The Black Opera

by Mary Gentle

  Tullio Rossi left with a grin. It was half an hour later before the ex-soldier returned. Conrad startled at the opening of the door, having become lost in his thoughts and the mutable light.

  “Tullio?”

  The man swung one of the objects he carried—another wooden chair, Conrad realised. Tullio plonked it down on the far side of the table, and put down the bucket he held in his other hand, which turned out to be a quarter full of coal.

  “They agreed you don’t have to be in isolation. You can have a fire.” Tullio sat and dug in his pockets, and brought out a greasy pack of cards. “And I’ll play you at Vingt-et-Un. If Isaura manages to find a cheap enough wine, you can at least be drunk for your first night here. After that, I suppose you will have to work.”

  Conrad found he couldn’t speak for all of a minute.

  “Not Twenty-One,” he finally managed. “If I ever had any idea I could follow my father as a gambler, you cured me of it! We’ll play Gin, since at least I can remember what’s in the discards.”

  He was indeed drunk for his first night, although the wine Isaura found was sour and of a very dubious colour.

  Tullio let himself in and out with a fine disregard for the building’s status as a prison, until Conrad had to ban him for the morning hours, while he sat at the table—not lighting a candle until he had to—and found to his chagrin that he could perhaps work better isolated.

  Although most of the friends who would have disturbed me socially left town after Il Terrore, except for Spinelli and Sandrine. But…

  He left unthought the realisation that he missed working in such close concert with an opera’s composer. Missed the mutual inspiration that words had begun to take from the music, as well as the other way around.

  And he pushed out of his mind the knowledge that, arrogant son of a bitch as he might be, Roberto Capiraso was an imaginative man, and, like most composers, could likely contribute as much to the shape of the words and story as Conrad’s incessant questioning would to the shape of the score.

  Seven days elapsed. The same answer came from the palace every day.

  His window looked out on a nearby brick wall. It was not an inspiring view, but the terracotta, ochres, and sanguines of the brickwork—reduced to evening monochromes, or brilliant in the dawn—were sufficient to take a man’s mind off his isolation and imprisonment, at least for a short time, and allow imagination free rein. Conrad lost himself in the first and second Acts, only pausing to eat, and demand technical answers of Paolo-Isaura and Tullio which they were ill-suited to give.

  “Don’t ask me where you should end the scene!” Tullio finally shrugged. “I just watch operas, padrone; I don’t know how they work!”

  Conrad broke off his interrogation. “Sorry. At least in here I’m working faster because I’m so deeply involved.”

  And I do not—do not—wish I was working with Roberto Capiraso.

  Conrad became used to seeing Tullio half a dozen times in afternoons and evenings—bringing in wine, olives, pizza, and whatever other staples the ex-sergeant could forage, along with all the city and theatre gossip he could remember. It was useless to protest his gratitude that Tullio would do this. The big man merely shot him a look that reduced him to the apparent status of a stumbling recruit, and waved away any thanks.

  Along with Tullio, two times out of five, Isaura would turn up in one of Sandrine Furino’s second-best gowns, with a shawl over her head, and relate how she was chatting with the prison laundresses with a view to arranging an escape.

  “Do you think you may have read too many Gothic romances?” Conrad speculated.

  Isaura’s amused sneer was practised, and modelled on Tullio’s own.

  Paolo-Isaura and Tullio brought welcome company, both of them. No matter how sunny and well-lit the cell might be, and how many hours could be lost in the construction of a script for L’Altezza azteca, ossia Il Serpente Pennuto, the solitude sapped his energy and his courage.

  And I really have no right to laugh at Paolo for reading Gothic novels, Conrad mused, chewing on the end of a dip-pen one morning. It’s ironic—every time I speculate about Leonora and the Conte di Argente, I can’t help imagining that he abducted her, or blackmailed her into marrying him, or some such Gothic device.

  The prison, being a debtor’s prison, was nearly as busy with visitors as with prisoners. Conrad grew used to seeing masked women visiting those who might be lovers or brothers; and small children gazing with wide eyes at the place Papa found himself in.

  To think of all the times I swore I’d never follow my father, Conrad considered wryly. And at least he managed to stay out of jail…

  Towards the middle of that week, Conrad managed to interview two or three borderline applicants for the minor roles, which Spinelli forwarded on the grounds that he was too taken with their charms to judge their voices.

  Which I doubt. He just wants me to have contact with the outside world.

  Paolo visited his cell again, to report how the opera continued, and brought the news of having found a tenor.

  “Enrichette Méric-Lalande—you know, the French soprano who sings here a lot? She’s refused us—rudely, actually—but she wrote to say she has a protégé, one Lorenzo Bonfigli, who’s a tenor, and he turned up yesterday with her letter of introduction—”

  “What kind of tenor? Graceful? Lyric?”

  “More spinto than lyric, apparently. He’s done a few small heroic roles—and he can do Gilbert Duprez’s chest-voice high C.” She grinned. “Four times out of five, anyway.”

  Conrad reflected on the advantages of a male chest-voice C above middle C, in the same cast as Velluti’s soaring castrato.

  “Better be five times out of five, or he suffers! Hire him. We need a High Priest of the Sun. That could work as a lyric-dramatic tenor. And I’m murdering him at the end of Act One,” Conrad added, with considerable schadenfreude. “He could double as Cortez’s Captain in Act Two…”

  Isaura cheered up, and continued for some minutes on the initial stages of rehearsal with the material they had.

  “Less than four weeks, now,” she concluded, her initial enthusiasm beginning to sound harried.

  Conrad smiled, and ruffled her hair.

  “Now you understand opera. ‘Work faster’!”

  His private well-lit cell, away from the crowded and unfumigated main prison hall, was something Conrad would have called a godsend if not aware that he owed it to his friends.

  There were also long hours of an absolute solitude. Especially at night.

  And since I look to be in here until the King’s return…

  I’ll do as much as I can.

  He interviewed Estella Belucci, when she arrived from Palermo one morning, and proved to look very little like a rebel. She turned out to be a surprisingly subdued blonde woman in a fashionable bonnet, who jolted every time someone in the main part of the prison shouted or screamed.

  “This ‘Zo-sheel,’” she eventually got the confidence to say, presenting a well-thumbed copy of what libretto details Paolo had passed on, with Xochitl’s first verses circled. “Suppose she’s not a slave-girl—or wasn’t always a slave-girl?”

  I’ll listen to anybody at this point. Conrad opened the books on South America that Tullio had fetched for him, and showed her engravings of the Aztecs in their native costumes, and the initial drafts of the first trio for Velluti, Sandrine, and Donna Belucci.

  “What had you in mind?”

  Her finger, with its well-trimmed but evidently chewed nails, underlined Cortez’ first entry, and the description of the sopranos’ warrior-women costumes. “He defeated their neighbouring enemy tribe, the Amazons?”

  Conrad pointed his pen at the globe Tullio had brought in from the secret museum, and tapped the continent of South America. “The Amazon River, see?”

  Estella Belucci raised her pale eyebrows. “Geography’s not your strong point, signore, is it?”

  “I promise you, the Amazon River is in S
outh America.”

  “Yes…” Her smile gave warning of why managements might find her difficult. “But I think you’ll find the Classical Amazons come from Greece.”

  Conrad spun the globe to peer at Greece.

  He wiped off three thousand years of civilisation and as many miles with a dismissive wave.

  “Well, the Greeks were great travellers! Obviously America became the home of the Classical Amazons by the time of Cortez…”

  “Obviously.” Her smile lost out to ambition. Estella Belucci leaned forward where she sat. “Signore, you write here that audiences want girls in peril, not warriors. But suppose it’s both? ‘Zo-sheel’ might be an Aztec slave now because she’s an Amazon warrior captured in battle and made prisoner!”

  Leave it to a singer to make their part a priority. But…

  “You know,” Conrad said, “that’s a good idea.”

  Tullio, letting himself into the cell in time to hear the last interchanges, grinned broadly. “Certainly is! Amazons always play well—’s an excuse to have a woman with one tit hardly covered!”

  Conrad muttered, “Philistine!” But having seen Estella Belucci out like a gentleman, he came back and scribbled a note in the margin.

  On the eighth day, about the time the slanting sunlight on the opposite brick wall told Conrad it was mid-morning, the metal spy-hole in the door slid back, then forward; and there was an incongruous knock.

  “Come in,” Conrad called dryly.

  The guard pulled open the door that bolted on the outside. “You have a visitor, signore.”

  His tone was sufficient that Conrad knew the visitor must be a woman. Self-conscious, he touched the stubble on his cheeks where Tullio had not yet been in to shave him.

  Another of Spinelli’s “borderline” voices for the Priestesses of the Feathered Serpent or the Amazon warriors?

  “Show her in.” Conrad couldn’t help smiling at the guard’s one-male-to-another look.

  If he only knew I am just interested in their voices!

  “Here, signorina.” The guard held the door open for a woman in a blue morning walking dress and three-quarter coat, and a deep-brimmed fashionable bonnet, with three frivolous ostrich plumes curving over from the back.

  The guard slipped out rapidly; clearly expecting a later gratuity.

  The locks clicked as the door shut behind him.

  Before Conrad could say anything, the woman pulled at her hat-strings and yanked the concealing bonnet from her head, dropping it down on his half-written page.

  His chair squealed on the wooden floorboards as Conrad jumped up, staring at the face of Leonora—once Leonora D’Arienzo, since married, now Leonora Capiraso.

  Conrad gathered his wits. He managed a bow.

  And, although it stuck in his throat: “Contessa.”

  CHAPTER 19

  “Corrado!” She ignored formality. Her eyes were shining, beyond what might be accounted for by the weak sun reflected in at the window. The time that he hadn’t seen her—every sleepless night, every unprofitable attempt to lose himself in other women’s company—burned up as if it had never been. Her smile wiped it all out. She said, again, “Corrado!” and her perfect voice broke.

  “I never expected to see you again.” Conrad realised, blankly, that it wasn’t the best thing to say; that he had better have proclaimed he always knew they would be reunited. The truth spilled out of him like blood. “I hoped you were ill, or dead, or emigrated to the New World—some reason why I couldn’t find you!”

  Pain came through too clearly in his voice.

  “We might have been within twenty feet of each other, any time these five years! Except you would have been in a stage box, and I in the pit.—Why did you leave me!”

  Her hand came up as if it would have touched his, but hesitated in mid-air.

  Conrad startled out of the paralysis of her presence. She won’t be alone!

  Her husband will be behind her on the stair.

  “You shouldn’t enter this cell on your own.” Conrad could only speak in a whisper. “The San Carlo is as much a pit of gossip as La Fenice was. One visit to an unmarried man without your husband present…”

  “Oh, don’t be foolish. My maid is only a few steps behind me.”

  Her voice wasn’t loud, but he heard those theatre-taught reverberations that meant she intended it to carry, and be overheard by any nosy guards.

  “Our kind of people do visit the poor, and prisoners, and do good works.” Her voice changed pitch, so as not to be casually overheard. “I only have to mention it quite openly at church. Everybody knows di Galdi is a spiteful old man.”

  The Naples gossip circuit working full-time, Conrad deduced.

  The door didn’t open again. He wondered if there was in fact a maid. Or if, well-warned, she lurked in the passage outside to give word of any approach.

  That means Nora truly intends to speak to me…

  Leonora Capiraso, Contessa di Argente, sat down without invitation on the cell’s other wooden chair. She began coolly to remove her gloves.

  A sudden consciousness of the physicality of her hands encased in warm leather, which she loosened finger by finger, made him take refuge standing behind his high-backed chair, so she should not see evidence of his desire.

  Not looking at him, she said, “I need to explain why I left Venice.”

  “I looked for you.”

  And that’s all I’ll admit. No need for her to know how I walked all the alleys and little bridges, how I went into every church from the Basilica to the smallest chapel, hoping for the miracle of finding her attending Mass.

  She regarded him, suddenly fearless. “You’ll think less of me.”

  Contradictory emotions choked him.

  “I didn’t sleep.” Her hands hovered, lifted from her sides, as if she would have touched him but didn’t dare. “For the first year—I never slept the night through unbroken. Bad dreams. Nightmares. Roberto thought I was ill—”

  “I don’t want to hear about ‘Roberto’!”

  She nodded as if that were a reasonable request to make.

  “I wasn’t ill,” she said simply. “I missed sleeping by your side. Your breathing. Your warmth.”

  Pain and loss met together in him, and made cruelty. “Evidently you didn’t miss it enough to come back to me. Or not to leave me in the first place!”

  “I had to!”

  Conrad dug his fingers into his palms until he was sure they must bleed. I can’t say “I’ve missed you,” “I love you.”

  Not yet. Not until I know why you’re here now. Not until I know—

  “Why did you leave me in Venice?”

  She turned her head, giving him only her perfect profile and a perceptible shiver.

  “We were very Bohemian—” Her attempt at a social smile visibly fractured. Conrad saw her expression became pure honesty. “How daring I felt, to be singing at La Fenice every night, and spending every day with my lover in Venice. I warned you I was only a provincial girl from Castelfranco Veneto… And coming home to that apartment house, by the bridge with the cats…”

  “Smelly beasts.” Conrad wondered if he should have sounded more sentimental, but her mouth turned up. “I remember watching those cats from our window.”

  They had ranged from wild veteran Venetian mothers and dusty warriors, to stick-thin fluffy black kits, moving as if they ran on stilts. After love, he would lie shoulder to shoulder beside Leonora in the heated afternoon, watching between scarlet-painted shutters, and giving the beasts stories more melodramatic than the most outlandish libretto.

  “You made up names for each of them,” he remembered.

  Years since I thought of it—that we were so happy we could be shamelessly silly.

  “…All the ugly ones had the names of prima donnas.”

  “Of course!” Leonora wrinkled up her nose at him, instantly turning a lady in her late twenties into a gamin adolescent.

  It hit him like a punch deep
into the gut. He felt as if his throat bled, getting the words out. “To see you like that—in the Palace—with no warning—!”

  “I had no idea what it would be like to see you.” Moisture glinted in the corners of her violet-shadowed eyes. “I couldn’t speak, couldn’t think.”

  “You let your husband speak for you.”

  “My husband isn’t here to speak for me now.” What had been a glimmer of light swelled, and shimmered on the lower lid of her eye.

  The tear did not fall.

  “I didn’t have a contract after La Fenice. I’d been writing to impresarios, but all they could offer was a lot of travelling and small roles… St Petersburg…one in Buenos Aires…” She twisted at one of her discarded gloves. “Roberto had been backstage between acts every night.”

  “I stayed away from backstage because you asked!” Conrad hated the rough neediness of his tone. “On the pretext that you needed to concentrate for your performances.”

  Anger choked him.

  Leonora spoke so quietly that he had to rein himself in to hear her, over the pounding of blood in his ears.

  “I didn’t notice any of the other men there, but I noticed him—oh, don’t look at me! You were so happy, so cheerful, like—like sun—and he was the dark to your fair—”

  “Enough of the poetry.” Conrad cut through her rapid words. Rather than look at her, he began pacing. “Did you sleep with him?”

  “I didn’t want to—”

  “But someone held a pistol to your head. I understand.”

  His bitterness was a dizzy satisfaction to voice at last, seeing out of the corner of his eye how she flinched.

  “Is that what I needed to do to keep you, Nora? Look miserable every moment and pine over you?”

  He found himself with clenched fists. I did all my pining for you afterwards.

  “Was he sad like Mister Lord Byron? So unhappy that you just had to crawl into his bed and comfort him? Did he have some tragedy in his life—”

  “Roberto said he knew people.”

  Her voice was a shock, so flatly commonplace that Conrad stopped and turned, looking down at her.