IN FEBRUARY ARIANA SANG three Madama Butterflys in Lisbon. Perhaps superstition had something to do with what happened: Butterfly was one of the roles she had taught Vanessa and which—in theory at least—she had renounced.
The curtain rose on a set depicting a hill above Nagasaki harbor, a little house bustling with preparations for a Japanese wedding. The groom-to-be, U.S. Navy Lieutenant Pinkerton, took the wedding as a lark, but the American consul warned him that his betrothed, a Japanese geisha, had taken it seriously enough to convert to Christianity. The bride-to-be, Cio-Cio-San, known as “Madame Butterfly,” joyfully arrived with a crowd of friends and relatives.
There was applause as Ariana, looking surprisingly Oriental and petite, made her entrance in the title role.
No sooner had the marriage ceremony been performed than Butterfly’s uncle, a Buddhist monk, stormed angrily in and cursed his niece for betraying the religion of her ancestors. Butterfly was reduced to tears. Pinkerton drove the guests from the house. He comforted his sobbing bride and led her to the bridal chamber.
As the curtain fell to warm applause Ariana felt a soreness just above her collarbone. She had a cup of tea in her dressing room.
The Second Act curtain rose on Butterfly’s little house. Though Pinkerton had promised to come back “when the robins nest,” three springs had passed, and Butterfly still waited patiently, secure in her faith that one fine day—“Un bel di”—her husband would return to her.
On the fourth note of the aria, the F-sharp at the top of the staff, Ariana experienced a sudden choking. It was hardly a difficult note to sustain, yet for the rest of the act she had a sensation that it simply was not there.
The consul entered, trying to break the news to Butterfly that Pinkerton had married an American. But Goro, the marriage broker, interrupted, bringing a rich suitor for Butterfly’s hand. She angrily left the stage and returned a moment later, carrying her child by Pinkerton: a blond, blue-eyed two-year-old. The boy’s name, she told the consul, was Trouble, but when his father returned it would be changed to Joy.
A cannon shot sounded in the harbor, announcing a ship’s arrival. Excitedly peering through a telescope, Butterfly recognized Pinkerton’s ship, the Abraham Lincoln. In a rapturous duet, Suzuki, her maid, helped her decorate the house with cherry blossoms.
Ariana’s throat felt as though she were shouting through scabs.
By now night was falling. As Butterfly, Suzuki, and little Trouble waited for Pinkerton, their crouching figures were silhouetted against the paper wall and off-stage voices could be heard in the haunting melody of the Humming Chorus.
In the next intermission the house doctor peered down Ariana and said he detected an inflammation. “I wouldn’t continue.”
“Doctor, I have to complete the performance.”
He sighed—“I shouldn’t do this”—and gave her cortisone.
The pain in her throat had abated slightly by the time the curtain rose on the final act. It was after dawn, and Pinkerton still had not appeared. Suzuki persuaded Butterfly to rest in the other room. The consul arrived with Pinkerton and his American wife. Realizing Butterfly had remained faithful, Pinkerton fled, unable to face her.
Butterfly entered, saw the American lady in the garden, and asked who she was. Finally grasping the truth, she agreed to give up her child, asking that Pinkerton collect his son in half an hour.
Alone with the infant, Butterfly took her father’s hara-kiri dagger and stabbed herself. With her dying breath she crawled to embrace Trouble. Arriving instants too late, Pinkerton found the boy beside his dead mother, playing with a miniature American flag.
Oddly enough, Ariana had five curtain calls, and the reviews were respectful. Not her best, said one, but Kavalaris after all is Kavalaris, a claim that can be made by few others.
A day later, when she vocalized, the F-sharp was still not there. “How could it be?” she demanded at her next coaching session with Austin Waters. “How can an F-sharp simply vanish?”
“The note is there,” he assured her. “You’re just nervous.”
But it was something more than nerves. She felt like an organism under attack. A month later in Brussels she was singing Desdemona in Verdi’s Otello, another of the roles she had supposedly abdicated to Vanessa. During Act Three, in her scene with Otello, her A below high C suddenly vanished. Again, she was able to force other tones into the gap, but the sound was strained and ugly.
And again, when she vocalized later, the A was still missing.
“Now I’ve lost two,” she sobbed to Austin. “The F and the A.”
“What do you think you just sang?”
“That wasn’t an A, that was a B-flat bent down and that was why it sounded horrible.”
He gave her a long look. “Sweetheart, you haven’t lost anything except your marbles.”
But she was losing something. She could feel it. So could audiences. Her voice began tearing arias into irregular shapes. She had to break the line more and more frequently to sneak a breath, and soon there was nothing sneaky about the breaths; they were outright gulps slicing into the melody.
Curtain calls became fewer, bravas less spontaneous; and soon critics were commenting that this or that arietta had not been quite up to Kavalaris’s usual standard.
One day Richard Schiller asked, “Excuse me for prying, but are you on anything?”
“What do you mean, on anything?” she said.
He shrugged in a way that seemed embarrassed. “Drugola.”
“Drugs? Are you crazy?”
“No, but I sometimes get the impression you are.”
“I think we’d better continue this discussion another day.”
“After your vacation. You got three free weeks coming up. Use ’em.”
Ariana fled back to her work—what remained of it—not simply for distraction, but for solace and sanity. The Chicago Lyric Opera had mentioned needing a Carmen on short notice, and she began studying the role.
In Carmen Bizet had written the greatest mezzo part ever. The French vowels—usually so hard to project with their closed, nasal quality—were exploited for their sensual effect: an exuberant sexuality sprang from the very sound of the score. Yet there was a classical clarity and perfection that reminded Ariana of Mozart. But how different Bizet was, how modern! Carmen held the listener with its story, which Mozart’s operas did not, and with its unending stream of irresistible tunes, which unlike Mozart’s needed no allowance for style or period.
And yet she was uncertain whether or not to take the role. She was, after all, a soprano—true, a soprano whose high notes were going. But to accept a mezzo role seemed an admission of defeat.
March 3, in the first district court of Ciudad Trujillo, Dominican Republic, Judge G. de Souza y Saavedra granted Señora Maria-Kristina von Heidenstam Stratiotis of Marjamaa, Sweden, an uncontested divorce from Señor Nikos Lykandreou Stratiotis of Ile St-Louis, Paris. Both parties were in absentia at the proceedings.
Twenty-eight days later in Vatican City, the papal curia issued a decree per extraordinaria annulling the marriage of Principessa Marghereta di Montenegro and Jean-Baptiste de Grandmont.
On a beautiful Tuesday in early spring with sunlight splintering off the walls of Olympic Tower and flags snapping on the hoods of diplomatic limousines, 1,500 guests gathered at St. Patrick’s Cathedral to witness the marriage of Principessa Marghereta di Montenegro and Nikos Stratiotis.
The three television networks stationed cameras on Fifth Avenue, on Forty-ninth Street, and in the nave of the cathedral. Millions of viewers were able to watch as uniformed guards from Cartier’s and Harry Winston’s brought the bride’s jewels to the cathedral in armored trucks; as beautiful, famous women in bright designer dresses and glistening faceted diamonds stepped out of Continentals and Mercedes-Benzes and Rolls-Royces on the arms of handsome, suntanned escorts; as Prince Arnoldo of Montenegro, dapper and Old World in spats and cutaway, escorted his daughter Maggie down the aisle. The bride wore a blush French illusion veil, held in place by a wedding tiara of diamonds, sapphires, and rubies. Television commentators claimed that the matching lace side panels of her skirt were embroidered in 3,200 seed pearls.
After the ceremony the wedding cortege of limousines and chartered London buses sped west through Rockefeller Center, where a reception for eight hundred was held in the world-famous Rainbow Room atop the RCA building.
By nine o’clock that evening two thousand guests were busily enjoying champagne at the bar, cocaine in the bathrooms, and live disco on the dance floor. The celebrating showed no signs of slowing down.
In Chicago, one time zone to the west, it was eight o’clock, but in the opera house the time was noon and the place was Seville. Soldiers and passers-by thronged the city square as the girls from the nearby cigarette factory returned to work. One of them—Carmen, a hot-blooded, amoral gypsy—flirted with Don José, commander of the troop, and teasingly tossed him a red rose. He feigned indifference, but afterward, unobserved, mused on the flower and hid it in his coat.
Micaela, a simple peasant girl from Don José’s village, arrived with a letter and a kiss from his mother. She gave him the letter; she gave him the kiss. Alone, he read the letter and discovered, to his pleasure, that his mother wanted him to marry Micaela.
A commotion broke out in the factory. Girls rushed into the square. Carmen had stabbed a coworker during an argument. The captain of the guards arrested her and handed her over to Don José.
Carmen now used all her powers of seduction, all the dark lure of her insinuating mezzo voice, to win her freedom. In a lilting seguidilla she offered to meet Don José at a tavern on the outskirts of the city if he would let her go. Fatally snared by her charms, he loosened the rope around her wrists, allowing her to escape.
Applause was warm. Chicago gave Ariana Kavalaris three bows for this, the first act of her first stab at Carmen. It had cost her a month’s hesitation to accept Chicago’s last-minute offer of the role. She’d had to persuade herself that it was no surrender to go mezzo, simply a proclamation of versatility.
There was also the consideration that the role, lying mostly in the low range, exposed none of the freak gaps in her high register.
And so she was Carmen the irresistible temptress, singing and dancing with two gypsy friends for the soldiers at Lillas Pastia’s tavern on the outskirts of Seville. When the bullfighter Escamillo entered to the acclamation of the crowd, she ignored his advances. She was waiting for Don José, due to be released from the jail where he had been imprisoned for letting her escape.
Finally, after the inn had closed, Don José appeared. Carmen urged him to desert the army and join the gypsies. At first he refused; but the captain of the guard arrived to order him back to the regiment. The two men drew swords. Carmen’s gypsy cronies overpowered the captain, leaving Don José no choice but to escape with them to the mountains.
Again, three curtain calls.
Ariana was in her dressing room sipping chamomile tea for her nerves when the phone rang. A voice at the switchboard asked if she would talk to Mrs. Busch—urgent from New York.
She took the call.
“Are you near a television set?” Carlotta sounded out of breath.
“Of course not. You know perfectly well I’m performing.”
“CBS,” Carlotta said. “The wedding’s coming up right after the commercial.”
“Panagia mou,” Ariana whispered. “Did you go?”
“I went to the ceremony and two minutes of the reception. The room was thick with cigar smoke and deals. You know the sort of people.”
So. It was ended.
Ariana was no longer thinking clearly as she listened to Carlotta’s voice spilling from the telephone. All she wanted was for Carlotta to have no notion how deeply she was hurt. She had never for an instant believed that Nikos would go through with it. She had seen everything—the publicity, the gossip, even the engagement—as an elaborate game played solely to test her capacity for being hurt; in an obscure way it confirmed that he loved her after all. But now she saw that the only game had been the one she had played on herself; there was a cold hollow in the pit of her stomach and she realized how completely unprepared she was for this disaster.
“Thank you, Carlotta. Yes, I’ll look at it.”
A stagehand found a small black-and-white TV. She sat and for the longest three minutes of her life stared at guests streaming into the cathedral. They were the same princes and polo players and playboys who had come to her own wedding; the same women, showing their money, wearing mink coats and diamond bracelets in the daytime.
Could it really be ended? she thought. Does anything in life end like this, between acts of Carmen and commercials on the evening news?
There was a rap at the door. “Places, Miss Kavalaris.”
“Thank you.”
Her thoughts moved amazingly quickly in the next thirty seconds: it was as though she were watching a speeded-up film of her entire life with Nikos. Everything stood out sharply, from the evening so long ago when a young man in an absurd fedora had sauntered into a coffee shop on Broadway to the night twenty-three years later when he had slammed the iron grille door of a townhouse on Sutton Place.
What struck her now that the story was finished was a sense that it could have ended no other way.
She hurried onto the stage, into the gypsy smugglers’ camp. She was Carmen again, now tiring of Don José, reading and rereading her fortune in the cards and finding only death.
Death, she thought. Only death.
Escamillo, Carmen’s latest conquest, entered. Don José, wildly jealous, attacked him, but Carmen separated the two.
A frightened Micaela appeared, bringing word that Don José’s dying mother was calling for him. The girl had a lovely voice, all purity and innocence.
I used to sing Micaela, Ariana thought, when I was a student…when I was a soprano.
She realized someone was threatening her. It was Don José, warning that, though he was going home with Micaela, he would never let Carmen leave him.
She sat alone in her dressing room, waiting for the last act.
At 10:40, on the arm of Escamillo, she entered the square where all Seville waited outside the bullring to hail her new lover. Friends warned her that Don José had been seen lurking about. Unafraid, she waited for him.
I want to die, she thought.
Don José appeared, pathetic and beaten, and begged her to return to him. Scornfully she refused, flinging at his feet the ring he had given her. As shouts from the arena acclaimed Escamillo, Don José—blind with jealousy—plunged his dagger into Carmen’s heart.
She fell to the hard planking of the stage and lay there, hearing the chorus pour from the bullring, hearing the sobbing Don José give himself up, hearing the curtain whoosh down.
The audience was friendly, polite, only mildly enthusiastic. Ariana took two solo bows. She could tell they were applauding her past, not her Carmen.