by Mary Morris
But her father is dead. The day after she breathed in his ashes, she took herself to Palos where she earned her living in the ports and on the ships ready to take on a worthless girl. She heard that her mother had made it out of Seville and was living in Lisbon, but she had not gone to look for her. She would never have let her in. For two years Inez had stayed around the docks. Then she found this ship, heading for the New World, and they hired her. At least she would have a bed to sleep in and food to eat. It is odd that she doesn’t speak, but it puts her at a slight advantage. Though most men want her for her body, some just want to talk. And because she does not reply, they trust her with their secrets and some even leave her body alone.
Her silence is matched only by her beauty. Her long black hair, her olive skin. Those green eyes. And a body that is full, that men love to cup and knead. A body made for the taking. After Javier, hands did not matter. Men did not matter. In silence she bears her pain. It drives some of the men mad. They taunt her. They try to trick her into speech. But most make silent love to her, then tell her their darkest secrets that they will share only with their confessors. Some of these men she drives mad. Even Columbus enjoys her, and her silence makes him want her all the more. But what entices him the most is that he can tell her anything, and he knows she will not betray him. Columbus does not trust many of his men, but he has come to trust this silent whore. She is the only one he doesn’t rotate among his other ships.
When they anchor off the coast of Hispaniola, Columbus brings Inez to his cabin. He offers her a basin of water where she may wash and a comb with which to untangle her matted hair. From his bed he observes her. He is drawn to her green eyes, her lush hair. He pours her a glass of sherry, and as she sips it he begins to confide in her. He shares his fears that he might not find gold. It is possible that he has not reached China. He never writes about this in his journals, but he tells Inez. In his journals he is always on course. He keeps his doubts for himself and his silent whore. He will force his mapmaker and crew to swear that Cuba is not an island but a peninsula of the mainland. He will make it part of Cathay. But he cannot invent gold. What can he bring back of value that will satisfy the king and queen?
When he finally touches her, he is gentle and slow. No one has touched her with such tenderness in years, and though she feels no pleasure, she isn’t repulsed either. She does not mind resting in his arms in the softness of a bed and sheets. His skin is smooth, almost hairless and pale, and he smells of the sea. Late into the night, he continues his monologue that is filled with his doubts and his need to return from this voyage with something of value. Night after night after they make love, he confides in her.
Somehow in talking to Inez, Columbus discovers the solution to his dilemma. Though she has never spoken to him, it is as if she has. Looking around one afternoon, he finds his answer. He considers it another sign. He observes the gentle Taino who bring them wild birds and rodents that they roast. Who methodically, futilely search for gold. He gazes at their brown naked bodies and knows what he can bring to his king and queen. He will bring slaves.
After all he has seventeen ships. Surely one can be used to carry the captives. Slaves are as good as gold, aren’t they? He orders his men to capture as many Taino and Carib as they are able. For three days they raid villages, putting as many as they can into chains. Those who struggle or try to flee are slashed to pieces. An arm, a foot is chopped off as they run into the jungle where they will bleed to death. Others cower. Children are left behind to starve. But the women are taken. How else can they populate Spain with more slaves?
His men capture five hundred and chain them into the hold of the ship. The prisoners cry and shriek as the ship sails. They do not stop shrieking until the sailors slit two throats. In a matter of days the captives grow ill. They develop skin ulcers that will not heal. They clasp their guts in pain. They cough blood. Half die on the voyage and their bodies are tossed into the sea. The rest perish shortly after they reach Spain. But Columbus will only learn of this failure upon his return. Once he has captured the slaves and sent the ship, heading for home, Columbus believes he has at last succeeded.
He is ready to leave this desolate place, but something catches his eye. Over by the river he sees something moving. A tiny creature crouches by the banks, drinking and bathing itself. At first Columbus thinks it is an animal and perhaps they will kill it for food. But the creature hears the men and toddles toward them on short, stubby legs. It is a child of no more than two, a naked fair-skinned little boy who smiles as he walks in their direction. Columbus looks and sees that the encampment is deserted. No one is here to care for this boy, but somehow he has survived. The child totters toward Columbus, curious, without fear, and then smiling, gazes up at the Admiral of the Ocean Sea with the bluest of eyes.
Inez is also at the river’s edge where she has come to bathe, and Columbus shouts to her. When she sees the little boy, she stifles a cry and scoops him into her arms, covering him with her shawl. “I will care for him,” Inez says in a clear, crisp voice. These are the first words anyone has heard her speak since the voyage began.
Columbus is not sure what to do with the boy, but Inez convinces him. “Look at his eyes and his fair skin. He is the child of one of ours.” While among the men there is speculation about whose child this might be, Inez knows right away. It is not his eyes that tell her. The boy is circumcised, and when she bathes him she sees that it has been done with a swift, sure hand.
Inez takes the boy into her cabin where he nestles against her in her bed. When he grabs at her blouse, she lets him find comfort at her breast, and before they reach Lisbon, her milk begins to flow.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
FIXED POINT—1992
Since she’s been back in New York, Elena can’t get lamb with garbanzo beans out of her mind. She barely remembers the Berber dancers in Fès, the drummers in Jemaa el Fna in Marrakech, the camel trek into the Sahara. Since she and Derek have returned from Morocco, she can only think about the lamb stew. Elena rarely thinks about food, but now she thinks about it all the time.
It is a warm summer day and, even as she walks to the class she is about to teach at the Ballet Extension School, the savory dish is on her mind. They’ve been back for weeks, but she recalls little of their ten-day jaunt beyond the swirls of spices like a genie rising from the tagine, the aromas of turmeric and ginger, cumin and cardamom that filled her head. The salt of the lamb, the sweetness of the apricot. It seems impossible to her. How many times had visitors begged her grandmother for the recipe to her lamb with garbanzos? Or her chicken that falls off the bone?
She’d seen guests in their home, their mouths watering at the flavors, begging to know. How many times had her grandmother laughed in their faces? Maybe if someone put her feet to a fire she’d tell. How can the family’s secret recipe that her grandmother guarded with her life—and the recipe that everyone believes died with her—be served in a Moroccan restaurant that they’d stumbled upon in a maze of dark alleyways and narrow streets in Tangier?
Elena cannot understand. Throughout their trip through Morocco, to Fès, down to Merzouga and the Sahara where the sand covered the roads and got into their teeth, across the Atlas Mountains and finally to Marrakech, Elena had been obsessed with this one fact. And now it is the only thing she remembers of their entire journey. Not the wild love they made in Malaga, not the ferry crossing past Gibraltar or that strange giant circle around the moon their last night in the desert, none of it made a lasting impression on Elena except for her first taste of that lamb stew.
And now wherever she is—at Gristedes getting groceries, at Lincoln Center at the ballet, in bed with Derek—the past comes streaming back. Moments she has long ago forgotten or put into a vault inside her brain that she hadn’t intended to open. Memories and secrets that she sealed away to such an extent that it seemed as if they happened to someone else. All of this comes roaring like a locomotive through her mind.
On the corner o
f Eighth Avenue, Elena lights a cigarette. She has a few moments to smoke before she reaches the school, which is located on Fifty-Seventh Street and Ninth Avenue in an old loft building that had once been a millinery factory. It is a large room, really, with mirrors on one side and ballet barres along the wall. There is a dressing room and a small office. A former ballet dancer who had a semi-illustrious career opened this studio for young dancers. All of the teachers are former members of the ballet corps.
Crushing out her cigarette in front of the building where dozens of other butts lie, she goes inside. She’s already a few minutes late. This isn’t unusual. She’s been warned about being late before. Perhaps it’s just a matter of time before she’ll lose this last link she has to the world of dance.
Taking off her coat, Elena hangs it up in the dressing room. She is already wearing her black tights and leotard. She slips off her sneakers and puts on her ballet shoes. She used to spend so many hours sewing and gluing her shoes herself, putting in padding just where she needed it, replacing the ribbons. Now they are worn down, frayed, another sign of her diminishing life. Flexing both of her feet, for they ache as usual, she walks into the room. Eleven girls and two boys, aged twelve to fifteen, are in various poses of stretching. Some have a leg on the barre; others are bent forward. A few are on the ground, legs spread. Most wear leg warmers.
As she walks into the studio, there is a flurry of “Good morning, Ms. Torres” and “Hello, Ms. Torres.” Elena smiles, and then claps her hands.
“Against the wall,” she says, “in second position. Now pick a spot and hold it. Heads up.” She walks past them, raising a chin, straightening a spine. It is hard not to look at these children and have a glimpse of what lies ahead. She examines the turnout of their hips and legs. The lift of their chins. In the next two years half will drop out. Others will begin to experience problems with their feet and spines. One might make it to the ballet corps. In her years of teaching, Elena has only had two students go on to dance with major companies. She looks at these children’s faces and feels as if she is selling snake oil.
Tilly Wilson stands, arms out, feet splayed like a crooked cross. And poor Sterling Anderson. His nervous mother sits, plucking lint off her dress. She stays for his lessons on the excuse that it will be too short a time for her to go home. Sara Murphy is flapping her arms like wings. All that girl can do is pretend she is Odette in Swan Lake.
Most of them saw Swan Lake and maybe the Nutcracker and decided they were going to be dancers. Others, like Elena, had a different trajectory. She didn’t even know what a ballet was when she began to dance. She just twirled around in her family’s trailer, spinning on one foot. She fell in love with the movement of her body. She flowed through rooms. She soared on roads on the way to school until it began to occur to her that she could spin right out of this life and into another.
As Elena’s legs grew longer, her gym teacher thought that she might like to dance. There were classes in Santa Fe about forty minutes from Entrada, and dutifully every Tuesday and Thursday afternoon her mother, Rosa, drove her down once she’d finished her shift cleaning rooms in the Taos hotel.
Elena was only nine when her lessons at Miss Marilyn’s Dance Studio began. She had no idea if she wanted to be a dancer. She didn’t even know what that meant. But she knew she wanted to dance. Then Miss Marilyn took her to see Giselle when it played at the Santa Fe Opera. Elena was twelve at the time and she spent the two hours riveted by the story of the peasant girl with a weak heart and a passion for dance who sacrifices all for love. From that moment on, for Elena there was no going back.
Now as she looks over her roomful of students, Elena thinks back to the first time, when she’d come to spend her summer in New York. She was only fourteen, a wisp of a girl, as if hands could break her, her father used to say. When she was seventeen she’d come back for a year that has extended itself into the rest of her life, except for a brief return to pack up her things and those occasional sojourns home.
Her father drove her to Albuquerque where the School of American Ballet was hosting auditions. Though he drove in silence, he had tears in his eyes the whole way. “You are my little girl,” Rafael Torres told his daughter even as she was drifting away from him. It was as if by making this simple drive down from the mountains, the rest of his life and hers were all mapped out, and in a way, they were. Her dance instructor arranged for Elena to have a shot. “She’s a natural,” Miss Marilyn, as all her students called her, said. Miss Marilyn had once danced with the New York City Ballet, and then she had a baby and moved to Santa Fe where she raised her daughter alone. Years later Elena heard rumors that the daughter was Balanchine’s child.
Elena had been so nervous she’d thrown up twice the night before her audition. She’d stretched all night long until she could lay completely flat, legs in a split, on the floor, but now her muscles ached. She’d slept in her leotard. She’d been up at four though they didn’t have to be there until ten. She made her father drive at first light and he’d driven at a snail’s pace because there was ice on the road.
When they arrived, her father waited in the hallway with the other parents. “I’ll be right here,” he told her. Taking a deep breath, Elena walked into the stark room where Miss Marilyn and a man and a woman she’d never seen before sat on folding chairs. Elena was still sick to her stomach.
There were four other children in the room. One girl she recognized from her ballet class. A nice girl with a toothy grin and, Elena thought, rather floppy arms, but perhaps she was just jealous as she often was of other girls who received Miss Marilyn’s praise. Since she’d first seen Miss Marilyn in that burgundy velvet tutu with her pink tights and toe shoes, a costume she’d worn when she danced in Giselle, Elena wanted to be her daughter. Miss Marilyn always came to class wearing a lovely tutu and tights. Some days she looked like a black swan. Some days she was a Spanish dancer. Elena was amazed at how easily it was to turn into something else just by changing your clothes.
Elena was expecting a piece of music. Instead they asked her to stand before them. The man, who wore a gray suit and looked like a school principal, examined her turnout and ran his fingers down her long legs. He asked her to rise on her toes and bend so that he could see the flex in her feet. He spent a long time on her neck. Elena was glad that she’d pinned up her hair that morning.
Then he asked them to assume second position and raise a leg. As they stood, legs raised, the man walked around. When he came to Elena, he pushed her leg up farther than she thought it could go, but she did not lose her balance. He turned her to the left and right, still holding her leg in the air. He touched his finger to her chin, raising it slightly. The man walked away from her and she held the pose. After a few moments he looked at her again and she put her leg down. He did the same with them all, and then he asked a boy and a girl to leave. The girl burst into tears. The boy seemed relieved. He dashed out as if none of this had ever been his idea.
The remaining three included the girl with the toothy grin. She didn’t want that girl to get the scholarship to go to New York. She hoped the girl would smile and show her buckteeth, but the girl had long ago stopped smiling when things mattered.
While the man told them what to do, the woman, who wore black slacks and very red lipstick, was making notes. From time to time she nodded at the man or the man nodded at her. Miss Marilyn sat with her spine erect, as she always did. She’d injured her spine years ago. But Miss Marilyn regretted nothing. Not even when her daughter moved back to New York to study piano. “You are all my little girls,” Miss Marilyn liked to say.
The man in the suit told the third girl to go and she left, stone-faced. Now it was just Elena and the toothy girl who wouldn’t smile. He sent them to the barre where they performed various movements. It was so easy Elena almost forgot she was doing something important. After a few more minutes the man stepped back and thanked them. “You’ll get a letter from us,” he said. As they were leaving, Miss Marilyn smiled
but, because they were both her students, Elena couldn’t tell who she was smiling at.
Outside her father waited and they drove home, but this time he wanted to talk. He asked her questions, but Elena was silent. Nothing was what she’d expected and the whole experience made her sad and made her feel as if her life was going to be sad and as if it belonged to someone else. Three weeks later a letter arrived offering her a summer scholarship to study at the School of American Ballet. The toothy girl didn’t get accepted and soon afterward stopped going to Miss Marilyn’s, but now Miss Marilyn worked with Elena all the more fiercely. “Hold your head up,” Miss Marilyn said to her ten times in every class. “Show everyone your beautiful neck.” Miss Marilyn ran her finger slowly along the front of Elena’s throat just to remind her of how long it was.
* * *
“All right,” Elena says, “we’re going to work on spotting for spins.” She moves around the room, or rather glides. It is how she always moves. The way Miss Marilyn taught her. Head up, feet sliding along the floor. Never move your torso. Just your arms. When it is Tilly’s turn to cross the room, Elena follows close behind. “Chin up. Eyes straight forward. En pointe. Be very straight, Tilly, very tall.” Tilly’s eyes flutter, the way they always do when Elena is behind her, as if she is going to cry. But Elena doesn’t care. She pushes Tilly the hardest.
Now she wraps her hands around the girl’s tiny waist. “All right, spin, head forward. Spin, head forward.” The girl spins like a top.
Of all of them, Tilly has the most promise. She has that long black hair, those long legs, and an excellent extension. Everything about her feels like a dancer. It is the odd thing about a dancer. You never look at someone and think, “Oh, that’s a teacher or that’s a doctor.” But a dancer always looks like a dancer. Of course it is in her body, isn’t it? But it is more than that. It is also the way the gaze is always set at some distant point in space. It is one of the first things a dancer learns to do when spinning. To have a fixed point in the distance so that you don’t fall. Even years later, many of them, herself included, can’t stop looking at that spot.
