The Doctor and the Diva (42 page)

“Christopher tells us that you’re going to meet Maestro Valenti,” Mark said. His long hair was whisper-fine, his shirt half-buttoned, a little fissure of flesh visible on his well-toned chest. He stood in a languorous way, with his weight leaning into one hip. He was clearly aware of his good looks.

The shorter man, Edmund, had the homeliness of a Hapsburg monarch with his narrow head and slack jaw, and his red, protuberant lower lip.

Erika felt a faint dislike for both of them—they, unlike Christopher, struck her as insufferably young. Mark and Edmund acted excessively polite. No doubt they viewed her simply as their friend’s employer. Their presence reminded her that her accompanist’s situation was not as solitary as her own.

“You are silent this morning,” Christopher said as they walked through the Oltrarno and a street shaded by ancient trees toward the master teacher’s house.

“I’m thinking—” Erika said.

“Of what?”

“You must see me as very old. What age do you suppose I am?”

“Twenty-nine,” he said at once.

“I’m far into my thirties.”

“The perfect age for a mezzo,” he said.

With the flicker of a smile, she pointed at his bow tie, dog-eared once again. Despite his elegant hands and manners, there was always something askew about Christopher, as if he’d just been napping on a sofa, fully clothed.

Tucking his chin into his collar, he looked down to inspect himself. “Oh, dear,” he said, trying to pat his bow tie smooth.

It was not yet seven-thirty in the morning. When had she ever been summoned before a voice teacher at such an hour? According to Christopher, Maestro Valenti was the most dedicated vocal instructor in Florence. Opera was a religion for him.

“Valenti wastes no time on small talk,” Christopher said. “Relentless work—that’s all he cares about. Valenti won’t speak of anything personal or trivial except—”

“Except?”

“Except that Valenti is a sort of hypochondriac. He has a passion for people’s little ailments. He can’t hear enough about yours, and he’ll confide in you about rashes he has found on the most private parts of his body. You’ll see all his powders and pills. Homemade potions, I think.”

A maid escorted them into a studio with an amber-tiled floor where the maestro—sixty years old, perhaps—sat hunched at the piano, playing something modern by Puccini. He did not glance up as they entered.

Maestro Valenti wore a suit of summer white, his silver hair swept off his forehead, ending in a long wave that touched his back collar. All of this contrasted with his dark eyes and smoky complexion. Black eyebrows hinted at the color his hair had once been.

Wordlessly, the maid handed Erika a tall glass of water and went out. Erika sipped and felt a cool river move down her gullet to her stomach, where a hollow of hunger had carved itself. She thought of the chocolate and bread she’d left standing on the table in her room. Why had she not made herself eat something before coming here? Light-headed and suddenly nervous, she wanted to sit down.

“What role do you know best?” Maestro Valenti called out, not bothering to look at her as he continued with whatever he was playing.

“Amina,” she said, “in
La sonnambula
.”

He hummed as he played, the music a hive that enveloped him. It broke off abruptly.

“ ‘Care compagne’? Will you start with that for me?” From a cupboard he retrieved the score and dismissed Christopher, indicating that it would be no problem to accompany her himself.

The maestro’s olive complexion had charcoal nuances, with smudges of half-moons below his eyes. As he resumed his seat at the piano and flexed his fingers, the wrinkles at his knuckles appeared dark gray.

“Care compagne” . . . The first time she had sung it at the New England Conservatory, she had been fourteen. Each time she sang it—or any aria—she was never absolutely certain what tones she might float. At first her voice sounded faded to her, but as she and Maestro Valenti eased into the next part (“Come per me sereno”), the phrases came with more surety, and she let the loveliness Bellini had composed—the legato beauty of it—carry her.

The studio’s shutters had been thrown open like arms to the warm autumn morning. Birds flitted from twig to twig along the shady boulevard. As she sang, she saw a single rose in a tubular vase on a nearby table. Erika imagined herself inhaling its fragrance, the promise of its unfolded petals, its mysterious crevices.

For the audition she had worn a décolleté dress, for she could never bear the restriction of a high-necked blouse as she vocalized. The balm of early morning light caressed her neck and upper chest. The pouf sleeves she wore made her feel youthful—as if she were dissolving into the happiness of the village girl Amina.

Silence followed her singing. After a pause, the maestro’s fingers sought the keys again. Valenti waved a hand and encouraged her to go on being Amina—all the way through the next part, “Sopra il sen la man mi posa.” He hummed and played and called out entrances and exits and cues for other, imaginary cast members—as if the room had filled with unseen villagers. She saw that Valenti wished to measure her stamina. It was not a couple of arias he wanted her to sing, but the entire opera.

While he called out lines and played, in a kind of shorthand, the music that ran between Amina’s parts, she grabbed her glass of water and gulped. The water lost its chill as the scenes rolled on. Her eyes shut as she drank the water like a fast prayer, letting it moisten her tongue and throat before continuing.

Finally she had sucked the glass dry. As she set down the empty glass, it knocked against a shelf with a hollow echo. Valenti rang for the maid to bring more water, and the music went on.

Occasionally, when Erika pronounced an Italian word badly, the maestro’s spine tensed and his fingers flinched from the keys. “Your Italian is not so bad,” he said, “but for the stage, every word must be perfect. Repeat after me,
‘Sono innocente.’
”

“That’s right. ‘
Innocente.’
Take a little bite out of the middle of the word—that’s how we pronounce it.” He shook his head. “You don’t realize how cruel Italian audiences can be about foreigners’ mistakes. If you mispronounce something, they will laugh you right off the stage.”

Later he cried, “Hit each note cleanly! ‘D,’ then jump—as the composer wished—neatly up to ‘C’.”

Twelve times he made her redo a particular phrase. He seemed not to mind how long it took her to perfect it.

After that he did not interrupt her again. While she sang, his strange little humming continued as he played. She heard strains of the opera’s other, unseen characters that were so alive in his head.

How stupid she had been not to eat anything. By now her exhaustion was such that she felt she had become—like the heroine Amina—a sleep-walker herself. Her vision dimmed and the studio’s amber-tiled floor blurred. She heard her voice, but it came from afar, like tones from under the piano’s lid. Would she last to the end of it? She tucked one curl behind her ear and her fingers came away wet with sweat.

“I am going to faint,”
she considered telling him, but they were too close to the end not to keep on. Her shoulders swayed, and her legs felt as though they were melting. Only the music carried her through it—no food, no nourishment, left inside her at all.

With the final part—“Ah, non giunge”—over at last, Erika dropped against a black satin sofa.

At first Maestro Valenti said nothing about her singing. Instead, he tapped his knuckles lovingly against the pages of the score and sighed, muttering in wonderment over Bellini’s genius, as though the composer—dead eighty years by now—were his close friend.

“Are you ready to sing a couple of arias from
Il barbiere di Siviglia
for me now?” Valenti asked. From the couch Erika must have given him the stare of a dead woman, because he swung his head back and laughed.

“Every diva must learn to stay fresh,” Valenti teased and shook his finger. “She cannot let herself be wrung out after a few arias. Even after a whole opera, you must be ready to sing more—still more.”

She wondered if he intended to take her on as his student. Clearly her stamina had failed to please him. Her fatigue was so huge that it might not have mattered, in that moment, if he had said no.

When she put the question to him, he glanced at her, astonished. “Do you think I would have kept you here all morning,” he said, “if I did not find your voice beautiful?”

She did not have the energy to smile at him. She slid deeper against the black sofa, expressionless.

“You have done a wise thing by moving to Italy,” he said. “Two years of work, and you will have a career.”

“I must use your water closet,” Erika confessed.

He rang for the maid, who ushered Erika down a dark hallway into a cubicle where a pale gas jet glowed like a divine finger pointing upward in a da Vinci painting.

With her skirts lifted, Erika sat on the commode, her head in her hands, elbows on her knees. How could she manage to come here daily, and work that exhaustingly with him? Her own undisciplined past shamed her now. She saw how frivolous and how easy her training with Magdalena had been. Years of laziness seemed irreversible. How could she—a dilettante with a pretty voice—endure hours onstage in sweltering cloaks and heavy costumes? Valenti warned that she must withstand fifteen piano rehearsals and five orchestral rehearsals before ever performing her first real opera in Italy. How would she last through it all?

How would she keep on doing it for years? As a way of life?

When she returned, the maestro frowned and moved closer to peer at her. “Is there something wrong?”

“I’m afraid I’m feeling very weak.”

“Palpitations?” His uneven black eyebrows flitted upward with interest, and he patted his heart, as if he knew such sensations well.

His solicitous manner made her want to laugh. She wished Christopher had been present to see Valenti at that moment. For the first time she noticed that the silver-haired man kept a collection of antique glass vials on the windowsill beside the piano—bottles of blue juice and pink crystals and noxious-looking liquids.

Maestro Valenti pulled up a chair beside her. “Here.” He showed her a pillbox nestled in his palm, and offered her one of the white tablets contained inside, as if with one swallow, the pill would transform her misery into pastoral serenity.

“Do you feel feverish?” he asked. “A dryness of tongue?”

“I’m only hungry. I had nothing to eat this morning.”

He had his servant bring her grapes and olives and cheese and thick slabs of bread. Valenti watched as she seized a whole cluster of red fruit, popped one chilled grape after another into her mouth, and crushed them with her teeth. “Better?” he asked. He studied the impact on her as if the food had been a prescription.

“Don’t you have other students today?” she asked, strengthening.

“Not on Thursday morning. That is why I had Signor Christopher bring you today.”

The maestro seemed friendlier now that she had experienced her spell of illness with him. “Erika von Kessler.” He repeated her name while staring through the window toward a full-bodied tree.

She tore a shred of bread with her hands and continued to eat while he sketched out a full year’s worth of projects he envisioned for her, seven roles he wanted her to master, in
La sonnambula, Le nozze di Figaro, Nina, Il barbiere di Siviglia, Carmen, La cenerentola, Rigoletto.

She set each olive like a bead on her tongue and chewed, plucking the pit from her mouth before she swallowed. Listening to his panoramic plan of how he intended to direct her work, she sensed that she could depend on him. Valenti was close to her father’s age; his calm and deliberate speech rhythms reminded her of Papa. And she thought:
If I lose hold of his hand, I am lost. But if I stay close to him, he will get me to the place I long to be.