Here at the End of the World We Learn to Dance

by Lloyd Jones

  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 discr
etion. 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.

  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 b
usiness.

  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.