Voice of Destiny

by JH Fletcher

  ‘What’s going on?’

  She soon found out. Microphones were thrust, flash bulbs blazed like artillery. She got out of the car, questions hammering the air.

  ‘Madame Visconti, what do you have to say …’

  ‘Madame Visconti

  ‘Madame Visconti, have you read …’

  She could have screamed at the lot of them. Instead she took a deep breath, mustering every gram of her theatrical presence. She faced them, smiling, and raised her right hand above her head. The gesture and her personality commanded their silence. The bellows ceased. In the silence, Lucia could hear the roar of traffic along the Strand. ‘I’m sure the hotel management can organise a room for us where we can do this properly.’

  Representatives of the management, nervous-eyed at the excitement, agreed that a room would be no problem.

  ‘Wonderful! Give me five minutes.’

  Her smile broadened as she leaned forward, taking the media pack into her confidence. ‘I’m dying to go to the bathroom.’

  Some liked that but not all; a woman’s voice bayoneted the laughter. ‘How does it feel to be accused —’

  Lucia interrupted her firmly: ‘Five minutes.’

  She reached her suite without further drama. With the door closed behind her, she rounded on Otto.

  ‘What’s going on?’

  He had no idea, either.

  ‘Find out!’

  In the end he got Monty on the phone, and he told them.

  ‘Sciotto’s memoirs claim you collaborated with the Nazis in World War II.’

  Lucia threw up her hands. ‘Not that again!’

  ‘I’ll tell the press you’re not well,’ Otto said.

  She was well enough to turn on him for making such a suggestion. ‘And have them crucify me? Tell the world I wasn’t willing to face the cameras?’

  That would be the day. She went down the corridor like a fury. At the entrance to the room where the media was doing its caged-lion act, she stopped, took a deep breath, rehearsed her most beaming smile, then walked in.

  Questions flew like hail. Again she raised her hand; again she silenced them. She looked around the faces, striving for eye contact, smiling at each individual.

  ‘Is this to do with Teresa Sciotto’s memoirs? Then I have to tell you I haven’t read them. Would one of you like to tell me what she said?’

  Again the voices, beating at each other and at her.

  ‘One at a time. Otherwise I can’t hear you.’ She might have been a schoolteacher with a bunch of unruly kids.

  Finally the bayonet voice prevailed: ‘She says both you and your mother were well-known Nazi sympathisers during the war. Specifically, she claims you sang for Mussolini, that you appeared in a German opera organised by the SS. What do you have to say about these allegations?’

  ‘We lived in constant fear of being arrested, of being deported to a labour or concentration camp. The SS ordered me to sing in Fidelio, so I sang. So would anyone. When they told you to do something, you did it, but I never collaborated in any way. So far as Mussolini was concerned, I was picked to sing at the dedication of a war cemetery when he was present. It happened before the war, when I was a child. That was the only time I met him.’

  ‘You say you had to do what you were told. Did Teresa Sciotto sing for the Germans?’

  ‘You’ll have to ask her.’

  ‘She claims they asked her several times but she always refused.’

  ‘Then she’s the only one who did. As far as I know, she didn’t help the partisans, either. I did.’

  2

  Next day, fearful of what the papers might contain, she got Benedetta to read them to her. On the whole they weren’t as bad as she’d feared. All carried the story but most were non-committal in their comments. One noted the long-standing rivalry between the singers and suggested this should be taken into account in assessing the truth of the story. Lucia was pleased.

  ‘Quite right!’

  Then came the report in The Star, undisputed monarch of London sleaze, and her mood changed.

  VISCONTI’S TEARFUL CONFESSION: I SANG FOR THE SS!

  CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE

  1

  She was scheduled to sing Medea at the Athens Festival.

  It was as hot as Hades when she arrived and a turbulent wind filled the air with dust. It was the worst possible weather for an opera singer’s throat.

  She was still in shock over the scandal of the Sciotto memoirs. London had been bad enough but when she had phoned Australia the news had been even worse. The papers were full of it, Denzil furious.

  ‘Just what I don’t need, let me tell you.’

  Subservience had its limits.

  ‘You think I like it?’

  ‘I’ve even had some reporters phoning me about it! I thought we had something special. Now I don’t know. We’ll need to talk seriously when you get back.’

  Whatever that might mean.

  It was hardly the best preparation for an opera that required not only musical brilliance but acting skills capable of projecting contrasting qualities of scorn, vengeance and tenderness.

  2

  Lucia stood on the semi-circular stage of the Herodes Atticus amphitheatre. Above, on the summit of the Acropolis, the Parthenon raised its floodlit columns to the sky.

  The stone walls of Creon’s palace are silvered by moonlight as Medea enters. A barbarian princess from Cochis, she has been brought to Corinth by Creon’s son, Jason. Medea is the mother of Jason’s two children yet for political reasons Jason has resolved to put her aside and marry Glauce, a local princess. Medea is to be sent away, deprived even of her children whom Jason loves and is determined to keep with him. Medea, abandoned, resolves to wreak vengeance on the man who has betrayed her.

  Overcome with anguish, she murders her children and thus deprives Jason of his most precious possessions. At the end of the drama she pours out the icy vindication of a woman cursed both by fate and those who had made up her entire world. She has destroyed Jason, her children and herself. She speeds away in a serpent-entwined chariot. ‘I go now to hell, where I shall meet with you again.’

  Out there, the audience. Here, the fragile silence neither of the present nor two thousand years ago but of eternity. Shadows hovered: pain and supplication, fury, tenderness and heartbreak within the inexorable unfolding of the destiny in whose coils all humanity was bound.

  Medea steps forward, slipping back her cloak to reveal herself to the sentry at the palace gate. Lucia felt herself uplifted by the gods, her feet barely grazing the ancient stones on which she stood.

  She poured all her ferocity into the opening chords.

  — I am Medea …

  I am fate. I am the cry for justice. I am death.

  3

  After it was over, engulfed in applause, she could barely stand. History and the present, Medea and Pericles, Colonel Strasser and Reinhardt Hoffmann, Jacques Mazetta and the peasants killed on the Hanoi road … The burden was so great that, standing in the ancient ruins that were the living presence of the past, she thought it had reached the point of destroying her.

  I cannot go on.

  Yet somehow she finished the tour. No-one would ever be able to say she had betrayed her public but the strain of all that had happened affected her voice. In Rome, appearing as Lady Macbeth, she missed the D flat, while in Verona the critics described her performance in Un Ballo in Maschera as lacklustre.

  So it was, on the back of a rare failure, that Lucia flew back to Sydney and to catastrophe.

  4

  ‘You’d better send him in, I suppose.’

  Not very gracious, but Brendan Hicks hated dealing with the Director of ASIO; the security chief always made him feel he didn’t know what was going on in his own backyard.

  In this case he certainly hadn’t known; the pampered hair nearly stood on end.

  ‘You’re telling me one of my own ministers has been negotiating a private loan with a Saudi sheik? For
how much?’

  ‘The figure we heard was three hundred million.’

  ‘Oh my God.’ But perhaps there was a let-out. ‘Through an intermediary, you say? Any chance the sheik doesn’t know who he’s dealing with?’

  The imbecility of some questions made them impossible to answer diplomatically. The Director looked at him. The Prime Minister coughed.

  ‘No. Of course not.’ His momentary embarrassment made him more ferocious than ever. ‘Leave it with me. I’ll sort him out.’

  Which, with an election coming, was a guarantee. But the bad news was not finished.

  ‘That opera singer mate of his …’ the Director said.

  ‘I suppose you’re going to tell me she’s got a husband and three kids hidden away somewhere.’

  ‘Worse than that. A book just out claims she’s a Nazi.’

  The door was barely closed behind the Director before Brendan Hicks was screaming for his assistant.

  ‘Get hold of that fool Ryan! Now!’

  5

  ‘Are you out of your mind? Getting involved with a deal like that? With a Saudi? Have you never heard of blackmail?’

  ‘I understood it had your blessing.’

  A dangerous silence.

  ‘Why should you imagine that?’

  ‘Hector Godolphin said —’

  ‘I knew nothing about it.’ The PM cut him off very clearly and emphatically. ‘Nothing. You understand me?’

  ‘I must have misunderstood.’ Denzil was trying desperately to cover his tail.

  ‘Damn right you misunderstood! Three hundred million dollars? You know what the media will do if they get hold of this?’

  ‘It was two hundred.’

  ‘Not according to ASIO. Perhaps your man was hoping to get something for himself?’

  He might have done, at that.

  ‘I’ll crucify the bastard!’

  ‘You’ll do nothing! You won’t contact Hector or this — what’s he called? — Anwar Benwhatsit. I’ll deal with them. You’ll keep your head down and pray this doesn’t come out. Because if it does, and I am speaking very seriously now, you’re finished. And another thing: get rid of that singer you’ve been screwing.’

  ‘What’s she got to do with anything?’

  ‘ASIO says she’s a Nazi. You think the government needs that kind of publicity?’

  ‘She isn’t a Nazi. She’s not political at all.’

  Argument enraged the PM who, no more than the media, was not in the business of being fair or truthful.

  ‘It’s how the world sees her that matters. And they see her — what did that damn rag say? — as an accomplice of the SS. Your mate! Get shot of her! Or I’ll get shot of you!’

  6

  She had known her arrival would be frenetic but it was far worse than she could have imagined. Journalists, seemingly in their hundreds, were at the airport to ambush her. It was a torrid time. The tone of their questions, demanding explanations for the Nazi sympathies they took for granted she possessed, was an echo of the fascist reporting of her childhood.

  Always she had been able to hold her own with the ratbag media, trade them blow for blow and win. She had even enjoyed it. Not today. Exhausted by the flight and the dramas of the last month, she let fly at them.

  ‘I’m not going to justify myself. I’ve nothing to justify. There’s no point, anyway. You’re not interested in the truth.’ In tears, with Otto helping her and Denzil Ryan conspicuously absent, she fought her way through the scrimmage. The car drove away with flash bulbs exploding like landmines about it.

  Next morning the coverage was vindictive. One paper demanded action against this accomplice of the SS during World War II.

  She phoned Denzil in Canberra, using the direct line he had given her in happier days. There was no answer. When she spoke to his office she was told he was unavailable.

  She phoned her Sydney lawyer, who rearranged his schedule to see her.

  ‘I shall sue the pants off them!’

  ‘What for?’

  ‘For libel, of course.’

  ‘They say you were an accomplice of the SS; so you were. You sang in an opera that the SS arranged. And they will argue that it’s in the public interest to reveal it.’

  ‘I had no choice!’

  ‘No-one’s said you did. It would be the worst publicity for you to fight it. It’ll drag on for years, they’ll bring witnesses from Italy, they’ll build a campaign of character assassination against you …’

  ‘You’re saying there’s nothing I can do?’

  ‘I am saying, Madame Visconti, you’d be wiser to let it lie.’

  ‘It isn’t fair! It isn’t true!’

  ‘Since when has the media cared about that?’

  She hated him for saying it but knew when she was licked. Very well, she would forget it, or at least remain silent. Denzil was another matter. He was busy, no doubt, but had always found time to phone her before. She refused to accept that he was avoiding her, yet she knew.

  She went to Canberra.

  7

  He tried to freeze her out. He neither took nor returned her calls. It saddened him; he had enjoyed being with her, being seen with her, her beauty and most of all her fame a constant lift to his ego. But there was no help for it. He had no intention of letting his career go down the gurgler because of her. At the same time he knew he’d have to handle her carefully; Lucia Visconti could make a dangerous enemy. As it happened, things sorted themselves out without his help. Amanda, his office assistant, stuck her face around his door.

  ‘Security says Madame Visconti’s in the lobby.’

  He thought quickly.

  ‘Tell them you’re coming down to fetch her.’

  ‘You’ve a meeting with Mr Dann in ten minutes.’

  ‘This won’t take long.’

  Not that it mattered. Harry Dann was looking for favours, not dispensing them. He’d wait.

  Within minutes Amanda was back.

  ‘Madame Visconti

  Denzil was on his feet. As soon as the door was closed he came and put his arms around her.

  8

  She was wearing a light scarf over her hair to protect it from the drizzle falling outside. She stood stiffly within his embrace. He held her at arm’s length, looking down at her. She pulled the scarf from her hair, and said: ‘Remember me?’

  I am Medea. The coils of fate that she had sensed in the amphitheatre of Herodes Atticus drew ever tighter about them both.

  He tried to laugh. ‘Of course I remember you.’

  ‘I wondered. I don’t seem to have heard from you recently.’

  She recognised the inevitability of what was to come. Even so, she, who had never asked a favour of him, had to plead now.

  ‘You said we had something special together. Surely we can work something out?’

  Medea’s plea: For pity’s sake, grant me asylum and the peace of lying in your arms.

  Denzil gave what he hoped was a statesman-like cough. ‘I think we’ll have to take it easy for a bit. Just for the time being, you understand.’

  ‘Why should we? Just because that woman told a pack of lies about me?’

  ‘That’s not the issue. The PM …’

  His words, the very air, had lost their reality. None of this could be happening. If she denied the nightmare she would wake.

  ‘Who cares what he thinks?’

  She battered and battered at the absurdity of what he was telling her, that a human relationship could be obliterated because of one old man, clinging to the authority that he desecrated.

  ‘He is Prime Minister, after all.’

  Who mattered more than she did. Bitterness and humiliation soured her breath. While Denzil tried to jolly her.

  ‘You can’t blame him. They’re calling you a Nazi-lover. And with an election coming!’

  ‘But it’s not true!’

  Although she was coming to understand that, in politics as in art, perception and not reality was what mat
tered. Freshly falling snow was black, if enough people said it was.

  ‘But it looks bad. We don’t need it.’

  Anger spiked her voice. ‘And that’s it? For the sake of politics?’ The notion was too vile for understanding or grief, yet Denzil Ryan was neither chastened nor apologetic. He was sullen, determined to have his way.

  ‘It’s a question of the national interest.’

  Lies. She saw from his expression that she had always been expendable. While politics, his career, were his life.

  There was nothing more to say. She could hate him now for spurning her. She turned away. She walked out of the room and through the outer office. Anger was growing. Its fever shook her. Amanda came scurrying after her; she turned to face her. What can this woman want?

  ‘Visitors have to be escorted inside the building. Regulations …’

  Because Lucy did not exist. She was a potential terrorist, an entry on a form, a name in metre-high letters upon the facade of an opera house. She was a hundred women living within the halls of the world’s imagination. She was Gilda and Leonora and Amelia and Violetta and Tosca and …

  Medea. Armed with vengeance as, two or three or four thousand years ago, the wronged woman who exemplifies all wronged women stood within her snake-entwined chariot and invoked ruin.

  Lucia smiled at the anxious girl. Regulations were the only reality. Theseus existed in a signature, a name upon a form permitting entry to the labyrinth.

  ‘We must obey the regulations, must we not?’

  She left the building. The drizzle had ceased. The wind ripped blue openings in the clouds. She found her way to the lake.

  Her heart wept. Denzil was a fool to sacrifice substance for the shadow. Or she was a fool to have committed herself to a man who was no more than shadow.