Here at the End of the World We Learn to Dance (22 page)

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 had 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

Christmas Day. As soon as I woke I thought, Ivan's back. Right now he is in bed with Rosa. It wasn't just depressing. It completely immobilised me. Yet as I lay on my mattress it also occurred to me that I knew Rosa as Ivan must know her. I knew her as a husband did. Her touch. The feel and taste of her mouth. The amazing stillness of her sleep. Her way of lying on her back in layers and clouds of smoke, her words coming unstuck from the back of her throat as she floated them up at the ceiling.To that extent Ivan and I had something in common.We shared an intimacy with Rosa. It didn't occur to me that it might be a different intimacy or that intimacy, like dancing, can be a variable experience.

I got up and dressed. I stood at the window for a while then went out to the kitchen, switched on the jug and returned to the window. This was the first Christmas I'd spent away from my family; away from the farm.

This was also the time that Louise used to dread. Holiday time. Schmidt's family time. Stuck in her flat, in a nowhere state of mind, changing records on her RCA Victor, watching the light come and go in the window.

I reread the short letter from Jean asking me to call home on Christmas Day. They hadn't heard from me in such a while. Meg was already there. She had come home a week earlier than expected for some reason. My big sister wanted to hear from me. The letter ended: ‘PS. Reverse the charges.'

I thought of them at home, grouped around the long dining table. I imagine the Wheelers would be over for the dinner, Chrissie in one of her soft woolly tops, my father swaying on his one good leg, uncorking bottles, making sure everyone was happy, that everyone's spirit was turned up to his own. I found myself back at the window, smiling down at an empty street, a cup of tea in my hand. There was no milk. And no place open to go and get some.

I didn't own a TV or a radio. But I did have my tape deck. I put on Troilo and tried to follow the notes on the score of ‘Danzarin'. But after a while this was too much like homework; I put it to one side and stretched out on the mattress to wait for Rosa. I was sure she would turn up. Hour after hour my optimism remained undimmed. Any moment now I would hear her on the steps outside.

Two deadly boring days dragged by before there was a knock on the door. I sprang up, all my nerve endings jangling. At last. I pulled on a T-shirt and hurried to the back door. But it wasn't Rosa. It was a younger woman in jeans and brown hair, wearing stylish dark tortoiseshell-patterned sunglasses. She was someone I knew I was supposed to recognise. But for the moment I stood there and said nothing. Then she moved her sunglasses back.