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time she wished.
    She smiled and thanked him, but she preferred browsing through the boutiques of the Brera district. Octavia had appeared in Milan once before, to sing the Countess in Figaro. She had strolled through the Brera then. Vendors sometimes called out her name, sang a snatch of music from the opera, even pressed some trinket upon her. Octavia’s career was still new, and it was gratifying to be recognized. It pleased her, too, to think that these shopkeepers and waiters might be descendants of her very first admirers. It eased the sting of finding that Teresa’s portrait was not among those displayed in La Scala’s museum of great singers of the early days: Pasta was there, and Grisi, and Nancy Storace, a soprano Mozart had loved. But no Teresa Saporiti.
    The staff of La Scala welcomed her at the artists’ entrance, and a pleasant woman escorted her to the elevator to ride up to the Ansaldo rehearsal room. Octavia heard the first strains of the music of act one trickling from the Steinway, and the chatter and shuffle of the chorus arranging themselves behind the principals. A thrill of excitement quickened her breath.
    Opera was work, and there were a hundred pitfalls. Singers would catch colds, costumes wouldn’t fit, staging would change. Colleagues would have differences. But at the end, there would be the glory of an opera fully realized. There would be Mozart’s transcendent music; there would be choristers who had been rehearsing for weeks; there would be the achingly beautiful dancers twirling about the stage; there would be costumes, flamboyant creations of color and fabric and imagination; and there would be some of the great voices of the world, trained in New York or in Indiana or in Bologna, voices for which everything had been sacrificed and to which every ear was drawn. The scenery was being built and painted; the lighting was being designed; the programs laid out, held against some last-minute casting change. The director and the conductor would be arguing, liaisons would be forming between performers of every sexual preference, and in the streets of Milan the melodies would be on the lips of cab drivers and clerks and cooks.
    Octavia never tired of it. There had been failures, disappointments and betrayals and difficulties, but through it all, she sang. In those magical moments when everything came together, the breath, the voice, the music, and the theater, nothing else mattered.
    â€œOctavia!” The director, a plump man with a sharp mind and a vast knowledge of opera, came to greet her as she stepped out of the elevator. “Che piacere rivederti, carissima!”
    â€œE tu, Giorgio,” she said. This was a significantly warmer reception than she had received the last time she came to La Scala. It meant Octavia’s star was rising. She knew, of course, that it could fall just as quickly, but this was not the time to dwell upon that. She allowed him to press his cheek to hers, left and right, and then, smiling, she followed him into the rehearsal room.
    It gave her a frisson of delight to see the chorus rise and applaud when they saw her. It was very nice indeed to see the lower members of the cast hang back, wait to be introduced, and then shake her hand and greet her in whatever their common language might be, German, English, Italian. Marie Charles, the soubrette who would sing Zerlina, struggled to say “I am zo glad, madame,” when she met her, and Octavia pressed the girl’s hand in both of hers, saying, “Bien sur, chérie, moi aussi.”
    When the introductions were complete, Octavia glanced at her watch. “Oh, look at the time,” she said. “We’re to start at ten, and here it is! Let’s not keep Russell waiting.”
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    They began at the top of the show, omitting only the overture. Octavia marked her first passages, not feeling completely warmed up yet, and then began to open up when they reached “Ma