Tender Is The Tyrant

by Violet Winspear

  It was true, Lauri thought with a little shiver. The atmosphere was rather supernatural as the day waned, bringing with it the violet hour. The rain had left pools in which the pigeons bathed, and there was hardly a soul about. Lamps began to glimmer along the water-edge of the Campanile, and there was a rustle like silk as the evening breezes stirred the Laguna.

  ‘We ought to be making our way home, she said.

  ‘I thought we might have dinner together at the Cafe of the Three Fountains,’ he suggested, ‘You have never been there, Lauri. It is quiet, the food is good, and we can eat in peace without having to listen to a lot of talk about ballet.’

  ‘But you love ballet, like all the others,’ she exclaimed.

  ‘I enjoy risotto, but I can’t eat it all the time,’ he rejoined. ‘I like the music of Ravel, the books of Thomas Mann, and arguments about technique with Maxim—but not all the time. Tonight I want to dine at the Three Fountains, to watch the stars in the water, and be a man with a girl. Don’t you want that as well?’

  Yes, she realized. She wanted to forget all about ballet for a few hours ... to be free of the man who was her master each morning at the palazzo. Controlling her every movement, her every inclination, as though she were a marionette with no human feelings. ‘You are not tired,’ he would say. Come, we will go over that pas de bourree again, and this time you will use your legs with grace, not as though they are sticks of celery!

  Sometimes it seemed to her that he had a heart of stone. It didn’t matter to him that some days she ached with homesickness; that Andreya could make her feel very much the British interloper—all he cared about was the dance.

  ‘Your body is like a violin to a musician,’ he would say. ‘Care for it, watch your Achilles tendon, never wear worn-out slippers, and always have a rub down after you have finished exercising or practising

  ‘Ballet must be lit by a magic combination of style, wit and magic,’ he emphasized, ‘otherwise it is a static one-dimensional picture instead of a three-dimensional one.’

  His authority as a teacher was absolute, and to rebel against ‘his commands was to find herself being put firmly in her place. All the same, her technique was improving, and she grudgingly admitted that what he didn’t know about ballet would have fitted beneath the ruby of the poison-ring which Andreya wore.

  They all knew it was a poison-ring. Viola had once seen it lying on the ballerina’s dressing-table and she had taken a good look at it. The tiny aperture under the ruby was empty now, but long ago—in the days of the Borgias—it had needed only a slight movement of the hand to tip the lethal contents into somebody’s glass of wine.

  Lauri was wondering how a woman could bear to wear such a ring, when at her side Michael raised his voice in order to hail a passing gondola. ‘Come along,’ he caught at her arm and they ran across the Piazza to where the swan-prowed boat awaited them.

  ‘We’re not really dressed for a smart restaurant.’ she said, as Michael assisted her into the craft. She was wearing a jacket over a skirt, with a wine velvet cap perched on one side of her head. He was just as casually clad.

  ‘This is Venice, where people dress to suit themselves, not the conventions.’ Michael sat back in his one-armed seat with its fringed black cushions, and the warning cry of their gondolier echoed across the water as they swooped beneath a bridge and around a narrow corner.

  As they drew away from the Byzantine domes of St. Mark’s into the deep, mysterious waterways, their gondolier seemed to get the idea that they were sweethearts and he decided to serenade them. His voice was untrained but strong, and Lauri listened fascinated as his Venetian song resounded against the walls of the old palazzos, the cloistered warehouses and workshops whose projecting windows almost touched overhead.

  The gondolier smiled down at Lauri as he sang with gusto the old song of Venice that tells a girl to marry young, to marry while the leaf is green because youth is soon lost.

  The song died away and all that was left was the ripple of water beneath the gondolier’s great paddle. But he had made magic for Lauri and her eyes shone softly as she gazed around her, smelling the old drowned walls and watching goblins of light dance on the water. She had never dreamed in England that Venice would be so strangely enchanting, so captivating in all its moods.

  No wonder Maxim di Corte brought his dancers here to recuperate, and rehearse for their next season. Though she didn’t begin to understand the man, she realized that as Director of his team he was beyond reproach. He knew the needs and feelings of dancers as if they were his own; that they were beings as full of emotion and imagery as the lovely ballets they brought to life onstage.

  Venice was ideal for them. Ma Venezia ze la sola. Che me posa contentar. The bells across the water making music as they exercised and mimed, and learned carefully their roles in the forthcoming season of ballets.

  ‘You are very quiet.’ Michael’s voice roused her from her reverie and she gave him a smile. He should be wearing dark hose, she thought. A velvet jerkin with slashed sleeves, and a plumed berretta.

  An answering smile kindled in his eyes. ‘You are glad you agreed to come with me to the Three Fountains?’

  ‘Did I agree?’ Her mood had grown quietly gay. ‘It seemed to me, you Tartar, that you abducted me.’

  ‘What a Tartar likes, dushamoya, he takes.’ He took her hand, and as she glanced up and saw their gondolier sculptured tall and dark above them, her heart missed a beat. For a strange moment it was as though Maxim di Corte stood there ... reminding her of something she had forgotten completely until this instant.

  ‘Michael,’ she gasped, ‘there are to be important guests at the palazzo tonight. We are all expected to attend for dinner.’

  ‘I had not forgotten,’ he drawled, ‘but I always find those dressy affairs so boring. Don’t you?’

  ‘That isn’t the point.’ Her hand struggled in his like a captive bird. ‘Signor di Corte will be annoyed with us—the other dancers are bound to put in an appearance—’

  ‘If the others attend, then he may not notice that we are absent.’ Michael squeezed her hand. ‘Relax, Lauri. He will be too busy with his guests to give us a Second thought. It is just that there are feudal strains in the man and he likes to show off his vassals to the well-to-do people who invest money in the company.’

  ‘You mean he thinks it a good business policy to let possible investors see what they are getting for their money?’ Lauri frowned.

  ‘You have it in a nutshell, my pet.’ Michael lowered one eyelid in a wicked little wink. ‘Maxim di Corte’s dancers are the flames that entice the moths. We are no. more than that at these dinner parties at the palazzo.’

  ‘Then I’m glad this one slipped my mind.’ Lauri was no longer worried about being absent from the dinner party, which was being given for the Contessa Riffini and several of her friends. The very thought of titles and tiaras made her feel nervous.

  ‘Look, we approach the isola on which the Cafe of the Three Fountains is situated.’ Michael pointed out the lights twinkling among the trees of the small island, and Lauri heard music drifting across the water. A few minutes later their gondola drew in against a stone jetty, and Michael paid their boatman and went ahead of Lauri to give her a hand up the water-worn steps.

  ‘Dinner on a little island is much more to my liking,’ she smiled. ‘You do have charming ideas, Michael.’

  ‘I am gratified to hear that I can charm even you, you cool British Miss.’ He escorted her from the jetty towards the sound of music and the glimmer of lanterns in the dining-garden of the Three Fountains. Tables were set under the trees, and a smiling waiter led them to a table near a fountain of nymphs and fauns, with a gush of white flowers arising from the basin in place of water.

  The air was drenched with the fragrance of syringa and plum-blossom, while on their table gillyflowers were arranged in a howl, shy and pretty things, velvety under her touch.

  ‘This garden is idyllic, she said to Michael. ‘J
ust smell that syringa.’

  ‘First I wish to smell some good food. Now what shall we have to eat?’ He consulted the menu with enthusiasm. ‘Mmm, how about some Adriatic fish with a half-bottle of Falerno to start us off? Macaroni with the fish, I think—they cook it with tomatoes, butter and a little onion. It’s delicious.’

  It was indeed delicious, and evasive on her fork. Michael showed her how to attack the creamy strips, to subdue and sustain a buttery forkful. Their wine, he said, was the same the Romans of ancient times enjoyed.

  They lingered over their meal in this garden on an island, listening to the musicians who wandered from table to table, watching the gondolas glide by like black swans.

  Avanti was a word they had never heard, and they gaily clinked their glasses together and laughed to think of their fellow dancers on their best behaviour for the Contessa. ‘I hate starched shirts and manners to match,’ Michael said as their peach dessert flamed in the waiter’s ladle and the toasted almonds crackled. ‘Give me freedom. Give me laughter and love. Do you not agree, dushamoya, that they are the most important things in life?’

  She thought that finding love was very important, but she wasn’t sure that her companion’s regard for love was quite the same as her own. Teach with almond is heavenly,’ she said. ‘The taste is somehow pagan.’

  ‘I am glad to hear that you have a taste for the pagan,’ he said wickedly. ‘I discover you slowly, Lauri, peeling the petals, as it were, from off a thistle.’

  ‘What a romantic description,’ she laughed. ‘.Am I so prickly?’

  ‘As a little hedgehog at times.’ His smile was speculative. ‘Would you like me to speak romantically to you?’

  ‘No indeed. Please get on with your peaches and almonds.’

  ‘Come, are you afraid you will like it?’ He studied her face in the lantern light, delicately hollowed and touchingly young. Her lips were darkly red, slightly moist from the wine they were drinking—wine of dreams, of youth, of sadness.

  ‘Do you think I don’t know that you fight your own dreams, your own longings in order to please your aunt ... and the grande signor, who sees you as another Travilla?’

  ‘Please, Michael.’ She went cold, as though touched by a ghost, and the enchantment began to die out of this supper a deux. ‘I’m not another Travilla. I haven’t her ability—or anything else.’

  ‘You have not seen Maxim’s portrait of her, up in that Venetian tower of his.’ Michael leant towards her. ‘In some lights, with your dark head a little inclined and your lashes making shadows on your cheeks, you might have sat for that portrait. I saw it the night we talked together on the ship. He must have seen it at once—and how that calculating heart of his must have leapt to the fact that you were also a dancer.’

  ‘Stop it!’ She jumped to her feet. ‘I want to go home!’

  ‘Home?’ Michael’s eyes narrowed. Do you mean to England?’

  She stared at him, and felt a sudden wild and impossible longing for England, for her aunt, and the quiet cottage life they had led. ‘No, silly,’ she forced a smile to her lips. ‘Home to the palazzo.’

  It was late when they arrived back at the palazzo. The Signor’s dinner-party was long over and most of the lights were out ... all but one that glowed behind a narrow window high up in the tower where he had his apartment.

  Built long ago, that tower, solid and tall in the starlight. Michael saw Lauri looking up at it, and he gave a rather mocking laugh. ‘What is the matter?’ he asked. ‘Were you afraid he would be waiting up to scold the pair of us?’

  ‘Of course not,’ she said, though something of the sort had entered her mind.

  ‘Come, you know you are afraid of him.’

  ‘I am nothing of the sort.’ She hurried ahead of Michael into the palazzo, and hated to admit to herself that she looked forward with apprehension to her lesson next day with her dark master.

  CHAPTER SIX

  LAURI was apprehensive about her lesson with Maxim di Corte the following morning, but it turned out that she didn’t have to face him for a few more hours. Bruno informed her at breakfast that Maxim would be away for a day at least, attending to business connected with the Contessa Riffini. Lauri breathed a sigh of relief. He might not remember when he returned that she had been absent from the dinner party he had laid on for the Contessa.

  She attended Bruno’s class and after a strenuous two-hour practice, he bade his pupils take chairs and proceeded to talk about the great exponents of dancing and how they had achieved their perfection.

  They had stamped their personality on a particular style of dancing, he said. There had never been a Sylphide quite like Taglioni, or a Dying Swan like Pavlova. Never a Spectre of the Rose like Nijinsky.

  Bruno wandered about the room, hands clasped behind him, a look of rapt pleasure on his face as he talked about the gods and goddesses of the dance. ‘We come to Travilla,’ he announced. ‘“A swallow in flight ... a sport of Psyche.” She was nothing less, my children. She became part of the music and danced upon it as on a beam of light. When you watched her you realized that each dance step is truly a variation on the heartbeat. Unlike some of the other great prima ballerinas she danced not for the world—as was generally supposed and accepted—but for one man, her husband. But in dancing for him, she answered an eternal plea in all men, touched a universal chord in all women.’

  ‘Were you acquainted with her?’ one of the dancers wished to know.

  ‘In the last years of her life, long after she was compelled to retire from ballet,’ Bruno replied. ‘But I saw her dance often when I was a youth. My father was a government official and my parents lived in various cities all over the globe. Often we were fortunate enough to be in the cities where Travilla was appearing.’ Cups of steaming coffee were brought in at that point, along with seeded rolls thick with butter and smoked sausage. After the first pangs of youthful hunger had been satisfied, the talk reverted to Travilla.

  ‘People say she was beautiful,’ spoke up a young male dancer. ‘In pictures I’ve seen of her she struck me as being rather plain.’

  ‘Few pictures have done justice to her elusive attraction.’ Bruno wiped his lips on a large bandanna which he used for mopping his neck and forehead when he was putting his class through their paces. ‘On-stage, she had a strange, fey beauty. In the changing, jewel-toned lighting she-was a bird of paradise ... a fluttering thing that every boy longs to catch. She made of the magical a reality for a few’ golden hours, so that we in the audience were drawn in, made a part of her world,’ Lauri listened to all this with fascination, for Bruno could speak half a dozen languages and he translated all that he said into English as well as French and Italian. Now he translated a question that made her go tense in her chair.

  ‘Do I think there can ever be another Travilla?’ He looked thoughtful, and perhaps it was only by chance that his glance rested for a moment on Lauri.

  ‘I am a hopeful man, a believer in fairy tales, otherwise I would not be in this mad and wonderful business called ballet,’ Bruno smiled in his shy way and thrust his hands through his hair. ‘And now, my children, the debate is over and we will proceed with some work.’

  Lauri was one of a quartet dancing in The Magic Jade, a new idea of Bruno’s about a jade figurine that comes to life at night in an auction room. A young man desires the figurine and he hides in the auction room in the hope of having the jade to himself for just one night.

  It was exactly the sort of ballet to appeal to Lauri, and the remainder of the morning passed enjoyably for her. Lunch was served in the dining salone, and afterwards she attended the mime class until five o’clock. In ballet all movement must have a meaning, and the hands, the eyes, the entire body of a ballet dancer should speak silently and eloquently.

  Michael Lonza sometimes attended the mime class, but not today, for he was working with Andreya on the new production of Giselle, in which he danced the princely role of Albrecht.

  It was well known in the
Company that Andreya disliked the role of Giselle, but she was the prima ballerina, and Concha confided to Lauri that she had been known to dance with a pulled ligament rather than let another dancer take her place, even for one performance. She clung to all the leading roles’ as firmly as a moray-eel to a rock, and anyone chosen to understudy her might as well sit in the wings with some knitting.

  ‘I wonder why Andreya dislikes the role so much?’ Lauri and Concha were enjoying ravioli at the Cafe Anzolo.

  ‘Andreya is vain, like all great beauties, and she knows that she will never dance Giselle as it was danced by Travilla. She is intensely jealous of the memory of Travilla,’ Concha added gleefully.

  At the end of the meal, Concha wanted to go with a group of dancers to a late art exhibition; Lauri felt disinclined for further company and made her way back to the palazzo alone. When she reached the forecourt she stood gazing up at the tower that looked as dark and impregnable as the man who had his apartment up there.

  There were no lights behind the narrow windows of his rooms. His tall figure did not stand silhouetted against the stars, for tonight he was away from home and the tower had a strangely deserted look.

  Lauri went a step closer to the rough stone walls and gazed with fascination at the door set deeply in the wall. It seemed to her to have an air of hiding the forbidden. It intensified her curiosity about Maxim di Corte’s eyrie; the tower-study in which he kept his collection of books on the ballet ... and his own special portrait of Travilla.

  She put out a hand and tried the handle ... to her half-frightened delight it turned and the unlocked door swung inwards with a ghostly little creak. A winding staircase confronted her, illumined by lamps set in wall niches spaced rather wide apart, making a spiral of up-winding, shadowy light.

  Her heart beat fast ... the temptation to mount those stairs was overwhelming. It would, she reasoned, take her about five minutes to reach the battlements. She would steal a quick look over the city from the roof of Maxim di Corte’s tower, then scuttle down the stairs and be out of the door like a shadow that had never entered in the first place.