Anatomy of a swan

There was nothing about my body that had been built for ballet. Nothing in me ever hinted that I could even approach that discipline. From the very beginning, every movement had been impossible to replicate. There wasn’t a single thing that came to me completely naturally. I gazed at my mother rehearsing on La Scala’s stage, with that mix of admiration and self-pity that belongs to someone who tries to excel but can’t—or just wasn’t born to. I watched her lift into the air like a bird and land on pointe like a dragonfly, beside my father, a surgeon of exceptional talent, who loved her above all else. She had been born to become the greatest of all time. I hadn’t.

Or at least, that’s how it should have been.

One night, in the middle of a jump repeated hundreds of times, my mother fell to the floor and never rose again. Fate dimmed out her light long before it could shine brighter than any star.

A shadow swallowed my father when he realized there was no movement, no operation, no shock that could rewind a glaring heart attack. He had lost not only his great love, but the greatest talent the world had ever seen. He had no recordings, no photographs of those performances—nothing to cling to in order to relive the moments they had shared. He could not accept that such immeasurable talent had been lost.

After a year of suffering, he refused the limits of fate and put himself in the service of science. If he could bring his patients back from paralysis, why not give me the art of movement—and thus give his life a new beginning? Why not reshape and optimize every limb of mine—tissue, muscle, bone—to recreate the talent he had watched die in front of him? And so, operation after operation, he made it possible for me to perform movements I had once only seen from afar, as well as to spin with dazzling speed. In a few years, I climbed the ranks and secured an honorary place in the most renowned theatres. He made me the greatest ballerina I could ever have imagined—at the cost of the greatest physical pain I had ever endured. With every show, stabbing aches coursed through my body, from my shoulder blades to the tips of my fingers. Each time I wondered whether I would manage to stay upright, with a body so perfect—and yet so mutilated by surgery. Ironically, the more my pain grew, the more my father’s healed, along with his blind faith in science. There was no cut, no suture, no pill, no supplement that could stop him.

That was how I became the greatest experiment of his life. Ten years had passed, and the pain had become almost unbearable.

The Bolshoi Theatre was ballet’s ultimate institution. Only the finest dancers managed to set foot on that stage and receive the ovations of the richest, most devoted aristocrats.

That morning’s newspaper ran the headline: “Altea: La Scala’s promise, only 25 years old, ready for her first performance.” The article praised my singular gifts, my supple body perfectly calibrated for each step. It proclaimed I could stir emotions others couldn’t even imagine. Reading that description, I wondered whether it was truly me—or only an artificial version. How could I look so perfect and natural when, inside, I was nothing but a knot of exhausted nerves and a graveyard of fractured bones? But soon, everyone would notice.

The voices outside my dressing room reached me like a roar in the night.

“They told us she was the best. But in these rehearsals there was no talent at all.”

“The pas de deux was a complete disaster.”

“It looked like she couldn’t even stay on her feet.”

“Do you think she hurt herself? The doctors didn’t find any fractures.”

“How could she be so uncoordinated?”

“It was like she didn’t know how to dance.”

That was when my father burst into the dressing room. His forehead was slick with sweat and his fingers trembled, but they were clenched tight around a small bundle of cloth. He reserved that treatment for special occasions—when he wanted to push me beyond every physical limit.

For a moment, I prayed the bundle’s contents would fly away.

“I will never allow them to question our abilities. We’ve come this far after years of hard work and tonight, we deserve to shine in this theatre. I have the most sophisticated solution ever invented against the pain that afflicts you: three pills to restore your excellence, one for each act. The first is a powerful analgesic, to make you forget pain ever existed; the second will let you soar as high as possible, with a beta blocker that will remove any tremor; the third, the anti-edema, will make you the perfect Black Swan. Don’t forget even one of them—each one amplifies the next. If you miss one, I can’t guarantee you’ll ever dance the way you did before.”

With all my heart, I wished that for once we would stop, admitting we had already achieved everything my mother had ever wanted. I wished I could stop suffering and find out what it meant to have a body that was mine—unmodified, simply mine. But the night had arrived: it was time to go onstage. Instead of speaking, I swallowed the first pill on pointe.

“Sensational.”

“This woman was born to dance.”

“Her movements are divine.”

“A true natural talent.”

From my toes to the hollow of my inner thigh, I felt myself burning from the inside. I was used to enduring pain, but this exceeded anything I had ever done in my life. Sitting before the mirror, I watched my eyes become a bottomless dark tunnel. There was no light left to guide me.

At first, the warmth retreating from my joints had made me feel good: I truly believed I was at peace, that I had a body mute to pain. But when the curtain fell, everything came rushing back like an unstoppable fire.

Five minutes before the end of the break, my father came in. The mirror reflected our opposite positions: him in a shadowed corner, the maker of a design whose price only we knew, burdened by a loss he was certain I could heal step by step; me, lit by the footlights, struck by the weight of ten years of pretending. To sink into oblivion or to suffer in order to be remembered—which punishment could be worse?

In those five minutes, I could have told him everything I had kept inside for ten years: the nights I cried over the outcomes of surgeries; the difficulty of keeping a dead person’s memory alive; the constant doubts about whether I deserved what I had, or worse—whether I even wanted it. But when he stepped forward and offered me the booster, the stimulant that would reduce my sense of fatigue to zero, I could only yield. The pill slid so easily between my fingertips, ready to grant me the gift of movement. My limbs would not have endured another jump without his help. In an instant it was in my throat, and I felt my muscles loosen. The pain vanished in time for the second act.

I went onstage in all my pure white-swan perfection.

“There’s something ethereal in the way she moves—she seems to come from another dimension.”

“Her interpretation of the white swan surpasses anything we’ve ever seen.”

“The pain of loss echoes in every step.”

“She is absolutely extraordinary.”

Five minutes before the end of the break, I turned off the lights in the dressing room.

I felt as if my muscles no longer existed. Pain had drilled through my bones and nerves, to the point that my connective tissues were unable to hold me together. I hovered on the edge of the abyss, trying to cling to a past that no longer existed. What was the point of everything I was doing? I had spent my entire life imitating someone else’s gestures, trying to fulfill a destiny made impossible by a premature death. It should have been my mother on that stage, with her legs, her hands, her bones. Instead it was me in her place: a modified, perfected, optimized version of her. I was only the faded memory of someone who was gone—a shadow that swallowed me even when every spotlight was trained on me. Who was I, beyond a simple experiment?

A voice in the hall urged the audience to take their seats and the spectators in the boxes to gather. The break was over, and I was about to close the most complex act—one on which so many dancers before me had failed, and for which I would need every gram of my energy.

Behind me, the third pill lay on the table.

There is a moment in Swan Lake when the prince watches, enraptured, as the Black Swan turns thirty-two times. They are seconds of pure pleasure—the highest expression of loving something believed to be true, only for it to reveal itself as a grand deception. The White Swan pays the price with death. How is it possible that a lover cannot grasp the difference between true and false, between the beloved and what is only their semblance? Only as I grew up did I understand how a person can bend their perception of reality until it matches what they feel inside.

I hesitated for an instant before throwing myself into that complex choreography of fouettés en tournant. By then I no longer had any sensation in my fingertips: my hands were torn, my muscles weakened, and my body felt pierced by dozens of blades. Yet the audience had kept watching me with the same adoration and admiration as in the previous acts. Every single spectator was convinced they were witnessing the performance of the greatest ballerina of all time.

I began to turn. One. Two. Three. Four. Five times. Before the worshipful eyes of my partner, the public, my father, I was the embodiment of perfection. Each turn was a chance to relive the cherished past, to believe talent could be built by science. I gave the illusion that time could be rewound and fate’s choice undone; with a small effort, I could reincarnate someone who was no longer there. By the tenth turn, no one could have imagined what I was feeling inside.

From the upper rows, the first applause started, then the second, then the third. In seconds, all the boxes came alive with joy at that exhibition, until it reached half the stalls. I had reached the thirteenth turn when even the first rows filled with smiles and clapping. In everyone’s eyes, I saw reflected in my father’s gaze my mother’s image. I was no longer there—or perhaps I had never been.

At the eighteenth turn, something inside me broke. In the millisecond I met the eyes of the person who loved me above all else, I let them understand the spell was over. My leg folded into a distorted shape, my arms gave way, my pelvis twisted. I felt my head slam against the cold, hard stage—the witness to all my agonies and sufferings. A rivulet of blood stained the black feathers that adorned my arms. There could be no doubt about the choreography: ballerinas always completed all thirty-two turns. But my performance had only ever been a grand deception.

I felt the pain of a love slipping away.