Pierrot Love: When A Call From The Other Side Takes Its Own Side

By Ana Claudia Antunes

Paris, late nineteenth century. A ballerina sees her life take a turn when her supposed lover turns her into the victim after having ruined her promising career in a Ballet company that leads her to dance in the Moulin Rouge to subterfuge as she tries to have a chance to achieve fame. When all seems completely lost, she surprises him with a come back up and starts to write screenplays. Only that she does not know that she is already living as a ghost and cannot leave the arthly bounds tormenting a girl born in the twenty first century and who had gone through a similar experience to hers. Is she prepared to face her own demons, or succumb to random colossal forces that prevent her from a follow-up while the girl is reporting both lives? A thriller with good doses of humor and horror spiced with artistic mastery of several composers of the nineteenth and twentieth century that give life to a seemingly familiar saga to all who dream by reaching the final glory... or be fatally sorry!
Ana, a teenage girl who dreams of being an actress, has become entangled in a plot where a ghost of a nineteenth-century dancer who is the first to contact her to tell her story does not seem to match the facts reported by another ghost, allegedly her ex-lover and possible serial killer, and who also appears to insert into their midst to be involved in the same case. She hopes to resolve the issue as soon as possible, before they devour her or engage her further in a tangle of misunderstandings. Or she will start to disbelieve her own ears and lose herself in the path of her own acquittal tied into an emotional touch revealing a tough ancestor line that she treads. For doing so she will need all her courage thus find a heroin in her vein, facing her own fate ... Or hate!

• Language: English
• Publisher: Ana Claudia Antunes
• Release date: Nov 17, 2014
• ISBN: 9781633397057

Book preview

10

Dance As One

http://webspace.webring.com/people/ka/anabowlova

http://dance-as-one.blogspot.com

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Cover Art: The Pierrot's Love (1905) by Anonymous

Interior Art: All is Vanity (1892) by Charles Allan Gilbert

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Dedicated to those who believe in their dreams,

making them all shine through a dazzling beam.

For life is just a dream inside another dream...

Those who dream by night, in the dusty recesses of their minds wake in the day to find that all was vanity; but the dreamers of the day are dangerous men, for they may act their dream with open eyes, and make it possible.

(T.E. Lawrence)

1

A PLAY INSIDE A PLAY

Tipping her fingers over the keyboard gave her such a pleasure that she kept typing the words with no swaying. She was not there to shillyshally anyway. Since that man came to visit her  so mysteriously as he disappeared, she couldn't falter in her own instincts. She had to write her story, his story, their story.

Anne started to type in the computer the same afternoon. His face was pale, he looked more like a buffoon in an old movie, she wrote. The words came easily, a flowing river of emotions pouring down in her fingers and popping out in the screen.  But she had to come up with a title.

All is Vanity, she said to herself. Then she searched on the internet to see if that name was available. It was not. There was another author who had the same idea as hers.

Oh well, she sighed, after all, there is no originality when everything seems already invented. She put both hands over her head and thought for a moment. She then wrote with only one hand, while she sustained her head with the left one. She took a deep breath and repeated to herself, Love, yes, it is all about love. It has always been about love. Love, love, love!

––––––––

All is Love, she repeated. Browsing over the internet she found no match. I can't believe there is no literary work entitled as 'All is Love'. Poet, where art thou the Bard?

Anne continued typing two words, A play. That's how it all started. She would finish her play, before the characters could finish with her:

The main characters:

Andrew: A French writer, divorced, on his fifties. Adventurer. A Don Juan in full decline. A mind filled with passion and desires.

Therese: a thirty-five year old single mother struggling to have some dignity, a sewer of Haute Couture for enriched families in Paris. Romantic, introspective, living in her own dreams.

Little Talitha:  A sixteen year old teenage girl and Therese's only child. A devoted daughter, though a rebellious by heart, charming and inspiring, an authentic soul who aspires to be an actress. Aggressive, sometimes, but a pure heart of gold.

In a Paris of the late nineteenth century a man crosses the avenue Champs Elysees and reaches the other side of the road. He arrives to a small shop and buy some flowers.  There is a small coffee bar right in the corner between two streets with flowers name, Magnolias and Camelias, the latter one as an allusion to Alexandre Dumas's novel La Dame Aux Camelias that turned into a play, and it premiered in the same place he was heading to, which was the Vaudeville Theater, a small place for beginner actors or actress who had disposed of an extra lift and have often sweated to earn a little amount of money to have a place to perform. The play was a huge success, which then became an opera and renamed as La Traviata and what later happened to be displayed as a silent film, The Lady of the Camellias. No other lady was so handled as this one.

The man sits in a chair and asks for a coffee, leaving behind him a wet footprint mixed with the mud that had splashed over his shoes. It's been raining dogs and cats, and his hat and coat drips water inside the coffee place as well. The owner looks at him with a grumpy face. He frantically drinks from the cup made of porcelain, taking small sips with less than a second on each interval. He takes out his hat and puts it over the table, brushing the top with his fingers, without paying attention to the woman on the table beside him who had just complained that he had spilled water on her purse. He finishes his coffee, taking a last sip from the white cup and sets the artifact made of Chinese porcelain over the small saucer. He then pours some coins over the table. He looks at the door and observes people walking on the street. He watches the clock every five seconds, like a nervous tic, he gets carried out with an anxiety that keeps growing as a hungry animal. He leaves the coffee house. He looks the place from the outdoor.

Café Au Fleur, bien sure, he reads the sign outside in big letters. He takes a deep breath in and tastes the delicate sweet flavor left from the sugar tablet that he had dropped on his coffee, and that he could still feel under his tongue. That taste reminds him of her soft lips, and the smell he once felt of another flower, when he took that into his mouth, when he sensed a profound experience of giving and receiving the most distinguished élan. And that made him discover something that he had never experienced before. This was indeed a delicacy that no delicatessen could provide him. And this one was something he knew that he would never happen to try, ever again.

The man enters the old building. There in the dressing room lies another flower. The man looks pale when he watches the young woman changing her clothes through the mirror. He remembers their first conversation; her voice comes to his mind like a whisper dressed in small gusts of wind.

My love... The voice gets stronger as he keeps reminding of old scenes.

The world of actors... The woman's voice sounds distressed now. She will surely not be part of it!

What if she wants to be an actress? The man talks to himself as if assuming he's still making a point to an unreachable ghost sighting. What if?He repeats his statement.

I don't think girls should worry about this, she says with a sad but firm tone, Besides...I HAVE HIGH HOPES FOR HER. Those words impregnates the air like a strong sound coming from a train wagon rolling through its trails over the hard friction made of steel.

God forbid she will have to suffer like I did.

She makes a pause suffocated by her own thoughts. A cold breeze invades his body giving the chills and making him feel like his bones being cracking.

I should grieve indeed if I thought my girl would have to worry about money, she crosses her legs and sighs, still looking at an empty space in the wall. She searches for better words to describe her feelings and to find excuses for herself about her own daughter's behaviors. She then looks at him and says, Hopefully she will find a nice decent man to look after her. The man, lost in his own reverie and frozen in icy introspection, keeps still, looking back at her with glassy eyes.

Alo, Andrew! The young lady shakes her hands in a frenzy motion, waving at him from behind the curtain, without showing her face.

But I guess I just have got into this bad habit of talking to myself, or rather talking at you, instead of to you. The same goes as if I were talking with your dead, I mean dear mother, that of course if she were still with us.

Mais, Andrew, elle n'est pas la, n'est-ce pas? The girl opens the curtain, swooping it with a snap, curls the rope that holds part of the mantle elevated, caresses it between her fingers and takes the soft fabric around her hand leaving a knot hanging to reveal her voluptuous body. Holding the drape still she gives him a gentle smile and blinks her right eye. But she's not with us anymore, or is she?? She giggles with a somewhat disturbing sound, a mixture of frustration with a deep grieve. She jumps to his arms, embracing him in a tender lace, and then shouts, How long it's been? He keeps still, a bit afraid that he could break the magic of that moment.

Anyway, how have you being?

She changes the subject as she changes her clothes, the man thinks while observing her undressing from the mirror's reflection.

Dear Andrew! The girl dances and turns in front of him, shouting, Merci! You finally came...I am so happy that you are here I could fly! And she stretches her arms widely, spinning around in a colossal turn ending up striking her face against his.

How I hungered to taste those lips, he whispered to her ears. But it was Therese, the whole time, Therese, the Princess he longed for quite a long time. Those were the lips he was eager to taste, just once more.

Andrew, that is his name, a man of many virtues but way too many faults, and he's about to face one of which had been haunting him his whole life. Therese, that's his lover's name. In the theater, looking at the mirror there is another young lady. Also inside his heart as inside that house it happened a mysterious event, which brought him back to the days he still had the desire of being a detective. In between dialogues and colloquial scenes there it breathes a tale never to be told. For there was a curse for those who dared to open a secret book. There it lays a treasure that could blind the one who had a heart once broken.

Talitha... she was that sweet flower waiting its blooming. Talitha, whose petals were made of dreams, and whose beams diverted in enchantments of starry nights, a former dancer whose dream of becoming a prima-ballerina never matured. She gets involved with a sordid and intricate boyfriend who in turn would make any move to take her out of track.

It's the late nineties from the nineteenth century, and there she is, bored with her own life, when she becomes the sorriest creature in the world and starts to get along with the strangest types. All her trials and sufferings reveal the reminiscences of a past that she tries so hard to forget and to uncover from all her denials and trials that she herself imposes on her life.

Giovanni is a well succeeded Italian artist who dreams of one day becoming a movie director. It is the beginning of the movie industry when the silent images are a magical world and Auguste and Louis, the two Lumière brothers, start to stir the public all around the world, as they get noticed as two mega stars in their mute films.

The young man, Talitha's Italian love, takes the train to come from Rome to Paris just to watch the film makers displaying their ingenious playtime at the Paris's Salon Indien du Grand Café.  He even shows her the invitation, proudly bragging about being one of the few lucky two hundred or so who could afford to attend the event. The flier, too small to be called a program, was printed in a piece of paper with typographic words, saying about the unpretending presentation.

Cinématographe" au Salon indien du Grand Café à Paris.

And the address, 14 Boulevard de Cappucines 14

Then in small letters it displayed the description of the event, as a regular show, This instrument invented by Mr Auguste and Louis Lumiere allows one to record, by a series of instantaneous shots, all movements that for some time given occur in front of an objective lens (...) and reproducing those moves projecting them, in grand scale and in large size, in front of a big audience, their images on the screen! Giovanni holds this small piece of paper like a treasure that he got from the furthest place he could possibly travel. He once went to India, an adventurer, a free spirit, a naturalist, a traveler. And now he feels ready to conquer her heart.

His strong attraction to her visible physical appealing lets her in a labyrinth of ardent desires. She cannot contain her sexual drive and she invests all her soul in that new conquest. But Talitha is still indecisive in her own tastes and, as hard as it looks to Giovanni, she immaturely takes the wrong turn of dealing with her own dragons.

Talitha dreams (and she only dreams) of becoming a Ballet dancer and at the same time meeting her 'Price', a very high price to pay, to find her Prince Charming. But to reach that she has to go through a series of experiences and struggles that will culminate in a dreadful truth: To face her own darkness. She lives with her mother in a small room of a building where other four families share one single studio at the Quartier Latin, a poor neighborhood. Little Talitha knows she only has a chance to get out of poverty, and that is if she becomes a big star or meets a rich man to marry, and that if one of the sponsors should one day take her as a wife, or better yet a lover. For as a wife she would have to take care of a man, and as a lover she would only take care of herself, while the lover would fill her with gifts. There is not much of a choice for her. Little Talitha is a little rat, as they call the thin, long legged girls who are picked to be part of a Ballet Company. She isn't very attractive either, and her lack of good nutrition and self-care makes her look like a true little mouse. And as a teenager she goes through rejection after rejection that permanently burns her sense of identity. She gets so involved with her sordid and intricate boyfriend, who in turn would make any move to take her out of track, that she falls into a failing attempt to recreate herself. And, in the end, she returns with her own senses, making peace to her old self and building her own self-esteem.

In spite of all the efforts, and increasing love and incisive care that Giovanni offers to her, Talitha relives her past life over and over until she finds herself trapped in a virtual trip which leads her to total wreckage. Would Giovanni be able to rescue her lover from the darkness of her soul? Would Talitha remain oblivious to her own life? Would she prefer to live in dreams than to face her desires? She lives in an inner thriller with a cutthroat atmosphere that's already the world of Ballet. She wants to help her mother who is too sick to sew anymore clothes to her rich clients. All that leads her to a middle aged man whose heart has already burning in lust another woman. And to arrive to that mysterious mind she tries to turn into his lover and that with consequences they couldn't both expect. For that she would have to give up everything she thought she was and had fought against to go through a series of trials that can make her give up her own life. Those odd qualities that uncover her past will burn the soul of a man already lost in his own mind. And that would turn out to be so unbearable that she would have to switch her gears before taking a new direction in her life.

Nevertheless, is that in fact all a real life account, or are those images that never happened? Papers that never existed, places that they have never been...Were they only a dream or just memories that passed once through two romantic lovers who just wished they had more time together over the Earth?

But the problem was Talitha. Her mother was too concerned with her. She had a premonition that she wouldn't last much longer and she just wishes that her daughter will have a better chance, or at least not to deceit herself to believe that she can have a decent life. So will she be the new star who will brighten the sky already full of a constellation of millions of stars? Yet Talitha is not tall enough, not sick enough, neither is she strong enough to believe she can make it to the top. As she explores the terrains of a fantastic world surrounded by the fantasies, the glamor, the perils, the restrains and the strains that the world of the Performing Arts delivers to her, she colorfully replenishes her own soul to the public eyes. Until one day when she will be noticed.

Talitha cries. She can't perform, not when that image of flames burning the theater where she was dancing still insists on haunting her at night. She has nightmares about the way her dear friend, Emma Livry died before reaching twenty years of age. Her wings burning, busting in that fire and yet she became frozen, she couldn't move, she couldn't save her friend. She heard her screaming, she saw her asking for help, flapping her arms like a