Here at the End of the World We Learn to Dance (21 page)

28

Can I add here that nothing is ever quite as you expect or hope it will be? In Louise's old neighbourhood of Almagro a street has been named after her beloved Troilo, but there the association ends. Some forward-thinking city planner on his way up in 1950-something, to judge by the surrounding boxy architecture, has seen fit in the name of modernity to seal the cobbled road. Progress takes many shapes, and happily the tar seal is coming apart and in patches an authentic scrap of Troilo's cobbled past is revealed.

Perhaps Troilo stood here? Or over there? You take another step to assert the possibility. You glance around, speculating. That view of the old plaster façade, the last in the street, that too can be added to Troilo's and Louise's neighbourhood.

The combustive roar you hear is the traffic streaming down Corrientes. Several blocks down from Troilo a splashy new shopping mall, all glancing window and light, takes the Gardel name. The original market of Gardel's youth and this new air-conditioned consumer's palace are, so I'm told, approximately the same place. A uniformed guard said as much when I went in to use the flashy toilets. Around the corner from the shopping mall a new statue of a Gardel smiled back at yet another note-taker.

Richer pickings are to be had at the corner of Corrientes and Sanchez de Bustamante, where, the approximate whereabouts of Gardel's backyard has been preserved. A clumsily hand-painted sign reads—Carlos Gardel Quinta. If you stop to listen you will hear a recording of a songbird from an electronic device attached unobtrusively to one of the trees.

Music? It remains constant. Gardel and Troilo and Goyeneche. The big three still command huge sections of any music store; it's almost as if they haven't died. You can buy their painted portraits and photos at the fleamarket on Plaza Dorrega. There, you can drop a coin into a dancer's hat. And on the other side of the square a thirteen-year-old boy singer is introduced to the crowd as the ‘young Gardel'.

One drizzly midweek night, marooned on a downtown island in the vast Avenida de Julio with more than a dozen lanes of traffic passing in both directions, I happened to look up Avenida Cordoba and, directly ahead, blinking in to a hideously green neon was this:

L

A

C

H

A

C

R

A

In the restaurant window four sheep carcasses were being spit-roasted in the manner of a beach barbecue. A large steer clothed in brown woolly-eyed innocence stood in the entranceway. A line of tables with starched white cloths marched back to swing doors at the rear. After staring in the window, I walked back to the traffic island where for some time, oblivious to the traffic if such a thing can be imagined in Buenos Aires, I stood looking look back at the neon of La Chacra, mildly exhilarated to have arrived at the source.

In every other respect the city I find myself in is different from the one in which Louise lived. Buenos Aires has spread to the pampas; swallowed them whole. There is the traffic, of course. God knows, it never stops, except intermittently beneath my hotel window and then only for an hour between five and six in the morning. The yellow taxis are so numerous you could walk across their tops from one end of the city to the other. The
milongas
are hot, breathless places where the young dance in sneakers and the elderly throw away their crutches. The matinee sessions at La Confiteria Ideal are heavily patronised by the senior citizens who have adopted grace to sidestep their daily ailments. In Buenos Aires, at least, the dance floor remains the spring of youth and eternity. The parks belong to the dogs; after Paris, Buenos Aires is the greatest city in the world to be a dog. They are a famous sight for the tourists—ten, fifteen, twenty of dogs at a time, their leashes fanning out from the dogwalker's leather-gripped hand.

Turning to the attractions of my own guidebook, the location of Troilo's
danzarin
turns out to be a muddy
dique
on the Buenos Aires waterfront. At first it's hard to see what could have inspired such a stirring melody. There is the climbing white backdrop of the city. There are the breakwaters; a lone tree, like the last of its kind, perches on the end of one. You pass the glassed-in restaurant setting of the Buenos Aires yacht club. Then you come across the pier where Louise and Schmidt used to rendezvous, and there you find the whole drama of arrival and departure—the moment of giddy anticipation and the flat sadness because of its passing that is the spirit of the man who wrote Rosa's favourite song.

On the day I visited, fishermen lined the pier, their heads and shoulders drooping over the top rail. Now and then a fish rose from the muddy water in a silvery flash. I didn't stay. I walked on to the end of the pier. It's easy to see why Schmidt hated meeting Louise here. It's the only place in Buenos Aires, at ground level, at least, where you are aware of the horizon. And the horizon is there to remind us of what we seek and what we have left behind. It is the dividing line of experience. While she waited for Schmidt to show up I like to think of Louise drawing up her own list. On the deficit side: the want of a happy domestic life with Schmidt, children, grandchildren. And the continuation of one's own story that progeny carry within them. On the other side of the score sheet, romance.

Louise weathered revolution and a war in which her host country sided with the enemy. At least this time Schmidt's name was less of a liability. She saw the rise of Perón and his wife, Evita. I imagine Louise kept her political leanings to herself. I have a sense of her harbouring conservative tendencies, possibly finding some things to admire in Perón while disdaining his efforts at ceaseless self-promotion. But this is just wild speculation, something to toss about in my head while my hand rakes the peanut bowl in the bar at the top of Honduras—remember that fork in the road with its diminishing point through the trees. There was talk of another coup when I visited Buenos Aires. People shrugged. It is possible. Maybe. Maybe not. They moved their fingers through the baskets of peanuts.The talk might as well have concerned the weather. It will rain. It will shine. If you just sit patiently it is like nothing ever happened.

Small schoolchildren in their white smocks and looking like miniature chemists floated by the bar window. Rain had started to fall. A dog walker slipped on a cobblestone. The melancholy beer drinkers stared at their last mouthful sitting at the bottom of their glass.

I sat gazing out the window at the fork in the road. The sooty branches of the jacarandas probed the sky and at a distant point appeared to provide an arc across Honduras. The defiant faces of the cart boys employed to pick up dogshit from the city streets looked in the window at two girls their own age peering at the screen of a laptop—youth in its various guises, each thinking itself unique and like the world has never seen. I took another sip of beer. My attention floated back to the apartment building at the top of Honduras and I noted how it fronted on to different streets. I thought about the lives of Señora Schmidt and Louise, and how they had backed on to each other—neither particularly aware of the other except as a distraction or background noise. Pleasantries exchanged in the hall or in the lift; in my beery state I was starting to see them as two butterfly wings attached to the corpus of Schmidt. He needed both to fly.

On my last day there I hadn't quite found what I hoped to. In a harebrained moment I decided to knock on the door of Louise's old apartment. A plainly flustered woman answered and handed me a crying baby. She mistook me for the father returned at last to relieve her of her babysitting duties. Through broken Spanish and sign language I managed to persuade her to let me in and roam like a city health inspector. I looked quickly and felt no connection at all; disappointed, I turned to thank the poor, confused woman. I signed off with a ludicrous semi-military salute, hurried for the stairs; across the courtyard a hoard of grubby-faced porteño children howled at my back—‘amigo! amigo! señor! señor!'

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.