by Linda Ferri
Clara tells me to hurry up, the others are already in the salle de danse.
The salle is immense, with big mirrors and barres along the wall. The parquet floor is brightly polished. In the corner there’s Madame Rostand, seated at the piano.
With her dyed platinum blond hair, a long skirt and black leotard, and her long staff with the silver knob, Madame Petruchskaya is in the middle of her instructions, her Russian r more pronounced than usual. She explains what the test will consist of (which steps, figures, and so on) and what she expects from us (posture, the spirit of the dance). While she’s talking I picture Alba, Mama’s ballerina cousin, the star of the New York City Ballet. I see the photo of her divine arabesque under the spotlights and what Madame Petruchskaya is saying gets confused with what Alba told me: “The dance, darling, is a sublime and damnable cocktail of blood, sweat, and tears.”
There are ten of us girls from age seven to eleven, arranged by height. I’m the tallest, so I’m the last. In front of me is Natasha, who isn’t Russian, however. She’s French and very unpleasant. She’s already drawing herself completely erect, but her arms are like soft parentheses along her body with her curled fingers just brushing her legs. I’m hypnotized by her perfect figure and posture and totally neglect my own. Now it’s her turn and she starts with her chin held high, which gives an arch to her back and a direction to her steps. Her feet touch the pavement, then fly off it with the ease and assurance of someone who’s going into and coming out of her own house. At the end there’s applause.
Now it’s my turn. But my eyes are fixed on my shoes, on the curved line they trace on my feet, on the ugly contrast between that pink and the black of the tights. I barely hear the piano and I move as if I’m in a dream, the whole while absorbed by that pink line.
I don’t advance to the auditions for the Opera School, nor does Clara. Madame Petruchskaya communicates this to my mother and then declaims, “What can one say, chère madame? The dance is a religion. To have faith in oneself and faith in the dance is a gift from Heaven, a blessing … “
In the car on our way home, Mama repeats this line, mimicking Madame Petruchskaya’s Russian rs. Then she says conclusively, “What a fanatic that woman is.” While Clara is laughing, I sink into a gloomy meditation on this last of a series of proofs of my resistance to divine grace.
I was in upper middle school when she joined our class—the only girl taller than I. She had a far-off, ethereal look, and when she sat down at the desk next to mine a cascade of golden hair swirled around her, a veil through which I caught a glimpse of mysterious other worlds. There was something old-fashioned or perhaps timeless about her clothes, like the eternal robes of angels—and also something threadbare, faded, and completely indifferent to the rules of girlish elegance to which my own outfit of jeune fille de bonne famille conformed.
We took to walking part of the way home together. By a strange coincidence, Eleonora lived in the very same apartment that had been ours when we had first come to Paris—the apartment with the little garden where years earlier Ruga, my pet turtle, had been lost. When I told her how I’d looked and looked for Ruga, she told me that when she was little her father had given her a mongoose, Syria, who had disappeared. Eleonora had cried a lot, until one day, when she was standing mournfully in her garden, a bird landed at her feet. And how amazed she’d been to see that around its neck the bird was wearing Syria’s collar. Then she said the name aloud and the bird answered her with a warble. “The souls of living things don’t die when their bodies die,” she explained. “They pass on into the bodies of other beings, even into plants. So if you keep looking—really looking—you’ll find your Ruga.”
I was very impressed and immediately set to work. But since I didn’t know exactly what distinctive sign would guide me, I settled on the easiest: the shell. For days and days my investigation failed to come up with a single man, flower, or animal endowed with anything resembling natural armor. I confessed to Eleonora that I was discouraged.
“Don’t worry,” she said, consoling me. “We’ll look for Ruga together with the pendulum.”
We’re at her house, seated at the dining room table. Spread in rows in front of us is a child’s set of geography cards. Eleonora is kneeling on a chair, casually holding the pendulum, while I feel as if I’m about to enter the Sybil’s cave. “The pendulum will tell us what kind of living thing your turtle has changed into.” She tells me, “Close your eyes and concentrate on her name. You have to see it in your mind, written in capital letters, like a big shining sign.”
I have faith in her, and I do what she says, and before long I see enormous letters on my closed eyelids, tongues of flame that hurt my eyes.
“There,” Eleonora says. “On that card— the woman scything—the pendulum’s swinging from right to left. That means that Ruga’s soul isn’t in a woman. You go on concentrating—I’ll try the tiger card.”
We try a number of them—the rose, the alpinist, the forest, the mountain—yes, even the mountain because apparently it happens that souls can take refuge in rocks. But the pendulum persists in its cycle of denial. I’m beginning to think that maybe Ruga isn’t dead at all, that she’s off somewhere leading the life of an old turtle. But then the pendulum starts swinging the other way on the card of the Japanese woman.
“Excuse me, but you just said that it wasn’t a woman,” I say, puzzled and a bit annoyed.
Eleanora once again reassures me, saying that at times it’s necessary to interpret the answers of the pendulum and that maybe her father will be able to help us.
The father, who seems to me quite old, is a marquis and a Buddhist. He has a silver mustache whose tapered ends point straight up, like little missiles. Without hesitating he answers our question. “If the pendulum reacted positively to the card of the Japanese woman, it means that the turtle was reincarnated not in France but in the Orient … perhaps in Japan, or perhaps in China, in India, in Indochina, in the Philippines, in Indonesia … “But I’m not listening to him anymore, and my head is spinning at the thought of all the peregrinations I’ll have to undertake to find my Ruga. I’m disappointed, frustrated by my own frustration, and when Eleonora and I leave her father, I start crying with rage. She strokes my hand and says, “But if you love Ruga so much, why don’t you try to let her go, why not be happy that she’s alive even if she’s gone away to lead her own life? Why does she have to be tied to you?”
“That’s easy for you to say,” I snap. I feel hurt and mean. “You’re not normal, you live on air, you’re not attached to anything or anyone. You don’t even have a ring or a pen or a dress that you really care about.”
That time Eleonora said nothing, but I saw a shadow cross her usually serene face and I felt terrible. The next day I gave her my shocking pink felt-tip pen.
Then, having abandoned the turtle to her exotic avatar, we threw ourselves into a new series of experiments. We used the pendulum to help us with the subject of our Italian composition; to discover the mysterious identity of Bel-phagor, the phantom of the Louvre; to tell us where the kidnappers were hiding little René from Lyon. Next we tried telepathy—we sent a single letter to each other, then a color, a word, a thought—putting the communion of our minds to harder and harder tests.
Together we summoned strange impish spirits who pinched my behind and a bookseller by the name of Erasmus who had been burned at the stake in Bruges in the sixteenth century, whose mournful soul communicated with me by rapping three times on the table. I forgot my other friends, Anna and Teresa, and our obsession with dresses, hair bands, and shoes, and the hours we’d spent lying side by side on a bed pulling out split ends and examining with biblical exegeses the ambiguities in a sentence spoken by some boy we liked.
I’d gone through the looking glass, into that country where she had come to be called Eleonora (her real name was actually Diana), and her brothers (named Tancredi and Federico) answered to the names of Brando and Manfredo. Her father—right in front of us—read a magazine, E
Borghese, with photos of nude women. From time to time, wrapped in his London Fog raincoat and always a few steps ahead of us, he took us to the Theosophical Society, where they played a music I’d never heard while the listeners swayed their heads keeping time to the arcane repetitive rhythm. Sometimes I felt like laughing, but only because I didn’t feel worthy of all that mystery.
Eleonora and I are drawing a comic strip—the adventures of a mad orchestra conductor and a worm who plays first violin. But just as we reach the third episode Eleonora announces that her father has run out of money and the whole family is going back to Italy before the end of the year. I cry. I’m in despair. I ask to see Eleonora’s father. He receives me.
Still crying, I beg him not to take Eleonora away from me. “Without her I can’t live, can’t you see? She’s everything to me, she’s like Clara, a sister—even more—she’s practically my twin.”
He listens to me intently, raising an eyebrow. Then he tells me a long complicated story about two mermaids who are friends, about how they lose each other and find each other again and again during their voyage from a small sea to the vast ocean—and I can tell that I’m not going to get anywhere with him.
Then I try my father. I ask him for a loan for Eleonora’s father. He tells me that things like that aren’t done, that they end up offending people, and that anyway it’s not so much that Eleonora’s father has run out of money but that he likes living in a certain way—now here, now there—and that we have to respect the way other people are.
“Fine,” I blurt out. “I see. It’s the same story over and over. I lose my animals, I lose my friends, I lose everything, and somehow I’m supposed to go on being happy.”
We’re walking on top of a sea of cars like Jesus on water. My father’s holding our hands, and Clara and I climb up and down hoods and roofs, out of breath from excitement, taking care not to slip if someone tries to bar the way.
The sidewalks are thick with people who overflow onto the street and try to make their way between the stopped cars, but there’s no room, so a few people—and then more and more—join us on that makeshift route.
It is a hot evening in May. May 1968 in Paris.
The demonstration on the Champ de Mars spills over into the streets that surround the park. Along with the hysteria of automobile horns, there are slogans, songs, shouts, all in a festival atmosphere that at times overheats and explodes— a shop window breaks into pieces, there’s an exchange of insults and shoving, a brawl. I cling to Papa’s hand, my buoy in the stormy sea. I’m sweating from the effort of keeping my footing on the high, slippery terrain, on this car roof on which there are now four of us. And now the furious driver gets out of the car and yells at us to get off, get off the roof of his car right away, we’re nothing but good-for-nothing vandals. His eyes are bloodshot bulbs just at the height of my feet, and there he is grabbing at my calf. I have a new kind of fear, one I’ve never felt, strangely pleasant, a light current that runs along the wiring of my skin—since my father is with me, nothing, nothing serious or nasty or irreparable can happen, not even now that the driver’s hand is on my leg and pulling, pulling at me to make me get down, to make me fall, while my father is pulling me the other way shouting at him not to touch me, to wait a minute and we’ll get down on our own. The hand lets go, and I end up bumping into my father and I laugh. But in his eyes there’s a shadow, the first ripple of worry, very likely because my mother didn’t want him to take us to see the demonstration.
He helps us get down from the roof, and somehow we make our way to the sidewalk. Then, walled in by the crowd, our faces jammed against a sweater or a plaid shirt in front of us, we’re swept along toward the Champ de Mars.
I don’t recognize the open space where Clara and I play every day, I can’t find it: the park has become a single living thing, a body that’s breathing and pushing toward a platform that’s been set up in the middle. On it someone is speaking and the crowd is still pushing, listening with its thousands of ears to that voice ringing from the loudspeaker.
I’m squeezed into the middle of the crowd, shivering each time it responds to the voice either with applause or with a cyclopean roar. But I can’t see, I can’t see a thing, not even the lady on the stage whom I want to see so badly.
I ask my father to put me up on his shoulders. From up there I see her. She’s dressed like Mama in a midlength skirt, a cardigan, and a necklace that seems to be a string of pearls.
“Who is she, Papa, that lady who’s talking?”
“Simone de Beauvoir. A writer, a philosopher.”
“And what’s she saying?” I keep at him because I don’t understand a single word or, to tell the truth, the whole situation.
He says, “It would take too long, I’ll tell you when we get home,” and he hushes me.
So at home I try again.
“She was telling all those kids that it’s fine to protest for freedom and justice, it’s good to do that, but everyone has to take responsibility for his own life, take charge of his own life and basically be himself.”
“Have you done all those things?” I ask, hoping that a concrete example will make it all clear to me.
“Ah … I’m not sure. Yes, probably yes … At any rate I’ve never felt that I was living someone else’s life.” My father answers me in such a vague, pensive voice that I’m left more than ever in the dark.
I’m skating on an ice rink that I’ve been on before. I go around a few times confidently, not hurrying, proud of how well I’m doing, how good my balance is. But then I feel something like a breath on the back of my neck—another breath and then another and then the heavy breathing of a whole crowd behind me. I know who they are, and I don’t turn around. I pick up the pace, but imperceptibly, so they won’t know I’m scared. But then I realize that it’s not me making myself go faster, it’s their breath that’s pushing me. Every lap is faster and faster, and I feel my skate blades vibrating on the ice, they’re about to break or else melt the ice—I know this—and I lose control, I’m going to smash into the railing and the telephone rings and I wake up.
From her room I hear my mother ask, “Is he dead?”
I sit on my bed gasping, trying not to know what I know, but all the lights in the house are on in the middle of the night, my brothers are awake, and Clara is awake beside me and it’s the end, what I know has become true.
My father went out at eight to take his new sports car for a test run with a friend.
The parents of our friends come down from the fifth floor in their pajamas. Mama is crying, the mother of our friends is crying, and Clara is holding my hand. The father of our friends goes up to his apartment and comes back down with his overcoat on.
My mother is sitting on the little sofa in the front hall, I’m standing in front of her, my knees against hers, my hands in hers. She swallows once and then again and says to me, “I’m going to the hospital now with your brothers. Papa is there, there’s still a thread of hope.” With her look she’s imploring me to believe, if I believe then she can too, but in my eyes she sees my father’s heavy body hanging by a thread and she begins to sob again.
Clara and I stay at home, along with the mother of our friends. She comes with us into our bedroom, lets us push our beds together, and sits beside us as we lie down. I promise God that if he saves my father I’ll become a nun, but it’s a halfhearted vow because I don’t believe in that sort of bartering and because I don’t really want to become a nun, and then I’m overcome with a fear of God, of a God who demands these things, and I hate him and I hate myself, a Judas traitor. I sit up because I’m having trouble breathing, but there’s the hand of our friend that presses me down and stays on my chest as she says, “That’s a good girl, sleep. Try to sleep.” Time stays still, broken only by a wave that every so often swells and crests inside me and then breaks and roars in my ears, leaving me stunned and deafened.
At last they come back. Papa is dead. Outside it’s dawn, but the city is extinguish
ed. A crowd of people arrives, a swarm of whispers and sobs. Some bankers come. They wish to offer their condolences and to make sure that the widow will honor the debts of the deceased. Some of my father’s friends take my brothers aside, remind them of their new responsibilities. No one says anything to my sister and me, and there are so many people around Mama that we can’t get close to her. Maybe she’s forgotten about us. Holding hands, we drift invisibly through the rooms, but each of us is alone—a new strange sheet of glass separates us. We go up to one group and then another, and perhaps someone gives us a gentle pat. A friend of Pietro’s arrives, he’s someone I like, and I come out of my daze, proud of my tragedy, for the first time worthy of his attention, but he gives me a hurried kiss and goes off to find my brother. Then Dame Dame comes, and it’s as if we’ve found our bodies again. She washes our hands and faces and dresses us, she herself is crying the whole time. She closes the door to our bedroom, makes us sit down on the bed, and talks about Papa and how we must pray for his soul. And then I see it, I see it taking off, headed straight for Paradise, my prayers and Clara’s are the motors. Then I see it change as it’s flying, change into a huge butterfly, velvet brown and violet, or into a golden eagle— and I watch it for a moment without reaching out to hold it back, it’s happy to be free in the way Eleonora explained to me. But then right after that I see Persephone, taken from the world of the living, dragged down into the world of the dead, but her mother arranged that she could come back to spend a little time with her, and then my eyes close and I give in to the darkness. Finally I begin to cry, and in between sobs I say in a whisper, “Oh, Papa, wherever it is you’re going, don’t forget me.”
Translation copyright © 2005 by Alfred A. Knopf,
a division of Random House, Inc.
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This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and