(Now it is tough to do consumption well in opera because singers tend to be heavily-built and have strong voices. But let that pass.) Alfredo deeply loves her and has given up fettucini for her. (And you know those two were inseparable!) The two are living in a villa outside of Paris when Alfredo's father visits Violetta and says that she has to call the affair off because Alfredo's sister's fiance's family objects to the name Violetta is giving the family. Violetta agrees to leave her lover and return to her life of partying. She writes him a note and leaves.
Now the second scene of the second act is really dramatic. How can I convey it to you? I know! Think of Alfredo and Violetta as being played by Bogart and Bergman a la CASABLANCA.
Alfredo attends a gambling party when who should walk in with a count on her arm but Violetta?
Alfredo: Of all the gambling tables in all the parties in Paris, she walks into this one!
He is more and more insulting as the night wears on, beating the count at cards and finally provoking the count to challenge him to a duel, knowing as an older man the count hasn't a chance. Violetta asks him not to kill the count...
Alfredo: Tell me who was it you left me for? Was it the count, or were there others in between? Or aren't you the kind that tells? [pause] Why are you here? To tell me why you ran out on me at the villa? Violetta: Yes.
Alfredo: Well, you can tell me now, I'm reasonably sober. Violetta: I don't think I will, Alfredo. Alfredo: Why not? After all, I got stuck with the wine bill. I think I'm entitled to know.
Violetta: Now I see what has happened to you. The Alfredo I knew at the villa, I could have asked him not to kill the count. He'd understand. But the one who looked at me with such hatred... well, I'll be leaving the party soon and we'll never see each other again. We knew very little about each other when we were in love at the villa. If we leave it that way, maybe we'll remember those days and not Paris, not tonight.
[She breaks down.]
Violetta: Alfredo, Alfredo, we loved each other once. If those days meant anything at all to you....
Alfredo: I wouldn't bring up the villa if I were you. It's poor salesmanship.
Violetta: Please. Please listen to me. If you knew what really happened, if you only knew the truth.... Alfredo: I wouldn't believe you no matter what you told me. You'd say anything to get what you want.
[Flash back to happy days at the villa. Drinking wine together. Falling in love. Then Alfredo getting the farewell note, his heart breaking. Crumpling it up and throwing it down.]
Well, to make a long story short, or silly at any rate, Alfredo's father tells him that Violetta was acting out of nobility all along. In the next act Alfredo rushes to the dying Violetta to tell her:
Alfredo: We'll always have the villa. We didn't have it, we'd lost it, until we met again. We got it back last night.
Violetta rushes to Alfredo only to die in his arms.
Now if this touching ending seems to have familiar chords, it is because it is reminiscent of the following night's opera in the same opera house, Puccini's LA BOHEME.
Yes, here on the same stage THE TWO TUBERCULAR TITANS OF ITALIAN OPERA, on consecutive nights competing for the coveted Palm d'Eath Award! And in the event of a tie they will be together on Sunday on one colossal stage: Violetta *and* Mimi, duking it out in sudden death competition.'
We were close enough to the stage to see that Violetta and Alfredo looked like they were in their forties--a bit old for Alfredo to be under his father's thumb. Mark also points out that the opera is missing one critical scene: the scene in which Alfredo's father tells Alfredo that he (the father) had been the one who'd gotten Violetta to leave Alfredo and now he's sorry he did that. Why Verdi (or F. M. Piave, the librettist) didn't write this is a mystery, at least to us.
This opera was sung in Italian, but with such strong Estonian accents that we had difficulty making out the words. 'Evelyn says this as if she understood Italian,' Mark says, but Evelyn points out that a lot of Italian words are similar to English or Spanish, which she *does* understand.
After the opera we walked back to the hotel. The movie was THIEF Of HEARTS, which didn't excite us much so we went to bed.
May 21, 1994: Rainy and ugly again. And that was just the breakfast. Luckily all we have to do is take a taxi to the boat and hope Helsinki's weather is better. The Eurovision forecast for Helsinki is cloudy and cold, but not rainy.
We grabbed a taxi to the ferry, 60 EEK rather than the 25 we paid yesterday, probably because we called for one rather than taking one from a stand. We got there at 10:00 as they requested. We had been told it was an 11:00 boat, but when we got there the woman who gave us our boarding cards said it was 10:30 in the next building--the Estline building. At this point we are totally confused as to what line we bought our ticket from.
We changed the last of our krooni to Finnish markka. Math problem: If US$300 gets you 1188 Lithuanian litu, and 550 Lithuanian litu gets you 1774 EEK, and 336 EEK gets you FIM 134, and a cup of coffee on the boat costs FIM 5, what does the coffee cost in United States dollars? Answer: US$0.98. (The working exchange rate when changing directly seems to be about FIM 5.20 per US dollar, but in fact the rate we got from Visa was FIM 5.34 per US dollar.)
What's to report? They checked our passports and about 10:15 we boarded the ferry. Seats are assigned in bird fashion--wherever on the boat you can find a perch, you perch. There are more places to perch than there are passengers, so there's no problem. There is a floor with snack bars and a duty-free shop, but all the prices are much like they'd be in Finland--maybe four times what things would cost in the Baltic states.
We sailed at 11:00 after all. The seating was a bit more crowded than it might have been had the weather been good, but no one wanted to venture outside.
The boat is run like a floating party with lots and lots of big glasses of beer. As we left Mark went around snapping pictures on deck. Then we wrote in our logs and even napped a bit.
Right now as Mark writes we are entering Helsinki harbor. We seem to have passed an old fortification and a submarine out of but beside the water. Some colorful sailboats passed by us and headed for the mouth of the harbor.
Mark describes our approach: 'Seagulls fly over the deck playing tag with the boat. They fly right in the front of the boat, probably just to prove to themselves that they can do it. I remember when we were in Africa we'd be riding a Land Rover at high speed. Gazelles would go out of their way to cross the road six feet in front of the Land Rover, just to prove to themselves and female gazelles that they could do it. Or they may be signaling predators that they will not be easy prey and some other prey would be easier. I guess you never really know an animal's motives deep down. In that same part of the world is Mt. Kilimanjaro. I am told that close to the western summit there is the dried and frozen carcass of a leopard. No one has explained what the leopard was seeking at that altitude. But it would not surprise me at all to find out that the leopard had something he wanted to prove himself and did not survive the effort. Now I think we are closing in on our destination. We seem to be in a fairly large natural harbor almost entirely encircled by land. I guess we are about half an hour later than expected, and by the size of the beers people are sitting down with they do not expect we will be rushing off the ferry really soon. I think we may arrive all afternoon. Jeez, does everybody in Finland drink beer and smoke? There is no place on this boat to get away from cigarette smoke.'
'There is one of those plastic-ball pools right near us where children swim in three-inch plastic balls rather than water. Every time the door opens, two or three plastic balls come flying out. I guess when a kid drowns in plastic balls, bubbles come up shaped like water,' Mark adds.
Well, it is still going to be hard to read signs here. Finnish is related to Estonian and very little else. Hungarian fits in there also. They all have elements of Mongolian left over from stragglers from the Golden Horde. Mark has been keeping a sharp lookout in case any are still around.
Of course, Finland is officially bilingual--Finnish and Swedish--a holdover from the three hundred years of Swedish rule, no doubt. So every place has two names, one Finnish and one Swedish. We will try to list both at the first mention, but use only the Finnish from then on. We figure the Swedish-speakers will get all the names in Sweden so this balances out.
Mark admits, 'Well, now, this was stupid. I suggested we move down to the deck we will leave from. Everybody and his brother is on the same deck and nobody is moving. It's like Times Square on New Year's Eve, only not so festive. It is now 16:09. We must have started entering the harbor before 15:00. And our arrival continues. No wonder people were in no hurry. At 16:14 Evelyn starts to put down her bag and almost immediately the crowd starts to move.'
And later, 'Well, it was tough to get a crowd that big to move and once it moved it would have been even tougher to stop it. I am glad I did not drop my log.'
Passport check was little more than letting the man see my picture. Luggage check was ... well ... it wasn't. It seems as if this year not too many Americans are leaving explosives about. Good thing, too.
In Riga the Americans we had met recommended the Eurohostel. Our 'Lonely Planet' guide 'Scandinavian & Baltic Europe on a Shoestring' didn't offer a lot of other choices, so we decided to try it. We'd like to use the phone but we have only the paper money we got changing the Estonian krooni to Finnish markka, and it turns out there is no currency exchange office here, just a money machine that dispenses only paper money. If we'd known we could have gotten some Finnish change on the boat. Evelyn got change in the cafe and we called the Eurohostel. They did have space, doubles for FIM 110 (about US$20) per person per night. They couldn't tell us the best way to get there by bus, but said a taxi would probably be about FIM 40-50.
We grabbed a taxi. It was only FIM 35, because it wasn't all that far, but it was cold and it was worth it not having to carry the baggage the kilometer or so (or more if we got lost, which we usually do).
Checking in was complicated. This was because we did not have IYHF (International Youth Hostel Foundation) cards. It was FIM 110 each per night without the card and FIM 95 with. How much was the card? It took the woman a while to figure this out. (Since it was early in the season she had never done this before.) It was FIM 90 each. Mark looked at the room and pronounced it acceptable. Then it took the woman a long time to write up the cards. First she wrote up the wrong card, then had to redo it on the right card. We were supposed to have photographs for them, but didn't. She gave them to us anyway. (We thought we could get photographs made at the train station, four for FIM 20, and use two of them to renew our passports later this year, but that's another story yet to come.) Since we planned on staying at the af Chapman in Stockholm, we figured we'd save something like US$5 each.
Meanwhile the entire Estonian Cathedral Choir from Tallinn was waiting for us to finish so they could check in. The woman leading them told us they were performing a mass tomorrow at the Cathedral at 17:00.
The rooms are very Spartan: just two beds, a table, some strange cabinets, and that is it. The sheets are paper products. The whole thing looks much like a dormitory room from college. The 'facilities' are down the hall on each floor--again, very dorm-like. There is also a kitchen on each floor, including refrigerated lockers. Not luxurious, but given the high cost of everything in Finland, the best one can do in this price range. |
