Lose Yourself (The Desires Unlocked Trilogy Part Two) (5 page)

‘
My intention is to give an image of the various
forces of life in an ever-changing interplay.’ Bruno Lempert speaks like a textbook, and she is finding it hard to follow his English. ‘To recreate these forces of nature requires a purified and polished reflecting instrument.’

Maria is aching to scratch her back, but all the dancers are sitting completely still. It is as if they are listening to the very word of God himself. Lempert raises his eyebrows and stares at them. His eyes are round with heavy lids but, despite their rich, deep-brown colour, they appear cold to Maria. She is a little frightened of her new dance teacher. He speaks in riddles.

‘That is what I need you, the dancer, to be. I need you to reflect, with your body, these different elements. When you are dancing, you cannot be yourself.’

He is staring, now, right into her eyes and Maria feels her cheeks colouring. She has an urge to flee the dance studio, but she can’t. All the trouble her mother and Pina have gone to, to get her here – and Jacqueline, too . . . How she wishes
she
were her teacher, not this austere man. But it seems that Jacqueline’s job is to travel to schools and teach the schoolgirls of London the new ballet: the bread-and-butter work. Maria’s teacher is none other than Lempert, the principal and founder of this new dance school, and colleague and friend of Kurt Jooss himself. He has danced in Jooss’s ballets. He knows what he is talking about and this small group of twenty young women and men are the chosen few. And yet, inside Maria, there is a small voice rebelling; for, when she is dancing, it is the only time she feels she
is
herself. If he asks her to give up that, then there is no soul left in her dance.

‘There is, of course, a process to go through to achieve this,’ Lempert continues. ‘To reflect these natural elements, we have to study their dynamic within your body, your mind and your soul. Then, through movement, we will externalise them.’

A blonde girl next to Maria sneezes and takes a hankie out from the sleeve of her leotard to blow her nose. Maria glances over at her. The girl is beetroot with embarrassment, and Maria immediately feels a wave of warmth towards her. They glance at each other and smile, before directing their attention back towards their teacher.

‘But first of all,’ he says, walking around them in a circle, so that Maria does not know whether to twist around and watch him as he moves or sit still, ‘we have to begin at the beginning, and that requires breaking down your body, freeing you from all habitual gestures.’

He is in front of them again as he claps his hands and, after a slight hesitation, the group rises. Maria shakes out her stiff legs.

‘Please raise your hand if you have already trained in classical ballet.’

Everyone puts up their hand apart from Maria, the blonde sneezing girl, a woman with a short black crop, who looks slightly older than the rest, and two out of the four men in the room.

Lempert grimaces, and again Maria feels her face heating up. The first class, and she is already embarrassed by her lack of training. How could she possibly think she could be of a similar pedigree to the others? She glances over at the blonde girl and they smile at each other again, in sympathy.

‘Please,’ Lempert says, directing the small group, ‘come and stand on this side of the room.’ He then ushers the other dancers to the back of the studio and, to her surprise, Maria finds herself standing, with her companions, in front of the others.

‘Now,’ Lempert says, hands on hips and directing his speech to the group of ballet dancers. ‘You are going to have to do a lot more work than these dancers because, with a classical dance training, your bodies have certain habits. Some groups of your muscles will only coordinate with other given groups. We are going to have to get your bodies to that degree of relaxation that you do not give in to your classical habits.’

‘Are you saying that classical ballet is wrong?’ A girl with red curly hair speaks up from the group of ballet dancers.

Lempert shakes his head. ‘Of course not, Alicia. How can anything be that simple? But classical ballet is entrenched in years and years of tradition. We at Ballets Jooss are trying to do something different. For instance, if you look at the subject matter of our ballets, how would you describe them?’

‘Revolutionary,’ says the short, dark-haired lady, standing next to Maria.

Lempert whips around. ‘Indeed,’ he says, ‘they are political, social, humanist . . . They combine the intellect and the heart. That is what we are trying to do here: combine spirit, mind and body. People, we want to
communicate
.’

Maria’s head is beginning to pound. This is all too much theory. She just wants to dance.

She has a flicker of memory: she is in the deserted ground floor of the palazzo with her mother, Pina and Jacqueline. Jacqueline is playing a tinny old piano that Belle had somehow unearthed, and Maria is dancing for them. It is like a golden loop of memory. The Venetian winter sun is streaming through the half boarded windows as dust motes spin up into the air around her bare feet. And her mother and Pina are watching her; yet, despite their looks of appreciation, it is not for them she dances, but for a ghost sitting beside them – her father, Santos Devine: adventurer and sailor.

To her relief, Lempert claps his hands, signalling for the group to come together again.

‘Now,’ he says. ‘Enough talk. Let us begin.’

To her surprise, Lempert makes them take off their dance shoes. The wooden boards are cool beneath her bare soles.

‘No dance,’ he instructs them. ‘I just want movement.’

He nods towards the pianist, up on a rostrum under a small gallery at the end of the studio.

‘On the count of four, I want you to start to walk around the room. No eye contact – eyes to the floor, please. One, two, three, four . . .’

Maria begins to walk, not looking at her fellow dancers, wondering what they are all thinking. Part of her is terrified of making a fool of herself, and yet another part of her is excited. She is beginning to grasp what her teacher is saying.

‘I want you to walk with the emotion of hesitation,’ he calls out.

The piano slows down and, in response, Maria begins to shuffle around the studio.

‘Walk with contentment.’

She ambles along; for some reason, she has an image of herself as a large man with a big belly, well fed, heavy with satisfaction. She pushes out her stomach, puts her hand on it.

‘And with joy.’

Now she is a black cat of Venice, jumping between rooftops, prancing in the spinning light, pausing to lick the cream off the tip of her nose.

‘With freedom.’

She is gliding on an icy river. She imagines what it must feel like, for she has never skated in her life, yet the image is magical to her – that sense of moving on ice – all grace, speed and perfect balance.

As she is sliding around the room, she can’t help noticing her blonde friend, who is tiptoeing around the studio. How different their versions of freedom are!

Despite the fact it is the first day of class, Lempert works them hard. After two hours of breaking down their bodies, everyone in the group is breathless and steaming. Maria’s black leotard is stuck to her body with sweat.

‘Enough!’ Lempert suddenly announces. ‘Every morning, we will have technical class and each afternoon we will study other related subjects such as dance notation, theory, stage practice, make-up and life drawing. This is a rounded education in dance – an organic approach.’

There is a rustle of surprise among the dancers.

‘We will take a break now for lunch. Be back here at two for theoretical class.’

The girls crowd into the tiny changing room. There is no window in here and the dank room is lit by a single bulb. Despite the bustle around her, Maria takes her time. She has a packet of sandwiches with her that Jacqueline made for her that morning: some kind of grey meat paste between two precious slices of the coarse rationed bread. She has no idea where to go for her lunch, and she is too shy to ask anyone else. Gradually, the changing room empties out until she is the last left.

She hangs up her black leotard, damp with sweat, and is glad that she has a fresh one with her for this afternoon. She puts on her skirt and sweater, buttons up her coat and picks up her bag. Well, she should get some fresh air, at least; surely she can find a park to sit in. She is not hungry at all. Maybe she will give the London pigeons her sandwiches, although she knows – with food shortages and rationing – that would not be a very moral thing to do.

She walks out of the dance school – an old red-brick house, not dissimilar to Jacqueline’s house – and stands for a moment on the pavement outside, pondering which way to go.

‘Hello there,’ says a voice behind her.

She turns around to see the blonde girl from class, adjusting her hat as she approaches her. The girl sticks out her hand. ‘Joan,’ she says.

‘Maria.’

‘Pleased to meet you. And where are you from, Maria?’

The girls begin to walk down the street. They seem to be heading away from the river.

‘Italy,’ Maria mumbles, waiting for the hostility. Joan, after all, sounds very British.

‘Oh, Italy!’ Joan surprises her by sounding impressed. ‘Oh, lucky you. Where are you from in Italy?’

‘Venice.’

‘No? Really? Oh my gosh; I have always dreamt of going to Venice. Is it as beautiful as they say?’

Maria thinks about her home city as they walk down Kennington Road, cars and trucks passing by them, belching out fumes. It couldn’t be more different from this urban jungle. ‘Oh, yes,’ she enthuses. ‘It’s a magical place.’

Joan giggles. ‘Oh, I do so love the way you speak English. It’s so sweet. You sound a little American.’

Maria feels a tweak of annoyance. ‘I learnt from Jacqueline . . .’

‘And she’s half American, isn’t she? That explains it,’ says Joan. She stops suddenly and puts her hand on Maria’s sleeve. ‘I say, now I know who you are! Are you the daughter of that amazing Italian woman Jacqueline is always talking about? Belle?’

‘Yes, that’s me.’

‘She sounds so brave, helping all those Jewish people escape during the war. You must be proud of her.’

‘Yes, of course I am.’ But all Maria remembers of that time is not how brave her mother was, but how tense she was. She couldn’t stop herself from helping people, and yet there was always this fear they would be discovered. If she thinks about it, Belle risked her and Pina’s lives to save strangers. She knows it is not very noble to think this way, but it is the truth.

‘I say, let’s go for a cup of tea and a bun. Do you fancy that? There’s a café just down the road.’

Joan is a chatterbox, but Maria likes it. She is so friendly and warm, quite unlike any of the other English people she has met so far.

‘So, what do you think of Lempert?’ she asks Maria.

‘I am finding it hard to understand his approach, to be honest . . .’

‘Oh, don’t worry; you’ll understand soon enough, once we start dancing properly.’ Joan’s eyes shine. She opens up her cigarette case and offers Maria a cigarette. ‘Of course, I am in love with him,’ Joan says dramatically. ‘But I am also in love with countless other men, as well.’ She sighs with panache. ‘I fall in love too easily, you see.’ She removes the cigarette from her mouth while taking another sip of her tea.

Maria looks at the red lipstick stain left on the end of it. ‘I have never been in love,’ she says, all of a sudden, shocked at her admission to her brand new acquaintance.

‘Oh, but you are so young, you are only just beginning. How old are you?’

‘Eighteen. But you don’t look much older than me,’ Maria protests.

‘Twenty-two, my dear, and that makes
all
the difference, I can tell you.’ Joan pauses and stubs out her cigarette before taking a bite out of her currant bun. ‘Although, I fell in love for the first time when I was seventeen. Still, that was the war. You grow up fast during the war. Things are different.’

‘In what way?’

‘Well, surely you must know? I mean, you were living in occupied territory and in so much danger . . . hiding all of those people like Jacqueline, and helping them escape.’

‘It wasn’t me. It was my mother who did that. I was too young, really, to know any different. Most of the time it was quiet. They only bombed Venice once and that wasn’t even the city.’

‘Well, it wasn’t quiet here, I can tell you. I wanted to study dance, and I was down at Dartington Hall with Lempert and Jooss.’ Joan tears her bun into tiny pieces and eats them one at a time, savouring each mouthful.

‘Where’s that?’ Maria asks.

‘It’s this fabulous place in Devon – a performing arts school. Oh, I just loved it there.’ Joan sighs, picking up every last crumb on her plate with her fingertip. ‘But then, you know, it was wartime so I came to London to make myself useful. I wanted to be part of it, you know.’ Joan’s smile begins to droop. She shakes her head. ‘God, I certainly was a part of it then . . .’

She pauses, takes another sip of tea and picks herself up again.

‘But, you see, when the Americans came, we would have these terrific dances. That’s where I met Stan. He was an American bomber pilot. He looked like Clark Gable, I promise you he did. He was so dreamy and I fell for him hook, line and sinker, so I did.’