Here at the End of the World We Learn to Dance (16 page)

Now with the benefit of hindsight I see more clearly what their attachment was all about. It was to each other, mediated through the farm and its routines. My father wasn't like the neighbouring farmers who stayed out all day. At one o'clock Peter arrived in the door for the soup Jean had simmering on the stove all morning. I remember once when school finished early on the last day of term Megan and I stormed in the door to what we thought was an empty house. We went into all the rooms calling for them until finally there was a sheepish reply from their bedroom. Our father came to the hall in his woollen farm socks and heavy trousers, tugging on his belt, red-faced and a little amused. He offered some lame explanation about their feeling ‘tired'. Meg and I crept to our rooms for ‘silent reading'. We knew we had disturbed an area of our parent's lives which we were expected not to think about. The only solution was to mark out our distance again and wait in our bedrooms for the dinner gong to bring us back together.

On my last morning I stood at the window watching Peter drag his leg on to the farm bike. My mother crept up behind me. For the past few days I had sensed her wanting a moment alone.

‘You know Lionel, your father won't ask for your help. You know that, don't you?'

She joined me at the window.

She said, ‘If he has that hip operation there's a recovery period. The doctor says he's not allowed to do anything.'

She went on to say that he was on the hospital waiting list. The hospital chose the date for the operation, not them, and unfortunately, as it happened, the date pencilled in for the op fell smack in the middle of docking and shearing.

She said, ‘I hate to put this to you…'

I couldn't bear to look at her. I couldn't let her see just what a huge thing she was asking me to give up or to see how desperate and impatient I was to return to the nights at La Chacra. I couldn't wait to get away from their slow, shambling lives, and the door view of my mother propped up in bed, with her Esperanto book held open at a tilt and the sibilant nonsense rising from her mumbling lips as she plodded along lines of language that no one really needed to know or wanted to understand.

16

Departure is such a defining act. Henry Graham's family gave away their beehives to a widow. The house they disassembled to a pile of weatherboards; just an old concrete washing tub was left standing. Billy Pohl took from the cottage only what he could carry in his coat pockets. He left in the dark so the neighbours wouldn't see him. He walked all that day and through the night. He wore out three pairs of shoes until at last he'd walked all the way south, as far as Riverton, where he sat on the rocks and searched the horizon for Antarctica, then slipped his shoes back on and started north. He kept walking until he had walked out all his grief.

Louise also travelled lightly. She arrived at the railway station a full two hours before the train was due to depart. She just couldn't wait to get on her way. She didn't want to linger a moment longer in her old life. The station master ventured out to exchange views on the weather. It was her last conversation in Little River. ‘They say a southerly is on its way…' Years later, whenever she thought of Little River, first stop in her memory was the station master's red face, his pale blue eyes, and the rocking motion with which he held himself.

In Buenos Aires, Rosa's parents, Roberto and Maria, spent nearly a month selecting pieces of furnishings, sorting, itemising, and arranging for their despatch.

This was Rosa's father's idea. It seems that he had woken one morning with the need to do something dramatic in his life. Roberto wasn't his father's son for nothing. Yet he might be criticised for having left his run a bit late. He was nearly sixty. Until now, it had been a sedentary life. Everything had been carefully laid out ahead of his arrival. Into this space his father created Roberto had slipped effortlessly, as if of right. But it was a hand-me-down life, the music business not his but his father's. His father's ambition, his empire. And finally its demise had been Roberto's to oversee. Six shops devolving to the one. The raft that sustained them shrinking to a few bare timbers. Aside from these business misfortunes other tensions waged in the air. The sabre-rattling of the military. The wanton violence of the Montoneros, their scoffing rejection of everything bourgeois, old money, family cartels, American business. The demonstrations grew rowdier, the confrontations more violent. Bombings were frequent.

One evening Roberto invited Maria and Rosa to hear his plans. The repaired to the living room. A large inflatable globe stood on a glass-topped coffee table. Roberto blew evenly on to the Atlantic Ocean; the globe began to spin, and eventually came to rest with his finger on Sydney. It was the only flamboyant act of his life, apart from his death.

In the course of packing up for their new life in Australia, Roberto came upon a cache of letters in an old safe. For years a potted cactus had sat on top of the safe gathering dust. No one had seen the old man open the safe. No one even thought of the cast iron box as a ‘safe place for valuables. It was just the place where the cacti sat.

Here were the letters Louise had written to Schmidt. As well, Roberto discovered a number of letters to Louise from Billy Pohl that had fallen into Schmidt's hands following Louise's death. Louise's own letters to Billy Pohl were to end up with the director of the cemetery out at Chacarita.

One letter stands out above the rest. They say it's always the letter that fails to arrive that carries the weightier news. This letter, written by Rosa's grandfather, had been stamped ‘return to sender' by the Little River post office. Louise had already left, and so several weeks later Schmidt had the painful experience of reading back to himself the news he'd intended for Louise.

He'd been unable to wait any longer.

17

Rosa once said that every change of dance partners brings something new out of you. A new way of being, a new way of moving. An entirely new compass is put in place. The same might be said of countries. ‘Think of the country as the woman and the immigrant as the dancer weaving new steps and patterns upon her.' Rosa was quoting a famous poet.

At Montevideo, after three long weeks at sea, Louise left behind the spacious decks and games of Patience for the crammed immigrant boat and its reeking cargo on the final leg up the Rio de la Plata.

It was late October. The air was warm. ‘Congenial', she'd later write. And after weeks at sea, with just the horizon to concentrate on, land was jammed with detail. She left the Neapolitans, the Galicians and a number of German families with their luggage piled on the wharf, and on unsteady legs set off across a wide dusty road to a row of motorised cabs. She went to the head of the line and showed the driver a slip of paper with Schmidt's address.

Soon the taxi left behind the bustle of the port for the quieter residential streets and the bridal formation of trees. The taxi passed in and out of their shade. Louise gazed up at the icing cake friezes on the building façades. It was roughly as she'd hoped. The layer upon layer of new sensation. The new life arriving effortlessly, like a well-managed stage shift. She couldn't stop smiling. Eventually the taxi drew up outside a pink two-storey house. There was no garden. The house was flush with the street and you entered through a door off the pavement. She noted its cheerful colour, the jagged cracks in its plaster exterior. With a start her eye stopped at the black shuttered windows. She'd reached a stage in the journey that she hadn't properly thought out. So much energy had been invested in her getting here that now she had arrived, the shutters had a cautioning effect on her. They were a domestic detail that raised questions about the piano tuner's new life, things to do with privacy and matters undisclosed, the unsaid things that live in the margins of letters.

The driver tilted his head back and waited. He spoke in Spanish. Then he turned himself around and spoke in halting English.

‘Señora, this is the address' Once more Louise looked up at the shutters, then back the way they'd come. She seemed to remember their passing a hotel.

‘Si.Viejo.'

Viejo Hotel on Defensa. This is where Louise's Buenos Aires story begins.

For a number of days she laid low. The several weeks at sea had left her feeling weak. Her stomach was in disagreement with something she had eaten or drunk. She sat in the shade of her room while she thought about how best to insert herself into the piano tuner's life. At home she would have sat by a window looking out at the wind and rain and it wouldn't have occurred to her that there was another way; that the partially glimpsed is oddly more satisfying. She liked the shutters. At least she liked the idea of them. She liked their hard ruled lines of light. It was as though the day itself was measured. Take this amount of light only, as in a prescription. She smiled. She had just thought of a way to begin a letter to Billy Pohl.

At night she sat beneath the hanging plants out in the courtyard with the other hotel guests, drinking tea, listening and smiling perhaps a little too hard through the conversation of others.

On her third day in Buenos Aires she decided to leave a note for the piano tuner. That way the next step would be up to him.

On the evening of the fourth day a hotel worker handed her a business card—
Paul Schmidt. Importer & wholesaler. Specialist in
musical instruments.

‘Señor Schmidt is waiting at the gate.'

She stood carefully, the way she had observed of the other women, as though rising to one's feet also meant gathering up all one's worldly possessions. She was also aware of the interest from the hotel staff. Their olive faces glowed in the gas light, alive with the prospect of something consequential about to happen.

The last time she saw Schmidt he was bearded, in ragged trousers and bare feet. So it took a moment to adjust to the view at the far end of the courtyard. The snappy whiteness of a summer suit shifting behind the gates. As she approached she notes the changes. The piano tuner was plumper than she remembered— though in a prosperous way. The skin beneath his eyes was moist. She had an idea that he had just hurried away from a big dinner.

‘Louise?'

His voice, too. His voice had changed. It is more accented.

She nodded and smiled back at his astonished face. That too was not as tanned as she remembers.

‘My God, Louise,' he said. ‘It is you.' His hand reached through the bars of the gate to touch her cheek.

Schmidt told her she looked exactly the same. She hadn't changed a bit.

‘Not a bit. Not just a little?'

‘Not a whit.'

This was in bed in the grandeur of the Hotel Madrid where they lay amid wreaths of white sheets, their flushed faces staring up at the ceiling.

Their initial excitement is easily imagined. The assignations. The meetings. The embraces coming after so many years apart.

The shared sense of waking from a prolonged coma and a determination to reclaim what had once worked for them in a cave half a world away. They took walks and meals together. Schmidt made her laugh. He spoilt her. Opened doors for her. He made space in his life for her, generous space. But ultimately it was to be a compromise of sorts, with Louise learning to share Schmidt with a woman he never spoke of. It would be a life spent in the margins of another's life. Furtive. Secretive. Life in fact as they had known it in the cave.

18

Schmidt helped her to find lodgings. After the Viejo it was a step down to rooms off narrow corridors, and noisy courtyards. A whole community gathered behind a single door facing Avenida Almirante Brown in the neighbourhood of the port. Here, smiling Italian women gossiped about the European stranger. The woman without language. The woman without a husband. The woman without children. A woman three times struck down by lightning.

It was the little things that she was learning to claim. She loved the kitchen window. The old sprigs of rosemary on the tiled sill. The window frame with its flaking paint. The security of the sill, the way its bevelled edge helped to locate her, steadied her for this next moment, when she pulled back the window and opened the shutters to the blinding light. The sheer volume of things foreign suddenly pouring through—the block of sky, the foreign curses flung across the courtyard, and below, the mêlée of terrified chickens and the shouts of children out in the street, and the strange birds that sat in the boughs looking back at her.

She felt like a child, learning things over again. Their names. The different weight of things said and things meant.

Schmidt's efforts to teach her Spanish were unsuccessful. She shook her head and made up excuses. She was too old to learn. She was English. Besides, the one person she wanted clear understanding with understood her perfectly.

So, at the
pasteleria
she might point at trays of pastries that looked like deep seashells with custard filling; likewise at the
parrilla
, at the item she had bought on other occasions. She pointed and pointed and if she was feeling bold that day, where she pointed she sometimes stuck a word. As soon as she opened her mouth to speak the others in the shop turned their heads. Who was this strange fish that had swum into their waters? Sometimes she would flush out an English voice. More often it was someone wanting to show off or practise their English. ‘Please, the señora wishes for a piece of the lion.' The world was all the more interesting when not fully comprehended. She smiled graciously.
Gracias. Muchas
gracias.

This was life in the margins of language. In the margins of Buenos Aires. In the margins of Schmidt's life. Nonetheless it came as a shock when Schmidt told her of his wife's pregnancy.

Along with her regular pastry shop and
parrilla
, there was the Astride in Montserrat. She turned up there and waited for Max to bring her an absinth. Max was a short tubby man, his face oval and thick-skinned with discretion. Things said stayed secret with Max. He also had an extraordinary capacity to answer back any kindness shown him, his face bursting alive. She enjoyed watching him strut about the bar, the boyish pride with which he wore his money belt. It hung off his bulging stomach like a gunslinger's holster. The way he expertly anticipated his customer's requests, the chess enthusiasts too engrossed by their game to look up and signal more coffee. As the shops and offices emptied, the bar filled. The drinkers kissed his cheeks, and behind his glasses Max's green eyes would develop a reef of light, a pearliness settling along the tops of his stained teeth. She heard someone call him Max and so the next time he brought her over her drink she was able to say, ‘Gracias, Max,' and witness the heavenly glow that recognition brought to his face.