=== Long Distance ===
Portillo was a good boss, a generous guy; I rarely saw him, sometimes only on the twenty-ninth, when I waited, with some stupendous circles under my eyes, to pick up my paycheck. What I remember most about him is his voice, so high-pitched, like a teenager’s—a common enough tone among Chileans but, for me, a disconcerting one to hear from a Spaniard. He would call me very early, at six or seven in the morning, so I could give him a report on what had happened the previous night, which was pretty much pointless, because nothing ever happened, or almost nothing: maybe some call or other from Rome or Paris, simple cases from people who weren’t really sick but who wanted to make the most of the medical insurance they had bought in Santiago. My job was to listen to them, take down their information, make sure the policy was valid, and connect them to my counterparts in Europe. Portillo let me read or write, or even doze off, on the condition that I always answer the phone in good time. That’s why he called at six or seven—although, when he was out partying, he might call earlier. 'The phone should never ring more than three times,' he would tell me if I took too long picking up. But he didn’t usually scold me; on the contrary, he was quite friendly. Sometimes he asked me what I was reading. I would say Paul Celan, or Emily Dickinson, or about Emmanuel Bove, or Humberto Díaz Casanueva, and he always burst out laughing, as if he had just heard a very good and very unexpected joke. One night, around four in the morning, I received a call from someone whose voice sounded mock-serious, or disguised, and I thought it was my boss pretending to be someone else. 'I’m calling from Paris,' said the voice. The man was calling direct, which increased my feeling that it was a prank of Portillo’s, because clients usually reversed the charges when they called. Portillo and I had a certain level of trust between us, so I told him not to mess with me, that I was very busy reading. 'I don’t understand, I’m calling from Paris,' the man responded. 'Is this the number of the travel insurance?' I apologized and asked him for his number so I could call him back. When we talked again I’d become the nicest phone operator on the planet, which wasn’t really necessary, because I’ve never been impolite, and the man with the unrealistic voice was also unrealistically nice, which was not usual in that job: it was more common for clients to show their bad manners, their high-handedness, their habit of treating phone operators badly, and surely also laborers, cooks, salespeople, or any other of the many groups made up of their supposed inferiors. He told me he’d been in Europe for five months, most of that time in Paris, where his daughter—whom he called la Moño—was working on her doctorate and living with her husband—el Mati—and the kids. None of this was in response to my questions, but he was talking so enthusiastically that it was impossible for me to break in. He told me how the kids spoke French with charmingly correct accents, and he also threw in a few commonplace observations about Paris. By the time he started talking to me about the difficulties la Moño had been having lately meeting her academic obligations, about the complexity of the doctoral programs, and what kind of sense parenthood made in a world like this one ('a world that sometimes seems so strange nowadays, so different,' he told me), I realized we’d been talking for almost forty minutes. I had to interrupt him and respectfully ask him to tell me why he was calling. He told me he was a little under the weather, and he’d had a fever. I typed up the fax and sent it to the office in Paris so they could coordinate the case, and then I started the long process of saying good-bye to Juan Emilio, who fell all over himself in apologies and politeness before finally accepting that the conversation had ended.
=== ... ===
g back the dance. But even dancers with superlative temporary, a here-and-now art. Even the oldest of ballets memories are mortal, and with each passing generation, ballet loses a piece of its past. are of necessity performed by young people and take on the look of their generation. Besides, unlike theater or music, ballet has no texts and no standardized notation, no scripts or scores, and only the most scattered written records; it is unconstrained by tradition and the past. Choreographer George Balanchine encouraged this idea. In countless interviews he explained that ballets are here and gone, like flowers or butterflies, and that dance is an ephemeral art of the present; carpe diem. The point, he seemed to be saying, was not to bring back old musty dances such as Swan Lake: it was to 'make it new.' For the dancers, however, this was a paradoxical injunction: history was all around us—in our teachers and the dances, but also in Balanchine’s own ballets, many of which were suffused with memories and a Romantic ethos. But we nonetheless made a cult of never looking back, of setting our sights resolutely on the present. And yet it is because ballet has no fixed texts, because it is an oral and physical tradition, a storytelling art passed on, like Homer’s epics, from person to person, that it is more and not less rooted in the past. For it does have texts, even if these are not written down: dancers are required to master steps and variations, rituals and practices. These may change or shift over time, but the process of learning, performing, and passing them on remains deeply conservative. When an older dancer shows a step or a variation to a younger dancer, the ethics of the profession mandate strict obedience and respect: both parties rightly believe that a form of superior knowledge is passing between them. I never for a moment, for example, questioned the steps or style Alexandra Danilova conveyed when she taught us variations from The Sleeping Beauty: we clung to her every movement. The teachings of the master are revered for their beauty and logic, but also because they are the only connection the younger dancer has to the past—and she knows it. It is these relationships, the bonds between master and student, that bridge the centuries and give ballet its foothold in the past. Ballet, then, is an art of memory, not history. No wonder dancers obsessively memorize everything: steps, gestures, combinations, variations, whole ballets. It is difficult to overstate this. Memory is central to the art, and dancers are trained, as the ballerina Natalia Makarova once put it, to 'eat' dances—to ingest them and make them part of who they are. These are physical memories; when dancers know a dance, they know it in their muscles and bones. Recall is sensual and brings back not just the steps but also the gestures and feel of the movement, the 'perfume,' as Danilova said, of the dance—and the older dancer. Thus ballet repertory is not recorded in books or libraries: it is held instead in the bodies of dancers. Most ballet companies even...