Eating Air

by Pauline Melville

  She told him nothing about what had happened with Jerry.

  ‘And I’m leaving the Royal Ballet. I’ve found myself an agent. He might be able to find me work with the Ballet Rio in Brazil. He’s a good agent.’

  ‘Look. An agent is only a thing that sits on your shoulder like a parrot shouting “Pieces of Eight”. Just dance. That’s all. It doesn’t matter where. Go to Brazil. That’ll be good. That’s how we must always be. Able to go where we want. I can always find you through your mother.’

  She had hoped he would dissuade her from going. She wanted him to ask her to join him. He was laughing, buoyant and gay:

  ‘We’ll meet up somewhere and tell each other our stories. What about going to Paraguay? I always fancied Paraguay.’

  ‘Maybe.’ She sounded doubtful. She looked out of the window. On the pavement below a boy cycled round and round in circles.

  *

  Donny stepped out of the phone box. His optimistic tone had been a front. He, too, was suffering some sort of paralysis of the spirit. A bus was leaving for Culloden. He boarded it. When he got there he leaned against one of the tombstones with his eyes wide open. There was a heat wave that August. The grass seemed to be burning around him. In the end he felt as if the blazing sun had caught his whole head of hair and set it afire. After that he began a long wandering. As the sun faded, he went back to the docks and decided to head for the trawler bound for Norway. The frozen wastes would be enough to break his arms. Everywhere he went the world seemed to be in a state of decay. In the end he left the land and took to the sea.

  *

  The director of the company did her utmost to persuade Ella to stay. Ella sat in the office wearing a blue suit. She looked demure, her hair plaited into a gleaming French knot at the back, as her future opportunities with the company were explained. She was smiling as she listened but her shining dark eyes were impenetrable. Everyone was shocked that she had taken the decision to leave. Nobody could make her change her mind. Ella was polite but unmovable. There had already been interest shown by the Danish Royal Ballet and a Los Angeles dance company. The most attractive offer came from the Ballet Rio in Brazil. That contract would start in six months’ time.

  Chapter Forty-Two

  Ella’s first major success with the Ballet Rio was in The Firebird. The ballet opened at the opera house in Manaus near the wide silver blade of the Amazon River. The first performance took place on a night muggy with heat, but Ella danced best in the heat, which relaxed her muscles. She wore a plumed spiky black-and-red coxcomb headdress and a bristling scarlet tutu made to resemble macaw feathers. There was a new quality to her dancing. She had become a creature that hated the touch of a human. A wild bird. Full of hate. She beat her arms in a frenzy, attacked, fought and whirled. In South American folklore firebirds eat men. For a human to lay a hand on the firebird’s body would be a terrible thing. Ella transformed herself into the most savage of heroines. Her firebird was a primitive, bestial creature; proud and bursting with hatred; predatory and arrogant. It was a dazzling performance, danced with such ferocity that even her partner became nervous. She danced out the pleasures of extremism and the love of danger. ‘Beauty allied to terror’, wrote one of the critics. Overnight she became an enormous success in Latin America.

  At first she missed Donny, mourned him and on those tours of Argentina, Chile and Peru felt an urge to wander around street markets calling out his name. Gradually she understood that he was already with her, a necessary condition of her being, the pure gravitational force of her existence.

  Some years later another dancing role added to her notoriety. The role was Salome. By the time she danced Salome some depth charge had been released into her performance giving it a new tragic consciousness. The set for the show consisted of enormous rust-coloured iron walls dripping with painted blood. Around these walls were inscribed in words the story of Salome. At the beginning she danced with her back to the audience wearing a series of multicoloured veils. Later in the ballet she spun round and round letting the veils drop to reveal a crimson costume as if she herself were drenched in blood. There was a slow erotic fire at the core of her body. At the point where she danced in the blood of the man she had killed, Ella’s magic-hipped, erotic Salome performed alone in the spotlight’s circle. Her black hair was loose like a maenad as she held up the severed head of John the Baptist. It caused uproar when she first danced the part. She danced it in Caracas, Bogotá and Quito.

  Once, in the eighties, the company went on tour to Peru and spent a season in Lima. During the day she worked out in a studio run by an accomplished dancer called Juliana Gabo in a smart part of town where the houses had bougainvillaea climbing white-washed walls. She liked Juliana who chatted to her as she washed out leotards in the sink. Juliana always spoke in a conspiratorial whisper:

  ‘When we went to teach dance in the countryside we discovered that the children of the indígenas were half the size of the children in town. The sight shocked us all. I will show you.’

  Juliana drove an old car. They bumped along dirt tracks to a village on the wide plains of the Altiplano where snow glinted on top of the distant Andes. The two women stood on the outskirts of the village. It was true. The barefoot ragged children who scuffed up the sandy ground playing football were stunted compared with the city children.

  ‘You see,’ said Juliana on the way back. ‘Dancing was not enough. Now I am a member of Sendero Luminoso. We are a revolutionary organisation.’

  ‘I understand.’ A wave of darkness came over Ella as she remembered the car crash in England.

  That night the two dancers held on to each other’s hands in the studio after everyone had left. They embraced. They whispered and exchanged confidences and caresses. Later in bed in Juliana’s apartment Ella told her about the shame of being told she was too dark to dance in Swan Lake. Juliana was indignant and held her and kissed her all over her body making tiny buds tingle and blossom under Ella’s skin. She looked hard into Ella’s eyes:

  ‘Yes. I can see you have the eyes of an indígena.’

  When Juliana was arrested some years later and sentenced to twenty years in jail Ella experienced a spurt of fury. She read in the papers that Juliana spent her time in prison teaching the other inmates – whores, petty thieves and crack-dealers – the benefits of regular exercise to their health as well as the secret ecstasies of dance. Ella sent her cards of love and support.

  Ella and Donny communicated sporadically across continents on crackling and unreliable telephone lines. She asked him if he would like to come and live with her in South America. He said:

  ‘No.’ His voice sounded far away over the phone. ‘It’s too hot. I prefer the snow. I am going to Finland. Anyway, I hate the feeling that I’m going to be somewhere for the rest of my life. It makes me want to get walking down the road. Even when I stay somewhere for a while I am always secretly planning to leave the next day. Don’t worry. I will always be in touch.’

  She had taken his telephone call at the stage door after a performance of La Bayadère. The venue for the ballet that evening was a shallow-domed circular concert hall not far from the Plaza de Armas in Lima. Ella was standing by the stage door. She replaced the telephone on the hook and puzzled over what it was that bound her to this man despite other relationships she enjoyed with both men and women. If it had just been an ordinary marriage that flourished or failed, how much simpler that would have been. She hung the phone up and stepped outside. The audience was streaming down the steps into the cold night air of the city. She shivered as a wind blew in from the Andes. Someone was playing an accordion. Two old men danced in the square. They held on to each other’s arms and rotated in a gentle waltz like elderly satyrs.

  *

  That year the company had a season in New York. Two balletomanes stopped her in the foyer of the Lincoln Center. They were charming young American sisters with soft hair pinned in coils. Each of them sported a delicate gold watch on a slender wrist and th
ey both wore chic silk jackets that ballooned as they walked making them seem fluid and graceful, although Ella sensed some rigid inner puritanism which controlled their interior mechanisms.

  ‘It’s wonderful that you are having such a great success here in New York.’

  ‘Thank you very much,’ replied Ella as the two women glided on their way. She watched them go. It’s not the dancing they like here, she thought. It’s the smiling.

  ‘May I congratulate you? Let me introduce myself. My name is Johnny Caspers. I think we met once a few years ago at a “Friends of the Ballet” do.’ A bearded man eagerly shook her hand. ‘I organised my New York business trip especially to coincide with your tour.’ His eyes were shining with emotion. ‘We have something in common. A Surinamese background. My family were Surinamese Jews. I’ve admired your dancing for years.’

  ‘Thank you.’

  ‘Next time you come back to England please get in touch. I organise some of the galas at Covent Garden.’ He gave Ella his card. After he left she felt a sudden quite unexpected urge to return to the rough tropical vegetation of Surinam.

  As the years passed, Ella kept to her strict routine of training. There was a succession of lovers, both men and women, but the stable elements in her household were her dance classes, three tortoiseshell cats and Marijke from Surinam whom she had known as a child and who worked as her maid. The company gave her fewer leading roles and now she taught and gave master classes to the next generation.

  One day, in her apartment behind the Rua Ouvida, Marijke prepared a banho de cheiro, a ‘blue bath’, with steaming aromas of rosemary, rue, rose-mallow and basil. While Ella was bathing and massaging her feet, Marijke stomped into the bathroom with a letter from England. Ella’s Aunt Doris had written to say her mother’s health was failing. She must return if she wanted to see her alive. Ella weighed up the risk of return. It was over thirty years ago. Nothing more had ever been heard about the death of the police driver. It was an event that hardly even ruffled her consciousness. She suffered no guilt, only occasional unease at the thought of discovery.

  ‘Marijke. I am going back to England to look after my mother. First we will go to Surinam and find somewhere to live. I have decided to settle there when I retire. You can stay there and get the place ready. When the time comes I will join you.’

  Narrator’s Intervention

  I must put salt on the story there for a minute. There I was in the Head in the Sand café, not working very hard I must say – life itself being so savage, so hilarious and unpredictable that not much invention is required – when real life intervened. I looked up and saw my wife, Ma Brigitte, belting down the road towards me. She had thrown a red scarf over her head and I could see from the expression on her face that some enormous stick had stirred up the shit. She came in and flung herself beside me trembling so much that the gold bangles rattled on her wrist and I could smell the sweat from under her flabby arms. She grabbed hold of me. Her eyes rolled back until only the whites showed and her pupils turned inwards to look at her brain.

  ‘Terrible news.’ She gasped and her eyes swivelled forward to look at me. ‘Your grandfather Papa Bones is dead. You must go back to Surinam immediately. You know how quickly they does bury the dead there. Mind you, at least they bury. Over here they cremate.’ Ma Brigitte shuddered. My wife has a dread of fire. I took her to a nearby restaurant and fed her with kebabs and hot chilli sauce until she recovered. Then I hurried home to pack.

  *

  Saying goodbye to my grandfather was sad. A soft white mist shrouded the giant Royal palms in the burial ground. When the last of the mourners had gone I fired a salute from my Heckler & Koch rifle. Boom. Boom. The noise echoed through the graveyard.

  It was not till I left the cemetery that I saw Ella de Vries standing there, fresh and demure as ever. She came over to shake my hand:

  ‘I only met your grandfather once or twice but he was such a well-known character in Paramaribo. I came to pay my respects.’

  ‘Thank you. What are you doing here? I believe you are a big star now in Brazil. In fact, I keep a photo of you.’ I was shifting from foot to foot and my heart was ricocheting under my ribs. She smiled in the face of my sheepishness and suggested we go for a coffee.

  We went to a small coffee shop situated between two historic buildings, the Jewish synagogue and the Mughal style mosque near to where Papa Bones used to hold court.

  ‘I’ve decided to base myself here in Surinam when I retire from dancing altogether. I came to look for a place. There’s a village in the interior where I spent time as a child. My friend Marijke who works for me is already there. But first I’m going to England to look after my mother.’

  ‘Come and visit me in Mambo Racine’s when you are in England. You can dance in a different way there.’

  ‘I most certainly will. I shall be in England in two weeks’ time.’

  What a gorgeous creature. That black hair. The mango-coloured dress. Those elongated black Carib eyes. I dribbled a bit as I watched her leave the café and brave the heat of the afternoon.

  *

  It was the eighth day of Papa Bones’s wake and in Surinam that is the day when the spirit of the deceased likes to be entertained by stories. Naturally he likes the stories to be about himself. Tongues loosened with rum, friends and neighbours stood up in turn and regaled each other with stories of Papa Bones, his love of gourmet food, his eroticism, his obscenity and his ability to dance. Not to be outdone, I told the story of when he was walking in the bush after a furious row with my grandmother and he saw the shimmering colours of a female anaconda in a hole in the ground. Immediately he began to feel there was a woman near him, walking close by, who wanted to seduce him. When he came home he wouldn’t have anything to do with my grandmother. In the next room she could hear him laughing and giggling like he was in love. He could see a beautiful girl with him. But there was nobody there. Only he could see this girl. He refused to make love to my grandmother. She realised that the spirit of the anaconda was seducing him away from ordinary life. Some people stop eating altogether when this happens. My grandmother knew that snakes don’t like hot pepper. She took some bricks out of the wall near the pan where the farine is parched. She made Papa Bones pass through the hole in the wall, bricking it up behind him while she burned peppers in the farine pan so that the snake spirit would not follow him. After that he was all right again. The audience at the wake burst into applause.

  It was altogether a good send-off for Papa Bones and I returned to England with the sense of a job well done.

  Chapter Forty-Three

  Ella did not attend the wake. She went back to Wieni by boat to sort out her future living arrangements. Marijke met her at the landing-stage. To Ella’s astonishment there was nothing left of the village except the collapsed wooden and palm-thatch structures of abandoned houses.

  ‘Come,’ said Marijke. ‘I’ve taken over what used to be the president’s house. We can stay there. It was his fishing retreat and it’s been deserted for years. It’s one of the few houses left standing.’

  ‘What happened?’ asked Ella as she went in and put her bags down in the empty dusty front room.

  ‘There was a massacre.’ Marijke slung up a hammock for Ella from the house beams as she spoke. ‘The government tried to cover it up but there is still evidence.’ She gave a sour grimace. ‘As we say in the village, “You can hide your grandmother but you cannot stop her coughing.” Come with me.’

  For an hour Ella followed Marijke along the trail. As they penetrated further into the bush, skeletons started to appear as if refusing to be excluded from the riotous uproar of a party. One laughing skeleton stretched out in front of them. It had partly emerged from a mound of red earth. Vine flowers wove through the ribs and snaked up the legs in mimicry of a Hollywood film star from the thirties. A black beetle sat motionless on the brow of the skull decorating it in a startling way; the delicate symmetry of its body sharply outlined against the white bo
ne. The skull-head was laughing, bone-arms thrown back in hilarity and legs wide open in sexual invitation. Another skeleton was propped up against a tree where it had fallen with its head drooping as if recovering from a hangover.

  The shrubs rustled and cracked. Ella jumped with fright. Out of nowhere a skinny Trio Indian man appeared with a look of horror on his face. He had no teeth. The folds of skin around his mouth made him look permanently aghast. He was short and only reached her shoulder. He held up his hand and gestured for the two women to follow him. Two fingers on his hand were missing. The fingers ended half-way in bulbous stumps.

  He guided them to the bank of a small creek. On the opposite side of the creek some fifty barefoot people were approaching through the trees. It was like staring into the face of a mass suicide, as if they belonged to a former life, as if they were waving from across the River Styx. Some women carried children. As the ghostly crew came towards them down to the bank of the creek they started weeping. They were shaking. No-one spoke. There was only the sound of wailing and gasping sobs. It was not just tearfulness. They stood beneath the trees in the throes of a collective grief that enveloped and contained them like a cloud as if they were bewitched. Unreachable. Some buried their faces in their hands, their bodies quivering with misery. One or two came limping forward and showed wounds, mutilated stumps. One man pulled back his trouser-leg to reveal a hugely swollen broken knee joint. They were clearly starving. They had fled after the massacre. There was not enough food. They had forgotten their nomadic history and no longer knew how to survive.

  ‘There is nothing you can do,’ said Marijke. ‘They run away from everyone who tries to go near them.’