Obligation (IV)

By Malcolm Lidbury (aka Pink pasty) - Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, 

I have had a bug for two weeks, four or five days of which were Purgatory proper: the wobbles, fever, cracked lips. I inhaled an entire bottle of eucalyptus oil in an attempt to open up the airways in my wheezy lungs, some days smelling nothing at all. I was lent such an exhaustion that the ordinary indifference of my immediate family towards any illness that might strike me, relented so far that my husband brought me a few drinks and meals.  The sixteen-year-old asked, unprecedentedly, and only once, during my recovery if I needed anything.  The fourteen year old kept a safe and disdainful distance and silence. It has crossed my mind to wonder whether having a family to which you dedicate your life actually makes any difference at all to whether you die alone. 

So I should be outside now, catching up, the only female in the household among four males if you include the dog, and trying to remember which drill bit you use for masonry to tie up an energetic but  demented rambler.  I wonder now if she's an ally, a metaphor even. 

But I want to straighten out a few abstract things first.

Primarily, do not go to the milonga, or anywhere, when you are sick.  My husband is now ill.  I haven't seen my increasingly frail parents in two weeks.   My kids had colds for weeks but I sailed through all that.  I haven't gone out much and am unlikely to have picked this up from anyone other than some coughing fucker in the supermarket.  Why it is still socially acceptable apparently among a large proportion of people to mingle when sick beggars belief. 

I was reminded recently that a voodoo doll in English is, or was, a poppet. Something about the relationship between that signifier and its signified strikes me as peculiarly English.  Poppet: a sweet word for something intended to cause great harm. I am  inclined to believe that what goes around comes around yet I cannot quite dispel the image of the poppet pinning of people who spatter their germs around confined public spaces.  I say this even while the knowledge of what an unforgivable and insanely vicious thing that is almost makes me choose a different image for this piece.  Yes, almost. It's one of those times when you want to be particularly careful with correct attribution.   This artist in fact suffered persecution by the police for painting nude images of men to the point where the stress caused them to abandon painting two decades ago.  One starts to wonders whether the poppet represents the accuser or the accused.  

On the stormy night of my last practica a woman arrived in a cloth mask.  To be fair, she often turned up in these. She said she had had COVID. 

But, but...I stammered. Are you feeling better? I extracted, from the depths of my horror, politeness inexplicably doing a number on the Germanic directness I ought to have adopted and that she would surely have understood 

A little bit, she said, frankly.

But, but.... I continued to burble.

Anger overcame my disbelief.

Look, I'm sorry but you can't be here.

"Here" was, admittedly more concept than reality, since in terms of a practica there were about eight empty tables enjoying the music, which rendered the subsequent exchange particularly odd.

Yes, I can. It's my right, she shot back with the aforementioned Teutonic assertiveness.

I doubted I was any match.

But if you've had COVID.... 

If I wear a mask I can be here, she said with utter conviction.

On what planet...

No. If you have COVID you cannot be here. I have elderly, vulnerable parents...

One doesn't need to justify ones boundaries, it only weakens them.  Still, the last time I was this assertive in public was trying to get the stalker out of my practica before everyone arrived.

I don't have COVID now, I've been negative for three weeks.

I took refuge in that monosyllable that Michael Kitchen has perfected to convey all manner of British emotion:

Right.

She invited me to dance.

I passed, but, being British, couched it in an excuse. 

I was brought up with a sense of social obligation so acute that only Armageddon would stop my parents attending a social event to which they had committed.  COVID showed us the folly of this approach and yet, illness aside, this philosophy is threaded, for me, with a strengthening and admirable reliability and steadfastness. I married a man with no sense of social obligation, a principle that bends slightly, only towards my parents. Decades ago we were due in Oxford at the house of a couple with a new baby.  The man who was, not too long after, to become the father of my children simply decided on the night he wasn't going. He just didn't feel like it.  He'd never really bought into the idea. He'd just said OK as the easy option at the time. I arrived socially bedraggled and woebegone to a muted welcome and a dinner table set for four.  I never again made any social commitments with him and have never quite understood the logic of soon after conjoining myself for life and children. 

So I love the easy come, easy go milonga but in twelve years have rarely made what I would call deep friendships there.  It is a cake and eat it situation, admittedly one of the more bizarre of English sayings. The Presbyterian overtones suggest it really ought to be Scottish in origin.

The fact of either dancing or friendship may say something about me but arguably more about the non-committal environment of the milonga. Sure, I've gone for tea, drinks and meals with people from the milongas sometimes, almost always as a prequel or sequel to the milonga.  There are people I might have stayed in contact with, indeed, with whom I have stayed in loose contact, who have tended to be visitors.  There are people I  like to chat with in the milonga, people I hope to see, people who make me laugh, but these are all things that stay inside the milonga. 

It is not peculiar to tango.  The same happens in other dances - and, I imagine, other hobbies, too. 

Right.  The rambler.