Flight of the Swan

TO THE MEMORY OF ANNA PAVLOVA

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About the Author

The swan was a symbol of the beauty of our times, still trying to soar with the instinct for life as it was about to perish under the hooves of war. Madame came from St. Petersburg and was the product of that baroque city, glimmering softly during its endless white nights. Onstage at the Maryinsky Theater countless feet scissored and stabbed the air in unison, hands flashed, heads nodded simultaneously to a musical chord. The windows of the pastel-colored palaces were reflected rhythmically on the waters of the Neva as our arms arched gracefully over our heads, and we flew in the stage lights like wingless angels.

Then we landed on this strife-torn island and the swan melted under the scorching sun.

—from the
Memoirs of Masha Mastova

V
ERY FEW PEOPLE KNOW
that Madame, the famous Russian ballerina, visited our island from April to September 1917. But my husband, Juan Anduce, and I remembered the time vividly. A few weeks ago, on April 23, 1932, Madame lay dying in an obscure hotel in Amsterdam, asking for her swan costume. “Play the last measure softly,” she whispered to the friends who stood around her, the newspaper headlines quoted. No sooner did she pass away, as she lay still warm in her coffin, than her husband, Victor Dandré, was speeding toward London in search of the marriage license which would assure him of his inheritance: magnificent Ivy House, the mansion surrounded by English gardens and a lake full of swans that once belonged to the painter William Turner and which Madame had purchased with her savings. But I knew he’d never find it. I had destroyed the license, a yellowed parchment written in Cyrillic characters, years before. When I read the article I was overwhelmed with recollections. I have lived for fifteen years on this island, almost half as long as I lived in Russia. I still love the color red, as all Russians do—
russ
, after all, means red, something few people realize because it’s so obvious—but my Russian heart is beginning to feel stifled. Incredibly enough, I am growing tired of this island’s splendid sun and I miss winter. I would give anything to hear its silence, the stillness that precedes the blizzard, oblivion’s snowflakes sifting quietly over my graying head.

When my husband, Juan, was still alive, I had very little time to brood about these things because we had the ballet school and needed to keep our students whirling like tops in the studio we built together in San Juan. It was on the second floor of an Old house, with several wrought-iron balconies that opened onto the shady Plaza de Armas.

The academy was Madame’s gift to us when she left the island. The training is difficult and very demanding, but its benefits are countless. It not only gives young men and women the opportunity to find jobs as dancers; it also gives them self-respect and a sense of who they are. This was Madame’s original wish, and I have done my utmost to put it into effect.

Juan died of a punctured appendix a few months ago and now I live alone. Fortunately, I still have my studio. But when I close the door after the day’s last student has left, I plunge into despair. Time erases everything and at the end we are left with nothing. I refuse to become a ghost, a woman without a country, without love and without memories, clutching at my own shadow.

I was thirty-nine years old when I made the decision to leave Madame’s company when she traveled to South America. I stayed behind on this island, where I married Juan Anduce, the cobbler hired to repair the dancers’ slippers when our ballet company was stranded here during the Great War. For three months we were virtual prisoners; it was a nightmare for all of us. The company’s ballerinas wore out dozens of slippers each week and it was impossible to have new ones delivered during our tour because of the German submarines. So Madame had to improvise. That’s when Juan Anduce, my future husband, turned up, his green eyes gleaming with the island’s lushness and a mischievous smile on his face.

I had met Madame a number of years earlier, in St. Petersburg. I was young and naive, and one day I went to her apartment on Kolomenskaya Street and asked if she would take me on as a private student. Madame had only recently graduated from the Maryinsky Imperial Ballet School and gave classes at home to a small group of girls to supplement her income. It was from this group that she eventually picked the dancers that formed her company, later taking them on short tours on the Continent when war was about to break out in Russia. I joined the flock of young women and accompanied Madame from Russia to the Baltic when I was nineteen. From there we toured many European countries, until one day we sailed to the United States. Many of our relatives in Russia perished during those years, when the White and Red Armies were grappling in mortal combat along a frontier thousands of miles long. Madame saved us from disaster.

Like the rest of the girls in our company, I could have kissed the ground my mistress walked on, dragged myself over a bed of hot coals or needles of ice just to be near her. Those were anguished years, during which we, her followers, spent many sleepless nights worrying about the future. But Madame seemed to glide serenely over the troubled waters of her age: the Russian Revolution, the deaths of millions of her countrymen, even the suffering of this small island which she visited for a short time and to which she could have been indifferent, yet wasn’t. It was hard not to revere her if you ever saw her dance; her Odile in
Swan Lake
and her Aurora in
Sleeping Beauty
were perfect. But our group held her in special esteem, because she always kept her promises.

Madame and I have known each other from way back. I’m the daughter of a Russian peasant from Minsk who used to beat me with a poplar branch every time he got drunk. I survived thanks to a traveling merchant who went by the house one afternoon and saw him beat me. He punched Mastovsky on the chin and took me to live with his own family in St. Petersburg. He had a brother named Vassily who was a ballet master. He came by the house one day and suggested I take classes with him. Of course I was thrilled to do so. A few years went by and I was perfectly happy, but when I turned sixteen, the merchant raped me and began to beat me. Eventually I went to Madame’s apartment and knocked on her door. It was 1897 and Madame had just opened a small ballet school at home, and she took in private pupils. I had a strong, slender body, like the peasants of Belarus usually do. Madame took me in as a maid, and later decided to continue my training.

Like so many of the young dancers who joined Madame’s school, I was a fanatical admirer of the ballerina’s art. Since I didn’t have the training, I wasn’t a good enough dancer to be a soloist, so I danced in the chorus. I was tall and lanky then, not fat and sluggish like I am now, wearing muumuus all the time to conceal my size. Because of my rawboned strength, I always danced at the tail end of the line of girls, always near the wings so I could dart off the stage to help Madame change into one of her costumes, or to help the stagehands out. I admit I was never attractive. I looked a bit like a stork, with a long nose and quick-darting eyes which Madame said were always suspiciously assessing my surroundings.

During our free time I washed and ironed Madame’s clothes, made her bed, helped dress her, and brushed and tidied up her hair with the silver swan brush and comb one of her admirers had given her, which were always kept in their own leather case. Little by little I became my mistress’s confidante.

I knew more about Madame than anyone else in the company: who her biological father was, for example, and why Madame would get so upset if anyone mentioned Matvey Federov, the reserve officer who had married her mother, Lyubovna Fedorovna, and who was killed in the war when Madame was only two years old. I knew all of her secrets: how Madame managed to enter the Imperial Ballet School in St. Petersburg, why she married Victor Dandré, a con man and a scoundrel, and why she had stayed with him for so many years.

This knowledge gave me power, and the other dancers respected me for it. I was Madame’s right hand, the keeper of her flame. The desire for something we do not have is what makes us struggle to better ourselves, as our priest in Minsk used to say.

One day Madame and I made a pact: “I’ll take care of you and you take care of me,” she said. I naturally agreed. Anyone who knows something about love knows it’s the lover, rather than the beloved, who is the stronger, and my love for Madame made me as solid as a rock.

M
ADAME EMBARKED ON HER
first South American tour with her company, of which I was part, on February 10, 1917. Victor Dandré, Madame’s husband and manager, had persuaded her to take this trip while we were still performing in New York. During our tour of the United States we visited 140 cities in seven months. And yet we were hardly tired, fueled by the excitement and the adrenaline of success. None of us would have guessed the anguish that lay ahead of us.

There was an economic boom in Argentina because of the war, and Mr. Dandré was sure a pot of gold awaited us at the southernmost tip of the continent. He was as eager to reach it as a bear that smells honey. The United States had just entered the war on the side of the Allies, and German submarines now made the Atlantic crossing almost impossible so we couldn’t return to Europe, no matter how homesick we felt. Very few ships managed to get through; most ended up at the bottom of the ocean. No one knew how long the war would last, and we couldn’t just sit around waiting for it to end, Mr. Dandré told us. So he pointed out Cuba to us on the map and made plans for the company to ship out, making this island our first stop en route to South America.

Madame had anticipated the tour with grand illusions. She was a pacifist like the great Vaslav Nibinsky, who was also crossing the Atlantic by steamer on a tour headed for South America. Madame wasn’t at all keen on the United States entering the conflict. She had gone to Germany several times and had danced for the kaiser just before the war broke out; she saw what the German troops were like up close, and the carnage they were capable of. In fact, that was one of the reasons she decided to make the tour of South America, because several nations there—including Argentina and Brazil—remained neutral and wanted no part in the bloody European conflict.

On the other hand, Spanish music and Spanish ballets in her repertoire were always some of Madame’s favorites:
Paquita
, for example, or
Don Quijote
, during which she could flash the fire of her flint-dark eyes at the audience and hide a mischievous smile behind her sequined fan. That was Madame for you. She could become whatever she wanted when she danced—which was very handy when she mimed passionate loves.

Mr. Dandré set up a deal with Adolfo Bracale, the Italian impresario who had staked out the Caribbean as his private territory, bringing all sorts of artists here who wanted to make themselves known. Enrico Caruso, Hipólito Lázaro, Amelita Galli-Curchi, Sarah Bernhardt all sailed down the Caribbean at some point or another, looking for the goose with the golden egg and more often than not ending up omelets themselves because of Bracale’s wheelings and dealings. He was famous for keeping more than half the money the agents put up, with the promise that he would send it later on to the performers; and then he never did. But he had an eye for genius, and many of the artists he brought to the area, often just beginning to bloom, went on to become international sensations. Madame, of course, was one of them. But she was never taken advantage of because of Mr. Dandré. Mr. Dandré was tough, and he oversaw all of her affairs.