Die Upon a Kiss

by Barbara Hambly

  Guesses, the chorus-boy Ponte had whispered, and Cavallo had replied, Silencio.

  Who guesses?

  Guesses what?

  “I think so,” said January. “I heard only one word, nigger, and that in a whisper. But I’d swear in court to the smell. Not,” he added with bitterness in his voice, “that my testimony would be admitted against white men.”

  “Now, Maestro,” chided Shaw in his mild voice, “you know it ain’t come to that. You’s a free man. It’s only slaves they don’t let to testify.”

  “And what white juryman,” asked January, “would vote against a white plaintiff on the word of a man of color?”

  “Not knowin’ personally which particular juryman you’re speakin’ of,” said Shaw, and he spit in the direction of the gutter, “naturally I couldn’t say. And like as not any lawyer’d point out a man can wear a dirty coat to do dirty work. An’ nigger is damn close to nero—comes from the same word, in fact.” He folded his arms, chewing ruminatively, like one of those scrawny, deadly Mexican steers that will gore a man on horns eight feet tip to tip. A carriage clattered past, the coachman maneuvering between a mule-dray loaded with chairs and a cart trying to make the corner into the New Exchange yard: January glimpsed the occupants, faces vaguely familiar from the French Creole balls and parties he played at. A well-off planter family, the Master springing lightly down to go into the Exchange. The mistress—stout from too much good food and the bearing of too many children—called out reminders about when to meet for supper. A daughter and a son-in-law and grandchildren, all of whom probably lived beneath the same roof both on the plantation and here in town during Carnival: close-knit, inextricably part of one another’s lives, for better or for worse.

  January’s mother, that avid student of town gossip, could have told him the names of the free colored mistresses of both father and son-in-law, and what the men had paid for their contracts of placement—plaçage— and probably what the mother and daughter had had to say on the subject, if anything. In the doorway of the Exchange the planter paused to greet Fitzhugh Trulove, linchpin of the St. Mary Opera Society, a big, fresh-faced Englishman with beautiful silvery hair and a decided partiality for the loveliest and least competent member of Madame Scie’s corps de ballet.

  At length Shaw said, “You speak Italian, don’t you, Maestro?”

  “I do,” said January. “Not as well as Hannibal—you can’t shut him up in any language. I couldn’t write poetry in it.”

  “I surely wouldn’t ask you to,” replied Shaw gravely. “Only enough to sort of ooze around backstage and listen for who in that company might have wanted to hire a couple of Salt River roarers to ventilate their boss’s gizzard for him.” From behind the unwashed strings of his dust-colored hair, Shaw’s gaze changed a little at the way January stiffened. “You don’t think so?”

  “I don’t think it was anyone in the company,” said January, and he told Shaw what he had told Hannibal the previous night: about the grandeur of Belaggio’s version of Othello, and the soaring beauty that would render it a target for hate. He spoke hesitantly—it was the first time he had talked to Shaw about music and he wasn’t entirely sure he would be understood. In fact, he realized that he was taking much for granted in supposing the Kentuckian’s acquaintance with music extended beyond “Turkey in the Straw.” “Have you asked him whether anyone warned him not to put Othello on?”

  “Didn’t even know about it.” Shaw eased his verminous hat back a little and leaned one bony shoulder against the wall. “If’n anybody did, Belaggio didn’t think fit to mention the matter.”

  “He wouldn’t,” said January. “He’s a Milanese. He doesn’t understand the custom of the country.” His voice twisted a little over the phrase and he glanced through the Exchange doors, where the auctioneer was crying the virtues of four pure-bred mules, a wagon, and Negro driver. . . .

  “He’s only been in this country for what? Three days?” Shaw tilted his head a little to one side. “Who-all would know what operas he planned to do? Caldwell?”

  “Caldwell and the members of the St. Mary Opera Society,” said January. “That’s Fitzhugh Trulove, Jed Burton . . .” He nodded at the coarse-faced little man visible in the yard, “—the Widow Redfern, Dr. Ker from Charity Hospital, Harry Fry, who just bought the steamboats Alameda and Oceana. Vincent Marsan, Hubert Granville from the Bank of Louisiana . . . maybe two or three others. And their wives,” he added, aware of who was the real power in any cultural society in the American quarter. “Caldwell himself. His theater managers, Russell and Rowe. And whoever else they might have mentioned the matter to. Caldwell’s been talking for years about challenging John Davis’s French Opera by bringing opera to the American Theater. Marsan was the one who heard Belaggio was putting on a season in Havana, I think, but it was Trulove who put up most of the money for Caldwell to bring them here lock, stock, and barrel for Carnival.”

  “An’ you think if any of ’em—Granville or Trulove or the Widow Redfern—was to take offense at this Othello thing, an’ say Why don’t you just pick somethin’ else? . . . Belaggio wouldn’t?”

  January was silent, turning over in his hands the folded copy of the Gazette. Remembering the music he’d heard for the first time yesterday, the music that had turned his heart inside-out. Remembering what he had seen of Lorenzo Belaggio in the three days since the man had arrived in New Orleans. The man whose life he had last night saved.

  “I don’t like Lorenzo Belaggio,” he said at last. “Maybe I’m just fastidious.” His mouth turned down as an image came to his mind, brief and sharp as a miniature on ivory. He’d come suddenly up the narrow steps to the principals’ dressing-rooms on an errand, and found Belaggio pinning Nina, the slave-woman who looked after the company’s wardrobe, against the wall. One of the impresario’s beefy hands was pressed over the struggling woman’s mouth while the other groped down the front of her blouse.

  January shook his head, trying to force aside both the memory and his disgust. “Then I read the libretto for Othello, and played through the score. And I didn’t know what to think.” His words slowed, almost stammering as he tried to fit what he felt into what he knew. “This isn’t just a story being told. You don’t write music like that just to fill seats, or show off your soprano’s cadenzas. Not this kind of music. You write it because it’s inside you, and it will kill you if you don’t bring it out.”

  He glanced aside as he said the words, annoyed at himself for speaking his heart. Belaggio had scowled petulantly as he let the slave-woman loose, then shrugged with a grin of complicity. We’re both men, eh? And against that, like the surging through-line under Baroque counterpoint, the terrible, terrifying duet of Othello and Iago. Farewell the tranquil mind, farewell content. . . .

  “Well, Maestro.” Shaw scratched with absent-minded thoroughness under his right arm. “I’ll take your word for it. You’re a musician, an’ it’d be as silly for me to say you don’t know what you’re talkin’ about as it’d be for me if I said so to some doctor who pointed out the difference between the cholera an’ food-poisonin’, which look pretty much alike to most people. But all the same, I surely would like to know if some of the members of that company got their own reasons for wantin’ the man put to bed with a shovel. Somebody had to know he was gonna be comin’ up that alley, long about that hour of the night.”

  Clouds were moving in overhead, fantastic floating mountains, like fleeces in a stream, such as January had seen nowhere on earth but in this land of his birth. Chill flowed before them, and the scent of rain. Men emerged from the Exchange, Marsan saying over his shoulder, “Have it delivered to my plantation. Roseaux, across the river on Bayou des Familles. I’ll have my factor draw a draft. . . .” The cracker who’d bargained with Chamoflet checked his stride, came over to Shaw.

  “ ’Scuse me introducing myself, friend, but the name’s Jared Tucker, I’m a dealer. I’s wonderin’ if you’d brought your boy here to the Exchange for purposes of sal
e?” He indicated January with a gesture of his cigar.

  “Mr. Tucker.” With a little wave of apology, Fitzhugh Trulove broke from his companions and interposed his soft, pear-shaped bulk between the slave-seller and January before January or Shaw could utter a word. “Please allow me to introduce Mr. January, one of the free musicians who plays for the Opera. Mr. Tucker.”

  “Pleased,” lied January in English through lips that felt like wood.

  Jared Tucker inclined his head, not in the least embarrassed. “My ’pologies,” he said, an upriver nasal twang. “No offense meant.”

  “None taken.” January averted his eyes from the dealer’s, proper for a black man, but not before he caught the glint in them of annoyed regret. Eleven hundred, maybe eleven-fifty, gone to sheer waste. January could almost hear the thoughts spoken, as he’d heard them spoken, not once but many times, in the corners of crowded ballrooms where he and the other musicians played for white men’s parties. Not even anger there. Only the expression of one who sees an acquaintance buying a bishopped horse or squandering an inheritance. Damn shame. . . .

  January set his teeth hard as Tucker and Trulove strolled back to Marsan and the others: “. . . draw a draft on the Louisiana Bank for the balance in three months,” January heard Marsan say, resuming the conversation exactly where it had left off. The slave-dealer nodded as if nothing out of the ordinary had taken place. “Or I’ll have Mr. Knight get in touch with you. . . .”

  Shaw spit, wordlessly eloquent. After a little silence he said, “Be too much to ask for you to get me a copy of this liber-etto you talk about—I guess that means the words they’s singin’?”

  “It won’t do you much good.” January became aware his hands were balled into fists in his jacket pockets. He made them relax, fingers seeking the rosary of blue glass beads that never left him. Passing along—or trying to pass—to God an anger that he understood would eat his soul if he let it.

  With a sigh, he shook his head. “For one thing, it’s in Italian,” he went on. “For another, words are the least of an opera. They have to ride the music: it’s the music that tells the story. Come to Madame Bontemps’s house— Bontemps is my landlady. She lets me hold my piano classes in her parlor. Come Sunday afternoon, after dinner, and I’ll take you through some of the libretto with the music, and try to show you what I mean.”

  “Obliged.” Shaw ruminated a moment more, while the auctioneer inside rattled off the dimensions, location, and terms of sale for six plots of land along what would be a new railway route from the river to the lake, if the city ever decided which contractor was going to build it. January guessed that the property, developed from one of the nearer plantations, was under a foot and more of water at the moment.

  “I’ll surely ask Belaggio if’n anybody’s spoke to him on the subject of changin’ the repertoire. In the meantime . . .” Shaw extended a forefinger like a knotted cane-stalk to tap the grimed and smeary newspaper that he’d handed January. “You might want to have a squint at that.”

  A FEARFUL ESCAPE FROM DEATH

  The bloodstained histories of Macbeth, and the fearsome rivalries of the Borgias, pale in comparison to the dreadful enmities and dark deeds perpetrated in this very city. Signor Lorenzo Belaggio, newly arrived in New Orleans to bring to it a spectacle of opera never seen here before, was assaulted last night as he emerged from James Caldwell’s American Theater, by villains hired by a rival to work his ruin.

  Belaggio, who though badly wounded in the affray bravely fought off four assailants, will present under Mr. Caldwell’s auspices a season of seven operas at Caldwell’s unsurpassed American Theater. “It is the first time that Italian Opera shall be seen in this city as it was meant to be seen,” Belaggio declared.

  And indeed, the American Theater, larger and more handsomely appointed than its rival, Mr. Davis’s Théâtre d’Orleans, bids fair to eclipse Mr. Davis’s customary offering as the sun eclipses the pallid stars. Though Davis was heard by many to utter murderous threats against the courageous Italian, the City Guards have dismissed as absurd the possibility that rivalry—nay, defeat in the lists of art—played some part in the hiring of bravos to incapacitate the key figure in the upcoming spectacles. Still . . .

  Perplexed and faintly nauseated, January set the paper on the edge of his piano, gazed through the spotless white-curtained parlor windows at the Rue des Ursulines, milky silver now under the shadow of approaching rain. Two of the street’s namesake nuns hurried along the banquette, the rising wind snapping at their magpie habits; a woman selling asparagus from a wicker tray dropped them a curtsy and a smile.

  The article went on—January had already read it twice, once on a bench in the Place d’Armes, where he’d stopped to rest after parting from Shaw, and once after he’d returned to Madame Bontemps’s—to insinuate that, in fact, John Davis—Parisian-born and French to his fingers’ ends—had done precisely what “the City Guards have dismissed as absurd”: hired men to injure—“though surely even a beaten rival would not have the calculated malice to utterly make away with”—Lorenzo Belaggio.

  January had worked for James Caldwell often enough to know the flamboyant former actor wouldn’t stoop to this. To stealing, or helping Belaggio steal, his rival’s thunder by putting on the same opera, yes, of course. To buying up all the red silk and flame-colored glass in town, so necessary for the fire-effects of the volcano, certainly. But this—accompanied as it was by harrowing accounts of the Roncevaux in the alley—had to have come from Belaggio himself.

  January turned to the keyboard, and shaped the ghostly echoes of that final, heart-shattering duet. Kill me tomorrow, but let me live tonight. . . .

  And yes, he told himself, Beethoven was a horrid-tempered domestic tyrant and yes, Rossini is a sharp and money-clever entrepreneur and Balzac doesn’t bathe and sleeps with every woman he meets, but still . . .

  But still...

  Why persist in the childish belief that beautiful art must come from a beautiful soul?

  What was there in this music that shouted to him, I understand what it is like to be outcast. What it is like to be so damaged in my heart that I cannot believe in even the beloved’s profession of love.

  How could Belaggio understand that, and yet be behind the mean-minded insinuations that peppered the article in the Gazette?

  Or was he himself, thought January wryly, guilty of the Venetian Moor’s own brand of disillusionment, that cannot bear to see the beloved as less than perfect? This woman’s love stirs my heart, therefore she must be without flaw; this music shakes my soul, therefore the man who wrote it must be good. . . .

  “Benjamin?”

  The deep, pleasant voice was accompanied by a light rap on the French door’s small panes. As January rose from his piano-stool and opened to the short, stocky gentleman who stood on the high brick step, he flung up his hands in mock terror and gasped, “Dio me salve! Assassino!”

  And John Davis rapped him sharply on the elbow with another folded copy of the Gazette and burst out laughing.

  January stepped aside to let the theater owner in. In doing so, he nearly collided with his landlady, who had emerged from her bedroom in her usual silence and fastened both men with a stare of unwinking disapproval. “People aren’t supposed to come into the parlor now,” Madame Bontemps announced in her odd, flat voice. The round brown eyes rested on Davis. “M’sieu Janvier should have told me you were coming. I want to know when someone is going to come into the parlor.” She was a small woman with an indefinable suggestion of crookedness to her narrow shoulders, clothed as usual in a dress cut after the fashions of her girlhood triumphs at the quadroon balls. This was a style toward which January ordinarily felt a wistful nostalgia—he’d grown up looking at women clothed in high-waisted, narrow-cut gowns of clinging gauze and thought women nowadays dressed like idiots—but on Madame Bontemps’s stocky little frame the costume, executed in brilliant green chintz, was impossibly grotesque.

  Nothing daunted,
Davis bowed, removed his rainflecked beaver, and kissed her gloved hand. “My dear Madame, I apologize most abjectly for not writing ahead to inform M’sieu Janvier of my coming. . . .”

  “M’sieu Bontemps wants to know who will be coming into his parlor,” she proclaimed, M’sieu Bontemps being the protector who, fifteen years ago, had put her aside on the occasion of his marriage. In spite of the dismissal she had kept his name, as many plaçées did. There were times when January wondered if his landlady remembered she had been turned away. “I’ll have to write him about your coming in. I write him every Sunday.” M’sieu Bontemps had died three years ago in the cholera. January knew his landlady still did write her former protector, whose parting stipend to her had shrunk almost to nothing, courtesy of the white man’s widow. It was this latter circumstance that had forced her to take in boarders, including himself.

  “And very wise of you, Madame,” Davis agreed gravely. “M’sieu Bontemps is a great friend of mine, you know.”

  “I know.” She peered up at him from beneath the immense red-and-yellow mushroom of her bizarrely-fashioned tignon. “But I have to write him nevertheless. Until he writes me back, M’sieu Janvier, you have to speak to M’sieu Davis down at his office.”

  “Of all the ridiculous things.” Knowing, evidently, that argument was pointless, Davis stepped amiably back down to the brick banquette, and gestured with the Gazette as January took an umbrella from beside the door. They made their way toward the corner through the lightly pattering rain, Madame Bontemps watching them from the step. By the way she’d kept her distance from Davis, January wondered whether she’d read the article also and seriously suspected his friend of hiring bravos to murder Belaggio after all. Except, of course, that her suspicions could as easily have stemmed from the color of Davis’s waistcoat—“You can’t trust a man who wears too much green,” she’d informed January darkly that very morning—or an objection to the hearts-spades-diamonds fobs that decorated his golden watch-chain.