LA Voce Oscura

Chapter 1:

The city smells like ambition and horse dung and something underneath both that I cannot name.

I have been in Milan for four hours.

I have already filled out three forms confirming that I am Polish, that I am twenty-three, that I am unmarried, that I have no family in Italy, that I am not here to work in a factory or sell goods in the market or marry an Italian citizen.

I am here, I wrote in my careful Italian, to sing.

The registration clerk looked at me the way registration clerks have looked at me in Prague and Vienna and Budapest — the particular expression of a man who has been asked to process something that does not fit his categories.

He stamped my papers anyway.

The Kingdom of Italy is counting its people this year, all of them, even the ones who arrived four hours ago with a forged letter and sixty lire and a voice they are not yet sure is worth anything outside of smaller cities.

I fold the papers into my coat pocket and step back into Via Dante.

Milan in November 1881 is not what I expected.

I expected grandeur — I had heard about the Esposizione Nazionale, the great national exhibition that has been running since May, Italy showing itself off to the world.

What I find is chaos.

The exhibition has drawn half of Europe to this city and half of Europe has not yet gone home.

The streets around the Duomo are impossible — vendors, tourists, Milanese who have learned to move through crowds the way water moves through rock, without resistance and with total indifference.

I am not water.

I am a Polish woman with a heavy bag and an appointment at La Scala in two hours and I stop twice to check that the letter is still in my coat.

It is still there.

It will not become more real the third time I check it.

The letter says that Zofia Wierzbicka, soprano, trained under Maestro Benedikt Hauer of Prague, is recommended for consideration for the autumn chorus at Teatro alla Scala, Milan, by the grace of said Maestro’s long professional relationship with the theatre’s director.

Maestro Benedikt Hauer does not know I exist. I paid a man in Prague forty lire to write the letter. He had very good handwriting.

I find a café near the theatre and sit with an espresso I nurse for forty minutes because I cannot afford two.

The woman at the next table is speaking French.

The men at the bar are arguing about something political in the fast Milanese dialect I cannot fully follow — something about the government, something about old families, something about what Italy was supposed to become and what it has become instead.

The word Habsburg comes up twice with the particular edge Italians give it, the edge of an old wound that has not finished closing.

I finish my espresso.

I pick up my bag.

I walk to La Scala.

The building is not what I expected either.

I have performed in opera houses. Not this one — nothing like this one — but I know what opera houses are. They are grand on the outside and cramped and political and smelling of sweat on the inside and the people in them are more afraid than they look.

I know how to walk into one.

I walk into La Scala and something happens that I do not know how to explain.

The air changes.

Not the temperature.

Not the light, though the light is extraordinary — gas lamps along the corridors casting everything gold, the kind of gold that is warm rather than bright.

Something else.

A pressure, barely perceptible, as if the building has noticed me and is deciding what to do about it.

I tell myself it is the size of the place.

I tell myself I am tired and have been traveling for three days and have eaten only bread since yesterday morning.

I tell myself the particular quality of resonance in old stone buildings creates acoustic phenomena that sensitive ears can perceive as physical sensation.

I am a soprano. I have very sensitive ears.

I follow the directions I was given to the audition room and I do not look back.

There are nine of us auditioning for chorus positions.

I can assess them in the time it takes to find a chair: three are better than me technically, two are better than me in terms of presentation, one has the kind of face that gets work regardless of the voice, and the remaining two are here on the same basis I am, which is hope and desperation in roughly equal measure.

Madame Riva runs the audition.

She is sixty or sixty-five, iron-haired, with the posture of someone who has been telling sopranos they are insufficient for forty years and has found this work deeply satisfying.

She looks at each of us for exactly two seconds upon entering.

When she looks at me I have the sense of being measured by an instrument calibrated for something I don’t understand.

We are called one at a time into the audition room.

I am fourth.

While I wait I become aware of the candles.

There are four candles on a sconce in the corridor, the old kind, real wax, lit despite the gas lamps that provide the actual illumination.

They are decoration, or tradition, or both.

I notice them because of what they are doing.

They are leaning.

Not toward the draft from the door — away from it. Toward me.

All four flames tilted at the same slight angle, reaching in my direction like something curious, something that has detected a change in the air and is orienting toward the source.

I stare at them.

They stare back, if flames can stare.

Someone opens the audition room door. “Wierzbicka.”

I look away from the candles. When I look back they are straight. Four perfectly vertical flames, decorative and inert.

I am tired. I am hungry. I pick up my bag and walk into the audition room.

I sing the Casta Diva from Bellini’s Norma.

It is not the most technically demanding piece I know.

It is the one that has never, in my entire life, failed to do what I need it to do.

When I am uncertain or frightened or standing in a room full of people who have already decided what I am worth, I sing this and my body remembers what it knows.

I get four bars in and Madame Riva holds up her hand.

“Again,” she says. “From the beginning. Slower.”

I start again.

I am three bars in when I feel it.

The gaze.

It is not Madame Riva — she is looking at the papers on her desk, making a note. It is not the accompanist. It is not from inside the room at all.

I look up.

The audition room has a small gallery — a viewing balcony above, glassed in, the kind of thing that exists in great theatres for directors and patrons to observe without being seen.

It is dark up there.

The glass reflects the gas lamps below and shows me my own face, pale and serious and mid-phrase.

Something is behind the glass.

I cannot see it. I can feel it — the same quality of attention you feel when someone in a crowd is looking directly at you before you know where to look.

A pressure.

A specificity.

Whatever is up there is not looking at the room. It is looking at me.

I keep singing.

This is the thing about the voice: it does not care what the rest of me is doing.

I can be terrified, furious, standing in a room that has decided I am nothing, and the voice does what it does.

It has always been this way.

My father said it when I was small — your voice knows things you don’t know yet, Zofia.

Sing and it will teach you.

My father is dead.

He died when I was fifteen and I have been teaching myself ever since.

I finish the piece.

The gallery above is dark and still and shows me nothing.

Madame Riva looks up from her papers.

She studies me for a moment — that calibrated two-second assessment, extended now to something longer.

Then she writes something down.

“Chorus,” she says. “Report Monday.”

I find my way back through the corridors alone.

I am trying to remember the route — right at the statue, left at the column, down the stairs — and I am not fully attending to the building around me and so I almost miss it.

Almost.

I am passing a corridor that angles away from the main passage when I feel the gaze again.

I stop.

The corridor is empty. Gas lamps, stone floor, a door at the far end closed. Nothing.

I look up.

Above the corridor, set into the curve of the building’s upper tier, is a box. One of the patron’s boxes — I can see the gilded rail, the heavy curtain pulled to one side.

From this angle, from below,

I can see only darkness inside it. The number above the rail, in tarnished gold: 23.

Empty.

Of course it is empty. It is four in the afternoon on a Tuesday and there is no performance tonight.

I stand in the corridor for three more seconds.

Then I pick up my bag and I walk toward the exit and I do not look back at Box 23.

I am very good at not looking back at things.

Outside, Via Manzoni is loud and cold and entirely ordinary.

A tram passes.

Two men argue on the corner about the price of something. A group of tourists from the Esposizione — German, I think, from the language — are consulting a map and blocking the pavement.

I step around them.

I think about the candles.

I think about the gallery above the audition room and whatever was behind the glass.

I think about Box 23.

Then I think about sixty lire and three months of rent and a city that does not know my name yet.

I got into the chorus.

I will be paid. I will eat tomorrow.

Everything else I will think about later.

I walk toward my lodgings through the crowded Milanese street, and behind me, La Scala rises against the November sky, and in Box 23, if I had looked back, I would have seen what I already knew.

It was not empty.

It has never been empty.

Historical Note

In 1881 the Kingdom of Italy conducted its first major national census, counting its population for the first time as a unified nation. Italy had existed for only ten years — declared in 1861 and completed with the annexation of Rome in 1870. Foreign nationals residing in Italy were required to register and document their purpose of stay.

The Esposizione Nazionale di Milano ran from May 6 to November 1, 1881 — a grand national industrial and cultural exhibition held in Milan’s Piazza d’Armi. It drew visitors from across Europe and was Italy’s most ambitious public demonstration of its new national identity. Milan’s population swelled significantly during the exhibition’s six-month run.

Teatro alla Scala — La Scala — opened on August 3, 1778. It remains the most prestigious opera house in the world.