by Donna Leon
The voices of the audience came through the curtain, dull and low, like the ebb and flow of waves on a beach. A man wearing a microphone and earphones hurried across the stage and set a wicker picnic basket at the bottom of the steps leading to the portrait, turned, ran lightly across the stage, and disappeared through the metal grating of the cappella of the Attavanti family.
The audience noise slowly diminished, then stopped, and there came a round of tepid applause, followed by a long pause. Then they came, the five doom-filled notes that began the opera, then the swish of the curtain, followed immediately by the busy music that announced the arrival of the prisoner escaped from Scarpia’s dungeons, and they were on their way.
Brunetti widened his stance in anticipation of being there for the entire act. He leaned back tentatively against a horizontal board that helped support the scaffolding. He looked in Vianello’s direction, then at the singers onstage. Time passed, Brunetti lulled by the familiar music, however muffled the sound might be up here.
Flavia was right about the conductor: things did plod along, even the tenor’s first aria. Every so often, Brunetti turned in a full arc, searching the stage and what he could see of the backstage area for anything or anyone looking as if it didn’t belong there. The woman with the headset suddenly appeared next to Vianello, but neither acknowledged the presence of the other.
He was so occupied with looking around that he missed the musical build-up to Flavia’s entrance and tuned back in only when he heard her calling out for ‘Mario, Mario, Mario.’
The audience greeted her arrival with wild enthusiasm, even before she did much of anything, though Brunetti recalled that there really wasn’t much of anything for her to do in the first act. She stood not more than six or seven metres away; from this distance, he could see the theatricality of her makeup and one or two places on her velvet gown that were rubbed smooth. The closeness, however, also increased the force field that surrounded her as she half spoke, half sang her jealous accusations to her lover. The tenor, who had been rigid and artificial in his first aria, came alive in her presence and sang his brief passages with an intensity that flooded over Brunetti and surely washed out into the audience. He’d questioned people who had killed for love, and in their confessions he had heard this same rapturous uncertainty.
The act proceeded. Flavia left, and in her absence everything slackened. Brunetti wanted to go back to her dressing room but decided not to, both because he did not want to distract her during a performance and because he feared being seen or heard if he tried to move from where he was.
He watched the action, saw how the tenor exaggerated his facial expressions to project them across the footlights. Scarpia seemed badder than bad and thus unconvincing, but as soon as Flavia returned and he could aim his lust at her, the mood tightened; even the music sounded worried.
She prowled the stage in search of her lover, body vibrating with jealousy. Scarpia turned from snake to spider and spun his web until she fell into it and, maddened by suspicion that had turned to certainty, fled the stage. Only the many-peopled majesty of the procession and Te Deum kept things from sliding downhill once she took her energy from the stage. Puccini was a showman, and the scene was powerful, ending with Scarpia’s agonized admission that he had lost his soul.
The act ended, and the applause swept through and under and around the curtain. Brunetti watched the three principals walk to centre stage and, hand in hand, pass through the opening to take their applause.
The applause died down while Brunetti stood and debated whether to try to find her dressing room or not. The security guards, who had watched the first act from the wings, had flanked her as she left the stage. He chose not to add to her stress; instead, he decided to make a circuit of the backstage area in search of Vianello so they could try to find a someone who, like them, did not look as though they belonged there.
Twenty minutes later, he and Vianello stood just inside the fire door, watching the stagehands light and place the candelabra on Scarpia’s table, fluff up the pillows on the sofa where the rape of Tosca was to take place, and set the knife carefully to the right of a bowl of fruit. A man came on to the stage, fussed with the fruit, slid the knife a centimetre to the right, stepped back to admire the new arrangement, and walked offstage.
Scarpia, smiling and talking on his telefonino, crossed the stage and took a seat at his desk. He stuffed the phone in the pocket of his brocade jacket and picked up his quill pen. Applause from beyond the curtain signalled the arrival of the conductor. And then the first notes.
Brunetti was struck by how calming this music was: one would never suspect that tragedy was to follow. The lightness disappeared, and soon enough Scarpia began his rapist’s fantasies, words that troubled Brunetti deeply because he had often listened to arrested men say much the same thing. ‘I prefer the smell of violent conquest to sweet consent.’ ‘God created varied pleasures, and I want to taste them all.’
Words quickly turned to action, and Brunetti found himself confronted by the sound and sight of violence. Cavaradossi threatened, Tosca welcomed, but only to be toyed with, her lover taken offstage to be tortured, crying out with pain. Horror piled on horror, until Cavaradossi, bloody and defeated, was dragged in and then as quickly offstage.
The music softened, grew definitely playful, strange prelude to the real horror of sexual blackmail. Brunetti turned his attention back to Tosca just in time to watch her discover the knife lying on the table, the delicate little fruit knife – a tiny blade, but long enough for what she saw instantly she could do with it. Her hand slapped down on the knife, and he almost saw her biceps expand with the force with which she grasped it. Had the weapon made her grow taller? Certainly, she stood straighter, and she had shaken off the air of hypnotic weakness.
Scarpia set down the pen, pushed himself up from his desk, the workman worthy of his hire and coming to collect, and walked towards her, taunting her with the safe conduct in his hand as though it were a sweetie and he were asking her to get into his car with him, please, little girl. As he lured her, she stabbed him in the guts, ripping the knife straight up to his breastbone and out. Brunetti had gasped when he saw her do it last week, and now, closer to her and even more fully convinced of the reality of what she was doing, he gasped again.
Scarpia turned from the audience, and Brunetti saw him squirt blood down his front from a tube in his hand, then turn to Tosca and grab at her. And she, face puffed up with rage, shouted at him that he’d had Tosca’s kiss and that it was a woman who had killed him. ‘Look at me, I am Tosca!’ she screamed into the face of the dying man, and Brunetti felt the horror of her act at the same time as he marvelled that no woman in the audience stood up and cheered her.
She ripped the safe conduct from his dead hand, placed a candle by the other, dropped the crucifix on his chest and, as the music mimicked the dying away of Scarpia, she slipped out of the room to go and save her lover.
The curtain came down; applause flooded in from beyond it. Scarpia got to his knees and then to his feet, brushed himself off and stretched his hands to Flavia, who had been standing in the wings. Cavaradossi, face a bit less bloodied, came and joined hands with them, and the three passed through the opening in the curtain and found themselves engulfed in applause.
‘My God, I had no idea,’ he heard Vianello say from beside him. ‘It’s magic, isn’t it?’
A convert, Brunetti thought, but said, ‘Yes, it is, or it can be. When they’re good, there are few things like it.’
‘And when it’s not?’ Vianello asked, though he sounded as if he could not conceive of that.
‘There are few things like that, either,’ Brunetti said.
The applause died down, and when they looked to the other side of the stage, they saw Flavia flanked by the two security men. Brunetti waved, but she didn’t see him and left the stage with the two guards. Tired of standing for so long, they asked a passing stagehand where the bar was and followed his instruction
s. They took two wrong turns, but eventually they found it, had a coffee, and listened to the comments that were being passed back and forth. Brunetti heard nothing he thought worth remembering, but Vianello listened attentively, as if there were something to learn from what people said.
They got back to their respective sides a few minutes before the curtain. The scaffolding behind which Brunetti had hidden had been restructured into the stairs leading to the rooftop of Castel Sant’Angelo, so he was left with nowhere to hide. He moved slowly through the darkness in the wings until he found a place that afforded him a view of the rooftop where the events of the third act would unfold.
A moment later, the two guards accompanied Flavia to the steps that led to the ramparts and waited while she climbed them, then retreated to their places at the sides of the stage.
Although there was only death to come, the scene opened with soft flutes and horns and church bells and the utter tranquillity of night’s slow mellowing into day. Brunetti detached himself from watching the shifting of light on the stage and studied the people on the other side, who stood still with their heads tilted back to allow them to follow the action on the ramparts above them.
Brunetti, far off to one side, saw most of the area where the act would take place; above it rose the towering figure of the sword-carrying Archangel after whom the castle was named. His perspective also allowed him to see through the wooden frame that supported the ramparts, behind which stood the platform, raised on a hydraulic lift to about a metre below the ramparts, which held the cushioned Styrofoam panels that would catch the falling Tosca. Both the mechanism and the platform were invisible from the amphitheatre; indeed, from the ramparts themselves. A ladder led from the platform to the stage and would allow the resurrected Tosca to climb down in time to take her bows.
He watched the events unfold, heard the tenor sing his aria, saw Tosca rush on to the scene, but then he lowered his eyes and swept the backstage area, looking for any sign of anything or anyone out of place. Shots rang out from above him: Mario was a goner, although Tosca didn’t know it yet. Calmly, calmly, she waited until the bad guys were gone, and then she told Mario to get up, but Mario was dead. The music grew wild, she panicked and screamed. The music screamed some more. When she ran over to the left, Brunetti could see her high above, standing at the edge of the wall, looking backwards, one hand raised ahead of her, the other flung out behind. ‘O Scarpia, avanti a Dio,’ she sang. And then she leaped forward to her death.
The applause from behind the closing curtain drowned Brunetti’s footsteps, and the curtain hid him from the audience as he moved around behind the painted scenery to the bottom of the ladder leading down from the platform. He heard some thumping from above, and then he saw a foot and leg appear over the side of the platform. Her foot kicked the hem of her dress out of the way, and she began to climb down.
Brunetti moved over to stand at the side and called up to her loudly enough to be heard above the applause that still came towards them from the theatre. ‘Flavia, it’s me, Guido.’
She turned and looked down, stopped suddenly, gripped the sides of the ladder and pressed her forehead against the rung in front of her.
‘What’s wrong?’ he asked. ‘What is it?’
She pulled her head back and, very slowly, started down again. When she got to the bottom, she stepped on to the stage and turned to him, eyes closed, one hand still clutching the side of the ladder. She opened her eyes and said, ‘I’m afraid of heights.’ She let go of the side of the ladder. ‘Jumping on to that thing is worse than singing the entire opera. It terrifies me.’
Before he could respond, a young man carrying a bag of tools appeared between her and the mechanism that raised the platform to the ramparts. Though he was at least a generation younger, he gave her an appreciative smile and said, ‘I know you hate it, Signora. So let’s take it down and get it out of the way, eh?’ He raised a metal ring that held a number of keys and turned his attention to the machinery.
Brunetti watched her as she notched up her smile and said, moving away from the young man and towards the curtain, ‘Ah, how very kind of you.’
Brunetti shook his head at the raw charm of it and said, ‘Well, you’re down here now, safe and sound.’ She forgot about her smile, and it disappeared, leaving her face tense and tired. ‘It was wonderful,’ he added and pointed at the curtain, whence still rolled the sound of applause and shouts. ‘They want you,’ he said.
‘I’d better go, then,’ she answered and turned towards the noise. She placed a hand on his shoulder and said, ‘Thank you, Guido.’
27
He and Vianello stood together on the left of the stage while the cast took their bows. Baritone, tenor, soprano, and as their voice range rose, so too did the volume of the applause they received as they went out to take their solo bows. Flavia swept the board, as Brunetti thought only right and understandable. He watched her first solo bow through the opening in the curtain. No roses fell, an absence which filled him with great relief.
The applause went on and on, filtering back to the stage to mix with the sound of hammers and heavy footsteps. The hammering stopped well before the applause did, and when that began to die down, the stage manager, who turned out to be the young man with the telefonini they had met earlier, appeared and waved to the singers and conductor to take no more bows. He congratulated them on a successful performance and ended by saying, ‘You were lovely, boys and girls. Thank you all and see you at the final performance, I hope.’ He clapped his hands and said, ‘Now, off you all go to dinner.’
When the young man noticed Brunetti and Vianello, he stopped and said, ‘Excuse my rudeness earlier, signori, but I was trying to stop a disaster and had no time to talk.’
‘Did you stop it?’ Brunetti inquired. Beyond them, the applause faded and then disappeared.
He grimaced. ‘I thought I did, until five minutes ago, when I received a text message that has led me to abandon all hope.’
‘I’m sorry,’ Brunetti said, unable not to like this peculiar character.
‘Thank you for the thought,’ he said, ‘but, as I told you earlier, I work in the circus and am surrounded by ravening beasts.’ He gave a polite half-bow and moved off to speak to the tenor, who had not yet left the stage.
Glancing around, Brunetti saw that the stage manager, the tenor, and he and Vianello were alone there, nor was there the loud bustle of a production being taken down. The crew had probably begun its strike.
Flavia had reappeared and was now talking to the stage manager. The young man waved a hand towards the back of the stage, opened his arms wide, and then shrugged with exaggerated emphasis. She patted his cheek and smiled at him, and he went away looking better for it.
She turned and, when she saw Brunetti, came over, and he took the chance to introduce her to Vianello. The Inspector was strangely awkward and could do no more than say thank you a few times and then go mute.
‘We’ll walk you home,’ Brunetti said.
‘I hardly think that’s . . .’ she started to say, but Brunetti cut her short.
‘We’ll walk you home, Flavia, and go up to the apartment with you.’
‘And give me hot chocolate and cookies?’ she asked, but with a warm voice and a small laugh.
‘No, but we could stop on the way if we pass a restaurant that’s still open.’
‘Didn’t you eat already?’ she asked.
‘Real men are always hungry,’ Vianello said in the deep voice of a real man, and this time she laughed more easily.
‘All right. But I have to phone my children. I try to call them after every performance: if I don’t do it, they’ll get grumpy.’
She reached out quite naturally and grabbed Brunetti’s wrist, but it was only to turn it so that she could see his watch. Just finding out what time it was made her look tired. ‘I’d rather be singing Lauretta,’ she said. When she saw that Brunetti didn’t understand, she added, ‘In Gianni Schicchi.’
&n
bsp; ‘Because she doesn’t have to jump?’ Brunetti asked.
She smiled, glad that he remembered her fear. ‘That, of course, but also because she has only one aria.’
‘Ah, artists,’ Brunetti said.
She laughed again, relieved that his evening’s performance was over. ‘I might be some time. It takes forever to get out of this,’ she said, sweeping her hands down the front of her dress.
Looking around and failing to see the two guards, Brunetti asked, ‘Where are your gorillas?’
‘Ah,’ she said, ‘I told them the police would be here for the curtain calls and would take me back to my dressing room.’
Like Ariadne, she knew the way, turned left and right without hesitation and took them, in a matter of minutes, to the door of her dressing room. A woman sitting outside got to her feet when Flavia approached. ‘I’m not on strike, Signora,’ she said with restrained anger. ‘Just those lazy slobs in the stage crew.’
Brunetti made no remark about the solidarity of the working class. Instead, he asked, ‘When did that start?’
‘Oh, about twenty minutes ago. They’ve been threatening it for weeks, but tonight their union voted for it.’
‘But you don’t agree?’
‘In the middle of a financial crisis, those fools go on strike,’ she said, with no attempt to disguise her irritation. ‘Of course we’re not joining them. They’re crazy.’
‘So what happens?’ Brunetti asked.
‘Everything stays put, and the people at the concert tomorrow afternoon can look at the roof of Castel Sant’Angelo while they’re listening to Brahms.’
So that’s what the phone call had been about, Brunetti realized. And that was the disaster that had made the stage manager uncertain about seeing everyone at the last performance.
Perhaps the woman heard the rancour in her own voice, for she added, ‘I understand they haven’t had a new contract in six years, but neither have we. We’ve got to work. We have families.’
