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I DIDN’T GO TO VENICE of my own accord. I was sent there, forced to go, by that … that woman, she who has worshippers throughout the world, she who, despite a corrupt and failing body, limitless greed, and the personality of a broom, has—still, after all these years—the voice of an angel. It isn’t surprising that she has power over me. Why shouldn’t she? Even after a big meal, and I mean a big meal, she can walk onto a floodlit stage, stare into darkness and blinding glare, and then, with inimitable self-possession, make thousands weep. That all her gifts have been so concentrated is a miracle, and though she has no talent or virtue but this, it’s more than enough.

I’ve represented her since 1962, when neither of us was known and we both were unrecognizably young. She was almost beautiful then, and almost innocent. Everyone assumes that I had an office, and, one day, she, a professional singer, walked into it. I have an office now, but I didn’t then. I was a bookkeeper in a dark little factory that made gears for motor scooters. Everything there had oil on it, even my ledgers, which were so splotched that sometimes you couldn’t read the numbers. And when it rained, the floor was covered with ankle-deep water.

Naturally, I didn’t want to stay in such a place for the rest of my life, and I believed that unless I did something impulsive and courageous, and unless I had a great deal of luck, I would. So I waited for my luck, and it came one day as I was walking home, not five minutes from the factory, in front of an industrial laundry. The doors were open, and, inside, one of the laundresses was lifting heavy wet sheets onto a cable that took them into a dryer. As she clipped them to the line, she sang. Working with arms raised is so difficult that most people would not have been able even to talk. But she was singing, and the singing, as she has proved many times since, was worthy of La Scala.

“Who the hell is that?” I asked one of her colleagues, a woman who looked distressingly not so much like a Picasso as like Picasso himself. It was a question that was to shape not only my life, but that of a substantial part of the world if art is to be accounted, even if these days art hardly is.

“Oh, she’s always singing. Everyone says how good she is.”

“Does she sing professionally?” I asked.

“No, she’s a laundress.”

“I see that, but, perhaps, on the side?”

“Her boyfriend won’t let her.”

“Why not?”

“He’s jealous.”

“Is he a soprano, too?”

“He’s in the army.”

“The army.”

Not wanting to be killed, I was going to leave right then, but then she said, “Yes, he’s in New Zealand, at the embassy, for two years. It has something to do with ostriches, I think. When he gets back, they’ll be married.”

“Oh,” I said. “Well, please tell your friend. …” I reached into my pocket and pretended to be surprised. “I seem to have left my cards in the office. Tell your friend that I’m an impresario, and that I’ll come tomorrow after work—which is?”

“Which is what?”

“What time does she finish work?”

“Six. We all do,” she said, looking at me as if I were an idiot.

“At six, then,” I said. “She should sing at La Scala, the Metropolitan Opera, Covent Garden.”

“Why don’t you tell her? We can stop the line, it’s just sheets, or you could wait ten minutes. People fall in love with her because of her voice.” Suspicion crossed her face like a cloud. “You don’t look like an impresario.”

I laughed artificially. “I have an appointment,” I said, “for a contract signing with Lucida Lamorella. I’ll be here tomorrow. Tell her.” All the while she was singing so beautifully that I could see why people fell in love with her even if I did not, because I could tell from a distance and despite a voice that one could love forever that she was—how shall I say it—spiritually blank. I don’t know how I was able to tell. Certain things are more or less self-evident.

That night I pressed my shirt and thought of a plan, and the next day I put on my suit, quit my job, and made a reservation at a restaurant. I paid the headwaiter to say, “Signor Cassati, how are things at La Scala?” I bought contract papers and stamps, and an impresario’s hat, a Borsalino. By the time I went to the laundry, I had become an impresario, for, after all, what is an impresario but someone who in less than a day can transform himself from a bookkeeper in a motor-scooter-gear factory into an impresario? Having convinced myself of my transformation, it was easy to convince her.

She was really something. She ate like a hippopotamus. God intended for one to be able to see the beauty and soul of nearly all women. And there I was, twenty-seven years of age, in a restaurant with a girl of twenty-one, who was really quite pretty, and, if not slim, possibly svelte. She could not have helped but have some of the charm of youth, and her voice must have meant something in respect to her soul, but I felt no attraction to her whatsoever. She ate olives so fast that many of them fell from her mouth and rolled across the tablecloth and onto the floor. She kept a wad of bread in each cheek pouch—just in case—while she shovelled food in through the main mouth part. It’s always good to have a reserve: her smock had pockets and she used them. She never stopped eating. I was worried that I wouldn’t have enough money left from my small savings to get us to Pflanzenberg, where solely by the balls of my feet I had tentatively booked her to sing the part of Norma with the opera club of one of the Volkswagen subcontractors that made windshield wipers. I could do this because I knew them through the gear factory, and had gotten their president tickets for La Scala.

“Do you know Norma?” I asked.

A black olive fell from her mouth. “Norma who?”

“Bellini’s Norma?”

“Of course. Mama made me memorize it. She made me memorize everything—before she died.” She went back to eating.

“What do you mean, ‘everything’?”

“Operas.”

“How many operas?”

“Oh, I don’t know. Sixty or seventy.”

My eyebrows went up and my face jerked forward. “Sixty or seventy?”

“Yes, what’s so strange about that?”

“What’s so strange about that?” I repeated in astonishment.

“Nothing,” she said, as if I had really asked her. “Do they have any nuts?”

“Who?” I asked.

Before I could even think, she said, in her very powerful soprano, “Waiter, do you have nuts?”

Soon she was cracking nuts as she ate, as she spoke, and as she drank. “I know them perfectly.” She closed her eyes and stuck out her tongue, which, in those days, was how she emphasized a point.

“Perfectly?”

“The whole thing, all the parts. It just comes to me after I’ve seen it once, and then I don’t forget. It all makes sense, and flows naturally from one thing to another, so it’s no big fuckin’ deal.”

“That’s good,” I said, “because, with your permission, I’ve booked you to sing Norma in the opera house at Pflanzenberg.”

“Me?”

“Yes. You know you’re good.”

“But Quagliagliarello won’t let me.”

“Who’s Quagliagliarello?”

“My boyfriend.”

“Where is he?” Of course, I already knew, but I made myself look curious.

“In New Zealand.”

I said nothing, letting it dawn on her. It took a while, but then she asked, “Where’s Pflanzenberg?”

“In Germany, nowhere near New Zealand.”

“Germany! What would Quagliagliarello think?”

“He would fly back and kill me, that’s what he would think.”

“He would.”

“So don’t tell him. Why does he have to know? By the time he gets back, you’ll be singing in La Scala, and it will be a fait accompli. In fact, it will be a fait accompli when, in New Zealand, he sees your picture on the cover of an LP. You know, in a gown, getting out of a carriage and alighting onto a red carpet, fountain in the background, nice shoes, glowing complexion, happiness. He won’t even place you, because he won’t expect to see you on the jacket of a Deutsche Grammophon Gesellschaft recording, but then he’ll see your name, but it won’t matter, because he’ll be so shocked he won’t be able to kill me. What is your name? Here we are having dinner, and I don’t even know.”

“Rosanna Scungili,” she answered, as if she knew that this was soon to change, as indeed it would. Imagine an American or English opera singer whose name was Jane Octopus-Slice. She might be the greatest singer in the world, but much would stand in her way.

“How about Rosanna Cadorna?” I suggested after my eyes had swept the restaurant and stopped at a painting of the famous general.

“Who’s she?”

“She would be you.” Rosanna’s expression was blank. “You would be she.”

“How?”

“You’d change your name.”

“I see,” she said. “All right.” She was the quickest to decide absolutely anything of anyone I’ve ever known. She still is. She has no hesitation. It’s as if nothing matters to her. I think she may be psychotic. When her father died, the first thing she said was, “What time is the European Song Fest?” Back then, in the restaurant, just after she had so quickly agreed to a different name, she said, “Let’s go to Germany. I already know the part. When do we leave?”

*  *  *  *  *

FOR SOMEONE who didn’t like German food, Rosanna ate a lot of it. In addition to the meals we had at the Scheibenwischeroper, the windshield-wiper opera, I had to buy her several kilos of bread, sausage, and cake every day. I have heard—I have seen—that really crazy people can eat ten kilos of food a day and not gain weight. That was Rosanna until she was forty. Then something changed, and she began to gain weight as inexorably as a tank into which water is dripping. Now she cracks marble floors as she passes over them, and stalls elevators as she gets into them, but back then the Germans thought she was just a typical starving Italian girl. Indifferent to her appearance and her manner, they remained unimpressed until at the first rehearsal she opened her mouth to sing.

The Germans, after all, produced Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, and Brahms: it’s not as if they’re insensitive to music. And at the end of her first aria all those stolid Germans were so moved they were in tears. They were astounded that she was there with them, and they had the touched, trembling, holy air of those present at the creation, for it was easy to see that she was going straight to the great stages of the world.

It wasn’t exactly straight. After her flawless performances in Pflanzenberg, we went on to one flawless performance after another in—if memory serves, and it should, for these were glorious days of rising and success—Wachenrauss, Hofheim, Würzburg, Karlsruhe, and Heilbronn. The engagements in these cities were all in opera clubs. She had to sing near machine tools, gymnastic equipment, and walls of boxes. Once, she brought down the house—that is, the people on blankets on the grass—while a Turkish soccer game raged off to her left. She was as unconcerned as if she were playing in the hushed spaces of the greatest opera house. There she stood, despite the most despicable noise and distraction, a monstrous woman, really, floating in a sea of ineffable beauty and transforming the world about her without either self-consciousness or delicate temperament.

You know how great singers and musicians are always supposed to be prisoners of temperament? It’s the opposite of what’s true. In fact, what so distinguishes them in this regard is that they have no temperament: they are absolute. It is we, who are not great, who are prisoners of mood. It is we who vary and change, and when we who spend our lives trimming and ducking encounter those who make no adjustments we imagine that it is they who are in a frenzy, such are the laws of relative motion.

I have never seen Rosanna sing with adjustment for anything. She could be in a dirty garage in Saarbrücken or at a command performance for the queen of England, and it would be—indeed, it was—exactly the same. Indeed, she is a miracle of temperament, or lack of it. She is seized each time by the divinity of the music and she neither varies nor falters. Well, she does sometimes falter, but only when her body has failed her and she is sick. Even then, though she may not sing well, she sings better than most, and when you see her struggling against her affliction—she is not anymore a healthy woman—you know that to finish her aria she would sing even unto death.

But when not singing, she’s intolerable. She has always been intolerable. In our almost forty years of association I have seen several hundred of the scores of thousands of young men who have fallen in love with her voice. These are the ones who, like the hardier sperm that can swim close to the egg, come to her entranced and obsessed. And then, unlike sperm, they turn away in horrified disillusion. Most women would have been suicidal after two or three such rejections, but (though it doesn’t happen anymore, because she is too fat) it did not affect Rosanna. “They’re idiots,” she used to say. “They’re in love with something Mozart or Bellini plucked from the ether, not with me. That’s why they could never sing themselves. They try to make their lives something other than pedestrian, because they have nowhere else to go. When I come back from where I go, I want just to be a laundress. And when I come back from where I go, I have no strength left to be anyone else. Besides, I never loved anyone but Quagliagliarello, until you took him away from me.”

“I didn’t take him from you, he was jealous of your career.”

“Can you blame him? He got back from New Zealand and what did he see? Did he see Rosanna Scungili, laundress, who hangs wet sheets and sings like a nightingale?”

“And eats like a hippo.”

“I had a high metabolism. No, he sees Rosanna Cadorna, just become world famous, who rides around in long cars and talks to the Pope, who makes in one night by opening herself to others like a whore, more than he has made in his life, who lives in the most expensive suites of the best hotels, and who, in two years, has become old. What was he supposed to do?”

“Anything but what he did.”

“He was a soldier, he had a gun.”

“He should have killed me, not himself. That’s what I would have done.”

“No. I was gone, and could never come back. It was too late.”

“Do you think, Rosanna, that had you stayed a laundress and married Quagliagliarello when he got back from New Zealand, you would have been happy?”

“I don’t know. I loved him. We could have had children.”

“You would have given everything up for your singing. You wouldn’t have been able to help it. If I hadn’t found you, someone else would have. You could have waited for Quagliagliarello, but remember how quick you were to go to Pflanzenberg?”

“Yes,” she said. “I know. I hardly hesitated an instant.”

*  *  *  *  *

AFTER HEILBRONN, where we were in a real theater with lights, we went on to Nürnberg, Stuttgart, Munich, and Vienna. Her mastery of the repertoire was so flawless that, like a diva who has been on the circuit for decades, she could without preparation take any part anytime. This was noticed as much as the inimitable quality of her singing, and it was why, a year and a half after her debut at the windshield-wiper opera in a warehouse, she went on stage at La Scala when Adriana Rossi could not sing on account of a high fever, to take the part of Amenaide in Tancredi.

The moment she started to sing, the breathing of the audience was altered. And you could see them rise effortlessly in their seats. The light was suddenly clear and perfect, and there was not a cough or a shuffle as the whole world was put on notice that Rosanna had arrived. The magnificence and joy of her singing did to this refined—you might even say jaded—audience what it did to me when first I heard her at the laundry. She went from strength to strength, and that night it was as if the music had not come long before from Rossini, but was issuing suddenly from Rosanna.

When the performance ended, the other singers, who, as you may imagine, were not a humble group, melted back from her in a crescent, and, half in envy and half in awe, applauded from the semidarkness of non-center stage as if they, too, were the audience. Shouts of “Brava! Bravissima!” came for twenty minutes, until Rosanna pulled and set the hook forever by storming off the stage, as only a true diva could, and shouting in dismissive anger, “Basta! Basta!”

They loved it more than I can convey, and from that moment our fortunes were assured in terms of opportunities offered, monies earned, praise lavished, oceans crossed in quiet airplanes, and distant respect tendered by millions.

Rosanna’s success was so astonishingly quick partly because she was already in the semi-monstrous state of disconnection for which most people require years of constant flattery, ready limousines, and obsequious retainers. She skipped her education in the cruelties of status, having had them from the beginning even in her laundress bones. Which is not to say that she had no regrets, but only that she would do whatever was needed to be done, instantly and in spite of them, as if they did not exist.

Were it not for her beautiful voice, I never would willingly have come, once I had known what she was like, within a hundred kilometers of her. And I was never interested in her other than professionally. Although she must have a soul, someplace, loving Rosanna would be like—how shall I put it?—smoking an unlit cigar, walking a dead dog, swimming in an empty pool, or listening to the radio when it is off. One thing that has made her tolerable is that in return for my plucking her from her wet sheets, she has shared her considerable fortunes with me. One might even say generously, were it not for the original contract of representation and the half-dozen times she has tried to break, evade, or alter it. It was, however, very carefully worded. Don’t forget, I was a bookkeeper, whose eye was trained in harrowingly close textual analysis.

She even proposed to me. Granted, it was because of a quirk in the law that would have dissolved the agreement upon our marriage, a marriage that quite apart from its nearly-impossible-to-express repulsive attributes, would have been quickly followed by divorce so as to render Rosanna a free agent.

“Naturally I won’t marry you, Rosanna, and you know it.”

“Why not?”

“Because, as you know, our representation agreement would cease to govern upon our marriage.”

“It would?”

“What a surprise!” I said. “Last week you spoke to the lawyer, who. …”

“What lawyer?”

“DeMarco.”

“Oh, him.”

“Who told me that he had given you, at your request, a disquisition on this very subject. I was expecting you to ask me to marry you. But, Rosanna, even were all things equal, I couldn’t marry you, because of Lucia.”

“What is she to you!?” Rosanna asked indignantly.

“My wife.”

Rosanna stormed off, laundress-style. I’m thoroughly used to it. I bear it. To this day, she’s responsible for half my income, and although she’s a lot of work, the work consists of choosing offers rather than begging for them, and there is a difference. Even were she struck dead by more cholesterol, the revenue from CDs and broadcasts would continue, though it would be reduced. Maybe I would find another great diva. Maybe not. What’s the difference? My children are grown. Neither Lucia nor I are anymore interested in living grandly. I like to fish, shoot, and read. She is content running the house and helping to take care of the grandchildren. In short, for me the age of Rosanna Cadorna could come to an end and I would not be unhappy.

Still, because we are not quite ready to retire—perhaps in three or four years—and from long ingrained habit, I continue to serve Rosanna above and beyond my essential obligations. This is not because I want to, but as a reflexive defense learned after her three non-performance suits. I am not required to find the tentlike clothing that fits her, arrange for special water filtration at her villa, or sit with her while she eats, but I do, solely to build immunity. Thus, when she came to me last summer (the summer of 2001), and more or less ordered me to Venice, I went.

That I would go was not a certainty, not these days, when I am more and more able to take or leave her, and at first I resisted.

“Cassati,” she said, putting a book in my hands, “look at this.” On its dark cover was a detail from a painting, a beautiful young girl who reminded me painfully of my daughters when they were young, before they had left home—Il Colore Ritrovato: Bellini a Venezia. “Color refound,” or, better, “rediscovered,” or, even better, “Color Restored: Bellini in Venice.”

They had washed Bellini’s paintings until they glowed like jewels, and now these were exhibited in the Accademia in Venice, with this book the record of both his effortless genius and their ingenious efforts.

“Beautiful,” I said.

“And amazing,” she added.

“Yes.”

“To think! He was a great painter!”

“He was.”

“Too.”

“‘Too’?”

“As well as composer.”

It took a moment for me to understand. “Bellini?” I asked.

“What a genius!”

“It was a different Bellini,” I told her. “There were two, you know. One was a painter. He came before. The other was a composer. He came after.”

“Two?” She was skeptical.

I nodded.

“Are you sure?”

“Positive.”

“I didn’t know that, Cassati, but I still want you to go to Venice and check it out.”

“Check what out?” I didn’t want to go to Venice. I had other plans.

“Bellini.”

“I told you, it’s a different one.”

“Okay, check him out anyway.”

“What do you want me to check?”

“See how things are.”

She saw the way I was looking at her. I had no idea what she was talking about. “What do you mean, ‘How things are’?”

“See if you can buy some of the paintings. I like them, especially the one of Father Christmas taking the mummy.”

“I assure you, Bellini painted no such scene.”

“Yes, he did, it’s on page a hundred and six.”

I turned to the page. “That’s not Father Christmas, Rosanna, it’s a priest of the temple, and that’s not a mummy, it’s the Baby Jesus in swaddling cloths.”

“So much the better.”

“You can’t buy these paintings, they’re the property of the state.”

“Maybe for me they would make an exception. I’ll ask the president.”

“He won’t do it.”

“I’ll ask the Pope.”

“Neither will he.”

“Go, anyway.”

“To Venice?”

“Yes.”

“Why don’t you go to Venice? Why do I have to go to Venice?”

“Too many people would recognize me. Besides, I leave tomorrow, as you know, for Buenos Aires.”

“What exactly do you want me to do?” (I had lost.)

“Check out the paintings, in person, look around, report to me, and get a copy of this book.”

“But you have a copy of the book.”

“You can keep this one. Get me a fresh one.”

That was why, last summer, I went to Venice.

*  *  *  *  *

TO THE QUESTION what is the difference between Venice and Milan other than a difference in tone, in the sunlight, and in the air, the answer is that Milan is where you busy yourself with the world as if what you did really mattered, and there time seems not to exist. But in Venice time seems to stop, you are busy only if you are a fool, and you see the truth of your life. And, whereas in Milan beauty is overcome by futility, in Venice futility is overcome by beauty.

It isn’t because of the architecture or the art, the things that people go to look at and strain to preserve. The quality of Venice that accomplishes what religion so often cannot is that Venice has made peace with the waters. It is not merely pleasant that the sea flows through, grasping the city like the tendrils of a vine, and, depending upon the light, making alleys and avenues of emerald or sapphire, it is a brave acceptance of dissolution and an unflinching settlement with death. Though in Venice you may sit in courtyards of stone, and your heels may click up marble stairs, you cannot move without riding upon or crossing the waters that someday will carry you in dissolution to the sea. To have made peace with their presence is the great achievement of Venice, and not what tourists come to see.

What Rosanna can do with her voice—the sublime elevation that is the province of artists, anyone can do in Venice if he knows what to look for and what to ignore. Should you concentrate there on the exquisite, or should you study too closely the monuments and museums, you will miss it, for it comes gently and without effort, and moves as slowly as the tide.

Despite the fact that you are more likely to feel this quality if you are not distracted by luxury, I registered at the Celestia. The streets near San Marco are far too crowded and not as interesting as those quieter areas on other islands and in other districts, and they have a deficit of greenery and sunlight. And the Celestia, with its 2,600-count linen and stage-lit suites, is the kind of luxury that removes one from the spirit of life, but I went there anyway almost as a way of spiting on Rosanna, who was paying for it, and because that is where we always stayed in Venice, and I wanted to accumulate more hotel-stay points. In that I am compulsive. Once I start laying-in a store of a certain commodity, like money, I get very enthusiastic about building it up.

Also, I’m somewhat known in Venice, and were I to stay in a less than perfect hotel word might get out that either Rosanna or I were not doing as well as was expected, and in the public eye position is not half as important as direction of travel. People are clever, and just as they find comets and shooting stars more of interest than simple pinpoints of light, they wisely ignore the fixed points of a career in favor of its trajectory.

I arrived in the evening, swam for a kilometer in the indoor pool, bumping on occasion into an old lady who was shaped like a frog and kept wandering blindly into my lane, and then I had dinner in my suite. Because I’m unused to sleeping with the sound of air-conditioning and in curtain-drawn darkness—at home the light of the moon and stars filters through the trees as they rustle unevenly in the wind—I slept as if anesthetized, and the next morning, parted from my current life, I woke up as if the world was new to me, as it used to be every morning when I awoke when I was young.

Still, I look my age, which is right and proper, so when I walked to the Accademia to “check out” the Bellini I stopped feeling like a youth, because I was brought back by the registering glances of passersby, the deference, the treatment one receives instantly and with neither word nor touch from strangers on the street. Young people look at you only quickly, as they would a post or a gate, saving their more intense concentration for one another. This, for someone of my age, constitutes the kind of dismissal for which, not inexplicably, one can actually be grateful. And for someone of my age it is a pleasure when older people look at you knowingly—for what you have seen, what you have done, for the wars you have lived through, the pains you feel, the energy you lack, and your bittersweet knowledge that you are not young anymore.

So by the time I paid admission to the Accademia I was in a state of perfect balance, my youth fresh in feeling and memory, my age clearly in mind, my reconciliation of the years that had passed with the years that were to come much like the reconciliation in Venice of land and sea.

The first thing you do in the Accademia is go upstairs, and this I did, rising into the same kind of rarefied world into which Rosanna provides entrance with her voice, and into which she had sent me to see what had happened when the paintings had been made young again, how it had been done, and how their colors, liberated from the sadness and fatigue of centuries, shone through.

*  *  *  *  *

I AM NOT A WELL-EDUCATED MAN except that I have educated myself, and, because I have educated myself, what I say will not stand up, for lack of recognized authority. This in turn leaves me free to say what I will, in the hope that, like those small forces that do not threaten empires and are thus not fully pursued, the things in which I believe can survive in some high and forgotten place until the power of empire subsides.

And although I know that few will listen to or credit this, I think we are in a lost age, in which holiness and charity have been traded for the victory and penetration of knowledge, though all the knowledge in the world has not brought us any further than where we can go without it even in the outermost halls of grace. I believe that more is to be known and apprehended from the beauty of a face than in delving, no matter how deep, simply into how things work, no matter how marvellous that may be. The greatest substance of the world is immaterial, the province of the heart, and its study cannot be forced or reasoned. Merely to touch upon the edge of things in parsing their mechanics is to forswear their fullness, for the entry to this fullness lies not in science but in art. I cannot prove this, for it cannot be proven, but I claim, assert, and have seen it.

There in the Accademia, among so many magnificent paintings that their import was almost lost, was the girl who reminded me of my daughters when they were young. She was one of the two saints in Bellini’s Madonna with Child Between Two Saints, the one to the Madonna’s left. Sometimes in a simple sequence of notes a shaft is opened into precincts of pure and perfect light. Rosanna has this wonderful gift, but music is by nature sequential, and moves in time. In the painting, where I saw, among other things, the souls of my daughters in the face of a saint, the revelatory sequences coexisted: in the way the light fell; how their eyes were directed, focused, and drawn; in the position of their hands; the rendering of expression; the tint of flesh; depth of darkness; softness of air; and composition of the ineffable. More was to be found in that one painting, in the construction of faces and the action of light, than in all the ponderings of the world.

Only when I had been there for God knows how long, and people had come and gone in untold numbers, silently pulling up and gliding away like fish in an aquarium, did I fall back almost in exhaustion, and come to my senses. That was when I realized that I had been hearing music, and that it was not imagined. Music is my business. I can remember it and hear it almost as vividly in recollection—and, just before sleep and in dreams, more vividly—than when it is real. So I thought at first that I was simply remembering a great singer singing a great song.

But, no, a soprano, accompanied only by a guitar, was singing somewhere, and the song floated across the air and through the open windows of the Accademia. As I looked up at these windows and at the warm and motion-filled light that bathed them, the song grew stronger. Singers on the streets are often students with neither experience nor promise. This was different. She was different. She was obviously young, not entirely polished, and not entirely sure, but the quality and power of her voice were of the first rank. I had not heard an unrecognized voice of this quality since the moment forty years before when first I heard Rosanna.

I ran through the Accademia like a merchant in pursuit of a thief. I wasn’t quite sure of where the song came from and did not want, in searching the side streets, to lose it. People don’t run in the Accademia. Well, perhaps American children, but not Italians of my age. Someone like me is rarely seen at a run in any circumstance, anyway, so I attracted the attention of the guards, who insisted that I submit to a search. They took me aside, patted me with their hands, and made sweeping motions with their electronic wands. “Forgive me, signore,” one of them told me, “but you have the air of someone who has stolen a painting—not to sell it, but out of love.”

“Obviously I don’t have a painting,” I said, breathing hard. It was hot and I was lightly dressed, with neither coat nor cape. The guard knowingly shook his head from side to side. “In this field of maneuver, they cut with a knife, and roll the canvas. It fits neatly down the thigh or inside the front of the jacket. Sometimes, but not always, they leave the knife behind.”

“Oh.”

“But you’re all right. Why were you running? Late for an appointment? You must be a lawyer.”

“No, I’m not a lawyer. The singer outside—I don’t want to miss her. I have to find what street she’s on. She might go away. It’s very important. Let me go.” I started off.

“Don’t worry,” the guard said, “she’s been here every day for a month. They’re on Foscarini, right in front of the Bancomat.”

“The Bancomat.”

“Yes.”

“Thank you,” I said, and gave him ten thousand lire. Then I rushed off.

“She stays there all day,” he called out after me, “no need to run.”

Only a great voice could sing, all day, as beautifully as that, only a great voice.

*  *  *  *  *

ON THE WHITE STONES of the Rio Terrà Foscarini just before the Calle Nuova Sant’Agnese, in front of the glass windows of a bank, in which the huge, rough walls of the Accademia were reflected, was a young woman of about twenty-five, who was singing. To her right, on an expensive folding chair, was a man of approximately the same age accompanying her on guitar. The guitar case on the sidewalk in front of them—of heavy grade, to protect an instrument worth perhaps seven or eight million lire—was held open to receive donations that appeared to be about twenty-five thousand lire for the morning. I calculated almost automatically that for singing that long Rosanna would earn no less than two hundred million lire and, depending upon the arrangements, possibly a billion lire, not to mention expenses that might easily be a hundred million or more.

And there I was, in a position perfectly illustrative of the essence of arbitrage, able to reconcile two rashly conflicting valuations. For her voice, though not as polished and confident as Rosanna’s after decades of performance, was a touch more beautiful, and would ripen with experience and time. I could bridge the irrational discrepancy in valuation, and take my share for doing so. As I have said, my reaction was almost automatic, and had been since I had started to run in the Accademia, but I was not comfortable. A counterweight to my obvious desire was pulling me back. I was in considerable distress, and had no idea why. I tried to ignore it. I tried to calm myself and, by listening intently and looking closely, take control of the many contradictory currents that had been set in motion within me.

Though a dozen people who had paused to listen formed a semicircle about the two performers, many more passed indifferently in both directions, as if they were busy with things of paramount importance, or were deaf, or viewed the soprano and guitarist as beggars. It was hard to tell the nationalities of those who had gathered. There are so many foreigners in Venice, especially around the Accademia at this time of day, and these days clothing is so universal that Eskimo children (in summer) dress like the youth of Palermo. It was women, mainly, who were watching, and, except for me, not one man unaccompanied by a woman. Only a few people of the twelve or so had cameras, and only one, an Englishman in a blue blazer, with blond hair and that masterful English bearing that Italians find entertaining even though they consider the same quality in Germans insufferable, was in the process of taking a photograph. He was next to his wife and daughters, who were truly beautiful and as tall as giraffes. Otherwise, the cameras remained sheathed.

The guitarist had a weak chin but strong eyes. His hair was pulled back, and rested at the base of his neck. It was so evenly dark that I thought it was either wet or dyed. If he had been there all morning it couldn’t have been wet—it didn’t look wet—but why would so young a man color his hair, unless he were not as young as I thought, and was perhaps considerably older than she, who surpassed him in promise and in youth. He wore black pants and a white shirt open at the collar, with the sleeves rolled up just beyond his elbows. A superb musician, he was playing from music set before him on a chrome stand. Deeply intent, he appeared to be suffering immensely, and never looked at the crowd, although he graciously acknowledged the few contributions tossed into the guitar case.

As a longtime impresario, I could see at a glance that he was a fine fellow who would treat me like a snake. I knew beforehand the full spectrum of his suspicion, anger, contempt, rage, helplessness, resignation, and grief. If things went the way all forces pushed them, he would come against me and fight hard until he realized that I was the representative of both inevitability and his own desires. For, after all, what were they hoping for on that street corner if not to be discovered by an impresario of La Scala? They were not singing just for bread and wine. In that regard, I noticed that they had no bottled water, and though they were in the shade, it was very hot. Everyone in Venice that day was drinking water from plastic bottles, and they had none. It made me wonder what people did in the previous ages of man. Not so long ago, it was possible to exist in the summer without carrying around a plastic bottle full of water, but perhaps people were unhappier then, though I know that I myself was not. (We used to drink from fountains and taps, and we didn’t get typhoid. Well, some of us did.)

If she had not been beautiful, she would have been beautiful nonetheless. I don’t know how she would be judged by common standards. For me it was impossible not to be enthralled as she sang an aria from La Clemenza di Tito, the first performance of which occurred in September of 1791, three months before Mozart died, and which was undoubtedly one of the many songs that carried him aloft. I am constructed so that when I heard her singing this, I reacted very strongly, which was unfortunate for me and for my fortunes, but fortunate in a far greater sense. It did, however, complicate things. A lifetime has taught me not to fall in love with a woman just because transcendent music is flowing from her breast. The men who fall in love with Rosanna this way are such idiots, and I’ve always been in a position to see this clearly. Perhaps I’m an idiot, too, for to add to the many difficulties I was experiencing in regard to this singer, I now was in love with her in the way that old men can briefly be in love with youth, which is like standing on the platform as an express train that doesn’t stop at your station goes by at full speed. It’s exciting, the wind comes up, your clothes whistle in the air, you awaken, and then it’s gone, without even having seen you.

Let me describe her, for in my infatuation I burned into memory every detail, and for a woman I have never touched (she made sure, for his sake, not even to shake my hand), it is as if I have slept next to her for decades. First, she was, for a singer, very slight. I could easily have lifted her into my arms. Doing that with Rosanna would be as inconceivable as tossing a hippo across the English Channel. But this beautiful singer was, at the same time, full, so that, though I might easily have lifted her, I could not have held her effortlessly or for long. She was not a delicate, weightless creature, all bone; she was, although trim and strong, a woman. The strength of her singing had to be more than just spiritual. Her body, though not overbearing, was alluring. Physically, she was dense and substantial, quick, self-possessed, and sexually willing. I knew that. How I knew, I don’t know.

I never remember what anyone is wearing, even I myself. My wife will sometimes command me to close my eyes. “What am I wearing?” she asks. I cannot say. “What are you wearing?” I cannot say that, either. But, strangely, I am able to remember what everyone there was wearing, not least the soprano. She stood in black sandals, and her toenails were painted. This shocked me, for I think it is barbaric and makes women look like the rhinoceroses in the Babar books. Why would such an angelic and unparalleled person stoop to such vulgarity? I immediately thought of Rosanna, who hires experts to buff and paint the nails on her feet, and suspected that this rhinocerine practice might somehow correlate with divine song, though why would it?

She wore pants that, though tight enough to show her perfect figure, were loose enough and black enough so that as she stood with her legs together it seemed as if she were in a sheath skirt. Her sleeveless top with narrow shoulder straps was black as well. It embraced her tightly, accentuating her firm and attractive bosom. Because the shoulder straps were so narrow, her brassiere straps, also black, had escaped their bounds and were visible on both sides. She was slightly sunburned, and on her left wrist she wore a cheap Japanese watch with a silver band. The face of the watch was rectangular and its diminutive blue dial against the black of her clothes was ravishing.

Her chestnut hair, though not colored, was pulled back and had the same quality as his. That is, it seemed wet, though it was not. And then I realized that—in Venice, in peak season—they could not afford a hotel room. They were probably living on the street. A woman who, with a season of apprenticeship to learn techniques of the stage and how to live richly, would, or, rather, could be one of the two or three highest-paid sopranos of the world, whose talent was equal to, if not finer than, that of Rosanna Cadorna, the highest-paid singer in existence, was, for all her beauty and majesty, living on the street.

I have mentioned that she was beautiful, and she was. Her face was as sharp as a hawk’s, and as strong. And her eyes were the strangest eyes I have ever seen. Unless she looked directly at you—and as she sang she looked either at her feet or up at the high walls of the Accademia—you could not see them. It was as if she were blind or they were hooded like a hawk’s, neither of which was the case. Much as he would not engage his audience, neither would she, but whereas he was obliged to look at the music, she could not, and here the highly unusual eyes served to protect her privacy. Perhaps she was ashamed of singing and living on the street. But when she sang, the shame vanished. Perhaps it was this that gave her the ability to sing for so long, that her singing was the only thing that kept them in the light and warmth of the world.

When she finished with the aria, some people tossed a few thousand lire into the guitar case. It appeared that she would rest a few minutes, so I took my time in removing from my wallet my card and some money. I wanted to put them up immediately in the finest suite of the Celestia. It would have been perfectly appropriate, and though it might have made them slightly grandiose in negotiation, it would have made them feel indebted to me and thrown them off balance. But something told me this was not right. You give a starving soprano soup, not roast oxen and cake. And, although I didn’t know why, I didn’t want them to feel indebted to me, even though I knew that no matter how little I helped them, they would.

My card announces me as an impresario of La Scala and the sole representative and manager of Rosanna Cadorna, Philippe Juneaux, and Lèandra Busoni. I gave it to them, to him—the proper etiquette—rather than putting it in the guitar case, with ten one-hundred-thousand lire notes, all freshly printed. He read the card, felt the money, and almost had a cardiac arrest. Seeing this, she came over to look, and followed suit. They couldn’t talk. They looked at me, as I knew they would, as if I had risen from the dead.

“I would be very happy,” I said, “if you would join me for dinner tonight at the Celestia. Please meet me in the lobby, at eight.”

They didn’t understand Italian very well, so I said it in English, which they did understand. All they could say was “Thank you, thank you …,” which I interrupted by asking how long they had been in Venice.

“We arrived last night on the train,” he offered as precisely as if talking to a magistrate.

“But the guard at the Accademia told me you’ve been here for a month,” I said.

He looked puzzled. Then he moved his hand in a kind of backward, hitchhiking motion, thumb pointing to the bank. “The people in the bank gave us coffee,” he said, “and thanked us. They said that African drummers were here for ten days. They liked it, at first.” He smiled.

Duplicating his gesture but with my thumb pointing to the Accademia, I said, “In there, they’re not musical, but visual.” This put them at ease.

“You represent Rosanna Cadorna and Lèandra Busoni?” she asked, as if it could not be true.

“Yes.”

“We just got here,” she said. What she meant was what my late friend Federico, a cellist, meant when he told me that, on his first trip to England, in the nineteen thirties, half an hour after exiting the station he found himself standing on a Whitehall street corner next to Winston Churchill. It was true: Federico was an absolute literalist and could not lie.

“Will you join me for dinner, then?” I asked.

They nodded.

“Good.” I turned and made quickly for the Accademia Bridge. I had no reason to hurry except that I knew they would be looking after me, and, as I walk self-consciously when I know I am being watched, I wanted to get out of there. And I wanted to give the impression that I had something to do, even though I didn’t have anything to do at all.

With the million lire they could find a room, bathe, and spend the rest of the afternoon speculating. I had made what was perhaps the second great discovery of my career, and yet I was profoundly unsettled. I looked forward to taking them to dinner, but I did not look forward to the rest. By the time I reached a point almost at the center of the bridge and walked over to the rail to look back, they were gone.

*  *  *  *  *

AT THE CELESTIA I stayed on my terrace fronting the Grand Canal and the Isola di San Giorgio. Although I could see out, behind a balustrade and a dense hedge of miniature orange trees I was visible to no one. In bright sun and a breeze, I read the papers, drank several liters of water, and looked long at the view.

Unsure of what lay ahead and fearful that they might not make the right choices, they would be in a state of excited agitation. Knowing what lay ahead for them on whatever road they might take, I felt sadness and regret. What, exactly, would I have to offer? No one in his right mind would think it anything but glorious, but perhaps I was not in my right mind. I thought of Rosanna, glorious only when she sang, and even then glorious only from afar, like a plain woman made up to be strikingly beautiful in the unnatural light of the stage.

Exhausted by the glare of the sun, I slept until ten of eight. I awoke in confusion and rushed to dress. Rather than wear the suit I had planned to wear—the quality of which bespoke great wealth—I threw on a blazer and went without a tie. As long as a handkerchief was in the breast pocket, the blazer was elegant enough for the restaurant.

Sunburnt, of advancing age, and attired in a way that made me look like the magnate I am not except in the little world of managing singers, I ran once again, this time through the narrow carpeted corridors of the hotel and down increasingly widening staircases until I reached the lobby, where I stopped disappointedly because they were not there. I looked at my watch, which said 8:12. Surely they would have waited for twelve minutes. It was possible that they hadn’t arrived yet. I glanced at the clock in the lobby, one of those bulging glittery things that looks like it was once possessed by Marie Antoinette. It said twenty-seven past the hour. A gift from Rosanna, my watch was so rare, expensive, and delicate that it was never, ever, accurate. I truly regretted having been seduced by its prestige.

At first I was upset, but, then, thinking that perhaps they had come and, when I did not show up, decided that the whole thing was a hoax and left, I was relieved. It was as if I had discovered that a furious and incendiary telegram I had sent and would regret for the rest of my life had not been delivered, because the lines were down, or a dog had eaten it, or a telegraph messenger had pedalled his bicycle into a canal. Though I felt the missed opportunity, I was pleased that nothing had happened. Walking toward the restaurant, my relief was confirmed in an after-reaction of happiness that seemed to spring from nowhere.

But when I entered the restaurant, they were sitting in the vestibule like nervous mice, without even a drink. “Ah,” I said, in a nearly dread-filled voice that probably threw them into despair, “there you are.”

“We’re sorry for being early,” she said.

“No,” I contradicted. “I’m late. I’m the one who should be sorry.”

“Please,” he said, “you needn’t be sorry. We’re sorry.”

Had I wanted to I could have signed them right then and there and for a tenth of what they deserved, but in this negotiation I could not be their opponent, I had to be their advocate, something I realized in amazement as we were shown to our table.

I made hand signals to the waiters without even looking at them, the way really rich people do. I don’t know what the signals mean or if I am actually saying anything when I use them, but the waiters know that when someone is so confident of being served properly without even looking at those who are serving him, they will receive a spectacular tip, and therefore they always do the right thing. In this case, instead of allowing us time to settle in before bringing the menus, they brought them immediately (which is what I wanted), and did not stay to talk about the special dishes for that evening, something I never like.

“The menu has no prices,” she announced in alarm.

“Mine has the prices,” I told them, “and as the host I cannot reveal them. That’s not the paramount rule, however. The paramount rule is that you must eat extravagantly. If you don’t, I’ll be insulted.”

They ordered, trying their best to be extravagant, but they didn’t know how. They both wanted soup and the seafood “bouquet,” and to know if the soup came with bread. The “bouquet” would stun them, as it consisted of a whole American lobster, chilled and shelled, half a dozen immense shrimp, cold scallops, smoked salmon, a great amount of Alaskan king crab, smoked oysters, smoked trout, and caviar. I ordered the same, and, in addition, for the table, a different type of caviar, Champagne, scotch, grilled boned quail, and truffled wild rice. Dessert would be another production.

Almost before we spoke, the half a glass of Champagne she drank transformed her, as it does some women, into a creature of angelic grace and happiness. A shot of scotch made him a touch belligerent—just a touch—and yet relaxed and ready for whatever might happen. For my part, I like caviar and I had a double Glenlivet, which made me reckless and determined, which, I believe, is what the heart most requires even if it brings trouble, for recklessness and determination make life come alive.

“You’re not Italian,” I began, “and you’re not English, I can tell. What are you?”

“Most people, hearing our accents,” he said, “say, ‘What the hell are you?’ Guess.”

“German?”

“Of course not,” she said, and laughed. She was charming. Her speaking voice was as intensely beautiful as might have been expected.

“Russian?” I asked.

Now they both laughed, at ease. She shook her head back and forth. They liked the game.

“Vietnamese,” I said.

Their eyes widened.

“Congolese?”

“Consider northern Europe,” he suggested.

“You’re not Finns,” I said, as if I had evidence. They looked at one another, it appeared to me, knowingly. “Are you Finns?”

“No, but close,” she said.

“Estonians.”

“Yes.” She was pleased. “No one speaks our language except other Estonians, and even in Europe many people have actually never even heard of Estonia.”

“Are you from Tallinn?”

“Rapla.”

“Rapla.”

“There are probably more people in this hotel than in Rapla,” he said, with a trace of bitterness. “We both studied in Tallinn.”

“With whom?”

He looked at me almost painfully. “No one you would know.”

“Not necessarily. I’ve been there.”

“You have?”

“Rosanna Cadorna sang there …” I looked at them, and said, with some embarrassment, “before you were born.”

They gawked at me. That I had known Rosanna before they were even born put me, evidently, beyond the realm of their understanding. “It’s amazing that you really represent Rosanna Cadorna,” she said as the food was laid down in great profusion.

“Yes, it is amazing,” I answered with irony that flew by them, “and it’s been amazing since nineteen sixty-two, when I discovered her. It’s not a secret, and has been in many magazines and books. I heard her singing as she was hanging wet sheets on a line in a laundry in Milan.”

“No one had heard her before you?”

“No one who believed that she should sing in La Scala.”

“What was an impresario doing at a laundry?”

“Look, even impresarios need clean clothes, but this wasn’t that kind of laundry, it was an industrial laundry, and I wasn’t an impresario at the time, I was a bookkeeper.”

They didn’t know the term bookkeeper, and they looked mildly amused. “Honey?” she asked.

At first, I didn’t know what she meant: I thought she was beginning to ask me a question in a manner that was both flirtatious and insane, but then I understood, and I said, “Accountant.”

“Oh.”

He got right to it, maybe because of the scotch. I was sorry. I wanted not to get to it. I wanted to know them more. But someone had to get to it eventually, someone always does, and it’s usually me. He was apparently nervous to be taking the initiative, but it is a gift of young men that despite their fears they so often do. “We are grateful for what you gave us,” he said, trying not to be formal, though it came out like the speech of the many university presidents who have given Rosanna—who reads romance comic books and thinks that electricity is a liquid—her many honorary doctorates. (“Rosanna Cadorna,” they say in a universally stilted manner, “you have brought to the peoples of the world the ineffable beauties of song. In your work of many decades … blah, blah, blah.”)

“We are grateful for what you gave us,” he said, “not only because it was more than what we have earned in all our time in Prague and Vienna. …”

I was hardly listening. Instead, I studied them to see what difference, if any, the money had made. He had shaved. They had washed their hair, and hers, at least, had the quality of easy perfection that young people’s hair has when they are healthy. He wore a kind of Eastern European safari jacket, which was probably the most formal item of clothing he had with him, and had the handkerchief been in his pocket instead of mine he would have looked more like a tycoon than me. That’s because tycoons these days are very casual. His long hair did not count against him. It might even have counted for him. Except for the fact that he was not relaxed, he might have been taken for an industrialist’s son who has just returned from racing sports cars in Africa.

She was wearing the same shoes, the same top, and the same black brassiere the straps of which were still seductively out of control, but instead of the black pants she had worn during the day she was in a silklike, probably rayon, sheath skirt of very dark blue and black in a tight and subtle print. She had made up lightly, and my eyes jumped from feature to feature, noting the changes. In some ways she looked less austere than she had, and in some ways more so. Her lips were now redder with a light application of lipstick; her face was paler and smoother; and her eyes were even more striking than they had been, for now their hiddenness—only occasionally did they flash in the light, for she modestly averted her gaze most of the time—was abetted by mascara and eye shadow that had touches of chestnut and deep green. When I looked at her eyes I thought of a seraglio and of dark vines in a Persian garden, so hooded and hidden and mysterious were they, and then, on those rare occasions when she would look at me directly, their intense blue would flash both wet and bright. Her peculiar beauty was so strong that it was almost frightening. As if I could see into the future and long past my own death, when the world was still busy, worried, and moving, I saw the rarity and severity of her beauty as it had settled. I saw her isolated and apart, having risen almost without limit, frightening those who were neither as pure nor as sharp of feature. In my spark of clairvoyance she was no longer a young woman, nor even entirely human, but almost birdlike, mythical, a vision her forbears had had as they crossed the sea-ice. Whatever had taken possession of her voice had shaped her face and was obviously resident within her. She was only in her early twenties, with a power unlike any I had ever seen, and yet she was also shy and uncertain, soft, slight, in many ways still possessed of the charm of girlhood.

“So, we thank you,” he said, finishing.

“Please, don’t even consider it,” I told him with the same bizarre formality. Then the quail came, interruptively, sizzling on iron salvers.

The world has changed beyond measure. When I was young you could find musicians everywhere, and because all around the world there were so many, there were many great ones. Now that music is faithfully reproducible, musicians are not needed as once they were. And music itself has changed. Though small cadres of classicists keep the sacred and ineffable alive, they are under siege by coarse generations whose music is hardly as musical as a bus engine or a chain saw. Something must have occurred during their mothers’ pregnancies. How else is it possible to explain that playing Bach keeps them away from public spaces the way iron spikes drive pigeons from cathedral ledges?

Which is to say that, not long ago, Segovia, Manitas de Plata, and Liona Boyd could tour internationally and fill great halls. What chance would they have today? What chance would this young Estonian have? I didn’t know if they were married or engaged, but I knew from the way they sat that they were in love. I knew as well that even were I to help them take the very first step—the thing that at this meal was, as the English say, I think, “the insect in the room”—I would have to spend half my energy making work for him. He would appear at libraries and in schools. A few times, until it was sadly driven home to him that only twenty or thirty people would show up, I would rent halls for several hundred. He was a fine guitarist, but the world was never liable to honor guitarists, and surely not now, whereas a soprano or two can still rise as high as royalty.

“Do you know what it would be like to eat this way every night?” I asked.

They didn’t understand what I was working toward, and smiled pleasantly, knowing that they didn’t get the point and hoping, perhaps, that I would not test them.

“No, truly. Think what it would be like to eat like this every night.”

“It would be wonderful,” she said out of politeness.

“No it wouldn’t. If you eat simply, and struggle for a living, it’s wonderful to have an exception now and then, but, when it’s the rule. … Have you seen Rosanna Cadorna?”

“Wasn’t she always that way?” he asked, a fork speared into quail poised in his left hand, and a crystal tumbler of scotch in his right, airborne.

“You mean that, when she was nineteen, she had to sit in the center of the backseat of a car or it would go around in circles because it would lean so much that the metal would scrape the ground? No. She was always a big eater, but she was once as thin as either of you.”

“What happened?”

“What happened? She got what she wanted, and to get it she gave up what she needed.”

They looked at me as if they didn’t understand what I was saying, because they didn’t. At their age and in their position it would have been impossible for them to understand.

“You think she’s happy?” I asked. “Do you think that with her villa, her apartments in Rome, Paris, and London, her Bentley, her special African-mud-wasp facial stuff, or whatever it is, with deference and solicitude everywhere, she’s happy?”

“She isn’t, then?”

I shook my head. “No, she’s not happy. She’s just a commodity, hardly a human being anymore. Everyone feels obliged to tell her how wonderful she is. She believes none of it. She had a few great moments, but now she suffers from every decline in the gate, from every fall in CD sales, from every bad review, and although they still cannot justifiably fault her singing, they attack her anyway. They attack her for failing to do what they arbitrarily feel that she should do but what she never intended to do, for her politics or the lack of them, for her missing personal life, for her appearance.

“I’m the manager, so I take some of the blows, but even when we do make a good contract it’s like buying and selling a slave. What makes it worse is how the people who are buying profess to love her singing. All I can say, and you may never understand this, is that if you are in the business of buying and selling singers, you cannot credibly say that you love singing.”

“What about you?” he asked.

I briefly closed my eyes. “I never, ever, tell anyone that I love her singing, or his singing. Because I am an impresario, it would not, to a singer, be credible. Only God knows what I feel.”

“What about me, then?” she asked. “I sang for you. It’s not easy to put oneself out like that, for strangers on the street. …”

“Which is why he is rightly so protective,” I interrupted.

“Which is why he is, yes. You won’t tell me what you think?”

“I will tell you what I think you can do, where you can sing, what your life might be like.”

“Then tell me.”

They braced themselves. Here it was. We were finally getting down to it.

“I’m relatively certain that after a year or two, perhaps more (depending upon what you know of the repertoire and how fast you learn), you would be a rising star, and that, not long after, with luck, you could be one of the two or three leading sopranos of the world. Perhaps, if your beauty and severity of appearance took the right turns, and others fell back, as they tend to do, you could be, as they say, facile princeps, the leading soprano of the world.”

They were stunned. They believed me, but they could not believe me.

“You would be wealthy beyond what you can imagine. You would have villas and obscenely expensive automobiles. You would stay in presidential suites. Everyone you meet would treat you with deference—even royalty and prime ministers, even the Pope.”

I paused, and then I said, with great difficulty, “You, not he,” pointing at him almost accusingly. “Not he. He would be the afterthought. He would fade away. If he had been a pianist or another singer, he would have had his own chance, even if impossibly small. But not guitar. He’ll drop back, and then he’ll drop away. I saw it even this afternoon, on the street.”

“How did you see it?” she asked, determined to defend him.

“In his expression, his position, his eyes.”

“Why are you telling us this?” he said with justifiable indignation. “Why are we here?”

“I’ll sign both of you,” I said. “I would love to. She can rise … there is no limit to how high. But I refuse, I refuse, to do any further damage.”

“What damage?” she asked. She did not actually know.

“Immense damage.”

“We would be fine,” he insisted. “As long as I can play, I’ll be happy.”

“What are you suggesting?” she insisted. Now that the picture of triumph had been complicated, she was greatly disturbed.

“I’m suggesting, although I know you would never be able to believe this, that what you have now, as you struggle, is something you may regret to lose.”

“What’s the difference if we sing on the street or in an opera house?” she asked.

“What’s the difference if you sing on the street or in an opera house?” I repeated. “All the difference in the world. The difference between hope and success, youth and age, and, in some ways, life and death.”

I knew what was coming, and was ready for a minute or two of storm. As I expected, he leaned forward in his chair, made a fist with the index finger extended, and lectured me passionately on their deprivations, beginning with “You don’t know. …” They came, with great power, one after another. “You don’t know … this,” and “You don’t know … that,” and so on.

When he was finished, and somewhat exhausted, after relating to me what it was like to sleep under bridges and go without meals and washing, I nodded, and said quietly, “But I do know. I grew up in the war, so I know very well.”

“Who would choose not to have what you have said we could have,” she asked quite sensibly, “in favor of what we have now?”

“No one,” I answered.

“Then, you tell us,” she went on, “what should we do? What makes sense?”

“First of all,” I said, “I’m not the only impresario in the world. You can always appeal to someone else—and then,” I said, almost as an aside, “I’ll have even more regrets to live with.”

“We don’t know how to appeal to impresarios except by accident,” he said. “It’s not that easy.”

He was right. I nodded. “Could you teach in Rapla?”

“Far too small.”

“Tallinn?”

“Yes, but it would be nothing like what you have held before us.”

“And you never thought of it before?”

“Of course we did,” she said, “but now you’ve made it seem real.”

“Because it is real. And it will remain real. This is what I suggest. First, stay for dessert, and don’t be angry with me.” I looked up at them. They agreed, and, to my surprise, happily. “I want only the best for you.” This was true more than they could know.

“You should understand, first of all, that if you do sign with me I’ll ask only ten percent.”

They looked at one another as if perhaps ten percent was a lot and they were about to be cheated. This made me laugh. “Anyone else, as you will see if you care to look, will take much much more than that. And anyone else would try to sign you immediately—my own first impulse. When I heard you, I ran down the stairs at the Accademia. And anyone else would never urge you to do what I am going to ask you to do now.”

They looked both expectant and disappointed.

“First, I’m going to give you ten million lire.”

“For what?” he asked.

“For nothing. You don’t have to pay it back. It will cover your expenses for the rest of the summer, and you can concentrate on what you do, without desperation. Then, go home. Think about what may happen, what life could be like. Think carefully, and keep working. It’s the work that in the end is worth something, and when you exchange it for something else, it leaves you in more ways than you know. Because of your perspective and your position, you won’t be able to believe me when I say this, but what you have now is more than you will ever have.

“Perhaps next year you’ll want to come to Milan. If you lose my card, just remember Cassati. You can find me. Even if you forget my name, you’ll never forget Rosanna’s, and you can reach me through her.”

“Next year,” she said, “our chances may not be as good.”

“No. Next year, your chances, once you have considered them in tranquillity, will be better. And if that is what you decide, next year, they will not seize you, you will seize them. Something that people are often afraid to know or say is that life is more splendid than career.”

“How do you know?” she asked.

“From regret.”

The waiter was sweeping crumbs from the table before bringing dessert. He was my age, his hair was slicked back, and he must have wondered who we were.

*  *  *  *  *

THE NEXT MORNING, when I left Venice, I felt older than I am. The hotel provided a gondola that took me, via the Grand Canal, to the station. I had time to make the trip this way rather than on the vaporetto, because the fast train left at eleven. You cannot help but feel either very old or very young, like a child, when you are helplessly borne along in a gondola, and see young people making their way on the streets and crossing the bridges, knapsacks on their backs, sandals on their feet, their strength and youth a blessedness that they only half know.

I suppose they may have envied me, riding easily in the gondola, my luggage stacked, my hat, my suit, its cream-colored linen suggesting someone of influence and consequence, which I know is not true. They may have envied me, but I envied them—sunburnt, straight of leg, firm of arm, awake as I can never be awake again. It is in the nature of things, however, that my envy be quick and benevolent, for I have had my turn, and now it is rightfully theirs. And for all my dignity and wealth, I am an impresario, and an impresario, you know, is nothing more than a glorified parasite.

I have had this discussion too many times not to know where it leads. I explain the truth of my condition, and the people I am with—usually in a restaurant—protest. How can I say that? I brought Rosanna to the world, enriching it immeasurably. That is when I shock them, because I say that I should have left her in the laundry. And when they get their breath they pronounce with annoying certainty, no, for if I had, the world would be immeasurably poorer.

“Listen,” I say, “let me tell you this. I’m an impresario. I know the job. I know what to do. I work in the service of art, the art that you love, and I love. But if in my lifetime in service to art, surrounded by it, moved by its beauty again and again, I have learned one thing, it is that in its every expression and in its every utterance it is adoring of the human soul and the human heart. If I had left Rosanna in the laundry, her life itself may have been a work of art greater than the sum of all the songs she has ever sung.”

They don’t understand. They never understand. Why would they? They have not intervened, as I have. They have not interrupted the course of things. They have not broken apart lines. Or, at least, if they have, they seem not to care. I am now old enough to choose where I stand at the last, and though my friends and acquaintances in the world of music may not understand or approve, I stand on this. I see clearly. I know what I have done. And I know, finally, what is right.

In the gondola, on the Grand Canal, I felt that I was borne back toward where I had started, not by the power of the gondoliere and not merely with the gentle flow of the tide, but as if on a river that, though running into darkness and oblivion, was running swift and bright.

Soon after pushing off from the dock at the Celestia, we passed under the Accademia bridge. I strained toward the Rio Terrà Foscarini, but heard nothing, only the water and the noise of the crowd. It felt like sitting in a dark room, and I looked ahead as if I had lost every chance in the world.

But then, as if the lights of a room had come up, or the great and powerful lights of the stage were pushed to the full so that the rouge on the singers’ faces looked like roses in the summer sun, I heard her as she began to sing.

Her voice, not even a full day later, was more powerful, more masterful. She had ascended from her very high position at least a step or two, and her song was the most beautiful thing I had ever heard, far more beautiful in its promise, despite a younger and less accomplished voice, than any song Rosanna has ever sung, for, you see, Rosanna was not allowed to bloom.

And as I passed over the waters and heard this song that she sang on a side street, it said to me that no matter where you lead or you are led, no matter how the waves may break upon you, and what sins you may unknowingly commit, it is true that by the grace of God you can sometimes make amends.