Mozart’s Blood (12 page)

“Aha!” the
maestro
cried, slapping his thick hand against his chest. “Then now—now you are ready!”

Ughetto protested, “I've
been
ready!” His voice rose in complaint, and at the top of the rise, it broke, the pitch collapsing. It dropped an entire octave, ending in a toneless scrape, like the croak of a frog.

Ughetto and Brescha stared at each other. For a long moment, neither spoke. Then Brescha, jowls trembling, said, “What was that?”

Ughetto shook his head. “I don't know.” His voice rasped in his throat with unsteady vibrations. He didn't recognize either the feeling or the sound. He was afraid to speak again. He put a hand to his neck, as if he could fix it that way, and stared round-eyed at his teacher.

“What have you been doing today?” Brescha demanded.

Ughetto only shook his head. He didn't dare open his lips.

“Were you running? Screaming in the cold?”

“No,” Ughetto whispered.

“Don't whisper. Speak!”

Ughetto stared at his teacher in horror as an idea began to take form in his mind, a terrible idea. He shook his head, wordlessly. Cold fear began in his loins and spread upward through his belly and his chest.

But it couldn't be. It wasn't possible.

He remembered the flakes of opium dissolving in dark Roman wine. He remembered the strong arms of Luigi lifting him, lowering him into the warm water. He recalled the splintered bench in the tub, and the hands on his ankles, opening his legs. He would never forget the flash of pain from the knife.

And he remembered the screeches of Nonna and her son, the surgeon's wide, frightened eyes before he scuttled away like a cockroach before a broom.

Ughetto felt an urge to touch himself beneath his trousers, to explore what the surgeon's knife had left to him.

He remembered blood. But whose blood had it been?

Brescha came close, bending his great height above him. “Ughetto,” he said. Anxiety made his voice scrape, too, but it stayed in its high register. “Speak to me, dear boy. Let me hear your voice.”

The endearment made Ughetto's lips tremble. With difficulty, squeezing his hands tight together, he said, “Maestro. I don't know what's wrong.”

And he heard, with horrified ears, the froglike sound of his voice. Its pitch wavered as it searched for a register to settle in.

Brescha clutched his robe with one hand, as if he could steady himself that way. With the other he rubbed his brow, and then his eyes. He looked away, as if he couldn't bring himself to look into his protégé's eyes as he spoke the awful news.

“Ughetto,” he said. His voice throbbed with sadness. “Your voice is changing.”

 

They met, several hours later, in the
direttore
's private office. It was a lovely room, with an enormous Venetian vase in one corner and a broad writing desk of polished pine in the other. A clavier stood against one wall, its inlaid wood cover closed.

Ughetto stood before the desk, his head hanging. Anselmo sat behind it and glowered up at him, his face suffused with fury. Brescha stood behind Ughetto. The old
castrato
's eyes were red, his lips swollen from having wept for a solid hour.

Ughetto had shed no tears. Shock had made him cold, then fevered, then icy cold again. He stood very still, facing Anselmo across the desk but avoiding his eyes.

“How could you not have known?” Anselmo shrilled.

A distant part of Ughetto noticed that when the
castrati
were upset, their voices went up. Not down. He didn't dare answer the
direttore,
because he knew already that his voice would go lower. He already understood that his voice, his only real asset, was seeking a new register, probing the depths for where it would settle.

He stared at the terra-cotta tile beneath his feet. The clean wool and linen of his new gown and breeches mocked him, reminders of the glory that had just this day slipped from his grasp. He wondered if it had left anything in its place.

Brescha cleared his throat and said in a shaking voice, “Ughetto has always been shy. He bathes alone. And who would—” He choked on a sob. “Who would have suspected?”

Ughetto lifted his head and turned to look at Brescha. He was amazed, even now, at how wounded the old singer was, how grieved. Brescha wasn't angry. Brescha behaved as if his heart was broken. There had been no word of anger until they faced Anselmo.

Anselmo frowned at Brescha, whose lip began to tremble. “I blame you,” Anselmo said sourly. “You should have examined him.”

Fresh tears coursed down Brescha's heavy cheeks, and he quavered, “You're the
direttore!
Why didn't you examine him?”

Anselmo was thinner than Brescha, but just as tall and ungainly in his proportions. He stood now, and Ughetto felt smaller than ever. His head reached no higher than Anselmo's chest. “Who brought Ughetto to us?”

Brescha said, “Those people from Napoli, Luigi someone and his crone of a mother. Ughetto comes from…Where is it, Ughetto?”

Ughetto cleared his throat and tried to steady his voice, but it was no use. He scratched out, “Trapani,” and fell silent again.

“Sicilia,” Anselmo said darkly, as if that explained everything. He toyed with a paper knife on his desk, making it catch the sunlight. “If we'd known…perhaps it would not have been too late. Ughetto, you should have told us.”

Brescha stepped forward, and for the first time since he had known him, Ughetto felt his long, fleshy arm surround his shoulders. Brescha cleared his throat, and his reedy voice was steadier when he said, “Anselmo. This is not Ughetto's fault. He didn't know. No one knew. And now we must take care of him.”

“Take care of him! Can he get our money back?”

“He was eight years old when he came here,” Brescha said. “Exactly my own age when I started my training. What do we know, when we're that age, Anselmo? Can you remember?” His voice trembled again. “Did you know what your body would look like?”

The
direttore
scowled and looked away. “We are disgraced,” he said bitterly. “Thanks to your ambition, Brescha!”

Ughetto could not stand in silence anymore. He said, in that new voice he didn't recognize, “Don't blame Maestro Brescha, signore, I beg you. He is hurt enough.”

Brescha's arm tightened around his shoulders, and Ughetto felt his ungainly body shake with suppressed sobs.

Anselmo stood up abruptly, dropping the paper knife. “Out,” he said, fixing Ughetto with his angry gaze. “Today. We will tell the Cappella Sistina you ran away.”

“No!” Brescha exclaimed.

“Yes,” was the answer. “It's the only way to save our reputation.”

Ughetto stared at him. “But where will I go?”

Anselmo spread his hands. “How should I know? Go back to your family!”

“I have no money,” Ughetto said. His voice sounded unfamiliar to his own ears, the voice of a stranger. “How do I get there?”

Brescha turned him toward the door. “I will give you money, Ughetto. The money you would have earned from the Cappella.”

“You will not!” Anselmo snapped.

Brescha paused and looked over his shoulder. His jowls trembled now with anger. “Anselmo, tell me. Did you choose the knife? No. Did I? No. And no more did Ughetto.” He looked down at Ughetto, his eyes glistening. “He has been my greatest pupil. If I am to lose him, I will at least give him a chance in life.”

Teresa stood in the road while her friend's aunt read her letter of introduction. The house was a narrow, dark building with stone walls and no garden at all. The door opened directly into the road, with no step or stoop to separate it. The aunt, named Gilda, was a stout, mustachioed woman with black hair and a glint in her dark eyes that did not bode well for Teresa's petition.

“Signora,” Teresa pled. “Only a few weeks, until I—until I find work.”

Gilda raised one thick eyebrow and looked Teresa up and down. Teresa fidgeted. In the last three days she had felt more like a capon at market, assessed for how much meat she might provide, than a seventeen-year-old girl away from home for the first time.

“Not married,” Gilda said in a flat tone.

Teresa dropped her eyes in what she hoped was a modest manner. “Not yet, signora.”

“You can pay?”

Teresa fumbled in her little string bag and brought out the tiny cotton pouch where she had stowed her meager savings. She opened it, and showed the interior to Gilda. “This is what I have, signora,” she said. “It's not much.”

“Hardly anything,” Gilda grumbled. She looked over her shoulder. “But I can use it. My husband isn't working just now.”

Hopeful, Teresa bent to pick up her valise, but when she straightened, Gilda had put out a forestalling hand.
“Aspetta, aspetta,”
she said.

Teresa put down the valise again. Gilda glanced over her shoulder one more time, then stepped out into the road, pulling the door closed behind her. “I have a room you can have, for a while,” she said in a low tone. Her face was grim. “But you stay away from my husband.”

As gravely as she could, Teresa said, “Of course, signora.”

Gilda said, “I mean it. One improper glance, and you're out.
Capisci?
”

Teresa sighed, suddenly overwhelmed by the weight of impending years. Would she, one day, look like Gilda? Would she have a growth on her upper lip, a thickened waist, a sour expression?

“Capisco, signora,”
she answered tiredly. “I will promise whatever you like. I only need a place to lay my head, a place to wash, perhaps a bit of food if you can spare it. As soon as I can afford a rooming house, I'll go.”

Gilda nodded. “How many
lire
are there in that little purse?”

Teresa had no need to count them. She knew precisely how many were left after her coach trip, after her meager meal of soup and bread, and her only other meal on the road, oranges and cheese. She told Gilda the number.

Gilda nodded again, and held out her hand. Reluctantly, not knowing what else to do, Teresa turned over the pouch and let the
lire
fall into the older woman's palm.

“Bene,”
Gilda said, and unexpectedly, she smiled. Her teeth were surprisingly good, and for a moment Teresa saw the resemblance to her niece in Limone. “Come in,
ragazza,
” she said, as pleasantly as if Teresa were an expected guest. “Come in and let me show you your room.”

 

The room Gilda gave her was barely as wide as her outstretched arms, but it was enough. The bed was clean, if a bit hard, and there were a ewer and basin on a rickety marble-topped stand. There was no wardrobe, but Teresa had so few clothes it hardly mattered.

Gilda's cooking showed her Limone roots. She made
pasta
with braised onion sauce, fish from the Lambro fried in butter, salads of arugula and fennel, and
carpaccio
of veal with sliced beets and grilled tomatoes. At first Teresa found the traditional Milanese green olive bread too salty for her taste, but she soon learned to savor it, dipping thick slices into olive oil.

Ippolito, the man Gilda so jealously guarded, was a stubby creature with the veined nose and reddened cheeks of a drinker. He said little, but he ate a great deal, and washed everything down with sour red wine. Teresa sat at table with the two of them for lunch and dinner, sitting as far as she could from Ippolito, studiously keeping her eyes on Gilda. She offered to help in the kitchen, but Gilda, it developed, was as jealous of her recipes as she was of her husband.

The couple had had a daughter who died in infancy. There had been no other children. When he worked, Ippolito was a stonemason. Gilda informed Teresa that Ippolito was between jobs because there was little construction in Milano at the moment. She spoke without a hint of irony, giving no indication that she heard the constant hammering and shouts of builders on nearly every street of the city.

Ladies came daily to the little house, carrying bolts of cloth. They stood on a wooden stool in Gilda's
salotto,
gossiping cheerfully while she measured and pinned and cut.

Teresa borrowed Gilda's soapstone iron. She heated it on the wood stove, then pressed her best dress. She washed her hair in cold water in the basin in her room and scrubbed her cheeks until they were pink. She put on the dress and wound her hair up as neatly as she knew how. She took her mother's music book in her arms for luck and started out of the house, intending to go straight to the theater.

Gilda stopped her in the hall. “Where are you going?”

Teresa bit her lip. “I'm—going to look for work.”

“What work, in that dress? Do you plan to be a charwoman?”

“No, signora. A—a singer.”

Gilda's eyes widened, and she stared at the girl for a long moment. Her mustachioed lip pursed. “Well,” she said. “I suppose singers have to come from somewhere.”

Teresa started again for the door.

“No, no, no!” Gilda cried. “You can't go like that!”

Teresa stopped in the little hallway, her hand on the latch. “
Cosa?
What is it?”

“Your dress!” Gilda said.

Teresa looked down at herself. Her gown, if such it could be called, was of brown muslin. She had sewed it herself with inexpert fingers. The petticoat was also brown, but there had not been enough muslin, and so the sides and back, where the over-skirt hid them, were of pieces of leftover beige cotton. The bodice had no boning, but Teresa was slender and not overlarge in her bosom, and she had hoped it would not matter. Still, the whole effect was rather cheap looking, and she knew it.

She sighed, remembering the elegant gown of the lady who had shared her coach. “This is all I have.”

Gilda clucked her tongue and crooked a thick finger, drawing Teresa into the living room. Before Teresa knew what was happening, she was standing in her shift and Gilda was dropping a different dress over her head, muttering to herself as she pulled the laces tight on the bodice, as she bent to check the length of the hem and to tweak the overdress into place over the petticoat. The whole ensemble was in shades of blue, the bodice the blue of a midnight sky, the skirt that of a robin's egg. The petticoat was even paler, an ice blue for which Teresa had no name. The skirt was not nearly so wide as that of the lady from the coach, but it draped beautifully over the petticoat, and the bodice was stiff with whalebone and topped with a fall of creamy lace. Teresa stood very still, hardly daring to move in the lovely creation.

“Gilda!” she breathed, not realizing she had used the aunt's given name. “What fabric is this? Whose dress?”

“It's mostly silk damask,” Gilda said shortly. “The petticoat is satin. And it was to be for the wife of the doctor in the next street.”

“Why did she not—”

Gilda snorted. “She died. Not much of a doctor, do you think?”

Teresa shivered. It was not a good omen. But it was a lovely dress, and only a bit too big in the waist. Even as she thought about it, she felt Gilda's strong fingers tugging at the laces, adjusting the skirt. “Did she pay you?” Teresa asked after a moment.

“Half in advance,” Gilda said. “She still owes me the other half.”

“I will pay you for it,” Teresa said. “I promise.”

Gilda gave a rough laugh. “You do that,
ragazza,
” she said. She stepped back, nodding appreciatively. “You're much prettier than the doctor's wife was, anyway,” she said, and her unexpected smile broke out. It softened her dark face and made her look years younger. “Just tell everyone who made your gown.”

 

For three days straight Teresa presented herself at La Scala. The first day she could not even get in the door. The second day she managed to get in through the delivery entrance, but was promptly ejected by an officious man in a frock coat who flourished a cane at her as if she were a bothersome dog. By the third day, after standing beside the stage entrance and approaching every single person who passed her, she knew there would be no straightforward way to win an audition. The singers laughed, and the orchestra members averted their faces, out of embarrassment for her, she suspected. The director, it seemed, did not use the stage entrance.

As she trudged back toward Gilda's home, lifting the skirts of the blue gown to keep them from being muddied, she felt something close to despair. She couldn't afford a voice teacher who might have a contact at the opera. She didn't have an accompanist. She had not attended any of the conservatories, which might at least lend her petition credibility.

She walked slowly, her head down, her music clamped under her arm, hardly knowing where she turned or which street she was taking. When she heard the strains of an organ, she stopped. She lifted her head and looked around, hoping she wasn't completely lost.

She found herself on Via Falcone, opposite a small, rather odd little church with a circular wall and a soaring bell tower to her right. The music was unfamiliar, but she thought it might be Bach, or perhaps Handel. She had just started across the street, thinking she would go into the church, sit down for a time, and listen to the organ, when she heard a sweet and rather eerie voice rise to join the organ.

Teresa caught her breath. What was this? It was certainly a soprano voice, but it was like nothing she had ever heard in Limone. She hurried, afraid it would stop before she could find its source. She had to circle all the way around the little church before she found the entrance on Via Torino. There was a niche with a figure of the Virgin set into it, and a plaque beneath that said
Santa Maria presso San Satiro
. Teresa scarcely glanced at these as she hurried in through the wooden doors. She crossed herself automatically as she entered the nave.

It was a lovely place. She glanced around, surprised at how large it seemed once she was inside. It took her several moments to realize that the church's spaciousness was an illusion. Whoever had designed it had created a trompe-l'oeil effect by painting vaulted arches on the walls. A Mass was in progress, with worshippers standing in the pews and the priest chanting the ordinary from the altar. The music—that glorious voice, with the reedy tones of the organ underlying it—wound through the resonant space, slender and full at the same time.

The singer began a long
melisma,
figures of eighth-and sixteenth-notes, winding up the staff and then down again. Did the singer never breathe? The passage seemed to go on an impossibly long time.

Teresa sidled into a pew, crowding next to an old woman in a black scarf. She peered over her shoulder into the organ loft to try to find the singer.

Around her, as the
Sanctus
came to an end, the worshippers knelt, but Teresa had lost track of the liturgy. She could see the singer now, and she still stood, distracted by his voice and form. She had heard about such creatures, of course. There were singers of this ilk in Roma, and in Napoli and Venezia. She had not thought to hear such a voice in a Milanese church.

Someone tugged at her skirt, and she realized she was the only person standing in the nave except the priest. Abruptly, she sank to her knees, hoping the floor wasn't too dirty. Still she kept her head turned toward the organ loft.

When the
Amen
began, she bent her head and closed her eyes, listening with the purest admiration. The Mass went by in a blur, Teresa simply waiting for each part the
musico
would sing. His artistry stunned her. Some objected to the knife, claiming it was unnatural and cruel. Teresa, at that moment, was not so sure. If it was mutilation that created such singers, would it not be worth it? Would even she, given the chance to sing those long
melismas,
those piercing high notes, accept it? She just might, if it would do her any good.

As the congregants filed out of San Satiro, Teresa went in search of the stairs leading down from the organ loft. She stood in the shadows, waiting. When he came down, he had doffed the dark robe and was dressed in a modest suit, only his height and his long arms and neck assuring her that it was, in fact, the
castrato.

She stepped forward. “Sir,” she said softly. “Your singing is magnificent.”

He had a fleshy face, with a shock of black hair springing up from a high forehead. He started to smile at her, his round, beardless cheeks creasing, when someone behind her hissed, “Capon!” and thrust past with a sharp elbow that sent Teresa staggering into the wall.

The
musico
's smile faded. He stood very still, his cheeks flaming, his eyes downcast. The man who had insulted him swept through the doors and out into the gathering evening.

Teresa regained her balance and tucked her book of music securely under her arm again. She repeated in a clear voice, “Magnificent, sir. The most beautiful thing I've ever heard.”

The tall
castrato
smoothed his lapels. “Thank you, signorina,” he said. His voice was high and fluting, rather like an adolescent boy's, but richer and more resonant. “It's strange that men such as that one gather in the opera house to hear my kind sing, yet hate to come face-to-face with us when we're not in costume.”

Teresa took a step toward him. A seed of hope began to germinate in her breast, nearly stealing her breath. “Sir,” she said. “Did you say—do you indeed sing at La Scala?”