"Barbara Hambly - Benjamin January 5 - Die Upon A Kiss" - читать интересную книгу автора (Hambly Barbara)

of his family or home, January guessed from things he had said-from the lilt of his speech-that Hannibal
came of the Anglo gentry that had lands in the Irish countryside and a town house in London, the gentry
that sent their sons to Oxford to become good Englishmen on money abstracted from a peasantry that
eked out a starving living on potatoes and barely understood a hundred words that were not in Gaelic.
Raised on Shakespeare and on the classics of Rome and Greece, it was almost beyond the fiddler's
comprehension that one man would feel revulsion for another of equal merit for no other reason than the
color of his skin.
"And you think someone told him not to put on that particular opera?"
"You think someone didn't?"
Hannibal picked up the coffee-cup again, offered it to January, then, when it was refused, sipped it
himself. "And he doesn't understand."
"Could you have written a piece that perfect," asked January softly, "and not want to put it on? Not have
to put it on?" His eyes turned toward the black door of the rehearsal-room next to the offices of Belaggio
and Caldwell. There the company had spent most of the evening familiarizing themselves with the libretto
of the new piece that would be the center of Caldwell's Italian season. The other six operas-not all of
them Italian, but sung in the melodic Italian style-were in repertory, having been performed at one time or
another, somewhere, by everyone in the company. Even small towns in Italy had their opera houses, and
for every production at La Scala or La Fenice, there were hundreds of minor Figaros and Freischiitzes
and Barbers of Seville, done two or three a week.
But every season had its new opera, its premiere. The one no one in town had yet seen. John Davis, at
the French Opera, had invested a great deal of money and time in arranging to premiere La Muette de
Portici which Belaggio, out of sheer effrontery, had selected to present as the second opera of his own
season, on the night before Davis's scheduled production.
Othello, Belaggio's own work, was thunder no man could steal.
". . . seizing the man, I hurled him from me," Belaggio boomed, swept away in the torrent of his own
r├йcitatif.
"But he rose out of the darkness and fell upon me like a tiger with his knife....."

What, think you I'd make jealousy my life?
And chase the moon's dark changes with my heart. . . .

The doomed Moor's heart-shaking aria sounded again in January's mind, the soar and dip of the music
that presaged Othello's plunge into the very madness he scorned. The building tension that made the
listener want to leap up on the stage and shout No, don't heed him. . . ! Knowing inevitably, tragically,
that Othello would. Othello understood passion and war, but he did not understand the pettiness of soul
that was his undoing.

Blood, Iago, blood!

... nigger, the men in the alley had said, and let him pass. Had they meant, That's a nigger, we're waiting
for a white man?
Or had Othello been the nigger of whom they spoke?
"Don't die on us now, Maestro."
January opened his eyes with a jolt. Lieutenant Shaw stood before him, the coarse, narrow planes of his
face illuminated now only by the lantern in Hannibal's hand. "We'll need a ox-team to haul you home."
The lamp in Belaggio's office had been quenched. The backstage was dark, and cold.
"Belaggio ...?"
"Gone back to the City Hotel with a couple Guards to make sure he gets there all in one piece. The
ladies, too, all of 'em." Shaw slouched his hands in his pockets, spit toward the sandbox in the corner,
and missed it by a yard-a tall, stringy, shaggy-haired bumpkin who looked like he should have been