Then, out of the blue, as he loped down a long flight of steps leading to an ornamental pond, a statue answered that question. An angel rather — the angel who stood, wings unfurled, atop a tall fountain in the center of the pool. The dream the angel chose to interpret was not last night’s but the dream he’d dreamt in the sauna of Adonis, Inc., on the night of his thirtieth birthday, the dream about the fountain in the courtyard of the mosque that had seemed so obscure then and was so clear now as he stood at the edge of the pool and was drenched in the wind-borne spray of the veritable fountain.
The fountain was the fountain of art; of song; of singing; of a process that renews itself moment by moment; that is timeless and yet inhabits the rush and tumble of time, just as the fountain’s trumpeting waters are endlessly conquering the same slim splendid space. It was what Mrs. Schiff had said about music, that it must be a warbling, and willing to inhabit this instant, and then this instant, and always this instant, and not just willing, and not even desirous, but delighted: an endless, seamless inebriation of song. That was what bel canto was all about, and that was the way to fly.
Shortly after ten that night Daniel, in his latest Arabian gear, appeared on Rey’s East 55th Street doorstep with a bowl of his special bread pudding. The doorman, as ever, looked askance, not to say daggers, but Daniel, borne along by winds of inspiration, just whistled a few bars of “I Whistle a Happy Tune” and sailed into the elevator.
Rey, naturally, was surprised to be visited so late and without warning. He’d already changed from his daytime drabs to the night’s relative spendor, a shot-silk kimono with a few choice panels of embroidery.
Daniel held out the still-warm bowl. “Here, amorino, I made you a pudding.”
“Why, thank you.” Rey received the pudding in both hands and lifted it up to sniff at it. “I didn’t realize you were such a homebody.”
“I’m not, usually, but Mrs. Schiff swears by my bread pudding. It’s my own recipe, and very low in calories. I call it humble pie.”
“Would you care to come in and enjoy it with me?”
“Do you have any cream?”
“I’ll look. But I doubt it. Where would one get cream nowadays?”
Daniel took a stoppered jug of cream from within his burnoose. “On the black market.”
“You think of everything, mon ange.”
In the kitchen, Rey, ever careful of his figure, spooned out a small portion of the pudding for himself, and a larger one for Daniel.
When they were settled before the fireplace, under a fauvish pastel portrait of Rey in the role of Semiramide, Daniel asked Rey if he would do him a favor.
“It depends on the favor, surely. This is delicious pudding.”
“I’m glad you like it. Would you sing a song for me?”
“What song?”
“Any at all.”
“That’s the favor you ask?”
Daniel nodded. “I just suddenly had to hear you sing. With the Teatro closed for the summer… Records are wonderful, but they’re not the same thing.”
Rey riffled through the sheet music on the piano. He handed Daniel the score of Schubert’s “Vedi quanto t’adoro,” and asked if he could handle the accompaniment.
“I’ll do my best.”
They went through the opening bars several times, Rey humming the vocal line, until he was satisfied with the tempo. Then he sang, without ornament or embellishment, the words Metastasio had written, the notes Schubert, a hundred years later, had set:
It dawned on Daniel, even as his fingers fumbled along in the loveliness, that Rey was not so much singing as setting forth a literal truth. Though he’d never heard the aria before, the Italian seemed to translate itself with spontaneous, pentecostal clarity, vowel by golden, anguished voweclass="underline" See! ingrate, how I still adore you! A look from you is still enough to shatter my defenses and to strip me bare. Have you the heart to betray such love? And then to leave me?
Rey broke off at this point, Daniel having altogether lost track of the accompaniment from the marvel of Rey’s singing. They started out from the beginning again, and this time Rey introduced to the bare skeleton of Schubert’s written score a tremolo that mounted by imperceptible degrees to utmost extravagance at “E puoi lasciarmi?” Then abruptly, at “Ah! non lasciarmi, no,” the heightened color was gone, as though a veil had fallen from the face of the music. He sang in a silvery, slightly hollow tone that suggested that he (or rather, Dido, whom he’d become) had been abandoned at the very instant she implored not to be. It was heartbreaking, heroic, and thoroughly exquisite, a sorrow and a sunset condensed into a single string of pearls.
“How was that?” Rey asked, when they’d finished the last repetition of the opening stanza.
“Stupendous! What can I say?”
“I mean, in particular, the ‘E puoi lasciarmi?’ which Alicia has objected to.”
“It was like being slapped in the face by Death.”
“Ah, you should be a reviewer, bell’ idol mio.”
“Thanks a lot.”
“Oh, I’m quite sincere.”
“I don’t doubt that.”
“I might even be able to arrange it for you.”
Daniel looked down at his brown hands resting on the closed keyboard and expelled a short, self-defeated snort of laughter.
“You wouldn’t want that?” Rey asked with, it would seem, honest incomprehension.
“Ernesto — I wouldn’t want to review it, if I couldn’t do it.”
“Then you’ve never given up the wish to be a singer?”
“Does anyone ever give up his wishes? Do you?”
“That is an unanswerable question, I’m afraid.” Rey went to the divan and sat down, his arms spread wide across the cushions. “All my wishes have come true.”
Ordinarily Daniel would have found such complacence infuriating, but the song had modified his perceptions, and what he felt, instead, was a rather generalized tristesse and a wonder at the immense gulf between Rey’s inner and his outer man, between the hidden angel and the wounded beast. He went and sat down at a confidential, but not amorous, distance from him and leaned back his head so that it rested on Rey’s forearm. He closed his eyes and tried to summon up the exact curve and sweep and nuance of that E puoi lasciarmi?