House on the Lagoon (19 page)

The Firemen’s Band was playing Puerto Rican danzas, and once in a while they worked in “I’m Dreaming of a White Christmas.” The bandstand was decorated with frosted accordion paper bells and tinsel Christmas trees that shimmered in the breeze. This was no puny small-town band. There were forty musicians in all—dressed in navy-blue uniforms, and wearing bright red caps with shiny patent-leather visors—and they were playing brand-new instruments, or at least it seemed so to me. Six trumpets, four tubas, four trombones, and at least a dozen clarinets and saxophones gleamed in the sun as if they were made of gold. The first thing I thought when I saw them was that in Ponce firemen must be very rich. Men strolled on the right and women on the left side of the plaza, listening to the music, and when I looked at their reflections in the tubas’ brass bells, they seemed to be gaily chasing each other in circles.

I asked Abby if the firemen were trying to cool down the crowd with their music, and she laughed. She said she doubted it; they were playing in honor of Secretary of the Interior Harold Ickes, who was on an official visit to Ponce and was sitting right there next to the mayor, on the dais in front of the bandstand. I liked everything I saw at Plaza Degetau: the fountain with its six bronze lions spewing water from their gaping muzzles, the stone benches with verses from local poets carved on them, the huge laurel trees whispering secrets over us.

In Old San Juan—which was near Trastalleres—plazas were narrow and treeless. They had been used by the Spaniards for military maneuvers, and there was an austere, martial air about them. Houses were crowded together like dominoes on each side of the narrow streets. They had cramped balconies and balusters that looked like rows of matchsticks, and there were no trees to provide shade. Ponce, on the other hand, had wide streets and plazas, as if it had been built with elegant parties in mind. Houses were set comfortably back from the street; they had wide terraces in front and enclosed gardens at the back where mangoes and honeyberries leaned over the walls like dark green anemones. They were usually one story high and were painted light colors—pastel blue or peach, or ivory. It was a beautiful city. From afar, it looked like a wedding cake put out to set in the sun.

After we tired of strolling around Plaza Degetau, we walked to Aurora Street, where I had been told our house was. As we approached it, I saw a tall building with a Greek portico in front. “That’s La Perla Theater, where the Kerenski Ballet School performs every year,” Abby said. “Our house is just a little farther down the street.”

I had heard wonders about the Kerenski Ballet School in San Juan, and a few weeks after we got to Ponce, Abby enrolled me in it. I began to attend the studio on Acacias Avenue every day. André Kerenski and Norma Castillo exerted a strong influence on the artistic life of Ponce in the forties and fifties, and their ballet school was one of the best in Puerto Rico at the time.

André was twenty-nine and Norma twenty-five when they arrived in Ponce in 1940, two years before we did. Kerenski was born in Russia and had been a student at the Imperial Ballet School in St. Petersburg. His mother, a red-haired White Russian aristocrat whom André had been very attached to, had emigrated with him to the United States when he was twelve. When he was twenty-two, she managed to enroll him in the chorus at the Metropolitan Opera Ballet. She died a year later, leaving him the last of her Fabergé cigarette cases, which he sold and lived from for the next four years.

The penury André Kerenski was forced to endure, and his mother’s untimely death, made him turn his back on his aristocratic roots. He became friends with socialist sympathizers at New York University, where he earned a degree in liberal arts. He believed in a better world, one he had lost when his mother took him out of his own country before he could decide what he wanted. He was convinced that the Revolution his mother had run away from had been justified. Private property should be abolished and everything should belong to the state; that was the only way to prevent the abuses of the rich. He sympathized with Lenin from afar, and was in complete agreement with the transformation of Imperial Russia into the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. Later he refused to believe that Stalin was the monster the press made him out to be. André met Norma Castillo at the Metropolitan Opera Ballet and he fell in love with her, forgetting all about politics.

Norma was the daughter of a sugarcane hacienda owner from Ponce who had sold all his land at the end of the First World War. A staunch believer in statehood for the island, her father had invested all his money in U.S. municipal bonds and had retired to live on the interest. Norma was his only child, and he had wanted only the best for her. She showed a special ability for ballet and in 1935 he sent her to study in Paris; later she joined the School of American Ballet, affiliated with the prestigious New York City Ballet. When she graduated, she was offered a job at the Metropolitan Opera Ballet, where she met André, fell in love, and married. Soon after that, André renamed his wife Tamara, because of her jet-black hair, which she wore in a sleek chignon at the back of the head, in the style of Tamara Toumanova, the famous dancer from the Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo.

Tamara’s skin was satin-white and she had a robust constitution. She reminded Professor Kerenski of the beautiful young peasant women he had seen as a child outside St. Petersburg. His mother used to take him to spend the summer in a countryside dacha which had a silver-plated balcony, an onion-domed roof, and a long avenue of firs leading up to its entrance. André and Tamara had come to Puerto Rico for their honeymoon, and André had fallen in love with the island. He was enchanted by the Castillos’ old house on Acacias Avenue, which also had silver-plated balconies and a carriage house with a wrought-iron gate with the initial C at the top. It must have been more than a hundred years old.

The Kerenskis had come to Ponce during carnival week. One afternoon they were sitting on the balcony which opened onto Acacias Avenue when the carnival parade went by. André was amazed by what he saw. The revelers were a fountain of energy: they danced up and down the street as far as the eye could see, their costumes a sea of colors. There were snake charmers, flamenco dancers, battling angels, and dozens of
Vegigantes
of all sizes and hues. They had absolutely no inhibitions, shimmying, quivering, and rippling, as if they wanted to get rid of the flesh on their bones and fly away like spirits. They spun on their toes and swiveled their hips, as if possessed by demons. Professor Kerenski couldn’t believe his eyes. “This town is full of natural-born ballet dancers,” he said to Tamara. “A ballet school would be a great thing here. With a little training, one day they’ll have their own Anna Pavlova and Vaslav Nijinsky to boast of. I think we should move to Ponce.”

At first, Tamara didn’t even want to consider it. She had been a disciple of Mordkin, the great dancer in Sergei Diaghilev’s company in Paris, and her career was on an upturn. She was about to be named to one of the principal ballet roles in the Metropolitan Opera Ballet’s performance of Adam’s
Giselle,
and she was looking forward to it with great excitement. André didn’t have as much to lose as she did, but he had always wanted to be a ballet teacher more than a dancer and moving to Ponce was his opportunity to do something for the common people. Tamara thought it over for a few weeks; she was in love with her husband and finally consented.

Tamara informed her family of their decision, and they moved to the island soon afterwards. Her parents were not as well off as they used to be; the value of municipal bonds had plunged after the Second World War, and the Castillos had begun to feel the pinch, so the house on Acacias Avenue was not kept in good repair. When André and Tamara seemed so enamored of it, however, Tamara’s father presented it to them as a wedding gift, and her parents moved to a small modern apartment. Tamara’s mother gave her her diamond earrings to wear at the social events she would now be attending in Ponce, and Tamara pawned them and used the money to fix the leaky roof, paint the walls, and scrape and polish the floors of the old house.

The romantic, turn-of-the-century atmosphere of the place was perfect for a ballet studio. It had arches over the doors, carved to look like filigree fans, and a fine burlwood floor. Professor Kerenski had the interior walls torn down and the whole house became a sixty-foot-long ballet studio. A wooden barre was screwed to the wall on the right and a mirror to the wall on the left, and there students “could learn to interpret the soul through the outline of the body,” as André used to say.

Soon the first full-page ad for the school came out in the local newspaper: “Ballet training for beginners and amateurs, with special attention to children.” André wanted to have some pupils from the slums, to teach them free of charge, and Tamara agreed to it. But when Tamara’s friends saw the advertisement, they flocked to the Castillos’ old mansion with their daughters, leaving no room for the poor children.

The first two years of the school were prosperous. André and Tamara had as many students as they could handle—there were at least fifty at the school at one time, girls between eight and sixteen—and they were making more money than they had ever dreamed of. But André wasn’t completely happy with the way things were going. He didn’t like the fact that the school had only girls. His yearly production at La Perla Theater, for example, had to be put on stage without boys. In
Peter and the Wolf
the role of Peter had to be danced by a girl, and that was not satisfactory. Kerenski himself had to dance the part of the Wolf, because no girl could ever dance
that
part convincingly.

One day he called a meeting at the school and asked all the students’ mothers to attend. He told them about the ballet schools in St. Petersburg and in Monte Carlo, where male dancers often became prodigies. Ballet could open the doors to the world of art and fame. Why didn’t they bring their sons to his school, too? The mothers listened to him politely, fanning themselves and winking at each other as if what he was saying was terribly funny. Kerenski asked them why they were laughing. Hortensia Hernández, a buxom lady wearing a gold charm bracelet, who had two daughters at the school, finally put up her hand. “Ballet is a risky career for boys,” she said, giggling. “It encourages effeminate behavior and they can end up being fairies.” André was horrified, but there was little he could do to change their minds. No boys were ever brought to the Kerenski Ballet School on Acacias Avenue.

After I joined the school, I had to go through four years of rigorous training before I could dance in Kerenski’s production at La Perla Theater. In Ponce, girls my age were treated like hothouse flowers. They ate quantities of cream puffs, cakes, and all kinds of desserts and had no idea what discipline of the body meant. The first thing Professor Kerenski did was put us on a diet. Fritters,
tostones,
and rice and beans were strictly forbidden. For two years he spoke to us only in French and made us learn by heart all the names of the steps we had to perform in class. During the day we walked down the street doing developpés, arabesques, and coupés, and at night we went to sleep murmuring the names of the steps under our breath like a prayer.

At the studio we practiced for hours on end, our slippers whirling over the floorboards like silk drills. We struggled to learn to balance our bodies and govern our minds, “to do a pirouette on your toes, and end it poised on a dime,” as Professor Kerenski would say. The heat in Ponce was stifling all year round; as we practiced, we perspired like legionnaires, but we bore our sufferings with a smile.

The Kerenskis’ school was divided into two sections. There were the run-of-the-mill students, who were in Tamara’s charge, and whose mothers had enrolled them to lose weight and learn to behave gracefully in public. They were not expected to amount to anything, but they made up the greater part of the academy, and their monthly dues kept the studio afloat. Then there were the serious students, who were under Professor Kerenski’s personal care.

Professor Kerenski lived for ballet; he saw it as the expression of the soul’s most profound emotions. He was as romantic as he was Russian. He did not believe in Balanchine’s theory that the dancer should be as unemotional and impassive as a metronome and must simply follow the rhythm dictated by the music. “If you let the music flood you when you dance,” André used to say to us, “one day you’ll attain enlightenment.” He was the perfect maître de ballet. He established three levels in his classes—A, B, and C—and when a student reached the last level, it meant she was ready to be a star. That year she would dance a solo in the school’s production at La Perla Theater.

I was one of those fledgling swans, trained and groomed by Professor Kerenski himself, and my life began to revolve completely around ballet. The Ponce Lyceum, where I went to school, was two blocks from the studio, so it took me five minutes to walk there after class. When I arrived, I was already wearing my black leotard, which I had pulled on in the bathroom at school. I worked out until six, when Abby sent Abuela Gabriela’s chauffeur to pick me up in our blue Pontiac. When I arrived home, I took a bath, had dinner, and did my homework. By nine I was so tired I went right to bed. I hardly spoke to anyone at home except Abby, but no one seemed to mind.

Professor Kerenski was very conscious of what he wore. I think he wanted to impress on us the fact that he was Russian, so we would appreciate his skills all the more. He always wore a red silk jacket and black pants. The jacket had a mandarin collar and had a sash tied at the waist. His hair was dark blond, and he wore it carefully combed about his ears like the dome of a small basilica. His Russian good looks dazzled the students—especially the new ones—but he never took advantage of it. He was very serious about his art and kept his distance. When he gave a class, he stood before the mirror, baton in hand, keeping the rhythm as he tapped on the floor, and he never ventured too close to the girls. Whenever he performed one of the sequences from
Le Corsair
or from
L’Après-midi d’un faune,
for example, we would all sit in awe on the floor watching him, hardly daring to breathe.