Your Face Tomorrow: Dance and Dream (8 page)

 
Tupra, on the other hand - or was he already Reresby when we were on our way to the restaurant in the Aston Martin that he drove on nights when the aim was to make a good impression or to toady up to someone — went into long, complex disquisitions on the lady which went beyond her and her insignificant case (on the lips of the thoughtful Reresby she no longer seemed quite so insignificant). It was when I heard such subtleties from him that I saw the influence of Toby Rylands, of whom, according to Peter Wheeler, he had been a disciple, and then I would see again how linked their characters were, or was it merely that ability, or that shared gift which they also attributed to me (in all other respects, Tupra was completely different): 'Bear in mind that, deep down, what fills Mrs Manoia with horror,' he remarked as we waited at a red light, 'is not her own imminent physical decay, against which she is struggling as best she can, but the troubling intuition that her world is about to disappear and is already dying. Some of her oldest friends have died in recent years, a few very unexpectedly, it's been a bad time; in some cases, her friends have retired, in others, there are people who would like to speed them on their way to retirement. It's no longer easy for her to find companions to go out on the town with every night of the week, and nowhere will you find proper parties with hosts and everything on a daily basis, still less in Rome, which that killjoy Berlusconi and his maladroit ways have transformed into one long yawn' (I translated the rather literary word 'maladroit' to myself as
mala sombra,
it doesn't mean quite the same thing, but never mind, and 'killjoy', which I'd never heard before, I took to mean
ceniza
or, perhaps
aguafiestas).
'I mean companions in the old sense, the traditional sense. There are some younger people following in their footsteps, they want to find favour with Manoia, because, in his field, he has no intention as yet of stepping aside.' Here I noticed the school of Sir Peter Wheeler: just as Wheeler had taken ages to explain to me what exactly Tupra's 'line of work' was, Tupra was now nonchalantly mentioning Manoia's 'field', in order not to have
to say anything more about it. Not that I really cared. 'But she feels slightly lost among all these apprentices, too much of a veteran. That's the worst that can happen to someone who has been young for far too long, whether because she entered the adult world too soon, or because she made one too many pacts with the devil (that's just a manner of speaking, of course, such pacts are purely a matter of chance). Then, because she didn't have children, she continues to be the little girl of the house, and that brings with it a lot of bad habits, she pays dearly for the contrast as soon as she steps out into the street, and in any disco she finds to her horror that she is suddenly competing for the title of oldest person there; it's very corrosive to the soul, that moving between two worlds. She'd be better off at the casinos.'

I was surprised to hear not the slightest hint of irony in his use of the word 'soul', which is not to say that no irony was intended. The car started off again, but he kept talking. With him it was impossible to tell when he knew something for sure, with facts to back him up, and when he was offering a purely personal interpretation of what he saw, whether he was up to date on the Manoias' precise circumstances or was merely making conjectures - or, in his case, decisions - based on other occasions when he had met them (or perhaps, who knows, only the one occasion): 'Can you imagine a world in which you hardly know anyone any more and, even more humiliating, in which no one knows you, or only from hearsay? That is what she is beginning to see happening, without as yet admitting as much to herself, of course, without actually putting it into words, possibly without the slightest awareness that it is this, above all, that is making her feel more embittered and terrified with each day that passes. But now and then I've seen in her the same look of precariousness and surprise that enters the eyes of the old when they drag their feet and live longer than expected, outlive almost all their contemporaries and even the odd descendant, it's even happening to Peter Wheeler, and he's in the fortunate position
of having his replacements ready, which is the privilege of people who are admired by those who are going to replace them and who do replace them, or of the great maestros. But what hope is there for a nice lady who was once very pretty and still is if you like, who is fond of parties and celebrations, and whose greatest merit was that she made life around her a little brighter, superficially at least?' Just as, in cars in England, I never got used to sitting in what was to me the driver's seat and not having the steering wheel in front of me, so I could never be quite certain what was intentional and what accidental - meaningful or superfluous - in each sentence spoken by Tupra: there was always a doubt in my mind as to whether I should simply listen to them or note them down with my retentive faculties at full power, paying close attention to every word and not taking a single syllable for granted. Sometimes I adopted the latter strategy and it was terribly exhausting being under such constant tension. 'Which is no small thing, of course, when you've been around some very unpleasant lives,' added Tupra or Reresby and started instinctively looking for a parking place, only to realise at once or pretend to realise: 'Ah, the staff at the restaurant will park it for us.'

'When the time comes for finding replacements or spares, what hope is there for anyone,' I thought, as we got out of the Aston Martin, and Tupra gave the doorman the keys along with a list of detailed, not to say obsessive, instructions. 'Both the admired and the unadmired or the despised, the maestros and their followers, Tupra or me or that jolly lady, what aspirations can we have?' I said to myself, not listening to him now, since he wasn't speaking for my benefit. 'You content yourself with whatever comes your way and are even grateful that something or, above all, someone does come your way, even if they're only diluted versions of what has been suppressed or interrupted or of those you miss; it's hard, very hard indeed to replace the missing figures from our life, and you choose a few or none at all, it takes an effort of will to
cover the vacancies, and how painful it is to accept any reduction in the cast of characters without whom we cannot survive, can barely sustain ourselves, and yet if we don't die or, at least, not very quickly, it is always reducing down, you don't even have to reach old age or maturity, all it takes is to have behind you some dead beloved person or some beloved person who ceased to be beloved and became instead a hated omission, our most loathed erasure, or for us to become that for someone else who turned against us or expelled us from their time, removed us from their side and suddenly refused to acknowledge us, a shrug of the shoulders when tomorrow they see our face or when they hear our name which, only the day before yesterday, their lips still softly whispered. Without actually saying as much, without formulating the idea in our minds, we understand how difficult this business of replacement is, just as, at the same time, we all offer ourselves up to occupy vicariously the empty places that others assign to us, because we understand and are part of the universal, continual, substitutional mechanism or movement of resignation and decline, or, sometimes, of mere caprice, and which, being everyone's lot, is also ours; and we accept our condition as poor imitations and accept that we live ever more surrounded by them ourselves. Who knows who is replacing us and whom we are replacing, we only know that we are someone's replacement and that we ourselves are always being replaced, at all times and in all circumstances and in any endeavour and everywhere, in love and in friendship, in work and in influence, in domination, and in the hatred that will also tire of us tomorrow, or the day after or the next or the next. All of you and all of us are just like snow on somebody's shoulders, slippery and docile, and the snow always stops. Neither you nor we are like a drop of blood or a bloodstain, with its resistant rim that sticks so obstinately to the porcelain or to the floor, making it harder for them to be denied or glossed over or forgotten; it's their inadequate, ingenuous way of saying "I was here" or "I'm still here, therefore I must have
been here before". No, none of you, none of us, is like blood, besides, blood, too, ultimately loses its battle or its strength or its defiance, and, in the end, leaves no trace. It simply took longer to erase, and made the drive to annihilation work harder too.'

And so in the disco, when Mrs Manoia had drunk moderately during supper and moderately while she watched, longingly and with foot tapping, the crowded, heaving dance floor - two moderations can, after all, make an excess - and she was already calling me, in Italian, Jacopo or Giacomo, with the stress on the first syllable, and was, of course, addressing me as
'tu'
and urging me to address her likewise, she took advantage of a truce or a change of register in the music on one of the two dance floors to insist on dancing a few slow, or perhaps only semi-slow, dances, first with her husband, who took off his glasses, breathed on them, polished them with a cloth and gave her a myopic look declining her offer, then with Tupra, who raised one open hand to indicate his unfinished duties of hospitality and business towards her unwilling spouse (it was too noisy for anyone to be able to talk except by shouting directly into someone's ear, or else by signs alone), and lastly with me, who had no option but to say yes. I was struck by the fact that, despite the foreseeable results of her initial attempts and despite my having been the one who had been looking after her throughout the evening and although she was, by then, professing for me as much warmth as I was beginning to feel affection for her - transitory emotions which, by the next morning, we would be unable even to recall, without, however, any feelings of guilt on either side - she had respected the hierarchy even when asking for a partner, which indicated a strong, deep-rooted sense of respect.

And perhaps that was why, having offered each of us three men, in the correct order, the opportunity to dance with her, she then felt she had been given permission to wrap herself around her enforced
partenaire
in the most tempestuous and even somewhat immodest manner, by which I mean that she pressed herself furiously, indeed almost painfully, against me. Not that she intended to hurt me, it was, I think, simply that she was not entirely in control of her true volume (just as backpackers are unaware of the amount of space they take up, because, however hard they try, they cannot feel the beloved burden or limpet on their back as part of their own body), nor could she have realised the impact on my breast of her two breasts, which were as hard as logs and as pointed as stakes - her bust must have been made out of the densest wood or, possibly, granite. The woman had gone too far, she had lost all sense of proportion in her zeal to fortify and shore them up, probably in so many stages that her memory deceived her as regards the date of the last time and the number of stages in total. They were delightful to look at, and her canoe or gondola neckline doubtless flattered them, but, when one thought about it, there was absolutely nothing nautical about that particular promontory. What could the jolly Mrs Manoia have had stuck, embedded, placed, propelled, injected or built inside herself - marble, a citadel, iron, two pantheons, anthracite, steel, it was like being impaled on two stout stalactites, or two pointed irons minus the flat part, as sharp-prowed as an iron but entirely round. It seemed to me a degenerate form of a contemporary madness, and an abuse too; I could understand why her husband might avoid being assailed by such twin bulwarks, and Tupra, I imagined, who had a quicker, better eye than mine, would have calculated at a glance the risks of any full-frontal collision (I refer to the collision of the male with those horizontal pyramids or, perhaps, giant rubies, for the blouse or top with the boat neckline was a slightly watered-down shade of wine red, and in the neurotic disco lights it flashed and even glowed iridescent).

It was, however, very hard to get angry with Flavia Manoia, or to slight her, knowing that one so easily could: she was too affectionate, cheerful and vulnerable, all three things at once, and only one of those things would have been enough to stop me brusquely rejecting her or even moving discreetly away. And so I withstood the pressure of those two horn-like cones, trusting that she would be the one to put air and distance between us, although the word 'trusting' is far too weak, for the truth is, I was desperate for her to do so. Reresby would have been right, as he almost always was, to commend her legs, if he had ever got round to doing so; and one had to acknowledge that the lady knew exactly the right length of skirt for her build and stature, three inches above the knee; if you saw her from a distance, with her lithe, swaying sensuality, her firm, robust bust, her shapely, rather hard calves and thighs, as well as that eminently screwable arse, as a man with no time for good taste might have put it, she could give precisely the impression she intended every night and thus oblige her husband - as I saw immediately with a slight sense of unease - to put on his now clean glasses and keep watch out of the corner of one eye on her every step and every embrace. The devil does not always demand exaggeration or at least not from everyone, and he doubtless makes pacts of infinite gradations as regards appearances, and is perhaps very exact about distances: sometimes he is kind to a body or a face far off in the shadows, but will condemn and destroy it in the light and from close up (he does not normally allow the opposite to happen). This was not exactly the case here - Mrs Manoia's features had, in Vong's restaurant, seemed extremely pleasant, although not tempting, definitely not that - but in exuberant motion and with a man in her arms she looked far more attractive than when in repose and gulping down or, rather, sucking at bits of crab: sufficiently attractive anyway for someone leaning at a bar, some metres or yards away, to stand up and scan and sniff the dance floor and, more than that, to begin to wave both hands histrionically when he recognised the individual she was clutching to her with practised fanaticism, otherwise known as her dance partner. I, on the other hand, did not, at first, recognise him. Mrs Manoia made me perform so many turns - she wasn't so much doing a semi-slow dance as a semi-fast one, and I was dancing to her tune and to her commands - that I could not fix my eyes on any one point for more than a few tenths of a second, it was worse than being on a carousel. So much so that I took him for a black man, due to the poor visibility and my own precipitate movements and because he was wearing a very pale jacket, several sizes too large and with massive shoulder pads, and the only people I have known who dared wear such an item of clothing, loose but structured, cut very straight, were certain members of that race, especially well-built, nouveau-riche types belonging, loosely, to the world of show business: athletes, boxers, TV celebrities, dandified rappers. For a few seconds, I thought he must be one of them, because in his left ear gleamed an earring, a hoop rather than a stud it seemed to me, which was too large and loose for the taste of the modern, ultra-late scene of the time, although I don't know about now (I don't go out so much), as if a gypsy had lent it to him or as if he had stolen it from a pirate of the sort that hasn't existed for two hundred years, not at least in the West. Luckily, he wasn't wearing a hat with a brim broad or narrow, or a scarf tied in a knot at the back of his head buccaneer-style, bandanas they call them now (he might have decided to go for that had he wanted a coordinated look), he wore his hair greased or smoothed or, rather, pulled back, so much so that for a second, confused moment I feared that he might have secured it with something worse still, namely, a black hairnet like those worn by Goya's
majos
or, perhaps, as unashamedly sported by the period bullfighters I've seen depicted in engravings and paintings, again by Goya. If I say luckily, this is not just because those who wear hats nowadays, never mind people who wear them indoors, strike me as pathetic individuals, not to say enormous phoneys (they have pretensions not so much to originality in style of dress as to some kind of biographical-artistic originality, men and women alike, although in the latter this seems not only more affected, but completely unforgivable, and women who wear berets, either straight or at a rakish angle, deserve to be shot), but because when I finally realised the identity of the dude or groover or guy, black or otherwise, standing at the bar (this was in a brief moment of stillness allowed me by my Vatican spinning top: she stopped turning for about ten seconds and I got a clear, ungiddy view of the figure waving his hands in the air), it occurred to me that had he been wearing a gypsy violinist's hat or a pirate headscarf I would not have been able to bear it, the mere sight of him, I mean, and still less his company in the presence of people who knew me, I would have found it unbearable to have anyone associate me with that man, even if only as a fellow Spaniard: I would have denied myself in order to keep him at a safe distance, I would have invented another name (Ure or Dundas would do, since those names were free that night), I would have pretended to be a complete stranger and, of course, British or Canadian through and through, I would have said to him in a heavy fake accent:
'Mi no comprender.
No Spanish.' And confronted by his probable, barbarous attempts at English, I would have closed ranks entirely: 'No Spanglish either,
hombre.'