Russell Hoban - My Tango With Barbara Strozzi

‘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 watching 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.’

I took her by both bruised arms and pulled her to me and kissed her. She kept her mouth closed for a moment, then opened it as we pressed against each other. She tasted like peaches and cream, like summer and sunshine, like hope. Thank you, I said to the wheeling stars and unseen planets high above us in the night.

That was as far as it went that night. We didn’t end up in bed. When I left her I spun out into the North End Road where the street lamps glowed like fire balloons. A 28 bus trundled by as shiny and sweetly red as a toffee apple. Scatterings of Saturday-night shouted and screamed in random decibels that spiralled into the darkness above the illuminations of Ryman, Fish and Chips, and Cancer Research UK. Brightness pervaded the North End Road all the way to the night lights in Waitrose. At the roundabout I crossed to the Fulham Road which was awash with buses, cars, taxis, litter and louts of all classes. Turned into Barclay Road at Domino’s Pizza and made my way to the west side of Eel Brook Common, Basuto Road and home, descending through levels of unlight and quiet to ordinary reality where I was uncertain of her kiss that still lingered on my tongue.

My flat looked different now; it seemed pleased with what I was bringing to it. I poured myself a Glenfiddich, said, ‘Here’s looking at you,’ and sat down to try to remember Bertha’s face. I could hear her voice but her face wouldn’t come.

Nicely warmed by the whisky, I got Maps of the Heavens off the shelf where it lay — it’s too tall to stand up — and turned to Albrecht Dürer’s marvellous sixteenth-century woodcut of the northern celestial hemisphere. There was Sagittarius the centaur aiming his arrow at Scorpio; I could feel the vibration of his bowstring but I couldn’t find Pluto; maybe he was busy in the underworld. That’s how it is — you can’t always see what’s going on.

I dialled Bertha. ‘What?’ she said.

‘It’s me,’ I said. I noticed that I had put my hand on my heart.

‘I know,’ she said.

‘Would you tell me your birth date, time of birth, and place of birth? I want to ask my astrologer to do your horoscope.’

‘You have a personal astrologer?’

‘The same as I have a GP and a dentist,’ I said. ‘I’m not her only client.’

‘You want my horoscope because …?’

‘Because whatever this is we’re in, we’re in it together so it’s a good idea to know how the stars and planets are for both of us. Don’t you think?’

There was a pause at her end. Then, ‘I don’t want to know too much.’

‘Because it would …?’

‘Get in the way of whatever I might be doing. I’d fall down stairs, slip on banana skins, get run over by buses, walk into plate-glass doors — that kind of thing.’

‘How about if I get your horoscope and don’t tell you anything, keep it all to myself?’

‘Then I’d catch you looking at me in a certain way and I’d think, oh shit, what has he found out about my stars? No, it’s a bad idea.’

‘OK. When can I see you again?’

‘You’re not tired of me yet? I’m a lot of trouble.’

‘It’s a lot of trouble not seeing you.’

‘I think we both need a little time to settle down. Can you phone me Thursday?’

‘OK, Thursday.’

‘And when you phone, call me Barbara — that way I’ll always know it’s you.’