Flight of the Swan

by Rosario Ferré

  3

  WE HAD NEVER HEARD of Puerto Rico before, but as it was on the way to Panama and Peru, where Dandré had scheduled numerous performances for us during the coming months, we gladly boarded the ship. Dandré pointed out that the island was the smallest of the Greater Antilles and that it was a possession of the United States. “Under the American flag there’s bound to be progress,” he said, dusting off his bowler hat before putting it back on as we walked up the ship’s gangplank. “The island was until recently under military rule. There will be order and discipline and we will be paid in dollars,” he added, looking satisfied with himself and plucking at his mustache, as he did whenever he didn’t want anyone to contradict him.

  None of the dancers cared for Mr. Dandré very much, and we felt sorry for Madame, who, in spite of being a star, couldn’t live without him. He took care of her as if she were a child, and lavished attention on her. When we were on the S.S. Courbelo, for example, the captain improvised a pool made of canvas and pumped it full of seawater, so Madame could cool off from the heat. She spent hours diving and swimming in it, but when Dandré begged her to come out, calling “Nanushka! Nanushka! Please, it’s time for dinner,” she would laugh and shriek, and send Poppy, her terrier, scrambling out of the water to jump all over him, so he would get dripping wet.

  Mr. Dandré was very organized and solved all the logistical problems of our tours. He planned the itineraries and made the reservations, contacted the impresarios and thrashed out the contracts with them, figuring out the expenses of the trips as well as the possible profits and losses. But money often seemed to evaporate mysteriously in his hands, and then we’d find ourselves at the mercy of people like Bracale, who would send his thugs to threaten us or to supervise our performances. On one occasion, when we were playing at the Metropolitan Opera House just before we left on the trip for South America, a group of men wearing wool masks broke into the back office, blew up the safe, and made off with twenty thousand dollars, three quarters of it from Madame’s back wages. After that, Madame took special care of her personal valuables, especially her jewels, which she carried everywhere with her in a small alligator case.

  Dandré was always laughing and looking at the bright side of things. But he had a lecherous disposition and was constantly trying to pinch the girls’ fannies or burst into our dressing rooms unexpectedly when we were changing our costumes. “Whenever Mr. Dandré is away,” the girls used to tease Madame—and he traveled often because of the complicated quartermaster duties he performed for the company (or so Madame said, with a shamefaced smile)—“we all rejoice. You belong only to us then, Madame, to your sacred nymphs.”

  I felt the difference more than anyone. When Dandré wasn’t around, Madame paid much more attention to me. She didn’t have to drop everything at six in the afternoon to run him a bath, darn his socks, or see about his dinner that evening. “Time for Masha the ugly, time for Masha the awkward,” I’d whisper to her under my breath; and then I’d do a little jig for her sake, to celebrate our privacy. In her hotel room I’d beg her to teach me how to weave my arms like a willow in the wind or to fly like a butterfly instead of like a moth.

  No matter how hard Dandré tried to whittle down classical ballet to a mere way of making money, to crass bourgeois showmanship, it was much more than that to us. As Madame preached many times, giving us a little speech before class, dancing was a spiritual experience. In ancient times man’s devotion to the gods, his happiness and bereavement, were all expressed through movement. The body was the harp of the spirit, the medium through which we achieved union with the divine.

  When Madame approved of the way a dancer performed a difficult sequence of steps, she would stand before the stage lights during rehearsal and cry “Harasho!” while clapping ecstatically But she wasn’t always so generous. Sometimes she could be terribly cruel with girls who took a long time to learn the choreography for a new ballet. She would show them how to do a sequence of steps once, and if the student didn’t remember all the details the first time around, she would explode. “You have expression like cook! Are you artist or not?” she’d call out from the sidelines. And if someone gained a pound or two—something easy to do in these islands, where the best food is fried by the roadside in smoking black cauldrons by turbaned black women, she would immediately call out to us: “Vaches! How can you pretend to be dancers when you look like chateaubriands!”

  Dancers with weak ankles or legs had a hard time in our troupe. Madame was merciless with them, ridiculing and shaming them. Don’t be misled, Madame only looked frail. Her exceptionally arched insteps, her slender ankles, her delicately drawn neck made her seem as fragile as a porcelain doll, but her muscles were tempered in steel. She wasn’t like a swan at all; she was a hare, a racing machine. She never got tired; she could dance fifteen hours a day without stopping, sleep for six hours, and keep going the next day. She earned the right to every minute of the spotlight in every performance she was in, by sheer stamina. She was like a force of nature, and she rejected everything that was weak.

  Madame was a jealous guardian of her leading roles, and with good reason. In classical ballet, as in every walk of life, there are opportunists lurking behind every painted flat, and mediocre dancers often take advantage of the excellence of others. For this reason, when she went onstage, if her partner got too close to her during a supporting turn, or if he stepped on the hem of her costume, she pretended nothing was amiss. She danced around the scoundrel with a radiant smile, and as soon as the curtain went down, she’d turn around and give him a sound slap across the face.

  In any case, Madame had every right to be so demanding with other dancers, because she was just as exacting with herself. She could rehearse a combination of steps, which took ten seconds to perform, for hours; repeat a battement tendu, a bourrée, or an arabesque so many times the dancers began to feel the ground give way under their feet. The few times I watched her do the devilishly difficult fouettés, her leg an iron pivot on which her whole body turned while it churned like a butter pole, the other leg a whip of bone and flesh lifting and falling forty times in perfect rhythm, I was so amazed I was sure the holy Pantocrator was hovering over the stage, miraculously sustaining Madame inside the iris of His eye.

  Once, just before a performance, Madame was watching the audience through a tiny peephole in the velvet curtains, leaning forward and already costumed to appear on the scene, when she said to me: “Look at them, Masha, how self-satisfied and complacent they are, after a rich dinner and an expensive bottle of Châteauneuf-du-Pape. Their bodies have taken over and their spirits are unable to rise. We’ll try to help them with our dancing, but we can’t promise them anything.” The moment the curtain went up and she appeared onstage, it was her winged power countering their heaviness, her élan vital pitted against their dead weight. Madame’s profile was serene and chiseled in snow; her walk unfaltering, like a panther’s. By contrast, I was ugly and awkward, my face was full of pimples, and my arms were gawky; I was always tripping over myself and clumsily dropping things. But I couldn’t let her see how much I loved her. When you revered Madame she exploited you all the more—and then discarded you like a dried corn husk.

  Madame exerted a mysterious attraction on those around her. An aura emanated from her that pulled young girls to her like moths. One had to be careful not to get too close, or one could fall into the fire. When I was a child in Minsk I saw the Imperial Ballet give a presentation in the garden of a castle—my stepmother took me there because she worked in the kitchen. It was the first time I ever saw a ballerina, and they looked like fairies, dancing among the flowers. Madame was my fairy godmother.

  When Madame lost patience with the girls, calling them muttons or vaches, Mr. Dandré immediately came running, supposedly to defend them. But he was really after something else: he wanted the girls to become dependent on him, so later he could do as he wanted. On one occasion, a month before the company arrived in Puerto Rico, we were staying a
t the Ansonia Hotel in New York when tragedy struck. A young dancer named Maria Volkonsky, who had recently arrived from Russia, was feeling very lonely. As a result of her anxiety Maria had begun to eat fattening foods and had gained ten pounds. Dandré realized it, and he immediately took advantage of the situation. He began to coddle her; he supervised her meals and was with her constantly, trying to win her confidence so that she would let him in her room when he tapped on her door at night. Maria felt terrible because, apart from me, she was the dancer who most revered Madame. Yet the more she admired her, the more Madame despised her because she was fat. Finally, Madame refused to let her perform. She made Maria teach the understudy her roles, and this made the girl even more unhappy. Maria became so distracted one night that she threw herself from her hotel window, which opened onto one of New York’s dreary back alleys. It took the company weeks to overcome its grief and to be able to dance again.

  One day Nadja Bulova, Madame’s understudy, was feeling ill and Madame sent for me to rehearse the pas de deux of Les Sylphides with her. She bourréed next to me during Chopin’s lyric arpeggios, and suddenly she leaned forward during an arabesque and her hand brushed my breast. It could have been unwittingly, but I felt a shudder of delight rush through me. Madame always made it a point not to touch any of us or let us touch her; it was part of her discipline when she gave classes. She usually carried a slender baton in her hand and would introduce it under an arm or a leg when it needed lifting, or tap us lightly in the back if our posture was deficient. To touch her on the shoulder or attract her attention plucking at her dress would have been considered a sacrilege. Her inaccessibility was part of her mystique, and we accepted the taboo without questioning it. For some reason, on the day of our rehearsal she broke her own rule.

  The caress surprised me. Maybe I was wrong all along and Madame could love me! But I didn’t say anything. I told myself I had to be careful, or I could end up like Maria Volkonsky.

  4

  FOR MR. DANDRÉ BALLET was a business venture like any other. He never closed a deal with an impresario without first demanding half the money on the table as an advance. Even with Bracale we were never at his mercy, because Dandré demanded a good amount for our performances. Madame, on the other hand, never danced simply for the money. She wanted to give everyone the opportunity to enjoy the beauty of ballet, even those who had no money.

  We were living in troubled times. More than ten million people had died in Europe and twice that many were wounded. Sixty million men served in the various armies, and now, with the United States having recently joined the conflict, there would be even more devastation. Europe was being torn apart, but compassion and love were still possible; that was Madame’s message. The Dying Swan, the solo piece that made her famous all over the world, was a prayer for peace. Our beloved St. Petersburg was the swan, torn by strife and civil war, its churches smoldering to heaven, its golden domes now sheltering atheists who murdered priests as they tended to the devout.

  Madame’s relationship with Dandré was, after twelve years of living together, understandably more filial than anything else. Desire had long since run its course between them. I was sure of that, because I put clean sheets on their separate beds every morning. Dandré understood Madame and was content to serve her because he was making a good profit. He was like a huge punching bag, absorbing her explosions and always bouncing back when the crisis she had provoked was over. Dandré was one-dimensional, what you saw was what you got. Which was more than you could say of Madame.

  Madame would say to her followers: “If you want to be an artist you must remain free.” And at other times: “When you dance, you must dance for someone. Art is always a reaching out, an effort to meld with the beloved.” How to interpret these blatant contradictions? During our tours, the girls often met rich, good-looking gentlemen who became infatuated with them and came knocking at their dressing-room doors. (Not me—I never considered leaving Madame for a minute; she was my sun and moon; my North Star.) If the gentlemen offered them diamonds or pearls it was fine; but if they came asking for the girls’ hands in marriage, Madame would lock herself up in her room and begin to smash cups and saucers against the wall. Most of the girls didn’t have the courage to cause her so much pain, and they would break off their engagements. One day she asked us to kneel before the holy icon of the Virgin of Vladimir and made us take a vow: “A career and love are impossible to reconcile. That’s why, when you dance, you must never give yourself to anyone,” she told us, as she lit a ruby-red votive candle in front of the Virgin with a long taper. And we kissed the holy icon and gave her our promise.

  Had Madame ever fallen in love? Did she know what such a promise meant? I had heard rumors that in her youth she had loved someone passionately, but that she had had to give him up. In fact, she remained faithful to her oath until we arrived in Puerto Rico. Here she underwent a metamorphosis.

  Most of the girls in the company had had unhappy love affairs, and they found consolation in Madame’s celibate example. She was pure as snow, unsullied by the mud of sex and betrayal. I, for one, was always on the lookout to fend off marauders, who were usually not too far away. The girls and I were constantly pampering her. We would brush her hair, rub Pond’s cold cream on her face, massage her feet. Once a woman has experienced the softness of another woman’s caresses, the delicate fingertips like silk buds on her skin—even if it’s an amitié en rose—how can she ever go back to loving a man? It was difficult to understand at the time.

  It was true that during our tours around the world Madame paid her dancers miserly salaries—our wages were a pittance, more crumbs than pay—but we didn’t mind. We knew why we were dancing and what we were dancing for. It didn’t have to be mentioned; it was taken for granted, like the tide that pours from the Black Sea into the Dardanelles every day at dawn.

  Madame’s dancers lived like birds, totally at the mercy of God’s will. We had to pay for our own hotel accommodations, our food, our taxis, even our toe shoes. The English and the French girls (there were both) wrote home constantly, asking their parents to send them money to survive. We Russians, of course, had no one to write to since our country had gone up in flames. Madame would become incensed when she was criticized for these things by her enemies. “The families should pay me, because now they can say their children were my pupils, and this will assure their prestige in the world,” she’d maintain. But none of it mattered to us. We would have danced for nothing if we could have remained by Madame’s side.

  5

  THE S.S. COURBELO WAS really a cattle boat headed for Panama which was detoured to Puerto Rico for repairs, and as soon as it began to roll from side to side, the mournful bellowing of the animals below deck began to echo through the ship. We spent a miserable night and everybody was depressed, but there was no getting away from the steers or from the stench of their manure, which seeped through the cracks in the hold. No one slept. Seeing that the journey to Puerto Rico was a short one and that we would only spend one night at sea, we hung our hammocks up on deck, and spent the night under a sky full of stars.

  As we approached the island the next morning, Madame came up on deck and stood near me. She put an arm around my shoulders and snuggled against me, then made the sign of the cross on my forehead. “Good morning, Masha! Have you had a glass of fresh milk yet? At least there’s plenty of it on board!” she said with a little laugh. That’s what I always liked about Madame. No matter how bad things were, she always saw the silver lining.

  I smiled back at her and admitted I had had a cup of café con leche in the galley a few minutes before. “The coffee is very good. I hear the Catholic pope only drinks Puerto Rican coffee in Rome,” I said to tease her, knowing how passionate she was about her Orthodox faith. I leaned on the rail and looked at the approaching coastline, a bare line of vegetation floating between two immense canvases of blue—navy-dark water beneath, a pale azure sky above—with not a cloud in sight. At this latitude sunlight was e
ven stronger-than in Havana; it fell on the waves like liquid bronze, bathing our arms and faces. I was in good spirits. “What sun!” I cried, spreading my arms wide. “I wonder what our dancing will be like here, with a sun like this to warm us!” Madame kissed me on the cheek. I embraced her and didn’t say a word. Her kiss made everything I had endured worthwhile.

  As we neared the fortified city of San Juan, the light became even stronger, refracted by the looming medieval walls and ramparts. Madame turned her face toward the sun’s rays and closed her eyes. I imagined she was thinking of St. Petersburg, remembering its relentless drizzle, the sharp golden steeple of the Admiralty piercing the slate-colored sky. “If only I could absorb this sunlight and take it with me when I leave!” Madame said. “Maybe that way I could get rid of the periodic depressions that visit me, when I feel lost in the St. Petersburg mist.”

  When the cattle boat docked at the busy port, Madame and Dandré disembarked together, ahead of everyone else. I watched them from the ship, leaning on the banister. Dandré was carrying Madame’s alligator nécessaire with her jewelry—her diamond necklace, her earrings and bracelets, and the czar’s Fabergé egg with the tiny diamond fish inside—his gift to her when she graduated from the Imperial Ballet School. Madame carried Poppy, her black-and-white American bull terrier, in her arms. Custine, the ballet master, and Smallens, the orchestra director, walked along smartly behind them, each holding a birdcage. Madame had been presented with two beautiful silver-gray nightingales in Santiago de Cuba before she left, and naturally she had brought them along. (“Look, Masha, darling, nightingales on these islands have whiskers, little black hairs on their beaks!” she pointed out to me gaily when she saw them.) Madame never traveled without her pets, and she wasn’t going to leave such wonderful gifts behind.