Here at the End of the World We Learn to Dance (25 page)

For the second night in a row Rosa has failed to show up at the restaurant. Kay is back on and running the ship. To my mind Kay has always looked part of the furnishings, as though she arrived in the same removal truck that delivered the booths, the red carpet and the stained wood.Tonight she looks younger and fresher. She is tanned from her beach holiday. Her eyes look bigger and brighter. She's put a blonde rinse through her hair. For the first time I can imagine her with a life elsewhere. This is a luxury that I don't have.

Back in the kitchen I'm feeling maudlin. No Rosa means no dancing and no intimacy for the second night running. Again we finish up early, and when Angelo comes back with his trays the sight of me gives him pleasure. He laughs and mutters something in Spanish. I don't understand any of it except one word, ‘Romeo'. And as he leaves me to it he gives his crude finger-fucking gesture.

The next day I'm more lucky. On our way to make a pick-up we stop by Rosa and Ivan's house to get some dog ownership papers. As we pull up the drive Ivan says, ‘Might as well switch on the jug since we're here.' In the hall, every step I take seems to creak with the whole overlap of my life with Rosa.

Then there comes a
corte
, one of those turnstile moments. It is as we are wandering up the hall when Rosa steps from the bathroom in her bathrobe, her hair swaddled in towels. This is the first time that the three of us have been in the same room.

Rosa ignores Ivan. She says to me, ‘Ah, it's my favourite dishwasher.' She kisses my cheek. Her bathrobe parts and I smell her soapy scent.

‘Don't I get one?'

Ivan is standing there in the hall, grinning. Rosa slaps her hands on to her hips while she decides whether Ivan deserves a kiss.

‘Have you been good?' she asks.

‘I'm always good.You know that.'

The two of them are grinning at each other. Rosa's look is one of kind regard. Ivan's is of the adoring cocker spaniel kind. For half a second it's as if I'm not there. For half a second I think back to Angelo's teasing gesture. So Angelo is there in the hall with us; so is Billy Pohl and Henry Graham, and I have a feeling that I must look like they did, envious, resentful of the chemistry between Schmidt and Louise. It's the same old dance.

‘In that case…' says Rosa.

Ivan closes his eyes and offers his cheek. But it is a discounted kiss—a kiss on the end of her fingertip which she attaches to him.

In the kitchen she becomes more adventurous. While we are waiting for the jug to boil she says to Ivan, ‘I've been helping Lionel with his life-saving.'

I don't think Ivan heard. Thank God. The jug is burbling away and Ivan's attention is elsewhere. He's turning the pages of his diary for the address of the lovely mild-tempered collie bitch sitting patiently out in the van. Colette was booked in for a long brush, massage and hydrotherapy.

‘Where are you? Where are you? Carl. Choisa. Connie. Colette.'

He looks up to find the two of us observing him.

‘What?' he asks.

‘Life-saving,' says Rosa. ‘Lionel is sitting for his certificate.'

Still Ivan is none the wiser. He looks at me, then back at Rosa.

‘What certificate?'

‘His life-saving. Here, we'll show you.'

Without another word she drops to the kitchen floor and pretends to be the ‘drowning person'. One hand is flung dramatically above her head. Her eyes are closed while she waits to be saved.

Ivan looks perplexed and slightly irritated. He's thinking, will this take long? His eyebrows bristle. He checks the time on his watch.

‘Lionel, I am drowning.'

I check first with Ivan. ‘All right, go ahead,' he says. I drop to my knees and roll Rosa on to her back. I lift her jaw and tilt the head back. Under the circumstances I'm not about to do mouth-to-mouth. So I close Rosa's mouth and seal my mouth over her nose and give four quick breaths.

‘Okay,' I announce to Ivan's frowning face. ‘Now we watch for the chest to rise.'

That's what we do.The two of stare at Rosa's ample chest, Ivan with a cup of tea in his hand. In her own good time Rosa's chest begins to rise.

‘There,' he says dourly. ‘She's alive.'

He glances at his watch again. Immediately we're back on dog watch. There is a ‘collect' he wants me to do later. He's double-booked a shampoo with a toe-clipping and massage.

‘Freddy's the spaniel's name. Now be gentle with him. In fact, if I were you, I'd carry him out to the van. The old woman will be watching to see how you interact…' Then the voice from the floor speaks up.

‘See, he does not care if I drown or survive. All he cares about is his dogs. His schnauzers. Corgis. Foxies. Toe-clippings and dog massage.'

Back in the van Ivan is more talkative than usual, more interested in me. He's interested to know how long I have been life-saving, how my interest came about, that sort of thing. Rosa is in the restaurant that night. It's busier than the previous three or four nights, but still nothing to get carried away with. But with Rosa back at the tiller there is a keenness amongst the waitresses. Tonight they are looking for things to do without first being asked. The door between the front and back of the kitchen swings back and forth all night long. For the first time in a while the tape deck is switched on; later, I smile to myself as I hear Gardel turned up. I rush through the last of the dishes and pans, wipe down the benches, dump my apron and present myself at the front of the restaurant.

There are no stragglers. No hangers-on among the waitresses, thank God.The chairs have already been put upside down on the tables. So the space is cleared and ready for dancing.The compilation of steak-eating standards ‘La Cumparsita', ‘El Choclo' and ‘Felicia' have been turned up. Only this time, rather than dance, Rosa says she wants to be ‘rescued'.

‘This morning you didn't do such a good job of saving me. I want the kiss of life this time,' she says.

She doesn't wait for an answer. Already she is crouching down to place herself on her back. I wait until she has arranged things. Then I get down on my knees and begin to clear her air passages. I turn her head this way and that. I lay her exhausted limbs at her side. Now I pinch her nose and she shakes her head. ‘Not the nose one, Lionel. The kiss of life.Yes? Good. Then let us proceed.

And this is what Ivan sees. My mouth placed over his wife's mouth.

This is what he says: ‘Lionel?'

His voice isn't raised. There's no anger, let alone rage. Just a polite inquiry.
Lionel.
I look up. And there he is—in the doorway. His hands which usually live in his trouser pockets hang at his sides. They look as if they want to grab hold of something. We must have missed him during the orchestral section of ‘La Cumparsita'. There's a look of distress on his face. But a little perplexity is hanging in there as well, as if to say, if I'm quick about it he might be open to an explanation.

But I'm not quick. I'm far from quick. I've never been in a situation like this before. I'm in deep over my head. And it's left to Rosa to talk our way out of this.

‘He is saving my life,' she says matter-of-factly. There's not a single trace of fear or apology. It's as if she is snappish and irritated with Ivan for interrupting this critical moment in her resuscitation. Ivan hasn't taken his eyes off me.

‘Is that what you're doing, Lionel? Life-saving? Is that what I'm seeing here?'

‘Sure.'

And I don't feel like I'm lying when I say this.

Diggs is testing me for my certificate in a day's time. I explain this to Ivan, and go on a bit about the various methods: mouth-to-nose, mouth-to-mouth.

As Rosa picks herself up from the floor Ivan's interest switches to her.

‘There,' she says, and she takes a deep thank-God-I've-made-it-back-to-the-beach breath. Absurdly, all three of us look in the vague direction of the sea.We listen to Rosa's improbable account: ‘I was swimming and suddenly this large breaker crashed down on me and pulled me under. I couldn't breathe. I thought I would drown. Then I felt the strong arms of my faithful dishwasher around me.'

She smiled gratefully.

‘Thank you, Lionel.'

She looked unflinchingly back at Ivan.

‘If you were a husband who loved his wife you would thank Lionel for his heroics.'

By now Ivan is looking very fidgety. His eyes are twitching dangerously. You can see him struggling with what to believe, as opposed to what he has to believe.

He says to me, ‘I guess I'll be seeing you, Lionel.' And as he says this his eyes stay fixed on me for an unnatural length of time.

‘Sure. Tomorrow,' I answer.

To Rosa he gives a curt nod. They haven't finished discussing this by any stretch of the imagination.

‘I'll see you at home,' he says.

We watch him leave. Wait until his shadow passes by the restaurant front and we hear the van start up. About now I remember to breathe again. I feel terrible. Typically, Rosa is ready to move on to the next thing. She comes towards me with her figurehead smile. It's a case of where were we…oh yes. ‘Now we can dance,' she says.

The next day when I showed up at Ivan's plant his van wasn't there and the door was locked. An envelope marked for my attention was pinned to the door. Inside it was a cheque for the money Ivan owed me, and a note thanking me for my help but saying he felt he could manage on his own.

33

I was holding on to an extra few days. A few more days to enjoy Rosa if I could. Come the end of the month I'd be back home, on the farm. Between now and that moment I was determined to extract as much as I could from the little time left to us.

Diggs didn't need me at the pool until 11.30 am. So until then I was free to do whatever I wanted. I asked Rosa if she would come to my flat. It was perfectly safe; Ivan would be working with the dogs. She was hesitant, her explanation uncharacteristically vague.

‘It's not so easy, Lionel.'

‘You can drive over at nine. What's so hard about that?'

‘Well as you know, for one thing I am asleep. And besides…'

‘Besides what?'

‘And besides now you're hectoring me.'

She didn't know of my plan to leave at the end of the month. She didn't know of the abyss staring back at me. I was planning to tell her soon. But that, like the difficulty of leaving on a particular day, kept shifting ground.

‘You could come to the pool,' I said. ‘You never come to the pool. I miss our time there and the stories.'

It didn't strike me as a big thing to ask but Rosa appeared to turn it around and look at it from all angles.

‘Yes,' she said. ‘This once I will come.'

The weight she gave the word ‘once' passed me by at the time.

After weeks of bathing with filthy dogs the sparkling water of the Stanley Hope Pool was dazzling, the last of January's heat lifting the reek of chlorine from the damp patches. The jostling bodies. The girls flirting under my zinc nose. I don't know how it started but somehow my name had got around the pool.
Hi Lionel! Over
here. Hey, Lionel!

During the lunch hour I had to be on my mettle. The lane swimmers, women mostly from offices downtown, hated getting splashed. If anyone banged into them they stopped swimming, and trod water while they raised their goggles to glare at me or Diggs, as if it were our fault. The older women in their tight one-piece bathing suits, bathing caps and goggles, treated the water like work, ploughing up and down the lanes. Afterwards they dragged their joyless bodies up the steps, their faces and heavy thighs covered in red splotches of exertion. By comparison Rosa got in and out of the water, almost amphibiously. She swam effortlessly, too, the water neatly parting for her, whereas the other women appeared to push a wall of water ahead of themselves.

The pool was a different constituency from the one at La Chacra—they were kids a year or two younger than myself. I'd forgotten that world and its close, exploratory, furtive ways. A boy and girl getting off on each other's charge as they lay together on the hot tiles, their sides just touching.

I saw all these things while I waited for Rosa to show up. Contrary to her word, day after day passed where she failed to show.

At the restaurant I'd ask her what happened. Why didn't she come? These conversations were always rushed since she seemed to be juggling things more and more, the restaurant and some undisclosed area of her life outside. I noticed her on the phone a lot more, smiling into the receiver. She often went early and left Kay or Angelo to lock up.

Or else Ivan was there these days to pick her up.

So we weren't even dancing any more.

When I peppered her with questions she looked sorry and regretful. She didn't know what to say to me. Finally, one night as I was badgering her, she stopped me to say she had some news.

‘Yes?'

What possible news could be more important than her reason for not coming to the pool?

‘Not now. Not here,' she said, glancing around the kitchen.

‘But you will tell me?'

‘Yes.'

‘When?'

‘Tomorrow. Tomorrow I will come to the pool.'

‘So tomorrow you will definitely come? You promise?'

‘This I said already. Now you are nagging me,' she said.

She didn't say at what time. I decided it would be early afternoon. That would give her time to wake up, shower, knock back her orange juice and black coffee, and still have time before she needed to think about the restaurant. Not that she seemed to give it much thought these days. A drunk in the night had thrown a beer bottle and shattered the glass in a corner of the large front window. That was a week ago. Instead of getting it replaced, she'd asked me to help Angelo tape some cardboard over the web of broken glass.

Around one o'clock I started getting restless. Diggs noticed me casting my eyes in the direction of the turnstile so he started checking his watch from time to time, responding to my anxiety with a shrug of his shoulders, a tug at his crotch.