Mozart’s Blood (5 page)

The shower was as compact as it could be, but someone had kindly equipped it with shampoo and French soap. Tiny bottles of creams and lotions waited before the lighted mirror, with a welcoming note from a Milanese
profumeria.
There was an electric kettle, with packets of Nescafé and tea in a basket. The assistant returned to knock on her door and to ask, in halting English, if she would like to go to the canteen for lunch or have something brought in.

Octavia answered her in Italian. “Giuditta, I'd love to stay in. I'm a little tired from the time change. Do you think perhaps you could bring me something?”

Giuditta smiled with relief at being able to respond in her own language. She went out and came back bearing a tray with a tomato and fennel salad and a
panino
of
prosciutto
and
mozzarella
and basil, with a bottle of mineral water and two chocolates on a doily. She laid it on the makeup table and then withdrew. Octavia ate, idly leafing through an Italian copy of
Opera News.
She saved half the
panino
for Ugo. She heated water in the electric kettle and poured it into the teapot. With a cup of tea in her hand, she lay back in the velvet chaise longue and wondered where Ugo was. Usually, if he had slept in, he would join her at the rehearsal hall by lunch-time. Perhaps, she thought, he was too tired. It had been a long flight, and she had told him he didn't need to be there this morning.

She let her head fall back against the cushions. Faintly, through the layers of the opera house, she heard the strains of violins and flutes. The cranking of machinery and the scraping of plywood sounded from the tower as set pieces were moved about. The distant fragments of music began to coalesce into the first bars of the overture, and Octavia closed her eyes, remembering.

 

Such a feeling of haste there had been, in those early days. Teresa Saporiti had only recently joined the Bondini theater troupe, and they struggled to master Mozart's new opera.

No one knew if
Don Giovanni
was meant to be a tragedy or a comedy. The opera opened with the attempted rape of Donna Anna and the murder of her father, the Commendatore, by Don Giovanni. The rejected lover Donna Elvira spent her time alternately screaming her rage or avowing love for her seducer. But the other characters played comic rôles, Leporello as the hapless servant keeping a catalog of the Don's conquests, Masetto and Zerlina as the peasant bridal couple whose wedding the Don tried to ruin. The first act ended with a festive party scene, dancing choristers, a band onstage, and sly jokes. But the opera's climactic scene was one of pure tragedy, with the Commendatore's cemetery statue coming to life to drag an unrepentant Don Giovanni into the flames of hell.

The singers stood by, helpless and confused, as Bondini and the librettist, da Ponte, had screaming arguments at rehearsals. Mozart was little help, procrastinating the overture until the night before the opening, keeping copyists working frantically to have parts ready in time.

All the singers suffered under accusations of incompetence and laziness. Teresa, the youngest of the Bondini company, agonized over all of this, fearful of losing her opportunity to create a Mozart rôle.

But at last, the premiere of
Don Giovanni
was to begin. The composer was on the podium. The Countess Zdenka Milosch, so they said, was in the audience. The instrumentalists' parts were on their music stands. The singers were ready.

Teresa had rouged and powdered her cheeks. Her hair was dressed in a towering coiffure. Her paniered skirts draped over a ruffled petticoat beneath a boned and embroidered stomacher. She carried a painted fan in one gloved hand and a lace handkerchief in the other, and she stood in the wings with the other cast members to hear the overture for the very first time.

The music began. Teresa leaned against a plaster pillar, pressing the handkerchief to her lips. Liquid notes cascaded from the strings and the winds, the oversize orchestra making a sound that penetrated her very bones. She felt it in her fingertips, in her eyelids, in her beating heart. She heard Donna Anna's music weave into the whole, as closely as the weft of a tapestry. There was the Commendatore's theme, presaging the fiery end of Giovanni to come. There was the persuasive, sensual melody of “Là ci darem la mano,” when the Don would seduce the country bride, Zerlina.

Teresa's eyes opened. She didn't want to be seduced by Luigi Bassi, the Don Giovanni of this first production. Teresa Saporiti wanted to be seduced by—or to seduce—Mozart.

She peered out past the proscenium, where he stood at the harpsichord, sweat dripping down his cheeks to mark his black tailcoat with powder from his wig. He was a small man, and he had a profane way of speaking, but his mouth was tender and sweet. His hands were finely made. He coaxed magic from the orchestra with those hands, and worked miracles upon the harpsichord. His eyes, brown as chocolate and sparkling with humor, enchanted her. His laugh was irresistible, making even sour old Pasquale Bondini laugh with him.

And his music—his music was utterly, stunningly sensual. It made her thighs tremble and her belly dissolve.

Teresa Saporiti was nineteen, and she had never been in love.

 

Giuditta knocked gently on the dressing room door, startling Octavia. She blinked and sat up to look around the dressing room. Ugo still had not come. Her tea had grown cold in its cup, and the
panino
looked tired and limp on its plate.

“Signorina,” Giuditta called softly. “
Maestro
is ready for the second act.”

Octavia shook herself and stood up.
“Grazie,”
she called back. “I'll be there in a moment. I fell asleep.”

The door opened, and Giuditta bustled in to take the tray. “Your tea has gone cold! Shall I make another pot?”

“That would be so nice,” Octavia admitted. “I'm still tired from the flight.”

“Ma certo,”
Giuditta said in maternal fashion. “I'll make it now. You can carry a cup up to the rehearsal hall.”

Octavia took a moment to reapply her lipstick and brush her hair. She accepted the cup of tea from Giuditta and carried it in her hand as she climbed the stairs to the rehearsal hall.

The cast and chorus were already assembled when she went in, and all eyes turned to her. She nodded to everyone, an apologetic hand at her throat. “I am so sorry, Russell, everyone. It was such a long flight yesterday, and I fell asleep in my dressing room.”

Russell hurried to take her hands, to assure her she had not delayed him in the least. The chorus smiled at her. Lukas said something understanding, and Marie Charles dimpled. Massimo Luca gave her a limpid look from his caramel eyes, and she began to feel fully awake.

Only Brenda McIntyre, the Donna Elvira, frowned and looked away, tapping at her score with thick fingers. Octavia took a chair near her, setting her teacup on the floor beneath her chair. “Brenda, I don't know if anyone told you, but I finished a run of
Traviata
in New York just the night before last. I feel like it's the middle of the night still.”

The woman's face softened a bit, and she pointed at the teacup. “You should try some chamomile right after the performance,” she advised, with a sanguine nod. “It soothes the body and the throat, and helps you to sleep.”

“Oh, thank you,” Octavia said. “I'll try that. I never thought of chamomile.”

She picked up her score, hiding her irritation beneath an expression of contrition. Chamomile, indeed. Ugo would love it.

Russell tapped his music stand with his baton, and the pianist opened his score. He played the opening bars of the second act, and the read-through was under way again.

Octavia sat back in her chair, listening as the characters of Leporello and Giovanni and Elvira teased and flirted and raged at each other. When Masetto began to sing, she sighed with pleasure. Massimo Luca's voice was even more flexible now, fully warmed up, his tall figure already taking on his bucolic character. He stood with his lean legs apart, his head up, none of the usual chin-tucking basses too often employed. His eyes gleamed with pleasure in the music, in the responsiveness of his own voice, in the give-and-take with Marie Charles. Octavia lowered her eyelids, thinking that her own eyes must gleam as well. Perhaps it was just as well Ugo had not yet arrived. If he caught her staring hungrily at a toothsome young bass, she would never hear the end of it.

It's your own fault, Ugo,
she thought.
He distracts me from my worry about you.

When it was time for her “Non mi dir,” she turned her body slightly, so that Massimo would have her profile to watch. She sang with all the tenderness she could muster, feeling those caramel eyes on her face. The long B-flat of the recitative floated in the big room, and she saw Russell nod and smile. She barely glanced at her Ottavio, but Peter wouldn't mind. Time enough when they began staging.

Russell kept the rehearsal moving, stopping only to deal with a few problems that cropped up here and there in the ensembles. By four-thirty, they had made it all the way through the show. The concertmaster, with a huge orchestral score under his arm, came to congratulate the principals and take his leave. The stage director shook Octavia's hand and assured her she would be a marvelous Donna Anna. She gave him a deferential smile. “Oh, I hope so,” she said.

“Sì, sì,”
Giorgio said, patting her arm in paternal fashion. “I have no doubts about you at all. You will be superb, and I will help you to develop your character.”

“Thank you,” she said. How Ugo would laugh!

Ugo's continued absence nagged at her. The sky beyond the tall windows of the rehearsal room had turned dark, and a fitful rain spattered the glass. He should have been there long before. He could at least have called the theater if he wasn't going to come, could have asked someone to bring her a note.

She gathered her coat and gloves, feeling piqued. She would scold him for making her worry. It wasn't fair, when she had her rehearsals to worry about, when she had Russell to make happy and this self-important Nick Barrett-Jones to deal with. Even now, Nick was making his purposeful way toward her, and she supposed there would be some invitation, some social thing she would have to beg off.

She was surprised, and pleased, when Massimo Luca reached her first.

He smiled down at her. He had a distinct cachet about him that reminded her of the smell of freshly turned earth, or newmown grass. “Madame Voss,” he said in his rumbling bass.

“Octavia, please,” she said, laughing.

He made a slight, almost invisible bow. “Octavia, then, thank you. Several of us are going to dinner, and we would be delighted to have you join us.”

Reluctantly, Octavia shook her head. “I am so sorry,” she said in Italian. “I would love to come with you, Massimo—truly—but my assistant is not yet here, and I need to see what has become of him.”

“Che peccato,”
he said. “Shall I leave you the address of the restaurant, in case?”

She accepted a note from him, with the name of a well-known restaurant not far from Il Principe. “How nice of you,” she said. “If I can, I'll come, but please don't wait for me. I have no idea what—” She broke off, looking up at the windows. The storm had begun in earnest, a noisy rain rattling against the panes.

“Could we at least drop you at your hotel?”

It was hard to resist the prospect of being in a car with Massimo Luca, but she shook her head a second time. “Russell will be taking me,” she said. “We have some things to discuss.”

Massimo gave her a regretful smile and turned to go. Octavia put a hand on his sleeve, finding his arm hard and lean beneath black leather. “Ask me another time, will you?” she said. It was delightful to look up at a man, to have to tip up her chin to find his eyes. Why were so many male singers short? Only the Wagnerians seemed to reach a decent height.

The young bass bowed to her.
“Ma certo,”
he said softly. “Octavia. I promise.”

In the limousine on the way back to Il Principe, Russell pulled out his score and pointed out several details to Octavia. She listened and nodded, but by the time the doorman was opening her door and extending his arm for her, she had almost forgotten. She bade Russell a distracted farewell and hurried through the cold rain to the glass doors of the hotel. She barely nodded at the concierge's formal greeting as she hastened through the pillared lobby to the stairs.

She unlocked the suite and threw the door open. “Ugo? Are you here?”

She checked the bathroom, but only her own face looked back at her from the tall mirrors. She pushed open the connecting door to Ugo's bedroom. Nothing had been touched. She went back into the suite and looked at the telephone. No message light flashed on it.

She scanned her own bedroom, in case he had somehow fallen asleep on her bed or on one of the brocaded chairs. There was no sign that anyone except the maids had been in the room. The water in the flowers had been changed, and the fruit and chocolates neatly arranged on the coffee table. The bedcovers were turned back.

Pulling off her long scarf, winding it nervously around her hands, Octavia went to the window. She shouldered past the heavy drapes to look out over the rain-haloed lights of the city. The headlights of evening traffic blurred to streams of yellow light.

“Ugo,” she whispered into the night.
“Dove sei?”

Despite the richness of the room behind her, the heavy brocades and damask and silks, she felt cold and alone. She had not felt this way in a very, very long time.

She stepped back from the window, letting the drapes fall together again. She would order room service, have a long bath in the enormous marble bathroom. Perhaps she would drink a glass of wine and go straight to bed. The real work of staging and interpretation would begin tomorrow morning. She must try to remember Russell's notes, and she must try not to worry about Ugo. There was, in any case, not a damned thing she could do about it.