Puccini's Ghosts (33 page)

La mia vita è il tuo bacio! Non la temo! Hai vinto tu!

My life is your kiss! I don’t fear it! You have conquered!

And then George fluffed the entry of the brass so that it was Jimmy Brock’s trombone that led the orchestra in a blast of sound as the women’s chorus, crowded offstage in the wings, sang of perfumed gardens in the light of morning, before the scene faded to silence.

George was now too tired to raise his arms but he tapped the top of his music stand with the baton again. ‘Nearly there!’ he called. ‘Only the last scene to go! Cast, please.
La folla,
Calaf, Turandot, Altoum, positions,
“Diecimila anni”!
’

‘’Scuse me.’ Sandy Scott stepped forward to the front of the stage. ‘D’you mean we’re going straight from Scene One into Scene Two?’

‘More or less, yes,’ George said.

‘Because I think you’ll find Scene One takes place in the Palace gardens, in front of a pavilion,’ Sandy said, raising an eyebrow and looking round, ‘and Scene Two takes place outside the Palace. That calls, unless I am mistaken, for a scene change.’

Several people murmured agreement. George coughed. ‘I am aware of that. There are certain staging issues, and they are being dealt with.’ He cast his eyes around. ‘Stage manager? Raymond? Do we have a stage manager?’

Raymond emerged reluctantly from the wings, stroking his moustache.

‘Ray, can you answer Sandy’s query about the staging here?’

Raymond said, ‘We’ve just the one set of steps. We move them from stage left after they’re finished being the pavilion steps in Scene One to centre stage where they’ll be the palace steps in Scene Two. Right?’ He nodded at George and melted back out of sight.

Sandy stared after him. ‘Well, in that case why aren’t they being moved? Who’s in charge here? Where’s the stage hands?’

From the wings came Raymond’s voice. ‘Stage hands have buggered off. Move them yourself.’

George said quickly, ‘That’ll do, let’s remember this is just a stage run-through, not a dress rehearsal. And moreover,’ he said to Sandy, ‘we shall further
suggest
the change of location by the use of lighting.’

Above the confused discussion he heard somebody say, ‘Ach, it doesn’t really matter.’ George looked up and scanned the faces. ‘I mean, if your man Puccini couldn’t even be bothered to finish it…’

‘I told you, Puccini died. He couldn’t finish it because he
died,
’ George said into the crowd. ‘So Alfano completed it, so that we have a whole opera.’

‘See your man Alfano, though. No guarantee he knew what way Puccini
meant
it to go.’

‘Why can’t we sing it in English?’

George let out a roar, threw his arms in the air and flung his baton across the room. ‘For Christ’s sake! Jesus Christ! Look, just shut up and do as you’re told!’ he screamed. ‘Shut up, all of you!’

Nobody said anything. Slowly George crossed the floor and picked the baton up. Pulling his fingers through his hair, he remounted the creaking podium. He fixed hard eyes on them all and said quietly, ‘Right. Thank you. Act Three, Scene Two. Cast on stage
now
.’

He was ready, baton raised, by the time the chorus and principals had flopped back into position. The orchestra cranked itself into the foursquare beat of
‘Diecimila anni al nostro Imperatore!’
and the exhausted crowd sang in a peal of high, approximate notes and involuntary trills, at first subdued and tentative:

Amor! O sole! Vita! Eternita!

Love! O Sun! Life! Eternity!

But as George bent and swayed on top of his beer crates with wide swimming movements of his arms, the chorus’s nervy squeaking swelled in excitement and volume as if a subterranean colony of disturbed bats, rising from darkness, had found the cave mouth and were flittering out and singing into the open sky:

Luce del mondo è amor!

Light of the world is love!

i
’m reviewing a number of things since I saw Mrs Foley.

Did I really escape altogether feeling like
me,
jaded and alone?

No. There are days that summer—there are, of course there are—when I feel like my old self, when I wake up unable to summon Liù except as a passing ghost. The sensations of my own skin and clothes and surroundings—the damp and complex musk of old carpet, underarms, Woolworth’s talcum powder, the smell of bacon in my hair—anchor me to Seaview Villas and the everyday pessimism that sours all my longings. Liù’s ringing voice and her supple form in luminous silk stiffen into a mute doll as tawdry and dismayed as I am, lying in a patch of struggling daylight in a house of shrivelled hopes.

On such days, in gaps in rehearsals, I seek out Enid and other safe disappointments. I call in at Sew Right and if Enid’s mum is these days a little less interested in me, I somehow think it appropriate, since I am not who I was. There may be something distracted and even forgetful about her, and she’s always busy. Even when she’s not reaching for pins or cutting difficult curves in material or serving customers, her mind seems fixed on some task connected to the costumes that is about to demand all her attention.

Och it’s yourself, you’ll be wanting Enid, is all she says nowadays.

Instead of delaying me with an offer of tea she’ll say, She’s away out with Senga and Deirdre, you’ll be better trying the Locarno.

Senga and Deirdre dropped out of the chorus weeks ago but they still hang around on the fringes of the production, sneering or ogling, and Enid still hangs around them. If I do go to the Locarno and find her there, she comes and greets me at the counter as if I’ve returned from somewhere far away. She talks fast as if I may not be staying long, and usually I don’t. She still says, glancing back at them, that Senga and Deirdre are fine when you get to know them and even if they call
Turandot
a load of shite, they don’t really mean it. Anyway, she shouts over the jukebox, she’s only in it herself because her mum says she’s got to see it through and there’s nothing else to do round here.

I don’t care what they think. I don’t even care if their company crushes me. I’m not sure it actually touches me, though my aloofness may be no more than the tacit gratitude of the benumbed. The only thing I’m certain of is that my real life won’t begin until I’m hundreds of miles away from the thudding, steamy Locarno and the rest of Burnhead. After times like these when, back in the solitude of my room, I find that Liù has returned shining and real, I cry with relief at reaching her again.

Sometimes Enid turns up here and makes me walk up to the farm with her, to see what’s going on, or so she says.

Fifteen’s not too young to get engaged, she tells me. There’s girls in the Bible were married at twelve. I was telling Billy.

This is the only time she mentions the Bible now and she hasn’t been Gathered since early July. Billy’s name crops up much more often now than the Lord’s.

23

J
oe lay facing the wall with his back curled and his arms tight around his chest. The wheeze of car tyres on the road outside passed through the room like a cold whisper and he shuddered; it was a satisfaction that he was soaked to the skin and probably going to catch a chill. Then he wouldn’t be able to sing at all and it would be George’s fault, because it was George’s fault he had walked out of the rehearsal into the rain.

He rolled over and groped under the bed for the bottle. Instead of unwrapping it properly he had torn away only enough of the brown paper to let him get at the cork, as if the contents would be less vicious and disgraceful if he kept them covered. He gulped hard, twice, set the bottle on the floor and lay back. He shivered again and sniffed as the whisky scorched its way down his throat, then he turned back to the wall and curled himself up like a baby and sobbed.

He had strained again to sing
‘Nessun dorma’
all the way through and failed; it was the third full run-through on stage and still he couldn’t get to the ends of phrases without taking laborious breaths in the wrong places. Sometimes the high notes were simply beyond reach and often his voice split and wobbled in distress. His throat seemed full of chalk that he could not clear no matter how much water he drank or how hard he coughed, and even in some of the easier passages he produced only a kind of quaint mewling.

And it wasn’t just the singing. Even when he was managing to do something quite well George yelled at him to budge or show some feeling, and he couldn’t; the music alone required such concentration it was impossible to act. There were points in the opera where he still didn’t understand what he was saying and it was far too late to find out. His stance centre stage, with feet apart, one fist clasped to his chest and his eyes on the roof, felt as natural to him as any position ever would; what harm was there in being the one fixed point in a boiling sea of people? If his face betrayed little apart from the massive physical effort of the role, what could he do about it?

But this afternoon George hadn’t let up, bawling about his boots being nailed to the floor and his face made of granite.

So what? I’m a singer, not an acrobat.

Nobody is asking you for acrobatics!

Oh, no? That’s not my recollection, Maestro.

Just what the hell is that supposed to mean?

At the end of
‘Nessun dorma’
people had shuffled and looked away. George had scratched the back of his head with his baton and frowned at the score.

That was when Joe had stepped forward and said
George, I’m asking you again. We have to transpose
‘Nessun dorma’.
It’s unsingable. A tone lower would make it much better for my voice. Changes the whole tessitura.

Are you insane? Don’t be absurd! You can’t go transposing things willy-nilly. It’d make no harmonic sense with anything else.

But
‘Nessun dorma’
opens Act Three. It doesn’t have to fit with anything else.

Of course it does! It’s not the only bloody aria in the opera, you know!

Then George said the unforgivable.
Joe, you know it’s a demanding role. If you put some proper work in, you might find the technique and stamina that’s called for.

Joe was pleased with the next bit. He sat up and took another drink and lay back down, playing it over as he squeezed a mouthful of whisky through his teeth.

Well, Maestro. If you won’t grant a simple request to transpose
‘Nessun dorma’
down a tone then I’m afraid this production no longer has a Calaf.

It had been an exit worth getting wet for. A dignified walk to the edge of the stage in Calaf’s big boots, a hop to the floor, swift strides down the shed towards the door, head high. The masterstroke, turning at the door to call out,
Please convey my sincere apologies to the entire company.

And straight out into the rain, which was unfortunate, but he certainly could not have diminished the drama of it by going back to ask for an umbrella. Nobody had followed so nobody had seen him drag the neck of his pullover up over the back of his head, and as the rain came down harder, make off down the track still in Calaf’s wide-topped thigh boots that forced him to run with his legs apart.

He stared at the arrows of rain spitting on the skylight and felt the minutes tick through his anger. He let it grow. An afternoon spent on it would not be wasted. This time he might even carry out the threat to leave. It would serve George right if he didn’t go back. It was a mistake that he was here at all; his own mistake perhaps, but still George’s fault.

You’ve got to come, I need you to. Of course it’ll be better than staying in London, there’s a beach on the doorstep, don’t forget.

Standing in Crouch End with the telephone held to his ear and watching sunlight burn down on a bloom of mouse-coloured dust at the edges of the carpet, Joe had imagined himself laughing as glittering water washed over his bare toes, shrieking as blue waves broke on his shoulders.

George was always doing this to him, creating expectations that failed to materialise and then the failure was always, of course, Joe’s.
It’s not my fault the sea isn’t blue. I only said there was a beach, you just assumed it’d be warm enough to swim in. You can hardly blame me for the weather,
he’d said.

Joe kept finding himself held unfairly accountable for his own disappointments.

He did hate the weather here, the malicious pattern of cloud, rain and wind broken by blasts of sun so scorching and short-lived that people stripped off and flung themselves at it like maniacs and spent the next week puce and crazed by sunburn. Come to think of it he hated the people too, the very sight of them trailing dumb and dazed through Burnhead, as if they’d been reared underground. They weren’t designed for sunshine, not even short bursts of it; they had thin skin like uncooked sausages, just as liable to tighten and erupt under a touch of heat. He hated this creaking house too, with its cling of damp. He’d felt trapped from the moment he got here, tiptoeing about feeling secretive and restrained, because of course George hadn’t warned him about his infuriating sister and mute Raymond and the girl who kept staring at him.

George rewrote things, that was the trouble. He glossed over the bits he didn’t like and moulded facts to fit so that he could see life as he wanted it to be. Joe swigged from the bottle again and felt a sudden glow of whisky wisdom: George had rewritten
him
. All the last Doge of Venice nonsense was George’s. Joe had told him it wasn’t an uncommon name and there were dozens of Foscaris in Italian telephone directories. But after a while he hadn’t pointed that out so often. He’d studied his face in the mirror and seen there was another way of looking at it. Maybe he could detect in his features something ancient and noble, maybe he could be descended from the last Doge, who was to say? After that it had been easier to go along with George’s version of the famous family restaurants until they could both imagine that people once converged on Glasgow from all points of the compass to eat at Foscari’s; Joe let the photograph that he remembered from childhood, of his grandfather outside a fish and chip shop in the Gorbals, slip quietly from memory. It now occurred to him that the reason behind George’s determination to elevate him was that Joe as he really was, one of a line of immigrant caterers, with a run-down café in a slum, was simply not good enough.

Nor was it good enough for George that he wasn’t a great tenor. Joe had gone off the idea of singing within two terms and told George he might go back to technical drawing and just join a choir, but George had refused to let him treat what he called The Voice so casually. He insisted that his was a supernormal gift. His theory was that Joe was experiencing simple nerves over the commitment and responsibility of so huge a talent. Of course Joe was flattered, and stopped telling him that just because he was able to sing it didn’t mean he wanted to and that actually, he found most of the music boring.

It
was
all George’s fault. George had talked him into and out of so much that Joe didn’t know if his opinions and tastes really were his or not. On every subject Joe could think of—opera, girlfriends, commitment, style, college, lineage, love, destiny—George had got him fired up with wrong ideas about what he wanted and was capable of and the person he could become, rolling his own ambitions up into one ball and tossing it to him in the shape of singing Calaf. Well, Joe was letting the ball drop at his feet. It wasn’t his to begin with and he was no longer sure he had ever really wanted it. There it lay, George’s fantastic bundle of expectations and Joe’s confusion about his entire life, one and the same thing.

He drank deep from the bottle again and began to plan when he might be ready to hear George’s appeasement speech, because soon he’d be begging at the door. The first time, naturally, he wouldn’t listen. Joe felt a fresh surge of rage and his back tightened in disgust because he knew that he’d forgive George eventually, after a few more appeals, and that would be the point at which George would slide in a remark to suggest that really the fault was Joe’s.

Of course I feel terrible about undermining you,
he might say.
If that’s what I was doing.

But in order to get
‘Nessun dorma’
brought down a tone Joe would have to listen to a lot of that kind of thing. It was undignified and it clashed with his rebellious picture of himself; the thought of going through with it sickened him. But at least he had planned his walkout to leave enough time for the orchestra to get used to playing the aria in the lower key. You had to use tactics with someone like George or he would get the better of you, every time.

Joe eased himself up from the squealing bed, pulled off his boots and flung them so hard across the floor they hit the skirting board. Then he got under the covers. He wished that just by lying still and quiet he might be spared all that would follow George’s knock on the door. He squeezed his eyes shut and wished he were invisible. Another car hissed by on the wet road, a dog barked. After a while, no other sounds came. Joe felt his mind begin to untangle and within a few more minutes he was asleep and snoring.

d
ay and night, I walk. I have re-learned the shades of this house. I am reacquainted with the sea-bleached brightness that glances off surfaces and I know the mere absence of light—the doomy, religious dark that sucks daylight out of corners—but I am drawn most to the kind of shining, greedy blackness that thrums through night air like a low whisper. As I walk, I consider that perhaps the strife I have raised here was not waiting for me after all but was brought. Perhaps it resides in me.

When the need for oblivion comes, I give in and sleep. I am less afraid of what awaits me when I close my eyes, because I find myself in the same dreams, the very same ones that came that
Turandot
summer, and in them I am again the girl I was. They are extravagant, restless dreams of flight and revelation in which I pass across landscapes I recognise but that turn out to be harbouring impossible surprises; I happen upon unlikely doors and unexplored paths that take me to places behind the ordinary surfaces of things. I am drifting through the garden of Pow Farm and I part the shrubs to find another garden beyond, lush with sunlight and fountains. When I look up through the sycamores the trunks become pillars meeting in splendid arches in the sky.

Sometimes I will discover a vast room coated in dust and with one finger trace a line down a wall to reveal a painted Arcadia of nymphs and trees and pools in silvery pinks and blues. I find objects of incredible fragility—confections of glass and beads, slippers and masks and fans of silk and feathers, frivolous, carnival trappings—whose only purpose is to adorn. Even in the dreams I think my discoveries slightly absurd yet there is a ripeness in their beauty, as if the things I find have never before been thought quite as wonderful as I think them now. In another dream I meet obstacles, irrational wooden structures in the middle of fields or unnatural hills that rise up and push live, turfy smells in my face, smells like camomile or fresh blood that turn on me so suddenly that my stomach retches before my mind has had time to realise I am repelled to the point of nausea.

And still dreaming, I see some Lila or another in the act of gazing from my bedroom window across the moonlit ground. She watches as from the dead marsh between the house and the sea a city sprouts up, Gothic and toy-like, with winding alleys and steep roofs and soaring unreal towers. Her eyes are searching the spires and minarets for something and now the dream fills with longing, its atmosphere changes. I am not watching, but watched. My body and clothing are melding into the same supple gold substance, as if they are being drenched in the same warming paint, except that the transformation is deeper; not a gilding of surfaces but a metamorphosis—skin and bone and fibre lose themselves and re-form as one melting body. It is nakedness of a kind, yet I am brave and happy to be watched and by whom or what I do not care—it may be the gaze of some vapoury, white-faced god—because all I want is more: more nakedness and shedding of self, more of this beautiful flaunting. When I wake from this dream I feel that I am being chased from it by a sadness that finally catches hold and clings to me like a chill.