The Black Opera (87 page)

A few yards off, on the lowest tier, Conrad saw Luigi Esposito lean forward, one elbow on his knee, hand cupped to his ear to better hear the distant singing.

“That's it, right there. We have to get Luigi's attention. And everyone else.”

Conrad couldn't bring himself to look up the tiers at the
lazzaroni
and corn-sellers and butchers and laundry-women who make up a proportion of Neapolitans present.

“And we need to do it
soon
. Or the Prince's Men will have won.”

Conrad turned away. Roberto gathered their attention with the lift of a hand. Conrad glimpsed the King's face.

I suppose I need not ask if he regrets, now, not giving orders to evacuate Naples before the eruption.

“You should sing.” Conrad put out a hand to stop Ferdinand rejoining his scant group of officers. “Any of us who aren't professional, but can read music, will make an adjunct to the chorus.”

Ferdinand's bland face took on a smile.

“I admit to singing while Maria played the piano; I'm not hopeless. Very well. Some of these gentlemen may have done more than sing in the Mess. I'll call them over.”

“Yes, sir—”

In the centre of the
Anfiteatro
, not far from the cleft in the earth, Leonora stepped forward, lifted her head, and—
a capella
—reprised the first two bars that
began her final part in
Il Reconquista d'amore
.

“Six minutes remaining!” Conrad snapped, ushering Ferdinand Bourbon-Sicily into the row of chorus singers, beside him. He pitched his voice to carry to all of the remaining company of the Teatro San Carlo. “And it's the
finale ultimo
, which we've practised enough to sing asleep! We don't have—”

Estella and Lorenzo
.

“—Soprano and tenor, but you know the roles transposed to your own voices. The Prince's Men haven't even had it all their own way so far! But it isn't decided until it's
finished
. You're
used
to improvising. Remember what we know—you can trust bel canto, and
we
can trust who we sing with!”

Conrad took a space this time between a church-choir mezzo, and a captain of the King's Rifles; the latter moving over to make room for Ferdinand.

A few yards around the shallow curve, Paolo sat with the oboe player and other musicians. At her feet, she had the case she had been clutching aboard ship; in her hands, Alfredo Scalese's violin.

JohnJack, Brigida, Velluti and Sandrine clustered on the arena floor, and Roberto Capiraso, Conte di Argente, some yards in front where all could see him.

Six minutes before… before we stop what the Prince's Men have planned for so long? Or before what they plan to do—is done?

He barely noticed his audience. If he had been told that he would, one day, ignore the better part of ten thousand Returned Dead men and women, he would have laughed. Only a minor part of him kept any track of the Neapolitans, sprawled on the tiers as their ancient pagan ancestors would have, desperate for blood shed for entertainment. Only the absence of wine and bread and olives made it clear this was no usual crowd.

We're losing them
.

He breathed, in respite from his role as the tenor shadowing what Lorenzo Bonfigli would have sung, and gazed down the amphitheatre. Sunlight still blazed beyond the western edge of the eruption cloud. The edge of shadow caught Sandrine and Velluti, singing hand in hand as if lovers were trusting children.

Across the arena, where the sun was full, Isabella of Castile stood as her pages removed her bright armour, and gowned her in blue and gold. Her low contralto floated across the ancient, shattered stone:

“Di Dio più santo, io giuro!”

By God most holy, I swear!

The Returned Dead of Naples shifted in their seats, heads turning first towards Conrad, where Velluti spiralled a delicate harmony up beside Sandrine's mezzo, and then to the Prince's Men, and the inhuman perfection of Isabella at the
height of her conquest. Conrad cast a quick glance round.
What do
we
have here—hundreds? Dozens?

One of Alvarez's sergeants held out Isaura's scribbled-over score for Conrad to share. About to shake his head, Conrad caught Roberto's eye on him.

A stern jerk of the conductor's hand, and Conrad bent over the score—startled what authority the man carried when he was not being
il Conte
—and found his place.

He straightened to sing, this time shadowing Sandrine.

Conrad waited until his rest came before he looked again. He climbed onto the lowest tier, shading his eyes against the brighter end of the amphitheatre.

“Oh, I think I see…”

He stepped down, threading his way between singers to where Roberto Capiraso conducted. The Count stood with his body twisted, attempting to both conduct from the score a rifleman held out for him to see, and listen to Brigida Lorenzani whispering urgently.

Conrad overheard her frustrated cry:
“They're trying to listen to both of us!”

Without wasting time, Conrad gave a sharp nod of agreement. “The two operas share music.”

He kept all accusation from his voice.

“There are differences,” Conrad pressed on. “Particularly in the
finale ultimo
, but I think we ought to have realised before now—as far as our audience is concerned, there
aren't
two operas. There's one.”

Roberto Capiraso scowled, went to speak, halted, and began again. “If we're the ‘black opera' too—”

“—Just as much as Nora's singers are the counter-opera.” Conrad faced the bearded man and his dark, haunted eyes. “You told me you thought the end of
Aztec Princess
was better than
Reconquista
. So it comes down to singing it to
interpret
it that way—”

JohnJack shook his robe, a few more sewn peacock's feathers abandoning it with the dust. “But if we're all singing the same thing—!”

“You're not; not quite. And it wouldn't matter if you were. What matters—”

With time running out, Conrad found the words.

“What matters is whether those people sitting down there feel that you're singing in
support
of Nora's principals, or whether Nora and
il Principe
are singing comprimario roles to
you!”

A moment succeeded, silent despite every note and every voice in the arena.

Sandrine patted at her hair, re-fixing a hairpin. “People's attention has to—shift. We have to sing well enough to make it apparent her voice is in service to ours.”

“Yes.”

“And this from the man who wanted none of the dirty tricks of bel canto!”

Conrad silently marvelled at what he was about to say. “Trust your composer.”

The startled-deer look that il Superbo shot him was almost worth it.

“Trust him,”
Conrad repeated, “because
L'Altezza azteca
is the most recently composed and revised of the two.
Reconquista
was written over the space of years.
L'Altezza
was composed over weeks in a white heat in
il mondo teatrale
. Which do
you
think is going to be better?”

It got a knowing chuckle from all of them, even Velluti.

“Places!” Paolo-Isaura called, not interrupting her playing.

Roberto Capiraso hung back a moment as the singers walked forward across the nominal “stage.”

“Do you believe that to be true?”

“I do.” Conrad smiled crookedly. “Under any other circumstances, of course, I wouldn't admit it.”

“No.” Roberto's lips twitched, in a smile darker and more self-knowing than Conrad had seen before. “I don't suppose you would. Get into line, tenor. This is the finale.”

It's not up to me—to Roberto—even to Paolo
. It's up to the singers. And chiefly, to those four men and woman—

Conrad didn't move from where he stood on the arena floor, transfixed as they sang.

—Sang the wrong parts, but the right voices. Lines transposed—because every singer knew all the words of the scene. And it was not Velluti, but JohnJack, who sang,
“Mi perdono, perdonata!”
in his resonant, precise, passionate bass, holding Sandrine's hand as he sang, the General begging pardon of his Princess rather than the hero of his King.

Every word and note fell into place.

Velluti put his arm around Brigida's plump shoulders and sang with her the duet that should have been hers and her daughter's, “We are strangers, you and I, in this land of stone and serpent,” and the emotion fitted both of them, Hernan Cortez so far from any familiar road or hill to walk down, and Thalestris utterly at sea in a country that values no woman unless she fights for power like a man, and Conrad couldn't keep his eyes off Leonora.

He broke off his singing and whispered to Paolo. “Move, go with them, she's doing it!”

He pointed down the arena, where Leonora walked up the centre of the arena, or as close as she could come while avoiding the sunken corridor, and her voice was sufficient without accompanying instruments—which was just as well,
Conrad thought, watching her bewildered musicians already frightened by the Returned Dead, and the bemused other singers of the Prince's Men who stared after her from the stage.

Leonora walked on, fists clenched, and sang, and turned all the heads of the audience to her.

Roberto bowed his head to one side to hear Paolo and sharply nodded assent, and without ceasing to mark the time, said, “We'll go down towards her.”

The instruments they had with them were of necessity portable, but he signalled the musicians to stay with their scores.

He knows he can depend on the Prince's Men for music
, Conrad realised, walking down the arena behind the composer.

“Bring my music,” Paolo directed without ceasing to play.

She walked off, and the other musicians followed her anyway. Conrad picked her score up, holding it open so that she could see it; silently cursing at having a buffoon's part. He just managed not to fall over the rock-bombs that scattered the arena now, hot and spitting where they sat in craters in the chill earth and brickwork.

Leonora launched into improvised coloratura melody.

It was not in il Superbo's score. For a moment the counter-opera clashed horribly to a stop.

Roberto bit out a sharp oath.
“Cazzo!
You sons of whores, keep playing!”

The handful of musicians began to play from the score.

First Velluti and Sandrine, then Brigida, and at last JohnJack, abandoned the known notes—and the rehearsed score—to soar with Nora's incredible voice; winding a coloratura quartet around her because they
can
improvise like this, they know the shape of music.

Conrad stopped, his serviceable tenor nowhere capable, and his mind leaped to catch the new melody.

This! Yes—
this
—

This is what I heard when I dreamed, weeks ago.

When I had hemicrania after Il Terrore di Parigi. What I was dreaming as I woke.

It can't be.

It isn't in either score, and it's not something I heard Roberto play, but I dreamed it, and only now remember.

Objections followed on the tail of that; thick, fast—

I only
imagine
I dreamed it; I had hemicrania then and now, it's a false similarity, or even a product of the illness. It must be
like
a part of the score that I've forgotten. Or something Roberto did once play. Or she stole it from another
opera and I'll remember in what house I heard it.

He violently forced himself to believe the reasons of Reason. It did no good. All of him, heart, mind, and soul—
If there's any such thing!
—insisted that it was true.

I dreamed this melody of Leonora's when I had no idea whether she was alive or dead
. Certainly no idea that she had Returned. I dreamed what she is singing now.

Is there some link between us, since Venice, that I heard in my own mind what must have been in hers, rehearsing it for the black opera?

Conrad's eye throbbed in time to his heartbeat. He stared at Nora. A faint unseeable disturbance in his vision warned him.

As it had in times past, a flickering defect appeared in the centre of his vision, expanding outwards until the whole world was fractured in planes of light. He stood blind, nausea rising in his throat, and the music and her voice seizing on him.

He felt himself listening so acutely that it was as if he joined with the music. He barely noticed the defects of light in his field of vision—did not note when they dwindled and shrank, as they so far always had, and freed him from the icy terror of remaining blind.

The conviction remained.
I've dreamed this; these are the notes I couldn't retain in my mind
. For all the reasons why it might be an illusion, a trick of memory, a wished-for thing; he could not divest himself of the absolute knowledge of the inexplicable.