by Mark Helprin
“Rosanna Scungili,” she answered, as if she knew that this was soon to change, as indeed it would. Imagine an American or English opera singer whose name was Jane Octopus-Slice. She might be the greatest singer in the world, but much would stand in her way.
“How about Rosanna Cadorna?” I suggested after my eyes had swept the restaurant and stopped at a painting of the famous general.
“Who’s she?”
“She would be you.” Rosanna’s expression was blank. “You would be she.”
“How?”
“You’d change your name.”
“I see,” she said. “All right.” She was the quickest to decide absolutely anything of anyone I’ve ever known. She still is. She has no hesitation. It’s as if nothing matters to her. I think she may be psychotic. When her father died, the first thing she said was, “What time is the European Song Fest?” Back then, in the restaurant, just after she had so quickly agreed to a different name, she said, “Let’s go to Germany. I already know the part. When do we leave?”
FOR SOMEONE who didn’t like German food, Rosanna ate a lot of it. In addition to the meals we had at the Scheibenwischeroper, the windshield-wiper opera, I had to buy her several kilos of bread, sausage, and cake every day. I have heard—I have seen—that really crazy people can eat ten kilos of food a day and not gain weight. That was Rosanna until she was forty. Then something changed, and she began to gain weight as inexorably as a tank into which water is dripping. Now she cracks marble floors as she passes over them, and stalls elevators as she gets into them, but back then the Germans thought she was just a typical starving Italian girl. Indifferent to her appearance and her manner, they remained unimpressed until at the first rehearsal she opened her mouth to sing.
The Germans, after all, produced Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, and Brahms: it’s not as if they’re insensitive to music. And at the end of her first aria all those stolid Germans were so moved they were in tears. They were astounded that she was there with them, and they had the touched, trembling, holy air of those present at the creation, for it was easy to see that she was going straight to the great stages of the world.
It wasn’t exactly straight. After her flawless performances in Pflanzenberg, we went on to one flawless performance after another in—if memory serves, and it should, for these were glorious days of rising and success—Wachenrauss, Hofheim, Würzburg, Karlsruhe, and Heilbronn. The engagements in these cities were all in opera clubs. She had to sing near machine tools, gymnastic equipment, and walls of boxes. Once, she brought down the house—that is, the people on blankets on the grass—while a Turkish soccer game raged off to her left. She was as unconcerned as if she were playing in the hushed spaces of the greatest opera house. There she stood, despite the most despicable noise and distraction, a monstrous woman, really, floating in a sea of ineffable beauty and transforming the world about her without either self-consciousness or delicate temperament.
You know how great singers and musicians are always supposed to be prisoners of temperament? It’s the opposite of what’s true. In fact, what so distinguishes them in this regard is that they have no temperament: they are absolute. It is we, who are not great, who are prisoners of mood. It is we who vary and change, and when we who spend our lives trimming and ducking encounter those who make no adjustments we imagine that it is they who are in a frenzy, such are the laws of relative motion.
I have never seen Rosanna sing with adjustment for anything. She could be in a dirty garage in Saarbrücken or at a command performance for the queen of England, and it would be—indeed, it was—exactly the same. Indeed, she is a miracle of temperament, or lack of it. She is seized each time by the divinity of the music and she neither varies nor falters. Well, she does sometimes falter, but only when her body has failed her and she is sick. Even then, though she may not sing well, she sings better than most, and when you see her struggling against her affliction—she is not anymore a healthy woman—you know that to finish her aria she would sing even unto death.
But when not singing, she’s intolerable. She has always been intolerable. In our almost forty years of association I have seen several hundred of the scores of thousands of young men who have fallen in love with her voice. These are the ones who, like the hardier sperm that can swim close to the egg, come to her entranced and obsessed. And then, unlike sperm, they turn away in horrified disillusion. Most women would have been suicidal after two or three such rejections, but (though it doesn’t happen anymore, because she is too fat) it did not affect Rosanna. “They’re idiots,” she used to say. “They’re in love with something Mozart or Bellini plucked from the ether, not with me. That’s why they could never sing themselves. They try to make their lives something other than pedestrian, because they have nowhere else to go. When I come back from where I go, I want just to be a laundress. And when I come back from where I go, I have no strength left to be anyone else. Besides, I never loved anyone but Quagliagliarello, until you took him away from me.”
“I didn’t take him from you, he was jealous of your career.”
“Can you blame him? He got back from New Zealand and what did he see? Did he see Rosanna Scungili, laundress, who hangs wet sheets and sings like a nightingale?”
“And eats like a hippo.”
“I had a high metabolism. No, he sees Rosanna Cadorna, just become world famous, who rides around in long cars and talks to the Pope, who makes in one night by opening herself to others like a whore, more than he has made in his life, who lives in the most expensive suites of the best hotels, and who, in two years, has become old. What was he supposed to do?”
“Anything but what he did.”
“He was a soldier, he had a gun.”
“He should have killed me, not himself. That’s what I would have done.”
“No. I was gone, and could never come back. It was too late.”
“Do you think, Rosanna, that had you stayed a laundress and married Quagliagliarello when he got back from New Zealand, you would have been happy?”
“I don’t know. I loved him. We could have had children.”
“You would have given everything up for your singing. You wouldn’t have been able to help it. If I hadn’t found you, someone else would have. You could have waited for Quagliagliarello, but remember how quick you were to go to Pflanzenberg?”
“Yes,” she said. “I know. I hardly hesitated an instant.”
AFTER HEILBRONN, where we were in a real theater with lights, we went on to Nürnberg, Stuttgart, Munich, and Vienna. Her mastery of the repertoire was so flawless that, like a diva who has been on the circuit for decades, she could without preparation take any part anytime. This was noticed as much as the inimitable quality of her singing, and it was why, a year and a half after her debut at the windshield-wiper opera in a warehouse, she went on stage at La Scala when Adriana Rossi could not sing on account of a high fever, to take the part of Amenaide in Tancredi.
The moment she started to sing, the breathing of the audience was altered. And you could see them rise effortlessly in their seats. The light was suddenly clear and perfect, and there was not a cough or a shuffle as the whole world was put on notice that Rosanna had arrived. The magnificence and joy of her singing did to this refined—you might even say jaded—audience what it did to me when first I heard her at the laundry. She went from strength to strength, and that night it was as if the music had not come long before from Rossini, but was issuing suddenly from Rosanna.
When the performance ended, the other singers, who, as you may imagine, were not a humble group, melted back from her in a crescent, and, half in envy and half in awe, applauded from the semidarkness of noncenter stage as if they, too, were the audience. Shouts of “Brava! Bravissima!” came for twenty minutes, until Rosanna pulled and set the hook forever by storming off the stage, as only a true diva could, and shouting in dismissive anger, “Basta! Basta!”
They loved it more than I can convey, and from that moment our fortunes were
assured in terms of opportunities offered, monies earned, praise lavished, oceans crossed in quiet airplanes, and distant respect tendered by millions.
Rosanna’s success was so astonishingly quick partly because she was already in the semimonstrous state of disconnection for which most people require years of constant flattery, ready limousines, and obsequious retainers. She skipped her education in the cruelties of status, having had them from the beginning even in her laundress bones. Which is not to say that she had no regrets, but only that she would do whatever was needed to be done, instantly and in spite of them, as if they did not exist.
Were it not for her beautiful voice, I never would willingly have come, once I had known what she was like, within a hundred kilometers of her. And I was never interested in her other than professionally. Although she must have a soul, someplace, loving Rosanna would be like—how shall I put it?—smoking an unlit cigar, walking a dead dog, swimming in an empty pool, or listening to the radio when it is off. One thing that has made her tolerable is that in return for my plucking her from her wet sheets, she has shared her considerable fortunes with me. One might even say generously, were it not for the original contract of representation and the half-dozen times she has tried to break, evade, or alter it. It was, however, very carefully worded. Don’t forget, I was a bookkeeper, whose eye was trained in harrowingly close textual analysis.
She even proposed to me. Granted, it was because of a quirk in the law that would have dissolved the agreement upon our marriage, a marriage that quite apart from its nearly-impossible-to-express repulsive attributes, would have been quickly followed by divorce so as to render Rosanna a free agent.
“Naturally I won’t marry you, Rosanna, and you know it.”
“Why not?”
“Because, as you know, our representation agreement would cease to govern upon our marriage.”
“It would?”
“What a surprise!” I said. “Last week you spoke to the lawyer, who. …”
“What lawyer?”
“DeMarco.”
“Oh, him.”
“Who told me that he had given you, at your request, a disquisition on this very subject. I was expecting you to ask me to marry you. But, Rosanna, even were all things equal, I couldn’t marry you, because of Lucia.”
“What is she to you!?” Rosanna asked indignantly.
“My wife.”
Rosanna stormed off, laundress-style. I’m thoroughly used to it. I bear it. To this day, she’s responsible for half my income, and although she’s a lot of work, the work consists of choosing offers rather than begging for them, and there is a difference. Even were she struck dead by more cholesterol, the revenue from CDs and broadcasts would continue, though it would be reduced. Maybe I would find another great diva. Maybe not. What’s the difference? My children are grown. Neither Lucia nor I are anymore interested in living grandly. I like to fish, shoot, and read. She is content running the house and helping to take care of the grandchildren. In short, for me the age of Rosanna Cadorna could come to an end and I would not be unhappy.
Still, because we are not quite ready to retire—perhaps in three or four years—and from long ingrained habit, I continue to serve Rosanna above and beyond my essential obligations. This is not because I want to, but as a reflexive defense learned after her three nonperformance suits. I am not required to find the tentlike clothing that fits her, arrange for special water filtration at her villa, or sit with her while she eats, but I do, solely to build immunity. Thus, when she came to me last summer (the summer of 2001), and more or less ordered me to Venice, I went.
That I would go was not a certainty, not these days, when I am more and more able to take or leave her, and at first I resisted.
“Cassati,” she said, putting a book in my hands, “look at this.” On its dark cover was a detail from a painting, a beautiful young girl who reminded me painfully of my daughters when they were young, before they had left home—Il Colore Ritrovato: Bellini a Venezia. “Color refound,” or, better, “rediscovered,” or, even better, “Color Restored: Bellini in Venice.”
They had washed Bellini’s paintings until they glowed like jewels, and now these were exhibited in the Accademia in Venice, with this book the record of both his effortless genius and their ingenious efforts.
“Beautiful,” I said.
“And amazing,” she added.
“Yes.”
“To think! He was a great painter!”
“He was.”
“Too.”
“‘Too’?”
“As well as composer.”
It took a moment for me to understand. “Bellini?” I asked.
“What a genius!”
“It was a different Bellini,” I told her. “There were two, you know. One was a painter. He came before. The other was a composer. He came after.”
“Two?” She was skeptical.
I nodded.
“Are you sure?”
“Positive.”
“I didn’t know that, Cassati, but I still want you to go to Venice and check it out.”
“Check what out?” I didn’t want to go to Venice. I had other plans.
“Bellini.”
“I told you, it’s a different one.”
“Okay, check him out anyway.”
“What do you want me to check?”
“See how things are.”
She saw the way I was looking at her. I had no idea what she was talking about. “What do you mean, ‘How things are’?”
“See if you can buy some of the paintings. I like them, especially the one of Father Christmas taking the mummy.”
“I assure you, Bellini painted no such scene.”
“Yes, he did, it’s on page a hundred and six.”
I turned to the page. “That’s not Father Christmas, Rosanna, it’s a priest of the temple, and that’s not a mummy, it’s the Baby Jesus in swaddling cloths.”
“So much the better.”
“You can’t buy these paintings, they’re the property of the state.”
“Maybe for me they would make an exception. I’ll ask the president.”
“He won’t do it.”
“I’ll ask the Pope.”
“Neither will he.”
“Go, anyway.”
“To Venice?”
“Yes.”
“Why don’t you go to Venice? Why do I have to go to Venice?”
“Too many people would recognize me. Besides, I leave tomorrow, as you know, for Buenos Aires.”
“What exactly do you want me to do?” (I had lost.)
“Check out the paintings, in person, look around, report to me, and get a copy of this book.”
“But you have a copy of the book.”
“You can keep this one. Get me a fresh one.”
That was why, last summer, I went to Venice.
TO THE QUESTION what is the difference between Venice and Milan other than a difference in tone, in the sunlight, and in the air, the answer is that Milan is where you busy yourself with the world as if what you did really mattered, and there time seems not to exist. But in Venice time seems to stop, you are busy only if you are a fool, and you see the truth of your life. And, whereas in Milan beauty is overcome by futility, in Venice futility is overcome by beauty.
It isn’t because of the architecture or the art, the things that people go to look at and strain to preserve. The quality of Venice that accomplishes what religion so often cannot is that Venice has made peace with the waters. It is not merely pleasant that the sea flows through, grasping the city like the tendrils of a vine, and, depending upon the light, making alleys and avenues of emerald or sapphire, it is a brave acceptance of dissolution and an unflinching settlement with death. Though in Venice you may sit in courtyards of stone, and your heels may click up marble stairs, you cannot move without riding upon or crossing the waters that someday will carry you in dissolution to the sea. To have made peace with their presence is the great ac
hievement of Venice, and not what tourists come to see.
What Rosanna can do with her voice—the sublime elevation that is the province of artists, anyone can do in Venice if he knows what to look for and what to ignore. Should you concentrate there on the exquisite, or should you study too closely the monuments and museums, you will miss it, for it comes gently and without effort, and moves as slowly as the tide.
Despite the fact that you are more likely to feel this quality if you are not distracted by luxury, I registered at the Celestia. The streets near San Marco are far too crowded and not as interesting as those quieter areas on other islands and in other districts, and they have a deficit of greenery and sunlight. And the Celestia, with its 2,600-count linen and stage-lit suites, is the kind of luxury that removes one from the spirit of life, but I went there anyway almost as a way of spiting Rosanna, who was paying for it, and because that is where we always stayed in Venice, and I wanted to accumulate more hotel-stay points. In that I am compulsive. Once I start laying-in a store of a certain commodity, like money, I get very enthusiastic about building it up.
Also, I’m somewhat known in Venice, and were I to stay in a less than perfect hotel word might get out that either Rosanna or I were not doing as well as was expected, and in the public eye position is not half as important as direction of travel. People are clever, and just as they find comets and shooting stars more of interest than simple pinpoints of light, they wisely ignore the fixed points of a career in favor of its trajectory.
I arrived in the evening, swam for a kilometer in the indoor pool, bumping on occasion into an old lady who was shaped like a frog and kept wandering blindly into my lane, and then I had dinner in my suite. Because I’m unused to sleeping with the sound of air-conditioning and in curtain-drawn darkness—at home the light of the moon and stars filters through the trees as they rustle unevenly in the wind—I slept as if anesthetized, and the next morning, parted from my current life, I woke up as if the world was new to me, as it used to be every morning when I awoke when I was young.
