LUISA WONDERED WHY they were in a church, Had Mara engaged her to sing at communion without telling her? Was that what she and Jacqui were whispering about up in the gallery? Then the audience came to fetch her, wondering where she was, but no need to hold her so roughly.
Well, if it was a church service, they no doubt wanted a religious aria. They were an ignorant rude bunch, probably only able to recognize Schubert’s cloying, overperformed “Ave Maria.” She listened for a pitch in her head, and began to sing.
To her dismay, instead of the sweet B-flat of the Schubert, she produced Verdi’s somber E-flat. In her mind she heard the urgent violins produce the minor chord. Against her will, against all her efforts to banish the aria from her mind, she was singing Desde-mona’s “Ave Maria” from the last act of Otello.
And then the angry tenor was standing over her, his face swollen, as it had been in her dreams since that dreadful night at the Met. You bitch, shut up. This is a church, not a carnival.
She shut her eyes and let her voice rise to the high A. Yes, she had come down on the note, they were wrong, those fools who said she was a spent force, Now that red-faced cretin was shouting over the music, not trying to sing, not even saying the lines right, speaking English, not Italian. “Prostituta,” yes, he was calling her a whore, telling her to be quiet. Idiot; didn’t he know that came in previous scene? And then his hands were around her throat again and he was lifting her by her neck, her voice, her voice, he would destroy it forever. A babble from the chorus, they were trying to stop him. Her maid was screaming for help, but Luisa was falling down a hole that had no end. She was cold, colder even than Desdemona’s chastity: perhaps she, too, would be gathered into heaven.