The Europe That Was (1979) SSC by Geoffrey Household

Author:Geoffrey Household [Household, Geoffrey]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781504010450
Publisher: Open Road Media Mystery & Thriller
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

TECHNIQUE

The curtain flopped on to the dusty boards. The crowd roared for more. Una mujer estupenda—a stupendous woman! So the playbills called her, and so she was. The crowd hammered on the tables and shouted at the fallen curtain to give them back their Isabelita. There were three tiers of them in the music hall: on the sawdust-covered floor the labourers from dock and market and factory; a yard higher on the surrounding dais, where the drinks were a little more expensive, the minor employees of commerce, the sailors with money to spend; in the gallery of boxes, the capitalistas—moneyed youth, shopkeepers, travelling salesmen, a foreigner or two.

They were roaring jovially now, but at times they could terrify. What they shouted for they got—the management saw to that. And, since there was no limit to what they might shout for, it was up to the lonely woman on the stage to dominate them. She must be, as Isabelita put it, a Danielita in a den of lions.

Even when the lions were out of hand, the true artiste knew how to tame them and harness their undisciplined ferocity to her own triumphal car. A jest would do it, a swing of the hips, a laugh of provocative contempt. And above all, a girl had to hold them with her eyes. Isabelita had no trouble with them, though even if she had danced like Argentina herself it might not have been enough. A Spaniard among Spaniards, she understood and loved her audiences. Her triumph was not only that of a consummate artist; it was that of the orator who masters a potentially hostile crowd.

The blue curtain drifted irregularly up into the wings. The stage was empty. The click of the castanets began behind the backdrop and the orchestra followed the rhythm with accompaniment more conscientious than they would ever have given to the human voice. Isabelita believed in making the lions hungry before they were fed. She showed them an arched instep; she showed them the flounce of a skirt; she showed them a hand. The quick rhythm of the castanets stirred their hair with a pleasurable wind of expectation. Then she was there. She was not a very lovely woman. A plump body she had, and blue-black oily curls swinging free around the white neck. But her eyes glittered. The mouth smiled distantly, ironically. Every movement of the little feet travelled upwards through her whole body. Even the flower behind her ear was alive.

Isabelita’s art was perfect. The Madrid professor who taught her was as exacting as the priest of a complex religion. His ritual of shawl, heel, hip, skirt and hand was unvarying and established by the experience of centuries—a highly conventionalized technique for expressing a limited number of simple emotions that could be understood by any human being. Intellect played but a small part in his and Isabelita’s style, yet such were the dash and precision of performance that the dancing was intensely exciting. There was no suggestion of inhumanity.

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