by Lloyd Jones
There are no stragglers. No hangers-on among the waitresses, thank God.The chairs have already been put upside down on the tables. So the space is cleared and ready for dancing.The compilation of steak-eating standards ‘La Cumparsita’, ‘El Choclo’ and ‘Felicia’ have been turned up. Only this time, rather than dance, Rosa says she wants to be ‘rescued’.
‘This morning you didn’t do such a good job of saving me. I want the kiss of life this time,’ she says.
She doesn’t wait for an answer. Already she is crouching down to place herself on her back. I wait until she has arranged things. Then I get down on my knees and begin to clear her air passages. I turn her head this way and that. I lay her exhausted limbs at her side. Now I pinch her nose and she shakes her head. ‘Not the nose one, Lionel. The kiss of life.Yes? Good. Then let us proceed.
And this is what Ivan sees. My mouth placed over his wife’s mouth.
This is what he says: ‘Lionel?’
His voice isn’t raised. There’s no anger, let alone rage. Just a polite inquiry. Lionel. I look up. And there he is—in the doorway. His hands which usually live in his trouser pockets hang at his sides. They look as if they want to grab hold of something. We must have missed him during the orchestral section of ‘La Cumparsita’. There’s a look of distress on his face. But a little perplexity is hanging in there as well, as if to say, if I’m quick about it he might be open to an explanation.
But I’m not quick. I’m far from quick. I’ve never been in a situation like this before. I’m in deep over my head. And it’s left to Rosa to talk our way out of this.
‘He is saving my life,’ she says matter-of-factly. There’s not a single trace of fear or apology. It’s as if she is snappish and irritated with Ivan for interrupting this critical moment in her resuscitation. Ivan hasn’t taken his eyes off me.
‘Is that what you’re doing, Lionel? Life-saving? Is that what I’m seeing here?’
‘Sure.’
And I don’t feel like I’m lying when I say this.
Diggs is testing me for my certificate in a day’s time. I explain this to Ivan, and go on a bit about the various methods: mouth-to-nose, mouth-to-mouth.
As Rosa picks herself up from the floor Ivan’s interest switches to her.
‘There,’ she says, and she takes a deep thank-God-I’ve-made-it-back-to-the-beach breath. Absurdly, all three of us look in the vague direction of the sea.We listen to Rosa’s improbable account: ‘I was swimming and suddenly this large breaker crashed down on me and pulled me under. I couldn’t breathe. I thought I would drown. Then I felt the strong arms of my faithful dishwasher around me.’
She smiled gratefully.
‘Thank you, Lionel.’
She looked unflinchingly back at Ivan.
‘If you were a husband who loved his wife you would thank Lionel for his heroics.’
By now Ivan is looking very fidgety. His eyes are twitching dangerously. You can see him struggling with what to believe, as opposed to what he has to believe.
He says to me, ‘I guess I’ll be seeing you, Lionel.’ And as he says this his eyes stay fixed on me for an unnatural length of time.
‘Sure. Tomorrow,’ I answer.
To Rosa he gives a curt nod. They haven’t finished discussing this by any stretch of the imagination.
‘I’ll see you at home,’ he says.
We watch him leave. Wait until his shadow passes by the restaurant front and we hear the van start up. About now I remember to breathe again. I feel terrible. Typically, Rosa is ready to move on to the next thing. She comes towards me with her figurehead smile. It’s a case of where were we…oh yes. ‘Now we can dance,’ she says.
The next day when I showed up at Ivan’s plant his van wasn’t there and the door was locked. An envelope marked for my attention was pinned to the door. Inside it was a cheque for the money Ivan owed me, and a note thanking me for my help but saying he felt he could manage on his own.
33
I was holding on to an extra few days. A few more days to enjoy Rosa if I could. Come the end of the month I’d be back home, on the farm. Between now and that moment I was determined to extract as much as I could from the little time left to us.
Diggs didn’t need me at the pool until 11.30 am. So until then I was free to do whatever I wanted. I asked Rosa if she would come to my flat. It was perfectly safe; Ivan would be working with the dogs. She was hesitant, her explanation uncharacteristically vague.
‘It’s not so easy, Lionel.’
‘You can drive over at nine. What’s so hard about that?’
‘Well as you know, for one thing I am asleep. And besides…’
‘Besides what?’
‘And besides now you’re hectoring me.’
She didn’t know of my plan to leave at the end of the month. She didn’t know of the abyss staring back at me. I was planning to tell her soon. But that, like the difficulty of leaving on a particular day, kept shifting ground.
‘You could come to the pool,’ I said. ‘You never come to the pool. I miss our time there and the stories.’
It didn’t strike me as a big thing to ask but Rosa appeared to turn it around and look at it from all angles.
‘Yes,’ she said. ‘This once I will come.’
The weight she gave the word ‘once’ passed me by at the time.
After weeks of bathing with filthy dogs the sparkling water of the Stanley Hope Pool was dazzling, the last of January’s heat lifting the reek of chlorine from the damp patches. The jostling bodies. The girls flirting under my zinc nose. I don’t know how it started but somehow my name had got around the pool. Hi Lionel! Over here. Hey, Lionel!
During the lunch hour I had to be on my mettle. The lane swimmers, women mostly from offices downtown, hated getting splashed. If anyone banged into them they stopped swimming, and trod water while they raised their goggles to glare at me or Diggs, as if it were our fault. The older women in their tight one-piece bathing suits, bathing caps and goggles, treated the water like work, ploughing up and down the lanes. Afterwards they dragged their joyless bodies up the steps, their faces and heavy thighs covered in red splotches of exertion. By comparison Rosa got in and out of the water, almost amphibiously. She swam effortlessly, too, the water neatly parting for her, whereas the other women appeared to push a wall of water ahead of themselves.
The pool was a different constituency from the one at La Chacra—they were kids a year or two younger than myself. I’d forgotten that world and its close, exploratory, furtive ways. A boy and girl getting off on each other’s charge as they lay together on the hot tiles, their sides just touching.
I saw all these things while I waited for Rosa to show up. Contrary to her word, day after day passed where she failed to show.
At the restaurant I’d ask her what happened. Why didn’t she come? These conversations were always rushed since she seemed to be juggling things more and more, the restaurant and some undisclosed area of her life outside. I noticed her on the phone a lot more, smiling into the receiver. She often went early and left Kay or Angelo to lock up.
Or else Ivan was there these days to pick her up.
So we weren’t even dancing any more.
When I peppered her with questions she looked sorry and regretful. She didn’t know what to say to me. Finally, one night as I was badgering her, she stopped me to say she had some news.
‘Yes?’
What possible news could be more important than her reason for not coming to the pool?
‘Not now. Not here,’ she said, glancing around the kitchen.
‘But you will tell me?’
‘Yes.’
‘When?’
‘Tomorrow. Tomorrow I will come to the pool.’
‘So tomorrow you will definitely come? You promise?’
‘This I said already. Now you are nagging me,’ she said.
She didn’t say at what time. I decided it would be early afternoon. That would give her time
to wake up, shower, knock back her orange juice and black coffee, and still have time before she needed to think about the restaurant. Not that she seemed to give it much thought these days. A drunk in the night had thrown a beer bottle and shattered the glass in a corner of the large front window. That was a week ago. Instead of getting it replaced, she’d asked me to help Angelo tape some cardboard over the web of broken glass.
Around one o’clock I started getting restless. Diggs noticed me casting my eyes in the direction of the turnstile so he started checking his watch from time to time, responding to my anxiety with a shrug of his shoulders, a tug at his crotch.
One o’clock passed. Then two o’clock. She wasn’t coming. I’d already decided. The next time I looked up it was four o’clock. I found myself pulling kids up for things I would usually let pass. I was a black cloud circling the pool.
Then, just before closing time, without any expectation, I happened to look up the end of the pool and there she was. Usually she strode through the turnstile twirling her magisterial hands ahead of her. But this wasn’t the Rosa who had shown up. This Rosa was far less confident of herself. As she came closer I saw all the uncertainty that accompanies bad news. For that is what I’d decided I was about to hear.
The last swimmer was getting out. A few more picked up their towels and made towards the changing rooms.
‘I’m late. I’m sorry,’ she said.
She snuck a quick look back up the pool in the direction of Diggs’s office.
‘I’ll be quick. I’ll be in and out before you know it.’
‘Be my guest,’ I said.
‘Thank you.’
It was a strangely formal exchange. Diggs came out of the Men’s with a hose in his hand. The sight of Rosa took him by surprise. As she walked by him they exchanged a nod; then Diggs turned and followed her with his eyes. Then he sought me out with a what-the-hell-do-you-think-you’re-doing look. He tapped his watch. I called across the pool that everything was all right—‘I’ll lock up’—and that just caused him to look heavenwards. He’d never let me lock up before. Today wasn’t going to be any different. There was a light splash and we both looked down at the dark shadow moving underwater. There was something wilful and attractively casual about her decision to forego her usual bathing cap. She broke the surface, her eyelids beautifully composed, lips pursed, more pink than red. Then everything opened in her face at once. She found me on the side of the pool and smiled. Diggs rolled his eyes and dragged his hose up to the toddlers’ shed at the top of the pool.
For the rest of Rosa’s swim I picked up articles of clothing left behind. A sodden towel. A child’s white singlet. By the time I came out of the changing rooms I was relieved to see that she was true to her word. It was a short swim and she was already out of the pool. That meant I could start the chlorine. The pump room was by the entrance to the Women’s, and that’s where I was when I heard Rosa call out—‘Lionel? Lionel? Is that you?’ It was the voice of someone caught up a tree and slightly embarrassed to be calling for help.
I looked around for Diggs. His office window was ablaze with the late-afternoon sun. As I stepped inside the entrance of the Women’s I was thinking, this is probably a sackable offence. I didn’t know how I would explain it to Diggs. A woman’s cry for help. That cat-up-a-tree thought. I could hear the shower running, so I called quietly ahead—just in case someone unaccounted for was still in the shed, and Rosa answered back: ‘Lionel, thank goodness. I thought I had been deserted. Be a sweet and get my towel. It’s with my bag. I left it on the steps.’
I tried to be casual about it and pick up Rosa’s things as I would the belongings of anyone else. This time, as I slipped back inside the Women’s, Rosa must have seen my shadow on the wall and noted its hesitancy, because she called out: ‘Come on, Lionel.
There’s nothing to be shy about.’
As I came around the corner I was surprised by the long view of Rosa dripping wet under the showerhead. She stood tall, her right shoulder pointing away from me, her right hand cupping her left breast. She was beautiful.
She smiled back at me. ‘My lifesaver,’ she said.
As I approached she dropped her hand away from her breast and presented all of herself. She raised her arms and it was clear to me what she wanted. She wanted me to dry her—here and there. But as I moved towards her she stepped back into the shower jet.
‘If I let you touch me, Lionel, it must be for the last time.’
Touch. Last. These are the words I hear over the shower.
Then she says: ‘I am pregnant. I am going to have Ivan’s baby.’
‘Pregnant?’
She nods, her wet hair sticking to the side of her face. I have never seen her so happy.
I kneel then so she can’t see me. I don’t want her to see how upset I am. I don’t know where these damn tears sprung from.
I start with her legs, not dwelling on but not ignoring either the rich tangle of hair. I feel her hand touch my face. She brings me higher but not so high; she invites me to drift and drift and she purrs at the place my mouth goes. The only sound we hear is the shower water and the gurgling of that water going down the drain.
34
Each of us carries our fatal flaw within. Schmidt, who was so used to doorways and glancing views—on the bus bound for Chacarita—the flower of broom clipping his eye and launching him out of his seat. Blinding him to the traffic and all consideration of safety.
Louise would have acquired some Spanish. She must have. The words that come first are always those ones which are self-explanatory. Tipa blanco are those trees with the black and stricken branches which in spring sprinkle white-tipped flowers over the city pavements. Tipa blanco. The same flowers used to stick to the heels of Louise’s shoes.
The simplest vocabulary might have saved her life. On the day the lifts in her apartment building broke down she might have taken greater care had she read the sign at the top of the landing warning tenants of the slippery stairs. A distraught caretaker, cap in hand, later told the authorities that he had arranged for signs to be placed on every landing. Louise took no heed. In too much of a hurry she had stepped carelessly, the heel of her dancing shoe slipping on the edge of the step. She landed on her tailbone, her head bouncing with fatal impact against the concrete.
At a milonga in Almagro, Paul Schmidt sat waiting, and waiting.
Death ends all things and La Chacra was no exception.
It started with Angelo’s departure. Rosa pleaded with him to stay but after Angelo resisted all attempts at flattery and, finally, bribes, Rosa washed her hands of him. With breathtaking dexterity she let it be known that Angelo wasn’t such a great chef anyhow. She’d find another, this time a better chef. Angelo knew only the one thing; had just the one trick up his sleeve. La Chacra needed to develop a more adventurous menu.
A succession of chefs followed, the menu changing as many times until Ernie Buckler arrived to turn the steaks on the grill. Ernie had worked on the ferries and in canteens that fed up to two hundred at one sitting. With Ernie arrived a new clientele; most of them seemed to know ‘Ernie boy’. They shook their heads at the offer of the wine list, asked for beer, and finished with endless cups of tea.
The decline had begun before Angelo’s departure but after he left a more general haemorrhaging took place. Once upon a time you’d have needed a booking on a Friday or Saturday night. Now you could walk in the door and pick a table.
Kay left for a new restaurant in town and a new position. Maitre d’.
Rosa didn’t appreciate how important Kay was until she left. By then it was too late. There followed a dizzy period where the restaurant had to weather a complete turnover of waitresses.
There was no more hiding the carpet stains, the stiffness of its fibre; no amount of disinfectant could overcome the stale aroma.
The decline was just as self-evident at the back of the kitchen. The walk-in fridge was a shrine to better times when Angelo’s famous créme cara
mel sat in floor-to-ceiling trays. Ernie’s deserts didn’t require the same amount of preparation. The pile of dishes failed to mount to much. Quite often, and to my pleasant surprise, he cleaned his own pans.
Rosa looked tired. She looked older. Her thirty-seventh birthday came and went. She had kept the day a secret.That night she cited some vague business that would take her away from the restaurant for a few hours. I learnt later that she and Ivan had gone off to a flashier restaurant down at the waterfront.
The next night, it was near the end of my shift, Rosa visited me out in the kitchen. I handed her a poem I’d written that day. The words are lost to memory—fortunately. I seem to recall that I made something of her name—Rosa/Rose. But she read it generously, her eyes burning into the sheet of paper. She was halfway through it when I had the thought that maybe it wasn’t the right thing to have done, and that in fact the poem wasn’t much good. She reached the end and looked up.‘So you are now a poet and a historian—as well as a dancer?’ She smiled up at me, at my youthfulness; and as if she had just caught a glimpse of all the surprises still to be sprung in me, she said, ‘Come here.’ I bent down to present my cheek and receive my award. ‘No, Lionel. Here.’ She turned my head so she could kiss me properly on the lips. She placed her hand against my jaw, to hold the kiss. To make it linger. Now I know it as the kiss which signals farewell; where one retains the contact in order to better remember. When we parted she said, ‘Lionel, I have some news for you.’ She’d just come off the phone from speaking with Jean.
