View all notes
Available query params: commented=1, untagged=1
[...] Dance, Kniaseff used to say, is a discipline that enables you to survive. One evening, he was sitting with her at the bar in Studio Wacker, in the muted light. They were alone, class having ended long before. He told her that this discipline gives real meaning to life and keeps you from drifting. He himself … She was amazed that he should confide in her, he who was normally so reserved, observing a kind of military rigidity. Do you know why the Russians have excelled in this discipline better than anyone? Because many of them have had to struggle against their internal chaos, their violence, and the melancholy that comes over them periodically. And he burst out laughing, as she listened to him with mouth agape. “You are my favorite pupil, and you mustn’t be afraid of suffering and bleeding into your dance slippers. You understand?” It was the first time he’d really spoken to her. During the lessons, she had so little self-confidence that she never would have imagined him paying any particular attention to her. It’s true that she often found herself with dancers who were older than she, more seasoned. And that evening, he had told her she was his “favorite pupil.” And he had even added, alluding to one of his former students: “If you keep it up, you’ll be as good as Chauviré …”
That was the most uncertain period of my life. I was nothing. Day after day, it felt like I was drifting in the streets and that there was no difference between me and those sidewalks, those lights, to the point of becoming invisible. And yet I had the example of someone who practiced a difficult art—“very, very difficult,” as Kniaseff repeated in his Russian accent, an accent so light that it sounded British or Viennese. And I do believe that the example the ballerina set, without my fully realizing it, incited me to gradually change my behavior and shed the uncertainty and nothingness that filled me.
Then he got up, leaving me alone with them, and went to join two men sitting in the armchairs near the bar. I have only a disjointed memory of that evening, as if it had unfolded on a staccato rhythm, faster and faster. Who was the man at the table with the ballerina that evening? It could not have been Hovine, whom I met later, or Jean-Pierre Bonnefoux, who studied with her under Kniaseff at Studio Wacker. We exit the restaurant, and the man with her, whose face has been erased forever, leaves us on the sidewalk. I am alone with her. She tells me she needs to walk and that her building isn’t far away. I offer to accompany her.
We follow Boulevard Pereire, then Avenue de Villiers. The air is warm, almost like in summer, and yet I seem to recall it was in the month of November. And I’m certain that the trees hadn’t yet shed their leaves.
<3
At first, I had a hard time keeping up with her, but eventually I got used to her pace. And little by little the feeling of emptiness, of profound stagnation that took hold of me at certain times of day, melted away. It was if she was pulling me along and helping me rise to the surface.
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.
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.
Most of the time, during our walks throughout Paris or on bus rides, we didn’t speak. The silence between us was a much stronger bond than words. We were like those people who walk side by side, never saying a thing but always taking the long way around.
The place looked as if it hadn’t changed since the thirties, like a bedroom long walled off that you discover when knocking down a partition in an apartment, with its period furniture, its unmade bed still bearing the imprint of a head on a pillow, and the evening paper lying on the nightstand, its headline announcing the assassination of President Paul Doumer. No doubt that was why the bar was called the Hole in the Wall. From outside, it was very difficult to spot the entrance in the dark wall.
“She got out of there as best she could,” Verzini added. “Thanks to dancing. She acquired a discipline. And I’ve always tried to help her to the best of my abilities.”
He had turned back toward the little table. One by one he picked up the proof sheets of The Glass Is Falling, spread out in disarray, and started putting them in order.
“It’s a little like you. I imagine you work at this table on all these papers because you too need a discipline.”
I was amazed at his insight. It was as if he had seen right through me.
I said, “I’m following the ballerina’s example.”
She found herself alone in the street once more, but this time with a feeling of relief such as she had never known. She was certain she would never see him again and that a new life was starting for her, then and there. Sometime later, overhearing in a conversation the phrases “youthful indiscretion” and “bad company,” she thought that she, too, had committed a “youthful indiscretion” after mixing with “bad company.” But she had already practically forgotten that man and their last meeting in the church of Saint-Louis d’Antin. What exactly, she wondered, was a youthful indiscretion? Most of the time, practically nothing. At her age, everything scarred over very fast, and soon there was no longer even a trace of scar tissue. No more hostile witnesses. No more traces of anything. Innocence, once more.