Flight of the Swan

by Rosario Ferré

  When the rehearsal was over, we went back to Dos Ríos to rest. “Do you think it’s wise to go on wearing your tunic when you dance the Bacchanale on opening night?” I asked, trying to be as diplomatic as possible. “People may think you’re wearing it for political reasons.” But Madame didn’t heed my warning, and the costume for the Bacchanale—the red chiffon tunic I loved because it made her look like a Communist Venus—was kept as it was. She only asked me to repair the hem. That night I knelt in front of the icon of the Virgin of Vladimir and prayed that the days might go by fast and that Dandré, the lesser of two evils, would come back to us as soon as possible. Madame knelt by my side and, I am sure, prayed that he would never return.

  29

  ON SUNDAY, DOÑa BASILISA’S daughter came home from school to spend summer vacation on the island. Ronda Batistini arrived from the States early; her ship dropped her off at Arecibo’s wharf at eight in the morning. Don Pedro was crazy about his daughter and went to pick her up in the Pierce-Arrow himself.

  “This is my daughter,” Doña Basilisa said to Madame proudly as she took the girl to meet the dancer. They were all sitting in rocking chairs out on the verandah, drinking cold guarapo—silvery sugarcane juice—spiked with a little rum in tall glasses. Ronda was refreshingly spontaneous; she pumped my hand vigorously and then gripped Madame’s, defying Puerto Rican custom, which dictated that women never shook hands. “I saw posters of your performance at the Metropolitan Opera House, but I couldn’t get tickets. And now you’ll be dancing in my hometown,” the girl said, clearly elated to meet the famous ballerina.

  Adelina, Doña Basilisa’s maid, told me the story of Ronda that morning, as we were preparing lunch. The girl was the apple of her parents’ eyes, she said as she gave me a bowl of gandules to clean, picking out the dry ones. The tender smell of the fresh peas reminded me of spring in the Russian countryside, and I breathed it in so that it would cure my lungs. Since her brother, Adalberto—the one no one ever talked about in the house because of Don Pedro’s religious beliefs—had vanished, Ronda would be Dos Ríos’s sole heir. This made her feel she had a great responsibility resting on her shoulders.

  Her brother’s disappearance made a deep impression on Ronda, who grew up to be sober-minded and thoughtful. Perhaps because she tried desperately not to dwell on her brother’s absence, she had developed an intense passion for healing. She loved animals and was always bringing sick dogs and cats to the house, which turned into a regular animal hospital because she would bathe, feed, and minister to them. She became famous all around Dos Ríos for her gift and people would travel for miles to bring her their sick pets. Many brought them when they were terminally ill and knew they were going to die. “I want my dog to die with you,” they’d say to her. “After being my companion for fifteen years, it’s the least I can do for him.” And Ronda became used to looking death in the face.

  When Ronda turned sixteen Don Pedro insisted she go to high school in the States. He wanted to get her away from the turmoil at the farm, from the yapping dogs and lowing cows she was always taking care of. At first Doña Basilisa was adamant and refused to be separated from her daughter, but when she learned that Diana Yager, the governor’s daughter, was attending Lady Lane School in Massachusetts, she condescended to send Ronda to the same school, where she would learn proper manners.

  At Lady Lane, Ronda discovered how different she was from the rest of the girls. The housemother boxed her ears because she sliced meat and ate with the knife in her right hand and the fork in her left, “as stevedores do,” instead of putting the fork down and picking it up again with the right in a routine polite young ladies were supposed to observe; because she reached across the table for the bread, or threw salt over her shoulder for good luck whenever it spilled over. Her roommates laughed at her because she doused her bedsheets with bay rum every night to keep away bad dreams and drank tea made from sour-sop leaves her mother sent her in little brown paper parcels, to use whenever she had menstrual cramps. But Ronda patiently stood their teasing because soon she would be returning to her pets.

  When she came to Arecibo for vacation in the summer she scandalized everyone with her American tomboy independence. She wore bell-bottomed khaki slacks in public, smoked unfiltered Chesterfields, and took her pets riding with her in her father’s Pierce-Arrow. She went to the beach alone at night with her boyfriends to roast marshmallows on an open fire, and never went to Mass on Sundays. Tongues wagged, but she was headstrong and went on doing what she pleased. She was very pretty, with light brown curls that framed her oval-shaped face and made her look like an ivory miniature. Don Pedro and Doña Basilisa were crazy about her. They forgave her rebellious behavior and kept her on a pedestal.

  When she graduated from high school that spring, Ronda said she wanted only two things: to be able to go on to veterinary school and to own a pura sangre, a paso fino horse she wanted as a graduation present. She dreamed it would be all white, its mane and tail the color of guarapo spilling all the way to the ground, and its glossy pelt rippling under the sun. She planned to name it Rayo, and would love it for as long as she lived. But Don Pedro, in spite of his preference for his daughter, refused both. There were no women veterinarians on the island—it was a career for men. And owning a spirited horse was dangerous, she might have a serious accident. They had already tragically lost her brother, and they couldn’t risk losing her also. Don Pedro had written Ronda a formal letter at school informing her of all this—Adelina the maid had heard him read it out loud to Doña Basilisa before he mailed it—but as they still hadn’t talked about these matters in person, Adelina was sure Don Pedro would eventually give in. “What Ronda wants, Ronda gets,” Adelina told me, shaking a sheaf of freshly picked lettuce out the kitchen window as she began to make the salad for lunch.

  Ronda got along better with her mother than with her father. Don Pedro’s family was Spanish; his father had been born in Majorca, at a little town called Soller, where he built a magnificent stone house with the money he sent back home from Dos Ríos. Don Pedro was very strict with Ronda, and expected her to get married and start a family as soon as she graduated from high school. Doña Basilisa, on the other hand, saw her daughter’s veterinary career as an actual possibility. Don Pedro should consent to let the girl pursue her studies, since later she could lend a hand at the mill. She could help cure farm animals—the cows, the heifers, and above all, the valuable oxen, with their horns bound in strips of mud-spattered cotton sacks, that pulled the sugarcane carts up and down the slushy country roads.

  Doña Basilisa wasn’t religious like Don Pedro. Her family was half Spanish, half French—great admirers of encyclopedists like Montaigne, Voltaire, and Montesquieu. They were skeptics and rationalists, and Doña Basilisa was also, if only by family tradition, because she certainly hadn’t read them. But she never dared express her own opinions or contradict her husband in any way. At the dinner table, when Ronda argued with Don Pedro and ran sobbing to her room, Doña Basilisa would follow and simply sit next to her on the bed, stroking her daughter’s hair without saying a word. Doña Basilisa’s comforting presence, her soft arms that always smelled of powder, and her cool hands eventually helped Ronda regain her self-control.

  Doña Basilisa couldn’t even begin to imagine what would happen if Don Pedro found out that Ronda and Bienvenido Pérez were attracted to each other. When Ronda came back from school that summer looking so beautiful and full of life, Doña Basilisa became even more apprehensive. She knew Don Pedro was capable of anything; he would be furious with Bienvenido when he found out. He had helped the young man acquire an education partly to get him away from the farm. But Bienvenido, instead of staying in San Juan once he graduated, where he had many more opportunities as an engineer, had, incredibly, come back to Arecibo.

  Madame was pleased to meet Ronda. She liked young women who knew what they wanted. When Madame learned Ronda was going to be a veterinarian, she thought it was wonderful. She told her all abou
t the exotic whiskered nightingales she had received as a gift in Cuba, and about Poppy, her American bull terrier, who looked just like her husband. “I often get along better with my pets than with many of my friends,” Madame confessed to Ronda. “Most animals are more trustworthy than people.” Ronda, on her part, hit it off with Madame from the start because of her passionate nature.

  At first the girl was a heavy cross to bear. I found her conceited and spoiled—being her father’s pet she was used to getting her way—and I couldn’t understand why Madame found her so charming and went out of her way to be nice to her. But then, Madame always did all she could to gain a hold on her young female admirers. At first she thought she could do the same with Ronda. The girl admired Madame to no end and wanted to know all about her, but she was already in love with Bienvenido when they met. Madame could never control her.

  Madame went everywhere with Diamantino now, and they were often seen at the beach swimming or visiting Doña Victoria’s parlor in the evening, where they sat together listening to music. A rift opened between Madame and the girls. They refused to come to the house to see Madame, and spent most of the time on their own in Arecibo. Madame, on the other hand, liked to be with Ronda when she wasn’t with her lover (she was almost never with me anymore). Ronda entertained her and took her mind off the animosity that had sprung up between her and our troupe. To feel rejected and unloved, after being the center of attention for so many years, was a calamity Madame could not accept. Furthermore, when Ronda found out about the rumors that were going around about the dancer—that she was almost forty and had fallen for Diamantino Márquez, who was twenty—“an old hag embracing a pink-cheeked cupid,” as her backbiting students put it—Ronda was incensed. “I don’t care how old she is! If she loves him, all the more power to her.”

  One afternoon, Madame and I decided to walk to town with Ronda instead of waiting for Diamantino to drive us there. We strode down the road, enjoying the sunshine and the sweet breeze which combed the cane fields. Oro and Plata ran beside us. “In Philadelphia once I got to see Isadora Duncan dance barefoot,” Ronda said. “I liked her very much,” she added candidly. “Why don’t you dance barefoot, Madame, instead of with your feet bound like Chinese women? It would make you much closer to nature.” And when Madame laughed and insisted she was wrong, that classical ballet made the liberation of the spirit possible precisely by disciplining the body, the girl answered: “Isadora’s art is far more advanced than yours.”

  “That may be so, my dear,” I retorted in defense of Madame. “But I’d like to see Madame dancing barefoot and au naturel if she began drinking vodka with her caviar in the company of poets with golden locks and baby blue eyes, like Isadora did with Essenin, her Russian Ganymede.”

  That exchange was worthy of the trenches of Verdun, and I felt proud of myself. But when Madame heard what I said, she turned and stared back at me accusingly. “How about the pot calling the kettle black?” she shot at me. And I knew then she had caught me making love with Juan, who was ten years older than I was, on the verandah’s hammock.

  Doña Basilisa wanted to have a picnic on the beach for Ronda. She asked us to help out, and we carried everything we needed down to the seashore: towels, canvas chairs, umbrellas, tablecloths, napkins, paper plates, and cups. Adelina brought out steaming cauldrons full of delicious food that Doña Basilisa had prepared: rice and guinea hen, roasted pork, pasteles, hayacas, rabbit fricassee, and we all went merrily over to the nearest palm grove looking for shade. Diamantino was wearing an oil-black bathing suit which fit him like a glove. It was the first time I had seen him partly without his clothes on, and I must admit I felt jealous. He was very attractive; under the circumstances, Madame’s folly seemed more understandable.

  Don Pedro had picked out a special wine from his wine cellar—a golden amontillado which we cooled at the water’s edge, inside a lobster trap. The day was clear as a glass bell, as they often are in December on the island. I was feeling happy and looking forward to the outing when I saw Diamantino and Madame kissing shamelessly in public, a bit further down the beach. They were leaning into the wind and Madame’s clothes were billowing around them; they looked like a pair of sloops sailing full gale.

  Food was the only magic raft I could hold on to so as not to sink in an ocean of sorrow. My appetite has always been my impending nemesis, and I’ve finally succumbed to it in my old age. Now I’m fat and have stopped worrying about my weight, but when I was young I used to remind myself: “A minute on the tongue, a lifetime on the hip, Masha,” trying to resist temptation. Doña Basilisa was an expert temptress, and the day of the picnic I ate everything in sight. It was the most effective way to combat depression.

  Doña Basilisa had invited several of her friends from the War Relief Association: twenty ladies, all of them as plump as she was, with flanlike double chins and pink elephant legs and arms, all wearing white uniforms with red crosses sewn on their caps. After lunch they planned to cross the canal, Caño Tiburones, in a towed barge and visit Piñales, a hamlet with several poor neighborhoods. They meant to make speeches to the people there, asking for Red Cross donations and instructing the children as well as the adults on how to plant manioc roots and breadfruit and plantain trees, fast-growing staples which traveled well. They would pick up the produce themselves in a few months in several wagons, they said, to ship them to the soldiers overseas.

  It was obvious Doña Basilisa had her heart set on making a good match for her daughter: Diamantino was just the right age for the girl, and he was from an excellent family. With time he would inherit part of Don Pedro’s fortune and maybe go into politics, as Don Pedro wanted him to. “Things have to happen naturally,” Doña Basilisa told me with a wink that afternoon, when she asked Ronda to spread the gay, red-checked tablecloth on the sand with Diamantino’s help. “They can’t be forced.” But it was obvious where Diamantino’s interest lay, and he only treated Ronda like a good friend.

  I had to wheedle and plead, but I finally convinced our dancers to come to the party. They arrived a little later with Molinari. Juan was at the beach also, and was helping me carry the cauldrons of food to a shaded spot under a sea-grape shrub when we saw them. Molinari brought with him two bottles of rum and he said hello as if nothing had happened. Juan and I did the same. Where was he staying? He wasn’t at the hotel, and he certainly wasn’t at Dos Ríos; he had disappeared for three or four days. Neither of us dared question him about his little night visit, however, and we decided to wait until we could corner him alone.

  The servants passed the rice and guinea hen around and we all began to eat and drink. Our girls wouldn’t join the rest of the company; they kept to themselves in a little group, grumbling and complaining about the heat, the sun, the mosquitoes—whatever they could think of to spoil Madame’s happiness. I walked over to them and heard them discussing how much money they would need from the sale of the tickets to go back to San Juan after the first few performances. Madame pretended she didn’t hear, and went on sitting next to Diamantino and sipping white wine under a large-leafed almond tree to keep out of the sun. Doña Basilisa and her Arecibo friends sat at a long wooden trestle table the servants had set up under the palm trees, shaded by large black umbrellas.

  After lunch, Doña Basilisa called out to the boatman to ferry her over to Piñales. The girls all dove into the shallow waves and were cooling off in water up to their chests when I saw them whispering among themselves. A mischievous gleam had appeared in Nadja’s eyes. She was the most talented of the dancers, and since Madame and I were staying at Dos Ríos she had become the leader of the pack. Doña Basilisa and her friends were standing placidly on the barge, letting themselves be rowed to the other side of the canal, when the girls began to wade determinedly toward them. Madame, Diamantino, and I stood on the shore, wondering what was going on.

  Nadja, Katia, Maya, and Egorova, together with Ronda, who now joined them and was laughing hysterically, pulled themselves up on the barge
and sat on it until it began to sink. The fisherman who was shoving it with a long pole across the canal began to shout for them to get off, and we ran forward to try to help him. But the girls wouldn’t budge. Doña Basilisa and her twenty plump, powdered friends slowly sank to the bottom of the canal like so many waterlogged pink elephants. Fortunately, the canal was shallow at that point and the water only came to their waists. Their snow-white Red Cross uniforms ruined, they had to give up their plans to collect money from the poor and to teach the starving people of Piñales how to plant manioc root and plantain to feed the soldiers overseas.

  I wondered if the girls had had too much to drink in the heat, or whether they were following someone’s orders. I remembered seeing the servants passing around jiggers of Molinari’s rum with tall glasses of lemonade, which the girls drank avidly. Fear filled my heart. The devil was punishing us for our sins, stirring the pot with his tail.

  30

  DONA BASILISA WASN’T ANGRY at what had happened; she took the whole thing in stride. “You wanted to teach us how to swim, isn’t that so, dear?” she asked Ronda and the dancers as she came out of the water, laughing good-naturedly and dripping from head to toe. Her friends from town didn’t laugh, however, and they all angrily left the party, heading toward the house to dry themselves before driving back home. Suddenly I felt sorry for Doña Basilisa; she was all sweetness but she had no core, a chubby, gray-haired little girl everybody made fun of. To prove that she didn’t hold anything against Ronda and the dancers, she invited us all to dinner at the house that evening. But Nadja, Katia, and Maya began bickering among themselves about who was going to dance the leading role in the chorus. Madame had to intervene and ordered them all back to town with Smallens and Novikov. Molinari went with them; he said he had something important to do in town. Madame said she would stay on at Dos Ríos with me.