Flight of the Swan (6 page)

“Then we sailed off to America. Our first tour took the company across the whole United States by train. We visited forty cities, from New Orleans to Seattle, in a span of nine weeks, and sometimes Niura had to dance two performances a day. She earned thousands of dollars a week, but at the end of the tour she didn’t have any money. Mr. Dandré mapped out pulverizing schedules for her and would disappear with the profits at the end of each month, although he insisted he spent it all on our traveling expenses, new costumes, salaries, and hotels. We stayed in New York for a while, where Dandré made Niura appear in all kinds of advertisements—Pond’s Vanishing Cream, for instance—which was perfect for the image of Niura fading away in a swan costume. Dandré himself wrote a clever ditty for the publicity campaign in the States, which went: ‘Wintry winds I frosts and fogs I have little effect or none I on a face protected by Pond’s.’

“Mr. Dandré was already middle-aged when Niura met him. Some said he was corrupt, and it wouldn’t have been surprising. In czarist Russia that was common, everybody was like that. But he was affectionate with Niura. He spent a fortune on her designer clothes because he insisted it was good for business. In his opinion, every little girl’s dream was to be a ballerina, so Niura had to look exactly like a ballerina’s dream.

“The ballet world was full of eccentric people. One of the most fascinating persons Niura met in Europe was Serge Diaghilev. He was a strange man. He liked male stars better than female ones, and in his ballets the male dancer always eclipsed the ballerina. A shock of white hair sprouting from his forehead gave him a diabolic air, but he had a passion for art, and could recognize true talent when he found it. He used to stroll down the Champs-Elysées with his monocled eye flashing in every direction as if defying the world, a red carnation in his lapel, arm in arm with one of his gentlemen friends. Once, years earlier, he did this with a famous Irish writer who visited Paris after having spent time in an English jail—Wilde or Wile was his name, I can’t be sure—and their picture came out in all the papers.

“Diaghilev and Vaslav Nijinsky, the
dieu de la danse
, were lovers, they lived in open promiscuity. They say Diaghilev was obsessed with germs, and always kissed his friends through a handkerchief. When Nijinsky danced
L’Aprés-midi d’un Faune
, he wore a skin-tight leotard with rippling brown spots on it and mimed the sexual act on a scarf spread out on the floor. The silk scarf was supposed to belong to a nymph, but it could just as well have been Serge Diaghilev’s opera muffler. The ballet, set to Debussy’s music, was very avant-garde and shockingly beautiful, but even in Paris it created a huge scandal.

“Diaghilev was as corrupt as they come, but Nijinsky was as innocent as a child, he couldn’t understand Diaghilev’s obsessions. He wanted a normal life and married Romola de Pulsky during a tour of Argentina in 1913. Romola was the daughter of Hungary’s foremost actress, she was wealthy and beautiful, but she was also ambitious and wanted to share Nijinsky’s fame. What a tragedy that was! As a Russian, you must know what it means to be married to a Hungarian: they are like leeches and never let go, sucking your blood to the end. Nijinsky was still in love with Diaghilev, but he couldn’t admit it to himself. Worst of all, he depended on the Ballets Russes to keep on dancing, but Diaghilev never forgave him for getting married to Romola and kicked him out of the company. Eventually Nijinsky went mad and was interned in Bellevue Sanatorium.

“But that was much later. When we traveled to Paris in 1910, Niura joined Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes at Monte Carlo. For a marvelous season she performed with Nijinsky as her partner, but she didn’t stay long. She was out of there like a bullet and returned to the Maryinsky. She’s always been proud and never danced second to anyone. She was prima ballerina
assoluta
in every company she ever danced with Vaslav Nijinsky, on the contrary, who came from a humble background, was easy prey for Diaghilev. Serge was the son of a cavalry colonel from the Urals, and he charmed poor Nijinsky into renouncing his contract with the Imperial Ballet and joining the Ballets Russes full time. Nijinsky reigned supreme in it, as Niura found out. But only for a short time. He was the perfect example of what happened to you when you let your heart get under your feet, Niura said.

“When we moved to London my daughter set out to create her own ballet company with Dandré’s help, but it was a risky venture—the lamb bedding down with the wolf, you might say. It was around that time—June of 1912—when disaster struck. Dandré, who still lived part of the year in St. Petersburg, where he was chairman of the Commission of Inspectors to the St. Petersburg City Council, was accused of illegal use of city funds. He borrowed large sums, invested them, skimmed off the profits, and returned them to the fund a month later. But one day the operation took longer than it should have and Dandré got caught. He was prosecuted and put in jail. Niura had eighteen thousand dollars put away, the greater part of her earnings after her first grueling European tour, and she wired the money directly to Russia to get Dandré out on bail. When I found out about it, I was furious. I would have let the man rot in prison. Not a week passed before Dandré slipped away from St. Petersburg and secretly crossed the border over to Denmark, where Niura was waiting for him. She brought him to London, and he’s been living off our backs ever since.”

All through Lyubovna’s story I sat listening as if in a trance, balanced on the edge of my chair. My tea had turned cold, and the cup stood on the table untouched. A storm of emotions was raging in my chest. I disliked Lyubovna for her groveling, but despised Dandré for having broken Madame’s spirit.

I
WENT TO SEE MADAME IN HER ROOM
at the Malatrassi the next morning. She embraced me and began to cry openly. Dandré sat on the bed, and went on thoughtfully smoking his cigar, a stern expression on his face. He was traveling the next day to New York, he said, to get all the members of our troupe English passports.

I told Madame she had to pull herself together, because if the dancers saw her fall apart, there would be no hope for our company. “This is only a temporary crisis, one of the many we’ve already had to endure, and the Virgin of Vladimir will protect us,” I said, trying to raise her morale. But a premonition had seized me; I was afraid we’d be trapped on the island.

That afternoon we went out for a little sightseeing and Molinari went with us. He spoke French, Spanish, and English, and we were told he also worked for the government as a translator. I wondered at his versatility. He was dressed in black from head to toe, and his yellow eyes roamed about like a vulture’s, ready to pounce on whatever caught his attention. If Madame lagged behind, or if I stopped to speak to people in the street, he’d be next to us in an instant, urging us to walk on. There was a lot of activity downtown, large crowds of people singing the American anthem and cheering at every turn, waving small American flags. A military band was playing on the corner of Calle Comercio, which led down to the piers. It was good music, gay and informal, and we let it flood over us so as not to think about what had happened. The American flag was flying in front of the schools, above the post office, at the entrance to the harbor; it even hung from the windows of the Municipal Theater and the balcony of the Casino of Puerto Rico. We wondered what was the reason for so much zeal.

A line of uniformed recruits marched toward the wharf, knapsacks on their backs, carrying Winchester rifles. The column was headed by still more flags, and a large band played a march by John Philip Sousa, the American composer. I recognized it immediately because the company had danced to it in New York’s Hippodrome, where Sousa’s band forgot all about us and went on playing until we almost collapsed from exhaustion on the stage. Once in a while, though, the Puerto Rican soldiers would break into a
paso doble
, a spirited Spanish dance accompanied by castanets and tambourines. They would fall out of step and begin to run a little to keep up with the fast rhythm of the music, and from the back of the column it looked as if they were dancing the rumba. This made Madame laugh.

“Where are they off to?” she asked.

“They’re companies A and B of the Puerto Rican Battalion,” Molinari replied. “They’re sailing this evening for Colón and the Panama Canal, to defend it from possible German submarine attack.” And he pointed toward the
Buford
, the ship anchored on the harbor, where it had docked that morning.

Madame was amazed. “And why should they defend Panama? It’s not their country, is it?” she asked.

Molinari smiled ingratiatingly. “It is now, Madame! We were made American citizens only last month, and we have to defend our citizenship with our lives.” Dandré agreed stolidly while Madame stared at him in disgust. She had long ago given up trying to civilize him, but he always surprised her with his crassness. “That’s impossible. How can you become citizens of one country if you live in another?” she asked. “That’s exactly what you’ll be doing, Madame, in order to survive,” Molinari answered with an unctuous smile. Madame stamped her foot in anger, but couldn’t deny what Molinari had said. She would soon be a British subject, whether she liked it or not.

Madame raced ahead of us to march beside the last soldier, who held a shorn lamb in his arms. “Where are you taking the poor thing? Is it going to Panama, too?” she asked. “Of course! It’s the battalion’s mascot. St. John’s lamb is our country’s national symbol.” Madame laughed and clapped her hands. “I think I’m going to love it here, Masha,” she told me. “How can you resist a people who have a lamb as their national symbol?”

As we crossed the city we looked around more carefully. Well-to-do women on the island dressed much as they did in Russia during the summer when they went strolling down Nevsky Prospekt: in white muslin or linen gowns, with elegant hats on their heads and parasols in their hands. Men wore traditional white linen suits and straw boaters. Adults in the street were very friendly and looked at passersby directly in the eyes instead of avoiding our gazes, as they often did in St. Petersburg or, for that matter, New York.

Fortaleza Street was full of stores: hardware, textiles, shoes, bedding, children’s clothes, all exhibited in the windows in an unsophisticated way. My favorite was La Casa de las Medias y los Botones, “The house of stockings and buttons.” Madame and I stopped in front of it as we walked by. The display window looked like something out of
A Thousand and One Nights
: buttons made of ivory, of fake mother-of-pearl, of glass that shone like diamonds, fake gold, silver, all displayed on wooden drawers that rose all the way up to the ceiling. They also sold silk ribbons by the spool and all sorts of feathers: ostrich, marabou, pheasant. The rolls of lace, silk damask, brocades, wools, and linens recently arrived from Europe stood spilled over the mahogany counters like newly discovered treasures. The store was swarming with customers, all of them asking to be helped. Madame and I stood there and stared at what was going on. “People in San Juan must love to dress up,” Madame said. “We must come back here soon, to have new costumes made.”

Fortaleza Street was narrow, and it had a chapel named after Saint Jude, one of my favorite saints because he intercedes for lost souls, and mine strayed long ago. His statue was in a niche, and Madame and I liked to pray to him. It was a nice chapel, with domino-marble-tiled floor and a gilded image of La Monserrate—a black Virgin—sitting under the altar dome. We didn’t mind praying in Catholic churches because they resemble the Orthodox so much. They are dark and mysterious, so you can meditate on life’s enigmas. We disliked Protestant churches, where everything was bare and cold, like the churches in New York where there wasn’t a single saint and Madame and I got so bored we immediately started to yawn. Catholics love their saints, and on this island they seem to love them in a special way, because in almost every house we looked in there was a small altar with old saints carved in wood holding small, lighted candles in their hands.

Most of the buildings were dilapidated. Balconies with wooden balusters or elaborate ironwork looked toward the Atlantic and took in the breeze. Walls hundreds of years old were shedding plaster as if they were molting. The whole place smelled of moss, and a dank humidity crept up from the slippery cobblestones. And yet I liked it. In St. Petersburg, everything is old. Trees, sidewalks, houses are full of the sounds of the present and of the past. San Juan was like that, too.

Because of the military celebrations the streets were teeming with automobiles: Studebakers, Peerless Eights, Franklins, Willis Overlands. People had come from all over the island to see the parade, and they went on arriving. It seemed as if half of them were driving luxury cars, and the other half were straggling barefoot down the cobblestone streets. But we didn’t see the magnificent yellow-and-black Pierce-Arrow that had picked Madame up at the wharf anywhere, no matter how hard we looked. As we went down San Justo Street a group of children, barefoot and wearing tattered, grimy smocks, skipped over a hopscotch grid they had drawn on the street with chalk. Many looked ill-fed and in poor health. They stopped playing and began asking Madame for money. They broke her heart, and she would have taken them back to the hotel with her if it hadn’t been for Mr. Dandré.

We were almost back at the Malatrassi when we passed a large concrete building which was evidently a school. It looked relatively new; the American flag stood in front of it also. The windows that faced the street were open, and we could hear the children singing in English. The school day was just beginning. First they pledged allegiance to the flag; then they sang the American national anthem. Madame and I climbed on a nearby bench and watched, fascinated. How could it be possible that children on this island were taught in English when they only spoke Spanish? This was a mystery to us.

A very elegant gentleman entered one of the classrooms on crutches, apparently about to give a lecture. There was something remarkable about him: he seemed to exude an extraordinary energy, his eyes blazed from his pale face with a dark fire. He only had one leg. The other one had been amputated, and his pant leg, immaculately pressed and starched, was carefully folded around the stump. He was talking to a group of students, obviously a class. The youngsters listened reverently, and people on the street also stopped to hear. Suddenly the man raised his voice, and the whole school, the street packed with people, even the trees full of birds, fell silent around them—or so it seemed.