I heard her shout to them, “WHICH ONE OF YOU GOONS SHOT OUT MY TIRE?”
She pointed to the Ferrari’s dented fenders.
“I swear by the sacred waters of Gjöll I will send you all to Náströnd!”
Looking even more monstrous as they got closer and closer, the seven all laughed together—an ugly, grating, feral sound. One rider came in closer and his bike skidded to stop. I could see t
he cloud of dust he’d raised, even in the fading, gloomy light.
His voice was guttural, worse than an angry WWF wrestler—deep, rumbling, and bestial, exactly as he appeared. His face looked wolfish; there’s no other way to describe it.
He snarled, “Hand over your cargo!”
Cargo?
My mind screamed, “What cargo?”
What the devil—literally—was he talking about?
The “leader” of the gang—if that is what he was—then got off his bike and strode forward. I couldn’t get over how tall he was, like a pro basketball player except he was incredibly bulky. And how he could stay cool wearing that heavy black coat billowing in the wind I’d no idea.
Still, at least I didn’t see him wield a gun or any sign of a weapon. Yet his whole posture and attitude was arrogant and cruel. Even through the goggles he wore, the yellow viper-like slit pupils of his eyes were pretty much a dead giveaway that the monster was utterly evil.
“I’M WARNING YOU,” Val shouted, “REMEMBER MY OATH IF YOU TAKE A SINGLE STEP CLOSER!”
His strides got even longer, and he laughed low in his throat.
In a brilliant flash of light that stunned me, Val transformed to become exactly as I’d remembered her the other day except—amazingly—I thought she was even taller, stronger and more beautiful. To look directly at her actually hurt my eyes.
In her right hand she grasped a silver-handled sword of incredible splendor; I didn’t think Excalibur could look any better—if Excalibur is out in the world somewhere. Its long, sleek blade seemed to have been forged not just from steel but from diamonds. Eerily translucent, it shined with a light all its own.
While she brandished the sword and then began making it sweep around her head in whirlwind fast arcs so that her arm became a blur, the other evil riders kept circling, circling, their throats rumbling laughter as deep as their motorcycles’ engines.
The wolf-monster actually tilted his huge ugly head back and howled—but with sheer, ugly animal pleasure—and from somewhere, probably deep in his cloak, a midnight black broadsword appeared in his enormous hands, a sword almost as long as I was tall.
And then without warning, Val charged. She moved at least as swiftly as a cheetah, becoming just a blur.
IN a Callas performance no syllable of the text, no note of the score, went unexamined. Singers so attuned to dramatic nuance -- there are not many -- are liable to come across as nervous and infirm of purpose, like writers who italicize everything and thus stress nothing. Art means choices, as we all know: to play up A, we give up B. In defiance of this incontrovertible theory, Callas could on occasion sculpt a passage instant by instant without losing sight of her target. At the opening of Act Three of the studio recording of Medea, taped in 1957, she honed each word of the invocation of the gods of hell to an edge of ferocity. Her usual practice, though, was to set the mood and then place expressive accents sparingly. Lucia's frisson by the fountain was only that, and that was all it needed to be. In the part of the doomed Anne Boleyn, in Donizetti's Anna Bolena, Callas fired off bull's-eye zingers at Henry VIII, well aware that Anne is on thin ice, as the tremor in her anger showed. In the "Miserere" from Il trovatore she smiled at grief. The finale of Medea, in contrast, had to be tremendous, and so it was. In a live performance in Florence in 1953 Callas rode the last phrases as if they were tidal waves surging to the abyss. (The passage is a bonus track on the complete 1958 Dallas Medea, on Gala, an excellent budget label.)
However deep their gifts of sympathy and self-transformation, actors privileged to test themselves against a gallery of the great roles reveal over time the bedrock of their own hearts and souls. As the constant in Callas we discover a rare nobility, a proud, unflinching submission to fate. How apt, one might say: according to a dictum espoused notably by Puccini, the very essence of opera is to torture the heroine. But Callas never conveyed masochism, still less some cold-marble high-mindedness. The worlds of her heroines turn upside down in a moment, in many cases several times in short order. As Callas played them, they waste no time sniveling or frittering away their lives in second thoughts. Always her element was the unconditional.
***
Most mysterious among her many gifts, Callas had the genius to translate the minute particulars of a life into tone of voice. Her Cio-Cio-San, in Puccini's Madama Butterfly, is a marvel. As the child bride of the first act, Callas worked in fragile, chiming timbres that she was able to maintain even in the swelling raptures of the love duet. In Act Two a veil of grief descends, but still her voice was the voice of a child. Only in the final scene, in the prelude to Cio-Cio-San's suicide, did Callas disclose her full, tragic richness. By way of contrast, consider the final act of La traviata, in which Violetta hangs on by a thread, singing in blanched sounds already brushed by death. For the thought of death, the singer had a quite different color, audible in the second studio Norma (1960) and in her Carmen. We hear it again in the Dallas Medea, where Callas fulminated in cries so clipped, so dark, so wild with rage, that they scarcely seem human.
