Carlos Fuentes: Myself with Others: Selected Essays

This was not the voice of Medea, the voice of Norma, the voice of the Lady of the Camellias. Yes, she had slimmed down, we all knew it, without losing her glorious and warm voice, the voice of the supreme diva. No: no one was a more beautiful woman, a better actress, or a greater singer on an opera stage in the twentieth century.

Callas’s seduction, let me add, was not only in the memory of her stage glory: this woman I now saw, thinned down not by her will but by her sickness and her time, nearer every minute to her bone, every second more transparent and tenuously allied to life, possessed a hypnotic secret that revealed itself as attention. I really think I have never met a woman who lent more attention to the man she was listening to than Maria Callas.

Her attention was a manner of dialogue. Through her eyes (two black lighthouses in a storm of white petals and moist olives) passed images in surprising mutation: her thoughts changed, the thoughts became images, yes, but only because she was transforming ceaselessly, as if her eyes were the balcony of an unfinished and endless opera that, in everyday life, prolonged in silence the suffused rumor, barely the echo, of the nights which had belonged to Lucia di Lammermoor and Violetta Valéry.

In that instant I discovered the true origin of Aura: its anecdotal origin, if you will, but also its origin in desire, since desire is the port of embarkation as well as the final destiny of this novella. I had heard Maria Callas sing La Traviata in Mexico City when she and I were more or less the same age, twenty years old perhaps, and now we were meeting almost thirty years later and I was looking at a woman I had known before, but she saw in me a man she had just met that evening. She could not compare me to myself, I could: myself and her.

And in this comparison I discovered yet another voice, not the slightly vulgar voice of the highly intelligent woman seated at my right; not the voice of the singer who gave back to bel canto a life torn from the dead embrace of the museum; no, but the voice of old age and madness which, I then remembered (and confirmed it in the Angel record I went out hurriedly to buy the next morning), is the unbelievable, unfathomable, profoundly disturbing voice of Maria Callas in the death scene of La Traviata.

Whereas the sopranos who sing Verdi’s opera usually search for a supreme pathos achieved thanks to agonizing tremors and an attempt to approach death with sobs, screams, and shudders, Maria Callas does something unusual: she transforms her voice into that of an old woman and gives that ancient voice the inflection of madness.

I remember it so well that I can almost imitate the final lines: “E strano! / Cessarono / Gli spasmi del dolore.”

But if this be the voice of a hypochondriac old lady complaining of the inconveniences of advanced age, immediately Callas injects a mood of madness into the words of resurgent hope in the midst of a hopeless malady: “In mi rinasce — m’agita / Insolito vigore / Ah! Ma io rittorno a viver’.” Only then does death, and nothing but death, defeat old age and madness with the exclamation of youth: “Oh gioia!”

Maria Callas invited Sylvia and me to see her again a few weeks later. But before that, one afternoon. La Traviata died forever. But before, also, she had given me my secret: Aura was born in that instant when Maria Callas identified, in the voice of one woman, youth as well as old age, life along with death, inseparable, convoking one another, the four, finally, youth, old age, life, death, women’s names: “ la juventud,” “ la vejez,” “ la vida,” “ la muerte.”

* * *

SEVEN, yes, seven days were needed for divine creation: on the eighth day the human creature was born and her name was desire. After the death of Maria Callas, I reread The Lady of the Camellias by Alexandre Dumas fils. The novel is far superior to Verdi’s opera or to the numerous stage and film adaptations because it contains an element of delirious necrophilia absent from all the descendants.

The novel begins with the return to Paris of Armand Duval — A.D., certainly the double of Alexandre Dumas — who then finds out that Marguerite Gautier had died. Marguerite Gautier, his lover lost through the suspicious will of Duval père, who says he is defending the family integrity by demanding that Marguerite abandon Armand, but who is probably envious of his son and would like Marguerite all for himself. Anyway, Duval fils hurries desperately to the woman’s tomb in Père Lachaise. The scene that follows is surely the most delirious in narrative necrophilia.

Armand obtains permission to exhume the body of Marguerite. The graveyard keeper tells Armand that it will not be difficult to find Marguerite’s tomb. As soon as the relatives of the persons buried in the neighboring graves found out who she was, they protested and said there should be special real estate set apart for women such as she: a whorehouse for the dead. Besides, every day someone sends her a bouquet of camellias. He is unknown. Armand is jealous of his dead lover: he does not know who sends her the flowers. Ah, if only sin saved us from boredom, in life or in death! This is the first thing that Marguerite told Armand when she met him: “The companion of sick souls is called boredom.” Armand is going to save Marguerite from the infinite boredom of being dead.

The gravediggers start working. A pickax strikes the crucifix on the coffin. The casket is slowly pulled out; the loose earth falls away. The boards groan frightfully. The gravediggers open the coffin with difficulty. The earth’s humidity has made the hinges rusty.

At long last, they manage to raise the lid. They all cover their noses. All, save Armand, fall back.

A white shroud covers the body, revealing some sinuosities. One end of the shroud is eaten up and the dead woman’s foot sticks out through a hole. Armand orders that the shroud be ripped apart. One of the gravediggers brusquely uncovers Marguerite’s face.

The eyes are no more than two holes. The lips have vanished. The teeth remain white, bare, clenched. The long black tresses, dry, smeared onto the temples, cover up part of the green cavities on the cheeks.

Armand kneels down, takes the bony hand of Marguerite, and kisses it.

Only then does the novel begin: a novel that, inaugurated by death, can only culminate in death. The novel is the act of Armand Duval’s desire to find the object of desire: Marguerite’s body. But since no desire is innocent — because we not only desire, we also desire to change what we desire once we obtain it — Armand Duval obtains the cadaver of Marguerite Gautier in order to transform it into literature, into book, into that second-person singular, the You that structures desire in Aura.

You: that word which is mine as it moves, ghostlike, in all the dimensions of space and time, even beyond death.

“You shall plunge your face, your open eyes, into Consuelo’s silver-white hair, and she’ll embrace you again when the clouds cover the moon, when you’re both hidden again, when the memory of youth, of youth reembodied, rules the darkness and disappears for some time.

“She’ll come back, Felipe. Well bring her back together. Let me recover my strength and I’ll bring her back.”

Felipe Montero, of course, is not You. You are You. Felipe Montero is only the author of Terra Nostra.

* * *

Aura was published in Spanish in 1962. The girl I had met as a child in Mexico and seen re-created by the light of Paris in 1961, when she was twenty, died by her own hand, a few years ago, in Mexico, at age forty.