THE comet is captured on film for the first time. Its appearance in 1835 precedes by just four years the disclosure by French inventor Louis Daguerre of his eponymous method for fixing images on copper sheets coated with a thin layer of silver. But by the time the comet returns seventy-five years later, astronomers in observatories in both hemispheres are lying in wait with their telescopes and photographic plates. Many months before the comet can be seen with the naked eye, its image is preserved – little more than a tiny speck at first, and often only identifiable when scientists are certain where in the sky they should be searching.
There, right there. It must be …
Photographs are like that: something in the background – a face, a sign, a pin-prick of light – can stay undetected until somebody bothers to look.
Or knows what they are looking for.
Photographs conceal as much as they disclose. Harry excises from family portraits the images of relatives who offend him. And for many years he hands out, like a calling-card, a picture of himself beside former President Theodore Roosevelt. Taken aboard the steamship Imperator, heading to New York from England, it shows Harry with his arms crossed next to Roosevelt, who is a head taller and has his hands behind his back. The picture is genuine. But before he has copies printed, Harry removes from the image five other men who posed for the photographer. A group portrait becomes much more intimate: The Mysteriarch and his great pal Teddy.
BESS is accustomed to being photographed with her husband. For most shots, including those taken on arrival in Melbourne and at stopovers during the journey, she adopts the same pose – head tilted slightly to one side, lips together in a half-smile. But on this Wednesday night Bess is not with Harry. When she takes her place in the front stalls of the Opera House she is accompanied by the doll she calls Mayer Samuel. She arrives early, well before her husband appears on stage, because she believes her son will enjoy a recent addition to the bill – Vasco the Insane Musician, a one-man band whose eyes roll crazily as he simultaneously blows into a harmonica, squeezes an accordion and uses his right foot to thump on a bass-drum.
If a photographer had erected his cumbersome equipment on stage and taken a magnesium-flash picture of the audience as they gazed at the musician, Bess might not be immediately noticeable in the resulting print. She would just be someone much shorter than all the people around her. A woman with the high ruffled collar of her blouse hiding a dainty neck. Her curly dark hair, cut short, is parted down the centre. Something about her expression suggests complicity in a secret – an impression reinforced by arching eyebrows. A casual observer of the photograph would not even take much notice of the smart young boy seated on her lap, a boy with suspenders buttoned to his shorts. Because one of her hands is tucked under the boy’s chin he, too, would appear to be staring unblinkingly at the camera. Concentrating. Nothing would reveal the boy as a porcelain doll.
But this has been noticed by a lady seated in the same row as Bess. She wonders if the small woman and the well-dressed doll are one of Harry Rickards’ surprise attractions – a ventriloquist, perhaps. She keeps an eye on her, wondering if she will make a move towards the stage. If Bess even notices this lady first staring at her, then nudging the gentleman beside her, she shows no signs. She has become adept at ignoring the glances and finger-pointing she attracts whenever she takes Mayer Samuel out. And a photograph could never show what she is thinking on this warm evening.
To anyone who knows her – Harry himself, for example, who has again appraised spectators from behind the stage curtains – she would appear to be the embodiment of a dutiful wife. One who has come to see her husband extend the milk-can illusion longer than usual, close to three minutes by the clock on the stage, until a young girl in the audience two rows behind Bess leaps to her feet and shrieks at Franz Kukol, exhorting him to use his axe to please, please smash the container imprisoning the drowning man. But much of what occurs on stage passes in a blur. Bess allows the doll’s head to sink forward on to its chest. She feels detached from all that is happening, again having that same curious sense of observing herself she experienced in Puccini’s room after he first assembled her phonograph. The various escapes presented on stage serve only to remind her of the inevitability of the composer’s disappearance. She is a Floral Sister again, trying to part the fog that shrouds the future. But she knows he must go.
IT is almost eleven when she stands before his door again, having first put Mayer Samuel to bed. He takes her right hand and raises it to his lips, keeping his eyes on her own. The room is dimly lit, but Puccini looks better than on Sunday. He has shaved; his hair smells of pomade.
‘Your husband …?’ he asks, maintaining his hold on her hand.
‘Has departed again. Gone to the flying-field after his performance.’
‘Ah,’ he says, nodding as if this were not an extraordinary thing to do at night. ‘Come.’ He leads her inside, where she releases his hand and stands silently near the Edison machine.
‘What is it?’
‘I have been thinking about you leaving,’ she says.
‘I will leave,’ he replies, resting both hands on her arms. ‘Just as you will leave. But why do you think about this now? We are only just past the humming chorus, ending Act Two. Butterfly is still alive. There is more music to come. Why think already of the final curtain?’
‘Because I think I know the ending. We both know …’
He shakes his head.
‘I will leave. But not at once. There are still things I must do here. I have not yet seen the Halley’s Comet. And my work is unfinished, though I have advanced these last few days. For this I should thank you.’
‘Me?’
His hands are now on her cheeks.
‘When I write music for Minnie of the saloon, it is your face I see.’
She closes her eyes, unable to find the words to reply. Then takes a step closer to the piano and the pile of paper on top. His writing, she sees, is even worse than her husband’s. Scratches and loops.
‘This is your new work?’
‘There will be changes. There are always changes. But this is what I have. In the beginning I thought it could be a second Boheme, yet now I am not so sure. The story is a problem, you see. Giacosa and Illica, who worked with me on Boheme and Tosca and Butterfly, have not been with me this time. I have new librettists, Zangarini and Civinni, and – I do not know …’
‘You’ve never told me what it’s about.’
Puccini pauses before responding.
‘It is a Western story about miners and an outlaw calling himself Dick Johnson and a sheriff and the girl they both love, Minnie – the owner of the Polka Saloon. There are fights and false identities. A card game with a neat twist. There is a drop of blood falling from the ceiling, most dramatic. Everything builds towards a hanging in the final Act.’ He rubs his eyes. ‘But the story is not so important. It is there only to support my music and the themes, always the same, of love and longing and farewells and death.’
They are now standing on either side of the piano. The score lies between them. Puccini makes a dismissive gesture.
‘In all operas, even those of the great Verdi, the stories are ridiculous. Nothing on stage comes close to the complexity of ordinary lives.’
‘Surely not.’
‘Surely so! If I instructed my librettists to base a work on the last couple of years of my own life, critics would say it is too unbelievable. Too dramatic.’
Now he is pacing back and forwards.
‘We could call this opera Doria. She is a simple, sweet girl – a servant in the household of a composer, let us call him Giacomo. The composer’s wife, Elvira, develops an intense jealousy of Doria, whom she suspects of having an affair with her husband. Doria protests her innocence but is driven from the house. Shamed and desperate, she takes poison and dies. When she is examined by a physician, he declares her a virgin. An innocent girl is dead! Damages must be paid to the wronged family. The husband, this wretched Giacomo, has to decide if he can bear to live in the same house as Elvira, the mother of his son.’
His voice has dropped to a whisper. He looks up on feeling her touch.
‘So,’ he asks, ‘a fine story for an opera?’
‘This is what happened?’
‘All the most unbelievable stories are true. This was a big scandal for me. A most difficult time. My work dried up. Another reason I came here.’
‘Your wife had reason to be so jealous?’
‘She was wrong regarding Doria. And now I am here.’
