The Twins by Tessa de Loo

into the living-room unexpectedly, separate from the choir, in a Bach cantata. Uncertain of the result she came home – she could not hear her own voice in the studio. There a celebration was in progress: alcohol was on the table. Her mother hugged her, moved, and presented her with a bouquet of flowers that tickled her nostrils. She had a sneezing fit. ‘Mind your voice!’ cried Mies sarcastically; she liked to be the centre of attention herself. Her father was looking feverishly in his record collection for that particular cantata – his way of indicating his appreciation. Lotte fell into an armchair, bewildered, and pensively spooned down a brimming glass of advocaat that Marie had held out to her with a respectful laugh. It gave her a scandalously pleasurable feeling that she was earning success with something that she herself enjoyed to the roots of her hair (the reward was already there in the singing itself). Two days later she received a perfumed letter: ‘Your timbre is unique, it is a rare gift. I will still remember your voice in twenty years, and that is something others would give everything for.’ Catharina Metz recognized the sender as a notoriously severe music critic. Blushing, Lotte packed the letter in the suitcase she had come with from Germany. Along with hermourning dress and Anna’s embroidered handkerchief that had been in one of the pockets, here she kept the sewing case that had drowned with her and a newspaper cutting about Amelita Galli-Curci . Later she moved the letter to a drawer in her dressing-table where a scent of violets still lingered after sixty years.
    She had first heard Amelita Galli-Curci in a duet with Caruso. It was a hot afternoon in September; she was walking home through the wood after school with Jet. The water-tower shimmered through the trees when suddenly she stopped. Like a force of nature , a voice was coming from an open window which was so enchanting that Lotte was all ears – a gigantic, immobile ear. Jet pulled impatiently on her sleeve and then walked on, shrugging her shoulders. Lotte wanted to delay as long as possible the banal moment of coming home and discovering that the voice emanated from a groove in an ebony disc. So she stood there with eyes closed until the last sounds had died away between the tree trunks.
    The queen of coloratura singing, Galli-Curci, married to a marquis from the foot of the boot of Italy, scored triumphs in the United States immediately after the First World War ‘as a lyric soprano of unusual beauty, pure and crystal clear from low A-flat to high C’, according to Opera World of the day. In the cutting that Lotte kept, there was a photograph of a majestic, dark-haired woman who defied the camera with a raised chin – a Rembrandtesque hat on her head at an angle, a shawl with large flowers and birds draped over her shoulders, and two showy rings on her right hand, which rested militarily on her breast, just above the heart. A Napoleonic stance. Thus inspired, Lotte slipped into the water-tower , ignoring the strict prohibition – long hair or ribbons could get caught in one of the machines. She positioned herself – chin up, hand on chest, directed her gaze upwards and brought about a change of scenery: the metal stairs no longer led to a reservoir filled with sand, gravel and coals, but spiralled endlessly upwards on their own axis, into a firmament full of stars – they might also have been theatre lights. As yet unhampered by excessive self-criticism,she sang ‘Caro Nome’ or ‘Veranno a te’ in her own Italian version as she had managed to learn it from the record. Her voice filled the whole tower from the low A-flat to the high E, ascending the stairs to where the steps became fainter and fainter, in a never-ending Escherian revolving. Her chest expanded. Drunk from the melody and the sound of her own voice, she floated away to another phase in her life – the reservoir arched high above her, a stained-glass window