Take Me to Paris, Johnny

by John Foster

  By 1970 the Joffrey had established a reputation for exciting dance. Adapting classical style to contemporary themes, it aimed—according to Abdullah Jaffa Anver Bey Kahn, otherwise known as Robert Joffrey—to express the boundless release and joy of dancing. To achieve this neo-expressionist goal, it developed a repertoire which, in the words of a New York critic, ‘veered from revival of short classics to ballets drenched in media razzmatazz. The company loves to jive, rock, swing, bump and grind. Lights flash, music blares, scenery moves, wind machines blow and both stage and dancers vibrate and gyrate to electronic devices and music.’ The aim was not to caress, but to blitz the audience.

  The assistant director and choreographer was Gerald Arpino. A trim, compact man with a ‘delicate’ look, he added to the enterprise a special preoccupation of his own. Into the pulsating Joffrey scene he wanted to ‘unleash’, as he put it, the American male dancer and to establish him as a star in his own right. But for that to happen, the male dancer must no longer be considered effeminate; rather, as one ballet writer put it, he must exhibit ‘a virile masculinity, which is not incompatible with grace and elegance’. How they tiptoed round the scandal of the homosexual, these sensitive ballet critics! How they covered their tracks and dealt in double-talk and cloaked their desires in the high language of art! At least there was no misunderstanding Mr Arpino. He was looking for a man, he said, with a torso like a bull, who would ignite the stage with his potent sexuality.

  In other words, this new male dancer would not be Juan. With the elegant elongation of his limbs, the slightness of his lower leg, the delicacy of his head, he was hardly Mr Arpino’s kind of man. That, at least, is the evidence of Juan’s folio of studio photographs, which speak eloquently of his technical virtuosity. And of his singularity: exceptionally high extensions, a Russian lyricism in the melting, hovering arms and yet, at the same time, an ethnic tang, a Spanish flourish, a hint of the matador in the studied bravado of the hand on the hip and the tilted head. He was exotic, even appealing; but a far cry from the rampant all-American (white?) male for whom the choreographer sighed.

  Not that Juan was out of sympathy with Mr Arpino’s vision. If the truth be told, he rather sighed for a similar man himself. And the reason for that, he once told me, lay in the fact that he had a woman’s soul in a man’s body.

  Reflecting on this surprising confession, I wondered if his belief was a fragment of Cuban folk wisdom that he carried secretly within him. Was it, perhaps, a key to self-knowledge that was passed on from one generation of locas to another? If this was the case, then you had to concede that the idea had a certain dignity. It meant that a loca was neither immoral, nor sick, but simply different.

  Yet the doctrine was double-edged. To be an anomaly was in one sense no more remarkable or reprehensible than to be left-handed. It was more disturbing, though, if the woman’s soul inside you cried out against the disharmony of her male body and demanded an end to the contradiction. That was how it was with Betty, who submitted herself to the surgeon’s knife and happily emerged to resume her business as the proprietress of a hairdressing salon. The other Cubans, including Juan, merely fantasised about such things. In them the woman’s soul was never so shrill or insistent, and their male bodies were more assertive. In the gay clubs they amused themselves and teased or appeased their female souls in drag.

  La Negra remembered the details. ‘We settled into our favourite club,’ she told me. ‘It was 45th Street and 3rd Avenue, Stage 45, a gigantic disco with a round oak bar. Very chi-chi. Very uppity. I think we were the only poor people there.’ They played all sorts of games: La Negra in her accustomed role of femme fatale, Alex the ingenue, and Juan/Michel the bimbo, the classic air-head. ‘He looked fantastic. He posed—the fashion used to be to pose—looking like a runway model in his ankle-length fur coat.’

  The fur coat was a gift from the priest. Or was it, on second thoughts, from the engineer, who replaced the priest? Juan was proud of the engineer, the youngest scientist to have worked on the Manhattan Project, he told me, attaching himself to another piece of American history. The engineer must therefore have been a good deal older than the priest, and he was equally bountiful in his affection. If, as we have reason to believe, it is more blessed to give than to receive, Juan provided the occasion for a multiplication of blessings. Nobody could receive more graciously than he, and nobody gave more freely or, I suspect, more patiently, than the engineer. He furnished Juan’s apartment like a jewel box with delicate and fashionable things from Bloomingdale’s. Years later, when I wrote to him with the news of Juan’s death, it was still that mysterious capacity to draw out generosity that he remembered. ‘I sense from your account,’ he wrote ‘that many people are increased in their humanity, more endowed with love, because of Juan’s presence among them.’

  After the engineer moved to the South to become a distinguished professor there were other men. There was the actor who inflamed him with passion and left him for a woman, which inflamed him still more. And then Ernie, the only one of Juan’s patrons whom he dignified with a name, if only because of the indeterminate nature of his business in sporting goods. They each occupied a space in his memory, and he referred to them habitually, and mostly fondly, as if they were a line of popes or kings in whose reign an event could be located. That was the way he ordered his memories, very tidily, in much the same way that he arranged his life, in little compartments, so that there would be no unnecessary confusion or unpleasantness.

  But this line of succession was always subordinate to another, more fundamental chronology, an arrangement that turned around the decisive event. Quite simply, there was his life before and his life after the Accident.

  It was toward the end of the era of the engineer that the misfortune struck. ‘In 1976 my dream ended,’ he wrote to the Minister, ‘when I was knocked down by a taxi-cab while I was crossing the street to the school of the Joffrey Ballet.’ They took him to a city hospital, reconstructed his left knee, and told him he might never walk normally again.

  The knee mended. The scar remained, invisibly. He relived the trauma a thousand times. Even ten years later a careless step of mine into the traffic would still set off a panic that always produced a startled-rabbit look in his eyes; he would tense and arch his body and throw back his head, and the surge of anger would last, as he strode off at a furious pace, for several blocks. At every crossroad we were back at the scene of the accident on Sheridan Square.

  The dream was ended. Even if he danced again—and in fact the knee recovered more fully than he dared to hope—he would never regain his old strength and fluency. He had foreseen no other future. The accomplishment, the pride in it, that had buoyed him up in the company of Cuban friends was shattered. He was a cot-case, on sickness benefits, then welfare. He was ashamed, turned in on himself, unable to write home.

  His memory locked shut around the horror of the next months. For a companion he had Sibley, a black and white cocker spaniel which he alternately spoiled and neglected. Then, after Alex had moved to Los Angeles, he shared his apartment with Rafi, a Puerto Rican dancer whom he loved like a brother. Rafi really was a star. He was a glorious being, with an almost luminous presence. Everybody remembered that. Perhaps that is why the knife that killed him had to be silver. Juan always insisted on this fact. Rafi was murdered, stabbed with the twist of a silver knife in his arse, stabbed and slashed and cut up so badly that you wouldn’t want to think about it. ‘My best friend,’ Juan told the police when they came to ask questions. ‘They have killed my best friend in life.’

  If someone else, some stranger, were telling Juan’s story, I expect their chapter might finish here, at the very nadir of his fortunes. That would accord with Juan’s own sense of things, and give due weight to the crucial event. And it would restore a fairer balance, some better proportion to the recollection of his life; because already it was more than two-thirds spent.

  But this is also my story, and has my memory’s shape. And so it con
tinues, relating all those things that happened in New York before we met. Before we began to join our lives.

  It was a black woman who rescued him from the nightmare. She was, I like to think, like the two black women he knew at the Pink Tea Cup, a homey neighbourhood restaurant in Bleecker Street where they would slap up a plate of Southern fried chicken and collard greens for the cost of no more than a couple of subway rides. Or she was like the more fashionable woman at the Qantas office whom Juan, in later years, would wait to consult about his travel details (there were always problems) even when all the other (white) desks were free. They melted the tension in him, these middle-aged black women, and drew out his boyish sunniness.

  So at the Welfare office he dealt with a black woman clerk. ‘Honey,’ she told him one day, ‘what’s a young man like you doin’ on the welfare line? You oughta be ashamed of yourself.’ She despatched him forthwith for an audition with an outfit called People Performing Inc. It was a company created out of unemployed artists; it was subsidised by the City and carried out its somewhat chaotic operations in an abandoned building in the East Village.

  He went, and his arrival was noticed. Julio, another young unemployed Puerto Rican dancer, saw him come in, clutching his folio of studio photographs. He was wearing a cream silk shirt, brown boots and khaki pants with the kind of knife-edge crease that pleased his Cuban sense of being well groomed. As the only other Latin in this odd assemblage of crazies and supposed artists, Juan gravitated to Julio in an instant alliance. Playing on Julio’s well-founded reservations about the enterprise, he put on an act of campy outrage that achieved its comic effect from his own obvious vulnerability. ‘How dare Welfare send me to this place! None of these people’, he told Julio, ‘have my experience.’

  Experienced or not, they had a show to put on. It was nearly Christmas—a festival that Juan regarded distantly as a kind of ethnic celebration for WASPs—and they had been commissioned to produce the City’s annual tribute to ‘A Visit from St Nicholas’. Directing this quaint piece of family entertainment was a gentleman who, according to the programme notes, was otherwise preoccupied with a biographical montage of movement, text and sound on the life of Jean Genet. The technical designer was an astrologer; an expressionist painter with a passion for metaphysics prepared the sets; and the music was provided variously by a cowbell artiste, a guitarist who danced at the Continental Baths and a ‘red-hot, white-skin blues artist’ called Leatherman.

  Though he knew there were no long-term prospects in this quixotic company of counter-cultural relics, Juan was back on his feet. He began to reinvent a future: a dance workshop, perhaps, for Spanish kids on the Lower East Side; teaching; choreography. In dance you have to prepare for getting older. Then Julio discovered an interesting possibility, and six months later Juan followed him. He became a scholarship student in the dance programme at Marymount Manhattan College.

  Marymount had begun its prestigious history as a finishing school for young Catholic ladies. Here their manners and their morals were polished and refined until, having acquired all the graces that society and matrimony would require of them, they graduated in a flurry of brocade and white lace. On these ceremonial occasions they received their certificates of virtue from the Cardinal Archbishop who, to judge from the pictures, had the habit of regularly upstaging his daughters in sartorial splendour. The evidence of their progress, class by class and year by year—and of his magnificence—was framed and mounted in sequence on the wall of the college library. Juan puzzled over this display. Were these his sisters, part of the pedigree that he could claim? Or were they tormentors, perpetrating some white respectable female joke on a Hispanic queen of no particular virtue? The questions remained unresolved.

  By the time that they threw open their doors to men and established a scholarship programme, the Marymount sisters had long since embraced the values of progressive education. But their institute retained its aura of privilege. In the morning before classes began, sleek limousines continued to deliver long-faced, long-haired and long-limbed young ladies to the door of the neo-Georgian facade in the most elegant section of East 71st Street.

  Although it didn’t yet boast a male changing room for the dance students, you would have to say, as Juan frequently did, that Marymount had class. For many of the students this seemed so self-evident and so appropriate that it went unremarked. For Juan, on the other hand, it required a sharp alertness and a certain inventiveness. If they returned from their summer vacations in Paris or skiing holidays in Switzerland, he would regale them with stories of Brazil, or the Caribbean, where an unexplained profusion of cousins was constantly inviting him. Otherwise he wrapped himself in an air of privacy, a mode of existence that can also be interpreted as classy in New York. Only the cook knew that he slipped into the kitchen of the college canteen after the lunch hour for a free feed.

  The coursework posed other problems. Dance classes he approached nonchalantly, even with a touch of arrogance. The academic classes excited him more, but they also distressed him. In one routine exercise he was required to write a critique of a ballet he had recently seen; but if he was stringing together a tenuous existence on scholarships and grants, and falling behind with his rent, and jumping the subway turnstiles because he didn’t have the money for a token, he was unlikely to be swanning about with the critical public at the ballet.

  That was the least of his problems with this exercise. From his Cuban education he retained the ability to recite the patriotic poems of José Martí. He could count to a hundred in Russian. And he had more recently acquired a High School Equivalency Diploma to which the Regents of the University of the State of New York had affixed their seal; but none of this conferred on him the important ability to write. Despite this disadvantage, he submitted a piece describing a Joffrey performance of Gerald Arpino’s ‘Trinity’. It began with panache. ‘Sneers, leers and cutting remarks have almost become the traditional property of the balletomanes and their adamant opponents, the devotees of the modern dance.’ It came back with a scribbled comment in lipstick pink. ‘Is this your wording? No credit.’

  The next semester a longer piece on Diaghilev met the same fate. ‘As a personal choice,’ this essay concluded, ‘if only one of Diaghilev’s ballets could be saved for the future, I would choose Apollo, for its pure beauty and expressive use of style.’ The professor pounced. ‘It is one thing to take material directly from a book; another to give it as a personal opinion!’ The logic of the professor was impeccable; these were obviously different ‘things’. Yet if one’s personal opinion should in fact happen to coincide with that of another author, it is difficult to see why this pleasing coincidence should be judged more harshly than the act of plagiarism itself.

  Being a liberal college, they gave him another chance, and then another. Naturally it was not the task of a dance professor to explain to him the rules of English grammar or the construction of English sentences, or how an essay might be shaped or argued. And so, equally naturally, the dispiriting succession of savaged essays continued.

  There was more joy for him in the college theatre. He sewed costumes, painted make-up, and danced. In his last semester the students presented a programme of modern dance. ‘Motion Madness’, as they called it, was a flamboyant show-biz extravaganza, belted out to the strains of Bill Haley and Dr Buzzard’s Original Savannah Band. Strangely, the production was prefaced by a piece called ‘Expressions’, a pas de deux to Debussy’s ‘Reverie’ of such porcelain delicacy that it might have been choreographed for some defunct European court. This was the work—though the middle initial made him sound more like a banker than an artist—of Juan G. Céspedes.

  Of course it was a great show. That was affirmed again and again as the audience dissolved in a welter of congratulations to their performing daughters. Well-heeled Hispanic ladies with red fingernails lowered their hauteur in the excitement; Westchester matrons, with that severely anorexic look that rich American women are apt to confuse with elegance,
allowed their modest bosoms to swell with pride.

  I was in the audience that night. Sitting with me, making use of the other free passes to which the performers were entitled, were Hiram and Danny. Hiram was none other than La Negra. He had preceded Juan to New York, where he had settled into a small apartment in the Village and a relationship with Danny. In New York he had discovered his Jewish roots, though Juan maintained in private that if his family in Cuba had any religion, at best they were Seventh Day Adventists, which, in Juan’s normally tolerant opinion, was hardly a religion at all. Nevertheless, there was no doubt that Hiram was deeply observant. He always lit the Sabbath candles and said the prayers, which more than compensated for the occasional cigarette he allowed himself on Saturday afternoons. He also attached great importance to the tradition of not cutting one’s hair. This observance he also laid on Danny, who was otherwise more at home in leather than a tallis but who, for the sake of domestic harmony, had grown his greying hair thick and long and plaited in a pigtail. That is why, as I sat beside him in the auditorium, he reminded me more of a Chinese mandarin than the traditional Jew Hiram apparently intended him to be.

  They—or perhaps I should now say we—were Juan’s family. In company he generally introduced Hiram as his cousin, which adequately reflected the bond that had developed between them. He was Juan’s essential link with Guantánamo, his source of news during all the months when he never bothered to write. In Hiram’s apartment they laughed and watched TV and ate caramelo and smoked and argued together. If Juan sometimes bridled at Hiram’s superior airs or doubted his claims to be psychic, Hiram retaliated by accusing him of being secretive or, if he really wanted to hurt, by hinting that Juan had not made it. Betty was doing well in her hairdressing salon; it seemed that Alex had fallen on his feet in Los Angeles: and Hiram himself, despite the ulcer that he nursed, was happily settled with the ever-reliable Danny.