The Black Opera

by Mary Gentle

  He stood, and realised she had caught the cuff of his coat. He looked down at her.

  Paolo said slowly, “When you said Leonora was Malibran standard, was that the lover speaking, or the opera aficionado?”

  “Before she died, she went on at La Fenice. The opinion was not just mine.”

  The disguised woman tapped her fingers together. “I just thought… We desperately need another good voice tutor. Granted she can’t sing, but—could she teach? Not down here—the Argente mansion is very well guarded—she could see the chorus singers in her drawing-room?”

  Leonora, close enough for any excuse to visit her…

  “Dear God!” Conrad muttered, breathless.

  Paolo-Isaura gave him a much-recovered smile. “And there you go again! I am a bad influence. “Her expression turned serious. “I’ll go talk to her, since I’m in charge of rehearsals. But… you’re my brother.”

  Conrad read the unspoken And I won’t do it if you can’t bear the temptation in Paolo’s determined gaze.

  “Go ahead, brat. This collection of divas need an expert coach. Do what the counter-opera needs.”

  She glanced around once to see they were unobserved, and sprang up to give him a hug.

  And since the day’s already gone to hell…

  He ruffled her hair out of all order, breaking the heavily-charged atmosphere.

  “I ought not to talk to Nora,” he said ruefully, “and I have to talk to Il Superbo. Not the way I’d have it. Where is he?”

  “Up at the Palazzo Reale.” Isaura frowned, and put her hands on Conrad’s shoulders. “I know you told me, when I was little, that you were determined to be nothing like our father… You do some admirable things, Corrado. I just want you to know that I notice that.”

  Being still among the living, there was no physiological reason to prevent him from blushing.

  Conrad went off to find an escort from one of Alvarez’s men, feeling himself burning hot to the tips of his ears.

  I’m obliged to be professional with il Conte di Argente for many reasons. One of which is, because my sister thinks me a considerably better man than I am.

  The ever-quickening clock made it mid-afternoon when he left the underground passages of Naples. His eyes, accustomed to lesser light, flinched back from the bright sky. Dazzled, he followed the escort from Alvarez’s Rifles into the Palazzo Reale. He dismissed the troopers before he made his way to the museum of archaeological erotica.

  Between Leonora and the counter-opera, Conrad found his thoughts not able to settle. Like a set of scales, pressure to remove one subject only made the other rise up into his mind.

  The Palace building jolted.

  It was a distant bang, as if from a quarry or a pile-driving team at work—but too far off to be that. It gave the impression that something had taken hold of the world and given it a sharp diagonal knock.

  Conrad felt it at the same time peculiarly disconcerting—his animal nature insisted the earth should always be solid; should not move—and wholly mundane. Live in Naples and one becomes used to a tremor or two from Vesuvius.

  Is Ferdinand correct? Should I attribute that to the black opera in rehearsal?

  No evidence either way.

  Conrad unlocked the door of the secret museum, entered, locked it again, and threw his coat and hat over the cabinet containing a satyr in congress with two wood nymphs.

  At the far end of the room, Roberto Capiraso was silhouetted against the bright, seaward-facing windows. He leaned with one arm on the upright piano, looking down at the keys, picking out the line of a melody which now tapered off.

  Conrad took a breath. “Signore Conte.”

  CHAPTER 28

  In the silence, Conrad unlocked the drawer and took out his folders. He had a strong impulse to leave, taking them with him, below Naples. Only necessity—and the thought that it would be a retreat—prevented him acting.

  The expectation of a jeer set his teeth on edge. Nothing came. Looking up, he saw the Conte di Argente’s expression was vaguely constipated. Conrad finally identified the man’s stifled emotion.

  He’s embarrassed.

  He deserves to be!

  “I suppose this must be awkward for you.” Conrad broke the silence. “When you sent me to prison, did you think about when we’d have to work together again? Or didn’t you think ahead?”

  Roberto Conte di Argente glared from under heavy brows.

  “I suppose,” he said stiffly, “that I took some decisions that were—unwise.”

  Hardly a grovelling apology.

  But then again, it’s il Superbo.

  Remembering asking—begging—for help against di Galdi… stuck in Conrad’s throat like an immovable bone.

  He considered what he could safely say, and hurled caution through the window. “Tell me—what exactly did I do to earn your hatred?”

  Other than it being easier to hate me than to hate Nora?

  The Count shifted his gaze. He stared out at the sea.

  “Apparently,” Roberto Capiraso broke the longer silence, “after six years—she still remembers your name.”

  It momentarily overwhelmed Conrad.

  She does? My name? More? Everything she and I went through, does she still recall it, no matter that she’s been through death…?

  Roberto Capiraso said sternly, “Do not pity me.”

  Startled, Conrad reflected, He can read what I think quicker than I can.

  The feeling had only just begun to come clear in his mind that, if their positions were reversed, he would not find being in il Conte di Argente’s place very enviable.

  The melodic line of the priests’ hymn to Cortez as Quetzalcoatl, the Feathered Serpent god, meandered on the warm air. From Capiraso’s fingers, it came out more melancholy than Conrad had envisaged.

  “Polite hypocrisy won’t solve this,” Capiraso said.

  “Nor lies.” Conrad added, “Please don’t suggest that you regret your actions.”

  “No, indeed.” The other man had a glint in his eye.

  “So?”

  Roberto Capiraso straightened up from the forte-piano. Silence fell. “So… You don’t point out to the King that his composer, too, might just as well create his music in one of his Majesty’s cells?”

  Perfectly truthfully, Conrad said, “I might if it had occurred to me.”

  “Ah. My thanks to… your inadequate sense of vengeance, then.”

  And there’s that dry sense of humour again.

  Conrad felt himself oddly wistful that it was not possible to fall back into their old relationship. No matter that we dislike each other, L’Altezza azteca is better when we co-operate.

  “Working white-knuckled is not the best way to produce an opera,” Conrad mused aloud.

  The Conte di Argente made a short bow, as one gentleman conceding an argument to another.

  He has at least made some offer of apology, Conrad thought. And he’s polite. Has Ferdinand spoken to him? Or Nora? Or does Capiraso consider himself honour-bound not to upset the production of the counter-opera…?

  “I made my own decision, not the King’s or my wife’s.” The Count’s tone was amused, but oddly unmalicious. “You might as well write what you think on your forehead; it’s as easy to read.”

  “Thank you,” Conrad said ironically.

  He found himself exchanging an unspoken and perfectly-understood look with the other man.

  Everything can wait for two weeks. What I need, desperately, to say to Nora—It can wait until after the first night of L’Altezza azteca. What I still owe this man after di Galdi and the prison… Two weeks is not a long time.

  Roberto Capiraso drew in a breath and let it out.

  “I have questions regarding some passages…” He took from his jacket what looked like one of Paolo’s endless scruffy lists. “We have gaps all the way through, that we must now fill in, and hardly any of the necessary verses for the end of Acts Three and Four.”

  “Give
me your notes,” Conrad said. “Why don’t you play me the new material while I look over your queries?”

  Roberto Capiraso lifted a folder that rested on top of the upright piano, and extracted a sheet of paper with the staves scored by quick slashes of a pen. Conrad’s own words were scribbled over the top, with many alterations.

  “First…” Capiraso separated and threw a section of the score across the green-topped table. “…I’ve tightened your friend Spinelli’s entrance in Act III.”

  Capiraso’s spiky handwriting marked cuts, Conrad saw, but il Superbo had not attempted to make revisions to the actual verses.

  “I altered the setting, since Velluti complained,” Roberto Capiraso continued, his tone business-like. “It appears only the primo uomo can have an entrance being praised by his soldiers… So General Chimalli is now in the Jaguar Warriors’ military camp; enters up-stage after the chorus.”

  “We can re-use some of the flats,” Conrad thought aloud. “Background of tents, palm trees, mountains.”

  “Baritone and tenor drinking chorus from the soldiers.” Roberto Capiraso drew an ink-line down the page. “Then I suggest we merge these two separate arias of Chimalli’s. Give him half a verse in the major key, proclaiming that all the lands from the Amazon to the sea submit to his armies and to his will. Then the other half of the verse in the minor key, done as an aside to the audience: there is only one thing he can’t subdue—the heart of Tayanna, the Aztec Princess—and he would give up all his military conquests if he could conquer that one heart.”

  Il Superbo’s tone faltered on the last words, despite his deliberate self-composure.

  “That’s—actually, that’s very good.” Startled, Conrad glanced up from the paper, and met Capiraso’s dark eyes. “I’ll revise the verses. Roberto…”

  He was surprised to find himself automatically using the man’s first name.

  “It’s opera,” Conrad said simply. “Unrequited love and illicit passion are staple subjects. The Aztec Princess can’t be different—not if it’s to succeed.”

  The secret museum was quiet for a long moment.

  “I agree.” Roberto Capiraso’s tone was flat.

  That’s the best I’ll get.

  The urge to question the Count about Leonora—how they met, when they met—was very strong.

  And he must want to make the same demands of me.

  Roberto Capiraso raised his manual-labourer’s hand and pointed towards the museum’s door. “I believe I can work with you if we avoid certain subjects. If, once those doors are closed—or, once we are below Naples in rehearsal—neither of us knows such a person as Leonora D’Arienzo.”

  “Very well: I won’t speak to you about Nora.”

  Conrad opened his mouth to add, I won’t speak to Nora, except where the opera is concerned.

  He cut himself off, immeasurably tempted.

  It will be unconscionable to make a promise that only sounds honest because its wording.

  Conrad seated himself at the large table, his gaze staying on Roberto Capiraso. “I should mention… Signore Paolo suggested today that he ask Nora to help out under Naples as a voice tutor and recitateur.”

  Roberto Capiraso’s shocked expression salved a number of the wounds to Conrad’s pride.

  “Help with the counter-opera?” Il Superbo sounded flatly disbelieving.

  “No need to speak as if it were ridiculous.” Conrad frowned. “Before she gave up her career, she knew the business of an opera house from top to bottom. If she wants to help—let her.”

  Roberto Capiraso, for the first time in Conrad’s acquaintance, looked as if he had no idea what to say.

  And I don’t even know if I can bear to speak to Nora.

  “Assuming that she agrees,” Conrad said, “I believe all of us are capable of leaving private business outside of rehearsals. After the first night, then yes—because we must talk about this, soon—but not before. Is this acceptable?”

  “Acceptable.” The word came just too quickly from Capiraso’s mouth.

  The composer went back to the piano. Conrad sketched out a couplet, his gaze on the man. The Count’s expression changed a number of times—and finally relaxed.

  “After all…” Roberto Capiraso spoke as if he mused aloud. The whimsically-amused glint was back in his eye. “…Anyone can put on an opera in sixteen days…”

  Conrad momentarily put his hands over his face. I take it back. It’s going to be a long two weeks!

  “It’s taken us eighteen months!” The King looked grim. “My men have checked every opera house in Catania. And they’ve found nothing.”

  Conrad met with Ferdinand Bourbon-Sicily again on the Tuesday, the twenty-ninth; ridiculously grateful for the leap year that gave them an extra day of February to work with, even if it was an illusion of the calendar.

  “Without any great stroke of fortune,” Ferdinand added, “I think we won’t discover where the black opera is being sung. Not in the next two weeks.”

  In England, three public houses (and a heretic church) qualify as a village, Conrad knows. In the Italian states, it’s three churches, a campanile, and an opera house, not always in that order. The King’s forces have spent a summer and two winters searching every provincial rat-hole village and town, in both the Two Sicilies and beyond.

  Conrad made a face. “Meaning they have to be singing it as a drawing-room opera?”

  Ferdinand gave him a tired but approving smile. “Precisely! I’ve been assuming that as a possibility for the last six months. There are palazzos with halls large enough to have a full production put on. Ask Signore Conte di Argente! But as for which of them might house it…”

  A surge of choral singing echoed up the ancient walls, reverberating from the rehearsal-mine. Conrad noted that Ferdinand waited until it faded before he spoke again.

  “We’re seven miles from Vesuvius here. And Pozzuoli is seven miles west of us. Say the black opera must be within, what, ten miles of the volcano? That gives us half of the Burning Fields, all Naples, then Pompeii, and all the way to Sorrento, Salerno, and the Amalfi coast.”

  Conrad bit down on his frustration. “The black opera they sang in 1816 needed to be close to Tambora. Assume that it has to be somewhere large, for the audience they’ll need… And that’s assuming they need more of an audience than they did for 1816, which was no more than the crew of a boat!” He paused. “How many private palazzos would be suitable?”

  King Ferdinand smiled crookedly. “Given that they could be rehearsing anywhere in Europe and bringing their singers here at the last moment? Dozens. Hundreds. Even here, if you add up which of the nobility are rich enough to own a palazzo that would put Tiberius to shame, and then might also belong to the Prince’s Men… and who must be questioned with kid gloves on, because their business affairs are not completely respectable… My spies and officials have been searching, but even the King’s name doesn’t open every door.”

  Conrad looked levelly at the King.

  He didn’t come here just to unload himself of his frustrations.

  Ferdinand stood, resting his hand down. Conrad felt the warmth of it heavy on his shoulder.

  “Conrad, I don’t wish to put still more of a burden on you… but I believe we need to face this. L’Altezza azteca ossia il serpente pennuto must be as excellent as fallible human beings can achieve, because—unless something miraculous happens within the next two weeks—the black opera will go forward. The only defence we have against it will be our counter-opera.”

  CHAPTER 29

  March opened with fine weather but Conrad didn’t see it. The cast members of L’Altezza besieged him with so many requests and suggestions that he spent more time writing underground than in the secret museum. It was impossible not to feel homesick for the tall buildings and narrow streets of Naples above; for the spring sun shining on worn and peeling orange-red plaster, and women leaning on the black-painted rails of their balconies to speak with their neighbours, gossip cur
tained off by rows of flapping washing.

  Roberto Capiraso co-opted Spinelli’s forte-piano and did most of his own work down in the ancient mines, since he also was much in demand.

  Conrad missed climbing the rickety outer wooden stairs to Sandrine’s lodgings, for rehearsals—or to the wooden-railed flat roof above Spinelli’s apartment, where they could sit with bread and onions and wine, the Gulf of Naples spread out to their view. In the tunnels, nothing changed. The light came only from oil lamps.

  But the whole underground complex was full of echoing sound. And from time to time he would look up and catch distant sight of Leonora.

  Roberto did not speak to him unless Leonora was absent. Leonora stayed with the singers—displaying an iron will in rehearsals. Conrad Scalese might as well have been transparent air.

  Work was his only palliative.

  “Act Three, Hymn to the Sun!” Paolo’s summoning of the chorus rang through the chamber. Conrad distinguished her touch on the violin, as strings and woodwind came in, in accompaniment.

  He leaned back in his chair—one at the table set up in the main hall—and scribbled two more lines, adjusted a word, crossed one line out, and then scribbled over the other.

  “Conrad…” Roberto Capiraso sat down in a nearby chair, a sheaf of papers in his hand. He absently signalled one of the servants for wine. “Some revision’s needed for the end of Act Two.”

  “Act Two? I thought we had that sewn up!”

  “Much of it.” Roberto sounded civil enough. “The charming L’Altezza Sandrine herself is pleased with her aria of unwilling love—her duet with Cortez—her duet with the Jaguar General—and the ‘jealousy trio’ between all three that leads into the end of that scene. The High Priest’s invocation of vengeance is fine. Although if you’re having Lorenzo murdered at the end of Act Two, we may have to move that back.”

  Conrad nodded. He found himself pouring wine, since it was unlikely il Superbo would lower himself. “And so?”