The Freedom in American Songs (6 page)

But then began a different kind of song: a break in the feverish Spanish passion wars. One of the men began playing an accordion—
Under Paris Skies
—and the dancer in the white dress—a woman I now supposed must be Leni—floated from stage left to meet … yes, it was … in a
beret
, and carrying a folded umbrella … Ben, floating to take her hand and, straight out of a painting by Toulouse-Lautrec, the two waltzed together while the other dancers caught their breath backstage and perhaps drank gargantuan glasses of cold water. Ben did not do any of the steps I had seen him practise in the park. He was all soft-shoe. Together he and Leni finished the waltz and sailed offstage, not one clack of a castanet. Had he worn a striped jersey with a red cravat? I couldn't remember. I left the barman a tip and rose from my solitary table, which I realized felt lonely, and went home.

What had I expected? A cabaret full of people in mantillas? Bangles to the elbows? Billows of cigar smoke and a few treacherous moustaches? I had not expected a Parisian waltz, that was for sure. How disappointed Ben and Leni and the other dancers must have been, to find not enough people had shown up to make even the appearance of a real audience. How I'd wished I could turn myself into forty people.

I did not see Ben selling his magazines at the fruit market for some time. But when I did, I was with Gerald. I'd told Gerald about Ben, about the day in the park and the flamenco evening and how we should buy
L'Itinéraire
whenever we saw anyone selling it, and he always bought it now. I introduced Gerald to Ben and Gerald bought a copy. It featured a cover story about a New York saxophone player who had been homeless throughout the nineties. Ben and I talked about the show. I told him I'd attended and he said it was too bad about the bridges and the traffic and I agreed, and then Gerald and I went into the indoor part of the market where they sell hard salami studded with lumps of white fat, and where there is sometimes another man, an older man, standing by the garbage can and selling more copies of
L'Itinéraire
. He has a red face and gets out of breath and leans on the garbage can as if it were a podium. Gerald usually buys the magazine from him, and gives him a two-dollar tip each time. So this time, as Gerald approached and the man saw he already held a copy of the magazine, having bought it from Ben, his face grew redder.

“Where did you get that?”

“From Ben,” Gerald did not intercept my signal to shut up. “Down there … outside, in front of the liquor store …”

The red-faced man is not normally a fast-mover. But he whisked his papers under one arm and leapt away from his garbage can. “He's selling them here, at the market?”

Before Gerald could say anything else, the red-faced man was out of there, round the corner and having it out with Ben over territorial rights. I don't know what happened but I know the next time I saw Ben he had gained another ten pounds and lost about the same amount of life-force. His neck and arms were bruised and he had difficulty coming up with conversation. He'd fallen off his bicycle, he told me. He'd had a bit of a hard time. A few setbacks. He managed a wan smile. I wondered about his lettuces and carrots in terra cotta pots—whether they'd ever happened, or had remained in the land of dreams.
Come on, Ben
, I wanted to say,
get your trowel, dig the sacred soil
. But who was I to talk, my own flamenco shoes, studded with glorious nails, stuffed in a sack and shoved in a corner of the closet; my comb with its roses collecting dust on top of the Quality Street toffee tin where I keep my needles and thread?

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

You Seem a Little Bit Sad

 

 

Somehow Cara always
saw
the young man from the halal meat counter after she'd had a mortal blow to happiness. With his slicked hair and his exuberant greeting, he was like some sort of Middle Eastern meat angel, she thought. And how was it that, out of all his customers, who must have numbered in the hundreds each week at that place, he remembered her, later, out of context, as she encountered him by chance on Rue Belanger or on Jean-Talon, on her way for Lebanese cucumbers at the market? And it was not as if she were a good customer of his. Whenever she saw him she felt guilty, as she had bought no more than three packets of meat in her first couple of weeks in the neighbourhood: lamb loin chops, chicken marinated in yogurt and herbs, squares of veal for stew. She had asked him if the veal was pork, to which he replied as kindly as he could that there was no pork in the shop, and though she felt him shower forgiveness upon her for thinking there could be pork at a halal butcher, she felt she had paraded her ignorance before him, and she began going elsewhere for her small pieces of meat. But he saw her on the street nevertheless, and gave her the most enthusiastic greeting, and it was always when she was feeling lonely or blue; when the centre of morose sadness had spilled from that distant location in the farthest sky of her heart and begun saddening the first meadow, the very first ground in her heart's forefront, so that each waking step on the street was a struggle against depression.

At first she misinterpreted his greeting, which seemed sincere and as joyful as an orange bursting with juice, as perhaps a ploy to get her business back again. She fancied he was, if not the sole owner at his butcher shop, at least a co-owner, and her business might mean twenty dollars or even forty a month, and multiply that by however many customers he had, well, it was no wonder he tried to be nice to them. It surprised her that he recognized her even at night, or in a scarf, or with her sunglasses on, or after she had given up meat altogether and lost quite a bit of weight. No matter what she did or how the darkness fell, the halal butcher recognized her on the street and gave her the kind of greeting she might have expected from a beloved old family friend. Perhaps, she thought, he belongs to the Pentecostal church, or to some other evangelical crowd trying with all its might to spread the love of Jesus and gain tithing converts. She did not assume he was insincere, only that it was possible he had been misguided. She did not entertain at all the notion that he might find her attractive, since she had for years considered herself to have grown invisible to men, and besides, he was twenty years younger than she. She decided, unconsciously, not to take his kind greetings personally, yet she could not help feeling precisely the lift of heart one would feel upon being greeted by someone who unreservedly loves us.

What was wrong with summer? Why did spring promise loveliness by way of magnolias and cherry blossoms, only to burn one's retinas and make people sweat from the inside out until they descended into a kind of torpor? And it wasn't just summer and it wasn't just now. It was other times and places—Paris in her youth, for instance. What was wrong with Paris, whose cafés, she remembered, had thrown spears in her heart and given her dreams in which she lost all her teeth? She remembered discovering coriander leaf in a Thai café near Montmartre, and if that wasn't the very taste of springtime turning into a lonely, deep summer heat, then Cara did not know what was. Even now that she had a husband and a child and a clothesline that crisscrossed clotheslines of some European neighbours who handed olive bread and arancini over the garden fence, the lonely taste of coriander made her suffer, as did the clanging of Montreal's church bells and the sound of the postman dropping her bills and her husband's
Harper's Magazine
through the letter slot onto the doormat, now that their dog had died. Foolish, barking, hair-shedding nuisance of a dog—fifteen-­year-old hound of stinkiness—when he had been alive she had not realized that she loved him. Now, with the days topping thirty degrees, she had to wear her sunglasses or the neighbours would see she had been sobbing, again, about the dog's death. How could you not realize you loved something or someone for fifteen years? What was wrong with her? Before she had moved to Montreal, a shop girl in her tiny town had once bought her a coffee in a paper cup at the gas station. The girl had been no more than twenty, and had simply paid for one of the gas station's coffees and given it to Cara. Had Cara, even then, broadcast to the entire world that she suffered from a terrible loneliness so deep it made her at times unable to function? Did the halal butcher boy see this now, as he approached her, two weeks after her dog had died? She had not seen him in short sleeves before and had not known his arms were covered in thrilling tattoos. He had a life outside the butcher shop, of course, but she had not thought about what it might entail. Were there not Irish songs about butcher boys? She believed there were. She had, in fact, once had a crush on a boy who would later become a butcher. There was a letter from him in a box somewhere, written after he had begun his apprenticeship. In it, he had been stung by a bee, and this was the cause of a delay in his training. There had been no word of romance in his letter, or in anything about him—but it had been understood that something might happen between them if she were to come back to the town where he lived, the town where they had met when she visited for one summer. And what of this butcher boy, here in Montreal, twenty years her junior, now that she was middle aged? Was there a hint of romance there? She had told herself there was not, but …

It was insane to invoke her mother, but the mind knows no rules about what it will or will not throw on the shores of one's consciousness, and now Cara remembered everything her mother had said about tattoos. It was impossible for Cara to simply observe this young butcher's tattoos without hearing her mother beseeching her never to get a tattoo herself, since the human body was meant to continue unmarked, just as it was from birth. How would it be to gaze upon this man's tattoos and truly see them, and appreciate them for their artwork and their stories, without a layer of her mother's disapproval interfering in the act of observation? It was impossible, for the reason of the tattoos alone, let alone the age difference, the fact that Cara had a husband she loved, or any other factor … impossible to entertain romantic thoughts about the middle eastern butcher. Still, she entertained them. They were not fully formed thoughts, not complete at all, but they existed as he walked toward her on this day in which she still felt heartbroken over the loss of that nuisance of a dog. She saw him getting ready to give her his enthusiastic greeting, and she decided she would be the first to speak this time. She forgot they had always spoken French to each other.

“Hi, how are you doing?”

“Pretty good.” She remembered the French now, and was surprised that he spoke English perfectly well. The baker and the café owner and all the proprietors in her neighbourhood spoke French to her although French was not their native language, except for the Haitian grocer. They were Italian and Japanese and Lebanese, and she enjoyed the idea that these people for whom French was a second language, as it was for her, had taught her the words for many kinds of foods and had also been responsible for her learning a fair amount of French syntax. But now the butcher said, “Yes, pretty good, because I have quit my job and am going back to Mexico to get my wife. She is coming with me then, and we are going to New York.”

He was Mexican! He was not Middle Eastern at all, and never had been. Why had no one in Cara's school days ever taught her the slightest bit of proper geography? Why, even now, in middle age, could she not tell the difference between a Mexican butcher and a Middle Eastern one? He ate pork all the time when he was not at work, and when he was at work he was not the co-owner at all, but an employee.

“It was,” he told her now, “a hard place to work.”

“I'm happy for you that you will be with your wife.” It was true, Cara was happy for him. She was happy for him because he had welcomed her when she had been a newcomer to town, not knowing her from Adam yet treating her with his enthusiastic smile.

“We have been apart for a year and a half.”

Cara wondered if he had had girlfriends. She wondered anew if she herself might have been considered by him as a prospect, despite her age. She found it hard to imagine a man going without a lover for a year and a half. Was it her imagination, or did trouble ripple across his face as he thought of how it would be to get used to being together again with his wife, after all this time? It would be hard for anyone. It would be hard, in some ways, for his wife, too. Maybe there were many things he did at home that got on her nerves, that she had not had to put up with for all this time. Would they have a happy reunion?

“In New York,” he said, “I will be able to dance more salsa than I can here. Salsa is everywhere there.” He looked happier about this than he had looked about his wife. Cara imagined him gliding across every last part of a vast dance floor with his smile and his tattoos. He was becoming more interesting by the moment, and she did not even know his name. They were talking with each other now like two very good old friends. Lilac time had nearly passed and now there were extravagant irises bursting open in all the gardens behind the wrought iron railings.

Salsa frightened Cara, as did hot springs, fondue parties and the double-cheeked kiss of greeting practised by everyone in Montreal. She did not like anything that prevented her from exercising her natural reserve, or that might involve an accidental exchange of sweat or saliva, and this whole interchange with the now Mexican butcher had always threatened to become overly demonstrative in some way, yet she had been the first to say hello this time. It would take only a slight departure and she might find herself following this man home to his bachelor's apartment where he might make that delicious spicy soup she had tasted in the Mexican café down the street, the soup containing hominy and a chunk of perfectly roasted pork. Perhaps his pillow would be visible through his bedroom door, a dent from his head still there from this morning. She was, in fact, a person who required the open end of a pillowcase to face away from her so that she never saw it, so that all she saw of even her own pillow was an unbroken puff of plain smoothness. This conversation was, really, quite frightening the more deeply she entered it. She felt certain she was about to be invited to the last salsa evening the Mexican butcher might know here in Montreal before the arrival of his wife, and she did not have the faintest idea how to dance. Dancing alone was different—she had always danced alone and would be the first to get up at any dance that did not require one to be part of a couple. In fact, strangers had asked her if she were not a professional dancer or a dance teacher, when they saw her dance alone. But dancing with a partner was different. She could not bear it when a dance partner took her hand and did that horrible thing whereby they lift one's arm and proceed to duck under it and twirl around and begin fishing around with their other arm to link up in some sort of mysterious order of motion that surely no one could be expected to follow. Life was full of things like this, and she avoided them at all cost, which was probably why, she now saw, she felt so unhappy and alone so often. The whole world was not afraid of dancing together as she was. The whole world knew, she saw all of a sudden, how to take the hand of a Mexican butcher and twirl with him and dance as dancers had done from the beginning of dance itself, which was the beginning of humanity, a club to which Cara had never felt she belonged. Why did it take, for her, such special bravado to dance, to laugh, to twirl, to speak to a stranger on the avenue? Why was it that others knew what life was all about while she did not even know how to make small-talk at the most casual gathering? Who was the Mexican butcher's wife, and how was it that Cara knew the wife was a real human being whereas she, Cara, was …

“You seem a little bit sad,” the Mexican butcher said.

Quickly she fumbled around in her mind for a reason, because you couldn't blame coriander you had eaten in Paris decades ago, nor hot springs that had frightened you in New Mexico, nor the fact that you wished you could dance salsa like an expert, nor the fact that summer had arrived with a strange, searing baldness about the sun that blinded and scared you and made you stricken with loneliness, and she said, “Yes, it's because I lost my dog. My dog died.”

“The lovely black dog—I remember seeing you with that dog. I am sorry your dog died.”

And he was. The lovely Mexican butcher was sorry Cara had lost her dog. He would understand, had she told him, just how it felt when the postman dropped her bills and magazines on the hall carpet with a thump and there was no corresponding howl. He would know just what she meant if she told him she couldn't imagine the dog unable to hear that sound he had always howled at maniacally, with an earth-shattering yowl that always woke the baby in the upstairs apartment.

“I imagine my dog,” she told him now, “somewhere too far away to hear it when the mailman drops a letter through our door. I can't see any other reason why the dog doesn't still howl. In fact I imagine if I listen carefully enough, very very carefully, I will hear him howling from wherever it is he has gone. Isn't that silly?” This was a thing Cara had not even told her husband. It made her feel ridiculous but now she was glad someone knew. Someone knew her dog had not died but had merely moved far away to a place where she could no longer find him. She knew, somehow, that the Mexican butcher, with his wife who had been gone a year and a half, with the salsa lessons to which he looked forward in New York, with his own pork consumption at home after work, when he had still had his job, and with the little cloud that had rippled across his face while he thought of how things would be different soon, when he was no longer single and would need to consider the happiness of a wife who was present rather than distant … yes, this man would understand how the distance of her dog made her sad. He would even understand that there was a lot more to her melancholy than the dog itself, although he might not ask her to go into detail. Sometimes, with the right person, you did not have to map out every coordinate of a situation. Some people were naturally sympathetic, and the Mexican butcher was like that.