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Authors: Linda Ferri

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BOOK: Enchantments
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I object, “But that's practically at the beginning. If we do all the chapters we'll never get to the end.”

“Well, I'm sorry, but what's the big hurry?” Anna asks, beginning to lose patience.

“It's not that we have to hurry,” I try to explain. “It's just that the story gets more beautiful toward the middle.” But this time she has no intention of giving up. The play will go on according to the novel. So we do the scene with the letter, the scene where they meet the kind Laurie (played by an eight-inch wooden Pinoc-chio), who's the nephew of the grumpy and very rich Mister Lawrence, who gives a piano to Beth (we also play that scene), et cetera et cetera. Then—finally—we get to my big moment.

So far I've played my part wearing a mask of flour; now I dump the whole bowl onto my face. With the eye shadow I transform my eyes into even more livid slits, and as a final touch I put some gray eye shadow on my lips. And I'm ready to die, body and soul. When I lie down on the bed, I actually feel ill. A moment later, surrounded by the loving care of my sisters, I'm about to faint, and when I pronounce my last words of comfort to each of them, tears well up in my half-closed eyes. When I hear them whispering their lament for the angel of goodness, loyalty, and generosity that I have always been, I see my wingéd soul fly up to Paradise in a triumph of silver clouds. At the very end, when Meg shuts my eyes, tears of joy flood my face. I lie there sweetly drowning as wet lumps of flour cascade onto the pillow.

We're in the car—Mama and Clara in front, I in the back. It's three in the afternoon, a cold rain. The smell of the plastic on the seats is making me a little sick. We're going to Madame Petruchskaya's dance class in the Rue du Bac, and my hands, which are resting on the seat, are trembling.

Today is not a class like the others.

Today Madame Petruchskaya will pick the most gifted girls and nominate them for the ballet school of the Opera.

Clara is looking out the window and is telling the story, to no one in particular, of the lady who came to her classroom that morning, and her eyes were painted all around with blue and when the principal said, “Children, this is
your substitute teacher, Miss Azzurra,” Clara burst out laughing and her friend Benedetta too, but luckily the substitute teacher didn't notice and neither did the principal.

And now Clara laughs all over again, merrily.

“Lucky her,” I think.

I also think that if Mama runs into the car in front of us, maybe we'll be late.

And then I think that I'll say I'm feeling sick. But I don't say anything and stay quiet the whole car ride.

There's not much traffic, and all too soon Mama lets us off in front of the building (parents aren't admitted during the audition). She calls out, “Good luck, children!” Clara looks at me, happy to have a chance to say,
“Merde.”
A minute later we're in the front hall in front of the beautiful staircase that leads up to the salle de danse. I go up behind my sister, taking slow steps, staring at the raindrops that are running off my raincoat and falling on the red carpet, making a
petits-pois
design.

In the changing room there's the usual stink of sweat. I take off my dress, and I'm cold. Even my black tights are cold. I put on my black leotard and pink ballet slippers. I'm the last one.

Clara tells me to hurry up, the others are already in the salle de danse.

The salle is immense, with big mirrors and barres along the wall. The parquet floor is brightly polished. In the corner there's Madame Rostand, seated at the piano.

With her dyed platinum blond hair, a long skirt and black leotard, and her long staff with the silver knob, Madame Petruchskaya is in the middle of her instructions, her Russian
r
more pronounced than usual. She explains what the test will consist of (which steps, figures, and so on) and what she expects from us (posture, the spirit of the dance). While she's talking I picture Alba, Mama's ballerina cousin, the star of the New York City Ballet. I see the photo of her divine arabesque under the spotlights and what Madame Petruchskaya is saying gets confused with what Alba told me: “The dance, darling, is a sublime and damnable cocktail of blood, sweat, and tears.”

There are ten of us girls from age seven to eleven, arranged by height. I'm the tallest, so I'm the last. In front of me is Natasha, who isn't Russian, however. She's French and very unpleasant. She's already drawing herself completely erect, but her arms are like soft parentheses along her body with her curled fingers just brushing her
legs. I'm hypnotized by her perfect figure and posture and totally neglect my own. Now it's her turn and she starts with her chin held high, which gives an arch to her back and a direction to her steps. Her feet touch the pavement, then fly off it with the ease and assurance of someone who's going into and coming out of her own house. At the end there's applause.

Now it's my turn. But my eyes are fixed on my shoes, on the curved line they trace on my feet, on the ugly contrast between that pink and the black of the tights. I barely hear the piano and I move as if I'm in a dream, the whole while absorbed by that pink line.

I don't advance to the auditions for the Opera School, nor does Clara. Madame Petruch-skaya communicates this to my mother and then declaims, “What can one say,
chère madame?
The dance is a religion. To have faith in oneself and faith in the dance is a gift from Heaven, a blessing … “

In the car on our way home, Mama repeats this line, mimicking Madame Petruchskaya's Russian
rs
. Then she says conclusively, “What a fanatic that woman is.” While Clara is laughing, I sink into a gloomy meditation on this last of a series of proofs of my resistance to divine grace.

I was in upper middle school when she joined our class—the only girl taller than I. She had a far-off, ethereal look, and when she sat down at the desk next to mine a cascade of golden hair swirled around her, a veil through which I caught a glimpse of mysterious other worlds. There was something old-fashioned or perhaps timeless about her clothes, like the eternal robes of angels—and also something threadbare, faded, and completely indifferent to the rules of girlish elegance to which my own outfit of
jeune fille de bonne famille
conformed.

We took to walking part of the way home together. By a strange coincidence, Eleonora lived in the very same apartment that had been ours when we had first come to Paris—the apartment
with the little garden where years earlier Ruga, my pet turtle, had been lost. When I told her how I'd looked and looked for Ruga, she told me that when she was little her father had given her a mongoose, Syria, who had disappeared. Eleonora had cried a lot, until one day, when she was standing mournfully in her garden, a bird landed at her feet. And how amazed she'd been to see that around its neck the bird was wearing Syria's collar. Then she said the name aloud and the bird answered her with a warble. “The souls of living things don't die when their bodies die,” she explained. “They pass on into the bodies of other beings, even into plants. So if you keep looking—really looking—you'll find your Ruga.”

I was very impressed and immediately set to work. But since I didn't know exactly what distinctive sign would guide me, I settled on the easiest: the shell. For days and days my investigation failed to come up with a single man, flower, or animal endowed with anything resembling natural armor. I confessed to Eleonora that I was discouraged.

“Don't worry,” she said, consoling me. “We'll look for Ruga together with the pendulum.”

We're at her house, seated at the dining room table. Spread in rows in front of us is a
child's set of geography cards. Eleonora is kneeling on a chair, casually holding the pendulum, while I feel as if I'm about to enter the Sybil's cave. “The pendulum will tell us what kind of living thing your turtle has changed into.” She tells me, “Close your eyes and concentrate on her name. You have to see it in your mind, written in capital letters, like a big shining sign.”

I have faith in her, and I do what she says, and before long I see enormous letters on my closed eyelids, tongues of flame that hurt my eyes.

“There,” Eleonora says. “On that card— the woman scything—the pendulum's swinging from right to left. That means that Ruga's soul isn't in a woman. You go on concentrating—I'll try the tiger card.”

We try a number of them—the rose, the alpinist, the forest, the mountain—yes, even the mountain because apparently it happens that souls can take refuge in rocks. But the pendulum persists in its cycle of denial. I'm beginning to think that maybe Ruga isn't dead at all, that she's off somewhere leading the life of an old turtle. But then the pendulum starts swinging the other way on the card of the Japanese woman.

“Excuse me, but you just said that it wasn't a woman,” I say, puzzled and a bit annoyed.

Eleanora once again reassures me, saying that at times it's necessary to interpret the answers of the pendulum and that maybe her father will be able to help us.

The father, who seems to me quite old, is a marquis and a Buddhist. He has a silver mustache whose tapered ends point straight up, like little missiles. Without hesitating he answers our question. “If the pendulum reacted positively to the card of the Japanese woman, it means that the turtle was reincarnated not in France but in the Orient … perhaps in Japan, or perhaps in China, in India, in Indochina, in the Philippines, in Indonesia … “But I'm not listening to him anymore, and my head is spinning at the thought of all the peregrinations I'll have to undertake to find my Ruga. I'm disappointed, frustrated by my own frustration, and when Eleonora and I leave her father, I start crying with rage. She strokes my hand and says, “But if you love Ruga so much, why don't you try to let her go, why not be happy that she's alive even if she's gone away to lead her own life? Why does she have to be tied to you?”

“That's easy for you to say,” I snap. I feel
hurt and mean. “You're not normal, you live on air, you're not attached to anything or anyone. You don't even have a ring or a pen or a dress that you really care about.”

That time Eleonora said nothing, but I saw a shadow cross her usually serene face and I felt terrible. The next day I gave her my shocking pink felt-tip pen.

Then, having abandoned the turtle to her exotic avatar, we threw ourselves into a new series of experiments. We used the pendulum to help us with the subject of our Italian composition; to discover the mysterious identity of Bel-phagor, the phantom of the Louvre; to tell us where the kidnappers were hiding little René from Lyon. Next we tried telepathy—we sent a single letter to each other, then a color, a word, a thought—putting the communion of our minds to harder and harder tests.

Together we summoned strange impish spirits who pinched my behind and a bookseller by the name of Erasmus who had been burned at the stake in Bruges in the sixteenth century, whose mournful soul communicated with me by rapping three times on the table. I forgot my other friends, Anna and Teresa, and our obsession with dresses, hair bands, and shoes, and the
hours we'd spent lying side by side on a bed pulling out split ends and examining with biblical exegeses the ambiguities in a sentence spoken by some boy we liked.

I'd gone through the looking glass, into that country where she had come to be called Eleonora (her real name was actually Diana), and her brothers (named Tancredi and Federico) answered to the names of Brando and Manfredo. Her father—right in front of us—read a magazine,
E Borghese,
with photos of nude women. From time to time, wrapped in his London Fog raincoat and always a few steps ahead of us, he took us to the Theosophical Society, where they played a music I'd never heard while the listeners swayed their heads keeping time to the arcane repetitive rhythm. Sometimes I felt like laughing, but only because I didn't feel worthy of all that mystery.

Eleonora and I are drawing a comic strip—the adventures of a mad orchestra conductor and a worm who plays first violin. But just as we reach the third episode Eleonora announces that her father has run out of money and the whole family is going back to Italy before the end of the year. I cry. I'm in despair. I ask to see Eleonora's father. He receives me.

BOOK: Enchantments
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