Flight of the Swan (25 page)

“Don’t worry about it. We’ll get someone who’s worth her while,” Doña Basilisa said airily. She didn’t like it when Doña Victoria implied her daughter was being spurned.

Doña Basilisa picked up her handbag, said they were under a lot of pressure, and got up from the sofa. They had been away at the farm for a month, she said, and she had just found out her daughter had been selected queen of the festivities. She had to see to thousands of details during the two weeks ahead—Ronda’s gold-lamé dress, her mantle, a headpiece which would reproduce the Statue of Liberty’s magnificent golden crown. They soon rose and left the hotel.

The next day Ronda invited me to go see Rayo at Don Cayetano Ramirez’s horse farm, which stood just behind the Hippodrome. In San Juan Ronda didn’t see me as Madame’s maid anymore. After Madame’s disappearance at Dos Ríos, Ronda had come to depend more and more on me. I accompanied her everywhere and we struck up a friendship which fortunately didn’t fade when we met again in the city.

She picked me up at La Fortaleza in her father’s Pierce-Arrow, driven by a uniformed chauffeur. We went first to Mira-mar, to the Batistinis’ mansion. It was just as magnificent as Juan had described it, with stained-glass decorations on all the windows and a wide balcony from which you could see the Atlantic glinting in the distance. Ronda took my hand and we explored the house together. We stepped into the living room, where Don Eduardo had passed away and the solemn silence of the Sacrament of Extreme Unction—administered in spite of Don Eduardo’s protests—seemed to emanate from the wood-paneled walls. We visited Adalberto Batistini’s room, where I thought I saw his ghost gazing out the window at the landscape he wanted to paint and of course we visited Diamantino’s cell in the basement, to which Don Pedro had removed him when Don Eduardo had died. This was where El Delfín, who had created such havoc in our company, had lived for several years. In the two months we had spent on the island, these people had become more real to me than those of my beloved St. Petersburg.

We chatted and talked over tea, which Adelina brought out on the terrace—it
was
nice to be served rather than to serve, for a change—and then we rode out to the Hippodrome in the Pierce-Arrow. I could tell Ronda was still depressed; the fact that Bienvenido hadn’t written her a single line since his disappearance was a bitter reminder that she had no assurance whatever of his love. Unless, of course, he were dead; and Ronda was certain he wasn’t.

On our way to the Hippodrome, we stopped at La Casa de las Medias y los Botones, Madame’s favorite store, to pick up an extra strand of rhinestones that had to be sewn by hand to Ronda’s costume. We had to elbow our way in, there were so many people there. At carnival time La Casa de las Medias became even more popular than it usually was: people flocked to it like flies to ajar of honey. Its jeweled buttons, luxurious brocades, feathers, fans, and masks, the elements that would create the fanciful evening clothes
Sanjuaneros
loved, were all on display.

Ronda finally made her purchase and we fought our way out of the store. Then we drove out to Don Cayetano’s horse farm. When we saw Rayo, with his curved neck, silky mane, and delicate hooves plucking the ground, I was sure he would help Ronda forget her impossible love. But I was wrong. “Isn’t he beautiful?” she asked the minute she saw him. “I’ll ride him with Bienvenido during the carnival’s race. He’s sure to be back from the hills by then.”

Doña Basilisa and Don Pedro were good friends of Governor Yager, and the next day we heard that they had sent him a personal message informing him of Ronda’s plight, asking for his help in finding her a king. But the governor was so busy organizing search parties for Los Tiznados all over the island that it slipped his mind. The letter lay on the governor’s desk, unanswered, for several days, and Doña Basilisa didn’t dare keep looking for a suitable monarch because the governor might be insulted if she took further steps to solve the problem.

One of the governor’s aides dropped by the hotel the day after Madame arrived. “Governor Yager would like you to be his guest at La Fortaleza again, Madame,” he informed her. “He feels you’d be safer there until Mr. Dandré gets back. I’m supposed to drive you over to the mansion myself.” Madame thanked him and asked if I could go with her. Fortunately, the aide said yes.

Half an hour later I was unpacking our valises and making Madame comfortable in one of La Fortaleza’s ample guest bed-rooms. The butler showed us to our quarters. Madame’s bed had a bronze canopy with gauze curtains falling down its sides and an absurd bronze crown sitting on top. It had been made for the diva Angelina Bertoli, queen of sopranos, when she had visited the island years before, the butler explained. I remembered Don Pedro’s vivid story about the nightingale in the little red plush cart.

The room was beautiful, with a marble-topped console carved in dark, gleaming mahogany and a balcony that overlooked the bay and the Moorish gardens. The governor apparently wanted to make up for the discomforts Madame had suffered at the hands of the supposed “pranksters” of the Home Guard during her escapade in the mountains. He didn’t believe her story for a minute and suspected Los Tiznados—he’d received several police reports that Madame had been seen riding through the towns of the interior with them—but concluded it was better not to stir things up by questioning her before Mr. Dandré got back.

This time I wasn’t put away in a cell in the basement, like the last time we had stayed at the governor’s palace. I had a small room to myself adjacent to Madame’s, which opened to an inner patio. Since Lyubovna was staying at the convent and Dandré was away, I was considered Madame’s official companion and everyone treated me with respect.

Madame said she wanted to rest for a few days before she danced again, and I was glad of the decision. No one in the troupe dared ask if she had been with Diamantino in the mountains, or if she planned to be reunited with him later, and I was reluctant to question her. We all wanted to believe she had changed her mind about abandoning the company. I was the only one she confided in, and that only by halves, always drawing a reticent veil over what had really happened.

Juan came every day to La Fortaleza as Madame’s official shoemaker and told me confidentially that Diamantino aimed to rejoin Madame at some point, but that he didn’t know exactly when. I pretended not to be aware of anything, and went on trying to make Madame’s life as comfortable as possible. One afternoon we were sitting on the balcony that opened onto the bay, brushing each other’s hair and doing our nails, when I heard a heavy step echo behind us. I turned around and saw Dandré’s bearlike shape pause heavily in the doorway. “How are you, Niura, my little swan?” he said, his dark shadow looming over his suitcase. “The
Borinquen
just got into port this afternoon. I never had a chance to send you a telegram.”

My heart did a triple cabriole, and I had to hold on to my chair so as not to fall off. Madame didn’t move from her lounge chair. She kept on varnishing her nails with Revolutionary Rose as if Dandré had been away for only a moment. “You look thinner, darling,” she finally said, looking up from her nails. “Have you been eating well? I’ve missed you.” I didn’t need to hear anything else. I sighed, picked up my hairbrush, and left the room.

The next days were agonizing. I was torn between feelings of relief at having Dandré back and my old jealousy, which sprang up in scarlet shoots around my heart. If it’s true that absence makes the heart grow fonder, it was certainly true in Madame’s case. Time had softened her image of Dandré, and his hoodlum ways now didn’t seem so menacing. She had missed his pampering and his attention to detail, which were very different from the undependable embraces of her firebrand lover. Dandré seemed to guess this and was very tender with Madame, so that soon her old dependence on him began to resurface. He went back to his coddling: “Don’t you think you should do this, darling? Why do you want to do that, dear?”—the you-know-it’s-not-good-for-you kind of advice. To make matters worse, at night Dandré and Madame slept in the bronze canopied bed, which took to jingling and jangling like a two-penny orchestra. Meanwhile, I lay in the next room stifling my hot shame under the sheets or gazing out of the window and counting the cold stars nailed to the sky.

Dandré had recovered Madame for us, but I feared it was only temporary. I was tempted to tell him what I knew, but I chose to be compassionate. They had spent too many years together, had braved many storms arm in arm. They were like two trees whose trunks had grown into each other and it was pitiful to separate them. Better to wait and see if things would resolve themselves.

The girls, on the other hand, were happy to see Dandré and no longer minded when he patted their cheeks and pinched their behinds. They followed him everywhere, chattering and laughing, and when he gave them their new passports, they were exuberant, kissing him on the tip of his nose or on his bald pate. Dandré, for his part, had apparently talked to Molinari, because a few days after his arrival, he had more information about Diamantino Márquez and about Madame’s carryings-on with the young man than I ever would have dared reveal. His reaction was totally different from what I expected. He wasn’t jealous, he bantered in front of Madame; he was too old for that. But didn’t Madame feel guilty robbing the cradle? And wasn’t the corn just a little green behind the ears? From now on, every time he made love to her he was going to take a milk bath first, so Madame wouldn’t be able to tell the difference in how her two lovers tasted. When I heard him talk like that and heard Madame’s peals of laughter shaking the bed’s ridiculous bronze crown at night, my fears of Madame’s abandoning us or of a crime of passion being committed in the bedroom next to mine were scattered to the wind.

At other times, however, I wondered how Madame really felt. At times she looked sad; she reminded me of the Swan of Tuonela, gliding silently on the icy Gulf of Finland in search of its lost reflection. Maybe Dandré wasn’t smart enough to realize that something was wrong, that perhaps Madame wasn’t sincere in her loving behavior. I desperately wanted her to stay with him and to forget Diamantino, so that our lives would return to normal, but she looked like she was waiting for something. She would sit out on the balcony staring out to sea for hours or watching the cargo ships sail in and out of the harbor. Even with Dandré constantly urging her to get up and practice, to round up her dancers and begin rehearsals again, Madame said she just didn’t have the energy—until the day I saw Juan coming up La Fortaleza’s stairs with a new pair of toe shoes tucked under his arm, asking to see her.

I was going to take the package from him, but Juan refused to hand it over. “I’m supposed to give them personally to Madame, my duck,” he said quietly. I thought it was odd and immediately suspected something. I went to Madame’s room and silently mouthed the words behind Dandré’s back: “Juan Anduce is asking for you. He has something to deliver personally.”

Quick as lightning, Madame went downstairs to meet Juan. When she came back, she was beaming, holding the new shoes tightly against her chest. “Diamantino is finally coming back,” she whispered breathlessly, and she made me swear I’d keep the secret.

A
FEW DAYS EARLIER
Daniel Dearborn had flown into San Juan from the island of St. Thomas. Danny Dear, as he was known, was the all-American hero of the moment. He had thousands of fans across the nation, and the president conferred on him the Congressional Medal of Honor. When he smiled, he looked like a wholesome American farm boy, and if he frowned he reminded you of a Viking god. Sitting on his frail wicker chair inside the
Silver Hawk
’s cabin, he appeared on the front page of every newspaper in the world.

Dearborn was independently wealthy, and had set himself the task of becoming his country’s first Ambassador of the Air. He had devised to fly nonstop from Washington, DC, to Mexico City in a twenty-seven-hour flight, financing the trip himself. From Mexico he flew to Venezuela and from there set across the Caribbean, hopping from island to island on a fourteen-country pan-American “goodwill tour.” That was when he visited Puerto Rico, on his way to Santo Domingo and Cuba.

Unmarried, blond, and blue-eyed, Dearborn chose to fly his monoplane alone, without weaker souls to distract him. He had already crossed the Atlantic in a radarless flight from Newfoundland all the way to Paris, which first propelled him to international fame. During that heroic voyage, nights were dark as a wolf’s maw, and he had had only the stars to guide him. He had had to battle sleep, ice needles forming inside the plane’s unpressurized cabin, disorienting fog, islands appearing before the cockpit which turned out to be mirages, and even a whole array of ghosts who supposedly sat on the tail of his plane, laughing at him for his audacity. But he expected none of this to occur on his trip to the sunny Caribbean.

I didn’t share the public’s overwhelming admiration for “the Viking.” Dearborn was the son of a Swede; his real last name was Mansson, and his father had changed it to Dearborn when he emigrated to the United States. In my eyes, he was just another phlegmatic Scandinavian, the same kind that for centuries had tried to invade Russia from the Baltic. The American government, bent on fostering his image as a demigod come to impart the blessings of civilization to the inhabitants of the islands, took advantage of Dearborn’s altruism and launched a huge publicity campaign. His airplane was like the moon—it pulled a human tidal wave behind it, and mobs would spill over airport fences and into landing fields every time the
Silver Hawk
was about to touch down.

Danny’s visit was proof that Americans were able to pilot the destinies of the sleepy-eyed, lazy people of the tropics. “The young colonel’s mission,” a mainland journal proclaimed, “is to make men of alien races forget their differences in the common admiration of bravery.” But I knew what was going on. I wasn’t ignorant like the other dancers, who never read a newspaper or leafed through a magazine.