Alabama bought Madame flowers which wilted and shriveled in the steam of the overheated studio. The place being more comfortable, more spectators came to the classes. A critic of the Imperial Ballet came to witness one of Alabama’s lessons. Impressive, reeking of past formalities, he left at the end on a flood of Russian.
“What did he say?” asked Alabama when they were alone. “I have done badly—he will think you are a bad teacher.” She felt miserable at Madame’s lack of enthusiasm: the man was the first critic of Europe.
Madame gazed at her dreamily. “Monsieur knows what kind of a teacher I am,” was all she said.
In a few days the note came:
On the advice of Monsieur——I am writing to offer you a solo debut in the opera Faust with the San Carlos Opera of Naples. It is a small role, but there will be others later. In Naples there are pensions where one can live very comfortably for thirty lire a week.
Alabama knew that David and Bonnie and Mademoiselle couldn’t live in a pension that cost thirty lire a week. David couldn’t live in Naples at all—he had called it a postcard city. There wouldn’t be a French school for Bonnie in Naples. There wouldn’t be anything but coral necklaces and fevers and dirty apartments and the ballet.
“I must not get excited,” she said to herself. “I must work.”
“You will go?” said Madame expectantly.
“No. I will stay, and you will help me to dance La Chatte.”
Madame was noncommittal. Looking into the woman’s fathomless eyes was like walking over a stretch of blistering pebbles through a treeless, shadeless August as Alabama searched them for some indication.
“It is hard to arrange a debut,” she said. “One should not refuse.”
David seemed to feel that there was something accidental about the note.
“You can’t do that,” he said. “We’ve got to go home this spring. Our parents are old, and we promised last year.”
“I am old, too.”
“We have some obligations,” he insisted.
Alabama no longer cared. David was a better person at heart than she to care about hurting people, she thought.
“I don’t want to go to America,” she said.
Arienne and Alabama teased each other mercilessly. They worked harder and more consistently than the others. When they were too tired to put on their clothes after classes, they sat on the floor of the vestibule laughing hysterically and slapping each other with towels drenched in eau de cologne or Madame’s lemon water.
“And I think——” Alabama would say.
“Tiens!” shrieked Arienne. “Mon enfant begins to think. Ah! Ma fille, it is a mistake——all the thinking you do. Why do you not go home and mend your husband’s socks?”
“Méchante,” Alabama answered. “I will teach you to criticize your elders!” The wet towel fell with a smack across Arienne’s rigid buttocks.
“Give me more room. I cannot dress so near to this polissonne,” retorted Arienne. She turned to Alabama seriously and looked at her questioningly. “But it is true—I have no more place here since you have filled the dressing room with your fancy tutus. There is nowhere to hang my poor woolens.”
“Here is a new tutu for you! I make you a present!”
“I do not wear green. It brings bad luck in France.” Arienne was offended.
“If I had a husband to pay I, too, could buy them for myself,” she pursued disagreeably.
“What business of yours is it who pays? Or is that all the patrons of your first three rows can talk to you about?”
Arienne shoved Alabama into the group of naked girls. Somebody pushed her hurriedly back into Arienne’s gyrating body. The eau de cologne spilled over the floor and gagged them. A swat of the towel end landed over Alabama’s eyes. Groping about she collided with Arienne’s hot, slippery body.
“Now!” shrieked Arienne. “See what you have done! I shall go at once to a magistrate and have it constaté!” She wept and hurled Apache invective at the top of her lungs. “It is not today that it shows but tomorrow. I will have a cancer! You have hit me in the breast from a bad spirit! I will have it constaté, so when the cancer develops you will pay me much money, even if you are at the ends of the earth! You will pay!” The whole studio listened. The lesson Madame was giving outside could not continue, the noise was so loud. The Russians took sides with the French or the Americans.
“Sale race!” they shrieked indiscriminately.
“One can never have confidence in the Americans!”
“One must never trust the French!”
“They are too nervous, the Americans and the French.”
They smiled long, superior Russian smiles as if they had long ago forgotten why they were smiling: as if the smile were a hallmark of their superiority to circumstance. The noise was deafening yet somehow surreptitious. Madame protested—she was angry with the two girls.
Alabama dressed as fast as she could. Out in the fresh air her knees trembled as she waited for a taxi. She wondered if she was going to take cold from her soaking hair under her hat.
Her upper lip felt cold and peppery with drying sweat. She had put on a stocking that wasn’t her own. What was it all about, she said to herself—fighting like two kitchen maids and just barely getting along on the ends of their physical resources, all of them?
“My God!” she thought. “How sordid! How utterly, unmitigatedly sordid!”
She wanted to be in some cool and lyrical place asleep on a cool bed of ferns.
She did not go to the afternoon class. The apartment was deserted. She could hear Adage clawing at his door to get out. The rooms hummed with emptiness. In Bonnie’s room she found a red carnation such as they give away in restaurants fading in a marmalade pot.
“Why don’t I get her some flowers?” she asked herself.
A botched attempt at a doll’s tutu lay on the child’s bed; the shoes by the door were scuffed at the toes. Alabama picked up an open drawing book from the table. Inside Bonnie had designed a clumsy militant figure with mops of yellow hair. Underneath ran the legend, “My mother is the most beautiful lady in the world.” On the page opposite, two figures held hands gingerly; behind them trailed Bonnie’s conception of a dog. “This is when my Mother and Father go out walking,” the writing said. “C’est très chic, mes parents ensemble!”
“Oh, God!” thought Alabama. She had almost forgotten about Bonnie’s mind going on and on, growing. Bonnie was proud of her parents the same way Alabama had been of her own as a child, imagining into them whatever perfections she wanted to believe in. Bonnie must be awfully hungry for something pretty and stylized in her life, for some sense of a scheme to fit into. Other children’s parents were something to them besides the distant “chic,” Alabama reproached herself bitterly.
All afternoon she slept. Out of her subconscious came the feeling of a beaten child, and her bones ached in her sleep and her throat parched like blistering flesh. When she woke up she felt as if she had been crying for hours.
She could see the stars shining very personally into her bedroom. She could have lain in bed for hours listening to the sounds from the streets.
Alabama went only to her private lessons to avoid Arienne. As she worked she could hear the girl’s cackling laugh in the vestibule raking over the arriving class for support. The girls looked at her curiously. Madame said she must not mind Arienne.
Dressing herself hurriedly, Alabama peeped between the dusty curtains at the dancers. The imperfections of Stella, the manoeuvres of Arienne, the currying of favor, the wrangling over the front line appeared to her in the moated sun falling through the glass roof like the groveling, churning movement of insects watched through the sides of a glass jar.
“Larvae!” said the unhappy Alabama contemptuously.
She wished she had been born in the ballet, or that she could bring herself to quit altogether.
When she thought of giving up her work she grew sick and middle-aged. The miles and miles
of pas de bourrée must have dug a path inevitably to somewhere.
Diaghilev died. The stuff of the great movement of the Ballet Russe lay rotting in a French law court—he had never been able to make money.
Some of his dancers performed around the swimming pool at the Lido to please the drunk Americans in summer; some of them worked in music-hall ballets; the English went back to England. The transparent celluloid décor of La Chatte that had stabbed its audience with silver swords from the spotlights of Paris and Monte Carlo, London and Berlin lay marked “No Smoking” in a damp, ratty warehouse by the Seine, locked in a stone tunnel where a gray light from the river sloshed over the dark, dripping earth and over the moist, curving bottom.
“What’s the use?” said Alabama.
“You can’t give up all that time and work and money for nothing,” said David. “We’ll try to arrange something in America.”
That was nice of David. But she knew she’d never dance in America.
The intermittent sun disappeared from the skylight over her last lesson.
“You will not forget your adagio?” said Madame. “You will send me pupils when you go to America?”
“Madame,” Alabama answered suddenly, “do you think I could still go to Naples? Will you see the man immediately and tell him that I will leave at once?”
Looking into the woman’s eyes was like watching those blocks of black and white pyramids where there are sometimes six and sometimes seven squares. Looking into her eyes was to experience an optical illusion.
“So!” she said. “I am sure the place is still open. You will leave tomorrow? There is no time to waste.”
“Yes,” said Alabama, “I will go.”
* * *
1 This word spelled stchay or schstay in the first edition of the novel has been regularized to schstay here. It has not been verified as a ballet term, and its meaning is unknown.
4
I
Dahlias stuck out of green tins at the station flower stalls like the paper fans that come with popcorn packages; the oranges were piled like Minié balls along the newsstands; the windows of the buffet de la gare sported three American grapefruit like the balls of a gastronomic pawnshop. Saturated air hung between the train windows and Paris like a heavy blanket.
David and Alabama filled the second-class wagon-lit with brassy cigarette smoke. He rang for an extra pillow.
“If you need anything I’ll always be there,” he said.
Alabama cried and swallowed a spoonful of yellow sedative.
“You’ll get awfully sick of telling people how I’m getting along——”
“I’m going to Switzerland as soon as we can close the apartment——I’ll send Bonnie to you when you’re ready to have her.”
A demi-Perrier sizzled in the car window. David choked on the dank must.
“It’s silly to travel second class. Won’t you let me have them change you to first?” he said.
“I’d rather feel I could afford it from the beginning.”
The weight of their individual reactions separated them like a barrage. Unconscious relief buckled their parting with sad constraint—innumerable involuntary associations smothered their good-byes in platonic despair.
“I’ll send you some money. I’d better be getting off.”
“Good-bye—Oh, David!” she called as the train shoved away. “Be sure to have Mademoiselle get Bonnie’s underwear from Old England——”
“I’ll tell her—good-bye, dear!”
Alabama stuck her head inside the dim incandescence of the train lit like a spiritualist’s séance. Her face flattened to a stone carving in the mirror. Her suit wasn’t right for second class; Yvonne Davidson had made it out of the reflections of an Armistice parade—the lines of the horizon-blue helmet and the sweep of the cape were too generous for the constraint of the scratchy lace-covered benches. Alabama went over her plans sympathetically to herself as a mother might soothe an unhappy child. She couldn’t see the maîtresse de ballet till the day after she got there. It was nice of Mademoiselle to give her a bunch of maguey; she was sorry she had forgotten it on the mantelpiece at home. She had some dirty clothes in the laundry, too—Mademoiselle could pack them with the linen when they moved. She supposed David would leave the linen at the American Express. It wouldn’t be hard packing, they had so little junk: a broken tea set, relic of a pilgrimage to Valence from St-Raphaël, a few photographs—she was sorry she hadn’t brought the one of David taken on the porch in Connecticut—some books, and David’s crated paintings.
The glow from the electric signs blared over Paris in the distance like the glare of a pottery kiln. Her hands sweated under the coarse red blanket. The carriage smelled like the inside of a small boy’s pocket. Her thoughts insistently composed gibberish in French to the click of the car wheels.
La belle main gauche l’éther compact,
S’étendre dans l’air qui fait le beau
Trouve la haut le rhythm intact
Battre des ailes d’un triste oiseau.
Alabama got up to look for a pencil.
“Le bruit constant de mille moineaux,” she added. She wondered if she’d lost the letter—no, it was in her Cutex box.
She must have gone to sleep—it was hard to tell in a train. Tramping in the corridors awoke her. This must be the border. She rang the bell. Nobody came for ages. A man in the green uniform of a circus animal trainer appeared at last.
“Water?” said Alabama ingratiatingly.
The man stared blankly about the wagon. There was no response in the smooth enigma of his fascinated countenance.
“Acqua, de l’eau, wataire,” Alabama persisted.
“Fräulein rings,” commented the man.
“Listen,” said Alabama. She raised her arms in the motions of the Australian crawl and finished with a tentative compromise between exaggerated swallows and a gargle. She faced the guard anticipatorily.
“No, no, No!” he cried out in alarm and vanished from the compartment.
Alabama got out her Italian phrase book and rang again.
“Do´—veh pos´—so com—prar´—eh ben—zee´—no,” the book said. The man laughed hilariously. She must have lost the place.
“Nothing,” Alabama told him reluctantly and went back to her composing. The man had driven the rhythm out of her head. She was probably in Switzerland by now. She couldn’t remember whether or not it was Byron who had crossed the Alps with the curtains of his carriage down. She tried to see out of the window—some milk cans glistened in the dark. What she should have done about Bonnie’s underwear was to have had it made by a seamstress. Mademoiselle would see to it. She got up and stretched, holding on to the sliding door.
The man informed her disparagingly that she couldn’t open the doors in the second class and she couldn’t have breakfast served in a couchette.
The country from the windows of the diner next day was flat like the land from which the sea has receded with sparse feather-duster trees tickling the bright sky. Little clouds foamed over the placidity aimlessly as froth from a beer pail; castles tumbled over the round hills like crowns awry; nobody sang “O Sole Mio.”
There was honey for breakfast and bread like a stone mallet. She was afraid to change in Rome without David. The Rome station was full of palms; the fountains scrubbed the baths of Caracalla with sprays of sunshine opposite the terminus. In the open friendliness of the Italian air, her spirits rose.
“Ballonné, deux tours,” she said to herself. The new train was filthy. There were no carpets on the floor and it smelled of the Fascisti, of guns. The signs pronounced a litany; Asti Spumante, Lagrima Christi, Spumoni, Tortoni. She didn’t know what it was she had lost—the letter was still in the Cutex. Alabama took possession of herself as a small boy walking in a garden might close his hand over a firefly.
“Cinque minuti mangiare,” said the attendant.
“All right,” she said, counting on her fingers, “una, due, tre—It’s a
ll right,” she assured him.
The train swerved this way and that, trying to avoid the disorder of Naples. The cabbies had forgotten to move their cabs off the car rails, sleepy men forgot which way they were going in the middle of the streets, children spread their mouths and soft hurt eyes and forgot the emotion of crying. White dust blew about the city; delicatessens sold sharp smells, cubes and triangles and wicker globes of odor. Naples shrunk in the lamplight from its public squares, suppressed by a great pretense of discipline, quelled by its blackened stone façade. “Venti lire!” expostulated the cabby.
“The letter,” said Alabama haughtily, “said I could live on thirty lire a week in Naples.”
“Venti, venti, venti,” caroled the Italian without turning around.
“It’s going to be difficult not being able to communicate,” thought Alabama.
She gave the man the address the maîtresse had sent her. Flourishing his whip grandiloquently, the cabby urged the horse’s hoofs pendulously through the munificence of the night. As she gave the man his money his brown eyes swung on hers like cups set on a tree to catch a precious sap. She thought he would never quit looking.
“Signorina will like Naples,” he said surprisingly. “ ‘The city’s voice is soft like solitude’s.’ ”
The cab clumped away through the red and green lights set about the brim of the bay like stones in the filigree of a Renaissance poison cup. The syrupy drippings of the fly-specked south seeped up on the breeze that blew the vast aquamarine translucence into emotional extinction.
The light from the pension entry shone in globular drops in Alabama’s fingernails. Her movements gathered up in consequential stirrings of the air as she passed inside leaving no traces on the stillness behind her.
“Well, I’ve got to live here,” said Alabama, “so that’s all there is to that.”
The landlady said the room had a balcony—it did, but there wasn’t any floor to the balcony; the iron rails joined the peeling pink wash of the outside walls. However, there was a lavabo with gigantic spouts sticking out over the bowl and splashing the square of oilcloth underneath. The breakwater curved its arm about the ball of blue night from her window; the smell of pitch rose from the harbor.
Save Me the Waltz: A Novel Page 19
