My Uncle Oswald

“I’ll tell you on the way up,” I said.

We had just returned to the mainland from Capri and we were in Sorrento now. It was warm October weather in this part of Italy and the sky was blue as we loaded up the trusty Citroën torpedo and headed north for Lucca. We had the hood down and it was a great pleasure to be driving along the lovely coastal road from Sorrento to Naples.

“First of all, let me tell you how Puccini met Caruso,” I said, “because this has a bearing on what you’re going to be doing. Puccini was world famous. Caruso was virtually unknown, but he desperately wanted to get the part of Rodolfo in a forthcoming production of La Bohème at Livorno. So one day he turned up at the Villa Puccini and asked to see the great man. Almost every day second-rate singers were trying to get in to see Puccini, and it was necessary that he be protected from these people or he would get no peace. ‘Tell him I’m busy,’ Puccini said. The servant told Puccini that the man absolutely refused to go. ‘He says he’ll camp in your garden for a year if necessary.’ ‘What does he look like?’ Puccini asked. ‘He’s a small stubby little chap with a moustache and a bowler hat on his head. He says he’s a Neapolitan.’ ‘What kind of a singer?’ Puccini asked. ‘He says he’s the best tenor in the world,’ the servant reported. ‘They all say that,’ Puccini said, but something prompted him, and to this day he doesn’t know what it was, to put down the book he was reading and to go into the hallway. The front door was open and little Caruso was standing just outside in the garden. ‘Who the hell are you?’ Puccini shouted. Caruso lifted up his full-throated magnificent voice and answered with the words of Rodolfo in La Bohème, ‘Chi son? Sono un poeta’ . . . ‘Who am I? I am a poet.’ Puccini was absolutely bowled over by the quality of the voice. He’d never heard a tenor like it before. He rushed up to Caruso and embraced him and cried out, ‘Rodolfo is yours!’ That’s a true story, Yasmin. Puccini himself loves to tell it. And now of course Caruso is the greatest tenor in the world, and he and Puccini are the closest of friends. Rather marvellous, don’t you agree?”

“What’s this got to do with me singing?” Yasmin asked. “My voice is hardly going to bowl Puccini over.”

“Of course not. But the general idea is the same. Caruso wanted a part. You want three cubic centimetres of semen. The latter is easier for Puccini to give than the former, especially to someone as gorgeous as you. The singing is simply a way to attract the man’s attention.”

“Go on, then.”

“Puccini works only at night,” I said, “from about ten thirty p.m. to three or four in the morning. At that time the rest of the household will be asleep. At midnight, you and I will creep into the garden of the Villa Puccini and locate his studio, which I believe is on the ground floor. A window will certainly be open because the nights are still warm. So while I hide in the bushes, you will stand outside the open window and sing softly the gentle aria ‘Un bel di vedremo’ from Madame Butterfly. If everything goes right, Puccini will rush to the window and will see standing there a girl of surprising beauty—you. The rest should be easy.”

“I rather like that,” Yasmin said. “Italians are always singing outside each other’s windows.”

When we got to Lucca, we holed up in a small hotel, and there, beside an ancient piano in the hotel sitting-room, I taught Yasmin to sing the aria. She had almost no Italian but she soon learnt the words by heart, and in the end she was able to sing the complete aria very nicely indeed. Her voice was small but she had perfect pitch. I then taught her to say in Italian, “Maestro, I adore your work. I have travelled all the way from England . . .” etc., etc., and a few other useful phrases, including of course, “All I ask is to have your signature on your own notepaper.”

“I don’t think you’re going to need the Beetle with this chap,” I said.

“I don’t think I am either,” Yasmin said. “Let’s skip it for once.”

“And no hatpin,” I told her. “This man is a hero of mine. I won’t have him stuck.”

“I won’t need the hatpin if we don’t use the Beetle,” she said. “I’m really looking forward to this one, Oswald.”

“Ought to be fun,” I said.

When all was ready, we drove out one afternoon to the Villa Puccini to scout the premises. It was a massive mansion set on the edge of a large lake and completely surrounded by an eight-foot-high spiked iron fence. Not so good, that. “We’ll need a small ladder,” I said. So back we drove to Lucca and bought a wooden ladder, which we placed in the open car.

Just before midnight we were once again outside the Villa Puccini. We were ready to go. The night was dark and warm and silent. I placed the ladder up against the railings. I climbed up it and dropped down into the garden. Yasmin followed. I lifted the ladder over onto our side and left it there, ready for the escape.

We saw at once the one room in the entire place that was lit up. It was facing toward the lake. I took Yasmin’s hand in mine and we crept closer. Although there was no moon, the light from the two big ground-floor windows reflected onto the water of the lake and cast a pale illumination over the house and garden. The garden was full of trees and bushes and shrubs and flower beds. I was enjoying this. It was what Yasmin called “a bit of a lark.” As we came closer to the window, we heard the piano. One window was open. We tiptoed right up to it and peeped in. And there he was, the man himself, sitting in his shirtsleeves at an upright piano with a cigar in his mouth, taptapping away, pausing to write something down and then tapping away again. He was thickset, a bit paunchy, and he had a black moustache. There was a pair of candlesticks in elaborate brass holders screwed onto either side of the piano, but the candles were not lit. There was a tall stuffed white bird, a crane of some sort, standing on a shelf alongside the piano. And around the walls of the room there were oil paintings of Puccini’s celebrated ancestors—his great-great-grandfather, his great-grandfather, his grandfather, and his own father. All these men had been famous musicians. For over two hundred years, the Puccini males had been passing on musical gifts of a high order to their children. Puccini straws, if only I could get them, were going to be immensely valuable. I resolved to make one hundred of them instead of the usual fifty.

And now there we stood, Yasmin and I, peering through the open window at the great man. I noticed that he had a fine head of thick black hair brushed straight back from the forehead.

“I’m going out of sight,” I whispered to Yasmin. “Wait until he’s not playing, then start to sing.”

She nodded.

“I’ll meet you by the ladder.”

She nodded again.

“Good luck,” I said, and I tiptoed away and stood behind a bush only five yards from the window. Through the foliage of the bush not only could I still see Yasmin but I could also see into the room where the composer was sitting, because the big window was low to the ground.

The piano tinkled. There was a pause. It tinkled again.

He was working out the melody with one finger only, and it was wonderful to be standing out there somewhere in Italy on the edge of a lake at midnight listening to Giacomo Puccini composing what was almost certainly a graceful aria for a new opera. There was another pause. He had got the phrase right this time and he was writing it down. He was leaning forward with a pen in his hand and writing on the manuscript paper in front of him. He was jotting his musical notes above the words of the librettist.

Then suddenly, in the absolute stillness that prevailed, Yasmin’s small sweet voice began to sing “Un bel dl vedremo.” The effect was stu