House on the Lagoon

by Rosario Ferré

  I had heard wonders about the Kerenski Ballet School in San Juan, and a few weeks after we got to Ponce, Abby enrolled me in it. I began to attend the studio on Acacias Avenue every day. André Kerenski and Norma Castillo exerted a strong influence on the artistic life of Ponce in the forties and fifties, and their ballet school was one of the best in Puerto Rico at the time.

  André was twenty-nine and Norma twenty-five when they arrived in Ponce in 1940, two years before we did. Kerenski was born in Russia and had been a student at the Imperial Ballet School in St. Petersburg. His mother, a red-haired White Russian aristocrat whom André had been very attached to, had emigrated with him to the United States when he was twelve. When he was twenty-two, she managed to enroll him in the chorus at the Metropolitan Opera Ballet. She died a year later, leaving him the last of her Fabergé cigarette cases, which he sold and lived from for the next four years.

  The penury André Kerenski was forced to endure, and his mother’s untimely death, made him turn his back on his aristocratic roots. He became friends with socialist sympathizers at New York University, where he earned a degree in liberal arts. He believed in a better world, one he had lost when his mother took him out of his own country before he could decide what he wanted. He was convinced that the Revolution his mother had run away from had been justified. Private property should be abolished and everything should belong to the state; that was the only way to prevent the abuses of the rich. He sympathized with Lenin from afar, and was in complete agreement with the transformation of Imperial Russia into the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. Later he refused to believe that Stalin was the monster the press made him out to be. André met Norma Castillo at the Metropolitan Opera Ballet and he fell in love with her, forgetting all about politics.

  Norma was the daughter of a sugarcane hacienda owner from Ponce who had sold all his land at the end of the First World War. A staunch believer in statehood for the island, her father had invested all his money in U.S. municipal bonds and had retired to live on the interest. Norma was his only child, and he had wanted only the best for her. She showed a special ability for ballet and in 1935 he sent her to study in Paris; later she joined the School of American Ballet, affiliated with the prestigious New York City Ballet. When she graduated, she was offered a job at the Metropolitan Opera Ballet, where she met André, fell in love, and married. Soon after that, André renamed his wife Tamara, because of her jet-black hair, which she wore in a sleek chignon at the back of the head, in the style of Tamara Toumanova, the famous dancer from the Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo.

  Tamara’s skin was satin-white and she had a robust constitution. She reminded Professor Kerenski of the beautiful young peasant women he had seen as a child outside St. Petersburg. His mother used to take him to spend the summer in a countryside dacha which had a silver-plated balcony, an onion-domed roof, and a long avenue of firs leading up to its entrance. André and Tamara had come to Puerto Rico for their honeymoon, and André had fallen in love with the island. He was enchanted by the Castillos’ old house on Acacias Avenue, which also had silver-plated balconies and a carriage house with a wrought-iron gate with the initial C at the top. It must have been more than a hundred years old.

  The Kerenskis had come to Ponce during carnival week. One afternoon they were sitting on the balcony which opened onto Acacias Avenue when the carnival parade went by. André was amazed by what he saw. The revelers were a fountain of energy: they danced up and down the street as far as the eye could see, their costumes a sea of colors. There were snake charmers, flamenco dancers, battling angels, and dozens of Vegigantes of all sizes and hues. They had absolutely no inhibitions, shimmying, quivering, and rippling, as if they wanted to get rid of the flesh on their bones and fly away like spirits. They spun on their toes and swiveled their hips, as if possessed by demons. Professor Kerenski couldn’t believe his eyes. “This town is full of natural-born ballet dancers,” he said to Tamara. “A ballet school would be a great thing here. With a little training, one day they’ll have their own Anna Pavlova and Vaslav Nijinsky to boast of. I think we should move to Ponce.”

  At first, Tamara didn’t even want to consider it. She had been a disciple of Mordkin, the great dancer in Sergei Diaghilev’s company in Paris, and her career was on an upturn. She was about to be named to one of the principal ballet roles in the Metropolitan Opera Ballet’s performance of Adam’s Giselle, and she was looking forward to it with great excitement. André didn’t have as much to lose as she did, but he had always wanted to be a ballet teacher more than a dancer and moving to Ponce was his opportunity to do something for the common people. Tamara thought it over for a few weeks; she was in love with her husband and finally consented.

  Tamara informed her family of their decision, and they moved to the island soon afterwards. Her parents were not as well off as they used to be; the value of municipal bonds had plunged after the Second World War, and the Castillos had begun to feel the pinch, so the house on Acacias Avenue was not kept in good repair. When André and Tamara seemed so enamored of it, however, Tamara’s father presented it to them as a wedding gift, and her parents moved to a small modern apartment. Tamara’s mother gave her her diamond earrings to wear at the social events she would now be attending in Ponce, and Tamara pawned them and used the money to fix the leaky roof, paint the walls, and scrape and polish the floors of the old house.

  The romantic, turn-of-the-century atmosphere of the place was perfect for a ballet studio. It had arches over the doors, carved to look like filigree fans, and a fine burlwood floor. Professor Kerenski had the interior walls torn down and the whole house became a sixty-foot-long ballet studio. A wooden barre was screwed to the wall on the right and a mirror to the wall on the left, and there students “could learn to interpret the soul through the outline of the body,” as André used to say.

  Soon the first full-page ad for the school came out in the local newspaper: “Ballet training for beginners and amateurs, with special attention to children.” André wanted to have some pupils from the slums, to teach them free of charge, and Tamara agreed to it. But when Tamara’s friends saw the advertisement, they flocked to the Castillos’ old mansion with their daughters, leaving no room for the poor children.

  The first two years of the school were prosperous. André and Tamara had as many students as they could handle—there were at least fifty at the school at one time, girls between eight and sixteen—and they were making more money than they had ever dreamed of. But André wasn’t completely happy with the way things were going. He didn’t like the fact that the school had only girls. His yearly production at La Perla Theater, for example, had to be put on stage without boys. In Peter and the Wolf the role of Peter had to be danced by a girl, and that was not satisfactory. Kerenski himself had to dance the part of the Wolf, because no girl could ever dance that part convincingly.

  One day he called a meeting at the school and asked all the students’ mothers to attend. He told them about the ballet schools in St. Petersburg and in Monte Carlo, where male dancers often became prodigies. Ballet could open the doors to the world of art and fame. Why didn’t they bring their sons to his school, too? The mothers listened to him politely, fanning themselves and winking at each other as if what he was saying was terribly funny. Kerenski asked them why they were laughing. Hortensia Hernández, a buxom lady wearing a gold charm bracelet, who had two daughters at the school, finally put up her hand. “Ballet is a risky career for boys,” she said, giggling. “It encourages effeminate behavior and they can end up being fairies.” André was horrified, but there was little he could do to change their minds. No boys were ever brought to the Kerenski Ballet School on Acacias Avenue.

  After I joined the school, I had to go through four years of rigorous training before I could dance in Kerenski’s production at La Perla Theater. In Ponce, girls my age were treated like hothouse flowers. They ate quantities of cream puffs, cakes, and all kinds of desserts and had no idea what discipline of the body
meant. The first thing Professor Kerenski did was put us on a diet. Fritters, tostones, and rice and beans were strictly forbidden. For two years he spoke to us only in French and made us learn by heart all the names of the steps we had to perform in class. During the day we walked down the street doing developpés, arabesques, and coupés, and at night we went to sleep murmuring the names of the steps under our breath like a prayer.

  At the studio we practiced for hours on end, our slippers whirling over the floorboards like silk drills. We struggled to learn to balance our bodies and govern our minds, “to do a pirouette on your toes, and end it poised on a dime,” as Professor Kerenski would say. The heat in Ponce was stifling all year round; as we practiced, we perspired like legionnaires, but we bore our sufferings with a smile.

  The Kerenskis’ school was divided into two sections. There were the run-of-the-mill students, who were in Tamara’s charge, and whose mothers had enrolled them to lose weight and learn to behave gracefully in public. They were not expected to amount to anything, but they made up the greater part of the academy, and their monthly dues kept the studio afloat. Then there were the serious students, who were under Professor Kerenski’s personal care.

  Professor Kerenski lived for ballet; he saw it as the expression of the soul’s most profound emotions. He was as romantic as he was Russian. He did not believe in Balanchine’s theory that the dancer should be as unemotional and impassive as a metronome and must simply follow the rhythm dictated by the music. “If you let the music flood you when you dance,” André used to say to us, “one day you’ll attain enlightenment.” He was the perfect maître de ballet. He established three levels in his classes—A, B, and C—and when a student reached the last level, it meant she was ready to be a star. That year she would dance a solo in the school’s production at La Perla Theater.

  I was one of those fledgling swans, trained and groomed by Professor Kerenski himself, and my life began to revolve completely around ballet. The Ponce Lyceum, where I went to school, was two blocks from the studio, so it took me five minutes to walk there after class. When I arrived, I was already wearing my black leotard, which I had pulled on in the bathroom at school. I worked out until six, when Abby sent Abuela Gabriela’s chauffeur to pick me up in our blue Pontiac. When I arrived home, I took a bath, had dinner, and did my homework. By nine I was so tired I went right to bed. I hardly spoke to anyone at home except Abby, but no one seemed to mind.

  Professor Kerenski was very conscious of what he wore. I think he wanted to impress on us the fact that he was Russian, so we would appreciate his skills all the more. He always wore a red silk jacket and black pants. The jacket had a mandarin collar and had a sash tied at the waist. His hair was dark blond, and he wore it carefully combed about his ears like the dome of a small basilica. His Russian good looks dazzled the students—especially the new ones—but he never took advantage of it. He was very serious about his art and kept his distance. When he gave a class, he stood before the mirror, baton in hand, keeping the rhythm as he tapped on the floor, and he never ventured too close to the girls. Whenever he performed one of the sequences from Le Corsair or from L’Après-midi d’un faune, for example, we would all sit in awe on the floor watching him, hardly daring to breathe.

  Tamara was still a beautiful woman, but lately she had gained weight. She always wore a black leotard, with a long gauze skirt covering her generous hips. Sometimes she danced by herself in the early afternoon, before any of her students arrived at the studio. I got there earlier than most, and I used to love watching her; the minute she started to move, you forgot she was overweight because she was so graceful. Professor Kerenski never danced with any of the students. He always danced solo in front of the class when he wanted to show us how to do a new step.

  Tamara didn’t have anything to do with the advanced classes; she taught only beginner and intermediate classes. She had to teach the nine- and ten-year-olds to stand correctly, shoulders down and fanny tucked in, and train the twelve- and thirteen-year-olds to walk elegantly down the aisle, preparing them for the debutante pageant which took place at the Ponce Country Club every summer.

  One day I was resting in the Kerenskis’ living room and I saw Tamara come out of the bathroom after a bath (the Kerenskis had restored the carriage house next to the studio as their private apartment; it had a living room, a bedroom, a bath, and a modern kitchenette). She was naked and I was surprised to see how beautiful she was. She reminded me of Ingres’s Odalisque—a reproduction of it hung in the living room of our home on Aurora Street. She had her back to me, so she didn’t see me, but when she stood before the mirror I thought she looked sad. She often had that same expression in class, as if she wanted to get away from everything. I thought maybe she was bored with her job, and I couldn’t blame her.

  Professor Kerenski was more enthusiastic than ever. Sometimes he would take off his red silk jacket and show us how to dance a particularly difficult sequence, in his black pants and T-shirt. It was then that we noticed his chest was covered with a red nap, very different in color from the blond page boy he groomed with such care. What was even more curious was a faint odor of crushed geraniums that came from his armpits whenever he lifted his arms to show us a new step.

  I had a good friend at the ballet school, Estefanía Volmer, the daughter of the owner of El Cometa, Ponce’s largest hard-ware store. Don Arturo Volmer was from a family of modest means, but he had married Margot Rinser, whose father was the founder of the largest rum distillery in Ponce. Her father had given them El Cometa as a wedding present, and Arturo had done everything he could to make it an ongoing concern, but he had had little luck. He wasn’t a good businessman; he made little money selling “tinker toys,” as he used to say—just enough to break even—and Margot still had to ask her father for the niceties she was used to.

  Margot had been a great beauty, but she had developed bone cancer in her right leg a few years after her marriage, and the leg had to be amputated. Don Arturo never got over his wife’s tragedy. He lived only to care for Margot; he took her everywhere, pushing the wheelchair himself, and wouldn’t let a nurse near. He was so obsessed with his wife’s tragedy he hardly remembered Estefanía existed.

  Margot herself never gave Estefanía a second thought: when she got pregnant, she was already in a wheelchair. Margot had been an only daughter and was used to being the center of attention at home, even more so when she became seriously ill. Whenever she saw Estefanía walk into her room, she was always a little surprised, as if she had forgotten she had a daughter.

  Estefanía had been brought up by nursemaids, with very little supervision. She was much more of a rebel than I. She had Coca-Cola and devil’s food cake for breakfast—she wouldn’t be caught dead eating the soggy porridge with bananas Abby made for me every morning. When she turned fourteen, she refused to put on any underwear and went around with her breasts swimming under her blouse like jellyfish. At fifteen she began to go to parties by herself. She never had a chaperone, and she was the only girl I knew in Ponce who went to the movies alone on a date. I admired her for it; the whole town talked about Estefanía, but she went on doing what she damn well wanted to. She was a beautiful girl, with milk-white skin, a long swan’s neck, and red curly hair that reminded you of a burning bush when she stood under the noonday sun.

  Estefanía was two years older than I. I had met her at the Lyceum, where we were both on the volleyball team. She was not a good student; she liked people better than books. But she enjoyed taking care of the younger children at recess time. She would organize games for them and play as if she were a child herself. She had a gay disposition and was always laughing and kidding, as if life were an ongoing party. She liked to dress to shock people, and sometimes we both did, as jarringly as possible—polka-dot pedal pushers with Hawaiian-style see-through blouses, for example—just to see people stare at us. Yet the reason I liked her was that I knew she was unhappy.

  I remember that when Estefanía turned sixtee
n, her father gave her a red Ford convertible as a birthday present, a senseless gift. But her parents had no sense at all, so it didn’t surprise me when I saw Estefanía drive up to school in it. Since her family lived near the rum distillery on the outskirts of town, she said, they gave her the car so they could get rid of the chauffeur, who was always drunk. Now she could go everywhere on her own at night, to the drive-in theater, even out to The Place, Ponce’s cabaret by the sea, where she danced with the American sailors she met at the bar. But I know she never did anything she shouldn’t have with them.

  I was enchanted when Estefanía decided to enroll in the ballet school. She soon became an admirer of Professor Kerenski, and after that we shared all our secrets. We weren’t in love with him; we didn’t care at all about his good looks. We worshipped him for his excellence as a dancer, for the extraordinary ease with which he soared into the air and did eight entrechats in the Don Quixote suite, for example, or for the forty fouettés he completed during the Prince’s solo in Swan Lake.

  André was like a god to us; he ruled our lives in every way. He told us how many calories we could eat a day, what kind of shoes to wear to prevent bunions, and how to comb our hair so it wouldn’t fly into our eyes when we danced. Most important, he forbade both of us to have steady boyfriends, because, he said, we had become his “spiritual” partners.

  Our personalities changed as well. We turned meek and obedient, lost weight and looked more fragile every day. It was as if we had lost the desire to live our own lives. At home, our parents couldn’t believe their eyes. Abby was particularly worried. She was used to sparring with me, and she couldn’t figure out what was happening. She would come into my room to say good night and see me lying on the bed with a whimsical expression on my face, dreaming I was Giselle and had swooned on my tomb. Abby couldn’t get over it. I never complained about anything; I did everything I was told, without answering back. When I did something wrong, I hung my head and humbly accepted her rebuke; it was almost as if I were a different person. She didn’t guess I wasn’t really there. I was simply waiting for my chance to escape from the house and run back to Professor Kerenski. “The minute you start getting bad grades at school, I’ll punch that carrot-headed Petrouchka on the nose and take you out of the ballet school myself!” she told me one day. “You’d be much better off playing the piano for the poor children of the slums of Ponce at the charity bazaar next month.” “Don’t worry, Abby,” I said. “I’ll burn the midnight oil studying, just to please you.”