Here at the End of the World We Learn to Dance (2 page)

Schmidt's widow shook her head. She had seen and heard enough. She was ready to leave.‘There is one other thing,' resumed the neighbour. She began to describe the day the landlord's men had shown up to cart away the dead woman's possessions. She suddenly looked mischievous and edged her face closer to confide. ‘I snuck my head in for a look. I was curious too.' Well, there was little to remove. A record player, a stack of record albums, some articles of clothing, a pair of black stilettos, ‘the kind worn by those who dance at the Ideal.' The widow had friends who danced there. Now she wondered if they had seen her husband with the shop assistant and chosen not to say anything. The neighbour continued. She was used to cluttered rooms herself, but in the dead woman's flat you noticed the floorboards. They stood out. Their long run and the ‘scuff marks' in the middle of the main living area. The widow felt her eyes smart as she pushed out the next question, but she had to ask. ‘She and the Señor liked to dance? Is this what you are telling me?' The neighbour made a grand display of her hands. ‘Dance? They dance and they dance. Oh, how they dance. Then they sit in the garden to rest, then they dance some more. The woman did not speak. She dance only.'

3

No one passes through life unnoticed. The panaderia where she bought her bread sticks. The bus driver. The news-stand where she bought the English-language
Buenos Aires Herald
. And, of course, there was Max. Homosexual Max. His face tilted to receive kisses on both cheeks from his regulars. Max bulging like an overcooked soufflé inside his waiter's jacket. Max with his hairless chin. His small appreciative eyes glowing inside his spectacles. His body was found on the other side of Avenida Moreau de Justo in a stagnant pile of plastics and bottles, nudging against a bloated pig by the boatman's pier.

In the café where Max worked, small children with grown-up faces on the end of spindly bodies placed cigarette lighters on the tables of drinkers late in the afternoon. The drinkers waved them away like blowflies.They tapped the ends of their cigarettes into the ashtrays and resumed their thoughtful answers. A balding man, yes? No. No one could remember Max. For thirty years he worked behind the blinds at La Armistad, in the city neighbourhood of Montserrat, yet no one could remember his name.

Time is cruel, though necessarily so. The world has to make room for so many names.

In the 1940s, a young man with a large pink birthmark on his neck used to deliver coffee on a silver tray to Schmidt's staff on Coronel Diaz.

Years later the birthmark has faded and crumbled like an old head of agapanthus above a frayed and brackish collar. His eyes slope up to his crinkled forehead while he thinks back.

‘Si. The Señora always ordered a short black.'

‘A short black?'

‘Si, espresso.'

‘That is all?'

The man shrugged; his head and shoulders rose, his lips pursed; his eyes sloped down into the pit of memory.

‘Sometimes a pastry,' he said.

‘What kind of pastry?'

‘Señora, it is a long time ago.'

Louise's friends, the ones she trusted and listened to and confided, day in, day out, year after year of lonely exile, are to be found in several rooms of a restored palace on Piedras and Independencia. Troilo. Goyeneche. Gardel. Each with their own room. You look up at the walls with their photographs. Their personal belongings are religiously displayed; on their own they are not particularly interesting—but that they belonged to Gardel is everything. So you find a long glass tube that contained the singer's toothbrush, his silver shoe-horn, a ring engraved with his image that the loving son gave to his French-born mother, his French-tailored collars, his cane, his silk
lengue
; and since the smallest detail is not to be overlooked, the ticket punch from window Number 10 where Gardel used to place his bets at the Palermo racecourse is included.

Then there are the photos. Gardel with his film star looks; his ever present smile, the slicked-back hair in the style he pioneered. In a group photograph you can tell which is Gardel simply by looking for the focal point. He is the one smiling his radiant smile, the grateful beneficiary of a once-in-a-century singing talent and universal love.

Louise arrived in Buenos Aires a few years before Gardel's plane crashed in Colombia. In all probability she was one of the hundreds of thousands who formed either side of his funeral procession up Corrientes to La Chacarita. The procession passed through the working-class neighbourhood of Almagro where she lived. She experienced this and other major historic events: the revolution, the war, the rise of Juan and Eva Perón, Evita's death and a funeral procession even larger than that which saw Gardel on his way. Defenders of Gardel's unimpeachable reputation are quick to point out that by the time of Eva's funeral, Buenos Aires had grown to a city four times the size it was in Gardel's day. In any case, these events are mere backdrop. They don't belong in Louise and Schmidt's story. The composers, the singers and the bandoneon players were more influential.

On the other hand, Gardel may have been a ‘bit before her time', as they say. Gardel is best thought of as ‘a friend of a friend'. She and Paul Schmidt were closest in time and sensibility to Anibal Troilo and Goyeneche.

Troilo's original bandoneon sits behind glass in
la Troilo sala
. His signature piece ‘Danzarin', was a favourite. Of Louise's other friends, Julio Maria Sosa was represented by his Remington shaver, Sabina Olmos by her perfume bottles and Hugo Carril by his toiletries.

All those days and nights Schmidt was home tending to his other life, stoking the family coals, playing husband and father, Louise huddled next to her 1938 RCA Victor radio. The radio in the room next to Troilo's looks like a small beautiful wooden chapel.

4

Rosa is the name of the little girl who used to stand in line to fill up the water bucket at La Chacarita.

She and her grandfather would catch the 39 at the corner of Paraguay and Coronel Diaz. The bus knew the way to the cemetery— they passed under the canopy of trees on Honduras, jumped the railway tracks with its tired rubbish, past the men spit-roasting meat under a scrap iron roof, past the markets. Before they turned up Maure on to Corrientes her grandfather would always look out the right-hand window for the two tenement buildings that stand like launch pads on a flattened landscape. The cemetery marked the end of the line for the bus route. After disembarking Rosa would gaze up at the grand entrance steps to the cemetery. It was like entering an opera house, elevated, and full of promise. The tug on her arm was her grandfather. She had forgotten to bring flowers. So from a florist on Guzman they would buy jasmine for Rosa to place on Gardel's tomb.

To a child, death is a story that is not quite believable. The crypts. The floating angels. The
cementerio
workers. The ones in green to collect the leaves.The ones in blue with mops and buckets to wash down the steps of the huge, ostentatious family tombs. On a summer's morning Rosa would peek down the shadowed stairs to a shrine of light. Impossible to imagine that something as small as a flower urn might contain a whole life. And once, when she saw an admirer light a cigarette for the famous singer's bronzed hand, she understood that Gardel was not quite as dead as everyone made out.

It was the bit afterwards she looked forward to—after her grandfather had finished with washing his old shop assistant's headstone—when they repaired to El Imperio de la Pizza. Nothing has changed. Today the café sprawls onto two busy avenues. The doors are flung open to catch the diesel fumes and the occasional whiff of fresh air.

Rosa and Schmidt always sat at the same table with the view out the doors across Avenida Corrientes to the palms outside the grand entrance to the
cementerio.
The old man would ease into his chair as though he'd deemed it to be his final resting place. One massive sigh and his face became immobilised. For several long minutes Rosa would divert her attention to the huge metal fans beating inside the wire cages; sitting patiently and respectfully until her grandfather's face twitched and sputtered into a smile. ‘Did I drop off? No. Did I snore? I didn't snore, did I?' About now the oldest waiter would decide to look up to discover them and approach with a smile in the maw of his broken teeth.

He and Schmidt always greeted each other warmly. As with his bus conductor and the flower vendor, Schmidt remembered
his
waiter at Christmas. One year the waiter hobbled to the table with their pizza, complaining of arthritis in his hip. His scooter needed repairs which he couldn't afford. It meant he had to walk to El Imperio. After the old man limped away with his silver tray, that day, along with his usual tip, Schmidt left an envelope with the money needed to cover the repairs. Rosa had watched her grandfather count out the notes until he caught her eye. Placing a finger to his lips, he said, ‘Not a word to your grandmother.'

The trips to La Chacarita were to end with her grandfather's death. Thereafter, her grandmother led her on a wild-goose chase all across the city. Whole days were spent getting in and out of taxis to look up at old houses with dusty windows. ‘This is where your grandfather and I lived in 1926…This is where we liked to go on Sundays for lunch…This is the apartment where I was pregnant with your father…'

But this landscape was even harder to believe in than the statuary of the cemetery.

The warehouse where her grandfather opened his first store was now, inexplicably, a
parrilla.
Rosa stared in the window and listened to her grandmother place the tubas, pianos, bandoneons, and guitars. Eventually an irritated diner would stop mid-sentence or mid-mouthful to glower back and off they'd go, to stand outside the next address. A café, a dress shop, a furniture store, all were once part of the family's empire of musical instrument stores. Now the landscape lay transformed. It did not remember.Those parts of her marriage she wished to retrieve had vanished under the new layers. So the city too had betrayed her.

Inevitably they would end up outside the last remaining store run by Schmidt's son, a comparatively dull and unimaginative man. His sole outside interest was the Almagro football team. Michael Schmidt and music were not a natural fit. But like his father he was a generous man who found it impossible to deny his daughter. So after arriving back at the shop Rosa would run to her father and beg for sweets, leaving the old woman to stand alone and stare at the family name
SCHMIDT
cast in gold-embossed dark lettering across the window front.

Her grandmother repeated the same story over and over. She was nineteen years old when she answered an advertisement for a shop clerk. She had never known anyone to work so hard as her grandfather. ‘It was like someone making up for lost time.'

‘And of course his Spanish was scratchy.'

This was the most surprising thing she had heard about her grandfather. It was perhaps the third or fourth time she was hearing this story that she raised the courage to ask why her Poppa's Spanish was, as she put it, ‘scratchy'.

‘He was from Bournemouth. His father was a glassblower.'

‘So he was English?'

‘Well, Schmidt is a German name, isn't it?'

The old woman grew impatient reciting these facts, as if they were already known.

‘His father was German. A German glassblower. Your Poppa was a piano tuner when he emigrated.' The old woman glanced away. Her face closed on a half-forgotten memory of the shop assistant. She added, ‘Everyone has to come from somewhere, Rosa. Even butterflies.'

On one of these outings Rosa left her grandmother sitting on a bench to go and buy an ice cream. It was a hot December afternoon and quite a crowd gathered around the ice cream vendor. When she looked back she saw her grandmother had grown tired of waiting. She was resting on her side. By the time Rosa returned to the bench the old woman was asleep, so she sat beside her eating her ice cream.Vanilla with fancy strawberry whorls. Her favourite. She finished it, licked her fingers and waited. She waited until she decided her grandmother had slept long enough. ‘Nanna, wake up. Nanna, it is time to go.' She pulled on her grandmother's sleeve. She picked up her arm. When she let it go it flopped back into place. A young man, an unemployed schoolteacher in a frayed suit, stopped. He spoke softly to Rosa, then crouched next to the old woman's head. After checking her pulse he released a slow whistling breath between his lips. He looked at Rosa, clucked his tongue. He reached in his pocket for a sweet which she unwrapped and ate. Strawberry and banana. Who would have thought…

Death kept throwing up new surprises.

The old woman was buried in La Chacarita. And, as if to go one up on the shop assistant, she left instructions for her remains to rejoin her husband's. Since they had hardly spent a single night apart while alive, she saw no reason to change this arrangement in death, even if it meant putting up with the ‘other woman' alongside them. The epitaph on her headstone reads:
In death as in life.

5

Look closely enough and you can find the child in the adult and vice versa.The child whose requests for ice cream and pony rides Schmidt could never refuse, and who once cried when her parents painted her bedroom blue without first consulting her, is also the woman with the flaming black eyes and stubborn legs whose way of saying, ‘I see there isn't a table cloth on table six!' would result in a panic among the waitresses in their rush to correct the oversight.

I was nineteen years old, newly arrived in the city, a student in need of a part-time job. Rosa was thirty-six. To this day I cannot think of Rosa without her holding a cigarette in her hand. I can summon the tilt of her chin just before she releases a smoke ring to the ceiling. The space above her head was always layered in cloud. She smoked when it was no longer fashionable to do so. No one I knew smoked. We drank, but in our new enlightenment we didn't touch cigarettes. In Rosa's case you felt an exception could be made. It was forgivable because she was foreign, and it was because she was foreign that she smoked. A cigarette was as vital to her sense of self as the lush red lipstick she heavily applied. Rosa's looks and her accented English—a casual mix of flat Australian vowels (a result of her family shifting to Sydney when she eighteen) and some darker traces of something else, Italian, Spanish—or whatever they spoke in the Argentine (I didn't know then)—was also part of La Chacra's appeal. Rosa was foreign. And foreign restaurants were the happening thing. La Chacra was first to serve up sour cream with potatoes in their jackets. The salad came separately in a bowl. No one commented on these little differences. It was chic to pretend that this was the way we had always eaten salad. La Chacra's salad's also contained flowers. I'd find the crushed flowers set aside on the bowls that reached me back in the kitchen. Others placed them in their mouth and closed their eyes and hoped that they were doing the right thing, that they weren't setting in train a future event that would see a primrose grow out their arse.The other thing about La Chacra was the music. Argentine music. Tango music. ‘Mi Buenos Aires Querido'. ‘Adios Muchachos'. ‘Tomo y Obligo'. ‘Mi Noche Triste'. ‘Viejo Rincon'. All are tango standards made famous by Gardel in the first half of the last century but still available today, in Buenos Aires, on just about any tango compilation.