Yvonne as Mercedes and the Queen of Dryads in "Don Quixote"

Hi.

These chapters from my other novel Our Lives as Kites (a novel about creativity in ballet and modern dance recently published in Kindle format at Amazon) continue to show Yvonne Fillon in ballet school in Toronto.  

The period for these chapters: 1968. This is when she, only sixteen, is invited, as a result of an injury to one of the principals, to audition for the dual role in "Don Quixote" with the National Ballet of Canada, as she had danced the roles with the School and created some waves. 

Here she plays out in her imagination, the role of Mercedes, a street dancer in Barcelona, Spain, and the one of the Queen of Dryads, the way she views them and intends to dance them in the audition. Call it teen over-excitement, call it visualization, call it dreaming, this is it.

A short vocabulary is available at the end.


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6 – Yvonne as Mercedes, 1968

They call me Mercedes in this ‘hood down in Barcelona.  By rights, I be Maria Dolores Amyanta de los Llobos, but nay,  even my parents, whoever they was before leaving me on the steps of the cathedral, forgive them, Father in the high, wouldn’t know it, as they didn’t came back for my dropping in the saintly water with holy chrism, as they sure had bigger troubles ‘an my crying and hopefully bigger fish to fry. 

     So I know it, ‘name that is, from the white-aproned sisters that took to their heads to make a good girl out of myself and got done nothing of it.  Not that I would let them to have a good go at it.  Seventeen times, if this poor wretched mind of mine tells well, is numbers I ran away from their huge house, slitty narrow windows, dark as hell and all. 

     Twenty-two, that I am now, and that’s, I dare guess, much less ‘an the number of men who’ve had a trip along Besós or whatever river, with myself in the boat. 

     Still, my greatest trick is dancing, not anything you verily have in your dirty minds over there.  Can’t be stopped by no one, once the fiesta’s around, bands hot with music, air banged by drums, and strummed by guitars — then I get going moving and twirling, stepping and flinging knees legs up in the air, pushing hips as though doing you know what at you all, and only on toes I goes around,  as on water. 

     So today I’m out in the plaza, burgundish fluffish skirt, blackish strips to boot to go with on the top, arms and neck fully showing, ‘coz I have what to, darned the oglers be.   

     The oglers are there anyway and they sit as judges banging their staffs on the cobblestones in front of their seats, and I cry to them ‘Your honors, looky’ and they just bang away to the music, ‘coz wifery is around, ogling them in their turn, they can’t get away for the soul of them, so they just go with the music, but doing that they encourage me none the less, ‘coz they want for the living out of them, they want it, to get those rumps of theirs hot and jiggling and what better show to have for that than Mercedes dancing to the crowd, no ifs and buts.  Buts, hee-hee.   

     Jacinto’s my barker, hump wobbling left-right-left-right on top of him as usual, what with him coming in a rush from over the cathedral, not to lose a whit of my dancing, begging all the way through also left and right and nipping you too if you don’t open your eyes to what he does in truth with his sleigh-of-hands.  He’s dumped himself some way from me, he knows I doesn’t want him to ruin the wonderfulness of me sight.  He’s whooping now and then, so any sleepy crowd be waked to attention and look at dear me.  He knows well, coins jingling in my hat will, though in small part, as suckers I can’t suffer, switch hands, after everything is over and he’d come shuffling to me. 

     The dames peeking into your future also know they’d get their due.  Sitting as they are in the corners of the plaza, they now and then mumble though their litanies of feats coming to you truth words like ‘Ah, and, Senor, Senora, don’t you forget to help Mercedes, you might just help yourself by doing that.  Drop something in her hat when the time comes and she walks around with the hat.  Someone high up may look well upon your doing that.  They just may, ‘coz she keeps the spirits high, and high spirits becalm the waters of life in storms and enable you to behold the luck that might just be around the corner, with you unawares.’

     So the senores and senoras and even the riff-raff don’t think twice about it and put in their more or less hard-earned dough when the time comes, or add to it if they was already doing it, hearts even softer now and touched and melting.  And this is good, ‘coz winter’s just several months away, and then one like me can only do the small hostales and the gathered and the gathering, or the other way round, are both smaller.

     I  be on and off these days with Espada, the matador, as he’s moving all the time around Catalonia and even Spain with his corridas, so hanging on to him isn’t small feat, no, sir, as dames are out there all over the place to curry favor with him.  Crooked legs has he, but then he’s hot in other parts, and so much so in his heart and soul as they burn you as a butterfly in a flame if you get too close when a bullfight is around, or men to fight over a woman like me, a woman, says he, the dahling, quick as quicksilver.   Manliness aside, and not to play that down a whit, it’s same bizniz with him too: you bring light on me, I bring light on you, and it all ends as everybody’s face is brighter when you look or feel at your own pockets or satchels or backpacks at the end of the day.   

     He’s with his kind of caravan, and me with mine.  Only thing, mine moves just around Barcelona, whereas he needs to go where’s place enough for the bulls to romp and tromp around, jerk and hack with their horns at the guts and legs of picadores’  horses and at matadores themselves to make them butcher’s raw.  Me, I  be more into engagements, weddings, baptisms, smaller crowds, and the catch of the net’s likewise.  I means to say up until the fiesta for the corrida, the big thing,  year in year out,  for all of us living on crowds and their sweetness to us.  Then, on a good fiesta’s day, I makes enough to  pay off my butcher, my hostaléros — ‘coz I have many of them hostaléros here, the way I move around a lot —  and my dress-maker and shoe-maker, just enough to keep the barge afloat and buy some new stuff, some of it gifted by Escada, I tells this to tell yous I be grateful, some by older men who I takes up with on the sly with when he’s not around or not looking, sugar-daddies or some such, who put my bean-counter’s ledger — as though I had one, he, he, he — in better shape, so to say.

      He’s not fiendish to girls other than me, Espada, he sure isn’t, and never methought that in far away places he might not get sweetness and succor pouring out from other corners over his poor soul, and worse, body, in distress.  So this helps even out the bargain amongst us. 

     ‘You, senorita, you take care of yourself,’ he always tells me when leaving for a trip.  And sure this I takes to mean ‘and don’t mess up with others,’ but I just replies in kind, ‘And you take care of yourself, Espada; don’t you worry about the fire in this home, ‘coz is going to stay burning hot and lively for you.  Just come back in good health; your bulls make me carry bad dreams and wake up at night or morning-wise all in a cold sweat, turmoiling about you.’ Still, I gather, he’s one of the few calling me senorita, others just call me chica, and I clue this one to some respect and it gets stacked onto my feelings about him.  Sure as God made little green apples, there’s something about him, his ramrod-straight carriage and manners, that’s giving him more honor than whatever that is that he does in the bullring, though myself fully knows many times this is just hot air learned in their trade, how to behave with crowds and people in eye-to-eye to hold their name high and some such nonsense.  Still, it gets to me and makes the tethering worse.  Worse, as I thinks that, the best dancer to see in Barcelona’s fiestas, I deserves something steadier, though handsomer I don’t need, he’s a big chunk of a man enough for myself in that way, so much so when he’s got on him his fighting attire and trimmings, el Traje de Luces, all tight on him to pitch that thinness of hips, calves tapering nervy and sharp above the black zapatillas, wide toward the knees and pushy under white knee-length medias, thighs nigh blowing out from under his taleguilla,  chaquetilla short in front over bumping chest, showing the frilled-up oh-so-white camisa, and the black montera on his head.  He’s all to the good to me on those days. 

     He isn’t so good on days when he’s back in town but doesn’t show up at my haunts and I hears it from Mamá Damiana or Mamá Melchora, that’s he’s drawn to the shore in other places and raises hell as a seven-headed dragon without caring a bit it could all trickle to me, as though I’ve never before been of this world.   

     On those days, if I has time, and I always finds some for a thrashing like that, I packs a wide belt for horses with me in a bag, show up at the place he’s set up quarters, throws open the doors of the room where he’s in, and if any women chance to be there, wearing or not wearing anything on them dear skin, I be known to lash at them with that belt all around the place, up and down the stairs, and so until they find the way to get out of town well before dark sundown. 

     Yet, not those days are the worst for me.  The worst is when he’s brought back gored by one of those bulls and he lays for weeks at at time in a sad hospital room with doctors and sisters from convents nearby tending to his open gashes, not of this world at times, and hanging by a thread to it.  Then I know my earnings are gonna go to a naught for quite a while, as I sit with him most of the days and nights, on a chair or stool beside his bed, losing my thought and repose, as though I was his sisters or mother, none of which I sees around.  So only then you see he’s somehow a lonely man and what is left of crowds and making a noise in the world.  And none of those dames comes in, as they surely know I be around, or better ‘coz they don’t care a darn iota about him when he’s down and low and not making any duros.   

     ‘Carmencita, where are you, Carmencita?’ I hears one such time, slipping out of his lips that are hot with the heat of the sickness, and it’s having the props knocked from under myself, that he had in mind someone who wasn’t around, and who could she be, this one?  And he cries about her for days, and I be more and more out of my joints with it.  So finally he gets out of it all, he’s back with us and well, and he tells me this was his small sister, lost when he was seven, and that he has now and then this dream with the two of them going in a long garden with trees in blossom, leaping and skipping around and somehow by the end of the way, she’s lost from sight as fading in the air of that garden.  So I tells him, it can only mean you saw yourself with her in heavens, and be at peace now, you’ll see her there, but don’t rush time, ‘coz you need a life to yourself, time’s to use as you have it, as twice it doesn’t come to you, as much as you might pray, and our time’s not for knowing, as much we want to peer into it.   

     But enough of this talking! Two hours from now we have on the streets first the bulls running to the bullring in the encierro, then the grand parade with all the matadors with their cuadrillas, while in the plaza in front of the cathedral we’re gonna have the loudest music and dancing waiting for their passing through and this is where I’ll show up, strutting my stuff. 

***

     It’s high noon now, all the street bands, the murgas —  and they might well be five, they might be ten, as they suddenly shoot into action as cannons hidden in battle or mushrooms after a rain, from one place or another, some hidden in the shadows of an inn or under the awnings of a store, others sitting right there laid back and carefree under the blazing down sun —  all the bands then are pitching their songs to crowds around them and riding their music high and proud.  There are guitars, drums, cymbals, lutes, all sharply pitched, all hitting their paces.  And the words of the trovadores and cantaores are sung with pain as though cut to their quick, as they tell about toreros, courage, love and death, wine and frollic, about losing your sweetie and fighting for her and getting her back again, about being down and lost and poor, about cruel Father Time running roughshod over us and turning the young into old and the fresh into withered and making glorious, live, powerful places, be just white sand in dry deserts.   

     Gone from the gates are the bulls and the oxen! They are coming, coming, coming! Here in the plaza, we all learn this now from the blast of the guns telling all and sundry to take care of their limbs and hold on to dear life if caught by the bulls, from the cries of the spindly youth, that worked themselves into a tizzy, still, hidden behind the barricades of stones and logs, some of them youth wanting to run in front of the beasts, as, they say, it’s done in Pamplona, carrying red neckerchiefs and red cummerbunds to bring the devils after them.  The fools, I says, the fools of them!

     Jacinto’s as running a high fever.  He done no sleeping the whole night, so eyes show reddish on his unshaven face.  He’s jumping all over the place, like taken out of  the mothballs, slamming and banging and pealing with an iron piece the small bell stolen from the deaconry years ago, a thing of his that no one else has that he keeps for days like this, so no one can take after him and he be it. 

     ‘You, Jacinto, you stay away from me and quiet while I dance, I don’t want that pealing to throw me off of my steps!’ I tells him, but there’s no hope in the heavens with his child’s mind he’s gonna listen all the time, though he doesn’t wanna get shorted on his payoff to come from me.   But the devil’s surely caught in his thinking and will between his own gathering an’ nipping an’ begging from folks and the part coming from me, and perhaps deems this rootin’-tootin’ an’ jumping a way to put peoples’ sights on him the more. 

     Look!

     There they come, the matadors, at the end of the narrow street coming into the plaza, each with his suite, the cuadrilla.  Two of them are to fight later today in the corrida, and one of them is my Espada, God keep him in his heavenly sights! I knows there’s gonna be no dancing with him right now, as he’s grim-faced and tight, and I surely knows he wants to keep his head together for the fight.  But we’re gonna dance thereafter, merry-go-round all night, if God keeps him untouched by the beasts. 

     Back straight as a ramrod, walking with measured steps, still he shows with a short nod of a head and a dart of his eyes toward me that he knows I be here and dancing for him, in truth for all of them passing in their parade, to be caught (by the beasts) we’ve just seen bolting an’ galloping heavy an’ awful threatening in front of us.   

     Espada sure tries to keep away from his thinking right now the awful thing that happened to him just two years ago to the day, here in Barcelona too, when the huge Diura bull Xerfes, who felt not nor looked not behaving as any bull like all others on that day, stomping his front feet on the ground, raising his tail against the air and lashing with it in all ways as you thought it was Beelzebub’s own, eying evewhere with eyes blind with fury, charging at the picadores’ horses and killing two of them in a row an’ leaving their entrails on the ground, running at the barricades in the streets an’ the ones in the bullring, took into his beast’s mind to charge on him right before the time of the estocada. 

     Just as he as matador trimm’d himself to end the days of the beast, so the monster had unbeknowst to Espada bethought itself to end the days of his closest foe.  It didn’t think of all and sundry around him cryin’ an’ shouting’ an’ askin’ for his demise, but thought only about the bein’ movin’ in front of him, and fluttering and rounding in ways that to it seemed to call for fury and revenge that red drape of the muleta. 

     The bull seemed to watch him for the time to have a leaf fall to the ground in heavy rain, an’ seemed to follow the cape, and willing to do as asked, stand in place, an’ seemed taken in and under spell, but suddenly as the matador wheeled himself just a quarter of a turn to his left, it bounded ahead with two huge steps and with a jerk of his right horn caught Espada in his right thigh, the one more to the fore, lifted him in the air up and over itself and threw him  to a side as a doll with no life nor will to it.  Luck made it that the Espada’s toreros were close by, and came in rushing to help, with more capes to take beast’s muddied sight and mind from the hurt man.  Taking courage, helpers rushed in, took Escada in their arms and carried him past the barricades and into the small chapel of the bullring and tied his wide injuries with clean rags until the chirurgeon tromping heavily came in from his abode nearby. 

     It took Escada two full-moon’s passing before he was anew in strength enough to lift himself with my help from his bed and move around the room in dark with narrow windows at the Benedictine sisters’ convent, who had been so good to allow him in for healing and took care of him, with the chirurgeon. 

     Yet, so often was he cursin’ and shoutin’ at himself with anger, for havin’ lost the beast for a blink of an eye from his sight.

     Done all that, I sure knows I could all be anew here just for a play of luck in the stars and that no tellers could say if it would ever happen again and how not to go through it, as it’s so much his craft that brings all that with it, part and parcel.  And bringing Espada an’ his craft apart is so much out of this realm of truth as bringing apart me from my dancing is.  For no doubt, as long bodies are healthy with us, we would just go on, the both of us, ‘coz ardor, fire of soul an’ courage an’ love fare with him an’ the enticement of music and dance an’ the flame of them fare with me.  

7 – Yvonne as The Queen of Dryads, 1968

Then the gods gave the trees to us, the Dryads, one to each, and told us that as long green and leaves in flutter stay with them, we too we’ll live and not any longer.  So immortal we’re not.  Then, as one could have foretold, there was an awful fight among us all as to who would take over the oaks,  the sequoias and the baobabs, the trees of sublimely long life that one is bound to find in place centuries later still, and who were to master the apple and the cherry trees, the humbler this way, which grow old terribly faster.   

     There was still this catch at hand in our favor: should we be in a place with many trees in kind, say a forest or an orchard, should one of the home trees die, we would be allowed to move on and refresh our own lives and souls with and within a new tree just coming up to the air from its roots.  This is how it happens that many of us go through several lives, should the rain and the glebe of the place be giving enough to help the new crop of trees withstand their first time out. 

     Demeter the fruitful with the mellifluous golden locks, the goddess of bountiful crops and animal husbandry, loved us no end and spent time of no number in our company, and even more so after taking into her head to leave Mount Olympus when she learned that Hades, the god of darkness and the host of those lost from this world, Demeter’s and Zeus’s own brother, had stolen Persephone, she of the beautiful and fleeting ankles, her beloved daughter with Zeus, to be his, Hades’s, wife and queen of the world under, and — something that Demeter could not believe until Helios, who saw everything from his wonderful carriage drawn by galloping solar steeds over the skies of mortals and the divine aether alike, lighted the truth for her — indeed all had been done at the urging and with the heavenly help of Zeus.  Thus, treason upon treason upon treason, this is what divinely fruitful Demeter thought about it for a time longer than we can count. 

     Aeons later, in Spain, when lady Dulcinea del Toboso took in valiant Don Quixote’s asseveration of love and eternal service to her, she turned to the forests to glean quiet for his soul tried to the raw, at loggerheads with the world around him.  Here, she found us still tending with our lives to the green, the lush, the sap — no timeless ichor, this —  thusly, in the end, to the very life of trees and to the souls of those seeking peace herein amongst them.   

***

Cupid the child god was with me, the Queen of Dryads, to pacify Don Quixote and to reward him with good feelings and with the presaging of love to come from Dulcinea in return for his own. 

     Guided by the vision of Dulcinea he came, Don Quixote, soul troubled by vast and unending questions about the ills of the world, never doubting that he was fated to right them straightaway and determined to fight injustice with his words and his chivalrous lance and sword until his body would help him to do so. 

     The green around us in the woods is an ocean with waves of leaves, of pine needles, all turned over or around by unquietness in the air, the winds of change in the day or in the seasons, and we live in it as the Nereids live in the oceans of water.  And as the water seas seem to disappear close to shores under heavy winter ice or under giant islands of ice travelling over them and bumping into and breaking apart the unlucky ships, so our cold seasons bring dryness, barren branches, and surrender and loneliness to the soul. 

     So it was that Dulcinea wanted to bring Don Quixote to us in the full glory of summer, when his eyes would marvel at the sights around him, of freshness and vegetal power, when the birds would roam and flutter about at the highest of their liveliness and sprightness and would not have left for warmer places to show us deserted or have hidden out of the seeing world in accommodating holes in trees or dugouts under the snow.  She showed us to him in the tremor of the leaves under the warm breeze of summer slow as a breath in repose, branches rising proud and holding up, pushed by fresh and lukewarm sap, in the shadow still entire, in the grass crushing rich with water under the foot and springing back lively when the passing burden left it, in the streams forever dodging and running away from one place to another and sprinkling up and awry nippy drops when meeting shores or boulders or the unwonted face —  be it man or beast —  drinking from them unsatiatedly in the sharp heat of the afternoon. 

     All is unnamed, and above some meadow, a lark would use the lift provided by the hot air to even higher work on its towers of pushing high, while deer hidden in the shadow of an old oak would wait for the good time to cross the water in front of them, careful and straining at any pale hint of motion within their range.

      Now and then, I shuttle around on wings of wind, of bees or of owl,  to all the sisters into treedom, who never can leave their outpost while their very home, the tree itself, is alive and well, the happenings around their own part of the earthly world, this time of Don Quixote coming soon to visit to find and to gather himself and his dreams in this wood, also to oh so very shyly to perhaps anew glimpse, in the greater quiet allowed us outside of the beavering and the hustle of man, a better view of his inamorata Lady Dulcinea —  who weightless and aetherial leads him to us —  to boost his chivalrous strength and loving ardor. 

     It is again that time of the day for the breeze to come down cool from the mountains above us, rolling in featherly.   The air it brings is fresher and sharper, and gives us more life, as though going straight into the vessels of sap passing up and down through our home-bodies from the roots to the touch and the gentle, lost, edge of the air around each branch. 
______
BTW, this is, of course, one of the lead roles of this great ballet. 

Your comments would be appreciated (here or at kitescomments AT gmail DOT com), especially if the ballet and/or the dance are your passion/thing, professionally or otherwise.   

Vocabulary:
cuadrillas: the team assisting the matador 
el Traje de Luces : matador's fighting attire
montera: the soft black bicorne hat worn by bullfighters
taleguilla - torero's trousers
camisa: the plain white shirt
zapatillas - torero's shoes
chaquetilla: a short and rigid jacket
hostalero: Inn or tavern-keeper
murga: band of street musicians
 

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