Flight of the Swan

by Rosario Ferré

  “You mean that young violinist Niura is going around with? Isn’t he the son of some local political chieftain?” Lyubovna asked. She was so preoccupied with Dandré’s departure, she hadn’t noticed anything was amiss.

  “Yes,” I said. “And he’s also a revolutionary out to make a killing with your daughter, who, in spite of her thirty-eight years, is still a babe in arms.”

  I explained Diamantino’s tactics to Lyubovna. Everywhere he went on the island people recognized him as Don Eduardo’s son, and to be seen with Madame, who was an internationally renowned star, gave him a lot of prestige. If he could convince her to publicly espouse the revolutionary cause on the island, it would help him even more. Such support would give him recognition, and they might offer him an important political position. I had convinced myself this was the real reason for Diamantino’s insistence that we leave San Juan and make the trip to the countryside. He wanted people to see her with him. Diamantino didn’t just happen to meet Madame at La Fortaleza a week before. He sent her the Pierce-Arrow to fetch her at the dock and then came to meet her at the governor’s mansion for a purpose.

  Lyubovna sat down on Juan’s working stool. The floor around us was covered with strips of leather curled around the edges, sawdust, and centuries of grime. It smelled of glue, wax, and turpentine; of people who had to pinch both pennies and toes, and had their shoes repaired over and over because they couldn’t afford to buy new ones.

  “It can’t be. Has Niura gone crazy?”

  “She hasn’t yet, but she will if she falls in the arms of that rascal. I know his type.”

  “But he’s a total stranger! And he doesn’t even speak Russian. I’m sure Niura thinks of him as her son; you’re exaggerating.”

  “No, I’m not. And lots of ‘mothers’ have made love to men young enough to be their sons—remember George Sand and Isadora Duncan. You must speak to Madame and remind her of her duties. It’s not just her life; it’s that of all of us.”

  “That’s ridiculous. Niura would never do that.” Lyubovna’s voice was pebbly, and when she got nervous it rasped several notes higher.

  “You know Madame when she gets something into her head. She’s convinced that through patience and love, she’ll be able to overcome the differences of age, belief, culture, language, and just about everything else that estranges her from her provincial Romeo.”

  I could tell Lyubovna was frightened. For the first time since we arrived on the island she saw there was a real possibility that her daughter might fall into Diamantino’s clutches. “What can we do?” she asked, the blood drained from her face.

  “You must stay here and keep an eye out for Dandré when he comes back. We must not lose contact with him. I’ll go with Madame on the trip, and try to protect her from that scalawag.” Lyubovna embraced me and we both went out hurriedly, afraid that Juan might be coming back.

  There is only one train on the island; it runs all the way around the coast to La Concordia, then turns around and comes right back by the same route. We boarded it at seven-thirty in the morning at a very European-looking station, with clock tower, glass ceiling, and all—only everything built in miniature—on the outskirts of San Juan. The train was rustic but charming. It had a coal engine, two passenger cars with wide open windows, the mail coach, and one freight car. The passenger cars were of two kinds: first class—$1.50—had slippery straw seats, second class—seventy-five cents—had wooden seats made of slats, both equally hard on your derriere. Madame asked Diamantino to buy two first-class tickets for them and second-class for everyone else—as Dandré used to do—but Diamantino refused. Madame was traveling with him now, he said, and he was a gentleman. He took off one of his diamond studs, bought fifteen first-class tickets with his own money, and gave one to each member of the troupe. (Molinari paid for his own ticket, and traveled second class.)

  The night before, Madame had left the Teatro Nacional with Diamantino and they walked on the Condado beach for hours. “The sand was strewn with jagged volcanic rocks against which the waves kept smashing,” Madame said. (The next morning she wanted to share with me what had happened. I swallowed hard and prayed to the Virgin that she might spare me, but my prayers went unheard.) “We made love like a pair of playful octopuses crawling over each other,” Madame half sighed, half joked as she lay back on her bed and I fluffed her pillows. “We wanted to know everything about each other, inspect every nook and cranny of our past lives.” I forced myself to go on listening as I bent down solicitously to straighten her bedcovers.

  “The sky was perfectly calm and the full moon spilled light over us like an overturned bucket,” she went on dreamily. “It’s a shame not to have met earlier, Masha, not to have been born at the same time. I’ll never let him go!” I began to vigorously brush with a whisk broom the dress Madame would wear the next day, and looked uneasily out the window. The doves were cooing and nuzzling on the balcony’s rail as if validating what she had just said. I could taste blood seeping up my throat and was sure it was coming from my heart, then I realized I had bitten my lips.

  “When he turns thirty you’ll be forty-eight; when he turns sixty you’ll be resting quietly in your grave,” I said dejectedly, without turning around to look into her eyes.

  19

  THE NEXT DAY, AS we plowed through the steaming cane fields rustling on either side of the train, I spoke to Madame in private. Diamantino and Novikov had walked to the last car to get us some breakfast, and we were alone for the first time. “You’re making a terrible mistake,” I said over the train’s nerve-racking clatter. “How can you behave like this? Everybody’s judging you. You’ll end up poor, alone, and unloved if this goes on!”

  Madame looked at me, pale with anger, and the wind from the open window whipped her words around me like wasps. “How dare you, Masha!” she cried. “You don’t own me. I can do whatever I want with my life.” She slapped me, and her hand left an imprint, bright as a tulip, on my cheek. Just then Novikov walked in, a tray of steaming coffee in his hands. It spilled over the straw seats and we jumped away. “Christ! What’s come over you?” he cried, taking hold of our arms.

  “It’s a relief to be away from Dandré,” Madame sighed. “We’ve been together for eleven years—a lifetime—and everybody has a right to be free once in a while. But I can’t even talk to another man without this calfless cow butting in to reproach me.” Novikov understood perfectly. He smiled and nodded at Madame while I kept tactfully silent. Novikov was an expert in the science of love. “Make him suffer, darling,” he said. “Dandré is an old alligator, enjoy yourself as much as you want.”

  I was always wary when Madame criticized Dandré, because she always forgave him in the end. Maybe that’s why at that moment I turned into the devil’s advocate and tried to defend her husband.

  “Dandré is a kind man,” I said to Madame. “He pampers you even more than your mother—always making you drink milk and eat meat so fresh it’s practically breathing on the plate because it gives you energy. I see him take such special care of you. ‘Your feet are your fairy wings, my dear, you must give them maintenance,’ he keeps saying. It’s true that he’s like the front bumper on a train and understands life from only one perspective. In Dandré’s eyes what’s black is black and what’s white is white—there’s never a double take. But that’s why he’s so successful at everything and is such a good manager. He thinks the world of you and is a good companion because he’s your own age.” And I emphasized the last sentence, giving Madame a reassuring smile.

  Novikov roared with laughter and agreed with me. “Of course, Dandré is my friend and he’s everything you said. But one must live for the moment, dear. Don’t worry about the future. It usually takes care of itself.”

  That same afternoon we made up. Our bickering was like a tropical shower—angry raindrops one minute, serene sunlight the next. We were the heart of the company. The other members came and went—they were always looking for romance, though usually, thanks
to Madame’s preaching, common sense prevailed. But Madame and I remained faithful to each other for years.

  20

  “I FEEL EXHAUSTED FROM so much traveling, Masha,” Madame admitted, sitting beside me. “After a while you don’t want to stop anymore; you just go on dancing until your feet wear out. The feeling of home evaporates; it doesn’t exist at all. There’s only the stage, where you disrobe your soul for others every day. It’s a scary feeling—as if music took hold of your life and were leading you to your death.”

  I agreed. In the States alone we’d traveled for three whole months and visited forty towns by train.

  We relaxed, looking out the window at the beautiful scenery speeding past us. Diamantino was still somewhere else; he knew many people on the train and liked to converse with everyone.

  “You and the girls have sacrificed a lot for me, Masha,” Madame went on in a conciliatory tone. “Your work is anonymous and thankless. Tulle skirts evaporate in an instant; there are so few testimonies of our art. But you mustn’t worry. Thanks to the photographs Dandré is always taking of us, our art will become eternal, like Schubert’s, Tchaikovsky’s, or Chopin’s.”

  She was concerned that when she was gone the girls and I would be left out in the cold. Many of us were already past our prime, and there was very little Madame could do to remedy the situation. How could she, an impoverished dancer from a country that had evaporated from the face of the earth, assure our survival? It was impossible for a ballet company like ours to have more than one star—it took too much money for promotion, costumes, clothes. The dancing was important, but it wasn’t everything. “One must constantly give birth to oneself, become one’s own creation,” Madame said. As Niura Federovsky, the reserve officer Matvey Federov’s illegitimate daughter, had struggled to become the great Madame. And that took guts, because it was easy to lead quiet, mediocre lives, but terribly hard to live up to an image of perfection all the time.

  “My sari in Pharaoh’s Daughter, for example, was made of twenty-four-karat gold lame. It was worth thousands of dollars. My headdress, an ibis with turquoise eyes, cost another thousand. I designed both of them myself, because I knew that if I did, Dandré couldn’t refuse me the money. We barely managed to raise it, and I had them made. Could you imagine what it would cost to dress all the girls like that? That was the secret of Serge Diaghilev: he had all the money in the world for his Ballets Russes de Monte Carlo; Prince Sergei Oblonsky and Prince Savya Mamontov’s pockets were at his disposal and they were bottomless oil wells. Our company is very different. We dance for the poor and for the everyday citizen, as well as for the rich. Considering our meager funding, our Ballets Russes have done wonders.”

  And then there was Dandré, who was always a liability. Dandré’s passion for Madame had caused his downfall in Russia. Madame had just graduated from the Maryinsky when Dandré saw her dance for the first time. She was doing the ghost scene in Giselle at the Imperial Ballet Theater, and after Dandré saw her, he couldn’t get her out of his head. He couldn’t afford to keep her, but he set her up in a beautiful apartment in St. Petersburg and then began to get involved in illegal deals in order to pay her expenses. My mistress didn’t know any of this or she would never have permitted it. When she found out about it, it was too late. His petty thefts were discovered, and he was thrown in jail.

  Madame immediately took out all her savings and had him released on bail. Then she gave him enough money so he could travel secretly to Helsinki on a fishing boat. She was still very young then, no more than twenty-four, and on her first ballet tour abroad. Dandré met her in Estonia and later made his way to England with the group. Madame helped him settle down in London. After that she could go back to Russia as many times as she wanted, but Dandré could never go back. He lost everything—his country, his estate, his relatives—all because of Madame. She couldn’t help feeling grateful.

  “Now Dandré has a lover in New York, I’m sure of it, Masha,” she told me. “Every time he says he has to take a little side trip there for business, I know exactly where he goes. But I don’t mind. He’s a nobody, a commonplace impresario. I’m the one who’s famous: I can bask in the glory of my reputation.”

  When Madame was young she had desperately needed someone like Dandré to help tide her over her difficulties. She was an orphan and he was like a father to her. Madame met him when she was seventeen. Dandré had a box at the Imperial Ballet Theater which he shared with a young friend, handsome Prince Kotschubei, who came to see the girl dance every night. She had recently begun an affair with Prince Kotschubei, but the prince was very young also, and he didn’t have independent means. So when Madame met Dandré at the Imperial Theater, she clung to him like a gull to a rock in midocean.

  At intermission they invited her to come up to their box, and she sat between them and drank her almond juice like any other schoolgirl, since dancers couldn’t touch alcohol. But she was far from innocent. She had an erotic talent at an early age, an extraordinary sexual energy. “I danced naked for them, Masha,” she said guiltily, “my feet sliding over their naked bodies like soft, silk stars. I had the physical configuration of a child and hardly any pubic hair, my sex floated above my smooth legs like a delicate triangle of flesh, my breasts were twin moons, rising pale from my chest. During these extravagant, wild afternoons we made love untiringly on the prince’s bed, our limbs sprawled over his linen bedsheets, and I felt wonderfully loose and relaxed as I floated above both my lovers, light as a dragon-fly.

  “Mother has never forgiven me for these intemperate meetings, Masha, when the Eleusinian spirit took hold of us. That’s why she never speaks to me, even though she follows me around the world like a shadow and I take good care of her. With all the playing and frolicking, I became pregnant and had to have an abortion. I was too young to bear children, and the abortion made me sterile. That’s why I can’t see a child walking down the street without wanting to hold it in my arms. Even now, years later, Mother kneels before her icons every night and prays to God that a bolt of lightning may strike Dandré dead when she remembers, although I have long since forgiven him.” I shushed her and told her to close her eyes and rest. But she persisted. The affair with Diamantino had stirred up dregs I would never have dreamed of.

  “These early bacchanals with Prince Kotschubei, Dandré, and myself were a great sin, and they were never repeated. We were all upset by what had happened and mended our ways from then on. Dandré and I were secretly married a few months later in the small Orthodox church of Ligovo, where my grandmother came from and where I was baptized as a child. But I didn’t want anyone to know of our marriage; I agreed to it just to keep Dandré happy. That’s why I gave you the marriage certificate right after the wedding, Masha, with strict instructions that you burn it. How could I belong to Dandré and at the same time give myself to my art? My duties as a dancer were sacred. As an instrument of God, my body had to be free. Just the same, for ten years Dandré and I have been faithful to each other, drawn together by the terrible secret we share: the sad memory of a child unable to give birth to a child.

  “After my terrible sin I went about with a newspaper clipping in my handbag and took it out from time to time to read it. It’s the story of a woman in Russia, a poor peasant from Tilsit, who had fourteen children. She sat on the corner of the town square with her children all around her, and gave them away to people as they went by. Isn’t that unfair? When I would give my life for a single one.

  “During all the years we’ve spent together, I’ve accepted Dandré’s attentions, but I never loved him. He’s too masculine. Everything about him is so big: his bear paws; his shoulders, wide as a stevedore’s; his penis, as overpowering as a judge’s mallet. I cringe when he lies down next to me in bed. He could easily crush my arms like the wings of a bird if he accidentally put his weight on them. I can’t let myself go; I can’t experience any womanly pleasure. But after I met him, I slept soundly every night, knowing Mother and I were financially secu
re. Now Dandré rarely presses me for anything. He still solves all my problems, but he’s content just to be near me, to have me kiss him on his bald pate or on the tip of his nose. But it’s not a good arrangement because I feel so empty. Is it sinful to want both?

  “Our dancers are normal, middle-class young women from Russia, England, the United States; I’d do anything for them. They dream of Prince Charming every night, though they don’t tell me about it. But you’re different, Masha; you worry me the most. It makes me sad that you dislike men because of what you’ve had to suffer. I try to comfort you as much as I can so you won’t feel that way. My father didn’t beat me like yours did, but I never got to meet him—he left a void in my life. When I was a child, I used to dream about a dark, empty closet and that I was locked up inside it. My father was waiting for me there, squatting in the darkness. The dream terrorized me, but when I met Dandré I stopped having it. I’m grateful to him for that.”

  Madame was getting drowsy and I thought she would stop talking, but her voice droned on, hovering like an insect above the pounding of the train.

  “It’s amazing how much my life has changed since I met Diamantino. Every time I look at him, I blossom inside. His face has a softness about it I love; it’s so different from the stone-cast expression Dandré wears at all times. Diamantino is a poet and a musician. I love to dance for him, Masha, I know it’s difficult, but you must understand. His violin sets me free.

  “I’m a melancholy person by nature; that’s why I wear this ring with a black opal on my index finger. It was a present an admirer from Australia gave me. The black opal is like the Russian soul, at the same time dark and radiant, with rays of light glowing from its mysterious depths. Before, when I looked into it, I thought love simply wasn’t in the cards for me. God had given me talent, professional success, beauty, and good health. To complain en ungrateful. Today I look into the shimmering black stone and Diamantino’s face emerges from its depths: dark and dangerous and fascinating; powerful as a magnet.