As might be imagined, Grossgemuth had denied these insinuations in a few, dry words: the Massacre of the Innocents could be thought of as a testimony of Christian faith, but nothing more. But battle had raged at the Parisian premiere, and the newspapers had argued about it for weeks in a heated and venomous way.
Curiosity also ran high about the musical difficulties of performance, the sets—said to be fantastic—and choreography by the famous Johan Monclar, who had come especially from Brussels. Grossgemuth had been in Milan for a week with his wife and secretary, so as to attend rehearsals: and he would of course attend the performance. All this gave the performance a tone of exception. It was the most important soirée of the entire season. It had attracted to Milan the most important Italian critics and composers, and a small fervent group of Grossgemuth’s disciples had come from Paris. The Chief of Police had reinforced the police guard in case of demonstrations.
Some officials and many police officers originally detailed for Scala duties were instead busy elsewhere. A different and much more worrying threat had suddenly declared itself in the late afternoon. Various signs and symptoms made it clear that an attack might take place, perhaps that very night, by members of the Morzi gang. The chiefs of that vast movement had never made a mystery of the fact that their ultimate aim was the overthrow of established order and institution of the “new justice.” There had already been symptomatic disturbances in preceding months. The Morzi were at present boycotting the law on internal migration, about to be approved by Parliament. This pretext might well serve for a full-scale attack.
Small groups of determined, provocative characters had been noticeable all day long in the streets and squares of the town center. They had no badges, flags or banners; they were not in formation or attempting to form processions. But it was only too simple to guess what they were. There would of course be nothing strange in harmless and inoffensive demonstrations of this sort continuing at intervals for years. And on this occasion too the forces of law and order left them undisturbed. But Police Headquarters were in possession of confidential information which led them to expect a full-scale attempt to gain power during the next few hours. Rome had at once been informed, police and carabinieri had been ordered to stand by, not to mention certain army divisions. But there was nothing to prevent its being a false alarm. It had happened before. Spreading rumors of this kind was one of the Morzi’s favorite pastimes.
As happens on such occasions, a vague and unspoken sense of danger had filtered through the city. There was no concrete justification for it, not even any very specific rumors; nobody knew anything for certain, yet there was considerable tension in the air. When they left their offices that evening, many people went home in a hurry, gazing anxiously down the streets and expecting to see a huge black mass advancing from a distance to block their path. It was not the first time the town’s tranquility had been menaced; many people had begun to get used to it. That was yet another reason why most of them went their way as if this were an evening like all the others. Several people commented on an interesting phenomenon: although a presentiment of trouble had begun creeping through the city, not a soul said anything about it. The usual evening conversations took place, but in a different tone of voice, full of secret allusions; people casually wished each other goodbye and made appointments for the next day, for none of them wanted to talk openly about a subject which in one form or other was uppermost in everybody’s mind. It was as if talking about it could break the spell, and bring bad luck; just as on warships it is taboo to refer even jokingly to torpedoes or collisions.
Nobody could have been less aware of what was going on than Maestro Claudio Cottes. He was a sincere and in some ways stupid man, and nothing existed for him outside music. He was Romanian by birth (though few were aware of it), and as a very young man had settled in Italy during the golden years at the beginning of the century, when his prodigious precocity as a virtuoso pianist had quickly given him fame. Even after the public’s fanaticism had died down, he still remained a magnificent pianist, of the delicate rather than the powerful type, who every so often visited the most important European cities on concert tours, at the invitation of well-known music
