Flight of the Swan by Rosario Ferré Read Free Book Online Page B

time, Dandré had a theater box at the Maryinsky, which he shared with a gentleman friend, and he went to see Niura dance every evening. He realized she had a unique talent, and that if she stayed in Russia she’d never be able to free herself from the ‘shroud of the Imperial Ballet School,’ as he used to say. She was stifled at the Maryinsky, where only old-fashioned ballets were produced. In Paris and London she could blossom into a true artist. One day he suggested she go on tour and visit Helsinki, Riga, Stockholm, and other cities of the Baltic coast. She could dance there accompanied by a small troupe and he would escort her part of the way. The tour was an enormous success, and after that, Niura began to go abroad more often. Dandré convinced her to buy a house in London, in the suburb of Golders Green—William Turner’s famous Ivy House—so she already had one foot out of the country when the Russian Revolution began.
    “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