Z
ZIZI. In Paris, they called her ZIZI, short for Zinaida Pavlovna. She had been a lady-in-waiting to the Grand Duchess Maria Pavlovna, and in 1918 she fled straight from Tsarskoye Selo, the VILLAGE of the CZARS, to France. One limpid Monday in 1923, penniless, in despair, she went to a tryout for models at the haute couture salon of monsieur D**. The designer watched her move toward him, born along smoothly on those foreign legs of hers, gliding soundlessly as a swan: her grace, the fingers she extended in greeting as if they were alien things that did not belong to her. Monsieur D** dismissed all the little shop girls and seamstresses who had modeled for him until then. This was the start of another Russian period no less important than the one organized by Diaghilev years earlier. Understand? The exhaustion of trench warfare, gas creeping along the lowlands, the thrust of bayonets, the disaster of General Samsonov’s defeat on the Prussian front, the famine that stalked Saint Petersburg during the winter of 1919; a tremendous effort of nature and the intersecting tensions of history, all were necessary, all were translated into the elegance of the former Russian nobility on the CATWALKS of Paris: fashion modeling transformed into an art. You could cause exactly the same furor today, Linda, I imagine it perfectly. These Russian women, so strikingly beautiful; you, my angel, so perfectly in accord with my ideal of beauty. . Russian beauty.
I. I notice ripples of light reflected on the canvas cloth beneath which I am slowly sipping a lemonade — YALTA, the sea, LINDA there beside me — and half-close my eyes. (At the next table, two Mongolian girls begin speaking in their harsh and unmistakable language, full of tongue clicks and hypnotically rolled rs. I follow that avalanche as the hare does the serpent’s rattle. I know perfectly well that if chance had sent me off to live in captivity in Inner Mongolia I would eventually have kissed the hard lips of the younger one, would have tapped her white teeth with the nail of my index finger, untangled that hair, wiry as a horse’s mane.) Full of life, now, compact, visible (Whitman). (Lleno de vida hoy, compacto, visible.) Me.
About the Author and the Translator
José Manuel Prieto was born in Havana in 1962. He lived in Russia for twelve years, has translated the works of Joseph Brodsky and Anna Akhmatova into Spanish, and has taught Russian history in Mexico City. He’s the author of Nocturnal Butterflies of the Russian Empire and Rex. He currently teaches at Seton Hall University and lives in New York City.
Esther Allen teaches at Baruch College, City University of New York. She has translated a number of books from Spanish and French, including the Penguin Classics volume José Martí: Selected Writings, which she edited, annotated and translated. She has been a Fellow at the Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library, has twice been awarded Translation Fellowships by the National Endowment for the Arts, and has been decorated by the French government as a Chevalier de l’ordre des arts et des lettres.