Here at the End of the World We Learn to Dance

by Lloyd Jones

  What was it I was hoping to recover? An overlooked object, a dropped bracelet, a follicle of hair? A taste of her life? I should have known better, and in fact I do know. I know everything there is to know about Louise and Schmidt, of an affair that was a study in deception. It is the same dance Rosa taught me.

  29

  One afternoon at the pool I tell Rosa I have a surprise to show her.

  She says, ‘I also have some news. But yours first.’

  Her head turns for the pool clock. She mutters something about the restaurant. She has to get more wine in. She’s promised Angelo to pick up a box of ice lettuce. As usual she is in a hurry.

  Now I have to tell her that the ‘surprise’ is a short drive away.

  ‘No. It is impossible. It can wait for tomorrow.’

  ‘It’ll take ten minutes. You can set your watch by it if you don’t believe me.’

  ‘And Angelo will shoot me if I don’t have his things…’ ‘Ten minutes. What’s ten minutes?’

  ‘It depends what time of the day we are talking about…’

  ‘Please. Rosa.’ I’ve been busting with the surprise since she got to the pool.

  ‘Okay. But I will tell Angelo that it is your fault that he is late with his lettuce. You have no idea. He treats me like I am his servant. Rosa get this. Rosa, I need more this, that.’

  Twenty minutes later, in another part of town to which she is unaccustomed, a light industrial area studded with old turn-of-the century villas, many in disrepair and some derelict, I lead her up a flight of wooden steps. The queasy-making smell of wax from the downstairs candlemaker turns her head. Her grip on my arm tightens. ‘What is this…? What have you brought me to?’

  I have forgotten to mention. To add to the ‘surprise’ I have blindfolded her with her scarf. ‘It is childish of course. You see what I do for you. You and Angelo. I do these things and for what…?’

  ‘We’re nearly there,’ I tell her.

  She reaches up to pull at the blindfold.

  ‘This is ridiculous.’ Then she asks, ‘Can anyone see us?’

  ‘Just those people crammed in the window,’ I tell her and she gasps.

  ‘Where? Where? Lionel, take off this stupid…’ But we’ve arrived. I turn the key and push the door open. I stand aside for Rosa. It’s been fun up to now. Here’s the part I’m unsure about.

  I untie the blindfold and there’s a moment of adjustment where she stays put in the doorway, at this threshold, blinking, braced for surprise with held breath. So far she’s not surprised. But what she sees hasn’t been expected either. She is somewhere in between— apprehensive is the word I’m after. The white-painted walls of the interior draw her in. Now she sees my denim jacket hanging off the back of a kitchen chair. The chair had come with the flat. I wouldn’t have been able to afford it otherwise. She notes my bookshelves, such as they are—two pieces of timber I flogged from a Burke’s bin—and the bricks they rest on. The shelves are the most colourful item in the room. But I’m also proud of the tasteful combination of creamy colours and the broadleaf green of the few pot plants I have been able to afford. I hope she has noticed this. One by one Rosa takes in these details, this spectacular evidence of my new, independent life—away from the farm, away from the schoolish hostel with its warden and curfew hour. As her eye prowls the exhibit I watch her mentally ticking various boxes. Knowing I’d be leading her here this afternoon I scrubbed it clean. That’s the cleansing fluid, Pine-something, that her nose has just picked up. With Rosa here the Pine feels like a character reference. But these are things on their own. It’s the overall response that she is fishing for. She isn’t sure what to say or how to react.

  Now she stands at the window to gather her thoughts. The view isn’t much. A few cars are parked in the street below. The pitched and flat rooftops fall away. There is the flattening effect of grey and muggy skies.

  ‘You were right,’ she says at last. ‘This is a surprise.’

  But when she says this it doesn’t sound like a surprise. She doesn’t sound surprised, either. If anything she sounds depressed. The whole glorious moment is set to deflate. She unfolds her arms; folds them again. Now she drops them at her side.

  ‘Lionel,’ she begins.

  I know what she is about to say. I know it by the tone what’s coming and I don’t want to hear it. I do not want to hear it said that I’ve overstepped the mark.

  ‘I have tea. Would you like a cup of tea?’

  She looks around the room.

  ‘There is nowhere to sit.’

  ‘You can sit on the bed if you like.’

  ‘I don’t see a bed. I see a mattress on the floor.’

  ‘That’s the bed.’

  ‘And I’m a thirty-six-year-old woman.’

  I didn’t anticipate this. I had thought she would be pleased. I’d have thought she’d seen what I had in mind; that this is our place. Somewhere that isn’t so public. Somewhere that isn’t the restaurant or the pool. She says, ‘I don’t see any music. A home without music is a person without a soul.’

  ‘I have music.’

  In fact this was supposed to be my next surprise. I’ve made copies of the tapes from the restaurant. I put on a favourite of Rosa’s—Goyeneche singing ‘Vuelvo al Sur’ and hold out my arms. She looks away to the window but gradually the song catches her and brings her back and she can’t resist. We dance milonga style, cheek to cheek.

  There is a place in Goyeneche’s song where he stops singing to declaim each word, releasing each one syllable by syllable. The first time I heard ‘Vuelvo al Sur’ I pictured Dean Martin with a drink in his hand, half-remembering, half-forgetting, an amiable TV drunk grinning and willing sympathy from me, Meg, Peter and Jean lined up on the couch at home. The difference here is that Goyeneche’s pause is not forgetfulness. It is more deliberate than that. It is to enable what will happen to happen. A corte. However with Rosa I find myself rocking back and forth in a kind of stasis. She smiles and waits. At last, suppressing a giggle, she releases herself.

  The moment in which to push forward into a new situation has been and gone. Now she looks at her watch.

  ‘Now look. Despite what you said, despite what you promised me, you have made me late. Angelo will hate me. He will revile me for his lettuces.’

  She’s already on her way. I call after her, ‘Wait.You said you had a surprise for me.’

  ‘Oh, that.’

  She looks vaguely around the room. She thinks for a moment more.

  ‘Yes, well, that can wait. There has been enough surprise for one day.’

  Angelo was first to notice the impact of the bedsit on my finances. He observed me eating more when I came in to start my shift, binge eating and picking over the scraps on plates.

  ‘First I give you pasta, then you want a steak. This is not a normal appetite, my friend. Perhaps you are pregnant?’

  I looked up from the steak he’d just cooked me.

  ‘Just a joke, my friend.’

  It amazed me what I had to spend just to stay alive. Nearly everything I earned from the restaurant went towards the rent, the rest on milk, tea, bread and a few staple items. At the end of the week I had nothing to show for my labour at La Chacra.

  I asked Rosa if I could extend my hours. And with a hint of bravado I said, ‘Maybe I should look around for a second job.What do you think?’

  We were on our way to the markets. Rosa was driving. She took her time to answer, pursing her lips while she thought about the possibilities.

  ‘Maybe,’ she said, and there the matter sat as we slowed for the next set of lights. In the car, especially in traffic, Rosa needed to devote herself fully to the road. After a pause she said, ‘If it is money you need then maybe I can help. Well, I am thinking Ivan actually. Maybe he can help.’

  Ivan’s name hadn’t been mentioned in weeks, not since her stories at the pool of Roberto starving himself to death before the dance marathon video and Ivan’s sudden promotion in the pecking
order at the Almagro Steak House. Roberto’s decline had provided Ivan with his moment of reckoning. A corte out in the real world. He’d stepped up to the mark at the restaurant and grown into the chef ’s position.

  In delicate silence Rosa spoke softly but firmly.

  ‘That was my news. Remember?’ And then, more brightly as if this was glad tidings I could share in too, ‘Well,’ she said, ‘Ivan is coming back.’

  ‘Why is he?’ I blurted.

  ‘What do you mean, “Why is he?”’

  The car behind tooted.

  ‘The lights are green,’ I said.

  ‘I can see. I know what green is.’

  She graunched through the gear changes. At last, in top gear, we settled back.

  ‘Pasta,’ she said gently. ‘Have you forgotten. Ivan is my husband. I am married to him.’

  ‘I know what a husband is,’ I said.

  ‘Now you are angry.’

  ‘I am surprised.’

  ‘No,’ she said. ‘You’re angry.’

  I didn’t have the energy or the will to argue over the fine point of exactly how I felt. Though I don’t think it was anger. Rosa’s calmly delivered news left me temporarily dazed. I’d given up thinking about Ivan months ago. Even at the pool when I listened to Rosa’s account of Ivan’s safe pair of hands guiding the Almagro through the period of her father’s decline, Ivan’s name seemed safely in the past. Not once had I heard her mention or even hint at Ivan coming back into her life. But then I was blind to certain coincidences that only years later would take on greater definition, like a shape emerging from a fog. Ivan was the missing element. We were poised to enter that marginalised space that Schmidt and his ‘faithful shop assistant’ had occupied.

  30

  Around this time the newspapers carried a story on a huge meteorite hurtling Earth’s way. They were full of scientific speculation and talk of instant climatic changes, and the rapid extinction of us all that would follow. At La Chacra, at the end of the shift when we sat around drinking and talking, we thought about what we might do. Crouch under a table or stand in a doorway or just stay where we were and defiantly stir our teabags. On impact, we were told, the meteorite would shatter into a million fragments. During these discussions I thought of Ivan.

  Two days before he was due to fly in, Rosa asked me to spend a few hours at her house to help put things back the way Ivan was used to.

  This was the first time I had been to Rosa’s place. Nothing about it seemed to fit the person. The choice of where she lived seemed no more than incidental.

  Rosa’s house was one in a line of ordinary weatherboard houses. Her section, however, stood out, though for all the wrong reasons. The grass ran to clay patches.The flowerbeds were overgrown with weeds. And this was the house of somebody whose day was ruined if she spotted a crumb on the floor of the restaurant!

  The anonymity continued inside. I had expected to find more things from her life in Buenos Aires or Sydney. There was her grandfather’s record collection. She dug out some of Louise’s records from the pile, old jacket covers of Gardel and Solsa, their colours washed out. You saw the passing effect of time. Their complexions were too rosy and creamy. They were faded remnants of what they had been, like pressed flowers. I looked up at the walls—there were no pictures.Their starkness gave prominence to a photo portrait of Troilo with his pallbearer’s face, his small chinless mouth. He looked like a man accused of some heinous crime and unable to defend himself. There was one other artefact of note. On top of a speaker stood a section of glass from the shop window in the chic neighbourhood of Palermo: Schmidt: música y importador, Buenos Aires, 1926.

  Rosa seemed to read my thoughts.

  ‘It is a house. Not a home. But if it’s a home you wish then I have photographs.’

  She went into another room and came back with an armful of albums. The green fabric cover was worn through to pale bone-coloured paper. She opened this album and there was the pink villa, with its black-shuttered windows. She turned the page and ‘introduced’ me to her grandmother, a matriarchal figure who at a glance you know as one of those women who will accept certain losses in order to preserve the appearance of the whole, her heart aching as she sets the splendid table beneath an outside garden trellis on the occasion of Schmidt’s sixty-fifth birthday.

  We quickly thumbed through the other albums with Rosa pulling faces at her younger self, insisting on defects when none were obvious. Her eyes are too wide apart, her hair a mess—or this for example, of the photo taken of her dancing in Hyde Park on Australia Day: ‘Look how thin I am. Too thin. I am dying.’ At the same time, secretly, and not so secretly proud of her beauty.

  We arrived at the wedding photos. Rosa in white. Ivan, delighted with the outcome. Tucked inside a brown hire suit, legs astride, feet planted firmly. The tired and worn-out woman beside him is Maria, Rosa’s mum.

  The tour ended, Rosa’s gathered up the albums and we set to work. Really there wasn’t much to do. A huge TV had to be hauled back from its place of exile in a spare room at the back of the house. At one point I managed a quick glimpse into Rosa’s bedroom. There was just time to see a bedpost and a floor rug before Rosa closed the door.

  But here was the real reason for getting me over. In the hall she held a stepladder while I reached through the ceiling trapdoor. Rosa directed from below. ‘The cartons should be to the left…’ As I brought the first one down I saw a number of small moulded dogs on wooden stands.These were trophies for dog grooming Ivan had won in competitions across New South Wales and Victoria. That’s where he had been these past months; helping a mate with his dog grooming franchise and competing for trophies.

  On Christmas Eve a small gift wrapped in Christmas paper waited for me on the kitchen bench. There was a note attached warning me to ‘please unwrap with care’. Inside I found a music score, a very old one which before Rosa was to tell me I guessed right away had belonged either to Schmidt or Louise. It was Troilo’s ‘Danzarin’.

  This was incredibly generous. I knew how important it was to her, this piece of music connecting her to her grandfather and to Louise. It was an heirloom she had given to me.

  She had also arranged presents for the rest of the staff. At the end of the night Kay and the other waitresses lined up to thank Rosa for their bottle of wine and box of Turkish Delight. Besides myself, Angelo was the only other staff member singled out for a special gift. His was a chef ’s apron with the word maestro embroidered in green stitching. He added something in Spanish that ended with the pleasant-sounding maestro, and something else more melting, so that for a brief flashing moment Rosa looked young and bashful that I wanted to know what Angelo had said so I could repeat it at the first opportune moment alone with her.

  Champagne was poured. Toasts were made to Rosa and La Chacra, to its eternal success. Angelo emptied his glass with a single gulp. He refilled it. His face glowing, he offered second and third toasts.

  The boyfriends trickled in. Bulging in their muscle shirts. Big Polynesian boys who sang in their church choir, drank orange juice and worked on the doors of various pubs and clubs around town. The waitresses perched on their knees. They were unusually relaxed. Released from their chores they turned into swans and preened their feathers. I imagined the wild sex they were in for later and I thought with envy how easy and uncomplicated it was for them. At the end of the night I would return to my bedsit; Rosa would leave for home where Ivan, newly returned, just hours earlier as it happened, was probably waiting up for her.

  Among the waitresses that night I noticed a new attention to the music. For the very first time they seemed to actually listen to Gardel and Goyeneche, like birds who up to this moment had shown no special regard for the particular sky they’d flown in. Now as they stood their hair flowed past their shoulders. They moved dreamily with their painted fingernails hanging at their sides, their shoulders twisting, some with a look of rapture that I thought would match their face asleep on the pillow. Really they ha
d no idea how to dance.

  At a certain point when the soft Ballada came on, Rosa and I looked for one another. Instincts. Instincts.What powerful magnets they are. We moved to the middle of the floor as we would have at the end of a normal evening shift after the last waitress had gone, and we began to dance. As usual I felt the rough edges fall off me. I became emboldened. Everything we tried seemed to come off. I didn’t notice the waitresses making space for us. I didn’t notice that we had an audience until the song finished and the waitresses applauded and wolf-whistled. ‘Way to go, Lionel. Way to go.’ The waitresses pressed around. ‘My God, where did you learn to do that? That’s amazing.’ I beamed back at the bank of smiling faces. To their rear, Kay and Angelo stood apart with looks of judgment that went beyond what they had just witnessed to juggling another question—how it had come to pass in the first place? My eyes met Kay’s. She dropped her gaze and reached for her glass. I watched her swallow. Angelo’s smile was more smug and direct; he wanted me to know that he wasn’t fooled.

  Now the waitresses wanted to see us dance again, so we danced to Piazolla’s ‘Oblivion’, a quiet, trembling melody respectful of the late hour. We danced with cheeks pressed together, our eyelids closed.

  The music ended. We rocked in place a few extra seconds then parted.There was a delayed response from the audience this time, a gap in proceedings for all kinds of suspicion to wash about. Then as Rosa and I moved to an arm’s length apart, the faces relaxed. I detected a sigh of relief around the room. It was only a dance, after all.

  31