My Tango With Barbara Strozzi Read online

  ‘OK,’ she said. ‘Now what?’

  ‘You sound suspicious,’ I said.

  ‘I am. That’s what happens after a certain number of Saturday nights.’

  ‘Should I try again on Monday?’

  ‘Give up easily, do you?’

  ‘Not ordinarily but I’m full of uncertainty; tonight isn’t like other nights.’

  ‘What, is it Passover or something?’

  ‘I’ll explain later. I’m Phil Ockerman.’

  ‘Bertha Strunk.’

  ‘Is Bertha’s trunk anything like Pandora’s box?’

  ‘That isn’t something you can find out in five minutes.’

  ‘I’ve got all the time in the world.’

  ‘People say that but you never really do know how much time you have. Anyhow, Phil, it takes two to tango.’

  ‘Well, Bertha, that’s what we’re here for, isn’t it?’ My desire was inflamed by her use of my name.

  She reached for the book that was sticking out of my pocket. ‘What’s a dybbuk?’ she said. She pronounced it correctly.

  ‘A dybbuk,’ I said, ‘is the soul of a dead person that, “finding neither rest nor harbour”, enters the body of a living person and takes control.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Various kinds of unfinished business. In this play it was love.’

  She gave me a serious look. ‘Do you believe in dybbuks?’

  ‘I believe more things all the time, so right now I’d say that I do believe in dybbuks. Do you?’

  ‘I’ll have to wait and see.’

  The room was filling up, there were at least fifty people here by now, young, middle-aged and old in all shapes and sizes. In a few minutes the class would start but I didn’t want our conversation to stop. ‘Bertha,’ I said, ‘what kind of work do you do?’

  ‘I paint artificial eyes.’

  ‘You do paintings of them?’

  ‘No, I paint the actual plastic eye that goes into the eye socket.’

  ‘Unusual occupation. How did you get into it?’

  ‘I had a friend who lost an eye and the making of his artificial eye got me interested in that kind of work.’

  I imagined a man with his real eye looking to the left or right and his artificial one looking straight ahead and I asked Bertha about that.

  ‘Both eyes move together,’ she said. ‘The artificial one is attached to the muscles of the eye socket. That’s enough about me for now. What about you? What do you do?’

  ‘I’m a writer.’

  ‘What do you write?’

  ‘Novels.’

  ‘What’s the most recent one?’

  ‘Hope of a Tree, just out two months ago.’

  ‘It’s not one I’ve heard of.’

  ‘What’s the last thing you’ve read?’

  ‘The Da Vinci Code.’

  ‘Sorry I asked.’

  ‘Actually the writing wasn’t very good.’

  ‘Thanks, it’s kind of you to say so.’

  ‘Do you make a living with your novels?’

  ‘No, I have to teach as well.’

  She nodded as if she hadn’t expected me to be a commercial success. Was my unsuccessfulness so apparent?

  ‘Why do you want to learn the tango?’ she asked with her head a little to one side.

  ‘I came here looking for someone.’

  Again she nodded. ‘Who?’

  ‘That’s a long story.’

  ‘I haven’t got all the time in the world but I’ll listen if you want to tell me about it.’ Was she just being polite?

  ‘I thought you’d never ask,’ I said. ‘It could be that we have a lot to talk about.’

  ‘Maybe.’ With a half-smile.

  By now people were making their way to the dance floor for the beginners’ class. Michiko Okasaki, the woman who’d been taking the money at the door, and her partner Paul Lange now came to the centre of the floor to start the lesson. She was short, he was tall. All of us beginners stood around them while they demonstrated and explained the embrace, which they called the hold. Next they showed us how the leader walks forward and the follower walks backwards. We learners, without music, took our partners and tried this.

  Feeling for the first time Bertha’s right hand in my left and the warmth and solidity of her body under my right I could hardly believe what was happening: I was leading this woman and she was following me. Then she led and I followed, meeting her eyes with mine.

  There was a CD player on a table in a corner of the floor, and Paul Lange went to it and started ‘La Cumparsita’. It was the same recording I had at home, Juan D’Arienzo y su Orquesta Tipica. Surely a sign, surely a good omen, that? The lesson continued with music and moved on to side steps for which we briefly exchanged partners. Instead of holding Bertha I had a chic executive type and we both smiled but I was relieved when I was holding Bertha again for steps outside the partner. The teaching was marvellous, everything was made so easy that I thought I might eventually be capable of real tango dancing. I tried to take my mind back to Barbara Strozzi but all I could think of was Bertha; it was as if an electric current connected the centre of me to the centre of her. As each step was shown us we learners stood and watched and while watching I still held Bertha’s hand.

  ‘You’ve still got my hand,’ she said.

  ‘I know,’ I said, but I didn’t let go and she smiled. High above us the spire aimed itself at the night sky and the restless planets; in the church we stepped forward and back. Under us flowed unseen springs and rivers. I sent my thoughts to Bertha without speaking. I squeezed her hand and she sqeezed back.

  We left at the end of the beginners’ class. When we turned into Turnmill Street we looked down towards Cowcross. High up we were, looking down on distant lights: a moment that is still with me, flickering always in the changing colours of my mind. We didn’t speak at all but there was no ghostly silence this time; there were the voices of other pedestrians and the sound of taxis passing us as we came down came down Turnmill. There was a hotdog vendor at the corner by the station. The smell became an unforgettable tune, ‘When My Hot Dog Smiles at Me’ or whatever, and we hungered for the rolls, the mustard, and the steaming sausages on the cart. ‘Bon appetit,’ said the hot-dog man and we ate them standing on the pavement like two detectives in a cop film.

  Bertha lived in Fulham, in the North End Road. My flat was also in Fulham, in Basuto Road, so we both took the Circle Line westbound. We sat down and looked at each other for a few moments as the train left Farringdon. I was expecting the usual exchange of personal histories and provenances, but no: ‘How tall are you?’ said Bertha.

  ‘How tall am I?’ I said, sitting up straighter.

  ‘That’s what I said,’ said Bertha.

  ‘Five seven,’ I said, stretching my neck.

  ‘I’m five nine,’ said Bertha.

  ‘So do you want to throw me back or what?’

  ‘I don’t know – I’m kind of old-fashioned,’ she said after a pause.

  ‘Meaning?’

  She blushed, half-shrugged, half-smiled, looked apologetic. ‘I want a man who can protect me.’

  It was my turn to blush. ‘Should I forget tango and take up karate?’

  She didn’t laugh. ‘I’ll have to think about this,’ she said.

  ‘I’m really confused, Bertha.’

  ‘Me too.’

  ‘I thought there was something happening between us.’

  Again the apologetic look, the half-shrug and a little shake of the head. ‘Yes and no,’ she said.

  ‘Is there some particular thing or person you want protection from?’

  ‘Let’s talk about something else,’ she said. ‘Where are you from?’

  ‘Pennsylvania,’ I said lamely. As we travelled west the metaphor of the Circle Line was closing its loop and I felt myself on the outside looking in. She was from Exeter and we pushed these and other counters towards each other while long silences sprang up like brambles. At Padd
ington we sat saying nothing and looking at the people waiting on the opposite platform until a Wimbledon train arrived. We sat among Saturday-night faces and voices until Fulham Broadway appeared and we got out. I walked her to the North End Road which was full of Saturday-night noise, people, and rubbish. She opened her street door and I followed her up a flight of stairs to her flat. At her door I didn’t feel free to kiss her or even take her hand; by then the colours had gone out of the night and everything was like a not-very-good print of a black-and-white film. I just stood there and waited for her to say something. Only a little while ago I had held her, felt the weight and warmth of her body under my hands!

  ‘Give me your phone number,’ she said.

  I wrote it down on the back of a handbill from the tango class and gave it to her. ‘Are you going to give me yours?’ I said.

  She wrote it on the same handbill, tore off that piece and gave it to me. ‘Not too soon,’ she said, ‘OK?’ And I thought that was the end of it for now but as she turned to go inside she paused and turned back to me again. ‘Would you like to come in for a coffee?’ she said.

  ‘What is this?’ I said. ‘What the hell are you playing at?’

  She didn’t blush but she shook her head the way one does when baffled. ‘Nothing is simple for me,’ she said.

  ‘That makes two of us. When I sit down for the coffee, will you pull the chair away or what?’

  ‘I promise not to pull the chair away.’ She opened the door. ‘Are you going to come in?’

  I went in cautiously. There was a smell of rug shampoo. She switched on a light and the flat sprang into view not looking like her. ‘This flat belongs to a friend,’ she said as she hung our coats on a clothestree by the door.

  ‘Man or woman?’

  ‘Woman,’ she said as I followed her into the kitchen. The light was hard, the walls were blue, there was a framed photograph of Sir Cliff Richard. There was a framed print of Jesus with his Sacred Heart exposed. There was a cutesy spice rack, there were smiley magnets on the fridge door.

  ‘Why Cliff Richard?’ I said.

  ‘Hilary’s doing an Alpha course because he recommended it on the website,’ said Bertha. ‘This is her kitchen. We’ve been flatmates for more than a year but I don’t put anything of mine on the walls except in my room.’

  ‘You moved here when you broke up with somebody?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Are you with anyone now?’

  ‘No. Are you?’

  ‘No. I was divorced six months ago.’

  ‘Your idea or hers?’

  ‘Hers. She said I was a failure. What about your somebody?’

  There was a pause while she spooned instant coffee into two mugs, filled the kettle and turned on the gas. I wasn’t sure if she’d answer me.

  ‘I left him,’ she said. ‘We’re still married.’ Her face now seemed very vulnerable. She took off the velvet jacket and I saw purple bruises symmetrically on both arms as if she had been held and shaken.

  ‘I guess he’s more than five nine,’ I said.

  She nodded.

  ‘Those bruises,’ I said, ‘are less than a month old.’

  She nodded again and crossed her arms to cover them.

  ‘Have you seen The Rainmaker?’ I said.

  ‘No. Why?’

  ‘In this film a husband’s beatings put his wife into hospital. Her name is Kelly. She falls in love with a lawyer called Rudy. When the husband discovers them together he goes for Rudy with a baseball bat. Rudy gets the better of him and beats him half to death. Then Kelly takes the bat and says to Rudy, “Stop! Give me the bat. You were not here tonight. Go!” When he’s gone she finishes the job but she beats a murder rap because it was self-defence and no jury would convict her.’

  ‘What happened then?’ said Bertha.

  ‘Rudy and the widow go off together and start a new life.’

  Bertha poured the coffee and we sat down at the kitchen table while Jesus watched with a shit-happens look on his face. ‘Do you think they could?’ she said.

  ‘Start a new life?’ I could feel Pluto going over my Sagittarian ascendant. Where to?

  ‘Yes,’ said Bertha. Her face was soft and she was looking at me as if I might be five foot eight. What a sweet face.

  ‘Certainly,’ I said. ‘That husband got what was coming to him. Their consciences would be perfectly clear. You ever think of a baseball-bat sort of solution for your problem?’

  ‘Not with a bat.’

  ‘So you have thought of it. How would you do it?’

  ‘I wouldn’t do it. People have fantasies about all kinds of things. How did we get into this anyhow?’

  ‘Your bruises.’

  She put on the velvet jacket again. ‘Now it’s colder in here. Let’s take our coffee to my room.’

  We went through the sitting room quickly. There was a painting on black velvet of a Spanish dancer. The last time I saw a painting on black velvet was in my grandmother’s house in Philadelphia. There was a little shelf of paperbacks; I saw the names of Georgette Heyer and Barbara Cartland. There was a book on the coffee table, The God That Changes Lives. There was a little shelf of little glass animals. ‘Are you good friends with Hilary?’ I said.

  ‘We get on well enough but we don’t have much to do with each other. Here’s my room.’

  The first thing I noticed was a poster of the painting called Hope, a young woman in clinging garments sitting on half a globe with her left ankle tucked under her right leg. Her eyes are half-closed as she leans her head against the lyre that she strokes with her right hand. There’s a dreamy smile on her face – she looks as if she’s stoned out of her mind. I don’t know who painted that picture. Where do I remember it from? Was it hanging on a schoolroom wall? Not at the front with George Washington but perhaps in a lesser position at the back. ‘Our father who art in heaven,’ we said in the morning, ‘Hallowed be thy name.’ And so on while the planets seen or unseen moved above us. We pledged allegiance to the flag and we sang ‘Long, Long Ago’ and ‘The Little Brown Church in the Vale’ and other primary-school standards and then we started our lessons.

  ‘Are you hopeful?’ I said.

  ‘I hope that nothing bad is coming my way. What about you?’

  ‘I hope I’ll get an idea for a new novel. Do you think he’s coming your way?’

  ‘Who?’ said Bertha.

  ‘Who else? The bruiser, your husband.’

  ‘He knows where I am but I don’t think he’ll come here. He only gets physical when there aren’t any witnesses. If he sees me when there are he doesn’t even raise his voice to me. The bruises are from a couple of weeks ago when he caught me in a dark side street with no one about. He gave me a shaking but I got away from him.’

  ‘It’s only a matter of time though, isn’t it?’

  ‘Everything’s a matter of time.’ She went to the CD player and put on Marianne Faithfull with the song from the ending of The Girl on the Bridge:

  Who will take your dreams away

  Takes your soul another day …

  Slow and mournful, the words hung in the air between us.

  ‘Not really a happy song,’ I said.

  ‘The dreams I have, I’d be glad for them to be taken away,’ said Bertha. She stopped the recording.

  More and more I was feeling that she wanted something from me. What brings people together at a particular place and time? ‘How did you find out about the crypt at St James’s?’ I said.

  ‘Girl I know told me about it. Something else – when I heard the name of the church I got a picture in my mind.’

  ‘Of what?’

  ‘A yahoo ad on a wall with the word FOUND. I took that as a sign.’

  ‘Which it is. On the wall at Farringdon.’

  ‘You know what I mean – I took it as a sign that I’d found the right place.’

  ‘The right place for what?’

  ‘Something more than a tango lesson.’

  I was watch
ing her face for any indication that I might be that something. Maybe the hint of the beginning of a smile. ‘Don’t ask too many questions,’ she said. ‘It’s unlucky. You were going to explain why this night was different from other nights for you.’

  ‘I came to St James’s looking for Barbara Strozzi,’ I said.

  She gave me a hard look. ‘Who’s Barbara Strozzi?’

  I told her all there was to tell, including my sensing of Strozzi’s presence in the Underground and at the Clerkenwell church. ‘Does that sound crazy to you?’

  ‘Yes, but crazy is OK sometimes – you have to trust what pulls you. If you want to go where it’s pulling you.’

  All during this conversation I could feel the fragile architecture of trust and comradeship building up between us. The wrong word, the wrong move, would make it collapse like a house of cards. I drank my coffee and looked at Hope. ‘Shall I say more about Barbara Strozzi?’ I said.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘When I saw you I saw Barbara Strozzi in you. Her music brought me to the tango but seeing you took me back to her music, her cantate and lamentate.’

  ‘You’re a pretty weird guy, aren’t you.’

  ‘Yes, you might as well know that right from the start.’

  She looked at me for a while as if she was deciding whether to go along with the weirdness or back away from it. I could see myself coming up full-screen and then minimising in her eyes as she clicked her mental mouse. ‘I’ll have to listen to her music some time,’ she said.

  ‘How about now?’ I said.

  ‘You came prepared.’

  ‘I have my little CD player and a Strozzi disc with me because I thought I might listen to it in the train.’ The disc was Diporti di Euterpe, with Emanuela Galli, Ensemble Galilei and Paul Beier. I ejected Marianne Faithfull and inserted Strozzi.

  Bertha was looking at the CD brochure with the lyrics which also had a black-and-white reproduction of the Strozzi portrait in the Royal Academy exhibition. ‘Actually,’ she said, ‘there is a resemblance. Mostly it’s the look on her face. I see that same look every day in the mirror.’

  ‘Here she comes,’ I said. The first track was ‘Tradimento.’ ‘Betrayal’. Bertha said nothing for a few moments as Galli’s voice spun into the room over the baroque guitars backing it. Then, ‘That certainly sounds like another time and place. I don’t quite see how you found your way from this to tango music.’ She picked up the translation. ‘Cupid and Hope want to take me prisoner …’ she read out. She stood shaking her head as she turned towards me. ‘Cupid,’ she said. ‘Hope. Betrayal.’