Summary
In a twilight Milano where gas-lamps flicker like nervous eyelids, Anna—once gilded by ancestral coin—now feeds cotton nightmares to her Singer, each stitch a stifled scream disguised as couture. Her voice, a clandestine comet, streaks across garret air while Robert, her betrothed, drifts through marble corridors of finance, unaware that friendship itself will soon bear serrated teeth. A snuff-box, palm-warm and silver, becomes the fragile ark of their covenant: its lid etched with Goethe’s incipit, a land promised but never mapped. Enter Morton—smile lacquered, heart calcified—who eavesdrops destiny in a bank vestibule; that night, beneath the city’s cobalt ribs, he guts Robert’s satchel, hurls the clerk into the sewer’s black esophagus, and lets rumor finish the job. Months ossify. Anna’s contralto, now a sovereign currency, floods European boards; bouquets rain like guillotined rainbows. Yet memory—feral, ungovernable—pushes Robert, half-mad and shaven, toward the parquet of a lunatic asylum where song is the last unpoliced country. When her cadence grazes his cortex, past and present solder; recognition detonates. The lovers, reeling, stage a counter-heist of truth, baiting Morton with the same trinket that once vowed devotion. A proscenium becomes courtroom; the snuff-box, Exhibit A; applause turns to shackles. Curtains fall on a restored couple, but the city’s arteries still pulse with the unasked question: can love reimburse a life?
Synopsis
Anna, once the only heiress of a rich family, is now obliged to work day and night at her sewing machine. Her strenuous work is enlightened by her dream of love. Robert, her fiancé, meets an old friend of his who tries Anna's voice, which he thinks is very premising. She is now left under the instruction of her tutor. One day Robert, who works in a bank, is sent on a very important mission to St. Marseilles, but before leaving is presented with a snuff-box by Anna, on which she inscribes the first words of "Mignon," "Don't you know the beautiful land-." Morton, a friend of Robert, having overheard the conversation between Robert and the manager of the bank, plans to steal the large sum of money which Robert will cash in St. Marseilles. That night, with the help of other villains, Morton succeeds in stealing the money from Robert and throws him into a sewer. Not hearing anything from Robert everyone thinks that he ran away with the money. Anna has forgotten her lover and is now on the stage triumphing wherever she plays. During her tours she is invited to sing before the insane men in the asylum of the town. Robert is among the unfortunate men, having lost his reason by the shock he received when robbed. Anna arrives at the asylum and when he hears her beautiful voice, his memory is restored. Anna recognizes him and together they plan to find the guilty man. One day Morton, who is one of Anna's most ardent suitors, shows her the snuff-box she gave Robert. Recognizing it, she understands how he had obtained it. Shortly after, accompanied by Robert and the police, Morton is arrested, and Anna and Robert live happily together.
Review Excerpt
"
Anna’s attic smells of rusted scissors and lilac water; the sewing machine gallops like a metronome on laudanum, its needle a mechanical mosquito gorging on dusk-blue wool. Outside, Milan’s cathedral spikes the bruised sky, indifferent to one fallen heiress stitching survival into hems.
That sonic contraband—her voice—oozes through floorboards, climbs the spine of Robert, bank clerk by day, poet by ear. He pockets the tremor, carries it to cafés where espresso cups clink like champagne for gh..."
