Here at the End of the World We Learn to Dance (17 page)

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Authors: Lloyd Jones

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BOOK: Here at the End of the World We Learn to Dance
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She sat up to the window trying to concentrate on the night settling in the trees and rooftops, watching its slow spread to the street. She was trying not to think of Schmidt at home, kneeling by his pregnant wife, rubbing her swollen ankles and feet. She finished her third absinth and Max brought her a copper tray of peanuts. Since by now the bar was quiet he pulled up a chair and listened to her talk on and on; and why not? Drink stripped off her layers as it did with everyone else. Max was a good listener. He nodded at a surprising number of right places. He responded to the nuances by sighing and shaking his head. He brought her a coffee and a piece of torte. She talked. At some point he got up to pour her a brandy. A little nightcap never did anyone any harm. By now the hour was late. Only the chess players remained as he pulled on his coat to walk her to the bus stop. ‘Bub bye, Louise. Bub bye,' his chubby hand waved.
Bub bye.
Words Louise had taught him. At home, she walked straight to her Victor RCA.

19

Every cloud has its silver lining. The pregnancy and successive others saw Schmidt's wife give up her day-to-day duties in the business. Schmidt waited until he felt the time was right, then casually announced without fuss or fanfare that he thought he'd found a possible replacement. A quiet, able woman. A foreigner. A weary sigh departed him as he said this. ‘I don't know if it will work out. We'll have to wait and see.'

In 1932, Louise joined Schmidt's staff where she remained to the end.

During the day, she worked shoulder to shoulder with Schmidt. At night, they danced
milonga
, pressed together like a clothespeg.

Over the years, at Christmas and at other busy times, Schmidt would employ another assistant. These intrusions were temporary and Louise accepted them with indifference. She had seen such help come and go over the years, and one more eager-to-please face cannot break down the knowledge that this newcomer, like all the others before them, is simply filling in time and space.

Without another life to divert her she poured herself into Schmidt's business.

Among the staff she was known as the reliable one. The trusted one. At the end of the day she scooped out the takings and counted the notes and coins into neat piles of separate denominations. She knew the business backwards. Her knowledge was deferred to. The new assistants were directed to ask ‘Mrs Cunningham'. ‘Mrs Cunningham' was the filing system. She was the store. This quiet, unassuming presence rarely spoke. She saw to the paperwork. She dusted. She filled in orders in her neatly scripted English. She visited the Customs Authority. There she did business with the clerk, an elderly poet who had once visited Edinburgh, and who looked forward to her coming so he too could practise his English, sometimes reading to her from
Treasure Island
, the poet standing to recite. Louise seated, her ear cocked ready to correct pronunciation. R.L. Stevenson was the custom clerk's favourite ‘Scottish author'.

For her part, at the shop Louise was deliberately courteous in an old-time employer-employee way. She was always careful to address the piano tuner as ‘Señor Schmidt'. Never ‘Paul'. She often had to repeat herself. Then it would be like soft rain falling, so quietly did she speak. ‘Señor Schmidt?' Until finally he turned, perhaps a little surprised to find her standing there—his ‘pale moon'. It was the end of the working day. City faces hurried past the front window. Heads inclined, some holding the brim of their hats.

‘Ah, Louise.'

Here it was—a quiet acknowledgment won. Automatically Schmidt looked for his wife who unexpectedly had dropped in. The Señora was in his office on the phone talking loudly to her friends. The sound of her voice left him momentarily disoriented. It often happened like this when Louise and his wife were in the same room. His wife was the one to suddenly change into a foreigner. Now, turning back to his ‘shop assistant', he saw the dust mites hanging in the air. The years piled up between. Her face, as always, was resolute, betraying nothing. Her thin pale lips barely moved as she spoke the name of the subway station and the time.

At a later hour, on the platform beneath Avenida Corrientes, the subway roar was deafening. People bumped in to one another and the mouths of these reef fish moved in voiceless complaint as they shifted around a middle-aged man in a dark coat with his arms wrapped around a thin woman standing half out of her high heels.

Once a year Schmidt would visit Colonia in Uruguay. His wife usually joined him for the trip to the quaint Portuguese settlement across the River Plate. There was a musical instrument business on Avenida General Flores and two more retailers upriver in Montevideo, for whom Schmidt was the agent and supplier. Bandoneons. No one could get enough of them.

The first year his wife was pregnant Schmidt went alone. The following year found her burdened with baby. The city sagged under a heatwave. No one moved if they could help it. Señora Schmidt sat in their shaded apartment. The thought of the three-hour boat journey made her shudder. She couldn't possibly go.

Schmidt complained in a quiet, grumbling way. He alluded to the various functions he'd been invited to and for which he needed her to be there. ‘Well,' she said. ‘Why not take the moody shop assistant. She could use some fresh air.' Schmidt pulled a face and walked over to the window, his heart in a flutter. Beneath the window, the park. Beyond, the river. He looked without taking in anything. There was a general impression of browns and greens, of a world poised for rearrangement. Now he heard his wife come up behind him and place her hands on his shoulders. ‘Just this once,' she said.

It would be the first of many trips to Colonia. Schmidt arranged rooms at a different address to the one which he and his wife had stayed at in the past. At the dead end of Calle de España, a cobbled lane dropping down to the water's edge, on the top floor of a three-storey
casa
, Schmidt and Louise raced each other to close the shutters.

They slept through the hot afternoon. At night they picked their way over the cobbled streets with other holidaymakers. They walked slowly, arm in arm, both feeling young again. Louise delighting in the genteel ruin of the old town. Schmidt too, feeling the bloom of youth upon him, once put his back out when reaching up for a branch of flowering japonica. No matter—it was just a muscle spasm. Smiling bravely he squeezed out the perfume between thumb and forefinger before planting the stem in the top buttonhole of Louise's white blouse.

To onlookers they must have seemed like a couple uncommonly absorbed in each other; not your average honeymooning couple for whom the candle burns brightest at that one showy moment, but then not typically middle-aged either. Look at how the señor assists the señora over the roughly paved
calle
. Look how he bends to kiss her cheek. Look at how they dance, his cheek pressed next to hers.

Schmidt kept his appointment on Avenue General Flores. He turned down the rest of his social engagements, complaining that he felt unwell, listing the heat and his nervous digestion, then spent three more days idling with Louise, at the end of which he left to make his rounds in Montevideo, leaving Louise to wander at her leisure around the yellow railing that traces the Colonia waterfront, and to stab her finger at the offerings listed on the menu.

20

In Buenos Aires, Schmidt's wife told friends of her husband ‘convulsions', his flip-flopping in bed. ‘He worries too much. The business.
The business.

It is always on his mind.' Insomnia. It was the devil's curse. There was a time when she wondered if he was possessed. She consulted an Indian shaman who instructed her to crush the eggshell of a particular bird in to Schmidt's coffee. She followed the shaman's directions and watched for her husband's reaction. Schmidt raised his cup, tasted the coffee, swallowed. She saw him reach a hand to his throat. He coughed once and worked his mouth to get rid of the grittiness. Angrily he asked if she had put salt in his coffee. But nothing else came of it. Schmidt did not expel the promised egg with its captured troubled spirit. And his restlessness continued.

While the rest of the city slept she lay in bed listening to her husband stalk around the apartment, his slippered feet laying trails of insomnia about the place. She told her friends he wore out the carpet between the kitchen and the window. She heard him switch on the jug. The low murmur of radio music.
That
dance music he always listened to. A cough. A sigh. And finally the snip on the door as the insomniac let himself out into the night. She understood that he had to do something with himself. He had to get out and about. He reported back to her, somewhat shrilly, there were others similarly affected. The pavements were filled with people like himself. Night people. Insomniacs who stopped one another to exchange a word or offered a passing nod of recognition.

The routine was well established. Schmidt would walk several blocks from the apartment on Avenida del Libertador, perhaps stop in at the all-night bookstore run by Felipo, a friend of his wife's. It was, a useful alibi, and not too much of a nuisance. There was always a book of numerology to discuss or a tall tale to hear from a Bolivian's volume of stories. Afterwards he'd walk another block, turn down a side street for a door with a red light, outside of which there was a taxi waiting to drive him to one or another
milonga
, though nearly always in Almagro, a neighbourhood that his wife and her friends never went near, and where, he knew, Louise would be waiting for him, in a chair by the wall, politely declining all offers to dance, her eyes on the door; and at every new arrival looking up hopefully for the flash of silver hair.

In future years…whoever thought that a ‘three-minute affair' would stretch so far? In future years, on Sunday afternoons, Louise and Schmidt would meet down at the waterfront where a long rickety pier probes like an index finger the muddy waters of the River Plate.

Louise was usually the first one there. There she is, sitting on a bench waiting for Schmidt to extricate himself from his comfortable apartment on Avenida del Libertador.

He always hoped to see her first. Sometimes he did, and these days hobbling on bad knees he stops to squint into the untrustful distance, admiring the view. The way the river air pushes her skirt against her legs. To his eyes Louise is still young, forever young; the sight of her still excites. On the other hand, the same view can produce a moment's regret where he feels intensely her exile and solitariness. Once she told him she'd been a victim of a pickpocket. She went on to describe the feeling of a ‘fish nibbling in her coat pocket'. A fish. And just like that his memory tore back through the years to Little River with its lapping tide and crayfish pots.

The other thing he saw at this distance was her containment, the same thing that you see in nuns and old men for whom the world they move through is not nearly as important as the one they have carved out within. With Louise there was always that other place that she would not always share, even when he tried to draw her out: ‘Why, my dear, are you so sad today?' Sad? She looked up and saw the piano tuner's loving concern for her. And as easily as that, responsibility shifted. Now it was her turn to act light, to laugh or pass on an incident. Or simply shrug and say, ‘No reason,' and to go on staring at the shifting water.

Schmidt would have suggested a café in Almagro or one of the many parks were it not for Louise being so insistent that they meet at the pier. It's easy to see why. At the end of the pier you find yourself searching for the horizon. And tucked behind the horizon was the old life Louise had left for this one. The pier was their place. It is also the place of Troilo's signature departure piece, ‘Danzarin'.

This, along with the rest of her grandfather's collection would pass down to Rosa.

21

In Sydney, a younger Rosa trawls through the letters. She begins to unpack memories of the strange old woman who worked in her grandfather's store. She is old enough to know the whole story now. And, she is like Louise now, isn't she? Young. In a strange country. Without a local's grasp of the language. She is struck by the similarity of their circumstances. Someone else has trodden this same road.

It's here, on the other side of the Pacific, in her new life, that she begins to reconsider the woman she knew as ‘Mrs Cunningham'.

Mrs Cunningham was always polite to her, although her smile was a bit quick, not quite securely fastened. She was always in a hurry to turn back to her bookkeeping. Nor did Mrs Cunningham have any of the questions which adults usually hold in reserve for children. How is school? What's your favourite subject? She resorted to none of the easy flattery. I bet you are the cleverest in your class. No. Children have a way of sniffing out the genuine interest from that which is faked. But Louise was a rarer species still. She didn't care, and nothing pricks a child's interest more.

Rosa would stand outside the door marked ‘Mrs Cunningham', daring herself to knock. She never did. She could never quite bring her fist to strike against the stained wood. Her purpose was too vague and uncertain. She wouldn't know what to say to ‘Mrs Cunningham'.

Then her death, followed by her grandfather's depression. She listened in on her parents' talk. When she tried to find out more they said it was nothing. But if it is nothing, then why were they talking about it in that way?

‘Poppa is sad.'

‘Poppa is sick.'

‘Poppa has lost his faithful lieutenant.'

Then her grandfather's death and the revelation that the outward signs had not been reliable. ‘Mrs Cunningham' had tucked in all her overflowing bits to make sure that nothing would give her away. In control at every moment; filling in that space the family accorded her with cordiality and good grace. ‘Mrs Cunningham' had been a fake.

In Sydney it is hard not to feel a fake. It is difficult to pretend that you belong when clearly you come from somewhere else. When you don't understand the language. Roberto's finger had come to a halt on the globe a bit too easily.

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