by JH Fletcher
1960. Civil war fear in Algeria. Police open fire: fifty-six die in South African massacre.
1961. Settlers and nuns butchered in Congo. Bay of Pigs; US backs invasion of Cuba. First American soldier slain in Vietnam. Newcomer Ryan impresses in Australian Federal election. Opera star found dead.
7
Lucia had been shocked when Toscanini had died, back in January 1957. He had been the greatest conductor of his day, the man who, with his fiery temperament and endless seeking for perfection, had been music for so many. To wake to the news of his death was like being told that the dome of St Peters had collapsed overnight, yet to Lucia the shock was nothing in comparison with her feelings when Valentino Alba, recently retired administrator of the Parma Opera, phoned to tell her that Marta Bianci had died in her sleep.
‘She suffered nothing. Her face was so peaceful. It was a blessing.’
A blessing? Marta Bianci dead? Was he mad?
Her hand clutching the phone, her senses swirling, she barely took in what he was saying.
‘A requiem mass. Verdi. We would be honoured if you would …’
‘Where? When?’
‘In Parma. At the cathedral. Next Friday.’
She had been due in Edinburgh; she cancelled it. She flew to Parma. She came down the steps from the aircraft. Flash bulbs exploded in her face, a clatter of media voices drove shards into her head, and she could have killed the lot of them. There were dignitaries, as there always were; there was no peace in her life, no Space even to mourn the loss of her friend. A hundred sober faces, a hundred concerns, battered her as much as the banks of cameras through which she had just passed. It was terrible, terrible. She turned to the nearest face, fighting the desire to scream, to use her nails to rip holes in the world, to compel it to silence and reverence and respect.
‘Get me to the hotel.’
Because Marta Bianci was dead and the world, so graced by her life, was ashes.
She sang, as she had been asked. Looking out at the congregation, she saw the faces of conductors, producers, singers, and thought that the world of opera must have come to a halt for the occasion.
At the reception she met Teresa Sciotto for the first time in years. They knew the predatory cameras were on them, but Teresa, whom the years had not made wise, fired off a salvo anyway.
‘Are you well?’
‘Very well.’
‘But you’ve lost so much weight.’
Teresa’s eyes said skinny, thin, haggard, which wasn’t much of a worry. Vogue had published some glam pics of Lucia recently, had called her svelte. Lucia smiled.
‘My trouble is, I think too much. How I envy you not having that problem.’
They smiled and hugged, black thoughts inside the black dresses. Teresa would have preferred to escape but Lucia held her tight, posing for the cameras. Why not? Teresa was fatter than ever, a waddle with a voice. Beside such generous flesh, how could Lucia look anything but great?
There was Professor Menotti, too. He came hobbling, a scarecrow out of a nightmare. He was decrepit, an ivory cane clutched in his vulture’s claw, but as lecherous as ever. He fawned like the creature he was, purple lips shining. His smile rubbed against her insinuatingly; he was disgusting. Lucia remembered his hand groping her; she turned her back on him, saying nothing, and her silence razored him to the bone. The media could make what it liked out of that.
It made a lot. The media had discovered there was money in portraying the most celebrated of all singers as a hellcat, and photographs of her turning her back on the famous professor, who the captions claimed had wished only to honour her, appeared around the world. It was true that she had never been a docile soul. Now, more and more, Lucia was willing to oblige them. She did all the things a prima donna was not supposed to do.
8
The mysteries of her art were claimed to be both sacred and secret. She thought, and said, that was crap. She gave interviews, talking openly about her approach to what she called her trade.
‘Always I have to reinvent myself! Always! There is no rest. It would be easy to trot out the same thing, over and over. Easy for me, for the producers, the orchestra, conductor … Go down better with the public, too. They’re not comfortable with constant changes. But I have to do it. I have to dig ever deeper into the blood of the characters. My own blood. Nothing less is tolerable. But, oh, it tires me. Some mornings I can hardly drag myself into battle. It becomes unbearable. But there’s no alternative. I wouldn’t be able to look at myself in the mirror, otherwise. I couldn’t live with myself.’
More controversially still, she wrote an outspoken literary piece in which she described prowling the docks at night, claiming that it was the duty of the artist — or tradesperson — to seek truth wherever she could find it.
Ships and docks and cranes. Gangsters sailors stevedores politicians gamblers. Lights gaudy guttering yellow daubs of come-on light painted in flash streaks across cobbles reflective and shining with silver rain. The rods of rain falling endlessly on wharves and patrols, surly shouldered guards, the pugnacious peaks of caps, hands curled tight about the hafts of clubs, the straining slaver of shepherd dogs, white-fanged red-tongued tight-leashed. Razor wire in coils bares its teeth at the sky. Life seething under the multitudinous blows of the rain, between the wharves and crimping houses, the warehouses dark amid the darkness, the mumble grumbling voice of the city sidling always under the rain-arrowed night.
‘Come on, sailor. Show you a good time, sailor.’ Under the rain-arrowed night …
An enterprising publisher offered her a deal, which she refused. Others didn’t know what to make of it at all.
‘It’s almost as though …’
Precisely; but nobody knew for sure whether the famous diva had moonlighted as a hooker or not.
She sang with the Beatles in their first Melbourne concert; she seemed determined to outrage the establishment, while the world loved her. She became a publicist’s dream.
VISCONTI SUES
TEMPER TANTRUMS IN ROME
LA SCALA SAYS ENOUGH
VISCONTI IN LOVE!
At times it was hard to know where fact ended and fiction began. She remembered what an agent had told her years ago: ‘Good publicity’s good, bad publicity’s better, no publicity’s the kiss of death.’
Kissed or not, Lucia was not planning to die yet.
9
The war in Vietnam blew red-hot, if it had ever cooled at all. Every time she read about it in the papers or heard commentary on the news, she thought: Jacques.
From time to time she came across items he’d written, reports from Saigon, Vinh Long, Da Nang. She’d heard nothing from him since the letter telling her of his marriage. Once, she had thought about him every day; now, months went by when she did not think of him at all. She told herself she was over him. She had been out to dinner with half a dozen men over the years but nothing had come of any of them. She shut away her memories of her days and nights with Jacques; she had no interest in sex or even romance.
I am self-sufficient, she told herself.
10
Lucia stood on the stage of the Metropolitan Opera. She looked out at the stalls, the four banked tiers forming a semi-circle behind them. Everywhere applause, shouts, flowers. As always, one part of her mind had been conscious of the audience throughout the performance: this alien being staring from darkness at the real world upon the stage, the massive sarsen stones of the temple of Irminsul, the priestess inciting the Gauls to rebellion against Rome.
She had stood, screaming in electrifying fury, summoning them to destruction.
Guerra! Strage! Sterminio!
Now she stood, Norma no longer but Lucia Visconti, acknowledging the applause of the New York audience, thinking of the letter she had received two days before from her friend Khieu Pen in Lyons.
It is not generally known in the west, but I have heard from my sister in Phnom Penh that the Americans have started bombing Cambodia. Can’t they und
erstand that such an escalation of the war plays into the hands of their enemies? In particular there is a group, not widely known in the west, who call themselves the Khmer Rouge, and their reputation is fearsome.
She bowed, she smiled, she lifted graceful arms in acknowledgement of their love, while her heart reverberated once again with Norma’s summons to her Gallic warriors.
Guerra! Strage! Sterminio!
War! Pillage! Death!
CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR
1
Back in 1959 Lucia had bought Helena a comfortable apartment in a new block not far from the cathedral in Parma. Helena had not wanted to move but Lucia had refused to listen to her mother’s objections.
‘It makes sense. You’ll be near the shops. There’s a doctor round the corner. And what’s in Montegallo, for heaven’s sake?’
Helena was not one to give in without an argument.
‘Why should I care where the doctor is? I’ve still got my health. And what about my friends?’
As far as her health went, she was right. Friends were another story; some in Montegallo still crossed the road to avoid Grandini’s woman. So into Parma Helena went and seemed well settled there, for all her forebodings. Whenever Lucia found time to visit, her mother always complained for her daughter’s benefit but had made friends with two or three other women in the same block. Now, six years later, Lucia suspected a tractor could not have dragged her back to the country. From something her mother had said, Lucia suspected she’d even started going to Mass. Why not, if it gave her satisfaction? Prayers and incense meant nothing to Lucia, yet there were times when she remembered the village priest holding up the cross before the victims of the SS and wondered whether she might be missing something from her life. Faith was not something you could order over the counter, or even in a cathedral, but perhaps in time it would come. For the moment it was enough to concentrate on her career and live, as far as she could, on the right side of the line.
The fact that Helena was settled in Parma didn’t mean that she should never get away. Each year, when Lucia headed to La Tranquilla for her summer break, she continued to make sure that her mother came for a week as well. Made her: that was what it took. Every year Helena refused, but Lucia had not built her place in the world by listening to others.
‘I’m coming to collect you. Make up your mind to that. And be ready. I don’t want to hang around like I did last time.’
Bullying could breathe life into a relationship that might otherwise grow stale. She brought her down, established her in the guest bedroom, generally made much of her. It took a while for them to come to terms with each other — Helena regarded being crotchety as one of the privileges of advancing age — but she got on well with Carlo and Gianna, and in time was prepared to be civil even to her daughter.
This year, after Carlo had carried Helena’s cases to her room, they sat in the living room and eyed each other. The air was cautious between them. Helena was heavily lined now, her hair almost white, and had increasing difficulty in walking. She was only — what? — sixty-six, yet Lucia saw that her mother had aged a lot in the last twelve months.
It had been a long road to get to this point in their lives. Perhaps age brought, if not greater understanding, greater tranquillity. By consent, mutual if unspoken, they no longer mentioned Eduardo or the closing stages of the war. For years that episode had divided them, as unforgiving as razor wire. Now they had learned to ignore it. The past could not be undone, Eduardo was dead, deservedly or not, and time really did dull pain and resentment.
They had learned to be selective of all their memories. In their conversations they revisited Tolmino; each year Lucia heard, once again, the stories of her mother’s childhood: the climb up Razor Mountain, the big kitchen warm and copper-shining while the burja screamed outside the window and the world was sheathed in ice. She heard about the flight from war through the empty countryside. Finally, she heard about her father.
‘Do you still write to him?’
Lucia had never spoken of the woman Edma, did not know if her mother knew of her existence.
‘We stay in touch,’ Helena said. Which meant he must write to her, too. Lucia felt a twinge of jealousy. The only communications she’d ever had from him were a card at Christmas and on her birthday. Not that she could complain; she wasn’t much of a correspondent herself.
‘He always asks after you,’ Helena added.
‘He could ask me himself.’
‘He was never one for letter-writing.’
He writes to you, though. And you were the one who walked out on him. Somehow she kept the thought to herself.
Helena said: ‘He always says he doesn’t want to bother you. She’s too busy to waste time on an old man: he said that once. And it’s true: who knows that better than I do?’
Her mother had always known how to put the knife in. Lucia knew she should have written more often but time was the great enemy and some things seemed destined never to get done.
Into the silence, Helena said: ‘That woman he had living with him … He told me she died, a year ago.’
So she had known, after all. Caught on the hop, her sense of guilt compounded by the revelation of the secret that had turned out not to be secret at all, Lucia said nothing.
‘You met her, I think?’ Helena added.
‘Twice. She didn’t like me much. The second time was better than the first but she was still scared of me, I think.’
‘You never mentioned her.’
‘I didn’t know what to do for the best. I’m sorry.’
‘Don’t be. You did all right.’
Helena patted her hand; it was the closest they’d been for a long time.
They said no more that night. Both of them were burdened by the weight of confidences and shared feelings that had overtaken them after so many years of politeness and distance. No doubt Helena was also tired from the journey. She went to bed.
The next day the walls separating them were back in place. It was three days before the time for renewed confidences returned.
‘What happened to that Frenchman you were friendly with?’
‘Jacques Mazetta? He went back to the Far East.’
‘Didn’t you say he’d been there to cover the war against the Viet Minh? Surely that’s been over for years.’
Lucia knew how long it had been, almost to the hour.
‘It’s never been over at all. Look at the mess it’s in now. Even Australia’s got itself involved. I remember Jacques saying the last song hadn’t been sung there. He was right.’
‘You ever see him now?’
Lucia squeezed a laugh. ‘I’m too old for things like that.’
‘At forty-two? Don’t be ridiculous.’
But it was true; she had lived so long without a man that she had almost forgotten what desire was. Love, of course, was a different matter.
2
Lucia phoned Monty Cardozo.
‘See if you can fix me up with something in Sydney.’
He laughed, coughing. She could imagine the hooded eyes wreathed in cigar smoke.
‘Still trying to reinvent your childhood?’
‘Could be.’
‘We’ll see what we can do.’
He organised a recital tour: Perth, Adelaide, Melbourne, Sydney. The first thing she did when she arrived was hold a press conference. ‘I intend to spend more time here. This is my country, after all. Where else should I go?’
At last, after years of delay, she bought the penthouse she had promised herself in a new block overlooking the harbour, to demonstrate her good intentions. There were new developments everywhere; someone was making a packet. She was invited to dinner with the Governor-General, where she met an army of forgettable faces: the Prime Minister, Brendan Hicks, that silver-haired slob of a Canberra politician; a property speculator and newspaper proprietor called Hector Godolphin; and a troop of others with the culture and musical knowledge of a merino ram. Culture didn’t rate but
the sunburnt country had a weakness for millionaires.
Not that millionaires made up the whole population; her father, for one, had never seen a million dollars in his life. She flew to Adelaide; she fixed him up with a ticket to her recital, in case he was interested. Music had never been his bag — she had never forgotten his expression when her mother had suggested singing lessons for their talented daughter — but he came, anyway, which delighted her. After the recital she took him out to dinner, and they had a good chat; it was like the old times they’d never had. Not that he was a man who would ever be fluent with words.
‘I’m sorry about Edma,’ she said.
‘Yeah, right.’
‘You must miss her.’
‘Yeah, right.’
‘You plan to stay on at the farm?’
No answer at all but a look that said: Where else would I go? Which was answer enough.
At the end of the evening, with the old man bug-eyed and yawning, not used to an opera singer’s hours, she said: ‘Maybe you and Mama should think about getting together again. You’ve stayed in touch all these years and you’re both short of company, now. Maybe you could make a go of it.’
‘And maybe we couldn’t. She gave it a try once, couldn’t stand the place. And I wouldn’t live anywhere else.’
‘You could talk …’
‘Nuthin’ to talk about.’ Ted’s voice turned the lock on further discussion.
So there was a bit of feeling between them when they parted, Lucy telling herself she’d been a fool to stick her beak in.
The next day she went to the museum, looked at the Aboriginal exhibits, the photographs of this place and that. The faces in the photographs had a harsh, sandy quality, like the land from which they were sprung. She thought: I say this is my country but I don’t know anything about it at all.
3