12

WHILE Bess and Audran talk in his room and Harry is taking his second curtain-call at the Opera House, his shirt soaked with sweat, a tall man is trying to get out onto the rooftop of the Hotel Metropole. He uses the key the manager has loaned him to open the door, which sticks a little, at the top of an interior staircase. The door groans then gives way. He emerges like a coal-miner leaving a shaft at the end of a day’s toil.

After replacing the key in a waistcoat pocket he gazes up at the night sky, a different sky to what he has seen in the United States or at home in Italy, hands clasped together behind his back.

Nobody will bother him here. The manager has assured him he is the only other person who ever comes up. A match flares. The orange light accentuates lines on the composer’s face as he leans into the flame with a cigarette. There are no clouds. The sky is smoky grey, almost purple, and studded with stars except in the vicinity of a crescent-shaped moon, still low, which has blanked out its less lustrous competitors.

It is pleasantly mild, like a July evening in Rome. Savouring the sharp tang of the tobacco, he wonders why he has come up here. For inspiration? Perhaps the outlaw Dick Johnson – lover of Minnie, his Girl of the Golden West – could sing his final aria as if he were serenading the stars. Caruso would enjoy that, and it would be up to others to devise ways to have stars inside the Metropolitan Opera House in New York. The composer has also been considering a scene with Johnson and Minnie in a snowstorm. His next opera must feel as big as the Wild West itself. As imposing as a clearing in the Californian forest with some colossal redwood trees. And perhaps ten horses on the stage. What a sensation that would be. But first he must finish his work, or the only sensation will be the cancellation of the scheduled premiere. A scandal to match the jeering and catcalls that greeted his first Butterfly.

He has come to Australia to finish this new opera. And he has come for the comet, having read that it will be best seen in southern skies, brighter and more beautiful than anything ever witnessed before. More beautiful and radiant even than his Minnie. He is blessed to be here and alive in the year the comet will reveal itself for the first time since 1835, when Verdi himself had not produced his first opera. There are days and nights, however, when the composer fears that his last Act for Minnie and Dick Johnson will still be incomplete when the comet comes again in another seventy-five years.

He is tired. And there is still so much to do. Wrestling with the divine art which begins, or ought to begin, where the singing stops. Rising above the silence. It is puzzling: after all his work, all the scribbled notes on sheets of paper for the music to accompany her songs, he still cannot see Minnie – a problem he did not experience with Mimi in Boheme and then Cio-Cio-San in Butterfly.

Minnie is as elusive as the comet. He stands quite still on the roof, keeping a safe distance back from the ledge around the perimeter. He has no interest in peering down at the street three storeys below. All that may captivate him is above. It is, no doubt, a beautiful sky. But it does not reveal what he is hoping to see.

He is weary. And there is no comet. So he will return inside.

The composer draws deeply on his cigarette one last time, then flicks it upwards. For just a few seconds, as he turns around, it flares brilliantly, soars in an orange-red arc, then fades away against the stars.