Zia’s boyfriend even gets Mamma to dance the tango. She moves all the chairs in the dining room but then she tries to get out of it. I can’t do anything. I can’t do anything. I’d have to change my shoes. I don’t have the shoes. I’ve never known how to dance. I don’t know how to dance. I’m fine sitting down. I’ll fall over. You know I’ll fall over. You dance and I’ll watch. I like watching people who are good at it.
But Zia’s boyfriend says it’s easy and everyone can do it. He’s a doctor specialising in human movement and he says that even the seriously ill can manage to walk, so of course Mamma can manage to dance. She has to rest one hand on his shoulder and put her other hand in his and let herself be carried away. Be light. She doesn’t know where he’ll take her. She has to have faith.
The tango begins and Mamma gives him her hand, looking at him terrified, and it’s like she’s been dipped in starch but this thing about even the seriously ill managing has convinced her. He smiles at her. He smiles and dances with her as though he knows about the yellow pegs and the dreams of extermination camps. As though he knows about the holidays in autumn and the squared moon. He moves her feet with his feet, her legs with his legs. The basic steps, but getting faster. Faster. Thank you. Thank you. Why are you wasting all this time on me. But Doctor Salevsky truly is a little special and in the end you give in to that desire and nostalgia for life that is the tango.
And Mamma, too, weaves her steps in and out and in and out in sets of eight and away she goes, off to Cape Horn. To America. To the end of the earth. And it doesn’t matter if she stumbles or falls backwards, it doesn’t matter because Zia’s boyfriend makes you realise that you shouldn’t think happiness is only possible for other people, it can be yours too if you try. What a milonga! What a waltz! When he comes over, it only takes a nod and she’s up moving the chairs and running to take off her slippers. Forget about the cinders, Mamma, this is the King’s hall. Forget about those clothes hanging off you. Bolero!
Zia says that it’s better dancing in our dining room because when she goes to real bars with her boyfriend she gets the impression that all the women are involved or have been involved or intend to be involved in a relationship with him and so are watching them in a dejected, or nostalgic, or predatory way. They don’t seem to know that she and he are together so bad luck, there’s nothing any other woman can do about it.
Mamma tells Papà that if he at least learnt the eight basic steps they’d be able to make two couples in the dining room once in a while. Papà makes a kind of mocking gesture with the tip of his thumb on his nose and then tells her seriously that the tango is not one of his things. That he only does his things and not anyone else’s.
Nonna has revealed to us that Nonno, when he was in the Navy, was the best tango dancer in the crew and being in his arms was like flying to the top of the world. But those were other tangos and there were no dejected, or nostalgic, or predatory women. There was only Nonna.