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CALLASSA
Invicta Veritate
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And I was with Callassa
Immeasurably Beautiful with Murderous Eyes
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CALLASSA
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With haste I had made my way down the stairs and surreptitiously positioned myself outside the door of the lounge where everyone had assembled. It was unusual that she’d had guests at mid-day, they usually came during the evenings. There were three unfamiliar and unremarkable cars parked on the asphalt (what wouldn’t be unremarkable next to hers?) and as far as I could make out, there were three male guests. I didn’t want my presence to be discovered because I would feel stupid, if that were the case. However, I did try to peep into the room but the door was only ajar a half inch or so. Therefore I couldn’t see anyone. I found myself picturing people from hearing the sound of their voices;
One of the voices was saying, “Your petulance, Miss Canali, suggests to us that you want to right the ills of the whole world.” I couldn’t make up my mind whether what was being said was in protest or intended as insult. There was an aggressive force in the voice and I immediately took to disliking it. He was referring to her as being ‘petulant’. My temper moved beyond its normal gentle simmer. Why shouldn’t she right the ills of the world? There were plenty of them.
“Miss. Canali,” the same voice continued. “Pardon my observation, but I see much vanity watered by money here in your own realm. How can you make a case for what other people are like?”
“I thought the subject was a movie?” she countered and with great assertion. “What has what I own got to do with it? I don’t see actors living as paupers, just because they perform those roles? Do I? Well?”
“Miss. Canali…..”
“Will you stop calling me that!” Signorina. Grazie mille!’
“Fine. Whatever. As I was going to say, actors don’t demand changes to their scripts on account of some personal and hypocritical ideals they hold.”
A different voice interjected with, “Callassa, I think there’s a need for calm. If I might just say, we have to take into consideration that there’s a political climate inseparable from the marketing requirement of a story. Some things are just not in vogue at the moment. The investment can’t be jeopardised because you want to throw your own unacceptable sentiments at the world.”
“So you want to avoid what is true for some kind of dumb action movie? Is that it? You can’t stand tears but you delight in bullets raining down on all and sundry. Perhaps we should make a cartoon and be done with it!”
“No that’s not merely ‘it’. But you must realise that action is what sells. Thoughts and confrontational statements do not. You can’t be confrontational toward those who you want to sell to.”
“My point is why can’t we be honest? Being honest is more than stabbing and shooting with the odd shriek and smile or two thrown in. I do not care for glossing over humiliation and pain with images of stupid gung-ho men pleasing other men, just because it’s what men do.”
“We’re talking about the First World War. Callassa, you’re simplifying, in fact you’re not even on cue. I have not a clue where you’re coming from and haven’t we been through this already?”
“Yes, we have. You think I’m simplifying, do you? You just want to satisfy the lust for heroism by dressing it differently. Instead of the Americans doing it, it’s the British. What’s the difference?”
“If you can’t see our position, Callassa, I’m afraid we can’t work together. That’s jolly well all there is. We’re done here. You are out of the frame.”
“Good, and look, I’m ‘jolly well’ not interested in being a party to the reinforcing of contemporary ideologies of domination and enslavement. My talent is much better applied somewhere else. Do you ‘jolly well’ understand?”
“Have you even read the scripts? Have you studied the history? Have you? I fail to see why you’re being so critical. Our stance is, what you’re asking cannot be accommodated. Not in the least way possible.”
“Fine. We’ll leave it at that. As far as I am concerned there’s nothing in this effort for me. You don’t value my contribution because you think me too intelligent. Go to Hell. Go on. Get out of my house and take those stupid computers with you. And another thing before you go scuttling off, I am going to make sure that the management company disengage themselves from you. You are just a bunch of American-wannerbes without the pre requisites and whose watered down offering of that we can well do without. You’re even a contamination on their art.”
I was still listening but there was silence. It was a silence that was surely being seeped with animosity. I wondered if they were staring at each other in a hostile way? Then I heard the moving of feet and belongings being collected. Nothing was being said. She hadn’t left the room yet. I thought she might have chosen to leave first but apparently not. I would have to tip toe away and return when they had left. There were steps being taken toward the door, I had to hurry.
“She doesn’t like being told what to do and talking to her is like having tea with Beria.” The comment came from a tall man with a grey beard voiced as the three came bustling out. I hoped he wouldn’t say anything really insulting while I was in earshot and who on earth is Beria anyway? Maybe finding out was unwise. I watched them. They were executives, or so I thought, because they didn’t have that ‘creatively different’ bearing about them. One did have untidy hair. Maybe she was the culprit? I jest, I hoped so anyway. She hadn’t shown them out. I think she had used an expletive or two at their backs. It sounded like it.
I continued watching them make their way to the door. One was carrying a large leather bag. I was pleased they were leaving. When they were almost gone I made an appearance. I wanted to go sit with her and find out what was wrong. As I opened the door, I saw her sitting on a sofa with a downcast look on her face. She acknowledged me by patting the vacant space beside her. As I was close, I saw that her eyes were murderous and I wondered for how long they would remain that way. I sat close to her, in fact as close as I could. She didn’t turn her head. Now I was wondering what the three had thought of her, the demonstrably talented and immeasurably beautiful woman, sitting in this ornate room with a huge and resplendent portrait of herself for all to see. What better message is there to invite a response? I am referring to the latter (portrait). I touched her hand. It was a gentle touch.
“What was that about?” I asked her, softly, as was the touch of my hand on hers. I hoped she wouldn’t be unpleasant toward me. I was not assured.
She took a deep breath and exhaled the air in contemptuous fashion. Without relinquishing her intense train of thought, she said, and in bitter fashion, “I can’t escape from the control of men. I can’t bear it.”
“Is it about the movie?” I asked her, the movie now defunct as far as she was concerned.
She wasn’t going to answer straight away. There was much happening in her mind and she was mostly within the grip of its depth of detail.
I sat, waiting.
“A man’s control of a man’s world,” came her eventual disclosure.
“They can’t be your equal,” I told her with all the surety I could muster. “You have the advantage, so don’t worry.”
“The fact that they judge me because I am a woman makes me hate them. It’s as though I’m obsolete. I’ll show them.”
“I am sure Stephen Lewis doesn’t think you’re obsolete, nor anyone else of importance. How could they?”
“Honey, I am determined to say what I ******* want, by whatever means. I don’t care who I upset, because that’s my intention. I don’t care for affectation. I don’t need the money. I made money by what is beyond their never grown up, time-dependent banality.”
I was looking at her exposed arms, their slender and satin skin. There was a yellow jade bracelet on her wrist. Her hair was held in a pleated coil by a jade clasp. Had those who’d gone really just regarded her as a character in some kind of sex play? That she was a woman, thus her role irrevocably cast? Surely not merely that? She was an ocean of unexplored mysteries, but then and again, I had heard them make reference to ‘market forces’. I was thinking over what she’d just said regarding their ‘time dependent banality’. She’d meant a great deal by this and I didn’t have the time to fully consider its detail. I decided to ask her something.
“Why not make a movie about you?…I mean, a movie that possesses your spirit?”
She turned her head toward me. I thought her eyes were now translucent and at odds with her state of mind.
“Lives are debased by fear and terror,” she said to me. “They are all material bankrupts, all of them bereft of the true substance of life. The ones who are regarded as exemplary make me pewk.”
“We’re inmates of another world? Is that what you mean?”
“Yes.”
“With only one profile? We can’t go with the flow, just for their money?”
“Of course not. You didn’t mean that, did you?”
“No.”
“Why did you ask it then? I need you to support me.”
“I do, really, as much as possible.”
“Good, dearest honey taste, I feel contaminated, what can we do? I need to break free and rid myself of this.”
“You know, I think the same way as you and really, it’s because of you. I have been taught a great deal and it’s led me in certain directions, to think in certain ways about things. You changed it all.”
“I’m your teacher now. Forget what anyone has told you, it’s not worth knowing. You live and breathe me, no one else. I am everything.”
“That’s all right,” was my answer.
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I hadn’t asked her for the detail of what the disagreement had been about. It was obviously related to her wanting to change the script for the movie, or add to it. Perhaps even take an acting role. The project was still in its infancy and would remain there, as far as she was concerned. I was going to suggest that she arrange a get-together for the people she knew. I was thinking of those who were connected to the opera, the theatre and such in the ways she had been. Such a creative mingling would surely be better for her than what she’d been doing. She had been on the telephone for almost an hour. I guessed her call was related to the spanner she’d promised to throw in the works. I didn’t care for the whole thing. I would not ask her yet. My doing so would only re-ignite the bad feeling. My thoughts now were that she had wanted to introduce the subject of execution for cowardice and the myriad dynamics surrounding it, all unsettling in the extreme. I question why this topic wasn’t marketable? Why it was politically insensitive? Such a topic viewed from a woman’s perspective, especially hers, her very deeply particular emotion-tide, it would contain incalculable pathos, enormous depth of response. Perhaps she wanted to state that, if women were in control, there would not be the conflicts that lead to such abominations and attacks on precious freedom and dignity? This does accord with what she has said in the past. Actually, she has voiced a great deal more than that.
I was alone in the room where the disagreement had taken place. I was sitting in a deep armchair, positioned so to observe the portrait of her on the wall. Truth be told, I had shifted the chair so I could admire the portrait fully, so that she would loom above me and everything else in the room, not that I needed her portrait to do that.
The portrait does bring back emotions I used to feel long ago. I am gazing at her representation, but there is far more involved in my responding than that of appreciation. The space is being seeped with something, that I can’t describe. I will try by saying that the force of her brown-eyed gaze disturbs the equilibrium of the onlooker. In my case, I am taken first of all, into a motherly contemplation with her, to share with a serene, inner regarding that is bound with her capacity to give birth. Then, there are novel images that flock into my brain. They are not images in the conventional sense. I am seeing her as made of music. Does that make sense? As though the music and I, are in a different dimension, a different life form altogether.
I pulled my thoughts away because I wanted to dwell more on the experience of her I knew. This woman was my thought, what pricerless treasure. What undeniable requirement to give oneself totally, without condition. Why not so for the rest of the world? That they become as I, inferior to and controlled by a woman? I think if many had the opportunity to know her they would become so. She is more than beautiful; she is more than gender, more than human. She is the elusive, the unearthly candor that does haunt me so. I was asking myself why those who had left earlier hadn’t felt this way? One of them had likened being with her to ‘sharing time with Beria’, who I discovered later and after looking it up, was the infamous head of the Soviet Secret Service. Surely a polar opposite to her, if there ever was one? *
* Lavrenti Pavlovich Beria (1899-1953). Infamous Soviet Secret Police Chief. Minister of Internal Affairs, under Stalin.
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What can be written regarding the losing of the object of love, of idolatry? That she should die and thus, leave me alone here? Why this dark question? Perhaps the answer is that within the asking there is inevitability. I cannot take for granted our time like this, these days, these glorious upon glorious days. I want to impregnate each least division of an hour with what I feel for her, but I cannot transcend. I wish I could halt the passing of time and we together, become as the portrait I am gazing toward, fixed, un-changing, without ever knowing of human life’s ephemeral substance. What kind of knowing would that be? My thinking in this way is making me depressed. I know absolutely that when she dies, I shall, within her leaving stream, so too become that condition. I only understand human life’s meaning, its incalculably great experience, through her and only her. It has always been this way for me, ever since I could make sense of the world that I was born into. And…I have surely got twenty years belonging to her and perhaps a few more beyond those . . . with beauty’s child, with her.
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Until next time and our affair, she and I, in days of summer-warm delight and the later moon’s bronze hue upon her adorable face.
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And I was with Callassa
Immeasurably Beautiful with Murderous Eyes
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Beneath an English Sky
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Philip my sweetness, my lover. I know you like that description. There is a substance within love that I am unable to describe. I can say though . . . or in a better way tell you; the hours are overflowing with what takes me away completely and through the experience I have become a person immeasurably finer
CALLASSA
XXX
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CALLASSA
Invicta Veritate