The Vampire Tapestry

by Suzy McKee Charnas

  “Really?” Jean said brightly. “Nights when rain blows onto the stage here I bet the Toscas wish they were carrying umbrellas instead of canes or flowers. One night it really poured, and a man sitting in the unroofed section in front of me put up a villainous-looking black umbrella, which isn’t allowed because the people behind the umbrella-wielder can’t see. He turned out to be John Ehrlichman, of Watergate memory.”

  “And to be both prepared and unprepared,” said Dr. Weyland urbanely. He turned to Elmo. “Young man, I noticed that you have a seat on the aisle down in front. May I change seats with you? No reflection on Miss Gray—she does not snore, scratch, or fidget—but I have trouble sitting so still for so long, no matter how fascinating the occasion.”

  Jean smiled in spite of herself. The man had charm, when he chose to exercise it. She wished he didn’t make her feel so silly and so—so squat.

  Elmo said uncertainly, “I’m in the second row. It’s pretty loud up there, and you can’t see so well.”

  “Nevertheless, I would consider the exchange a great favor; I must get up and stretch my legs now and then. An aisle seat on the side would be a mercy for me and those around me.”

  * * *

  The pit boys brought up a snare drum to set in the wings near the stage manager’s console. Spiegel herself was momentarily absent, seeing to the administration of oxygen to a chorister from St. Louis. The Santa Fe altitude could be hard on lowlanders.

  The assistant technical director circulated, hushing the chattering choristers who milled outside the dressing rooms. Behind the flat that enclosed the smaller, more intimate second-act set depicting Scarpia’s office, a minuscule orchestra assembled on folding chairs. They would play music to be heard as if from outside, through an open window of the office. A TV monitor was positioned for the assistant conductor to work from.

  In the small prop room a final test was run with the two candlesticks which Tosca must appear to light at the end of Act Two. The candlesticks were battery-powered, their brightening and dimming handled by a technician using a remote-control device adapted from a model airplane kit.

  The house manager called in to Spiegel, back at her console, advising her to delay the start of Act Two: the lines outside the ladies’ rooms were still long.

  * * *

  Elmo sat in his new seat, relieved to be at a greater distance from the stage. Down front, he had felt like a bystander trapped into eavesdropping on somebody’s very private business.

  Now as Scarpia mused alone on the anticipated success of his plans, Elmo felt safely removed and free to study the scene: the inlaid-wood effect on the stage floor, the carved shutters of the window behind Scarpia’s curly-legged dining table, a fat-cushioned sofa placed across from a big writing table all scattered with books and papers.

  Suddenly Scarpia’s singing turned ferocious—bang, bangetybang-bang, up and down. Shocked, Elmo stared at the man. Though large of frame, Scarpia was almost daintily resplendent in silk brocade: over knee breeches and lace-trimmed shirt, a vest and full-skirted coat of a delicate pale blue. From this Dresden figure came a brutally voluptuous voice. The words were close enough to Spanish for Elmo to catch their drift. They were about women: What I want I take, use, throw away, and then I go after the next thing I want.

  Elmo squirmed in his seat, uncomfortably aware of Jean sitting between himself and McGrath. It seemed indecent for any woman to overhear from a man such a fierce declaration of appetite.

  * * *

  One of Scarpia’s spies brought the news: they had not found the fugitive Angelotti at Cavaradossi’s villa, to which Tosca had led them. They had, however, found, arrested, and brought back for questioning Tosca’s lover, Cavaradossi. Scarpia began to interrogate Cavaradossi over the cantata performed by the unseen small orchestra and chorus.

  Into a pause glided a familiar soprano voice, Tosca’s voice, leading the chorus. Cavaradossi murmured impulsively that it was her voice. A glance passed between the two men: Cavaradossi’s back stiffened slightly; Scarpia lowered his powdered head and pressed on with his questions, rejecting any complicity with the prisoner even in admiration for the woman who fascinated them both.

  The stage director, watching from the back of the house with the standees, found herself delighted. Such a small bit of new business, and it looked great. Suddenly the triangle of Tosca and the two men flashed alive.

  * * *

  Jean thought back to the last part of Act One. If that had been a telling embodiment of the two-faced nature of society, here was something quite different. The choral work heard now from offstage was not, like the Te Deum earlier, a pretentious ceremonial of pomp and power. Instead, strings and voices wove a grave, sweet counterpoint against which Scarpia’s interrogation, by turns unctuous and savage, gained in ferocity.

  He was like a great beast circling his prey while outside was—Art with a capital A in the person of Tosca, Rome’s greatest singer, whose voice crested the swell of the music supposedly being performed elsewhere in the building.

  Scarpia turned suddenly, irritated at finding that voice so distracting, and slapped the shutters to, cutting off the choral background.

  Jean whispered into Elmo’s ear, “You’re right about him being like an animal.”

  * * *

  Behind the set a kneeling apprentice fastened the shutters with tape. There must be no chance they might drift open again or be blown in by a gust of wind.

  “Places, judge’s party,” said the backstage speakers. The hooded torturers and scarlet-robed judge assembled at their entry point in the wings.

  * * *

  Weyland saw Cavaradossi taken out, marched downstairs among the judge and his assistants for the continuation of the interrogation in the torture chamber. Only two remained onstage: Scarpia, composed and watchful, and Tosca, newly arrived in his office and trying to hide her alarm. Scarpia began to question her with elaborate courtesy: Let’s speak together like friends; tell me, was Cavaradossi alone when you found him at his villa?

  Now the pattern of the hunt stood vividly forth in terms that spoke to Weyland. How often had Weyland himself approached a victim in just such a manner, speaking soothingly, his impatience to feed disguised in social pleasantry . . . a woman stalked in the quiet of a bookstore or a gallery . . . a man picked up in a park . . . Hunting was the central experience of Weyland’s life. Here was that experience, from the outside.

  Fascinated, he leaned forward to observe the studied ease of the hunter, the pretended calm of the prey . . . .

  * * *

  Tremain strolled on the smoking deck, feeling left out. The fictional Angelotti was supposedly hiding offstage in a well at Cavaradossi’s villa. When next seen he would be a suicide, a corpse “played” by a dummy. Tremain himself had nothing to do but cool his heels in costume for two acts until the curtain calls. He would have liked to chat with Franklin, who played the sacristan and was likewise finished after Act One; but Franklin was in one of the practice rooms writing a letter to his sick daughter back in Baltimore.

  Tremain went down to the musicians’ area and out the passageway to the south side of the building. There were production people standing three deep on the stairs that led up to the little terrace off the south end of the theater. From the terrace you could see fairly well without being noticeable to the seated audience.

  He turned away and headed downhill toward the paved road sunk behind the opera house.

  * * *

  To lunging music, Scarpia luridly described for Tosca how in the torture chamber a spiked iron ring was being tightened round her lover’s temples to force him to tell where Angelotti was hiding—unless she chose to save Cavaradossi by telling first.

  In the trap under the stage where the torture chamber was supposed to be, Cavaradossi watched the conductor on a monitor, crying out on cue and instructing Tosca not to reveal Angelotti’s hiding place. Dressers stripped off the singer’s shirt and substituted a torn one artfully streaked with stage bl
ood (a mixture of Karo syrup and food coloring whipped up by the assistant technical director). They dabbed “blood” across his forehead and rubbed glycerin onto exposed areas of his skin where it would shine in the stage lights like the sweat of pain.

  “Piu forte, piu forte!” roared Scarpia to the unseen torturers, demanding that they increase the pressure. Tosca cried that she couldn’t stand her lover being tortured any more. Her voice made a great octave leap down to dark, agonized chest tones.

  In the trap Cavaradossi gave a loud, musical cry.

  * * *

  Weyland had made a mistake, exchanging his seat for one so near to pit and stage. This close, the singers in their costume finery were too large, too intense. Their violent music assaulted his senses.

  Under locked doors in his mind crept the remembered odors of heavy perfume, sweat, smoking tallow, dusty draperies, the scent of fresh-mixed ink. He had been in rooms like Scarpia’s, had heard the click of heels on beeswaxed floors, the thin metallic chime of clocks with elaborate ceramic faces, the sibilance of satin cuffs brushing past embroidered coat skirts. More than once in such an office he had stood turning in his hands his tradesman’s cap, or rubbing his palms nervously on the slick front of his leather work apron, while he answered official questions. When questions were to be asked, Weyland, always and everywhere a stranger, was asked them. Often from another room would come wordless shrieks, the stink of urine, the wet crack of snapping joints. He had grown adept, even brilliant, at giving good answers.

  Another artful scream from the hidden tenor jerked him back into the present. He tensed to rise and slip away—but the music, storming out of the pit, gripped him. Its paroxysms of anguish—deep shudders of the cellos, cries of horns and woodwinds—pierced him and nailed him in his place.

  * * *

  Tosca broke down and revealed Angelotti’s hiding place; the blood-smeared Cavaradossi was dragged onstage, reviled her, blasted out a defiance of Scarpia and an allegiance to the Bonapartists that doomed him to execution for treason, was hauled away.

  In the fifth row center a man turned off his hearing aid and went to sleep. He didn’t like the story, and he’d eaten too much carne adovada at the Spanish restaurant. Later, hearing rapturous talk about what a great performance this had been, what a privilege to have witnessed it, he would first say nothing, then agree, and finally come to believe that he too had experienced the magical evening.

  * * *

  Scarpia’s voice flowed smoothly again as the orchestra returned to the elegance of the lighter strings. He bade Tosca sit down with him to discuss how to save her lover’s life. He took her cloak, his fingers crushing the russet velvet greedily, and draped it over the back of the sofa. Then he poured out wine at his table, offering her a glass in dulcet tones: “É vin di Spagna . . .”

  Thrusting aside the wine, she stared at him with loathing and flung him her question: how much of a bribe did he demand? “Quanto?”

  And the monster began to tell her, leaning closer, smiling suggestively: he wouldn’t sell out his sworn duty to the State for mere money, not to a beautiful woman . . . while the orchestra’s avid, glowing chords prefigured the full revelation of his lechery.

  Elmo swallowed, stared, listened with a dazzled mind. He had forgotten Jean sitting next to him, as she had forgotten him.

  * * *

  This is the hour I have been awaiting! cried Scarpia. The spare, almost conversational structure of the music grew suddenly rich with the throbbing of darker strings and brass as he disclosed the price of Cavaradossi’s life. In tones sumptuous with passion he declared his desire: How it inflamed me to see you, agile as a leopard, clinging to your lover! he sang in a voice itself as supple as a leopard’s spring. At last he claimed the brazen, eager chords of lust in his own fierce voice.

  Resonances from the monster’s unleashed appetite swept Weyland, overriding thought, distance, judgment.

  * * *

  The lady in the snakeskin-patterned dress glanced at the professorial type sitting next to her in the aisle seat. Heavens, what was wrong with the man? Sweat gleamed on his forehead, his jaw bunched with muscle, his eyes glittered above feverishly flushed cheeks. What was that expression her son used—yes: this man looked as if he were freaking out.

  * * *

  Jean sat groaning silently at the back of her throat for the tormented woman on the stage, who now rushed to the window—but what use was suicide, when the brute would kill her lover anyway?

  With the devotion of a romantic spirit, Jean gave herself up to the beautiful agony of the second act.

  * * *

  Tremain strolled in the dark down behind the opera house, cigarette in hand, head cocked to the music above him. He drew a hot curl of smoke down his throat: bad for a singer, but you can’t be disciplined all the time. Anyway, except for wearing this absurd scraggle of glued-on beard and long gray hair and staying in his ragged costume until the curtain call, he could do as he pleased. Caruso had smoked three packs a day, and it hadn’t hurt him. Great appetite was a sign of great talent, Tremain hoped.

  From the opera house came a distant, explosive crash. He identified it at once and smiled to himself: Scarpia and Tosca had finally overdone the pursuit scene and toppled the water pitcher from the dinner table. Must be having a wild time up there tonight.

  One more smoke and he would go listen close up with the others. He looked out at the sparkling lights of Los Alamos to the west and mouthed Scarpia’s words silently to himself.

  * * *

  With ghoulish delight Scarpia gloated, How you hate me! He strode toward Tosca, crying in savage triumph, It is thus that I want you! . . . Throes of hatred, throes of love . . .

  The breath strained shallowly in Weyland’s throat. His hands ached from clenching. Tosca’s cries drew from him a faint whining sound: he too had been pursued by merciless enemies, he too had been driven to the extremity of desperation. Tosca fled Scarpia, darting behind the desk from which pens and papers scattered to the floor. The dance of hunting rushed toward a climax. Weyland trembled.

  He could see the voracious curl of Scarpia’s lips, the predatory stoop of the shoulders under the brocaded coat as he closed in on her . . . as she flew to the sofa with Scarpia a step behind her . . . as Scarpia lunged for her. To the urgings of the horns, Weyland’s mouth twisted in a gape of aggression, his eyes slitted cruelly, small muscles started convulsively beneath his skin, as the prey was flushed into flight again—as Weyland sprang in pursuit, as Weyland roared, Mine!

  Startled movement at his side distracted him: the woman sitting there jerked away and stared at him. He stared wildly back, then surged to his feet and fled past an usher who was blind to all but the drama onstage.

  Hurdling a low gate between the patio and the dark slope beyond, he plunged down the hillside. The dry rattle of a military drum followed from the opera house. Impressions blurred in his molten mind: rows of pale tents, restless lines of tethered horses, smells of smoke and sewage and metal polish, wet rope, wet leather; and always, somewhere, the tapping of drums and the bark of voices. He heard them now.

  Yet he caught no sentry’s footfall, no gleam of white crossbelts marking the presence of solitary prey. Where was the camp whose tumult he heard—those lights to the west? Too far, and too bright. Perhaps a night battle? He sought the scent of blood and black powder; he listened for the muffled cries and weeping of a moonlit field in the battle’s wake, where a vampire might feed unnoticed and unresisted among the tumbled casualties.

  In that year of revolution and royalist repression 1800, Weyland had followed Bonaparte’s Grand Army.

  * * *

  Tonight there was no need for the assistant technical director to trot about backstage hushing people as Tosca began her great aria, Vissi d’Arte. Tonight people were already quiet, listening.

  A percussionist who would ring bells for the beginning of the next act came out of the musicians’ passage and headed for the already jammed side terrace.
Her attention was trained on the music. Anything that could be heard from outside the opera house she did not notice.

  * * *

  Impelled by unbearable tension, Weyland rounded the corner of the building and padded swiftly along the sunken road that ran behind it.

  There was a man up ahead there; a spark in the darkness, an emanation on the night wind of body warmth, sweat, and smoke. Long hair, breeches, loose and ragged sleeves, a gleam of starlight on shoe buckles as the figure turned its back to the breeze—detail sharpened as Weyland closed the distance with silent strides.

  A little flame jumped in the man’s cupped hands.

  Body strung tight on the rich, wild throbbing of his own heart, mind seething, compelled to strike, Weyland slowed for the final rush.

  * * *

  Tremain’s concentration on the poignant strains of the Vissi d’Arte was interrupted. Turning, he glimpsed a tall form looming, huge pupils of the eyes shrinking rapidly like a cat’s before the wavering match flame. Tremain’s mouth moved to frame some startled pleasantry, and his mind said, It’s only the night that makes this scary.

  Hands of iron seized him and slammed him away forever beyond the singing.

  * * *

  The high notes of the Vissi d’Arte burned clear and steady, the low notes smoldered with emotion. Anders followed like a lover, breathing with the singer’s breathing. Only once she faltered, and Anders’s lifted left hand restored her while his right, held low and armed with the baton, translated for the players in the pit.

  At the close of her beautiful, vain plaint, the audience exploded. They screamed, they cracked their palms wildly together—briefly. The pace of the drama had caught them up and would brook small delay.

  * * *

  Weyland’s mouth was full of blood. He swallowed, pressing the limp form tighter in his arms, burrowing with greedy lips past the disordered neckcloth.

  His stomach, irritated by his earlier, incompletely digested meal, rebelled. Retching, he let the body drop and tried to rise, could only stagger to one knee, heaving. He must not leave vomit for dogs to find, for hunters to examine by torchlight. He swallowed regurgitated blood, gagged, his throat seared; knelt panting and shivering in the darkness.