Save Me the Waltz: A Novel (27 page)

There was honey for breakfast and bread like a stone mallet. She was afraid to change in Rome without David. The Rome station was full of palms; the fountains scrubbed the baths of Caracalla with sprays of sunshine opposite the terminus. In the open friendliness of the Italian air, her spirits rose.

“Ballonné, deux tours,” she said to herself. The new train was filthy. There were no carpets on the floor and it smelled of the Fascisti, of guns. The signs pronounced a litany; Asti Spumante, Lagrima Christi, Spumoni, Tortoni. She didn’t know what it was she had lost—the letter was still in the Cutex. Alabama took possession of herself as a small boy walking in a garden might close his hand over a firefly.

“Cinque minuti mangiare,” said the attendant.

“All right,” she said, counting on her fingers, “una, due, tre—It’s all right,” she assured him.

The train swerved this way and that, trying to avoid the disorder of Naples. The cabbies had forgotten to move their cabs off the car rails, sleepy men forgot which way they were going in the middle of the streets, children spread their mouths and soft hurt eyes and forgot the
emotion of crying. White dust blew about the city; delicatessens sold sharp smells, cubes and triangles and wicker globes of odor. Naples shrunk in the lamplight from its public squares, suppressed by a great pretense of discipline, quelled by its blackened stone façade. “Venti lire!” expostulated the cabby.

“The letter,” said Alabama haughtily, “said I could
live
on thirty lire a week in Naples.”

“Venti, venti, venti,” caroled the Italian without turning around.

“It’s going to be difficult not being able to communicate,” thought Alabama.

She gave the man the address the
maîtresse
had sent her. Flourishing his whip grandiloquently, the cabby urged the horse’s hoofs pendulously through the munificence of the night. As she gave the man his money his brown eyes swung on hers like cups set on a tree to catch a precious sap. She thought he would never quit looking.

“Signorina will like Naples,” he said surprisingly. “ ‘The city’s voice is soft like solitude’s.’ ”

The cab clumped away through the red and green lights set about the brim of the bay like stones in the filigree of a Renaissance poison cup. The syrupy drippings of the fly-specked south seeped up on the breeze that blew the vast aquamarine translucence into emotional extinction.

The light from the pension entry shone in globular drops in Alabama’s fingernails. Her movements gathered up in consequential stirrings of the air as she passed inside leaving no traces on the stillness behind her.

“Well, I’ve got to live here,” said Alabama, “so that’s all there is to that.”

The landlady said the room had a balcony—it did, but there wasn’t any floor to the balcony; the iron rails joined the peeling pink wash of the outside walls. However, there was a lavabo with gigantic spouts sticking out over the bowl and splashing the square of oilcloth underneath. The breakwater curved its arm about the ball of blue night from her window; the smell of pitch rose from the harbor.

Alabama’s thirty lire bought a white iron bed that had obviously once been green; a maple wardrobe with a beveled mirror opaling the Italian sun, and a rocker made of a strip of Brussels carpet. Cabbage three times a day, a glass of Amalfi wine, gnocchi on Sundays, and the chorus of “Donna” by the loafers beneath the balcony at night were included in the price. It was a huge room with no shape, being all bays and
corners till it gave her a sense of inhabiting a whole apartment. There is a suggestion of gilt about everything in Naples, and though Alabama could not find a trace of it in her room, she felt somehow as if the ceilings were encrusted with gold leaf. Footfalls rose from the pavements below in sumptuous warm reminiscence. Nights fell out of the classics; the merest suggestion of people floated off into view, fantastic excrescences of happy existence; cacti speared the summer; the backs of fish glinted in the open boats below like mica splinters.

Madame Sirgeva conducted her classes on the stage of the opera house. She complained incessantly about the price of the lights; the piano sounded very ineffectual in the Victorian chasms. The darkness from the wings and the dimness between the three globes she kept burning overhead divided the stage into small intimate compartments. Madame paraded her ghost through the sway of tarlatan, the creak of toe shoes, the subdued panting of the girls.

“No noise, less noise,” she reiterated. She was as pale and dyed and shriveled and warped by poverty as a skin that has been soaked under acid. The black dye in her hair, coarse as the stuffing of a pillow, was yellow along the part; she taught her girls in puffed-sleeved blouses and pleated skirts which she wore on the street afterward beneath her coat.

Swirling round and round like an exercise in penmanship, Alabama threaded the line through the spots of light.

“But you are like Madame!” said Madame Sirgeva. “We were at the Imperial School together in Russia. It was I who taught her her entrechats, though she never did them properly. Mes enfants! There are four counts to a quatre-temps, please, p—l—e—a—s—e!”

Alabama clamorously dropped her person bit by bit into the ballet like pieces dropped through a mechanical piano.

The girls were unlike the Russians. Their necks were dirty and they came to the theatre with paper bags filled with thick sandwiches. They ate garlic; they were fatter than the Russians and their legs were shorter; they danced with bent knees and their Italian-silk tights crinkled over their dimples.

“God and the Devil!” shrieked Sirgeva. “It is Moira who is never in step, and the ballet goes on in three weeks.”

“Oh, Maestra!” remonstrated Moira. “Molto bella!”

“Oh,” gasped Madame, turning to Alabama. “You see? I provide them with steel shoes to hold up their lazy feet and the moment I turn my back they dance flatfoot—and I am paid only sixteen hundred lire for all that! Thank heavens, I have
one
from a Russian school!” The
mistress went on like a churning piston rod. She sat in the humid closed opera house with a seal cape about her shoulders, faded and dyed like her hair, coughing into her handkerchief.

“Mother Maria,” sighed the girls. “Sanctified Mary!” They drew together in frightened groups in the gloom. They were suspicious of Alabama because of her clothes. Over the backs of the canvas chairs in the dingy dressing room she flung her things: two hundred dollars’ worth of black tulle “Adieu Sagesse,” moss roses floating through a nebula like seeds in a strawberry ice, costly nebula—one hundred, two hundred dollars; some yellow clownish fringe, a chartreuse hooded cloak, white shoes, blue shoes, buckles for Bobby Shafto, silver buckles, steel buckles, hats and red sandals, shoes with the signs of the zodiac, a velvet cape soft as the roof of an old chateau, a cap of pheasant’s feathers—she hadn’t realized in Paris that she had had so many clothes. She would have to wear them out now that she was living on six hundred lire a month. She was glad of all those clothes that David had bought her. After the class, she dressed amidst the fine things with the purposeful air of a father inspecting a child’s toy.

“Holy Mother,” whispered the girls shyly, fingering her lingerie. Alabama was cross when they did that; she didn’t want them smearing sausage over her chiffon step-ins.

She wrote to David twice a week—their apartment appeared to her far away, and dull. Rehearsals were coming—any life compared with that seemed dreary. Bonnie answered on little paper with French nursery rhymes on the heading.

Dearest Mummy—

I was the hostess while Daddy put on his cuff buttons for a lady and gentleman. My life is working quite well. Mademoiselle and the chambermaid said they never saw a box of paints so pretty as the one you sent. I jumped of joy with the paintbox and made some pictures of
des gens à la mer, nous qui jouons au croquet et une vase avec des fleurs dedans d’après nature
. When we are Sunday in Paris I go to Catechism to learn of the horrible sufferings of Jesus Christ.

Your loving daughter,

Bonnie Knight

Alabama took the yellow sedative at night to forget Bonnie’s letters. She made friends with a dark Russian girl blowing through the ballet like a sirocco. Together they went to the Galleria. In the blank stone enclosure where footsteps spattered like steady rain, they sat over their
beers. The girl refused to believe that Alabama was married; she lived in constant hopes of meeting the man who provided her friend with so much money, and of stealing him away. Crowds of men passing arm in arm eyed them callously and disdainfully—they wouldn’t pick up women who went to the Galleria at night alone, they seemed to say. Alabama showed her friend Bonnie’s picture.

“You are happy,” said the girl. “One is happier when one doesn’t marry.” Her eyes were a deep brown that glowed red and clear like violin rosin when she was exhilarated by a little alcohol. On especial occasions she wore a pair of black net teddies with lavender bows that she had bought when she worked in the chorus of the Ballet Russe before Diaghilev died.

Rehearsing in the big empty theater, the troupe went over and over the
Faust
ballet. The orchestra leader conducted Alabama’s three-minute solo like lightning. Madame Sirgeva did not dare to speak to the Maestro. At last with tears in her eyes, she stopped the performance.

“You are killing my girls,” she wept. “It is inhuman!”

The man threw his stick across the piano; the hair stood up on his head like grass sprouting on a clay scalp.

“Sapristi!” he screamed. “The music is written so!”

He dashed distractedly out of the opera house and they finished without music. The following afternoon the Maestro was more determined, the music went faster than ever. He had looked up a copy of the original score; he had never made an error. The arms of the violins rose above the stage bent and black as grasshopper legs; the Maestro snapped his backbone like a rubber slingshot, flinging the fast chords up over the footlights with an impossible rapidity.

Alabama was unused to a slanting stage. To habituate herself she worked alone at lunchtime after the morning class, turning, turning. The slant threw her turns out of balance. She worked so hard that she felt like an old woman by a fireside in a far Nordic country as she sat on the floor dressing afterwards. The telescoping vacation blue and brighter blue of the Bay of Naples was blinding to stumble through on her way home. Alabama’s feet were bleeding as she fell into bed.

When at last her first performance was over she sat on the base of a statue of the Venus de Milo, outside the studded doors of the opera greenrooms; Pallas Athene stared at her across the musty hall. Her eyes throbbed with the beat of her pulse, her hair clung like Plasticine about her head; “Bravo” and “Benissimo” for the ballet rang about her ears like persistent gnats. “Well, it’s done,” she said.

She didn’t dare look at the girls in the dressing room; she tried to
hold on to the magic for a long time. She knew her eyes would see the sagging breasts like dried August gourds, and wound themselves on the pneumatic buttocks like lurid fruits in the pictures of Georgia O’Keeffe.

David had telegraphed a basket of calla lilies. “From your two sweethearts” the card should have read, but it had come through the Neapolitan florist “sweat-hearts.” She didn’t laugh. She hadn’t written to David in three weeks. She plastered her face with cold cream and sucked on the half lemon she had brought in her valise. Her Russian friend embraced her. The ballet girls seemed to be waiting about for something more to happen; no men waited in the shadows of the opera door. The girls were mostly ugly, and some of them were old. Their faces were vacuous and so stretched with fatigue that they would have fallen apart save for the cordlike muscles developed by years of hard breathing. Their necks were pinched and twisted like dirty knots of mending thread when they were thin, and when they were fat the flesh hung over their bones like bulging pastry over the sides of paper containers. Their hair was black with no nuances to please the tired senses.

“Jesu!” they cried in admiration, “the lilies! How much can they have cost? They are fit for a cathedral!”

Madame Sirgeva kissed Alabama gratefully.

“You have done well! When we give the ballet programme for the year, you will have the stellar rôle—these girls are too ugly. I can do nothing with them. There was no interest in ballet before—now we shall see! Do not worry. I will write to Madame! Your flowers are beautiful, piccola ballerina,” she finished softly.

Alabama sat in her window listening to the night chorus of “Donna.”

“Well,” she sighed distractedly, “there should be something to do after a success.”

She put her wardrobe in order and thought of her friends in Paris. Sunday friends with satin-coated wives toasting impeccable accents in the sun of foreign
plages;
tumultuous friends drowning the Chopin in modern jazz in vintage wines; cultured friends hanging over David like a group of relations over a first-born. They would have taken her out somewhere. Calla lilies, in Paris, would not have been tied with a white tulle bow.

She sent David the clippings from the paper. They were agreed that the ballet was a success, and that the new addition to Madame Sirgeva’s corps was a competent dancer. She had promise and should be given a bigger role, the papers said. Italians like blondes; they said Alabama was as ethereal as a Fra Angelico angel because she was thinner than the others.

Madame Sirgeva was proud of those notices. It seemed more important to Alabama that she should have discovered a new make of toe shoe from Milan; the shoes were soft as air. Alabama ordered a hundred pairs—David sent her the money. He was living in Switzerland with Bonnie. She hoped he had bought Bonnie woolen bloomers—up to the age of ten girls need to have their stomachs protected. At Christmas he wrote her that he had bought Bonnie a blue ski suit, and sent her Kodak snaps of the snow and of the two of them falling down the hills together.

Asthmatic Christmas bells tolled over Naples; flat metallic sheets of sound like rustled sheafs of roofing. The steps about the public places were filled with jonquils and roses dyed orange, dripping red water. Alabama went to see the wax Nativities at Benediction. There were calla lilies everywhere and tapers and worn, bland faces smiling convulsively over the season. From the reflection of the candle flicker on the gilt, from the chants that rose and fell like the beating of the tides on amorphous shores before the birth of man, from the spattering tread of the women with heads bound in lace veils, Alabama absorbed a sense of elation as if she marched to the righteous tune of spiritual organization. The surplices of the priests in Naples were of white satin, lush with passion flowers and pomegranates. During the services Alabama thought of Bourbon princes and hemophilia, papal counts, and maraschino cherries. The gleam of gold damask on the altar was as warm and rich as what it represented. Her thoughts prowled about her introspection like leopards in a cage at the zoo. Her body was so full of static from the constant whip of her work that she could get no clear communication with herself. She said to herself that human beings have no right to fail. She did not feel what failure was. She thought of Bonnie’s tree. Mademoiselle could get it together as well as she.