Tenor of Love - Hardcover

Mary Di Michele

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0670044636 ISBN 13: 9780670044634

Publisher: VIKING CANADA (AHC), 2005

Synopsis

A NOVEL OF PASSION AND BETRAYAL, ART AND AMBITION BASED ON THE LIFE OF ONE OF THE GREATEST OPERA SINGERS OF ALL TIME
One summer day in 1897, a young singer, Enrico Caruso, arrives at the home of the Giachetti family. He has come to Livorno to sing on the summer stage with Ada Giachetti, a famous and beautiful soprano. Ada's mother offers him a spare room, and before Ada herself has a chance to meet the unknown tenor, her younger sister, Rina, arrives home from the market and falls fatefully in love.
With the help of singing lessons from Ada, Caruso wins the leading role in Puccini's new opera La Bohème. Although Caruso loves Rina, it is Ada he adores, and they soon become lovers. Heartbroken, Rina becomes an opera singer too, hoping to take her sister's place. For decades, the two sisters are locked in a struggle to be the star on Caruso's stage and in his bed, while Caruso's voice grows more and more unimaginably beautiful.
But as his relations with the two sisters break down in scandal and tragedy, the now world-famous Caruso builds a new life for himself as the star of the Metropolitan Opera in New York. There, far from the drama and passion of Caruso's Tuscan life, a shy young American woman will win his heart and, taking the greatest leap of faith of all, supplant Ada and Rina as his one true love.

About this title

About the Author

Mary Di Michele was born in Italy and raised in Canada. She is the author of a previous novel, Under My Skin, a Harper's Magazine Notable Book, and eight books of poetry. She is a professor in the English Department of Concordia University in Montreal, Canada, where she lives.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Chapter One: Little Sister

In quella parte del libro de la mia memoria dinanzi a la quale poco si potrebbe leggere, si torva una rubrica la quale dice: Incipit vita nova.

In that part of the book of my memory before which little can be deciphered, there is a rubric that reads: Here the new life begins.

-- DANTE, LA VITA NUOVA

1

Every summer my family would escape the heat and the crowds of Firenze and move to Livorno where we had an apartment on the uppermost floor of a building on Viale Regina Margarita. Poplars shaded our home there, singing sotto voce in the marine breezes. The scent of pinewood, tamarisk, and lime trees blended with the salt in the air.

It was early in July, nearly noon, when a young man presented himself at the door. In 1897 I was barely seventeen; I was sixteen and counting the days. The poplars shone so brightly that morning they were themselves green suns. Their leaves shivered in the heat and wind, the light in them rippled. The foliage seemed to move in waves so the street became a high sea, a sea not blue like the Ligurian, but verdant.

Only Mamma was home when he knocked. He came with a letter of introduction from Leopoldo Mugnone, the Sicilian conductor and composer who had helped launch my sister Ada's singing career. When the young Enrico Caruso asked Mamma if she could recommend a pensione for him to stay, she felt sorry for him and offered our spare room to this stranger carrying his things in a cardboard suitcase.

That morning Ada was rehearsing at the Goldini, while I was shopping at the farmers' market. Mamma had a craving for artichokes and I had gone to fetch some. I filled a sack with those thorny green roses. The prickles are on the head, surrounding the heart, and the choke is at the center. Roses don't threaten their own beauty; they keep their thorns on the stem. The artichoke is not a mistress, but a wife swathed in a chastity belt. Mother had been planning to stuff and stew the artichokes for dinner, but the tenor's unexpected arrival changed all that.

It must have been stepping out of the brightness of the afternoon and into the cool dimness of the house that made everything seem so dark, so altered. I smelled him before I saw him. His scent was a murky music composed of musk and wood, and yes, also some kitchen smells. It was more than the slick air of his brilliantine and the must of stale clothes that I sensed. It was the odor of cooking oil and of Sicilian olives spiced with garlic and chilies. It was a smell of eating in bed, not the invalid's, but the lover's.

The bag of artichokes dropped out of my hands. The loose heads rolled freely, bloodlessly, as if from the clean execution of the guillotine. I scrambled after them, gathering them up in my skirt.

"Signorina." At the sound of his voice I looked up and it was then I saw him for the first time, the view of his face from below. I was on my knees. He was smiling, and although he had already begun to laugh, from the angle that I saw him his face seemed grave and his eyes were obscured by deep shadows.

"Signorina," he repeated, and when he spoke the syllables resonated as if I were being called to worship by a golden bell. I say worship, but the voice had body, not just spirit. Maybe I had tasted something like it; maybe it was like cream, cream when it is whipped, the volume filled with sweetness. I felt a weakness in my stomach and in my knees. I felt a fluttering in my knickers as if a moth, asleep for sixteen years, had suddenly burst through its cocoon and was beating its wings against my bottom.

"Mamma" was the only word that escaped my lips. It was the voice of a doll you have to shake to make her talk.

I went running into the kitchen, the artichokes bunched up in my skirt, not aware that I was exposing myself. He followed closely. I turned and saw his grin and that his eyes were fixed on the lace of my bloomers. I dropped the artichokes again and that was the end of having them for dinner.

To thank us for our hospitality, the napoletano insisted on taking us all out for dinner. He used the money the theater had advanced to him for lodging. We went to a trattoria nearby, nothing fancy, but where the food was always good.

The young man, Enrico Caruso, seated himself between Ada and me, but his chair was turned towards her and his thin frame angled her way. As soon as he saw Ada he seemed to forget me, and I began to watch as if from offstage, as if from the wings.

We were seated in the patio garden, so Ada was careful to stay in the shade of the awning. The tenor was a thin man, as dark as Ada was fair. His darkness might have affected an air of melancholy, but his eyes, his mouth, were mobile with lines of laughter. Laughter was a kind of light in his face; it shone even in the shade. I watched him watching her and tried to see what drew him to her. What was her allure? At twenty-four, Ada was a woman with a body ripe from having given birth the year before. Her complexion was creamy white, moist and glowing. She wore her hair pinned up at the back and combed away from her pale face, framed and softened by wispy curling tendrils. Her hair was the ashen color of wheat after the fields have been razed. Her eyes were chameleons; at times they were the color of seawater in the shallows where yellow sand makes it look green as a pasture, at other times they were the blue of ocean as on the horizon between sea and sky. Her eyes were green that day. In spite of the Neapolitan's gawking at her, Ada studied the menu as if unaware of his attention. You couldn't see her eyes then, just the eyelids, so finely veined they seemed purple, and the thick dusky lashes.

Mother ordered a simple dish, spaghetti alla marinara, and I chose what she chose, but Ada ordered the most expensive dish on the menu, vitello, stewed in Marsala and served in a cream sauce, and then dessert.

Ada led the conversation. "Verdi is divine, but he's old now, his music is getting tired. While this new composer, this Puccini, well, for me, he is a god among gods. His melodies make me throb when I sing them." She stretched out her white neck and touched it as she spoke as if to point to where the arias had pushed her heart into her throat. Ada was generous to this southern young man with her opinions, spreading out the wings of her beauty and her growing reputation. Ada already saw herself as a diva.

"Mugnone praised your beauty and your singing, signora. When the maestro showed me your photo, he wagged his finger at me and warned me not to fall in love with you."

"Do you think it's a good likeness?"

"If I may say so without offense, signora -- it pales. Your complexion requires a portrait artist -- nothing less than an artist will do to capture it."

"And how is that scoundrel? Does he miss me?"

"Miss you? Signora, they all pine for you, from the musicians to the stagehands. They say there is nobody like you! My poor head has been filled with visions of your beauty."

Miss her, I wished that we could miss her a little. What chance would I have with this man when my sister had him enthralled even before he met her?

Caruso took a sip of his wine, as well as a few sips of mineral water, and then continued with his Sicilian story. "Yes, Mugnone is a good and generous man. When the company closed for the season, he knew I needed to keep working and got this summer engagement in Livorno for me. But, let me tell you, I had quite a trial by fire on his stage.

"It's true that I like a little wine, but I never allow myself to get drunk. Our Neapolitan wines are light, like water. I can drink a couple of glasses and I'm refreshed, relaxed, ready to perform. But those Sicilian wines! They're closer to liquor than table wine. By the time I realized this I was drunk, and on my usual two tumblers with dinner.

"Lucia di Lammermoor was the production that night. Luckily the tipsy man knows no fear, but when I went to sing my role as Edgardo, I slurred the lines: 'sorte dalla Scozia' sounded like 'volpe dalla Scozia.' I was jeered off the stage. After that I was ready to quit, to leave Sicily forever. Mugnone brought in another tenor to take my place. But, imagine this, the audience wouldn't accept a substitute, and he had to call me back because they kept shouting for the little drunken singer; they kept calling for me as the 'fox of Scotland.'

When the waiter came round to our table to pour more wine for us, the young tenor placed his hand over his glass and shook his head. With a wide smile, he said, "No, grazie."

2

Living with my sister was like being blinded by sunlight. Before Ada's brilliance, that dizzy dancing of light on water, I felt dimmed. But I can't say I always minded when the intensity made me, for the sake of so much pleasure, squint. Ada was always the primary light, the dazzling one. The best I could do was to reflect her. Like the day moon, flattened, almost invisible in the depth of blue sky; the white of my face and the white of the fair-weather clouds were the same. My beauty was in harmonizing. Who, what man, would ever notice that? Perhaps someday a poet, dreamily looking up, might spot me. But most men were not poets, so I remained, because of my sister, a seventeen-year-old spinster.

Though Ada was now a married woman and a mother, she had abandoned her family to stay with us in Livorno. Nominally, it was just for the season: "My career demands it," Ada proclaimed. After they had married, Gino, her husband, whom she had met on the operatic stage, gave up his singing to work in the bank. But Ada wasn't prepared to give anything up; she kept performing publicly even when her pregnant belly began to show. One evening, from my seat in the audience, I saw the baby kick during an aria. I'm certain that if there had been a single birth staged among all those deaths in grand opera, my sister might have shown the audience the real thing.

Ada left her son to be the leading lady with the local opera company. When wet nurses can be hired for a few soldini, a woman with a purse needn't be tied down; she could keep her own big breasts firmly tucked inside her corset. If the child wanted his mother, he would have had to go to the opera to catch her dying as Verdi's Violetta or Puccini's Mimì on the stage of the Teatro Goldini. The poor child, his mother was lost to him. It was drama -- it was role-playing that Ada really loved. The role of mamma that was not sung was not for her.

Nobody ever overlooked Ada, least of all the young Neapolitan tenor, Rico, as he urged us to call him. It was closer to his baptismal name, Errico. But "Enrico" sounded more like the name of a star, so he had changed it. Our aspiring star, Rico, became solemn when Ada ("sleepyhead," she called herself!) walked in, all primped and powdered as if even the family dining room were a stage set to showcase her beauty. Ada expected to be looked at; she rarely deigned to look at you. She kept her eyes lowered. They were heavily lidded, obscured by long lashes darkened with castor oil to make them seem even longer. Even as she kissed Papa good morning and sat beside him, her eyes stayed half closed, as if she were still in a dream -- a dream about herself.

Even though Ada hardly glanced Rico's way, as soon as she made her entrance, Signor Napoli's mouth would drop open -- no longer to eat, but to gape. Though he had been joking while tearing thick slices of bread, soaking the crusty chunks in his bowl of steaming coffee and milk, slurping up heaping spoonfuls, the frothy milk forming a white scum on his black mustache, though he had been animated and partaking of the meal while talking to me or Papa, it all stopped then so that he could watch and listen to Ada. Rico would hang on to her every gesture; he seemed to be reading her desperately, as a singer might study an unfamiliar score, a new libretto, hoping for a starring role for himself. But when I spoke of Rico to Ada, she always dismissed him as the "little man, the pipsqueak."

"Adina, adetta, adetina, adella, adellina ..." Every morning I had to listen to my father's variations on my sister's name, that unending string of endearments. There weren't enough syllables, not enough diminutives, in our language, not nearly enough variety in our phonetics, to express his delight in once again finding his firstborn child at the breakfast table.

"Il sole si siede alla nostra tavola." The sun, the sun was sitting to table with us! Such extravagant phrases, yet my father was not a cavalier in the royal guards, but a civil servant in the national treasury. Still, his eyes were a blue so bright that when they turned to look at you it was like being placed in the limelight.

"Good morning, Papa."

"Good morning, Rina," he would answer. Apparently my name in itself was good enough for me.

For hours I have watched a man stroking a cat with such tenderness when that same man would disdain even to offer the lightest touch to his companion, his so-called lover. How Ada behaved at breakfast reminds me of that. It was on Papa that she lavished all her attention. She spoiled the older man in front of the young one. She catered to Papa's every need, as if he were the child: tucking in the napkin around his neck for him, offering to cool the hot sop of his breakfast, blowing on the spoon, her full lips puckered.

How a daughter indulges her father, how a lover strokes a cat, these are thinly coded signs, easily read. I was barely seventeen, but compared to Rico, I thought myself not the half as naive. At least not when it came to my sister.

"Would you like a little more hot milk in your coffee, Papa, or how about another sweet bun?" Ada coaxed.

Mother had already left for mass. We never saw her first thing in the morning, but we always found evidence of her attention in the table laid out for us with fresh bread and milk. I would make the espresso. My mother was a saint, and I wanted to be like her because I loved her. I was not myself so devout. I couldn't get up at first light to accompany her to church. But there were masses later in the morning on Sundays; I would go with her then. While Mamma practiced her faith daily, praying for hours on her knees, first at mass, then performing her novenas, I was a weekend Catholic.

Mamma wouldn't be back until we had finished eating, and then, even though past satiety, I would sit with her and drink more coffee while she broke her Communion fast. When she was done, we would clear the table together. I was my mother's daughter while Ada was my father's; that's how it worked in our family. My mother loved the Son of God, Gesu Cristo, while my father loved his mistress, Teresa.

Praise had been the right first note to strike with Ada, but Rico kept hitting all the wrong ones. None of us had ever heard him sing before. So when they started rehearsals, and our tenor sang at half voice, Ada feared she was doomed to play with a nobody. She despised him.

"He's no Scottish fox, he's a Neapolitan mouse, a thin-lipped rodent with no voice, with no range!" she complained.

Rico's singing practice was to save his voice for performances before an audience; at rehearsals he didn't use his full powers, but this was not generally known in the company. The impresario kept this secret because it was a privilege he feared that others might demand. How was he ever to judge the readiness of the production if they all decided to follow this Neapolitan's example?

So Ada was not impressed by the southern tenor.

"This, this is what you offer me as a leading man, th...

Edition details

• Publisher: VIKING CANADA (AHC)
• Publication date: 2005
• ISBN 10: 0670044636
• ISBN 13: 9780670044634
• Binding: Hardcover
• Language: English
• Edition number: 1