The Shoemaker's Wife(93)

Enza took a deep breath. She knew this was the most important moment in her professional life thus far—the moment she was chosen and singled out for her talent. She had worked since she was fourteen years old for this opportunity. Her skills, nurtured in Mrs. Sabatino’s dress shop on the mountain and perfected by rote in the factory, had finally been revealed in full. Her talent was no longer a private matter; it was on display for all to see and appreciate on the stage of the Metropolitan Opera. And now, she would hem the garments of The Great Voice. She could scarcely believe it. If only Anna Buffa could see her now.





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. Giulio Gatti-Casazza, the general manager of the Met during Caruso’s reign, marveled at Caruso’s ability to fill every seat and satisfy every customer. It would have been difficult to find anyone who didn’t love Caruso, and he liked it that way.

Caruso could move an audience with a simple gesture, a wink, or a single tear. The occasional improvisation was not beyond him, as his good friend Antonio Scotti had experienced onstage with the master. Once Scotti had entered a scene early; instead of being thrown off, the master went to Scotti, embraced him, and invented an a cappella greeting that Scotti sang back to him. The audience went wild.

“I demanded an Italian girl.” Caruso blew a cloud of gray smoke up to the ceiling as he stood in a pair of navy military pants with runners of ruby red satin down the sides. Enza marked the hems with chalk.

“There are lots of us in the workroom, Signor Caruso,” Enza said.

“But Serafina tells me you’re the best.”

“That’s very kind of her, sir.”

“You like the opera, Vincenza?”

“Very much, sir. I used to work for a woman in Hoboken who played your records. Sometimes she played them so much, the neighbors would all shout, ‘Basta!’ until she was forced to stop.”

Caruso laughed heartily. “You mean every house in Hoboken isn’t filled with fans of the Great Caruso? You have a musical soul, Vincenza. You know how I can tell? Your eyebrows. They’re like D minor notes. They shoot up high, and drop low on the staff. Do you cook?”

“Yes, sir.”

“What can you make?”

“Macaroni.”

“Be more specific.”

“Gnocchi.”

“Ah, peasant food to survive a long winter. Good. You make it with potatoes?”

“Of course.”

“What sauce?”