Synchronicity and Maria Callas

The following short story, “Synchronicity and Maria Callas” is an excerpt from my recently published book, Ostraca: Re-membering Sophie/Re-membering Me.

syn. chro. nic. i. ty: noun. (Psychology): a coincidence in time of two or more causally unrelated events, which have the same or similar meaning.

Cecilia Sophia Anna Maria Kalogeropoulos, also known as Maria Callas: an American–Greek soprano, generally considered the greatest singing actress of the twentieth century.

From: Isabell Serafin Krause

To: Edoardo Malerba

August 20, 2012

6:06 p.m.

Dear Edoardo,

I can scarcely believe you sent this. I could not help smiling. Issuing a mere thank you doesn’t feel appropriate. It falls oddly flat. But I do thank you—so much. I will hold onto this forever.

Isabell

One Monday last summer I sat alone reading over dinner in a Turin restaurant. I had dedicated my August summer vacation to Nicholas Gage’s Greek Fire, a biography of the love affair between arguably the two most famous Greeks of the twentieth century, the opera diva Maria Callas and her equally charismatic paramour, the shipping magnate Aristotle Onassis.

For years, I read biographies on Callas and was fascinated by her life. Her reign over the world of opera during the 1950s and 1960s transported me to another time. During restive evenings, I often found myself falling asleep to the sounds of her voice in archival television interviews. This preoccupation with the singer had lasted for years, and seemingly sans logic. Before my discovery of Callas’ art, I had been no great fan of opera and yet increasingly the soprano’s music and the stories of her life fascinated me.

Seven years into my discovery of Callas, I never tired of reading those books that revealed the most intricate aspects of her life. I found the operatic nature of her personal life as moving as her music. That summer, as I walked the streets around Turin’s Teatro Regio, I remembered Callas’ summer spent directing at the theater. The year was 1973 and her renowned voice had given out after years of dramatic performances. That August, as I walked the streets around the theater, I imagined La Callas behind its grand walls. I spent my early evenings alongside her ghost, replaying “O mio babbino caro” and “Vissi d’arte” inside my head, each aria linking me to another era.

“No one interesting remains in Turin during August.”

This is what everyone says. The interesting people decamp to Liguria. They go to the seaside and spend their vacations along the Mediterranean. This was, in part, why I had arrived in Turin that August. I wanted to avoid anyone interesting. I wanted to be alone. Until late that summer, I had passed most of the year in Belgium penning a novel, my first. I spent my days hunched over a stack of pen-marked pages in small cafés.

The process of writing my novel, a story told in fragments about a young woman whose life decomposes after the end of a pivotal relationship, was one I likened to a bloodletting. The book possessed a maudlin quality that had, in equal parts, fueled and exhausted. My afternoons spent meandering Turin’s quiet, arcade-lined boulevards were meant to serve as a soul refurbishment. Over a month, the desired effect had been achieved. I walked the streets around Piazza Vittorio. I looked out over the Roman theater ruins of Porte Palatine and ate croissant alla crema in the mornings and drank caffè shakerato in the late afternoons. On the weekends, I walked the streets around Via Po. The entire time, I read of the heights of Callas’ fame. I read of her divorce from Giovanni Battista Meneghini, an opera-loving businessman nearly thirty years her senior. Meneghini and Callas had enjoyed a placid marriage until her 1959 affair with Aristotle Onassis drove the singer to a tempestuous separation that eventually ended in the dissolution of her marriage, a near-impossible feat in Italy, as divorce was not yet legal. It was Callas’ brilliant Torinese attorney who rendered the Callas–Meneghini union invalid. Seven years after Callas and Onassis began their much-publicized affair, a clever legal maneuver finally legitimized the lovers’ relationship, a coup that captured the attention of the international media.

That summer, I read of Callas’ long trips from Onassis’ yacht, the Christina, to Turin, where she sought the counsel of her attorney, whose former office-cum-home apartment was, unbeknownst to me, around the corner from the very restaurant where I sat that same Monday, eating a torta salata al formaggio.

I had been at the restaurant for about an hour. It was a large and unpretentious place that overlooked Piazza Solferino. I had been making my way through Greek Fire when I caught sight of a gentleman on the opposite side of the restaurant who smiled at me shyly and nodded hello. Before I knew it, he was standing before me. I fail to remember precisely those first fragments of conversation. I do remember his English, which was perfect, courtesy of ten years spent living on the East Coast of the United States. I remember that our conversation flowed. When he asked if I might join him for an after-dinner coffee, I did not hesitate to say yes. We walked over to a nearby café and sat in the early evening darkness at an outside table along a tree-lined avenue. He asked how long I had been in the city. I told him a month. He was surprised. I said that it had been nice. “This is the first vacation I’ve taken alone.” Suddenly he stopped short and looked curiously at me.

“Were you at the restaurant a few weeks ago?” I nodded and told him I had gone there several times over the last month. “You were wearing a pair of white shorts and a hat and you were writing. I didn’t recognize you without the hat. That day, two weeks ago, I thought about coming up to you. I wanted to ask you if you might have a drink with me but I couldn’t get the nerve up to do it. I go to that restaurant all the time. It is very close to my uncle’s house.”

I laughed, incredulous. “You were scared to approach me?” He nodded. “So, why did you suddenly have the courage to come up and say hello this evening?” “I have no idea,” he shrugged his shoulders and then grinned. “It just felt right.”

After dark, sugar-sweetened espressos, we walked through the center of the city. He spoke animatedly about the fascist architecture of Piazza San Carlo, the Roman base of Palazzo Madama. He spoke of his work. He had studied analytic philosophy in Rome and had taught in Philadelphia. These days, he was conducting research at the University of Prague. He had been in Turin since the end of May and had just returned from his annual two-week stint in Liguria with his mother, a vacation he faithfully accompanied her on each summer. Liguria. It was a place he hated, but he went because he knew she enjoyed it. Unlike most sea-loving Italians, Edoardo did not like the water, nor did he like the heat and crowds of the typical seaside cities where the trendy Piedmontese conglomerated like Portofino, Alassio, San Remo. Each August, he looked forward to his two weeks spent on the sunlit, empty streets of Turin. We each laughed at the coincidence of our love of the desolate city in summertime.

After our walk, he handed me a spare helmet and coaxed me to climb on the back of his Piaggio, then called out to me as we coursed down the city’s cobblestone streets.

“When are you due to leave Turin?”The motorbike whirred softly over the current of the warm evening air.

“In two days.”

“Really?” I heard his voice drop just slightly. I told him I was on my way to Berlin. I had just taken a writing job there. “You’re a writer?” he asked, his curiosity suddenly piqued. “What do you write?”

I told him I had just finished a novel.

“Earlier at the restaurant, I saw you were reading a book.” “A biography,” I said. “One on Maria Callas.”

He stopped the Piaggio. We had arrived at my apartment.

As I took my helmet off, he turned to look at me. I could see my response had caught him unaware. “You’re an opera connoisseur?”

“Not really,” I said, laughing. “Just a Callas connoisseur. I just happen to really like Maria Callas.” He gave a bemused smile.

“When exactly are you due to fly out?”

“Wednesday, early in the morning. My flight is due out at seven thirty.”

“I’d like to see you again before you leave. Do you have some time to get together tomorrow evening?” he asked. “I have something to show you before you go.”

I looked at him, puzzled. “Something to show me?”

“You’ll see.” His eyes shone, mischievously. “I’ll pick you up tomorrow at five thirty.”

“Va bene. Buona notte.”

“Buona notte,” he said. Once I was safely out of sight, the Piaggio drove off.

The Following Evening

At five-thirty, Edoardo pulled up outside the apartment I was renting. It was a place too far from the center of the city to be convenient, a modest walk-up. Edoardo looked as he had the previous day: pale and clean-shaven, with a mop of flaxen hair. He wore a black T-shirt, beige trousers and a pair of comfortable-looking black loafers. His style of dress was more American casual than Italian chic. It was obvious he had little interest in superficial matters. Edoardo was a man of books, a man of ideas.

He suggested we go to Superga, the eighteenth-century basilica perched on one of Turin’s verdant hillsides. As we walked the grounds, we spoke of my creative writing and his academic work. He told me about his mother, who had been a philosophy student at the University of Turin, and of his great grandfather, who had been a philosopher. But it was Edoardo’s grandfather he wanted me to know more about. He told me I should accompany him back to his uncle’s apartment.

“It was my grandfather’s old office,” he said. “The other day, I found a box of papers that belonged to him. My uncle saved them all. There are some I’d like to show you.”

Before I knew it, we were back on the Piaggio, racing through Turin’s dusky streets. When we arrived at the apartment, I was struck by the interior, dark-lit with expansive wood floors, and oil paintings that hung on the walls.

“This was my great grandfather,” he said, pointing to an oversized piece that depicted a staid-looking man, posed with a book in his hands. “The book he is holding is one of the philosophy texts he wrote. It was published at the end of the nineteenth century. And this is a portrait of my great-grandmother.” He pointed to an oil painting of a pretty auburn-

haired woman with a soft expression. The portraits, each of which stood four-and-a-half to five feet, were aristocratic in rendering. Later, as we sat on the couch in his uncle’s study, he produced several large boxes. In each were carefully preserved documents from the 1950s and 1960s.

“My grandfather was Maria Callas’ attorney from 1952 to 1968,” he pronounced. “He handled her divorce from Giovanni Battista Meneghini when she decided she wanted to leave him for Aristotle Onassis.” And, with that, he handed me a stack of letters from La Divina herself. My hands trembled as I held the correspondence. There, before my very eyes, were letters Maria had handwritten, telegrams she had sent, negotiations for her performances and a slew of other documents. There were the legal contracts involving all those characters I had read so much about: the famed Luchino Visconti and Larry Kelly of Maria’s beloved Dallas Opera House. I sifted through letters from Rudolf Bing, the former director of New York’s Metropolitan Opera. It was all there for me to see. Overcome, and scarcely knowing what to do or say, tears began to form at the corners of my eyes and ran down my cheeks.

It was the Swiss psychiatrist Carl Jung who coined the term “synchronicity,” describing it as “a coincidence in time of two or more causally unrelated events that have the same or similar, meaning.”

1. Two strangers randomly arrive at the same restaurant, in an otherwise empty city, twice, two weeks apart.

2. At the very moment a woman is reading a book on Maria Callas, she finds herself suddenly face-to-face with the grandson of one of La Callas’ most trusted confidants and, after a month spent reviewing the opera singer’s life, finds herself holding Callas’ letters while seated in the very apartment where the diva herself used to sit.

I left Turin the following morning with a sense that the connections we make might very well be orchestrated by something which lies beyond us, a phenomenon one might

refer to as fate.

From Edoardo Malerba

To Isabell Serafin Krause

August 19, 2012

4:17 p.m.

Isabell mia,

I’m with my uncle. Not surprisingly, many more of Callas’ personal correspondences were in a separate folder. I have hundreds of personal letters and signatures. In attachment, you will find one of them.

Con affetto,

Edoardo