Again Rosaura glanced at Martina. Martina smiled her encouragement and leaned against the soundpad on the far wall. “She said an interview.”
“In a few days, on our show ‘A Public Affair.’ “
“People will call?” Rosaura said.
I nodded. “And ask you questions. But today I want to see if you and I are compatible.”
She clutched her hands together and set them on the edge of the table. I scooted my chair over and pushed the mike aside. She was young, with the elastic skin of a teenager. The laugh lines around her eyes added about ten years to her age, though. If she had come from Argentina, she had probably lived through a lot. “Martina tells me that you used to dance in Argentina.”
“Si. Yes. I danced with Compañía Nacional de Argentina for many years, the last as prima ballerina.” She gazed down at her hands, but her words were filled with a quiet pride. Her accent was as clear as I had thought, and she seemed to have no fear of me. I would ask a few more perfunctory questions and then get back to Senator Kasten.
“Did you do the traditional works, or was the company more experimental?”
“Before the coup, we did Argentinian work. El Perón insisted on it. But Evita, she had us do Swan Lake as a secret. She had never seen it.”
El Perón. Evita. I glanced at Martina, remembering our conversation from a few days before. “You danced for Juan Perón?”
“And his wife.” Rosaura still did not look at me, but her voice was soft, a little husky. Her black hair fell in waves around her face. There was not a gray strand in it.
“Isabel?”
“Eva. Eva Perón. She was beautiful.”
Eva Perón had died in the early fifties. Juan Perón was overthrown a few years after that. He returned to power in 1973 and died a year later. His third wife, Isabel, took over for him until she was ousted by another coup in 1976. I remembered that from a special we did on Argentina a few months before. Rosaura could have danced, as a young woman, for Isabel thirteen or fourteen years ago. She hadn’t even been born when Eva died. “How long ago was that?” I asked.
Rosaura shrugged. “It seems a long time now.”
I glanced at Martina. Her face was very somber. She sat on the floor with her arms wrapped around her knees.
“Did you have trouble leaving Argentina?”
Rosaura shook her head. “We were here when they announced the coup, performing in Chicago. Argentina was not the same without Eva, and we were part of El Perón.”
“It would have been dangerous for her to return,” Martina said.
“So I stay.”
1 folded my hands in my lap, feeling a slow anger burn in my stomach. Perhaps this was how Sandusky felt when Martina baited him. Martina presented me with an obvious impossibility and expected me to accept it. “How old are you, Rosaura?”
“Ah—veinte-ocho—ah, how you say—?”
“Twenty-eight,” I said. “Eva Perón has been dead for nearly forty years.”
Martina hid her mouth and nose behind her knees. Only her eyes peered at me, studying me darkly. I wondered if I was failing her test.
Rosaura laughed. “I still dance,” she said. “I could not dance if I were so old as you think.”
“I hope I didn’t offend you.” I stood up and extended my hand. This time she took it as if she were a head of state and I, her servant. She rose slowly. “I will contact you about the show.”
“Did we—ah—are we compatiable?” Rosaura asked. Her eyes had a dark fire, and her skin was as pale as a dead woman’s.
“We are compatible,” I said, correcting her pronunciation. “We’ll see how the week’s schedule works out. I enjoyed talking with you.”
“Thank you,” she said. She turned for the door. Martina opened it for her, then opened the door to reception.
“I’ll be with you in a moment,” Martina said. She waited until both doors closed before turning to me. “You’re not going to use her, are you?”
“For Chrissake, Martina, she’s nuts.”
“That was easy.” Martina took a step toward me, moving with what Sandusky called her bantam walk. She looks like a little banty rooster, he would say, out to pick a fight “I would expect a comment like that from Sandusky, but you claim to have an open mind.”
“You expect me to believe that that girl, who looks no more than twenty-four, is actually fifty-eight and still dancing?”
“I expect you to believe that she is twenty-eight and danced for Evita Perón.”
“Eva Perón died in 1952.”
Martina shrugged.
“Everyone gets older. I don’t appreciate practical jokes, Martina.”
“This is no joke,” she said. “People can get stuck in time.”
I sighed. She said she had something that would test my open-mindedness and this certainly did. “If I believed you, what would you have me do?”
Martina put her arms behind her back. “Put her on the air.”
“This program is really important to me. And it’s obvious that she’s not operating with a full deck.”
“She’s very rational.” Martina spoke slowly, as if to a child. “Don’t ask her age, and you will be fine.”
“But she looks—”
“Too young. And no one can see her over the radio.” Martina nodded toward the reel-to-reel. “Senator Kasten waits. Such a limited worldview you have that allows the existence of dipshits like him and refuses the presence of an Argentinian prima ballerina.”
“I know she exists,” I started, but Martina had already turned her back and disappeared out the door. I unclenched my fists. Open-minded did not mean jeopardizing something I had worked for, at least not over something silly like Rosaura Correga. Martina should have understood that.
I went back to the Kasten tape and stared at the grease mark. Kasten was a jerk, and I couldn’t believe that the people of southeastern Wisconsin had elected him to the United States Senate. But I had done nothing about it. I hadn’t taken any risks for anything I believed in since my last year in college.
I shook my head. The argument I was having with myself was silly. I didn’t believe Martina’s roommate. And no one should have to take action for something he did not believe in, no matter how open his mind was.
Or how open he believed it should be.
* * * *
I checked the facts in the campus library the next morning. Eva Perón had died in 1952, as I had thought. She had been dynamic—a radio and movie actress—and beautiful, just as Rosaura had said. The Compañía Nacional de Argentina was performing in Chicago at the time of the 1955 coup. Then the company disappeared, missed its next performance and was never heard from again. Press speculation at the time assumed the company members had gone home to join the rebellion, although many were known Perónistas. None had applied for United States protection or a green card. One newspaper had a photo of the group’s prima ballerina. Rosaura Correga, as she had looked not twenty-four hours before.
People can get stuck in time.
I walked out the main doors onto the campus mall. A chill October wind blew leaves across the concrete. Students rushed from building to building, heads bent, under the gray sky. It felt as if the rain would start at any minute, but it had felt that way for days.
I stuck my hands in my jacket pockets and walked down the hill toward the lot where I had left my car. The students looked younger to me than they had ever looked before. Not that I felt old at thirty; I no longer felt naive. I had lost that searching, hungry look that the best students had. The world was no longer a place of wonder. It had become a familiar, dirty place, like a spacious penthouse apartment—lived in, but not clean.
Martina was trying to give that back to me, that sense of wonder. And for two brief moments, once when Rosaura was speaking and again when I saw her photo, I held a belief that what she said could possibly be true.
If I interviewed her, the interview would center on the dancing and the Perón years. I would have to s
creen the callers somehow, or not open the phone lines until late in the show. If anyone asked her her age, my credibility—and my chance to be a permanent talk-show host—would vanish.
And then I saw her, walking kitty-corner along the hill, the same small willowy woman who had stood in the studio the day before. Her hair streamed behind her in the wind and all the grace had left her movements. She walked with the stalking ease of a young lion. I ran until I caught up with her.
“Rosaura! Rosaura!”
She didn’t turn when I called her name, so when I reached her, I grabbed her arm. “Rosaura.”
“What?” She pulled away from me. Her accent was pure Midwest. Waat?
“Rosaura Correga?”
Her face was the same—eighteen years old except for the crow’s feet around the eyes. Her manner differed. She didn’t drop her gaze and look away. She stared at me, and color filled her windburned cheeks. “What the hell do you want?”
“You’re not Rosaura Correga?”
“Do I look like a Rosaura? Give it a rest.” She didn’t seem to recognize me. Not one flicker of fear or nervousness touched her face.
“You’re not a dancer then?”
“I’m on the crew team. That’s exercise enough.” Even the voice was the same. The same tenor, the same tone, only the accent differed. I knew voices. I worked with them intimately every day.
“Do you have a sister or a mother named Rosaura?” I asked, thinking that the look might run in a family.
“No. My mother’s name is Brigid, and I doubt my Gaelic ancestors would appreciate being confused with the Spanish.” She brushed her hair out of her face. “Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have a class.”
Probably an acting class. She would go far. She was good. She was damn good. I watched her walk away, her slight body looking tall in the wind. Martina had almost convinced me, almost got me to jeopardize my show for a bit of silliness.
Thing was, standing there on the campus hillside, the October wind tousling my hair and bright-eyed students milling around me, I felt suddenly lonely, as if a part of me had flown away with that long-haired girl disappearing in the crowd.
* * * *
I pulled the last cart, signed the charts, and handed over the board to Dick, the 9 a.m. to noon programmer. The “Morning Show” had gone without a hitch, but I had half wanted something to deal with, troubleshoot, to take away some of the nervous energy that had been part of my mood.
I took the albums back to the record library. The stacks were quiet—no one was previewing new albums or pulling records for another show. I was tempted to shut off the station speakers and blast some music of my own —my own private rebellion—but I decided not to.
“There you are.” Martina was behind me, her hands on her hips. “Sandusky wants to go to breakfast again. You game?”
“Not today,” I said. I moved into the jazz section, away from the door, pretending to put music away. Most of the albums I held were old-time rock and roll, the stuff that hadn’t been remastered yet, but Martina didn’t know that.
She blocked the front of the aisle. “You haven’t said anything about Rosaura yet. Have you got a show for Thursday?”
“I saw Rosaura yesterday.” My hands were shaking. “I decided that I didn’t want her on the program.”
Martina tilted her head to one side. “You saw Rosaura?”
“On campus. Only she’s got Irish ancestors and she talks like someone from Waukesha.”
“And it was Rosaura.”
“No doubt.” I set the albums down. I suddenly wanted to face Martina. “You almost had me believing you, you know? I actually went to the library, checked the facts, and I probably would have put her on, if I hadn’t seen her cross campus with all the books under her arms. Theater major, right? Your roommate.”
“No.” Martina gripped the record shelves. “She was telling you the truth.”
“Yup.” I leaned against the Count Basic “Let me tell you a little truth. Your stunt, demanding that I prove my open-mindedness, probably did a lot more to close my mind than anything else could have. The next time someone brings me something that seems to be straight out of the Twilight Zone, I’m going to be a hell of a lot more skeptical. You proved your point. I’m not as open-minded as I like to think I am.”
She sighed. “I actually thought you were a little different.”
“What does it matter to you?” I had raised my voice. I hadn’t raised my voice in years. “It was a stupid conversation over breakfast a few mornings ago. Sandusky’s the Neanderthal, not me. I didn’t deserve this.”
“Neither did I,” she said softly. She touched my cheek. “I really liked you, Linameyer.”
Her use of the past tense deflated my anger. “That sounds final.”
She shrugged. “If your world doesn’t have a place for a twenty-eight-year-old ballerina who danced for Eva Perón, it certainly doesn’t have a place for me. I think I’m going to tell Sandusky to buy his own breakfast. See you, Linameyer.”
She waved and disappeared around the shelves. I followed her, but she was gone by the time I reached the classical section. I should have followed her out of the station, but I didn’t want to know. I didn’t want to know what she thought about herself that made her even more special than Rosaura Correga.
* * * *
The café still smelled of coffee and burned toast. I tried to talk Sandusky into a different restaurant, but he was a regular at the café—and a regular was a regular no matter how bad the food had gotten.
“What the hell did you say to Martina to make her stomp off like that?” Sandusky clutched the battered menu. “She was going to buy me breakfast.”
“Why would Martina buy you breakfast? I thought you two don’t get along.” I pushed the menu aside and decided that I’d try the oatmeal. The worst it could be was lumpy.
He colored. “We don’t, but I had a fight with Linda last night. I guess Martina thought she owed me some sympathy.”
“A fight about what?” I wasn’t really interested in the answer, except that it kept my attention off of Martina.
“The ballet. I told her I liked the ballet, I liked seeing all those beautiful women spread their legs—”
“You didn’t.”
“—and she said that was not what the ballet was all about. She said it was about the impossible. That the dancers were trained from childhood to do something impossible, and then they’d do it, and we should applaud them while we could because they would die young and their spirit was forever encased in their art, or some kind of weirdo female bullshit like that.”
“Linda really said that?” The waitress stopped at the table. I waved my empty coffee cup at her, gaze still trained on Sandusky.
“Yeah. And she said that I didn’t have the sensitivity to appreciate art.”
“She should have known that from the moment she saw you.” The waitress poured my coffee, and I realized that the burned-toast smell came right out of the pot. I pushed the cup aside.
Sandusky added milk to his. “So what was Martina all huffy about? You two got something going?”
“No. She decided I wasn’t open-minded enough.”
“That roommate thing.” Sandusky slurped his coffee. “Can’t say as I blame you. Thst old woman was enough to give anyone the creeps.”
I jerked, nearly spilling my cup. “You met her roommate?”
“Sure, that day Martina brought her to the station. Tiny and bent and some kind of cock-and-bull story about dancing for Juan Perón. If I know those Latin American dictators, she wasn’t dancing for him. She was letting him dance on her.”
“You don’t know Latin American dictators, Sandusky.” I leaned back, feeling tired. Martina had shaken me more than I realized.
The waitress set my oatmeal in front of me, along with a lump of raisins on the side. Sandusky’s eggs looked like they had a few days before, the morning we had come with Martina. I frowned.
“You’ve been saying weird
stuff went on in the newsroom. What were you talking about?”
Sandusky poured catsup over his eggs and hash browns, then stirred them together as if he were making stew. “I don’t know, Linameyer. It’s kind of embarrassing.”
“Kinky predawn sex before the UPI machine?”
Sandusky glanced up, flushed to his ears. “I don’t like her, Linameyer. And besides, I would never do that.”
I nodded. My attempt at levity failed. “I’m sorry. You’ve been wanting to tell me this for days. I’m ready to hear it.”
Full Spectrum 3 - [Anthology] Page 15