Here at the End of the World We Learn to Dance Read online

  Rosa looked up from her little adding machine, saw me, and called out across the empty restaurant: ‘Say hallo to our new kitchenhand. His name is Lionel.’ Ivan raised his hand and looked away. He really didn’t want to know. He just wanted to get out of there. He jangled change in his pocket while he waited for Rosa to lock up. But she couldn’t do that until I had finished out the back. In the meanwhile she was gentle and solicitous with him. ‘Ivan, why don’t you sit down and have a drink? Lionel will be done by the time you’ve finished. Why don’t you pour yourself a brandy? Or a soda or something?’

  Ivan just shrugged and jangled change in his pocket.

  Then there was a period when I didn’t see him at all. We all assumed he was waiting up at home, planted before the TV or in bed. Ivan was referred to less and less. I’d been there a month when one night a waitresses came back to say that Rosa had left Kay in charge while she drove Ivan out to the airport. We took that to mean that the marriage was over. Ivan was flying back to Melbourne. Or was it Sydney? Someone said Ivan ran with some Yugoslav crooks. Ivan had come to mean bad business. So we were all relieved for Rosa’s sake that she’d finally pulled this sick thorn from her side.

  A weather watch went out on Rosa. Everyone figured this would not be a good time to ask Rosa for any favours or to be late. We were expecting a fire storm. So it was a surprise to find Rosa more subdued; well, we figured that was also to be expected. It was over, and even if it had been a bad marriage (we’d decided that was the case) a certain amount of grieving was understandable. Kay, who was the oldest waitress (she may have been as old as thirty-two) set the tone by speaking in a hush and generally moving about as though in an intensive care ward. She’d been through a marriage break-up herself. ‘Believe me, once is enough.’ Her quiet efficient manner carried through to the kitchen. Plates were placed delicately rather than dropped in a pile. Angelo would come all the way down to my sink rather than yell out to ask when he could have the meat pan back.

  Some things continued the same as before. The low dismal cloud of smoke hanging over Rosa. When I stopped to say goodnight she forced herself to smile, parted with a quick ‘Good night, Pasta’ and went back to her adding machine. I found myself wishing that I’d accepted that offer of a drink. I should have just swallowed my nerves and gone with the moment. Because the other thing that had happened, and it was something I wanted to draw to Rosa’s attention, was the music. For whatever reason she’d stopped turning it up after the last waitress ran out at the stroke of midnight. So that final hour I spent scrubbing without the salve of Troilo, Gardel and Goyeneche.

  I resolved to mention this and one night as I was leaving I called across to Rosa in her booth. I said, ‘What’s happened to the music, Rosa? I miss it.’

  She kept looking down at her figures, her whispering lips moved to the end of the adding machine printout. It was only a matter of seconds but I felt like I’d interrupted her with some unforgivable triviality. Finally, she looked up and studied me through the grey smoke.

  ‘What you want? You want to dance?’

  ‘Yes,’ I said. Though this wasn’t true. I didn’t mean that. I just missed the music.

  Still, I would have thought she would be pleasantly surprised to hear this. Instead, her expression didn’t change at all. She just ground out her cigarette in an ash-tray. A boy at primary school used to sit on the hot asphalt and grind red ants to a pulp under his fingertip. Rosa rotated her finger the same way and with the same relish when she ground out a cigarette.

  ‘Well,’ she said, after what was a drawn-out consideration. ‘I don’t think so.’ That was all she said. She stuck a new cigarette in her mouth and felt around in the coils of adding machine paper for her lighter. The matter was apparently at an end. So I nodded back. That was fine with me. Better in fact. It was a huge relief. I’d done the right thing. Now I could go. ‘However,’ she said. ‘If you are interested…’ The blackbird in the hedge suddenly stopped twitching; its eyes glowed back at me.

  ‘Yes,’ I heard myself say.

  ‘Then you will need to take some lessons. The lessons I can arrange and then, perhaps I will dance with you.’

  6

  The white lights, the long brown floorboards. The soft pastel reflections of the dancers catching on the dark glass. Dancers finding a place to sit and change out of their street shoes, then standing to press their weight into every corner of their shoes. One foot, then the other. The men less experimental, more in a hurry to tie their shoelaces. One man’s eyes glinted madly behind his glasses; the jaw of another set with canine anticipation. I watched a number of women step forward from the fringes; like reluctant swimmers, wanting, desiring, but not quite trusting. Big women in heavy lipstick and in dresses that were too short. Skinny ones who held their hands in front of themselves and looked much like they must have once behind a school desk.

  This scene repeated itself in dance classes across the city.

  My first lesson was in a small school hall off a road leading to the rubbish dump. This was in early spring. I got off a bus full of sneezing people, and as I crossed a tennis court, I could smell the gorse on the hills. The puffy white clouds. It didn’t feel like either the right time of day or the right time of the year to be taking a dance lesson.

  A single car, a Lada, was parked on the tennis court. It occurred to me that I had the wrong school or the wrong time. Either possibility would have been fine. I’d tell Rosa that I’d got the time wrong. And the idea of dance lessons would slowly fade.

  That’s when I heard the first sad bars of ‘Milonga Triste’ tumble out the doorway of the school hall.

  There is something undeniably sad about accordion music (out of German or Austrian hands, I mean) and especially in an empty hall. It makes a mockery of empty spaces. It puts you in mind of a phoney civic occasion created for a South American despot.

  As I stood in the doorway, accordion music sweeping towards me, I took in an astonishing fact. I was the only dancer. The one other in the hall beaming at me, a short, dark-haired man in black trousers and a white buttoned-down shirt, must be Mr Hecht. Rosa had given me his contact details. We’d spoken on the phone and he’d managed to ease some of my fears. I told him I was a beginner.

  ‘No problem.’

  ‘No, but I’m a seriously bottom-of-the-class beginner.’

  ‘So is everyone when they first start.’

  ‘I’ve never danced, you know.’

  ‘We try and cater for all levels.’

  Nothing I said was a surprise to him.When I mentioned Rosa’s name, and what a good dancer I thought she was, all he said was, ‘Rosa can dance.’

  Mr Hecht glanced up. He looked at his watch. ‘You’re in luck,’ he said. ‘Usually half a dozen turn up for this class.’

  I didn’t feel lucky. Where were they all? I wanted a crowd.

  We waited a few more minutes. Mr Hecht played around with his tape deck. He experimented with a number of tapes. Voice/instrumental/back to voice. Then he too looked around the hall as if the others might be hiding underneath the chairs. On one of these inspections he discovered my feet. I thought I saw him flinch.

  I was in the same sneakers I wore every day, to my lectures, to wash dishes at the restaurant. Mr Hecht ran a finger across his lip, then darted out to his car, the Lada parked on the tennis court. He came back with a pair of hand-made Brazilian boots for me.They were black leather, soft and pursy, with zips up the sides, and squeaked when I walked.

  I squeaked out to the middle of the floor where we began with some stretches. We both kept stealing glances at the door—I caught him once and he smiled at me and said, ‘Very unusual.’ Another time a car drove in off the street and turned around on the tennis court. A face looked speculatively towards the open door and we looked speculatively back and the car drove off again. ‘Well, I suppose we might as well begin.’ I thought he sounded a touch regretful.

  Some of what he had to say was already familiar. Rosa had stressed th
e need for flex in the knees. Now I followed Mr Hecht on the ‘tightrope’ walk, ankles and knees brushing, the toe of the extended foot probing for the floor ahead. We walked up and down the hall like that for several minutes, sliding, open-hipped, thrusting forward. I couldn’t stop smiling at my silky self. ‘This time with your eyes closed,’ said Mr Hecht and immediately I felt my balance go. I righted the ship and started off again, frontwards and backwards, until a word of caution from Mr Hecht found me a step away from crashing into the chairs along the side of the hall. Now he introduced a step to the side. So the movement was one step back, one step across. He moved to his left and I followed.The dance instructor and his stumbling shadow.

  I left the hall with the pleasant hazy feeling of achievement. Of course, for the entire lesson all I’d done was place my feet in the spaces left by the dance instructor. It wasn’t like I’d had to lead anyone.

  The true test came the following Sunday night. In a narrow hall, home to an Immigration Advisory Service during the week, I found myself partnering a girl my own age. She had lovely olive skin. She could have been from Tunisia or Malta. She wore blue tights. A brief cotton top bubbled with her breasts and left her midriff bare. A body piercing flashed goldenly near her navel. The first time she smiled up at me I saw a wad of white gum in her teeth. The bit of chewing gum turned out to be an integral part of her communicative effort. It was quite sweet really. Once, when by some fluke the music and a nicely judged turn neatly cohered, her eyes lit up; she drew her lips to dangle the white thread of gum, and I felt rewarded.

  At the restaurant another routine established itself. After the last waitress had left—it was usually Kay—and after I’d finished up in the kitchen, Rosa would invite me to show her what I’d learnt and then make the necessary adjustments to the steps I’d imperfectly picked up.

  A moment’s hesitation on my part would sometimes cause us to stall. Rosa’s response depended on the length of delay, or the extent to which I’d become stuck. If I quickly got us moving again there would be a grunt of approval. But when the solution didn’t come swiftly enough she would lean back with her face brimming with circular inquiry, and if I was still at a loss she would treat me to that doleful look of someone waiting for their correct change from a complete idiot on the other side of the counter.

  She tolerated these surrenders at the start, patiently explaining that there was no correct answer. Beyond the solid foundation of the ocho there was no ‘lawful sequence’, as she put it. To stall just gave you away. It revealed an ‘arid imagination’, she said, or as I preferred and which was probably closer to the truth, a lack of confidence to express myself so intimately. I was off a farm. The bare hills and the wind—these were my companions. Dogs and sheep, and the sleepy-lidded sky. I wasn’t used to people so close up. Intimacy was a faraway notion. I had no experience of it, and because of that I recognised there was a line for me to cross—a line that separated private and public, containment and abandonment, secrecy and expression.

  For all that, Rosa had opened the door to something new. The gancha, and the equally sexy ‘sandwich’ step. These days I found myself drifting to a different part of the library. In the margins of my notes on economic history I found myself jotting down new bits of information —

  ‘que brada: an improvised jerky contortion, the more dramatic the better’

  ‘corte: a sudden, suggestive pause’ (a prelude to que brada)

  ‘that reptile from the brothel’ (a reference to the tango in El Payador newspaper)

  ‘What was once orgiastic devilry is now just another way of walking…’ (Borges)

  ‘Tangos are spectacular confessions. They are public displays of intimate miseries, shameful behaviour, and unjustifiable attitudes…’ (Savigliano)

  And this, what an Argentine poet had to say about the ‘famous’ La Moreira who lived with her criollo pimp. ‘There was no marriage contract, only constant seduction.’

  This was new air I was breathing. Much of my life up to then involved a world I had known in advance of actually experiencing it. School. University. Sports. Drunkenness. I put a tick in each box as I came to it. Rosa represented a different kind of eddy. She was foreign and an entirely unexpected element in my life.What’s more, the dance lessons and the shabby halls represented a world that hadn’t been officially sanctioned. It’s possible that I liked the idea of taking dance lessons more than the actual lessons themselves. To begin with that was probably true. But at some point a genuine interest kicked in. I found myself more interested; interested in Rosa as well. And although I wasn’t aware of it at the time I was also taking the first steps towards hearing the story of Schmidt and Louise.

  It began predictably enough with a bit of criticism. Rosa said I didn’t give anything to my steps.They lacked heart and conviction. I might as well be putting out the milk bottles. No. Forget the milk bottles. She said, ‘It is as though you are swimming underwater. Every so often you rise to the surface and lunge for a breath. Your face is practically changing colour. You are drowning before my eyes.’ Then, less dramatically, ‘Lionel, watch, I am going to teach you to breathe.’ Rosa advanced her foot and as she moved her weight forward she exhaled. ‘Yes?’ ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘So, perhaps we will practise our breathing…Give me your hand.We will walk to the end tables…’ That’s what we did, hand in hand, pressing my leading toe into the carpet, driving it there with an exhalation. ‘We are exaggerating, of course,’ she said. ‘But the breath will help give shape and character to how we dance. One last thing, please. When you breathe out aim down at the floor. Not that I am worried.’

  The next night we have finished one dance and are waiting to begin another when Rosa says, ‘Still, technique is just part of it. You can learn that inside a month, frankly. But to learn the feeling…well, that can take years. A lifetime to learn.’ She must have noted the deflating effect of this news because she followed up quickly with a more encouraging timeframe. She said, ‘If you haven’t fallen in love by the end of the dance you haven’t danced the tango.’

  ‘One dance?’ I said. Even by Rosa’s standards this was extravagant. ‘One dance might only be three minutes.’

  ‘Or shorter.’

  ‘Or longer.’

  ‘Yes. Possibly. Of course, as the case may be.’

  ‘Three minutes to fall in love?’

  I was feeling more secure in my employment these days so I didn’t try to hide my scepticism.

  ‘This is a fact,’ she said.

  ‘Oh, a fact. So you can prove it? After all a fact is…’

  ‘I know what a fact is, Lionel. And I know it to be true because it has happened.’

  ‘To you?’

  ‘No,’ she said carefully. ‘Not to me…’

  She pursed her lips, ready to say more but some other thought intruded and had a cautioning effect. Her attention shifted to Table 14. Her expression changed to annoyance. ‘Lionel, is that a dinner plate I see left out?’

  Mr Hecht had been Rosa’s idea. For no reason other than to show my independence I felt I had to seek out another teacher.

  Harry Singer, a cyclist and retired greengrocer, gave lessons in a studio above an Indian restaurant. Harry worked with another, younger teacher, a foreigner, Frederico, who took the more seasoned dancers.

  Whereas Mr Hecht was precise in his movements and description, Harry was like the elderly shopkeeper he had once been dashing back and forth between the shelves and his counter. ‘Okay. We’ll try this…Watch…’ His hands pawed the air for a partner. He wasn’t good at remembering names, but if he stared long enough and looked flustered in the right direction, sooner or later a woman would detach herself from Frederico’s group and drag herself up the leper’s end of the hall.

  ‘Right. I want you to do this. Like this. Walk behind me.’

  I became the third dancer, the shadow at the grocer’s back, tracing out his steps, his bony head looking back over his shoulder, correcting me. ‘Like this,’ he’d say. In
this copy-me style of Harry’s I learned the gancha where the woman flicks her heel inside your forward-thrust leg. Harry had a warning: ‘Some don’t like it. Personally I don’t mind, so long as she doesn’t use my trousers to wipe her shoes.’ This remark produced a nervous twitter.

  Harry also introduced a rock ‘n’ roll spin, a move of his own, and nothing to do with tango, as I discovered. He demonstrated with Diane, a short blonde woman with a wonderfully reassuring voice and manner. ‘I can’t believe this is your first time,’ she said. Of course I had lied. And once, as I spun her inside the arc of my arm, she actually applauded. ‘Good. Very good. I’ll dance with you any time.’ Harry wasn’t happy, though. His arms were folded. His face hung disapprovingly. ‘That last spin,’ he said, ‘it happened too far away. Keep your hand flat against the back and let them spin around it.’ He and Diane demonstrated and Harry’s hand rode around her back, waist, round to the front. He winked. ‘Once you’ve got them there you don’t let them get away.’

  I tried to introduce the move to Rosa, and as I went to spin her I felt her resist. From the half turn where we had stalled she gave me a look of incomprehension. ‘What is this? What is this you are trying to do?’ It was as though I’d made an improper suggestion. She picked my hand off her.

  I didn’t want to mention the retired grocer’s lessons. I didn’t want her to think I had been elsewhere, ‘behind her back’, or that I didn’t have confidence in her judgment or Hecht as a dance instructor.

  She looked at me suspiciously.

  ‘Just improvising,’ I said.

  ‘You may improvise. Sure, that is the tango. But perhaps wait until you’ve learnt the steps. Yes?’