‘Well, has she?’
She saw him grin.
‘Well, maybe just sometimes, Billy.’
‘Sometimes is reasonable,’ he said.
In 1924, Schmidt wrote asking her to come to Buenos Aires. He wanted her in his life. But he couldn’t wait much longer. She must decide. The letter also contained the news that he’d started a business, ‘importing bandoneons’.
Louise stood at the back door with Schmidt’s letter. This was the fifth time she had read it. She arrived at the word ‘bandoneons’ and looked up and stared through the clumps of flax at the shredded ocean.
The end came unexpectedly.
Most of the mail passing through the post office was domestic. A great deal of it related to the mine and the government department that managed it. Leading up to Christmas, volume tended to swell with packages from the United Kingdom and Australia. In the new year it quietened down to the regular correspondence. Letters from Argentina were always likely to catch the postmaster’s attention.
He was a small man with an eyepatch—he’d lost his eye in an explosives mishap up at the mine. He also hobbled, though no one knew why. His hobbling and his eyepatch contributed to Louise’s idea that he might be discreet, so when he mentioned his stamp collection she was happy to steam off the stamps and give them to the postmaster.
In 1927, to celebrate the non-stop flight of Charles Lindbergh across the Atlantic, Little River held a ‘kite day’. The celebrations included wood chopping, a cake fair, some local knitting and crafts and the postmaster’s stamp collection.
At the miner’s hall Billy found himself in the crowd moving past the tiny colourful postage stamps set against a white mount— a fresco of British Royalty figures, fantails and kowhai, and more unexpectedly, the howler monkey, the giant anteater, the condor, the rhea, Iguazú Falls and José de Martin, the military hero of Argentina. All this was merely interesting until Billy caught sight of Louise’s name in the postmaster’s acknowledgment thanking all those ‘whose correspondence made the display possible’.
Billy walked home. He let himself in and sat down in his chair. Louise was in the kitchen, her back to him. Over her shoulder he could see the map. This time his eye stopped at the tail of South America.The rest of the landscape and ocean, he now realised, was diversionary landscape.
Louise was chopping up beans when she heard Billy call to her, a quaver in his voice, like he got when he was trying to sound firm with damaged goods taken back to the shop.
‘Louise, I want to see the letters.’
Whenever she had imagined this moment she had always thought she would pretend not to know what he was on about. But when she turned from the chopping board and saw his dark face she felt the full brunt of his knowledge. That was the first thing. The next thing she saw the hurt in his face. She had never wanted to hurt him.
‘I’m sorry, Billy. I’m so sorry.’
He looked away, his eyes blinking.
‘I want to see them,’ he said.
She said, ‘They’re under the house.’
Later she wondered why she hadn’t lied. Then she thought she was glad she hadn’t.
She said, ‘They’re private letters, Billy.’
‘I know that. I didn’t say I wanted to read them.’
She left him in his chair, his legs apart, hands on his thighs, staring into space. She was only gone a minute. The cake tin with the letters was under the front step. When she came back inside she found Billy was buttoning up his coat.
‘This them?’
He took the lid off and looked in at the pile of seventy to eighty letters. It was enough to see them. It near took his breath away. Now that he’d seen the letters, the sheer number of them, he put the lid back on and handed her the tin. He gave a curt train conductor’s nod and moved towards the door. It was getting on for dark. She called after him, ‘Where are you going, Billy?’
‘I don’t know, yet,’ he said.
He didn’t come home that night or the next. Then, in the early hours of the third day, she heard a movement inside the house. She sat up in bed and saw Billy’s coated figure dart across the bedroom door. She heard him moving things about, the sharp sound of a chair leg drawn back. Once he coughed.
She got out of bed and pulled on her robe. In the main room she felt the cold air from the open door. She went to close it, but was diverted by a half-empty cup of tea. She went to pick it up and that’s when she saw the pile of money. She didn’t like to touch it. She’d never seen so much money. Billy saved her the task of counting it. He seemed to emerge from a corner of the room. ‘There’s four hundred pound there. It’s yours.’ He told her he would go away for a few more days. ‘That should give you enough time.’
Billy’s gesture wasn’t immediately obvious to her. The pile of money. This talk of his disappearing for a few days.
‘What about all this…money, Billy? It didn’t just fall out of the sky.’
‘No it sure as hell didn’t,’ he said.
He seemed preoccupied. He glanced around the room as if checking to see if he had forgotten something.
‘I was happy here,’ he said. ‘I don’t know how it will be with you gone.’ He closed his eyes. It didn’t bear thinking about. He took a deep cleansing breath. He said, ‘I want you to be happy, Louise. I want it more than anything. I had thought…well, I was hoping, wasn’t I? I’d hoped you’d forgotten him. I don’t know, Louise. I don’t know what’s right here, to be honest. Maybe it’s unfair to ask anyone to give that up.’ He shook his head down at the floor. She went to touch his arm and he glanced away. His gaze stopped in the door of their bedroom. Their life together briefly flashed in the air.
‘Jesus,’ he said.
She tried reaching for him again. She wanted to hug him but he stepped away. He made it clear that he wanted it to happen this way, and his way was to believe in the practical nuances of instruction, and the painlessness of following things to the absolute letter. That was Billy for you.
When she saw him move towards his packed bag she got to it first. She wanted to do things for him, help him through, which was as well because Billy had closed his eyes. She had to pick up his bag for him. She had to close his fingers around the handle. She told him she would never forget him.
He nodded, with the slightest glimmer of a smile.
‘I know that,’ he said. He turned to the door. ‘I’m going now, Louise. I don’t want to open my eyes. Just turn me around so I face the gate, if you don’t mind.’
She’d seen Billy do this same thing with the pit ponies. Blindfolded, they had followed trustingly after Billy on soft knees for the black hole in the ground. She took hold of his sleeve and turned him for the door, guided him down the steps. He stumbled once and she caught him.
‘I’m okay, Louise. I’m okay.’
He meant her to take her hand away.
‘Goodbye, Billy,’ she said.
She watched him walk slowly to the gate and let himself out.
He closed it behind him. She saw he still had his eyes closed. She watched him walk along the fence with his face turned to the cottages on the other side of the road.
It was the last time she would see Billy Pohl.
15
There at the farm gate was someone who looked like my father, only older and more dishevelled. At first he didn’t recognise the car, and its mystery showed in his face.
Peter’s elbows fell out of an old green jersey. It was his favourite. To this day, in fact, whenever I think of him he is dressed in that same threadbare jersey. The missing elbows weren’t something I would normally have noticed in the past. But I was seeing my father through Rosa’s eyes. And frankly, I was also a bit annoyed to see him there. The farmhouse is at the end of a long drive in from the road and I’d hoped for a moment alone with Rosa before she drove on to catch her boat. But there was my father, as he had always been, only more embarrassingly so, moving amongst the mud-splattered cattle towards the driver’s side
of the car. A look of boyish delight on his red face.
‘Lionel!’
He dropped his face down in to the driver’s side window; it was much too large and rural. Then he saw Rosa, and it was as though a rare animal had flitted across his vision. He quickly recovered and reached past me with his large paw. ‘Hallo. I’m Lionel’s father. Peter.’
This was the first time a friend or acquaintance of mine had been invited to call him Peter. In recollection I think he’d noted everything in a single glance, and just like that, I too found myself upgraded in his eyes. That evening was the first time I would call my father by his first name.
As Rosa got out of the car she paused to take in where we lived.
The razorback gullies, the slips and burnt hilltops where my family had farmed for more than thirty years. And as she started for the driver’s side Peter reacted with surprise.
‘No. No. No,’ he said. ‘Come down to the house for a drink.’
Rosa glanced at her watch. She looked to me for a lead. I didn’t want her to come in to this area of my life where all the trappings of my childhood would be available to her. What if she had a change of heart? I didn’t want to risk any re-evaluation on Rosa’s part. But I said, ‘Sure, if you’ve the time. You can meet Jean.’
This was also the first time I had called my mother by her first name. My father smiled. He tapped the roof of the car. ‘You get back in and drive down to the house. Jean is there. She’ll fix you up. I’ll be along as soon as I’m finished with this lot.’
As we nosed our way through the heifers I looked up and in the rear mirror I caught sight of my father leaning on a manuka staff and gazing after us. He was trying to arrive at some kind of conclusion. I had seen him search the skies in the same kind of way, sniffing out ‘the weather’, trying to second-guess it. The man I saw in the rear mirror I thought looked confused and slightly awed.
We drove down to the house and parked by the shed. Over at the kitchen there was a movement in the window. My mother would have heard the car. She would have seen the unfamiliar vehicle winding down the hill. The front door opened and she hurried down from the porch, her face filled with questions and happy surprise. When she saw Rosa she quickly adjusted.
‘This is Rosa, Mum. This is Jean. Rosa runs the restaurant I work at,’ I told her.
‘No,’ said Rosa. ‘The truth is your son runs it. He, alone. I am the lucky one.’
I saw my mother catch the foreign accent. She wiped her hands on her dress.
‘Oh,’ she said. ‘Well it’s nice to meet you.’
Rosa ignored Jean’s offer of a handshake and kissed my mother on her cheek. My mother blushed and smiled. Quite unconsciously she raised a hand to her cheek where Rosa had kissed her. And it struck home, perhaps for the first time, how isolated my parents’ lives were. In the past, whenever people raised this with my mother she would point to the mobile library, the telephone and the television. She kept in touch, she liked to say. But it was always from a distance. Around people she and Peter became uncertain. They turned adolescent, bashful, apologetic.
Jean herded us in to the kitchen and there I discovered the ‘new thing’ in my mother’s life.
Stuck to the cupboards, the fridge, the door and the light were the words—sego, si ranko, porda, lumo.
‘I’ve decided to learn Esperanto,’ said my mother.
‘Esperanto!’ What a joke, I thought. What an embarrassment. And, more importantly, what would Rosa make of this?
‘It’s a language,’ said my mother firmly. She looked to Rosa for support.
‘Yes. Yes. Of course. I recognise these words.’
My mother smiled at Rosa and cast a look of quiet triumph my way, as if to say, ‘Well, there you are.’
Rosa’s behaviour was even more unexpected. I had never seen her so anxious to please. My mother smiled sweetly. Rosa smiled sweetly back. She wanted my mother to like her.
I went out to get my bag from the car. On my way back I met Rosa in the hall. She was looking at the photos lining the walls. Dull images, worn by time. Photos of how the farm used to look; photographs of Peter and Jean in their younger days, of me and my older sister, Megan, when we were little. Rosa peered more closely.
‘This is your sister, Lionel? This one?’ She pointed to Meg when she was fifteen. She is on her favourite horse. In the same photo I’m sitting on my pony, Meads. My father tended to be the one who named the animals on the farm.
‘That’s her.’ I didn’t point out me.
‘She’s very pretty.’
She looked at her watch and said she had better get on her way.
She didn’t want to miss the boat. The way Rosa drove there was every chance of that.
My mother was aghast. ‘What, now? No. No,’ she said, and Rosa laughed.
‘That’s what your husband said.’
‘Peter?’
I explained that we’d met him out at the gate.
‘Well, Peter is right. You can’t go. You just got here.’ She looked for something to take off Rosa, her handbag, her woollen buttoned-down top.
At that moment my father pushed the door open. He stood on the step. The outdoors seemed to cling to him. He smelt of the hills, his hair pushed this way and that by the wind. My mother said to him, ‘They just got here and now Rosa is leaving.’
‘No,’ said my father, stepping out of his boots. ‘Stay the night. You can pick up the boat in the morning.’
That was true, as it happens. It made no difference to Rosa whether she got back to town that night or before noon the next day.
Rosa checked with me.
‘Sure. We’ve got room, Rosa.’
‘Room!’ boomed my father. ‘We’ve got rooms to burn.There’s Meg’s, the spare, or the study…’
‘Meg’s, I was thinking,’ said my mother quietly. She could have been considering where to place new furniture.To Rosa, she said, ‘We would love you to stay.’
‘Thank you. You’re both very kind.’
The compliment made my mother’s face red. She turned to my father and he sprang to life.
‘Right. A drink. I’ll take care of it.’
I noticed he winced as he moved past us in the hall. I watched him hobble to the door at the end.
My mother spoke quietly, so Peter wouldn’t hear. ‘It’s his hip. The doctor said he needs a replacement.’
I saw her look at me to gauge the effect of what she said. I felt a panic rise in me. And I’m ashamed to say it wasn’t for my father’s sake, either.
‘Well, we find out next week,’ said my mother.
Before dinner there was a knock on my door. I didn’t answer it. I was sure it was Rosa, and I didn’t want her to see my bedroom with its swimming certificates, old school photos and posters of pop bands that no longer existed. That was the old me.
The new me was unveiled after dinner when Rosa, in full flight on trails from Buenos Aires to La Chacra, to family history on the Coast, suddenly blurted, ‘You know, your son is a very good dancer.’ Peter peered at me over his tea cup. I saw in his eyes the stranger I’d become.
‘Lionel is?’ asked my mother doubtfully.
Now Rosa said, ‘Lionel, there are some tango tapes in the glovebox.’
‘Tango,’ said my father. He sat back in his chair and grinned at my mother. ‘I’m looking forward to this.’
I went out to the car and got the tapes. We pushed back some of the furniture. My mother stood up from the table to watch. My father poured himself another glass of whisky (he filled Rosa’s glass too) and stayed at the table.
The tape started with the slow, sensuous ‘Mi Buenos Aires Querido’. It is difficult to convey the strange dislocating effect of that sound in the isolated farmhouse. Years later when I was to show my sister Megan where we danced that night she stared at the floor then out the window at the bare hills unfolding to the horizon and shook her head. She couldn’t grasp it.
I placed my hand on the small of Rosa’s back an
d we began to dance—slowly. Rosa closed her eyes, and for the benefit of Peter and Jean I tried to look disengaged; as though it held no more joy for me than washing and drying the dishes. I’m not sure I succeeded any more than Schmidt and Louise did in the cave the time when they had danced in front of Billy Pohl and Henry Graham. Once I looked over Rosa’s shoulder and saw my father’s mouth ajar and from my mother a look of awe that I felt had to do with things other than dancing.
‘Mi Buenos Aires Querido’ ended and my mother applauded. There was a ‘bravo’ from Peter. My mother came forward. She laid her hand on Rosa’s arm. ‘That was the most beautiful thing that I’ve ever seen.’ She turned to me. ‘Lionel, you didn’t say. You didn’t even write about this.’
‘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?’