Ballerina, p.3
Ballerina, page 3
She gave out these details in spurts, in no particular order, as if there were gaps in her memory. For instance, she didn’t say a word about her parents, or about many other things. I sensed it was pointless to ask. She wouldn’t answer. The past seemed so distant to her that all she had left was free-floating debris. Now she told me about the Balanchine ballet La Sonnambula, which she’d been rehearsing for the past two weeks for Félix Blaska’s company. In short, her former life no longer interested her and she had sloughed it off like dead skin. Thanks to dance. Kniaseff was right to say that dance is a discipline that enables you to survive.
Abruptly, the name of the “ghost” that she’d run into three times came back to her: André Barise. He had a brother who looked so much like him that she wondered whether he wasn’t a twin, whose name she had forgotten. Moreover, everyone just called them the “Barise brothers.” And those two words, for her, were enshrouded in a swamplike odor.
Their names were especially linked in her mind to the train trips she made, from the age of fourteen, from Saint-Leu-la-Forêt to the Gare du Nord, and in the evening from the Gare du Nord to Saint-Leu. She often happened to take the 7:30 a.m. train with the Barise brothers and, for the return trip, the 7 p.m. train with just André Barise.
Jowly faces, hard little mouths. Their eyes always stared at you with a shifty look. Thick hands and, in contrast, a precious way of speaking, a vocabulary that they labored to make sound distinguished. And each wore an identical signet ring on his little finger.
It was hard to avoid them. If she suddenly changed carriages to get away from them at the stop in Saint-Prix or Enghien, they followed her. Even if she changed trains at Ermont to arrive instead at the Gare Saint-Lazare.
The evening trips back to Saint-Leu-la-Forêt were the worst. André Barise sat next to her. If she changed seats, he did, too. After Ermont, the cars were half-empty and she could no longer avoid him. He stuck to her. He adopted an increasingly precious tone to tell her about his plans. He worked in an office, but soon he was going to be hired to help make a film, as an assistant at Boulogne Studios. She got up again and took refuge near the exit door. He came to join her and flattened her against the door. She struggled, but he pressed harder against her, so heavily that she was suffocating. The few remaining passengers paid no attention. No doubt they thought it was a game, since Barise threw his head back now and then and laughed out loud.
Getting off the train, on the platform at Saint-Leu-la-Forêt, she started running. She soon put distance between them. He huffed and puffed behind her, and finally gave up. She felt lighter as she ran, and that lightness, that feeling of now being out of reach, she owed to her dance lessons.
But in the morning, when she came across the Barise brothers in the waiting area of Saint-Leu-la-Forêt station, she felt like putting an end to it once and for all. Only the thought that she would soon be in Paris, at Studio Wacker, brought her peace.
In the evening, at the Gare du Nord, she was overcome by despair at the sight of André Barise. She would again have to put up with him until Saint-Leu-la-Forêt, that guy and his swampish odor.
It was one evening, leaving Salle Pleyel, where she was dancing Balanchine’s La Sonnambula. A woman had come to the performance, a certain Paula Hubersen, whom she’d introduced to me at the party that the Turk threw for the dancers every year in his small apartment on the Bassin de la Villette or the Ourcq canal.
I’m unsure about the spelling of her name. Paula? Pola? I think it was Pola. Much later, I learned she was the daughter of a composer of operettas who’d had to leave Vienna for America before the war. She was around thirty-five and lived in Paris, separated from an American husband. Like the Turk from the Bassin de la Villette or the Ourcq canal, she was fanatical about the dance milieu. She enjoyed a reputation as a kind of patroness, since she donated money to fledgling companies.
Back then, I lived day to day, never wondering about the individuals that chance brought my way. I let myself by carried by the tide. I floated. Last night, at the twilight hour, I was alone and couldn’t tear my eyes away from a lit window in a building façade. I imagined someone was waiting for me, there, behind the window, to finally respond to the questions I’m asking myself today about that period of my life, questions that have gone unanswered for so long.
Leaving Salle Pleyel, Pola Hubersen led us to her car. She told the ballerina she’d been very moved by her performance in La Sonnambula, a ballet she had seen, some years earlier, with Maria Tallchief in the role. Yes, she found her as moving as Maria Tallchief. We climbed into the car, the ballerina in front and me on the back seat. Pola Hubersen wanted to take us to dinner near her home, in one of those wide avenues that fan out from Place de l’Etoile.
A place you couldn’t have spotted in this deserted neighborhood. You entered through an unmarked door, as if it were a speakeasy. In contrast with the darkness outside, the harsh light in the small dining room made you squint. A mahogany bar. Several tables were set beside a thick curtain, which they had no doubt pulled shut to keep the light from filtering out. Given the late hour, we were the only patrons.
Pola Hubersen was apparently a regular, as the man who seemed to be the manager and whom she called by his first name immediately brought her a bottle of whiskey and a glass. And the ballerina didn’t seem surprised by this. She must have been familiar with Pola Huber-sen’s habits for some time.
Why has that evening remained so present in my memory? At first, I’d felt as if I had no points of reference. The place where we were seemed cut off from the world, with its curtains drawn shut against the wide deserted avenue that sloped down toward the Seine. If I had left the ballerina and Pola Hubersen and found myself outside, on the sidewalk, I don’t believe that feeling would have dissipated. I would have walked straight ahead, not recognizing the city around me, and sought out the nearest metro station for reassurance; but at that hour, the station gates were locked shut. Who could I ask for directions? The ballerina and Pola Hubersen were talking between themselves and ignoring my presence. Pola Hubersen regularly poured whiskey into her glass with a graceful gesture and drank it in little sips, the alcohol apparently having no effect on her. I labored to follow their conversation, thinking that their words were now my only reference markers: Maria Tallchief … Babilée … Rosella Hightower … Michaël Denard … Béjart … Maybe you should be in that company … You were so good in Train of Roses …
Pola Hubersen turned to me and asked in a very gentle voice:
“And what about you, are you interested in dance?”
I jumped. Until then, she hadn’t paid me much attention.
“Yes, I’m interested.”
I tried to find the words. I was so surprised that she should speak to me … And I’ve always had trouble answering questions.
The ballerina came to my aid.
“He’s interested because he considers it a discipline. A discipline that enables you to survive, as Kniaseff always says.”
Pola Hubersen kept her eyes fixed on me. Apparently, what the ballerina had just said impressed her.
“Do you need discipline?”
She seemed to want to know more.
“Yes, unfortunately.”
“Why ‘unfortunately’?”
“Because, at the moment, I don’t have any.”
Her face was serious. She seemed to be taking this thing to heart.
“But surely you’ll end up finding a discipline … ”
“Don’t worry about me, it’ll happen, it’ll happen … ”
And I forced myself to smile and give a slight shrug, to break the serious turn the conversation was taking.
Outside, we walked down the avenue. She had proposed we “have one last drink” at her place, and the expression made me smile. Neither the ballerina nor I ever had any drinks.
I felt reassured in their company. One or perhaps two in the morning. The locked gates of the metro stations didn’t matter, or the deserted avenue and the dark windows of the buildings that made it seem as if no one lived there anymore. Or the silence around us.
We turned onto a narrow side street. She opened the building’s entrance door and let us pass in front of her. In the dark, she patted the wall, looking for the light switch. No need to take the elevator, the apartment was only one flight up. A foyer. A fairly spacious salon with windows overlooking the street. A certain untidiness. An African mask on the floor, between two windows. Statuettes of Shiva and Ganesh on the mantelpiece and on a coffee table, in front of a wide sofa layered in cashmere shawls. Paintings stacked against one another as if for a move had left outlines on the walls.
We were seated, the ballerina and I, on the wide sofa. She came to join us with a tray that she set on the coffee table, amid the statuettes. She filled three glasses with a liqueur whose name I couldn’t read on the bottle. I took a sip. A very strong liqueur. Pola Hubersen took a large gulp. The ballerina, not a drop. And I suddenly remembered something that she’d told me Kniaseff often said to his students: “Dancers don’t need alcohol, because dance is the strongest liquor of all.”
I don’t know how long we sat there. She had put on a record of Hindu music, whose tones and silences penetrated me with a throbbing sweetness. And the faces on the ballerina and Pola Hubersen suggested that at that moment, they were feeling the same thing.
“It’s cold in here, don’t you think?” Pola Hubersen asked us.
“It’s a bit chilly,” said the ballerina.
“They shut off the heat yesterday. We’ll be more comfortable in my room.”
She walked ahead of us down the hallway. The ballerina had taken my hand, as if to lead me on a path that she already knew.
The bedroom was as large as the salon, but there was only one window behind the red drapes. A small lamp sat at the edge of a bedside table cluttered with books. She lay down next to the bedside table and invited us to follow her example. The ballerina was between Pola Hubersen and me. The bed was narrow. Pola Hubersen turned off the lamp and slid closer to us. All that remained was a shaft of light from the hall, spilling from the half-open door.
The day after the one when the ghost was waiting for her in front of Studio Wacker and when she fended him off with an elbow to the stomach, she telephoned Verzini. Could she see him right away? He told her to come join him at the bar on Rue Godot-de-Mauroy.
He was there, sitting at a table, alone. He hadn’t removed his coat and he was wearing snow boots. It had snowed overnight. When she came in, he stood up to light the wall lamps at the bar.
She remained standing, looking embarrassed.
“Have a seat. Would you like some coffee?”
He turned on the percolator and set two cups on the table. He looked at her with a smile.
“To what do I owe this morning visit?”
But she remained silent. He took her hand.
“Is something wrong?”
Finally, she found her resolve. In rushed tones: “Someone’s been bothering me. Someone I knew long ago in Saint-Leu … André Barise … There were two brothers … the Barise brothers … ”
He knitted his brow. She awaited his answer.
“Barise … Right, of course … The family lived on Rue de l’Ermitage … near my house … The parents had a small silk shop in Paris. I could even tell you where: Rue Olivier-Métra … You see? I still have a good memory … ”
Well, this André Barise knew her home address and the address of Studio Wacker. Eight years earlier, the two brothers were constantly harassing her in the trains she took to Paris for her dance lessons, and in the evening on her way home. And after all these years, yesterday, in the street, André Barise had tried to block her path and she had elbowed him hard in the stomach to get rid of him.
Verzini appeared lost in thought.
“We’ll have to teach that boy a permanent lesson … ”
Arms folded on the table, he leaned toward her and said in a murmur, as if afraid someone might overhear: “Don’t fret. The first thing is for you to change apartments.”
That was precisely what she’d wanted to ask him about.
“I have a place that’s empty at Porte de Champerret. You can move in there, if you like.”
She felt as if a weight had been lifted.
“Just let me know what time your lessons are at Wacker. I’ll have someone keep an eye on the area. Do you feel better now?”
He spoke to her as if to a child.
“So, you elbowed him in the gut? Next time I’ll be the one to handle it and it’s liable to be much more painful. Assuming he makes it out alive.”
And he suddenly burst out laughing. He gazed after her as she walked up the street toward the Grands Boulevards. She walked on the patches of snow and black ice, light on her feet—like a dancer, he thought; anyone else would have skidded and fallen heavily. What a strange girl … She hadn’t changed since she was a child, when he had known her with her father, and much later with the father of little Pierre.
One day, she and her father had been in his house in Saint-Leu-la-Forêt. Looking at the two of them, he’d had the premonition that the man’s failings would be transformed, as if by magic, into qualities for the little girl. It would seem the future had proven him right.
She had to wait until six o’clock before Verzini could show her the apartment at Porte de Champerret and give her the keys. She had missed her dance lesson, and whenever she couldn’t submit to that discipline under Kniaseff’s instruction, it left her feeling strangely empty. According to Kniaseff, the body first had to exhaust itself to reach a state of lightness and of fluidity of movement in the legs and arms. And the word “exhaust,” which he pronounced with a Russian accent, had at first been incomprehensible to her. Once, when the two of them were alone together, he had explained what that meant: yes, it was about “loosening the knots” through exercises, and it was painful, but once they were “loosened,” you felt a great relief, that of being freed from the laws of gravity, as in dreams when your body floats into the air or in the void.
She walked haphazardly. She was used to doing this, and often for long stretches at a time, even after dance lessons. No doubt about it, Kniaseff was right: the body had to exhaust itself.
But that morning, walking wasn’t enough. So she tried to think about something else—about Verzini, who had just done her another favor, as he had for years. Perhaps in memory of little Pierre’s father? But they never spoke about him, and Verzini didn’t know what had become of him. She had asked him once. “He was reckless,” was all Verzini said. She remembered Verzini’s house in Saint-Leu-la-Forêt, on Rue de l’Ermitage, where she had lived with little Pierre’s father. There was often a woman there, whom they called Mrs. Juan, a woman about the same age as Verzini. She had always been nice and encouraged the ballerina when she’d begun taking dance lessons.
One day, she had overheard a conversation between Verzini and little Pierre’s father. They were talking about Mrs. Juan. The woman had had a pretty rough life, Verzini said. Her first husband had been murdered, and then her brother-in-law. Settling scores. So to help Mrs. Juan out, Verzini had bought from her the house in Saint-Leu-la-Forêt, on Rue de l’Ermitage, that had belonged to her first husband. Those were the kinds of details she remembered, more or less.
She had lived with little Pierre’s father for several months. He was often absent, and then he disappeared. He hadn’t counted for much.
From the moment she began taking dance lessons, the early years of her life had been erased like a bad rough draft. She felt like she was born a second time. Or rather, it was at that moment that she’d truly been born.
It was ten in the morning and it had started snowing again. A light snow, practically raindrops. She was cold and felt little pains throughout her body. She had to “loosen the knots,” as Kniaseff would say. And so she decided to go to see Pola Hubersen. She was the only one capable of easing her mind. She lay down on the bed, Pola Hubersen stroked her, and her fingers lingered at the right places, with the precision of an acupuncturist. Their lips brushed, and the contact of those lips on her body was even sweeter than the fingertips. Little by little, the knots loosened, without the pain she normally felt at the start of her dance lessons. She occasionally missed a lesson and found herself on the bed with Pola Hubersen. Then she let herself drift with the current, eyes closed.
She took the metro and transferred twice. The trains took a long time to show up and she had difficulty overcoming her impatience. She knew that at that hour of day, Pola Hubersen would be at home. And besides, she had given her a key to the apartment in case she should come by unannounced.
She got off at the George-V stop and walked down the avenue, her agitation growing. She entered the building at the start of Rue Quentin-Bauchart. Pola Hubersen got up very late and perhaps wasn’t awake yet. She crossed the foyer, and when she arrived in the salon, she noticed a man’s coat on the wide sofa. Pola Hubersen was evidently with someone in her room, and she didn’t want to walk in on them unexpectedly. The apartment gave the impression of being narrow: the foyer, the salon overlooking the street, and the long hall that led to the bedroom. But a small door hidden in the wall, on the opposite side, led to a series of rooms along another hallway, most of which were empty, or furnished only with very low settees. She took that path, opened the last door on the right, and went into the large bathroom adjacent to Pola Hubersen’s bedroom. The light was on, the door to the bedroom wide open.
