Flight of the Swan (19 page)

“Angelina came to Arecibo during her first singing tour of America,” Don Pedro said. “She was only fifteen, but she had already traveled in Europe as a child prodigy, performing at several imperial courts. It was rumored that she even sang in St. Petersburg, and that the czar was so taken, he had his jeweler make a replica of the czarina’s tiara for her.” Madame looked at the painting in wonder, and told Don Pedro her story. “The world is no larger than a handkerchief!” she said, smiling.

“La Bertoli was no less a prodigy than you are, Madame, and she also appeared at Teatro Oliver, which you will soon grace with your presence,” Don Pedro exclaimed grandly. “Felix Lafortune, the famous pianist and composer from New Orleans, accompanied Angelina, and he was a spectacle, too. He was a young man in his twenties, thin and long-maned, with a silky mustache and arms as agile as a spider’s legs. When he played the piano, it was as if he had four hands instead of two.”

Bienvenido and Ronda had come into the dining room and stood listening to Don Pedro. Bienvenido looked uncomfortable. He had evidently never heard of La Bertoli and didn’t care a fig about opera.

The other guests were entering the dining room. Rogelio walked over to the painting to examine it more closely. “The gallant young pianist and the doll-like diva apparently put on a magnificent show together,” he said. “I was too young to see them perform at Teatro Oliver, but people in Arecibo are still talking about them.”

“Angelina’s experience was a good example of the charm of our island, Madame,” Don Pedro said, a malicious smile on his lips. “You must beware of it. It could also weave its spell around you, and then you’ll never want to leave.”

“Would you find that a disagreeable prospect, Madame?” Diamantino intervened, looking at Madame with lovesick eyes. I was furious. “Oh, she’d love to stay!” I piped in before Madame could answer. “Except Madame is thirty-eight, not a fifteen-year-old nightingale!” Everybody burst out laughing and my cheeks were smarting, but I didn’t give a damn.

Doña Basilisa announced that dinner was served, and the guests approached the table. I pulled out a chair for Madame and she sat down at one end of the table, while Don Pedro sat at the head. Bienvenido sat down last, making it a point to sit as far as possible from Ronda. Doña Basilisa evidently didn’t relish the conversation or the idea of Madame extending her stay on the island, and she tried changing the subject several times, but Don Pedro persisted.

“If it hadn’t been for Salvatore,” he rambled on, “who looked after his daughter like an eagle after his young, La Bertoli might have stayed longer. During her visit to Arecibo she met Adalberto Ríos, the son of one of our neighbors. He was a no-good loafer; he didn’t like to work and twiddled his life away painting. One evening the young man went to listen to Angelina sing and fell head over heels in love with her. When the Bertolis went on their way, Adalberto followed them to San Juan. Once there, and just before La Bertolis ship sailed off, Adalberto asked Salvatore for Angelina’s hand in marriage. The old man was wise enough not to say no; he simply begged them to postpone the wedding. Angelina had engagements in New York which she couldn’t break; she had signed contracts to sing at several charity fund-raisers. The girl had a terrific tantrum and had to be wrenched from her lover’s arms, but Salvatore finally managed to sail away with his daughter.”

Don Pedro’s voice was steady and without a quaver, but there was something unreal about his story. I looked at him keenly over the top of the cut-glass wine goblets and noticed that his right eyelid had begun to twitch. He saw me looking at him, and went on impassively. “Adalberto Ríos never got over the affair. After Angelina and her father sailed away, he locked himself up in his room with his oils and paintbrushes and no one but his family saw him again for months. One night, after everyone was asleep, he went up to the attic where he had his atelier and hung himself from a rafter.”

The suspense was so great I could hardly breathe. I wondered why Adelina hadn’t mentioned the story to me before, but nobody dared to contradict Don Pedro. Everyone at the table had grown silent. Only Doña Basilisa was sobbing quietly into her linen handkerchief, her pink, round shoulders quivering and her gray curls bobbing on her head like an old doll’s. Ronda got up from her chair and walked over to Doña Basilisa. She put her arm around her mother’s shoulders to comfort her.

“The name of the young man wasn’t Adalberto Ríos,” Ronda told Madame in a melancholy tone. “It was Adalberto Batistini, and he was my brother. The painting was done by him. We found it in his studio after he hung himself. Like all devout Catholics, Father considers suicide a capital sin, so Adalberto couldn’t be buried in consecrated ground. He had him buried in our orchid grove, and forbade us to ever talk about him.”

“May his soul burn in hell!” Don Pedro whispered, as he got up from the table and left the room.

So that was the reason for Doña Basilisa’s nervousness, for her silly laughter and her ceaseless chatter! That was why she kept praying in whispers when she had shown us her orchid grove, and forbade us to pick a single flower!

B
Y FRIDAY EVERYTHING WAS
ready for opening night at Teatro Oliver. Madame had carefully gone over the stage floor, and all the imperfections were taken care of. The dancers had rehearsed their numbers meticulously: the program included a segment of
Les Sylphides
, then a scene from
Giselle
, both of which Madame would dance with the girls. Then came the
Bacchanale
, which she would perform with Novikov, and finally Tchaikovsky’s Violin Concerto, played by Diamantino. In the morning, however, Nadja Bulova came down from her room to the hotel lobby looking agitated. Novikov had come down with a fever and had trouble breathing. “The doctor examined him and diagnosed pneumonia,” she said. “It’s impossible for him to dance.”

Madame turned to Diamantino in despair. “Don’t worry about it,” he reassured her, “I can take Novikov’s place in the
Bacchanale
. I’ve watched him dance it enough times, and the role is not difficult; I’ll just do more miming than dancing. I can easily act out the role of Dionysus and hold you by the waist as you do your arabesques and pirouettes.”

The Dying Swan
was very obviously missing from the program. “I’m tired of dancing it, Masha,” Madame had told me. “I want to dance about life from now on, not about death.”

Ronda spent the day sitting at the back of the empty theater, chain-smoking and nervously watching the rehearsals. She had asked Bienvenido to come to the theater to help out and at first Bienvenido had said he was busy. But he couldn’t stay away. He turned up after the musicians began to play and joined Juan in helping to move the theater props and adjust the footlights. Ronda was sure Bienvenido loved her in spite of himself, in spite of his silly conviction that he had to remain single in order to serve his country in its struggle for political independence. One day he would tell her so, and they’d be happy forever.

Arecibo is on the northwest side of the island, and in the summer, when the sun sets, churches, houses, roads, even the air one breathes take on a special glow. On the night of our performance the sky became flamingo pink and then a deep indigo blue as the evening fell over the sea that bordered the town. Arecibo’s upper class began to arrive at Teatro Oliver, dressed in its best silks and laces. It was a hot night, and all the doors and windows were left open so that the night air might circulate. A lace-covered banquet table was set under the brick arches of the entrance hall, because Don Pedro was throwing a party after the ballet ended. The air was heavy with jasmine, as profuse vines crept up the theater’s columns and hung from its eaves in delicate clouds sprinkled with white stars. This spectacle was completely new to us, used as we were to the disquieting white nights of St. Petersburg, when one walks in a haze for months.

I stood with the dancers to one side of the stage as Madame patiently went over some of the steps with Diamantino. I could see she was worried about the reaction his appearance might trigger. The
machista
conventions of the town could make him the butt of cruel jokes when they saw him dance the role of Dionysus, a crown of laurel leaves on his head, but Diamantino insisted. He told Madame he wanted to prove to his godfather and to his Arecibo friends that he was taking his career as an artist seriously. In any case, once Madame finished dancing, it would be his turn to show them what he could do with Tchaikovsky’s Violin Concerto.

That afternoon I had seen Madame stashing away some clothes in a duffel bag in her dressing room, and I sensed that something was afoot, but I kept my suspicions to myself. I went on doing my exercises as usual. “You’re a peasant girl from Minsk,” I told myself sternly. “You’ve gone through much worse and have managed to survive.”

The girls were aware of the situation, too, and their animosity was mounting. At first they didn’t want to discuss it in front of me, but I heard Nadja Bulova whisper bitterly to Maya Ulanova that Madame was planning to leave us in the lurch and take off with her lover. They feared that they’d never be able to get back to San Juan, much less to civilization in New York or London. When anxiety reached a fever pitch, they begged for my help. They wanted me to talk to her, but I shook my head—there was nothing I could do. Madame’s destiny was in God’s hands.

Katia Borodina, Maya Ulanova, and Egorova Sedova—were sentimental and were more hurt than angry But Nadja was furious. She had turned down several suitors in order to become a professional dancer and now that would be impossible. Without Madame, there was no company; it would melt like a dream. “She’s an old bitch. I hope he breaks her heart,” she whispered to one of her friends.

At eight o’clock sharp Smallens, the orchestra director, walked to the podium. He tapped the music stand with his violin bow to demand attention, and darkness enveloped the theater as the curtains rose. Doña Basilisa and Don Pedro sat complacently in the audience, their plump arms and legs stuffed into their chairs like rubber limbs. Ronda was deathly pale and kept nervously fanning herself with the program.

Adam’s music wafted onto the stage like a ghostly mist, and the girls and I ran out to begin our performance of
Giselle
. At first everything went smoothly; the local musicians were much better than any of us had expected, thanks, no doubt, to Doña Victoria’s music school. A few seconds later, Madame joined us, wearing Giselle’s costume. She danced the maiden who falls in love with Prince Albrecht and commits suicide when she can’t have him. I danced the Queen of the Wilis, commander of the squadron of chaste virgins, who, ash bough in hand, orders Giselle to leave her lover and join them. I thought the ballet, produced by Marius Petipa in St. Petersburg thirty years earlier, was a fitting good-bye to our beloved Madame, who was about to sever herself from our company and take off with a scoundrel without a hint of regret. But we were in for a surprise.

The performance seemed under control and we were beginning to relax, anticipating the extravagant party we were going to afterward. At least we could get drunk on champagne and eat all sorts of fattening delicacies cooked by Doña Basilisa without having to worry about our weight anymore, since this was the company’s Waterloo and we would never dance together again. Then Glazunov’s
Bacchanale
began to throb under our feet like the beating of an uncontrollable heart. The atmosphere of the theater became charged with a mysterious energy.

I swear I didn’t foresee what was going to happen. The music made us dance so feverishly and so fast that, after a few minutes, we didn’t know what we were doing. Smallens had ordered the brass instruments and the drums to play increasingly louder, until I thought my ears were going to burst. The scherzo was already swirling around Madame and Diamantino, who, as Ariadne and the god Dionysus, were curling and uncurling around each other in a frenzy of lascivious movements, when I saw that the girls had fallen under the spell of the music. Slowly they advanced toward the couple—Katia, Maya, Egorova, Nadja—and began to encircle them. The choreography didn’t call for such a development, and Madame looked up in surprise. Before she could do anything to prevent it, however, the maenads threw themselves on Diamantino and began to claw him. Six fiery dragons couldn’t have been more fierce: they ripped his costume apart and tore at his flesh with their nails. They flew at him like witches, borne by their tulle skirts, aiming their grands jetés and their battements tendus at him. They yanked out his hair and screamed obscenities at him until the trapdoor yawned unexpectedly beneath Diamantino’s and Madame’s feet, and they both plunged into the darkness.

I cried out in anguish, and we all rushed backstage and down to the murky cellar. The girls were weeping and begging me to forgive them—it wasn’t their fault, they insisted as they trailed behind me. The frenzy of the music had taken hold of them and they didn’t know what had happened—it had all come about so quickly.

I couldn’t blame them. They had given up so much for her!

Fortunately, no one in the audience noticed that anything was amiss, and the end of the performance appeared to go as planned. Everybody thought the attack on the god Dionysus was part of the choreography and thus a scandal was avoided. As soon as the curtain went down we began to look all over for Diamantino and Madame, but they had vanished. The police were summoned and agents swarmed all over the theater. They looked in the dressing rooms, behind the scenery, even under the orchestra seats once the theater was empty. But they couldn’t find them.

Instead of seeming upset, Molinari went around pinching the corners of his lips, trying not to let a smile of satisfaction slip out of his mouth as he observed the commotion. I was sure he had had a hand in the disappearance, but I had no proof.

“Congratulations. You finally got what you wanted: now Madame and her lover are safely out of our reach,” he said, trying to pin the vanishing act on me. I was furious. I had no idea where Madame and Diamantino were: they could have been kidnapped or assassinated, or might even have left of their own accord—if what Madame had said to me about wanting to spend the rest of her life with him was true.