‘What about after the dance? Do I invite her for a drink?’
‘No. You escort her back to her seat, thank her and go back to the men’s side. Tango doesn’t commit you to anything. For three or four songs you share your yearnings, hopes and desires. Some people say it’s like sex, only better – and more frequent. But then it’s over. It would be totally improper to dance more than one tanda with a woman. It’s considered bad manners.’
They watched the couples under lowered eyelids. After a while Perdu gestured with his chin to a woman who might have been anywhere between her early fifties and her late sixties. Black hair with some grey streaks, tied at the nape of her neck like a flamenco dancer’s; a dress that looked new; three wedding rings on one finger. She had the poise of a ballerina and the slender, firm, supple figure of a young briar. A splendid dancer, secure and precise, and yet charitable enough to make up for her partner’s lack of movement or meekness, disguising the man’s flaws with her grace. She made everything look easy.
‘She’ll be your dance partner, Jordan.’
‘Her? She’s much too good. I’m scared!’
‘Remember the feeling. Someday you’ll want to write about it, and then it’ll be good to know how the fear feels and to go ahead and dance all the same.’
As Max tried, half in panic, half pluckily, to attract the proud briar queen’s gaze, Jean weaved his way to the bar, ordered a thimbleful of pastis in a glass and topped it up with the water. He was … excited. Extremely excited.
As though he were about to step out on stage.
How frantic he had been whenever he was due to meet Manon! His trembling fingers turned shaving into a bloodbath. He could never decide how to dress, wanting to look strong and slender and elegant and cool all at once. That was when he started running and doing weights to get himself in good shape for her.
Jean Perdu took a sip of pastis.
‘Grazie,’ he said on a hunch.
‘Prego, Signor Capitano,’ said the small, round, moustachioed bartender in a singsong Neapolitan accent.
‘You flatter me. I’m not really a captain—’
‘Oh yes, you are. Cuneo can see.’
Chart music was spilling out of the loudspeakers: the cortina, time for a change of partners. In thirty seconds the band would launch into the next tanda.
Perdu saw the briar dancer take pity and allow a pale Max, head held high, to lead her out into the middle of the dance floor. Within a few steps she bore herself like an empress, and this did something in turn to Max, who till then had merely been clinging to her outstretched arm. He took off his earmuffs and tossed them aside. He looked taller now, his shoulders broader, his chest puffed out like a torero’s.
She shot Perdu a quick look with her bright, clear-blue eyes. Her gaze was young, her eyes were old, and her body sang the sweet, passionate song of the tango, beyond all notion of time. Perdu had tasted the saudade of life, a soft, warm feeling of sorrow – for everything, for nothing.
‘Saudade’: a yearning for one’s childhood, when the days would merge into one another and the passing of time was of no consequence. It is the sense of being loved in a way that will never come again. It is a unique experience of abandon. It is everything that words cannot capture.
He should include it in his encyclopedia of emotions.
At that moment, P. D. Olson came over to the bar. The moment his feet and legs were no longer dancing, he reverted to walking like an old man.
‘You have to dance the things you cannot explain,’ Perdu said under his breath.
‘And you have to write the things you cannot express,’ the old novelist thundered.
As the band launched into ‘Por una Cabeza’, the briar dancer bent into Max’s chest, her lips whispering incantations, and her hand, foot and hips subtly correcting his posture; she created the impression that he was leading her.
Jordan danced the tango, wide-eyed at first and then, following a whispered instruction, with lowered lids. Soon they looked like a well-grooved couple, the stranger and the young man.