Imitating old Quevedo, I asked the Aura papers, feverishly written as the summer of ’61 came to an end: “Listen, life, will no one answer?” And the answer came in the night which accompanied the words written in the midst of the bustle of commerce and journalism and catering on a grand Parisian avenue: Felipe Montero, the false protagonist of Aura, answered me, addressing me familiarly:
You read the advertisement. Only your name is missing. You think you are Felipe Montero. You lie to yourself. You are You: You are Another. You are the Reader. You are what you Read. You shall be Aura. You were Consuelo.
“I’m Felipe Montero. I read your advertisement.”
“Yes, I know … Good. Please let me see your profile … No, I can’t see it well enough. Turn toward the light. That’s right…”
You shall move aside so that the light from the candles and the reflections from the silver and crystal reveal the silk coif that must cover a head of very white hair and frame a face so old it must be almost childlike …
“I told you she’d come back.”
“Who?”
“Aura. My companion. My niece.”
“Good afternoon.”
The girl will nod and at the same instant the old lady will imitate her gesture.
“This is Señor Montero. He’s going to live with us.”
* * *
SIX, only six days before her death, I met La Traviata. My wife, Sylvia, and I had been invited in September of 1976 to have dinner at the house of our old and dear friends Gabriella and Teddy van Zuylen, who have four daughters with the green eyes of Aura who spy on the guests near four paintings by Roberto Matta, Wifredo Lam, Alberto Gironella, and Pierre Alechinsky, without anyone being able to tell whether the girls are coming in or out of the paintings.
“I have a surprise for you,” said our hostess, and she sat me next to Maria Callas.
This woman made me shake violently, for no reason I could immediately discern. While we dined, I tried to speak to her at the same time that I spoke to myself. From the balcony of the Theater of Fine Arts in Mexico City I had heard her sing La Traviata in 1951, when she was Maria Meneghini Callas and appeared as a robust young woman with the freshest, most glorious voice that I had ever heard: Callas sang an aria the same way that Manolete fought a bulclass="underline" incomparably. She was already a young myth.
I told her so that night in Paris. She interrupted me with a velocity at once velvet-smooth and razor-sharp in its intention: “What do you think of the myth now that you’ve met her?” she asked me.
“I think she has lost some weight,” I dared to answer.
She laughed with a tone different from that of her speaking voice. I imagined that, for Maria Callas, crying and singing were acts nearer to song than to speech, because I must admit that her everyday voice was that of a girl from the less fashionable neighborhoods of New York City. Maria Callas had the speaking voice of a girl selling Maria Callas records at Sam Goody’s on Sixth Avenue.
This was not the voice of Medea, the voice of Norma, the voice of the Lady of the Camellias. Yes, she had slimmed down, we all knew it, without losing her glorious and warm voice, the voice of the supreme diva. No: no one was a more beautiful woman, a better actress, or a greater singer on an opera stage in the twentieth century.
Callas’s seduction, let me add, was not only in the memory of her stage glory: this woman I now saw, thinned down not by her will but by her sickness and her time, nearer every minute to her bone, every second more transparent and tenuously allied to life, possessed a hypnotic secret that revealed itself as attention. I really think I have never met a woman who lent more attention to the man she was listening to than Maria Callas.
Her attention was a manner of dialogue. Through her eyes (two black lighthouses in a storm of white petals and moist olives) passed images in surprising mutation: her thoughts changed, the thoughts became images, yes, but only because she was transforming ceaselessly, as if her eyes were the balcony of an unfinished and endless opera that, in everyday life, prolonged in silence the suffused rumor, barely the echo, of the nights which had belonged to Lucia di Lammermoor and Violetta Valéry.
In that instant I discovered the true origin of Aura: its anecdotal origin, if you will, but also its origin in desire, since desire is the port of embarkation as well as the final destiny of this novella. I had heard Maria Callas sing La Traviata in Mexico City when she and I were more or less the same age, twenty years old perhaps, and now we were meeting almost thirty years later and I was looking at a woman I had known before, but she saw in me a man she had just met that evening. She could not compare me to myself, I could: myself and her.
And in this comparison I discovered yet another voice, not the slightly vulgar voice of the highly intelligent woman seated at my right; not the voice of the singer who gave back to bel canto a life torn from the dead embrace of the museum; no, but the voice of old age and madness which, I then remembered (and confirmed it in the Angel record I went out hurriedly to buy the next morning), is the unbelievable, unfathomable, profoundly disturbing voice of Maria Callas in the death scene of La Traviata.
Whereas the sopranos who sing Verdi’s opera usually search for a supreme pathos achieved thanks to agonizing tremors and an attempt to approach death with sobs, screams, and shudders, Maria Callas does something unusuaclass="underline" she transforms her voice into that of an old woman and gives that ancient voice the inflection of madness.
I remember it so well that I can almost imitate the final lines: “E strano! / Cessarono / Gli spasmi del dolore.”
But if this be the voice of a hypochondriac old lady complaining of the inconveniences of advanced age, immediately Callas injects a mood of madness into the words of resurgent hope in the midst of a hopeless malady: “In mi rinasce — m’agita / Insolito vigore / Ah! Ma io rittorno a viver’.” Only then does death, and nothing but death, defeat old age and madness with the exclamation of youth: “Oh gioia!”
Maria Callas invited Sylvia and me to see her again a few weeks later. But before that, one afternoon. La Traviata died forever. But before, also, she had given me my secret: Aura was born in that instant when Maria Callas identified, in the voice of one woman, youth as well as old age, life along with death, inseparable, convoking one another, the four, finally, youth, old age, life, death, women’s names: “la juventud,” “la vejez,” “la vida,” “la muerte.”
* * *
SEVEN, yes, seven days were needed for divine creation: on the eighth day the human creature was born and her name was desire. After the death of Maria Callas, I reread The Lady of the Camellias by Alexandre Dumas fils. The novel is far superior to Verdi’s opera or to the numerous stage and film adaptations because it contains an element of delirious necrophilia absent from all the descendants.
The novel begins with the return to Paris of Armand Duval — A.D., certainly the double of Alexandre Dumas — who then finds out that Marguerite Gautier had died. Marguerite Gautier, his lover lost through the suspicious will of Duval père, who says he is defending the family integrity by demanding that Marguerite abandon Armand, but who is probably envious of his son and would like Marguerite all for himself. Anyway, Duval fils hurries desperately to the woman’s tomb in Père Lachaise. The scene that follows is surely the most delirious in narrative necrophilia.