Voice of Destiny

by JH Fletcher

  ‘That’s on stage.’

  ‘Off stage is just as important. You have to make the most of your looks. You have so much. Hair, eyes, cheekbones … You’re a beautiful woman. But you’ve got to get into the habit of elegance, too. Making the most of yourself. That means working at it all the time.’

  Lucia sighed. ‘There’s so much to learn … Sometimes I wonder whether I’ll ever get there.’

  ‘How long have you been my student? Three years. And you’re what, eighteen years old? You’ve come so far in so short a time! Of course you’ll get there!’

  2

  Another student opera — Puccini’s Suor Angelica — and another success. The war raged across the world yet for the moment had little impact on their lives. Lucia still made the journey from Montegallo to Parma, the tram as asthmatic as ever. Every minute of her days was focused on study: her voice, dramatic expression, musical theory, German and French lessons, and — after her talk with Marta — how she looked.

  Her mother’s relationship with Eduardo continued, as volatile as ever. There were times when Helena smiled, every movement of her body proclaiming her joy and fulfilment, others when the air inside the cottage was bruised with fury until Eduardo stormed out, yet again, and Helena prowled, eyes bitter in a drawn face. These were the times Lucia dreaded most, with Helena attacking her mercilessly, blaming her for all her shortcomings, real and imagined. By contrast, she never blamed Eduardo for anything.

  ‘What else can you expect? An older woman with a useless daughter?’

  Even Lucia’s successes in the student operas and concerts, the glowing reports she had from her teacher, did not placate her mother.

  ‘What use are they? They don’t pay the bills.’

  And then, shortly after her nineteenth birthday, Marta Bianci took Lucia aside and told her she had found her a job in the chorus at the Parma Opera.

  Her first response was joy, then doubts surfaced. It was wonderful news, in its way, but not what Lucia had been hoping. ‘In the chorus?’

  Marta reassured her at once. ‘To give you the chance to earn some money and let you get the experience of singing small parts. No-one expects you to sing in the chorus itself.’

  So that was all right. All the same, when for the first time Lucia walked through the city, not towards the conservatorium but to the Royal Theatre, she was in such a panic that she wouldn’t have complained had the ground opened and swallowed her.

  Things weren’t much better when she got there. Not all the members of the opera welcomed her. She came with a reputation and some were only too eager to challenge the idea that here was a star in the making.

  Teresa Sciotto was two years older than Lucia, another soprano. She had black hair and malicious eyes. She was fat, too, or heading that way, a waddle with a voice. But that was the trouble. What a voice. Everyone said she was a rising star; rivalry was inevitable.

  Now she pared Lucia to the bone, eyes flashing spitefully.

  ‘We’ll be all right, now. Mussolini’s girlfriend’s here.’

  Let herself be bullied once and Lucia knew that her life would become impossible.

  ‘You’re obviously disappointed they didn’t ask you to sing for him instead of me.’

  ‘Giovinezza? A cow could sing that!’

  ‘Perhaps they should have asked you, then.’

  It didn’t come to bloodshed, but it was close.

  3

  Her first roles weren’t really roles at all. There were a number of plays in the theatre’s repertoire, particularly by Shakespeare and other authors of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, that required singers to stand in the wings and sing the various songs required by the text, while the actors mimed on stage. For a few months she did this, then she was given the small role of Beatrice in Suppé’s Boccaccio.

  Elation soared only to come crashing down again. There were to be six performances; she would sing three, Teresa Sciotto the rest. Lucia knew there was nothing she could do about it except treat it as the challenge it was. It would be up to her to sing — and act — her rival off the stage.

  All through the rehearsals she was like a woman obsessed; a gun could have gone off in her ear and she wouldn’t have noticed. It was a small part but she was determined to make the most of it. She was early at every rehearsal, she concentrated on every detail of the part, she was professional in everything she did.

  Teresa took every chance to remind those who would listen of Lucia’s lack of experience, but she had an answer to that, too.

  ‘My teacher always warned me never to sing on stage until I had a lot of experience.’ Which left Teresa tangle-tongued and scowling, but most of the time Lucia found it easier to ignore her.

  Before the first performance she was once again sick with nerves but, with Teresa watching her spitefully, she took care to keep her feelings well hidden. I’ll die first …

  Fortunately there was no need. Before her first entrance she felt as a criminal must on the way to the scaffold. Words and music vanished from her mind; then, at the last moment, terror was replaced by calmness. It clothed her like a garment. She was transported; she became Beatrice to the point where she was shocked by the crash of applause at the end of the performance that woke her, it seemed, from a dream.

  The director was ecstatic.

  ‘Marvellous! Marvellous!’

  Both Helena and Marta Bianci were in the audience and they said much the same, but it was only when she read the review in the next morning’s paper that she dared believe it.

  Great dramatic impact … In a small part of limited scope, Visconti showed the promise of great things to come.

  The theatre decided to stage a ten-part revival of the operetta before the end of the season, with Lucia singing each performance. It was the triumph she had been looking for.

  4

  By the time the following summer arrived, it was no longer possible for any of them to ignore the war.

  For a long time Lucia had had a foretaste of trouble. In Montegallo, Eduardo Grandini was no longer the strutting man he had been. The headlines still blared of triumph and impending victory but no-one believed them any longer. The most basic foods were in short supply, while everyone they knew seemed to have lost a son or father to the war.

  It was a time of mingled hope and terror. To some people it was simple. If Italy were defeated, the war would end. Everything would return to how it had been before. The boys would come home, food supplies would be miraculously restored, the world would be put to rights overnight. Nobody could understand why they’d got involved in the first place; the sooner it was over, the better for everyone. Some believed it, or pretended to; for others, doubt outweighed hope.

  Knowing that he would be blamed for everything that had happened, Mussolini would never agree to surrender. They’d have to get rid of him first, and who would take over if they did? The king? Marshal Badoglio? It didn’t seem very likely. Even if Italy surrendered, what would the Allies do? Or the Germans? No-one believed they’d just pack up and go home. The Germans were bad enough as allies; the thought of them as enemies was too terrible to contemplate.

  In a world on the edge of collapse, opera seemed too trivial to matter. Lucia, needing the comfort she never found at home, once again confided in her old teacher about it. Marta Bianci put her right at once.

  ‘That’s nonsense! Art is never trivial or unimportant. In a world in ruins, it will be the saving of us all.’

  They certainly needed a saviour of some sort. Hunger, literal and perpetual, had become a fact of life. In some areas, it was no longer a question of mere hunger; there was talk of starvation in outlying areas, of both the elderly and very young dying from want. Lucia was twenty years old; there were days when she felt a hundred. In the midst of deprivation, fear a daily companion and hope a forgotten memory, she began to wonder whether her life would ever be more than this: an endless tunnel of darkness without even the faintest glimmer to brighten the future. Her helples
sness made things worse. Like everyone else, she could do nothing but live each day as it came, focusing only on survival. One of the tram cars was derailed because the track had not been maintained; the passengers waited doggedly while it was levered back onto the rails. They didn’t complain but no-one offered to help, either; the war had sapped all energy from their bones. When the car was ready, everybody climbed silently aboard again; nowadays even normal conversation had become too much of an effort. Despite everything, life went on. Someone acquired a chunk of horsemeat, dripping with blood, marbled with thin threads of sinew. People queued to buy what in the past they wouldn’t have looked at twice, and thought themselves lucky. A letter came from one of the boys fighting in an Italian division in Russia. Reading between the lines, it sounded as though conditions there were worse even than at home.

  ‘Where will it all end?’

  No-one knew.

  On one occasion there was no fuel for the engine that drew the tram. It made getting to the city difficult but Lucia managed it; the opera season was over for the year but she had gone back to Marta Bianci for further coaching and a lack of transportation wasn’t going to stop her. She found a farmer going in by trap. She begged a lift from him, paying for the favour by singing to him all the way. She was delighted when, at the end of the journey, he told her that for such payment he would have taken her all the way to Berlin.

  She made a face at him. ‘Who’d want to go there?’

  For the next four days she stayed with her old teacher; then, without explanation, fuel supplies were restored and the trams began to run again.

  When she got home she found her mother in bed with a terrible cold. Helena was weak from exhaustion, scarcely able to lift her head from the pillow. There was no food in the house and Lucia was afraid for her.

  ‘Can’t Eduardo help?’

  Apparently not; the stresses of the war had begun to affect even the Fascists, and Eduardo had not been seen for several days.

  ‘We can’t just sit here!’

  ‘What can we do?’

  ‘I’m going to look for food. See if I can talk a farmer into letting us have something.’

  Frightened, Helena clutched her arm. ‘Don’t!’

  Certainly, it would be a risky business. The authorities were coming down hard on black marketeers; they’d heard of cases where culprits had been shot. It made no difference; as far as Lucia was concerned, she had no choice.

  ‘If I don’t get some food into you, you may die.’ She was hungry herself, come to that, but Lucia was young and youth has its own resilience.

  ‘Don’t forget there are German patrols, too, nowadays,’ Helena warned.

  There had been for months. Lucia wasn’t likely to forget it; none of them wanted anything to do with the serious-minded and ruthless Germans. ‘I’ll be careful. Neither of us is going to starve to death, if I can help it.’

  Early the next morning she took her bicycle and her purse containing all the money she had and set out to look for food. She kept to the back roads, reasoning that the patrols would be less likely to police these. The Taro River Valley seemed the best bet; she followed the Salsomaggiore Road, cycling through the peaceful countryside, listening to the dawn chorus of birds and telling herself over and over again that all would be well.

  She found a farm. She turned in at the gate and went to the back door, where the farmer’s wife stared at her with unfriendly eyes.

  ‘What do you want?’

  Lucia explained, putting as much heartbreak into her voice as she could, but the woman wasn’t interested.

  ‘We’ve all got problems …’

  And slammed the door in her face.

  ‘Bitch!’

  She would not give up but rode on, receiving rebuff after rebuff, until at last she found someone willing to take pity on her.

  ‘Poor child!’

  There were some eggs, a chunk of cheese, even a small cut of smoked ham. The woman refused money.

  ‘If you’re stopped by the patrols, just don’t let on where you got it.’

  For farmers, too, the illegal disposal of food could mean trouble.

  ‘Of course I won’t. And God bless you!’

  She rode home in triumph but also in terror. Had she been stopped on the outward journey she could have pretended she was simply out for a ride; now, with her pannier full of food, no-one was going to believe that.

  Help me, God! Protect me! Over and over again, while the wheels of her bicycle whirled and she thought she might faint with fear. The closer she drew to Montegallo, the worse it became; it was here that the patrols would be most likely to stop her. She considered hiding the food beside the road and coming back for it later, but the thought of someone stealing it was too terrible to contemplate and she rode on.

  She saw no soldiers and arrived home safely but the terror of the ride stayed with her for the rest of the day; her mother, struggling out of bed, used two of the eggs to make an omelette and it was all Lucia could do to choke it down.

  Eduardo reappeared — drawn by the smell of the food, Lucia thought sourly — and raised his eyebrows at the ham.

  ‘Where did you get this?’

  Lucia smiled at him. ‘We found it outside the door two mornings ago.’

  He stared coldly at her. ‘Just like that?’

  ‘Someone must’ve taken pity on us. More than you can say for some people.’

  Because Eduardo had brought no food with him. Naturally he didn’t believe a word of her story — anonymous benefactors were thin on the ground these days — but it was the only explanation he was going to get. Not that it made any difference; suspicion didn’t stop him scoffing what he could grab. Lucia hated to see him gobbling the food she’d taken such risks to get, but at least there was one benefit: he could hardly report them when he was eating it himself.

  The food ran out only too soon. Lucia refused to ask Eduardo for help. Helena had no such compunction but it did no good. Encouraged by the success of her earlier adventure, Lucia got out her bicycle and set off once again through the countryside. It was July, high summer, and would be hot later. Conditions across the nation were worse than ever, and there were rumours of anything from the end of the war to the end of the world. Only two weeks before had come the news that the Allies had invaded Sicily, far away to the south, but cycling through a limpid dawn, Lucia found it hard to believe there was such a thing as war at all. There had been late rains and streams bubbled cheerfully on both sides of the road; the grass was thick and green, birds were singing, everywhere was alive. How could she take even the war seriously on a morning like this? She didn’t waste her time with the people who had turned her away before; instead she rode straight to the farm where the woman had helped her. Once again she was willing, but this time Lucia insisted on paying her.

  ‘Otherwise I’ll feel I won’t be able to come again.’

  ‘You won’t tell anyone?’

  ‘Of course I won’t. Not a word.’

  She packed her prizes into her pannier—eggs, cheese, potatoes, a couple of tomatoes that were still partially green but with the wonderful smell of freshness upon them — and set out on the return journey. The sun was well up by now; it was already hot and she could feel sweat running down her back as she rode. She smelt the resinous scent of the pine trees, her sandalled feet were covered with dust from the road, she was enjoying the prospect of a meal of eggs, cheese and potatoes. She could taste them so clearly, could imagine the two tomatoes ripening on the windowsill of the cottage in the glow of the evening sunlight. She came around a bend past a narrow track running off into the trees and saw ahead of her a grey motorcycle drawn up at the side of the road.

  Her body went numb with shock. She had a crazy impulse to twist the handlebars and take to the track, seeking safety in the forest, but try anything like that and she’d be in real trouble. Her only hope was to carry on and hope she could bluff her way through.

  The German soldier raised a gauntleted hand
to stop her. She slowed, brakes squeaking. She dismounted, keeping the bicycle between them. She forced herself to look at him. He was tall and lean, shovel helmet threatening, grey eyes like nails beneath the steel rim. He had a gun of some sort slung about his neck.

  ‘Identification!’

  She had her purse in the pocket of her dress. She fumbled in it, took out her identity card and handed it to him. He examined it carefully, checking her face against the photograph. Eventually he handed it back to her.

  ‘What are you doing, cycling here at this time of the morning?’ His Italian was fluent, if accented.

  ‘Going for a ride before it gets too hot.’

  ‘Where are you from? One of the farms?’

  She shook her head.

  ‘From Montegallo. I’m on my way home.’

  ‘You know it’s against the law to obtain food except with a ration card?’

  ‘I know’

  She was close to fainting; all he had to do was order her to open the pannier. Her body trembled. Even her lips … Summoning all her willpower, she drew them tight against her teeth; she would not let him see how frightened she was. Not that it served much purpose except to salve her pride; from his expression, he already knew about fear, and how to inflict it. They stared at each other. The soldier’s thin lips smiled. He took off his helmet. For all his height, he was suddenly a boy with grey eyes, neck too slight for the high collar of his uniform jacket. A cruel boy, all the same, unpleasantly aware of his status in this world, and of hers. His smile broadened in his pale face; his gaze seemed to finger her through her clothes, letting her see what she already knew, that she was his, should he choose to make her so, and helpless.

  Fear made a hollow in her chest. There were so many stories about these soldiers and how they treated their victims; some of them, surely, must be true.

  ‘Hot, isn’t it?’ As though he’d stopped her just for a chat.

  Lucia did not answer, using silence to protect her from the lascivious lips, the eyes that moved appraisingly from throat to breast to thigh. Again he smiled: not merely man to woman, but captor to captive.