by Mark Helprin
With the million lire they could find a room, bathe, and spend the rest of the afternoon speculating. I had made what was perhaps the second great discovery of my career, and yet I was profoundly unsettled. I looked forward to taking them to dinner, but I did not look forward to the rest. By the time I reached a point almost at the center of the bridge and walked over to the rail to look back, they were gone.
AT THE CELESTIA I stayed on my terrace fronting the Grand Canal and the Isola di San Giorgio. Although I could see out, behind a balustrade and a dense hedge of miniature orange trees I was visible to no one. In bright sun and a breeze, I read the papers, drank several liters of water, and looked long at the view.
Unsure of what lay ahead and fearful that they might not make the right choices, they would be in a state of excited agitation. Knowing what lay ahead for them on whatever road they might take, I felt sadness and regret. What, exactly, would I have to offer? No one in his right mind would think it anything but glorious, but perhaps I was not in my right mind. I thought of Rosanna, glorious only when she sang, and even then glorious only from afar, like a plain woman made up to be strikingly beautiful in the unnatural light of the stage.
Exhausted by the glare of the sun, I slept until ten of eight. I awoke in confusion and rushed to dress. Rather than wear the suit I had planned to wear—the quality of which bespoke great wealth—I threw on a blazer and went without a tie. As long as a handkerchief was in the breast pocket, the blazer was elegant enough for the restaurant.
Sunburnt, of advancing age, and attired in a way that made me look like the magnate I am not except in the little world of managing singers, I ran once again, this time through the narrow carpeted corridors of the hotel and down increasingly widening staircases until I reached the lobby, where I stopped disappointedly because they were not there. I looked at my watch, which said 8:12. Surely they would have waited for twelve minutes. It was possible that they hadn’t arrived yet. I glanced at the clock in the lobby, one of those bulging glittery things that looks like it was once possessed by Marie Antoinette. It said twenty-seven past the hour. A gift from Rosanna, my watch was so rare, expensive, and delicate that it was never, ever, accurate. I truly regretted having been seduced by its prestige.
At first I was upset, but, then, thinking that perhaps they had come and, when I did not show up, decided that the whole thing was a hoax and left, I was relieved. It was as if I had discovered that a furious and incendiary telegram I had sent and would regret for the rest of my life had not been delivered, because the lines were down, or a dog had eaten it, or a telegraph messenger had pedaled his bicycle into a canal. Though I felt the missed opportunity, I was pleased that nothing had happened. Walking toward the restaurant, my relief was confirmed in an after-reaction of happiness that seemed to spring from nowhere.
But when I entered the restaurant, they were sitting in the vestibule like nervous mice, without even a drink. “Ah,” I said, in a nearly dread-filled voice that probably threw them into despair, “there you are.”
“We’re sorry for being early,” she said.
“No,” I contradicted. “I’m late. I’m the one who should be sorry.”
“Please,” he said, “you needn’t be sorry. We’re sorry.”
Had I wanted to I could have signed them right then and there and for a tenth of what they deserved, but in this negotiation I could not be their opponent, I had to be their advocate, something I realized in amazement as we were shown to our table.
I made hand signals to the waiters without even looking at them, the way really rich people do. I don’t know what the signals mean or if I am actually saying anything when I use them, but the waiters know that when someone is so confident of being served properly without even looking at those who are serving him, they will receive a spectacular tip, and therefore they always do the right thing. In this case, instead of allowing us time to settle in before bringing the menus, they brought them immediately (which is what I wanted), and did not stay to talk about the special dishes for that evening, something I never like.
“The menu has no prices,” she announced in alarm.
“Mine has the prices,” I told them, “and as the host I cannot reveal them. That’s not the paramount rule, however. The paramount rule is that you must eat extravagantly. If you don’t, I’ll be insulted.”
They ordered, trying their best to be extravagant, but they didn’t know how. They both wanted soup and the seafood “bouquet,” and to know if the soup came with bread. The “bouquet” would stun them, as it consisted of a whole American lobster, chilled and shelled, half a dozen immense shrimp, cold scallops, smoked salmon, a great amount of Alaskan king crab, smoked oysters, smoked trout, and caviar. I ordered the same, and, in addition, for the table, a different type of caviar, Champagne, scotch, grilled boned quail, and truffled wild rice. Dessert would be another production.
Almost before we spoke, the half a glass of Champagne she drank transformed her, as it does some women, into a creature of angelic grace and happiness. A shot of scotch made him a touch belligerent—just a touch—and yet relaxed and ready for whatever might happen. For my part, I like caviar and I had a double Glenlivet, which made me reckless and determined, which, I believe, is what the heart most requires even if it brings trouble, for recklessness and determination make life come alive.
“You’re not Italian,” I began, “and you’re not English, I can tell. What are you?”
“Most people, hearing our accents,” he said, “say, ‘What the hell are you?’ Guess.”
“German?”
“Of course not,” she said, and laughed. She was charming. Her speaking voice was as intensely beautiful as might have been expected.
“Russian?” I asked.
Now they both laughed, at ease. She shook her head back and forth. They liked the game.
“Vietnamese,” I said.
Their eyes widened.
“Congolese?”
“Consider northern Europe,” he suggested.
“You’re not Finns,” I said, as if I had evidence. They looked at one another, it appeared to me, knowingly. “Are you Finns?”
“No, but close,” she said.
“Estonians.”
“Yes.” She was pleased. “No one speaks our language except other Estonians, and even in Europe many people have actually never even heard of Estonia.”
“Are you from Tallinn?”
“Rapla.”
“Rapla.”
“There are probably more people in this hotel than in Rapla,” he said, with a trace of bitterness. “We both studied in Tallinn.”
“With whom?”
He looked at me almost painfully. “No one you would know.”
“Not necessarily. I’ve been there.”
“You have?”
“Rosanna Cadorna sang there …” I looked at them, and said, with some embarrassment, “before you were born.”
They gawked at me. That I had known Rosanna before they were even born put me, evidently, beyond the realm of their understanding. “It’s amazing that you really represent Rosanna Cadorna,” she said as the food was laid down in great profusion.
“Yes, it is amazing,” I answered with irony that flew by them, “and it’s been amazing since nineteen sixty-two, when I discovered her. It’s not a secret, and has been in many magazines and books. I heard her singing as she was hanging wet sheets on a line in a laundry in Milan.”
“No one had heard her before you?”
“No one who believed that she should sing in La Scala.”
“What was an impresario doing at a laundry?”
“Look, even impresarios need clean clothes, but this wasn’t that kind of laundry, it was an industrial laundry, and I wasn’t an impresario at the time, I was a bookkeeper.”
They didn’t know the term bookkeeper, and they looked mildly amused. “Honey?” she asked.
At first, I didn’t know what she meant: I thought she was beginning to as
k me a question in a manner that was both flirtatious and insane, but then I understood, and I said, “Accountant.”
“Oh.”
He got right to it, maybe because of the scotch. I was sorry. I wanted not to get to it. I wanted to know them more. But someone had to get to it eventually, someone always does, and it’s usually me. He was apparently nervous to be taking the initiative, but it is a gift of young men that despite their fears they so often do. “We are grateful for what you gave us,” he said, trying not to be formal, though it came out like the speech of the many university presidents who have given Rosanna—who reads romance comic books and thinks that electricity is a liquid—her many honorary doctorates. (“Rosanna Cadorna,” they say in a universally stilted manner, “you have brought to the peoples of the world the ineffable beauties of song. In your work of many decades … blah, blah, blah.”)
“We are grateful for what you gave us,” he said, “not only because it was more than what we have earned in all our time in Prague and Vienna. …”
I was hardly listening. Instead, I studied them to see what difference, if any, the money had made. He had shaved. They had washed their hair, and hers, at least, had the quality of easy perfection that young people’s hair has when they are healthy. He wore a kind of Eastern European safari jacket, which was probably the most formal item of clothing he had with him, and had the handkerchief been in his pocket instead of mine he would have looked more like a tycoon than me. That’s because tycoons these days are very casual. His long hair did not count against him. It might even have counted for him. Except for the fact that he was not relaxed, he might have been taken for an industrialist’s son who has just returned from racing sports cars in Africa.
She was wearing the same shoes, the same top, and the same black brassiere the straps of which were still seductively out of control, but instead of the black pants she had worn during the day she was in a silklike, probably rayon, sheath skirt of very dark blue and black in a tight and subtle print. She had made up lightly, and my eyes jumped from feature to feature, noting the changes. In some ways she looked less austere than she had, and in some ways more so. Her lips were now redder with a light application of lipstick; her face was paler and smoother; and her eyes were even more striking than they had been, for now their hiddenness—only occasionally did they flash in the light, for she modestly averted her gaze most of the time—was abetted by mascara and eye shadow that had touches of chestnut and deep green. When I looked at her eyes I thought of a seraglio and of dark vines in a Persian garden, so hooded and hidden and mysterious were they, and then, on those rare occasions when she would look at me directly, their intense blue would flash both wet and bright. Her peculiar beauty was so strong that it was almost frightening. As if I could see into the future and long past my own death, when the world was still busy, worried, and moving, I saw the rarity and severity of her beauty as it had settled. I saw her isolated and apart, having risen almost without limit, frightening those who were neither as pure nor as sharp of feature. In my spark of clairvoyance she was no longer a young woman, nor even entirely human, but almost birdlike, mythical, a vision her forbears had had as they crossed the sea-ice. Whatever had taken possession of her voice had shaped her face and was obviously resident within her. She was only in her early twenties, with a power unlike any I had ever seen, and yet she was also shy and uncertain, soft, slight, in many ways still possessed of the charm of girlhood.
“So, we thank you,” he said, finishing.
“Please, don’t even consider it,” I told him with the same bizarre formality. Then the quail came, interruptively, sizzling on iron salvers.
The world has changed beyond measure. When I was young you could find musicians everywhere, and because all around the world there were so many, there were many great ones. Now that music is faithfully reproducible, musicians are not needed as once they were. And music itself has changed. Though small cadres of classicists keep the sacred and ineffable alive, they are under siege by coarse generations whose music is hardly as musical as a bus engine or a chain saw. Something must have occurred during their mothers’ pregnancies. How else is it possible to explain that playing Bach keeps them away from public spaces the way iron spikes drive pigeons from cathedral ledges?
Which is to say that, not long ago, Segovia, Manitas de Plata, and Liona Boyd could tour internationally and fill great halls. What chance would they have today? What chance would this young Estonian have? I didn’t know if they were married or engaged, but I knew from the way they sat that they were in love. I knew as well that even were I to help them take the very first step—the thing that at this meal was, as the English say, I think, “the insect in the room”—I would have to spend half my energy making work for him. He would appear at libraries and in schools. A few times, until it was sadly driven home to him that only twenty or thirty people would show up, I would rent halls for several hundred. He was a fine guitarist, but the world was never liable to honor guitarists, and surely not now, whereas a soprano or two can still rise as high as royalty.
“Do you know what it would be like to eat this way every night?” I asked.
They didn’t understand what I was working toward, and smiled pleasantly, knowing that they didn’t get the point and hoping, perhaps, that I would not test them.
“No, truly. Think what it would be like to eat like this every night.”
“It would be wonderful,” she said out of politeness.
“No it wouldn’t. If you eat simply, and struggle for a living, it’s wonderful to have an exception now and then, but, when it’s the rule. … Have you seen Rosanna Cadorna?”
“Wasn’t she always that way?” he asked, a fork speared into quail poised in his left hand, and a crystal tumbler of scotch in his right, airborne.
“You mean that, when she was nineteen, she had to sit in the center of the backseat of a car or it would go around in circles because it would lean so much that the metal would scrape the ground? No. She was always a big eater, but she was once as thin as either of you.”
“What happened?”
“What happened? She got what she wanted, and to get it she gave up what she needed.”
They looked at me as if they didn’t understand what I was saying, because they didn’t. At their age and in their position it would have been impossible for them to understand.
“You think she’s happy?” I asked. “Do you think that with her villa, her apartments in Rome, Paris, and London, her Bentley, her special African-mud-wasp facial stuff, or whatever it is, with deference and solicitude everywhere, she’s happy?”
“She isn’t, then?”
I shook my head. “No, she’s not happy. She’s just a commodity, hardly a human being anymore. Everyone feels obliged to tell her how wonderful she is. She believes none of it. She had a few great moments, but now she suffers from every decline in the gate, from every fall in CD sales, from every bad review, and although they still cannot justifiably fault her singing, they attack her anyway. They attack her for failing to do what they arbitrarily feel that she should do but what she never intended to do, for her politics or the lack of them, for her missing personal life, for her appearance.
“I’m the manager, so I take some of the blows, but even when we do make a good contract it’s like buying and selling a slave. What makes it worse is how the people who are buying profess to love her singing. All I can say, and you may never understand this, is that if you are in the business of buying and selling singers, you cannot credibly say that you love singing.”
“What about you?” he asked.
I briefly closed my eyes. “I never, ever, tell anyone that I love her singing, or his singing. Because I am an impresario, it would not, to a singer, be credible. Only God knows what I feel.”
“What about me, then?” she asked. “I sang for you. It’s not easy to put oneself out like that, for strangers on the street. …”
“Which is why he is rightly so protective,�
�� I interrupted.
“Which is why he is, yes. You won’t tell me what you think?”
“I will tell you what I think you can do, where you can sing, what your life might be like.”
“Then tell me.”
They braced themselves. Here it was. We were finally getting down to it.
“I’m relatively certain that after a year or two, perhaps more (depending upon what you know of the repertoire and how fast you learn), you would be a rising star, and that, not long after, with luck, you could be one of the two or three leading sopranos of the world. Perhaps, if your beauty and severity of appearance took the right turns, and others fell back, as they tend to do, you could be, as they say, facile princeps, the leading soprano of the world.”
They were stunned. They believed me, but they could not believe me.
“You would be wealthy beyond what you can imagine. You would have villas and obscenely expensive automobiles. You would stay in presidential suites. Everyone you meet would treat you with deference—even royalty and prime ministers, even the Pope.”
I paused, and then I said, with great difficulty, “You, not he,” pointing at him almost accusingly. “Not he. He would be the afterthought. He would fade away. If he had been a pianist or another singer, he would have had his own chance, even if impossibly small. But not guitar. He’ll drop back, and then he’ll drop away. I saw it even this afternoon, on the street.”
“How did you see it?” she asked, determined to defend him.
“In his expression, his position, his eyes.”
“Why are you telling us this?” he said with justifiable indignation. “Why are we here?”
“I’ll sign both of you,” I said. “I would love to. She can rise … there is no limit to how high. But I refuse, I refuse, to do any further damage.”
