Pescara Tales Read online

  When the company arrived, the Pescara folk went into a frenzy of expectation. The alien singers were admired along the streets for their gestures, their mannered walk, their clothing, their postures and expressions. But the person on whom all attention converged was Violetta Kutufà.

  She wore a kind of dark jacket edged with fur and fastened by gold aiguillettes, and on her head sat a species of toque all in fur, worn tilted slightly to one side. She walked about the town independently and with an assured pace, entered shops, dealt disdainfully with the shop-keepers, complained about the mediocrity of their goods and left without having bought, humming unconcernedly to herself.

  Along the streets and in the squares and on all walls great handbills announced the imminent performance of The Countess of Amalfi, and the name Violetta Kutufà radiated everywhere in vermilion letters. The souls of the Pescarans were afire.

  The awaited night arrived.

  The theatre was in a ward of the superseded military hospital, an old Bourbonic pile at one end of the town, not far from the marina. The ward was low, narrow and long, somewhat like a wide corridor. The stage of wood and painted paper-scenery rose a few palm-breadths above the ground; against the major walls, and corresponding to the theatre’s gallery, were stands constructed of boards and tables covered with tricolour flags and decorated with festoons; the drop curtain, a masterpiece by Cucuzzitto son of Cucuzzitto, had represented on it Tragedy, Comedy and Music like the three fluttering Graces entangled together over a battlemented bridge beneath which flowed Pescara’s blue stream; chairs borrowed from churches occupied a space in the middle that corresponded to the front stalls; benches from schools made up the rest of the seating behind them.

  Towards seven the communal orchestra began to play in the square; then, still playing, it made a circuit of the town, ending at the theatre. The boisterous march uplifted all souls in its passage. The women, dressed in their finest silks, thrilled with impatience. The hall filled quickly.

  The twin galleries were series of beaming matrons and radiant damsels: Teodolinda Pomàrici a sentimental lover of the stage, lymphatically pale and languid, sat beside Fermina Memma, considered the male of the pair; the Fusilli of Castellammare, big girls with jet-black eyes, dressed in uniform rosy clothes and all with gathered braids down their backs, laughed noisily and gesticulated; Emilia d’Annunzio cast her beautiful tawny eyes around with an expression of infinite tedium; Mariannina Cortese signalled with her fan to Donna Rachele Profeta who sat in front of her; Donna Rachele Bucci argued about talking boards and apparitions with Donna Rachele Carabba; the schoolmistresses Del Gado, both dressed in taffeta silk, short capes of a long-departed mode, and peculiar caps that glistened with steel points, sat silent and uneasy, perhaps stunned by the novelty of the event, perhaps rueful at having been drawn to witness a profane spectacle; Costanza Lesbii coughed constantly, trembling beneath her red shawl, very pale, very blond and very thin.

  At the foremost front stalls sat the leading citizens, Don Giovanni Ussorio prominent among them. His person was groomed to perfection with a magnificent pair of trousers checkered in black and white, a shining coat of heavy felted wool, and a large quantity of the products of Chieti jewellers on his fingers and shirtfront. Don Antonio Brattella, member of the Marseilles Areopagus, a man exuding greatness from every pore, and especially from his left auricular lobe, as swollen as an unripe apricot, was expatiating in detail and a loud voice on the lyric drama of Giovanni Peruzzini, each utterance as it left his lips acquiring a Ciceronian timbre. Others in the prime chairs shifted about with greater or lesser self-importance. Doctor Panzoni struggled in vain against the temptations of sleep, and from time to time emitted a sound that coincided remarkably with the A major of the tuning orchestra.

  There was a series of increasingly menacing hisses in the hall, and the spectators fell into profound silence. At the raising of the curtain the stage was found empty. From between the wings came the sound of a violoncello. Tilde came out and sang. Then came Sertorio and sang. Then a crowd of scholars and friends gathered in a choir. Then Tilde drew towards the window and sang:

  Oh how slow appear the hours

  To one stricken with desire…

  An impatient restlessness made itself felt in the audience, for now a love duet was due. Tilde in fact was a primo soprano past her youth; she was dressed in a blue costume, had hair that was vaguely blonde, and whether artificial or not it covered her head thinly; her face, whitened with talc, brought to mind a raw cutlet rolled in flour and nested for some reason in a hempen wig.

  Egidio arrived. His was the role of the Young Tenor. He had a sunken chest and his legs were more than a little crooked, so that in outline he might have suggested to the mind a ladle with two handles, were there ever such a thing. Beardless and overly smooth-featured his head, once again unfortunately, made one think of that of a calf after it had been shaved, oiled and hung in the sight of all above a butcher’s booth.

  Tilde, your lips are mute;

  You lower to earth your eyes;

  I long for the kind salute,

  Your silence to me denies.

  But trembles now your hand:

  Dear maiden, tell me why?

  To which Tilde, overcome by the deepest of sentiments, responds, sadly surprised:

  This solemn moment – and

  Thou needeth my reply?

  The duet now grew in tenderness, the melodies of Maestro Cavaliere Petrella delectating with every new note the ears of the listeners; the ladies in the gallery leant forward on their parapets, immobile, attentive, their faces made paler by the reflected green of the tricolours.

  Come death, come paradise:

  With bliss twice-won our prize!

  Tilde left, and then entered Duke Carnioli, singing: a corpulent, truculent man, shaggy-haired to the shoulders, all as expected of a baritone. He sang in an exaggerated Florentine accent, aspirating initial hard c’s, if not indeed totally ignoring them at times.

  Know’st thou not the weighty pains

  Of honjugal locks and chains?

  But when his aria ended with the line of Amalfi, she the Dame, a long tremor coursed through the audience. At last. The Countess was now demanded, invoked.

  Don Giovanni Ussorio turned to Don Antonio Brattella:

  ‘When does she appear?’

  Don Antonio, loftily:

  ‘Oh my God, Don Giovà! Don’t you know? In the second act! The second act!’

  Sertorio’s sermon was listened to with some impatience, and the curtain fell to weak applause. And it was thus that Violetta Kutufà’s triumph was introduced. A sustained buzz ran through the stalls and gallery, growing as the audience heard hammer blows behind the curtain where the sceneshifters were at work, their invisible activity augmenting everyone’s state of expectation.

  When the curtain rose again, a kind of spell gripped the audience. For a start, the scenic apparatus struck them as nothing less than miraculous: three illuminated arcades extending in perspective one beyond the next, the middle one a magical garden. Pages dispersed about the stage turned at the same moment to bow in one direction. The Countess of Amalfi, dressed completely in red velvet, trailing a regal train, her arms and shoulders bare, entered, rosy-faced, agitated:

  It was a night whose ravishment

  Pervades my soul e’en now…

  Her voice was uneven, sometimes strident, but on the whole potent and penetrating, and it produced a singular effect after the tender miaowing of Tilde. Instantly the public divided into two factions: the women favoured Tilde, the men Leonora.

  Resisting my beguiling ways

  Is not some facile game…

  Leonora had in her poses, gestures, walk, something provocative that intoxicated and inflamed the bachelors familiar only with the flaccid Venuses of Sant’Agostino Lane, and titillated the long-married men wearied with connubial monotony. They all studied closely at each turn the singer’s plump, white shoulders, where at every play of her ar
ms two dimples appeared almost to smile.

  At the end of the a solo the applause was immense. After that, the swooning of the Countess, the dissimulations before Duke Carnioli, who was the principal singer in that duet, all and every scene drew ovations. The temperature in the hall had risen, along the gallery stirred a confusion of fluttering fans among which feminine faces appeared and disappeared. When the Countess stood leaning against a column in an attitude of one lovelorn and in distant contemplation, her form illuminated by the lunar light of a Bengal lamp, and Egidio beside her sang the romantic aria, Don Antonio Grattella was heard to breath out loudly:

  ‘What grandeur!’

  And Don Giovanni Ussorio from a sudden impulse began on his own to clap. Those around him, wanting to hear, hissed him venomously into silence. Don Giovanni retreated into his chair, confused.

  All things are of love, all tells that love’s there:

  The moon and the zephyrs, the stars and the sea…

  The listeners’ heads swayed with the strong rhythm of Petrella’s melody, everyone’s attention captivated despite the indifferent quality of Egidio’s voice, all eyes imbibing deeply of the scene, nobody concerned or aware that the moon’s projected light smoked and gave forth at best a washed-out yellow counterfeit. But when after that conflict of passions and seduction the Countess of Amalfi retraced her steps towards the garden, taking up her aria again, that aria which yet vibrated in the souls of the listeners, their delight was such that many threw back their heads almost as if to join in warbling the words, collectively at one with the siren who was losing herself among the flowers:

  The primed bark awaits us, come follow, my fair!

  Life’s summons – live! love! – will heed gaily we.

  At that point Violetta Kutufà had completely conquered Don Giovanni Ussorio, who, quite beside himself, overcome by a kind of musical and erotic frenzy, clamoured furiously:

  ‘Brava! Brava! Brava!...’

  Don Paolo Seccia exclaimed loudly:

  ‘O look, look at him! Ussorio’s gone quite mad!’

  All the ladies were staring with astonishment and perplexity at Ussorio. The schoolmistresses Del Gado told rosaries under their capes; Teodolinda Pomàrici floated quietly in an ecstatic trance; the Fusilli girls alone preserved their tomboy vivacity and kept twittering together, all pink, making their serpentine braids writhe with every movement.

  During the third act, neither the sighs of a dying Tilde, protectively hovered-over in spirit by the women of the audience, nor the reproaches and rebukes of Sertorio and Carnioli, nor the sunnier ditties of the chorus assembled to represent Amalfi’s populace, nor the monologue of the sorrowful Egidio, nor the merriment of the dames and cavaliers, had the power to distract the Pescara audience from its passion: it would have its will. Leonora! Leonora!

  And Leonora reappeared, this time descending from a pavilion on the arm of Lara’s Count. And with that came the zenith of her triumph.

  Now she was dressed in a violet gown decorated with silver trimmings and enormous clasps. She turned towards the gallery, straightening the following train behind her with a light toss of her foot and by that movement displaying an ankle. Then, insinuating between the verses and words a thousand charms and a thousand immoralities, she sang in tones that ran the gamut of ambiguities from the playful and challenging to the cynical and mocking:

  In blooms I sport, a butterfly,

  This well-known air took the audience by storm. The Countess, sensing the ardour of the men, their admiration and desire mounting to her, grew intoxicated, multiplied the seductiveness of her gestures and walk, lifting her voice to supreme altitudes, her fleshy bare throat, lined slightly but suggestively by its necklace of Venus, trembling at the trills:

  A bee that only honey sates,

  I drink from the blue limpid sky…

  Don Giovanni Ussorio, ravished, stared with such intensity that his eyes seemed on the point of starting from their sockets. Baron Cappa drivelled slightly, enchanted. Don Antonio Brattella, Member of the Areopagus of Marseilles, swelled and swelled, until he finally exploded forth the word:

  ‘Co-lossal!’

  III.

  And in that manner, Violetta Kutufà conquered Pescara.

  For more than a month, performances of the opera by Maestro Cavaliere Petrella were attended with unabated and indeed ever-increasing fervour. The theatre was always full, packed. Acclamations for Leonora broke out furiously at the end of each of her arias. A singular phenomenon had occurred: the whole population of the port seemed to have been infected by a kind of musical hysteria; Pescara’s whole life appeared enclosed in the magic confines of one single melody, that of the butterfly sporting among blossoms. The melody was repeated with stupefying persistence everywhere, in every manner and possible variation, on every instrument; and the image of Violetta Kutufà was summoned by the sung notes like – heaven forgive the comparison – the joys of paradise called forth by the chords of a church organ. The musical and lyrical faculties of the Pescarans, by nature vigorous since the community’s days as Rome’s ancient Aternum, at this time experienced a limitless efflorescence. Street urchins whistled the tune, every amateur musician made an attempt on it: Donna Lisetta Memma played it on her harpsichord from morning until night; Don Antonio Brattella played it on his flute; Don Domenico Quaquino on a clarinet; Don Giacomo Palusci, the priest, on an old rococo spinet; Don Vincenzo Rapagnetta on a violoncello; Don Vincenzo Ranieri on a trumpet; Don Nicola d’Annunzio on a violin. From the bastions of Sant’Agostino to the Arsenal and from the fish market to the custom house the multiform sounds blended and contrasted and overlapped in every kind of discord. In the early hours of the afternoon the town resembled some great asylum for the incurably mad. Even the knife grinders sharpening their wares at the side of lanes sought to follow with their buzzing iron the general rhythm.

  As it had come now to the time of the carnival, a public entertainment was held in the theatre’s hall.

  On Fat Thursday, at ten in the evening, the hall flamed with moulded stearin candles, smelled of myrtle and glittered with mirrors. Masked revellers, Punchinellos predominating, entered in groups; on a platform bordered in green fabric and scattered with a constellation of silver-paper stars the orchestra had begun playing. Don Giovanni Ussorio entered.

  He was dressed as a Spanish grandee made up to look like the opera’s Count of Lara, but fatter. A blue beret with a long white plume concealed his baldness; a short mantle of red velvet trimmed with gold lifted and fell on his shoulders with the vigour of his stride. The costume rather accentuated than otherwise the curve of his belly and the shortness of his legs. What was visible of his remnant hair, impossibly black and glistening with cosmetic oils, looked like a fringe of some curious matter that had become attached by chance to the edges of his beret.

  One impertinent Punchinello on passing this transmogrification of Don Giovanni squealed ‘Good heavens!’ in a falsetto voice and with a gesture of such comical horror that it raised a peal of laughter in the Don’s vicinity. La Ciccarina, the town’s beauty, the black hood of her domino framing that superb flower of flesh her rosy face, was one of those who laughed, her luminous merriment rocking her figure supported at each side by a ragged Harlequin.

  Don Giovanni disappeared among the crowd, annoyance written on his face, looking for Violetta Kutufà; but the hilarity of other masked revellers pursued and stung him. Suddenly, he came face to face with another Spanish grandee, a second Count of Lara, and with pain he recognised Don Antonio Brattella. Rivalry had already broken out before this moment between the two men.

  ‘What price the medlar?’ squealed Don Donato Brandimarte, alluding maliciously to the familiar fleshy excrescence that the Member of the Areopagus of Marseilles grew on his left ear lobe.

  Don Giovanni exulted with ferocious joy at this insult. The two rivals stared at one another and examined each other’s costumes from top to toe; then they parted, keeping their distance from one anoth
er while circulating through the crowd.

  At eleven o’clock an agitation rippled through the crowd: Violetta Kutufà was entering the hall. The theme of her costume was diabolical: a black domino with a long hood in scarlet and a scarlet mask; her round, snow-white chin and large red mouth were visible through a fine veil. Her eyes, elongated and made a little oblique by the mask, seemed to be laughing.

  Everyone knew her immediately and all drew back to make way for her; with the exceptions of Don Antonio Brattella, who with affected gestures and smiles advanced upon her from one side, and Don Giovanni who came darting from another. Violetta Kutufà cast a rapid glance at the rings glinting on the fingers of the second, and then took the arm of the Areopagite, laughing and walking away with a certain frisky sway of the loins, the Areopagite talking to her in his usual inflated and silly manner, calling her ‘Countess’ and interpolating in his discourse lyric excerpts from Giovanni Peruzzini. She kept smiling and leant towards him, pressing his arm with familiarity, for the ardour and pretentiousness of this ugly and vain man amused her. At a certain point, the Areopagite, repeating the words of Count Lara in Petrelli’s melodrama, said, or actually sang:

  ‘May I then not despair-r-r?’

  To which Violetta Kutufà, her attention returning to him, replied in the manner of Leonora:

  ‘Why, who forbids you, sir?... Adieu.’

  And seeing Don Giovanni a little distance away, she parted from this fascinating gallant and attached herself to the other, who had been following with rancorous and disdainful eyes the manoeuvres of the pair through the dancing crowd.

  Don Giovanni trembled like a boy blessed with the first glance cast upon him by a distantly adored damsel; then, overcome by a sudden and glorious impetus of energy, he drew the singer into the dance. He whirled breathlessly, with his nose in the woman’s breast, his cloak floating behind him, the plume in his cap bending back in the breeze, narrow streams of sweat and hair oil seeping down his temples. Then, suddenly exhausted, he stopped, reeling with giddiness. Two hands kept him upright, and a voice spoke with droll earnestness into his ear: