“For how long?”
“That’s up to God,” she said with her smile. “The radio said this morning it would be the biggest snowstorm of the year.”
She was wrong: it was the biggest of the century. But in the first-class waiting room, spring was so real that there were live roses in the vases and even the canned music seemed as sublime and tranquilizing as its creators had intended. All at once it occurred to me that this was a suitable shelter for Beauty, and I looked for her in the other waiting areas, staggered by my own boldness. But most of the people were men from real life who read newspapers in English while their wives thought about someone else as they looked through the panoramic windows at the planes dead in the snow, the glacial factories, the vast fields of Roissy devastated by fierce lions. By noon there was no place to sit, and the heat had become so unbearable that I escaped for a breath of air.
Outside I saw an overwhelming sight. All kinds of people had crowded into the waiting rooms and were camped in the stifling corridors and even on the stairways, stretched out on the floor with their animals, their children, and their travel gear. Communication with the city had also been interrupted, and the palace of transparent plastic resembled an immense space capsule stranded in the storm. I could not help thinking that Beauty too must be somewhere in the middle of those tamed hordes, and the fantasy inspired me with new courage to wait.
By lunchtime we had realized that we were ship-wrecked. The lines were interminable outside the seven restaurants, the cafeterias, the packed bars, and in less than three hours they all had to be closed because there was nothing left to eat or drink. The children, who for a moment seemed to be all the children in the world, started to cry at the same time, and a herd smell began to rise from the crowd. It was a time for instinct. In all that scrambling, the only thing I could find to eat were the last two cups of vanilla ice cream in a children’s shop. The waiters were putting chairs on tables as the patrons left, while I ate very slowly at the counter, seeing myself in the mirror with the last little cardboard cup and the last little cardboard spoon, and thinking about Beauty.
The flight to New York, scheduled for eleven in the morning, left at eight that night. By the time I managed to board, the other first-class passengers were already in their seats, and a flight attendant led me to mine. My heart stopped. In the seat next to mine, beside the window, Beauty was taking possession of her space with the mastery of an expert traveler. “If I ever wrote this, nobody would believe me,” I thought. And I just managed to stammer an indecisive greeting that she did not hear.
She settled in as if she were going to live there for many years, putting each thing in its proper place and order, until her seat was arranged like the ideal house, where everything was within reach. In the meantime, a steward brought us our welcoming champagne. I took a glass to offer to her, but thought better of it just in time. For she wanted only a glass of water, and she asked the steward, first in incomprehensible French and then in an English only somewhat more fluent, not to wake her for any reason during the flight. Her warm, serious voice was tinged with Oriental sadness.
When he brought the water, she placed a cosmetics case with copper corners, like a grandmother’s trunk, on her lap, and took two golden pills from a box that contained others of various colors. She did everything in a methodical, solemn way, as if nothing unforeseen had happened to her since her birth. At last she pulled down the shade on the window, lowered the back of her seat as far as it would go, covered herself to the waist with a blanket without taking off her shoes, put on a sleeping mask, turned her back to me, and then slept without a single pause, without a sigh, without the slightest change in position, for the eight eternal hours and twelve extra minutes of the flight to New York.
It was an ardent journey. I have always believed that there is nothing more beautiful in nature than a beautiful woman, and it was impossible for me to escape even for a moment from the spell of that storybook creature who slept at my side. The steward disappeared as soon as we took off and was replaced by a Cartesian attendant who tried to awaken Beauty to hand her a toiletry case and a set of earphones for listening to music. I repeated the instructions she had given the steward, but the attendant insisted on hearing from Beauty’s own lips that she did not want supper either. The steward had to confirm her instructions, and even so he reproached me because Beauty had not hung the little cardboard “Do Not Disturb” sign around her neck.
I ate a solitary supper, telling myself in silence everything I would have told her if she had been awake. Her sleep was so steady that at one point I had the distressing thought that the pills she had taken were not for sleeping but for dying. With each drink I raised my glass and toasted her.
“To your health, Beauty.”
When supper was over the lights were dimmed and a movie was shown to no one, and the two of us were alone in the darkness of the world. The biggest storm of the century had ended, and the Atlantic night was immense and limpid, and the plane seemed motionless among the stars. Then I contemplated her, inch by inch, for several hours, and the only sign of life I could detect were the shadows of the dreams that passed along her forehead like clouds over water. Around her neck she wore a chain so fine it was almost invisible against her golden skin, her perfect ears were unpierced, her nails were rosy with good health, and on her left hand was a plain band. Since she looked no older than twenty, I consoled myself with the idea that it was not a wedding ring but the sign of an ephemeral engagement. “To know you are sleeping, certain, secure, faithful channel of renunciation, pure line, so close to my manacled arms,” I thought on the foaming crest of champagne, repeating the masterful sonnet by Gerardo Diego.1 Then I lowered the back of my seat to the level of hers, and we lay together, closer than if we had been in a marriage bed. The climate of her breathing was the same as that of her voice, and her skin exhaled a delicate breath that could only be the scent of her beauty. It seemed incredible: The previous spring I had read a beautiful novel by Yasunari Kawabata2 about the ancient bourgeois of Kyoto who paid enormous sums to spend the night watching the most beautiful girls in the city, naked and drugged, while they agonized with love in the same bed. They could not wake them, or touch them, and they did not even try, because the essence of their pleasure was to see them sleeping. That night, as I watched over Beauty’s sleep, I not only understood that senile refinement but lived it to the full.
“Who would have thought,” I said to myself, my vanity exacerbated by champagne, “that I’d become an ancient Japanese at this late date.”
I think I slept several hours, conquered by champagne and the mute explosions of the movie, and when I awoke my head was splitting. I went to the bathroom. Two seats behind mine the old woman with the eleven suitcases lay in an awkward sprawl, like a forgotten corpse on a battlefield. Her reading glasses, on a chain of colored beads, were on the floor in the middle of the aisle, and for a moment I enjoyed the malicious pleasure of not picking them up.
After I got rid of the excesses of champagne, I caught sight of myself, contemptible and ugly, in the mirror, and was amazed that the devastation of love could be so terrible. The plane lost altitude without warning, then managed to straighten out and continue full speed ahead. The “Return to Your Seat” sign went on. I hurried out with the hope that God’s turbulence might awaken Beauty and she would have to take refuge in my arms to escape her terror. In my haste I almost stepped on the Dutchwoman’s glasses and would have been happy if I had. But I retraced my steps, picked them up, and put them on her lap in sudden gratitude for her not having chosen seat number four before I did.
Beauty’s sleep was invincible. When the plane stabilized, I had to resist the temptation to shake her on some pretext, because all I wanted in the last hour of the flight was to see her awake, even if she were furious, so that I could recover my freedom, and perhaps my youth. But I couldn’t do it. “Damn it,” I said to myself with great scorn. “Why wasn’t I born a Taurus!”
She a
woke by herself at the moment the landing lights went on, and she was as beautiful and refreshed as if she had slept in a rose garden. That was when I realized that, like old married couples, people who sit next to each other on airplanes do not say good morning to each other when they wake up. Nor did she. She took off her mask, opened her radiant eyes, straightened the back of the seat, moved the blanket aside, shook her hair that fell into place of its own weight, put the cosmetics case back on her knees, and applied rapid, unnecessary makeup, which took just enough time so that she did not look at me until the plane door opened. Then she put on her lynx jacket, almost stepped over me with a conventional excuse in pure Latin American Spanish, left without even saying good-bye or at least thanking me for all I had done to make our night together a happy one, and disappeared into the sun of today in the Amazon jungle of New York.
* * *
† From Gabriel Garcia Márquez, Strange Pilgrims: Twelve Stories, trans. Edith Grossman (London: Cape, 1993). © 1992 Gabriel García Márquez y Herederos del Gabriel García Márquez.
1. Gerardo Diego Cendoya (1896–1987) was a Spanish poet.
2. Yasunari Kawabata (1899–1972) was a Japanese novelist who wrote a work called The Sleeping Beauty.
WILFRED OWEN
The Sleeping Beauty†
Sojourning through a southern realm in youth,
I came upon a house by happy chance
Where bode a marvellous Beauty. There, romance
Flew faerily until I lit on truth—
For lo! the fair Child slumbered. Though, forsooth,
5
She lay not blanketed in drowsy trance,
But leapt alert of limb and keen of glance,
From sun to shower; from gaiety to ruth;
Yet breathed her loveliness asleep in her:
For, when I kissed, her eyelids knew no stir.
10
So back I drew tiptoe from that Princess,
Because it was too soon, and not my part,
To start voluptuous pulses in her heart,
And kiss her to the world of Consciousness.
* * *
† From Wilfred Owen, The Complete Poems and Fragments, ed. Jon Stallworthy (New York: Norton, 1984). First published in 1914.
INTRODUCTION: Cinderella
Who does not love a Cinderella story? Or for that matter a Cinderella team or a Cinderella ending? Our quintessential story about a rise from rags to riches has also become a cultural meme for capturing dramatic turnarounds, hard-won victories that are earned by a deserving underdog. The tropes that accompany versions of the story—missing shoes or cruel stepsisters—have migrated into many different narratives, flashing out at us as reminders of a fairy-tale drama that mingles persecution at home and class differences with romance that takes the form of love at first sight.
The version of “Cinderella” best known in Anglo-American and European cultures comes from Charles Perrault, who published his “Cendrillon” in 1697. Disney’s 1950 feature-length animated Cinderella opens to the image of a book with a voice-over that gives us the beginning of Perrault’s tale about a beleaguered heroine, an evil stepmother and her daughters, a fairy godmother, a pumpkin, glass slippers, and a midnight spell. Since Disney, the story’s staying power has derived from its depiction of maternal cruelty and sibling rivalry as well as its staging of the power of radiant beauty. Both Cinderella and the Prince are transformed, with one rising phoenix-like from the ashes and the other determined to find his soul mate via a sole mate.
The double transformation that fuels the narrative energy of “Cinderella” leads to a happily ever after in virtually every version of her story. But the heroine’s stepsisters rarely fare well. Who can forget the final scene of the Grimms’ “Cinderella,” which graphically describes the fate of those ill-tempered, disagreeable pretenders to the throne?
When the couple went to church, the elder sister was on the right, the younger on the left side: the doves pecked one eye from each one. Later, when they left the church, the elder sister was on the left, the younger on the right. The doves pecked the other eye from each one. (see here)
For their “wickedness and malice” (see here) the sisters are punished with blindness for the rest of their lives. This ending, along with the details of the mutilation of their feet, is often cited as evidence of the brutal, violent turn taken by German fairy tales. Yet the Grimms’ punishment for the stepsisters is relatively mild when compared to what befalls their counterparts in other cultures. An Indonesian Cinderella forces her stepsister into a cauldron of boiling water, then has the body cut up, pickled, and sent to the girl’s mother as “salt meat” for her next meal. A Filipino variant shows the stepmother and her daughters “pulled to pieces by wild horses.” And a Japanese stepsister is dragged around in a basket, tumbles over the edge of a deep ditch, and falls to her death.1
Many versions of “Cinderella,” however, end on a conciliatory note. Charles Perrault offers what is perhaps the fullest elaboration of a reconciliation between the heroine and her stepsisters, who throw themselves at Cinderella’s feet and beg her forgiveness. This Cinderella, who is as good as she is beautiful, not only pardons the sisters but also invites them to join her in the palace and loses no time in marrying them to two high-ranking court officials. An Armenian Cinderella falls at the feet of her wicked sisters as they are leaving church, weeps copious tears with them, and bears them no grudge.2 And finally, a recent American version marketed through elementary schools stages a crudely sentimental reconciliation scene, presumably designed to appeal to the educators and parents buying the book:
[The sisters] begged Cinderella to forgive them for being so mean to her.
Cinderella told them they were forgiven.
“I am sure you will never be mean to me again,” she said.
“Oh, never,” said the older sister.
“Never, ever,” said the younger sister.3
Cinderella has been reinvented by so many different cultures that it is hardly surprising to find that she is sometimes cruel and vindictive, at other times compassionate and kind. Even within a single cultural zone, she can appear genteel and self-effacing in one story, clever and enterprising in another, coy and manipulative in a third.4 Still, Jane Yolen may have a point when she asserts that the shrewd, resourceful heroine of folktales from earlier centuries has been supplanted by a “passive princess” waiting for Prince Charming to rescue her. Disney’s Cinderella, as we shall see, is a shrinking violet by comparison with some of her folkloric ancestors, who refuse to stay at home suffering in silence and who become adept at engineering their own rescues.
Just how spirited and resourceful was Cinderella in her earliest incarnations? Answering that question requires surveying a vast array of tales featuring heroines known not only as Cinderella, Cendrillon, Ash Girl, and Cennerentola, but also as Rashin Coatie, Mossy Coat, Catskin, Katie Woodencloak, and Donkeyskin. The Aarne-Thompson-Uther index of tale types identifies two distinct Cinderella tales: ATU 510A (“Cinderella”) and ATU 510B (“The Dress of Gold, of Silver, and of Stars,” also known as “Cap o’ Rushes,” etc.). The two narratives encoded in the tale-type indexes seem virtually unrelated at first glance. The plots of “Cinderella” stories are driven by the anxious jealousy of biological mothers and stepmothers who subject the heroine to one ordeal of domestic drudgery after another; the plots of “Catskin” tales are fueled by the erotic passion of fathers, whose unseemly behavior drives their daughters from home.
In tales depicting the social persecution of a girl by her stepmother, the central focus comes to rest on the unbearable family situation produced by a father’s remarriage. But while the father’s responsibility for creating turmoil by choosing an inappropriate marriage partner recedes into the background or is suppressed over time (even as the father himself is virtually eliminated as a character), the foul deeds of his wife come to occupy center stage. We see her throwing her stepdaughter into a river,
instructing a hunter to kill her and recover her lungs and liver for dinner, sending her into a snowstorm wearing nothing but a shift, depriving her of food, and making her life wretched in every way.
In tales depicting erotic persecution of a daughter by her father, stepmothers and their daughters tend to vanish from the central arena of action. Yet the father’s desire for his daughter in the second tale type furnishes a powerful motive for a stepmother’s jealous rages and unnatural deeds in the first tale type. Psychoanalytic criticism has read “Cinderella” and “Catskin” as enactments of Oedipal desires, with each tale suppressing one component (love for the father or hatred of the mother) of the Oedipal plot. Many “Catskin” narratives, among them Perrault’s “Donkeyskin” (see here) and the Grimms’ “Thousandfurs,” mount two phases of action: in the first the heroine is persecuted by her father, in the second she turns into a Cinderella figure, obliged to spend her days in domestic servitude under the supervision of a despotic cook or a queen.
Yet there is an even more compelling case for arguing that the tales captured the hard facts of everyday life, staging domestic arrangements that led to the physical and sexual abuse of girls, with cruel parents and stepparents who exploit rather than protect the young. Our headlines today reveal that the dark side of fairy tales like “Cinderella” and “Donkeyskin” still come true today. They are a stark reminder that domestic violence does not belong exclusively to the “long ago and far away.”
While wicked stepmothers figure prominently in fairy tales disseminated in our culture, fathers who persecute their daughters by showing them too much affection are virtually unknown. “Cinderella,” “Snow White,” and “Hansel and Gretel” are the tales from Perrault and from the Grimms that continue to thrive even on foreign soil, while stories such as “Donkeyskin” and “Thousandfurs” have either failed to take root or have been modified beyond recognition, with the result that fathers have a surprisingly limited role in fairy tales transmitted today.
The Classic Fairy Tales_Norton Critical Edition Page 22
