Vienna Nocturne (5 page)

He gave an approving nod and leaned back on his heels, his hands loosely at his waist. “I knew him in Rome. Fine singer. Fine lineage. Porpora taught Rauzzini. He did well by you.”

“You knew him?” she exclaimed. “What was he like?”

He smiled thoughtfully but did not have a chance to answer, because Dorotea Bussani was coming over in her carefree way to say how well Anna had sung and how much fun they would have. “You aren’t stupid,” she declared, clapping Anna over the shoulders. She was a striking girl with a long face and reddish hair; everything about her seemed lanky and open. “We always get stupid girls who stand like poles, it’s
agony
, can’t do anything except prop them up and wait for it to be over. But
you’re
smart and we’ll have such fun. You know how to
entertain
! You know what it’s all about!”

Dorotea had grown up in a family of traveling performers, which was where her husband had discovered her when she was only fifteen. There were almost thirty years between her and Bussani. He was a comic bass of the first class, with a rumbling voice and a sardonic manner.

“Marvelous,” said Stefano Mandini in velvet tones, taking Anna’s hand to kiss it. He had an aquiline nose and a broad, steeply
sloping forehead. Everything about him was precise and well contained. Anna had liked his singing very much. His voice was not as beautiful as Benucci’s, nor as loud, and his manner was less passionate, but the technique was without flaw. Mandini could probably sing anything he liked, and he gave one the impression that he did so not to entertain, as Dorotea did, but because it was a physical challenge that happened to provide him with an income. “I think we’ll find ourselves lucky to have you,” he said. “I think you’re the piece we were missing.”

“Brava,” said Salieri with a wry smile. “When I heard how young you were, I was afraid you’d embarrass me. Now I’m afraid I might embarrass you.”

“Oh, never!” said Anna.

“Look it over, tell me tomorrow if there’s anything you want changed. There’s not much time, but time enough.”

“You sang prettily,” her mother conceded on their way home. “And you looked well.”

“She was an angel, madam,” cried Michael Kelly. “Those are the best buffa singers in the world and your daughter holds her own among them.”

“You are too kind, sir,” said Mrs. Storace. “I enjoyed your aria, as well. Very nice Irish tenor.”

“I thank you, madam,” Michael declared fervently. “I am neither a large man, nor a great one, but with my voice I hope to seem so.”

“That is all one can ever do,” said Mrs. Storace, and she talked with Michael all the rest of the way home and through dinner. She liked having a gentleman to speak English with. Anna, lost in daydreams and fatigued by the rehearsal, was glad to stay quiet.

A few days later they began staging the opera. They memorized their parts as they went along. They were well trained in memory and the music fell into familiar tropes and patterns. Sometimes Salieri would alter something or other. He was a dry, thin gentleman, with a square head and a habitual, wincing frown; a man at once
smooth and sharp, who held the rigor of an ascetic while yet, at least according to Michael Kelly, enjoying his women and his drink.

The men all knew one another from previous engagements and acted like brothers. They were scrupulously courteous with Anna and Dorotea. Only Michael treated Anna as a friend, with frankness and unreserve. She supposed this was because he was not handsome, although he had a pleasant expression, boyish and birdlike. At any rate, she could be easy with him.

Benucci said very little to her. He let the others talk. He seemed, on purpose, after that first day, to situate himself far from her when they weren’t rehearsing, and whenever she caught his eye he would find a reason to turn away and say something to Mandini or Bussani.

Nevertheless Anna felt his presence keenly. He would tap her shoulder and say, “Well done,” or, “Very fine,” and when she found in their staging some interesting motion or turn of phrase, his approval was open and genuine. When they sang together there could be no appearance of reserve. They must look into each other’s eyes, argue and exclaim, laugh, dance, despair, declare their love and their hatred, and then again their love renewed. On stage they had a rapport, a secret, silent dialogue that could be indulged in nowhere else. They spoke in glances, in movements of head and hands, in inflection, in touch—all there, on the open stage. Dorotea remarked to Anna that she had never seen a leading couple so well matched. They acted as if they already knew each other, she said. She had never seen Francesco Benucci better than he was now. All the other sopranos had been too dumb—they hadn’t known what to do with him.

Anna shook her head and demurred, but in her heart she felt it was true. Francesco Benucci had found his match. That was why he wouldn’t talk to her, and why, on stage, his hand seemed to linger in hers a moment longer than was necessary. It was wonderful and strange. She thought only of him. Her only project was to make herself better, for him. Her Dorina would be sparkling, vibrant,
bright—everything he deserved. She slept with the windows wide open and in the morning the air was filled with honey. It seemed impossible that this should be her life, that she had made it this far, and no one had told her, not even her mother, that she must go back to London. Young ladies of sixteen were not supposed to live like this, in the honeyed air, singing on the stage with men. Yet it was so.

In the bowels of the theater were all the magnificent ropes and gears and pulleys of the stage machinery, as complex and fine-tuned as any clock or warship. These great works of wood and rope were pulled and pushed and held down by stage workers, moving the flats of painted scenery to create spectacular effects. It was a dark, churning space, crowded with men who must work in silence at the limits of their physical strength, and whose any mistake might kill someone.

Anna and Benucci retired to this space below every night, near the end of the last act. Once there, they would fold themselves into a small wooden closet that the workers would gingerly raise through a trapdoor in the middle of the stage—so that the two lovers might emerge at last in a state of final marital bliss.

They had to practice it many times for safety and timing.

Benucci went in first, with his wide, foxlike grin. A lattice above the door let the light in. He held out his hand to Anna and she
stepped up to join him, turning so her back rested snugly against his front.

He settled his arms around her. “Comfortable?” he asked, his voice sounding at once above her head and through her heart.

“Oh, yes,” she said.

The men slid the door shut.

“Just rest against me,” he said in a low, easy tone. “We’ll be out soon.”

She realized that she had been holding herself rather stiffly, and she sighed a little and let her head lean back against his shoulder. He had large, nice hands, and they held her easily. His face inclined in such a way that his calm breath touched her ear in soft and stroking intervals.

The men outside were talking. It was so dark and quiet where Anna and Benucci were that it seemed the outside must be far away. Anna could not help herself. She lifted Benucci’s hand and put it to her left breast. Her heart beat so fast that she thought she would faint.

His hand held at her breast and his breath caught. Still they did not move. Then he sighed through his nose and circled his hand and pressed there so that she was pressed totally against him. And then she took his hand and put it under her bodice and he pressed and squeezed there, while his other hand stroked her hip. She had never been held so raptly, so completely, with such open ardor.

There was a rattling at the door. Benucci quickly took his hands away. Anna giggled. She thought her eyes must be as big as an owl’s. The man outside explained what they were working on. He said that everything was very safe.

“Are you all right in there, or should we let you out?” he said.

“Perfectly all right,” said Anna.

“Not causing a stink, is he?” asked the man jauntily. “Not getting too ripe for the young lady?”

She smiled and said, “Signor Benucci perfumes himself in roses.”

The door closed again and the box lurched and seemed to hesitate.
Benucci twisted down to kiss her and she turned up to meet him. They made no noise but rustling and sighs, the soft wet
tsks
of lips meeting and drinking and parting. There was a holler from without and the machinery cranked into motion, lifting their conveyance into the air. The sensation of weightlessness, of unhinging, brought a moment of fear, and with it, of greater exhilaration. Benucci pressed himself against Anna and flicked his tongue along the side of her neck, just near her shoulder, and she did not know or care where she was in the world or what she did, as long as there was this, forever. She was made of fluff and nothing, was wholly released, though she had never been so confined.

Up and down they went, more times than they could ever have hoped. If the compartment was constrained, if she could not turn totally to face him, at least they were alone. When they stepped outside it seemed at first they could hardly look each other in the eye, but then everyone remarked how well, how naturally, they moved and sang, as if they’d been working closely all their lives. And almost every other night, for more than a month, they could step into that lifted space and for five or ten minutes be alone together again, alone in their secret, before the door would slide open and they would come forward, flushed and laughing, to general applause, to sing their last number and be married for the hundredth, the five hundredth, time, just as all lovers dreamed.