Voice of Destiny

by JH Fletcher

Another dinner, this time with the director of the Adelaide Festival. There was a man there talking about Aboriginal culture. He seemed to know what he was on about. After the meal she had a chat with him.

  He said: ‘I know someone in the Alice. I can have a word with him. He’ll show you around, if that’s what you want.’

  ‘Not just the tourist stuff.’

  ‘I’ll tell him.’

  She phoned Monty in London. ‘What have we got on the calendar?’

  ‘Nothing for a couple of weeks.’

  ‘In that case ‘I’ll change my flights, take an extra week.’

  ‘Decided to go sightseeing, have you?’

  ‘Something like that.’

  4

  The town was like a maths diagram, a grid of dusty streets running between houses whose concrete cubes fought the land, ruler flat, on which they stood.

  Her companion said: ‘The kids sniff petrol and glue. If they could get coke, they’d stick that up their noses, too. They cut each other up over anything or nothing. Half the women get beaten up by their blokes, like every other day. As soon as they’re old enough, sometimes before, the young girls get screwed by the elders. It’s a bloody disaster.’

  ‘Why don’t they run away?’

  ‘And go where? They get to the cities, they’re no better off. Boys or girls, there’s only one commodity they got to sell. And they do, my word they do. We would, too, in their place.’

  ‘The politicians, the officials?’

  ‘Most of them don’t give a stuff.’

  ‘So nobody does anything? It’s a disgrace.’

  ‘Tell me about it. Back in the nineteeth century, someone said the problem of the labouring classes was easily solved. Kill ’em off, there’d be no problem. Same thing here. But we’re smarter. We let ’em do it to themselves.’

  ‘One day I shall do something.’

  ‘Sure.’

  Meaning, he’d heard that one before.

  He took her to Ayers Rock, and the Olgas.

  ‘Not that those are their real names.’

  ‘Which are?’

  ‘Uluru, which doesn’t mean anything, and Kata Tjuta, which means Many Heads. They’re both sacred sites, the source of many of the mysteries of the Anangu people.’

  ‘Mysteries?’

  ‘Because they’re known only to initiates. The problem is that a lot of the younger generation don’t want to know, so in many cases the secrets aren’t being handed down.’

  ‘But why?’

  ‘You’ve got to understand the problem. Before the whites came these people had lived in their own way for tens of thousands of years. They got by. Their system of beliefs might seem strange to us but it tethered them to the land. They knew who they were. Now? We came in and broke everything they had. Put nothing in its place. Never gave them the chance to work things out for themselves, either, or even to adapt to the brave new world we’d stuck them with. Too many of them live between handout and grog shop. Substance abuse is one whitefella phrase that everyone out here knows, believe me.’

  ‘If the secrets aren’t passed on, what happens to them?’

  ‘They die. It may not come to that, but it might.’

  ‘That’s terrible. How will they know who they are?’

  ‘You think they know now?’

  She walked alone, pondering what he had told her, while the walls of Uluru rose in pleated majesty and a light breeze blew from the many heads of red stone that towered in the distance like half-buried giants above the scrubland. Eventually, still tangled in thought, she went back to the hotel.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE

  1

  By the end of 1968, Lucia, along with many other people, felt the world was coming to an end. She had never been interested in politics, yet now it was impossible to ignore. How, dear God Almighty, was it possible to ignore the dead and maimed and dying and betrayed, the sold and bombed with napalm and steel and the hundred thousand lies of ad men, con men, salesmen, policemen, clergymen, statesmen …

  Catastrophe and even danger seemed to haunt her footsteps like a malevolent shadow. In April she was flying between Dallas and New York when Martin Luther King was assassinated in Memphis. A month later she was singing at the Paris Opera when the city exploded into days of rioting, students and factory workers combining to put the French capital and its occupants under a state of siege. Later that year she was in Vienna when the Russian tanks invaded Prague. A week after that, she arrived in Chicago as students protesting against the Vietnam War were attacked by police with a brutality reminiscent of the war itself, which went on, ever more ferociously, ever more hopelessly.

  After the Chicago atrocities she was interviewed on television. This was normal — she’d lost count of the television interviews she’d given around the world — but the nature of the questions was not.

  Following the usual enquiries about her voice and the operas she would be singing, the interviewer turned to the demonstrations and the behaviour of the police. Some people had accused the police of overreaction. What did Madame Visconti think?

  Lucia was too experienced to be trapped into criticism of a country that was no stranger to xenophobia.

  ‘I didn’t see what happened, so I can’t comment.’

  ‘The demonstrators were expressing their opposition to the war in Vietnam. Perhaps you’d care to comment on that?’

  It was like easing your way across a bridge of ice, with crevasses on either side. One slip would bring disaster. Pondering each word, she said: ‘As you may know, I’m half-Australian. My country is also involved in the Vietnam War. There’s opposition to the war in Australia, too. I’m not a politician but there are times when I wonder what we hope to gain by fighting in a country so far away when there is so much opposition at home and in Vietnam itself. In my youth I lived through the Second World War. Every day I knew fear and hunger, as did everyone in my situation. Many people died. This year we’ve seen the deaths of Martin Luther King and Senator Robert Kennedy. There have been riots in Paris and Chicago, Soviet tanks have invaded Prague. In all these places, people have died. More and more I believe that war and killing solve nothing.’

  ‘So you think the war in Vietnam should end?’

  ‘Surely everyone thinks that?’

  She was asked to appear on a student radio programme. Again she endured the loaded questions.

  Would she be willing to take part in a concert against the war? Would she go to Hanoi, if invited, to sing against the war?

  Would she be willing …?

  The interviewer was getting more and more excited. She interrupted him. She would do none of these things. She was a singer, not a politician. And people must remember that Australian soldiers were fighting in Vietnam. She would say or do nothing that might imply criticism of her countrymen.

  The interviewer had been effusive. Now his expression said she was dirt.

  ‘You weren’t so picky in the past, were you? I hear you sang in a concert organised by the SS.’

  Lucia decided it was time to lose her temper with this presumptuous young man.

  ‘It was an opera, not a concert. And I sang because I had no choice. They’d have put me in a camp, if I’d refused.’

  There was some fallout, all the same. The huge auditorium of the Chicage Opera tended to overwhelm some of the more subtle nuances of Lucia’s dramatic technique but did not conceal a small group of noisy demonstrators who chanted ‘Nazi, Nazi’ before they were thrown out.

  She flew back to Europe, thankful it was behind her. It was not. The story refused to die. In Hamburg it surfaced again.

  ‘You refuse to sing against the Vietnam War. Does that mean you support the war?’

  ‘I don’t support any war.’

  ‘Is it because of Australian involvement in Vietnam that you have refused to sing?’

  ‘There are peace talks under way. I hope we’ll see an end to the fighting without any interference from me.’ Trying to make a joke of it.<
br />
  For a time it looked as though she might be right. President Johnson ordered an end to bombing a week before Richard Nixon was elected President of the United States. Troop withdrawals, both American and Australian, began. The candleflame of optimism flickered once more, but not for long. Withdrawals ceased. More and more she wanted to speak out, yet as long as Australian troops were there she would not.

  2

  Years after she had made her promise to Khieu Pen, she sang under his baton in Lyons. She had supper with him afterwards. He asked about Jacques.

  ‘Do you ever hear from him?’

  To hear his name, out of nowhere, gave her a jolt.

  ‘He married, you know.’

  ‘I heard. But he’s in Indochina again.’

  ‘That’s where the action is.’

  ‘My sister Somaly has met him. He went to see her in Phnom Penh, as I suggested.’

  Do not ask, she told herself. He is out of your life. Show no interest. But could not do it.

  ‘Was he well?’

  ‘It seems so. He is being transferred to Paris, she says. As foreign editor.’

  ‘So he’ll have to settle down at last. I wonder how he’ll like it.’

  Domestic bliss in Paris, with his wife and new job.

  ‘Did she say if he had any children?’

  ‘She never mentioned it.’

  3

  The war dragged on, spilling into Laos and Cambodia with no end in sight. More and more Lucia found herself remembering the tanks and terror of her youth, Reinhardt Hoffmann’s lies, the abduction of Eduardo Grandini, the cold voice of Colonel Strasser warning her of Auschwitz. Most of all she remembered Jacques Mazetta, lost to her for so many years, yet still loved, and how the war in Indochina had ruined all their hopes. Five months after the last Australian troops pulled out of Vietnam and there had seemed hope, at last, of an end to the killing, President Nixon announced he was stepping up the bombing of Hanoi.

  In Lucia’s head, images warred with each other. The cheering audiences of Dallas, Chicago and New York, the warm-hearted hospitality and decent people that she had found everywhere in the United States. The Martyred Five, gunned down before the church by an SS firing squad. The courageous priest, cross uplifted. The dark silence into which she had whispered the words that brought Eduardo Grandini to his death. The folly and vindictiveness of governments, the brutality of the Vietnam conflict. Khieu Pen’s letter, telling her of the bombing of Cambodia: Can’t they understand that such an escalation of the war only plays into the hands of their enemies?

  It seemed not.

  Yet could she make a difference? She wasn’t stupid; she knew how much she stood to lose if she came out publicly against the war. Her record sales in the United States would collapse, the opera houses might close their doors to her. If speaking out would shorten the fighting by a single day, she would do it and to hell with the consequences, but would it? To suffer pain and achieve nothing …

  It was too much to ask.

  She quartered the world: Japan, the United States, South America, Europe. She gave master classes and recitals. Her records sold in their millions. She became rich beyond avarice. Success imprisoned her. More and more she wondered what the point of it all was.

  In August 1973 she had another letter from Khieu Pen.

  I have decided to go back to Cambodia. I know I can do nothing, that my presence will not stop the B52s, but neither can I stay here. Music has been my life but now I ask what purpose music can serve.

  One month later Chile’s elected President Allende was murdered in a coup engineered by the American CIA. In a world controlled by evil men, she thought that silence was no longer possible.

  4

  Monty was furious.

  ‘You could kill your career stone dead. Don’t you know how much of your income comes from the States? Don’t you care?’

  ‘I’ve gone beyond the point of asking myself if it’ll help, of setting off costs and benefits. There comes a time when you can’t ignore things any longer. If you feel I’m putting your business at risk, I shall understand if you want to make a break.’

  There was a long silence. Eventually Monty said: ‘I think you’re misguided. Brave, but misguided. I don’t believe it’ll do any good at all. But if you feel you’ve got to pin a target on yourself … We’ve travelled a long way together. I guess I’ll stick around a while yet.’

  It was strange, the things that could make her cry.

  She spoke to a friend, who contacted another friend in Paris who knew someone in the Vietnamese consulate …

  Approaches were made; discussions held. Finally, at the beginning of 1974, a decision was reached.

  5

  Lucia looked out of the window of the car, seeing a vision of another Paris that had repudiated the original. The graceful columns of Hanoi’s Nha Het Lon Opera House, colonial relic of an alien culture, faced a boulevard scarred with poverty, the only traffic a scattering of trishaws. The car drew up outside the opera house entrance. She was escorted inside. The interior of the building also echoed the past, a Paris transported to the east. It, too, was dilapidated; there was no money to renovate buildings or for anything but the war that must be won, that little by little was being won, but at a cost in hardship and moral exhaustion that cast ominous shadows across an uncertain future.

  She hated it, remembering only too well the atmosphere of a country at war, but that was why she was here, to affirm her faith in survival by renouncing the atrocities of past and present.

  She and the tenor Grosjean had flown in together from Bangkok. They had been met at the airport, had been made much of. It was to be expected; it was a coup for the North Vietnamese to have such eminent and willing captives.

  At a reception, a slender, smiling man in military uniform had invited her to broadcast to the world her reasons for being here. She had refused.

  ‘Why? If you are willing to sing for us?’

  ‘It is not for you, or politics. It is for humanity.’

  Listening to herself, she had thought how pretentious that sounded, yet it was the truth. No political system had drawn her here; she had come to defy the evils that politics had let loose upon the world. Her questioner had sucked delicately on a cigarette.

  ‘Whatever your reasons, we are glad to see you. What will you be singing?’

  ‘You’ll have to wait and see.’

  He had smiled indulgently, a civilised-seeming man in a world in which civilisation trembled. She heard later that he was a member of the politburo, a hardliner who had been opposed to her visit, to any contacts with what he dismissed as a decadent and hostile west.

  There were two days of rehearsals. It was nowhere near enough, and even these were interrupted by rumours of renewed air raids now that the 1973 peace agreement seemed to be collapsing, but there was no help for it. Each time there was a warning everybody was escorted out of the opera house to an underground shelter, although whether it was deep enough and strong enough to withstand a direct hit from a B52 bomb seemed improbable. The two singers had been assigned an escort, a buck-toothed young soldier who wore glasses and assured them again and again that the Americans would never deliberately target the opera house. Hopefully he was right. Theoretically the war was over, yet the Americans had made furious noises about the concert, threatening retribution against the singers who, according to one congressman, were committing an act of war against the United States by coming here. No American media would cover the concert or report that it was taking place, but Washington had been unsuccessful in persuading foreign journalists to stay away, and the Vietnamese officials told them that camera crews and reporters were flying in from around the world.

  Presumably this meant that, however much they might wish to, the United States was unlikely to risk the public relations mistake of deliberately targeting the opera house. Lucia thought they would be safe enough.

  She was right; there were no raids and, after each all-clear, they went b
ack to work. With its eyes on the audience beyond its borders, the Vietnamese government had decreed that the emphasis would be on music coming, like the singers, from the west, yet there would be Vietnamese music, too. It was an interesting experience, rehearsing a concert that would feature both western and eastern music. Again she was asked to broadcast her opinions; again she refused. She knew that she was making a political statement by being here at all, yet she persisted in her belief that to sing was altogether different from mouthing propaganda into a microphone. Jane Fonda had done it, two years before, but Lucia would give neither interviews nor speeches. She would do what she had come here to do. She would sing and that was all. As to what she would sing …

  A mixed bag: a Schumann lied, arias from Norma and Aïda, Isolde’s ‘Liebestod’, and an Italian song from her youth. Finally, the showpiece, ‘Abscheulicher’, that great denunciation of tyranny, and, with Jean Grosjean, the rapturous duet ‘O namenlose Freude’ from Fidelio.

  At the end of the concert she stood staring out at the packed auditorium, weeping for all that might have been in the world and was not.

  And this is the world we are leaving to our children, she thought. The children who are the future of the world, yet who are so easy to kill.

  Later the member of the politburo again directed his enigmatic smile towards her.

  ‘It seems you do not like strong government.’

  She corrected him. ‘I do not like tyranny.’

  ‘Even in a good cause?’

  ‘There is no such thing as good tyranny.’

  While the escort who had been assigned to protect her rattled his buck teeth and seemed about to die of fright.

  6

  There was indeed fallout. Dallas and New York cancelled contracts for forthcoming performances. Lucia had expected it but was furious.

  ‘Can’t we sue them?’

  Monty stared, as at a gibbering maniac.