Whenever Billy tucks in his shirt and tightens his belt he can feel the letter in his shirt pocket press against his heart.
In a moment though he will feel the ample breast of Margaret Spooner. There she is, wriggling her hips in spite of herself, in a bevy of rural beauties lining the district hall. Billy moves towards her. He is like a ship coming into port, the sea of people on the dance floor clearing between them, the landscape spreading out beyond that original point of contact, which for Margaret was a certain come-hither look combined with rural bashfulness. At his approach Margaret, in the approved fashion, drops her eyes, looks away, looks back, sets her mouth, and Billy notices, the mark of lipstick smudged against her teeth. She must have nibbled her lip. So she’s nervy like himself. That’s good. A woman too confident is hopeless to dance with.The deft touch is lost. You might as well piss into the wind.What happens is this.You find yourself stacking bricks, laying them down, picking them up, and setting them down again as you make your way from one corner of the dance floor to the next.
Margaret’s not bad on the dance floor, though. Lighter than he thought would be the case. He’s moving into his work now. And at some point she whispers, ‘Where did you learn to dance like that, Billy Pohl?’
She is blushing like a new tomato. Must have been when his thigh brushed the inside of hers.
Love is already ripening its seed in the Tautapere Hall. To think he wasn’t even going to come to the dance!
Still, what you do on your own accord is never what you recommend for another, especially when it is your daughter.
It’s 1958, and a youth with an oil slick and a duck wave for a haircut, all muscle inside a white T-shirt, has dropped around to the house in his loud car this Saturday night to pick up Billy and Margaret’s youngest daughter, Sharee. One peep from behind the kitchen curtain and Billy has an urge to part with the facts of life. ‘Don Juan out there,’ he starts to say, but that brings him a cold stare. He’s being sarky. Okay, he’ll try again. ‘Sharee, I’m going to tell you something that I’ve never told your mother. It is possible for you to fall in love in the course of one dance, three minutes flat.’ The confused young face peeps out from her fringe of brown hair. ‘Well, that’s all, Sharee. Go out and enjoy yourself. Just remember what I said about the three-minute affair.’
‘Strange,’ says his daughter. ‘You’re strange.’
With a father’s heart Billy stands at the window as his daughter walks up the path to the street, batting her mother’s eyes, spreading her wings, ready to enact history and claim her future.
Louise still thinks of Billy, after all this time. She has lived more years now than the number remaining to her. Alone in her Almagro flat, the mind is sorting and compiling. It focuses and clears out extraneous matter. There is Schmidt, there are the city rooftops of Buenos Aires; there is her former life, increasingly more vivid and clearcut these days—Little River, the noise that a seagull makes dropping a shellfish on to an iron roof, the smell of the smoke-filled nights in Little River’s main street, the inflamed face of the station master, and Billy Pohl, his slouching figure passing the picket fence, the blue-black of his beard and his silences as he dries his clothes on the drying rack.
She tries to picture him now. He must have aged. It happens to everyone. Time will have scissored and cut his hairline.
There isn’t really anyone remotely like him in Buenos Aires. But there are bits and pieces to graft on to a memory. The gentle stomach sag of the retired schoolteacher who visits the shop to pick up strings for his guitar. Or the back view of the violinmaker, his working shoulders oddly reminiscent of Billy sitting on the step outside sorting his flounder net. Or the splayed legs of the man sitting next to her on the bus this morning, his tobaccoey smell. When she rose to her feet to get past him for her stop he had looked up with surprise, no doubt wondering why this woman was smiling down at him.
Old conversations drift back to her.
‘Tonight, I’m going to dance your legs off.’
‘Here, Louise, throw a stone in to the still water and watch the ripples fan out.’
The first is a boast of Billy Pohl’s. The second a directive from Paul Schmidt.
27
Buenos Aires. 1968.
In a city divided by rivers of traffic and without a coastline there is no place to walk free of your life. The skinny streets fold back to vast avenues, all choked with traffic and noise. The effect is pulverising to the senses.
It is the same thing every day. It never stops. When Billy Pohl wakes up in the Hotel Chile the first thing he hears is the sound of traffic thundering by beneath his window. The street cleaners lead the parade. Then come the buses with their heavy gear work as they chop down for the corner his hotel sits on. How and when did the world become such a noisy place? He glances up at the ceiling, wondering what in God’s name brought him here in the first place. Louise. Unfinished business. He smiles back at the young face in his memory—then reaches for his teeth sitting in the glass of water on the bedside vanity. Pulls on his clothes. Closes the cage door on the lift and descends to the street where he walks into a headwind of fumes and noise, heading for the nearby café with the varnished pastries in the window.
He always looks for a table on its own; preferably in a corner where he can mutter his request up through his hand to the waitress. He hates it when the others in the café lift their nosy heads out of their newspapers, the way their ears prick. The slow thoughtful stir of their teaspoons. Billy hating his foreignness. Hating to be singled out—especially whenever the waitress departs from the established form. She must know what he wants by now. He’s been here four mornings in a row and each time he’s asked for exactly the same thing. Why does she have to spray him with incomprehensible language and ask him these other things? Tostada, Señor? ‘See. See. Whatever.’ He waves her away. Yesterday he found he’d ordered an omelette which he ate without complaint. But he drew the line at black coffee. He sat upright and sternly folded his arms until the waitress noted his wounded face.
‘Si, Señor?’
Billy pointed at a glass of latte on another table. He wanted one like that.
‘Si, Señor.’
Today he is in a hurry. In another thirty minutes or so he will take a taxi out to the cemetery at Chacarita where after a series of blunders he will find his way to the door of the English-speaking director. The director will look up Louise’s details and on a map of the cementerio show Billy the way to her grave.
Years later, when I met the director, at first he didn’t remember Billy at all. Then I thought to add a detail that had struck Rosa when Billy showed up at her father’s music store.
‘He was possibly wearing a green and white blazer with a pennant?’
Billy’s best blazer was his Riverton Bowling Club one. Rosa remembered the ribbons and pennants embossed with the years of triumph. Billy told her, ‘This one for the Club Pairs; that one for the Fours I skippered from 1952 to ’63.’
The director, by now well advanced in years himself, began to slowly nod.
‘Ah, the lawn bowler.’ The word ‘lawn’ forced his mouth wider to a view of a tooth in the corner of his jaw that was out of alignment with the others. He stood up behind his desk and walked to the window with the sweeping view of the calles and their extraordinary tombs. He folded his hands behind his back. Yes, he remembered. He had personally escorted the old man to Louise’s grave.
It was a hot day and a bit of a struggle for Billy. They stopped at a bench within view of the gallerias for Billy to sit and get his breath back. Billy mopped his face with his handkerchief, the director tapping his fingers on the seat, impatient to get back to the office. Billy, on the other hand, was content to sit and gaze at the huge walls of coffins. ‘By golly, don’t they look like office filing cabinets?’ the director remembers him saying. The unexpected image of filing cabinets prompted him to ask about Billy’s work, and without missing a beat Billy answered: ‘Rates office. Invercargill Ci
ty Council.’
Within another three days he would be slotted into galleria 21 with a bus driver, a piano teacher and a dressmaker for neighbours. The final moment came as he left the same café he always went to for breakfast.The usual waitress Billy relied on to make himself understood wasn’t on that day. A new woman was in her place. One who shouted so the whole café could hear—a torrent of Spanish that lifted heads out of newspapers. Billy became more and more flustered. He wanted coffee. A cup of coffee. Café. Café? White. No sugar. No sooker.
The whole bloody world understands that.
‘N’entiendo, Señor.’
She continued to stand there looking down at him, pencil and pad at the ready.
‘Y quieres algo a comer?’
Billy gave up at that point. He pushed his chair out, grabbed his hat and left. He was wild with frustration. Tired of foreigners. Tired of the battle to make himself understood. Without looking he waded into the traffic of Avenida de Mayo. Taxis honked. Billy waved at them contemptuously. Buggeryers all. Cars weaved. A bus bore down on him. He had to move quickly to get out of its way; then there were another two lanes, a line of taxis to beat. He had nearly made it to the other side when an oncoming car braked heavily. Billy froze: the screech of brakes and the slow motion of the car were strangely at odds with each other. He made it up on to the sidewalk. Out of breath he grabbed at his collar. He managed to loosen it but his chest still felt tight. It felt like every loose end in him had suddenly been pulled on. By golly. He was going to have to sit down on the sidewalk. He was going to have to sit down in front of all these people. He would have to do it—even it meant the population stepping over him.
The desk clerk from the Hotel Chile saw the commotion through the glass doors.The first time he hadn’t taken much notice. The second time he looked up and saw the green bowling club blazer and rushed outside; by this time Billy was dead. The hotel clerk knelt by Billy and looked up at the ring of people. The mystery of Billy was on each of their faces. Death drew studied lines in their expressions. It occurred to the clerk that he was the last person to whom Billy had spoken to. ‘Ola, Martin, I’m just going out to get some breakfast.’
I prefer not to leave Billy Pohl on the sidewalk like something fallen out of the sky. I prefer to see him as Rosa did when Billy came to the family apartment smelling violently of aftershave, sporting a red rash over his neck, and in his bowler’s blazer sitting on the same couch as Rosa’s grandmother with all that overlapping experience between them, and neither able to understand a word of the other.
28
Can I add here that nothing is ever quite as you expect or hope it will be? In Louise’s old neighbourhood of Almagro a street has been named after her beloved Troilo, but there the association ends. Some forward-thinking city planner on his way up in 1950-something, to judge by the surrounding boxy architecture, has seen fit in the name of modernity to seal the cobbled road. Progress takes many shapes, and happily the tar seal is coming apart and in patches an authentic scrap of Troilo’s cobbled past is revealed.
Perhaps Troilo stood here? Or over there? You take another step to assert the possibility. You glance around, speculating. That view of the old plaster façade, the last in the street, that too can be added to Troilo’s and Louise’s neighbourhood.
The combustive roar you hear is the traffic streaming down Corrientes. Several blocks down from Troilo a splashy new shopping mall, all glancing window and light, takes the Gardel name. The original market of Gardel’s youth and this new air-conditioned consumer’s palace are, so I’m told, approximately the same place. A uniformed guard said as much when I went in to use the flashy toilets. Around the corner from the shopping mall a new statue of a Gardel smiled back at yet another note-taker.
Richer pickings are to be had at the corner of Corrientes and Sanchez de Bustamante, where, the approximate whereabouts of Gardel’s backyard has been preserved. A clumsily hand-painted sign reads—Carlos Gardel Quinta. If you stop to listen you will hear a recording of a songbird from an electronic device attached unobtrusively to one of the trees.
Music? It remains constant. Gardel and Troilo and Goyeneche. The big three still command huge sections of any music store; it’s almost as if they haven’t died. You can buy their painted portraits and photos at the fleamarket on Plaza Dorrega. There, you can drop a coin into a dancer’s hat. And on the other side of the square a thirteen-year-old boy singer is introduced to the crowd as the ‘young Gardel’.
One drizzly midweek night, marooned on a downtown island in the vast Avenida de Julio with more than a dozen lanes of traffic passing in both directions, I happened to look up Avenida Cordoba and, directly ahead, blinking in to a hideously green neon was this:
L
A
C
H
A
C
R
A
In the restaurant window four sheep carcasses were being spit-roasted in the manner of a beach barbecue. A large steer clothed in brown woolly-eyed innocence stood in the entranceway. A line of tables with starched white cloths marched back to swing doors at the rear. After staring in the window, I walked back to the traffic island where for some time, oblivious to the traffic if such a thing can be imagined in Buenos Aires, I stood looking look back at the neon of La Chacra, mildly exhilarated to have arrived at the source.
In every other respect the city I find myself in is different from the one in which Louise lived. Buenos Aires has spread to the pampas; swallowed them whole. There is the traffic, of course. God knows, it never stops, except intermittently beneath my hotel window and then only for an hour between five and six in the morning. The yellow taxis are so numerous you could walk across their tops from one end of the city to the other. The milongas are hot, breathless places where the young dance in sneakers and the elderly throw away their crutches. The matinee sessions at La Confiteria Ideal are heavily patronised by the senior citizens who have adopted grace to sidestep their daily ailments. In Buenos Aires, at least, the dance floor remains the spring of youth and eternity. The parks belong to the dogs; after Paris, Buenos Aires is the greatest city in the world to be a dog. They are a famous sight for the tourists—ten, fifteen, twenty of dogs at a time, their leashes fanning out from the dogwalker’s leather-gripped hand.
Turning to the attractions of my own guidebook, the location of Troilo’s danzarin turns out to be a muddy dique on the Buenos Aires waterfront. At first it’s hard to see what could have inspired such a stirring melody. There is the climbing white backdrop of the city. There are the breakwaters; a lone tree, like the last of its kind, perches on the end of one. You pass the glassed-in restaurant setting of the Buenos Aires yacht club. Then you come across the pier where Louise and Schmidt used to rendezvous, and there you find the whole drama of arrival and departure—the moment of giddy anticipation and the flat sadness because of its passing that is the spirit of the man who wrote Rosa’s favourite song.
On the day I visited, fishermen lined the pier, their heads and shoulders drooping over the top rail. Now and then a fish rose from the muddy water in a silvery flash. I didn’t stay. I walked on to the end of the pier. It’s easy to see why Schmidt hated meeting Louise here. It’s the only place in Buenos Aires, at ground level, at least, where you are aware of the horizon. And the horizon is there to remind us of what we seek and what we have left behind. It is the dividing line of experience. While she waited for Schmidt to show up I like to think of Louise drawing up her own list. On the deficit side: the want of a happy domestic life with Schmidt, children, grandchildren. And the continuation of one’s own story that progeny carry within them. On the other side of the score sheet, romance.
Louise weathered revolution and a war in which her host country sided with the enemy. At least this time Schmidt’s name was less of a liability. She saw the rise of Perón and his wife, Evita. I imagine Louise kept her political leanings to herself. I have a sense of her harbouring conservative tendencies, possib
ly finding some things to admire in Perón while disdaining his efforts at ceaseless self-promotion. But this is just wild speculation, something to toss about in my head while my hand rakes the peanut bowl in the bar at the top of Honduras—remember that fork in the road with its diminishing point through the trees. There was talk of another coup when I visited Buenos Aires. People shrugged. It is possible. Maybe. Maybe not. They moved their fingers through the baskets of peanuts.The talk might as well have concerned the weather. It will rain. It will shine. If you just sit patiently it is like nothing ever happened.
Small schoolchildren in their white smocks and looking like miniature chemists floated by the bar window. Rain had started to fall. A dog walker slipped on a cobblestone. The melancholy beer drinkers stared at their last mouthful sitting at the bottom of their glass.
I sat gazing out the window at the fork in the road. The sooty branches of the jacarandas probed the sky and at a distant point appeared to provide an arc across Honduras. The defiant faces of the cart boys employed to pick up dogshit from the city streets looked in the window at two girls their own age peering at the screen of a laptop—youth in its various guises, each thinking itself unique and like the world has never seen. I took another sip of beer. My attention floated back to the apartment building at the top of Honduras and I noted how it fronted on to different streets. I thought about the lives of Señora Schmidt and Louise, and how they had backed on to each other—neither particularly aware of the other except as a distraction or background noise. Pleasantries exchanged in the hall or in the lift; in my beery state I was starting to see them as two butterfly wings attached to the corpus of Schmidt. He needed both to fly.
On my last day there I hadn’t quite found what I hoped to. In a harebrained moment I decided to knock on the door of Louise’s old apartment. A plainly flustered woman answered and handed me a crying baby. She mistook me for the father returned at last to relieve her of her babysitting duties. Through broken Spanish and sign language I managed to persuade her to let me in and roam like a city health inspector. I looked quickly and felt no connection at all; disappointed, I turned to thank the poor, confused woman. I signed off with a ludicrous semi-military salute, hurried for the stairs; across the courtyard a hoard of grubby-faced porteño children howled at my back—‘amigo! amigo! señor! señor!’