Canto di Tenore

(Novel length: 183,000 words)

Please see the review of this book on MusicWeb International: http://www.musicweb-international.com/classrev/2010/Nov10/canto_di_tenore.htm

Riccardo Vincenzo Rivera is an Italian-Chilean celebrity. He is a very famous, successful opera singer, a tenor, but he has a problem: a violent recurring dream and panic attacks that he cannot control or logically explain. Will he be able to confront his past and the traumatic experience that it hides? On a chance encounter, he meets Gilda, an unusual, fascinating woman. They fall for each other and have a brief affair but Gilda is married and ten years older than Riccardo. Around the story of their love and against the background of opera, complex characters move around various European locations, in an intriguing plot of hidden secrets, trauma and murder. Gilda is forced to face a tough decision and to ask herself a series of difficult questions about the people she cares for the most.

The lives of the characters resemble the plots of intensely dramatic operas and, like operatic stars, their stories happen in America, England, Italy, France, Spain and Germany, developing in a crescendo of passionate emotions, secretive plotting and dramatic relationships; building up to its climatic finale, outside of a prestigious theatre, in the city of Munich, on the day of Mozart’s 250th birthday (27th January 2006). 

M G da Mota has a Masters Degree in Modern Languages and Literature and is fluent in four languages. She grew up and studied in Portugal and, after graduation, lived in Germany for a while. She is very interested in classical music, opera, literature and history. Under a different surname (Mota-Bull), she currently writes reviews of CDs, DVDs, books and live concerts for an international, distinguished classical music magazine on the web: www.musicweb-international.com. As part of her work for this web magazine, she has conducted interviews with famous people in the world of classical music and opera, as for example, Americans Joyce DiDonato  and Lawrence Brownlee. Besides the above, she also works in IT for American Express and loves to fly helicopters! She presently lives in Sussex, in Great Britain, with her English husband.

Cover picture: Courtesy of Malcolm Bull. M G da Mota's website is at: http://www.flowingprose.com/

This fine English literary novel from M G da Mota is full of fascinating information about the opera world, hence the Italian title, you may even be lucky to find some interactive links!

Here is an extract:

OVERTURE

She sat at the edge of the cliffs, feeling the wind slashing against her back and swirling her hair around her face. She watched the sea through a translucent wall of water; at least that was the image that her mind formed of the tears, flooding her gaze, changing the colour of her eyes. Somewhere, far away, beyond the horizon, was the coast of France. Here, in England, she was on the edge of those white, sheer vertical walls of soft rock, violently battered by a rough sea, their edge craning over the water many meters below. 

The sun was still shining though it was somehow unseasonably cold; but she could not feel it. Her body was numb from the pain, from the loss and from the days of holding it back, bottling it inside her chest with no hope of escaping. She was alone at the edge of the cliffs, called the Seven Sisters – she did not know why – and she could hear the distant noises of people calling to their dogs to return home, as the wind was picking up. Vague memories began hovering in her mind; lost pictures of an exhibition that portrayed her childhood: Three young children running along the white stretching sands of a beach, rolling crested waves, deeply green and fresh, licking their feet, as they ran under the scorching sun. In the distance, as if materialising into the hot air, her mother’s voice telling them not to take their cotton hats off, accompanied of dad’s good humoured laughter. Three children happily eating their ice-creams, competing to see who was the fastest. Three children screaming, playing and splashing in the water under Mum and Dad’s watchful eyes. Mum distributing the presents under the Christmas tree and then the laughter and the cries of delight and surprise, as the wrapping paper was torn apart. A little girl mesmerised in front of the television, wonder eyes stuck to the images and the sound of the opera singers, tenderly watched by her father and, from the door frame, Mum’s indulging smile and slight shake of the head at the two of them. 

Suddenly, a thud; a coffin reaching the bottom of a deep grave. A convulsive sob shook her body, as if it was a flower stem breaking in the wind. Every story must have an end and it was seldom happy. Tears ran freely down her cheeks, leaving a wet, shiny trail, inundating her lips, sliding down her neck, casually dropping on her clothes. An excruciating pain, as if her ribs were crushing her chest, filled up her whole being. Her heart threatened to explode but silence reigned around her now. Most people had wisely returned home but she could not. Somehow, there was comfort in the movement of the waves, in the howling of the wind and the crushing of the sea against the base of the cliffs. Somehow, it was good to stare at the shimmering water under the fading sun and imagine what people in France, beyond the far horizon, would be doing at that exact moment. She sighed deeply, put her arms around her knees and stared blindly ahead. 

There was only sea and wind. She did not know how long she had been sitting there. She did not hear the door of a car being shut, in the parking lot nearby, and she was not aware of his presence until he spoke. He had been observing her for a while, only a few metres away, wondering if he should address her. She looked desperate, crying alone. He felt that he must say something or she might jump over the cliff and smash her body on the rocks below. She heard his voice but had no idea of what he said; not because she did not understand the language but because her mind was far away. He walked a couple of steps closer to her, bent slightly and repeated his earlier words in a soft accent, which she could not identify.

‘Are you all right?’

Aria: Una Furtiva Lagrima

The first time she heard him sing she was driving home from work. She remembered it well because it was the second day of spring, though the crisp, clear skies were cold; pale sunlight touched the frozen ground and the people walked wrapped up in their winter coats, scarves and gloves, trying to shelter from the icy wind. She was listening to one of the classical music stations, as she always did, not only because she loved it but also because she could not stand the DJs on the other radio stations. They tended to irritate her, parading themselves instead of the music or the stars they were supposed to promote. 

The presenter announced somebody singing something from his latest CD and she vaguely registered that he had dual nationality though she was unable to say what. Then the presenter added that they should stay tuned, as this somebody was coming right after the commercial break. She sighed. Classic FM was a good station, which she enjoyed, but the commercials annoyed her although she understood they were necessary.

The traffic was slow because it was the middle of rush hour, and in spite of the wind and the cold, the sea front, from Brighton and along Hove, was packed with people walking and crossing the road at will, without paying attention, forcing the cars, on occasions, to slam down the brakes. She inhaled, feeling tired and sad. She had received a call from her older brother, four days ago, while at work, telling her that their mother’s situation had suddenly taken a turn for the worse. She had fallen, hit her head and been taken to hospital with concussion, which seriously aggravated her already poor condition.

Gilda Maria took a deep breath. Her chest ached and she was not sure of her feelings. Would it be better if her mother died, as a consequence of the fall? Her heart filled up with sadness; she forced her grief down her throat and focused her eyes on the road. It was then that the commercials finished and he started singing. He sang Una Furtiva Lagrima from Donizetti’s L’Elisir d’Amore. Slowly, the car was filled up with luminous notes of an intense beauty, perfectly articulated by a crystal clear diamond of a voice. It opened up in a soft crescendo, waving inside her breast, leaving her as if in a trance, sending waves of soft, tender longing to her heart like the last kiss of a departing lover. She pulled to the left and stopped the car; her mind in a soft state of drunken enchantment at the sublime sound of that voice, clearly pronouncing the vowels, purely stressing each sound in a liquidity and agility of tone that she had seldom heard. The music poured down her heart; his crystalline voice flooded it and she felt a pleasant type of pain, which she had scarcely experienced before, like a lover’s first touch, the gentle caress of the sun, or the soft embrace of clear, fresh water sparkling down a mountain. When he finished the aria, perfectly singing the last notes in a sublime dolce piano, she was unable to move until the sounds had slowly melted in the air. 

Gilda sat there bewitched, entranced, enchanted, as if the world had ceased to exist and his voice was the only living memory. Then suddenly, frantically, she jumped into action. As the presenter repeated his name, she searched for pen and paper inside her bag, to write it down and to later buy his CD. His name, as his voice, had music within it. Riccardo Vincenzo Rivera, she pronounced slowly to herself while scribbling the letters on the reverse of a credit card receipt. He was half-Italian and half something else, which she didn’t grasp. It was irrelevant anyway. She had his name and that was the important bit; now she could search for his CDs in the Internet or go to the Classical Longplayer, in Brighton, to find them.

Gilda Maria arrived home, a nice detached two-bedroom house in the lovely village of Steyning, feeling as if she was walking on air from the echo of his voice in her mind. She parked her car on the driveway, in front of the adjacent garage; it was too much effort to put it inside. She was about to lock it when an inner voice reminded her that Adam always got slightly upset if she left the car outside overnight. Although he was away on business on the other side of the World and would not return for another two or three weeks, she felt she owed him. So, to make her husband happy, she opened the garage door and duly parked the car. She unlocked the front door and stepped in, absently bent down and collected the mail, piled up on the floor by her feet. She kept thinking about Adam. He had left two weeks ago to be working in Australia, some place near Brisbane whose name she could not remember. Anyway all in all, he was going to be away for five weeks. Gilda felt slightly guilty. Secretly, she was happy that he had gone for a while. Adam was a lovely man and a good husband but Gilda was a fiercely independent woman. Although Adam gave her enough space to live her life the way she liked, she found pleasure in being alone, enjoying the freedom of staying up all night, dedicated to tasks that she loved, without feeling guilty because he might be waiting for her to go to bed.

Gilda took off her coat, hung it in the cupboard under the stairs and marched up to the first floor to change into something more comfortable. Shortly after, she returned downstairs and switched on the television, intending to watch the news but soon realised she was unable to concentrate. The thought of her mother in hospital kept crawling back into her mind. Should she go home? Her brother advised her to give it a couple more days and see how the situation developed. It could have another turn and perhaps this time for the better. Gilda sighed. Suddenly and for no apparent reason, her mind was full of that wondrous voice, which she had heard while driving home. She missed it. It was a painful longing inside her chest; a kind of sadness, which she could not describe, for being unable to listen to it. It made her decide to walk to the shops, during her lunch break, on the next day and look for a CD from this Riccardo Vincenzo Rivera. She considered ordering it at that moment, through the Internet, on her home computer, but then realised that she could not wait four or five days for its arrival. Gilda wondered why she was unable to shake off the memory of his voice. Unwillingly, she forced herself to get up and walk to the shelves, where her CDs were lined up in no particular order, and chose Beethoven’s seventh symphony, which normally gave her the necessary energy boost.

True to her decisions, Gilda went to the Classical Longplayer during her lunch break, the next day, and bought Rivera’s CD, which contained the aria, she had heard on the radio. The CD was a collection of Bel Canto arias, which was perhaps a little unusual for a modern day tenor. Gilda knew that to sing such pieces, voices with coloratura were needed or, in other words, extreme agility and range, virtuoso voices. She knew that this kind of bel canto operas had been pushed out of fashion by the more dramatic, heavy operas of Verdi, Puccini and also Wagner where the heroes had problems and the stories were psychologically intense. The truth was also that most singers found some of the arias too difficult and out of reach for their voices. 

Gilda realised then why his voice fascinated her so much. It was not only beautiful but it was quite unique; a type of voice, which she had never heard before. It had power and range, was amazingly clear, with easy high notes, but also able of conveying a lot of emotion. She looked at his photograph on the cover. He had a pleasant attractive face and expressive black eyes. It fitted his voice and his name.

In the evening, alone in her lounge, Gilda played her newly acquired CD. She did not play it in the right order. First, she decided to listen to Una Furtiva Lagrima, then later to the other arias, which she did not know so well. 

Rivera’s voice flooded the room, climbed slowly up the walls, holding the house hostage with its beauty and purity. Gilda was glued to the couch, motionless, feeling a delicious torpor invade her body, leaving it dormant. The clarity of his singing, the sublime musicality of his voice, took hold of her as if a luminous sunny day had just dawned after a long, stormy and dark night. At that precise instant, a shrilling sound broke the spell. The enchanting tunes shattered into a million pieces, all over the room. Annoyed, irritated, almost outraged at the interruption, Gilda walked to the CD player to pause it. She picked up the telephone. It was her younger brother. Their mother had died.

Puccini

“Madama Butterfly”

“The humming chorus from Madama Butterfly was played at the end of the service, as her father wished, using his record player and the slightly scratched recording.”

One

A fearful, painful scream shook the walls of the room, making one’s blood freeze. Only there was nobody there. He was alone and it was dark. He kept weeping, thinking he must stop. It could not carry on forever. That anxious, painful thud in his chest, the aching beating of his heart. It must stop. He and he alone had the power to make it stop.

With an ultimate effort, he forced his eyes open. A warm, playful ray of sun touched his face. He realised it was morning. Darkness had been pushed away. The icy fear that stuck to his skin vanished. Drops of cold perspiration fell from his face onto the bedcovers. He took a deep breath and dried off his forehead with the back of his hand, then he sat upright in bed and took his pulse. It was now beating serenely. He breathed in and out a few times, calmly taking in the familiar surroundings. With a deep sigh, he smiled at the walls, pushed the bedcovers away and whispered to himself that it had only been another nightmare.

1

The plane was now flying high above the clouds, having taken off from Gatwick half an hour ago. It was raining on the ground but up there the sun was shining, the sky was blue and, underneath it, there were only white clouds, resembling pieces of fluffy cotton, which made one feel like jumping off the plane and bouncing across those never ending fields of softness.

Gilda had her eyes fixed on the whiteness extending under the plane but she did not see it. Her mind was immersed in deep thought. Her eyes were dry and red from lack of sleep. She wished she would be able to free up the tears imprisoned within her and let out the sadness, which had invaded her heart. But she could not. She had not shed a single tear since her younger brother told her their mother had passed away. Gilda sighed. Suddenly and for no apparent reason, she missed listening to the tenor recently discovered. Riccardo Vincenzo Rivera’s voice fascinated her. It was rare, uniquely beautiful and pure; it touched her heart softly, making her happy and sad at the same time, but always leaving her with a feeling of serenity. She wished she could listen to him singing instead of the undefined rumour of scattered conversations, mixed up with the roar of engines and air conditioning vents that filled up the plane.

Gilda Maria rubbed her eyes to try to clear her blurred vision. It suddenly occurred to her how much her whole life was connected to opera, indirectly of course, but unmistakably linked. It had all started when she was born and her father decided to name her Gilda, after the tragic heroine of Verdi’s opera Rigoletto. Her father had been an amateur tenor when young. Francisco Santiago had a beautiful voice but was born in the wrong country. Portugal did not have much of an opera tradition and though Lisbon had the Teatro Nacional de São Carlos, its opera house, nothing much happened beyond that. The Santiago family was poor and Francisco was forced to look for a job, before finishing school, in order to help his mother. He loved music and was always singing around the house; later, he would sing romantic songs to the young ladies, standing under their windows in the long, hot summer nights. For a few years, he belonged to the local town choir and became its soloist, singing almost anything, from Schubert’s Ave Maria to Lara’s Granada, from Verdi’s La Donna è Mobile to music from South American composers, which he had come across by accident. An old friend of his, who had travelled around Brazil, Argentina and Chile in search of fortune but who returned poorer than ever, had brought a few records and popular scores from various South American countries. Francisco liked the songs and introduced them into the repertoire of the choir. Some became part of his nearly obligatory encores. 

Another of his friends, who worked as a journalist, tried to convince him to audition for the radio sometime in the fifties but Francisco, partly due to being naturally shy, partly due to the circumstances of having got married a couple of years earlier, decided against it. However, his passion for music and particularly for opera had never died down; on the contrary, it seemed to increase as the years went by. Opera transported him to a different world: a world of wonder and beauty where emotions grabbed the heart overwhelmingly, or delicately, giving one a special taste for life and for the good things it had to offer. He had always felt one could learn from opera. It had everything: Love, tenderness, friendship, war, power struggle, politics, intrigue, treason, tragedy and even comedy, exactly like life itself. Opera was life for Francisco and he loved it all unconditionally though he did have some favourites. Rigoletto was one of them and therefore he had named his only girl after the tragic daughter of the title character. His wife did not approve. Rosa was a little superstitious and did not like the idea of naming her little girl after a woman who dies tragically in her father’s arms, taking the bullet meant for her wretched lover.

‘It’s a beautiful sounding name,’ Francisco replied.

‘Yes but of a tragic figure. I fear such a name may catch up with her.’ Rosa opposed.

‘What do you mean?’

‘She may die a horrible, tragic death!’

Of course, Francisco had dismissed it all with a laugh, calling it a silly superstition. In the end, however reluctant, his wife surrendered to the beauty of the name and their daughter was called Gilda. But Rosa was not happy and, when their second son was born, before he could be named Lindoro, Elvino, or something similar, she put her foot down, stubbornly refusing even the mere suggestion that the boy be named after an opera hero. Instead, he would receive a plain, simple, common Portuguese name, like his brother before him, who was named after his grandfather Manuel. Gilda’s youngest brother was then called Miguel.

Gilda had sometimes wondered if her love for opera had simply been inherited from her father, or if it had been impregnated in her body at birth. When she was born and while her mother was in labour, apparently her dad played his opera records uninterruptedly because he believed it would calm down the mum and make the baby happy. So his opera collection from Bizet’s Carmen to Verdi’s Rigoletto, from Rossini’s Il Barbiere di Siviglia to Mozart’s Le Nozze di Figaro and many others in-between, was played in succession and non-stop. Whatever the reason, the truth was that little Gilda was drawn to classical music in general and opera in particular from a very early age. At seven, she watched Carmen on television with her father; it became common for them to sit together and listen to his records. Then Francisco would also sing and explain to his little girl the nuances of the voices, why some were better than others, the various types of voices that existed for both men and women, teaching her how to differentiate them and appreciate those differences. Little Gilda was a fast learner and she quickly grasped what a tenor, a baritone, a bass or, in the case of the women, a soprano, a mezzo-soprano and a contralto were. She could also identify them easily when they were singing. The only one she did not quite know was the counter-tenor. Francisco did not have any records that featured such singers and so Gilda had to wait until many years later to listen to one. She also did not know what a castrato was until she became fifteen, as her father did not think it suitable to tell about those to a little girl. From the start though, her favourite voice was the voice of a tenor. Perhaps because it was her father’s voice, perhaps because it was the type of voice she simply found the most beautiful. She did not know but it did not matter. Gilda Maria smiled briefly to herself, still looking out through the window of the plane. No tenor voice, however, had ever had that power of enchanting her like the voice of Riccardo Vincenzo Rivera, possibly because it was capable of reaching higher notes than most tenors without losing its freshness and its clear, crystalline sounds. 

If the young Gilda had any doubts that she loved opera, these were all removed when she was twelve and her father took her to see a live performance for the first time in her short life. Gilda never forgot it. On that year and for the first time in their entire history, the company of the Teatro de São Carlos, from Lisbon, toured the country, taking opera to the small, decayed theatres of the province. In her hometown, they performed Puccini’s Madama Butterfly.

and that was the opera her father took her to see at the tender age of twelve. Gilda Maria was glued to the chair, paralysed by the beauty of the music. She did not understand a word, as they sang in Italian but that was irrelevant. The music and the sublime sounds of their voices filled up her heart; grabbed her and tore her apart. She cried and felt with Butterfly when she sang Un bei di vedremo levarsi un fil di fumo, imagining the day when Pinkerton’s ship will steam into the harbour of Nagasaki and he will return to her and the house on the hill. Though she did not know what Butterfly was singing, Gilda thought it was heartbreakingly beautiful and sad, anticipating the tragic finale. She also remembered how at the end of the performance, she threw her arms around her father’s neck and whispered in his ear that it was the most amazing thing she had ever seen.

Gilda sighed and wondered how her father would be feeling. She had not talked to him since Miguel had rung her to say their mother had passed away. The funeral was to take place on the next day in the morning. It was customary in Portugal to bury people within twenty-four hours of their death; by special request within forty-eight but her family, presenting the fact that she lived abroad and would not otherwise be able to make the funeral, had managed to obtain seventy two. Gilda took her hand to her chest. She felt a painful anxiety inside it, which on occasions made her gasp for air. Again, she wished she could cry and release the horrible pressure, which felt as if two giant hands were pressing her chest down, crushing the bones and smashing her heart into a pulp. 

Gilda took another deep breath and felt slightly better. The stewardess handed her a small tray with food but she refused it with a polite thank you. There was a knot in her throat. If she attempted to eat, she would feel sick and the whole thing was bound to end in the throw up bag.

She looked out of the window again. There were now breaks in the clouds and she could see water and the outlines of the French coast from time to time. Her mind wandered off once more to opera. Gilda thought about her name. She smiled quietly to herself remembering the bewildered looks on people’s faces when they asked her about it. They generally enquired if she was named after Rita Hayworth’s title character, Gilda, in the iconic black and white film of the forties, which had made Hayworth a star and was a scandal, at the time of its release, due to the sexual innuendo. Gilda always smiled, amused because she knew people’s reaction when she answered.

‘No, I’m not named after the character in the film. I’m named after the daughter of Rigoletto in Verdi’s opera with the same title!’ She would gleefully explain, anticipating their dumb expressions.

‘Oh!’ Was invariably the comment for lack of something better to say.

Gilda had never met anyone who asked if she was named after the tragic character from the opera instead of the glamorous Gilda of Rita Hayworth’s film. Of course, some people knew about Rigoletto but they had no idea of the story or that Rigoletto was the main character, least of all that he had a daughter named Gilda. Most knew Verdi was an Italian composer but it ended there. The world of opera was a strange one to the vast majority of the Portuguese and the ones who enjoyed it and possessed some knowledge were normally thought to be pretentious and arrogant, as they cared about something, which was really reserved for a rich minority of the population. Therefore, people were usually surprised to meet a man of modest possessions, like Francisco Santiago, naming his daughter after an opera character and being so passionate about that art form. They would have understood if Francisco had named her after a popular singer, like Simone de Oliveira or Madalena Iglésias, who were famous in the sixties, but after an opera character it was, to say the least, unusual. They could not classify it as pretentious because Francisco and his family were the most unpretentious people one could imagine, but it was strange. And so, from a very early age, Gilda learned that her relatives, and most family friends politely thought her father eccentric and blamed him for turning his daughter into somebody equally strange. Luckily, for everybody concerned, Francisco’s wife, Rosa, was a normal person and so were the two boys; therefore there was a balance, which meant nobody would get off the tracks.

Gilda knew though that her unconventional ways were looked upon critically and so was her father for supporting her, while her mother was pitied for having such a daughter who, according to everybody, should really have been born a boy. While growing up in the seventies, she had not grasped the differences between the way she was brought up and that of most of her friends. It was not until she went to University that Gilda finally realised her father was a man far ahead of his time in terms of his ideas on how to bring up his children. In a time where there was a clear distinction between boys and girls – boys were allowed almost anything from an early age while girls were not encouraged to be independent and strong minded – Francisco brought up his children in exactly the same way. If her brothers were allowed to do something so was Gilda; if they were going to University so would she; if they had to be home by eleven at night when they were sixteen, the same applied to Gilda. She enjoyed the freedom and right to make her own decisions in exactly the same way as her two brothers. She chose what she wanted to study at University, though she remembered her aunt commenting that she did not see the point of putting a girl through University. She would get married sooner or later and have children; would have no time for anything else. Gilda gratefully recalled how her father had simply ignored the remark and mentioned casually that his daughter would decide what she wanted to do with her life; his only part in it would be to support her as much as he could.

Gilda considered herself to be an ordinary person and she cared little for what people thought about her. However, she was aware that some of her decisions had never been widely accepted, except by her father. Never had this been truer than when she made her mind up to go to Germany and Russia after graduating. Women, in Portugal at that time, did not travel alone to foreign countries, much less live there several years while still single and without the supervising look of a father, or older brother.

As well as having a good ear for music, Gilda had a special talent for languages. Her degree was in English, German and French. She had learned Spanish on her own and cracked Italian by listening to many operas, following the librettos and its translations into languages she already knew. This talent was her excuse to leave for less narrow-minded countries. While living in Germany for five years, she became proficient in German. Later, she spent one and half years in Russia and learned Russian, reaching a comfortable level of fluency. Although she was an ace in foreign languages, her current job title was as a project manager, in the IT department of a big international computer company in Brighton. She had worked as a freelance translator before; she still did sporadic translations of technical documentation, within the firm, and sometimes she had to accompany big clients who could not speak English.

The pilot said something at that instant, breaking up her chain of thought. The aircraft had started its descent towards Lisbon. Gilda felt surprised that her journey was already so near the end. For no apparent reason, this made her think about Adam. Her husband was working in Australia for a few weeks and she had told him that he needed not come to attend her mother’s funeral. He had seemed worried on the phone that she might have to go through it alone but Gilda insisted she was fine. She would be with her family; he did not have to worry. She urged him not to come. In the end, he agreed but now she was beginning to regret her decision. Adam was a good, kind man. He would support her should she need a shoulder to cry on. Gilda took a deep breath, violently shaking her head. She was a grown-up woman, independent and totally capable of dealing with difficult situations. She had no need to have her husband around all the time. After all, their marriage had almost been casual. They had been living together for a couple of years and though her parents accepted it, her mother suffered immensely with the fact that her only daughter lived with a man and was unmarried. Gilda knew her father felt the same, though he would never mention it. Putting her signature on a paper that stated she was no longer single did not matter to her. So she had agreed to be married at the registry office making her family very happy. 

Adam and Gilda got on well. He was very understanding and gave her the necessary space to do the things she enjoyed, though he did not share her passion for opera, classical music or any other artistic activity. They considered themselves happy and their marriage to be successful. Gilda knew the difference rather well. Her previous relationships had all been shattered sooner, or later, and none of the men had even shown a third of Adam’s tolerance and flexibility. She remembered how she had sought refuge in opera, which led her to discover Mozart’s hidden treasures. 

A sudden jerk of the plane brought her back to reality and Gilda realised the aircraft had just landed in Lisbon. With a deep sigh, she prepared herself for the unpleasant, painful days ahead. She wondered who would be picking her up and assumed one of her brothers. They would not let father drive in such a situation.

Enlivened by the touch of the Portuguese sun on her face, Gilda felt good as she stepped out of the plane. She smiled quietly; for a couple of seconds she was happy, forgetting her presence there was not to pay a visit to family and friends but to attend her mother’s funeral.