Sainte Marie-de-la-mer looks down with round expressionless eyes. Her other features are blunted with time; a huge stone woman, squatting effortfully as do the gypsies in childbirth. I can hear the sea borne across the flats and the cries of birds through the open door. Gulls, no doubt. There are no black birds here. I wonder if Mère Marie can see me now. I wonder if the saint hears my silent prayer.
Perhaps it is only the shriek of the seagulls that makes me uneasy. Perhaps the scent of freedom sweeping across the flats.
There are no blackbirds here.
But it is too late. Once invoked, my incubus is not so easily banished. His image seems tattooed across my eyelids so that, open or closed, I see him. I feel that I have never ceased to see him, my Black Bird of misfortune: awake or asleep, he has never been truly out of mind. Five years of peace was more than I expected-more, perhaps, than I deserved. But everything returns, as the islanders say. And the past rushes in like the tide.
5
My earliest memory was of our caravan, which was painted orange with a tiger on one side and a pastoral scene with lambs and shepherdesses on the other. When I was good I played opposite the lambs. When I was disobedient I was given the tiger for company. Secretly I loved the tiger best.
Born into a family of gypsies, I had many mothers, many fathers, many homes. There was Isabelle, my true mother, strong and tall and beautiful. There was Gabriel the acrobat, and Princess Farandole, who had no arms and used her toes as if they were fingers; dark-eyed Janette, who told fortunes, the cards flickering like flames between her clever old hands; and there was Giordano, a Jew from southern Italy, who could read and write. Not just French, but Latin, Greek, and Hebrew. He was no relation of mine as far as I knew, but he cared for me best of all-loved me, in his pedantic way. The gypsies named me Juliette; I had no other name, nor did I need one.
It was Giordano who taught me my letters, reading to me from the books that he kept in a secret compartment in the body of the caravan. It was he who told me about Copernicus, taught me that the Nine Heavens do not revolve around the earth, but that the earth and planets circle the sun. There was more, not all of which I understood, about the properties of metals and the elements. He showed me how to make black burning-powder with a mixture of saltpeter, sulfur, and charcoal and how to light it using a length of twine. The others nicknamed him Le Philosophe and made merry of his books and his experiments, but from him I learned to read, to watch the stars, and to mistrust the Church.
From Gabriel I learned to juggle, to turn somersaults, to dance on the rope. From Janette, the cards, bones, and the use of plants and herbs. From Farandole, pride and self-reliance. From my mother, the lore of colors, the speech of birds, and the cantrips to keep evil at bay. Elsewhere, I learned to pick pockets and to handle a knife, to use my fists in a fight or to flick my hips at a drunken man on a street corner and to lure him into shadows where eager hands waited to strip him of purse and poke.
We toured the coastal cities and towns, never staying in one place long enough to attract unwelcome attention. We were often hungry, shunned by all but the poorest and the most desperate, denounced from pulpits across the country and blamed for every misfortune from drought to apple rot, but we took our happiness where we could, and we all helped one another according to our skills.
When I was fourteen we scattered, our caravans burnt by zealots in Flanders amid accusations of theft and sorcery. Giordano fled south; Gabriel made for the border; and my mother left me in the care of a little group of Carmelites, promising to return for me when the danger was past. I stayed there for almost eight weeks. The sisters were kind, but poor-almost as poor as we ourselves had been-and they were for the most part frightened old women, unable to face the world outside their order. I hated it; I missed my mother and my friends; I missed Giordano and his books; most of all I missed the freedom of the roads. No word had come from Isabelle, for good or for ill. My cards showed me nothing but a confusion of cups and swords; I itched from the crown of my cropped head to the soles of my feet, and I longed more than anything to be away from the smell of old women. One night I ran away, walked the six miles into Flanders and lay low for a couple of weeks, living on scraps, hoping to hear news of our company. But by then the trail was cold; talk of war had eclipsed everything else, and few people remembered one group of gypsies among all the rest. In despair I returned to the convent, but found it shut, and a plague sign on the door. Well, that was the end of it. With or without Isabelle, I no longer had a choice; I had to move on.
And so it was that I found myself alone and destitute, living perilously and poorly from theft and scavenging as I made my way toward the capital. For a time I traveled with a group of Italian performers, where I learned their tongue and the rudiments of the commedia dell‘-arte. But the Italianate trend was already losing its popularity. For two years we lived indifferently until my comrades, discouraged and homesick for the orange groves and the warm blue mountains of their native land, decided to return home. I would have followed them. But maybe it was my demon prompted me to remain, or maybe the need to stay on the move. I made my farewells and, alone, though with money enough now for my needs, I turned my face again toward Paris.
It was there that I first met the Blackbird. Named LeMerle for the color of his unpowdered hair, he was a firebrand among the languid gentlemen of the Court, never at rest, never quite in disfavor, but always on the brink of social disgrace. He was unremarkable to look at, preferring unadorned clothing and the simplest of jewelry, but his eyes were as full of light and shadow as trees in a forest, and his smile was the most engaging I had ever seen, the smile of a man who finds his world delightful, but absurd. Everything was a game to him. He was indifferent to matters of rank or status. He lived on perpetual credit and never went to church.
It was a carelessness to which I responded eagerly, seeing in it some reflection of myself; but we were nothing alike, he and I. I was a little savage of sixteen; LeMerle was ten years older; perverse; irreverent; irrepressible. Naturally, I fell in love.
A chick, hatching from the egg, will take as its mother the first object that moves. LeMerle pulled me from the street, gave me a position; most of all he gave me back my pride. Of course I loved him, and with the unquestioning adoration of the new-hatched chick. Love not often, but forever. More fool me.
He had a troupe of player-dancers, the Théâtre du Flambeau, under the protectorship of Maximilien de Béthune, later to become the Duc de Sully, who was an admirer of the ballet. Other performances too could be arranged, these not so public, and unsponsored-though not unattended-by the Court. LeMerle trod a discreet, perilous line of blackmail and intrigue, skating the parameters of fashionable society without ever quite falling to the lures cast to him there. Though no one seemed to know his real name I took him for a nobleman-certainly he was acknowledged by most. His Ballet des Gueux had been an immediate success, though condemned by some as impious. Unabashed by critics, he was so audacious as to include members of the Court in his Ballet du Grand Pastoral-with the Duc de Cramail dressed as a woman-and was planning even as I joined his troupe the Ballet Travesti, which was to prove the final straw with his respectable patron.
It flattered him at first, to have me at his feet; and it amused him to see how hungrily men watched me as I danced onstage. We performed, LeMerle’s troupe and I, in salons and theaters all over the city. By then, comédie-ballets were becoming fashionable-popular romances from classical themes, interspersed with long interludes of dance and acrobatics. LeMerle wrote the dialogue and choreographed the routines-adapting the script to allow for the tastes of each audience. There were heroic speeches for the dress circle; flimsily clad dancers for the ballet enthusiasts, and dwarves, tumblers, and clowns for the general public, who would otherwise have become restless, and who greeted our act with loud cheers and laughter.