Roald Dahl - My Uncle Oswald

A. R. Woresley was wildly excited when I showed him our haul. We now had King Alfonso, Renoir, Monet, Matisse, Stravinsky, Proust, Nijinsky, Joyce, Bonnard, and Braque. “And you’ve done a fine job with the freezing,” he said to me as he carefully transferred the racks of straws with their labels on them from my suitcase freezer to the big freezer in Dunroamin, our headquarters house. “Keep going, children,” he said, rubbing his hands together like a grocer. “Keep going.”

We kept going. When Yasmin and I returned the next day to Paris, we collected Clemenceau, Foch, and Maurice Ravel, who was living alone out at Monfort-l’Amaury with a houseful of Siamese cats. After that, and it was the beginning of October now, we drove on south into Italy, looking for D. H. Lawrence. We found him living at the Palazzo Ferraro in Capri with Frieda, and on this occasion I had to distract fat Frieda for two hours out on the rocks while Yasmin went to work on Lawrence. We got a bit of a shock with Lawrence though. When I rushed his semen back to our Capri hotel and examined it under the microscope, I found that the spermatozoa were all stone dead. There was no movement there at all.

“Jesus,” I said to Yasmin. “The man’s sterile.”

“He didn’t act like it,” she said. “He was like a goat. Like a randy goat.”

“We’ll have to cross him off the list.”

“Who’s next?” she asked.

“Giacomo Puccini.”

“PUCCINI IS A BIG ONE,” I said. “A giant. We mustn’t fail.”

“Where does he live?” Yasmin asked.

“Near Lucca, about forty miles west of Florence.”

“Tell me about him.”

“Puccini is an enormously rich and famous man,” I said. “He has built himself a huge house, the Villa Puccini, on the edge of a lake beside the tiny village where he was born, which is called Torre del Lago. Now this is the man, Yasmin, who has written Manon , La Bohème , Tosca , Madame Butterfly , and The Girl of the Golden West . Classics every one of them. He is probably not a Mozart or a Wagner or even a Verdi, but he’s still a genius and a giant. He’s a bit of a lad, too.”

“In what way?”

“Terrific womanizer.”

“Super.”

“He is now sixty-one but that hasn’t stopped him,” I said. “He’s a roustabout, a drinker, a crazy car driver, a madkeen fisherman, and an even keener duck shooter. But above all, he’s a lecher. Someone once said of him that he hunts women, wild-fowl, and libretti in that order.”

“Sounds like a good chap.”

“Splendid fellow,” I said. “He’s got a wife, an old bag called Elvira, and believe it or not, this Elvira was once sentenced to five months in prison for causing the death of one of Puccini’s girl friends. The girl was a servant in the house, and the beastly Elvira caught Puccini out in the garden with her late one night. There was a tremendous scene, the girl was sacked, and thereafter Elvira hounded her to such an extent that the poor thing took poison and killed herself. Her family went to court and Elvira was given five months in the clink.”

“Did she go?”

“No,” I said. “Puccini got her off by paying twelve thousand lire to the girl’s family.”

“So what’s the plan?” Yasmin asked me. “Do I just knock on the door and walk in?”

“That won’t work,” I said. “He’s surrounded by faithful watchdogs and his bloody wife. You’d never get near him.”

“What do you suggest then?”

“Can you sing?” I asked her.

“I’m not Melba,” Yasmin said, “but I have quite a decent little voice.”

“Great,” I said. “Then that’s it. That’s what we’ll do.”

“What?”

“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.”