seeing it, the point aimed at her face or her breast or her stomach – did it matter where it was aimed, for God’s sake? – Flavia froze. She could not move; she could not speak, she could barely breathe. She stared into the mirror, aware neither of herself nor of the woman standing near the door, and thought, not for the first time, of the things she had left undone in her life, the people she had hurt, the stupid things she had cared about.
‘I said you can change,’ the woman said unpleasantly, the voice of someone who did not like to be ignored.
Flavia forced herself to her feet, and turned towards the bathroom door. ‘My clothes are in there,’ she said.
The woman took an uneven step towards her and said, ‘You can bring them out here.’ There was no questioning or bargaining with that voice.
Flavia went into the tiny room and grabbed her slacks, sweater, and shoes. Keeping her head down, she glanced in the mirror to see if there was any chance that she could swing around and slam the door, but the woman was already standing in the doorway, watching her, so Flavia abandoned the idea. This is how they break your will, she told herself. They stop you from doing the little things, and then there’s no chance you’ll try to do the big things.
Favouring her right leg, the woman backed away from the opening but stood with her body blocking the door. Flavia walked in front of her and dumped her clothing on the back of the chair. She reached behind her head and searched with nervous fingers for the clasp of the zipper at the back of the dress. She had it, lost it, grabbed it again, and pulled it down halfway, then pulled her arms around to her back and finished pulling it down. She let the dress fall to the ground and kicked off the always-too-tight velvet slippers she had worn with it.
Standing there in her underwear, she avoided looking at herself in the mirror and picked up the old pair of blue woollen slacks she often wore to the theatre, refusing to let herself believe that this had anything to do with superstition. She kept her head down while she pulled up the zipper at the side but managed, through the hair of her wig that fell across her face, to catch a glimpse of the woman. Her expression reminded Flavia of what she had seen on the faces of some of the nuns when she was in liceo: very theatrical boredom painted over a look of hungry intensity that was as unsettling as it was confusing to young girls.
Not bothering to remove the ridiculous tiara from it, she peeled off the wig and tossed it on to the table, then looked in the mirror to strip off the rubber cap. She tugged her sweater over her sweat-soaked hair and felt a flash of security as she pulled it down over her breasts. She slid her feet into her shoes and tied them, glad that they were tight and rubber-soled.
Still bent over her shoes, she practised smiling and thought for a moment that her face – or her heart – would break into pieces at the effort. When her mouth felt right, she sat up and asked, ‘Is it you who’d like the lesson?’
‘Yes, please,’ the woman said politely. She sounded childlike in her pleasure, and Flavia feared she would not be able to keep herself from screaming.
Flavia tried to remember what her own teacher had asked her the day she took her first private class. Memory supplied it. ‘Are you working on anything at the moment?’
The woman looked down at her shoes, brought her hands close to one another but could not grip them together because of the knife, and said something Flavia could not hear.
‘Excuse me?’
‘Tosca,’ the woman said, and Flavia took a very deep breath and then another. I will ask her. I will ask her. I will sound normal and ask her. ‘Which act?’
‘Three. The final scene.’
‘Yes, it’s difficult, isn’t it, because her emotions are all over the place. What do you think those emotions are?’ Flavia asked in what she hoped was a dispassionate, pedantic voice.
‘I never thought about that,’ the woman said, her face blank with confusion. ‘I just thought about the music and how to sing the notes.’
‘But that depends on her emotions; that determines everything.’ The last act of Tosca, and she’d never thought about the emotions? She’d stick that knife into me without a second thought. Flavia put a serious expression on to her face. ‘She comes up on to the roof and finds Mario. She’s holding the safe conduct she’s killed Scarpia to get. So there’s joy, but she’s just killed a man. Then she has to tell Mario to pretend to die when they shoot him, and when they do, she thinks they’ve won everything and praises him for his acting. And when they’re alone, and he’s dead, she realizes she’s lost everything. Then they come to get her, and she knows the only escape is death. That’s a roller coaster of emotions, don’t you think?’
The woman’s face was impassive. ‘I know it’s difficult to sing, especially the duet that comes before all that.’
Best to agree with her, best to let her think she knows everything there is to know about this opera. ‘Yes, that’s true,’ Flavia said sagely. ‘You’re certainly right about that.’
‘And then she dies,’ the woman said, and Flavia stopped breathing for a long time. She tried to think of what to say, but her brain, her imagination, wit, all of the things that made her herself, had ceased to function. She looked down and saw her shoelace and thought of how beautiful it was, how perfect, what a wonderful way to tie a shoe, and how efficient shoes were, to keep your feet safe. Safe.
She sat up and asked, ‘Would you like to try the last part of it?’
‘Yes.’
Here was a way out of this room. ‘But we certainly can’t do it here,’ Flavia said. ‘In so small a space, I can’t tell anything about your voice.’ She had to let her think of it. ‘It’s really the most dramatic moment in opera, don’t you think?’ she asked in a normal voice while her musician’s mind thought of the cheap, shouting vulgarity of it. ‘Maybe we could find one of the rehearsal rooms?’
She made herself sound unconvinced, left unasked the question of where else they could try to practise it.
‘They’re all too small,’ the woman said, and Flavia wondered how she knew that.
‘Then we have no choice but to stay here,’ Flavia said, moving with evident reluctance towards the upright piano that stood against the other wall.
‘Why not the stage?’ the woman asked and Flavia, prepared for it, hoping for it, lusting with every shred of life in her for it, asked, ‘Excuse me?’
‘The stage. Why can’t we do it onstage?’
‘Because . . .’ Flavia began. ‘But it’s not . . .’ And then she let surprise win and she said, as at a great revelation, ‘Of course. Of course. No one’s there. There’s no reason we can’t use it.’ She turned to the woman with a smile that she immediately tried to hide, as if unwilling to treat this woman in a friendly fashion. After all, how could an amateur come up with such a clever idea when she, familiar with every inch of the theatre, had not thought of it?
‘I know the way,’ the woman said, taking two steps towards the door. She stepped aside and took Flavia’s right arm in her left, and Flavia felt the solid muscle of it, realized that the woman was almost a head taller than she. To feel the woman’s hand on her arm, even through the wool of her sweater, was to feel her flesh creep, an expression she had always thought utterly ridiculous. How could flesh creep? The answer was simplicity itself: by giving the sense of moving away involuntarily from contact with a disgusting substance.
The woman’s touch was not light; and though it was in no way painful, it was revolting. Flavia kept pace with her, conscious of the faint irregularity of the woman’s gait, wondering where Brunetti was, or his colleague whose name she couldn’t remember. Were they ahead or behind? How could they stay hidden if neither of them knew the theatre? Talk, you fool, talk and talk and talk.
‘Have you worked on “Vissi d’arte”?’ she asked with what she made sound like real interest. Every time she’d sung it, from the very first time as a student until earlier tonight – and how long ago had that been, dear God? – Flavia had hated the aria. She didn’t like the whining slowness of the music, Tosca’s endless, whingeing list of complaints, the bargain she tried to make with God: I gave You that, so You owe me this. ‘It’s one of the most beautiful arias he wrote.’