Some time after her death, it came to me to explore the archive that Miss Callas had assembled over the course of her life. The library, a room in her apartment at 36 Avenue Georges Mandel, documented Maria’s attempt to internalize the musical world for the sake of her art. It was required of Callas, she believed, to swallow the world entirely in order to emit Norma or Medea.
Her archive was not yet picked over. It looked mad, crooked, and it contained many of her possessions, her letters and scores, which would later disappear.
Everything stopped abruptly
Over the wide room, a hologram of Aristotle Onassis sprang up here and there, recommending spy fiction and a catalogue from Van Cleef & Arpels. He addressed the camera, and thus me, in a “get a load of this” tone. He blew me a kiss.
A glance took in her collection of scores and a stack of 8-track tapes for language acquisition (Introductions to Turkish, Persian, German). She spoke Greek, French, English and the Italian dialect of Veronese, usually in a blend, multidimensionally, rising and falling like the keys of a typewriter. I saw copies of Macbeth and a biography of Nicholas and Alexandra, dog-eared, which she had carried around for a while, moving from one carry-on bag to another.
This is disgusting, said Ari, looking around.
This is a disgrace, said Ari. (In the end, I would find several cremated poodles who were lost in the shelves.) Ha, he said suddenly. Mincing, he held up a trashy biography of Jackie Kennedy mid-1970s, and raffishly kissed her paper cheek. His head is the head of the minotaur, and people whisper how can she sleep with him?
Jackie Kennedy is a bag of bones, he once not only told Maria, but told her in front of guests. An incalculable gift.
My assistant asked if we might come across some special map of Greece to lead us to hidden archeological treasures. Of course not, you idiot, I said. He and I congratulated each other on the significant finds, like a purple metal garbage can sporting a silkscreened picture of Jackie at JFK’s funeral. Should I throw out the inevitable junk? I wondered if the word theft could be applied, as we shuttled away piles of hotel room stationery, covered in notes and lists and letters.
Jackie Kennedy bled into the real Kennedys, Jack and Bobby, JFK and RFK
And everything was confidential
(FBI agents burst through a tear in time)
And life was lived like something snapped off
The other woman was more interesting than Ari himself. This is for whom he would leave me, wrote Callas on Excelsior Hotel paper. This is my weight in gold. This is my value in couture. This is my bag of secrets.
This is our Hisarlik, I tell my assistant. This is our Hisarlik, this is our Troy, this is our flaming library, Alexandria under our feet, this Knossos, this is our old religion.