Read Online Maria Callas: The Woman Behind the Legend by Arianna Huffington - Free Book Online

behaving as she had assumed it would. There was little camaraderie, and still less love, between Maria and her colleagues. And Maria as always, in response to what she felt to be withdrawal, denial and rebuffs, threw herself even more obsessively into her work. She adopted an aloofness that hid the pain from the world and to a large extent from herself.
    While Maria became more and more the wholly absorbed artist at work, the war continued. First there was the bombing. Athens itself was not bombed, but whenever bombs fell on its port, Piraeus, the sound of the sirens pierced the air in Athens, and everybody was ordered to the shelters. Maria and Jackie ran first to the canary room, picked up a cage each and followed Madame Evangelia down the 120 steps to the cellar. The other tenants, running down the stone steps, some barefoot, others in their pajamas, would overtake the two young women with their canaries, waving their arms and making loud, reprimanding noises at time-wasting frivolities like canaries. Maria never let her fear of air raids or of Nazi soldiers on the streets affect her actions, but once in the shelter, the cellar door firmly closed behind her, she was always violently sick.
    Food was the other great problem. Since Greece had always relied on imports for a large proportion of her food, the Allied blockade and enemy indifference caused great hardship, which the Red Cross tried to relieve without much success. All food was rationed and black markets had sprouted up in odd places. The main black market was up in the mountains, a long, exhausting walk or an almost equally long ride in fragile little cars drawn by temperamental woodburning locomotives. Sometimes Maria went with her mother and sometimes she went alone, walking home laden with whatever vegetables, chickens or rabbits she was able to buy.
    One day in the early summer of 1941, when Maria returned from the mountains, she discovered that the Germans had issued another of their endless series of proclamations, this time against any kind of noise both in public places and in private homes. She exploded, and this became the order she most loved to disobey, with fervor and bravado. On the very evening that the Germans issued their proclamation, she moved her piano up to the door of the balcony and sat there playing and singing at the top of her voice to the great relish of the passersby who broke into sudden, spontaneous applause. So infectious was the enthusiasm that many of the Italians and some of the Germans in the street joined in.
    Throughout the war, Maria’s voice proved to be a magic gift which gained for her friends, food, protection. The first war friend Maria’s voice brought her was a young Italian soldier who heard her sing when he was walking past her open window in Patissiou Street. He waited until she came out on the balcony and talked to her, full of emotion at the memories from home that her Italian singing had evoked. They met a few times after that; they would sit on a park bench, Maria singing his favorite arias from Italian opera, and he unable to hold back his tears. He would give her food from his rations, and Maria would go away and hide in doorways, tear the package open and eat the food then and there. Her mother was furious that she hardly ever brought anything back, but Maria was too hungry, too lonely and feeling too unloved to share.
    Her voice had brought her another war friend: Colonel Mario Bovalti from Verona. At first he started calling at Patissiou 61 and accompanying Maria on the piano; gradually, he began bringing little gifts, sharing his rations with the family and giving Maria a great deal of attention and some much-needed love.
    In the autumn of 1941 her voice saved her life. One night a Greek air force officer, a friend of the family, came to Patissiou 61 with two disguised British officers who had escaped from prison. Evangelia knew that the punishment for sheltering fugitives from German justice was death, and