Novel - The Shoemaker's Wife by Adriana Trigiani

Author:Adriana Trigiani
Language: eng
Format: mobi
ISBN: 9780061257094
Publisher: Harper
Published: 2012-12-31T07:00:00+00:00

Chapter 18

A CHAMPAGNE FLUTE

Un Bicchiere da Spumante

Enrico Caruso stood on the fitting stool in his spacious dressing room in the Metropolitan Opera House, puffing a cigar.

Hoping to please their star, the set decorator had poached the best ideas from interior designer Elsie de Wolfe, creating a lair for the singer inspired by the colors of the Mediterranean on the southern coast of Italy, where Caruso was born. The decor was all sun, sea foam, and sand.

A seven-foot sofa, covered in turquoise chenille and studded with large coral buttons, conjured the waters of the port of Sorrento. The lamps were milk-glass globes topped with tangerine shades. Overhead, the light fixture was a brass sunburst with round white bulbs on the tips. An Italian summer was tucked away behind the scenery, costumes, and props.

“I live in a seashell,” Caruso remarked. “I'm a real scungeel.”

Enrico’s makeup table was oversize, painted white, with large lightbulbs encircling an enormous round mirror. On the table, laid out with the precision of surgical equipment on pristine starched cotton towels, were vanity tools, brushes, powders, black kohl pencils, and tins of hair pomade. A small tin of glue for hairpieces, mustaches, and beards was open on the table. A low gilded stool covered in coral-and-white-striped fabric was tucked under the table.

“I have a bagno like the pope,” Caruso said as he stood on the fitting stool. “Have you met him, Vincenza?”

“No, Signore.” Enza smiled at the thought of ever meeting a pope, as she pinned the darts in the back of the costume.

“I have the same bathroom,” Caruso said. “But where I have silver fixtures, he has gold.”

Caruso was five foot ten. He had a thick waist and a barrel chest that could expand four inches when his lungs were inflated with enough air for the trademark power of his tenor. His legs were powerful, with muscular calves and substantial thighs, like the men who hauled marble and lifted granite in the villages of southern Italy. Expressive hands, muscular biceps, and slim forearms were grace notes on his physique. He acted with the dimensions of his body, just as he sang through them.

The most memorable feature of the Great Caruso’s face were his eyes, large, dark brown, dramatic, and expressive. His gaze was so penetrating, the whites of his eyes could be seen clearly from the mezzanine, as if the beams of the spotlights originated within him, instead of simply illuminating him from the rafters above. The intelligence behind his eyes made Caruso an artist of emotional scope and power, and a brilliant actor as well as the greatest opera singer of his time.

Caruso knew what the audience wanted: they wanted to feel something, and they wanted him to take them there, so he gave of himself from the depths of his talent, from a bottomless well of sound, willingly and generously. He was the first opera singer to make phonograph records and sell them in the millions. He saw art as a gift to the masses, not simply a diversion for the upper classes.

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