Storm Glass (11 page)

So all that day my stock market quotations and the children’s plastic pails lay untouched in the sand beside the deck-chairs as we all responded to the boat. Sometimes we just stood and stared at it. It was something that could not be interpreted but could not be turned away from either. Sometimes we commented to each other that it really was a strong boat and might, in fact, be made seaworthy once again. The children played around the edges of the boat, having been forbidden, since the incident of the baby’s bed, to touch either the vessel or its contents.

On the second night the dreams revisited us but in slightly different form. I, for instance, dreamt that I had discovered a miniature model of the boat. Walking through the streets of an unfamiliar city I had seen it in a junk shop window and had decided to purchase it though the price was much too high. When I placed it on the mantelpiece in my living-room, my wife had demanded: “Who told you I wanted a family portrait over the fireplace?” and I had replied, “You’ll never know till you light the fire.” I awakened with my heart pounding to discover that my wife, in the twin bed opposite, had been dreaming of adopting a child from a small obscure Caribbean island.

But before this she dreamed of her childhood home, which had miraculously evolved into the boat. Upside down, the keel had become the peak of the roof, and, with little alteration, planks had turned to clapboard. Inside, the windows were gaping holes, providing a variety of ocean views and covered with curtains made of torn clothing and shoe laces. Her father crouched in the left-hand corner of the overturned stern, reading the Bible and writing stock market quotations in the damp sand of the floor. When we went back to sleep I dreamed I was a fisherman considering immigration to a new land.

One of the children dreamed that he could see the pattern of the boat clearly charted by stars in a navy-blue sky. It was situated right between the Big and Little Dippers. He pointed it out to a crowd that had assembled somewhere vaguely to his left but they had been unable to see even the Big or Little Dipper and spoke only of fireflies and satellites.

The next day we were all easy with the boat, as if our vision of the beach had expanded just enough to include it. And so, when late in the morning we watched the uniformed men tie the
boat to their own authoritative coast guard vessel, we felt remotely sad and guilty too, as if the boat had committed some obscure crime, to which we were a party. We asked and were told that the boat would be filled with weights and sunk at sea. Our last glimpse of it was a spot of red on the horizon—its painted stern glowing in the sun.

The following week vacation ended and the children returned to their home in the north where winter gradually bleached their brown skins. When they spoke of the boat, they did so with such confusion that their mother assumed that they had been taken on a fishing excursion, and their father believed that they had been presented with an expensive toy by us, their over-indulgent grandparents. Even their drawings, which often included the boat, were quickly glanced at by their parents and then forgotten.

We quickly readjusted to our childless existence and finally forgot about the boat altogether except when it entered our unremembered dreams. Each day we went to the beach and sat beneath our colourful umbrellas. My wife knitted. We seldom spoke. I read stock-market quotations. She unpacked the Styrofoam cooler. Sleek fibreglass sail-boats and impressive yachts sailed across our constant vision of the sea. And when, a month later, our attention focused on the horizon, we did not recognize the subject of our dreams, the object of our very own design, believing instead that it was merely a wounded sea monster, thrashing and lurching in the waves. But the children had gone. This time we had caused the image, created it. This time it was our unsubstantial pride, moving slowly, painfully back to shore.

ANGER

E
very night I danced
La Sylphide
, creating my reputation with them as “the daughter of the air.” Heavy blue curtains opened and closed on fantasy after fantasy—painted scenery, paper gold. But I knew the blocks of wood inside my shoes, the hard reality of the boards beneath my feet. I knew no sylph with wings could lure a man from his marriage—the cold porridge of his life. I had spoken to myself about it often. No man, I said, will break through the walls he has built for a woman who flies, whether her flight be caused by magic, or, as in my case, by days of sweat in front of a ruthless mirror. And I continued to know this even on the nights when my dressing-room filled with white roses, champagne, diamonds.

But that night, my costume was new, with real silver threads woven through the cloth. These are the trails of meteors, my dressmaker said, running her hands across the glitter. And she was right. Dressed in it I scarcely touched the ground, burned across the stage. And later I received my encores and my roses
with grace, felt, for the first time, a stirring of affection towards the audience, that anonymous beast whose eyes had scrutinized my flesh. So that even when I discovered darker roses (blood inside my shoes), I was not distracted from the exceptional mood of the performance.

They were a people dominated by weather, held in check by unceasing cold. An irremovable layer of frost covered their windows in early October, cancelling all hope of a view for months to come. Icicles hung heavy on the beards of the men and snow filled the children’s hair. I was told of women from the rural areas who grew fingernails of ice, which hardened to such a degree that they never melted, even when their hands reached for flowers during that brief season. The dogs and horses that I saw had eyes with crystal retinas and coats covered with layers of hoar-frost. By January each year a solid stillness had entered the air. Too cold for snow, a final terrifying freeze set in and the outdoors became, in fact, quite dangerous. The lungs of a newborn baby could petrify in a second. A tear could solidify and leave serious scratches on an eyeball.

Adults adjusted, however, to this prolonged winter and went about their business in the streets taking shallow well-ordered breaths and wearing a special kind of mask that was said to prevent damage to the eyes. But there was a further problem. The extra heat and moisture caused by the vibrations of vocal cords caused spoken words to crystallize and fall to the ground, replacing the discontinued snow. Occasionally, therefore, you would see a tiny set of white hills and know that there had been a conversation. In fact, in their language, the word
conversation
referred both to the familiar interchange of words and the tiny mounds of snow left on the street afterwards. And
sometimes these, combined with identifiable footprints, could be used as evidence of one sort or another; evidence that, in some cases, was more precise and more meaningful than fingerprints. During the long ten months of their winter, therefore, the people seldom spoke.

But they responded with unusual enthusiasm to gesture, and passionately loved the dance. Each night the huge theatre, situated in the city’s centre, was filled to capacity with a silent, attentive crowd. The women dressed in white satin and diamonds to match their national season. Over their heads the magnificent crystal chandeliers were scarcely warmed by the thousands of candles that burned in them. Above these were ceiling frescos of blue and silver and below a grey carpet like the first thickness of ice that covered the river early in autumn. And then the men, dressed in soft mauve uniforms, their pale blue eyes fixed on my darker, unfamiliar skin, night after night.

Their prince, well acquainted with the ballets of the time, had followed my career for a long time before he sent for me to come and dance in his country. He heated the theatre, especially for me, with four giant furnaces and provided me with a coach to travel in. I was also given a house five miles from the city limits, where blue-grey ice stretched out towards infinity. Here messengers skated to my door with gifts from the palace: wonderful furs and velvets, and quantities of jewels—diamonds, sapphires, pearls. But the prince never appeared in my rooms, preferring, perhaps, to arouse my curiosity by the strange visual messages he sometimes sent along with the gifts. I would pull from envelopes a variety of objects masquerading as letters: a handful of frozen tears; a delicate bracelet made entirely of ice, which melted on my wrist; his fingerprints pressed into white
wax; and once, a bright blue heart painted on the inside of the wrapper of a razor blade.

The thought of him, this elusive prince, began to fill my waking hours. The first thing I would see each morning, when I breathed on the frost that covered the window pane, was his messenger’s skate blades gleaming on the horizon. They were like razors reflecting the sun. I spent my leisure hours inventing the pretty words I was certain he would say to me, imagining caresses. Someone said he kept a tiny room filled with photographs of me. Someone else said that he had demanded that all the ribbons from my discarded shoes be sent to him. I was fascinated. I desperately wanted to see him. I arranged elaborate dinners, unusual concerts at my house, hoping he would appear. I sent him special invitations scented with spices. He was utterly unyielding.

Eventually I soothed myself by sending him small objects as a kind of reply to his constant messages: a starfish from my warm native sea, three of my dark eyelashes, and finally one of my shoes, filled with the blood of the previous evening’s performance. I knew that by the time it reached him, travelling through the freeze in the messenger’s pocket, the liquid would be frozen—a ruby of sorts—some real colour in exchange for the silver of the jewels and the pure white of his absence.

After that we spoke once, outside the door that was my entrance to the theatre. He asked if I was pleased with my surroundings, with the servants, the furs, the jewels, whether the music was correct, too fast, too slow, whether my supply of shoes was sufficient, my dressmaker adequate. Answering his questions I examined his eyes, so amazingly pale. But some flame was there, the edge of the fire at night, cold blue. Heat disguised as ice.

Later, when all was black beyond the edges of the stage, I thought I saw the silver braid of his uniform, shining like a skate blade from the depths of the theatre. Me dancing
La Sylphide
, becoming for his country “the daughter of the air,” his obsession and then his indifference around me like blue peripheral light. When I left the theatre I saw the two miniature mountains of our only conversation standing side by side with our footprints behind them, his static, mine restless and confused. I laughed aloud in the presence of such meaningless evidence.

My dressmaker was enthralled by my black hair. She said it shone like the wings of blackbirds and made her sad since the presence of any bird was brief in that country unless it was caged and forced to sing in some rich woman’s boudoir. And I said that I’d always wanted hair like corn silk, like spun silver. Then she promised me the costume I wore that evening, silver threads as fine as hair, running through the gauze. After the performance I refused to remove it, wore it under fur to my coach, to the journey that I made each night, five miles over ice to my house.

Travelling, I could hear the icicle beard of the driver clattering in the wind. When the light inside the carriage changed I knew we had left the city. I had never seen the winter landscape at night. Breathe though I might on the windows of the coach, the frost was too thick to be penetrated. This night, however, the light of the city was replaced by a colder, bluer illumination, and I knew there was a moon. My small stove threw shadows on the interior of the coach, the empty plush seat across from me. Exhausted from the performance, lulled by the motions of travel, I fell into a deep sleep.

And dreamed my special coloured dreams of flying. Landscape, southern and lush, passing beneath me with such clarity
I could see each pebble at the bottom of the sea as I followed the coast. Poppies, red and yellow, grew on the edges of highways, wisteria in full bloom over doorways. Dark pines, cypresses reaching up towards my arms, soft curve of hills, the gentle herds of animals. And my dancer’s shadow down there, created by sun, fluctuating with each change of elevation.

I awakened to an utterly opposite geography. The coach had stopped and its door was flung open to endless snow, sharp stars, moon and velvet sky. Imprinted on this, darker than the rest, was the figure of a man who, masked and covered by a long cloak, had, at last, responded to my invitations.

The driver, immobilized by fear at the sight of the pistol, said nothing. And the man behind the mask filled up the night with his silence. But when he placed the skin of an animal on the snow and turned to remount his horse, I understood that he wanted a solitary performance, wanted me to dance, for him, alone, in a frozen, anonymous landscape, where no trace of evidence could possibly survive. The pistol shone, like a final denial, in his hand.

When I began to dance, I danced towards the heavens, that whirling vortex, an extension of my costume stretched across the sky. I danced and hardly touched the skin beneath my shoes. Black music, blue music, then silver in my ears. And then the music of the moon, transparent and frightening, like the hot steam of his breath against the cold. Sweat crystallized along my inner arms, my bare thighs, until frost covered my body like fine down. Once the moonlight shone on his exposed teeth where he carried either a grimace or a smile, and once on the ice-blue edge of fire in his eyes. As I reached for something in the sky and was finished, a handful of diamonds landed at my
feet. And then my private music was broken apart, into the sound of his moving away.

I returned to the south with jewels in my luggage and anger lodged like glass inside the network of my veins. When I dance now in my own country they call me the daughter of the earth. My costumes are crimson and yellow; passion and anger are in my gestures. The anger is the window that I look through to the world. It is what I eat and what I dream and what I dance. I keep it close to me always for clarity. It is the source of my energy, the root of my self.