The Black Opera (20 page)

“If there was any justice, Rossi,
you'd
be struck by lightning!”

“Nah. I leave that to my betters and social superiors. Particularly those who ended the Battle of Maida with a splinter from an artillery carriage in their bums…”

“And isn't it a pity we're
not
writing a one-act Neapolitan comedy.” Conrad couldn't suppress a smile. “Heroic as that might be, I don't think it's going to carry me through four acts and a whole evening!”

He grabbed up his hat, cane, and gloves, and summoned a carriage, since even in early spring, now, it had turned too warm to walk comfortably down to the Palazzo Reale and Ferdinand's libraries—an enviable collection, and unusually scientific for a European monarch.

As he was jolted over the cobbles, Conrad worried like a mastiff at the idea of a suitable subject for his libretto.

Classical tragedy? The life-story of some historical figure? Rossini and Colbran between them grabbed all the major historical heroines…

The coachman reined in slightly, muttering. Four men in double-breasted greatcoats, only two of them wearing their tall hats, and the burliest with a carriage-whip clasped behind him, stood in debate in the middle of the street. There were any number of children over six and under twelve scattering around unsupervised. Four, playing tag, darted across in front of the horse. Conrad caught sight of a groom in a muffler, standing by his master's carriage, who was evidently taking the time to show off the fine points of the dun mare to more of the brats.

The coach swung back to pass three women in shawls and bonnets, with a child in plain blue shift and a white coif.

Here there were no pavements, and groups of people chatting occupied all the road. Approaching the palace, which did have pavements, the couples and groups more reluctantly left the centre of the road clear. The carriage slowed, nevertheless, for a rifleman in a cockaded hat walking with his arm around the waist of a woman—her red dress and bonnet and white shawl of sufficient quality to make her sweetheart or wife rather than whore.

And slowed
again
, for a trooper wheeling a barrow piled high with ammunition boxes.

Conrad sat back in his seat with a groan.
This is my audience
.

These are the people who will come to every performance of a three-week run, and comment more knowledgeably than the Master of Music at a Conservatoire. Some come to be a composer's claque and hiss his competition. Most of them come to the Teatro San Carlo with a better ear for voice and music than any house in Italy. And these are the people who have to be seized up into passion by King Ferdinand's opera.

I'm approaching it the wrong way. Any average work won't do it
.

So that leaves me looking for a subject that they won't expect, but will love. And Ferdinand wants it done in six weeks.

Conrad opened his mouth and shut it again.

I wonder if it really compromises my atheism to swear by hell-fire and bloody damnation!

He left the carriage and found his way to the smallest of the King's libraries, which was the one best stocked with good translations of the Classical Greek and Roman authors. He read omnivorously for hours, only occasionally interrupted as functionaries and courtiers wandered in and out. None of them paid overt attention to the books that piled up by his elbow.

I'd bet money that the Prince's Men have a paid spy in the Palace
. Most likely more than one. But who'd suspect me, a lowly copyist attached to the King's Master of Music?

And Prince's men or not, I prefer to be considered ‘lowly' when it comes to royal courts.

Any attention from a King, major or minor, plunges one into the jealousy and enmity that is court politics.
Make a friend, make three enemies
, as the proverb goes.

Of the half dozen other men who occupied chairs in the library, all had the look of genuine scholars or Natural Philosophers—it spoke well for Ferdinand Bourbon-Sicily that his court attracted them, Conrad thought, going back to the passage in Seneca that he had been puzzling over.

A coil of cold wind snaked over the back of his neck. He felt all his hairs stand up.

A sepulchral moan echoed through all the bookcases, and the heights of the vaulted roof.

It swelled into a groan of spiritual anguish.

One annoyed academic voice hissed,
“Sssshh!”

Conrad was broken rudely out of communion with blood-drenched love affairs (not to mention incest, patricide, vengeance, fraternal treachery, and other promising subjects). He looked wildly around.

An old man in scholar's voluminous robes sniffed, returning pointedly to his leather-bound tome.

Searching for what had disturbed him, Conrad instantly saw the translucent shimmering form of a ghost.

The spectre drifted through the main library table, ignoring how it cut its body off at the waist. The skirts of its formal velvet coat swirled through the page that Conrad had been reading. White eyes looked down.

“Conrad. Son!”

C
onrad marked his place in his book with his finger and regarded his father's ghost.

“Father.”

The apparition wore court dress, as always, as if prepared to give a recital at a moment's notice to some German princeling or Neapolitan Count. The ghost of Alfredo Scalese was too familiar a sight to surprise Conrad very much. He calculated that it was a rare year that went past without one or two visits by the man.

Several of the other users of the library gave pronounced harrumphs at the impolite manifestation, and went back to their books.

“I comfort myself, sometimes,” Conrad murmured, hardly above a whisper.

“With the thought that at least you're only a spectre. If you were one of the corporeal Returned Dead, you'd be much more intrusive.”

The ghost laughed. It had a chilling quality, although Alfredo's round face held nothing but amusement.

“I'll never understand how a son of mine could be so fond of work.” Alfredo shook his head, his white hair twisting on an unseen wind. “The day's done. If you were to walk down by the Mercato, I guarantee you'd meet a dozen pretty girls.”

Bluntly, Conrad said, “Go away, Father.”

“Oh, you snake's tooth!” His smile was roguish, clearly still dwelling on hypothetical girls. Alfredo's teeth had been a good colour and regular before he died; they were blinding white now. “I recognise that temper: that's your mother in you. Used to give me hell sometimes… Why don't you get out and enjoy yourself, son?”

Conrad wondered how closely his father's ghostly existence allowed Alfredo to examine the lives of others.
Will he know if I lie?

“It's very simple.” Conrad lowered his gaze determinedly to his book. “If I don't work, I don't earn. If I don't earn, I don't eat.”

“Oh, you could eat on what you earn in
half
of the year! Live well, too. If you didn't insist on this ridiculous plan to give your money to other men, when my debts died when I did—”

“The Law disagrees with you!”

“Fuck the Law, forwards and backwards!”

“SSSSSHH!”

All four of the remaining scholars were glaring when Conrad looked around. He swept his notes up and crammed them into his pockets, and strode to the far, deserted end of the library, sinking into a wing-backed chair there. It did him no good: Alfredo Scalese's ghost glided effortlessly beside him.

Conrad couldn't help a low snarl. “There speaks the man who changed his name to avoid his debts! Not that it worked. They still pursued us all round Europe.”

Alfredo's gliding figure shrugged. “I only changed to an Italian name to get a foothold in the opera business. Many men have done it! Look at Johann Simon—beg pardon,
Giovanni Simone
—Mayr…”

About to cite everything of Mayr's early bel canto from
Ginevra di Scozia
to
La Rosa Bianca e La Rosa Rossa
, set against his father's lack of any produced opera in his lifetime or after it, Conrad fell into an ambiguous silence.

True, Alfredo Scalese ended up in debt and couldn't support a family and died in early middle age, but he could at least compose functional court music, and his son never has…

The court dances never brought forth any miracles, either, but Alfredo had the ambition to try writing music for opera. Conrad felt again the suspicion that being a librettist meant he had turned out a disappointment to his father.

“…And why not welsh on the rest of my debts—especially those owed to respectable businessmen?” Alfredo cut short his attempts to jolly Conrad into unreliability. “Only tell me… why should my son be wasting his life away in unhappiness, over something as unimportant as money? I promise you, after you die, nothing counts for less.”

It might be the more-than-mortal vision of spectres that allowed Alfredo to perceive his moods, Conrad thought. Or, despite his comparatively early death, Alfredo might just know his son that well.

“I have a chance to succeed in my ambitions,” Conrad said quietly, standing and concentrating on the small shelf of books above a solid desk.
Some men can't see ghosts; better not to be seen talking to myself
. “I'm composing another libretto. For the early summer season, perhaps.”

There was nothing else he was free to say, even to a spectre. He thought it unlikely Alfredo was able to gossip to other ghosts, but a promise of silence is a promise.

“And you need
help
with a libretto?” Alfredo drifted close enough to survey the books Conrad was taking down at random from the shelf—large travel books and atlases for the most part. He intersected Conrad's arm, and was chill as the wind that sent clouds trailing rain across the Bay.

“Myself, I had once considered a rewrite of
The Vestal Virgin
, but everyone and their mule produces a version of that!—illicit lovers condemned for letting the Vestal flame go out, it's so tempting—” Alfredo checked, and snorted. “Then again, Venus shows her forgiveness by lighting the altar-fire again with a lightning-bolt. I should suppose you've had enough of lightning!”

Conrad winced.

“I'm sorry, Father.” He deftly avoided a move by the spectre to hook a transparent arm through his. “I have to work.”

There were a dozen books he would like to have taken home from the library, but only for interest's sake. None gave him an idea.

A gentle, non-spectral cough drew his attention.

Conrad looked up to see Luigi Esposito removing his hat, and smoothing back his hair.

“Intercepted a complaint,” the police captain said.

Alfredo Scalese clapped spectral hands. “At
last!
What has my son been up to?”

“A complaint about
you,”
Luigi said, with far less good humour than Conrad had seen him display in a long time. “You disreputable old ruffian.”

The local police chief prodded in Alfredo's direction with a dusty forefinger, and, despite incorporeality, Alfredo drifted back a yard or so.

“If you were alive, I'd have you in debtor's prison so fast you couldn't blink!” Luigi shot Conrad a shame-faced look. “I know he's your father. I just wish he was here to pay for his own sins.”

I just wish he was here
, Conrad surprised himself by thinking. He didn't voice it, for fear both of seeming weak, and of giving his not-mortal sire ammunition for a later date.
Yes, I know what he's like, but he was my father.

Luigi, constrained by no such past emotions, said, “Begone, before I fetch an exorcist!”

A spatter of applause came from the occupants of the King's library as Alfredo Scalese drifted off through one wall.

Captain Esposito elegantly perched himself on the desk, pulling out books at random from the shelves and flicking through them, ignoring the dust on his white gloves. “I've had occasion to rebuke you for your father in the past. And I dare say I will in the future—the older generation are quite disgraceful in their morals… Not your fault, of course…”