AlliterAsian (9 page)

“Embarrassing? I never said that.”

On the verge of tears, Julia took a different path. “My otosan forced it out of me … about us, and as long as your brother continues to print those stories—”

“Wait a minute. Don't drag my brother into this. This is about you and me. Nobody else.”

“No, it isn't. My father is a good friend of Morii-san and your brother—”

“What about us?” he insisted.

“Don't you see? It's no good. My father made it quite clear that no daughter of his is going to consort with the likes of you.”

“The likes of me? What does that mean? What does he think I am?”

“That's my father talking.”

“How does he know what my brother writes anyway? It's all in English.”

“He hears it from Morii-san. His friends … it doesn't matter. We can't see each other anymore.”

“But Julia—”

“No, it's over.” Her words had a sense of finality that crushed him as she rose to her feet. Sobbing silently, Julia left Ernie's with Romeo sitting stunned at what was once their table.

All Romeo could do in the days that followed was to mope around, muttering about his lost love. He had no interest in anything around him. Baseball, school, even other girls. His friends tried to snap him out of it. “Hey, Romeo, get a load of Akiko. Ain't she something? I hear she's been looking you over but good in class! What do you say? Give her a tumble?” But nothing worked.

Tommy was sympathetic and knew he couldn't do much to help except to say, “Time heals all wounds.” Romeo smiled as if to thank him for that.

He finally took to going over to Julia's house at night to gaze at the light in her window, perhaps to catch a glimpse of her. He stood there every night, even as the nights grew darker and colder.

One day he started smoking, for no particular reason. He just felt like lighting one up. The cigarette did give him some comfort as he stood in the cold. So one night in early December, he shivered with a cigarette hanging out of his mouth and his hands in his jacket pockets in front of Julia's house. The light was on and the lace curtains were drawn. Her silhouette suddenly appeared facing the window. He couldn't move, mesmerized by the shadow. What he thought he heard next was like a dream come true. Yet he couldn't believe it, since it did seem like wishful thinking. Her voice called out his name, once, and not in anger but in a sad, regretful, and yearning way.

There was no time to ponder it further because someone came crashing into Julia's room, complaining loudly in Japanese. Because his parents kept him and his brother away from the Powell Street
area, he couldn't understand the meaning, but he did recognize the tone. Her shadow collapsed as Romeo reacted to the sound of a loud slap to the face and a scream.

He automatically raced to the door, opened it, for it was unlocked, and stepped inside. “Julia?” he yelled. “Julia?” He scrambled up the stairs as he heard more angry Japanese.

Romeo turned the corner and approached the front bedroom. As he entered, he smelled stale liquor and found Julia on the floor nursing a cheek with her father towering over her.

“Leave her alone!” Romeo commanded.

Surprised, the judo sensei uttered, “
Nanja
?”

Without thinking, the teenager rammed his body into Sensei Sato.

“Tomeo!” Julia called out. “Stop!”

Even though he was drunk, Sensei Sato quickly recovered from falling against the dresser and grabbed Romeo's arm in a painful lock. Just as quickly, Julia jumped to her feet and pushed against her father with all her might, allowing the captive to get free.

Romeo must have suddenly realized what he was up against—he was a lover, not a fighter after all. The sensei, too, was a black belt, third
dan
. As fast as he could, Romeo fled the room and ran down the flight of stairs to the outside. He disappeared into the muck of night. Sensei Sato, bogged down by his daughter's tight grip and his dizzy head, had no choice but to let the boy go.

No one saw Romeo much after that, though everyone guessed there was some comfort in holding Julia's true feelings in his heart. He was rumoured to have talked to his brother later that night, for the last time. After explaining what had happened, he said to him, “I'm sorry, Tommy, I really put you in it this time. I've got to get out of town for a while.”

Tommy smiled his characteristic understanding smile and answered, “Don't worry about me. I suspect if this hadn't happened, there would've been something else to inspire Morii to attack me. Just take care of yourself.” The brothers hugged each other and, after Tommy gave Tomeo some money, Tomeo left, stifling his tears.

Morii didn't, in fact, attack Tommy and the
New Canadian
. Never had the chance. Even after World War II and its editor's departure, the
New Canadian
flourished for the next forty to fifty years. Tommy Shoyama himself eventually found work as an economist and rose to great heights in Canadian history: from Tommy Douglas's right-hand man (they became known as the Two Tommys) to deputy minister of finance in the Trudeau government.

Sensei Sato never hit his daughter again, perhaps having learned some kind of lesson that night. Circumstances soon humbled the man in any case. Julia, for her part, married a good man and moved to Montreal about five years later but never forgot Tomeo.

Throughout the rest of their lives, Tommy and Julia each said they were happy, but everyone who knew them saw a sadness in their eyes. Perhaps it was over the reckless but romantic teenager who was lost in the chaos on the Sunday following the confrontation—when Pearl Harbor was attacked on December 7, 1941.

       
A
UTHOR
C
OMMENTARY

Midge Ayukawa told me a story about the aunt of a friend of mine who was dying of cancer. Before World War II, the aunt and Tommy Shoyama, future deputy finance minister of Canada, were in love—an ill-advised love. Mr Shoyama was then editor of the
New Canadian
, and the aunt's father was a known associate of Morii, the Black Dragon gangster. Tommy and the aunt knew such a relationship wouldn't survive if discovered, so they
sneaked around, meeting in back alleys and dark movie houses. Unfortunately, her father found out and demanded that she end it. She did. I decided to turn it into a short story, changing the facts by adding a fictional brother, Tomeo Shoyama. Many Canadians in the 1930s and 1940s gave nicknames to one another, especially the Nisei. Tomeo becoming Romeo seemed a natural fit in a Japanese-Canadian story about star-crossed lovers. —
Terry Watada, 2015

       
A
BOUT THE
A
UTHOR

Terry Watada is a Toronto writer with many titles to his credit. His recent publications include
The Game of 100 Ghosts
(poetry, TSAR, 2014) and
The Sword, the Medal and the Rosary
(manga, HpF Press and NAJC, 2013). His work has been extensively anthologized, most recently in
Vancouver Confidential
, edited by John Belshaw (Anvil Press, 2014). “Light at a Window” has since been expanded for publication as his second manga.

Notes Towards an Essay About Maria Callas

Ricepaper
15, no. 4 (2010)

C. E. Gatchalian

My Journal Entry, April 5, 1994

Homosexuality=shamanism=the chosen=antennae of the world
. Further down:
Art points skyward, defies nature, transcends the muck. It is, without question, the highest human faculty. Anthropology and Camille Paglia nudging a Filipino gay boy toward self-acceptance. The ego consolidation of a newly out sophomore. But despite a newfound Buddhist emphasis on ego-devaluation, those ideas are still with me, still motor my daily existence
.

I want to write an essay about Maria Callas, the greatest operatic soprano of the twentieth century. Most modern classical music stars dwell in rarefied peaks, free from the glare of the masses, subjects of esoteric study. Maria Callas was an exception. She was a pre-Stone-wall icon, the gay cultural intelligentsia's Judy Garland. To adore Callas in the twenty-first century is to retreat. Regress. Which is why I am writing this essay: to remember a fabled war-torn time. The essay I want to write is about adoration and inertia
.

La Bohème
was my favourite opera once upon a time, but I eventually tired of it, coming to see it as “opera lite.” But surfing YouTube two years ago, I happened across an audio recording of Mimi's Act-one
aria rendered by Maria Callas, a singer I'd never particularly cared for. Her voice emerges from my laptop—that hard-to-describe, naked sound that has always divided opinion. Two and a half minutes in, the aria swells towards its high point: “Ma quando vien lo sgelo, il primo sole é mio.” The simple, virginal Mimi singing of how spring's first kiss is hers. Callas and orchestra in perfect synchronicity as the world, for a moment, lifts the veils from sensuality, and a stodgy, effete art form becomes a container for living truth. I've listened to more renowned Mimis—Tebaldi, Scotto, Stratas—but none achieve the miracle that Callas pulls off. I'm not hyperbolizing when I call my Callas moment one of existential clarity, when my east met my west, when all came to Librium.

So began my personal study—one undertaken, so it seems, by many other gay men—of the life and art of Maria Callas: ugly duckling, musical genius. The narrative of her life, informed by egomania, willpower, metamorphosis, sexual frustration and fulfillment, and, finally, tragedy, is undeniably queer: the lonely outsider who pays the price for professional and personal acceptance. But the most efficient manifestation of her queerness is her art, a masterpiece drawn from imperfection, insecurity, and a bit of hate.

Callas's voice takes me inside myself and out again—the exact opposite of what happens when I listen to a more conventionally beautiful voice. The latter is escapism—a fireworks display from which I return unchanged. The Callas voice is too flawed, too human for escape: The dark, eerie timbre; the ferocious, almost manly, chest tones; the bottled middle register; and the forced and wobbly high notes (especially later in her career) were the musical equivalents of her personal flaws and, in turn, mine. Tito Gobbi christened her “La grande vociaccia”—the Great Ugly Voice—but it was ugliness contained in the most refined and exquisite musicianship. The
impeccable diction; the flawless weighing of every note; the silken fioritura; the perfectly placed portamenti—what was great was not the voice but rather what she did with it.

It was, in short, a voice from the closet.

You know the story. He's bullied and ostracized. So the young gay boy retreats to be the best at whatever he's good at. Not the best he can be, but the best, period. Just as society invokes “objective standards” in condemning his burgeoning sexuality, so the young gay boy invokes them in his quest for perfection. Callas attracts a lot of gay men because she's the best, period. And she became the very best despite a bevy of disadvantages: a broken home, a difficult mother, an ungainly figure, and a seemingly untameable voice. In
The Queen's Throat
, his brilliant and now-legendary paean to opera, Wayne Koestenbaum writes, “The listener's body is illuminated, opened up: a singer doesn't expose her own throat, she exposes the listener's interior.” When I listen to Callas, every trill, every cadenza becomes a journey out of the dregs, a manifestation of her personal triumphs and, by extension, mine. In her unflinching artistry, I see my own obsessive-compulsive perfectionism; in her astonishing mid-career weight loss, my metamorphosis from willowy geek to musclebound quasi Adonis.

As a young gay boy I was shy and artsy, and while I managed to escape physical bullying, backtalk and exclusion were inevitable. Scholastic excellence was my weapon, as was success as a classical pianist (which lessened the trauma of my teenage years by significantly abridging my school schedule, including exemption from P.E.). Egos that are mutilated eventually balloon, and for most of my life it's been egomania that's gotten me up in the morning, a narcissistic search for vengeance against a world that I was convinced was against me. (Therapy and meditation are doing their job, I'm happy to report.)

I adore Callas because she avenges on my behalf. The Greek-American fat girl-become-svelte prima donna of La Scala. Each diamond-pointed gruppetto, every sweeping arpeggio is an act of revenge against gay bashers, against all who ever crossed me. Indeed, Callas's own words, “We [artists] must whip ourselves into shape like a soldier,” and “I would not kill my enemies, but I will make them get down on their knees,” suggest a militaristic, score-settling approach to her craft.

Her 1949 career breakthrough was one of the queerest events in twentieth-century opera. While performing Brünnhilde in Wagner's
Die Walküre
, she was asked, on a few days' notice, to fill in for a sick colleague who was to sing Elvira in Bellini's
I Puritani
, a part Callas had never before performed. She opened as Elvira to an incredulous audience. To perform, back-to-back, the heavy verticality of a Wagner opera and the florid horizontalness of a bel canto opera was an unheard of feat—akin, almost, to a skater speed skating one week and figure skating the next. This was Callas at her queerest: doing the unthinkable, defying categories. Breaking the seemingly impenetrable wall between the dramatic repertoire and the coloratura one, Callas—despite her self-declared aesthetic conservatism—was a bona fide postmodern opera star: a convention-busting, boundary-blurring
sui generis
.

There is, also, the curious quality of Callas's sexual persona. There was an affected, contrived quality to her famously genteel way of moving and speaking, a quality undercut by the unaffectedly fierce “masculine” manner in which she approached her work. Unlike her alleged archrival, the musically demure and unthreatening Renata Tebaldi, Callas attacked the music with a decisiveness normally associated with male singers. The end result was a compellingly solipsistic persona: hermaphroditic, self-completing, narcissistic.

And there is the story of Maria, the woman whose nun-like devotion to her calling ended, for all intents and purposes, when she met shady Greek shipping magnate Aristotle Onassis. The virginal high priestess of opera had lived most of her life in her throat; the extraordinarily sexual Onassis opened her up to the rest of her body, a body she'd hated, even when she lost weight, a body that, for most of her life, nobody had ever wanted.

My Journal Entry, August 7, 2000

Went the full nine yards, finally. Pure, total blandishment. That a man like D, with his manliness, his Greekness, his swagger, would want me, with my awkwardness, my Filipino-ness, my inexperience. He's a collector, yes; I was willing to be collected. My first real man; he left me a bit more of one
.

Opera is pre-modern, steeped in the past, home to myth, old-style melodrama, and stereotypical notions of sex and gender. When I embrace opera, I am embracing a world that shunned me, thereby accepting the beast and consequently disembowelling it. If opera remains popular, even outside gaydom, it has little to do with the inner (i. e., plotlines) and almost everything to do with the outer (i. e., the music, the staging).

When gay men love Callas, they are embracing pre-modernism while queering it up royally. For she dragged hidden human truths out of sexist, archaic stories—out of the effete, rococo, centuries-old closet that is opera. Absolute honesty is queer; notions of normalcy
are always relative. Callas simultaneously embraced the norms of bel canto singing and broke through them to illuminate the only reality that ultimately counts: human emotion. She was the most profoundly gifted vocal artist of her century, one whose polychromatic voice could encapsulate every nuance and subnuance of feeling. There is no irony in Callas-philia, as there is with Garland-philia or Monroephilia; when gays align themselves with Callas, they align themselves with greatness. But it is greatness haunted by the omnipresence of the abyss, by intimations of what can and, in Callas's case, did go wrong. The great Callas scholar John Ardoin likens the experience of listening to Callas to watching a trapeze act. Usually there is a net below; but on those rare instances where there is not, a completely different atmosphere is created. “The very being of each spectator seems to be bound up in each step taken on high,” says Ardoin, “for there is no longer any semblance of pretence.”

Callas's vocal fall was legendary, ugly. Her hard-won artistic victories were Pyrrhic, unequalled greatness for a too-brief time. Pushing her voice beyond its natural Fach, tackling the most technically intimidating repertoire, giving every ounce of herself to each and every performance, she seemed constitutionally incapable of performing with a net. And while this cost Callas her voice (her career was essentially over by age forty-two), it is what gave her singing its abyss-defying, life-and-death intensity. “Singing for me is not an act of pride, but an effort to elevate toward those heavens where everything is harmony,” she once said. But she could never escape the abyss—indeed, she seemed always to be staring it down. Her singing, even at its most technically brilliant, never sounded easy the way the vocalizing of her great bel canto rivals Joan Sutherland and Montserrat Caballe did. It always carried with it a knowledge of the fragility of greatness—and of the unspeakable horrors that lurk beneath it.