The Doctor and the Diva (40 page)

The walls were painted traditional Chinese colors—mustard gold, with moldings and doors that glowed fiery red.

Erika was told to wait on a hallway bench until he had a chance to audition her. Through the studio’s open doorway she observed the maestro. He was a round, effete little man who crossed his arms over his chest. As he listened to others talk, he would sometimes give a laugh and a haughty jerk of one shoulder, and shake his head dismissively.

Half the morning she sat listening through the open doorway as he coached young sopranos through cadenzas with comet-tailed notes. As their upper registers shattered, the awful sounds made Erika think of birds that flew straight into windows and came out bloody. The maestro’s fists would fall onto the ivory keys in a temper, or he would withdraw his hands from the keyboard and punish his failed coloraturas with long silences.

To his tenors, Brassi was kinder. “Whenever I bathe,” Erika overheard the maestro advising a male student, “I always take my bath in a darkened room with incense and a single candle burning. It relaxes me, especially before a performance.”

As she waited, Erika noticed through another open doorway that the dining room furniture had been imported from the Far East—one low table hewn of darkly oiled wood, encircled by floor cushions. Maestro Brassi evidently expected guests for lunch: the table had been set for eight.

For two and a half hours she waited on the bench. Students came and went, with scores pressed against their chests.

Around noon, aromas of fried pork and soy and sounds of sizzling vegetables invaded the house. The air tasted of ginger. Erika presumed that Maestro Brassi had hired a cook from Peking or Shanghai. She grew hungry for the food, smelling it.

Near lunchtime, after a young tenor exited, the maestro himself finally came out. He lifted a finger toward Erika and gestured for her to enter the studio. “Go in and wait for me. I need to check something with my chef. Remember—this must be quick.”

Down the corridor he hurried away with rapid, mincing steps. If anything got in his path, Erika imagined he would flap his hands and swat it away.

Five more minutes elapsed. The room’s red color affected her mood. She stood by the piano and decided she would sing one of the most furious arias she knew.

Framed photographs of Japanese Kabuki actors hung on the walls. The maestro tried to make himself up like a Kabuki figure, too, she realized. In the hallway, hadn’t she noticed something like white flour dusting the wings of his nose? Perhaps he rubbed his cheeks with beet juice as well.

What a silly, infernal little man he was. Hadn’t she sent him a note, requesting a formal time to meet? And hadn’t he scrawled a reply, telling her to appear at nine-thirty in the morning? How dare he set an appointment and then make a show of having no time for her. She hated his pretensions.

He reentered the studio carrying a small platter of Chinese hors d’oeuvres. A young accompanist followed him into the room and took up his position at the piano while Maestro Brassi slid into a chair and settled the plate on his knees. He did not offer anyone else a taste of the food. Clearly he expected the audition to be dull, and Brassi had brought the morsels to amuse himself during her arias.

Before she began, Brassi placed a piece of crispy duck meat on a thin white pancake and rolled it up. A brown paste oozed from one end of the stuffed pancake as he munched. He dipped two fingers into his mouth and licked them clean.

She handed the pianist a score she’d brought along. “I shall sing ‘Ah, fuggi il traditor’ from
Don Giovanni,
” she announced. “After that, I shall do ‘Mi tradì.’ ” She did not want to allow Brassi to tell her what she would sing.

Hearing the finality in her tone, he made no objection. It suited her mood very well to open with an impassioned line, a musical scream, as Donna Elvira sang about her philandering lover. Ah, to sing of a traitor! Outrage warmed her chest, her throat, and her diaphragm.

The first notes thrust into the air like a gleaming sword. It went on like that, strong and deadly, straight through the second aria. The tones astonished her. Her indignation dispersed all nervousness. Let him deny that this was the best voice he had worked with all morning, Erika thought.

Once she started to sing, Brassi did no more nibbling from his platter of hors d’oeuvres. Taps came at the front door and flurried footfalls sounded in the corridor as his luncheon guests assembled. The studio door was ajar, and she sensed the respectful hush that fell out there—a churchlike quiet—because her voice commanded it. She knew they all sat out there wondering who was in here, vocalizing. A shrewd expression touched Maestro Brassi’s face.

“A strong and natural voice,” he admitted. Regretfully he added, “It is only too bad your training has been poor until now. Before you came to me.”

His speech was loud and calculated, she surmised, especially for those listeners in the hallway. Brassi stepped toward her.

“Say the sound of the letter
h,
” he ordered. “Aspirate!”

She did so.

“Now sing the first phrase of ‘Ah, fuggi il traditor’ again.”

Erika repeated it. Midphrase, Brassi chopped the blade of his hand straight into her stomach. Pain bloomed behind her eyes. She could not recall any instance in her life when anyone had hit her so bluntly, so hard.

“Do it again.”

“I will not.”

“Ah,” he said, his lips stretched to a sneer, “but you will.”

“If you touch me again,” she warned, “I shall punch you back.”

He moved back a few paces. He could see that she meant it. “I do this to illustrate your faults,” he defended himself. “If you had been breathing correctly, you would have felt no pain. The diaphragm muscles should be tough. Like a stone wall. As a student of mine, you must learn this.” His jaw jutted upward.

Though Brassi was reputed to be one of the most celebrated voice coaches in Florence, she decided that this would be the only meeting she would have with him. She did not care how many impresarios came to his house to sample Peking Duck. The maestro picked up a Chinese umbrella and opened and closed it like bellows, with deep knee bends, in mimicry of what he considered her absurd breathing habits. In a high, splintered voice, he eked out the first phrase of the aria she had just sung.

A comprehension of his methods flashed into her head. She saw a pattern to all she had observed that morning. Each student was a victim he had alternately flattered and mocked. In order to keep each singer in his fist, Brassi had to affect a superior stance, and feed a student’s doubts and inadequacies.

“After what I witnessed here this morning,” Erika said, “I would never dream of becoming your student.”

She fished a gold coin from her purse and placed it on the piano. Through the corridor, past a tunnel of shadowy figures, she rushed out. Sunlight stung her eyes. As she hurried across the piazza, she heard a door open behind her and the ting of a coin thrown at her heels. The door thundered shut.

Pride prevented her from glancing down at first, but then she thought better of it. Money was something she would need now. She stooped to retrieve the gold coin rolling on the paving stones, and replaced it carefully in her purse.

A
nother potential voice teacher—and Magdalena’s sentimental favorite—was the man who had coached Magdalena during her own youthful days in Italy. But by now, he must be an octogenarian. The house where Maestro Piva lived faced a piazza with bougainvillea and a teeming fountain. On the morning Erika went to audition for him, she did not need to peer at house numbers to know which door was his. His windows were open, and from across the square she could hear the maestro playing something from Verdi’s
Aida
as she approached. He played with such finesse that the music flowed across the piazza, a slender river of sounds that pulled her toward him.

It surprised her that he was not distracted by the cacophony of old men who argued over their card game on the cobbled pavement outside. Nor did the
thwump!
of a ball that some little boys bounced against a wall interrupt the maestro’s playing. The music threaded between the muted murmurs of old women on benches; the strains of
Aida
outlasted the clangor of church bells that marked the hour.

The square was alive with so many pigeons that Erika feared she might step on them, and she expected birds to be caught under her skirt. She had the impulse to run, as her little son would have done, just to scatter them, but any hurry on her part would not be dignified.

A matron dressed in black came to the door, and introduced herself as Maestro Piva’s daughter. Lines of displeasure framed her mouth.

“Magdalena’s friend is here to see you, Father.” In the parlor she called to her father in alarming shouts, but nothing interrupted his trance.

The white-haired gentleman continued his music, oblivious to them. The daughter crossed her big-boned wrists over her stomach and muttered to forewarn Erika: “He doesn’t take students anymore.” Only when the daughter placed a hand on her father’s shoulder did he stop playing and glance up.

Was it the maestro’s wish to discontinue teaching, or was it his daughter’s preference? The latter, Erika suspected. Piva was an affable fellow. A pink delight quickened in his cheeks at the sight of this new American lady sent to him by his most famous pupil. Either Piva’s skin had stretched, or his bones had shrunk; the two no longer matched well. A hollow of age had formed where his throat ended just above his collar-bone, a cavity deep enough to store a chestnut.

Warmly he clasped Erika’s hand, and released it only reluctantly, as they took their seats. “What will you sing for me?” he asked in eagerness.

She named several arias and told him to choose which he might like to hear. He grinned and regarded her with unwavering buoyancy, but oddly, he did not respond to the question.

“Father!” his daughter barked. “The lady asks what you want her to sing. Now, what shall it be? ‘Caro mio ben’? ‘Voi che sapete’? Or something from
La sonnambula
—‘Care compagne’?” Impatience made her shouts more rapid, and her face looked tired. Clearly, it wore her out to have to prompt him.

Was he senile, then? Erika fidgeted uneasily on the antique velvet settee. How many years had elapsed since Magdalena had actually seen her former maestro?

“In his day,” Magdalena had said of Piva, “he was a tenor of great repute. He can play all the operas from memory.”

The white-haired maestro sat with crossed legs, and he leaned toward Erika as if nothing charmed him so much as the presence of an American lady who had come to the homeland of bel canto to study. “In six months, you will know our language like your own,” he said. “After you study with me for one year, you will know five roles
perfettamente
. Cues, recitatives—not just arias. All of it will be here—” he said, making motions of inscription on his heart.

Erika found it premature for him to predict her progress when he had not yet heard her sing. Had her letter of introduction from Magdalena been enough to convince him? Or was he being wishful in his old age, and confusing her fate with that of his most successful student? A brilliant student made a teacher’s reputation—or so the saying went.

They agreed that she should begin with “Caro mio ben.” As Maestro Piva resumed his place at the piano, his daughter bent toward Erika. The daughter shielded her mouth with one hand and whispered, “He has lost his hearing.”

As Erika rose to sing, her heart fell into her shoes. If he was too deaf to shape an opinion, why audition at all? Her vocal cords withered before the first notes emerged. He played. (How did he manage so well? From the habit of touch? From memory?) She sang limply while the daughter waited in a chair. As soon as it was done, Erika bowed and thanked him, and she hurried out, knowing she would not return.

Later that afternoon, feeling somewhat dispirited, she went to sip a
limonata
at Doney’s famous
caffè
. There, she saw children—English children—eating
cannoli
, their tongues licking long hollow tubes filled with sweet ricotta cream. She imagined the bliss that would come over her son’s face if he tasted one.