Back in the innocent days before the dreadful events in the Ville D'St.Neighns, a wandering spirit had taken me over once again, as so many times before, and I had left my home in the green fair land of Moldowshire. I travelled to the sunny shores of Portugal, and across the green hills of Spain, to the pale misty lakes of France, and from there onward to the dark mystic forests of Italy, where life of a stranger was not worth a bed&breakfast. I finally arrived at the small village not far from the Austrian border, and went to search for a place of a bed&breakfast. That is where I first heard of the mysterious and avoidable place called Palazzo di Tenore.
It sounded promisingly operatic to me, so off I went, despite the fact that people only spoke of it in hushed voices of dread and terror and fear. I figured they were probably Philistines. Little did I know. My ears were never to recover from that horror.(*)
I reached the opera house and wondered why it was so shunned, for it looked no different from other opera houses. But should I have guessed that something was wrong when they asked us, in the rich and pompous opera hall, to fasten our seat belts? I think so. Alas, blinded as I was, I did what they told me to do. With a horrendous sound the seat belt snapped together around my waist, a sound that was almost organic, a slurping like two monstrous amoebas beings fusing to one. Alarmed, I tried to liberate myself, but I found that I could not open the belt again. And then the lights went out, and a very fat, bearded tenor entered the stage. A malicious grin was in his face as he started to unleash the horrors of his voice. Oh, this voice! If only I could forget it! It was like the rubbing of sandpaper against the hardened skin of a croaking old woman dying from an attack of shrieking parrots in the streets of Sodom and Gomorrah.
How long that ordeal lasted, I still cannot tell, for I must have passed in and out of consciousness several times during that torture, but I remember 'La Donna e Mobile', 'Chiri, Chiri, Chiesa', 'Fungi a Piedo', 'Ridi Pagliaccio', 'Boy, Boy, Crazy Boy', and countless others, mutilated in horrible inhuman form, but still recognisable. And at the culmination of my torment, the beloved, unforgettable, 'Lady in Red', twisted into... no, I cannot say. It was at that point, as I did not believe I could bare any more, that I pushed up with all my might, and the seat belt came loose from the aged seat. I turned around to escape from that grotesque sight in the stage, and as I looked around that large hall, I saw the most bizarre and unimaginable sight I had ever seen...
I should add that I had led a sheltered life up to then, and had only gone to CIVILISED opera houses. So I had never before seen a patron talking into a cell phone, let alone such an obnoxiously loud one. It sounded as if he and the tenor on stage were doing a duet:
"fenniculi, fennicula ..."
"WHY DO YOU BLAME ME FOR EVERYTHING IT'S NOT MY FAULT YOU'RE FRIGID OK?"
Then a fat woman in armour appeared and threw a spear at the obnoxiously loud guy, killing him. Now, I thought, was my chance.
However, I was cruelly misled, for the fat woman now turned to the tenor on stage, who stopped his horrible singing. The woman yelled: "This one will never desecrate your operas again!" "Well done, my beloved wife!" thundered the tenor. "But tonight we have a second philistine here who did not want to listen to my genius. And who wrecked one of our expensive Opera Appreciation Seats!" With that, both of them turned their eyes directly to me. I froze in shock. "He will die too, my love!" shrieked the woman and waved her spear.
The thought of being killed like that, by a fat Valkyrie with a spear, was too much for me, so I spread out my hands and cried: "STOP!!", as loud as I could. Everything went quiet. Then the conductor gave a sign and the orchestra continued in adagio, with a slowly developing theme. I now realised that if I was to get out of there alive, I would have to *sing* my way out...
It was then that the horrible truth dawned on me. I was the baritone in the opera, which meant that after singing, I would have to kill the tenor and then marry the fat woman. But first I needed a clue as to which opera I was in ... it was evidently a very obscure Donizetti opera. With luck, it was obscure enough that I could get away with making something up ...
"ASH NAZG DURBATULUUUUK agh burzum-ishi krimpatul!" I crooned
What these words meant, I did not know, for all this happened in the year 1953 or even earlier, if I remember correctly. I had just made them up. The tenor looked slightly puzzled, and I could see that my plan had worked - now he too was in an area unfamiliar to him, and he had to improvise. "Those words, ah those woooooords, were inscriiibed on a riiiiiing", the tenor yelled. "A riiiing, oh a riiiiing, that was maaaaagic and eeeevil..." What was he up to? Was he trying to nudge me towards Wagner, an area he surely knew better than I did, to gain advantage again? In the audience, an elderly, British-looking guy with a anachronistic ornamental waistcoat dropped his pipe and started to take notes.
I was determined to confuse the tenor by singing on a subject I figured he would have no notion of: nobiliary law. "I am meeeeeEEEEEEEdiatiiiiiiiIIIIIIIzed!" I cried. "but I'm still UUUUUUUUURadel!" the audience burst into applause. The British- looking guy muttered something about modelling government on a colony of cherrystone clams.
To my surprise, however, the tenor seemed quite familiar with nobiliary law, which was mildly unnerving, because I wasn't. However, at least he now seemed to be in a better mood.
He replied with a verse of something that sounded like "Noldorin inheritance law in Numenorean tradition", and to avoid collapse and defeat, I had to resort to a summary of ancient Norse bylaws, which alas, I had only passing knowledge, but I believe I managed to distort him from that fact...
And so it went on round after round - for the Tenor's power of song was great but I had the mastery - until the foundations of the old building begin to shake, and cracks begin to appear in the ceiling. The whole Palazzo was about to collapse. A massive chandelier came chrushing down in the middle of the stage and panic spread over the audience. I rushed to pull up the British-looking guy, who seemed to have lost in his thoughts and unaware of what was going on. All around us people were running here and there, but we made our way to the exit, and as we leaped out, the walls came crumbling down, and the magnificent dome collapsed into rubble. From the ruins we could hear the last wailing high-note that echoed around and then faded out as one final "Preciooosooooo....."
The scholar I had saved thanked me fullheartedly and told me he was an English Professor, who had been on a pilgrimage to Rome, when promises of a cultural even of enlightenment had lured him into this dark place. I replied with strange words that seemed to have come to my tongue as if from somewhere else. "Elen sila lumenn omentielvo", I said to him. He looked me eerily and trotted away quite hastily, but I had a feeling we would be meeting again.
(*) That is why Blogambar has bat-ears.