THE DECISIVE MOMENT in my grandmother Rebeca’s life came on the rainwashed afternoon of her tenth birthday (6th June, 1894), when Don Patricio Garza bought her from her mother for ten gold sovereigns. Mituco de Tierra Firme was then a pie-cut of high ground shambled with board huts and wedged into a wilderness of tidal quicksands, where staggering mangroves braced themselves with roots dropped from their branches, and fat singleclawed crabs scuttled drunkenly across the heaving ground, and armadas of mosquitoes mustered each night to strafe the helpless town. In the mud alleys that spidered off the one board street (which began at the company pier and ended at the highroad to Belém) schoolless children bathed in alternate cascades of rain and sunlight, and here Rebeca was carried in love and born in hope and nursed in anger and swaddled in resentment, and here she grew, wild and canny as an otter, but showing such promise of loveliness that Don Patricio chose her at first glimpse for his Galatea.
I can recall a few early scenes from a hallucinovision documentary on Grandma Rebeca which I viewed three years ago. In one Rosenda sits before the unscreened and open-shuttered window of the family hovel, stitching at a piece of organdy. To the right an iron frame bed with sheetless tick mattress kneels beneath last year’s Palm Sunday cross of jaundiced frond; to the left the door is held open by a pillar of sunlight in which galaxies of dust specks gyre calmly. Flies buzz on the sound track, and a vendor calls, “Mangos, papayas, melons.” Six-year-old Rebeca felines in to rub herself against her mother’s shoulder. Rosenda fends her with an absent-minded elbow, mumbles, “Go play,” but is sufficiently distracted by the show of affection not to notice as Rebeca unpins from mama’s waist the handkerchief in whose free end the petty cash is knotted. Exit Rebeca on bare and dusty feet. Rosenda sews on. Fade out on Rebeca seen through the window, sinking bright teeth into a plump mango and then aiming us a grin from whose corners sweet juice drips.
In another Rosenda has borrowed a neighbor’s razor strop to discipline her daughter—not, we may assume, for the offense filmed above, for the palm cross has been replaced by a greener one and the girl is somewhat larger. She stands cornered on the bed. Rosenda, her hair unbound by the chase, grunts “Bandida!” and swings her arm. The strop hisses through the air, bites the side of Rebeca’s left calf and the back of her right, and snakes against her shin.
Thwap!
“It didn’t hurt.”
“You should have been a man.”
The strop recoils, stiffens in air, and bites again.
Thwap!
“It didn’t hurt.”
“You should have been a man.”
The scene fades, leaving this triologue repeating itself like an object placed between two mirrors.
And, finally, ten-year-old Rebeca, Ondined in summer rain at the sea end of the company pier, still barefoot, still dirty, still uncombed, sleepwalks through a rabble of drenched urchins, her face and palms uplifted to the liquid sky, while an elegant gentleman with waxed moustache and seal-black silk umbrella descends the gangway of the Colombian-flag paddle-wheel steamer warped alongside, blinks toward Rebeca, halts transfixed, and has to be prodded by the passenger behind him.
Don Patricio Garza Cortada was the last heir of Mituco’s incorporator, one of the richest men in Tinieblas, and by far the most cultivated. He was forty years old on the day he saw Rebeca and had lived the last twenty of them in Paris, friend to Gauguin and L’Isle-Adam, companion to the gaudy Prince of Wales, sharer (along with Maitre Saint-Saëns) of the Comtesse de Pourtalès’ box at the Opéra, guest at cozy little dinners chez la Marquise de Saint-Paul, Bois de Boulogne paint pal (she did the flowers, he did her) to Madeleine Lemaire and (he followed Dumas, fils) her lover, conversational umpire to Wilde and Whistler, voice of encouragement to the young Valéry.9 He had exquisite taste—Octave Mirbeau both prized and pirated his opinions—but rode and fenced too well to be labeled an esthete. In his first years in Paris, when the term was still in vogue, he was approvingly called “dandy,” but he was too passionate at heart to fit Baudelaire’s definition. He was a great lover of women and had had many lovely friends, but they all betrayed him, not because he was crass or ugly or cowardly or dull—for he was none of these—, but because he had an honest heart and a faithful nature and was, thus, bound to be betrayed. Still, he blamed his companions’ vices, not his own virtues, for his misfortunes in love, and that summer (1894), as he sailed home to Mituco to claim an inheritance, began to dream of finding a strong but malleable girl and crafting her into the perfect mistress. He saw Rebeca, and the dream dug its steel talons in his brain.
He did not send his Portuguese valet but went himself, brushing among the penny-pleading children, and took her arm in his gloved hand and had her lead him to her mother. He wished, he said, to make the girl his ward. He proffered gold to prove his good intent. Rosenda accepted. As far as she was concerned, she was selling her daughter for more than she was worth to a rich lecher with a yen for prepubescents. Rebeca thought much the same and expected to be raped that very evening, an idea that disturbed her less than the fact that Rosenda, not she, was being paid for it. As it was, she was merely bathed and put to bed in vast and canopied four-poster two stout doors from Don Patricio in his teak and cedar mansion on Mituco Island. She was neither old nor refined enough for his tastes. He had resolved not to touch her until her fifteenth birthday—the traditional moment of female maturity in Latin America—, by which time she would be schooled in all the arts and bound in loyalty to him. More, he decided not to return to Europe until Rebeca was fit for publication.
Rebeca had the private attentions of the best teachers from the Liceo, who taught her French and English and history and math, voice by the solfeggio of Lablache and ballet in the Cecchetti method. She had Don Patricio for a special master, honing her mind and polishing her accents, teaching her to draw in ink and paint in aquarelles, to play chess and compose verses, to jump the Peruvian mare he bought her for her twelfth birthday, to hold his foil and shoot his pistol. She had Paris frocks and Seville mantillas and a pink silk parasol to hold above her head when she drove about the town in Don Patricio’s lacquered phaeton. She had a maid to hang her dresses and a groom to hold her horse and the Bishop of Mituco to hear her brief confessions. She lacked only for physical affection, for in the five years she spent on Mituco Don Patricio never so much as took her arm to help her to the carriage, much less caressed her, for fear of losing his artistic objectivity. He wove grand polychromic visions of their future, threading the bright strands of her youth into his sombre heart. He conjured up their life in Europe, unraveling his dream on afternoons when they sat on the gabled porch, he holding a firm profile, she sketching his portrait. His voice would take her, gowned and ermined, to hear Melba sing at Covent Garden or into Paris salons glittering with jewels and intellect. But watch: He ends his phrase; she gasps, “Qué bello!” throws her pencil down, and rushes to him; he draws his head away, raises his arm, and fends her back.
Rebeca’s fifteenth birthday party was the grandest ever given in Tinieblas before or since, grander than Alejandro Sancudo’s last inaugural party, which featured the Spirochetes, flown in from London with their electronic twangs and howls, grander even than the party given by General Manduco on the third anniversary of his so-called revolution.10 Don Patricio began making preparations a full year before, ordering three hundred cases of champagne from France and a ton of ice from Canada, contracting a string ensemble from New Orleans and another one, just to be safe, from Lima. He hired forty cooks and a chef from Paris to supervise them and a Sorbonne licentiate from Ciudad Tinieblas to be the chef’s interpreter. And since there was no ballroom on Mituco big enough to hold all the guests he wanted to invite, he had two acres of land cleared at his own expense and built a pavilion which, after the party, would go over to the shareholders of the Compañía Mituqueña de Progreso Infinito for any use they or their heirs might give it. And after all this, which he considered a bare minimum, he cast about for some special entertainment—a good tenor, or perhaps a group of players—and, at length, wrote to the impresario of a Belgian ballet company which was on tour in the United States and which was scheduled to return to Europe via San Francisco and the railroad at Panama. He offered expenses and a thousand pounds for a performance of Swan Lake to be held in the theater at Mituco Marítimo, with the condition that his ward, Rebeca, have a variation in the third-act pas de six. The final plan, then, called for a reception at Don Patricio’s home for two hundred special guests (including the President of the Republic and the ambassadors of the more important nations); the ballet, where these and three hundred more would witness Rebeca’s artistic debut; and a grand ball in the new pavilion, to which all the shareholders of the Mituco Company and their families, three thousand souls, would be invited. And when the last guest had departed and the musicians were loosening the strings of their instruments and putting them to rest in their velvet-lined cases, Don Patricio would take Rebeca to his bedroom (rosed—so he imagined—with the first rays of dawn that glanced across Mituco Bay from the dark brow of the cordillera) and lead her into womanhood.
For which Rebeca was altogether ready. There never was a jeune fille so stridently en fleur. She had her father’s height and the Fuertes women’s brilliant eyes. She was strong and slender from hours at the barre. In body she was, at fourteen, fully womaned, as is common in the tropics, and her mind throbbed with fantasies of love and art and glamour. At night she squirmed in moist longing for caresses, and, if Don Patricio had not shown her a thousand times he would not give her any, no door could have kept her from his bed. Her ballet teacher, the only other male she was alone with, might have had her any afternoon, but his embraces were reserved for sailors. There was nothing morbid in the ready flush that appled in her breasts at the first chords of the nocturne that her teacher played for her pliés, at the sight of Don Patricio, scarleted like an English squire, returning at a canter from his morning ride, at the scent of wild jasmine that gorged her room on sultry evenings, at the very thought of man. She was simply well-hormoned and famished for affection.
As a man of the world, Don Patricio was aware of Rebeca’s condition; as an artist he was too immersed in the creative trance to pay it much attention. He was engaged in shaping a perfect woman and preoccupied with problems of form. His sense of structure demanded that Rebeca’s debut in love be preceded by her debuts in art and in society. That made for a crescendo of tension and an elegant progression of scenes. Any other arrangement would be clumsy, would flaw Rebeca’s development. Ballet, ball, then bedroom, and his dream, gestating now five years, would be fleshed out. And so he bent in patience to the labor of creation, never imagining that his nearly finished work might be vulnerable to a plagiarist.
The tide was full on the morning of Rebeca’s birthday, and S.S. Pluto (Pacific Steam Navigation Company) was able to dock at Mituco Marítimo long enough for the Ballet Concert d’Anvers to disembark. Most of the town was on the quay to greet them, and they made a passable entrance, led by the impresario (the only Belgian in the lot), a red-faced gentleman with a spade beard and a prosperous expanse of waistcoat, who puffed down the gangway clutching the guardrail in one hand and a carpetbag full of the prima’s tutus in the other. This lady followed on the arm of the first dancer. She was Italian, spare and nervous as a race mare, bonneted, parasoled, and ruffled in grey silk.
“Sommes-nous en Afrique?” she asked loudly and languidly, turning her huge brown eyes (made up as for a performance) toward the thicket of mahogany faces below her.
“Pas l’Affique, ma chére Carla,” replied her French partner, his pale brow pearled with sweat. “L’enfer.”
Next came the soloists: in front a German girl, a little plump, perhaps, for modern tastes but perfect for her time, light-stepping with laughing eyes and bobbing breasts. Her best role was Giselle, the peasant pas de deux, where she was fetching with her blond braids twined about her head and her bust cross-strapped in velvet. Her partner, a beautiful young Dane, his eyes as vacant with seasickness as Nijinsky’s were to be with madness, walked beside her. There was a Russian girl, as haughty as a borzoi, whose modish hat (gift of a gentleman from San Francisco) bore a stuffed partridge, and a pretty Swiss, all muslin frills and ruches, still pouting that her spot in the pas de six that night was going to Rebeca. Behind her stalked a tall and moustached Serb, a strong dancer, immensely vain of his jumps and vainer still of the opal-headed walking stick (pinched from a shop in Boston) which he carried on his shoulder like a mace. With him was his protégé, a slim Pole. Next came a Hungarian couple, the czardas partners, the girl’s gold ringlets flowing to her shoulders, the fellow’s jacket swaggered on one shoulder like a hussar’s cape. They smiled glowingly at the onlookers while hissing back and forth in bitter Magyar. And finally, the object of their quarrel, a gorgeous animal from Odessa, Rumanian-Russian-Gypsy-Jew, flash of dark eyes beneath a lilac bonnet, hint of musk in the salt air, enough temperament to outfit twenty primas but far more skill in bed than on the boards.
After them trooped the corps de ballet: French girls, Dutch girls, Austrian girls; four prancing Czechs soon to be magicked into linked cygnets, a pair of twins from Naples, a trio of blond Letts. They spilled down the gangway from their week at sea and foamed about the impresario, who watched, squealing in rage and terror, as a cargo net bulging with boxes yawed wildly toward the bay and then swung back, spilling out an ancient trunk, which floated down into a space miraculously opened in the crowd and exploded on the quay, shrapneling out pink tights and white tulle dresses, kid boots and ballet shoes, the prince’s crossbow, his mother’s paste tiara, the swan queen’s feathered headdress, and Von Rothbart’s hawky mask.
This cued the entrance of a final member, the ballet master and character dancer Vyacheslav Sukasin. He was of middle height (he wore a pompadour and special shoes), athletically slim (he used a French corset), and youthful (he dyed his hair and touched his cheeks with rouge). Under his arm he carried a flaked morocco case stuffed with old programs, announcements of performances—the kind that hang in bunches in theater lobbies and that departing audiences strip off, glance at, and then drop in the street—, newspaper ads for companies he’d danced with, photos of girls he’d partnered, of composers and conductors, of choreographers and impresarios (a few of them inscribed), and many of himself, and yellowing reviews in all the languages of Europe, the passages that named him scored in violet ink. This case never left him, and he was never slow to open it—at restaurants, on trains, in hotel lobbies, or backstage before performances—to show the pressed mementos of his art. He had been famous—well, at least well-known. He’d partnered all the greatest primas and soloed with several companies. He’d danced before the Tsar, and, see, that night in Zagreb he’d taken seven calls in La Sylphide.
Sukasin had a clean line and a grasp of miming, a knack for camouflaging his mistakes, and the ability to seem restrained when he was actually out of training, but his true talent was for ballet politics. He could set a troupe of dancers so at odds that only he seemed tractable. He knew how to skewer an established rival with slander and maim a potential one with quick wounds to the sex. And he was agile on both sides of the lust ladder. But he loathed practice, and his intrigues always came unsewn sooner or later, so he never danced as well as he might have nor lasted long with any company. Now, in his mid-forties, he found himself dancing character parts—Casse-Noisette, Dr. Coppelius, and Von Rothbart, the evil magician in Swan Lake—and serving as ballet master with what he knew was not a first-rate group. Worse, he was about to lose even this. As he had once used sex to advance himself professionally—he won his first solo in Tchaikovsky’s bed—now he used his profession to advance himself in sex. Or, more accurately, he practiced the kind of Machtpolitik noted in baboon tribes, with the difference that your baboon is usually satisfled with symbolic presentation. Sukasin had had every member of the company, males and females. He was sensitive enough to the weaknesses of others to capture the unwary by stealth; for the rest, surrendering him an orifice or two became the only way to keep a part or get a better one, to avoid being insulted at rehearsal or having a costume disappear at curtain time, to insure against last-minute changes in choreography or wanderings of the spotlight during a solo. And since he had a gift for making the act of love at once extremely pleasant and degrading, he caused such discord, bitterness, and rage, so many tantrums, jealousies, and botched performances, that the impresario had told him he could seek another place once they were back in Europe.
But none of this showed in Sukasin’s placid smile, in the jaunty gait with which he descended the gangway—almost unnoticed, for the crowd was oohing the smashed trunk and ogling the dancers—, or in the charming grin he flashed when the first mituqueño he approached knew enough French to aim him toward the theater. Surely Rebeca thought him decent enough when he arrived to inspect her variation and rehearse her with the other dancers in the intrada and coda to the pas de six. She was a bit ashamed of the way Don Patricio had bought her a solo, yet the ballet master was neither harsh nor patronizing. He nodded with reserved approval at her variation and then spent twenty minutes polishing it while her five partners lounged in the second row of the orchestra and stagehands unrolled backdrop curtains and began tying them to lowered booms. He would throw both palms in air and call “Arrêtez!” and stride across the bridge laid over the orchestra pit and then, gently and paternally, correct her, bending to take her calf in both his hands and turn it to a better line or marking the steps himself while counting out the measures.
“What’s happened to the monster?” the Polish boy whispered to his friend. “He seems almost human.”
“Ha!” snorted the Serb. “He smells fresh meat!”
He smelled talent also, and with it presence, that indefinable power through which a very few performers can magnetize an audience whether they’re talented or not. Besides, Rebeca was young and vulnerable—a property, in short, which he might steal, build up, and live off.
He stopped her as she stood on point, arms bowed above her head, and molded her position. A not-so-accidental hand pressed her upper thigh. Rebeca blushed and shuddered.
“Voilà, donc!” sneered the Serb. “De la bonne viande à point!”
Sukasin turns and with a lift of palms summons the other dancers to the stage. He waves them to their places, tells Rebeca to watch him, calls “Numéro dix-neuf” to the pianist in the pit, claps his hands twice. First notes of the intrada (moderato assai). Enter the dancers, marking, with Sukasin in Rebeca’s spot. The stagehands, who have already raised the palace garden and the lake with ruined château and who are about to start hauling at the backdrop for Act Three, pause for a peek, but there is nothing particularly exciting about six foreigners shuffling about in street clothes. They turn back to their ropes. The wall, window, and stairway of the palace hall rise slowly, and as our camera follows them aloft, the lights dim up and strings and woodwinds infiltrate the soundtrack. The camera trundles back, widening the shot, and we discover the performance in full progress. The darkened house is packed with fan-flapping doñas and dusky dons in ice-cream flannel suits. Onstage, drenched in bright amber, the grand betrothal ball proceeds, guests crescented from wing to wing and, at the footlights, three couples: the Serb and the Russian girl, the German and her Dane, the Polish boy and—there she is—Rebeca.
The dream Europe Don Patricio had built for her had suddenly materialized on Mituco. Within this dream was another, where swans turned out to be enchanted maidens, where chaste Odette merged into lewd Odile, where love and death were rounded into music. And Rebeca was part of a divertissement within the inner dream. She forgot her birthday, the French chef, and the pavilion, the three hundred cases of champagne and the President of the Republic. She forgot Don Patricio, the five years she had spent in his house, and the life they were to lead together. She forgot the theater and the audience and danced in the great hall while Odile vamped the prince and the young girls mourned not to be chosen for his bride and the queen smiled puzzledly and Von Rothbart brooded in his inky cape. In another life his hand had pressed her thigh, awakening wild longings, and her young thoughts were mingled up in moonlight off a sylvan lake where sad-eyed maidens fluttered to their beaked and feathered master.
In my country the sweet fruit does not wither on the bough. When it is ripe it falls, and the first crow pecks it. After the intrada, when Dane and German had begun their variation, Sukasin slipped into the wings, took Rebeca’s elbow, and pushed her to the room he used for changing. He touched her carefully, peeled down her tights, and bent her back into a nest of curtains. The room was hot, thick with the smell of sweat and grease paint, swollen with music. When she looked up, he had pulled off his boots and tights, put on his mask and bird wings. He knelt before her and spread her thighs with his plumed forearms. She was already in climax when he entered her.
Sukasin restrained his own pleasure—it was in his interest not to make her pregnant—and took her andante con moto with the first variation, modorato with the second, allegro with the third. There were multiple ovations. Harp arpeggios were already cuing Rebeca when he uncoupled, pulled her to her feet, drew up her tights, and thrust her, wobbling, out the door into the wings.
“Danse, fille!” he hissed, and she fled onstage.
Maria Taglioni was in retirement when Don Patricio arrived in Europe; Pavlova had not début’d when he left. But he had seen every important ballerina between these two, and he decided, with the objectivity he had at such cost managed to retain, that Rebeca was as good as any of them. It was, in fact, almost impossible to see in her the girl he’d tutored these five years. The wild looks she blended to the eerie music11 of her variation, the frenzy she projected in the coda, were new to him. He marveled to see her so transfigured and congratulated himself on having arranged the performance and thus brought out these hidden traits, At the entr’acte he went backstage with the President of the Republic to pay her his respects, but the ballet master, M. Sukasin, told him she had gone home to rest and dress for the ball. After the performance the whole andience came to compliment him. By the time he left the theater the sets had all been struck and the dancers, still in costume, had gathered on the quay for the lighter which would take them and their baggage out to the Pluto. His carriage took him the few yards to his home. He hurried to Rebeca’s room and found it empty. He went to his own and saw a letter on the chiffonier. He had time, while reading it, to admire the elegance of her hand and the correctness of her French grammar; he thought the style a little florid. She was, she wrote, at once possessed by shame and joy. She had given her heart and body to a stranger, lost her honor and found her happiness. Since she could neither face her friend nor leave her lover, she was fleeing Mituco forever. She thanked him for his kindness and regretted she had been unworthy of it. She would never forget him.
“Very well,” be said aloud. “I found her in the streets. No doubt she belongs there.”
He folded the letter, replaced it in its scented envelope, and laid it where he’d found it. He opened the top drawer and took out his pistol. From the balcony he could see both the harbor, with the steamship swinging at anchor and the lighter putting out to it, and the pavilion, where his guests were gathering. He stood there for a moment. Then he pressed the pistol muzzle against his right eye, the one, he calculated, which had seen Rebeca first, and blew his brains out.