Carried forward on the sea of people, Claudio Cottes soon found himself in the stalls almost without noticing it, under the full brilliance of the lights. It was ten minutes to nine, and the opera house was already full. Cottes gazed around in ecstasy, like a small boy. The passing years could not alter the feeling he received every time he entered the auditorium; it remained pure and untarnished, like the sight of great natural beauties. He knew that many others, whose presence he greeted with a small gesture of acknowledgment, felt the same. This created a special link, a sort of masonry which to an outsider might seem perhaps slightly ridiculous.
Was anyone missing? Cottes’s expert glance examined the audience block by block, and found everything in order. On his left sat Ferro, a pediatrician, who would have let thousands of young patients die of croup sooner than miss a prima. (This suggested to Cottes an amusing play on words about Herod and the children of Galilee, which he decided to use later on.) On his right were the couple he had christened “the poor relations,” an elderly man and wife who always wore the same shabby evening dress. They never missed a prima, and applauded everything with the same enthusiasm; they spoke to nobody, not even to each other, so that everyone considered them to be claqueurs de luxe, who had been given seats in the most aristocratic part of the stalls to lead the applause. Beyond them sat Professor Schiassi, a first-class economist, who was famous for having followed Toscanini for many years on all his conducting tours; as he was then short of money, he went about on a bicycle, slept in the public gardens and ate sandwiches from a haversack. Relations and friends considered him slightly mad, but were nonetheless devoted to him. And then there was Beccian, a hydraulic engineer, who was probably a multimillionaire, but a most humble and unhappy music lover; a month earlier he had been elected “Consigliere” of the Società del Quartetto* (an honor for which he had hankered like a lover, for decades, performing indescribable diplomatic feats to get elected). Pride had made him insufferably overbearing, both at home and at his business: he sat in judgment on Purcell and d’Indy, although previously he would not have dared address the last desk of double basses. And there with her tiny husband was the lovely Maddi Canestrini, ex-shopgirl, who had an afternoon session with a music-history professor every time there was a new opera, so as not to show her ignorance: never before had it been possible to admire her celebrated bosom in such measure of completeness. It stood out among the crowd, someone said, like the lighthouse at the Cape of Good Hope. And then there was Princess Wurz-Montague with her birdlike nose, who had come on purpose from Egypt with her four daughters. In the lowest stage box one could catch the glint of the lascivious eyes of bearded Count Noce; he could be relied on to attend all operas which promised the presence of ballerinas, and had always been known to express his satisfaction on such occasions with the unchanging formula, “Ah, what a figure! Ah, what legs!” In a first-row box sat the entire tribe of the old Milanese family Salcetti, who boasted of never having missed a prima at the Scala since 1837. And in the fourth row, almost on top of the stage, were the poor Marchesas Marizzoni—mother, aunt and unmarried daughter. They were busily taking bitter side-glances at a magnificent box (no. 14) on the second row, their feudal benefice, which they had been forced to quit this year from economic necessity. For an eighth of the cost they had resigned themselves to listening up in the gods, and were holding themselves as stiff as hoopoes, trying not to be noticed. In another, watched over by a uniformed aide-de-camp, slept a fat Indian prince of unestablished identity; the aigrette of his turban could be seen over the top of the box, waving up and down with his breathing. Not far off stood a striking woman of about thirty, intent on attracting attention; her astounding scarlet dress was open in front to the waist, and a black ribbon curled like an adder around her bare arm: a Hollywood actress, they said, but opinions differed as to her name. Motionless beside her sat a most beautiful child, so frighteningly pale it seemed as if he might die at any moment. The rival groups of the nobility and the wealthy merchant class had both discarded the elegant custom of leaving the barcacce* half-empty. In boiled shirts and fashionable tailcoats from the best houses, the well-provided sons of Lombardy were packed in serried, sunburned bunches. An extra proof of the unusual success of the evening was the exceptional number of beautiful women with extremely daring décolletés. During one of the intervals, Cottes promised himself a game he had enjoyed in his youth—studying the depth of such perspectives from above. He secretly selected as vantage point the fourth-row box where he caught sight of the glitter of Flavia Sol’s diamonds: she was a fine contralto and his good friend.
Like a dark eye in the midst of a quivering mass of flowers, a single box stood out in contrast to such gay magnificence. It was in the third row, and was occupied by three men, aged between thirty and forty, two sitting at the sides, and the third standing. They wore double-breasted black suits, dark ties, and their faces were thin and overcast. They were immobile and nondescript, foreign to everything happening around them. They gazed fixedly at the curtain, as if it were the only object worthy of their regard. They did not seem to be spectators who had come to enjoy themselves, but judges of a sinister tribunal who were waiting
