Narabedla Ltd (22 page)

All opera stories are pretty dumb, but
Idomeneo
is a little dumber than most.

From the point of view of any baritone it has one glaring fault—there’s no baritone role in it—so I suppose it’s possible that I could be a little prejudiced. I think not, though. The title role is the old king, Idomeneo, sung by the old tenor, Canduccio. Canduccio’s pet hate, the pale, pretty little man named Malatesta, sang the role of the king’s son, Idamante, and Eloise Gatt, one of the sopranos, was Idamante’s girlfriend.

The story is, frankly, too silly to discuss. But on the other hand, the story doesn’t really matter, because the music is, well, Mozart. Even sight-reading on a first run-through, it was—well—beautiful. Eloise Gatt had a really sweet soprano, with that mellow cantabile swinging-along sound that goes so well in Mozart, and Malatesta …

When Malatesta sang his first lines a shock went through me. I’d never heard a castrato sing before.

The part Malatesta was singing was written for a castrato in the first place. Of course, I’d never heard it sung that way. Due to the twentieth-century shortage of that particular type of performer, I couldn’t have. The shortage hadn’t begun in the twentieth century. Mozaft himself had had to rescore the part for a tenor after the first production, because even in Mozart’s time it was hard to find a singer who’d let his testicles be cut off to keep his golden boy’s voice all through his life, and anyway after the first performance it was mostly given by amateur companies of the nobility. All of whom were determined to keep their gender equipment intact.

But Binnda wanted to give it as written, and fortunately he had Ugolino Malatesta on hand to do it.

It was pretty funny, when you stopped to think about it, to have Malatesta singing the part of anybody’s son. Malatesta was the only human on Narabedla older than Norah Platt. He spoke six languages, English as good as my own—when he was willing to use it. He generally wasn’t. He was smooth-skinned and spry and his voice was beautiful, and the single thing that gave away his age—not counting that chopping the testicles off young boys with beautiful voices had been out of style for a couple of centuries—was that he really didn’t want to make the effort to speak in anything but his native Italian.

But his voice! It was a wonder. It wasn’t just a soprano.

He could pull out of those old pipes a perfectly pure high C, fit for any pretty young coloratura, but the timbre was not like that of any woman who ever lived. It was unearthly. It was colder than a woman’s voice, more majestic, more detached. It wasn’t a boy’s voice, either, because no boy soprano had ever had that much lung power. The top of his range was what I would have called a falsetto in any intact male singer—but there was nothing false about it in Malatesta—and there it had no sex at all. It had nothing to do with Mimi or Cio-Cio-San. It was simply a limpid, quicksilver miracle.

Malatesta knocked me out. If mumps had given me that voice, instead of simply wrecking my baritone, I might have learned to reconcile myself to the mumps … almost.

The other singers were all superb, too. The two sopranos, the gaunt, dark Electra and the plump, pretty little Ilia, could have sung in any hall on Earth. When we came to the Neptune, sung by the balding redheaded man, I suddenly realized where I’d seen him before. Eamon McGuire. Of course! It had been in Santa Fe, at the open-air opera. McGuire had sung the Commendatore in
Don Giovanni.
A long time ago, when I was still turning up at rehearsals in the hope of a last-minute fill-in, I’d gone backstage to ingratiate myself with him on the chance that, some day, I might sing the Don opposite him. Then he had dropped out of sight, and for twenty years or so he had from time to time been the subject of one of those whatever-became-of sessions. Drank himself to death, most people thought.

But now I knew what he had drunk himself to.

The second tenor part was the silent gray man who had complained about the lack of brown sugar, Floyd Morcher. I didn’t have much trouble committing his name to memory because during the break he walked over to me and silently pressed a card into my hand. He turned away without waiting for me to read it. He didn’t seem to welcome conversation.

The card said:

Jesus can help you even here.

I have services every Sabbath.

At the bottom he had signed his name. I stared after him, wondering exactly what kind of help he was offering. I hadn’t forgotten there were flaws in this Paradise. I wondered what Morcher thought of people who thought a good way to punish somebody was to have him eaten alive, in public, and run the whole terrible event in slow-motion film so that it would
last?

From time to time we had an audience. They came and went, human and alien. I saw Barak—well, I smelled him before I saw him, but when I looked up there he was, burping furiously at an alien that looked like a shrimp. I saw Tricia Madigan briefly, with that huge, skinny black man I’d seen her with in the bar. He was so tall that out of the corner of my eye I’d taken him for one of the skinny, biped aliens with the pine-needle Mohawks. But when I looked closer he was human enough, and not that big—he was over seven feet, but the aliens were sometimes double that. Tricia and he watched for ten minutes or so, then Tricia blew me a friendly kiss and they went out. Half a dozen aliens drifted in to watch, and sometimes their chattering (or hissing or screeching) to each other caused Binnda to turn and wave his arm at them reprovingly. One of them was one of those bedbug things of the Mother’s, the rest were only vaguely familiar— especially one of the ones that hung from the tree.

After an hour Binnda declared a break. The singers went off for tipple of their own—the soprano had said something revolting about a teaspoonful of olive oil—and Norah Platt offered me a cup of tea.

“Going well, isn’t it?” she offered.

“I suppose so. Norah? I’ve been wondering about something. How come you’re playing for us when we could have Purry do a full orchestral accompaniment?”

All I had really meant by that was that I would have liked having Purry present—he was about the closest thing I had to a friend in that place. I had hurt her feelings. She said with indignation, “Truly, Knollwood, would you actually prefer that
thing
to a real, live artist? I know I’ve played a few clinkers”—I restrained myself from agreeing—“and I’m sorry for that. The old arthritis, I’m afraid. It’s rather awful today in the knuckles and the neck. And, of course, the joints. But music isn’t just
technique.
It’s also
feeling,
and how can one get that from a Purry?”

“Don’t worry, my boy,” said Binnda, coming up from behind me. “We’ll have the full orchestra for the dress rehearsal, this is just to get us together for a preliminary run-through. How did you like Malatesta? Simply superb voice! You don’t hear that kind of thing at the Met or Covent Garden these days, do you? And now, let’s get on to the second act.”

And we did, and as Norah was cueing the Idamante for his first aria, I looked back at the dozen or so beings milling around in the seats, tanks, and perches. Most of them were weirdos, but a couple were human, and one of the humans was Woody Calderon.

When Binnda declared a lunch break I jumped down from the stage and grabbed Woody before he could get away.

He looked as cheerfully inept as ever as he pumped my hand. “Gee, Nolly, it’s great to see you! And singing, they tell me! That’s wonderful! Soon as you get over that little cold you’ve got, or whatever it is.” He grinned apologetically at me. Then he said, “I heard you were here. Gosh. I hope it wasn’t because of me or anything like that.”

What I would have said to that I don’t know, because what can you say to a Woody Calderon? Binnda came bustling up behind us and saved me the necessity. “Why, Woody,” he called genially, “you’re back from the Xseni planet, I see? I hear you were a great success! Join us for lunch? I’ve got a simple collation laid out in the courtyard.”

“Oh, boy,” Calderon said happily. “Come on, Nolly! You don’t want to miss this!”

When we got outside I saw why. Meretekabinnda’s idea of a simple collation was copied closely, I was sure, from the last opera gala he had sneaked into. It was an open-air luncheon, in an enclosed courtyard. The yard was planted like an English garden. White-linened tables were spread with canapés, fresh fruit, cut-glass bowls of reddish liquid with ice floating in it—“Nothing alcoholic, dear boy,” Binnda rasped to me, “for we do have work this afternoon, don’t we?”—and those slim, tiny Oriental-looking Kekkety servants hovering around to fill a fresh plate or whisk away a used one.

“Wow!” Woody Calderon grinned. “Smoked oysters!” They were, on top of Ritz crackers, held in place by Philadelphia brand cream cheese that had been tinted pink with paprika; there was also Beluga caviar, some other kind of crackers with more cream cheese, this time green and tasting of chives, with a little anchovy strip laid across each one, and cold shrimp that had not come out of a can, and five or six kinds of cheeses, Gouda and Edam and Brie and Port Salut and ripe, moldy Stilton. It wasn’t exactly a lunch, but the rest of the cast gobbled it up, and so did Meretekabinnda.

When Woody had filled his plate I took him aside. There was a bench at the far end of the courtyard, under a flowering peach tree. I sat him down in it and said, “I’ve got an important question for you. Do you want to stay here?”

He choked on a macadamia nut. “Stay here? What do you mean, Nolly? We signed a contract!”

“
I
didn’t! I was kidnapped.”

“Gee, Nolly,” he said remorsefully, “I heard something about that. I’m sorry. I honestly can’t help thinking that it’s kind of my fault, in a way. But, you know, this isn’t so bad, is it? I mean, we’ve got work, we’ve got—”

I didn’t want to hear the standard litany. “I want to go home!”

He stared at me through his Woody Allen glasses, honestly perplexed. “Why, Nolly?”

“We’ve been kidnapped, for Christ’s sake! Isn’t that reason enough?”

“Well, sure, there’s that,” he said reasonably, “but look at the good side. There’s no I.R.S. here, you know. Nobody hassles me. It’s not like back home, where nobody knew I was alive except the bill collectors and the critics that hated me.”

I stopped for a minute, because an idea had just occurred to me. “Wait a minute,” I said.

“Wait for what?” he asked defensively.

“The critics! I just thought of something. You really did get some lousy notices, didn’t you? And suddenly I begin to suspect I know why.”

“Well,” he began, “you know how it is with critics.”

I shook my head. “You know what I think? I think Henry Davidson-Jones got to some of those critics.”

His jaw dropped. He forgot to swallow the latest smoked oyster.

“Figure it out for yourself, Woody.” I was getting excited. “It makes sense. Davidson-Jones wants artists for Narabedla. Good ones—I mean, were you listening to those people today? They could’ve been stars back home! But stars have reputations, and if they’ve got reputations someone’s going to miss them when they just disappear. Oh, sure, they cover it up—there was that fake plane crash for you. But if a lot of
famous
musicians all got wasted in a year, there’d be talk. He doesn’t want talk.”

Woody was looking at me with those unhappy, gentle sheep’s eyes, trying to follow what I was saying. “He wouldn’t do anything like that! Would he?”

“Wouldn’t he? All he has to do is keep you from getting famous. That’s easy; he gets to the people who make reputations. The critics.”

“He couldn’t.”

“Of course he could,” I said firmly, because the longer I talked the surer I became that I was right. “He could do it easily. He doesn’t have to bribe them or anything, Woody, he’s
Henry Davidson-Jones.
He says to one of them, ‘Pity about poor Calderon, did you hear that sour note in the adagio?’ and to another one, ‘Well, young Calderon’s playing a little better tonight, but you should have heard him last week in Phoenix.
Pathetic.’
And what critic is going to argue with the guy who underwrites the benefits and gives the prizes and pays for the scholarships?”

“Oh, my God,” Woody moaned.

“So you don’t owe him a thing,” I finished.

“God,” he repeated. I had him convinced then. I was sure of it.

But then I could feel him slipping away. He took another tiny sandwich and munched on it, thinking. “Well, maybe that’s true,” he said, “but it doesn’t change anything, does it?”

“What do you mean, it doesn’t change anything?”

“No,really,” he insisted, beginning to get stubborn. “I’ve still got a good deal here. I don’t have to do fry-chef work at McDonald’s when I don’t have an engagement, because Mr. Shipperton gets me all the engagements I can handle. And they pay in real money, you know. I’ve got a Swiss bank account, just like I was some big drug dealer! And— well,
listen,”
he said, beginning to glow, “you know what? There’s a 1753 Guamerius cello that’s coming up for auction at Sotheby’s pretty soon. I don’t have enough nearly to pay for any of those big old instruments, of course, but I’ve got the catalogue; this one’s been pretty well messed up and a lot restored, and it might go for under a hundred thousand, and Mr. Shipperton says they’ll advance me the price and I can pay back as I earn. I mean, a
Guarnerius,
Nolly! Mr. Shipperton says the folks here would like to see one anyway. Mr. Shipperton says if I want to put a bid in he’ll have somebody cover the auction. Mr. Shipperton says—”

“Mr. Shipperton says ‘Jump,’” I said bitterly, “and all you say is, ‘How high?’”

He stopped chewing and looked at me. His eyes were hurt. “You don’t have to take that attitude, Nolly.”

“There’s nothing wrong with
my
attitude. What’s the use of owning an expensive cello if nobody hears you play it?” 

“I’ll hear me! About a million Aiurdi and J’zeels and all those’ll hear me.”

“I’m talking about human audiences. Back in the U.S.A., where you belong.”

“Well, see, Nolly,” he said, “when I was back in the U.S.A. I didn’t have any of those big audiences, did I? Now I do, and they’re pretty nice people.”