by Sue Woolfe
There would’ve been no way out of this but less attractive age or incapacitating illness, except that Magdalena discovered dance. As long as she possessed money for her lessons, she had somewhere to go that was lit and crowded with what passed as companionship. People nodded at her, made room for her at their tables, danced with her.
Esteban’s pronouncements often had their kernel of truth, she mused. Because of her anxiety to please anyone at all, she’d spent her childhood and youth listening to people while guessing their thoughts. In fact, in every passing conversation, two lines of thought would be going on for her – the conversation in the air, and the other in her head.
‘What did he imply by this?’ she’d ask herself. ‘What brought her to believe that?’
Since tango is an extemporised dance, in which neither of the partners knows where the music will take the leader, communing is essential, but not common. So Magdalena was considered by many of her partners to be something of a mind reader.
Once Magdalena had become competent in the demanding posture, basic steps and sequences of tango, she’d go to social nights and find to her astonished relief that she could dance with any competent partner as if they were no longer two people but had become only one, a four-legged beast joined at the heart, their arms in the embrace of lovers while they breathed together and thought the one thought. Occasionally, once she’d learned how to balance one-legged, her free leg, which for the length of the dance belonged to him, would apparently disobey him, but only to tease, to float and toss and weave patterns in the air, to say: You’ll have to wait till I come to earth. I’ll do what you want, perhaps, but only when I choose. And then it would become his again, surrendering.
One day, Nadina, after some or other domestic tension, complained about the way women in tango always had to accept the man as the leader.
‘Tango’s caught in a time warp,’ she said.
‘It reflects Argentina’s history,’ said Esteban, deeply offended.
‘It’s good to acknowledge history,’ said Magdalena because she wanted to smooth things over for Nadina, and she’d been struggling towards a concept in her head. She often felt like that, as if her mind was a dog sleeping in front of a fire, but her owner would come home and her mind would stir and leap up, barking.
The troupe gazed at her in surprise. ‘We shouldn’t modernise everything,’ she went on. ‘We’ll blur over where we came from.’
Greg kissed her hand with a warmth that surprised her. ‘I couldn’t have put it better myself.’
In the old days, she’d fall in love with each different partner, any partner at all, as long as he could move together with her and the gusts of violins and the anguish of the singer. Always the songs were about disappointed love. She’d be infatuated ten, twenty times a night, broken-hearted ten, twenty times a night, when afterwards she and her partner would disentangle themselves and walk to their separate seats, one ordinary, clumsy step after another, only awkwardly human after all. They’d sit apart in silence, awaiting the next moment of wild joy, hoping it would come again, this night, this lifetime.
One night a classmate, himself a competent dancer and deeply moved by her communing, came to sit beside her afterwards, and crept his arm around her shoulders.
‘A kiss?’ he murmured.
The music had long ago faded. There was only the jaggedness of chatter and a warm glass of water in her hand, with a disintegrating slice of lemon in it. For a moment her old life beckoned. It would’ve been so easy now that his face was nearing hers, his head tipped. But tango gave her the words of their teacher.
‘All we were doing was dancing, ‘she said. His head paused in its advance. It withdrew. His arm fell behind her.
‘I’ve been inappropriate,’ he said, looking down, chastened.
She was chastened too, for she felt responsible for everything that went wrong, including this stranger’s temptation.
She repeated the teacher’s mantra, as if to a child.
‘The dancer is not the dance.’
‘Of course not.’
In the plaintive music, which he felt to be as broken as he was, he’d forgotten that.
She laughed then, gently, because she felt she understood him.
‘The music makes us feel we’ve at last found something we’ve needed for a long time,’ she said.
They were silent for a while.
He indicated the dance floor again filled with embracing couples while violins sighed their heartbroken songs, ‘This isn’t the way one normally behaves with a stranger.’
She nodded. She longed to tell him her history, and how the music articulated the tumult she couldn’t quite say, but she knew she must wait to tell him, that telling this, telling anything was too intimate. She’d like to tell him, one day. Perhaps, after all, he was the one she waited for.
But at that very moment, while she struggled for words, it came to him that she was too plain, her nose was too bony, her smile too sombre. In total, she was too intense, and he’d mistaken it as desire for him.
He left the tango hall soon after, and she never saw him again.
Magdalena suspected that her communing ways were why she’d been chosen for the troupe. But would it continue to be enough? Communing came so naturally to her that it didn’t seem like a talent at all, and so she waited, as usual, for them to reject her. It was only a matter of time. Till then, she made the best of it. The passionate connection, as Nadina put it, was for all dancers a pose, but underneath there was a truth – that they were acknowledging together how tender are the possibilities with another human. She assumed Greg felt like this too, but she didn’t know how to ask him.
She also knew, like any dancer knows, that the tango look was a culmination of simple, measurable physical things, such as the way she leaned her heart on his weightlessly, the way he rotated his chest from his hips upwards as smoothly as water swirling around stones in a creek, with her heart riding on it and her legs following his heart, his foot occasionally kicking up behind him in apparent exultation, while her stretched foot painted poignant patterns on the floor because she was grateful to it, the floor, the way it held her, how she loved the consoling way the floor nursed her foot when it finally landed.
As they rehearsed, Magdalena realised all over again it was going to be a wrench when she finally lost Greg to Janette, for no previous partner had moved with her like this. Once Janette took over, there’d be no more troupe for her, and she’d be alone in dance halls, and at risk again.
Magdalena received an unexpected call three days before the Singapore performance and then the surgery, at home in her tiny apartment. She had been meditating, which she always did before shows. It was important she lose her self-consciousness, her sense of existential wrong-doing. Besides, Esteban had choreographed an unusual routine, and her memory of a particular sequence kept failing. Usually her memory wasn’t required, for Greg danced a consummate lead and she sensed his every move almost before he even knew it himself, but this time Esteban required sequences that weren’t led.
It was her brother’s voice.
‘Cheryl?’
It was the name she’d been born with. Magdalena was the name she’d adopted to forget her old life. Her heart always sank at the sound of Cheryl because Cheryl tethered her to self-destruction.
She hadn’t spoken to her brother in years. He was a rich businessman with a wife almost identical to their other brothers’ wives – blondes with high cheek bones. They all seemed to say the same things. Jim’s wife had even said in her company that she didn’t know what to say to Cheryl, and Jim wasn’t able to tell her for he’d never known either, even when they were children sucking green ice blocks outside the corner shop and licking up sticky drips from their hands. Her mind had always seemed somewhere else.
‘I’m ringing about your operation,’ Jim said.
She’d been soaking her feet in a mixture of witch hazel and warm water, to clean and soften the skin, so it’d seem l
ess wrinkled. Another sign of age. She’d had to step across the carpet to reach her mobile. Her wet footprints had made tracks on the grey carpet, like an explorer’s footsteps in the desert. But she lived by herself, and there was no one to complain.
‘I’ve had the same,’ Jim said. When she was quiet, he prompted: ‘Operation. I heard you were having it.’
‘The same,’ she repeated. She and her siblings had nothing in common. Only strands of DNA and of memories.
He began to talk about himself and his operation, relishing the details. How difficult, how delicate. He always had been one eager to talk about himself, especially into the silence that was his sister.
‘We seem the only ones who got the germ. The mutation. It must’ve been a mutation.’
She’d asked the young doctor in the navy suit what had caused the eye problem. He hadn’t known.
‘So I’m saying, it’s genetic,’ said Jim. She wasn’t sure what he expected of her, with their sharing of this mutation. It wouldn’t give her more to say to him, she reflected. She walked back with the phone to her dish of warm water, but it had cooled.
‘May I just put the jug on?’ she asked, not thinking about the expense for his phone while he waited.
She didn’t stay for his answer, just padded to the kitchen, filled the jug, turned it on.
She couldn’t hear his voice above the noise of the jug.
When she could hear, he’d rung off.
She wondered if she should call back, but didn’t. She was trying not to think about the operation. She poured the jug into her dish. She laid the mobile on the sofa beside her. This time when it rang, she didn’t lift her feet out.
‘I thought you’d be glad to know, you can survive it.’ He laughed.
‘I’m glad you’re fine now.’ She added, trying for a laugh:
‘So it’s not dangerous?’
‘I had the best doctor.’ He named a doctor. ‘You should use him.’
‘I trust mine,’ she said.
‘Your sight matters,’ he said. ‘Go with the best.’
She had a moment of panic until she remembered Jim always believed that whatever he’d chosen to do was the best, and whomever he’d chosen to do it with.
She changed the subject to asking how he’d found out about her operation. It turned out that the connection was the photographer, the one who’d complained about her squint. Jim owned a successful real estate business, and the glamorous houses he sold needed photographers who emphasised grandeur.
‘Do you want my doctor’s name?’
She thanked him, but no. She was a little in love with her own, though she didn’t tell Jim this.
‘Ring me when it’s over,’ he said.
When he rang off, she had her first moment of terror.
If it’s true that in the moments of drowning, you review your life, Magdalena in those next few days before the operation became a drowning woman. She didn’t know where the last ten years had gone, except into the dance. Dance had taken up all her time, her hope of a settled, domestic life, a family, a career. Tango wouldn’t always last, couldn’t, not for a woman, old men don’t invite old women to dance, she’d always seen that, but she’d committed herself to the dance when she was still young enough to believe she’d never get old, not this old, not old enough for her eyes to fail. What is old age, she suddenly had to ask herself, but the body dying, part by part, the body that had brought her this salvation?
The only person Magdalena usually talked to was Rashmi. For her day job she now wrote instructions for an online publishing company website. Greg, a computer programmer, had helped her get it. After her waitressing and dress shop jobs, a friend of Greg’s needed assistance and was willing to overlook her lack of formal qualifications because he didn’t have to pay her so much. She was required to answer authors’ questions about their digitised manuscripts. It was anxious work, for while she was fine with some questions, she didn’t know the answers to technical ones, and relied entirely on the advice of Rashmi, the digitising expert in India. They talked every day on Skype, and only Rashmi knew how much help Magdalena needed. Rashmi never seemed to mind, and often showed her photos of her little daughters, the matching dresses an aunt had made, the ringlets she’d put in their hair. Magdalena enjoyed this but shared nothing about her own life. She didn’t even mention she’d be absent from work, for fear she’d burst into tears and that would be difficult for Rashmi.
So that last afternoon, before Singapore and before the operation, they simply said goodbye as always. When the Skype call clicked off, Magdalena stared for a while at the blank screen. She thought: If I die under the knife, she’ll never know who I was.
Afterwards, she didn’t remember much about the flight from Sydney with the troupe, the hotel in Singapore, or the city itself because of her fear. But in the performance, all that filled her was the music, though she’d heard it a thousand times, every time they’d rehearsed. Sometimes, as they moved together she wondered where she ended or where Greg began, what was feminine or masculine, who was the leader and who the follower – at which point in space was that boundary since their bodies and minds had melted into one? Dancing with him in that performance was a damp, mossy, cushiony dark fern-like swaying, as if they were beings other than human.
In the last embrace, his head bowed against hers, holding the pose for five seconds before he straightened and gently set her down, in that moment, a thought came to her, almost bulged all the way down from her head and through her body: This is the only world where I am myself.
They all slept in the next day, the girls in one room, the boys in another. She wondered why Janette hadn’t shared a bed with Greg as planned, but didn’t comment. Only Magdalena was going home, and Nadina soon after to pick her up from the hospital: the others were going to stay in the city for a few days, being tourists. Greg had been invited to teach men’s classes and Janette would accompany him. Janette couldn’t hide her excitement as she fussed over what dress to wear, and whether she’d wear the blue suede shoes or the black patent, trying, Magdalena noticed, not to gloat over this lucky turn of events.
‘Oh, it’ll be nothing like your triumph last night,’ she said to Magdalena over and over.
Greg insisted on accompanying Magdalena to the airport. They rode in a rocking train, and he took her hand. She couldn’t explain this to herself, until he asked:
‘Are you frightened?’
And she’d answered:
‘I won’t worry till the moment I walk into the hospital.’
She felt him exhale a deep breath.
It was another of their maxims about performing: put off the worry till it’s over. They all did. But this time it wasn’t true.
He changed the subject:
‘Who’s taking you there?’
She blinked in surprise, and pointed out that the hospital was a short taxi ride from her apartment, and she could get there as easily as she could the day she first went to the surgeon.
Greg was unsurprised at her answer. ‘I wish Janette was as independent as you,’ he said.
‘She has other qualities.’
In a way, in the face of the drama of her operation, the doings of her ordinary life seemed so simple. She suddenly wondered why she’d always found them worrying. Why, all she’d needed to do, she now thought, had been to be happy. How simple it all could have been!
‘No one dances like you in the whole world,’ Greg blurted unexpectedly. ‘If things were different, I’d ask you to marry me.’
He smiled ruefully. She didn’t.
‘There’s a complication,’ he said.
‘If things were different,’ she repeated in a murmur. They said little else, but he kept holding her hand.
He held her against his body for a long moment as they said goodbye, the way they always held each other as they danced. Even longer. This was unexpected too.
She also remembered little about the surgery, except that she seemed to swim into conscious
ness several times, as if she’d dived into a pearly lagoon and was rising occasionally to break the shining stillness of its surface. At one moment, she heard a doctor or nurse exclaim over her vitreous fluid, how packed it was with floaters.
Her surgeon replied:
‘They are meaningless.’
And Magdalena wanted to exclaim: ‘But they might be the end of my dancing!’
Of course she didn’t, because her mind was diving again into the pearly lagoon.
Afterwards, she remembered the comforting presence of Nadina holding her, Nadina nodding as the clinic people told her to ring immediately if there was any sign of trouble.
‘What sign of trouble could there be?’ Nadina asked.
‘Severe pain,’ the nurse said.
Magdalena wondered what severe meant, but didn’t like to bother anyone with the question.
Nadina had arranged a roster of tango friends to stay with her for those first days. There was a sequence of different touches, soft touches, and gentle voices. Magdalena, without a contact lens in her good eye, had always had poor vision, but enough to see shapes and colours. She was not up to putting a lens in her good eye now and she didn’t like to ask anyone’s help.
It was on the fourth day that Nadina’s roster failed. It happened, as these things often do, on a Sunday. Someone thought someone else was taking a shift with Magdalena, and Magdalena didn’t like to ring Nadina when the friend failed to turn up, even though Nadina had lovingly inscribed her mobile number in huge letters on a bit of paper on the fridge door, and underneath it, the doctor’s emergency number. As luck would have it, or perhaps fate, an ache that could’ve been called severe started above Magdalena’s right eyebrow. Magdalena was determined not to panic. She stumbled to the fridge door and, though she didn’t like to worry Nadina, by all manner of squinting she made out the doctor’s number.