Giacomo Puccini came from a family that fortune consistently favored. His younger brother Michele was the one exception — he crossed to South America first, fell to yellow fever, and never came home.

He was born in Lucca in 1864, three months after their father died. He studied where Giacomo studied — the music institute in Lucca, then the conservatory in Milan — and got none of the luck. At the end of 1889 he sailed for Buenos Aires. From there the story stops resembling a career and starts resembling a libretto.

He traveled twelve days north to Jujuy, seventeen hundred kilometers from the capital, to teach music and Italian at a girls’ school. He gave piano lessons to the wife of a friend. The lessons became something else. There was a duel; the offended husband was wounded; Michele went back to Buenos Aires, and the man’s anger followed him there. He left for Brazil. In Rio de Janeiro, in March 1891, he died of yellow fever during an epidemic that was killing hundreds a day.

He was twenty-six.

There was a moment when Giacomo — not yet the Giacomo of Manon Lescaut, still poor, still uncertain — thought of following his brother across the ocean. Michele talked him out of it. The biographies record the warning in its plainest form: don’t come.

I heard a better version from Héctor Tizón in Yala, Jujuy while making of Le Mot Just, in 2004, or thereabouts. Tizón told the story of the Puccini brother who had washed up in his province, and he gave the warning a sharper edge than the books do. Michele, he said, had told Giacomo not to come to Argentina for a specific reason.

The country had too many lawyers!

I cannot confirm the line in print, and I won’t pretend Tizón offered it as documentary fact. He offered it the way a writer offers things, in fact the story is written in one of his many stories about the Northwest in Argentina. But consider who was saying it.

Tizón was a lawyer. He was juez del Superior Tribunal de Justicia de Jujuy — a judge of the province’s highest court, its dean, asked more than once how a novelist could also sit in judgment. His answer was that the two were not in conflict but in need of each other.

So the line reached me through a man who was himself the thing the line complained of.

That is the part I keep. Not the duel, not the fever, not even poor Michele, who deserves more than a footnote in his brother’s fame. What stays with me is the shape of the transmission: an Italian who died unknown in Rio, a complaint about a country’s surplus of lawyers, preserved and handed forward by a distinguished judge, who happened also to be a great writers.

Fourteen years after Michele’s death, Giacomo came to Buenos Aires himself — invited, fêted, his operas staged one after another at the recently inaugurated Teatro Colón, the Italian community pouring out to meet him. He arrived as a triumph in the city where his brother had arrived as a fugitive from his own appetites.

Michele, the first to arrive, contracted yellow fever. His brother — the last of a distinguished composing lineage — became the operatic success history remembers.