Let the Fat Soprano Sing

By William M. Balsamo

She always wore her hair in a pompadour, a tiara wrapped with a black scarf and pierced with cheap pieces of costume jewelry purchased at K mart. This added about a half-foot to an otherwise short body. Her high-heeled shoes added another three inches at the bottom of her anatomy and between he tiara and her heels was a rather plump (downright fat, actually) undisciplined body.

Her face was smeared with mascara to the extreme with generous layers of powder and rouge and heavy eye shadow. The eyes were dramatically adorned with false eyelashes and the eyebrows thickened and expanded to twice their natural length. This makeup was not reserved for special occasions, but applied to her face immediately upon awakening in the morning.

Her face was round and fat. Her cheeks fleshed out like cream-puffed pastry and her chin hung down so low that, if it had been suspended from any other part of her anatomy, it would have requires the support of a bra.

If her appearance was that of an artist ready for the stage, it was not far from the truth. Her name was Rafaella and she was a dramatic soprano.

Thirty years ago when she was in her early twenties, she had a very special vocal gift and the powers to match. Her voice was, even at such a young age, rounded and fully developed. It was agile and pliant, dynamic and expressive. Her talent was well-recognized and she appeared in various amateur shows and once even made an appearance on TV.

Her signature song in those days was Musetta’s waltz from La Boheme but as her voice grew darker and her interpretations intensified she chose to sing Butterfly’s “Un Bel di.�E#060;o:p>

At that time her future was all but a promise. She was perky and pretty, well-trimmed and properly proportioned with an engaging smile and charming personality. What she lacked was the proper schooling and cultural refinement denied her by being brought up in a poor working class family.

Rafaella was always Rafaella and hated to bear the brunt of a nickname. Raffy? Rafella? Faella? None of them fit properly and she was known throughout her life only as Rafaella. It was the perfect name for a prima donna.

When she sang she booked herself always as Rafaella Callavitas. It wasn’t her real name but her idol since childhood was Maria Callas whom she adored to such a degree that she tried to duplicate the same repertory the famed diva had immortalized. She called herself Calllavitas because she saw herself living within the persona of Maria Callas. Thus she was ‘vita�Einside of Callas. As clever as this may have seemed, it was not her idea. ( Rafaella never had ideas of her own. She was motivated by a desire for fame and sheer impulse). One could even say that she was driven by a darker force which was to emerge throughout her life.

The man behind her ambitions was a Hungarian pianist named Janos. They were the same age but came from two different backgrounds. She was a small neighborhood girl from a big town. He was a desolate refugee from a war-torn country. That was back in the fifties when Hungary had suffered Nazi Occupation and Russian repression. It was no wonder that he was strange in the same way that she was obsessed. She called him Kallu which was short for Kezakalu which is Hungarian for “Blubeard.�EShe was his Judith. He was her Bluebeard and together they were perfectly mismatched but somehow destined to weave their influence around each other. They considered themselves a perfect combination.

Anyway it was his idea to call her Callavitas. She liked the name and it stuck. He taught her the standard Callas repertory which she learned by constant repetition. Over and over they repeated each phrase until the songs and arias stuck in her mind. Being musically unschooled she was unable to read music. Yet, it was necessary to commit each phrase of a role to memory. They labored together for hours every day to learn roles and memorize pages of music till it became an obsession.

She made money as a church soloist and occasionally she sang at Jewish resorts in the Catskills. For those engagements she had to learn a few songs in Yiddish to please the summer crowds. But, her voice like her mascara was too thick for those Jewish Alp engagements, so she abandoned them after a few years.

At one point she auditioned for a maestro Calestani. She sang “Ritorna Vincitor�Efor him on a day when she was in exceptionally good voice. After her final “Numi Pieta�E#060;span style='mso-spacerun:yes'>  the maestro got up and went to the window overlooking the noisey street below. He walked over to her and said, “Questa e uno voce molto importante!�Eand promised her a debut with the Rome opera next spring as Norma.

She was ecstatic and Kallu who sat through the audition was thrilled. She saw herself as the rival to Maria Callas and he saw himself as her protég�Eand famed tutor, accompanist and conductor.

A week later they were devastated by the sudden and shocking news that Maestro Calestani died of a massive stroke complicated by heavy drinking and cardiac arrest.

Together they blamed their ultimate demise on this sad twist of fate. She never made her debut with the Rome Opera. This all happened years before Rafaella had passed the age of thirty. It was also the point at which her self-comparisons with the great callas had terminated. As Callas grew older she thinned down to elegant charm. For Rafaella the opposite became true.

As the years passed she developed an eating disorder whch turned her from a cute, black-haird coquettish prima donna into a bloated eating machine with a compulsive craving for food.. She rationalized her weight by saying she was only feeding her voice. , but her figure grew totally out of proportion until cheek and chins (for now she had acquired more than one) blended into her torso which flowed into her abdomen and surrounded her thighs. Once can euphemistically say that she was well-rounded and get away with it. Janos also grew in girth, but since he was much taller than she, he bore his burden with greater ease.

This mired mood of depression continued for several years. Job offers declined in local companies partly because she could not “fit�Einto any of the roles, not to mention the costumes, she sang. Musetta was no longer suitable for a woman who looked like Mamma Lucia and she refused to sing the later because it was too small of a part for her. She did in time get a church job singing at weddings and funerals. Janos by an accident of good fortune was hired as an organist in a small Italian immigrant church.

Although he and Rafaella had long since become lovers he was living with a black woman who provided a different kind of excitement which went beyond the world of music.

Rafaella became the exclusive soprano at the church and used the choir loft in the same way she had hoped to command the stage. She sang all the Ave Maria’s at weddings and the Libera me Domine’s at the funerals. She had, so to speak, found her niche. She was relegated to a place where she could be heard and not see. She was the reverse of the child who should be seen but not heard, but she really wanted to be heard, seen and appreciated. She gradually came to learn that in life one cannot have everything.

She sometimes began to sing the stabat Mater and winked seductively at Janos everytime she sang the words, “Fac me, vere.�EThese words were assigned by then an adulterous meaning which went beyond the dictionary. They found themselves locking eyes with each other and after mass they would make out shamefully behind the organ, as if by hiding in the loft they could escape the wrath of God. He probably didn’t much care what they did but their passion after such ceremonies knew no limits. In between gasps of ecstasy she would moan, “Kallu, I love the way you play the organ.�E#060;o:p>

Rafaella’s sole dream, rooted deeply in fantasy, was to have Bluebeard walk her down the aisle in holy Matrimony. She really didn’t care who sang the Ave Maria after she married, although she probably would have had someone play a tape f her own voice. She really only wanted to walk down the aisle in a white gown while holding a bouquet of white carnations mixed with red roses. She knew that Janos was living with a black woman, but she felt deeply within herself that he would soon tire of the woman and discard her for true love. The dream never materialized and the fantasy became an illusion. Yet, the fat soprano kept on singing. Her voice thickened with contempt and the frustration of unrequited love gave off the stench of betrayal. Rafaella, sweet and coy, Rafaella now became a hardened and jaded woman who was betrayed by both fate and her beloved Bluebeard.

“Kallu, marry me,�Eshe proposed one leap year on the verge of tears. “I will give you all my love.�E#060;o:p>

“I love you, Rafaella. You know that. But now I am too busy to think of marriage.�E#060;o:p>

In so far as he was capable of love, he did love her. After all, she did add interest to the choir loft especially before and after services, but he wasn’t ready to leave his black mistress for her.

“Kallu,�Eshe pleaded, “People are beginning to talk about us.�EShe confided fearfully.

“I don’t care,�Ehe said in his thick Hungarian accent. “People always talk anyway. Let them.�E#060;o:p>

People did talk especially those saintly little old ladies who spent their whole day in church. They could hear the rumbling and occasional arguments coming from the choir loft. Under the pretense of saying the rosary they would come to church with small mirrors and focus the glass onto the choir loft.

“Kall,marry me.�ERafaella begged repeatedly.

“I no marry you. I too busy.�E#060;o:p>

Then the fights, accusations and threatened blackmailing would start. Rafaella know that if the church’s pastor had discovered that Janos was cohabitating with a black woman, he would fire him on the spot. The pastor was a bigot and well-supported by the mafia. Janos had no recourse to a union and has no understanding of his civil rights. Rafaella also knew that if Janos lost his job, she would soon lose hers. So their destinies were bound to each other in much the same way that their dreams were interwoven.

The seemingly saintly little old ladies who came regularly to church with their novenas, nine first Fridays and perpetual rosaries were incurably vicious gossips.

“Whaddya gone do wid these two? They makka love right in front of God! Proprio avvanti a Dio! Disgratiata!�E#060;o:p>

Rafaella and Janose became the talk of the neighborhood. Some called her his “little fat church whore�Eothers called him an agent for the KGB. Neither was really true. They were just two pathetic to be placed into any category and too absurd to be taken too seriously, and if making love in front of a sanctuary lamp was their greatest offense, it could easily be forgiven as a weakness rather than a sin. But it wasn’t. They had that rare gift of alienating the entire parish. It ws not intentional; for, if anything, they craved to be loved, accepted and respected.

They were unfortunately victims of their own dreams and frustrated ambitions and sensed deeply that they were intended for greatness. She was “una voce molto importante�Eand he was a conductor without an orchestra to essay his great worth. Neither wanted to be confined to a church choir surrounded by dusty prayer books and rusted pipe organs.

Fate does make its calls and for everyone in a different way. For Rafaella and Janos it was to be traumatic and disguised as a blessing. The opportunity arose to perform a children’s Christmas opera about a crippled boy. It was the story of Amahl, a boy born with an impediment which only a miracle can cure. He lives alone with his poor mother and their poverty is so extensive that they have no food to eat. At the opera’s end he is indeed cured by the power of God and everyone has a Merry Christmas. It was to be performed in the sanctuary of the church as a special holiday offering to the community with the hope of generating revenue from the sale of the tickets to recover some of the growing deficits in the parish.

The pastor had no great love for opera and little patience for crippled children but gave in to the demands of Rafaella and Janos, (who had suggested the idea), against his will and better judgment. They convinced him that such an event would be a cultural boon to the community and a financial bonus for the parish. The opera was to be fully staged with orchestra and chorus, gleaned from whatever sources were available in the community.

In this Christmas opera the poor mother and crippled child are visited by the three kings on their way to Bethlehem. The rigorous journey from the East was a bit too much for them and they decide to stay at the hut of the mother and child. They are given humble accommodation and, in the middle of the night, the mother attempts to steal a pot of gold the kings intended to give to the Christ Child. A miracle occurs and the boy is cured of his crippled leg. The opera ends with the boy joining the magi to go and visit baby Jesus in Bethlehem.

The plot is quite contrived and only those who have made pilgrimages to Lourdes and Fatima would dare attempt to believe it were true. To make it come off as half-credible and all the more effective the roles of the mother and child need to be played by a woman and young boy capable of eliciting the empathy of the audience. They need to be thin, attractive and young. Any casting less than this would invite disaster.

Rafaella was chosen by Janos to be the mother and a neurotic boy from the church’s elementary school was selected as the crippled boy, Amahl. Although her friends advised her to diet for the sake of the performance, Rafaella insisted that she needed the extra weight to sustain the demands of the role.

At one point early in the opera, the mother has a rather significant line. Admonishing her crippled child for making up fantastic stories she attempts to bring him back to reality by saying, �Ehere we are with nothing to eat!�EHer girth was such that nothing could have been further from the truth. To any casual observer she gave every indication of having just emerged from a bacchanalia featuring roast pig, chicken cordon blue and duck al orange.

The day of the performance came and the church was almost empty. Most people had never heard of the opera and gave last minute Christmas a higher priority. Besides most reasoned thee were better ways to spend a Sunday afternoon.

In the vacuous space of the empty church the orchestra tuned its instruments indifferently to the score. Janos entered the church sanctuary and stood before the orchestra. He turned to bow to the assembled audience and beyond the third pew there was no one. Altogether they made up about two dozen people. Some looked as though they were homeless off the street, others looked ragged as though their only purpose was to get out of the cold.

Turning again to the orchestra he gave the command with his baton to intone the soft opening of the prelude, a pastoral theme followed by the melancholic pan pipe of the crippled boy. From the doorway of her humble hut Rafaella calls out her son’s name. “Amahl! Amahl!�Ehe does not hear her. She calls out again ordering him to hurry inside because it is getting late.

When he enters the house he speaks of a star with a tail running through the stars and sky. It ws bigger than anything he had ever seen. At this point Rafaella with her creamed-puffed checks and sagging chin and grotesque rotundity the size of Jupiter’s diameter utter the fateful line, “Here we are with nothing to eat!!�E#060;o:p>

From the first row of the Church un uncontrolled roar of laughter emerged and there was a subtle whisper sounding out I the church’s near perfect acoustics. Someone in the church murmured to a person next to him, “She looks as though she just ate a horse.�E#060;o:p>

Rafaella’s eyes filled with fury. Her composure quickly evaporated revealing the dept of her hurt. She was no longer a poor peasant with nothing to eat. She was now Medea with serpents in her hair and daggers in her heart. She stepped out of her role and demanded the orchestra to stop. They didn’t listen to her but continued to play. Her voice rang out like a trumpet and bounced off the stone walls of the church. It shattered the stained glass windows and cracked the marble tiles of the main aisle.

This dramatic soprano like a wounded buffalo only wanted to be heard, loved and appreciated. She wanted to walk proudly down the aisle holding a bouquet of flowers. She didn’t even care if they were plastic as long as she could walk down the aisle in Cinderella slippers, a white veil and the chance to weep like all brides do when they hear the Ave Maria.

In total humiliation and at the nadir of her life’s constant decline, Rafaella let out a burst of epithets. She cursed her fate and damned her destiny. The chain of curses which flowed from her mouth shocked the coterie of friends that she had invited and silenced the orchestra.

Her best performance came tragically to an end. She cursed Mr. Calastato for dying suddenly on her before bringing her to fame. She cursed Maria Callas for casting a doomed shadow over her career and she cursed the black bitch for living with her beloved Kallu.

At last after decades of struggle, she had her audience. (as small as it was) an she cursed them too. Among the fury and the rage, the failure and the rejection, her best and last performance came tragically to an end. She even cursed God for giving her a voice and denying her a promise.