Chapter 30

Camilla was as much of a wizard with shrimp as she'd promised. She did a light boil, just enough to shell it, and then finished it off in a frying pan with garlic, white wine and sprinklings of a couple of herbs. We served it over rice with a side of stir-fried mixed vegetables—I did that part—and it was delicious. We gave some to Asmedogh, who also polished it off happily.

At her suggestion Asmedogh joined us to eat dinner that evening. I don't know why I hadn't thought of that when it was just him and me; it simply never occurred to me. He sat on the table instead of at it, of course, and didn't join much in the conversation—there was no physical link, which Camilla still needed, and in any case he wasn't much at idle chit-chat.

After dinner I dug around for my old Traviata score, and finally unearthed it in a trunk full of memorabilia that I had stashed away in the guest room closet. The same trunk also held an old inexpensive espresso machine that I'd completely forgotten. I took it downstairs, gave it a thorough cleaning and plugged it in to see if it still worked. Lo and behold, it did, and I brewed us each a double shot. We drank it out of regular coffee cups—espresso cups were beyond the scope of my rather motley assortment of dishware—but it still tasted as good.

Camilla had her mind focused on Traviata, and gave me a capsule of what to expect. The tenor was a new kid whose name I didn't know at all; she said she'd heard he was OK but nothing out of the ordinary. "They blew their budget on Tosca and on me," she said without a hint of bashfulness. As for the conductor, "Miro's perfectly adequate, even though he's no Gerry. Pedestrian pretty well right down the line, tends to emphasize strings over brass and winds—which is fine for Traviata—and goes about middle-of-the-road on tempi. He keeps the orchestra together OK, although he's sloppy on big crescendi. But Traviata doesn't run to much of that, so it won't be a problem."

I should also expect low-end sets and staging, she said. Budget again. They were borrowing the sets from another house, which had recycled them from yet elsewhere. Costumes were also being borrowed, though the house had a perfectly adequate department for handling alterations. "Just as well," she said; "you're a lot bigger than asshole Marko. Well, they'll be ready. Your agent has your measurements, right?" I nodded yes.

The worst part would be the stage director who, she said succinctly, "sucks." "He hasn't had a new idea since he was born, and if he had one it'd be bad," she told me. "I sang there last year, too—Butterfly—and he was so useless we largely took to ignoring him and doing what we wanted. The idiot wanted me to take 'Piccolo Iddio' at the very back of the stage." It's her final aria, a touching farewell to her infant before she kills herself, and one of the few that doesn't go by its first words, those first words being "tu, tu"—"you, you"—repeated seven times. "I said sure, sure, and just moved in front of the prompter's box."

That led us to exchange a few horror stories we'd stored up about incompetent stage directors. My most amusing was one I hadn't actually been involved in but had only heard about, a director who'd wanted Madeleine Contras to actually mount up on her horse at the end of Wagner's Götterdämmerung. Madeleine had reportedly argued with him for days before she agreed to try it, but by then the horse had got a good look at all three hundred pounds of her and bolted the minute she put a foot in the stirrup. Madeleine went flat on her ass, and the horse was replaced with a scrim projection of a picture by performance time.

"I'm absolutely convinced that animals don't belong on opera stages, but especially horses," she said. She recounted a tale of her early career when she was Micaela in Carmen and the director had Escamillo, the lead baritone, make his first entrance on horseback. That part went all right—"he was nothing like Madeleine's size, and he could actually ride, which was why they tried it"—but in the second performance the horse took it into his head to make a deposit mid-stage.

"The whole chorus is on and milling around, and they kept having to make detours around the horsepoop," she giggled. "Finally one chorister got fed up and went offstage for a bucket and a broom and cleaned it up right during the final stanza of the 'Toreador song.' The baritone—I won't tell you his name, he's still around and mostly he's a good guy—got so furious he wanted the chorister fired. Management wouldn't do it. But that horse went missing the final three performances."