The Extraordinary Operatic Adventures of Blanche Arral

By Blanche Arral, Translated by Ira Glackens, William R. Moran, Editor.

Amadeus Press, Portland, Oregon, 2002, hardcover, 14 illustrations, $24.95, 352 pages,
ISBN 1-57467-077-8

Reviewed in Good Reading, the Magazine for Book Lovers, ABN 38 003 750 150, May, 2005


Good Reading Magazine

Any opera lover or anyone who has enshrined their copies of Beaton’s "My Royal Life" and Dennis’ "Little Me" simply has to have this book. But, unlike the stories of Beaton’s faux family and Belle Poitrine's misadventures for love, this story is real. Blanche Arral really did grow up in a well to do Belgian home, become a famous opera star in the Paris of the Gay Nineties, sustain an international career for many decades, and die the wife of a New Jersey dentist in the 1940s.

"Extraordinary” hardly begins to describe her adventures. After becoming an opera star despite her family’s better intentions, she married a Russian Prince, held court in St. Petersburg, and lost her husband in a mysterious manner in the early stages of the Russian Revolution. While searching for him in Constantinople she was imprisoned by the Sultan and literally had to escape from the seraglio (does this sound familiar? Keep reading).

Having resumed her career on the international opera circuit she was rescued from opera - loving rebels in Latin America, stole Melba’s concert audiences in Melbourne by virtue of superior marketing and escaped a tsunami in Thailand by clinging to a Louis Quinze chimney piece. She eventually found haven in the USA where, while singing Carmen, she was literally stabbed by her leading man who used a real knife instead of the one with the collapsible blade.

After her hair was burned off in a freak accident she made some of Edison’s first voice recordings and took to wearing the loaf-like wig in which she concluded her "extraordinary" life in New Jersey.

More about this book

These are just some of her adventures. Only their impossible circumstances and the history of the manuscript (there are several prefaces, the result of an amanuensis’ draft being passed from one intergenerational protégé to another) lead to the delicious yet unfounded suspicions about this biography. 

If it were not for the existence of historically proven photograhs and recordings which support many of the extraordinary facts set out in this book it would be far too tempting to supect that Blanche is yet another fabulous creation of a clever and very funny mind.

The Unknown Callas: The Greek Years

by Nicholas Petsalis-Diomidis, with a foreword by the Earl of Harewood

Amadeus: Timber. (Opera Biography, No. 14). Portland, Oregon, 2001. c.600p. illus. bibliog. index., $40, LC 00-040155. ISBN 1-57467-059-X


Like the fans of James Dean, Jean Harlowe, Jim Morrison, Diana Princess of Wales, and others, Maria Callas’s fans remain grief-stricken 29 years after her death, her annual record sales amount to almost one million dollars and her underwear is publicly offered to souvenir hunters at auction.

This book takes the prolonged post mortem one step further by focusing on Maria Callas’ early years before she acquired the fame, which gave her immortality, about which almost nothing has been previously written. As an investigative work it is staggering, involving minute detail of the years she spent in occupied Athens during World War 2. It’s a major task to read, and it’s with a sense of enhanced, sad understanding rather than factual enlightenment that one finishes the book and gazes once more on the Callas recordings and authorized iconography which the singer would probably have preferred as her memorial.

Still, the legitimate research behind the book counts for much, and it may be for this reason that the distinguished Earl of Harewood, regarded as a trusted friend of Maria Callas, wrote the preface. The strength of the book is the work the author did to find and interview witnesses, many now dead, whose observations are presented with apparent caution and respect for their reluctance to talk on the record at all.

This strength is also the book’s weakness, as few are willing or able to make authoritative remarks. It’s touching to see how many of her unknown former acquaintances and colleagues were unwilling to make adverse comments about Maria Callas or to recall events, which were painful to her and to them. In the absence of their precise confirmation of the facts on which they are asked to comment, the author presents the information anyway, subject to sufficient caveats to protect the integrity of the text and, in some cases, enhanced by his own opinions.

His attention to detail leads Mr. Petsalis-Diomedes to reinforce some of the well-known stories that usually appear in discussions of the singer’s life before she became successful and beautiful. Those that predominate in this book concern her youthful ugliness, greed, nastiness to others, and susceptibility to enemy aliens during the occupation of Greece, the approximate date of the loss of her virginity, and her relationship with the “wobble” in her upper register. These are part of the Callas legend and do no particular damage, but as Mr. Petsalis-Diomedes announces at the beginning of the book that he is going to avoid them it is bemusing to find oneself reading so much about them.

The book ends with the young Maria’s departure from Greece for her career abroad, but the author adds as one of several appendices a discussion of Maria’s famous break with her mother. No other book, except perhaps Litsa’s own silly book published in 1967, makes such a case of perfidy against Litsa Kaloyeropoulou. The author with relish presents previously unpublished letters between the husband, mother and father and Maria’s mother emerges as a giant amongst those self obsessed child/mothers who never allow their children to ignore them while simultaneously failing to give of themselves. For this reason alone the book is fun to read, but the discussion hardly amounts to the most perfect case of objective historicity.

In setting out to be the witness of truth to Maria Callas’ early years the author has succeeded in exposing many authentic (and minute) details of the child who metamorphosed into what the author calls “the miracle that was Maria Callas.” However Maria’s ability to be eponymous was too great to allow him to succeed completely. Like her underwear, which was bought and burned by the Athenian municipal council, this book shows, by a serious and mostly scholarly effort to find them, that Maria’s secrets are no longer available. Too much was not said and too many have kept their silence. For those who try to speak for her, this means everything.

Stranger than Fiction

A Clean Slate

by 

 

Marc Ellis

Published in Redoubt, Volume 13, University of Canberra, 1992, ISSN 1030-4932


The deal had been clinched soon after.

You must not judge me, he had said to her. It is not necessary. I will not repeat your experiences for you.

He was calling his own bluff.

She had prepared him for this. Bad previous experiences and all that was associated with them were revealed, laid out on the table.

It was not him, he must understand. It was her. She knew that.

The deal had been clinched soon after.

I promise you. It will not happen.

It was too risky. She wished to die away, to fade, to find a wall to flatten against, to find a place with no echoes.

It is not necessary to repeat your experience, he had said to her. He would make sure of this.

I promise you, he had said, it will not happen. You must not pre-judge me. It is not necessary. I will not repeat your experiences for you. You can be too alone.

She had prepared him.

It was not him he must understand. It was her.

She knew that.

***

The river succumbed to a race of long - tailed taxis and a party of Americans came down to the hotel’s landing steps to board them.

I want another spritzer snared a Brooklyn accent, and I want it pretty quick.

There was a flash of white coats and a mop of clean black hair leaned into the boat. He could imagine a blonde old girl in tight pants.

George. This is warm. Get me another one.

Just a moment, he would say, brushing his fingers against red fingertips as he took the glass away, her sorrowful demanding pout passed on to his lips. She would have her spritzer, and pretty quick too.

***

The travel bag lies on the fake satin bedspread, lacerated by its zipper. Outside, the traffic of Bangkok completes another silent lap of Silom Road. He hitches up his trousers and smoothes out the shadow of the slim, square case he has removed from one pocket. The noise of the shower falling onto the putty-framed tiles provides applause. The digital clock watched him from the bedhead. Four fifteen am. The avalanches of shower water fall less frequently than before, and more heavily. The washing of hair.

It could seem a pity, he thinks.

He eases his arm into her suitcase and places the cigarette case next to her pill boxes and jars, then eases his back - clad arm from the hole evenly.

***

She had stripped naked before him and taken a dress from the open, packed bag on the bed in front of her. She bent when she was naked, using the function of the search for clothes as a reason for covering and hiding herself. Her knees were bent and jammed together, and she kept her head down.

I should have known I’d need a change before the plane.

He had made certain requests and they had been satisfied. The cigarette case was rectangular with a finely - sprung lid. Cloisonné, with an elegant pattern in emerald and ruby. He pressed the lid and felt the small whir of the mechanism release it. The stuff was packed densely and bore the imprint of the lid’s underside. Things had gone smoothly.

***

Their hotel room overlooked Wat Arun. Stuck to each other, they wound their way into the shower where the distilled water fell off their skin and splattered on the porcelain. Only the odd drop survived, trickling and creaking into the cracks between them, cleansing, eroding. The rest rose in furious clouds to blend with the marble walls.

The sun was rising.

The Temple of Dawn he said. He felt his lips move in and against her ear. Multi - coloured mosaics, he said.

She pressed her head back against him and let the water run into her eyes and slide down her nose. It catapulted off her chin and fell onto her breasts, running over his hands and slipping between his fingers.

Porcelain mosaics, he said. Smashed porcelain.

He heard a laugh. She had not read the guidebooks. Setting his shoulders hard against the tiles he edged his feet together, clutched with one hand at her thigh, and pulled her to him.

The sun was moving, illuminating the handbasin, the bidet, and the huge towel which waited for them spread out on the rail, ready to enfold, to comfort, to disguise.

***

Their shopping had been peaceful, desultory. A silk suit off the peg and some scarves; an ounce of perfume and a cloying array of crèmes, moisturiser and soap, all only marginally cheaper than they were at home. Everything had come from the one department store, except for the cigarette case which she had dutifully bought for him at the government jewellery shop.

Now we can just watch, he said, leading her by the arm into the smog of Siam Square. We don’t have to do anything.

At Wat Arun, she ran ahead of him to climb the steps.

It’s easy, he had told her, handing her down from the tuk tuk. They were meant to be climbed. It has a function.

She had already run off, pursuing the smile she had managed to paint on her lips in the taxi. He could hear her laughing ahead, and the souvenir sellers scattered before her at the foot of the stairs.

The porcelain mosaics confused his vision. All he was sure of was the river, the tuk tuk and the high prang ignoring the sun.

She was gone. The souvenir sellers resumed their places. The heat flew with a quiet, steady hum and the taxi driver turned his back and sauntered towards a noodle stall beside the entrance.

She’s gone he said to himself, accepting the slight breeze relayed by the teak trees, hearing the slow thump of the temple bells. A cushion of clean, dry fur floated in the klong, and the grey water lapped at the sharp teeth of a drowned dog.

It fell in, he rationalized, not seeing the souvenir sellers as he mounted the steps.

It was an accident.

***

At the restaurant beside the river they chose their fish from a tank and said how they wanted it.

She agreed with everything he suggested. He could see the agreement welling up within her. Opposite the restaurant was a pink door set in a pink wall. A small, black dot was set in the door, and a compact doorbell was small but prominent below it. As they ate, several men came to the door, rang the doorbell and, after waiting for a few minutes, they were admitted. It was impossible to see who admitted them. The ends of some fingers, unmarked by rings or nail polish, by any indication of sex at all; the curve of the arm as it increased in substance from the wrist, that was all that could be seen.

Open and shut. They were all types, the men who rang the doorbell, and they all stood patiently waiting, indifferent to the calm curiosity of the diners who watched them and ate their fish and pushed the greasy durian around the frosty plates.

Her head was bent sightly forward and she was holding a piece of the foetid green fruit to her reaching lips. Another man was swallowed by the door and the importance of a clean slate, of blamelessness, sang out to him from the silence of the door’s black dot.

She had prepared him for this and he had called his own bluff. Bad previous experiences and all that was associated with them had been revealed, laid on the table, well in advance of this. He stood forewarned. He had been greedy, unable to control himself.

The durian was eaten; the last green smears across the plate they had shared exhausted any opportunities for respite from the decision of which had then informed himself, leaning, looking into her eyes.

Tired? We could walk if you’re up to it.

He took her arm and led her through the hotel arcade to the street, knowing that she would succumb to the first tuk tuk that blocked their path.

***

All ready?

She states this as happily as she can bear, smoothing back her damp, combed hair and putting her palms to her freshly-hydrated cheeks. She holds the towel. She has dressed damply in the bathroom.

All ready he replies, moving towards her. He reaches to take the towel, not going close to her. He throws the towel onto an armchair and zips up the suitcase.

All ready he replies, smiling for a moment tenderly at her.

© Marc Ellis 1992

Stranger than Fiction

Grotesques

by 

 

Marc Ellis

Published in Australian Writing 1988, Outrider Magazine, Manfred Jurgensen and Robert Adamson (eds.), Indooroopilly, Queensland, 1988 (subsequently published in Australian Writing Now, Penguin, Ringwood, Victoria, 1988).

click here to purchase from Amazon.com

Inside the abbey, Walter begrudgingly paid ninety pence to a verger and walked through a turnstile. He stood and stared at some tombs for a moment, then settled himself carefully on a fragile chapel chair and let the grotesques mock him from the cornice. They gave him the same feeling as when he woke up to find huge tarantulas staring at him from the top of the wardrobe door.

A group of tourists entered the abbey, revolving the turnstile steadily like a mill race. Pre-paid vouchers were pinned to their chests with name-tags. Walter slid back in the tiny chair and stared at them, considering what aliens a thirteenth century pilgrim would have made of them. The group hovered then dispersed, like a cloud of dust. Walter stood, stretched, and walked to a row of gaudy royal tombs. “You and I are earth,” proclaimed a plaque. Walter looked at it and felt the soothing hum of the ancient roof stretching to the left and the right of him, surging to and fro since 1225. Vergers circulated ceaselessly, like flies at a picnic, and the tourists stood in clumps, trying simultaneously to watch out for them and to ignore them. There appeared to be no local visitors at all.

Two of the vergers led their gowns towards each other and met at the plaque. After a whispered, business-like conversation, they separated, their robes unveiling the plaque again. Walker noticed that it bore the face of a woman carved in deep relief above the inscription. Her egg-shaped head, its top and sides finely drilled on its ruff, like an ice-cream on its cone. The eyes stared and the mouth, pursed with the expression of confident piety with which the deceased’s beneficiaries armed her for purgatory, looked as unpromising as the spout of a dry fountain.

Stepping up to it, Walter realised that the pupils of the eyes were in fact holes drilled into the eyeballs. Paradoxically this gave the woman a vibrant stare. Placing his hands on his knees, he bent to look into them. “The more you look in,” he observed, “the more she looks out.” In contrast, the realistic detail of the nose proclaimed its artificiality. It had none of the curious liveliness of the eyes. Almost perfectly Roman, a slight suggestion of bulbousness indicated the restraint which had been urged on the sculptor. Walter peered into the face like a rescuer staring at a mound of impenetrable rubble. ”Somewhere back there," he realised, “there were people like me.” For a moment, he was unable to evade the strength of expression in the eyes and to see beyond, to the ribs which had been made by the drill as it was ground into the lump of rock. The sight visited him for a few seconds. “Too clever for his own good.” Walter mourned the sculptor as, with the reassertion of their steady gaze, the eyes shut like a safe door on his glimpse of the artist. Walter stepped backwards and the words “You and I are earth” rose like film credits into his line of vision. “Condescending bitch,” Walter fulminated, “there’s nothing earthly about her at all. She looks as though she was marble all her life.”

Turning from the plaque, Walter discovered that a group of tourists had arrived at the font behind him and were gazing at it with blank intensity, as though they were considering buying it. A verger invaded their circle and flapped to a standstill. “For chrissakes!” he spat. In their astonishment, some of the group smiled and nodded. "Take it off!” he barked, pointing a bony finger at the cloth hat which one of the tourists was wearing. The appalled man stared blankly back at him. Simultaneously a flabby hand slapped onto the hat and slid it from view. The group shuffled in around the victim and gently moved him away.

Walter turned to look at the plaque again, but found that it was concealed from view by a woman who was carefully readjusting the vinyl strap of her travel bag. She wore a navy blue nylon shift over baggy matching trousers. One of her little toes poked out of the strap of her white sandals. Its nail had been painted pink. Her wide hips made her appear slightly diamond-shaped and her big, round head, onto which a pudgy nose and a pair of thick, sausage-like lips had been stuck, appeared to have been popped on top of her at the last minute.  Her hair had been dyed with henna and permed into mean little waterproof curls. The brilliance of her aquamarine eyes was an almost shocking contrast. She was looking expectantly at Walter.

Walter felt a bit trapped. He wondered if she was waiting for his reply to a question he hadn’t heard her ask. “They were worse than that at Notre Dame,” she said, as though giving him some important fact. Her chin, which retracted into the circle of her face when she was silent, identified itself when she spoke by pushing out two folds of flesh at the top of her neck. This created subsidiary creases of such width that she looked as though she said everything with a sarcastic smile. “Oh but this is history,” she said, oblivious to the irrelevance, “this is what I’ve really come to see.” Her eyes turned upwards, racing along the perpendicular lines like trolleys on tracks. Walter noticed that her name tag was stamped “Neeta Featherstone.” Her eyes returned to him, possessively. “It sort of makes it all, you know, worthwhile, doesn’t it?”

Walter felt quite unable to reply. The abbey hardly needed her endorsement, but he was interested to know what it made worthwhile. Neeta smiled at him confidentially. As though they had shared a private joke. Walter had the awful feeling that she was going to tell him something he didn’t already know. As a means of defence, he tried to categorize her, but this proved to be difficult. The group which had been around the font seemed to have completely vanished and, in any case, despite her name tag, Neeta showed no signs of belonging to that particular group at all. There was something about her that made her seem disembodied. Her tourist’s uniform sat on her with indifference, as though it was a fancy - dress costume. Walter smirked at the idea and was annoyed to observe that she noticed. “You know these parts?” she asked, rather abruptly. “No, I’m from Australia too,” he obliged, curling his toes wit impatience. Her response was unexpected. “You must be used t it ten,” she said. Walter, avoiding her eyes, was surprised to realize that this was an accusation. He felt as though he had been asked to explain what he was doing there, as though he had no right to existence at all. “I beg your pardon?” he responded pointedly. He was not confident that he was strong enough for Neeta. “You seem a bit bored,” she explained, smiling, “you young people don’t need to be concerned with the past, not like us old fossils.”

“Oh, but I’m very interested, “Walter said, earnestly. Her unilateral declaration of intimacy attracted his satirical cooperation. “I’ve always wanted to come here, all my life. It’s a little overwhelming, actually. There’s something about this place what makes you wonder what point there is in being alive.”

Neeta’s eyes gleamed, then travelled back up the perpendicular vaulting. “Oh this is a real treat for me, dear,” she said, “I don't concern myself with all that sort of stuff. I mean we have no choice in the matter, do we?” Walter tried to think of something to say. “Do we?” she repeated, almost imperiously. “No,” he replied, obediently. Her occasional intensity made Walter wonder if she was mad. “How long are you here dear?” she asked with what Walter felt was almost malevolent solicitude. He tried to deflect it by smiling at her. He noticed that the verger had returned to the font and that, although he was staring at him, he was showing no interest in Neeta at all. “A year or two,” he said, warily. The eyes narrowed slightly. Walter watched the verger clasp his hands behind his back, turn a full circle about the font, and disappear. Something made him feel that he had a lot of explaining to do. “Well, you are lucky I must say,” Neeta declared. “We’re on a tour,” she said, eagerly, parking her head at an angle and outing her mouth into gear, preparing to recite. “We’ve been in England for two days and we’re going to Scotland this afternoon. But we were in France last week and we’re going back over there to the continent to Germany Saturday. Then Italy, then Bangkok, then home.” She smiled her congratulations to herself. “We like this sort of thing,” she continued, still smiling purposefully. “Churches tell you so much about yourself; they really bring the past alive, don’t they. I don’t know why, but I feel really comfortable in a church.” Walter felt reproved. “They just go on and on,” she concluded liltingly. “Yeah,” Walter said, a bit gruffly, “but where does that leave us?”

Cassell, Petter, Galpin & Co.: “Magazine of Art Illustrated” (1878)

“Yeees," Neeta sighed. Her eyes focussed on his very carefully indeed.  Walter felt that she had understood his question. He was curious about why he felt that she was pretending she hadn’t. He wanted to find out who she was, but to ask her seemed ridiculous when she was wearing a name tag. “This is history, dear,” she said, indicating with her head to the left and right. “There’s not a lot we can do about it is there. We're just the meat in the sandwich!” She laughed mechanically and hollowly. Walter observed that all of her sentences concluded with almost perfect cadences, like hymns. He smiled politely and looked about him.

Neeta looked at her wristwatch. “I have to be off,” she said. “Off to everywhere,” sang Walter cheerfully. Neeta looked at him silently and hitched up her bag. Her arm moved automatically, as if it belonged to someone else; its action did not disturb the gaze she had turned on him again. Walter blushed to find himself meeting her brilliant eyes as they bore into him. “There they are,” he said enthusiastically, breaking the spell and rising on his toes to point to the group of tourists standing by the turnstile. A bus - driver was counting them. “Oh, I’m not with them,” said Neeta with a reassuring gush intended to convey her thanks for his trouble. She turned and stepped backwards towards the plaque where Walter had first seen her. Nodding goodbye, Walter turned as casually as possible and studied the font. When he looked back he saw that Neeta had gone.

Over by the turnstile the last of the tourists were trooping out of the abbey, their heads turning to the roof, the walls, the windows, soaking it up, making the most of their visit. Walter felt as though he had been left behind. A verger stood at the turnstile, occasionally nodding a brisk, begrudged farewell. When the last tourist had departed, the verger turned crisply and headed towards the font – towards Walter.

“This week Scotland, Germany, Italy, and Bangkok,” Walter sneered to himself, searching for a fraternal remark to make to the verger. “Get off that grave!” the verger snarled at him. Walter jumped. Looking down, he saw that he had been standing on some writing embedded in faded gilt. The verger rounded on him, “remember this is a church!” he hissed, turning and flapping his sleeves. The writing was everywhere that Walter could see. There was no way that the grave could be avoided.Warm with embarrassment, Walter hopped from place to place, trying to follow in the steps of the verger as he led the way across the plaques to the turnstile, where another group of tourists was streaming in from outside.

©     Marc Ellis, 1987

Stranger Than Fiction

LiNQ (Literature in North Queensland)

Thrashing Slacks

By 

Marc Elllis

First published in LiNQ, Volume. 16,  Number 3,  James Cook University, Townsville, 1988, ISSN 0817-458X


The old woman, she hits me with a stick. She gets it from the woodpile, bends down, and she takes a cough of a breath and puts her hand down on her chest.

“You little bugger,” she says and then she turns her head sideways while she puts her hand into the bottom of the wood pile. “You are going to cop it.” When she turns her head her hair at the back looks like stuff, not like hair. It’s all wound around itself and held on with three copper pins. When she’s down there in the wood pile you always know you could do something terrible to her just by leaning over and flicking those little copper pins out of her brown felty fluff – filled hair. But she’s always in her thrashing slacks. They’re a thick yellow (almost gold) and bottle green tartan. They flip around her ankles and are baggy at the knees and at the thighs, but all of a sudden they’re tight as a balloon around her belly. A big green and yellow tartan balloon.

“I told you. I told you to git out of there,” she says heaving herself up. Her dark brown knotted cardigan has bits of bark on the sleeve where she shoved it into the wood pile. “Go on, git.” She knows what she’s doing but she lets you think it’s going to happen almost like an accident, even as she breaks the stick over her knee. It’s off the old fence. It had been dry in January and the moss fell off. In February it was even drier and it started to fall down. In March we picked it up. We needed all the firewood we could get. The place was chilly. She ways complained about the cold but it never seemed to stop her. She cropped up everywhere. In the cellar, where the dirt floor covered the foundations, you could peek up through the floorboards into the rooms upstairs. There was even a hole stopped with a cork from a claret flagon, and you could see quite a lot through that. The telephone wire went from place to place but you couldn’t really tell where the rooms were. That always came as a surprise. At the front of the cellar you could stand up straight. But as you went back it got lower and lower and darker as well so you had to crawl on your hands and knees until right at the back you were flat on your stomach with your arms out in front of you feeling the way because you couldn’t see a thing. You could hear everything the same as when you slide down into the bath under the water and you can hear the boiler clanking and the walls creaking and when someone shuts a door it’s like a bomb’s gone off. Down in the cellar, you could hear her scissor walk. She wears shoes she can get off quickly. Brown sandals with flat heels or black slippers with a milky lining with grey lines and black spots from her naked foot. She has a pair of jewelled Turkish slippers turned up at the toes. She wears them all with the tartan slacks and it’s the slacks you see when you hear the scissor walk.

Slap slap slap slap slap through the house. Slap slap across the breakfast room lino. Clap clap clap clap clap into the kitchen. Bang bang bang. Bang. She throws the pots and pans about, and the baking dish gongs in agony. From room to room the scissor walk keeps her going about her business. She hates the housework. It’s dangerous to get in her way. And in the garden she hacks away at the oleander bushes crowding the entrance to the laundry and she prunes the waterfall of pigface back until you can see the bare brick of the crumbling walls. The despised rugs are hurled through the hall for a beating on the veranda. The flower pots along the front steps and the courtyard are force - fed from the front hose and the fuchsia petals are forced as they drown to wave goodbye by the bulging tension at the rim.

“Come here you little bugger,” she says, waiting by the wood pile. “Come here and be thrashed.” She’s not smiling at all. I walk towards her and know what is going to happen to me. The stick’s end is uneven. It’s part of the bottom of a paling and about a third of it is crusted with dirt. A rusty sliver of metal lies smoothly against its side. She’s appraising it, moving one hand along the stick to feel how dirty it really is. In wet weather she uses the bigger wooden spoon, which is clean. She doesn’t want to dirty her hands or my corduroy trousers. I step back and let her examine her weapon. I can’t stop seeing the gold and green of her tartan slacks, lines of rich, buttery yellow screaming up and down around the fence paling and going out of control around the bulge at the top of her thighs, crashing into each other and bouncing off again.

She takes too long. A shower of cream blossom falls from the almond tree. She doesn’t look up with me but she wants to. She’s annoyed by the blossom at her feet. She doesn’t know it’s in her hair, she’s like her wedding photo on the sideboard and her lips are as shiny and tight and her eyes are as bare. You’d think I’d pity her standing there with the stick, its prickles in her slacks and her head covered by shards of almond blossom from next door’s tree. But there’s no time even to wonder about it. I never even want it to be over with.

Illustration by Alex Frank

“Come back here,” she says leaving the dirty part of the stick at her end. She’s going to grab me again if I don’t. She has a way of doing that, she stretches out her arm, she keeps me ahead of herm but even then I can sell the lotion on her hands and I can get a closeup look at the rings, mellow gold and dirty opaque diamond, that strangle her finger. Her hands are mottled with flecks of blue, and rubbery green veins are plugged with the deliberate manicure she does in her bedroom. Sometimes when I look up through the wine cork’s hole in the floor she is doing her nails. She has a little pot, white and blue with a gold lid, for the expensive cream, two bottles of fluid that clear your nose just to see them, a bright pink filing board, and a blue scarf. She sits with her legs crossed at her dressing table with the radio on and taps her foot up and down beside the hole in the floor. Sometimes she sings, la la la la la, or she mutters the words at the tunes that are blunt from all the people who have listened to them. She beckons her fingers and holds her hands before atomising the nail, giving its fragments a chance to spin into space before they are turned to dust in the carpet at her feet. She sharpens her nails as she files them and they pinch my ear as she grabs it. “I said come back here,” she says.

Her voice has changed now; she’s pretending to be someone else. It’s not her, and we don’t know each other.

“This is for wilful disobedience,” she says looking at her stick, carefully stating each syllable. I do not ask her to clarify.

She generally gets worked up enough after the first few strokes, but this time it takes quite a while. I tend to hop about, and this makes it worse. But if I stand still it takes her longer to stop. The almond blossom quivers in her hair and falls from her shoulders as we go round and round. She has me by the ear. On one side I can feel the cold rings on her knuckle as she pushes me into her. On the other is the coarse cotton of her slacks, and their leaping yellow lines open up and she pushes me through them, into her belly, trapping me there.

© Marc Ellis, 1988

Copenhagen Climate Change Diary, December 6 - 19 2009

Sunday December 6 2009:-

The UN Conference on Climate Change has begun! "110 heads of states and governments will ... attempt to seal a political global climate deal. If a deal is agreed, the UN will aim at transforming it into a legally binding text to replace the Kyoto Protocol as its regulations of emissions expires in 2012."

Monday December 7 2009:-
Oops; well, following the leaking of the white paper which appears to pre-empt the issue of emissions levels for developing countries, it is going to take something equally catastrophic to refocus the gathering on climate change and away from the bullying of developing countries by the "first world". If only the Antarctic ice shelf would collapse right now...

Tuesday December 8 2009:-
Copenhagen is now a five ring circus: (Ring 1) Having requested a collapse of the Antarctic ice shelf yesterday this is exactly what happened: an enormous iceberg is heading for Australia. (Ring 2) Sarah Palin has become aware of the "Hopenhagen" conference and has deftly pointed out that fiddling with emissions levels is an "economic catastrophe" (she's obviously unaware that CO2 is now officially "harmful to the public" in the USA). (Ring 3) The leaking of Denmark's pro-large economy white paper has now enabled Tuvalu to propose an alternative which is for some reason supported by the G77 but which remains disadvantageous to them. (Ring 4) The 'leaked' paper has been revised and now expressly supports Kyoto with a 12 month deadline for a replacement (i.e. do nothing). (Ring 5) In the meantime scientists at the conference have felt the need to issue joint statements with inter-faith groups reassuring the evangelical right wing that climate change is not fiddlin' with Gawd's Wrath. Hallelujah

Wednesday December 9 2009:-
Today’s daily roundup seemed uneventful. Perhaps people took a long lunch after the break to watch warrior Obama spend a few tons of emissions to accept the Peace Prize. But while the NGOs watched Princess Mary narrate a sustainable fashion parade and/or stripped to their underwear (presumably to show how warm it has become) the bosses had a few quiet words to the press. Ban Ki - moon made it clear that he expected a consensual outcome (i.e. he’d had enough of these leaks and would be banging heads) and Yvo de Boer (executive secretary of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) in case you didn’t know) said all he wanted was agreement on: (1) how much developed countries would reduce emissions, (2) how much developing countries would limit development, (3) who is going to pay for it all and (4) how the money was going to be managed. At least they might as well reduce the scope before the heads of government arrive next week.

Thursday December 10 2009:-
OK, so now we have an official draft agreement courtesy of the UN climate bureaucrats which would cut emissions by 50% by 2050 but don’t get excited because (a) it is one of those documents like a D.I.Y. divorce paper where it all depends on what is put in the gaps by all parties concerned; (b) at present those parties do not include the USA, China or India so it’s like children trying to get their parents divorced against their will (c) the chief G77 negotiator walked out of the meetings saying “things are not going well.” So much for that. The good news is that after the po-faced UN head of climate change Yvo de Boer said that any Copenhagen agreement has to be all about money, the European union hob nobbed and quickly came up with 30b Euros over two years (this is a third of the total estimated requirement) as if they had already thought it through. On the other hand, the African Union negotiator (Meles Zenawi) folded his arms and said the outcome of the entire conference depends on what the major economies pay for and the Americans and the Chinese said they aren’t paying for anything and engaged in an hilarious “I know you are so what am I?” exchange about each other. One wonders what Sarah Palin is so worried about. As Hopenhagen turns to Hopenhell her bit will be biting into Greenland’s sub-tropical tundra in no time at all. Maybe this is what the Danes wanted all along. They’re so clever.

Friday December 11 2009:-
Today’s summary was accidentally deleted!

Saturday December 12 2009:-
With the unofficial (non combatant) delegates and eco-tourists working themselves into a frenzy on the cobblestones of Copenhagen this weekend Connie Hedegaard, the Conference President called a press conference to state that “we have made considerable progress over the course of the first week” which in context is one of those comments like “you do not look fat.” The press corps (not being sure what this meant) probed and were informed that the progress to which she referred concerned previously unnoticed discussions on wind and solar power and the expansion of forests, but Madame President clearly avoided claiming progress on the subject of who is going to pay for caps on emissions. The gap-filled circulating white paper keeps circulating but the African Union is doing its bit to define the issues. They want the industrialised nations to pay 5% of GDP. This would require the USA to come up with $780 billion over two years (compared to the EU’s 33b Euros), so as the African Union said yesterday, “things are not going well.” Obama, having gone home from Norway to refuel his enormous plane, flies back to Denmark next week with many of his co-heads of government. They must be wondering what they are going to do when they get there. Say yes to 5% of GDP? Say no? Suggest another draft text? Their way will have been prepared by no less than the Archbishop of Canterbury (no stranger to schism) who will preach tomorrow to Queen Margarethe and her family on the topic of loving the environment. Maybe divine enlightenment will ensue. Maybe it won’t. As delegates are no doubt united in anticipation of the conference’s end, it’s beginning to hardly matter.

Sunday December 13 2009:-
Despite the Conference’s day of rest today 200 unofficial conference delegates sang their eco-protest-songs in the Scandinavian slammer while the official delegates brewed enough trouble to keep them going for the rest of the week. The Archbishop of Canterbury said in church this morning that the conference outcomes were being put at risk by "fear and selfishness," and you don't need to be a Ugandan Bishop to realise he probably got that right. The ubiquitous Meles Zenawi (leader of the African delegations), who has cast a spell of doom on the conference’s outcome every day since it began, proved his consistency by announcing today that he would sink any agreement if it did not sufficiently account for African financial needs (remember they want a mere 5% of GDP), and then revealed that he had China and India on side to give his threat meaning. In the meantime the draft text fiasco continued when the original (mostly white) G8 countries went off to further negotiations at a secret dinner to which no-one else (i.e. China, India, Mexico, Brazil or South Africa) was invited, thereby adding insult to injury. An optimist might say they were trying to exert pressure on the USA to show some leadership, but if so they failed. Back at the ranch, Conference President Connie Hedegard (who said yesterday that great progress had been made without iterating any examples) said not enough progress had been made and that everyone had to hurry up. Actually, quite a few people said this including Tony Blair (but it’s not clear why he said it or two whom; it’s possible that he’s giving press conferences to himself). Almost everyone who spoke to a reporter today revelled in the fact that there’s no text for the heads for government to sign when they arrive this week but no one knows what to do about it. In any case Connie can’t hurry up anything. What with secret dinners for the rich, and threats by the poor to tear up an agreement that doesn’t even exist, while the developing giants of India and China make mischief in the peanut gallery, it’s fairly safe to say by now that China, India and the African states came to Copenhagen with about as much good faith as the USA, and that is saying something.

Monday December 14 2009:-
Gordon Brown decided that he would arrive before all the other heads of government so as to prove himself in Copenhagen the leader he has signally failed to be at home. Or so he thought a few months ago when his program was arranged. Now he’s simply going to be first on the scene of the Climate Change train wreck. Not being renowned for his “people skills,” it’s unlikely that his presence is going to be an effective triage. “Train wreck” is no empty metaphor; this is precisely how the conference was described by no less than Jairam Ramesh, India’s Minister for the Environment who helpfully pointed out that only two days remain before a text is needed for the HOGs to sign, and that no convergence of views is in sight. Ed Miliband (the UK Climate Minister and younger brother of Foreign Secretary and Hilary Clinton’s love interest, David Miliband) was equally blunt and told conference delegates to “get your act together.” The rest of Monday slumped into a miasma of sulks about Saturday night’s secret dinner to which no one was invited but those whom the Danes believed to be worth cultivating (i.e. none of the developing or poor countries). Five whole hours of negotiating time were lost on account of this invitation list. In these circumstances Vice President Al Gore’s charismatic and crowd pleasing appearance could not fulfil its function as a curtain raiser to a freshly drafted global agreement. By now a draft agreement should have been almost ready for Gordon Brown to pass off as his own work. Instead, Gore’s irrefutable evidence of global warming simply highlighted the absence of a draft text and showed how little notice has been taken by governments of the fundamental point of this conference: that it is time for global regulations to effect climate change.

Tuesday December 15 2009:-
The second phase of the conference began today with the arrival of the first of what will become a torrent of celebrities seeking to “expand the brand” by aligning themselves with what they thought was going to be a successful example of populist political change. Instead, “Hopenhagen” has turned out to be an humiliating spectacle of bitter public enmity unseen since the spoils were divided at the end of both World Wars. Gordon Brown arrived as promised, huffing and puffing, and has not been seen since, presumably because he’s too terrified to come out of his hotel room and face the Africans. Prince Charles arrived as well (separate plane) and gave the keynote address to the second phase of the talks in which he steered clear of schism and pronounced all delegates “profoundly weary.” Schism claimed Al Gore when his own research scientist contradicted everything Gore said in his speech yesterday (there must be something in the water). Arnold Schwazenegger (not an obvious candidate for emissions martyr) urged delegates to “effect a global transformation,” a phrase which really has to be heard in his unique version of English, and Nick Griffin, leader of the British Fascists, made a quaint and rather touching misjudgement when he denounced the conference as a meeting of “mass murderers.” He believes emissions issues are the product of a vast left wing conspiracy, but if he was assuming that those he was accusing of murder were trying to do something to prevent global warming he cannot have read the papers last week and seen how they were in effect doing exactly the opposite. It isn’t easy for a neo - Fascist to find that he really is expressing the opinion of the silent majority. It makes them feel a little too conspicuous. But as it was, the loony Right Wing has paved the way for the next three days when the world’s leaders will arrive to find that there is nothing for them to do but state the obvious (like Prince Charles), claim to be rescuing victory from the jaws of defeat (like Gordon Brown), make wild and crazy statements (like Nick Griffin) and undergo long photo ops with the clueless celebrities who thought that they could ride the climate gravy train without the entire world observing the carbon guzzling engines which are pulling it.

Wednesday December 16 2009:-
When Connie Hedegaard resigned as conference president today and was replaced by the Danish Prime Minister Lars Lokke Rasmussen no one seemed to notice, so irrelevant has leadership and process management become in the melange of self interest playing out its rage against climate change in Copenhagen. Apart from the Danish police who have succeeded in acquiring an unexpected reputation for brutality, no one achieved anything inside the conference venue, where observer delegates were shut out of the venue after the talks broke down completely for the second time in 72 hours and the third time since the talks began. It seems that negotiators could not negotiate until they had defined what it was they were supposed to discuss given the extent of their conflict and the absence of any text which could form the basis of an agreement. Gordon Brown abdicated as global patriarch more or less as soon as he had crowned himself and said the conference was heading for “deadlock.” David Miliband (Ed’s big brother) said it was heading for farce, as if it hasn’t been a farce for days already, and Yvo de Boer, the UN head of climate change, compared it to a cable car stalled over a ravine. But, he said, the ride would be faster when the car began to move again (quite right: gravity can be compelling when you move away from the edge of a ravine). Ban-ki Moon has distanced himself from the conference and kept a low profile since last Friday when he warned delegates to stop wasting time and get on with a draft agreement. So it’s more a relief than a shock to hear that delegates today are openly discussing reconvening in Mexico next summer. No one is even suggesting any more that there will be any significant outcome on Friday. Obama might as well stay at home.

Thursday December 16 2009:-
We all knew that when the top brass arrived in Copenhagen they were going to have to save face, tread water or whatever seeing as there is no agreement to talk about, or more specifically nothing written down in five pages or less for them to sign. So President Sarkozy et al have done the expected and whacked those feckless delegates over the head and told them they have failed to fulfill their historic destiny by bickering and being uncooperative. But something a bit odder is going on. It began yesterday when John Kerry in his usual electrifying manner stated that the US would pass significant CO2 legislation only if the conference would agree on what that legislation ought to say. Well, this was strange considering that the USA has shown no interest in meaningful C02 legislation, or what the nonexistent draft text ought to say, or in showing leadership at the conference itself. And in any case the last thing a senator from Massachusetts is going to be able to do is predict what congress will do, at any time in the future, and the very, very last thing the US Congress will do is follow the recommendation of a gang of foreigners. Kyoto made that point quite clearly. So Kerry was being specious, as usual; but it is impossible to find words to describe Secretary of State Hilary Clinton who arrived today and told the conference the USA would provide $100b per year by 2020. Well, this is a lot. It's almost (but not quite) enough to make the Africans overlook the Egg Foo Yong they missed out on last Saturday night when the sacked conference president left them off her dinner invitation list. But hang on; there's a catch. This money would be provided (courtesy of the Bank of China one assumes), ONLY IF the conference agreed on an acceptable draft text within 24 hours. Call me old fashioned, but isn’t this a bit of an obvious abrogation of responsibility? If there is anything going on at the conference it is a massive leadership vacuum into which pour 200 of the world’s, um, leaders. And what do they say? “I cannot lead in a leadership vacuum. You lot can’t make the decisions but I can, and because you can’t, I won’t.” It’s very strange indeed. Has anyone thought about leading by example? Or making a commitment that is not contingent on a flock of pigs flying to hell at the precise moment that it freezes over.

Friday December 19 2009:-
At midnight on Friday (Denmark time) the USA, China, South Africa and India agreed to an “accord” which sets 2 degrees C as an average temperature increase, proposes a review in 2016, contributes $USD 30b to developing countries for 2010-2012 and promises $USD100b a year by 2020 without saying where it is coming from. It confirms the continuation of the Kyoto Protocol and the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change and commits developed countries to a reduction in emissions of 80% by 2050 but does not determine reductions in the shorter term. Mitigation in developed countries will be measured, reported and verified according to guidelines yet to be determined by parties to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC). Naturally, the major environmental organizations have made it clear that they deplore the accord but, when it is recalled how far gone was any hope for agreement within a few days of the conference’s opening, it says something for the signatories that they stuck it out and concluded even this, the slightest of results, even if it is a mere fragment of what was expected and a molecule of what was hoped for. Despite the continued obliteration of previously agreed points as Friday night wore on, it appears that the signatory heads of government did rise to the occasion and attempt to break their deadlock, though China is being blamed for being disproportionately obdurate as regards international monitoring. However many heads of government effectively abandoned the talks by refusing to extend their visit to continue negotiations and left Denmark hours before the accord was concluded. Their departure, as well as the enormous gaps in detail which remain (sourcing funds, assigned emissions levels, monitoring, reporting), leave the accord looking very much like the notorious “leaked text” which emerged almost as soon as the conference began and which alienated the developing countries from the negotiations at that very early stage. An EU spokesman said at least the accord “keeps our goals and hopes alive,” but Yvo de Boer, the UN Climate Change head, made the telling observation that it remained to be seen which countries would support it. Unless most of them do, and reconvene to fill the gaps, the present signatories might keep their hopes and dreams alive but they would be doing this on their own, and it might be all they are doing about climate change until it is too late to do anything effective at all.