Here at the End of the World We Learn to Dance

‘And Angelo, I see you’re back?’

  ‘Si. For now, Angelo is back.’

  He sounded a touch regretful. I couldn’t imagine Angelo anywhere else. Nor could I imagine La Chacra without him. He bunched a towel in his hand and lifted a pot of simmering pasta off the stove.

  ‘So, what can I make for you? The blue cheese and walnut sauce?’

  ‘Great,’ I said. I hadn’t eaten in days. I hadn’t tasted Angelo’s food since Christmas Eve.

  Angelo gave a heavy sigh. ‘I thought so. The year changes, but nothing else.’

  It was a slow night. The waitresses drifted out to the kitchen and then out to the loading bay to smoke. Once Angelo came back to fetch one of the waitresses. ‘The pesto for table twelve,’ he said without any urgency, then he stayed out there himself for a cigarette. I didn’t need to be told that Rosa hadn’t come in.

  The next night she is in and there’s no talk of the bus. She seems as happy to see me as I am to see her. The night can’t end quickly enough.

  After everyone has gone we turn up the music. We dance slowly—it’s been such a long time. We dance the usual steps, the ones that are second nature to me now, but it is different. It is different because of what has happened and for the way that everything is left unsaid. As I think that, I realise my error. It is said. It is said by the way we dance.

  Troilo’s ‘Danzarin’ ends with his signature rush—the sort of thing that makes petals stand on end. Our faces are an inch apart, Rosa’s eyes sparkling with mischief and pleasure. I want to kiss her. She knows that, of course. She removes her hand from my shoulder and distances herself with a backward step.

  ‘Now,’ she says, ‘you’re discovering at last what it is to dance.’

  This is the night we have special favours to ask of each other. She goes first. She wants me to help Ivan with his dog grooming. She’s quick to overrule any objection. ‘Well you did say I forget how many times you need to make more money…’ The thing is, she says, Ivan suffers from psoriasis. Whenever his skin complaint flares up he has to pull back from actual dog washing. ‘So he needs someone to help him. I told him you might do it.’

  I’m not sure I want to be that close to Ivan.

  ‘Can I think about it?’

  ‘Actually, I told him you would do it. But if that is unreasonable…’

  ‘No. No.’

  ‘Good. Then it is settled. I believe you also have something to ask of me…’

  ‘Life-saving,’ I start to say.

  I tell her about Diggs’s offer and explain the need to practise the ‘kiss of life’ on someone.

  ‘The kiss of life.’ She repeats it after me. She likes that.

  32

  So now I’m washing dishes at night and dogs during the day. There are different combs for different dogs depending on whether it’s a shorthaired dog or one of those long-haired mutts with two date eyes. I even brush their teeth. Ivan has a special toothbrush and special chicken-flavoured dog toothpaste. All the dogs become skittish around water—their tails droop. But they love having their teeth brushed. Their eyes look at you when you do this, and it’s like they’re thinking, isn’t this interesting, and, thank you, thank you.

  Rosa had made the arrangements. The first morning I waited nervously for Ivan to show outside the restaurant. Lines of early morning traffic streamed by. Then the van I’d seen in Rosa’s drive swung out of a centre lane. I stepped away from the doors of La Chacra and the van met me at the curb. Ivan leant across to open the door and as I got in he said, ‘Lionel, is it?’ With the engine running we shook hands. ‘Give the door a decent slam. That’s it.’ That’s as much as I ever heard Ivan say. After I closed the door the air was suddenly close with dog breath and panting. I turned to find two big animals with black gums and drooling pink tongues.

  ‘That’s Jazz and that’s Veronica.’ And to the dogs he said, ‘This is Lionel.’

  That was pretty much it until we arrived at his dog grooming base.Thereafter it was all instruction. Do this…make sure you use this…‘And watch the basenji. They’re a temperamental breed. A basenji will read you like a book. They know your attitude. Approach them with respect. Treat thy neighbour, etcetera. Know what I mean, Lionel?’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  ‘Ivan will do.’

  After my second day he asked me if I had togs. ‘Better bring them along tomorrow.’ There was no further explanation. The next day I was just getting in to the swing of clipping dog toenails, combing their hanks, and even massaging their bony skulls, that marrowy bit between their eyes, and their arthritic hindquarters, when Ivan asked me to get in the bath with Giselle, a temperamental poodle in for a ‘hydrotherapeutic treatment’. Suddenly I had an insight into the conversation that Rosa must have had with Ivan. ‘Yes, of course he can swim. He loves swimming. He spends every afternoon at the pool.’

  I was used to dogs. But the dogs I knew were working dogs, farm dogs. I’d spent most of my life around dogs. The dogs that came through Ivan’s door were ‘kept dogs’. They seemed to know they were different. We’d pick them up from different neighbourhoods and courier them back to the grooming place. Along the way the dogs to be groomed would look out the van windows at the dogs in the street. A certain sniffiness was transmitted. Lots of ear twitching and gaping from the street dogs. And stony Winston Churchill gazing from the groomed dogs.

  That’s pretty much how Ivan and I acted around each other. Me with the constant fear that I would say something that would give me away; something of my inner life would bubble to the surface, or worse, Ivan would recognise some private truth to do with his wife known only to himself. It would spring from me, written all over my face.

  After my first day with Ivan, Rosa came back to the kitchen to ask how it had gone.

  I thought it had gone well.

  ‘So you are learning about dogs,’ she said drolly.

  ‘I already know about dogs. I grew up with them, don’t forget.’

  ‘Ah,’ she said. ‘Jean called. I just remembered. She called, then you came in and Angelo dropped a plate and I forgot. So.’

  ‘What did she want?’

  ‘She was so nice. She tried some Esperanto and I spoke in Spanish and she could understand some of it.’

  ‘Does she want me to call her?’

  ‘She said you would know and just to say that she had called.’

  She gave me a querying look.

  ‘Everything is all right, Pasta?’

  ‘As far as I know, everything is all right. You’re the one who spoke to her.’

  ‘Well,’ she said. ‘You know where the phone is. I think it would be nice if you called Jean.’

  I switched my attention back to the dishes. I felt uncomfortable discussing my mother with her.

  ‘And so, you and Ivan got on well?’

  ‘No problem. He loves his dogs, doesn’t he?’

  ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Perhaps he loves his dogs too much.’

  I went on to tell her about the dogs I’d met that day. Betsy, a slow patient Labby that had stood with such a melancholic expression that Ivan wondered if she was depressed. I’d washed her twice, the second time with warm water to relax her for a massage. After Betsy there was Trevor, a collie, and Rex, a sausage dog. It was interesting how each dog responded differently: Rex with a toothy pornographic grin as I rubbed down his limbs.

  And later, much later that night when we turned up ‘Los Argentinos’ to dance, she asked me again about Ivan.

  I said, ‘He doesn’t say much, does he?’

  ‘Well Ivan is different. A different kind of man.’

  We were on the verge of private information. I waited. She was about to say more when she sniffed, sniffed again, and stepped back from me.

  ‘Oh God, that smell. That disinfectant. I am so used to smelling it on Ivan. Now you two smell the same.’

  Her face froze. Goyeneche sang on.

  ‘No,’ she said, releasing herself from me. ‘You will have to wash it of
f, Lionel. I cannot dance with that smell…’,

  She led me back to the kitchen where she filled the sink with warm water. She poured in the detergent I washed the dishes with, then she got me to strip off my shirt and began to wash me with a sponge that I used to wipe down the benches. I felt like a dog, with Rosa my groomer. I had to lean over the bench so she could wash my back. She didn’t scrub. She washed in a caressing kind of way. Then she dried me, and while she was doing that I felt her mouth hover over my back. Then she turned me and kissed each nipple, drifting her fingers down that line to the top of my jeans. ‘What a handsome compadrito. Now we can dance.’

  Cautiously we felt our way, each step probing an area of uncertainty before committing the rest of us. To a casual onlooker, to Ivan say, pulling up at the window and looking in, we would have seemed very intimate. The tension in me had everything to do with the possibility of Ivan crashing in on this moment.

  When I got home I showered, and in the morning I showered again to make sure Ivan would not smell his wife on me.

  My days and nights were spent involved with water of one kind or another. January was hot and humid. After five or six hours of splashing around with the dogs I would try to squeeze in a swim at the pool before heading off to the restaurant.

  Changes were happening there, small things that passed unnoticed at the time and only really acquired significance much later in the piece. Restaurants are a fickle business. All a restaurant has to offer is a menu and an atmosphere, and these things are as faddish and ephemeral as the season’s fashion statement.

  Here it is—a Wednesday night and one of the waitresses has been sent home early. I can’t recall that ever happening before. Then again I can’t recall business being this quiet. And Angelo— that’s his voice I can hear joking and flirting with the waitresses out on the landing. That means Rosa can’t be about. Sure enough, when I pop out to the door her booth is vacant. A scattering of silent diners are sawing into their steaks. Something is going on that I can’t put my finger on. Later, when the dishes come in they arrive in one tidy pile. I feed the machine and wait, and while I’m doing that Angelo trundles back with his meat trays, just the two, plus his carving knives. He’s hardly raised a sweat all night.

  When I ask him, ‘What’s going on out there, Angelo? It’s as dead a doormat…’ he shrugs, like he isn’t paid to wonder or care.

  Then he says mischievously and with a mad glint in his eye, ‘Maybe Rosa and Ivan try to make baby?’ And he makes a crude little gesture with his fingers. He watches me as he does that, lewd, calculating, and with the knowledge that he’s working something into a wound he’s just opened. Angelo is not the friend I thought I had. Still I don’t want to get on his bad side while he’s feeding me.

  ‘Babies. You know?’ he says, laughing and shaking his head.

  Babies. I don’t find it nearly as hilarious as Angelo does. I don’t find it funny at all. All the same, it does set me wondering.

  The next day, in the van on our way to pick up a basenji, I’m quieter than I normally am; even Ivan notices this and asks if I’m all right.

  I tell him I’m ok. A bit tired maybe. A pat answer and the world rolls safely onwards.

  ‘Good,’ he says. ‘That’s good.’

  Out at this house in the western suburbs where we’ve come to pick up a basenji I find myself naturally taking the dog’s side. I’m watching the dog and so is Ivan. Ivan is pretending to look elsewhere; the dog is waiting for Ivan to discover him. But Ivan’s floating gaze cannot be diverted from the distant hills, the clouds. The basenji sits on his sharp hindquarters, its snout following Ivan’s eyes. Its tongue hangs in the angled part of its jaw and there is something playful and knowing about the loll of its tongue like it really wants to say to Ivan, ‘You silly fucker.’ I don’t know how he’s going to get this mutt in the van. The booking is for a massage and shampoo and comb. Ivan’s eyes will eventually meet with the basenji’s. There’s no avoiding it. You can see the basenji is thinking the same thing. The basenji’s thinking, I can do this. I can sit here for as long as it takes.

  While this is going on I’m thinking, it’s five weeks now since I’ve had full-blown sex with Rosa. A lot of nibbling around the edges since. I start thinking about her breasts, the beautiful warm snare of her legs and hair. I’m starting to become aroused when one of the dogs in the van barks. Ivan looks up slightly annoyed, as if that were my fault.The other dogs are cramming the window to see what will happen. You can see that they’re all willing anarchy into the head of the basenji. The basenji nods in their direction like he knows the game. Now Ivan starts to whistle softly. He’s found a grassblade to inspect. Now my employer is rolling on his side on the lawn and the basenji is coming over to lick his face.

  Back in the van with the captured dog and Ivan’s face filled with aftermatch glow, he says: ‘You let them think they’re the centre of attention and you’re history. That’s your basenji for you, Lionel.’ He looks across at me with a drizzly smile, and I think, what I am supposed to draw from this? Is it this? He may not be physically present at the restaurant after hours when Rosa and I dance, alone, but his antennae are up and floating over the city and peering into every sinkhole and crevice. Is this what he means? Or is he really just talking about dogs?

  For the second night in a row Rosa has failed to show up at the restaurant. Kay is back on and running the ship. To my mind Kay has always looked part of the furnishings, as though she arrived in the same removal truck that delivered the booths, the red carpet and the stained wood.Tonight she looks younger and fresher. She is tanned from her beach holiday. Her eyes look bigger and brighter. She’s put a blonde rinse through her hair. For the first time I can imagine her with a life elsewhere. This is a luxury that I don’t have.

  Back in the kitchen I’m feeling maudlin. No Rosa means no dancing and no intimacy for the second night running. Again we finish up early, and when Angelo comes back with his trays the sight of me gives him pleasure. He laughs and mutters something in Spanish. I don’t understand any of it except one word, ‘Romeo’. And as he leaves me to it he gives his crude finger-fucking gesture.

  The next day I’m more lucky. On our way to make a pick-up we stop by Rosa and Ivan’s house to get some dog ownership papers. As we pull up the drive Ivan says, ‘Might as well switch on the jug since we’re here.’ In the hall, every step I take seems to creak with the whole overlap of my life with Rosa.

  Then there comes a corte, one of those turnstile moments. It is as we are wandering up the hall when Rosa steps from the bathroom in her bathrobe, her hair swaddled in towels. This is the first time that the three of us have been in the same room.

  Rosa ignores Ivan. She says to me, ‘Ah, it’s my favourite dishwasher.’ She kisses my cheek. Her bathrobe parts and I smell her soapy scent.

  ‘Don’t I get one?’

  Ivan is standing there in the hall, grinning. Rosa slaps her hands on to her hips while she decides whether Ivan deserves a kiss.

  ‘Have you been good?’ she asks.

  ‘I’m always good.You know that.’

  The two of them are grinning at each other. Rosa’s look is one of kind regard. Ivan’s is of the adoring cocker spaniel kind. For half a second it’s as if I’m not there. For half a second I think back to Angelo’s teasing gesture. So Angelo is there in the hall with us; so is Billy Pohl and Henry Graham, and I have a feeling that I must look like they did, envious, resentful of the chemistry between Schmidt and Louise. It’s the same old dance.

  ‘In that case…’ says Rosa.

  Ivan closes his eyes and offers his cheek. But it is a discounted kiss—a kiss on the end of her fingertip which she attaches to him.

  In the kitchen she becomes more adventurous. While we are waiting for the jug to boil she says to Ivan, ‘I’ve been helping Lionel with his life-saving.’

  I don’t think Ivan heard. Thank God. The jug is burbling away and Ivan’s attention is elsewhere. He’s turning the pages of his
diary for the address of the lovely mild-tempered collie bitch sitting patiently out in the van. Colette was booked in for a long brush, massage and hydrotherapy.

  ‘Where are you? Where are you? Carl. Choisa. Connie. Colette.’

  He looks up to find the two of us observing him.

  ‘What?’ he asks.

  ‘Life-saving,’ says Rosa. ‘Lionel is sitting for his certificate.’

  Still Ivan is none the wiser. He looks at me, then back at Rosa.

  ‘What certificate?’

  ‘His life-saving. Here, we’ll show you.’

  Without another word she drops to the kitchen floor and pretends to be the ‘drowning person’. One hand is flung dramatically above her head. Her eyes are closed while she waits to be saved.

  Ivan looks perplexed and slightly irritated. He’s thinking, will this take long? His eyebrows bristle. He checks the time on his watch.

  ‘Lionel, I am drowning.’

  I check first with Ivan. ‘All right, go ahead,’ he says. I drop to my knees and roll Rosa on to her back. I lift her jaw and tilt the head back. Under the circumstances I’m not about to do mouth-to-mouth. So I close Rosa’s mouth and seal my mouth over her nose and give four quick breaths.

  ‘Okay,’ I announce to Ivan’s frowning face. ‘Now we watch for the chest to rise.’

  That’s what we do.The two of stare at Rosa’s ample chest, Ivan with a cup of tea in his hand. In her own good time Rosa’s chest begins to rise.

  ‘There,’ he says dourly. ‘She’s alive.’

  He glances at his watch again. Immediately we’re back on dog watch. There is a ‘collect’ he wants me to do later. He’s double-booked a shampoo with a toe-clipping and massage.

  ‘Freddy’s the spaniel’s name. Now be gentle with him. In fact, if I were you, I’d carry him out to the van. The old woman will be watching to see how you interact…’ Then the voice from the floor speaks up.

  ‘See, he does not care if I drown or survive. All he cares about is his dogs. His schnauzers. Corgis. Foxies. Toe-clippings and dog massage.’

  Back in the van Ivan is more talkative than usual, more interested in me. He’s interested to know how long I have been life-saving, how my interest came about, that sort of thing. Rosa is in the restaurant that night. It’s busier than the previous three or four nights, but still nothing to get carried away with. But with Rosa back at the tiller there is a keenness amongst the waitresses. Tonight they are looking for things to do without first being asked. The door between the front and back of the kitchen swings back and forth all night long. For the first time in a while the tape deck is switched on; later, I smile to myself as I hear Gardel turned up. I rush through the last of the dishes and pans, wipe down the benches, dump my apron and present myself at the front of the restaurant.