Here at the End of the World We Learn to Dance (20 page)

When I came out the Lone Ranger was gone. I didn't see the man again. Rosa never mentioned him and I didn't ask, but for a horrible split second it was as though we had already past out of one another's life.These incidents aren't so much about Rosa. They are about me. They are about my fierce devotion to Rosa. ‘Your jealousy,' Rosa would say, her head bobbing with its smile. Teasing me. Stabbing her fingers into my ribs. But when she rested her head on my leg and closed her eyes this was happiness. So were our discussion when for a rare moment I was able to forget her physical attractions and think about what she was actually saying. There was always something to decide. An issue to resolve.

One night she saw a swastika tattooed over the forearm of a man paying for his dinner. It was as he was writing out a cheque that his shirtsleeve happened to ride up his arm and that's when she saw the swastika. She wanted to say something; she felt the need to make him account for it, to get him to explain why he had done such a thoughtless thing. Yet everything else about the man seemed in conflict with the crudeness of the tattoo. He had complimented her on a fine meal—the finest, he said, that he'd had in some time. He'd been complimentary to a new waitress. The moment when Rosa might have spoken up came and went. Afterwards, to upbraid herself for her failure of nerve, she ripped up his cheque.

At the pool she asked me, ‘What would you have done?'

‘I think I would have said something.'

‘You would have?'

She was quick and sharp with that.

‘Yes, I would have. I think.'

She squinted across at the bleachers on the other side of the pool.

‘It is better to be honest with one's feelings, yes?'

‘Yes,' I said.

Rosa continued to squint.

‘You don't seem so sure,' I said.

‘That is because I am not so sure.'

I waited for her to elaborate. Perhaps it was too hard, because this speculative talk ended, for the moment anyhow, with her grunting and the more down-to-earth matter of her arranging my leg to rest her head. Across the pool, on the bleachers, three girls my own age, sitting in a wet line, caught my eye. They blushed and looked away. Rosa reached down and waggled my foot.

‘Say something,' she said.

‘I'm thinking.'

I was back to considering the diner with the swastika. I like to think I would have said something; in an ideal world we always know what to say and when. But then I also knew that my nerve had failed me when Jean rang up. I knew I wasn't going back to the farm.

‘Hello?' said the voice on my lap.

‘I'm still thinking,' I said.

She said, ‘I think your brain must have more loops in it than mine. I have a thought and you are still circling the track. I have another thought and still you are going around and around…'

‘Sorry.'

‘Don't be sorry. I will tell you about Billy Pohl instead.'

26

Tautapere District Hall. 1939.

Billy still holds on to the letter Louise wrote him with her world-record-breaking claim that she had fallen in love inside three minutes. About the same length of time that a milkman making deliveries in the early hours comes into hearing range and departs again.

Whenever Billy tucks in his shirt and tightens his belt he can feel the letter in his shirt pocket press against his heart.

In a moment though he will feel the ample breast of Margaret Spooner. There she is, wriggling her hips in spite of herself, in a bevy of rural beauties lining the district hall. Billy moves towards her. He is like a ship coming into port, the sea of people on the dance floor clearing between them, the landscape spreading out beyond that original point of contact, which for Margaret was a certain come-hither look combined with rural bashfulness. At his approach Margaret, in the approved fashion, drops her eyes, looks away, looks back, sets her mouth, and Billy notices, the mark of lipstick smudged against her teeth. She must have nibbled her lip. So she's nervy like himself. That's good. A woman too confident is hopeless to dance with.The deft touch is lost. You might as well piss into the wind.What happens is this.You find yourself stacking bricks, laying them down, picking them up, and setting them down again as you make your way from one corner of the dance floor to the next.

Margaret's not bad on the dance floor, though. Lighter than he thought would be the case. He's moving into his work now. And at some point she whispers, ‘Where did you learn to dance like that, Billy Pohl?'

She is blushing like a new tomato. Must have been when his thigh brushed the inside of hers.

Love is already ripening its seed in the Tautapere Hall. To think he wasn't even going to come to the dance!

Still, what you do on your own accord is never what you recommend for another, especially when it is your daughter.

It's 1958, and a youth with an oil slick and a duck wave for a haircut, all muscle inside a white T-shirt, has dropped around to the house in his loud car this Saturday night to pick up Billy and Margaret's youngest daughter, Sharee. One peep from behind the kitchen curtain and Billy has an urge to part with the facts of life. ‘Don Juan out there,' he starts to say, but that brings him a cold stare. He's being sarky. Okay, he'll try again. ‘Sharee, I'm going to tell you something that I've never told your mother. It is possible for you to fall in love in the course of one dance, three minutes flat.' The confused young face peeps out from her fringe of brown hair. ‘Well, that's all, Sharee. Go out and enjoy yourself. Just remember what I said about the three-minute affair.'

‘Strange,' says his daughter. ‘You're strange.'

With a father's heart Billy stands at the window as his daughter walks up the path to the street, batting her mother's eyes, spreading her wings, ready to enact history and claim her future.

Louise still thinks of Billy, after all this time. She has lived more years now than the number remaining to her. Alone in her Almagro flat, the mind is sorting and compiling. It focuses and clears out extraneous matter. There is Schmidt, there are the city rooftops of Buenos Aires; there is her former life, increasingly more vivid and clearcut these days—Little River, the noise that a seagull makes dropping a shellfish on to an iron roof, the smell of the smoke-filled nights in Little River's main street, the inflamed face of the station master, and Billy Pohl, his slouching figure passing the picket fence, the blue-black of his beard and his silences as he dries his clothes on the drying rack.

She tries to picture him now. He must have aged. It happens to everyone. Time will have scissored and cut his hairline.

There isn't really anyone remotely like him in Buenos Aires. But there are bits and pieces to graft on to a memory. The gentle stomach sag of the retired schoolteacher who visits the shop to pick up strings for his guitar. Or the back view of the violinmaker, his working shoulders oddly reminiscent of Billy sitting on the step outside sorting his flounder net. Or the splayed legs of the man sitting next to her on the bus this morning, his tobaccoey smell. When she rose to her feet to get past him for her stop he had looked up with surprise, no doubt wondering why this woman was smiling down at him.

Old conversations drift back to her.

‘Tonight, I'm going to dance your legs off.'

‘Here, Louise, throw a stone in to the still water and watch the ripples fan out.'

The first is a boast of Billy Pohl's. The second a directive from Paul Schmidt.

27

Buenos Aires. 1968.

In a city divided by rivers of traffic and without a coastline there is no place to walk free of your life. The skinny streets fold back to vast avenues, all choked with traffic and noise. The effect is pulverising to the senses.

It is the same thing every day. It never stops. When Billy Pohl wakes up in the Hotel Chile the first thing he hears is the sound of traffic thundering by beneath his window. The street cleaners lead the parade. Then come the buses with their heavy gear work as they chop down for the corner his hotel sits on. How and when did the world become such a noisy place? He glances up at the ceiling, wondering what in God's name brought him here in the first place. Louise. Unfinished business. He smiles back at the young face in his memory—then reaches for his teeth sitting in the glass of water on the bedside vanity. Pulls on his clothes. Closes the cage door on the lift and descends to the street where he walks into a headwind of fumes and noise, heading for the nearby café with the varnished pastries in the window.

He always looks for a table on its own; preferably in a corner where he can mutter his request up through his hand to the waitress. He hates it when the others in the café lift their nosy heads out of their newspapers, the way their ears prick. The slow thoughtful stir of their teaspoons. Billy hating his foreignness. Hating to be singled out—especially whenever the waitress departs from the established form. She must know what he wants by now. He's been here four mornings in a row and each time he's asked for exactly the same thing. Why does she have to spray him with incomprehensible language and ask him these other things? Tostada, Señor? ‘
See. See.
Whatever.' He waves her away. Yesterday he found he'd ordered an omelette which he ate without complaint. But he drew the line at black coffee. He sat upright and sternly folded his arms until the waitress noted his wounded face.

‘Si, Señor?'

Billy pointed at a glass of latte on another table. He wanted one like that.

‘Si, Señor.'

Today he is in a hurry. In another thirty minutes or so he will take a taxi out to the cemetery at Chacarita where after a series of blunders he will find his way to the door of the English-speaking director. The director will look up Louise's details and on a map of the
cementerio
show Billy the way to her grave.

Years later, when I met the director, at first he didn't remember Billy at all. Then I thought to add a detail that had struck Rosa when Billy showed up at her father's music store.

‘He was possibly wearing a green and white blazer with a pennant?'

Billy's best blazer was his Riverton Bowling Club one. Rosa remembered the ribbons and pennants embossed with the years of triumph. Billy told her, ‘This one for the Club Pairs; that one for the Fours I skippered from 1952 to '63.'

The director, by now well advanced in years himself, began to slowly nod.

‘Ah, the lawn bowler.' The word ‘lawn' forced his mouth wider to a view of a tooth in the corner of his jaw that was out of alignment with the others. He stood up behind his desk and walked to the window with the sweeping view of the
calles
and their extraordinary tombs. He folded his hands behind his back. Yes, he remembered. He had personally escorted the old man to Louise's grave.

It was a hot day and a bit of a struggle for Billy. They stopped at a bench within view of the gallerias for Billy to sit and get his breath back. Billy mopped his face with his handkerchief, the director tapping his fingers on the seat, impatient to get back to the office. Billy, on the other hand, was content to sit and gaze at the huge walls of coffins. ‘By golly, don't they look like office filing cabinets?' the director remembers him saying. The unexpected image of filing cabinets prompted him to ask about Billy's work, and without missing a beat Billy answered: ‘Rates office. Invercargill City Council.'

Within another three days he would be slotted into galleria 21 with a bus driver, a piano teacher and a dressmaker for neighbours. The final moment came as he left the same café he always went to for breakfast.The usual waitress Billy relied on to make himself understood wasn't on that day. A new woman was in her place. One who shouted so the whole café could hear—a torrent of Spanish that lifted heads out of newspapers. Billy became more and more flustered. He wanted coffee. A cup of coffee. Café.
Café?
White. No sugar.
No sooker.

The whole bloody world understands that.

‘N'entiendo, Señor.'

She continued to stand there looking down at him, pencil and pad at the ready.

‘Y quieres algo a comer?'

Billy gave up at that point. He pushed his chair out, grabbed his hat and left. He was wild with frustration. Tired of foreigners. Tired of the battle to make himself understood. Without looking he waded into the traffic of Avenida de Mayo. Taxis honked. Billy waved at them contemptuously.
Buggeryers all.
Cars weaved. A bus bore down on him. He had to move quickly to get out of its way; then there were another two lanes, a line of taxis to beat. He had nearly made it to the other side when an oncoming car braked heavily. Billy froze: the screech of brakes and the slow motion of the car were strangely at odds with each other. He made it up on to the sidewalk. Out of breath he grabbed at his collar. He managed to loosen it but his chest still felt tight. It felt like every loose end in him had suddenly been pulled on. By golly. He was going to have to sit down on the sidewalk. He was going to have to sit down in front of all these people. He would have to do it—even it meant the population stepping over him.

The desk clerk from the Hotel Chile saw the commotion through the glass doors.The first time he hadn't taken much notice. The second time he looked up and saw the green bowling club blazer and rushed outside; by this time Billy was dead. The hotel clerk knelt by Billy and looked up at the ring of people. The mystery of Billy was on each of their faces. Death drew studied lines in their expressions. It occurred to the clerk that he was the last person to whom Billy had spoken to. ‘Ola, Martin, I'm just going out to get some breakfast.'

I prefer not to leave Billy Pohl on the sidewalk like something fallen out of the sky. I prefer to see him as Rosa did when Billy came to the family apartment smelling violently of aftershave, sporting a red rash over his neck, and in his bowler's blazer sitting on the same couch as Rosa's grandmother with all that overlapping experience between them, and neither able to understand a word of the other.