by Lloyd Jones
My father blinked at me through the bars of his arms.This was the first time he’d heard my restaurant nickname.
‘Water pipe. Down pipe. It’s all the same thing,’ I answered solemnly.
‘Thank you.’
Rosa turned to my parents. ‘I want you to think of water going up and down the pipe. I want you to listen to it. It will keep you straight because what happens if you bend forward?’ My father went to answer but Rosa answered for him. ‘Yes.You get a kink in it and the water does not flow. So. I want you both to think of yourselves as water pipes.’ She motioned my parents towards her. ‘Peter, come here, please. Jean.’
My father limped over. My mother smiled up at him. Rosa arranged them. She got them to stand more square on. She placed my father’s big unfeeling hand on my mother’s back. I had never seen my parents actually learning. Like all children I assumed that they knew everything they needed to know in this world. Now I saw the keen way my mother lapped at new information; and the slight self-doubt that nagged in my father’s face.
Rosa clapped her hands as she did in the restaurant whenever she wanted everyone’s attention. ‘Okay. I think this. Lionel, you take Peter over there. And I’ll go through basico ocho with Jean, please.’
‘Ocho,’ said my mother adventurously. ‘That’s Spanish for eight, I believe.’
‘Bueno, bueno,’ answered Rosa.
My mother smiled back at my father.‘Bueno. That’s Spanish for good.’
I slipped in to the role of Mr Hecht and got Peter to stand behind me and copy my steps until we laid the ocho down. As he counted the steps I offered encouragement. It felt as unnatural as any other reversal. The father is the one who usually casts the shadow. The father is where knowledge begins. My father concentrated like he did when looking over the possible purchase of new farm machinery. His eyelid lowered in the mechanical act of committing everything to memory. Whereas across the room, my mother held her mouth slightly open to catch every word of Rosa’s instruction.‘Okay,’ I said. ‘Let’s try it again. One back, across, lead with your left…’ Peter grimaced whenever he moved his right leg. He had to drag it into place, then extend his left toe as I had done; because of his big woollen jumper that skirted his hips there was something absurdly female about his efforts.
From across the room Rosa clapped her hands. ‘The ladies are ready.’
‘Oh Christ,’ muttered Peter.
‘You’re fine,’ I said.
‘More like a sick old sow,’ he answered.
Rosa switched the tape on to ‘Los Argentinos’ and we danced.
‘They are enjoying themselves, yes?’ she said of my parents. She was justifiably proud of what she had started here.
Halfway through the tango Peter and Jean began to argue.
‘You’re throwing me off balance, Peter.’
‘That’s because you’re trying to move before I’m ready.’
Rosa said something sharp in Spanish for my ear only. She gently shoved me aside to sort out my parents.
‘The man moves. The woman responds. It is a conversation. The man may have his opinion but he must respect the other, yes? It is the same thing.’
‘See,’ said my mother.
My father rolled his eyes and started over to his whisky glass. Rosa grabbed his elbow and led him back; she placed his hand on my mother’s shoulder.
‘You don’t move until I do,’ said my father.
‘Peter, please,’ said my mother.
This time my parents followed me and Rosa around the room. They trailed after us for two more tangos, I heard my father’s heavy breath, my mother’s gentle corrections, the slow drag of my father’s gammy leg that threatened to pitch the farm and my own future in uncertainty.
Megan’s room is next to mine. In the middle of the night I heard the light go on and Rosa get out of bed. Her shadow crossed the doorway. Her footsteps trailed up the hall for the bathroom. On her way back she looked up to find me waiting in my doorway. She clasped a hand to her chest. ‘Lionel, you gave me a fright.’ She reached up and kissed me warmly on the mouth. Then a peck on my cheek. ‘Good night,’ she said, and because she knew what I had hoped for, she added, ‘This is your parents’ house. We must respect that.’
In the morning I was still in bed when I heard her out in the hall on the phone talking rapido to Angelo. I hurried into my clothes. I was too late. Peter and Jean were already standing at the door. It meant I would have to share Rosa’s departure with them.
‘Adiós,’ said my mother.
‘Muchas gracias,’ replied Rosa. ‘You are learning.’
She kissed both my father’s cheeks. Peter blushed and looked triumphantly at my mother.
My mother suddenly remembered the tango tape.
‘No. It is yours. A gift,’ said Rosa.
In amongst all these formalities she squeezed my hand, a melting smile, then she drove to the main road, back out into the world.
I sat at the same desk I had studied at for my school exams. Only now the desk top rubbed against my knees. I threw myself into legal systems. And when I came up for air I found an empty world. Yet it was the same world no less that had entertained me in the growing-up years. I bounded up hills which in my childhood I’d named after mountains. On top of these wind-blown slopes I gazed at more of the same, hill after hill chipping away against the grey sky. As a child the view had suggested everything that was enormous and unknowable. Now the same landscape seemed diminished and foolish. It didn’t know anything except fertiliser and weather.
Of course I was missing Rosa. I missed her terribly. It was only a week, but coming after the events of the weekend it was a long time to be apart. Whenever I took a break from study I stood in Meg’s room inhaling the Tosca brand of perfume Rosa sprayed between her large, comfortable breasts. I went back over the events of the weekend. The kiss in the cave might have been part of a Rosa-conceived experiment to slip inside Louise’s shoes. Even the big event in the hotel room may have started out the same way, but I didn’t think or feel that that was how it had ended. The new Rosa, the demure Rosa, was proof of that.
I brooded, and generally stonewalled Peter and Jean’s efforts to humour me. I let them know I was studying. My head was crammed with the ‘do or die’ facts and cases of legal systems. My mother came in with sandwiches for the ‘worker’.
‘Surprizo sinjoro,’ she said.
I don’t know why, but her learning Esperanto infuriated me. It was such a dumb thing to do. I baited her mercilessly. She resisted, in her quiet way. She said it was an established and legitimate language.
‘Okay. Tell me this. Where in the world can you order a cup of coffee in Esperanto?’
She thought for a moment, swallowed, and said she was not going to defend something that was ‘self-evident’ to her.
At dinner she and Peter asked after Rosa. Was she married?
‘Was,’ I told them. Or was that ‘still is’? Come to think of it, I wasn’t sure of Rosa’s exact marital status.
I said, ‘I really don’t know that much about her.’
My mother glanced across the table to my father. It was his turn to take up the inquiry.
‘She’s an interesting woman, all right. And you work at the restaurant?’
‘I’m the kitchenhand. I told you.You know that already.’
I got up to leave the table.
‘We’re just interested to know about your life, Lionel,’ said my mother. ‘We’re not prying.’
‘We’re just being parents,’ said Peter.
Late one morning I came back from a walk to find Chrissie Wheeler in the kitchen talking to my mother. Jean looked industrious and pleased with herself. Scones were baking in the oven.
‘Lionel, look who’s here,’ she said.
She gave Chrissie a slight shove that she wasn’t prepared for and poor Chrissie took an odd, stumbling step towards me. Immediately she wanted to swim back to the bank from which she had been pushed. She blushed bac
k at Jean. Her face lit up in an eczema red. She pulled a strand of light brown hair across her face and smiled shyly at me.
‘Hi Lionel. I heard you were back.’ She looked at my mother when she said this.
Smiling to herself Jean went on stirring the soup with a wooden ladle.
She said, ‘The scones won’t be ready for another twenty minutes. Why don’t you two go for a walk?’
Chrissie must have sensed my reluctance. For that matter I made no attempt to hide it. She said, ‘Maybe Lionel has study or something to do?’
‘Nonsense,’ said Jean. ‘Off you go.’
I was glad to get away from the kitchen and the clumsy matchmaking efforts of my mother. We took one of the farm tracks. I’d known Chrissie all my life. Her parents had a farm farther up the same valley and were firm friends of Peter and Jean.The Wheelers used to come over for cards and games evenings. On occasion Chrissie would sleep over in Meg’s room. We had played games over the same tracks we now walked along as two adults—or at least one of us was, Chrissie, as I thought of her, was still on the cusp. Away from Jean’s custodial eye she was full of questions. How was I finding the city? University? Study? Not too hard, was it? Was it easy to make friends? She kept brushing her hair back from her face and when she did that I caught a whiff of fresh shampoo. She even smelt young. She couldn’t leave her hair alone; that nervous gesture and her slender legs tucked into tight jeans, made her feel so much younger and more junior than myself. Our sides touched. And when Peter came motoring along the track, home for lunch, his big rumpled face smiled at what he saw and at what he and Jean plainly hoped for.
Over lunch my parents did all the talking. Chrissie hid behind her hair.
‘Chrissie, did Lionel tell you he’s learning tango?’
Chrissie stole a quick look at me, ‘Really?’ her youthfulness bolting ahead. She quickly retracted and crept back behind her hair and said, ‘I mean, really?’
I nodded down at the scone I was buttering. The table lapsed back into silence.
Now I heard Jean say, ‘Lionel, why don’t you show Chrissie some steps.’
‘We don’t have any music.’
‘We do. We have the tape that our visitor left behind.’ Our visitor.
She wasn’t going to mention Rosa by name in front of Chrissie.
‘Chrissie doesn’t know the steps. You have to know the steps.’
‘Exactly,’ persisted my mother. ‘That’s why I thought…’ She was interrupted by Chrissie.
‘No. No. Please Mrs Howden, it’s all right.’
My mother ignored her.
‘Lionel?’
‘She doesn’t want to,’ I said.
My mother put down her bread-and-butter knife and gave me a cold look; Peter placed his hand on her hand and gave it a tender rub.
So I said to Chrissie, ‘Another time.’
The week dragged on. In the afternoons when I took a study break I went out on the farm with Peter. His leg was a dead weight to haul behind him or hoist on to the farm bike. It was a shock to see how reliant he’d become on the bike. All the time he complained of his ‘bloody leg’ and how it restricted him. He couldn’t drop down a hillside any more. It wasn’t just the loss of mobility; it seemed to me that my father had grown older. His loyalty to the same old overalls and green jersey meant that they too accompanied him on this aging journey. Those big holes in the elbows of his jersey. A safety pin held together one of the shoulder straps of his overalls.
These bare hills I had grown up in had turned my father into a cripple and my mother into a social isolate. And for what? It made no sense to farm, none whatsoever. It was a crappy business as far as I was concerned. My father just smiled. It didn’t seem worthwhile to him to point out that he did what he did because that is what he’d done all his working life. Financially though it had become harder, a lot harder. Everything about my parents lives was fraying. There were no more government subsidies to fatten the profit line, no more residual youth and energy to call on. My parents were just one of many smallholders whom the government had deliberately closed their eyes to and probably hoped would leave this marginal land behind and let it revert back to whatever it had been three generations before.
Peter’s justification was peasant simple. ‘You can’t remove what is in your blood.’
Old instincts and established routines and hoary old attachment to the land were justification to continue. Jean had her own reasons. In her case, the world was just the right distance from the farm gate. She preferred to read about it and listen to it on the National Radio. ‘I guess we’re old dinosaurs.’ She smiled when she said this, happy to be a dinosaur.
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, Rob
erto 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.
