Here at the End of the World We Learn to Dance (15 page)

‘He's been taking lessons,' said Rosa.

‘Lessons!' boomed my father from the table.

‘Yeah. I'm sure I mentioned it,' I said, even though I knew I hadn't.

The tape moved on to ‘Buenos Aires Conoce'. This time Rosa encouraged my mother on to the ‘dance floor'. She motioned to my father. ‘You too, Peter.' And when he was slow to move from the table she slapped her thigh, and to my surprise he rose like a big woolly farm dog obedient to its master's voice.

‘We are all going to dance,' announced Rosa.

My father made a scoffing noise. My mother shot him a look of impatience. ‘Just listen, please, Peter.'

We began with some stretching exercises. Rosa wanted Peter and Jean to understand posture. She drew her hands above her head, like someone embarking on a swallow dive. She said to my mother, ‘I want you to imagine you are reaching up to a lower shelf in the kitchen.' My mother smiled compliantly. My father half-heartedly leant his hands against the cupboard door. ‘Now I want you to imagine you are reaching for the spaghetti at the back of the shelf.' My mother stood slenderly on her toes. My father stuck out his stomach in the belief that this extended his back. We had our spaghetti now and we eased back to normal standing positions.

‘This time,' said Rosa, ‘I want you to think of yourselves as water pipes. She turned to me for clarification. ‘Water pipe? This is the word, Pasta?'

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 back 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.