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Chapter 19

 

 

Meretekabinnda's idea of beginning to stage an opera was pretty straightforward. He lined up the principal singers, gestured to Norah Platt to begin, and let them sing out straight through. It was pure oratorio style, with no attempt at moving them around. After lunch I went to the seats in the back of the house and leaned back, enjoying the music. Enjoying as much as I heard of it, anyway. The thought of this Dr. Boddadukti, whoever he was, performing surgery on my one and only body, kept getting between me and the opera.

"Catching some z's?" said a voice from behind me. It was Tricia Madigan.

I smelled her before I straightened up to look at her, a pretty, feminine scent of perfume and girl, mixed with a heavier, sweeter aroma of musk oil. She wasn't alone. The sweet musk scent came from the big black guy she was with. "You don't know Conjur, do you? This is Conjur Kowalski. You two guys ought to be friends, 'cause we're going to be seeing a lot of each other on the tour."

Perplexed, I shook his hand. It was a big one. He could have wrapped it completely around mine, and I was pretty sure that if he'd wanted to he could have squeezed mine into pulp. (Nolly, Nolly, I told myself, you have got to get back into shape.) He was good-looking, too—maple-walnut ice cream colored, with a Roman nose and an Afro hairdo. "Did you say you were going to be on the tour?"

Kowalski laughed, a deep voiced, friendly, we're-all-in-this-together kind of laugh. "That damn Binnda, he don't tell you nothing. We're like your double feature, you know what I'm saying?"

And Tricia explained, phrasing it as politely as she could, "Well, you know, Nolly, not all the funnies go ape for opera. So Binnda thought he ought to put in some extra hooks to build the old box office up. That's us."

I looked from one to the other. "You're going to sing?"

"Aw, no, Nolly. Conjur and I do a kind of act. We started—when was it, Conj? About a month ago? There was a kind of . . . Well, I guess you could call it . . . Well, the closest thing is the funnies had some sort of little convention, as you might say, on the B'kerkyi planet—wow, is that a weird place!—you know, a conference about something or other. Anyway, they're not that different from you and I, hon. They like to have a little fun along with their business, so Binnda brought us put there to play for them. We did our show and they loved it."

I looked from her to Conjur Kowalski. "What kind of show was that?"

She gave me a look of startled amusement. "Aw, you rascal, I don't mean anything bad. Like vaudeville, you know? I did my baton things. Conjur did mostly break-dancing. It's not his main thing, but the old Harlem Globe Trotters don't go over very well—"

"Those dudes are not Globe Trotters," rumbled Kowalski.

"No, 'course not. Only Jonesy must've thought they could do the same thing when he signed them on, only it doesn't work out here. And, hey, Conjur doesn't get along with them too well, do you, hon? When Conjur plays anything he likes to win."

I scowled at her. "Is that what you're going to do in the opera? Baton-twirling and break-dancing?"

"No, no, not in the opera! After the opera, maybe—like, it'll be a kind of a double feature. And anyway we're working up a new act."

"Which we best go practice some," said Conjur Kowalski, looking past me, "because here comes the Man." The Man, in this case, was Sam Shipperton, leading a dark, short, stocky man into the rehearsal hall.

"Sure, hon," Tricia said, getting up. "Anyway, Nolly," she said to me, "we just thought we'd look in on you folks to see how things were going. Come see us when you get a minute, okay?"

"You bet," I said, not really listening to her. Shipperton had brought his charge up to the stage, and Binnda had stopped the rehearsal to introduce him.

"Our other tenor," he said proudly. "Our good friend, Dmitri Arkashvili, who will sing the High Priest of Neptune. And just in time, my dear Dmitri, because we have almost reached your entrance cue."

"I've been digging them up for you as fast as I can," Sam Shipperton complained.

"Of course you have, of course you have. And doing a perfectly splendid job of it, too! Now, if we can resume from bar eighty—oh, dear, now what is it?"

One of the Mother's little bedbugs came skittering up to the piano, reared on its hind legs, and twittered at Binnda, whereupon he threw up his sinuous hands. "Take ten, everyone," he called and hurried over to the skry at the side of the stage. He began to chatter at it, and at once it lit up with the faces of half a dozen aliens, all different.

As I came up toward the stage to get a better look, Norah Platt addressed the bedbug. "What's going on?" she asked.

"I have only been told to inform Meretekabinnda he is needed," it said. Its voice was high and twittering, but what surprised me was that it spoke English at all. ("But of course they speak anything they like," Norah said tolerantly when I turned to her. "They're the Mother's.")

The conversation over the skry seemed agitated. "Is it something about the rehearsal?" I asked Norah.

She was massaging her knuckles. "Oh, who can say?" she said fretfully. "I don't think it's anything to do with us, though—look, there's a J'zeel there, and they don't care about opera. I expect it's some Fifteen Peoples thing, Nolly. It'll sort itself out."

It didn't take long. Binnda snapped something angrily at the screen, the skry went blank, and he came back to us, muttering to himself. He stood in thoughtful silence for a moment, then climbed up on a chair. "Dear friends," he called, "I regret to have to tell you that my presence is required elsewhere, and so we must adjourn our rehearsal for today. I'm sorry. It's this Andromeda thing, you know; some last-minute details to be dealt with before the launch. But I'm sure it will all be straightened out by tomorrow." And then, as the company was stirring itself to leave, he came over to me, Ugolino Malatesta in tow.

"What a nuisance, my dear boy," he twinkled—it was amazing how close he could come to having very nearly human expressions on that wholly nonhuman face. "But I have a suggestion for you. It's been quite a long time since you sang in public, hasn't it? And one's skills need brightening after a long layoff? Well, dear Ugolino never seems to tire, and he's offered to coach you."

I blinked at him. "Coach me?"

"Oh, not that you need it, really—but it has been years, after all, and Ugolino is so good at technique. So if you won't take it amiss . . ."

What he said made perfect sense. I told him, "I won't take it amiss. I'll appreciate all the help I can get."

"Wonderful! And now"—he made a humorous grimace—"I'm off to see if I can get the Ossps and the J'zeel to agree on a launch time!"

 

Malatesta explained that his own home was pretty far away, and so we'd do better to have our first session in my own. In slow, careful, accented English, he said that, after all, the way to get started was to start, and no time was better than now. I had no objection at all.

As we passed through Execution Square I averted my eyes from the horrid scene. This time it wasn't deserted. There were six or eight people standing around, gazing at it curiously, like rubberneckers at a car crash. Malatesta muttered something I couldn't understand, but I didn't think it mattered. He was making the sign to ward off the evil eye, and I didn't think he was talking to me. Actually, I didn't comprehend very much at all of what he said to me for the first little while, because I made the mistake of letting him know I understood a little Italian, and that was all he needed. English vanished from his repertory. All future conversations were in Italian, and what I didn't grasp I had to get along without.

Once inside my house he got right to work. The language problem was small; there was no chitchat. He was a businesslike and hardworking teacher.

I was glad of his impersonal attitude. I would not have known how to take him if he had tried intimacy. When I looked at Malatesta, what I saw was myself. There was nothing effeminate about him; he didn't give off that aura of sexual interest that I sometimes got from gays. When we were working, which was almost all of that long, hard five-hour first session, he wasn't a person at all. He was a teaching machine. He stood me before my mirror and had me watch my mouth move, peer at the vibrations of my Adam's apple, pour out the vowels on the scale: "Ah ah ah ah ah ah ah. Ee ee ee ee ee ee ee . . ." endlessly up and down the full span of my register. And always instruction. "You must sing," Malatesta instructed, "off the top of your voice. It is the second most important rule of singing, that."

And all the other rules followed. Never shout. (Certainly not when I was singing, for that was a horrid, wolfish sound; but never at any other time, either, because that strained the vocal cords.) Keep the throat always warm. (If I were to visit the planet of the Quihigs, for example, I must always wear a natural wool scarf around my neck, always, because the Quihigs lived on a world of frequent chill drafts.) Get plenty of sleep. (A tired voice was a bad voice.) Always start the day's vocalizing in the middle register—it is time enough to reach for the upper and lower notes when the voice is warm, not before. Swallow at least four ounces of heavy cream, better still olive oil (but I must secure my own supplies of olive oil, he could not spare any of his) before each performance. Never press the voice when it is not right; it is better to cancel a performance than to give a bad one. Do not smoke! (Yes, he admitted, even that young fellow Caruso enjoyed an occasional cigar—one had heard his records, of course—but see what happened to Caruso, dead of throat cancer in his prime.) And, above all, to breathe one must always be sure to open up the bottom of one's throat, because that (at last) was Rule Number One.

And as I was singing my scales Malatesta was walking around me, studying my posture, watching my eyes to see if I was straining. He touched me all over with his papery hands, touched the breastbone, the cheekbones, the larynx, the lips—he even reached into my mouth and placed a feathery-light fingertip on my front teeth to feel if I was getting maximum reinforcement from the hard resonators in the skull. "It cannot all come from the throat, but," he instructed, "you must use your sounding boards to make the tone come out full and pure, have you understood?"

I had understood. I was even grateful. I was beginning to feel like a singer again.

I hardly remembered I was on Narabedla.

If there was anything wrong with Malatesta as a coach, it was only that some of his ideas seemed a few centuries out of date. I don't mean his sense of anatomy or his recipes for voice production. They were as good as any I had ever heard, in all my early years of teaching and practice. It was his ideas on performance that sounded peculiar. He insisted that I fill my lungs at every chance; that I take in all the air I could, so that I could release it in song with ease and comfort. That part was all right; but Malatesta was never satisfied unless he could actually hear me gasp from all the way across the room. I tried to object to that. Modern audiences, I told him, did not like to hear their singers suck air, no matter what it had been like in 1767. He laughed at me. "Modern!" he jeered. "But these audiences here, they are completely primitive! They are not in the least modern, those ones!"

How noisily the air entered my lungs, he insisted, did not matter at all. What was important was how it sounded when it came out—smooth, effortless, brilliant, with no change in quality from the bottom of my range to the tricky As and even Bs at the top.

Conversation wasn't difficult as long as he stuck to singing and talking about singing. That much Italian vocabulary had stayed with me. It was harder when we took a break and I got up the nerve to ask him about his, ah, condition.

He didn't take offense. He seemed to think it was perfectly normal to discuss his castration; only he would only do it in his native language. He was willing to speak fairly slowly, with good diction and using simple grammatical forms; even so, when he said, "Ogn'anno, quattro mille ragazzi di dodici anni"—he made a scissoring gesture with two fingers of his right hand—"tsit, tsit, e dopo sono tutti castrati come me," I had to rehearse it for a moment before I understood he was telling me that four thousand boys got gelded every year. Then, when I must have flinched, he grinned. "Hai paura, tu?"

He was asking if the idea scared me. It did, though I didn't tell him why I had such a personal interest in it. I asked, "Ma, perche?"

He shrugged. "La chiesa l'ha detto, hai capito?" And when I frowned, he repeated, "La chiesa." And then, making a sign of the cross, "Il Bibolo."

"Ah," I said. "The Bible." It took a while, because my operatic Italian was not up to theological discussions, but it developed that what he was trying to tell me was that the purpose of this wholesale gelding was religious. It seemed there was an injunction in the Bible that forbade women singing in church, so the only adult sopranos they could have in their eighteenth-century choirs had to be manufactured. Boys were available, yes. But boys did not have the lung capacity, the muscles, the breath reserve of a grown-up. So they cut the ducts to the testicles to save the voices, and the choirmasters, piously deploring the horrid practice of child castration, never hesitated to employ the results.

Later on I tried to check up on what Malatesta had told me. It wasn't easy to find the right verse in the Bible. For that matter, it wasn't easy to find a Bible on Narabedla, until I thought to borrow one from Floyd Morcher; but I finally did locate it. I Corinthians 14-34. The key sentence was, "Let your women keep silence in the churches."

Four thousand a year . . . Narabedla suddenly did not seem so bad.

 

For five hours I tried to please him. Then I begged for rest. "Ma, che cosa adesso?" he demanded.

I said apologetically, "I'm tired. It's difficult, after all this time."

He stared at me in amazement. "You call this difficult? But if you could only know! As a child at the Conservatory Sant'Onofrio I each morning must rise two hours before the sun to work. All day to work! To sing, study, work till eight o'clock in the night—it is in that way that one becomes a truly skilled singer!"

I said humbly, "But, maestro, I have not practiced in many years."

I thought he was pleased at the "maestro." He sniffed, but then he said, "Then, all right. Now! Let us have a simple drink together, and then I will leave you for this first lesson. Camerriere!" One of the Kekketies popped out of the kitchen, listened to Malatesta's quick order, in Italian so rapid-fire I could catch none of it, and returned in a moment with cups of hot, honey-sweet wine.

 

And all this time, five long hours of it, I had hardly remembered that I was on Narabedla, or that a few yards from my door a hideous monster was ponderously thrusting its fangs into the throat of a human being, or that I was to undergo surgery soon, or that Marlene Abramson and Irene Madigan, back on Earth, were endangered and worried.

I was singing.

Even Malatesta no longer seemed like a wretched victim of a barbarous mutilation. He was simply a colleague. He took as much pleasure as I did in the task of getting me ready to sing again. When he sank back, inhaling the steam from the cup, tasting it slowly and pleasurably, smiling at me out of those old, shrewd eyes—he was not only my maestro, he was very close to being my friend.

By the second glass he was boasting of his own exploits. He had studied with the great Farinelli; he had sung leads in Venice, Naples, and Vienna, in operas by Sarti, Galuppi, and Paisiello. (To him, Mozart was one of the new kids on the block. He hadn't been born until Malatesta's career was long over.) But when I tried to get him to tell me how he had come to Narabedla he suddenly became unable to understand me. To change the subject he went so far as to try a little English on me: "Is good, this wine, Knoll-a-wood, is that not true? And with the ladies is also very good, you understand?"

I nodded appreciatively to show that I understood, although in fact I didn't. "It is too bad," I said, as delicately as I could in the Italian that was only slowly coming back to me, "that such opportunities do not arise for you."

He gazed at me indignantly. His comprehension had cleared up as though by magic. "But for why should such opportunity not arise? Can I not make the love?"

I goggled at him.

"No, in truth!" he insisted. "One retains the essential instrument, is that not so? To become a father, all right, I agree, that cannot be, but to penetrate the charming parts of some fine woman, yes, certainly! One does so quite often, my dear Knoll-a-wood, with many beautiful ladies, not excluding the extremely charming Madam Norah."

Norah Platt? My eyes bulged. He gazed at me with a perplexed expression. Then he understood. Or remembered. "Ah, Knoll-a-wood," he cried. "But you are the one who—You suffered the malady which—Even though you possess the small jewels—But not to be able . . ." His voice trailed off and he gazed mournfully at me. "Ah, my poor little man," he whispered, and set down his empty glass, and patted me on the shoulder in the manner of somebody who is commiserating for a misfortune so terrible that it cannot be named aloud, and left.

And I was back in Narabedla, with all my worries, fears, and angers intact enough to make that night, too, one that was short on sleep.

 

 

 

 

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