Vienna Nocturne (2 page)

He glanced along the row of mirrors. He had been an orphan in Rome, and until he had been given to the conservatory—gelded and sold, like a piece of cattle—he had never looked closely at his own face. But after that great change, the singing masters had made him stand before a mirror every day so he would not grimace, nor make any sign of strain, while cycling through the musical scales. When he had first looked into the mirror he had been struck at once by the thought that in this unfamiliar face lay the melded images of his unknown parents, their lips and cheeks and eyes. He had thought that if he studied this face long enough, this face that contained theirs, he might someday meet them again, on the streets of Rome, and say, “I am your son. I have become a great singer.” For he believed that he had been born to a poor girl who had given him away.

He had liked to imagine her, his mother, while lying on his cot at night. That was the only time in the conservatory when he was alone and quiet. All the rest of the day and night the young castrati spent singing. They sang psalms as they dressed in the morning, as they washed and walked. They sang in nightly vigils.
Figlioli angiolini
, they were called—little angel boys. They stood watch over the corpses of dead children. For this service the conservatories were paid high fees. It was on such a vigil that Rauzzini, as a boy little older than Anna, had fallen in love with singing; as he stood in his white cassock, motherless, and comforted the poor dead children, who were far worse off than he, and their veiled, grieving relations. He had loved the ceremonial ritual, the candles, the lateness of the hour; loved the importance of his task, which could be done by no other, and the sweet sounds that released like butterflies from his finely coordinated throat. He had understood then how powerful he could be, and how admired.

His voice could fill the largest hall, be heard from mountaintop to mountaintop, yet it was so beautiful—he was not arrogant, it was simply a fact—that it would not have waked an infant at arm’s length. Not one in a hundred of those
figlioli angiolini
had grown to have a voice and technique like his. He had been blessed by God, and by his own determination.

He’d had a storied career in Rome, and later in Milan, where the young Wolfgang Mozart had written him an exquisite motet. After Milan he’d gone to Munich, but his mistress there—the exquisite Elizabeth Bauer, just seventeen, with skin like silk and constellations of freckles and moles—had made a mistake with their rendezvous. The old duke had burst in upon them. The duke was a jealous man at best, but there was particular shame in being cuckolded by a castrato. Most people did not know the extent to which a man like Rauzzini might still serve a lady, but Elizabeth knew, the sweet girl. She had a mole on her left buttock that he would carry in his heart forever.

She had sent him a rose the next morning and told him her husband
intended to kill him. So to London he had come. He liked the fog. His humors were thick and hot, and made his joints ache, as if the heat of the man he would never be had backed up and poisoned his blood. He liked what cooled and quieted.

He had read a review of the Storace girl in the paper, but had not believed there would be anything interesting about her. He had been happily mistaken. She was a treasure. She would be his student and sing in his own operas, for he wished to compose.

He had been about her age when his life had turned from one thing to another. At the conservatory, the regular boys had mocked the young castrati, who were fed on broth and eggs and meat while they, the instrumentalists, were half starved. They had divided themselves into
integri
and
non integri
, whole and not whole. Remembering this, Rauzzini tossed his head in the mirror. None of us were whole, he thought. The fellow who’d done his surgery had been usually employed in extracting teeth. Most castrated boys died from infections. But Rauzzini had lived, had grown brilliant and handsome, and the voice had been good, the voice of a boy in the body of an almost-man, only fuller and more masterful than any boy could muster. But Anna required no injury. She had everything she needed.

One look and he had cherished her. The absurdity did not diminish the feeling. Intelligence, openness, heart—these qualities attracted him, these rang upon his life’s purpose. There was no higher art than music and no purer musical form than song. The voice of such a child must brim the soul. For the preservation of his own childhood voice he had been castrated. Yet now it need not be so. This girl, this pearl, this new daughter, would grow into a fine young woman. She would lose nothing. Neither her heart, nor her joy, nor her confidence. She would be celebrated. She would have everything he had, and everything he had not.

The Royal Opera House glowed with hazy light, its air filled with heat and smoke and rumbling noise. On the ground, there was not room to move and yet movement was constant. Now and then someone lost his supper, and the mess was absorbed with sawdust, and the stink dissolved into the rest of the stink. There were pickpockets and food vendors and three men for every woman, and when these women were groped and squeezed, they whacked the men with whatever implements they had at hand. The crowd on the grounds pressed against a row of spikes set there to keep them from overflowing onto the stage in occasional riots. They threw orange peels upon the stage boards. The set burned above them, a hot apparition. The singers and dancers sweated and strained upon it, in costumes decorated with feathers, baubles, and anything that might catch the light. For ten minutes, twenty, the audience’s attention held, for favorite singers, arias, or intervals of ballet, and the applause then was raucous and long. But soon enough there would be a lull of confusion, and food was thrown, and men stood on
benches shouting at one another, and lords in the boxes dallied behind curtains with their mistresses. Anna’s mother said the opera house was full of harlots. Had it not been for the debts, she said, she would not have allowed Anna to sing there, not so young. And because of this, for the first time in her life, Anna was grateful to the debts, and bowed before them, and wanted to kiss their hands, because there was nowhere on earth she would rather be than inside an opera theater.

She was thirteen. The Cupid costume showed her legs from just above the knee. She had not shown her legs since she was a small child. The stockings were white and the breeches gold. Her white legs would catch the light and everyone would look at them. Her mother was not happy about the costume, but Cupid was a boy; he could not have had his legs covered.

Anna had never done anything like this. The audiences at Marylebone had been perhaps one hundred people, the stage small, the music simple and easy. Standing in the wings before her entrance, she breathed deliberately, as Rauzzini had taught her, and straightened her shoulders. “Trust your heart,” he had said. “Wrap your heart in the strongest silk, and don’t let anything tear it, nor burn it away.” From the stage came the sounds she yearned for—the orchestra, the cheers. Upon her cue she stepped onto the boards, noticing in passing a stray orange peel that had not been swept up. She wanted to knock it away with her foot, but that would have been out of her part. So she pretended that it did not exist. There, before her, were the heads of the players in the orchestra, there her hopeful father smiling at his double bass. Everything was as they had rehearsed, but now it was night, and the air was hot and smoky, and in the broad, vaulted space before her, pushed against the spikes, standing on benches, leaning out of balconies, eating, drinking, talking, and embracing, two thousand faces turned to Anna with her bow and arrow, her golden pantaloons, her silver wings, her blazing stockings. Two thousand hearts lived with hers, and she did not know where was the silken armor Rauzzini had meant for
her to wrap around her heart. She felt her limbs grow weak and uncertain, felt the two thousand faces begin to turn away.

But then she saw Rauzzini in the wings, dressed all in red with his face brightly painted. He played the hero. He met her eyes and his face told her that he trusted her, and that because he trusted her she had no choice but to see it through. She looked at the bow and arrow in her hands, and lifted them in the air. Though she could not hear, she watched the concert master and found her entrance. Into the wall of faces she launched her unwilling voice, launched it with the imaginary arrows, while Rauzzini watched from the wings, while the silk singed and peeled but did not dissolve. She did not know why he had trusted her. For a moment her mind was a blank and she could not remember anything. Then the music and the stage drew her back. The opera house became a circle of dim light in which she sang and danced as if she were alone. At a certain point she knew it must be good, because she was aware that the murmur of the hall had quieted, but she did not allow herself to dwell on it. The aria finished, the applause was ready and resounding, and she stood for a moment feeling the confused and muddy-minded release of a condemned thief who has been spared at the foot of the gallows. “Bow!” Rauzzini shouted from the wings. “Bow!” He was laughing. The applause went on. Anna gave a start, flourished her arm, called up a radiant smile, and bowed like a boy, one leg extended before her. Then she ran off the stage and into her teacher’s arms.

Rauzzini said there was no steadiness in music. One could not hold music in one’s hands. One could not taste it, nor see it in the air. It vanished almost as soon as it was made. Music for them was an offering. That was what it meant to sing. It meant being in love with the audience, having that ardent munificence, withholding nothing. Only then would the voice truly be beautiful.

Anna did not quite understand. She was only fifteen. But she said she did.

He had taught her to sing a line, to sing as though she were speaking, to sing softly and loudly. He had taught her how to move, how to gesture, how to pronounce the language, and how to have appropriate musical style and inflection. Everything that was necessary. Now it was time, he said, for her to sing in Italy. Italian opera was all, and Anna could not sing as she wished—as a prima donna—without first establishing herself there.

So she was leaving. Anna’s mother and father would go with her
and in Naples they would be reunited with her brother, Stephen, who was studying at the conservatory.

“You must promise to care for yourself,” Rauzzini said to Anna a few days before her departure. She had come to his studio, as familiar to her now as her own home, for a last lesson. He kept blowing into a handkerchief. “You must promise to stay safe and well and never cross through danger, nor associate with bad people.”

“I won’t,” she said. There had come over her face a kind of ashen sobriety unsuited to a girl of fifteen. She had not taken off her hat. It was askew. Her face was blotched and distressed with tears. “I hate saying good-bye. I can’t bear it. We have to go on a ship, and nothing is packed and everyone is in fits and it’s all because of me.” She smiled weakly. “Make me sing, maestro. I’m afraid I’ll forget on the voyage how to sing.”

Without difficulty they slipped into their usual routine, and one would not have known it was the last lesson except that he did not correct her as assiduously as usual. He was helplessly sad. She sang beautifully, with dear honesty and true instinct. Her cheeks brightened and her loveliness was restored. She had grown up. Her figure was womanly, her waist neat. Her darkly lashed eyes could entrance every soul, her brows articulate any subtlety of comedy and wit. Her lips were clever and full, and her smile—her father’s smile—almost devilish in its charm. But it was her voice, now, that Rauzzini cared for; the voice he had helped shape, the voice that had become as dear to him as his own child’s. He lapsed in correcting her because he was trying to burn the sound of it into his brain. It was impossible, and yet he must try.

The voyage to Naples brought out the worst in everyone. The air was bad, the sailors unsavory, and the quarters more like a sick house than a ship. They were trapped. Nothing happened. A nothing to end all nothings. Theirs was the weariness of bodies not allowed
to move as they should and unable, after enough time, to recall how such movement felt. Everything was monotony, stomach cramps, bad breath. They dreamed of vegetables.