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vague pointing gesture in what she thought was the direction of the mainland.
    ‘It’s only about twenty kilometres, Signora. But he doesn’t have a car.’
    How did she get sucked into these things? ‘But, surely, there’s the train, or a bus.’
    ‘Of course. But the trains don’t really run much any more, at least not in the morning. And the bus takes more than an hour.’
    More than an hour? Had she been transported to Burkina Faso in her sleep? ‘Well, I hope he gets here,’ she said. Pulling free of the conversational quicksand, she turned towards the elevator.
    Upstairs, she found one of the cleaners, who told her that most of the flowers and vases had been given away, though two vases were still downstairs in Marina’s locker. Before the cleaner could begin to tell her more, Flavia gave her watch the same wide-eyed glance she’d given to the porter’s clock and said she was late for a meeting with her pianist.
    To avoid giving the impression that she was escaping, Flavia walked downstairs slowly, running her memory over the two arias she and the pianist had agreed to work on that day.
    From verismo to bel canto in one month. Finish the run here, spend a week on vacation with the kids in Sicily, then to Barcelona to work with a mezzo whom she admired but with whom she had never sung. It would be her first appearance in Spain since her divorce, her ex-husband being Spanish and wealthy but also violent and well-connected. It was only his remarriage and transfer to Argentina that had opened the doors of both the Liceu and the Teatro Real, where she’d be able to sing roles she had longed to sing for years: Donizetti’s Maria Stuarda and Anna Bolena, both of whom lose their heads, though for different reasons and to different music.
    La Fenice had given her a rehearsal room in which to prepare these roles, a generous concession on the part of the theatre, since she’d be singing both parts in another opera house. Her room was the last door along the corridor on the right side.
    As she passed the first door, she heard a piano from behind it giving the chirpy introduction to an aria she recognized but could not identify. Plunky, plunky, plunk: it sounded like the cheeriest of airs, yet her musical memory told her it was quite another thing, the light-heartedness entirely false. No sooner came the thought than the music turned ominous. The low female voice entered, singing, ‘Se l’inganno sortisce felice, io detesto per sempre virtù.’ As the singer began to elaborate on that thought, Flavia remembered the aria. What in heaven’s name was Handel, and – even more incredibly – Ariodante’s enemy Polinesso, doing here? The voice soared off into coloratura whirligigs that made Flavia marvel that she was listening to a contralto, for the agility of these leaps by rights should belong to a soprano, but a soprano with a dark, musk-rich bottom register to go home to.
    She leaned against the wall of the corridor and closed her eyes. Flavia understood every word: consonants bitten off cleanly, vowels as open as they were meant to be, and no more. ‘If the deception works, I will detest virtue for ever.’ The melody slowed minimally, and Polinesso’s voice grew more menacing: ‘Chi non vuol se non quello, che lice, vive sempre infelice quaggiù.’ Flavia gave herself over to the pleasure of contrast: the melody skipped along, beside itself with joy, as Polinesso declaimed the truth that anyone who always does the right thing will always be unlucky in this world.
    Then back to the A section and off she went, coloratura chasing the notes all over the place, laying a light hand upon each one of them, and then again as if in a game of hide-and-seek. Flavia had seen Ariodante two years before in Paris, when a friend sang the rather thankless role of Lurcanio: she remembered three of the singers, but not the Polinesso, who could only dream of singing like this. The vocal flourishes grew ever more demented,