Jerry settled into his seat as the orchestra began the preludio.
Maria took longer to settle into hers. Her hip injury was bothering her again, and the seats were a little damp. They weren’t used to sitting in the orchestra seats, so close to the stage, but they were the best that were still available.
The audience was thin today. You would think the final performance of Rigoletto at Teatro La Fenice di Venezia would be packed, or at least well attended, but maybe there just weren’t that many opera fans in Venice anymore. Still, this was the theater where it was first performed, in 1851.
Jerry had loved the opera since he was a kid. A friend had tricked him into attending a concert with Shirley Verrett, whom he had just barely heard of. She came onto the stage, a tiny middle-aged black woman, and waited for her cue with a half-smile on her face. Then she opened her mouth, and Jerry was transfixed. After what seemed moments later, but was at least 90 minutes, the crowd was on their feet, waves of applause washing though the auditorium. He went home in a daze and dreamed of sopranos. That night, the hall burned down. He liked to think that it was because there was nothing left to be sung there.
The soprano singing Gilda, Rigoletto’s daughter, was no Shirley Verrett. Her voice was thin and wavery, and between phrases she coughed discreetly into a handkerchief held in her left hand. Also, the lone viola was having trouble keeping its tune, perhaps because of the damp.
Charmingly, in the third act, the storm scene, it started raining hard enough that Maria was forced to open her umbrella. It pattered though the hole in the roof onto the rake of the house, and ran down into the pit, further flooding its already soggy expanse. After the roof collapsed a few months ago, they had moved the orchestra onto the stage. That was okay because the company was down to less than a dozen players. Many parts were doubled up, and the crowd scenes just had to be imagined. It was part of its charm that Rigoletto could be done with fewer players. It was too bad that they had lost the tenor, Vitorio, a few weeks before. He had just disappeared, like so many others, swallowed by despair.
In due course, Sparafucile, who doubled as Count Ceprano, stabbed Gilda, Rigoletto prepared to throw the sack with her corpse into the river, but discovered that it was his dying daughter, who still had enough breath to sing a final aria, though by now interrupted by near constant coughing. The orchestra stumbled to a close, and with Rigoletto’s cry of “La maledizioe!” it was done.
There was scattered applause, and the thirty or so opera lovers filed out around the waterlogged chairs and broken chunks of fallen gilt plaster from the balcony façade. Jerry helped Maria as best he could, but to be honest, he wasn’t all that spry himself. They hobbled together into the Campo San Fantin, and then over the rickety makeshift wooden bridge to the Piazza San Marco. They made their way around the edges of the square, sheltered from the rain, but the water was ankle deep and filthy. Maria hitched her dress up over her green Wellington boots, and they splashed in silence to the Doge’s palace, where they were staying, along with several other survivors from Maria’s cruise ship. They could see the hull of it though the drizzle to their right, run aground in the lagoon, listing and scorched from the blast.
Most of the world was worse, of course, buried under the snow of Nuclear Winter, but Venice, Queen of the Sea, was drowned by three years of ceaseless rain.
“The final performance of Rigoletto,” Jerry said aloud. “Maybe the final opera, ever.”
Maria didn’t reply, of course, but she nodded. Her vocal cords were scorched when she screamed in the blast. She was a beauty, before the burns. She folded her umbrella, straightened her dress.
“Rigoletto. A good choice. And the end of La Fenice.” He stared out from the overhang at the remains of Piazza San Marco. He remembered it being full of happy, bustling tourists, before. Now a bare half-dozen figures skulked along the edges as they had, trying to avoid the unavoidable rain.
“You know, La Fenice burned down four times in 300 years? Each time they rebuilt it, a true phoenix, reborn out of the ashes. Now who will?”
Maria shrugged, and turned to go in.
“Fire couldn’t destroy it. Fire couldn’t destroy the Phoenix, but rain did.”
Michael Ehart has been at various times all the expected things: laborer, seminary student, musician, shoe salesman, political consultant, teacher, diaper truck driver, stand-up comedian, and the least important guy with an office at a movie studio. He made his first sale to a magazine at age 15, which means he has been writing for over 50 years, with the aforementioned occasional breaks for gainful employment. He lives in the upper left hand corner of the United States with his wife and youngest daughter.
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