Isadora finds herself in the heart of the pine forest in Viareggio with Eleonora Duse, who has lately been considering the romantic idea of an early death

The season ended, as they do, the moment everyone had begun to think it would last forever. Yesterday there was a city’s worth of women walking hand in hand, little children running for sweets along the passeggiata, bicycles and laughing men, tea at the Grand Hotel, and the lazy persistence of summertime strangers.

But then this morning came wrapped in winter wind. They brought the blue umbrellas in, and everyone left for London and New York, even the newlywed rich, who had seemed ready to stay forever. Now, the only man in the water walks waist-high through the surf, working a cage into the sand and pulling it up again, sifting for rings and coins the season left behind.

My time with Raoul ended as abruptly as the season. He took his leave while I was in with the oracle, without leaving a note, nothing to show his gratitude for how I saved his life. I suppose when a spell is broken there’s no sense in waiting around. I was left to pay the oracle, and while I was at it, I traded her leather pouch for the carved wooden box in which I was keeping the last of the children. Penelope wasn’t thrilled with the trade, as it was her box to begin with, but she had to admit that the ashes fit nicely in the pouch and seemed less liable to spill.

Penelope’s brother sent word shortly after that, and she went to him, leaving just enough money to cover the hotel. Left in a lurch, I had just begun to worry when a telegram arrived from Duse reminding me of her setup on the coast, two little houses arranged together in the pine forest, close enough to walk barefoot and far enough to offer both guest and host some needed privacy. These messages come right when we need them and not a moment sooner, or if they come sooner, we forget. And so I went at once.

My very favorite squat hen, Duse has retired to a coop of medals and painted plates, nestling among a lifetime of postcards and mementos, dried flowers strung over her counters and scattering their precious petals over all the food she prepares.

She is fifty-five years old and as handsome as a girl, pushing me away without ceremony when I try to kiss her. She spends most afternoons walking along the sea, and never steps outside without her wide-brimmed hat, which is decorated with batting and feathers. My little dockbird, snagged in her own net. Still, I know for a fact that if we had an audition this afternoon, she would be the one called to try another scene while I could count myself lucky to be directed to a pile of mending in the back room and told where to bring the coffee.

The flat morning air suits this numbness that has been building. Every emotion becomes too feeble to go beyond the confines of my mind, born to die alongside weakling thoughts such as my sense of duty to art and life. These malformed thoughts cry for my attention and cannot be soothed, and like any harried mother, I grow simple in my affect and begin to see life as a tourist taking in a roadside carnival, the type where the main attraction is a block of wood wrapped in bandages and presented as a mummified corpse.

After Patrick’s birth I had been scheduled to go immediately on tour, but a strange sadness overwhelmed me. At last, the tour manager noticed that my dead-eyed marionette dances were disturbing the audience, and I was immediately sent to a doctor whose office featured a cool stone exterior wall covered in a moss so thick and vibrant I thought I might hear its life. The nurse found me standing out there, pressing my face to it.

I was familiar with neurasthenia and prepared for its diagnosis. The nurse brought me in, and I found myself in the office of a young French physician, a man as thin as his medical license and equally lifeless, seeming pinned under glass. He listened vaguely to my heart and looked at my palms the way a psychic would before he announced that I was well and truly hysteric. He prescribed a rest cure, tapping his pen against a calfskin notebook as he spoke. I asked him to look again, and reluctantly he consented, examining my left eye and then my right with a silver scope and lifting my tongue to see if the answer was perhaps written there. I repeated my symptoms with my tongue pinched between his fingers: malaise, hopeless thoughts. But he maintained his diagnosis, noting gently that I lacked the neurasthenic constitution. He was a young and nervous man, and his hands shook as he fiddled with a gold-plated pen, insisting that I spend three months in bed.

Through my clouded eyes I saw the future: he would tell the tour manager, who would dismiss me; there would be a notice in the paper reporting my inability to keep a simple series of evening shows. My condition would be taken into account for the rest of my life and subtly brought into talk of my salary, my performance and ability. This man would ruin me in a single afternoon.

It was impossible to change his mind, but I had to try my best; he was already pressing the tip of his fine pen to the prescription pad. And so, for lack of a better idea, I stood, stepped lightly to the center of the room, and lifted my arms, palms up at shoulder height.

I wasn’t sure what I meant to do exactly. When he asked, I said I was taking the pose of Blind Justice and would remain until my last breath or until the diagnosis rang true to my condition.

His laughter turned to disbelief, then to complaints and pleading as five minutes passed, then twenty, an hour. He never opened the door to his waiting room, not wanting the nurses to see the negotiation. He was stubborn, which I appreciated, though when I complimented him on it, he didn’t respond. He said I was only proving his diagnosis and asked me to come off it. I said nothing in response but held my shaking arms in perfect position, imagining in a pleasurable way that I was nailed to a cross. If I were to die, it would be in self-defense.

He began to suggest that he might have me committed to the sanitarium. I held on, knowing the end was near of either my life or his will. By then he was sitting on the floor, pleading with me.

Finally he had enough. He opened his calfskin book and, with a long and suffering sigh, wrote a neurasthenic diagnosis compounded by the stress of a small dressing room. For treatment, he prescribed fatty meats and bread along with dark beer and regular walks, with only one weekend’s worth of suggested rest. Condition of the artist. I had him write it in three languages and then brought it to my manager, who sent a girl to the market at once.

The manager wanted to keep the doctor’s note, but it was far too precious to me. I tucked it into the stirrups of my trunk to keep forever. I still marvel over it: a single sheet of paper that would speak on my behalf if I lacked the will to speak, which I can cite as precedent for the rest of my life. Of course it’s back in France. Separated from it, I feel distant from my saner self.

It’s a pleasant walk to the beach. The whole place is deserted, unless anyone’s hiding in the striped canvas dressing tents by the road. Though they get dingy quick with sand and sun, I far prefer those tents to the Victorian bathing machines that preceded them. Some of the hotels still keep the old things around, looking like outbuildings mounted on broad wagon wheels and tipped inelegantly to one side. Duse claims she still sees a few of the older ladies using them. The process is this: climb the steep grade of wooden stairs and lock yourself into a room that slants in a perfect diagonal. Once you’ve got your footing, you must work through every single one of your buttons and garters and belts and straps and yardage and stockings at that perilous angle, hanging it all on the hooks provided or else every delicate thing will fall to ruin. After that, you must hold the opposite walls with spread and trembling arms as, outside, your male companion hefts up the wooden rail and pulls the whole thing down into the water like an eager ox, at which point—if you weren’t brained on one of the wall-mounted hooks—you may emerge at the water with your modesty intact. In theory, it saves a lady the humiliation of being seen in her bathing gear, but in reality, anyone getting carted around in a splintering man-yoked box is going to get everyone’s attention. Seems better to stay home, most days.

I’m grateful to Mother, who never went in on those old ideas. We spent long days at Sausal Creek, where she would watch us flailing from her spot on the shore. Calling out instructions only worked when we were above the surface to hear them, and so she started carrying a long metal hook that she used to fish us out if the situation became dire. I hated that hook and feared her for it, but here I am, in the waves. The social page reports that Mother is in Paris again. I’m sure she alerted the paper herself; I can see her frowning at the clock, as if my return is a simple matter of patience.

These months away from my practice have slowed and softened me, and now that I try to use my body again, I find its power has spread to my shivering fringe. The waves slap my thighs like a man’s broad palm before I dive in. At first I would go only a few meters out and bob there like a sullen duck, but I ventured farther the next time, rolling onto my back and righting myself again for a slow crawl. Now I have started the work of distancing myself from land. Happily, I lost my old swimming costume somewhere in Albania; those things are good enough for sunbathing, but I would have sunk like a fat stone wrapped in wool if I’d actually tried to swim. My old cotton romper does the trick; it’s a larger version of something the children would wear, shapeless but light enough in the water.

The waves calm far enough out, and I find that if I keep my eyes just above the surface, I lose the land entirely. This is where the poet Shelley went over, his friends reaching from the boat as he gazed oblivious toward nothing in particular. My rebelling mind presents an image of the car doors, which must have bowed grotesquely against the river. They say the drowning soul feels no pain. Or so they say, anyway, to me.

Going under, I feel my thoughts compressing between my ears. The water clasps me like a strangling hand, shocking every hair to brittle attention. I swim through its upended gravity, crawling away from sunlight.

I taught them to listen to the pulsing point under their ribs, to unfurl from it like a banner, taught them to run and leap, to make themselves into columns so perfect they might stand forever. I taught them how to consume beauty, to take it in and make the dance it gave them, an art that can exist only as beauty can, as life itself, in a moment. I taught them all of that, but I never taught them how to swim.